Emigration to Liberia: From the Chattahoochee Valley of Georgia and Alabama, 1853–1903 by Matthew F. K. McDaniel (review)

Between 1867 and 1868, an “emigration fever” swept the Chattahoochee Valley (21). Based on newspapers and American Colonization Society (ACS) papers, Matthew McDaniel traces the more than 500 African Americans who left their Chattahoochee Valley homes in Columbus, Georgia, and Eufaula, Alabama, and headed to Liberia courtesy of ACS support. In Emigration to Liberia, Matthew McDaniel addresses who the emigrants were, why they left Alabama and Georgia, and what they faced in Africa. His largely descriptive work shows that emigrants encountered a “mixed bag” in Liberia (62).

McDaniel claims that Chattahoochee Valley emigration was significant because of its “relative magnitude and timing,” but his evidence points to more similarities between African American immigrants than differences among them (5). He finds that Chattahoochee Valley residents accounted for twelve percent of all ACS–sponsored Liberian emigrants between 1865 and 1904 (30). Did larger groups leave from other regions? Only comparative data from North Carolina is presented, perhaps because it is the only information available. North Carolinian emigrants, like those from Alabama and Georgia, emigrated between 1867 and 1868. Like black North Carolinians, Alabamians and Georgians left a post-Civil War South that denied them security and property. They sought “freedom, safety, property, and prosperity” in a “black-led” country (63). Most travelled as young families, the majority falling between ages 18 and 40. According to McDaniel, the cotton-farming Baptists and Methodists from Alabama and Georgia deviated from other immigrants only in that they were more often literate.

At first, reports McDaniel, Chattahoochee Valley residents, like other Liberian émigrés, “touted the agricultural and economic opportunities” (45) in Liberia, but in a short time, their letters lingered more on the “disenchantment some felt” (49). As McDaniel points out, Liberia was an “alien land” to American southerners unaccustomed to densely forested land and the rainy, equatorial climate (54). Some things were familiar, like the U.S.-style plantation system earlier immigrants had transplanted to Liberia and the social hierarchy in which new arrivals were “relegated to the bottom” (41).

McDaniel’s ambitious book grapples with complex issues and a dearth of primary sources. He references the few other scholarly works on African Americans in Liberia, though he is missing Marie Tyler-McGraw’s An African Republic (Chapel Hill, 2007). Still, his work points to a lacuna in the literature. By tackling an understudied topic, he fills a niche that students of Alabama, Georgia, and Liberian history will find useful. Future researchers and others will particularly appreciate his detailed appendix, which lists all identified immigrants, along with their ages, occupations, and other details.