Liberty Brought Us Here: The True Story of American Slaves Who Migrated to Liberia - REVIEW

by Susan E. Lindsey 

Between 1820 and 1913, approximately 16,000 black people left the United States to start new lives in Liberia, Africa, in what would become the largest out-migration in US history. When Tolbert Major, a Kentucky slave and single father, was offered his own chance for freedom, he accepted. He, several family members, and almost seventy other people boarded the Luna on July 5, 1836. After they arrived in Liberia, Tolbert penned a letter to his former owner, Ben Major: "Dear Sir, We have all landed on the shores of Africa and got into our houses .... None of us have been taken with the fever yet." 

Drawing on extensive research and fifteen years' worth of surviving letters, author Susan E. Lindsey illuminates the trials and triumphs of building a new life in Liberia, where settlers were free, but struggled to acclimate in an unfamiliar land, coexist with indigenous groups, and overcome disease and other dangers. Liberty Brought Us Here: The True Story of American Slaves Who Migrated to Liberia explores the motives and attitudes of colonization supporters and those who lived in the colony, offering perspectives beyond the standard narrative that colonization was solely about racism or forced exile. 

Susan E. Lindsey is coauthor and editor of Speed Family Heritage Recipes, a historical cookbook of recipes from the Speed family, who built Farmington Plantation in Louisville. Lindsey has also published several essays and short stories. 

ISBN 978-0-8131-7933-9
280 pages · 6 x 9 · 21 b/w photos
Hardcover $45.00

Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard - REVIEW

Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement

by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard

University Press of Mississippi

ISBN 978-1-4968-2369-4

A NEW ENGAGEMENT WITH THE TANGLED, FRAUGHT ANTEBELLUM DEBATE SURROUNDING BLACK RESETTLEMENT

     The African colonization movement occupies a troubling rhetorical territory in the struggle for racial equality in the United States. For white colonizationists, the movement seemed positioned as a welcome compromise between slavery and abolition. For free blacks, colonization offered the hope of freedom, but not within America's borders. Bjørn F. Stillion Southard indicates how politics and identity were negotiated amid the intense public debate on race, slavery, and freedom in America.

     Operating from a position of power, white advocates argued that colonization was worthy of massive support from the federal government. Southard pores over the speeches of Henry Clay, Elias B. Caldwell, and Abraham Lincoln, which engaged with colonization during its active deliberation.

     Between Clay's and Caldwell's speeches at the founding of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816 and Lincoln's final public effort to encourage colonization in 1862, Southard analyzes the little-known speeches and writings of free blacks who wrestled with colonization's conditional promises of freedom.

     He examines an array of discourses to probe the complex issues of identity confronting free blacks who attempted to meaningfully engage in colonization efforts. From a peculiarly voiced "Counter Memorial" against the ACS to the letters of wealthy black merchant Louis Sheridan negotiating for his passage to Liberia to the civically minded orations of Hilary Teage in Liberia, Southard brings to light the intricate rhetoric of blacks who addressed colonization to Africa.

Bjørn F. Stillion Southard is assistant professor of communication studies at University of Georgia. He is coauthor of Presenting at Work: A Guide to Public Speaking in Professional Contexts. His research appears in the volume Thinking Together: Lecturing, Learning, and Difference in the Long Nineteenth Century. He has written articles in Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Argumentation and Advocacy, and elsewhere.