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From the inception of the antislavery movement, both in Great Britain and the United States, colonization which called for the removal of freed people from the place of their enslavement, seemed to provide an answer to the troubling question: what was to be done with the Negro? Its first and, some would say, most daring experiment was in the establishment of Sierra Leone by British abolitionists in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The colony was made up almost entirely of former American slaves who had retreated to London with the British at the end of the Revolutionary War. Although the colony soon fell on hard times its numbers were later replenished with emigrants from Nova Scotia and other parts of the Maritime provinces. In spite of a checkered history, some British abolitionists kept faith with colonization well into the nineteenth century, organizing an elaborate and ultimately unsuccessful expedition to the Niger River in the early 1840s.
In the United States, the question of the future of the Negro was posed ever more starkly. Looking into the future, Thomas Jefferson thought colonizing the freedmen held out the best hope for the country. Others called for emancipation and the settlement of the freed people outside the limits of the country. By the second decade of the nineteenth century these views had coalesced into the American Colonization Society, which had its founding meeting in December 1816. The society's objectives were disarmingly simple: it would establish a colony on the west coast of Africa to which it would send freed slaves and those free men and women who wished to leave the country. It sent its first group of colonists to Liberia in the early 1820s, and over the next four decades managed to sustain the colony with a regular but relatively minor addition of black settlers. The society's greatest successes came in the wake of major crises in the United States such as the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831 and the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. As the political tensions over slavery mounted, many on both sides of the issue turned to colonization as the most logical and palatable solution to the crisis. While some die-hard supporters of slavery saw colonization as nothing more...