History of Liberia
is a country in West Africa founded by free people of color from the United States. The emigration of African Americans, both freeborn and recently emancipated, was funded and organized by the American Colonization Society. The mortality rate of these settlers was the highest among settlements reported with modern recordkeeping. Of the 4,571 emigrants who arrived in Liberia between 1820 and 1843, only 1,819 survived.
In 1846, the first black governor of Liberia, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, requested the Liberian legislature to declare independence, but in a manner that would allow them to maintain contacts with the ACS. The legislature called for a referendum, in which Liberians chose independence. On July 26, 1847, a group of eleven signatories declared Liberia an independent nation. The ACS as well as several northern state governments and local colonization chapters continued to provide money and emigrants as late as the 1870s. The United States government declined to act upon requests from the ACS to make Liberia an American colony or to establish a formal protectorate over Liberia, but it did exercise a "moral protectorate" over Liberia, intervening when threats manifested towards Liberian territorial expansion or sovereignty. Upon Liberian independence, Roberts was elected as the first president of Liberia.
Liberia retained its independence throughout the Scramble for Africa by European colonial powers during the late 19th century, while remaining in the American sphere of influence. President William Howard Taft made American support to Liberia a priority of his foreign policy. From the 1920s, the economy focused on exploitation of natural resources. The rubber industry, specifically the Firestone Company, dominated the economy. Until 1980, Liberia was controlled politically by descendants of the original African-American settlers, known collectively as Americo-Liberians, who made up a small minority of the population. The violent overthrow of the Americo-Liberian regime that year led to two civil wars that devastated the country, the first from 1989 to 1997 and the second from 1999 to 2003.
Early history (pre-1821)
Historians believe that many of the indigenous peoples of Liberia migrated there from the north and east between the 12th and 16th centuries AD. Portuguese explorers established contacts with people of the land later known as "Liberia" as early as 1462. They named the area Costa da Pimenta, or Grain Coast, because of the abundance of melegueta pepper, which became desired in European cooking.In 1602, the Dutch established a trading post at Grand Cape Mount but destroyed it a year later. In 1663, the English established a few trading posts on the Pepper Coast. No further known settlements by Europeans occurred until the arrival in 1821 of free blacks from the United States.
Colonization (1821–1847)
From around 1800, in the United States, people opposed to slavery were planning ways to liberate more slaves and, ultimately, to abolish the practice. At the same time, slaveholders in the South opposed having free blacks in their states, as they believed the free people threatened the stability of their slave societies. Slaves were gradually freed in the North, although more slowly than generally realized; there were hundreds of slaves in Northern states in the 1840 census, and in New Jersey, in the 1860 census. The former slaves and other free blacks suffered considerable social and legal discrimination; they were not citizens and were seen by many as unwanted foreigners who were taking jobs away from white people by working for less. Like Southern states, some Northern states and territories severely restricted or prohibited altogether entry by free blacks. This was, for example, the case in Illinois, and was proposed for Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution.Some abolitionists, including distinguished blacks such as ship builder Paul Cuffe, believed that blacks should return to "the African homeland", as if it were one ethnicity and country, despite many having generations of ancestors living in the United States. Cuffe's dream was that free African Americans and freed slaves "could establish a prosperous colony in Africa," one based on emigration and trade. In 1811, Cuffe founded the Friendly Society of Sierra Leone, a cooperative black group intended to encourage “the Black Settlers of Sierra Leone, and the Natives of Africa generally, in the Cultivation of their Soil, by the Sale of their Produce.” As historian Donald R. Wright put it, "Cuffee hoped to send at least one vessel each year to Sierra Leone, transporting African-American settlers and goods to the colony and returning with marketable African products." However, Cuffe died in 1817, and with him his project.
The first ship of the American Colonization Society, the Elizabeth, departed New York on February 6, 1820, for West Africa carrying 86 settlers. Between 1821 and 1838, the American Colonization Society developed the first settlement, which would be known as Liberia. On July 26, 1847, Liberia declared itself a sovereign nation.
