Trading Freedom by Dael A. Norwood

Author:Dael A. Norwood [Norwood, Dael A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Economic History, Foreign Exchange, History, General, Asia, China, United States, Revolutionary Period (1775-1800), 19th Century
ISBN: 9780226815589
Google: n0xNEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2022-01-18T16:18:06+00:00

No minister was ever received in this country as he has been and no mission was ever more popular. The Embassy was honored by a reception on the floors of Congress, the treaty was ratified by a unanimous vote of the Senate, the press of all parties endorses the action of the government, the President heartily approves of the objects of the mission, and the people everywhere, irrespective of political parties, are in favor of the policy established toward the Chinese.98

The Herald exaggerated the bipartisan comity, but it did not inflate Washington’s support, which was consistent even across a rancorous election year and presidential transition. Although the administrations were driven by very different politics—Johnson fighting until the end for a reconciled white man’s government, Grant (at first) embracing a firmer commitment to multiracial democracy—they both found the Chinese embassy useful as an example of the persuasive power of American diplomacy.

Secretary of State Hamilton Fish explained the continued official support in a long letter to historian George Bancroft, then serving in Berlin as US minister to North Germany. The “great principle” of the 1868 treaty, Fish said, was “the recognition of the sovereign authority of the imperial government at Pekin over the people of the Chinese empire and over their social, commercial, and political relations with the western powers.” Burlingame’s treaty, Fish averred, “was a long step in another direction” from both the “European-Chinese policy” of “isolation” and “disintegration” and the high-toned isolationism that Chinese statesmen had pursued out of fear of the political and economic consequences of greater trade with the West.99 Like Williams, Burlingame, and Seward, Fish saw Chinese immigration to the United States as critical to the development of the Pacific Coast and the nation’s “new position in the commerce of the world” that the Pacific Railroad was making a reality. Fish also predicted that the growth of US commercial power—underwritten by migrant labor—would call forth a corresponding increase in the number of Americans settling in China’s treaty ports, because it would augment overall trade. To promote this virtuous cycle and encourage the continuance of the “cooperative policy” more generally, Fish directed Bancroft, and other US diplomats, to support the Burlingame mission’s efforts in Europe.100

An eminently respectable conservative in Grant’s cabinet, Fish managed the State Department with the same controlled diligence and attentive care he took with his large New York estates. Once he adopted them, the principles of the 1868 treaty guided Fish’s personnel decisions as well as his policy statements—leading to J. Ross Browne’s firing and informing the instructions to his replacement, Frederick F. Low. Fish even cautioned the navy to be wary of trusting any officers who took foreign merchants’ peculiar “views of the Chinese character and government” too seriously, lest US influence in Asia be weakened through rash anti-Chinese actions, as Britain’s had been.101

President Grant’s first annual message, issued in December 1869, made this support for Burlingame’s mission public. After reviewing how the United States was faring after “emerging from a rebellion of gigantic

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.