Citizens
In 1839, the French frigate L’Artémise arrived in Hawai‘i with an ultimatum. French merchants had been increasingly incensed by their treatment on the islands over the past two decades. The wine and brandy they hoped to trade were not permitted on the islands; Catholic worship, too, was not freely permitted. If the Hawaiian kingdom did not agree to a new treaty and a significant payment, the frigate would blockade the harbor and attack.1 The goals could be summarized briefly: commercial access, religious freedom, and extraterritoriality. In many ways, these demands would be echoed in other ports by representatives of the United States in the decades to come.
The French captain Cyrille Pierre Laplace did not communicate only with the Hawaiian government. He also brought a message for the US consul. He promised safety for all US residents on the islands—except for the missionaries. France, he explained, considered the American missionaries to be “a part of the native population.” The French blamed the missionaries for many of the difficulties they faced on the islands. Missionaries “direct [the king’s] counsels, influence his conduct, and are the true authors of the insults given by him to France,” Laplace claimed. If war came between France and Hawai‘i, the missionaries would have to suffer alongside their flock.2 Remembering these events later, the missionaries recalled feeling both shocked and frightened. They gathered together and united in a hymn, seeking safety under God at a time when “their own government afforded none.”3 The French refused to recognize their rights as US citizens, and it was unclear what their country would or could do to protect them.
Within the United States, Protestant observers were shocked by France’s behavior in Hawai‘i. The kingdom, these Americans argued, had every right to prefer Protestantism to Catholicism. The North American Review, for example, summed up the root of the conflict: France was willing to go to war to “compel” another country to welcome Catholic worship.4 The Hawaiian government was entirely in its right, the Review insisted. Prohibiting native access to Catholic worship may have been “indiscreet and unjust,” but the government was not acting inappropriately.5 The Hawaiian government had as much right to their course of action as Massachusetts might have “to prevent a half dozen Hindoo widows burning themselves alive any Sunday evening on Boston Common.”6 Sovereignty, the US missionaries and their supporters believed, entitled a state to exclude or welcome religious groups as it saw fit.
This, at least, was what they said when the group being excluded was Catholic. American Protestant missionaries often found themselves excluded by local governments who did not grant them the full scope of religious freedom that missionaries demanded. While government-established religions could (and did) shape missionary methods around the world, they rarely deterred missionaries from any and all attempts to evangelize. In the Ottoman Empire, China, Greece, and elsewhere, American missionaries did what they could to circumvent restrictions and assert their right to live and work freely where they chose. In such cases, US missionaries might, like the French priests in Hawai‘i, turn to their government to protect their right to evangelize. Hawai‘i was unique in the extent to which US Protestant missionaries found encouragement from the local government. Yet even here, as the crisis with L’Artemise revealed, it was far from clear how much protection they could expect from their own government when troubles arose. Throughout the mid-nineteenth century, missionaries and diplomats alike raised new questions about what citizenship rights missionaries had that the US government might have to protect.
The meaning of religious liberty was central to these discussions, as was the legal principle of extraterritoriality. In the Hawaiian case, American observers were shocked that the French wanted to violate “that universal principle of international jurisprudence, that every state shall try offenses committed within its jurisdiction.” By allowing a Frenchman in Hawai‘i to be tried not by the Hawaiian legal system, but by a special system in which he would be judged by his own countrymen, they argued, extraterritoriality would allow foreigners to entirely evade the law.7 Yet at other times and places—such as when US missionaries were found in violation of local laws and facing unsympathetic legal systems—the United States would find itself sounding much like France as it demanded redress.
This was not mere hypocrisy; rather, it reflects how Protestant missionary goals could influence US foreign policy goals. In Hawai‘i, Americans found French extraterritoriality inappropriate because it attempted to supersede laws that supported contemporary Protestant worship and values. A few years later, US diplomats come to a very different conclusion in Greece when US missionary Jonas King was brought to trial for violating laws that protected the Greek Orthodox Church. In China, extraterritoriality would be a longstanding goal of US and European diplomacy.
The Hawaiians signed the treaty with the French and paid the money. War did not come. But the questions raised by this incident are important for understanding the place of missionaries in the US diplomatic landscape. After all, the French had named them as outside of the proper circle of American protection: in moving to Hawai‘i and working closely with the Hawaiian government, they had become, according to the French, Hawaiian themselves. But the missionaries, and many American supporters both inside and outside the government, continued to see Protestant missionaries as US citizens who went into the world to represent, if not their country, then their countrymen. As such, they demanded respect and protection.
