The inconsistencies of Bruce’s attitude would only later become fully apparent. For the moment, Ward—because he was in the service of the taotai—was relatively free from British, and more generally Western, interference. The representatives of Ward’s own United States were not inclined to acknowledge, much less control, his activities. Consul Smith blithely denied that Americans were involved in the mercenary doings at Kuang-fu-lin, and Minister John Ward was too wrapped up in affairs relating to the final settlement of the Tientsin treaty crisis to pay his adventurous countrymen much attention. Still, there was at least some contact between Ward the free-lance and Ward the minister at this time: After the outbreak of the American Civil War the young New Englander would write of the diplomat from Georgia’s abandonment of the Union, “I find my old friend Ward Ex-Minister is a damned traitor and joined the rascals.” But if Minister Ward did make any attempt to interfere with the ongoing training and patrols of the Foreign Arms Corps in 1860, it was singularly halfhearted and unsuccessful.
The failure of the diplomatic community to do anything at all about Ward’s corps soon had Western merchants in Shanghai squawking. Their complaints, as was so often the case, were reflected on the pages of the North China Herald, which began a long and particularly vindictive campaign against the corps. The China coast newspapers generally, and the Herald in particular, were a phenomenon unique to the early period of Western encroachment into the Middle Kingdom, and their history offers important insight not only into the kind of foreigners who made the treaty ports their homes but into why men like Ward aroused such bitter resentment. Until the late 1860s such papers were, in the words of one expert, “one man affairs … directed by an editor of limited experience supported by an inadequate staff, dependent upon a narrow range of news sources.” Because the foreign communities in the treaty ports were so small, most of these editors were more interested in grinding axes than in cultivating journalistic integrity, and commentary tended to degenerate into gossip-laced feuding.
In 1860 the North China Herald was ten years old, appeared weekly, and generally ran between four and eight pages. Its yearly subscription rate was fifteen Chinese taels (about twenty-four dollars), and its circulation was no more than five hundred, but it exerted an influence out of all proportion to its size. For both the British and the American consuls as well as private business firms it served as the organ of public notice; salesmen hawking everything from “Persian Insect Powder” to cough lozenges to fire insurance advertised in its pages, as did the proprietors of dress shops, saloons, and billiard parlors; social and political events were covered in detail and described in language that was readily accessible to all; and opinions were offered straight from the shoulder. Given the contrast between its size and the scope of its concerns, the Herald was indeed a remarkable journal.
In 1856 the Herald had been taken over by Charles Spencer Compton, who had a long history of involvement in the China trade and scant liking for either the Manchus, whom he viewed with standard Western indignation, or the Taipings, whom he saw as a threat to free enterprise. Under Compton, the Herald occasionally expressed criticism of the rebellion, but the editor was always careful to condemn military participation by foreigners, fearing that such behavior would only bring the rebels’ wrath down on Shanghai.
Thus by July 1860 a Herald correspondent was reporting that
on Monday last the 9th, twenty-nine foreign sailors deserted from their ships in the harbour, having been allured by the promise of high pay, to put themselves under the orders of agents of the Taotai, and to assist the Imperial soldiers against the rebels.… [T]he acts of mercenaries are spreading feelings of ill-will in the minds of the natives against the private members of our community; as it cannot, for a moment, be supposed that the Chinese populace can discriminate between the character of individual Foreigners.
In fact, as was reported in the same issue of the Herald, Wu Hsü was using the existence of Ward’s Foreign Arms Corps as a way to pacify rather than stir up the “populace”: “H.E. the Taotai has … issued a proclamation telling the people that the rebels are very close, but that they need not fear to go and fight, as foreign soldiers are [near] Sung-chiang.” But to the Herald, Ward and his followers continued to be a “gang” and a “disgrace,” and their operations were nothing more than “depredations.”
