Vanceboro Station Hosts the 1917 Balfour Mission

by Gary Beers

Vanceboro shared a serious piece of world history when it hosted, at the railroad station, the British Balfour Mission delegation.

The Mission, also referred to as the Balfour Visit, was a formal diplomatic visit to the United States by the British Government during World War I, shortly after the United States’ declaration of war on Germany (1917).

The mission’s purpose was to promote wartime cooperation, and to assess the war-readiness of Britain’s new partner. British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, President Woodrow Wilson and chief advisor, Colonel Edward House, had a meeting that discussed the secret treaties which bound Britain and France to Italy and the proposed Balfour Declaration.

The Declaration was a public statement issued by the British Government announcing its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. The declaration was made in a letter dated 2 November 1917 from the Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland.

The declaration had many long-lasting consequences. It greatly increased popular support for Zionism within Jewish communities worldwide and became a core component of the British Mandate for Palestine, the founding document of Mandatory Palestine. It indirectly led to the emergence of the State of Israel and is considered a principal cause of the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict, often described as the world’s most intractable conflict.

Excerpted from The Balfour Visit¹

Lord Rothschild’s 1st Draft

Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour’s Issued Declaration

The American Commission at the Vanceboro Station, April 21, 1917

Footnotes

1. Balfour, Arthur James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Collection. The Balfour visit: how America received her distinguished guest. Edited by Towne, Charles Hanson New York: George H. Doran Co, 1917. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/17030750/. ↩︎
2. Photos by Frank E. Colby ↩︎