Often, they got it. Lobbying efforts from missionary organizations in the United States and the often quite close relationships between missionaries and diplomats abroad meant that the US government could not ignore missionaries, even if it had wanted to. Defining the rights of missionaries became a vexing task for the US government. As Americans worked out the meaning of citizenship at home, missionary claims became a key venue for determining the full extent of citizenship rights in the mid-nineteenth century.
The Rights of Missionary Citizenship
Over the course of the antebellum decades, Americans were determining the meaning of citizenship in part through the experiences—and particularly the challenges—of Americans abroad. Sailors and missionaries forced the US government to consider what rights citizens had when they left the shores of the United States and what, if any, limits there were to which types of people could claim the protection of their government. There were no obvious answers. Citizenship was not defined in the US Constitution. Did moving to another country for the rest of your life involve revoking your citizenship? Did marriage to a non-American affect one’s citizenship? What about the citizenship of children born abroad? Missionaries confronted all of these questions and more in the 1830s and 1840s. None of them had clear answers in the decades before Reconstruction.8
With the meaning of citizenship in flux, it is little wonder that Laplace’s claim that missionaries had forfeited their right to be considered US citizens struck a nerve. As much as the missionaries bristled at Laplace’s disrespect for Hawaiian sovereignty, they were far more upset by his suggestion that they had been involved in—had, in fact, orchestrated—the persecution of Catholics in Hawai‘i and had thus forfeited their claims to protection as US citizens.9 As they sought to defend themselves, the missionaries had to address questions about their relationship with the government, the appropriate limits of missionary intervention, and the implications that missionary work had on their identity as US citizens.
Laplace based his claims on stories about the arrival of two Catholic priests, one French and one Irish, in 1827, seven years after the US missionaries began their work in the Sandwich Islands. These were years of turmoil and change within Hawaiian politics and culture. Two leaders claimed the power of the regency: Boki, the governor of Oahu, and Kaahumanu, the mother of the king and a devoted Protestant convert. It was Boki who had invited the priests, only to have them denied the right to preach to any but foreigners. Kaahumanu ordered them off the islands and provided a boat to carry the priests to California. Meanwhile, the Hawaiian government began a to arrest Catholic converts, considering some Catholic practices to be a violation of anti-idolatry laws. Some of these Catholics were sentenced to hard labor.10 Laplace asserted that this persecution was the work, not of the Hawaiian government, but of the US Protestant missionaries. They had insinuated themselves into the government, he claimed, and advanced their own goals at the expense of religious liberty. The Protestant missionaries were certainly anti-Catholic. However, it was not immediately clear if they had actually been a force behind the laws against Catholicism in the Sandwich Islands. It was also not clear whether doing so would have involved relinquishing their US citizenship.
American Protestant missionaries did have a close relationship with the Hawaiian chiefs, many of whom were Protestant converts. In the same year as Laplace’s arrival, the missionaries would even open a new boarding school especially for the children of chiefs to train them for future leadership.11 It was understandable, then, that the French would have assumed missionary involvement in anti-Catholic persecution. Proof, however, was hard to demonstrate. In official correspondence, the king asserted all of the laws originated with himself and the chiefs. The missionaries, he insisted, played no part.12
Critics, however, found many hints of missionary malfeasance. It was hard for them to imagine that the kingdom had acted without outside influence. Critics and missionaries alike understood the Hawaiians to be childlike and in need of guidance.13 In this context, foreign observers easily assumed that missionary influence was pervasive. American merchants, too, complained about missionary influence on the islands. An anonymous report of the event spent seventy-two pages countering missionary claims of innocence. Missionaries believed it was written by J. C. Jones, a former US consul with whom they had frequently been in conflict. The missionaries had not kept out of politics, Jones claimed, and they drastically understated the reality of Catholic persecution. At the very least, missionaries were aware of atrocities and responded without compassion. But Jones suggested that the missionaries’ actions were far more nefarious.14
Jones’s main focus was on the brutal treatment of Hawaiian Catholics. The pamphlet’s illustrations depict bare-chested women tied to trees and lashed, only for the “unpardonable crime of believing in the church of Rome.” He tells of mothers with babies slung on their backs being forced to bear heavy stones to build a wall in Honolulu. Damningly, he claims that Hiram Bingham, one of the founding ABCFM missionaries on the islands, witnessed this but still described Catholic Hawaiians to US audiences as “deluded pagans” who had not yet learned of the truth of the Christian God.15
Bingham appears at several points in the pamphlet as a shadowy figure behind the Hawaiian government’s anti-Catholicism. While Jones had little direct proof of missionary interference, he provides plenty of suggestive moments. He includes, for example, blistering anti-Catholic extracts from the geography textbook that missionaries printed on their press and used in their classrooms. He tells of Protestant missionaries who would “thunder from the pulpit” against the priests.16 Again and again, Jones asserts that Kaahumanu was acting under “the advice and counsel of the American missionaries whose influence with that chiefess [sic] had more force, than any he had at that period been able to call into requisition.”17 Jones’s most suggestive charges, however, come when he describes the role of Bingham as a translator in key moments of negotiation about the treatment of Catholics in Hawai‘i.
One particularly tense moment arose in a meeting between Commodore John Downes of the US frigate Potomac and Kaahumanu. Downes had been horrified to find Catholics forced into hard labor and, like Laplace, urged the Hawaiian regent to adopt a policy of tolerance. Downes couched his suggestion in the language of religious liberty and civilization, insisting that in civilized countries, people were not punished for their religious beliefs. Catholic countries, he warned, “might not view with indifference, such cruel treatment of Catholics.” This call for tolerance was, Jones argued, “liberal and truly Christian advice,” but the Protestant missionaries did not see it this way. Bingham was present at this meeting, acting as translator. The missionary inserted himself into the conversation, insisting that the Hawaiian authorities were justified in their actions since not all civilized countries, and certainly not Spain, practiced religious toleration. Few present, Jones reflected, would “soon forget” Bingham’s intervention.18
Bingham and the other missionaries taught that Catholicism was idolatry, a claim that was particularly loaded given its association for Christians with the traditional religion of the Sandwich Islands. They also taught that Catholicism had a history of inspiring its adherents to “wield the civil power and become the rulers of the country.” They fully supported, even encouraged, the interpretation of Catholic worship as an antigovernment practice.19
In 1837, when the Catholic priests had been forced on board a ship and ordered to leave the island, Bingham again served as Kaahumanu’s translator in her discussions with the visiting captains of British and French ships. The captains demanded the priests’ immediate release. Bingham, far from simply translating what was being said, worked together with Kaahumanu to argue with what Jones described as “obstinacy and boldness.” When the king arrived ten days later to continue negotiations, the captains refused to allow Bingham to continue as interpreter, removing the missionary from the conversation.20
Though the missionaries generally denied Jones’s charges of government interference, there was some truth to his claims. While missionaries were not the authors of the laws against Catholics, they had indeed influenced the culture that led to the laws’ adoption. The missionaries had debated whether they should, as a body, intervene to protect Catholics against persecution. The missionaries were of two minds. In the first place, they agreed that the Hawaiian government had the right to send the priests away and was under no obligation to welcome them into the kingdom. They agreed, too, that it was for the best that Catholic worship be banned, lest the Hawaiians be led astray. Yet they also understood that religious toleration was, as missionary Sheldon Dibble put it, “a principle of freedom which was of immense value to the world.” As they could not decide between these competing perspectives, the Sandwich Islands missionaries decided that, as a group, they would do nothing. As individuals, however, they could answer questions truthfully if they were asked.21
Did any of this suggest that the missionaries had somehow forfeited their right to be respected as US citizens? The l’Artemise incident had left missionaries shaken. If foreign nations could deny their rights to be considered US citizens, what protections did they have? Missionaries eagerly queried representatives of the US government. Shortly after the departure of l’Artemise, the US frigate Columbia arrived in harbor. The missionaries asked Commodore George C. Read to launch an investigation into the question of their rights. Read demurred. Though polite in his response to the missionaries, he was not inclined to be drawn into this matter. The time for action had passed. With the French gone, there was no longer a direct threat. Any broader discussion about how to respond to the events should happen in Washington. Missionaries were US citizens, Read understood. They should trust their government to act appropriately.22 But they did not yet have this claim positively affirmed by the government.
The ABCFM addressed this question of missionary citizenship at their 1841 Annual Meeting. Rufus Anderson, corresponding secretary of the ABCFM and the driving force behind its vision, assured the crowd that missionaries “retain their citizenship wherever they may be sent.” This citizenship was never renounced. Rather, like merchants and other Americans whose work might take them to live abroad for some period of time, their core identity as Americans continued. They went out in service of organizations, like the ABCFM, that had been incorporated by state governments (in the case of the ABCFM, by Massachusetts in 1810) and thus, in at least this small way, had their work legitimized by state governments. And the federal government, well aware of their missionary identities, had issued them passports, essential documents of citizenship, signifying the government’s own legitimation of missionary work. Just like merchants, Anderson and others argued, missionaries were fully within their rights to go about their legitimate business abroad.23
Both the State Department and missionaries made this comparison of missionaries to merchants as they discussed missionary rights of citizenship. The government protected merchants and their interests; so, too, it should protect missionaries and their interests.24 Secretary of State Daniel Webster assured Hawaiian missionaries that they were “as much entitled to protection as merchants or sailors.”25 In a “commercial nation,” as Thomas Scott Williams, a chief justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court and member of the ABCFM argued, it would be “most alarming” to deprive citizenship rights from those who had to reside abroad.26 But the long experience of merchants revealed that Americans did not give up their rights on leaving their home country. Missionary supporters’ belabored explanations of this logic suggest the potential difficulties that they faced. Missionaries, after all, were not really like merchants.
Justice Williams, in fact, argued that missionaries were better than merchants, going out into the world “not for his own good, but the good of others.” For his part, Anderson highlighted the unique role of missionary work and other aspects of the ministry as fulfilling a “divine appointment.” For both men, and for the audience of missionary supporters they were addressing, these divine and benevolent roles did not remove missionaries from the body politic. Far from it. Anderson was quick to note that missionaries served as “the agents, in this business, of a very numerous and respectable body of citizens.” Acting on behalf of “many hundred thousands” in the United States, their rights were inextricably connected with those of their supporters at home. Williams went a step further. A missionary was “an ambassador,” not of his government, but “the representative of a great number of his fellow citizens, to communicate knowledge to the ignorant and happiness to the miserable.”27
The type of official statement that Sandwich Island missionaries had been seeking from the US government finally came in 1842. In that year, Secretary of State Daniel Webster instructed Commodore David Porter, the US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, to extend protection to missionaries “in the same manner that you would to other citizens of the United States.”28 As in the Sandwich Islands case, there was considerable pressure from missionary supporters in the United States on the federal government to take such a stand in Ottoman territory. Missionary supporters celebrated Webster for this statement.29 For his help to the cause of foreign missions, he was given an honorary membership in the ABCFM.30
Citizenship and Rights
The situation in the Middle East was different than that in the Sandwich Islands. Here it was not a fellow Western power that was refusing to recognize the citizenship rights of US missionaries, but a host government. Missionaries of the ABCFM had come into conflict with the Maronite Church in 1841 and were ordered to leave the region. When the missionaries asked for Ambassador Porter’s assistance, he refused. In Porter’s reading, the existing treaty between the United States and the Ottoman Empire were purely commercial in nature. Nothing in it allowed for the protection of American evangelism, and so he told the missionaries that he could not be of any help to them. If they were told to leave, they should go. In their capacity as missionaries, they were outside of his—and by extension the US government’s—protection.31 The missionaries, unsatisfied with this response, appealed again for help to the US consul in Beirut and then to supporters in the United States who could reach out to the secretary of state.
