Various plans having the same end in view were likewise proposed, some of them evincing a remarkable ingenuity. One of these, in 1817, was to encourage, by all proper means, emancipation in the South; then to make arrangements with the non-slaveholding States to receive the freed negroes, and compel the latter, by law, if necessary, to reside in those States. By this means it was thought that a gradual change of "complexion" could be effected from natural causes, which would not take place unless the blacks were scattered, and that thus, from simple association and adventitious mixtures, the sable color would retire by degrees, and after a few generations a black person would be a rarity in the community. Another plan proposed in 1819 was to remove the females to the Northern States, where they should be bound out in respectable families; those unmarried, of ten years and upwards, to be immediately free, and all the rest of the stock then existing to become so at ten years of age; the proceeds of the males sold to be appropriated by the party making the purchase to the removal and education of these females. In furtherance of this scheme, it was argued that while negro women would still bear children, though settled among white persons, they would not do so half so rapidly, and thus their posterity would in three or four generations lose the offensive color and have a tint not more disagreeable than the millions who are called white men in Southern Europe and the West Indies, and finally be lost in the common mass of humanity. While it is true that very few people, after fifty or sixty years, could under this rule boast of their fathers and mothers, the grand object would be attained, and the world be satisfied. Another proposition, which emanated from a distinguished gentleman in one of the Southern States, and filling one of the highest offices in the government of the United States, was that a grade of color should be fixed in all the slaveholding States at which a person should be declared free and entitled to all the rights of a citizen, even if born of a slave. He contended that this act would separate all such persons from the negro race, and present a very considerable check to the progress of the black population, giving them at the same time new interests and feelings. The children thus emancipated, even if the parents should not be wholly fitted for it, would come into society with advantages nearly equal to those of the poorer classes of white people, and might work their way to independence as well, without any counteracting detriment to the public good.