On March 23 command of the Ever Victorious Army was given to Charles George Gordon (now promoted major), despite the continued protests of the army’s veteran officers against outside control. Charles Schmidt wrote in early April that “ ‘[t]he ever Victorious army’ [sic] do not want any regular Military Foreign Generals, however necessary the latter may be supposed to be. Do not intrude! We want men of Ward’s and Vincente’s stamp!” But the likelihood of Vincente Macanaya being given command was slim, as Schmidt himself recognized: “[H]is being a Manila man puts the damper on his chances of election to the position of Commander under the present Sung-chiang dynasty.” Schmidt could see that with the arrival of Gordon the Ever Victorious Army entered on a period of transition that would leave it far from the vision Ward had originally conjured up and subsequently come so close to achieving. Schmidt further sensed that the money he and Vincente were owed by their Chinese backers would probably never be paid. Schmidt, Vincente, and other officers of the force had, like Ward, often accepted Wu Hsü’s and Yang Fang’s vouchers in lieu of payment. But as things stood in April 1863—with Ward dead and Yang and Wu degraded—these vouchers meant little. In bemoaning this fact, Schmidt bid farewell to Vincente Macanaya and, at the same time, to an era:
“Perhaps, Vincente, the time may come when our old Tartar masters will be tired of their new ones [the English]. They may then again ask a favor of us and let us then be wise;—have nothing to do with a necessity for vouchers;—but catching our one moon’s advance first, be with that content.—Until then Adieu.”
Under Charles G. Gordon the Ever Victorious Army came out of the organizational and operational tailspin it had been in since Ward’s death. But it also lost much of the roguish élan that had characterized it during Ward’s tenure and took on an aura that more closely matched its deeply religious and psychologically complex new commander. The contrast between Ward and Gordon was a paradoxical one, involving details of character that at once suggested similarity and extreme difference. For example, when Gordon was younger he, like Ward, had played a game that involved falling into the ocean and observing the reaction his distress created among those ashore; the difference, as Richard J. Smith has pointed out, “was that Ward could swim.” Ever the pure adventurer, Ward had none of the religious intensity and fascination with death that marked Gordon, whose indulgent mother had taught him to interpret the Bible as literal truth. Gordon never belonged to any church or organized Christian sect but relied wholly on his own interpretations of the sacred book for guidance. Thus like Ward he constructed his own system of values, but unlike his American predecessor Gordon formed those values around a deep religious commitment that bordered on mysticism.
Again like Ward, Gordon had had a history of violent encounters as a boy at school. But while Ward had been a popular champion of weaker children, Gordon had been a difficult youth prone to violent outbursts that too often resembled bullying. In adulthood, both Ward and Gordon possessed undeniable charm, yet Gordon’s was perhaps the less calculated. Indeed, for all his perspicacity about the world around him, Gordon could be remarkably lacking in insight about his own character and actions. For this reason his personality, while more restrained than Ward’s, was also less disciplined. Never very comfortable with other people, Gordon was particularly ill at ease with women, giving rise after his death to grossly unfair questions concerning his sexuality. Harry Parkes, Britain’s foremost consul in China, summed Gordon up as “a fine noble generous fellow, but at the same time very peculiar and sensitive—exceedingly impetuous—full of energy, which just wants judgment to make it a very splendid type.” Throughout his life it was this occasional lack of judgment that kept Gordon from attaining the highest level of success. It also, in the end, made him a legend throughout the world: His final decision to stand alone at the head of a comparatively tiny garrison at Khartoum and take on the hordes of the Sudanese Islamic rebellion in 1885, while impractical to the point of being suicidal, also gave him just renown as a courageous martyr.
