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

Oh great, a Black Supremacist state is rising in Africa. Hopefully they don't try to attempt to conquer Europe or Spain.
Liberia at this point has no army or navy, just some militas, theyre not capable of winning a war against any European army.

Also like good luck finding any country in the 1870s without a racist as leader.
 
Liberia at this point has no army or navy, just some militas, theyre not capable of winning a war against any European army.

Also like good luck finding any country in the 1870s without a racist as leader.
And I suppose this timeline is in the wrong subforum for the Liberians to be getting a visit from Andries Rhoodie's biracial cousin...
 
Also Blyden was undoubtedly a bigot, those letters are from otl, though against that he's pretty unique in that time period for treating the native africans as actual humans but that doesn't mean Liberia will be. Blyden's party has just been kicked out by the electorate after all.
 
Anderson
William Spencer Anderson: 1881-85 - The Congressman

The 1881 Liberian Election was one of the closest in history and also one of the bitterest. It is difficult to avoid the assumption that the two Candidates hated each other at least partly because they were so similar. For a start they both had the same name, William Anderson, the Candidate for the True Whigs, would face Benjamin Anderson, the Candidate for the Liberian Christian Party. The two men's rivalry however far predated their turns in politics because they were Liberia's two most prominent explorers into the Hinterland who had spent the last twenty years mapping out the interior and making deals of annexation with the polities within. Benjamin, as his backers made much of, has been the more famous and more successful of the two, he had managed to reach Musardu and make a deal with that famous trading town, whereas William had been unable to reach Moussodougou. But both were far more successful than previous Liberian expeditions, which had seen Levin Ash briefly enslaved and William Seymour killed in battle, and had annexed their fair share of villages into the republic. As a result the election in the interior was bitterly fought with favours pulled in, chiefs bribed and in many cases votes simply made up in areas far out of reach of scrutiny by the Monrovian justice system.

William and Benjamin shared more than just a name and a career path, they were both freeborn black men from the Northern United States who had arrived in Liberia as adolescents and they both also shared a reputation for corruption and helping themselves to government money, indeed accusations of this when William was an important member of Roye's government had been one of the instigating causes behind the Republican Uprising. And both sides tried to paint the other as being a thief and scoundrel while white-washing their own sins. Benjamin's campaign was also funded by the remnants of the Republican party within both Monrovia and the exiles in Freetown (though William also received funding form the burgeoning pan African movement in Sierra Leone, meaning the 1881 election became the first example of the longstanding habit of Sierra Leonean merchants viewing the Liberian elections as a chance to fight their own arguments by proxy) which was something William tried to pin on him, though given Benjamin had fought for the True Whigs during the Uprising it fell flat.

Ultimately Benjamin won because he tapped unto a genuine discontent within the country at True Whig governance. Blaming the recession of the 1870s entirely on the confiscation of riches from the republican merchants is an exaggeration but the collapse of the palm oil trade and the devaluation of the Liberian dollar were disastrous and the terms of the infrastructure loan Blyden had agreed were ruinous. Moreover Blyden's attempts to seek the protection of a great power at the expense of their independence and the added humiliation of being rejected by those powers was a huge blow to Liberia's national pride. William could not distance himself from a regime he had been leader of the house for and he ultimately went down to defeat, though given the troubles Liberia suffered during the 1880s and 90s, it was perhaps lucky for the True Whigs that it was the Christian Party who took that poisoned chalice.

The Christian Party had been founded out of alarm over the corruption of Christian morals represented by Blyden's embrace of polygamy and African dress. Benjamin agreed with the True Whigs that Liberia's future was in the interior but he followed Curmell's take that the Africans were horrible sinners who must be redeemed by Christianity rather than Blyden's take that the Islamic and Pagan natives were prouder and more admirable than the settlers. Benjamin's stories of slavery, war and lax sexual morals in the interior, were much repeated in the Star. The much told story of him being stripped and groped by voracious Sudanese women under the guise of checking if was a black man, probably did more to encourage new settlers into the interior and into Benjamin's newly organised professional army (deemed necessary due to the way the militas were increasingly seen as politically aligned to various parties) than anything else.

