Page:The American Slave Trade (Spears).djvu/211

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FREE-NEGRO COLONIES AND THE SLAVE-TRADE
169

able reading. Said Henry Clay in a speech found in the African Repository, Vol. VI., p. 12:

"Of all the descriptions of our population the free persons of color are by far, as a class, the most corrupt, depraved, and abandoned." "The same periodical, Vol. VII, p. 230, called them "an anomalous race of beings, the most depraved upon earth" An editorial Vol. 1, p. 68, said: "There is a class among us, introduced by violence, notoriously ignorant, degraded and miserable, mentally diseased, broken-spirited.”

Meantime the colony had been named Liberia by the home society, from the Latin word liber, a free man.

In 1834 the Maryland Colonization Society, formed on the same lines as the original association, sent out an expedition on the brig Ann. She called at Monrovia, got twenty-five acclimated citizens, and, going down to Cape Palmas, formed an independent colony, landing on February 11th. “A very valuable tract of land at Bassa Cove was purchased for the Young Men's Colonization Society of Pennsylvania," this year, and the ship Ninus landed one hundred and twenty-six emigrants there, of which one hundred and ten were "slaves, freed by the will of Dr. Hawes, of Virginia.” Meantime the original colony was widening its borders.

Then came (in 1836) Thomas Buchanan, a colored man, agent of the New York and Pennsylvania societies to Monrovia. He was a born leader. He saw the evil likely to arise through trade jealousies between the separate and independent though neighboring colonies, and a union of all was effected under