Consuls
In the summer of 1861, William Thayer was the new consul general for the United States in Egypt. He had hardly been in Alexandria a month when he met with the viceroy for the first time. The Egyptian leader peppered him for the latest news about the American Civil War as Thayer tried to change the subject to what he thought was a pressing matter: the protection of Faris-el-Hakim, a Syrian physician who had been working for American Presbyterian missionaries when he was attacked in a courtroom in Osiut (Asyut). The circumstances that brought Thayer to Faris’s defense were somewhat unusual. Faris was neither a US citizen nor an American protégé with official connection to the United States. His employment by American Protestant missionaries, though, seemed enough to justify Thayer’s attention and care. For Thayer—as for Secretary of State William Seward and President Abraham Lincoln—Faris’s case would become an important test of both religious liberty around the world, and of the ability of the United States to lead, even in a time of national crisis.1
The story, which had only the most minor of connections to US diplomatic priorities, drew American attention with its combination of persecution and chivalry. Presbyterian missionaries Gulian Lansing, Samuel Ewing, and John Hogg hired Faris to travel about six hundred miles from Alexandria to Osiut, where he would distribute Bibles and other religious publications. The circulation of sacred texts was essential to their evangelism, and missionaries found that it could be more effective to have local Christians, rather than US missionaries, do this work. While there, Faris met a woman who needed his help. Though born a Christian, she had at some point become Muslim and now wished to renounce Islam and return to the church. Egypt had recently enacted new laws of religious toleration, which she hoped would allow her conversion to be recognized and accepted. In order to benefit from the legal protection of religious toleration, she would need to go in front of a court to formally declare this desire. She asked Faris to act as her attorney, and he agreed.
Once they arrived at the court, however, Faris found a large crowd of prominent citizens and “rabble” alike. Tensions were high. The government’s promise of religious toleration meant little this far away from the reach of Alexandria. To the crowd at Osiut, Christianity was an “odious heresy,” and Faris had placed himself in a difficult and dangerous position. He was forced to sit on the ground and was then bastinadoed, beaten, spat on, kicked, and maimed. He was imprisoned and only released when the jailor feared that he was dying. He survived, but he was left with permanent health complications.2
Faris’s connection to the United States was slim. He was employed by the missionaries, but they never filled out the requisite paperwork for the local government that would have categorized Faris as an American protégé, under the protection of the US government. Yet after Faris was attacked, the missionaries immediately turned to the consular agent at Osiut, and then to Consul General Thayer. For Thayer, the missing paperwork was unimportant. He determined that Faris had been acting as the “agent and representative of two US citizens, engaged in a lawful missionary enterprise.” Regardless of whether or not Faris met the formal definition of an American protégé, Thayer insisted that any attack on Faris was an attack on the missionaries. Accordingly, Thayer demanded that the Egyptian government respond quickly and decisively, just as he would have if the victim had been a US citizen. He demanded the imprisonment of the attackers, some of whom were officials in Osiut, and a hefty indemnity payment. In the end, thirteen men were sentenced to a year in prison (though pardoned after a bit more than a month) and Faris was granted 100,000 piastres (five thousand dollars) for his injuries.3
News of the case traveled to Washington, and President Lincoln expressed his gratitude to the viceroy for his “speedy” punishment of the Egyptian subjects who had been guilty of what the president called the “cruel persecution” of Faris. These events, Lincoln wrote, would be proof not only of the viceroy’s friendship to the United States, but to the “firmness, integrity, and wisdom” of his government. The Christian world, Lincoln and Thayer alike claimed, would take notice.4
In his letter to the missionaries informing them of his success, Thayer expanded on this point. Clearly this was a victory for Faris and the missionaries, but it was more than this. It was, Thayer reflected, a victory for “the great multitude of Christians of all denominations—whether native or of foreign birth—throughout Egypt.” And it was a victory for the United States. Thayer rejoiced that the US flag remained “as it always has been, the potent symbol alike of civil and religious liberty.” The missionaries agreed. “As missionaries,” they explained, they were glad that this particular decision advanced their work. But “as Americans,” they took pride in this evidence of US influence toward “tolerance and right” in Egypt.
Thayer and the missionaries all agreed that Faris’s case was about more than just this one particular story. It spoke to much larger issues: the influence of the United States in the world, US responsibility to stand for religious toleration and liberty around the globe, and the relationship between the American state and the missionary movement. The missionaries were grateful to Thayer for taking action as a consul and seeing the links between US and missionary goals. Not all consuls did so, but missionaries consistently believed that they should and complained when they didn’t.
The consular system was an important arm of the Department of State in the nineteenth century. Its primary responsibility was to assist US commercial interests around the world. Accordingly, the consular system might seem at first glance to have little to do with missionary work. However, consuls could be extremely important missionary allies. Sympathetic consuls could help advance the missionary cause. They, like missionaries, at times assumed that commercial relations could only improve if non-Christian countries became Christianized.
