Politicians
It was a Sunday morning, so President John Quincy Adams went to church. On this particular week, the president gathered with the congregation to listen to Charles Stewart, a former missionary to the Sandwich Islands (Hawai‘i). Stewart had chosen Acts 26:18 for his text: “To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified, by faith that is in me.”
Charles and Harriet Stewart had been part of the ABCFM mission at Lahaina from 1822 to 1825, when illness brought the couple back to the United States. Compared to their missionary brethren, it was a short stay. But even in those few years, Stewart learned enough about the Sandwich Islands to become a trusted expert for a US audience. When competing accounts of the Sandwich Islands threatened to create “erroneous impressions” on the minds of those at home, the North American Review assured its readers that Stewart could be relied on to provide “correct information” that would help Americans “discriminate between undoubted facts and heedless conjecture.” Earlier in the week, Stewart had visited President Adams at the White House, introducing himself as an expert who could share information about the islands that had captured the imaginations of American Christians and merchants alike.1
When the president met the missionary, Stewart’s journals and letters could be found in missionary and other periodicals. His book, Residence at the Sandwich Islands, would be published the following year and would go through several editions in the United States and England.2 Like many other returned missionaries, Stewart also preached at various churches and shared his experiences with those gathered in the pews. These sermons were intended to edify, entertain, and exhort listeners to take action in the work of world evangelization. In this, they were part of a broader literature known as “missionary intelligence.”
And so, on a Sunday in March 1827, Stewart preached in Washington, DC. In his diary, Adams described the sermon as “a very particular and minute account” of the success of the mission in transforming Hawaiians from “the primitive barbarism of the savage state.” The president found the missionary’s tales of Hawaiian culture to be “horrible and disgusting—Treachery and Cruelty; Parricide and Infanticide were among their most ordinary practices.” But Adams noted, too, the signs of improvement that Stewart claimed. The islanders, according to the missionary, were now “more than half civilized.”3 Remarkable progress, it seemed, in such a short time.
This was not the only missionary sermon that Adams would attend. On a snowy Easter morning the following year, Adams listened to a sermon from Jonas King, then a missionary in Palestine. King had been introduced to the president in March, and apparently made enough of an impression to gain an invitation to dinner the following week, though he did not attend.4 On Easter Sunday, April 6, King preached in the US Capitol on “the goodness and severity of God.” Adams described the sermon as having “the tone and Style of conversation,” though he did not intend that as a compliment. King’s main purpose was to discuss the duty of American Christians to support his mission in Palestine due to “the severity of God to the inhabitants of Asia Minor” and “the goodness of God to ourselves” in the United States. King’s description of Constantinople around this time was bleak. It was, he wrote, a place “full of oppression, deceit and false religion, of confusion, plague, and death.”5 Adams was not much impressed. The missionary, Adams concluded, was “grave and earnest, but not eloquent.”6
A decade later, Adams, now in the middle of his postpresidential career as a congressional representative for Massachusetts, heard an “urgently mendicant” sermon on the “melancholy picture” of the Ottoman Empire preached by missionary Harrison Otis Dwight. Dwight was home from his mission in Constantinople (Istanbul) and had taken the Gospel of Matthew verse “the field is the world” as his sermon theme.7 Adams, at least, was not moved by what he heard as Dwight described the limited success of Protestant missions in the region. In a field of Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, the missionaries had converted almost no Muslims or Jews to Christianity. Instead, the “sum total of accomplishment,” as Adams put it, was “the conversion of a small number of Armenian Christians of the Greek Church into Christians of the Presbyterian Church.” What was the point? To Adams, this seemed like misdirected effort. After all, he had recently read an article in the Emancipator about two men, formerly enslaved on a plantation in Virginia, who were escaping to Canada. One of them, at thirty-five years old, had never heard of Jesus Christ, nor been in a house of worship. “This is the fate of millions of natives of our own country,” Adams concluded, “and we are spunged [sic] for contributions to teach Armenian Christians evangelical Presbyterianism.”8 There was greater need, he felt, far closer to home.
Perhaps more than any other single figure, John Quincy Adams shaped nineteenth-century US foreign relations.9 We do not expect him to have needed the mission movement to tell him about the world. By the time he listened to Stewart and King, he had already enjoyed a remarkable diplomatic career, with positions in Paris, Leiden, St. Petersburg, the Hague, London, and Berlin. He had served as a member of the Massachusetts legislature, the United States Senate, secretary of state, and president. By the time he grumbled about Dwight’s misguided efforts, he was a congressman serving on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Yet even with all of this international experience, Adams consumed—and could even be transformed by—missionary intelligence. In certain regions of the world, it turned out, the missionaries knew more than the US statesman. Much more. For these regions, missionary intelligence could influence American ideas about what the world was like and how Americans ought to interact with it.
