Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Hale, Sarah Josepha - Susan M. Ryan (essay date 1995)

Susan M. Ryan (essay date 1995)

SOURCE: "Errand into Africa: Colonization and Nation Building in Sarah J. Hale's Liberia," New England Quarterly, Vol. LXVIII, No. 4, December, 1995, pp. 558-83.

[In the following excerpt, Ryan discusses Hale's position, expressed in her novel Liberia, that the only way to solve the slavery problem was for the slaves to return to Africa.]

To many white Americans before the Civil War, the idea of "returning" free blacks and manumitted slaves to Africa sounded like the perfect solution to the United States' increasingly rancorous and violent racial problems. Generally thought a moderate position in its day—compared to radical abolitionist and pro-slavery sentiments—colonizationism has since come to seem (as it seemed to most anti-slavery activists at the time) misguided at best, and venomous at worst, in its attempt to eliminate racial difference within the United States and so to evade the...

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