Given the slave trade’s polarizing impact, local people did not respond in a unified and homogeneous way to African-Americans who came seeking land.
On the one hand, foreign slave buyers and their local allies vehemently and violently opposed the repatriates, whom they viewed as threats to their profits. On the other hand, local abolitionists welcomed African-American returnees as allies whose global ties and external knowledge could help bring a speedy end to the trade in enslaved Africans that had ravaged local societies for centuries.
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