The Devil Soldier (12 page)

Thus if it is true that Ward—himself serving as a clerk in his father’s shipping office at the time—convinced Burgevine to accompany him to China in 1859, the task cannot have been a difficult one. More surprising is the fact that the two men were friends at all. Ward and Burgevine, wrote the Ningpo missionary Dr.
Macgowan, “were typical of the regions that gave them birth,” and, had they remained in the United States, “they would have been zealous participants in the strife that was desolating the fairest portion of the New World. One would have been fighting for the Republic and freedom; the other for disunion and servitude. As it was, they argued much and often on the slaveholders’ rebellion, but always amicably.” Burgevine’s callousness about human life (particularly when that life was wrapped in something other than a white skin) was to resurface savagely in China, and his burning desire for wealth contrasted sharply with Ward’s financial carelessness. What Ward prized most, in his own phrase, was “credit”—recognition for his acts of bravery—and he was willing to subordinate personal profit to get it. For Burgevine, by contrast, money was always the bottom line.

Yet Burgevine eventually became invaluable to Ward, precisely because of these differences. Five years Ward’s junior, the bearded, tough Carolinian was educated enough to understand Ward’s plans, as well as “refined” enough (in the words of one contemporary Shanghai author) to be “both engaging and insinuating” when dealing with Shanghai’s foreign dignitaries. But he was also ruthless enough to hold the volatile, often drunken Western freebooters who later became Ward’s officer corps in check. In the field, the two men played complementary roles—Ward the inspired leader, Burgevine the enforcer—and by all accounts their personal relationship was no more or less complicated. Above all, Burgevine had been touched by Ward’s ephemeral yet pronounced ability to inspire loyalty: The charismatic New Englander was
virtually the only person Burgevine did not, during his short but troubled career in China, betray.

In the late summer of 1859, Burgevine shipped out as third mate on the
Edwin Forrest
, bound for Shanghai by way of San Francisco. Some writers have claimed that Frederick and Harry Ward were Burgevine’s shipmates on this voyage, though several circumstances make this doubtful. What is certain is that by this time Burgevine had accepted Ward’s claim that China’s distress could be the source of their own good fortune, provided that distress was severe enough to convince Chinese officials to drop their long-standing resistance to using Western mercenaries against the Taiping rebels. The
Edwin Forrest
arrived in Shanghai on October 18, and although Burgevine, like Ward, initially accepted employment on river and coastal steamers, his hopes for turning a profit on Chinese instability were not to be disappointed.

For China’s troubles in the summer and fall of 1859 had become genuinely critical, and the price that any and all solutions to those troubles might command had grown proportionately large. More important for the two new American arrivals, the desperate situation faced by Shanghai’s imperial officials had made the employment of Western barbarians in the imperial cause—so long disdained by the proud Chinese—a real possibility.

By 1859 the Emperor Hsien-feng’s taste for liquor and indolence had caused one of his legs to swell with edema, but his profligacy continued unabated. His mind, rapidly deteriorating, became more and more fixed on the issue of how to deal with Britain and France, the powers that had forced his representatives to agree to the humiliating Treaty of Tientsin.
Lord Elgin, the ruddy-skinned, heavyset British envoy who had negotiated the Tientsin terms, traveled up the Yangtze during the winter of 1858-59 to study and assess the Taiping movement, and Hsien-feng became fearful that the British would decide to support the rebellion. Elgin—accompanied by his younger, thinner, and more forceful brother, Frederick Bruce—toured both Taiping and imperial domains (though primarily the latter), and Hsien-feng might have rested easier had he known that Elgin’s report to London stated that
“the tone of the natives with whom I conversed certainly left on my mind the impression that they viewed the rebellion with feelings akin to those with which they would have regarded earthquake or pestilence, or any other providential scourge.” In fact, by the time Bruce traveled north toward Peking to exchange ratifications of the Tientsin treaty with the Chinese government (and thus formally put the treaty into effect), the British were giving some thought to aiding the imperialists in their struggle against the rebels.

