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 APR 14 1915 
 
 Patriotism, Philanthropy, and RELicms^ '>':;, .» ^^00^ 
 
 A^N ^^.DDR^SS 
 
 IlEFORE THE 
 
 AmericaiN Colonization Society, 
 
 JANUARY 16, 1877, 
 
 ALEXANDER T. McGILL, D.D. LED. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY REQUEST. 
 
 WASHINGTON CITY : 
 
 Colonization Buildinc;, 450 Pennsylvania Avenue. 
 1877. 
 
A^DDRESS. 
 
 Mr. President: Truthfulness must be considered the only rock on 
 which any moral reform or social combination will ever abide. After 
 long observation I affirm that the American Colonization Society is 
 the most truthful institution of uninspired wisdom I have known to 
 be set up amid the passions of men and changes of time. No rock in 
 ocean ever stood the conflict of surges at the base and tumult of storms 
 at the summit with more simple and unchanging aspect of stability and 
 usefulness. Truth is not simple as error is. She disdains the poverty 
 of one idea, prefers to be complex, proceeds with a balance, and re- 
 poses with confidence only when she is many-sided in her complete- 
 ness. The wreath which was laid on the cradle of this organization — 
 patriotism, philanthropy, and religion — is the same as it was threescore 
 years ago, without the fading of one leaf or flower, whilst every other 
 society with but one of these objects in its aim has withered away. 
 Truth is also positive in her moderation. Error is negative, and 
 therefore easier as well as simpler, coinciding with the passions of 
 men, and achieving success with a quicker speed than is possible for 
 the solid and temperate and well-poised movement of the true. 
 
 Societies younger than ours, with the one idea of abolishing slavery 
 at any cost and without delay, have triumphed already and disappeared, 
 because their work is done. But ours may now be seen coming slowly 
 up, with scant resources, to a ravaged field and forlorn occupation, and 
 yet the best opportunity that ever dawned on her benevolence. No 
 changes have changed her in the least. Slavery predominant and 
 slavery destroyed are just the same thing to her interference — the 
 problem of the black man remaining unsolved to her eye. We have 
 always proposed to work with him as a freeman, and therefore gladly 
 accept his emancipation everywhere. But what is freedom to him in 
 the social degradation which yet remains? What is liberty worth 
 when his own is used by others more than by himself, and that to 
 make him a slave to his own passions.' What is the bill of rights in 
 his hand when it is reddened in a war of races or trampled with con- 
 
tempt, which no constitutional amendment can amend in the constitu- 
 tion of our nature? What is religion itself to him, the freedom with 
 which the Son makes free, when its altars are abandoned for the polls, 
 and its pulpits forsaken by the best culture it has, for the stump, the 
 tribunal, and the brawl of pot-house politicians? 
 
 It must be confessed that complicated misery and fearful danger 
 attend the glory of his manumission still, and it calls for more than 
 one idea to heal the complication. No remedy here can advance 
 him another step ; no mechanism of party can put on him the true 
 habiliment of manhood. We must send him home, when he is will- 
 ing to go, and see that his home is attractive and safe, as it was not 
 when he was torn from it and sold from bondage to bondage. We 
 must consign him as a citizen from one Republic to another, with 
 gain to him in the transfer of true instead of nominal " liberty, 
 equality, and fraternity." We must do by him for his home what 
 the navies of Christendom could not do for the coast of Africa — stop 
 the traffic in human flesh ; and we must do by him what all the mis- 
 sionaries of Christendom besides could not do for a quarter of the 
 globe — span it with an equatorial church, redeem it from the curse of 
 Ham, and overspread the mysteries of darkness and death on its bosom 
 with the mysteries of "a kingdom which cannot be moved." 
 
 Such is the composite object we offered sixty years ago as a true 
 catholicon for the African race. And who can doubt it now, or 
 allege that it was faulty or mistaken in any one of its ingredients ? 
 We seem to be hindered at present from gathering certificates on 
 every hand. Party faction, more than sectional faction ever did, pre- 
 vents us from asking Congress, and State after State, and church after 
 church to witness the excellence of our object and the wisdom of our 
 way. But it is enough to recall the memorials of attestation, which 
 all men must honor, as a verdict on the past and a trust for the future. 
 It would be well to begin another decade with a roll-call of the orig- 
 inal officers and members, and ask what one of those illustrious men 
 would now, if he were living, and led by the logic of events which 
 have intervened, regret the institution, as too slow and cumbrous and 
 neutral, or in any one particular as not suited and true to the situation ? 
 Would Bushrod Washington, or Henry Clay, or Daniel Webster, or 
 John Randolph, or William Thornton, or Francis S. Key, or John 
 Mason, or Charles Marsh ; would Robert Finley, or Samuel J. Mills, 
 or William Meade; would any one of the fifty original members who 
 sat as peers in the first council of colonization, and represented there 
 
the patriarchal wisdom of JefFerson, Madison, Monroe, and Marshall, 
 sav that the amazing overturn which we have witnessed in this genera- 
 tion has altered one syllable of the original platform on which our 
 object was placed ? 
 
