Afterlives of Slavery in Early Liberia

Abstract

Abstract: This article examines letters written by formerly enslaved settlers in Liberia during the mid-nineteenth century to examine two aspects of the afterlives of slavery. Manumitted settlers in Liberia, as formerly enslaved people, connected to audiences in the United States in different ways from freeborn settlers, who were more likely to make multiple transatlantic voyages, or had commercial connections with the United States. In this afterlife of slavery in Liberia, the letter writers examined here relied on relationships with their former enslavers to remain connected to kin and community in the United States. In a second evocation of afterlives, these letters show how settlers' conceptualizations of home pressed beyond both the United States and Liberia. For them, "home" was reunification with family–a family that could only be made whole through a belief in a shared spiritual afterlife.