Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society

Abstract

Eric Burin's book on the colonization movement seeks to render a fuller view of the organization most responsible for relocating thousands of African Americans to Liberia during the nineteenth century. Born of contradiction and compromise, the American Colonization Society (acs) was founded in 1817 for the purpose of removing free blacks to Africa. Eventually, it became steeped in the business of resettling freed slaves in Liberia, though its national leaders were careful to refute charges that the acs promoted abolition. Notwithstanding these denials, Burin argued that the group's colonization venture “tended to undermine slavery” as evidenced in the number of manumissions that occurred during the antebellum period that were explicitly coupled with the removal of the newly emancipated to Liberia (p. 2). Drawing on the acs's records and other sources, this book presents a vivid portrait of the organization as a conduit through which several thousand African Americans passed from American slavery to African freedom.