Another America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It - Hardcover

Ciment, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809095424 ISBN 13: 9780809095421

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 2013

Synopsis

The first popular history of the former American slaves who founded, ruled, and lost Africa's first republic

In 1820, a group of about eighty African Americans reversed the course of history and sailed back to Africa, to a place they would name after liberty itself. They went under the banner of the American Colonization Society, a white philanthropic organization with a dual agenda: to rid America of its blacks, and to convert Africans to Christianity. The settlers staked out a beachhead; their numbers grew as more boats arrived; and after breaking free from their white overseers, they founded Liberia―Africa's first black republic―in 1847.

James Ciment's Another America is the first full account of this dramatic experiment. With empathy and a sharp eye for human foibles, Ciment reveals that the Americo-Liberians struggled to live up to their high ideals. They wrote a stirring Declaration of Independence but re-created the social order of antebellum Dixie, with themselves as the master caste. Building plantations, holding elegant soirees, and exploiting and even helping enslave the native Liberians, the persecuted became the persecutors―until a lowly native sergeant murdered their president in 1980, ending 133 years of Americo rule.

The rich cast of characters in Another America rivals that of any novel. We encounter Marcus Garvey, who coaxed his followers toward Liberia in the 1920s, and the rubber king Harvey Firestone, who built his empire on the backs of native Liberians. Among the Americoes themselves, we meet the brilliant intellectual Edward Blyden, one of the first black nationalists; the Baltimore-born explorer Benjamin Anderson, seeking a legendary city of gold in the Liberian hinterland; and President William Tubman, a descendant of Georgia slaves, whose economic policies brought Cadillacs to the streets of Monrovia, the Liberian capital. And then there are the natives, men like Joseph Samson, who was adopted by a prominent Americo family and later presided over the execution of his foster father during the 1980 coup.

In making Liberia, the Americoes transplanted the virtues and vices of their country of birth. The inspiring and troubled history they created is, to a remarkable degree, the mirror image of our own.

About this title

About the Author:

James Ciment is an editor and the author of several books on the history of Africa and the Middle East. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

