By 1828 the high-minded, if patronizing, aims of the 1819 Hartford Colonization Society had given way to a more critical assessment of the condition of free blacks, as can be seen in this address of the Connecticut Colonization Society. With a refinement lacking in Aristides' letter to the New Haven Chronicle, the managers of the Society, representative of the best families of Connecticut, nonetheless reach a similar conclusion that efforts to reform or ameliorate the condition of African Americans are both fruitless and unkind to the recipient: "Much can be done for them--much has been done; but still they are, and in this country always must be a depressed and abject race."

Emancipation without immigration, they write, is to leave former slaves

to shift for themselves; he [the former master] turns them out to be vagabonds, and paupers, and felons, and to find in the work-house, and the penitentiary the home which they out to have retained on his paternal acres.

New Haven Congregational minister Leonard Bacon, a vocal advocate for the American Colonization Society, remarked that the condition of America's freedmen could by repeated in two words: "irremediable degradation."