“Civilization,” many missionaries believed, was an essential byproduct of and companion to their evangelism. This realization was at the heart of much of the cooperation between the missionaries and the US government: both missionaries and consular officers often understood their goals to be linked. In spite of this, America’s commercial and missionary interests could also clash. Not all consuls or all missionaries understood their work to be compatible. Conflicts overseas between US missionary and commercial representatives signaled important debates about the role of the United States in the world.
In Asia and the Middle East, US consuls took on particularly significant roles that went beyond commercial assistance. Here, missionaries and consuls were partners in shaping the American experience abroad. In these relationships, for good and ill, missionaries most directly faced the questions of how and when their religious and their political identities mattered.
The Consular System
In an era when the US diplomatic footprint was minimal, consuls were the main boots on the ground. American consuls could be found in international ports from the very beginning of the United States. Global commerce was a central goal of early US foreign relations, and so the consular system was an important component of US engagement with the world. By the middle of the century, the consular system had grown at an impressive rate, with more and more consuls appointed overseas to assist the flow of international commerce. In major port cities, US consuls served alongside the consular officers of other foreign nations maintaining the paperwork that allowed ships to carry goods to and from the United States.
The US consular presence in missionary lands expanded at mid-century. On an 1828 list of diplomatic and commercial officers of the United States, none were listed in East or Southeast Asia, the Pacific, or the Middle East—all regions that already had a US missionary presence. Two years later, the Sandwich Islands had a commercial agent, China had a consul, and the Ottoman dominions had a chargé d’affaires, a dragoman, and a consul, all of whom were based in Constantinople. These numbers would climb over the coming decades, with consuls soon being placed in Bombay, Singapore, and more locations in Turkey and Egypt. It was only in the 1840s that China welcomed a US ambassador and additional consuls, and in the 1850s the US presence in the Ottoman Empire extended to seven consuls in addition to the resident minister.5 As consuls appeared in missionary territory, the missionary relationship to the US government—and individual missionaries’ understandings of their rights as US citizens abroad—would evolve.
In its 1855 instructions to consular officers, the US State Department explained that the general role of a consul was “to discharge administrative and sometimes judicial functions in regard to their fellow-citizens, merchants, marines, travelers, and others who dwell or happen to be in such places.” Missionaries fell under the category of “others,” though depending on where the consuls were based, missionaries could occupy a fair amount of their time or energy. After all, consuls were tasked with promoting “the interests of the citizens of the United States who may require the exercise of consular functions.”6 These broad instructions saw consuls doing a wide range of things to assist missionaries. In Athens, Greece, the consul helped missionaries locate a teacher for a mission school in 1839.7 In Fouchow (Fuzhou), China, the consul assisted missionaries in renting property and then held copies of the lease during a period of unrest and opposition to the missionary presence in 1856.8 In Jerusalem, the consul helped missionary J. T. Barclay find a home to rent and negotiated a lower rent in 1872.
Wherever they served, missionaries understood that a friendly consul could make all the difference in the world to the missionary project. In Jerusalem, for example, the consul not only found Barclay a home—he helped him find a community. Shortly after Barclay’s arrival, he was visited by a range of authorities and leaders in the city, all of whom had been informed of his presence by the consul.9 Barclay soon hired the consul’s brother, a member of the Presbyterian Church born in Bethlehem who had previously worked for the missionaries of the ABCFM, as a teacher and dragoman, further solidifying the positive relationship between the mission and the consulate.10
Considering their importance for America’s international presence, consuls were very poorly paid. A consular office could be lucrative for those who could use their posts as a supplement to other commercial endeavors, but not all were successful. As a result, it could be difficult, particularly in less desirable locations, to attract skillful and responsible consuls to fill the available positions. To make things easier, regulations did not require US consuls or consular agents to be US citizens or even to speak English. The consul Barclay was so fond of, Jacob Serapion Murad, was one such example. When a disappointed US citizen who had hoped for the appointment to the post had complained to the president about being passed over by a non-American, the missionaries rose to Murad’s defense. “Though an Armenian by nation,” Barclay explained, Murad was “thoroughly an American in principle.”11 What mattered most, Barclay insisted, was that a consul possessed an understanding of local conditions and a willingness to pursue US interests, including those of the missionaries.12
Though the consular system had not been designed to protect or assist missionary endeavors, missionaries did their best to make the consular system work for them. For most of the parts of the world where missionaries worked, consuls were the only representatives of the American state to whom missionaries might look for assistance.
The frequent comparisons that missionaries had made between themselves and merchants suggested both that they understood themselves to be equally deserving of the protection of the US government overseas and that they feared that the government did not prioritize their protection as much as they did that of merchants. These could become arguments not only about the specific issues at hand, but about the broader questions of America’s international standing and which groups of Americans were empowered to represent their country.
