Over Chinese New Year 1890, more trouble developed for the new Christians of Sha-ling and P’ingtu. New Year was the traditional time for Chinese people to venerate their ancestors. However, as word spread that the Chinese Christians refused to worship their ancestors, many of the local people became angry. Li Show-ting was dragged from his house by his brothers and beaten with bamboo rods. When he was nearly unconscious, he was dragged into the center of the village, partly ripping the scalp from his head in the process. In the chaos that followed, however, he was able to escape and flee to Lottie.
In the meantime, Dan Ho-bang, the man who had originally asked Lottie to come and explain the heavenly way to him, was also in great danger at the hands of his irate relatives. They tied him to a pole by his hands and feet and beat him. They screamed at him and kicked him, telling him to renounce this new faith, but he would not. One of the other Christians at Sha-ling ran to P’ingtu to get Lottie. He arrived breathless and desperate. “Unless you come now,” he told her, “they will kill Dan Ho-bang. Maybe they have done it already.”
Questions about what to do flooded through Lottie’s mind. Should she send for a treaty representative? Should she go to Sha-ling alone? Should she take some of the P’ingtu Christian men with her for protection? After a minute or two of thinking about what to do, Lottie called for a shentze. She had led these people to their newfound faith in Jesus Christ, and now she was ready to die helping to protect them if need be.
“Can the mules go faster?” Lottie yelled to the lead man as she bumped her way over the ten miles that lay between P’ingtu and Sha-ling. Finally, as they approached the outer wall of the village, Lottie could hear the mob yelling and cursing. She took a deep breath, praying that God would give her wisdom.
The mob was as violent and bloodthirsty as the messenger had described, and Lottie fought her way to the center of the crowd. She gasped when she saw Dan Ho-bang kneeling with his head in his hands. Blood streamed down his face as he was being kicked and spat upon. Lottie shoved several men with sticks out of the way and ran to his side.
A gasp rose from the mob, and then the people fell silent. Lottie did not know how long the silence would last, so she began to yell out the speech she had prepared in the shentze on the way there. “If you try to destroy the church here, and the Christians who worship in it, you will have to kill me first. Our Master, Jesus, gave His life for us Christians, and now I am ready to die for Him.” Then she turned to Dan Ho-bang. “Do not fear, only believe,” she told him. “Our Lord Jesus Christ watches over us, and no matter how we are persecuted, Jesus will overcome it.”
One of Dan Ho-bang’s nephews yelled back, “Then you will die, foreign devil!” With that he lifted a huge sword over his head and aimed it at Lottie. Then, inexplicably, his hand dropped to his side and the sword clattered onto the cobblestone road. With that, the mob’s energy appeared to drain, and slowly the people wandered away.
Lottie lifted Dan Ho-bang to his feet and took him back to his house, where several of the Christian men helped wash and tend his wounds. While they worked, Lottie encouraged them all. “Do not give up! The Bible tells us, ‘Blessed are the persecuted.’ If you keep your faith, others will follow you.”
When Dan Ho-bang was well enough to travel, Lottie took him back to P’ingtu with her, where she could oversee his complete recovery.
Although the persecution of Christians in Sha-ling continued, something had changed. Many of the local people were secretly impressed that a white woman would give her life for an old Chinese man. Did she say that Jesus had already given His life for the Christians? they asked one another quietly. Soon a revival began to break out in Sha-ling as new converts flooded into the little Baptist church, eager to learn more about this new faith in Jesus Christ.
Throughout this time, Lottie continued her barrage of letters home to the Foreign Mission Board begging for more missionaries, especially men who could work in the other villages surrounding P’ingtu. Everywhere Lottie went, the Chinese people besieged her with questions. Ten men came by cart to fetch her and take her to the nearby village of Li T’z Yuen. People there had heard of the heavenly way and wanted Lottie to come and explain it to them.
Thankfully, more help did begin to arrive. First Mary Thornton arrived in the summer of 1890, though her arrival was tempered by the sad news that George Bostick’s wife had died. In November, T. J. League and his wife arrived especially to help Lottie. This was a tremendous relief for Lottie. By now, Fannie Knight had been well trained in teaching the gospel in the surrounding villages; Li Show-ting had become an outstanding preacher; and once he had a grasp of the Mandarin language, T. J. League would be able to take up the role of teaching the men. Being a man, T. J. also had authority to baptize new converts.
With these new workers in place, Lottie felt it was time to return to the United States on furlough. It had been thirteen years since she had last been home, and she eagerly booked passage on the maiden voyage of the Empress of China for the journey back across the Pacific Ocean.
Chapter 13
Dark Times
It was a blustery summer day in 1891. Lottie and the Pruitts, who also were returning home on furlough, stood on the deck of the Empress of China. As the ship pulled away from the dock in Shanghai, Lottie’s mind surged with conflicting emotions. On the one hand, she was pleased to be going home to see Edmonia and Ike, her only surviving sister and brother, and to enjoy the peaceful rest she knew she would find in the hills of Virginia. On the other hand, she had a feeling things were about to go very wrong for the Southern Baptist missionaries in Tengchow. Tarleton Crawford had returned to China some time ago, and he had returned even more critical of the Foreign Mission Board and the way it conducted its affairs than he had been before he left. While back in the United States, he had not received the kind of welcome and invitations to speak that he had anticipated as a veteran missionary. This was because he often spoke out against the mission board in a very critical and harsh way when he was invited to speak.
