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Constitution and Laws of Maryland in Liberia, published by the Maryland State Colonization Society, 1847. The Maryland State Colonization Society was the Maryland branch of the American Colonization Society, an organization founded in 1816 with the purpose of returning free African Americans to what many Southerners considered greater freedom in Africa.
The area was first settled in 1834 by freed African-American slaves and freeborn African Americans primarily from the U.S. state of Maryland, under the auspices of the Maryland State Colonization Society. [1] [2] The larger American Colonization Society was founded in 1816.
Concerned about the tensions of discrimination against free blacks (often free people of color with mixed ancestry) and the threat they posed to slave societies, planters and others organized the Maryland State Colonization Society in 1817 as an auxiliary branch of the American Colonization Society, founded in Washington, D.C., in 1816. [16]
The American Colonization Society was established in 1816 to address the prevailing view that free people of color could not integrate into U.S. society; their population had grown steadily following the American Revolutionary War, from 60,000 in 1790 to 300,000 by 1830.
Russwurm became supportive of the American Colonization Society's efforts to develop a colony for African Americans in Africa, and he moved in 1829 to what became Liberia. In 1836 Russwurm was selected as governor of Maryland in Africa, a small colony set up nearby by the Maryland State Colonization Society. He served there until his death.
Maryland then finally agreed to join the new American confederation by being one of the last of the former colonies ratifying the long proposed Articles in 1781, when they took effect. Later that same decade, Maryland became the seventh state to ratify the stronger government structure proposed in the new U.S. Constitution in 1788.
Throughout the early and mid-1800s, organizations like the American Colonization Society encouraged formerly enslaved Americans to relocate there. Hanson went on to become a senator in Liberia.
George had built up connections with the leaders of the colonization movement, and served as the vice agent of Liberia for one year, among other privileged positions in the colony. In 1827, the state of Maryland founded their own colonization society separate from that of the American Colonization Society.