Troublemakers
George F. Seward did not trust the missionaries. In 1867, the nephew of the secretary of state was serving as the US consul in Shanghai, and he did not like the practice of hiring missionaries as interpreters. Seward was convinced that the US legation and consulates were far too dependent on these missionaries. Though missionaries were the people usually available, they could not be counted on to know the court dialect or to understand official forms. They were distracted by their missionary work. They could not be expected to dedicate the time needed to prioritize government work. Yet even after decades of interactions with China, no US consuls could speak or read Chinese—unless they had been connected with the Protestant missions. The situation, Seward bemoaned, was humiliating. The time had come for the consuls to train up their own interpreters: young men who could be sent out especially for government work.1
A decade later, in 1877, Seward was appointed US minister to China, and he noticed something that worried him. Not only had the consuls been too dependent on the missionaries, but the missionaries had been expecting quite a lot from the consuls and the legation. In fact, the majority of cases that came before the legation had something to do with missionaries. This made sense, of course. Missionaries had long enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with US diplomats, and they made up the majority of US citizens living in China. Seward worried, though, that missionary diplomacy may have gone too far. He was not convinced that it was appropriate for diplomats to intervene on missionaries’ behalf as much as they did.
In a circular letter, Seward warned the China consuls about this tendency of missionary troubles to appear in the legation’s business. To some extent, he understood that such problems were inevitable. Missionary work was, by its nature, disruptive. If missionaries wanted to transform religious cultures, they could hardly expect to do so without facing resistance. Seward summarized the many forms of these missionary troubles bluntly: “They are assaulted, their converts maltreated, their mission-houses, chapels, dispensaries, and book-shops are pillaged and destroyed, or if none of these things happen, they find difficulty in securing houses and lands from which to carry on their work.” To find redress for all of these wrongs, missionaries turned to the consuls or the legation.2
These conflicts between the missionaries and their host governments could be, as Seward put it, “awkward” for the government of the United States. Things were changing for Americans in China and around the world. American missionaries could be a troubling presence, forcing themselves into challenging situations and then expecting the US government to fix things. As Seward set out to articulate policy regarding missionaries, he walked a delicate line.
Seward reminded the consuls that the missionaries had the “sympathies of the American people,” and that they did important work toward the “moral and physical advancement of the people.” But part of the professionalization of the diplomatic corps after the Civil War meant distinguishing between the government’s foreign policy priorities and the crises of foreign missions. Church and state were, and had to remain, separate. The rights that the government had to protect were the civil rights of missionaries as individual citizens; the government would not and could not “bring the power of the state actively into the advocacy of the Christian system.” This seemed clear enough. In practice, however, it was not always easy to determine where to draw the line between the rights of missionaries as citizens and the rights of missionaries as missionaries.3
Seward’s frustration was based on the kinds of missionary troubles he encountered through much of his work in China. Here, it seemed, missionaries were not always innocent victims. Rather, driven by religious ardor and confident that God and the United States would protect them, they pushed against the limits of foreign restrictions, trying to do as much as they could get away with. “Missionary troubles,” it turned out, not only described the troubles that missionaries could find themselves in. It could also describe the problems that missionaries caused for the US government. In China and elsewhere, missionaries could be troublemakers. Seward and his peers were faced with an important question: Just how much should the government respond to the troubles that missionaries seemed to create in their wake?
Treaty Rights in Interior China
In the fall of 1872, Chinese officials in Hangchow (Hangzhou) began arresting people who had sold or leased land to missionaries. Missionaries were concerned. The punishments seemed extreme: up to “one thousand stripes,” as they informed the consul. These were punishments designed to scare anyone away from helping the missionaries set up in the area, and they wanted the consul, stationed at Ningpo, to intervene. He did so, noting that it was his duty to protect the missionaries, as US citizens, from both “danger and annoyance” as they went about what he called their “benevolent work.”4 He was sure that these efforts were motivated by anti-foreign, rather than anti-mission, sentiments, a distinction that was ever-important after Tientsin and seemed to justify government intervention. The goal was nothing less than to rid the city of foreign residents. But one thing did worry the consul: Did the missionaries actually have the right to be in Hangchow?
Successive treaties between China and the various Western powers had gradually opened more and more coastal cities to trade. Under the terms of the treaties, foreign governments could send consuls to what became known as the “treaty ports” to help facilitate international trade. Alongside consuls and merchants came missionaries, whose right to purchase land and reside in these cities was explicitly permitted in the treaties. Missionaries were also permitted to obtain passports to travel throughout the Chinese Empire. Herein lay the challenge. Over the course of the 1860s, missionaries claimed not only the right to itinerate in the interior, but also to reside there and to establish the schools, chapels, and medical institutions that were part of their work.
In that decade, American missionaries established stations outside of China’s treaty ports. In justifying this move, they relied on an 1860 treaty between France and China that, they believed, had guaranteed the right of missionaries to reside inland—a right denied to merchants and diplomats. The most-favored-nation status that the United States had acquired through their treaty with China meant that Americans, too, could claim this privilege. But by 1870, US diplomats had come to the opinion that the missionaries had been misinterpreting the treaty. There were discrepancies between the French and Chinese translations of the treaty, leaving it unclear whether any missionaries had the right to live away from the ports. George Seward, then the consul at Shanghai, noted in that year that the ability of missionaries to reside inland had been “wrung from the Chinese by war” and had left a bad feeling among many of the Chinese. As a result, he mused, “the record of murdered ones is a long one.”5 He was, in short, not inclined to help when missionaries encountered opposition at their inland stations.
Hangchow was 140 miles inland from the consulate at Ningpo, and it was in that port city that Americans had secured the right by treaty to reside. Missionaries had moved inland regardless. As the consul reflected on this, he concluded that whatever the treaties said, the fact was that “missionaries were here, and they had been here for many years.”6 The missionaries, in other words, had secured their right of residence not through treaty, but through practice. The missionaries had come, no one had stopped them before, and now the consul would work to secure their ability to remain.
Two years after the Ningpo consul’s intervention, the missionaries were still in Hangchow, and community leaders adopted a different method to address missionary property. Now, they approached the missionaries and the consul with a petition requesting the migration of the mission buildings. The problem was not the missionaries as such—it was merely their specific location, which interfered with the feng shui of the city. Residents of the city paid to move the mission premises to a new location and reimbursed the missionaries for their trouble. Samuel Wells Williams, now working for the legation, rejoiced that this seemed to present a new era in US missions in China. Clearly, the American missionaries had made a “good name” for themselves in the seven years they had been in Hangchow. The “ugly rumors” that missionaries faced in places like Tientsin could be neutralized because the community knew and trusted the American missionaries. Conflicts could be handled simply and respectfully, and the missionaries were welcomed. It was not quite so simple as Wells made it seem—there would be a number of negotiations between the missionaries, the consulate, and the local officials in Hangchow before everyone was satisfied. But all recognized that they were on a path toward good relations.7
Williams’s delight at how things worked out in Hangchow might be explained by the fact that elsewhere in China, consuls continued to report attacks on missionaries living away from the treaty ports. In 1872, Rev. Isaac Pierson was attacked in Yu-Cheu (Yuzhou). In 1874, consuls reported attacks on missionaries in Hoochow (Huzhou), Soochow (Suzhou), Kiu-kiang (Jiujiang), and Chi-mi (Chimi).8 In 1875, two more missionaries were attacked in Shui Chang (Shuicheng).9 Many of these situations echoed the earlier concerns in Tientsin.
There were conflicting accounts of what actually happened in Chi-mi. Missionary Rev. H. Corbett had been traveling from his home there to a nearby village where a group of Christians had invited him to preach. Something happened when he passed through a market town on his journey. According to Corbett, he was beset by a crowd of men chanting “hit him, hit him” and “kill him, kill him” while attacking him with stones. A few weeks later, he was again met by a crowd who attacked him from all sides and threw stones at him. Corbett escaped, but some of the Chinese Christians he was with were not so lucky. One received a bad gash on his head; another was so severely wounded that he could not walk. Corbett’s home, too, was attacked. Corbett went to the consular agent at Chefoo (Yantai), 130 miles away, who approached a local Chinese official, the taotai, with a request for an investigation. The investigation, however, reported a very different series of events.
According to the taotai’s report, Corbett had never been attacked at all. Instead, the crowd had gathered on the first day in response to a Chinese Christian kidnapping a young boy and announcing to a theater that he would take the child to the Catholic church and force him to become a Christian. The crowd had rescued the child. Corbett had been at the theater with his own children, who had attracted the interest of the gathering. Corbett had “rebuk[ed]” the crowd and left. “There was certainly no such thing as attacking and stoning him.” As the taotai remarked: “What a discrepancy between these two representations!”10
The US consul faced a potentially complicated situation here. The missionary, a US citizen, claimed that he had been the victim of assault and theft. The Chinese officials, however, denied outright that anything of the sort had happened. The taotai had further reminded the consul of the challenges that missionaries faced in the interior, where their treaty rights were unclear. Good relations were possible, he suggested, but only if missionaries were “peaceable” in their interactions with the Chinese. Friendly relations, clearly, were not being maintained. But whose fault was it, and what actions should the United States take?11
No one at the consulate or legation appears to have doubted for a moment Corbett’s version of events. When the consul was not satisfied with his correspondence with the taotai, he asked the legation to reach out to the Chinese foreign office. Williams did so, and the foreign office urged another investigation, this time with the governor of Shantung. This was not sufficient for the Americans, however. Williams sent Eli Shepherd, the US consul at Tientsin, to conduct his own investigation. Shepherd’s report referred to these events as a “serious disturbance”—the first since Tientsin—that revealed the existence of real hostility against missionaries, even one who “had been peaceably living and quietly pursuing his calling in their midst.”12
Shepherd found that the same rumors that had circulated in Tientsin had now come to Chi-mi. He reported that a mob of three thousand had assembled at one point, riled up by anti-foreign sentiments and the accusations that missionaries kidnapped children to use their body parts in medicine. Shepherd demanded the arrest of forty-two rioters, all known by name. This demand was backed with the threat of force: it was only when a US gunboat appeared and promised to stay until the affair was settled that the taotai agreed to bring charges against some of the accused. By June, Sheppard and the taotai came to a final settlement. At the meeting, the officers of the US gunboat Saco attended in full uniform. The four leaders of the mob who had been convicted of stoning were to be beaten with bamboo. Local constables would be dismissed from their office. Corbett would be repaid for his pecuniary losses. And, at Sheppard’s request, the rest of the criminals would be pardoned after agreeing to a bond to “keep the peace” and guarantee Corbett’s safety in the region.
Sheppard’s report had two conclusions. First: that many of the people of China, and even many of the officials, did not know, or else did not understand, the provisions of the treaties between the United States and China that protected missionaries’ work. And second: the involvement of the US Navy was ultimately essential for the keeping of the peace.13
It was no accident that many of these attacks occurred at the mission stations in the interior. As Secretary of State Hamilton Fish explained, missionaries took a risk when they move inland, and these risks affected more than just the missionaries themselves. American diplomats faced “embarrassment” when missionaries assumed “privileges which cannot be claimed or defended under the treaty.”14 But missionaries continued to push the boundaries of the treaty, and local officials continued to reveal a wide range of interpretations of the legality of the missionary presence. No one could agree on what, exactly, the treaties had to say about missionaries outside of treaty ports. Missionaries described this as “ignorance of the most basic provisions of the treaty.” The effect of this was clear. Without officials proclaiming the right of missionaries to live in the interior, they faced strident opposition from those who saw the missionary presence as “an unauthorized intruder.” Missionaries in the mid-1870s wanted the Chinese authorities issue proclamations about the missionaries’ rights to reside and evangelize in China.15 Seeing the same problem, the US diplomats puzzled over how best to respond.
Benjamin Avery, the new US minister in 1875 explained this dilemma to a consul: “The difficulty,” he wrote, was that “our missionaries have advanced their stakes and cannot be left in the lurch; yet it would be wrong to encourage them to make any new ventures beyond treaty-limits in the present unsettled and somewhat threatening aspect of the question.” He advised the missionaries to “learn to wait and labor where they are,” and not to rush into fields where they could not legally reside.16 To the Chinese government, he promised to advise the missionaries to avoid communities known to be hostile to their presence, even as he maintained that the missionaries did, in fact, have the right to reside where they wished. He had every reason to believe the missionaries would be “duly cautious in their movements.”17
But even with those concerns, Avery was quite clear that if missionaries came into trouble, it was the job of the government to protect them. He defended missionaries against Chinese officials who blamed them for the troubles they encountered. If a missionary did break the law or exceed treaty limits, he argued, extraterritoriality provisions in the Sino-American treaties guaranteed that missionaries should face US, not Chinese, justice.18 Whether or not the missionaries had the right to reside wherever they chose, this was a right that they possessed everywhere they went. He merely hoped that the missionaries would allow their “sense of prudence and patriotism” to prevent them from testing this.19
Avery clearly understood the missionary position to be important for the US cause more generally. Adopting militaristic language as he described the situation to the secretary of state, Avery worried about the “general retreat of all missionaries, of whatever nations, from the advanced posts they are now occupying.” To the Chinese, such a retreat would seem to be evidence of “a weakening of foreign influence and power,” which could “react disastrously upon other interests than those of religion.”20
All Avery wanted was for the missionaries to use tact and delicacy and to avoid unnecessary conflict. For the most part, this seemed to be precisely what happened. But the conflicts that did arise suggested deeper concerns festering under the surface. Avery’s letters about missionary troubles existed among other dispatches to the State Department about a rising anti-foreign sentiment in China. The challenge facing US diplomats was significant. As Avery explained to the secretary of state, they had to simultaneously support the “prestige and opportunities” of missionary citizens without “engaging indirectly in religious propagandism,” while still “dealing justly and honorably by China.” It was a tricky balance, and one that missionaries were not making any easier.21
These were the concerns echoing in his mind when Seward wrote his reflections on missions in 1876. His primary concern was that the missionaries not draw the government into difficult situations. Echoing his uncle’s use of biblical allusions a few years earlier, he advised missionaries to adopt the “wisdom of the serpent.”22 Seward urged them to be “forbearing and long-suffering, to avoid places which are dangerous, to deal respectfully with cherished beliefs, erroneous though they be,” and finally “to arouse the least possible animosity, and to draw the Government as little as may be into the arena of discussion and conflict.”23 Seward’s use of the Bible to make his case for how missionaries should maintain the separation between church and state was indicative of the challenges diplomats like himself would continue to face.
Seward instructed all the consuls to gather the missionaries residing in their area together and read his letter aloud to them. The missionaries, he felt, needed to be reminded of what they could and could not expect from their government. As he outlined the ways that they ought to avoid conflict, he asked that they “not embarrass us unduly.” When troubles did come, as indeed they would—in China and elsewhere—the agents of the US government would do their work to learn the facts of the case, present them to the local authorities, and to procure settlements promptly. They, like the missionaries, should use “discretion and tact,” taking care not to add to any difficulties. Whenever possible, consuls should handle difficulties locally, but always keep the legation at Peking informed of what they were doing.24 The government was committed to protecting missionary interests. Seward just hoped that the missionaries would not drag the legation into unnecessary conflict.
It did not take long for Seward’s new policy to be tested. Seward’s circular was penned in March; by April, the Wuchang (Wuhan) consul and Episcopalian missionaries had an opportunity to exercise tact and delicacy in facing local opposition. On the afternoon of the fourteenth, the mission station at Fukai was busy. In the chapel, a small group gathered to hear a native convert give an address about his faith. In the dispensary behind the chapel, Dr. A. C. Bunn was hard at work seeing to his patients. His work was interrupted, however, when he heard a disturbance outside. A crowd descended on the chapel, led by two distressed women. The women, he wrote, threw themselves at Bunn’s feet, begging him to return their missing children to them. Two children, it appeared, had disappeared, and the crowd believed that the missionaries had taken them.25
It was a tense afternoon, the kind of situation that could go badly very quickly. By the end of the day, as things calmed down, some five hundred people remained crowded in the street outside of the chapel. They only caused “but little annoyance,” Bunn reported, although the missionaries received threats. Bunn explained to the diplomats that the suspicions against him could be traced to the same sorts of rumors that had long plagued Christian foreigners. In addition, tensions were already high in the community because of rumors of a coming war or insurrection.26
Bunn had no doubt that the women genuinely believed he had the children on the premises, and he allowed the crowd to make a thorough search. Throughout, he continued to see to his patients, who continued coming through the crowd to receive care. He exercised precisely the sort of delicacy and tact that Seward had hoped for. In the end, this was a crisis averted. The crowd, encouraged by the constable that Bunn eventually called, dispersed. The children were located elsewhere. When the local officials learned what had happened, they issued a proclamation that the missionaries were there “only to do good,” and thus should not be attacked by any crowds.27
Seward was quite pleased with how this all played out. Well aware of how things might have gone differently, he was grateful and relieved by the behavior of the missionaries, the consul, and the Chinese officials alike. He sent his congratulations to the consul and informed the secretary of state that the missionaries had been “very discreet” and the Chinese officials had demonstrated “good will and favorable action.” At no point did the consul or the US minister have to get involved at all, although clearly, they were keeping track of events. Bunn only wrote his summary of what had happened because the consul requested it. The report then made its way all the way to Washington, where it appeared among the papers relating to the foreign relations of the United States that Congress received in December 1876. Though he was grateful not to get involved, Seward was keeping a close eye on what was happening to those he called “our missionaries.”28
Religious Toleration and Printing in the Ottoman Empire
Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire, too, required government attention. The empire was a place of incredible religious diversity, and the Ottoman government had made religious toleration an important part of its legal code in the 1850s. While Islam remained the state religion, the government recognized the rights of its subjects who practiced other religions. Tolerance, the Ottoman government understood, was the key to maintaining rule over such a large group of people. What this policy might mean for US missionaries was not immediately clear, however, especially considering the different ways that Americans understood religious freedom from the ways that the Turks defined religious tolerance.
Edward Joy Morris, the US minister resident at Constantinople in 1865, accordingly understood that it was important for Americans to grasp what, exactly, religious tolerance meant. To this end, Morris sent documents to the State Department explaining the Turkish government’s views on the subject so that US Christians could understand how much Christian practice and Christian evangelism would be welcomed in the sultan’s territories.29
American Christians who celebrated the religious toleration of the sultan may have been surprised to learn that this toleration demanded an extreme wariness toward missionaries. Christians were allowed to enter Turkey and faced no “restraints in the exercise of their spiritual ceremonies.” But proselytism was something different—especially proselytism directed against Islam, the religion of the state. “The principle of religious toleration,” a Turkish official explained, “cannot, in our view, be reconciled with open aggression against any religion whatever.” Proselytism was, in this understanding, a “contradiction in the principle of religious liberty, for by its very existence it attacks that liberty in others, and that respect for the conviction of others, without which religious tolerance would be but an empty form.” Missionaries who complained that they were facing intolerance when they faced restrictions on their evangelism were, he argued, willfully misinterpreting the law.30
And missionaries did complain, especially after a new restriction on the importation or publishing of certain books in 1875. The policy targeted “improper books, pamphlets, and writings,” and required significant oversight of missionary operations. All works to be published in Constantinople or imported for sale from foreign countries or the provinces had to be inspected. Unpublished material would need to first be approved in draft form, and then have the printed copy rechecked to ensure that no objectionable material had been added. It also required all texts to prominently display on the title page whether the book was of a religious or scientific nature. The goal, in part, was to clarify which publications were evangelistic and to keep problematic materials off the market. In the words of US minister Horace Maynard, this had the effect of “carr[ying] us backward centuries.”31
Shortly after hearing of these new regulations, American missionaries made their protest known to the US minister at Constantinople. Identifying themselves not as a missionary group, but rather as a large institution of book publishing and importing, they argued that the new procedures were “needlessly burdensome.” They worried that they would have books seized throughout the provinces. In practice, they expected that it would make book publishing in Constantinople nearly impossible. They complained about existing delays that groups like the American Bible Society had faced in getting written permission to publish biblical translations (the effort of ten years of missionary labor). In their forty years in the region, the missionaries emphasized, they had never before been censored. But, they acknowledged, they faced opposition and mistrust because of the “impression” that they did, in fact, publish objectionable material.32
Enclosed with the missionaries’ protest was a catalog of the more than three hundred books and tracts that US missionaries in Constantinople printed in Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Bulgarian, Spanish, and English. Some of these would have been quite easy to categorize as either religious or scientific, as the regulations required. Titles like Beatitudes and Lord’s Prayer, Notes on Matthew and Mark, Belief and Worship, or Sin and Salvation would all have clearly been “religious.” Similarly, the arithmetic and algebra textbooks (with multiple editions of each), as well as other classroom texts like Physiology would have been “scientific.” But many of the titles on the list would have been difficult to categorize, precisely because they reflected the ways that US Christians so often collapsed the categories of “religious” and “scientific.”