The 1881 Election was also the first one in which many of the modern rules and customs that we're familiar with today applied. It was the first wherein the outgoing President left immediately rather than serving for months as a lame duck, a Blyden rule made to distance Liberia from American customs rather than, as many wits have implied, to stop the outgoing administration from stealing everything not tied down. It was also the first where one of the candidates was still a sitting member of Congress, as William had not resigned his seat in the House. After losing the election, he used that seat to act as a British style leader of the opposition, where he helped defeat Government attempts to reduce the franchise only to Christian natives, instead leading to the fateful compromise position of there needing to be a church in that district. That debate was one of the first ones with genuine participation from the native Liberians and paved the way for much greater Mande participation in politics and the True Whigs stint as the so called Islamic Party. Leaders of the Opposition and presidential candidates running for both the presidency and a safe seat in either the senate or house became the standard.

William ran again in 1885, hoping to make hay against a government caught up in the Sierra Leone crisis, but he was defeated by a greater margin and retired from front line politics. He was and remains the least famous and notable of the two Andersons but did a lot to form Liberia's institutions and flex the power of its congress. His problem ultimately is that politically he stood for nothing but opposition to Benjamin. The most successful True Whig leaders always had a positive vision for the country and William ran simply on not being the other guy.

(Authors Note: I can not find a picture of this guy anywhere. In cases like that I think I'd rather leave out the picture than use a portrait of someone else. Let me know your thoughts on that.)
 
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I've just read through this and have to say that I find it a fascinating read. I unfortunately know very little about Liberia, which makes this even more interesting. So, consider it followed!
 
Ross
Joseph J. Ross: 1885-90 - The Lawyer

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Ross was very much the last of the first generation of True Whigs, he like the rest of them was born in the New World as a free black, though he had arrived in Liberia at a younger age, eight years old, like them he had received a middle class education, had served in the Milita and had worked his way up through settler society thanks to the patronage of other dark skinned settlers who'd been among the first arrivals, working as an attorney for local judges. He'd been there with the True Whigs from the start, running unsuccessfully for the House during Roye's victory of 1869, fighting under Johnson during the Uprising and serving as senator through Blyden's presidency when he became known as one of the government's resident legal experts. He was an obvious choice to be picked to replace William Anderson because by 1885, there was deep suspicion that the Christian Party were breaking every law going.

The Liberian Crises of the 1880s had all had roots going back decades but by the 1880s everything was coming home to roost. The economy had gone into recession in the 1870s thanks to the palm oil export cratering, and it was quickly followed by similar failures of the dye and sugar markets as the big European empires began to overload the market and undercut the Liberia merchant leaders. Coffee, cotton and rubber would all still remain profitable until the early 1900s but these were all much harder to produce with only Coffee a significant export in 1885. As the Christian Party increased imports to try and reverse Blyden's Afrocentric economic policy and arm it's new army, this left Liberia with a significant trade deficit. Increasingly this deficit was made up with the importation of labour, with the impoverished Kru turning kobo-tabo and going to suckle off the white people as they called it in the coast by taking on temporary contracts working in Freetown, Lagos and the British Navy to earn Sterling, increasingly the only currency of worth in the country. This further weakened the settler economy due to the loss of their supply of cheap labour for their own projects and also the treasury as money earned abroad wasn't taxed.

To attempt to cope with this, and pay off the debt Blyden's infrastructure loan had lumbered the country with, Benjamin Anderson began to try and tax Liberian citizens leaving and entering the country and this was perceived in Freetown, where a lot of that labour was going, as an attack on them. Freetown was also during this time period going through a recession, leading to the local creole merchants being replaced and bought out by big European ventures who were not inclined to play nice with Monrovia. British merchants had been playing fast and loose with Liberian customs and tariffs since before there was a Liberia but now they had both the debt as a stick to use on Anderson and the justification of the Berlin Conference for a much more aggressive policy in Africa.

This reopened the question of Galinas. Galinas, like a lot of Western and Northern Liberia was only vaguely under Liberian control. Liberia was not really a country at this point, so much as a series of independent villages loosely allied to a single Westphalian state, that of the Liberian settlers who were too few and too poor to project power over much of it. Blyden's pan-Africanism theory had been that to bind these polities together within the Liberian Democratic system would see them act as one but it was too much, too soon to expect people to see themselves as part of the same people as their enemies who they had been fighting for generations. The leader of Galinas, Lahai, still called himself King and had de facto self rule, he had just agreed to enforce some laws at Monrovia's bidding, banning the slave trade for instance, and send a few of his trusted men to the congress to represent him. He did not consider himself Liberian, though his son who had been educated in a Blyden school and then sent to college in the United States did.

