The Devil Soldier Read online

  Copyright © 1992 by Caleb Carr

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. This work was originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., in 1991.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Carr, Caleb

  The devil soldier: the American soldier of fortune who became a god

  in China/Caleb Carr.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76552-9

  1. Ward, Frederick Townsend, 1831-1862. 2. China—History—

  Taiping Rebellion, 1850-1864—Personal narratives, American.

  I. Title.

  DS759.35.W37C37 1995

  951′.034′092—dc20 94-45844

  [B]

  v3.1

  A NOTE ON NAMES

  Because of the vast array of spellings used in the translation of Chinese during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all place and personal names in the following text have been adjusted to a uniform system, regardless of their source. A slightly older style of translation than the current Pinyin has been used, because it is easier for English-speaking readers to pronounce. This explains why Beijing is still Peking and why American, Chinese, British, and French speakers and writers appear to be using the same spellings, when in fact they employed many different versions.

  —C.C.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  A Note on Names

  Maps

  Prologue:

  “Across the Sea to Fight for China”

  I:

  “A New Race of Warriors”

  II:

  “Perhaps You Smile …”

  III:

  “As If by Magic”

  IV:

  “Not As Was Hoped, Dead …”

  V:

  “Astonished at the Courage”

  VI:

  “His Heart Is Hard to Fathom”

  VII:

  “Accustomed to the Enemy’s Fire”

  Epilogue:

  “Poor Old Ward”

  Cast of Characters

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Other Books by This Author

  PROLOGUE

  “ACROSS THE SEA TO

  FIGHT FOR CHINA”

  In the summer of 1900 an expeditionary force of European, Japanese, and American soldiers marched into the Chinese capital of Peking, the triumphant blare of their bands and bugles announcing not only the conclusion of a successful campaign but the effective end of thousands of years of imperial rule in China. The last of the Middle Kingdom’s dynasties, the Manchu (or Ch’ing), had withstood internal and external threats throughout the nineteenth century, and would hold on for eleven more years before a tide of republican revolution would engulf it completely. But all hope of recovery was in fact lost when the Western and Japanese troops entered Peking and its sacrosanct Forbidden City, the inner compound guarded by high walls that for centuries had been the residence of China’s rulers. The violation of the Forbidden City by “barbarian” foreigners stripped the Manchus of any legitimate right to rule in the eyes of many Chinese, and the imperial clique was finally seen for what it was: an arrogant, corrupt group of anachronisms, whose sumptuous world of silk dragons, peacock’s feathers, and divine rule had no place in the twentieth century.

  The Western and Japanese governments had ordered the march on Peking because a group of antiforeign Chinese extremists known as the Boxers, under orders from the Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi, had laid siege to their diplomatic legations and attempted to kill their ministers. The attack on the legations was a stupendously rash act, the crowning achievement of an imperial elite that had spent the last half century trying to stem the advance of foreign influence in China and preserve the empire in its near-medieval state. All such efforts had been in vain: The barbarian outsiders had finally pried China open to foreign trade, foreign religion, and foreign political ideas. The bitter Tz’u-hsi had meant to make the “foreign devils” pay for their success when she authorized the attack on the legations in June 1900. But the Western diplomats and their families had once again frustrated her by bravely withstanding the siege. When the multinational relief column marched into Peking in July, Tz’u-hsi fled in disgrace, taking with her the last chance of imperial resurgence. In the conflict between unreasoning Chinese pride and relentless foreign commercial and philosophical expansionism that had raged for sixty years, there seemed to be no middle ground, and now Chinese pride had lost the long battle.