ONE
The Black Mayflower
 
 
Even to the casual waterfront visitor, there would have been something unusual about the departure preparations of the Elizabeth, an otherwise ordinary-looking three-masted ship berthed on New York City’s North River. The goods being loaded onto it—farm equipment, artisan tools, the materials to build a gristmill, enough weaponry to arm a company of troops—were neither the bulk freight of commerce nor the baggage of travelers planning on a return voyage. The appearance of the Elizabeth’s passengers would have likewise caught the eye: they were all either black or mulatto. Most had their families with them, including a couple of dozen children, though there were a few single men and women, too. And on this last day in January 1820, they were about the only people in motion on the normally bustling waterfront.
New York City was then on the cusp of greatness, primed to become the young and unnaturally restless nation’s gateway to the world. The change was most noticeable in the speed and scale of things. Just two years earlier, a transplanted English merchant named Jeremiah Thompson—having made an unparalleled fortune in cotton—launched his Black Ball Line, which offered the first regularly scheduled voyages in modern maritime history. At first devoted to freight, the packet ships were quickly adapted to passenger traffic by former merchants in the now-illegal slave trade eager to wring a profit from the business of moving impoverished immigrants across the Atlantic.
But on that bitterly cold day in early 1820, nature intervened. Global temperatures at the tail end of the “little ice age,” as historians call the three centuries between the early 1500s and 1800s, were on average only about a degree colder than normal, but that was enough for the North River to routinely freeze over. Commerce slowed down but New Yorkers did not. So popular were winter promenades across the ice that vendors, many of them former slave women (New York’s last slave would not be freed until 1827), set up stands to sell smoked oysters, roasted corn, and baked sweet potatoes from the Manhattan docks to the Jersey Palisades.
For the ninety-odd passengers and crew aboard the Elizabeth, however, the ice was no playground. For six days, they struggled with pikes and shovels to break the ship free. As they did so, the passenger list shrank. The Joshua Moses family of Philadelphia, laid low by illness, returned to shore with “seeming reluctance.”1 The body of a two-year-old was carried off the ship to be interred, without fee, in the vault of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the city’s oldest black congregation.
Then came a thaw and, on Sunday, February 6, the ship weighed anchor off White Hall Street, near Battery Park, the naval escort Cyane by its side. “We left standing on the wharves, I believe some thousands of people, both white and coloured,” recorded one passenger.2 But even though contemporaries likened the sailing of the Elizabeth to that of the Mayflower from England exactly two centuries before, the mood was not celebratory. For the “coloured” people in the crowd, it was a solemn occasion; some were there to bid farewell to friends and loved ones, others to witness a bittersweet moment in the history of their people. For the whites in attendance, there was satisfaction of various sorts. A few saw a group of despised and degraded people at long last set free. Many others simply subtracted ninety or so “niggers” from a population that darkened the soil of a white man’s republic.
For the Elizabeth’s passengers, the first of thousands of black Americans who would eventually settle in what would come to be known as Liberia, it was surely a moment of great, and conflicting, emotion: They would have felt sadness over leaving loved ones behind, fear of what awaited them on a continent none of them knew much about, and relief about leaving the burden of race behind. They watched the harbor come alive to enterprise and opportunity as the ice melted, and beyond the harbor they saw a city and a nation with a limitless future—a nation, they had been told since birth in ways both subtle and crude, that did not belong to them.
Little is known of most of these emigrants. They were a mixed lot. Just over half were male, about one-third were children, and roughly two-thirds were residents of either New York or Pennsylvania. About half had a notation in the ship’s registry indicating if they were literate or not. (Roughly three-quarters of the respondents were.) Twenty or so had their occupations listed. Of these, about a third were farmers and the rest artisans of various kinds, carpenters constituting the largest group. Just two of the passengers, a nurse from New York City and a popular minister from Baltimore, would qualify as professionals. There was, however, one aspect of their lives that unified them and, at the same time, distinguished them from the vast majority of their fellow African Americans: They were not slaves.
The 1820 census revealed that of the roughly 9.6 million persons, other than nontaxed Indians, living in the twenty-four states and various territories between the Atlantic Ocean and the Missouri River, some 1.75 million were nonwhites, all but a handful of them of African or mixed-African origin. And of these people, just 229,620—or 13 percent—were free, all of them exceptions to two of the oldest rules of antebellum American life: race is destiny and blackness equals slavery.
*   *   *
Daniel Coker and Lott Carey were exceptional men within this exceptional minority. Each had, through hard work and by taking great risks, escaped from bondage and made as much of themselves as early nineteenth-century America allowed a black man to make. And each, as he pushed up against the limits of freedom, would relinquish one struggle only to take up another, abandoning the only country that he knew for a continent that, by all contemporary accounts, was a land of “burning sun and tortuous [ sic] insects—poisonous exhalations, corrupted water … unwholesome food,”3 and savage men, a “graveyard” for civilized persons. Coker sailed on the Elizabeth, while Lott would leave a year later on the ship that followed. Each, in turn, would lead the first emigrants as they struggled to survive in West Africa. Beyond these similarities, though, their lives and fates could not have been more different.
Coker was a child of relative privilege, if that word can be applied to a black man of his race and time. He was born in Frederick, Maryland, around 1780, the son of a slave and an Irish indentured servant who worked on a neighboring plantation. While his parentage represented that rarer and more scandalous of interracial liaisons—black man, white woman—mixed-race persons were often the rule rather than the exception in free black communities throughout the South. Mulattoes were typically the first to be manumitted, and they often exited bondage with a trade or a rudimentary education, skills that helped them better navigate freedom. But they also lived in racial limbo, not always trusted by their darker free black neighbors and viewed by many whites as an affront to the God-given racial order. Coker himself would take up such attitudes, later declaring racial amalgamation “truly disgraceful to both colours.”4
Coker was not born free, odd given the laws and customs of the South, where the mother’s status usually passed to the child. But he became a favorite around the plantation and the inseparable companion of one of his master’s sons, who refused to go to school without him. The “peculiar institution,” of course, made no room for the education of slaves, and for good reason. A literate slave often meant a discontented slave, and one with the ability to make his way in the wider world. Coker’s life offered all the evidence slave owners would have needed for the proscription. He escaped to New York City in his teens, joining one of the largest free black communities in the country, and by twenty was a lay minister. In 1801, he returned to his home state and became the first black teacher at the African Academy, a school for free blacks, and the first licensed black minister in Baltimore, even though technically he remained a slave until he was purchased and freed by a Quaker abolitionist five years later.
