My Dear Amelia: The Doty Letters from Amoy, Christian Parenthood, the Heathen Chinese, and the Missionary Enterprise
1446
My Dear Amelia: The Doty Letters from Amoy, Christian Parenthood, the Heathen Chinese, and the Missionary Enterprise@This work was supported in part by a grant from The City University of New York PSC-CUNY Research Award Program and by a CUNY Fellowship Leave. Special thanks are also due to an anonymous reviewer for her/his useful suggestions.
Nineteenth-century Protestant missions in China, as in other regions, were essentially family enterprises composed of husband, wife, and children. Almost all of the missionaries were married, and the family became a de facto partnership in fulfilling daily responsibilities, developing and sustaining the missions. Constrained by the Victorian conception of the separate (and unequal) male and female spheres, the missionary family consisted of these key components: 1) husband engaged in such “manly” activities as leadership, exploration and publicity; 2) wife devoted to more “feminine,” more “stationary” work such as the education of Chinese women;@For a contemporary controversy over the role of Christian ladies in the China field see the following interrelated articles: C.E. [Charlotte Elizabeth], “China, India, and the East,” Christian Lady’s Magazine 3 (1835): 540-42; Lydia, “China, India, and the East,” Christian Lady’s Magazine 6 (1836): 498-502; J.S., “China, India, and the East,” Christian Lady’s Magazine 7 (1837): 540-43. For some of the histories of American women missionaries in China see Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984); Eva Jane Price, China Journal 1889-1900: An American Missionary Family During the Boxer Rebellion: With the Letters and Diaries of Eva Jane Price and Her Family (New York: Scribner, 1989). and 3) children growing up to become model Christians for the heathen. Therefore, it is not surprising that following their opening by Western powers in the Opium War (1840-42), China’s treaty ports saw the arrival of married missionaries who had often brought with them children and/or later gave birth to new family members there.@For a list of American missionaries and their spouses in China during the mid-nineteenth century, see Rufus Anderson, Memorial Volume of the First 50 Years of the American Board of Commissioners For Foreign Missions, 4th ed (Boston: The Board, 1861) 414-32.
Important as it was, the family is usually not a key element of the traditional narratives of the missionary enterprise. It is usually the subplot of the stories of Western imperialism, the collusion of commercial and religious forces, the Qing government’s interferences, local resistance and acceptance, as well as cultural and linguistic barriers and assimilation.@The historical literature on Christian missions in China is too voluminous to cite. For some classic studies see Paul A. Cohen, “Christian Missions and Their Impact to 1900,” The Cambridge History of China, ed. John K. Fairbank, vol. 10, pt. 1 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1978) 543-90; John K. Fairbank, ed., The Missionary Enterprise in China and America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1974); Ellsworth C. Carlson, The Foochow Missionaries, 1847-1880 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1974). For a brief history of the Reformed Church’s missionary activities in China see Gerald F[rancis] De Jong, The Reformed Church in China, 1842-1951, Historical Series of the Reformed Church in America, No. 22 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, [1992]) . These accounts are certainly rich and informative, but they do not do justice to what men and women missionaries experienced as father and mother who had as much daily worry about the spread of God’s tidings as about the common things that might happen to their family (any family)—illness, death, separation, the caring of the young, etc.
One of such missing stories belongs to the family of Elihu Doty, an ordained minister of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) in the United States.@For Elihu Doty and his family’s biographical information, I rely on: [Alexander Wylie], Memorials of Protestant Missionaries to the Chinese (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Press, 1867; Taipei, Taiwan: Cheng-Wen, 1967) 97-98; Ethan Allen Doty, The Doty-Doten Family in America (Brooklyn: [Published for the Author], 1897) 108-11; De Jong 17-43; “List of Protestant Missionaries to the Chinese,” Chinese Repository 20 (1851): 513-45; W[illiam] J[ohn] Pohlman, Letter to Rev. Dr. DeWitt, 8 October 1845, Chinese Repository 16 (1847): 175-77 . Following some disappointing work in Batavia (Jakarta), Singapore, and Borneo, Elihu Doty arrived in the treaty port Amoy (Xiamen), China in June 1844 with his wife, Clarissa D. Ackley, and two young children, Ferris Holmes and Clarissa Eliza. Shortly after their arrival, the Dotys lost Ferris Holmes, who was then only six years old. To compound his grief, Doty wrote in September 1845 that one of his DRC colleague’s wife had died in Amoy, and that his own wife, who had just given birth to Amelia Caroline in January 1845, was now “lying almost as helpless as an infant, on a bed of sickness, and I fear, must prove of death.”@E[lihu] Doty, Letter to Rev. Dr. DeWitt, 30 September 1845, Chinese Repository 16 (1847): 174-75 . Ackley, who had taken advantage of her Chinese knowledge to organize meetings for women and establish an elementary school, finally succumbed to diarrhea and constant indigestion in October 1845. Her death dealt a blow not only to the family but also to the mission’s outreach to the female population.
