An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia » (New Edition)

Marie Tyler-McGraw is an independent historian and public history consultant. She is author of At the Falls: Richmond, Virginia, and Its People (from the University of North Carolina Press).

The 19th-century American Colonization Society (ACS) project of persuading all American free blacks to emigrate to the ACS colony of Liberia could never be accomplished. Who supported African colonization and why? No state was more involved with the project than Virginia.
Tyler-McGraw traces the parallel but seldom intersecting tracks of black and white Virginians' interests in African colonization. African colonization attracted aging revolutionaries, republican mothers and their daughters, bondpersons schooled and emancipated for Liberia, evangelical planters and merchants, urban free blacks, opportunistic politicians, Quakers, and gentlemen novelists. Tyler-McGraw 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.

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction     1
A Small Frisson of Fear, Soon Soothed     9
The Alchemy of Colonization     23
Auxiliary Arms     39
Ho, All Ye That Are by the Pale-Faces' Laws Oppressed: Out of Virginia     63
My Old Mistress Promise Me     83
Revising the Future in Virginia     105
Virginians in Liberia     127
Liberians in Africa and America     151
Civil War to White City     171
Notes     183
Bibliographical Essay     227
Index     233