eneralship. This master
stroke the leader followed up promptly with a second stroke not less
masterly. That second stroke was his "Thoughts on African Colonization,"
published in the summer succeeding the formation of the New England
Anti-Slavery Society.

Garrison's championship of the cause of the slave had started with
strong faith in the efficacy and disinterestedness of the colonization
scheme as an instrument of emancipation. It commanded, therefore, his
early support. In his Park Street Church address he evinced himself in
earnest sympathy with the friends of colonization. But after his arrival
in Baltimore a change began to exhibit itself in this regard. He began
to qualify his confidence in its utility; began to discern in it
influences calculated to retard general emancipation. As these doubts
and misgivings arose within him he expressed them frankly in the
_Genius_. Lundy had been suspicious of the pro-slavery purposes or
interests of the enterprise for many years. He could not reconcile
himself to the significant or, at least, singular fact of so many
slaveholders being in the membership and the offices of the association.
Then, in addition to this lack of confidence on the part of Lundy in the
scheme, Garrison became acquainted, for the first time, with the objects
of the society's philanthropy--the class of free people of color. He
found that these people were not at all well affected to the society;
that they had no appreciation of its benevolent intentions in respect to
themselves. He found, on the contrary, that they were positively
embittered toward it and toward its designs for their removal from the
country as toward their worst enemy. This circumstance was undoubtedly a
poser to their young friend. How could he reconcile this deep-seated and
widespread disbelief in the purity of the motives of the Colonization
Society, with the simple integrity and humanity of the enterprise
itself? Later, his acquaintance with such representatives of the free
people of color in Philadelphia as James Forten and his son-in-law,
Robert Purvis, served but to confirm those first impressions which he
received in Baltimore from the Watkinses and the Greeners. It was the
same experience in New York and New Haven, in Boston and Providence. He
learned that from the very beginning, in the year 1817, that the free
people of color in Richmond and Philadelphia had, by an instinctive
knowledge of threatened wrong and danger, met