Boxers
“What kind of thing is the law of nations?” Scribbling in his notebooks on China and Japan, William Rankin recorded this question, underlined it, and noted that to fully answer the question would “require the space of a large book.” Rankin, the son of China missionaries, had returned to the United States for his education and had become a historian of East Asia. Now, in notebook after notebook, he compiled and indexed his notes: names of missionaries and diplomats and a long list of subject headings. His notes on missionaries were so extensive that they required several subcategories: missionaries, as interpreters; missions and science; missionaries and good faith; Prot. missions not political; political affairs; heroism; vindication of missions; objections to missions; and more. The questions on the law of nations were part of his notes on an 1857 interview with Townsend Harris, “the first formal instruction ever received by Japan in international law,” as Rankin explained.1 In the first decade of the twentieth century, Rankin was reviewing these notebooks for his next big project: a biography of his uncle, Divie Bethune McCartee. He would need all of these notes to advance his overarching thesis.
McCartee, Rankin argued, was a model missionary. His career, which took him from the United States to China and then Japan, revealed “all of the principal kinds of work likely to be done by a foreign missionary,” but it did more than this as well. For McCartee was not just a missionary, he was also a diplomat. To Rankin, this meant that McCartee revealed “the international functions and uses that often make a missionary the most indispensable nexus between the Orient and the Western world.”2 This was a bold statement, and one that not everyone agreed with. For all his confidence about the significant role of missionaries in diplomatic history, he found difficult audiences in editors, diplomats, and missionaries alike, all of whom had doubts about the true importance of missionary diplomats by the turn of the twentieth century when Rankin was writing.
No wonder he was taking notes on international law. Harris had been asked: “What kind of treatment is a minister entitled to from the country to which he is sent?” and the answer was: “He must be treated according to the law of nations.”3 As Rankin argued about missionaries as the “indispensable nexus” between Asia and the United States, it was essential to understand this concept and the ways that it shaped missionary experiences abroad: what they did, where they went, and how they acted. But missionaries were never just missionaries, Rankin insisted. For all that missionaries represented their faith, Rankin knew they also represented their country. McCartee, after all, was only one of many missionaries who had served both his God and his country, working for the US consulate in China in addition to other diplomatic positions on behalf of the Chinese and Japanese governments.
By the time that Rankin was writing, the Boxer Uprising had fundamentally altered the way that Americans viewed the role of foreign missionaries, particularly in East Asia. In his article, “Political Values of the American Missionary,” Rankin joined with others who were insistent that missionaries should not be blamed for anti-Western sentiments in China or anywhere else. Rankin’s arguments were not always consistent, but they were passionately made.4
East Asia, as the place of his birth and the scene of so many of his family’s adventures, held a particular fascination for Rankin. His ten volumes of research notes on Asian history and politics were self-indexed and reveal a systematic mind that read widely and attentively. Such notes would eventually help him tell his uncle’s story and place Asian missions within the history of US diplomacy. But first, they would help him write articles such as “The Hour of China and the United States,” his attempt to describe Sino-American relations and the role of America in China’s future. The article, published in July 1899, included a postscript referencing the “momentous events” that had occurred in China since its writing. In this immediate pre–Boxer Uprising moment, Rankin recognized some of the tensions that would soon lead to that explosive event, but like so many other missionary supporters, he was blind to the possibility of missions as a contributing factor. Debates over Asian immigration and the Philippine War were the immediate US political contexts in which Rankin was writing in 1899. China’s recent loss in the Sino-Japanese War and its resulting indebtedness to Russia made up the Chinese political context. “A new page of history opens with the virtual invasion of China, not by barbarous horde, but by the governments of Europe,” he warned. It was a portentous moment.5