In the missionaries’ telling, they had broken no laws. Their work did not disturb the peace, and the complaint from the Maronite Patriarch seemed unfounded. The missionaries had no relationship with the Maronite Church. They did not open any schools for Maronite students, did not operate in Maronite regions, and had not admitted any members of the Maronite Church to communion. For fifteen years they had operated in Syria without complaint, focusing their Beirut school on the Druze population. As they described their work, these missionaries positioned themselves as the victims of religious persecution. The Maronite Patriarch had “an inveterate enmity against Protestant Christianity.” As evidence of this claim, they explained that the Bibles that were published by the Protestant press were collected and burnt; one convert had died in jail as a martyr. The laws of the Ottoman Empire, as the missionaries understood them, ought to protect their work. Christians were granted “liberty of Conscience.” They were supposed to have the freedom to change sects if they so desired. Yet these rights were ignored; Protestant missionaries and converts alike were ill-treated.32
Unlike the converts, however, missionaries carried US passports. They understood these documents to guarantee them “the rights common to all American Citizens within the Dominions of the Sultan.” Those rights, they claimed, included the right to remain where they were and to go about their business as missionaries. As they appealed to the US government for help, missionaries insisted that they fully understood the relevant local laws—wherever they served, they claimed to study the laws that they would need to obey. Now that they felt themselves to persecuted by this foreign power, they demanded their government to take action to defend them.33
Importantly, missionaries had powerful allies in the United States as they made this request. Samuel Turell Armstrong, a member of the ABCFM and the former governor of Massachusetts, agreed with their interpretation of things, and he said as much in his letter to Daniel Webster. Porter had effectively “denationalized” the missionaries, he argued, by refusing to protect them from removal. But much of Armstrong’s argument was based in European practice, not Ottoman law. American missionaries should have the right to evangelize and to demand US government protection because British missionaries enjoyed this protection from their government. In the absence of a strong US diplomatic response, the American missionaries would need to turn to British officials for protection. What was at stake, Armstrong implied, was not just religious freedom, but America’s international standing. Americans needed more consuls in the region who were willing to support missionaries’ presence, in Armstrong’s eyes. This would help to resolve what he found to be a “very embarrassing” situation for US missionaries.34
While Webster and President John Tyler agreed that the government should defend Protestant missionaries’ right to remain and go about their work, it was not clear to all US diplomats that these were rights that missionaries actually possessed. Porter, for one, remained resistant. He explained to Webster that the existing treaty governing relations between the United States and the Ottoman Empire did not give US citizens “any right to interfere with the subjects of the Sublime Porte.” Missionaries, he insisted, simply did not have the right to go wherever they wanted to go. And the US government did not have the right to force other governments to accept missionaries where they weren’t wanted.35
The official policy that Webster put forward required diplomats to extend missionaries the same defense they would give to any US citizens, but what this actually meant going forward could be hard to define. US citizens had the right to reside in foreign countries as they went about their lawful business. But not everyone agreed about how “lawful” the business of evangelism was.
Questions about the “rights of missionaries” arose in West Africa, too. In Gabon, the French accused missionary John Leighton Wilson of being “the instigator” behind anticolonial resistance. As in Hawai‘i, Westerners seemed to have a hard time attributing resistance to any indigenous sources and looked for outside influences. The missionaries became the ones to blame. When the French began shooting cannons at the coast and threatening the mission house, Wilson flew the US flag in an effort to assert his neutrality in the struggle with the French. This was not effective. Instead of being taken as a sign of neutrality, the French ship took it as a sign of aggression and began firing at the flag and the mission house.36
Was this the right move? Wilson would later ask visiting US vessels if it was appropriate for him as a “private citizen” to claim the protection of the US flag. All agreed that this was, indeed, a proper signal of his neutrality. But Wilson still wanted to know: What could he expect from his government in the face of such “outrages” against his person and his property? It was “a matter of some importance to American missionaries,” he wrote in an 1845 letter that would later be published in the Missionary Herald, the ABCFM’s periodical. Missionaries, he granted, were “not the political representatives of [their] country,” but did it follow that they had “no political character distinct from the savage tribes among whom they may be found?” Did becoming a missionary, in other words, require a renunciation of the right to be respected as a US citizen? This could not be the case. But, he worried, this seemed to be how the French were looking at it. And missionaries around the world needed answers.37
The government, however, made no further response. In 1848, writers at the New York Evangelist asked again if the US government had a duty to protect the citizenship rights of missionaries. Again drawing on comparisons to merchants and sailors who could depend on the protection of the US government when they went out into the world for self-interest and trade, the article asked if “the benevolent considerations that move [missionaries] to their work make them aliens or outlaws, and involve a forfeiture of the rights of citizenship and protection?” The stakes were high. The answer to this question would reveal, the article concluded, “whether the government is made for the people, or the people for the government.”38
The Trials of Jonas King
Mission supporters would get their answer when the government came to the defense of missionary Jonas King, on trial in Greece. King’s incendiary writings against Islam in the 1820s had gained him an enthusiastic following among some US missionary supporters who appreciated his reputation as a particular kind of rugged and chauvinistic missionary.39 King’s early missionary career in Palestine had been spent in the Islamic world navigating how to work under a government that did not welcome Christians or Protestant missions, and the beginning of his time in Greece seemed to promise new opportunities. He arrived ready to help the country rebuild itself after the Greek War of Independence, excited to be in a Christian country that he had spent years depicting as the helpless victim of Islamic brutality. King sought first to distribute humanitarian relief from his fellow citizens, but his attention soon shifted to the sorts of long-term aid that missionaries across the globe understood to be essential to building Christian civilization: schools. In this effort, King initially received the approval and even the gratitude of the Greek government. But quite quickly, he would find himself in conflict with his hosts.40
If being in a Christian country created missionary opportunities, it also brought new challenges. The Greek Church was not Protestant. Greece was, for King and for many Protestants, missionary ground. King’s mission was sponsored by the ABCFM, but he had American colleagues from other missionary societies as well: the Episcopal and Baptist denominations both supported Greek missions in these years. All focused on schools, scriptural translation into modern Greek, and the distribution of the Bible and other religious texts. This work would later be described by a US diplomat as the spread of “general knowledge,” rather than sectarian evangelism. King insisted that he was not proselytizing.41
That claim was important, for proselytizing on behalf of Protestant churches was against Greek law. Greek officials did not share King’s interpretation of his work. On no less than three occasions, Jonas King was charged with violating Greek laws about religion. In response, King aggressively asserted his right to religious liberty, also guaranteed in the Greek Constitution, and argued with the government and his Greek detractors over doctrinal issues and the meaning of religious freedom.
