from the United States ceased, and the country
entered upon a period of stagnation from which it has not yet fully
recovered.

[Footnote 1: But not Hilary R.W. Johnson, the efficient Secretary of
State, later President.]

[Footnote 2: President Roberts died February 21, 1876, barely two months
after giving up office. He was caught in the rain while attending a
funeral, took a severe chill, and was not able to recover.]

Within just a few years after 1871, however, conditions in the United
States led to an interesting revival of the whole idea of colonization,
and to noteworthy effort on the part of the Negroes themselves to better
their condition. The withdrawal of Federal troops from the South,
and all the evils of the aftermath of reconstruction, led to such a
terrorizing of the Negroes and such a denial of civil rights that there
set in the movement that culminated in the great exodus from the South
in 1879. The movement extended all the way from North Carolina to
Louisiana and Arkansas. Insofar as it led to migration to Kansas and
other states in the West, it belongs to American history. However, there
was also interest in going to Africa. Applications by the thousands
poured in upon the American Colonization Society, and one organization
in Arkansas sent hundreds of its members to seek the help of the New
York State Colonization Society. In all such endeavor Negro Baptists
and Methodists joined hands, and especially prominent was Bishop H.M.
Turner, of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. By 1877 there was
organized in South Carolina the Liberian Exodus and Joint Stock Company;
in North Carolina there was the Freedmen's Emigration Aid Society; and
there were similar organizations in other states. The South Carolina
organization had the threefold purpose of emigration, missionary
activity, and commercial enterprise, and to these ends it purchased a
vessel, the _Azor_, at a cost of $7000. The white people of Charleston
unfortunately embarrassed the enterprise in every possible way, among
other things insisting when the _Azor_ was ready to sail that it was not
seaworthy and needed a new copper bottom (to cost $2000). The vessel at
length made one or two trips, however, on one voyage carrying as many as
274 emigrants. It was then stolen and sold in Liverpool, and one gets an
interesting sidelight on Southern conditions in the period when he knows
that even the United States Circuit Court in South Carolina refused