While the Society was in the initial stages of development, two missionary agents, Samuel J. Mills and Ebenezer Burgess, had visited England and, after receiving a rebuff from Bathurst, the Secretary of State for the English Colonies, had gone down the African coast as far as Sherbro Island and selected a site for the American colony. Interest was aroused to such extent that Congress assented to the proposal for purchasing the Georgia blacks and shipping them to Africa and an appropriation of one hundred thousand dollars was granted for the purpose. A brig was chartered by the government to carry away the negroes, furnished by the Colonization Society, and the United States ship Cyane ordered to accompany the expedition as an armed guard. The vessels departed from New York in February, 1820, and after a five weeks voyage landed eighty-six men, women and children on Sherbro Island. The inclemency of the climate, however, proved disastrous to the little group, and, after a number had succumbed to malarial fever, the remainder fled to Sierra Leone. But the Society and its local auxiliaries kept at work and the next year sent out another party of negroes from Norfolk, this time seeking Cape Montserado as a place of settlement. Success now attended the enterprise. Lieutenant Richard F. Stockton of the Navy arrived at Montserado in the autumn of 1821 and, in company with Dr. Ayres, the agent of the Colonization Society, succeeded in purchasing, for a few hundred dollars' worth of trinkets, the land on which Liberia was founded. Although the promoters had negotiated a favorable treaty with the natives the early settlers were attacked by hostile tribes and more than once they were on the point of abandoning the little town of Monrovia that had been named in honor of the American President and which is now the capital of the African Republic and a place of about six thousand inhabitants. A few years after this Philadelphia took up the work of colonization on a larger scale. At a meeting, held in the Franklin Institute in 1829, the Pennsylvania Colonization Society was formed, with Dr. Thomas C. James as its president and numbering among its founders many prominent citizens, including William White, Roberts Vaux, B. W. Richards, J. K. Mitchell, George W. Blight, James Bayard and Elliott Cresson, the latter becoming one of the most active assistants of the enterprise, in which he was joined by Mathew C. Carey, Solomon Allen and Robert Ralston, the last four contributing liberally to the colonization cause. For a time, too, a fortnightly journal, known as the Colonization Herald, was published in this city and local interest was aroused by reports of the parades of the State Fencibles, the