Post on 31-Mar-2023
S. WELLS WILLIAMS
EARLY AMERICAN PROTESTANT MISSIONS IN CHINA
A THESIS
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THEOLOGY
GORDON-CONWELL THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
SOUTH HAMILTON, MASSACHUSETTS
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE
MASTER OF ARTS IN THEOLOGY
BY
ANDREW T. KAISER
DECEMBER 11, 1995
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank the Sterling Memorial Library of the Yale University Library System for providing access to the small portion of the Samuel Wells Williams Family Papers currently available on microfilm. The author regrets that time and financial considerations prevented a more detailed investigation of the entire collection of manuscripts so generously made available by the Department of Manuscripts and Archives. Heartfelt thanks and appreciation are also offered to Professors Richard Lints and Garth Rossell for their encouragement and support. Their wholehearted advocacy of interdisciplinary research made this project possible.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
"A Devoted And Pious, And Well Educated Printer" . . . . . . 4
"'till More Active Service Be Opened" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
"Doing Good in Any Line" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Selected Writings of S. Wells Williams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
v
ABSTRACT
This paper is an examination of the life of Samuel Wells Williams
(1812-1884). During his long term of service in and around China
Williams served as a missionary printer for the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions, as translator for Com. Perry's
expeditions to Japan, as Secretary and Interpreter for the United States
Legation to China, and as the inaugural Professor of Chinese at Yale
University.
Specifically, the purpose of this work is to investigate the years of
Williams's service to the American Board as one of the first handful of
American Protestant missionaries to China. Circumstances in Williams's
life that are infrequently mentioned in contemporary scholarship on
missions in China are highlighted in an effort to introduce new categories
of discussion into the field. The paper is specifically interested in
combining the best insights of the theological and historical disciplines.
Topics examined include the Sunday school movement, life and
evangelism in Canton before the Treaty settlements, missionary views on
opium and war, American millennialism, differing views on missionary
methods (with reference to Rufus Anderson), and the role of providence
in Williams's faith.
The paper covers the years from Williams's birth in 1812 until
Williams's decision to resign from the employ of the American Board in
early 1857.
1
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
The forty-three years of service (1833-1876) in China completed by
Samuel Wells Williams as both a missionary and a diplomat cover some
of the most turbulent years in the history of East-West relations. It
seems self-evident that an investigation of such a man's life might
contribute much to our understanding of those days of change, and yet
his is a story too infrequently told.1 It is the purpose of this study to
correct this error, and to give voice to a character that has yet to be given
much attention by modern scholars.
Rather than reading Williams as a "missionary" according to the
definitions of contemporary scholarship, this study will attempt to take
him at his own words. This is of course an exercise in "enlarging the
context," and it requires that the scholar be constantly on the alert for
new paths of investigation for the subject may not fit neatly into the
molds which our scholarship has prepared for him or her.2 Williams's
1As of yet, there is no critical biography of Williams available. This paper relies heavily on the letters and journal entries recorded in Williams's son Fredrick Wells Williams's compilation The Life and Letters of Samuel Wells Williams, LL. D., Missionary, Diplomatist, Sinologue (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1889; reprint, Wilmington, DA: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1972). Fortunately, the volume is largely composed of selections from S. Wells Williams's own letters and journals. These primary source materials will accordingly contribute much to this and any future studies of Williams. Unfortunately, it must be remembered that Williams's son served as the final redactor of all this material. Since little is known of the son it is often difficult to know how to establish the proper critical distance with regard to these sources.
2Perhaps few texts are more in need of such an enlarged context than Williams's own frequently quoted mention of "the Society for the Diffusion of Cannon Balls." When
2 story is an instructive one, in as much as it so often eludes and
challenges the categories traditionally used by Sinologists to describe
Christian missions in China. These departures arise specifically in the
areas where the context is enlarged.
Accordingly, this study will look at sides of Williams's life that
rarely receive attention by scholars and yet seem to have great bearing
upon both his character and the general course of his life. There is
power in the simple telling of a story. And while spatial constraints
prohibit the kind of full and fresh account of Williams's entire life which
is needed, it is hoped that the brief periods elucidated in this study will
suggest some potential new categories by which our understanding of
Williams as well as some of the other early missionaries to China might
be more fruitfully examined. These new tools for discussion will arise
from the details of Williams's own circumstances through both the
careful reading of the historical record and the insightful posing of
relevant theological questions.
Beginning with Williams's childhood and the family that raised
him, the study will move slowly through his adolescence until he first is
called to service in China. This will reveal the character of his faith, as
well as the nature of his call to Christian service. Next, the years
covering his initial period in China will be examined with particular
attention to the general nature of foreign life within China before the
settlement of the first Anglo-Chinese War and the specific duties which
Williams undertook while there. His ideas regarding the opium question viewed within the context of the entire journal entry, it is clear that Williams fears this final recourse, and has pity rather than bitterness or anger for the Chinese negotiators. The allusion to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge is obvious, and to find cynicism in Williams's use of words such as "pity" and phrases such as "poor fellows" is to commit gross anachronism. See Williams, Life and Letters, 257.
3 and the war(s) it engendered will be developed and linked to his
Christian faith. Third, the years leading from his marriage until his
commissioning as Secretary and Interpreter to the American Legation will
be discussed. Here, his understanding of mission work will be
investigated noting especially the influence of millennial expectations and
the doctrine of providence, while the factors that shaped his decision to
engage in diplomatic employment will also be presented. Finally, these
historical and theological investigations will be brought together to
suggest ways in which contemporary discussions of nineteenth-century
missions in China can be enlarged to more accurately reflect the variety
of experience and character present during those formative days.
4
CHAPTER TWO
"A Devoted And Pious, And Well Educated Printer"
Information regarding Williams's life before he began his career in
China is understandably rare. The exploits of one of many children in a
small rural town may show promise, but rarely seem worthy of recording
until after works of greatness have been done. However, between
Williams's own writings and recollections and the account of his youth
left by his son Frederick it is possible to reconstruct the general course of
his adolescence and the key influences on him during his early years.
In 1637 a Puritan named Robert Williams from Norwich, England
disembarked after the dangerous cross-Atlantic journey and joined the
earliest settlers of what is now Roxbury, Massachusetts. Family legend
has it that during the arduous crossing to the new land, Robert's wife
had a dream amidst her discomfort and struggle which foreshadowed
"…that from her loins should come a line of pious and illustrious
preachers, whose sturdy voices should sound the truth to millions in
that land."3 A descendant eight generations later remarked that Robert
Williams had indeed become "the ancestor of more ministers—and more
long-lived ministers—than probably any other man in this country."4
3Williams, Life and Letters, 1.
4Williams, Life and Letters. 1.
5 Six generations later—and just as the pioneer Protestant
Robert Morrison began his ministry to China—a Williams by the
unfortunate name of William was living in Utica, New York as a printer.
Known as "Col. Williams" for his meritorious service defending New York
in the War of 1812, "Billy Williams" was a pillar of his community. He
insisted on being involved in every good charitable act of the community
from engineer in the volunteer fire department and editor of one of the
local newspapers to church elder and leader in the Sunday school
program.
Col. Williams soon had the good fortune to marry another settler
from New England named Miss Sophia Wells. Of good Puritan stock,
Miss Wells—or rather, Mrs. Williams—developed through the early death
of her father a penchant for thrift and right-living which was an example
to all who knew her. The family was full of charity towards others as the
Colonel customarily invited his apprentices to live with his family while
Sophia was "ever actively on the path of love and good works."5 But it
was not until the birth of their first son one year after their marriage that
Sophia was converted to the Christian faith. Afflicted by a terrible
disease from which she never fully recovered, Sophia experienced a
spiritual awakening with the encouragement of her husband.
The son whose birth accompanied Sophia's rebirth was named
Samuel Wells Williams. Born on September 22, 1812 in Utica, New York
as the first of fourteen children, little Samuel was whisked away by his
mother's family in an effort to protect him from his mother's sickness.
Born a little more than a year before Robert Morrison finished his first
5Williams, Life and Letters. 10.
6 Chinese translation of the New Testament, the young lad proved to
be wonderfully healthy and later remembered these days growing up on
his grandmother's farm as "some of the happiest days of my childhood."6
It was while living with his grandmother that he came to be called "Wells"
so as not to be confused with his uncle Samuel.7
Williams's youth was a typical one filled with a cascade of ever-
increasing antics and chores. Yet as a young lad at the opening of
nineteenth century America, play was likely to be less frequent for him
than for the typical youth of today. Williams's mother kept him ever
busy, sharing with the rest of respectable Britain and America a healthy
dread of that crouching evil "idleness." This is not to say that Williams
lacked the playful, adventuresome spirit so common in young boys;
rather, as his brother recollects, "If his pranks and scrapes were few, it
was doubtless owing to his abundant occupations."8 Indeed, he was still
quite young when Sunday school was enthusiastically added to his
already "abundant occupations." And it was in the Sunday school where
Williams learned the faith and was awakened to Christian service.9
6Williams, Life and Letters. 12.
7Williams, Life and Letters. 12.
8Williams, Life and Letters. 14.
9It must be stated immediately that this is only one of the many influences acting upon the young boy Wells—though it is a rather large influence and one frequently dismissed. Tantalizingly few details are available about his family life, apart from their support of the Utica Sunday school and their respect within the community. Additionally, the great economic, social, and religious fermentations sweeping New York at this time could be examined in greater depth beyond acknowledging the increased options they provided for young Williams's development. These are all potential influences on Williams for future research to develop more fully, but as space is limited and they seem more likely to be recognized by other scholars this section will focus on religious education.
7 Utica at the turn of the century, with its five or six thousand
residents, was poised to be catapulted by the completion of the nearby
Erie Canal into the upper ranks of New York's cities. America was
breathing deep the heady populism of the Jeffersonians, and
individualism was finally being codified as a virtue. In the spirit of
republican philanthropy so popular in the cities of those days, Utica
sought to alleviate "the plight of free blacks" by opening Sunday
schools.10 Sunday school in these early days provided simple literacy
training to all those unable to afford an education using lessons which
were "…either from the catechism or were verses from the Bible or from
hymns chosen and memorized by the scholar."11 In 1816, the same year
the seminal Chinese convert Liang Fa was baptised by William Milne, five
women between the ages of fourteen and sixteen began instruction at
Utica's first Sunday school.12 These young volunteers sought to educate
and reform those "'of all ages and without distinction of color' from 'the
lowest dregs of society.'"13 The school seems to have been initially
10Anne M. Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790-1880 (New haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 23. The classes were appropriately segregated, of course. It is not known whether "free blacks" were taught writing as well as reading in the Utica school. For a discussion of blacks in the early days of the Sunday schools see "Chapter Two" in Boylan, Sunday School, 22ff.
11Edwin Wilbur Rice, The Sunday-School Movement (1780-1917) and the American Sunday-School Union (1817-1917) (New York: Arno Press & The New York Times, 1971), 101. In the discourse of early Sunday schools in both England and America, students at the schools were called "scholars."
12Boylan, Sunday School, 114. Note: this paper follows P. Richard Bohr in using the proper rendering of Liang Fa's name within the text, while using the traditional spelling (Liang A-fa) for bibliographic reference to his works. See the opening to Bohr's essay in Suzanne Wilson Barnett and John King Fairbank, eds., Christianity in China: Early Protestant Missionary Writings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 35.
13Boylan, Sunday School, 34.
8 organized by Col. Williams, and by 1820 the local Methodists and
Baptists had joined with the Williamses' home church, the First
Presbyterian Church of Utica, to form the Utica Union Sunday-School.14
It was not long, however, before "common" schools supported by
tax dollars began to appear in the more developed and settled of the
states, particularly in the Northern states. These schools offered the
same training in literacy that the Sunday schools supplied—though here
the education was not necessarily available for adults. Rather than
replacing the Sunday school, the common schools liberated the Sunday
schools from the burden of providing basic literacy and allowed them to
concentrate on the more pressing issue of religious instruction.15 As the
evolving Sunday schools came to be viewed by clergymen and maternal
associations as "among the most valuable means of religious instruction"
they also began to gain the kind of middle class participation previously
hindered by the stigmas of poverty and illiteracy.16 And while illiterate
adults lost one of their last hopes at gaining the skills of letters, the
participation of children in the Sunday schools increasingly approached
the populist ideal of becoming a place where "'the rich and the poor' meet
together.'"17 Perhaps more important still, these children were then able
to receive intensive theological training.
14Williams, Life and Letters, 20; Rice, The Sunday-School Movement, 456.
15Boylan, Sunday School, 24.
16Boylan, Sunday School, 16.
17Boylan, Sunday School, 16. However, along with adults, black children also lost one of the few means of education available to them. See Boylan, Sunday School, 27.
9 Behind the original philanthropic concerns of the first
Sunday-schools and eventually surpassing these concerns lay the unrest
of "established" American culture at the turn of the century. As is so well
documented in Nathan Hatch's The Democratization of American
Christianity, the populist and expansionist impulses accompanying the
Second Great Awakening and America's new found independence posed
immense challenges to the orthodox churches and institutions of
traditional American society.18 The 1801 Plan of Union and the many
organizations created by the Congregationalist and Presbyterian
congregations during these first few decades of the nineteenth century
are a benchmark of the fears that filled the hearts and minds of the
pious. Though many Reformed churches initially resisted these new
Sunday schools for fear that their ecumenical nature would destroy
family religious instruction and catechistic training, the increasing
foment of the rapidly "Democratizing" nation eventually led them to
embrace the Sunday school instruction within the church as better than
what little moral and doctrinal instruction the common schools might
offer.
Nor were these fears ill-founded for the orthodox Calvinist in
Jeffersonian America. It seemed at times as if the world was crashing
down on top of the traditional believer. In towns all across the country
men and women like Lorenzo Dow, Joseph Smith and Billy Hibbard
would tear through the citizens disrupting the established order with
challenges such as
18Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), passim. See especially Chapters Two and Six.
10 …larnin' isn't religion, and eddication don't give a man the power of the Spirit…. St. Peter was a fisherman—do you think he ever went to Yale College? No, no, beloved brethren and sisters.19
Many Presbyterians and Congregationalists chose to respond to threats
such as these by pushing religious education all the more and
championing "respectability, seriousness, intelligence, and piety."20
Thus, the founding of Andover Seminary in 1808 was symbolic not only
of established religion's defense against heterodox theology, but also of
established society's desire to resist the influence of the rougher and
lower portions of society so recently liberated and enfranchised.21 And,
as has been said before, what could be better suited for achieving those
ends than the strict religious instruction of society's children? In the
Sunday school, at least, the established churches would still teach their
children the Bible.
So, as Ann M. Boylan argues, the American Sunday-school moved
rapidly beyond its early goal of helping the under-privileged to place its
emphases upon the religious aspect of its teaching. In the new schools:
Teaching reading and writing was only a means to a greater end, not an end in itself. That greater end—an evangelical interpretation of the Bible—was to be achieved by teaching students to read the Bible, familiarizing them with its
19Hatch, Democratization, 20.
20Hatch, Democratization, 19.
21This is by no means an argument in favor of the social control theory. The abbreviated history of Jeffersonian America included here is only designed to give signposts for those unfamiliar with this period. The role played by individual families in the educational process and the nature of their resistance and cooperation must be acknowledged.
11 contents, and leading them to interpret it as their teachers did.22
When in his later life S. Wells Williams recalls his Sunday-school
days his memories are of Bible study and not English study. Since by at
least 1818 (just around his seventh birthday) young Wells was enrolled
in some sort of daily school in Utica—thus indicating the presence of
basic educational alternatives—it should come as no surprise that
literacy as a goal would have faded quickly from the minds of the Utica
Sunday school founders' minds.23 With the relegation of literacy to the
realm of the common school, the Sunday school was given all the more
time to devote to the discipline of Scripture study. In fact, Col. Williams
and the other men in town involved in organizing the Utica Sunday
school are remembered primarily as being committed to "the stupendous
project of making every child commit to memory the entire body of the
Holy Word."24
The amount of time these children spent engaged in Bible study is
difficult to believe. After a week spent in and out of the daily school
developing their reading and writing skills—employing lessons which
invariably used the Bible as their text—young Williams and his
classmates would trek to the First Presbyterian Church of Utica every
Sunday morning at half-past eight to hear the day's Scripture lesson
recited and explained by their instructors. The regular Sunday meeting
would next be attended, and immediately after church was dismissed the
22Boylan, Sunday School, 9-10.
23Williams, Life and Letters, 24.
24Williams, Life and Letters, 20.
12 afternoon session would begin with the entire school being
questioned on the lesson by the superintendents.25
Wells recalls his superintendent Mr. Truman Parmele as having
"an influence over the boys… of the purest and strongest kind."26
Parmele gained some renown for his mode of instruction and questioning
and in 1823 published his ideas in a volume called Questions on the
Historical Parts of the New Testament.27 Though far from exhaustive, the
questions were a great improvement over the individualistic graded
lessons of the day and were intended to encourage both scholars and
teachers to move beyond mere memorization and towards thoughtful
reflection.
Prior to the adoption of this system, the young scholars had
become involved in works of such supererogation that the two hours
typically allotted for recitation were hardly sufficient to allow the entire
class to participate. On one particular Sunday, after all the boys in one
class had recited whole chapters from the Gospels, a lad named Henry
Ivison rose and spoke five hundred verses without an error. "The
teachers wisely perceived that in such contests the spirit would speedily
be forgotten…, and forthwith limited the lessons to fifteen verses."28
25This description comes from Wells' own written recollections of his Sunday school days. Williams, Life and Letters, 21.
26Williams, Life and Letters, 21.
27Rice, Sunday-School Movement, 104.
28Williams, Life and Letters, 22. Ivison, an apprentice of Williams's father, and Williams were friends and worked together for some time in an Albany bookstore. Ivison went on to run the successful school book publishing company Ivison, Phinney, Blakeman. See National Cyclopædia of American Biography, vol. III. (New York: James T. White & Company, 1898), 24.
13 Williams was not left out of this frenzy, and indeed he remembers
on one special Sabbath evening examination receiving a book "for having
learned the New Testament through…."29 Though memorization of
scripture always played a large role in the Utica Sunday school program,
this was not empty exercise. Recall that Williams's earliest memory, as
mentioned above, was of reciting en masse portions of the catechism—
generally understood to be one of a given church's primary keys to
orthodox Biblical interpretation.30
Sunday school for young Williams was never "mere" memorization.
Williams's instructor was one of his father's apprentices—a boy named
George S. Wilson. This teenager was so popular with the Utica youths
that there was a waiting list to get into his class; students would take
diligent notes on the Sunday morning sermon in hopes of being called
upon to report to young Mr. Wilson what had been said.31 Wilson also
organized an extra-curricular association for the boys called the
"Juvenile Association for Doing Good." It was largely run by the boys—
though never without the presence of Mr. Wilson—and seems to have
consisted largely of holding decorous parliamentary meetings. As a
generous act of encouragement towards the young boys, Wilson also
promised to supply blank journals at his expense to any of the boys who
would fill them with original writing. Thus Williams and his classmates
29Williams, Life and Letters, 21.
30For more information on the Utica Sunday school see the Semi-Centennial of the Sunday School of the First Presbyterian Church of Utica, (New York, 1866). Williams's contribution to this memorial is the one found in Williams, Life and Letters, 21-2.
31Boylan, Sunday School, 153.
14 were encouraged to reflect in words what they saw, did and thought.
Williams penned a number of these little books recording such details as
a trip to Niagara Falls in December of 1823 and his personal reflections
on the incomprehensibility of suicide—"God does not call them into his
presence, but they must go."32
In light of this lengthy discussion of the nature of Sunday school
education and the schools of Williams's youth, it is impossible to ignore
the massive amount of time the young Williams must have spent before
the pages of the Bible. Indeed, as he grew out of the Sunday school
classes, Williams himself went on to become a teacher in the Utica
Sunday school. There is no real analogy in modern schooling that would
adequately describe the depth and degree of Biblical literacy which was
engendered by this sort of single-minded education.
