Joseph Jenkins Roberts
Joseph Jenkins Roberts was born free in Virginia and became the first president of a republic founded on the proposition that free black Americans should leave. The American Colonization Society, which established the settlement in 1822, was an alliance of two incompatible motives: abolitionists who thought emigration the only route to real liberty, and slaveholders who wanted free black people out of the country because their existence undermined the argument for slavery. Most free black Americans rejected it outright. He emigrated at twenty with his mother and brothers, built a trading business shipping palm oil and camwood, and rose through the colonial administration to become the first non-white governor in 1842. Independence was declared in 1847 for a commercial reason as much as a political one: British traders would not pay customs duties to a company rather than a state, and the society could not defend its revenue. He was elected the first president and spent his terms getting recognition from Britain, France and eventually - only in 1862, after secession removed the southern votes - the United States. The republic reproduced the arrangement it had escaped. Some fifteen thousand Americo-Liberian settlers governed perhaps a million indigenous people who could not vote, hold office or claim citizenship for over a century, on a coastal strip whose interior the state barely entered. The constitution was modelled on the American one and the franchise was restricted to property-holding settlers. That structure held until 1980, when a sergeant from an indigenous group killed the president and executed the cabinet on a beach, and the consequences ran through two civil wars. Roberts served again from 1872 to 1876 and died in office.
- Lived: 1809 CE – 1876 CE
- Nationality: Liberian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
