Workers
On the fourth of July 1871, former secretary of state Henry Seward was in Constantinople (Istanbul). Among the other celebrations of the day, Seward joined the formal opening of the new buildings of Robert College. It was a grand edifice of stone on a prime location overlooking the Bosporus. After years of difficulty securing the right to build these new expanded premises, the building now stood ready to welcome in a larger class of eager students. Above its roof flew the US flag.
This was the first time that a building had been granted permission to fly a foreign flag on the Bosporus, a fact whose significance was not lost on the school’s founder, Cyrus Hamlin. Hamlin had first come to Turkey as a missionary for the ABCFM in 1840. After two decades at the head of Bebek Seminary, and almost as long in conflict with the ABCFM over how a mission school should operate, he left his formal missionary career to focus his attention on a new endeavor. He would create the “first Christian college in Turkey.” True, he would later recall, the Jesuits had previously built institutions that they called colleges. But those were not what he was talking about. His school would be, he explained, an “American college,” and therefore could lay claim to the title of a Christian college in a way he thought that the Jesuit schools never could. Within this idea was the claim that to be an American was, in an important way, to be Christian.1
Figure 7.1. Front view of Robert College, Istanbul, with the US flag.
Source: Hamlin, My Life and Times, facing 461.
Robert College was founded to be an American Christian college in Turkey. Although he was no longer officially connected to a missionary body, Hamlin believed this to be a missionary endeavor. Missionary organizations had long debated the proper combination of “secular” and “religious” subjects in mission schools. Now Hamlin was free to embrace the kind of educational model that he understood to be best suited to help the future of Protestant Christianity in Turkey. It was not just, or even primarily, about evangelism and preparing a native ministry—the narrower goals of some missionary bodies. Rather, his school offered a high-caliber liberal arts and scientific curriculum that allowed its graduates to seek employment in a range of fields.
When William Seward helped celebrate the opening of Robert College in 1871, he endorsed the vision of America’s role abroad that supported close connections between missionary and diplomatic goals. There was a reason that the college’s new buildings were opened on July 4, just as there was a reason that the initial cornerstone had been laid on July 4 a few years earlier. There was a reason, too, that the school flew the US flag. The college would become the most prominent US institution in the Ottoman Empire. Because of Hamlin’s missionary history and his commitment to creating a Christian school, it was an emblem, too, of the ongoing difficulty of parsing “religious” from “secular” subjects in both missionary and diplomatic contexts. Americans and Turks alike celebrated the school.
The “secular” work of missionaries invited a new sort of missionary troubles as the century drew to a close. The 1880s and 1890s were years of great expansion for both the missionary movement and the State Department. The numbers of both US missionaries and US diplomats abroad had been steadily increasing since the 1870s. On the part of the mission movement, this growth was largely thanks to the formation of women’s mission boards. The number of American foreign missionary organizations had ballooned from sixteen at mid-century to ninety in 1900. By the end of the century, American women outnumbered men in the mission field.2
This demographic shift among missionaries necessarily affected the dynamics between missions and the State Department. Missionary women, unlike men, did not easily move between government and evangelistic work, though many of them prided themselves on representing their country through mission work. Since they were not ordained ministers, their presence also heightened ongoing discussions with US religious communities about the proper methods for mission work. At the same time, reformers within the State Department and the consular system sought professionalization and a shift away from the systems that allowed for so much missionary diplomacy in earlier decades.
Robert College established Hamlin’s legacy as a missionary, an educator, and as many of his obituaries insisted, a diplomat. When Hamlin died in 1900, the press celebrated him as a “missionary diplomatist” for his skillful handling of the Sublime Porte. He had obtained permission to build on the Bosporus in the face of Turkish and Russian opposition and had further gained the right to fly the US flag and claim the protection of the United States over his college—a right that no English, French, German, or Russian institution along the strait could claim.3 Hamlin was no diplomat in a formal sense. He was a booster of a certain kind of American presence with enough connections to help make that vision more of a reality. Hamlin’s American college was just one example of the type of “secular” and humanitarian work that emerged out of the missionary movement at the turn of the century.
Hamlin almost failed to get permission to build his college. It was the perceived connections between the missionary and US officials that eventually led the Sublime Porte to allow Hamlin to build his school. A simple question from a visiting US admiral—why can’t the American college be built?—seemed potentially threatening in the context of Ottoman resistance in Crete and American seeming sympathy for the Cretan cause. “Better build a hundred colleges for the Americans with our own money,” a Turkish gentleman would later explain to Hamlin, “than to have one of Farragut’s monitors come into the Mediterranean!”4
When he was naming the school, Hamlin had considered calling it the American College, only rejecting that title out of a concern that it was “too much tainted with democracy.”5 Two decades later, the Women’s Board of Missions had no such concerns about identifying their school in this way: The American College for Girls joined Robert College in 1871 as the leading US institutions in the city. The word American in the school’s name signified something. It said something about the kind of education that would be provided, the values that its curriculum would inculcate, and the changes that it hoped to inspire throughout the region.
