Prologue
A Missionary-Diplomatic Family
As one civil war threatened to explode in the United States, Divie Bethune McCartee watched with anxiety as another civil war approached his new home in China. McCartee had been in Ningpo (Ningbo) for more than a decade, ever since a treaty between the United States and China had opened up the port city to US residents in 1844. Now, the uprising against the Qing Empire known as the Taiping Rebellion threatened his ability—and that of all other Americans in the region—to live and work in safety. Just a few years earlier, McCartee had been able to assure his friends at home that even as fighting broke out elsewhere in China, he was still able to work in “peace and quietness all the time.”1 By 1860, he reported that the fighting was closing in on Ningpo. As the interpreter for the US consul, McCartee’s role was an important one. His duty, as he understood it, was “to act as mediator and prevent slaughter of innocent blood.”2
The Taiping Rebellion was a crisis point in Chinese history, much as the US Civil War was in US history. The Chinese war arose out of long-festering anxieties and resentments within the Qing Empire and ultimately claimed between twenty and thirty million lives. American observers were not quite sure what to make of these events. Some were excited by what they saw as a Christian undercurrent in the philosophy of its leader.3 Yet the violence, on the other hand, was overwhelming. It threatened the Western trade and Christian missionaries who had only recently gained access to more of China. Americans like McCartee watched the spreading violence and puzzled over how to protect American lives and US interests. In 1861, the US government sent a small delegation of naval officers aboard the US flagship Hartford to negotiate with the Taiping rebels. McCartee was among them.
Divie Bethune McCartee was not a naval officer, and he was not an ambassador. He was a missionary, sent to China by the Presbyterian Church to evangelize the people of Ningpo. Like many other US Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth century, he found that his evangelistic work was deeply entwined with diplomatic work. In order to serve his God, he would also have to serve his nation; if he was able to advance the interests of the United States, he believed he would also be advancing the interests of Protestantism. Good diplomatic relations, he hoped, would open the door for the spread of Christianity. When he was asked to join the Hartford delegation, McCartee asked himself “whether my duties as a missionary or as a citizen of the USA were most urgent.”4 Should he board the Hartford and help negotiate with the Taiping rebels, or should he remain at his mission? Ultimately, as with many mid-nineteenth-century missionary diplomats faced with times of crisis, he found that serving the mission and serving the state were inextricable.
Though the Hartford delegation intended to project US power, there was in truth very little that they could hope to accomplish. The diplomats hoped to gain assurances that if the Americans remained neutral in the conflict, the Taiping rebels would protect US residents and trade from attack. Such a guarantee was nearly impossible in the face of so much turmoil. While the promise of safety was minimal, McCartee managed to include a clause extending protection specifically to American “teachers of religion,” as well as their students and converts.5 When negotiating protection for US citizens, McCartee wanted to be sure that missionaries would be included.
For much of the nineteenth century, US diplomatic officials supported such cooperation between Protestant missionaries and US diplomacy. Ansom Burlingame, the US minister to China, was delighted by McCartee’s work during the Taiping Rebellion and offered him additional work for the US delegation throughout the 1860s. In a letter to Secretary of State William Seward, Burlingame praised McCartee as a man of “rare qualities as a Christian, a patriot, and a scholar.”6 Missionaries like these were just the sort of men the State Department needed in the nineteenth century.
Throughout his five-decade career in China and Japan, McCartee served his country and his God through work as a medical missionary, consul, translator, professor of international law, and more. He was far from alone. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the state regularly turned to missionaries to assist in US foreign relations. Missionaries served as consuls and translators. They corresponded with and advised US diplomats, sometimes even testifying before Congress about international affairs. They were trusted experts who wrote for US domestic audiences about the world and its people. This perceived expertise had its benefits. Their mission boards regularly corresponded with the State Department, and they advocated for the appointment of their favored officials in international posts. At moments of crisis, they called for political and even military support for their missionaries around the world. Missionaries found that expanding the reach of the US state would result in the expansion of Protestant missions—and vice versa. Christian foreign missions, in turn, were an essential part of the toolkit for US diplomacy.
Over the course of McCartee’s life, the United States went through profound changes on the world stage. At the time McCartee was born in 1820, US politicians struggled to articulate a foreign policy position for the United States that could simultaneously encourage global commerce while avoiding the kinds of political entanglements that the relatively weak state could not sustain. By the time of McCartee’s death in 1900, the United States had claimed its position as an imperial power. In the decades in between, there was one constant in America’s role overseas: Protestant missionaries and their supporters played a key role in projecting US power and defining US interests.
