Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God: A History of the True Whigs

Introduction
Pan-Africanism: An Unlikely Beginning

Political Movements are always the children of their era's troubles. For the Black African, the late 19th century was a time of relentless degradation as their continent was conquered and portioned by European colonialists, it is only natural therefore that there emerged in reaction a political current of black cultural nationalism. The idea of Black unity, of an innate pan-national African Character, and of the importance of cultural resistance to imperialism emerged however not within the native Kingdoms themselves, which often had their own strong national identities but, instead, within the children of the diaspora.

It was in Liberia, and in particular within the radical thinkers of the True Whig Party, that the philosophy of first generation pan-Africanism would first emerge. It consisted of three main tenets. First: The Black Race had an innate identity that transcended language, religion and national loyalties but was fundamentally different from that of Europeans. It was important that Black Africans did not attempt to become like Europeans but retained their own cultural purity. Second: That the Black Race was innately cooperative, unlike the more individualistic European. Communal property and co-operative effort was a fundamental part of the African Character and so segregation by class was an unnatural European imposition. Third: That the Black Race should be united, that any borders between them were artificial.

This was a radical and novel philosophy for the 1860s, but to an extent it's own founders, Blyden and Roye, were far more conservative than we would assume from later history. The Liberia Herald, the principle organ of the True Whig's message, would often make pro colonial arguments on the basis that West Africa united under British Rule and so no longer divided by artificial borders was a step forward. While Blyden controversially refused to so much as support the Union in the American Civil War, he did not cheer for the 15th amendment because he viewed the idea of black men gaining rights within western societies as a fatal mistake. In his eyes, a poor man in British Lagos who remained culturally African was better off than a free rich man in America who thought like a European.

Edward Roye was also a strange man to start a movement that became so associated with communalism, he was, when he founded the True Whigs, probably the richest black man in the world. Roye was born in Newark, Ohio, the son of a runaway slave from Kentucky. He worked as a school teacher and then a buyer and seller of real estate before emigrating to Liberia in 1846, having beaten his head against the glass ceiling of white supremacist America. Unlike many new arrivals in Liberia, who were destitute and poor, Roye came with goods to sell and money to invest. Within a year he was one of the leading merchants in Monrovia, and launched the first international shipping line under the Liberian Flag, which soon operated on three continents and undercut European merchants by selling Africa goods directly in New York and Paris. Roye's success saw him invited into the Monrovian elite, he joined the masons and served as both speaker of the house and chief justice.

From the outside there was nothing particularly unusual about his situation. Monrovia was dominated by a rich elite, who controlled trade and thus enforced political control. Each district had a big man who inevitably served as boss, judge and senator as Roye had done, and a multitude of poorer farm workers who were firmly under their thumb. Liberia was very much a society that worked for men like Roye. And yet, he would soon attempt to overthrow it.

His motives for the radical actions he undertook in the late 1860s are somewhat opaque and clouded by later hagiography. A part of it was quite simply racial resentment, Roye was black rather than mixed race as a lot of the other elite was, he was welcomed into some extent but he never felt like one of them, he married a woman as dark skinned as he himself was. A part of it was also genuinely political disagreement, Liberia's relationship with the native African's was frankly terrible, something Roye and Blyden blamed on an elite who were far more interested in America and Europe than actually attempting to build relationships in the African interior. And, as later actions and his own interpretation of collective ownership would prove, a part of it was his own economic interests. Roye knew that his advantages as a shipping merchant would soon disappear as Europeans more firmly established themselves in Africa, to stay still would be death. To remain dominant, he needed to bring the rural Kru people on board, to stop them dodging Liberian tariffs and selling directly to European traders, he needed railways built to link Monrovia firmly to the Mande cities in the interior and he needed investment in educating their workforce. The other merchant elites, however, had no desire to make such radical changes when things were currently working for them.

And one must always account for personal ambition. Roye had hit the limits for how far he could rise within the limits of the Republican Party, the President was out of his reach, but by running a rival party, the party of those who the Republicans had alienated, the up-country farmer's, the middling classes and the new arrivals, he could make it all the way. A rich mogul running a spite campaign against the elite that had not, quite, accepted him, inevitably had to adapt populist rhetoric to get elected and thus for simple realpolitik reasons he had to turn to Blyden and the Herald, as the only genuine voice of the opposition.

