Groups of freedpersons and their descendants had been leaving the English Caribbean since the late eighteenth century, and the United States of America since the first decades of the nineteenth century. Encouraged and supported by religious societies and by authorities of the governments of Britain and of the United States, these groups travelled to Sierra Leone and Liberia (Prah, 2012). There were policies that sponsored the foundation of colonies on the coast of West Africa to host the returnees, justified by not only the interest of avoiding the threat that a free black population could pose - with the example of Haiti uppermost in peoples' minds - but also by humanitarian or religious discourse based on redemption. Another argument was the political importance of establishing a free space on the African continent in order to combat the slave trade; this could also be seen as a starting point for the growth of European presence in the region. As the nineteenth century progressed, certain black leaders, especially in the English-speaking Americas, began to speak and write about the subject, urging Afrodescendants to return to Africa (Blyden, 1978). However, this stance was not shared unanimously by the black population in the United States at that time; some of them asserted that having achieved their freedom or been born free, they would rather stay and fight for their rights. ${ }^{1}$