"19th Century Architecture": Liberia, President Roberts' House and Sycophantic Metonymy

“19th Century Architecture”: Liberia, President Roberts’s House and Sycophantic Metonymy

Dk Osseo-Asare 4202m3_3.24.05

“The Americans are successfully planting free negroes on the coast of Africa: a greater event probably in its consequences than any that has occurred since Columbus set sail for the New World.”1

It is interesting to note that the nineteenth century buildings listed on this final paper assignment are all in Europe or the United States. Similarly, this class on “Nineteenth Century Architecture” attempts to analyze the historical and theoretical issues of that century while confined to this same closed, trans-Atlantic sphere. Such a project is absurd—not only because it denies the existence of the majority of the world’s population at that time—but also, because any discussion of the West is inherently tied to the networks of commerce and ideas that circumscribe the globe. This postcolonial dialectic of self-reflexive West and “other” is already widely accepted across many disciplines, generally as proposed in Edward Said’s landmark Orientalism. In his book Culture and Imperialism, Said demonstrates through literary analysis the problem of limited geopolitical scope; in his discussion of Jane Austen’s nineteenth century Mansfield Park, he observes that although the estate is financed by Sir Thomas’ sugar plantation in Antigua, the two properties remain disconnected and unlinked: Far from being nothing much ‘out there’, British colonial possessions in the Antilles and Leeward Islands were during Jane Austen’s time a crucial setting for Anglo-French colonial competition. Revolutionary ideas from France were being exported there, and there was a steady decline in British profits: the French sugar plantations were producing more sugar at less cost. However, slave rebellions in and out of Haiti were incapacitating France and spurring British interests to intervene more directly and to gain greater local power. Still, compared with its earlier prominence for the home market, British Caribbean sugar production in the nineteenth century had to compete with alternative sugarcane supplies in Brazil and Mauritius, the emergence of a European beet-sugar industry, and the gradual dominance of free-trade ideology and practice.

In Mansfield Park—both in its formal characteristics and in its contents— a number of these currents converge. The most important is the avowedly complete subordination of colony to metropolis. Sir Thomas, absent from Mansfield Park, is never seen as present in Antigua, which elicits at most a halfdozen references in the novel.2 1 2

Western British Review, quoted in The National Magazine (Vol. IV, No. 3, March 1854).

Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage/Random House, 1994), p.107-108.

In the same way that Austen’s exclusion of Antigua lends Mansfield Park a false autonomy, our study of the Beaux Arts, for example, suggests a cultural system that is somehow wholly contained to a French or Euro-American locus, when in reality it is not only still in flux and participating in the larger contemporaneous cultural exchange— operating at the level of the public with exhibitions like the Parisian Musée ethnographique in1882 and in circles of the artistic elite with the search for new forms and meaning in chinoiserie, japonisme, mélanomanie and moving towards the early twentieth century cubist allegiances to africanisme and the jazz- and vaudeville-induced negrophilia of the avant-garde3—but the cultural system of nineteenth century architecture realized buildings, consistent with Mansfield Park, as the direct result of built environments in the colonial world (plantations, mines, etc.): the system of architecture this course claims to address was already globalized in its material contingency and generated a hierarchical structure in which that codified as “ideal,” “good,” or “preferable” in the cultural epicenters such as Paris had far-reaching implications in removed yet related contexts.

Located uniquely at a historical moment in which competing cultural systems of the nineteenth century collide, this paper examines the birth of Liberia as a national homeland in West Africa for repatriating freed slaves from the United States.

Specifically, the argument focuses on period representation of the presidential mansion as symbol for the country, onto which are mapped the motives behind as well as visions for the new state. After first comparing the conflicting goals for free black immigration to Liberia—the largest block emigration in American history4—I will consider the diffusion of 3

Archer-Straw, Petrine, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000). Although this book deals primarily with the decade of the 1920s, it incorporates, especially in the earlier chapters, discussion of the nineteenth century precedents for the conceptualization of “other” cultures and “the primitive” in France.

4 Holsoe, Svend and Bernard Herman, A Land and Life Remembered: Americo-Liberian Folk Architecture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), p. 1.

architectural typology and methods of construction from the American Southern rural vernacular to the Liberian landscape. Simultaneously, I will offer alternate readings of the Liberian condition by visitors or citizens at that time, in order to expose its constructed nature as the product of American enterprise, and would-be Western (“civilized”) space in “Darkest Africa.” Against this field, I can finally probe the projected image of the presidential mansion as the iconic achievement of the state, reflected in the transplanted Victorian model by way of the American Southern paradigm of the “big house.” My thesis will unfold simply that this late colonial experiment, almost perverse in its constructedness, is profoundly anchored in the same lineage of aesthetic and technological “tradition” that is in the West subsumed as “architecture.”

