Anson Burlingame

Anson Burlingame (November 14, 1820 – February 23, 1870) was an American lawyer, Republican and American Party legislator, diplomat, and abolitionist whose career spanned state politics, three terms in the United States House of Representatives, and a pioneering role in Sino–American relations. He is best known for serving as United States minister to China from 1862 to 1867 and subsequently, in a remarkable reversal of roles, as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary for the Qing Empire to the United States and several European powers, a mission that produced the landmark Burlingame Treaty of 1868.

Burlingame was born in New Berlin, Chenango County, New York, on November 14, 1820, the son of Joel Burlingame and Freelove Angell. In 1823 his parents moved west to Ohio, and about a decade later the family relocated again to Michigan, part of the broader westward migration of New England families in the early nineteenth century. Between 1838 and 1841 he attended the Detroit branch of the University of Michigan, where he pursued classical and legal studies. He later entered Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1846, and during his time there he became a member of the Sigma chapter of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. On June 3, 1847, he married Jane Cornelia Livermore. The couple had three children: Edward Livermore Burlingame, born in 1848; Walter Angell Burlingame, born in 1852; and a daughter, Gertrude Burlingame, born in 1856.

After his admission to the bar, Burlingame established a law practice in Boston, Massachusetts, where he quickly gained a reputation as a powerful orator and committed opponent of slavery. He rose to prominence in Massachusetts politics with his speeches on behalf of the Free Soil Party during the 1848 campaign, aligning himself with antislavery and reform currents that were reshaping Northern politics. His growing stature led to his election as a delegate to the Massachusetts constitutional convention of 1853, where he participated in debates over representation and state governance, and to service in the Massachusetts State Senate from 1853 to 1854. In these early legislative roles he emerged as a vigorous advocate of free labor principles and an outspoken critic of the Slave Power.

Burlingame entered national politics with his election to the United States House of Representatives, where he served three consecutive terms from 1855 to 1861, representing Massachusetts during a period of mounting sectional crisis. He was first elected as a member of the American Party, often known as the Know Nothing Party, reflecting the complex realignment of mid-1850s politics. As the slavery issue came to dominate national affairs, he helped organize the new Republican Party in Massachusetts and was subsequently reelected as a Republican. As a Republican member of Congress, he participated actively in the legislative process and represented the interests of his Massachusetts constituents during a critical era in American history, aligning himself with the party’s antislavery and Unionist positions.

Burlingame’s most celebrated moment in Congress came in the aftermath of the caning of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina on the Senate floor in May 1856, following Sumner’s fierce antislavery speech “The Crime Against Kansas.” Outraged by the assault on his fellow Bostonian, Burlingame delivered what The New York Times later described as “the most celebrated speech” of his career, a scathing denunciation of Brooks in which he branded the South Carolinian “the vilest sort of coward” on the House floor. Brooks responded by challenging Burlingame to a duel, declaring that he would face him “in any Yankee mudsill of his choosing.” Burlingame, a noted marksman, promptly accepted and, as the challenged party, chose rifles as the weapons and the Navy Yard on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls as the location, thereby avoiding U.S. anti-dueling laws. Brooks, reportedly alarmed by Burlingame’s enthusiasm and reputation with firearms, failed to appear, citing the danger of traveling through “hostile country” in the northern states. Burlingame’s spirited defense of Sumner and his willingness to face Brooks in a duel greatly enhanced his standing throughout the North and underscored his reputation as a courageous abolitionist.

After losing his bid for reelection to Congress in 1860, Burlingame was drawn into diplomatic service by the new Republican administration. On March 22, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln appointed him United States minister to the Austrian Empire. However, because Burlingame had publicly championed the Hungarian nationalist Lajos Kossuth and his struggle for independence from Austrian rule, the Habsburg government found him unacceptable, and he did not take up the post. Lincoln instead appointed him minister to the Qing Empire in China, a position he assumed in 1862. In Beijing, Burlingame pursued what he termed a “cooperative policy” in contrast to the coercive, imperialistic approach that had characterized Western conduct during the First and Second Opium Wars. He cultivated reform-minded officials at the Qing court and worked to persuade the Western powers to renounce interference in China’s internal affairs. As he later summarized, this cooperative policy “substituted for the old doctrine of violence one of fair diplomatic action,” and he reported that he had secured agreement from European representatives “to give to the treaties a fair and Christian construction” and “never [to] menace the territorial integrity of China.”