When missionaries came into conflict with merchants and sailors, as they did with some regularity in port cities in the Pacific and East Asia, the consuls well might side with the sailors in finding missionaries to be more meddlesome than benevolent. Such clashes were easy enough to explain. Missionaries came to these regions burning with religious fervor. They had a particular vision of what the US position in the world ought to look like. The United States, they argued, was a Christian nation and should be recognized as a leader in morality and civilized behavior. As they put forward these claims to those that they hoped to convert, missionaries could be incensed to see US sailors drinking, carousing, and generally behaving in ways that did not live up to their high moral standard. For their part, sailors and merchants could find missionaries to be sanctimonious and moralistic, which they undoubtedly were. Consuls and diplomats could find missionary priorities at odds with national policy. Conflict was inevitable. And consuls, with their primary allegiances to the commercial interests of the country, very well might agree with the more negative portrayals of missionaries and their impact on local culture and customs.13
But consuls could also be incredibly important allies to the mission movement. This had a great deal to do with the distinct roles of consuls who served in the non-Christian world. In Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, consuls took on judicial and diplomatic roles in addition to their commercial responsibilities. Ambassador Caleb Cushing explained the reasons for this in 1844 as he worked to negotiate the new treaty with China. This legal and diplomatic mindset saw the world divided in two parts: Christendom on the one side, and pagan and Muslim states on the other. The “law of nations,” Cushing determined, only governed the relations between Christian powers. In “the greater part of Asia and Africa,” on the other hand, “individual Christians” were at risk. They could not trust local governments to protect them from “the sanguinary barbarism of the inhabitants, or by their frenzied bigotry.” And so, to protect the rights of US citizens who might be traveling or residing in such regions, extra protection was necessary.
This protection came in the form of extraterritoriality, a legal concept that allows foreigners to be subject to the laws and judgment of their own country, rather than those of the country where they are visiting. Treaty provisions for extraterritoriality required foreign consulates to create judicial systems and even prisons to handle any criminal behavior of their own citizens. And it allowed those citizens certain freedoms from local laws and regulations.
By the time Cushing worked to guarantee Americans extraterritoriality in China in 1844, the practice was already standard in Western treaties with the Barbary States, Turkey, and Muskat. In China, Britain and Portugal had taken similar measures. America, Cushing concluded, should do so as well.14 Extraterritorial provisions, however, required a different organization of America’s consular presence. In China and in the Ottoman Empire, these responsibilities developed gradually over the century as new treaties expanded US extraterritoriality and more consuls were placed in these regions.
Even as the numbers of consuls increased, they were expected to cover wide ranges of territory. The seven consuls in the Ottoman Empire in 1859, for example, were based in Constantinople, Smyrna, Beirut, Jerusalem, the Isle of Candia, the Isle of Cyprus, and Trebisond. These consulates did not exactly overlap with the locations of missionary stations.
In places where there were no US consuls, missionaries might turn for assistance to the consuls of other nations. English consuls could often be depended on to support US missionaries in the absence of a formal US presence. In 1849, for example, it was the English consul at Salonica who forced local leaders to reverse course in their attempts to bar a Jewish teacher from visiting with the US missionaries and instructing them in Hebrew. Under threat of the removal of English protection, the policy was immediately reversed. American audiences saw this as a victory for “the cause of religious liberty.”15
Foreign consuls could assist when missionaries were physically attacked as well. In 1856, the missionaries in Persia suspected that one of their teachers and his family had been poisoned after two of his children and his wife became extremely sick after eating from a pot of soup that had been heated in a neighbor’s home. They suspected arsenic poisoning and tested the soup on a cat to confirm their suspicions. The cat died instantly. Assuming this to be an attack on the mission, the Americans looked for help in pressuring the government to take the matter seriously. There was no US or British diplomatic or consular figure in the area, so the Americans turned to the Russian consul general, who had been an enthusiastic supporter of their work. The Russians acted in an unofficial capacity, which perhaps explains the reluctance of the government to conduct a thorough investigation. Suspects were called in for questions, but ultimately released.16
FIGURE 4.1. Circa 1860 both missionaries and the US government expanded their reach in the eastern Mediterranean. Outside of common centers like Constantinople, however, missionaries and consuls continued to settle in different locations.
Sources: Department of State, List of Ministers, Consuls, and Other Diplomatic and Commercial Agents of the United States, in Foreign Countries (Washington: Department of State, 1859); Methodist Episcopal Church, Fortieth Annual Report of the Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church (New York: Printed for the Society, 1859); Rev. J. Logan Aikman, Cyclopedia of Christian Missions: Their Rise, Progress, and Present Position (London: Richard Griffin and Company, 1860); Presbyterian Church in the USA, The Twenty-Second Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (New York: Published for the Board at the Mission House, 1859); William Gammell, A History of American Baptist Missions in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, Under the Care of the American Baptist Missionary Union (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1854); ABCFM, Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Presented at the Meeting Held at Philadelphia, PA, October 4–7, 1859 (Boston: Press of T.R. Marvin and Son, 1859).
