Anson Burlingame

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Anson Burlingame (November 14, 1820 - February 23, 1870) was an American lawyer, legislator, and diplomat, born in New Berlin, Chenango County, New York. In 1823 his parents (Joel Burlingame and Freelove Angell) took him to Ohio, and about ten years afterwards to Michigan. Between 1838 and 1841 he studied at the Detroit branch of the University of Michigan, and in 1846 graduated from Harvard Law School.

He practised law in Boston, and won a wide reputation by his speeches for the Free Soil Party in 1848. He was a member of the Massachusetts constitutional convention in 1853, of the state senate from 1853 to 1854, and of the United States House of Representatives from 1855 to 1861, being elected for the first term as a Know Nothing and afterwards as a member of the new Republican Party, which he helped to organize in Massachusetts.

On June 14, 1861 Abraham Lincoln appointed Burlingame as minister to China. On November 16, 1867 he was appointed envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to head a Chinese diplomatic mission to the United States and the principal European nations. The mission, which included two Chinese ministers, an English and a French secretary, six students from Peking, and a considerable retinue, arrived in the United States in March 1868. On July 28, 1868 it concluded at Washington, D.C. a series of articles, supplementary to the Reed Treaty of 1858, and later known as the Burlingame Treaty.

Burlingame's speeches did much to awaken interest in, and engender a more intelligent appreciation of, China's attitude toward the outside world.

Burlingame died suddenly at Saint Petersburg on the February 23, 1870.

Burlingame, California and Burlingame, Kansas are both named after Anson Burlingame.

[edit] References

• Biography at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.