How would textbooks on moral science or geography be sorted? These were academic subjects and books intended for the schoolroom, but their content reflected a clear religious point of view with commentary on the religious character of various populations. So too would the multiple readers intended for classroom instruction, the Magazine of Knowledge, and even the many memoirs and biographies that the missionaries published. The regulations sought to make it easier for readers and consumers to identify when they were looking at a book that was talking about subjects of belief or subjects of fact. But the missionaries’ way of thinking defied this categorization. For them, all knowledge would lead to a better understanding of God and God’s world.
In the decades after the new regulations were enacted, missionary organizations complained about texts being seized and the US government not doing enough to stop it. In June 1881, the American Bible Society reported that authorities in Gallipoli had seized Bibles that were prepared for distribution in the region. Although the government was attentive to this issue, it would take nearly two years to reach a resolution that the Bible Society would find satisfactory.33 By the summer of 1884, US officials in Turkey were still working to reach a “favorable adjustment” in what had become a ban on the sale of Bibles in Turkey.34 At the same time, the American Bible Society reported similar bans of Bible sales in Russia and Greece. There, too, they wanted the government to intervene to allow them to conduct their missionary efforts.
For missionaries and their supporters, after all, this was not just about some books that had been seized. It was about their rights. It is telling that the missionaries framed their appeals as business concerns. They were not just evangelists—they were publishers and booksellers. As missionaries had been doing for decades, they called on their government to support them in the pursuit of their legitimate business. Accordingly, when a rumor reached the ABCFM in Boston that the Turkish minister in Washington had persuaded Secretary of State Frelinghuysen to waive the $100 indemnity for the Gallipoli case, the ABCFM objected. In a letter to the secretary, the mission board explained that Turkish authorities seemed to have “very little respect for the rights of our missionaries,” which required a strong response from the US government.
Missionary groups approached these cases as if they were the same as those in which missionaries were the victims of physical attack. “Any failure to secure indemnity and punishment of wrong doers is speedily known everywhere,” the ABCFM warned, “to the great inconvenience and possible injury of American citizens in the Empire.” Backing down, in other words, was not a viable option.35 The government did not, however, see the situations as the same. The American Bible Society and the ABCFM, frequent collaborators, accused the State Department of providing insufficient protection for missionaries and their work.36
Though diplomats referred to both sorts of cases as missionary troubles, this group was more frustrating. Evangelical missions were clearly at odds with the religious tolerance demanded by Ottoman law, and it was harder to frame them as innocent victims. As much as missionaries tried to limit their work to non-Muslim populations, their long-term goals were clear. Missionaries had long compared their publishing work to the planting of seeds. In due time, they expected a harvest of profound cultural transformations. How, then, was the US government to respond to the publishing crisis? They did work to protect missionary investment and recuperate seized material, but as in China, their support of the missionaries could not seem to endorse the mission itself.
Religious Freedom in the Caroline Islands
The missionary troubles in the Ottoman Empire and China challenged US diplomats in part because the United States had other interests in both regions. Protestant missionaries were a vocal and powerful group of US citizens in both places, but they were not alone and diplomats did not want to put other groups at risk by prioritizing missionary interests too much. It was a rather different situation on Ponape in the Caroline Islands. The island had been home to a small group of US missionaries for thirty-five years when, in 1887, one of them was arrested by the new Spanish colonial government. Here, too, missionary troubles required US government action. Within a decade, the Caroline Islands would have their first US consul—a direct response to missionary demands for assistance in navigating foreign empires and questions of religious freedom.
The Rev. E. J. Doane first arrived at Ponape in the 1850s and had led the ABCFM missionaries in building schools and Protestant churches as they worked to “civilize” the people of the islands. A year before his arrest, Doane had held up Ponape as a tremendous example of America’s benevolent “influence upon the world.” In an article in the Missionary Herald’s children’s column, Doane described the celebration of the Fourth of July on the islands. “Our Ponape natives,” he crowed, “have taken up the day as almost one of their own.” Doane and the missionaries did not celebrate with fireworks and parades, but rather with a great celebration that brought together the children of ten Sunday Schools. In the packed church, adults gathered to pray, sing, read Scripture, and listen to orations from Christian converts. For Doane, this was evidence of the true influence of America on the world. As the Herald’s editors noted, American Christians should celebrate that the “glorious Fourth is now honored the world around,” not only in the homes of foreign ambassadors, but in mission houses. “True it is,” Doane concluded, “that the kingdom of Christ gives both political freedom and freedom from the poverty and savageness of heathenism.” American missionaries, linking their country’s legacy of political independence with their religious commitment to evangelism, embraced both sides of this project.37
This influence could not last. Once Spain asserted its control over the islands, the US missionaries quickly faced opposition from the new governor. At least some of the conflict was religious in nature, as the Spanish worked to encourage Catholicism on the islands and limit the influence of Protestantism. Doane and his missionary colleagues were frustrated by what they saw happening. Schools closed. Church attendance decreased. Alcohol seemed more prevalent. The US missionaries saw all this as evidence of Spain’s negative influence.38 When officials arrested Doane on vague charges and sent him to Manila, his missionary sponsors demanded US action. In the correspondence between the ABCFM and the State Department, it was clear that the government was sympathetic to these “missionary troubles,” as they were again called. The nearest US representative was Julius G. Voight, the consul at Manila. He began an investigation in August and met with the governor-general and Doane, and quickly sought reparations for the difficulties Doane had endured and a guarantee of the protection of American missionaries and their work in the Caroline Islands. The United States dispatched a naval vessel in support of the imprisoned American missionary citizen that remained there to guarantee the missionaries’ protection.39
Doane was released, and even received the approbation of the Spanish governor-general Emilio Terrero, who called the missionary work in the islands an “extraordinary service to humanity and civilization.”40 Terrero granted the missionaries the right to “preach, teach, catechize, distribute Bibles, hold schools, make proselytes to the Protestant faith, and, in short, to pursue the missionary and other work precisely as heretofore.” They retained the right, too, to own real estate on the island if they could provide clear titles from the original native owners. They were ordered to obey all Spanish laws and to respect the “opinions of others in all matters, especially of religion”—the particular concern here was that Protestant American missionaries not interfere with the work of Catholic friars and priests who were also establishing churches and schools on the islands.41
Missionary supporters at home were cautiously optimistic about these results. Terrero’s support was important, but it did not necessarily mean anything about what would happen on Ponape. After all, more than two thousand nautical miles separated that island from Terrero and the US consul in Manila, and it was the local officials who had arrested Doane in the first place. “Whether this officer can or will control the subordinate officials throughout the Spanish possessions,” as a writer for the Missionary Herald put it, “remains to be seen.”42 In the meantime, the supporters waited for news of an indemnity. Ongoing negotiations would be needed between the Spanish and US governments.
