To require of applicants for passports, which under our laws are issued to all citizens upon the sole evidence of their citizenship, any announcement of their religious faith or declaration of their personal motives in seeking such passports, would be utterly repugnant to the spirit of our institutions and to the intent of the solemn proscription forever by the Constitution of any religious test as a qualification of the relations of the citizen to the Government, and would, moreover, assume an inquisitorial function in respect of the personal affairs of the individual, which this Government can not exert for its own purposes, and could still less assume to exercise with the object of aiding a foreign Government in the enforcement of an objectionable and arbitrary discrimination against certain of our citizens.
Our adherence to these principles has been unwavering since the foundation of our Government, and you will be at no loss to cite pertinent examples of our consistent defense of religious liberty, which, as I said in my note to Baron Schaeffer of May 18, 1885, in relation to the Keiley episode at Vienna, "is the chief corner-stone of the American system of Government, and provisions for its security are embedded in the written charter and interwoven in the moral fabric of its laws."
I received this upon my return. Secretary Bayard asked me also to ascertain the views of my colleagues respecting this iradé, and I found them willing and ready to take it up with the Porte in a manner similar to the instructions I had received.
I called on Saïd Pasha and left with him a note in accordance with my instructions, and I sent a copy of this note to the French and British ambassadors. They in turn each advised the Ministry that they could not admit of regulations prejudicial to the existing rights of their subjects as secured by treaties. And here for a time the matter rested.
Several months later three American Jews were expelled from Jerusalem because they had not left the city at the expiration of three months, and again the question had to be taken up with the Porte. This time Saïd Pasha replied that the restrictions with regard to the three Americans had been ordered withdrawn, "the Sublime Porte having lately decided that the measure concerning the Israelites going to Palestine shall not be applied but to those who emigrate in number (en nombre), and that no obstacle shall be opposed to the sojourn of those who are not in this class."
This, like most other questions that arose between the Ottoman Government and our own, could not be settled for any length of time by principle, law, or treaty. Such documents might be used as reminders of agreements once reached, but in Turkey they do not of themselves direct policies or action. Drummond Wolff had advised being "patient, pleasant, persistent," to which I would add: eternally vigilant.
On the whole, the interests of the United States throughout the Ottoman Empire were peculiar, in that the majority of the complaints related to personal, as distinct from commercial, rights. I have said in an earlier chapter that some of the questions at issue, especially those involving extraterritoriality, grew out of capitulations dating back over four hundred years, to the conquest of Constantinople by the Moslems in 1453. The terms of these capitulations or "privileges" were made originally between the Greeks and the various Italian city republics—Pisa, Genoa, Venice. The Moslems later embodied them in revised capitulations with France in 1535, 1604, 1673, and 1740; with England in 1583 and 1675; with Holland in 1680; with Austria in 1718; and with Russia in 1783. On these later European capitulations was based our own first treaty with the Sublime Porte in 1830. Practically speaking, therefore, consular jurisdiction in Turkey was then not very different from what it was in the fifteenth century.
When I took office one of the vexatious questions to be settled was the interpretation of Clause IV of the Treaty of 1830. This treaty was negotiated by Charles Rhind, as American commissioner, with Reis Effendi, Turkish representative. Rhind had prepared it, with the help of dragoman Navoni, in French and in Turkish, and when it was finally drawn up, according to Rhind's own report, Reis Effendi "signed and sealed the treaty in Turkish and I did the same with the French translation, and we exchanged them." Thereupon the original Turkish version, together with a copy of the French translation as signed by the American commissioners—President Jackson had appointed Captain James Biddle and David Offley together with Rhind—and several English translations were transmitted to Washington. The treaty actually approved by the Senate was one of the English versions.
Before the ratifications were exchanged the American chargé d'affaires at Constantinople, David Porter, received word that the French version was not exactly in agreement with the Turkish. Porter's simple method of correcting this discrepancy was to sign a document, also in the Turkish language, accepting the Turkish version of the treaty without reserve; and when the translation of this document reached Washington nothing further was said.
Indeed, the treaty rested in peace until 1868, when the American minister, acting according to the English version, clashed with the Turkish authorities in the interpretation of Clause IV, regarding jurisdiction over American citizens—in this case two who had been arrested and imprisoned for alleged offenses against the Turkish Government. The English version read: