  Oddly, Thomas Jefferson was probably the first to imply that the U.S. ought to make reparation to its slaves. He did not explicitly say that it did or ought to, and his proposal to send them off to “such place as circumstances of the time should render most proper” and to “declare them a free and independent people” was mainly motivated by a desire to rid the U.S. of them, but it also suggests that they were a people and that the U.S. was under some obligation to set them up as a people (Jefferson 1785a [1954: 138]). Some years after Jefferson’s proposal, American slaveholders founded (1816) the American Colonization Society whose ostensible object, made plausible by the presence of some white Quakers among its founders, was to help African Americans to go to Liberia and get a fresh start in a country free of racial discrimination. But the real object of the Society, or at least that of the white slaveholders who founded it, was to rid the country of free blacks who they feared endangered their peculiar institution. Their stratagem was therefore dealt a deadly blow when Martin Delany, who agreed with Jefferson that U.S. blacks were a people and needed a territory on which to become a state, declared that Liberia was “not an independent nation at all; but a poor miserable mockery—a burlesque on a government—a pitiful dependency on the American Colonizationists” and its “principal man, called President, in Liberia” was a “mere parrot” of these individuals (Delany 1852 [2004]: 185, emphasis in original).