Probably present at the 1845 founding of a short-lived Illinois auxiliary to the American Colonization Society (ACS), Lincoln had helped transfer a donation to the latter during his residency in Washington, D.C., as a member of the Thirtieth Congress. In 1852, he made his first recorded remarks on African American resettlement in a eulogy for the president of the ACS (and national statesman), Henry Clay. The next year, he helped an Indiana colonizationist, James Mitchell, who had come to Springfield, Illinois, to rekindle that state's colonization movement. In 1854, in his Peoria speech, Lincoln articulated two motifs of his support for colonization: first, the unwillingness of "the great mass of white people" to accept black equality, and second, on a note of qualification, Liberia's liability to be overwhelmed by any sizable influx of immigrants. Accordingly, he supported the colonization program of Francis Preston Blair and his sons Frank and Montgomery (until 1860, better-known Republicans than was Lincoln), who rejected Liberia in favor of closer destinations in the American tropics.