THE PERIOD following the War of 1812 was known, somewhat misleadingly, as the “era of good feelings.” True, the end of the war had stimulated a powerful resurgence of patriotism, Federalist New England sheepishly set aside its secessionist complaints, and Americans throughout the nation reveled in their ability to match the world’s greatest power in battle. But bipartisanship remained elusive. In the 1820s, the political rivalry between supporters of Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams would prove to be every bit as bitter and divisive as the old feud between Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians.
Yet in another sense the slogan was accurate. The end of war and the onset of national reconciliation enabled Americans to focus on internal economic development and overseas trade. Building on its earlier capitalist foundations, after 1815 the United States underwent something of a “market revolution”—or more properly a “communications revolution,” given that the true innovations of the period were in linking people across vast distances—a period of explosive economic growth based on the emergence of an increasingly sophisticated economy. The agricultural basis of the American economy had changed little since the colonial era, but now farmers were producing crops with the intention of selling them to distant consumers in American towns and cities and in Europe. To service this integrated national economy with a global reach, the federal and state governments built canals and roads; in the 1840s and ’50s, they built telegraph wires and railroads, propelling growth further still. Productivity and consumption soared as farms became more efficient and factories churned out high-quality finished goods. Fueling this expanding economy was a population that grew just as rapidly, mostly through increased immigration. Capitalism and immigration were of course nothing new in American history, but rarely before had they experienced such tremendous expansion in such a short space of time. America was entering the industrial age. By the outbreak of the Civil War, the United States was not only a prosperous and dynamic nation, it was also a powerful one.1
But in international relations, economic power does not automatically translate into military and political power. Though the United States was an economic power of the first rank by the mid-nineteenth century, it was at most a regional power in the international system. Still, while economic prosperity does not by itself bring international power, it does make it possible. Accordingly, in the decades before the Civil War, Americans became attracted to the idea of wielding their power abroad, if only in the Western Hemisphere. This was nothing new, but in the decades following the War of 1812, they broadened the scope of U.S. foreign policy in significant and enduring ways.2
That they did so between 1815 and 1861 was no simple accident of timing. Political figures such as John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay staked their careers on establishing the “American System,” an ambitious plan for internal progress with the federal government at the helm. Adams, Clay, and others promoted a crucial, guiding role for the government in assisting industry and building infrastructure such as canals, telegraph lines, and railroads. Though governmental reformism was not always popular—Andrew Jackson and the Democrats based much of their success in opposition to the American System—it attracted the support of many, especially in the Northern states where religious reform was most prevalent. Indeed, most Northern religious reformers were Whigs—the party of reform—while many Southerners and others hostile to a “benevolent” hegemony of Protestant reformers, especially Catholics, were Jacksonian Democrats. Though many within both parties were evangelicals, attitudes toward worship divided the faithful along political lines, with the churchgoing formalists of the North becoming Whigs and the autonomous, antiformalists of the South supporting the Democrats. Still, as we shall see, both parties supported activist foreign policies, albeit on very different terms.3
That they did so largely under the banner of Christ was no coincidence, either. As America itself changed economically and socially, American religion changed as well. After 1789, with the Enlightenment’s ambivalence toward religion fading from the collective memory, Christianity recaptured its dominance within the broader culture. In response to the market revolution, religion also began a period of innovation, as religious Americans confronted the problems of capitalism and strove to balance Christian selflessness with economic self-interest. So began a period Jon Butler calls the “antebellum spiritual hothouse.” And as the American religious landscape underwent its own dramatic changes, religious ideas about American war and diplomacy changed with it. The Second Great Awakening, whose fires of religious passion consumed American society in the first decades of the century and dwarfed its colonial predecessor in geographical reach and number of adherents, thrust evangelicalism into the vanguard of American religion. Alongside this evangelical “explosion,” as the historian Mark Noll describes it, arose a vast array of social movements that aimed to improve American society through moral reform. Encompassing temperance, education, prison conditions, and other aspects of personal moral betterment—the abolition of slavery above all, explored later in this chapter—the agenda of politically active evangelicals sought to remake the United States in a progressive Christian image.4
