LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 01 1 932 607 2 
 
 pH8^ 
 
/y^^-t^ ^ J^. (^o^v^^xjC 
 
 j> 
 
 Emancipation and Restoration to their Fatherland. 
 
 E 448 
 
 .S19 
 
 Copy 1 CORRELATE DUTIES 
 
 PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES 
 
 DESCENDANTS OF COLORED PEOPLE 
 
 DESIRING TO BK 
 
 COLONISTS IN^ AFRICA. 
 
 BEFOKE THE 
 
 AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY, 
 
 A' X JANUARY 20, 1 874. 
 
 X By GEORGE W. SAMSON, D. D., of New York. 
 
 vVASHINGTON CITY: 
 
 m'gIJ-L & WITHEROW, PRINTERS AND STEREOTYPERS. 
 
 1874. 
 

 ADDRESS. 
 
 / li huraaB enterprises which result in great and permanent 
 blessings to mankind begin in the feeble and limited efforts of 
 a few men ; they are prompted by convictions that take hold 
 on deep principles of truth and right, which only a few minds 
 of mature experience and free from personal ambition fully 
 conceive; their full and comprehensive operation is retarded 
 often for generations by the imperfect views and selfish spirit 
 common to fallen human nature; but at length they triumph 
 over every obstacle and command the admiration and support 
 of nations and ages. 
 
 Such an enterprise is that of the colonization of the African Con- 
 tinent by the descendants of its people, brought two centuries 
 ago to the eastern shore of North America. It is the world's 
 latest and completest development of the law that emancipa- 
 tion of enslaved captives is necessarily coupled with the duty 
 of their restoration to the land of their nativity. This duty, 
 whether the enslaved be a captive taken in war or a bondman 
 forced to labor, grows out of three relations universally re- 
 cognized among mankind as of binding force : first, the right 
 of the enslaved to the use of the powers God has given him in 
 the home where Grod placed him; second, the claim set up by 
 nations having the power to enforce it; and third, the united 
 convictions of duty and interest which finally compel the cap- 
 tor and master to acknowledge this right and to yield to its 
 demand. 
 
 The law of duty is drawn from the record of what men have 
 thought and done in all ages of human history; and especially 
 in primitive and simple times. All great writers on law and 
 jurisprudence, from Solon to Blackstone, go back alike to Ho- 
 mer and Moses for precedents; to the one because the fiction 
 is reality, being but a picture of human impulses as they show 
 themselves in the actual life of men ; the other because the 
 
.S/7 ■ 
 
 faithful chronicle of one nation's experience is but a transcript 
 of the principles ruling all nations. 
 
 The principle of equity ruling individual and national duty 
 to bond-servants among Asiatics is set forth in Jacob going 
 back to his father with presents after a service of twenty 
 years, and in the restoration of his descendants froin centuries 
 of bondage in Egypt, and afterwards in Assyria, when their 
 masters, enriched by their labor, sent them back to their n;/ive 
 land well provided for support in their settlement; and tha+ 
 universal law of recognized obligation is now seen in the stip- 
 ulations of the Chinese, the Kussian, and other governments in 
 Asia, that no subject of theirs shall be removed for foreign 
 service without the guarantee of his return by the employer. 
 That same principle, always and everywhere ruling European 
 mind and action, is pictured in the inexorable law which com- 
 pelled the final restoration of the captive Helen to her Grecian 
 lord, as it more quickly prompted the return of Briseis with 
 gifts to her Trojan sire; and this law of inseparable connection 
 between emancipation and restoration is still read in the de- 
 mand on Turkey b}^ the Allied Western Powers that the 
 Greeks, after four centuries of bondage, should be restored 
 both to their freedom and their property rights; it is now 
 pending in the claim of both England and the United States 
 as to the very doubtful case of the Yirginius captives; and it is 
 read in the order from the Italian Government, this morning 
 published at New York, that children brought to this country 
 by Italian padroni shall be returned before the 15th May to 
 their homes at the cost of their masters. 
 
 The point for our consideration to-night is, that this princi- 
 ple is not only binding, but it has been specially recognized as 
 still holding between enlightened and prospered America and 
 benighted and down-trodden Africa. It is our privilege and 
 pride to hail the fact that, in the entire history of our Ameri- 
 can nation, this principle has been both recognized and con- 
 trolling; and that the American Colonization Society is its 
 noble monument. 
 
