LIBERIA; OR, MR. PEYTON'S EXPERIMENTS. EDITED BY MRS. SARAH J. HALE. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and fifty-three, by HARPER & BROTHERS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York. PREFACE. "Two hundred years! two hundred years! Have sunk beneath their 'whelming tide!" IN 1620 the first African slaves were brought to Virginia. In 1820 the first emancipated Africans were sent from the United States to Liberia. If a superior intelligence, while contemplating, from the serene heights of the mansions of the blessed, the movements, the tumults, and the aimless activity of the inhabitants of the earth, had observed that one little ship taking its solitary way across the ocean, laden with emigrants returning, civilized and Christianized, to the land which, two centuries previous, their fathers had left degraded and idolatrous savages, would he not have thought that, of all the enterprises then absorbing the energies and hopes of man, this, regarded by so large a portion of the few who were cognizant of it as a wild and hopeless venture, was the one which promised to the human race the largest portion of ulti mate good? And who can doubt that, in thus providing a home of refuge for "the stranger within her gates," our beloved Union was nobly, though silently, justifying herself from the aspersions of oppression and wrong so often thrown out against her? What other nation can point to a colony planted from such pure motives of charity; nurtured by the counsels and exertions of its noblest, wisest, and most self-denying statesmen and philanthropists; and sustained, from its feeble commencement up to a period of self-reliance and independence, from a pure love of justice and humanity? The aim of this little book, imperfectly as it has been carried out, is to show the advantages Liberia offers to the African, who among us has no home, no position, and no future. These advantages have not been exaggerated. The endeavor has been to present the unvarnished reality; to be as exact and accurate as possible, and rather to err by keeping within than going beyond the bounds of truth. For the few incidents in the history of Liberia that are mentioned, the writer is principally indebted to the author of "The New Republic;" the little memoir of Lott Cary is taken from "A Plea for Africa;" the accounts of the productions and climate of Liberia are derived from the most authentic sources. Philadelphia, June, 1853. |