Their ability to do so and maintain theological consistency was due to the innovations of several Protestant ministers. The contribution of Nathaniel W. Taylor, a scholar of divinity at Yale, was probably most significant. Building upon the revisions of Edwardsean theology by Samuel Hopkins and Lyman Beecher, who were among the first clergy to push for benevolent social action, Taylor modified the doctrines of original sin and predestination that still formed the key tenets of Calvinism. In its place, his revised Calvinism, known as the New Haven Theology, reconciled predestination and inherent sin with people’s ability to act in a moral and godly way, what Taylor called “complete moral agency.” Taylor acknowledged that people were born with original sin, but he did not believe it was binding. In other words, people could transcend humanity’s original sin and work toward a more godly, humane society. If this was the free will of Arminianism, scourge of Puritans and Calvinists for centuries, then so be it. By finding room for both “the consistency of exhortation to immediate duty” and “the doctrine of the sinner’s dependence” on God, Taylor made it possible, indeed imperative, for Christians to make their world a better place. Another pioneer of American Protestantism, Charles G. Finney, a revivalist with an emotional style resembling that of George Whitefield, took this notion further by dispensing with predestination altogether. Finney’s Oberlin Theology, named for the college where he taught, promised that anybody could be saved so long as they accepted Christ into their heart and worked to apply Christian love to earthly society. The objective was to improve life on earth. Taylor and Finney agreed on little, but on this they concurred.5
Evangelical reformers believed they were in the vanguard of the most glorious movement humanity had witnessed since the days of Christ. They saw their efforts to improve America and the wider world as hastening the events foretold in the Book of Revelation, especially the millennium’s thousand years of peace, the second coming of Christ, and his victory over the Antichrist. They were millennialists, but more specifically they were postmillennialists who believed that Christ’s return would follow the millennium. In order to bring about the second coming, life on earth had to improve. Hence their belief that reform would not only extend Christian charity where it was most needed, but that reform would also usher in the most profound spiritual rebirth the world would ever see. Popularized by the Second Great Awakening and flowing from traditional American notions of providence, millennialism became one of the dominant religious currents of an unusually religious era. Its significance guided the thoughts and actions of clergy and laity, churches and circuit riders, Northerners and Southerners—indeed, even of the skeptical and irreligious, so pervasive was the belief that “America” represented the culmination of historical progress.6
Other Christian reformers were not so concerned with theological consistency or the end of the world because they rejected conventional Protestant theology—particularly evangelical emotionalism—outright. These Christian rationalists, Unitarians and Universalists, had broken away from New England Congregationalism. Just like many evangelicals, Unitarians could trace their theological and cultural roots back to the original Puritan colonists. They saw their faith in Enlightenment terms, as a reflection of scientific principles guided by the spirit of problem solving. Unitarian reformers such as William Ellery Channing mounted their own drive to bring about America’s moral improvement.7
Even further along the religious spectrum stood the Transcendentalists. A radical experiment in communal, spiritual utopianism that had split from Unitarianism, Transcendentalism celebrated the promise and potential of America even as it decried Americans’ reliance on slavery, ill treatment of Indians, and tolerance of war. It was, in fact, a spiritualist rebellion against the cold rationalism of the Unitarians. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once complained to his wife, “The Unitarian church forgets that men are poets.” Transcendentalism embodied a campaign for serious social reform as much as it represented a literary school or spiritual movement. And though most Transcendentalists rejected the divinity of Christ, there was no doubting their spiritual core and application of Christian ethics and love to the corruptions of a swiftly modernizing America. Any consideration of the Transcendentalists without reference to their Christian origins and context would be incomplete.8
WHETHER THEY BE evangelical or millenarian, Unitarian or Transcendentalist, Protestant reformers included the application of Christian love to foreign policy as well as domestic society. Foremost were two ideas—one very old, pacifism, and one relatively new, humanitarian intervention, though it was not yet called that—grounded in the belief that Christian, republican America stood for something different, something better in the world.
