sts was held in
Washington and out of which grew the American Colonization Society.

A year later, speaking before this organization, Mercer stated his
reasons for supporting deportation. "Many thousand individuals in our
native State, you well know Mr. President, are restrained from
manumitting their slaves, as you and I are, by the melancholy
conviction that they cannot yield to the suggestions of humanity
without manifest injury to their country." He held that the rapidly
increasing free black population endangered the peace of the State and
impaired in a large section the value of slave property. What
banditti, consisting of the degraded, idle, and vicious free blacks,
"sally forth from their coverts, beneath the obscurity of night, and
plunder the rich proprietors of the valleys. They infest the suburbs
of the towns and cities, where they become the depositories of stolen
goods, and, schooled by necessity, elude the vigilance of our
defective police."[245] Thus a Virginia slaveholder saw in Negro
colonization a means to relieve the State of a dangerous population,
to increase the value of slave property and to make possible
manumission by that class of slaveholders in which he put himself.

A concurrent expression on Negro deportation, but apparently an
independent one, is connected with the name of Robert Finley, of
Basking Ridge, New Jersey. A graduate of Princeton, a teacher, a
Presbyterian pastor, Finley was in 1816 made president of the
University of Georgia, at Athens, where he died the following year at
the age of forty-five. As early as 1814 he wrote "a very particular
friend in Philadelphia" his ideas on Negro colonization.[246] On
February 15, 1815, he wrote a letter to John O. Mumford, of New York
City, in which he argued for the removal of the free blacks. He said
in part: "Everything connected with their condition, including their
color, is against them; nor is there much prospect that their state
can ever be greatly ameliorated, while they shall continue among us.
Could not the rich and benevolent devise means to form a colony on
some part of the Coast of Africa, similar to the one at Sierra Leone,
which might gradually induce many free blacks to go there and settle,
devising for them the means of getting there, and of protection and
support till they were established? Ought not Congress to be
petitioned to grant them a district in a good climate, say on the
shores of the Pacific Ocean? Our fathers