Abstract
People who lived transnational lives were at the centre of an early nineteenth-century project that in the United States was known simply as ‘colonization’. This is the term that people — black and white — used to refer to efforts between 1817 and the end of the American Civil War to send African Americans (freed slaves and free blacks) across the Atlantic to colonize the west coast of Africa, which in 1847 became the republic of Liberia.
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Amy Kaplan (2002) The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press);
Amy S. Greenberg (2005) Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press).
Ira Berlin (1998) Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
Notable exceptions are W. Jeffrey Bolster (1997) Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge: Harvard University Press);
R.J.M. Blackett (1983) Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press);
Cassandra Pybus (2006) Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press);
Simon Schama (2006) Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (New York: Ecco);
Lamin Sanneh (1999) Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press);
Marie Tyler-McGraw (2007) An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press).
Robin D. G. Kelley (2002) ‘How the West was One: The African Diaspora and the Re-Mapping of U.S. History’, in Thomas Bender, ed., RethinkingAmerican History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 123–147, esp. 124.
Samuel John Bayard (1856) A Sketch of the Life of Com. Robert F. Stockton … (New York), pp. 39–47.
Freedom’s Journal [FJ], March 30, April 13, June 8 and August 17, 1827; Leonard P. Curry (1986) The Free Black in Urban America, 1800–1850: The Shadow of the Dream (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 235;
Leon Litwack (1961) North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 25;
Liberator, May 21, 1831; Colored American, January 27, 1838; Robert Johnson, Jr. (2005), Returning Home: A Century of African—American Repatriation (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press), p. 178;
John B. Russwurm to Ralph R. Gurley, July 24, 1829, quoted in James O. Horton and Lois E. Horton (1998), In Hope ofLiberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 198.
See for example David Waldstreicher (1997) In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press); Shane White (1994) ’“It Was a Proud Day”: African Americans, Festivals, and Parades in the North, 1741–1834’, Journal of American History 81, 13–50.
Henry B. Stewart to William McLain, October 20, 1849 and May 23, 1857, in Bell I. Wiley (1980) Slaves No More: Letters from Liberia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky), pp. 281–282, 295–297.
Horatio Bridge (1853) Journal of an African Cruiser, ed. Nathaniel Hawthorne, 2nd edn (New York: George P. Putnam), p. 14.
See for example Robert C. Toll (1974) Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press);
Eric Lott (1993) Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press);
William J. Mahar (1999) Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press).
Robert Cantwell (1948) Nathaniel Hawthorne: The American Years (New York: Rinehart), pp. 73–74;
Susan G. Davis (1986) Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), pp. 38–48; Bridge, Journal of an African Cruiser, pp. 14–15, 11.
See also Elaine Frantz Parsons (2005) ‘Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan’, Journal of American History 92, 811–836.
James C. Scott (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Scott Sandage (1999) ‘Gender and the Economics of the Sentimental Market in Nineteenth-Century America’, Social Politics 6, 105–130;
and Scott A. Sandage (2005) Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), ch. 8.
Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, pp. 157–158; Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic, pp. 73, 128; Eric Burin (2005) Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida), pp. 144–145.
Ann Laura Stoler (2001) ‘Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies’, Journal of American History 88, 829–865, part of a Round Table: ‘Empires and Intimacies: Lessons from (Post) Colonial Studies’, 829–897;
Stoler, ed. (2006) Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press).
Joseph Blake to R.R. Gurley, March 9 and May 13, 1835, ACS, Reel 153; ‘Roll of Emigrants That Have Been Sent to the Colony of Liberia, Western Africa, by the American Colonization Society and Its Auxiliaries, to September 1843’, US Congress, Senate Documents, 28th Congress, 2nd Sess., 1844, IX, pp. 152, 156; Tom W. Shick (1980) Behold the Promised Land: A History of Afro-American Settler Society in Nineteenth-Century Liberia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), p. 38; James Wesley Smith (1987) Sojourners in Search of Freedom: The Settlement of Liberia by Black Americans (Lanham, MD: University Press of America), ch. 7.
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© 2010 Bruce Dorsey
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Dorsey, B. (2010). The Transnational Lives of African American Colonists to Liberia. In: Deacon, D., Russell, P., Woollacott, A. (eds) Transnational Lives. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277472_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277472_14
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