e year, 1816, General Charles Fenton Mercer, member of the House of
Delegates, came upon the secret journals of the legislature for the
period 1801-5 and saw the correspondence between Monroe and Jefferson.
Interested in the colonization project, on December 14 (Monroe
then being President-elect) he presented in the House of Delegates
resolutions embodying the previous enactments; and these passed 132 to
14. Finley was generally helped by the effort of Mercer, and on December
21, 1816, there was held in Washington a meeting of public men
and interested citizens, Henry Clay, then Speaker of the House of
Representatives, presiding. A constitution was adopted at an adjourned
meeting on December 28; and on January 1, 1817, were formally chosen
the officers of "The American Society for Colonizing the Free People
of Color of the United States." At this last meeting Henry Clay, again
presiding, spoke in glowing terms of the possibilities of the movement;
Elias B. Caldwell, a brother-in-law of Finley, made the leading
argument; and John Randolph, of Roanoke, Va., and Robert Wright, of
Maryland, spoke of the advantages to accrue from the removal of the free
Negroes from the country (which remarks were very soon to awaken
much discussion and criticism, especially on the part of the Negroes
themselves). It is interesting to note that Mercer had no part at all in
the meeting of January 1, not even being present; he did not feel that
any but Southern men should be enrolled in the organization. However,
Bushrod Washington, the president, was a Southern man; twelve of the
seventeen vice-presidents were Southern men, among them being Andrew
Jackson and William Crawford; and all of the twelve managers were
slaveholders.

Membership in the American Colonization Society originally consisted,
first, of such as sincerely desired to afford the free Negroes an asylum
from oppression and who hoped through them to extend to Africa the
blessings of civilization and Christianity; second, of such as sought to
enhance the value of their own slaves by removing the free Negroes; and
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