PHILADELPHIA'S LADIES' LIBERIA SCHOOL ASSOCIATION AND THE RISE AND DECLINE OF NORTHERN FEMALE COLONIZATION SUPPORT
Vol. CXXXIV, No. 3 ( July 2010) 1 “Death of Mrs. Thomson,” Cavalla Messenger 29 (1864): 215; Randall Burkett, “Elizabeth Mars Johnson Thomson (1807–1864): A Research Note,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 55 (1986): 21–30. 2 Gustavus and Elizabeth Caesar left for Liberia in August 1831, sponsored by Lydia Sigourney’s “The Charitable Society in the African Sunday School” at Hartford and Philadelphia philanthropist, Beulah Sansom. They were followed in November 1832 by William and Elizabeth Johnson and their infant son, William. Soon after their arrival, the Philadelphia’s Ladies’ Liberia School Association took over financial responsibility for the women. Gustavus served as a minister in Caldwell, Liberia, until his death in 1834. Elizabeth Caesar remarried A. W. Anderson, a Baptist minister and teacher in Caldwell. William Johnson went to Liberia as a catechist and schoolmaster but died, along with his infant son, within two weeks of arriving in Liberia. Elizabeth Johnson remarried James Thomson, an Episcopalian who had immigrated to Liberia in 1832 from Demerara (British Guyana). See Clifton Hartwell Brewer, A History of Religious Education in the Episcopal Church to 1835 (New Haven, CT, 1924), 243–46; Burkett, “Elizabeth Mars Johnson Thomson,” 23–24. Philadelphia’s Ladies’ Liberia School Association and the Rise and Decline of Northern Female Colonization Support