Imperial Twilight
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So Palmerston proposed a quick solution. At the cabinet meeting he rolled out several charts of the China coast and used them to show how a small British squadron consisting of a line-of-battle ship, two frigates, and a few steamers, properly commanded, might be able to blockade China’s most crucial ports and rivers, shutting down the domestic coastal trade and the internal transport of grain in order to force a quick surrender from the Chinese government—the same kind of focused naval action Matheson and Lindsay had sketched out in their pamphlets in 1836. The resemblance wasn’t lost on the other ministers, and Lord Broughton, the president of the Board of Control at the time, who left a record of the meeting in his diary, described Palmerston’s plan for the distribution of force in China as being essentially the same as what Lindsay had proposed after Napier’s death. Personally, Broughton did not at first support it. He raised the issue of George Staunton’s objections to Matheson and Lindsay in 1836—how such a war in China would be both unjust and uncivilized—and he shared a letter from Lord Auckland “strongly deprecating a war with China,” in which the governor-general indicated that India had no forces to spare. Most of the other ministers, however, were open to the possibility of “hostile measures.”87
The Whig prime minister at the time, Lord Melbourne, was mainly concerned that the British government should not have to pay the £2 million that it now, thanks to Charles Elliot, owed to the opium traders. It would be no simple matter for Parliament to raise a fund to pay off the opium dealers as it had done for the slave owners, not least because it had only just finished paying out most of the £20 million slave indemnity and there were no financial resources to spare. For that matter, the slave indemnity had been funded not through revenues but through the issuance of government debt—debt that piled on top of the already hideous mountain of government obligations left over from the Napoleonic Wars.88 And since opium investors weren’t nearly as widespread throughout British society as slavery investors had been, the “widows and orphans” arguments would not carry much weight.
In any case, Melbourne was an extremely unpopular prime minister and in no position to convince a hostile House of Commons that it should increase Britain’s debt burden by £2 million, an amount comparable to the government’s typical yearly budget shortfall at the time, all on account of the bizarre actions of an unhinged chief superintendent in China. As an alternative to asking Parliament for the money to pay the opium traders, the president of the Board of Trade suggested that the East India Company might be made to foot the bill. It was a reasonable suggestion, insofar as the Company had largely created the India-China opium trade in the first place. Palmerston, however, had a different option in mind, one that hadn’t even occurred to the Times when it speculated whether the burden would fall on the government, the Company, or the merchants themselves. With voluble support from the brand-new secretary at war, Thomas Macaulay (who had just been sworn in the day before and was eager to live up to his title), Palmerston suggested that China should be made to pay for it.89
Despite minor disagreements, the cabinet concluded its discussion within the day, free of any complications. The matter was settled: a naval squadron of limited size would be dispatched from England to obtain reparations from China for Lin Zexu’s poor treatment of Charles Elliot and the other British subjects. Instructions would also be sent to Lord Auckland that the government in India should support the China squadron as necessary, for several of the ministers worried that it was reckless to think such a small naval force could ever triumph against an empire the size of China. Nevertheless, all seemed well and the ministers left in good spirits, joking lightheartedly about how they had just made war on “the master of one third of the whole human race.”90 After the meeting let out there was still plenty of daylight left in the afternoon, so Lord Broughton went off for a two-hour horseback ride with Queen Victoria through a park and forest. It started to rain while they were out, though, and by the time they got back to the palace they were soaked through.91
CHAPTER 14
Will and Destiny
Long before Charles Elliot could learn that a British fleet was on its way to Canton he had already shepherded the merchants to the brink of war. On May 21, 1839, when Lin Zexu finally lifted the restriction on foreigners leaving Canton, Eliot ordered all British subjects to abandon the factory district and move to Macao, beyond the commissioner’s reach. The British and Parsis and most of the Americans followed him, emptying the factories of whatever property and important papers they could cram into their boats and spirit away to safety in Macao (along with certain less necessary items, like the 524 bottles of wine one partner in Russell & Co. managed to salvage).1
