In nineteenth-century America, the belief that blacks and whites
could not live in social harmony and political equality in the same
country led to a movement to relocate African Americans to Liberia,
a West African colony established by the United States government
and the American Colonization Society in 1822. In
The Price of
Liberty, Claude Clegg accounts for 2,030 North Carolina blacks
who left the state and took up residence in Liberia between 1825
and 1893. By examining both the American and African sides of this
experience, Clegg produces a textured account of an important
chapter in the historical evolution of the Atlantic world.
For almost a century, Liberian emigration connected African
Americans to the broader cultures, commerce, communication
networks, and epidemiological patterns of the Afro-Atlantic region.
But for many individuals, dreams of a Pan-African utopia in Liberia
were tempered by complicated relationships with the Africans, whom
they dispossessed of land. Liberia soon became a politically
unstable mix of newcomers, indigenous peoples, and "recaptured"
Africans from westbound slave ships. Ultimately, Clegg argues, in
the process of forging the world's second black-ruled republic, the
emigrants constructed a settler society marred by many of the same
exclusionary, oppressive characteristics common to modern colonial
regimes.