Performing Respectability and the Politics of Politeness in the Liberia Herald

Can political autonomy exist if it depends on the successful performance of respectability or politeness? This question shaped the lives of black American colonists in Liberia in the early nineteenth-century. When the... [ view full abstract ]

Can political autonomy exist if it depends on the successful performance of respectability or politeness? This question shaped the lives of black American colonists in Liberia in the early nineteenth-century. When the largely-white American Colonization Society (or ACS) founded the Liberia colony in 1829, they justified their plan in large part as a civilizing project: free black colonists would carry American “Christianity and civilization to the doors of [Africans’] cabins.”[1] But those colonists were themselves the objects of a similar civilizing project, since both supporters and opponents of colonization treated Liberia as an experiment in whether or not formerly-enslaved black subjects could sustain a civil society. In this context, the colony’s local newspaper, the Liberia Herald, had to navigate the uneasy ground of representing endemic problems within the colony—including death and disease, inadequate resources, and political controversy—while projecting an image of genteel respectability as a monthly periodical.

While scholars have generally treated the Liberia Herald as an appendage of the ACS, it offers a unique look at the difficulties of black self-representation in the 1830s. This paper—accompanied by an 1835 series of editorials arguing about how, and by whom, Liberia should be represented—shows how supporters of American colonization framed their understanding of colonial stability through ideas of respectability or its absence. In the process, this paper shows how the hypothetical goal of black political freedom was undermined when colonists were compelled to perform civility for an American audience.

[1] The Life of Jehudi Ashmun 235