The US colonized Liberia through federally funded land seizure and private initiative

Evidence

In terms of federal funding, Charles Fenton Mercer steered the next offensive after joining the House of Representatives. On January 13, 1819, Mercer introduced the Slave Trade Act, which allocated 100,000 to send “negroes” back to Africa. Signing the bill into law was the old Virginia governor sympathetic to colonization: James Monroe, who had been elected to the US presidency weeks before the formation of the ACS. Almost immediately, debates sprang up as to whether the bill authorized Monroe to acquire land in Africa. By 1821, Monroe had dispatched US naval officer Robert Stockton, as an agent of the society, to West Africa. With a drawn pistol in one hand and a pen in the other, Stockton embezzled—some say for 300—a strip of Atlantic coastal land south of Sierra Leone from a local ruler, who probably did not hold title to his people’s land. The United States thus joined the growing band of nations seeking to colonize Africa. By 1824, American settlers had built fortifications there. They renamed the settlement “Liberia,” and its capital “Monrovia,” after the US president. Between 1820 and 1830, only 154 Black northerners out of more than 100,000 sailed to Liberia. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 397

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the kind of self-interested, policy-first account the reader is tracking: governmental policy (funding and colonization) preceded ideological justification, a clean instance of Kendi’s inversion.
• CANDY: The pistol-in-one-hand, pen-in-the-other land grab for $300 is a vivid, compact story even if not precisely state-of-the-art history.