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This essay examines letters written by U.S. black settler-colonists in Liberia to their families, friends, and former masters in the United States during Liberia's colonial and early national periods, 1820–1855. It argues that the letters stage speculative, epistolary encounters with freedom that evade strictly historicist interpretive methods. Consequently, the essay proffers a reading practice that attends to the letters' speculative reflections on the meaning of freedom in nineteenth-century Liberia. It shows how the black settler-colonists represent freedom not simply as an event or an accomplishment (of a return to Africa, or of manumission, independence, or national citizenship) but as an ongoing, equivocal, ungiven possibility that also repeatedly returns, recursively, to the legacy of slavery in the United States.

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This contribution to a roundtable on the question of recovery makes a case for overreading the archives of the black Atlantic diaspora not only for what they tell us about who did what, where, and when but also for scenes of speculative thought. The author draws on his research into black settler colonization of Liberia to make this case.

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