The Devil Soldier (35 page)

The rebellion still rages but as yet it has made no direct assault upon Shanghai. Since the 2nd of February six battles have been fought within thirty miles of this place with great loss to the rebels.… Without giving you all the details of these battles, I will write in general terms that while there were not more than twelve hundred men, at any one time, on the side of the Imperialists, there were said to be from five to twenty thousand men on the side of the rebels—and while the rebels are superior to the Imperial soldiers in this part of the Empire—and nearly always beat them when the Imperialists are led by native officers—they are unequal to the Chinese, trained and led by Europeans or Americans. They were beaten in every battle with great slaughter.

Although it had been Admiral Hope who had first brought Ward to
Burlingame’s attention, the connection through Burgevine almost certainly widened Ward’s access to the American minister. By summer the two men were corresponding quite informally, and one August letter from Ward to Burlingame offers the most complete surviving commentary by the commander of the Ever Victorious Army on the state of China, events in America, and his own affairs generally.

“I have not written to you for some time,” Ward opened, “but I have been so horribly busy that I have done I fear nothing properly, unless it is to flog the chang maos.” Citing recent battles, Ward played up the bravery of his own men:

So you can see my people have been hard at work—with I am sorry to say severe loss to me, some 400 men being killed or rendered useless to me hereafter—it is the fate of war though and I suppose I take the same chances and fortune favors me. The Rascally officials here though rob one of what one treasures most (Credit) when one risks one’s life—but I fancy the truth will eventually leak out. I have told Butler my secretary to give you the particulars of my little fights as I think it will serve to kill a few moments as I think Peking must be excessively dull and monotonous—let it be though confidential for he is such a devil of a fellow that there is no answering for his pen when once started.

Decrying the self-serving statements and activities of both Chinese officials and Western merchants in Shanghai, Ward exhibited a fear that Peking would never get an accurate account of either his own actions or those of the Ever Victorious Army: “We have a bad set here—and if you ever speak to Kung Wang [Prince Kung] about such things I wish you would say a word about my people.… Now I have written you a long chit and I trust you will understand that I am so horribly pressed for time & detained by these infernal Shanghai bores that any apparent negligence on my part in not writing to you sooner will be pardoned.”

Before closing, however, Ward took time to warn Burlingame against what he considered a great danger. By the summer of 1862 the leaders of Western Shanghai had become so convinced of the inability of the imperial government either to protect them or to properly manage the port’s affairs that a “free city” movement had sprung up. Its proponents favored international supervision of Shanghai and an end to imperial authority—in essence, the theft of an entire city. In condemning the movement, Ward revealed much of his feeling about China:

There is one thing though that I really think your attention should be drawn to, and that is the Free City movement of the merchants here. It is certainly one of the most outrageous things to be mooted at such times as this by money makers that I really think they should be snubbed.… It is only causing very hard feelings and to tell you the truth I fear I shall be by the authorities considered from my position as one of the exponents of this squatter sovereignty—and as I am down on any such rascally filibusterism, and also mean because the parties mooting it are the first to shreik [
sic
] for aid whenever they come to grief and let better people get broken heads for their villainy, that if they have addressed you on the subject you would use some of our old New England plain sense and speech and let them understand the ultimate consequences of any such outrageous doctrines.

Then came a final observation demonstrating that, his Chinese citizenship aside, Ward was still attached to the troubled country of his
birth: “Grand news from home. Jeff[erson Davis] and the Secesh party catching it. If old Uncle Abe does not give them thunder this fall then I am mistaken. If he wants a subscription to build the strongest[,] darkest & deepest Hotel in the country for the blackguards Jeff & Cabinet I am up for 10,000—all I am afraid of is that they will all loot enough to keep themselves the remainder of their lives in Europe—I hope McClellan is in Richmond before this.”

Typically,
Burlingame would later portray this last rather wild proposition as a “patriotic” offer by Ward to “contribute ten thousand taels to the Government of the United States, to aid in maintaining the Union”; the same almost avuncular indulgence that Burlingame had always shown toward Ward lasted even beyond the young commander’s end. Nor is it difficult, on the basis of such letters, to see why: Ward had expressed a real commitment to China (even as he acknowledged the shortcomings of the empire’s “Rascally officials”), a strong aversion to the “infernal bores” and “money makers” of Shanghai, and, despite his own past, a condemnation of “filibusterism”—all positions that matched Burlingame’s own. There was no sense of Ward voicing these opinions simply to ingratiate himself with the American minister, for Burlingame was, in the summer of 1862, not in a position to perform any significant favors for the Ever Victorious Army. The correspondence and friendship between the two men was thoroughly genuine.

