By the 1820s, there were 230,000 free Black people in the United States. Thomas Jefferson originated the idea of how to get rid of them and came up with the destination: Africa. Jefferson, with other like-thinking slavers, created the American Colonization Society as a private company in 1817, which established the colony of Liberia on the west coast of Africa in 1822, becoming an independent state in 1847. The indigenous people who lived there were not consulted. The Black Americans spoke only English, and they were essentially settlers.
