By LESTER I. VOGEL
Lester I. Vogel, a title to come here in the Rare book and Special Collections Division, has recently published a book, much of which is based on his use of the Library's incomparable collections. To See a Promised Land: Americans and the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century (Pennsylvania State Press, $35, 338 pages) explores Americans' perceptions about the land of the Bible through the books, pamphlets and articles they read and through the travels they made. The ideas of such historical figures as Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant are covered as well as the Jerusalem exhibition at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, "a spectacle that epitomized the popular appeal of the Holy Land for earlier Americans." Following are some excerpts:
All people of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic faiths share a cultural legacy: the concept of "Holy Land." Whether the designation "holy" is due to the presence of God, of his prophets or his people, "Holy Land" represents a fusion of geography, histories, cultures, religious practices and beliefs. The net effect is that a special regard for a certain place is transmitted from one generation to the next.
This book examines one aspect of the Holy Land legacy: the relationship between Americans and their culture, on the one hand, and the territory Western thought calls "Holy Land," on the other hand. It surveys pre-1918 American historical experience in, and cultural relationship with, the specific geographical area in Western Asia known variously as Canaan, Zion, Palestine or Israel. The concept of an acknowledged "sacred" land altogether removed from the North American continent has been a persistent theme in American civilization ever since the arrival of the first European settlers in the 17th century. The ensuing relationship between Americans and the Holy Land is seen in the ever-increasing number of Americans who made the voyage to Middle Eastern soil, and it is still evident in the enduring preoccupation with Holy Land imagery among Americans. This "Holy Land" concept has implications that are wide-ranging and not confined to any particular region of the United States, segment of the American people or period in American history.
Most historical analyses of Americans' relationship with the Holy Land confine their attention to the political disposition of the land and the national aspirations of those fighting for its possession. This is unfortunate because a fuller picture of American attachment is so vital to an understanding of present realities.
I have therefore chosen to look at the period before 1918 and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire -- the quiet years before the Holy Land became the focus of a political maelstrom -- and to examine what Americans knew and thought about the Holy Land during that earlier time, before the land became politicized and embroiled in conflict between Arab and Jewish national interests.
Before all else, in the minds of Americans, the Holy Land has been a classic geographical image, a far-off place of both real and imagined features peopled by groups about whom Americans already had well-formed preconceived notions. Perceptions of the Holy Land were affected by cultural factors, and interaction with it was shaped by those perceptions. Because interaction between Americans and the Holy Land was particularly rich between 1865 and 1918, coming as it did at the close of a major phase of Holy Land history and during a dynamic period in U.S. history, I have chosen to focus especially on that watershed era.
I use five recurrent points of American contact with the Holy Land during the appointed time period: American tourists/pilgrims, American missionaries, American settlers/colonists, American explorers/archaeologists/biblical scholars and American diplomats. As the primary producers of written accounts of the Holy Land meant for American audiences of the time, these five groups played a major role in both shaping American perceptions and affecting the extent of American experience in the Holy Land. But American attachment to the Holy Land was not limited to these points of contact, and I mention of a few other sources of interest, such as popular education and entertainment.
During several years of research, materials from collections in various libraries and archives in the United States and Israel were examined, but most of the materials on which this study is based -- usually public written records of the American encounter with the Holy Land -- are in the general collections of the Library of Congress, that huge repository of Americana.
In addition to making available many primary sources that reveal American "public thought" about and interaction with the Holy Land, the Library of Congress provides an unparalleled single location for studying the entire spectrum of relations between America and the Holy Land because it has the widest array of materials on ancillary topics, such as the history and influence of religion in American life; the role of the Bible in America; public opinion and the formation of foreign policy; the social, commercial, and political history of the Middle East; and geographical imagery, perception, and myth--to name a few of the directions. And also, illustrative matter in the various collections offer ample visual supplements to narrative.
