Why Liberia Speaks English: the Surprising American Origin Behind West Africa’s Oldest Republic
By James H. Sterling
In 1816, a coalition of prominent white American politicians, clergy, and slaveholders founded the American Colonization Society (ACS). The group included figures like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Bushrod Washington. Their motives were complicated and contradictory. Some white members viewed colonization as a gradual path to ending slavery. Many others, particularly Southern slaveholders, viewed free Black Americans as a destabilizing presence who might incite revolts among enslaved populations.
Their shared solution was physical removal. The ACS raised federal and private capital to purchase land along the Windward Coast of West Africa. Beginning with the voyage of the ship Elizabeth in 1820, thousands of freeborn Black people and formerly enslaved African Americans made the dangerous Atlantic crossing. Between 1820 and the outbreak of the American Civil War, roughly 13,000 African Americans relocated to the territory.
The settlers arrived carrying the dialects of the American South. They spoke the regional English varieties of Virginia, North Carolina, and the Georgia Sea Islands. They carried English-language Bibles, established English-language printing presses, and designed town layouts modeled on American coastal trading ports. This wave of 1820s resettlement transplanted an American linguistic footprint directly onto African soil, establishing an elite class known as Americo-Liberians.
James Sterling reports on renewable energy developments, climate policy, ecological conservation, and green tech innovations around the globe.
