Uncommon Membership Certificate in the American Colonization Society, Signed by Its President, James Madison

Slavery was a problem that vexed the Founders long after the Constitutional Conventions famously avoided resolving the issue.  Well into retirement, the wise men who had set up the government saw the danger in slavery's persistence and the damage it could cause the Union.  Thomas Jefferson, at the time of the Missouri Compromise, famously wrote, "But this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. it is hushed indeed for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence." The subject vexed fellow Virginians James Monroe and James Madison as well.

Madison left the Presidency in 1817 and retired to his plantation in Montpelier.  In 1826, when Jefferson died, Madison became President of the University of Virginia and stayed on as Chancellor until his own death. During his tenure at the University, Madison was chosen to help revise Virginia's state constitution, and worked on a handful of other issues of significance to him.  One of these was slavery, the use of which in the South continued to trouble him; and his concern surfaced during the Virginia Convention.  Try as he might, however, he saw no way to easily extricate the Union from this issue.  He came to believe that free transportation back to Africa for slaves was a solution, a position advanced by the American Colonization Society. 

This Society was founded in 1816.  In 1819, Congress granted it $100,000 for repatriating slaves, and provided its first ship for transporting them the following year. By 1822, the Society succeeded in establishing the colony of Liberia on the west coast of Africa. The colony was named Monrovia, after President James Monroe.  Additional supporters were Bushrod Washington, Henry Clay, and Francis Scott Key.  These people wanted to see the end of slavery but felt the issue so intractable in the South that separation of the races might prove the only solution.  Although only 15,000 people made the journey back to Africa, the idea lingered. President Lincoln also considered it, only to ultimately reject it. 

Beginning in 1833, James Madison was President of this organization and signed its membership certificates.  This he did by signing a few in advance, to be filled in as reqiured.  Document signed, Washington DC, after 1833, with an engraving by Henry Stone at the top.  The Society's emblem pictures a ship sailing towards Liberia, with Latin motto "Lex in Tenebris," or "light amid darkness".

Signed membership certificates from the Society are relatively uncommon. Only four have appeared at public sale in the last 30 years.

In the end, such efforts to use colonization in Africa as a way out of the slavery issue failed.  The only solution was to be a great war, the Civil War.