It was not the most promising start for a revolution and in 1867, when the True Whigs first began to emerge as a serious force, it's doubtful that anyone could have seen what would become of this new party.
 
Roye
Edward James Roye: 1867-1871 - The Martyr

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The True Whig's Triumph at the 1869 Presidential Election and the ascension of Roye to the presidency was seen as a game changer on the level of the Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800, but, in truth, it was only a partial victory. Roye's party, being largely a one man band, had much less ability to compete for senate seats and so the ruling Republican party continued to control the Congress and they were not in the mood to allow Roye to fulfil his radical agenda.

The election of Roye had come alongside a referendum of increasing the presidential term from two years up to four, this had been supported by both parties and so had passed in a landslide but upon Roye's election, the congress changed their mind. They refused to ratify the change until a second referendum could be held and then declared that that one had reached the opposite conclusion but refused to publish the results to prove it. It was an obvious power grab and Roye simply ignored it and ratified the original change to the constitution. Congress refused to recognise Roye as having more than a two year mandate and ran their own, uncontested, election in 1871, which reinstalled Liberia's first President Joseph Jenkisn Roberts unopposed. Roye refused to recognise this and maintained his own mandate stretched to 1873.

Liberia now had two Presidents, neither of which recognised the other, and the country began to lurch towards violence. Both the Republicans and the True Whigs began to organise militias in preparation of an inevitable confrontation. All it would take was a spark and it would take long for that to emerge.

Roye had won the 1869 election based on a populist agenda of spending money on investments in the interior. The previous government had earned little money thanks to their limited control of the coast meaning few traders actually paid tariffs, and balanced the books by spending very little too. Even military actions were conducted by private militias under the control of the local bosses rather than a professional army. Roye however felt that every modern country should borrow money in order to invest it. The Liberian Banks, however, were largely controlled by the Republicans and they were unwilling to lend him any. The Republican paper would loudly rage about Roye's government high spending and alleged corruption, with the True Whig Speaker, W.S Anderson a particular target thanks to his much publicised expeditions into the interior and Europe. When Anderson returned from the latter empty handed, having been unable to agree a loan with a European bank, the Congress shared his expense reports with outrage and arrested him for theft.

The Herald argued, in return, that by the African laws of communal property, it was only right for Roye to spend Liberia's money how he wished and openly began to push for the confiscation of private wealth from Republican 'rebels' to fund the modernisation efforts. In Summer 1871, a band of Royes' supporters attacked a Republican owned Bank to commandeer its money. The Republican militias in return marched on the Presidential Palace to arrest Roye and install Roberts in his place. Roye and his men put up a fight, there were exchanges of grenades and cannon fire, but the true powerbase of the True Whigs was outside Monrovia in the up-country where Blyden was attempting to rally the interior tribes and the farmer's militias and the Republicans were soon in control of the Palace.

Roye, and his cabinet, attempted to leave the city, aboard one of his trading ships, with as much gold as they could carry but were intercepted at the docks by Kru mercenaries. Roye was shot in the confusion and died aboard the ship, though his son and many of his closest allies, such as Hilary Johnson and Alexander Crummel, did manage to escape and rendezvous with Blyden.

For the Republicans this was as bad a result as was possible, their orderly legal coup had become a bloody civil war and with Roye martyred at their hands, the True Whig forces gathering outside the city were not in the mood for mercy.
 
Smith and Johnson
James Skivring Smith: 1871 - The Scapegoat

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Smith was born in South Caroline, one of seven children to a family of free blacks, but moved to Liberia with his parents at the age of eight. Like many families, the arrival was not a happy one, both of the elder Smiths died of Malaria within their first year in Monrovia meaning that James was raised largely his elder brother. Notably intelligent, even as a child, as a teenager he was apprenticed to Dr. James Lugenbeel of the American Colonization Society and eventually moved to the United States to study medicine at the University of Vermont. In 1848, he became only the second African-American to graduate as a doctor from an American University, and returned to a, newly independent, Liberia as a major symbol of black intelligence and work ethic. He worked for the ACS as a doctor and was soon elected to the senate where he became a notable voice for Liberian Expansion.

