Skipwith saw little kinship between his own family, who were intent on improving themselves in grammar school and at the Baptist Church Sunday School, and the “crooman” (Kru) who was about to be executed for brutally killing “an american boy.” Skipwith reflected that “it is something strange to think that these people of Africa are calld our ancestors. In my present thinking if we have any ancestors they could not have been like these hostile tribes in this part of Africa for you may try and distill that principle and belief in them and do all you can for them and they still will be your enemy.”25
There were, of course, profound cultural differences between the eastern woodland Indians of North America and the sixteen African ethnic groups that eventually fell under the political hegemony of Liberia. The Mandinka, to cite only one example, were skilled in metallurgy and political organization and were successful in converting many Vai and members of other ethnic groups to Islam. Nevertheless, colonization threatened West Africans and Native Americans in somewhat similar ways. Like the white colonists in North America, the Liberian settlers were initially unprepared for agricultural life in a foreign environment. As merchants and middlemen who had access to American credit and exports, they increasingly monopolized the natives’ supply of imported commodities while insulating themselves in self-contained communities. As their numbers increased and their settlements expanded, they also destroyed forests and game; exploited tribal rivalries; endangered traditional commercial networks, including the lucrative slave trade; and demanded obedience to their own laws in exchange for schools, markets, and police protection. Above all, they spoke of civilizing the natives and of enlarging their territory, as Edward Wilmot Blyden put it at the time of the American Civil War, “by fair purchase and honourable treaty stipulations, preparatory to the influx of our worn-out and down trodden brethren from abroad.”26
While some West Africans welcomed the settlements and even sent their children to Monrovia to be “made Americans,” King Bowyah appealed in 1851 for British aid against Liberian infringements on Afro-British trade. Writing to the British consul in Monrovia shortly before an African attack on a Bassa Cove settlement, Bowyah complained that the “Americans” were trying to seize his country: “I write this to let you know that this Country is not belong to Americans, and I will not sell it. I have this Country from my Fore Father, and when I die, I wish to left to my sons. I want all English to come here and make trade with my people.” Such appeals, even from native slave traders, became a pretext for British and French territorial encroachments and gunboat diplomacy.27
As high-handed imperialists, however, the Americo-Liberians were difficult to outmatch. By 1853, when prominent American blacks were reevaluating the alternative of African emigration, a report issued by the Colored National Convention held at Rochester strongly condemned the oppression of Liberia’s native population. This attack on all forms of colonialism was written by James W. C. Pennington, a fugitive slave and former blacksmith who had received an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg and had become an active abolitionist and the pastor of America’s largest black Presbyterian church. Determined to dissociate the benefits of Christian missions from the “rapine” and “plunder” of colonization, Pennington compared the Dutch and English exploitation of southern Africa with the expansion of Liberia: “The Liberians themselves, with their government backing them, are pursuing precisely, the same policy, that other colonizers have for the last hundred years in Africa: They boast that they have made their arms so often felt, that ‘no combination of the natives can be induced to fight them.’ ” According to Pennington, it was a “singular coincidence” that Britain chose an African colony (at the Cape of Good Hope) “to relieve herself from what she believed to be [her] over-grown population; America, to relieve herself from what she calls obnoxious population.” In both cases, the colonizers “paid no regard to the African’s love of home or veneration for his father’s grave.”28
Pennington might have added that the Americo-Liberians, deeply influenced by the American systems of slavery and racial caste, tended to regard physical labor as a degrading fate ideally suited for the unenlightened, such as African natives and the so-called Congos who had been liberated from slave ships by the United States Navy. From the outset, Liberia was in theory a beachhead of free soil, a deadly threat to the slave markets of Africa. In practice, the settlers adapted African customs of pawning—borrowing for an indefinite period of time the services of a son, daughter, wife, or other person—to American notions of servitude. Even poor settler families could adopt a Congo as a “ward” and receive $150 dispensed for annual maintenance and rehabilitation by the United States government.
