recruits were soon needed.  An American Negro, Thomas Peters, who had served as sergeant under Sir Henry Clinton in the British army in America, went to England seeking an allotment of land for his fellows.  The Sierra Leone Company welcomed him and offered free passage and land in Sierra Leone to the Negroes of Nova Scotia.  As a result fifteen vessels sailed with eleven hundred and ninety Negroes in 1792.  Arriving in Africa, they found the chief white man in control there so drunk that he soon died of delirium tremens.  John Clarkson, however, brother of Thomas Clarkson, the abolitionist, eventually took the lead, founded Freetown, and the colony began its checkered career.  In 1896 the colony was saved from insurrection by the exiled Maroon Negroes from Jamaica.  After 1833, when emancipation in English colonies took place, severer measures against the slave trade was possible and the colony began to grow.  To-day its imports and exports amount to fifteen million dollars a year.

Liberia was a similar American experiment.  In 1816 American philanthropists decided that slavery was bound to die out, but that the problem lay in getting rid of the freed Negroes, of which there were then two hundred thousand in the United States.  Accordingly the American Colonization Society was proposed this year and founded January 1, 1817, with Bushrod Washington as President.  It was first thought to encourage migration to Sierra Leone, and eighty-eight Negroes were sent, but they were not welcomed.  As a result territory was bought in the present confines of Liberia, December 15, 1821, and colonists began to arrive.  A little later an African depot for recaptured slaves taken in the contraband slave trade, provided for in the Act of 1819, was established and an agent was sent to Africa to form a settlement.  Gradually this settlement was merged with the settlement of the Colonization Society, and from this union Liberia was finally evolved.

The last white governor of Liberia died in 1841 and was succeeded by the first colored governor, Joseph J. Roberts, a Virginian.  The total population in 1843 was about twenty-seven hundred and ninety, and with this as a beginning in 1847 Governor Roberts declared the independence of the state.  The recognition of Liberian independence by all countries except the United States followed in 1849.  The United States, not wishing to receive a Negro minister, did not recognize Liberia until 1862.

No sooner was the independence of Liberia announced than England and France began a long series of aggressions to limit her territory and sovereignty.  Considerable territory was lost by treaty, and in the effort to get capital to develop the rest, Liberia was saddled with a debt of four hundred thousand dollars, of which she received less than one hundred thousand dollars in actual cash.  Finally the Liberians turned to the United States for capital and protection.  As a result the Liberian customs have been put under international control and Major Charles Young, the ranking Negro officer in the United States army, with several colored assistants, has been put in charge of the making of roads and drilling a constabulary to keep order in the interior.