Though the curriculum at the American College for Girls was not evangelical, it was a mission school through and through. The board of trustees were all members of the Women’s Board of Missions, led by Augusta Smith, president of the Women’s Board of Missions (affiliated with the ABCFM). Within Constantinople, five of the six members of the college advisory board served as missionaries.6 The school was necessary, as its most conservative supporters believed, to create a pool of eligible brides for future missionaries and ministers. But the supporters of the American College for Girls had much more ambitious aims. As teachers and as mothers, women were the key to transforming Ottoman culture. This was a very old idea for American women’s educators, who had used similar arguments in favor of advanced women’s education for decades. In the mission field, women missionaries continued to embrace this maternalist justification for women’s education, suggesting that teaching women was the surest way to advance non-Christian cultures.7
It was this aspect of the American College for Girls that attracted the approval of both the US and Turkish governments. At the 1891 graduation ceremonies, for example, students listened to celebratory addresses by representatives of both the US legation and the Turkish Department of Public Instruction.8 Both governments found much to praise in the school’s project of educating women to educate the nation. For the Ottoman government, the advanced curriculum seemed to be educating modern women who would help build Ottoman culture. For the United States, the school represented the sort of positive cultural influence that Americans wanted their country to have in the world. The college, like many similar institutions, positioned the United States as a civilized and benevolent power on the world stage that had much to offer to the people of the world. That it did so without the official sponsorship of the US Government was an important benefit. It allowed the United States to represent itself as lacking in self-interest or imperialist ambitions, in contrast with European powers. Politically, then, both governments found much to praise in the mission schools. As they did so, neither focused on the religious goals or identity of the school. To both, it was primarily a secular institution, despite its missionary credentials.
The missionary leaders of these schools embraced the secular effects of their institutions, fully expecting that in due time they would result in spiritual and religious shifts as well. Later in life, Hamlin would reflect that this educational work had “some permanent value in the intellectual and spiritual changes then taking place.”9 He might have added political changes to that list. The students who came to Hamlin were, he remembered, leaving everything behind in order to advance their education. Hamlin called them “patriotic,” as they “fervently desired to do something for the emancipation of their people.”10 He took pride that some of the leaders of the Bulgarian nationalist movement had graduated from his schools.11 His son would later claim that Bulgaria owed “her emergence from a virtual serfdom into practical independence” to Robert College’s “liberalizing and uplifting tendencies.” The college, he wrote, was “an unassailable lighthouse of progress in a benighted empire.”12
The mission schools, hospitals, and presses staffed by American women and men were institutions with significant symbolic value. That value could look slightly different for diplomats, missionaries, foreign governments, patients, students, and their families, depending on their needs and goals. The resulting questions in the mission field, American churches, and in Washington over the political and religious meaning of mission work set the stage for profound debates about the nature of the missionary diplomacy that had operated for nearly a century.
The Secular and the Sacred in Education and Medicine
By the 1880s, missionary supporters had gotten used to debates over missionary methodology and the proper relationship of evangelism and “secular” work. Naysayers had criticized the monthly prayer concerts of the 1830s for being too earthbound when they included maps and geographical lessons as part of their efforts to attract attention (and funds) to missions. From the 1840s onward, missionary leaders like Rufus Anderson critiqued mission schools for becoming too “secular” and focusing too much attention on preparing students for careers other than ministry.13 These debates were far from resolved by the 1880s. The wide range of missionary organizations at work throughout the world allowed for considerable variation of approach to education. All of the missionary organizations sought to spread the gospel and create Christian societies. The differences in method represented both the range of visions of what a Christian society could look like and the different priorities of various mission groups. These debates would have important implications for the relationship between missions and foreign relations.
American missionaries had emphasized the importance of education from the very beginning of their work. From the 1810s forward, establishing a school was one of the first activities of many American missions. This impulse came from a number of motives. American Protestant missionaries felt it was essential for all Christians to be able to read the scriptures. Accordingly, they prioritized literacy training and primary-level education. For missionaries coming from denominations that valued an educated ministry, secondary and higher educational institutions were necessary to prepare Christian converts for work as evangelists and preachers. But there were other reasons that missionaries founded schools too.
Missionary educators knew that schools could do more than train future pastors. They could attract people to the mission who otherwise would not have come. Families who were interested in the social and economic mobility that Western education could offer in many of the colonized spaces where missionaries worked were willing, sometimes even eager, to have their children educated at the mission. This could provide a captive audience for the evangelizing work of missionaries. Many of these missionary teachers welcomed this sort of work, as they found education to be an important part of the civilizing work that they believed was essential to their mission. Finally, mission schools could be a way for the mission to financially support itself when funds from the United States were slow or irregular. These motives were no less religious in nature, but critics would, over the course of the century, raise questions.
It was this second cluster of motivations that caused debate about mission schools as early as the 1840s. Hamlin embraced the value of a secular education to the mission movement. Training in the sciences, literature, and even the English language could prepare students for new opportunities. At Bebek Seminary, Hamlin experimented with pairing an industrial workshop with the school in order to allow his impoverished students to earn money for clothing and other necessities. This had religious value, he was quick to note. Protestant converts faced persecution and, with it, real financial risks. Creating economic opportunities was essential, both as a humanitarian impulse and as a means to remove a major disincentive to conversion.14 Yet some of his missionary brethren joined the ABCFM’s Rufus Anderson in criticizing Hamlin’s work as “Americanizing” the students and making them more focused on their financial situation than on spiritual concerns.15
For these critics, educational institution building seemed to serve the needs of the state more than the kingdom of God. Such schools emphasized culture over Christ and, as anti-foreign and anti-imperial movements grew in many missionary regions, identified missions too closely with Western power. Missionaries like Hamlin debated strategy with leaders like Anderson in arguments that were about both theology and politics. These two camps could not decide how or where to draw the lines between the secular and the sacred, or between the mission and the country. At times, they even argued over whether such a line was necessary or even possible.
