The Devil Soldier (10 page)

Walker never revealed his true reasons for invading Mexico to anyone (according to the journalist
Richard Harding Davis, Walker even “messed alone, and at all times kept to himself”), and most of the men he raised for his outlandish expedition were not political partisans but simple adventurers, bent on glory and loot. Certainly Ward, who traveled north from Tehuantepec to join Walker’s band, would have had nothing to do with any scheme that advanced the cause of slavery: His later statements of vehement opposition to the Confederacy confirm this. Unaware and uninformed, glad for the chance of action, Ward and the other Sonora filibusters set out in October 1853, meeting from the very beginning with misfortune.

This result was largely a product of Walker’s unfortunate personality.
Among a company of extraordinary characters—Ward included—whose conversation was spiced, according to one account, with “
extravagant humor and improbable blasphemy,” and whose chief pastimes were drinking and gambling, Walker was the sole man who, according to Davis, “did not boast nor drink nor gamble, who did not even swear, who never looked at a woman.” Many of Walker’s men deserted his cause even before he declared himself president of the “Republic of Lower California” on November 3, 1853. Although the exact date of Ward’s departure is unknown, his leaving is generally described as a result of personality conflicts with his chief. The causes of such conflict are not difficult to imagine. One deserter from Sonora described Walker as “excessively vain, weak-minded and ambitious. His vanity makes him tyrannical—his weakness renders him cruel, his unbounded and senseless ambition has led him to believe himself born to command. His great pride was in ‘standing upon his dignity;’—his men were constantly harassed with vexatious orders upon etiquette. There was not a sensible man in the entire command who did not utterly despise him.”

Nonetheless, there were important lessons in the Sonora experience for Ward: Having learned the value of discipline during his ocean voyages, he now learned its limits. Ward never brooked insubordination (on one occasion he threatened to blow up the ship he was serving on when the fearful crew refused to take in sail during a storm), but he also developed what has been called the “common touch” of command: the ability to empathize with his men, to take stock of their condition and mood and structure his plans accordingly. During his China adventure Ward was to stand in singular contrast to Walker by being not only well respected but well liked by the soldiers who served under him. No description of Ward—even those of his enemies—ever accused him of vanity or cruelty; indeed, his integrity, fairness, and charm were generally conceded.

As for William Walker, after being arrested and tried in the United States for the Sonora fiasco, he went on to launch an even more ambitious expedition in 1856. Managing to secure the presidency of Nicaragua for himself, Walker was actually recognized by the American government. But his pride and arrogance separated him from his backers,
and he fell ignominiously before a firing squad on a lonely stretch of Central American beach. Ward had not yet put his China plans into action when Walker was killed, and the lessons the younger man had learned in Sonora could only have been underlined by news of the execution. Ward later stated on at least one occasion that, as part of Walker’s force, he had been branded an outlaw in the United States. His frequent trips back to his native country make this seem unlikely, but his shame at having served under the “King of the Filibusters” was very real.

Ward remained in Mexico following his desertion from the Walker expedition, and during this time he met Charles
Schmidt. Schmidt wrote that after the Sonora experience Ward, “having found favor with the new President General [Juan] Álvarez, came very near entering his service, as most liberal offers were made to him. He declined however on account of his not liking the people, their manners and customs, all being at variance with his preconceived ideas of the way in which their governmental affairs ought to be conducted.” With another American as a partner, Ward apparently tried his hand at business next, collecting scrap metal and shipping it to New York. But his commercial talents were no more impressive than ever, and the venture failed.

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 city 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.