Africa and the American Flag

by Andrew H. Foote

Great and corresponding energy was displayed by Buchanan in civil concerns. The legislature passed an act that every district should have a free school. Rules and regulations were established for the treatment of apprentices, or recaptured Africans not able to take care of themselves. Provision was made for paupers in the erection of almshouses, with schools of manual labor attached. The great point was, that the people had begun to be the government; and there, among colored men, it was shown that human nature has capacity for its highest ends on earth, and that there is no difficulty or mystery in governing society, which men of common sense and common honesty cannot overcome.

Buchanan died in harness. Drenching, travelling and over-exertion, brought on a fever when far from the means of relief. He expired on the 3d of September, 1841, in the government house at Bassa. Then and there was a remarkable man withdrawn from the work of the world. Ever through his administration he illustrated the motto of his heart: “The work is God’s to which I go, and is worthy of all sacrifice.” The narrative already given is his character and his eulogium. His deeds need no explanatory words—they have a voice to tell their own tale.

The blow given to King Boatswain’s successor, Gaytumba, nearly obliterated the predatory horde which he had collected: they were scarcely heard of afterwards. A small portion of them seem to have migrated northwards, so as to hang on the skirts of more settled tribes, and carry on still, to a small extent, the practice of slaving and murder, to which they had been accustomed. The Fishmen tribe still continued to raise some disturbance. Certain points on the sea-coast gave great uneasiness; these points were the haunts of slavers. Merchant traders, at least some of them, came peddling along, establishing temporary factories for the disposal of their goods, and not unfrequently having an understanding with the slavers for their mutual benefit.

CHAPTER XVI.

ROBERTS GOVERNOR—DIFFICULTIES WITH ENGLISH TRADERS—POSITION OF LIBERIA IN RESPECT TO ENGLAND—CASE OF THE “JOHN SEYES”—OFFICIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF EVERETT AND UPSHUR—TROUBLE ON THE COAST—REFLECTIONS.

Transactions growing out of the circumstances above mentioned, became of very grave importance. The rights of different nations to trade on that coast had been contested in war, and settled in peace, for centuries. The long Napoleonic wars had thrown possessions and commerce, all along the coast, into the hands of England; and in restoring forts and factories to different nations, the intention seems to have been, to let every thing, with the exception of the slave-trade, revert to its old fashion. At existing factories, parties were allowed to conduct their trade in their own way, and to exercise whatever competing influence they could gain with the native powers to forward their purposes. Comparatively few of the old establishments were preserved. Everywhere else the coast had become free to all traders; it being understood that no one was entitled to use measures of force to the injury of others.

If a private company of merchants in France, for instance, had taken possession of a part of the coast, driven off other traders, or seized and confiscated their goods, because they refused to pay such duties as the company chose to levy, the matter undoubtedly would have led to national complaint, and to correspondence between governments. If France disavowed all concern in these transactions, reparation would have been sought for by force. Governor Buchanan’s zeal therefore sometimes outran his discretion, in the outcry he made against the English Government, for resisting his interferences with their subjects, when these men were acting on practices of very venerable antiquity, or making arrangements with the natives identical with those which he, as the Agent of the American Colonization Society, was making.

Edina, in the Bassa country, for instance, had been the resort of vessels of all nations. Private factories, for trading in ivory, palm oil, &c., were there in 1826: such places were assumed to be open ground, on which the same might occur again, or were common property. Such had been the case on almost every point occupied by the Liberian Government: hence the levying of duties and the establishment of monopolies were resisted by English traders.

England was bound to defend the property of her subjects, or to compensate them for the loss of it, if this occurred through the neglect of the government. And it no doubt appeared very strange to Great Britain, that an association of Americans should claim a right to profit by duties levied on her vessels, when there was no government responsible for their acts.

From the feeling to which these transactions had given rise, it was inferred that something in the shape of reprisals was intended by the seizure of the “John Seyes,” a colonial schooner. But this ground was abandoned, by admitting the vessel to trial before the vice-admiralty court, at Sierra Leone, on suspicion of being engaged in the slave-trade. Of this there does not appear to have been evidence justifying even a shadow of suspicion. As the vessel and cargo were, by these proceedings, really lost to their proprietor, the whole case offers only the most revolting features of injustice and oppression. There was then no American squadron on the coast of Africa, to look after such interests.