 1st. " To rescue the free colored people of the United States from 
 their political and social disadvantages. 
 
 2d. " To place them in a country where they may enjoy the bene- 
 fits of free government, with all the blessings which it brings in its 
 train. 
 
 3d. '• To spread civilization, sound morals, and true religion through- 
 out the continent of Africa. 
 
 4th. "To arrest and destroy the slave trade. 
 
 5th. "To afford slave owners who wish or are willing to liberate 
 their slaves an asylum for their reception." 
 
 Only the last plank of this original has been loosened in the least 
 by the great convulsion through which we have passed. Slave owners 
 no longer exist among us with wishes or willingness to be consulted 
 and regarded. But surely the nation itself, whose fiat has broken every 
 yoke and made the slaves its own constituency, should be willing to 
 liberate them from every ban that is left, f>om the very name of 
 ** freedman," and help them to an asylum which is absolutely safe, 
 and more and more complete in all its appointments and attractions. 
 What means " intimidation " in the charges and counter-charges of this 
 convulsive present? No such word has ever yet been heard at the 
 polls of Liberia. No military muster is made, or needed, or called 
 for there to guard the franchise of a colored citizen. There, in- 
 deed, he is his own master, free to canvass, free to change, free to 
 vote, without one claim of antecedents on the one hand, or fear of 
 guns upon the other. Is it not now as much as ever, and more 
 than ever, "an asylum" for the black man? 
 
 If he prefers, after all, to make this country his home, with a view 
 to advance the improvement of his lot and elevate his race, we are not 
 done with him in the true objects of our colonization. We shall stand 
 at his side to help him and rejoice. For his advancement anywhere 
 is not only a chief aim of the Society, but a great auxiliary, both at 
 home and abroad. The more elevated he becomes here the more 
 fitted he is for Africa — to go himself or send others. We have never 
 failed to choose the best for this emigration. If he be not cultured 
 enough to know how to work, and how to vote, and how to bear 
 ofiice, how to teach and how to christianize in teaching, we do not 
 
elect him for the citizenship of Liberia. We would rather detain 
 him, with all the damage his unfitness may do to ourselves, than send 
 him over to be a burden or a pest in that community which we seek 
 to model for the redemption of a continent. We do not forget the 
 war of anti-slavery upon us on account of this kind of selection, and 
 its vehement demand that colonization should wait for the best, until 
 these could be used at home, in the work of immediate and universal 
 abolition. And now we look to the magnanimity of the triumphant 
 to spare the intelligence, and industry, and virtue, of which they have 
 made so much, in order to propagate for us and Africa this glory of 
 the race. 
 
 Twenty-six years ago, Mr. President, at the great anniversary over 
 which Henry Clay presided, I believe, for the last time, having the 
 President of the United States on his right, and a vast audience, com- 
 posed largely of statesmen, ambassadors, and philanthropists of the 
 highest rank before him; after almost every phase of the subject had 
 been swept by his magnificent eloquence at the opening, and after the 
 Rev. Dr. Fuller, then of Baltimore, had followed him with ingenious 
 prophecy and tender pathos which continued that brilliant assembly 
 in a trance, you were felicitous enough, under all the disadvantage of 
 being third orator in such a succession, to hold the unflagging interest 
 of that house with the great thought that the work of the Society is 
 more at present with Africa than with America; to make the Colony 
 attractive and draw to itself, without the persuasion of agencies here, 
 the crowd that must be always eager to make their own condition 
 better. That thought is my gateway to another line of truth, the 
 truth of facts, as well as principles, in your beneficent and steady 
 working to this hour. 
 