Pacifism had been present in America since the colonial era. In the 1790s, Benjamin Rush had proposed a faith-based Department of Peace to balance the War Department—only to undermine himself by later supporting the War of 1812. After the war, Christian pacifism became more acceptable to a wider body of people, including the major Protestant denominations, which in turn began founding local peace societies. With the establishment of regional and national organizations, such as the American Peace Society in 1828 and the more radical New England Non-Resistance Society in 1838, the crusade to end war found a wider audience. Not every member of the peace societies was an evangelical. Unitarians, the evangelicals’ bitter rivals, and of course Quakers were active participants. But almost everyone was a practicing Protestant of one sort or another. In conjunction with other religious reform agendas of the era, international peace seemed a natural fit: it would eliminate the major source of violence in the world and reflect America’s Christian virtues in the process. More than that, pacifism suited the era’s great missionary endeavors: if war really was unchristian, then the spread of the Christian faith would spread peace.9
The link between international peace and Protestant missions was not coincidental. Most ministers believed that the spread of universal Christian love would also bring about universal peace. In yet another American formulation of democratic peace theory, Protestants argued that true Christians would not wage war on one another. As one Baptist put it, the acceptance of Christianity “puts a restraint upon those passions which prompt to war.” Instead, preached a Boston minister, “a higher Christian morality will ultimately render this scourge of the human race universally unpopular and odious.” In an oft-repeated 1830 sermon about everlasting judgment, a young Ralph Waldo Emerson, then a Unitarian minister, promised that war had been condemned by Jesus and thus one day “shall come to an end.”10
To Christian peace activists, it was self-evident that war was a sin “contrary to the gospel.” Christianity was a religion of peace—the world’s only religion of peace, claimed some—but Christians had lost their way in applying its true principles. War, William Ellery Channing proclaimed shortly after the War of 1812, was the “worst vestige of barbarism, this grossest outrage on the principles of Christianity.” It brought only material and spiritual destruction and corrupted the innocence of young men by apprenticing them in the “trade [of] butchery.” It impoverished communities and nations and tore apart families. And, Channing said, it eroded the religious and republican foundations upon which American democracy rested. Channing’s Unitarian colleague Theodore Parker agreed. “War is a violation of Christianity. If war be right, then Christianity is wrong,” he preached. “Nothing is so hostile to a true democracy as war.” War brought no benefit, only the capacity to destroy—on this, all peace activists agreed. After tallying up the total costs of America’s wars between 1776 and 1815, a writer for the Family Christian Almanack concluded that the vast sums could have been better spent “to furnish every family in the world with a Bible; to provide the means of common education for all its children, and to support one minister of the Gospel for every thousand souls.” In Rochester, New York, George Washington Montgomery, a Universalist minister, advanced the liberal goal of disarmament, claiming that arms were a cause rather than a symptom of tensions. If nations got rid of their weapons, they could do away with war altogether.11
Reform evangelicals were an especially interdenominational, ecumenical lot. They were more interested in societal improvement than doctrinal disputes—indeed, their preoccupation with the here and now at the expense of the hereafter was one of the main criticisms leveled at them by religious conservatives. Reform-minded evangelicals loosely, and unofficially, joined together in an informal “Evangelical United Front.” Under this banner, evangelicals of most denominations threw their energies together behind a common cause, be it temperance, education, or peace. When combined, their ecumenism (an effort to bring denominations and religions together) and their pacifism led them to the innovative conclusion that the act of coming together would itself facilitate peace. If they resolved to talk instead of fight, an anonymous pacifist with the American Peace Society argued, “they can as easily find some peaceable method of settling their difficulties, as professors of religion find a way to settle difficulties in the church, without resorting to personal violence.” International arbitration would be one method of bringing countries together, or better still “a congress of nations” that “might take the place of war.” This dream, said a prominent Tennessee Baptist, was “the desire of all nations.” In New England, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Methodists joined together to call for the convening of a Congress of Nations to settle international disputes, and perhaps even prevent them before they occurred. Similarly, Elihu Burritt of the Christian Citizen magazine joined with Theodore Parker and the evangelical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison in an attempt to establish a League of Universal Brotherhood. They would take some time to germinate, but the seeds of collective security and international organization had been planted in the American mind.12
Conservative Christians, on the other hand, criticized the peace societies for paying too much attention to earthly concerns and not enough to more important spiritual matters. The pacifists’ focus on improving life in the here and now—and on themselves—was little more than “idolatry,” one critic charged. Benevolent campaigns to eradicate war were hopelessly idealistic because they tried to improve humanity without paying attention to the underlying causes of original sin and human depravity. They “aim to do away the evil by striking at the branches—not at the root.” This was an important criticism, one of the first salvos in what would become a running dispute between liberals who sought earthly reform as a means to grace and conservatives who retained the traditionally Calvinist view that grace was God’s alone to dispense and could only come through faith in Christ. The dispute would affect all faith-based plans for reform for at least the next century, including America’s role in matters of international war and peace.13
DESPITE SUCH CRITICS, pacifism had introduced a powerful moral voice into antebellum debates about America’s proper role in the world. But it was not the only voice stemming from reformist Christian moralism. If pacifism was a very old Christian idea, the other to have a significant impact was rather modern: humanitarian intervention. It was every bit as radical as the peace movement but decidedly not as pacifistic. Occasionally the two groups overlapped—humanitarian intervention, after all, did not always have to mean military intervention. But most advocates of humanitarian intervention did not fool themselves into thinking that military force would never be used to uphold the natural, democratic rights of oppressed foreigners.
