True Whig Party

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The True Whig Party, also known as Liberian Whig Party, was Liberia's only legal political party for over 100 years, from 1878 to the coup d'etat of 1980.

It is considered the first monopoly or single-party state in the world. Initially, its ideology was heavily influenced by that of the United States Whig Party.

The political party was founded in the township of Clay-Ashland, Liberia in 1869.^[1].^[2] It presided over a society where only Black American settlers and their descendants were citizens able to vote, and so represented them, often working in tandem with the Masonic Order. The party endorsed systems of forced labour. In 1930 they sold human labour to Spanish colonialists on Fernando Po (now Bioko in Equatorial Guinea which in the 18th century was a Portuguese colony), leading to a five-year U.S. and British boycott of Liberia. Despite this dispute, the West saw them as a stabilising, unthreatening force and so invested heavily in the nation under William Tubman's leadership (1944–1971).

The party lost power after Tubman's successor, William Tolbert, was killed in an April 1980 coup by forces opposed to his clampdown on the political opposition and tolerance of corruption. It was then the opposition's turn to clamp down on the True Whig Party. The vast majority of its members and supporters left the party, but it struggled on as a minor party.

The party participated in the Liberian elections, 2005 as part of the Coalition for the Transformation of Liberia.