On taking command of the Ever Victorious Army in March 1863, Gordon made several disparaging statements that unfairly attributed the unit’s recent troubles to Ward. But he quietly took other actions that indicated both that he knew such statements to be ungrounded and that he had studied Ward carefully during the thirty-mile-radius campaign. Adopting the practice of going into battle armed only with a rattan cane, Gordon was able to form around himself the same superstitions of invulnerability that had marked the attitude of China’s peasants toward Ward. On a more practical level, Gordon strengthened the branches of the Ever Victorious Army that Ward, toward the end of his life, had recognized were the most crucial: the artillery and the armed steamers. He cleaned out officers he considered unreliable and restored a disciplined air to the army’s camp. Yet this air, unlike that of Ward’s day, was all business: While the men marched, drilled, and fought effectively, they did so with little of the enthusiasm that had so marked the Ward period.
By late July 1863 Gordon and Li Hung-chang had engaged the Taipings extensively outside the thirty-mile radius. These engagements had been so successful that they were closing in for an attack on Soochow, the Chung Wang’s most valued prize. Now serving with the Taipings was Burgevine, whom Gordon knew personally, and through an extensive system of spies and contacts inside the rebel camp that he (again like Ward) employed, Gordon was able to communicate with the troubled ex-commander of the Ever Victorious Army. Having found the rebel service less profitable than he had expected, Burgevine was ready to desert, and Gordon facilitated the move. According to Augustus Lindley, Burgevine next proposed to Gordon that the two men abandon both the Manchus and the rebels “and commence a system of independent conquest.” Lindley speculated that the idea might have been the result of “mental derangement, consequent upon the effects of his [Burgevine’s] wound and the stimulants he used”; whatever the case, Gordon turned him down.
But the British engineer turned imperial commander soon had cause to reconsider his loyalty to the Chinese government. Surrounding the walls of Soochow and laying siege to the city, Gordon engaged in weeks of tough fighting that resulted in surrender by the seven commanding rebel wangs (the Chung Wang was not among them) on December 4, 1863. Gordon—who, unlike Ward, was not bound to China by either citizenship or inclination—had great admiration for the leaders of the Taiping cause, whom he considered “without exception brave and gallant men.” He had arranged for the surrender of Soochow by offering the rebel leaders a pardon. But when Gordon and his army left the city, Li Hung-chang promptly had the men executed. Gordon considered the incident a violation of his own honor and flew into a rage that astounded and bewildered everyone around him. Li (most of whose family had been killed by the Taipings) was especially confused: In China, the execution of rebel leaders was common policy, and any pledges made to practitioners of the worst of the “ten abominations” could hardly be considered binding. But when Gordon threatened Li with personal violence and gave serious thought to defecting to the Taipings, Li perceived just how bad the situation was. He quickly urged his superiors to grant heavy rewards to placate Gordon, who was subsequently made a member of the emperor’s own imperial bodyguard and given ten thousand dollars. As it usually did, Gordon’s mood soon swung, and the Ever Victorious Army got back to business. But it had been a revealing and perilous moment.
The fall of Soochow hurt the Taiping cause badly and worsened the plight of Nanking. When the Ever Victorious Army took Ch’ang-chou on May 11, 1864, it became clear that the Taiping capital would never get the relief its defenders had long hoped for from the east. With victory against the rebels finally within reach, the imperial Chinese government felt safe in disbanding the strange force of “imitation foreign devils” that had always caused them so much anxiety. The Ever Victorious Army passed into history shortly after the fall of Ch’ang-chou, without ceremony and largely unmourned. Gordon himself issued an epitaph that was callous, somewhat unjust, and certainly indicat
ive of the feelings of Chinese and Western officials by 1864: “This force has had ever since its formation in its ranks a class of men of no position.… Ignorant, uneducated, even unaccustomed to command, they were not suited to control the men they had under them.… I consider the force even under a British officer a most dangerous collection of men, never to be depended on and very expensive.” Gordon might have thought to add that the force had been vital to the suppression of the world’s most brutal rebellion.
The Taiping movement did not long outlive the Ever Victorious Army. The Chung Wang, who in the spring of 1864 was desperately fighting Tseng Kuo-fan’s forces in Nanking, had known since his expulsion from Kiangsu that his own days and those of his comrades were numbered. Faced with the collapse of his Heavenly Kingdom, the T’ien Wang withdrew ever further into a world of degeneracy and insane religious fantasy, urging the starving people of Nanking to eat grass—which he called “heavenly dew”—to survive. Finally, in a moment of clarity on June 3, 1864, the failed civil servant whose mad ramblings had cost tens of millions of lives took poison, leaving his followers to shift for themselves.