As Secretary of State under the Republican President Stephen Benson, Smith had helped organise the annexation of the Republic of Maryland and a joint Liberian-Maryland campaign against the Mande and Kru. Benson and Smith were far from alone among the Republican leadership in believing that expansion into the Interior and integration of the indigenous people was crucial for the future of Liberia but the political structure of the ruling elite made such integration difficult and Smith jumped ship to the opposition party in the 1860s as it rebranded itself as the True Whigs.

An experienced politician, moderate and friendly with the Monrovian elites and yet dark skinned and popular with the poorer majority who made up Roye's main backers, Dr. Smith was an obvious choice for Roye's Vice President. His actions in the Republican Uprising are controversial and largely mysterious. We know that, after Roye's death, he was captured by Republican militias and installed as President, until Roberts could return to the country from Europe.

We also know, from the Liberian Star, that President Smith condemned both President Roye's unconstitutional attempt at extending his time in office and the violence he had instigated in the city and said that he would serve out the remainder of Roye's term until, the rightfully elected, Roberts could take over. There is of course a huge amount of debate as to under how much duress he was under when making such comments. Supporters of the True Whigs tend to assume such comments were made entirely at gunpoint, while their opponents have more time for the idea that Dr. Smith was genuinely horrified and repentant by the violence and sincerely hoped to bring about reconciliation.

Smith's unfortunate death during the Sacking of Monrovia means it is impossible to say for sure. His time as leader of the True Whigs is left out of most modern histories, a sad ending for a genuinely trail blazer.

Hilary Richard Wright Johnson: 1871-72 - The Butcher

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There are few Liberian politicians with more unfilled potential than Hilary Johnson. He was the first major politician in Liberian history to be born in Africa, the son of Elijah Johnson, one of the original settlers and by all first person accounts he was the most natural politician and leader of all of Roye's cabinet, being picked as Secretary of State at the age of only 32. A long and rewarding career should have beckoned but the events of 1870 curtailed any chance of that. After that autumn, he would forever be the man who sacked Monrovia.

The irony is Johnson was only picked as the leader of the True Whig war effort because he was seen as a less controversial figure within Monrovia than many of the other candidates, with some kind of reconciliation with the Republican Congress still seen as possible. The Liberians still felt they needed to prove themselves on a global stage as capable of self-governance and while a certain amount of violence could be ignored and blamed on rotten apples, a full on civil war was rather harder to justify. Crummel and Roye Junior almost certainly would have come to terms with Roberts rather than risk the entire project collapse.

Blyden and Johnson however, were resolved to fight. Blyden had spent the time since Roye's election working in the interior and he could call upon his allies in Bopulu and the other Mande cities while Johnson was able to muster militia of the True Whig's farmer base. A sticking point was the Kru, with neither the Militias nor the Mande willing to campaign to Monrovia without a peace treaty in place but the surrender of the Sterra Kru in 1866 combined with Roye's election in 1869 had sent a shockwave through the Kru villages, many of their chiefs had begun to view cooperation as their only serious hope for the future and so Johnson was able to negotiate not just peace but the active recruitment of Kru mercenaries. While skeleton forces were still left behind to guard farms and friendly Kru villages, the main force of the Hinterland could march for Monrovia.

The weakness of the Republican position was based on their mentalities, they were traders, their focus was on international trade and reassuring their European and American contacts that the situation had stabilised and normality could resume. They were, of course, aware of the farms in the Interior and the way the fed the city but their instinct had been to secure international trade first. Thus, despite the time it took Johnson to assemble his army, he was still able to take the roads first and put Monrovia under siege, cutting off its food supplies. The republican militias rallied out to break it and were routed, with Johnson's army in pursuit.

Nobody planned what came next, but it was inevitable. Kru and Mande warriors, from both armies, who had largely joined the campaign for loot started looting as soon as they reached Monrovia. And the urban black poor, who had seen their man deposed and killed by the Republican elite, rose up as one. It took hours for Johnson to regain control and while quick work in organising bucket chains managed to prevent too much damage by fire, many citizens were raped, murdered or robbed before that had happened. The exact death toll is disputed, the figures published in the Star are doubtless exaggerated, but it is undeniable that it had a sobering effect on everyone involved.

Johnson, by all accounts, never got over the guilt. He retired from politics within weeks of the Sacking of Monrovia, living out the rest of his days as a lecturer at Liberia College and as an organiser of the charity efforts to rebuild Monrovia.
 

