This circumstance was undoubtedly a poser to their young friend.

How could he reconcile this deep-seated and widespread disbelief in the purity of the motives of the Colonization Society, with the simple integrity and humanity of the enterprise itself?
Later, his acquaintance with such representatives of the free people of color in Philadelphia as James Forten and his son-in-law, Robert Purvis, served but to confirm those first impressions which he received in Baltimore from the Watkinses and the Greeners.

It was the same experience in New York and New Haven, in Boston and Providence.

He learned that from the very beginning, in the year 1817, that the free people of color in Richmond and Philadelphia had, by an instinctive knowledge of threatened wrong and danger, met and resolved against the society and its sinister designs upon themselves.

These people did not wish to leave the country; they did not wish to be sent to Liberia; but the society, bent on doing them good against their will, did want them to leave the country, did want to send them to Liberia.
And why did the society desire to remove the free people of color out of the country?
Was it from motives of real philanthropy?
The colored people were the first to detect its spurious humanity, the first to see through the artful disguises employed to impose upon the conscience of the republic.