The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (20 page)

According to
Robert Goodloe Harper, the aristocratic Maryland lawyer and politician who gave Liberia its name, the blacks who were hopelessly debased in the United States by the stigma of racial slavery would be wholly transformed within an environment of dignity and equality: “They would become proprietors of land, master mechanics, shipowners, navigators, and merchants, and by degrees schoolmasters, justices of the peace, militia officers, ministers of religion, judges, and legislators.” Once they were removed from the social and psychological oppression of whites, Harper affirmed, America’s blacks would “soon become equal to the people of Europe, or of European origin, so long their masters and oppressors.”
George Washington Parke Custis, grandson of the first president, contrasted the bloodshed of the Spanish conquest of America with the redemptive role America would soon play in Africa: future generations of Africans “will not think of Cortes or Pizarro—the name of America will be hailed with enthusiasm by millions on that vast continent that are now unborn.”
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The
bombastic style of many colonizationist orations served only to reinforce the ritualistic and self-justificatory power of the myth of America. Evils alleged to be of European origin, such as slavery and the racial dilemma, were to be overcome by movement to an uncorrupted space where victims of oppression could prove by their own exertions that they were worthy of the Promised Land. The ultimate fate of millions of American slaves—and, by implication, of America’s republican institutions—would depend on the black colonists’ success in civilizing Africa, eradicating the slave trade, and building a free and prosperous society that would be as attractive to American blacks as the United States had proved to be for European immigrants. Liberia’s mission was so abstract and grandiose that it almost precluded serious discussion of capital investment, technological assistance, labor skills, and markets.

The American Colonization Society was aware that parallels with
New World colonization could be double-edged. By 1820 American history had shown that a few small and dubious settlements, ravaged
by disease and harassed by “savages,” could grow into a great and prosperous nation. But more than two centuries of continuing Indian warfare had also given pause to free blacks who considered themselves good Americans, entitled to the security and amenities of civilized life, who were now asked to found new Jamestowns and Plymouths. Two lines of argument were addressed to such misgivings. First, unlike the Europeans who colonized America, blacks were not aliens in Africa. They were being offered the opportunity to return to their ancestral homeland, a point underscored by
John Kizzel, a former slave from South Carolina who had finally settled in
Sierra Leone after being freed by the British and evacuated to Nova Scotia during the Revolution. In 1818, Kizzel and ten other black refugees from America addressed the following appeal to their American brothers and sisters:

