The success at Wu-sung was followed up quickly. In their eastward march from Soochow, the Taipings had once again secured Ch’ing-p’u and then established strongly entrenched bases at several towns in the area: Ying-ch’i-pin, Ch’en-shan, T’ien-ma-shan, and Kuang-fu-lin (Ward’s original training ground in 1860). The rebels consolidated their occupation of Kuang-fu-lin by filling it with twenty thousand troops. A week after his appearance at Wu-sung, Ward took five hundred men of his corps and, according to Dr. Macgowan, attacked Kuang-fu-lin “without artillery, and made a bold rush on the rebel fortifications. The enemy seeing, for the first time, their own countrymen in foreign attire, and led in a disciplined way by gallant officers, were filled with dismay, and fled precipitately.”
Banking not only on the superior arms and training of his men but also on the psychological impact of their appearance, Ward had taken an enormous risk at Kuang-fu-lin. The gamble had paid off, and Ward repeated the tactic during the first week of February at Ying-ch’i-pin. He launched a surprise attack against greatly superior numbers, killing and wounding thousands of stunned rebels and driving the rest back to Ch’en-shan and beyond. During this action Ward sustained some five wounds, the most serious of which was the loss of a finger to a Taiping musket ball. Characteristically, he did not pause to recuperate but on February 5 took Burgevine and six hundred men of the corps and attacked T’ien-ma-shan. The pattern of victory was the same: a surprise rush against the rebel entrenchments, then a wild pursuit during which thousands of rebels were killed, wounded, or captured.
Wu Hsü’s joy over Ward’s successes was unrestrained. On February 5 he sent a personal letter to Ward, congratulating “the General” (although Ward had not yet received such a rank from the Chinese government) on his successes at Kuang-fu-lin and Ying-ch’i-pin:
I have received reports from battalion commander Li [Heng-sung] and others that the rebels have attacked the barracks in Kuang-fu-lin since the new year, and that you, General, repeatedly led troops to engage them, and you are invincible. Yesterday, I heard that at 9:00 a.m. on the fifth day of this month [Chinese calendar], a large number of rebels attacked and occupied Ying-ch’i-pin. Then again, your excellency led five hundred men of the Foreign Arms Corps to attack the nest of rebels, and defeated several tens of thousands of them.… I was very pleased when I heard this news. A blemish in an otherwise perfect thing is that your finger has been wounded.… The soldiers of the Foreign Arms Corps have rendered good service in these battles, and they are all praiseworthy and should be given rewards respectively. I have already discussed this with Yang Taki personally. As to the details of how to reward the soldiers, your excellency can name a sum to Taki, who will send the money at once.… The only thing (which is not good) is that your finger has been wounded, I do not know if this will affect the everyday life of your excellency. I hope that you will pay much attention to your health and recover very soon. This is the most important thing.
The letter was not signed but concluded “Signature is in another place”—a Chinese expression indicating that the receiver would know who the sender was without the latter identifying himself, and a sign of Ward and Wu’s unusually close relationship.
Just a day after writing this letter, Wu received a note from Ward detailing the success at T’ien-ma-shan. The taotai again sat down to write: “You have obtained a great victory. I was so delighted after reading your letter. The victory you have just had shows that your troop is well-trained and impenetrable. In addition to sending your letter to the Governor [Hsüeh Huan], I am looking forward to your coming to Shanghai, so that I can seek your counsel personally.” On receiving the details of Ward’s successes, Hsüeh Huan, in a subsequent memorial to the throne, acknowledged the American’s personal leadership in this series of attacks and his “great contributions” to their success.
Inspiring as Ward’s victories were, however, the sheer weight of numbers was with the Taipings, and following the defeat at Wu-sung (an event important enough to rate a line in the “Latest Intelligence” section of the London Times), Ying-ch’i-pin, Ch’en-shan, and T’ien-ma-shan rebel units quickly surrounded Ward’s several encampments in the Sung-chiang area, as well as the walls of the city itself. Once again, Ward’s daring had proved an annoyance to the Chung Wang, one that the rebel commander intended to erase with overwhelming odds. Taiping storming units immediately went to work on Ward’s defensive positions, and the outlook was not hopeful.
