IV
“NOT AS WAS HOPED, DEAD …”
Following the victory at Sung-chiang, Ward and his men became closely identified with that city (the corps being often referred to as “the Sung-chiang men” or “the Sung-chiang force”), and disagreements with local imperial administrators were inevitable. During these encounters Ward seems to have exhibited for the first time the limits of his tact. Rightly suspecting that the officials assigned by Hsüeh Huan and Wu Hsü to oversee affairs at Sung-chiang were also secretly charged with keeping a careful eye on the Foreign Arms Corps and its leader, Ward took effective control of the city by refusing to relinquish even nominal military authority. Such an imposition was deeply insulting to the local mandarins, whose responsibilities were both civil and military. But Ward dealt brusquely with their protests, and when the unlucky mandarins crossed paths with Burgevine—who commanded the corps during Ward’s frequent visits to Shanghai—these rebukes could be more than verbal.
Ward established his permanent headquarters in Sung-chiang next to a small Christian church, and from there he addressed the manifold problems of expanding and better providing for his force. The seizure of Sung-chiang brought dozens of eager new volunteers, mostly Westerners who had gotten word of the looting and bounties that had followed the battle. But Ward—who quickly became known as Colonel Ward in view of the corps’s success—had learned several important lessons during his weeks in the field. Vincente and the Manilamen had vindicated themselves in fine style, and Ward henceforward examined Western recruits with a wary eye. In addition, even more rigid discipline was maintained among those foreigners he had either kept on from the original force or hired after Sung-chiang. A typical example of how Ward dealt with insubordination, drunkenness, or abusive treatment of enlisted men by his Western officers was offered some months later by a Danish member of the corps, John Hinton. Detained by British troops for violating the various Western neutrality laws, Hinton testified that one of Ward’s officers, a Prussian, had been imprisoned in Sung-chiang
for disobedience of Ward’s order. I saw him amongst a lot of Chinese prisoners, and he was very heavily ironed and shamefully treated. A few days afterwards Egan, who is Ward’s Lieutenant, had a quarrel with the Colonel on account of Egan’s having struck a man when on drill. Egan, in consequence, threw off his uniform and declared he would go to Shanghai. Ward swore he should not, and Egan, the same night, got very drunk, and when in bed Ward sent men and took him prisoner to Sung-chiang, where he was confined with the Prussian.
The statements of bitter Western freebooters who had journeyed to Sung-chiang expecting to enjoy a riotous life of drinking and plunder and found instead something very like regular military discipline were offered by Western businessmen and especially British officials in Shanghai as proof that the Foreign Arms Corps was not a volunteer unit but a criminal organization of kidnapped and impressed soldiers. The British—reluctant to use the term impressment, quite probably because it had all too often been accurately applied to Her Britannic Majesty’s forces themselves—branded Ward’s methods “crimping,” but Ward continued to go about his affairs without apparent anxiety over British invectives. In the months to come Ward’s relationship to the British community in Shanghai was destined to evolve from such open hostility toward working cooperation; but there is no evidence that he ever lost his general and characteristically American distrust of people and things British, even if he did come to respect individual Englishmen. This attitude was recognized by the British community in China, many of whom were enraged by it. One especially indignant observer, writing in the Hong Kong Daily Press, later observed that
one might have expected that he would either have English predilections, or have been able to have subdued those anti-English animosities which characterise so many of his tribe and generation. But no, sir, he hates England and Englishmen from the very bottom of his heart. He will not have an Englishman near him, nor will he deal with them. All the white men about him are low Americans, with feelings congenial to his own.… [Y]ou will find that if the [Chinese] imperialists gain the upper hand, Colonel Ward and his gang will prove a very important anti-English element.
Of course, this view was inaccurate in its extremity; some of Ward’s best officers were Englishmen, albeit deserters. But in its expression of the mutual animosity that often existed between American and British citizens in the treaty ports of China (an animosity that would shortly be heightened by Britain’s tacit support of the Confederacy during the American Civil War), as well as in its blind invective against Ward, it was indeed typical.
