W.N. Lewis vs. Rev. John Seys: Power, Ideology, and Race in Colonial Liberia

In the lobby of a modest wooden building that served as the seat of Liberia’s Supreme Court, the superintendent of Methodist missionaries in Liberia addressed a single judge and a jury of ten colonists: “I am arraigned here as the representative of the Missionary Society of the M.E. Church,” John Seys introduced himself.  “For what am I being sued and brought here?  For $80 worth of duties on goods and provisions imported into this colony.” A year earlier, the Colonial Council of Liberia had levied a heavy duty on merchant goods, exempting both the Methodist Episcopal Church and the American Colonization Society (ACS) from paying duties on “goods not to be employed in trade.”  When a customs official attempted to collect duties on goods being used to pay laborers working for the Church, however, Seys refused to pay the $80.30 in taxes despite the fact that Methodists had spent more than $18,000 in the colony.  The fallout over a seemingly trifling sum would lead to the ejection of Seys from the colony, the rapid decline of Methodist activity in Liberia, and eventually—combined with financial pressures on the ACS—would contribute to the incorporation of Liberia as an independent republic in 1847.

By exploring the ideologies of Methodist missionaries, ACS agents, and Liberian colonists, this paper employs this court case to open a wider window on networks of power within colonial Liberia, where “benevolent” organizations jockeyed with one another to control the colony’s trade and inhabitants.  Although ostensibly allied in a single colonial project, these groups carried with them across the Atlantic specific gendered and racial ideologies that transformed a minor court case into a moment of intense factional and political crisis.