 You began with a careful and costly experiment on the Coast to 
 find the most healthy location for your Colony. The life of Mills 
 himself was paid in that experiment. But you succeeded. Even 
 Plymouth and Jamestown, for health to the Englishman, were not to 
 be compared with Monrovia for health to the American negro. You 
 began with a tutelage to govern the colonist, because the power of 
 self-government in him had not then been developed or tried ; and he 
 became at once heroic in the hands of your Agency; refused to follow 
 disheartened "tutors and governors" back to America; took the guar- 
 dianship of himself into his own hands ; declined the offer of British 
 marines to protect him at the price of only a few feet to be ceded for 
 their flagstaff, and with a band of but thirty-five fighting men repulsed 
 
the natives, led by their kings, with eight hundred in one battle, and 
 double this number in another. Such heroes were Lott Cary and 
 Elijah Johnson. They would buy territory for themselves and make 
 their own Trustees of the chivalric Stockton and Ayres, who pur- 
 chased Cape Mesurado for such colonists at the hazard of their own 
 lives. We do not wonder that Ashmun and Gurley hastened in their 
 wisdom to divide with such colonists the government of their own 
 Commonwealth, and that the Society itself hastened to fulfil its prom- 
 ise from the first, to resign its own authority as soon as the treedman 
 <:ould stand for himself 
 
 Nations are slow of growth, especially in the cradle of their youth. 
 A centenary is the familiar unit with which we measure the growth 
 of our own in its boast ot unparalleled progress. But one quarter of 
 a century — scarcely more than enough of years to bring the infancy 
 of an individual man to the majority of manhood — was enough to 
 bring your first handful of emigrants, who landed as guests merely at 
 Sierra Leone and Campelar, without a foot of territory or shore to be 
 called their own, to the dignity and independence of a Republic com- 
 plete in everv department of a nation's power, and acknowledged by 
 the greatest nations ot the world. And what it the subsequent advance 
 in material greatness may not correspond with such a beginning, and 
 the reproach of disappointed hope may have come to hinder the ex- 
 pansion ot colonization zeal among ourselves ? Does not lite in all its 
 analogies demand a quiet solidification to succeed a rapid growth ? It 
 would be impossible for a narrow Coast of six hundred miles by fifty, 
 with a vast interior of teeming and savage people pressing on its civil- 
 ization with a proportion of twenty-five to one, at the process of assim- 
 ilation, to go fast without being overwhelmed. It is the slowness of 
 safety ; it is the compactness of unity ; it is the balancing of maturity ; 
 in all respects the opposite of failure and decline, which must explain 
 the present appearance of results in Liberia. Your thought is right 
 and true, and your promise fulfilled, that Africa is overtaking America 
 in the power of attracting immigration. Its agriculture is improving, 
 its commerce increasing; its education already commands the respect 
 of Universities in Europe, and its documents of State have become the 
 admiration of Governments over the civilized world. The romance 
 of travel is all gathered now to the old continent which it fringes and 
 guards and aims to redeem. The engineer is at the heels of the ad- 
 venturer in this age, and he is always followed soon by trains of immi- 
 gration. 
 
The attraction to Africa of her own children will be a stream 
 which is not to be reversed. Our great asvlum in this land for all 
 nations already suffers some reversal. The skill of industries, and 
 even the toil of common labor, have almost crowded the voyage back 
 to the old world of late, because of the redundancy and the mixture 
 of races to be met in our workshops and fields. The discouragement 
 of capital is much; oppressive legislation is more; but most of all is 
 the jostle of nationalities — Caucasian, Ethiopian, and Mongolian — in 
 their free fight for employment and a living, the cause of this back- 
 ward turning from America. But Africa forbids by her climate all 
 competition with her sons. There may be on the heights of her 
 grand interior safe retreats from the fever of her Coast to attract in 
 coming time enough of other kindreds to stimulate the development 
 of her own myriads and make a civilization equal to the best ; but 
 the din of busy occupation, the hum of toiling millions, the rewards 
 of tillage on her exuberant soil must be chiefly, by God's own appoint- 
 ment, Ethiopian. 
 
 His blessing has attended thus far the work of your hands. This 
 might indeed be counted on, when we know it is right and true by its 
 principles and aims; and if our depression had been a thousand times 
 deeper than it ever was, the integrity of motive and operation would 
 have assured us that God is with us. But see the signals of His pres- 
 ence and direction from the beginning. It was no sudden or acci- 
 dental thought of Dr. Finley or any other agent in the first convoca- 
 tion. It was older than the Revolution of American Colonies in its 
 meditation and projection, and when the time had come "all things 
 worked together for good." Patriotism in the legislative councils of 
 Virginia ; piety in the conference of clergymen at Princeton, N. J., 
 and missionary ardor among the students of theology at Andover, 
 flowed together simultaneously to begin this organization. God has 
 ennobled it in the succession of its Presidents. Washington, Carroll, 
 Madison, and Clay have been the line of your predecessors. He has 
 guided the selection of agents and officers of every kind without one 
 mistake in the appointments of human wisdom. He has prospered 
 the voyage at all times, without one shipwreck with loss of life in 
 sixty years. Truly we may thank Him and take courage. "What 
 hath God wrought?" We may well rely on His abiding benediction 
 when we feel sure that His own ark is in it, as it was in the House of 
 Obed-edom. 
 
