Ah, Mrs. Howe, you have given us a prose Battle Hymn.
—Frederick Greenhalge, governor of Massachusetts
The light in New England in late fall is austere and clean and rinses the white steeples of Boston’s Congregational and Unitarian churches, the red brick of the State House, and the gray stone of the Back Bay town houses. Even the gold dome on the white cupola of Faneuil Hall reflects its luster. It’s November 26, 1894, the Monday before Thanksgiving, a windy and clear evening, as men and women file into Faneuil Hall from all over Boston and from the suburbs of Cambridge, Watertown, Winchester, and as far out as Quincy and Andover. They have come to this public meeting place near the harbor to talk about the most pressing international human rights issue of the day.
Schooners and sloops and oyster scows make a grid of rigging that glows in the sunset. The sound of squawking gulls. Buckets of cod and haddock on the docks. The outline of the giant masts of the USS Constitution fading in the twilight of the Charlestown Naval Yard. Across the street the stalls of Quincy Market are closed, the awnings rolled up for the night.
Faneuil Hall was known as the Cradle of Liberty because Samuel Adams and James Otis and the Sons of Liberty had met here in the decade before the American Revolution to form their opposition to the sugar tax, the stamp tax, and other forms of British oppression. The Boston Tea Party was conceived here. The space itself was made even more dramatic when the architect Charles Bulfinch redesigned it in 1805. Even after government by town meeting ended in Boston in 1822, the hall continued to be the main forum for political and social debate. Here in the 1840s William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, and Frederick Douglass gave some of their most important antislavery speeches to overflowing crowds.
By 1873 women were speaking from the podium, and suffragists Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe were among the first to address the movement for woman suffrage on that stage beneath George A. Healy’s dramatic painting of Daniel Webster exhorting, “Liberty and union, now and forever” on the Senate floor. In keeping with that spirit of reform, a group of prominent New Englanders filled Faneuil Hall on that blustery late-November evening.
All that summer and fall, news of the massacres of the Armenians at the hands of the Turks in the Ottoman Empire reached Americans through news reports and bold headlines in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and in the nation’s leading magazines—The Nation, The Century, and Harper’s. The news came from American missionaries who were teaching Christians at missionary colleges all across the Anatolian plain of central and eastern Turkey; it came from American and British diplomats stationed in the Armenian provinces of the Ottoman Empire, from European and American journalists, and from Armenian survivors and refugees. And recently it came by way of a new invention—the wireless telegraph.
The outrage over the Armenian massacres emerged in a culture that was just beginning to look outward to the international arena in which the United States would define a global identity in the coming decade. In the first years of the 1890s, there had been a near war with Chile over the killing of two American sailors in Valparaiso, and U.S. involvement in a border dispute between British Guiana and Venezuela that brought jingoism to a new level. Americans such as Theodore Roosevelt began to broadcast their feeling that the country needed a war. The question of annexing the Hawaiian Islands dominated a tug-of-war between the imperialists and anti-imperialists that lasted throughout the decade.
Americans also expressed great sympathy for the Cubans in their struggle for independence from Spain. By 1895, when Cuban rebels rose up against the deplorable conditions to which they were subjected by their Spanish rulers, the Cuban crisis became a Western Hemisphere liberation cause for Americans. By 1898 the Cuban struggle would lead to the Spanish-American War—the war that consummated the jingoist spirit and launched the United States as a colonial force in the world. With the defeat of Spain, in a war that lasted ten weeks and gave Cuba its independence, the United States acquired Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam, giving the nation a rising sense of global power.
The 1890s were a transformative time for U.S. foreign policy—a decade in which it would embrace imperialism and assert itself, at times, with a rhetoric of Protestant Anglo-Saxon superiority over the “backward” peoples of the world. The Armenian Question emerged, in some ways uniquely, as a humanitarian project at a time when imperialist designs were governing most American international interventions.
Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the Turkish caliph, had begun to implement his solution to what was now internationally known as the Armenian Question. In short, the Armenian Question revolved around the issue of much-needed reform for the oppressed Armenians—the largest Christian minority living under Ottoman Turkish rule in Anatolia. As the British journalist and longtime resident of Constantinople—Sir Edwin Pears—put it, all the Armenians “desired was security for life, honour, and property.”1 But, the sultan’s lifetime friend and confidant, the Hungarian scholar Arminius Vambery, wrote, the sultan had decided that the only way to eliminate the Armenian Question was to eliminate the Armenians themselves. The means would be government-sanctioned mass murder on a scale never before seen.2 The Turkish massacres of some fifteen thousand Bulgarians in 1876 (a response to the Bulgarian uprising for independence) had been an unprecedented act of state-sponsored mass murder that riveted Europe and the United States. Yet even that atrocity paled beside what happened in 1894, when the very sultan who came to power in the midst of the “Bulgarian horrors,” as they were soon known, began a campaign of mass slaughter against his Armenian subjects. By the end of 1896 the sultan’s campaign had taken the lives of about two hundred thousand Armenians—approximately one hundred thousand killed by direct massacre and the rest dying of disease and famine.3 In a two-year period, in the middle of what in the U.S. was called the Gay Nineties, the sultan refined the idea of state-sponsored murder, creating a new and ominous political weapon for the modern age.