Loyal beyond all reason, the Chung Wang remained in Nanking even as Tseng Kuo-fan’s soldiers were storming it, to see to the safety of the T’ien Wang’s young son. Escorting the rebel heir out of the city, the Chung Wang gave up all chance of his own escape by offering his fastest horse to the boy. Captured by Tseng Kuo-fan, the Chung Wang was imprisoned in a wooden cage and, in a rare example of leniency, allowed time to write a short autobiography before his execution. After vainly urging Tseng Kuo-fan to have mercy on the defenders of Nanking (all of whom were executed), as well the T’ien Wang’s followers generally, the Chung Wang ended his life with this melancholy statement:
Now our Kingdom is finished, and this is because the former T’ien Wang’s [appointed] span was ended. The fate of the people was hard, such a hard fate! How could the T’ien Wang have been born to disturb the country? How could I, a man of no ability, have assisted him? Now that I have been taken and locked up, is it not because of the will of Heaven? I do not know my origins before this life. How many brave and clever men in the empire did not do these things, and I did. It is really because I did not understand. If I had understood …
The Chung Wang was not alone in his failure to understand the forces released by the Taiping rebellion. Burgevine, for example, had left China briefly after his defection from the rebels, then returned, apparently thinking the imperial government had forgotten or forgiven his transgressions. But the imperialists hunted Burgevine down and seized him in the summer of 1865, and while being transported on a riverboat with another group of prisoners, he mysteriously died. The official story was that the boat had capsized and all the prisoners had drowned. But in October, when a Western doctor exhumed Burgevine’s body and did an autopsy, he found something peculiar: “a piece of skin, about 13 inches long and 3 inches wide, which had been removed from part of the thigh.” The doctor could not conclude “whether this portion of skin was cut out,” but the Chinese penchant for flaying traitors alive immediately presents itself.
To its end and through its aftermath, the Taiping rebellion was a wrenching and often fatal experience for those who became in any way involved in it; and one might have thought that in ensuing decades China’s leaders would have learned from it many useful lessons and changed their governmental habits. But even Tseng Kuo-fan and Li Hung-chang, who represented China’s best hope for a new political order, proved too steeped in tradition to carry any of their reform programs to the necessary lengths, and too prone to the usual Chinese habit of bureaucratic infighting to permit their alliance to gain lasting power. Following the defeat of the Taipings, Prince Kung and the Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi ordered Tseng and Li to lead their Hunan and Anhwei armies against the Nien rebels. In the course of putting down this threat, Tseng and Li fell out, and their armies entered a factional feud that was to endure for decades and take precedence over reform and reconstruction. Tseng Kuo-fan at least died a true (if unsuccessful) defender of China, in 1871. But Li Hung-chang, in his later years, undermined his nation’s strength by recklessly amassing personal power and lining his own pockets with bribes from China’s enemies. As Tseng summed it up just before his death, “The dead leaves of disappointed hopes fill all the landscape.”
Prince Kung and Tz’u-hsi also began to feud relatively soon after the defeat of the Taipings. The shrewd Tz’u-hsi emerged the ultimate victor in this contest, but just how unfortunate this victory was for China became apparent in 1900, when she ordered the fanatical Boxers to attack the foreign legations in Peking rather than trying to use the Western treaty system to ensure China’s integrity as Kung had done. These and other private wars among the native Chinese and Manchu elites eliminated the possibility of real change in China during the late nineteenth century. Yet as that era came to an end, the Middle Kingdom’s rulers clung to their ancient ways ever more tightly, making the death of the empire a certainty.