The earliest colonists had occasionally applied concepts similar to humanitarian intervention when it suited their material or political interests. In sending an armed force into Rhode Island to snuff out a sect of heretics, John Winthrop spoke of protecting persecuted minorities and extending the rule of law to an otherwise lawless region. Similar language pervaded the wars against various Indian tribes in the colonial era, from Pequots to Iroquois. But the concept of genuine humanitarianism did not really emerge until Americans discovered the plight of the Greeks in the 1820s. Since the Renaissance, Greece had held a very special place in the Western imagination as the birthplace of Western civilization. Virtually all educated Americans were steeped in classical thought, and Greek ideas about democracy exerted a strong influence upon the Founders. But by then, Greece was a Christian province of the Islamic Ottoman Empire. In 1821, when the Greeks rebelled against Ottoman rule, the call for America to help was difficult to ignore. “Greek fever” swept across the United States.14
Greece was not only the cradle of civilization; it was a Christian land under the oppressive thumb of Muslim Ottoman Turks, and thus a battle, declared a Harvard classics professor, of “the cross versus the crescent.” Greeks lived under both civil and religious tyranny, a plight Americans believed they knew much about from their days in the British Empire. Fittingly, popular support for Greek independence was emotional and overwhelming. A women’s group in Brooklyn, for instance, erected a giant cross emblazoned with a slogan, “Sacred to the Cause of Greece,” that was visible in Manhattan. Freeing the Greeks from their tyranny would enable American missionaries to spread the gospel in Muslim lands. Missionaries, the Reverend Sereno Dwight argued, “will feel their way into the farthest retreats of Mohammedan darkness.” It would also extend republican democracy at an important crossroads between two bastions of authoritarianism, Europe and the Ottoman Empire. “Humanity, policy, religion—all demand it,” war hero and future president William Henry Harrison declared in summing up the case for American intervention. “The star-spangled banner must wave in the Aegean.”15
Perhaps no American pushed for humanitarian intervention as vigorously as Daniel Webster. A congressman from Massachusetts in 1823, and later a senator and secretary of state, Webster deployed all of his famed rhetorical skills in an attempt to get the United States to midwife the birth of Greek independence. Webster was thoroughly grounded in the orthodox Congregationalism that still typified New England’s spiritual and cultural life. Though he was not an evangelical, Christian imagery, phrases, and ethics infused his oratory with a crusading, moralistic zeal. Webster based his argument on behalf of the Greeks partly on a universal, natural right to liberty, but his most stirring rhetoric came in contrasting civilized Christian Greece with its barbaric Muslim oppressor. The Greeks, he declared to Congress, were suffering “a bitter and unending persecution of their religion” and the “habitual violation of their rights of person and property.” With its blend of religious and civil liberty with property rights, this was about as strong a case as an American could make. Yet Webster continued. He pointed to the lack of separation of church and state in the Ottoman Empire, with the “religious and civil code of the state being both fixed in the Koran, and equally the object of an ignorant and furious faith.” And he argued, perhaps lost in the moment and forgetting about America’s own slaves, that nowhere else was freedom so violated. “In short, the Christian subjects of the Sublime Porte feel daily all the miseries which flow from despotism, from anarchy, from slavery, and from religious persecution …. In the whole world, Sir, there is no such oppression felt as by the Christian Greeks.” Webster concluded with a flourish. The Greeks
stretch out their arms to the Christian communities of the earth, beseeching them, by a generous recollection of their ancestors, by the consideration of their desolated and ruined cities and villages, by their wives and children sold into an accursed slavery, by their blood, which they seem willing to pour out like water, by the common faith, and in the name, which unites all Christians, that they would extend to them at least some token of compassionate regard.16
