Repeating carbines were not always available in the numbers Ward required, however, and he often had to settle for muzzle-loading muskets. In doing so, he was careful to seek models that bore the TOWER imprint on their locks: the proof of British government–supervised manufacture. Among the other long arms available in Shanghai were Prussian muskets and rifles, although only a few of these employed Johann Dreyse’s famous “needle” firing system, which was shortly to help the Prussians overcome the Danes, the Austrians, and the French in a succession of wars. Ward’s officers were also supplied with swords, and before long his troops were learning how to handle the peculiarly effective Chinese “stinkpots.”
In short, what had only recently been a collection of much (and in some cases properly) maligned vagabonds had by mid-June 1860 become a mercenary force that caused the foreign authorities in Shanghai appreciable anxiety, not only because they posed a threat to Western neutrality in the Chinese civil war but also because they were armed to the teeth with weapons that could give a large detachment of regular Western troops a very respectable fight. And there was little reason to doubt that if foreign diplomats and soldiers attempted to terminate Ward’s activities, such a conflict would take place: Many of Ward’s men had been cruelly treated by their countrymen before arriving in Shanghai. The example of Ward’s American recruits is typical. Under American maritime law, a ship’s master was required to pay a seaman three months’ wages if he discharged the man in a foreign port. But if the seaman deserted, the master incurred no such obligation. Because of this, any troublesome or supernumerary sailor was generally beaten into forced desertion or taken ashore by his officers, encouraged to drink himself into oblivion, then charged with desertion when he failed to return to his ship on time. In 1830 the desertion law had been slightly amended, and the U.S. consular service had become responsible for paying the three months’ severance pay. But this was only in cases where the seaman in question agreed to be discharged. Those men who desired to keep their posts but were marked for elimination by their captains continued to face beatings and trickery.
Naturally, men who were considered undesirable for any reason by their ship’s masters were also scorned by the foreign community in Shanghai: Ward and his new contingent were marked as outcasts before they even took the field. Insofar as the citizens of the settlements could ignore the well-armed mercenaries, they did so. But as Ward’s ranks swelled to nearly a hundred men, such ignorance became an increasingly difficult proposition. A. A. Hayes, the Harvard-educated New Englander who was a junior partner for the Olyphant Company and who knew Ward in Shanghai, remembered that in the early days “[t]he English pronounced Ward a freebooter and a dangerous man.… Nor were we Americans, I am bound to say, highly impressed at the outset by what we heard of our countryman.… He was regarded by most people as an outlaw, by many as a desperado.”
Ward established his training camp at the town of Kuang-fu-lin, a muddy, insect-infested patch of ground some twenty miles west-southwest of Shanghai. Here the process of disciplining the contingent and preparing it for battle began, with results that could only be described as indifferent. Andrew Wilson—an English journalist and former editor of Hong Kong’s China Mail who was later attached to Ward’s force for two years and wrote an invaluable study of its operations—left a description of the Westerners Ward employed that throws light on the problem of discipline as well as on Ward’s attempts to cope with it:
As a rule they were brave, reckless, very quick in adapting themselves to circumstances and reliable in action; but, on the other hand, they were troublesome when in garrison, very touchy as to precedence, and apt to work themselves about trifles into violent states of mind. Excited by rebel sympathisers [sic] at Shanghai, and being of different nationalities, one half of them were usually in a violent state of quarrel with the other; but this, of course, was often an advantage to the commander.
While Ward understood that such men needed careful preparation before they could face the Taipings, the men themselves would hardly have been likely to acknowledge such a need. Even worse, Ward’s Chinese backers could not be made to see it. Having hired foreigners and supplied them with up-to-date weapons, Wu Hsü and Yang Fang evidently believed that the only thing left to do was find the rebels and defeat them. Ward’s attempts to gain time to prepare what became officially known as the Shanghai Foreign Arms Corps met with an increasingly impatient response from the holders of the purse strings, and Ward knew that if Wu and Yang issued an ultimatum, he would have no choice but to engage the Taipings before he was ready.
The Foreign Arms Corps’s Kuang-fu-lin camp was located near the headquarters of an imperial officer who was to work in close conjunction with Ward during the years to come: Li Heng-sung. Described by one of Ward’s successors as a “useful puppet,” Li was a typical Chinese commander in that he had purchased his first commission. He subsequently displayed above-average determination, however, and was promoted for his courage in fighting the rebels in the Shanghai area. The Manchu military forces were divided, at their highest level, into eight armies, each of which was known by the pattern of its banner. Just below these “bannermen” in the imperial military hierarchy was the Army of the Green Standard, a national unit which, like the Banners, had once been an impressive force but was by 1860 a largely ineffective relic. Li Heng-sung’s troops were Green Standard “braves” (as most Chinese soldiers were known), and despite the fact that he seems to have been a fairly capable commander and was, in Dr. Macgowan’s opinion, “highly esteemed” by Ward, Li’s actions were consistently hampered by the unreliability of his troops. In their very first encounters with the rebels, Ward’s Foreign Arms Corps acted in conjunction with Li’s braves, and before long the foreigners had learned for themselves the minimal value of imperialist assistance.
