Repository from Tennessee stated in 1831 that “the colonization movement had many friends in Tennessee and that they were determined to make every possible effort to aid the good cause.”[62] The society at its meeting on November 8, 1831, appointed a committee of seven to solicit funds to defray the expenses of sending free negroes to Liberia. A committee of three was appointed to memorialize the legislature of Tennessee to make an appropriation for the aid of the society.[63] The legislature appointed a committee on colonization to consider the petition of the society, and, on September 30, 1833, passed two resolutions, requesting this committee to investigate the expediency of asking Congress for an annual appropriation of $100,000 and the general assembly for $5,000 to aid in colonizing free negroes in Liberia.[64] In response to this request, the legislature in 1833 passed a law, giving ten dollars to the state society for every free negro sent to Liberia, provided that not more than $500 was expended in any one year.[65] The society held its annual meeting in the Hall of Representatives at the State Capitol, October 14, 1833, and was addressed by James G. Birney, of Alabama, agent of the American Colonization Society. “We admire this institution,” said the Nashville Banner, “and feel the utmost veneration and respect for the humane motives of its founders, and for those who are engaged in promoting its objects. It would afford us unfeigned pleasure to see all its generous designs crowned with complete success.”[66] The petitions received by the legislature in 1832 and 1833 from the State Colonization Society and its auxiliaries contain the leading reasons advanced by these societies for colonization. The memorialists said: We take it to be self-evident general proposition, that the benefits of government, should be extended alike to all its citizens; we are compelled, however, by our peculiar circumstances, to violate this general principle, by withholding from that class of citizens, the exercise of many political rights. They are excluded from the ordinary means of education, on the ground of prejudices which are quite natural, and which will probably never be removed. Nor is it at all likely for the same reasons, that they will be suffered to participate to any great extent if at all, in the benefits of an enlarged system of common schools, when carried into effect in our State; they must therefore of necessity remain ignorant, and by consequence vicious.