"Every historian working on colonization will want to read and engage this provocative history of the experience of African colonization for the manumitted, the manumitters, and their proslavery critics.""--American Historical Review""One of the most insightful treatments of colonization in years.""--Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography""Balanced, accessible, and thorough. Each of Burin's chapters explores the ACS from a specific perspective: ACS members who manumitted enslaved workers specifically to go to Liberia, the enslaved themselves, northern fundraisers, white southerners, legal authorities, and finally, the freedpeople in Liberia.""--Journal of African American History""Presents a vivid portrait of the organization as a conduit through which several thousand African Americans passed from American slavery to African freedom.""--Journal of American History""Conveys the image of chattel slavery not as a monolithic structure controlling all masters and slaves everywhere but as a constantly changing entity throbbing with painful issues of personal and private rights in conflict with predominant opinions about social cohesion and custom. . . . The result is a refreshingly complex picture of American slavery.""--History""A meticulously researched biography of one of the oft-overlooked cul-de-sacs in American history.""--Virginia Quarterly Review""