The tenth president of Liberia was Alfred Francis Russell
who was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1817. His father was his owner’s son.
His mother was enslaved. This meant that Alfred, also, was enslaved from birth.
In 1833, his mistress emancipated him so that he could join 200 other
emancipated former slaves on the ship, Ajax,
bound for Liberia. Russell was also a clergyman. He was an Episcopalian priest
who had started his ministry as a Methodist minister. He was elected vice
president of Liberia and assumed the office of president for one year,
1883-1884, after the elected president resigned. As president, he made a
proclamation that combined his commitment to the native peoples of Liberia with
his faith this way: “Our aboriginal
citizens…are important, nay indispensable, to us in building up this national
fabric, and the redemption of land, so long under the dominion of the devil”[1].
While the role of emancipated slaves from Kentucky in
the formation of the nation of Liberia is commendable and while the
authenticity of their commitment to the Christian religion and its promulgation
among native-born Africans is undeniable, something else was in play. As James
Ciment writes:
“Liberia was born of a white idea: that the
burgeoning and unwanted population of free blacks and emancipated slaves in
post-Revolutionary America should be sent to Africa. The early nineteenth
century politicians who devised this idea considered it an inspired one.
America could rid itself of its most ‘useless and pernicious’ class of people
while simultaneously establishing a beachhead from which Africa could be
civilized and Christianized”[2].
Kentucky’s Henry Clay was a key influence in the effort to
establish Liberia as a place to send freed African Americans starting with the
formation of the American Colonialization Society in 1816 where he said:
“Can there be a nobler cause… than that
which, whilst it proposed to rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if
not dangerous, portion of its population, contemplates the spreading of the
arts of civilized life and the possible redemption from ignorance and barbarism
of a benighted quarter of the globe”[3].
Clay’s words epitomize the abject prejudice of many white
Americans of his day. It was rooted in fear, perhaps due to the treatment of
white plantation owners in Haiti following the Revolution that ended on January
1, 1804. By 1850, freed slaves were required under the Kentucky Constitution to
leave the State within ninety days of their emancipation.
“The General Assembly shall pass laws
providing that any free negro or mulatto hereafter immigrating to, and any
slave hereafter emancipated in, and refusing to leave this State, or having
left, shall return and settle within this State, shall be deemed guilty of
felony, and punished by confinement in the penitentiary thereof”[4].
(By 1891, when the current Kentucky Constitution was
adopted, legalized slavery was no longer part of the American experience and
the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the United States Constitution had
been passed. So, the passages about the treatment of slaves from previous
Kentucky constitutions were no longer appropriate.) However, the attitude
expressed in the 1850 Kentucky Constitution is the same as
Henry Clay’s argument in favor of sending emancipated slaves back to Africa. The
Kentucky Colonialization Society was formed in association with the American
Society to raise funds in support of relocating people from Kentucky to
Liberia. It also recruited slave owners who would agree to emancipate some of
their slaves and finance their emigration.
The Liberia resettlement project did provide the initial
resources a new emigrant would need: travel expenses, support for six months in
Liberia, medical attention, temporary housing in Africa and between five and
100 acres of land there[5].
The project was only available to people who voluntarily chose to relocate. It
was not very successful. Many of the people who took advantage of the offer
died soon after arriving in Liberia. Many others returned to the United States.
What does the history of Liberia have to do with the Kentucky
Faith & Public History Education Project other than that some Kentucky Christians were among the emigrants? It exposes how an appeal to
Christian values and objectives was used to disguise a racist agenda. For an objective
consideration of the religion and its history, we must be willing to admit to
the misuses of its tenets and to the failings of its adherents.
By Lesley Barker ©2021
[1] Liberia
Info. “Alfred F. Russell”. ONLINE at http://liberiainfo.co/prd/presidents/alfred-f-russell/.
ACCESSED 1/6/2021.
[2]
Ciment, James. Another America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled
It. Farrar Straus and Giroux. 2013.
[3] Ibid.
[4]
Article X.2. Third Constitution of Kentucky. 1850.
[5] Mary
Kaltenbrun. The Negro Colonization Movement in Kentucky. (1941) Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper
1821. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/1821..
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