American Colonization Society

In 1816, the American Colonization Society (ACS) was organized in Washington, D.C. , with the objective of encouraging, and paying for, free black Americans to establish and live in a colony in Africa.

Why colonization?

For a time, the colonization project seemed to appeal to everyone. Many of the first members of the ACS were Southerners who supported a gradual abolition (elimination) of slavery . (See Abolition Movement .) They promoted colonization as a means to deal with the growing numbers of free blacks that would result from abolition. Soon many Northerners joined the society, believing, like the Southerners, that free blacks and whites could not live together without conflict. Colonization appealed to Southern slave owners as a way to rid the South of troublesome free blacks, who they feared would incite rebellions among their slaves. It was also popular with some Northern antislavery advocates, who hoped it would make slaveholders more willing to free their slaves. Some African Americans also endorsed the idea in the belief that Americans would probably never treat them as equals and that they might have a better life in distant Africa.

Most black Americans, though, argued that the United States had been the home of their families for generations. They had a clear right to live there as equals and were willing to fight for that right. Most abolitionists came to strongly oppose the ACS.

Liberia

After a long search for a location for the new colony, the ACS bought a large area of land on Cape Montserado, in West Africa, about 225 miles south of Sierra Leone. There, in 1822, the society established the colony of Liberia. Liberia's capital, Monrovia, was named in honor of the fifth president of the United States, James Monroe (1758–1831; served 1817–25), who, along with Congress, gave the society close to $100,000 to transport black Americans to Liberia. In the project's first ten years, about 2,638 blacks migrated to Liberia.

To encourage the colonization of Liberia, the ACS published letters from blacks who had moved there and had good things to say about it. It also published The African Repository and Colonial Journal, which served as strong propaganda (the spreading of ideas or information, both true and otherwise, to promote or damage a cause) by painting a positive picture of Liberia for black Americans. The ACS also promised to provide colonists with land and economic support for six months. This promise was not always kept, and emigrants were at times left stranded on the Cape.

In 1838, the Commonwealth of Liberia was formed under the administration of a governor appointed by the ACS, and the ACS governed the country until it became a republic in 1847. By 1846, thirteen to fourteen thousand free black Americans had immigrated to Liberia under the plan. Joining these emigrants in Liberia were slaves rescued from illegal slave-trading ships off the coast of Africa. (See Slave Ships and the Middle Passage .)

Conflict

By the 1840s, the ACS was mired in controversy. Abolitionists, black and white, opposed the society's basic assumption that African Americans could not live and work in the same communities as white Americans. They argued that African Americans had worked hard in the United States and had earned the right to call it home. They thought the ACS was creating a distraction from what abolitionists considered the only reasonable course of action—the immediate abolition of slavery in the United States. Most Southern plantation owners did not approve of the ACS either. They did not want to see African Americans, a group they considered the region's labor force, shipped across the Atlantic.

The news from Africa was not much better. The native people of Liberia resented the newcomers from the United States. Armed conflict and bloodshed erupted in the colony. In 1847, the ACS went bankrupt (did not have enough money to cover its debts). The American Liberians took the opportunity to found the independent Republic of Liberia. Seizing power, they dominated the native groups as well as the Africans rescued from slave ships, creating a rigid class system in the new country. The ACS stopped promoting colonization as part of its agenda, and by the end of the century the group had disbanded.