Scholars have been arguing for centuries that words matter and
that in many ways a person is what he or she reads. Given the
astounding amount of time and diligent effort these first fruits of the
Sunday school movement invested in learning and reciting this one book,
it would be curious indeed if something of the ideas, concepts, and
principles of that one book failed to make some sort of impression on
their character. Repeatedly over the course of his later life, the words of
Scripture would come to Williams's mind as a source of comfort and
guidance.33 These years undoubtedly left an indelible mark on his
32From "Samuel Williams' Journal No. 2," December, 1823. Williams, Life and Letters, 23-4.
33Note in particular Williams's disarming account of and reflections upon the death of his wife. Such peace is almost unimaginable. Williams stayed watch an entire night with his dying wife reciting to her from memory God's promises as recorded in
15 character. His oldest son and biographer Frederick summarizes
Williams's Sunday school experiences with the following words.
Such was the stimulus which cultivated and increased the religious fervor of his nature, and here Wells first decided to enter upon a missionary life; in a school which, during fifty years, furnished more than thirty missionaries and ministers, it is not strange that the spiritual child should have developed into the Christian man.34
It has been mentioned before that Williams entered school in 1818.
However, as was common those days, Williams moved frequently from
one school to another as new schools opened and closed and teachers
came and went. In 1827 he was sent to a newly opened classical school
in the town of Paris Hill some few miles from his Grandmother Wells's
farm. While here he was boarded at the farmhouse opposite the school
where his teacher the Reverend Ely Burchard would instruct him in
literature and science. One of Williams's classmates, a Mr. A. O. Osborn,
recalls the fifteen year-old Williams as spending these years "almost
constantly reading some book—usually one brought from his father's
shop at home—in which he was ever deeply absorbed."35 The same Mr.
Osborn also suggests that Williams's reading of the biography of Mr.
Judd's mission to the Sandwich Islands during these years may have
first shaped his desire for the mission field.
In 1829 Charles Bartlett opened the Utica High School, later to
become the well-known Utica Gymnasium, and Williams returned to his
Scripture. Williams's notes in his deceased wife's journal are found in Williams, Life and Letters, 442-444.
34Williams, Life and Letters, 22-3.
35There is little other evidence to corroborate Osborn's recollections. Williams himself mentions no other missionaries as inspirations of heroes. Letter from Mr. A. O. Osborn. Williams, Life and Letters, 26.
16 hometown. Here he renewed once again his friendships with his old
Sunday school classmates, especially James D. Dana with whom he was
to sustain a remarkable lifelong friendship and correspondence. These
last few years of school in Utica are notable for the love and ability which
Williams began to show for the natural sciences. Here he developed the
passion for the "rare and curious in nature" that provided him with so
much amusement and recreation throughout his many travels in the
East.36
The next few years of Williams's life were exceedingly full. In 1830
his good friend James Dana headed for Yale. Due to insufficient funds,
Williams was unable to attend. Since his father intended him for the
family print shop and bookstore, Williams restrained his great
disappointment and resigned himself. Less than half a year later, in
February of 1831, Wells and his brother Frederick professed their faith
and joined the First Church of Utica. His son records that Williams's
decision "was due rather to a sense of fitness of his publicly confessing a
truth long believed, than to any influence of those about him."37 The
sincerity of this decision was demonstrated in the fall of that same year
when his mother Sophia finally succumbed to the sickness that had
stalked her since Williams's birth.
36Williams, Life and Letters, 28. During his multiple excursions to Japan and his long residency in Beijing, collecting natural specimens was to supply much recreation for the ever ambulant Williams.
37Williams, Life and Letters, 29. This suggests that Williams's public confession was not the fruit of revivalistic services. Unfortunately, this is an instance where S. Wells Williams's own words are glaringly absent in his son's biography. Sound redaction criticism, however, can find little reason why a turn of the century son might seek to hide or disguise a revivalistic conversion.
17 Rather than rejecting an empty institution or recanting words
made in haste, Williams embraced the faith he had only recently
professed publicly. Through the trial and sorrow of a dearly loved
mother's death, the boy of barely nineteen years developed "the habit and
desire of shaping his daily duty and conversation with reference to a
personal and ever-present God."38 Drawing upon the resources of his
Sunday school education, Williams here first demonstrates the
consistency of character and steady faith which so characterized his life.
His remarkable trust through trying circumstances finds its roots in his
familiarity with the promises of his God as recorded in the Bible. Robbed
by the death of his mother "of every vestige of the joy and beauty of
living," Williams for perhaps the first time shows his colors as a Christian
man. Indeed,
from the time of this bereavement [no one] who knew him well [could] fail to note that out of its lessons and experience first came to him that profound realization of a higher life, and that habit of bringing it to mind even in his busiest moments, which was for him the real meaning of religion and the moving spring of his whole career.39
The circumstances of his mother's death provided him with the
opportunity to continue his studies, and following his love for the natural
world he headed for the newly established Rensselaer Institute of Troy.
Upon arrival, Williams discovered to his great disappointment that the
school had a slim half dozen students and only Professor Amos Eaton to
instruct them. Eaton required his students to teach each other as much
38Williams, Life and Letters, 30.
39Williams, Life and Letters, 30. S. Wells Williams's conduct throughout these events again lacks outside attestation. Here, hagiography seems likely—though by no means necessary.
18 as to listen to him, and his bout with asthma during his later years
eventually required him to curtail many of his walking nature lectures
and retire to his study leaving his students to huddle by themselves
around the meager lab tables and do what they could. These few years
of nearly independent study served to prepare Williams for a lifetime of
study in a foreign and often lonely land.
Just over a year prior, on February 22, 1830, the first two
American missionaries to China from the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions arrived at the Portuguese port of
Macao aboard the ship Roman and three days later reached the Chinese
city of Canton.40 Their ship was owned by the magnanimous American
trader D. W. C. Olyphant who had offered passage on one of his ships
and a year's free residency in Canton for whomever the American Board
could send.41 Olyphant had first visited Canton in 1820 as an agent for
the New York firm of Thomas H. Smith which had made its fortune in the
years following the second American war with the English and the
decline of the seal and fur trades. When that firm was found insolvent in
1827, Olyphant returned to new York and established his own firm of
Olyphant and Company known so well for its support of missions and its
40G. R. Williamson, Memoir of the Rev. David Abeel, D. D., Late Missionary to China (Washington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1972), 52, 67. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, often called the "American Board" for expediency, is at times also referred to in its abbreviated form as the "ABCFM."
41Kenneth Scott Latourette, The History of Early Relations between The United States and China, 1784-1844 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917), 89. In fact, Olyphant was to provide free housing for the ABCFM mission in Canton for its first thirteen years. Excerpted from Williams's "Recollections" in Williams, Life and Letters, 78.
19 strict policies against opium trading.42 One author suggests that
Olyphant supplied the first Protestant missionary to China Robert
Morrison and his new family with residence in his quarters (later to be
called "Zion's Corner") in the Canton factories following the Morrisons'
second trip to China in 1826.43 Olyphant was to become a very dear
friend and helpmate of Williams during his years in China.44
The two special passengers on board Olyphant's Roman had been
sent largely in response to an appeal from Morrison to the ABCFM of
which he had been made a "corresponding member."45 The Reverend
David Abeel was an ordained Dutch Reformed minister of failing health
who had served congregations in New York state and volunteered his
services to the ABCFM.46 He was chosen originally to represent the
American Seaman's Friend Society amongst the sailors in Canton for one
year and then to serve the ABCFM in surveying South East Asia.47 The
other missionary sailing with Olyphant was Congregationalist Elijah
Coleman Bridgman from Massachusetts. He would become Williams's
42Latourette, United States and China, 53-4, 69. On Olyphant and opium, see also Eldon Griffin, Clippers and Consuls: American Consular and Commercial Relations with Eastern Asia, 1845-1860 (Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, Inc., 1938), 201n, 202.
43Just how much influence and wealth Olyphant had before the incorporation of his firm in1827 is not known. He was, however, a close friend of Morrison from the date of his arrival. A. J. Broomhall, Hudson Taylor & China's Open Century. vol. 1, Barbarians at the Gate (London: Hodder and Stroughton for Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1981), 169.
44Wells named his second son "Olyphant" after his merchant friend. Williams, Life and Letters, 182.
45Broomhall, Hudson Taylor, vol. 1, 173-4.
46Williamson, Rev. David Abeel, 50-1.
47Williamson, Rev. David Abeel, 78.
20 immediate mentor in Canton and his long time companion.48
Bridgman immediately set himself up in Canton and commenced
language study and literary work for the ABCFM rapidly establishing a
small school for Chinese boys.49 The Andover graduate Bridgman was
joined in 1832 by Edwin Stevens of Yale who replaced Abeel with the
American Seaman's Friend Society in Canton.50
It was Morrison's hope that the new missionaries from America
would bring with them a printing press.51 In December of 1831, less
than a year after Bridgman and Abeel's arrival, a printing press was
received from the Bleecker Street Presbyterian Church of New York. The
press, named the Bruen Press after one of the church's pastors, was sent
at the urging of Olyphant who was a member of the New York church.52
With the arrival of the type a few months later, Bridgman put the press
to use and in May of 1832 at the urging of Morrison commenced
publication of the valuable journal The Chinese Repository.53
48Barnett and Fairbank, Christianity in China, 90-1. See also Williams, Life and Letters, 61-2. Note: Bridgman's arrival in Canton is incorrectly recorded by Frederick Williams as 1840.
49For a concise if limited summary of one side of Bridgman's labors in China see Fred W. Drakes' contribution to Barnett and Fairbank, Christianity in China, 92. See also Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in China (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 218.
50Four years later Stevens was with the ABCFM. He was the last person to actually minister for the ASFS in China during their short-lived mission in Canton. Latourette, Christian Missions in China. 218. This is apparently a revision of his early statement regarding the ASFS in his previous United States and China, 92-3.
51Latourette, United States and China, 91n.
52Williams, Life and Letters, 39, 78.
53Latourette, United States and China, 91n, 92. The Repository itself is a subject worthy of its own monograph. In particular, its relation to the merchant community
21 In 1832 Morrison, Bridgman and Stevens were the only
Protestant missionaries permanently resident in China. The workers
sent out by the London Missionary Society (Samuel Dyer, Jacob Tomlin,
and Walter Medhurst with the LMS press) were located either in Malacca,
Java, Batavia or Singapore.54 Dutch missionary Charles Gutzlaff was in
the midst of his second investigative journey up the coast of China in the
service of the British East India Company and had yet to take up his
government position at Hong Kong.55 Since the work of language study,
printing, and translation was too much for Morrison and Bridgman alone
(especially taxing were Morrison's labors for the British East India
Company), they appealed to the American Board to send help.56 In a
letter to American Board Secretary Rufus Anderson, Bridgman says "We
need a printer if the work goes on.… I am constantly pressed with
labor—hardly find time to eat or sleep." 57 Furthermore, this man
should be "a devoted and pious, and well educated printer."58
needs to be illuminated while the actual authorship of its editorials as well as the actual criteria used by Bridgman and Williams for accepting these editorials needs to be carefully investigated. Spatial constraints mean that this work will deal with The Repository in an unfortunately limited fashion.
54For remarkably detailed narratives of these pre-Canton days see the first volume Barbarians at the Gates in A. J. Broomhall's excellent series Hudson Taylor & China's Open Century. 6 vols. (London: Hodder and Stroughton for Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1981-). For purposes of expediency, the London Missionary Society is often referred to by its abbreviated form as the "LMS."
55Ralph R. Covell, Confucius, the Buddha, and Christ (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1986), 73-81.
56Latourette, United States and China, 93.
57Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 3. Bridgman to Rufus Anderson, December 8, 1832.
58Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 71. Bridgman to H. Hill, February 16, 1833.
22 The request was noted in Boston and eventually William
Williams, owner and operator of the largest bookstore in America west of
Albany, was asked if he might be able to supply the Board with a young
man fit to run the mission press in Canton.59 He wrote to his eldest son
Samuel Wells Williams at once. Just one short day after receiving his
father's note, Williams responded in writing on April 23, 1832 with his
willingness to go to China after the completion of his course of study at
the Rensselaer Institute in the autumn and some instruction in the
workings of a press. It would most likely mean giving up his plans to
become a naturalist but—with the steadfast faith that was to
characterize his entire life of service—Williams closed his letter with the
acknowledgment that "there are places enough to have a choice, and
good ones too."60
In the fall of 1832 Williams returned to his hometown of Utica and
engaged in a crash course on printing and bookmaking. Over the next
six months his father's notable establishment provided him with
experience covering the full gamut of the profession from composition
and printing to proofing and binding. For one who had always loved to
read books, Williams found this work tedious, laborsome, and "full of
business… but such business as I hate."61 In the spring of 1833 his
father William married Miss Catherine Huntington of Rome, New York.
59Williams, Life and Letters, 39. On William Williams's success see National Cyclopædia of American Biography, vol. I, 422. This biographical notice contains frustratingly little regarding his conduct as a father or his relationship with his children.
60Letter to his father from Troy, N.Y. on April 23, 1832. Williams, Life and Letters, 40.
61Letter to James Dana. Williams, Life and Letters, 49.
23 By the end of April Williams was ready to sail for China, and after a
brief delay Williams and fellow missionary Rev. Ira Tracy left New York on
Olyphant's Morrison on June 15, 1833.
24
CHAPTER THREE
"'till More Active Service Be Opened"
On September 22, 1833 Williams offered a bottle of currant wine
from his father's own 1812 vintage to be consumed at the captain's table:
somewhere in the midst of the Indian Ocean, Samuel Wells Williams had
reached the age of twenty-one.62 Just over one month later, the ship
Morrison dropped anchor twelve miles down the Pearl River from Canton
amidst the great merchant fleet of Whampoa and S. Wells Williams and
Reverend Tracy were rowed up river to the famous "Thirteen Factories" of
Canton.
Now the school boy had become the young missionary. Over the
next fourteen years—and indeed the rest of his life—Williams was to put
forth "painstaking and generous efforts in giving [his knowledge of China
and Chinese] to others."63 Rather than counting conversion notches on
his belt, Williams invested himself in arduous studies to develop and
pass on to those who came after him his knowledge and understanding
of China, her people, and their language.
These are not the virtues the modern reader associates with
nineteenth century missions. It is generally assumed that evangelistic
62Williams, Life and Letters, 53.
63Letter from the missionaries of Shanghai upon his departure from China. Williams, Life and Letters, 419.
25 fervor dictated the supposedly rash acts of these pioneers.
However, it must be remembered that Williams entered China during the
earliest period of Protestant missions in the Middle Kingdom.
Understood in the light of the entire history of Christianity in China, the
remarkable control and patience with which Williams approached the
mission task is rapidly revealed to be a wise and tempered strategy that
attempted to cope well with the reality of Qing Dynasty China at the
opening of the nineteenth century.
The history of China's earlier encounters with Christianity is
surprisingly long and far too little studied. Passing over the seventh
century Nestorians and the poorly understood twelfth century Catholic
missions of John of Montecorvino brings the record rapidly to the Jesuit
mission to the late Ming and early Qing courts.64
From the initial journeys of Francis Xavier in the first half of the
sixteenth century to the documented "success" of Matteo Ricci and
Michel Ruggiere in the late Ming and on through Johann Adam Schall
von Bell during the early Qing Dynasty, the Jesuits found converts first
among the gentry and then with the favor and encouragement of the
courts amongst the common people as well. Persecutions came and
went, though the Jesuits ability to survive the Ming collapse in 1644 and
to find still greater popularity with their new Manchu rulers is something
of a miracle. The colorful story of Schall casting cannon for the defense
of the ailing Ming only to be given office shortly thereafter by the newly
64For a good look at the earlier days, the two classic works are Arthur C. Moule, Christians in China Before the Year 1550 (London: S. P. C. K., 1930); and Latourette, Christian Missions in China. These should be combined with the excellent new contribution Samuel Hugh Moffett, A History of Christianity in China: Volume 1, Beginnings to 1500 (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).
26 enthroned Shun Zhi (Qing) Emperor indicates, regardless of the
cynical motives present amongst China's rulers, an undeniable degree of
official toleration towards the priests.65
However, this period was brought to a close by what can be seen
as a precursor to the more chaotic East-West upheavals that would bring
down China's last imperial dynasty and eventually raise up a new
socialist dynasty. The well-known "rites controversy" describes the
disagreements that surrounded the Roman Church's efforts to resolve
the conflicts—apparent or real—between Catholic practice and Chinese
culture. Debates raged within the Catholic Church and her various
orders over the proper Chinese term for translating God. The Fathers in
China and in Rome struggled to come to grips with the relationship
between the reverence of deceased ancestors enjoined by Confucian
virtues of filial piety and the Biblical injunctions against idolatry.66 After
over a century of argumentation and ad hoc practice, Pope Clement XI
attempted to bring all practice into accord with Papal will by enjoining
"total, absolute, integral and inviolable observance" of all previously
issued condemnatory decrees in the forceful Papal Bull of 1715 Ex Illa
Die.67
65Latourette, Christian Missions in China, 105-6.
66Though such clear conflicts between Confucian rites and Christian practice are not frequently encountered in post-1949 China, these issues are still far from conclusively decided. For a succinct discussion of the theological points at stake see Covell, Confucius, the Buddha, and Christ, 59-67.
67This quotation comes from a translation of Ex Illa Die in George Minamiki, S.J., The Chinese Rites Controversy from its Beginning to Modern Times (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985), 58ff.
27 Imposed upon the more accommodating Jesuits of Ricci's
descent by the understandably ill-informed authorities of far distant
Rome, Ex Illa Die struck a fairly aggressive pose, repeating all the
previous pronouncements against many practices of traditional Chinese
culture and in some cases strengthening them. Chinese converts were
required, with little room for exception, to break from most traditional
ceremonies and rites with little regard for their supposed exclusively civil
significance. The great Emperor Kangxi—so often noted for his tolerance
and even appreciation for the Jesuits—was finally taxed beyond the
limits of his patience and in 1720 upon reading the injunctions of the
Pope he decried Ex Illa Die as sectarian and divisive.68 "There is no more
striking example of sheer ignorance."69
Kangxi's death in 1723 ushered in the reign of the Yongzheng
Emperor. Kangxi's son and heir then took his father's well-known
Sacred Edicts (Shengyu) of 1670, expanded upon them and had them
published as the Shengyu guangxun. Most significant for the purposes of
nineteenth century missions was the sermon on the seventh of the
sixteen maxims entitled "Destroy heterodox doctrines in order to render
honor to orthodox learning."
A classic restatement of Mencius, this section affirmed the
inherently good nature of humankind and the role of environment in
68The author recognizes that the nomen "Kangxi” actually refers to the reign period in esse. However, following the traditional practice of referring to Dynastic rulers by their reign titles legitimates this otherwise confused phrase. This convention is maintained throughout this paper.
69Kang Xi's written words as recorded in Michael Stainton, "Sources of 19th Century Chinese Opposition to the Missionaries and Christianity," Ching Feng XX, no. 3, (1977): 135.
28 shaping a person's actions.70 Yongzheng stressed good education
and a virtuous leader as the proper means for protecting these orthodox
truths from the heretical lies of such sectarian influences as Buddhism,
Taoism, the notorious White Lotus sect, and the Western religion of the
"Lord of Heaven" (Catholicism). When he described Catholicism with the
simple compound "bu jing" (unclassical), Yongzheng perfectly reflected
and summarized the philosophical background to the expulsion of the
Jesuit missionaries and the suppression of Christianity he had
commanded that very same year.71
Persecutions followed, missionaries were martyred, and
Yongzheng's writings were read, studied, memorized and recited for the
illiterate populace of China by dutiful local officials reared and nurtured
within the reigning school of Confucian orthodoxy.72 Borrowing Paul
Cohen's insightful concepts, the philosophical "heterodox-orthodox
antithesis" operating behind Chinese official religious pronouncements
had once again closed the door to the practice of Western religion within
the Middle Kingdom. From 1724 and the Shengyu guangxun until the
toleration clauses of the Anglo-Chinese Wars in the 1840's and 1850's,
70Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism, 1860-1870 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 11ff.
