Mississippi-in-Africa

File:Old Map Liberia.JPG

Map of Liberia in the 1830s, where the Mississippi colony and other state-sponsored colonies are identified.

Mississippi-in-Africa was a colony on the Pepper Coast founded in the 1830s by the Mississippi Colonization Society and settled by freed African-American slaves. In the late 1840s, some 300 former slaves from Prospect Hill Plantation and other Isaac Ross properties in Jefferson County, Mississippi were the largest single group of migrants to the new colony.

They became part of the Americo-Liberians, an ethnic group who formed an elite that dominated the country politically and economically into the late 20th century. The colony was located in what is present-day Sinoe County, Liberia.

History

The American Colonization Society was founded in the United States as a joint project by abolitionists and slaveholders to establish a colony for free American blacks in West Africa. Slaveholders wanted to relocate free people of color out of the South, as they believed that free blacks threatened the stability of their slave societies. Some who supported eventual abolition of slavery believed that transporting freed slaves to Africa would give them a better opportunity to make their own communities. Disheartened by the discrimination faced by free blacks in the North, some abolitionists also supported the ACS, because they thought free blacks might be able to create a better society for themselves in Africa.

Most free blacks did not want to emigrate; they considered the colonization plan to be a means to export them. They believed they had a native-born claim to the United States, were part of the society, and wanted to gain equal rights in their native land. Samuel Cornish and David Walker published Freedom's Journal in New York City, writing articles that opposed the colonization movement.

In the late 1840s, approximately 300 freed African-American slaves were relocated here from Prospect Hill Plantation in Jefferson County, Mississippi. They were the largest single group of American colonists to migrate to Liberia. They had been freed in the 1836 will of slaveholder Isaac Ross, who intended for his plantation to be sold to pay for the passage of the freed slaves to the colony in West Africa. Ross' grandson and heir Isaac Ross Wade contested the will through years of litigation, during which time he occupied the plantation. The will was upheld in 1845 by the Mississippi Supreme Court, but there were further delays, and Wade was supposed to pay the freedmen for their labor. In 1847 the court ruled that the slaves, then technically free, could leave the United States. In 1848 the last group of Ross freed slaves emigrated to the colony in West Africa.

The passage to Africa was arranged by the Mississippi Colonization Society, which Ross had previously co-founded with two other major planters and a Presbyterian minister. It had purchased land on the Pepper Coast for a colony for freed-slave emigrants from Mississippi. Ross was the first among the founders to have arranged for manumission of his slaves.

The freedmen developed a society in West Africa much like the one they had left. They built houses in the style of Southern mansions and established a hierarchical society with strong continuities to theirs in the United States. They established plantations and battled local tribes for control of the territory, believing their American culture and Christianity made them superior. The settlement existed independently from 1835 until 1842, when it was incorporated into the Commonwealth of Liberia. In 1847 Liberia became independent of the American Colonization Society.

Journalist Alan Huffman's history of the settlement explores its influence in contributing to more than a century of resentment between tribal peoples and the Americo-Liberians, descendants of the colonists who dominated the politics and economy of Liberia well into the 20th century. These groups have been on opposite sides of the civil war in Liberia from the 1980s.

Governors

Term	Incumbent	Notes
1835	Mississippi and Louisiana State Colonization societies found Mississippi-in-Africa colony
June 1837 to 10 September 1838	Josiah Finley, Governor
1842	Incorporation into the Commonwealth of Liberia

See also

Republic of Maryland

External links

• Alan Huffman, Mississippi in Africa, official website