Adams was not a part of the evangelical denominations that made up the mission movement’s most passionate supporters. He was, however, a man of faith. Born into a Congregational-Unitarian family, Adams spent his adulthood visiting different types of churches at home and abroad, reflecting on the role of faith in public life. During the years when his political career introduced him to various missionaries, Adams maintained pews at Presbyterian and Episcopal churches in Washington in addition to Unitarian and Episcopal churches in Quincy, Massachusetts.10 Attending the churches and reading the publications that circulated missionary intelligence, he was part of a larger missionary public. And missionary intelligence, it turned out, focused its attention on a different geography than what consumed Adams during his tenures as a diplomat, secretary of state, president, and then member of congress. Europe and Latin America loomed largest for Adams and the US government in the first half of the century; Asia and the Middle East captivated the missionaries.
These sermons were not Adams’s first nor his only direct experiences with missionaries sharing news and urging action. During his tenure as secretary of state, he had a number of encounters with missionaries traveling through Washington. Jeremiah Evarts, one of the leaders of the ABCFM, visited on several occasions to pass along requests, official statements, and updates on behalf of his organization.11 Missionaries Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk visited before they traveled to Palestine. They needed passports and learned that there were no US consuls in the regions they planned to travel. Adams could offer them passports and letters, but little else.12 Missionaries to the Sandwich Islands came to request money to bring as gifts from the US president to the chiefs in Hawai‘i.13 British missionaries, too, visited and provided Adams with samples of the printing that they were able to do in Calcutta.14 When missionaries in the Sandwich Islands came into conflict with a naval officer, one of them was introduced to Adams by General Van Rensselaer, a congressional representative who just happened to be serving as president of the ABCFM at the time.15
Throughout the diplomatic crises of the first half of the nineteenth century, missionaries could play an important role behind the scenes, shaping public interest and priorities. The places where they did, and did not, influence American thinking reveals as much about US diplomacy as it does about the foreign mission movement.
There was one region in particular where Adams’s ideas were shaped by missionary intelligence: China. At other key moments of diplomatic crisis—the framing of the Monroe Doctrine, the controversy over Indian removal, the Mexican War—Adams also received and considered missionary intelligence and appeals. At times he rejected it, finding the interests of the federal government and the missionary movement to be at odds. At other times, Adams accepted a key tenet of missionary diplomacy: missionary intelligence and action enabled US state action. Adams’s missionary contacts knew that the reverse could be true, too. Sometimes, US state action enabled missionary entry. Each of these dynamics described the relationship between the government and the mission movement in the middle of the nineteenth century.
When it came to determining which type of relationship would emerge, geographical context was the key. Missionaries and government officials had distinct, if often overlapping, ideas about which places mattered to US interests and how Americans ought to intervene in foreign affairs.
Adams Meets Parker, 1841
From 1841 to 1843, as the US government and missionaries alike attempted to imagine what the results of the Opium War between Great Britain and China might be, Adams served as chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The Treaty of Nanking that ended the war would transform Chinese relations with the West. President John Tyler asked Adams’s committee to report on possible measures that might improve US opportunities in the region as well. Adams, like many Americans, seemed to be of two minds about what had just happened and what the United States should do next. Western nations, Adams reported, now enjoyed access to more of China as a result of a “conquest” of “questionable morality.” Yet he hoped that the war’s effects would be “auspicious” for the United States, opening up new possibilities for improved relations.16
During the years of Adams’s terms as secretary of state and president, China had been by far a more powerful country than the United States. While Western powers were eager to possess the tea, porcelain, silks, and other goods that China brought to market, there was comparatively little that Europeans and Americans could offer in exchange. Much of America’s early Pacific explorations were focused on the China trade: the sandalwood and bêche-de-mer that Americans could find in the Sandwich Islands and Fiji were the keys to securing US trade in China, as the fur trade had been in earlier years.17 Far more troubling than an unbalanced trade relationship, though, was the control that China maintained over the foreign visitors who came to its shores. Americans, like Europeans, were restricted to the foreign district in Canton (Guangzhou), forced into what Adams called the “humiliating” position of being considered “outside barbarians” by the Chinese. Writing for the Foreign Affairs Committee, Adams explained that this dynamic was the “root and substance” of the conflict that led to the Opium War. The war, he insisted, had been about “equal rights of independent nations, against the insolent and absurd assumption of despotic supremacy.” Here, the independent nations he worried about were Britain and the United States; the insolent despot was China. The war’s end promised a new era. For merchants, China represented a great potential trading partner and market. For missionaries, it represented a great field of souls in need of conversion. For all, China was an important key to their vision for the future.
Adams’s explanation of the conflict at the root of the Opium War was a willful misreading of Chinese diplomacy. In the 1830s, Chinese relations with the various Western powers were severely tested by the opium trade. The sale of opium was illegal in China, yet smuggling flourished. Missionaries were early opposed to the trade for humanitarian reasons, but often kept quiet about their concerns. They saw it as a harmful drug and were troubled to see Western merchants enriching themselves through it. Further, for practical reasons they hoped the illegal trade would cease. Smuggling set the Chinese authorities against all outsiders, and so complicated the ability of all Westerners to gain a foothold in China and challenged missionaries’ understanding of the linked goals of the two groups. But some of the major donors to the China mission and its philanthropic institutions were smugglers, so missionaries kept their mouths shut.
