They Were Fighters
This article originally appeared in Southern Exposure Vol. 33 No. 1/2, "East Meets South." Find more from that issue here.
The following article contains anti-Black racial slurs.
In her 1984 study, Chinese in the Post-Civil War South: A People Without a History, the anthropologist Lucy M. Cohen cited a 1976 interview with Ora Hongo Mixon, the great-granddaughter of Dr. Eli Hongo, one in the first group of Chinese to settle in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, in 1867. “I used to hear grandmother,” Mixon recalled, “. . . talk all the time about young Chinese who had come over [to Louisiana] from the war; they were fighters; she said they were tired of fighting.”1 The war they fled was the failed Taiping Rebellion of 1851-1864. Veterans of this peasant revolt came to Cuba as coolie laborers, and many of these were likely among the Cuban Chinese brought to Louisiana to work on sugar plantations beginning in the late 1860s. This story of immigrant Chinese who arrived, “tired of fighting,” in the Reconstruction-era American South is not often told. But it is in many ways a quintessentially Southern story, involving staples of Southern history: slavery, racism, conflicting visions of Baptist religion, and rebellion.
Rebels at Heart
The Chinese “fighters” who arrived in Natchitoches Parish in the late 1860s came by way of Cuba.2 In the 1840s, the great planters and slaveholders of Cuba—the hacendados—were in a bind and forced to turn to the importation of Chinese indentured plantation workers. British enforcement of the abolition of the slave trade had created a labor shortage on the island, but also, there was the specter of nearby Haiti and its successful slave revolt from earlier in the century. In other words, the hacendados faced a shortage of docile and compliant plantation workers, and thought of the Chinese. In 1847, three years after a slave uprising, the first group of 206 Chinese indentured workers from Fujian province landed on Cuban soil.3
A lot could be said about the nineteenth century saga of Chinese “immigrating” to Cuba. Before the British and then the Americans abolished the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 and 1808 respectively, the major promoters of what came to be known as the Chinese coolie trade had transported slaves from Africa. At its height, the Chinese coolie trade was carried very lucratively by fortune-amassing Liverpool, Boston and New York shipping companies.4 It is not surprising, therefore, that in several respects, the Chinese coolie trade mirrored the slave trade.
In the case of the Chinese coolie trade, armed men did not go out raiding and capturing victims as with the slave trade. However, brokers of Sino-Portuguese descent working on commission “would entice their [Chinese] victims into a teahouse, promise that they would be taken to . . . ‘Great Spain’ to make their fortune, pay them 8 silver dollars to sign an eight-year indenture agreement, and then decoy them to depositories or barracoons, which the Chinese called zhuzi guan, or ‘pig pens.’” Trapped in these enclosures fit for pigs but not for humans, many of the Chinese died because of disease. At this point the immigrants became coolies; they “were stripped of clothing, disciplined with salted cat-o’-nine tails, and penned to await the next clipper ship sailing for the sugar plantations of Cuba. . . .” Historians have compared the sea voyage of the Chinese netted by the coolie traders to the slave trade’s “middle voyage” from Africa to the Americas. On ship, the Chinese were “shut up in bamboo cages, or chained to iron posts, and a few were indiscriminately selected and flogged as a means of intimidating all others. . . .” Deaths at sea from “sickness, blows, hunger, thirst, or from suicide by leaping into the sea” were not uncommon. From 1848 to 1874, more than 16,000 of approximately 141,000 Chinese shipped to Cuba died at sea.5
Once ashore in Cuba, the Chinese were sold in the “men-market.” They were stripped naked and prodded and poked at by buyers. A laborer testified that once in the fields, “We are fed worse than dogs, and we are called to perform labor for which an ox or a horse would not possess sufficient strength. Everywhere cells exist, and whips and rods are in constant use, and maimed and lacerated limbs are daily to be seen.” Conditions were so miserable that suicide became a viable alternative for the Chinese in Cuba. “Suicide by hanging on trees, by drowning, by swallowing opium, and by leaping into the sugar caldrons are the results of wrongs and sufferings which cannot be described.” Historians have calculated that indentured Chinese laborers in Cuba committed suicide at a rate one hundred times more than whites and fourteen times more than slaves, leaving Cuba after the importation of the Chinese with the highest suicide rate in the world.6
