PRESIDENT McKINLEY AND THE CHINESE CRISIS.
When, in 1899 and 1900 the civilized world was filled with indignation
over the atrocities of the “Boxers,” a vast element in China, and when
it became necessary for the United States to send its contingent of
soldiers to the scene, for the protection of United States interests
there, and of its diplomatic corps, this government’s hand in the matter
was guided by President McKinley.
The result was like that of all other affairs in which the comity of
nations has been involved, during President McKinley’s incumbency of the
executive place, so far as the United States were concerned. It was
creditable to this country, and was ramified by the judicious and
commendably conservative character of the man.
The conduct of our country in it all was devoid of elements of greed and
spoliation, or revenge, or any sort of unnecessary violence, and there
was an utter and entire absence of outrage.
The great uprising of a large part of the Chinese population against the
presence of foreigners in the empire, which began in the latter part of
1899 and resulted in the loss of untold thousands of lives, was one of
the strangest occurrences in the history of the world. At its inception
little was thought of it by the other nations, for China has been the
home of disorders, insurrections, uprisings and rebellions for many
centuries, but when the revolt spread from one province to another; when
Christian missionaries were ruthlessly slaughtered on every hand; when
natives who had been converted to Christianity were subjected to the
most horrible tortures; when foreign ministers in Peking were
assassinated and legations burned; when the guards of other countries
whose duty it was to protect the foreign representatives and members of
legations were attacked by the imperial Chinese troops and forced to
shoot down the soldiers of the empire as well as the rioters by the
thousand in order to save themselves; when millions of dollars’ worth of
property belonging to missionaries and citizens of other countries had
been burned; when the fleets of foreign nations were fired upon by the
Chinese, as was the case at Taku on the morning of June 17th, 1900,
resulting in the taking of the forts by the foreign fleets after a brisk
bombardment; and, finally, when the American, British, German, Russian,
French, Italian and Japanese soldiers, sailors and marines sent to the
relief of the imprisoned ambassadors and ministers of the great powers
of the world were beaten back by the Chinese troops with heavy loss,
then, and then only, did the other nations fully realize the great
danger that confronted them. The awful Yellow Terror was wild for blood,
and determined to drive every one of the “white devils,” as the
Celestials call all foreigners, out of the Empire.
When the outside countries demanded that their ambassadors and
ministers, as well as their citizens in China, be protected, the Chinese
government replied that the uprising was too widespread to be
controlled, and then the powers took the matter in hand themselves and
sent troops by the thousand—the aggregate by the end of July, 1900,
being nearly 100,000, with fully that many on their way or ready to
start. Meanwhile the Chinese imperial troops, most of them having joined
the insurgents, showed their fighting qualities in several engagements,
and the tried and trained warriors of the United States, England,
France, Russia, Germany, and other countries soon found they were
opposed by no mean foe. The Chinese have a contempt for death, and are
stoical when undergoing the most frightful punishment; they fell in
ranks and rows and heaps before the steady fire of the invaders, but yet
they came on. The one thing they did not like, however, was the use of
the bayonet against them, and when the foreign troops resorted to the
cold steel and rushed upon them with it the Chinese invariably gave way.
The uprising which began in 1899 was the most extensive China had ever
known, and the national government soon found itself helpless. It was
incited by the secret society Ye-Ho-Chuan, or “Boxers,” the literal
meaning or translation of the name of the society being “Righteousness,
Harmony and Fists.” It had about 4,000,000 members in the Empire, and
while the society was formed for the purpose of overthrowing the Manchu
dynasty, which represented not more than 12,000,000 of the 450,000,000
people of China, its hatred of all foreigners was the predominating
spirit. The “Boxers” first began by attacking the outlying foreign
mission settlements and then worked their way to the capital of the
Empire, leaving a bloody trail behind them.
China had always hated the people of outside countries, and never had
much to do with them until about the first quarter of the nineteenth
century. China traded as little as she could with the outside world.
