Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
About 1/2 of the original 4500 immigrants (former slaves) survived the first 20 years. The American Colonization Society (ACS) was established by idealistic white Americans to return slaves to their homeland. ACS delivered the colonists by an American warship in 1821. Former slaves took over control of the colony from ACS in 1847 after the ACS was facing bankruptcy. [Furtado: 1001 Days] "Liberia, founded in 1822 by freed American slaves who returned to Africa with the help of U.S. colonization societies, was governed by Americo-Liberians for six generations and sold rubber and iron ore abroad. A military coup in 1980 ended that era, and by 1989 full-scale civil war had embroiled virtually every ethnic group in the country. This brutal protracted conflict claimed the lives of about one tenth of the population (4.6 million today), and hundreds of thousands of others fled the country. Liberia finally turned the corner in 2006 with the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as Africa’s first female president, who succeeded in stabilizing the now-democratic political system." [Geography: Realms, Regions, and Concepts, 17th Edition, p. 307]