At least one of the missionaries in the Caroline Islands felt that US missionary presence ought to have some relation to US power there. Missionary Miss Fletcher argued that even if it was indisputable that Spain had the “right of discovery,” the question needed to be asked: “How about those thirty-four or thirty-five years of labor and expense which America has given?” In the intervening years, Spain had not “even looked at” the islands; it was only when Germany attempted to claim the islands that Spain became interested. Now she asked if American missionaries were really expected to “step aside and see all this come to naught.”43 The missionaries were not being sent away, which made her concerns all the more compelling. Sharing the islands with the Spanish Catholics felt like being asked to step aside. While the United States had never claimed the islands, the missionaries had come to think of them as their own.
The logic of empire underpinned much of the ways that both the United States and Spain reacted to these events. The arrest had occurred in Ponape, but the important diplomatic conversations were not with the people of the islands, but rather between officials in Washington, Madrid, and Manila. It was in these centers that US and Spanish officials conferred about the proper relationship between American missionaries, islanders, and local governors. And the Spanish officials in Manila and Madrid agreed that the US missionaries were doing good work on the islands. The tensions between Catholicism and Protestantism were set aside in the interest of promoting the more general goals of “civilization.” For more than thirty-five years, US missionaries had transformed the Caroline Islands in ways that, Spain understood, ultimately benefited their colonial interests.
The view from Washington, Madrid, and Manila, then, seemed rosy. But Doane’s release did not change the fact that he had been falsely arrested in the first place. The American missionaries and their organizations in the United States wanted more of a US presence on the ground. They wanted a guarantee of extraterritoriality—common in US treaties in Asia and the Middle East, but unheard of in US treaties with European powers. The problem for the State Department was that after 1886, the government on Ponape was not a non-Christian one; it was Spanish. It was obvious within diplomatic circles that the ABCFM’s request was absurd. Spain required more respect and deference than China, and could be counted on to take the concerns of the Americans and their missionaries more seriously.44
Yet Spain did not respond as fully as the Americans, missionaries or diplomats, had wanted or expected. Government officials in Madrid were saying the right things, but action was slow. Yes, the Spanish agreed, Doane’s arrest had been unjust. When the Spanish began to “actively” occupy the Caroline Islands, the US government was given “specific assurance” that the “rights and privileges of citizens of the United States” in the islands would not only not be infringed, but would in fact “be fully protected and secured.” But two years after Doane’s release, reparations remained unpaid. The new governor had taken the deeds to Doane’s property, and it seemed likely that Doane would be removed from the land he had owned for more than three decades. For the missionaries, this was unacceptable. In a letter to Secretary of State James Blaine, Judson Smith of the ABCFM reflected that the missionaries enjoyed better protection at their missions “in the midst of the Turkish Empire, in China, and among many tribes of Africa.”
If the missionaries could expect protection “even of heathen kings and rulers,” there was no reason he could understand why their protection could not be demanded of Spain.45 If the Spanish would not respect the rights of Americans, Smith suggested that the government send a man-of-war to Ponape and show a “distinct protest” against the actions of the Spanish government on the island. A show of strength was required. The Spanish needed to “understand that the American Government stands behind the American citizens who reside there, and guards their welfare and their just claims with all its wealth and strength.”46
Doane never did receive his indemnity. The Spanish government concluded that none was actually necessary. Neither the ABCFM nor the US State Department would leave it at that. Throughout the whole incident, the ABCFM linked its concerns about Doane’s rights and the proper respect that the US government deserved. Unlike in China or Ottoman territory, Americans had no major competing interests at play here and were able to interpret this incursion of missionary rights as an affront to American standing. In the American Board’s initial call for indemnity in 1887, Judson Smith had made it clear: the “honor of our Government” was at stake.47 When asked to quantify the damages that Doane needed to be reimbursed, Smith came to a figure of $5,000 by adding the amount that the Board had to spend as a result of Doane’s arrest ($1,000) to the value of the land the governor had seized in Ponape ($2,000). The remainder was a rough estimate of what was needed to recognize both the interruption of Doane’s work and “the indignity to our Government” as a result of Doane’s ill treatment.48 Smith regularly described the missionary interests on the islands as “American interests,” and the State Department did not take issue with this interpretation. Indeed, they adopted it. The crisis in Ponape mattered to the US government not only because of the arrest of a US citizen, but also because of the interest that the United States had in supporting the civilizing work that missionaries had undertaken on the island.
