Thoughts on African Colonization

by William Lloyd Garrison

'The Society has never interfered, and has no disposition to interfere with the rights of private property.' * * 'The alarm for the rights of property appears to have subsided, and the Society is no longer charged with any sinister or insidious design. It has constantly disclaimed any intention of disturbing the rights of others; and its conduct entitles its declaration to credit.' * * 'The American Colonization Society has, at all times, solemnly disavowed any purpose of interference with the institutions or rights of our Southern communities.' * * 'Our friends, who are cursed with this greatest of human evils (slavery) deserve our kindest attention and consideration. Their property and safety are both involved.'—[African Repository, vol. v. pp. 215, 241, 307, 334.]

'It has constantly disclaimed all intention whatever of interfering, in the smallest degree, with the rights of property.' * * 'The Society, from considerations like these, whilst it disclaims the remotest idea of ever disturbing the right of property in slaves,' &c. * * 'It is not the object of this Society to liberate slaves, or touch the rights of property.' * * 'Honorable instances might be adduced of disinterested benevolence on the part of the owners of slaves, and of their sacrificing property to a large amount, in their enfranchisement and restoration to the land of their ancestors.' * * 'The American Society has disclaimed from the first moment of its institution, all intention of interfering with rights of property.' * * 'The federal government has no control over this subject: it concerns rights of property secured by the federal compact, upon which our civil liberties mainly depend; it is a part of the same collection of political rights; and any invasion of it would impair the tenure by which every other is held.' * * 'It is equally plain and undeniable, that the Society in the prosecution of this work, has never interfered or evinced even a disposition to interfere in any way with the rights of proprietors of slaves.' * * 'The slaveholder, so far from having just cause to complain of the Colonization Society, has reason to congratulate himself, that in this Institution a channel is opened up, in which the public feeling and public action can flow on, without doing violence to his rights.'—[African Repository, vol. vi. pp. 13, 69, 81, 153, 165, 169, 205, 363.]

'It was proper again and again to repeat, that it was far from the intention of the Society to affect, in any manner, the tenure by which a certain species of property is held. He was himself a slaveholder; and he considered that kind of property as inviolable as any other in the country.'—[Speech of Henry Clay.—First Annual Report.]

'Your committee would not thus favorably regard the prayer of the memorialists, if it sought to impair, in the slightest degree, the rights of private property.'—[Report of the committee of the House of Representatives of the United States, on the memorial of the President and Board of Managers of the Colonization Society.—Second Annual Report.]

'The Society has at all times recognised the constitutional and LEGITIMATE existence of slavery.'—[Tenth Annual Report.]

'The Society protests that it has no designs on the rights of the master in the slave—or the property in his slave, which the laws guarantee to him.'—[Fourteenth Annual Report.]

'Something he must yet be allowed to say, as regarded the object the Society was set up to accomplish. This object, if he understood it aright, involved no intrusion on property, NOR EVEN UPON PREJUDICE.'—[Fifteenth Annual Report.]

'To the slaveholder, who had charged upon them the wicked design of interfering with the RIGHTS OF PROPERTY under the specious pretext of removing a vicious and dangerous free population, they address themselves in a tone of conciliation and sympathy. We know your rights, say they, and we respect them.' * * 'Equally absurd and false is the objection, that this Society seeks indirectly to disturb the rights of property, and to interfere with the well established relation subsisting between master and slave.'—[African Repository, vol. vii. pp. 100, 228.]

'I repeat, that though not a slaveholder, yet I think that every man ought to be protected in his property, and as the laws of our country have decreed that negroes are property, every person that holds a slave, according to these laws, ought to be protected.'—['A new and interesting View of Slavery.' By Humanitas, a colonization advocate. Baltimore, 1820.]

'We are made to disregard this description of property, and to touch without reserve the rights of our neighbors.'—[Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the New-Jersey Colonization Society.]