As one citizen of this nation, I would be willing to make all my contributions, and devote the last dollar of my means, to the colonization of the black man of this country to Liberia.
I have the honor to be,
Yours, most respectfully,
JOS. A. WRIGHT.
Rev. William McLain,
Sec. Am. Col. Soc., Washington City.
Opinions of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Chief Justice Marshall, and others, on the colonization of Africa.
The following extracts from an Address to the Legislators and People of Virginia, published in the thirty-third Annual Report of the American Colonization Society, Jan. 15, 1850, shows the progress of the question in Virginia:
The Governor of the Commonwealth having in his late message recommended the American Colonization Society to the particular attention of the Legislature, and the subject having been referred to a select committee, whose report is daily anticipated, it seems a fitting time to remind the Legislators and citizens of Virginia of some fuels touching the origin and history of an institution which is attracting the regards and challenging the admiration of the civilized world. It must endear this institution to Virginians, and strengthen their confidence in its wisdom, to be reminded that it comes commended to the present generation by the authority of our most patriotic and sagacious statesmen, and the deliberate successive acts of our Legislature.
It claims for its authors Thos. Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, Edmund Pendleton and George Wythe, high in the first rank of their country’s orators and jurists—the Mansfield and the Hale of Virginia—George Mason, perhaps the wisest statesman to whom Virginia has given birth, and Thomas Ludwell Lee, who was deemed by the Legislature of 1776 their fit associate. These gentlemen were appointed, by the first Legislature after the Declaration of Independence, to revise the laws of this State. This committee proposed a comprehensive plan of colonization. The emancipation feature in this plan was probably the reason of its failure. The seed of the Colonization Society had nevertheless been sown, which springing up after the lapse of a few years, and pruned of its excrescences, began to grow and bear fruit. Its first fruit was the plan of Dr. Thornton, (a Virginian,) in 1787, to colonize the free colored people upon the coast of Africa. This being the suggestion of a private individual had no visible results. A few years afterward the Colony of Sierra Leone, consisting of slaves who had taken refuge in the British army during the Revolutionary war, was established.
On the 31st December, 1800, the House of Delegates of Virginia passed almost unanimously the following resolution: