Liberty Brought Us Here: The True Story of American Slaves Who Migrated to Liberia
Susan E. Lindsey
Many years ago, I stumbled across a few lines that would evolve into my book, Liberty Brought Us Here: The True Story of American Slaves Who Migrated to Liberia. I read that Ben Major, a Kentucky slave owner, had freed his enslaved people who then sailed to Liberia. He corresponded with them for 15 years, sending them seeds, tools, and other supplies to build new lives.
Initially I wasn’t planning to write a book; I was just curious. Why did this man, who descended from a long line of slave owners, free his enslaved people? What was the colonization movement about? Did those who supported it have noble or nefarious intentions?
The people Ben freed included two brothers, Tolbert and Austin Major—both single fathers—their children, and two teenage girls. The mother of the girls, the widowed Agnes Harlan, was enslaved on a neighbor’s plantation. She and her five sons were freed by their owner so that they could all go to Liberia together. I wondered if they wanted to go to another country. Did they have a choice? What would life in Africa have been like for them? Did they survive?
To answer these questions, I had to research slavery—surely the most divisive issue in American history—as well as the early years of Liberia and the colonization movement. My personal curiosity took on new focus and direction after an acquaintance who worked in publishing urged me to write a book.
I quickly came to realize that few Americans know much about colonization or about this country’s connection to Liberia, even though 16,000 black people migrated from America to Liberia to escape the racism, violence, and oppression of the United States. It was the largest out-migration in American history and the American Colonization Society operated for nearly a century, yet it’s a story largely ignored in U.S. schools.
The standard narrative about the colonization movement was that it was purely racist—that those who supported it wanted to deport all free black people from the United States. While there were supporters who undeniably felt that way, I learned that the whole truth was more complex and nuanced.
I spent about six years on research. I consulted primary and secondary sources, took extensive notes, made reams of copies and dozens of scans, and tracked sources so I could cite them in endnotes and a bibliography. I studied academic journals, books, courthouse documents, old newspapers, more than 300 letters from other Liberian settlers, as well as online resources, and I visited universities, museums, archives, and cemeteries. I located two sisters who are descendants of Ben Major; they shared their family’s private collection of materials and opened up the dusty attic of the family home for me.
I celebrated each new detail I uncovered and every fact I could confirm. Moments of elation and triumph kept me going. On the American Colonization Society membership lists at the Library of Congress, I found Ben Major’s name, as well as those of Henry Clay, James Monroe, Francis Scott Key, and A. Lincoln of Springfield, Illinois. Column by column showed Lincoln’s years of membership, along with a handwritten note several columns over: “Address change. Washington DC.”
There were surprises—good and bad—along the way. I learned that, on average, 20 percent of those who migrated to Liberia died of malaria within a year. I learned that in the first twenty years of colonization, 45 percent of the settlers were women. And while white men founded the American Colonization Society and accounted for 90 percent of the nation’s slave owners, white women slave owners were more than twice as likely to free their enslaved people for colonization. I was dismayed to learn that, once settled in Liberia, black people from America recreated the two-tiered society they had known in the American South, placing themselves on the top and indigenous people below them.
I listened to discussions about cultural appropriation and better representation of minority authors in the world of publishing.
As a white woman, I struggled with whether I should be the one writing this book. African and African American authors have written about colonization and Liberia, but I knew of only one other book that addressed an ongoing relationship between a former owner and people he freed for emigration.
I decided to move forward, but worked hard to write an accurate, balanced story and sought feedback from people who had lived or worked in Liberia and people who are Liberian (some living in Liberia and some in the United States). I joined the Liberian Studies Association. I had Liberians and African Americans read early drafts of the book and I took their feedback seriously.
I wrote this book for several reasons: to satisfy my own curiosity, to honor the lives of the people at the center of this story, and to broaden understanding of this long-neglected chapter in our history. Researching and writing Liberty gave me a broader, deeper perspective on current discussions about race, immigration, and social and economic inequality.
Ultimately, this is a black story and a white story; a story of enslavement and a story of freedom; an American story and an African story.
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Liberty Brought Us Here, available in hardcover and as an e-book, can be ordered through University Press of Kentucky, www.KentuckyPress.com, and is also available through online book retailers.
Liberty Brought Us Here: The True Story of American Slaves Who Migrated to Liberia
Between 1820 and 1913, approximately 16,000 black people left the United States to start new lives in Liberia, Africa, in what would become the largest out-migration in US history. So when Tolbert Major, a Kentucky slave and single father, is offered his own chance for freedom, he accepts. He, several family members, and almost seventy other people board the Luna on July 5, 1836. When they arrive in Liberia, Tolbert pens a letter to his former owner, Ben Major: “Dear Sir: We have all landed on the shores of Africa and got into our houses . . . none of us have been taken with the fever yet.”
Drawing on fifteen years of surviving letters and extensive research, author Susan E. Lindsey illuminates the trials and triumphs of building a new life in Liberia, where settlers were free, but struggled to acclimate in an unfamiliar land, coexist with indigenous groups, and overcome disease and dangers. Liberty Brought Us Here: The True Story of American Slaves Who Migrated to Liberia explores the motives and attitudes of colonization supporters and those who migrated to Liberia, offering perspectives beyond the standard narrative that colonization was solely about racism or forced exile.
Buy links
Publisher: https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813179339/liberty-brought-us-here/
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/liberty-brought-us-here-susan-e-lindsey/1135542267?ean=9780813179339
Books-a-Million: https://www.booksamillion.com/product/9780813179339
IndieBound: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780813179339
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Susan E. Lindsey, author of Liberty Brought Us Here, is also coauthor and editor of Speed Family Heritage Recipes, a historical cookbook of recipes from the Speed family, who built Farmington Plantation in Louisville, Kentucky. Lindsey has had several essays and short stories published, too. She currently lives in a Victorian-era home in Louisville and writes in an office with a bay window overlooking the garden.
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