“The Boasted Privileges of the Liberian”: Trans-Atlantic Constitutionalism and American Identities in the Monrovia Riot of 1835

Those African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans who comprised the early colonists of Liberia confronted an array of new, contradictory, and interdependent identities. They were widely referred to as colonists or colonizers, but also as “repatriates” of their “native continent”. They were Liberians in contrast to people of color who remained in the Americas, but were Americans in contradistinction to the “recaptive” Africans whom they rescued from ongoing slave raids. They were “coloured” or “black” or “Negro” to the white appointees of the American Colonization Society who governed colonial Liberia, while the indigenous people of coastal west Africa sometimes dubbed them “the white man”. They earned still other appellations when a group of them rioted in Monrovia in April 1835, disabling the colony’s only printing press, immobilizing the court, and successfully demanding the resignation of the white colonial Agent who was the nominal head of their body politic. Those who participated became known as insurrectionaries, “nullifiers”, and, collectively, a mob.

I argue that the riot and its aftermath reveal the political cultural assumptions of the formerly enslaved and free black Americo-Liberians—assumptions drawn from these American ex-patriates’ insights into the flaws and feats of the U.S. political system into which most of them had been born, up to and including the problems of political incorporation encapsulated in the U.S.’s recent nullification crisis. I show that their deeply alienated memories of the U.S. Constitution, as well as their affective ties to localized and national U.S. political elites, were, paradoxically, the motives and means by which they resisted white rule and shed their status as exiles and deportees. As an excerpt of a larger chapter on the precarious transnational identities and the tragic vacuums of power in colonial Liberia, this paper explores ideological limitations imposed upon U.S. and Liberian citizenship in pre-national Liberia.