The Devil Soldier Read online

  With the coming of the industrial revolution in the West, a new commodity joined tea and silk on the list of principal Chinese exports: cheap human labor. Desperately poor or pitiably naive Chinese were swindled into disingenuous contracts—or simply abducted outright—and then packed into ships and taken abroad to live in conditions that were often as miserable as those they had left behind. Called coolies, these Chinese may not have been outright slaves. But, as in Africa, the morality of the trade did not harmonize with the preachings of New England ministers; yet, as from Africa, New England ships carried the cargo. Nearly every Salem family who could afford them had Chinese servants, and the port eventually became so identified with the China trade that its parades featured local girls dressed in the finery of Chinese maidens. Underlying this charming veneer, however, was the hard reality of Chinese misfortune.

  Thus one great-grandmother might recall whimsically of Salem during the pre-Civil War era,

  The wharves … were lined with ship-chandlers’ and sail-makers’ shops, warehouses, and counting rooms, the sailmakers sitting cross-legged like Turks, sewing the sails with thimbles fastened into the middle of their palm, while the odor of tar and canvas pervaded the premises. The old wharf and sail lofts that fronted the street were favorite resorts of my childhood days and I was never so happy as when allowed to wander about on the old wharf fascinated in watching the loading and unloading of ships that had rounded the point and come lumbering into the port.

  Yet other Salem youngsters could detect the dark side of this romance: From his earliest days, the Ward boy called Frederick Townsend showed no attitude toward Salem other than a determined desire to leave it.

  How much of this desire was rooted in a simple need to be free from the stifling town and how much was connected to the nature of life in the Ward home is difficult to say. Ward’s family made certain of this after his death when, in a moment of astoundingly narrow-minded destructiveness, they destroyed his personal letters and papers. Although they were both the children of prominent families, Ward’s parents—Frederick Gamaliel and Elizabeth Colburn Ward—changed residences often during their early years together and generally ended up back at the fine brick mansion that was the residence of young Frederick Town-send’s paternal grandfather. Situated near the Crowninshield wharf, the house spoke elegantly of a fine past, as did the poetry with which Ward’s mother embellished her personal writings. But the Ward family, like Salem itself, had passed the crest of its fortunes, and in official town records Ward’s father was described simply as a “mariner.” He would later add ship’s master and ship’s broker to his roster of occupations, but at none of these would he achieve any noteworthy success.

  Frederick Townsend was the oldest of four children, and he remained close to two of his younger siblings—his brother Henry and his sister Elizabeth—throughout his thirty years. Henry, known to his brother as Harry, would eventually follow Fred to China and become his partner in a broad range of projects. Elizabeth was her eldest brother’s principal confidante and correspondent. (She kept Ward’s letters and papers carefully stored for decades in four large trunks; it was her executors, a group of cousins as well as her sister-in-law, Harry’s widow, who saw to the destruction of these documents.) According to Ward’s fellow Salemite and first biographer, Robert S. Rantoul, Fred himself was an unusually quiet child, who uttered no words for the first three years of his life, “and was at last betrayed into speech by an incident which called for action. The cat was breaking into the bird cage, and he rushed, with his first articulate words, to summon his mother. Months elapsed before he spoke again.”

  In one history of Salem shipping and sailing, Ward’s father is described as “a stern disciplinarian of the quarterdeck,” and there are many indications that he attempted to apply his shipboard principles at home. His chosen method of swimming instruction, for example, was to strip his young sons and throw them off the wharf, diving in after them to demonstrate his own technique. To be sure, the boys became expert swimmers. But Fred also became famous in Salem for repeating a unique prank: He would deliberately fall off the wharf and feign drowning simply to observe the panic created among adults above. This apparent instinct for making a game of a stern experience was destined to stick—although in later years the games would become quite deadly.

  Daniel Jerome Macgowan—an American Baptist missionary and physician who went to China in 1843 and practiced medicine for nearly two decades in the port of Ningpo—was one of the first men to put together a rough sketch of Ward’s China exploits. And although he had no intimate knowledge of Ward’s early life, Macgowan knew enough of the friction between Ward and his father to mention it in his relatively brief account. The elder Ward was apparently “a severe man,” said Macgowan, “whose severity was often complained of in after life by his son.” Yet Fred’s father indulged him in at least one area: sailing. Apparently intending that his oldest son should follow family tradition, the elder Ward trained his boy to be a master seaman, and by the age of twelve Fred was allowed to sail the family’s fifteen-ton sloop Vivid on his own.

  Ward’s schoolmates, interviewed by Robert Rantoul at the turn of the century, still remembered with clarity his singular courage and, beyond that, recklessness. Unafraid to take the Vivid out at night or in foul weather, Fred often placed himself in tricky situations. Rantoul cites one case in 1843 when Fred transported a group of women, among them his own mother, to the town of Beverly. Returning in darkness, the sloop encountered a violent storm: “The situation was full of peril. Towards midnight they reached home safe to find the town awake with panic. Throughout the scene Ward sat with a firm hand on the tiller, speechless as the sphynx.” The boy’s brief assessment of the incident was typical: “When the lightning-flashes showed us who were there, I wished myself at home. It would have been all right if it had not been for the women.”

