Schmidt’s assertion that Ward objected to the “manners and customs” of Mexico, as well as to the way Mexican “governmental affairs” were conducted, is somewhat surprising—and revealing. Manners, customs, and governmental affairs have never been the usual province of mercenaries, and Ward’s refusal of Mexican President Álvarez’s “most liberal offers,” along with his consistently poor judgment in matters of business, provide additional indications that the young American was most strongly preoccupied with concerns other than money. During his Mexican interlude Ward also picked up at least a conversational ability in Spanish, demonstrating a desire, equally unusual for a man of his profession, to integrate himself into the native landscape.
In the case of Mexico, this integration brought disillusionment with the way the country was run, and soon after his scrap metal business failed Ward set out for California. He made the trip, according to Robert Rantoul, on “a single mule.” In San Francisco Ward signed on as first mate of the clipper Westward Ho!, which arrived from New York on February 27, 1854, en route to Hong Kong.
Not yet twenty-three, Ward had already established himself as a talented naval officer who had no difficulty securing a post on an important ship—the Westward Ho! was one of the “extreme clippers” that could make the China trip in just over a month—as well as a soldier of fortune of, if not equal talent and reputation, at least enormous potential. What he continued to lack were opportunities; and China in 1854 only frustrated him again.
In March 1853 the Taiping T’ien Wang, Hung Hsiu-ch’üan, had led his armies to their greatest triumph: the capture of Nanking, China’s second most important city and the seat of power for the central empire. It was immediately renamed the “Heavenly Capital,” and nothing seemed to stand in the way of a Taiping march to Peking and the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty.
But the rebellion stalled. Rather than taking the full and considerable might of the Taiping armies north, Hung dispatched only an expeditionary force to take Peking, then immersed himself in the affairs of his new capital. Ruling through a cabal of assistant wangs who rivaled the Manchus in the complexity of their intrigues, Hung became preoccupied with the construction of palaces and lost much of his political fervor. His appetite for concubines grew as his interest in the conduct of the civil war died. While his northern expedition was slowed and then defeated by imperial troops, Hung—despite his puritanical pronouncements to the faithful—assembled a large harem that became his refuge. The number of wives and concubines a man was allowed soon became codified under Taiping law: the higher the man’s post, the greater the number, giving free rein to the lust of the T’ien Wang.
Hung’s retreat into a closed and sensual world was mirrored in Peking by the Emperor Hsien-feng’s. Those citizens of China who would not or could not pledge loyalty either to a messianically deluded peasant or to the ineffectual, arrogant libertine who sat atop the Dragon Throne now found themselves trapped between the armies of both—for the war went savagely on. Whole cities were pillaged and burned repeatedly, rivers became choked with bodies, and China teetered on the brink of self-destruction.
Most of this spectacle lay out of sight of the foreign settlements in the treaty ports, and foreign emissaries sent to negotiate with the Chinese government still fumed in exasperation about Peking’s unwillingness to live up to its treaty obligations. Thus the rebellion continued to be viewed with a somewhat favorable—if cautious—eye by the Westerners. One American commissioner sent to deal with trade problems in China, Humphrey Marshall of Kentucky, informed Washington in April 1853 that “[a]ny day may bring forth the fruits of successful revolution, in the utter overthrow of the existing dynasty.” And President Franklin Pierce, in his annual message to Congress for that year, announced that “[t]he condition of China at this time renders it probable that some important changes will occur in that vast empire which will lead to a more unrestricted intercourse with it.”