In Shanghai, news of the fighting in the Sung-chiang area had quickly followed reports of the Wu-sung engagement. Yet the citizens of Shanghai’s Western settlements—desperate as they were for any sign of effective resistance to the Chung Wang’s legions—did not reprise their familiar vitriolic denouncements of “the filibuster Ward.” The North China Herald, along with the other China coast English-language papers, remained momentarily silent, as if awaiting events; when it did acknowledge the situation, on January 18, it was only to say that “[b]esides this body of armed men [the Taipings near Wu-sung] there are two others approaching Shanghai, one from the direction of Soochow, which during the day was in fierce combat with the Imperialists at Sung-chiang; the other body from Hangchow.”
Alarm in Shanghai had continued to mount as January came to a close and it was learned that the central Taiping column alone—the force moving east from Soochow—numbered eighty thousand men. On January 25 the Herald reported “that up to the hour of going to press, the advance of the insurgents is imminent, and our naval and military authorities are on the qui vive to repulse them should they appear within range of the posts occupied by the troops, marines, and blue-jackets. The firing in the direction of the Pootung [eastern] side of the river has continued at intervals during the day. As we write the booming of distant guns reaches our ears, which are estimated at about five miles distant.” During the first week of February, any hope that the men at Sung-chiang might hold out against the Taipings dwindled.
And then came another unexpected report. Far from being overwhelmed by the rebels in their district, the Ward Corps had survived every Taiping attack; indeed, they had turned the final assault into a disaster for the soldiers of the Heavenly Kingdom. The Taiping commanders had thrown some 20,000 men at Sung-chiang, only to find that Ward, anticipating the move, had placed “masked” or hidden artillery batteries in the main path of the rebels’ advance. When the Taipings had come within close range, these batteries opened fire. The Taipings suffered 2,300 casualties immediately. Reeling under the shock of concentrated artillery fire, the rebels were next assaulted by a strong detachment of Ward’s infantry, who quickly seized between 700 and 800 prisoners. In the ensuing confusion, Ward was able to recapture many boats laden with arms and provisions that the rebels had taken during their occupation of the area. In all, it was a daring display of offense as defense, and the Daily Shipping and Commercial News did not overstate the issue by declaring that “the Taiping rebels have sustained a severe defeat, which may have a wholesome effect on the bands of marauders in the vicinity of the city and settlement of Shanghai.”
On February 15 it was the turn of the North China Herald, Ward’s old nemesis, to acknowledge his achievement:
It would appear that during the week the [rebel] bands infesting the northern suburbs [of Shanghai] have either retired towards the coast, or what is more probable, made a westerly detour towards the south where a large body of Taiping insurgents has been hovering on the outskirts of Ming-hong between Shanghai and Sung-chiang, after having been defeated in their attack upon the latter city by the bravery and discipline of the Imperialist troops under the command of Colonel Ward—who has trained a regiment of fine able-bodied men in the European system of military tactics.
Gone forever were accusations of lunacy or criminality; for the remainder of his life, Ward would be treated with uniform respect, if not deference, in the pages of the Herald.
Ward’s friend Augustus A. Hayes took note of this transformation in the attitude of Shanghai’s Wes
terners with appropriate irony. “One day,” he later recalled of that time,
it was known that a powerful Rebel force was approaching Shanghai. Then came again the familiar call to arms, the preparations to receive women and children on board the steamers, the daily orders and bulletins.
Then, however, followed something new and surprising. The Rebels had, we heard, been met and defeated with tremendous slaughter,—and by whom? By a native force, admirably drilled, equipped and disciplined, fighting by European tactics, and led to victory—complete, overwhelming victory against an enormous numerical superiority—by our lately despised American filibustero, General Ward. Public opinion changed at a jump. It must have been with a grim satisfaction that Ward awoke, the morning after this battle, to find himself famous.
