In the massacres and plundering which attended the uprising of 1900 it was manifest that the movement was not against the Christians, or any other special class, but against all foreigners and foreign things. Missionaries, railroad constructors, merchants, teachers, and diplomats were alike the victims, and foreign property and foreign-made goods in the hands and shops of Chinese were destroyed.
The evidence is also overwhelming that the empress dowager and the government—as reconstructed after the displacement of the emperor in 1898—were in sympathy with the Boxers, and that the government finally coalesced with them, and became responsible for the attack upon Tientsin and the siege of the legations. There is reason, however, to believe, that the emperor did not approve of these acts, and there were instances of heroic devotion to duty and the true interests of the country on the part of some members of the Tsung-li Yamen and other public men. The native Christians also, as a rule, proved true to their new faith, and courageously supported their foreign friends in their hour of trial.
The dispatch of a division of the American army, composed of all arms of the service and fully equipped for a campaign, was one of the most extreme acts of executive authority in the history of the United States. It has been seen that when the Secretary of State was requested by the representatives of Great Britain and
pt. vii.; ib. for 1901, pt. iv. p. 433; U. S. For. Rel. 1900, "China"; General Wilson's China, chaps, xxii.–xxiv. Most of the works already cited in this chapter contain narratives of the Boxer operations and the siege of Peking.