Glad to have you on board!

I always thought Liberia would be a great place to set alternate histories in. Thanks for creating this!

It's an obvious setting for one, because in otl you basically get 100 years of people saying 'guys, this isn't working, we need to bring the natives onside' and being completely ignored until it's too late and 1980 has happened. The coup against Roye was an obvious point where reform was just flat out rejected and I think it's probably the best chance for genuine reform because the elite hasn't yet become unmovable.

Nice to see another African timeline! Subbed!
Cheers, glad to have you on board. This is my second African timeline after a quick one about Morocco. This one should be a bit longer and involved.
 
So hopefully I'll get the new update about the presidency of Edward Blyden up today but in the meantime just some historical background.

Essentially most of the Roye presidency is otl.

Early Liberian politics were dominated by the free born settlers who arrived there first, rather than the poorer freed slaves who got there later, each district normally had the employer, judge and senator all being the same person. The republican party which provided all the early presidents was essentially the party of those first arrivals who got very rich selling goods to europe and using the new settlers as cheap labour.

There was also the racial wrinkle that most of the bosses were light skinned whereas most of the settlers were dark skinned. Of the four first Republican presidents, three were light skinned the exception being the 2nd President Benson. Benson assembled a dark skinned brain trust around him, Smith, Roye, Blyden, Anderson, Gibson, Curmmell etc. and that dark skinned elite became increasingly disenfranchised with his more light skinned successors. They took over the pre-existing opposition party (called just 'the opposition') in the mid 1860s. and Roye won the presidency in 1869.

This was seen as an existential threat by the republicans, because while their leaders were all from the elites. Roye ran on a populist ticket. Blyden, his speech writer, legitimately was racist against the light skinned elite and wanted their businesses and riches seized and distributed among the poor (the elite were at this point buying food and clothes in europe and america and having them shipped to monrovia at massive cost rather than buying from locals and Blyden hated this), Blyden and Roye also wanted to extend the franchise to the indigenous liberians who outnumbered the settlers 10 to 1 and if that happened, the elite would never win an election again.

So all the republican resistance to Roye is OTl. Only in ttl it's slightly less successful, blyden isn't exiled prior to the coup, anderson isn't shot and while roye is still arrested and killed trying to escape, that isn't the end to it because a true whig resistance force still exists. and so the entirely ahistorical sack of monrovia happens rather than roberts just retaking the presidency.

In OTl Blyden spends the early 1870s in exile in Sierra Leone, the republicans remain in power through the 1870s and the true whigs drop any talk of extending the franchise to avoid another coup, it becomes purely a vehicle for dark skinned settlers. And that distinction quickly stops mattering as immigration from the usa slows down post reconstruction and both light skinned and dark skinned settlers are intermarrying freely. Moreover as liberia enters a recession thanks to european traders undercutting their trade, there's no longer as drastic a class distinction. So the settlers stop thinking of themselves as being dark or light skinned but just as settlers with the indigenous Liberians very much the other.

In 1883, the republic party supported the true whig candidate (Johnson, the man above who I cast as the butcher) for president and the two parties essentially rejoin as a single party arguing for the status quo.

Blyden runs for President once again on the ticket of extending the franchise in 1885 but he runs as a republican and loses massively to Johnson. And that's basically it for democracy in pre revolution liberia, from then on the true whigs are unopposed.

In this timeline Blyden gets to be president in 1872 when the true whigs are still the party of expanding the franchise and he gets to be more radical and enact his pan African philosophy discussed in the introductory post here. He won't have an easy time of it, Liberia still has no money, Europe is still going to be a dick to it and the indigenous Africans and settlers still hate each other, something the sack of Monrovia is not going to help. But the whole point of this timeline is to give the liberian radicals a chance to remake liberia in their image by breaking the status quo through the coup against roye getting out of control. Blyden isn't Johnson (which is why I had Johnson quit politics early), he is going to try and redistribute wealth and extend the franchise, however much resistance he might face.
 
So hopefully I'll get the new update about the presidency of Edward Blyden up today but in the meantime just some historical background.

Essentially most of the Roye presidency is otl.

