America’s political elite founded the American Colonization Society in 1816.

Evidence

Carrying this literary cannonball of racist ideas, Finley invaded Washington, DC, in late November 1816. He lobbied journalists, politicians, and President James Madison, whose views on Blacks mirrored Jefferson’s. Finley and his powerful associates called an organizational meeting for colonizationists on December 21, 1816. Presiding was Kentucky representative Henry Clay, whose early life had resembled Thomas Jefferson’s. Born to Virginia planters, Clay had become a lawyer, a Kentucky planter, and then a politician. He had expressed an early abolitionism that had faded with time. Clay had just finished his second stint as Speaker of the House when he presided over the colonization meeting that birthed the American Colonization Society. Slaveholder and Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington—the nephew of George Washington–was elected president of the society, and the vice presidents included Finley, Clay, General Andrew Jackson, and Mercer’s Princeton schoolmate Richard Rush, the son of Benjamin Rush, who had pledged his support for colonization before his death in 1813. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 389

Categorization

• SHARE: A founder lineup spanning Jackson, Bushrod Washington, and Clay — plus Benjamin Rush’s son — is a specific founding-elite detail a history-minded friend would enjoy.