ld react upon
slavery at home, by pointing out to the States and General Government, a
mode by which they might free themselves from the whole African race.

The Society had thus undertaken as great an amount of work as it could
perform. The field was broad enough, truly, for an association that
hoped to obtain an income of but five to ten thousand dollars a year,
and realized annually an average of only $3,276 during the first six
years of its existence. It did not include the destruction of American
slavery among the objects it labored to accomplish. That subject had
been fully discussed; the ablest men in the nation had labored for its
overthrow; more than half the original States of the Union had
emancipated their slaves; the advantages of freedom to the colored man
had been tested; the results had not been as favorable as anticipated;
the public sentiment of the country was adverse to an increase of the
free colored population; the few of their number who had risen to
respectability and affluence, were too widely separated to act in
concert in promoting measures for the general good; and, until better
results should follow the liberation of slaves, further emancipations,
by the States, were not to be expected. The friends of the Colonization
Society, therefore, while affording every encouragement to emancipation
by individuals, refused to agitate the question of the general abolition
of slavery. Nor did they thrust aside any other scheme of benevolence in
behalf of the African race. Forty years had elapsed from the
commencement of emancipation in the country, and thirty from the date of
Franklin's Appeal, before the society sent off its first emigrants. At
that date, no extended plans were in existence, promising relief to the
free colored man. A period of lethargy, among the benevolent, had
succeeded the State emancipations, as a consequence of the indifference
of the free colored people, as a class, to their degraded condition. The
public sentiment of the country was fully prepared, therefore, to adopt
colonization as the best means, or, rather, as the only means for
accomplishing any thing for them or for the African race. Indeed, so
general was the sentiment in favor of colonization, somewhere beyond the
limits of the United States, that those who disliked Africa, commenced a
scheme of emigration to Hayti, and prosecuted it, until eight thousand
free colored persons were removed to that island--a number nearly