Category: New Cess

New Cess was the name given to this location by the Portuguese. It was also called “New Sestos” and sometimes “Young Sestos.”

The repatriates arrived just as slave trading and anti-slavery efforts were increasing in the area. In 1808, the British navy began patrolling high-volume slave marts along the West Africa coast and seizing suspected slave ships. Those actions unintentionally drove slaves buyers from major ports like Elmira and Bonny to previously underutilized areas like the coast of present-day Liberia.

Among people already living in the area, opinions were sharply divided regarding the slave trade. Each ethnic group contained some members who were proslavery while others were abolitionist. That was the case in societies all along the rim of the Atlantic.

Given the slave trade’s polarizing impact, local people did not respond in a unified and homogeneous way to African-Americans who came seeking land.

On the one hand, foreign slave buyers and their local allies vehemently and violently opposed the repatriates, whom they viewed as threats to their profits. On the other hand, local abolitionists welcomed African-American returnees as allies whose global ties and external knowledge could help bring a speedy end to the trade in enslaved Africans that had ravaged local societies for centuries.

On October 27, 1825, Jehudi Ashmun, governor of Colonial Liberia, reached an agreement to lease land on both sides of the river mouth from a local ruler named King Freeman. Within a month, the government had erected a warehouse and placed a trader on the land to buy rice from nearby farmers. The goal was to supply Monrovia with local rice in place of rice imported from America.

Immediately after completion, the warehouse was destroyed, in Governor Ashmun’s words, by “a mischievous individual.” The person responsible was expelled from the area by King Freeman, who rebuilt the warehouse at no cost to the colonial government.

Footnote: J. Ashmun, “Accessions of territory – and new establishments connected with the colony, African Repository, May 1826, p. 93.

By May 1826, a large rice farm was being planted on the land by laborers assigned by the local ruler and were being supervised by the resident Liberian trader.

According to Ashmun, King Freeman did not want to risk upsetting his neighbors by allowing the colonial government to establish a town in his territory prematurely. So he stipulated in the lease agreement that the project be done in phases. Only if the small-scale initial farming and trading phase succeeded would large number of repatriates be allowed to settle in the area.

Footnote: J. Ashmun, “Accessions of territory – and new establishments connected with the colony, African Repository, May 1826, p. 93.

In 1931, the legislature granted 200 acres of land in the New Cess section, Timbo district to the Union of Baptist Churches of Ontario and Quebec, Canada, for missionary purposes. Acts of the Liberian Legislature, 1931, pp. 34-35.

In 1933, Jacob H. Logan and Sons of Grand Bassa received a franchise to operate a ferry across the N’yah or New Cess River from Logan’s town, Goyah section on the right bank to Zeawornh’s town on the left. In 1934, the legislature voted to transfer the voting poll from Trehn-Dru, New Cess, to Wohrwehn, Trade Town section due to the “adverse topological situation” of Trehn-Dru.

Footnote: Acts of the Liberian Legislature, 1931, pp. 34-35; Acts of the Liberian Legislature, 1933, pp. 36-37; Acts of the Liberian Legislature, 1934, p. 17.