Eventually, missionaries like Elijah Bridgman began voicing their concerns in print. Writing for US audiences, they tended to emphasize that the majority of the illicit trade was done by British, not US, ships. But they called attention to American participation as well. In 1839, Bridgman was able to push American merchants to agree to Chinese demands to give up the trade. Few kept to their word.18 In the next year, opium joined a list of trade goods including liquor and tobacco that received the ABCFM’s opprobrium.19 This was not just a question of the morality of drug use or even of public health. The illegality of the trade and the flagrant disregard of the laws brought the missionary response to the opium question into the realm of foreign relations.
In 1839, the Chinese government stepped up its efforts to halt the opium trade. The emperor wrote to Queen Victoria, urging her to take action to stop British smuggling. In China, officials tightened restrictions against the trade yet again. Eventually, the Chinese seized supplies of English opium and blockaded European shipping coming into Canton. The aggression of the British in response would become a major problem for American merchants and missionaries alike. Unwilling to accept Chinese efforts to curtail the trade, the British insisted on the right to free commerce and backed up their demands with naval force. The Opium War, which lasted from 1839 to 1842, would lead to a profound shift in Chinese relations with the Western nations by forcing the Chinese to grant more concessions to foreign powers who were anxious to trade.
In the United States, the Opium War led to confusion and anxiety. Within the government, some worried that the British would try to gain exclusive trading rights and usurp any US position in China. The House Committee on Foreign Affairs received a petition from a group of merchants in January 1840 who were very concerned about the potential blockade of Chinese ports and sought protection from the government.20 It was not entirely clear how the United States ought to respond to these events.21
John Quincy Adams, like many American observers, agreed with the central premise of the British position: that free trade was not just an economic issue, but an ethical one as well. “Commerce,” Adams had written, was “among the natural rights and duties of men,” but in China “everyone has a right to buy, but no one is obliged to sell.” Calling the Chinese attempt to control its foreign trade “churlish and unsocial,” Adams echoed the British critique of China as setting itself apart and above other countries.22 Whatever they did, Americans wanted to protect their trading interests and their equality with other nations.
The wartime years coincided with missionary Peter Parker’s visit to the United States, which allowed missionaries to become both informants to the American public and advisors to the US government. Parker had been a medical missionary in Canton since 1834, where he worked alongside Elijah Bridgman, Samuel Wells Williams, and Edwin Stevens. His duties included caring for the health of his missionary brethren as well as establishing a dispensary and hospital in Canton. Parker’s hospital saw long lines of Chinese patients. The mission provided treatment for free, for which the missionaries received patients’ gratitude, if not their presence at worship. Though Parker employed a local Christian to evangelize at the hospital, he had little time for evangelism himself. His work at the hospital and at the Medical Missionary Society, an international organization of medical missionaries serving in China, consumed the majority of his time.23 By the late 1830s, Parker began to add government work to his list of tasks.
It was the Chinese, not the US, government that Parker assisted first. Commissioner Lin, appointed by the Chinese emperor to suppress the opium trade as the customs inspector in Canton, had asked Parker to help him in his negotiations with the British by translating several passages from Vattel’s Law of Nations on war, blockades, embargoes, and the right of a state to exclude foreign merchandise and confiscate smuggled goods. Lin wanted to come to the table prepared to argue with the British in terms that they would understand and accept. He trusted Parker to prepare him for such a debate. After the Vattel translations, Lin had Parker translate into English his official communication with Queen Victoria about opium. Parker did not expect this to be effective, as indeed it was not. In theory, Vattel may have been on China’s side, but the British would not accept the right of an Asian power to define what sort of trade was or was not permissible. In the summer of 1840, war officially began with the arrival of British forces and the blockade of Canton. The fighting effectively closed the hospital for a time, and Parker returned to the United States in July for a brief visit.24
The timing of Parker’s arrival was ideal for opening the door for conversations with the powerful figures who could shape the United States’ China policy. At the time, the US consulate in Canton was staffed by a single consul, and direct information from China was highly valuable. Parker’s friends in New Haven urged him to Washington, where they thought he might be of some use in sharing his knowledge of recent events and Chinese society and culture with politicians. There, he met with the ambassadors of Spain, France, Austria, and Russia, in addition to President Martin Van Buren, Secretary of State John Forsyth, President-Elect William Henry Harrison, and Daniel Webster, who would be Harrison’s secretary of state. He preached a missionary sermon in Washington in January and was then invited to preach again in the chambers of Congress on the following Sunday. John Quincy Adams attended both events.
For Parker, this was an incredible honor. He was preaching in front of what he described as “one of the most enlightened audiences of any age or nation, the Senate and House of Representatives.” It was also an excellent opportunity to share his views about what the United States needed in China.
