-^ The Founding of Liberia 



consisted of ten members, of whom six sat for the county of 

 Montserrado and four for the county of Basa. The administra- 

 tion of justice was vested in a High Court, of which the 

 Governor was president. Slavery and the slave trade within 

 the limits of Liberia were declared unlawful. The question 

 of granting citizenship to white men of European or Euramerican 

 origin was much discussed, but finally it was decided (mainly 

 through the bitter opposition to this principle on the part of 

 Elisha Whittlesey, a member of the commission appointed to 

 discuss this constitution) to confine citizenship in Liberia 

 to persons of colour, or " Africans." " African," I believe, 

 was the term originally employed and woven, so to speak, 

 into the Liberian constitution. (This was made use of a 

 good many years later by a Moorish trader, Attia, possibly 

 a Morocco Jew, who boldly established factories on the coast 

 and up the rivers of Liberia and carried on trade outside the 

 limits of ports of entry, claiming his right to Liberian citizenship 

 as an African. He was able to enforce this claim by the terms 

 of the constitution, although he and his sons were for the 

 most part as fair-complexioned as Europeans.) Many people 

 thought this condition in Liberia most illiberal ; but unless 

 there had been some restriction excluding white men from 

 citizenship, the slave traders already settled on that coast might 

 have claimed to form part of the Liberian community. More- 

 over, the experiment was being conducted admittedly in the 

 sole interests of coloured people, and considering the way in 

 which already in the 'thirties of the last century the European 

 Powers were laying hold of the African coast, it was not over- 

 generous to select for a purely African experiment three hundred 

 miles of the West African littoral. 



By 1838 Liberia as a State had attained a certain consistency. 

 The number of the American colonists was not seemingly so 



159 



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