One hundred sixty-eight members of the Tennessee State Colonization Society "invite your honourable body to a consideration and adoption of the means which shall be best calculated to effect the removal of our free coloured population in a manner consistent with the rights and interests of every portion and description of persons within the limits of this commonwealth." The petitioners deem it unnecessary "to enlarge on the disabilities and degradation necessarily entailed on the manumitted African, so long as he remains in the country where his colour will be regarded as the index of an inferior and servile caste." They therefore request "the reasonable interposition of legislative wisdom and counsels to save the commonwealth from the dangers and calamities threatened, and from all the difficulties and embarrassments which the population referred to may hereafter create" and recommend that free people of color in Tennessee be transported to the "flourishing colony of American Negroes [that] has been planted on the western coast of Africa."
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Repository: Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee
