tely be the means of
exterminating slavery in our country."[281]

The charge was made later, especially by the Abolitionists, that the
movement was a deeply laid device for making slavery more secure than
ever. They took great delight in referring to Randolph's remark, made
at the first public meeting of the deportationists, that colonization
would tend "to secure the property of every master in the United
States over his slaves." Subsequently the management of the Society
itself recognized the force of this remark as a quotation from the
eighty-second report will show: "It was this ill-omened utterance of a
solitary member of the Society, who appears to have taken very little
if any part in its subsequent proceedings, that afterward gave the
impracticable abolitionists a text for the most vituperative and
persistent assaults upon the Society and its purpose."[282] Randolph's
remark is not only qualified by the fact that he took "very little if
any part in its subsequent proceedings" but also by his prediction
that thousands of slaveholders, when assured of a place to send the
Negroes, would emancipate their slaves because they would then be
relieved from their care. With all this, however, Randolph claimed the
colonization movement had nothing to do with abolition.

And it must also be remembered that the eccentric Randolph was only
one man among a large group of men who were interested in the
deportation movement. In this large group two, Mills and Finley,
religious patriots, stand head and shoulders above all the others,
both of whom, Mills, particularly, hoped to provide a method for the
abolition of slavery. Moreover, the Abolitionists should have observed
that the name of Daniel Webster appeared among the signers of the
constitution as well as the name of Ferdinando Fairfax[283] and
especially that of William Thorton.[284] Fairfax and Thorton were
excellent representatives of deportation schemes, proposed in the
eighteenth century and deliberately designed to remove from our
country all Negroes both free and slave. It seems, therefore, safe to
conclude that the colonization movement of 1816-17 was at that time
sincere in its purpose and straightforward in its aims.

Therefore with humanitarian aims the colonizationists at their first
public meeting, December 21, 1816, passed resolutions favorable to the
formation of an association for the purpose of deporting the free
blacks to Africa or elsewhere, and appointe