The Vote for Freedom to Liberia from Prospect Hill Plantation, 1847

The dataset was extracted from the list of passengers on the barque Nehemiah Rich, departing from New Orleans, Louisiana on January 7, 1848, published in the African Repository and Colonial Journal. The dataset includes headings from the Nehemiah Rich passenger list—number, names, ages, where from, and remarks, as well as additional fields documenting alternative spellings of names. Captain Isaac Ross, owner of the Prospect Hill plantation near Lorman, Mississippi, wrote his will allowing the majority of the enslaved adults at the Prospect Hill plantation to vote for one of two choices after his death: freedom to Liberia or be sold. The people freed from the Ridges and Prospect Hill plantations comprised more than half of the estimated 571 emigrants from Mississippi to Liberia.