Shad's grandfather, William S. Tubman, who was 5 when he left Augusta, was raised in the coastal town of Harper. Even though Harper was well-developed and the Tubman family had been growing and thriving there for 60 years by the time Shad came along, it was still very much a frontier outpost.

The main Liberian colony around Monrovia and the smaller one at Harper, the Maryland colony, had been settled by different colonization societies, and the Maryland colony had tried to survive on its own after Liberia declared its independence in 1847.

It was 10 years later when, faced with its demise at the hands of the surrounding French and British colonies in West Africa, Maryland chose to be annexed into Liberia. But Maryland and Monrovia were still greatly separated by both distance and mind-set.

Monrovia had been taken from the natives by sword, while the missionaries who settled Maryland had bought the land properly from the area tribes. Maryland was the sleepy farming and church community - all green fields and blue laws - and Monrovia was the bustling capital.

Over time, however, as the influence of the colonization societies began to die away, Maryland experienced some of the same kinds of growing pains that Monrovia had. Not-so-neighborly squabbles grew into border wars with native tribes.

President Tubman's mother, Elizabeth, was born a slave in Atlanta and had come to Harper in 1871 with her parents. She and Tubman's father, Alexander, were childhood friends in Cape Palmas, according to biographer Doris Henries. But they married other people, and it wasn't until later that the two, both widowed, fell in love and were wed. Shad was one of six children they had, but only he and his brother Alex lived into adulthood.

The children were raised to be hard workers by their stern father, a "rugged" rock mason and devout elder in the Methodist Church. Alexander demanded that they rise early in the morning, "at the call of the pepperbird," and help with household chores - tending the garden, feeding the animals, and carrying firewood and well water - before they went off to school, where the demands on them were also high.

William V.S. Tubman sits for a press conference at the Mayflower Hotel in Akron, Oct. 22, 1954. The Ohio town was the headquarters of the Firestone Corporation and the city toward which all of the rubber trees in Liberia were said to bend - a joke on the westward lean the rubber trees develop from the way the winds whip from the Sahara down the continental bulge. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE TUBMAN FAMILY

Their "saintly" mother, Elizabeth, showed them what it meant to be compassionate and care for the less fortunate in their community. According to Mrs. Henries, the Tubman historian and family friend, Elizabeth and Alexander made frequent evangelistic tours to the native villages in the interior, and Elizabeth was known to feed and clothe urchins she took in from the street.

The Tubmans wove their son into a tapestry of industriousness and compassion. The only trait that didn't seep into Shad was their puritanical values.

For while Shad was known to sneak out of the house with some of his nicest clothes and give them to playmates who had none, he was also known to sneak out after evening prayers to join in the moonlit dances in Krutown - the natives' part of Harper. And he smoked and drank, which infuriated his teetotaler parents.

To say that Shad smoked and drank is probably insufficient. Shad Tubman really enjoyed a good smoke and a stiff drink.

In 1913, Shad graduated from Cape Palmas Seminary with honors, but he spent the night before his ordination in prayer about his vices. The next morning he went to the bishop and told him he couldn't take his ordination vows, knowing he would continue to drink and drag.

"In those days, the Methodist Church said the pastor shouldn't drink, he shouldn't smoke and so on," remembers his son Shad Jr. "He went to the bishop and said, 'Look, I drink, and I'm not going to stop it. I smoke. And if I took that vow, I'd be lying to God, so I'm not going to do it.'"

"Now, some people will say it was a good thing for the country he didn't (take the vow)," adds his son, laughing. "And some will say it's a terrible thing he didn't."

Shad Sr. chose to stay on at the seminary as an instructor for a salary of $150 a year. At the same time, he apprenticed himself to a local law firm, and he added to his meager income by tailoring, a skill he had learned in his schoolboy days.

Restless natives

Shad won his first presidency at the age of 16, when he was leader of his young men's social group, the Gastronomic Club, which arranged debates, dances and other events around Harper in friendly rivalry with another local crew, the Apollo Circle. At this same time he was serving in the militia, and in 1914 he founded his own unit - the Tubman Volunteers - to fight against the local Kru and Grebo tribespeople.

Over the years, the Tubman colonists had an uneasy relationship with the native tribes. The settlers wanted to live in peace with the locals and help civilize and Christianize them. But at the same time, they felt they had to fight to protect their turf. By the time Shad was born, the peace between the tribes and the settlers had eroded, and there was open warfare.

In 1874, Shad's grandfather - Augusta-born William S. Tubman - was killed for attempting to stop a native ritual. Witnessing a trial by "sassywood," during which tribespeople accused of witchcraft or other transgressions were forced to drink from a bowl of poison to prove their innocence, Tubman kicked over the sassywood bowl to stop the proceedings. The locals were so enraged that they beat him to death.

Vice President Richard Nixon and President William V.S. Tubman review the troops at the Military Air Transport Command Service terminal at Washington National Airport after Tubman debarked from the Columbine, President Eisenhower's personal airplane. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE TUBMAN FAMILY

The very next year, Shad's uncle William S. Tubman II also met a brutal end in the settlers' clashes with the natives. He was killed in battle and left on the battlefield as the soldiers retreated. The body was cut to pieces and eaten by the Grebo warriors.

Dazed by his brother's grisly death, Alexander Tubman paid little attention to the enemy warriors still around him. A friend of his from the Grebo tribe rushed to his aid and helped him escape the second wave of the natives' attack. Alexander spent the rest of his life caring for the needs of that Grebo friend, Dyne Weah; when Weah died during Tubman's presidency, Shad spent a reported $3,000 on funeral arrangements.

