DB4ME

Chapter 10

THE TRUMPET THAT NEVER CALLS RETREAT

HAD IT NOT BEEN FOR SLAVERY AND FOR THE RACIAL prejudice that permeated even the ostensibly antislavery North, Edward Wilmot Blyden might never have visited the Middle East. Born in St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies in 1832, Blyden was slated to be a tailor like his father but refused to abandon his dream of studying theology. He left home at age eighteen and moved to New Jersey, intending to enroll in Rutgers’s Theological Seminary. Handsome, eloquent, and refined, he met all of the requirements of admission but one, his race. Edward Blyden was black. Rejected by Rutgers, he presumed that equality was unattainable anywhere in the United States and decided to emigrate to Liberia.

Founded in 1817 as a refuge for former slaves from the United States, Liberia emerged thirty years later as an independent state modeled on the American Republic, but which also imported some of America’s prejudices, granting special privileges to the small immigrant community and denying them to millions of natives. Yet, once ordained by the Presbyterian Church, Blyden chose not to shun Liberia’s indigenous tribes. He journeyed farther into West Africa, into Sierra Leone and the territories that today form Nigeria. There, for the first time, he encountered a different faith, Islam, about which Blyden was ignorant.

African Muslims, Blyden soon learned, were “self-reliant, productive, independent and dominant, supporting, without the countenance or patronage of the parent country.” He credited Islam with saving native peoples from animism, with educating them and endowing them with pride. Most importantly for Blyden, Islamic civilization, conveyed to black Africans by “Arab missionaries” of similar color and cultural background, served as a bulwark against the slave hunters, most of whom, he alleged, were pagans.

Impressed by what he saw of Islam, Blyden desisted from further evangelical efforts and dedicated himself to building ties between Christians and Muslims in Africa. Once consolidated, he believed that the continent could serve as a nexus between the ancient societies of the Middle East and the Western civilization they spawned, a catalyst for “the spirit…to destroy race enmities…and to reconcile nation with nation.” Visits to Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria, undertaken in the summer of 1866, only steeled Blyden’s commitment to his dream.

That vision embraced not only Christians and Muslims but also Jews, whom Blyden regarded with “awe and reverence.” He had acquired that respect growing up among the Jewish community of St. Thomas, and later in life Blyden believed that Jews were destined to ally with blacks in sowing brotherhood throughout the world. He further held that the reestablishment of Jewish statehood in Palestine would set an example for African liberation. “I would earnestly…entreat Israel to remember that land of their sojourn and early training,” Blyden wrote, “[and] to assist Ethiopia to stretch forth her hands unto God.”

William Blyden later served as Liberia’s secretary of state and ambassador to Great Britain as well as an editor and a distinguished professor of classics. He aspired to become a liberator, in a league with Lincoln and the early abolitionists. “Not the author of the Fugitive Slave Bill will be immortal in the annals of the nation, but the writer of the Emancipation Proclamation,” he decreed on one of several return visits to the United States. “Not the memory of Jeff Davis will send a thrill throughout humanity, but the recollection of the so-called insanity of John Brown.” 1

Subsequent generations would credit Blyden with inspiring Pan-Africanism and the Black Muslim movement. Few, though, would hold him up as a model for his evangelical contemporaries in the Middle East, all of whom were white and far less approving of Islam. Nevertheless, in his energy, determination, and dream of one day peacefully binding all Middle Eastern peoples in a network of shared ideals, Blyden indeed epitomized the movement. Like Blyden, the missionaries sought to unite Middle Eastern peoples by fostering common values and forging new identities. They, too, strove to transform the suffering wrought by racial hatred in the United States into a force for universal betterment. In their hearing, “the trumpet shall never call retreat,” described in “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” heralded not only triumph over inequity in the United States but a new era of comity for the Middle East.

