Settlement & History of Liberia

It has been said that Americans will do anything for Latin America but read about it. The same might be said even more strongly of Americans and Africa. Individual dramatic events may capture the public imagine from time to time. Sometimes these events offer an image of hope, such as the release of Nelson Mandela and the fall of apartheid in South Africa. More often they present an image of horror and despair, such as the nearly continent-wide AIDS crisis, or the brutal civil war and recent French intervention in Ivory Coast.

Apart from these individual events, however, Americans have little consciousness of Africa. Even African-Americans often have little overall knowledge of their ancestors' homeland. Probably few could find Ivory Coast on a map. If they did, they would find that one of its neighbors is Liberia, and they might hazily recall having read that Liberia was founded in the 19th century by freed slaves from the United States.

In fact, Liberia was, if unofficially, America's first overseas colony, founded in 1822 by the American Colonization Society, which ruled it until it gained independence in 1847 -- peacefully, but on the initiative of the Liberian settlers rather than by grant (Liebenow, 1987, pp. 16-17). Between 1822 and 1904, some 20,000 African-Americans emigrated to Liberia, most in the early decades, but some 4000 in the decades after the Civil War.

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freed from. Now, however, they could cast themselves in the role of their former masters. That freed slaves would choose to establish a plantation system is of course paradoxical. Of all people, we might expect them to be most passionately opposed to slavery in all its forms and manifestations. All too often in history, however, oppressed groups have turned oppressors as soon as the opportunity arose. The New England Puritans, who fled religious intolerance only to establish an intolerant rule of their own, are one familiar example from American history. Moreover, no society appears out of a vacuum. The AmericoLiberians, in creating a society in their new country, fell back on the only example they knew, but from which they had been excluded from full membership  which was the society of the preCivil War South. This therefore became the model on which AmericoLiberian society was based: Their standards were those of the antebellum American South. Far from rejecting the institutions, values, dress, and speech of a society that had rejected them, the free persons of color painstakingly attempted to reproduce that culture on an alien shore. What they had rejected, apparently, was a situation that denied them
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Approximate Word count = 10026
Approximate Pages = 40 (250 words per page)

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