Medical missions attempted to strike a similar balance and relied on several explanations for how their work was a legitimate part of the missionary project. In the first place, there was real need. Missionaries described non-Western medical care as decidedly inferior to what medical missionaries could provide. They emphasized painful treatments and “cruel” practices that had their roots in what one medical missionary described as “inherited religious beliefs and hoary prejudices.” The “bad medicine” of the East was, in part, a religious problem; it had to be solved through the Christian application of scientific knowledge. It was this humanitarian explanation that diplomats embraced. Missionary hospitals exemplified the benefits that could come with connections with the United States. They helped make the United States appear to be a benevolent force in the world.
But it was more than this. Medical missionaries also insisted that the justification for medical missions could be found in Jesus’s role as a divine healer. Medical care was sacred work. Focusing on the themes of healing in many of the miracle stories of Jesus, they found a scriptural basis for the connection between medical care and missionary work. Medical missionaries, as one explained it, were prompted both by “our humanity, as well as our Christianity.”16
Medical missionaries worked evangelization into their medical practices. People came to the hospital to receive medical treatment, not to be evangelized. But the missionaries did not lose any opportunities to evangelize the sick. They hired local Christian teachers, known as Bible Women, to preach in the waiting areas of their hospitals. In some hospitals, missionaries and Bible Women conducted daily worship services and brought the Bible with them to visit hospital patients at noon. Some printed scriptures on prescriptions. Waiting rooms served as libraries of Christian texts. When medical missionaries visited patients in their homes, they not only checked on the progress of their healing, but prayed with them and taught them hymns.17
The missionaries found that few objected to the evangelizing in the waiting rooms. Some former patients even returned with neighbors and family to hear the Bible Women speak of the gospel. Like mission schools, mission hospitals were places that the community understood to be capable of providing a clear benefit. Both could be just the beginning of a longer relationship with the mission. And because of their involvement in “nonreligious” life, they could invite unexpected sorts of missionary troubles.
Religious Freedom and Japanese Mission Schools
When the Japanese responded to foreign pressure in 1873 and lifted the laws prohibiting Christianity, Protestant missionaries flooded into the country, sure that their understanding of religious freedom would now be embraced by both the Japanese government and the Western powers. In that single year, eighty-seven Protestant missionaries began their work in Japan.18 They found a country in the midst of a profound political and cultural transformation, and the missionaries were optimistic about what that might mean. Somewhat similar to the Ottoman government, the Japanese government seemed to recognize benefits in the Western education that American missionaries offered, even as proselytization remained illegal.19 Starting in 1872, when the government urged universal primary education for boys and girls, through the 1889 adoption of the Meiji constitution, missionaries embraced the opportunity to build Christian schools that benefited Japanese families and the government alike. Because the government did not have the resources to fund the wide-ranging educational program that it planned, private missionary schools filled an important gap at the primary and secondary level in these years. Missionaries were particularly important in the education of girls and women, with schools offering a range of curricula from industrial to academic subjects.
A group of these early missionary teachers, employed at the government-sponsored college, had emphasized that it was only “fear of the government” that kept people from listening to their gospel message more broadly. They described the students as “very desirous to be instructed in history.” Though the missionaries were told to leave Christianity outside of the classroom, they found this impossible. The history of the West was, they argued, “to a great degree, the history of Christianity.” If they were to teach Japanese students about the history, law, and culture of the West, they would simply have to teach them about Christianity. And as they encouraged their students to embrace the legal and commercial culture of the West, the missionaries would necessarily encourage them to embrace the Christianity that they believed was its inspiration. Missionaries taught their students that it would be “vain for them to strive to enter the light of modern civilization and reject the light of Christianity.”20 To the missionaries, they were one and the same.
It was into this context of new possibilities that the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church sent Elizabeth Russell to Nagasaki in 1879. Russell, too, would start a school that would have her thinking about the line between Christian and secular education. Russell’s school emphasized the academic subjects. She taught reading, history, arithmetic, and algebra in English, which she identified as “the language of civilization, the language of progress.” The school also offered courses in Latin, Greek, and after 1885, the sciences. From 1888, she offered a collegiate degree. Her goal was not only to teach her students content, but to wake up “powers that would forever lie dormant under the mental enervation” that was the result of studying only in Asian languages and less rigorous subjects. These branches were, she insisted, “indirectly religious work” that would result in “the students’ steadily broadening views on all subjects.”21 This explanation was typical of those who celebrated the religious benefits of academic study.
By this point, missionaries claimed that in practice, the Japanese had the free ability to practice Christianity. While anti-Christian prejudices may have remained in some areas, missionaries argued that it was often sufficient to show authorities the recent regulations that supported Christian practice, and the problems resolved themselves.22 In remarkable contrast to the records from China, Korea, or the Ottoman territories in the 1880s, the diplomatic correspondence of the Japan legation revealed no missionary troubles. This did not mean, however, that the missionaries were not active in political affairs. Their educational work, in fact, brought them very close to political debates in the country.
As in Turkey, women missionaries in Japan understood their work to be training women to become the mothers and teachers of their nation. At such a transformative time in Japanese history, this was an important role. The Japanese Education Ministry released guidelines in 1882 that called for distinct curricula for male and female high school students. Girls were to be trained to serve their family and the state through participation in the national economy, with industrial education as a component of all schools. Missionaries worked to ensure that their educational program conformed to the state guidelines, though leaders like Russell bristled against the expectation that women’s primary identities should be as wives and mothers.
