Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,129

This is the grave of Anson Burlingame.

Born in 1823 in New Berlin, New York, Burlingame mostly grew up in Ohio and then Michigan, as his parents moved west. He was a good student and the family had some money. He went to the University of Michigan beginning in 1838. He graduated in 1841 and passed the bar. He then moved to Boston. He had by this time become a committed abolitionist and was a big supporter of the Free Soil Party in 1848. He was also very skeptical of the Irish and became a Know-Nothing after that. There was a ton of crossover between being anti-slavery and anti-Irish and it’s a huge mistake today to assume that abolitionists somehow replicate the human rights position of contemporary liberalism. You will be very disappointed if you start digging at all. And as I always say, if you don’t want to know about the past, don’t ask the questions.

Burlingame moved from lawyer and public speaker into electoral politics in the 1850s. Massachusetts had a constitutional convention in 1853 and he was a delegate. That same year, he served a single year in the state senate and then ran for Congress in 1854. He won, running as a Know-Nothing. He soon switched to the Republicans, as that had become the clear second party and they were happy to take in the anti-immigrant fanatics.

In 1856, South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks nearly beat Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner to death on the Senate floor. Burlingame was so angry and so horrified that he gave a speech in Congress that shot him into the national spotlight. He called Brooks a coward, among other things. Now, the thing about Brooks is that the reason he beat Sumner is that he thought the senator wasn’t man enough to have a duel. And in fact, inherently in the abolitionist critique of the planter elite is that slavery had made them a bunch of violent lunatics. So he decided to just beat Brooks instead, with his allies protecting him from anyone interfering with his murderous violence.

So Brooks, figuring that Burlingame was another wussy northerner, challenged him to a duel for his words. Burlingame however was no wet noodle. He knew what he was getting into. He knew that Brooks was a murderous piece of shit. He didn’t really buy into these southern notions of violent honor. But also knew that he had to call out Brooks. So Burlingame said, sure. Let’s duel. He had the choice of weapons and location. He chose rifles and he chose the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Let’s do it. Brooks? He was the coward. He was shocked that Burlingame accepted. But see, Burlingame was a great shot. This became known, he had a lot of rifle training. So Brooks didn’t show up. He said that if he crossed into Canada, he would be “unsafe.” Yeah, because Burlingame would have shot and killed his slaver ass. Brooks would soon die of dysentery anyway. What a piece of shit.

Anyway, all of this really raised Burlingame’s status from obscure local congressman to defender of the northern martyr. That didn’t mean he was electoral gold. He lost his 1860 reelection campaign. Democrats had strength in Massachusetts. So Abraham Lincoln named Burlingame Minister to Austria. But that was not acceptable to the Hapsburgs. Burlingame had spoken freely about his admiration for Lajos Kossuth and Hungarian independence. So Vienna vetoed this. Lincoln responded by sending Burlingame China as the American Minister there. Did Burlingame know anything about China? Not to my knowledge. But Massachusetts was heavily involved in the China trade, so one can see this as a logical move from that perspective.

Burlingame had a pretty liberal notion of international relations it turns out. He was disgusted by the Opium Wars, which let’s face it are one of the worst things ever done to a nation in global history. He pushed a more cooperative policy with the Chinese government. He also became involved in internal Chinese affairs to some extent. He put himself in alliance with reformist liberal members of the Chinese court, which of course could mean greater alliance with American political and economic values. He was also quite effective at dealing with Europe. He encouraged Europe to stop talking about actually taking over China and told them they would be more effective if they at least claimed to respect the territorial integrity of the country.

In fact, Burlingame was so effective that he came to represent the Chinese court in the United States. In 1867, he wanted to go back home. China didn’t really want him to leave. But if he was going to leave, they asked him to represent them as the head of a multinational mission that consisted of some Chinese officials, some European missionaries, and Burlingame, to present their interests in Washington. He agreed. He then gave a tour of the United States, giving speeches about how Chinese immigrants to the United States were good and should be embraced. He had grown a lot since his Know-Nothing days, though he could still have been viciously anti-Catholic and probably was.

This all got a lot of attention and so by the time Burlingame got to Washington, Congress was primed to work out a pretty good treaty with the Chinese. This became known as the Burlingame Treaty, which gave China most-favored nation status in trade and was the first European or Euro-descendant power to negotiate a treaty with the Chinese government in a state of fairness and respect, not exploitation. Obviously this did not continue in the United States, not with the Chinese Exclusion Act and then the American imperialist turn, personified in China by its attempt to get Europe to agree to the Open Door Policy. But that’s not on Burlingame.

After this, Burlingame took his Chinese treaty tour to Europe. He went to Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, working out new treaties. Then it was off to Russia. He was working out a new treaty in St. Petersburg. He dropped dead. No one knew why. There was a week of pain and then he died in 1870, at the age of 49. In 2025, a couple of his descendants did real historical research here and got an article published in the Journal of American East-Asian Relations suggesting that he had been poisoned. I read the thing and wasn’t too convinced. They suggest he was poisoned with arsenic. Maybe he was. I can believe that. It’s harder to say why and they have a bunch of theories, but none of them really stick. Still, it’s entirely plausible.

A bunch of money was raised to get Burlingame’s body back to the United States. Anson Burlingame is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other Americans involved with China, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. April 2026 donations added up to–$48. Which I thank those three readers for very much, but a lot of regular readers here might want to keep the series alive. Figured I’d update this with the first grave post each month, just to give people a sense of what the support is for it. Anyway, Samuel Shaw, America’s first consul at Canton, is in Boston and Edward Conger, who was minister to China during the Boxer Rebellion, is in Los Angeles. There are also a good number of interesting people buried in the foreign cemetery in Shanghai, in case anyone has a lot of spare yuan laying around. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.