Joseph J. Ross: 1885-90 - The Lawyer
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.