Some three thousand imperialist troops were deposited in Ch’ing-p’u as a garrison, after which Ward returned to Sung-chiang, then went to Shanghai. He called on Li Hung-chang and once more asked that his army be allowed to play a role in Tseng Kuo-fan’s siege of Nanking. “Ward has seen me to-day,” Li wrote to Tseng on August 14, “and urges me to transfer him to help attack Nanking. He says that he could arrive there in three days—without fail. After victory, the wealth and property in the city would be equally shared with the Government’s troops; and so forth. As I, Hung-chang, have received your Excellency’s letter saying that there are already enough troops without further reinforcement, I ask for the matter to be deferred pending your instruction.”
Denied a part in the Nanking fighting, Ward soon turned his attention south to Ningpo, where the Taipings were gathering for what looked to be a concerted effort to retake the port. As he began to make provisions for taking a large body of troops to reinforce Major Morton’s detachment (in what would be his first action outside Kiangsu province), Ward also took time to write to Burlingame and warn him of the “free city” movement that was gaining momentum among Shanghai’s foreigners.
On July 26, the North China Herald had echoed many Westerners’ sentiments about the constant problems of lawlessness, refugees from the interior, and inefficient imperial administration in Shanghai by declaring that “the formation of one central and responsible executive power emanating from a legislative assembly, empowered to draw up a code of laws for general purposes, is becoming an absolute necessity.” Li Hung-chang was aware that the foreigners were quite serious in proposing this usurpation of Chinese authority: He told Tseng Kuo-fan on August 14, “Whether this arrangement is possible remains to be seen. Permission to do so, of course, rests with the Tsungli Yamen.… As I, Hung-chang, replied in an official letter to the Tsungli Yamen, no guarantee can be given that they [the foreigners] will not get possession of the city. In such a case everything would depend on the Court’s decision. It is like walking on ice. I am very worried.”
For his part, Ward had no illusions about the laxity and corruption of Chinese officials in Shanghai: “Actually if I had not my foot so deeply in the mire,” he told Burlingame on August 16, “I would throw them all overboard.” Yet Ward would not put his weight behind what he called “squatter sovereignty,” again demonstrating that his ties to China were quite genuine. The fact that Li Hung-chang never seriously questioned Ward’s loyalty (even if he did sometimes try to take credit for battles that rightly belonged to Ward) further shows the extent of Ward’s commitment. By late August, Li was heightening his attacks on Ward’s principal Chinese associates, Wu Hsü and Yang Fang, complaining that they were using irresponsible and illegal methods to raise money to pay the Ever Victorious Army. Wu especially, said Li, “is to be guarded against like a bandit or a brigand. How difficult it is for one who is in authority!” Yet there was no such criticism of Ward, no suggestion that simply because he was being paid by Wu and Yang he was also a party to their “fraudulent tricks.”
In fact, far from being a party to Wu’s and Yang’s more extreme frauds and embezzlements, Ward was ultimately a victim of them. In his August 16 letter to Burlingame, Ward claimed that not only Wu and Yang but Li Hung-chang as well “actually owe some 350,000 tls. [taels] to me & my friends for advances made on acct. of wages, etc.” While the figure is impossible to prove—it would later be the subject of a decades-long lawsuit by Ward’s family against the Chinese government—the basic accusation is almost certainly true. Ward was in the habit of supplying his men out of his own pocket when the flow of money from Shanghai was slow: Prompt and regular payment of his men remained one of the keys to his success. In supposing that all these accounts would eventually be put right, Ward took risks with his personal finances that ultimately proved disastrous.