All of this was undertaken to preserve the system of slavery in Cuba. The irony was that exactly the opposite occurred. Why? Because just like the slaves throughout the Americas before the arrival of the Chinese—whether in Haiti, Cuba or Southampton County, Virginia—the Chinese indentured laborers also resisted and fought back, utilizing similar means as the slaves before them, including mass escapes, mutinies aboard ship, and armed uprisings. A historian reading the record of their resistance in Cuba noted how it contradicted his previously-held, racist “image of the Chinese as passive victims, meek as lambs to slaughter.”7
But the coup de grace, the death knell of both slavery and the coolie trade in Cuba, arrived in the 1860s. In this decade, many of the Chinese who landed in Cuba were exiled veteran soldiers of the crushed Taiping rebellion in China, either fugitives fleeing reprisals by the Qing government or prisoners sold into the coolie trade. Rebels at heart, many of these later made common cause with the slaves during the 1868 to 1878 popular insurrection that led finally to the abolition of slavery in Cuba.8 According to the Cuban historian Juan Jimenez Pastrana, those Chinese who were “fugitives of justice,” or who felt that returning to China was a hopeless proposition, realized that they had to make their stand in Cuba.9 It is likely that among these Taiping rebels to land in Cuba in the 1860s were the “fighting” ancestors of Ora Hongo Mixon.
“White Already to Harvest”
It may be said that the war the ancestors of Ora Hongo Mixon had tired of fighting in the 1860s was a single struggle for human liberation, which, over decades, stretched from China to Cuba, and ended, finally, in Louisiana. However, it is also possible to say that this struggle actually originated where it concluded—in the United States and in the South.
A mighty wind in politics and culture today is the Southern Baptist Convention, perhaps the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.10 It is not openly discussed enough, but the Southern Baptist denomination owes it formation to an argument about slavery. Before there was a Southern Baptist Convention, there was a single national Baptist organization in the United States—the Triennial Convention—which was specifically called into being in 1814 to promote and facilitate overseas missions.
Northern and southern Baptists got along famously until about the 1830s, when two significant events occurred. First, in August 1831, the Nat Turner slave rebellion erupted in Southampton County, Virginia. It was followed shortly thereafter—in fact just weeks after Nat Turner’s execution by hanging in Virginia—by another slave rebellion on the island of Jamaica.11 Were the two events connected? The rebellion on Jamaica, which commenced two days after Christmas in 1831 and ended effectively on August 1, 1834—Emancipation Day in Jamaica—was called “The Baptist War.” Both the leadership and the rank and file of the rebellion were predominantly Baptists, slaves who had received their first Bibles from black American and white British Baptist missionaries.12 In Virginia, Nat Turner too had aspirations of becoming a Baptist preacher, but he had been frustrated in this by the local white Baptists of Southampton County who had refused his request to be baptized in the church.13
A Mixed Nation
The Chinese introduced from Cuba to Natchitoches brought no spouses. There were no Chinese women in in Natchitoches, and the first generation of men married or established households with white, black, Creole, and Indian women. The granddaughter of one of these Chinese said in a confidential interview: “They settled down and some of them had children and some of them didn’t. They married all kinds of people, Creoles, blacks, whites. Some of them married; others just ‘took up’ with their wives. They were a very mixed nation.”
These patterns of marriage between Chinese men and women of diverse cultural backgrounds emphasize the necessity of understanding the social organization of Chinese settlements in local communities. Most of the Chinese newcomers settled within established and distinctive non-Chinese cultural enclaves and intermarried with members of these groups, thus dropping from public attention. Like some of their counterparts in Cuba, became “a people without history.”
