Labor in the Remaking of Black Citizenship in Liberia
CAREE A. BANTON
In 1865, in anticipation of a post–Civil War future in the United States, African American interest in Liberian emigration waned.1 That year, the American Colonization Society (ACS) sent five migrant ships to Liberia. However, in keeping with the decline, the largest group of migrants on board these ships did not hail from the customary departure points on the American mainland. Instead, the ships brought new streams of migrants to Liberia: Barbadians from the Caribbean and African recaptives liberated from slave ships on the Atlantic Ocean.2 Having united blacks from different points of origin, ships transformed Liberia into one of the most critical sites of African diasporic migratory assemblage in the nineteenth century.3 As these groups joined native ethnic Liberians and African Americans in a black nation-building project, their migrations orchestrated changes in Liberia’s demography while transforming the nation into a black cosmopolitan space. In altering Liberia’s sociopolitical landscape, the new migrants created a milieu with multiple voices and visions. By bringing issues and demands different from those of African Americans, these migrants provoked intraracial disputes over matters of citizenship and belonging—specifically, which groups to embrace and the nature of their inclusion in the republic.4
Migration to Liberia originating from non-American spaces represents an understudied aspect of Liberian colonization. Barbadian and African recaptives’ presence in Liberia contributed to redefinitions of black citizenship in a black republic. More specifically, labor intervened in historical efforts to define citizenship, reconstructing its meanings at a moment of crisis brought on by streams of new migrants. What forms of labor represented the new political subjects in Liberia? In what ways did labor map the sociopolitical divides in the imagined black community? How did migrants’ labor serve Liberia’s efforts to project an image of civilization and modernity?
Before the influx of the Barbadians and recaptives, little thought was given to their future citizenship status in the republic. Moreover, the presence of non-American migrants went against Liberia’s founding ideals, since the ACS had imagined the nation-building project as solely for African Americans. The ACS’s 1816 constitution had declared that the organization sought to “exclusively colonize free people of color residing in our country in Africa.”5 African Americans had dominated emigration to the republic, and citizenship was allocated almost exclusively to them. In its 1847 postindependence constitution, Liberia sought to clearly define the terms of citizenship, declaring that “none but Negroes or persons of Negro descent shall be eligible to citizenship in this Republic.”6 Through a black nationalist spirit of racial solidarity propagated in the diaspora, blacks were drawn into a sense of citizenship with the nation. But colonizationists’ advertisement of Liberia as the Negro Republic, reflecting the essentialization and racism that created race, had overdetermined political claims for citizenship along racial lines.
Following the American Civil War, however, when the locus of Liberian migration shifted away from African Americans to African recaptives and West Indians, what it meant to be a black citizen in Liberia began to change in deliberate and meaningful ways. For a nation increasingly fixated on displaying civilization and modernity, the influx of Barbadians and recaptives unsettled ideas of an undifferentiated black racial identity. More significantly, for a black, race-conscious, and supposedly racially homogenous society, the new migrants also compelled new meanings of citizenship.
The constant struggles and contestations for citizenship have attracted rigorous analysis. Ideas of citizenship have often been grounded in nation, birthright, and blood. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, citizenship expanded and evolved. Voting, petitioning, access to civil rights, and participation in public life through the press increasingly formed the core of political citizenship. In fighting for independence from Spain, Afro-Cubans created a multiracial platform for citizenship that differed from the outcomes of similar circumstances in Mexico and the United States.7 Similarly, in Brazil, enslaved Africans subverted traditional forms of citizenship through theatrical performances, seizing on the public sphere to act out and embody citizenship roles otherwise denied to them.8 In recognizing their mutual universal rights, Colombians challenged normative forms of citizenship after emancipation.9 Under an imperial structure, though racial inequality compromised experiences of citizenship for large numbers of black colonial subjects, they nonetheless participated in some semblance of citizenship through acts of petitioning.
African American migrants in Liberia have become the paradigm for understanding black transatlantic identity and variations in experiences of black citizenship.10 However, in Liberia where race determined the question of citizenship for migrants, it is critical to outline the various ways articulations of such claims and the domains in which they emerged changed over time. The exclusion of other black migrants from Liberian colonization narratives flies in the face of evolving constructs of citizenship. Widening the scope of Liberian colonization to include other streams of black migrants expands citizenship constructs and reveals the paradox within ideas of blackness.
Indeed, the insertion of Barbadians and African recaptives into Liberian colonization narratives and their juxtaposition to their African American and native ethnic counterparts reveal the centrality of labor to a new discourse on citizenship and ideas of black civilization and modernity in Liberia. Discourse related to migrant labor formulated public expressions as well as policies regarding belonging and nonbelonging. Consequently, a double consciousness emerged in the Atlantic world through the different functions labor performed from place to place, thereby creating divergences in experiences of black citizenship.11
In the Caribbean and the United States, panic had arisen regarding the idea of preparing former slaves for citizenship. Enslaved Africans defined through their labor’s centrality to racial slavery did not experience full self-ownership and were rendered powerless by legal policies and landlessness. Their exclusion from economic and political means to citizenship relegated them to a second-class status. This experience led blacks throughout the diaspora, especially black nationalists, to advocate for legal equality and assimilation or emigration as a way to defuse white supremacists’ racist denial of citizenship to formerly enslaved blacks. Across the Atlantic in Liberia, however, the status of blacks reversed, as colonizationists and Liberian officials touted their labor as the signifier of civilization and modernity. In these instances of valorization, labor functioned as a condition for citizenship. Thus, paradoxically, even in Liberia, the vestiges of slavery continued to provide the background for citizenship claims through the ideas of race and productive labor. Colonizationists who were influenced by European scientists and philosophers reasoned that races evolved unevenly and the civilized should control the inferior. Europeans considered themselves the most civilized, followed by diasporic migrants reared in close proximity. To be considered civilized and modernized, black Liberian migrants needed to reclaim their racialization through slavery, recouping the necessary proximity to whiteness and concomitant white supremacist ideas. Diasporic experiences of enslavement became instrumental to the embodiment of civilization, modernity, and productive labor, characteristics through which black migrants could attract Liberian citizenship.
