The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia

The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia. By Claude A. Clegg III. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. xi, 330; 39 illustrations, 4 maps, 7 figures, 4 tables, notes, index, bibliography. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. At last scholars are beginning to focus on a much larger segment of AfricanAmericans who emigrated to Liberia in the nineteenth century. Claude Clegg's The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia, is part of an emergent literature that gives voice to the obscure immigrants historians are wont to characterize simply as "free Negroes." This history-from-below approach is a refreshing departure from the current historiography with its fixation on the American Colonization Society (ACS) and the elite "merchant princes" and politicians who dominated Liberia. The subject of Clegg's study is 2,030 black North Carolinians repatriated to Liberia by the ACS and some independent colonization societies. While the North Carolinians represented a small percentage of the estimated 18,000 black emigrants from the United States, they nonetheless constituted the third largest number from the twenty-eight or so states that contributed colonists. The book is organized into eight chapters, along with an introduction that briefly traces the origins of the American colonization movement. A short epilogue summarizes the political turmoil that has bedeviled Liberians since 1980. In the first two chapters, the author illustrates how Quakers in North Carolina, who were actively involved in holding and selling slaves, had a change of heart in the late 170Os. The turnaround by this Christian denomination provided the initial organized impulse for manumission in that state. This apparent humanitarianism of the Quakers later melded with northern antislavery sentiments and a growing national interest to relocate free blacks outside the United States, to form the ACS in 1816; Liberia was established six years later as a refuge for free blacks. Chapters 3-4 discuss immigration and the ACS's attempt to promote Liberian colonization to an apprehensive black population. Chapter 5 is the heart of the book. Here, the author broadens his thesis-i.e., "The Price of Liberty." Quite often, North Carolinian slave masters made freedom for their bondspeople contingent on repatriation to Liberia. Naturally, slaves preferred freedom in unknown Liberia to continual enslavement in the United States. As it turned out, however, freedom meant an inescapable encounter with West Africa's virulent malarial epidemic, which resulted in the death of a large percentage of the newcomers. Chapter 6 explores the reasons behind the resurgence in emigration in the 185Os, following a precipitous decline throughout the 184Os. …