Even if Ward had been concerned with improving his image in the foreign settlements of Shanghai in July 1860, there would have been no time for doing so. Shuttling back and forth between the port and Sung-chiang with new recruits and supplies, Ward simultaneously dealt with the administrative details of both his force and the Sung-chiang area. The list of concerns requiring his personal touch was long, but two problems in particular—inadequate medical care for his men and plundering of the local populace by his officers when he was in Shanghai—netted his special attention. That attention in turn revealed much about Ward’s priorities and offers further clues as to why his relations with the corps’s Western officers were frequently so strained.
China was by no means a medically backward country. Its tradition of herbal healing was well-established in the mid-nineteenth century. But when dealing with the ailments of soldiers, local Chinese officials such as Wu Hsü generally substituted money for medical care. Wounded men were given cursory treatment, then paid off and, if their wounds were severe, discharged and left to seek further attention on their own. Ward attempted to change all this by establishing the first in a series of medical stations at Sung-chiang, one designed to attend not only to wounds but to noncombat-related complaints of his soldiers. These and subsequent efforts on Ward’s part, as Dr. Macgowan noted later, enjoyed only “indifferent success; his surgeon being afflicted by an unquenchable thirst, which he never attempted to allay with water, being rather hydrophobic. Nevertheless, when he was free from delirium tremens, the troops confided in him. Once during a skirmish this staff-surgeon tumbled into an indigo pit, and would have been asphyxiated there and then, but for the intervention of an illnatured by-stander, who dragged him out for future malpractice.”
While Ward’s attempts to provide adequate medical care for his men did not always bear practical fruit, they did succeed in annoying Wu Hsü. The issue remained a bone of contention throughout the period of Ward’s operations in Kiangsu; and the taotai complained even after Ward’s death that wherever it went, the corps “always sets up a medical station. Even when the soldiers have only an ailment, they will be sent there immediately. The monthly medical expense exceeds several thousand [taels].” That Ward himself was responsible for this expense—indeed insisted on it—was indicated by the fact that once he was out of the way, Wu commanded: “From now on, when soldiers are injured during the war, they will be paid, based on the same practice for officers, a considered amount of money for nursing the injuries, while the installation of the medical station should be canceled.”
As for relations with the citizens of Sung-chiang and the peasants in the nearby countryside, Ward was even more hard-pressed to realize his goals. The average Westerner, particularly the average Western freebooter, was unlikely to concern himself with the deleterious effects of plundering an already plundered populace. Loot was the principal reason such a man had signed on, after all. The Manilamen, too, initially took advantage of any chance for plunder. And it must be remembered that plunder, during the Taiping rebellion, had a distinctly human dimension: Young girls and boys were considered prized items and fair spoils. Ward early on attempted to confine looting to money and valuables, and enforced strict punishments for violators. “It is really to the credit of Ward,” wrote Dr. Macgowan, “that he brought his men to refrain from plundering the people whom they were paid to protect.… The sight of vil
lages fleeing for protection into cities held by rebels was never witnessed by men under Ward’s command.” Charles Schmidt also recalled of Ward, “Especially he was always careful that his men did not wantonly oppress the people.”
But this must have been a thankless job for Ward, and certainly it was a policy that took months to become established. Even Burgevine, so valuable in maintaining discipline generally and during battle particularly, never really absorbed Ward’s admittedly limited yet nonetheless real and unusual concern for the Kiangsu peasants. Thus whenever Ward’s business took him to Shanghai for days or weeks at a time, he could expect affairs around Sung-chiang to deteriorate, a circumstance that further demonstrated the importance of personal leadership during the Chinese civil war: Ward’s approach was often welcomed by local residents, whereas the approach of a Foreign Arms Corps contingent commanded by a man such as Burgevine might well inspire fear and even enmity.
For all these reasons, Ward continued to treat his Western officers with the harshest of hands. The usual punishments of imprisonment and “bambooing”—flogging across the back of the thighs with a short rattan cane such as the one Ward carried into battle—were sometimes augmented by capital punishment. This final recourse was not used with anything like liberality, and there is no evidence that it gave Ward any particular satisfaction. But the men in his employ were often criminals and even murderers to begin with, who held lesser forms of deterrence in contempt. Dr. Macgowan recalled a case of a “mutinous Irish captain of the force” (possibly the aforementioned Egan), who was “arrested and taken out of his quarters” as a “pour encourager les autres”: “It was supposed that he was beheaded; at any rate he has not since been heard of.”