Rankin was not an anti-imperialist. His sense, coming out of the war in the Philippines, was that the United States needed to remain there and assume “the responsibilities of victory.” This meant spreading American civilization and freedoms: “Wherever our flag has gone, there the liberty, the humanity, and the civilization which that flag embodies and represents must remain and abide forever,” he wrote. Now, China was at the brink of change. Rankin reported political and educational reforms, even as Russia attempted to extend its influence in the north. It was a time for America to take a stand. For Rankin, the obvious choice was to unite with the British and back either “a native government” or a British protectorate that would “encourage, assist, and require development on lines of freedom and light.” With schools, commerce, and churches, England and America could help China to achieve its destiny.6
In time, Rankin hoped, the Chinese government and Christian missionaries could spread schools, colleges, and churches throughout the country. “Then how long need it be to make the English language as prevalent in China as it is in India to-day, or even in Japan; and how long to bring the quickening message of Christianity to every hamlet of that empire?” Rankin insisted that the United States had more than a commercial interest in China—it had a moral interest, too. The same duties that he felt called the United States to the Philippines also demanded its attention in China.7
Within a year, the American conversation about China changed dramatically. The Boxer Uprising—an outpouring of anti-foreign and anti-Christian violence culminating in the arrival of foreign troops into Peking and a siege on foreign legations—set the stage for an American reconsideration of its position in China. Observers at the time, like historians ever sense, puzzled over the multiple causes of these violent events. Who was to blame? What was the way forward? Because of the centrality of missionaries and Chinese Christian converts to the events, the foreign mission movement, too, was a subject of debate. Had missionary troubles gone too far? Were missionaries at the heart of anti-Western sentiment in places like China? As Rankin explained, the question on everyone’s mind was “What is a missionary good for anyway?”8
The Boxer Uprising
Edwin H. Conger, the US minister in China, began warning Washington about the newest set of “missionary troubles” in early December 1899. By that point, missionaries in northern China had been sending increasingly concerned notices about the Spirit Boxers and the Big Sword Society for almost a year. Sometimes described as secret societies, sometimes as militias, these groups worried the missionaries for their threats to foreigners and Christian converts.9 The Boxers, as they came to be known thanks to their use of martial arts practices, seemed to be motivated by a number of concerns, but missionaries found them to be united by an opposition to Christians. Churches and Christian communities in China had faced isolated incidents of violence for years. The Boxers, though, seemed to be an escalation of what had previously seemed like localized issues. As Tungchow missionary Luella Miner explained, the movement had broken its anti-Christian specificity and become “general and anti-foreign.”10 By its end, the Boxer Uprising would claim the lives of more than two hundred foreigners and many thousands of Chinese Christians.11
The Boxer Uprising emerged in northern China, in Shandong, where the Big Sword Society and the Spirit Boxers had been active since around 1895. The Chinese defeat in the Sino-Japanese War in that year shook Chinese confidence, and the presence of foreign powers continually anxious to extend their economic and religious reach into China was not helping. Northern China was experiencing an economic depression. The increasing dependence on foreign imports over the second half of the nineteenth century had challenged the region’s economy, particularly in cotton production.
Away from the port cities, the most palpable embodiment of these foreign powers were the missionaries. And the missionaries, of course, had long been active participants in the imperialism that the Boxers wanted to challenge. The tradition of Protestant missionaries serving diplomatic roles within US foreign relations existed alongside troublesome missionary involvement in political matters in other national contexts. German Catholic missionaries were particularly aggressive in legal matters, bringing lawsuits on behalf of their converts. Americans, for their part, occasionally expressed concerns about these actions, acknowledging that these missionaries’ extension of extraterritoriality over their converts “practically removes this class from the jurisdiction of their own rulers,” which had the doubly bad effects of encouraging conversion for economic motives and encouraging opposition from non-Christian Chinese subjects who objected to such treatment.12
FIGURE 9.1. Map of China, 1898. This map shows the extent of missionary presence in the interior of China in the years before the Boxer Uprising.
Source: ABCFM, Maps of Missions of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Boston: The Board, 1898), 7.