Such epithets were ironic indeed, coming from a paper that spoke for Western commercial interests in Shanghai, and it is understandable that Ward’s reaction to these and similar attacks was one of indifference and even amusement. “Depredating” was an activity common to nearly every foreigner in China: The basis of most fortunes made in the treaty ports was (or at one time had been) opium, and of the remainder gunrunning, smuggling, land speculation, and confidence games made up a large portion. The righteous moralizing of Westerners whose names had been made through the spread of drug abuse or the disposal of useless weapons at inflated prices was hardly likely to disturb someone like Ward, who was well-acquainted with Chinese affairs as well as with the business practices common in the treaty ports, which he dismissed tersely as “lying, swindling & smuggling.”
The opium trade not only belied the Western community’s attacks on Ward but on a larger scale revealed much about the foreigners’ attitudes toward the Taiping movement. The apparent anxiety of merchants in Shanghai over the rebellion’s potentially adverse effects on trade were curiously inconsistent with existing circumstances, for the Taipings had never posed a threat to Western trade. On the contrary, the rebels had (as Thomas Meadows pointed out) made a special effort from the beginning not to interfere with the shipment of tea and silk down the Yangtze and Huang-pu rivers. This effort had been for the most part successful: Although figures always fluctuated, the rebellion had caused no interruption in exports. In fact, during the crucial years 1860 and 1861, tea and silk shipments actually increased. Of course, the fact that merchants were doing exceptionally well in Shanghai at the time of the Chung Wang’s breakout from Nanking was reason enough for heightened fears about the effects of war on trade. But an equal and perhaps greater cause of alarm—lurking unacknowledged beneath the surface of the debate over how to deal with the rebels—was the drug trade. Opium was the one sector of commerce that the Taipings had made a concerted effort to interrupt, and in so doing they may have committed their greatest error with regard to the Western communities in China.
The buying, selling, and smoking of opium were illegal under Taiping law, and violations carried the same draconian penalty that China’s Communists would use a century later to finally end the opium problem: death. That opium from British India played a huge part in both China’s debilitation and the prosperity of Shanghai’s Western community in 1860 is beyond question; but because British diplomatic representatives in China were so reluctant to discuss the trade publicly or in dispatches, we may never know how much influence opium actually had on official British policy.
Yet the very fact that otherwise loquacious British diplomats and politicians grew silent and evasive on this one subject speaks eloquently of the importance of the opium trade to the British empire, which had, after all, already gone to war once to preserve the free flow of the drug. At the time of the Opium War, the Manchus had been branded enemies of Britain for attempting to interfere with the drug trade. That the troublesome Taipings should have been viewed in the same light when they committed the same “attack” on “British trade” is hardly surprising. By refusing, for the most part, even to acknowledge the realities of the opium issue, eminent British statesmen were able to occupy the moral “vantage ground,” as Lord Palmerston called it after the Opium War. They defended that territory tenaciously. “The Chinese must learn and be convinced that if they attack our people and our factories they will be shot”—Palmerston’s policy was designed to protect opium traffickers without naming them, and, in this as in so many things, he set the pattern for British statesmen throughout the nineteenth century.
That British
representatives in China took Palmerston’s words literally was demonstrated in July and August of 1860, when Frederick Bruce’s brother Lord Elgin returned to China and led a task force of more than two hundred British and French ships back to the forts at Taku to settle accounts for the defeat of the previous year and finally force compliance with the Treaty of Tientsin. Ten thousand British and six thousand French troops participated in the subsequent storming of the forts and march toward Peking, during which the anti-Western general Seng-ko-lin-ch’in (known as “Sam Collinson” to the British troops) was repeatedly defeated and his Tartar horsemen sent reeling westward. The Western allies apparently meant to have an exchange of Tientsin ratifications in China’s capital whatever the cost.
