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THE MIDDLE EAST AND ANTEBELLUM AMERICA

Chapter 5

IN JUNE 1821, UNDER THE PUNISHING SUDANESE SUN, an Egyptian officer paused to drink from the Nile. He had been traveling for nine months, hazarding boat-smashing rapids, hostile tribesmen, and heat. On barges laden with cannons, ammunition, and supplies, he and his troops haltingly advanced. Their mission was to subdue brigands disrupting Egyptian trade in the African interior and to broaden the influence of Egypt’s ruler, Muhammad Ali. The officer, who called himself Muhammad Effendi, was described by acquaintances as a “pale, delicate-looking man”—an uncommon complexion in the Middle East—but with “the grave and calm look of the Turks.” Kneeling, he cupped his hands beneath the water and raised them to his encrusted lips, but before sipping he uttered a benediction, or so he later wrote: “To the prosperity of the great and liberal republic of the United States.”

Muhammad Effendi had been born thirty-four years earlier, at the time of the Constitutional Convention, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and received the Christian name of George Bethune English. A member of the Harvard class of 1807, he first studied law but then switched to divinity and Hebrew. Like Levi Parsons, Pliny Fisk, and many seminarians who studied the Pentateuch at the time, English developed a deep reverence for the Jews and a desire to rectify “the infernal wickedness and diabolical inhumanity” done to them by Christians. He went well beyond seeking penitence, however; his encounter with the Old Testament led him to doubt the historical and theological veracity of the Gospel. It also prompted him to read a 1688 Italian translation of the Quran. He concluded that “Mahometans, who are the most numerous sect of religionists now in the world,” possessed a superior claim to the biblical prophecies and had better fulfilled the Mosaic prohibitions against idolatry—“the worship of angels, and dead men, universal throughout three quarters of Christendom.” Not surprisingly, these heresies sparked counterattacks from the Harvard Transcendentalist William Ellery Channing and from Edward Everett, the later senator and secretary of state. English, however, would not be dissuaded and he left Cambridge seeking new sources of excitement and substance in the world.

He went “out West,” which at that time meant Ohio, and tried his hand at journalism before settling on the banks of the Wabash River as a member of the puritanical Harmonie sect. Tiring of utopianism, though, English journeyed in 1817 to Washington, where he called on an old family friend, John Quincy Adams, the new secretary of state. Adams obtained a posting for English in the Mediterranean Squadron and a commission as a first lieutenant in the Marines. But service aboard ship also bored him—the Barbary Wars were over—and after arriving in Egypt, English resigned from the corps.

The Middle East seemed to offer the young contrarian all that was lacking in his life—exoticism, adventure, and the religion that had previously inspired him in school. Rather than return to mundane Massachusetts, George English remained in Egypt, converted to Islam, and adopted the name Muhammad.1

From Harvard to Sennar

Open-minded to the point of heresy, English was hardly typical of the Americans of his day. Yet, in his attachment to the Middle East, he exhibited the same characteristics found in figures as diverse as John Ledyard, Levi Parsons, and William Eaton. Inspired by the Bible, charmed by Oriental myths, and impressed by the caparisons of power, English represented a fusion of the motifs in his country’s Middle Eastern involvement, an increasingly common amalgam.

By 1820, English was fluent in both Arabic and Turkish and ready to place his talents at the service of the Egyptian state. Through the good offices of the British consul, he was able to obtain an interview with Isma’il Pasha, a son of Muhammad Ali. English’s varied experiences impressed Isma’il, but none more so than his brief stint in the military. Egypt was just then working to modernize its army and, to that end, eager to recruit European advisers. Though he had served in the U.S. Navy and had never risen above the rank of lieutenant, English emerged from the meeting with Isma’il with the title of topji bashi, or general, in command of Egypt’s artillery.

If expanding Egypt’s offensive capabilities was Isma’il’s objective, English, with his penchant for romance, seemed unlikely to achieve it. Rather than modernize his regiment, the American tried to revive one of Egypt’s oldest weapons, a chariot with blade-studded wheels for cutting down infantry. The experiment failed thoroughly and, before he could mount another, English was ordered into action against Sudanese rebels. While Isma’il and his vanguard proceeded overland, English and the bulk of the force were to follow on water, up the Nile. Starting in September 1821, English and his six thousand troops—Turks, Bedouin, North Africans—boarded barges at the Wadi Halfa cataract and set off for regions unfamiliar to most Egyptians and utterly unknown to Westerners.

The journey, through one hundred miles of roiling whirlpools and falls, proved to be harrowing. “The side of the boat approached to within a yard of the white foam,” English remembered. “Our rais [helmsman] tore his turban from his head, and lifted his clasped hands to heaven, exclaiming, ‘We are lost!’ The rest of the boatmen were screaming to God for aid.” The explorer survived the ordeal only to contract a severe case of “opthalmia,” which blinded him for days. Still, English managed to recover and to come through with all but one barge, disembarking at Bahar al-Abiad, the headwaters of the White Nile.

Like William Eaton fifteen years before him, English had led a major expedition across a desolate stretch of the Middle East, and, like John Ledyard, he left vivid descriptions of everything he saw, from ramshackle villages to the bleak, unforgiving terrain. He noted the plight of slaves, the arrogance of bandits, and the patent discomfort of twenty-year-old tribesmen who had recently undergone circumcision. Especially fascinating for him were the ruins “now prostrate and confounded with the dust of their worshippers” that lined the riverbank and that he often explored at night, sneaking off from his convoy. “A voyage up the Nile may be considered as presenting an epitome of the moral history of man,” English attested. “We meet at almost every stage with the monuments of his superstition and his tyranny.”

From Bahar al-Abiad, English led his troops through a countryside freshly ravaged by Isma’il’s cavalry, past incinerated hamlets and untilled fields strewn with corpses. He abhorred the behavior of Egyptian soldiers—“The luckless fornicators,” English dubbed them—who looted and pillaged. Horrified, he watched as forty of them “engaged in driving, with repeated strokes of heavy mallets, sharp pointed pieces of timber, six or eight inches square, up the posteriors of some insurgents.” More detestable scenes awaited English in Sennar, the same city that Ledyard had fruitlessly tried to reach over thirty years earlier. In place of the bustling and colorful caravanserais he had imagined, English found a cluster of four hundred filthy grass huts inhabited by “detestable” people who ate cats and rodents, and women who were, he claimed, “universally, the ugliest I ever beheld.”

English, himself half-starved and ragged, was scarcely in better shape. The expedition, though, was judged successful and Egypt extended its suzerainty over the Sudan. Recuperating back in Alexandria, English became acquainted with the missionary Joseph Wolff, the converted British Jew, who tried to persuade him to return to Christianity. English also met Pliny Fisk, grieving over the recent death of Levi Parsons. The missionary joined in the effort to save the wayward general, only to find himself stymied. “Obstinate hostility to the truth is the prevailing temper of your soul,” Fisk berated English. “I consider your case as one of the most deplorable and dangerous that I have ever known.”

Though uninterested in resuming his former faith, English did yearn for his original home. At the end of 1822, he left Egypt and boarded a ship back to the United States. He published a memoir of the Sudan expedition that earned him—and the Middle East—much attention. “A few American steam boats…would soon make the Nile as navigable as our Hudson, Patomac or Mississippi,” the aged John Adams observed after reading the book.2 The former president’s son, John Quincy, was also impressed and happily received English at the State Department. The secretary invited his old friend to reenter government service. His task was to apply his uncommon skills in securing the first-ever treaty between America and the Ottoman Empire.

Bribery and Brass

Relations between the world’s oldest existing empire and its newest republic had, since the late eighteenth century, languished in ambiguity. Regarding the Porte as vital to American commerce and as “the Theater of Politicks in Europe,” President Adams in 1798 named the South Carolina congressman William Loughton Smith as the country’s first minister to the Ottoman Empire. Smith declined the offer, however, and the post remained unmanned. Jefferson, too, thought it “expedient” to put the United States “on the footing with the Porte” at least on a par with Prussia, but never followed up on the plan. The country would defeat the Barbary pirates, quadruple its trade with the Middle East, and furnish it with hundreds of missionaries—all without official relations with the region’s preeminent power.

The absence of a treaty between Washington and the Porte owed much to anti-Islamic sentiment in America, but it also reflected anti-American policies in Europe. Fearing a challenge to their economic primacy in the Middle East, Britain and France worked to obstruct any negotiations between the sultan and the president. “There is no benefit for the Porte to make a trade treaty with the [American] republic because such a treaty would irritate Great Britain,” concluded an official Ottoman report, prepared for Sultan Mahmud II, in December 1820. The author also noted that the Americans had demonstrated warlike behavior during the recent conflict with the Ottoman regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. American merchants operating in the Middle East were consequently subjected to exorbitant tariffs and exposed to arbitrary arrest by Ottoman agents and police. “Our countrymen, not having an ambassador at the Porte, remain at the mercy of the natives,” recalled Boston’s George Barrell after visiting Istanbul in 1818. There was, however, one American who sought to protect his countrymen’s interests, a former Philadelphian named David Offley.

Although no portrait of Offley has survived, one might imagine him wearing the simple black waistcoat favored by his Quaker tradition and an expression that was at once stern and enterprising. Another hybrid type, Offley had been drawn to the Middle East not only by his religious convictions but also by his love of profit. After establishing a trading house in Smyrna in 1811, however, he soon found his business crippled by massive custom duties. Disgusted with paying what he termed “Imaginary Protection against Imaginary dangers,” Offley drank dozens of cups of coffee and smoked innumerable waterpipes with Ottoman officials until he finally reached the court of the capudan pasha, the commander of the imperial navy. There, in 1815, Offley paid two thousand dollars in “bachsheesh” to obtain the same extraterritorial rights for Americans as those enjoyed by Europeans. Much of the process had to be repeated the following year, however, after the capudan’s execution for treason, but by then Offley had learned what he considered to be the rules of Middle Eastern diplomacy, a combination of “bribery and brass.”

Offley prospered, eventually handling two-thirds of all American ships calling at Smyrna, storing their cargoes and servicing their hulls. He even jailed their disorderly sailors for a fee of sixty dollars per year. Yet he could not issue passports or even protect American property. Offley’s efforts to establish real diplomatic relations between the countries of his birth and that of his chosen residence continued to founder on European opposition.3

Hopes for a breakthrough seemed feeble until 1819, when the idea of achieving a U.S.-Ottoman agreement fixed in the dexterous mind of John Quincy Adams. Called by the historian John Gaddis “the most influential American grand strategist of the nineteenth century,” Adams seemed to radiate intelligence from his expansive, high forehead to his determined mouth and inquisitively arched eyebrows. As a younger man, he had represented his nation in some of Europe’s most illustrious courts and could now, as the fifty-two-year-old secretary of state, understand the value of formalizing America’s relations with Istanbul. Such a treaty would safeguard the Middle Eastern trade that Adams, as a New Englander, appreciated and provide added security for the missionaries with whom the secretary, as a faithful Christian, sympathized.

Adams proceeded quietly, selecting as his agent in the matter a trusted but cunning New York lawyer named Luther Bradish. Like Offley, Bradish was both successful commercially and fervid in his beliefs, a future president of the American Bible Society. Disguised as an innocent sightseer, he boarded the USS Spark and planned to sail to Istanbul. At the Dardanelles, however, the ship was barred from entering the Sea of Marmara. Bradish had to disembark at Smyrna and to make his way overland to the Ottoman capital.

Portly and stiff-lipped, Bradish was ill-suited for the unrefined diplomacy of the Middle East. He was scandalized by the need to keep bribing Halet Effendi, the Ottoman foreign minister, while avoiding European interference. Yet the Ottomans appeared interested in concluding a deal, especially if it included gifts of American armaments and warships. “Though once only a minor republic,” a memorandum presented to the sultan averred, “America is today almost as powerful as Britain. Their cannon foundries, ammunition stores, gunpowder factories and arsenals are in very good condition.” On the basis of these demands, Bradish estimated that the treaty would cost nearly $50,000, including $7,000 “to preserve him [Halet] in his present opinion,” and, if concluded, was likely to place violent strains on America’s relations with Britain.4 Adams may have found this price prohibitive—the record is silent—but, in any case, the entire question of U.S.-Ottoman agreement was soon rendered moot. First Halet was assassinated, and then, starting in 1821, the Ottomans were preoccupied with a rebellion in Greece.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY WESTERNERS regarded Greece as a southern European country situated on the Near Eastern cusp. Politically, though, as an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, Greece exerted an influence on events throughout the Middle East, as the war for independence soon demonstrated. Fighting between ethnic Greeks and Turks broke out in Smyrna as well, and nearly took the lives of Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk. For the United States, the crisis became a source of constant dilemmas, pitching its relationship with the region into quandaries unequaled since the Barbary Wars. While the struggle against North Africa compelled Americans to choose between bribing the pirates and fighting them, the Greek war posed an even more fundamental question. Should the United States give precedence to its economic interests in the Middle East or should it forget financial considerations and uphold its democratic ideals?

America’s reaction to the Greek revolt was in large measure an outgrowth of Philhellenism, or “love of all things Grecian,” a political and intellectual movement dedicated to ancient Greek civilization. Like Lord Byron and other cultured Europeans of that time, educated Americans were thoroughly versed in the classics. They named their children after the heroes of Greek history and mythology, and their towns after the Hellenic cities of Athens, Sparta, and Troy. Grecian motifs were discernible in virtually every aspect of American life, from art and architecture to literature and government. In a letter to his elderly friend John Adams, Thomas Jefferson expressed his longing to “see the language of Homer and Demosthenes flow with purity, from the lips of a free and ingenious people.” Many Americans shared that dream, viewing Greece, along with biblical Israel, as their cultural birthplace and Greece’s quest for freedom as identical to America’s own recent struggle against misrule.

The Greek revolt appealed not only to Americans’ romantic side but also to their religious convictions. Large segments of the American population viewed the conflict as a showdown between Islam and Christianity, and the Greeks as latter-day crusaders. Even a nominally secular publication like the North American Review could claim, “Wherever the arms of the Sultan prevail, the village churches are leveled to dust or polluted with the abominations of mohametanism.” A group of New York women pressed the point by erecting a monumental cross, inscribed with the words “Sacred to the cause of the Greeks,” on Brooklyn Heights, where it was easily glimpsed from Manhattan. In his reply to Jefferson, John Adams confessed, “My old imagination is kindling into a kind of missionary enthusiasm for the cause of the Greeks.”

The intensity of American Philhellenism and opposition to Islam was undoubtedly known to the provisional Greek government when it asked the “fellow-citizens of Penn, of Washington, and Franklin” to help “purge Greece from the barbarians, who for four hundred years have polluted its soil.” The response could scarcely have been more exuberant. “Such an appeal…must bring home to the…American the great and glorious part which this country is to act in the political regeneration of the world,” declared Harvard’s Edward Everett. William Henry Harrison, the frontier general and future president, called for a nationwide mobilization for Greece. “Humanity, policy, religion—all demand it,” he decreed. “The star-spangled banner must wave in the Aegean.”

Thousands of Americans subsequently responded to that challenge. Societies dedicated to Greece’s freedom were formed at Yale and Columbia, and fundraising parties or “Greek balls” were thrown in Albany, Richmond, and Savannah. State legislatures passed resolutions recognizing Greece’s right to liberty, and citizens’ committees arose to find homes for Greek orphans and collect donations for the rebels’ relief. “A meeting was held here for the benefit of the Greeks,” the Connecticut pastor Thomas Robbins informed his diary. “There was a full [house] and a collection of $60.” In all, Americans raised some $100,000—about $2 million today—and helped finance the building of the sixty-four-gun frigate Hudson, Greece’s flagship.

Mere philanthropy did not suffice for some Americans, who were willing to give of their livelihoods to Greece and even, possibly, their lives. Samuel Gridley Howe, abolitionist, physician, and pioneer in educating the handicapped as well as the husband of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” author, Julia Ward Howe, volunteered his medical services to Greece. The memoirs of Howe’s experiences, vivid with descriptions of Greek men massacred “like wild beasts, in the streets,” of priests executed, and women and young boys carted off “to serve the brutal lusts of the rich,” inspired others to follow in his path. Among them was the New Yorker George Jarvis, who served as a lieutenant general in the Greek army, and James Williams, an African American from Baltimore who had fought alongside Stephen Decatur in Algiers and who now battled the Turkish navy for Greece.5

Popular support for the Greek insurrection meant that Congress could no longer ignore the issue. The Kentucky congressman Henry Clay insisted that the United States consider recognizing the independent Greek state. “I have in mind the modern not the ancient, the alive and not the dead Greece…a Greece fighting for its existence and for the common privilege of human existence,” declaimed Massachusetts’ representative, Daniel Webster, who urged not only diplomatic assistance but also military aid to the nobly struggling Greeks. Yet not all Americans endorsed these recommendations. Many of Webster’s own New England constituents, recalling their difficulties during the Barbary Wars, opposed any policy that might provoke the Porte into interfering with the lucrative Mediterranean trade or with missionary work in the Ottoman Empire.

