AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY Abolitionists may talk twaddle
till the crack of doom, but after all, Colonization is to be the
great cure of negro slavery in this country, or it remains
uncured. You may free the slave in the South, but he is
nevertheless a slave North or South. His shackles are only to be
cast off by returning to the land of his forefathers. Here he is
surrounded by a wall of prejudice as indestructable as the
everlasting hills. The fires of the volcano are not more
inextinguishable than this prejudice, and we would therefore
remove the black man from its influence, instead of encouraging
him to break it down by an insolent bearing towards those who
are in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, his intellectual
superiors. –newspaper editorial, West Chester, Pennsylvania,
1854.Ever since pre-Revolutionary times, white Americans had
discussed sending freed slaves back to Africa. The notion became
a formal movement in December 1816, when delegates from several
states met in Washington, D.C., and org