An efficient and effective consular service was a symbol of national pride. Inefficiency and ineffectiveness, on the other hand, could be a national embarrassment. Consuls and missionaries alike wanted the United States to be respected abroad. They wanted the United States to have the same level of protection and power that European nations enjoyed. Many of them sought a special role for the United States abroad. George Frederick Seward, the consul general to China, bemoaned the ways that European powers outstripped the United States in their influence over Chinese markets and media. But it was not US interest alone that motivated him; he felt sure that a stronger US presence would help protect China from being overpowered by European ambitions.17 In the Levant, too, when diplomats considered closing some consular agencies it was ultimately the sense of competition with European powers that kept them open. If European countries had vice consuls and consular agents present, it simply would not do for the United States to close theirs. National pride was at stake.18
Asian Consuls
The right consul could mean the difference between protection and abandonment, between expanding access to new communities and being blocked. When new treaties opened up much of Asia to trade with the United States and other Western powers in the middle of the century, missionaries and their supporters were anxious to be sure that their own access to these countries would be similarly increased. Missionaries followed treaty developments closely, requesting their own copies from the State Department after ratification and publishing them in missionary periodicals and annual reports to make it clear to readers what the possibilities were for missionary activity.19 When missionaries had the chance to advance missionary interests by serving the consulates directly, they tended to do so.
Missionaries in China often had close relationships with the consuls there. They regularly participated in the discussions surrounding treaties, serving as translators, consuls, and advisors throughout the process. Peter Parker was not the only American missionary who combined his missionary work with service to the State Department. Most of the early Canton missionaries did in some capacity or other. Elijah Bridgman had served alongside Parker as joint Chinese secretary to the US Legation and chaplain during Caleb Cushing’s negotiation of the 1844 treaty. Samuel Wells Williams, in addition to his extensive publications, served as an official interpreter to the US delegation in Canton. In Ningpo (Ningbo), Divie Bethune McCartee served as acting consul for eleven years and was a frequent interpreter for the Americans in the decades that followed. Missionaries and consuls traveled together as well, such as when the Macao consul joined missionaries on a river journey to distribute copies of religious books and tracts.20
As US diplomats continued to “open” additional Asian countries to Western trade, they continued to follow the model of using missionaries as translators, interpreters, and consuls. Siam (Thailand) was another important site of American missionary activity, though one that generated much less commercial interest than China. High tariffs in the first half of the century had kept US merchants largely away, but missionaries remained interested in the region. When the United States sent Townsend Harris to Bangkok to negotiate a new treaty in 1856 that would guarantee a lower tariff rate, he found a community of US missionaries who had been in the country for decades. The missionaries had found a welcoming audience in King Mongkut, who appreciated the medical and scientific learning that these Westerners brought with their Bibles. It was a missionary, John Chandler, who had urged President Filmore and Secretary of State Webster in 1851 to send a diplomat to Siam to push for a revision to the existing treaty that governed trade between the countries.21 Five years later, the United States sent Townsend Harris to Bangkok to negotiate a new treaty. Because the missionaries had fluency in the language and good relations with the Siamese government, Mongkut as well as Harris turned to them as advisors and translators during their negotiations.
Like the treaty with China, the US treaty with Siam was modeled on an earlier British treaty that had established an unequal relationship between the Asian and Western nations. The similarities between treaties were not accidental. Both England and the United States used some of the same diplomats to negotiate multiple Asian treaties, and the same motivations animated them all. The British treaty with Siam that Harris used as a model had been negotiated by the men who had earlier negotiated the British treaty with China. After Siam, Harris would go on to negotiate the US treaty with Japan, applying similar principles.22 The main priority of all these Western treaties was trade, but commerce was not the only thing that these treaties affected. Americans were granted extraterritoriality, allowed to purchase land and settle in Bangkok, and to travel freely throughout the country. Most important, like the other treaties, this one granted the United States most-favored-nation status, meaning that any further privileges granted to other nations in future treaties would apply to the United States as well. Harris secured the rights that the British had negotiated in 1855, and nothing more.
Chandler, like some other optimistic observers, was disappointed. Writing to the secretary of state about the negotiations, Chandler complained that Harris had been “in too great a hurry” and “lost his patience and self command, and failed to secure any advantages over treaties up to that date.”23 The Americans, he believed, might have gotten much more out of the treaty. In practice, because of his good relationship with the missionaries, Mongkut allowed the missionaries even more freedoms than the treaty required. American missionaries settled throughout the country, not just in Bangkok, establishing missions where they went.24
When Harris left Bangkok, he named Stephen Mattoon, a Presbyterian missionary who had been living in Bangkok since 1847, as the first US consul to Siam. Harris had met Mattoon while negotiating the treaty, but Mattoon’s appointment was first suggested by the Siamese. As Harris later explained, an official had “strongly recommended” Mattoon on the basis of his long residence and linguistic skills. More than this, he argued that Mattoon “was a discreet good man; that they had full confidence in him; that he never lied; and that he never got angry.” Harris agreed with this assessment, and Mattoon would serve in this role for three years.25 When Mattoon stepped down from the role due to financial concerns (the consulate, at this time, was an unpaid position), he was replaced with John Hassett Chandler, previously associated with the Baptist mission in Bangkok. Missionary wife Margaret Landon would later refer to Mattoon’s departure from the consulate as a “calamity” for both US diplomatic and missionary relations with Siam. Those who followed were, in her opinion, “a series of consummate rascals.”26 Chandler served as vice consul and consul, even as he polarized much of the American community in the city. In the years after the Civil War, the position was usually filled by political appointees from Washington, though Presbyterian missionary Noah McDonald served as acting consul three different times between 1868 and 1886. Other missionaries, including Samuel Reynolds House and William Dean, served the consular system in other roles, including as judges in the extraterritorial court.27
American missionaries enjoyed good relations with the Siamese government, making the intervention of the United States on their behalf largely unnecessary before the 1870s. Once consuls began arriving in Siam as political appointments from the United States, however, conflicts followed. Missionaries and consuls soon found themselves at odds.
