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
the logic of Henry Clay. In the course of the next month Robert Y. Hayne
gave a Southern criticism in two addresses on a memorial presented in
the United States Senate by the Colonization Society.[1] The first
of these speeches was a clever one characterized by much wit and
good-humored raillery; the second was a sober arraignment. Hayne
emphasized the tremendous cost involved and the physical impossibility
of the whole undertaking, estimating that at least sixty thousand
persons a year would have to be transported to accomplish anything like
the desired result. At the close of his brilliant attack, still making
a veiled plea for the continuance of slavery, he nevertheless rose to
genuine statesmanship in dealing with t