Although Liberia officially became a sovereign nation on July 26, 1847, that independence grew out of a chain of events that began thirty years earlier. In December of 1816, an unlikely partnership of Quakers and slave-owners met in Washington, DC and founded the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States. The name was shortened to the American Colonization Society (ACS) and the group organized its first expedition in February of 1820, 86 freeborn blacks aboard the Elizabeth. The American Colonization Society gained tremendously from high ranking supporters, such as Henry Clay, one of the slave-owners among the founding members, and later, Thomas Buchanan, cousin of U.S. President James Buchanan and governor of Liberia prior to independence. The U.S. government formed a ready alliance with the ACS, recognizing the benefits of a distant repository for seizures from the international slave trade, illegal in U.S. waters since Congress banned the import of slaves in 1807. The cooperation between the ACS and the U.S. government loosely followed the model established by the British founding of Sierra Leone in 1791, mainly for blacks that fought on behalf of the British in the American

Revolution; the Sierra Leone Company, which at first owned and operated the colony, eventually relinquished control to British Commonwealth trusteeship. As Svend Holsoe points out in his text A Transplanted World: Black Americans in West Africa: The English and other Europeans have had a long tradition of using transportation to rid themselves of unwanted population. Deportation was a factor in the settlement of early New World communities and continued well into the nineteenth century, when criminals and other undesirables were deported to Australia.5

The U.S. government financed the first land purchases for the colony, and maintained a series of white American governors up until independence (hence the name of the capitol, Monrovia, after U.S. president James Monroe). The ACS was responsible for overseeing the colony in Africa, in particular the transition housing for “recatives,” as slaves freed from intercepted slave traders were called, and domestically, for setting the longer-term plan of action for the colony.

The dualistic, even contradictory, objectives of the ACS have received marked criticism in American political theory and history. Essentially, the vision of the ACS worked both in concert and direct opposition to the larger, contemporary grass roots efforts of abolitionists, who sought to legally eliminate slavery in U.S. territories. The philanthropist lobby of the ACS believed that blacks, even if technically “free” in America, could never achieve the true respect of their white peers nor equality in the political and economic system overall, and that consequently, blacks ought to return to Africa in order to create in their own independent state an egalitarian space for blacks. However, the slave owners who backed the ACS saw it as a means of removing the troublesome free blacks from the South, who, merely by their presence, threatened the entire machine of the Southern slave-driven economy. A scathing exposé of the ACS, published in 1833, argues that the society’s goal is to find an equilibrium for the status quo—large numbers 5

Holsoe, Svend and Bernard Herman, p. 3.

of black American slaves, which already outnumber white Americans in states such as South Carolina, versus an increasing population of freed blacks which undermines the slave-holders means of production and exploitation: It [the plan of colonization] originated in the fears of the slave-holders, and is the offspring of the Legislature of Virginia, its simple object being to colonize the free people of colour “either in Africa, or such other place as Congress shall deem most expedient.” It was no part of its plan to abolish slavery, to suppress the slave trade, or to promote civilization or Christianity in Africa. Convenient as it may be in this country to represent these things as objects which it embraces, its simple design was and is, to get rid of the free coloured people, who are regarded in the slave-holding states as the filth and offscouring of all things.

Their influence is obviously dreaded, and their increasing numbers looked upon with the greatest horror and alarm. This is proved by the following quotations from the African Repository, an avowed organ of the Colonization Society:—“The free blacks are a greater nuisance than even the slaves themselves.”6

In his article, the author assembles a damning collection of quotes culled from the African Repository, the official journal of the ACS, including comments such as: “[The objects of the society] are, in the first place, to aid ourselves by relieving us from a species of population pregnant with future danger and present inconvenience.” (7th Annual Report); “What is the free black to the slave?—A standing perpetual excitement to discontent; the slave would have little excitement to discontent but for the free black.” (15th Annual Report); and, “Let these 300,000 men be banished, and the security of the slaveholder will never be broken by the uplifted voice of freedom contending for equal rights.” A modern echo of this nineteenth century critique of the Society can be found in historian Herman Eduard von Holst’s classic Constitutional and Political History of the United States, in which he says succinctly, regarding this duplicitous agenda of the ACS: “The slave states knew exactly what they wished and laughed in their sleeve at seeing the philanthropists of the North falls so readily in the trap.”7 The conflicting views of the sponsors of the ACS (the Northern humanitarian endeavor to relocate free blacks 6

Clericus, Facts Designed to Exhibit the Real Character and Tendency of the American Colonization Society (Liverpool: Egerton Smith and Co., 1833).