But tensions continued to grow even after their evacuation from Canton. In early July, a gang of drunken British sailors killed a Chinese villager in a brawl on Kowloon, a peninsula on the far side of the Pearl River delta from Macao. Lin Zexu demanded that the sailors be handed over for trial. Foreigners had always reluctantly complied with such orders in the past to avoid losing their trading privileges, but the trade at Canton was already completely shut down, for the British at least, and Elliot was emboldened by his hope that a naval fleet might be coming to his aid, so he broke with precedent and refused to surrender the sailors. Lin Zexu, however, was emboldened as well, having just received new regulations from Beijing that formally mandated the death penalty for opium users in China—and that, for the first time, prescribed execution for foreigners who sold the drug as well.2
To force Elliot’s surrender of the murder suspects, Lin started putting pressure on Macao, where the British had thought to escape him. In August 1839 he issued orders forbidding the supply of British ships there. Servants were removed from homes, and Chinese naval junks started appearing in greater force in the harbor. To judge by warning signs written in Chinese that the British found bobbing along the shore, it appeared that someone had poisoned the springs from which their ships drew fresh water. On August 24, an English passenger on a boat near Hong Kong was set upon at night by attackers who stripped him naked, cut off his ear, and stuffed it into his mouth. Elliot thought it was the work of pirates, but others suspected Chinese loyalists acting under the influence of Lin Zexu.3
Facing rumors that several thousand of Lin’s troops were mustering in preparation to march into Macao, on August 26 Elliot finally led the British merchants in abandoning the Portuguese city altogether. They crammed their wives and children onto a ramshackle convoy of merchant ships, removing for safety to the harbor at sparsely populated Hong Kong island, forty miles to the east of Macao on the opposite side of the Pearl River delta. Lin Zexu issued instructions for the Chinese civilians in the vicinity of Hong Kong to arm themselves and prevent shoregoers from the British merchant fleet from obtaining supplies. He authorized them to kill foreigners or take them prisoner if necessary.4 On September 4, 1839—still a month before the British cabinet would hold its October 1 meeting to decide on sending a fleet to China, and the better part of a year before that fleet could possibly arrive—a trio of small British vessels under Elliot’s command, with Karl Gutzlaff serving on board as interpreter, impulsively opened fire on a squadron of Chinese war junks that were blocking their access to fresh water, fighting them to an astonished stalemate in what would go down as the first, tentative battle of the Opium War.
As news of the opium seizure and shutdown of trade at Canton reached the British public, followed soon after by rumors of war, the press erupted with alarm. As the Leeds Mercury noted in September 1839, most people in Britain hadn’t even known about the Chinese opium trade previously, but now it was suddenly emerging as a national crisis. The paper called on the British government to make the “righteous decision” to outlaw the trade and suppress the growth of poppies in India—for the sake not only of “the vindication of our national morality” but also “the security of our interests and the safety of our commerce.” As many in the manufacturing districts saw it, opium was antithetical to British trade
interests in China, both because the Chinese spent money on the drug that they might otherwise use to buy manufactured goods, and because smugglers created so much trouble for the legitimate trade. Although some might consider the British opium merchants respectable men in purely commercial terms, said the Mercury, “as regards morality and humanity, [they are] the pitiless agents of as cruel and detestable a system as ever was contrived by our common adversary to effect the ruin and misery of men.”5
Antislavery activists helped lead the public outcry against the opium trade. One of the leading figures in the British abolition movement, a renowned orator named George Thompson, took up the cause of “the Opium Question,” as it was called, and went on a speaking campaign during the winter of 1840, giving public lectures to overflow crowds in Leeds, Nottingham, Darlington, York, and other manufacturing centers to rally working-class support for abolishing Britain’s overseas drug trade.6 The central question, he told his audiences, was “whether we should go to war in defence of those who gained immense profits by the introduction of smuggled poisons into the Chinese empire, or abandon the idea of this unjust war, and trade with the Chinese upon fair and honourable terms.”7
