cause a movement throughout the zone of bondage, leaving behind him plantations waste and mansions desolate?  Who could believe that such a tremendous physical force would remain forever spell-bound and quiescent?  After all, however, slavery was doomed; public opinion had already pronounced upon it, and the moral energy of the nation would sooner or later effect its overthrow.  “But,” continued Nott, “the solemn question here arises—­in what condition will this momentous change place us?  The freed men of other countries have long since disappeared, having been amalgamated in the general mass.  Here there can be no amalgamation.  Our manumitted bondmen have remained already to the third and fourth, as they will to the thousandth generation—­a distinct, a degraded, and a wretched race.”  After this sweeping statement, which has certainly not been justified by time, Nott proceeded to argue the expediency of his organization.  Gerrit Smith, who later drifted away from colonization, said frankly on the same occasion that the ultimate solution was either amalgamation or colonization, and that of the two courses he preferred to choose the latter.  Others felt as he did.  We shall now accordingly proceed to consider at somewhat greater length the two solutions that about 1820 had the clearest advocates—­Colonization and Slavery.

[Footnote 1:  See “African Colonization.  Proceedings of the Formation of the New York State Colonization Society.”  Albany, 1829.]

2. Colonization

Early in 1773, Rev. Samuel Hopkins, of Newport, called on his friend, Rev. Ezra Stiles, afterwards President of Yale College, and suggested the possibility of educating Negro students, perhaps two at first, who would later go as missionaries to Africa.  Stiles thought that for the plan to be worth while there should be a colony on the coast of Africa, that at least thirty or forty persons should go, and that the enterprise should not be private but should have the formal backing of a society organized for the purpose.  In harmony with the original plan two young Negro men sailed from New York for Africa, November 12, 1774; but the Revolutionary War followed and nothing more was done at the time.  In 1784, however, and again in 1787, Hopkins tried to induce different merchants to fit out a vessel to convey a few emigrants, and in the latter year he talked with a young man from the West Indies, Dr. William Thornton, who expressed a willingness to take charge of the company.  The enterprise failed for lack of funds, though Thornton kept up his interest and afterwards became a member of the first Board of Managers of the American Colonization Society.  Hopkins in 1791 spoke before the Connecticut Emancipation Society, which he wished to see incorporated as a colonization society, and in a sermon before the Providence society in 1793 he reverted to his favorite theme.  Meanwhile, as a result of the efforts of Wilberforce, Clarkson, and Granville Sharp