As yet Dr. Finley had not hit upon any definite location for the proposed colony, although years before he began his efforts in behalf of the negroes. Thomas Jefferson had suggested that Virginia and other American Commonwealths might profitably imitate the example set in England by the Sierra Leone Company in populating that district of Africa. But the English plan of transporting the indigent negroes from London, started toward the close of the eighteenth century, was on an altogether different basis. Blacks and whites were mixed in the English colony, the emigrants were made up mainly of the idle and the dissolute, and the humanitarian motive, so strongly marked in the work of the American Colonization Society, was missing almost entirely. Oddly enough, the free negroes of the North protested against the plans of the Colonization Society. In Philadelphia a number of negroes, meeting in the Bethel Church, adopted an indignant resolution of protest which Congressman Joseph Hopkinson presented in the House. But these incidents served also to arouse greater interest in the society's plan and led to the formation of several local auxiliaries, one of which was established promptly in Philadelphia, where the Friends and the Abolitionists were ready to give active support to any plan for the betterment of the negroes. Philadelphia money, representing the contributions of many local philanthropists, aided largely in strengthening the treasury of the national society, and, as an opportunity was afforded for the purchase of a number of smuggled slaves, put on sale by the State of Georgia, in 1817, and George Washington Parke Custis offered part of his lands for a refuge for the Colonization Society's purchases, an active effort was made again to arouse Congressional support, resulting this time in the founding of the African Republic by the Government of the United States.