  Yet there had once been such a middle ground in the Middle Kingdom, or at least the possibility of it. For the briefest of moments during the 1860s, the imperial government in Peking as well as the foreign powers had gotten a glimpse of a China in which progressive Western ideas—particularly military ideas—would be placed at the service of the emperor and his ministers to ensure the empire’s survival and participation in a rapidly changing world. Unfortunately, both the Chinese imperialists and the Westerners, as if horrified by their glimpse of this strange future, had slammed the door on it; but not before the names of those who had so briefly cracked the portal open had been recorded and honored by the Chinese people. Legends quickly grew around those names, as at least one group of American soldiers discovered during their occupation of Peking in the summer of 1900. Writing a quarter of a century later, one of these men recalled,

  There was much talk among the soldiers as to who had been the first to enter the Forbidden City, where no white “devil” was ever supposed to have been before. One day a group of us were arguing about the matter before a little Chinese shop, where we had stopped for one thing or another, and of a sudden the old merchant spoke up, in pidgeon English.

  What did it matter, he wanted to know, which one of us had by force of arms broken into the temples of the gods? We were disrespectful of the gods, we were like burglars, for all our bravery. And we could never be the first white men to enter a sacred Chinese temple, anyway, because there was Hua, the White God. Hua had been braver than any of us—and he had been good, too. He had come from far across the sea to fight for China, and he had been carried into a sacred temple, and was there still. His was a victory of right.

  The “Hua” of whom the old Chinese merchant spoke was Frederick Townsend Ward, a young soldier of fortune from Salem, Massachusetts, who had come to China in 1859 and offered his services to the imperial government in its bitter war against a hugely powerful group of quasi-Christian mystics calling themselves the Taipings. When he arrived in Shanghai, Ward was twenty-eight years old and penniless; when he died in battle three years later, he was the most honored American in Chinese history, a naturalized Chinese subject and a mandarin entitled to wear the prestigious peacock feather in his cap. He had married the daughter of another mandarin and received high praise from the emperor. But above all, he had assembled out of the most improbable elements an army that was unlike anything China or the world had ever seen: a highly disciplined force of native Chinese soldiers commanded by Western officers that was expert in the use of modern foreign weapons and capable of defeating vastly superior numbers of opponents in the field. Known to the Taiping rebels as “devil soldiers,” Ward’s men were dubbed the Chang-sheng-chün, the “Ever Victorious Army,” by Peking; and after Ward died a memorial temple and Confucian shrine were built around his grave.

  More than any other person or organization, Ward and his Ever Victorious Army had pointed the way toward a different kind of China, one in which Manchu chauvinism would have given way to reasoned Chinese acceptance of outside assist
ance. That assistance would in turn have allowed the empire to avoid a violent collision with progress and emerge as a twentieth-century power. China’s failure to follow such a course had, certainly, less to do with Ward’s untimely death than with the fact that the Manchus did not truly desire progress and the West did not desire China to be a power. But the momentary achievement itself, the transitory indication that an alternate future was possible, was nonetheless important—was, in a very real sense, Ward’s greatest victory.

  What follows is not a biography of Frederick Townsend Ward in the conventional sense, for it would be impossible to write a conventional biography of a man whose legacy has suffered so many attempts at eradication. Ward’s service to the Chinese empire gave him great renown in the distant, troubled country that he adopted as his own. His memory was honored and his eternal spirit appeased (or so it was hoped) with annual sacrifices at the shrine built to his memory. But the ever-suspicious imperial Chinese government harbored lingering anxiety concerning Ward, largely because of his foreign origins. In the United States, by contrast, Ward’s exploits received only passing mention in Congress and the press following his death, and then were virtually forgotten. For their part, the Ward family made repeated attempts to pry money owed to their illustrious relation out of the Chinese government, but they did little to ensure that an accurate account of his life would endure.

  When the imperial Chinese government finally collapsed in 1911, Ward’s legacy was further endangered. The American Legion named its Shanghai post after him and tried to maintain his grave during the era of Republican China. But China’s new rulers were not sympathetic, for Ward—although his origins were American and he harbored doubts about the shortcomings of the Manchu dynasty even after he became a Chinese subject—had fought for the Manchu cause. His private misgivings about imperial corruption and repression were considered academic by most of the Republicans. Then, too, Sun Yat-sen had fallaciously but effectively traced the origins of Chinese nationalism back to the Taiping rebellion, which Ward had helped defeat. It thus comes as no surprise that Sun and his followers did little to perpetuate Ward’s memory.

