Who was Anson Burlingame?
Postcard of Anson Burlingame, ca. 1870
In 1870, Mark Twain wrote a eulogy on behalf of his friend and mentor, Anson Burlingame: “It is not easy to comprehend at an instant’s warning the exceeding magnitude of the loss to which mankind sustains in this death . . . he was a very, very great man.” Twain went on to list Burlingame’s successes in his tribute, and however effusive, they are by all accounts accurate. Burlingame’s legacy has been largely forgotten now, eclipsed primarily by the overwhelming circumstances and people of his time, namely, the civil war and Lincoln. But during his own era, he was greatly respected and admired.
“He was a large, handsome man,” Twain recalled, “with such a face as children instinctively trust in, and homeless and friendless creatures appeal to without fear. He was courteous at all times and to all people, and he had the rare and winning faculty of being always interested in whatever a man had to say – a faculty which he possessed simply because nothing was trivial to him for which any man or woman or child had a heart.”
Graduating with honors from Harvard in 1846, he became a Boston lawyer, a state senator, and from 1855 to 1861, a Massachusetts representative to the House of Representatives. In that position, Burlingame accomplished a great many things, but most prominently, he was an outspoken abolitionist at a time when it was neither very credible nor safe to hold such a creed.
In 1861, Lincoln chose Burlingame to be envoy to Austria, but Burlingame’s egalitarian leanings got in the way of the closed European mindset, and Austria refused to received him. The President, recognizing Burlingame’s abilities, reassigned him to China, “ . . . to represent the youngest in the court of the oldest of nations.” As ambassador, Burlingame was determined to counter the show of arrogance, dismissiveness, and lack of respect that all the European consuls displayed toward their Chinese host.
Monument to Anson Burlingame in Washington Park
There was an incident once in which an American killed three Chinese citizens. Usually in such circumstances, the perpetrator would have been given embassy immunity and received little or no punishment. Burlingame refused to play favorites. In a wholly unprecedented move, he made sure that there would not only be a trial, but one in which Chinese citizens would have the right to testify. The criminal was found guilty, sentenced and hanged.
The Burlingame treaty, as it was so named, was unmatched in fairness and equanimity, even down to our time. The Chinese had such a high regard for him that they granted this new envoy full authority to work on China’s behalf with all the other European nations. In this, as with all his endeavors, he was highly successful.
“It was this trait of generosity that moved him in framing treaties, to frame them in the broad sense of the world, instead of selfishly seeking to acquire advantages for his own country alone and at the expense of the other party to the treaty, as had always before been the recognized ‘diplomacy.’ ” This sense of fairness is what set Burlingame, again in Twain’s words: “ . . . head and shoulders above all the Americans of today . . .”
Burlingame died in 1870, at the age of 50, in St. Petersburg while closing a deal with Tsar Alexander II for a similar “Burlingame treaty” between Russia and China. For that effort, China posthumously awarded Burlingame its highest honor, along with a substantial pension for his family.
On one of Burlingame’s trips between China and Washington DC, he stopped in San Francisco, where he visited with a charismatic Peninsula landholder and banker, William Ralston. Burlingame accepted Ralston’s invitation to acquire 1,100 acres of land next to Ralston’s own ranch in Belmont and even changed his residency to “Californian,” making plans to retire here. When he died prematurely in Russia, Ralston nonetheless named part of the parcel “Burlingame” in memory of a great American public servant.
Twain Bench with obituary quote
Upon Burlingame’s death, Mark Twain wrote an obituary for him, some of which is preserved on a bench as part of the Anson Burlingame Monument in Washington Park.
On Wednesday, in St. Petersburg, Mr. Burlingame died after a short illness. It is not easy to comprehend the exceeding magnitude of the loss which mankind sustains in this death, the loss which all nations and all peoples sustain in it. For he had outgrown the narrow citizenship of a state and become a citizen of the world; and his charity was large enough and his great heart warm enough to feel for all its races and to labor for them.
