The Johnson Family: From Conway to Liberia 
by Kenneth C. Barnes

Author's Note: In the Spring/Summer 1997 issue, Faulkner Facts and Fiddlings published my article, "The Back-to-Africa Movement in Faulkner County," in which I described a movement among local black citizens in 1890-92 to return to their ancestral homeland of Africa. Many earnestly attempted to emigrate to Africa, but only one family, John and Elissa Johnson and their six children of Conway, actually made it to the Republic of Liberia in West Africa. The last sentence of this article read: "One wonders what were the experiences of the one black family from Faulkner County, the Johnsons, who made it to their promised land of Liberia." Since the publication of this article in 1997, some additional documentary information about the Johnson family has come to light. Also, in the summer of 1998 I was able to travel to Liberia to locate and interview two great grandchildren of John and Elissa Johnson. What follows serves as an epilogue to the earlier article.

On a spring morning, April 6, 1889, the Johnson family from Conway, Arkansas, steamed out of New York harbor aboard the small bark Monrovia bound for the Republic of Liberia. John and Elissa Johnson traveled with their six children: John, Jr. (who at age 16 went by the name Johnny), Ella, Noah, Joseph, Monrovia, and one-year-old baby Ulysses. 

Born in Kentucky around 1852, John Johnson had grown up a slave on a plantation in Coahoma County, Mississippi, just across the Mississippi River from Helena, Arkansas. John and 93 other slaves were the property of James L. Allcorn, a wealthy planter who became a brigadier general in the Confederacy during the Civil War. Afterward, Allcorn went on to become governor of Mississippi and a U.S. Senator. During the war many slaves from the Mississippi delta area fled to Helena where the Union Army had established a post in 1862. John Johnson must have been one of these, for he enlisted under the name John Allcorn in the 1st Arkansas Colored Infantry which was later reorganized as the 46th U.S. Infantry of African Descent. The unit served in the Mississippi valley region through the end of the war. Sometime after the war, John gave up his slave name and took the surname Johnson. By 1880 he was living with wife Millie and four children in Cypress township, in the southeastern corner of Faulkner County. Millie may have died thereafter, for by 1888 John was married to Elissa, who had borne him several more children.2 

By 1886 John Johnson became interested in emigration to Liberia, the free black republic in West Africa, to where freed American slaves had been returning since the 1820s. A native African, J. C. Hazeley, arrived in Arkansas early in 1886 to recruit settlers for the American Colonization Society, which arranged emigration to Liberia. Hazeley gave a grand lecture in Little Rock and had a display of photographs about the "dark" continent, all for the admission price of ten cents. Evidently John Johnson attended and expressed interest, for Hazeley asked the American Colonization Society to send Johnson - by this time leaving near or in Conway - a package of information about emigration to Liberia. John named his baby girl, born later that year, "Monrovia," presumably for the capital of the Republic of Liberia. Two years later, the Johnsons formally applied for emigration, and by April 1889 they were on their way to Africa. 

Arrival in Liberia 

Forty-two other passengers, African American families from Missouri, Indiana, Kansas, and the Indian Territory, accompanied the Johnsons on their trans-Atlantic voyage. After a month at sea, the ship arrived in the port of Monrovia on May 7. It was the day of Liberia's bi-annual presidential election, and everyone was busy at the polls when the ship came in. (3)

After staying a few days in Monrovia, the emigrants traveled by boat down the Liberian coast to Grand Bassa County, where the St. John River empties into the Atlantic, and then sailed a few miles upriver to their new homes. Two families from Kansas and another from Indiana, evidently displeased with their prospects, refused to land. They finally disembarked only to sell guns and other items to raise money for their passage back to Monrovia. The Johnson family and the 34 others settled near the farm community of Fortsville. The Liberian government gave each family 25 acres of land, and the American Colonization Society provided food and essential supplies to last six months while the settlers were building houses and planting their crops. The Society even commissioned a local resident, Coy Carver Brown, to see after their needs and paid a physician, Dr. J. S. Smith, $200 to provide medical care to the emigrants. Other American settler families in the area gave a hearty welcome to the new arrivals. (4)

In letters and reports sent back to the American Colonization Society's office in Washington, D.C., both Mr. Brown and Dr. Smith spoke highly about the new settlers and their quick adaptation to life in Liberia. Smith said some women in the group were homesick, longing for "the fleshpots of our American Egypt," but after time and reflection they acclimated well. By September only three of the 42 new settlers in Bassa had died -two infants and a ten-year- old girl from Missouri -a favorable survival rate through the initial bouts with malaria and other fevers which settlers inevitably experienced. 