Some Japanese observers criticized missionaries for encouraging political dissent among their female students. Government-sponsored newspapers as well as statements from the Ministry of Education argued that the curriculum of these US missionary schools had led Japanese women down the wrong path, encouraging Western values like individualism and equality, which did not fit easily with the submissive role that Japan was hoping to inculcate in its young women. Leading Meiji feminists had connections to the mission schools and faced government repression for their advocacy for women’s rights.23 In response, the government began prioritizing public secondary schools for girls, removing much of the audience for the missionary institutions.
Once the Meiji constitution was finalized in 1889, missionaries faced a new period of crisis. Japan had lost its earlier expectation that embracing aspects of US culture would result in increased American respect for Japan. Instead, Japanese political leaders endorsed a new nationalist era. Most of the mission schools dropped the study of English around this time, not because of domestic American debates about missionary education, but because of Japanese demands for a less Western approach to education.24 By the end of the century, new treaties brought mission schools under the direct oversight of the Japanese government. Soon, religious instruction was banned in primary schools and government-recognized middle and high schools, requiring the missions to give up many of their schools and renegotiate the curriculum and status at those that remained.25
What stands out across these debates over missionary education is the difficulty in defining such work as religious or nonreligious. The Japanese government, like the Turkish government that embraced US mission schools, sought to benefit from the scientific and literary teachings of US missionaries without allowing their religious influence to spread. American government officials, too, could celebrate the educational work of Protestant missionaries as if it was a secular project that was wholly disconnected from their evangelistic goals. Yet missionaries blurred these lines at every turn, taking full advantage of any benefits of being seen as secular while always insisting to their supporters at home that their work was religious.
Korea, Medicine, and Politics
In the 1880s and 1890s, Korea emerged as another field of great interest to missionaries, but of little interest to the Department of State. A tributary of both China and Japan, Korea seemed to have little to offer independently as a trading partner. Around 1870, the US government had unsuccessfully attempted to open relations with Korea. This first attempt to force relations with Korea emerged when the United States became troubled about the fate that could await sailors stranded on Korean shores due to storms or wrecks.
Frederick Low, the man sent by President Ulysses S. Grant to negotiate the matter, admitted that he knew very little about Korea or its people. But he was sure that it was an uncivilized country with a racially inferior populace. After sending initial communications of his intent to negotiate a treaty through the Chinese, Low arrived in Korea with five heavily armed warships staffed by 1,230 marines and sailors. As the US ships advanced up the river from Chagyak to Seoul, they received warning to turn back. When they did not, the Korean cannons opened fire. In the initial skirmish, some thirty Koreans were killed. The Americans advanced further upriver, opened fire, and landed ground forces. After two days of fighting, at least 250 Koreans and three Americans were dead. Low withdrew without even getting the meeting he had sought with a high-ranking Korean official to negotiate.26
It would take another decade, until 1882, for the United States and Korea to reach a treaty of amity and commerce. Among the negotiators was Chester Holcombe, a diplomat based in China who would later become one of the directors of the ABCFM.27 American interests in the region remained the same: the United States wanted protection for stranded sailors and a commercial relationship. Korean interests, however, had shifted slightly in the years since the fighting in 1871. Watching developments in China and Japan, the Koreans were increasingly worried about the imperialist designs of the West, especially given its own tributary position in relation to the Chinese and Japanese. Considering their options, Korean leaders wondered if an alliance with the United States might be a possible way to keep other, more invasive countries, at arms’ length.28
Missionaries, keenly interested in Korea as a mission field, followed these developments closely from China, Japan, and the United States. As American missionaries understood the situation, the Korean king would “gladly welcome” the “influence and friendship” of the United States. “It is bad enough to be ground between the upper and nether millstones of China and Japan, but to see England and Russia waiting to circumvent not only China and Japan, but each other, is a still darker outlook,” on missionary periodical explained. “There is only a choice of masters.”29
With the treaty signed, the United States sent its official representative: a minister resident and consul general. This official was lower in rank than the leading diplomats in China or Japan, and he served alongside a small staff that only rarely included another US citizen. Outside of Seoul, there were no US representatives at all.30 This small legation reflected the relative insignificance that the State Department expected Korea to have for US affairs. And in a commercial sense, this was the case. Korea presented only a small market for Americans, and did not generate much excitement among the commercial classes. But for missionaries, it was another matter entirely. Missionaries from the Presbyterian and Methodist mission boards soon arrived on the peninsula and established what would become a significant missionary establishment in Korea.