Earliest American Links with the Bible's Land. To most Americans, the Holy Land was an abstraction closely identified with some ideal. To the Puritans the consummate polity was theocratic in form and symbolically associated with Zion. The New World was the Canaan where Puritans had come to build the true biblical commonwealth. This theme of a fresh start in a special place recurred periodically as various religious groups sought refuge from European and, later, American religious intolerance.
It has been popular to say that trade and spreading the Gospel were the prime motivators of Europeans attracted to the New World. But in addition, there were sporadic commercial contacts between the American colonies and the Levant region. Contact with the Holy Land was limited to very few Americans during the Colonial period. Most colonists had to be content with printed reports and occasional graphic representations. Only infrequently did they hear about the Holy Land from firsthand experience. But such reports did reach the colonists, and perhaps the earliest came remarkably soon after the beginning of the British Colonial effort in North America.
In the year 1610, George Sandys, a son of the Archbishop of York, was 32 years old, "restless and eager to escape for a time from his surroundings." Sandys had suffered through a disastrous marriage and saw the wealth his father had accumulated dissipate in a flurry of litigation. Sandys departed for a trip to the East. On Aug. 20, 1610, three years after the founding of the Jamestown settlement by the London Company, he left Venice to journey through Greece, Turkey, Egypt and the Holy Land. What makes Sandys so significant is not that he was a well-to-do gentleman "who, following the routes opened up by the Levant Company, voyaged out of curiosity to the classic lands of Greece and the Aegean, the biblical lands of Palestine and Egypt, and the fabled wonders of Constantinople, ancient seat of the Eastern Empire." George Sandys is notable because he was the earliest firsthand connection between the Holy Land and America.
To Sandys, the Holy Land was "where God himself did plant his own Commonwealth, gave laws and oracles, inspired his Prophets, sent Angels to converse with men; above all where the Son of God descended to become man; where he honored the earth with his beautiful steps, wrought the work of our redemption, triumphed over death, and ascended to glory ... but which has become the most deplored spectacle of extreme misery ... which calamities of them so great and deserved, are to the rest of the world as threatening instructions."
Pilgrimage, Tourism and Exodus: Americans Go East. On a blustery spring afternoon, with the executive business concluded for the day, President and Mrs. Lincoln rode out of the White House grounds in an open carriage on a brief outing to the Washington Navy Yard. The burdens of war finally lifted from his shoulders, the president was in a cheerful, almost playful, mood. Only days before, news of the Confederacy's capitulation had reached Washington, and now, with a free moment alone with his wife on a bright afternoon, the president could relish the occasion with buoyant conjectures about his personal future. During the ride, he spoke about travel -- about a possible journey to California and even one abroad at the conclusion of his second term. But of all the places to see, the president appeared to relish most a tour of the Holy Land. The idea of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem was appropriate that afternoon. It was Good Friday, April 14, 1865. Later that evening, Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln attended the fateful performance of "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theater, and the dreams of pilgrimage came to an abrupt and tragic end.
Although Lincoln was assassinated before fulfilling his ambition to visit the Holy Land, his talk of such a trip was by no means idle fancy. The Holy Land was a travel destination on the lips of many Americans. It already existed as a concept in the collective mind of Americans, a peculiar fusion of geographical place with historical past. Indeed, beginning with George Sandys and continuing down through the mid-19th century, Americans learned of the Holy Land -- and heard Americans' impressions of it -- either by word of mouth from the few who were lucky enough to have visited it, or through written reports and graphic representations.
The easing of civil conditions in the Holy Land during and after the Egyptian invasion correlated with an increase in the American presence in there. This period saw a confident, expanding America sustain its first attempt to penetrate the eastern Mediterranean.
Such American authors as John Lloyd Stephens, George William Curtis, Bayard Taylor, John W. De Forest, William Cullen Bryant, John Ross Browne and Herman Melville ranged over a more secure though still perilous Holy Land.
After the Civil War's conclusion the interest was rekindled on an unprecedented scale. More Americans than ever before began rushing overseas to see the land of the Bible. A new wave of American experience in the Holy Land was about to begin. But in April 1865, many of those who would play roles in shaping that experience were otherwise engaged:
The man who clinched victory for the Union, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, was supposed to be sitting with the Lincolns in the presidential box that sorry night, but a change in plans made him leave Washington for Burlington, N.J., earlier in the day.