It was in this context that the initial attacks on churches, Chinese converts, and missionaries emerged. But the groups who would become the Boxers had other roots as well. The Spirit Boxers were first motivated by appeals to return to traditional values in order to restore harmony in local communities.13 Some of the groups active in the 1890s were focused on spirit possession, others on physical prowess. The anti-Christian conviction of different groups seemed to vary earlier in the decade. By late 1898 and early 1899, though, as missionary Luella Miner described, these local groups began to converge, changing their names to a unified title of the Boxers United in Righteousness. They began to use the same slogan: “Fu-Qing mieyang,” or “Support the Qing, destroy the foreign.” They spread their geographic reach across North China. When they were shut down after violent clashes with Chinese forces in one place, they reemerged elsewhere. Attacks on Christians spread and became increasingly violent. In 1899 and early 1900, the Boxers, the foreign powers, and the Chinese government were caught in a triangle of struggle and anxiety.
As the Boxers expanded, Western observers demanded a strong response from the Chinese government. Missionaries worried for the safety of their converts and themselves. Qing officials worried about the direction that Western reactions would take. The situation deteriorated as the Boxers moved toward Peking.
Over the first half of 1900, Conger’s dispatches and telegrams to the State Department related a rapidly escalating situation in northern China and, soon, Peking as well. The US missionaries were his informants, cabling him with the news of attacks on Christian converts and threats against the missions. Church members were attacked starting in November 1899. An English missionary was killed in January 1900. While the delegations in Peking were reluctant to sound the alarm, many of the Western diplomats recognized that the missionaries were “the only foreigners . . . really at all in touch with Chinese native feeling.”14 And missionary reports were alarming.
The missionaries reported that local government officials would not listen to their concerns; it fell to Conger to communicate with the Chinese and try to demand that attention be paid to the situation in Shandong. His communications with the Tsungli Yamen, China’s foreign relations body, relayed stories of attacks, beatings, and even murders of Chinese Christians. Over time, his reminders about China’s treaty obligations to protect Christian converts went from subtle to explicit as he sought to protect US citizens in inland China. By March, the situation had deteriorated to the point that Conger asked for a naval response. The missionaries concurred. They had wanted US warships as early as February.
As Conger saw it, the problem was that the Empress Dowager herself had “very strong anti-foreign sentiments,” and so had little motivation to actually enforce the treaty protections of foreigners and Christians in China.15 Local officials at best looked the other way, or at worst sympathized with the Boxers in their attacks on Christians. Conger coordinated his interactions with the Tsungli Yamen with the European powers in the region: Germany, England, France, and Italy. All were concerned about the safety of their missionaries. Many worried, too, about commercial access to inland China. The Boxers attacked telegraph wires and railroad tracks, leading to worries that Westerners would be stranded and unable to evacuate or call for help. Though the US State Department worried about too much coordinated effort with other foreign powers, assuming that the best way forward with China was to work alone and to appear as conciliatory as possible, when the situation was dire, Conger was ordered to join with the Europeans.
In April, Conger reported that warships had arrived: two British, one French, two Italian, two German, and one American. They were ready to suppress the Boxers and bring “peace and quiet again” to the area.16 American marines made their way into Peking in late May to defend the US legation. As Secretary of State John Hay reassured the foreign secretary of the ABCFM, the United States was “ready and willing to do its utmost to protect its citizens in China and everywhere else.”17
All of these actions and worried reports preceded any actual attacks on US citizens or property. On May 8, a stone was thrown into the Presbyterian mission compound in Peking, narrowly avoiding striking a servant in the head.18 Later that month, American missionaries based thirty-five miles east of Peking reported that open threats of violence against missionaries there had become a daily occurrence. When some Methodist converts at the US mission were murdered at the end of May, Conger demanded a full investigation and swift punishment of the criminals. The obsequious formality of all of Conger’s official correspondence with the Tsungli Yamen barely masked his anger when he wrote that the crime was “all the more outrageous and the responsibility therefore the more direct because the Chinese Government has been repeatedly informed of the presence and operation of the Boxers in that vicinity.” He had written about this countless times, having “insistently demanded protection for these poor people against just what exactly has happened.”19 Things only got worse from there.
