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‘Destiny seems to point me to that country’: early nineteenth-century African American migration, emigration, and expansion*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2012

Bronwen Everill
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Warwick, Humanities Building, University Road, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK E-mail: B.Everill@warwick.ac.uk

Abstract

Traditional American historiography has dismissed the Liberian settlement scheme as impractical, racist, and naïve. The movement of Americans to Liberia, and other territorial and extraterritorial destinations, however, reveals the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors that influenced movement in the African diaspora. The reaction of different African Americans to these factors influenced the political and social development of Liberia as well as the colony's image at home. Africans migrating within and beyond US borders participated in a broader movement of people and the development of settler ideology in the nineteenth century.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

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122 ‘The plantation slave system linked self-possession to possession of the land … for slaves, achieving freedom would mean, prominently, achieving the right to the land on which they labored so they could produce food for themselves and their families … And achieving that right, in turn, depended in part on demonstrating that they could make the land productive – that they had the intelligence and self-discipline to master nature’ (Smith, African American environmental thought, p. 19).

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133 Ibid., p. 174.

134 Winks, Blacks in Canada, p. 143.

135 Frederick Douglass to Horace Greeley, quoted in a letter from Benjamin Coates to Frederick Douglass, 17 July 1850, in Lapansky-Werner, Emma J. and Bacon, Margaret Hope, eds., Back to Africa: Benjamin Coates and the colonization movement in America, 1848–1880, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005, pp. 64–5Google Scholar.

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139 Thirtieth annual report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States Washington, DC, 1846, p. 39; Lynn, Martin, ‘Technology, trade, and “a race of native capitalists”: the Krio diaspora of West Africa and the steamship, 1852–1895’, Journal of African History, 33, 1992, pp. 421–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.