First ideas of colonization
As early as the period of the American Revolution, many white members of American society thought that African Americans could not succeed in living in their society as free people. Many considered blacks physically and mentally inferior to whites, and others believed that the racism and societal polarization resulting from slavery were insurmountable obstacles for integration of the races. Thomas Jefferson was among those who proposed colonization in Africa: relocating free blacks outside the new nation.Colonies in Africa
In 1787, Britain had started to resettle the "black poor" of London in the colony of Freetown in Sierra Leone. Many were Black Loyalists, former American slaves who had been freed in exchange for their services during the American Revolutionary War. The Crown also offered resettlement to former slaves whom they had first resettled in Nova Scotia. The Black Loyalists there found both the discrimination by white Nova Scotians and climate hard to bear. Wealthy African-American shipowner Paul Cuffe thought that colonization was worth supporting. Aided by support from certain members of Congress and British officials, he transported 38 American blacks to Freetown in 1816 at his own expense. He died in 1817, but his private initiative helped arouse public interest in the idea of colonization.Colonization societies
The American Colonization Society was founded in 1816 by Virginia politician Charles F. Mercer and Presbyterian minister Robert Finley of New Jersey. The goal of the ACS was to settle free blacks outside of the United States; its method was to help them relocate to Africa.Starting in January 1820, the ACS sent ships from New York to West Africa. The first had 88 free black emigrants and three white ACS agents on board. The agents were to find an appropriate area for a settlement. Additional ACS representatives arrived in the second ACS ship, the Nautilus. In December 1821, they acquired Cape Mesurado, a strip of land near present-day Monrovia, from the indigenous ruler King Peter.
From the beginning, the colonists were attacked by indigenous peoples whose territory this was, such as the Malinké tribes. In addition, they suffered from disease, the harsh climate, lack of food and medicine, and poor housing conditions.
Until 1835, five more colonies were created by the colonization societies of five different states in the U.S, which were the Republic of Maryland, Kentucky-in-Africa, Mississippi in Africa, one by the Louisiana Colonization Society, and one set up by the Pennsylvania state colonization society. Another one was planned by the New Jersey colonization society but never came to fruition. The first colony on Cape Mesurado was extended along the coast as well as inland, sometimes by use of force against the native tribes. In 1838 the former four settlements came together to create the Commonwealth of Liberia. Monrovia was named the capital. By 1842, four out of the aforementioned five colonies were incorporated into Liberia, and the fifth settlement by the Pennsylvania society, Port Cresson, was destroyed by indigenous people. The colonists of African-American descent became known as Americo-Liberians. Many were of mixed race, including European ancestry. They remained African Americans in their education, religion, and culture, and they treated the natives as White Americans had treated them: as savages from the jungle, unwanted as citizens and not deserving the vote.
Rejection of colonization in the United States
Free people of color in the United States, with a few notable exceptions, overwhelmingly rejected the idea of moving to Liberia, or anywhere else in Africa, from the very beginning of the movement. Most of them had lived in the United States for generations, and while they wanted better treatment, they did not want to leave. In response to the proposal for blacks to move to Africa, Frederick Douglass said "Shame upon the guilty wretches that dare propose, and all that countenance such a proposition. We live here—have lived here—have a right to live here, and mean to live here."Starting in 1831 with William Lloyd Garrison's new newspaper, The Liberator, and followed by his in 1832, support for colonization dropped, particularly in Northern free states. Garrison and his followers supported the idea of "immediatism," calling for immediate emancipation of all slaves and the legal prohibition of slavery throughout the United States. The ACS, Garrison declared, was "a creature without heart, without brains, eyeless, unnatural, hypocritical, relentless and unjust." It was not, in his view, a plan to eliminate slavery; rather, it was a way to protect it.
The ACS was made up of a combination of abolitionists who wanted to end slavery—it was easier to get slaves freed if they agreed to go to Liberia—and slaveholders who wanted to get rid of free people of color. Henry Clay, one of the founders of the group, had inherited slaves as a young child, but adopted antislavery views in the 1790s under the influence of his mentor, George Wythe. Garrison pointed out that the number of free people of color who actually resettled in Liberia was minute in comparison to the number of slaves in the United States. As put by one of his supporters: "As a remedy for slavery, it must be placed amongst the grossest of all delusions. In fifteen years it has transported less than three thousand persons to the African coast; while the increase on their numbers, in the same period, is about seven hundred thousand!"