Missionary Troubles, 1840s–1880s
The front page of the New York Times on July 4, 1862, was full of news of war. Surrounding a map of recent battles, the paper informed readers of the immense losses on both sides of the ongoing Civil War, with a list of the recently killed and wounded carrying on for multiple columns into the interior of the paper. The long and bloody war would continue for several more years, but in Canton, US missionaries anticipated other news.1
On that day, the missionaries in China gathered to celebrate US independence. By 1862, the US presence in China had grown far beyond what Samuel Wells Williams had experienced. New treaties had opened up more and more of China to US trade and evangelization, and missionary organizations had taken full advantage of the opportunity. Canton alone was home to missionaries of multiple denominations from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Mississippi, New York, Connecticut, South Carolina, Maryland, West Virginia, and Tennessee—an interesting mix of Americans from northern and southern states. On the Fourth of July, this group gathered to reflect on the civil war that had been tearing their country apart on the other side of the world. The missionaries were hopeful. The last they heard, New Orleans had fallen to Union forces. They had every expectation that soon the Civil War would be over, the Union would be restored, and even the southern missionaries found this to be good news.
In a collective letter, they thanked President Abraham Lincoln for the “great service he has rendered to our native land.” They understood the war to be a “national calamity.” The United States had to trust in God for deliverance. But the missionaries also trusted in the earthly power of the United States. As they wrote to the secretary of state, they insisted that they had “every confidence in the wisdom and integrity” of the government. They felt so strongly about it that they wrote these thoughts down, signing their names alongside their home states, and sent them directly to the government in Washington, all the way from China.2
Three years later, with the war finally over, the Americans in Bangkok gathered to celebrate the Fourth of July. The sermon at that gathering, delivered by missionary and former consul Stephen Mattoon, described the Union’s victory as his country’s “resurrection” now that the “curse of slavery” had finally been ended in the United States. Similar sermons could be heard from pulpits throughout the United States on that day, but Mattoon was in Siam (Thailand), and he took the opportunity to muse on the international implications of America’s status as the home of liberty in the world.
The US flag, Mattoon reflected, was the symbol of liberty throughout the world. American missionaries, as citizens of the United States with unique opportunities to transform foreign cultures, had a role to play in spreading not only the gospel, but what he called “the principles of liberty” abroad. It would be hard work; the missionary described Bangkok as “heavy laden with oppression.” But in time, liberty would reign even there, through the grace of God and the “moral means” of the American missionaries.3
These missionary expressions of patriotism—and of the importance of their US citizenship—were not new in the Civil War era, and they were not limited to Independence Day. Decades earlier, Rev. Eli Smith had preached to an audience of “weather-beaten sailors” and curious onlookers from a pulpit fashioned out of a flag-covered capstan on the Delaware, then visiting the missionary’s city of Beirut. As he preached behind the stars and stripes, Smith took his theme as “the unequalled privileges” of the United States, especially in comparison to the “land of darkness” where the Americans now found themselves. As he prayed for the “light from heaven” to descend on Beirut, Smith was overtaken by emotion and wept. It had been years since Smith had been in the United States, and the distance only served to make him more convinced of the superiority of his home country.4
Through the middle decades of the century, missionaries continued to provide US audiences with intelligence about the world at large. These were years of profound transformation. Within the United States, they were years of social and political upheaval, civil war, and its aftermath. Divisions touched nearly every part of American life. These years saw the fracturing of the Union, followed by the rebuilding of a new and much more centralized federal state. Within the churches, passionate debates over slavery divided denominations along sectional lines and raised challenging new questions about religion and politics. The war ended slavery but was soon followed by racial segregation and violence that was paired with new theories about race and racial difference rooted in white supremacy. Through all of this turmoil, US Christians continued sending missionaries out into the world.
These missionaries found a world in similar turmoil. Asian nations faced increasing aggression from European empires and internal rebellions. In Africa and the Pacific Islands, European empires sought new colonies. Nationalist and republican movements remade the landscape of Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, creating new nation-states and challenging the ability of large empires to maintain rule over vast holdings. The decades from the 1840s through the 1880s were years of profound transition in global politics and the world economy.
At the center of much of this turmoil were questions about power, justice, and civilization that had long animated the missionary movement. Nationalist movements and wars for empire challenged Americans to consider the logic behind the division of humanity into distinct communities. What unites a group of people? Who or what creates the hierarchies that determine their relative power? Missionaries approached these political questions with a commitment to the ultimate sovereignty of God. But that commitment was shaped by a conviction that God favored the sort of republican government, capitalist economy, and liberal educational institutions that they knew in the United States. For mid-century missionaries, this faith emerged as a particular kind of missionary patriotism.