Early Liberian politics were dominated by the free born settlers who arrived there first, rather than the poorer freed slaves who got there later, each district normally had the employer, judge and senator all being the same person. The republican party which provided all the early presidents was essentially the party of those first arrivals who got very rich selling goods to europe and using the new settlers as cheap labour.

There was also the racial wrinkle that most of the bosses were light skinned whereas most of the settlers were dark skinned. Of the four first Republican presidents, three were light skinned the exception being the 2nd President Benson. Benson assembled a dark skinned brain trust around him, Smith, Roye, Blyden, Anderson, Gibson, Curmmell etc. and that dark skinned elite became increasingly disenfranchised with his more light skinned successors. They took over the pre-existing opposition party (called just 'the opposition') in the mid 1860s. and Roye won the presidency in 1869.

This was seen as an existential threat by the republicans, because while their leaders were all from the elites. Roye ran on a populist ticket. Blyden, his speech writer, legitimately was racist against the light skinned elite and wanted their businesses and riches seized and distributed among the poor (the elite were at this point buying food and clothes in europe and america and having them shipped to monrovia at massive cost rather than buying from locals and Blyden hated this), Blyden and Roye also wanted to extend the franchise to the indigenous liberians who outnumbered the settlers 10 to 1 and if that happened, the elite would never win an election again.

So all the republican resistance to Roye is OTl. Only in ttl it's slightly less successful, blyden isn't exiled prior to the coup, anderson isn't shot and while roye is still arrested and killed trying to escape, that isn't the end to it because a true whig resistance force still exists. and so the entirely ahistorical sack of monrovia happens rather than roberts just retaking the presidency.

In OTl Blyden spends the early 1870s in exile in Sierra Leone, the republicans remain in power through the 1870s and the true whigs drop any talk of extending the franchise to avoid another coup, it becomes purely a vehicle for dark skinned settlers. And that distinction quickly stops mattering as immigration from the usa slows down post reconstruction and both light skinned and dark skinned settlers are intermarrying freely. Moreover as liberia enters a recession thanks to european traders undercutting their trade, there's no longer as drastic a class distinction. So the settlers stop thinking of themselves as being dark or light skinned but just as settlers with the indigenous Liberians very much the other.

In 1883, the republic party supported the true whig candidate (Johnson, the man above who I cast as the butcher) for president and the two parties essentially rejoin as a single party arguing for the status quo.

Blyden runs for President once again on the ticket of extending the franchise in 1885 but he runs as a republican and loses massively to Johnson. And that's basically it for democracy in pre revolution liberia, from then on the true whigs are unopposed.

In this timeline Blyden gets to be president in 1872 when the true whigs are still the party of expanding the franchise and he gets to be more radical and enact his pan African philosophy discussed in the introductory post here. He won't have an easy time of it, Liberia still has no money, Europe is still going to be a dick to it and the indigenous Africans and settlers still hate each other, something the sack of Monrovia is not going to help. But the whole point of this timeline is to give the liberian radicals a chance to remake liberia in their image by breaking the status quo through the coup against roye getting out of control. Blyden isn't Johnson (which is why I had Johnson quit politics early), he is going to try and redistribute wealth and extend the franchise, however much resistance he might face.
Waiting to see your take on it!
 
One thing I never understood is why Liberia and Sierra Leone never pursued federation, even as a failed effort. They’re both freedmen states.
Something Blyden was big on, actually. You might see more of an effort towards that in this timeline.

OTL, relationships were often bad because of Freetown defining themselves by their loyalty to the british, and that meant supporting their efforts to fuck over Monrovia either by trade war, or in the early 20th century by actual invasion. So while there pre independence links, it was nothing strong enough to build on, especially since Liberia almost defined itself by its opposition to pan africanism.

Of course one of the way Blyden attempted to form that federation OTL, was by asking the British to annex liberia to Sierra Leone. In OTL he made that offer while acting as liberian ambassador to France and had no power to do so, the President quickly disowned him but in TTL, he's in charge so has more power to make that happen.
 
I knew there had to be some historical attempt. Perhaps less likely given its distance, I wonder if there will be overtures to Gabon as well, since Libreville was a former slave resettlement site, founded by Americans no less.
 
