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Liberia created american experiment { July 1 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
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Joe Crankshaw: Liberia's plight our concern because nation was an American experiment
By Joe Crankshaw columnist
July 1, 2003
Atenuous cease-fire exists in Liberia, at least it did when I started writing this column, but that could change any minute. Rebel forces are seeking to force President Charles Taylor to resign. The strife has been bloody, some 200,000 Liberians have been killed during the past 10 years and about 300,000 have fled the country.
The conflict is of interest to Americans because it marks the dissolution of an American dream born during the days before the American Civil War. Abolitionists and even some slave owners were seeking a solution to the problem of what to do with freed slaves. Some of them, mostly members of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, an Episcopal Church organization, hit upon the idea of training them and returning them to Africa to form their democratic society.
It was an idealistic scheme that drew the backing of President James Monroe, and the first of the missionaries supporting this idea went to what is now Liberia in 1756. There was in existence in the area a small colony for former slaves at the town of Sherbo, which had been founded by John Kizzel. Kizzel had received his freedom by joining the British in the American Revolution, and was sent back to Africa after the war.
A second organization, the American Colonization Society, was founded in 1816 by a combination of slave owners and abolitionists to send blacks back to Africa. In 1819, Monroe authorized the Navy to return any Africans seized from slave ships to Africa, and he said a station should be established in Africa to receive and care for the freed blacks.
Initial efforts to establish a colony were not successful, but eventually several small towns were developed, and one main town called Monrovia was formed, in honor of the U.S. president. The colony was not officially a part of the United States, but it sought to present a democratic republic on the west coast of Africa. In the early days it was heavily supported, until abolitionists decided it was an effort to send all the blacks back to Africa, and began campaigning against the program.
The Episcopal Church established a strong presence in the tiny territory through monks of the Order of the Holy Cross. They ran a mission and schools for the returning Africans. It was not a safe or easy undertaking. The late Bishop H. C. Campbell, who supervised the effort in Liberia during the 1930s and early 1940s, had many recollections of the events.
The freed slaves were in danger of becoming enslaved again, in spite of their new-found freedom. They had only a small, semi-skilled militia to defend the earthen walls thrown up around Monrovia. Arab slavers from the eastern side of Africa, warring African chieftains, and European slave catchers harassed the tiny settlements. Many of the blacks were taken and sold back into slavery, and a number of the monks were killed trying to stop the raids.
Bishop Campbell, who spent his last years in retirement at the monastery at St. Andrew's School in Sewanee, Tenn., often kept students spellbound with his stories of the Liberian people, who finally declared their independence and established a nation in 1847. He told us of the statue of an old woman and her pipe, which stands in Monrovia.
The woman, he said, was returning to town after drawing water from the river when she saw in the bushes a group of slavers preparing to raid the town. She walked over the earthen berm with her water buckets, then paused at the top near one of the three cannons defending the town. She knew it was loaded, and by chance was aimed where the slavers lay in wait. She lit her pipe, took a puff, then tapped the glowing embers into the fuse hole of the cannon. It went off, doing heavy injury to the slavers and alerting the militia men.
Another of the Bishop's tales was about a French slaver, Theodore Cnot, who tried to raid the town only to be driven off by the entire population throwing rocks and waving machetes, swords, muskets, rakes and hoes.
Unfortunately, over the years, the noble experiment has fallen prey to human greed, corruption and desire for power. Several governments have fallen, and that of Taylor, which began with a true election, has deteriorated. President George Bush is scheduled to visit the nations of West Africa in July in an effort to bring stability to the region.
In Liberia, he will hear calls for U.S. Marines to come in, restore order and put the nation — which is an American experiment — back on the path to true freedom and growth as a republic. It will be interesting to see what he does with that request.
Contact Joe Crankshaw by telephone at (772) 221-4181, or e-mail: Joe.Crankshaw@scripps.com. His columns are archived on the News'website, TCPalm.com.
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