 It should be always borne in mind in any survey of what 
 men and nations have said and done, that our Divine Euler 
 and Redeemer has himself linked the impulses of interest and 
 
duty indissolubly in man's nature; and He means that they 
 shall never be severed in the noblest human endeavor, not 
 even in the moral redemption of man. The very law of Heaven 
 is, "Thou Shalt love thy neighbor as thyself;" the stimulus to 
 Christian enterprise from the Divine Master's own lip is "an 
 hundred-fold in this world" to him who "forsakes all" to pro- 
 mote His cause; human interests, individual and national, 
 are legitimate appeals to engage in Christian enterprise; com- 
 merce is generally the pioneer of Christian missions; and no 
 intelligent mind could have full confidence in the Colonization 
 of Africa by restored natives if in every stage of its progress 
 these divinely linked impulses of interest and duty were not 
 found to be combined in the acts and words of the three par- 
 ties concerned : the American whites who send the emigrants, 
 the emigrants themselves who go, and the people of Liberia 
 and of the African Continent who urge their claim to colo- 
 nists. 
 
 The suggestions which have led to African colonization can 
 be traced far back into the history of the American Colonies 
 and of the infant nation; and it is worthy of remark that in 
 each step taken American sentiment leads and British phi- 
 lanthropy follows; while both act from interest as well as 
 from duty. 
 
 In August, 1773, before the American war, prompted by the 
 desire of some young African slaves to return to their native 
 land as Christian missionaries. Dr. Ezra Stiles, of Newport, 
 E I., afterwards President of Tale College, joined by the cel- 
 ebrated theologian. Dr. Samuel Hopkins, wrote an address on 
 the iniquity of the slave-trade, and proposed the education and 
 sending out of these African youth as " the least compensation 
 we are able to make to the poor Africans for the injuries they 
 are constantly receiving from this unrighteous practice;" to 
 which address responses came in the form of pecuniary con- 
 tributions both from Scotland and New England. In 1787, the 
 same year that the United States Constitution declared that 
 the slave-trade should cease after twenty-one years, Dr. Wil- 
 liam Thornton published an address to the free people of 
 color in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, proposing to become 
 the leader of a colony to be settled on the West Coast of Africa. 
 
Shortly after Dr. Hopkins corresponded with Granville Shai'pe, 
 of England, making a kindred suggestion; and in 1792, five 
 years later, the Government of Great Britain at great expense 
 transported the negroes captured in the American States dur- 
 ing the war of Independence, who had been temporarily sup- 
 ported in Canada, to the new territory obtained for them at 
 Sierra Leone, on the "West Coast of Africa. From this day 
 the duty of restoring at public expense the descendants of 
 African captives to their native land becomes a controlling 
 sentiment; which sentiment has not died out from the Ameri- 
 can breast, and cannot now be stifled except from a mistaken 
 view of the interests and obligations involved. 
 
 England, led as America was to be, by united interest and 
 duty, now enters the ai'ena of active enterprise in paying her 
 debt to Africa. The independence of America, cutting England 
 off from a market in the Western World for her manufactures, 
 turned the attention of our worthy ancestors to the East; 
 bringing to her, also to both Asia and Africa, a blessing which 
 a centuiy ago no one dreamed of. For two centuries, from 
 A. D. 1600, the English East India trading enterprise had been 
 secondary to the American colonial; and the supply posts she 
 had planted on the Western and Southern Coast of Africa had 
 been but of temporary consideration. Now, however, that 
 very Cornwallis who lost prestige at Yorktown was called to 
 retrieve his honor in India. Soon extended territory in South- 
 ern and Eastern Asia, and in Western, Southern, and Eastern 
 Africa, were gained by Great Britain for commercial purposes; 
 and highways were opened along which English and American 
 missionaries, with their wives and children, were seen pressing, 
 their concord never disturbed even by the war of 1812. Fol- 
 lowing America, successive acts of the British Parliament in 
 1805, 1807, 1811, and 1824 were passed making the slave-trade 
 first to have a limit, then to be a felony, and last to be piracy. 
 Following again the Northern States, after many years Great 
 Britain in 1834 abolished slavery in her West India Colonies; 
 paying, however, $100,000,000 as remuneration to the owners. 
 To plant and sustain the Colony of Sierra Leone England ex- 
 pended in 1801 about $116,000, and in 1802 made an appi-opri- 
 tion of $50,000 over and above the employ of her national ves- 
 sels for transportation. 
 
