THE BRAZENNESS DISPLAYED BY AMERICAN MISSIONARIES in challenging Porter was evidence of the emerging alliance between church leaders and decision makers in the United States. The missionary movement had grown significantly since the early 1820s, when its first emissaries to the Middle East, Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk, failed to attract converts and died forsaken deaths. Even the modest accomplishments of Fisk’s successors—Isaac Bird, William Goodell, and Eli Smith—in establishing schoolhouses in Syria could not account for the missionaries’ ability, a mere ten years later, to impact American policy toward the Middle East. The process through which small groups of women and men who journeyed thousands of miles into inhospitable territories managed to transform their country’s relationship with an entire region and profoundly alter the region itself, is a remarkable story. It is a saga steeped in hardship and blood.
Stations of the Cross and the Sun
Through their schools, the missionaries had gained a foothold in Syria by 1827, but the ultimate goal of evangelizing Palestine remained elusive. That year, however, the American Board and the Boston Female Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews decided to launch another mission to Jerusalem and, to spearhead it, chose a thirty-year-old pastor from the Berkshires named Josiah Brewer. “Marked,” according to one of his professors, “with mildness, modesty, good sense and unaffected piety,” Brewer was charged with succeeding where Parson and Fisk had failed by establishing a permanent station in the Holy City and initiating the ingathering of the Jews. “Our Pilgrim mothers [would] have exulted…had they foreseen that…their daughters should be sending back the gospel to Jerusalem!” Brewer declaimed as he departed Massachusetts, confident of his ability to supplant “the blood-red flag of the crescent with…the white banner…of peace,” on Jerusalem’s walls.
Peace, however, was the last thing Brewer discovered in Palestine. He landed in the country just after the disastrous Ottoman defeat at Navarino in 1827, portending the empire’s dissolution. The vast majority of Palestinian Muslims at the time still viewed themselves as devoted Ottoman subjects and still considered all Westerners, whether Americans or Europeans, as “Franks” who threatened the Islamic state. Brewer’s attempts to remind the natives that the U.S. Navy was not even present at Navarino and that America in fact respected Ottoman sovereignty proved ineffectual. Even less convincing were the protestations of goodwill toward Islamic culture that he uttered while distributing New Testaments. Evicted from two Galilean villages, lice-ridden and enervated by disease, Brewer finally curtailed his mission. He hobbled back to Boston in disgrace.1
The American Board nevertheless remained hopeful that some kind of station could eventually be erected in Jerusalem. Board elders pointed to improved conditions in the Holy Land since 1831, the year that Muhammad Ali, furious over the Ottomans’ refusal to compensate him for his losses at Navarino, sent Egyptian troops to occupy Syria and Palestine. The modernizing Egyptians granted unprecedented privileges to the non-Muslim millets of the area. Eager to take advantage of this enhanced situation, the board authorized the launching of a new Palestine mission. Chosen to lead it were William and Eliza Thomson, a young couple who had met in Princeton, New Jersey, where he was studying Bible and she was teaching school. The two married in 1833 and promptly volunteered as evangelists.
Not all of Palestine’s inhabitants welcomed Muhammad Ali’s reforms, however. The Muslim majority deeply resented the equal rights that Egypt had granted to the local Christians and Jews and the openness it showed to foreigners. Anger at the occupiers escalated and then, following attempts to tax Muslim peasants and draft them into the Egyptian army, exploded in a violent revolt. The bloodshed peaked in Palestine in 1834, just as the Thomsons reached Jerusalem.
Eliza was then nine months pregnant and unable to flee the city. William Thomson felt he had no choice but to leave her behind and try to secure help in Jaffa. “I have not heard one syllable from Mrs. T. since I left,” he fretted, haunted by rumors of atrocities. Eliza, in fact, had bolted herself indoors, panicked by the “roar of cannon, falling walls, the shrieks of the neighbors, the terror of servants and constant expectation of massacre.” In spite of this trauma, she managed to give birth to a boy, Thomas. The father returned on July 22, following a column of Egyptian reinforcements, only to find Jerusalem in ruins and his wife desperately ill. She died two weeks later.
“The wreck of a country, and the dregs of a people,” Thomson wrote despondently of Palestine. “The Jordan would scarcely be dignified with the name of river in America.” His caviling could not, however, deter other missionaries from trying to work in Jerusalem. George Whiting and Betsey Tilden arrived shortly after Eliza Thomson’s death, but neither could endure the privations. The numinous Palestine of the Bible was revealed to be “a land of devils,” in the opinion of the veteran missionary Isaac Bird, “no longer the blessed but accursed.” By the end of 1834, the American Board was finally compelled to admit that “not a single soul” in the Holy Land had been “brought to a sense of sin, and converted to God,” and resolved to abandon all futher expeditions to Palestine. Henceforth, the missionaries’ attention would be directed elsewhere in the Middle East, especially around the area of Mount Lebanon.2
The Bird and Goodell families continued to expand their schools and build new ones in and around Beirut, but conditions in the city began to deteriorate following the Egyptian invasion of 1831. Fighting erupted between pro-Egyptian Maronites and the Druze who remained loyal to the Porte, producing crossfires so intense that the Americans feared to step outdoors or even sit by open windows. The Maronites also exploited the chaos to press their anathemas against Protestantism and their opposition to evangelical schools. “The Turks…exhibit more excellent traits of character than the Christians,” protested William Goodell. “The idea of not acting dishonorably seems very rarely indeed to visit the bosom of a Christian.” Isolated and physically threatened, the missionaries concluded that they could no longer hold out in Lebanon. Beginning with the Bird family, evacuated by an Austrian schooner, the entire community fled.
The situation in Syria and Palestine had become insufferable for Americans, but even in Smyrna, a largely Christian city and the missionary’s gateway to the Middle East, the atmosphere had grown adverse. The first attempt to establish a station in Smyrna, by the amateur mountaineer Elnathan Gridley in 1826, failed after the young preacher went climbing, caught pneumonia, and died. Gridley’s replacement was Daniel Temple, painted by one biographer as “gloomy, austere, [and] sanctimonious,” a diehard who had worked his way up from rural poverty to scholarships at Dartmouth and Andover. But nothing in New England had prepared Temple for the Middle East, where consumption quickly killed his wife and two of their four children. The devastated missionary returned to America, together with his surviving sons. “The thought of their being educated in this deeply depraved and ungodly part of the world is truly distressing,” he wrote.
