third, of such as desired to be relieved of any responsibility whatever
for free Negroes. The movement was widely advertised as "an effort
for the benefit of the blacks in which all parts of the country could
unite," it being understood that it was "not to have the abolition of
slavery for its immediate object," nor was it to "aim directly at the
instruction of the great body of the blacks." Such points as the last
were to prove in course of time hardly less than a direct challenge to
the different abolitionist organizations in the North, and more and more
the Society was denounced as a movement on the part of slaveholders for
perpetuating their institutions by doing away with the free people of
color. It is not to be supposed, however, that the South, with its usual
religious fervor, did not put much genuine feeling into the colonization
scheme. One man in Georgia named Tubman freed his slaves, thirty in all,
and placed them in charge of the Society with a gift of $10,000; Thomas
Hunt, a young Virginian, afterwards a chaplain in the Union Army, sent
to Liberia the slaves he had inherited, paying the entire cost of the
journey; and others acted in a similar spirit of benevolence. It was
but natural, however, for the public to be somewhat uncertain as to the
tendencies of the organization when the utterances of representative
men were sometimes directly contradictory. On January 20, 1827, for
instance, Henry Clay, then Secretary of State, speaking in the hall of
the House of Representatives at the annual meeting of the Society, said:
"Of all classes of our population, the most vicious is that of the free
colored. It is the inevitable result of their moral, political, and
civil degradation. Contaminated themselves, they extend their vices to
all around them, to the slaves and to the whites." Just a moment later
he said: "Every emigrant to Africa is a missionary carrying with him
credentials in the holy cause of civilization, religion, and free
institutions." How persons contaminated and vicious could be
missionaries of civilization and religion was something possible only in