An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia (review)

Historians rarely know what to make of the American Colonization Society. Denounced by William Lloyd Garrison as an insidious conspiracy by proslavery southerners to eliminate troublesome free blacks, the movement has typically been dismissed as an ineffectual racist curiosity when it has not been ignored altogether. For the past several decades, however, a small number of specialists in the early national South have labored to redraw the Society as a politically connected, conservative antislavery organization. Well aware of the depth of American racism, in part because the organization's Chesapeake-based leadership consisted of petty slaveholders, ACS leaders pushed for black emigration as the best hope for race relations and southern economic modernization. William Freehling, Randall Miller, Eric Burin, and Claude Clegg have all written about various aspects of colonization with subtlety and understanding, and here Marie Tyler-McGraw adds to this literature with a sophisticated examination of the white and black Virginians who created the movement.

The author of many works on the early national Chesapeake, and especially of a seminal 1987 article on Richmond's free blacks and colonization, Tyler-McGraw correctly regards Virginia as the best prism through which to examine the movement. Virginia legislators, terrified by the specter of servile revolt in the wake of Gabriel's conspiracy, endorsed the idea at the dawn of the nineteenth century, and during the heady nationalism that followed the War of 1812, another elite Virginian, Charles Fenton Mercer, helped to forge the national society in Washington. Virginians guided the Society during its first years, sent more settlers to West Africa than any other state, and a black Virginian, Hilary Teage, was the main author of Liberia's 1847 Declaration of Independence. Even as northern free blacks rejected emigration and lower South politicians denounced the federally-funded Society as a slippery slope toward national manumission, Virginia's freed community, Tyler-McGraw argues, continued to embrace emigration as a "form of resistance to slavery" (6). As residents of a region that denigrated their abilities and denied their claims to citizenship in the land of their birth, black Virginians regarded Liberia as a place where they might succeed in "proving their abilities" (177).

The author's discussion of elite white women who supported the movement is particularly insightful. Margaret Mercer, the cousin of the Society's founder, was typical of the evangelical women whose gentry origins provided them with insight into the "moral corruption that human bondage produced in the souls of masters and slaves" (84). Because she never married, Mercer was able to run her own estate and emancipate her sixteen slaves for emigration to Liberia. Because one of the goals of the movement was to Christianize western Africa, even a good many patriarchal southerners urged the Society's Washington office to encourage the formation of female auxiliaries. By getting upper class women behind the movement, John Latrobe hoped, influential wives might win their politician husbands over as well.

The danger in paying so much attention to closet abolitionists such as Margaret Mercer, however, is that Tyler-McGraw occasionally underplays the entrenched racism that informed colonization. Her goal, clearly, is to contextualize the movement rather than to rehabilitate its image, and its genteel white advocates admittedly lacked the extreme racial animus of lower South positive good theorists. Yet the very fact that colonizationists believed that black Americans possessed the ability to do well in a foreign land, yet declined to fight entrenched racism in the United States, was precisely what so infuriated the Society's northern critics. Despite this, An African Republic stands as the best, most thoughtful examination of those black and white Virginians who, for better or worse, created modern Liberia.