An African Republic

The nineteenth-century American Colonization Society (ACS) project of persuading all American free blacks to emigrate to the ACS colony of Liberia could never be accomplished. Few free blacks volunteered, and greater numbers would have overwhelmed the meager resources of the ACS. Given that reality, who supported African colonization and why? No state was more involved with the project than Virginia, where white Virginians provided much of the political and organizational leadership and black Virginians provided a majority of the emigrants. In African Republic, Marie Tyler-McGraw traces the parallel but seldom intersecting tracks of black and white Virginians' interests in African colonization, from revolutionary-era efforts at emancipation legislation to African American churches' concern for African missions. In Virginia, African colonization attracted aging revolutionaries, republican mothers and their daughters, bond-persons schooled and emancipated for Liberia, evangelical planters and merchants, urban free blacks, opportunistic politicians, Quakers, and gentlemen novelists. An African Republic follows the experiences of the emigrants from Virginia to Liberia, where some became the leadership class, consciously seeking to demonstrate black abilities, while others found greater hardship and early death. Tyler-McGraw carefully examines the tensions between racial identities, domestic visions, and republican citizenship in Virginia and Liberia

Citizenship · Emancipation · Emigration · Ethnology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · White (mutation) · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society · 1847-1944 · 19th century · Africa · African americans · American Colonization Society · American Colonization Society; Virginia; slavery; Liberia; Africa; African colonization; back to Africa; Joseph Jenkins Roberts; Charles Fenton Mercer; Margaret Mercer; free blacks; black emigration; black colonization; Paul Cuffe; Virginia black churches · Black studies · Colonization · Colonization & independence · emigration and immigration · Ethnic Issues · Ethnic Studies - African American Studies - General · Free african americans · Free African Americans · Immigration & emigration · Liberia · race relations · Social Science · To 1847 · united states · United States - 19th Century · United States - State & Local - South · Virginia · White people · Whites