Barbadian and recaptive African experiences of citizenship in Liberia stood in contrast to those of their African American counterparts. Whereas African American pioneers linked Liberia as a nationality to a certain ethnic orientation and cultural particularity, new migrants ushered Liberian citizenship into a political arena that went beyond narrow cultural affiliation. Thrust into the national spotlight, migrants viewed as “civilized” by virtue of their labor productivity not only redefined what it meant to be a black in a modern black republic but became an entirely new category of citizen. New forms of Liberian citizenship gave meaning through action. As Jurgen Habermas has outlined, “The nation of citizens does not derive its identity from some common ethnic and cultural properties, but rather from the praxis of citizens who actively exercise their civil rights.”12 The universal recognition of the utility of productive labor offered a different mode of incorporation into a republic unencumbered by ethnic identity. Discursive exchanges, missionary observations, government regulations and practices, and press stories came together to prescribe and affirm ideas of labor productivity as qualification for citizenship. Thus, discourses involving labor productivity redefined prior forms of Liberian citizenship and became a spectacle through which to exhibit the republic’s modernity.
Prescribed ideas of citizenship established in the 1820s absorbed new streams of migrants arriving in Liberia in the mid-nineteenth century. On January 16, 1865, Nicholas Augustus, a blacksmith from the Caribbean island of St. Thomas who had “worked his passage to New York on the ship Theresa,” traveled to Liberia on the Greyhound.13 The following month, John Blyden, a steam engine boilermaker, noted for having “survived ten months as a fireman in the U.S. Navy,” sailed from Boston to Liberia on the brig M. A. Benson.14 He was the brother of Edward Blyden, Liberia’s secretary of state. John Blyden and Nicholas Augustus were friends, hailing from the same Danish Caribbean Island. Having paid their way to New York, the ACS assisted with their voyage to Liberia. In a Liberian colonization movement previously dominated by African Americans, the migration of these two islanders was atypical. The plurality of identities represented by these migrants signaled the need to broaden Liberia’s political association.
On June 3, 1865, seven emigrants left New York on the Greyhound. Among them were Daniel Walker from Carbondale, Pennsylvania, as well as Henry W. Johnson; his mixed-race wife, Patience; and their children from Canandaigua, New York.15 Born in Vermont, Johnson had lived in Canandaigua for more than twenty years.16 He had been a barber for many years, but according to the ACS, “in face of obstacles such as would turn back a man of more ordinary perseverance, Mr. Johnson acquired a knowledge of law, and was admitted to practice in the Supreme Court of New York.”17 In the words of the ACS, “Mr. Johnson removed to Liberia, believing that in that field he can accomplish more for the political and social equality of his race than in America.”18 New African American migrants, especially the skilled and professional, were always welcome in Liberia. In August 1865, one settler wrote, “The lawyer Johnson of New York arrived with his family in the ‘Thomas Pope.’ The whole family seems very much pleased with Monrovia.”19 Johnson himself wrote, “After a pleasant voyage of thirty-six days; we arrived in Liberia.”20 Having to grapple with sickness and disease, migrants’ expectations about life in Liberia did not always match their experiences on arrival. For African Americans, however, social acceptance was predetermined. As Johnson noted, “No incident happened during the journey, and we have been kindly treated by all the prominent citizens of Monrovia.”21
African Americans also departed from other U.S. states. The passage of a series of laws in the 1860s led to the November 1865 emigration of 173 African Americans from Baltimore on the schooner H. P. Russell. The migrants left under the auspices of Virginia’s Lynchburg Emigration Society, founded in 1825 as a chapter of the ACS.22 The LES sought to aid and promote “the amelioration of the conditions of free persons of colour in the United States by resettling them in Liberia.”23 Mostly Baptists, the emigrants were “agriculturalists and mechanics of experience and business character.”24 Colonizationists described John McNuckles, the group’s leader, as “a man of unusual shrewdness and practical good sense, a master plasterer and bricklayer, possessing the confidence and regard of the entire community in which he lived, and from which he removed to Africa.”25 The circumstances under which these emigrants departed highlighted their exclusion from American society. However, their practical skills forecasted their future status in Liberia.