Freetown traders regularly traded with Galinas and at least since 1860 had been refusing to pay customs duties when doing so on the basis that Galinas was an independent country and Monrovia had no business there. Monrovia had gone to Britain repeatedly with their treaties of overlordship to prove otherwise and the UK had backed don but no actual agreement had been reached. Blyden's extension of the franchise to the people of Galinas had seemingly ended the dispute once and for all except that the Christian Party had attempted to withdraw that from the Islamic Vai people entirely and had settled on a compromise bill that only Districts with churches had representatives. While there was a Church in Cape Mount, there wasn't one west of the Mano river. Galinas and Sulima, to British eyes, had just been kicked out of Liberia. Freetown, eager to get one over one Monrovia quickly reached out to both King Lahai and his western most sub-chiefs and signed a series of new treaties that saw all of Galinas west of the Mano river joining Sierra Leone in 1885, just prior to the Liberian Election.

President Anderson was left in a difficult position, he could not possibly stand up to Britain but nor could he afford to be seen losing territory during an Election season. Instead he stalled out talks, won an election on being the tough guy standing up for Liberia and then capitulated, agreeing that the new border was along the Mano River rather than the Moa river in return for some of the debt being forgiven. He did however redouble his attempts to take control of the border and prevent Kru labourers from leaving the country without paying for visas. Moreover he attempted to enforce what the Berlin Conference called Effective Ocupation.

The new Professional Army, Anderson's main contribution to the Liberian state, was barely in truth professional. It was not, as the militias had been, unpaid citizens doing compulsory national service, but it also wasn't the unofficial armed wing of any political party and in the aftermath of the Uprising and the bitterness of the 1881 election this was deemed important enough to amend the constitution to allow a standing army during peacetime. Anderson recruited his force mainly from forces in the interior who had been fighting for Liberia as mercenaries for years and they remained essentially mercenaries. Often badly paid they were mostly funded by looting villages in rebellion or who had not paid their taxes. Their uniforms consisted of little more that hats and guns. During Anderson's first term they had been used primarily to protect settler towns from rebels but from 1885 onwards, there was a campaign of pacification.

Anderson was convinced that Liberia must be United, Civilised and Christianised. He invited in many more missionaries and set about an active campaign of church building and Christianisation. He also set about enforcing hut taxes, in either labour, goods or coins within the interior, and the Army was always ready if anyone would object. Various villages attempted to defect to the UK, France or the Wassoulou but with the Ture Crisis raging on, they had little success.

This led in turn to increasing reports of brutality and atrocity, from the natives, being republished in the Herald. Thanks to their positions in the Senate and the House, their chiefs could use the congress to get their opinions heard and increasingly they were. Ross made much of the President's Administration being corrupt, of money being stolen, laws being broken and of Liberian citizens living under fear of Liberian guns. The 1889 election should have been a True Whig Victory. Only it wasn't.

The Christian Party won a third term.

Ross refused to accept the results. His accusations of vote fixing were thrown out by the Liberian Supreme Court but he remained convinced that the counters had lied and that the judiciary could no longer be trusted to act independently of the government. A neutral bureaucracy became one of the True Whig's key demands. But even if there was vote fixing, and some of the totals are certainly suspicious, it was not just that. For a start many of the settlers liked Anderson's policy of conquest in the interior, memories of the sack of Monrovia still loomed large after all. Second, many of the residents of the interior did, if it was your rival's villages getting sacked and your boys taking home trophies as payment, it worked for you. Moreover a lot of the villages that had been in rebellion, were under military occupation and so either could not vote or had their votes organised by the Army.

None the less, the True Whigs could have still won if they had truly united the anti government opposition. But in a lot of the interior villages, Monrovia was just a name. Protestors didn't vote or attacked vote collectors or voted for their own chiefs instead. 1889 was proof that the old True Whigs were dead, in order to compete they couldn't remain the Monrovian party who liked the residents of the interior but must become the party of the interior. A party for and by the natives of the country. Not a party led by an American born old hand like Ross.
 
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Zeppey
Doblee Zeppey: 1890-97 - The Figurehead

The native Liberians were not remotely the unthinking savages they were sometimes painted by the settlers. The Kru had been serving as guides on European Ships for centuries, the Vai were not only literate but had created their own alphabet and the Mandinka had been nicknamed 'the only true gentlemen in Liberia' for their fine manners. However they did often have a world view that was alien that to the settlers, they did not believe in the ability to own land, for one and they had no substantial moral opposition to either slavery or the slave trade. There is still some debate as to how much exactly the leaders who signed Annexation treaties with Monrovia, understood as to what they were giving away. Lahai certainly seemed to view himself as an independent actor during the Sierre Leone Crisis.