The ambitious Coker went on to found his own school and, in 1810, blazed yet another trail by writing A Dialogue Between a Virginian and an African Minister, the first abolitionist tract published by an African American. Frustrated at the reluctance of white church officials to let black members run their own affairs, he set up his own Methodist congregation in 1814 and raised the money to buy a building to preach in. Two years later, he joined with the pioneering churchman Richard Allen of Philadelphia to found the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first national black church. But Coker soon had a falling-out with Allen and the congregation, though over what is not exactly clear. It may have had to do with color, as many members objected to a mixed-race person—contemporary accounts and portraits reveal Coker as extremely light-skinned, with pronounced Caucasian features—becoming bishop. Ultimately, the dark-skinned Allen was chosen. Or it may have had to do with his views on African colonization.
*   *   *
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, free blacks represented the fastest-growing segment of the American population. Many of them had run away during the revolution, while others had been freed by slave owners who took the rhetoric of the struggle against Britain—“ all men are created equal”—to heart. Since even these enlightened masters—George Washington, most notably—usually stipulated that freedom would be granted upon their deaths, manumissions surged after 1800. Nowhere was this population explosion more evident than in the three-state region (Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia) surrounding the Chesapeake, a region that was home to a majority of immigrants to Liberia and to the white men who sent them there.
The idea of colonization was not new in 1820. Thomas Jefferson, for one, had broached it in his Notes on the State of Virginia, written just five years after the Declaration of Independence. “Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort,” Jefferson wrote. “The slave [usually of the same race], when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.”5 Like most other people of his era, Jefferson loathed the idea of racial amalgamation, but there was also a degree of patronizing charity in his conclusion—being the inferior race, free blacks could never possibly compete with whites and so would become a permanent, and permanently oppressed, underclass.
The burgeoning free black population of the early 1800s added a new element to the equation: fear. In the paranoid depths of the white imagination, free blacks represented a threat to order: they loitered, they stole, they fenced goods pilfered by slaves, they hid runaway slaves or shepherded them to freedom, and, worst of all, in the dark of night, they gathered with their still-enslaved friends and family in dirt-floored plantation cabins, infecting them with tales of an idle and carefree life on the other side. Their very presence lowered property values.
It was with these fears in mind that a group of men met on the evening of the winter solstice of 1816, in the tavern of the Davis Hotel in Washington, a smoky, shabby brick affair that was nevertheless a favorite haunt of the district’s power brokers. Attending this initial plenary session of what would come to be called the American Colonization Society was a veritable who’s who of early nineteenth-century movers and shakers: Congressman John Randolph of Virginia, Representative Robert Wright of Maryland, several members of the prestigious Lee clan, the lobbyist (and part-time lyricist) Francis Scott Key, the aging “lion of New Hampshire,” Senator Daniel Webster, as well as key members of the clergy, the business community, and the law profession.* Although not in attendance, Bushrod Washington—Supreme Court justice and closest living link to his demigod uncle—agreed to serve as the new society’s president, though in what all viewed as a figurehead capacity.
No attendee commanded more respect than the man presiding over the meeting. Henry Clay, “Star of the West” and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, was the second most powerful individual in America. Later known as “the great compromiser” for his attempts to forge a North-South consensus on slavery, no one represented the conventional wisdom of Washington better than Clay. His opening remarks set the tone of the meeting and the course of the organization: “Can there be a nobler cause,” he asked, “than that which, whilst it proposed to rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of its population, contemplates the spreading of the arts of civilized life, and the possible redemption from ignorance and barbarism of a benighted quarter of the globe!”6 The benighted quarter Clay and his audience had in mind was Africa.
Clay’s words were inspiring, even if they amounted to a call for what later generations would have called ethnic cleansing. But what magical transformation did he expect to occur during the crossing that would turn a “useless and pernicious” people into heralds of “civilized life”? And who had the money or ships to send the hundreds of thousands of free blacks to Africa anyway? Ultimately, the society would extract a risibly inadequate $100,000 from Congress, under the guise of establishing a haven for recaptives—Africans rescued by the U.S. Navy from the recently banned international slave trade—and raise modest sums from supporters, mostly through appeals to evangelical congregations in the North and Upper South.* Still, as overblown as Clay’s rhetoric now seems, and as daunting the logistical obstacles to the goal he set for the ACS were, his plan had an even more fundamental flaw—as events one hundred miles to the north would soon reveal.
*   *   *
It did not take long for word of the ACS’s founding to spread to Philadelphia’s free black community, the nation’s largest and most influential. Its leading members—including Allen, Coker, and one of America’s richest black men, the sail manufacturer James Forten—supported the ACS’s plan on first hearing it, until they presented it to the men and women whose interests they purported to represent. A public meeting convened in mid-January to calmly discuss the merits and defects of colonization quickly turned into something else entirely, as speaker after speaker blasted the motives, methods, and aims of the ACS. Then Forten put the question to the three thousand attendees at the Bethel Church. The “aye” vote was met by a resounding hush while the “nay,” he reported, “seemed as it would bring down the walls of the building.”7
The community’s uniform response startled its leadership. After all, the very first effort at colonization, an expedition of thirty-eight led by the wealthy whaling merchant Paul Cuffe the year before, had spurred vigorous debate in the free black community, not outright condemnation. But then Cuffe was black. Whereas Philadelphia’s black leadership frequently met with well-meaning white reformers and evangelicals as near equals, ordinary free blacks knew only fear in their encounters with whites. As Forten’s own gr...

About this edition

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0809095424
• ISBN 13: 9780809095421
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320