The Forgotten African Colony on U.S. Soil
Few know that America once hosted a failed African colony, the 1821 settlement of Aracoma, Virginia, by a group of freed black Americans before Liberia’s founding.
In the early nineteenth century, the question of what to do with the growing population of free African Americans became a point of national debate. Concerns about assimilation, freedom, and the future of freed slaves led to the formation of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816. The Society attracted a strange alliance of supporters, both abolitionists—who saw colonization as a refuge from slavery—and slaveholders, who feared the presence of freed blacks would encourage revolts.
Before the Liberian capital of Monrovia welcomed its first settlers in 1822, the ACS sponsored an unusual and little-remembered experiment: the foundation of Aracoma, a colony for freed slaves, within Virginia itself.
Aracoma was conceived as a model settlement for emancipated African Americans. The ACS acquired a tract of land along the Guyandotte River, in what was then western Virginia (now West Virginia). In 1821, a group of freed blacks from various parts of Virginia and Maryland arrived, bringing farming skills and high hopes. The Society’s idea was that they would thrive in a relatively isolated area, build homes, cultivate crops, and demonstrate the viability of black self-governance.
However, the reality of Aracoma quickly became complicated. The settlers faced resistance from neighboring white communities, who resented what they saw as government-aided competition. There were reports of threats, harassment, and economic boycotts. The ACS, underfunded and divided over its real mission, struggled to provide promised support, such as seeds, livestock, and protection.
Moreover, the settlement was located on land of marginal quality, prone to flooding and subject to the challenges of clearing heavy forest and brush. Disease was rampant; malaria and dysentery claimed many lives, and medical help was scarce. The greatest threat, however, came from local whites, and eventually, open hostility prompted some settlers to return east, while others vanished into the growing population pushing west.
By 1824, just a few short years after its founding, the Aracoma project had disintegrated. Some of its remaining families attempted to join emerging black communities in Ohio and Indiana, while others, discouraged but determined, returned to jobs as farmhands elsewhere in Virginia.
This forgotten experiment is now almost entirely absent from American memory. The site of Aracoma was eventually overshadowed by the neighboring town of Logan, West Virginia, which grew around it by the end of the nineteenth century. Ironically, when Liberia was founded in the 1820s, it would become the focus of the ACS’s colonization plans, and Aracoma faded from written record.
The story of Aracoma is a little-known chapter in the history of American colonization and black autonomy. It reflects the complexities and contradictions of antebellum America: the aspirations of freed African Americans, the hopes and prejudices of white reformers, and the harsh realities of race relations even in well-intentioned endeavors. Today, almost no trace of Aracoma remains, a ghost of a lost vision for an African American homeland on U.S. soil.
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