The Devil Soldier (13 page)

One American diplomat who knew him in Shanghai wrote in 1894 that at the time of the Taiping rebellion Li was “thin, wiry, with a quick nervous manner.… He had a quick vibratory way of moving his head which suggested remarkable mental alertness. He was ready in conversation to a remarkable degree. He was never ill-tempered. He was positive in what he said and met an issue squarely. He was not diplomatic in the cheap sense.” Indeed, Li’s diplomatic talents were of the most profound order, and under Tseng’s tutelage he became a capable battlefield commander as well as a superb administrator of both military and civil organizations. The one thing Li lacked was Tseng’s unshakable honesty. Fatally avaricious, Li connived throughout his life to build a huge personal fortune through illegal as well as legal means. Such was
his dexterity, however, that he was consistently pictured as a great patriot.

By 1859 Tseng Kuo-fan had formulated a rough strategy in which his own Hunan Army and a second force—which would be created as soon as a sufficient power base had been retaken from the rebels in Anhwei province—would act as the two arms of a huge nutcracker in crushing the Taipings in Nanking. Tseng himself was already applying pressure from the west, on the rebel stronghold of Anking. His hope was to create another army that would move to the east, defend Shanghai, and then drive the Taipings back toward their Heavenly Capital. This second army would be organized along the same lines as Tseng’s Hunan force: Sound training and discipline would be emphasized over numbers, Confucian values would be drilled into the ranks, and officers would be required to develop strong links to their enlisted men. If Li Hung-chang’s progress as an administrator continued, Tseng believed, the new eastern army would be safe under his command. All that was required for the scheme’s success was a little time—perhaps a year or two.

The Taiping breakout from Nanking early in 1860 played havoc with Tseng’s plans and put the embattled imperial government under even greater pressure. There was no eastern arm to Tseng’s nutcracker in place, and Peking—rightly worried about what move the British and the French would make in the face of their humiliation at Taku—gave no thought to dispatching troops from the north to play such a role. It was a crucial moment. Although the Taipings were tactically on the offensive, their strategic goal was a defensive one: to secure Kiangsu, Shanghai, and a reliable source of supplies. If they failed, their movement would eventually perish. This urgency, combined with the anxiety of Western and Chinese merchants, made the port near the mouth of the Yangtze an ideal place to be a soldier for hire in the spring of 1860; for, despite Tseng Kuo-fan’s misgivings, there was no one else for Chinese officials to turn to if the rebels were to be stopped.

The Chinese victory against French and British arms at Taku had not gone unnoticed in Shanghai: In the port to which Ward returned late in 1859 there had lately been signs of friction between the Western
residents and their hundreds of thousands of Chinese hosts. Native pride was not the only cause of tension. The ongoing coolie trade had led to antiforeign demonstrations, especially against the French, whose arrogance in dealing with the Chinese far surpassed that of the Americans and even the British. When news of the battle at Taku reached Shanghai, angry Chinese citizens took to the streets and swarmed the harbor, demanding the release of coolies who they claimed were unwilling captives on a French ship. The coolies were freed, but not before two Catholic chapels had been burned. In addition, there was anger over the ongoing opium traffic, which had been legalized by the Treaty of Tientsin. Symbolic of this open wound in Chinese society were Shanghai’s “opium hulks,” retired, generally decrepit sailing vessels that were moored along the picturesque Bund and used as transfer stations for the tens of thousands of opium chests that came into the city annually.

The long-standing Chinese distrust of Westerners and their ways had by no means been eradicated by the complex business ties between native and foreign elements in Shanghai. Ward’s achievement in gaining the confidence of two of the most powerful Chinese officials in the port—taotai Wu Hsü and the banker Yang Fang—at the fateful meeting in June 1860 was, therefore, all the more appreciable. But it was not altogether surprising. Throughout his life Ward had shown not only strong social acumen but a pronounced cultural facility, and his previous trips to China, while they had not resulted in gainful employment as a soldier, had given Ward an understanding of Chinese methods. Chaloner
Alabaster, a talented and daring member of the British consular service who served as a translator in Shanghai during the period of Ward’s operations, found the young American “thoroughly acquainted with Chinese manners and customs,” and those who were closer to Ward confirmed that he gained this knowledge not by arrogantly forcing himself into the affairs of the native population, as Westerners so often did, but by playing his own game according to his hosts’ rules.

