Missionary Intelligence, 1810s–1840s
As the story goes, it was a gathering during a rainstorm that set in motion the beginnings of American foreign missionary work. A group of students huddled under a haystack for protection from the weather and began to pray. As the rain fell, they experienced a calling to answer the scriptural commission to spread the gospel and “teach all nations.”1 There were millions of souls around the world, they believed, who were suffering for want of the gospel. Without it, they could not be saved. In this life, they could expect oppression or depravity. In the life to come, they could only expect damnation. If Christians could reach them and evangelize to them, they would be able to offer them salvation and, at the same time, would fulfill Jesus’s Great Commission. It was a challenging calling, but one that offered the potential for glory.
The immediate result of this Haystack Meeting, as the gathering has been remembered, was the creation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) by American Congregationalists in 1810. Over the next several years, they were joined by missionary organizations from all of the major US Protestant denominations. These missionaries generally carried with them a commitment not only to their faith, but to the particular form that it took in the United States. They were invested in both Christianizing and “civilizing” the globe, and their work encompassed preaching, teaching, translation, medicine, and more.
When the first eight missionaries left the United States for India in 1812, the State Department staff consisted of the secretary of state, a chief clerk, and ministers to the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and Portugal. By 1848, when US Protestants supported missionaries in Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, the Americas, and the islands of the Pacific, the State Department had similarly grown, particularly in its representation in Latin America. But there remained large swathes of the globe without a US diplomatic presence. Missionaries looked to the non-Christian “heathen world” as the space of highest priority. The State Department’s primary interest, however, was in supporting US commerce, and its focus continued to be on Europe and Latin America even as Turkey and China recently joined the list of places that housed official representatives of the United States.
If the late eighteenth century had seen the United States fight for its independence from the British Empire, the first decades of the nineteenth saw the government work to fully realize that independence. Weakness is a key theme in the diplomatic history of the early American republic. So, too, is the ambition for greatness and power. The United States was interested in demonstrating its membership in the community of nations and its equality with European states. The foreign missionary movement was just one embodiment of these ambitions. The early years of US Protestant missions developed in the midst of political discussions about the rights of neutral nations in the face of ongoing war between Britain and France, the creation of the Monroe Doctrine, and the relentless expansion of settler colonialism across the North American continent. Over the course of these decades, the US military fought England, Mexico, and Indigenous American nations in various efforts to claim new territory and assert American independence, honor, and power.
The history of the mission movement in these same years was, in many ways, quite similar. Missionaries, like politicians, claimed more strength for their country than was merited. That first group of US missionaries who left the United States in 1812 were shortly arrested by British officials after their arrival in India. They did not, in fact, have the right to be there, not as Americans who were currently at war with Great Britain, and not as missionaries who were currently barred from evangelizing in the East India Company’s territories. Yet these missionaries and their supporters at home remained undeterred. Their movement was both optimistic and urgent. Trusting in God’s Providence to direct them, US Protestant missionaries went out into the world confident of their right to work wherever they could gain access.
Figure I.1. World map of US missionary and diplomatic presence, 1816. In 1816, John Quincy Adams was serving as the US minister to England and both the Protestant foreign mission movement and the US State Department were beginning to expand their respective reach. Only two foreign missionary societies were in operation this early in the century: the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions.
Sources: Department of State, A Register of Officers and Agents; American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Boston: Samuel T. Armstrong, 1816); Baptist Board of Foreign Missions, The Second Annual Report.
This confidence served them well, in some ways. Seeking passage on the ships of US merchants who were similarly interested in expanding their reach to new markets and sources of raw materials, missionaries set down roots all over the world. Because American missionaries and the US government emphasized different regions of the world, missionaries emerged as the American experts on the places where they lived and worked. They were trusted by home audiences for the information they shared about the peoples they interacted with. As they shared missionary intelligence about the non-Christian world and urged Americans to support their efforts, missionaries presented Americans with an alternate vision for the role of the United States in the world.
Religious revivals in the early nineteenth century expanded the numbers of Americans who were concerned about spiritual salvation and the spread of the kingdom of God. The numbers of missionary societies grew, as did the geographic spread of Protestant missionaries. They went into what they called the “heathen world,” driven by a calling to evangelize and civilize all peoples. This focus on the non-Christian world brought missionaries into a different geography than their diplomatic peers. Though limited in their choice of locations by the commercial and political connections that could provide missionaries transportation and relative safety where they worked, missionaries wanted to work in spaces beyond the diplomatic priorities of Europe and Latin America. This gave missionaries the opportunity to become the American experts on the spaces where they lived and worked.
From the very beginning of the century, missionaries told Americans that they had a duty to be active in the world and to care about the lives and needs of people who lived far away. And missionaries were prolific as they spread this message. Missionary texts hoped to inspire a domestic American enthusiasm for supporting a foreign mission movement, but they were not solely concerned with cosmic questions about the kingdom of God. They were, at times, quite earthbound and concerned with practical and political questions about peoples, governments, and civilization. The work of evangelization combined the earthly and the spiritual every day. Missionary magazines and published sermons and tracts were an obvious place to receive this sort of information about the world, but missionary intelligence was much more broadly available. Even Americans who might not have shared the evangelical goal of world conversion consumed missionary writing in geographic, scientific, historical, and travel sources.
Figure I.2. World map of US missionary and diplomatic presence, c. 1830. By 1830, missionaries from the American Board for Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions, and the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church were all active in foreign mission work.
Sources: Smith, America’s Diplomats and Consuls of 1776–1865, 56–127; “Brief View of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and Its Operations,” Missionary Herald (January 1831), 3–4; Baptist Board of Foreign Missions, “Report of the Board of Managers, for the Year ending April 29, 1831,” American Baptist Missionary Magazine 11 (June 1831): 167–182; Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, “Missionary Societies Throughout Christendom and Their Missions,” 33–35.
As missionaries asserted their positions as experts on the world stage, they spoke to a wide range of American readers—the missionary public. As the century progressed, that expertise would allow missionaries access to influence American diplomacy in unexpected ways. But first, they had to build an audience.