Grains of Mustard Seed

Traditionally, the missionary movement in the United States was closely identified with abolitionism, and tolerance of racial differences was among the values that evangelists took with them to the Middle East. If God, asserted Henry Jessup, “could place a Tammany ward politician side by side with a Negro Republican” at His own table, then missionary schools could accept all pupils, irrespective of race or ethnicity. In the missionary view, the Civil War came as a long overdue vindication of their tolerance as well as a necessary, divinely appointed step toward redemption. “This great struggle…is indeed His chosen method of removing from our land one of the foulest abominations that ever cursed the world,” Justin Perkins, writing from Mosul, explained. “The war is needful to the liberties, and even the life of our nation.” Of the 150 missionaries that Edward Joy Morris, America’s ambassador to the Porte, estimated were serving in the Middle East at the outbreak of hostilities, not one sympathized with the Confederacy, not even those who hailed from the South.

While the war prompted most Americans to turn inward, focusing on the domestic crisis and all but ignoring international affairs, the fighting provided added impetus to the missionaries. “The providential history of this war will be marvelous,” predicted the American Board secretary Rufus Anderson, and not without foundation. In spite of severe budgetary cutbacks and a shortage of army-aged volunteers, the Middle Eastern missions flourished. In Egypt, for example, a land formerly overlooked by evangelists, the Reverend John Hogg and his family sailed 1,160 miles up the Nile, visited sixty-three villages, and preached to an estimated seven thousand people. Reaching Assiyut, a Coptic city halfway between Cairo and Aswan, Hogg established a school for girls that later became one of Egypt’s most prestigious educational institutions. Another school was opened in Jaffa by Mary Briscoe Baldwin, an austere and lantern-jawed Virginian, with funding provided by the Union admiral David “Damn the Torpedoes” Farragut, the adopted son of David Porter. The feminist pioneer Mary Mills Patrick established a women’s college in Istanbul and the Eli and Sybil Joneses, a Quaker couple who had tended to Northern wounded during the war, inaugurated the American Friends School in Ramallah, in what is today the West Bank. By the end of the Civil War, Syria alone boasted thirty-three mission schools with a student population of one thousand, a fifth of them girls.2

Missionaries in the Middle East, reported Ambassador Morris, “enjoy[ed] a liberty of conscience that is not accorded to dissenters from the established faith in some of the most enlightened kingdoms of Europe.” Exploiting that openness, American evangelists vastly expanded their activities in the region. Schools, clinics, and churches grew so numerous that by 1870 American Protestant denominations felt compelled to divide the Middle East into separate theaters of operation. The Congregationalists consequently assumed responsibility for missionary work in Turkey, while the Presbyterians claimed Syria, Egypt, and Iran. The smallest church, the Dutch Reformed, was left with the least populated and therefore least promising area, Arabia, and the Persian Gulf.

The Middle East, as never before during the antebellum period, lay tantalizingly open to the missionaries, though large segments of the native population remained averse, and even hostile to their presence. The Eastern churches persisted in rebuffing the Americans, disdaining them as arrogant upstarts. “We had the Gospel before America was born,” the Coptic patriarch lectured the Reverend Hogg. “We don’t need you to teach us.” Evangelists had negligible success in their efforts to convert Jews and remained forbidden, at the pain of death, from proselytizing to Muslims.  “Mohammedans, Muscovites and Monks furnish their full quota of opposition [to us],” a Presbyterian report of the 1870s complained, but the preachers had little hope of recourse, not even from their own government. Maintaining David Porter’s original policy of avoiding unnecessary friction with the Porte, the State Department reminded missionaries that “no foreigner who objects to Ottoman law need live under it,” and those that do “must also take the peril of their position” into account. The depth of those perils was once again illustrated in 1862, when two American missionaries, one in Adrianople (Edirne) and another in Alexandretta, were murdered.3

Native enmity indeed proved dispiriting for the missionaries, but not as demoralizing as their failure to produce converts. Four decades of punishing and often fatal labor by the Americans had saved no more than thirty souls in all of Syria and a comparable number in Anatolia. The average cost per apostate, the writer Baynard Taylor reckoned, was close to $16,000, “a sum which would have Christianized tenfold the number of English heathen.” Another author, Henry Field, estimated that “Christian Missions make no more impression upon Islam than the winds of the desert upon the cliffs of Mount Sinai,” and that “more converts are…made from the Gospel to the Koran in a day, than all our missionaries have made from the Koran to the Gospel in a century.” Responding to these dreary statistics, the American Board reminded its evangelists of the difficulties they had already surmounted in the Middle East and of the vast rewards that the region would ultimately yield. In words seemingly culled from the Civil War experience, missionary leaders spoke of waging “offensive warfare” against the “citadels” of Islam and decadent Orthodoxy. “From the same battlefields a cry of help is raised again by those too few and too weak to sustain the…powers of darkness and sin.”