How could the interests of merchants and missionaries in the Middle East be reconciled with the Philhellenism displayed by much of the American public? This was the predicament that now confronted John Quincy Adams. While he recognized the immense material and spiritual benefit of maintaining cordial relations with the Porte, the secretary believed that Islam was a “fanatic and fraudulent” religion, one that was founded on “the natural hatred of Mussulmen towards the infidel” and the “subjugation of others by the sword.” He aspired to be the architect of the first U.S.-Ottoman treaty, but he simultaneously agreed with those Americans who viewed the Greek war as the latest phase in the millennial struggle between Christendom and the “[Muslim] doctrine of violence and lust.”

Adams had yet another doctrine to consider when formulating his policy toward Greece. He worried that by intervening on the European continent in favor of Greece America might undermine its opposition to further European conquests in the Western Hemisphere, as stated in the Monroe Doctrine. So pressing were his concerns that when President James Monroe announced his intention to pledge American military assistance for the rebellion, Adams worked hard to dissuade him. The Europeans would certainly exploit such a statement to renew their colonizing efforts in South America, Adams argued, and to dominate the Caribbean trade. His arguments finally swayed the president. Even though the United States “cherished sentiments…in favor of the liberty and happiness” of Greece, Monroe told Congress, it would not intercede in an internal European affair.6

America’s decision to withhold aid from the Greeks significantly augmented its image in Istanbul. At the same time, the Europeans’ support for the rebels caused their influence to ebb in the Porte. The time was ideal for Adams to renew his search for a U.S.-Ottoman treaty and to call, once again, on the talents of George Bethune English.

An American Mussulman in the Capital of Islam

“You will inform me, by private letter, of your progress and success,” Adams instructed English, after hiring him as America’s secret envoy to the Ottomans. “[You] will communicate, as often as you shall have convenience and safe opportunities, any information, commercial or political, which may come to your knowledge, and which may be interesting to the United States.” English’s first assignment was to gain access to the new capudan, Husrev Mehmet Pasha, if not with the sultan himself.

Traveling, he wrote, as an “American Mussulman who has come from a far distant country to visit the Capital of Islam,” English entered Istanbul on November 5, 1823, donned local dress, and rented rooms in the city’s oldest quarter. Cautiously, he began building connections—first with the sultan’s librarian and then with more senior factotums. Each connection brought him closer to his target, but at the price of becoming one himself. “My situation is full of danger and disquietude,” he confided to Adams. “I frequently hear myself being denounced as a Greek spy in disguise, and my own servant when I go out of doors will not follow me in order…not to partake of a shot meant of me.”

On January 4, English at last gained admittance to Husrev, a man preoccupied with the military situation in Greece and “much engaged in taking measures to preserve his head and his place.” Husrev was also concerned about European demands for pieces of his empire and about designs on Middle Eastern markets. English therefore assured him that the United States had no desire for Ottoman lands, but only for open and mutually beneficial trade. America, moreover, was a country that respected all religions, Islam included, where “a mussulman citizen…would have precisely the same privileges as a Christian.” Impressed by this presentation, the capudan agreed to discuss formulating a treaty, but do so only clandestinely, aboard ship, to avoid European intrigues. Maintaining the meeting’s secrecy, English understood, also guaranteed that the capudan received all of the bribe money and would not have to share it with others. “I have thus far got on pretty well,” the envoy guaranteed Adams.

Yet Adams was not reassured. English’s penchant for cloak-and-dagger tactics and his liberal use of bribes discomfited the straitlaced secretary and led him to distrust the agent’s ability as a negotiator of international treaties. Accordingly, he demoted English to the role of interpreter for John Rogers, commander of the Mediterranean Squadron. Adams instructed Rogers to follow through on the meeting with the capudan, to obtain terms with the Ottomans similar to those enjoyed by Britain and France, and to take care that none of his actions were construed as for or against the Greeks. The commodore could also promise Husrev that “his good offices will be duly estimated in the transaction.”7

Rogers, a decorated veteran of the Barbary Wars, was a by-the-book officer appointed to rid the fleet of drunkenness and duels, not to conduct sensitive talks with Ottoman leaders. His lack of diplomatic finesse, compounded by Husrev’s preoccupation with Greece, delayed further discussions on a treaty. Not until July 5, 1826—two and a half years after English arrived in Istanbul—did the commodore and the capudan finally meet, rendezvousing between the islands of Tenedos and Lesbos. Dressed in white Moorish costume, sailors from the USS North Carolina and the Constitution boarded the Ottoman flagship and regaled its crew with choruses of “Hail Columbia.” Gifts were exchanged—silks and a waterpipe for Rogers, and for Husrev, jewel-encrusted rings, pistols, and a snuffbox. With English interpreting,

 the two men agreed that Rogers would proceed to Smyrna and await word of the treaty’s approval. The capudan then cast off, saluting with his guns and flying the sultan’s personal pennant, which was an honor never before bestowed on Westerners.

Rogers indeed proceeded to Smyrna, where, as Offley’s guest, he attended soirees and entertained minor officials. He waited for more than a year but still received no reply from the Porte. Adams had meanwhile advanced to the presidency and was better placed to press for a treaty. But if “Old Eloquence,” as he was known, had been an imposing statesman, his performance as head of state proved far less sterling. Instead of placating the Turks, his administration issued repeated declarations in support of Greek independence, giving rise to rumors that the United States was secretly arming the rebels. “See how these Franks never keep their promises,” the Sultan complained. “It is wiser to respect the position of Great Britain and to delay the Americans with politics.” Adams further alienated the Turks by proclaiming his sympathy for the “suffering Greeks” in “that most unequal of conflicts” and by wishing them “the triumph of humanity and freedom.”

Adams managed to antagonize not only the Ottomans but also George English, who criticized his rashness and blamed him for undermining any remaining hopes for a treaty. It was the wrong moment to assail a president frustrated by years of failure to procure even a limited agreement with Istanbul. His opinion of English was hardly improved by David Offley, who traduced him as an unstable turncoat secretly in league with the sultan. The imprecations stuck. Accusing him of “misconduct…most mortifying” and of “eccentricities approaching to insanity,” Adams resolved to sever all ties with his personal emissary and longtime friend. “I can now no longer sustain him,” he wrote. English sailed back to America and tried, unsuccessfully, to plead his case at the White House. Unemployed, the former divinity student, ex-Marine lieutenant, and Muslim general died on September 20, 1828, not in Islam’s capital but in that of his native United States.8

Annus Mirabilis: 1830

English’s death coincided with a seemingly unstoppable downswing in the Middle East’s political situation and a further reduction in the chances for a Turkish-American treaty. Exploiting the Ottomans’ imbroglio in Greece, provincial rulers throughout the empire began to assert their autonomy. The great powers, meanwhile, feared that Greece’s secession from Ottoman rule would inaugurate the Ottoman’s total disintegration and trigger a European war over its pieces. They sought, therefore, to maintain the status quo in Greece. But the Porte, resenting what it regarded as alien interference in its internal affairs, sent a combined Ottoman and Egyptian fleet to southern Greece. French, British, and Russian gunboats intercepted the flotilla and on October 20, 1827, near Navarino Bay (present-day Pylos), sank three-quarters of the sultan’s ships.

The Turkish defeat at Navarino emboldened the Greeks in their quest for independence and inaugurated the very scramble for Ottoman lands that the powers had hoped to avoid. Thus, in 1829, the Russians conquered a huge swath of the Bulgarian frontier and a year later France landed 24,000 troops at Algiers, initiating a 130-year occupation of the country. The so-called Eastern Question—what to do with the disintegrating Ottoman Empire? —destined to plague Europe throughout much of the next century, precipitating one war (in the Crimea) and contributing to the outbreak of another (World War I), commenced.

So, too, did the notion of an Arabic-speaking Middle East free of Ottoman rule. Muhammad Ali, a former Albanian mercenary who had been sent to Egypt earlier in the century to help liberate the country from Napoleon, was furious over the loss of his warships and the Ottomans’ refusal to pay him for his services in fighting the Greeks. Independent in all but name from Istanbul and generously backed by the French, Muhammad Ali prepared to march his army into Anatolia and to establish his own empire.9

The amputation of entire Ottoman provinces by the European powers and their local allies hardly seemed conducive to an agreement between Ottoman leaders and those of another Western nation, the United States. Americans, moreover, had cheered the European triumph at Navarino; a Wisconsin town was even named for the battle. The Ottomans, though, in urgent need of a diplomatic counterweight to Europe and a source for replenishing its warships, were willing to ignore these slights. “However you may act towards us, the Americans will be our good friends,” the Ottoman foreign minister reportedly told a British merchant. “And an American ship…is worth two of yours of the same size.” While European consuls fled Istanbul in fear of reprisals, Americans were welcomed in the capital and told of the sultan’s renewed interest in a treaty. Anti-Turkish sentiment in the United States, however, continued to inhibit a positive response to that offer until 1830, by which time a new tenant occupied the White House.

A penniless orphan and child soldier who forged himself into an outstanding lawyer, senator, and hero of the War of 1812, Andrew Jackson could scarcely have differed more from his privileged predecessor. He also had none of Adams’s commitment to diplomatic protocol and conducted his foreign affairs less with “Old Eloquence” than with “Old Hickory.” Jackson wanted trade with the Ottoman Empire and was unwilling to let any obstacle hinder him, not even popular sympathy for Greece. As one of the first foreign policy decisions of his administration, Jackson declared his determination to “leave no proper means unemployed to acquire for our flag the same privileges [in Ottoman lands] that are enjoyed by the principal powers of Europe,” and to seek a formal treaty with the Porte.

Jackson’s choice as negotiator was, fittingly, David Offley, who was accompanied by U.S. Navy Commodore James Biddle and the New York merchant Charles Rhind. The three began discreet discussions in Istanbul in February 1830 only to encounter the usual British obstructions. The Americans persisted, nevertheless, and on May 7 signed America’s first-ever Treaty of Navigation and Commerce with the Ottoman Empire. This granted extraterritorial rights (“capitulations”) to the United States and permission to trade in the Black Sea. Presenting the treaty to Congress, Jackson praised “the most friendly feelings…entertained by the Sultan” and the “enlightened disposition…evinced by him to foster the intercourse between the two countries.” America, for its part, pledged to furnish the Ottoman navy with a variety of gunboats, including “two-deckers, frigates, corvettes, and brigs,” all at discount prices.10

The year 1830 should then be remembered as the turning point in antebellum America’s relations with the Middle East. It was the year in which the United States attained a legal and commercial status in Ottoman lands equal to that of Europe, the year in which the president established the precedent of selling American weaponry to the region. A navy yard, described as “entirely under American control and American regulations,” was soon operating in Istanbul, churning out eleven ships of the line and twelve frigates, as well as the world’s largest battleship, the 934-ton Mahmud. American officers were permitted to serve as advisers aboard these ships, while Turkish cadets seeking “improvement in seamanship and naval tactics” received instruction on American vessels. In addition to reoutfitting the Ottoman navy, the United States also armed its ground force with Harpers Ferry rifles, Colt revolvers, and American-style cannons.

Arms sales, though, accounted for only a segment of the boom in American commerce with the Middle East that began in 1830. Protected by the new treaty, merchants traversed the empire bearing the latest products of American industry, from false teeth to a machine capable—so its inventors swore—“of projecting balls without gunpowder.” American-made “chairs and tables, books and book-cases, Yankee clocks and glass windows” were just some of the products that, according to a missionary stationed in Anatolia, the United States exchanged for consignments of dates, figs, and carpets. American textiles were especially valued throughout the area. One American visitor to Damascus reported seeing bolts of American cotton being borne on caravans bound for Asia Minor and another noticed bales in Anatolia bearing the stamp “Tremont Mill, Lowell, Mass.” A common word for cloth in the Persian Gulf area was merkani and in Turkey, americano.11

 

HAVING ESTABLISHED themselves throughout the Ottoman realm, American businessmen began to venture beyond its boundaries. In Yemen, at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula, they purchased half of the annual coffee crop, and in Muscat (modern-day Oman) they bought gum Arabic, rhinoceros horn, and ivory. In 1832, a New Hampshire entrepreneur named Edmund Roberts, sailing aboard the USS Peacock with a trove of quality arms, maps, and mint-condition American coins, set out for Mocha and Muscat. He gained entrance to the fortress of Sultan Sayyid Sa’id, who was recovering from wounds suffered during a recent war with the Wahhabis. “The lumps of dirt and the spots on the wall were the blood and brains of many a victim,” Roberts wrote. Sa’id signed a trade agreement with the United States, the first between his country and the West, and donated a pair of lions to the Washington Zoo. He also sent his personal emissary, Na’aman, to New York, where curious crowds followed his tours of monuments, clubs, and the newly built Long Island Railroad. Visiting Sa’id’s fortress in 1833, a British diplomat found that its walls were no longer bloodstained but, more disturbingly, bright with paintings of American victories in the War of 1812.12

The expansion of America’s trade through an increasingly unquiet Middle East meant a broadened role for the U.S. Navy. Citing the “salutary effect” that the Mediterranean Squadron continued to make on North Africa, Jackson believed that American consuls in the region “cannot be too sparing of their allusions to it.” To emphasize the point, the USS Concord was dispatched in 1832 to Alexandria, where its commander, Matthew C. Perry, destined to open Japan to the West, became the first American commodore to visit Egypt. The following year, the USS Delaware, captained by the Barbary War veteran Daniel Patterson, paid calls to Cairo, Jaffa, and Beirut. Writing from Lebanon, an American missionary described how at least forty thousand people, “Christians, Moslems and Druzes…peasants, priests, sheikhs and emirs,” toured the ship and were hosted by its spotlessly uniformed crew. One Arab nobleman, impressed by the spectacle, repudiated his previous image of Americans as a “savage and uncivilized people” and instead pronounced them “superior in every respect to other nations…in politeness and kindness towards us strangers.” America, in the eyes of many Middle Eastern observers, would soon challenge the naval supremacy that the British had long enjoyed in the area. Ibrahim Pasha, Muhammad Ali’s son, went so far as to declare that Britain had only the second-best fleet in the Mediterranean, “after the American.”13

Increased commercial and naval activity in turn necessitated a bolstered American diplomatic presence in the Middle East, but in responding to this need, the United States remained dolefully sluggish. There were few American consulates in the area, most of them manned by ill-paid and unqualified foreigners, some of whom could not even speak English. American-born consuls often proved even more incompetent. In Tangier, Consul James Leib, a notorious drunk, would nightly wrap himself in Old Glory and beckon to imaginary U.S. warships offshore, while his counterpart in Tunis, the failed actor John Howard Payne, succeeded only in composing the famous ditty “Home Sweet Home.” “Our whole consular system is radically wrong, disreputable, and injurious to our character,” carped one New Yorker after visiting the region in the 1830s. “The…American flag is waving over the houses of Greeks, Italians, Jews, and Arabs, and all the mongrel population.” No flag flew over the Dardanelles, however, because the consul there was too poor to buy one.14

Such sparse and flawed representation was clearly inadequate for a country with broadening interests in the Middle East. The Jackson administration acted promptly to rectify the problem. In 1831 it appointed as America’s first chargé d’affaires in Istanbul a most extraordinary—and ornery—man.

The Devil and David Porter

Known as Sindbad to his friends, David Porter arrived at his post after a storied, if occasionally notorious, career. The son of a Revolutionary naval captain, Porter had led the boarding party that captured the Tripoli in 1801, was wounded in a daring coastal raid, and was captured with the crew of the Philadelphia. Later, in the War of 1812, he became the first American captain to seize a British warship and the first to sail around Cape Horn. But Porter also had an impulsive side. He had killed a man in a bar brawl, served as a witness for Stephen Decatur’s fatal duel, and attacked a Puerto Rican fortress that had failed to return his salute. An impenitent curmudgeon, he left his wife in Chester, Pennsylvania, to live on the Marmara Coast with his sister, and bombarded the State Department daily with rambling, misnumbered dispatches. Short, dark, and weather-beaten, with imperious, penetrating eyes, Porter was inhospitable to visitors and intolerant of the Middle East. “Salaams are an infernal nuisance,” he snapped after one unctuous audience with Sultan Mahmud II. “Why the devil can’t the man be satisfied with a decent salute?”