71Stainton, "Sources of Opposition," 135.
72All schools would have agreed with the general condemnation of Western religion voiced in the Shengyu guangxun as subverting the peasant's loyalty to the state in accordance with the five relationships.
29 Christianity was not only philosophically but also legally
"heterodox."73 Missions to China were officially "illegal."
As mentioned above, at the time of Williams's arrival in China,
Protestant missions were still in their infant stage. The ethos behind
Yongzheng's Shengyu guangxun still prevailed and the Chinese officials
were none too friendly towards those who would peddle foreign religion
and thus foment rebellion. William Milne and his wife—the first
Protestants to follow Morrison—arrived at Macao in 1813 only to be
ordered to leave by the authorities.74 Thus Milne, and many of the other
early missionaries, set themselves to the task of building a "wall of light"
around China. Through language study and teaching; evangelization of
Chinese emigrants in neighboring places such as Malacca, Singapore
and Batavia; and the translation and publication of both Western and
Chinese materials for the mutual edification of both Chinese and
Westerners, these pioneers prepared themselves and China for the
inevitable future day when China's wall of seclusion finally would be
breached.75 Meanwhile, through every crack they could find, the
missionaries sought to shine the gospel into China.
Not surprisingly, there were not very many missionaries during
this early period and of them only a very few were able actually to live in
73The distinction between the philosophical and legal is in many ways a false dichotomy in dynastic China, given that law was understood not so much as codified and abstract but as embodied in the person of the Emperor—"the Son of Heaven, the True Dragon." Yet to the degree that the Emperors following Yongzheng and the officials who served them shared the conceptual universe of the expanded Sacred Edicts, Western religion was theoretically and most practically against the Emperor and his state and thus "against the law."
74Latourette, Christian Missions in China, 213.
75Covell, Confucius, the Buddha, and Christ, 70-73.
30 China. As late as 1835 only twelve Protestant missionaries could be
found East of Burma. In 1832 there were a total of seven Protestant
missionaries serving China—five representing the London Missionary
Society and two representing the American Board of Commissioners for
Foreign Missions.76 Of those, only three—Morrison, Bridgman and
Stevens—were living in China when Williams and Tracy arrived.77
In fact, just to say that these few were "living in China" is
something of an overstatement. The Manchu officials had granted to
some of the foreign traders the right to residence in the notorious
"factories" of China.78 Stacked side by side along the banks of the Pearl
River, these thirteen Chinese style buildings extended back towards the
walls of Canton city in five- or six-hundred feet of consecutive
76For these and the preceding statistics see Latourette, Christian Missions in China. 213ff; 217ff. In 1832 Robert Morrison, Medhurst, Tomlin, Dyer, and Kidd served the LMS and Bridgman and Stevens served the ABCFM. Kidd was at the time back in England due to poor health. Others, such as Abeel (who later returned to Amoy) and Milne (who died in 1822), had entered and left the field prior to 1832. These numbers are still further confused by Stevens's and Abeel's initial relationship with the American Seaman's Friend Society (a mission aimed specifically towards Westerners). It also appears that after 1831 Abeel should be counted as a missionary to China (he was still involved in Chinese language study and serving the ABCFM at Singapore in 1833), while Stevens was in the service of the Seaman's Friend Society until spring of 1836. See Latourette, United States and China, 92; Williamson, Rev. David Abeel, 119.
77According to Latourette, Gutzlaff—who sailed for Asia in 1827—was the Netherlands Missionary Society's appointment to "the East Indies" and thus not exclusively to "China." He was, however, within the circle of evangelists with which Morrison and Bridgman frequently met and conversed and he visited Canton a number of times. His investigative journeys along the coast of China are significant for their effect upon the morale of the early missionaries and their effect upon the sending countries. As Williams seems to take little note of Gutzlaff's "findings" (apart from sharing Bridgman's doubts) little will be said of Gutzlaff here. For Gutzlaff's journeys see Covell, Confucius, the Buddha, and Christ, 73-81. On Gutzlaff himself cf. Broomhall, Hudson Taylor, vol. 1, 200-10, 323-50; and Jessie Lutz's "Karl F. A. Gutzlaff: Missionary Entrepreneur" in Barnett and Fairbank, Christianity in China, 61-87.
78Originally, factory "was the term employed throughout the East, to designate the factors of the East India Co., and had no sense at all synonymous with 'manufactory.'" Williams, Life and Letters, 56.
31 courtyards. In front of each whitewashed mansion flew the national
flag of its resident company, while a small park some one hundred by
fifty yards was open for the exercise of the merchants. The American
factory, "one of the best,” was three stories of quarters, storehouses, and
drawing rooms with a turret on top and a long corridor beneath
connecting the front chambers to those in the rear.79 Though
sumptuously appointed by the wealthy traders, these were far from ideal
quarters: the residences towards the back of the factories were known
for their darkness and general lack of breathable air.
These buildings were leased by the famed Hong merchants of
Canton. A group of thirteen Chinese merchants who had bought their
offices from the Emperor at great expense, these influential men were not
only free to engage in and supervise foreign trade, but were also
responsible to the extent of their lives for any untoward behavior of the
foreigners. These men were immediately responsible to the imperially
appointed superintendent of maritime customs referred to by the
foreigners as the "Hoppo".80
Hence it was the thirteen Hong merchants (the Cohong) whom all
of China expected to control the foreign barbarians. They sought to do
so by minimizing all contact between the foreigners and the Chinese
79Descriptions abound though frequently differ. This paragraph is a distillation of Broomhall, Hudson Taylor, 87-8; Lattourette, United States and China, 24-5, 81; and Williams, Life and Letters, 55-6.
80The Hoppo was mistakenly named by foreigners because of their belief that he was a representative of the Board of Revenue (hu bu). In reality, the superintendent of the haiguan bu (board of maritime customs) and his office's income was held directly to the Imperial Household (neiwu bu). See Frederic Wakeman, Jr., "The Canton Trade and the Opium War," The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10, John K. Fairbank and D. Twitchett, gen. eds., Late Ch'ing, 1800-1911, pt. 1, John K. Fairbank, ed., (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 161.
32 people. It was the Cohong who enforced the rules that forbid the
residents of the factories to enter the city walls of Canton, limited their
travel to the small park in front of the thirteen factories, required the
residents to leave Canton when the trading season was concluded,
required all official petitions to the Chinese government to go through
their hands and finally forbade the foreign residents native teachers from
whom to learn the Chinese language.81 The profits the foreign traders
brought the Hong merchants and the Imperial household were sufficient
to guarantee that these restrictions were only strictly enforced during
times of great duress. By 1833 little had changed since the middle of the
eighteenth century when the Cohong trade was formally established—
indeed since the first arrival of the British East India Company in 1664.
Within this curious system of control and exchange, Williams and
Tracy arrived in Canton where, as Williams writes,
I was reported to the hong merchants as a trader who had come to live in the Hong of Broad Fountains, and the hong merchant who owned the hong was security for my good conduct, though we never saw each other.82
The Hong of Broad Fountains was the American Factory and—once
registered with the Cohong—Williams and Tracy joined Bridgman and
Stevens there as guests gratis of the magnanimous Olyphant.
Olyphant's passion for missions had already earned his quarters at
"Number Two, American Hong" the nickname "Zion's Corner" from the
81Broomhall, Hudson Taylor, 85-8. Some of this material is excerpted from Williams's "Recollections" in Williams, Life and Letters, 58-60.
82Letter to Rufus Anderson. Williams, Life and Letters, 60.
33 foreigners in Canton.83 Since in 1832 there were 132 foreigners
spread between Canton, Macao and Lintin of whom only twenty were
Americans, the social circle of foreign life in China was fairly limited.
Missionaries and other residents came and went, but by as late as 1841
the number of Americans in the Canton vicinity had only increased to
thirty-seven.84 And they all lived in the same thirteen buildings. The
factories were hardly "China"; surrounded by fellow Westerners, served
by Chinese, living in whitewashed mansions filled with fine furniture and
appointments from the fortunes of the East India Company and her
trading sisters, the foreign "residents of Canton" were forced by the
Cohong to live in an odd expatriate Western ghetto.
No sooner was Williams off the boat than Bridgman gratefully
handed over to the young man the management of the mission printing
office.85 His immediate task was to print the current editions of The
Chinese Repository to which within a few months he began contributing
articles and essays. Begun in 1832 by Bridgman, The Repository was a
classic expression of the "wall of light" mission ethos. This publication
and its general content on China was to be "most decidedly Christian,
but not wholly religious."86 It sought to supply the local audience (the
merchants) with the information they required (information on China)
83For Hong address and "gratis " see Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 12. Canton Mission to Rufus Anderson, May 2, 1836. For "Zion's Corner" see Latourette, United States and China, 89.
84Latourette, United States and China, 81.
85Williams, Life and Letters, 63.
86Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 61. Bridgman to Anderson, May 5, 1832. Underlining is from Bridgman's original.
34 and thus affect their sympathies and gain their subscriptions to
help cover mission costs not met by the American Board. Given the
"numerous discrepancies" in the available information regarding China
at the time, the principle object of the journal was
to review foreign books on China, with a view to notice the changes that have occurred, and how and when they were brought about, and to distinguish, as far as it can well be done, between what is, and what is not, now true.87
In the index volume released at the close of The Repository's twenty-year
run, Bridgman and Williams confess their roles as editors while at the
same time announcing that "No missionary society has ever shared in
[The Repository's] direction, nor directly contributed to its support."88
This served as Williams's primary occupation for the majority of his
period of service under the American Board.89
87Bridgman, "Introduction," The Chinese Repository, vol. I (May 1832), 2.
88Elijah Coleman Bridgman and S. Wells Williams, "Editorial Notice," General Index of Subjects Contained in the Twenty Volumes of the Chinese Repository, with an Arranged List of the Articles (Canton: Printed for the Proprietors, December 31, 1851), n.p.
89An examination of Williams's contributions as listed in the General Index challenges Murray A. Rubenstein's thesis that the American missionaries employed The Repository to encourage Western war with China. His contributions are mostly of a scientific nature—especially during his early days—while his later contributions involve mostly the translating and reprinting of official documents. Also, Williams's only contribution under the heading "War with the English" is a translation of an "Imperial Rescript." Cf. Murray A. Rubenstein, "The Wars They Wanted: American Missionaries' Use of The Chinese Repository Before the Opium War," The American Neptune, vol. XLVIII, no. 4 (Fall 1988), 271-82; and Bridgman and Williams, General Index, passim.
The questionable nature of Rubenstein's thesis is further supported when after the inclusion of John Quincy Adam's "Lecture on the War with China" is noticed the editor's response is then also read. Williams and Bridgman very clearly decry the injustice of the war, claiming that were it not for the evil opium, no war would occur! Chinese Repository, vol. XI, 289-274.
35 The Chinese Repository was "Printed for the Proprietors" who
were the members of the "Christian Union in China."90 Begun by Abeel,
Bridgman, King, Morrison and son, and two other men in 1830, the
Union was "formed to give wisdom and strength to our efforts and better
security to our friends abroad."91 With a depository and library, the
group kept tabs on the other mission stations in the region and collected
general news and knowledge. Accordingly, the group covered the
expenses of The Repository for at least its first year.92
In truth, Bridgman was rather distressed about The Repository. He
had received no instructions from the Board as to the proper use of the
press. By linking the journal to the Christian Union, he sought to avoid
the possible reprimand of the Board for misuse of the press while also
insuring that regardless of the publication's success or failure the Board
would have minimal financial responsibility for the potential losses.93
This frustration was repeated often in letters to Boston, asking for
instructions for the press and some kind of answer as to the
appropriateness of The Repository.94
90Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 62. Bridgman to Anderson, May 31, 1832.
91Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 37. Bridgman to Evarts, January 27, 1831.
92At some point Olyphant stepped in to help bear the expenses, eventually covering all the losses. See the discussion in Latourette, United States and China, 92n, 100n
93Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 62. Bridgman to Anderson, May 31, 1832.
94Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 68. Bridgman to Anderson, January 31, 1833.
36 To produce this journal Williams commenced working in the
"printing office" which had been supplied by Olyphant. The Bleecker
Street Church's Bruen Press had been placed in one of the four ground
floor rooms which comprised the printing office located between two
factories. The floor was cold stone and part of the shop lacked a rooftop
such that during inclement weather of any sort the office was unbearably
uncomfortable. To compound the trials of this work, Williams was
obligated to first learn the Portuguese language in order to be able to
communicate with his "skilled tradesmen from Macao.95 Because the
journal was an English language publication Williams was required not
only to proof all copy but also to diligently oversee all of the typesetting.
For the first few years Williams's letters to the Board dealt almost
exclusively with the details and questions of running a printing press.
No printing in Chinese was possible in the mission at this time—
there was little room in the tiny office, and Williams lacked the Chinese
language abilities such work would require. It is not even clear that the
mission possessed a full set of Chinese type—they may have had to
borrow type from the East India Company's press. Moreover, Bridgman
himself had yet to engage in much Chinese language work besides the
revision of Morrison's Bible. He was occupied with language study,
writing and editing The Repository, and teaching his young pupils—
among which Liang Fa's son Liang "A-tih" was now working to master
Greek and Hebrew.96 Scant months after Williams's arrival Bridgman
95Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 211. Williams to Anderson, December 13, 1833.
96Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 62. Bridgman to Anderson, May 31, 1832.
37 admitted that he had "never undertaken to preach, or even to
compose tracts, in Chinese."97
This is at least partly due to the fact that during these early days of
Protestant missions to China, the few men stationed in China were
regarded primarily as ministering to the other foreign residents in
Canton and Macao.98 With "Zion's Corner" as their base of operations
the small circle of Morrison, Bridgman, Stevens, Williams and Olyphant
joined in prayer and ministry to the Canton area.99 On one occasion,
after Abeel's departure to Singapore, Bridgman despaired for the "twenty
or thirty hundred seamen now at Whampoa" who were without the
services of a chaplain.100 Not only were the large numbers of seamen
left without instruction, but the foreign residents of Canton as well.
Until Stevens's arrival Bridgman led these small worship services in the
foreign community.101 The frequency with which the letters from the
Canton mission to the Board mention the attendance at these services
indicates that they were not just a side hobby for the missionaries. In
97Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 79. Bridgman to Anderson, November 11, 1833.
98Letter to Anderson. Williams, Life and Letters, 60.
99C. W. King, Olyphant's partner and nephew also joined these gatherings and had been present in 1830 at the instigation of the Christian Union at Canton. See Latourette, United States and China, 99; Edward V. Gulick, Peter Parker and the Opening of China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 63.
100Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 51. Bridgman to Evarts, October 8, 1831.
101Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 37. Bridgman to Evarts, January 27, 1831. This letter also states that Olyphant's Canton representative and later partner Mr. Talbot remitted Abeel's $700 room and board debt upon his departure. According to Latourette, Talbot also served as American Consul. Latourette, United States and China, 81n.
38 May of 1832 Bridgman records ten to sixteen persons in attendance
at his Sabbath services and mentions distributing tracts and English
language Bibles to these communicants.102 Considering the English
language Repository as well, it is apparent that the Western traders,
sailors and diplomats of greater Canton were perceived to be a very
important mission field by these first missionaries in China.
This ministry, however, was not available to Williams. Bridgman,
as an Andover Graduate, was ordained and thus a qualified preacher of
the Word. Stevens was likewise an ordained Presbyterian minister.
Williams, however, had not received training at a seminary and was not
an ordained minister of the church. He was a printer by vocation, and so
he printed.
Besides the Canton mission's English language work there did
exist in China a Chinese language ministry of evangelization. The
operation of this mission was dependent on the efforts of Liang Fa. The
American Bible Society supplied some funds for the printing and
dissemination of tracts in Chinese within China. Their funds were
augmented and employed by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge in China. Begun in December of 1834, it had a larger
membership than the Christian Union due to its desire to
publish, in a cheap form, plain and easy treatises in the Chinese language, on such branches of useful knowledge as are suited to the existing state and conditions of the Chinese Empire.103
102Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 61. Bridgman to Anderson, May 5, 1832.
103Williams, The Middle Kingdom, vol. II, 340. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China is generally abbreviated as the SDK. Bridgman's 1833
39 Most of its work was produced by missionaries stationed along the
"wall of light" such as Milne and Medhurst and the majority of its
materials were printed on the LMS press in Singapore. Like the
Christian Union, its existence was brief as the political events at the end
of the thirties and the opening of the forties opened new possibilities for
the evangelization of China.
Liang Fa, the renowned "first convert" from among the people of
China, functioned primarily as the colporteur for these publications.104
Leaving aside the Singapore work of the SDK, the letters from the Canton
mission (reporting progress to both the American Board and the
American Bible Society) mention two publications in Chinese which
Liang Fa distributed.105 One is Bridgman's Gospel Lessons in Chinese.
Bridgman and others with the Morrison Educational Society in Malacca
had made use of this collection of translated Scripture passages for
teaching the handful of young boys attending their schools. The other
was a proper tract called Quanshi liangyan (Good Words to Admonish the
admission that he had yet to compose tracts in Chinese and the discussion above seem to question some of Drake's comments in "E. C. Bridgman's Portrayal of the West" in Barnett and Fairbank, Christianity in China, 89-106, esp. 94. Bridgman's letters—though certainly longing at times for the freedom to preach the Gospel openly—are overwhelmingly concerned with bringing Chinese people to Christ, not opening China to the West.
104Williams is wrong on this point: Liang Fa was not the first convert from among the Chinese. Letter to his father from Canton on November 6, 1833. Williams, Life and Letters, 65. According to P. Richard Bohr, Liang Fa was baptized in November of 1816 by Milne. Lattourette states that on July 16 of that same year Morrison had baptized his first convert "Tsae A-ko." Barnett and Fairbank, Christianity in China, 40; Latourette, Christian Missions in China. 212-13.
105SDK materials were used largely amongst the overseas Chinese populations. They were, however, distributed by Gutzlaff, Stevens and the LMS missionaries during the mainland river probes and coastal explorations of the 1830's. See Covell, Confucius, The Buddha, and Christ, 73-81.
40 Age ).106 This was written by Liang Fa himself—not the
missionaries—"for the purpose of making 'God's great mercy known to
men and turning men's hearts to the worship of God alone.'"107 Not only
were both of these distributed by Liang Fa and the Chinese he hired to
assist him, but both Chinese language works were also printed by Liang
Fa in Chinese print shops in and around Canton.108
All of this began to change when on the fifteenth of July, 1834,
Lord Napier arrived in Canton with strict orders from British Foreign
Secretary Lord Palmerston to secure direct communication with the
Chinese authorities.109 This is exactly the thing which Chinese political
theory dictated should be avoided at all costs if occurring outside a clear
context of foreign inferiority.110 The ill-fated Napier was also told that
under no circumstances could he interfere with the opium trade: he had
106For a recent exposition of this earliest attempt at Chinese contextualization and the man who wrote it see Whalen W. Lai, "The First Chinese Christian Gospel: Liang A-Fa's 'Good Words to Admonish the World,'" Ching Feng vol. 38, no. 2 (June 1995), 83-105.
107From Liang Fa's work quoted in Barnett and Fairbank, Christianity in China, 40.
108Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 227. Williams to Anderson, December 20, 1834.
109Jack Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 44ff.
110This inferiority was expressed fundamentally in the Tribute system with its obligatory "kowtow" (ketou), the requirements that all government communication pass through non-government intermediaries (e.g., the hong merchants), and the system of communication which demanded that foreigners head all their official requests with the submissive "petition" (pin). This understanding of Chinese foreign policy, however, has been recently brought in to question. Some scholars suggest the motivation behind Chinese actions is a realistic posture of self-defense rather than the traditional ideology of tributary superiority. See, for instance, John E. Wills, Jr., "Tributary, Defensiveness, and Dependency: Uses and Limits of Some Basic Ideas About Mid-Qing Dynasty Foreign Relations," The American Neptune, vol. XLVIII, no. 4 (Fall 1988), 225-29.
