American Colonization Society's Thirty-Fourth Annual Report

. They would visit all the ports from Sierra Leone to Sherbro, some 120 miles. Their report to the home office was so satisfactory and favorable, that the Society was encouraged to continue on its mission. Because of the pressure exerted by the southern slaveholders, the federal government soon gave support to the American Colonization Society, and Congress decided that the proposed colony must be in Africa, and not in the United States. Proposals were been made to Great Britain and Portugal, asking to admit freed African Americans into their colonies, but these request were rejected. In order to meet the operating expenses of the Society, funds came mainly from the sale of slaves who had been seized and confiscated by the government in illicit slave trade, and from funds donated by the state branches. By a congressional act in 1819, the President of the United States authorized to return any Africans captured on an American or foreign ship that was attempting to bring them into the

However, the Society did succeed in getting some state legislatures to contribute to the effort. The Virginia State legislature would appropriate $30,000 annually for a five-year period to support the program. The Society announced in its Thirty-fourth Annual Report this as “A great Moral demonstration of the propriety and necessity of state action”11 During this period of the 1850s, the Society also received several thousands of dollars in support money from the state legislatures of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Maryland. Beginning in the 1830s, the Society was attacked by abolitionists, who tried to discredit colonization as a slaveholder’s plot. William Lloyd Garrison’s strong criticism of colonization as a scheme to sustain the system of slavery would create hostility between abolitionists and