“It is wonderful,” Charles Schmidt wrote of Ward’s appearance in Shanghai, “how he so easily introduced himself into the good graces of the Chinese, a people so suspicious, self willed, wily and slow to contract with a stranger in cases where the real intrinsic value of the stranger’s
services are
shadowed
in the future.” Ward’s basic method was apparent to Schmidt: “To be successful he had to
ingratiate
himself into power over his supporters; in doing so, he had to brook much, and overcome many obstacles of a sectional kind; doing so only by that necessary dissimulation without which nothing can be done with this crafty people.”

Ward was well-prepared for this job of “dissimulation”: He had, after all, spent his childhood and early adolescence in Salem. Many analysts have commented on the strong similarities between the New England and the Chinese merchant classes: the avariciousness, the acceptance of duplicity, and the moral posturing. In addition, Ward the disciplinarian had learned that there were many situations in which applying direct pressure to his associates was inappropriate and counterproductive, and he used this knowledge deftly in China. The Chinese considered emotionally unstable and unpredictable behavior sure signs of barbarism, and Ward’s actions demonstrated a thorough appreciation of this fact. As Schmidt put it, “By a mild and gentle but determined demeanor towards all classes of the Mandarins who acted in concord with him—(on whom he had to rely for the support he required, and for the making of his fortune)—he won their belief in him.” Finally, Ward’s attempts to win the confidence of Wu Hsü and Yang Fang were assisted by his strong egalitarianism.
As one biographer put it, “Ward, unlike many of his fellow Westerners in China, manifested no prejudice toward the Chinese.”

The results of Ward’s carefully considered but “determined” campaign were quick: Within days of his meeting with Wu and Yang, he was prowling the Shanghai waterfront, looking for recruits to lead against the Taipings as well as for weapons with which to arm them. The project represented a quantum leap in Ward’s professional activities. True, he had prior experience working with mercenaries (most notably the Walker days in Mexico), and in the Crimea he had participated in a clash of professional national armies. But the Chinese civil war was on a scale unlike anything he had experienced. Ward could not have been unaware of this; his work with Admiral Gough had given him a very realistic idea of Taiping strength and combat methods. Yet he now seriously proposed
facing this massive force with a small number of indigent sailors and soldiers selected from among the hundreds of criminals, expatriates, wanderers, and simple drunkards who had found their way to the Shanghai settlements. Ward apparently felt no trepidation in approaching this rather formidable task: From the first, his steps were deliberate and confident.

Ward’s Chinese backers kept actual administration of the new contingent’s finances in their own hands. As they had done with the Pirate Suppression Bureau and the Houseless Refugees Fund, Wu and Yang intended to turn a profit on Ward’s corps regardless of its actual success in the field by jealously guarding (and in all likelihood skimming) the money they raised for it from local merchants. Ward offered no objection to this arrangement, so long—and only so long—as he received the funds he had been promised. He was well aware that pay was the crucial issue in a mercenary force, and he successfully impressed upon his sponsors the need for complete and timely fulfillment of financial obligations. As one
anonymous Shanghai author wrote, “It is no secret that Yang would no more attempt to withhold the Contingent’s pay in Ward’s days than he would jump into the Huang-pu.”

Nor would Ward tolerate Wu and Yang’s interference in either the actual military administration of the force or the purchase of arms. Shanghai’s legion of gunrunners were accustomed to unloading obsolete equipment on both the Taipings and the imperialists at absurdly bloated prices, and Ward knew that Wu and Yang would be only too likely to buy such equipment, further inflate its cost in their accounts, and pocket the difference. At first Ward did allow his backers a voice in determining the objectives of the force—in deciding where and when it would strike—but details of training and operations he kept jealously to himself.