The children of these Chinese men and non-Chinese women were variously classified as white, black, Chinese, and mulatto, depending on the year the census was taken. These changes in color classification reflected shifts in the public perception of the Chinese and influenced the cultural identity of descendants. Some “passed” into white society, others merged into the black communities, and a few took advantage of “Mexican/Indian” categories to be considered white in some situations or black in others. Nevertheless, all retained a vague sense of Chinese ancestry even though branches of the same family had adopted separate values and identities and had grown apart. Those who “passed” do not acknowledge their Creole, black, or Chinese background.
As the Chinese heritage has become submerged through time and in view of the values and norms that shape race relations in Natchitoches, it is understandable, perhaps, that the public appears to have forgotten the private discussions and during periods of conflict, however, the descendants of the Chinese have kept alive the face of their Chinese ancestry. Past heritage comes to the fore where conflicts, normally hidden from public, take places as in an incident described by the granddaughter of a Chinese settler who had intermarried. One branch of this settler’s descendants passed for white, and denial of kinship with her family has precipitated conflicts between them. “Years ago, my boy became involved in a fight with a ‘white’ boy. The white playmate suddenly yelled ‘nigger’ at my boy. That made me angry, and I told him: ‘My daddy and your daddy are first cousins, you half-white b----. Our grandparents were Chinese and Creole.’” The woman remarked that the boy never returned to her home.
The Jamaican slaves’ radical interpretation of the Baptist faith and message had a profound effect on the British missionaries, who then appealed to their American counterparts to end slavery and end it quickly. Because of what happened in Jamaica and Virginia, an abolition movement gathered momentum among Baptists in the United States.14 In 1845, when the Triennial Convention finally decided it could no longer in good conscience appoint slaveholders as missionaries, the white Baptist churches of the South decided to break from the national organization and form their own—the Southern Baptist Convention—where slaveholders could apply and were welcomed. 15
In the summer of 1845, the board of the new denomination met in Augusta, Georgia. As one of its first actions, it voted “that, with as little delays as possible, we will proceed to establish missions in the seaports of China, or such of them as may be selected for the purpose.”16 The first missionaries to be appointed by the Southern Baptist Convention were missionaries to China.
Of all places, why China? In the 1830s, British and American shippers desired to expand the export of opium from India to China. It was a very lucrative trade. In 1839, however, Chinese officials attempted to ban opium because of the drug’s debilitating effects on the population. This action provoked Britain to attack China in 1840, launching the First Opium War. The result of British military victory and Chinese defeat was a treaty forcing China both to legalize opium and to open its ports more extensively to foreign commerce—a circumstance the Southern Baptists were quick to exploit. As the Southern Baptist Convention explained in a report issued a year later in Richmond, Virginia: “Regular steamers from Great Britain and America will soon enter all her ports, and an opportunity will soon be furnished of sounding in the ears of her teeming millions, the gospel’s joyful sound. This field, ‘white already to harvest,’ the Board have determined to occupy with all the force they can command.” 17
Of course, the opening of Chinese ports profited missionaries, opium traders, and other merchants, but at the expense of the Chinese people.18 In southern China, the outcome of the First Opium War was catastrophic. One historian wrote that “hundreds of thousands of boatmen and porters” alone—not to mention others—“in central and southern China were thrown out of work,” creating an “army of unemployed.”19 In 1847, almost a year to the day after the Southern Baptists issued their report on missionizing in China, the first Chinese indentured laborers stepped on to ships bound for the killing fields of Cuba.