Parker found an interested audience in Daniel Webster. Their meeting concluded with a request from the incoming secretary of state to the missionary to bring written suggestions for the United States’ future China policy. Parker was happy to comply. At the top of his list was the need for a US minister plenipotentiary to be appointed. This diplomat, he hoped, might help lead peace talks between England and China, end the opium traffic, and restore trade. Parker’s initial hope was that John Quincy Adams might serve in that role.25
Parker had visited Adams to discuss the proposals he would make to Webster. In a forty-five-minute interview, Parker explained that he was urging the United States to appoint a minister of the United States to China, and he thought that Adams was the man for the job. Adams, though, was not sure. “The time has not yet come,” Adams wrote in his diary, “for a diplomatic mission from the United States to the Celestial Empire.” In 1841, the conflict between China and England was too significant, and US relations with Great Britain were not strong enough to allow the United States to serve in a mediating role. Adams advised waiting.26
A year later, as Parker prepared to return to China, the government appeared to have abandoned plans for an embassy in China. Parker met with President John Tyler, who had come to the White House after the death of Harrison, and again urged Webster to send someone to China.27 Adams now supported this project. It seemed important, Adams reflected, for some “intelligent and discreet and spirited informal commissioner” of the United States to take residence in China, empowered “to take advantage of any incident which might occur to open a communication with the Chinese Government, to sustain and promote the interests, political and commercial, of our country.” Parker agreed. The president, too, had assured Parker that “he had his eyes fixed upon China.”28
Tyler’s first move was to send Commodore Lawrence Kearny and the East India Squadron to China in 1842. Kearny’s instructions urged him to maintain strict neutrality between the Chinese and the British while protecting American shipping and taking steps to punish American participation in the opium trade or any smuggling that was being perpetrated under the American flag. In this work, he, too, received missionary assistance. Elijah Bridgman, one of Parker’s missionary brethren in Canton, served as Kerny’s translator and advisor. What was supposed to be a few days’ work for the missionary ended up lasting two months as Bridgman helped Kearny to resolve a dispute over property losses and the death of an American sailor during the previous year. Following Bridgman’s advice, Kearny welcomed Chinese officials onboard the American ships, in hopes of fostering better relations between the countries.29
As Bridgman and Kearny laid the groundwork for better relations between the United States and China, Parker returned to China with his new wife Harriet Webster. The couple had met in Washington. Their marriage, uniting a cousin of Daniel Webster with the missionary, further enmeshed missionary and diplomatic circles. They arrived in Canton in July 1842, just before the negotiations between the British and the Chinese began. The resulting Treaty of Nanking would transform Western relations with China. Most important, the treaty opened up new ports to Western residents and Western trade. Outsiders would no longer be restricted to Canton.
This new state of affairs provided a new urgency to Parker’s recommendation of a US mission to China. If European powers were taking on a more extensive presence in China, the United States wanted to be there as well. In short order, Caleb Cushing, the congressman from Massachusetts who followed Adams as chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was appointed to the role. His first priority was to negotiate with the government the terms of a new treaty between China and the United States.
As he prepared for his new diplomatic mission, Cushing reviewed Parker’s writings on China. He accepted the ABCFM’s offer of help, and asked Parker and Bridgman to serve as assistants throughout the treaty process.30 They complied. Parker secured a student to cover his hospital duties during his absence and joined Cushing in Macao to begin the negotiations.31 Bridgman was less enthusiastic about this work, and not at all initially convinced that Cushing’s diplomatic mission would have much benefit to the evangelical mission. Yet within the United States, Rufus Anderson of ABCFM was convinced that the two missions shared many goals. While the political project “could not be the same,” as the religious one, the ABCFM trusted that a favorable treaty would “facilitate the measures for the religious improvement of the Chinese empire” by opening the door to more evangelism.32
The negotiations that led to the 1844 Treaty of Wanghia reveal the fruits of missionary influence. The treaty extended many of the recent British gains to the United States, most importantly the opening of five new ports to foreign residence. Parker was a helpful presence in the US delegation; through his medical practice, he had treated the parents of two of the Chinese delegates and counted another as a close friend. The two missionaries assisted in a line-by-line scrutiny of the proposed text. Bridgman and Parker were particularly attentive to articles that would protect missionary efforts in these new treaty ports. They made sure that hospitals and houses of worship were included on the list of types of property foreigners were allowed to own in the treaty ports. They also secured the right of US citizens to employ Chinese language teachers and assistants in literary labors, such as translating and publishing religious tracts and scripture. This had previously been banned, which created obvious obstacles for missionaries interested in learning the language, translating scripture, and distributing religious print widely.
The Treaty of Wanghia, in short, gave missionaries their long-sought ability to evangelize more openly in China and initiated a new era in the complex relations between missionaries and merchants.33 Caleb Cushing returned to the United States in 1844 with the treaty, leaving behind Parker as the official secretary to the US Mission in China, complete with a salary paid by the US government.34
As soon as news of the treaty circulated in the United States, missionary societies prepared to send missionaries out to new stations in China. The Missionary Herald celebrated the ways that China’s new treaties had begun the work of “breaking down the walls of seclusion with which that country has been so long encircled.”35 The numbers of missionaries in China would soon balloon, ushering in a new era of US-China relations. In many ways, these treaties and the provisions for missionary activity were the results of missionaries’ longstanding efforts to distribute missionary intelligence among Americans at home.