It would be wrong, however, to say that all Englishmen in China approved of Britain’s playing a part either in such armed interventions or in the opium traffic. Some found their nation’s behavior in these connections so morally repugnant that they actively supported the Taiping cause, and thus set themselves up as opponents of Ward and his Foreign Arms Corps. Of these, perhaps none was more remarkable than Augustus F. Lindley. Arriving in China as a merchant naval officer in 1859, Lindley had been so appalled by the behavior of imperial officials and Western businessmen in the treaty ports, and so intrigued by reports of the Chinese Christian movement in Nanking, that he had journeyed up the Yangtze to assess the rebel movement for himself. Here he met and was greatly impressed by the Chung Wang, to whom Lindley—writing under his adopted Chinese name, Lin-le—later dedicated a two-volume account of the rebellion and his own part in it. Receiving a permit to carry on trade in Taiping territories, Lindley soon began running guns to the rebels, motivated by what he would subsequently call “feelings of sympathy for a worthy, oppressed, and cruelly wronged people; as well as by a desire to protest against the evil foreign policy which England, during the last few years, has pursued.” Lindley took the field with the Chung Wang’s armies, trained a group of Taipings in the use of firearms and artillery, and was even married in a Taiping ceremony.
There were other Englishmen who sought employment in the Taiping armies, although not all were motivated by as apparently lofty considerations as Lindley. For their part, the Taiping leaders, according to the Chung Wang, were circumspect about hiring Western mercenaries, considering them arrogant and unreliable. The “T’ien Wang,” wrote the rebel commander, “was unwilling to use foreign troops. A thousand [foreign] devils would lord it over ten thousand of our men, and who would stand for that? So we did not employ them.” This determination eroded along with Taiping military fortunes during the early 1860s, however, and more and more foreign profiteers were allowed into the rebel ranks.
Englishmen and other Westerners were not only fighting on the Taiping side in 1860 but, as in Lindley’s case, running guns, securing supplies, and even enlisting recruits in Shanghai. One American, identified only by the surname Peacock, persuaded foreigners in the port to defy their various nations’ bans on active participation in the Chinese civil war and to travel up the Yangtze to enlist. Some of these volunteers achieved positions of importance: One Englishman called Savage, an ex-pilot and, by some accounts, ex-soldier, held a high enough rank under the Chung Wang during the Kiangsu campaign of 1860 to be given charge of entire city garrisons. Rewards of money and rank were readily available to men who proved as capable as Savage. And while Western analysts such as Andrew Wilson might write off the foreigners who participated in the war during this period as “a few Malays and Manila-men, and, perhaps, a crazy English sailor or two,” they did help the Taipings become better acquainted with modern weapons and tactics.
As for the attitude of the Westerners who fought on either side of the Chinese civil war toward each other, Augustus Lindley’s words are again indicative. Lindley had only scorn for the Westerners who served the Manchus—with the exception of Ward. After the latter’s death, Lindley wrote that Ward,
whatever his failings might have been, was a brave and determined man. He served his Manchu employers only too well, and at the last, by closing a career full of peril and fidelity with the sacrifice of his life, he sealed all faults with his death, and left those who cherished his memory to regret that he had not fallen in a worthier cause.… This adventurer originated the force that finally was the principal instrument in driving the Taipings from the dominions they had established as “Tai-ping tien-kuo.” By such apparently insignificant means does the Great Ruler of the Universe overthrow the efforts and establish the destinies of man!
The first truly significant demonstration of these “apparently insignificant means” came in mid-July 1860, with the Foreign Arms Corps’s second assault on Sung-chiang, an assault that quickly took on legendary proportions in Shanghai and, finally, throughout the Chinese empire.
Following his conquest of Soochow on June 2, the Chung Wang had dispatched columns east toward Shanghai and succeeded in capturing most of the cities and towns that ringed the port, including Sung-chiang. But in much the same way that his determination had mellowed and the pace of his armies slackened on the march to Soochow, so did the advance toward Shanghai grow ever less decisive. The Chung Wang apparently enjoyed being away from the scrutiny of his increasingly unbalanced leader, the T’ien Wang. He also took full advantage of the considerable amenities Soochow had to offer. Claiming that he needed time to enlist troops before descending on Shanghai and then moving back west and up the southern bank of the Yangtze, the Chung Wang in fact occupied himself with the construction of a magnificent residence, described by one visitor as consisting of “several sets of rooms, all connected with each other by passages and halls, but otherwise separated by courtyards variously adorned. Some have ponds, trees, soft rocks, penetrated with subterranean passages, the whole forming a labyrinth of palatial dimensions.”