Doty thereupon took the motherless children of his as well as those of his colleague back to America, where he arranged for Amelia’s adoption by Rev. John Dubois and left the other children with friends. Doty remarried and in August 1847 returned to Amoy with his second wife, Eleanor Augusta Smith, who gave birth to Edward Smith later in the same year. But premature deaths continued to haunt the Dotys. Barely seven months old, Edward died in July 1848. A decade later in 1858, Smith died (at 34) after giving birth to Elmira Louisa, who unfortunately survived her mother for just a few months. Before her death, Smith, who did not have any prior acquaintance with the Chinese language, had to acquire a higher level of competence before she eventually assumed the deceased Mrs. Doty’s duties. The passing of Smith thus struck another setback to the Amoy mission. Doty took his four children to the care of his wife’s parents and sister in the United States. He did not marry again and returned to China in 1861. Declining in health, Doty retired from China in 1864 and died upon arrival in America.
In what ways did the American family and the China mission relate? How did the missionaries’ commitment to their family, affected by a series of afflictions, on the one hand and their evangelism among the “heathen and wicked people” on the other intersect? These questions can hardly be answered by looking at the plethora of nineteenth-century publications by missionary societies and missionaries themselves, both of whom were, quite understandably, more interested in reporting the progress of official businesses than family affairs. It is toward the missionaries’ private writings, writings not intended for publication, that we should look.
Culled from the dozens of letters in the Doty-Dubois Family Papers, 1846-65 (housed in the New York Public Library),@I am grateful to the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York, for their permission to publish transcripts and quotations from the Doty-Dubois Family Papers. the following personal correspondence sent from Amoy to New York should
suggest some answers. Four of these letters were written by Doty to his
young daughter Amelia, whom Rev. Dubois had just adopted, and the
remaining letter was penned by Smith to Amelia’s adoptive mother, Mrs.
Dubois. Spanning from 1848 to 1851, these archival sources, yet to be
fully tapped by historians and literary scholars, document a difficult
period of the Doty family. Addressed to someone as close as a daughter
or her adoptive mother, the family letters were candidly written,
providing a rare glimpse of how Christian parenthood actually played out
in the “contact zone” between “heathen” China and Christian America.
At one level, these letters from afar are love letters showing that the Doty couple was ever thinking of their family, children, and friends in America (Letters 1-5), and providing updates on their life in Amoy and the development of their mission (particularly Letter 2). Of all their dear ones, the Dotys missed their young children the most, including the deceased ones. As Smith relates, the “precious Amelia” is “the subject of many thoughts and prayers” and the death of the seven-month-old son leaves “a cutting stroke to us, and the vacancy produced by it will long be felt” (Letter 2). And the deeper the Dotys’ love, the greater the pain caused by the separation from their far-away children, their inability to hug and kiss them but through the adoptive parents: “Give Ma and Pa Doty’s love to Pa and Ma [Dubois] and get from them many kisses from us” (Letter 5). Besides expressing his love, Doty, as absentee father, also loses no time in teaching Amelia about the importance of seeking “a new heart” and reminding her to pray for her sister in New York and love and obey “Pa and Ma Dubois” (Letters 1, 3, and 5).
At the other level, the correspondence contains evangelical statements in which Doty constructs his martyrdom, a common missionary theme, on the sacrifices that not only he but also his family and children have to make for the sake of the Amoy mission. As the missionary explains to Amelia, the reason “why Pa and Ma Doty are so far away in China” is that “the Chinese are very ignorant and wicked people who do not love God nor Jesus” (Letter 4). Much as the father “would love to see Amelia and know just how she looks, just how tall she is and hear just how she talks and reads and all these things,” he cannot do so but devotes himself to teaching “such foolish heathen” “about God and how to save their precious souls” (Letter 5).
