Liberia: The Complex History of the Country Created in Africa to House the Black Population of the U.S.
The African country was founded to receive freed slaves in the U.S. But its history is much more complex than is believed, according to experts.
When the first Black Americans landed on the west coast of Africa 200 years ago, they were following the reverse path of their ancestors, who had been forcibly removed from the African continent to be enslaved in America for more than two centuries.
These Pioneers, many of them newly freed from slavery and others freeborn children of enslaved people, established a colony on the site that would come to be known as Liberia, or “land of the free.”
They left behind the slave society of the United States, where they faced prejudice, inequality, and countless limitations, even after becoming free. In their new home, they sought to build lives with greater opportunity and political rights.
But the history of this country’s creation in Africa to house America’s former slaves is complex.
While many free Black Americans had spearheaded the return-to-Africa movement decades earlier, the early colonization of what would become Liberia was encouraged and sponsored by an organization made up of white men, many of them slave owners.
“The return-to-Africa movement was started by Black people,” historian Ousmane Power-Greene, a professor at Clark University in Massachusetts and author of books on the colonization project, tells the BBC.
“But at the same time, there were those who joined the movement because they wanted to deport (free Black Americans). They were excited by the idea of getting rid of Black people (living in the United States),” he noted.
American Colonization Society
In the early 19th century, decades before of the American Civil War (1861-1865), which would mean the end of slavery in the United States, many in the country were already debating what to do with the free black population if this institution was dismantled.
In search of answers to this question, In 1816, a group of white men met at the Davis Hotel in Washington and founded the American Colonization Society (ACS).
Founded half a century before the abolition of slavery in the country, the ACS enjoyed the support of illustrious names, including then-President James Madison (1809-1817), former President Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809), and future Presidents James Monroe (1817-1825) and Andrew Jackson (1829-1837).
The members of the ACS held diverse and often conflicting views regarding slavery.
Some were abolitionists and had a genuine desire to help the Black population build a better life in Africa. Others, however, rejected the idea of abolition and believed that free Black people should no longer live in the United States because they might endanger the institution of slavery.
Many slaveholders at the time feared that the growing number of freedmen might foment rebellions among those still enslaved, and tried to prevent them from living together. In some cases, slaveholders even offered manumission on the condition that the newly freed slaves agree to move to Africa.
Other ACS members advocated for the gradual end of slavery, but they also feared the effects of integration and rejected the idea of free Blacks and whites living side by side.
Despite this diversity of positions, ACS members agreed on a colonization project in Africa, which would establish a home for the freed to reduce the number of free Blacks living in the United States.
The idea gained popularity, and several state colonization societies soon began to spring up across the country, following the same model.
“Is it a racist organization? Is it anti-slavery? The answer is more complex,” says Power-Greene, noting that the ACS has gone through several phases over the decades.
Back to Africa Movement
Although ACS was founded by white men, the Back-to-Africa movement was already popular among the Black population at the time. Even before the abolition of slavery, diverse communities of free Black Americans sprang up across the country.
“It’s in these communities that the activities of the Back-to-Africa movement are taking place, these ideas are developing,” historian Herbert Brewer, a professor at Morgan State University in Baltimore and an expert on the African diaspora, tells the BBC.
“It’s important to understand that the Back-to-Africa movement predates the ACS,” says Brewer. “As early as the 18th century, Black people in the United States were thinking and writing about different projects to repatriate people of African descent to Africa.”
Some Black Americans believed that they could only escape discrimination and enjoy a truly free and prosperous life if they returned to Africa, the land of their ancestors. Many were proud of their African heritage.
“In the 1820s, the United States was a peculiar place for a free Black person,” Brewer notes. “You were legally and technically free, but in reality, and based on the various types of laws that existed at the time, you were excluded from public life.”
But others rejected the idea of leaving the country where many of them had been born and which they had helped to build with their labor, and defended the right to full citizenship.
In this context, the creation of the ACS was met with divisions among the free Black population.
Many criticized the project as a racist plan, backed by landowners slaves to prevent integration, deport Black people, and make the institution of slavery more secure. Even among Black people who supported the idea of leaving the country, there was distrust about the true intentions of the ACS members.
Others, however, saw in the organization the opportunity and the financial resources necessary to implement the old project of returning to Africa. "For them, this alliance was a marriage of convenience," says Brewer.
"It's hard to emphasize how complex this issue is," says Brewer. "Some people were for it and then changed their position. Some wanted to go to Africa and then gave up." Others were against the idea and then decided to go.”
In Search of Land for the Colony
At the time of the creation of the ACS, the British Crown had already established a colony on the west coast of Africa, Sierra Leone, to receive former slaves, many of whom had fled the United States to Canada after the American Revolution.
The success of this project contributed to the popularity of the ACS, and in 1818, the association sent representatives to Africa with the mission of finding an ideal place to establish their colony. These envoys, however, faced initial resistance from local leaders, who did not want to sell their land.
Two years later, three members of the ACS and 88 free Black Americans embarked in New York and crossed the Atlantic. They settled on Sherbro Island, off the coast of Sierra Leone, but faced great difficulties and many died of malaria.
The ACS continued to search for a suitable site for the colony until, in 1821,He managed to purchase a strip of land about 58 kilometers long and 5 kilometers wide in the coastal region of Cabo Mesurado from local leaders. Payment was made in rum, weapons, provisions, and other goods worth $300.
