It does not require a vivid imagination to picture the tragic condition of the earlier colonists as they arrived in the fatherland, and faced a wild country to be subdued, savage kinsmen who were their foes, a land without law, and a climate without kindness. These freed Negroes were, by training and experience, alien to the natives, and strangers to their fatherland. The story of those early years must be read elsewhere; but this merest hint cannot but call forth sympathy for the actors in the drama.
For twenty-five years the colonization society directed the colonial policies, until, in 1847, the colonists declared Liberia free and self-governing, and fashioned a government modelled after that of their native America. Since then, the Republic of Liberia has held its place among the nations of the world, and its unique position as the only State in Africa over which the Negro exercises authority. All the rest of the continent has been divided among the European nations.
Of the effort of the Church to supply this lonely colony with her ministrations, it is not our purpose to speak in detail. That has been done elsewhere. Our present object is to see what the Liberians themselves have accomplished with the assistance of the Church. We may therefore pass over, with very brief notice, the story of the Church in Liberia, until the time when she developed a bishop of the negro race.
In 1833, through the activities of Governor Hall and others, a parish was organized at Monrovia under the auspices of the American Episcopal Church whose interest in the well-being of the colony had early been enlisted. Two years later, Mr. James M. Thompson, a negro layman who, as lay-reader, had been holding the flock together, accepted the appointment as missionary on the part of the Church in America. A small appropriation was made, and a school was built at Mount Vaughan and opened, in 1836, with five boys and two girls as the beginning of an educational work which has been a feature of supreme importance to the development of the Liberian Church and to the Republic. On Christmas Day of that year, the Rev. Thomas S. Savage, M. D., arrived from Connecticut, the first white missionary sent by our Church to a foreign field.
In 1837, the Rev. and Mrs. John Payne and the Rev. Lancelot B. Minor, of Virginia, arrived, followed by others in fairly quick succession. For fifteen years these devoted servants of our Lord, battling with an unhealthy tropical climate, labored to establish the faith of the Colonists and to spread the Gospel among the neighboring natives. In 1851, the Rev. John Payne was called home to be consecrated and sent back as “Bishop of Cape Palmas and Parts Adjacent”; and, until 1869, he skillfully guided the enterprises of the Church. It is probably true to say that nowhere and at no time since the first three centuries of the Christian Era, has there been so much of heroism, and of tragedy, bravely and quietly and naturally endured, as in this mission of Liberia during the period of eighteen years which Bishop Payne’s Episcopate covered and in the thirteen preceding it. It is rightly called the “Period of Establishment,” when, at the cost of quite one-fourth of the splendid lives devoted to the cause, the foundation of the now native Church was firmly laid both to resist every shock of heathen attack and to offer its strength to the superstructure of the native living Temple of God.
And the call upon faith and zeal, so peremptory in Bishop Payne’s life, was echoed to the Church at home. The answer came in the persons of both white and negro volunteers; among them, the Rev. Eli W. Stokes, and the Rev. Thomas A. Pinckney, both of them negro priests.
Though it had been the consistent dream of Bishop Payne, and his steady labor to realize it, that Liberia should develop its own pastors,—that the tree should bear its own appropriate fruit,—it was not until negro volunteers in America came forward that he could dare to feel that the tree was ready for the fruit-bearing so needful to its life. In 1853, the staff of negro clergy was greatly strengthened by the coming of the Rev. Alexander Crummell, whose father was a native of the Gold Coast. The Republic soon established the Liberian College, of which Dr. Crummell was a distinguished professor. Throughout its history, College and Church have been closely associated in developing the Republic. Already, through the schools which had gradually grown in number as in attendance, the boys and girls had been preparing to take their places in the College, and as teachers and guides and pastors of their people. The coming of Stokes and Crummell and Pinckney and their Christian wives, furnished models in racial kind to both boys and girls, though Mrs. Thompson, widow of the first lay-reader, had long been a wholesome example. Speedily volunteers offered; and, in the Report of 1853, news was sent home of the admission of two candidates for Holy Orders from among the natives—Ku Sia, who, upon baptism, had received the name, Clement F. Jones; and Mu Su, renamed John Musu Minor. These men, ordained on Easter, April 16th, 1853, were the first products of the Liberian Church Schools. Following these ordinations, a stream of native applicants, small indeed as was natural, flowed steadily into the ordained ministry of the Church.
But evidently the negro colonists of Liberia had not yet proved their ability to organize and maintain an independent native Church. This was natural enough, for the colonists were poor and the Republic itself had not yet learned how to turn its natural resources to profitable account. Hence the Church in Liberia had to depend almost entirely on financial help from the American Church.
In 1855, the Board of Missions in New York, through its Foreign Committee, took the following action, which changed the entire status of the work in Liberia. “Resolved: That the whole extent of the American Colonial Settlements in Western Africa, including the State of Liberia and the colony of Cape Palmas, is considered as a missionary station occupied by this Committee.” From this time on, the Mission of the Church was no longer the Cape Palmas Colony and its near neighborhood, but was co-terminous with the whole Province of Liberia.