Such saber rattling could not, however, hide the failure of American Protestants to remake the Middle East in their own devotional image or quell the debate over educating native peoples who had no intention of accepting Christ. Board members continued to insist that a missionary’s job was achieving redemption and not running schools and hospitals, while the evangelists maintained that their “semi-secular” work was no less ethically imperative, a means of “letting in the light” to the Middle East.4

The controversy surrounding the missionary schools was especially intense in Istanbul, where Cyrus Hamlin, last seen teaching Armenian students to bake bread and make ovens as part of their moral education, sought to create the region’s first modern university. Starting in 1860, Hamlin appealed to the Ottoman authorities for permission to open a new and significantly expanded school, but the sultan, under pressure from the Catholic and Orthodox churches, demurred. Fortunately, Admiral Farragut happened to be visiting Istanbul as the sultan’s personal guest and managed to secure the necessary permits. Hamlin proceeded to purchase a plot for the campus in the Bebek hills, overlooking the Bosphorus, and acquired a small collection of books from Harvard. Only one obstacle remained, the largest: the American Board, which refused to bankroll any secular institution.

Hamlin consequently resigned from the board and in May 1861 returned to the United States intending to raise funds for the university himself. He hoped to draw on the connections of his cousin Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln’s first vice president, but was once again frustrated, this time by the outbreak of war. “No one was about to throw money into a risky foreign venture when the fate of the entire country was at stake,” Hamlin admitted. He headed back to Istanbul, despondent, but while passing through Paris, he chanced to meet Robert Rhinelander Robert, an outstanding philanthropist from New York. Excited as much by Hamlin’s vision as by the bustling missionary himself, Robert proffered an initial grant of $30,000—the first of many hundreds of thousands—to begin construction. Hamlin set to work, personally laying the foundations of the cupolaed hall that would later be named for him, the first structure in the Middle East to be built with American-made girders.

The doors of Robert College opened in 1863, the year of Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chickamauga, and admitted a mere four students. That number soon rose to over one hundred, however, as the school obtained the imperial imprimatur of Sultan Abd al-Aziz and a charter from the New York Board of Regents. Though primarily geared toward engineering and applied science—one of its professors introduced the telegraph to the Middle East—the college would serve as a conduit for the import of Western ideas and mold new generations of Turkish modernizers. Among its graduates would be five future prime ministers of Turkey, including the country’s first woman prime minister. “The work has proved to have the divine leaven that diffuses itself,” Hamlin, looking back on his achievement, reaffirmed. “It is the grain of mustard seed becoming a tree.”5

Hamlin would not be the only missionary to witness a flowering of American-style education in the Middle East. A second and equally influential university would be built in Beirut, through the labors of Daniel Bliss.

“Their faces are so entirely devoid of expression,” Bliss wrote of his first glimpse of Middle Eastern natives—Arabs, Armenians, and Jews—in 1855. “It is hard to realize that some of them have souls.” Bliss had come to the region, together with his wife, Abby, to open a mission in the remote Arab villages of Mount Lebanon, a task that required extraordinary endurance. But physical strength was only one of the qualities that Bliss abundantly possessed. Like Hamlin, he had been orphaned at an early age and had worked on various farms and in factories in Vermont before earning a scholarship to Amherst. Now, at age thirty-seven, he trudged across the snow-encrusted peaks to reach his destination. Within five years, he had succeeded in learning Arabic and establishing separate primary schools for girls and boys.