June saw a flurry of correspondence between Peking and Washington as Conger reported that missionaries were being personally threatened alongside foreign railway employees. Conger reported that more railways were destroyed. Foreign troops were needed. The Chinese appointed new, anti-foreign members to the Tsungli Yamen.20 Bricks were thrown into an American chapel. Boxers seized one US missionary station, giving the missionaries the choice to “recant, or flee and leave their property to be looted, or stay and be killed.” Another American mission was burned to the ground. Eleven church members were killed, and their houses, too, were destroyed. An English missionary was murdered. Missionaries evacuated their stations. One US marine, watching the scene in Peking, would recall that they came “with only such articles of clothing as they could carry in their arms, as they had to flee for their lives.”21
The evacuees came together at the Methodist compound in Peking, half a mile down the road from the US Legation. Seventy American men, women, and children gathered there, alongside Chinese Christians and a number of US marines. Frank Gamewell, the senior Methodist missionary at that station, estimated that up to 1,500 people were crammed into the missionary compound.22 It quickly became a garrison: missionaries and their converts built stronger brick walls, laid out barbed wire, dug ditches, and carried guns.
For months, Conger had called on the Chinese government to suppress the Boxers, with only lukewarm response. The show of Western force seemed to turn the tide, but not in the direction he had hoped for. When an imperial edict of June 21, 1900, embraced the Boxers as patriotic soldiers and declared war on the foreign powers, the situation went from bad to worse. Just over a week later, Conger sent his last message out of Peking until the end of the conflict. Two messages reached Tientsin via courier pleading for help. The telegraph wires were cut, and the legation was cut off from contact with the United States.
The missionaries moved from the Methodist compound to the US Legation, but even that was not safe enough when the threat of siege came closer and closer. The US Legation was too close to the city walls, and so they relocated to the British Legation, where they joined the entire foreign community of Peking. They would be there for over a month. It was overcrowded and undersupplied. Female missionaries soon tried to find ways to make horse meat appetizing to the crowd. They could smell human and horse corpses just outside the complex walls, rotting in the June sun.23 They waited and they worried while John Goodnow, in Shanghai, took over the role of negotiating with China on behalf of the Americans.
Anxious observers in the United States and Europe worried about the fate of these besieged Westerners. The London Daily Mail and the New York Times reported (incorrectly) that hundreds in the diplomatic legations had been murdered. The media assumed that Conger was dead, along with who knows how many other Americans.24 Stories of the Boxers had appeared in foreign papers since the late fall of 1899, with missionaries reporting the movement’s rapid spread.25 “BOXER REBELLION IS SPREADING; AMERICAN LIVES IN GREAT DANGER” proclaimed one front-page headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune from June 1900. The US media reported that missionaries needed protection urgently. Women and children at the mission stations, in particular, were in danger. “Missionary work in north China has been crushed for years to come,” the article predicted.26 The secretary of state wired to hear if the press reports were true; US missionary supporters were anxious to know if they were safe. In response to this perilous state of affairs, the secretary of state sent William W. Rockhill to act as commissioner to China. He reached China at the end of August and remained until September of the following year, when a resolution was finally reached and signed by China and the foreign powers.
Even after the resolution of September 1901, there were still many lingering questions. The press had reported the echoing of the chant “support the Qing, destroy the foreign!” through the streets during the uprising, and American observers nervously noted the seeming equation of this problematic foreignness with Christian evangelism.27 In the aftermath of the fighting, the role of missionaries in US relations with China continued to trouble observers. On the one hand, missionaries were recognized as victims of the uprising. Memorials, such as that at Oberlin College, celebrated those who had fallen. But even after the fighting was over, the negotiations to set the terms of peace were complicated.
