Liberty in Liberia?

BRIAN BALOGH: In December 1816, is a group of prominent white Americans got together in a swanky DC hotel to tackle a problem. A growing number of free blacks in the country. Virginia planter John Randolph, a cousin of Thomas Jefferson, explained the threat.

“The existence of this population of free Negroes is viewed by every slave holder as one of the greatest sources of insecurity. They excite in their fellow beings a feeling of discontent and act as channels of communication between slaves of different districts.”

PETER ONUF: The solution, he suggested, was simple. Get rid of them. Send the free blacks off somewhere where they couldn’t agitate against slavery or inspire slave rebellions. How about Africa?

BRIAN BALOGH: Thus was born the American Colonization Society or ACS. Its goal was to return free African-Americans to Africa, where they could, the argument went, lead a better life.

PETER ONUF: The ACS attracted support from political heavyweights like James Madison, James Monroe, and Henry Clay. But colonization also made sense to a broad swath of American society. Some people thought that an outpost of anti-slavery sympathizers in West Africa could help shut down the slave trade. And some free blacks saw immigration as a chance to build a freer society, away from the prejudices of white America. Here’s how one man from Illinois put it.

MALE VOICE: We love this country and its liberties, if we could share in equal right in them. But our freedom is partial, and we have no hope then it will ever be otherwise here. Therefore, we rather be gone, though we suffer hunger and nakedness for years.

PETER ONUF: For the majority of free blacks, though, the ACS smacked of a deportation scheme. The backlash was immediate.

MAYA JASANOFF: Resolved, that we never will separate ourselves voluntarily from the slave population in this country. They are our brethren by the tides of suffering and of wrongs.

BRIAN BALOGH: This is a resolution passed as a meeting of Philadelphia’s black community in January 1817. 3,000 people showed up to discuss the ACS’s plan. But when colonization came up for a vote, every single person voted nay.

PETER ONUF: Nevertheless, with the help of funding from state legislatures, the ACS was raising money, enough to outfit a ship. In February of 1820, that ship set sail with the first contingent of immigrants. Here’s a newspaper account.

MALE VOICE: The ship Elizabeth, having on board about 90 people of color, sailed from New York on Sunday last. This expedition was fitted out by the American Colonization Society for the purpose of founding a colony in which the surplus black and yellow population of this country may find liberty and happiness.

BRIAN BALOGH: Liberty, maybe, but not a lot of happiness at first. About a third of the settlers died of yellow fever within three weeks of landing in their new homes. The survivors retreated up the coast to the British colony of Sierra Leone.

PETER ONUF: The next year, the ACS sent another ship to pick up the survivors. Again, they sailed south in search of a place to settle. And the end, they made a treaty with some local chiefs. The settlers offered up some tobacco, three barrels of rum, five umbrellas, 10 pairs of shoes, and other choice items. In return, they got a 36-mile stretch of coast.

BRIAN BALOGH: Like if the new colony was hard. The native tribes weren’t wild about the newcomers. Sporadic minor battles were a fact of life. But as the years passed, many of the settlers adjusted to their new world. Settlers like Rosebell Burke who wrote this cheerful letter to her former owner.

FEMALE VOICE: I am in most excellent health. My children are as fat as pigs. Little Martha can say her ABCs. She’s got entirely over her sickness, and is now growing very fast. Remember me kindly to our Eleanor. Tell her I love Africa and would not exchange for America.

BRIAN BALOGH: Not everybody who left the US ended up happy, though. Payton Skipworth, a former slave from Virginia, found it rough going.

MALE VOICE: There is no chance for farming in Monrovia, for it is a solid body of stones.

PETER ONUF: Skipworth had been freed on the condition that he emigrate to Liberia. But he found life in the new colony so unbearable that he wrote back to his old master asking if well, just maybe, he could come back.

MALE VOICE: Myself and my wife are dissatisfied in this place. Those that are well off have the natives as slaves. And poor people have no chance to make a living, for the natives do all the work.

BRIAN BALOGH: It’s hard to know what to make a claim that settlers enslaved native people. Skipworth was clearly trying to make a point. It might have been exaggerated. But we do know that most American settlers looked down on native people and sometimes exploited them. Because of racial mixing in the US, many of the settlers were light-skinned. They saw this as a marker of their superiority, along with their Christianity and “civilized” background.

When the colony declared independence in 1847, citizenship was reserved for the settlers and their descendants. That group became known as Americo-Liberians, just 5% of the total population.

PETER ONUF: Fast forward 80-some years, indigenous Liberians– that is the other 95%– still didn’t have the right to vote. In 1930, a League of Nations investigation found that the Americo-Liberian elite had been selling indigenous people to nearby European colonies as forced labor.

BRIAN BALOGH: This was obviously a huge embarrassment to a country that had pitched itself as a haven for the oppressed. The resulting scandal forced the president to resign.

PETER ONUF: At the beginning of today’s show, we heard about how Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution took their values with them to new lives in new lands. And the same thing happened here. The settlers who emigrated to Liberia were motivated by very American beliefs in freedom and opportunity. But their world view also had a darker side– an obsession with racial hierarchy. In a painful irony, the very people who suffered most from American racism ended up building it into a new country they founded.