The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (21 page)

One should not generalize about Americo-Liberian culture from
the behavior of the elite families or even from the hundreds of surviving letters of former slaves who became artisans and farmers in Liberia. These literate blacks, though often suffering from privation and poverty, were a privileged group by virtue of their literacy.
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Furthermore, their letters were crafted for the eyes of former owners, benefactors, and ACS officials. Yet the very existence of such a correspondence is highly significant. Few exiles and expatriates have cared to address their former oppressors and describe their achievements and hardships, their hopes and grievances. Few oppressors have shown continuing solicitude for members of a despised and outcast group. The former slaves who appealed for aid, approval, and family news also rejoiced over finding a land they described as free of racial prejudice, a land where even whites addressed them as “Mister” instead of “boy” (they failed to mention that Americo-Liberians used “boy” when addressing grown native men). While the letters from Liberia may have minimized the
Africanisms of Americo-Liberian culture, they gave expression to a governing ideology that extolled enterprise and self-respect and that decried the life of “savages” who rejected the clothing, tools, and Bible of civilized life.
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In 1840
Peyton Skipwith almost mimicked the rhetoric of an
American frontiersman when he described his adventures in a punitive expedition against
Getumbe, a
Gola chieftain who led a federation of native rebels some fifty miles inland from
Monrovia. Skipwith, a skilled mason and devout Christian, had been emancipated in 1833 by
John Hartwell Cocke, a Virginia planter, reformer, and active leader of the ACS. Cocke had sent Skipwith, together with his wife and six children, to Liberia. It was in a letter to Cocke that Skipwith recounted his march, “Rifle in hand,” through “the wild bush” with some three hundred militiamen led by
Joseph Jenkins Roberts, who eight years later would become the first president of the independent republic. Skipwith reported that “a savage host” of about four hundred men had attacked a missionary village defended by “three Americans” who “whipt the whole enemy. They killd on the feeld above 20 dead, and god he only knows how many was wounded and carread away.… The Battle lasted about one Hour fifteen minutes. How this was done they had and over quanty [i.e., a surplus] of musket loded and had nothing to do but take them up and poor the Bullets in thire flesh and they would fall takeeng fingers and tearing the flesh assunder.”
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Sion Harris, one of the defenders of the mission houses, described the same surprise attack “by about 3 or 4 hundred warriors” in a long letter to
Samuel Wilkeson, president of the ACS board of directors. After firing repeated volleys into the enemy’s ranks, Harris found himself facing “the head man”: “
Goterah returned back to the kitchen which he seized and shook with one hand and brandished a dreadful knife with the other, about six inches broad. And about a hundred and 50 men came up to the fence to whom he said, let us go in. I took deliberate aim at him (he was half bent, shaking) and brought him to the ground, cut off his knee, shot him in the lungs and cut of[f] his privets.” Harris later delivered Goterah’s head, which had been cut off by an African recaptive, to the governor of the colony.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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