Indemnities, in particular, became the subject of intense debate, as the Western powers set a price on the losses that they had suffered. In these negotiations, missionaries were again important. Churches and missionary premises, after all, were high among the property of foreign citizens that were destroyed by the Boxers. But far more significant was the damaged property of Chinese converts that some wanted to claim for indemnities, as well. Once again, the goals of the mission movement and the goals of diplomacy were uncomfortably blurred.
Conger’s thought was that including Chinese Christians in these claims would be “a most humane act and would give to missionary work great prestige for the future,” but would ultimately be unproductive. The investigations would be “almost limitless,” and the missionaries themselves should be able to settle the losses of their converts within their villages.28 Missionaries were not so sure. These conversations continued for months. When the questions were raised about how much the Chinese would actually be able to pay, the debates became even more complicated.
The US position was that securing trade was much more important than imposing indemnity on China. In the long term, trade would benefit the United States much more than repayment for any lost property from the Boxer Rebellion. As Conger and Rockhill negotiated with the European powers and China about how best to resolve this crisis, they were also weighing the interests of different groups of Americans against each other. Merchants and missionaries had always had sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting priorities in China. Now, when the United States was again taking stock of its position in Asia, those competing claims came up again.29
Were the Boxers anti-foreign, anti-Christian, or both? The difference was not one that Conger felt the need to parse too carefully. The American missionaries were “our missionaries.” He and Hay had both initially called these events “the missionary troubles” until they became “The Boxer War” in their correspondence.30 Conger’s correspondence with the Tsungli Yamen discussed both issues, noting the banners inscribed with “exterminate the foreigners” and simultaneously calling for the defense of Chinese nationals who happened to have converted to Christianity.31 Because the treaties between the United States and China protected (non-American) Christian converts as well as American missionaries, there was a certain fuzziness to the categories at issue here. Though no Americans were attacked in the first months of the uprising, their converts and church members were. Since the treaties promised protection of Christians, Conger could interpret the lack of protection for these converts as a breach of Chinese treaty obligations.
Meanwhile, the Boxers blurred the lines as well. When German engineers planned a railroad near the American Presbyterian mission at Chefoo (Yantai), the missionaries and Conger worried that a general anti-foreign sentiment stoked by the railroad would ultimately harm the mission.32 After decades of Western nations mixing commercial and religious entries into China, the Boxers had responded with a generalized opposition that reacted to the seemingly encroaching imperialism of some states and the missionary presence of Catholics and Protestants as if they were all the same thing. With US missionaries calling for warships to protect them, perhaps the Boxers had a point.
Reconsidering the Missionary Presence
In the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising, not everyone was so sympathetic with the missionary side. If the Boxers were, at heart, anti-Christian, was this an example of foreign missionaries dragging US foreign relations into another difficult situation that was unnecessary and dangerous? Critiques of missionaries were easy to come by in the United States in those years. Stories about missionary greed, prejudice, intolerance, and narrow-mindedness were common. Reports on the Boxer indemnities suggested that missionaries lied about the valuation of their destroyed property and stated that the State Department needed a “ruthless hand” in evaluating the legitimacy of missionary claims.33 Even as the mission movement continued to grow and to send an impressive number of American Protestants abroad, Americans at home could be forgiven for feeling ambivalent or even critical about their role in the world. American diplomats in China, too, could be quite critical of the missionaries.
