The Devil Soldier (15 page)

If real bravery consists in an undauntedness of spirit, a cool presence of mind, and active physical exertion, then all these qualities are combined in Vincente to a degree that leaves no doubt on the minds of the many friends who know him, and have seen him so fearless in the midst of danger. He has all the appearance of a soldier.—There is nothing rough about that appearance. [He is] gentlemanly in his ways to all, kind hearted to his friends, sober in his habits, quick in perception, frank, liberal to a fault, and with an eye always to duty, serving faithfully where he serves, beloved and respected by his comrades in arms.

Ward’s trust in Vincente was almost immediate, and he quickly made the Manilaman his aide-de-camp. Still able to converse at least
capably in Spanish, Ward began recruiting more Filipinos and soon had raised over eighty of them. The absence of a significant language barrier may have made Ward more comfortable among the Manilamen than among the polyglot of European drunkards who had originally filled out the roster of his Foreign Arms Corps. Certainly, Vincente and his countrymen soon justified their new leader’s faith: Within days the corps was back at Kuang-fu-lin, this time training in earnest and conducting intelligence forays into the surrounding countryside. Setting a standard to which their European and American officers were forced to rise, the Manilamen ably went about the business of capturing Taiping patrols and shipping the prisoners back to the imperial authorities in Shanghai, all the while preparing for a new attempt on Sung-chiang.

By early July the activities of Ward’s new force were arousing considerable criticism in Shanghai. Foremost among the Western voices calling for the permanent disbandment of the Foreign Arms Corps was that of Thomas Taylor Meadows, the British consul. Britain had a special bone to pick with the corps: In putting together his training program at Kuang-fu-lin, Ward had recognized the need for experienced drillmasters, and those of the British army and navy were renowned as the best in their field. Ward had made a particular point of enticing these valuable men away from their obligations to queen and country. A pronounced need to ensure the obedience of British soldiers and sailors was the immediate cause of Consul Meadows’s antipathy toward the Foreign Arms Corps. But he had many other reasons for wanting Ward and his force put out of action.

Meadows was a sinologist of the first order. A broad, bearded man who stood over six feet tall, he had been a student of Chinese in Munich before taking up a post at the British consulate in Canton in 1842. He had witnessed the Opium War and had predicted (as he was fond of reminding people) as early as 1846 that a major rebellion would soon take hold of the Middle Kingdom. Furthermore, his understanding of China and the Chinese was not completely the result of book learning and consular duties: An avid shooter, Meadows often took hunting trips into the Chinese interior, and during these journeys he made it a point to converse with the peasantry and gauge their opinions. Like many a
Western diplomat, Meadows was appalled by the brutality and corruption of the Manchu government, and, like many foreign residents of the treaty ports, he early on saw the Taiping movement as an alternative with real possibilities.

In addition, Meadows considered the neutral stance adopted by the Western powers in China theoretically admirable but practically advantageous to the Manchu government: The first concern of the “neutral” West was the maintenance of trade in the treaty ports, and that trade benefited Peking. But while he saw the neutral policy’s shortcomings,
Meadows did try to use it to terminate the activities of the Foreign Arms Corps, a goal for which he worked assiduously throughout the summer of 1860. In the first week of July, Ward’s men dispatched a Taiping prisoner to imperial Chinese officials in Shanghai, and the man was, according to Meadows, “disembowelled and beheaded” (although the Chinese usually tore out a man’s heart rather than his lesser organs during such ritual executions). Meadows took the occasion to write to both the American consul (the less than vigilant W. L. G. Smith) and his Spanish counterpart in almost identical language:

We have direct evidence that the Taipings have been permitting the silk to pass down freely on being told that it was for the foreign merchants at Shanghai. But we cannot reasonably expect this to continue if they find foreign auxiliaries thus engaged in active hostilities against them;… I have the best reasons for believing that the above force of auxiliaries were raised by, and are now commanded by one or more United States citizens, while the men are chiefly Manilla-men [
sic
]. Believing the proceedings of these [American and Spanish] citizens … are endangering an important branch of British trade, I now beg to bring them to your notice with a view to a remedy.

Rightly suspecting that he would get little satisfaction out of either the American or the Spanish government, Meadows also addressed a protest to his superior, British minister Frederick Bruce. The Taipings, Meadows said, had as yet shown no inclination to molest foreign trade,
but activities such as Ward’s might change all that. “There is certainly great reason to suppose that anger may cause [the rebels] to retaliate on the commerce of foreigners, if not on the persons of those whom business takes into the silk districts.… It appears to me practically impossible to maintain neutrality if we not only interpose between the rebel forces and the people and city of Shanghai but also protect the provincial authorities in it, [and] permit the authorities to raise forces, Chinese or foreign, in it.”

Meadows’s alarmist words found sympathetic ears among foreigners who saw any military activity in the Shanghai area—whether imperialist, Taiping, or foreign—as a direct threat to trade. But Bruce was far less impressed. Despite the fact that both men worked for the British government, Bruce and Meadows did not belong to the same breed of diplomatic official. Bruce was among those career officers who were neither sinologists by experience nor sinophiles by inclination. Forty-six years old at the time of his appointment to China, Bruce had served in the United States, Canada, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Egypt before traveling to the Middle Kingdom with his brother Lord Elgin and there was precious little scholarly love of Chinese civilization in him.

