Burlingame townships

It’s likely few Kansas residents could find the city of Burlingame (population 968) without a GPS. Even fewer, one suspects, know much about the city’s namesake. This year, the 200th anniversary of Anson Burlingame’s birth, provides an opportunity to make his acquaintance.

As a Massachusetts congressman, outspoken abolitionist, and pioneering diplomat, Burlingame devoted his life to causes as relevant today as two centuries ago — racial equality, social protest and international diplomacy.

Just as citizens today march for racial justice, Burlingame took a principled stand against slavery during the run-up to the Civil War. He barnstormed the country giving stirring abolitionist orations at a time when, his friend Mark Twain wrote, “it was neither very creditable nor very safe to hold such a creed.”

One stop on his journey was a municipality known as Council City, about 20 miles south of Topeka. According to a 1931 article in The Burlingame Enterprise newspaper, the name Council City “was retained until 1857 when Anson Burlingame, a noted diplomat on a tour through Kansas stopped here and made a patriotic free state speech. It so interested the settlers that they called a meeting and changed the name of the town from Council City to Burlingame.”

Kansas also played a prominent role in a notable political donnybrook involving Burlingame. In 1856 in Washington, D.C., Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner delivered his censorious “Crime Against Kansas” speech, accusing Southern legislators of having “chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows ... the harlot, slavery.” While tame by modern standards, this sexually laced insult provoked outrage in the mid-1800s, leading Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina to bludgeon Sumner in a sneak attack with a walking cane in the Senate chambers.

The notorious “caning of Sumner” incident nearly killed the Massachusetts senator, compelling Burlingame to issue a stern public rebuttal, first doubling down on the condemnation of slavery, and then rebuking the cowardly attack. So vehement was Burlingame’s response that Brooks, Sumner’s assailant, challenged Anson to a duel. But unbeknownst to Brooks, Burlingame was no effete representative of a genteel state—raised in the frontier, Burlingame was in fact a crack shot. Once Brooks learned of his foe’s marksmanship, he hastily conjured up excuses to avoid the deadly duel. Public derision followed, with “Bully Brooks” “humiliated and emasculated” by the ordeal.

Parallels between the 19th and 21st centuries also exist in international affairs. During the soon-to-end 45th U.S. presidency, belittlement and bellicosity has often characterized our diplomatic relations. This regressive state hearkens back to antebellum times, when dominant countries lorded over their perceived inferiors, and treaties were often lopsided pacts negotiated under duress.

But Burlingame, initially as President Abraham Lincoln’s ambassador to China, and subsequently as China’s envoy to the Western world, rejected such heavy-handed tactics in the landmark Burlingame Treaty — the first of the modern era to recognize China as a nation among equals and to affirm its territorial integrity. As Twain noted in his eulogy of Burlingame, this novel approach to treaty negotiation was “to frame them in the broad interest of the world, instead of selfishly seeking to acquire advantages for his own country alone and at the expense of the other party to the treaty, as had always before been the recognized ‘diplomacy.’”

Though significant progress has been made, the challenges faced by Anson Burlingame in the 19th century persist today and as we strive to move ahead, we might first take a moment to look back. As Twain observed of Burlingame, “A chivalrous generosity was his most marked characteristic—a large charity, a noble kindliness that could not comprehend narrowness or meanness.”

Such traits, in these fevered political times, we could all do well to emulate.

Jack Burlingame, a writer and editor, is a distant relation of Anson Burlingame — his fifth cousin thrice removed. He coauthored this with his sister, Barbara Burlingame, a scientist and professor.