American Protestants heralded this moment as the “hour for Korea.” They expected great opportunity there. Not only had Korea become open to political and economic interactions with the West, it also welcomed US technologies and institutions. Korea began to institute a new postal system in 1885, and soon reports came to the United States about the spread of steam, rail, and telegraph. And the Korean people seemed receptive to Protestant missionaries.31
In 1886, there were five US missionaries in Korea, with more to come. Within two years, the missionaries claimed to have baptized more than a hundred Korean converts.32 By 1909, there were nearly three hundred Protestant missionaries in the country.33 In Seoul, Pyeng-yang (Pyongyang), Mokpo, Kwngju (Gwangju), Chunju (Chungju), and Kusan (Kunsan) US missionaries worked to build up evangelistic, medical, and educational projects. The main missionary hospital reported treating more than ten thousand patients in 1886, and missionaries founded schools at all levels from elementary through medical training.34
The missionary enthusiasm for Korea in the 1880s and 1890s is, at first glance, surprising. Proselytization was not legally sanctioned in the country, and the missionaries did not officially possess the right to reside in the interior of the country. The Korean government did not revoke anti-Christian laws that could potentially endanger not only converts but the missionaries themselves if they practiced their religion publicly. One might have expected the missionary troubles of China and the Ottoman Empire to emerge here too. While the first US minister to Korea did occasionally discuss religious freedom as a general principle of the United States, he did not push the issue, and the United States would decline to join France in a request to remove anti-Christian laws in 1893.35 It was France, far more invested than the United States in providing government support for evangelization, that opened the door for American missionaries by obtaining permission for noncommercial travel in the interior of the country with passports.36
Yet here, as elsewhere, American missionaries took a lack of explicit opposition to their work to be tacit acceptance. Relying on a higher authority than earthly states, they went where they could and pushed against the limits of the permission granted them in treaties. Some of the missionary work, particularly in the education and medical fields, was welcomed, even celebrated. Here, as elsewhere, missionaries faced a challenge of categorizing and describing their work. Missionaries’ “religious” work was problematic; their “nonreligious” work was praised by Koreans and US representatives alike. But as missionary discussions about methods and secularization suggest, none of the work of the mission was actually nonreligious. The stage was set for another string of missionary troubles.
Dr. Horace Allen arrived in Korea from China in 1884 as the doctor attached to the US Legation. He had missionary goals, however, and hoped to establish a hospital in the country. Within a year, he had done so: the Korean Government Hospital of Seoul. As its name indicates, the hospital was paid for by the Korean government, which made for an unlikely partnership for the American missionary. The only costs that Allen’s missionary supporters faced was that of the medicines themselves and his salary.
It was either luck or coincidence that brought Allen’s proposal to open a hospital before the crown. Shortly after Allen’s arrival in the country, a political uprising rocked Seoul. The return of the king’s father, the former regent, sparked a rebellion that erupted into violence in December. The US minister, Lucius Foote, described it as a “political revolution.” At the height of the uproar, Prince Min Young Ik, gravely wounded, stumbled into a dinner party that Foote had been attending. Foote called for Allen to attend to the prince and several of his injured companions. It was an auspicious beginning for the missionary relationship with the royal family. From then on, Allen served as the king’s doctor.37
Soon thereafter, George Foulk, the interim chargé d’affaires, assisted him in working with the Korean government to get the hospital started. The Americans had every hope of success. The year before, an American missionary had visited Korea to begin exploring the establishment of a mission hospital. Minister Foote had hosted the missionary and discussed the matter with the king. There seemed at the time to be “no serious objection,” and in fact Foote thought that “a mission school and hospital at Seoul will be tacitly encouraged.”38 When he returned to the matter, Foulk stressed the missionary’s humanitarian and altruistic goals in his communications with both the Korean and US governments, regularly referring to the fact that Allen offered “gratuitous service” and did not ask to be paid for his medical work by anyone but the mission board.39
Foulk presented Allen’s proposal to the crown in January of 1885; by May, Foulk triumphantly wrote to Washington to announce the successful opening of the hospital, serving patients every day but Sunday.40 The hospital was a great success. Allen was joined by another medical missionary, and soon they opened a school through the hospital that trained a small class of Korean students in medicine. Before long, the king named Allen as his private physician, which gave Allen significant access to the palace.
Allen was not the only missionary to enjoy such access. The queen, too, named an American missionary as her physician: Dr. Lillias Horton Underwood. Horton had been sent to Korea in 1888 by the Presbyterians in response to a request for a female medical missionary. After the establishment of Allen’s hospital, it became clear that there was a real need for a dedicated women’s hospital. Though women were treated at the government hospital, male doctors reported some difficulty in providing care to female patients.41 Korean society, Americans understood, was deeply segregated along gender lines for all but the lowest classes.42 Allen had even told US readers about a time he had provided medical care for the queen, only to find that she had been veiled and covered so completely that he was only able to see “one square inch” of her skin.43 American women’s mission boards well understood the need for women doctors and nurses throughout the mission field. The purpose was to provide opportunities for American women to serve the needs of women around the world, and they eagerly sent women like Dr. Horton to advance the dual causes of medicine and the gospel among women.
Horton had been a doctor in Chicago prior to her entry into the mission field, and she brought with her not only medical expertise, but a passion for education. She managed the care of the women of the royal family, ran a dispensary for lower-class women, and also taught mathematics and English in the mission school and ran a Bible class for women. In Seoul, Horton met and married missionary Horace Grant Underwood.44
Horton’s description of her first meeting with the queen reflects the uneasy position that missionaries held in the country. She recalled feeling incredibly anxious as her “chair coolies” carried her through the city. The gowns that she had packed in order to attend events in full court dress had been ruined on her journey across the Pacific. But it was not only her dress that concerned her. Far more concerning was the ways in which she had been warned not to mention religion. The other missionaries reminded her that they were only in Korea “on sufferance,” and though their preaching “may be overlooked and winked at” when they focused only on “the common people,” they expected grave results if they should raise the subject in the palace. “I saw the logic of these words,” Horton remembered, “though my heart talked hotly in a very different way; but I went to the palace with my mouth sealed on the one subject I had come to proclaim.”45
Horton did well, despite her fears, and served as the queen’s doctor until her assassination in 1895. After that, she, Allen, and her husband found themselves enmeshed in a new type of missionary trouble in Korea. By the end of the year, the US Department of State would be issuing increasingly frustrated statements about their inappropriate behavior and ultimately removing the US minister from office for failing to control the missionaries.
