The Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, commonly known as the American Colonization Society (ACS), is established by the Reverend Robert Finley of New Jersey on December 9-21, 1816, to support the emigration of free African Americans to Africa.

Charles Fenton Mercer, a Federalist member of the Virginia General Assembly, had discovered accounts of earlier legislative debates on black colonization in the wake of Gabriel Prosser's rebellion, and Mercer had pushed the state to support the idea.

One of his political contacts in Washington City, John Caldwell, in turn contacted, his brother-in-law and a Presbyterian minister, who had endorsed the plan.

Officially established at the Davis Hotel in Washington, D.C., attendees include James Monroe, Bushrod Washington, Andrew Jackson, Francis Scott Key, and Daniel Webster, with Henry Clay presiding over the meeting.

Its co-founders are considered to be Henry Clay, John Randolph of Roanoke, Richard Bland Lee and Bushrod Washington.

Mercer is unable to go to Washington for the meeting.

Although Randolph believed that the removal of free blacks will "materially tend to secure" slave property, the vast majority of early members are philanthropists, clergy, and abolitionists who want to free African slaves and their descendants and provide them with the opportunity to "return" to Africa.

Few members are slave-owners, and the Society will never enjoy much support among planters in the Lower South.

This is the area that will develop most rapidly in the nineteenth century with slave labor, and initially it has few free blacks, who live mostly in the Upper South.

The colonization effort results from a mixture of motives.

Free-born blacks, freedmen, and their descendants, encounter widespread discrimination in the U.S. of the early nineteenth century.

Whites generally perceive them as a burden on society and a threat to white workers because they undercut wages.

Some abolitionists believe that blacks cannot achieve equality in the United States because of discrimination and will be better off in Africa where they can organize their own society.

Many slaveholders worry that the presence of free blacks is a threat to the slave societies of the South, especially after some are involved directly in slave rebellions.

The Society appears to support contradictory goals: free blacks should be removed because they can not benefit America; on the other hand, free blacks will prosper and thrive under their own leadership in another land.

Some Society members are openly racist and frequently argue that free blacks will be unable to assimilate into the white society of America.

John Randolph, a Virginia politician and major slaveholder, says that free blacks are "promoters of mischief."

At this time, about two million African Americans live in the United States; two hundred thousand are free persons of color, with most in the North, where they are restricted by law in various states.

Henry Clay, a US Representative from Kentucky, considers slavery to have a negative effect on the southern economy, but in this period Kentucky has become a state that is selling slaves to the Deep South, where demand is booming because of the rise of cotton.

Clay thinks that deportation of free blacks is preferable to trying to integrate them in America.

Reverend Finley suggestsat the inaugural meeting of the Society that a colony be established in Africa to take free people of color, most of whom had been born free, away from the United States.

Finley means to colonize "(with their consent) the free people of color residing in our country, in Africa, or such other place as Congress may deem most expedient."

The organization will establish branches throughout the United States, and will be instrumental in establishing the colony of Liberia.