Liberia declares war on Germany

On the morning of 4 August 1917 the French armoured cruiser Desaix entered the roadstead of Monrovia. An hour later the Congress of Liberia unanimously passed a joint resolution of both houses declaring war on the German Empire. Before the ship’s commander came ashore, Liberian soldiers arrested all the German men in the capital, and at four in the afternoon they were escorted on board. Only the managers of German firms were left behind, to draw up inventories of their property and hand it over to the government. The American minister James L. Curtis cabled Washington the next day that the Liberian soldiers had behaved in exemplary fashion and there had been no disturbances among the population. One of the two independent states of Africa, alongside Ethiopia, had become a belligerent. It could wage war neither on land nor at sea. What mattered was a place at the side of the United States and among the future victors.

Three months’ delay

Liberia had been moving towards war since the spring. On 8 May it broke off relations with Germany, but the removal of the Germans and the declaration of war got stuck in disputes between the allies. The British and French wanted the Germans gone as quickly as possible from a country surrounded by their colonies. Washington, however, decided it would not advise Liberia to go to war until London promised to lift the restrictions with which it was strangling Liberian trade in order to hit German firms. Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote on 4 June that after entering the war Liberia should be able to count on the Allies’ help in rebuilding its economy.

In Monrovia the delay favoured German intrigues. On 2 June, when the British cruiser King Alfred entered the port, Curtis reported that President Daniel Edward Howard did not want to send the Germans to an enemy country and was proposing to send them to Spain, and that German agents were trying to split the cabinet. Most of the ministers, led by Secretary of State Charles D.B. King, wanted, however, to follow the Americans’ advice. A few days later the French chargé d’affaires E. Baret and the British consul general presented a concrete plan. Germans under 60 were to be taken to France by a French warship; older ones and the former consul would be sent to Germany via the Netherlands or Scandinavia. Liberia replied on 6 June that it would accept the plan, though it knew it amounted to an act of war, and set two conditions. The Allies were not to conclude a peace that did not protect it from German retaliation, and once the Germans had left they were to lift the trade restrictions immediately.

London replied on 8 June that it would lift the restrictions once all the Germans had left Liberia and the government had prevented their firms from being taken over by front men who would return them to their former owners after the war. The Liberians accepted this without haggling. At the end of June Howard issued a proclamation that forbade the purchase of German firms’ property bypassing the government and annulled any such transactions concluded after 8 May. The state itself was to take over and liquidate these firms and deposit the money in a bank in Monrovia. The proclamation also called on the Germans to leave the country as soon as possible. Berlin protested through the Spanish consul, who represented German interests. It invoked the commercial treaty of 1867, which guaranteed Germans the right of residence and trade, and threatened to hold Liberia responsible for any damage. King replied on 17 July that the treaty had been a treaty of “friendship” and had not survived the breaking off of relations, and that the aliens act of 1915–1916 allowed the president to expel anyone whose presence endangered the security of the republic.

In July things speeded up. On 12 July the Liberian minister in London sent a cable: “British and French governments advise declaration of war. Will guarantee protection. Trade restrictions will be removed.” Monrovia, however, was waiting for word from Washington. On 18 July the State Department judged the British assurances sufficient and advised that it saw no obstacles. On 21 July Baret and the British consul M.Y.H. Parks handed King a joint note. Britain, France and the United States gave Liberia a “positive assurance” that they would defend it against German aggression, and a British squadron from Sierra Leone was to protect it from the sea during the war. The British consul wanted to set these guarantees down in a formal convention, but on 28 July Washington firmly refused to take part in an agreement that would bind the powers after the war as well. Curtis replied that the advice of the United States had “finally closed” the matter of a convention. The French wanted the ship to arrive before the Germans learned what awaited them.

Desaix at Monrovia

After the arrests in the capital, Desaix sailed on the evening of 4 August along the Pepper Coast. She was to pick up the Germans from Grand Bassa, Sinoe and Cape Palmas, give them time to inventory and hand over their property, and on the way back take on board the firm managers from Monrovia and the other ports and the Germans from Cape Mount, then head for France, where internment awaited men of military age. The women, the former consul and the German member of the international customs receivership were to leave for Germany via the Scandinavian countries under safe-conducts. Together with the other Germans, the staff of the German telegraph station in Monrovia left Liberia. According to some accounts it had operated right up to the declaration of war.

On 13 August King informed the representatives of the three powers that the president regarded the guarantees as entirely sufficient, that Liberia had been at war with Germany since 4 August, and that German men fit for military service were sailing to France aboard the cruiser Desaix. He also offered that, should the British consider it necessary to establish a naval base in Liberia, Liberia would agree at once, on condition that the base remained under its jurisdiction and was dismantled after the war. The German women sailed from Monrovia only in October, on a Spanish ship that had to call at Gibraltar to be searched. With them went the German customs receiver, breaking the terms of his safe-conduct, as the former consul had done before.

A state without an army or money

Liberia could not give the Allies soldiers. Its only armed force was the small Liberian Frontier Force, trained since 1912 by American officers, among them the black Major Charles Young. This force was occupied with upholding the authority of the Monrovia government over the peoples of the interior, and in 1915 it suppressed a rising of the Kru on the coast. The Monrovia government, drawn from the descendants of settlers from America, ruled a country in which most of the inhabitants had no political rights. Liberia was counting above all on money. Its consul general in Baltimore wrote to the State Department at the end of August that Liberia had regarded this war as a “white man’s war for world domination” and had kept out of it until the United States, “her only real friend”, entered it. It treated the break with Germany and the declaration of war as something for which it was owed Washington’s protection. According to this memorandum, Monrovia had suspected from the start that the British and French were mainly interested in driving German trade out of Africa after the war.

The country’s economy, in which before the war the Germans had had by far the largest share, was in ruins. The liquidation of German firms gave the state a little money, but also meant the loss of the merchants who had bought Liberian produce. In September 1918 the United States opened a war credit for Liberia of up to 5 million dollars, but by the end of the war had paid out only about 26,000 of it. A post-war plan for a large loan, meant to put the republic’s finances on their feet, was bogged down in negotiations for years, until in November 1922 the American Senate sent it back to committee, which ended the matter.

The war reaches Monrovia

The German threats did not go without effect. Berlin declared Liberian waters a war zone, and the Allies concluded that they were unable to defend the ports there effectively. On 10 April 1918 the German submarine cruiser U-154 surfaced off Monrovia. Her commander demanded that the French radio station and the cable station be shut down, and when the government’s reply did not satisfy him, he shelled the town in the afternoon. The shells destroyed the radio station and several buildings, several inhabitants were killed, and the armed schooner President Howard, the only vessel of the Liberian navy, was sunk. The shelling stopped only when a British steamer appeared.

After the war Liberia took its seat at the victors’ table. It signed the Treaty of Versailles and as a signatory became one of the founding members of the League of Nations. The treaty devoted a separate section to it. In Article 138 Germany renounced the rights arising from the agreements of 1911–1912, above all the right to appoint a German customs receiver, and any part in plans for the rehabilitation of Liberian finances. In Article 139 it recognised that all its treaties with Liberia had lapsed as of 4 August 1917.