1863, May 201 A++ 7450.10. 50 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and fifty-three, by HARPER & BROTHERS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York. PREFACE. "Two hundred years! two hundred years! Have sunk beneath their 'whelming tide!" IN 1620 the first African slaves were brought to Virginia. In 1820 the first emancipated Africans were sent from the United States to Liberia. If a superior intelligence, while contemplating, from the serene heights of the mansions of the blessed, the movements, the tumults, and the aimless activity of the inhabitants of the earth, had observed that one little ship taking its solitary way across the ocean, laden with emigrants returning, civilized and Christianized, to the land which, two centuries previous, their fathers had left degraded and idolatrous savages, would he not have thought that, of all the enterprises then absorbing the energies and hopes of man, this, regarded by so large a portion of the few who were cognizant of it as a wild and hopeless venture, was the one which promised to the human race the largest portion of ulti |