Bliss had once again demonstrated the missionaries’ determination to make an impact on the Middle East, irrespective of the dangers. But no amount of fortitude could protect them from the vicious fighting between Maronites and Druze that erupted in 1860. The violence compelled most of Syria’s missionaries, Bliss among them, to seek shelter in Beirut. There, though destitute, Bliss made contact with veteran evangelicals like William Thomson, Henry Jessup, and Harrison Dwight, and observed their schools firsthand. He saw how many of their students, immediately after graduating, left their country for America. For them, he noted, “the promised land is not now east and west of the Jordan, but east and west of the Mississippi.” To reverse this trend, Bliss advocated a curriculum that would instill in pupils a love of their homeland and a commitment to civic duties. Native teachers should be trained as soon as possible, he urged, and their language of instruction should be Arabic.

On the first day of 1862, Bliss submitted to the American Board his proposal for furnishing the Arab world with its first modern college. The reception was characteristically tepid. Rufus Anderson regarded the project as yet another diversion from the missionary effort, but recognized its value in revitalizing the Syrian station, a “necessary choice of evils.” Permission was ultimately granted, but Bliss had to raise much of the $100,000 endowment himself, soliciting contributions from a number of British and American donors, among them Mrs. Franklin H. Delano, an Astor family Brahmin and great-aunt of the thirty-second president. With the proceeds, Bliss purchased a plot of land overlooking St. George’s Bay, “a home for jackals and a dumping place for the [city’s] offal,” and rented classrooms in existing buildings. Four years later, the missionaries in Beirut laid the cornerstone for the new Syrian Protestant College. Bliss, its first president, undoubtedly shocked many board members back home when he pledged that “a man white, black or yellow, Christian, Jew, Mohammedan or heathen, may enter and enjoy all the advantages of this institution…and go out believing in one God, or in many Gods, or in no God.”6

Though he hastened to add, “It will be impossible for any one to continue with us long without knowing what we believe to be the truth and our reasons for that belief,” Bliss had conceded what Hogg and Hamlin and most missionaries already knew but had never dared vocalize. Unable to import their spiritual beliefs into the Middle East, Americans would have to settle for instilling secular notions of patriotism, republicanism, and the preservation of individual liberties. These principles took root in the college’s student body as it expanded from sixteen students to several thousand and, through them, percolated throughout the region. Among the early graduates were Ya’qub Sarruf and Faris Nimr, pioneers of modern journalism in Egypt, and Dr. Shibli Shumayyil, the Darwinian theorist and social commentator, and the lexicographers Nasif al-Yaziji and Butrus al-Bustani, who modernized written Arabic. Praising these accomplishments in a lecture to the college in July 1866, Edward Wilmot Blyden looked forward “to the day that students may be sent from Liberia to Syria to learn the Arabic language,” and “the Syrian College [will] aid in evangelizing not only the West and South of Asia, but the North and West of Africa.”

The college’s most enduring contributions were not literary, however, but political. Its “great mission,” according to Jessup, was to create a “new Phoenicia, a new Syria,” based on brotherhood and loyalty to the motherland. This objective was predicated on the novel notion that the diverse peoples of Syria in fact constituted a distinct Arab nation. “No one can look upon these ungainly and heavy Turks, and feel that the susceptible and lively Arabs—the hardy mountaineer and the Bedaween rover—were made to be their subjects,” maintained a contemporary missionary “Intelligence.” The overwhelming majority of Syrians, though, defined themselves not in national terms but rather by religion, tribe, and district—usually in that order. They showed little promise of attaining internal cohesion, much less the unity necessary for independence.