7 Holst, Herman Eduard von, quoted in Johnson, Bitter Canaan: The Story of the Negro Republic (London/ New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992), p. 20, and Pham, Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (New York: Reed Press, 2004), p. 8.

for the latter’s personal and spiritual benefit versus the Southern slave-owners selfinterested effort to secure his assets for the future) becomes profoundly important in analyzing settler architecture in Liberia. Because the ACS, despite what may be written in its own internal publications, publicly cloaks the project of black American colonization in the language of egalitarianism and evangelism, the Society’s presentation of the Liberian colony, and later, state, demands at all times active preservation of the image of black American reintroduction into Africa as a beacon of Christian civilization, ultimately capable of transforming the continent.

The discrepancy between official and alternative versions of nineteenth century Liberia reveals the degree to which the ACS controlled the perception of Liberia internationally.

A short treatise by William Nesbit, Four Months in Liberia: or African Colonization Exposed, written in 1855, explains that it is essentially impossible for an individual to leave Liberia, once having arrived, unless he receives express permission from the ACS administration. Anyone who appears likely to portray the Liberian project in a poor light will never be granted a visa to leave, as would anyone without financial means. Thus, the author professed admiration for Liberia at length and very publicly during his four month tenure, so that the administration would believe he wished to sail to the U.S. only to retrieve his family and return. Once safely back in America, he says: This institution is a scheme of the most consummate villainy ever enacted, and though supported and applauded by some of the greatest and best of the land, by different men, from different motives, has enlisted in its cause as agents, some of the most unscrupulous men, white and colored, to be found anywhere; men who for the love of gold, create and circulate the most egregious falsehoods for the express purpose of fleecing the public out of their money, and living on and victimizing the unsuspecting colored man‌ There are seven brick houses [in Monrovia], a few comfortable frame houses, but by far the largest number are very indifferent dilapidated frame and bamboo huts, certainly not worth ten dollars a piece. On all these buildings the climate has such a blighting effect, that they wear a withering and ruinous appearance; indeed the meanest village that I know in the United States, far transcends Monrovia in the beauty of its buildings, and the appearance of its thrift. As there

are no horses, cattle or beasts of any kind, all the labor has to be performed by the naked natives.8

On the other hand, the African Repository throughout the mid-1800s incessantly lauds the “success” of the various missionary projects, the historic value of “civilized” blacks in Africa, and the overall “progress” of the Liberian project: There can be no doubt of advancement when house building and boat building are becoming common throughout the land, and when coffee and sugar cane farms are doubling in their extent.”9

This inconsistency between the message of the ACS, which effectively controlled all Liberian communications, and the reality on the ground is mirrored in two passages from the Liberian Declaration of Independence: We, the people of the Republic of Liberia, were originally inhabitants of the United States of North America…

The native African bowing down with us before the altar of the living God, declares that from us, feeble as we are, the light of Christianity has gone forth, while upon the curse of curses, the slave trade, a deadly blight has fallen, as far as our influence extends.

That these were lines were not only penned by the signers, but eventually recognized internationally (in Europe and America, and so too among the state’s neighboring European colonies in Africa) as part of the mandate of the nation of Liberia underscores its confused origins. Similarly, the juxtaposition of an anti-slavery attitude with the reality on the ground in Liberia confirms the violent contradictions. Although the settlers were indeed, “originally inhabitants of the United States,” labeling them as “the people of the Republic of Liberia” automatically disenfranchises the huge population of native Africans already living in the territories claimed by Liberia. With a fleet of a single ship and few trained sailors or solders, Liberia was itself powerless against slavers, who continued to ply its coasts. Furthermore, visitors to Liberia record a thriving local slave trade: 8

Nesbit, William, Four Months in Liberia: or African Colonization Exposed (Pittsburgh: J.T. Shryock, 1855).

9 “Inauguration of President Warner,” African Repository 40 (3): 92 (March 1864).

I have seen barbarous cruelties inflicted upon the aborigines by the Americans; whether the crime justifies the act, I am not able to say; but there is the same relation existing with many, as there is in the South between master and slave, with as much seeming authority;10

The final significance of the glaring inconsistencies occurring between Liberian documentation of this sort is that Liberia of the nineteenth century was entirely constructed; no one, or at least, almost no one, actually saw Liberia; it existed in the form of pamphlets and short articles, and in the contemporary narrative of popular myth.

