The Devil Soldier (7 page)

that the all watchful eye of the mother pictured to her family his future fame and
warlike
greatness. Her proposition was to send him to West Point, that the full bent of his soul’s desire might there be nurtured in its proper soil. Had he gone, no doubt his native land would have been blessed with the greatness of his genius;—would have been the happy recipient of his Great Generalship. Perhaps you smile—But if he were not a superior being, should we not see his like, now, in the hour of need—here?

(Schmidt was writing in Shanghai in 1863, when the outcome of China’s Taiping rebellion was still in doubt.)

Any hope of military training was crushed, however, and Ward’s father dealt with his son’s rebelliousness in typical Salem fashion: by taking him out of school and packing him off for a long sea voyage aboard a clipper ship. The vessel was the
Hamilton
, captained by William Henry Allen, who had married into the Ward family. Fred, not yet sixteen, was taken on as second mate. The
Hamilton
’s destination was Hong Kong.

Still a boy, Ward was thrown into a world that belonged very much to men, a world in which keelhauling, flogging, mutiny, and murder were all common elements. Quick adjustment was called for. Fortunately, Ward had already developed many tools that served his purpose. Rantoul’s interviews of Ward’s contemporaries formed a revealing picture of the boy-officer:

A born fighter, he was no bully.… [I]t was his ruling passion to champion the weak, and his strength, which was great, was ever on call in the interest of fair play.… He was a favorite with his mates,—they all concur in that judgment,—but if a boy was “spoiling for a fight” Ward did not keep him waiting long.… Of no more than medium stature and always slight, compact and wiry, he had the strength of an athlete, and the surviving sister [Elizabeth] recalled with pleasure the frolics of the “children’s hour,” when, at the end of their evening’s romp, they all rode off to bed on his willing shoulders.

And then a telling comment: “What he craved was power,—not the semblance of power.”

Ward did well aboard the
Hamilton
, earning Captain Allen’s praise.
But the captain, like others before him, was also disturbed by the young man’s recklessness. Demonstrating that he had absorbed at least some of the harsh lessons taught by his father, Ward soon gained a reputation among the crew as a strict disciplinarian. While the development of this all-important instrument of command would serve Ward well in later life, it apparently did not sit agreeably with his shipmates on the
Hamilton:
On one occasion the young second officer went over the ship’s side, and, while some accounts say that he fell while chasing a butterfly, most concede that he was thrown by crew members weary of his boyish orders.

When the
Hamilton
finally reached Hong Kong, Ward got his first glimpse of the empire that would one day become his arena. Because of his age and the severe restrictions placed by the emperor in Peking on the movements and business activities of foreigners, Ward in all likelihood did not comprehend China’s already alarming condition. Had he been able to examine the country more closely or with older eyes, he would undoubtedly have detected in 1847 the origins of the crisis in which he would later play so remarkable a part.

During the mid-nineteenth century a foreign resident of Shanghai,
John L. Nevins, went to some lengths to collect, translate, and publish a series of
Chinese tracts that he felt would demonstrate to his fellow foreigners the extreme contempt with which most Chinese viewed the West and its representatives. The tone of these tracts was uniformly scathing: “In social intercourse,” the Chinese authors wrote of the foreigners,

men show respect by removing their hats. A less degree of respect is shown by raising the hand to the forehead.… They kneel only before God (Shang-ti) and the pre-existent Lord of their sect. When friends meet they inquire about each other’s wives but never about parents. They regard parents as belonging to a past period.… These people have an outward show of gentility, but their hearts are full of deceit. Their appearance is such as to easily deceive. They all live by carrying on commerce on the sea.… At first they confined themselves to cheating barbarians adjacent to them, not daring to carry on their lawless practices in the Middle Kingdom. Now our Emperor, full of compassion and condescension, has deigned to hold friendly intercourse with them; but these barbarians, so far from appreciating this condescension, have availed themselves of the opportunity to give unbridled license to their lawless propensities.

During the era of Western encroachment into China an enormous gap existed between Chinese and Western concepts of “civilization” and “barbarism.” The outward signs of this gap—differences in dress, manners, and business methods—seemed to many nineteenth-century Western visitors somewhat superficial, obstacles that should not and would not impede China’s acceptance of other sovereign states as equals and the normalization of trading and political relations. But, as was learned by Portuguese traders and Jesuit priests during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and then by British, French, and finally American merchants and missionaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, those outward differences were not decorative encumbrances that could be easily swept away. Rather, they were sturdy pillars connected directly to the ancient foundation of a culture that was radically different from anything the Western voyagers had encountered in any other part of the world.

The differences began but did not end with religion. In 1644 the Manchu invaders of China had found in place among their new subjects a “religion” that was at heart a successful ideology of social regimentation and control: Confucianism. The great sage who had taught that reverence for elders and the family was not only sacred but directly analogous to obedience to the emperor and the state was as useful to Tartar rulers as he had been to the Ming; and during the Manchu era the perpetuation of the Confucian system remained the cherished goal of China’s middle and upper classes, and, most important, of the literati, the men who became the emperor’s civil servants and actually administered the enormously extended family that was China. True, large numbers of peasants indulged their more mystical leanings by worshiping the idols of Buddhism and seeking knowledge of
tao
, “the way,” but
Confucianism was never challenged as the ideological force that made the Chinese empire function.

Confucius’s definition and elaboration of a virtuous “civilization” was not Christ’s, and the vices that the Chinese sage considered “barbarous” did not always correspond to those proscribed by the Bible. The absolute subordination of the individual first to the family, then to the state, and finally to the emperor—the “Son of Heaven”—allowed for physical cruelties in China that struck early Christian missionaries (who seemed to have forgotten such Western religious atrocities as the Inquisition) as unspeakably savage. Children might be bought and sold, human lives extinguished by the tens of thousands and in horrifying ways; men of means might emulate their emperor by purchasing dozens of concubines, while their nominal wives languished in miserable servitude; imperial commissioners and officials might knowingly use duplicity to pursue their master’s interests. Yet so long as these activities increased the stability of the Confucian system, they were viewed as permissible and even desirable.

