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Liberia, Kentucky and Difficult Issues Related to Faith

 


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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