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<img src="https://cdn.kahimyang.com/resources-15/african-americans-deparat-for-liberia-sm.webp" loading="lazy" alt="African Americans depart for Liberia, 1896. The American Colonization Society sent its last emigrants to Liberia in 1904" />
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(African Americans depart for Liberia, 1896. The American Colonization Society sent its last emigrants to Liberia in 1904)
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Following the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution" class="news_link" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">American Revolution</a>, the number of freed Black Americans had grown from 60,000 in 1790 to 300,000 by 1830. The American Colonization Society (ACS) emerged as the solution, with the mission of shipping Black people to a colony in Africa.
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The organization was the brainchild of the Reverend Robert Finley, a Presbyterian minister from New Jersey. The ACS' early supporters included some of the nation's most powerful and influential men, including Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Francis Scott Key, as well as slave-owning US presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and James Madison.
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Clay said in his opening address:
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"Can there be a nobler cause than that which, while it proposes to rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not a dangerous portion of our population, contemplates the spreading of the arts of civilized life?" 
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Colonization, the state-sponsored emigration and resettlement of freed Black Americans outside America, was widely supported in the US for religious, economic, and social reasons. Even after its dissolution in 1964, the ACS has left a lasting legacy of segregationist sentiment in both America and abroad, according to historians.
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Eric Burin, a history professor at the University of North Dakota, said:
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"The establishment of the American Colonization Society was a watershed moment in American history.  What you have is a powerful white organization propounding a vision of America as a white person's country, and African Americans responding with a resounding rebuttal that it's their country, too."
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The ACS attracted a diverse crowd of white individuals, including slaveholders who saw colonization as a way to remove freed Blacks, whom they feared would cause chaos by helping their slaves escape or rebel.
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Many white Americans also believed that African Americans were inferior, and should be relocated to a place where they could live in peace away from the shackles of slavery. Abraham Lincoln held this belief, which led him to support a plan to relocate 5,000 Black Americans to the Caribbean in the 1860s.
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The ACS also had a religious mission of Christianizing Africa to "civilize" the continent, according to historian Marc Leepson.
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The initial reactions of the Black American community and abolitionists were nuanced. Some activists, like James Fortein, immediately rejected the ACS, writing in 1817 that "we have no wish to separate from our present homes for any purpose whatever".
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The relocation of thousands of emancipated Black Americans to West Africa which led to the creation of the country of Liberia in 1800s