>>13693925The basic story is that Liberia was founded by the American Colonization Society (with George Washington's nephew as its president) as a place for freed slaves to live in safety and freedom that most people believed they wouldn't be able to find in the US. When you read about abolitionists of the day, this was the Part 2 of most of their plans. Free the slaves, get them over to the colony, keep tabs on them to make sure they're doing alright. This was especially pressing around the time of the Civil War.
Problems included a high mortality rate on the journey there (common for long sea voyages), rampant disease, and hostile natives all over the land. The natives, they segregated themselves from, and even enslaved them in the same way they were enslaved in the American South, believing that they were so different from them and culturally and genetically superior, better educated and civilized, etc, and didn't want to be mixed with them. The colonists made up such a small fraction of the population though that they couldn't hold onto the country and eventually lost their status as the absolute political elites of the area, and tribal conflicts and corruption ended things.
If they were able to get more colonists there to defend it, they probably would have developed much better, but not many American blacks wanted to accept the risks and go there, and the US didn't have the funds or means to send masses of them anyway, especially with the cost of the Civil War
>If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days. -Lincoln 