Indeed, there was formerly a law punishing with death any Chinaman who
ever visited any other country. “China for the Chinese,” was the
watchword, and the lives of foreigners have never been safe in the
Flowery Kingdom.
China is thousands of years old, and was known to the ancients—the
oldest nations of which history makes record. It was mentioned in
ancient Sanskrit literature, but little was known of it. It was called
by the earliest civilizations as Seres; two thousand or more years ago
it was known as Chin, possibly because of the Thsin dynasty, which
occupied the throne some two hundred years before Christ. In the Middle
Ages it was called Cathay. The probabilities are that the name China
comes from the race called Chinas, who lived in the mountains near the
Indies, and was a branch of the Dard races. This name probably reached
Europe through the Arabs.
In 1840 China had her first experience with a civilized power. She had
been fighting barbarian nations like herself for many centuries, but had
never become embroiled with any of the western countries. England had
been doing a large trade with China in opium, to which the mandarins of
the Empire, who really ruled the country, objected, and finally they
stopped all foreign trade whatever. England declared war and captured
Canton, Shanghai and other important cities, after subjecting them to
bombardment, and China, to gain peace, being defenseless, paid England
an indemnity of $21,000,000 and opened the ports of Amoy, Fuh-Chow-Foo,
Ningpo and Shanghai to foreign trade.
Troubles then began to visit poor China in hordes. A rebellion broke out
in consequence of the failure of the Emperor Heenfung to carry out
promised reforms, and taking advantage of this, one Hung Sew-tseuen, who
had been converted to Christianity, and who knew the longing of his
countrymen for a native Chinese dynasty, proclaimed the inauguration of
the Taiping dynasty with himself as the first Emperor. This was in 1852.
He overran several provinces and captured Nanking, which he made his
capital, and was further aided in his schemes by England, which declared
war against the Tartar or Manchu dynasty in 1857 and gained further
trade advantages. France also joined in this campaign and the allies
marched to the very gates of Peking. A war indemnity of 8,000,000 taels
was also paid by the imperial government to the victors.
China quarreled with Japan over Corea, the Hermit Kingdom, in 1894, and
was badly whipped both on sea and land. The Japanese fleet and army
captured and occupied Port Arthur and Wei-Hai-Wei, the two strongest
harbors on the northern China coast. Japan proposed to keep Port Arthur.
Russia, with the assistance of Germany and France, compelled Japan to
restore Port Arthur to China. Afterwards Russia took Port Arthur
herself, and proceeded to make it the strongest military and naval base
in the Pacific.
From 1895 until 1899 the outrages in China on foreign missions, schools,
and hospitals were of monthly occurrence. At the same time foreign
aggression on Chinese territory became more marked. Russia, Germany,
France and England acquired large areas of territory, either by lease or
by force, and began fortifications, railroads, factories, etc. This
foreign aggression only intensified the popular discontent among the
Chinese masses, and the secret societies flourished as never before.
The “Boxers” had been ravaging, pillaging and murdering for some months
before the European powers became awakened to the seriousness of the
situation. During the latter part of May, 1900, the Washington
government addressed a note of warning to Peking to the effect that the
United States could not stand idly by and see its citizens slaughtered
and their property destroyed, as the Chinese government was bound by
treaty to protect the persons and property of citizens of friendly
nations. No reply was made to this, for it soon became apparent that the
Dowager Empress was friendly to the “Boxers.” Small bodies of imperial
troops were sent against the “Boxers,” but the latter easily overcame
the soldiers, who at once joined them.
The “Boxers” society was organized in the province of Shan-Tung, and it
grew so rapidly that the great provinces of Shan-Tung, Honan and Pechili
were completely under its control. Soon it had branches in every
province of the Empire, and entirely dominated Pechili, the province in
which Peking lies. Its leaders were energetic and resourceful, and by
the end of May, 1900, all China was aflame.
The 4,000,000 membership of the “Boxers” society was made up of coolies,
river men, idlers, pirates, bandits, and criminals of all classes. But
their leaders, although unknown to the European authorities in the far
East in the latter part of 1899 when the great uprising was inaugurated,
were men of ability and shrewdness.
