The Devil Soldier (2 page)

The brutal Japanese seizure of Shanghai in 1940 brought the destruction of many official Chinese and American consular documents, further clouding Ward’s legacy. In addition, the Japanese sacked Ward’s
shrine and memorial hall and defaced his grave (after promising American officials that they would not). Although they later claimed to have made an effort to restore the site, the cataclysmic war between Chinese Nationalists and Communists followed too quickly on the heels of World War II for verification of such claims to be possible.

Finally, the victory of Mao Tse-tung’s Chinese Communist party made it certain that assembling a record of Ward’s Chinese adventure would become an exercise in detective work as much as scholarship. Like Sun Yat-sen, Mao drew badly flawed but popular parallels between his own and the Taiping movement. (Chiang Kai-shek assisted this effort by making similar comparisons between the Communists and the unsuccessful Taipings, vainly hoping that they would discourage popular support for Mao.) In pursuit of their revisionist goal, Communist scholars sometimes misplaced or destroyed invaluable relics and documents relating to the Ever Victorious Army. But the profound Communist discomfort with Ward and his legacy demanded even greater destruction: In 1955 Ward’s remains were dug up, and his grave site and shrine were destroyed and paved over. The whereabouts of Ward’s bones today are unknown. They have almost certainly been destroyed. A plain headstone over an empty grave in Salem, Massachusetts, is the only memorial to this most noteworthy of nineteenth-century American adventurers.

For all these reasons, the following account is not an attempt so much to reconstruct Ward’s life from the inside out as to paint a picture of the man by allowing the events and people who surrounded him—and about whom we know a good deal more—to throw light on his shadowy figure. No man’s life can be truly understood out of context, but in Ward’s case the context is especially vital.

Put simply, that context was the Chinese empire during its penultimate period of internal and external crisis. The bizarre visions that compelled Hung Hsiu-ch’üan, the Taiping leader, to attempt the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty became, through the chain of circumstance, a very real factor in Ward’s life. And the formation of Ward’s character in Salem, Massachusetts, and aboard American sailing vessels during the 1840s and ’50s is important to any understanding of how the Chinese empire survived. Similarly, foreign attempts to open China to
greater trade and Western influence are key to understanding why Ward was drawn to Shanghai. And no account of the West’s intrusion into China in the nineteenth century can be complete without an account of Ward’s achievements.

The precise meaning of those achievements has always been a problem for analysts. Historians disposed to view late imperial China from the left have seen Ward as an indirect facilitator of Western penetration and exploitation: a pawn bent on shoring up a corrupt dynasty that was powerless to stop Western imperialism and a man who had no regard for nascent Chinese nationalism. Others have seen Ward as the embodiment of the imperial Chinese government’s response to the simultaneous threats of internal disorder and external aggression, a response that became known as the “self-strengthening movement.” In this light Ward was not an unknowing Western tool but a willing Manchu instrument, ultimately controlled by Peking and used by the imperial government to bring the Chinese army up to date. Still others have written Ward off as a simple mercenary, greedy for plunder and a servant of the Manchu cause only because the Manchus were the most desperate and convenient employers.

Yet the Frederick Townsend Ward who emerges from a careful study of events does not fit into any of these categories. Certainly, his campaigns served the Manchu cause and initially made most Westerners (whose goals in China were opposed by the dynasty) uneasy and even hostile toward him. Yet by the time of his death he was operating in close coordination with Franco-British regular forces, and Peking was expressing strong worries about his ultimate ambitions. Some who knew Ward claimed that he intended, once the Taiping threat had been eliminated, to establish his own warlord principality within China. Yet given his consistent defense of Chinese political integrity, it seems unlikely that he ever meant to carry out such a betrayal of China itself. And while he was unquestionably a soldier of fortune, Ward’s loyalty to his men and to China was always more important than his desire for reward (although he certainly did expect rewards for his service). A talented officer by trade, Ward cut a remarkably poor figure as a mercenary: He made sure to secure funds for his army but rarely did the same for
himself, instead accepting notoriously unreliable notes of debt from his Chinese backers. In truth, Ward had little real business sense at all; his talent was for soldiering, and he put that talent to use defending China.

