DORCHESTER NEWS

LIBERIAN PRESIDENT 1857 TO 1864 BORN 1816

DORCHESTER COUNTY MARYLAND

STEPHEN ALLEN BENSON, (1816-1865), was born a black freeman in Dorchester county, Maryland. At age six, he and his parents emigrated to Liberia, on the African Coast with a movement sponsored by the American Colonization Society, a white resettlement movement of mixed motives.

After several years of native African resistance, in which Benson lost a brother, his father wounded and he and other siblings captured, Liberia formed a government much like the early American's had and Stephen Benson took a seat on the Colonial Council as a Judge in 1847. In 1853 he was elected as Vice President of the Republic of Liberia. In 1856 he became the second president of Liberia's Republic until 1864, then returning to his coffee plantation in Grand Bassa where he died in 1865.