Influenced by the ACS and the Presbyterian Church, Blyden initially embraced the liberal idea regarding the need to “civilize” the native populations of Africa. That is, Blyden advanced similar concepts of freedom as contemporaries like the liberal thinker John Stuart Mill. Prior to the publication of On Liberty in 1859, Mill, for one, put forth a liberal concept of freedom for African-descended people in post-emancipation colonial Jamaica. Mill’s debates with Thomas Carlyle in the early 1850s on the “Negro Question” were grounded in the belief that “civilized” people shouldered a moral obligation to uplift “uncivilized” people to enjoy the “natural freedoms” boasted by “civilized nations.” The freedom to govern oneself was not a foregone right, but an earned privilege. In other words, liberalism supposed that Black people could not govern themselves until they became civilized enough to enjoy and appreciate the freedom it entailed.
Republicanism, however, purported that the republic—the state—is the very means by which freedom is realized. Taking Blyden seriously as a republican and liberal thinker requires examining the tensions in how both conceptions of freedom undergird Blyden’s participation in the young Liberian Republic. Blyden’s early experiences in Liberia and his involvement in military expeditions against various native populations, for example, gradually shifted his perspective as he saw the native populations were not merely “uncivilized,” but culturally different. According to Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, some empires employed what they call the “politics of difference” to govern disparate populations, which meant “recognizing the multiplicity of peoples and their varied customs as an ordinary fact of life” (12). For Blyden, the Liberian republic was a means to establishing a uniquely African Empire. He, therefore, sought to justify Liberia’s expanding settlements and arrogation of native territories as the means to govern based on this “politics of difference” vis-à-vis a republican exclusion of the native population and a liberal mission of “civilizing” the native population.
While the Secretary of State for Liberia, Blyden declared in an 1865 Liberian Independence Day address: “We are laying the foundations of empire on this coast.” Blyden, thus, signals a departure from the purely liberal rhetoric of civilizing toward a more republican vision of Liberia’s right to govern and defend its settlements from British and French colonial territorial encroachments. He also offers this rallying cry: “We have the germ of an African Empire. Let us, fellow citizens, guard the trust committed to our hands. The tribes in the distant interior are waiting for us.” Drawing a contrast between citizen and native, these respective statements encapsulate the dual impulses of Blyden’s thought—the liberal desire to civilize and the republican drive to ensure freedom as non-domination from European empires, even if it meant dominating a native population in the process.