At yet another level, the letters are replete with unequivocal distinctions between Christians and the heathen Chinese, between superiority and inferiority. For Smith, the nearly completed chapel in Amoy “contrasts beautifully with the low-dark-mud houses, by which it is so densely surrounded, and is a fitting and beautiful emblem of the superiority of the Christian religion, when compared with the moral darkness and degradation, in which so many are enveloped” (Letter 2). These Christian-pagan binaries also serve to construct moral lessons for Amelia as a “fortunate” child growing up in America. Unlike the Chinese children who “never hear about the God who made them … but only learn to worship dead idols and do just as their parents have done,” and unlike the “ignorant Chinese girls” who “are not taught to read,” Amelia, according to Doty, is “far better off” in “that happy land called America” (Letters 4 and 5). With God’s blessings there, Amelia “had not been sick and died as other children often are” but, instead, she “can read,” “grow good,” “every day pray to our Heavenly Father,” and, above all, “have a new heart” that is not like “theirs – all wicked” (Letters 3 and 5).
It is worth noting that the American missionary was not alone in constructing a happy Christian childhood in contrast to the poor lives of the heathen Chinese children. During the same period, as Henrietta Harrison points out, l’Oeuvre de la Sainte Enfance (the Holy Childhood Association) “promoted attractive images of the power of French Christian children over the pagan Chinese” in France.@Henrietta Harrison, “A Penny for the Little Chinese: The French Holy Childhood Association in China, 1843-1951,” American Historical Review 133.1 (2008): 79. The comparison of a happy French childhood to the unfortunate Chinese abandoned child helped shift attention away from a series of domestic problems facing French children such as high child mortality and poverty.@Harrison 79. In the Dotys’ case, it was the pagan and illiterate Chinese child that should make Amelia feel “fortunate” despite her separation from her biological father and siblings, and despite the deaths of her biological mother and family members. It was indeed the same pagan child that helped create “that happy land called America” for Amelia regardless of the serious problems that were haunting many other American children of the time such as child labor, slavery, and poverty. Tellingly, both the French and the Dotys’ construction of a happy Christian childhood depended on a reduction of a wide range of childhoods in many different types of families in China—ranging from rural to urban, from literati to peasant, from rich to poor—into the most unfortunate pagan Chinese child as a human object to be pitied.
As we see, the levels of meanings in the Doty letters are interdependent and interrelated. In other words, parental love, family values and sacrifices, evangelism, missionary martyrdom, the Chinese other, and America “that happy land” were terms depending on one another to create meanings, meanings that in turn helped the Dotys rationalize the decisions they had made about their family and children and the Amoy mission.@For a discussion of evangelical Protestantism and family life in the United States see Sally K. Gallagher, Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003). For a history of evangelism, imperialism, and the gendered American missionary family in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries see Hunter, particularly chapters 5 and 6. Their rationalization shows that the nineteenth-century American evangelical family was constructed as much on God-human and parent-child love as on the representation of the Chinese people as “foolish heathen.” After all, faith and family values were (and still are) part and parcel of the American political discourse as a “world leader.”
Like other manuscripts of the time, the Doty letters cannot be simply reduced to edited, type-written transcripts that appear below. What is lost from the following electronic texts or NINES exhibits is the materiality of the original handwritten letters as communication artifacts of the mid-nineteenth century. As such, the letters have two aspects that call for our attention—the method of their transmission and their physical characteristics. First, the letters were transmitted through the postal network known by contemporaries as the “Overland.”@Jean R. Walton, “Elihu Doty’s Garden: New Brunswick, Borneo, and China,” Journal of New Jersey Postal History Society 32.4 (November 2004): 137-39.
According to Jean R. Walton, Overland mail from China went first to Hong Kong to enter the British postal system, and from the colony “it went to Ceylon, where it transferred to a ship to Suez, traveling overland to Alexandria, thence by ship to Southampton. From there it went to London and then to Liverpool, where it was put on a ship to the U.S.”@Walton 138. By reducing the sail time between Europe and India from several months to about one and a half month, the Overland Route was hailed as a communication revolution, superseding the traditional routes such as the Cape Route around Africa.@Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) 129-41.
According to Jean R. Walton, Overland mail from China went first to Hong Kong to enter the British postal system, and from the colony “it went to Ceylon, where it transferred to a ship to Suez, traveling overland to Alexandria, thence by ship to Southampton. From there it went to London and then to Liverpool, where it was put on a ship to the U.S.”@Walton 138. By reducing the sail time between Europe and India from several months to about one and a half month, the Overland Route was hailed as a communication revolution, superseding the traditional routes such as the Cape Route around Africa.@Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) 129-41.
The Dotys, however, did not share the same positive view of the Overland postal service. Unlike the wealthier China traders, the missionary family could not afford the postage rates; they had to send their private letters under cover of the bulky official mission correspondence and request that those letters be forwarded upon arrival in the United States.@Walton 137. Besides the high postage, the Dotys also complained about the unreliability of the mail network. In a letter to Dubois (not transcribed below), Doty, who had been waiting anxiously for his friends’ mail, suspected a miscarriage of letters, fearing that “they have gone to the bottom of the ocean in a vessel bound from Hong Kong to this place.”@[Elihu Doty], Letter to John Dubois, 15 December 1847, Doty-Dubois Family Papers: Correspondence 1846-50, Personal [Misc.], Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York.