Nor was Tarleton Crawford popular with the other missionaries in Tengchow. He was domineering and grumpy most of the time, and when he got onto an issue, he pushed and pushed until he forced others to agree with his point of view. The latest issue he was pushing was that the Foreign Mission Board should allow the missionaries to run their own affairs without any “interference” from the home board. In his opinion, the mission board should hand over money to the missionaries but should not give advice or direction to them.
In some ways, Lottie agreed with Tarleton. Few members of the Foreign Mission Board had ever been outside the United States, and most of the members had little idea of what missionary life was like. But what to do about it was where Lottie and Tarleton differed. Rather than try to cut the mission board completely out of the picture, Lottie felt that missionaries should communicate more regularly with the board, explaining the situations they encountered in the field until each board member came to understand and respect the problems the missionaries faced overseas.
Now that Lottie and the Pruitts, who shared her view on the matter, were leaving on furlough, Lottie wondered what would happen to the Baptist mission. Three new missionaries were on their way to Tengchow, and Lottie felt a sense of dread for them. Without someone to balance Tarleton Crawford’s strong and sometimes hateful talk about the board, what would they think? Lottie knew that the board had not heard the last of Tarleton Crawford. As far as she was concerned, trouble was brewing in North China.
The voyage home was quiet, which suited Lottie completely. She was exhausted from her work and suffered from constant headaches. After the Empress of China berthed in San Francisco, Lottie made her way straight to Scottsville, where Edmonia and Isaac were eagerly awaiting her arrival. Even though Southern Baptist women’s groups from across the South clamored to have Lottie come and speak to them, she refused their invitations. She did this, she wrote explaining to the groups, not so much for her own sake but for the sake of the Chinese Christians. Lottie was now fifty-one years old, and she feared that if she didn’t give her body complete rest for six months, she might not be fit to return to her work in China.
The little house that Lottie jointly owned with Edmonia turned out to be just the place she needed to rest. Lottie had her own room, with a wondrously comfortable bed piled high with fluffy quilts and made with crisp, sweet-smelling linen sheets. It was pure luxury to climb into bed each night. And when Lottie awoke each morning, she was greeted with the sound of Belle the cow waiting to be milked and the chickens scratching around under her window. Edmonia had re-created a tiny replica of the large plantation the Moon family had once owned. Viewmont lay just a few miles up the road, but it was in a state of disrepair, one of hundreds of antebellum mansions whose owners could not pay for their upkeep. Strangers lived in the place now, but Lottie often walked through the tangled, overgrown grounds reliving the happy and carefree days of her youth.
Finally, after six months of care and attention from Edmonia and two servants, Lottie felt well enough to begin her tour of Southern Baptist women’s groups. Her tour coincided with the Baptist church’s celebration of the centennial of William Carey’s going to India as the first Baptist missionary. The celebration was an important event, and Lottie received numerous invitations from groups who wanted a “real” missionary to address them on what it was like to live among the “heathen.”
Lottie accepted as many invitations as she could, traveling from nearby Scottsville Baptist Church all the way down the East Coast of the United States to Atlanta, where she attended the Southern Baptist Convention. She was not allowed to address the assembly, of course, since women were not allowed to speak to men in public groups. However, in private gatherings, around the dining table, and over glasses of lemonade, Lottie spoke about her work in China and the constant need for more workers.
While in Georgia, Lottie took a nostalgic train ride to Cartersville, where she and Anna Safford had started the school for girls. Almost the entire town came to meet Lottie, who spent a great deal of time with her former students, now middle-aged women with children of their own.
Wherever she went, Lottie tried to change the image Americans had of Chinese people. In her early letters home, she herself had often referred to them as heathen, but after living among Chinese people for so long, her attitude had dramatically changed. Lottie now grimaced when she heard the word heathen used. It was not a description that fit the intelligent and hardworking men and women she had come to know and love in Tengchow and P’ingtu. Whenever an unwitting person used the word, Lottie would gently correct him or her. “Just think,” she would say. “The Chinese were a civilized nation while we Europeans were still skulking in the forests of Northern Europe. Join me in praying that the Chinese will become Christians, but be very careful that you respect this and every other group of non-Christian people.”
Throughout her time on furlough, Lottie heard snippets of information about what was happening among the missionaries back in China. At a meeting with Henry Tupper, she learned the truth of what was going on. The news was distressing. The trouble Lottie had predicted in North China had come to pass. Several of the new missionary arrivals had left the umbrella of the Foreign Mission Board and along with Tarleton Crawford had formed the “Gospel Mission.” Even though she had seen it coming, Lottie still was shocked by his decision. She kept writing to Fannie Knight in P’ingtu, fearing that she too might fall under Tarleton Crawford’s “spell.” For now, Fannie, along with Laura Barton and the Searses, who had arrived after Lottie left on furlough, were the only missionaries who remained faithful to the Southern Baptists in North China.
