“Nearly All Have Natives as Helps in Their Families, and This Is as It Should Be”: The Meanings of (Un) Freedom in Colonial and Early Republic Liberia

Using the runaway indentured servant ads of the Liberia Herald as a point of entry, my paper will examine the use of indentured servitude and debased labor in colonial and early-republic Liberia to investigate the assumptions and beliefs of the settlers who instituted and maintained these systems of servitude and the Africans who most often functioned as laborers. This paper will use the inhabitants of Liberia, preeminent products of the “Black Atlantic,” to explore the contours of freedom and unfreedom and what defined the shades of gray between liberty and slavery for them. From its earliest days, the Liberian freedom of its African American inhabitants was often conceptualized as a product of the indentured servants and devalued labor—usually performed by Africans—readily available there. These African laborers were a common source of commentary regarding Liberia, especially as visitors drew parallels between the systems of labor employed in the West African colony and its American parent. This Diasporic society became all the more perplexing as it incorporated not only freeborn people of color disenchanted with the United States’ racial prejudices, but also former slaves, and many of these newly emancipated Liberians only found freedom through “choiceless choices” between emigration and sale bequeathed from deceased owners. What did it mean for these ex-slaves to benefit from coerced, unfree, or debased labor themselves? What does this suggest about the meaning of freedom in the early nineteenth-century Atlantic world? Essentially, this paper will follow the command of William Nesbit, a disenchanted settler who returned to the United States after a brief residence in Liberia, when he asked his readers to use their imagination after the failure of his words to "finish the picture of the condition of the Slave's Slave."