Neither James Matheson nor William Jardine went in for significant philanthropy as John Murray Forbes’s uncle Thomas Handasyd Perkins had done in Boston, but a loftier place in public memory was reserved for Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, Jardine’s longtime associate in Bombay. With a fortune made by dominating the opium and cotton export trade of western India, Jeejeebhoy poured his own money locally into Parsi charities, famine relief, schools, hospitals, and public works, establishing himself as one of the leading figures (the leading figure, by some fawning accounts) who turned Bombay from a colonial backwater into a modern global metropolis. A director of banks and newspapers along with managing his business empire and funding many charitable works, Jeejeebhoy was a steadfast supporter of British rule, and on February 14, 1842, just as the war in China was nearing its end, Queen Victoria knighted him. “I feel a high, I hope a justifiable pride,” he said at the time, “in the distinction of being enrolled in the knighthood of England, marked as that order has ever been by the brightest traits of loyalty and honor.”30
Jeejeebhoy was the first Indian to become a British knight, and in 1857, Victoria would make him a baronet as well. The name of “Sir J. J.,” as he is known colloquially, adorns schools and hospitals in Bombay to this day, the great philanthropist of the city’s Victorian past.31 As one Gujarati newspaper rhapsodized at the time of his death in 1859, “His hospitals, rest houses, water works, causeways, bridges, the numerous religious and educational institutions and endowments will point to posterity the man whom Providence selected for the dispensation of substantial good to a large portion of the human race.”32 Of the fact that so much of that “substantial good,” dispensed to such a “large portion of the human race,” was made possible by Jeejeebhoy’s sale, through Jardine and Matheson, of Indian opium to Chinese smugglers, little is said.
Across the Atlantic in the United States, the dominant reaction to the war can be summed up as neatly as anywhere by the little girl who appeared in a story in a Boston children’s magazine in 1841, nervously asking her father, “The English won’t come here, will they father, and kill us if we don’t buy their opium and eat it?”33 The father reassured her they wouldn’t, though the two of them agreed that the British should have sent their soldiers to China to arrest “the wicked men who sold the naughty opium” rather than “to kill [the Chinese], and burn down their houses, and destroy their cattle, and their gardens, and their fields of fruit and grain.” Disillusioned, the girl in the story decided she wouldn’t like Victoria so much anymore. “They say she has a little girl,” the child mused. “I wonder how she would like to have it eat opium and be killed by it.”
As in Britain, in America the opium question resonated with the issue of slavery. William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper, The Liberator, joined its abolitionist colleagues in England by taking China’s side in the war. “In this quarrel,” it asked in April 1840, “who can help sympathizing with the injured Chinese, and wish them success in their operations against their Christian opponents, whom the Chinese, with a remarkable degree of propriety, stigmatize as ‘barbarians’?”34 It ran a poem titled “Opium” that celebrated Lin Zexu as a model for Western activists, lauding his efforts to liberate China from its “fetters” of addiction:
Let the heathen teach us! let
Patriotic, fearless LIN!
Show us how by man is met,
Man-destroying, fatal sin.
See his nation vexed and sold
By the followers of Christ!
Mind, the dupe of British gold,—
Mind, unpurchased and unpriced.
China from her slumber wakes!
(British Christians freely scoff;)
China, strong in virtue, breaks
Hell’s infernal fetter off.35
Lest the point somehow be lost on the reader that the British were trying to force opium on the Chinese, a note explained, “The opium trade is the child of the East India Company’s adoption. They have employed all the resources of science, wealth, and unlimited power, to force it to its present height; and they have prostituted the means of government to an unlawful end.”
Britain’s hypocrisy in condemning slavery while fighting a war in support of opium traffickers was an echoing refrain in American attacks on the country’s conduct in China. As one Baptist clergyman declared (and as a British opponent of the opium trade would quote him in the House of Commons in 1843), “That the government of British India should be the prime abettors of this abominable traffic, is one of the grand wonders of the nineteenth century. The proud escutcheon of the nation, which declaims against the slave trade, is thus made to bear a blot broader and darker than any other in the Christian world.”36
There was more than one way to weigh the balance between slavery and opium, however. In the halls of Congress, John Calhoun, the proslavery senator from South Carolina, argued that the opium trade was in fact far worse than slavery. By his exaggerated reckoning, if Lin Zexu hadn’t interrupted the British smugglers they would have shipped enough opium in 1839 to supply “thirteen or fourteen millions of opium smokers, and to cause a greater destruction of life annually than the aggregate number of negroes in the British West India colonies, whose condition has been the cause of so much morbid sympathy.” Calhoun was every bit as critical of the Opium War as the abolitionists, but as a champion of slavery he turned their argument on its head. As he would have it, by enslaving and killing millions of Chinese with opium, the British had forfeited all right to pass judgment on the United States for adhering to what he saw as the comparatively minor and innocuous institution of chattel slavery.37
Remarkably, of all prominent Americans it was former president John Quincy Adams—no fan of the British or of slavery—who staked his reputation on endorsing the war. In a much more extensive and detailed version of Thomas De Quincey’s argument about honor and the kowtow, Adams insisted that the war had nothing to do with opium and everything to do with China’s disdain for free trade and its treatment of foreign ambassadors—as exemplified by its demand that Macartney and Amherst prostrate themselves before the emperor. “The cause of the war is the kowtow!” declared Adams in a speech for the Massachusetts Historical Society in the fall of 1841—“the arrogant and insupportable pretensions of China, that she will hold commercial intercourse with the rest of mankind, not upon terms of equal reciprocity, but upon the insulting and degrading forms of the relation between lord and vassal.”38 Adams believed that Britain had every right to force China to come to terms with the civilized world of free and equal commerce, and therefore the war was perfectly just and admirable. Opium, he maintained, had no more been the cause of the war in China than the tea thrown overboard into Boston Harbor had caused the American Revolution.
