In China, the memory of the Opium War is a story of national decline and humiliation. Over three years, the Chinese government was defeated in a series of intermittent, but bloody engagements and finally forced to open ports and cede land, including Hong Kong, to Great Britain, all—as the Chinese and many sympathizers in the West saw it—for the purpose of protecting the illegal, but enormously profitable opium trade making China a nation of drug addicts. British merchants, and in their wake American ship captains and traders, saw their role as supplying the large demand for opium in China, and moved their operations from Canton to Hong Kong. The treaty that ended the Opium War ratified the seizure of Hong Kong and was the first of many “unequal treaties” with encroaching foreign powers that would follow. Hong Kong became a thriving center of trade—considered an exemplar of unfettered business enterprise in the West, but, for more than 150 years, in China a symbol of foreign exploitation.

The Massachusetts Historical Society enters the fray

In the fall of 1841, 74-year-old John Quincy Adams, a former U.S. president then a representative from Massachusetts in Congress, agreed to present a public lecture in Boston on behalf of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Since 1802, Adams had been, when his diplomatic and political career allowed it, an active member of the MHS. While his address was the first in a series of lectures on American history designed to raise funds for the Historical Society, Adams chose as his topic the conflict then underway between Great Britain and China—the Opium War.

Earlier the same year, Adams had made his famous defense before the Supreme Court of the Amistad captives—Africans who had been illegally kidnapped and sold as slaves in Cuba. On 22 November 1841, his audience at the Masonic Temple in Boston, “crowded to overflowing,” probably expected to hear another attack on slavery by “Old Man Eloquent,” but they were in for a surprise. Adams launched into a vigorous defense of the conduct of the British government in their relations with China, denying that the illegal opium trade was the cause of the war. He argued that the Chinese government recognized “no such Law [of Nations]” and that its “hereditary, patriarchal despotism” had brought the conflict upon itself by demanding the “Ko-tow”—the complete submission of the representatives of “barbarian” nations to Chinese supremacy—making normal diplomatic relations impossible.

In recording the events of 22 November in his diary, John Quincy Adams expressed his relief that his lecture “was heard without manifestation of disapprobation,” even though it ran “directly contrary to the strong current of popular opinion in this Country and will be handled without mercy by political antagonists.” John G. Palfrey, the editor of the Boston-based North American Review, originally had suggested that John Quincy Adams write an article for the Review about the conflict between China and Great Britain, but he clearly was taken aback when Adams forwarded to him the manuscript of his argument that Britain had a “righteous cause.” Palfrey, who questioned whether the “unsocial and selfish” policies of the Chinese government justified British military action, prevaricated, knowing that Adams was about to return to Washington.

John Quincy Adams’s address never appeared in the North American Review, but it was published in part, without his permission, in the 4 December 1841 issue of the Quarto Notion, George Roberts’s Boston literary newspaper. Even that excerpt of the talk took up three entire pages of the Notion, concluding with what Adams described as the “monitory lesson, written upon a beam of phosphoric light—of preparation for war and preservation of peace.”

China Trade materials at the Massachusetts Historical Society

Soon after the acquisition of important manuscript collections previously held by the Museum of the American China Trade in Milton, Massachusetts, Katherine H. Griffin compiled an overview of the Massachusetts Historical Society’s related holdings, “Manuscripts on the American China Trade at the Massachusetts Historical Society,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, v. 100 (Boston, 1988), 128-139.

Current information about the Historical Society’s China Trade holdings can be located by searching collection guides (manuscript and photograph collection descriptions and inventories) and the Historical Society’s online catalog, ABIGAIL, for the phrase “China trade.”