Negro men sailed from New York for Africa, November 12, 1774; but the
Revolutionary War followed and nothing more was done at the time. In
1784, however, and again in 1787, Hopkins tried to induce different
merchants to fit out a vessel to convey a few emigrants, and in the
latter year he talked with a young man from the West Indies, Dr. William
Thornton, who expressed a willingness to take charge of the company.
The enterprise failed for lack of funds, though Thornton kept up his
interest and afterwards became a member of the first Board of Managers
of the American Colonization Society. Hopkins in 1791 spoke before the
Connecticut Emancipation Society, which he wished to see incorporated as
a colonization society, and in a sermon before the Providence society in
1793 he reverted to his favorite theme. Meanwhile, as a result of the
efforts of Wilberforce, Clarkson, and Granville Sharp in England, in
May, 1787, some four hundred Negroes and sixty white persons were landed
at Sierra Leone. Some of the Negroes in England had gained their freedom
in consequence of Lord Mansfield's decision in 1772, others had been
discharged from the British Army after the American Revolution, and all
were leading in England a more or less precarious existence. The sixty
white persons sent along were abandoned women, and why Sierra Leone
should have had this weight placed upon it at the start history has not
yet told. It is not surprising to learn that "disease and disorder were
rife, and by 1791 a mere handful survived."[1] As early as in his _Notes
on Virginia_, privately printed in 1781, Thomas Jefferson had suggested
a colony for Negroes, perhaps in the new territory of Ohio. The
suggestion was not acted upon, but it is evident that by 1800 several
persons had thought of the possibility of removing the Negroes in the
South to some other place either within or without the country.

[Footnote 1: McPherson, 15. (See bibliography on Liberia.)]