Secretary of State William Seward, though, was in Washington. Recuperating from a carriage injury at his home across from the White House, Seward was attacked and knifed in his bed as part of the plot against Lincoln. He survived the attack and, like Grant, went on to live Lincoln's dream of pilgrimage. Grant and Seward were two of many prominent Americans who traveled to the Holy Land in the years after the Civil War.
A Grand Pleasure Excursion of Brooklynites. On Dec. 15, 1866, Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain) departed from San Francisco, sailing to New York by way of the Isthmus of Nicaragua. Clemens, a young reporter who apparently loved ocean travel, had been engaged by the newspaper Alta California to write a series of letters about a trip, possibly to Peking on an invitation from Anson Burlingame, the U.S. minister to China. Clemens was on his way through New York to St. Louis, where he would spend some time with his mother before leaving for the Orient.
While in New York he became aware that "prominent Brooklynites are getting up a great European pleasure excursion for the coming summer, which promises a vast amount of enjoyment for a very reasonable outlay."
The trip to Europe and the Holy Land was being planned primarily by members of Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Church. Beecher, a prominent churchman, was scheduled to lead the tour, and it was rumored that he intended to use the trip to Palestine as preparation for a book on the life of Jesus. Clemens found himself drawn into the affair both on its merits and by the attendant hoopla that had much of New York aroused. Rumors circulated that celebrities would abound as part of the excursion: Union war hero William Tecumseh Sherman himself would lead the party in capturing the sights, and the entire affair would receive publicity in the nation's press because several well-known New York newspaper publishers would be present. P.T. Barnum had reportedly secured an agent to accompany the excursion and help participants collect "antiquities, relics and curiosities from the different places visited" -- all to be displayed, properly labeled and with a photograph of the donor next to his or her contribution, in a special department of Barnum's famous Manhattan museum. With such inducements, the tour naturally became one of the most discussed events of the year.
Former President Ulysses S. Grant's journey around the world between 1877 and 1879 was heralded as "one of the most important events in modern history."
The trip seized the imagination of the American public and held it. On May 17, 1877, former President and Mrs. Grant left Philadelphia for England. Their trip lasted two years and was proclaimed "perhaps the grandest tour an American couple had ever had."
The Grant trip started as a personal getaway after eight trying years in the White House that concluded with a growing catcall over the corruption of Grant's administration. The former president and his wife decided to vacation in Europe to escape the public row of politics. With a daughter already living in England, the British Isles were a natural destination, but the trip would not remain a quiet family visit. It began to accrue an entourage as the European clamor to see America's champion rose and more social commitments were made. John Russell Young, reporter for the New York Herald and a future Librarian of Congress, reported on the trip to a curious nation.
After a tumultuous tour through Britain, during which they were embraced by working people and entertained by the queen, the Grants went on to Paris in October 1877, where their party assumed more of the guise of a grand tour rather than a pseudo- political trip that brought out crowds in England. By winter, the party boarded the U.S. Navy's Vandalia for a Mediterranean cruise that included Italy and Egypt before reaching the Holy Land.
Correspondent Young reported that, aboard the Vandalia, the Grant party was anxious about the weather, since foul weather would prevent a landing at Jaffa and imperil the tour of Palestine. "The idea of a visit to the East without setting our feet on the Holy Land was not to be endured," Young wrote. The party was therefore thankful when they found they could land at Jaffa in calm seas.
Doing Canaan. Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of the Quaker City cruise was its designation as a "pleasure excursion," a voyage devoted entirely to the pleasures of its passengers --in a typically 19th century Victorian sense, spiritual, intellectual and educational. Indeed, if the jargon of the 19th century shows something of what its people were thinking, then the description that American travelers "did" the sites during their tours (moving about with impatience and at a generally accelerated pace) implies for us that the "doing" of 19th century touring was quite rigorous. This was especially true for the Holy Land tourist, who until late in the 19th century was subject to a number of perils when traveling through Palestine. As late as 1882, one American consul-general, J. Augustus Johnson, offered a discouraging assessment of the Holy Land's tourist environment.
