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Marie Tyler-McGraw.  An African Republic: Black & White Virginians in
the making of Liberia.  University of North Carolina Press, 2007.  xi +
249 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-3167-0.

Reviewed by Hannah Kelley
Published on H-SAWH (October, 2008)
Commissioned by Antoinette G. Van Zelm

Citizens of a New Republic

In the introduction to An African Republic: Black & White Virginians in
the Making of Liberia, Marie Tyler-McGraw demonstrates that the American
Colonization Society (ACS) played a prominent role in the United States
and the creation of Liberia. While some scholars have illustrated the
ACS as a "sideshow" for racist concepts, Tyler-McGraw argues that the
history of the ACS "is central to understanding nineteenth-century
American meanings for citizenship in a republic and race as a category"
(p. 1). 

Created by prominent white men in December 1816, the ACS viewed African
colonization as a vehicle for political, economic, and social
advancement for America's free blacks. The founders believed that racial
discrimination would always serve as an obstacle to black citizenship
and freedom in the United States; emigration was the only way for
African Americans to achieve true freedom. Many early ACS members
believed that the formation of an African republic would illustrate that
America's free blacks were tethered to their historical subjugation
within the United States; free backs did not lack ability, but white
Americans would not be able to see past the historical construct of
race.  

An African Republic is extensively researched and draws on the records
of the ACS, the Virginia Colonization Society, and the Virginia
Emigrants to Liberia database at the Virginia Center for Digital
History. Tyler-McGraw uncovers the transatlantic conversations taking
place concerning ideas of the American republic, region, and racial
identity. She asserts that the ACS defined a republic as homogeneous,
based on Enlightenment ideas that "human achievement is influenced by
environment, and on the energetic missionary impulse of Protestant
evangelicalism" (p. 2). Free blacks did not fit into the ACS vision of
the American republic. For the organization's members, America was a
white republic. 

While free blacks did not, in white minds, fit into the American
republic, they could replicate that republic in Liberia; such a daunting
task fell on the shoulders of Virginia's free black emigrants. From the
first emigrant voyage to Liberia in 1820 until the Civil War, one-third
of all emigrants came from Virginia. Virginia's free blacks came to
dominate the leadership class in Liberia. An interesting connection
Tyler-McGraw finds in the transatlantic conversations is the emigrants'
desire to inculcate Virginia's Jamestown history into Liberia's national
origins story. She asserts that "these recurring themes were celebrated
by colonizationists on both sides of the Atlantic as a triumphal
narrative" (p. 7). While some whites may have viewed African
colonization as a restoration of African Americans to their native land,
the free blacks who settled in Liberia saw themselves first as
Virginians, and then as Americans. 
Therefore, it was only natural that they transported the values and
culture of Virginia to the continent of Africa. 

Liberian emigrants reflected the attitudes and culture of the United
States by distinguishing themselves from the indigenous African
population. Many emigrants wore fancy clothes and maintained elaborate
homes and businesses built out of stone and brick. Throughout the
decades, Liberia experienced a kind  of strife that affects every
country, region, or state: social division. Tyler-McGraw demonstrates
that the root of social strife in Liberia was a legacy of the American
experience; Liberians separated themselves along lines of class, color,
and education. Many of the free blacks of Virginia who first emigrated
to Liberia were mulattoes who had often received a smattering of
education, and they tended to dominate the local trade. Furthermore, as
the first emigrants, Virginians in Liberia often maintained a sense of
superiority and "felt themselves to be more culturally and socially
elevated than emancipated slaves from the Lower South" (p. 152). 

While Tyler-McGraw traces a connection between notions of Virginia
identity and racial identity in Liberia, she points out one major
difference in the transatlantic debate over African American identity
and citizenship: in Liberia, culture was central to emigrants'
self-image, not race. Liberian settlers conceived their patriotic
narrative through the improvement of Africans in Africa, and thus in the
diaspora.  

Tyler-McGraw's discussion of the role of gender and race in the
colonization movement is particularly effective. White Virginia women
were given a voice and role in the public sphere through their
involvement with the ACS. These women formed female colonization
auxiliaries that were active and visible in Virginia from 1826-36. Some
women, such as Virginian Mary Berkeley Blackford of Fredericksburg,
linked slavery to morality and championed emancipation and emigration as
a means of maintaining the moral fiber of the United States. 

Other women viewed slave emancipation as a form of personal
emancipation. Tyler-McGraw asserts, "For Virginia colonization women,
freedom from the responsibilities of slaves was less a political
abstraction than an imagined domestic utopia" (p. 88).Themes of
education and morality often dominated female conversations about
African colonization. White Virginia women attempted to transmit
gendered evangelical, educational, and domestic values to Liberian
emigrants. In 1826, the treasurer of the Richmond auxiliary asserted
that "the best way to civilize a nation is to educate the girls" (p.
91).  

Tyler-McGraw constructs an informative and insightful narrative that
thoroughly explains the complications and desires surrounding Liberian
colonization. She reveals the  connections between notions of national
and regional identity and the formation of Liberia. Her work
demonstrates the passion that many prominent white Virginians had for
African colonization. 
However, she asserts that part of this enthusiasm came from Virginians'
desire to re-live the glory days of the founding of the American
republic through the construction of an African republic. This desire
for a lost past led prominent Virginia families, such as the Lees and
the Washingtons, to advocate colonization. 

On the other end of the spectrum were the African Americans, some of
whom desired colonization and the opportunity for full citizenship in a
new republic, and others who felt that the ACS was trying to persuade
them to leave the only homes they had ever known. Tyler-McGraw
demonstrates that African colonization was an explosive issue in the
nineteenth century, with its fair share of critics and supporters. 

In Tyler-McGraw's treatment of the Liberian experience, the role of
religion deserves more attention. While she does discuss the Protestant
evangelical strain of the ACS, and the role of morality and religious
tract societies with regard to white women colonizationists, more
analysis of religion's effect on  life in Liberia would have been
welcome. How did Protestant evangelicalism affect emigrants'
relationships with indigenous Africans? How many indigenous Africans
were converted? Did religion lead to feuds between Liberian emigrants
and native Africans?  

As a transatlantic study, An African Republic: Black & White Virginians
in the Making of Liberia will be of particular interest to anyone
interested in African history, Virginia history, or the history of
national identity. 
Tyler-McGraw includes wonderful maps and illustrations, and she provides
a detailed bibliographic essay for further reference. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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