But while nearly all Americans wanted to save the Greeks, not everyone believed it was America’s task to do so. In fact, while Reverend Dwight and others hoped to evangelize the Holy Land by going to war alongside the Greeks, missionaries themselves feared that angering the Turks would bring an end to American missions within the Ottoman Empire, which covered almost the entire Middle East. Their experiences in Greece, moreover, convinced many Protestant missionaries that the Greek Orthodox Church was just as bad as the Roman Catholic Church. American business interests, especially the largely New England–based merchant marine, feared losing access to their lucrative trade with the Ottomans. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams was sensitive to both constituencies. While he agreed with the morality of the Greek cause, he felt that American strategic and economic interests were even more important. Thus while he did nothing to stop Americans from privately supporting the Greek cause, officially the U.S. government did little more than mouth anticolonial platitudes about freedom and democracy. Adams partly defused the emotional furor over Greece by penning an 1823 presidential speech that reiterated the independent, unilateralist principles of Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address and his father’s 1776 Model Treaty. Later known as the Monroe Doctrine, Adams’s speech warned Europeans not to interfere in the Western Hemisphere’s affairs, such as the independence revolutions in Latin America, just as it promised that the United States would not interfere in European quarrels.17
The case of Greece illustrated both the uses and limited influence of religion in U.S. foreign policy: while it introduced Americans to humanitarian interventionism, it also revealed that when they clashed, presidents and diplomats would usually prioritize national interests ahead of national ideals. This was true of pacifism’s influence as well. Religion demonstrated utility, but not control; it could shape foreign policy, but not determine it. Yet as we shall see, it continued to push American foreign relations in a moralistic, crusading, and sometimes humanitarian direction that helped establish a tradition of what was and was not desirable in U.S. foreign policy.
FEW INITIATIVES, secular or religious, encompassed issues of war, peace, and empire as directly and comprehensively as overseas missions. Combining virtually all aspects of moral improvement, from temperance to education to peace, and applying them on a global scale, missionaries were the ultimate agents of benevolent reform. Unique among New World colonizers, Americans did not have much of a missionary tradition; aside from the limited but successful missions of Quakers and Moravians, colonial missionaries to the Indians had by and large met with more failure than success. Nonetheless, in the nineteenth century, as American power and piety grew in equal measure, the missionary enterprise grew with them. Most denominations sent missionaries abroad, but as with many innovations in American religion the impetus came mostly from New England Protestants, specifically Congregationalists. In 1810, they set up the interdenominational American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and headquartered it in Boston. The ABCFM quickly became one of the best-funded mission boards in the world, sending thousands of Protestant missionaries to live and proselytize all over the world. Moreover, missionaries, including Catholic missionaries, also continued to seek converts within the United States, especially among immigrants and in the western borderlands that were increasingly coming under U.S. sovereignty and settlement.18
Protestant missionaries were not simply Americans abroad. Their stated aim was to convert foreign peoples to the gospel—specifically the Protestant version of the gospel, as many of their targets were other Christians, especially in the Middle East where Islamic and Ottoman law forbade the conversion of Muslims under pain of death. Sustained by their consuming and crusading faith and an allure of mysterious foreign cultures—what H. Richard Niebuhr called the missionaries’ unusual “love of the distant”—American missionaries were a highly motivated group whose sole aim was to spread the blessings of civilization to “savage” lands. Motivation had to be high, for missionary life was tough. Mission death rates, mostly from disease but occasionally violence, were often as high as a third; the median life expectancy of some missions in the Ottoman Empire was as low as thirty-nine years. “You go where death may soon arrest you,” an 1835 ABCFM handbook for prospective missionaries warned; “where illness may unnerve your strength; where an exhausting climate, without your accustomed advantages of health, almost invariably produces some degree of bodily languor and mental depression.” Missionaries would also have to contend with the supposedly corrupting influence of foreign cultures that had not yet been enlightened by Protestantism and Western science. They would be confronted with “perverted notions of right and wrong,” “aversion of mind to objects which demand sacrifices and efforts, and yield no visible advantage”—the stupidity of sloth, in other words—“blind attachment to their superstitions,” and “rooted and cherished habits of iniquity” in addition to the usual “dishonesty, deceit, treachery, cruelty, tyranny, and extreme selfishness” found among “savage” peoples. Why then did missionaries do it? Because, the handbook’s author revealed, “I know of no life more desirable than that of a devoted missionary.”19