The other material aspect of the Doty letters that needs discussing was their physical characteristics. Probably to avoid incurring extra postage for the mission, the Dotys used paper economically. All of the letters were written on thin, feather-light paper in order not to add too much weight to the mission’s package. Having less content, the letters addressed to the young Amelia (Letters 1, 3, and 4) are smaller in size than those addressed to Mrs. Dubois and Amelia when she was older (Letters 2 and 5). Approximately, the smaller letters measure 5 by 8 inches, and the regular adult letters, 8 by 10 inches. Like most other letters in the Doty-Dubois Family Papers, the letters transcribed below are completely “filled up” on both sides of the paper as though the Dotys did not want to waste any space, maximizing its use for communication with their daughter and her adoptive parents in New York. How then did all of these constraining, less-than-desirable postal and letter-writing conditions inform the Doty letters as multivalent expressions of Christian parenthood, the “othering” of the Chinese people, and the missionary enterprise? It is with this question in mind that we may begin to think beyond the shiny digitized texts on our computer screens and appreciate the following family letters in their historical contexts.
My Dear Amelia: The Doty Letters from Amoy, Christian Parenthood, the Heathen Chinese, and the Missionary Enterprise
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1452
Letter 1
For Amelia Caroline@[Elihu Doty], Letter to Amelia Caroline [Doty-Dubois], 2 August 1848, Doty-Dubois Family Papers: Correspondence 1846-50, Personal [Misc.], Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York. This letter was written in blue ink on the front and back of thin paper of 5 5/16" x 8¼".
Pa Doty, far away in China, wants now to write our little letter to his dear Amelia Caroline. Dear Pa and Ma Dubois in their letter told us about dear Amelia, which made us very glad. Pa and Ma Doty were very glad to hear that little Amelia learned such pretty verses as “Suffer little children to come unto me” and others. They were also very glad that dear Amelia prayed for them and remember them, and that she prayed for others, for ___, that God would give her a new heart. This is right. Dear Amelia ought to pray to God to give every body a new heart and make them good and happy. Dear Amelia must every day pray to God to take away her own naughty heart, and make her a new and good heart, and help her to love Jesus.
Dear Amelia must be a good child. She must love Pa and Ma Dubois very much and pray for them too, and she must always obey them.
A while ago Pa Doty wrote a letter to tell dear Amelia that she had a pretty little baby brother away here in Amoy. He is not here any longer. He was sick, very sick, and died. This dear little body we put into a grave in the ground and God our Heavenly Father took his precious little soul to heaven. He is very happy there with Jesus. Does dear Amelia know that little children often die, and that if they are good and love Jesus, their souls will go and live with Jesus in heaven? Pa Doty wants dear Amelia to love Jesus very much. Then when she dies, she will go to heaven, and there will be her little baby brother, and her brother Ferris, who went to heaven a good while ago, and her own ma, who also died when Amelia was a small baby and went to be with Jesus, happy in heaven.
This is Pa Doty’s little letter to Amelia Caroline. Pa and Ma Doty loves Amelia very much and every day prays to our Heavenly Father to help her and so does Pa and Ma Dubois. And dear Amelia must love and obey them and try to make their hearts glad and not sorry. Pa and Ma Dubois will kiss Amelia many times for Pa and Ma Doty.
Amoy August 2nd 1848
My Dear Amelia: The Doty Letters from Amoy, Christian Parenthood, the Heathen Chinese, and the Missionary Enterprise
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1451
Letter 2
Amoy Saturday, Oct. 21st, [18]48@Mrs. E.A.L. Doty [Eleanor Augusta Smith], Letter to Mrs. John Dubois, 21 October 1848, Doty-Dubois Family Papers: Correspondence 1846-50, Personal [Misc.], Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York. This letter was written in blue ink on the front and back of thin paper of 8 3/8" x 10 13 /16".
My dear Mrs. Dubois:
We cannot think of closing our mail for the dear friends in the U.S. without sending at least a few lines to Gansevoort, though we have both had an unusual amount of writing to do for this month and are both very tired, mentally, physically.