In 1865, the largest group of migrants sent to Liberia under the auspices of the ACS departed from the Caribbean island of Barbados. Though the ACS had high hopes for the Barbadians, lingering doubts and an air of suspicion hung over them. In keeping with the larger goals of the Liberian project, the ACS inquired about the Barbadians’ religious orientation, industriousness, manners, and civility. The society had prescribed a certain baseline black demeanor that included productive Christianity, civilization, and labor. Worried an official with the Massachusetts Colonization Society in a letter to William Coppinger, secretary and treasurer of the ACS, “I shall be rather sorry if the Barbadoes expedition fails, but we must not risk too much. You and the committee will be able to judge whether it is safe. I have always had some doubts.”26 At an earlier meeting with the board of directors, members had declared that “the whole trip [would] cost . . . a hefty portion of a declining treasury.”27 The ACS could fund resettlement only for the “best” among the prospective Barbadian emigrants. The ACS thus tirelessly sought information about Barbadians from “merchants engaged in trade in Barbados as well as those who had visited the island.”28
When the brig Cora sailed away from Barbados on April 6, 1865, transporting the 346 Barbadian emigrants to their new homes in Liberia, it undoubtedly set them on a path to a more expansive form of freedom and belonging. Historian Stephanie E. Smallwood has observed that the Atlantic passage was an “experience of motion without discernible direction or destination” for slaves.29 With Barbadian emigration, however, the Atlantic opened possibilities for liberation, humanization, and citizenship. Caught between the burdens of the past and the promises of the future, the Barbadians’ journey across the Atlantic must have been a transformational and moving experience. This passage likely filled them with the idea that they were on a direct course to achieving their postemancipation goals. These Barbadians found themselves traveling between two vastly different worlds: emancipated yet second-class citizens of the British Empire on one side of the Atlantic, fully free citizens of a black republic on the other.
The migrants had considered Liberia a space of social and political equality for those of the black race. Liberian officials had been equally enthusiastic, hailing the Barbadians’ arrival “as highly auspicious for the future welfare of Liberia and the civilization of Africa.”30 The equality projected onto Liberia became tempered, however. The sense of racial harmony articulated by Barbadians and the Liberians proved problematic as migration across the Atlantic refocused their vision to experiences within the Liberian republic, where a persistent local ethnogenesis belied the rhetoric of black solidarity articulated throughout the diaspora. While awaiting the arrival of the migrants, President Daniel Warner announced, “My opinion of the Barbadians is that they will do well, and will prove as valuable an acquisition to the country as the same number of the American population that have come into it have done. On this question, there is amongst us a variety of opinion—some favoring the American side of the question; others the West Indian side.”31 For Warner, this moment of uncertainty signaled concern about migration’s potential to cause national instability. It became apparent that a sense of presumed difference would figure into migrants’ experiences of freedom and citizenship.
Liberia was not unlike other republics that had developed codes of citizenship impenetrable to some outsiders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When the ACS created the Liberian colony in 1822, African Americans were designated as the only beneficiaries. In 1847, independence necessitated defining the terms of citizenship. In this new moment, African Americans creatively navigated their past and future to map out an idea of citizenship that signified their new identity as Liberians. African American migrants who became Liberian officials transformed terms implied within their broader pan-Africanist rhetoric into a nationally recognizable legislative language. They defined citizenship in Liberia by drawing on the ideals of the U.S. Constitution. As with the United States, citizenship in Liberia became an unmediated relationship between the individual and the state. All inhabitants in the area, whether politically represented or not, would have to accept the sovereignty of the Liberian state over their forms of government and acknowledge the laws of Liberia as binding.
African Americans also made citizenship in the republic dependent on race. Article 5, Section 13 of the Liberian Constitution declared, “The great object of forming these Colonies, being to provide a home for the dispersed and oppressed children of Africa, and to regenerate and enlighten this benighted continent, none but Negroes or persons of Negro descent shall be eligible to citizenship in this Republic.”32 The question of race and citizenship was directly related to African Americans’ past difficulties with citizenship in the United States. This method of reading race into political questions of citizenship reflected another radical reinterpretation of republicanism, this time across the Atlantic.33 In constructing the new political structure, African Americans ensured that state power would legally be in the hands of blacks. From the birth of the colony to the drafting of the constitution, the political sphere was coded African American. In the preamble to the 1847 constitution, African American experiences of slavery became a pretext that rationalized their leadership in the new political order. They laid claim to the republic by citing their suffering in the United States, where they were “shut out from all civil office” and “debarred by law from all the rights and privileges of men.” They noted their inability to improve themselves under those conditions: “Against us, every avenue to improvement was effectually closed.”34 With this, African American migrants legitimized their citizenship in the republic. Along with the political foundations, the values and culture of the new nation would be tied to an African American identity.
African Americans’ legal and political construction of Liberian citizenship destabilized the notion of a Liberian nationality held together by black homogeneity. Though Liberia was a black nation and constitutionally all blacks could be citizens, not all could make those claims. Though the racial aspect of Liberia’s constitution reflected its architects’ determination to establish models of racial equality based on laws that did not mandate racial discrimination, the document masked other means of inequality and exclusion for some blacks. The insistence on a black national identity, while appearing inclusive in its definition of citizenship, was ambiguous and subject to interpretation. It both opened up possibilities for inclusion and placed boundaries on the ways that citizenship could be thought about, claimed, and exercised.