The murder of Queen Min in 1895 and the subsequent confinement of the king to the palace by Japanese-backed conspirators shocked the Americans in Seoul. John Sill, a former Episcopal priest serving as the US minister to Korea, first reported the event in October. The assassination, he explained, was part of an attempt by Japan to exert more control in the region. He expected the United States to take swift action to restore the king to power. “It is absurd,” Sill reflected, that the Americans could be expected to recognize the new Korean government. He hoped to join representatives from England, Russia, and France in taking action to restore the king to power. These hopes were dashed, however, when Washington responded.46
The rebuke from the State Department on November 11 was blunt: “Intervention in political concerns of Korea is not among your functions.” This would be the first of many warnings that Sill received from Washington in the coming months. All of the news reaching the United States suggested that the Americans in Seoul were very closely involved in the ongoing political crisis.47 Sill tried to justify his actions by insisting that US interests were indeed at risk as a result of the political upheavals in Korea—instability created risks for the US residents.48 But Olney was far more concerned about reports that “irresponsible persons” among the Americans had been “advising and attempting to control, through irregular channels, the Government of the country.”49 Since the Americans living in Korea at the time were missionaries, this was a critique on missionary involvement, and particularly of Sill, Allen, and Underwood.50 After several decades of missionary troubles around the world, the State Department was very concerned about the kind of problems that missionaries could create for US foreign relations—not only in Korea, but in US relations with China and Japan.
The relationship between a small group of missionaries in Seoul and the king during these difficult months was quite close. King Gojong, suspecting that the Japanese would not act against him with foreign witnesses present, called on US missionaries to remain near the royal chamber at all times. Missionaries took turns sleeping at the palace, and they came armed.51
The missionaries’ protection of the king took multiple forms. The king was reportedly so concerned about poisoning that he would not eat any food prepared in the palace and was subsisting on condensed milk and hard-boiled eggs that arrived to him still in their shells. This, Dr. Underwood concluded, would not do. She and the wife of the Russian minister began to prepare special meals for the king, delivered daily to the palace by her husband in a locked box. Her care for the king suggests a kind of intimacy that was quite unusual in missionary experience with foreign leaders, particularly when the leader in question was not Christian.52
Not only did the male missionaries sleep by the king’s chamber while the female missionaries prepared the king’s food, the men accompanied some US military advisors in protecting the king from an attempted kidnapping by the pro-Japanese prime minister and acting minister of war. Lillias Underwood later recalled multiple visitors coming to their home to speak of schemes to free the king from his confinement. Horace Underwood, she claimed, did not participate in the planning—he did not know who to trust, and further assumed that as a missionary, he ought not take part. But on the day in question, he joined the others in storming the palace to free the king, and he carried a revolver. During the ordeal, the king clung to Underwood’s hand. The missionaries later sheltered the king’s second son and sponsored his journey to the United States, promising the support of the Presbyterian Board of Missions.53
The Underwoods insisted that Horace had not been involved in the planning, but rumors continued to follow them for years. Many of the missionaries in Korea began to gain a reputation as political meddlers. In practice, most missionaries in the country did not create problems, but the Japanese press frequently criticized them and suggested that they were acting out of turn. Missionaries in Japan and China accordingly reported back to Washington about the political meddling of the Korea missionaries, concerned that it would have negative implications for their own work and for the reputation of the United States in the region. It was out of this context that Olney’s instructions to Sill in 1895 and 1896 were so insistent that missionaries “strictly confine themselves to their missionary work” and leave politics alone.54 It was not only US political interests, but also missionary interests around the world that were at stake.
Even though the State Department was frustrated by Sill and the missionaries’ activities in 1895, these concerns did not lead to a complete abandonment of missionary diplomacy. By the time of the assassination, Allen had become the secretary of the US legation; he would be named US minister to China only a few years later, under President McKinley. This turn to diplomatic work did require Allen to formally step away from his affiliation with the missionary society, but his interests in the cause of missions never disappeared.
Though these missionaries clearly became involved in local politics, they also revealed some level of discomfort with it. They did not want to be seen to be political, regardless of what they actually did. So Dr. Allen, in 1885, declined an invitation to make a public address welcoming the new British consul because he “thought it best to stay out of politics.” Yet in the very next sentence of the letter where he explained this decision to American supporters, he described a successful petition he had sent to the government regarding his hospital.55 This dynamic is perhaps most revealing of the debates within missionary circles (and even within the missionary community in Korea) over the appropriateness of such political connections. When government alliances served the cause of missions, they were commendable, Allen and others seemed to conclude. But in a nod to those who critiqued such closeness, and in the face of inconsistent policies among mission boards that neither particularly trusted foreign governments, nor wanted to pay for programs whose costs the government might cover, Allen maintained some boundaries between political and mission work.56 When his work took on a more explicitly political dimension, he stepped away from the mission.
