Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with Joseph P. Stinnett, author of Out of Virginia: Black Americans' Search for Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Liberia

What inspired you to write this book? 

Working on a newspaper series about the Civil War, I ran across a brief article in an 1865 paper mentioning the large group of Black Americans from in and around Lynchburg, who emigrated to Liberia a few months after the Civil War ended. I was the editor of the Lynchburg paper, familiar with the history of Piedmont Virginia, and I’d never heard of them, and neither had the local historians I consulted. That triggered my journalistic curiosity which soon grew into a desire to understand why these 172 people wanted to leave Virginia just after gaining freedom. I wrote a long essay about them for the Sphex Club, Lynchburg’s historic town-gown group, after which a fellow member, retired University of Lynchburg professor Tom Tiller, began urging me to write this book. I scoffed but finally got going on the project and discovered that nearly 200 other free and enslaved people from the area had gone to Liberia before the Civil War, many of them coerced. I dug into many original documents and letters to, from and about them, and felt like these first-hand documents provided an actual glimpse into how determined Black Americans acted on their own agency despite living in a slave society, which in turn inspired me to keep going and to believe the book would be a worthwhile endeavor. I also wanted to disprove the local white fantasy I’ve heard all my life that Lynchburg was a genteel place where “slavery wasn’t that bad.”

What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book? 

Once I figured out what to research, especially in the voluminous records of the American Colonization Society at the Library of Congress and available online at Fold3.com, I quickly learned that these documents offered a deep perspective into the words and deeds of Black Americans, enslaved and free, in the 19th century, and how they experienced colonization. The book is also something of a grassroots history of the colonization movement, from the emigrants’ first-hand point of view. I spent several years reading and studying books and academic writings on slavery, abolition, and colonization, especially in Virginia, not to mention thousands of mentions and stories about Lynchburg slavery in 19th century newspapers, which enabled me to understand how colonization was viewed when it was happening. Abolitionist newspapers were a gold mine. I’m hoping readers will be engaged with the emigrants’ stories in my own book, learn from them, and gain a better understanding of slavery and colonization movement. I also learned much about the multiple indigenous groups of West Africans who lived in the region that became Liberia. They’d been trading with Europeans in slaves and commodities for centuries, were skilled negotiators, had their own powerful trade organization, and often spoke multiple languages. The work of Liberian scholar C. Patrick Burrowes was a key to this research. The West Africans are among the most interesting people in the book.

What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book? 

I knew Lynchburg was a slave society pre-Civil War, with nearly half its population enslaved. My biggest surprise was just how deeply Piedmont Virginia was embroiled in the buying and selling of human beings, colonization, and in the national debate over American slavery itself. A letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Lynch, the founder of Lynchburg, was a founding document of the American Colonization Society. William Lloyd Garrison blasted Lynchburg and its newspapers regularly in The Liberator. Harriett Beecher Stowe cited Lynchburg slave ads in her book, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Slave buyers frequently came to Lynchburg seeking Black Americans to sell south to the slave labor camps. The term “lynching” is thought to have originated near Lynchburg when the city founder’s uncle punished some Tories during the Revolution. But I was surprised to learn that the “Judge Lynch” I kept running across in editorials was not an actual person but rather a threatening metaphor used to mean the illegal killing of Black people and abolitionists via mob violence.

My biggest surprise in the actual writing and production of the book was how different book publishing is from newspaper publishing. I expected a similar process, which was a bit of a handicap because as an overconfident, lifelong newspaper journalist I assumed I could crank out any project quickly. This assumption ignored the massive research required, which turned out to be the most fun and rewarding part but also the most time consuming, especially when I kept uncovering new facts that altered what I thought I already understood. I am grateful to UVa Press Editor in Chief Nadine Zimmerli for guiding me along and for maintaining her faith in the book.

What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?

In 1834, Black abolitionist James Forten of Philadelphia paid the expenses for a Liberian returnee from South Carolina to testify at a public hearing in New York that included cross-examinations. Conducted by a joint committee of colonizationists and abolitionists, the contentious proceedings lasted two days and featured frequent interruptions and complaints from colonization supporters as returnee Thomas C. Brown detailed all that was wrong with the colony. Two of his children and his brother and sister died there, and he had not been well himself for more than three days in a row there. A free man from South Carolina, Brown was a master carpenter, builder and property owner. Like Forten, he was a fourth-generation American and said he “by no means” considered himself an African. He said he went to Liberia to better his condition but returned because of his health and the lack of work. He described a poor land without resources, where the few people associated with the government lived well and many others were reduced to begging. The colonizationists had hoped to impugn Brown and cast doubt on his account, but the attempt was a spectacular failure. His interrogator was unable to counter the damning descriptions or Brown’s accurate statement that about half the people who came to Liberia died. Colonization supporters frequently shouted at Brown from the audience. By then, the damage to colonization efforts had been done. Said Brown, “The grave-yards always look fresh.”

What’s next? 

In the immediate future, I hope to speak to as many people and groups as possible to share the history and stories of the amazing, almost forgotten Black Virginians who went to Liberia. I am always thinking about other writing projects but haven’t settled on one yet. In the meantime, I hope to continue hiking on the Appalachian Trail, improving my limited guitar skills, reading more 20th-century Russian novels (Vasily Grossman is one of my favorite authors), listening to jazz (especially Sun Ra) and hanging out with my grandchildren.