Missionaries did not only think about these things on the Fourth of July, or when a naval ship happened to pass through. Throughout the middle of the nineteenth century, their relationship to the United States mattered. Citizenship was both a practical issue of protection and a profound matter of identity. Missionaries continued their earlier role as unofficial ambassadors. Through missionary intelligence, they represented the world to the United States and the United States to the world. But as the missionary movement grew, it demanded that the US government grow along with it. Through years of turmoil at home and abroad, American missionaries wanted and needed connections to their home government.
Figure II.1. World map of US missionary and diplomatic presence, c. 1860. In the middle of the century, Protestant missions and diplomatic missions alike had expanded across the globe, though the two continued to focus on slightly different geographies. In the decades after the Civil War, the number of Americans abroad from both groups would grow immensely.
Sources: Department of State, List of Ministers, Consuls, and Other Diplomatic and Commercial Agents of the United States, in Foreign Countries (Washington: Department of State, 1859); Methodist Episcopal Church, Fortieth Annual Report of the Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church (New York: Printed for the Society, 1859); Rev. J. Logan Aikman, Cyclopedia of Christian Missions: Their Rise, Progress, and Present Position (London: Richard Griffin and Company, 1860); Presbyterian Church in the USA, The Twenty-Second Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (New York: Published for the Board at the Mission House, 1859); William Gammell, A History of American Baptist Missions in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, Under the Care of the American Baptist Missionary Union (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1854); ABCFM, Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Presented at the Meeting Held at Philadelphia, PA, October 4–7, 1859 (Boston: Press of T. R. Marvin and Son, 1859).
In these decades, missionaries appealed for an increased consular footprint for the United States. Consuls, whose official duties focused on the protection of US trade, could also be key to the success of missionary work. As representatives of the US state, their support could protect and even enable missionary endeavors. In the 1840s and 1850s, missionaries found that the US government, while not always present in the regions where missionaries were most active, was generally sympathetic with the goals and work of the Protestant missionaries.
Missionaries, after all, were citizens of the United States. As such, they had the right to the protection of their government when they were abroad. Occasionally, missionaries found themselves in great need of that protection. Their increasing demands on the government gave rise to new questions about what rights, exactly, missionaries had that the government needed to protect. US citizens had the right to government protection when they were going about legitimate business overseas. But what, exactly, was missionary business? And to the extent that missionary business was evangelism, when and how should the US government protect it?
The answer to this question had important implications for the legal interpretation of missionaries’ relationship to the US government. The twin commitments of the United States to religious liberty and the separation of church and state made this a tricky question to answer. Missionary methods had, by the Civil War era, become quite diverse. Missionaries evangelized, of course, and they continued to write about the world for US audiences. They also translated scripture and published books and periodicals of multiple genres into foreign languages. They founded schools, colleges, medical dispensaries, and hospitals. After the Civil War, the creation of women’s mission boards further diversified missionary methods and personnel. Missionaries could be ordained male ministers, or they could be men with certain types of professional training (doctors, printers, and the like). They could be wives or unmarried women who were more likely to serve as teachers, nurses, or doctors than as evangelists. All of this was missionary work. For the missionaries, all of it was religious. For the US government, however, some practices were more obviously religious than others.
By the 1880s, this question of what counted as religious began to create more and more challenges for missionaries in their interactions with foreign governments. “Missionary troubles,” as the State Department termed these issues, appeared with growing frequency in the correspondence between the mission boards and the State Department. In the post–Civil War era of increased power in the central government, politicians in Washington began to notice the ways that missionaries seemed to be driving US interests in key regions of the globe, including Asia and the Middle East.
Missionary troubles—and the State Department’s response to them—took many forms in the years between 1840 and 1890. Foreign missionaries claimed the rights of citizenship. Missionaries worked for the government as consuls and interpreters. When they faced violent opposition, they demanded their government intervene to protect them. Sometimes, however, the troubles that they got into seemed self-inflicted. By the last decades of the century, as the State Department grew in its size, professional organization, and knowledge about missionary regions, diplomats and others began to wonder if missionaries might be less victims and more troublemakers. They debated the meaning of missionary labor and its status as religious or secular. Throughout these complex discussions, however, missionaries and diplomats alike recognized that the mission movement and the United States were connected by similar goals and a similar vision of the United States as a force for good in the world.