The events of 1895 and 1896 were far from typical. Yet, as Horace Allen reflected in 1901, “Scarcely a day passes in fact, when I am not called upon to assist a missionary.”57 Like consuls and ministers throughout missionary lands, he faced the challenge of missionary troubles as part of his regular work. As elsewhere, the cases largely emerged away from the capital, when local officials bristled against the seeming invasion of Western influence. The same rumors of foreigners taking the bodies of babies and children to turn them into medicine that had plagued missionaries in China earlier followed missionaries with their entry into Korea, occasionally leading to what Lillias Underwood called “the baby riots.” These did not reach the level of violence as had been experienced in Tien-tsin, but the US minister warned the missionaries that if violence did seem likely, they should seek immediate refuge at the legation.58
Missionary Humanitarians and the 1895 Armenian Massacres
In 1895, missionary teacher Mary Barnum opened a letter home with the haunting phrase: “Written after the dreadful massacres of Nov. 12.” She was in Harpoot in late November 1895 and witnessed one of the many attacks that would collectively be known as the Hamidian massacres. Barnum, like a number of other American, British, and Armenian witnesses, sent accounts of the violence to horrified readers who wondered how the European powers had failed to prevent such atrocities. “The dreadfulness of the situation around us grows more and more appalling,” she explained. “We seem to have gone back to the dark ages.”59
After Sultan Abdul Hamid II suspended the new constitution in 1878, much of his focus was on how to maintain power over the vast lands of the Ottoman Empire in the face of nationalist movements within and Russian pressure without. Armenian nationalists bristled at the increasingly restrictive and oppressive reforms as Hamid sought to create religious, cultural, and ethnic uniformity throughout the empire. Among other things, Hamid sought to unify the empire through Islam. By the mid-1890s, the sultan’s response to oppositional movements was to orchestrate brutal attacks on the Armenian Christian population throughout the empire. The death count is imprecise, but over the course of the Hamidian massacres, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 Armenians died.60
Within weeks of the attack at Harpoot, only thirty-two girls and teachers remained at Barnum’s school. Many of the students had learned of “fathers and brothers killed, homes plundered and burned, and saddest of all, that their friends have denied Christ.” As a missionary, Barnum was particularly troubled by the idea of Christians being forced to abandon their faith, and she thus framed part of the crisis as a religious liberty issue. The victims were religious martyrs, in this framing, and Christian Americans could and should sympathize with their fellow Christians in their time of suffering.
This was also a political and humanitarian issue. On their own, there was little the missionaries could do to help in a practical way. Barnum distributed the needles and thread that had been unharmed after the mission buildings had been set on fire, but she had little else of use to share. Deeply frustrated to see so much suffering without the ability to help, she wrote of her desire to light a “grand bonfire” to destroy the unnecessary articles that remained in the house. It felt a “mockery” to have what little remained when it could do no practical good. How could she expect to clothe people with only the “hats, collars, (especially soiled gentlemen’s paper collars), belts and gloves” that remained? “And how would pictures do for beds and quilts?” The needs were great, and the missionaries did not feel prepared to meet them.61
The only way to change that was to raise the alarm throughout the international community. Aid was needed, and American missionaries planned to make sure that Americans understood their duty. In the United States, Cyrus Hamlin, now retired from Robert College, got to work. When he addressed a church in Lexington, Massachusetts, on what was becoming known as “the Armenian Question,” the Boston Globe covered the event and spread Hamlin’s missionary intelligence far beyond the walls of the church. Hamlin, relying on reports he had received from a missionary in Bitlis, reported that two Armenian villages in that region had been sacked. The Turks carried off the livestock, leaving the people to starve. The missionaries denied the sultan’s claims that the soldiers were there to put down a rebellion. There was no rebellion in that region; the Armenians were unarmed and outnumbered. As Hamlin explained to his US audience, the sultan’s command was nothing short of “an order to destroy the Armenians.” Some two and a half million Armenians were living “in terror and distress” in the Ottoman Empire, fearful of “a general assassination” against them. In case anyone missed the religious significance of the attacks, the title of the article was blunt: “Killed Because Christians.”62
Hamlin was not the only missionary to spread news of the massacres. Former missionary Frederick David Greene compiled an assortment of letters from missionaries like Barnum and Knapp to create The Armenian Crisis in Turkey, an early entry into the American reporting on the Armenian massacres. One reviewer found that the collection of missionary letters provided evidence of “a gigantic and indescribably horrible massacre of Armenian men, women, and children” in Sassoun (Sason) in early September 1894.63 In the two years that followed, the crisis only grew.
