Jeff Koopersmith

Liberian Revisionist History
If Liberia was "founded" by freed American slaves, I'll vote for "W" 2004
By Jeff Koopersmith

July 8, 2003 -- NEW YORK (apj.us) -- The President of our United States is in Africa for what should be an illuminating trip.

Although he's wisely chosen to skirt Liberia -- a nation whose people theoretically identify strappingly with the United States -- I think he might want to have a chat with Colin Powell about the fact that our harebrained journalist community is lifting misinformation from the US State Department Web site that claims Liberia was set up by "American freed slaves."

Throughout the world, newspapers of record have been "educating" us -- and worse, our children -- with a romance that Liberia, now swathed in the blood of futile revolution, was "founded by freed US slaves."

The Washington Post tells us this. CNN tells us this. Colin Powell's State Department tells us this. Countless others we cannot rely on, but should be able to, relate the same plucky story.

Too bad. Because it's a lie.

Some freed American slaves did settle there, but Liberia was in point of fact a colony founded by a group called "The American Colonization Society" (ACS), a cluster of White Americans -- including some well-known slaveholders -- that had a far different agenda.

These men wanted to make certain that black slaves who gained their freedom would never settle down in their white neighborhoods or marry their white daughters.

Frankly, this assemblage replicated a British model of setting up a bringing-up-the-rear nation. In that case, it was Sierra Leone, whose establishment was toward much the same mission -- which kindly could be called repatriation, but was in reality a "Go back where you came from!" project.

The American Colonization Society established its new colony in West Africa in 1817. The land for what was to become Liberia was purchased, largely with white American funds, from local tribes in the desperate hope that slaves, if ever emancipated, would move back to Africa. Remember, the American North had already begun to emancipate slaves by this time, and the ACS chose to offer blacks a one-way ticket to Africa rather than having them do the unthinkable -- demand rights equal to whites, real jobs, and a home on the same block.

Their legal legacy hung in the air until 1964 -- and exists today in the backwater minds of American society.

Leading lights of the "Send 'em back to Africa" brigade included Francis Scott Key, Henry Clay, the United States Capitol architect William Thornton, and Bushrod Washington. All of them were slave owners, but claimed to be "second-sighted" -- at least to each other.

None of these men were philanthropists in this regard, and were furthermore frankly and realistically of the opinion that slavery would eventually end not because it was iniquitous but because it was "unsustainable."

Thus, they prodded their fellow slaveholders to give their slaves freedom -- but only on the condition that these freed men and women emigrate to Liberia.

How avant-garde can one get?

Many slaveholders took the advice of the ACS and slaves were leaping on ships heading to what was never to be the Promised Land by 1822.

In fact, may brave black leaders spoke up against this insidious monkey business and publicly and heroically attacked the ACS scheme. Why should freed slaves have to emigrate to Africa just to earn their freedom? Remember, many were second and third generation Americans by this time -- well, at least "sort of" Americans.

Meanwhile, Southern plantation owners were furious -- denouncing the ACS as an enemy of the slave economy. They wanted to keep their slaves, not send them home.

In fact, building opposition to the illustrious Mr. Key and the rest of them forced the ACS to journey to England to try to raise money to fund their conspiracy. True abolitionists were up in arms over the plan, calling it anything but munificent. William Lloyd Garrison wrote a book on the evils of this colonization movement and sent American abolitionists to England to harass the American Colonization Society members at every turn.

Yet the Liberia movement had legs. Maryland and Virginia, just recovering from the Turner Rebellion, proudly formed their own colonization societies in 1831, and in 1832 the Maryland legislature passed a law that all freed slaves had to leave the state and be offered complimentary trips to Liberia, in an area of that colony commanded by the Maryland State Colonization Society. But this didn't work out. According to historians, there is no proof that even a single slave was sent to Liberia from Maryland -- for the same reason that farmers today don't inform on illegal Mexican and Central American fruit and vegetable pickers. They need the help at harvest.

Follow the money.

The American Colonization Society took more than twenty years to finally die. Yet nearly 15,000 American slaves had sailed for Liberia by this time. They did not fare well. Local tribes were hostile to them, and by the mid 1840s the US government refused to claim sovereign title to the ill-conceived nation. Disease was rampant in the new colony, and the ACS itself was riddled with poor administration and corruption.

Near bankruptcy and amid chaos in 1846, the American Colonization Society commanded Liberians to "declare independence." The freed slaves already mortified in poverty and disease did just that. What alternative did they have? Their hope that the United States would embrace them as a protectorate progeny was over.

It's too bad that George W. Bush cannot travel to Liberia today. He would be able to see the residue left by some of our leading founders. He might stay in Buchanan, Greenville, or, most appropriately, Bong Town. He could also eat Maryland-style fried chicken in eateries in Maryland County, Liberia.

As Ayn Rand understood, the American Colonization Society fashioned a nasty atrocity cloaked in altruism. Today, the blood running in the streets of Monrovia can be traced, in large part, to Francis Scott Key and his gaggle of hypocrites.

Perhaps "America the Beautiful" would be a better national anthem.

JEFF KOOPERSMITH is a political consultant, opinion research authority, policy analyst, and self-described "renegade lobbyist."