The field of movement now shifts to America. In 1800 Vir- 
 ginia, filled with free negroes by the humane acts of Washing- 
 ton and kindred spirits in emancipating their slaves, began to 
 discuss the question of an asylum for them ; and Monroe, then 
 Governor of Yirginia, and Jefferson, President of the United 
 States, were enlisted. Interest, indeed, but mutual interest, 
 that of the whites and blacks, met and mingled with deep con- 
 victions of duty. The Northwestern Territory, made free by 
 Virginia's own act only thirteen years previous, was suggested 
 as that as3'lura; but the humanity of those true friends of the 
 colored people forbade the selection of a home so inclement 
 and so exposed to white aggression, especially from the French 
 Canadians. Under date of December 27, 1804, Mr. Jefferson 
 suggested their incorporation with the English Colony of Si- 
 erra Leone, since the British Government had proposed to 
 deliver up this Colony to home rule. Under date, again, of 
 January 21, 1811, after he had ceased to be President, Mr. Jef- 
 ferson, replying to an appeal of an Association of Friends who 
 were urging from humanity African colonization, refers to 
 his former suggestion as to Sierra Leone, against which objec- 
 tion had arisen, and adds: "You inquire whether I would use 
 my endeavor to procure such an establishment, secure against 
 violence from other powers, and particularly fi'om the French? 
 Certainly 1 shall be willing to do anything I can to give it 
 effect and safety. * * * Nothing is more to be wished 
 than that the United States themselves would undertake to 
 make such an establishment on the Coast of Africa." Mr. 
 Jefferson's suggestion as to Sierra Leone, he states, arose from 
 the fact that the Colony was mainly made up of " fugitives 
 from these States during the Revolutionary war;" and the ob- 
 ligation of the State of Virginia and of the United States to 
 make pecuniary appropriation for this purpose admits no dis- 
 cussion in the mind of this strict constructionist. 
 
 The era for the rise of the American Colonization Society 
 had now dawned. At the meeting for its organization, De- 
 cember 21st, 1816, Hon, Henry Clay, in an opening address; 
 referred to three interests it sought to promote: first, that of 
 the colored people; second, that of the whites of America; and 
 he added as a third, " the moral fitness of restoring to the 
 
6 
 
 land of their fathers" these exiles, since, said he, "if we can 
 thus transmit to Africa the blessings of our arts, of our civili- 
 zation, and our religion, may we not hope that America will 
 extinguish a great portion of that moral debt which she has 
 contracted to that unfortunate Continent?" He cited the Col- 
 ony of Sierra Leone, planted by England, as an example both 
 of the principle and of the promise for its fulfillment. Mr. 
 Caldwell, who followed, referring to the expense which would 
 necessarily attend it, said that there could hardlj' be a dif- 
 ference of opinion as to the fact that every section of the 
 United States was alike interested and indebted ; that it was 
 "a great national object and ought to be supported by the na- 
 tional purse ; " since, as Mr. Clay had declared, " there ought 
 to be a national atonement for the wrongs and injuries which 
 Africa had received." 
 
 The memorial sent, in accordance with this view, to Con- 
 gress, was responded to by a report closing with two resolu- 
 tions, which contained the following recommendation : that 
 stipulations be obtained fi'om Great Britain and other maritime 
 powers, both for the suppression of the slave-trade, and also 
 "guaranteeing a permanent neutrality for any colony of free 
 people of color, which, at the expense and under the auspices of 
 the United States, shall be established on the African Coast;" 
 to which was added, " Resolved, That adequate provision should 
 be hereafter made to defray any necessary expenses which 
 may be incurred in carrying the preceding resolution into 
 effect." After some delay, from pressure of other business, 
 Congress, on the 3d March, 1819, appointed an agent on the 
 Coast of Africa to receive and colonize recaptives taken in 
 slave ships. 'The sloop-of-war Cyane, with a merchant ship 
 in convoy, and subsequently several vessels of war, were at 
 the public expense employed in this service of national obli- 
 gation. As it was now apparent that a nucleus of trained 
 negroes was essential to the colony, who might be instructors 
 and supporters of the almost helpless recaptives, Mr. Monroe 
 interpreted the law just passed by Congress as necessitating 
 the sending of select American negroes liberated by philan- 
 thropic masters for this mission, and also as providing for the 
 buying of lands and the furnishing of other supplies necessary ; 
 
and thus in its equity the United States began to act on the 
 principle of duty recognized in other lands and ages. 
 
