on the 28th the organization of the society was completed. The constitution adopted began as follows:
Art. 1. This society shall be called “The American Society for Colonizing the F’ree People of Color of the United States.”
Art. 2. The object to which its attention is to be exclusively directed is to promote and exeeute a plan for colonizing (with their consent) the free people of color, residing in our country, in Africa, or such other place as Congress shall deem most expedient. And the society shall act, to effect this object, in co-operation with the general Government, and such of the States as may adopt regulations upon the subject.
The constitution was written by Robert Wright, of Maryland. Elias B. Caldwell, Clerk of the United States Supreme Court, was the chief orator of the occasion, but John Randolph also spoke. Mr. Justice Bushrod Washington was elected President. Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson were among the seventeen Vice-Presidents, of whom, by the way, only five were from the free States. Itis asserted that all of the twelve managers were slaye-owners, and certainly nearly all were so, while Bushrod Washington was engaged in the domestic slave-trade when not hearing cases on the bench.
J. H. B. Latrobe, in an address delivered before the society on January 20, 1880, describes the organization and the motives of the original members accurately. He said that some "regarded it as a missionary enterprise only." Others "hoped that it would lead to a separation of the negroes from what the masters said was an injurious contact with their slaves." Others believed that it would tend to raise the negroes of the United States to civil and religious liberty in the land of their forefathers. Others
