Charles River Editors - The Colonization and Establishment of Liberia: The History of the West African Nation Before the Liberian Civil Wars

By Charles River Editors

An 1830 map of Liberia

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An 18 th century European map of West Africa

Thither he sailed, but on his arrival the people were filled with astonishment and alarm. Paul Cuffee

In the spring of 1786, an organization was founded in London to provide some aid for destitute blacks and Asians in the British capital who were by then beginning to become conspicuous. Quite a number of them were resettled blacks from the American colonies who aided British forces in the Revolutionary War and found themselves thereafter no longer welcome in the United States. Others were captives, slaves for one reason or another released on the high seas, and other stevedores and sailors washed up on the shore of England. It was generally believed that the figure was some 15,000, and with limited employment prospects and no community support, most were in very difficult circumstances indeed.

The organization was called the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, and its activities included distributing alms, providing housing, and offering whatever support was appropriate. In this regard, the activities of the Committee were reasonably orthodox, although, at some point, discussion began on the possibility, and indeed the wisdom of establishing a colony in Africa specifically for the repatriation of blacks. The key architect of this plan was a passionate abolitionist and social activist by the name of Granville Sharp, along with a handful of other philanthropists and Negrophiles.

Sharp

The motivations for this were complicated and varied, and in part they could be explained by an interest in creating circumstances advantageous to blacks, but also to give them an opportunity to form and run a colony effectively in order to debunk a widely held belief that no black man could do such a thing. There was also some value in redistributing freed blacks from the various plantation colonies of the empire, not to mention the political expedience of protecting the British Isles themselves from an expanding population of non-whites generated as a consequence of imperial activities.

The idea of locating this ideal colony in the vicinity of modern Sierra Leone came about thanks to the representations of a plant collector by the name of Henry Smeathman, who had recently returned from the West African region and believed that the Pepper Coast (also referred to as Grain Coast) offered the most viable prospects. At the time, British and European trade in West Africa was vibrant and wide-ranging, including the slave trade, and there was a steady movement of merchant and Royal Navy ships between West Africa and the British mainland. His reasons for advocating that spot are rather vague, although it probably was at the time one of the least deadly stretches of an otherwise fever-ridden coastline.

An early 19 th century map of the area

There was a lot of sentimentality and idealism behind the development of the idea, as well as a certain amount of pragmatism, but the upshot of it was that in 1787, a shipment of 4,000 blacks arrived in several ships offshore of what would today be Freetown. They were essentially dropped off, wished the best of luck, and otherwise abandoned. Conditions, of course, were primitive, and the mortality rate among these early pioneers was atrocious.

One of the first problems they faced was hostility from local tribes, and almost from the moment they landed, they found themselves in a state of war. Nonetheless, they managed to establish a bridgehead, and in due course a colony took root. Numbers were augmented occasionally by independent arrivals, and the steady deposit of captives collected in one way or another by the Royal Navy Atlantic Squadron.

Then, sometime early in 1812, a trading vessel belonging to a wealthy black sea captain and trader by the name of Paul Cuffee drifted into Tagrin Bay and dropped anchor. As he took on a cargo, Cuffee looked around the town, and though he witnessed a shabby and disorganized settlement, the idea behind the colony impressed him and remained with him as he crossed the Atlantic and returned to America. There, for reasons related to an acrimonious British and American trade disagreement, his cargo was seized by U.S. Customs, and to petition against this, he appealed directly to Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin and President James Madison. As improbable as it sounds, the three men met in the White House, and after he presented his case and appealed for the return of his property, Cuffee and President Madison fell into casual conversation about West Africa, particularly Sierra Leone. Cuffee explained how and why the colony had been founded, and then shared the idea that had been bouncing around his mind since he left the coast of Africa. He suggested to Madison that freed slaves and free-born blacks in the United States could found their own colony in Africa, for the sake of repatriation, to escape the dogged racism that followed them even into freedom, and to carry the light of Christian civilization back to Africa. His idea was simply that free blacks and freed slaves would mingle with the indigenous people to the advantage of both, sowing the seeds of Christian civilization as it had been assimilated and creating a society built on equality, freedom, and trade. As Cuffee put it, I have for these many years past felt a lively interest in their behalf, wishing that the inhabitants of the colony might become established in truth, and thereby be instrumental in its promotion amongst our African brethren.

Cuffee

Gallatin

Madison

The idea captured the interest of the president, in part because he, in common with the rest of political establishment, while broadly content with abolition and the freeing of slaves, did not necessarily want a free population of blacks complicating an already troubling race dynamic in the country. Colonial race consciousness around the world was certainly acute, and the adjustment of the races to one another as they assimilated was always complicated. Needless to say, President Madison figured that with a history of 200 years of slavery between them, black-white relations in America were always going to be deeply divisive and acrimonious.