But was serving China synonymous, to Ward, with serving the Manchus? This appears less certain. Ward was fully aware of the dynasty’s flaws: Although they had ruled with the power of Confucian tradition for two hundred years, the Manchus were still regarded by many Chinese as invaders, whose usurpation of power from the Ming dynasty in 1644 was criminal. It may well be that Ward intended to turn against these descendants of the “Tartar hordes” once the Taipings had been defeated. Such a move would probably have been aimed not at the establishment of his own warlord domain but at the restoration of a native Chinese dynasty similar to the Ming. For their part, the Manchus initially thought that they could use Ward and became fretful when they discovered how singularly he remained his own man, a true “free-lance.” Clearly they took the tales of Ward’s expansive ambitions seriously. In the end, however, we will never know what marching orders the Ever Victorious Army would have received had its creator and commander lived to see the fall of the Taiping capital of Nanking.

Whatever the nature of his ties to the West and to the Manchus, Ward did prove true to the task of serving China: His organization and leadership of the Ever Victorious Army were crucial to China’s military restructuring, which was an important part of the short-lived period of general reform that touched all branches of the Chinese government in the 1860s and ’70s. Those reforms did not, in the end, prove fundamental enough to prevent disasters such as the Allied march on Peking in 1900 or the fall of the Chinese empire in 1911; but on the most basic level they ensured that there was a Chinese nation—rather than a collection of feuding principalities and European colonies, as had been distinctly possible—that could become a republic. For this if for no other reason, Ward’s place in history is important.

It is useful to bear in mind, however, that this importance was a largely unconscious achievement for Ward. A high school dropout with almost no formal military training, Ward was neither an idealist nor a philosopher but an adventurous realist who sought to carve out a place
in what had consistently been, for him, a hostile and violent world. His first thought was not for instituting comprehensive programs of reform but for his soldiers, whom he affectionately called “my people.” Yet, as shall be seen, it was precisely this commitment to the people around him—rather than to the kind of political, religious, and commercial ideologies that obsessed the Taipings, the Manchus, and the leaders of the Western communities in China—that made Ward unique. The ingenuousness of his achievement does not reduce its significance. It simply helps us understand his compelling, mysterious character.

I
“A NEW RACE OF WARRIORS”

On May 2, 1860, the city of Nanking, China—nestled between a wide bend in the Yangtze River and a commanding promontory called Purple Mountain—was alive with celebration. Its citizens, who had been in open rebellion against the Manchu emperor in Peking for the better part of a decade, had endured a bitter siege during the winter, one that had finally been broken by a daring series of feints and raids by the rebel armies. After long months of privation, the way now seemed clear to bring badly needed food, arms, and treasure into the city. And so the people of Nanking lifted their voices in thanks to the god whose worship had made them outlaws in their own country:
Shang-ti
, the “Supreme Lord,” whose eldest son was called Jesus and whose second son, the rebels believed, was their own leader, their
T’ien Wang
(“Heavenly King”). The scattering of the Manchu emperor’s soldiers—or, as the followers of the T’ien Wang called them, the “demon imps”—before the walls of Nanking was taken as yet another sign that the T’ien Wang had truly been dispatched by Shang-ti to bring down the Manchu dynasty and establish the
T’ai-ping t’ien-kuo
(“Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace”) in China.

In the midst of the May 2 rejoicing, the T’ien Wang dispatched a message to his senior advisers and assistants, summoning them to an immediate council of war to determine the future of the great Taiping movement. The message was brought out of the T’ien Wang’s sumptuous yellow palace by one of his female attendants: Taiping men were
generally forbidden from entering the inner sanctum of their leader, who lived alone with a retinue of concubines and cited Solomon and his hundreds of wives as a hallowed example. Making its way from splendid residence to splendid residence, the summons finally reached the colonnades and gilded domes of the palace of the
Chung Wang
, or “Faithful King.” (The T’ien Wang’s lieutenants, though subordinate to him, all incorporated the word
wang
, or “king,” into their titles.)
The Chung Wang had been more responsible than any man for lifting the recent siege of Nanking. Indeed, his considerable military talents had ensured the survival of the rebellion for a number of years. And he had been honored in return: Once a poor mountain farmer and laborer called Li Hsiu-ch’eng, he now controlled troops numbering in the hundreds of thousands, as well as a vast fortune in silver. But in the spring of 1860 the Chung Wang was a deeply troubled man, vexed by doubts about the Taiping cause that no amount of honor or reward could ease.

