Seward’s Missionaries: Inclusionary Protestantism and the Struggle for China’s Markets, 1838–1856

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 cheaper laborers relative to the enslaved Black labor force, casting themselves alongside free White men. Essential to their political success was the support of the 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 two congressional figures, I  introduce what I call inclusionary Protestantism, an abolitionist and transnational movement for opening borders and incorporating Chinese immigrants based on their economic and moral value to the United States. Inclusionary Protestantism produced images of Asian nations that dovetailed with Abraham Lincoln’s emancipatory “Civil War faith” to form what Andrew Preston calls the ideological core of postwar American foreign policy in the twentieth century. In making this argument I draw directly from Matthew Frye Jacobson’s emphasis on America’s moral vision of foreign export and labor markets, and in step with the work of Gary Okihiro and Beth Lew-Williams, I nuance a period typically understood as solely exclusionary. I also contribute to the historiography by showing how the religious interests of Speer and political interests of Seward were formed in relation, rather than in distinct and parallel lanes. 

Part I of this paper discusses the relationship between Walter Lowrie, the corresponding secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions from 1838–1865, and Speer. Lowrie served as a U.S. senator during the penning of the Monroe Doctrine and his name became synonymous with early Presbyterian foreign missions. He imagined China to be an empire of industrious and business-minded subjects, and the Philippines and Macao as strategic outposts that the Protestant Church needed to win from the Catholic Church. Speer’s admiration of Lowrie motivated him to serve as a medical missionary in China from 1846–1852. Providing evidence for Gordon Chang’s argument that Americans developed both physical and spiritual attachments to China in the early nineteenth century, the exchanges between Lowrie and Speer reveal an early vision for San Francisco to be the site through which the Protestant Church would convert China, and then the world.

Upon returning to the United States in 1852 to minister to the Chinese in San Francisco, Speer would correspond with another U.S. senator, William H. Seward. Part II of this paper is concerned with this relationship. Seward became popular among northern missionaries in 1849 when he argued in Congress that a “higher law than the Constitution” —God’s law—justified the abolition of slavery. Speer developed a deep admiration for Seward, whose views on China and Britain aligned neatly with what Speer experienced overseas. As a member of the Whig party, Seward disparaged the militaristic imperialism of the British empire in Asia, which he associated with Andrew Jackson’s imperial wielding of presidential power. Prefiguring turn-of-the-century evangelicals who developed what Ian Tyrrell has called an imperial ideology of moral reformism, Seward preferred moralization, rather than militarization, as the means through which America would ascend to its destined role as a global superpower. Moralizing America meant tearing down institutions based on prejudice such as slavery, granting citizenship to all, and educating all to respectful ways of life. America’s destiny was to civilize the world through an open door policy, enabling the free exchange of ideas, people, and commerce across borders. In fulfilling this destiny, it was imperative for America to win the Chinese export and labor markets. 

Sharing Seward’s Whig and humanitarian proclivities, and sense of civilizational superiority, Speer took Seward’s ideas and applied them to his work with the Chinese in California. As a result, Speer’s ministry focused more on the social uplift and political incorporation of the Chinese rather than conversion, much to the ire of his supervisors. Part III discusses the intersection of Seward’s foreign policy goals with the earliest Asian American political organizing in the U.S. Early on in Speer’s ministry, around 1855, Seward took an interest in Speer’s work, visited him, and subscribed to his newspaper, The Oriental, which appealed for Chinese interests to readers. In his letters to Seward around this time, Speer builds upon Lowrie’s ideas, adding that the inclusion of the Chinese into the American workforce would create “a most useful and important class, if rightly managed.” He argues to Seward that lobbying against discriminatory taxation and the People v. Hall decision, which prevented Chinese immigrants from testifying against Whites in court, was in accordance with God’s providential plan to convert the entire Asian continent by bringing Chinese and American people into closer commercial and spiritual proximity. The inclusion of the Chinese labor market, Speer believed, was in the “commercial, agricultural, religious, and national interests” of the American empire—and he expected Seward to agree. Speer’s ministry to the Chinese within U.S. borders and subsequent correspondence with Seward advances what Emily Conroy-Krutz calls missionary intelligence. 

In 1868, Seward would help finalize the Burlingame Treaty, which opened immigration between China and America and facilitated substantial Chinese immigration into the United States until Chinese exclusion in 1882. It is very likely that Speer’s arguments for the San Francisco Chinese made a significant ideological contribution to Seward’s diplomatic agenda, ultimately increasing the number of Chinese immigrants allowed into the country from 1868 to Chinese exclusion in 1882. Speer’s application of Seward’s ideology also created a tradition of inclusionary Protestants ministering to the Chinese in California. Here, I introduce listeners to the texts and churches that identified themselves along the Seward-Speer tradition of inclusionary Protestantism. 

If “Civil War faith” was Lincoln’s contribution to the ideological core of twentieth century U.S. foreign policy, inclusionary Protestantism was his secretary of state Seward’s contribution. Civil war faith, Preston argues, was defined by two principles: humanitarian intervention and America’s role as God’s chosen nation. These two principles, wielded by Seward’s missionaries, meant the inclusion and political empowerment of Chinese immigrants in an era defined by exclusion.