 Eight years after this, in 1829, when twelve State Legisla- 
 tures had united in commending the Colonization enterprise, 
 Hon. Henry Clay addressed the Society of his adopted State, 
 Kentucky, in that masterly speech of more than an hour in 
 length, which did more than any single effort ever made to 
 bring our country to view rightly the question of slave-eman- 
 cipation as a moral law which was inevitably sooner or later 
 to rule; while, too, the same speech gave the clear forecast of 
 the provision for the emancipated which, sooner or later, our 
 nation must make, or suffer the penalty of violated law. He 
 refers to the fact that, in the council of diplomats assembled at 
 Ghent, to form the treaty which fixed the relation of the new 
 American States to the various States of Europe, a British 
 jurist admitted the superior fidelity shown by the American 
 States toward weak and dependent Indian tribes and African 
 slaves; their acts, both before and after their independence, 
 standing out in striking contrast to the course not only of 
 Spain and France but even of England herself. He dwelt on 
 the fact that as soon as they had the power, they carried out 
 in good faith their remonstrances with the mother country 
 against the slave-trade; providing in their very Constitution 
 for its cessation as soon as previous British property guaran- 
 tees to investments made in the trafiic could be legally can- 
 celed. He argued that the humanity which controlled the 
 mass of slaveholders not only pei-mitted but encouraged manu- 
 mission and provision for emancipated slaves; and declared 
 that the day was not distant when interest and duty would 
 unite to secure universal emancipation. He showed that the 
 competition of white labor, which had driven the colored peo- 
 ple of all the free States into obscurity, was now acting in 
 Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky; and that humanity as well 
 as national indebtedness demanded the most studious consid- 
 eration on the part of American statesmen as to their future 
 provision. He pointed to the recognition of this duty wit- 
 nessed in churches, especially among Christian women, but also 
 in the acts of the Legislatures of more than half of the States of 
 the Union and in the enrollment among the members of the 
 
8 
 
 Colonization Society of " some of the most distinguished men 
 of our country in its legislative, executive, and judicial coun- 
 cils." He urged that nothing but the substitution of white 
 for colored laborers in the Southern States would give them 
 the prosperity of the North ; that the return of the exiles of 
 Africa, properly trained and provided, would bring the blessings 
 of peace, prosperity and happiness to the teeming populations 
 of two continents; with the union of freedom and republi- 
 can institutions as a heritage to millions of their descend- 
 ants. He hailed the enterprise as the fulfillment of the mission 
 of the World's Redeemer and of the aspirations of his ardent and 
 pious disciples to regenerate the two continents still left in 
 heathenism. As to the expense incurred, he showed from 
 careful estimates that one million of dollars applied annually 
 for sixty or seventy years, less than $75,000,000, paid as a na- 
 tional debt, would restore all the exiles to the land of their 
 ancestry. Such a strain of eloquence has seldom fallen from 
 the lips of any orator of ancient or modern times; such a 
 tracing of the moral law of duty could never have been 
 resisted, except by selfish cupidity, in any age; every point of 
 its great argument has been intensified in each succeeding de- 
 cade of American history since; if listened to in the day of its 
 utterance, the words of Him who spake as never man spake 
 would have been verified to the very letter, that the man and 
 the nation true to God's law of righteousness towards the cap- 
 tive " shall receive an hundred-fold " for his fidelity ; and if no w, 
 when that hundred-fold has been entered on the other side of 
 the balance-sheet, and has been more than paid in the expense 
 of the late war — if our nation and its people determine to do 
 the duty that must be met towards the freed people of our 
 country, they may save the generations soon to struggle for 
 the mastery in the competition for life on our continent — they 
 may save this last refuge of the needy — another accuramulation 
 of a debt that at a hundred per cent, of annually accruing in- 
 crease must some day be fully paid. With a single allusion to 
 the concurrent testimony of other statesmen of that day, we 
 may pass to a glance at the proof of this still pending event 
 revealed to the forecast of that generation of great men and 
 of devoted lovers of their country and of the world. 
 