William Wharton, the acting secretary of state, had to walk the delicate line that so many State Department officials had walked before and since in explaining this US interest in missionary work. The US government “can take no cognizance of the relations of these missionaries to any sect or church,” he explained to the US chargé d’affaires in Spain H. R. Newberry. That would be clearly inappropriate. But at the same time, the United States “has felt a deep interest in their efforts to ameliorate and improve the condition of the natives.” For Wharton, the decisive factor in determining whether and how to respond was the recognition that “these missionaries are citizens of the United States and entitled to the intervention of this Government for the protection of their persons and their property.”49
It was as a result of these struggles between the Spanish governor and the missionaries that the United States decided to send a consul to Ponape. The ABCFM had made this suggestion when the conflicts seemed to them to demand additional pressure that was more local than Madrid, Washington, or even Manila. While missionaries served as consuls elsewhere, it did not seem wise for a missionary to serve in that capacity in this case. Strategically, it would be far better to have someone who could not be accused of taking the missionary side out of self-interest. Although the missionary board’s suggestion of a US citizen already resident in Ponape was not taken up, the desired consul was on his way in 1890.50
But then, somehow, things got even worse at Ponape. In the summer of 1890, missionary Lucy Cole wrote that “we are in great trouble here.” A new anti-Spanish uprising on June 30 had led to the death of more than thirty of the military forces from Manila, including a lieutenant and two corporals. Cole described the Ponapeans as “hunting them down like pigs.” Cole and Anne Palmer were the only missionaries on the island at the time. They were two single women with a school full of girls to care for. One of the local teachers for the mission, Nanpei, had saved the two Catholic priests by bringing them, along with five other men from Manila, to be hidden at the mission residence. The women kept them in the house for two days and two nights, in constant fear that they would be discovered. In the midst of the conflict, Cole would escape with some of the girls on the boat of a friendly American; Palmer felt the need to stay at the house until the priests were safe. Though they were only in her house from Wednesday morning until midnight on Thursday, Palmer reflected, “It seems as if it must have been at least a week.”51
Under cover of darkness, Nanpei eventually snuck the men to the Spanish man-of-war that waited in the harbor to retreat to Manila. The missionaries knew that it was only a matter of time before the fighting grew worse. Four Spanish ships were expected in a matter of weeks, with the promise that they would begin shelling Ponape as soon as they reached the island. The missionaries feared for their lives, convinced that they would be caught in the crossfire. The US fleet in the Sandwich Islands was too far away to reach them in time to do any good, and so the missionaries anxiously awaited the Morning Star, the ABCFM ship that was usually tasked with transporting their mail and provisions.52 But the Spanish ships arrived first and brought with them the expected firepower.
When they were done, the American mission was in tatters. The mission church, built in 1870, had been burned. So, too, were the homes of four missionaries, the dormitories for the girls’ school and the training school, and the school building. The church bell was destroyed, as were the books, household goods, and medicines that the mission relied on. All told, the damages amounted to $11,114.
The Spanish would later insist that this attack on American property had been a necessary act of war. The rebels, they claimed, were seeking asylum in the mission buildings and needed to be routed out. In effect, they were treating the missionaries as more Ponopean than American. Their sympathy for the rebels outweighed their status as US citizens. The missionaries, the Spanish believed, were troublemakers.53
In a panic, the ABCFM wrote to the State Department that things were dire. Could the government do anything to hurry the consul along? He had never been needed more than he was right now.54 By October, the governor had refused to allow the missionaries to leave the island and forbade them from holding any meetings. Commander Taylor, of the USS Alliance, arrived on the islands in the middle of the month. He reported that the Spanish now accused the missionaries of “inciting the natives to rebellion.”55
Taylor’s investigation into the events in Ponape presented a rather different picture than what the Spanish were suggesting. His arrival provided precisely the “moral effect” that the navy had expected: missionaries were reassured that the government would send protection when it was needed, and the Spanish would be reminded that “the Government of the United States stands by its citizens wherever they may be.”56 Taylor negotiated between the governor—once friendly, but now deeply suspicious—and the missionaries. Coming into a space he described as “in a condition of active war,” he worked to assess the damage to the mission property and secure the ability of the missionaries to leave the island safely and quickly. He determined easily that the missionaries were innocent of all the charges leveled against them, and managed to do so without upsetting the governor.57
This was somewhat remarkable, given the charges that the governor was leveling against the missionaries. Governor Cadarso was convinced that the missionaries were behind the uprising. The rebels were “the missionaries’ best friends,” he ranted to Taylor. Their entrenchments, he was sure, had been “planned under the advice of missionaries, or of their native assistants, who had been to Europe or America.” None of this was true. Yet Taylor did believe that the mission had an important influence that set the stage for rebellion. For decades, the American Protestant missionaries had worked to educate and “civilize” the Ponapeans. “It may be supposed,” he granted, “that the ideas, religious and political, imbibed by the natives in long association with these missionaries, would not predispose them to ready submission to Spain and its religion.” By its very nature, in other words, mission work helped to raise this community to a level of civilization that chafed at the sort of colonialism that the Spanish hoped to enforce. “But,” Taylor argued, “no act unfriendly to Spain has been committed.”58
Taylor received permission to remove the missionaries, along with a number of their students, from Ponape until peace was restored. They left very reluctantly. It was only with Taylor’s assurances that they were truly in grave danger, and the realization that they could not rely on the protection of the local government, that they agreed to leave. They boarded the USS Alliance and were escorted off the island.
