Another object the deportationists had in mind was to stop the slave trade. They believed that the existence of a settlement in Africa would deter the slaveholder from securing his cargo in human beings. It would also furnish the opportunity needed to develop a commerce in legitimate articles of trade between Africa and America and other parts of the world. It was also hoped by the leaders of this deportation movement to remove the great obstacle to the abolition of slavery. Now that provision was made for the freedmen the slaveholder felt at liberty to manumit his slaves. To quote Mills again: "It is confidently believed by many of our best and wisest men, that, if the plan proposed succeeds, it will ultimately be the means of exterminating slavery in our country."[281] The charge was made later, especially by the Abolitionists, that the movement was a deeply laid device for making slavery more secure than ever. They took great delight in referring to Randolph's remark, made at the first public meeting of the deportationists, that colonization would tend "to secure the property of every master in the United States over his slaves." Subsequently the management of the Society itself recognized the force of this remark as a quotation from the eighty-second report will show: "It was this ill-omened utterance of a solitary member of the Society, who appears to have taken very little if any part in its subsequent proceedings, that afterward gave the impracticable abolitionists a text for the most vituperative and persistent assaults upon the Society and its purpose."[282] Randolph's remark is not only qualified by the fact that he took "very little if any part in its subsequent proceedings" but also by his prediction that thousands of slaveholders, when assured of a place to send the Negroes, would emancipate their slaves because they would then be relieved from their care. With all this, however, Randolph claimed the colonization movement had nothing to do with abolition. And it must also be remembered that the eccentric Randolph was only one man among a large group of men who were interested in the deportation movement. In this large group two, Mills and Finley, religious patriots, stand head and shoulders above all the others, both of whom, Mills, particularly, hoped to provide a method for the abolition of slavery. Moreover, the Abolitionists should have observed that the name of Daniel Webster appeared among the signers of the constitution as well as the name of Ferdinando Fairfax[283] and especially that of William Thorton.[284] Fairfax and Thorton were excellent representatives of deportation schemes, proposed in the eighteenth century and deliberately designed to remove from our country all Negroes both free and slave. It seems, therefore, safe to conclude that the colonization movement of 1816-17 was at that time sincere in its purpose and straightforward in its aims.