The conflicts between consul George Frederick Partridge and the missionaries, for example, were many. Some seem to have been personal (as when Partridge reportedly unsuccessfully tried to “bribe” women “of bad character” to discredit missionary Samuel House), but others spoke to broader concerns about the position of the United States. As part of Partridge’s efforts to encourage US trade, he sold licenses that permitted the buyer to sell low-duty alcohol in Bangkok. Liquor shops that possessed the license took to displaying the American flag as a sign of their immunity from Siamese taxes. The result, soon enough, was that missionaries were afraid to fly American flags over their own buildings because, as they explained “the natives thought it was the sign of a liquor store.”28
This was precisely the type of incident that was designed to frustrate American missionaries and make them question the relationship of their work to the US diplomatic project. For all that they needed a consul in place, particularly as missionaries and converts began to face persecution from local governments in the 1870s, missionaries were concerned that the behavior of this undisciplined and unrespectable man would harm their own cause by associating the United States, not with a superior religion and moral system, but with drinking and all the bad behavior that followed from it.
As in China and Siam, Japan was the site of new treaties that allowed missionaries and consuls to both work together and argue over the proper role of the United States. Commodore Matthew Perry first opened trade between Japan and the United States in 1854, accompanied by missionary translators. Two years later, Townsend Harris arrived as the first US consul general to Japan. Missionaries celebrated Harris’s new treaty with Japan, which not only expanded trade, but included provisions about religious freedom. Americans living in Japan were granted free exercise of religion and the right to build churches. These provisions for religious freedom were essential prerequisites to mission work and were obtained at the explicit direction of Secretary of State Marcy, who had urged Harris to do whatever could be done for future missionary efforts.29
Though this religious freedom was not extended to any potential Japanese converts, missionary supporters assumed that this would eventually follow, as it had done in China. After all, the Japanese knew enough about Christianity, they believed, to understand that evangelism would follow the recognition of Christian practice. The right to religious freedom “must be followed by its propagation,” one article in a missionary magazine explained. The Japanese were shrewd enough to understand “that the exercise of our religion involves making converts and planting churches.” Harris was not a missionary, but he had worked alongside them before and now brought a major victory for the cause. Missionary supporters accordingly celebrated Harris and the United States alike, noting with pleasure that “we have, as a nation, opened a way through their wall of exclusion, and this without bloodshed.” God’s hands, they could see, were at work in opening Japan for the United States.30
But Harris’s treaty actually did not secure missionaries the right to evangelize. They were explicitly warned, in fact, not to do anything “calculated to excite religious animosity.” The Japanese commissioners in the treaty negotiations had resisted all the religious concessions. While they backed down on some points, on this they remained firm.31
The Missionary Herald nonetheless celebrated Harris’s treaty as “The Good News from Japan.” Henry Blodgett, a missionary in Shanghai, argued that Japan “ought to be occupied today.”32 This militaristic language of occupation echoed the strong arm that Commodore Perry had used to open Japan for trade. As the century progressed, the United States’ sense of its right to be active in whatever countries it wanted to be was more fully developed than it had been earlier in the century. Missionaries were not immune to this, either.
The Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Dutch Reformed churches all sent out missionaries to Japan in the 1850s; the ABCFM followed shortly thereafter. They found, however, that in spite of their optimistic predictions after the new treaties with Japan, missionary work was still quite difficult. An 1864 article in the Missionary Herald summarized the challenges as “the known aversion to intercourse with foreigners, the bitter, long-continued hostility to Christianity, or the peculiar and not well understood character of the Government.”33 As they had earlier done in China, missionaries remained convinced that they might do useful preparatory work for the time when they would have more freedom to evangelize. In the meantime, they worked on language acquisition, translation, and text distribution. With the help of the US consul, one missionary found work as an English language teacher to Japanese government interpreters.34
There was little else that missionaries could do, given that the Japanese government turned to the death penalty to punish any Japanese who became Christian. Harris had suggested that missionaries confine themselves to the sale of books, as “the only safe ground” for them to stand on under existing law.35 Over the course of the 1860s, missionaries reported government officials breaking up any religious classes that they tried to organize. Very few, they explained, were willing to even step inside of a church building. The solution was not to back away. Rather, missionaries urged the US government to take action.