We wrote you last month, acknowledging the reception of a letter from you in July, which is the last we have received. In that we informed you of the death of our previous babe, which occurred just before your letter arrived. It was a cutting stroke to us, and the vacancy produced by it will long be felt. Our dear little son was a great source of comfort and was much loved by all. He was an unusually playful happy babe, and playing with him was almost the only source of innocent recreation we possessed. But he was only lent us; while our heart bleed under the chastisement, we are, I trust, enabled to say “the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.[”]
How is the ‘precious Amelia’? She is the subject of many thoughts and prayers as are also her beloved guardians. Your minute account of her little sayings and doings, does much to clear her beloved Father’s heart. You cannot think how much we value this in your letters or how much happiness you are imparting, when mentioning anything in reference to this subject of so much interest and affection.
Nothing new has occurred in our mission since we last wrote you. While as yet, we see very few marked results of labour, there are some delightful features of encouragement.
My dear husband’s school is in a flourishing condition, and our meeting for females better attended. For the first time, I went out alone, this week, taking only my old “Rover,” to see some Chinese ladies, and to try and get them to come out to meeting. I went about an hour before meeting time thinking they would perhaps be more likely to accompany me than to come alone. We visited several places where I had never been before, and were universally, kindly and politely received.
The experiment proved a very encouraging one, and it was a cheering sight to see, in addition to a school of between twenty and thirty boys, twenty one of these long-secluded Chinese females listening to the words of Life. We have been greatly cheered by the arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Young, who have been to England for the benefit of their health. They return, greatly improved and prepared to enter fresh upon their duties and labours. Mrs. Young is a lovely woman. She is soon to open a Girls’ School, which we feel to be a very desirable thing. She possesses a pretty good knowledge of the language and consequently can go to work at once.
I am studying and progressing as fast as I can expect to though I often feel it is very slow and am very impatient to be able to begin to be more useful. There is so much to be done, that one can scarcely be contented to wait, such a length of time, before anything can be done, after one is on the field. We are all enjoying our usual good health, though we have all felt something of the debilitating effect of the hot season. The weather is now delightfully cool and bracing, and we already feel its healthful effects upon us. Our Chapel is nearly completed, a neat little building it is. It contrasts beautifully with the low-dark-mud houses, by which it is so densely surrounded, and is a fitting and beautiful emblem of the superiority of the Christian religion, when compared with the moral darkness and degradation, in which so many are enveloped. May this little sanctuary, be indeed, a light shining out of darkness, and be the birth place of many precious souls.
Very often do we think of and talk about you, dear friends, and earnestly hope you may long be spared to labour in your pleasant field, and be cheered by seeing the fruits of your exertions. I remember the faces of some of your dear people, but cannot reveal their names. Remember me to that young lady, whom we called upon, and who returned with us in the Sleigh, if you please. Dear Husband unites in much love to you and Mr. Dubois, and much love and many, many kisses to the precious daughter.
Yours very affectionately
Mrs. E A L Doty
My Dear Amelia: The Doty Letters from Amoy, Christian Parenthood, the Heathen Chinese, and the Missionary Enterprise
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1450
Letter 3
Amoy August 16th 1849@[Elihu Doty], Letter to Amelia Caroline [Doty-Dubois], 16 August 1849, Doty-Dubois Family Papers: Correspondence 1846-50, Personal [Misc.], Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York. This letter was written in blue ink on the front and back of thin papers of 5 3/8" x 8 ½".
Ma Doty is going to write a letter to Ma Dubois and so Pa Doty will write a little letter to his dear little Amelia Caroline. Not many days ago Pa and Ma Dubois’ letters came here—away off in China. Oh! How glad they made our hearts. Yes, we were so glad to hear about our dear little Amelia. Our eyes almost cried for joy. We were very glad to hear that our Heavenly Father had kept Amelia well. So that she had not been sick and died as other children often are. We were glad too to know that Amelia thought about her Heavenly Father’s goodness and love and about her dying some day so that her spirit will go to be with him and to be with little (Sorry) her little baby brother and all who are holy and happy in heaven: and also about her body. That althou[gh] it will be put in the ground, it will one day come up again all fresh and new and very beautiful too. Does little Amelia know what the body will be like when it comes up again fresh and new out of the grave? It will be very glorious, just like the glorious body of the dear Savior. But Amelia don’t know how glorious that is. No, nor does Pa Doty know. Yet I know it will [be] very very bright and beautiful, more so than the Sun. Ma Dubois can read to Amelia a little about the glorious body of the Savior as John saw it: Rev 1:13-[e]tc. Now those who love this Savior when they come up fresh out of the grave will have such a bright, beautiful body. Won’t that be glorious indeed! But Amelia must have a new heart and love that Savior and the Heavenly Father now, and then she will go and be with him and at last have this glorious body too.
