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Reviewed by:
  • An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia
  • Kenneth C. Barnes
An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia. By Marie Tyler-McGraw (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2007) 249 pp. $34.95

The older literature about the African emigration movement generally focused on the American Colonization Society (acs), the national organization that founded the colony of Liberia in the early 1820s and established Liberia as an independent Republic in 1847. More recently, Tyler-McGraw and others have begun to mine the rich records of the acs for local and state history. Black emigrants to Liberia left North America often in response to local conditions, and in the antebellum years, much of the momentum within the movement was in the state auxiliaries of the acs.

Tyler-McGraw’s valuable book examines the African emigration movement in Virginia, fertile ground for a state study given that it provided more emigrants for Liberia during the antebellum period than any other state—approximately one-third of the 11,000 American settlers (others estimate 13,000). Tyler-McGraw’s failure to simplify her findings into unifying themes or a coherent narrative might seem frustrating at first. But the Liberia project meant different things to white and black Virginians. Members of each race differed markedly in their stance on emigration, and positions tended to shift over time. Virginia provides an excellent case study, especially to dissect the diverging white positions regarding African emigration, since several of the founders and influential leaders of the acs were Virginians—James Madison, John Marshall, William Meade, Charles Fenton Mercer, and Bushrod Washington, nephew of the first president.

White Virginians supported black emigration for diverse reasons. Some, particularly women of the acs, saw emigration to Liberia as a prelude to abolition, an opportunity for black people to demonstrate that they could be nation builders with a civilizing mission. Yet, some planters, particularly after the 1831 Nat Turner Rebellion, took up the emigration cause as a vehicle to remove free blacks from the state and negate the notion that slaves could ever have a future of freedom west of the Atlantic. Virginia’s legislature even appropriated funds to send free blacks to Liberia. During the 1830s, Virginians mirrored the acs in general, badly divided between those who saw Liberian emigration as a means to end slavery and those who viewed black exodus as a way to preserve it. From the late 1840s into 1850s, white Virginians again divided; those in the Shenandoah Valley supported emigration as a strategy to dilute the electoral clout of the Tidewater region, whereas those in the plantation districts, after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, again pushed free blacks to plan their future outside the United States.

The first two-thirds of this book focus on white Virginians, relegating people of color to serve primarily as objects of white action. In the last three chapters, Tyler-McGraw looks at the world that black Virginians made for themselves in Liberia. To some degree, they succeeded in [End Page 465] re-creating an American-style republic on the African coast. In the end, however, Tyler-McGraw concludes that black and white aspirations to build American institutions and spread Western civilization to Africa ultimately failed; the little Republic of Liberia emerged relatively isolated from both the West and black Africa. The tragedy of Liberian history may be that the settler elite never assimilated with the indigenous people of the area, as indicated by the coup of 1980, which toppled a government run by descendants of the American settlers.

Kenneth C. Barnes
University of Central Arkansas
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