But missionaries and other Taiping advocates could not keep reports of what the rebellion was doing to the Chinese interior and to the Chinese people from eventually reaching the treaty ports. The foreign settlements soon learned that Hung was not so much a Christian as a man who identified himself with Christ, and the anarchy and bloodshed that were everywhere rife became cause for extreme alarm. Not only was the rebellion taking millions of lives, it was giving those European powers that wished to absorb large sections of China into their own empires a rationale: the protection of their business and nationals. Recognizing this danger, U.S. Commissioner Marshall soon dropped his advocacy of the great rebellion and warned Washington that continued Taiping successes would render China “like a lamb before the shearers, as easy a conquest as were the provinces of India.… It is my opinion that the highest interests of the United States are involved in sustaining China—maintaining order here and engrafting on this worn-out stock the healthy principles which give life and health to governments, rather than to see China become the theater of widespread anarchy, and ultimately the prey of European ambitions.”
Ward seems to have reached a similar conclusion by 1854. Certainly he never made any serious attempt to seek employment with the Taipings (as some Western mercenaries were beginning to do), and his later statements of opposition to any usurpation of Chinese imperial authority—which he called an “outrageous doctrine”—further indicate his acceptance (albeit reluctant) of the Manchu dynasty as the lesser of two evils.
That lesser evil could, however, be devilishly irritating. In 1854 Robert M. McLane of Maryland arrived in China as American minister. On attempting to meet with imperial officials in Canton (the notion of foreign ministers from “lesser” states actually residing in Peking was still laughed off as absurdly presumptuous by the Manchus) McLane experienced immediate frustration. In Canton, one high-ranking imperial official repeatedly put McLane off, complaining on one occasion that “[j]ust at the moment I, the minister, am superintending the affairs of the army in several provinces and day and night have no rest. Suffer me then to wait for a little leisure, when I will make selection of a propitious day, that we may have a pleasant meeting.” This represented not merely one man’s obfuscation but a comprehensive policy of avoidance and obstruction, set in Peking and designed to free China from the obligation to open her interior to greater trade and foreign penetration.
If the goal was understandable, the attitude was not. The Chinese apparently failed to comprehend that their ethnocentric arrogance was self-defeating: It only made the Westerners more determined to take by force what they were entitled to by treaty. Part of Robert McLane’s assignment as minister was to assess the Taiping movement and see if it was worthy of American recognition. And while McLane—initially sympathetic to the Nanking government—soon reversed his position regarding the rebels, he also met with this rather startling reply when he requested an audience in Peking: “If you do indeed respect Heaven and recognize the Sovereign, then our celestial court … will most assuredly regard your faithful purpose and permit you year by year to bring tribute.” Along with the tribute, McLane learned, he would be expected to kowtow to the Chinese emperor: to go down on his knees and knock his head against the floor as a sign of obedience and respect. For the representative of a nation that had been born dealing a death blow to the idea of divine representation in monarchs, it was an absurd and maddening requirement.
The unsatisfactory conduct of both Taiping and Manchu officials in China prompted the United States, along with the other Western powers, to adopt an official policy of neutrality and nonintervention regarding the Middle Kingdom’s internal difficulties. But the impracticality of such a policy soon became evident, nowhere more than in Shanghai. In September 1853 an anti-Manchu sect called the Small Swords—led by an opium-smoking Cantonese who styled himself “Marshal of the Ming Kingdom”—seized control of the Chinese city in the port and took the taotai prisoner, disrupting trade and spreading alarm in the settlements. A pair of adventurous Americans infiltrated the Chinese ci
ty and rescued the taotai, but relations with other representatives of the Chinese government were far less cordial. Imperial troops, dispatched by Peking to lay siege to the Small Swords, were typically arrogant and abusive when they crossed paths with the city’s Western residents. When several of these encounters turned violent, the foreigners organized the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, an irregular force bolstered by small contingents of foreign regulars. The corps’s only field action was against not the Small Swords but the offending imperial troops, in the so-called Battle of Muddy Flat in April 1854.
