The
Volume XXI
Green
Bag
January, 1909
Number 1
Anglo-Saxon Law in Liberia Bv Arthur W. Spencer LIBERIA, the most advanced negro community, probably, in the world, a country which has effectively disbarred white men from active participation in its affairs, offers a striking example of the successful adoption of the common law of England and the United States by its colored inhabitants. Strange to say, the law embodied in the Constitu tion and statutes of the republic of Liberia, and in the decisions of its courts of law, partakes rather of the natural ness of an indigenous growth, than of the character of a superimposed institu tion transplanted from beyond the seas. The decisions of the Supreme Judicial Court of Liberia, the first volume of which, including those handed down from 1861 to 1907, has been issued, show that its judges are careful students of the law, men of sufficient intelligence and education to lend dignity to the bench, and of high ideals as to the digni fied and proper conduct of the duties of their office. But Liberia is a young country, and the blending of an old jurisprudence with the institutions of a new country is as picturesque now as was the similar phenomenon that could have been observed in the United States just after the close of the Revolutionary War. American negroes have by no means had so important a part in settling Liberia as might hastily be assumed. JUL 31i3,9
After the United States had passed the statute of 1807 prohibiting the slave trade, the practice was adopted of send ing to Africa slaves recaptured at sea by United States revenue ships. When the Liberian colony had been planted, these liberated slaves, together with slaves freed after being brought into the country illegally, were sent to Liberia. No fewer than five thousand negroes thus became settlers of Liberia who had never actually been American slaves, and had scarcely become familiar with American institutions. It is true that in 1819, when the first settlers were sent out by the American Colonization Society, there were several thousand free negroes in the Southern states whose families had been located in America for one or more generations. Many of them were educated, and this element seems to have exerted a con trolling influence upon the character of the new republic, to which it contrib uted the chief upbuilders. But the numerical preponderance of this class over the other negroes, those practically strangers to Anglo-Saxon institutions, has doubtless been commonly overrated. We may therefore say that the Liberia of the present, reaping the benefits of President Barclay's wise policy of as similation of the native population, is not so much a country of American negroes as a native African community
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