1821

 

The U.S. Navy schooner Alligator, under the command of Lt. Robert F. Stockton, carries New Jersey physician Eli Ayres of the American Colonization Society to the western coast of Africa. 

 

“Not only unenticing but insulting.” 

Stockton drops anchor off a rocky headland known as Cape Mesurado. He and Ayres go ashore to negotiate a deal to purchase a small tract, estimated now to have been about 140 acres. 

Payment would come in the form of trade goods – including guns, gunpowder, tobacco, rum, tableware, utensils, shoes, hats, umbrellas and mirrors (together worth roughly $7,000 in today’s money). Both parties also pledged “to live in peace and friendship for ever.”

 

The Colonization Society was then five years old – including slaveholder members, who feared increasing numbers of free blacks in the South were undermining the “Peculiar Institution.” 

This signing marks the foundation of the nation that came to be known as Liberia. 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I think you can assume your students have never heard of this effort, nor will they understand how Liberia ended up with a flag modeled on our own, or a capital named Monrovia.

 

As Smithsonian magazine notes, the most skeptical “antislavery activists,” in regard to this effort, tended to be native-born black Americans, who had never laid eyes on the continent of Africa. 

On the other side of the Atlantic, Black Americans were faced with a fraught choice. Most, like abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, found the prospect of emigration not only unenticing but insulting. As Douglass would later put it in an 1852 newspaper editorial, “There is no sentiment more universally entertained, nor more firmly held by the free colored people of the United States, than that this is their own, their native land.”

 

Still, plenty of African Americans decided to seek a different destiny in Liberia. Once the first few dozen settlers left Sherbro Island for Cape Mesurado in April 1822, the colony quickly expanded, and the ACS negotiated further land transfers with local leaders. By 1838, tens of thousands of free Black American repatriates were living in the city that would become Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, named after President James Monroe, who backed the ACS and had been in office at the time of the Cape Mesurado purchase.

 

Some who made the journey were idealists of one sort or another. Take Lott Carey (or Cary; sources differ), who had purchased his freedom in Virginia around 1813 and left with the first group of colonists because he hoped to spread Christianity in Africa. “If you think of coming out you need not fear,” he wrote a friend back home, “for you will find as fine a spot as ever your eyes beheld.”

 

As Smithsonian notes, Robert E. Lee freed most of his slaves before the Civil War, and offered to pay their way to Liberia. Emigration dropped off sharply after war exploded in 1861. 

Sadly, the American settlers often discriminated against the indigenous people. Liberia itself was riven by civil war, starting in 1980, as the wider population rose up against the elites, mostly descendants of American settlers.