The number of people who went to Liberia from Europe or America, who were not black immigrants to Liberia, and who returned from Liberia, or who were not Liberian civil servants or missionaries, is virtually negligible. Those who transported immigrants to Liberia, as well as the ambassadors and missionaries who did travel to and from Liberia, were all on the payroll of the ACS or affiliated missionary programs; as such, they had little desire to criticize the Liberian project, and indeed were selected precisely because they projected an optimistic commitment to the institution and its cause. Consequently, when reading contemporary versions of the settler experience in Liberia, including their perception of their new built environment, we must be fiercely vigilant in the identifying the allegiances of the historical authors.

Most of the roughly seventeen thousand black American immigrants to Liberia during the nineteenth century were from the rural American South. In Liberian counties with names like Louisiana, New Georgia, Maryland and Virginia, these new Liberian citizens redeployed the techniques of building construction they were familiar with previously in the United States—along with cultural codes adopted over an extended period of historical immersion, even if subjugated participation, in American society. The primary 10

Letter from John H. Harris, of Greensburg, Virginia, dated March 30th, 1855. From Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, ed., Liberian Dreams: Back-to-Africa Narratives from the 1850s (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), p. 122.

study of the transfer of Southern vernacular traditions of building from rural America to Liberia is photographic documentation conducted by Max Belcher during the 1970s and 1980s. In his book A Land and Life Remembered (text by Svend Holsoe and Bernard Herman), Belcher took comparative photographs of Arthington, Liberia, a community twenty miles outside Monrovia settled between 1869 and 1872, and the houses and churches in rural Georgia, North Carolina and Maryland, where the settlers originally lived. Many of the American buildings he photographed date from the nineteenth century, and the near-identicalness of the Liberian counterparts is remarkable.

While Belcher, Holsoe and Herman engage in-depth comparison of the various housing types found in Arthington and the settler’s home communities in the United States, I am interested here more in a performative understanding of architecture in the nineteenth century Liberian situation. That is to say, rather than extracting the precise similarities and differences between the trans-Atlantic vernacular conditions, I would extract from textual analysis of nineteenth century writing in and about Liberia a sense of how people —both settlers and non-settlers abroad—viewed architecture in that context. Herman proposes that, “The most common and enduring building form in Arthington—and throughout all the Liberian settler communities—remains the house.”11 This privileging of the house as an architectural type derives from the nature of Liberia’s “citizens.” As settlers, these first citizens arrived on foreign soil at a very specific moment, with only the temporary lodgings of the ACS (if that); therefore, their first objective became, in every case, erecting a house of their own. In addition, because the majority of settlers were from southern states, they incorporated the ideological universe of architectural preconception unique to the American South. At the same time that the process of house-building (self-build and local labor, scarce construction tools and technology) 11

Holsoe, Svend and Bernard Herman, p. 97.

meant that most buildings would be crude and rudimentary, settlers aspired to the glorious plantation houses inscribed in their memory. Herman notes that such aspiration is evidenced in the progression of building materials, from simple log cabin construction, to wooden frame houses, and finally to brick and stone dwellings. One of the poorer settlers, Richard McMorine, underscores the social value embedded in the perceived quality of a given dwelling, or as Herman suggests, “the spirit, direction, and disappointment of architectural desire”: But I Cannot Save anything, so I Cannot Build me a good house. Now I said that the First thing that I did was to Build me a house so it was. But it was not such a one as I would like to have. When we Come to this Country we have to Build Such as we Can But After that we want a better one. So I am not able to Build me one. It will Cost Double in this Country to Build what it will cost in the unted Stats so to Build such a one As I woult want would Cost about 700 hundred and so I Cannot Get One.12

The preference among settler construction invariably aimed toward what in the American South was referred to as the “big house,” i.e. the main building of a country plantation, housing the owner of the estate and his immediate family, and usually designed along a rough Victorian or Georgian model. Herman suggests a direct association between settler’s ideas of power and “cultural permanence,” coupled with the concept of a privileged gentry or “propertied society,” and the American Southern precedent, where “only the rural elite invested in country seats built in brick and stone.”13

At this point, it becomes possible to consider the meaning of the residence of the president of Liberia in the context of a larger historical meaning. As already noted, the American Colonization Society existed in a balance entirely dependent on the success of the Liberian project. If, at any point, Liberia began to be widely seen in either the United States or Europe as a complete or even partial failure, government backing would be jeopardized and popular support, already conflicted, would disintegrate. Such a 12 13

Holsoe, Svend and Bernard Herman, p. 99.

