purpose of emigration, missionary activity, and commercial enterprise, and to these ends it purchased a vessel, the Azor, at a cost of $7000.  The white people of Charleston unfortunately embarrassed the enterprise in every possible way, among other things insisting when the Azor was ready to sail that it was not seaworthy and needed a new copper bottom (to cost $2000).  The vessel at length made one or two trips, however, on one voyage carrying as many as 274 emigrants.  It was then stolen and sold in Liverpool, and one gets an interesting sidelight on Southern conditions in the period when he knows that even the United States Circuit Court in South Carolina refused to entertain the suit brought by the Negroes.

In the administration of Anthony W. Gardiner (three terms, 1878-1883) difficulties with England and Germany reached a crisis.  Territory in the northwest was seized; the British made a formal show of force at Monrovia; and the looting of a German vessel along the Kru Coast and personal indignities inflicted by the natives upon the shipwrecked Germans, led to the bombardment of Nana Kru by a German warship and the presentation at Monrovia of a claim for damages, payment of which was forced by the threat of the bombardment of the capital.  To the Liberian people the outlook was seldom darker than in this period of calamities.  President Gardiner, very ill, resigned office in January of his last year of service, being succeeded by the vice-president, Alfred F. Russell.  More and more was pressure brought to bear upon Liberian officials for the granting of monopolies and concessions, especially to Englishmen; and in his message of 1883 President Russell said, “Recent events admonish us as to the serious responsibility of claims held against us by foreigners, and we cannot tell what complications may arise.”  In the midst of all this, however, Russell did not forget the natives and the need of guarding them against liquor and exploitation.

Hilary Richard Wright Johnson (four terms, 1884-1891), the next president, was a son of the distinguished Elijah Johnson and the first man born in Liberia who had risen to the highest place in the republic.  Whigs and Republicans united in his election.  Much of his time had necessarily to be given to complications arising from the loan of 1871; but the western boundary was adjusted (with great loss) with Great Britain at the Mano River, though new difficulties arose with the French, who were pressing their claim to territory as far as the Cavalla River.  In the course of the last term of President Johnson there was an interesting grant (by act approved January 21, 1890) to F.F.  Whittekin, of Pennsylvania, of the right to “construct, maintain, and operate a system of railroads, telegraph and telephone lines.”  Whittekin bought up in England stock to the value of half a million dollars, but died on the way to Liberia to fulfil his contract.  His nephew, F.F.  Whittekin, asked for an extension of time, which was granted, but after a while the whole project languished.[1]