But all this was unknown inside the Forbidden City, where Hsien-feng sought the counsel of the dynamic Mongol general Seng-ko-lin-ch’in, of a trio of belligerent princes—Cheng, I, and Su-shun—and of his favorite concubine (and the mother of his son), Yehonala. Destined to rule China for half a century as the Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi, the beautiful and wily Yehonala was in 1859 a political neophyte who craved nothing so much as the humiliation of the Westerners on the field of battle. Hsien-feng’s occasional trepidation about using force against the barbarians disgusted her; and along with the three princes and Seng-ko-lin-ch’in, Yehonala pressed hard for the repudiation of the Treaty of Tientsin.

Unfortunately, the British and the French played into the hands of these Chinese war hawks. In June 1859 Frederick Bruce, now minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinary to China from Great Britain, appeared at the mouth of the Peiho River with a fleet of British, French, and American warships, intent on arrogantly cruising to Tientsin and then marching to Peking for the exchange of ratifications. The Westerners were informed that the Peiho River was closed and that the emperor required the foreign emissaries to debark peacefully and proceed to Peking “without much baggage and with a moderate retinue.” The American party, headed by minister John E. Ward (a native of Georgia and no relation to Frederick Townsend), complied with the imperial Chinese government’s demand; but Bruce and the representative of France, ignoring China’s face-saving maneuver, demanded that the river be cleared of all obstruction and approached the forts at Taku in force.

Seng-ko-lin-ch’in had rebuilt and rearmed the Taku forts since their first bombardment by the British and the French in 1857, and, when the
Western allies attempted to clear the Peiho River in that spring of 1859, the Mongol general opened a murderous fire on their ships. The battle raged for days, and for once the Chinese came away the victors. Several British vessels were lost, and Bruce was forced to order a general withdrawal to the coast and finally back to Shanghai. The Americans, in the meantime, made it to Peking. But, on being told that he would have to kowtow to Hsien-feng, Minister Ward replied, “I kneel only to God and woman” and returned to the coast. Once there, however, he belied his own proud words by agreeing to exchange ratifications at the town of Peitang, as the Chinese had wished all along. The American minister was thus officially confirmed in Peking not as the ambassador of an equal power but as a “tribute bearer,” and the power of the war party in the Forbidden City was firmly consolidated.

For a few brief months, China enjoyed a respite from foreign aggression. But internal difficulties more than made up for any advantages gained by the battle at Taku. In addition to the Taiping, several other large-scale rebellions had broken out during the 1850s. While never achieving the phenomenal success of the Taipings, these movements had by 1859 secured enough power to pose a significant threat to Manchu authority. Greatest of these secondary revolts was the Nien rebellion, which began in 1853 and by 1859 had caused a complete breakdown of imperial control in the Huai River basin. (The term
Nien
referred to the incorporation of small bandit groups and peasant organizations into a larger, though never fully centralized, entity.) In addition, China’s considerable Muslim population—outraged by discriminatory Manchu policies and fired by a fundamentalist movement within their faith—revolted in the northwestern and southwestern corners of the empire late in the 1850s. The ensuing fighting lasted into the 1870s and was particularly bitter.

Faced with this alarming array of troubles, as well as with the ongoing problem of the civil war with the Taipings, Hsien-feng, Yehonala, and their advisers shrank ever more determinedly into the comfort of Peking’s palaces and the equally unreal world of Manchu chauvinism. For this reason the Chinese victory at Taku in June 1859 was particularly unfortunate; it only reinforced the war party in the belief
that compromise with either the rebels or the Westerners was an unnecessary and detestable prospect. The imperial clique continued to display the haughty, ignorant arrogance that had always characterized its rule and that, if left unsupported by other, more talented leaders would certainly have brought about the end of the dynasty in the 1860s.

But the Manchus were not left to the fate they so richly deserved. And the most important support they received, ironically enough, came from the native Chinese (or Han) elite from whom the Manchus had wrested national power in 1644. In the 1850s and ’60s, a “self-strengthening movement” aimed at the modernization of China’s armed forces, the reinvigoration of the Confucian order, and the elimination of bureaucratic corruption took root in China. It was led by
Tseng Kuo-fan, unarguably nineteenth-century China’s greatest figure and, together with Otto von Bismarck in Prussia, one of the preeminent conservative reformers of the era.

