Once more, Sir. We all know that the slaveholders regard the free blacks as dangerous to the subordination of their slaves, and are contemplating their forcible removal. Think you, Sir, Mr. Webster was mindful of the agreement you have discovered, when, on the 7th of last March, in his place in the Senate, he proposed his magnificent scheme of taxing the whole nation untold millions to give additional security to property in human beings? "If," said the Massachusetts Senator, "any gentleman from the _South_ shall propose a scheme of colonization to be carried on by _this government_ upon a large scale, for the transportation of free colored people to any colony or _any place in the world_, I should be quite disposed to incur almost any degree of expense to accomplish the object." The magnitude of the scheme, and the cost at which it is to be accomplished, are thus hinted:--"There have been received into the treasury of the United States EIGHTY MILLIONS of dollars, the proceeds of the sales of the public lands ceded by Virginia. If the residue should be sold at the same rate, the whole aggregate will exceed TWO HUNDRED MILLIONS of dollars. If _Virginia and the South_ see fit to adopt any proposition to _relieve_ themselves from the free people of color among them, they have my free consent that the _government_ shall pay _them_ any sum of money out of the proceeds which may be adequate for the purpose." Will you, Sir, please to point out the article of the agreement of 1787, which, while it restricts Congress from having any thing to do with slavery, sanctions an appropriation not exceeding two hundred millions of dollars, for the purpose of strengthening the institution of slavery, by _relieving_ the slaveholders from the presence of free people of color, and forcibly transporting to any place in the world hundreds of thousands of native-born Americans, who have as good a constitutional right to the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness on their native soil, as Mr. Webster himself? Mr. Webster, it seems, now views the subject of negro colonization in precisely the same light that he did thirty years since, although his _intentions_ on this, as on various other points, have undergone marvellous changes. We learn from a Massachusetts paper (_Congregationalist_, 6 July, 1849), that this gentleman was in 1822 appointed by a public meeting to draft a constitution for the State Colonization Society. After considerable discussion in the committee he rose and said, "I must leave. I understand the whole project. It is a scheme of the slaveholders to get rid of their free negroes. I will have nothing to do with it."
Defense Brief
A Letter to the Hon. Samuel Eliot, Representative in Congress From the City of Boston, In Reply to His Apology For Votin — Part 10
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