, May 1, 1819, and was accepted by
the American Colonization Society to work for them "without pay as
other engagements would permit."[43]

The treasurer of the General Missionary Convention reported $2 for
Africa received September 21, 1819, from a friend in Nashville
Tennessee. The next year the society appropriated $200 in cash and
$100 in books. Contrasted with this was the $483.25 paid April 17,
1820, by the Richmond African Baptist Missionary Society to the
General Missionary Convention to be appropriated for Africa.[44] Thus
the Convention served only as a clearing house for the funds
contributed from Richmond. With this in mind we can more clearly
understand the following order voted by the Baptist Board of Foreign
Missions in 1820:

With African Mission Society, Richmond,
To various exp. for Collin Teague and Lot Carey ... 500 25.[45]

Furthermore, the historian of the Convention up to the year 1840[46]
relates that the Richmond African Baptist Missionary Society, of which
Lott Cary was the recording secretary, appropriated to the cause of
African redemption $700, all of its funds collected during the first
five years of its existence. For many years thereafter the Society
collected and contributed annually from $100 to $150 to the mission in
Africa.[47]

Lott Cary was giving up much to be an apostle to his people--a
pastorate of nearly eight hundred members, a farm and house costing
$1,500 and a salary increase of $200 a year if he would stay.[48] But
he must go. There were promptings big and great. Cary and Colin Teague
are said to have wished to be where their color would be no
disparagement to their usefulness.[49] "I am an African," he is
reported to have answered an intelligent minister who asked him why he
was leaving,[50] "and, in this country, however meritorious my
conduct, and respectable my character, I cannot receive the credit due
to either. I wish to go to a country where I shall be estimated by my
merits, not by my complexion; and I feel bound to labor for my
suffering race."

It is highly probable that Cary possessed no such race consciousness
as is portrayed in the foregoing reports of Crane and Gurley. True
enough, the occasion for such sentiment was there in the institution
of slavery but had Cary imbibed the spirit? On the one hand, the free
Negro was not wanted in Virginia as is evidenced by an act which made
unlawful the permanent residence in the State of any slave s