Some, such as Anson Burlingame Johnson, the US consul at Amoy (Xiamen), seemed to blame the Boxer’s anti-foreign stance entirely on the missionaries. “It is well-known here that the ill-feeling toward the foreigners in this province is entirely confined to the missionaries,” he reported in August 1900. Missionaries had been stepping beyond their evangelistic roles and inappropriately “meddling” in “secular matters.” To avoid another situation like the Boxer Uprising, missionaries needed to be restricted to purely spiritual work, he argued.34
After the uprising, missionaries did not retreat; if anything, they expanded. The numbers of Protestant missionaries in China, including Americans, increased during the following decade. And they did not confine their efforts to spiritual work. Education and medicine continued to be part of their agenda. In addition, missionaries collected indemnities that were issued as part of the peace negotiations. For this, they were roundly criticized in the US press, particularly after reports of missionary Dr. Ament of the ABCFM taking part in the post-uprising looting in northern China. Newspapers debated these reports and raised doubts about the virtues of missionaries. As one piece in the Detroit Free Press put it, the stories from China and elsewhere had begun to pile up to the point that missionaries “can hardly expect that judgement will be suspended forever.”35
For Mark Twain, the missionary response to the Boxer Uprising was inherently intwined with the whole story of US imperialism. Reflecting on the missionary claims of indemnity in China, Twain painted a picture of missionaries as greedy and callous, demanding retribution from a peasantry that could hardly afford to pay the exaggerated claims of the Western powers. This, in Twain’s telling, was the blasphemy at the heart of the missionary movement—and the hypocrisy at the heart of US foreign relations. It revealed that there were “two Americas” and two versions of the American civilization that the missionaries preached: one for export, and one for domestic consumption. The version for export was considerably adulterated, and this, Twain wrote, was becoming obvious to those whom Americans imagined were “sitting in darkness,” awaiting the enlightenment that missions and empire could spread. For Twain, the story of the American response to the Boxer Uprising was the same as the American experience in the Philippines, and he criticized the missionaries with the same venom that he criticized US imperialists. Twain’s argument did not fall on deaf ears.36
These critiques became common enough that they merited a small flurry of defenses of mission work in the first decades of the century. Some of these came from missionaries and their supporters, of course. Arthur Judson Brown addressed these concerns directly in his 1907 book for church and college mission studies, The Foreign Missionary: The Incarnation of a World Movement. Brown sought to answer the charges of any missionary critics who might pick up his book or (the more likely scenario) to provide supporters with tools to do so themselves. He expected that his readers would have a few key questions about missionaries at the front of their minds: “Is he wise in his dealings with proud and ancient peoples and their social and religious customs? Does he make unnecessary trouble for his own and other governments?”37
If supporters early in the nineteenth century focused on “the salvation of the heathen” as the justification for foreign missions, this was less emphasized by the beginning of the twentieth. The same religious motives drove American missionaries of this later era, but they often phrased their concerns differently. Brown was quite clear that “secondary” motivations were essential to understanding the missionary movement of his day. Philanthropic, intellectual, and commercial motives joined civilizing and religious motives for missionaries serving abroad. In other words, missionaries spread hospitals and schools, learned about the world and brought that knowledge back to their home communities, and created markets for Western goods and technologies as they went about their missionary work. To understand the missionary of the early twentieth century, Brown suggested, meant appreciating the ways in which they had “vastly increased the world’s store of useful knowledge.”38
Missionaries had to face criticism from all directions, Brown observed. Some of it was legitimate, but much of it was built on false assumptions about mission work and missionaries. Brown was very concerned about the ways in which the new ease of travel meant that more and more Americans were touring the world, but not always interacting with it beyond port cities, clubs, and foreign enclaves that kept travelers from getting to know much about the places where they traveled, the people who lived there, or the missionaries who served them. The problem here, so far as the reputation of missionaries was concerned, was that these “globe-trotters” spent their time around the sort of Americans abroad who did not much like missionaries and thought they were getting the full story.