"The climate," Johnson wrote, "is unfavorable for the foreigner, and is often fatal to the tourist. The graves of modern travelers and explorers may be seen from Dan to Beer Sheba, and from Jerusalem to Damascus."
The Missionary Imperative. Motivated by the impulse to spread Christianity, a diverse assortment of American Protestants attempted to base their evangelistic activities in the Holy Land.
Some of their efforts were desultory, truncated by a lack of resources, personnel, or desire to compete in an already crowded and unpromising field; the efforts of others showed some durability. All American missionary efforts, however, displayed two important features. First, their ventures in the Holy Land were somewhat erratic, comprising incohesive, discontinuous episodes that lacked a sense of progression or growth. Second, the Holy Land as a mission field always had special meaning to Americans who were willing to stake a claim to it, simply because the area was the land where Christianity was born and from which it had spread centuries before. It was the land of Jesus, whose message Christianity bore; it was the land of the remnants of the earliest, most primitive churches; it was the land that Christians had won and lost during the Crusades; and, above all, it was both a land that was inextricably part of the Christian past and an opportune place for spreading the Christian future, as conceived in the 19th century. It was, in short, a land made special through the geopious regard of Americans.
Unusual inducements made the Holy Land an attractive and almost irresistible field for missionary work. But the Americans were just one of several national groups trying to gain a foothold there. British and European Protestant missionary efforts, in particular, served as a context into which the Americans fit. The "context" slowly became formalized in the development of the Protestant bishopric in Jerusalem, first centered at the city's Christ Church. In the first half of the 19th century, British missionary efforts were dominated by the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews (also called the London Jews Society) and the Church Missionary Society (for a time an arm of the Anglican Church and the model for the American Board).
The Protestant bishopric in Jerusalem was established in 1841 as a post jointly sponsored by Britain and Germany, to further Christianity and later to support their imperialist pretensions at protecting the Protestant citizenry of the Ottoman domains.
An American Agricultural Mission. The colony of Mrs. Name Minor was an early flowering of the idea that the rebirth of the Holy Land, an event that was vital for the success of millennialist predictions, lay in better exploiting Palestine's agricultural resources. Another group of Americans tried to promote the same theory, and their efforts too ended before fruition. A sentence will go here explaing who Mrs. Minor was and everything else we need to say.
On July 24, 1852, the L. & A. Hobart, a spritely bark, set sail from Boston with a young, idealistic New England couple on board.
Mr. and Mrs. Phillip Dickson were on their way to the Promised Land as the anticipated vanguard of an independent settlement group confidently called "The American Agricultural Mission." Their scheme was forthright and simple: they hoped to introduce the native populace of the Holy Land to three notions -- Christianity, modern agriculture and American ideals. But they had not counted upon the difficulties of establishing their home in so foreign an environment.
By April 25, 1853, Phillip was dead; a short time later, his widow was on her way back to New England. While at sea, and quite unknown to her, she passed her late husband's family sailing eastward toward Palestine to reinforce the original effort.
Walter Dickson (Phillip's father), his wife and their daughters left Boston in mid-October 1853 aboard the John Winthrop. Arriving at Jaffa during the winter of 1854, they soon secured a small enclave for the proposed missionary work and farming, not far from the precincts of the port city, at the Mount Hope site.
Before long, the enterprise attracted at least one German family, and two of Dickson's daughters married two of the other family's sons. The extended group constituted the "American Mission Colony."