Blyden
Edward Wilmot Blyden: 1872-1881 - The Philosopher

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To a large extent, the history of the early True Whigs is the history of Edward Blyden. He was the Colossus that strode through the early history of the Republic of Liberia and did more than anybody else to define the political currents of the major parties, to this day there is still a place in Liberian politics for self-described Blydenists. He was undoubtedly a brilliant thinker who was, in many ways, decades ahead of his time, but he was also an at best average administrator, someone capable of alienating even his closest friends, a man capable of appalling bigotries and deeply out of touch with the average voter. There were good reasons why he had traditionally taken a back seat to less controversial figures in the True Whigs like Roye, Smith and Johnson. It was only the catastrophe of the Republican Uprising and the death of so many of the other True Whig leaders that meant that Liberia's most controversial politician got his chance at the top seat. And he would remain there for nearly ten years, serving out the remainder of Roye's term and two full terms of his own. This was not surprising with the Republicans painted thoroughly as traitors and the way the True Whigs expanded the franchise massively to indigenous Africans who had no knowledge of internal Monrovian politics and voted loyally for their chief's True Whig allies. Of the many extraordinary achievements of the Blyden Administration perhaps the most extraordinary was that they set up a situation where the True Whigs managed to lose the 1881 election rather than establishing permanent rule. Given the circumstances, it's likely only Blyden could have possibly accomplished that.

Blyden was born in the Danish West Indies as the son of a couple of Free Blacks and had the unusual, for a black man, advantages of a good education. He was educated alongside the Jewish population of the Island, a situation that led to a lifelong admiration and sympathy for the Jews on his part. He was an ardent Zionist, who hoped the return of the African Diaspora to Africa could be followed by a similar return for the Jewish Diaspora. This belief, in the need of a homeland for discriminated minorities, was one he had gained during his time living in the white majority Republics of Venezuela and the USA. In 1851, at 19 years of age, Blyden arrived in Liberia. He hoped to become a tailor, but he found in Monrovia a stratified society with no room for a middle class, the elite imported their clothes, and indeed their food, from Europe and America while the poor, mostly uneducated ex slaves, could not afford tailored clothes. Blyden was an educated free black and he fell upon his feet, getting a job as a clerk for Liberia's 2nd President, Stephen Benson, but he learned a lifelong resentment for Monrovian inequality, in which the merchants lived lives of opulence while the majority of ex slaves were brutally poor.

As Blyden advanced in settler society, becoming principle of Monrovia's best school, editor of the Liberia Herald, and an ordained minister, he maintained this distrust of those around him and it quickly warped into racial bigotry against the lighter skinned mixed race Liberians who he viewed as a weaker race, culturally unpure and untrustworthy. In his letters to the colonisation society, he maintained that the peace and prosperity of Liberia could only be maintained if they were banned from coming and only darker skinned 'pure' blacks were sent and further urged for no money to be spent on their education. If these letters had emerged prior to the Republican Uprising, they would have almost certainly ended his career but after that they only seemed prescient. Johnson has gone into history as the Butcher but Blyden was far less conciliatory to the defeated Republicans than Johnson would have been. He was ruthless in stripping Republican, and lighter skinned, elites, from their positions of power and wealth and redistributing that wealth and increasingly positions in the congress to both the poor blacks of Monrovia and the indigenous Africans. The first great exile to Sierra Leone began as a result. This was not itself that controversial, many of the other black intellectuals, such as Gibson and Curmelll, who had served under Benson had also become disenchanted with the later light skinned republican Presidents and so shared his disdain for the lighter skinned merchant elite.

Where Blyden lost them was his policy towards the indigenous Africans. Benson and Roye had both attempted to push into the interior and make deals with the indigenous peoples, under Roye, Anderson had launched his grand march into the Interior and set up a series of forts, trading posts and settlements therein. But they both viewed it as their responsibility to uplift the Africans, they took their cues from Curmell, who talked with horror about the trials by poison and human sacrifices he'd encountered in the interior and viewed the native Africans as savages who must be redeemed by being taught English and Christianity and Civilisation. Blyden on the other hand viewed the Africans as the black race in their purest and most admirable form and thought it was the settlers who had much to learn from them. Even elements that other Liberians were appalled by such as their polygamy and half naked dress styles, Blyden sort to mimic. Stuck in an unhappy marriage with a white skinned settler, who he'd married purely to allow himself to socially climb, he became blatant in his infidelity, claiming polygamy was the natural state, and shocked elite society by adapting native dress.