Between June 17 and June 22, 1860, the Taiping troops of the Chung Wang edged closer to Shanghai from the west and the northwest. Governor Hsüeh Huan decided to counterattack at the towns of T’ai-ts’ang and Chia-ting, and ordered Ward—through Wu Hsü—to support the imperialist attack with his one hundred men. Ward complied, and while no record of the precise role that the corps played in these engagements exists, the two towns were retaken from the rebels on June 26. Within days, however, the corps was drawn back to Kuang-fu-lin by a more important development: The city of Sung-chiang, only a handful of miles from Ward’s headquarters, had fallen to the rebels. Almost immediately, Wu Hsü and Yang Fang began to agitate for a Foreign Arms Corps counterattack on this strategic location, generally considered one of the gateways to Shanghai itself.
Ward demanded more time. Sung-chiang was surrounded by a wide, murky moat as well as a four-mile wall. The city’s formidable outer gates were built of strong teakwood banded with iron and were, in at least some cases, protected by inner gates of similar construction. In all, it was not a job for which Ward’s men—who still lacked artillery and were untrained in siege techniques—were prepared.
But Wu and Yang were growing impatient; they desired some more significant return on their considerable investment than the victories at T’ai-ts’ang and Chia-ting. Fearful that his support would be cut off altogether, Ward agreed to make an attempt on Sung-chiang at the end of June. The result was predictable. The Foreign Arms Corps had no siege equipment, a deficiency Ward hoped to overcome by attacking at night and, with luck, achieving surprise. But the men of the corps—perhaps overly impressed by the part they had played in the two earlier victories—brought large amounts of alcohol with them on the Sung-chiang raid. By the time they were making their way across the flat, grassy terrain outside the city, they were making so much noise that the Taiping sentries were alerted to their approach. The corps suffered heavy casualties and was thrown into flight. “The miserable survivors,” Dr. Macgowan wrote, “returned as stragglers to Shanghai, utterly disgusted. They were paid off and disbanded.”
For the first time the Western authorities in Shanghai were given good reason to belie
ve that Ward would abandon his mercenary plans and perhaps quit China altogether, and for the first time Ward confounded them by immediately rekindling his dream of building a private army with which to, as he later put it, “flog the chang-maos.” In the face of Ward’s considerable determination, Western merchants and diplomats became ever more hostile, using both the press and their extraterritorial laws to try to ensure that the Foreign Arms Corps did not prompt Taiping interference with the unequal and sinister balance of trade that they had established in China.
Of the many personal traits that served Ward well in China, none was more valuable than his adaptability. He had seen what the majority of his Western mercenaries were capable of in the field: Recalcitrant, belligerent, and besotted, they had come close to destroying Wu Hsü and Yang Fang’s faith in their young commander. In the face of this disheartening spectacle, Ward dismissed almost all the men, retaining only those who had demonstrated bravery and ability and whose arrogance might be transformed, with time, into something like authority. These few would become officers. But they would need men to command, and it was now necessary to rethink old notions about who in Shanghai would make the best soldiers of fortune. Ward took to the waterfront once again to grapple with this riddle and soon made an acquaintance who facilitated a solution.
Vincente Macanaya was twenty-three in 1860 and one of Shanghai’s large population of “Manilamen”—Filipinos who were handy on board ships and more than a little troublesome on land. Renowned as ferocious fighters, especially at close quarters, the Manilamen were in a class with the famous lascars of Malaysia and the pirates of the Bay of Bengal, groups that were also known to frequent the foreign settlements in Shanghai. As Spain was still in possession of the Philippines, the Manila-men were technically Spanish subjects. But by habit they were generally transients, at ease anywhere between India and Korea where laws were lax. Macanaya himself—who would, after his initial acquaintance with Ward, be known throughout Shanghai simply as Vincente—had been born in Manila and was a seasoned young man of singular courage. As Charles Schmidt, who served with and knew him well, wrote while Vincente was still alive:
If real bravery consists in an undauntedness of spirit, a cool presence of mind, and active physical exertion, then all these qualities are combined in Vincente to a degree that leaves no doubt on the minds of the many friends who know him, and have seen him so fearless in the midst of danger. He has all the appearance of a soldier.—There is nothing rough about that appearance. [He is] gentlemanly in his ways to all, kind hearted to his friends, sober in his habits, quick in perception, frank, liberal to a fault, and with an eye always to duty, serving faithfully where he serves, beloved and respected by his comrades in arms.
Ward’s trust in Vincente was almost immediate, and he quickly made the Manilaman his aide-de-camp. Still able to converse at least capably in Spanish, Ward began recruiting more Filipinos and soon had raised over eighty of them. The absence of a significant language barrier may have made Ward more comfortable among the Manilamen than among the polyglot of European drunkards who had originally filled out the roster of his Foreign Arms Corps. Certainly, Vincente and his countrymen soon justified their new leader’s faith: Within days the corps was back at Kuang-fu-lin, this time training in earnest and conducting intelligence forays into the surrounding countryside. Setting a standard to which their European and American officers were forced to rise, the Manilamen ably went about the business of capturing Taiping patrols and shipping the prisoners back to the imperial authorities in Shanghai, all the while preparing for a new attempt on Sung-chiang.