Temple nevertheless managed to overcome his revulsion to the Middle East and in 1833 he once again sailed for Smyrna, this time with a new wife and a printing press. His Bibles and textbooks were soon being studied in a school for Christian girls established by Joshua Brewer—the same Joshua Brewer who had retreated from Palestine five years earlier—now sponsored by the Ladies Missionary Society of New Haven. “If then the sword should not open a door…to the Christian preacher in Mahometan lands, may we not hope that the gradual progress of civilization will?” Brewer asked. The answer seemed clearer by 1838, by which time over two hundred girls had enrolled in the school.3
The missionaries’ success in Smyrna remained exceptional, however, and the lack of even basic security precluded evangelizing efforts elsewhere in Ottoman lands. The American Board accordingly set its sights on a region beyond the empire’s borders, on the Lake Urmia district of northwest Persia and on the community of Nestorian (Assyrian) Christians rumored to be living there. The task of accessing this nebulous realm fell to Harrison Gray Otis Dwight, a recent Andover graduate, and to the seasoned Lebanon missionary Eli Smith. The men rendezvoused in Smyrna in May 1830, disguised themselves in turbans and robes, and set out to become “the first Americans who have trod the soil of Armenia.”
Before them, however, lay a trail as travail ridden as any across the American frontier. Heading eastward to Erzurum, the pair trudged for three weeks through a waterless countryside without encountering a single village. The slight and scholarly Smith complained of having to sleep in stables with “every species of dirt, vermin and litter,” and of waking up rheumy eyed and feverish. Stricken with cholera outside of Tiflis, he was soon unable to walk and had to be strapped to a donkey cart by Dwight. In March, however, the Americans at last attained their goal and staggered into Urmia.
The city, compared with the turbulent Beirut and Jerusalem, at first seemed Edenic. Under the relatively open-minded Qajar dynasty, Persia was then experiencing an interlude of internal stability and freedom from the great-power encroachments of Russia and Britain. In Urmia, the missionaries found that the government did not interfere with their preaching and that the Nestorians’ Bible-based theology was not unlike their own. “I felt a stronger desire to settle among them at once…than among any people I have ever seen,” Smith blithely reported.
Settling in, the Americans erected a schoolhouse where forty students were soon receiving instruction in math, English composition, and Psalms. New missionaries arrived to reinforce the station—Justin and Charlotte Perkins in 1832 and, three years later, Asahel and Judith Grant. A native of Utica, New York, the twenty-eight-year-old Asahel was reputedly a swarthy man of medium height and unusual energy, “his eye bright, his aspect friendly, with a dash of enterprise and enthusiasm.” He was also a country physician who inaugurated what would become an exalted missionary tradition, providing free medical care to Middle Eastern populations. In his first year in Urmia, Grant treated ten thousand patients. He fulsomely recalled, “The sick, the lame, and the blind gathered round by the scores and hundreds, and my fame soon spread abroad through the surrounding country.”
Grant’s endurance enabled him not only to care for the sick but also to explore the wastelands as far south as Kurdish Mesopotamia, braving bandits and punishing terrain, in search of more Nestorians. Back in the United States in October 1840, the doctor assured the board’s commissioners that the Urmia station was thriving and that a new mission should be undertaken in the region of what is today called Iraq. The commissioners agreed and presently dispatched Colby C. Mitchell and Abel Hindsdale, together with their wives, to Mosul.4
American evangelists had registered their first unqualified Middle Eastern triumph, but then multiple disasters struck. Blinded and deranged by a sandstorm, the Mitchells succumbed to typhoid fever, and though the Hindsdales managed to reach Mosul, they arrived too debilitated to work. Disease also claimed the lives of Elizabeth Dwight, her son John, and all five of the Perkinses’ children. Charlotte Perkins, suffering from epilepsy, returned to the United States. Sarah Smith, Eli’s wife, drowned in a shipwreck near Cyprus, and his second wife, Mary Ward Chapin, died of dysentery.
“Enfeebled health and shortened life are among the sacrifices necessary to the work of the missions,” Eli Smith confessed, referring not only to Urmia but to the entire Middle East. Women, often weakend by childbirth, were especially vulnerable “I sometimes fear that this sickness is a judgment upon me for improving so little my great blessings,” wrote Mary Van Lennep, who in 1843 left Hartford, Connecticut, for the barrens of Anatolia. “I try to pray that…I may be willing to suffer.” Missionaries were subject to physical attack by brigands and vigilantes and accorded only negligible protection by the Ottomans. “A man’s hat is always more safe in America than a man’s head is in Turkey,” William Goodell quipped. Disease, however, remained the most efficient killer, responsible for a death rate among American missionaries in the Middle East that exceeded that of settlers on the western frontier. A third of all missionaries who left the United States for the Middle East between 1821 and 1846 died while on duty, most of them shortly after arriving. “The hour is near when you expect to leave the shores of your native land with the probability that you will never see them again,” departing young seminarians were told. Mary Van Lennep was dead within a year.
What had begun as a glimmering vision of stations in the Middle Eastern sun had produced little but suffering and death—stations, rather, of the cross. Not even Asahel Grant was spared. In a short span of time, the doctor lost his wife and two of their three children. He nevertheless managed to retain his faith and to erect the mission near Mosul, but this, too, came to ruin. Late in the spring of 1843, Kurds and Turks attacked the Nestorians there, killing eight hundred and banishing thousands more. Grant rejected charges that the missionaries had provoked the massacre by encouraging the community to seek independence from Muslim rule. “Let us have the great consolation that we have been instrumental, in some measure, of awakening an interest and a spirit of prayer,” Grant declared, struggling to comfort the Nestorians and also, perhaps, himself.
How, in the face of all these ordeals and defeats, did the missionaries come to enjoy such influence in the United States and, to a remarkable extent, determine the country’s policies overseas? What factors enabled these Americans to recover from their agonizing setbacks, to replenish their ranks, and to rebuild all that had been devastated? “You Americans think that you can do everything…that money can buy or that strength can accomplish. But you cannot conquer Almighty God,” an Arab guide taunted one newly arrived missionary.5 The preacher certainly agreed that God could not be vanquished, but determination and wealth might still, he believed, achieve miracles, especially in the Middle East.