Missionary troubles had, of course, long drawn the US government into more involvement in the region. Now, missionaries hoped that the intelligence they provided might inspire intervention. They worried about their own safety, and they worried about the safety of their fellow Christians. They wanted the United States to act. The US press echoed their denunciation of the Ottoman government. Mass rallies across the country protested the violence.64
In the face of the public uproar over the Armenian massacres, two problems faced the US government: how to provide safety for the US citizens in the region (almost all of whom were missionaries, many working in schools and hospitals that provided vital services) and how to respond to the international humanitarian crisis. To the first point, the government did not need to do much differently from its earlier responses to missionary troubles. But at least some in the government seemed to be fed up with the demands of missionaries. The 1890s were the early days of a debate over the value of missionaries, and at least some argued that the government should not intervene on the missionaries’ behalf. “If our citizens go to a far distant country, semi-civilized and bitterly opposed to their movements,” Senator John Sherman wrote, “we cannot follow them there and protect them.” To respond with force would only make matters worse, and lead to the deaths of the missionaries and probably also their converts and sympathizers. But it was not only this. Other politicians argued with missionary reporting about the state of affairs in Turkey. When missionary Dr. Grace Kimball claimed that the United States flag was not respected and provided no protection for American missionaries in Turkey, Secretary of State Richard Olney publicly refuted her in the Washington Post. Olney urged her and the other missionaries to stop spreading such rumors, claiming that “intemperate expressions of public opinion excited by appeals to sentiment, regardless of facts, endanger American missionaries at the hands of revolutionists in Turkey more than anything else.”65
Hamlin refuted both ideas in the pages of the Washington Post and the North American Review. The problem was not the missionaries, Hamlin argued, but the US government’s unwillingness to forcibly protect the treaty rights of its citizens. If the United States had done this earlier, “the massacres that blot with innocent blood the last pages of the century would never have been perpetrated,” he argued. Like so many missionary defenders, he carefully parsed the religious and the secular work of the missionaries. The government had promised to protect mission schools and presses, but had failed to do so. “No penalty was ever exacted, no promise was ever fulfilled.” Now, Hamlin claimed, the sultan felt free to act on his most extreme desires: “The extermination of all Armenians who will not Islamize, the expulsion of the American missionaries, the destruction of their property, and the showing of himself as superior to all treaties and to all claims of truth, justice, and humanity towards all men of the Christian faith.”66
Missionary writings about the crisis continually relied on Islamophobic tropes as they described the sultan, his troops, and the suffering of Armenian Christians. At least in part, missionaries and their supporters argued that US interests were properly aligned with suffering Christians around the world in the face of Muslim oppression. Their humanitarian arguments were inflected with religious and racial specificity.67
Hamlin went far beyond the earlier missionary arguments that the US government needed to protect their treaty rights around the world because this was the meaning of US citizenship. It was not only, or even primarily, US citizens who had been harmed in this case. By failing to uphold US treaty rights, Hamlin claimed, the US government had set into motion the steps that resulted in the massacre of somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 Armenian men, women, and children.68 Intervention of some sort was now necessary.
But what kind of intervention was possible? The foreign powers who had the greatest interests in the region were Great Britain and Russia, neither of which supported foreign action. The United States had no tradition of such intervention. The Hamidian massacres in Armenia, which were both a humanitarian crisis and a political quagmire, would be an important turning point.
United States government officials attempted to maintain a distinction between US and Armenian interests as they navigated the crisis. In his 1895 address to Congress, President Grover Cleveland attempted to carefully balance the competing interests at play, both expressing his concern for the safety of American missionaries in the region while also refusing to let the United States intervene directly. When it came to the dangers that missionaries faced, or the damages to their property as a result of the violence, the government should use “official energy and perseverance,” as missionary Henry Otis Dwight explained in the New York Tribune. But more tact and discretion was necessary for US action on the humanitarian crisis.69
To some observers, though, this distinction was far from clear. The missionary presence, they argued, demanded a broader US duty in the region. After all, missionaries were doing important work beyond evangelization. As one article in the Union Signal had explained, it was the influence of the American mission schools that had inspired “the Armenian spirit of independence.”70 Americans should, accordingly, send help. Meanwhile, petitions poured into Congress asking for warships to be sent to the region, at least in part to protect the American missionaries in the region.71 Cleveland worried that any show of force would impede the ability of American aid to reach those who suffered.72 Instead of gunboats, the United States sent money. Missionary and Armenian immigrant networks created the National Armenian Relief Committee, with Greene serving as secretary. Between 1894 and 1897, they raised approximately $300,000 to support the work of the Red Cross and missionaries in the region.73
The Armenian Crisis of the 1890s revealed a shift in US international engagement. At the beginning of the century, the Greek Revolution had inspired a similar US interest in Christian nationalist struggles against the Ottoman Empire, with similar turns to anti-Islamic rhetoric. But if the earlier situation had resulted in a firm government insistence that the United States would not intervene in European affairs, that was no longer the case. Congress not only debated intervention, it adopted a resolution in support of US intervention to “stay the hand of fanaticism and lawless violence.”74 When, by 1900, the Ottoman government had still refused to offer an indemnity to American missionaries for the property that had been destroyed in the violence, President McKinley sent a Philippines-bound warship to Smyrna (Izmir) to provide a demonstration of strength and support to the missionary interests in the region. The ship, and the warships that would continue to patrol the region in the coming decade, would also inspire Armenian hopes for future US intervention.75
As they taught, healed, and wrote in the final decades of the century, missionaries found that their work had political implications, both in the places where they worked and at home in the United States. American and foreign governments alike tried to parse out the religious and the nonreligious aspects of their work, suggesting that educational, medical, and civilizing efforts could somehow be divided from evangelism. But the missionaries themselves had a hard time distinguishing along these lines. Their work, they understood, had secular effects in addition to religious ones, and sometimes required political efforts. But they never lost sight of their religious motivations, or the ultimate religious effects that they hoped to see.
The first decade of the twentieth century would see some important shifts in the relationship between missions and the US government, all of which had their roots in these turbulent years. American empire entered a new phase with the wars of 1898, and both the missionaries and the government had to reevaluate their ability to partner in the work of spreading US culture and values around the world. The missionary troubles of the late nineteenth century exploded into the Boxer Uprising of 1900, resulting in a vigorous debate about the relative benefits and threats of missionary work for US diplomacy. And missionary appeals to American humanitarian concern would take on a new meaning with the coming of the first world war. The nineteenth-century debates about missionary methods and their political impact would set the stage for a new century with a much stronger State Department.