Disavowed by the Taipings because of religious and other differences, the Small Sword rebels were eventually reduced to cannibalism inside the Chinese city, and their movement ultimately withered and died. The final imperial attack on Shanghai’s walls was made in 1854 with French assistance and was successful; but the spectacle of foreigners fighting against both rebels and imperial troops during the Small Sword uprising was portentous. In the wake of this experience, Shanghai’s foreigners formed their own Municipal Council and took over the management of the Chinese Customs House for the imperial government, to ensure the free flow of trade. Such was the state of imperial fortunes that the Peking government seemed happy to approve the Western-manned Imperial Chinese Customs Service. In fact, the erosion of imperial authority caused by the Western response to Chinese anarchy was becoming severe. The Chinese needed to formulate an effective response to internal disorder and external encroachment, and they needed to do so quickly.
Unfortunately, Peking was not yet desperate enough to seek the advice and aid of sympathetic Westerners in formulating that response. Thus Ward once again could find no employment to suit him in China in 1854, and he soon departed. Always on the lookout for new opportunities, Ward was drawn this time to the great power conflict that was brewing in Europe. But China was by now exercising a powerful hold on him, and besides his native America it was the only place to which he would return time and again during the years to come.
Ward’s sister Elizabeth vividly remembered her brother coming to say good-bye to her at boarding school in 1854, “on his way to the Crimean War.” Through family friends, Ward had apparently secured a lieutenancy in the French army. Journeying first to France and then on to Russia, the twenty-three-year-old Ward demonstrated that his idiosyncrasies were crystallizing into patterns.
The Crimean War, pitting Great Britain and France against Russia, was a politically senseless conflict, and that senselessness was echoed in the dull-witted savagery of the combatant armies. But Ward took advantage of the dismal affair to learn a great deal about the weapons and tactics then in use among large national armies. Most important, the experience offered some practical training in the employment of modern riflemen as independent skirmishers (rather than as traditionally organized units of marching infantry) and in military engineering, particularly siege techniques. The reduction of fixed fortifications was the ultimate key to victory in the Crimea and would be of immense value to Ward later in China.
But Ward’s Crimean adventure came to an end when, as A. A. Hayes recorded, “he quarreled with his superior officer and was allowed to resign.” Ward’s Yankee self-reliance was showing a marked tendency toward intolerance of superior authority. Indeed, for the rest of his life Ward would display simultaneously a talent for leadership and an inability to suffer constricting subordination, traits not inconsistent with his boyhood experiences in Salem. Taking his leave of the French service without penalty, Ward next surfaced in China in 1857.
It was, in all likelihood, news of war that drew him back. In 1856 France and Britain, weary of the imperial Chinese government’s ongoing refusal to comply with its treaty obligations, had seized on a minor offense in Canton as an excuse for forcefully coercing Peking into more cooperative behavior. In 1857 a joint Anglo-French expeditionary force bombarded the Chinese forts at Taku in the mouth of the Peiho River, opening the way for an overland march to Peking. Once again, the Chinese were humiliated, and once again the Westerners demanded increased trade and increased safety for foreign nationals.
But the British and the French—as well as the Americans, who, though they offered no troops, sent a minister plenipotentiary to accompany the Allied expedition—wanted something else too: foreign diplomatic residences in Peking. The symbolism of the demand, if obscure today, was striking at the time. The Western nations were insisting that the Chinese finally accept them as equals, and drop their claim that China was the center of the world and foreign emissaries could therefore only be received as tribute bearers. While this demand might have seemed reasonable enough in the West, in Peking it was viewed as a more serious issue than even religious or commercial encroachment. The Manchus feared that such a concession would be interpreted within China as proof that they had lost the Mandate of Heaven and would thus lend legitimacy to the Taiping cause.
For the moment, however, the Chinese government could do nothing but accept the terms—forced on them at the city of Tientsin on June 18, 1858—and hope that they would be able to stall on actual fulfillment. In light of this result, the time seemed right for an all-out Taiping move against Peking. But the Taipings had suffered setbacks of their own. In 1856 several of Hung’s wangs, jealous of one another’s power, had launched an internal struggle that had cost tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. Shaken by the ordeal, Hung had decided to entrust power to members of his own family—men whose experience was questionable but whose loyalty was not—as well as to religious leaders who gave him spiritual comfort. The Reverend Issachar J. Roberts, the Tennessee Baptist who had schooled Hung in the Bible, was even asked to come to Nanking to assist the rebels in managing relations with foreigners. Only the talents of rising field commanders such as the Chung Wang kept the Taiping movement alive.
