Not so many went but still they numbered about 4000, mostly free black people from Maryland and Virginia. A good recent work on it is, Marie Tyler McGraw,_An African Republic: Black & White Virginians in the Making of Liberia_. There was little attraction for black Virginians many of whom were into the 4th and 5th generations on these shores. There are other examples of big migrations after the Civil War--e.g., the Great Exodus of 1879 when 40,000 black people left the lower Mississippi valley, following the end of Reconstruction, to settle in Kansas and Oklahoma. In the twentieth century of course there is the Great Migration that carried millions of black southerners to Northern and Western cities.

Jim Hershman

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