The problem Blyden had was he was wildly out of step with public opinion. The majority of settlers despised the native Africans who were slave traders, something ex slaves had a moral hatred of, and whom they had a long history of conflict with, the latest being when they had brutally sacked Monrovia. For many of the poorer residents who had lost family during the Sack it was not the Republicans who were the nightmare figures of that war, but the Kru mercenaries on both sides. Blyden attempted to break down the barriers between the settlers and the natives by encouraging inter marriage and for Liberian orphans to be warded with native villages as a counterpoint to the preexisting warding of natives in Monrovia but both proposals had little uptake. His attempt to introduce the Mande secret societies into Monrovian life was equally unsuccessful, cynically one could say the Free masons had that territory well and truly stitched up, and the opposition made much of lurid, and often untrue, tales of human sacrifice and cannibalism among the societies of Blyden's native allies.

Where he had more success was his attempts to house the homeless of Monrovia, after the sack, in new towns in the interior such as Arthington and Bewerville where contact with the natives became more common as part of a deliberate settlement of the interior. It is not a coincidence that the long struggling industry of settler agriculture began to finally take off in the 1870s. His attempts to force those communities to follow the native lines on communal property and cooperative businesses were less successful. Blyden was born free, he had never been a slave and so he did not quite understand how important the desire for land of their own was among the ex slaves. He managed to start crop sharing schemes among the plantations and a stronger support structure for new arrivals which did reduce inequality but individual ownership was too important to be removed entirely. The way the chiefs used cooperative effort to mean that the tribal chief assigned members of the tribe to work seemed suspiciously like slavery to ex slaves, especially since some of those members were domestic slaves. While mutual learning did happen, it was the work of generations rather than simply the settlers following Blyden's directive to act like 'pure Africans'.

He also, despite his time among them, misjudged the natives themselves. Many Chiefs were willing to come to terms with the Liberians due to their superior martial power but the natives, by and large viewed the settlers with hostility. The Kru, who took, almost certainly erroneous, pride in having always been slave traders but never slaves were contemptuous of a supposedly weak slave town. While to some extent the schools and roads the settlers built were welcomed there was also numerous armed attacks on the Liberian settlers and while all were dealt with by local forces, the encouraging of inter tribal warfare was not exactly what Blyden had intended. Nor did Blyden's outreach ever stop the troublesome problem of illicit Kru trade with Europeans to avoid paying export taxes and thus ensuring the Liberian treasury remained low.

What Blyden did more than anyone else was extend Liberian power further into the interior, with the famed Liberian Adventurer Benjamin Anderson leading multiple expeditions that annexed minor polities in the South Sudan such as Jenne and Medina into the Republic's territory. This wasn't at this point genuine control, the treaties mostly just asked for the natives to cease trading in slaves and recognise Liberian authority, something which was mostly ignored in practice. Under Blyden, however, there was the added wrinkle that they were invited into the Liberian democratic system. Despite what the Star often accused him of, Blyden did genuinely believe in democracy, he had far more time for the communal Mande than the more autocratic societies, and he was serious in attempting to extend the franchise to the friendly villages. But it was a rather uneven and halting attempt. For a start if only land owners could vote, nobody really knew what that meant in a society with no private land ownership.

The result in practice was that only village elders were actually enfranchised, though in some areas chiefs would vote for their entire villages and the distance involved meant voting tended to be spotty with apathy often overruling curiosity. Many senate seats assigned to the interior were either unoccupied or occupied solely by lazy relatives to chiefs who used the excuse of visits to the congress to get drunk in Monrovia and voting in presidential elections were spotty and dictated primarily by the enthusiasm of the local vote counter. While this did mean that the feared for indigenous super majority that would reinstall slavery didn't immediately develop, it also wasn't exactly the thriving Africa of Blyden's dreams. Corruption and bought votes were rife and, with some exceptions, actual political investment by the natives in a system they often didn't either understand or appreciate was a generation away. Blyden did propose attempting to solve this by moving the government inland to Bopulu where the natives could more easily attend meetings but even for his tame congress, that proved a step too far and he backed away from it as a result

Unsurprisingly, given his pre political focus on Education and Christianity, these became major policy goals of the Blyden administration. Both the schools and the churches were primarily funded by American based external charities rather than the Liberian government which rather limited what he could do but he attempted to interfere as much as he could. It was outrageous to him that educated Liberians were learning about Europe and not Africa, he wanted a syllabus that centered on black achievements and black leaders. His views in this matter were resisted strongly by men like Johnson at Liberia college, but the Blyden system did become standard in the native schools. In a perhaps more significant step for the future, he did also ensure education was extended to women for the first time.

