The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia.

The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia. By Claude A. Clegg III. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. xiv, 330. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5516-2; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8078-2845-9.)

The subtitle of this book leads the reader to expect information on how African Americans participated in the founding of Liberia. Instead, the book focuses significantly on another very interesting and provocative topic--the role of North Carolina Quakers in the nineteenth-century colonization movement.

The American Colonization Society (ACS) was established in December 1816. ACS founders believed that black removal was the best option for dealing with the issue of black liberty. The organization sent its first emigrants to Sierra Leone in January 1820. In 1822 the American government helped to establish a West African "settlement for African 'recaptives' from transatlantic slave ships" (p. 37). The colony was later named Liberia, which means "a settlement of persons made free" (quoted on p. 52). Throughout its existence, the ACS attempted to appeal to diverse interest groups, including moderate abolitionists, antislavery activists, slaveholders, free blacks, and freed slaves.

Also in 1816, North Carolina Quakers met in Guilford County to create that state's first antislavery organization, the General Association of the Manumission Society of North Carolina. Concerned that state authorities might view them as an abolitionist group, founders changed the organization's name to the Manumission and Colonization Society of North Carolina (MCS) and restricted membership to free white males.

The MCS sent its first emigrants to Liberia in early 1825. By 1830 the organization had spent $12,769.51 to colonize 652 African Americans in Liberia and Haiti. Up to 1830 the North Carolina group supplied colonization efforts with more emigrants, funding, and ideological support than any other state.

The MCS found its greatest support in the eastern agricultural counties of North Carolina, which had large illiterate and unskilled free black and slave populations. Between 1825 and 1860 Pasquotank County sent the most free or liberated emigrants to Liberia (247), followed by the counties of Bladen (122) and Northampton (119). Out of a total of 1,363 North Carolinian emigrants, 49 percent had been free. In the last wave of emigration (1871-1893), 348 African Americans from North Carolina embarked for Liberia under the auspices of the ACS. By the end of the century the ACS had settled roughly 16,000 African Americans in Liberia, 2,030 of whom were from North Carolina.

The majority of African Americans opposed the white-controlled colonization movement. They thought of themselves as Americans and believed that the removal of free blacks and former slaves would encourage the continuation of slavery. For them the sacrifice was too costly: one in six North Carolinian emigrants died of malaria. For those who lived, the price of liberty was an agonizing ordeal characterized by deprivation, poverty, sickness, and war against indigenous peoples.

This book is based on archival research, government documents, emigrant rolls, genealogical records, and contemporary newspapers. It is informative and easy to read, except for the discussion of malaria and other diseases, which is bogged down in scientific terminology.

SYLVIA M. JACOBS

North Carolina Central University