Page 405 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

391.

Although American officials certainly knew about the

opium trade in China, neither the Navy nor the State Department

was aware of the deep American involvement in that trade before
2
1839. American merchants who petitioned Congress in May 1839

did not disclaim American participation in the opium trade. But

they emphasized that they condemned a revival of the drug trade
and, in support of this end, they had voluntarily signed pledges

3
to forego further trade in opium. Kearny and the Navy Depart­

ment did not realize that Americans observed their pledges only

during the early stages of the Opium War. The English, although

they had assured Imperial Commissioner Lin Tse-hsu in March 1839

that they would end shipments of opium, had resumed opium specu­

lation within several months. In November 1839, when hostile

incidents between English and Chinese were still sporadic, an

American merchant reported from Macao that "the opium trade is

flourishing vigorously--" The leading English houses of Jar­

dine, Matheson & Co. and Dent & Co. were receiving larger

quantities of the drug from Bombay and Calcutta than they had

2
American consuls at Canton rarely mentioned the opium
trade in their despatches to Washington. In 1832 Com. John
Downes, visiting China in the U.S.S. "Potomac," noted the Ameri­
can receiving-ship "Lintin" anchored at the island of Lintin.
Downes notified the Navy Department that American merchants
utilized the ship "to receive and dispose of opium. . " But
the Department took no action. J.N. Reynolds, Voyage of the
United States Frigate Potomac, under the Command of John Downes,
during the Circumnavigation of the Globe, in the Years 1831, 1832,
1833, and 1834 (New York, 1835), p. 338.
3
U.S., Congress, House, Committee of Foreign Affairs,
A Memorial from American Merchants at Canton, China, Jan. 9,
1840, H. Doc. 40, 26th Cong., 1st sess., 1840-41.