As one would expect, there are conflicting reports of wards and pawns being treated like chattel slaves and also being acculturated into families, freed, and endowed with property. It is clear that under U.S. supervision the Americo-Liberians succeeded in assimilating large numbers of African recaptives or Congos, who learned English, wore Western dress, and welcomed the opportunity to become citizens. These exiles had already been violently uprooted from family and kin; the fear of reenslavement, reinforced by memories of kidnapping or trumped-up judicial proceedings, may have contributed to their adaptability. Because the recaptives were familiar with African crops and agricultural techniques, they were more successful than the Americo-Liberians as farmers and pioneers. They also found it easier to interact with the indigenous populations. The mediating role assumed by these emancipated slaves showed the wisdom of the Liberian government in according them citizenship and rejecting petitions to deny them land and reduce them to perpetual dependency.29
For the most part, however, the government lacked any effective political or judicial institutions that could have protected native African laborers even if there had been a will to do so. Supplied with cheap servants, succeeding generations of Americo-Liberians sought careers in trade or politics. Because they disdained industry and technological skills, they found it increasingly necessary to raise revenue by taxing the natives or exporting native labor to such productive regions as the Transvaal, Libreville, and Fernando Po (now Bioko). Charles Spurgeon Johnson, a member of the League of Nations International Commission of Inquiry into the Existence of Slavery and Forced Labor in the Republic of Liberia, quotes the Liberian secretary of state complaining in 1930 that “our only truly exploitable commodity is labor.” Before being exploited, however, the natives had to be subdued.30
As late as 1887, Americo-Liberian captives released by Dwallah Zeppie, a Gola leader, reported that their captor intended to drive the settlers back to the sea. Fearing that the Gola and Mandinka threatened the crucial supply of rice from interior farms, President Hiliary R. W. Johnson dispatched an expeditionary force that in 1890 finally captured Dwallah Zeppie and pacified the St. Paul River region. At this time the Liberian troops refrained from the kind of wholesale slaughter that in 1890 brought the American Indian wars to a shameful end at Wounded Knee. Yet, in the early twentieth century, when with U.S. assistance the government organized a Liberian Frontier Force to impose order in the hinterland, the troops plundered villages, raped native women, hanged local chieftains, and seized livestock and slaves.
This ruthless oppression represented something more than the greed of undisciplined soldiers. The highest government officials continued to profit from a system that subjected Liberia’s indigenous majority to corrupt and inequitable tax levies and allowed the forcible recruitment of slavelike laborers. As late as 1929, Frontier Force commanders threatened to destroy villages that failed to furnish a specified number of “boys.” After raiding and looting native towns, Liberian troops regularly seized and bound thousands of laborers. Some were sent to build badly planned roads or to work on the Firestone rubber plantations. The least fortunate, who often failed to return, were shipped to the Spanish island of Fernando Po. There, on the unhealthful cocoa plantations, they often worked for the black planter descendants of slaves once
liberated by British cruisers.31
We should not lose sight of the obvious and monumental differences between African and North American colonization. The settlers of Sierra Leone and Liberia did not advance across the continent, seizing all the land and herding the native inhabitants into a few barren reservations. Africans were far less vulnerable than the Native Americans to alien diseases and cultural disintegration. In Liberia, despite a low incidence of intermarriage, racial affinity doubtless encouraged a more reciprocal acculturation and a closer sense of identity between nonelite settlers and natives. Above all, the low level of immigration limited encroachments on the stability of African societies. Between 1820 and 1867, only some nineteen thousand American blacks arrived in Liberia. For more than two decades, one-fifth of the immigrants died during their first year in Africa. By 1843, largely as a result of malaria and other infectious diseases, 4,571 immigrants had left a surviving Americo-Liberian population of only 2,388.32