Close as Ward was to Admirals Hope and Protet, as well as to a select few of the Western officers in his army, none of these relationships was as completely free from reserve and maneuver as that with Burlingame. Hope later wrote that Burgevine, for example, “stood higher in Colonel Ward’s estimation than any of his other officers”; yet there are no personal references to Ward—admiring or otherwise—in Burgevine’s surviving written statements. As for Forester’s attitude, it is worth noting that after Ward’s death Admiral Hope—worried that the unit he still referred to as “Ward’s Disciplined Chinese” might change its title—wrote in a rather warning tone to tell Forester of his wish that “in remembrance of our friend it will always retain that name.” Certainly Forester dealt with his former chief most prejudicially—and inaccurately—in his published reminiscences. Nor has time turned up any
laudatory statements from officers of the Ever Victorious Army who survived to enjoy long lives of participation in the affairs of Shanghai, such as C. J. Ashley, Ward’s commissary general. Only Charles
Schmidt, the mercenary officer who had first met Ward in Central America in the early 1850s, left any testament to his commander:

“General Ward,” Schmidt declared in an undated memorandum that was probably written during the late 1870s,

was beloved and respected by all who knew him. Although not a highly educated man, he was shrewd and had common sense, and while in action he was very brave. This was not a reckless bravery, but a cool and daring bravery so requisite in a good leader. He would never send a man to a place where he would not go himself if required, but if he saw any person show the white feather, he would dismiss him instantly. He showed great tact in his difficult position, and managed to keep his own in spite of the intrigues and flatteries of British officers & periodical difficulties with the Chinese government officials who did not always rightly interpret the General’s motives for certain actions.… He was ever active and alert, trying to improve his force in order to accomplish that which he had undertaken to do for the Chinese government.

As it had from the first, then, Ward’s determination to finish the job that he had set out to do for the Chinese empire continued to put him at odds not only with representatives of foreign powers and corrupt Chinese bureaucrats but with many of his own officers, whose first and often only concern was pay and loot. Yet as the Ever Victorious Army expanded Ward remained singularly able to handle such men, and to get the best out of them. A. A. Hayes wrote of the officer’s life in the army, “It was a terrible service. Ward spared neither himself nor those under him. The officers, conspicuous figures among the native privates, suffered fearfully.” Ward had weeded out the most unreliable of his Westerners, but many of those who remained, while exceptional soldiers, were plagued by the same proclivities that had almost caused Ward’s first force to be stillborn in 1860. Ward kept a close eye on and strict
control over such behavior. Hayes recorded the example of the army’s chief of artillery, a highly competent Englishman named Glasgow, who, Hayes wrote,

had been a non-commissioned officer in the British service, and so brave and skilful that promotion was twice in his grasp, only to be forfeited by excesses. On a memorable day, when he was with Ward, he had a battery in the open, pounding at the walls of a city. To him came his slight, boyish-looking commander. “That battery is making bad practice,” said he. “Advance it one hundred yards.” The position was enfiladed by bullets, and men were dropping every moment; but from that order there was no appeal. Glasgow shrugged his shoulders, took a surreptitious pull at a flask, and gave the word. Another half hour, and he could cease firing, for the small man in the blue coat was in the breach, with the forlorn hope of the Ever Victorious Army.

Though able to make effective use of men such as Glasgow, Ward by all accounts looked forward to the day when employing them would no longer be necessary. By the spring of 1862 he had already begun elevating promising Chinese privates to noncommissioned rank, and, as Admiral Hope reported on several occasions after Ward’s death, Ward intended “to bring forward some of his best [Chinese] sergeant majors as Captains of Companies.” At least one such man, Wong Apo, was so promoted during Ward’s lifetime, in recognition of his repeated acts of bravery. Again, Ward’s unusual confidence in the military potential of the Chinese—an attitude facilitated by his equally unusual lack of racial prejudice—offered a glimpse of the future available to a Chinese ruling class willing to absorb progressive Western methods.

