Quicker
than the white people generally did, they saw through its false
pretense, and, besides, they could not understand why they should be
taken from the land of their nativity, and sent to the country from
which their progenitors had come, any more than the descendants of
Scotch, English, and German immigrants should be deported to the lands
of their ancestors.
Equally strange was it that the Colonization Society, if really
friendly to the negro, should find its most zealous supporters among
slaveholders. Its first president, who was a nephew of George
Washington, upon learning that his slaves had got the idea that they
were to be set at liberty, sent over fifty of them to be sold from the
auction block at New Orleans. That was intended as a warning to the
rest. One of its presidents was said to be the owner of a thousand
slaves and had never manumitted one of them. The principal service
that the colonization movement was expected to do for the slave-owners
was to relieve them of the presence of free negroes. These were always
regarded as a menace by slave-masters. They disseminated ideas of
freedom and manhood among their unfortunate brethren.
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