King was not just a missionary. In spite of his frequent run-ins with the Greek government, he had been appointed to consular office. When Greece sentenced him to banishment in 1853, King called on the US State Department to intervene and protect his right to remain in Greece while working as a missionary. Like missionary diplomats elsewhere, King advocated for a US foreign policy that supported Protestant missionaries’ freedom to evangelize. The State Department, under Daniel Webster and Edward Everett, supported this endeavor.
King’s troubles began in 1845. In that year, the ABCFM’s missionary manual included passports on their list of necessary items that missionaries would need to obtain before they traveled, alongside collared shirts with strong seams (to stand up to laundering on stones) and a select private library. These passports were “essential” for those missionaries who settled in “eastern countries,” and King would soon discover why.42
King first came into trouble when he was charged with “impious language” about Mary, the Mother of God. Protestants like King found Greek Orthodox veneration of Mary to be idolatrous, and King openly disagreed with the Orthodox contention that Mary had remained a virgin throughout her life. In his defense, King assembled (and later published) writings from Orthodox Fathers that supported his interpretation of Christian doctrine. For this, he was charged with “falsifying the testimony of the fathers.” The charges, and King’s characteristically bombastic response to them, led to repeated threats. In 1847, King briefly left Greece for fear of his safety, only to return in 1848. Briefly chastened, King waited a few years before preaching again, but he continued distributing Protestant texts.
In 1851, King again found himself at the center of controversy in Greece. By this time, he had resumed preaching at the chapel in his home, and both the content of his preaching and his goals came under question. Chaos broke out one afternoon in March when a student asked to address the worshipers at the conclusion of the service. To the gathered crowd, which may have included members of the Greek House of Representatives, the student criticized King for many past sermons that had gone against various dogmas of the Greek Orthodox Church. When King tried to quiet him, the crowd insisted that the student be allowed to speak. The mood soon became tense, the crowd excitable. They refused to leave, even after King’s wife asserted that this was a private home and they should go. They only did so after King brought out a United States flag and announced that they were not only gathered in his private home, but also in the US Consulate.43
King was indeed serving as consul at the time. While missionaries elsewhere served in similar capacities, King was an interesting choice for this role, considering his history of conflict with the Greek government. He would later tell this story in front of the US Senate, creating a “thrill” through those gathered there at this “glowing description of the power of the ‘Stars and Stripes’ to protect an American citizen.”44 Yet the flag itself was not enough to protect King from his troubles in Greece. Within months, he would face another criminal prosecution, this time for proselytizing and for malevolent speech against the Greek Orthodox Church. According to the charges, King’s public discussions of doctrinal differences between the churches on such topics as Mary, the Mother of God, and the meaning of the eucharist amounted to attacks on the Greek Church, and thus, the Greek state.
