Mississippi in AfricaTheir Legacy in Liberia Today Hardback - 2004

by Huffman, Alan

The gripping story of two hundred freed Mississippi slaves who sailed to Liberia to build a new colony where the colonists' repression of the native tribes would beget a tragic cycle of violence.

When a wealthy Mississippi cotton planter named Isaac Ross died in 1836, his will decreed that his plantation, Prospect Hill, should be liquidated and the proceeds from the sale be used to pay for his slaves' passage to the newly established colony of Liberia in western Africa. Ross's heirs contested the will for more than a decade in the state courts and legislature prompting a deadly revolt in which a group of slaves burned Ross's mansion to the ground but the will was ultimately upheld. The slaves then emigrated to their new home, where they battled the local tribes and built vast plantations with Greek Revival mansions in a region the Americo-Africans renamed 'Mississippi in Africa.' The seeds of resentment sown over a century of cultural conflict between the colonists and tribal peoples would explode in the late twentieth century, begetting a civil war that rages in Liberia to this day.

In the award-winning tradition of Slaves in the Family, this enthralling work traces an epic legacy that sweeps from the slave quarters of the antebellum South to the war-ravaged streets of modern-day Monrovia. Tracking down Prospect Hill's living descendants, deciphering a history ruled by rumor, and delivering the complete chronicle in riveting prose, journalist Alan Huffman has rescued a lost chapter of American history whose aftermath is far from over.