The “Boxers” might reasonably be considered as simply a part and parcel
of the revolutionary propaganda in China. The society differed little
from other societies known at different times as the “Society of
Heaven,” the “Heaven and Earth Society,” the “Triads,” the “Black
Flags,” the “Teente Brotherhood,” the “Tea Society,” the “Water Lilies,”
the “Floods,” or the “Vegetarians.”
These societies and others with different names but similar purposes,
waged constant war against the foreigners. They always resented the
presence of Christian missions and commercial enterprises alike. To them
the engineer who surveyed a railroad, the physician who came to end an
epidemic, and the missionary were equally the objects of aversion, and
the secret society murdered the one as cheerfully as the other.
Previous to the “Boxer” outbreak there were three or four rebellions
which tended to put the Celestials in the humor to fight anything and
anybody, particularly the foreigners.
China is yet honeycombed, and has been for centuries, as no other
country in the world with secret societies, embracing all classes,
having an existence dating from the second century of the Christian
era—an existence not of tradition but vouched for by record.
Up to 1898 these secret societies had for their main object the
overthrow of the Manchu or Tartar dynasty, but after that they devoted
their attention to the expulsion of the foreigner from the land. It has
always been a mistake to believe that John Chinaman was a stranger to
patriotism. Indeed, so passionately devoted is he to his native country
that he makes arrangements for the return of his bones to the Flowery
Kingdom in the event of his dying in foreign lands. This fiber of
patriotism was utilized in 1900 by that extraordinarily clever woman,
the Dowager Empress, to rally the entire nation into the presentation of
a virtually united front to the foreigner, to convert the secret
societies from anti-dynastic into anti-foreign movements, and to achieve
that which the Triad sought in vain to bring about at the time of the
Taiping rebellion—namely: coöperation of all the secret societies, one
with another, against the common foe, which this time was not the Manchu
conqueror but the white foreigner.
It can hardly be denied that from about 1840 to 1900 China was subjected
to a degree of indignity, insult, extortion, and bullying on the part of
some of the foreign powers no Christian power would have tolerated.
Treaties were imposed upon her by force, her finest harbors seized, and
vast stretches of her littoral successively placed under foreign rule.
She was compelled to consent to agreements providing for the transfer of
her immense river trade to foreign flags, and for the gridironing of the
entire land by means of foreign built and foreign controlled railroads,
while for every concession made by her a dozen new ones were presented
by the foreign powers.
In December, 1899, the Empress issued a secret edict, addressed to the
Viceroys of the various provinces.
“The various foreign powers cast upon us looks of tigerlike voracity,
hustling each other in their endeavors to be the first to seize upon our
innermost territories,” she declared.
“They fail to understand that there are certain things which this Empire
can never consent to do, and that if hard pressed we have no alternative
but to rely upon the justice of our cause.”
Four weeks later another edict was dispatched to the same officials by
the Dowager Empress, who had, it was said, English or American blood in
her veins, her mother having been a Eurasian, or child of a white father
and Manchu mother. In this second edict the Viceroys were warned to
exercise a prudent discrimination towards the disturbers of public
peace.
“The reckless fellows who band together and create riot on the pretext
of securing the inauguration of reforms,” were to be punished, while
those “loyal subjects who learn gymnastic drill for the protection of
their families and their country,” that was to say, the members of the
“Righteous Harmony Fists (‘Boxers’) association,” were to be favored.
The “Boxers” association was openly a society for the cultivation of
gymnastics, but secretly an anti-foreign political movement, something
like those “Turnverein” or gymnastic societies which played so important
a political rôle in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
becoming one of the most important factors in the liberation of the
fatherland from the presence of the French invader. From the time the
“Boxers” were openly encouraged by the Empress, they became a means of
union among all the various secret societies, and the fact that these
societies in all parts of the immense Chinese Empire simultaneously took
to arms to drive out the foreigner was due to the adroitness of the old
Empress, who thus, at the close of the nineteenth century, emulated in a
way the rôle played by Queen Louise of Prussia when she roused her
countrymen to rid Germany from the thraldom of Napoleon.