Resurrection
The turnaround for the missionaries began in 1840 when the European powers, fearing for the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, forced the Egyptian troops out of Syria and Palestine. Relative stability was restored to the area, but without reducing the rights that the minorities had achieved under Muhammad Ali. On the contrary, in gratitude to the Europeans for retrieving his lands, Sultan Abdul Mejid pledged to respect the “liberty, property, and honor of every individual subject, without reference to his religious creed.” Foreign nationals were now permitted to reside permanently in Jerusalem and the empire’s Protestants were finally recognized as a legitimate millet. For the missionaries, these events were nothing less than the handiwork of God. Exclaimed one of them, “Whereas, but a few years ago, there still existed…an obstinate bigotry and unrelenting spirit of persecution…there is now perfect toleration!”
The easing of restrictions had an immediate impact on missionary activities in Syria and Mount Lebanon. The Birds and the Goodells were able to reestablish themselves in Beirut and to welcome a new generation of evangelists, led by William Eddy and Henry Jessup. Returning to Lebanon from Urmia, Eli Smith began an Arabic translation of the Bible and developed the first Arabic-language movable type, “American Arabic.” Within a decade, Smith’s presses were producing some fifty thousand volumes per year in fourteen local languages, including translations of the Dairyman’s Daughter, Pilgrim’s Progress, and the region’s first elementary school primers. Smith’s only setback resulted from his attempt to adapt native music to the Protestant liturgy. “Not only do we find the singing of the Arabs no music to us, but our musicians have found it…impossible to…imitate their tunes,” he conceded.6
THE MISSIONARIES’ newfound success was an outgrowth of enhanced circumstances in the Middle East, but also of the radical transformations that were remaking America. The 1840s saw the rise of the Manifest Destiny ideology, a grander and more militant version of the old Puritan claim to a God-given right to the new Promised Land, which Americans now espoused to justify their conquest of the entire North American continent. Under the Manifest Destiny banner, the nation’s population of 17 million inexorably fanned out across the existing twenty-six states and into the vast territories west of the Mississippi and north of the Rio Grande, uprooting Native American communities and ousting the Mexicans on route. But the concept also had a worldwide, educational dimension. According to the New York journalist John O’Sullivan, who coined the term, Manifest Destiny also ordained America “to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man,” to disseminate its principles, both religious and secular, abroad.
The global and edifying aspect of Manifest Destiny accorded well with the missionaries’ sense of purpose and reenergized the movement precisely at its dimmest juncture. “The destiny of America is inevitably bound up with the destiny of the world,” declared Dwight Marsh, the head of the Mosul mission. “America is only safe in the salvation of mankind.” The evangelists were inspired by the dynamism animating their country and by the spirit of scientific inquiry it evinced. This was the America of breakthrough technological innovations, of Charles Goodyear’s vulcanized rubber and the dependable brass movement clock of Chauncey Jerome. Among the newfangled products that American missionaries introduced to the Middle East were the camera, the sewing machine, and a revolutionary communications device invented by the son of an American Board member, Samuel Morse. “I do love to give a shock to these [native] people,” confessed William Goodell. “It seems to move them a step forward toward the millennium.”
Far more than its technical aspects, though, the image of military strength projected by the United States throughout the Manifest Destiny period electrified the missionaries. Middle Eastern peoples, averred the otherwise bookish Eli Smith, “ought to know that we are a powerful nation. And there is no other way to teach them this but to make them feel it.” Much like the preachers on the American frontier who, when threatened with Indian attack, summoned the U.S. Cavalry, Smith and his fellow evangelists called on the federal government, its diplomats, and even its warships to protect them from irate Muslim rulers. Replacing David Porter as America’s ambassador in Istanbul, Dabney Carr came into office in 1842 declaring his intention to protect the missionaries “to the full extent of [his] power,” if necessary “by calling the whole of the American squadron in the Mediterranean to Beyrout.” Carr, a grandnephew of Thomas Jefferson, proved true to his proclamation. A year later, the USS Independence conducted a high-profile tour of Egyptian and Syrian ports. Its orders were to “inquire into the safety and prosperity of the Missions…and to extend to them such assistance as they may require.”
The confluence of divinely ordained missions and state-sanctioned might was emblematic of the Manifest Destiny era both in North America and in the Middle East. Still, in contrast to the missions that often formed the nuclei of future forts, towns, and cities in the American West, the stations established by American evangelists in the Middle East never served to stake out territorial claims. Nor were they identified with big business interests, in the manner of the American missionaries in Hawaii. The absence of imperialist and economic agenda distinguished the Middle East missionaries not only from their counterparts in the United States, but also from the European preachers who often doubled as government agents. “I am persuaded that their [the Americans’] sole motivation was religious,” concluded a French consul in Beirut after a scrupulous investigation. “I simply do not perceive any ulterior political motive.”
American missionaries in the Middle East viewed Manifest Destiny not as a blueprint for conquering territory but rather as a warrant for capturing souls and minds. They continued to disparage Islam as a fraudulent, retrograde faith and dismissed all forms of Eastern Christianity as decadent and outmoded. Their approach to the peoples and cultures of the region remained rife with arrogance and yet their hubris was tempered with beneficence. Confronting a crowd of indignant Lebanese, William Goodell could with all sincerity declare, “We have come to raise your…population from that state of ignorance degradation and death which you are fallen, to do all the good in our power.”