But in mid-August, as Ward prepared to go to Ningpo, there seemed little reason for him not to be confident about his affairs. He had realized many of his military goals and was on the road to realizing still more. The opposition of Chinese officials and the distrust of the imperial clique were securely counterbalanced by the success of his growing army. And, as for the military forces of the Western powers, Ward and Li Hung-chang had shown that they could be successful without them. The time had now arrived, “to which Ward had long looked forward,” according to Dr. Macgowan, “when he could take the field without the aid of foreign troops.” The battles of Chin-shan-wei, Liu-ho, and Ch’ing-p’u—as well as Ward and Li Hung-chang’s joint planning for possible Ever Victorious Army participation in the siege of Nanking—exemplified the synthesis of Chinese and Western methods toward which Ward had been working for more than two years. It is understandable, therefore, that he should have looked so eagerly toward the expansion of his operations into Chekiang province.
But that expansion was postponed. In the latter half of August the Chung Wang made another bid for Shanghai, with an estimated 100,000 men. In turning to face this threat, Ward and Li Hung-chang conducted their last and most crucial joint campaign.
In August 1862 a young lieutenant of the British Royal Engineers—Thomas Lyster—arrived in China, where, a few years later, he was destined to die of a series of illnesses brought on by the severities of the climate. But during his time in China, Lyster wrote numerous letters home that were later published by his father. Honest and unusually compassionate, the letters mark Lyster as a keen observer of Chinese-Western relations on a variety of levels. On August 18, for example, he wrote from Hong Kong:
Some of our fellows amused themselves by tying the tails of Chinamen together. I am afraid we bully them a good deal. If you are walking about and a Chinaman comes in your way, it is customary to knock his hat off, or dig him in the ribs with an umbrella. I thought it a shame, and remonstrated with the fellow who was with me to-day for treating a poor beggar of a Chinaman in this way; but he assured me that if you make way for them they swagger and come in your way purposely. The French soldiers treat them even more roughly than we do.
Lyster soon arrived in Shanghai, where he was thrown together with another young officer of engineers, Captain Charles Gordon. “This is an immense place,” Lyster wrote of Shanghai. “There is a surplus population here now of 70,000 villagers, driven in by the Taipings, which makes provisions very dear.… I suppose you know all about the Taipings. They number about 100,000, and are nothing but a band of marauders. They come down on a village, rob it, slay all the inhabitants they can lay hold of, and then burn the place.… I scarcely ever go into the country without seeing some poor people dead or dying.” The death toll in the countryside was indicative of the sharp fighting that characterized the Chung Wang’s latest offensive.
Before long, Lyster had met one of the campaign’s most illustrious combatants: “I was introduced to General Ward, the American, who is an officer in the service of the Chinese Government; in fact, he has been made a mandarin; he is a quiet-looking little man, with very bright eyes, but is a regular fire-eater; he has saved $pD 60,000. He is married to a Chinese.”
Ward was never more of a fire-eater than during the days before his introduction to young Thomas Lyster. Western military leaders downplayed the severity of the Chung Wang’s August advance into eastern Kiangsu, perhaps because their troops played so little part in the fighting. Indeed, English-language newspapers and Western consular officials had reported little or nothing of Ward and Li Hung-chang’s early August victories, because no foreign troops had been involved. But this attitude did not reduce the actual seriousness of the situation. The Chung Wang knew that he would soon have to comply with the T’ien Wang’s demands that he return to Nanking; should he be able to report the capture of Shanghai upon his arrival, his ruler’s bitterness might be assuaged. Thus the latest Taiping attack quickly became a fierce one.
By mid-August, just a week after its recapture by Ward, Ch’ing-p’u was again besieged, by a Taiping force of twenty thousand. The imperialists in the city, now b
olstered by a detachment of the Ever Victorious Army, managed to inflict a severe check on the rebels after an intense battle lasting several days. Next the rebels—moving from town to town in desperate search of any sign of weakness that might indicate an open road to Shanghai—engaged Ward and the imperialists on the northern side of the Huang-pu. Two key towns west of Shanghai were surrounded, besieged, and bypassed, but Li Hung-chang quickly dispatched forces to meet the various rebel columns as they advanced. Ward also led detachments out of Sung-chiang toward Shanghai to relieve the pressure on Li’s troops.