Nothing in Ward’s subsequent behavior indicated that he paid any more attention to the praise he received from Shanghai’s Western citizens than he had to their insults. He secured payment for his troops, used his expanded contacts to procure more and better weapons, and continued to apply his energies to enlarging and drilling his corps at Sung-chiang. The attitude was an appropriate one, for, despite the kind words in the English-language papers, the distrust that official representatives of the Western powers, particularly the British, had always felt toward the commander of the Ward Corps remained intact following the successes near Sung-chiang. It would take more and greater victories to finally destroy those barriers.
The enthusiasm of Wu Hsü and Yang Fang for the new Ward Corps during the fall and winter of 1861, and the two men’s confidence that the unit could play an important role in stemming the Taiping advance, were not universal among Chinese merchants and civil leaders in the port. The native elite of Kiangsu province especially tried to find other ways of bringing foreign power to bear on the rebel threat. Wu and Yang were, it should be remembered, Chekiang men, although they held positions of power in Shanghai; as such they were viewed with no little jealousy by many Kiangsu notables. This regional rivalry played a distinct part in prompting a powerful group of Kiangsu officials—most notably Feng Kuei-fen, a leading scholar from Soochow—to look beyond Wu and Yang’s pet project for help.
In November 1861 some half-dozen of these Kiangsu men—including not only Feng Kuei-fen but Wu Yün, the Soochow official who had attempted to discredit Ward’s victory at Sung-chiang in 1860—sent emissaries to Tseng Kuo-fan asking for assistance in meeting the Taiping threat in their province. Tseng replied that while he hoped to be able to dispatch an army to Shanghai soon, he could not yet spare troops for the job. The Kiangsu leaders, unimpressed by such outlandish and as yet unproved schemes as training Chinese soldiers to fight in the Western style, decided next to seek direct foreign military aid from the representatives of the Western powers in Shanghai. Specifically, they approached one of Great Britain’s more seasoned representatives, Harry Parkes. Parkes had been one of the British officials whose capture and abuse had prompted the burning of the Summer Palace in 1860: His views on a coordinated Chinese-Western response to the Taiping threat were understandably skeptical. In cautiously declining the latest Chinese request that foreign regulars take the field against the rebels, Parkes fell in line with the attitude not only of British minister Frederick Bruce but of Western officials generally. The rebels might have been viewed with steadily decreasing sympathy by the foreign powers, but joint action and offensive operations by their regulars remained steps too long for any of them to take.
The Westerners, characteristically, had their own ideas about meeting the rebel challenge. Early in January 1862, a Defense Committee was formed by the Shanghai Municipal Council, and this committee quickly decided that, while they did not wish to act in concert with imperial Chinese forces, all expenses incurred by foreigners in their efforts to protect the port should be met by their Chinese hosts. There was a mercenary quality to this proposal, one that had previously made the idea unacceptable to the British Foreign Office. But times had, apparently, changed, and, even more important, the Chinese were anxious to pay. As always in the Chinese bureaucracy, an official organ for the disbursement of these funds had to be established, and soon Governor Hsüeh Huan had called into existence the United Defense Bureau. The bureau had four Chinese executives whose task was to coordinate payment and military logistics in Shanghai with representatives of the foreign powers.
The Chinese were enthusiastic about the bureau, believing that it would inevitably draw the foreigners into offensive action against the rebels in the interior. With this end in mind, the bureau was authorized to raise enough funds to pay and supply as many as ten thousand foreign regulars. But on January 12, during a gathering at the British consulate, the Chinese representatives learned just how unrealistic their plans were. The French, with Prosper Giquel as interpreter, initially seemed obliging: They were ready to defend not only the foreign settlements but the Chinese city as well and, beyond that, to engage the Taipings outside Shanghai. But the British quickly squelched such ideas. Despite the misgivings of Admiral Hope, British diplomatic representatives stuck to Frederick Bruce’s clearly delineated line of defensive measures within Shanghai. Even defense of the Chinese city was not considered important or wise. Rightly suspecting that the “United” Defense Bureau was a Chinese contrivance aimed at getting foreigners to do the work of imperial forces, the British remained cool.
