Hilary R. W. Johnson

Infobox_President
name=Hilary R. W. Johnson
small

order=11th President of Liberia
term_start=January 7 1884
term_end=January 4 1892
vicepresident=Unknown
predecessor=Alfred Francis Russell
successor=Joseph James Cheeseman
birth_date=1837
birth_place=
death_date=1901
death_place=
party=True Whig

Hilary Richard Wright Johnson (1837-1901) served as the 11th President of Liberia from 1884 to 1892. He was elected four times. He served as Secretary of State before his presidency.

He was the first Liberian president born in Africa. His father was Elijah Johnson, one of the original American settlers who founded the colony at Cape Mesurado. His son Frederick Eugene Richelieu Johnson was Liberia's longest serving Chief Justice.

Presidency

The decades after 1868, escalating economic difficulties weakened the state's dominance over the coastal indigenous population. Conditions worsened, the cost of imports was far greater than the income generated by exports of coffee, rice, palm oil, sugarcane, and timber. Liberia tried desperately to modernize its largely agricultural economy.

In 1885, Johnson agreed to the annexation of the Gallinas territory after the US Government had advised him to yield to the British demands. In November of that year, the Havelock Draft Convention, which finalized the boundary between Liberia and Sierra Leone, was ratified by both Liberia and Great Britain. Since then, the Mano river has formed the boundary between Liberia and Sierra Leone.

In 1892, the French forced Liberia to cede to the Ivory Coast the area beyond Cape Palmas which Liberia had long controlled. President Johnson was responsible for this negotiation but retired before the treaty was signed.Whenever the British and French seemed intent on enlarging at Liberia's expense the neighboring territories they already controlled, periodic appearances by U.S. warships helped discourage encroachment, even though successive American administrations rejected appeals from Monrovia for more forceful support. [Liebenow, J. Gus, "Liberia: the Quest for Democracy". Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987]

Internal uprising

U.S. President Grover Cleveland, in an 1886 message to the United States Congress, spoke of the "moral right and duty of the United States" to help Liberia. "It must not be forgotten that this distant community is an offshoot of our own system", he said. But when Liberia asked for military assistance against an internal uprising, which the French were thought to have helped instigate, Cleveland's secretary of state refused on grounds that Liberia lacked standing to make such a request.

Some tribal people living in the hinterland of Montserrado County and further north would stay at war until the late 1890s. On the one hand there was a war between Gola and Mandingo over trading routes in the region, while various factions of the Gola were fighting with each other as well.

ee also

*History of Liberia

References