I suppose Amelia has been with Pa and Ma to New York and seen her Sister Clarissa. How glad you two sisters must have been. What a pleasant time you must have had! I long to hear all about it. Did Amelia think New York a very nice place and did you see many wonderful sights? I suppose so. Dear Amelia must love her sister Clarissa and often pray for her that she too may have a new heart to go to be with the Savior in heaven. I said before that Amelia must get Ma Dubois to read to her about the Savior’s glorious body but perhaps she can read it for herself in her Bible. Amelia will soon be five years old and many children learn to read in their Bibles by that time. Amelia once had a little brother named Ferris Holmes, who were five years old, took his Bible and sat down by Pa and Ma and with them read in turn—morning and evening at prayer. He died in Amoy here before Amelia was born. The Heavenly Father took his Spirit to be with him in heaven. In reading the Psalms he always wanted us to get the verses which had ‘Selah’ at the end. Now if Amelia can read like he could she will also soon learn to write. And then she can make Pa and Ma Doty’s hearts very glad by writing us little letters. Not long ago one little letter came here from Sister Clarissa. Oh how pleasant it was to receive it. Many kisses from my dear Amelia and she must give many to Pa and Ma. Pa and Ma Doty every day pray to the Lord to bless our dear daughter.
My Dear Amelia: The Doty Letters from Amoy, Christian Parenthood, the Heathen Chinese, and the Missionary Enterprise
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1448
Letter 4
Amoy Sept. 18th 1850@[Elihu Doty], Letter to Amelia Caroline [Doty-Dubois], 18 September 1850, Doty-Dubois Family Papers: Correspondence 1846-50, Personal [Misc.], Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York. This letter was written in black ink on the front and back of thin paper of 5¼" x 8 1/16".
My own dear Amelia Caroline[:]
Altho[ugh] I have very little time still I must write you a short letter. Ma Doty has written to Ma Dubois and told all about Mr. and Mrs. Talmage having come to Amoy and brought all your nice presents. But I must tell you how very glad I was to receive them too. It makes my heart glad to know that my far away children remember their far-off in China Pa and Ma. It would make me sorry if [they] did not, but I know they do and so I feel happy. Mr. Talmage bro[ugh]t the picture of you I dare say it looks very much like you. How you have grown! When we left you in America with your dear Pa and Ma Dubois to come to China, you was a little girl who could scarcely speak plain and whose head [had] only a little hair on it. But now you have more hair than I have, and now you can not only speak plain, but read the Bible and other good and nice books. As you grow large, oh, I do hope you will also grow good. But if you would grow good[,] you know you must every day pray to Jesus for his Holy Spirit to make your heart new and clean and to help. Unless you have a new heart you cannot be good and then your Heavenly Father cannot love you. I wonder if Ma Doty in her letter has told about your little brother Charles. He does not walk alone yet, but he goes about on his little feet when he is held up and laughs and calls pa-pa pa-pa: When I look at his little head with his little flaxen hair I often think of you when a little babe with just such hair. Mr. Talmage bro[ugh]t me a little letter written by your own Sister Clarissa. She says she had been to see you and had played on the lake. I hope one of these days to receive letters from Amelia too, written with her own hand. Oh how pleasant that will be. Does Amelia sometimes think why Pa and Ma Doty are so far away in China. I hope so. Yes, Amelia must remember the Chinese are very ignorant and wicked people who do not love God nor Jesus and do not worship him but worship idols, images made of clay and wood. They themselves first make them and then pray to them. Is it not very foolish[?] Now you know Pa and Ma are here in China, first to teach this people that they must not do so and to tell them about the dear Savior, and that they must believe and love him and have new hearts or that they cannot go to heaven and be happy. Oh, how many many children there are here who never hear about the God who made them and know nothing about the Savior Jesus; but only learn to worship dead idols and do just as their parents have done. Amelia must pity and pray for these heathen children. I hope one of these days when we have time and a good opportunity to send some little remembrances to Amelia. Ma Doty wants to do so too. But you must not be impatient to have anything soon, for China is very far away from Gansevoort and often takes a long time for things to go across the wide sea.
Amelia must kiss Pa and Ma Dubois for Pa and Ma Doty. The Lord bless you – is the Prayer of your far away Pa Doty.
My Dear Amelia: The Doty Letters from Amoy, Christian Parenthood, the Heathen Chinese, and the Missionary Enterprise
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1449
Letter 5
Amoy Jan. 21 1851@[Elihu Doty], Letter to Amelia Caroline [Doty-Dubois], 21 January 1851, Doty-Dubois Family Papers: Correspondence 1851-60, Personal [Misc.], Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. This letter was written in black ink on the front and back of thin paper of 8 1/8" x 10½".