  The brutal Japanese seizure of Shanghai in 1940 brought the destruction of many official Chinese and American consular documents, further clouding Ward’s legacy. In addition, the Japanese sacked Ward’s shrine and memorial hall and defaced his grave (after promising American officials that they would not). Although they later claimed to have made an effort to restore the site, the cataclysmic war between Chinese Nationalists and Communists followed too quickly on the heels of World War II for verification of such claims to be possible.

  Finally, the victory of Mao Tse-tung’s Chinese Communist party made it certain that assembling a record of Ward’s Chinese adventure would become an exercise in detective work as much as scholarship. Like Sun Yat-sen, Mao drew badly flawed but popular parallels between his own and the Taiping movement. (Chiang Kai-shek assisted this effort by making similar comparisons between the Communists and the unsuccessful Taipings, vainly hoping that they would discourage popular support for Mao.) In pursuit of their revisionist goal, Communist scholars sometimes misplaced or destroyed invaluable relics and documents relating to the Ever Victorious Army. But the profound Communist discomfort with Ward and his legacy demanded even greater destruction: In 1955 Ward’s remains were dug up, and his grave site and shrine were destroyed and paved over. The whereabouts of Ward’s bones today are unknown. They have almost certainly been destroyed. A plain headstone over an empty grave in Salem, Massachusetts, is the only memorial to this most noteworthy of nineteenth-century American adventurers.

  For all these reasons, the following account is not an attempt so much to reconstruct Ward’s life from the inside out as to paint a picture of the man by allowing the events and people who surrounded him—and about whom we know a good deal more—to throw light on his shadowy figure. No man’s life can be truly understood out of context, but in Ward’s case the context is especially vital.

  Put simply, that context was the Chinese empire during its penultimate period of internal and external crisis. The bizarre visions that compelled Hung Hsiu-ch’üan, the Taiping leader, to attempt the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty became, through the chain of circumstance, a very real factor in Ward’s life. And the formation of Ward’s character in Salem, Massachusetts, and aboard American sailing vessels during the 1840s and ’50s is important to any understanding of how the Chinese empire survived. Similarly, foreign attempts to open China to greater trade and Western influence are key to understanding why Ward was drawn to Shanghai. And no account of the West’s intrusion into China in the nineteenth century can be complete without an account of Ward’s achievements.

  The precise meaning of those achievements has always been a problem for analysts. Historians disposed to view late imperial China from the left have seen Ward as an indirect facilitator of Western penetration and exploitation: a pawn bent on shoring up a corrupt dynasty that was powerless to stop Western imperialism and a man who had no regard for nascent Chinese nationalism. Others have seen Ward as the embodiment of the imperial Chinese government’s response to the simultaneous threats of internal disorder and external aggression, a response that became known as the “self-strengthening movement.” In this light Ward was not an unknowing Western tool but a willing Manchu instrument, ultimately controlled by Peking and used by the imperial government to bring the Chinese army up to date. Still others have written Ward off as a simple mercenary, greedy for plunder and a servant of the Manchu cause only because the Manchus were the most desperate and convenient employers.