Two years only after this speech of Mr. Clay, when h s 
 spirit, though a southern man, was awakening a cou»te par 
 n So;th Carolina nullification, at the annual n;-*-? »/ '^ 
 Colonization Society, held at Washington and crowd d b 
 B^embers from both Houses of Congress, letters from both ex 
 President Madison and Chief Justice Marshall were read^M^ 
 Madison with pen tremulous with age, wrote . The boQ.e y 
 
 fad alw^yB ™y good ^«'^^«'" """ "''"' '"""J^ ," f 1o 
 fe inTt? accomplishment, he meets the obief obstacle ocolo^ 
 
 nization the attendant expense, with a suggestion ^o thy of 
 Te State as well as of the nation which bad so worthily hon- 
 odhimjTn which suggestion the philanthropist towers above 
 Tvcn the 'patriot, and^yet much more above * « -Uona hs 
 and the political bigot. "In contemplating, wr tes he the 
 necuniary resources needed for the removal of such a number 
 to eo great a distance, my thoughts and hopes have been long 
 turne! to the rich fund presented in the western lands o the 
 nation which will soon entirely cease to be ours, und r a 
 Idge'for another object. The great object in q'X-ot.on is 
 trulv o a national character; and it is known that dislin- 
 girled .Patriots, not dwelling ^y^^^^'^'^ZlZZl^Z 
 viewed the object in that light, and would be willing to et the 
 'Zl. domin be a resource in effecting it Shon . 
 remarked that the States, though all may be »'te'«''«d "i 
 rervin- our country from the colored population, are not 
 rehevin, o i j recollect that the sections most to 
 
 Telnefl Ue lllZ whose cessions created the fund to be 
 d sposed of " Chief Justice Marshall's letter, by a marked law 
 o common sentiment called forth at a common ons«, makes the 
 sime s" ,estion as to the public lands first made hy Senator 
 kZ ot New York, whom Madison, amid the spirit of nulh- 
 ^nitn call! a "dstinguished patriot;" he says that this 
 ?und ceded to he Genertl Government without restriction as 
 o it use by different States and chiefly by Virginia, is les 
 l; «sed to those constitutional objections -t-h are made n 
 th South;" and he concludes, as one '-?■-* by the exper. 
 „f 1 <i'i9. with a vision of the scenes of 1862 : " i he wboie 
 Vlll^^ ;rstrengthened by this act and he relieved from 
 a danger whose extent can scarcely be estimated. 
 
10 
 
 Forty years have passed since Madison and Marshall thus 
 wrote and when Clay spoke for the ages with almost inspired 
 forecast. And to-day how stand the three parties who in all 
 ages have agreed that an emancipated captive must be restored 
 with gifts, or the oflPended deity, the lawgiver of justice and 
 equit}^ will not be appeased! 
 
 Let us glance a moment, first, at the white race, holding 
 with tenacious grasp the soil, the foundation of all individ- 
 ual and national wealth ; which the red man, appealing to 
 Heaven, declares was his by ancestral heritage; and which the 
 black man, since the war, has verily believed was to be por- 
 tioned out among the race that had for two centuries tilled it 
 for usurping landlords. He who sits above has demanded, as 
 of the Trojan heroes refusing to agree in surrendering a stolen 
 captive, hecatombs of human sacrifices, not less than one mil- 
 lion of America's choice sons, two-thirds of them from the States 
 that least recognized the debt which fathers impose on the 
 estates they bequeath. He has exacted in the war expendi- 
 ture an hundred-fold of the sum asked for by Mr. Clay thirty 
 years before as adequate both for the emancipation and the 
 return of the captives; and He has yet more cut off from our 
 land, our ports, our ocean commerce, by an indirect tax, not 
 recognized by human tribunals, but by a higher law extorted, 
 a thousand- fold more than the sum contemplated by the states- 
 men of 1832. And now into our States come pouring literally 
 hordes of the Old World, swarming our States, Massachusetts 
 and South Carolina alike, as the Goths over Italj-, ruling New 
 York, Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis as Attica and Alaric 
 and Theodoric dominated Rome; and who supposes that this 
 mass can be ruled by equity j aye more, that new lords may 
 not seize on our inheritance, when equity towards the black 
 man is not shown ! We may well take up the warnings of 
 both Madison and Jefferson, of Clay and Jackson, in 1832; for 
 the utterances of those aged statesmen of the past century are 
 not to be treated as the excited imaginations of a moment I 
 They were the calm, compelled counsels of the truest friends 
 of humanity when about to meet their own account as Ameri- 
 can leaders. 
 