Americans understood this case to be about religious freedom. Rufus Anderson would say the conflict was over the “freedom to worship God and preach the Gospel in Greece.” Comparing King to Martin Luther, Anderson argued that this was a story about a much-needed and heroic reformer to a corrupt church.45 This grandiose claim ignored the complex political factors at play, both within Greece itself and in Greco-US relations. It ignored, too, the different definitions of religious freedom that were at work in Greece and the United States at the time. During the trial and the international crisis that followed, Americans and Greeks debated the nature of religious tolerance, the importance of matters of doctrinal difference between different branches of Christianity, and the ability of foreign states to answer those questions for each other. For Americans, these questions again forced the issue of how much protection missionaries deserved or could expect from the federal government when they were overseas.
King had claimed that he did not proselytize or speak malevolently against the Greek Church, but his decades of history as an aggressive evangelist give credence to the claims of those who testified against him. Years earlier, King had been warned against similarly agitating a foreign government while traveling in France. There, he had been evangelizing among members of the French nobility and was warned by French Protestants that his “irrepressible” efforts could lead to trouble. In response, he asked his detractors if they would prefer that he “should be silent, and not speak the truths of the gospels” whenever and wherever the opportunity arose. Of course, he argued, he could not keep silent.46 Similarly, King maintained that his speech against the Greek Church was unavoidable. As a Protestant, he must speak his beliefs. This would require him to speak against those of Orthodox Christians.
Just as he had been warned in France and, later, in Palestine, King had been warned in Greece to take care in how he talked about non-Protestant religions, lest he come into conflict with his host government. The schools in Greece had long been hot spots, largely due to the religious materials included in the curriculum. King refused to include the Greek catechism in his classrooms, while insisting on keeping the translated scriptures. In 1835, one supporter in Greece warned King that his schools were causing enough unrest that some worried that a “civil war on the subject of religion” might break out as a result of Greek audiences being unprepared “for such a change as those [Protestant] doctrines would bring in.”47 Yet King did not heed this warning. In his journals and published writings, King was scathing in his description of Greece and Greek Christianity. Greek Christians “profane the temple of the Lord,” he wrote, “and seem to know but little of the nature of Christianity.”48 His role, as he understood it, was to correct their error.
King’s students and others described him as eager to discuss religious topics, including controversial ones, in an attempt to convince others of the wrongness of Greek doctrine. Converts praised King for this practice. One reflected on how King was relentless in the face of the convert’s early “obstinacy.” He recalled King’s efforts to explain the ways that Greek doctrines (“all essentially Roman-catholic”) were in fact “in direct opposition to the gospel.” He remained grateful that King “would not leave me to my blindness.”49 These same personality traits and actions would appear much less positive to Orthodox observers and the Greek government. Greek newspapers, for example, covered his attacks on Orthodoxy, and King did little to hide his actions.50
Accordingly, King was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen days in prison, followed by banishment from Greece. It was only at this point that King and his missionary brethren called on the US government to defend their rights as US citizens to peacefully reside in Greece as active Protestant missionaries. In 1852, King’s missionary peers from the American Baptist Missionary Union and the Protestant Episcopal Church wrote to Abbot Lawrence, at the US Embassy in London, with a difficult request. They well understood that the US government would be reluctant to interfere in the workings of a foreign court system, especially one of a “friendly government.” But they were quite sure that intervention was exactly what King needed. Their government needed to investigate “whether his rights also as a Citizen of the US residing here under the protection of the Laws of this Country have not been infringed, and his religious liberty assailed, by the proceedings in his case.”51
King’s case initially found a reluctant audience in President Millard Fillmore, who found US action to be unjustified. The two countries, he believed, were operating with different definitions of religious freedom and the missionaries’ attempts to assert an American meaning to Greek laws were inappropriate. As more and more letters came to the State Department in support of King and protesting his treatment by the Greek government, however, Fillmore changed his mind. Secretary of State Daniel Webster had no such reservations. Webster, who had previously been celebrated by missionary supporters for his firm affirmation of missionary citizenship rights during his first term as secretary of state in 1842, was happy to restate this earlier policy in defense of missionaries.52
President Fillmore was correct, though, that the meaning of religious freedom under Greek law was different from its meaning in the United States. The Greek Constitution guaranteed toleration of other religious groups. For some groups, such as Catholics, these rights were further buttressed by treaties with European powers. There was, however, no statement of “universal religious liberty and equality” under Greek law, however much missionaries hoped to stretch the meaning of existing statutes. But the laws’ emphasis on toleration created real constraints for missionary evangelism.