As he had done before Sung-chiang, Ward continued after the battle to build a cult of personality among the local Chinese. In camp, this effort eventually became embodied in the form of a dog, a large black-and-white mastiff that shadowed Ward’s movements. A seemingly innocuous detail, this attachment to the mastiff was of real psychological value. Dogs were viewed as little more than a source of meat in China, and taking pains to feed and care for a large animal in a country ravaged by starvation inevitably struck most Chinese as more than eccentric: It was unnerving. Ward’s attachment to the mastiff was certainly as much a matter of affection as of design, but the increased awe it won him among the natives was no less real or important.
By the end of July the Foreign Arms Corps was ready to make an attempt at another strategic Kiangsu city: Ch’ing-p’u, some fifteen miles northwest of Sung-chiang. Possession of both Ch’ing-p’u and Sung-chiang would give the imperialists effective control of the western approach to Shanghai, and it was to be expected that the Taipings, having lost the second, would defend the first of these cities all the more vigorously. Yet the actual strength of the Taiping forces in Ch’ing-p’u was unknown to Ward, largely as a result of his poor relations with imperial officials in Sung-chiang. What intelligence the imperialists gained from their traditional network of spies and informers in the cities and countryside was kept jealously hidden from the Foreign Arms Corps’s commander, who made his plans, as in the case of Sung-chiang, largely in the dark.
But at Sung-chiang, Ward had at least been favored by surprise and an enemy who had no inkling that a privately financed, Western-led force might try to frustrate their advance. These advantages were now gone, and just as Sung-chiang had come to represent Ward’s daring and success, Ch’ing-p’u was shortly to become the symbol of his frustrations and failures, the object of a fierce determination in the young commander that quickly degenerated into self-defeating fixation.
Like Sung-chiang, Ch’ing-p’u was a formidable fortress that sat astride a crucial intersection of canals and was surrounded by a moat. Three gates—western, eastern, and southern—were cut into the soft-cornered square formed by its walls, and it was the southern gate that Ward made his target. The attack was to be carried out by some three hundred Manilamen and between thirty and fifty Western officers, supported by anywhere from three to ten thousand of Li Heng-sung’s Green Standard braves. The Foreign Arms Corps, along with Ward’s two six-pounder guns, was to be transported by a small flotilla of shallow-draft rivercraft.
Command of the Taiping forces in the Ch’ing-p’u area had been given to one of the Chung Wang’s more capable lieutenants, Chou Wen-chia, who had entrusted the city garrison itself to the English ex-pilot and ex-soldier called Savage. After the fall of Sung-chiang, Chou and Savage had anticipated an imperial move against Ch’ing-p’u and prepared for it by quietly building up the number of the city’s defenders: Some accounts put the total as high as ten thousand, but it was probably closer to five thousand. Most of these troops were tested veterans of the Kiangsu campaign, and, armed with muskets and trained in their use, they represented an unusually strong element of the Chung Wang’s army.
All of this was unknown to Ward and the Foreign Arms Corps, who attacked in the predawn darkness of August 2. The approach to the city was made successfully: Leaving Burgevine in command of a second wave, Ward and Vincente took an advance party to Ch’ing-p’u’s southern gate and there erected scaling ladders. As the men began to make their way up the wall, there was still no sign of resistance from the garrison, and it appeared momentarily that Ward would be able to repeat his Sung-chiang triumph by seizing one gate and from that vantage point raking the city’s interior with rifle and cannon fire.
But then the trap was sprung. Savage and his Taipings had been alerted to Ward’s advance and were lying in ambush. A devastating barrage of musket fire ripped into the Foreign Arms Corps’s storming party as it reached the top of the wall, while other defenders began to pelt the men still on the scaling ladders and the ground below with heavy rocks and bricks. Ward himself received five wounds quickly, the worst to his face: A Taiping musket ball hit him in the left jaw and exited through his right cheek. According to Charles Schmidt, Vincente—immediately behind Ward—caught his commander as the latter fell backward, then somehow managed to get Ward back to the ground outside the city. “There he [Vincente] stood in the midst of a perfect hail storm of stone, firing away like a fury, whilst his companions were dropping on all sides of him, killed by the unerring aim of the rebels on the walls.”
