The next thing he would refer to, was the report of a speech which he
[Mr. B.] had delivered at an annual meeting of the American
Colonization Society. And with regard to it, if he was in America, he
would say, decidedly, that it was not a fair report: that it was an
unfair report, got up by Mr. Leavitt, the editor of the New York
Evangelist, to serve a special purpose. He would not deny that he had
said something which might give a pretext for the report. He had
charged the parent society with having been guilty of a gross
dereliction of duty to the colony and the cause, in sending away two
ships' cargoes of negroes to Liberia, who were not fit for that place,
and he believed that those two expeditions had done much to injure
the colony itself, as well as to impair public confidence in the
firmness and judiciousness of the parent board. They were emigrants
unfit to be sent out--the refuse of the counties around South Hampton
in Virginia; who were hurried out by the violent state of public
sentiment in that region, after the insurrection and massacre there.
Like a man conscious of rectitude, he had gone to the very parties
concerned, and declared his grounds of complaint; a line of conduct he
could not too often commend to Mr. Thompson, and no proof could be
more conclusive than this anecdote afforded, that the active friends
of colonization in America, however they might differ about details,
meant kindly by the blacks, and by Africa. Mr. B. again expressed his
surprise that Mr. Thompson should occupy the time of the meeting by
repeating his own speeches. He had adverted to this matter before, he
said, and as he was in a poor state of health, and had work elsewhere,
and as there was much ground yet to go over, and Mr. T. declared his
materials to be most abundant, he thought those repetitions might have
been spared. They who took the trouble to read the published speeches
of this gentleman, would find, that however exhaustless might be the
boasted stores of his facts, proofs, and illustrations, about what he
called "American Slavery," he was exceedingly economical of them.
After reading six or seven of them, he found them so very like each
other, that the same stories, in the same order, and the same
illustrations, in the same sequence, and the same unfounded charges,
in the same terms of unmeasured bitterness, may be often expected, and
never in vain. Indeed, so meagre was his supply of wit, even, that it
also went on very few changes. The whole case exhibiting a most
striking illustration of the truth uttered in a personal sense by one
of their own statesmen and scholars, and now proved to be of general
application, namely, that when a man resorted to his memory for his
jokes, it was very probable that he would draw upon his imagination
for his facts. As he [Mr. B.] had been so often asked to produce
certain placards for the purpose of substantiating some of his
statements, there could be no better connexion in which to call upon
Mr.
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