The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia (review)

The Price of Libertyis a captivating narrative of black North Carolinians and their postmigration existence in Liberia. It is presented within the context of enlightening local, national, and international debates on slavery and colonization during the nineteenth century. Claude Clegg meticulously uses emigrant rolls, genealogical records, period newspapers, ethnographic sources, and a variety of documents to recover and recount the lives of numerous North Carolinian emigrants on both sides of the Atlantic. In lyrical prose, Clegg moves the reader from one milieu to the next, scrupulously explaining pertinent political, social, and economic issues of the time, the players, and the interaction between these diverse settings. Several themes recur throughout the book: the denial of freedom and citizenship rights experienced by free blacks in North Carolina; the persecution and exploitation of blacks in the United States generally; the frequency with which blacks in the United States and on the West Coast of Africa were subject to white retribution; the underdevelopment of a skilled African American and Liberian labor force; and the contradictions of American slavery and colonization.

The great strength of the book is the demographic information and biographical sketches of the North Carolinian settlers that Clegg painstakingly documents despite a paucity of sources. Giving narrative shape to this historical period of the Atlantic world are accounts of families such as the Sheridans, Dicksons, and Capeharts. Exasperated by the indignity of being disenfranchised in his own state, Louis Sheridan, a financially successful and prominent free black man, immigrated to Liberia with a party of seventy-two. Upon arriving in the colony in 1838, and much to his dismay, he found a colonial administration that not only poorly equipped the settlers, but also by its existence disallowed him from being "freed from the tyranny of the white man" even on African soil (156). Hungry for a life free from bondage, Andrew Dickson, a forty-two-year-old enslaved printer, launched a fundraising campaign to purchase his family's liberty. According to their slaveholder's will, the Capehart clan of fifty-five had to choose either to stay in bondage or to immigrate to Liberia. In 1846, the Capeharts left for Liberia on the same vessel as the Dicksons. In 1850, Susan Capehart writes that although she is "farming on the smalls," the longer she lives in Africa, "the better I like it" (184). Clegg notes that her daughter was attending school, which would have been impossible if the Capeharts had remained in North Carolina. The reader learns of lives that form the intersection of United States and West African history, making this work an important contribution to both fields of study.

The book is, however, not without shortcomings. Although Clegg claims that identity construction is the central theme, there is very little discussion of the processes by which identities are constituted and reconstituted across geographic settings and time. The reader does not acquire insight into how particular individuals—North Carolinians, Liberians, settlers, colonists, slaves, free blacks, or slaveholders—come to understand who they are as North Carolinians, Liberians, and so on. The categories are simply employed in the narrative to describe a certain state of affairs. Similarly, the dynamics of community-building in Liberia is largely left unexplored. While a description of two towns settled by black North Carolinian immigrants, Millsburg and Caldwell, informs the reader about the extent of rural poverty and the high rate of malaria mortality experienced by the settlers, the reader is left to wonder how social bonds and a shared identity that shape a community developed in these new settlements. Undoubtedly, specialists will recognize a sizeable portion of what is imparted in the text. However, the ample descriptions salvaged by Clegg of aspects of black life in the Atlantic world from 1825 to 1893, in addition to his beautiful prose, will engage and educate the expert as well as...