Adams’s speech was as remarkable for its vigor and decisiveness as it was for its absolute heresy in the eyes of the American public at the time, and even as he drafted it he knew how unpopular his views would be. In his diary he noted that the lecture was “so adverse to the prevailing prejudices of the time and place that I expect to bring down a storm upon my head worse than that with which I am already afflicted.”39 His apprehensions proved correct, and though he had intended to publish his speech in the North American Review, the journal’s editor refused to print it on account of the offensive views it contained. Adams was taken aback. “The excitement of public opinion and feeling by the delivery of this lecture far exceeds any expectation that I had formed,” he wrote, “although I did expect that it would be considerable.”40 Perhaps because he was so prominent, John Quincy Adams’s personal views on the Opium War would later be frequently mistaken as representing those of Americans at large. That, however, could hardly be further from the truth.
As for the American traders at Canton, in some ways they were the war’s greatest beneficiaries, for they would eventually get to share most of the advantages of Britain’s forced opening of China’s ports without any of the violence or the lasting stain on their national character. Americ
an merchants made hay as a neutral party during the war, their trade continuing with almost no competition during the years when the British were shut out of Canton by their hostilities. (Indeed, hiring American ships became for a while the only way for private British traders to get their cargoes into Canton, and they paid dearly for it.) Even after the Chinese government allowed regular trading to resume, the British suffered from resentment and glutted backlogs, and their cherished hope that the war would result in a grand surge in their China profits was quickly dashed—the year after the treaty was signed, a year desperate private British traders had counted on to make up for their extensive losses during the war, turned out to be one of the most disastrous trading seasons they had ever experienced in China (“and it served them right,” said one irate American).41
Beginning with Russell & Co.’s renunciation of the opium trade in February 1839, the Americans publicly distanced themselves from the British-dominated smuggling enterprise. With the war approaching, Robert Bennet Forbes led the Americans at Canton in petitioning Congress to send a naval force to protect them, but his group took pains to make clear that they had “no wish to see a revival of the opium trade,” and said they had voluntarily signed a pledge to abstain from dealing in the drug in the future.42 Heeding their call, the U.S. government sent a small squadron of two warships to China to look after them. But in a far cry from the British fleet that was so widely understood to be heading to China to protect a gang of drug smugglers, the American commodore carried instructions telling him to “impress upon the Chinese and their authorities that one great object of your visit is to prevent and punish the smuggling of opium into China.”43 The American squadron’s visit to China would be friendly and—in the most welcome contrast to the British of all—uneventful.
It was the Opium War—or rather, its successful conclusion—that finally prompted the United States to send its first diplomatic mission to China. Worrying that Americans might be left out of the newly opened ports, as soon as President John Tyler learned of the Treaty of Nanjing he asked Congress for an appropriation to send an emissary to China to ensure that Americans would share the same trading rights as the British. Tyler’s secretary of state, Daniel Webster, canvassed the New England China traders for their advice as to how to proceed, and John Murray Forbes responded to him on behalf of the merchants in Boston. Given the experiences of the Macartney and Amherst embassies, said Forbes, the United States should probably avoid sending regular gifts to Daoguang—they would simply be treated as “tribute” and would gain nothing. However, he did have an inspiration that the war might have opened a window of opportunity for the United States to get closer to the Qing government: the mission could, he believed, be an occasion for America to present itself to China as a friendly Western power, one that could act as a hedge against the aggressions of the British.44
Toward that end, Forbes suggested that the United States might offer to help China improve its military. Instead of more traditional gifts, he thought, the American commissioner should bring offerings of technology such as “scientific drawings and models of Steamboats, Railroads, Cannon, and perhaps of Fortifications.” A military engineer could travel with the commissioner, as well as a mechanic “thoroughly skilled in the latest mode of casting and especially boring cannon.” Given that the Opium War had surely left the Daoguang emperor wary of future clashes with Great Britain and the other European naval powers, he thought that if the United States could—“in a quiet way”—help China develop the capacity to defend itself against European arms, “it would open the eyes of the Emperor to the value of an Alliance with us more than the prospect of increasing their trade a hundred fold.”45 His advice struck home.