Similar to Andrew Jackson in temperament, Porter also shared his president’s determination to enhance America’s relationship with the Ottomans. He derived particular satisfaction from introducing his hosts to the wonders of American industry. “There is no part of the world so famous for men of ingenuity and useful mechanical Talents, as the United States of America,” he reckoned. As proof of this genius, Porter proposed presenting the sultan with a swan-shaped steamboat, “the head and neck fixed to the bow, the wings to the guards of the wheel, and the tail to the stern,” but the State Department rejected the idea in favor of the usual gem-studded snuffboxes. But Porter did arrive with made-in-Boston rocking horses for the children of the sultan’s harem and U.S. Army caps for his troops. The first memento was delightfully received; the second, somewhat less so.15

Ensconced in a handsome villa overlooking the Bosphorus, Porter proceeded to overhaul America’s diplomatic representation in the Middle East. Wherever possible, U.S. citizens were now appointed to the consular posts, and their performance was regularly monitored. The former captain also helped supervise the naval yard, supplying it with the finest New England carpenters and shipments of live oak, and assuring that its products surpassed the exacting standards of America’s Navy. Duly impressed, Mahmud II elevated Porter from chargé to ambassador—America’s first in the Middle East. “[I]t does not appear that any of the Diplomatists here have any idea that there is any thing like American influence,” he wrote, adding modestly, “Had I the talent of a Metternich or a Talleyrand…I would not stand higher in the [Turks’] estimation.”16

Porter was perfectly willing to wield that prestige, even in criticizing Ottoman policies. When a number of Syrian Jews were arrested and tortured on spurious murder charges—the so-called Damascus Blood Libel of 1840—Porter officially denounced the “barbarous” and “atrocious cruelties.” He reminded the Porte that the United States made “no distinction between the Mohammedan, the Jews and the Christian,” and wished to “protect that persecuted race among whose kindred are found some of the most worthy and patriotic of our citizens.” Porter established a tradition that would continue well into the twentieth century, of extending America’s protection to Middle Eastern Jews. This time the intervention succeeded. Buckling to protests from Britain and France as well, the Ottomans worked to suppress the libel and to secure the prisoners’ release.17

Porter’s most vexing difficulties, however, involved not Middle Eastern Jews but rather his Christian countrymen. By trying to convert Arab Christians to Protestantism, American missionaries in Syria and Mount Lebanon had provoked the ire of local churchmen, in particular the Maronite patriarch. In 1841, he petitioned the Porte to banish the evangelicals from the empire and, to issue the expulsion order, the Porte turned to the American ambassador.

Though hardly a religious man, Porter nevertheless professed a begrudging admiration for the missionaries and their pioneering work in education. “A reading nation,” he believed, “cannot be long in understanding what are its true interests…[and] will not be long in acting.” But upholding the U.S.-Ottoman treaty, not promoting American ideas, was Porter’s primary responsibility. His efforts, however, were increasingly frustrated by the missionaires and their contempt for Ottoman authority. “Avoid doing anything…likely to offend…the musselman,” he scolded them, emphasizing that the treaty did not protect Americans who “excite[d] the…inhabitants to change their rites and religion.” If the missionaries persisted in proselytizing Ottoman subjects, Porter warned, they did so “at their own risk, and on their own responsibility.”

In reproving the missionaries and showing sensitivity to the Ottomans’ concerns, Porter was merely carrying out the Jacksonian instructions that had enabled the United States to establish itself as a friendly and economically significant power in the Middle East. Unfortunately for the ambassador, though, a new administration was now in office, with an imperious secretary of state. Daniel Webster, the veteran Philhellenist and unwavering critic of Turkey, had little patience for what he regarded as Ottoman intolerance. Though pilloried by a later writer as a godless man who had sold his soul to politics, Webster was, in reality, an upstanding Congregationalist and an honorary member of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. In the board’s opinion it was Porter, not Webster, who trucked with the devil by refusing to protect the missionaries. These Americans, the commissioners pledged, had always lived peacefully as “Frank residents of Beyrout” without converting the Maronites or violating Ottoman law. Webster was convinced and in a stinging dispatch dated February 2, 1842, he upbraided Porter for his inaction and ordered him to “omit no occasion…to extend all proper succor” to the missionaries.18

The reprimand left Porter deeply embittered, but not for long; the sixty-three-year-old salt died in 1842. His legacy, however, would live on in the many family members—Porters, Heaps, Farraguts, and Browns—destined to play prominent roles in the Middle East, and in the paradigms he established for America’s relations with the region. In addition to selling arms and introducing American technology to Middle Eastern rulers, Porter solidified America’s image as a regional power on a par with Europe, but one which, unlike the Europeans, had no territorial ambitions in the area. Thanks largely to David Porter, American diplomacy in the Middle East had advanced immeasurably since the days when clandestine agents like George English were compelled to sneak incognito through Istanbul’s streets and conduct their negotiations in secret. And yet, while successful in establishing friendships with the Ottomans, Porter ultimately failed to maintain amity with his countrymen who were most active in the area. More than the statesmen, servicemen, and merchants from the United States, missionaries would exert a far-reaching influence on the relations between the Middle East and antebellum America.

Chapter 6

MANIFEST MIDDLE EASTERN DESTINY

The Brazenness Displayed by American Missionaries in challenging Porter was evidence of the emerging alliance between church leaders and decision makers in the United States. The missionary movement had grown significantly since the early 1820s, when its first emissaries to the Middle East, Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk, failed to attract converts and died forsaken deaths. Even the modest accomplishments of Fisk’s successors—Isaac Bird, William Goodell, and Eli Smith—in establishing schoolhouses in Syria could not account for the missionaries’ ability, a mere ten years later, to impact American policy toward the Middle East. The process through which small groups of women and men who journeyed thousands of miles into inhospitable territories managed to transform their country’s relationship with an entire region and profoundly alter the region itself, is a remarkable story. It is a saga steeped in hardship and blood.

Stations of the Cross and the Sun

Through their schools, the missionaries had gained a foothold in Syria by 1827, but the ultimate goal of evangelizing Palestine remained elusive. That year, however, the American Board and the Boston Female Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews decided to launch another mission to Jerusalem and, to spearhead it, chose a thirty-year-old pastor from the Berkshires named Josiah Brewer. “Marked,” according to one of his professors, “with mildness, modesty, good sense and unaffected piety,” Brewer was charged with succeeding where Parson and Fisk had failed by establishing a permanent station in the Holy City and initiating the ingathering of the Jews. “Our Pilgrim mothers [would] have exulted…had they foreseen that…their daughters should be sending back the gospel to Jerusalem!” Brewer declaimed as he departed Massachusetts, confident of his ability to supplant “the blood-red flag of the crescent with…the white banner…of peace,” on Jerusalem’s walls.

Peace, however, was the last thing Brewer discovered in Palestine. He landed in the country just after the disastrous Ottoman defeat at Navarino in 1827, portending the empire’s dissolution. The vast majority of Palestinian Muslims at the time still viewed themselves as devoted Ottoman subjects and still considered all Westerners, whether Americans or Europeans, as “Franks” who threatened the Islamic state. Brewer’s attempts to remind the natives that the U.S. Navy was not even present at Navarino and that America in fact respected Ottoman sovereignty proved ineffectual. Even less convincing were the protestations of goodwill toward Islamic culture that he uttered while distributing New Testaments. Evicted from two Galilean villages, lice-ridden and enervated by disease, Brewer finally curtailed his mission. He hobbled back to Boston in disgrace.1

The American Board nevertheless remained hopeful that some kind of station could eventually be erected in Jerusalem. Board elders pointed to improved conditions in the Holy Land since 1831, the year that Muhammad Ali, furious over the Ottomans’ refusal to compensate him for his losses at Navarino, sent Egyptian troops to occupy Syria and Palestine. The modernizing Egyptians granted unprecedented privileges to the non-Muslim millets of the area. Eager to take advantage of this enhanced situation, the board authorized the launching of a new Palestine mission. Chosen to lead it were William and Eliza Thomson, a young couple who had met in Princeton, New Jersey, where he was studying Bible and she was teaching school. The two married in 1833 and promptly volunteered as evangelists.

Not all of Palestine’s inhabitants welcomed Muhammad Ali’s reforms, however. The Muslim majority deeply resented the equal rights that Egypt had granted to the local Christians and Jews and the openness it showed to foreigners. Anger at the occupiers escalated and then, following attempts to tax Muslim peasants and draft them into the Egyptian army, exploded in a violent revolt. The bloodshed peaked in Palestine in 1834, just as the Thomsons reached Jerusalem.

Eliza was then nine months pregnant and unable to flee the city. William Thomson felt he had no choice but to leave her behind and try to secure help in Jaffa. “I have not heard one syllable from Mrs. T. since I left,” he fretted, haunted by rumors of atrocities. Eliza, in fact, had bolted herself indoors, panicked by the “roar of cannon, falling walls, the shrieks of the neighbors, the terror of servants and constant expectation of massacre.” In spite of this trauma, she managed to give birth to a boy, Thomas. The father returned on July 22, following a column of Egyptian reinforcements, only to find Jerusalem in ruins and his wife desperately ill. She died two weeks later.

“The wreck of a country, and the dregs of a people,” Thomson wrote despondently of Palestine. “The Jordan would scarcely be dignified with the name of river in America.” His caviling could not, however, deter other missionaries from trying to work in Jerusalem. George Whiting and Betsey Tilden arrived shortly after Eliza Thomson’s death, but neither could endure the privations. The numinous Palestine of the Bible was revealed to be “a land of devils,” in the opinion of the veteran missionary Isaac Bird, “no longer the blessed but accursed.” By the end of 1834, the American Board was finally compelled to admit that “not a single soul” in the Holy Land had been “brought to a sense of sin, and converted to God,” and resolved to abandon all futher expeditions to Palestine. Henceforth, the missionaries’ attention would be directed elsewhere in the Middle East, especially around the area of Mount Lebanon.2

The Bird and Goodell families continued to expand their schools and build new ones in and around Beirut, but conditions in the city began to deteriorate following the Egyptian invasion of 1831. Fighting erupted between pro-Egyptian Maronites and the Druze who remained loyal to the Porte, producing crossfires so intense that the Americans feared to step outdoors or even sit by open windows. The Maronites also exploited the chaos to press their anathemas against Protestantism and their opposition to evangelical schools. “The Turks…exhibit more excellent traits of character than the Christians,” protested William Goodell. “The idea of not acting dishonorably seems very rarely indeed to visit the bosom of a Christian.” Isolated and physically threatened, the missionaries concluded that they could no longer hold out in Lebanon. Beginning with the Bird family, evacuated by an Austrian schooner, the entire community fled.

The situation in Syria and Palestine had become insufferable for Americans, but even in Smyrna, a largely Christian city and the missionary’s gateway to the Middle East, the atmosphere had grown adverse. The first attempt to establish a station in Smyrna, by the amateur mountaineer Elnathan Gridley in 1826, failed after the young preacher went climbing, caught pneumonia, and died. Gridley’s replacement was Daniel Temple, painted by one biographer as “gloomy, austere, [and] sanctimonious,” a diehard who had worked his way up from rural poverty to scholarships at Dartmouth and Andover. But nothing in New England had prepared Temple for the Middle East, where consumption quickly killed his wife and two of their four children. The devastated missionary returned to America, together with his surviving sons. “The thought of their being educated in this deeply depraved and ungodly part of the world is truly distressing,” he wrote.

Temple nevertheless managed to overcome his revulsion to the Middle East and in 1833 he once again sailed for Smyrna, this time with a new wife and a printing press. His Bibles and textbooks were soon being studied in a school for Christian girls established by Joshua Brewer—the same Joshua Brewer who had retreated from Palestine five years earlier—now sponsored by the Ladies Missionary Society of New Haven. “If then the sword should not open a door…to the Christian preacher in Mahometan lands, may we not hope that the gradual progress of civilization will?” Brewer asked. The answer seemed clearer by 1838, by which time over two hundred girls had enrolled in the school.3

The missionaries’ success in Smyrna remained exceptional, however, and the lack of even basic security precluded evangelizing efforts elsewhere in Ottoman lands. The American Board accordingly set its sights on a region beyond the empire’s borders, on the Lake Urmia district of northwest Persia and on the community of Nestorian (Assyrian) Christians rumored to be living there. The task of accessing this nebulous realm fell to Harrison Gray Otis Dwight, a recent Andover graduate, and to the seasoned Lebanon missionary Eli Smith. The men rendezvoused in Smyrna in May 1830, disguised themselves in turbans and robes, and set out to become “the first Americans who have trod the soil of Armenia.”

Before them, however, lay a trail as travail ridden as any across the American frontier. Heading eastward to Erzurum, the pair trudged for three weeks through a waterless countryside without encountering a single village. The slight and scholarly Smith complained of having to sleep in stables with “every species of dirt, vermin and litter,” and of waking up rheumy eyed and feverish. Stricken with cholera outside of Tiflis, he was soon unable to walk and had to be strapped to a donkey cart by Dwight. In March, however, the Americans at last attained their goal and staggered into Urmia.

The city, compared with the turbulent Beirut and Jerusalem, at first seemed Edenic. Under the relatively open-minded Qajar dynasty, Persia was then experiencing an interlude of internal stability and freedom from the great-power encroachments of Russia and Britain. In Urmia, the missionaries found that the government did not interfere with their preaching and that the Nestorians’ Bible-based theology was not unlike their own. “I felt a stronger desire to settle among them at once…than among any people I have ever seen,” Smith blithely reported.

Settling in, the Americans erected a schoolhouse where forty students were soon receiving instruction in math, English composition, and Psalms. New missionaries arrived to reinforce the station—Justin and Charlotte Perkins in 1832 and, three years later, Asahel and Judith Grant. A native of Utica, New York, the twenty-eight-year-old Asahel was reputedly a swarthy man of medium height and unusual energy, “his eye bright, his aspect friendly, with a dash of enterprise and enthusiasm.” He was also a country physician who inaugurated what would become an exalted missionary tradition, providing free medical care to Middle Eastern populations. In his first year in Urmia, Grant treated ten thousand patients. He fulsomely recalled, “The sick, the lame, and the blind gathered round by the scores and hundreds, and my fame soon spread abroad through the surrounding country.”

Grant’s endurance enabled him not only to care for the sick but also to explore the wastelands as far south as Kurdish Mesopotamia, braving bandits and punishing terrain, in search of more Nestorians. Back in the United States in October 1840, the doctor assured the board’s commissioners that the Urmia station was  thriving and that a new mission should be undertaken in the region of what is today called Iraq. The commissioners agreed and presently dispatched Colby C. Mitchell and Abel Hindsdale, together with their wives, to Mosul.4

American evangelists had registered their first unqualified Middle Eastern triumph, but then multiple disasters struck. Blinded and deranged by a sandstorm, the Mitchells succumbed to typhoid fever, and though the Hindsdales managed to reach Mosul, they arrived too debilitated to work. Disease also claimed the lives of Elizabeth Dwight, her son John, and all five of the Perkinses’ children. Charlotte Perkins, suffering from epilepsy, returned to the United States. Sarah Smith, Eli’s wife, drowned in a shipwreck near Cyprus, and his second wife, Mary Ward Chapin, died of dysentery.

“Enfeebled health and shortened life are among the sacrifices necessary to the work of the missions,” Eli Smith confessed, referring not only to Urmia but to the entire Middle East. Women, often weakend by childbirth, were especially vulnerable “I sometimes fear that this sickness is a judgment upon me for improving so little my great blessings,” wrote Mary Van Lennep, who in 1843 left Hartford, Connecticut, for the barrens of Anatolia. “I try to pray that…I may be willing to suffer.” Missionaries were subject to physical attack by brigands and vigilantes and accorded only negligible protection by the Ottomans. “A man’s hat is always more safe in America than a man’s head is in Turkey,” William Goodell quipped. Disease, however, remained the most efficient killer, responsible for a death rate among American missionaries in the Middle East that exceeded that of settlers on the western frontier. A third of all missionaries who left the United States for the Middle East between 1821 and 1846 died while on duty, most of them shortly after arriving. “The hour is near when you expect to leave the shores of your native land with the probability that you will never see them again,” departing young seminarians were told. Mary Van Lennep was dead within a year.