Though only thirty-seven at the time he was summoned to the May 2 council of war, the Chung Wang had about him, said
an Englishman who knew him in Nanking, “a trace of arduous mental and physical exertion” that “gave him a rather worn and older appearance. His figure light, active and wiry, was particularly well formed;… his bearing erect and dignified, his walk rapid but stately. His features were very strongly marked, expressive, and good, though not handsome according to the Chinese idea, being slightly of a more European cast than they admire.” An anxious, restless man, the Chung Wang seemed to find spiritual ease only on the battlefield: “His large eyes flashed incessantly, while the lids were always twitching. From his energetic features, and the ceaseless nervous movement of his body … no one would imagine that he could possess such perfect coolness in battle; yet I have often since observed him in action, when, in spite of his apparent excitability, his self-possession was imperturbable, and his voice … unchanged, save being more rapid and decisive in moments of greatest danger.”

Like many of the hundreds of thousands of Taiping adherents, the Chung Wang had joined the rebellion less out of genuine devotion to the strange amalgam of Christianity and Chinese mysticism that was the T’ien Wang’s faith than out of weariness with Manchu oppression. In
the two centuries since Tartar tribesmen had swept down out of Manchuria and into China, deposing the Ming and establishing their own Manchu dynasty, their rule had degenerated into a system of
corruption and repression that left China’s poorest provinces in a state of near-constant rebellion. Young peasants joined these uprisings almost as a matter of course: “When I was young at home as an ordinary person,”
the Chung Wang later recalled of the Taiping movement, “I understood nothing, but joined up in the excitement.” In the ensuing decade of the 1850s, as the Taipings made their way from province to province and became the greatest threat to Manchu rule in the history of the dynasty, the Chung Wang battled his way up and out of the rebel ranks. But he also witnessed internecine conflicts among the Taiping leaders, brutal suppressive measures undertaken by the Manchus, the T’ien Wang’s withdrawal into a private world of debauchery, and the slaughter of millions of his fellow peasants by both rebel and imperial troops. By 1860 the Chung Wang was weary and losing heart: “There were many people in the [T’ien Wang’s] Heavenly Dynasty who did harm to the people; what could I alone do, for all my compassion? Power was not in my hands, so what could I do?… Once you are riding a tiger’s back it is difficult to dismount.”

The lifting of the siege of Nanking had not given the Chung Wang any commensurate sense of relief. In fact, his worries, especially those concerning his sovereign, had only multiplied. After the victory, said the Chung Wang, “no edict was pronounced praising the generals; the field commanders were not received in audience, nor were the court officials. The Sovereign was not interested in the affairs of government, but merely instructed his ministers in the knowledge of Heaven, as if all was tranquil.” Militarily, the Chung Wang knew that the rebel position at Nanking was still far from secure. The “demon imps” would be back, and, unless the Taipings could break out of the Nanking region and secure open routes to adequate sources of supply, the imperialists would eventually crush the movement, if only through attrition. The rebels’ next move would be crucial, and the May 2 council of war thus took on immense importance.

Knowing this, the Taiping chiefs arrived at the meeting wearing
their most impressive regalia and armed with battle plans that each was convinced would prove the salvation of the Heavenly Kingdom. The T’ien Wang made it a point on such occasions to wear robes of imperial yellow—previously reserved for the occupant of the Dragon Throne in Peking—as well as a tall headdress reminiscent of the Ming dynasty. The Chung Wang wore a coronet of gold, in the shape of a tiger flanked by two eagles and decorated with precious stones and pearls. Rebels these men may have been—but the plundering of more than half of China had allowed their movement to take on singularly imperial trappings.