[3] His parents were Elijah Johnson,[1] one of the original African-American settlers who founded the colony at Cape Mesurado, and his second wife Rachel Wright (b.

Johnson was educated in the colony at Alexander High School and later taught at Liberia College, with his later political adversary, Edward Wilmot Blyden.

He was appointed as Secretary of State by President Edward James Roye, an African-American who had emigrated to Liberia the year before independence in 1847.

Conditions worsened, as the cost of imports was far greater than the income generated by exports of commodity crops such as coffee, rice, palm oil, sugarcane, and timber.

[citation needed] But when Liberia asked for military assistance against an internal uprising, which the French were thought to have helped instigate, Cleveland's secretary of state refused.

Some indigenous Liberian peoples living in the hinterland of Montserrado County and further north continued resistance and warfare until the late 1890s.