ot by
expediency but the purest altruism, came an impulse that finally told in
the founding of Liberia. The heart of a young man reached out across
the sea. Samuel J. Mills, an undergraduate of Williams College, in 1808
formed among his fellow-students a missionary society whose work later
told in the formation of the American Bible Society and the Board of
Foreign Missions. Mills continued his theological studies at Andover and
then at Princeton; and while at the latter place he established a school
for Negroes at Parsippany, thirty miles away. He also interested in
his work and hopes Rev. Robert Finley, of Basking Ridge, N.J., who
"succeeded in assembling at Princeton the first meeting ever called to
consider the project of sending Negro colonists to Africa,"[1] and who
in a letter to John P. Mumford, of New York, under date February 14,
1815, expressed his interest by saying, "We should send to Africa a
population partly civilized and christianized for its benefit; and our
blacks themselves would be put in a better condition."

[Footnote 1: McPherson, 18.]

In this same year, 1815, the country was startled by the unselfish
enterprise of a Negro who had long thought of the unfortunate situation
of his people in America and who himself shouldered the obligation to
do something definite in their behalf. Paul Cuffe had been born in May,
1759, on one of the Elizabeth Islands near New Bedford, Mass., the son
of a father who was once a slave from Africa and of an Indian mother.[1]
Interested in navigation, he made voyages to Russia, England, Africa,
the West Indies, and the South; and in time he commanded his own vessel,
became generally respected, and by his wisdom rose to a fair degree of
opulence. For twenty years he had thought especially about Africa,
and in 1815 he took to Sierra Leone a total of nine families and
thirty-eight persons at an expense to himself of nearly $4000. The
people that he brought were well received at Sierra Leone, and Cuffe
himself had greater and more far-reaching plans when he died September
7, 1817. He left an estate valued at $20,000.

[Footnote 1: First Annual Report of American Colonization Society.]

Dr. Finley's meeting at Princeton was not very well attended and hence
not a great success. Nevertheless he felt sufficiently encouraged to go
to Washington in December, 1816, to use his effort for the formation of
a national colonization society. It happened that in February of this
sam