Bolstered by Ward’s men, Li ordered a series of attacks in the vicinity of Chi-pao and Hung-ch’iao—just a few miles from Shanghai itself—during which the main rebel force was successfully halted and then driven north. The Taipings tried to counterattack on August 28 but could make no headway: By the following day, they had been pushed past the familiar ground of Nan-hsiang and in the direction of Chia-ting, which they still held. Whatever the Chung Wang had expected to meet on the road to Shanghai, the sight of Li Hung-chang’s exceptionally effective Anhwei troops acting in conjunction with the devil soldiers must have surprised him; yet he made no mention of it in his own account of the campaign and ascribed his eventual retreat to the continuing harangues of the T’ien Wang.
On August 31 Li reported to Peking that the main Taiping force had once again pulled out of the Shanghai region. Li’s reputation was greatly enhanced by this latest defense of the port, as was Ward’s, and Li’s subsequent order that Ward resume his preparations for going to Ningpo gave rise to speculation that the governor was jealous. Certainly Ward’s position within the Chinese hierarchy had become uniquely powerful. “It is a fact,” A. A. Hayes recalled of this period of Ward’s life, “that an official of very high rank, whose name is familiar in modern Chinese history, was kept waiting by [Ward] at his door, later brusquely bidden to enter, and then roundly abused for presuming to think that Hua would come to the door to meet him; to which treatment the official meekly submitted.” There is good reason, then, to wonder if Li (who may well have been the official Hayes spoke of) sent Ward to Ningpo to prevent any further eclipse of his own fame. Indeed, so convinced was Li of Ward’s importance in both the Chinese and Western communities that he wrote to Tseng Kuo-fan on September 8:
Ward commands enough authority to control the foreigners in Shanghai, and he is quite friendly with me. Wu [Hsü] and Yang Fang both depend on Ward. If my Teacher gave them an order, these “rats” would all endeavour to comply with it. Ward is indeed brave in action, and he possesses all sorts of foreign weapons. Recently I, Hung-chang, have devoted all my attention to making friends with him, in order to get the friendship of various nations through that one individual.
These were heady assessments of Ward’s position and influence, but there is no indication that such talk changed the young commander’s behavior or attitude at all. In a September 10 letter to Burlingame, Ward displayed all the charm, humor, and boyish deviousness that had marked his entire life. As Ward’s last surviving written statement, the letter is worth quoting in its entirety:
My Dear Mr. Burlingame—
I have written to you once or twice but not yet had the honor or pleasure of an answer, but fancy you are so occupied with the gaieties of Peking that you forget us poor devils at Sung-chiang.
Matters about the same here, as usual the same amount of lying, swindling & smuggling as ever, no improvement. The mail has just arrived and I hear your wife also, I intended when I heard of her arrival to have immediately called on her, but fear I am compelled to leave chop chop for Sung-chiang. So much for being a soldier; and I fear I shall not have the pleasure of meeting her unless it is at Peking.
If I was only certain that my chits arrived safely I would give you some news but really do not like to put some things on paper unless there is a certainty of their getting in the proper place. Anything I can do for you here simply hint at it and it will be done—do it sans ceremonie and it will be truly executed. Our country is in a bad state and there is considerable crowing in some quarters. My brother is in New York hard at work, I greatly fear he will volunteer [for the Union Army] instead of coming out here, as he is getting decidedly belligerent in his tone and excessively patriotic. I find my old friend [John] Ward Ex-Minister [to China] is a damned traitor and joined the rascals [the Confederacy]. I beg of you to write me, tell me about Peking and Prince Kung and let me know how to write you without fear of its being otherwise overhauled.
And believe me as ever—an honest American
And your humble servant to command—
F. T. Ward
Shanghai, Sept 10, 1862
Many of Ward’s most pronounced characteristics resurface in this document: his eagerness for approval, his loyalty to yet curious detachment from the United States, his concern for his brother, and his clear-eyed perception of affairs in Shanghai. Above all, there is evidence of the adroitness that had allowed him to manipulate those master manipulators—the Chinese bureaucracy—so well. Li Hung-chang would seem to have had good reason to fear Ward’s rise. Yet on balance, given their personal relationship, it seems that Li dispatched Ward to Ningpo less out of bureaucratic insecurity than out of a simple wish to gratify his foreign comrade’s “fire-eating” tendencies. For, talented as Ward was at using the Chinese political system, Li was ultimately to prove the grand master of the game.