A Heavenly Army
In this respect, it is significant to note the case of one of the first Baptist missionaries to China from the South, J. Lewis Shuck, of Alexandria, Virginia. He had first arrived in the Portuguese colony of Macau in the fall of 1836 under the auspices of the Triennial Convention, but was not able to organize the first Baptist church in China (in Hong Kong) until 1842, after the First Opium War.20 It appears that in five years of residence in Macau, Shuck was able to convert, at most, three Chinese: one his house servant, and the other two, perhaps, orphans he had taken into his household.21 Before the war, Shuck did not seem willing to travel into China to undertake the most common missionary activity—to preach or to distribute Christian literature printed in Chinese. Proselytizing in China was then legally proscribed by the Chinese authorities; traveling in China required donning Chinese garb, adopting Chinese mannerisms and learning local dialects well enough to escape detection.22 There is no evidence that Shuck was willing to do this either before or immediately after the war.23
There was, however, ample evidence of what Shuck was willing to do: before the war, quite openly, publicly, and militantly, he encouraged Britain to attack China and conquer it. Conveniently forgetting about the scourge of opium affecting the Chinese people, he passionately believed and advanced the notion that China’s defeat in war would open the country to Christianity. In February 1841, commenting in his journal about the terrible slaughter of Chinese soldiers by the Royal Navy and Marines, Shuck wrote very dispassionately: “I regard such scenes . . . as the direct instruments of the Lord in clearing away the rubbish which impedes the advancement of Divine Truth.”24 Fifteen months later and under the British flag in Hong Kong, Shuck was finally able to establish the first Baptist church in China.25
It was evident that both the brokers of the coolie trade and the Southern Baptist missionaries were seeking to advantageously share the same brew. British military victory allowed unfettered Christian proselytizing in Hong Kong and the five Chinese treaty ports. After the war, access to and the increasing pauperization of the southern Chinese population helped the missionaries make converts. Perhaps not uncharacteristically, in 1842, the first Chinese to be baptized on Hong Kong Island by a Baptist missionary from the South was a beggar named Chan.26 Later on, the Southern Baptists may have had another motivation for being in a setting where British warships had made people so desperate: if they could collect a multitude of converts and outdo their northern competitors in the mission field, they could prove that God had blessed their position on the question of slavery.
So headlong, the Southern Baptists pushed into China, especially southern China. But like the Cuban hacendados, the Southern Baptists could not foresee what they were about to step into. The hacendados had projected on to the Chinese what they wanted to see: a docile, submissive, easily exploited, compliant, cooperative pool of laborers who would help them solve the problems they were having with their rebellious and demanding slaves. They didn’t know enough about the Chinese to think otherwise, and were sorely disappointed in the end. Likewise, when the leadership of the Southern Baptists planned their missionary strategy for China, they had no idea what direction Chinese history was about to take, or what role Christian teachings would play in it.
In the late 1840s, while coolie trade brokers were enticing Chinese into human pig pens and then on to the floating prisons moored in southern China’s coastal port cities, and while Baptist missionaries were trying to convert the poor and desperate, in the mountains of southwest China, an army was starting to gather. By 1850, this army numbered in the thousands. Its rank and file consisted of landless peasants, coolies, miners, charcoal burners, women warriors who had refused footbinding, and discharged soldiers. Some of its leadership was drawn from among the hundreds of thousands of boatmen and porters made redundant in the aftermath of the First Opium War.27 Soon after, the army began to advance. When detachments entered a village, it was recalled that, “Each time they entered into a rich house, or into that of a great family, they would dig three feet into the ground [to find buried treasure]. But not only did they not plunder the peasants, on the contrary, wherever they passed they distributed clothes and other things they had taken to the poor, and announced a remission of taxes for three years, thus winning the gratitude of the villagers.” For actions like these, others called them rebels, but they called themselves the army of “The Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace,” or the Taiping Heavenly Army.28