First, the indigenes had not disappeared with Liberian colonization. Indeed, a negotiation of differences between African Americans and the various ethnic groups indigenous to the area that became Liberia ran up against African American efforts to constitutionally define citizenship. Natives of the region held a collectivist sense of citizenship rooted in ethnic belonging. Ethnic groups from the Krus to the Mandinka viewed their place in Liberia through custom, heritage, and ancestry that united them to the land. Natives believed that they held by prescription and customary right the land on which they lived and buried their ancestors, and they illustrated their alternative idea of citizenship and belonging via repeated attacks on African American settlements.35 But African Americans’ formulation of citizenship excluded natives, who were viewed as uncivilized and unable to contribute meaningfully to the nation’s future. By modeling the Liberian government after the U.S. government, African Americans aimed to subsume and subordinate native ethnic forms of belonging and citizenship to the overarching Liberian governmental structure, thereby nullifying native claims to power and authority in the area.36
The tension created by Liberians’ affiliations with slavery added another layer of complexity to the question of citizenship, producing a coalitional ethos that acknowledged parallel but dissimilar forms of oppression. Asserted through the experiences of slavery in the Americas and slave trading in Africa, these differences created a disguised hostility that took the place of race as a signifier of intraracial difference. These differences became even starker with the presence of slave trading in areas inhabited by ethnic indigenes in the interior of Liberia such as the Gallinas located away from the Liberian capital, Monrovia, occupied by the diaspora. These two geographical spheres signified the ways in which the labors of slave trading contrasted with the labors of slavery and in which civilization and modernity from enslavement contrasted with the backwardness of slave trading.
Connections to slavery (as opposed to slave trading) created ideological boundaries around what it meant to be black and Liberian through methods not unlike those that emerged during the colonization of Africa. It produced citizenship by way of a black diasporic racial identity forged through proximity to whiteness and subjecthood and native identity through an association with slave trading and distance from whiteness.37 Implicit in these distinctions was an assumption of a dichotomy between the diaspora and Africa, with the Atlantic fragmenting meanings of race and blackness. Such ideas of black citizenship in Liberia correlated with one’s ability to dissimulate “African-ness.” Diasporic Africans presented themselves as demonstrating Africans’ capacity to overcome backwardness and become civilized and modern. Native Liberians, however, could not discursively draw on rights in the same ways that African American men could. Natives had not participated in the American struggle that defined those rights and thus had no means of inserting themselves into the citizenship narrative to claim them.
Unlike the indigenes, Barbadians arrived in Liberia with enormous cultural capital that placed them on a path to citizenship. Even before their arrival, the ACS and Liberian officials had incorporated them into the nation based on their diasporic experiences of enslavement and suffering, perceived level of civilization, and pan-Africanist articulations. Liberian officials often referenced the Barbadians’ thirty years of freedom and acknowledged their industriousness and their widely acclaimed religious character. In theory, the ACS’s legal foundations and the cultural and political framing of the republic through the lens of the African American experience excluded Barbadians. However, Liberian officials’ construction of citizenship and deliberations about the creation of a modern black republic while surrounded by “natives” created an additional loophole for Barbadian citizenship. As diasporic migrants who could carry out missionary work, Barbadians could earn citizenship by civilizing and Christianizing natives and drawing them closer to the ideals of a modern state.
Nevertheless, Barbadians’ labor secured their citizenship status. As a consequence of their skillfulness, they were declared the “most important part of the whole sojourn for a nation desperate for a healthy and productive population.”38 Colonizationists as well as Liberian officials saw Barbadians as possessing the kinds of agricultural and artisanal skills and experiences that were imperative for the country’s future development. President Warner affirmed the Barbadians’ value by specifically pointing to their skills: “Among them were coopers, carpenters, shoemakers, a wheelwright, printer, and teachers, with several who thoroughly understood the cultivation of the cane and manufacture of sugar and the culture and preparation of all kinds of tropical products.”39 That a large proportion professed to be Christians further confirmed their pedigree and connections to their African American counterparts. As diasporic blacks, African Americans and Barbadians shared in Liberian citizenship through historical experiences and goals of self-improvement and civilizing natives. Officials thus concluded Barbadians, like African Americans, had come to Liberia “prompted by the love of souls as well as the desire to improve their temporal condition.”40 Barbadians could claim de facto citizenship by joining in the African American narrative of the diaspora.
Barbadians’ labor ranked chief among Liberia’s national priorities, and citizenship became a forgone conclusion given the republic’s need for productive labor. Government officials praised the ACS for selecting “the kind of materials required here for the up-building of this offspring of American and English philanthropy, and the further development of the country and the character of the people in it. . . . Your sagacity in selecting those materials, is due the very respectable and promising immigration with which we have just been favored.” Officials noted that “the government of this Republic feels very grateful to the Society for the great interest it has taken in its West Indian emigration enterprise, both as it regards the pecuniary means it has furnished and the happy selection of the emigrants sent out.”41 The Liberian government viewed the skilled, educated, and professional Barbadian migrants as a first-class addition to the country.