41 no authority to act in this realm whatsoever.111 With the
termination of the British East India Company's monopoly on the China
trade on April 27, 1834, "normalized" diplomatic relations with the
government of China were necessary for Britain to monitor and control
its China trade which was now growing at an incredible rate. Napier as
the "Superintendent of Trade" in Canton was to be the foundation of new
equitable Sino-British relations.
Things went sour from the beginning of Napier's mission. He
immediately announced himself by letter to Lu Kun the viceroy of the
Liang Guang (comprising Guangdong and Guangxi provinces) and thus
ignored the requirement that communications be exchanged through the
Cohong. He then immediately went to Canton as a representative of the
British Crown who sought to treat with the Emperor's representative Lu
Kun as an equal. The viceroy was furious—Napier was not a merchant
and was thus not allowed in the Factories, let alone on Chinese soil!
After a handful of further blustery communication faux pas from Napier,
on August 16 of that same year Lu Kun ordered an embargo on British
trade. In the official statement that accompanied the edict ordering the
cessation of trade, the viceroy made it clear "that the whole wrong lies on
the barbarian eye [i.e., Lord Napier]."112
These events only hint at the real problems underlying the tension
in Sino-foreign relations. Opium was the focus of most of the problem,
and was either present or perceived as present in all foreign actions—
111Beeching, Opium Wars, 45.
112Williams, Middle Kingdom, vol. II, 472.
42 including missions.113 The circle of trade that drove the British
traffic in opium is well known. Cotton from the mills of Lancashire was
purchased by Indian opium-growers. The opium received in exchange for
the textiles was then sold in China. The immense funds raised here were
then converted into the precious China tea. These coveted leaves were
then brought back to Britain where they were taxed—providing one tenth
of the government's revenue—and then sold at great profit.114 Drug
trade—drug smuggling, given China's unambivalent denouncement of
the trade as illegal—played a vital role in the operation of the British
Empire's economy.
To compound matters, the East India Company's successful
attempts in the previous decade to undersell and drive out competition in
the opium trade left them in 1822 with a surplus of opium (increased
from 600 chests in 1815 to 4000 in 1822) to sell at rather low prices.115
The unfortunate opium-tea trade circle meant that the Chinese market
for the intoxicating paste had to be enlarged. So the trade was
encouraged and, with the opening of trade to all British companies in
1834, it exploded. From the 30,000 chests of opium sold in 1835,
already a marked increase over the 4,244 chests of 1820 and the
stunning18,956 chests of 1830, the volume of trade rocketed to 40,000
113It is hard not to compare this situation with contemporary Chinese mistrust of foreign Christians in China and the false pretenses under which they enter the country.
114Beeching, Opium Wars, 34.
115Beeching, Opium Wars, 34.
43 chests of "foreign mud" by 1838.116 Selling opium in China was
"clearly" in Britain's best interest.
But it was not in China's best interests. Chinese culture had never
condoned the use of the drug. In 1800 and again in 1813, the Jiaqing
Emperor had decreed strict prohibitions against the trade. The
Daoguang Emperor, by no means as effective as his predecessor,
nevertheless took actions in the 1820's: foreign ships were searched
outside Whampoa, and Chinese drug dealers were arrested and sent to
prison in Northwestern China. But through the connivances of foreign
smugglers, the unloading and transfer of the paste balls into Chinese
ships at Lintin just below the port of Canton, and the all too willing
corruption (addiction?) of local Chinese officials the trade went on and
blossomed. Court eunuchs and Imperial Guards were found to be
addicted to the drug in 1813. By 1835 China had an estimated two
million opium addicts.117
Perhaps even more threatening to China was the tremendous drain
on specie the illicit trade had created. With the British increase in opium
trade came an increase in China's expenditures of silver in purchase of
the drug. In the 1820's China's economy lost around two million taels of
silver each year to the illicit drug. By the early 1830's that figure had
increased to a staggering nine million taels annually.118 This drain
combined with the phenomenal growth of the Chinese population during
116Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1990), 149; Beeching, Opium Wars, 38.
117Beeching, Opium Wars, 36.
118Spence, Modern China, 149.
44 the preceding century to produce alarming inflation. Most serious
of all, was the compounding effect of these silver shortages and the
corruption of the local officials who converted rice and grain tax
payments into silver upon the poor and potentially rebellious peasants
struggling to pay their burdensome taxes.119 Peasant discontent meant
rebellion, and rebellion meant the loss of the tian ming (mandate of
heaven) and dynastic collapse. The opium trade had to be stopped, the
human resources of China preserved, and the precious silver restored to
her economy.
From 1834 until the conclusion of the first Anglo-Chinese War,
Sino-foreign relations were extremely tense and frequently interrupted.
No foreigner was immune to the confusions of these days, least of all the
missionaries. True, Olyphant and Company were free from the taint of
the opium trade and the Americans were less involved in the events than
their British neighbors; nevertheless, it was not good during these days
to be foreign in China, and it was not good for Chinese to interact with
foreigners.
On October 11, 1834 Williams reports that in the wake of Napier's
bombast the mission had been without native language teachers for over
a month. The punishments for teaching foreigners were severe, and it
was fear that kept the teachers away.120 In the same letter, he claims
119Susan Mann Jones and Philip A. Kuhn. "Dynastic decline and the roots of rebellion" in Fairbank and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10, pt. 1, 129.
120Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 224. Williams to Anderson, October 11, 1834.
45 that Liang Fa was being sought by imperial soldiers.121 A little over
a week later, Liang Fa had been smuggled out through Lintin to Tracy in
Singapore. Chinese types were still not held at the Canton mission for
fear of endangering the mission and the Chinese workers. In fact, "For
the year past, the operations of the printing office in the house, has been
exclusively confined to work done in the English language."122 The few
works that were printed outside the house by Chinese printers "always
demand[ed] caution."123
Compounding the pressures from the Chinese officials came a
series of changes in 1834 internal to the Canton Mission. In May of that
year Tracy was called away to Singapore to maintain the American Board
mission there for Morrison and his son.124 Shortly thereafter, on the
first of August, Dr. Robert Morrison, China's first Protestant missionary,
succumbed to a high fever and passed away in his son John Robert's
arms.125 His loss, though not entirely unexpected was deeply felt by the
small community. Williams found comfort that after almost twenty-
seven years of service—"twenty-three of them alone as to any one
assisting him in China"—Dr. Morrison "was in a frame of mind that was
looking towards his rest and wishing (if it was the Lord's pleasure) to be
121Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 224. Williams to Anderson, October 11, 1834.
122Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 227. Williams to Anderson, December 20, 1834.
123Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 227. Williams to Anderson, December 20, 1834.
124Latourette, United States and China, 104.
125Broomhall, Hudson Taylor, vol. 1, 221.
46 at peace in His kingdom."126 On October 26, 1834 Dr. Peter Parker
arrived as a new member of the American Board mission at Canton to
carry on and expand upon the medical work of Gutzlaff and Morrison.127
August of the next year found things at the mission still more
strained. The Daoguang Emperor had ordered the arrest of any and all
Chinese involved in the manufacture of two "Christian books" he had
discovered. Although the books were almost certainly the fruit of
Gutzlaff's illegal coastal explorations and thus were printed at the LMS
press in Singapore, imperial spies were nevertheless placed at the
entrances and exits of the various buildings of the Canton factories to
closely observe who entered and left, and why they did so—even Macao
was searched and watched by these imperial officers.128 Accordingly,
native Chinese teachers were nonexistent for the missionaries and no
workers could be found to work the mission press.129 In December it
was decided to remove the Bruen Press to Macao where Williams might
work unmolested. In the September 8, 1836 joint letter of the members
of the Canton Mission to the home office of the American Board, the
small band confessed that they had yet to hold any sort of public worship
126Letter to his father from Macao on August 8, 1834. Williams, Life and Letters, 71-2.
127Gulick, Peter Parker, 28.
128Missionary Herald, vol. 32, no. 4 (April 1836), 161; vol. 32, no. 6 (June 1836), 202-3. Events like this can only have served to increase the differences between the American Board and LMS missionaries to China already appearing with the revision of Morrison's Bible. Gutzlaff's brash actions, often with the support of the LMS community in the "wall of light," at times created unintended difficulties for the American Board residents in China.
129Letter to Anderson from Canton on August 20, 1835. Williams, Life and Letters, 76.
47 in Chinese. They also expressed the reasons for their remarkable
caution in distributing and printing Chinese literature.
The distribution of books also has been nearly or quite suspended for the present, it having been agreed that in our peculiar circumstance it would be unjustifiable to involve others in serious danger, without their own consent, by persisting in the attempt to circulate books directly under the eyes of the spies and officers of the government.130
As the members of the Canton Mission understood their position and
God's providence, it was the will of God that they continue to study and
be sequestered "'till more active service be opened."131
Off and on, over the previous four years, members of the Canton
mission had ventured forth outside of Canton and into the countryside to
distribute literature. The number of books taken was usually small—
only what could be carried in a sack slung over the back. This practice
seems to have been engaged in more freely near Macao and its relatively
friendly Portuguese authorities.
Williams records a number of short trips around Macao that were
prompted by a visit from a member of the British and Foreign Bible
Society.132 On one particular such occasion, Mr. Lay and Mr. Williams
set out for a day-trip to one of the islands across from Macao. They
visited one man's home and eventually ended up distributing their
literature to a group of peasants on the roadside. Williams was
130Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 13. Joint letter to Anderson, September 8, 1836.
131Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 13. Joint letter to Anderson, September 8, 1836.
132Letter to Anderson from Macao on November 29, 1836. Williams, Life and Letters, 87-91.
48 encouraged by their eagerness to obtain the books he and Lay
offered. Perhaps still more pleasing to him was the fact that "nothing in
their conduct could be taken as offensive or rude."133 This must have
been a great comfort given all the tensions of official relations between
China and the foreigners. However, to place these evangelistic efforts (of
the sort more typically expected from these early missionaries) in their
proper context, Williams admits that all told these summer excursions
circulated a meager one hundred and fifty volumes.134
Obviously, this was something of a sideline occupation for
Williams. The Repository was as demanding as always, and with the
relocation of the press to Macao came access to the Chinese fonts of the
late East India Company. Williams employed these in the printing of
Medhurst's Chinese Dictionary of the Hokkeen Dialect which had been left
unfinished with the 1834 close of the East India Company. The work
was taxing, as all dictionary work is, but it afforded Williams with an
invaluable amount of language work. It was during these days in Macao
that Williams first practiced his Chinese on a "congregation" of beggars
who would wait for him early Sunday mornings before heading off to beg
at the city gates.135
133Letter to Anderson from Macao on November 29, 1836. Williams, Life and Letters, 89.
134Letter to Anderson from Macao on November 29, 1836. Williams, Life and Letters, 91.
135Williams, Life and Letters, 82. This is most curious: why is the unordained Williams preaching? Clearly this was not an official church setting. Perhaps he is more practically telling them of his faith. Still, though Williams's "congregation" is clearly called so tongue in cheek, he does do more of this sort of preaching in the future. Note that this never replaces his printing and is always a sideline to his main occupations.
49 Again, this is not to suggest that Williams was changing the
nature of his "mission" in China. From the date of his arrival in China
until his amicable parting with the Board, Williams was officially
described as a printer. Thus in 1834 volume thirty of the ABCFM's home
publication the Missionary Herald lists the American Board mission in
China as being composed of three persons performing two distinct
functions: "Rev. Elijah C. Bridgman and Rev. Ira Tracy, Missionaries; S.
Wells Williams, Printer."136 1836 found him still a devoted printer.
Owing to the immense effort involved in printing Medhurst's
dictionary of the Fujianese dialect, Williams through his vocational
labors at the press was in actuality spending most of his time working
with the Chinese language. Indeed, these years in Macao provided
invaluable opportunities for language study for all the members of the
mission. Stevens was involved in Chinese study as well, though he also
contributed to The Repository and was of course responsible for the
Sabbath services in the small foreign church the missionaries had
encovenanted with a few other residents. Parker's ophthalmic hospital
opened in November of 1835 and between medical work and progress in
Chinese language study, he was more than occupied. Bridgman's time
was divided between the revision of Morrison's Bible and the editing of
The Repository.137
136Missionary Herald, vol. 30, no. 1 (January 1834), 6. This was still the case in January of 1842. Missionary Herald, vol. 38, no. 1 (January 1842), 4.
137The above division of labor is recorded by the missionaries themselves in Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1831-1837, vol. 1, no. 12. Joint letter to Anderson, May 2, 1836.
50 On January 5, 1837 Stevens passed away in Singapore while
on a missionary journey.138 This was a severe blow to the little band of
evangelists—now reduced to three. Stevens's ministry to the seamen at
Whampoa was never really recommenced.139 The missionaries
continued undaunted in their labors and in July of 1837, with
Medhurst's dictionary finally finished, Williams joined Gutzlaff and
Parker under Olyphant's nephew King's guidance in a journey to Japan
to assay its prospects with regards to Christian evangelization. And for
the accomplishment of this particular labor, as Williams simply states,
"We carry no books this first time, lest a good beginning be marred by
exciting their fears, but will endeavor to show them the practice of the
Christianity they hate by trying to do good."140
Aboard the ship Morrison once again, Williams was excited at the
prospect of returning seven Japanese sailors who had been shipwrecked
in America to their Eastern homeland. The journey went well enough,
but the ship was rebuffed with cannon immediately upon its arrival in
Edo Bay, and failed to make land anywhere in Japan. The poor lost
sailors returned to Macao more dejected than ever. This was the first
Protestant appraisal of Japan and though the mission itself failed,
Williams upon his return employed the unhappy Japanese in his print
shop and commenced to learn their language. This work with the sailors
138Compare the following: Williams, Life and letters, 91; Latourette, United States and China, 92-3.
139Latourette, United States and China, 92-3.
140Letter to his father from Macao on July 2, 1837. Williams, Life and Letters, 94.
51 produced a translation of the Gospel of Matthew into Japanese and
the first two Japanese Protestant servants of the Lord.141
The next few years were spent by Williams moving between the
study and the press. Most of his day was exhausted in language study:
first the Chinese work, and then the more taxing Japanese lessons (the
Japanese sessions were being conducted without the aid of any
grammars or vocabularies and thus were proving to be exceedingly
difficult). If time remained outside of these endeavors, Williams turned
to the press and the printing of the first portion of Bridgman's tutorial
Chinese Chrestomathy in the Canton Dialect newly completed upon his
return from Japan. Williams took upon himself the task not only of
printing the book, but also of enlarging upon its contents. Before the
volume was completed in 1841 he had invested much time and effort in
collecting authentic Chinese idioms and snippets from Chinese authors,
eventually supplying as much as half of the Chrestomathy's 734
pages.142
The degree to which Williams's life throughout his early years in
China was devoted to the solitary labors of the study is difficult to deny.
If his main release was found in the operation of the press, it must be
acknowledged that the distance from the desk in the study to the desk of
the editor and compositor is very short indeed. Apart from Parker's
hospital and the work amongst the foreign seamen of Whampoa
commenced by Abeel and Stevens, most of the work of the Canton
141For an excellent account of this expedition read Williams, Life and Letters, 93-100.
142Williams, Life and Letters, 105.
52 Mission was study. The knowledge these pioneers catalogued,
preserved in works like The Repository and the Chrestomathy, was to
provide invaluable information for those who would come after the doors
of the Middle Kingdom began to open to the outside world.
The late 1830's and early 1840's were filled with ever-increasing
tension as relations between China and the foreigners—especially the
British—pounding on her doors steadily worsened. From the time of
Williams's return from Japan until his departure for the United States in
November of 1844 he continued as best he could in the work of study
and writing. Peter Parker had returned to America in July of 1839,
leaving Williams and Bridgman to continue their work in Macao or
Canton, hoping that American neutrality would preserve their ability to
pursue their studies and writing.
But by 1841 things were really getting out of hand: armed
confrontations had grown increasingly common and disturbingly
destructive since 1839. The arrival of Commissioner Lin as
plenipotentiary at Canton in March of 1839 had signified renewed
determination on the part of the Qing court to curtail the devastating
drug trade.143 Lin's confiscation and destruction of some 20,000 chests
of foreign-grown opium by May of that year only made tangible the
tension which British Captain Elliot's September fourth encounter with
143By far, the best discussion of opium in China—not just its trade—is found in Jonathan D. Spence, Chinese Roundabout (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1992), 228-56.
53 three Chinese junks raised to the level of a war.144 Eventually
Prime Minister Palmerston sent troops and ships,145 Commissioner Lin
was discredited and, after a series of military attacks, sieges, and
blockades, the British dictated a treaty near the mouth of the Grand
Canal at the city of Nanjing on August 29, 1842.146
Williams, as an American, was officially a neutral in these
proceedings, but in as much as all Westerners were equally foreigners in
China, the vicissitudes in relations between the two nations often
impinged on his day-to-day life. From being trapped in the Factories of
Canton with the rest of the foreign community during Commissioner
Lin's opium siege147 and making subsequent moves between Canton and
Macao as circumstances dictated, to witnessing a bombardment outside
of Canton following upon the seizure of fellow missionary Vincent
Stanton,148 Williams experienced the First Anglo-Chinese War as
144Beeching, Opium Wars, 84, 91. Williams puts the exact number of opium chests confiscated by Lin at 20,283, though he mistakenly dates the destruction of the drug cache to "the summer of 1838." From Williams's "Recollections" in Williams, Life and Letters, 103.
145The force sent by Her Majesty's Government proved to bear a striking and curious resemblance to the force recommended and requested by the noted drug lord Jardine. Beeching, Opium Wars, 105.
146The little discussed Treaty of Chuenpi (January 1841)—perhaps not so "unequal" a treaty—was refused by both the British Palmerstonian Home Office and the Son of Heaven in distant Beijing. Beeching, Opium Wars, 126-7.
147Lin was of course also demanding that the British sailor(s) responsible for the murder of Lin Weixi be turned over for execution.
148This bombardment does not seem to be corroborated elsewhere. There were many different small conflagrations during these years, and perhaps Williams has his dates wrong. Letter to his father on August 20, 1840. Williams, Life and Letters, 119.
54 something outside of his life that nevertheless frequently broke into
his daily routine.
His reaction and comments following the Chinese attempts to curb
the British and foreign importation of opium serve well to illuminate the
strength of his aversion to the drug trade and his desire to avoid conflict,
as well as the nature his great trust in Providence.
Following Commissioner Lin's siege of the factories and seizure of
the opium, Williams wrote a passionate letter to the home office in
Boston.149 Noting with graphic disgust how opium was "destroying the
bodies of the Chinese by the thousands" and how it "steeped them with
the odor of the grave and soon introduced them to its precincts,"
Williams "rejoic[ed] at the check this trade has received [at Commissioner
Lin's hands]." Contrary to modern arguments that for Williams and the
early missionaries "the concept of national sovereignty was not applicable
to the Chinese,"150 Williams writes pointedly in this same letter of his
earnest hope that the people of England would
149Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1837-44, vol. 1, no. 168. Williams to Anderson, May 17, 1839.
150Stuart Creighton Miller's confusion on this point seems to arise from his assumption that unlike papers today, The Repository printed only editorials it completely agreed with. Though this is generally true, The Repository's overseas situation made it atypical. Like the "job printing" Williams carried on his press to support the mission, The Repository made concessions to the merchants to draw their interest, influence them and secure their subscription. Additionally, the pages were many and the writers were few—contributions were always appreciated. For Miller's nuance free reading of the missionaries as monolithic war-mongers see Stuart Creighton Miller, "Ends and Means: Missionary Justification of Force in Nineteenth Century China," John King Fairbank, ed.,The Missionary Enterprise in China and America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 249-82 (The quote can be found on page 250). Regarding nuances, letters written in 1839 and after show a marked difference in attitude towards the war between Williams and Bridgman, and a still larger distance between these two and the caustic Parker.
