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Mississippi-in-Africa was a colony on the Pepper Coast founded by the Mississippi Colonization Society and settled by freed African-American slaves. In the late 1840s, some 300 former slaves from Prospect Hill Plantation and other Isaac Ross properties in Jefferson County, Mississippi were the largest single group of migrants to the new colony. The colony was located in what is present-day Sinoe County, Liberia. ==History== The American Colonization Society was founded to establish a colony for free American blacks in West Africa. Slaveholders wanted to relocate free people of color out of the South, as they believed the free blacks threatened the stability of their slave societies. Disheartened by the discrimination faced by free blacks also in the North, some abolitionists also supported the ACS, because they thought free blacks might be able to create a better society for themselves in Africa. Most free blacks did not want to emigrate; they had a claim to the United States and wanted to gain equal rights in their native land. Approximately 300 freed African-American slaves were relocated here from Prospect Hill Plantation in Jefferson County, Mississippi. They were the largest single group of colonists to migrate to Liberia. They had been freed in the 1835 will of slaveholder Isaac Ross, who intended for his plantations to be sold to pay for the passage of the freed slaves to the colony in West Africa. Ross' grandson Isaac Ross Wade contested his will and had years of litigation, but the will was finally upheld in 1845 by the Mississippi Supreme Court. The slaves were freed and passage to Africa arranged by the Mississippi Colonization Society, which Ross had previously co-founded with two other planters and a Presbyterian minister. It purchased land on the Pepper Coast for a colony for freed-slave emigrants from Mississippi. The freedmen were transported to this colony, where they developed a society much like the one they had left. They built houses in the style of Southern mansions and established a hierarchical society with strong continuities to theirs in the United States. They established plantations and battled local tribes for control of the territory, believing their American culture and Christianity made them superior.〔Alan Huffman, ''Mississippi in Africa: The Saga of the Slaves of Prospect Hill Plantation and Their Legacy in Liberia,'' University Press of Mississippi, 2004〕 The settlement existed from 1835 until 1842, when it was incorporated into the Commonwealth of Liberia. Journalist Alan Huffman wrote a history of the settlement. He traces its influence on contributing to more than a century of resentment between tribal peoples and the Americo-Liberians, also known as Krios, who are descendants of the colonists. These groups have been on opposite sides of the civil war in Liberia from the 1980s.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Mississippi-in-Africa」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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