What had begun as a glimmering vision of stations in the Middle Eastern sun had produced little but suffering and death—stations, rather, of the cross. Not even Asahel Grant was spared. In a short span of time, the doctor lost his wife and two of their three children. He nevertheless managed to retain his faith and to erect the mission near Mosul, but this, too, came to ruin. Late in the spring of 1843, Kurds and Turks attacked the Nestorians there, killing eight hundred and banishing thousands more. Grant rejected charges that the missionaries had provoked the massacre by encouraging the community to seek independence from Muslim rule. “Let us have the great consolation that we have been instrumental, in some measure, of awakening an interest and a spirit of prayer,” Grant declared, struggling to comfort the Nestorians and also, perhaps, himself.

How, in the face of all these ordeals and defeats, did the missionaries come to enjoy such influence in the United States and, to a remarkable extent, determine the country’s policies overseas? What factors enabled these Americans to recover from their agonizing setbacks, to replenish their ranks, and to rebuild all that had been devastated? “You Americans think that you can do everything…that money can buy or that strength can accomplish. But you cannot conquer Almighty God,” an Arab guide taunted one newly arrived missionary.5 The preacher certainly agreed that God could not be vanquished, but determination and wealth might still, he believed, achieve miracles, especially in the Middle East.

Resurrection

The turnaround for the missionaries began in 1840 when the European powers, fearing for the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, forced the Egyptian troops out of Syria and Palestine. Relative stability was restored to the area, but without reducing the rights that the minorities had achieved under Muhammad Ali. On the contrary, in gratitude to the Europeans for retrieving his lands, Sultan Abdul Mejid pledged to respect the “liberty, property, and honor of every individual subject, without reference to his religious creed.” Foreign nationals were now permitted to reside permanently in Jerusalem and the empire’s Protestants were finally recognized as a legitimate millet. For the missionaries, these events were nothing less than the handiwork of God. Exclaimed one of them, “Whereas, but a few years ago, there still existed…an obstinate bigotry and unrelenting spirit of persecution…there is now perfect toleration!”

The easing of restrictions had an immediate impact on missionary activities in Syria and Mount Lebanon. The Birds and the Goodells were able to reestablish themselves in Beirut and to welcome a new generation of evangelists, led by William Eddy and Henry Jessup. Returning to Lebanon from Urmia, Eli Smith began an Arabic translation of the Bible and developed the first Arabic-language movable type, “American Arabic.” Within a decade, Smith’s presses were producing some fifty thousand volumes per year in fourteen local languages, including translations of the Dairyman’s Daughter, Pilgrim’s Progress, and the region’s first elementary school primers. Smith’s only setback resulted from his attempt to adapt native music to the Protestant liturgy. “Not only do we find the singing of the Arabs no music to us, but our musicians have found it…impossible to…imitate their tunes,” he conceded.6

THE MISSIONARIES’ newfound success was an outgrowth of enhanced circumstances in the Middle East, but also of the radical transformations that were remaking America. The 1840s saw the rise of the Manifest Destiny ideology, a grander and more militant version of the old Puritan claim to a God-given right to the new Promised Land, which Americans now espoused to justify their conquest of the entire North American continent. Under the Manifest Destiny banner, the nation’s population of 17 million inexorably fanned out across the existing twenty-six states and into the vast territories west of the Mississippi and north of the Rio Grande, uprooting Native American communities and ousting the Mexicans on route. But the concept also had a worldwide, educational dimension. According to the New York journalist John O’Sullivan, who coined the term, Manifest Destiny also ordained America “to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man,” to disseminate its principles, both religious and secular, abroad.

The global and edifying aspect of Manifest Destiny accorded well with the missionaries’ sense of purpose and reenergized the movement precisely at its dimmest juncture. “The destiny of America is inevitably bound up with the destiny of the world,” declared Dwight Marsh, the head of the Mosul mission. “America is only safe in the salvation of mankind.” The evangelists were inspired by the dynamism animating their country and by the spirit of scientific inquiry it evinced. This was the America of breakthrough technological innovations, of Charles Goodyear’s vulcanized rubber and the dependable brass movement clock of Chauncey Jerome. Among the newfangled products that American missionaries introduced to the Middle East were the camera, the sewing machine, and a revolutionary communications device invented by the son of an American Board member, Samuel Morse. “I do love to give a shock to these [native] people,” confessed William Goodell. “It seems to move them a step forward toward the millennium.”

Far more than its technical aspects, though, the image of military strength projected by the United States throughout the Manifest Destiny period electrified the missionaries. Middle Eastern peoples, averred the otherwise bookish Eli Smith, “ought to know that we are a powerful nation. And there is no other way to teach them this but to make them feel it.” Much like the preachers on the American frontier who, when threatened with Indian attack, summoned the U.S. Cavalry, Smith and his fellow evangelists called on the federal government, its diplomats, and even its warships to protect them from irate Muslim rulers. Replacing David Porter as America’s ambassador in Istanbul, Dabney Carr came into office in 1842 declaring his intention to protect the missionaries “to the full extent of [his] power,” if necessary “by calling the whole of the American squadron in the Mediterranean to Beyrout.” Carr, a grandnephew of Thomas Jefferson, proved true to his proclamation. A year later, the USS Independence conducted a high-profile tour of Egyptian and Syrian ports. Its orders were to “inquire into the safety and prosperity of the Missions…and to extend to them such assistance as they may require.”

The confluence of divinely ordained missions and state-sanctioned might was emblematic of the Manifest Destiny era both in North America and in the Middle East. Still, in contrast to the missions that often formed the nuclei of future forts, towns, and cities in the American West, the stations established by American evangelists in the Middle East never served to stake out territorial claims. Nor were they identified with big business interests, in the manner of the American missionaries in Hawaii. The absence of imperialist and economic agenda distinguished the Middle East missionaries not only from their counterparts in the United States, but also from the European preachers who often doubled as government agents. “I am persuaded that their [the Americans’] sole motivation was religious,” concluded a French consul in Beirut after a scrupulous investigation. “I simply do not perceive any ulterior political motive.”

American missionaries in the Middle East viewed Manifest Destiny not as a blueprint for conquering territory but rather as a warrant for capturing souls and minds. They continued to disparage Islam as a fraudulent, retrograde faith and dismissed all forms of Eastern Christianity as decadent and outmoded. Their approach to the peoples and cultures of the region remained rife with arrogance and yet their hubris was tempered with beneficence. Confronting a crowd of indignant Lebanese, William Goodell could with all sincerity declare, “We have come to raise your…population from that state of ignorance degradation and death which you are fallen, to do all the good in our power.”

Millions of Americans now supported that salvational effort. From the modest grassroots campaign that began after the Barbary Wars, the missionary movement had blossomed in the four decades leading up to the Civil War into a national passion. Support for the missions flowed not merely from congregations across the country, but also from the mainstream press, from Congress, and even from the White House. Inspired by the Manifest Destiny vision, farmers and factory workers, the graduates of single-room schoolhouses and alumni of the nation’s leading universities, northerners and southerners alike, reported for evangelizing duty overseas. There was never a shortage of volunteers. Perhaps the keenest gauge of Manifest Destiny’s influence on the missionary enterprise was the annual budget of the America Board, which had soared from a mere $10,000 in the days of Fisk and Parsons to $250,000 by midcentury.7

The impact of improved conditions for missionaries working in the Middle East, together with the revitalization of the evangelists’ zeal, was illustrated by the case of Cyrus Hamlin. Born in Maine in 1811, Hamlin had been orphaned at an early age and forced to work as a farmhand. But he also studied compulsively and ultimately won a scholarship to Bowdoin College, where he became the favorite student of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and graduated at the top of his class. Startlingly handsome, if outlandishly whiskered, Hamlin was the embodiment of the Manifest Destiny age, described as “indomitably self-willed,” “querulous,” and “despotic.” Forgoing the pulpit, he prepared for a career in the missions, but resolved to combine evangelizing with the genius of the industrial age. Manufacturing, for Hamlin, was more than just a process of production; it was also a means for purifying souls. Landing in Istanbul in 1840, he set out to instruct local youth in the rudiments of mathematics and grammar and induct them into the sacraments of work.

His arrival coincided with the new openness in the sultan’s attitude toward the West. As a result, Hamlin obtained permission to construct his school in Bebek, a mere five miles from Istanbul. By 1842, some forty pupils were enrolled at the institution, spending half of each day in the classroom and the other half fashioning Franklin stoves and Boston-style rattraps and operating a flour mill. The only resistance to this innovative curriculum came from the Armenian patriarch, whose flock supplied most of the students, and from Muslim villagers who pelted the school with stones, making it, Hamlin carped, “rather leaky.” Still, he managed to repair any damages and conciliate the patriarch. A contented Hamlin informed the board that “a decided impression” had been made on Ottoman education and “a general spirit of inquiry” aroused. “The old unchangeable East had begun to move,” he asserted, but without realizing how profound that shift would prove. Hamlin had no inkling that his modest school would someday evolve into Turkey’s first modern university.8

From a situation of near annihilation in the 1830s, American missionaries had recovered fully and, by the end of the antebellum period, were thriving. Hundreds of Muslims, Christians, and Jews were studying in missionary institutions throughout the Ottoman Empire, reading textbooks produced by American religious presses and absorbing American ideas. “This country is among the greatest civilized countries [in the world],” explained the pioneering Egyptian educator Sheikh Rifa’a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi. “Its inhabitants…freed themselves from the grasp of the English and became free and independent on their own…[W]orship in all faiths and religious communities is permitted.” Responding to a request from Sultan Abdul Mejid, missionaries also established an America-style school for Ottoman military cadets. With the language skills they learned, the young officers could read the latest U.S. Army manuals, as well as the more provocative works of Jefferson, Hamilton, and Paine.

Along with proselytizing and educating Middle Easterners, the missionaries also enlightened their countrymen back home. Through their innumerable letters, articles, and reports, the evangelists furnished Americans with images of Middle Eastern life that were far more detailed—and less varnished—than any culled from the Bible or A Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Missionary correspondence also served as a primary source for Edward Salisbury of Yale, who in 1841 became the nation’s first professor of Arabic, and for the American Oriental Society, founded the following year and dedicated to the study of ancient and contemporary Middle Eastern cultures. Salisbury, in turn, joined the missionaries in promoting progressive education in Syria and in other Ottoman lands. “The countries of the West, including our own, have been largely indebted to the East for their various cultures,” the scholar attested, “the time has come when this debt should be repaid.”

In spite of their striking accomplishments, the missionaries continued to face numerous hazards in the Middle East and to grapple with daily frustrations. “There are no rail roads here and ideas as well as burdens move by camel trains,” the Beirut-based William Eddy complained. Some of the most formidable opposition to the missionaries emanated not from the Middle East, however, but from their own American Board. Many board elders felt that the focus on school-books and medicine had obscured the missions’ original purpose of salvation. “Could Christianity be presented to men in its simplicity, without the technics of the schools, it might obtain a more ready and general reception,” Dr. John Thornton Kirkland, a former Harvard president, concluded after visiting Syria in 1842. The missionaries replied that the services they provided helped gain the natives’ trust, while generating a physical and intellectual atmosphere conducive to future conversion. Kirkland’s wife, Elizabeth, whom we will presently meet as a pioneering traveler to the Middle East, disagreed with both her husband and the board and took the missionaries’ side. “These worthy people have turned their attention to the establishment of schools as preparatory to the introduction to Christianity,” she asserted. “Generally speaking the American missionaries are held in most respect.”9

The question would be settled neither by the American Board nor by the missionaries but rather by the peoples of the Middle East, through their mounting demands for modern education and health care. If unresponsive to the missionaries’ religious message, they would remain appreciative of their philanthropy and generally accepting of their presence. Taking advantage of that openness, increasing numbers of Americans would follow their spiritual impulses to the region. Among them were two hybrid types, a missionary-scientist and a missionary-soldier, who journeyed to the Middle East, the land most venerated by Americans in search of sanctity and knowledge.

Adventures in Sacred Paradise

The rider stretched high on the hump of his camel and squinted into the dusty glare. Hardly the traditional adventurer—no broad-chested John Ledyard or redoubtable George English—Edward Robinson was, at age forty-six, wan, overweight, and nearsighted, a professor of Scripture at New York’s Union Theological Seminary. Like so many desert images, though, that of Robinson as a weakling was mirage-like. In fact, he was capable of riding eight hours straight under blazing skies while navigating by his compass and Bible. He had spent the last month crossing the barren Sinai Mountains, uncomplainingly, marveling at their “strangeness and overpowering grandeur” and reminding himself that these were the same serrated peaks that Moses and the Israelites traversed. Finally, in March 1838, Robinson prepared to exit the desert and step into a “romantic and exciting” land. Peering through his grime-dimmed spectacles, he spied the lapis waters of the Gulf of Aqaba and, beyond, the Wilderness of Judea. “Although not given to the melting mood,” he admitted, “I could not refrain from bursting into tears.”

Robinson was part of a lengthening procession of Americans who, in the decades before the Civil War, streamed toward the Holy Land. To accommodate the traffic, the United States appointed consular agents to six major Palestinian cities, making it the most widely represented Western nation in the area. These legations were nevertheless overwhelmed by the onrush of missionaries, tourists, colonists, and researchers, all drawn by the news of enhanced toleration of foreigners in Palestine and by effusive descriptions of its wonders.

Many of those accounts were, to say the least, exaggerated. William Thomson, the missionary whose letters spoke so astringently of Palestine, and who later left the country for Beirut, went on to write The Land and the Book, a rhapsody of idyllic images. No longer desolate and harsh, the biblical landscape was, he claimed, a paradise of “lofty mountains, covered with snow,” “wide plains carpeted with gay flowers,” and “lakes, rivers, and streams baptized with beauty.” The volume sold out thirty editions in the United States and helped perpetuate the dreamlike aura surrounding Palestine. That mystique would swiftly vanish, though, as arriving Americans often encountered a gloomier reality. “There is no other country in the world…of which so much has been written, and of which so little is really known,” remarked the American consul in Jaffa, noting how “a feverish state of expectation” about Palestine frequently pitched his countrymen into a post-pilgrimage depression.10

Edward Robinson, however, was an exception. Though a fervent Congregationalist, he never let religious beliefs becloud his scientific judgment. As a child on a Connecticut farm, he dreamed of someday visiting Palestine’s holy places and, as an adult, he determined to remove the “vast mass of tradition, foreign in its source and doubtful in its character,” surrounding those sites. The Puritans had superimposed a map of ancient Israel over their new Promised Land, America, and now their descendant Robinson sought to repatriate that map and restore its historical veracity.

Together with the Arabic-speaking missionary Eli Smith, Robinson headed north, through the area known today as the West Bank. The countryside, marred by “stagnation and moral darkness,” indeed depressed him, as did its inhabitants’ “unreliable” nature. Yet these same squalid towns appeared familiar to Robinson, “as if the realization of a former dream.” His sense of reverie intensified on April 4, 1838—Easter Day—when he and Smith, “like the Hebrews of old, at the time of Passover,” at last entered Jerusalem. A party of eight missionaries and their families greeted them, the city’s largest-ever gathering of Protestants.

Robinson did not dally, though, and the next dawn he was out, armed with a hundred-foot measuring tape, gauging Jerusalem’s walls. Using the Bible and other classical accounts as his guide, he identified the Siloam Pool and, in spite of his myopia and bulk, succeeded in crawling 1,750 feet through a narrow rock-hewn tunnel to the Virgin’s Fountain within the Old City. He also located the remains of a massive bridge that once led to Herod’s Temple and that is today known as Robinson’s Arch. Robinson then ventured out into the countryside in search of scriptural sites, convinced that their current Arabic names contained echoes of their Hebrew originals. Accordingly, in the Arab village of al-Samu’a, Robinson located the remains of biblical Eshtemoa. He found that al-Jish was the ancient Gush Halav, and that al-Jib had been Gibbon, where Joshua made the sun stand still. Robinson, “the greatest master of measuring tape in the world,” as one of the missionaries dubbed him, had retrieved a legendary past and grounded it in present-day reality.

Edward Robinson would make a second expedition to Palestine, in 1852, publish two hefty volumes of his research, and become the first American awarded a gold medal by London’s Royal Geographical Society. He founded an entirely new field, biblical archaeology, an “American science” that was accessible not only to scholars but to clergy and laymen as well. It also lured to Palestine other Americans who, like Robinson, alloyed their faith with an irrepressible urge to explore.11

William Francis Lynch was one such wanderer, a Navy commander and an “earnest Christian and lover of adventure” who had already probed South America and the Far East. He was the same age as Robinson, forty-six, but keen-eyed and trim, the vision of the stalwart Virginian. In May 1847, bored by the lack of action in the Mexican War, Lynch requested leave to visit Palestine. He proposed to be the first Westerner to navigate the entire length of the Jordan River, from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea, to “promote the cause of science, and advance the character of the Naval service.” Beyond its academic and motivational value, though, Lynch hoped that his expedition would strengthen America’s ties to the Holy Land and, through them, hasten a worldwide redemption.

