The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2004

Francisco en route to Hong Kong, where he would become the new U.S. consul. If both his friends and his enemies thought they were rid of him for a while, they soon found themselves mistaken. By the following April his name had begun to pop up in state- side newspapers. The story line: “Mosby charges consular corruption.” One of the first things Mosby had done on arrival was to examine the consular books, and it did not take him long to detect a bad odor. His predecessor, David H. Bailey, had appar- ently been bilking the government of many thousands of dollars annually. Just how he had been doing it became clear from conversations with American ship captains and dock workers. In his shipboard examination of emigrants to the United States (to ascertain that their emigration was voluntary, and not part of the nefarious “coolie traffic”), Bailey had been charging large fees for his service, then declaring expenses equal to the fees, and remitting noth- ing to the government. By this time Mosby knew that a whole shipload of emigrants could be examined very quickly, and that absolutely no expenses were involved. Another of the former consul’s lucrative practices had been the certification of opium shipments from Macao to the United States. While the certification was perfectly routine and legal, Bailey’s fee — $10,000 per year for one shipper — was not. Mosby astonished a Macao shipper by charging him $2.50 for the same service. An Augean Stable Mosby’s immediate superior at the State Department was Assistant Secretary of State Frederick W. Seward, son of Lincoln’s renowned Secretary of State. Mosby wrote to Seward about his discoveries. He did so nervously, because former consul Bailey was a crony of Fred Seward’s cousin (and U.S. minister to China), George F. Seward. Complicating the situation was George Seward’s alleged involvement in shady speculative transactions in China — in violation of the Burlingame Treaty of 1868, under which Americans pledged not to meddle in Chinese affairs. Seward was, in fact, so strongly suspected of illegal activities that a congressional committee had recently recommended his impeachment, and Bailey, who had been nominated to the consul generalship in China following his departure from Hong Kong, was in Washington as a witness in his behalf. It was not a good time for Bailey’s honesty to be brought into question and, as Mosby knew, it was never a good time to tangle with the Sewards. Other U.S. diplomats in the Orient had taken the J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 61 “I am in for the war, and intend either to purge the public service of these scoundrels or go out myself.” — John Mosby A painting of Hong Kong Harbor, c. 1870, by an unknown Chinese artist. Photograph courtesy Peabody Essex Museum.