 The second vital consideration, then, is, " What is justice and 
 
11 
 
 equity to the colored race?" Three home proffers have been 
 made ! Have they brought the relief needed ? 
 
 The first promised was homesteads. Gen. Patrick, the first 
 Provost Marshal General of Virginia, a devout Christian of the 
 Presbyterian church, as well as an able and spotless com- 
 mander during the war, was obliged to restrain, by force, mis- 
 taken friends alike of the colored man and of their country, 
 who told the people just freed alike from slavery and from 
 military control, that their master's lands were to be divided 
 up among them, and that the Government would provide 
 them mnles and implements for farming. Not the first acre 
 has yet been given them; and no man in our country be- 
 lieves this woufd either be for the colored man's interest or 
 justice to the white population; unless it be a revival of the 
 idea of 1832— the devotion of the lands now lavished in rail- 
 road grants, to the furnishing of African colonists as payment 
 of the national debt long due to them I 
 
 Then labor was proff^ered ; and with promises of a propor- 
 tion of the crops, a large portion of the colored people went 
 confidently to their toil. But crops failed, necessarily; for the 
 goil was exhausted; the laborer was unsteady and unskilled; 
 two or three years impoverished proprietors and left laborers 
 to starve; and all Government could do was to provide trans- 
 portation to new and remote lands far south. 
 
 Then came the ballot, eligibility to office, and the Civil-rights 
 Bill, upon which we will not dwell. 
 
 Turning now to Africa, what opens before us! How won- 
 derful the changes the last twenty-five years have wrought; 
 as if to prepare that continent to be the mission-field, the land 
 of promise, the Caanan of rest to this weary, jostled, outrun 
 and dispirited people. Herodotus tells us of an Egyptian col- 
 ony sent into Ethiopia, whose influence so advanced them 
 that they at length made an eff-ectual conquest of Upper Egypt, 
 where, in the city of Thebes, they for some generations took 
 on Asiatic culture; and Bunsen has indicated that this was the 
 very era when David wrote, " Ethiopia shall soon stretch her 
 hands unto God." Strabo, four centuries later, tells how Greek 
 youth of Gyrene trained themselves for years to explore sue- 
 cessfully the upper waters of the Nile ; modern readers of Liv. 
 
12 
 
 ingstone's researches can compare the records and see that 
 the ancient explorer passed over the track of the modern 
 pioneer; Ptolemy's map, published a century after Christ, 
 fixes the sources of the Nile just where Livingstone now 
 places them, ten degrees south of the Equator; Grecian influ- 
 ence so penetrated Central Africa that the Ethiopian treas- 
 urer of Queen Candace, as Luke's record indicates, was i*eading 
 the Greek translation of the Hebrew Isaiah ; and the Greek 
 language so influenced the dialects of the far interior as to 
 appear in the. vocabulary of the Yoruba people, living within 
 the bosom of the Niger, as the late Smithsonian publication 
 plainly indicates. Ten or twelve centuries yet later, the Ara- 
 bian followers of Mohammed penetrated from the Indian 
 Ocean to the Atlantic, south of the Great Desert; and so effec- 
 tually have they impressed their religious convictions, that 
 amulets containing passages from the Koran are found on the 
 necks of slaves carried to South America from the Western 
 Coast of Africa. 
 
 Three forms of ancient civilization have thus found the 
 African mind susceptible to their impress. It remains to ask 
 whether another, and that a far higher, may not take its 
 place. 
 
 Twenty-five years ago the encroachments of Persia and of 
 Eussia towards India began to give serious fears to English 
 Btatesmen and merchants that the day might be hastened 
 when India would be entered from both the West and the 
 North, and when Great Britain's monopoly of its trade would 
 come to an end. From that day, as not only her open acts 
 but the confidential intimations of her agents have declared, 
 the Continent of Africa has been singled out as the field of her 
 explorations and of her intended future commerce. The set- 
 tlement at Cape Coast Castle, on the south, has extended far 
 up the Eastern Coast to Natal, and even to Zanzibar, and back 
 into the interior to the diamond mines. From the Strait at 
 the mouth of the Red Sea, British exploring agents excited 
 the jealousy of Abyssinia; till six years ago the Abyssinian 
 war made the road to the interior, through that Christian 
 kingdom, a highway for English merchants. Within a few 
 years, the island of Lagos, nigh the mouth of the Niger, was 
 
