Seward’s Missionaries: Inclusionary Protestantism and the Struggle for China’s Markets

In 1856, Chinese Americans successfully lobbied against the Foreign Miners’ License Tax, a discriminatory law aimed at driving out Chinese miners. The Chinese argued that they were free and cheap labor relative to enslaved Black people, casting themselves alongside free White men. Essential to their political success was the support of Presbyterian missionary William Speer, a liberal advocate for Chinese inclusion into California’s labor market from 1852 to 1857. Drawing from primarily Speer’s writings, political work, and correspondence with Walter Lowrie, organizer of Presbyterian foreign missions, and future secretary of state William H. Seward, I introduce "inclusionary Protestantism," an abolitionist and transnational movement for opening borders and incorporating Chinese immigrants based on their economic and moral value. Inclusionary Protestantism produced images of Asia that dovetailed with Lincoln’s emancipatory “Civil War faith" to form what Andrew Preston calls the ideological core of postwar American foreign policy in the twentieth century.