The Grebo-Republic of Maryland War

            To understand the causes of the war between the Kru language-speaking Grebo people and the Republic of Maryland, a war about which we know almost no details, we only need to look at one institution: slavery. But before we get into that though, who the hell are the Grebo people and what was the Republic of Maryland?

            The first question is a little more easily answered so I’ll start there, although it’s not as cut and dried as it seems. See, when we, and by “we” I mean nation-states influenced primarily be western European culture; you know, white people. Yes, when we historically encountered other people, we were primarily motivated by the desire to steal their land, their natural resources, and in the case of Africa, their bodies. Only the live ones though. It was only in the 20^th century that western civilization discovered the value to be extracted from dead Africans by way of pointing out to the descendants of slaves how lucky they are to live in a country where they don’t get their arms chopped off with machetes for speaking the wrong language. There’s just the perfectly acceptable risk of being killed by police officers for not following their hastily shouted orders to the letter. But I digress.

            Although it’s a little more complex than this, on a basic level, humans tend to organize themselves into groups based on which language they speak, until they can fragment into smaller groups based on things like whether they prefer Star Trek or Star Wars, or what their favorite beer is, and this is true of the Kru-speaking peoples of Western Africa, who inhabit a region now composing parts of the coasts of Liberia and the Ivory Coast. It was once known as the Pepper Coast for the melegueta pepper that grows there. Fun fact: the melegueta pepper is part of the ginger family. Do not get it confused with the malegueta pepper which is an actual pepper. Apparently, people do that all the time.

            Another fun fact, which relates to our story, we’re a little fuzzy on the origin of the word ‘Kru’ to refer to this language group. It’s not a word that occurs in that or any other local language. Because of their knowledge in seafaring and navigation of the local waters individual Kru were frequently hired as crewmen by European ships that traded in the area. Another name used for these Kru sailors and the group as a whole at the time was Krumen. The best guess by linguists is that by this association the word ‘crew’ became ‘kru’ and stuck. To further complicate things, the Grebo people, who are a sub-group of the Kru, located on the southern point of that cultural group’s range, are still called Krumen to this day in the Ivory Coast. What’s most important to this story though is that the Kru were sailors, and also notable for their stubborn resistance to outsiders and captivity. The latter made the Kru horrible candidates for slavery, but the former made them much sought after for employment by captains of the slave ships which did their business in West Africa, and later by the British ships as part of the West Africa Squadron that patrolled those same waters in an effort to eradicate the slave trade. As far as can be told from accounts of the time, the Kru took a mercenary approach, and didn’t much care for which side they worked, as long as they were paid.

            Now on to the Republic of Maryland, which if you’ve never heard of it, don’t be surprised. I hadn’t heard of it until a month ago and my main hobby is knowing obscure historical shit like this. The Republic’s origins are rooted in the fact that as far back as slavery existed in the United States and earlier Colonial America, there were slave owners who for whatever reason freed slaves. These freed black men and women then had to integrate into a largely racist and hostile white society. Right or wrong, this integration wasn’t an easy thing for either side. It’s not surprising then that at some point, someone had the brilliant plan of “returning” free blacks in America to an Africa that most of them never knew, and overwhelmingly didn’t want to go to. The vehicle for this brilliant plan was the American Colonization Society, conceived of, naturally, by two white dudes, Charles Fenton Mercer and the Reverend Robert Finley. Both were opposed to slavery, but nevertheless felt, for various reasons most of us today would recognize as racist, that free black people could not integrate into American society. And they weren’t alone; the founding meeting of the Society included such American luminaries as James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Francis Scott Key, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay. I’ll give you a moment to recover from the shock of finding out that the idea of Back to Africa that Bob Marley sang about was started by white people.

            This wasn’t an unpopular idea at the time, at least for white people. It would continue to be so through the American Civil War and even later. Many people devoted to the abolition of slavery thought along similar lines to Mercer and Finley. The British had been doing it in Sierra Leon since the late 1700s, notably with escaped American slaves who were given their freedom in return for military service and then "given" land in Africa. Add to the feelings of abolitionists the fact that many slave-owners thought that having free blacks around might give “bad ideas” to enslaved blacks and you end up with one of the kookiest political alliances this country has ever seen.

