Like Senegal, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, La-Guinea, and Sierra Leone, Liberia lies on the Atlantic coast, bordered on the northwest by Sierra Leone, on the north by La-Guinea, on the east by Nigeria, and on the entire southern coastline of some 325 miles by the Atlantic coast.
Liberia, like Sierra Leone, is a nation of manufactured government. European merchant companies bought and captured slaves from these coastal nations to build soldier-of-fortune armies who will later form an expendable force in the insatiable quest to conquer new peoples and lands. Once conquered, these slave orderlies would then ease their masters into the first years of settlement in the newly-conquered territories. Between the 1700s and 1800, and as the slave trade was abolished first by the United States and later the European nations were dragged kicking and screaming to abide by the terms of the abolition of slavery, America was considering a variety of reversal schemes, generally borne out of fear and contempt for the virulent freed-slave populations and the quandary of mixed-race peoples called Mulattoes. To be sure, there was a measure of moral and philanthropic urge to humanize what was by acclaim an unconscionable crime of a farther-reaching natural dimension. intractable disease and genetic mutations.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
From these debates, often in the halls of congress itself, several colonization societies began to emerge. Each of the states had some manner of colonization society and experimentation. A chartered amalgam of these local societies called the American Colonization Society, a private concern, became the expert body to conjure up and implement a consensus plan. That consensus plan would be the repatriation of freed and recaptured slaves back to as natural an environment as they hailed from, with overseer priests and missionaries who will continue to administer benign concepts of Christianity in order to enhance the success rate of the repatriation program. This process will also discourage future emigration to the US by these Freed Slaves should their new environments prove inhospitable to them.
In the early 1800’s, trial loads of freed-slaves were shipped to the western coast of Africa, mainly Sierra Leone, Liberia, and The Cape Verde Islands. Having been faced with discrimination and an ambiance of rejection, some of the freed-slaves desired an opportunity at a modicum of freedom that comes from living among your kind, no matter the estrangement. It was therefore declared that the freed slaves had voluntarily emigrated back to their homeland. Each of the trial expeditions were equipped with those freed slaves who have been taught reading and writing, the Bible, a small missionary contingent to be augmented gradually later, and an assortment of administrative skills to get them started in their new homes.
Where some of the freed-slaves would end up, The Republic of Maryland, is what would later be called Liberia, its capital city Monrovia was named after American President James Monroe. The constitution of Liberia, adorned with a federal system of governance, was drafted at Harvard university in Boston, Massachusetts. This repatriation experiment would not be easy. There were indigenous peoples of The Republic of Maryland alright, but the impact of forcible integration of the new arrivals would prove too extreme for this indigenous population. The rejection is akin to receiving a transplanted body part whose chemistry is antagonistic to your own.
With a lot of kneading, coercion, wars, and conflicts, and given there was no appetite nor plan for their return to America in the event the experiment was unsuccessful, the people of Liberia, both repatriated Freed slaves and Natives, were condemned to either grow a two-tiered society or wipe each other out. The grand experiment had to be seen to succeed, even if it claimed thousands more lives, mainly from the less powerful natives. The freed-slaves had the unrelenting support from the colonization society and via the envoy missionaries, they were able to enforce their will on the natives. The demographics of the freed-slaves would include many from the Caribbean Islands, Central and East Africa, and South America.
coast, bordered on the northwest by Sierra Leone, on the north by La-Guinea, on the east by Nigeria, and on the entire southern coastline of some 325 miles by the Atlantic coast.
The Global Democracy Project 