  Yet ultimately the sea was not to bind but to further separate Ward and his father. For sailing was the boy’s reality, not his dream, and as he reached adolescence his hopes turned to the prospect of becoming a soldier. In 1846 the United States went to war with Mexico, and early in 1847 one of Daniel Webster’s sons raised a company of volunteers and paraded them through the streets of Salem. Ward, not yet sixteen, was determined to join the effort. In the company of another Salem youth, he set out one night to follow the troops. The boys’ plan and path were discovered before daylight, however, and Ward was brought back to face his father’s displeasure.

  Ward’s mother, by contrast, viewed her son’s martial longings with somewhat more sympathy—that, at any rate, was the view expressed by Charles Schmidt, later one of Ward’s officers in China and a man who had, by his own reckoning, “a very intimate acquaintance” with Ward. “The seeds—the germ—of command were so strongly imbedded in him,” wrote Schmidt,

  that the all watchful eye of the mother pictured to her family his future fame and warlike greatness. Her proposition was to send him to West Point, that the full bent of his soul’s desire might there be nurtured in its proper soil. Had he gone, no doubt his native land would have been blessed with the greatness of his genius;—would have been the happy recipient of his Great Generalship. Perhaps you smile—But if he were not a superior being, should we not see his like, now, in the hour of need—here?

  (Schmidt was writing in Shanghai in 1863, when the outcome of China’s Taiping rebellion was still in doubt.)

  Any hope of military training was crushed, however, and Ward’s father dealt with his son’s rebelliousness in typical Salem fashion: by taking him out of school and packing him off for a long sea voyage aboard a clipper ship. The vessel was the Hamilton, captained by William Henry Allen, who had married into the Ward family. Fred, not yet sixteen, was taken on as second mate. The Hamilton’s destination was Hong Kong.

  Still a boy, Ward was thrown into a world that belonged very much to men, a world in which keelhauling, flogging, mutiny, and murder were all common elements. Quick adjustment wa
s called for. Fortunately, Ward had already developed many tools that served his purpose. Rantoul’s interviews of Ward’s contemporaries formed a revealing picture of the boy-officer:

  A born fighter, he was no bully.… [I]t was his ruling passion to champion the weak, and his strength, which was great, was ever on call in the interest of fair play.… He was a favorite with his mates,—they all concur in that judgment,—but if a boy was “spoiling for a fight” Ward did not keep him waiting long.… Of no more than medium stature and always slight, compact and wiry, he had the strength of an athlete, and the surviving sister [Elizabeth] recalled with pleasure the frolics of the “children’s hour,” when, at the end of their evening’s romp, they all rode off to bed on his willing shoulders.

  And then a telling comment: “What he craved was power,—not the semblance of power.”

  Ward did well aboard the Hamilton, earning Captain Allen’s praise. But the captain, like others before him, was also disturbed by the young man’s recklessness. Demonstrating that he had absorbed at least some of the harsh lessons taught by his father, Ward soon gained a reputation among the crew as a strict disciplinarian. While the development of this all-important instrument of command would serve Ward well in later life, it apparently did not sit agreeably with his shipmates on the Hamilton: On one occasion the young second officer went over the ship’s side, and, while some accounts say that he fell while chasing a butterfly, most concede that he was thrown by crew members weary of his boyish orders.

  When the Hamilton finally reached Hong Kong, Ward got his first glimpse of the empire that would one day become his arena. Because of his age and the severe restrictions placed by the emperor in Peking on the movements and business activities of foreigners, Ward in all likelihood did not comprehend China’s already alarming condition. Had he been able to examine the country more closely or with older eyes, he would undoubtedly have detected in 1847 the origins of the crisis in which he would later play so remarkable a part.

  During the mid-nineteenth century a foreign resident of Shanghai, John L. Nevins, went to some lengths to collect, translate, and publish a series of Chinese tracts that he felt would demonstrate to his fellow foreigners the extreme contempt with which most Chinese viewed the West and its representatives. The tone of these tracts was uniformly scathing: “In social intercourse,” the Chinese authors wrote of the foreigners,

  men show respect by removing their hats. A less degree of respect is shown by raising the hand to the forehead.… They kneel only before God (Shang-ti) and the pre-existent Lord of their sect. When friends meet they inquire about each other’s wives but never about parents. They regard parents as belonging to a past period.… These people have an outward show of gentility, but their hearts are full of deceit. Their appearance is such as to easily deceive. They all live by carrying on commerce on the sea.… At first they confined themselves to cheating barbarians adjacent to them, not daring to carry on their lawless practices in the Middle Kingdom. Now our Emperor, full of compassion and condescension, has deigned to hold friendly intercourse with them; but these barbarians, so far from appreciating this condescension, have availed themselves of the opportunity to give unbridled license to their lawless propensities.