            Once the ball got rolling everyone was on board. State legislatures passed adopted resolutions in support of colonization, church groups raised money, and individual state chapters of the Society were formed. By 1819 the Society had enough support to get Congress to fund the colonization effort to the tune of $100,000, and in 1820 the first colonization ship sailed with 88 free blacks and 3 white Society agents. This was the basis for what would eventually become the nation of Liberia.

            So, “Republic of Maryland” you’re impatiently thinking or muttering under your breath. Okay, then, I’ll get to it. One curious result of how the Society was organized was how in many cases individual state chapters started their own colonies, funded through local donors who were in some cases rich plantation owners who didn’t want a bunch of “uppity” free blacks around to give their slaves ideas about freedom. A map of the Pepper Coast in the 1830s shows colonies established by chapters in Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania (working together), Louisiana, Mississippi, and of course Maryland.

            The impetus for the Maryland colony was a notable event in United States history, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, which took place in neighboring Virginia in 1831. If you don’t know much about this event and its leader, you should. Nat Turner was born a slave and lived his whole life in the part of southern Virginia where the revolt took place. Unlike the vast majority of slaves and many whites of the time, Turner was literate. He was also, like Joan of Arc, highly religious and had visions which he said were from God, and which told him he had been selected for an important mission.

            According to his confession, which was written down by a local lawyer who represented some of slaves in the trials following the end of the rebellion, his mission was laid out to him in 1828 while working in his master’s fields:

"I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first."

            Turner waited for God’s next signal to begin to make plans in secret for his fight “against the Serpent”, and in February of 1831 it came in the form of a solar eclipse. After several months of preparations he received his final signal from God on August 13 in the form of an atmospheric disturbance that may have been the result of an eruption of Mount St. Helens in what was then known as the Oregon Country. Nine days later the rebellion began, with Turner and his closest associates killing his master, his master’s wife, nine-year-old son, and a hired hand while they slept. From there the rebellion spread to neighboring plantations where more slaves joined until they numbered about seventy. As they went they gathered arms, and most important to the story of the Republic of Maryland, killed almost all the white people they found as they went with the final tally being about sixty dead, men, women and children. As a result, white people totally freaked out.

            Even though a company of militia put down the revolt within two days, everywhere in the surrounding counties of Virginia and North Carolina, reports of phantom rebel slave armies roaming the countryside came in. Thankfully our modern society is past constructing hysterical fantasies about menacing black people.

            Turner had escaped and would remain free for two months until he was finally captured, and in another similarity to Joan of Arc, tried and executed in an absolutely medieval manner; he was hung, flayed, beheaded, and quartered. If you’re unsure what the last one is, it means cutting the body into four parts, typically to be distributed to the four quarters for display as a warning. Of course Joan of Arc was eventually made a saint and is revered in France, whereas it is still routinely pointed out in comments on the internet when discussing the possibility of a plaque to memorialize the rebellion that we can't do that because Nat Turner was “. . . the guy that led a slave insurrection where scores of people were murdered including women and children.”

            The state, through trial and execution, and militia action killed about 150 slaves, while totally-not-hysterical mob violence killed at least another 200, the vast majority, if not all of whom were innocent of any involvement in the rebellion. Some were even slaves who had saved their masters from the rebels. Lynchings across the South in areas not in proximity to the rebellion killed an unknown number of innocent slaves and free blacks, as the violence continued for the next few weeks. Suspicion of free blacks was at an all time high, which was particularly acute in Maryland, a slave state, but the one which had the largest population of free blacks.

            With demands from the white public that something should be done, the Maryland Legislature went into action. A Maryland State Colonization Society had been formed earlier in the year after a visit to Baltimore by the son of Robert Finlay, but the organization lacked funds. With their mission clear, the legislature passed a law granting $20,000 to establish, and $10,000 annually to support, a colony in Africa made up of all the free blacks of Maryland; with no exceptions. Any free black not wanting to go to Africa was just plain out of luck. It was Africa or GTFO. This was later amended to allow individual free blacks to stay if they could find a white person of “good character” to vouch for them.