That evening at Faneuil Hall was marked by a distinguished company of social reformers that included William Lloyd Garrison Jr. (the son of the great abolitionist); Henry Blackwell and his poet daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell; Julia Ward Howe; the Reverend Samuel June Barrows, publisher of the Christian Register; Massachusetts governor Frederick Greenhalge; and a score of other leading civic figures.
Julia Ward Howe, in her seventies, was beginning to feel the effects of another year on the national lecture circuit. For decades she had lectured on woman suffrage, world peace, freedom in Russia—and on literary and cultural topics. A leading abolitionist, she continued to be a national and international voice of conscience. By the nineties Mrs. Howe was a figure of such national stature that the New York Times compared her with Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria, claiming that these English monarchs never inspired “the spontaneous, instinctive, chivalric obeisance which American audiences now pay to Julia Ward Howe, who fills the national imagination as no other woman has, by her identification with a great chapter in human liberty”—the abolition of slavery.4
Soon to become the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Howe had risen to national prominence in the wake of her famous poem, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which had helped to galvanize the Union cause with its vision of sacrifice for human liberty. By 1868, when she became the first president of the New England Woman Suffrage Association, she was a figure in American public life of the same stature as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mark Twain. No woman in American history had ever equaled the breadth of her moral and intellectual concerns or the radius of her voice in the national and international arenas.
Although Howe was not feeling her spunky self that Monday in November, she confessed when she reached the podium that she “could not stay away from this meeting…. I have to pray God night and morning that He would find some way to stay this terrible tide of slaughter.”5 A meeting about a human rights issue that had gripped America for the past two months was more than she could resist.
Dressed in her usual lilac satin gown, black flowered silk cloak, and small lace cap, Julia Ward Howe was eloquent:
Now, the fleets of the Western nations are waiting for some diplomatic development which shall open the way for action. I think that we, the United States of America, are now called upon to play the part of Florence Nightingale; to take our stand and insist upon it that the slaughter shall cease. Oh! let us give money, let us give life, but let us stand by our principles of civil and religious liberty.
With rising passion, she went on:
It may be asked, where is the good of our assembling here? what can a handful of us effect against this wicked and remorseless power, so far beyond our reach…? The walls of this old hall should answer this question. They saw the dawn of our own larger liberties. They heard the first indignant plea of Wendell Phillips when, in the splendor of his youth, he took the field for the emancipation of a despised race which had no friends. So, on this sacred arena, I throw down the glove which challenges the Turkish Government to its dread account. What have we for us in this contest? The spirit of civilization, the sense of Christendom, the heart of humanity. All of these plead for justice, all cry out against barbarous warfare of which the victims are helpless men, tender women and children. We invoke here the higher powers of humanity against the rude instincts in which the brute element survives and rules.6
Governor Greenhalge was so moved by Mrs. Howe’s words that he embraced her afterward, declaring: “Ah, Mrs. Howe, you have given us a prose Battle Hymn!”7 The analogy was lost on no one. Now, three decades after the Civil War, Howe saw the plight of the Armenians as yet another chapter in the struggle for human liberty and human rights. Throughout the rest of the nineties, the phrase “Spoke for Armenia” would be a frequent entry in Julia Ward Howe’s diary.8
Howe’s was not the only voice resounding that night. The leading Unitarian minister Samuel Barrows exclaimed: “We are appealing to the ears of the whole civilized world. We want you, Armenian citizens, and Armenians all over the world, to know and feel that from our heart of hearts we sympathize with them tonight in the deep wrong, in the terrible crimes, that have been committed in the name of government.” Social reformer Henry B. Blackwell—perhaps best known today as the husband of Lucy Stone and the brother of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States—spoke in terms that seem prescient, looking back at the dawn of the twentieth century’s age of genocide.
“It is literally true,” he exclaimed, “that an attempt is being made to exterminate the whole Armenian race and put an end to the whole Armenian question. All the horrors in Bulgaria that led to a great war have now been repeated, and we are here, not only to protest, but to demand of our government that it shall send its delegates to Turkey and ascertain the facts and demand explanation.” Blackwell was equally insightful in characterizing the American dilemma and appealing to an idea of foreign policy that transcends national self-interest:
It will be said that the traditional policy of the United States is one of non-intervention, and I approve of that principle, but there are times and places when every nation owes to human nature itself an expression of sympathy with those who have been so wronged. The people in Turkey who are governed are civilized; the government is barbarous…. What we want to do is to move not only our own government, but the governments of Europe.