Merchants, in Brown’s telling, disliked missionaries because the missionaries would not drink with them at the club, or because the missionaries might offer resistance to their more oppressive plans. If someone comes home from abroad and “maligns missionaries,” Brown explained “it is safe to assume, either that he has been making a fool of himself so that he had to be rebuked by the missionaries” or that he had been spending his time with those who had. Their “slanders” would be “sensationally paraded in the newspapers, and eagerly swallowed by a gullible public” that did not have much of a taste for earnest Christian folk anyway. Or at least, this was how Brown framed the main thrust of the problem.39 But, of course, it was not so simple as all that. Particular concerns arose with enough regularity that Brown could list them off one by one and discount them each in turn. Missionaries are inferior men? Missionaries live in luxury and idleness? Missionary administration is costly and unbusinesslike? Converts only care about economic gain, and are not motivated by genuine faith? Not so.40
But other questions took longer to answer and spoke to more particular political concerns. Among them were questions motivated by the theological transformations that had been occurring within American Christianity in the past several decades. With the rise of liberal theology came an increasing likelihood of tolerance for, and even celebration of, other religions. Non-Christians might not “want our religion,” and that lack of interest might be justified.41 This philosophical point had even more weight after the Boxer Uprising, as Americans wondered if perhaps missionaries were to blame for anti-foreign sentiments after all. Brown was ready to disprove this point, too, but he could not stop the critiques from coming with increasing frequency. The uprising had led American missionary critics to wonder if missionaries got involved in political questions too often, interfering in lawsuits and making themselves “universally hated” by local people. Critics claimed that “missionaries make trouble for their own governments,” too, drawing them into conflict with foreign powers wherever they went.42
Defending Missionary Diplomacy
It was not only missionary figures who defended missionaries. Defenders also turned to sympathetic diplomats who reported that missionaries caused them much less trouble than other categories of Americans abroad. Having the endorsement of political figures was extremely valuable in this debate. In October 1900, the Missionary Herald responded to what they categorized as “many flippant utterances” critiquing missionary work in China by publishing quotations from five diplomats supporting missionary work. John Foster, a former secretary of state, joined former U.S. ministers to China James Angell, Charles Denby, George Seward, and a former minister to Siam, John Barrett, in responding to the ABCFM’s questions with enthusiasm.
The ABCFM was sure that this eminent group of men would silence their ignorant critics. Foster was sure that “the presence of missionaries in China had little to do with these troubles,” and that China remained an important missionary field. Angell blamed the Boxer Uprising on “the aggressive policy of certain European powers” and conflicts within China over reform policies. Denby declared missionaries to be “benefactors of the people among whom their lives are spent, and forerunners of the commerce of the world.” Seward, in a passage that would also be published in the Boston Herald, declared that “for every enemy a missionary makes he makes fifty friends.” Barrett informed readers that the king of Siam (Thailand) felt that missionaries “had done more to advance the welfare of his country and people than any other foreign influence.” In this moment of tension, Americans should remember that their country was, as he put it, “a Christian as well as a commercial nation” that accordingly could not “think of withdrawing the messengers of Christianity from Asia until we are ready to withdraw the merchants of commerce and the ministers of diplomacy.” If the United States was to have any relations with Asia, in other words, Barrett felt that it needed to send missionaries. They were an essential part of US foreign relations.43
Barrett went further in his article in The Outlook, a weekly news and opinion magazine, “Some Truths About the Missionaries.” Barrett found anti-missionary stories to be unfair. He argued that they seized on a few negative examples and ignored the good that the vast majority of missionaries were accomplishing. He himself had arrived in Siam with a “slight prejudice against missionaries,” but had been entirely converted after his experience working with more than one hundred missionaries in Siam and seeing the good they were doing in China, Japan, Korea, and elsewhere in Asia.44
The “truths” Barrett shared with American readers focused on a few themes. First, that missionaries were doing important work, particularly in the fields of education and medicine. In rural areas especially, missionaries were creating institutions that mattered. Their good influences were creating “better men and women.” Graduates of mission schools were an “earnest, energetic, and ambitious body of men who want[ed] to see their own country advance along lines of modern civilization.” In this evaluation, Barrett insisted that he did not stand alone. “Nearly every Minister or Consul of the United States who has lived many years in Asia” would agree with him, he was sure. While missionaries had their “faults and weaknesses,” the world should not “overlook their virtues and their strong points.”45