Cushing returned to Washington in 1845 and met with Adams. The two men discussed the history of the Opium War and the present state of US-China relations. Adams wanted to know about religion and morality in China, reflecting that “there were differences of international law between nations, modified by their systems of religion.” Christian nations related to each other on the basis of “the fundamental moral principle of Christianity—brotherly love among men,” while China relied on another system entirely. Cushing described it as “the relation of authority and obedience between parent and child.”36
Adams’s logic—that religion was the basis for a country’s approach to international relations—illuminates the reason why missionaries and diplomats could see eye to eye in China and other missionary lands. On some level, missions that sought to convert communities and cultures to Christianity would serve the interests of the US government. But Adams was not always persuaded that missionary and government interests aligned.
Adams Meets King and Robertson, 1828 and 1830
Adams’s embrace of missionary intelligence in China stands out because earlier in his career, he had bristled when missionary writings and priorities threatened to create diplomatic challenges for the United States. In 1823, as secretary of state, Adams made what might have been his longest-lasting influence in US foreign relations when he helped draft President James Monroe’s address that would be remembered as the Monroe Doctrine. The doctrine set out some of the basic principles of US foreign policy at the time: nonengagement in European political conflict and opposition to European colonizing efforts in the Americas. As Adams had explained in an earlier address, the United States would not go out into the world “in search of monsters to destroy.”37 One of the main priorities of US international relations was commerce, and the government sought to support whatever policies would create the best possibilities for Americans to trade. Yet some Americans could imagine very different priorities for US foreign relations. Missionaries and their supporters at home, for example, not only saw monsters around the world, but wondered if perhaps the United States ought to try to destroy them after all.
It was in the midst of debate over precisely this tension that Adams wrote the Monroe Doctrine. In the early 1820s, revolutions in Latin America captured American enthusiasm while prompting some anxiety about the future of independent republics throughout the Americas.38 At the same time that Adams considered these events in Latin America, his attention was also drawn to the unfurling controversy surrounding the Greek Revolution and the American response to it. Many Americans saw this revolution across the Atlantic, as they had the French Revolution before it, as an inheritor of the principles of the American Revolution. Unlike the French Revolution, however, the Greek Revolution set off a proto-humanitarian interest as well, with distinctly religious and racialized dynamics. This was, American observers understood, more than just a war for independence; it was a battle between persecuted Christian Greeks and oppressive Muslim Turks.39
American coverage of the war was marked by anti-Muslim fervor. Muslims, according to these stories, were inherently cruel and violent; Greek Christians, accordingly, were the victims of horrific persecution. As Americans read reports of what was happening in Greece from Phil-hellenic writers like Lord Byron, they were struck by the injustice and depravity of the treatment of Greeks. Sympathetic observers reacted with particular horror to stories of violent attacks against women, who were shown bare-chested and brutalized in the illustrations accompanying some of the reporting. Modest Christian women, they understood, needed to be protected from violent and lascivious Muslim men. American Protestants called for government action in response. The United States, they argued, was a Christian nation. As such, they ought to come to the aid of persecuted Christians across the ocean.40
This was not an argument that convinced the US government. Pragmatic commercial concerns outweighed humanitarian appeals. The Ottoman Empire, of which Greece was then a part, was a powerful force and important to US trading interests. American diplomats found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to explain to Ottoman officials why Americans were actively organizing on behalf of the Greeks. The public enthusiasm for Greece, and the religious tone that it took, raised doubts about the assertion in the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli between the United States and representatives of the Ottoman Empire that the United States was “not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”41
Adams, as secretary of state, was quite concerned that the public uproar on behalf of the Greeks would create a crisis in US-Ottoman relations.42 It was this thought that animated Adams’s statements about monsters across the globe. Regardless of what Philhellenes urged, Adams insisted that the US government would not get involved in humanitarian crises. Yet the US public was another thing altogether. If the government would not provide aid, American missionary and benevolent societies could. Missionaries had not been active in Greece before, but they had been working with Orthodox Christians elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire.43 The war changed this. Jonas King, one of the ABCFM’s early missionaries to Palestine, was one of the American Philhellenes who helped to draw American attention to the plight of Greece. King had long relied on violent stereotypes of Muslims in his writings about the Ottoman Empire. He had described Constantinople as “full of oppression, deceit and false religion, plague, and death.”44 It was unsurprising, then, that on a tour of the United States in 1827 he became a prominent proponent of the Greek cause against the Turks.