Herman Melville, visiting the Holy Land in 1857, met the Dicksons and wrote in his journal that Deacon Dickson was "a thorough Yankee, about 60, with long oriental beard, blue Yankee coat and Shaker waistcoat" and that Mrs. Dickson was "a respectable looking elderly woman." Melville asked the Dicksons if they had settled permanently in the Holy Land. Mr. Dickson replied "with a kind of dogged emphasis, 'Permanently settled on the soil of Zion, Sir.' "
Melville asked whether the Dicksons employed any Jews and were told by Mr. Dickson, "No. Can't afford to hire them. Do my own work, with my son. Besides, the Jews are lazy & don't like to work." Melville asked whether Dickson thought the trait "a hindrance to making farmers of them?" and Dickson replied, "That's it. The Gentile Christian must teach them better. The fact is the fullness of Time has come. The Gentile Christians must prepare the way."
Melville reflected, "Old Dickson seems a man of Puritanic energy, and being inoculated with this preposterous Jew Mania, is resolved to carry his Quixotism through to the end. Mrs. D. dont seem to like it, but submits. The whole thing is half melancholy, half farcical--like the rest of the world."
Despite their best intentions, relations between the colony and the local Arabs were strained. The comparatively independent Western women were subjected to insults, and the colony's livestock and property were frequently targets of thievery and vandalism. Trouble came to a head on the night of Jan. 11, 1858, when the colony's compound was raided. During the fray, son-in- law Frederick Steinbeck was fatally shot and Walter Dickson was knocked unconscious. The women were raped and the colony was despoiled. In response to this outrage, the U.S. Consul at Jerusalem, J. Warren Gorham, together with his Prussian colleague, demanded that the Pasha take action. A 1,000 piaster reward was posted, though Gorham seemed dubious about the result because of the intense anti-Christian feelings of the Muslims. Yet it was not long before four Arabs were imprisoned and the family compensated more than $2,000 in damages from the authorities.
The appearance of the U.S. steam frigate Wabash showing the colors off Jaffa harbor may have reinforced Turkish resolve to be of assistance. As for the survivors, by September 1858 the "American Agricultural Mission" was disbanded and the Dickson family was on its way back to the United States and the consoling familiarity of Groton, Mass.
The American Colony of Jerusalem. The words "Saved alone" on a cable shattered the world of Horatio Spafford. The successful Chicago lawyer, nearly ruined by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, had struggled hard to rebuild his law practice and real estate investments. With his wife, the former Anna Larssen, a daughter of Norwegian immigrants, he had led relief efforts to the point of exhaustion. When the opportunity to spend some relaxing time in Europe arose in 1873, Spafford decided to send his wife and four little daughters on ahead while he concluded a business deal, so he saw his family depart on the Ville du Havre, one of the most luxurious steamships afloat at that time. Weeks later the cable arrived from Wales. Anna Spafford had miraculously been pulled from the cold Atlantic after the ship collided off the coast of Newfoundland in the early morning of Nov. 22, 1873, with the English iron sailing ship Lochearn. The four Spafford girls were among the 230 passengers lost in the calamity. Later, on the sad journey across the Atlantic to join his wife, Spafford composed the words of a hymn still sung and beloved by many Christians today:
When peace like a river attendeth my way/When sorrows like sea- billows roll/Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say:/"It is well, it is well with my soul."
Golden Dome and Ferris Wheel. The view is an astounding one: the Temple Mount with its Dome of the Rock bathed in bright sunlight.
Tourists are scattered about its plaza, marveling over the place and its sacred associations. In the foreground, the solemn eastern wall of the Holy City looks like stone, yet is somewhat more uniform than expected; it is bedecked with huge block letters gratuitously announcing: "Jerusalem." As if to temper reverence with levity, an enormous ferris wheel looms over the scene.