The Liberian government extended citizenship to Barbadians as a consequence of the belief that they were important stakeholders in the republic’s priorities. In 1865, one Liberian onlooker remarked that “the people just landed seem, upon the whole, to be a well-selected company, and may be regarded as a valuable acquisition to our young Republic.” Former Liberian president J. J. Roberts described the new arrivals as “an interesting company. Most of the male adults, I am told are mechanics and practical farmers, and seem to have correct ideas about the circumstances and capabilities of the country—so far greatly pleased.” Roberts reaffirmed Barbadian citizenship by repeating the well-worn argument that the Barbadians possessed the wherewithal for national development, specifically Liberia’s need for “men here who thoroughly understand the cultivation of the canes and the manufacture of the sugar and indeed the culture and preparation of all kinds of tropical products.”42
Land gave Barbadians a further stake in the nation and additional means of acquiring citizenship. The prospect of land on which to build homes, better themselves, and help forge a successful black nation played a significant and perhaps pivotal role in enticing Barbadians to Liberia. Shortly after arriving, Barbadian John Padmore, who had previously been a planter, noted that “the president has directed that our lands of twenty-five acres shall be laid off on Monday 16th on Carysburg road, which is the best locality for us.” While working for wages had defined economic life and the relationship to the land in Barbados, Liberia reversed those dynamics, enabling Barbadians to fulfill their desire to build themselves up through their labor. In 1871, Padmore noted that “the young crops look promising. We have sold about fifty thousand pounds of arrow-root and eight thousand pounds of ginger.”43 Linking their bodies and labor to the Liberian nation enabled Barbadian migrants to claim citizenship in more direct ways, allowing them to move from the discursive sphere of claiming citizenship to living it.
With national development at the fore, Barbadian immigrants were progressively drawn into a relationship with the land, other migrants, and the nation. As agriculturalists, Barbadians’ work was often politicized and became representative sites for the staging of contestations over citizenship. Echoing American ideas of virtuous citizenship, Barbadian labor was further used for civic education. The New Era newspaper sought to visit all of Liberia’s agricultural districts to evaluate their chances “for success in this department of industry.” The publication’s title highlighted the importance of labor and the new migrants to Liberia’s renaissance. The newspaper campaigned to inform “the citizens of the several districts on the importance of educating their children and native boys, improving themselves, and sustaining their families by an economical and judicious system of farming.” After a tour of the Barbadian settlement in Crozierville, the New Era reported, “This district is made up of small farmers. . . . Many of these people were first-class mechanics, some farmers, some teachers, and some small traders. The Barbadians are known to be the most intelligent and best-educated company of emigrants that ever came to Liberia, and equally industrious.”44 The exigencies of nation building and the larger civilizing project in making new demands on Barbadians’ labor facilitated their citizenship. Missionary onlookers concurred, reporting that “the small farms of the Barbadians are cultivated with great care. They keep down all the grass and noxious weeds, and thus produce from one acre twice the amount of product that is made by other farmers that we have noticed.”45 Observers viewed Barbadians as good custodians of the land, a characteristic that demonstrated their fitness for citizenship.
Barbadians’ agricultural labor was valued not only for national development but also for the vision of the nation that it projected. The image of civilized blacks diligently laboring on behalf of Liberian modernity thrust Barbadians to the forefront of the nation and into the gaze of observers, particularly white missionaries. With commentary often reflecting on Barbadians’ institutions, industry, character, and infusion of their material cultures into Liberia, observers marked productive labor as the preserve of Barbadians. In 1867, an observant Episcopalian missionary hinted at the growing dialogue surrounding the Barbadian presence in Liberia: “Who in the world raises those fine yams why we never saw any like them for the many years we have been here?” “The Barbadians up the river,” a companion responded, adding, “So too in Krootown, maybe seen as good a tailor cutting and finishing as neat work as any man of the shears and needle ever made in any community. He too is a Barbadian!” Pointing to another of the Liberian newcomers, the friend continued, “Go to that man’s brother’s shoe-shop in Monrovia and see him make as neat and nice a shoe or boot as ever came from the hand or from the last of any of his trade. He is a Barbadian!”46
Moreover, Barbadians took advantage of Liberia’s natural resources. According to the missionary, “Now and then we see beautiful pieces of furniture carried through our streets made of the unrivaled wood of the Liberian forests. These are made at Carysburg by a Barbadian, a first-rate cabinet maker [who] would shame a furniture warehouse in any city in the United States.” Charles Inniss had been a cabinetmaker in Barbados, and a circular advertising his work in Liberia declared, “Charles Inniss: Cabinet Maker; Careysburg, near the residence of Mr. McDowell, all orders are entrusted to the care of the above named will be executed with neatness and dispatch and in the latest American and English style.”47 Such reports highlighted the connections between labor and citizenship.
In various ways, Barbadians’ labor became a part of civic duty and efforts to cast the Liberian nation in a civilized light. With the civilized required to train the uncivilized, Barbadians were called on to take natives as apprentices, putting the migrants in a position similar to that held by the white plantocracy in the Caribbean. The Barbadians, however, seemed to approach this task with some reluctance. One Liberian observer, presumably from the United States, worried that “they have no native apprentice boys around them, except as by chance they hire them. I think in this they are unwise.” Unaware of the motivations that had driven Barbadian emigration to Liberia, such observers reasoned that Barbadians “must get the good-will of the natives, and induce them to bind their sons till of age, that they may be taught to labor and educated to read and write, that both parties may be mutually benefited.” Onlookers worried that without establishing a relationship with natives, Barbadians would fail to “accomplish much beyond a bare subsistence by such a system of one-horse power as they now have. Besides, they need implements of agriculture and machinery, and then with their industrious habits and promptness, they will be sure to succeed.”48 Although access to cheap native labor was an advantage of Liberian citizenship, the idea ran contrary to the Barbadians’ definition of the term. For them, citizenship linked working the land and owning one’s labor to having the independent source of wealth they desired.