Later, when the rebels captured the city of Nanjing and established a capital from which to govern territories under their control, they decreed:
All lands under Heaven shall be farmed jointly by the people under Heaven. If the production of food is too small in one place, then move to another where it is more abundant. All lands under Heaven shall be accessible in time of abundance or famine. If there is a famine in one area move the surplus from an area where there is abundance to that area. . . . Land shall be farmed by all; rice, eaten by all, clothes, worn by all; money, spent by all. There shall be no inequality, and no person shall be without food or fuel. No matter whether man or woman, everyone over sixteen years of age shall receive land. 29
The font of these radical ideas—which millions in southern and central China eventually embraced between 1850 and 1864—was a man named Hong Xiuquan. A primary source and inspiration for his ideas was the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, which Hong had studied under the supervision of a man named Issachar J. Roberts, a native of Shelbyville, Tennessee, and one of the first missionaries to be appointed by the Southern Baptist Convention.30 Roberts was the same missionary who had baptized the beggar Chan, who afterwards, served Roberts.31 But Hong Xiuquan, though often penniless, was no beggar and no one’s servant. In a context reminiscent of Nat Turner’s in Southampton County, Virginia, it may be said that Hong also possessed “uncommon intelligence” with “too much sense [to] be of any service to any one as a slave.”32 Like the white Baptists of Southampton County who refused to baptize Nat Turner, Roberts also denied the serious but impudent Hong the baptismal rite. In both cases, the ultimate outcome was organized rebellion, all in the name of Christ Jesus.33
It is one of those strange twists and ironies of history: the Southern Baptist Convention, formed to resist the abolition of slavery, sent missionaries across the ocean to a place where it hoped to justify its reason for being, only to propagate a gospel that inspired oppressed men and women to rise up, and witness some of those so inspired arrive in the Americas to ultimately fight and help win the struggle for the abolition of slavery on an island just a hundred miles offshore from its southern homeland. There is a lesson in this story somewhere, inspiring to some and cautionary, perhaps, to others. But Ora Hongo Mixon’s grandmother was right about their ancestors, some of the earliest Chinese to settle in the South: they were fighters.
Notes
1 Lucy M. Cohen, Chinese in the Post-Civil War South: A People Without a History (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 168-169.
2 Ibid.
3 See Frederic Wakeman, Jr., “Voyages,” (Presidential Address delivered at the American Historical Association annual meeting in Washington, D.C., December 1992), American Historical Review 98:1 (February 1993): See also Lisa Yun, “Chinese Coolies and African Slaves in Cuba,” Journal of Asian American Studies 4:2 (June 2001): 99-122.
4 Wakeman, “Voyages,” 4-5. On this point, Wakeman cited Juan Perez de la Riva, El barracon: Esclavitud y capitalisms en Cuba (Barecelona: Critica, 1978), 89-92, 101.
5 Wakeman, “Voyages,” 5-6. On the “pig pens,” Wakeman cited Juan Jimenez Pastrana, Los chinos en la historia de Cuba, 1847-1930 (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1983), 31-32. Regarding death from disease in the enclosures, Wakeman cited the deposition of Ye Fujun in Report of the Commission Sent by China to Ascertain the Condition of Chinese Coolies in Cuba (Taipei, 1970), 9. According to Wakeman, the treatment of the Chinese before boarding ship is discussed in Basil Lubbock, Coolie Ships and Oil Sailers (Glasgow, 1981), 32-35 and in Robert L. Irick, Ch’ing Policy toward the Coolie Trade 1847-1878 (Taipei, 1982), 27. Lubbock in Coolie Ships, 11, compared the transport of the Chinese coolies to the “middle voyage” of the slave trade. Also, reference to the treatment of the Chinese on ship is from the deposition of Li Zhoachun in Report of the Commission Sent by China, 12. According to Wakeman, statistics of Chinese deaths at sea are derived from Cuban census figures.
6 Wakeman, “Voyages,” 6. The description of the “men-market” is from the deposition of Li Zhaochun in Report of the Commission Sent by China, 18. The description of how Chinese laborers were treated in the fields is from the petition of Xian Zuobang in Report of the Commission Sent by China, 19. The reference to methods of suicide is from the petition of Yang Yun in Report of the Commission Sent by China, 20. Perez de la Riva calculated the rate of suicide in El barracon, 67.