Liberian presence was accepted, but certainly not welcomed. While the settlers had done much to improve the roads and increase internal trade, they had also limited external trade by charging visas for European merchants visiting the country which meant the Liberian merchants could underpay for goods. The attempts at conversion and taxes were also very much resented as was the brutalities of the Army. The democracy they had been extended by Blyden was seen as mostly a curiosity, a way to obtain bribes from the Monrovians for voting the way they'd asked for.

But the schools changed that, especially when Liberia College began to take in and educate the sons of Liberian Chiefs during the 1870s. This was in fact something the College's American backers had long been hoping for which is why they began to offer scholarships in American colleges for the best of the native students. The schools in the interior followed the Blyden system of emphasising black history and geography and taught physical work as well as academic work and Arabic as well as English and so were well thought of by the people of the Interior. Liberia College in Monrovia was higher thought of still and many a young chief applied to go there, often doing a stint in the army to pay for it. The result was that by 1890 there was a generation of young western education natives who had been taught the importance of democracy and were ready to embrace the True Whigs now the True Whigs were ready to embrace them.

At a great congress in Monrovia, the True Whigs and their allies from the interior, decided after three punishing defeats, that if they were to defeat President Cheeseman and his Christian Party, they needed a greater presence in native politics. Zeppey, a leader of the Gola, the first people to ally themselves with the Monrovians was known as a particularly influential chief, he was also the sworn rival of many of the Christian Party's closest allies in the interior, the likes of Fahn Kambo. His sons were present in Monrovia and they argued that if he was named leader of the Opposition and the True Whig's nominative choice for President, it would go some way to winning trust. It was still a difficult sell, and it was arguably only a speech from the grand old men himself, Edward Blyden, which meant it happened.

Yet, despite the headlines, during his time as leader of the opposition Zeppey was mostly a figurehead who mostly organised in the interior rather than in Monrovia. In Congress, it was still Ross who led the opposition to Cheeseman's government, though he was ably backed up what became known as the 'Islamic party' of Vai chiefs. The Monrovians might have read a lot about Zeppey but they didn't know him. The Star could publish an exposes about the domestic slaves kept in his town and the Herald could defend this practice being essentially a way to offer security to those who would otherwise be clanless outcasts rather than plantation slavery (the slave trade had been largely stopped but full abolitionism was a step neither party was yet willing to take and so would be pushed back for a future generation to deal with) but both articles would contain no quotes from Zeppey himself.

What they did know was what Blyden was writing in the Herald and that was about the Ture Crisis. Samori Ture, the Slave turned Emperor and leader of the Wassoulou, was one of Africa's greatest ever conquerors and throughout the 1880s and 90s he was almost single handedly preventing the French from establishing complete control of West Africa, one of their long standing ambitions. The fight between Ture and the French was one that would intimately effect Liberia as it was Ture's conquest of the area around Northern Liberia, that meant numerous chieftains had signed up with Monrovia or Freetown for protection, indeed in 1885 there was rumours that Ture himself was interested in signing a protectorate with the UK, though it's disputed how serious this was. Moreover the Wasoulou, though they did eventually establish their own gunsmiths, were also huge buyers of repeating rifles from Liberia and Sierra Leone, which became another market for them to squabble over.

France was also prowling around Liberia's Northern and Eastern borders, hoping to increase their territory at the Republic's expense and arming rebels across Greboland. Cheeseman tried to appeal to both Washington and London for help but their answers failed to reassure him and so instead he made a devil's bargain with the French. Taking seriously France's pretexts that they needed to secure Northern Liberia to hunt down Ture, Cheeseman declared war on the Wassoulou in 1892 and sent his own army after Ture, trapping him between his two enemies and dealing him a huge defeat in the following year, at which point France confirmed their agreement with Liberia's current borders.

This was however an election year and Blyden made much of the Christian's party betrayal of their Black African Brothers. Ture was Muslim and exactly the sort of self made proud black Muslim that Blyden admired. The Herald argued that Cheeseman should have not only refused to fight for the French but should have fought with Ture against the European invaders. This was an important moment in both pan-Africanism and the history of the true whigs as it was the first genuine anti-colonial sentiment to emerge from that movement, albeit from opposition and in service of political attacks on the government, thus paving the way the far more outspokenly anti-colonial second generation of pan Africans. But, while pan-Africans tended to be True Whigs, most True Whigs weren't pan Africans, it was very much a broad church.

The 1893 election was not won by the True Whigs on Zeppey's character. It was won on religious freedom, it was won on giving a voice to the people of the interior, it was won on the idea of mutual support with True Whig soup kitchens popping up throughout Monrovia and it was won by Ross's attacks on the ruling Administration's corruption and law breaking and on Cheeseman's betrayal of Ture.