The sky is Missouri's, not the Holy Land's; the view is of the Jerusalem exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, a spectacle that epitomized the popular appeal of the Holy Land for earlier Americans. In a 10-acre space at the very center of the fairgrounds, the Jerusalem Exhibit Company, a fair concessionaire, reproduced the principal features and life of Jerusalem on an unprecedented scale. The site was contoured to replicate hills and valleys; it was then enclosed in a reproduction of the city's ancient walls complete with gates. Inside, such structures as the Church of the Sepulchre, the Temple Mount, Solomon's Stables, the Golden Gate, the Via Dolorosa and the Wailing Wall were erected to full scale and arranged in a manner that approximated their placement in reality. Compacted, narrow streets with shops, peopled with native Jerusalemites and livestock, portrayed life in the Holy City for fairgoers. Religious services and ceremonies of the various faith and ethnic groups were staged as pageants. Lectures on picturesque Palestine and its peoples were delivered to troops of Sunday school masters and pupils.
The Jerusalem exhibit was a massive and expensive undertaking, but it had the benefit of broad support from an advisory board composed of clergy representing 27 religious groups of Protestants, Catholics and Jews. The affair was presided over by the Rev. W.B. Palmore, a Southern Methodist, and managed by Alexander Konta, a St. Louis businessman who had visited the Holy Land on several occasions and had good relations with the Turkish authorities. The investment prospectus issued by the Exhibition Company made it clear that the project was intended to create for the visitor a "vision and a dream," that would educate, enlighten, and spiritualize.
Notes
1. G. Sandys, Sandys Travels, prelim. p. 11.
2. Mary Todd Lincoln, Letter, to James Smith, Chicago, Dec. 17, 1866. Quoted in Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters, edited by Justin G. Turner and Linda T. Turner (New York: Knopf, 1972), p. 218 and 400.
3. The Holy Land-related works by these authors were Stephens's Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrea and the Holy Land (New York: Harper, 1838); Curtis's The Howadji in Syria (New York: Harper, 1852): Taylor's The Lands of the Saracen (New York: Putnam, 1856); De Forest's Oriental Acquaintance (New York: Dix, Edwards, 1856); Bryant's Lettres from the East (New York: Putnam, 1869); Browne's Yusef, or the Journey of the Frangi: A Crusade in the East (New York: Harper, 1853); and Melville's Clarel, a Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, edited by W.E. Bezanson (New York: Hendricks House, 1960).
4. Seward had actually been to the Hold Land once before, in 1859. The completion of his term of office gave him the opportunity for an around-the-world tour that included a stay in the Hold Land for a second time, in 1871. Grant embarked on a grand tour of Europe and the East that included a stop in the Hold Land during the winter of 1878.
5. Alta California, April 9, 1867.
6. Stephen Morrell Griswold, Sixty with the Plymouth Church (New York: Revell, 1907), p. 153-166.
7. New York Sun, June 8, 1867; quoted in L. Dickinson, "Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad," p. 4-5.
8. James D. McCabe, A Atour Around the World by General Grant, (Philadelphia: National Pub. Co., 1879), p. 20.
9. W.R. Siddall, "Transportation and the Experience of Travel" (Geographical Review, 77 (1987): 309).
10. J. Augustus Johnson, "The Colonization of Palestine" (The Century, (1882): 293).
11. See Abdul L. Tibawi, American Interests in Syria, 1800-1901 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 9. and Saul P. Colbi, Christianity in the Hold Land: Past and Present (Tel Aviv: Am Hassefer, 1969), p. 85-94.
12. According to British scholar V. Lipman, the Dicksons were Seventh Day Baptists who were inspired by Mrs. Minor's letters as published in Philadelphia and other papers. See V. Lipman, American and the Hold Land Through British Eyes, p. 134. Though the Dicksons resided at Mount Hope with Mrs. Minor until the latter's death in 1855, I have decided to treat their effort as separate because their intentions differed somewhat from Mrs. Minor's original plan.
13. Herman Melville, The Melville Log, edited by John Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), v. 2, p. 548-549.
14. J. Finn, A View from Jerusa;em, p. 281, 304, 310. See also George W. Chamberlain, "A New England Crusade" (New England Magazine, 36 (1907): 195. There is at least one report that a descendant of the survivors was American novelist John Steinbeck.
15. "Walls of Jerusalem and the Ferris Wheel ... Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, U.S.A. No. 8503," stereographic slide (Bennington, Vt.: H. White, 1904).