It was a system that seemed to work. As Ward set about the initial task of organization—quickly hiring Henry Andrea Burgevine as his second-in-command—he not only earned Wu Hsü’s genuine respect but established what was an apparently sincere friendship with Yang Fang. Yang had spent his life cultivating contacts inside Shanghai’s Western community, but the relationship to Ward was unique, in its closeness,
in its commercial complexity (the two initiated several business ventures together), and in its lack of ceremonial restraint. Ward and Yang apparently argued much and at length over financial details—encounters that became somewhat famous in Shanghai—and Ward’s celebrated patience and tact often reached their breaking point. But the seasoned, personable old banker almost invariably gave in to the younger American. “Yang,” wrote
one observer, “… would be down on his knees at one of Ward’s angry shouts, and knocking his head against his feet, and at the same time assenting to everything.”

Ward became a regular visitor to Yang’s yamen—where Westerners of all walks regularly congregated—as well as to his home, where Yang lived with his wife and at least two children: a son, whose name is unrecorded, and a daughter, Chang-mei. Nineteen years old at the time Ward first appeared in her father’s life, Chang-mei was considered bad luck in Chinese Shanghai: She had been engaged to be married once, but her fiancé had died, a singular sign of Heaven’s displeasure. In keeping with Chinese custom, Ward’s glimpses of the young girl could only have been fleeting at this time.

With the important work of ensuring the support and respect of his backers done, Ward’s next challenge was enlistment. Although by all accounts he did not display the bigotry toward the Chinese that was so prevalent among Shanghai’s Westerners, he does seem at first to have shared the general belief that the Chinese could not be made to fight a modern war. Ward looked immediately to the sailors and adventurers of the foreign settlements for recruits, despite the fact that there was little in the backgrounds of such characters to indicate that they would ever make exceptional soldiers. These were, after all, men on whom the talents of some of the Western world’s most accomplished and brutal disciplinarians had been wasted. Yet Ward—still very much in the process of learning his trade—evidently believed that he could tame them.

With Burgevine, Ward sought out his potential recruits in the saloons, hotel bars, brothels, and gambling dens that were their haunts. Ward was known to spend freely on these occasions, buying champagne (one of the most common beverages in Shanghai) for audiences of generally penniless indigents as he told them of the high pay and potential
looting that would come with service in his corps.
One British observer later recalled of such scenes: “Everybody made lots of money in those days, and it used to be the custom to ‘shout’ for a case of champagne at a time, to treat everyone within hailing distance—and then go off to the wars or other dangerous business on the morrow in search of more money to get more champagne with on returning to Shanghai.” The same observer—displaying the hostility characteristic of the English community’s attitude toward Ward during the early stages of his operations—went on to claim that Ward sometimes kidnapped intoxicated men and impressed them into service, a charge as unlikely as it is unsubstantiated. There were more than enough men in the port willing to gamble a bankrupt present on the chance for a rich and glorious future with Ward; “shanghaiing” (as it would come to be called) was singularly unnecessary.

Although most of Ward’s recruits were Americans, his relatively small roster soon included citizens of nearly every Western nation: Englishmen, Prussians, Danes, Swiss, and Frenchmen all signed up, much to the displeasure of the ministers and consuls who represented their homelands. Over all of these varied recruits, Ward exercised the same intriguing hold that had won him the backing of Wu Hsü and Yang Fang. But at no time did any of them—including Burgevine—get close enough to their chief to be able to read his thoughts or predict his goals. “Although his means of selection from a high grade were abundant,” Charles Schmidt wrote of Ward’s enlistment activities, “he preferred men from that class of persons who were almost entirely ignorant of what they were about to do; and he did so solely from a determination to control the army under him entirely by his own power.” Given the questionable reliability of many of his new Western soldiers, this was a sound policy, and in light of it as well as Ward’s other achievements in the realm of personal relations, it is difficult to argue with one contemporary’s assessment that “Ward was, as if by magic, apparently intended by nature, nativity and art to deal with and control the Foreigners and Natives who formed the officers, rank and file of the Contingent, as well as the Chinese superiors he had to deal with.”