Considering the imperialistic control exercised by this minuscule group, which by 1880 claimed sovereignty over six hundred miles of the African coast and over territory extending inland as far as the Niger River, one wonders what might have occurred if the settlers’ appalling mortality had been quickly overcome. What if white colonizationists had succeeded in their goal of transporting a million or more African Americans to a Greater Liberia, or had even matched the British government’s efforts in assisting the immigration between 1820 and 1850 of over 200,000 Europeans to Australia? It is clear that the objectives of the Liberian government were continually thwarted by the nation’s failure to attract a significant number of immigrants, particularly experienced farmers and skilled artisans, teachers, sanitarians, and engineers. But one can only speculate about the effects of massive immigration in a country of limited resources and even more limited technology, a country whose expansion would inevitably collide in the late nineteenth century with the European Scramble for Africa.33
This emphasis on underdevelopment and black imperialism, however justified by the continuing disfranchisement and exploitation of the vast majority of Liberia’s population, obscures the symbolic importance of the settlers’ achievement. The Americo-Liberians, one must remember, were all former slaves or the descendants of slaves. Even the elite Johnsons, Robertses, Shermans, and Tubmans belonged to the most degraded and persecuted caste in North America, a caste that increasing numbers of whites thought incapable of self-government or of anything but the most menial labor. From the very outset, Liberia’s racial and ideological mission was defined by Western criteria of historical progress. It is clearly unrealistic to judge the Americo-Liberians’ treatment of aborigines by higher standards than those applied to white colonists from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.34 And it was the white demand for cocoa, rubber, coffee, gold, and other products that Liberia’s coerced labor was intended to serve.
Despite a shortage of capital, labor, and political experience, the Americo-Liberians established a constitutional republic in 1847 and maintained relative political stability for more than a century. Against overwhelming odds, they also preserved their national independence during a prolonged period when Britain and France were gnawing at their borders and when massive foreign debt and economic dependency increased the dangers of annexation. Competing in a capitalist world market with the most exploited, colonialized regions of the tropics, Liberia developed small but successful rice, sugar, and coffee plantations. Unfortunately, the perils of this route became evident in the late nineteenth century, when the global agricultural depression gave a decisive advantage to Cuba, Brazil, and other countries that profited from superior infrastructures and from more plentiful or more easily regimented labor.35
If Liberia’s modest achievements failed to abate the rising intensity of racism in the Euro-American world, the very survival of the nation made an important though belated contribution to black pride and hope. The relationship between Liberia and black nationalism was always complicated by the American free black community’s vehement hostility to the American Colonization Society. Early Liberian settlers such as Daniel Coker, Lott Cary, and John Russwurm, who might have been remembered as Pan-African pioneers, have traditionally been depicted as misguided accomplices in a racist conspiracy. Lewis Woodson, James M. Whitfield, and other early contributors to a black nationalist perspective advocated separate black settlements within the United States as a way of breaking the bonds of racial dependency while avoiding the taint of African colonization. After the financially troubled ACS forced Liberia to become independent in 1847, Martin Delany was prepared to admit that the nation had “thwarted the design of the original schemers, its slaveholding founders.” At the same time, he excoriated President Roberts for having forfeited all the honor he had won on a diplomatic mission to Europe by giving an official report, “like a slave, ‘cap in hand,’ ” to Anson G. Phelps, a wealthy American merchant and colonizationist.36
As we shall see in later chapters, this central concern with racial self-respect and the psychological hazards of dependency on whites was clearly a prerequisite for black liberation. But it also became a political weapon, used for various motives, that stimulated suspicion and bitter discord among black leaders. The fear of becoming an unwitting agent of white racism tended to dim the points upon which various factions of black abolitionists agreed. Frederick Douglass epitomized the first of these basic beliefs in 1854, when, after deploring the degraded and servile occupations of most free blacks, he asserted that “the free colored man’s elevation is essential to the slave colored man’s emancipation.” If this principle extended to the condition of free blacks wherever they resided, especially where they had escaped the effects of discriminatory laws, Liberia could hardly be ignored.37