55 …overlook any little [Chinese] breach of the so called law of nations in considering [Chinese] efforts to throw off such an incubus of death. Our prayer is that God, whose hand is so signally visible will overrule all the changes to his own glory, and the good of China.151
This is not another supposedly typical "good will come out of evil"
platitude of the sort so frequently dismissed by modern readers.152 The
good of China is specifically the elimination of opium and Williams is
writing precisely to express his disgust at the peddling of this destructive
paste. His disgust rapidly overrides any concern for that popular tool of
exploitation “the so called law of nations.” And yet without denying or
avoiding the real injustices of the opium trade and its defense, Williams
ultimately hopes that God will glorify Himself through these events.153
The justifications and motivations for British aggression in China—
so inextricably linked to the drug trade—were far from "wholeheartedly"
endorsed by Williams.154 Though he was fully aware of the benefits a
151Note Williams's cynicism regarding the "so called law of nations." Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1837-44, vol. 1, no. 168. Williams to Anderson, May 17, 1839.
152Williams believed that people who resorted to such pithy sayings sought "only a sheer excuse for leaving themselves in indolence." Letter to his father from Macao on April 26, 1841. Williams, Life and Letters, 122.
153This is "hope" in the most technical Biblical sense. He looks expectantly towards something that will certainly come. This confounding of modern understandings of hope (e.g., "I hope I win the lottery") with the missionary's own sense of hope is an example of the difficulties modern redactors of the missionaries face when evaluating their actions and especially their motives.
154Besides being a generalization, Tong's claim that the missionaries "wholeheartedly desired a British victory" grossly misrepresents the mood and attitude of Williams and others regarding the war. England was favored, if at all, only because a British loss seemed to mean the complete cessation of missions in China—after which China might close up entirely like Japan. This fear, however, by no means makes all of the missionaries fans of the British cause, or of the British means. This caveat clearly applies to Williams. Cf. any of the immediately preceding and following letters with Te-
56 more open China might present to the dissemination of the Gospel,
he writes that he is
…far from being sure that this turn up [i. e., Sino-British hostilities] is going to advance the Gospel half so much as we think it is. England has taken the opium trade upon herself nationally, and can that be a cause to bless? For the success of her arms here would extend that wicked traffic ten thousand times more than the Church is ready to extend her stakes here. The 50,000 chests now annually brought to China would rise to hundreds of thousands shortly, and only think of the destruction of it.…155
Williams is not a warmonger, blind to the injustice of the British casus
belli. On the contrary, he is very realistic regarding the dangers and the
great possibilities of the apparently inevitable British victory, and seems
to sense the greater magnitude of the dangers. But the intimate
familiarity with Scripture which Williams accumulated during his days
as a Sunday school scholar in Utica told him that in spite of the
wickedness in human hearts, God will save.156 His belief in God’s
sustaining Providence is expressed well in his later life when he writes
regarding the American Civil War that "God's hand will guide and uphold
his own ark and forward his own purpose, for he sees the end from the
beginning."157
This period from Williams's 1839 return from Edo Bay, Japan
until his return to the States in 1844 marked Williams's introduction
kong Tong, United States Diplomacy in China, 1844-60 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), 25.
155Letter to his father from Macao on April 26, 1841. Williams, Life and Letters, 122.
156At an older age, Williams began to look back on life with the view that God often mingles his judgments and his mercies. See Williams, Life and Letters, 325, 357.
157Williams, Life and Letters, 329.
57 into international politics. Though little mention is made of
Williams's role in the drafting of the American 1844 Treaty of Wangxia,
the letter of thanks he personally received from Caleb Cushing suggests
that the translations he contributed to the negotiation process were of
some worth.158
Nevertheless, given his future political involvement, Williams's
comments during these events are surprisingly non-political.
The bonds of social intercourse among the Chinese are strong for a healthy nation, and God's hand should be seen in thus forming their social polity; but it is not based on the knowledge of His truth, His designs to a world through His son, nor on His overruling Providence. It is better to leave all these cases in His hands; we are quite willing to do so when they look favorably, but we think we must help Him a little in caring, when we think the prospect is gloomy and troublesome to ourselves.159
Remarks such as the above are common in his writings and consistently
show Williams’s habit of looking towards God rather than humankind to
deliver humans from their own evil. This is neither idealistic or naive, for
it is founded upon the knowledge that it is God who is accomplishing His
will.160 Even towards the end of the climactic events of 1842, Williams
continues to look for God's "gracious guidance" so that the approaching
changes expected with the close of hostilities might be accomplished
"without that fermentation which will probably send it [into atoms]…",
158Williams, Life and Letters, 127.
159Letter to his father on August 20, 1840. Williams, Life and Letters, 121.
160Nor is this to be seen as otherworldly: as shown above, he is clearly aware of what it is that man is doing here. Notice again that this balanced "Christian realism" draws its limited confidence from faith in God's faithful ability to sustain and direct, rather than from trust in prophecies either specific or general (see below for Williams and millennialism).
58 and that God would rather "preserve them [the Chinese] in unity
and [lead] them to high places in his kingdom!"161 Here again Williams
is acutely aware of the real possibility of dangerous fragmentation within
a changing China. But still he hopes.
This hope cannot be brushed aside. How different this hope
appears from either the cynicism of the modern politician or the naive
idealism with which missions is often tacitly credited. When Williams
looked to God to accomplish His perfect will in history he was facing the
trials and struggles of life head on—not brushing them under a divine
rug. God would bring sense and meaning out of human evil and
meaninglessness. As Williams grew older and increasingly involved in
international politics this same home-grown faith in the One who
providentially sustains continued to shape his actions and outlook.
161Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1837-44, vol. 1, no. 86. Williams to Anderson, May 12, 18[4]2. This text was difficult to read due to unusually unclear handwriting—the written date appears to be 1862— and a damaged original letter.
59
CHAPTER FOUR
"Doing Good In Any Line"
The days that Williams passed during the events of the First Anglo-
Chinese War were largely occupied with writing, editing and printing The
Repository, as well as writing, editing and printing both a dictionary of
the mandarin dialect and small introductory grammar for those striving
to learn the Chinese language.162
In November of 1844 Williams was finally given the opportunity he
had been seeking for quite some time to visit his home once again.
Renowned merchant Gideon Nye generously offered Williams a passage
to the States by way of the Middle East and Europe.163 Though Nye was
never able join Williams, the trip was a joy to the youthful man and
provided valued exposure to the wider world as well as a tremendous
opportunity to pursue the purchase of a set of Chinese or Manchu types
for the Mission press.164 Though his searches in Europe were
frustrated, he found upon returning to the States that the Hon. Walter
Lowrie of the Presbyterian Board of Missions was willing to help Williams
162The two works are titled Ying hwa yun-fu lih-kiai (An English and Chinese Vocabulary in the Court Dialect ) and Easy Lessons in Chinese, respectively.
163Williams, Life and Letters, 131ff.
164Over the course of this year-long trip Williams spent two weeks with D. O. Allen in Bombay, travelled the Holy Land extensively, collected books for the Canton Mission library, and indulged his life-long habit of observing and collecting natural specimens.
60 in his pursuit of the movable Chinese type.165 Williams noted, also,
that his services were much in demand by the various mission societies
seeking to broaden their knowledge through soliciting lectures—and
these societies would gladly pay for his tales and statistics.
Accordingly, Williams gave himself to this work wholeheartedly
traveling frequently throughout the Northeast and as far West as Ohio.
Between 1845 and 1846 Williams delivered some one hundred lectures of
various length and content.166 In late 1846 he moved in with his
brother H. Dwight in New York and began the immense project of turning
the notes of those myriad lectures into a volume of general knowledge on
China. As he wrote and lectured, Williams's knowledge became
increasingly well known, and his contacts and relations expanded taking
him to New Haven quite frequently and getting him elected to the
American Oriental Society.
The most significant of these expanded relations was commenced
at his brother's house when Williams was introduced to Miss Sarah
Walworth, daughter of a New York chancellor. On May 29, 1847, after
only the briefest of acquaintances, the thirty-four year old Williams wrote
to young Miss Sarah:
In a word, my chief object in proposing a correspondence is to learn whether you are disposed to engage in the good work of missions and are willing to consider any proposal to accompany me.167
165Williams, Life and Letters, 146.
166Williams, Life and Letters, 148.
167Letter to Miss Walworth from St. Johnsbury on May 29, 1847. Williams, Life and Letters, 152.
61 She accepted this "proposal" and their correspondence rapidly grew
into love. On Thanksgiving Day, 1847 the two were married in Miss
Walworth's hometown of Plattsburgh New York.168
The publication and distribution in early 1848 of the first edition of
Williams's The Middle Kingdom marked a significant event in the history
of the Western study of China. Williams's main goal as stated in both
the original and revised editions of the text was "to divest the Chinese
people and civilization of that peculiar and indefinable impression of
ridicule which has been so generally given them by foreign authors."169
This the book did so most admirably, debunking many of China's more
"colorful" practices, and providing a wealth of information reflecting
surprisingly well the actual circumstances of life in nineteenth century
China. The book was well received and rapidly became a staple for
sinologists for nearly half a century. Perhaps due to the knowledge
evinced in the pages of The Middle Kingdom, Union College saw fit to
confer the honorary degree of LL. D. upon Williams in the summer of
1848.170 On June 1 of that year, he and his wife Sarah left New York
bound for Canton.171
168Though her good character is attested to regularly, details of her life with Williams are few. Something of the quality of her relationship with Williams can be adduced from his moving account of her death. See Williams, Life and Letters, 442-444. Neither Williams nor his son mention the Walworth family's associations with revivalistic Catholicism or Charels Finney.
169Williams, Middle Kingdom, vol. 1, xiv.
170Williams, Life and Letters, 162.
171Given that their first son Walworth was born on October 18, 1848—only one month after their arrival in China—it would appear that Mrs. Williams spent three of the last four months of her first pregnancy aboard ship traveling half way around the world!
62 When Williams returned to China, in spite of the agreeable
absence of the constrictive Cohong system of trade, Williams returned to
very much the same labors as had absorbed him before the Sino-British
war. According to the treaties signed between China and the various
foreign nations in the early 1840's, foreigners were now accountable to
their own national laws and courts while living in China and guaranteed
the right to live and trade not just in Canton, but in four other ports
(Shanghai, Amoy, Ningbo and Fuzhou) along China's coast. Foreigners
were also allowed to secure Chinese nationals for the purposes of
learning the Chinese language. Perhaps more significantly, and due
largely to the negotiations of the French prior to the signing of the Treaty
of Whampoa in October of 1844, the Daoguang Emperor was moved to
issue an edict finally lifting the official ban on Catholic religion in
China.172 According to the memorial presented by the Imperial
negotiator Qiying to the Emperor on behalf of the French legation,
all natives and foreigners without distinction, who learn and practise the religion of the Lord of Heaven, and do not excite trouble by improper conduct, [should] be exempted from criminality.173
At the same time, this document also made clear that any attempts to
"enter the country[side] to propagate religion" would be construed as
criminal actions. On December 22, 1845, just after Williams had
172This ban had been in effect since 1722 and the edicts of Kang Xi and his son (q.v. Chapter Two above). Though it has been well established that local Chinese officials rarely supported Daoguang's edict for various reasons ranging from ignorance, confusion, and hostility to graft and discrimination, little attention has been given to the fact that for the missionaries this edict meant that their evangelistic endeavors were finally condoned by the Chinese government within the five ports. They rejoiced in this new freedom.
173Williams, Middle Kingdom, vol. II, 356ff.
63 commenced his first return journey to the States, Qiying expanded
the rescript to apply to Protestants as well.
For Williams with his new family, all of these changes meant first
of all that upon his return to China, he was free to secure housing
outside of the factories. This brought him into more normal day-to-day
relations with the citizens in and around Canton. He was also able to
legally secure a language teacher, as well as to engage in public worship
in the Chinese language. Such services had commenced immediately
upon the repeal of the ban, and Williams immediately joined in these
Sabbath meetings.174 Additionally, Bridgman had removed to the now
accessible Shanghai to open a new mission station there while
completing the so-called Delegates Version of Morrison's New
Testament.175
This last development meant that the full responsibility for
producing The Repository fell almost exclusively on Williams's shoulders.
This was so until the close of its run and required immense amounts of
time and energy. Williams consistently contributed a large portion of the
material and did all the editing and proofing; on one occasion he
singlehandedly authored an entire edition of the magazine from cover to
174Once again, it is not clear how Williams's lack of ordination played itself out in these situations. Was he preaching under another's authority? The simplest answer would be that praxis simply overruled whatever objections right doctrine might have voiced. Yet it cannot be forgotten that Williams consistently maintained that he was not ordained and repeatedly resisted Anderson's pleas for his ordination (see below).
175Letters exchanged at this time between Williams and Anderson suggest that Williams heartily disagreed with Bridgman's desires to open another station. This disagreement, as well as Bridgman's solitary nature and reluctance to act and preach, contributed to the sense of distance the two men's relationship acquired in later years.
64 cover.176 Adding his other writing projects—dictionaries, language
primers, and his annual Anglo-Chinese Calendar—it is clear that the
general nature of his work in the mission had actually changed little
since his efforts before the first treaties. Between the labors of the
study, an overwhelming and growing correspondence, the requirements
of the press, his Sabbath services at Dr. Parker's Canton hospital, and
his new fatherly responsibilities with his own babies, Williams observed
that he had "almost no time to eat."177
As Williams continued his work in Canton and Macao for the next
five years, China began to experience convulsions which perhaps have
yet to run their full course. 1850 saw the death of the Daoguang
Emperor and the ascension of his arrogant and xenophobic son, the
Xianfeng Emperor. His stubbornness would require China to learn again
the lessons of the last two decades. At the same time, rebellion was
growing increasingly common and difficult to suppress within the Middle
Kingdom. When the events in China collided violently with the desires of
the Western nations for the second time in the nineteenth century,
Williams would find himself placed right in their midst.
176Though this is claimed by Williams's son, I have been unable by use of the index to ascertain either its veracity or the volume of The Repository to which it supposedly applies. Williams, Life and Letters, 168.
177Williams, Life and Letters, 172. Nor were the responsibilities of fatherhood taken lightly by Williams, or relegated entirely to his dear Sarah. As he writes upon his son Walworth's birth, "It is a new sensation to hear the wailing of one's own child and feel that an immortal spirit has been entrusted to our care to bring up in the fear of God and consecrate to his service. I feel as if this dear boy was more in my keeping than all the Chinese, and that his salvation more depended upon me than upon any other person." Letter to his brother from Canton on February 24, 1849. Williams, Life and Letters, 164.
65 In 1852 the first of a series of events that would lead to an
apparent change in vocation for Williams came to pass. First and
perhaps most important, Williams brought to a close the twenty year run
of The Chinese Repository. By this time, the special information the
Repository sought to provide its readers was no longer in such great
demand. The cost of the journal was as high as ever, and the demand
was very low—"only 300 subscribers at three dollars each, which hardly
paid the workmen's wages."178 At the same time, Williams noticed the
great difficulty involved in getting anyone not already sympathetic with
the cause to read religious materials. Thus, in a letter written to his
brother William F. Williams, a missionary to Mesopotamia, Williams
writes "I find my confidence in distributing tracts lessening, especially
when unaccompanied with oral teaching."179
Meanwhile, Williams was facing pressure from the Home Office of
the American Board. In his communications with Rufus Anderson there
occurred an extensive discussion beginning in 1850 regarding primarily
The Repository and the operations of the press at Canton but also the
continuation of Williams as "printer." The first question involved
conflicting understandings of missions, while the second involved the
more personal questions of vocation. These two themes played
themselves out over the rest of Williams's life as he apparently left
missions for politics, and then left China for New Haven.180
178From Williams's "Recollections" in Williams, Life and Letters, 178.
179Letter to his brother William from Canton on December 25, 1851. Williams, Life and Letters, 178.
180The first of these two changes will be discussed below, while space requires that the second transition be left for further study. I am suggesting that neither change
66 To gain an adequate understanding of Williams's approach to
missions, the prevailing sympathies of the organization which called and
sent him must first be examined. The same climate of both fear and
promise which spawned the Sunday school movement at the beginning of
the nineteenth century also contributed to the rise of foreign missions
and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in
particular. From the "haystack prayer meeting" of 1806, to the
organization of the "Brethren" at Williams College, on to Andover
Seminary and the 1809-10 appeal to the General Association of
Massachusetts to send American Christians overseas, the story of the
birth of the ABCFM is well known and well documented.181 A brief
review of this story highlights the theological currents swirling around its
foundations.
The turn of the century marked the arrival of the Second Great
Awakening as witnessed in the revivals which swept the country. The
various theological debates and the impiety they represented, the
ascendancy of Jeffersonian heresy, the French Revolution, and the
prevalence of war—all things which would lead later to the blossoming of
the Sunday schools—were all factors which drove ministers to call their
flocks to repentance. During this initial period—prior to the Cane Ridge
revivals of Kentucky—these New England revivals "centered on the
Congregational and Presbyterian campuses where Edwardsian ideas
reflects a change in Williams's goal to serve God, help China, and further His Gospel in China.
181On the Haystack prayer meeting see ABCFM, The Haystack Centennial: Ninety-Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Board. (Boston: ABCFM, 1907), 3-4. For general history of the American Board see Rufus Anderson, Memorial Volume of the First Fifty Years of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 5th ed. (Boston: The Board, 1862).
67 dominated."182 The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign
Missions was a direct product of these theological surges.
In 1798 a young man by the name of Samuel Mills, Jr. was
converted during one of his father's sermons and became a devoted
follower of the radical Calvinism of Hopkins so prevalent at the turn of
the century.183 Mills entered Williams College, soon to be rocked by
revival, and began to pray regularly with a handful of other similarly
effected young men. Caught out of cover during a thunderstorm during
one eventful prayer meeting, the men sought shelter near a haystack.
Out of that evening of prayer arose the secret society of "The Brethren."
Begun in September of 1808, its object was "to effect, in the persons of
its members, a mission or missions to the heathen."184 The organization
and its papers moved quietly to the newly formed Andover Theological
Seminary with Mills and there it prospered.
The seminary at Andover was created as a response to all of the
controversies facing the church in New England at the opening of the
nineteenth century. The election of non-Trinitarian Henry Ware to the
Hollis Professorship of Divinity at Harvard was the final straw for the
orthodox Calvinists of Massachusetts. The orthodox journal The
Panoplist was begun, and in 1807 donations were accepted to form a
theological institution at Phillips Academy in Andover. Young men and
182J. A. De Jong, As the Waters Cover the Sea: Millennial Expectations and the Rise of Anglo-American Missions, 1640-1810 (n.p.: J. H. Kok N. V. Kampen, 1970), 223.
183Mills's father and his town had been touched by revivals in the neighboring towns. Jong, Millennial Expectations, 223.
184Anderson, Memorial Volume, 39.
68 professors flocked to the school in reaction to the recent gains of
liberal religion.
The Panoplist was started with the original purpose in mind of
countering the heterodox claims of sectarian religion. Owing largely to
the great tension and passion the battles within Congregationalism had
engendered, The Panoplist soon earned a large readership. Under the
inspiration of its founder Jedediah Morse, the magazine gave regular
notice of various missionary accomplishments. For its articles, The
Panoplist regularly used material from the various British missionary
journals such as The London Evangelical Magazine and The London
Christian Observer.185 Thus along with a fresh account of the latest
salvoes in the theological battles reshaping post-revolutionary America
came an introduction to world missions. These tales of European
adventurers in exotic lands served not only to inspire American
Christians with stories of heroism and self-sacrifice for the Gospel but
also to reveal the relative impiety of the American church—especially
when compared with her missions-minded British sister.