In 1865, abolitionists’ efforts to counteract the growing “second slavery” added to Liberia’s pluralism and further complicated questions of belonging.49 British and American squadron ships patrolling the Atlantic routinely deposited Africans rescued from the slave trade onto Liberia’s shores in the 1860s. One report from Liberia marveled at the rate at which recaptives poured into the republic: “Several years since there were nearly 5,000 Congoes rescued from slave ships by American men-of-war who were landed at Liberia.” Unlike African American and West Indian emigrants, recaptives were not always welcomed. A Liberian official grimaced at “the alarming influx of savages landed from American cruisers in our midst within a few weeks or months.” After lamenting the presence of these uncivilized persons, Liberian officials determined that the recaptives would have to be “civilized and [make] a profession of religion”50 before they could be incorporated into the republic, and even then they remained “compromised subjects.”51
The identification of recaptives as the Other at their point of entry into Liberia became one of several discursive exercises in black identity making, social stratification, and exclusive citizenship based on presumed differences. As much as ethnic identity generated differences, the Atlantic also become a force of distinction. Some recaptives in Liberia, many of whom hailed from West Central Africa, particularly Congo and Angola, had not crossed the Atlantic. Like natives, missing the experience of the Middle Passage and slavery excluded them from identifying with the diaspora and thus ensured their marginalization.
Decisions surrounding whether to include or exclude recaptives ushered in another period of crisis in Liberian citizenship. Unlike other groups, recaptives came to be viewed as a “migrant problem” and a category of people in need of regulatory legislation. The politics of patronage exercised over natives evolved into a form of paternalism regarding liberated Africans. Properly inculcating citizenship virtues among recaptives necessitated institutional arrangements and structures through which daily routines could be negotiated. As such, recaptives’ relationship to the state would take the form of arranged housing and planned labor. To control recaptives, the Liberian government proposed a plan “to lay off a sufficient area of land at some suitable place in each county, say of several hundred acres of land each; to build one or more large suitable houses on them, and to settle the recaptives thereon, under good teachers, mechanics, and agriculturists, employed by and amenable to this government.”52
Turning African recaptives into civilized free laborers fitting the image of modern blackness and eligibility for citizenship required multiple mechanisms, some persuasive and others coercive. According to government officials, “the recaptives may, on the manual labor system, have a definite number of hours schooling each day, and a definite number of hours to work each day, at the various branches of industry, agriculture being the principal; and for them to be thus trained under the supervision of government, for their respective full terms of apprenticeship.”53 Through the apprenticeship system, recaptives were to be “bound out to reliable persons . . . after the expiration of the one year’s support by the Society, fall on the hands of government to be supported and trained for terms of years, ranging from seven to fourteen years, according to the laws of this Republic regulating the apprenticeship of recaptured Africans.”54 Apprenticeship inculcated the habits of free laborers so that the recaptives could understand the duties of citizenship, rendering them useful not only to themselves but also to the republic.
The apprenticeship plan for recaptives went beyond economic efforts at social, religious, and political organization and training. By controlling recaptives’ labor, Liberian officials attempted to maintain order and control access to citizenship through work. That many Liberian recaptives had not crossed the Atlantic created the perception that they lacked the necessary qualifications to move them from subjecthood to full citizenship. Like the indigenes, diasporic migrants regarded recaptives who had not crossed the Atlantic to experience extended interactions with whites as remaining in a state of suspended animation. The government thus despaired about finding individual masters or guardians for recaptives. If the recaptives could not find apprenticeships, the Liberian government noted, it “would be obliged, for its own safety as well as by the promptings of humanity, to take these people, thus un-provided for and turned loose upon the mercy of the public, under apprenticeship to herself, for the lawful term of their apprenticeship.”55 One report noted that “the Executive Committee will, no doubt, at once agree with this government, that those recaptives who may not be apprenticed out to individuals immediately on their being landed, they should, without a week’s delay after being landed, be placed under the contemplated systematic and authoritative plan of training.”56
To make matters worse, unlike African Americans and Barbadian immigrants who received parcels of land—the act of property ownership that presented them with certain rights—recaptives lacked access to land and thus were denied rights, privileges, and access to citizenship or inclusion in the republic. Instead of being small farmers, recaptives would be landless laborers at the mercy of fellow blacks. Like natives, recaptives became a part of a growing undercaste relegated to second-class status by laws regarding labor practices. Recaptives’ dependence on African Americans and West Indians sanctioned their exclusion from forms of citizenship available to other black migrants. Further, the exclusion of some blacks from the republic occurred not solely through the usual rhetoric of race but instead through reassigned tropes of civilization and savagery determined by labor.