The ABCFM hoped that the US government would take swift and decisive action. Smith urged Secretary Blaine “to exert the authority of the Government in defence [sic] of these defenceless [sic] Americans.” Such defense was, Smith argued, “the glory of the American Government.”59 But it was more than this. Smith was clearly worried about the safety of missionaries at Ponape and elsewhere—if Spain could get away with this, then what might missionaries in other spaces expect? For now, this was a unique situation. “The heathen Emperor of China does nothing of the kind,” he noted; nor did “the pagan kings and chiefs of Africa.” What Spain was allowing to happen in Ponape was beyond the pale. The US government simply had to respond. If they did not, the effects would quickly spread beyond missionaries. “It is more than a question of protecting a few men and women at the island of Ponape. It is a question of the honor and dignity of our Government.”60 The State Department agreed.
Writing to the US minister to Spain, Acting Secretary of State William Wharton expressed the frustration of the US government. Enough was enough. It was “inherently inconceivable” to Wharton that either of the female missionaries could have had anything to do with the uprising, and yet they faced a “spirit of hostility” from the local government and were “virtually held as prisoners” on the island. What was at issue, Wharton suggested, was the method of Spain’s colonialism. When the Spanish arrived in 1886, they had only “purely historical” claims to justify their possession of the islands. Neither they nor the Germans, against whom the Spanish had vied for control of the Carolines, had any actual presence on the island. At the time, “the only foreign influence they had known was the quiet, peaceful, and beneficient [sic] effort of the American missionaries to educate and civilize them.” The American missionaries, he suggested, brought the benefits of colonialism with them: civilization and education. As a result, they were loved. Spanish colonialism brought only oppression and division.61
While he came close, Wharton never directly questioned he legitimacy of Spain’s presence in the Caroline Islands. Instead, he closed his instructions to the minister with the usual diplomatic niceties. At this moment when officials in Ponape displayed a “ruthless disregard” for the rights of US citizens, the honorableness of the Spanish government was taken for granted.62 As fellow members of the community of nations, the United States and Spain would be able to come to an arrangement, the diplomats were sure. The United States was not about to challenge a colonial power for the control of this distant island. Yet the missionaries had brought Ponape, and Spanish colonial governance, to the close attention of the State Department.
Two years later, the State Department was still corresponding with its legation in Spain about the missionary troubles at Ponape. The new minister to Spain, A. Loudon Snowden, received extensive instructions about how to proceed with this delicate matter in the face of Spanish unwillingness to accept the missionary version of events.63 Snowden would prove to be the sort of advocate missionaries had long been looking for: firm and insistent, apparently as deeply sympathetic to missionary work as he was eager to defend the interests of his country.
Snowden bluntly dismissed the Spanish claims that the missionary property had been insufficiently marked as American at the time when it had been destroyed. This was willful destruction; to pretend otherwise was counterproductive. After all, Snowden was sure that he and the Spanish could agree, missionaries deserved “especial sympathy and protection.” They did not make trouble. They were “self-denying” women and men “who, to extend the civilizing and ennobling influence of Christianity, cross wide seas, penetrate heathen lands, face innumerable dangers, suffer untold hardships in an unselfish desire to spread the gospel of Christ.”64
In the end, Snowden negotiated a settlement of $17,500, the absolute minimum that the US government was willing to accept. It was significantly less than the $25,000 that the ABCFM had requested, and was paid as a lump sum, as the Spanish government refused to concede any of the specific points that the Americans had raised about who, exactly, deserved repayment. Doane’s original deed to the property he claimed remained contested; the Spanish continued to insist that the destruction of the mission buildings was a necessity of war. But they paid. In late May 1893—some six years after Doane had first been arrested—the missionary troubles at Ponape came to a close. The Spanish government still would not guarantee the safety of the missionaries if they were to return to the islands, but the honor of the United States seemed to have been respected at last.65
One of the more telling moments in the Ponape crisis can be found in one of John Foster’s letters to Snowden. The Spanish had been regularly referring to the missionaries as Methodists, and from time to time the Americans bristled at this specificity. The missionaries themselves were working with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions—primarily a Congregational missionary organization, but this was not the issue. For the Spanish, “Methodist” seemed to stand in for “Protestant.” This, they were. Was this, then, a conflict between a Catholic and a Protestant state? Not so, Foster claimed. The Spanish believed that the missionaries had acted politically; this was the root of their complaint. But Foster insisted that they had not. After all, the ABCFM “expressly forbid all interference by the missionaries with the political affairs of the country where they dwell.” But more than this: the US government “cannot take into consideration the particular sect of these missionaries.” It did not matter that they were Protestant, he claimed. If they had been Catholic, “the relation of this Government to them would be precisely the same.” Speaking of the position of the United States to the missionaries, he explained: “It sympathizes with their work because Christian. It accords them protection because American.”66
This distinction between sympathy and protection was, in many ways, what Seward had been getting at in China. The challenge for diplomats at the end of the century was precisely how to determine whether missionaries in trouble were acting as Christians or as Americans, and how far the government ought to go to act in their defense.