During a summer visit with his grandmother, John Russell, then a student at Princeton University, raped the enslaved octoroon Milly Crawford.

)[3] Alfred and his mother called their new mistress Mrs. Polly; she was a wealthy heiress of the frontiersman Colonel John Todd.

[5] In 1833, Mary Wickliffe emancipated Alfred (her grandson by blood) and his mother Milly; she also freed his cousin Lucretia (Lucy) Russell and her four children: Sinthia, Gilbert, George, and Henry, all of whom were of majority-white ancestry.

Conditions were very harsh for the pioneers; they suffered greatly from local diseases, including malaria, and supplies were extremely short in the colony for some time.

"[2] His cousin Lucy, her daughter Sinthia, and two eldest sons all quickly succumbed to the local fever, which caused ulcers.

By 1857, she had learned to read and write, as she wrote to her former master Robert Wickliffe from Liberia, asking to be remembered to his daughters and other persons she knew.

He later became an Episcopal priest in the St. Paul River area, where he had 200 acres in the Clay Ashland district, purchased for the free people of color by the Kentucky Colonization Society, an affiliate of the ACS.

Two months after Russell took office, in March 1883, the British Government annexed the Gallinas territory west of the Mano River and formally incorporated it into their colony of Sierra Leone, like Liberia established as a place of resettlement of free blacks and liberated slaves.

Whenever the British and French seemed intent on enlarging at Liberia's expense the neighboring territories they already controlled, periodic appearances by U.S. warships helped discourage encroachment.

As conditions worsened, the cost of imports was far greater than the income generated by exports of coffee, rice, palm oil, sugar cane, and timber.