It was while at the Andover Theological Seminary in 1809 and
1810 that Mills and a handful of his compatriots appealed to the
Massachusetts General Assembly to found a foreign missions
organization. Their plea was accepted and the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions came into existence. The seminary,
the The Panoplist, and the American Board all demonstrated a degree of
cooperation between the Hopkinsians and other Calvinists. Though all
185O. W. Elsbree, The Rise of the Missionary Spirit in America, 1790-1815, (Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1980), 95.
69 these efforts sought primarily the eradication of all heterodox
doctrine, there was also a missions emphasis explicit within all these
projects which was derivative of the millennialism implicit in the
revivalism which had so recently swept through the orthodox camps.
In the wake of Edwards and his chiliastic eschatology, it was
difficult to be a turn-of-the century Christian and not to think in
millennial terms. Those who sought to avoid the issue were too often lost
in the hype that naturally followed and repeated the frequent statements
of men such as Bellamy, Hopkins, Griffin, Nott and the promises of
"Theophilus" in the pages of The Panoplist. Drawing upon the
calculations of Edwards and Hopkins regarding the length of the ages
and the exact timing of the out pouring of the sixth bowl of Revelation
16:12, Theophilus promised that the final reformation was coming and
the age of unparalleled evangelistic success was at hand: the mission
age had dawned.186 Samuel Hopkins, meanwhile, had calculated in 1793
that the end of the age would come in 1866—leaving little time for
evangelism—based upon the words of Revelation, the 1517 date of the
Reformation and the proper age of the earth.187
Such prognosticating and prophetic interpretation surrounded the
ABCFM from its very instigation. In their 1811 annual "Address to the
Christian Public…", Morse, Worcester, and Evarts of the Board
interpreted all the social, political, economic and natural signs of their
days in terms of the approaching millenium.188 Leonard Woods, in his
186Jong, Millennial Expectations, 217-8.
187Elsbree, Missionary Spirit, 126-127.
188Jong, Millennial Expectations, 226.
70 February 6, 1812 ordination sermon for the first missionaries sent
out by the Board, took stock of the events of his days and promised his
hearers that "All the passing events of the civil and religious world, in
connection with prophecy, indicate the approach of better days."189 The
role which millennial expectations played in the American foundation of
its foreign mission societies—and especially the American Board—is
difficult to ignore.
These theological suppositions were expressed well by Timothy
Dwight in a sermon delivered to the American Board at their fourth
annual meeting. First of all, missions was to bring about "the glorious
end of redemption." Moreover, this millennium "…is advancing; it is
hastening;" and through fervency of labors in the mission field this
glorious day of worldly and eternal peace, wealth and unity would be
brought about. This "great harvest of the world" was drawing to an end
in the next two centuries and, though victory was assured, there was still
much work to do.190
These feelings were shared by Rufus Anderson when he took on
Evarts's field correspondence from the Home Office. In the same year
that S. Wells Williams's father William received the request from the
American Board for a young healthy printer, the American Board itself
received Anderson as its new young healthy corresponding secretary and
189Jong, Millennial Expectations, 225.
190The preceding paraphrase comes from Timothy Dwight, A Sermon, Delivered in Boston, September 16, 1813. Before the American Board of Commissioners, for foreign Missions, at their Fourth Annual Meeting, in Charles L. Chaney, The Birth of Missions in America (South Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1976), 282-5.
71 board member.191 Throughout much of the long and distinguished
history of the American Board, Anderson was the guiding ideologue and
visionary behind its operations.
As late as 1869, Anderson was still convinced that "the 'fullness of
time' has come for the commanded and predicted publication of the
gospel through the world."192 Largely due to these expectations of the
"promised advent of the Spirit" Anderson was driven to call for the
dissolution of subsidiary means of evangelism and for the promotion of
untiring preaching of the gospel.193 This, of course, is the so-called
"Apostolic model" of evangelism for which he is so well known. For
Anderson and the American Board he so indelibly influenced, education,
hospitals, and welfare work were not to be the primary means of
evangelism. Rather,
The object and work of the missionary are preeminently spiritual.… And the means he employs in this ministry of reconciliation, are as singular and spiritual as the end he has in view. He preaches the cross of Christ. …[his] grand agent is oral instruction.194
Williams shared neither Anderson's understanding of mission nor the
insipid millennialism with which it was undergird. These issues found
191R. Pierce Beaver, ed., To Advance the Gospel: Selections from the Writings of Rufus Anderson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), 11.
192Rufus Anderson, Foreign Missions: Their Relations and Claims (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1869), 27.
193This is seen clearly in Anderson's The Promised Advent of the Spirit—a cogent and well-thought out melding of practical missionary exhortation and "rightly dividing the ages." For his rather typical and orthodox Edwardsian use of scripture see §3, ¶4 of The Promised Advent of the Spirit in Beaver, To Advance the Gospel, 47ff.
194Quoted from Anderson's 1845 sermon The Theory of Missions to the Heathen in Beaver, To Advance the Gospel, 77-79. Italics are Anderson's.
72 expression in their disagreement over the nature of mission
employment as recorded in an unusually abrasive letter written by
Williams to Anderson in November of 1850.195
Over the course of this lengthy letter Williams defended his
operation of the press while berating the American Board first of all for
requiring him to "defend" his service at all, and second of all for their
inconsistent policies. He was sent as a free agent with little instruction
and now he was being judged for not doing in hindsight what they now
suggested might have been a better procedure. Moreover, Anderson's
multiple changes of opinion on the efficacy of The Repository—and
especially his admission that it was a good and constructive venture but
just not an acceptable labor for American Board missionaries—seemed to
ring increasingly hollow in Williams's ears.196 Finally, the Canton
Mission's willingness to accept "secular jobs" for its press was questioned
by Anderson, even though Williams and Bridgman had repeatedly stated
how insufficient their funds were to cover their expenses.197 Their
careful ingenuity had repaid debts owed to merchants, carefully avoided
195This is an incredibly important letter, revealing schisms that perhaps helped move Williams away from ordination while at the same time encouraging him to examine other modes of service. Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1846-60, vol. 1, no. 307. Williams to Anderson, November 1, 1850. Though it is an irrelevant point in Williams's estimation, hindsight finds Williams's passing remark that his press is run just as D. O. Allen runs his Bombay press to be quite significant.
196Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1846-60, vol. 1, no. 307. Williams to Anderson, November 1, 1850.
197At this time the American Board is facing financial constraints and urging economy upon its missionaries. Williams points out in this same letter that the Canton mission has never had sufficient funds to operate without the income from the job work of the press. Also, Williams was "somewhat at a loss to know" what Anderson meant "by the phrase 'secular job.'" Surely printing tracts and Sacred Scriptures were not to be classified as mere jobs? That was not how he conceived of his labors in the China field!
73 condoning or aiding the opium trade in any way, and covered the
expenses of the mission which the Board had repeatedly shown itself
unable to do. If these "subsidiary means" were seen as a distraction to
true missions by Anderson and his peers within the wood paneled offices
of Boston, Williams saw them as the means of influencing both foreign
and Chinese sinners for Christ, and often times the only way to put food
on the mission's tables! In Williams's eyes, the Canton Mission was
being betrayed by its officers.
Though Williams certainly shared Anderson's respect for the oral
preaching of the Gospel—as his doubts regarding the efficacy of tracts
demonstrate—and he certainly shared Anderson's desire to "preach the
cross of Christ," he was less ready to dismiss subsidiary means of
evangelism.
In an early semi-annual joint letter of the mission, Williams as
author pens an unequivocal call for the furtherance of what he calls
"preparatory labors" which he says would be just as much needed if
China were fully accessible. These labors include both the effort to "give
correct information regarding China" and the attempts to supply "the
sick and helpless much needed and charitable aid as will soften their
hearts and remove their prejudices against foreigners."198 A year and a
half later finds him praising the practiced piety of his friend Olyphant—a
merchant by vocation and clearly not an ordained missionary. "The
198Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1837-44, vol. 1, no. 9. Joint letter to Anderson, March 7, 1837.
74 missionary teaches, but such persons live, the Gospel in a manner
more fully understood and appreciated."199
Additionally, it seems as if Williams did not share the millennial
focus of his supporters in Boston. Certainly, he lacked the theological
education of the founders of the American Board. And yet he was clearly
a man well versed in the words of Scripture. Given the exhaustive
nature of his Sunday school experiences, it is striking that Williams
chose not to interpret the events he was witnessing in terms of Biblical
prophecy.200 After having passed through war and the forcible opening
of a heathen nation to the nations of Christendom, Williams has no
grand statements regarding fulfilled prophecy. Indeed, before the
conclusion of the hostilities of the first Anglo-Chinese War, Williams
looks simply to Providence and is in fact thankful that "one cannot pry
into futurity."201
This simple faith in God's guiding and sustaining hand leads
Williams to draw different conclusions about the nature of missions
work. He was, after all, sent as a printer and not a missionary. And as
he approached his twentieth year in the service of the American Board, it
seemed to him that given the great challenges facing evangelism in
199Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1837-44, vol. 1., no. 18. Joint letter to Anderson in Williams's hand, October 5, 1838.
200I have only found one instance, in a letter to a supporter in Utica written from Beijing in 1868, where Williams uses the word "millennium." He discusses the requirement that the Gospel be preached in all nations, notes recent progress in this regard, and then concludes that this progress makes makes him "the more willing to bide God's time in this undertaking which seems immense only to our little selves." Letter to Mrs. H. C. Wood from Tremont Temple, Beijing on June 29, 1868. Williams, Life and Letters, 375.
201See also the discussion above regarding the opium trade. Letter to his father of August 20, 1840. Williams, Life and Letters, 121.
75 China, "subsidiary means, like schools and hospitals, in which to
teach and practice the principles of Christianity, are worthy of not a little
care." He had seen first hand the remarkable success of Parker's
hospital wherein "the Gospel is constantly made known."202
This is by no means saying that Williams was unaware of or
eschewed theology when approaching missions. He knew, for instance,
that often times too much stress was given to what would later come to
be called the "social gospel."203 He understood the imperative to preach.
In a revealing and private letter to Anderson in 1849 Williams confesses
his frustration with Bridgman's unwillingness to preach the Gospel out
loud: the man spent so much time in his study and was so circumspect
and withdrawn outside of it that Williams wondered how he expected to
share Christ with anyone!204 But at the same time Williams still saw the
practical opportunities which hospitals and schools provided for
interacting with natives and for gaining their trust and respect.
Williams’s discussion with Anderson was rooted in certain
theological suppositions, but they were not the specific prophetic
interpretations so influential in the popular theologies of those days.
Rather, Williams's theology had at its center the guiding providence of
202Letter written to his brother William on June 21, 1852. Williams, Life and Letters, 180.
203Later, in 1864, Williams penned an essay for the Observer making clear his stand on "The Gospel and Civilization—Which is to Go First?" For Williams, the question is simple: the Gospel goes first. Missions are necessary to protect pagans from the evils of "pseudo-civilization" (those with the advantages of Western civilization and technology but feeling "no sense of weakness of wickedness such as the Bible describes." Letter to the Editors of the New York Observer from Beijing on January 11, 1864. Williams, Life and Letters, 351-354.
204Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1846-60, vol. 1, no. 291. Williams to Anderson, January 29, 1849.
76 the God who faithfully accomplished his will throughout all of
history. As far as what methods were best suited for evangelism,
Williams acknowledged simply that "it is difficult to tell beforehand what
will prove the most promising path." So he worked where he was, doing
what he could, following the paths that seemed most expedient while all
the while trusting that God would use him and ensure that His will
would be accomplished.
Williams’s trust was founded on the faithful and utterly reliable
saving acts of God in the Bible. In a beautiful passage which
demonstrates Williams's familiarity with scripture while at the same time
showing his distance from the prophetic interpreters of the previous
generation, the printer from New York explains his reason for continuing
as a Christian to participate in whatever work God might bring before
him.
Blessed is the work of doing good in any line; all finally run into the same Sea of Glass where its earthly agents wil one day be so happy in casting their crowns before Jesus, that they wil quite forget discussions as to whose rill was straightest, and deepest, and had the purest water.205
These comments are particularly moving in light of the other pressures
Williams was feeling from the Board. On top of the question regarding
the continuance of the press and the hospital, Anderson also urged
Williams to be ordained as a minister and missionary.206
205Letter written to his brother William on June 21, 1852. Williams, Life and Letters, 181.
206Williams still resisted being ordained—his vocation was books and printing. This again raises the fascinating question of Williams's preaching and ministering to the local Chinese. Was Anderson aware of this? We assume he was. Perhaps Williams preached, but refrained from sacramental functions as a proper Presbyterian. Or perhaps—more likely and still more controversial—Williams was being influenced by the
77 Before these debates could be settled, however, Williams
found himself swept away by a scheme he had little part in instigating
and little desired to participate in. On April 6, 1853 Commodore
Matthew C. Perry sailed in to Hong Kong harbor and marked the second
signpost pointing towards a new vocation in Williams's life. On the basis
of Williams's 1837 abortive trip to Japan, his experience with the
Japanese sailors and his meager scripture translations into Chinese, the
government of the United States requested that he accompany Perry on a
diplomatic mission to Japan as official interpreter. Williams felt grossly
under qualified—1837 was a long time ago—but he eventually agreed.
This time the journey was a success. The party was eventually
received, Williams set foot on Japanese soil, and he immediately began to
catalog its unique natural characteristics. Owing to centuries of Dutch
trade out of Nagasaki and the presence of a number of Dutch speaking
sailors amongst Perry's fleet, Williams's meager Japanese was not so
much tested, as given the opportunity to develop without any diplomatic
pressures whatsoever. The mission returned after two months and
promised to revisit Japan a year hence to establish treaty relations with
the Japanese Emperor.207
Upon his return to Macao on August 7, 1853, Williams resumed
immediately and without regret his labors in the chapel and his work on
ecumenism which so rightly affects those who serve the gospel outside of their own homes. As early as 1836, Williams had already developed what he called "a great disrelish of those sectarian terms of denominations which are used in Western lands…. Dr. Morrison never called himself any other than a Christian missionary, and I'm sure I don't know today what denomination of dissenters he did favor." Williams, Life and letters, 93.
207An account of this journey composed almost entirely of Williams's letters and journal entries can be found in Williams, Life and Letters, 183-198.
78 a "Tonic Dictionary" of Chinese and English. Missions work was
largely unhindered except where opium—"the bane of China"—was to be
found, although by this time the Taiping Rebels had captured Nanjing
and were moving quite threateningly towards Beijing. Williams
suspected that the Taiping might actually succeed in overturning the
Manchu foreign dynasty. He was hopeful that whatever change occurred
would bring good—though this is on account of God's overruling hand
which "can make them advance His cause," and not due to any
disillusions about the Taiping beliefs which were confounded with "much
that savors of Mohammedanism and paganism."208
These were very chaotic times for China. Inflation, specie drain,
taxation, corruption, rebellion and natural disaster were combining and
recombining in devastating proportions. When the Yellow River changed
its course on July 5, 1853 nature added her terrible judgment to the
criticisms China's people had been offering for almost a century. In 1795
a group of displaced peasants in the mountainous regions of
Southwestern China had set up their own defenses and administration
invoking the name of an ancient Buddhist sect called the White Lotus.
With their cry "the officials force the people to rebel," these rebels
struggled and fought against the Imperial forces for ten years, unable to
feed themselves on marginal land, unable to find unpopulated tillable
land, and thus unable to bear the official tax burden.209 This same
millennial Buddhist teaching had justified a similar rebellion in
208Letter to his brother on August 20, 1853. Williams, Life and Letters, 201.
209John King Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800-1985 (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1986), 64.
79 Shandong Province only twenty years before.210 In fact, rebellion
plagued much of the Qianlong Emperor's reign (1736-96) covering the
entire countryside from the 1780's Heaven and Earth Society revolt
which rocked Taiwan (then still part of the Middle Kingdom), to the
multiple Muslim revolts which erupted in Gansu Province and points
west and the perpetual stirrings of the Miao tribes in southwest
China.211 All these uprisings required great expenditure of lives and
revenues from the imperial government, as they invariably ended in
heavy fighting and mass executions. The 1813 revolt by the Society of
Divine Justice was finally suppressed by the legally normative means of
total execution: 20,000 heads rolled.212
All of this information, when combined, serves to demonstrate the
great tension which gripped China before the guns of the West thundered
at her gates. The Qing Dynasty was struggling desperately to keep a
tight lid on a boiling pot. Population, famine, national trade, and official
corruption all threatened to boil over. When these tensions found
popular expression in the form of rebellion and revolt in the nineteenth
century, the ruling Manchus were painfully reminded of their own
foreignness. The suppression of the second White Lotus Rebellion in the
first decade of the eighteenth century was possible only through the use
of the by now superior Chinese militia. The otherwise loyal Manchu
bannermen had been made weak by decades of graft on the part their
210Spence, Modern China, 112.
211Spence, Modern China, 114-15.
212Beeching, Opium Wars, 22.
80 commanders.213 The Manchu dynasty had its hands full, and
putting off foreigners, "using barbarians to control barbarians" and in
some ways ignoring the Western powers made sense.214 The Qing
Dynasty was shaky, and the West seemed at most a blister in Canton—
though an impertinent one at that.
Even after the first Anglo-Chinese War (skirmish?) had been
fought, the Manchu Son of Heaven faced still more severe problems at
home. It would be difficult to seriously question the massive and very
real threat the Taiping Rebellion posed to the dynasty.215 The intense
violence and destruction exacted by the Taiping, foreign and Imperial
forces in China's heartland during the fourteen year conflict was
tremendously destabilizing, producing dislocation, famine and death.
One record of one county in the Taiping-occupied breadbasket of China
Anhui Province states that from 1860 to 1864 no food could be grown.
Over that same five-year period the local population dropped from over
300,000 to a staggering 6,000.216 This was just one small locality, over
a small fraction of the total years of desolation, in only one of the largest
of many such rebellions.
213Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution, 64.
214Note, however, that contemporary scholarship is beginning to suggest a more aware and actively self-serving defensive posture on the part of Chinese foreign policy planning.
215Though the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom clearly employed an anti-Confucian justification for its authority (another sign of unrest!), its claim to rule China is demonstrated clearly by Hong Xiuquan's taking of a dynastic title (Taiping tianguo) for his new society in 1850. See Fredric Wakeman, Jr., The Fall of Imperial China (New York: The Free Press, 1975), 148-149.
216Due to war, famine, dislocation and natural disasters. From Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368-1953 . (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 239. Cited in Wakeman, Imperial China, 159.
81 From 1850 to 1873—arguably the most turbulent decades of
Qing foreign relations including Williams's drafting of the American
Treaty of Tianjin and the shameful and tragic sacking of the irretrievable
Summer Palace—it is estimated that the Chinese population dropped by
some sixty million persons as a result of rebellions and their
consequences.217 Of this total, only a tiny fraction of the casualties can
be linked to Sino-foreign engagements.218 Is it any wonder that as the
foreign allies closed on Beijing in September of 1860, the Manchu Prince
Seng chose to deploy the bulk of his troops against a force of
approaching rebels from Shaanxi Province?219 The Qing Court
understood the danger the internal turmoil of this period posed. So
much so, that one year after his defeat at Beijing, the same Prince Seng
was driven to ask the Allies for additional artillery to aid in the
suppression of another rebellion raging in Shandong Province.220
The West was becoming increasingly familiar with the nature and
degree of rebellion within China just as Perry opened intercourse with
Japan. On January14, 1854 Williams sailed once again with Perry for
217Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution, 81. This is a classic example of the frustration many scholars feel when reading Fairbank's Revolution. Without scholarly apparatus, he is often able to say more than he can warrant. The evidence used from Revolution in this work has been chosen due to either its congruence with other records or its unusual persuasiveness. On the value of Revolution and the challenges of reading it carefully see Spence, Chinese Roundabout, 337-349.
218I have been unable to find an exact figure—partly because of Ward and Gordon's actions against the Taiping, and partly because of the generally distorted nature of statistics reported to the Manchu government. The total was almost certainly less than one million casualties—and I suspect more in the area of 100,000.
