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n the fall of 1819, the venerable Ludwell Lee and his son, Richard Henry Lee, with a Presbyterian minister, John Mines, put out a call for a meeting in Loudoun County to discuss African colonization. Some seventy local men attended the meeting held in the county seat of Leesburg and organized the Loudoun County Auxiliary to the American Colonization Society (acs). Ludwell Lee was made president, and the society chose thirteen vice presidents and eight general managers from the county’s Quaker farmers, slaveholding planters, and townsmen.1 The number of such Virginia auxiliary societies would rise and fall in the antebellum decades, but Virginia could initially count more local societies and donors in acs annual reports than could any other state.2 Local societies were most frequently formed through a call for a public meeting put forward by one or more esteemed local citizens. Those who answered the call gathered in a county courthouse or church meetinghouse and formed themselves into an auxiliary on the model of the national society, with a prominent name as president and, if attendance justified, multiple vice presidents as well as a board of managers. Since the 1780s, Virginia had been a southern state moving unevenly away from a tobacco culture dependent upon enslaved labor that marked it as a distinctly southern economy. By the 1820s, the state was a major supplier of corn and wheat for domestic and international markets, with livestock, seafood, and garden crops as other important exports. Virginia was expanding its tobacco-processing industry, and its iron, coal, and salt resources encouraged local manufactures. Colonization came to be of interest first in these urbanizing and industrializing areas of Virginia, especially bay and river port towns such as Richmond, Petersburg, Norfolk, and Fredericksburg, where there were concentrations of free blacks. The most active colonization auxiliaries in Virginia Three Auxiliary Arms I were in these and similar sites such as Lexington, Lynchburg, and Charlottesville . Rural counties with several auxiliaries, such as Loudoun, Frederick , and Jefferson in northern Virginia, had trade connections with Alexandria or other port towns.3 A sprinkling of auxiliaries were organized in 1819 in northern Virginia towns and counties by the redoubtable Episcopal minister William Meade. His equally energetic colleague and acs founder, Charles Fenton Mercer, established one in Fredericksburg. But Richmond was initially resistant to Mercer’s efforts. That city was organized in 1823, a time of rapid auxiliary growth in Virginia that was aided by acs agents in the state.4 Some sixty or more auxiliaries were formed over a forty-year period in Virginia, but most were organized in the 1820s and a few were exceedingly ephemeral, scarcely surviving the announcement of their existence. Others existed only in the form of an annual meeting with little or no activity between these convocations, but several of these were revived in the late 1840s. Some areas with high concentrations of slaves, such as Amelia, Nottoway, and Powhatan Counties, had colonization benefactors but never developed an auxiliary. Western Virginia beyond the Shenandoah Valley organized auxiliaries in more populous areas such as Wheeling and Charleston and in areas with enslaved labor such as Greenbrier County, but in general transmontane donors operated independently of auxiliaries, writing directly to the acs from rural Barbour or Hardy Counties. Most auxiliaries had a few stalwart members as managers, the most important of whom were the corresponding secretary and the treasurer, who did the work of the auxiliary between annual meetings. These men had the task of communicating with the national society about potential emigrants and of assessing the local public mood, white and black, on the subject of African colonization. Local auxiliaries canvassed for members and solicited donations. They inserted the speeches given at annual meetings and other news favorable to African colonization in local newspapers and religious journals, and they sold subscriptions to the society’s publication, the African Repository and Colonial Journal. Local societies drew queries from free blacks, from those who wanted to emancipate their slaves for Liberia, and from the administrators of wills in which slaves had been emancipated on condition of emigration to Liberia. The Richmond-Manchester Auxiliary was the largest and most active in Virginia. Predominantly a group of aspiring merchants, the Richmond colonizationists followed the lead of the national society and selected as president John Marshall, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, a prominent national figure and also a local man.5 Baptists among the founders had Auxiliary Arms 40 [18.223.107.149...

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