Millions of Americans now supported that salvational effort. From the modest grassroots campaign that began after the Barbary Wars, the missionary movement had blossomed in the four decades leading up to the Civil War into a national passion. Support for the missions flowed not merely from congregations across the country, but also from the mainstream press, from Congress, and even from the White House. Inspired by the Manifest Destiny vision, farmers and factory workers, the graduates of single-room schoolhouses and alumni of the nation’s leading universities, northerners and southerners alike, reported for evangelizing duty overseas. There was never a shortage of volunteers. Perhaps the keenest gauge of Manifest Destiny’s influence on the missionary enterprise was the annual budget of the America Board, which had soared from a mere $10,000 in the days of Fisk and Parsons to $250,000 by midcentury.7
The impact of improved conditions for missionaries working in the Middle East, together with the revitalization of the evangelists’ zeal, was illustrated by the case of Cyrus Hamlin. Born in Maine in 1811, Hamlin had been orphaned at an early age and forced to work as a farmhand. But he also studied compulsively and ultimately won a scholarship to Bowdoin College, where he became the favorite student of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and graduated at the top of his class. Startlingly handsome, if outlandishly whiskered, Hamlin was the embodiment of the Manifest Destiny age, described as “indomitably self-willed,” “querulous,” and “despotic.” Forgoing the pulpit, he prepared for a career in the missions, but resolved to combine evangelizing with the genius of the industrial age. Manufacturing, for Hamlin, was more than just a process of production; it was also a means for purifying souls. Landing in Istanbul in 1840, he set out to instruct local youth in the rudiments of mathematics and grammar and induct them into the sacraments of work.
His arrival coincided with the new openness in the sultan’s attitude toward the West. As a result, Hamlin obtained permission to construct his school in Bebek, a mere five miles from Istanbul. By 1842, some forty pupils were enrolled at the institution, spending half of each day in the classroom and the other half fashioning Franklin stoves and Boston-style rattraps and operating a flour mill. The only resistance to this innovative curriculum came from the Armenian patriarch, whose flock supplied most of the students, and from Muslim villagers who pelted the school with stones, making it, Hamlin carped, “rather leaky.” Still, he managed to repair any damages and conciliate the patriarch. A contented Hamlin informed the board that “a decided impression” had been made on Ottoman education and “a general spirit of inquiry” aroused. “The old unchangeable East had begun to move,” he asserted, but without realizing how profound that shift would prove. Hamlin had no inkling that his modest school would someday evolve into Turkey’s first modern university.8
FROM A SITUATION of near-annihilation in the 1830s, American missionaries had recovered fully and, by the end of the antebellum period, were thriving. Hundreds of Muslims, Christians, and Jews were studying in missionary institutions throughout the Ottoman Empire, reading textbooks produced by American religious presses and absorbing American ideas. “This country is among the greatest civilized countries [in the world],” explained the pioneering Egyptian educator Sheikh Rifa’a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi. “Its inhabitants…freed themselves from the grasp of the English and became free and independent on their own…[W]orship in all faiths and religious communities is permitted.” Responding to a request from Sultan Abdul Mejid, missionaries also established an America-style school for Ottoman military cadets. With the language skills they learned, the young officers could read the latest U.S. Army manuals, as well as the more provocative works of Jefferson, Hamilton, and Paine.
Along with proselytizing and educating Middle Easterners, the missionaries also enlightened their countrymen back home. Through their innumerable letters, articles, and reports, the evangelists furnished Americans with images of Middle Eastern life that were far more detailed—and less varnished—than any culled from the Bible or A Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Missionary correspondence also served as a primary source for Edward Salisbury of Yale, who in 1841 became the nation’s first professor of Arabic, and for the American Oriental Society, founded the following year and dedicated to the study of ancient and contemporary Middle Eastern cultures. Salisbury, in turn, joined the missionaries in promoting progressive education in Syria and in other Ottoman lands. “The countries of the West, including our own, have been largely indebted to the East for their various cultures,” the scholar attested, “the time has come when this debt should be repaid.”
In spite of their striking accomplishments, the missionaries continued to face numerous hazards in the Middle East and to grapple with daily frustrations. “There are no rail roads here and ideas as well as burdens move by camel trains,” the Beirut-based William Eddy complained. Some of the most formidable opposition to the missionaries emanated not from the Middle East, however, but from their own American Board. Many board elders felt that the focus on school-books and medicine had obscured the missions’ original purpose of salvation. “Could Christianity be presented to men in its simplicity, without the technics of the schools, it might obtain a more ready and general reception,” Dr. John Thornton Kirkland, a former Harvard president, concluded after visiting Syria in 1842. The missionaries replied that the services they provided helped gain the natives’ trust, while generating a physical and intellectual atmosphere conducive to future conversion. Kirkland’s wife, Elizabeth, whom we will presently meet as a pioneering traveler to the Middle East, disagreed with both her husband and the board and took the missionaries’ side. “These worthy people have turned their attention to the establishment of schools as preparatory to the introduction to Christianity,” she asserted. “Generally speaking the American missionaries are held in most respect.”9
The question would be settled neither by the American Board nor by the missionaries but rather by the peoples of the Middle East, through their mounting demands for modern education and health care. If unresponsive to the missionaries’ religious message, they would remain appreciative of their philanthropy and generally accepting of their presence. Taking advantage of that openness, increasing numbers of Americans would follow their spiritual impulses to the region. Among them were two hybrid types, a missionary-scientist and a missionary-soldier, who journeyed to the Middle East, the land most venerated by Americans in search of sanctity and knowledge.
Adventures in Sacred Paradise
The rider stretched high on the hump of his camel and squinted into the dusty glare. Hardly the traditional adventurer—no broad-chested John Ledyard or redoubtable George English—Edward Robinson was, at age forty-six, wan, overweight, and nearsighted, a professor of Scripture at New York’s Union Theological Seminary. Like so many desert images, though, that of Robinson as a weakling was mirage-like. In fact, he was capable of riding eight hours straight under blazing skies while navigating by his compass and Bible. He had spent the last month crossing the barren Sinai Mountains, uncomplainingly, marveling at their “strangeness and overpowering grandeur” and reminding himself that these were the same serrated peaks that Moses and the Israelites traversed. Finally, in March 1838, Robinson prepared to exit the desert and step into a “romantic and exciting” land. Peering through his grime-dimmed spectacles, he spied the lapis waters of the Gulf of Aqaba and, beyond, the Wilderness of Judea. “Although not given to the melting mood,” he admitted, “I could not refrain from bursting into tears.”
Robinson was part of a lengthening procession of Americans who, in the decades before the Civil War, streamed toward the Holy Land. To accommodate the traffic, the United States appointed consular agents to six major Palestinian cities, making it the most widely represented Western nation in the area. These legations were nevertheless overwhelmed by the onrush of missionaries, tourists, colonists, and researchers, all drawn by the news of enhanced toleration of foreigners in Palestine and by effusive descriptions of its wonders.