In 1867, missionary Paul Bagley wrote to President Andrew Johnson directly to request a US response to a Japanese edict that made it a capital offense to become Christian. The law did not concern the religious freedom of Americans, but of the potential converts of the missionaries, and Bagley was concerned.36 By 1871, the American Board missionaries took this case public in the pages of the Missionary Herald. The time was rapidly approaching for a revision of the treaty between the United States and Japan, and missionaries urged the government to insist on the adoption of religious toleration “for humanity’s sake, if not on religious grounds.” This was, they wrote, supported by the US minister in Japan. “Some may say foreign powers have no right to interfere,” the missionaries acknowledged, but they strongly disagreed. While force might not be justified from outside powers, Christian countries like the United States “certainly may and ought to remonstrate, and do all they possibly can to show the Japanese the folly and the wickedness of their course.”37
In the meantime, missionaries did what they could, often with the effect of blending their religious work with politics. As had been the case earlier and elsewhere, they well understood that their ability to evangelize was tied to the government’s ability to secure further American access to Japan. Commerce and missions again seemed to go hand in hand. Missionaries like Divie Bethune McCartee helped to establish the new university at Tokyo, hoping that encouraging educational systems that resembled Western institutions would lead to a greater welcome for the Westerners. McCartee, with only his background in medical missions and consular work in Ningpo, became a professor of International Law.
Middle Eastern Consuls
Like Asia, the Middle East was an important exception to the usual functioning of the US consular system. Here, too, consuls took on judicial roles to enable the extraterritorial system of the United States to function in the region. From 1830, US treaties with the Ottoman Empire required that if any US citizen was charged with a crime, they must be tried before a US consul or minister. In this, the Americans were again following European example.38 The United States accordingly appointed consuls in Constantinople and Beirut in addition to consular agencies in Ramle (Ramla), Acre (Akko), and Jaffa.39 Yet for the missionaries who were spread throughout Ottoman territories, this did not seem to be nearly enough. Missionaries in Asia tended to find the consular support that they needed, given US commercial interests in the region. In the Middle East, however, missionaries regularly requested more US representation.
Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire were working under governments that did not support their presence, and they often delighted in shows of US power. Beirut missionaries celebrated in 1834, for example, when US warships arrived in Syria. Writing about the visit later, the missionaries reflected on both the pleasure they took in “the sight of our flag, and the presence of so many of our countrymen,” as well as the ability of the ships to “give the people an idea of our distinct national existence.” The visit, they hoped, would give people pause if they ever thought of threatening the missionaries. It should be clear to all who observed them that the missionaries “expected to derive important protection in times of danger.” At the time, there was no consul in the immediate region, so the missionaries had good reason to worry. They were relieved to find the commodore interested in their welfare and willing to patrol the coast in the summer. In their letters, later published in the Missionary Herald, they hoped that US merchants might take notice as well and begin to trade there.40
Consuls were essential for missionaries to feel secure in territory that did not always welcome evangelism. In their basic capacity as defenders of US citizens’ rights to property and safety abroad, consuls could be key allies of the missionaries. For example, hostilities in the Mount Lebanon region of Syria resulted in government orders forcing all foreigners, including the American missionaries, into Beirut. With only ten days’ notice, missionaries were forced to abandon much of their property just as they were beginning to rebuild the mission structure after an earlier wave of violence had forced their departure. It was the consul who could do the necessary work to ensure the safety of missionary property left on the mountain. When the minister of foreign affairs sought to limit any guarantee to those damages that might occur “in case of insurrection or revolution,” the consul, at the missionaries’ urging, protested and insisted that the Turkish government protect the property from any damages whatsoever.41 Missionaries had good reason to worry that without a consul present to serve as an advocate, they might face considerable difficulties.
One solution to this problem might have been for the missionaries simply to abandon plans to evangelize in regions where they could not expect the welcome of the local government. But missionaries seem not to have ever taken such an option seriously. Although missionaries did consider practical issues about their safety and about their likelihood to be effective in any given area before opening missions, their faith in the ultimate importance of their work overtook all other concerns. And in this region in particular, they balanced several competing concerns. If the Ottoman government was not particularly welcoming, this did not mean that individual communities would not be. American missionaries generally did not expect to work among Muslims in Ottoman territory, well understanding the risks of such an approach. They focused, instead, on bringing Orthodox Christians (whom they often referred to as “nominal” Christians) into the Protestant fold. This was, they understood, entirely legal.
By 1856, the Ottoman government granted equal rights to Christians and other non-Muslims to protection of their persons and property, freedom of worship, education of children of all religions, and permission for foreigners to acquire land. Under these laws, Orthodox Christians had the right to become Protestant, a freedom that did not extend to Muslims. Yet the missionaries still faced considerable opposition in many locations. A nearby consul, they hoped, could provide protection from attacks on their person or property, or from overzealous local officials who might seek to hinder their work.
Occasionally, missionaries themselves could serve as consuls in Ottoman territories, just as they did in Asia. Missionary James Barclay was regularly considered for consular roles (though he refused the positions). Charles Saunders, a Seventh Day Baptist missionary, served as the consular agent in Jaffa. John Baldwin Hay, who later held the Jaffa consular agency, was the son and brother of Episcopal missionaries. He used his position to help them establish a mission school.