  Yet the Frederick Townsend Ward who emerges from a careful study of events does not fit into any of these categories. Certainly, his campaigns served the Manchu cause and initially made most Westerners (whose goals in China were opposed by the dynasty) uneasy and even hostile toward him. Yet by the time of his death he was operating in close coordination with Franco-British regular forces, and Peking was expressing strong worries about his ultimate ambitions. Some who knew Ward claimed that he intended, once the Taiping threat had been eliminated, to establish his own warlord principality within China. Yet given his consistent defense of Chinese political integrity, it seems unlikely that he ever meant to carry out such a betrayal of China itself. And while he was unquestionably a soldier of fortune, Ward’s loyalty to his men and to China was always more important than his desire for reward (although he certainly did expect rewards for his service). A talented officer by trade, Ward cut a remarkably poor figure as a mercenary: He made sure to secure funds for his army but rarely did the same for himself, instead accepting notoriously unreliable notes of debt from his Chinese backers. In truth, Ward had little real business sense at all; his talent was for soldiering, and he put that talent to use defending China.

  But was serving China synonymous, to Ward, with serving the Manchus? This appears less certain. Ward was fully aware of the dynasty’s flaws: Although they had ruled with the power of Confucian tradition for two hundred years, the Manchus were still regarded by many Chinese as invaders, whose usurpation of power from the Ming dynasty in 1644 was criminal. It may well be that Ward intended to turn against these descendants of the “Tartar hordes” once the Taipings had been defeated. Such a move would probably have been aimed not at the establishment of his own warlord domain but at the restoration of a native Chinese dynasty similar to the Ming. For their part, the Manchus initially thought that they could use Ward and became fretful when they discovered how singularly he remained his own man, a true “free-lance.” Clearly they took the tales of Ward’s expansive ambitions seriously. In the end, however, we will never know what marching orders the Ever Victorious Army would have received had its creator and commander lived to see the fall of the Taiping capital of Nanking.

  Whatever the nature of his ties to the West and to the Manchus, Ward did prove true to the task of serving China: His organization and leadership of the Ever Victorious Army were crucial t
o China’s military restructuring, which was an important part of the short-lived period of general reform that touched all branches of the Chinese government in the 1860s and ’70s. Those reforms did not, in the end, prove fundamental enough to prevent disasters such as the Allied march on Peking in 1900 or the fall of the Chinese empire in 1911; but on the most basic level they ensured that there was a Chinese nation—rather than a collection of feuding principalities and European colonies, as had been distinctly possible—that could become a republic. For this if for no other reason, Ward’s place in history is important.

  It is useful to bear in mind, however, that this importance was a largely unconscious achievement for Ward. A high school dropout with almost no formal military training, Ward was neither an idealist nor a philosopher but an adventurous realist who sought to carve out a place in what had consistently been, for him, a hostile and violent world. His first thought was not for instituting comprehensive programs of reform but for his soldiers, whom he affectionately called “my people.” Yet, as shall be seen, it was precisely this commitment to the people around him—rather than to the kind of political, religious, and commercial ideologies that obsessed the Taipings, the Manchus, and the leaders of the Western communities in China—that made Ward unique. The ingenuousness of his achievement does not reduce its significance. It simply helps us understand his compelling, mysterious character.

  I

  “A NEW RACE OF WARRIORS”

  On May 2, 1860, the city of Nanking, China—nestled between a wide bend in the Yangtze River and a commanding promontory called Purple Mountain—was alive with celebration. Its citizens, who had been in open rebellion against the Manchu emperor in Peking for the better part of a decade, had endured a bitter siege during the winter, one that had finally been broken by a daring series of feints and raids by the rebel armies. After long months of privation, the way now seemed clear to bring badly needed food, arms, and treasure into the city. And so the people of Nanking lifted their voices in thanks to the god whose worship had made them outlaws in their own country: Shang-ti, the “Supreme Lord,” whose eldest son was called Jesus and whose second son, the rebels believed, was their own leader, their T’ien Wang (“Heavenly King”). The scattering of the Manchu emperor’s soldiers—or, as the followers of the T’ien Wang called them, the “demon imps”—before the walls of Nanking was taken as yet another sign that the T’ien Wang had truly been dispatched by Shang-ti to bring down the Manchu dynasty and establish the T’ai-ping t’ien-kuo (“Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace”) in China.