The United States offered a model for achieving that solidarity. A country coalesced from many states and various ethnicities, America had successfully wrested its liberty from a world empire and had recently fought to preserve its union. “Oh that all the Christians in the Turkish Empire had the spirit that the Americans had in 1775!” Bliss yearned and his wish was presently granted. Growing numbers of Syrian Protestant College graduates embraced the American paradigm and declared themselves devotees of Arabism (‘Aruba). Together with their Muslim neighbors, with whom they shared a common past and cultural heritage, these activists worked for the merger of all Arab lands into a single, sovereign state. The college, wrote the celebrated Arab historian George Antonius, had provided “the intellectual effervescence” for an “Arab revival,” and one that would radically transform the region’s politics. By failing to make Prostestants out of the local inhabitants, by fulfilling the dictates of America’s civic faith, the missionaries had helped fashion an entirely new identity in the Middle East. Fifty years after North African pirates prodded Americans into forging a federated and distinct United States, American educators were prompting diverse Middle Eastern peoples to unite into a unique Arab nation.7

 

OTHER MISSIONARIES, though, still refused to concede their original, evangelical goal. They continued to enjoy the support of a “very considerable and intelligent portion of the people of the United States,” according to William Henry Seward, himself a spirited supporter of missions. The secretary of state, also known for his restorationist sympathies, went out of his way to extend American protection to the Jews of the Middle East. Following a series of pogroms against the Jewish community of Morocco in 1863, he instructed the consulate in Tangier to “exert all proper influence” to shield the “Israelites” from the “barbarous cruelties” of their government.

Like many Americans, Seward persisted in believing, in spite of the nation’s calamity, in the imminence of Christ’s return. For some American evangelicals, though, the carnage that had so recently ravaged America proved that faith alone no longer sufficed. Committed Christians, they held, must not only long for but also labor toward redemption. That conviction compelled one American, George Adams, to lead dozens of his followers to Palestine with the goal, once again, of colonizing the country and restoring its sovereignty to the Jews, of preparing the world for peace.8

On Eagle’s Wings

Reports on his early life are sketchy. The best accounts place his birth in Oxford, New Jersey, in 1811 or 1813, a farmer’s son apprenticed to be a tailor. By the time he turned thirty, though, George Adams, had abandoned his trade for the Shakespearean theater and wandered far from his home. Acquaintances described him as an intelligent looking but contentious man, of medium build and dark eyes and hair, with “lips shut tight as a clamshell” and eyes so close-set “he could look down the neck of a Johnson’s Liniment bottle without squinting.” He also had a drinking problem and, after repeatedly showing up drunk for performances, was finally banned from the stage.

Adams would, at this juncture, seem an unlikely candidate to spearhead a revivalist movement in Palestine, a person with few or no religious beliefs. His journey to faith began in 1844, when Adams converted to Mormonism. He became friendly with Orson Hyde, the first Mormon envoy to Jerusalem, and dreamed of replicating Hyde’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land. But before he could leave, Adams was excommunicated for lewdness and embezzlement. He next appeared in Springfield, Massachusetts, now a Campbellite minister, only to be defrocked once again for intemperance. Fleeing his reputation, Adams moved to Indian River, Maine. He married a local woman, strong-willed and stout, and established his own Church of the Messiah. From his pulpit and on the pages of his monthly, The Sword of Truth and Harbinger of Peace, Adams prophesied the Second Coming, an era of brotherhood and financial prosperity. The prerequisite for this golden age, he proclaimed, was the Jews’ restoration to Palestine. “The reign of Christ on earth and the return of the Jews to Canaan are even now on the very eve of occurring.”

Starting in 1862, while Union and Confederate forces gored one another on the fields of Shiloh and Antietam, George Adams remained in Maine, scouring the state for volunteers. “Palestine will soon shake herself from the dust of ages and arise in glory, as in the days of old!” he bellowed at revivalist rallies, his long hair flailing, a tenebrous glare in his eyes. Finally, he departed for the Holy Land, taking with him Indian River’s postmaster, Abraham McKenzie, in order to assess its suitability for settlement. Their report was rife with praise. The soil of Palestine, Adams claimed, was excellent and its climate similar to California’s. With the aid of American innovations—“Johnson’s patent shifting mold-board” and “Smith’s remarkable double-back-action drill”—the country could support thousands of colonists and myriads of tourists annually. Jews could be retaught how to farm.

