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On September 3, 1901, Macedonian guerillas captured an American missionary named Ellen Stone and her traveling companions and dragged them into the mountains of their Turkish-controlled Balkan province. From the moment during the abduction when the revolutionaries brutally killed a Muslim trader who wandered onto the scene, things looked bad for Miss Stone and her party.

This was the first time America found itself facing the capture and holding for ransom of an American missionary on foreign soil. It was the first time, but—as we are reminded by Martin and Gracia Burnham's tragic story—not the last, that American missionaries would pay the price of citizenship in a superpower. For it was not the gospel she brought but the perceived power and wecaptionh of her nation that made Ellen a target.

We see this, and much else, with greater clarity in the account of the "Miss Stone Affair" recently published by Pulitzer prize-winning author Teresa Carpenter.

Carpenter's book, The Miss Stone Affair: America's First Modern Hostage Crisis (Simon & Schuster, 2003), tells how Stone, a Massachusetts-born descendent of Miles Standish who had dedicated her life to teaching the Bible to young women at schools in the Balkans, found herself caught up on that brisk fall day in 1901 in the region's political unrest.

Like the many other American missionaries who would experience a similar captivity, Stone was victimized by insurgents who believed the injustices they had faced justified using human lives as negotiating chits. And in becoming one of those chits, Stone found that what had before seemed a lonely pursuit of a divine calling had now brought her into the international spotlight.

As Miss Stone's captivity dragged on, she found herself—as would others after her—helplessly watching powerful factions wrestling over her very life. The story is far too complicated to tell here; and besides, I don't want to spoil Carpenter's compelling narrative. But the "usual suspects" and their motivations emerge early in the tale.

These include, of course, the thuggish captors exploiting, for political and economic gain, the publicity sparked by their deeds. They also include the government of the soil where the capture occurred—in this case, the Ottoman Turks—driven by their concern for law and order to pursue policies of force that endangered the lives of the captives.

They include, too, a missionary establishment afraid that any ransom, once publicized, would court an "open season" on American nationals spreading the gospel abroad. Indeed, in the Miss Stone Affair, missionaries in the field petitioned the American Board of Foreign Missions to reject the revolutionaries' demands and leave the captives to their fate, rather than to set such a dangerous precedent.

Here, too, we find the opportunistic media powers—the Pulitzers and Hearsts and McClures, doggedly pursuing and sometimes influencing the course of "The Story." Carpenter convincingly shows how these moguls engaged in their own parody of the hostage negotiations, seeking not the release of a captive, but the latest juicy details or, after the fact, the exclusive rights to the survivors' stories.

The American government, of course, was soon whirled into its own delicate dance of negotiation, caught between public opinion at home and diplomatic exigencies abroad. The famously macho president Theodore Roosevelt, unschooled in the egalitarian annals of Christian martyrdom, grumbled that women should not be trekking into harm's way and resisted any but a token American involvement. (His exact words were, "Women have no earthly business to go out as missionaries into these wild countries.")

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