 Much of the soil had been depleted by years of mineral-leaching tobacco crops.He was one of the originators of the plan for establishing the Free State of Liberia, and in that context one of the founders of the American Colonization Society in 1816, dedicated to the problem he saw as the most pressing--how to rid the South and North of free blacks.They were, he stated, a dirty, dissolute, impoverished population, a burden to taxpayers, and a source of crime and disease.