From Colony to Nation: Liberian Independence and Black Self-Government in the Atlantic World

The emergence of the independent republic of Liberia on the coast of West Africa in the mid-nineteenth century was a historically significant turn of events in several ways. Led by a Black American settler class that sought to rule over a territory primarily populated by indigenous Africans, Liberia was an experiment designed to enact the lukewarm antislavery agenda of its founding organization, the American Colonization Society (ACS), while lowering sectional tensions in the United States over the perennially divisive issue of Black bondage. As with similar monumental assertions of political autonomy in other countries, Liberians’ declaration of independence raised as many questions as it resolved. For instance, there was the immediate issue of who was and could become a citizen, and how the Liberian state would deal with the vast population of Africans who surrounded, traded with, and frequently warred against their settler enterprise. Further, there was the question of what the new nation-state would look like in terms of its governing constitution, its foundational institutions, and its civic life. The rights of women, relationships with foreign powers, and the place of a sovereign Black country in a world ruled by European powers were issues that were not immediately resolved by the independence of Liberia, nor were such matters regularly the subject of debate among the country’s founders.

Liberian independence, much like the US antecedent, came in stages and was influenced by conditions and events that were both internal to its development and beyond the control of the settlers themselves. When the ACS began transporting Black American emigrants to the newly established colony of Liberia in the 1820s, the territory was already on the horns of a dilemma. To be sure, the US government had given its blessings to the colonization experiment by providing nominal military support and federal funding for the ACS’s planned colony. President James Monroe and other American politicians hoped that the West African settlement would serve as a landing place for “recaptured Africans” taken from slave ships by naval patrols charged with enforcing the 1808 US prohibition of the transatlantic slave trade. However, this US backing was inconsistent at best, and the ACS and its agents served as the governing apparatus in Liberia for the generation preceding independence. The private organization did promulgate several governing structures and guiding documents during the 1820s and 1830s, all of which contained democratic pretenses but which conceded ultimate authority to the ACS and its colonial agents. As African American settlers pressed for more autonomy and democratic reforms, the colonial government half-heartedly incorporated a small number of them into its rank but was typically hesitant to embrace the notion that Black rule was advisable, even in Africa, without the tutelage and oversight of Whites.

Into the 1840s, the paradox persisted: a private, self-styled philanthropic organization operating as a colonial government with assumed powers and authority that were not generally recognized in (Western-centric) international law. By this time, Europeans, particularly British traders, questioned the colony’s right to collect duties at its settlements and designated ports of entry, a necessary function of the colonial administration if Liberians were to firmly establish and benefit from middleman status between inland African communities and the Atlantic coastal trade. Once it became clear that the Europeans, who were becoming ever more deeply involved in West African affairs, were reluctant to abide a colony managed by a private US-based organization and only marginally under the protection of the US government, the ACS encouraged Liberian settlers to declare independence as a way to settle the contradictions inherent in the colony’s founding and its complicated international relationships.

Sixty years after the constitutional convention that established the United States of America, Liberian independence was declared on July 26, 1847. Although less historically momentous, the official emergence of the new Black-ruled nation-state conjured images of both American independence from Britain and Haitian independence from France, both countries being the products of long wars of liberation. The Liberian declaration was deeply inspired by the US model, as were many of the political, institutional, and cultural ideals and habits that the ACS and African American settlers imported into what became Liberia. The document is both a grand moral statement and an aspirational blueprint for inventing a Liberian nationality that could submerge many of the societal divisions that had plagued the country from the arrival of the first African American settlers in 1820.

The authors of the Liberian declaration of independence styled themselves as “the representatives of the people of the Commonwealth of Liberia,” but they were actually an all-male group of twelve relatively prosperous settlers drawn from the country’s three counties of Montserrado, Grand Bassa, and Sinoe. Their document, adopted during a convention that would also create a constitution, enumerated the various racial affronts that Black Americans had suffered in the land of their nativity. “We were made a separate and distinct class, and against us every avenue to improvement was effectually closed,” they asserted. “Strangers from all lands, of a color different from ours, were preferred before us.” Taking cues from the American declaration, the Liberian convention posited that all men have “certain natural and inalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the right to acquire, possess, enjoy, and defend property,” along with the prerogative to constitute a government, based on the consent of the governed, in order to protect these rights. At its core, the Liberian declaration of independence is a hopeful document that, like other such proclamations, offers a rationale for liberation and self-government based on a history of past abuses and a future of burgeoning possibilities. “Liberia is an asylum from the most grinding oppression,” the authors stated plainly. “We are animated with the hope, that here we should be at liberty to train up our children in the way they should go.”

In line with the Liberian colony’s conflicted legal status that the framers of the declaration of independence were trying to resolve, the document, perhaps inadvertently, highlights both its own shortcomings and the ongoing tensions and fault lines in the country. In a world in which democracies were scarce and the codification of women’s rights even more so, the declaration assumed that men would rule the newly independent country, a position that was affirmed by the Liberian constitution. Moreover, the founders excused their creeping settler colonialism by maintaining that their West African domain was enlarged “by acquisition of land by honourable purchase from the natives of this country,” a well-worn, self-justifying narrative of settler colonies the world over and from time immemorial. The authors understood themselves to be bearers of Western civilization, “the light of Christianity,” and “honorable and profitable trade,” all of which they presumed would be beneficial to indigenous Africans “on this barbarous coast.” Aside from all of the issues of class, denomination, region, and color that internally divided colonial and early national Liberian society, these stark demarcations between settler/native, Christian/heathen, and civilized/uncivilized would remain elemental to post-independence national identity and would perpetuate a settler domination that would bode poorly for the country’s long-term stability and prospects for true inter-ethnic integration and equity.

In hindsight, Liberia has always been a complex, incomplete, and even contradictory symbol of nationality and self-government. Born in a nineteenth-century world engulfed by White global supremacy, the republic was always an oddity of sorts, alongside counterparts such as revolutionary Haiti and the ancient, quasi-feudal empire of Ethiopia. The independence of Liberia heralded yet another initiative in Black self-rule, but, like Haiti and the dozens of African countries that attained formal independence in the twentieth century, was hampered from the start by internal conflicts and international forces (often of a neocolonial variety) that doomed the country to a perennial state of emergency, isolation, and penury. If, as the national motto states, “the love of liberty brought us here,” Liberia was met with an array of challenges in the wake of independence in 1847.

Selected Bibliography

“Constitution of the Republic of Liberia.” African Repository and Colonial Journal, 24.1 (January 1848): 1–11.

Clegg, Claude A., III. The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Hall, Richard L.On Afric’s Shore: A History of Maryland in Liberia, 1834–1857. Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2003.

Moses, Wilson J., ed. Liberian Dreams: Back-to-Africa Narratives from the 1850s. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.

Sawyer, Amos. The Emergence of Autocracy in Liberia: Tragedy and Challenge. San Francisco: ICS Press, 1992.

Shick, Tom W. Behold the Promised Land: A History of Afro-American Settler Society in Nineteenth-Century Liberia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

Claude A. Clegg III is the Lyle V. Jones Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (St. Martin’s Press, 1997; repr. University of North Carolina Press, 2014), The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), and Troubled Ground: A Tale of Murder, Lynching, and Reckoning in the New South (University of Illinois Press, 2010). He is the editor of Africa and the African American Imagination (ProQuest and Schomburg Studies of the Black Experience, 2007).