            With this plan in place, ships carrying free black colonists from Maryland sailed to Monrovia in 1831 and 1832. Monrovia was the main colony for the national Society and had been growing for over a decade. However, after these two voyages, due to some disagreements between the Maryland State Society and the national Society, Maryland decided to establish a seperate colony. In 1834 a third ship sailed, picking up many of the prior colonists in Monrovia and finally reaching their intended destination at Cape Palmas. There they purchased land from the Grebo and other local tribes, and began farming and building homes.

            If you look back at that 1830s map of the Pepper Coast, you can see a string of colonies stretching from Monrovia in the northwest down to the Maryland Colony centered on the town of Harper at Cape Palmas. But if you look closely you’ll notice a string of communities labeled as “Kroo Towns” nestled between the line of Society colonies ending with the Louisiana Colony and the Maryland Colony. From this it appears that the Maryland Colony stood out in its isolation from the other colonies.

            In 1838, only four years after the establishment of the Maryland Colony, and with oversight by the administrators of the Society lessening, the other colonies united as the Commonwealth of Liberia.  This could be seen as a gesture of beneficence and trust by the national Society, but we can’t overlook the fact that the Society running out of money also probably had something to do with it.

            The Maryland Colony chose to remain separate, not joining the Commonwealth. It still received a yearly stipend from the Maryland state legislature, and was perhaps not as pressed for cash. Another factor was the desire of the Maryland State Society to retain its monopoly on trade with the colony, which would not be the case if the Maryland Colony joined Liberia. In 1841 the Maryland State Society, for various reasons decreed that though they would still control most of the affairs of the colony, it was on a paper a sovereign state.

            By 1846 the American Colonization Society was bankrupt and the following year Liberia declared its full independence as the Republic of Liberia. The Maryland colony, known as Maryland in Africa by this time, continued down the gradual road to full independence but it wasn’t declared so until 1854 when it became the Republic of Maryland.

            Here’s where we finally get into the war, and there is some disagreement, because some sources cite the cause of the conflict between the Republic of Maryland and the Grebo to have been due to the Republic disrupting the slave trade, while others put it down to “imprudent conduct” on the part of the Republic’s last governor, Boston Jenkins Drayton.

            Though the export of slaves had been suppressed by Britain and the United States since the early 1800s, it was still carried on by ships which smuggled enslaved Africans to markets in Cuba, where they were baptized and given Spanish names. Some of these were “re-exported” to the United States by smugglers in an act that was legally equated with piracy. The last known slave ship to reach the United States was the Clotilde which landed in Mobile, Alabama in 1859. The captain, having heard that federal authorities were aware of his smuggling operation hurriedly unloaded the Africans and burned the ship to the waterline to destroy the evidence. Despite the illegality of the act, most of the captive Africans were held as slaves and remained in that state until the end of the Civil War six years later resulted in their emancipation. A small group however, who became the subject of legal wrangling between the government and Timothy Meaher, the man who had financed the smuggling venture, remained on land owned by him at Magazine Point, north of Mobile. Retaining their language and customs from the region of Ghana they had been taken from, they were left on their own to survive as best they could. After emancipation they remained on the land at Magazine Point which became known as Africatown and remained distinct until the early 20^th century.

            Despite the experience of the Africans of Africantown, when taken by anti-smuggling forces, most often, whether Cuban or African, freed slaves were “repatriated” to Sierra Leon or Liberia, where they joined the free black colonists.

            Whether the cause of the war was over the slave trade or something Governor Drayton did, open conflict broke out between the Republic and the Grebo by December of 1856. The one detail of the war we do know is that an expedition sent by the Republic against the Grebo resulted in a defeat and loss of twenty-six lives and some artillery pieces. With the loss of that strategic advantage and being severely outnumbered by the Grebo, Governor Drayton appealed to the Republic of Liberia for aid. A Liberian force arrived in Cape Palmas and the Grebo chiefs were persuaded to sign a treaty to resolve the dispute.

            The funds from the state of Maryland that had sustained its independence had long dried up and with the writing on the wall, the Republic of Maryland led by Drayton determined in a popular vote that the best course of action was to appeal to Liberia for annexation. In April, 1857 the Liberian Legislature welcomed the County of Maryland to their Republic. Maryland County is still part of the Republic of Liberia, as is Grand Kru County to their west, whose inhabitants still primarily speak the Kru language.