The leader of the mission, in fitting with the small, inbred nature of the American China community, was a Massachusetts congressman named Caleb Cushing who was a relative of Forbes’s older cousin John Perkins Cushing. Caleb Cushing was well aware of the history of Western diplomacy with China, and even brought along a copy of Lord Macartney’s journal as well as Henry Ellis’s account from the Amherst mission, but his own mission was meant to set America apart from those British precedents. So he did not bring hundreds of crates of manufactured goods to China as Macartney had done. He brought no giant lenses, no hot-air balloon, no lustres or diving bell. He did not bring any intricate watches or horse-drawn carriages. His would be a much more modest cargo, with entirely different implications. What he did bring, as per his instructions from President Tyler and Daniel Webster, and following on the advice of John Murray Forbes, was weaponry. He brought several “good American” Kentucky rifles to give to the Daoguang emperor, along with a collection of six-shooter pistols of varying sizes. He brought a working model of a war steamer (“armed and rigged”), along with a full model of its engine. He brought books on gunnery, fortifications, shipbuilding, and naval strategy.46
With China ostensibly humbled by the British, the U.S. commissioner did not have to come seeking favor. In contrast to King George III’s high-blown letter to Qianlong with its language of “tens of thousands and tens of thousands thousand years,” President Tyler’s message to Daoguang in 1843 was given to short, declarative sentences that might have been composed by a third grader. “I hope your health is good,” he told Daoguang. “China is a great empire, extending over a great part of the world. The Chinese are numerous. You have millions and millions of subjects.”47 By way of introducing his own country, Tyler named all twenty-six states in the Union, one by one, without comment. He expressed hope for peaceful trade. At the end, he signed off, “Your good friend, John Tyler.” He did not try to impress, but neither did he feel that he needed to. And while there would be no giant planetarium in Caleb Cushing’s cargo that had taken thirty years to build, he did travel to China equipped with an atlas of the world, and a small globe—whose purpose, as Daniel Webster explained, was “that the Celestials may see that they are not the ‘Central Kingdom.’”48
The Cushing mission was a success, the first diplomatic mission from any Western country to come away from China with a treaty signed in peace. One key to that success, though, was that it wasn’t really necessary; by the time Caleb Cushing got to China the Daoguang emperor had already issued an edict allowing Americans to trade in the treaty ports on the same terms as the British. Qianlong, it would appear, had been quite sincere when he told Macartney that he couldn’t give special trading privileges to the British because then, to be fair, he would have to give the same to all the other countries that came to trade. All the same, Cushing corralled Elijah Bridgman and two other American missionaries to be his interpreters and managed to badger his way into a series of negotiations with the imperial com missioner who had hashed out the Treaty of Nanjing with the British.
Cushing’s negotiations took place at a temple in Macao (he was just as happy not to go to Beijing, as it spared him having to decide whether to kowtow). The resulting treaty between the United States and China, signed in 1844 and known as the Treaty of Wanghia, granted Americans most of the same privileges that the British had fought their atrocious and demoralizing war to secure. There were a few variations, though, which highlighted the different flavor of the American mission. One was that Cushing agreed explicitly that Americans who dealt in opium would be fully liable to Chinese law and the U.S. government would do nothing to protect them. Another was that Cushing managed to negotiate a clause allowing Americans to study Chinese legally with native teachers.49 James Flint would have been pleased.
Nevertheless, as hopeful as the Cushing treaty might have seemed for a more equal friendship between China and the United States when viewed up close, it is somewhat more disconcerting from a wider perspective because it never would have been signed without the Opium War to precede it. But that was all part of a pattern, for the Americans in China had always enjoyed a parasitic relationship with their British rivals. Their presence at Canton in the early nineteenth century benefited the British not at all—indeed, one of the key re
asons for the termination of the East India Company’s monopoly, opening the era of British free trade at Canton that led ultimately to the war, had been that the Americans were sapping away Britain’s full share of the China market. At the same time, however, Britain inadvertently helped carve out the spaces in which the Americans worked, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the Opium War—Americans benefited so much from the war precisely because Britain, not they, fought it. So not only could they trade without competition in the midst of it, and gain entrance to new ports and markets after its end, but it also gave them an opening to present themselves to the Chinese as a friendly and peaceful Western power in hopes of undermining the British through diplomacy. This would set a pattern of its own for the nineteenth century—one where Americans could rail against Britain’s aggressive actions in China on moral grounds, while at the same time reaping great benefits from those very same actions. In essence, the more bellicose the British (and later the French) became in China, the more the Americans would profit as the neutral party. It was in their best interests for the British to keep up the very same behavior they so loudly denounced.
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