Sparks’s article on the subject of colonizing free blacks in africa, pp. 40–90 of the enclosure, was a review of The Sixth Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States. With an Appendix (Washington, 1823), giving a brief historical outline of the origins of the American Colonization Society; summarizing the negotiations leading to the acquisition of land at Cape Mesurado that eventually became Liberia; supporting the colonization in Africa of American freed Blacks; defending the plan’s practicability; arguing that the success of such an establishment could end the “scourge of slavery” in the United States, where “Color has become a signal of inferiority, by the mere habit of connecting the idea of a slave with that of a dark skin,” and lessen “the mischiefs of slavery, and, what is more to be dreaded than slavery, the living pestilence of a free black population” (pp. 60–1); highlighting the commercial opportunities that would result from establishing a colony in West Africa, noting that “more than $450,000” in goods entered the port of Sierra Leone in 1821 alone, that Cape Mesurado has an even better trade location and might “grow up to be a place of commercial importance, employ many of our seamen, add to the tonnage of our shipping, contribute to our revenue” and, by promoting trade in goods rather than humans, gradually eliminate the slave trade (p. 65); and concluding that such a colony could help to civilize the people of Africa, in that “from competent teachers, and the example of a well organized community before their eyes, they may learn enough to qualify them for the happy state of society” (p. 80).

The interest that TJ formerly took in the subject of African colonization was publicized when newspapers printed TJ to John Lynch, 21 Jan. 1811, which is referenced in the above enclosure, p. 41.

In a review of Charles Jared Ingersoll, A Discourse concerning the Influence of America on the Mind; being the Annual Oration delivered before the American Philosophical Society, at the University in Philadelphia, on the 18th October, 1823, pp. 157–78 of the enclosure, Sparks critiques, starting on p. 163, arguments for a duty on books, conceding that such a tax benefits the national treasury and encourages domestic manufactures, but countering that “the revenue derived from books is so extremely small, as hardly to make a perceptible item in the custom house returns” (p. 164); and states in summary of Ingersoll’s opinion that “books to the value of between two and three millions of dollars are annually published in the United States,” which makes the ratio of home-manufactured books to imports “about ninety to one” (p. 164).