By 1854 Tseng had forsaken a brilliant career in the imperial bureaucracy in Peking to raise an army in the province of Hunan with which to fight the Taipings. Placing a premium on training and discipline rather than numbers, Tseng had put together a compact unit that relied on fighting ability rather than intimidation for success: a most unusual quality in a Chinese army, whether imperial or rebel. In addition, Tseng emphasized strong ties between officers and enlisted men, another break with imperial tradition. The Hunan soldiers also received intensive schooling in Confucian philosophy, so that they would know what they were fighting for. Tseng himself had no doubts on this score. In a typical proclamation, written at the height of the Taiping rebellion, he declared:

Throughout history the Sages have upheld this doctrine, which expounds the pattern of men’s relationships, of prince and subject, father and son, high and low, noble and humble, in an order that may no more be reversed than the position of a cap and shoe. The brigands from Kwangsi [the Taipings] have filched the ideas of the foreign barbarians, and honor the religion of the Lord of Heaven. All of them, from pretended princes and ministers down to common soldiers, call themselves brother, and say Heaven alone is their father, and human parents are no more than brother and sister. Farmers cannot till their own fields and pay tribute, for all the land belongs to the Lord of Heaven. Merchants cannot carry on their business for their own profit, for all goods belong to the Lord of Heaven. Scholars cannot recite the classics of Confucius, for they have another work, the New Testament, containing the teachings of the so-called Jesus, while our Chinese Book of Odes and Book of History which for thousands of years have been our guides in manners and morals are used to sweep the floor with. This is a rebellion not merely against the Dynasty but against the doctrines of the Sages.

Although Tseng’s origins aroused distrust among most Manchus (who, despite their genuine admiration of native Chinese culture, were never comfortable giving significant power to Han officials), his approach pleased them, and prompted tremendous enthusiasm among his soldiers. This appeal was reinforced by Tseng’s strenuous efforts to live up to the Confucian ideal of the self-sacrificing scholar-statesman. A hedonist in his early days, Tseng eventually gave up wealth and comfort in the name of his cause. “He dresses in the poorest clothes and keeps no state,”
one Westerner observed, and his principal pastime was gardening. A long, unkempt beard and mustache hung from his broad features, and his drooping eyes were often marked by sadness, even when he smiled. That sadness may well have been not only for the wretched state of his nation but for the part he himself played in the civil war, for Tseng was a harsh disciplinarian and a stern judge. He acknowledged as much, saying that “[s]o long as respectable people can live in peace, I don’t mind what is thought about my cruelty.” The
North China Herald
echoed the general sentiment concerning Tseng’s firm methods when it stated that “[h]e is strict, but men could always understand what he meant, and the consequence is that much fewer Mandarins have come to grief under him than usually happens.”

In 1854 Tseng’s methods were vindicated when he recaptured the important city of Wuchang. It was the first sign of Taiping weakness and
the first time an imperial officer had reclaimed lost territory in any meaningful sense. In the years that followed,
Tseng made further headway against the rebels and became set in his belief that the suppression of the rebellion was a job for Chinese troops alone. The prospect of working in conjunction with Western soldiers—whether regulars or mercenaries such as Ward—was, to Tseng, full of potential dangers. “If we borrow [Western] troops to help attack and they do not win,” he wrote after 1860, “it will invite ridicule; if they are successful, the disastrous aftermath will be unfathomable.” It was a point of view shared by Tseng’s Manchu superiors in Peking but questioned by one of his ablest subordinates, Li Hung-chang.

Destined to play an important role in Frederick Townsend Ward’s Chinese adventure, Li Hung-chang was, like Tseng, of native Chinese rather than Manchu stock. But there the similarities between the two men ended. Born in 1823 into the mandarin class, Li grew into an exceptionally tall man, over six feet, whose mental powers were equally unusual. At twenty-two he was sent to Peking to be one of Tseng Kuo-fan’s pupils, and he subsequently performed brilliantly in the competition to enter the civil service. During the mid-1850s, however, he abandoned Peking and, after several abortive attempts to fight the rebels with his own army, rejoined Tseng Kuo-fan and worked his way up from the very bottom of Tseng’s staff. Li’s patience, determination, and talent were recognized: Tseng eventually began grooming him to replace Hsüeh Huan as governor of the embattled Kiangsu province.