219Beeching, Opium Wars, 309.
220Beeching, Opium Wars, 330.
82 Japan.221 This time, Williams was heartily employed by Perry,
performing primarily the tasks of translating the treaties for the
American negotiators.222 Williams himself actually signed the treaties,
and his familiarity with the treaties with China in the 1840's led him to
suggest that a "most favored nation" clause be inserted. His advice was
heeded, and the Treaty of Kanagawa included under its Ninth Article in
Williams's own words a guarantee of equal representation and treatment
for all foreign nations in Japan. On August 11, 1854 Williams returned
to his family and home at Canton after visiting a number of cities in
Japan, the Lewchew Islands, Ningbo and Amoy.
This brought to an end the second series of events driving Williams
towards a change in vocation. The mission completed, Commodore Perry
was overflowing with praise regarding the services Williams had
rendered. In fact, Perry felt that "with high abilities, untiring industry,
and a conciliating disposition,” Williams was "the very man to be
employed in such business."223 For his own part, Williams was glad to
get back to his labors at the press. Eagerly back at work on his
dictionary, Williams's experience in international politics had been of
some interest to him, though it had by no means left him enamored. As
he had found out first hand, piety often suffered in the service of one's
nation.
221This journey and the negotiations which it entailed are recorded from Williams's own journal of the expedition in Williams, Life and Letters, 206-233.
222According to Williams's journal treaties were exchanged first in Dutch and then in Chinese—the latter were translated by Williams—while each nation had three copies of the treaty in their native language as well. Williams, Life and Letters, 214.
223Letter from Perry to Williams on September 6, 1854 before leaving Hongkong for the States. Williams, Life and Letters, 229ff.
83 the desecration of the Sabbath in a man-of-war is as great as in a pagan country, where it is not known; as to keeping the day holy, I fear amid such a melée of men talking, moving, and working, the thing's impossible.224
In the summer of 1855, Dr. Parker was appointed to fill the
position of United States Commissioner to China. Parker was still in the
States at the time, and with the Doctor's post as Secretary and
Interpreter to the Legation left vacant, the State Department decided in
Washington to commission its new-found star of East Asian languages
and diplomacy, S. Wells Williams, as the next interpreter.225
Being commissioned before he had been given any opportunity to
voice his own desires regarding the matter, Williams was caught a little
off guard. True, things had been touchy with the Board as of late, but he
was not in any position to abandon the mission and wholly disregard the
desires of the Board. As he wrote to his brother Frederick,
Whether I shall accept it or not will depend altogether on the proceeding of the committee as to their printing-office, for they wrote last year that they would rather like to give it up, and proposed I should be disconnected from the Board and get a living making books and doing Bible and tract printing. If they carry out this proposition I shall have to look around for something else to do, for the printing-office won't maintain me.… I am on the whole, however, rather unwilling to take this government position, and look for no enjoyments in its duties….226
224Williams, Life and Letters, 217.
225An fascinating record of Parker's idiosyncratic style of statecraft—and his stubborn temper—could be compiled by appealing to the two following especially colorful works where they discuss his service: Griffin, Clippers and Consuls; Tong, United States Diplomacy in China.
226Letter to his brother Frederic. Williams, Life and Letters, 234-5. This last point is less significant than it at first appears, for Williams was in the habit of turning over all payments received to the mission treasury. All income from his writings—
84 Williams knew very well what sort of work the position would
involve: he would translate official papers. Reflecting as he finally
accepted the position in 1857, Williams remarked that "during the last
eight years, I have done nearly all the translating of this sort for the
American and other consulates,—excepting the English,— and have
received no compensation therefor[sic]."227 But since the American
government was without officers in China and Williams had no word
from the Board, he decided to accept the position provisionally and
superintend the legation until Parker's return on December 31, 1855.
A year later found him alone in Shanghai still provisionally serving
the Legation, his Tonic Dictionary of the Canton Dialect finished, and
Anderson and the American Board still incommunicado regarding the
press at the Canton mission. The silence of the Board augured closure
for the press in Williams's estimation, and he had found the legation
work not as disagreeable as he had expected. As Williams wrote at the
time, "I am still undecided as to accepting the position of Secretary of
Legation, but matters now look much more to acceptance than
otherwise."228
Meanwhile, things were once again heating up in Canton.
Relations between foreign representatives and the provincial governors
had not changed much—let alone improved—since the treaties following
including The Middle Kingdom and his Tonic Dictionary—the products of his press, and even his salary from the Japan missions he understood to be his dues to the Board. Williams, Life and Letters, 232.
227Letter to Anderson from Macao on January 28, 1857. Williams, Life and Letters, 245.
228Letter to his brother William from Shanghai on October 7, 1856. Williams, Life and Letters, 238-9.
85 the first Anglo-Chinese War. Leaving aside the various petty
insurrections which swarmed around Canton in this turbulent decade,
these tensions finally erupted after the infamous "Arrow Incident" of
October 8, 1856. In pursuit of a foreign sailor guilty of piracy, Chinese
officials raided the 127-ton lorcha Arrow, arrested her crew and,
according to a British eyewitness, hoisted down the Union Jack she had
been flying so proudly. This was an insult to the flag! Even though a
nearby Portuguese Captain had not seen any British flags aboard the
Arrow for the last six days, the event was pushed through some rather
limp rationalizations and rapidly developed into a serious casus belli for
the British nation against the Chinese Imperial government.229 Events
spiraled out of control and by October 28 the British were firing upon the
Canton offices of the Imperial Commissioner, ostensibly demanding
"treaty revisions."230
Americans had been warned in advance to withdraw from Canton
by the Imperial Commissioner, which they did—all except for U. S.
Consul to Hong Kong James Keenan. He foolishly grabbed an American
flag and an American "volunteer" and marched into Canton behind the
British, waving and displaying the stars and bars everywhere. This
foolish action led the Chinese to fire upon an American warship
sounding the Macao-Canton passage on November 15. The U. S. Naval
commander Commodore James Armstrong took this offense against the
American flag quite seriously and proceeded to bombard and capture five
229Beeching has recorded the accounts of both the Portuguese captain and the British Captain Kennedy who claimed to have witnessed the belligerent seizure of the lorcha crew. Beeching, Opium Wars, 213ff.
230Tong, United States Diplomacy in China, 185.
86 of the Chinese Barrier Forts in the three days following November
20.231 This event is one of the few instances of combat between the
Chinese and American armed forces wherein American neutrality was
breached.232
Conflict followed and intensified throughout the fall and early
winter of 1856. Williams had now returned to Canton, and on December
11, he decided to visit his family who still resided in Macao for a week-
long holiday. But on December 14, 1856, in what was at the time hailed
as an act of retribution for the destruction so recently wrought by the
foreign armed forces, the foreign factories at Canton were burned to the
ground. Large portions of neighboring Chinese shops and homes were
destroyed as well, including the printing office of the American Board
Canton Mission.
Subsequent historical investigations have brought into question
the veracity of accounts blaming the Chinese for the great fire. Whether
intentional or not, the fire seems to have erupted from within the
American quarters. When local Chinese brought fire engines to
extinguish the blaze, they were fought off by armed British soldiers.233
Regardless of the true cause of the fire, it was successful in sealing the
mind of Williams.
231Tong, United States Diplomacy in China, 186-7.
232The participation in the raids on the Dagu Forts by offering to tow British ships to and from the battle is the other major instance of an American breach of supposed neutrality. This terrible battle was witnessed by Williams. Williams, Life and Letters, 299-312.
233Tong, United States Diplomacy in China, 189-92.
87 Taking pen in hand, Williams wrote to Anderson on January
28, 1857 explaining the lengthy process by which he had come to sever
his relationship with the Board. It was the destruction of the press in
the fire that liberated Williams from the obligations he felt to the Board.
Had it not been lost, Williams would "have tried to effect some
arrangement so that it should not cease altogether."234 In fact, Williams
makes it clear that his departure from the mission is not in his mind a
permanent one, but a temporary one "made in consequence of the
enforced suspension of printing operations."235 In a letter written the
day before to his brother William, Williams expresses the same desire to
continue his relationship with the Board adding,
I have a great respect for the Board and its officers, and believe that it is managed as well and made as good material as any mission society extant. If I can do as much good to the Chinese now as before, and not use mission money, I shall not regret it. Yet where it will end and where the progress of events will drift me, I cannot say, and have, indeed, some fears.236
Williams, as has already been established, was never ordained and
always described as a "printer" in distinction from being counted a
234Letter to Anderson from Macao on January 28, 1857. Williams, Life and Letters, 246-7.
235Letter to Anderson from Macao on January 28, 1857. Williams, Life and Letters, 246.
236Letter to his brother William from Macao on January 27, 1857. Williams, Life and Letters, 242-3.
These words challenge Paul Cohen's use of Williams as an example of "the disproportionately large number of early missionaries to assume secular responsibilities, which… resulted in a blurring, if not complete eclipsing, of their identities as missionaries." While it is certainly true that Parker, Morrison, Gutzlaff and others served terms under the employment of Western governments, Cohen's words here tacitly endorse a distinction—between the sacred and the secular—which not all missionaries supported. Paul A. Cohen, "Christian Missions and Their Impact to 1900," Fairbank and Twitchett, The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10, pt. 1, 549.
88 "missionary." Though it is true that with the opening of the treaty
ports and the official toleration of Christianity he came increasingly to
engage in the duties of preaching and evangelizing, the official records of
the Board as well as the distribution of his efforts amongst the various
tasks open to him show him indisputably to be a printer.237 Moreover,
his concern for "preparatory labors" or "subsidiary means" suggest a
certain willingness to define the field of labors that advance Christian
missions more broadly than some. Williams himself already questioned
Anderson on his criticism of so called "secular jobs" for the press, while
at the same time he also defended such work as an invaluable source of
funds for missions. To put it simply, Williams had always been primarily
engaged in the so-called secular responsibilities of the press and so no
conflict or blurring between his labors for and his responsibilities to—if
not the American Board—the Christian mission to China. After recalling
briefly his disagreements with the Board over the running of the press,
Williams closes his January1857 letter of explanation to Anderson by
brushing his own criticisms aside and expressing his earnest hope to
further missions while taking on his new line of employment.
This may all now pass, however, for it bears nothing on the feelings I now entertain towards the good cause of missions in China and my desire to do a little towards its advancement. I believe that God has stores of mercy yet to give China….238
237For example, the 1842 tabular view of the Canton Mission shows Williams again to be clearly classified as a "printer" and not a "missionary." Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1837-44, vol. 1, no. 3. Annual Tabular View, 1842.
238Letter to Anderson from Macao on January 28, 1857. Williams, Life and Letters, 247.
89 In Williams own mind, he was always first and foremost a
servant of the Lord. And as he left the employ of American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions, he did not leave the service of
missions. Rather he found a new venue through which to further the
cause of Christ in China. Like Olyphant whom he admired so for "living"
the Gospel, Williams still saw himself to be just as much in the service of
China missions as he had been while running the press in Canton. This
confidence came from his deep knowledge of God's providential guiding.
As Williams had remarked in writing just before his first encounter with
Perry set in motion the events that would eventually propel him into
diplomatic service, "Blessed is the work of doing good in any line."239
Williams was still confident that the same God who delivered Israel
would superintend all.
239For extended quote, see above. Letter written to his brother William on June 21, 1852. Williams, Life and Letters, 181.
90
CHAPTER FIVE
Conclusion
This all too brief look at the first half of Williams's life reveals a
number of factors that have not been given sufficient consideration in
attempts to evaluate his role as a missionary in China before the Treaty
of Tianjin and its articles of toleration.
First of all, Williams was raised in an environment very far
removed from the twentieth century. The degree to which the words and
concepts of the Bible filled his early days almost defies belief. Whether in
common school or Sunday school, Williams found scripture at the center
of all of his learning. Having directed such massive amounts of time and
energy towards this one book, it would be surprising if its ideas,
characters, stories and ideas failed to permeate his life.
Clearly, all of Williams's writings and actions must be read with
this perspective in mind. Many of his letters closed with beautiful
benedictions that—as foolish as they may sound to the modern reader—
must be accepted as reliable vehicles for Williams's own authorial intent.
Current skepticism over the value of Providence cannot be read back into
Williams's life. He himself was not a cynic. In his later life, and in his
personal letters to his family these sincere sayings and the faith in a
sustaining God which engenders them abound all the more.
I can trust in God that you are also kept in health and quiet, and the darling girls around you give you pleasure, occupation, care, and mother's joy, in their health and
91 amusements. Yet, even if I knew now that you had suffered; or they had ailed, causing you double sorrow and pain in their sorrow and pain, I would ask God to enable me to rejoice and feel that he had done us good. I can humbly and joyfully leave you all in his hands, and do so every day, our prayers meeting in his ears.… …Good bye, sweetest treasure—Keep up good spirits by casting all your cares on One whose heart is large enough to take in all your wants and woes, and power great enough to furnish all you really desire. Soon both of us must go by ourselves to the home whence none return, there to give account of all our conduct to each other. A kiss to the darlings and you…240
Second, the actual Sitz im Leben of the foreign missionary in China
prior to the Unequal Treaties must be adequately understood. Though
popular readings of this period may inflate the nature of native hostility
and violence towards the foreigners, the fact remains that contact
between Westerners and Chinese was quite circumscribed. Life in the
Thirteen Factories left few options available to the early missionaries.
Surreptitiously securing native teachers, from which to learn the
challenging language of China, Williams's time was spent overwhelmingly
between the study and the press. With time, his labors expanded to
include the full circle of literary endeavor from researching and writing,
to editing and publishing. For Williams, this was his labor for the Lord.
And it left little time for disseminating tracts or preaching in the streets—
both of which were eschewed during the earliest period by Williams and
Bridgman due to their as yet limited abilities in Chinese and the danger
such activities might cause to any Chinese persons who might become
involved. The serious and ground-breaking scholarship demonstrated in
240 Letter to his wife from Edo Bay off Kanagawa on March 11, 1854. Samuel Wells Williams Family Papers, Yale University Library, Microflim.
92 his Middle Kingdom further underlines his commitment to
understanding China and sharing that knowledge with others to the
benefit of the Gospel in China. Williams most decidedly does not fit the
activist "Bible-thumper" stereotype of the modern day evangelical
fundamentalist missionary.241
Third, Williams was fully aware of the evils of the opium trade and
the war that it caused. If the current estimates of opium use among
nineteenth century Chinese are even remotely close to the actual
numbers involved, Williams could not have failed to see the effects of this
drug on the population.242 He wrote eloquently and passionately of its
evil, and stated unequivocally that the first Anglo-Chinese war was
fought over the drug. He saw God opening the world to His Gospel as he
noted that "Troublous times may usher in the Gospel;" but he always
hoped that resistance "by force" might be avoided.243 If he failed to end
his writings with flaming condemnations of British or Chinese
aggressions, it was only because of the indomitable hope with which he
was supplied through his faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
241In a private section of a letter to Anderson, Williams confesses his frustration with fellow Board employee Rev. S. W. Bonney. Although this was 1849 and as such Christian proselytism had gained a certain "legality" in the treaty ports, Williams was offended by Bonney's "injudicious" approach to spreading the Gospel. Bonney acted with "…suddenness, and disregard for the feelings of the people.… It is in vain to talk to him, or point out the impropriety of forcing tracts into the chair of the governor as he is passing thro' the streets, [or] of talking with women publicly in the streets." Correspondence of the ABCFM, South China, 1846-1860, vol. 1, no. 291. Williams to Anderson, January 29, 1849.
242If doubt still remains on Williams's opinion regarding the drug and its trade, see his section on opium smoking and its effects in Williams, Middle Kingdom, vol. II, 382-387.
243Letter to his brother William from Lewchew on January 30, 1854. Samuel Wells Williams Family Papers, Yale University Library, Microflim.
93 Fourth, the nature of this hope was such that it rested not on
a right dividing of the times, or a proper reading of millennial prophecies.
As steeped as his own sending organization may have been in the
millennial expectancy of early nineteenth century America, Williams does
not see the world through these lenses. Rather, his intimate familiarity
with Scripture makes him fully aware of God's faithful acts in history.
He knows the outcome of history, and out of this grows his very real
hope. For, "we have only to keep on during this sojourn, regretting
nothing but sin, and trusting in joy and peace beyond this scene of
probation."244
Though Williams is eager to make the Gospel known to all nations,
this desire is not based on the knowledge of some rapidly moving
timeline or an impending new age. Perhaps heeding Jesus's own words
in Acts 1:7 he refuses "to pry into futurity" but rather seeks to serve God
as best he can where he is. Out of love for those who do not know
Christ, Williams uses whatever is before him to make Christ known.
Since his faith is in an active providential God, and not human
calculations of impending millennial fulfillment, Williams is free to work
where He is trusting that God will bring about His divine will for China in
His own time.
This, finally, is why for Williams the decision to leave the American
Board and enter the full-time employ of the United States Government is
neither a betrayal nor a sign of compromise. This is simply a
continuation of his "preparatory labors." Indeed, he is glad that he can
244 Letter to James Dana from Canton on April 30, 1853. Samuel Wells Williams Family Papers, Yale University Library, Microflim.
94 still serve the cause of missions while no longer being a drain on the
mission's finances. He knew that all would cast their crowns before the
Sea of Glass, and that the phrase "well done, good and faithful servant"
was not restricted for the ordained. In continuing throughout his years
of diplomatic service to work on the production of linguistic aids and
lexicons for the benefit of newcomers to China missions he made true on
his sincere desire to further the Gospel in China.245 While S. Wells Williams has been the explicit subject of this study,
this work should in no way be construed as a narrow and specialized
examination whose significance lies only with those interested in the life
of Williams. Much has been written on the supposed cultural
imperialism inherent in the nineteenth century mission to China, but
these writings all too frequently fail to adequately locate the missionaries
they discuss within their proper contexts.246 This usually comes from a
combination of ignorance regarding the categories with which the
missionaries themselves discuss and judge their own actions and
motivations, and an unwillingness to subscribe to the missionaries any
individuality.247
245Recall that his 1874 Syllabic Dictionary was made available to missionaries in China at a fifty percent discount covered by Williams himself. Letter to his brother R. S. Williams from Beijing on December 9, 1874. Williams, Life and Letters, 400.
246Some of the works of this sort more frequently encountered (and mentioned above) include: Stuart Creighton Miller, "Ends and Means: Missionary Justification of Force in Nineteenth Century China;" and Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism, 1860-1870 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963). While Cohen's work especially is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of Chinese responses to Christian missions in China, neither of these works adequately understands the myriad issues and dimensions included under the broad rubric of missions.
247An excellent example of these kinds of errors can be seen in Murray A. Rubenstein, "The Wars They Wanted." After briefly noting on page 274 Williams's lack
95 The subtle and careful reading given by contemporary
historians to sympathetic Chinese figures is often left behind when the
missionaries are examined. Accordingly, works such as The Chinese
Repository and Chinese Recorder are read as if all their contributors and
editorialists share the same monolithic view of China—a particularly
flagrant abuse when the views of the mighty opium traders Jardine and
Matheson are lumped with those of the missionary printer Williams and
the pious opium-free trader Olyphant. In other instances, little effort is
made to recognize how the actions and hopes of the missionaries
changed and developed during the different periods during which they
served in China. What could and could not be done—not to mention
what was actually thought and done—by missionaries before the
conclusion of the First Anglo-Chinese War would have been very different
from the options available to missionaries after 1860.
Scholars should also be aware of what it meant first, to be a
Christian, and second, to be a missionary within the specific context of
the subject he or she is studying. This is largely a theological question—
and an essential one at that. Put simply, there are many different
definitions of evangelism, mission, and conversion, and each will require
different thoughts and actions from its adherents. Given the frequency
with which the theological suppositions of nineteenth century Christians of seminary training and ordination, Rubenstein goes on (page 275, second column) to speak about what "they" all felt about opening China. Throughout the rest of the piece he sights article after article with no reference to its actual author as deducible from Bridgman and Williams's Index. While he recognizes the role millennial expectations played in nineteenth century America (and rapidly reduces the phenomena to social upheavals and professional survival techniques), he again assumes all American missionaries—including Morrison?—were equally impacted by these ideas. Rubenstein thus falsely attributes the missionaries with a kind of monolithic thinking that ignores their own unique character, circumstances and opinions. For attribution of Repository articles (note presence of British authors!) see Bridgman and Williams, General Index of the Chinese Repository.