With his handpicked crew of five officers and nine seamen—“young, muscular, native-born Americans, of sober habits”—Lynch departed New York for Istanbul. He presented himself at the court of Abdul Mejid, caused a stir by refusing to remove his sword, but then regained the sultan’s favor by presenting him with an album of American Indian prints, a gift from President James Polk. In return, Lynch received a firman, or imperial decree, granting him “protection against the Arabs.” The commander did not rely on this, though, and on reaching Beirut, he acquired the services of Henry James Anderson, a missionary doctor. “In the event of gun-shot wounds,” thought Lynch, “surgical aid would be indispensable.” The Americans also hired several Bedouin guards and purchased an arsenal of carbines, Colt pistols, bayonets, Bowie knives, and a buckshot-spewing blunderbuss.

The weapons, along with scientific instruments and camping gear, were loaded onto pack animals. Two galvanized iron boats were lowered onto gun carriages and lashed to the backs of camels. Exiting the coastal city of Acre, the peculiar train trudged thirty miles through a countryside that the Americans found depressingly barren and uninhabited. They nevertheless kept their spirits up with choruses of “Hail Columbia,” “Yankee Doodle,” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and with occasional infusions of grog. “We Yankee boys flinch  not,” wrote one of the sailors, Edward Montague. “We fear neither the wandering Arab nor the withering influence of disease…neither the heat of the sun nor the suffocating sirocco.” The men were particularly enamored of their commander, “one of the best, most humane, thoughtful, and generous men in the world,” according to Montague, a hero with “the resolute ‘go-ahead’ spirit of a real, true-born American.”

Lynch, too, seemed uplifted by all he saw, from the Stars and Stripes streaming above his troop, to the view of the Sea of Galilee. The thought that he walked on the very same shores that Jesus had trod, and touched the waters on which he had walked, overwhelmed him. So, too, did the hospitality shown to him and his crew by the ancient Jewish community of Tiberias. A wealthy merchant named Chaim Weisman invited the Americans to lodge at his home and feted them lavishly. A week later, on April 10, 1848, Lynch and his men took leave of Weisman and launched their iron boats.

“It must have been a singular sight from the shore,” Lynch recalled. “[T]he crews in man-of-war rig, with snow-white awnings spread, and their ensigns flying, the men keeping time with their oars, as we rowed along the green shores of the silent Sea of Galilee.” Christened the Fanny Mason and the Fanny Skinner (after the daughters of the secretary of the navy and a senior commodore), the metallic craft were designed to withstand the Jordan’s reported shoals and rapids. A wooden skiff was also acquired, fitted with the blunderbuss, and nicknamed Uncle Sam. The river indeed proved turbulent, and bands of armed natives gathered on the banks. The melodramatic Lynch recalled how he and his crew “were wanderers in an unknown and inhospitable wilderness,” where the presence of “barbarous tribes of warlike Arabs…prompts one instinctively to feel for his carbine, or grasp…the handle of his sword.”

Yet the scientist in Lynch also took pains to record the river’s depths and temperatures and to describe its harsh environs. Like Robinson, he tried to locate the exact site of events mentioned in the Bible—where the Israelites crossed into Canaan or Jacob wrestled the angel—though with far less precision. All around him, Lynch imagined, lay a land “teeming with sacred associations” and “hallowed by the footsteps, fertilized by blood, and consecrated by the tomb, of the Saviour.”

Six days passed before the sailors, fatigued but exhilarated, neared Jericho. Lynch believed that no Christian had visited the area since the Crusades and that a Bedouin attack was likely. In a maneuver he had learned from Indian fighters in the American West, he drew his men and boats into a defensive circle. The tactic proved unnecessary, though. The only intruders were several dozen Christian pilgrims, among them two Americans, who cast off their clothes and scampered into the Jordan.

Thereafter, the party completed the remaining twenty miles to its destination, the still and oleaginous Dead Sea. The men, wrote Montague, could “float with perfect ease upon it, and could pluck a chicken or read a newspaper at pleasure while so floating.” Lynch was less amused, oppressed by the desolation of the surrounding desert and by the troubling lack of fresh water. “The curse of God is surely upon this unhallowed sea!” His only respite came at the luxuriant spring of Ein Gedi, which Lynch renamed “in honour of the greatest man the world has yet produced,” George Washington.

Lynch spent the next three weeks conducting experiments on the Dead Sea waters, which he surmised might have medicinal qualities, and exploring the ruins of Qumran and Masada. He hiked to Kerak, in present-day Jordan, where members of the Christian community, descendants of once-proud crusaders, were sorely oppressed by the Muslim majority. Though frenetically busy, Lynch found time to relish the romantic desert nights, “the tents among the tamarisks, the Arab watch-fires, the dark mountains in the rear, the planets and the stars above them, and the boats drawn up on the shore.” He also kept abreast of events at home, through mail forwarded by the American consul in Jerusalem. One such dispatch brought word that John Quincy Adams, the president who had tried to open the Middle East to Americans over twenty years earlier, had died. “The thought of death harmonized with the atmosphere and scenery,” Lynch lamented. “We lowered the flag half-mast, and there was gloom throughout the camp.”

On May 10, Lynch hoisted the same flag over a raft anchored in the Dead Sea and ordered the iron boats disassembled. He and his men then headed north toward Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Caesarea. His impressions of these and other celebrated sites were similar to those of many American pilgrims, a blend of aesthetic disgust and spiritual elation. The trek, meanwhile, proved debilitating, and by the time they reached Damascus, all of Lynch’s men were delirious with fever. One officer, Lieutenant J. B. Dale, died at the Beirut home of Eli Smith and was buried by William Thomson.12

Lynch returned to New York and to an unexpectedly mixed reception. Critics who had assailed President Polk for sending the U.S. Army against Mexico now berated him for wasting $700 of the public’s money on yet another superfluous expedition. Lynch’s memoirs of the trip nevertheless sold briskly. It was a quirky volume, alternately descriptive and prescriptive, but consistently adamant in tone. The author was brutal in his portrayal of the Arab, alleging that “his ruling passion…is greediness of gold, which he will clutch from the unarmed stranger, or filch from an unsuspecting friend,” yet he was equally zealous in touting Palestine’s economic potential. Lynch proffered several ideas for developing the Holy Land, including a plan for resettling African Americans on plantations to be created in the Jordan Valley. The key to these programs’ success, he ventured, was security. “Fifty well-armed, resolute Franks…could revolutionize the whole country,” he wrote.

Lynch’s book concluded with an impassioned appeal for restoring the Jews to Palestine. The Jewish people were “destined to be the first agent in the civilization of the Arab” and the means of rejuvenating the entire region. Dr. Anderson, the expedition surgeon, expanded on Lynch’s proposal and, under the aegis of the American Geographical and Statistical Society, circulated a petition urging the United States to promote Jewish colonization in Palestine. “Jewish influence brought to bear…in what is called Syrian Arabia,” it stated, “would most effectually give a new impetus to the commerce of the East, as well as of the world.”13

The Fullness of Time in Palestine

The proposition that the United States should actively assist the Jews in returning to Palestine was neither new nor, in the antebellum period, considered especially radical. The restorationist ideas once prevalent among the evangelical churches of colonial America had deeply penetrated the mainstream. While the more established Episcopalians and Unitarians continued to shun the notion, the masses of Methodists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians embraced it. Many Americans believed that the Jews were already in the process of moving back to their homeland, an underpopulated area that, the missionaries assured them, could absorb millions—“A land without a people for a people without a land,” in the slogan of Lord Shaftesbury, a contemporary British restorationist. “There appear to be unusual movements among the Jews, and a looking toward Palestine,” Connecticut’s Reverend Thomas Robbins informed his diary in June 1838. Sarah Haight, a Long Island woman who journeyed to the Middle East in the 1830s, was convinced of the imminence of the Jewish ingathering in Palestine. “God’s own peculiar people shall again be brought…to rebuild and worship in their own temple,” Haight predicted, foretelling what she called “the fullness of time of the Gentiles.”

Restorationism found its broadest exposition in an 1844 treatise, The Valley of Vision; the Dry Bones of Israel Revived, by a New York University professor of Hebrew, the Reverend George Bush. The author of a biography of Muhammad that described him as a “pseudo-prophet” but also as a “man of superior cast of character,” Bush called for “elevating” the Jews “to a rank of honorable repute among the nations of the earth” by re-creating their state in Palestine. Such restitution would benefit all of mankind, forming a “link of communication” between humanity and God. “It will blaze in notoriety,” Bush foretold. “It will flash a splendid demonstration upon all kindreds and tongues of the truth.” The book was not without its critics, however. The highbrow Princeton Review denounced the “belief in the literal Restoration of the Jews [that] has for years been gaining ground in Christendom.” Yet a widening sector of the American public continued to believe with George Bush—a forebear of two later presidents of the same name—in the dream of Jewish statehood.

For Bush, as for most American restorationists, a Christian’s role in reestablishing the Jewish polity was limited to prayer and, at most, providing the “carnal inducements” necessary to entice the Jews back to Palestine.14 Some adherents to the doctrine, however, sought a more active role in that resettlement. They would personally travel to the Holy Land, take up residence, and prepare for the Jews’ return.

An example of this activism was rendered by one of America’s newest and most controversial sects, the Mormons. Joseph Smith, the movement’s founder, was a committed restorationist, and in October 1841 he sent his personal Apostle, Orson Hyde, on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Climbing the Mount of Olives, Hyde erected an altar and beseeched God to “restore the kingdom unto Israel—raise up Jerusalem as its capital, and continue her people [as] a distinct nation and government.” Mormons would later integrate that prayer into their liturgy and, on the site of Hyde’s altar, build a branch of Brigham Young University.

An even more ardent activist than Hyde, Warder Cresson remained permanently in Palestine and devoted his life to repatriating the Jews. A father of six from Philadelphia who had once been a Mormon and, before that, a Quaker and a Shaker, Cresson took up restorationism at age forty-six, in 1844. That year, Cresson met Mordecai Noah, the onetime consul in Tunis who had since embarked on a campaign to revive Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. Having tried and failed to enlist other American Jews in the project, Noah began promoting it to Christians. “Where can we plead the independence for the children of Israel with greater confidence than in the cradle of American liberty?” he inquired. The question resonated with Cresson, who became convinced that God had created the United States specifically to succor the Jews and that the American eagle would, in fulfillment of Isaiah, “overshadow the land with its wings.” Irrevocably, he proclaimed, “there is no salvation for the Gentiles, but by coming to Israel.”

Cresson promptly wrote to Secretary of State John C. Calhoun and asked to be posted as America’s consul in Jerusalem. The request coincided with the State Department’s search for diplomats acceptable to the missionaries, and after receiving assurances of Cresson’s “capacity & probity,” Calhoun approved the appointment. Dark-bearded with penetrating eyes and flared nostrils—the portrait of a fiery prophet—Cresson set sail on June 22, 1844, bearing with him a U.S. flag and a white dove that he planned to release on arrival. “I left the wife of my youth and six lovely children…an excellent farm, everything comfortable around me,” he remembered. “But the light…of God’s precious promises, in reference to the return of the Jew…became so great…that I could no longer remain at home.”

Arriving in Palestine, Cresson settled in Jerusalem, created a “consular seal,” and extended America’s protection over the city’s Jews, many of whom were impoverished scholars dependent on charity from abroad. Calhoun, meanwhile, learning from sources in Philadelphia that Cresson was “very weak minded,” and “what there is of [that mind] is quite out of order,” rescinded the consul’s appointment. Cresson merely ignored the instructions, however, and persisted in aiding the Jews. In a meeting with the visiting British satirist William Makepeace Thackeray, the author of Vanity Fair, he explained how his country, in concert with the European powers, would soon intervene to secure an independent state for the Jews. Cresson “has no knowledge of Syria but what he derives from prophecy,” wrote Thackeray. “I doubt whether any government has received or appointed so queer an ambassador.”15

Cresson continued to impress visitors with his visions of Jewish statehood and his bizarre, almost trancelike, behavior. But Cresson was not the only American restorationist to take up residence in Palestine at that time, nor was he necessarily the strangest. Equally unconventional, at least, was the novelist, singer, poet, and revivalist preacher Harriet Livermore.

The daughter of a New Hampshire congressman, Livermore had grown from a rambunctious tomboy into a graceful and dark-eyed ingénue who, in the years after the War of 1812, jilted a long line of suitors. Rejected, in turn, by an army doctor, she gave up on romance altogether in search of a higher love. “Sick of the world, disappointed in all my hopes of sublunary bliss, I drew up a resolution in my mind to…become a religious person.” Her quest took her first to Congregationalism and then to Presbyterianism and the Quakers, but wearying of them all, she eventually turned to Baptism and established her own sect, the Pilgrim Stranger. Livermore believed herself a theological prodigy, an apostle to the Indians, whom she believed were descended from the Lost Ten Tribes. These and other unorthodox notions featured in her novel, Scriptural Evidence in Favor of Female Testimony in Meetings for the Worship of God, which was financed by several influential Washingtonians, including Senator John Tyler and Dolly Madison. Her ministry reached its pinnacle in 1827, when Livermore addressed both houses of Congress. “She is the most eloquent preacher I have listened to,” remarked John Quincy Adams, a connoisseur. “No language can do justice to the pathos of her singing.”

The turning point in Livermore’s life came ten years later, however, when reports of Jewish resettlement in Palestine lured her to the Middle East. Armed with a State Department letter attesting to her “high character, both moral and religious,” she visited David Porter in Istanbul and then boarded a steamer for Beirut. South of the city, in the mountains of Sidon, she stopped in on Lady Hester Stanhope, a fifty-year-old British recluse who had once served as secretary to her uncle, Prime Minister William Pitt. Stanhope, too, had originally moved to the Middle East in the hope of encouraging Jewish resettlement in Palestine, but despairing of success, acquired a Crusader castle and refashioned herself as the Nun of Lebanon. As former belles and fellow restorationists, Livermore and Lady Hester should have bonded, but the two women in fact quarreled over which of them was the truly elect and which would accompany the Lord on His triumphal reentry to Jerusalem.

From Sidon, Livermore proceeded to the Holy City and rented a modest residence atop Mount Zion. From there, she planned to supervise the construction of an educational colony for returning Jews. Like many restorationists, Livermore subscribed to the Jeffersonian notion that all states required an agrarian base and that Christians had a divinely enjoined duty to reacquaint the Jews with farming. Livermore sought to see the colony completed, and then retire to a life of prayer and contemplation, “to meet [her] lot, which…is martyrdom.”

Funding the colony, however, proved more onerous than Livermore anticipated and her means were soon exhausted. Desiring only “to earn [her] bread, to pay [her] debts, and return to Mount Zion,” she tried peddling printed copies of her sermons, but was finally reduced to begging in Jerusalem’s streets. Yet even this effort foundered. Starving, Livermore withdrew from Palestine and returned, soul broken, to the United States. She died in 1868—a martyr, indeed, to some—in a Philadelphia poorhouse.16

The restorationist idea remained distinctly alive, however, as did the  vision of transforming urban, mostly indigent Jews into Palestinian peasants. While Harriet Livermore was languishing in Jerusalem, another American preacher arrived in the city, robust and eager to begin the work of colony making. Tall and striking but described nonetheless as “criminally modest,” James Turner Barclay was something of a Renaissance man—a physician, an inventor, and an architect. People marveled at his penmanship, which, according to one source, could render the Lord’s Prayer in letters so minute “they could all be inscribed on a five-cent piece.” Barclay’s premium achievement came in 1831, however, when he purchased Monticello, Jefferson’s classical estate, which had long since fallen into disrepair. Barclay attempted to revive the plantation through silk production, failed utterly, and subsequently turned to religion. He became a Presbyterian and then joined the Cambellites, a millenarian movement committed to restoring Christ’s rule on earth. To this end, in 1850, Barclay journeyed to Palestine.

Like Livermore, Barclay sought to establish a settlement for reeducating the Jews in agriculture but soon encountered a similar dearth of funds. Frustrated, he returned to architecture and obtained work renovating the Dome of the Rock. Barclay also authored a best-selling book, The City of the Great King, which, like William Thomson’s before it, portrayed Jerusalem in dazzling terms and, like George Bush’s, extolled the restorationist idea. “God hath not utterly cast away his people whom he formerly acknowledged; and neither should we,” he asserted. Christians, rather, must embrace the Jews, saying, “We will go with you, for we have heard that the Lord is with you.”17

Such exhortations helped divert attention from the restorationists’ failure to establish permanent footholds in Palestine and assist in the Jewish return. Other evangelists sought to succeed where Livermore and Barclay had faltered and to carry on the work of colonizing the Holy Land. The most headstrong and colorful of these was Clorinda Minor. A lifelong Episcopalian and the wife of a well-to-do Philadelphia businessman, Minor in middle age became an Adventist and began preparing for the End of Days. “Many Christians profess great sympathy for the Jews, and are waiting…for ‘the set time’ to favor Zion,” she observed. The “set time,” Minor calculated, was imminent, and in 1851 she left her husband and set sail for Palestine: “The conviction of my soul increased every hour that God was calling me to go!”