The story of missionary diplomacy is one of overlapping political and religious narratives that are far too often told separately. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the United States and its State Department expanded in geographic reach and political power. At the century’s beginning, the country occupied the eastern portions of North America and held colonizing ambitions to claim the entire continent. By the century’s end, the United States not only claimed territory from the Atlantic to Pacific coasts, but also colonies overseas, all of which served to provide markets and raw materials for an industrial and commercial economy with global reach.
At the same time, the nineteenth century saw profound changes in American religious life. Christian benevolent societies, animated by the conviction that Christianity was the path toward progress and modernization in all parts of life, sought to spread the blessings of so-called civilization throughout the country and the world. As the decades passed, new denominations formed and old denominations split. Protestants argued bitterly about theological questions as well as hot-button political issues, including slavery, race, empire, and the proper relationship between church and state. They argued, too, over whether missionaries ought to prioritize evangelization or broader cultural changes—and whether one might even be a necessary prerequisite of the other. Foreign missionary organizations took part in all of these developments, from the departure of the first US missionaries overseas in 1812 through the proliferation of missionary organizations in the decades following the Civil War. In South and East Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Pacific Islands, Protestant foreign missionaries brought America to the world and the world to America.
Generations
Four generations of the McCartee family can help us to survey these intertwining global histories of church and diplomacy over the course of the century. McCartee’s family had been connected to US foreign missions since the very beginning of the movement. His grandfather, Divie Bethune, had been a founding member of the New York Missionary Society in the late eighteenth century. In those early years, Americans Protestants focused their attention on evangelizing Native American nations in North America. Yet from the beginning, the ambition to take part in a global mission movement was evident. Bethune hosted British missionaries who visited New York on their way to China and India. He decorated his home with artwork celebrating British missionaries in Tahiti and India. He filled his library with missionary periodicals and memoirs. Bethune remained in New York, but his financial contributions and his vision helped pave the way for a US foreign missionary movement with global reach.
By the time that Bethune’s daughter was coming of age, US Protestants were venturing overseas as missionaries. Growing up immersed in her father’s New York missionary world, Jessie Graham Bethune had always wanted to be a missionary herself. Like hundreds of other American Protestant girls in the era of the early republic, she was inspired by the stories of missionary men and women who made great personal sacrifices to spread Christianity around the world. She had burned to go to China after meeting the British missionary Robert Morrison. Instead, she stayed at home, married the minister Robert McCartee, and never did get to China. Settled in New York, she spent her life engaged in benevolent causes, continuing to be an active part of US missionary culture that her parents had helped create. She read missionary memoirs and reports to her son Divie, the oldest of her ten children. She was an eager consumer of missionary intelligence: information about the world shared by missionaries with the intention to increase knowledge and encourage support for mission work.
Divie grew up reading the memoirs of US missionaries in addition to the British texts his mother had loved. In the 1820s and 1830s of his youth, US Protestants were establishing missions in India, Burma (Myanmar), Liberia, the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), and across the North American continent. American missionaries explored the Levant and sent gripping narratives to readers at home. Divie Bethune McCartee read them all and would later recall that missionary names were “household words” in their home.7
When Divie McCartee finished his medical training in the early 1840s, the opportunities for mission work had expanded even further. Euro-American imperialism and international commerce had made new regions increasingly accessible to missionaries, who in turn were expected to provide a “civilizing” and “benevolent” influence on a capitalist empire. Shortly after he felt called to combine his work as a doctor with evangelism, new treaties between the United States and China allowed Protestant denominations to begin planning new missions to fulfill their long-held dreams of evangelizing China. Within months of the Sino-American treaty’s ratification in 1844, McCartee was on his way to Ningpo, where he eventually married his wife Juana Knight. There, they served alongside Juana’s sister and brother-in-law, Mary Knight and Henry Rankin.
The Rankin’s son, Henry William Rankin, would continue the family tradition of enthusiastic domestic support of missions into the twentieth century. Like many missionary children of his generation, Rankin had returned to the United States for his education as an adolescent but would be forever shaped by his early childhood experience in China. In the United States, the young Rankin followed the missionary careers of his family in East Asia (his parents remained in China, while his aunt and uncle spent over a decade in Japan as well) while also noting tremendous transformations in US religious and political life. In many ways, the United States where Rankin came of age was foreign to the country his uncle had known. The post–Civil War United States created a far more powerful and centralized federal government. An important point of continuity was the missionary culture that the whole family took part in. If anything, the missionary movement that had nurtured McCartee had only grown by the time that Rankin was an adult, with more and more missionaries leaving the United States for an increasing number of locations. American missionaries established schools, hospitals, and churches in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, and Latin America. By the second half of the century, women outnumbered men in these endeavors, as women’s missionary societies sent more and more single women to work as teachers, nurses, and doctors alongside ordained male missionaries to spread the gospel and to transform the world.
