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n paris, in the late 1850s, two men who knew a great deal about Liberia may have passed each other in the environs of the Luxembourg Gardens, near their residences. Theophile Conneau, restored to his birth name and protected by his brother, who was court physician to Napoleon III, had recently retired from a modest and brief position as collector of the port of Noumea in New Caledonia. With him was his young American wife, the former Elisa McKinley of Philadelphia. A small, smartly dressed man, he charmed the friends of his older brother, Dr. Henri Conneau, with his discreetly censored stories of the slave trade and the African interior—stories with which he had extracted drinks from Brantz Mayer in Baltimore several years earlier. Conneau’s charm was not as dissipated as his body, and he had managed to court an American girl of good family with his hints of an exotic world not imagined in Philadelphia. By the time that the book he dictated to Mayer, Memoirs of a Slave Trader, appeared in print, Conneau had once again moved on, taking his new wife with him. He died in Paris of a heart attack in 1860 while scheming to be appointed the civil governor of New Caledonia. His young wife, who perhaps thought twice about returning to Philadelphia on the eve of the Civil War as the widow of a notorious slave trader, attached herself to the Empress Eugenie and outlived her husband by seventy-two years.1 There was another man in Paris in those days, aging and slight of build, whose life had also long centered on the African slave trade and Liberia. Charles Fenton Mercer, the congressional founder of the American Colonization Society and the man who had worked obsessively to tie American suppression of the slave trade to the finances of the Liberian colony, could be said to have been the source of many of Conneau’s slaving losses. Mercer had Nine Civil War to White City I fared no better among American politicians than Conneau had among the West African slavers. It had been twenty years since Mercer had resigned from his seat in a sectionally divided Congress to work first in a bank in Tallahassee and then in real estate in Texas, to travel in Europe, and now to linger on in Paris, the city that had so excited him as a youth. Mercer knew he should return to the United States. But there were excellent reasons not to do so, the most excellent of which was the fact that, once in the United States, he would never leave it again. The sore in his mouth that would not heal would have to be doctored. He would have to go back to Virginia where his heroes were dead and his friends were attacked by North and South. His old colleague, Meade, had been labeled “satanic” by William Lloyd Garrison and criticized by the Petersburg Democrat as encouraging insurrection among slaves.2 Mercer wrote a long letter to his niece about the history of the Mercer family in Virginia but stayed on in Paris, visiting the leading reformers of the day. In time he was forced to leave the contemplative peace of Paris for the agitations of Virginia, where his mouth cancer took his life in 1858. Mercer, the evangelical Christian and advocate of American internal improvements, still envisioned an Africa that would save America from slavery for the sake of white Americans. This Africa, elevated above savagery and heathenism, was dotted with little republics, mission stations, farms, and small factories, all directed by the most advanced free blacks and ex-slaves from the United States. Why could not his fellow citizens accept the genius in this vision, the natural fit with the most advanced ideas of progress? His friends in Paris never ceased to marvel at this example of enlightened and benevolent philosophy. The Liberian leadership held this view. They expected hundreds of thousands of emigrants from the United States when the course of the American Civil War made diplomatic recognition of Liberia and the Emancipation Proclamation expedient. There were other hopeful portents, viewed from Liberia. In order to make emancipation acceptable, President Lincoln offered financial compensation to slaveholders not in rebellion and suggested that the American government might sponsor emigration for those freedmen willing to go to Africa, Central America, or the Caribbean . But delegations of African Americans told Lincoln that they were not interested in Liberia, and he was forced...

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