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The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia by Claude A. Clegg, III Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2004 424 pp., $19.95, paper  Mississippi in Africa: The Saga of the Slaves of Prospect Hill Plantation and Their Legacy in Liberia Today by Alan Huffman Gotham Books, 2004 352 pp., $15, paper |
The indignities of slavery and racial stigmatizing left many African Americans to cast their nets to the shores of Africa within two generations after their cultural assimilation as Americans. But the dream of an African American political homeland, projected onto the West African coastline in what is today the country of Liberia, was dubious from its inception in the mid-19th century. The first settlers from the United States were ill-prepared for what they found. Many saw their dreams end in economic desperation and premature death; in the long run, the founding vision expired in brutal colonialization. Three recent books explore the disjuncture between West African political realities and African American political aspirations in Liberia.
Claude Clegg writes elegant prose based upon painstaking research. His study is set in North Carolina in Guilford County amid a Quaker settlement. Quakers across the Atlantic world wrestled with the great problem of slavery, which they had vowed to give up by the latter half of the 18th century. Unlike their brethren in Pennsylvania, who had adjudicated the problem of slavery through gradual emancipation, North Carolina Quakers lived in the confines of a growing and entrenched slaveholding state. Their forthright declaration that slavery was a moral evil condemned by God clearly constituted a threat to the economic and political order.
A different perspective on the problem of slavery underwrote the formation of the American Colonialization Society (ACS) in 1818. The ACS took root among the political leadership class and élite religious leaders of the young republic. Clegg argues that the concept of colonialization was hewn out of the dysfunctional Jeffersonian idea that races were "absolutely distinct and dissimilar in nature, interests, and aspirations, and consequently unsuited to exist as equals." The problem of freedom for black slaves, then, was larger than the abolition of institutional slavery. The central issue for figures such as Francis Scott Key, Henry Clay, and John Randolph was that ex-slaves and free-born African Americans had to be removed from the country to absolve the United States from the taint of being a slaveholding society. Discussions about the removal of African Americans to the expanding American west or to Haiti had been discussed by many political and religious leaders as early as the mid-1770s, but the opportunity was seized in West Africa to alleviate the American burden.
But more important than the political machinations of those who were embarrassed by the institution of slavery were the views of African Americans themselves. Paul Cuffe, a Massachusetts-born freeman and sailor and a member of the Society of Friends, began exploring the settlement of Sierra Leone, a British colony designed for black Loyalists and London's black Poor. Cuffe's stature as a profitable merchant gave him a credibility with African Americans that few black leaders had attained. His initiative to explore whether Sierra Leone's colony might be duplicated was respected among his more educated peers in the African American community. Cuffe's enterprise was cut short by his untimely death. Whatever careful plans he might have developed or learned from Sierra Leone—which later turned into a debacle in its own right—were lost. Left in the wake of Cuffe's efforts were Quakers who desired to extricate themselves from the business of human bondage; freed and semi-freed slaves desperate enough to risk their lives in an unknown land for a separate peace; and the ACS, driven by racism and a missionary impulse.
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