Zeppey was a largely absentee President, remaining mostly interested in flexing his power over his rivals in the interior and being photographed with foreign embassies, but his term was a busy one for the True Whigs brain trust who were actually in charge. They were unable to reverse the economic malaise the country had long since suffered under but they did much to reach out to the tribes of the interior, reigning in the Army and doing more to ensure that the franchise was extended fairly. They also introduced bipartisan counters at polling stations and attempted, thought not particularly successfully, to remove political influence over the judiciary. As country after country elsewhere in Africa fell under European domination, the fact that Liberia was still independent and run by a native chief, even if he was a powerless figurehead, became a point of pride. But, of course, with the Europeans growing in power, there was no guarantee that would be the case forever.
 
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This is amazing. I really hope you don't lose enthusiasm and continue the story, we need more TL focused on Africa.
 
Thank you, it's something of a wank but I'm trying to keep it realistic.
Don't worry he comes across as both believably incompetent and believably competent. In the short term he's kind of messing up but in the long term he's actually laying down solid groundwork for a state. He seems like a real character, so absurd that its hard to believe he's made up but in a very believable way. His moves towards integrating the interior are laying a competent groundwork for a strong state but at the same time you can tell his efforts to integrate into the British empire speak of a profound pessimism. He feels real in the way only a fictional character can, he also seems like a narcissist.
The much told story of him being stripped and groped by voracious Sudanese women under the guise of checking if was a black man, probably did more to encourage new settlers into the interior and into Benjamin's newly organised professional army (deemed necessary due to the way the militas were increasingly seen as politically aligned to various parties) than anything else.
This is really funny!
 
Liberia is taking baby steps towards opposition to colonialism, which seems to be a dangerous policy. It can make many friends abroad, but they have to be very careful not to antagonise France or Britain at this time. Of course, later on that is the kind of thing that can bring a lot of status, but right now, they're far too weak, relatively speaking.
 
Don't worry he comes across as both believably incompetent and believably competent. In the short term he's kind of messing up but in the long term he's actually laying down solid groundwork for a state. He seems like a real character, so absurd that its hard to believe he's made up but in a very believable way. His moves towards integrating the interior are laying a competent groundwork for a strong state but at the same time you can tell his efforts to integrate into the British empire speak of a profound pessimism. He feels real in the way only a fictional character can, he also seems like a narcissist.

This is really funny!
Glad you like it and thanks for the detailed feedback. Worth noting that while the story is of course fictionalised all the politicians are real liberian politicians. Early Liberia is stranger than fiction.
Liberia is taking baby steps towards opposition to colonialism, which seems to be a dangerous policy. It can make many friends abroad, but they have to be very careful not to antagonise France or Britain at this time. Of course, later on that is the kind of thing that can bring a lot of status, but right now, they're far too weak, relatively speaking.
Oh, yes very much so. As I hint in the last line, its entirely possible for ttl liberia to be conquered during the next couple of decades, in otl UK, France and Germany all made attempts and it was largely Liberia selling itself to american companies that ended that threat. This Liberia is less likely to do that and so more at risk.

Having said that, you're also right to say babysteps. From the European point of view, what happened in 1893 was a Liberian army fought alongside a European one to win territory for a European Empire from an African one and both Liberian parties stuck to that deal. Against that a man who has been out of front line politics for a decade writing a newspaper article condemning it is probably not going to be too worrying.

When a sitting President starts saying that stuff, that's when they're going to sit up and take notice.
 
Oh, yes very much so. As I hint in the last line, its entirely possible for ttl liberia to be conquered during the next couple of decades, in otl UK, France and Germany all made attempts and it was largely Liberia selling itself to american companies that ended that threat. This Liberia is less likely to do that and so more at risk.

Having said that, you're also right to say babysteps. From the European point of view, what happened in 1893 was a Liberian army fought alongside a European one to win territory for a European Empire from an African one and both Liberian parties stuck to that deal. Against that a man who has been out of front line politics for a decade writing a newspaper article condemning it is probably not going to be too worrying.

When a sitting President starts saying that stuff, that's when they're going to sit up and take notice.
That will indeed be a big difference. But even then, it might still be dismissed as being empty talk. Until even the slightest thing happens of course. Then it's clear evidence that Liberia has to be dealt with to "protect peace and progress" by taking over violently and murdering a ton of people.