King visited Washington, DC, while serving as an agent of the ABCFM, traveling through the country and fundraising for foreign missions. There, he met with Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and others. It was on this trip that King preached before an unimpressed Adams. It was not the politicians but the groups of benevolent-minded Americans with whom he had the greatest impact. The Ladies’ Greek Committee of New York, one of many Philhellenic organizations created in the United States to organize support for the Greek cause, soon hired him as their missionary to Greece. Despite his title as “missionary,” it was not an evangelistic position. He was to travel to Greece, establish schools, distribute Bibles and religious tracts, and see how US donations might be best put to use. But more evangelical organizations supported King’s work as well. Both the American Bible Society and the American Tract Society supported King’s mission to Greece and provided religious materials for distribution.45
Once he was in Greece, King began to use American money to build schoolhouses. King worked with the Greek government in going about this project, and his American supporters were delighted to learn that the new Greek president, Ioannis Kapodistrias, shared their sense that education was the key to transformation in the country.46 Schools, indeed, were a major emphasis of US missionaries around the world. Here, though, they took on a particular poignancy. American missionaries believed schools to be transformative cultural institutions. The United States, too, had seen major reforms in its educational system in the decades since the American Revolution. Academies, women’s seminaries, and public schools had all expanded in order to provide what reformers believed was a republican education. They understood that the civic and political life of a republic demanded an educated populace. Now that Greece had gained its independence from the Ottoman Empire and become a republic as well, it only stood to reason that they, too, needed schools to train new republican citizens.
The humanitarian aid of the war years thus expanded to include educational institution building. King’s schools grew alongside other American-sponsored schools, and soon he was joined by American missionaries sponsored by other denominational groups.47 The Episcopal Church sent reverends John Robertson and John Hill to Athens. Within two years of their departure, Robertson and Hill reported great success in their work. They found large numbers of students interested in attending their schools and public officials ready to support them.48 They continued to urge multiple types of US intervention, including Protestant evangelization. Robertson echoed King’s evaluation of Greece, writing to his American supporters that the country was in “a most wretched state.” Ongoing violence created ongoing dangers. Yet their work was promising. By 1832, the missionaries had published religious tracts and textbooks (in arithmetic and modern Greek grammar and reading) and were busy with their schools. Only want of funds kept them from immediately building more.49 As with all such appeals, Robertson hoped that his US audience would donate the additional gifts that would allow him to enhance his missionary work.
By the 1830s, Adams found such missionary appeals less threatening than he had in 1823. When he heard Robertson preach about his work in Greece, the now former secretary of state described his message as “affecting.” “It would seem as if within the last seven years one-half the population had perished,” Adams reflected. Those who survived were left in conditions “wretched beyond description,” but the missionary inspired Adams with his stories of their “passion to obtain education and to seek after wisdom.”50
The difference, of course, had a great deal to do with the context of who was taking action and how. It would have been untenable for the United States to intervene in a foreign war over humanitarian and religious concerns in 1823. The United States was far too weak and could not afford to anger the much more powerful Ottoman Empire. Further, other diplomatic crises closer to home demanded attention. As secretary of state, Adams had been unmoved. Now that Greek independence had been secured, and now that the actors in question were missionaries, and not the government, Adams was able to react differently. Missionaries, after all, were not the state. They could respond to humanitarian concerns in a different way than the US government could at this early moment in the century.
Adams Meets Worcester and McCoy, 1819 and 1828
In the same year that Adams listened to Robertson preach about Greece, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act. Here, too, missionary intelligence sought to influence US political action. For decades, the missionaries and the federal government shared a perspective of their goals and interests in relation to the various Indigenous nations of North America. “Indian Missions” fell under the umbrella of foreign missions in the early nineteenth century, directed as they were to non-US populations who had sovereign power over their own territory. Accordingly, Adams had met with missionaries to Native Americans during his earlier tenure as secretary of state.
Samuel Worcester called on Adams in late February 1819, long before Worcester would give his name to one of the most significant Supreme Court cases dealing with US-Indian relations. Worcester was in Washington with a group of Cherokees who were then negotiating a treaty with the US government involving land cessions and the migration of some of the tribe west of the Mississippi. He came to Adams for help in securing guarantees for government support “of schooling and religious instruction for these unfortunate Indians,” and Adams promised to aid him. But Adams was busy with other matters and admitted in his diary that “I have not even had time to acquire an exact knowledge of what this is.”51
It would not be long before Adams and the rest of the American public had a far better understanding of the issues at stake in the missionary role in government relations with American Indians. Missionaries came to the debates over removal with a long history of understanding their work to be connected with government Indian policy. Since their beginnings in the 1810s, American missionary organizations had enjoyed federal support of their Indian missions through the financial distributions of the Civilization Fund, a portion of the federal budget that was intended to support educational and “civilizing” efforts among Native Americans. Receipt of these funds required the missionaries send an annual report to the Department of War, which oversaw Indian relations. Both the Department of War and the missionary organizations wanted the same information to judge the missions’ progress.52 While the federal money was technically allocated to nonreligious purposes (the purchase of farming equipment or other materials for schools), these missions combined religious and secular work seamlessly in a way that did not create any problems for either the government or the mission boards. When various Native nations had attempted to negotiate with the federal government about land and removal, missionaries could accordingly serve as helpful allies and advocates.53 It was in this capacity that Adams first met Samuel Worcester.
