ABSTRACT
Liberia is Africa’s oldest republic, founded by freed slaves and free blacks from the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. From the first colony in 1822 through independence in 1847 and up to the American Civil War and emancipation in the 1860s, some 20,000 descendants of North American slaves settled in what is now Liberia. They were joined by some 5,000 to 10,000 “recaptureds,” Africans seized from illegal slaving ships after the trans-Atlantic trade was outlawed by the British and Americans in the first decade of the nineteenth century. In the latter years of the century, the Americos-as the North Americans were called-and the recaptureds were joined by several thousand West Indians. Together, these groups formed the class that ruled Liberia during much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
