Liberia is a small country of 43,000 square miles (111,369 sq. km.) situated at the south-western point of West Africa, bordered by Sierra Leone to the north-west, the Ivory Coast to the east, and Guinea to the north. Its 2.5 million inhabitants are made up of sixteen principal tribes and a small group descended from repatriate American slaves or from slaves freed from slave-ships captured on the high seas. The first slaves were brought to Liberia in 1822, as part of a scheme of the American Colonisation Society. The number of repatriate slaves was never large. There were about 12,000 colonists between 1822 and 1861, when the American Civil War effectively stopped colonisation. Of these, 4,500 were freeborn (all the first five presidents had been born in freedom) and about 7,000 born in slavery. As well there were about 5,700 Africans freed from their transport ships and resettled in Liberia – in one 18-month period in 1860–1 more than 4,000 of these ‘Congoes’ were settled along the coast. Colonisation was never pursued very vigorously, for there was controversy about the whole idea from the beginning. Many saw the scheme as simply a way for America to free itself of the problem of black freedmen, and those advocating abolition saw colonisation as a prop for the institution of slavery. In the early days disease took a tremendous toll of the repatriates, and the colonists were largely left to their own meagre resources.