promote more effectively the amelioration of the colored people, the
question of emigration and that only was taken up for serious
consideration. But those who desired to introduce the question of Liberian
colonization or who were especially interested in that scheme were not
invited. Among the persons who promoted the calling of this council were
William Webb, Martin R. Delaney, J. Gould Bias, Franklin Turner, Augustus
Greene, James M. Whitfield, William Lambert, Henry Bibb, James T. Holly
and Henry M. Collins.

There developed in this assembly three groups, one believing with Martin
R. Delaney that it was best to go to the Niger Valley in Africa, another
following the counsel of James M. Whitfield then interested in emigration
to Central America, and a third supporting James T. Holly who insisted
that Hayti offered the best opportunities for free persons of color
desiring to leave the United States. Delaney was commissioned to proceed
to Africa, where he succeeded in concluding treaties with eight African
kings who offered American Negroes inducements to settle in their
respective countries. James Redpath, already interested in the scheme of
colonization in Hayti, had preceded Holly there and with the latter as his
coworker succeeded in sending to that country as many as two thousand
emigrants, the first of whom sailed from this country in 1861.[30] Owing
to the lack of equipment adequate to the establishment of the settlement
and the unfavorable climate, not more than one third of the emigrants
remained. Some attention was directed to California and Central America
just as in the case of Africa but nothing in that direction took tangible
form immediately, and the Civil War following soon thereafter did not give
some of these schemes a chance to materialize.


[Footnote 1: _The African Repository_, XVI, p. 22.]