Many of those accounts were, to say the least, exaggerated. William Thomson, the missionary whose letters spoke so astringently of Palestine, and who later left the country for Beirut, went on to write The Land and the Book, a rhapsody of idyllic images. No longer desolate and harsh, the biblical landscape was, he claimed, a paradise of “lofty mountains, covered with snow,” “wide plains carpeted with gay flowers,” and “lakes, rivers, and streams baptized with beauty.” The volume sold out thirty editions in the United States and helped perpetuate the dreamlike aura surrounding Palestine. That mystique would swiftly vanish, though, as arriving Americans often encountered a gloomier reality. “There is no other country in the world…of which so much has been written, and of which so little is really known,” remarked the American consul in Jaffa, noting how “a feverish state of expectation” about Palestine frequently pitched his countrymen into a post-pilgrimage depression.10
Edward Robinson, however, was an exception. Though a fervent Congregationalist, he never let religious beliefs becloud his scientific judgment. As a child on a Connecticut farm, he dreamed of someday visiting Palestine’s holy places and, as an adult, he determined to remove the “vast mass of tradition, foreign in its source and doubtful in its character,” surrounding those sites. The Puritans had superimposed a map of ancient Israel over their new Promised Land, America, and now their descendant Robinson sought to repatriate that map and restore its historical veracity.
Together with the Arabic-speaking missionary Eli Smith, Robinson headed north, through the area known today as the West Bank. The countryside, marred by “stagnation and moral darkness,” indeed depressed him, as did its inhabitants’ “unreliable” nature. Yet these same squalid towns appeared familiar to Robinson, “as if the realization of a former dream.” His sense of reverie intensified on April 4, 1838—Easter Day—when he and Smith, “like the Hebrews of old, at the time of Passover,” at last entered Jerusalem. A party of eight missionaries and their families greeted them, the city’s largest-ever gathering of Protestants.
Robinson did not dally, though, and the next dawn he was out, armed with a hundred-foot measuring tape, gauging Jerusalem’s walls. Using the Bible and other classical accounts as his guide, he identified the Siloam Pool and, in spite of his myopia and bulk, succeeded in crawling 1,750 feet through a narrow rock-hewn tunnel to the Virgin’s Fountain within the Old City. He also located the remains of a massive bridge that once led to Herod’s Temple and that is today known as Robinson’s Arch. Robinson then ventured out into the countryside in search of scriptural sites, convinced that their current Arabic names contained echoes of their Hebrew originals. Accordingly, in the Arab village of al-Samu’a, Robinson located the remains of biblical Eshtemoa. He found that al-Jish was the ancient Gush Halav, and that al-Jib had been Gibbon, where Joshua made the sun stand still. Robinson, “the greatest master of measuring tape in the world,” as one of the missionaries dubbed him, had retrieved a legendary past and grounded it in present-day reality.
Edward Robinson would make a second expedition to Palestine, in 1852, publish two hefty volumes of his research, and become the first American awarded a gold medal by London’s Royal Geographical Society. He founded an entirely new field, biblical archaeology, an “American science” that was accessible not only to scholars but to clergy and laymen as well. It also lured to Palestine other Americans who, like Robinson, alloyed their faith with an irrepressible urge to explore.11
William Francis Lynch was one such wanderer, a Navy commander and an “earnest Christian and lover of adventure” who had already probed South America and the Far East. He was the same age as Robinson, forty-six, but keen-eyed and trim, the vision of the stalwart Virginian. In May 1847, bored by the lack of action in the Mexican War, Lynch requested leave to visit Palestine. He proposed to be the first Westerner to navigate the entire length of the Jordan River, from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea, to “promote the cause of science, and advance the character of the Naval service.” Beyond its academic and motivational value, though, Lynch hoped that his expedition would strengthen America’s ties to the Holy Land and, through them, hasten a worldwide redemption.
With his handpicked crew of five officers and nine seamen—“young, muscular, native-born Americans, of sober habits”—Lynch departed New York for Istanbul. He presented himself at the court of Abdul Mejid, caused a stir by refusing to remove his sword, but then regained the sultan’s favor by presenting him with an album of American Indian prints, a gift from President James Polk. In return, Lynch received a firman, or imperial decree, granting him “protection against the Arabs.” The commander did not rely on this, though, and on reaching Beirut, he acquired the services of Henry James Anderson, a missionary doctor. “In the event of gun-shot wounds,” thought Lynch, “surgical aid would be indispensable.” The Americans also hired several Bedouin guards and purchased an arsenal of carbines, Colt pistols, bayonets, Bowie knives, and a buckshot-spewing blunderbuss.
The weapons, along with scientific instruments and camping gear, were loaded onto pack animals. Two galvanized iron boats were lowered onto gun carriages and lashed to the backs of camels. Exiting the coastal city of Acre, the peculiar train trudged thirty miles through a countryside that the Americans found depressingly barren and uninhabited. They nevertheless kept their spirits up with choruses of “Hail Columbia,” “Yankee Doodle,” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and with occasional infusions of grog. “We Yankee boys flinch not,” wrote one of the sailors, Edward Montague. “We fear neither the wandering Arab nor the withering influence of disease…neither the heat of the sun nor the suffocating sirocco.” The men were particularly enamored of their commander, “one of the best, most humane, thoughtful, and generous men in the world,” according to Montague, a hero with “the resolute ‘go-ahead’ spirit of a real, true-born American.”
Lynch, too, seemed uplifted by all he saw, from the Stars and Stripes streaming above his troop, to the view of the Sea of Galilee. The thought that he walked on the very same shores that Jesus had trod, and touched the waters on which he had walked, overwhelmed him. So, too, did the hospitality shown to him and his crew by the ancient Jewish community of Tiberias. A wealthy merchant named Chaim Weisman invited the Americans to lodge at his home and feted them lavishly. A week later, on April 10, 1848, Lynch and his men took leave of Weisman and launched their iron boats.
