Earlier this fall, many Liberians asked for U.S. intervention in their civil war. Newspapers pointed out 5 percent of them are descendants of freed American slaves, and, despite the passage of many years since they founded this West African country, the United States is still looked upon as a source of aid.

One of these freed slaves was John Brown Russwurm, whose story enables Mainers to put a face on the historic abstractions surrounding America’s role in Liberia.

Russwurm was born in 1799 in Jamaica to a transplanted Virginia planter and a slave. Proud of his gifted son, Russwurm senior sent him to Quebec to be educated and then brought him to live in Portland after he married a widow living there with her own family. The boy was readily accepted as a part of this extended family.

Before his father died in 1815, Russwurm was sent to Hebron Academy. Afterward he traveled to Boston, where he taught in a school for blacks. Deciding he wanted more education, he appealed to his kindly stepmother and her new husband, a paper-mill owner in North Yarmouth, to pay his way to Bowdoin College. (He apparently never lost his affection for his family or for Maine, eventually sending his two sons years later to North Yarmouth Academy.)

Blacks were not welcome at American colleges at that early date. Russwurm, however, appears to have been treated well at Bowdoin, where he was invited to join the Athenaean Society, and received visits from fellow students Nathaniel Hawthorne and his friend Horatio Bridge, who eventually visited him in Liberia. On the other hand, he lived outside of Brunswick, instead of in the college dormitory, in the home of a carpenter.

In 1826, Russwurm became the first black to graduate from Bowdoin and one of the first in the nation from any college. A college degree placed him among the nation’s elite – white or black – and the 27- year-old set out to influence events.

Already a privileged man of the world, he held no allegiance to any particular country. At Bowdoin, where he delivered a commencement address extolling Haiti’s slave revolution, he had become interested in the idea of emigration for freed blacks. The colonization movement was seen by many as one solution to the race problem that was already a subject of heated national debate long before the Civil War. Russwurm was thinking of moving to Haiti, where he felt a black man would have more opportunities.

But first he went to New York City, where he became embroiled in the abolitionist movement, co-founding the first black newspaper in the nation, partly in reaction to the racist diatribes coming from other newspapers.

In the beginning, the new paper, Freedom’s Journal, opposed the colonization movement, which was dividing both black and white abolitionists. Seen as a way to facilitate the freeing of slaves by giving them someplace to go to form their own governments, colonization also was viewed by some as a racist plot to get rid of those same free men and women. Even many abolitionists with the best of intentions did not believe blacks and whites could live together in harmony.

After Russwurm became the paper’s sole editor, he gradually shifted its editorial policy to advocate colonization, a move that enraged many of his black supporters. After a protest erupted in 1829, Russwurm decided to fulfill his growing dream, emigrating to Monrovia, the fledgling colony founded by the American Colonization Society in the territory that would become the Republic of Liberia. Freedom’s Journal died a quick death.

While a popular idea, the colonization movement had attracted only a few hundred actual emigrants to the colonies established by the ACS and other groups. Russworm, by virtue of his background, added greatly to its credibility and quickly was appointed superintendent of schools, editor of the Liberia Herald, the colony’s official newspaper, and finally colonial secretary.

But he had allied himself with an unpopular white leader, and after a political brouhaha, he was fired from his posts and lost an election to regain some of the authority he had held. Abandoning the colony, he headed down the coast to Cape Palmas, an independent colony formed by the Maryland Colonization Society. Here, thanks in part to support from a fellow Bowdoin graduate who had preceded him, he was appointed governor in 1836, a position he ably administered until 1851 when he died.

“[Russwurm’s tenure] signified a new era in the history of the Negro and was a departure from age-old beliefs,” according to Penelope Campbell, a historian and author of the book “Maryland in Africa.” “Under his administration, a colony of former American slaves achieved a large degree of self-government. A Negro leader nudged unwilling compatriots through the intricacies of legal, political and economic development. A black man proved capable of handling the difficulties imposed by like-skinned Africans and white missionaries.”

A few years after Russwurm’s death, the Cape Palmas colony was annexed to the newly independent country of Liberia. Only 900 to 1,000 colonists lived there and nearby were 100,000 African natives, an imbalance of power that has posed political problems throughout the country to this day.

Meanwhile, the colonization movement slowly fell onto the rubbish heap of history, and with it the name of John Brown Russwurm largely has been forgotten even though his successes were inspiring and much noted at the time.

Wayne Reilly writes a history column each Monday in the Style section. During his 28 years at the Bangor Daily News, he worked as a reporter, editorial page writer and assignment editor.