What no one here knows of course is that, barring butterflies, there is a pretty big chance of a major war between the European powers that ends up permanently crippling their ability to maintain their empires. But even then, that's decades away and in decades a lot can happen, especially in a state like this Liberia.
 
This is amazing. I really hope you don't lose enthusiasm and continue the story, we need more TL focused on Africa.
I think it'll probably slow down when we get deep into the 20th century, because a) I know less about that period and b) this Liberia will be so different from otl by that point that it becomes less historical writing and more fantasy. Even if you ignore butterflies to the extent of still using real life figures, which is my intention, the fact this Liberia has such a different history means they're going to be fighting over entirely different issues.

The question as to when to end it is one I haven't decided on yet. Arguably the original story I am telling, about how to get majority rule Liberia a lot earlier, is complete and I don't think a timeline needs to go on too long after it finishes saying what it wants to say. Except that doesn't feel right here because the story is also about the development of panafricanism and you need to see how Liberia having had a pan african party in charge effects the next wave of pan africanism in Marcus Garvey and his lot.

For that point of view I think a stopping point in either the 1920s or 1961 and an atl version of the Casablanca conference which was the otl high point of pan africanism makes some sense, it's showing how this version of pan Africanism fairs in comparison to otl's. But then you have the problem that by not dealing with the post colonial age, you never see that theory actually meet reality. So, if you need to go forward further, 1980 when the otl True Whigs were destroyed would be an ironic end.

And of course no matter where I actually stop, I can always do an epilogue or summary looking at the current day. I'm just wary about pushing too far into territory I'm less knowledgeable in. Everything up until the 1920s I have pretty much sketched out, but beyond that it's much more just vague ideas. Like at the moment Liberia contains a lot of what in OTL was Guinea and the Ivory Coast but, assuming France doesn't change its mind on recognising the current borders, I don't have an exact idea as to what that means in terms of which leaders from those countries will be Liberians in ttl.
 
Massaquoi
Momulu Massaquoi: 1897-1913 - The Diplomat

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Zeppey was stood down for the 1897 election by the Party. He had been a useful figurehead, a way of proving that the True Whigs were not just a Monrovian party and convincing those in the interior to engage in the democratic process, but he was also a temperamental man, prone to fits of rage and he and his people had many enemies who had been driven straight into the hands of the Christian Party. The True Whigs were not prepared to risk a second term with him. Zeppey, insulted, attempted to run as an independent but he lacked the resources to get on the ballot or get news out that he was standing. For all the genuine progress in democracy, soon to be extended to all adult men, you still needed the backing of a Monrovian party to run for President if not yet for congress.

While there was some desire among the True Whigs for a settler to have another turn as candidate, with even rumours that Ross might have another election campaign in him, but instead they picked one of the youngest and most promising of their 'Islamic Party' wing. Momulu Massaquoi, son of King Lahia of Galinas. Massaquoi was only 28 years old at the time of election but had been elected to the House in the 1893 election upon his return from college in Tennessee. Arthur Barclay, the Barbadian born leader of the Christian Party, made much of the dangers of an Islamic President and certainly Massaquoi's six wives caused comment but in most other matters he was a perfect example of the westernised native that Liberia had always dreamed of. He spoke excellent English and, having been educated by missionaries, had huge respect for the Christian religion and the principle of freedom of religion. The True Whigs won in a landslide, the extension of the franchise meant that there was now an Islamic majority among the voters and the Christian Party struggled as a result, they would not be back in government until they had rebranded themselves and merged with other opposition groups as the Patriotic Union.

Massaquoi is the longer serving president in Liberian history, ruling for four straight terms of four years, before he was finally defeated in the 1913 election by Henry Too Wesley, the Grebo Lawyer, and there was certainly criticism made about his monopoly on power both within and without the True Whig party. The more radical firebrands were in particular side-lined in favour of his western focused modernisation agenda, a situation that would very much change after his defeat. But his calm and diplomatic leadership proved popular among the tempestuous years of the early 20th century. He did much to rebuild bridges with Sierre Leone, where members of his family now lived as part of the outcome of the 1885 crisis and with Britain generally, though at the cost of making concessions in terms of customs. When in 1898, a German gunboat attempted to enforce a protectorate on Monrovia at gunpoint, the British sent out a flotilla from Freetown to force them to withdraw.

The Germans at this point dominated external trade in Monrovia and Massaquoi was careful not to offend them too much but he also needed to keep them at arm's distance and they were not the only threat. When in 1907, France began to make loud noises about the Liberian Borders once again, Massaquoi visited Paris personally as a result and managed to talk them down with offers of opening his borders to their merchants.