By early July the activities of Ward’s new force were arousing considerable criticism in Shanghai. Foremost among the Western voices calling for the permanent disbandment of the Foreign Arms Corps was that of Thomas Taylor Meadows, the British consul. Britain had a special bone to pick with the corps: In putting together his training program at Kuang-fu-lin, Ward had recognized the need for experienced drillmasters, and those of the British army and navy were renowned as the best in their field. Ward had made a particular point of enticing these valuable men away from their obligations to queen and country. A pronounced need to ensure the obedience of British soldiers and sailors was the immediate cause of Consul Meadows’s antipathy toward the Foreign Arms Corps. But he had many other reasons for wanting Ward and his force put out of action.
Meadows was a sinologist of the first order. A broad, bearded man who stood over six feet tall, he had been a student of Chinese in Munich before taking up a post at the British consulate in Canton in 1842. He had witnessed the Opium War and had predicted (as he was fond of reminding people) as early as 1846 that a major rebellion would soon take hold of the Middle Kingdom. Furthermore, his understanding of China and the Chinese was not completely the result of book learning and consular duties: An avid shooter, Meadows often took hunting trips into the Chinese interior, and during these journeys he made it a point to converse with the peasantry and gauge their opinions. Like many a Western diplomat, Meadows was appalled by the brutality and corruption of the Manchu government, and, like many foreign residents of the treaty ports, he early on saw the Taiping movement as an alternative with real possibilities.
In addition, Meadows considered the neutral stance adopted by the Western powers in China theoretically admirable but practically advantageous to the Manchu government: The first concern of the “neutral” West was the maintenance of trade in the treaty ports, and that trade benefited Peking. But while he saw the neutral policy’s shortcomings, Meadows did try to use it to terminate the activities of the Foreign Arms Corps, a goal for which he worked assiduously throughout the summer of 1860. In the first week of July, Ward’s men dispatched a Taiping prisoner to imperial Chinese officials in Shanghai, and the man was, according to Meadows, “disembowelled and beheaded” (although the Chinese usually tore out a man’s heart rather than his lesser organs during such ritual executions). Meadows took the occasion to write to both the American consul (the less than vigilant W. L. G. Smith) and his Spanish counterpart in almost identical language:
We have direct evidence that the Taipings have been permitting the silk to pass down freely on being told that it was for the foreign merchants at Shanghai. But we cannot reasonably expect this to continue if they find foreign auxiliaries thus engaged in active hostilities against them;… I have the best reasons for believing that the above force of auxiliaries were raised by, and are now commanded by one or more United States citizens, while the men are chiefly Manilla-men [sic]. Believing the proceedings of these [American and Spanish] citizens … are endangering an important branch of British trade, I now beg to bring them to your notice with a view to a remedy.
Rightly suspecting that he would get little satisfaction out of either the American or the Spanish government, Meadows also addressed a protest to his superior, British minister Frederick Bruce. The Taipings, Meadows said, had as yet shown no inclination to molest foreign trade, but activities such as Ward’s might change all that. “There is certainly great reason to suppose that anger may cause [the rebels] to retaliate on the commerce of foreigners, if not on the persons of those whom business takes into the silk districts.… It appears to me practically impossible to maintain neutrality if we not only interpose between the rebel forces and the people and city of Shanghai but also protect the provincial authorities in it, [and] permit the authorities to raise forces, Chinese or foreign, in it.”
Meadows’s alarmist words found sympathetic ears among foreigners who saw any military activity in the Shanghai area—whether imperialist, Taiping, or foreign—as a direct threat to trade. But Bruce was far less impressed. Despite the fact that both men worked for the British government, Bruce and Meadows did not belong to the same breed of diplomatic official. Bruce was among those career officers who were neither sinologists by experience nor sinophiles by inclination. Forty-six years old at the time of his appointment to China, Bruce had served in the United States, Canada, Bolivia, Uruguay, and
Egypt before traveling to the Middle Kingdom with his brother Lord Elgin and there was precious little scholarly love of Chinese civilization in him.
Still, Bruce was no mere mercantile stooge. He was deeply committed to the stated goals of his government, even when those goals conflicted with Western commercial interests. It may well have been that Meadows was right and that neutrality in the Chinese civil war was a noble but ultimately farcical idea for countries that enjoyed special trading privileges from the imperial government in Peking. But Bruce’s instructions from the Foreign Office were that he not only prevent depredations against British trade but also vigorously enforce Britain’s Neutrality Ordinance. However irreconcilable these goals may have seemed, Bruce pursued them with typical British obstinacy. Thus while he fully intended to punish British citizens who joined either Ward’s force or the Taiping armies as mercenaries, he also ignored Meadows’s suggestion that the British prevent imperial officials in Shanghai from raising forces for their own defense.