Whenever possible, missionaries and their supporters reminded the US government that more consuls were needed. Rufus Anderson, secretary of the ABCFM, took Secretary of State Edward Everett’s request for information about Americans living in Jerusalem in 1852 as an opportunity to make this point. In addition to the resident missionaries, Anderson described a rising group of US tourists coming through the region. Anderson expected missionary writings to only increase the numbers of travelers in the region. In the absence of nearby consuls, missionaries were finding themselves increasingly taxed by requests to accommodate these travelers. Missionaries, he went on to explain, were reliant on consuls far from their own places of residence. For US missionaries in Upper Mesopotamia and on the Tigris River, Beirut—more than five hundred miles away—was the closest consulate. This was far from ideal.42
Missionaries needed consuls for more than just the protection of their property. They also feared for their physical safety. In 1859, missionaries in Constantinople sent the US government a memorial asking for more aid.43 When a group of Christians in Lebanon were killed by Muslims in the 1860s, the American Board again reached out for protection. The State Department promised protection to the American missionaries and sent a warship to the Mediterranean.44 In the coming years, mission boards would continue to keep in touch with Washington and comment on the effectiveness of the consular system in protecting their missionaries. By the 1870s, the US government increased the numbers of consuls so that consular agencies were responsible for areas within a nine-hour journey. But even so, confusion remained about who had oversight of which area. Americans in Washington and the Levant disagreed over the strategic importance of the region.45
The missionary connections to consuls in this region could lead potential converts to confuse the roles of consuls and missionaries and, relatedly, the political effects of conversion. In 1844, for example, missionaries in Syria were approached by a group who wanted to join the Protestant church. In their interviews with the missionaries, it became clear that their primary motivations were political, not religious. They expected that affiliation with Protestantism, rather than Greek Orthodoxy, would provide them with protection against the oppression they faced as Orthodox Christians. As the missionaries reported, these potential converts had hoped they might be protected against Turkish law, excused from paying their taxes, and benefit from the intervention of US consuls. None of these, the missionaries were quick to explain, were benefits of membership in the Protestant church. The missionaries were, accordingly, doubtful that their desire to convert was in earnest.
Ultimately, it was to the consul, not the missionaries, that the converts proved their sincerity. During Lent, they staged their break with Orthodoxy in front of the consul’s door. Traditionally, they would have refused to eat meat during this season of repentance. Instead, they gathered to share a dish of leben and announced their conversion to Protestantism, saying: “In this religion I will live, and in this religion I will die.” This, the missionaries understood, was “most solemn in itself, and most momentous in its consequences.” As notable as it is that the converts chose the consul’s home as the place to perform this sign of their departure from the Greek church, it is equally notable that their choice worked. No missionaries were present, yet missionaries were told about what happened, presumably by the consul, and quickly understood its significance. The converts had not been sure at first whom they should address about securing a Protestant minister and teacher: the consul or the missionaries. They saw the two roles as somehow connected. And as much as the missionaries were insistent that they were distinct, and that no secular benefits would follow from conversion, they could not deny the reality that there was indeed some sort of link between consul and missionary.46
Missionary Patriotism
Most of the time, missionaries never had to do much to explain the relative importance of their allegiances to their country or their faith. They emphasized their Americanness or their transnational Christian identity how and when it suited any particular situation. But when missionaries served as consuls and consular agents, they had to directly confront a question that otherwise could simmer under the surface: What was their relationship to their country when they were evangelizing overseas?
Working directly for the US government required a different form of missionary patriotism. It made it quite clear that missionaries served two masters: God and state. Sometimes, missionaries were able to do both at once: serving their mission boards while also taking on some government responsibilities. But at other times, the work for the consulate was too demanding, and they had to step away from missionary work, at least for a time. Doing so was worth it if their diplomatic efforts could open the door to more evangelism. Some government work, like translation, involved travel that took missionaries away from their stations. The judicial responsibilities that could come with US consulates, too, could put missionaries in uncomfortable situations. At the very least, it contributed to the sense among some observers that missionaries were united with foreign governments in colonizing efforts.
The various missionary organizations had different responses to this problem. As the largest of the mission boards, the ABCFM’s evolving policies on missionary service to government is instructive. Initially, the ABCFM had been enthusiastic about missionary government work. Rufus Anderson, one of the American Board’s corresponding secretaries and its leading strategist in the mid-nineteenth century, had volunteered missionary support of the US government in China.47 Anderson’s experience of watching Peter Parker’s work for the government, however, led to a shift in attitude. In 1847, Parker officially and permanently parted ways with the ABCFM, ostensibly because his government work, now on a permanent and salaried basis, would prevent him from fulfilling his missionary obligations. In that year, the ABCFM included a statement in its annual report that it would now be a “settled principle” that “a missionary, going into civil or political life, ceases de facto, from his connection with the Board.”48 Yet even after his departure from the mission, Parker would continue much of the same medical work that he had done as a missionary. The problem was not that his government work consumed all of his time and kept him from his missionary responsibilities. It was not so simple, then, as the official language of the ABCFM statement had made it seem.