7 Ibid., 4, 8.
8 Ibid., 6-8. On the participation of Taiping rebels in the 1868-1869 insurrection, Wakeman cited Juan Jimenez Pastrana, Los chinos en las luchas por la liberacion cubana, 1847-1930 (Havana, 1963) 71-79, and Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1960-1899 (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 57-58. See also Duvon Clough Corbitt, A Study of the Chinese in Cuba, 1847-1947 (Wilmore, KY: Asbury College, 1971), 22.
9 Juan Jimenez Pastrana, Los chinos en la historia de Cuba: 1847-1930 (Havana, 1983) 66-79.
10 See Eileen W. Lindman, ed., Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches 2004 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2004), 11-13.
11 William R. Estep, Whole Gospel—Whole World: The Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention: 1845-1995 (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994), 49-76. Also, see Cohen, 11-16.
12 Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787-1834 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 1-37.
13 The Confession, Trial and Execution of Nat Turner, The Negro Insurgent (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1975), 11.
14 Estep, 51.
15 Ibid., 51-61
16 Ibid., 62.
17 Ibid., 68.
18 See John King Fairbank, The United States and China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 142-147. See also Jean Chesneaux, Peasant Revolts in China, 1840-1949, tras. C.A. Curwen (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 23-24.
19 Chesneaux, 24.
20 Estep, 69. See also Carl T. Smith, Chinese Christians: Elites, Middlemen, and the Church in Hong Kong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 2-3.
21 Estep, 70-71; Smith, 3. According to Estep, when Queen’s Road Baptist Church was constituted in Hong Kong in May 1842, it had only five members, including, one assumes, Shuck and his wife Henrietta Shuck. According to Smith, in April 1843, the church had twelve in number, but “nine European and three Chinese members.”
22 On how Western missionaries sought converts and had to operate in China before the Treaty of Nanking, see Jonathan D. Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996) 14-22.
23 Western missionaries to China divided over how much to try to be or act Chinese. See Spence, 20, 62, and Jessie G. Lutz and R. Ray Lutz, “Karl Gutzlaff’s Approach to Indigenization: The Chinese Union,” in Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed. Daniel H. Bays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 269-291. Shuck’s relationship with his fellow Baptist missionary from the South, Issachar J. Roberts, was very strained (see Smith, 2-3 and Estep, 90- 91). Roberts was clearly identified with the set of missionaries who tried to be or act more Chinese. However, later after the First Opium War (around 1845), Shuck and Roberts were together distinguished from other Protestant missionaries in China for their practice of reporting numerous baptisms, utilizing Chinese assistants to do the preaching of their mission, and being too forward and aggressive in their style of preaching. See Michael C. Lazich, E.C. Bridgman (1801-1861), America’s First Missionary to China (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), 219, 244.
24 See Stuart Creighton Miller, “Ends and Means: Missionary Justification of Force in Nineteenth Century China,” The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, ed. John King Fairbank, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 251-257. In holding these views, Shuck was not unique among other American missionaries, but he was certainly one of the most militant in espousing them.
25 Smith, 2.
26 Smith, 6-7.
27 Chesneaux, 24-25. On women in the Taiping army, see P. Richard Bohr, “The Hakka and the Remaking of China,” (Plenary Address at the 2004 Toronto Hakka Conference: Tradition, Change, Unity, December 2004), 3.
28 Chesneaux, 25-26.
29 Ibid., 27-28. See Spence, 62, 92-93, Estep, 62, 69, and Bohr, 1-5.
30 Smith, 6-7.
31 See The Confession, Trial and Execution of Nat Turner, The Negro Insurgent, 8-9. Nat Turner had also taught himself to read. Originally, Hong was from a South China farming family of modest means and a village schoolteacher fallen on hard times.
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Samuel Chi-Yuen Lowe
Samuel Chi-Yuen Lowe will be a Harvard Divinity School field education supervisor based at the Center to Support Immigrant Organizing (CSIO) in Boston, Massachusetts. The son and grandson of Chinese Southern Baptist ministers, in 2009 he received a Ph.D.