Shortly after landing in Jaffa, Minor met John Meshullam, a British Jew who had converted to Christianity and who shared Minor’s desire to introduce the Jews to the “active labors of love.” Their efforts, though, like those before them, were hounded by a shortage of funds. Minor subsequently appealed to her friends in the United States, who responded by sending over seven volunteers and $256 worth of tents, tools, seeds, and medicines. A plot of cultivable land was purchased at Artas, near Bethlehem, and the Manual Labor School of Agriculture for Jews in the Holy Land was established. Additional support came from Baron Moses Montefiore, the Anglo-Jewish philanthropist, who welcomed any contribution to Jewish colonization in Palestine. In her prodigiously selling memoir, Meshullam!; or, Tidings from Jerusalem, Minor foresaw “that His time to favor Zion is come, and that He will now set his hand a second time to recover Israel.” Her prophecy seemed destined for fulfillment.18

Within two years, however, the Artas group had disbanded. The rupture resulted, first, from the Jews’ refusal to show even the faintest interest in farming, but more fatally, from the festering rifts between Meshullam and Minor. Still, “the Modern Tabitha,” as Minor was sometimes called, remained optimistic. She moved from Artas to a small farm outside of Jaffa and gave it the name of Mount Hope. With an orange grove given to her by Montefiore, and with the help of two German missionaries, Johann and Frederick Grossteinbeck, she eked out a tenuous existence. “If any of our Hebrew friends in the United States will help, we will…return them an exact account of every expenditure,” she appealed to the American Jewish paper Occident. “Let not the opportunity pass, and the sufferers perish.” Few donations arrived, however. The farm failed, and Minor eventually went bankrupt. She died, aged forty-nine, in 1855.

Still, some evangelists persevered. Following Minor’s death, Mount Hope was purchased by Warder Cresson, the idiosyncratic and self-appointed consul, who envisaged it as a “model American farm” for teaching Jews how to raise pineapples, bananas, and lemons. Nearby, Walter Dickson from Groton, Massachusetts, founded another colony for the Jews. Dickson hired the Grossteinbeck brothers who duly married his daughters, Almira and Mary. Repeatedly harassed by local Bedouin, the American Agricultural Mission, as Dickson styled it, sought help from the U.S. Navy, which supplied it with several Hall carbines and cartridges. The marauders were repulsed—temporarily—and the settlement managed to survive.19

 

OVER THE course of forty years, beginning with Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk in 1819, Americans had persisted in their efforts to bring the tenets of their faith, both sacred and civic, to the Middle East, gaining purchase in some of its remotest provinces as well as in its Palestinian heartland. They were far from alone in this endeavor. Missionaries from France, Great Britain, Russia and Prussia also penetrated the region, building schools and clinics and even establishing colonies. “Europe is striving to outbid America for the privilege of teaching and preaching in this country,” complained the evangelist William Eddy, from Lebanon. No nation, however, could rival the geographical scope, the professional breadth, and the investment of human and financial resources of America’s Middle East missions.

The missionaries’ dedication remained a reflection of the roles that early nineteenth-century Americans arrogated to themselves as the executors of Manifest Destiny, the bearers of industrial age fruits, and democratic benefactors of the world. The missionary fervor was also indicative of the still irrepressible American need for new frontiers, fresh experiences, and movement. Observing these urges in the 1830s, the French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville remarked on the “unquiet passions” of Americans. An “all-pervading and…superabundant force” seemed to propel them, a “strange unrest” even “in the midst of abundance.”20 That restiveness was not particular to evangelists, however. An impressive number of Americans—housewives and professionals, artists and businessmen, and even an African American slave—ventured to the Middle East in the pre–Civil War period, drawn to the area by their religious convictions and, even more compellingly, by their dreams.

Chapter 7

UNDER AMERICAN EYES

“I AM ALMOST TEMPTED TO FANCY MYSELF IN THE PARADISE of Mahomet,” sighed the poet, biographer, and master storyteller Washington Irving. The year was 1829 and Irving was already America’s most celebrated writer, the author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and the creator of Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane. But he was also a lawyer, an officer during the War of 1812, a friend of David Porter and Daniel Webster, and a diplomat who had been recently posted to the U.S. embassy in Madrid. From there, Irving was able to visit Granada, the once splendrous capital of medieval Muslim kings, and the majestic Alhambra palace. The experience left him intoxicated, disoriented, and feeling as though he were lost in a kind of Oriental dream and “living in the Arabian Nights.”

Irving had long been fascinated by the Middle East. The images of bleak, desert castles and steamy harems appealed to his melancholic and romantic sides, but for the curly-haired, boy-faced bachelor from Tarrytown, New York, the region was also a venue for wit. In 1807, after viewing North African prisoners from the Barbary Wars, Irving had invented the figure of Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan, the captain of an impounded Tripolitan ketch, who, from his captivity in New York, offered blistering observations on American society. “I have been positively assured by a famous dervise (or doctor as he is here called) that at least one-fifth part of them have souls!” he enlightens Asem, the “principal slavedriver” of the Bashaw, on the subject of American women. “I have actually seen an exceedingly good-looking woman with soul enough to box her husband’s ears…and my very whiskers trembled with indignation at the abject state of these wretched infidels.” Serialized under the title Salmagundi, Mustapha’s letters assailed not only impudent women but also corrupt attorneys, fulsome generals, “slangwhangging” politicians, and even President Jefferson, “a man of superlative ventosity, comparable to nothing but a huge bladder of wind.”

The Middle East again served as humorous outlet in 1824, when Irving collaborated on Abu Hassan, a play derived from a tale in A Thousand and One Arabian Nights. “A mighty potentate like thee may have hundreds of mistresses,” the protagonist tells his companion, the Caliph Harun al-Rashid. “[B]ut now I am fain to content myself with half a dozen! Oh Nature, Nature, how easily art thou satisfied!

But in 1829 Irving found nothing risible about Granada’s ruins, only reverie and awe. Shortly after the visit, he began writing The Conquest of Granada, a history rife with “romantic adventures, picturesque forays through mountain regions; daring assaults of cliff-built castles…beyond the scope of mere invention.” Next came Alhambra, which would rank among his most cherished works. An anthology of Arabian tales scintillating with sinister magicians, scimitar-slashing horsemen, and princesses perpetually in need of rescue, the book sought to blend “naked realities” with “illusions of the…imagination.”1

Published in 1832, Alhambra served to perpetuate the myths that Americans continued to harbor about the Middle East. For some, though, merely reading about the region was insufficient and they determined to see this fabled land for themselves. Washington Irving also planned a Middle Eastern tour, sailing from southern Spain to Morocco, but diplomatic duties took him elsewhere. Others would not be so indefinitely diverted. Belying Henry David Thoreau’s dictum “Eastward I go only by force, but Westward I go free,” they set out to explore the “Orient.”

Fun, Fight, or Frolic

Little stood in their way. Freed of North African pirates and patrolled by a permanent naval squadron, the Mediterranean no longer represented an obstacle to American travelers. On the contrary, the sea now served as a conduit for a steadily expanding flow of individuals eager to discover the Middle East. By the 1820s, the Smyrna merchant David Offley was already complaining about the impecunious American students who occasionally appeared at his doorstep, desperate for shelter and food. Other Americans in the region reported encountering countrymen who had been living in the area for some time. There was the New Yorker in Istanbul who had converted to Islam and become an imam and the New England hunter who cruised the Nile, shooting crocodiles and cats. The captain of an American merchantman calling at Mocha in 1819 told of meeting a Philadelphian who had been serving in the sultan’s army for nearly twenty years, and Western visitors to Cairo in 1820s were sometimes guided by a backwoods Ohioan who went by the name of Nebby Daood—Arabic for David the Prophet.

While early nineteenth-century Americans embarked for the Middle East, priceless relics from the region found their way to the United States. The city of Boston received its first mummy in 1823, the gift of an American trader in Smyrna, and Baltimore obtained 689 Egyptian antiquities from Colonel Mendes I. Cohen, the scion of a prominent Jewish family, who had explored the Upper Nile. The Boston businessman John Lowell also managed to send artifacts home from Egypt in 1832, before perishing in a Persian Gulf shipwreck. Displays of ancient Middle Eastern art, amassed and donated by local merchants, also appeared in Salem, Massachusetts, and in Charleston, South Carolina. These collections helped stimulate interest in classical Egyptian forms, especially pyramids, sphinxes, and obelisks. Significantly, construction of the Washington Monument commenced in 1833, with marble contributed by the Ottoman Sultan.2

The growth of America’s fascination with the distant Egyptian past was accompanied by a deepening curiosity about the contemporary Middle East. Not only wanderers and outcasts wanted to visit the region suddenly, not only pilgrims, scientists, and missionaries, but also professionals and venerable members of society. To them, the Middle East was no longer merely a battlefield, a Bible scene, or a marketplace; it was also an untrammeled region that any adventurous American, suitably equipped and bankrolled, just might pleasurably tour.

The numbers of American visitors to the Middle East climbed steadily throughout the 1830s. Under the terms of the U.S.-Ottoman treaty, they enjoyed the protection of U.S. consuls and were shielded from arbitrary arrest. Transportation to the region was facilitated as well, thanks to the advent of steam technology. Beginning in 1838, a spunky Bostonian could take a train to New York and board a steamship bound for Istanbul or Alexandria. With a carelessness that John Ledyard would have found unimaginable and with a speed that Pliny Fisk would have envied, Americans accessed the Middle East.

Yet the voyage still required immense physical stamina and the patience to endure multiple discomforts. The average passage took twenty-one days, with stops at London, Marseille, and Malta, and a standard fare of salted meat and hardtack. “There are no berths, no beds, no tables, no provisions, no dishes,” William Henry Seward, a New York senator and future secretary of state, grumbled en route to Palestine in the late 1850s. “The cabin is filled with…ants, cockroaches, and all kind of vermin.” Once ashore, visitors could be quarantined for as long as two weeks, often in conditions even more disagreeable than those at sea. In exchange for these inconveniences, passengers were required to pay about $190, the equivalent of a month’s salary for a U.S. senator in 1840 or a year’s wages for a manual laborer in the South.3 Nevertheless, Mediterranean-bound vessels were almost always fully booked by vacationing Americans in search of exotic adventures.

One of these wayfarers was John Lloyd Stephens, a thirty-year-old New York Brahmin, Columbia graduate, and associate of Tammany Hall. After reading A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, he resolved to see for himself the “splendor and opulence [that] once made the Prophet smile” and, in December 1835, boarded a steamer for Egypt. Stephens was typical of the sixty Americans who, on annual average, registered at the U.S. consulate in Alexandria in the three decades after 1830. Most of them lived in northern cities, but there were also some, such as the Mississippi-born bookseller James Cooley, who hailed from the South. American women also visited the Middle East in this period: two of them—Sarah Rogers Haight of Long Island and Elizabeth Cabot Kirkland, the forty-four-year-old daughter of a U.S. senator from Massachusetts—wrote grippingly of their experiences. The most exceptional of the travelers, however, was David F. Dorr, an African American slave from Louisiana who toured the Middle East with his master in 1854. Escaping later to Ohio, Dorr published an account of his travels, A Colored Man round the World, which he dedicated to his “Slave Mother” and to “the ruins of the ancestors of which he is the posterity.”

Though their backgrounds were diverse, American travelers shared remarkably similar impressions of the Middle East. Accustomed to well-ordered and largely homogenous American cities, the tourists were disoriented—literally unable to find the East—by the labyrinthine layout of Middle Eastern streets and by their culturally diverse inhabitants. James Cooley’s description of Cairo in 1842, for example, “narrow, gloomy…dusty, prison-like, and peculiar,” was indistinguishable from Stephens’s. While Stephens marveled at “the dashing Turk with his glittering saber, the wily Greek, the grave Armenian, and the despised Jews, with their long silk robes, their turbans,” Cooley gaped at the “Arabs, Armenians, Copts, Egyptians, Greeks, Jews, Syrians, and Turks…in their native costumes…apparently happy in all their filth and tawdry rags.” The same sense of anomie and shock struck Sarah Haight, on entering Istanbul in 1839. “I only saw a mass of irregular buildings, thrown together without any architectural rule, and in defiance of all good taste.”

Alike in their initial perceptions of Middle Eastern cities, the Americans subjected Middle Eastern society to the same ruthless judgments. Most arrived in the region already biased against Islam and soon found their prejudices confirmed. Islam, for Stephens, was a “false religion” followed by “bigoted Musselmans” and “haughty and deluded fanatics” and, for Cooley, a creed of “ignorance and superstition” embraced by “lunatics, idiots, and imposters.” Haight deplored the “Mohammedanism [that]…pulls down…every country in which it predominates,” and even David Dorr, who at first praised Islam for its acceptance of black people, ended up fearing Muslims as bigots and “head-choppers of Christians.”4

Cruelty, the Americans invariably assumed, was endemic to Islam and chronic throughout Middle Eastern cultures. In support of this charge, Stephens related his visit to a Cairo court where a seed-munching governor quietly ordered one of his subjects flogged. “When I heard the scourge whizzing through the air…and the first loud piercing shriek, I could stand it no longer,” Stephens recounted, adding that the governor kept smiling throughout. Americans were especially distressed by what they considered the mistreatment of Middle Eastern women. Cooley claimed that Arab women were “kept like birds in a cage [and] fed like beasts in a den,” and he recalled seeing one of them being bound and beaten by her husband while a crowd approvingly looked on. Yet not only women were treated brutally in the Middle East, the Americans discovered. Touring Morocco in 1842, Elizabeth Cabot Kirkland was stunned by the wholesale oppression of the Jews. “A rich Jew merchant is obliged to pull off his slippers before he passes the threshold of a Moor,” she wrote, “and [the Muslims] drive them about the streets whenever they cross their path, much as you would a dog.” Later, in Cairo, Kirkland encountered “a man lying stretched before us, the head severed from the body and placed between the legs.” The victim, she learned, was guilty of engaging in politics.

Middle Eastern politics was another subject of fascination for Americans, and a focus of disgust. Convinced that America’s democracy represented the highest form of human governance, the tourists regarded the region’s autocratic rulers with a blend of abhorrence and contempt. Stephens denounced the Oriental system in which “life hangs by so brittle a thread that when you part from a man of power, in all probability you will never see him again,” and Dorr pitied the sultan who “lives like a monarch, but will die like a fool.” Dr. Valentine Mott, one of New York’s most illustrious surgeons, was appalled by the coarseness of the Middle Eastern nobility he met in 1843. “His royal highness,” wrote Mott of an Egyptian prince, a grandson of Muhammad Ali, “has evidently a greater quantum of adipose than cerebral matter.” The editor and naval chaplain Walter Colton, like Mott a liberal who looked for the positive in Middle Eastern life, nevertheless shuddered at the knowledge that the sultan could, with a wave of his hand, order a thousand decapitations. “Islamism,” he concluded in 1836, was “the grave of inspired truth and liberty.”

The Middle East suffered from many evils, these travelers agreed, all of which it could be rectified simply by abandoning Islam and embracing Western culture. “The same effort which lifts the Mussulman above the broken fetters of his despotism, will place him on the ruins of his religion,” Colton ventured. “The scepter and the crescent, altar and throne, will sink together.” Cooley also looked forward to a time when Muslims would adopt “a more enlightened and consistent faith” and so gain entrance to the family of “civilized nations.” Haight went further by calling for an international “political crusade” to humble Islam and dismantle the Ottoman Empire. Presciently, she foresaw that Britain might someday take over Egypt and parts of Asia Minor and that France would occupy Syria and North Africa. But first Islam must “kick the beam,” in Haight’s quaint colloquialism, and disappear.