Brown reported in November that the settlers had made good progress in constructing their homes, and were getting ready to plant coffee scions (cuttings), which they hoped would eventually produce a cash crop. The Johnsons probably had sent word back to Conway of their satisfaction with their new homeland, for by mid-September letters from Conway began to pour in to the American Colonization Society requesting passage to Africa. J. S. Mattison of Conway exclaimed that "the whole country is in an uproar about going to Liberia!" (5)

Not long after the Johnsons' arrival in Liberia, Mr. Brown wrote to William Coppinger, the Society's general secretary in Washington, on John Johnson's behalf. Johnson had evidently discovered that he could claim a pension for his service in the Union army in the Civil War, and he hoped to receive this money by mail in Liberia. No records indicate that Johnson ever received a pension as result of the request. (6) 

John and Elissa Johnson fade from the written record after the year of their arrival in Liberia. However, two of their great-grandchildren, Louise and Zebulon Avery, who live today in Monrovia, still remember their grandfather, Johnny H. Johnson, the oldest son of John and his first wife, Millie. Arriving Liberia at age 16, Johnny eventually was able to draw ten acres of emigrant land himself when he came of age. He married a woman, Laura, who had come to Liberia from the French West Indies. Johnny eventually became a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). His grandchildren member him sitting in a hammock reading the Bible on the porch of his large two-story home in Fortsville. His yard was filled with beautiful flowers and food-bearing trees, particularly butter pear (avocado) and breadfruit trees. Emigrants often explained how in Arkansas they had been told that bread and butter grew on trees in Liberia, only to be disappointed on arrival to learn at the "bread and butter" on the trees were different than they expected. Nevertheless, settlers planted breadfruit and butter pear trees in their yards. 

Johnny Johnson died in the late 1930s. His younger brother, Noah, who was nine when the family left Conway, lived until the late 1960s. (7)

Louise and Zebulon Avery expressed a keen desire to get to know any Johnson relatives who might still live in the Conway area. For the Avery mailing address in Monrovia, contact Dr. Kenneth Barnes, Department of History, U.C.A., Conway, AR 72032. 

Editor's Note: Kenneth C. Barnes, Ph.D., is an associate professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas. His recent highly-acclaimed book, Who Killed John Clayton? Political Violence and the Emergence of the New South, 1861-1893 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), was reviewed in the Spring/ Summer 1998 edition of Faulkner Facts and Fiddlings, pp. 40-41. This article on the Johnson family was written at the request of the editor of this journal. 

(2). C.C. Brown to William Coppinger, August 1, 1889, Bassa, Liberia, Reel 170, American Colonization Society Records, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (This collection hereafter cited as ACS.) Biographical Directory of the American Congress, 1774-1996 (Alexandria, VA: CQ Staff Directories, 1996), p. 562; U.S. Census, 1860, Slave Schedule, Mississippi: Coahoma County; Desmond Walls Allen, ed., Arkansas' Damned Yankees: An Index to Union Soldiers in Arkansas Regiments (Conway: Desmond Allen, 1987), p. 7; Janet B. Hewett, ed., The Roster of Union Soldiers 1861-1865: U.S. Colored Troops (Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot, 1997), p. 16; U.S. Census, 1880, Arkansas: Faulkner County. 

(3) African Repository, 65 (July 1889): 94-95; C.T.O. King to William Coppinger, Monrovia, Liberia, May 8, 1889, Reel 170, ACS. 

(4) King to Coppinger, May 28, 1889, Monrovia, Reel 170, ACS; J. S. Smith to Coppinger, Bassa, Liberia, Reel 170, ACS. 

(5) Coy Brown to Coppinger, Bassa, Liberia, November 6,1889, Reel170, ACS; Harry Smith to Coppinger, Conway, September 11, 1889, Reel 113, ACS; J. E. Walker and G. W. Pounds, Conway, to ACS, September 14, 1889, Reel 113, ACS; J. S. Mattison, Conway, to ACS, September 16, 1889, Reel 113, ACS. 

(6) Brown to Coppinger, August 1, 1889, Reel 170, ACS. The General Index to U.S. military Pensions shows no actual application or pension for John Johnson or John Allcorn of the U.S. 46th Colored Infantry. Another Liberian emigrant from Arkansas, Thomas Jefferson Cooper, continued to draw his pension for Civil War service well into the 1890s. Interview by author with Henry Jefferson Cooper, Brewerville. Liberia, July 16, 1998. 

(7) Interview by author with Louise and Zebulon Avery, Monrovia, Liberia, July 21, 1998. Louise and Zebulon also allowed Dr. Barnes to take a photograph of their great-grandfather John Johnson's original immigrant's deed, dated January 4, 1898. 

Faulkner Facts and Fiddlings
Volume XL, Fall and Winter, 1998
Pages 65-68