“It must have been a singular sight from the shore,” Lynch recalled. “[T]he crews in man-of-war rig, with snow-white awnings spread, and their ensigns flying, the men keeping time with their oars, as we rowed along the green shores of the silent Sea of Galilee.” Christened the Fanny Mason and the Fanny Skinner (after the daughters of the secretary of the navy and a senior commodore), the metallic craft were designed to withstand the Jordan’s reported shoals and rapids. A wooden skiff was also acquired, fitted with the blunderbuss, and nicknamed Uncle Sam. The river indeed proved turbulent, and bands of armed natives gathered on the banks. The melodramatic Lynch recalled how he and his crew “were wanderers in an unknown and inhospitable wilderness,” where the presence of “barbarous tribes of warlike Arabs…prompts one instinctively to feel for his carbine, or grasp…the handle of his sword.”
Yet the scientist in Lynch also took pains to record the river’s depths and temperatures and to describe its harsh environs. Like Robinson, he tried to locate the exact site of events mentioned in the Bible—where the Israelites crossed into Canaan or Jacob wrestled the angel—though with far less precision. All around him, Lynch imagined, lay a land “teeming with sacred associations” and “hallowed by the footsteps, fertilized by blood, and consecrated by the tomb, of the Saviour.”
Six days passed before the sailors, fatigued but exhilarated, neared Jericho. Lynch believed that no Christian had visited the area since the Crusades and that a Bedouin attack was likely. In a maneuver he had learned from Indian fighters in the American West, he drew his men and boats into a defensive circle. The tactic proved unnecessary, though. The only intruders were several dozen Christian pilgrims, among them two Americans, who cast off their clothes and scampered into the Jordan.
Thereafter, the party completed the remaining twenty miles to its destination, the still and oleaginous Dead Sea. The men, wrote Montague, could “float with perfect ease upon it, and could pluck a chicken or read a newspaper at pleasure while so floating.” Lynch was less amused, oppressed by the desolation of the surrounding desert and by the troubling lack of fresh water. “The curse of God is surely upon this unhallowed sea!” His only respite came at the luxuriant spring of Ein Gedi, which Lynch renamed “in honour of the greatest man the world has yet produced,” George Washington.
Lynch spent the next three weeks conducting experiments on the Dead Sea waters, which he surmised might have medicinal qualities, and exploring the ruins of Qumran and Masada. He hiked to Kerak, in present-day Jordan, where members of the Christian community, descendants of once-proud crusaders, were sorely oppressed by the Muslim majority. Though frenetically busy, Lynch found time to relish the romantic desert nights, “the tents among the tamarisks, the Arab watch-fires, the dark mountains in the rear, the planets and the stars above them, and the boats drawn up on the shore.” He also kept abreast of events at home, through mail forwarded by the American consul in Jerusalem. One such dispatch brought word that John Quincy Adams, the president who had tried to open the Middle East to Americans over twenty years earlier, had died. “The thought of death harmonized with the atmosphere and scenery,” Lynch lamented. “We lowered the flag half-mast, and there was gloom throughout the camp.”
On May 10, Lynch hoisted the same flag over a raft anchored in the Dead Sea and ordered the iron boats disassembled. He and his men then headed north toward Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Caesarea. His impressions of these and other celebrated sites were similar to those of many American pilgrims, a blend of aesthetic disgust and spiritual elation. The trek, meanwhile, proved debilitating, and by the time they reached Damascus, all of Lynch’s men were delirious with fever. One officer, Lieutenant J. B. Dale, died at the Beirut home of Eli Smith and was buried by William Thomson.12
Lynch returned to New York and to an unexpectedly mixed reception. Critics who had assailed President Polk for sending the U.S. Army against Mexico now berated him for wasting $700 of the public’s money on yet another superfluous expedition. Lynch’s memoirs of the trip nevertheless sold briskly. It was a quirky volume, alternately descriptive and prescriptive, but consistently adamant in tone. The author was brutal in his portrayal of the Arab, alleging that “his ruling passion…is greediness of gold, which he will clutch from the unarmed stranger, or filch from an unsuspecting friend,” yet he was equally zealous in touting Palestine’s economic potential. Lynch proffered several ideas for developing the Holy Land, including a plan for resettling African Americans on plantations to be created in the Jordan Valley. The key to these programs’ success, he ventured, was security. “Fifty well-armed, resolute Franks…could revolutionize the whole country,” he wrote.
Lynch’s book concluded with an impassioned appeal for restoring the Jews to Palestine. The Jewish people were “destined to be the first agent in the civilization of the Arab” and the means of rejuvenating the entire region. Dr. Anderson, the expedition surgeon, expanded on Lynch’s proposal and, under the aegis of the American Geographical and Statistical Society, circulated a petition urging the United States to promote Jewish colonization in Palestine. “Jewish influence brought to bear…in what is called Syrian Arabia,” it stated, “would most effectually give a new impetus to the commerce of the East, as well as of the world.”13
The Fullness of Time in Palestine
The proposition that the United States should actively assist the Jews in returning to Palestine was neither new nor, in the antebellum period, considered especially radical. The restorationist ideas once prevalent among the evangelical churches of colonial America had deeply penetrated the mainstream. While the more established Episcopalians and Unitarians continued to shun the notion, the masses of Methodists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians embraced it. Many Americans believed that the Jews were already in the process of moving back to their homeland, an underpopulated area that, the missionaries assured them, could absorb millions—“A land without a people for a people without a land,” in the slogan of Lord Shaftesbury, a contemporary British restorationist. “There appear to be unusual movements among the Jews, and a looking toward Palestine,” Connecticut’s Reverend Thomas Robbins informed his diary in June 1838. Sarah Haight, a Long Island woman who journeyed to the Middle East in the 1830s, was convinced of the imminence of the Jewish ingathering in Palestine. “God’s own peculiar people shall again be brought…to rebuild and worship in their own temple,” Haight predicted, foretelling what she called “the fullness of time of the Gentiles.”
Restorationism found its broadest exposition in an 1844 treatise, The Valley of Vision; the Dry Bones of Israel Revived, by a New York University professor of Hebrew, the Reverend George Bush. The author of a biography of Muhammad that described him as a “pseudo-prophet” but also as a “man of superior cast of character,” Bush called for “elevating” the Jews “to a rank of honorable repute among the nations of the earth” by re-creating their state in Palestine. Such restitution would benefit all of mankind, forming a “link of communication” between humanity and God. “It will blaze in notoriety,” Bush foretold. “It will flash a splendid demonstration upon all kindreds and tongues of the truth.” The book was not without its critics, however. The highbrow Princeton Review denounced the “belief in the literal Restoration of the Jews [that] has for years been gaining ground in Christendom.” Yet a widening sector of the American public continued to believe with George Bush—a forebear of two later presidents of the same name—in the dream of Jewish statehood.