He also reached out increasingly to the African American community, where he had spent several years as a student. When the Coffee trade, Liberia's last profitable export, also crashed in 1901, he invited in a dozen graduates of the Tuskegee institute of Alabama to teach cotton growing techniques in the hope the coffee plantations could be replaced by cotton, though it took several years for that to pay off and didn't prevent Liberia's shift to an almost entirely agricultural autarkic economy from the thriving trade hub that had been 1860s Monrovia. He also opened up an industrial school in Ghendimah, the capital of his old Kingdom of Galinas and sought out foreign capital investment in industry and factories, though this was a haltering and limited process, not yet close to the thriving rubber and mining industries of the modern day.

His diplomatic persona also came in handy within Liberia itself, which was at the time a collection of different polities within their traditions, languages, religions and laws, joined together only by a loose democratic structure. Inter breeding and the practice of warding (orphans being raised by other ethnicities) did some good in merging them together but his time in office was still riddled with ethnic strife and rebellions. The biggest crisis he was faced with however was the mutiny of the army in 1899. The Army had not ever been well paid, their salaries had largely been supplemented by looting and with their excesses reigned in they were regularly short of cash. When payments were delayed for the 4th time in a year, they rose up en-mass, killed several officers and marched on Monrovia, looting all the way, to get at the treasury themselves. Massaquoi quickly called upon the Militas to reassemble for the first time in decades and the army was eventually disarmed, with most of the ringleaders shot.

A much smaller army emerged from the crisis, trained and ran largely by Buffalo soldiers who Massaquoi had recruited from the USA to keep order. Those soldiers often wrote diaries of their time in Liberia and provide a good outside glimpse into the country. They often noted how un-civilised the natives were, with their customs largely left intact including ones such as polygamy, domestic slavery and pagan religion that they found repulsive. They also were not impressed with the general poverty of the country and the poor quality of healthcare, noticeable in particular during the ravaging malaria epidemics which were common, but they appreciated the welcome they got from the people and were impressed with the True Whig's philosophy of communal property and mutual aid which saw poor Monrovians housed and fed, often within native villages. Their reports bought more interest in the country to the USA, who had previously generally held a hands off policy to Liberia, desiring it to exist without caring much about which state it existed in. William Taft went so far as to ask his congress to send a substantial aid package to Liberia in order to help kickstart its industries which the US would then take control of as part of the conditions of the package, though the bill was voted down.

Massaquoi's reign is often looked back on as a golden era but this is more a reflection of its relative calm compared to the turmoil that both preceded and succeeded it then of any genuine prosperity. He should be praised for his diplomatic and canny defusion of numerous crisis points but criticised for the way he did so by giving up control of his borders and allowing increasing foreign control over the Liberian economy.
 
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How is Islamic proselytizing in the country among later generation African Americans?
It'll exist, as will the reverse but I don't think it will be rampant. I imagine both religions will be largely targeting the remaining pagans and getting them to pick a side.
 
Johnson Jr.
Gabriel Moore Johnson: 1913-1921 - The Herald

In 1910, W.E.B Du Bois, the African-American humanist and intellectual, gave a speech in which he praised Liberia's history of democracy and civil order. In his own words 'the record of peace, efficiency and ability made by this little poverty-stricken settlement of the rejected and despised, sitting on the edge of Africa and fighting the world in order to be let alone is one of the most heartening efforts in human history'. It was undoubtedly sincere praise, but the tone is somewhat striking. Liberia had been spoke off by Black Americans in the 19th century as a shining city on a hill, the last great hope for the Black race but now, under Massaquoi, it was just a 'little poverty-stricken settlement' under threat by the great powers. And this reflected larger currents, with all the rest of West Africa conquered by Europeans, there was no one left to follow in Liberia's example and pan-Africans like Benito Sylvain instead flocked to Ethiopia, the great thriving Empire who had humiliated a European Army. Even internally, there was a general malaise around the country, the only reason the 1870s recession can have said to have ended was that it had become the new baseline for the economy. With the exceptions of its democracy and its higher education facilities, which local elites throughout West Africa sent their children to, Liberia was not much different in terms of day to day life then it had been before the settlers had arrived.

And it was the American-Liberian minority who felt this malaise most deeply, despite being comfortably the richest and most privileged ethnicity in the country. They had come to Liberia to have a chance to be on top, to run their own country and instead they'd been reduced to mere spectators in a native ran land, the 1913 election had seen a Vai battle it out with a Grebo. And nobody represented this fall from grace better than Gabriel Johnson, his grandfather Elijah had been a hero and leader who had rallied the first settlers against native armies, his father Hilary had led those same native armies to sack the great settler city and overthrow their government and he had served as the Major of Monrovia under a native President. It was time to reverse these trends of decline, it was time to make Liberia great again.