The missionary’s difficult life was desirable because it pursued the most glorious cause: reforming and soul-saving the entire world. Nothing could make a committed American Protestant of the era happier than this almighty application of Almighty love. Throughout Asia and the Middle East, antebellum missionaries built libraries, medical centers, and schools; later in the century, they founded hospitals and universities. They taught the English language and imparted republican and democratic theories of government. Secular reform, then, was an essential part of the missionaries’ proselytizing agenda. Yet their influence overall, especially in the Middle East, was rather limited, mostly because their numbers were at first so few and their foreign audiences not especially captivated. Only in Hawaii, and later China, did they enjoy much success—and even then, success was limited by low numbers, adverse local conditions, and competition from missionaries of other Christian faiths and nations.20
Almost by definition, missionaries were expansionists; many were also nationalists. They were often the first Americans to reach a foreign region and were usually its only permanent American residents. In the Middle East, missionaries traveled under the explicit protection of the U.S. flag, carrying with them an 1842 letter from Secretary of State Daniel Webster saying so; a decade later, in 1852, he extended and enhanced protections when American Protestant missionaries came under pressure in Orthodox Greece. In Hawaii, missionaries were responsible for bringing the islands into the American orbit at the expense of imperial rivals, France in particular. They were therefore a part of America’s emerging globalism, its initial search for trade, prestige, and strategic influence. Claimed an early missionary during the Napoleonic Wars, the “world is in arms and opposed to our national prosperity and existence. We must, therefore, like the Israelites, fight our way to empire, in opposition to the power, and policy, and disengaging principles of the most formidable nations on earth.” No matter how delicate their movements or sensitive their message, their profession was innately domineering and invasive: missionaries sought to change foreign peoples, to change their very cultures and identities, and condemned them as forever damned if they resisted. They believed in America’s righteousness and worked to bring about its manifest destiny. One missionary saw his goal as “reforming the world,” while another spoke of fulfilling “God’s plan for this world’s recovery.”21
And yet even the most zealous American missionaries were not necessarily deliberate agents of U.S. foreign policy. They believed in republican democracy and America’s righteousness, but they believed in the divinity of Christ and the power of God even more. They usually did not see a conflict between the two, but when the needs of Americanism and Christendom collided, almost all chose church over state. They were of course Americans themselves, and so could not avoid implanting American culture and custom alongside the gospel. Yet though they may have been nationalists, they were not always nativist. Forget books and proper grammar, an American in Beirut advised a fellow missionary, and “just learn the language as the people use it.” Moreover, the horizon of the missionary vision stretched far beyond the interests of the U.S. government. Protestant churches in the United States avidly followed American missionary activity, but they saw themselves in partnership with Protestant missions of other nationalities: Danish, Dutch, German, and especially British. Declared a Presbyterian missionary from Virginia, the “rapid aggrandisement of Protestant nations, both in Europe and America has already wrought wonders for the people that sat in darkness,” bringing them “pure religion” and “a brighter day.”22