A second point of agreement by the 1850s was that conditions and prospects for free blacks in the United States were worsening, not improving. The Fugitive Slave Law brought despair and physical insecurity not only to such prominent fugitives and foreign lecturers as Garnet, Pennington, William Wells Brown, Samuel Ringgold Ward, and William and Ellen Craft, but to the most obscure American free blacks, who were now vulnerable to seizure and enslavement without due process of law. The Dred Scott decision confirmed the fact that Southern slavery, far from being weakened by the “elevation” of free blacks, was eroding that population’s last remnants of civil rights. If virtually all black spokesmen still clung to the hope of regenerating America’s corrupted institutions, most of them showed a growing interest in external influence and alternatives to domestic political action: in the British free produce movement, which might weaken or destroy the market that poisoned the American economy; in related proposals for free black agricultural settlements in the Caribbean, South America, or Africa, which would serve as models of African American self-determination; and in efforts to restore Africa’s ancient leadership and promise by equipping its natives with the techniques and knowledge of Christian civilization. Liberia was intimately connected with all these aspirations. Indeed, President Roberts warmly encouraged plans for free-labor cotton and welcomed, along with Christian missionaries, agents sent by English textile firms.38
As early as January 1849, Henry Highland Garnet broke ranks with Frederick Douglass and black abolitionist tradition on the issue of emigration. Clearly influenced by the attacks of white land reformers on monopoly and aristocratic privilege in the eastern states, Garnet advocated black emigration to the West and Southwest as a “source of wealth, prosperity, and independence.” After cleverly associating aid to fugitive slaves with other forms of uplift and geographic mobility, he informed Douglass
that my mind, of late, has greatly changed in regard to the American Colonization scheme. So far as it benefits the land of my fathers, I bid it God speed; but so far as it denies the possibility of our elevation here, I oppose it. I would rather see a man free in Liberia, than a slave in the United States.39
Garnet still felt it necessary to denounce the forcible expatriation o
f blacks from the United States, although by the mid-1840s, ACS officials were insisting that emigration to Liberia would have to be selective as well as voluntary and that the Society wanted to help small numbers of aspiring blacks to “rise above their present level,” to Christianize Africa, and to abolish the slave trade at its source. Garnet applauded these objectives, when detached as far as possible from the ACS, and predicted that the new Liberian Republic would become the “Empire State of Africa.”40 In England he continued to expose the hypocrisy of the Clays and Websters, “who made the laws and would then transport the black man, that he might be freed from their operation!” But Garnet also assured a large meeting of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society that Americans “were a people who did things rapidly and earnestly … in right and in wrong.” There was still hope, therefore, that America would fulfill its Revolutionary promise and abolish slavery “almost instantaneously” if British public opinion constantly spoke out, reminding “the Americans of that sacred declaration, whereon their constitution as a nation was based, that declaration which declared that all men are equal.” Garnet quickly added that such arguments on consistency must be reinforced by economic pressure, especially capital investment in free-grown cotton in Africa and other regions.41 This goal of undermining the Southern slave economy became a centerpiece of Garnet’s later African Civilization Society and similar black emigration projects.
The black emigrationists made every effort to differentiate their aims and motives from those of white colonizationists. Although Alexander Crummell became an ardent Liberian nationalist, Delany, Garnet, Holly, and most other emigrationists looked for separate and more healthful asylums in Central America, Haiti, or the Niger Valley. With some justice they angrily denied the charge made by Frederick Douglass and other antiemigrationists that their projects were no more than fronts for the despised ACS. They could not conceal, however, the assumptions they shared with the more philanthropic white colonizationists nor their financial dependence on such figures as Benjamin Coates, a Quaker merchant and longtime supporter of the ACS. Despite their continuing suspicion of the ACS, black abolitionists became increasingly attuned to the symbolic meaning of Liberia.
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Page 16