13 
 
 seized • and since that time loans from British capitalists to Li- 
 ;:l for roads to the interior indicate a policy lead.ng to a mo ■ 
 onolvofthecommerceof Africa from thatside. About five 3 ears 
 a'^° afte h Zseveringinteriorexploratiousofthem,ss,onary 
 
 ifvinllne followed by Bcientiflc and military leaders hke 
 Earth Cue and Baker' the latter, Sir Samuel Baker, with his 
 w^ and' n armed escorl of 1,500 Egyptian soldiers, earing 
 Tnurba to of bullocks three river steamers, whose parts were . 
 Wb put together on the Me above all obstru^'--',:; !"^: 
 the in and lakes could be entered, has succesrfuUy planted a 
 
 :, Imercial and military -«'-»'.;„"- -J^^E 
 be kept open to the Mediterranean on the North to the Kea 
 S a 1; tbe East, to the Atlantic on the West ^^^^^ 
 not Cape Coast, on the South. The last act of this conoen 
 trated conquest is now proceeding m the inva .on ° - ^«'- 
 ritory of the Ashantees, whose subjugation will be the pielude 
 tn the submission of all the interior tribes. 
 'Id what inevitably must succeed to this commerc.al u^ 
 nation? Unquestionably, just as from Ind.a after B.msh 
 pauoii . ■i „„,. ,i,nt reached Bnsland as well as Amer- 
 
 occupation came a cry that leacneu unfe ^ 
 ica and made Christian missionaries meet, even amid the war 
 :?'l812. as brothers in arms in a higher -™e, ° t-aM 
 Christ on " India's coral strand," so now from "Afr.e 8 sunny 
 fou lins" already comes the kindred call. What means it 
 hat Arthington was dreaming of an inland settlement back of 
 Li,eria,and'that he sent to *he American Colom.at, S- 
 etv for choice Christian colored men to lead it ? Was the mina 
 h'at pe "ed that letter possessed by a fancy? or did a grand 
 eality almost frenzy his appeal ? Which sees f-'^!^*-. '-;^^- 
 saeriflcing philanthropist or the interested man of the world 
 
 Is tbe'colored man's lofty "->-/- f7rtwo"or"r 
 his only hope for bis family and kindred? Let two or three 
 of their own number declare. 
 
 In Richmond, Virginia, some twenty-five years ago, a mu- 
 K.tovouth of sprightly mind and liberal home-educa.ion, gifted 
 1, a hen Id of Christ.'^^onged to go and preach to his country- 
 ^e: t Mrica. His master gave him bis f-dom ; the J.ss.on 
 SoeietY of his native South gave h.m a salary; the Ooloniza 
 ttonshii> granted him a passage; and for years he was an 
 
14 
 
 efficient missionary in Liberia. When our civil war closed he 
 came from Africa to visit his kindred, and to tell American 
 freedmen of the land where they were not only freemen but 
 nobles without rival; to pledge a farm to any family as the 
 gift of the Liberian Government; and to thrill American 
 Christians with the picture of spiritual harvest-fields ripe for 
 the sickle, in the land where Egyptian science, Grecian art, 
 and Mohammedan superstition were to be supplanted by the 
 pure Christian faith. The voice of Eev. Mr. Hill rang at a 
 large public convention in New York with eloquence that sur- 
 prised and captivated ; for his theme had inspired the man. 
 He came to the Executive Committee of the Colonization So- 
 ciety at Washington, and on their behalf procured a passage 
 to Liberia for any who would go. He was met by the roman- 
 tic fancies of farms, and College education, and public offices, 
 which dazzled the vision of his colored brethren. Towering 
 like Moses before Israel when hesitating on the borders of 
 ^t?3'Pt, he exclaimed, " Be assured, in all that you are justly 
 receiving from the American people, you are onl^- borrowing 
 the jewels of your old masters to bear them to the land of 
 promise ! " Every day since that appeal the mist has dissipated 
 that was before his hearers' eyes; and now some of them see 
 their mistake. 
 