From a twenty-first-century perspective, the Americans who criticized the Middle East for its alleged corruption, cruelty, and bigotry were undoubtedly hypocrites. Their own nation enslaved nearly a sixth of its populace and, under the Manifest Destiny banner, forcibly uprooted numbers of native tribes. Hangings were still considered public entertainment in nineteenth-century America and political graft, epitomized by New York’s Tammany Hall, flourished. Yet the memoirs of American travelers reveal little by way of introspection or a willingness to weigh their own country’s foibles against those they attributed to the Middle East. Rather, their writings display an almost reverential love for anything remotely American. “There is a feeling of nationality among Americans abroad that I think belongs to no other people,” averred Edward Joy Morris, a future congressman and ambassador to the Porte, who in 1841 planted the Stars and Stripes on the peak of an Egyptian pyramid. The artist William H. Bartlett, who came to Cairo in 1849 in search of “the city of Saladin and the Arabian Nights,” ended up contrasting “Egypt, fallen and decrepit, bowed under oppression and…a false religion” with “America, daily rising in power, a land of light, freedom, enterprise, and Christianity!”

The United States, the paragon of liberty and virtue, had much to teach the Middle East, the tourists insisted. They looked forward to the day when missionaries, engineers, educators, and statesmen would, in the words of Sarah Haight, “penetrate the darkness that overshadows this heathen land” and remodel the region after America.5 Oblivious to the lack of equality and justice that sullied their society back home, American travelers gazed into a Middle Eastern mirror, through its cracked and tarnished glass, and the image they saw was flawless.

AMERICANS VIEWED the Middle East through virtually identical eyes and they toured it according to almost uniform itineraries. After accessing the region either through Alexandria or Istanbul, they invariably journeyed to Cairo for a requisite junket to the pyramids and a cruise up the Nile. Because of the precariousness of the journey, they were obliged to hire armed guards and dragomen—sixteen men, in the case of Sarah Haight. Also for safety, Americans were advised to dress in native attire, which, in Stephens’s case, consisted of “yellow slippers, blue sash, sword, and a pair of large Turkish pistols.” When not fending off beggars and flies, the voyagers fixed their attention on the ruins lining the riverbank, a source of awestruck melancholy but also of cost-free souvenirs. Citing the needs of science, Mott chipped a piece from an ancient obelisk, and Stephens chiseled the relief of a hawk from a temple wall, saving, he said, “that precious fragment from the ruin to which it was doomed.” The Americans also delighted in shooting wildlife—jackals, crocodiles, and birds. But the most titillating activity, at least for the men, was ogling Middle Eastern women.

In keeping with the nineteenth-century Western romantic perception of the Middle East as a fleshpot of bagnios, seraglios, and harems, antebellum American men roamed the region in a state of unflagging arousal. Accustomed to seeing women’s faces but rarely their naked limbs, the travelers were obsessed with the sight of Middle Eastern women who, though usually veiled, often seemed indifferent to body covering. Dorr told of locking eyes with one masked maiden (“I would have given five pounds to lift her veil”) and trying to buy another for twenty-five dollars. Chapters in his book detail the washing of harem girls by eunuchs, and the art of belly dancing. “Such a jingling and a screwing [and]…quivering of bodies is only to be imagined.” Valentine Mott dwelt on the women’s hennaed hands and long-lashed, kohl-blackened eyes, and Stephens fixated on the lips that, he imagined, nightly greeted the weary nomad. Few tourists were as libidinous as Nathaniel Parker Willis, however, an accomplished poet and publisher of Edgar Allan Poe. Traversing the Middle East in 1852, Willis tried “in vain to get a peep at the camel-driver’s wife or daughter.” He succeeded, finally, in catching a glimpse of a Jewish girl, “a graceful creature of fourteen, with a shape like a Grecian Cupidon,” and an Arab slave whose “warm dark eye…lifted its heavy and sleepy lids, and looked out of the accidentally opened door.” In both cases, Willis sighed, “In my life I have seen nothing so beautiful.”6

From Egypt and the Nile, American tourists usually turned eastward, toward Lebanon and Syria. Because of the danger of rebellious tribes and highwaymen, here, too, they carried an array of weapons, including pistols, carbines, and sabers. “We kept our arms in readiness, never suffering the baggage to be out of our sight,” wrote the poet Bayard Taylor, a translator of Goethe’s Faust, while trudging toward Beirut in 1853. “I wore my Frank dress, a turban on my head, and over this a white cotton sheet which covered a considerable part of my face,” recalled Elizabeth Cabot Lodge, while her husband, John Thornton Kirkland, the former president of Harvard, went about “armed with pistols.” Hazards notwithstanding, the rustic, tawny villages and the medieval magic of Aleppo and Damascus enabled Americans to recover some of the romance they had lost in Cairo and Alexandria. Taylor, for one, pictured himself as a crusader marching into battle against Saladin. The very grass and trees, he  mused, “heard the trumpets of the Middle Ages, and the clang…[of] European armor.”

The climax of any Syrian tour was a pilgrimage to the castle of Lady Hester Stanhope, the same Nun of Lebanon who had hosted Harriet Livermore in 1837. The tradition of visiting Stanhope appears to have been established fifteen years earlier by a New Yorker named George B. Rapelje, a fifty-year-old “plain man, of steady habits” who spent several hours in the lady’s company. Well entertained and victualed, Rapelje departed the castle with a sample of Damascene silk that Stanhope asked him to market in America. Unfortunately, by the time Stephens and Haight arrived, Stanhope was no longer receiving visitors. “Her friends have fallen away from her and her treasures have been exhausted by…wily Arabs, who…ridiculed her…religious creed,” Haight explained. The American missionary William Thomson, one of the few people Stanhope still agreed to see, found her withered body in 1839 and gave it a pauper’s burial.

Sailing the Nile, scaling pyramids, or eyeing Nubian beauties—none of these experiences compared with what was, for Americans, the zenith of any Middle Eastern trip: Palestine. The travelers’ excitement mounted the closer they came to the Holy Land, measured by their ever frequent references to the Bible. For Cooley, the sight of Egyptian snake charmers evoked Ecclesiastes (“Surely the serpent will bite without enchantment”), and sharing a meal with peasants made him think of Matthew (“He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish”). “Can it be a…dream?” Stephens asked as he stood on the shores of the Red Sea, “the very spot where the chosen people of God…stopped to behold the divided waters,” or atop Mount Sinai, “witness of that great interview between man and his Maker.” Scripture and landscape melded the moment Americans entered the Holy Land. Here were cities they had heard and read about since childhood and from which many of their towns had taken their names. “All my historical recollections…came fresh to my memory,” exclaimed Haight. “I saw in every face a patriarch, and in every…chieftain an apostle.”

Yet the fantasy of Palestine, like that of Egypt or Lebanon before it, swiftly evaporated. Entering Nazareth and Tiberias, Jaffa and Bethlehem, the Americans were crestfallen to find not the idealized settings of the Bible but rather a backwater of thistles, ruins, and dust. “How deplorable is [the Holy Land’s] condition now!” the same Sarah Haight bewailed. She was especially shocked by the sparseness of the population and its extreme poverty, even by Middle Eastern standards. “The very face of the earth is reduced to a…howling wilderness.” Jericho, Dorr determined, “is not worth mentioning,” a boring wasteland “covered with broken bricks and stones.” Most disappointing were Bethlehem and Jerusalem, their holy sites dominated, Stephens roared, by minarets and decorated with “parti-colored marble and…gaudy ornaments.” Dorr spent over two weeks in Jerusalem and departed “wishing never to return again.

Without exception, Americans returned from their Middle Eastern journeys bereft of any sense of reverie or illusion. Dorr, who once envisaged the Middle East as his ancestral homeland, in the end found nothing kindred about the region, only an abundance of dogs, snake charmers, and camel drivers contemptuous of anything Western. “Nothing denotes that the country or man is marching forward,” a disappointed Valentine Mott complained. “There is no appearance of intellectual or moral elevation.” Most disenchanted of all was John Lloyd Stephens. A month after setting out to find “gorgeous pictures of Oriental scenes,” the once boyish-looking and clear-eyed Stephens had been transformed into an embittered, fault-finding grump. Misogyny, gluttony, indolence, bad manners, and an utter lack of hygiene were just some of the native characteristics of the Middle East he now found insufferable. “I never saw among the wanderers of the desert any traits…which did not make me…value more the privileges of civilization.”7

In spite of the dim and often hideous pictures they painted, the books written by these American travelers proved exceptionally popular. John Lloyd Stephens, later to gain fame exploring Mayan temples in the Yucatán, published his Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land in 1837 and sold an impressive 21,000 copies in two years. Critics also praised Colton’s A Visit to Constantinople and Athens as “replete with information…on Oriental life and manners,” and called Cooley’s American in Egypt, with Rambles through Arabia Petra and the Holy Land “a novelty quite unique in its plan, and containing a great deal of…amusement.” Haight’s “precious volumes” were so “vivid and lifelike” that one reviewer imagined himself traveling to “those intensely-interesting regions” together with “the gifted-lady author.” Following the success of his book, Bayard Taylor went on a lucrative tour in which, dressed as an Arab, he lectured American audiences on Islam. David Dorr also gained a modicum of fame, the Cleveland Plain Dealer judging his work “graphic and racy [and] an exceedingly interesting work.”

Rather than tarnishing American illusions about the Middle East, the travelers’ testimonies only burnished them. The more sordid the portrayal of the region, it seemed, the more alluring its appeal to Americans. Writers in the United States continued to dwell on Middle Eastern themes. Edgar Allan Poe, who had lauded Stephens’s book for its “freedom…frankness, and…utter absence of pretension,” had himself written a poem, Al-Aaraaf, inspired by A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, and went on to author Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque. Washington Irving, too, returned to Islamic subjects. In 1850, he published a two-volume study, Mahomet and His Successors, which, though not uncritical of the Prophet, nevertheless extolled “his enthusiastic and visionary spirit” and the “striking and sublime” quality of his “luminous path.”

These works, both literary and anecdotal, further thickened the procession of Americans steaming toward the Middle East. By midcentury, the United States was second only to Britain in the number of its citizens visiting Egypt each year, and in Syria it was unsurpassed. “I have taken a thousand American gentlemen through Syria,” boasted Yusef, an Arab dragoman who escorted the famed Kentuckian writer, artist, and frontiersman J. Ross Browne in 1853. “Yes, sir…. I like the Americans!…Up to everything—fun, fight, or frolic.”8

YUSEF’S DESCRIPTION would not, however, apply to the most troubled, pacifistic, and depressive American traveler, who was also the most ingenious. The self-educated son of a bankrupt New York merchant, he had worked as a cabin boy and a whaler, had served in the U.S. Navy and lived among South Sea cannibals before settling on a western Massachusetts farm. In December 1856, with little more than a toothbrush and a single change of clothing, Herman Melville sailed for the Middle East.

Call Me Ishmael

Ill, despondent because his recent book Moby Dick had sold a mere three thousand copies, the thirty-seven-year-old Melville was desperate to recapture his readers’ ardor. Images of the Middle East, many of them conjured from A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, had long captivated him, and both Stephen Decatur and David Porter had figured in his fiction. The huge and haunting “Arabian traveler” who moves the protagonist of Melville’s Redburn to decamp for “remote and barbarous countries” was probably modeled on John Lloyd Stephens, and John Ledyard, “the great New England traveler,” was mentioned in Moby Dick. Now Melville, who had exhorted his readers, “Call me Ishmael”—according to the Bible, the father of all Arabs—resolved to see “stony Arabia” for himself. His objective was to find inspiration for a Middle Eastern version of Typee, his most popular adventure story. “I am full (just now) of this glorious Eastern jaunt,” he excitedly told his journal. “Think of it!—Jerusalem & the Pyramids.”

Like Sarah Haight twenty years earlier, Melville entered the Middle East via Istanbul and was instantly overwhelmed. “Imagine an immense accumulation of the rags of all nations, & all colors rained down on a dense mob, all struggling for huge bales & bundles of rags, gesturing with all gestures & wrangling in all tongues.” Like Stephens and Cooley, he shuddered at the nameless, meandering streets with their “horrible grimy tragic air” and “rotten & wicked looking houses,” visualizing “a suicide hung from every rafter within.” He, too, was astonished by the ethnic diversity and sexual intensity of the city, imagining that “out of every other window look faces (Jew, Greek, Armenian),” and “out of old shanties peep lovely girls like lillies & roses growing in cracked flower-pots.” Along with the many American visitors before him, Melville was dumbfounded by how millions of Middle Easterners could, “with one consent,” reject the essence of Western civilization, “much of our morality & all of our religion.”

Following the standard itinerary, Melville departed for Egypt. In Alexandria, he paused to view Pompey’s pillar, which looked, he thought, “like a huge stick of candy after having been long sucked,” then proceeded to Cairo, that “grand masquerade of mortality,” and the pyramids. There, at the foot of those colossal monuments, Melville lapsed into an almost mystical trance:

Vapors below summits. Kites sweeping & soaring around, hovering right over apex. At angles, like broken cliffs…. Arab guides inflowing white mantles. Conducted as by angels up to heaven…A feeling of awe & terror came over me. Dread of the Arabs…. The idea of Jehovah born here…something vast, indefinite, incomprehensible, and awful. These the steps Jacob lay at…Might have been created with the creation.

Such reveries were not infrequent for Melville, or unwelcome. He longed for transcendent experiences, moments of spiritual and metaphysical illumination that could lift him above this disingenuous life and afford him glimpses of truth. Having attained those heights in Egypt, he fully expected to match, if not surpass, them in Palestine, his next destination.9

“No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectations than Palestine,” Melville conceded shortly after arriving in Jaffa. Joining a caravan of thirty Arab horsemen who delighted in discharging their revolvers into every puddle and cactus, tormented by insects and the piercing sunlight, he ascended into the Judean hills. “Is the desolation of the land the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity?” he asked himself, then answered, “Hapless are the favorites of heaven.” Rather than uplifting him, the scenery pitched Melville into an ominous, hallucinatory gloom: “Whitish mildew pervading whole tracts of landscape—bleached—leprosy—encrustation of curses—old cheese—bones of rocks,—crunched, knawed, & mumbled—…You see the anatomy—compares with ordinary regions as skeleton with living & rosy man.”

Darkening as he rode, Melville’s depression overshadowed his initial sight of Jerusalem, which, he wrote, “looks at you like a cold grey eye in a cold old man.” Nothing enchanted him, not the Mosque of Omar nor the Holy Sepulcher, which smelled to him “like a dead house.” He sneered at the tour guides who pointed out the steps where Christ spoke and, in the same breath, the restaurant that served the best coffee. A descendant of Puritans who considered Americans to be “a peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time,” Melville felt little affinity for the Jews he encountered. He described them as lingering “in the emptiness of the lifeless antiquity of Jerusalem,” like “flies that have taken up their abode in a skull.”

The very concept of restorationism was odious to Melville: “that preposterous Jew mania,” he called it. He refused to believe that Palestine, a desert country, could ever sustain a state and that the Jews might be remade into farmers. Nor did he have much confidence in the ability of missionaries to transform Eastern Orthodox Arabs, much less the Muslims, into American-style Protestants. “Might as well attempt to convert bricks into bride-cake as the Orientals into Christians,” he laughed.

Melville’s attitudes toward Jews and missionaries did not endear him to the first American he met in Palestine, Warder Cresson. The former consul turned farm owner had also embarked on a physical and spiritual journey. By creating a Jewish state in Palestine, he came to believe, the United States could still save itself from dissolution over the issue of slavery. “God hath chosen Zion…as the center of the whole world…and there cannot be unity and harmony…without this concentration,” he wrote. At the same time Cresson’s “researches” into the New Testament and his extensive contacts with Jews had led him to question his own beliefs and to identify with those of the people he had come to baptize. Abandoning what he called “the sawdust of Christianity” for “the genuine article of good old cheese itself,” Cresson became a Jew, underwent circumcision, and adopted a Hebrew name, Michael Boaz Israel.

Cresson’s “model American farm,” meanwhile, was failing, and in an effort to secure donations, he returned to his native Philadelphia. His wife greeted him not with affection but with a civil suit aimed at procuring his remaining American assets and adducing his conversion as proof of mental incompetence. The trial was a public event, with more than one hundred witnesses, among them Mordecai Noah, called to testify. The defendant won, “settling forever,” Philadelphia’s Public Ledger declaimed, “the principle that a man’s ‘religious opinions’ never can be made the test of his sanity.” Subsequently, Cresson—Israel—sailed back to Palestine, married a Jewish woman, and moved to Jerusalem. There, in January 1857, he met Herman Melville.