Holsoe, Svend and Bernard Herman, p. 114.

meltdown, of course, was unthinkable to the assemblage of humanitarians and slaveowners who backed the ACS, in keeping with their separate visions and ideologies. As I carried out this research, it dawned on me that in this light of the ACS’ need for a specific public display, the perceived success of Liberia is one which can be easily defined and perpetuated by a few strategically-enforced images. Relatedly, the singlemost reproduced image in not only nineteenth century writing on Liberia, but also historical studies from the early twentieth century onwards is an etching titled “President Roberts’s House.”

While at first I simply assumed that this must simply be the most historically accessible image, I later began to wonder why this was so. Surely there must have been new citizens of Liberia who were capable of drawing the new nation; no doubt that any colonial administration or U.S. government liaison responsible for detailing the progress of the new nation would have the capacity to commission a score of timely illustrations.

However, the nature of the American sponsorship of the Liberian colony and state may suggest part of why such a limited visual record exists. As quoted earlier from the African Repository, internally the ACS was most concerned with promoting black American immigration to Liberia and ensuring the sustainability of the Society’s own efforts to transport black Americans in large numbers. Thus the African Repository is filled with statistics on numbers of emigrants, financial pledges of ACS sponsors, and inventory of goods produced in and shipped to Liberia, the later essentially to determine further export and immigration planning (numerous members of the ACS were also profiting immensely off the newfound dependence of the Liberian economy on American goods such as guns, liquor, tools and machinery, and even building materials such as bricks, viewed as superior to Liberian sources, or glass and metals)—but no images. An article on President Roberts (the first president of independent Liberia) and the Republic

of Liberia in the March 1854 edition of the National Magazine is a final source which demonstrates the calculated dissemination of the image of the presidential mansion as propaganda of the success of Liberia (see next two pages).

Thus, it does not matter that black American settlers in Liberia were dying like flies due to malaria, sleeping sickness and other tropical diseases, that slavery and indentured servitude were rampant in a society of former slaves who professed absolute abhorrence of the practice, that the missionary establishments that together with the ACS (i.e. a syndicate of high-powered American religious and mercantile leaders) ran the colony, repackaged as an independent state, were the primary traders in guns and liquor although they refused to officially acknowledge the practice, that the municipal system was dominated by nepotism and cronyism, tacitly approved and backed by the ACS, or that all of Liberia’s continental neighbors remained in colonial servitude—never mind such troubling concerns, because Liberia was a beacon of civilization. Liberians could rest assured that their president occupied a “proper” brick house, and, simultaneously, foreign financiers of the de facto remote-controlled Liberian plantations could know that at least their dollars were supporting a new black “civilization,” conceived in total accordance with their own, Western cultural system and evidenced by a Carolingian manor replete with arcades and horses prancing in the English garden remade for the tropics. Such is the power of the white man’s architecture.

List of Works Consulted and Cited

Archer-Straw, Petrine, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000).

Belcher, Max, Beverly Buchanan and William Christenberry, House and Home: Spirits of the South (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1994).

Benjamin, George, Edward W. Blyden: Messiah of Black Revolution (New York: Vantage Press Inc., 1979).

Clegg, Claude, The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

Clericus, Facts Designed to Exhibit the Real Character and Tendency of the American Colonization Society (Liverpool: Egerton Smith and Co., 1833).

Daniels, Anthony, Monrovia Mon Amour: A Visit to Liberia (London: John Murray, 1992).

Holsoe, Svend and Bernard Herman, A Land and Life Remembered: Americo-Liberian Folk Architecture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988).

Holst, Herman Eduard von, Constitutional and Political History of the United States, quoted in Johnson, Bitter Canaan: The Story of the Negro Republic (London/ New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992), p. 20, and Pham, Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (New York: Reed Press, 2004), p. 8. “Inauguration of President Warner,� African Repository 40 (3): 92 (March 1864).

Lynch, Hollis, ed., Selected Letters of Edward Wilmot Blyden (Millwood, NY: KTO Press, 1978).

Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, ed., Liberian Dreams: Back-to-Africa Narratives from the 1850s (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).

Nesbit, William, Four Months in Liberia: or African Colonization Exposed (Pittsburgh: J.T. Shryock, 1855).

Pham, John-Peter, Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (New York: Reed Press, 2004).

Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage/Random House, 1994).

Shick, Tom, Behold the Promised Land: A History of Afro-American Settler Society in Nineteenth Century Liberia (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1980).

Western British Review, quoted in The National Magazine (Vol. IV, No. 3, March 1854).

Young, Robert, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990).