Liberian Independence
Liberia declared independence on 26 July 1847, founded by an American colonisation society for freed slaves and governed for 133 years by their descendants. The American Colonization Society was formed in 1816 by an unlikely coalition: abolitionists who thought free Black Americans would never be granted equality, and slaveholders who regarded a free Black population as a danger to slavery and wanted it removed. Most free Black Americans opposed the scheme for exactly that reason, and only some 15,000 emigrated over four decades. The first settlers arrived in 1822, obtained land at Cape Mesurado from a local ruler by a treaty concluded at gunpoint, and named the capital Monrovia after the American president. Independence came because the society could not afford the colony and because British traders declined to recognise the customs authority of a settlement that was not a state. The constitution was modelled on the American one and restricted citizenship to people of African descent, which excluded no settler and eventually excluded very few others in practice. The settlers, who called themselves Americo-Liberians and were about two per cent of the population, ran the country as a closed political class: the True Whig Party held power without interruption from 1878 to 1980, and Indigenous Liberians did not receive full voting rights until 1946. Firestone took a concession of a million acres in 1926 at six cents an acre. A sergeant's coup in 1980 ended the arrangement, and two civil wars followed. The flag, the constitution and the county names are American, and so is the pattern the settlers reproduced. A community founded by people escaping a caste system built another one, which is the fact that Liberian historians have spent the years since 1980 working through.
- Year: 1847 CE
- Category: Political