96 conflict with the world views subscribed to by modern scholars, it
should be self-evident that there is much room for increased sensitivity
and understanding regarding the very nature of missions as conceived by
the missionaries themselves.248
This kind of careful and accurate reading of this pioneer period of
Protestant missions to China requires that the various issues addressed
in this paper be investigated afresh for each individual missionary.
Questions of faith, theological and missiological approaches, background
influences, attitudes towards culture, understandings of conversion,
relations within and outside of China, the exact historical circumstances
within which a subject is operating —these are far from tertiary
concerns. Often times, these are keys which unlock the missionaries
character. It should be clear that the imperialist/non-imperialist
categories currently employed are insufficient to attest to the full nature
of the early mission to China. Though this question may very well
continue to remain a significant one within the history of Christian
missions to China, new categories must be examined as well.
248This becomes evident upon reading, as an example, the preface to Paul A. Varg, Missionaries, Chinese, and Diplomats: The American Protestant Missionary Movement in China, 1890-1952 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), vii and following. The author's suggestion that "The theological language of the early missionaries might be more meaningful to the lay person today if translated into the language of modern psychology" a priori dismisses the validity of the missionaries' self-understanding of "theological absolutes" as "a life-shaping force in themselves." Varg rightly understands that there were many national and cultural issues which at times became entangled in the missionary project (especially during the period germane to Varg's study). It is true that few missionaries can be explained "wholly on the basis of their theology." Nevertheless, religion cannot be reduced to mere cultural and psychological phenomenon without betraying the essence of the Christian faith which the missionaries claimed as their motivation. It is anachronistic and poor scholarship to read our contemporary religious skepticism into the saints of the past.
97 The goal of this project has been to re-introduce one
missionary, S. Wells Williams, into the contemporary scholarly dialogue
on his own terms. In so doing, new categories have been established
which make it possible for Williams and other early missionaries to be
understood in a fuller—though decidedly more complex—context. People
are complex, and the closer one gets to a person or event the more
details evolve and the more complicated the subject becomes. It is hoped
that the issues discussed here will open the door for more accurate
readings of the many other men and women who spent their lives as
ambassadors of Christ in China.
99
A CHRONOLOGY
S. Wells Williams
1637 Robert Williams comes from Norwich England to Roxbury.
1780 Thomas and Ezekiel (fifth generation of Robert) leave Framingham for New Hartford in Whitestown, NY.
1800 Deacon Thomas' son William Williams joins Ashael Seward's printing business—upon his coming of age it is Seward & Williams, W.W. being very successful: Col. in War of 1812, local fire Chief, deacon, elder
1807 Robert Morrison arrives at Canton (London Missionary Society).
October 22, 1812 Samuel Wells Williams (SWW), eldest of fourteen, is born to Sophia Wells (pious, prayer warrior, concern for mission, exemplar mother) and William Williams.
December 31, 1813 Robert Morrison completes Chinese New Testament.
1814 Morrison baptizes the first Chinese convert.
1816 The Sunday school comes to Utica instigated by father William Williams. SWW commits entire NT to memory with classmates.
1816 Wm. Milne baptizes Liang Fa.
1818 SWW begins his schooling at the age of 6.
November 25, 1819 Morrison completes his Chinese Bible.
1827 SWW boards at a classical school run by Rev. Ely Burchard.
1829 SWW returns to attend the Utica High School (Utica Gymnasium) under Charles Bartlett.
February 22, 1830 Bridgman and Abeel arrive at Macao (ABCFM).
1830 Friend J. Dana attends Yale; Williams family lacks funds for SWW to attend Yale and intend him for father's bookstore.
February, 1831 SWW and brother Frederic make public profession of faith and join First Church of Utica.
Autumn, 1831 Death of SWW's mother Sophia Wells Williams.
100 November 23, 1831 SWW arrives at Rensselaer Institute of Troy (to study
botany and natural science).
June 18, 1831-1835 Karl Gutzlaff (Netherlands Missionary Society) makes three unofficial journeys up the coast of China disguised as a trader on an opium ship.
Spring of 1832 Father recommends that SWW be sent to run the printing press at the new American Board mission in Canton—the press recently donated by Bleecker Street Presb. of NY
March 1833 William Williams remarries to Catherine Huntington of Rome, N.Y.
May, 1832 Chinese Repository commences publication in Canton with Elijah C. Bridgman as editor.
June 15, 1833 SWW sails from New York on Mr. Olyphant's ship Morrison.
October 25, 1833 The Morrison anchors in Whampoa, 12 miles south of Canton—Wells immediately begins language study and work in the print room.
April 22, 1834 Expiration of the British East India Company's monopolistic charter for control of all China trade
July 1834 Lord Napier's attempt to gain access to the Governor General at Canton and open diplomatic relations fails completely—Sino-foreign relations at Canton are very tense.
August 1, 1834 Death of Dr. Robert Morrison, the Pioneer of Protestant Mission work in China
Late August 1834 Medhurst and Edwin Stevens set out on Olyphant's Huron to test for themselves Gutzlaff's reports of openness. No disguises or other behaviors antithetical to Christian faith were engaged in.
1834 Peter Parker, pioneer of medical missions, arrives from New York and opens a dispensary and hospital in Canton.
December 1835 The mission decides to move SWW and his press from Canton to Macao, where the Portuguese authorities allow him to work unmolested.
July 4, 1837 SWW and Parker (Gutzlaff joins half-way) sail to Japan on the Morrison to return some shipwrecked Japanese sailors.
• Attempt was made to land at Kagoshima in Satzuma • Morrison was fired upon by muskets and cannon!? • Japanese sailors returned with Gutzlaff and SWW, Genesis,
Matthew and the complete Johanine corpus is translated into Japanese;
• Two sailors make decisions for Christ, model changed lives and become the first fruits in Japan praying for the conversion of their countrymen
101 December 12, 1839 Chinese officials attempt to execute a Chinese opium
smuggler in front of the Factories. Foreigners interfere and some sailors force the officials to leave. Ensuing Chinese mob attacks foreign Factories—no damage is done, save the strangulation of the opium smuggler.
March 24, 1839 Canton Commissioner Lin "besieges" the Canton Factories. Six weeks later, the British surrender their opium stocks. Lin burns some 20,000 plus chests of opium just below the Bogue Forts.
August 29, 1842 Qiying and Henry Pottinger sign the Treaty of Nanking abolishing the Chinese Cohong, offering an opium tariff, ceding Hong Kong to Britain and opening the five "Treaty Ports" (Canton, Amoy, Fuzhou, Ningpo and Shanghai) to British trade and residence.
July 3, 1844 The American Treaty is negotiated between Caleb Cushing and Qiying on the basis of the "most-favored-nation" clause in the Nanjing Treaty. Extra-territoriality is extended and made explicit.
1845 Emperor Daoguang issues an edict of toleration regarding Christianity in China.
October 15, 1845 After a trip through India, Egypt, and Europe sightseeing and searching for a set of Chinese type, SWW arrives in NY. Here he lectures to raise funds for new Chinese fonts (in January of 1845 he spent a few weeks with D. O. Allen in Bombay).
1845 After a not so pleasant stay in Hong Kong, the China Mission of the American Board moved its offices from Macao back to Canton.
1846 SWW compiles lectures to write The Middle Kingdom.
May 29, 1847 SWW proposes marriage in a letter to Miss Sarah Walworth.
November 25, 1847 Sarah and Wells are married in Plattsburgh.
1847 Coolie trade to America begins and blossoms with the subsequent announcement of the gold rush.
March 14, 1848 Second edition of The Middle Kingdom is printed
Summer 1848 At the urging of Dr. Nott, Union College confers upon SWW an honorary LL. D.
September 1, 1848 Dr. and Mrs. Williams arrive at Canton.
October 18, 1848 Walworth Williams is born.
1849 From this point on SWW runs Repository all alone—Bridgman is in Shanghai. SWW also translates most of the official Chinese documents for all consulates (save the British) unofficially and without compensation.
102 1849-1856 SWW's "Anglo-Chinese Calendar" is published.
1850 The reign of the xenophobic Xianfeng Emperor commences.
May 19, 1850 Katherine Williams is born.
June 10, 1850 SWW's father William Williams dies in Utica.
1852 Wells closes The Chinese Repository due to low demand and high cost.
June 28, 1852 Olyphant Williams is born.
March 19, 1853 Hong Xiuquan and his Taiping Rebels capture Nanjing.
July 5, 1853 The Yellow River changes its course.
May 12, 1853 SWW leavs Macao for Lewchew and Japan as interpreter for Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry.
August 7, 1853 SWW returns to Macao and his printing press.
March 1, 1854 Hudson Taylor first arrives in China (Shanghai).
January 14, 1854 SWW accompanies Perry on his second trip to Japan.
March 31, 1854 Perry and SWW sign the Treaty of Kanagawa promising fair treatment and access to trade in certain ports to American merchants and sailors. SWW had inserted a "most-favored-nation" clause.
1855-1873 Repeated Muslim insurrections disrupt Yunnan province and points West distracting Imperial energies.
Summer 1855 Another girl is born to the Williamses (making two boys and two girls to date).
1855 Delegates' version of the Chinese Bible is published.
October 1, 1855 SWW moves to Shanghai and Dr. Peter Parker's offices to provisionally superintend the American legation for the year until Dr. Parker returns from the States.
October 8, 1856 The Arrow incident takes place, lending causus belli to British indignation.
Late autumn 1856 With the stoppage of all foreign trade at Canton, the American Legation decides to remove all of its offices from Chinese soil to Macao. During the exodus, Chinese forts fire on American ships and American frigates retaliate with a brutal bombardment of the Bogue forts. These are the only hostilities [?] entered into by Americans against China.
103 December 11, 1856 SWW now back in Canton, decides to visit his family in
Macao, "expecting to return in a week."
December 14, 1856 The foreign factories at Canton are set afire by the Chinese. SWW's press and fonts are destroyed along with many already printed works not yet removed to Macao.
January 1857 SWW accepts position as interpreter or Secretary of the Legation for the United States of America in China, understanding that the Board does not wish to fund a new press and set of fonts for its China Mission. He thus stays in Macao and resigns from the ABCFM.
October 1857 Dr. Parker leaves his post in SWW's hands and returns to America.
November 1857 Wm. B. Reed assumes charge of the American Legation to China.
December 1857 After a five-month blockade, British and French bombard and capture Canton.
May 20, 1858 British and French take the Dagu forts.
June 1858 The Russian, American, British and French (resp.) Treaties of Tianjin are signed with the Chinese. SWW interprets and negotiates with Martin for Reed. SWW pens article granting toleration to Christians in China.
October 1858 The Taipings break out of Nanjing.
June 1859 Seeking treaty revision, the British, French and American envoys are rebuffed at the Dagu Forts, the British suffering a rare and terrible defeat. SWW watches as a "neutral" from an American warship.
July 28, 1859 The American Envoys (Com. Ward and SWW and Martin) arrive in Beijing.
August 16, 1859 The American Treaty is ratified by the Emperor in Beijing.
December 1859 SWW cracks down on coolie traders and even pens an anti-coolie tract in Chinese
February 1860 SWW returns to New England on leave of absence, horrified by slavery and troubled by thoughts of war.
March 19, 1860 Taiping massacre at Hangzhou
June 2, 1860 The Ever-Victorious Army is organized.
August 21, 1860 British and French succeed in capturing the Dagu Forts.
104 October 18, 1860 After extensive and terrible looting, the Imperial Summer
Palace is burnt to the ground at Lord Elgin's command. The Allies enter Beijing without resistance.
October 24, 1860 British and French finally ratify their versions of the Treaty of Tianjin (1858).
Late 1860 The Xianfeng Emperor dies.
April 1861 The American Civil War begins.
June 1861 SWW, wife and youngest daughter sail for China. During the journey their oldest son Walworth dies in Utica.
Summer 1862 SWW and Reed's successor Burlingame visit Beijing. SWW returns to family in Macao but decides to move to Beijing where he feels his influence might be of some use.
June 16, 1863 SWW and family arrive in Beijing to take up official residence.
July 19, 1864 Taiping Princes are defeated and beheaded by Qing General Zeng Guofen at Nanjing after a series of victories by the Ever-Victorious Army.
March 1865 Lincoln is assassinated.
May 10, 1865 The American Civil War ends.
November 1869 SWW's wife and children (?) leave from Shanghai through Europe and back to the States. SWW returns to the Legation in Beijing.
June 21, 1870 The Tianjin Massacre
May 1871 Brother Frederic Williams dies after years of Missionary service in Mesopotamia.
November 1871 SWW goes to Shanghai to finish and print his Syllabic Dictionary.
Summer 1872 SWW and friends summer in Japan (with total freedom to travel) due to oppressive Shanghai heat. He shortly returns to Shanghai.
May 1873 Wife Sarah returns at word of his poor health—he recovers and they return to Beijing, the dictionary completed.
November 30, 1874 SWW interprets for Minister Avery as he presents his credentials to the Emperor.
Spring 1875 SWW and family head home via Europe on SWW's second official leave of absence.
March 1876 SWW returns to Beijing to prepare for his successor upon his impending retirement due to loss of eyesight.
105 October 25, 1876 SWW leaves Beijing and China for the last time exactly 43
years after his first arrival in Canton.
June 1877 SWW appointed Chair of Chinese Language and Literature at Yale University.
1878 Great Famine in Northern China
Autumn 1879 SWW authors a petition for the Yale Faculty to urge President Hayes to veto the bigoted Chinese Immigration Act of 1879.
January 26, 1881 SWW's wife Sarah passes away with the dawn.
March 7, 1881 SWW is elected President of the American Bible Society.
1881 SWW is elected President of the American Oriental Society.
February 1882 SWW loses "the power of utterance" (a stroke?) while leading prayers in his home. He slowly (over 6 months) recovers his faculties.
October 1883 The final revision of SWW's Middle Kingdom rolls from the presses.
February 16, 1884 SWW dies of anemia in his New Haven home.
106
Selected Bibliography
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ABCFM. Papers on microfilm. LaMont Library, Harvard University. Reels 256-265 and Index. Correspondence: "South China, 1831-1837", "South China, 1838-1844", and "South China, 1846-1860."
The American Neptune, vol. XLVIII, no. 4 (Fall 1988), Fresh Perspectives on Qing Dynasty Maritime Relations, Jonathan Goldstein, guest ed.
Anderson, Rufus. Foreign Missions: Their Relations and Claims. New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1869.
Anderson, Rufus. Memorial Volume of the First Fifty Years of the ABCFM. Boston: ABCFM, 1861.
Anderson, Rufus. Memorial Volume of the First Fifty Years of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. 5th ed. Boston: The Board, 1862.
Barnett, Suzanne Wilson and John King Fairbank, eds. Christianity in China: Early Protestant Missionary Writings. Harvard University Press, 1985.
Bavinck, J. H. An Introduction to the Science of Missions. Translated by David Hugh Freeman. Philadelphia: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1961.
Beaver, R. Pierce, ed. To Advance the Gospel: Selections from the Writings of Rufus Anderson. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967.
Beeching, Jack. The Chinese Opium Wars. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
Boylan, Anne M. Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790-1880. New haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
107 Broomhall, A. J. Hudson Taylor & China's Open Century. 6 vols.
London: Hodder and Stroughton for Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1981-.
Ch'en, Jerome. China and the West: Society and Culture 1815-1937. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979.
Chaney, Charles L. The Birth of Missions in America. South Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1976.
The China Mission Handbook. First Issue. Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1896.
The Chinese Recorder. Published as The Missionary Recorder. Fuzhou, 1867; The Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal. Fuzhou, 1868-72; idem. Shanghai, 1874-. The name was shortened to The Chinese Recorder circa 1911.
Clouse, Robert G., ed. The Meaning of the Millennium: Four Views. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1977.
Cohen, Paul A. China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism, 1860-1870. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.
Cohen, Paul A. "Christian Missions and Their Impact to 1900." In Late Ch'ing, 1800-1911. Part 1. Edited by John K. Fairbank. The Cambridge History of China. Vol.10. General Editors John K. Fairbank and D. Twitchett. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Covell, Ralph R. Confucius, the Buddha, and Christ. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1986.
Covell, Ralph R. W. A. P. Martin: Pioneer of Progress in China. Washington, D.C.: Christian College Consortium, 1978.
Davis, John Jefferson. Christ's Victorious Kingdom: Postmillennialism Reconsidered. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1986.
De Jong, J. A. As the Waters Cover the Sea: Millennial Expectations and the Rise of Anglo-American Missions, 1640-1810. n.p.: J. H. Kok N. V. Kampen, 1970.
Edwards, Jonathan. The History of Redemption. Marshallton, Delaware: The National Foundation for Christian Education, 1969.
108 Elsbree, O. W. The Rise of the Missionary Spirit in America, 1790-
1815. Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1980.
Erickson, Millard J. Christian Theology. 3 vols. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1983-85; Single volume edition, Eleventh printing, 1994.
Erickson, Millard J. Contemporary Options in Eschatology: A Study of the Millennium. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1977.
Fairbank, John King and Reischauer, Edwin O., eds. China: Tradition and Transformation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989.
Fairbank, John King, ed. The Missionary Enterprise in China and America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974.
Fairbank, John King. The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800-1985. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1986.
Fairbank, John King. The United States and China. 4th ed., rev. and enl. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Gernet, Jacques. China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures. London: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Grenz, Stanley J. The Millennial Maze: Sorting Out Evangelical Options. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1992.
Griffin, Eldon. Clippers and Consuls: American Consular and Commercial Relations with Eastern Asia, 1845-1860. Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, Inc., 1938.
Grove, S. A. The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense. Oxford: Clarendon, 1960.
Gulick, Edward V. Peter Parker and the Opening of China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973.
Harris, Paul H. "Cultural Imperialism and American Protestant Missionaries: Collaboration and Dependency in Mid-Nineteenth-Century China." Pacific Historical Review LX, no. 3 (August 1991): 309-338.
Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
109 Hibbert, Christopher. The Dragon Wakes: China and the West,
1793-1911. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1970.
Hoekema, Anthony A. The Bible and the Future. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1979.
Hutchison, William R. Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Lasch, Christopher. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991.
Latourette, Kenneth Scott. A History of Christian Missions in China. New York: Macmillan, 1929.
Latourette, Kenneth Scott. The Chinese: Their History and Culture. New York: Macmillan Company, 1947.
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London Missionary Society.London Missionary Society Pamphlets. London: T. Chapman of Fleet Street, 1796.
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Miller, Perry. The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War. New York: 1965.
Minamiki, George, S.J. The Chinese Rites Controversy from its Beginning to Modern Times. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985.
The Missionary Herald. Boston: ABFCM, 1805-.
Moffett, Samuel Hugh. A History of Christianity in Asia. 2 vols. HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.
Newbigin, Lesslie. Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture. Grand Rapids, William. B. Eerdmans, 1986.
110 Newbigin, Lesslie. The Gospel in A Pluralist Society. Grand Rapids,
William. B. Eerdmans, 1989.
Packer, J. I. Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1971.
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Robert, Dana L. "'The Crisis of Missions': Premillennial Mission Theory and the Origins of Independent Evangelical Missions." In Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880-1980, ed. by Joel A. Carpenter and Wilbert R. Shenk, 29-46. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1990.
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111 Tuveson, Ernest Lee. Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's
Millennial Role. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1968.
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112
SELECTED WRITINGS
OF
Samuel Wells Williams
The Chinese Commercial Guide. Hong Kong: A. Shortrede and Company,
1863.
Chinese Immigration. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1879.
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