Besides inadvisable, the Kiangsu leadership’s plans for foreign intervention remained academic so long as Peking refused to allow foreign soldiers to operate in the Chinese interior. The imperial government’s concern over this matter had not vanished. Tseng Kuo-fan was still bitterly opposed to the idea, convinced that if the foreigners were successful in such operations they would only use their victories to gain greater influence in internal matters of state and if they were unsuccessful it would “invite ridicule.” But Tseng’s views were now opposed, and effectively, by the Kiangsu men, who spoke through Hsüeh Huan. Late in January, Hsüeh memorialized to the throne, summarizing the opinions of the Kiangsu elite by reviewing other cases during which Chinese imperial dynasties such as the Han and the T’ang had used foreign warriors for their own purposes.
Great as their respect for the views of Tseng Kuo-fan was, Tz’u-hsi and Prince Kung were both impressed by Hsüeh Huan’s argument. In addition, Tseng had unconsciously undercut his own case by capturing Anking: The Chinese imperialists no longer looked utterly incapable of meeting the rebel threat, and the prospect of accepting foreign help in the treaty ports and perhaps even in the interior was far less humiliating. The Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi and Prince Kung both paused to reflect on the subject, and their reflections were influenced by events in the Shanghai region: Ward’s successful engagement of the Chung Wang’s advancing army offered additional hope that the Chinese could accept some kind of foreign aid without mortgaging their integrity.
Seeing that the scheme of training Chinese soldiers to fight a modern war now had political value, the British quite predictably reacted to Ward’s success by vigorously inserting themselves into the training business. Here was a job that was suddenly something more than the fantasy of a handful of Western free-lances, was, in fact, far too important, and too full of potential influence, to be left to men such as Ward and Tardif de Moidrey. Ever able and willing to shift course drastically, the British established their own training ground for Chinese troops at Tientsin in February 1862.
The driving force behind the project was General Sir Charles Staveley, who had commanded a brigade in John Michel’s division during the Peking campaign and who was shortly to assume Michel’s duties in Shanghai. The two men were very different: Michel had experience in unconventional warfare and respect for those who could wage it well, even if such men, like Ward, lacked formal training or experience in a national army. In addition, Michel was by nature gregarious and not disposed to condemn men from Ward’s walk of life out of simple prejudice. Staveley, on the other hand, represented the more unfortunate type of British officer abroad:
skilled and undeniably brave, but ambitious, aloof, and narrow-minded. Staveley’s sister had married the brother of Charles George Gordon, the young captain of engineers who had so forthrightly recorded the activities of Allied troops at the Summer Palace, and Gordon served as Staveley’s chief of engineers. Observing his brother-in-law with the same careful eye that had watched the burning of the Summer Palace, Gordon pronounced that “[t]he worst feature in his character is his selfishness & a certain want of consideration for others.”
Staveley’s training operation at Tientsin went well, and he became rather inordinately proud of it—too proud to believe that any American mercenary could do the job as well or better. Nor was Staveley the only Englishman convinced that the task of supplying China with modern armed forces was one for which only Queen Victoria’s officers were fit. Soon after the Tientsin program was launched, a former head of the Imperial Chinese Customs Service, Horatio Nelson Lay—like Staveley a remarkably arrogant and ambitious man—sketched out a plan for the creation of a modern Chinese navy: a fleet of British gunboats, officered by British sailors, answering only those orders of the Chinese government that Lay himself believed advisable. The project was doomed to failure; British arrogance had for once exceeded the bounds of possibility. But its mere conception was nonetheless revealing.