The American Colonization Society and the Founding of Liberia

A claim circulates that The New York Times ran an article on May 15, 1852, proposing that Black Americans be shipped en masse to Liberia. That specific article cannot be independently verified in surviving archives or indexes. What is extensively documented, however, is something arguably more consequential: an organized, decades-long movement with exactly that goal, backed by some of the era’s most powerful political figures, which had already been resettling free Black Americans in West Africa for thirty years by 1852.

The American Colonization Society was founded on December 21, 1816, at the Davis Hotel in Washington, D.C., at the initiative of Presbyterian minister Robert Finley. Its membership was a striking coalition: enslavers like Henry Clay and Bushrod Washington sat alongside genuine antislavery reformers, united by the belief, for very different reasons, that free Black Americans and white Americans could not coexist as equals in the United States. For slaveholders, the Society offered a way to remove free Black communities that they saw as a destabilizing example to the enslaved. For some reform-minded members, it offered what they framed as a humane alternative to a country unwilling to grant Black citizens genuine equality. Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe all supported the effort; Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, was named for Monroe.

The Society’s first settlers reached the West African coast in 1820, and in 1822 established a permanent colony at Cape Montserrado, negotiated and in places coerced from local rulers including King Peter. The colony took the name Liberia, from the Latin for “free,” and its settlement, Christopolis, was soon renamed Monrovia. Agent Jehudi Ashmun expanded the colony’s territorial claims through further treaties in the mid-1820s. Between 1820 and 1867, the Society and its affiliated state societies resettled roughly 10,000 to 12,000 free and formerly enslaved Black Americans in Liberia, along with several thousand Africans rescued from slave ships intercepted after the U.S. and Britain banned the transatlantic trade. Conditions were brutal: of 4,571 emigrants who arrived between 1820 and 1843, only about 1,819 (roughly 40 percent) were still alive by 1843, felled largely by malaria and other diseases to which they had no acquired immunity.

Colonization was controversial from its very beginning, and not only among white abolitionists. Free Black leaders organized against it almost immediately. Philadelphia sailmaker and abolitionist James Forten led a mass meeting rejecting the scheme as early as 1817, and writer David Walker denounced it in his 1829 Appeal. Frederick Douglass, writing decades later, was blunt that Black Americans had built the country with generations of unpaid labor and “have a right to live here, and mean to live here.” The core objection was consistent: colonization let the nation avoid confronting slavery and racial injustice at home by exporting the people harmed by it, rather than extending them full citizenship. Even so, a small minority of Black nationalists, including later figures like Martin Delany, engaged with emigration on their own terms, while Delany himself came to call the resulting Liberian state a “miserable mockery” of true independence, reflecting how contested colonization remained even among those who considered leaving.

Liberia’s settler population, an elite that became known as Americo-Liberians, governed the colony largely independently of the Society well before formal independence. On July 26, 1847, under the leadership of Virginia-born Joseph Jenkins Roberts, who had emigrated in 1829 and became the colony’s first Black governor in 1841, Liberia declared itself a sovereign republic, the first African colony to do so. Roberts won the ensuing election and was inaugurated as Liberia’s first president on January 3, 1848. The American Colonization Society itself outlived its founding purpose by more than a century, gradually shifting to missionary and educational support before formally dissolving in 1964.