Overall, it was working-class activists who provided some of the strongest organized opposition to the war in China. The Chartist reform movement, which had been founded in 1838 to promote universal manhood suffrage, was reaching a populist peak in 1839, and its representatives identified a parallel between the oppression of Chinese with opium and the poisoning of working-class Britons with gin. With rumors of war looming, the Northern Star, a Chartist newspaper, printed a long, scathing editorial on British policy in China in which it called the superintendent “Mr. Opium Elliot” and charged that Britain’s national interests “have been recklessly and shamefully sacrificed by the heartless, imbecile, and cowardly representative of a Government more heartless, more imbecile, and more cowardly, than probably any other that has ever soiled the page of history.” It spoke glowingly of Lin Zexu, with unrestrained adulation for him as an “incorruptible” official “whose sterling principle and sense of moral right, placed him above the reach of British Gold.”8
Other critics addressed the military question, warning that a war against China would not be the simple and painless affair some in Britain imagined. In The Chinese Vindicated, an English captain of the Hyderabad army in India warned that Great Britain should “beware how we force China to become a warlike and ambitious nation.” Certainly a small British army could invade China, he wrote, and probably it could march around as it pleased for a while, but what would be the outcome of that? Conquest of such an immense empire was impossible. “What then would be gained?” he asked. “Would it restore our commerce, or give us tea?” Yet if such a war should provoke China into developing its immense resources to the full, he predicted, “the combined nations of Europe would hardly compete with her single and united power.” China was “a formidable foe,” he concluded, “and to attack her on such a worthless occasion as the present, savours of insanity.”9
It wasn’t just the activist press that took up the cause of opposing a war in China. The Times, the London political paper of record, was especially vicious in its condemnation of the cabinet’s actions. Whatever “high-sounding terms” the Whig ministers might use to justify their war, it declared on March 23, 1840, the war in China was “in fact nothing less than an attempt, by open violence, to force upon a foreign country the purchase of a deadly poison prohibited by its laws.”10 In a separate editorial, the Times predicted that a war at Canton would cause the “utter extinction” of the China trade—Britain’s only source of tea would be lost, along with the potentially vast Chinese market for its manufactured goods. The British would be saddled with the massive expense of an unnecessary foreign campaign that would cost far more than the entire value of the lost opium.11
Through the winter and spring of 1840, Parliament was inundated with petitions from religious groups, temperance societies, and other public organizations across England and Scotland demanding an end to the opium trade and opposing the war in China.12 Those two elements—the smuggling trade and the war, which the government wanted to keep as distinct from each other as possible—were so obviously linked in public minds that by March 1840 critics in the British press had already taken to calling the imminent conflict “the Opium War,” the derogatory name by which it would be known to posterity.13 The sole purpose of the war, as those critics saw it, was to advance the interests of drug dealers. The Eclectic Review predicted it would “stand out in history as the blackest stain on the character of Britain.”14 No matter how the government ministers might try to paint it as a respectable war, said the Spectator, “do what they can—gloss it over as they may—THE OPIUM WAR is the name by which history will hand it down.”15
Goaded by strong public agitation, the House of Commons finally took up the question of the war in April 1840 with a motion to censure the Whig cabinet ministers for botching their management of Britain’s relationship with China—specifically, charging Palmerston with negligence for failing to give Charles Elliot the powers over other British subjects he had asked for, which might have allowed him to restrain the opium smugglers and prevent the outbreak of a war. The fact that the resolution targeted Palmerston directly and the war only obliquely was a political calculation: the Whigs in government had traditionally been the stronger party on moral issues. Meanwhile, some of their Conservative opposition (which had absorbed the earlier Tories) were certain to shy from denouncing any war alleged to be in defense of Britain’s national honor. By homing in on Palmerston’s conduct, the motion aimed to unite the Conservatives against Melbourne’s government while convincing a sufficient number of Whigs to break with their party on moral grounds.