Diasporic migrants’ control of labor organization in Liberia determined the nature of the structure and positions occupied by different groups of blacks. It was no coincidence that natives and recaptives served in coercive and restrictive labor practices that mirrored British postslavery efforts (outlined by Gad Heuman, this volume) and were akin to the systems of indenture, tenancy, and sharecropping that existed in the U.S. South after emancipation. The transfer of these kinds of labor arrangements to Liberia shaped experiences of freedom and citizenship. Running contrary to the ideas of liberty and free labor that had driven many migrants to Liberia, these systems showed the ways in which views about unfree labor persisted across space and became an exclusionary force in Liberia.57 Many observers attributed this mode of exclusion to the migrants’ American and European sensibilities.58 In many ways, the exclusion also represented the revival of caste systems driven by ideas of labor, civilization, and modernity rooted in global white supremacist ideals, which Liberian elites retooled in their attempts to foster certain values, ideals, and attitudes that would make their modernity known to the world.
Beyond class status and education, labor added to the migrants’ sense of place in the prefigured hierarchy within the Liberian republic that cultivated an unequal relationship between the different cohorts of blacks even before their arrival. This structure was largely scripted and shackled by the historical experiences of a white supremacist hierarchical order left intact after emancipation.59 If Barbadians had entered Liberia as black subordinates at the bottom of the social ladder, then their claim to a stable middle-class identity would have been severely undermined. The presence of liberated Africans in Liberia shifted the focus away from Barbadians’ low position in British society and their movement upward to a new advanced status in Liberia reflected in their settlement and views surrounding their labor.60 Within this dynamic of defining black citizenship, migrants participated in the social reproduction of economic relations through labor that oppressed new categories of people. Within this reformulation, the centrality of Western and white supremacist notions of modernity and civilization to the notion of productive labor sustained the historical continuity of the relationship between slavery and citizenship. New ideas of citizenship thus preserved and proliferated hierarchies assumed to have been left behind.
African Americans and West Indians identified and strengthened their citizenship through their relationship to the Others they created by racializing themselves as blacks and native Liberians and liberated Africans as native ethnicities. The capacity to labor and the republic’s ability to appropriate productive labor to projecting their modernity defined the savage and inferior identities placed on native ethnic Liberians and liberated Africans. West Indians and African Americans could claim citizenship concessions gained through long-standing historical negotiations with white supremacist institutions and modes of operation, while dislocation from the arena in which both groups had negotiated the terms of Liberian citizenship barred ethnic Africans and liberated Africans from doing the same. By not allowing these Others to occupy the same citizenship spaces and by judging them according to a rubric of savagery, racialized natives and African recaptives provided a mirror through which African Americans and Barbadians articulated shifting perceptions of themselves as civilized and superior.
After emancipation, the construction of black citizenship based on labor and civilization structured new relationships of dominance among migrants in Liberia. A strong belief in the value of self-possession through one’s labor united West Indians and African Americans in their contempt for other groups of blacks who served as hireling laborers—native Liberians and liberated Africans—as it further bred an egalitarian instinct that never accepted civilized black rule over other civilized blacks. In Liberia, it became permissible to discriminate against native ethnic Liberians and liberated Africans in ways that diasporic blacks had previously been victimized in Western societies. African ethnic identities replaced race as the criteria for new forms of discrimination. Old forms of discrimination that emerged in Liberia were made legal through governmental provisions. Natives, in their perceived primitive ways, and recaptives, having just been taken off slave ships, were seen as uncultured and a socially disruptive element for a Liberian society that sought to project black civilization and modernity under a constant white gaze. Liberia conformed to an image of order and modernity through the careful maintenance of the labor of different groups. Attitudes toward recaptives were thus also a response to the quest for a national image that would both be acceptable to whites and earn Liberia’s acceptance into the family of nations.
The Liberian state justified and normalized capitalist exploitation through aspirations for racial development and modernity. While expanding the experience of citizenship for some groups, Liberia retreated from its full promises to others. Some groups were denied citizenship because they were “uncivilized.” West Indians and African Americans with similar experiences of slavery and diaspora allied with each other based on a variety of ideological and socioreligious beliefs. These practices were often deployed to achieve hegemony over recaptives and indigenes, who had not gone through the full experiences of slavery, diaspora, and life in Western society.
Despite Liberia’s constitutional sanctioning of exclusive black citizenship, migration alone proved inadequate to allow certain groups to fully make such claims. As various groups of blacks demonstrated their different impulses toward citizenship, Liberia’s connection to each group manifested in various ways, reverberating through the migrants’ “labors” to credit or discredit their claims. Ethnic labels loomed large in the migrants’ daily lives in various levels of social and political organization. The categorical distinctions between West Indians, African Americans, Natives, and African recaptives that emerged upon arrival represented a fundamental method of ordering Liberian society and structuring experiences of citizenship. As Jemima Pierre has similarly argued, differences between the different groups were conceived through ideas of labor and civilization and were consolidated through racialization, cultural discourse, legal practices, social conventions, and official and unofficial documents that often referred to the natives and liberated Africans pejoratively as “congoes” and “savages.” Such ordering proved more than just the making subject to rule. As Pierre notes, “It was a distinction of ethnological proportions linking beliefs about the subjects’ physiological, emotional, mental character,” to exercise citizenship.61 Under a white gaze and in fear of portraying an uncivilized front to whites, Liberia ultimately overrode the pan-African rhetoric that had drawn blacks into the republic and discursively extended citizenship to them.
