The American Colonization Society (ACS) and Liberia: Unforeseen Legacies of U.S. Intervention
The American Colonization Society (ACS) was founded in 1816 with the primary intention of repatriating free African Americans and emancipated slaves to a colony in West Africa. The society believed in the concept of colonization as a solution to racial tensions and the issue of slavery in the United States and aimed to recruit volunteers from among free African Americans and emancipated slaves in the United States. Examining the continuum from the ACS’s actions to the later crisis establishes a broader trend of US interventions having enduring, unforeseen implications, positioning the Liberian case as emblematic of a larger phenomenon where ostensibly short-term actions possess far-reaching and unforeseen consequences within US foreign relations.
Slavery, the Thief of Virtue: the Social Visibility and Alienation of Enslaved Black Women in Abolitionist Discourse
But before virtuous womanhood was significantly challenged as anachronistic, it played a critical role in abolitionist rhetoric. In the mid-nineteenth century, white Christian abolitionists would argue that to sanction slavery was to sanction rampant adultery by white male enslavers who were systematically engaging in extramarital sex with their enslaved Black women and thereby depriving them of their virtue.