Extracts from a letter from Commodore Stockton to Hon. Daniel Webster, dated March 25th, 1850.
“Yonder is Africa, with her one hundred and fifty millions of miserable, degraded, ignorant, lawless, superstitious idolaters. Whoever has stood upon her sands, has stood upon a continent that has geographical and physical peculiarities which belong to no other of the great divisions of the globe. The latter appear, upon the face of them, to have been adapted to draw out the energies of the natives in their inequalities of temperature, soil, and surface, inviting the ingenuity and enterprise of man to overcome them, and in the varieties of their products tempting the interchanges of commerce; thus affording ample encouragement to the progress of civil and social improvement. But Africa is still, as of old, a land of silence and of mystery. Like the interminable dreariness of her own deserts, her moral wastes of mind lie waiting for the approach of influences from abroad. No savage people have ever advanced to a civilized state without intercommunication with others. All the continents of the world have, in their turn, been occupied and civilized by means of colonies; but in no one of them did it appear so inevitably necessary, from a previous examination of circumstances, as in that of Africa. It is plain to the very eye, that Africa is a land to which civilization must be brought. The attempt has been made over and over again by devoted missionaries and others to penetrate that land, and seek to impart the blessings of civilization and Christianity to her savage hordes. But the labor has been spent in vain. The white man cannot live in Africa. The annals of the Moravians, of Cape Colony, of Sierra Leone, of Liberia, contain the records of the sacrifice of some of the best men that have lived to grace the pages of any people’s history, in the vain attempt to accomplish something for her redemption through the instrumentality of white men. Who, then, is to do this work?
“Let now any calm, reflecting spectator of the present state of the world be asked to look at Africa, and then, from among the nations, point out the people best calculated to do this work—and when his eye falls upon the descendants of the sons of that continent now in America, will he not say, These are the people appointed for that work?
“Let us not be impatient or presumptuous. These African people are passing to their destiny along the same path which has been trod by other nations, through a mixture of hardship, of endurance; but in a land of light, and amid a civilized society. They are preparing to accomplish a work for their native continent, which no other people in the world can accomplish. Their plain mission is, ultimately to carry the gifts of society, of religion, of government, to the last remaining continent of the earth, where these blessings are totally unknown. Their work is a great one, as it would seem to be connected essentially with the final and universal triumph of civilization and Christianity in the world.”
Extract from a letter from the Hon. Edward Everett to the Hon. Simon Greenleaf, President of the Society, dated Cambridge, 28th May, 1849.
“I have for many years felt an interest in the subject of African colonization. In the winter of 1831, the Legislature of Massachusetts passed a resolution, requesting the Senators and Representatives of the Commonwealth in Congress to lend their efforts in support of the American Colonization Society. I was led at that time to investigate the subject with some care, and I came to the conclusion that the work which the Society had undertaken was of the highest interest and importance, second to no one of the enterprises undertaken by the philanthropy of the age. The views entertained by me at that time are set forth in a speech before the Society, in the Hill of the House of Representatives at Washington, made on the 16th of January, 1832.
“These impressions were renewed and strengthened a few years since, when it became my duty, in another capacity, to maintain the rights and interests of the colony of Liberia, in my official correspondence with the British Government at London.
“Since that time, the recognition of the political independence of Liberia, by the leading European powers, is an event well calculated to lead thoughtful persons to contemplate, with new interest, what seems to me one of the most important occurrences of the age—the appearance of a new Republic on the shores of Africa, composed of citizens who by birth are (the greater part of them) our own countrymen; but who will carry to the home of their ancestors means and facilities for promoting the civilization and Christianization of that continent, which Providence has confided to them, and to them alone.
“It is unfortunate, for the cause of colonization, that it has been considered mainly in direct connexion with the condition of the descendants of Africa in this country. But great as this object is, it seems to me subordinate to a direct operation upon Africa itself; the regeneration of which, I cannot but think, is the path appointed by Providence for the elevation of the descendants of Africa throughout the world. I am led to the opinion, from all the inquiry I have been able to make, that the difficulty of effecting the regeneration of Africa is exaggerated; that a large part of her population is susceptible of the highest forms of civilization; that the arts of life, as we understand them, already exist in many parts of the continent to a much greater extent than is commonly supposed; that the interior slave trade is the great obstacle which prevents its speedily taking a high place in the family of nations; and that nothing would so effectually remove this cause of demoralization and barbarity as the introduction of Christianity, and with it the languages, improved arts, and commerce of Europe and America.