If Ward’s fame did not affect his behavior, his battlefield successes did: He became steadily more reckless, almost as if he believed the Chinese superstition that he led a charmed life. In the first two weeks of September, Ward shuttled back and forth between Shanghai and Sung-chiang, preparing for his expedition to Chekiang province. During one of his visits to Shanghai, he called on A. A. Hayes, who remembered being quite concerned about Ward’s approach to his safety and affairs:
On a late day in September, 1862 … I looked up from my writing to see him standing by me. I could not think of this smiling, amiable man as a great commander and a future ruler. I only remembered then that when I, a few months before, lay sick of that terrible Shanghai fever, which is said to combine all the bad features of other fevers with a few of its own, he had taken time from his cares and duties to come and sit beside a young countryman’s bedside. He asked me to lend him my Arab horse, which of course I was glad to do. Later in the afternoon, walking in a street of the settlement, I met him, sitting erect in the saddle. We stopped, and I was patting my horse’s neck and talking to the general, when the impulse seized me to speak to him as I did.
“General,” I said, “you are taking fearful risks. You may be killed at any moment. In such a case, what will become of your property and affairs? Let me find you a confidential secretary, or some one in whose hands you can trust your great interests.” His blue coat was buttoned tightly over his chest. He smiled as he pointed with his right hand to the outline of a small book in his left breast pocket, and then touching it said, “Oh, it is all here.”
In the weeks and months to come the small book of which Hayes spoke would become the subject of mystery and controversy, for in it was the only accurate account (or so Ward’s friends and family claimed) of just how much money Ward was owed by his Chinese backers. Thus the book had value not only to Ward but to Yang Fang and Wu Hsü: just how much value Yang and Wu would soon demonstrate.
For the moment, however, the attention of most officials and commanders in Shanghai was fixed on events at Ningpo. Since June the port had been occupied by Captain Dew’s British naval units, the Chinese troops that Dew’s officers were disciplining, the Ever Victorious Army troops under Major Morton (who had returned from the north, and to whom Dew’s Chinese troops were attached), and Prosper Giquel and Le Brethon de Caligny’s still untested Franco-Chinese unit. Although they had been assisted by instructors from Tardif de Moidrey’s Franco-Chinese Corps of Kiangsu, Giquel and Le Brethon de Caligny’s men had not, even as late as July, been under fire, and both commanders decided during that m
onth that it was high time to prove the unit’s worth. Modeling their strategy on that of Ward and Admiral Hope in Shanghai, the two men determined that a thirty-mile radius should be cleared around Ningpo, with their Franco-Chinese troops playing the featured role. This campaign opened at the Taiping stronghold of Yü-yao, some thirty miles northwest of Ningpo. The walled city was taken in early August by Giquel and Le Brethon de Caligny’s men, supported by some fifteen hundred local pirates, as well as Major Morton and his Ever Victorious Army detachment. Captain Dew, prohibited by his superiors from playing a direct part in the attack, transported troops aboard the British gunboat Hardy.
But after the capture of Yü-yao, Le Brethon de Caligny was temporarily called away to other duties, and Tardif de Moidrey arrived in Chekiang to supervise the city’s defense. Unfortunately, Tardif was assisted by a less than capable subordinate officer who was unable to avoid a breach with the local imperialist forces. Arrogantly insisting that the imperialists accommodate his troops when making their own movements, this Frenchman provoked an argument that turned violent: Shots were exchanged, and in the aftermath many Chinese soldiers defected to the Taipings. Recognizing that the Western-imperialist military effort in Chekiang was anything but organized, the local Taiping commanders decided in September that the time was ripe for an attack on Ningpo itself.