 Some thirty years ago a tall, swarthy, but high-browed Afri- 
 can, whose grandfather was seized in the interior of Africa as 
 a captive from a cultured tribe, was displaying in Kentucky 
 great power as a Christian preacher. At his desire his owner 
 gave him his freedom, and he went as a missionar}^ to Liberia. 
 He disappeared from the Colony for years; but early during 
 the civil war found his way back to America to rehearse his 
 story and ask aid in his new work. Eev. Mr. Herndon had 
 found his ancestral tribe; he had become a chief among them; 
 he had won them to the Christian faith; he had allied them to 
 the Liberian Republic; and now besought means to rear a house 
 of worship, with a Sabbath bell to ring forth its melody in a 
 valley that never heard such music. He secured his desire; 
 he returned to his field; and now he is at once Liberian judge 
 in his district and a crier for the Judge of all the earth. 
 
 Some six years since, Eobert Arthington, of Leeds, Eng- 
 
15 
 
 land, gave £1,000 sterling to plant a settlement of select 
 Christian families, as the first of a cordon back of Liberia, 
 which he hoped might some day girdle the continent. The 
 chosen band were found in North Carolina and brought to- 
 gether at Portsmouth, Va. At the farewell meeting their Chris- 
 tian leader exclaimed, in his parting address, "Thank God for 
 American slavery! But for it I should have been born a 
 heathen and could never have been Christ's herald to my 
 countrymen in Africa." Just at that crisis the multiplying 
 and earnest requests to be sent to Liberia led one of the Ex- 
 ecutive Committee of the Colonization Society at Washington 
 to uro-e their claim to Government transportation by land, if 
 not on the sea, upon the members of the Senate and other 
 officers of the Government, who had it in their power to pro- 
 mote the claim. The appeal was met with the statement, " Oh ! 
 we want these select people here as laborers and as voters! " 
 The question was asked in reply and pressed home — "Senator, 
 General, are you not liable to be as selfish as you thought the 
 slaveholders were ten years ago ? " The appeal went home to 
 Christian minds and American hearts ! The train of facts pre- 
 sented in this address of to-night led Senator Fessenden, lately 
 Secretary of the Treasury and at that time Chairman of the 
 Finance Committee of the Senate, to pledge himself as a leader 
 in the effort to secure the same appropriation, $100 each, for 
 the ocean passage of freedmen, which the Government for 
 years had paid for recaptives sent to Liberia. His death 
 shortly afterwards cut short this mission. 
 
 During the administration of President Buchanan, a sla- 
 ver, called the "Wanderer" ran into Savannah, Georgia, 
 freighted with slaves captured from a superior tribe of trades- 
 people in the interior of Africa. While the Secretary of the 
 Navy was arranging for the return of these people to Africa, 
 under the auspices of the Colonization Society, the people 
 were scattered through the Gulf States. About ten years 
 later, some six years ago, a missionary from Central Af- 
 rica, Eev. Mr. Phillips, was addressing a large audience of 
 colored people on the customs of the Yoruba peojile in 
 Central Africa, when an unusual attention was observed 
 in a cluster of finely formed, intelligent people, in the rear 
 
16 
 
 of the house. To illustrate their language, the missionary 
 repeated the Lord's prayer in the Yoruba tongue ; when 
 an irrepressible cry of delight came from this attentive band. 
 At the close of the service they came pressing their way to 
 the missionary, and in their native tongue told him the story 
 of their capture, their dispersion at Savannah, and of their pres- 
 ent freedom and their longing for home. He spoke of the 
 Colonization Society ; and they begged that they might be sent 
 to Africa. Their case was named; the funds of the Society, 
 consecrated to pay the passage of emigrants to Liberia alone, 
 was more than absorbed for such applicants; and these captives, 
 now asking return under American law, are yet unredeemed! 
 To whom does their restoration belong ! From whom is the pas- 
 sage money back to Africa for any captive yet unrestored due, 
 but from the entire American people! Is it not time, when 
 philanthropic individuals are giving colleges and sugar-mills, 
 schools and tools to African colonists, and when Mission Socie- 
 ties are sustaining heralds of the Gosj^el for Africa's redemp- 
 tion, — is it not time for the American people and its Govern- 
 ment to pay their honest debt, in giving transportation home 
 to any applicant, and that charity be left to its appropriate 
 work? 
 
LIBRftRY OF CONGRESS 
 
 Oil 932 607 2 
 
 M 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 011 932 607 2 
 
 pH8.5