For Bush, as for most American restorationists, a Christian’s role in reestablishing the Jewish polity was limited to prayer and, at most, providing the “carnal inducements” necessary to entice the Jews back to Palestine.14 Some adherents to the doctrine, however, sought a more active role in that resettlement. They would personally travel to the Holy Land, take up residence, and prepare for the Jews’ return.
An example of this activism was rendered by one of America’s newest and most controversial sects, the Mormons. Joseph Smith, the movement’s founder, was a committed restorationist, and in October 1841 he sent his personal Apostle, Orson Hyde, on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Climbing the Mount of Olives, Hyde erected an altar and beseeched God to “restore the kingdom unto Israel—raise up Jerusalem as its capital, and continue her people [as] a distinct nation and government.” Mormons would later integrate that prayer into their liturgy and, on the site of Hyde’s altar, build a branch of Brigham Young University.
An even more ardent activist than Hyde, Warder Cresson remained permanently in Palestine and devoted his life to repatriating the Jews. A father of six from Philadelphia who had once been a Mormon and, before that, a Quaker and a Shaker, Cresson took up restorationism at age forty-six, in 1844. That year, Cresson met Mordecai Noah, the onetime consul in Tunis who had since embarked on a campaign to revive Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. Having tried and failed to enlist other American Jews in the project, Noah began promoting it to Christians. “Where can we plead the independence for the children of Israel with greater confidence than in the cradle of American liberty?” he inquired. The question resonated with Cresson, who became convinced that God had created the United States specifically to succor the Jews and that the American eagle would, in fulfillment of Isaiah, “overshadow the land with its wings.” Irrevocably, he proclaimed, “there is no salvation for the Gentiles, but by coming to Israel.”
Cresson promptly wrote to Secretary of State John C. Calhoun and asked to be posted as America’s consul in Jerusalem. The request coincided with the State Department’s search for diplomats acceptable to the missionaries, and after receiving assurances of Cresson’s “capacity & probity,” Calhoun approved the appointment. Dark-bearded with penetrating eyes and flared nostrils—the portrait of a fiery prophet—Cresson set sail on June 22, 1844, bearing with him a U.S. flag and a white dove that he planned to release on arrival. “I left the wife of my youth and six lovely children…an excellent farm, everything comfortable around me,” he remembered. “But the light…of God’s precious promises, in reference to the return of the Jew…became so great…that I could no longer remain at home.”
Arriving in Palestine, Cresson settled in Jerusalem, created a “consular seal,” and extended America’s protection over the city’s Jews, many of whom were impoverished scholars dependent on charity from abroad. Calhoun, meanwhile, learning from sources in Philadelphia that Cresson was “very weak minded,” and “what there is of [that mind] is quite out of order,” rescinded the consul’s appointment. Cresson merely ignored the instructions, however, and persisted in aiding the Jews. In a meeting with the visiting British satirist William Makepeace Thackeray, the author of Vanity Fair, he explained how his country, in concert with the European powers, would soon intervene to secure an independent state for the Jews. Cresson “has no knowledge of Syria but what he derives from prophecy,” wrote Thackeray. “I doubt whether any government has received or appointed so queer an ambassador.”15
Cresson continued to impress visitors with his visions of Jewish statehood and his bizarre, almost trancelike, behavior. But Cresson was not the only American restorationist to take up residence in Palestine at that time, nor was he necessarily the strangest. Equally unconventional, at least, was the novelist, singer, poet, and revivalist preacher Harriet Livermore.
The daughter of a New Hampshire congressman, Livermore had grown from a rambunctious tomboy into a graceful and dark-eyed ingénue who, in the years after the War of 1812, jilted a long line of suitors. Rejected, in turn, by an army doctor, she gave up on romance altogether in search of a higher love. “Sick of the world, disappointed in all my hopes of sublunary bliss, I drew up a resolution in my mind to…become a religious person.” Her quest took her first to Congregationalism and then to Presbyterianism and the Quakers, but wearying of them all, she eventually turned to Baptism and established her own sect, the Pilgrim Stranger. Livermore believed herself a theological prodigy, an apostle to the Indians, whom she believed were descended from the Lost Ten Tribes. These and other unorthodox notions featured in her novel, Scriptural Evidence in Favor of Female Testimony in Meetings for the Worship of God, which was financed by several influential Washingtonians, including Senator John Tyler and Dolly Madison. Her ministry reached its pinnacle in 1827, when Livermore addressed both houses of Congress. “She is the most eloquent preacher I have listened to,” remarked John Quincy Adams, a connoisseur. “No language can do justice to the pathos of her singing.”
The turning point in Livermore’s life came ten years later, however, when reports of Jewish resettlement in Palestine lured her to the Middle East. Armed with a State Department letter attesting to her “high character, both moral and religious,” she visited David Porter in Istanbul and then boarded a steamer for Beirut. South of the city, in the mountains of Sidon, she stopped in on Lady Hester Stanhope, a fifty-year-old British recluse who had once served as secretary to her uncle, Prime Minister William Pitt. Stanhope, too, had originally moved to the Middle East in the hope of encouraging Jewish resettlement in Palestine, but despairing of success, acquired a Crusader castle and refashioned herself as the Nun of Lebanon. As former belles and fellow restorationists, Livermore and Lady Hester should have bonded, but the two women in fact quarreled over which of them was the truly elect and which would accompany the Lord on His triumphal reentry to Jerusalem.
From Sidon, Livermore proceeded to the Holy City and rented a modest residence atop Mount Zion. From there, she planned to supervise the construction of an educational colony for returning Jews. Like many restorationists, Livermore subscribed to the Jeffersonian notion that all states required an agrarian base and that Christians had a divinely enjoined duty to reacquaint the Jews with farming. Livermore sought to see the colony completed, and then retire to a life of prayer and contemplation, “to meet [her] lot, which…is martyrdom.”