Meanwhile, in the war’s western theater, some twenty thousand imperial troops had finally succeeded in surrounding the crucial Taiping city of Anking. The siege was not yet pressed with conviction, however, nor would it be until Tseng Kuo-fan assumed overall direction of the imperial military effort in the region. But the achievement was a sinister omen for the rebel cause. According to Augustus Lindley, the Manchu braves at first
contented themselves with the ordinary phase of Chinese warfare—watching, flag-waving, and yelling at a safe distance from any probable vicious attempt of the dangerous chang-maos. Anking, however, was a place of great strength for Chinese warfare; it formed the point d’appui of all Taiping movements either to the northern or northwestern provinces, and previous to any attack on their capital, Nanking, or its fortified outposts, its reduction was an absolute necessity. The city being built right on the brink of the great river, was absolute mistress of that important highway, without which, and its invaluable water communication, any extensive movement of the Manchu armies in an easterly direction became impracticable. At last, therefore, the Manchu warriors girded up their loins, that is to say, tucked up the bottoms of their petticoat inexpressibles, fiercely wound their tails around their cleanly-shaven caputs, made a terrible display of huge flags, roaring gongs, horridly painted bamboo shields, and a most extravagant waste of gunpowder, and moving forward with terrific cloud-rending yells, established themselves safely out of cannon-range of the walls, and proceeded to complete the investment of the doomed city by building themselves in with a formidable series of earth-works and stockades, from which they could neither climb out nor enemies climb in.
In the face of this threat, the Taiping leadership became gravely concerned over the attitude and actions of the Chung Wang, whose preoccupation with Soochow and its surrounding territories seemed to have wiped from the young general’s mind any appreciation of the important role he had been assigned in the coordinated westward attack. The Taiping prime minister, the Kan Wang, later wrote in anger that following the fall of Soochow the Chung Wang had “rested upon his oars, manifesting no anxiety whatever about the state of Anking,” and some authors have speculated t
hat the Chung Wang, weary of Taiping court intrigues and massacres, meant to establish his own warlord kingdom in the provinces of Kiangsu and Chekiang. His tested loyalty to the rebel cause makes this improbable, but in view of the pressure being applied to Anking, his behavior in Kiangsu was open to question. Anking’s predicament also underscored the importance of Shanghai, which held the arms, river steamers, funds, and supplies that could restore rebel authority in the west. Taking stock of all this, and realizing that the port’s capture would silence all criticism of his actions, the Chung Wang roused himself from the pleasures of Soochow and, in July, once again turned his attention eastward.
Thus Ward’s decision to make a second attempt at recapturing Sung-chiang from the rebels was not based simply on pride or the need to restore his backers’ faith in him. There were real strategic issues at stake. Sung-chiang and the neighboring walled city of Ch’ing-p’u (about fifteen miles to the north) were the strongest fortresses on the approach to Shanghai from the west and southwest, and the front line of defense against any attacker emerging from those directions. And while it is true that only the capture of Shanghai itself would appreciably benefit the rebel cause, the maintenance of Sung-chiang and Ch’ing-p’u—along with Chia-ting to the northwest, Kao-ch’iao to the north, the Pootung peninsula to the east, and Nan-ch’iao and Chin-shan-wei to the south—gave the Chinese and Western residents of Shanghai breathing space in which to conduct trade and receive supplies with relative freedom. Thus if the Taiping advance were to be checked, Sung-chiang and Ch’ing-p’u were the logical places for the challenge to take place. In addition, Sung-chiang held an important place in Confucian folklore and was the seat of the prefecture that included Shanghai; its recapture would provide a boost to morale and help restore the tarnished prestige of local imperial officials.