Not often is a historian presented with such a high-stakes challenge: Find a nearly 200-year-old sheet of paper, which may not even be real, that launched a new nation. But it was a challenge that C. Patrick Burrowes, a former Penn State University professor who has spent much of his career researching Liberia’s early history, was eager to take on. So, exactly two centuries after the document was supposedly drafted, Burrowes set out to solve the existential mystery and clarify our understanding of a critical chapter of U.S. and African history.
The American Colonization Society was founded in 1816 by a group of white clergymen and political leaders who saw repatriation to Africa as a possible future for free Black Americans. Among its supporters were slaveholders, who feared that the increasing number of free Black people living in the South might foment uprisings, and white abolitionists, who believed an African homeland offered the best chance for Black self-determination. (For their part, Black antislavery activists tended to be more skeptical of the scheme.) Still, many of those backing the ACS simply hoped to alleviate political tensions then growing around the question of slavery, Burrowes says. “They thought, ‘If we can get a colony for free Blacks, we can take the pressure off.’” Of course, the pressure would keep building until it exploded in the Civil War. But meanwhile, the ACS pursued its vision.
In March 1820, its first ship, carrying 86 settlers, arrived in Sierra Leone, landing at swampy Sherbro Island. But the ACS was unable to persuade local residents to sign over land; besides, the island was plagued by mosquitoes that carried malaria and other diseases.
ACS officials turned to Cape Mesurado, about 150 miles to the southeast, on the advice of a Lt. Matthew C. Perry of the U.S. Navy, who was posted in the area. The ACS resettled the Sherbro repatriates to Mesurado and named the area Liberia to signify that it was a home for free people.
Because Ayres kept a detailed journal of the 1821 journey to Cape Mesurado, and newspapers printed the text of the agreement, we know much of what happened that December. But the absence of the original document left an enormous hole in the historical record.