Exploiting this felicitous news, Adams was able to recruit 156 Americans to his cause—artisans, fishermen, farmers, and traders, together with their wives and children. He changed his name to George Washington Joshua Adams, declaiming, “The great Restitution, as foretold by the Prophets and Apostles, has now commenced.” Adams instructed his followers to pool their savings, a total of forty-two dollars, to pay for their passage to Palestine.9

THOUGH CLEARLY an outsider, Adams represented ideas that continued to engage key segments of American society, including some of its most preeminent figures. In a meeting with Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the leading Canadian churchman Henry Wentworth Monk protested the fact that Jews, unlike Negroes, had yet to be emancipated. “There can be no permanent peace in the world until the civilized nations…atone…for their two thousand years of persecution [of the Jews] by restoring them to their national home in Palestine,” the reverend posited, and though never known for his piety, the president readily agreed. “Restoring the Jews to their national home in Palestine…is a noble dream and one shared by many Americans,” he said, adding that once the war was won, Americans would again be able to “see visions and dream dreams” and lead the world in realizing them.

Lincoln’s remarks indicated the extent to which the restorationist idea continued to captivate a broad cross section of Americans and the degree to which Palestine remained a national obsession. Tempered by the heat of battle, that fixation only hardened after the Civil War. Two years after Lincoln’s assassination, Victor Beauboucher, the U.S. consul in Jerusalem, noted that five hundred Americans had entered Palestine during the preceding eighteen months and passage to the country was completely booked. A former Union soldier who had lost a leg at Cold Harbor, Beauboucher was impressed with the pilgrims’ fervidness and their remarkable familiarity with the land. “This is the first country where I have felt at home, yet I have been in no country so unlike my own,” confessed the Episcopal minister and Massachusetts congressman Henry White Warren after disembarking at Jaffa in 1868. “You come to the Holy Land with something of the feeling that you come to your home,” wrote the celebrated Civil War correspondent John Russell Young. “Somehow you always belonged here.” Americans’ knowledge of Palestine, rooted in their daily Bible readings, could now be broadened by membership in the Palestine Exploration Society, dedicated to the study of Holy Land geography. They could also visit Palestine Park with its mock-up of the major sites—Nazareth, Bethlehem, Jerusalem—built on the bank of Chautauqua Lake. “We know far more about the land of the Jews,” boasted Harper’s magazine, “[more] than the degraded Arabs who hold it.”10

A preoccupation with Palestine and the belief in its eventual restitution to the Jews were not, however, synonymous. Similar to Herman Melville’s ridicule of Warder Cresson and the Dicksons was the dismissal by prominent theologians, particularly those from the more mainstream churches, of the restorationist idea. The Reverend Warren avowedly felt at home in Palestine, but the country’s Jews gave him “the greatest temptation toward despising a brother a man ever encountered.” Philip Schaff of the Union Theological Seminary could write rapturously of his first glimpse of Jerusalem in 1878, and then, a paragraph later, call for the destruction of the city’s “squalid and forbidding” Jewish quarter. For Warren and Schaff, the pitiful state of the Jews was proof of the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and punishment for their rejection of Christ. The Princeton Review seemed to speak for them and other conservative ministers when, in 1866, it denounced restorationism as “radically false,” contrary “to the whole drift of…New Testament teaching,” and “injurious to the interests of true religion.”

These detractors of restorationism, though often strident, rarely attained the force—or the popularity—of the notion’s defenders. One such advocate, the Presbyterian Nathaniel Clark Burt of Ohio, returned from an 1867 trip to Palestine praying that the Jews “shall yet be brought home to that country once their own by divine promise and gift.” The following year, Philadelphia’s Reverend Henry Riley predicted that “His people” would soon “be gathered from their wide dispersion among the nations, and restored to the actual possession of Palestine.” In books, especially, supporters of a Jewish-ruled Palestine enjoyed a patent edge over its opponents. In her best-selling memoir, Hadji in Syria, Sarah Barclay Johnson, the daughter of the missionary James Turner Barclay, expressed her hope of someday witnessing “the Hebrew race…returning to their ancient city, and…the land of their forefathers,” and of Palestine’s reverting to its “rightful owner.” Even more widely read was William C. Prime’s Tent Life in the Holy Land, a gushing journal of the author’s experiences in Palestine. The editor of the New York Journal of Commerce, Prime rhapsodized that the country’s past was “cast in holy radiance” and speculated how a future Jewish state would have to be initially provisioned with foodstuffs “imported by Jaffa and brought on camels from over the sea.”