Blyden also put his influence behind the independency movement in the Liberian Episcopal Church, he argued strongly that Islam was the more successful religion in Africa because it uplifted the black men and offered him black leaders, whereas Christianity only offered submission to white men. An independent Black Church was his solution to that and while Blyden was almost certainly projecting his own racial views on the would be converts, who didn't really have the same concept of blackness and were often equally hostile to black and white missionaries, his support to the independency movement was vital and helped them succeed in breaking out on their own.

The biggest problems Blyden faced however were economic. Blyden and Roye had worked out ahead of time that the palm oil trade was declining and so the merchant fleet needed access to other goods hence their push inland but such efforts came too late to avoid the recession of the mid 1870s, something blamed on True Whig governance. Blyden did attempt to compensate for this loss by encouraging increased cooperation and trade with the Sierra Leone creoles resulting in Liberian Coffee and Sugar companies spreading across the border but arguably this was to have greater political effects than economic ones. Money and immigration from the New World had also dried up, despite Blyden's best efforts, with the violence of the Republican Uprising clearly damaging the fledgling republic's reputation. Attempts to raise money for the rebuilding of Monrovia through charitable donations were largely unsuccessful, which was used to justify the targeting of rich Republicans for funds instead. Blyden attempted to print more money to justify increased government spending but he was no economist and the result was rampant inflation and the devaluation of the Liberian Dollar, with British Sterling taking over as the currency of the choice by the late 1870s.

Blyden attempted to solve this by retrying Roye's failed attempt to get a loan from Europe, agreeing a deal with a British Bank in 1874. The resulting deal was probably even worse than the one Roye had rejected 5 years earlier. The money borrowed had to be spent on British construction companies and in the end only a fifth of the money borrowed actually found its way to Liberia to pay for infrastructure, with the rest being used for 'overheads' and what was spent was grossly overcharged. Moreover the interest rates were punishing and kept the treasury low for decades longer, meaning ambitious plans for railways had to be entirely abandoned.

In his most controversial move, Blyden attempted to get out of this financial trap by selling his country, sending letters to both the Grant administration of the USA and the Gladstone government of the UK asking from them to take up a protectorate role, in the UK's case Blyden seems to have envisioned Liberia being annexed by their 'kin' in Freetown. His own papers seem to show the motives were a bleak pessimism about the inevitability of colonisation, with the justification being that it was better to enter an Empire on their own terms than reluctantly. Neither the UK nor the USA were interested and so talks never went anywhere, but it, as much as the sacking of Monrovia, probably contributed to the reputation Liberia had in the 1880s as easy pickings. And when details of the offers were leaked to the Star, there were anti-Blyden riots across the country.

By 1880, Blyden had alienated pretty much every faction in the country and he was convinced not to run again, though too late to save the True Whigs from defeat. He spent his retirement writing long articles in the Herald about the mistakes of the current Government and his dreams of a united Africa. In a poll held last year, he came 3rd in the ranking of Liberia's best Presidents and 4th in their ranking of worst Presidents.
 
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Interesting alt. history premise
Thank you, it's something of a wank but I'm trying to keep it realistic. We're entering the era of the scramble for africa next where otl Liberia lost most of their territory to the UK and France and very nearly lost their independence all together. TTL they're more established in the lost territories but it's not going to be a picnic.
 
and it quickly warped into racial bigotry against the lighter skinned mixed race Liberians who he viewed as a weaker race, culturally unpure and untrustworthy. In his letters to the colonisation society, he maintained that the peace and prosperity of Liberia could only be maintained if they were banned from coming and only darker skinned 'pure' blacks were sent and further urged for no money to be spent on their education.
Oh great, a Black Supremacist state is rising in Africa. Hopefully they don't try to attempt to conquer Europe or Spain.
 
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