LIBERIA

The establishment of the American colony of Liberia in 1822 marked the culmination of five decades of argument about whether whites and blacks could live together in a free society. Debate had begun in 1773, when the Reverend Samuel Hopkins of Newport, Rhode Island, a vigorous opponent of slavery, proposed an ambitious plan to send freed slaves as missionaries to Africa. While he won the support of some New England African Americans keen to emigrate, Hopkins trained only two would-be Evangelicals before the Revolutionary War intervened and the plan had to be abandoned.

It was not until the 1810s, when the number of freed blacks topped 200,000, that many Americans, both black and white, again paused to consider the future of this problematic population in a slaveholding society. This time, many groups saw advantages in the emigration of these blacks to Africa. White missionaries and antislavery activists such as Samuel Mills and the Presbyterian minister Robert Finley, as well as free black New Englanders such as Paul Cuffee, saw black emigration as an opportunity to elevate an oppressed segment of the American population while also bringing Christianity and enlightenment to the "Dark Continent." Some southern slaveholders supported emigration schemes to remove the divisive influence of free black communities and thereby prevent slave rebellions.

Drawing on bipartisan support for the plan from political leaders including Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Henry Clay, and John Randolph, leaders from all three communities came together in 1816 to form the American Colonization Society (ACS). In 1819, after lobbying from the ACS, President James Monroe backed a law facilitating the resettlement of free blacks in West Africa. The following January the ship Elizabeth sailed from New York with eighty-six African American men, women, and children and several government agents on board. This first expedition ended in failure, with the colonists unable to find fresh water and soon being forced to evacuate to the nearest British settlement. A second and third group departed America for Africa in 1821 and 1822 to settle a permanent colony on land purchased from the local inhabitants of Cape Mesurado, west of Grand Bassa. The colonists named their first mainland settlement Monrovia in honor of their presidential patron.

Those early years were marked by incredible hardship and internal dissension as the colony struggled to organize and provide for itself. A ragged coast and dense inland vegetation made communication with sponsors and trade with neighbors difficult, and to make things even harder, malaria ravaged the population. Only half of the 4,571 black Americans who arrived in Liberia during the first twenty-three years of settlement were still alive by an 1843 census.

Open revolts over how to run the settlement, as well as frequent disputes between settlers and the native population, continued to hinder the colony's economic independence. Yet little support was forthcoming from the ACS at home. By the 1840s the society had been crippled by financial mismanagement and accusations of racism from radical abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison. With the society rendered impotent, the Liberian colonists were effectively stranded.

Direct control of the colony's administration thus passed from the floundering ACS to the settlers in 1847, marking the official birth of Liberia, Africa's oldest republic. Joseph Jenkins Roberts, a freedman from Virginia, was elected as the first president. Yet despite political independence, Liberia was battered by further financial insecurities and continued to rely on foreign aid until the 1950s.

See alsoAfrican Americans: Free Blacks in the North; African Americans: Free Blacks in the South; Colonization Movement .

bibliography

Clegg, Claude A., III. The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Miller, Floyd J. The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787–1863. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1975.

Shick, Tom W. Behold the Promised Land: A History of Afro-American Settler Society in Nineteenth-Century Liberia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

Richard J. Bell