The U. S. frigate Constellation, wearing the broad command pennant of Commodore Lawrence Kearny, slipped out of the harbor of Macao and pointed her slender bowsprit up river. Leaving the Bocca Tigris astern, she threaded her way through 70 miles of muddy water, finally coming to anchor off Whampoa, about ten miles below Canton, China. A few days later, on 11 May 1842, Kearny dispatched a report to Secretary of the Navy Hiram K. Paulding:
It will be gratifying to the Department, I presume, to learn that my presence in the river, even as high as Whampoa, has not given offense to the high authorities of Canton.
That the Chinese had not taken offense to this unprecedented violation of their sacrosanct internal waters by a foreign warship was of profound significance, and was due solely to the diplomatic finesse demonstrated by Kearny since his arrival at Macao in late March. In the best tradition of the U. S. naval officer of pre-radio days, he had spent nearly two full months representing the United States in a distant and little-known land, during a period of great turmoil.
The trouble had started in Canton over a multi-million-dollar traffic in opium. Annually, the British carried huge quantities of the narcotic from Indian poppy fields to China, entering it through Canton—the only port then open to Occidental trade. When Peking moved to halt the traffic, Anglo-Chinese relations deteriorated quickly, and the first Opium War erupted in 1839.
It was not much of a war. British seapower predominated throughout and the Chinese, for the most part, limited themselves to mob assaults against English nationals ashore. To ensure that they did not miss any Englishmen, Cantonese mobs attacked all fankwei (foreign devils), including the few American merchants then residing in that South China city. The Americans clamored for U. S. protection.
Their answer came in the form of a naval squadron under the command of Lawrence Kearny. Actually, “squadron” was a rather grand title for Kearny’s force, comprising, as it did, only two ships: the 42-year-old Constellation—already a venerable heroine of the U. S. Navy—and the 18-gun sloop-of-war Boston.
Though hostilities ended before the American ships arrived off Macao in March 1842, trouble remained, and Kearny immediately addressed himself to his orders. They provided the very general guidance of that period when distant duty was long on duration and short on close contact with Washington. They directed him to protect the interests of the United States and her citizens on the coast of China, to pay proper respect to the strange foreign and domestic policies of the Chinese, and to prevent and punish the smuggling of opium into China by Americans or by others under cover of the American flag.
Almost as soon as the Constellation’s anchor hit the Macao harbor mud, letters from American merchants began to arrive on board. They recounted outrages committed by the Chinese during the recent war, requested protection, and demanded reparations. Kearny paused only long enough to issue an official ban against American smuggling and then turned his attention to these claims. Some he considered to be valid, others to be gross overstatements.
Word of his deliberations quickly reached Viceroy Ke in Canton who wrote to the U. S. Vice Consul in that city:
. . . I have heard that the newly arrived Commodore manages affairs with clear understanding, profound wisdom, and great justice.
Kearny’s tact and fairness so impressed Ke that he left adjudication of all claims to the American’s discretion, committing China to abide by the Commodore’s decisions.
After solving these thorny problems—they resulted in Chinese payment of several hundred thousand dollars—Kearny dropped back down river to Macao where he remained for about a month before transiting to Hong Kong to pay his respects to the British flag officer commanding. There, he first learned of the Treaty of Nanking, which ended the Opium War.
His reaction was both swift and decisive. The strategic importance of this document struck Kearny at once, driving him to a series of deeds that would affect Western relations with China for the next hundred years.
The crux of the treaty was a provision opening five Chinese ports to British trade. Above all else, Kearny wanted the same benefits for his own country—and he set out to get them.
First, he dispatched three copies of the treaty to Washington: two overland across Asia and one across the Pacific on board the USS Boston. Then, knowing the folly of waiting the inevitable six months for instructions from Washington, he sailed back to Macao and promptly addressed a letter to Viceroy Ke. In it, he requested equal consideration and treatment for the United States and, in the process, coined a historic phrase destined to categorize Sino-Western dealings for ten decades.
. . . he [Kearny] hopes the importance of their [the United States] trade will receive consideration, and their citizens in that matter be placed upon the same footing as the merchants of the nation most favored.
Thus, he officially enunciated the “most favored nation” doctrine and laid the foundation for the “Open Door Policy,” proclaimed 57 years later by U. S. Secretary of State John Hay.
Too anxious to wait at Macao for results, Commodore Kearny again sailed up the river to Whampoa. There he received Ke’s reply which promised that “ . . . it shall not be permitted that the American merchants shall come to have merely a dry stick. . . .” [Ke would ensure their fair treatment.] And to seal the bargain, he offered Kearny a treaty.
Believing that by signing a formal treaty he would exceed his authority, the Commodore tactfully declined. But assured by the Chinese that such an agreement would be forthcoming as soon as authorized negotiators arrived in Canton, he considered his mission completed, and headed for home. His patient and painstaking preparations produced swift accord when Caleb Cushing eventually reached China in 1844. The Treaty of Wang Hiya was signed on 2 July. China’s door was open.
Kearny’s orders shaped his homeward-bound course by way of Hawaii. Arriving there in July 1843, he learned with dismay that, threatened with a naval bombardment by Britain’s Lord Paulet, commanding HMS Carysfort, King Kamehameha III had ceded the archipelago to England.
Undaunted by the fact that he was still thousands of miles and many weeks from Washington, that he was operating on a set of orders now nearly three years old, Kearny jumped straight into the middle of the controversy. He issued a stiff, formal protest against the seizure, refusing to recognize its validity until the three governments settled the matter.
He could not know, of course, that Hawaiian appeals for U. S. help had been answered and that British disavowal of Paulet’s brash performance was already on the way. Two weeks later, Rear Admiral Thomas, England’s naval commander-in-chief in the Pacific, arrived with the happy news and restored the islands to Hawaiian sovereignty.
Though the outcome of the Hawaiian crisis would have been just the same if Kearny had never appeared, nonetheless, his work there was typical of early 19th-century American naval officers. Operating far from home on extended cruises and, for all practical purposes, completely isolated from governmental direction, they acted on their own initiative to promote the interests of the United States. And none knew better than they the importance of care and consideration in international dealings if they were to avoid the embarrassment of later repudiation by their government—a trap which, thanks to Lord Paulet, snared England in 1843.
In this age of single-sideband control of naval forces operating halfway round the globe, when crises such as Lebanon, Cuba, and Vietnam are controllable—from minute to minute—by the President himself, Commodore Kearny’s freedom of action seems utterly incredible. But that freedom carried awesome responsibilities with it, responsibilities which Kearny accepted readily and which he discharged with consummate skill. Proceeding on his own, using the nicest sense of judgment and diplomacy, Lawrence Kearny won an invaluable concession for the United States. And it is, perhaps, the greatest irony of his distinguished career that this, his most significant contribution to U. S. interests abroad, received but meager official notice rather than the wide acclaim it so richly deserved.