The Colonization Society happily endorsed this analogy and added a second crucial argument: missionaries had found that the “native tribes” in the Sierra Leone region were eager to welcome an American colony. The Africans were “more mild, amiable, and docile; less warlike than the aborigines of America.” Reports from Sierra Leone proved that “instead of the war-whoop of the savages, armed with the implements of death and torture, they go to meet their friends and brothers, a generous, humane, hospitable race, who already welcome their approach, as the harbinger of civilization and social happiness.” If the American settlers would take as their model
the “gentleness, forbearance, and moderation” of the
Quaker founders of
Pennsylvania, they could be assured the same rewards of uninterrupted peace and friendly intercourse with the aborigines.
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In 1834,
Philadelphia and
New York colonizationists actually founded a settlement in Liberia based on Quaker principles of pacifism and antislavery. The next year
King Joe Harris’s
Kru warriors wiped out this
Bassa Cove community in a midnight attack, killing twenty of the colonists while the survivors fled in panic through the forests to Monrovia. The response from the settlers’
Liberia Herald
was predictable: “Such is the dastardly, unprincipled disposition of these half cannibals, that nothing but a knowledge of superiority, in point of physical force, on the part of foreigners, will keep them to the terms of any compact made with them.” Before long Americo-Liberian clergymen were reported to be saying, “the best way to civilize these Natives is with powder and ball.”
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Despite the optimistic rhetoric of the Colonization Society, conflicts between settlers and
African ethnic groups had erupted with disturbing frequency since 1787, when Britain established a precarious colony at
Sierra Leone as a refuge for London’s indigent blacks. In 1789, for example, a Temne king destroyed Sierra Leone’s main settlement,
Granville Town, in retaliation for the burning of a Temne village by British marines. Aided by fugitive settlers and tribal allies, the Temnes’
King Tom led full-scale attacks on Fort Thornton in 1801 and 1802. Ironically, the rebellious
Trelawny Maroons who had been deported from Jamaica and then sent to Sierra Leone from Nova Scotia helped to save the colony. Counteroffensives were required to pacify the natives and force them to accept British interpretations of treaties and land cessions.
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Neither the British nor the Americans had learned much from the disastrous mistakes of New World colonization. Apart from choosing unhealthful sites that guaranteed devastating mortality from disease, they failed to comprehend that non-Europeans would not willingly accept Western ideas of land use, private property, and political authority. Christian humanitarians, eager to replace the
slave trade with legitimate commerce, never anticipated that increasing exports of camwood, rice, ivory, palm oil, and hides would simply increase the demand for slave labor in domestic African economies. The power of West African political regimes and alliances hinged on the control of trade routes as well as on access to Western firearms, textiles,
rum, tobacco, and iron tools and utensils. For centuries the diverse ethnic groups of
Upper Guinea and the
Grain Coast had preserved their sovereignty while conducting business with European traders. Merchants of mixed
African and European ancestry, who greatly outnumbered the Europeans residing temporarily at posts along the coast, often served as intermediaries between two economic and cultural worlds. But the survival and expansion of British
Sierra Leone, which became a training center for African missionaries, introduced new sources of conflict. Africans learned that self-professed benefactors not only endangered the slave trade and internal commercial networks but claimed exclusive and perpetual jurisdiction over land that could be sold but should always be governed, in native eyes, by traditional custom. The
Anglo-American humanitarians could not see that they were building an entrance ramp on the road to imperialism.
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When the Reverend
Samuel J. Mills and
Ebenezer Burgess explored the Sierra Leone coast in 1818, searching for a site that would satisfy the needs of the American Colonization Society, they found “great tracks” of uninhabited land on
Sherbro Island. After dispensing rum and other gifts to numerous African officials and chieftains, they discovered that these “children of nature” were incapable of understanding the benevolent objectives of the Colonization Society and were unwilling to sell even vacant land. Three years later,
Eli Ayers and Captain
Robert Field Stockton, a United States naval officer, encountered still greater resistance at
Cape Mesurado, east of Sierra Leone on the Grain Coast. Only after aiming cocked pistols at
King Peter’s head were Stockton and Ayers able to extort a treaty ceding the Cape, for less than $300 in trade goods, to the Colonization Society. In 1822, Ayers,
Jehudi Ashmun, and the first black settlers quickly learned that their security required more than a treaty and professions of peace and goodwill. Though weakened by fever, Ashmun exploited African tribal divisions while mounting a brass cannon and building a stockade and martello tower. By November he was prepared for the mass assault of hundreds of native warriors who nearly overwhelmed the thirty-odd defenders before the cannon’s repeated charges of grapeshot tore bloody holes in their ranks. In a second confrontation, twenty days later,
Matilda Newport supposedly turned the tide when she ignited a field piece at point-blank range with the coals from her pipe, decapitating an African priest and inciting panic among the native troops. For Americo-Liberians, these legendary
exploits signified the triumph of civilization over barbarism, much as similar victories over Indians became part of a mythology justifying the white Americans’ possession of North America.
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Like the seventeenth-century English colonists and the chartered companies that subsidized them, the Americo-Liberians and white ACS officials insisted that their purchases of land would not deprive “the Natives of the Country” of a single “real advantage.” On the contrary, according to the prevailing ideology, memorably expressed in a deed for land along the St. Paul River, the settlements would “improve [the natives] and advance their happiness, by carrying Christianity and civilization to the doors of their Cabins.”
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This progressive objective was closely tied to the United States government’s belated commitment to enforce its laws prohibiting Americans from participating in the African
slave trade. Although President
Monroe had been persuaded by his cabinet that the
Constitution barred the government from purchasing land or directly supporting a colony for America’s free blacks, the Slave Trade Act of 1819 provided a pretext for indirect aid. Monroe concluded that government funds could be used to prepare and support a site for resettling Africans rescued from the illicit slave trade by a special United States naval squadron. The privately governed colony of Liberia thus became an official refuge for Africans saved by the United States government from becoming slaves in Cuba or other parts of the New World. Federal funds appropriated to benefit African recaptives helped initially to subsidize Liberian housing, education, defense, and the purchase of agricultural equipment.
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Natives who resisted the extension of Americo-Liberian settlements along the coast were accordingly portrayed as enemies not only of Christian civilization but of selfless efforts to suppress the primal crime that had crippled and corrupted Africa. While the ACS continued to stress the “friendly character” of the colony’s relations with native tribes, it also underscored the colonists’ need and desire for naval protection: “The influence of the United States squadron on the African coast has been of vast advantage to Liberia. It has given the native tribes a better idea of the American character and resources, and has tended to quell their turbulent feelings and cause them to seek … a closer connection with the commonwealth of Liberia.”
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The free blacks and
mulattoes who first emigrated to Liberia were dependent on the coastal peoples for food, trade, and knowledge of the environment. The
Dei and other coastal groups viewed the black and
mulatto settlers as “Americans” or even “white men.” Though cautiously willing to profit from the methods of the non-
African world, they often looked with contempt upon former slaves or the descendants of slaves. If the darker-skinned
Americo-Liberians seemed African in appearance, they still deferred to whites, not to the authority of local kings.

For their part, the settlers felt infinitely superior to seminaked heathen who had no understanding of individual land ownership, who believed in trial by an ordeal of poison, and who enslaved and sold their neighbors. Like numerous other groups of exiles and refugees, the Americo-Liberians attempted to replicate the culture they and their forebears had syncretized in their recent homeland. The more privileged settlers relished imported American foodstuffs and disdained such local staples as cassava, plantain, and palm oil. In the sultry heat they wore black toppers, long frock coats, and heavy silk gowns. Amid the “riotous” vegetation, under the “pitiless” African sun that later enraptured W. E. B. Du Bois, they tried to reconstruct the churches, lyceums, benevolent societies, schools, poorhouses, and fraternal orders of Jacksonian America. Ironically, in cities like
Philadelphia, it was precisely such institution-building that had most enraged American whites who wanted to keep blacks in their servile “place.” In view of the Liberian context, there is a further irony: in the United States blacks had honored such voluntary institutions with the proud adjective “African.”
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The settler society, to be sure, was anything but homogeneous. While sharing a common heritage of persecution, the Americo-Liberians were divided by distinctions of complexion, class, wealth, skills, and education. By 1841, when
Joseph Jenkins Roberts replaced the last white governor, a small merchant and mostly light-skinned oligarchy had won control of the colony’s productive resources and political power. Roberts, a wealthy octoroon merchant and philanthropist, belonged to a network of elite families, many of them from Virginia, who had been born free and had immigrated during the first years of settlement. If this oligarchy curtailed opportunities for later immigrants, the majority of whom were former slaves, their achievements also challenged theories of racial incapability. A widening
inequality
between individuals has often been the proof required for an acceptance of equality between groups or nations.
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