Rankin spent his adult life reading, thinking, and writing about this mission movement and its political consequences. He was particularly fascinated by China and its relationship to the United States. Through his studies, he was struck by a truth that has escaped many scholars of US foreign relations. Like his uncle and so many other American Protestants, he saw the foreign mission movement as the key to the relationship of the United States with China and, indeed, the rest of the world. He celebrated his uncle as a missionary diplomat and a model for US foreign relations.
When Divie McCartee died in 1900, Rankin was convinced that Americans needed to carry on his uncle’s work into the twentieth century. It was a new era in US foreign relations, marked most dramatically by the Spanish-American War and domestic debates about imperialism. International crises increasingly demanded the attention of US humanitarians, and missionaries joined other Americans in debating how the United States ought to respond. “The evangelization of the world in this generation” had become the watchword for the missionaries whom Rankin worked with. Shaped by a confidence in their country’s power and in technological developments in transportation and communications, this rising generation of US Protestants expected to be able to transform the world. But for all the new opportunities they embraced in the world, they also found that they faced new constraints from a more centralized and powerful State Department.
This book tells the story of the men and women like McCartee and his family who saw foreign missions as an essential part of nineteenth-century US foreign relations. Some were Americans at home, consuming missionary intelligence, donating funds, and trusting in missionary expertise to explain the world, its peoples, and their needs to the United States. Some were missionaries in the field, balancing their roles as missionaries and as Americans in diverse places and contexts. Some were diplomats and statesmen, whose religious identities could lead them to identify missionary priorities and interests with those of their country. And some were diplomats who, despite some reservations, believed that Protestant missionary work would advance US interests. Over the course of the century, these missionary-diplomats and their supporters revealed the deep connections between an evangelical Protestant mission and US foreign relations. These connections were particularly significant during a century marked by the slow growth and professionalization of the apparatus of the US state. Foreign missionaries played a key role in nineteenth-century US diplomacy.
The Career of a Missionary-Diplomat
Divie McCartee’s story is but one example of how this worked. In China, McCartee began a truly remarkable career. Over his years in China and Japan, he bridged the fields of mission work, educational reform, and diplomacy with an ease that marked him as exemplary of the mid-century missionary diplomats. He served wherever he felt his skills would be of use. And his skills were of a diverse sort indeed.
It was his medical credentials that brought McCartee to China in 1844. Missionary societies had come to understand that institutions like medical dispensaries and schools could draw people into the missionary orbit. Doctors like McCartee hoped their healing ministry would facilitate evangelization. By his own estimates, he saw between 150 and 200 patients a day in this early period.8 When he wasn’t at the dispensary, he was studying. Other Americans in East Asia—consuls, sailors, and naval officers—tended to remain only for short periods and to restrict their visits to ports. Missionaries’ long residence in the area and frequent interactions with local people meant that their language skills regularly outpaced those of their American peers. McCartee, though, proved unusually adept at picking up on multiple dialects, and he soon distinguished himself as the lone Anglophone person in the area who could understand Mandarin. He traveled throughout the region, providing medical care and learning about the culture and natural surroundings he passed.
