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From the Syracuse Standard.
READ THIS, COLORED MEN.
MR. EDITOR:—My apology for troubling you with this article is simply this. I find myself attached by a letter from Samuel Williams, published in the Philadelphia Ledger of 26th Feb., in relation to my course since my return from Liberia, and my report of that country. My report of it is called untrue, and I am charged with having lied to the company with which I was engaged while there. I plead guilty to the latter charge, and have never wished to conceal it; and I confidently expect all reasonable men to fully exculpate me from all blame when they rightly understand the circumstances. I pursued a course of deception for the purpose of making my escape from that prison house, and I aver that there is no man in this community who, similarly situated, would not have done the same. As I am threatened with a further exposition, I do ask the people of this community, among whom I have spent the best years of my life, and whose esteem I always have been and am still ambitious to deserve, to withhold their opinions till they see the end. I promise to shortly furnish them with a truthful account of my observations in Liberia, and, by a number of the strongest possible corroborating letters received by me since my return, prove to a demonstration, to all willing to be convinced, that the Colonization Society, although supported and applauded by the greatest and best of the land, is nothing less than a magnificent swindle—a wicked fraud. That Liberia is not a free government, but is a pliant tool in the hands of designing men, and subserving the worst possible purposes. That the persons who emigrate there never do better their condition but knowing what they have lost, become the most miserable creatures that grace the earth. Colonizing them deteriorates them without being at all beneficial to the natives, and if it were possible for those poor deluded souls to return to their chains and slavery again, in the United States, they would hail such return as the happiest event that could possibly occur to them in this life.—Please insert the accompanying letters, received from my co-partners in distress in that unhappy country. And I assure your readers that after that farther exposition with which I am threatened, having been drawn out from my obscurity, I will not decline the contest, but will prove these assertions and many more that they have never yet been presented with, and will expose the whole scheme in all its naked ugliness.
Respectfully, &c.,
WM. NESBIT.