The long road to power

In the early 1920s, Shad began his own law practice in Cape Palmas and started making his name as a man of the people. He would often work for free and seldom turned anyone away. Tubman had already become known locally as a recorder in the probate court, a county attorney and tax collector.

His career really started to take off in 1920, when Liberian President C.D.B. King had occasion to hear Shad speak at a Masonic banquet in Cape Palmas. ''This country needs his brains!'' proclaimed King. According to Mrs. Henries' biography, King's influence persuaded some higher-ups in the True Whig Party, essentially the only party in Liberia, to nominate Shad to fill a Senate seat the next year. At 26, Tubman became the youngest senator in the history of the republic.

As Shad's political profile started to grow, it was King who would unwittingly give his career another, bigger boost. In the 1920s, the League of Nations investigated claims that President King and Vice President Allen Yancey were forcing Liberians into slave labor at the Spanish cocoa plantations at Fernando Po - an island off the coast of Nigeria. France and England, the established colonial powers that surrounded Liberia, wanted the league to dissolve the country, one of its charter members, and sought to divide the territory among themselves. Tubman resigned his seat in Congress to defend the vice president full time.

One of the great ironies of the Liberian experience is that the freed slaves who founded the country, having known the heavy yoke of bondage and stifling politics of race and class firsthand, had developed a caste system of their own in Africa. Now that irony, once winked at, had grown into an embarrassing international incident that threatened Liberia's very existence.

The Liberians defended themselves successfully against dissolution by the league, offering proof that they had paid the tribal chiefs for their cooperation and their peoples' labor, a common practice. At home Yancey and King were treated more harshly. The True Whig Party wanted to distance itself from the former leaders and anyone who had had anything to do with them.

So when Tubman sought re-election to Congress in 1931, he was kept off the ballot. Tubman's supporters, enraged by the freeze-out, stormed the polling places and ransacked the voting booths, shouting, ''No Tubman, no vote!''

The seat went unfilled until tempers cooled, and in 1934 Tubman was elected to return to Monrovia. In 1937, he left the Liberian Congress again to become associate justice of the Supreme Court.

At the time of Tubman's ascent through the True Whigs' ranks, the party was the only game in town. The descendants of the American slave founders held a grip on power that, at best, was similar to the way the Democratic Party controlled politics in the South throughout most of the 20th century, and, at worst, was something of a smiling dictatorship.

During a grueling trek across the Hinterlands in 1933, English writer Graham Greene got a rare glimpse into the True Whig ways when he happened upon Liberian President Edwin Barclay, and the politician suffered a spell of frankness.

''I asked him whether his authority was much the same as the American President's,'' Greene wrote. ''He said it was more complete. 'Once elected,' he said, 'and in charge of the machine' - words ran away with him; something candid and childlike and excited continually peeped through the politician's dignified phrases - 'why then, I'm the boss of the whole show.'''

''It will be seen that Liberian politics are complicated,'' wrote Greene near the end of his walking tour. ''Corruption does not make for simplicity as might be supposed. It may be all a question of cash and printing presses and armed police, but things have to be done with an air. Crudity as far as possible is avoided.''

In 1943, Tubman would succeed Barclay in the presidency. Tubman campaigned as a reformer and an outsider, but there was a lot of conjecture that he was handpicked to simply hold the president's office until Barclay could return to power later. If that was Barclay's intent, he picked the wrong man.

Tubman's first inaugural address was a blueprint for his presidency and a clear signal to the Liberian old guard that he had plans, not for just a single term in office, but for a generation of progress.

The hand of friendship

Tubman delivered that first inaugural address in Monrovia on Jan. 3, 1944, in the thick of World War II. Liberia had joined the Allies and served as an important materiel- and troop-transport point.

He called for better efforts in the health and education of Liberian people and called for the death of illiteracy. Women would be granted suffrage. He wanted to speed up the construction of roads. Agriculture and industry would be pursued with a new vigor. New immigrants would be encouraged to come to Liberia from the United States, from which migration had virtually ceased shortly after the Civil War.

Tubman's most ambitious proposals, however, really set him apart in Liberian history. He wanted to see to it that the natives of the Hinterland were no longer held at arm's length by the American settlers, who had remained close to the coast.

The tribespeople would be molded into citizens who would ''love their native land and feel proud to be called Liberians,'' he said.

''We shall engage in and strive at the assimilation and unification of our various populations composing the body politic. Liberia must be a place for all Liberians to live in alike - and to stand equally privileged, responsible and protected by like administration of law.''

This Unification Policy would be the cornerstone of his legacy and would go hand-in-hand with the Open Door Policy, by which Liberia would welcome international development to enrich the country. What Tubman was proposing may not have been new, but his charisma and ability to command the political forces swirling around him would be. The Liberia he had inherited from Barclay - where the native peoples were largely ignored and Westerners largely despised - would fall away quickly under his administration, for better or worse.

At the time he came to power, indigenous Liberians had few, if any, protections under the law, and no representation in congress. It had been just a few years since the League of Nations had nearly dissolved Liberia altogether for its alleged treatment of the natives. Until 1944, Western businesses had attempted only four joint ventures in the resource-rich country - which still eyed whites suspiciously after decades of neglect by the Americans and territorial encroachments by the French and British.

William V.S. Tubman would find a new way to do business.