The Foreign Service Journal, November 2011

president) James A. Garfield — con- spired to arrange an appointment overseas. In December 1878, there- fore, the 45-year-old widower, having placed his children with family and friends, found himself in San Fran- cisco en route to Hong Kong, where he would become the new U.S. con- sul. 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 stateside 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 prede- cessor, 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 Ameri- can ship captains and dock workers. In his shipboard examination of emigrants to the United States (to as- certain that their emigration was vol- untary, 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 nothing to the govern- ment. By this time Mosby knew that a whole shipload of emigrants could be examined very quickly, and that ab- solutely no expenses were involved. Another of the former consul’s lu- crative practices had been the certifi- cation 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 as- tonished 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 Sec- retary of State Frederick W. Seward, son of William Seward, President Abraham Lincoln’s renowned Secre- tary of State. Mosby wrote to Seward about his discoveries. He did so nerv- ously, 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 involve- ment in shady speculative transactions in China — in violation of the Burlingame Treaty of 1868, under which Americans pledged not to med- dle in Chinese affairs. Seward was, in fact, so strongly sus- pected of illegal activities that a con- gressional committee had recently recommended his impeachment, and Bailey, who had been nominated to the consul generalship in China following his departure fromHong Kong, was in Washington as a witness in his behalf. “I am in for the war, and intend either to purge the public service of these scoundrels or go out myself.” — John Mosby 48 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 1 A painting of Hong Kong Harbor, c. 1870, by an unknown Chinese artist. Photograph courtesy Peabody Essex Museum.