It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the important military innovations observed by Chinese commanders during their days of cooperation with the Ever Victorious Army and the forces of the Western powers should finally have amounted to so little. True, both Tseng Kuo-fan and Li Hung-chang favored China’s manufacture of more modern weapons: With the help of Prosper Giquel, an extensive, modern shipyard and naval arsenal was eventually built at Foochow. But in essence the military effectiveness that China achieved during the final years of the Taiping rebellion was an anomaly. This became singularly clear when the empire was badly humiliated by the emerging Japanese nation in 1894-95.
Had the battlefield ineptitude displayed during this war been a result of the imperial government’s preoccupation with goals that were higher and more peaceful than military reform one might forgive it. But it was factionalism and an addiction to social, political, and military obsolescence that actually prevented China’s nineteenth-century leaders from building on the foundation of Ward’s Ever Victorious Army. In the end, the fact that Ward had been born a barbarian counted for far more than the fact that he had taught the Chinese how to fight a modern war well. The history of late imperial China was full of rebellions and wars, many of which were prolonged and savage and any of which would have benefited from the presence of someone like Ward. But such flirtations with Western methods were not repeated in any meaningful way, and the Chinese went on slaughtering each other in essentially the same idiosyncratic, backward style that had marked their conflicts for centuries.
How much actual historical importance, then, did the Ever Victorious Army have? The question has been argued ever since the Taiping rebellion came to a close. In the early years of this debate, the army’s importance was undeniably overestimated by Westerners. Entranced by the romantic image of “Chinese” Gordon (as the force’s final commander came to be known), many foreigners, especially the British, portrayed the Ever Victorious Army as having played the most important role in breaking the back of the rebellion. We now know that that honor belongs to Tseng Kuo-fan and his Hunan troops. Yet to move in the opposite direction, as some sinologists and Communist Chinese historians have done, and portray the Ever Victorious Army’s contribution as minimal is equally misleading. The force that Ward created and commanded—barred as it was from growing past five to six thousand men or undertaking significant operations in the interior—could not have helped but play a strategically supporting role to the Hunan Army. But that role was nonetheless vital. Neither Tseng Kuo-fan’s nor Li Hung-chang’s forces alone could have prevented the Taipings from seizing Shanghai, and it is impossible to determine how long the rebel movement would have survived had that valuable port fallen. In this sense it cannot be said with certainty when or even if the imperial government would have put the rebellion down without the Ever Victorious Army.
On another and perhaps more important level, it should be remembered that there was no governing idea behind the Hunan and Anhwei armies progressive enoug
h to have allowed China to create an army capable of taking on an enemy such as the Japanese. A steady diet of Confucian philosophy was simply no substitute for disciplined training in the use of modern weapons and tactics. Had Ward and, more important, his work been better remembered, the disaster of 1894-95 might never have taken place, and the many humiliations that followed it—the Allied march on Peking in 1900, the steady loss of Chinese territorial integrity to the foreign powers, and finally the fall of the empire itself—might have been avoided.
Sadly, Ward was not well remembered. For a time the legal battle over his estate kept his name alive in the Western settlements in China, and he was honored as a loyal defender of the Middle Kingdom among some peasants and provincial officials for at least a few decades following his death. After that, however, as the account of his work was retooled to fit the successive waves of changing political philosophies that engulfed China, Ward’s life and the history of the Ever Victorious Army became the province of specialized scholars and finally drifted into almost complete obscurity.
Pleading other pressing business, Admiral Hope and Minister Burlingame had both disqualified themselves as executors of Ward’s estate late in 1862. Ward’s friend Albert Freeman was eventually named administrator of the estate, and he brought the case to arbitration in March 1863. A. A. Hayes was named one of the arbitrators, whose task turned out to be a taxing one. From the first, Yang Fang and Wu Hsü disputed Ward’s claim that they owed him 140,000 taels by insisting that their American employee had incurred offsetting debts to them during the operation of his army. This sum they first put at 10,000 taels, but it eventually rose, without credible explanation, to ten times that amount. The arbitrators accepted Yang’s claim that the 30,000 taels he supposedly owed Ward was a private family matter, but they found the claim against Wu for 110,000 taels to be valid. Wu continued to dispute the finding, prompting a second arbitration in October 1863.