1. See David W. Blight and Brooks D. Simpson, Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001).
2. This essay uses African recaptives and liberated Africans interchangeably to mean those who were freed from slave ships on the Atlantic, sometimes along the African coast but also in and around the Caribbean.
3. African Intelligencer, July 1820.
4. Janis Ho, Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British Novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 2.
5. African Repository and Colonial Journal 11 (1835): 288–89.
6. Frederick Starr, Liberia: Description, History, Problems (Chicago: n.p., 1913), 256.
7. See Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); Gary Gerstle, “Race and Nation in the United States, Mexico, and Cuba, 1880–1940,” in Nations and Nationalism in the New World, ed. Don Doyle and Marco Pamplona (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006).
8. See Celso Castillo, “Performing Abolitionism, Enacting Citizenship: The Social Construction of Political Rights in 1880s Recife, Brazil,” Hispanic American Historical Review 93, no. 3 (August 2013): 377–410.
9. See Jason P. McGraw, The Work of Recognition: Caribbean Colombia and the Postemancipation Struggle for Citizenship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
10. It is estimated that the ACS colonized more than 13,000 African American migrants to the republic, along with 346 Barbadians. See Tom W. Shick, Emigrants to Liberia, an Alphabetical Listing (Newark: Department of Anthropology, University of Delaware, 1971); Tom W. Shick, Behold the Promised Land: A History of Afro-American Settler Society in Nineteenth-Century Liberia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
11. W. E. B. Du Bois coined the term double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: McClurg, 1903). Paul Gilroy later expanded the phrase in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993).
12. Quoted in Ho, Nation and Citizenship, 7.
13. African Repository and Colonial Journal 41 (1865): 35.
14. John Tracy to William McLain, September 26, 1864, Svend Holsoe Collection, Liberian Collections Project, University of Indiana, Bloomington.
15. Minutes of the Pennsylvania Colonization Society, May 8, 1865, Liberia Collections Project.
16. See Preston E. Pierce, Liberian Dreams, West African Nightmare: The Life of Henry W. Johnson, Part Two (Rochester, N.Y.: Office of the City Historian, 2005), 8.
17. African Repository and Colonial Journal 42 (1866): 35.
18. Ibid.
19. H. D. Brown to Alexander Crummell, August 20, 1865, Alexander Crummell Letters, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York.
20. “A Gifted Lawyer,” African Repository and Colonial Journal 42 (1866): 39.
21. Ibid.
22. For more on the Virginians in the making of Liberia, see Marie Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
23. African Repository and Colonial Journal 42 (1865): 35.
24. Ted Delaney and Phillip Wayne Rhodes, Free Blacks of Lynchburg, Virginia, 1805–1865 (Lynchburg, Va.: Warwick House, 2001), 24.
25. African Repository and Colonial Journal 42 (1866): 35.
26. Joseph Tracy to William Coppinger, n.d., American Colonization Society Records, Reel 96, Domestic Letters No. 166, Folio 63563.
27. African Repository and Colonial Journal 42 (1866): 35.
28. Joseph Tracy to William Coppinger, n.d., American Colonization Society Records, Reel 96, Domestic Letters No. 166, Folio 63563.
29. Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 122.
30. African Repository and Colonial Journal 42 (1866): 247.
31. Ibid., 38.
32. Starr, Liberia, 256.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. See Hendrik Hartog, “Pigs and Positivism,” Wisconsin Law Review 4 (1985): 899–935, section 3.
36. Elwood D. Dunn, Amos J. Bayan, and Carl Patrick Burrowes, Historical Dictionary of Liberia, 2nd ed. (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2001), 84–86.
37. See Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Jemima Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
38. African Repository and Colonial Journal 42 (1865): 37.
39. Ibid., 47.
40. Ibid., 37.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 45 (1871): 278.
44. New Era, January 17, 1878.
45. African Repository and Colonial Journal 42 (1865): 47.
46. Ibid., 43 (1867): 269. The bootmaker may have been Samuel Innis, who practiced that profession in Barbados.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. For more on the “second slavery,” the resurgence of the slave trade in the 1840s, and the campaign to abolish the Atlantic slave trade, see Javier Laviña and Michael Zeuske, eds., The Second Slavery: Mass Slaveries and Modernities in the Americas and in the Atlantic Basin (Zurich: Lit, 2014).
50. African Repository and Colonial Journal 42 (1865): 355.
51. Damani James Partridge, “We Were Dancing in the Club, Not on the Berlin Wall: Black Bodies, Street Bureaucrats, and Exclusionary Incorporation into the New Europe,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 4 (2008): 660–87.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. African Repository and Colonial Journal 36 (1860): 356.
56. Ibid.
57. For African American tenancy and sharecropping, see Donald Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and the New Deal (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000).
58. M. B. Akpan, “Black Imperialism: Americo-Liberian Rule over the African Peoples of Liberia, 1841–1964,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 1, no. 2 (1973): 217–36.
59. Tomas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 1.
60. Sandra Gunning, “Nancy Prince and the Politics of Mobility: Home and Diasporic (Mis)Identification,” American Quarterly 53, no. 1 (March 2001): 44.
61. Pierre, Predicament of Blackness, 14.