Funding the colony, however, proved more onerous than Livermore anticipated and her means were soon exhausted. Desiring only “to earn [her] bread, to pay [her] debts, and return to Mount Zion,” she tried peddling printed copies of her sermons, but was finally reduced to begging in Jerusalem’s streets. Yet even this effort foundered. Starving, Livermore withdrew from Palestine and returned, soul broken, to the United States. She died in 1868—a martyr, indeed, to some—in a Philadelphia poorhouse.16
The restorationist idea remained distinctly alive, however, as did the vision of transforming urban, mostly indigent Jews into Palestinian peasants. While Harriet Livermore was languishing in Jerusalem, another American preacher arrived in the city, robust and eager to begin the work of colony making. Tall and striking but described nonetheless as “criminally modest,” James Turner Barclay was something of a Renaissance man—a physician, an inventor, and an architect. People marveled at his penmanship, which, according to one source, could render the Lord’s Prayer in letters so minute “they could all be inscribed on a five cent piece.” Barclay’s premium achievement came in 1831, however, when he purchased Monticello, Jefferson’s classical estate, which had long since fallen into disrepair. Barclay attempted to revive the plantation through silk production, failed utterly, and subsequently turned to religion. He became a Presbyterian and then joined the Cambellites, a millenarian movement committed to restoring Christ’s rule on earth. To this end, in 1850, Barclay journeyed to Palestine.
Like Livermore, Barclay sought to establish a settlement for reeducating the Jews in agriculture but soon encountered a similar dearth of funds. Frustrated, he returned to architecture and obtained work renovating the Dome of the Rock. Barclay also authored a best-selling book, The City of the Great King, which, like William Thomson’s before it, portrayed Jerusalem in dazzling terms and, like George Bush’s, extolled the restorationist idea. “God hath not utterly cast away his people whom he formerly acknowledged; and neither should we,” he asserted. Christians, rather, must embrace the Jews, saying, “We will go with you, for we have heard that the Lord is with you.”17
Such exhortations helped divert attention from the restorationists’ failure to establish permanent footholds in Palestine and assist in the Jewish return. Other evangelists sought to succeed where Livermore and Barclay had faltered and to carry on the work of colonizing the Holy Land. The most headstrong and colorful of these was Clorinda Minor. A lifelong Episcopalian and the wife of a well-to-do Philadelphia businessman, Minor in middle age became an Adventist and began preparing for the End of Days. “Many Christians profess great sympathy for the Jews, and are waiting…for ‘the set time’ to favor Zion,” she observed. The “set time,” Minor calculated, was imminent, and in 1851 she left her husband and set sail for Palestine: “The conviction of my soul increased every hour that God was calling me to go!”
Shortly after landing in Jaffa, Minor met John Meshullam, a British Jew who had converted to Christianity and who shared Minor’s desire to introduce the Jews to the “active labors of love.” Their efforts, though, like those before them, were hounded by a shortage of funds. Minor subsequently appealed to her friends in the United States, who responded by sending over seven volunteers and $256 worth of tents, tools, seeds, and medicines. A plot of cultivable land was purchased at Artas, near Bethlehem, and the Manual Labor School of Agriculture for Jews in the Holy Land was established. Additional support came from Baron Moses Montefiore, the Anglo-Jewish philanthropist, who welcomed any contribution to Jewish colonization in Palestine. In her prodigiously selling memoir, Meshullam!; or, Tidings from Jerusalem, Minor foresaw “that His time to favor Zion is come, and that He will now set his hand a second time to recover Israel.” Her prophecy seemed destined for fulfillment.18
Within two years, however, the Artas group had disbanded. The rupture resulted, first, from the Jews’ refusal to show even the faintest interest in farming, but more fatally, from the festering rifts between Meshullam and Minor. Still, “the Modern Tabitha,” as Minor was sometimes called, remained optimistic. She moved from Artas to a small farm outside of Jaffa and gave it the name of Mount Hope. With an orange grove given to her by Montefiore, and with the help of two German missionaries, Johann and Frederick Grossteinbeck, she eked out a tenuous existence. “If any of our Hebrew friends in the United States will help, we will…return them an exact account of every expenditure,” she appealed to the American Jewish paper Occident. “Let not the opportunity pass, and the sufferers perish.” Few donations arrived, however. The farm failed, and Minor eventually went bankrupt. She died, aged forty-nine, in 1855.
Still, some evangelists persevered. Following Minor’s death, Mount Hope was purchased by Warder Cresson, the idiosyncratic and self-appointed consul, who envisaged it as a “model American farm” for teaching Jews how to raise pineapples, bananas, and lemons. Nearby, Walter Dickson from Groton, Massachusetts, founded another colony for the Jews. Dickson hired the Grossteinbeck brothers who duly married his daughters, Almira and Mary. Repeatedly harassed by local Bedouin, the American Agricultural Mission, as Dickson styled it, sought help from the U.S. Navy, which supplied it with several Hall carbines and cartridges. The marauders were repulsed—temporarily—and the settlement managed to survive.19
OVER THE course of forty years, beginning with Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk in 1819, Americans had persisted in their efforts to bring the tenets of their faith, both sacred and civic, to the Middle East, gaining purchase in some of its remotest provinces as well as in its Palestinian heartland. They were far from alone in this endeavor. Missionaries from France, Great Britain, Russia and Prussia also penetrated the region, building schools and clinics and even establishing colonies. “Europe is striving to outbid America for the privilege of teaching and preaching in this country,” complained the evangelist William Eddy, from Lebanon. No nation, however, could rival the geographical scope, the professional breadth, and the investment of human and financial resources of America’s Middle East missions.
The missionaries’ dedication remained a reflection of the roles that early nineteenth-century Americans arrogated to themselves as the executors of Manifest Destiny, the bearers of industrial age fruits, and democratic benefactors of the world. The missionary fervor was also indicative of the still irrepressible American need for new frontiers, fresh experiences, and movement. Observing these urges in the 1830s, the French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville remarked on the “unquiet passions” of Americans. An “all-pervading and…superabundant force” seemed to propel them, a “strange unrest” even “in the midst of abundance.”20 That restiveness was not particular to evangelists, however. An impressive number of Americans—housewives and professionals, artists and businessmen, and even an African American slave—ventured to the Middle East in the pre–Civil War period, drawn to the area by their religious convictions and, even more compellingly, by their dreams.