The author of the motion was a former Whig turned Conservative named James Graham—the same man who, when serving as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1832, responded to the calls from the Canton traders for reprisals over their shrubbery and the king’s portrait that “trade with China is our only object and conquest there would be as dangerous as defeat.” His views on British relations with China had not changed since then and his resolution in 1840, despite its politically restrained language, was effectively a resolution to stop the war in China by forcing the resignation of the ministers who had launched it.16
To a standing-room-only audience in the cramped and poorly ventilated temporary quarters of the House of Commons (the previous chamber having burned down in 1834), James Graham began to speak on behalf of his resolution on the afternoon of April 7, 1840.17 Politically he represented the Conservative opponents of Melbourne’s Whig government, but morally he spoke on behalf of the opponents of opium and unjust war, of whom there were many on both sides of the chamber. More distinctively, though, when he spoke he represented the old view of China, the view cherished by Lord Macartney when he first set out on his hopeful embassy to Qianlong’s court in 1792—the China of awe and splendor.
The truth of the Chinese empire, James Graham told his audience on April 7, was that it was “inhabited by 350,000,000 of human beings, all directed by the will of one man, all speaking one language, all governed by one code of laws, all professing one religion, all actuated by the same feelings of national pride and prejudice, tracing back their history not by centuries but by tens of centuries, transmitted to them in regular succession under a patriarchal government without interruption.” The country was not just enormous and enduring and unified, he went on, but above all it was civilized: it was the home to a people “boasting of their education, of their printing, of their civilization, of their arts, all the conveniences and many of the luxuries of life existing there, when Europe was still sunk in barbarism, and when the light of knowledge was obscure in this western hemisphere.”18 Here was the eighteenth-century European vision of Qianlong’s China, of which even Macartney had grown disillusioned, and which had largely given way to cynicism in Britain by the end of the Napoleonic Wars—China as th
e great civilization of the world’s other side, the archetype of rational and enduring government, a model of the peaceful administration of a third of the world’s population.
Awe and wonder aside, Graham also reminded his listeners how much was at stake financially if Britain’s trade with China should be lost—for while the proponents of war thought it would restore trade, its opponents feared the opposite. The taxes on tea imports alone had, Graham reported, brought in nearly £3.7 million in revenue in the past year (almost 8 percent of the home government’s income, and in a time of deficit no less).19 In British India, roughly one-tenth of the government’s revenue, or £2 million, derived from the China trade. Combining those and a range of more indirect sources, Graham reckoned that in total he was “guilty of no exaggeration when he stated that one-sixth of the whole united revenue of Great Britain and India depended on our commercial relations with that country.” It was a fantastic sum of money at stake, far more than the value of the opium that had been destroyed, and it could all be lost if—as Macartney had once worried—the emperor should retaliate against British violence by shutting them out of China’s markets for good.
Graham’s resolution opened a monstrous debate that occupied the House of Commons for three full nights of expansive, exhausting speeches that went on in some cases for hours at a stretch. Supporters of the war, led by the very ministers whose conduct was under attack, offered a range of defenses. Thomas Macaulay, the secretary at war (and quintessential “Whig historian”), countered Graham’s vision of Chinese grandeur with a view that Britain alone represented civilization while the Chinese were merely barbarians standing in the way of its progress. An unapologetic proponent of empire, Macaulay held that the home government should follow the lead of its agents abroad, not the reverse. He suggested that without overseas agents acting on their own initiative, independently of their instructions from home, Britain would never have achieved conquest in India. The same principle was true in China, he argued. If Charles Elliot had been so confident the Chinese government was going to legalize opium, why should Palmerston ever have issued orders for him to suppress the opium trade, knowing that it would likely be legal by the time any such instructions could reach Canton?