 The white man sent with the gospel to Africa perishes quickly and 
 
9 
 
 constantly, as if it were the " breach upon Uzzah " for him to attempt 
 any more the devout but deadly adventure. And yet the living min- 
 ister must go there with the great commission upon him. It is the 
 Divine appointment. Bibles and tracts and schools are treasures of 
 unspeakable value ; but we must keep them " in earthen vessels" — men 
 of like passions with others. " The foolishness of preaching," more 
 than eloquence of any other sort, must be made to save men by means 
 of sympathy between man and man. It is the colored preacher that 
 must go, and go as a colonist, identified with the emigrating band in 
 seeking a home, or brought up in the colony itself and educated there. 
 Halfway back in the lapse of your anniversary time, and more than 
 half way back to the first planting of the colony, Mr. Clay said from 
 that chair, " What Christian is there who does not feel a deep inter- 
 «st in sending forth missionaries to convert the dark heathen and bring 
 them within the pale of Christianity ? But what missionaries can be 
 so potent as those it is our purpose to transport to the shores of Africa ? 
 Africans themselves by birth, or sharing at least African blood, will 
 not all their feelings, all their best affections induce them to seek the 
 good of their countrymen? At this moment there are between four 
 and five thousand colonists who have been sent to Africa under the 
 care of this Society ; there are now twenty-five places of public wor- 
 ship dedicated to the service of Almighty God and to the glory of the 
 Saviour of men ; and I will venture to say that they will accom- 
 plish as missionaries of the Christian religion more to disseminate its 
 blessings than all the rest of the missionaries throughout the globe." 
 
 About the time our great patriotic statesman was talking thus, like 
 an eloquent evangelist, Lieutenant Forbes, of the British Navy, was 
 publishing his book on Dahomey, in which it was virtually declared 
 that Liberia was a cheat, and that our Society was engaged in trans- 
 ferring to the shores of Africa American slavery under another name. 
 The prompt denial of this, and triumphant appeal to the Constitution 
 of the Society and the facts of history, could not hinder the American 
 Anti-Slavery Society from siding with Forbes and maligning Clay, and 
 insisting that our officers had evaded the issue in their emphatic refu- 
 tation. Where, now, is the truth, after all that obloquy, and the vic- 
 tories of our assailants, and the overthrow of slavery, and the advent 
 of freedmen to search for themselves the records of Congress, and 
 twelve States at least, and ecclesiastical assemblies innumerable, attest- 
 ing the singleness of aim with which the Society has always sought 
 to secure the liberty and culture and salvation of the negro? Our 
 
10 
 
 existence itself at the Sixtieth Anniversary may answer. Persistency 
 is triumph wherever truth is marshaled. The pointing of your finger 
 is equal to the marching of a host, when all things are ready. Vindi- 
 cated, established, and successful, beyond all precedent, among the 
 voluntary societies of the world, I would say to you "stand still, and 
 see the salvation of the Lord." But you have already listened to 
 these words long enough, with the raging of a red sea before you, 
 and the pillar of the cloud behind you. Your great opportunity, 
 God's own opportunity for movement, has come, and louder than a 
 thousand billows the voice of His Prophet is heard, saying, "go for- 
 ward." What if the patriotism and the philanthropy both should yet 
 be challenged and impugned whilst the public mind is bewildered 
 with the problem of freedmen at our doors by the million.'' Those 
 objects were feet in your progress. Take now the wings which have 
 infolded them all along, and spread these to heaven henceforth, and 
 let all men see the ultimate and main identity of your mission : 
 "Another angel flying in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting 
 gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every 
 nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people." 
 
 Surely nothing is lost to humanity or patriotism or any other object 
 of your manifold original by soaring in this way. It is infinitely better 
 to be narrowed upwards than downwards, -to have the expanse of a 
 firmament that touches everything with light and life to be your mar- 
 gin than the vale of cold and dark infidelity, where so many other 
 societies have descended to die. Let it be seen that the best economy 
 of Christian Missi®ns attaches itself to the work of Colonization, as 
 Hopkins, and Stiles, and Mills, and Burgess, and Ashmun, and Alex- 
 ander have taught us to believe, and America and Africa both are 
 yours, and both shall pass away from the orbit of earth before the 
 crown of vour immortality shall fade.