How I am going to send a little birth day letter to my Amelia Caroline because she is six years only on the day of the date of this letter. Six years old then[,] my Amelia must be quite a large girl able to read her Bible and other books and perhaps can write some too. Oh how I would love to see Amelia and know just how she looks, just how tall she is and hear just how she talks and reads and all these things. But this cannot be. There I am far off in China and my dear daughter is far away in that happy land called America and I know she is far better off, with her dear pa and ma there, than she would be with us among this heathen and wicked people. And I dare say, my dear Amelia will think it best that I should be here and try to teach the poor ignorant Chinese not to worship idols but to worship God our heavenly Father and to love the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved. Oh! these Chinese have very dark and wicked hearts or they would not be such foolish heathen. But why is not my dear Amelia Caroline just like one of those poor ignorant Chinese girls? Yes, dear Amelia you was born in China – in Amoy and in the very house in which I am now writing to you. And yet you are not like these Chinese. You can read but these girls are not taught to read. You every day pray to our Heavenly Father, but these girls, if they worship at all, only burn incense sticks before idols made of clay or wood, just such things as I have sent in a box to your dear pa. How do you know why it is that you are not like these ignorant Chinese girls? Do you think it is because you have a better heart than they have. No, this is not so. Unless you have a new heart your old heart is just like theirs – all wicked. It is only because your Heavenly Father has been wonderfully kind to you that you differ from these little heathen girls.
When you was a very little baby your Heavenly Father took your first Ma to heaven but he did not leave you without a very kind ma to love you and care for you and teach you. When the dear Lord Jesus told me your first Pa to go back to China and teach the heathen about God and how to save their precious souls, he gave you another dear pa to take care of and love you very much. Is not this all very wonderful and has not your heavenly Father loved you very much indeed? Truly it is so. And does my dear Amelia love this Heavenly Father very much too? You ought to. But unless you have got a new heart, you do not love Him and you must have a new heart. And do you know who only can give you this new heart? You cannot make you own heart new. But you can and must pray to the Lord Jesus to send his Holy Spirit to create in you a clean new heart. Then you will love God and the dear Savior. You are not too young to seek a new heart: Nor are you too young to die and, if you have this new heart, to go to heaven and be forever holy and happy there. Others seek earnestly and constantly for this new heart. Every day do I pray for you that your young heart may be the temple of the Holy Spirit. So you have gone to live in a new home. I hope your pa and ma and you find Cicero a pleasant place, and your new home a very happy one. I have a very imperfect recollection of that region of country, for when I was a very small boy, only a few years old, my father and mother lived for a short time in the adjoining county of Cayuga, not far from Auburn and near the Owasco Lake. There the County was New Auburn, was just beginning to be a small village and what I can remember more distinctly than anything else is that there was red cedar wood on the shore of the lake; and that there was a neighbor not far off, a farmer whose name I feel pretty sure was Johnson. Everything must be very much changed. Now and then there was no Cicero in that region. So you will not find fault any more that you have to study your books. It would be very wrong to be always unhappy and ill tempered that [Pa and Ma?] wants you to study and learn. If you should not very diligently study and learn all you can now, if you live to become a woman, you will be very sorry for it. Pa and Ma are much older and wiser than little Amelia Caroline and know what is best for her. And more[:] if Amelia was not cheerful and happy in doing as Pa and Ma wish her to do, it would be disobedience, and that would make their hearts sorry, and would make her Heavenly Father angry too.
And now would dear Amelia like to hear about her little brother Charles here in China? He now runs alone all about the house, and is just a [babe?] of mischief. Sometimes he plays with his pretty white dog named José and sometimes he plays with a stick. He is very fond of pictures and soon as he sees Ma and Pa have a book, he wants to look in it to see if there is not a picture. When he thinks a picture very nice he likes it. He begins too to say a few words, but it is as much in Chinese as in English. I dare say he would love to play with you and now if he were not asleep and could talk, he would send you many kisses for he is fond of kissing.
Give Ma and Pa Doty’s love to Pa and Ma and get from them many kisses from us. Our heavenly Father bless my dear Amelia Caroline – now just six years old – is the prayer of her Pa Doty.
My Dear Amelia: The Doty Letters from Amoy, Christian Parenthood, the Heathen Chinese, and the Missionary Enterprise
Endnotes
1 This work was supported in part by a grant from The City University of New York PSC-CUNY Research Award Program and by a CUNY Fellowship Leave. Special thanks are also due to an anonymous reviewer for her/his useful suggestions.