However, the Chinese went about it in the most horrible fashion,
subjecting the objects of their hatred to the most agonizing tortures
and inflicting upon them every conceivable atrocity the barbarian mind
could invent.
The fact that Hon. Edwin H. Conger, United States Minister to China, his
wife and daughter, were among the foreign ambassadors and ministers shut
up in Peking, and sometimes reported massacred, was sufficient reason
that the United States should join with the allied armies in the war
against “The Yellow Terror,” and there were other good reasons. Thus
came about the part that the United States naval and military forces
took in that war, in which occurred the battle of Tien-Tsin and the
relief of Peking, together with the development of the fact that
Minister Conger and his family were safe. All of which are matters of
recent history, and for which there is no reason that it should be
repeated here.
In the entire war, however, the exemplary conduct of the American
soldiers was apparent to the world, and it has been shown that the
kindness of President McKinley and the humane nature that characterized
him in all things was the spirit that pervaded the American camp.
The brutality and savagery of the Russian troops composing a part of the
allied forces which captured the City of Tien-Tsin July 14, 1900, were
almost beyond belief. In view of the frightful excesses of the soldiers
of the Czar, it was not at all strange that the Chinese should have
regarded the people of the so-called civilized nations with distrust. It
should be said in this connection, and in justice to the other troops of
the international column, that the Russians were the only ones who
committed excesses of any sort, while the United States troops did what
they could to prevent looting and murder. The Americans commanded the
admiration of all by their conduct, but the Russians were condemned on
every side.
Further testimony of the great respect and admiration manifested for the
United States troops is shown in the story of the march to Peking:
A correspondent, in describing the men as they appeared when sweeping
through a town not far from Tien-Tsin, said the Americans impressed the
spectators more than any other troops because they looked and acted so
business-like. It was most gratifying to the people of the United States
that the reports from China were invariably favorable to their soldiers,
who compelled the respect and admiration of the allies and Chinese
alike. It was demonstrated as never before that the American soldier was
the most effective fighter on earth. It was not claimed that he led all
others in bravery, but certainly no one ranked higher than he in that
respect. All had courage and daring, but no other soldier shot so
accurately. The Chinese gave testimony to that effect, and they had the
best kind of an opportunity to learn the facts.
“When we see so many falling around us that we are forced to run,” said
a captured Chinaman, “then we know we are fighting Americans.”
This superiority in marksmanship was conceded by the allies, too. They
had seen it demonstrated often, and the brave man is quick to give
credit where credit is due. “When firing at the top of a wall,” said one
correspondent, “the American bullets chip the masonry.” The Japanese
gave especially convincing evidence of the opinion in which the American
soldier was held in China. They are enthusiastic little fellows, and are
ever anxious to learn all that friend or foe can teach them, and they
gave particular attention to the methods and work of the Americans.
“We do not shoot as well as you,” said a Japanese officer, “but we have
seen the importance of learning it. Look out for us; in a few years more
we shall shoot even as well as the Americans.”
If imitation is the sincerest flattery, Uncle Sam’s enlisted men have
reason to feel proud, for no one is so quick as the Jap to see what is
worth imitating. His judgment and perceptive power in this line are what
brought him so rapidly to the front.
All in all, the people of the United States had ample excuse for pride
in the men who were representing them on the battlefield in China. The
record made was splendid.
After describing the appearance of the troops of other nationalities on
the march, the correspondent said:
“Then came the Americans, looking so hardy and determined, marching like
veterans, although so many of them were very young, and carrying their
rifles like men who know how to use them. They do know how to use them,
as the Chinese are well aware. When there is any hot work to do—where
fine marksmanship is needed—they always have the United States troops
attend to it, and the job is always well done.