America’s Palestine mania would deepen in the decades after the Civil War and, with it, the romance of Jewish restoration. “So much has been said for generations of the Jews regaining possession of Jerusalem, that it is agreeable to think that they are likely to do so at last,” professed a New York Times editorial. “They certainly deserve Jerusalem.” Few Americans would have embraced that sentiment more ardently than George Adams and his disciples who, in August 1866, boarded the steamer Nellie Chapin bound for Palestine. “The sons of Ephraim are now gathering home,” Adams proclaimed.11

THE JOURNEY from Boston to Jaffa took forty-two days, roughly twice the usual duration. Still, the pilgrims refused to complain, one of them swearing that “he would rather sit himself on a plank and puke his way across the sea than miss the trip to Palestine.” Yet far rougher ordeals awaited them after the Nellie Chapin landed. Following the violent demise of the Dickson colony and the friction it caused with the United States, the Ottoman government was loath to allow the establishment of new evangelical settlements. The Adams pilgrims were consequently forced to camp out on the beach, between the refuse heaps of local butchers and the graves of some two hundred recent cholera victims. “The exhalations through the porous sand from such a vast body of decomposition was very bad,” a diarist among them recorded. “The shore was the world’s privy.”

In spite of their discomforts, the Americans’ morale remained high. Sailors from the USS Ticonderoga, on shore leave in Jaffa in September 1866, found that the colonists were still optimistic about their chances for success. Adams excitedly described plans for constructing an American-style city, complete with “churches, hotels, [and] two colleges,” and for rebuilding the temple, with a Rothschild family member serving as high priest. The first step toward realizing that vision seemed to materialize early in 1867 when U.S. Vice Consul Hermann Loewenthal, a German-Jewish convert to Christianity, secured the group ten acres of arable land just outside of the city. Though this was much less than the three million acres Adams promised them, the colonists set to work. Within days, seventeen prefab houses imported from Maine were reassembled and a meetinghouse raised. “We the colony now stand free from every government on earth,” declared Adams, who now took to calling himself President Adams and who flew the American flag “every Lord’s day.”

The farmers’ crops quickly fell prey to scavengers, however, and, with winter approaching, the community faced the specter of famine. Adams was frequently seen in drunken rampages, arguing fiercely with his wife, and denouncing Loewenthal as “a monster in human form” and a “wily Jew…[who] opposed all Christian progress.” Less than six months after disembarking on holy soil, seventeen of the Americans were dead, the victims of exposure and dysentery. “Put your faith in God, and use a little wine or rum,” Adams reassured the survivors, many of whom were already growing skeptical of his remedies.

Conflicting reports regarding the colonists’ plight filtered back to the United States. In a letter to the New York Times, one settler denied allegations that the community was failing and insisted, “Mr. Adams has the good-will of the Latins, the Greeks, the Armenians, the Maronites, the Turks, the Arabs, the Jews, and the Mohamedans.” Another told the Bangor Times that the Arabs were “our warmest friends,” and that he thought “it a glorious thing to live in a country where once dwelt the prophets, patriarchs, and the Messiah himself.” Other articles, however, dredged up Adams’s repellent past and cast him as an “adventurer, a charlatan, and a scamp.” Conflicting rumors described the settlers as either engaged in a miniature civil war or indulging in free love.

