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Liberia
The portraits at right of African American leaders in Liberia were taken by Augustus Washington, whose photographs of white residents in Hartford, Connecticut, we viewed in Theme IV (IDENTITY: #5, Artists). Washington joined those who were convinced that the "true home" for the African American was in Africa, even if he or she was born in America. Washington and the men he photographed were in the minority among black Americans, most of whom opposed emigration and colonization proposals as veiled attempts to exile all black people from the United States. Between 1820 and 1864, only 11,000 African Americans emigrated to Liberia (4,000 free blacks and 7,000 former slaves who gained freedom by agreeing to emigrate to Liberia).1 The import here is not in numbers but in the meaning that Liberia held for African Americans in the 1800s. Was Liberia a welcome haven or just a new form of plantation servitude?
To consider this question, we look at letters, statements, and photographs by African Americans—men and women, free and enslaved—who made the long ocean voyage to Liberia, set up new lives, and corresponded back to family, friends, and, in the case of the Skipwith family, their former master, John Cocke, a Virginia planter. John Cocke was the white mirror image, so to speak, of Augustus Washington, for he too believed that America held no future for the black man. He became a co-founder of the American Colonization Society to form settlements in Liberia for freed slaves, and he funded two settlements for his own slaves, who had to earn their freedom through five to seven years of work.2 One settlement was in Alabama, a plantation overseen for a time by George Skipwith, whose letters to Cocke are included in Theme II of this Toolbox (ENSLAVEMENT: #4, Driver). The other settlement was in Liberia, and it included other members of the Skipwith family. Here we read a selection of their letters to Cocke as they attempted to create lives in Africa. Compare their experiences with those of other emigrants to Liberia, some of whom extolled the fledgling west African country as the only hope for black Americans. (xx pages, not including the Washington daguerreotypes.)
Discussion questions
- How do African American emigrants to Liberia respond to the new country and their new lives?
- What do they communicate to family and colleagues (and a former master) in their letters to the United States? Where are they most honest, as far as you can determine?
- What does Augustus Washington communicate about Liberia in his photographs?
- Consider these readings and photographs in light of the debate among black Americans on colonization proposals. (See IDENTITY: #8, Emigration). What did "Liberia" come to mean in the debate for both sides?
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Framing Questions
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How did enslaved African Americans construct communities over time? What were their principal characteristics? |
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What obstacles did slaves confront in constructing communities? |
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How did white Americans respond to the collective behavior of African Americans? |
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How was autonomy exercised through community by antebellum African Americans? |
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Printing
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Supplemental Sites
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Images: Philip Coker (Chaplain of the Senate of Liberia), John Hanson (Senator from Bassa County), and James Priest (later Vice President of Liberia), in Liberia, ca. 1837, daguerreotypes attributed to Augustus Washington. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Daguerreotype Collection.
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1 "A Durable Memento: Portraits by Augustus Washington, African American Daguerreotypist," exhibition, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 1999-2000; online exhibition at http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/awash/.
2 David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), p. 240.
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