It was this implicitly egalitarian attitude toward the Chinese that finally made Ward more popular among his men than among Western diplomats, his own officers, or Chinese officials in Shanghai and Peking. By March 1862 the Ever Victorious Army had become the embodiment of nearly all its creator’s hopes and fantasies: an efficient, well-organized unit of native soldiers who understood and could execute the most
up-to-date Western military maneuvers. The men were mustered at seven each morning, paraded twice a day between training sessions, and dismissed at six in the evening. The activities of the various units became specialized: By the end of the summer of 1862 there were two artillery battalions (one light and one heavy), a rifle battalion, three additional infantry battalions, and an “elite force” of some six hundred particularly well-trained Chinese shock troops. The skill of these soldiers aroused awe even in unsympathetic Chinese observers, such as the Soochow scholar
Feng Kuei-fen. Admiring the Ever Victorious Army’s ability to form a defensive square, Feng noted that the troops thus deployed looked “like a loaf of bread with pins sticking in it.”

The army was in a constant state of growth and evolution. In his memorial to the throne following Ssu-Ching, Hsüeh Huan had told the emperor that “I, your servant, commended Ward, telling him to enlarge the Ever Victorious Army, so that we can have more capable soldiers in future battles.” Already commanding close to two thousand men, Ward soon received authorization to move the army up to three thousand and beyond. Some witnesses claimed that Ward had personal ambitions to expand his force to twenty-five thousand. Even those who, like Wu Hsü, were well-disposed toward Ward recognized that such a force would be able to defeat any army in China. Wu himself pronounced that the “ideal number of the
Chang-sheng-chun
is three thousand”—large enough to do the job facing them, small enough to be controllable.

Control: As always it was the primary worry of Chinese officials at both the imperial and provincial level. Nor did this concern begin or end with the actions of the Ever Victorious Army; it dominated the official Chinese assessment of Ward personally. Perhaps the most dangerous quality for a man to lack in imperial China was restraint, and, for all his enormous personal charm and skill at disciplining troops, Ward’s unwillingness to subscribe personally to a social or political philosophy of anything other than his own devising implied an enormous lack of restraint, of respect for external control. Because of this, Peking was finally unable to separate Ward the man from the military reforms he embodied in the Ever Victorious Army. As a result, those reforms were never allowed to be of long-term use to the Chinese empire.

* * *

Ward’s military innovations, like those of
Tseng Kuo-fan, were seen in Peking as little more than temporary expedients. The Ever Victorious Army, like Tseng’s Hunan Army and the Anhwei Army that Tseng had placed under Li Hung-chang, was unshakably loyal to its commander; in the case of the Ever Victorious Army, perhaps even more than to the emperor. Although he had “subordinated” to China, Ward was, like Tseng, a man from outside the Manchu elite; worse still, he had been born a barbarian Westerner, which doubled the danger inherent in his troops’ loyalty to him. In addition, the Ever Victorious Army—again like Tseng’s armies—was basically an instrument of provincial rather than imperial power; Peking had little say over its training or specific objectives. Thus while the distrust that had marked Hsien-feng’s attitude toward both Tseng Kuo-fan’s armies and those of freelances such as Ward was unquestionably tempered under T’ung-chih, Prince Kung and Tz’u-hsi fully intended to disband any such sources of decentralized power once the Taiping threat had been removed.

But therein lay the problem for the Manchus, as well as yet another paradox. The rebellion could not be ended without Tseng’s and Ward’s armies; the more power those armies were given, the sooner that end would come. But to place no limits on their ascendancy would make the postwar job of disbanding them all the more difficult—perhaps impossible. This danger was especially acute in the case of the Ever Victorious Army, which even Tseng distrusted. He would later dismiss Ward’s troops as “disdainful, extravagant, utterly coarse,” while complaining that “their maintenance is very expensive.” The pride that Ward had worked so hard to instill in his men, and that propelled them to acts of extreme bravery on the battlefield, thus became another source of distrust for Chinese officials. By the end of March, Tseng had decided it was high time to dispatch Li Hung-chang’s Anhwei Army to Shanghai, to assist in the port’s defense and, if need be, to serve as a check on the Ever Victorious Army.