The settlement, meanwhile, became an attraction for American tourists. The Connecticut industrialist Charles Elliot portrayed the colonists as “unprotected as they would be on the Texas frontier,” and the Reverend Henry Whitney Bellows, from New York’s historic All Souls Church, declared Adams a “religious fanatic” with “a decided bee in his bonnet.” And yet the sight of the prim, cottage-style houses, each with its  well-tended garden, proved irresistible to the traveling correspondent John Swift. The colony, to his mind, was a “modern Mayflower,” a community of “genuine Yankees” who, “with a new religion in one hand and American plows…in the other,” were striving “to regenerate the land on American principles.” He quoted Adams boasting of his plans to “civilize the benighted Arabs” by planting democracy among them and creating a Jewish state. Adams’s wife, “the Presidentess,” assured Swift that redemption was near now that the “American eagle of freedom” had “winged his glorious flight from the newest to the oldest land on earth.”12

The question of whether Adams represented a point of pride for the United States or a potential embarrassment was placed, finally, before the State Department. Secretary of State Seward sent his friend the Reverend Walter Bidwell to investigate the colony. Bidwell reached Jaffa in March 1867 and, with the exception of a “pale faced and decidedly intellectual” woman who wanted to go home, found that the settlers were generally content and confident of a fruitful future. Indeed, compared with the hovels and trash heaps of Jaffa port, the colony seemed resplendent to Bidwell. A shockingly different impression, however, was submitted by J. Augustus Johnson, the American consul in Damascus. Married to the evangelical author Sarah Barclay, Johnson was partial to missionaries, but what he saw in Jaffa only sickened him. “American citizens,” he warned Washington, would soon be “begging of Arabs…to avoid dying of starvation in the streets.” Only by awakening to their senses and freeing themselves from Adams’s spell could those Americans hope to survive, Johnson wrote.

The wake-up occurred in the summer, as the death toll among the settlers reached sixty. Desperate, twenty-two of them published “An Appeal! To Philanthropy and Common Humanity” in the American press, and beseeched the federal government to evacuate them. “How can we confide in the hand or heart of one who has staggered on his pulpit too drunk to read the word of God?” they asked the consul Beauboucher. In a letter to Maine’s governor, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, they claimed that they were utterly destitute, bereft of food and medicine, their property stolen by “the vile imposter Adams.” They reminded Chamberlain, a hero of Gettysburg, that many of them “had chased the bright folds of the Stars and Stripes over many a southern battlefield” and were deserving of their country’s help.

Moved, finally, by these entreaties, the State Department allocated $3,000 to pay for the colonists’ evacuation. The money sufficed for only sixteen of them, but others found passage on visiting American naval ships. Adams warned them that they would only “recede and become…paupers and beggars” in America, but then he, too, departed, presumably to raise money for the group in Britain. He would next resurface at a Baptist church in Philadelphia, in 1873, preaching the Gospel and denying any association between himself and the George Washington Joshua Adams of Jaffa.

By the summer’s end, some fifty former settlers had returned shamefaced to Indian River. Abraham McKenzie brought with him a Bedouin tent and opened a business selling genuine “Palestine soil.” But forty of them remained in Jaffa, only one of whom, Rolla Floyd, managed to find permanent employment guiding American tourists up to Jerusalem. Though the settlement continued to be known locally as Almalikan—the Americans’ place—most of its buildings were purchased by German Adventists. Ownership of Adams’s house passed to Platon Ustinov, a colorful Russian baron and antiquities collector, grandfather of the actor Peter. Thus, ingloriously, ended yet another attempt by American evangelicals to establish a  colony dedicated to the Jews’ return to Palestine. “The failure of the American settlement at Jaffa…is but a repetition of the fate of previous similar experiments,” the local British consul, Noel Temple Moore, summed up. “There seems little hope of success attending these enterprises.”13

The American eagle, which, in Mrs. Adams’s imagery, was to have delivered the Jews to sovereignty in their ancient homeland, appeared to have folded its wings. Following the collapse of the earlier colonizing attempts of Harriet Livermore, Clorinda Minor, and the Dickson family, the disintegration of the Adams community discouraged many American evangelists from settling permanently in Palestine. Yet one family—the Spaffords, profiled in a later chapter—would still attempt to create an American colony in Jerusalem, while other missionaries would establish schools and clinics throughout the country. The surge of Americans to Palestine—indeed, to the entire Middle East—continued to swell, animated not only by piety but by an insatiable yearning for adventure.

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