The encounter, for both men, perhaps, was uneventful. Melville wrote tersely of “Crisson,” an “American turned Jew,” who divorced his wife in Philadelphia and then married a Jerusalemite “Jewess.” Beyond those words, however, his journal remained mute. Melville ultimately devoted only one word to describing the man who, Ahab-like, had forfeited everything in an obsessive pursuit. The single word was “Sad.”10

Melville’s interaction with restoration-minded Americans did not end with Cresson, though. He next visited the American Agricultural Mission, the colony maintained by Walter Dickson, the Grossteinbeck brothers, and several American families. Of these, the first to host Melville were the Saunderses, Charles and Martha, originally from Rhode Island. The pair, both in their mid-forties, had failed as gold prospectors in California before rediscovering their faith and sailing to Palestine. Mr. Saunders, portrayed by Melville as “a broken-down machinist…out at elbows,” had been enervated by the Middle Eastern heat, “a man feeble by Nature, & feebler by sickness, but worthy.” His daughter, too, looked ill, Melville thought, and homesick. Mrs. Saunders, by contrast, was studying Arabic with a neighboring sheikh and acting as a “doctress” to the poor, a plucky woman reading a “Book of Female Heroines,” which Melville “took to be the exponent of her aspirations.” Both of the settlers expressed bitterness toward the Jews who, they claimed, would “come, pretend to be touched & all that, get clothing & then—vanish.” Charles Saunders had despaired of teaching even a single Jew to farm, much less of converting any, but Martha stayed sanguine. “She is waiting the Lord’s time,” Melville quoted her saying. “The Lord’s work must be done.”

From the Saunderses’ house, Melville wandered over to that of Walter Dickson, a “thorough Yankee, about 60, with a long oriental beard, blue Yankee coat, & Shaker waistcoat.” Also present was Dickson’s starchy wife, Sarah. Melville inserted a transcript of his conversation with the couple, complete with biting asides, into his journal:

H.M. “Have you settled here permanently, Mr Dickson?”

Mr D. “Permanently settled on the soil of Zion, Sir.” With a kind of dogged emphasis.

Mrs. D. (as if she dreaded her husband’s getting on his hobby, & was pained by it)—“The walking is a little muddy, aint it?”…

H.M. to Mr D. “Have you any Jews working with you?”

Mr D. No. Can’t afford to hire them. Do my own work, with my son. Besides, the Jews are lazy & dont like work.

H.M. “And do you not think that a hindrance to making farmers of them?”

Mr D. “That’s it. The Gentile Christians must teach them better. The fact is the fullness of Time has come. The Gentile Christians must prepare the way.”

The visit to Dickson’s farm concluded the author’s nineteen-day sojourn in Palestine, a profound but draining experience. The Middle East, that seductive region where Melville had hoped to rekindle his inspiration and revive his diminishing career, had proved an egregious disappointment. “The whole thing is half melancholy, half farcical,” he groaned, “like all the rest of the world.”

Twenty years would pass before the influence of Melville’s Middle Eastern journey became manifest in Clarel, his vast epic poem. Spanning over eighteen thousand lines and couched in a dense tetrameter that readers and reviewers alike found impenetrable, the work tells the story of an American divinity student, Clarel, on the course of his pilgrimage to Palestine. In the Holy Land, where missionaries and merchants “in the name of Christ and Trade / Deflower the world’s last sylvan glade,” the youth meets a progression of devotionally charged and emotionally challenged characters. The most remarkable of these is Nathan, a “strange pervert” of Puritan stock who, like Warder Cresson, has changed his faith to Judaism. While Clarel strives to reclaim Nathan for Christianity, he also falls in love with the apostate’s daughter, Ruth. The dichotomy between Nathan and Clarel and the ambivalent treatment of the poem’s many Jews—African and Indian Jews, Westernized Jews, wandering Jews—symbolized Melville’s own spiritual wrestling. That conflict is left unresolved, however, by Nathan’s murder at the hands of Arab bandits, followed by Ruth’s heartbreaking demise.

Though clearly literary devices, the deaths of Nathan and Ruth were also grounded in Middle Eastern reality. A year after Melville’s departure, on January 11, 1858, a party of five Arabs entered the Dickson farm, avowedly in search of a lost cow. The Americans came out to help in the search and were promptly set upon. Frederick Grossteinbeck ran back for his rifle but was shot in the groin. “Oh! Father forgive all my sins and help me to bear this dreadful pain,” he cried to his wife, Mary, while bleeding to death on the floor. Mary was dragged, clinging to a broken bedstead, into the yard, where she was repeatedly and brutally raped. Sarah Dickson was also violated, and her husband was slashed and struck unconscious. Only their youngest daughter, Caroline, escaped unhurt, by playing dead in a corner. “We sat half an hour at least without stirring, in the dark,” Mary remembered.11

The Dickson colony never recovered from the assault. The survivors fled to the United States, including Johann Grossteinbeck, who shortened and Americanized his name. His grandson, John, would go on to write novels, among them East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath, of tragic, biblical proportions.

Ships of the Sea and the Desert

A flagrant attack against peaceful American families in the Middle East might have gone unanswered earlier in the century, but by the late 1850s Americans residing in the region could no longer be robbed with impunity. The status of Americans in the region had changed substantially since the days when George Bethune English had to change his name and religion in order to proclaim his patriotism on the Nile. The State Department rigorously protested the assault on the Dickson farm and demanded that its perpetrators be punished. But the Ottoman authorities dallied on the matter. Infuriated, Washington instructed its consul in Alexandria, Edwin de Leon, to proceed to Jaffa at once and lodge a protest with the governor.

De Leon was no ordinary consul. A former literary critic and correspondent from South Carolina, he had displayed both bonhomie and fierce indignation in his relations with Egyptian officials, and so gained their trust. De Leon was also a Jew, a member of a venerable Sephardic family who owed his post to the State Department’s now established notion that Jews formed a natural link between Christian America and the Muslim Middle East. Deposited in Alexandria by the USS St. Louis in 1853, De Leon swiftly gained the confidence of Muhammad Ali’s successors, Abbas Hilmi and Sa’id. Those connections proved useful when, following a series of pogroms against Russian Orthodox communities in the Crimea, De Leon secured shelter for the fleeing Christians in Egypt.

Charged with obtaining justice for the victims of the Dickson farm attack, De Leon determined to receive “prompt, stern and effectual” action from the Ottomans, “without which, American life and property will never…be safe in Syria, nor the American name respected.” Arriving in Jaffa on March 5, 1858, he immediately demanded and received an audience with the governor, but refused to accept his gestures of hospitality.

“Are our countries at war that you treat us thus?” the slighted official asked.

De Leon answered brusquely, “We regard the murder of men and violation of women, when permitted and screened by Governors, as a declaration of war. You have commenced it, not we.” If the governor refused to apprehend the assailants, the consul went on, the United States would send a warship to “throw shells many miles, and leave not one stone of Jaffa on another.”

The governor at once relented and arrested several members of a powerful Bedouin tribe found in possession of Dickson’s possessions. De Leon’s demands had been met, but his problems suddenly multiplied. Hundreds of the prisoners’ kinsmen, armed and demanding revenge, surrounded the city’s walls. The consul was faced with the dilemma of either releasing the suspects or hunkering down for a siege. He chose neither.

Understanding “the Arab character well enough to know that any appearance of timidity on [his] part might imperil the success of my mission,” De Leon assembled his vice consul, dragoman, and Janissaries—eight men, in all—and issued them horses and pistols. He then led his force out of the city and straight through the “wolfishly glaring” Bedouin. “The audacity of the act overawed them,” he later boasted, adding that the Arabs from that day called him “majnun” (madman) which “carries with it in the East a kind of sanctity and immunity.” The governor was less pleased, however, De Leon noted. A Muslim official had been compelled by a Jew “to punish ‘true believers’…for the satisfaction of ‘Christian dogs.’”

The suspects were subsequently tried and found guilty of murder, yet De Leon refused to consider the Dickson affair closed. “It is the nature of the Eastern Race, as of the tiger, after once lapping Christian blood to thirst for more,” he posited. There would be further attacks against American citizens in the area, he believed, unless the United States acted demonstrably and with force. To safeguard the “unprotected heads of the Christians and Jews in Palestine,” De Leon advised the government to send “an emblem of our power,” a battleship, to the Middle East.12

The government heeded De Leon’s advice and, in October 1859, the USS Macedonian appeared off the Syrian coast. The commander of the ship, Uriah Levy, was an exemplary figure, famous for declaring, “I would rather serve as a cabin boy in the American Navy than as a captain in any other service in the world,” as well as for outlawing the Navy’s long-honored practice of flogging. Prosperous in business as well, he had purchased Monticello from James Turner Barclay, the Jerusalem missionary, and restored its Jeffersonian charm. Most exceptionally, however, Levy had become the first American Jew to attain the rank of commodore.13

Thus it happened that two American Jews, De Leon and Levy, set out to protect American Christians in the Middle East—a paradoxical situation, no doubt, but one that reflected the self-assurance that the United States could now demonstrate in the region. More elementally, the episode indicated the extent to which the tools of diplomatic and military power could be wielded in the service of American religion in the Middle East, the ultimate amalgam.

STILL MISSING from that mixture, however, was the mythic component, but that, too, would soon to be supplied by another extraordinary American. Vermont-born and Dartmouth-educated, George Perkins Marsh had worked as a sheep breeder, miller, bridge builder, and quarryman before inheriting a fortune and devoting himself to art. He also found time, in 1840, to be elected to Congress, where he developed a close friendship with the aging congressman John Quincy Adams. Ten years later, Marsh left Washington to take over the American embassy in Istanbul. The Turks impressed him as “a rude people” and the Middle East as “a wretched place, full of villains of every description…rape, murder, robbery, and religious vendettas.” He nevertheless became an effective ambassador, advancing the sale of American-made warships to the Porte and organizing the first Ottoman naval mission to the United States. In addition to exercising authority, though, Marsh, the son of a Methodist minister, also pursued his religious impulses and at the first opportunity visited Palestine.

The trip would prove transformative for Marsh, not least because of the illness that nearly took his life near Nazareth. While recuperating, he reflected on the pitiful state of the Holy Land, its hillsides long deforested and soil drained by centuries of unchecked cultivation, overgrazing, and neglect. America, too, would become desiccated, Marsh reckoned, if its citizens wantonly exploited their environment and their leaders remained indifferent. There, in Palestine, Marsh formulated the ideas later incorporated in his master-work, Man and Nature, that called for government protection of wildlife and precious resources. The same urge to safeguard the United States from the ecological devastation of the Middle East led Marsh to pioneer the American conservationist movement and the creation of a national research institute on nature, the Smithsonian.

Conservationism was an outgrowth of Marsh’s religious experience in the Middle East, but the region also stirred his rustic imagination. While riding to Jerusalem, he became fascinated by the animal that Melville once likened to “a clergyman in a stiff cravat” and “a cross between a[n] ostrich & a grasshopper”—the camel. Marsh had a different metaphor for camels, “ships of the desert,” and he believed that, if imported to the United States, camels could thrive in the arid Southwest, delivering mail and maintaining supply routes between outposts. Most usefully, camel-borne cavalrymen could subdue “the Comanches…and other Rocky Mt. Bedouins” and “strike with a salutary terror the…savage tribes upon our border.”14 What began as a fantasy of camels would, Marsh believed, result in the projection of American power.

Marsh presented his vision of the camel corps at the Smithsonian in January 1855 and immediately made a convert of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. “Napoleon, when in Egypt used…the same animal in subduing the Arabs, whose habits and country were very similar to those of the mounted Indians of our western plains,” he reasoned. The result was the American Camel Company, created by Congress with a budget of $30,000. The sum was entrusted to three relatives of the late ambassador David Porter—Edward F. Beale, Gwinn Harris Heap, and Lieutenant David Dixon Porter—who in turn enlisted the help of Edwin De Leon in Egypt. In all, seventy-nine camels were purchased from various Middle Eastern ports and loaded onto the USS Supply, the same ship that delivered William Lynch to Palestine. “Americans will be able to manage camels not only as well, but better than Arabs,” boasted the officer in charge of the consignment, Major Henry Wayne. “And they will do it with more humanity and with far greater intelligence.” Wayne’s bravado notwithstanding, five Arab “camel  conductors” also boarded the ship, among them one Hadji Ali or, as the Americans nicknamed him, Hi Jolly.

Braving weeks of turbulent seas, on May 14, 1856, the camels reached their destination in Indianola, Texas. Their reception was no less stormy, as the sight of the bizarrely shaped beasts triggered a stampede of local mules, horses, and cattle. Camels, Americans learned, may conserve water, but they were also petulant, flatulent, halitosic, and liable to induce seasickness in their riders. The people of Galveston simply banned the animals from their city, with a fifty-dollar fine for violators. The caravan nevertheless completed its maiden trek, through alternating downpours and sandstorms, from San Antonio to Fort Defiance, Arizona. “What are these camels the representation of?” asked May Stacey, a trooper who accompanied the train. “The ‘go-aheadness’ of the American character,” he answered himself, “which subdues even nature by its energy and perseverance.”

Jeff Davis was exuberant. “These tests fully realize the anticipations entertained of their [the camels’] usefulness in the transportation of military supplies.” The government decided to buy an additional one thousand camels, one of which was to have been presented to Congress by Lieutenant Porter. The plans, however, never materialized; travel by dromedary was soon outmoded by that of the iron horse. The surviving camels were either sold to mines and circuses or left to roam freely in the southwestern desert. The last of them, Topsy, died at the Los Angeles Zoo in 1934. Hi Jolly, who later became a prospector and a U.S. Calvary scout, would be honored by a pyramid-shaped memorial and an Arizona highway that still bears his name. America’s brief romance with the camel would soon be forgotten, though, obscured by gathering storms in both the Middle East and the United States.15

IN 1860, long-smoldering ethnic tensions in Syria, perennially stoked by the Europeans, erupted in a nationwide conflagration. Druze warriors slaughtered some twelve thousand Maronite, Greek Orthodox, and Greek Catholic Christians. “The blood at length rose above the ankles, flowed above the gutters, gushed out of the water-spouts and gurgled through the streets,” the American missionary Henry Jessup wrote of one massacre. “Not a body was buried.” The unprecedented scale of the atrocities overwhelmed the evangelists, who were suddenly saddled with feeding an estimated fifteen thousand “terror-stricken, hungry and shelterless” refugees. Americans were once again caught in a Middle Eastern crossfire of which they had little understanding or warning. Fearing for their own lives, finally, the missionaries retreated to Beirut, where they, too, became objects of charity.

The enormity of civil strife in the Middle East, however shocking, was dwarfed by the massive rift cleaving America. The antebellum period in American history was hurtling toward a cataclysmic end. Also concluding was a crucial forty-year span in the country’s relationship with the Middle East, an era characterized by fundamental and far-reaching change.

Building on their postcolonial legacy in the region—the Barbary Wars, the early searches for adventure, and the advent of missionary efforts—Americans had engaged the Middle East with a mixture of self-confidence, curiosity, and zeal. No longer supplicants, American diplomats approached Middle Eastern rulers from positions of strength and, increasingly, with friendship. At the same time, tourists and explorers traversed the region with alacrity and, through their writings, introduced thousands of their countrymen to a spectrum of Middle Eastern cultures. Popular fascination with the area was also fueled by American artists, who, eager for inspiration beyond that supplied by A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, drew freely from Middle Eastern motifs. American evangelists, meanwhile, recovered from tragic setbacks to lay the foundations of an educational network that would help instill local populations with republican and patriotic ideas.

Rather than merely attacking or reacting to the Middle East, Americans were for the first time interacting with it and on multiple levels—strategic, commercial, cultural, and scientific. And although their relations were not always mutually respectful or tension free, the people of the United States and those of the Middle East were participating in highly diverse and frequently fruitful contact. They had begun, however fitfully, to know one another.

While relations between the United States and the Middle East intensified, the major themes of American involvement in the region—power, fantasy, and faith—also intermingled, clashing at times, but ultimately, irrevocably, merging. At home, however, Americans were growing asunder. Jefferson Davis would soon be elected the president of a newly seceded Confederacy. William Francis Lynch, enlisting as a captain in the Confederate navy, would find himself at war with David Dixon Porter and Uriah Levy, both of whom remained loyal to the Union. Edwin de Leon would also serve the Southern states, while Johann Steinbeck took up arms for the North. David Dorr would be severely wounded, fighting for emancipation in Georgia.16

The constitutionally joined nation, produced, in part, by America’s Middle East experience was tragically unraveling. The coming Civil War would alter the Republic in many and profound ways, yet it would also exert an enduring impact on peoples from Morocco to Syria to Anatolia. The region’s first Western-style universities would be built and the latest technologies introduced to help modernize traditional societies. Strife in the United States would also play a crucial role in the construction of the Suez Canal, which would influence the region’s politics for more than a century. While blue and gray battled over their country’s future, American soldiers, churchmen, and travelers together transformed the Middle East.