Instead, we might look at Parker’s departure from the ABCFM as emblematic of several ongoing debates about missionary methods. The reason that Anderson had at first supported Parker’s work for the government was that he understood that there was a significant overlap between the goals of the US government and the missionary movement. But Anderson was also at the center of debates about the appropriateness of medical missions and other expensive missionary efforts that focused on institution-building and gradual, long-term efforts over an evangelization that emphasized preaching alone. This debate was theological, but it was also about money and method. Anderson favored missions that were modeled on building churches that were self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating. Medical missions presented challenges to this model. While medical missionaries like Parker trained local doctors, nurses, and assistants, and while some funding support could be supplied locally, it remained the case that medical missions required significant financial obligations on the missionary societies. Anderson and other skeptics did not feel that these costs were outweighed by the benefits that medical establishments could supply by bringing people into the mission’s orbit. When schools and hospitals did not result in large numbers of baptisms, these critics wondered if they were worth the money. The institutions seemed more focused on culture than on Christ.49
Parker’s departure was the culmination of several years of discussion about whether his salary ought to be covered by the ABCFM or if he could secure funding through another organization focused on medicine.50 It was not only his political work, then, that Anderson thought took him outside of the proper concern of the American Board.
Other missionary organizations were more supportive of their missionaries engaging in political work in addition to institution building. The Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions had no such concerns about Divie Bethune McCartee’s combination of missionary, medical, and political work, even as his political duties occasionally required absences from his missionary work. “Going into civil or political life” was not a disqualification for missionary labor here. Presbyterian missionary Stephen Mattoon similarly combined the roles in Siam, although his appointment as consul aroused some early concerns. In his journal, Mattoon reflected that he had not sought out his diplomatic and political work, and hoped that he would “not forget my higher duties while engaged in them. In this as in everything I shall await the indications of Providence and seek to be guided accordingly as to the path of duty.” His missionary colleague Daniel Bradley had been shocked at the very idea of a missionary consul, reflecting that “such a thing would scarcely be possible.”51 Yet Mattoon found a way to work out his diplomatic and missionary work, and he was followed by many other Siam missionaries in combining the roles.
But some individuals did find the choice to be impossible. Dr. James T. Barclay, a Disciples of Christ missionary with the Christian Missionary Society, managed to combine his medical practice with a geographic study of Jerusalem but twice refused the position of consular agent in that city. He apparently could not imagine combining his work as a missionary with the duties of a consul.52
By 1869, at least some within missionary circles were beginning to question the close relationship between missionaries and consuls. In the Chinese Recorder, missionary “H. G.” suggested to his colleagues that the “policy of Consular interference” that many missionaries had turned to as a default when they encountered local opposition or persecution “may be a mistaken one.” Turning to consuls for protection may have allowed missionaries to expand their reach in China, he argued, but at what cost? The practice, he argued, was unscriptural, and it contributed to a bad image for Christian missionaries. The greatest risk, H.G. found, was that it could “lead the Chinese to look upon our religion and great guns as inseparable.” If missionaries turned to consuls, and even to gunboats, for protection in going about their work in places where they were not wanted, “one is led to inquire whether we are preachers of the gospel of peace, or merely propagators of the religion of a dominant power.” It was an existential question that would come up repeatedly in the decades to come.53
American consuls around the world advocated for higher wages and a more professionalized system throughout this era. Peter Parker complained in 1856 that earlier consuls were “simply commercial agents,” which put the entire US enterprise in China at a disadvantage. The Chinese, he reported, held their own commercial class in low esteem. For the United States to rely on commercial men for its consuls, and to have the consulates located in their “counting-rooms” made it hard for Americans to gain the respect of the Chinese.54 This was especially important because in China, consuls had the care of far more than commercial relations. Extraterritoriality protected Americans, but it also demanded that US consuls fulfill their judicial and diplomatic responsibilities.
Even as Consul General George Frederick Seward asked Congress to professionalize the consular service in China, he praised missionary Edward Lord, then serving as consul in Ningpo, and warned that Lord would soon leave the consulate if the salary was not raised.55 Similar concerns had previously been attributed to Divie Bethune McCartee’s refusal of another consular post. In order to attract and retain reliable and skillful consuls, changes were needed. Samuel Wells Williams found this situation to be a blight on America’s reputation abroad. In his thirty-two years of service in China, he reported in 1865, he had known of only one non-missionary US consular officer who was able to speak Chinese.56 This was not good for US diplomatic interests and, perhaps, was getting in the way of missionary interests as well. But until reforms were made, the United States in China would continue to depend on missionary labor.
These critiques and calls for action saw a slow response in Washington. Peter Parker first suggested special language training for US consuls to reduce their reliance on missionaries in 1846; twenty years later, the problem had still not been addressed. While reforms in the 1860s brought salaries to many of the China consulates, reducing the need for consuls to make the bulk of their income through business, the amounts were well under what those with experience in China recommended. Most frustratingly, perhaps, were the comparisons to salaries at other consulates. China consuls earned less than those in England, even though the British consulate did not have diplomatic or judicial responsibilities.57
So long as missionaries depended on consuls for protection in, and occasionally access to, the places they wanted to evangelize, they would exert as much influence as they could over consular efforts. Later in the century, when calls for consular reform and professionalization were finally heeded, the missionary relationship to consuls would shift. In the meantime, consuls in missionary lands could expect to spend a lot of their time on what they came to call “missionary troubles.”