The success of Burlingame’s diplomacy impressed leading Qing officials, who saw in him a trusted intermediary with the Western world. Intending to retire from his post and return to American politics, he prepared to leave China on November 16, 1867. At that juncture, reform elements at court, seeking to send a mission abroad to regularize and expand China’s foreign relations but concerned that untrained officials “would not be at all familiar with foreign manners and customs,” persuaded the Tongzhi Emperor to appoint Burlingame as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to head China’s first formal diplomatic mission to the United States and the principal European powers. The delegation, which included two Chinese ministers, English and French secretaries, six students from Peking, and a sizable retinue, arrived in the United States in March 1868. Burlingame embarked on a national speaking tour, using his considerable oratorical gifts to advocate equal treatment for China, respect for its sovereignty, and a welcoming stance toward Chinese immigrants.

When the Chinese mission reached Washington, Burlingame drew on his personal connections with the Republican administration to negotiate a supplementary agreement to the existing Reed Treaty of 1858. On July 28, 1868, the two sides concluded what became known as the Burlingame Treaty, the first treaty between China and a Western power framed on terms of formal equality after the Opium War. The treaty provided that Chinese subjects in the United States would enjoy the same rights as citizens of the most favored nation, employing a legal strategy previously used only to expand foreign privileges in China. Burlingame also secured language permitting Chinese nationals to become naturalized citizens, challenging existing American legal barriers to Asian naturalization. He subsequently led the mission to Europe, where he negotiated additional treaties on China’s behalf with Denmark, Sweden, Holland, and Prussia, further embedding the principle of cooperative diplomacy in China’s foreign relations.

While engaged in negotiations for a treaty between China and Russia, Burlingame died suddenly in Saint Petersburg on February 23, 1870, at the age of forty-nine. Contemporary observers attributed his death to natural causes, but in 2025 researchers, drawing on diplomatic dispatches, official reports, private correspondence, and medical journals, advanced the argument that his symptoms and their progression over six days were consistent with arsenic poisoning and suggested a “likely assassination,” though this interpretation remains a subject of historical debate. In recognition of his service, the Qing court in Beijing posthumously elevated him to the First Rank and granted his family a pension of $10,000. His body was returned to the United States, and he was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Burlingame’s family remained prominent in American intellectual and literary life. His son Edward Livermore Burlingame became the founding editor of Scribner’s Magazine, an influential literary and cultural periodical of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His grandson, Roger Burlingame, Edward’s son, achieved distinction as an author of fiction, nonfiction, and biographies. Burlingame’s own reputation underwent significant shifts after his death. Many of the principles embodied in the Burlingame Treaty were soon reversed: Western powers continued to encroach upon China’s sovereignty, and the United States Congress enacted increasingly restrictive laws on Chinese immigration, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Following the Communist Revolution of 1949 and the onset of Cold War tensions, he was often portrayed as a naive or overly optimistic advocate of China. With the gradual warming of Sino–American relations beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, however, historians and diplomats reassessed his legacy more favorably, emphasizing his role as an early architect of a cooperative, multilateral approach to China.

Burlingame’s name and memory have been preserved in several places and commemorations. The city of Burlingame, California, and the town of Burlingame, Kansas, as well as the community of Anson, Wisconsin, were named in his honor. The ranch he purchased on the shore of San Francisco Bay in San Mateo retained his name and was developed after his death, giving its name to the surrounding city of Burlingame, California. His portrait by the artist Albion Harris Bicknell hangs in historic Faneuil Hall in Boston, a testament to his importance in Massachusetts political history. In 2018, on the 150th anniversary of the Burlingame Treaty, a new bust of Anson Burlingame by sculptor Zhou Limin was unveiled at an international ceremony at the Burlingame Public Library in Burlingame, California, reflecting renewed interest in his life and in the origins of modern Sino–American diplomacy.