In addition to this, Barrett complicated the picture of anti-Western sentiment in Asia. This was not simple opposition to missionaries. Rather, it had emerged out of economic and political contexts in which the missionaries played only one small part. Barrett himself had found that he had much more trouble from “tactless and selfish business agents and promoters” during his tenure in Asia than from missionaries. Meanwhile, foreign nations had committed “unwarranted seizures of Chinese territory,” leading to an understandable mistrust of foreigners, and “dishonest local officials” inspired fear and hatred of missionaries out of a hope that they might expel the foreigners from their country. Missionaries, then, were not to blame.46
Rankin, too, joined in this defense of missionary diplomacy. The uprising, he insisted, was misunderstood by Americans. “It is not the western creed but the western greed which has made most of the trouble between China and the Occident,” he explained.47 To those who argued that missionaries destabilized the places where they worked, Rankin argued that, on the contrary, missionaries were essential to the stability of any Western presence in Asia. They created good will; in contrast to those who only came to Asia for profit and self-interest, missionaries came to help. In addition, missionaries had the double effect of both supporting colonial governments by stabilizing the colonized population while also preparing that population for eventual independence and self-government.48
This last point was a complicated one. Citing the shift over the course of the nineteenth century that British officials had made in their thinking about missions, Rankin pointed to the ways that missionaries, in fact, helped to sustain Western empires. While they supported self-government, they did not do so universally. In India and the Philippines, for example, missionaries could be expected to support the British and US colonial governments, respectively. In neither place, Rankin believed, was the population prepared for self-governance. Missionaries, out of their desire for what was truly best for the peoples they hoped to serve, thus supported colonial governments as preferential to any alternatives. It would only be when “Christian ideals of the social order have made a far more vital and general impression upon the native mind” that imperial control could decline. Accordingly, missionaries were needed to help “make a new moral climate” to transform the world.49
If the goal of missions was to transform the world into God’s kingdom, Rankin suggested, evangelism was not the only way that missionaries could accomplish significant changes. Important, too, was the consular and diplomatic work that some missionaries did for their governments. “Times without number,” Rankin insisted, missionaries had served as ideal civil servants.50 The reason missionaries were so well-suited to this work was that they always sought a “genuine reciprocity” for their work. They were guided by the Golden Rule, and let those values shape their interactions with foreign powers.51 Missionaries promoted “the social harmony of the races” wherever they went.52 They possessed a deep “knowledge of the language and people.”53 At his best, Rankin concluded with tremendous bluster, a missionary was “always a statesman, who takes a high and cosmic view of the duty and destiny of nations.”54
In China specifically, Rankin argued that missionaries were key because what the Chinese really needed was not “new furniture and machinery,” but “a new conception of their own best good, and how to attain it, in their ideals of life.” This message was what missionaries could bring, working alongside the US government, with whom they were “entirely at one.”55
The idea that missionaries were always guided by the Golden Rule, as Rankin suggested, was an open question; that they were “statesmen” at all seemed absurd to many observers in the years after the Boxer Uprising. After decades of missionaries working alongside diplomats in relative comfort, the uprising forced the question of how appropriate such relations were at precisely the moment that the State Department itself was undergoing a new series of reforms to professionalize the consular service. Missionaries and their supporters had to answer a new set of questions about the proper connections between their own work and that of the state. After decades of missionaries being able to argue persuasively that they knew the places where they worked better than any other Americans, now in the early years of the twentieth century that seemed less true. In the aftermath of the Boxers, all of those earlier tensions in American missionary diplomacy came to the fore like never before. It would be hard to imagine the career of someone like Divie Bethune McCartee emerging in quite the same way ever again, even as missionary leaders like Brown could still claim the ear of the president.
When Brown returned to the United States from his world tour in 1902, he had much to say about America’s place in the world. The Golden Rule, he—like Rankin—was sure, should go on to guide US foreign relations. But the United States was not always eager to take action in the face of humanitarian crises. Experience in China had provided a strong example of the risks the government took when it let missionaries lead. And missionaries continued to see the whole world as their field—including places that the State Department did not deem a high diplomatic priority. Such would be the case in Congo, where another group of American missionaries attempted to shape diplomacy, this time in the interest of averting humanitarian catastrophe.