President Wesley had won the 1913 election based on tapping into tiredness with Massaquoi's endless rule and promises to clean up the corruption, tax dodging and banditry that plagued the country. Massaquoi had originally planned to hold on as leader and challenge Wesley again in 1917, but the party, it turned out, were equally sick of him. They did not want to remain his personal fiefdom forever. Part of the reason they had lost the election was that they were known primarily as the Islamic party, as the Vai party, and this meant they increasingly lost the Christian Kru and the pagan Grebo, if the True Whigs wanted to be a pan Liberian party rather than one centred in the Western regions, they needed to change leader. Johnson, Major of Monrovia, was picked largely as a neutral compromise figure who everyone could live with. He had not taken part in interior politics and so had made less enemies, Monrovia even at this point was something of a country within a country, a world apart.

In 1914, both Wesley's and Johnson's plans for the country were rudely interrupted by the outside world. The Great War broke out in the Balkans and soon Germany, Liberia's primary trading partner was at war with France and the UK, it's two neighbours. The cotton export industry, Liberia's only remaining export industry of note, crashed as the Germans could no longer buy. Moreover attempts to sell the Cotton elsewhere were hindered by a German submarine blockade of Western Africa. When the French forced Liberia into letting them run a wireless station in Monrovia, the Germans attempted to bomb it from sea, something Wesley used as an excuse to declare War. In practice German West Africa had long since surrendered so this mainly involved seizing goods and money from German traders operating in Monrovia but it made the 1917 election a procession for Wesley, running as a war time leader avenging the one Monrovian civilian killed in the attack.

Wesley used his place at the victor's table and membership of the League of Nations to secure more foreign loans and investment, with British and French timber companies setting up operations in the interior. Johnson, having held on after losing his first election, was equally interested in securing foreign investment, but of a slightly different kind. In 1919, he travelled to New York City where he met the leaders of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. The UNIA were pan Africans who had slogans such as 'Africa for the Africans, at home and abroad!' and Johnson hoped to put their rhetoric into practice. He invited the UNIA to move their headquarters to Monrovia, and the leaders agreed. In 1920, at a packed convention in Madison Square Gardens, their Jamaican leader Marcus Garvey started a campaign to raise millions of dollars to fund the movement to Liberia of tens of thousands of radical pan Africans. Garvey lavished praise on the Liberian government and men like Blyden in whose footsteps he was following and, in a moment that the Liberian chiefs of villages which still had domestic slaves should have paid more attention to, he also took a swipe at the Emperor of Ethiopia saying he had no interest in an aristocrat who ruled a country where black men were kept as slaves. At the same time, Johnson toured Liberia with Ellie Garcia, a Haitian far up in the UNIA hierarchy, promising that if the True Whigs won, Johnson would not only bring the UNIA to Africa but would stand down as president for Garvey, though he would remain in the government. For the natives, Johnson and Garcia promised new investment and new businesses to challenge the monopoly of the European companies, already notorious for their labour practices. But for the American-Liberians this was their people arriving, this was their chance to retake control of the country.

For Wesley and his Patriotic Union this was deeply worrying. He ran on an explicitly anti-UNIA ticket, tapping into xenophobic worries among the natives of being overwhelmed by the new comers. Liberia's third newspaper, the Commercial, which was based in the Vai city of Ghendimah, summed up the mood among PU supporters with an article calling the UNIA a scam under the headline 'Liberia is ours to govern and ours to enjoy'. In this Wesley was supported by the UK and France, who banned UNIA representatives within their empires after Garvey had made an explicitly anti-colonial speech in January of 1920 and the USA, where the FBI were investigating Garvey for mail-fraud as a way to discredit his organisation. Wesley was aware that ultimately he was a President of a small country surrounded by dangerous Empires whom he owed money to and he was eager to appease them by banning Garvey entirely. Johnson ran his campaign instead on not having to do that any more, on not having to follow the imperialist line, on being proud to be Liberian again and he tapped into a genuine current of new found boldness.

The True Whigs won the 1921 election, Johnson was sworn in as President until Garvey could be bought into the country, and made a citizen and then stood down. Garvey's first speech as President was greeted by cheering crowds throughout Monrovia. If they had known what the next few decades would bring, they perhaps would have been less enthusiastic.
 
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