The rich ethnographic, ecological, and political detail of McCartee’s journals are typical of his missionary peers. Missionaries were often men and women with wide interests who recognized their unique opportunity to contribute to American understandings of both the wider world and scientific knowledge as they went about their proselytizing. McCartee, for example, sent reptile and insect specimens for the collection of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.9 He shared research on thumb printing in China with Americans who were developing it as a means of identification in the United States.10 He corresponded with the American Geographical Society of New York and the American Oriental Society, sharing copies of his own publications, forwarding maps, answering questions about China, and providing specimens of Chinese calligraphy and lithography. McCartee both respected and was fascinated with the country he had taken for his new home. While he had no doubt of the superiority of Christianity to all other religions, he found China to be a civilized country with a rich history and present. McCartee and the other missionary-diplomats eagerly shared this vision with their correspondents back at home.11
It was not only science that interested McCartee. Politics, too, drew his attention and consumed much of his efforts. His experience during the Taiping Rebellion was far from his only political or diplomatic work. McCartee took the scriptural command to “go into all nations” to preach God’s word “literally,” as he explained to a friend. He saw it as his duty to serve not only as a missionary, but to “apply to go as an interpreter, naval agent, or anything” that would allow him to reach new lands and new people.12 McCartee understood that missions and the US government alike would benefit from general good relations among Asian and Western powers. Accordingly, he worked alternatively for the American, Chinese, and Japanese governments in a range of capacities: as a translator and interpreter for all three governments, as an assessor on the Mixed Court in China that oversaw criminal and civil cases involving Americans and other foreigners, and as a professor of International Law at Tokyo University.13 He traveled to Japan as a translator for Vice Consul George W. Fish in 1858. When a Portuguese trading ship trafficking Chinese laborers grounded in Japan, McCartee made use of his Chinese and Japanese language skills to help resolve the immediate crisis. He saw the political role of the missionary as based not in nationalism, but in a sort of humanitarianism, advancing peaceful relations between countries and promoting “civilization” alongside Christianity. This, McCartee and other missionaries believed, was what the United States ought to stand for on the world stage.
During the McCartees’ extended furlough in the United States, Divie continued to act as a missionary diplomat. Like so many other missionaries on furlough, he educated his fellow Americans about the faraway lands where he had spent so many decades of his life. As he toured, he explained the culture, history, and crucially, the contemporary politics of these countries to US audiences. When he was in New York, he spent his days working as a translator for the Chinese Consulate.14 In Washington, he served as the temporary English secretary of the Japanese minister.15 And all the while, he sought information to bring back to Asia about US educational institutions that might provide models for mission schools in China, Japan, and Korea.16 As he returned to the United States for what would be the last time, he was just beginning to hear news of the unrest in China that the world would come to know as the Boxer Uprising. The missionary diplomacy that had guided his career would prove key to the American understanding of that crisis and the way forward.17
What a Missionary Is Good For
McCartee’s stories of diplomatic work inspired his nephew, who had left Ningpo as a boy and grew up idolizing his uncle. As an adult, the two were close; Rankin clearly saw McCartee as something of a father figure after the death of his own father. They shared a great many interests, none as deeply held as their passion for Asia and Christian missions. Working as a librarian at a mission-oriented school, Rankin was able to spend much of his time reading, writing, and compiling scrapbooks. As the century came to its close, US relations with Asia and the position of the foreign mission movement in US diplomacy had become Rankin’s major theme.
McCartee’s last letter to Rankin was written in San Francisco on January 19, 1900, just after his eightieth birthday. He had come to California for his health, hoping that the milder climate would ameliorate the vague illness that seemed to be wearing him down. He had what “for want of a better name, people called ‘heart failure,’” he explained to his nephew. His handwriting was shaky. He was working on his reminiscences, intended for publication someday. A recent improvement in his health left him hopeful. If he continued to feel better, he might return to Japan. Within seven months, he had died.18
By the time that McCartee died in San Francisco in the fall of 1900, much had changed in both missionary and diplomatic circles. Observers, as Rankin noted with concern, were looking askance at missionaries, not sure of their value to America’s work in the world. For Rankin, missionaries like McCartee—and there were quite a number of missionaries who had been like his uncle—had played an essential role in US diplomacy. Missionaries, he was sure, were the key. To turn away from missionaries was, for US foreign policy, perilous.
Rankin dedicated himself to the project of memorializing his uncle. Between 1900 and 1907, Rankin worked on multiple versions of obituaries and articles for different venues. His major goal was to publish McCartee’s own reminiscences, which he eventually did with the help and editorship of Presbyterian missionary leader Robert Speer. As he worked, he took copious notes, corresponded with anyone he could think of who might have new information about McCartee’s activities, and critiqued other people’s writings on McCartee.
Rankin did not approve of the obituary by David Murray in the New-York Observer. Murray’s obituary, which identified McCartee as a “pioneer missionary to China and Japan,” seemed to divide McCartee’s missionary work from his other accomplishments. This, Rankin argued, would not do. The problem was that Murray misunderstood McCartee’s work as a missionary: “All of his literary, educational, scientific and political work was merely incidental to his life as a missionary,” Rankin explained. McCartee was “always a missionary de facto,” even when other responsibilities took him away from official missionary service. McCartee had enjoyed a long and varied career, but he was a missionary first and always. And his missionary outlook could not be separated from what had come to seem, by the early twentieth century, as more secular pursuits.