It all came down to the meaning of toleration. The Greek Penal Code of 1853 criminalized “reviling and malevolently assailing the doctrines, rites, or customs of any religious sect.” Under this definition, proselytizing was criticism of other religions and thus illicit. American Protestant missionaries did not have the right to freely evangelize as they believed they did. But Americans like King insisted that it was impossible to explain evangelical Protestantism without, at least at times, speaking against those parts of the Orthodox Church that they disagreed with. Logically, they argued, if Protestant missionaries were to be tolerated, they needed to be able to vocally disagree with the Greek Orthodox Church. The Greek government disagreed.53
Webster’s instructions to George Perkins Marsh, the US minister at Constantinople who was charged with assisting King, were quite clear. Marsh should conduct a thorough investigation into the relevant Greek laws in order to determine if King’s treatment had been fair or just. The US government, Webster explained, was unsure “precisely to what extent [religious] toleration is allowed in Greece,” but had “good reason to believe” that Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and some Protestants had been allowed to expound on their views. In light of that, Webster was inclined to view King’s treatment as “persecution” that required a robust response from the US government. The government would not protect citizens who violated local laws, but it would hold the Greek government to its treaty obligations to treat US citizens justly. Missionaries, Webster insisted, deserved protection on the same grounds as merchants, sailors, and soldiers.54
Quoting Thomas Scott Williams’s statements from the 1841 discussion of missionary rights in Hawai‘i, Webster informed Marsh that a missionary was “indeed, ambassador, not sent out by the government as their representative, but as the representative for great number of his fellow-citizens.” As such, a missionary should expect full support from her government.55 Webster ordered Marsh to travel from Constantinople to Athens aboard a US warship and called on the US Navy to keep part of its Mediterranean Squadron patrolling the area so long as Marsh remained in Greece.
Within weeks of his arrival in Athens, Marsh concluded his investigation. It was “past all doubt, that the government of Greece has treated Dr. King with flagrant injustice and bad faith,” he found. The Greeks were guilty of an abuse of the legal principles of justice, and a perversion of the rules of law, as “flagitious as any that every disgraced the records of the Star Chamber.” While he admitted that the forms of the law had not been violated, the “plain intent and meaning of the law” had.56 Marsh found King to have been the victim of bad actors in the Greek government and deserving of US protection.
As a result, Marsh negotiated to have King’s sentence revoked. King’s banishment was reversed; he would remain in Greece until his death in 1869. It is easy to imagine a US government response that was much less supportive of King in his time of difficulty. After all, in only a few decades, diplomats would regularly refer to the “missionary troubles” that came about when US evangelists clashed with foreign laws. Yet King instead found enthusiastic support. The case was a landmark moment in the mid-century discussion of the rights of Americans abroad, and the duties of the US government to protect them.57 Politicians and diplomats, in addition to missionaries, followed the case and boiled with indignation at King’s treatment. Rejecting the Greek government’s interpretation of the Greek constitution, they insisted that King’s civil rights had been trampled and that his religious liberty had been denied.
The first decades of US missionary activity had brought challenges, certainly. What was new by the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s was the response of the missionaries to those challenges. Now, they increasingly turned to their government for aid. This was a considerable shift. King and the Syria missionaries were not the first US missionaries who were told to leave their stations, after all. When the first group of US missionaries reached India in 1812, they were initially refused the right to remain. As they tried to fight back against their deportation, they never reached out to representatives of the US government for help. The idea did not occur to them. After all, there were none in Calcutta in 1812. Instead, the missionaries worked with British agents, missionaries, and eventually sympathetic officers of the East India Company to secure their right to work in Bombay. By the time that the missionaries in the Sandwich Islands, Syria, and Greece were facing challenges in the late-1830s and early 1840s, the opportunities for government aid had begun to grow.58
The twin goals of religious freedom and extraterritoriality were what had brought Laplace to the Sandwich Islands, and they would animate US missionaries at their various stations around the world. Defining both of these concepts, however, would remain contested for missionaries and diplomats alike. Throughout these many discussions, religious liberty remained a murky concept. In some ways, missionaries recognized that it was a deeply important right, but its application to their work was not always clear. The Americans ridiculed French claims in 1839 that religious toleration was “the established usage . . . of all civilized countries” and effectively a part of the law of nations.59 Yet they simultaneously based their own claims to a freedom to evangelize in a broad understanding of both religious freedom and divine law. It was this reliance on divine law that ultimately undercut missionary claims that they should be treated like any other US citizens when they were abroad. Missionaries, after all, were not just like merchants.