Liberia 



<i«^ 



1 



that these slaves should be restored to him. His demand was 

 refused. The Chief of Brumley, receiving assistance from the 

 slave traders, gathered together a number of armed men and 

 attempted to take the Liberian settlements on the St. Paul's 

 River. Mechlin accordingly dispatched against him a force 

 of one hundred and seventy militia with one field-piece, under 

 Elijah Johnson, which proceeded to the St. Paul's River above 

 the first rapids. The expedition was also accompanied by one 

 hundred and twenty freed slaves who acted as scouts. Johnson 

 seized the villages of the chiefs of " Brumley " and " Gurrats " 

 and forced them to sue for peace. Favourable terms were 

 accorded to them by Mechlin, on the understanding that these 

 chiefs were no longer to hinder the trade of Liberia with 

 the interior populations, whose caravans hitherto had been 

 constantly turned away from Monrovia. 



In 1827 the state of Maryland organised a society some- 

 what in rivalry with the American Colonisation Society of 

 Washington, and sent out to Monrovia on the Orion 

 (October, 1831) Dr. James Hall (a white) with thirty-one 

 emigrants. Hall and Mechlin could not quite come to terms 

 as to the allotment of ground to the Maryland Society within 

 the then existing limits of " Liberia." Consequently, Dr. 

 Hall returned to America to receive fresh instructions. The 

 Maryland State had heavily subsidised this attempt to export 

 free Negroes, and the philanthropists who attached themselves 

 to the scheme did so with the special aim of promoting the 

 principles of temperance or total abstinence amongst these 

 African colonists, realising as they did from the reports that 

 reached them year by year that the abuse of alcohol was not 

 only a universal fault amongst the Europeans and civilised 

 natives of West Africa, but that it occasionally sullied the 

 records of Liberia. 



152 