That was not the only problem Rankin had with the obituary. Murray didn’t only misunderstand McCartee as a missionary. He also did not understand the degree of McCartee’s significance as a diplomat.19 McCartee, he insisted, deserved the credit for all of the “good relations” between China and Japan during his tenure, and also, “in some measure, the very founding of the modern diplomatic relations that exist.” That was all due to his missionary character. “When this missionary had anything to do with politics it was wholly in the interest of international comity and mutual understanding on all sides,” Rankin wrote. This was the central idea that he gained from his years of correspondence with his uncle.
As Rankin reflected on his uncle’s life, he found an ideal example of how the role of missionary and diplomat ought to be fused in the interest of international connections.20 The stakes seemed high: the turn of the century was a moment of potential transition for US diplomacy. To forget about the stories of the missionary-diplomats, Rankin argued, was not only to forget about a part of history. It was also, far more dangerously, to choose a wrong path for US foreign relations in the new century. As Rankin looked at the story of the mid-century missionary diplomats, he saw the best bet for mutually beneficial relations between the United States and Asia. In other words, the life of Divie Bethune McCartee could provide “the best possible answer to the question now so widely raised—what is a missionary good for anyway?”21
This, at least, was the way that the Bethune, McCartee, and Rankin families answered that question. As we shall see, they were not alone. If we want to understand the development of US diplomacy across the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, it is essential that we uncover the significant role of Protestant foreign missions in shaping the project of US foreign relations.
Protestant Missions and the State Department
This book examines the connections between the State Department and the Protestant mission movement over the nineteenth century through the lives and work of missionary diplomats like the McCartee family. At the start of the century, both the State Department and the mission movement were small and weak, with outsized ambitions for eventual influence over the whole world. Examining the evolution of both the state and missions together reveals how entangled their roots were and the ways that they would shape each other’s growth over the century and into the next.
Part I opens with an examination of the creation and consumption of missionary intelligence. In the first decades of the century, when the United States diplomatic corps was small, weak, and focused on European and Latin American affairs, missionary intelligence brought information about new and different parts of the world to American audiences. These missionary authors presented American readers with a world that needed their help, and they called on the religious community of US Protestants to help the suffering, feed the hungry, and clothe the naked. As they did so, they urged American international action—and not always in ways that the US government supported. But politicians, too, read missionary intelligence. The missionary vision of the United States was quite influential.
After all, missionaries and diplomats operated in different geographies for much of the century. The places that mattered most to missions tended to matter less to the State Department, allowing missionaries to emerge as key experts and influences when the state began to pay more attention to places outside of Europe and Latin America. The chapters in the book’s second section follow the missionaries around the globe, where they served as key figures in the development of US relations in Asia, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional troublemakers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided.
Once they were in the field, missionary diplomats made demands on their government. They insisted that officials send consuls, defend missionaries’ rights, and enable missionaries to travel where they wanted to go in pursuit of their evangelistic work. Because the State Department throughout the nineteenth century largely agreed with missionaries and their supporters that missionaries were key partners in advancing US interests abroad, these missionaries and their priorities created many elements of US policy.
But as the century went on and the State Department grew, these missionary “troubles” (as the diplomats called them) came to seem more problematic. In some regions, missionaries faced physical violence. Foreign governments seized Bibles and other missionary publications. Missionaries claimed their rights were violated. They used creative interpretations of treaties to locate missions in places where they were not welcome and then demanded US protection. Missionaries, in short, drew US diplomats into places and questions that they had not expected and did not want. As the decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries’ power. Were missionaries serving the interests of US diplomacy? Or were they creating unnecessary problems? Were they, perhaps, doing both?
The book’s third part focuses on case studies in the Philippines, China, Congo, and Turkey to explore how these arguments played out in the changing political context of the turn of the century. By the 1890s, the State Department was larger, stronger, and more professionalized than it had been in the 1820s and 1830s. The US government was far better placed to enact any grand ambitions for the country on the world stage. Missionaries could be a major asset to this work—or a major hindrance.
Across the century, missionaries forced the government to articulate new conceptions of the rights of US citizens abroad and of the role of the United States as an engine of humanitarianism and religious freedom. This is where many historians begin the story of religion and US foreign relations.22 But it has far deeper roots that stretch back into the nineteenth century. By the time the United States entered the First World War, missionary diplomacy had for nearly a century created the conditions for some Americans to embrace a vision of their country as an internationally engaged world power. Missionaries introduced Americans to new places, people, and problems, and in so doing, their missionary diplomacy shaped America’s strategic interests around the globe.