  During the era of Western encroachment into China an enormous gap existed between Chinese and Western concepts of “civilization” and “barbarism.” The outward signs of this gap—differences in dress, manners, and business methods—seemed to many nineteenth-century Western visitors somewhat superficial, obstacles that should not and would not impede China’s acceptance of other sovereign states as equals and the normalization of trading and political relations. But, as was learned by Portuguese traders and Jesuit priests during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and then by British, French, and finally American merchants and missionaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, those outward differences were not decorative encumbrances that could be easily swept away. Rather, they were sturdy pillars connected directly to the ancient foundation of a culture that was radically different from anything the Western voyagers had encountered in any other part of the world.

  The differences began but did not end with religion. In 1644 the Manchu invaders of China had found in place among their new subjects a “religion” that was at heart a successful ideology of social regimentation and control: Confucianism. The great sage who had taught that reverence for elders and the family was not only sacred but directly analogous to obedience to the emperor and the state was as useful to Tartar rulers as he had been to the Ming; and during the Manchu era the perpetuation of the Confucian system remained the cherished goal of China’s middle and upper classes, and, most important, of the literati, the men who became the emperor’s civil servants and actually administered the enormously extended family that was China. True, large numbers of peasants indulged their more mystical leanings by worshiping the idols of Buddhism and seeking knowledge of tao, “the way,” but Confucianism was never challenged as the ideological force that made the Chinese empire function.

  Confucius’s definition and elaboration of a virtuous “civilization” was not Christ’s, and the vices that the Chinese sage considered “barbarous” did not always correspond to those proscribed by the Bible. The absolute subordination of the individual first to the family, then to the state, and finally to the emperor—the “Son of Heaven”—allowed for physical cruelties in China that struck early Christian missionaries (who seemed to have forgotten such Western religious atrocities as the Inquisition) as unspeakably savage. Children might be bought and sold, human lives extinguished by the tens of thousands and in horrifying ways; men of means might emulate their emperor by purchasing dozens of concubines, while their nominal wives languished in miserable servitude; imperial commissioners and officials might knowingly use duplicity to pursue their master’s interests. Yet so long as these activities increased the stability of the Confucian system, they were viewed as permissible and even desirable.

  For all the fault that Western visitors found with the Confucian system, however, they repeatedly ran up against one indisputable fact: For thousands of years it had worked, and worked well. Over the centuries China had become self-contained and self-sufficient, an empire that viewed itself as the center of the temporal world and whose statesmen concerned themselves not with external expansion but with internal control. As has only recently been fully understood in the West, for example, the Great Wall itself was built as much to keep China’s population inside imperial borders and obedient to the imperial will as to keep foreign marauders out. Over the ages this attitude filtered from the central to the provincial and finally to the local level: A British officer who visited the city of Soochow during the 1860s noticed that its walls were “thickly studded with re-curved hooks, standing about two inches from the surface, and resembling stout nails. They were no doubt intended rather to prevent the garrison escaping than for defence.”

  Control permeated every aspect of Chinese life. The control of an individual over passions that might interfere with his respect for family and emperor; the control of a father over his family, and of his elders over the father; the control of magistrates and governors over their people; and, finally, the control of the Son of Heaven over them all—these were the relationships that came to define Chinese civilization. An emperor who could exercise such control was said to possess the “Mandate of Heaven,” and, should his dynasty be toppled by rebellion, no doubts were cast on the validity of the Confucian order. Rather, it was explained, that dynasty had become unworthy, and the Mandate of Heaven had been transferred to a family more capable of exercising rigorous control.

  Because of the powerful ethnocentricity that accompanied this philosophy, the first Europeans to reach China had been viewed as mere oddities by most Chinese. The miserable failure of the Jesuit missionaries to win converts only demonstrated to the guardians of the Confucian order that the world outside could never compete with the Middle Kingdom in strength of civilizat
ion. True, Christianity’s emphasis on the individual and his private relationship to God seemed dangerous to some Chinese; but the Jesuits did not in fact bring with them any radical or subversive social doctrines. Similarly, the Portuguese traders who infested the island of Macao opposite Canton and Hong Kong could hardly be said to have represented an expansive culture of new ideas. And while China’s Russian neighbors to the north were feared for their power, they, too, did not pose any significant threat to China’s cultural vitality.

  It was not until the British and finally the Americans reached Chinese shores that the rulers of the Middle Kingdom were thrown into panic. This fear, while prompted by religion, was on a deeper level ideological. Here were nations whose acceptance of the Christian doctrine that personal morality was more important than filial obedience had brought them to espousal of what, for the Chinese, was the virtual definition of barbarism: liberal democracy. Such a system theoretically involved not only religious but political and commercial freedom: the right of any people to participate in government, exchange ideas openly, and trade freely with other nations. These were all tremendously dangerous concepts to the Chinese; even more shocking, they were all concepts that began to take hold in China as the eighteenth century came to a close.