Despite these momentous events, Ward could find no more significant employment in China in 1857 than as first mate on the coastal steamer Antelope. The Chinese government still would not accept the notion of using foreigners against the rebels, despite the fact that Western mercenaries were known to be serving the rebel cause. The Antelope ferried passengers between the five treaty ports, and one such traveler, William S. Wetmore, later recalled an encounter he had with Ward when the ship went aground during a voyage through pirate-controlled waters:
Our captain quite lost his head and swore he would blow his brains out if he failed to get the ship off. The first officer, however, fortunately was cool and collected, and it was by his efforts that necessary steps were taken for protecting the steamer and ultimately getting her out of the perilous position she was in. At a later date … Ward … was pointed out to me, and I was certain that in him I recognized the quondam first officer of the Antelope, who had shown so much self-possession on this occasion.
But transporting treaty-port merchants could not hold Ward for long, and he once more turned his back on China. Unconfirmed but nonetheless plausible stories have persisted that he went back to Mexico to serve Benito Juárez (Ward himself later told an English officer in China that the Mexican government had been his last employer) and that he turned up in Texas as one of that state’s famous Rangers. Whatever the case, early 1859 found him in New York, working in an office and for his father: twin testimonies that his fortunes were at a low point. The elder Ward had left dying Salem to try his hand as a shipping agent, but if he hoped that his son would or could be of assistance in the venture, he was quickly disappointed. Ward left the East as soon as he had secured enough funds for another trip to China. Some have said that he completed the first leg of this journey—New York to San Francisco—alone and on horseback, but more reliable sources have him sailing on a clipper in the company of his brother, Harry. The two were moving with evident purpose, and soon after their arrival in San Francisco in the fall of 1859 they continued on to Shanghai.
Ward was just shy of twenty-eight at the time of this voyage, still full of the energy, exuberance, and recklessness that had marked his entire life. The rigors of an adol
escence spent at sea, the deadly absurdity of William Walker’s Sonora expedition, and the sickening waste of the Crimea had not hindered his development into an affable yet singularly iron-willed individual with a head full of great ambitions. Like many international adventurers, Ward drank and gambled in his idle hours (although he does not seem to have abused either pastime) and had a fondness for tobacco, particularly pipes and Manila cheroots. From a childhood pugilist he had developed into a more than capable close-quarters fighter, a valuable asset in maintaining discipline. Able to make and part with acquaintances easily, he had few true friends and kept his deepest thoughts to himself. All these were qualities much admired by—and, in their pure form, rare among—the world’s free-lances.
Yet in his few surviving letters there is an air of isolation about Ward’s individuality, an alienation that kept him apart even from his followers. Whether writing to his brother, Harry, about his personal affairs or requesting information from the soon-to-be American minister to China (and fellow New Englander) Anson Burlingame about events in America, Ward was unable to conceal a craving for the kind of conversation and companionship he could never find among the men he commanded. One astute British officer would later write that the ability to control the mercenary officers and irregular soldiers Ward organized in China rested on the commanding officer’s not being “one of their style.” Ward, once an inexperienced second mate of fifteen who had been thrown overboard by his crew, had by 1859 learned how to control such men successfully—but he never became one of them. Nor, for all his charm, did he ever strive to fit in among the merchants, diplomats, and military men who occupied the opposite end of the social spectrum. In fact, beneath a veneer of what one English official called “consummate tact,” Ward remained a puzzling and independent man, one whose idiosyncrasies—fully revealed only on the drilling ground and in battle—inspired consternation as much as awe in both his men and the foreign communities in China.