Unable to speak and bleeding profusely, Ward began to write out orders. Barely ten minutes had elapsed since the Taipings had opened fire, yet already half of Ward’s force had been killed or wounded. Recognizing the disaster for what it was, Ward ordered a general retreat toward Kuang-fu-lin and then Sung-chiang. The Taipings from Ch’ing-p’u gave chase but did not press the advantage, and the remnants of the Foreign Arms Corps struggled back into the safety of Sung-chiang’s walls, their wounded commander being carried for the last few miles in a sedan chair.
Despite his physical condition, Ward went quickly to Shanghai to enlist more men, buy more artillery, and try to shore up the damage done to his reputation among the Chinese by the defeat at Ch’ing-p’u. He arrived to find the Western communities gleeful over his misfortune. “The first and best item of intelligence we have to give our readers,” reported the North China Herald on August 4,
is the utter defeat of Ward and his men before Ch’ing-p’u. This notorious man has been brought down to Shanghai, not as was hoped, dead, but severely wounded with a shot in his mouth, one in his side, and one in his legs.… He managed to drag his carcass out of danger, but several of his valorous blacks [Manilamen] were killed or wounded.… It seems astonishing that Ward should be allowed to remain unpunished, and yet not a hint is given that any measures will be taken against him.
The Herald’s complaint was justified: Even Britain’s Consul Meadows had come to the conclusion that, given existing circumstances, Ward could not be stopped. During the week Ward spent in Shanghai following the first attempt on Ch’ing-p’u, Meadows wrote a long and angry letter to Minister Frederick Bruce, detailing his many frustrations in trying to put an end to the Foreign Arms Corps’s activities. Meadows h
ad quickly learned that he would not get any help in this effort from the Americans: Consul Smith had written him on July 13 to say that while some Americans had gone up-country illegally, their actions were simply a matter of the neutrality laws having “been overlooked inadvertently, but I hope and believe that there is a disposition on the part of our citizens to observe the laws.” Meadows had next attempted to convince the senior British naval officer in Shanghai to go upriver with a party of marines and arrest the Westerners at Sung-chiang, but, as Meadows complained to Minister Bruce, the officer “took no notice of my written request for assistance, and when I spoke to him, a day or two later on the subject, he stated that his instructions did not allow him to do police work.”
From the Chinese authorities Meadows got no satisfaction whatsoever, and he subsequently came “to the conclusion that it is impossible to enforce the Neutrality Ordinance so long as the Intendant [Wu Hsü] himself is the chief instigator of British subjects to violate it.” Furthermore, there was, said Meadows,
good reason to believe that the Taipings finding themselves attacked by men furnished with superior weapons and able to use them, have resorted to the same means of defense, and that there is a body of foreigners now in their employ. The pusillanimous and unpatriotic step taken by the Intendant and other Imperial Authorities seems not unlikely to end in large numbers of the most lawless and, in many cases, ruffianly foreigners being taught the means of maintaining themselves in a career of violence and depredation in the interior of the country, beyond the controul [sic] and even beyond the ken of the foreign authorities.
But while Meadows’s assessment was undoubtedly correct, he ignored the hard realities and choices facing the imperial authorities in Shanghai. Ward’s Foreign Arms Corps was the only even marginally effective instrument with which to challenge Taiping authority in the interior (certainly, the British and the other foreign powers were as yet unwilling to share such a responsibility). In addition, those Westerners who, like Meadows, persistently cried that Ward’s activities would bring Taiping retribution down on Shanghai took no stock of the fact that the port was the Chung Wang’s goal regardless of what Ward did. Shanghai’s resources were vital to the survival of the rebel movement, and whatever the opinions of the learned British consul, it was that fact—and not the operations of the Foreign Arms Corps—that was drawing the rebel army inexorably to the coast.