PBA Galleries

Includes:

• Thirty-Seventh Annual Report of the Vermont Colonization Society; presented at the Annual Meeting in Montpelier, October 18th, 1856. 20 pp. (8vo) original wrappers. Burlington: C. Goodrich & Co., 1856.
• American Colonization Society. The African Repository. Vol. XXXVII, No. XII, December 1862. 35 pp. (8vo) original blue wrappers (detached). Washington: William H. Moore, 1862.

The second publication is signed on front wrapper by G.W. Keely, Professor of Mathematics at Waterville College [Colby University].  After four decades, the scheme to send freed American Blacks to “colonize” the new country of Liberia on the northwestern coast of Africa, was widely dismissed by fervent anti-slavery crusaders as a slaveholders’ diversion. Ever hopeful, in 1856, the Vermont Society detected “an evident change in public sentiment in respect to the righteousness and final success of our cause” among moderates who opposed radical abolitionism. But while such Colonization groups would survive for decades to come, the onset of Civil War was to permanently doom their “cause”. Ironically, while the final Colonization periodical of 1862 stressed sympathy for the minority of Blacks who were “free people of color”,  in a matter of days, President Lincoln would issue the Emancipation Proclamation that would make all African-Americans free.