By Don Valentine
In 1860, at the start of the Civil War, there were an estimated 4.5 million Blacks (16%) in the US. Debate rested on what to do with the Blacks: emancipate, continue slavery or repatriate back to Africa? A successful campaign was put together to repatriate free and enslaved Blacks. The American Colonization Society (ACS) was the lead group. Britannica chronicled the Society, “It was founded in 1816 by Robert Finley, a Presbyterian minister, and some of the country’s most influential men, including Francis Scott Key, Henry Clay, and Bushrod Washington (nephew of George Washington and the society’s first president)…” ACS was mostly White men, abolitionists and slave owners. They all felt that free Blacks could not be integrated into White America.
Lieutenant Robert F. Stockton, a navy man, aided in the ACS first attempt to find land in the West African coast. The Library of Congress noted,“… Stockton took charge of the negotiations with leaders of the Dey and Bassa peoples who lived in the area of Cape Mesurado. At first, the local leaders were reluctant to surrender their peoples’ land to the strangers, but were forcefully persuaded — some accounts say at gun-point — to part with a “36 mile long and 3 mile wide” strip of coastal land for trade goods, supplies, weapons, and rum worth approximately $300.” This method of land acquisition dates back to Plymouth Rock.
The idea of repatriating the slaves gained the fancy of a few southern states. The Library of Congress recorded, “Slave states in North America, increasingly interested in getting rid of their free African-American populations, encouraged the formation of colonization societies. These groups organized themselves independently of the ACS and founded their own colonies in Liberia for transplanting free African-Americans. Some of the “volunteers” were emancipated only if they agreed to emigrate. The Maryland State Colonization Society established its colony in Cape Palmas, Liberia. Virginia and Mississippi also established Liberian colonies for former slaves and free Blacks.”
In speeches leading up to the Civil War, President Lincoln became an advocate of sending Blacks back to Africa. Encyclopedia Britannica noted, “Before the outbreak of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln was a staunch supporter of repatriation, echoing many sentiments of the time that free Black people would not be able to properly assimilate into White society and the races would be unable to amicably coexist. When the fight for emancipation grew and the Civil War began, his discussions with Black community leaders about colonization and his stance on repatriation strengthened. Alternatively, many slave-owning families detested the idea of repatriation due to the removal of a Black labor force.”
Liberia, which means “land of the free,” was the first nation on the African continent to gain its independence from the ACS on July 26, 1847. It still
