'Free blacks are a greater nuisance than even slaves themselves.' * * * 'They knew that where slavery had been abolished it had operated to the advantage of the masters, not of the slaves: they saw this fact most strikingly illustrated in the case of the free negroes of Boston. If, on the anniversary celebrated by the free people of color, of the day on which slavery was abolished, they looked abroad, what did they see? Not freemen, in the enjoyment of every attribute of freedom, with the stamp of liberty upon their brows! No, Sir; they saw a ragged set, crying out liberty! for whom liberty had nothing to bestow, and whose enjoyment of it was but in name. He spoke of the great body of the blacks; there were some few honorable exceptions, he knew, which only proved what might be done for all.'--[African Repository, vol. ii. p. 328.] 'Although there are individual exceptions distinguished by high moral and intellectual worth, yet the free blacks in our country are, as a body, more vicious and degraded than any other which our population embraces.' * * * 'If, then, they are a useless and dangerous species of population, we would ask, is it generous in our southern friends to burthen us with them? Knowing themselves the evils of slavery, can they wish to impose upon us an evil scarcely less tolerable? We think it a mistaken philanthropy, which would liberate the slave, unfitted by education and habit for freedom, and cast him upon a merciless and despising world, where his only fortune must be poverty, his only distinction degradation, and his only comfort insensibility.' * * * 'I will look no farther when I seek for the _most degraded, the most abandoned race on the earth_, but rest my eyes on this people. What but sorrow can we feel at the _misguided piety_ which has set free so many of them by death-bed devise or sudden conviction of injustice? Better, far better, for us, had they been kept in bondage, where the opportunity, the inducements, the necessity of vice would not have been so great. Deplorable necessity, indeed, to one borne down with the consciousness of the violence we have done. Yet I am clear that, whether we consider it with reference to the welfare of the State, or the happiness of the blacks, it were better to have left them in chains, than to have liberated them to receive such freedom as they enjoy, and greater freedom _we cannot, must not_ allow them.' * * 'There is not a State in the Union not at this moment groaning under the evil of this class of persons, a curse and a contagion whereever they reside.' * * 'The increase of a free black population among us has been regarded as a greater evil than the increase of slaves.'--[African Repository, vol. iii. pp. 24, 25, 197, 203, 374.]