Nearly a decade later, another missionary, Isaac McCoy, visited Adams in his new role as president. McCoy was a Baptist missionary who came seeking government protection for American Indians through removal. He and Worcester represented, in many ways, the two sides of the coin in missionary responses to the government policy of Indian removal. Where Worcester insisted that the Cherokee had the right to their ancestral lands as a sovereign people who had become civilized and Christianized, McCoy argued that white civilization posed, on the contrary, a danger to Indians. Their only hope of survival, McCoy felt, was to migrate to protected reservations where they might preserve traditional ways of life and remain safe from the violent and dangerous incursions of white American settlers.54 Each was convinced that his own approach was benevolent toward Indian nations, and each believed that his experience working at government-sponsored missions gave him the expertise to understand the situation and provide advice to policymakers.
Adams and McCoy talked at some length about the issue in 1828, and Adams reflected that the United States had not been consistent in its actions. “We have talked of benevolence and humanity, and preached them into civilization,” he recorded in his diary, “but none of this benevolence is felt where the right of the Indian comes in collision with the interest of the white man.” Adams thought the “most benevolent course” of action would be to make the Indians into US citizens, but he also believed that this was not a practical solution.55 The issue was at the heart of the 1828 presidential election, which Adams lost to Andrew Jackson. Jackson had gained national fame through his military exploits against Indigenous Americans. As president, he would usher in a far more aggressive phase of Indian removal in the federal government, signing the Indian Removal Act into law in 1830.
The US government’s Indian policy was a form of foreign relations. But unlike other foreign affairs officials, the personnel for Indian Affairs were part of the Department of War, not the Department of State, and it was Indian agents, not ambassadors or consuls, who represented the US government. But as the early emphasis on treaties suggests, US government officials well understood themselves to be dealing with sovereign foreign powers. These negotiations were some of the most significant moments of American state-building over the first half of the century. Missionaries, too, categorized American Indians as “foreign” in the early decades of the century (though they would migrate to the lists of “domestic” or “home” missions as the century progressed). As the competing perspectives of McCoy and Worcester suggest, missionaries were deeply enmeshed in the political conflicts over removal and were far from united in their approach.
Given the long history of missionary and government cooperation in Indian affairs, it should come as little surprise that some of the most prominent antiremoval voices among white Americans came from missionaries and their supporters. When Georgia passed state laws asserting the sovereignty of the Georgia government over Cherokee land in 1825, the missionary political response was decisive. Jeremiah Evarts, corresponding secretary of the ABCFM, authored the William Penn Essays, a series of anonymous appeals that sought to gather US support for the right of Native Americans to remain on their ancestral lands. This had been a cause close to Evarts’s heart for years. In 1827, Evarts had the Sandwich Islands missionary Charles Stewart introduce him to the president, taking the occasion to discuss the situation in Georgia.56 He had hoped that Adams was inclined to take action on behalf of the Cherokee, but in this he was disappointed. Two years after the men met, Jackson was in the White House and Evarts began writing his anonymous essays.
At the heart of Evarts’s argument was the idea that Indians from the so-called Civilized Tribes (including the Cherokee and Choctaw, both beneficiaries of ABCFM missions) had adopted the habits and culture of Protestant America and thus deserved to keep their land. But this was not all. Evarts included a lengthy history lesson to argue that native nations were sovereign and had always been treated as such by the federal government. It was a political as well as a moral critique of removal efforts. In addition to this published (if anonymous) activity, Evarts also encouraged family friend Catharine Beecher to appeal to American women using the same arguments. Her “Circular Addressed to Benevolent Ladies of the United States” inspired a widespread petition movement among white women to attempt to stop removal and similarly blended moral, political, and Christian arguments. These petitions, however, were unsuccessful.57
Members of the ABCFM also worked with Cherokee leaders to directly challenge the laws. It was on the advice of these missionaries that the Cherokee brought suit against Georgia. And it was with the ABCFM’s full support that missionaries Samuel Worcester and Elizur Butler refused to follow the new laws, resulting in their arrest, imprisonment, and eventual Supreme Court case. Among those who influenced these developments behind the scenes was Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen, a vigorous opponent of the Indian Removal Act and a member of the ABCFM who advised the board about lawyers and legal strategy in these cases.
Missionaries did not determine the government response to removal. Those who opposed it, after all, failed. For all that missionaries had presented Indians as sovereign foreign nations, the Supreme Court rejected this logic in the 1831 case Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, creating instead the new legal category of domestic dependent nations. When missionaries challenged their arrest under the new Georgia laws, it seemed momentarily possible that the US government would recognize Cherokee sovereignty more fully. In 1832, the court deemed the state laws that claimed the right to govern Indian lands and imprison missionaries to be unconstitutional in the decision for Worcester v. Georgia.58
After church on a Sunday in March 1832, John Quincy Adams, now a congressman representing Massachusetts, returned home to read “attentively” Justice Marshall’s opinion in the case involving that missionary he had met so long before. He understood immediately what the true outcome of Worcester v. Georgia would be. With Jackson supporting the Georgia government and Congress divided, the court was powerless to enforce its ruling. Bleakly, Adams predicted that “the Constitution and law of the Union and its judicial authority will be prostrated before the despotic power of the State.” While the missionaries remained in prison and their supporters in Boston debated further government action, Adams concluded that as he could “effect nothing,” he would “withhold [him]self from all action concerning it.”59 As a member of Congress, he was probably correct that there was not much he could have accomplished to change matters, though this sort of uphill battle never stopped him from speaking out against the evils of slavery.
