posed of two elements, — pro-slavery men, even of the extreme type of John Randolph, who favored the removal of free negroes from this country, because they considered them a dangerous element, a “pest,” in slave-holding communities; and philanthropists, some of whom sincerely believed that the exportation of colored people on a grand scale was possible, and would ultimately result in the extinguishment of slavery, while others contented themselves with a vague impression that some good might be done by it, and used it as a convenient excuse for not doing anything more efficacious.
Clay was one of the sincere believers in the colonization scheme as practicable on a grand scale, and as an aid to gradual emancipation. In his speech before the Colonization Society in January, 1827, he tried to prove — and he had armed himself for the task with an arsenal of figures — that it was “not beyond the ability of the country” to export and colonize a sufficient number of negroes to effect a gradual reduction of the colored population in this country, and thus by degrees to eradicate slavery, or at least to neutralize its dangerous effects. We know now that these sanguine calculations were entirely delusive; neither did his prediction come true, that the free negro “pests,” when colonized in Africa, would prove the most effective missionaries of civilization on that continent. But he believed in all this; to his mind the colonization scheme was an anti-slavery agency, and it was characteristic of his feelings when he exclaimed: —
