ancipation of slaves, and on
the suppression of the African slave trade. Abolitionists, attacking
this undertaking based upon national sentiment, were endangering the
union by their propaganda founded upon sectional sentiment.
Colonization, therefore, was just because it was "born out of a desire
to unite the North and the South in the settlement of the Negro
problem." The purpose of the treatise then is to (page 127) "set forth
the true aims of orthodox Colonizationists, or from another point to
demonstrate that their aims were as sincerely expressed as sound
policy would admit, and that, where motives were concealed, they were
concealed in order to secure the freedom of the slaves."

Written from this point of view the dissertation becomes too much of a
polemic to be accepted as a scientific treatise. Too much space is
devoted to the task of unifying the widely different views of the
colonizationists, too much effort is made to contrast the methods of
the colonizationists with those of the abolitionists. The author does
not seem to realize or at least fails to admit that the abolitionists
were radical reformers seeking to eradicate the cause of social
disease whereas the colonizationists were merely treating the symptoms
of the malady in undertaking the impossible task of transplanting a
whole race.

The general argument of the author in favor of the beneficence of
colonization is not convincing. There is no authority for the
contention that colonization promoted emancipation when the records
show that the majority of slaveholders who supported it had in mind
the expatriation of the free Negroes who among the bondmen were a
living testimony against slavery. To say that colonization might check
the slave trade by establishing one small colony in Africa is about as
unsound, contended some free Negroes in 1831, as to argue that "a
watchman in the city of Boston would prevent thievery in New York; or
that the custom house officers there would prevent goods being
smuggled into any other part of the United States." It is an insult to
the intelligence of men who have seriously considered history to say
that colonization was so built upon national sentiment as to have a
direct bearing on the preservation of the Union when the
colonizationists differed widely among themselves in the very
beginning and finally divided just as the abolitionists, who at one
time had also a national standing, in that most anti-slavery societies