This was also the view of Rufus Anderson, the ABCFM’s senior secretary and the nation’s leading theorist of missions. Anderson naturally supported “the conversion of the heathen,” but he also admonished American missionaries not to impose their own cultural or political views. The goal, he said, was to convert foreign peoples to Christ, not America. Missions, he instructed his charges in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), were “exclusively evangelical work and no alliance with secular powers can be otherwise than injurious.” Accordingly, Anderson instructed his missionaries to work in the local language and not teach locals English; nor should they seek to impose American cultural or political values; and nor should they assume themselves to be superior to the locals. “As a missionary society, and as a mission,” Anderson wrote missionaries in Hawaii in 1847, “we cannot proceed on the assumption, however plausibly stated, that the Saxon is to supersede the native races.” If a missionary had a political goal, it was to encourage local independence, not American domination. Missionaries should therefore aim to train promising locals in the pastorate, ordain them, and then get on with their work; when this task was done, missionaries should leave and let this new, local offshoot of Christianity flourish in isolation. As the historian William Hutchison writes, Anderson’s theory of missions was amazingly straightforward: “The Kingdom of God is a seed. The missionary is a planter. The missionary plants the seed. The missionary leaves. Yankee go home!”23
Amos Starr Cooke, an ordinary missionary, reflected the everyday dilemmas between the sacred and the secular and church and nation because he lived with them every day. An earnest, ABCFM-sponsored Congregationalist missionary to Hawaii, Cooke totally devoted himself to his two main concerns, classroom teaching and gospel preaching. Like many of his fellow New Englanders, he was a Calvinist who believed in the guiding hand of God’s providence. “I am more and more convinced that I am in the path of duty,” he assured his worried sister Mary in Danbury, Connecticut. But though he spoke of missing “our beloved America,” he also told her that where “God would have us there, is our home.” Amos complained about the “ignorance” of the Hawaiians, especially their rulers, but he reveled in his young pupils’ progress. He worried most of all that “Heathens have souls, and those souls are perishing.” The Hawaiians were as capable as Americans, or any people, of receiving God’s grace: this was his preoccupation, and he never wrote of nationalist concerns. But Cooke was not oblivious to international politics and acknowledged that the Hawaiians could not keep Western domination indefinitely at bay. He did not favor American annexation, and anyway doubted that it was possible. He disapproved of British imperialism, but disapproved of French Catholics even more and hoped that if anybody colonized Hawaii it would be Britain. His preference, however, was for the islands to remain independent, and, if that proved impossible, that they be administered by a consortium of all three countries, France included, which would ensure Hawaiian sovereignty and appease the great powers. While Cooke disapproved of the Royal Navy’s gunboat diplomacy, which he witnessed in action in 1843, he was under no nationalistic illusion that his country behaved any better: “It makes an American’s blood run cold as he sees what is doing,” he told Mary, “tho’ when he thinks of the poor Indian and slave of his own beloved land, his mouth is shut.” Similarly, Cooke lamented the intimidating, militaristic presence of the U.S. Navy in Honolulu Harbor. When, he plaintively asked a friend in Danbury, “will they cease to carry instruments of death, and carry Bibles and missionaries” instead?24
Antebellum missionaries such as Amos Starr Cooke saw themselves as marching under the banner not of the American interest, but an even older Protestant interest that had moved the spirits of George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards a century before. They were part of a transatlantic evangelical community in which cooperation with British missionaries was more likely than it was with American Catholics or U.S. diplomats. Missionaries, to be sure, spread Americanism wherever they went, but it was not always their intention to do so. Often their political influence was inadvertent. In Armenia and Syria, for example, missionary schools inculcated Armenian and Arab nationalism that only decades later would lead to rebellion against Ottoman rule. Missionary policy supported local independence and opposed foreign imperialism, including American. “For a long time,” a hostile French diplomat in Beirut reported back to the Quai d’Orsay, “I have sought to determine the objectives of the Americans in coming to evangelize here. At long last I am persuaded that their sole motivation was religious propaganda. I simply do not perceive any ulterior political motive.” Still, along with merchants they played a crucial role in expanding American horizons beyond the North American continent, indeed, beyond the Western Hemisphere. But unlike merchants, they brought with them sanctified ideals about civil and religious liberty and a crusading mentality to see them successfully exported. They introduced Americans to the world and the world to America. Christian exceptionalists to their core, they were also America’s accidental imperialists.25