The arrival of the ACS and American settlers caused divisions among the locals, who belonged to diverse ethnicities and lived in communities accustomed to centuries of contact with Europeans.
“There are intolerant and racist stereotypes about Africa that have affected the narrative about Liberia’s founding,” Brewer notes. “One of the distortions is that Africans were primitive, isolated people, with no exposure to or knowledge of the world.”
“They were interacting with ships that had come to the coast since the 15th century; they were part of the transatlantic trade, which included slavery,” says Power-Greene.
Power-Greene recalls that the arrival of the ACS and American settlers interfered with this trade system, which involved not only human trafficking but also the sale of food and other goods to ships, impacting the region’s entire economy.
“Some of the opposition came from Africans who were involved in the slave trade,” adds the researcher, noting that this aspect also characterizes the founding of Liberia as part of the abolitionist movement.
Early Difficulties and Tensions
The settlement installed on the site welcomed its first residents from the United States in April 1822. The group that had landed two years earlier on Sherbro Island also relocated to the new area.
Although created to house Black Americans, the colony was initially administered by a white representative of the ACS. In 1824, it was named Liberia, and its capital was called Monrovia, after then-U.S. President James Monroe, who had secured funding for the project.
Further land acquisitions expanded the colony's territory, which received more than 13,000 Americans in the following decades. Thousands more were sent to the region after being rescued from ships operating illegally, after the transatlantic slave trade was outlawed.
State societies, inspired by the ACS, also began acquiring nearby land and sending Black Americans to settlements in the region, thus expanding the colony.
The early period was fraught with challenges, with disease killing thousands in the early years and attacks by hostile groups. The immigrants were of African descent, but most had been born in the United States and were unfamiliar with the local language or customs.
Even among those born in Africa, Few had memories of the land they had been taken from at a young age. Moreover, given the vastness and diversity of the continent, it was unlikely their ancestors came from the same region to which they were migrating.
“People who come to Africa must expect to experience many hardships, which are common (in the first settlement) in any new country,” wrote American William Burke in an 1858 letter.
In 1853, shortly after emancipating themselves, Burke and his wife, Rosabella, boarded a ship with their four children from the American city of Baltimore, bound for Liberia. Trained as a blacksmith, Burke studied Latin and Greek in his new home and became a Presbyterian minister.
His letters, preserved by the United States Library of Congress, describe not only the hardships the pioneers faced, but also their satisfaction with their new life. “I love Africa and would not exchange it for America,” Rosabella wrote in 1859.
“I expected and was not disappointed or discouraged by anything I found,” Burke wrote. “The Lord has blessed me abundantly since my residence in Africa, for which I feel I can never be thankful enough.”
These early immigrants recreated many aspects of American society in Liberia, maintaining the English language, customs, dress, and architectural style they had been accustomed to in the United States.
The early years were marked not only by conflict, caused mainly by the expansion of the territory, but also by the integration between the native population and the newcomers, who built schools, churches, and created ties with the local inhabitants.
Brewer notes that this integration generated a hybrid society, with reflections on culture, language, food, and other aspects that are still present today.
Independence and Civil War
In 1847, the colony declared its independence from the ACS and became the second Black republic in the world, after Haiti. Joseph Jenkins Roberts, a Black American born in Virginia who had arrived in Liberia in 1829, was elected president.
Despite his role in Liberia's creation, Washington did not immediately recognize the new nation for fear of the potential impact on slavery in the United States. The two countries would establish diplomatic relations in 1862, amid the American Civil War.
In the United States, the proposal for voluntarily transferring formerly enslaved people to Africa or territories in the Americas was championed for decades. But more and more abolitionists began to oppose the idea of colonization, and by the turn of the century, The ACS had waned in importance.
Among the Black population, however, the back-to-Africa movement continued to gain traction. Liberia and other African nations welcomed new waves of Black Americans for several decades, including the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement in the United States.
“The popularity of back-to-Africa ideas waxed, waned, and then waned again depending on the circumstances,” Brewer says.
In the late 1980s, Liberia faced a brutal civil war that left more than 200,000 dead. One of the common accusations is that tensions and inequalities between immigrants and the native population decades earlier played a crucial role in sparking the conflict.
The criticism is that American-born Liberians formed an elite that exploited and discriminated against locals. But Brewer, Power-Greene, and other historians emphasize that this was nearly 100 years after the first settlers arrived, and not a product of the country’s founding. “Some of the claims of exploitation go back to the 1920s, when Firestone got involved,” says Power-Greene, referring to the U.S.-founded tire manufacturer that, in 1926, established one of the world’s largest rubber plantations in Liberia, and went on to dominate the country’s economy and politics in the decades that followed. “Liberians (in the 19th century) weren’t able to create a racial caste, as it’s often called, that made much sense. They made up only 3 percent of the total population of the area that would be called Liberia,” Power notes. Historians interviewed by the BBC note that the social caste system wasn’t created in the 19th century, with the pioneers, but in the 20th century, with the arrival of large companies to exploit the country's natural resources.
“Who took the land from the people of Liberia? It was the large multinationals,” Brewer criticizes. “(But) some people want to attribute the mistakes, the evils, the problems, the dysfunctions that arose (decades) later to the founding of the country.”