The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of LiberiaIn nineteenth-century America, the belief that blacks and whites could not live in social harmony and political equality in the same country led to a movement to relocate African Americans to Liberia, a West African colony established by the United States government and the American Colonization Society in 1822. In The Price of Liberty, Claude Clegg accounts for 2,030 North Carolina blacks who left the state and took up residence in Liberia between 1825 and 1893. By examining both the American and African sides of this experience, Clegg produces a textured account of an important chapter in the historical evolution of the Atlantic world. For almost a century, Liberian emigration connected African Americans to the broader cultures, commerce, communication networks, and epidemiological patterns of the Afro-Atlantic region. But for many individuals, dreams of a Pan-African utopia in Liberia were tempered by complicated relationships with the Africans, whom they dispossessed of land. Liberia soon became a politically unstable mix of newcomers, indigenous peoples, and "recaptured" Africans from westbound slave ships. Ultimately, Clegg argues, in the process of forging the world's second black-ruled republic, the emigrants constructed a settler society marred by many of the same exclusionary, oppressive characteristics common to modern colonial regimes. |
Contents
| 1 | |
One Origins | 7 |
Two Between Slavery and Freedom | 29 |
Three The First Wave | 53 |
Four Inventing Liberia | 77 |
A section of illustrations | 113 |
Five The Price of Liberty | 129 |
Six Emigration Renaissance | 163 |
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Common terms and phrases
abolitionism African Americans African Repository agent American Colonization American Colonization Society American immigrants Annual Report arrived Arthington auxiliary Bertie black North Carolinians bondage bondpeople Brewerville Caldwell Cape Capehart century colonists colonization movement Colonization Society colonizationists cultural death December dollars emancipation emigrant rolls enslaved expedition female free African Americans free blacks Friends Guilford County Haiti History Hooper hundred immigration to Liberia indigenous individuals January John John McPhail Joseph Gales July land letter liberated Louis Sheridan Lugenbeel malaria malarial mortality male manumission McKay ment Mesurado migration Millsburg Monrovia NCER Negro Norfolk North Car North Carolina North Carolina Emigrants Northampton County November October officials organization organization’s Pasquotank County Paul’s River percent Perquimans political population president Quakers R. R. Gurley RACS Raleigh recaptives reel relocation reprinted in African republic Robertsport September settlement ship slaveholders slavery state’s tion town U.S. Senate United Virginia William Coppinger William McLain