Adams’s bleak predictions were accurate. The inability of the Supreme Court to enforce its decision meant that, eventually, the missionaries gave in. Though the ABCFM considered bringing further suit, Worcester and Butler eventually capitulated. After an apology to the Georgia governor, they were released and eventually joined the Cherokee on the long and deathly march west of the Mississippi known as the Trail of Tears. Once in Indian Territory, the relationship between missions and the government returned to its previous status. Within these new territories, missionaries again served as “civilizing” elements who worked alongside the government. They had proven that they could influence public discussion of Indian rights, but they had also demonstrated how difficult it would be to make any real difference in treating Indians as anything but domestic dependent nations. Over time, missionary societies shifted their interpretation of Indian missions from the category of “foreign” missions to that of “home” missions. From within this framework, they would continue to influence the government development of a new generation of “civilizing” work and boarding schools.
Adams had been largely optimistic about the imperial ambitions that brought the British to fight China in the Opium War. He was far more outspoken in his criticism of the imperialism that undergirded the United States’ war with Mexico. Adams’s commitment to the antislavery cause had been at the root of his critiques of the efforts for expansion into the Southwest that took up so much of US political debate in the 1840s.60 John Quincy Adams had long opposed the annexation of Texas, for example, seeing it as an attempt to expand slavery in the United States. But in July 1845, news reached the US Congress that Texas had accepted the terms of annexation to the United States. “If the voice of the people is the voice of God,” Adams drily reflected in his diary, “this measure has now the sanction of Almighty God.” In this dark mood, Adams could find only the slightest hint of hope, and that was in his trust that the future was “in the hands of Providence.” Perhaps it was still possible that the “ultimate result” of the annexation of Texas would disappoint those who had advocated for it.61
When Congress voted to declare war on Mexico a year later, Adams was one of only fourteen members who voted against it. The war would ultimately lead to the expansion of the territory of the United States, giving the continental United States its current shape. It would also, as Adams well understood, lead to the expansion of the territorial and governmental power of slaveholding in the United States.
In short, it was a war that seemed to have little to do with the goals or interests of the foreign mission movement. Yet, in a pattern that would continue for decades, missionary supporters saw the hand of God in these militaristic developments. In particular, Protestant supporters saw the war as being a potential avenue for defeating Catholicism in the region. The Southern Baptist Convention’s Committee on Foreign Missions, for example, saw the war as a way to save Mexico “from the withering reign of the Man of Sin.”62 While many may have opposed the war itself, they found that its effects presented opportunities. Like Adams, they trusted God to direct human events. American missionaries had long understood empire to create a path for mission work; the Mexican War represented simply another step in this process.
But because this would be a case of missions following the flag, Protestant missionaries did not have the sort of influence in these matters that they had found in other foreign relations events of the first half of the century. They did not shape events; instead, they shaped the interpretations of events. Missionaries provided a logic for some observers to make sense of the presence of God in violent political events. In 1841, The Missionary Herald had noted that the new Republic of Texas had prepared the way for more than Catholic missionary efforts there.63 By 1845, the Baptist Home Missionary Society and the Methodist Episcopal Missionary Society had stations in Texas.64 Over the next few years, the Bible Society and Tract Society designated funds for the distribution of Protestant texts in Mexico. Soon after the war, home missionary societies turned their attention to Indian groups within the new territories of Texas and New Mexico. What had once been challenging potential sites for foreign missions had become domesticated.65 In a pattern that would be followed in later American imperialistic ventures, the cross followed the flag and provided the justification for violence and colonialism.
By the time of Adams’s death in 1848, missionaries were accepted as experts on their fields of action who could reach a wide audience about the issues that mattered the most to them. For decades, they had traveled the globe in the interests of evangelism. Along the way, they had developed a reputation for more than just piety. They wrote for US audiences as historians, scientists, and explorers, all attempting to tell Americans about what issues, places, and peoples they should care about. And their audiences were wide. As John Quincy Adams’s interactions with missionaries and the mission movement over the course of his career in Washington reveal, missionaries could even reach the ears of the political elite.
Adams, like many American Protestants in the mission movement, found that a faith in Providence and the providential role of the United States could explain all sorts of things. The United States might not go out looking for monsters to destroy, but perhaps they came to believe, God might place Americans in positions where they could be prepared to fight monsters regardless. Missionary intelligence and missionary diplomacy prepared them to do just that.