Liberia and the 1820 Arrival of American Emigrants to the West Coast of Africa: The United States Government’s Attempt to Resolve the Issue of Free Black People in America

Abstract

Abstract This thesis examines the founding of Liberia and investigates how the founding project attempted to reconcile advocating Enlightenment philosophical ideals with systematic racism. The purpose of this study is to fill in historical gaps in the self-determination narrative that freed slaves decided among themselves to sail from America to the West Coast of Africa in 1822 to begin a colony for freed American slaves. The more complex reality is that the United States government, as well as American educational institutions and religious leaders, had struggled for years with the “problem” of free Black people within a slaveholding republic. At a time when slavery was legal in the United States, white American politicians, religious leaders, and educational institutions coalesced around the convenient idea of supporting the removal of free Black Americans from the United States and relocating them to Africa. My research suggests that the Africa colonization movement was neither purely altruistic nor strictly imperial; rather, it drew on a European intellectual and scientific tradition that supported white racial superiority, Protestant missionary zeal, and emerging scientific theories of white superiority. Colonization of Africa offered a solution that appeared consistent with Enlightenment principles of liberty and self-government while preserving racial hierarchy within the United States. The departure of the ship Elizabeth in 1819, carrying the first Black American emigrants bound for Africa, marked the beginning of this experiment. Their subsequent struggle for survival has remained largely untold by historians. Most of the eighty-eight died before reaching the Grand Bassa region of West Africa in 1822. Land was taken from indigenous Africans and carved out as a place where surviving emigrants could settle. The colony was managed by the U.S.-based American Colonization Society for many years. The Republic of Liberia did not declare its independence until 1847—twenty-five years after the emigrants’ arrival in the Grand Bassa region. After two years of turmoil, the desperate group arrived 150 miles south of Sierra Leone, where the colony of Liberia began. By studying the religious and political circumstances that led to their departure, their inhospitable sojourn along the coast of Africa, and their struggle for survival upon reaching the promised land, scholars can better understand the interplay of irreconcilable forces at play—Enlightenment philosophical ideals and white supremacy ideology. In 1781, Thomas Jefferson outlined a colonization solution to the problem of non-slave Black people in America, acknowledging: “When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.”1 The plight and perseverance of the passengers aboard the Elizabeth reflects the discrimination and racial struggles Black people were forced to endure at a time when American enlightenment thinkers were proclaiming that all men were created equal.