2 For a contemporary controversy over the role of Christian ladies in the China field see the following interrelated articles: C.E. [Charlotte Elizabeth], “China, India, and the East,” Christian Lady’s Magazine 3 (1835): 540-42; Lydia, “China, India, and the East,” Christian Lady’s Magazine 6 (1836): 498-502; J.S., “China, India, and the East,” Christian Lady’s Magazine 7 (1837): 540-43. For some of the histories of American women missionaries in China see Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984); Eva Jane Price, China Journal 1889-1900: An American Missionary Family During the Boxer Rebellion: With the Letters and Diaries of Eva Jane Price and Her Family (New York: Scribner, 1989).
3 For a list of American missionaries and their spouses in China during the mid-nineteenth century, see Rufus Anderson, Memorial Volume of the First 50 Years of the American Board of Commissioners For Foreign Missions, 4th ed (Boston: The Board, 1861) 414-32.
4 The historical literature on Christian missions in China is too voluminous to cite. For some classic studies see Paul A. Cohen, “Christian Missions and Their Impact to 1900,” The Cambridge History of China, ed. John K. Fairbank, vol. 10, pt. 1 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1978) 543-90; John K. Fairbank, ed., The Missionary Enterprise in China and America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1974); Ellsworth C. Carlson, The Foochow Missionaries, 1847-1880 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1974). For a brief history of the Reformed Church’s missionary activities in China see Gerald F[rancis] De Jong, The Reformed Church in China, 1842-1951, Historical Series of the Reformed Church in America, No. 22 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, [1992]) .
5 For Elihu Doty and his family’s biographical information, I rely on: [Alexander Wylie], Memorials of Protestant Missionaries to the Chinese (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Press, 1867; Taipei, Taiwan: Cheng-Wen, 1967) 97-98; Ethan Allen Doty, The Doty-Doten Family in America (Brooklyn: [Published for the Author], 1897) 108-11; De Jong 17-43; “List of Protestant Missionaries to the Chinese,” Chinese Repository 20 (1851): 513-45; W[illiam] J[ohn] Pohlman, Letter to Rev. Dr. DeWitt, 8 October 1845, Chinese Repository 16 (1847): 175-77 .
6 E[lihu] Doty, Letter to Rev. Dr. DeWitt, 30 September 1845, Chinese Repository 16 (1847): 174-75 .
7 I am grateful to the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York, for their permission to publish transcripts and quotations from the Doty-Dubois Family Papers.
8 Henrietta Harrison, “A Penny for the Little Chinese: The French Holy Childhood Association in China, 1843-1951,” American Historical Review 133.1 (2008): 79.
9 Harrison 79.
10 For a discussion of evangelical Protestantism and family life in the United States see Sally K. Gallagher, Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003). For a history of evangelism, imperialism, and the gendered American missionary family in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries see Hunter, particularly chapters 5 and 6.
11 Jean R. Walton, “Elihu Doty’s Garden: New Brunswick, Borneo, and China,” Journal of New Jersey Postal History Society 32.4 (November 2004): 137-39.
12 Walton 138.
13 Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) 129-41.
14 Walton 137.
15 [Elihu Doty], Letter to John Dubois, 15 December 1847, Doty-Dubois Family Papers: Correspondence 1846-50, Personal [Misc.], Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York.
16 [Elihu Doty], Letter to Amelia Caroline [Doty-Dubois], 2 August 1848, Doty-Dubois Family Papers: Correspondence 1846-50, Personal [Misc.], Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York. This letter was written in blue ink on the front and back of thin paper of 5 5/16" x 8¼".
17 Mrs. E.A.L. Doty [Eleanor Augusta Smith], Letter to Mrs. John Dubois, 21 October 1848, Doty-Dubois Family Papers: Correspondence 1846-50, Personal [Misc.], Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York. This letter was written in blue ink on the front and back of thin paper of 8 3/8" x 10 13 /16".
18 [Elihu Doty], Letter to Amelia Caroline [Doty-Dubois], 16 August 1849, Doty-Dubois Family Papers: Correspondence 1846-50, Personal [Misc.], Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York. This letter was written in blue ink on the front and back of thin papers of 5 3/8" x 8 ½".
19 [Elihu Doty], Letter to Amelia Caroline [Doty-Dubois], 18 September 1850, Doty-Dubois Family Papers: Correspondence 1846-50, Personal [Misc.], Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York. This letter was written in black ink on the front and back of thin paper of 5¼" x 8 1/16".
20 [Elihu Doty], Letter to Amelia Caroline [Doty-Dubois], 21 January 1851, Doty-Dubois Family Papers: Correspondence 1851-60, Personal [Misc.], Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. This letter was written in black ink on the front and back of thin paper of 8 1/8" x 10½".
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