For all the fault that Western visitors found with the Confucian system, however, they repeatedly ran up against one indisputable fact: For thousands of years it had worked, and worked well. Over the centuries China had become self-contained and self-sufficient, an empire that viewed itself as the center of the temporal world and whose statesmen concerned themselves not with external expansion but with internal control. As has only recently been fully understood in the West, for example, the Great Wall itself was built as much to keep China’s population inside imperial borders and obedient to the imperial will as to keep foreign marauders out. Over the ages this attitude filtered from the central to the provincial and finally to the local level:
A British officer who visited the city of Soochow during the 1860s noticed that its walls were “thickly studded with re-curved hooks, standing about two inches from the surface, and resembling stout nails. They were no doubt intended rather to prevent the garrison escaping than for defence.”

Control permeated every aspect of Chinese life. The control of an individual over passions that might interfere with his respect for family and emperor; the control of a father over his family, and of his elders over the father; the control of magistrates and governors over their
people; and, finally, the control of the Son of Heaven over them all—these were the relationships that came to define Chinese civilization. An emperor who could exercise such control was said to possess the “Mandate of Heaven,” and, should his dynasty be toppled by rebellion, no doubts were cast on the validity of the Confucian order. Rather, it was explained, that dynasty had become unworthy, and the Mandate of Heaven had been transferred to a family more capable of exercising rigorous control.

Because of the powerful ethnocentricity that accompanied this philosophy, the first Europeans to reach China had been viewed as mere oddities by most Chinese. The miserable failure of the Jesuit missionaries to win converts only demonstrated to the guardians of the Confucian order that the world outside could never compete with the Middle Kingdom in strength of civilization. True, Christianity’s emphasis on the individual and his private relationship to God seemed dangerous to some Chinese; but the Jesuits did not in fact bring with them any radical or subversive social doctrines. Similarly, the Portuguese traders who infested the island of Macao opposite Canton and Hong Kong could hardly be said to have represented an expansive culture of new ideas. And while China’s Russian neighbors to the north were feared for their power, they, too, did not pose any significant threat to China’s cultural vitality.

It was not until the British and finally the Americans reached Chinese shores that the rulers of the Middle Kingdom were thrown into panic. This fear, while prompted by religion, was on a deeper level ideological. Here were nations whose acceptance of the Christian doctrine that personal morality was more important than filial obedience had brought them to espousal of what, for the Chinese, was the virtual definition of barbarism: liberal democracy. Such a system theoretically involved not only religious but political and commercial freedom: the right of any people to participate in government, exchange ideas openly, and trade freely with other nations. These were all tremendously dangerous concepts to the Chinese; even more shocking, they were all concepts that began to take hold in China as the eighteenth century came to a close.

Where the Jesuits had failed, British and American Protestants
began in the early 1800s to succeed. Granted, by midcentury there were no more than a hundred such missionaries in China. But that number must be considered significant when measured against the hostility of the overriding majority of China’s rulers and subjects, and against the fact that until 1842 Canton remained the only Chinese city where foreigners were permitted to reside. (Even in Canton, the Westerners were only allowed to operate in strictly circumscribed areas known as factories.) The interior of China remained forbidden ground to traders and missionaries alike; yet the mounting success of both groups in attracting Chinese citizens revealed cracks in the Chinese system of control that profoundly disturbed many imperial officials at the central, provincial, and local levels.

The Manchu dynasty and its servants were themselves largely to blame for these developments. The intricate, shielded, and socially pervasive Chinese imperial bureaucracy had proved an ideal breeding ground for corruption, and, even before the early days of Western intrusion into China, Peking had grown inattentive to the spread of outrageously dishonest bureaucratic practices. Indeed, many high imperial officials themselves made use of such methods, buying office and influence with comparative impunity. This behavior in turn created an air of discontent among ruined members of the middle class and impoverished peasants that opened their minds to new ideologies. Meanwhile, the heavy cut taken out of the profits of Chinese merchants (a disdained class in the Middle Kingdom) by the imperial government made those merchants more anxious to do business with the West, and to do it covertly whenever possible.

Without doubt, then, the Chinese dragon—for millennia the symbol of imperial power and prestige—lay stricken by the beginning of the nineteenth century, dying of a malady that sprang from the heart and crept into every limb and appendage. But this wasting disease was aggravated by the outsiders—specifically by opium, the West’s greatest weapon in the struggle to open China to increased trade. The drug underlay all Western activity in China, though most foreigners chose politely not to recognize or to discuss the fact. Once opium eating and smoking had been an indulgence of a relative handful of well-to-do
Chinese. But in the mid-eighteenth century the British East India Company had discovered that the fashion spread quickly when the available amount of the drug was increased. In light of this discovery the poppy fields of British India were tapped as never before, and between 1750 and 1839 the amount of opium imported into China multiplied a hundred times. In 1834 the East India Company’s monopoly on the trade was ended, and private smugglers entered the game; within a year more than 2 million Chinese were addicts.

Economically, the illegal trade crippled China and gave the Westerners an enormous advantage. China’s silver reserves poured out of the country to pay for the huge opium shipments, destroying the empire’s economy and drastically inflating the number of impoverished peasants. And while legitimate Western imports never equaled the amounts of silk and tea exported by the Chinese, China’s balance of trade remained unfavorable because of opium. The drug thus became a vital threat to the integrity and security of the Chinese empire and, simultaneously, the foundation on which the greatest Western mercantile empires in China were built.