“Captain Reilly’s Battery—only about 200 horses and six guns—closed the
United States column. Poor Reilly! He fell while directing his men
before the walls of the Sacred City at Peking, and died like the hero he
was. There was no attempt at show when Reilly’s battery passed the spot
where we were standing—none of the ‘pomp and circumstance of glorious
war’—and Reilly himself, a little bald, gray man, a sort of Joe Wheeler.
But Reilly is the fashion here to-day and everybody wants to see him.”
Thoroughly illustrative of President McKinley’s attitude in that war,
and characteristic of him and his administration, is the following
correspondence between him and the Emperor of China:
On July 19th the Emperor of China appealed to President McKinley to
intercede with the powers to bring about peace. It reached Washington
July 23rd. The following is the Emperor’s appeal:
“The Emperor of China. To his Excellency the President of the United
States, Greeting:—China has long maintained friendly relations with
the United States, and is deeply conscious that the object of the
United States is international commerce. Neither country entertains
the least suspicion or distrust toward the other. Recent outbreaks
of mutual antipathy between the people and Christian missions caused
the foreign powers to view with suspicion the position of the
imperial government as favorable to the people and prejudicial to
the missions, with the result that the Taku forts were attacked and
captured. Consequently, there has been clashing of forces with
calamitous consequences. The situation has become more and more
serious and critical.
“We have just received a telegraphic memorial from our envoy, Wu
Ting Fang, and it is highly gratifying to us to learn that the
United States government, having in view the friendly relations
between the two countries, has taken a deep interest in the present
situation. Now China, driven by the irresistible course of events,
has unfortunately incurred well-nigh universal indignation. For
settling the present difficulty, China places special reliance in
the United States. We address this message to your excellency in all
sincerity and candidness with the hope that your excellency will
devise measures and take the initiative in bringing about a concert
of the powers for the restoration of order and peace. The favor of a
kind reply is earnestly requested, and awaited with the greatest
anxiety.
“KWANG-HSU, 26th year, 6th Moon, 23rd day (July 19).”
President McKinley at once replied as follows:
“The President of the United States, to the Emperor of China,
Greeting:—I have received your majesty’s message of the 19th of
July, and am glad to know that your majesty recognizes the fact that
the government and people of the United States desire of China
nothing but what is just and equitable. The purpose for which we
landed troops in China was the rescue of our legation from grave
danger and the protection of the lives and property of Americans who
were sojourning in China in the enjoyment of rights guaranteed them
by treaty and by international law. The same purposes are publicly
declared by all the powers which have landed military forces in your
majesty’s empire.
“I am to infer from your majesty’s letter that the malefactors who
have disturbed the peace of China, who have murdered the Minister of
Germany and a member of the Japanese legation, and who now hold
besieged in Peking those foreign diplomatists who still survive,
have not only not received any favor or encouragement from your
majesty, but are actually in rebellion against the imperial
authority. If this be the case, I most solemnly urge upon your
majesty’s government to give public assurance whether the foreign
Ministers are alive, and, if so, in what condition.
“2. To put the diplomatic representatives of the powers in immediate
and free communication with their respective governments and to
remove all danger to their lives and liberty.
“3. To place the imperial authorities of China in communication with
the relief expedition so that coöperation may be secured between
them for the liberation of the legationers, the protection of
foreigners and the restoration of order.
“If these objects are accomplished, it is the belief of this
government that no obstacles will be found to exist on the part of
the powers to an amicable settlement of all the questions arising
out of the recent troubles, and the friendly good offices of this
government will, with the assent of the other powers, be cheerfully
placed at your majesty’s disposition for that purpose.
“WILLIAM McKINLEY.
“By the President: JOHN HAY, Secretary of State.
“July 23, 1900.”
By reason of the good offices of President McKinley, a settlement of the
Chinese troubles was had that was equitable to all parties concerned. It
is doubtful if such a result could have been reached otherwise.
As it was, instead of attempted dismemberment of the Chinese Empire, and
a program of wholesale looting, spoliation and consequent disturbances
between the powers interested, the matter was settled with honor to all
the world.
McKinley’s kindly heart and hand was of the leaven that leavened it all.