What to do with the Negro population has almost always been a question before the American people. Since the early date of 1714 its removal to some territory beyond the limits of the United States or to an unsettled area of our public lands has been advocated. During the century which followed the earliest mention of deportation, its advocates published their plans as individual propaganda, sought the approbation of religious and humanitarian organizations, and in one or two instances tried to secure favorable State or national action on them. But throughout this long period of one hundred years no concerted action was taken: the period is characterized by sporadic origins and isolated efforts; and these early projectors of plans to remove the Negro were the trailmakers in a pioneering movement which culminated in a national organization.[234] Obviously private enterprise alone could make little headway in the actual colonization of the Negroes in a territory sufficiently distant to be beyond the pale of the white population. The one item of expense was too serious a handicap for individual initiative to overcome. Besides the case of Captain Izard Bacon of Virginia, who temporarily removed his fifty-two freedmen to Pennsylvania to await a favorable time for sending them over sea,[235] and of Mary Matthews of King George's County, Virginia, who by will emancipated her slaves and provided for their removal to a place where they could enjoy their liberty,[236] there is but one significant example of actual colonization under individual auspices. This occurred in 1815 when Paul Cuffe took thirty-eight Negroes to the western coast of Africa.[237] This dramatic event in Negro deportation, owing to the wide publicity given to it, stimulated activity anew in colonization ventures. We shall now review these new schemes and show how representatives of the transportation movement assembled in Washington city, and having enlisted in their cause men most distinguished in the councils of the nation, formed the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States, an organization still in existence but now known as the American Colonization Society and having as a monument to its checkered career, the free Negro republic, Liberia, on the western coast of Africa.