Another speaker, Col. Albert Clarke, declared that “Turkey might govern as she pleased, but she was not to be permitted to outrage the sense of humanity.”9
The next day the Boston Globe headline reported: CRY FOR JUSTICE COMES FROM FANEUIL HALL, and the Boston Herald’s headline: TURKISH ABUSE AND THE SLAUGHTER AT SASSOUN ROUNDLY CONDEMNED. The article called the speeches “the opening shot of a fusillade of popular indignation that bids fair to be heard around the world.”10
But some Americans had been introduced to the tyranny of Turkish rule decades before the meeting at Faneuil Hall, when the most famous American novelist and wit, Mark Twain, recorded in his memoir Innocents Abroad his revulsion toward the autocracy of the sultanate. Writing about his travels to Europe, Turkey, and the Holy Land in 1867, he viewed other cultures through the lens of his democratic perspective. His encounter in Paris with Sultan Abdul Aziz, Abdul Hamid’s uncle and predecessor, spurred him to reflect on the brutality of monarchial rule in the Ottoman Empire. Twain called the sultan a “representative of…a government whose Three Graces are Tyranny, Rapacity, Blood. Here in brilliant Paris,” he reflected, “under this majestic Arch of Triumph, the First Century greets the Nineteenth!” He spared no words in attacking Abdul Aziz—who was known for his despotism, decadence, and cowardice. Of the sultan, Twain wrote:
a man who sits upon a throne…who holds in his hands the power of life and death over millions—yet who sleeps, sleeps, eats, eats, idles with his eight hundred concubines, and when he is surfeited with eating and sleeping and idling, and would rouse up and take the reins of government and threaten to be a Sultan, is charmed from his purpose by wary Fuad Pacha with a pretty plan for a new palace or a new ship—charmed away with a new toy, like any other restless child; a man who sees his people robbed and oppressed by soulless tax-gatherers, but speaks no word to save them;…a man who found his great empire a blot upon the earth—a degraded, poverty-stricken, miserable, infamous agglomeration of ignorance, crime, and brutality…11
Twain also recorded his sympathy with the plight of the Syrians, whom he encountered on his trip, and noted that they were an oppressed race living “under the inhuman tyranny of the Ottoman empire,” and had been “ground down by a system of taxation” that would destroy most peoples.12 Although Innocents Abroad first appeared in 1869, its reissue in 1897, a year after the Armenian massacres, was timely, and twenty-five years before the Armenians rebelled against the unjust tax system, Twain’s observations would come to seem prophetic.
Julia Ward Howe’s understanding of Ottoman Turkish history had been formed in part by her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, a social reformer who had founded the Perkins Institute for the Blind. In 1825, after graduating from Brown University and Harvard Medical School, he decided to emulate his favorite poet, Lord Byron, and join the Greek army in its war for independence from the Turks. As a surgeon in the Greek army, he spent the next two years in battle giving medical aid to Greek soldiers. Byron loomed large for both Julia and Sam Howe. Not only had Byron died in Greece in 1824 for the cause of Greek freedom, but in his passion for the classical cultures of Asia Minor, he had studied the Armenian language in the winter of 1816–17 at the Armenian monastery in Venice.
In 1828, when Sam Howe returned home to Boston to raise money for the Greek cause, he carried with him Byron’s helmet, which he had bought at an auction. As he rode down Beacon Street on a black stallion draped with a crimson saddlecloth, his fellow Bostonians welcomed him as if he were Byron’s brother. Indeed, with his strong features, piercing blue eyes, jet black hair, and soldierly demeanor, he was Byronesque. He had little trouble raising the money, and within a few months he was back in Greece helping the war-ravaged country begin a new era. In appreciation of his work, the Greek government later bestowed on him the title Chevalier of the Greek Legion of Honor, and thereafter his friends dubbed him “Chev.”13
Under Julia Ward Howe’s leadership on that evening at Faneuil Hall, the United Friends of Armenia—which had formed a year earlier, in 1893—began a process of activism and international relief, becoming a primary conduit for raising consciousness about the Armenian massacres as well as money for food, clothing, and medical supplies for Armenian relief work in Turkey. Before the 1890s were over, the organization would bring scores of refugees and orphans to the United States and was instrumental in finding employment for Armenian refugees in America.14
By September 1894, America’s major newspapers carried the names of faraway Armenian villages and romantic-sounding places like Sasun, Moush, Bitlis, and Zeitun, as reports of massacres on an unprecedented scale reached American readers—just as a hundred years later, the names Cambodia, Pol Pot, Rwanda, Hutu, Tutsi, Bosnia, and East Timor would be insignias of atrocity in the headlines of the late twentieth century. Harper’s Weekly featured large, dramatic illustrations of Armenians being massacred in the streets of Constantinople or on the rocky plateaus of Anatolia.
In the New York Times alone, often on the front page, headlines read: THE WORST WAS NOT TOLD, THE ARMENIAN ATROCITIES, EIGHT THOUSAND BUTCHERED, THE HORRORS OF THE ARMENIAN MASSACRES ONLY JUST BEGINNING TO BE REALIZED BY THE WORLD. And also DENYING ARMENIAN ATROCITIES, and TURKEY’S REPLY DEFIANT. Perhaps the first use of the word “holocaust” to describe a human rights disaster was on the front page of the New York Times on September 10, 1895, in the headline ANOTHER ARMENIAN HOLOCAUST. The article describes the mass murder of more than five thousand Armenians by a force of one thousand Turkish troops in the Erzinjan district of eastern Turkey. The beginning of modern human rights reporting had begun, and Americans were responsive.