Still, Bruce was no mere mercantile stooge. He was deeply committed to the stated goals of his government, even when those goals conflicted with Western commercial interests. It may well have been that Meadows was right and that neutrality in the Chinese civil war was a noble but ultimately farcical idea for countries that enjoyed special trading privileges from the imperial government in Peking. But Bruce’s instructions from the Foreign Office were that he not only prevent depredations against British trade but also vigorously enforce Britain’s Neutrality Ordinance. However irreconcilable these goals may have seemed, Bruce pursued them with typical British obstinacy. Thus while he fully intended to punish British citizens who joined either Ward’s force or the Taiping armies as mercenaries, he also ignored Meadows’s suggestion that the British prevent imperial officials in Shanghai from raising forces for their own defense.

The inconsistencies of Bruce’s attitude would only later become fully apparent. For the moment, Ward—because he was in the service
of the taotai—was relatively free from British, and more generally Western, interference. The representatives of
Ward’s own United States were not inclined to acknowledge, much less control, his activities. Consul Smith blithely denied that Americans were involved in the mercenary doings at Kuang-fu-lin, and Minister
John Ward was too wrapped up in affairs relating to the final settlement of the Tientsin treaty crisis to pay his adventurous countrymen much attention. Still, there was at least some contact between Ward the free-lance and Ward the minister at this time: After the outbreak of the American Civil War the young New Englander would write of the diplomat from Georgia’s abandonment of the Union, “I find my old friend Ward Ex-Minister is a damned traitor and joined the rascals.” But if Minister Ward did make any attempt to interfere with the ongoing training and patrols of the Foreign Arms Corps in 1860, it was singularly halfhearted and unsuccessful.

The failure of the diplomatic community to do anything at all about Ward’s corps soon had Western merchants in Shanghai squawking. Their complaints, as was so often the case, were reflected on the pages of the
North China Herald
, which began a long and particularly vindictive campaign against the corps. The China coast newspapers generally, and
the
Herald
in particular, were a phenomenon unique to the early period of Western encroachment into the Middle Kingdom, and their history offers important insight not only into the kind of foreigners who made the treaty ports their homes but into why men like Ward aroused such bitter resentment. Until the late 1860s such papers were, in the words of
one expert, “one man affairs … directed by an editor of limited experience supported by an inadequate staff, dependent upon a narrow range of news sources.” Because the foreign communities in the treaty ports were so small, most of these editors were more interested in grinding axes than in cultivating journalistic integrity, and commentary tended to degenerate into gossip-laced feuding.

In 1860 the
North China Herald
was ten years old, appeared weekly, and generally ran between four and eight pages. Its yearly subscription rate was fifteen Chinese
taels
(about twenty-four dollars), and its circulation was no more than five hundred, but it exerted an influence out of all proportion to its size. For both the British and the
American consuls as well as private business firms it served as the organ of public notice; salesmen hawking everything from “Persian Insect Powder” to cough lozenges to fire insurance advertised in its pages, as did the proprietors of dress shops, saloons, and billiard parlors; social and political events were covered in detail and described in language that was readily accessible to all; and opinions were offered straight from the shoulder. Given the contrast between its size and the scope of its concerns,
the
Herald
was indeed a remarkable journal.

In 1856 the
Herald
had been taken over by Charles Spencer Compton, who had a long history of involvement in the China trade and scant liking for either the Manchus, whom he viewed with standard Western indignation, or the Taipings, whom he saw as a threat to free enterprise. Under Compton, the
Herald
occasionally expressed criticism of the rebellion, but the editor was always careful to condemn military participation by foreigners, fearing that such behavior would only bring the rebels’ wrath down on Shanghai.

Thus by July 1860 a
Herald
correspondent was reporting that

on Monday last the 9th, twenty-nine foreign sailors deserted from their ships in the harbour, having been allured by the promise of high pay, to put themselves under the orders of agents of the Taotai, and to assist the Imperial soldiers against the rebels.… [T]he acts of mercenaries are spreading feelings of ill-will in the minds of the natives against the private members of our community; as it cannot, for a moment, be supposed that the Chinese populace can discriminate between the character of individual Foreigners.

In fact, as was reported in the same issue of the
Herald
, Wu Hsü was using the existence of Ward’s Foreign Arms Corps as a way to pacify rather than stir up the “populace”: “H.E. the Taotai has … issued a proclamation telling the people that the rebels are very close, but that they need not fear to go and fight, as foreign soldiers are [near] Sung-chiang.” But to the
Herald
, Ward and his followers continued to be a “gang” and a “disgrace,” and their operations were nothing more than “depredations.”

Such epithets were ironic indeed, coming from a paper that spoke for Western commercial interests in Shanghai, and it is understandable that
Ward’s reaction to these and similar attacks was one of indifference and even amusement. “Depredating” was an activity common to nearly every foreigner in China: The basis of most fortunes made in the treaty ports was (or at one time had been) opium, and of the remainder gunrunning, smuggling, land speculation, and confidence games made up a large portion. The righteous moralizing of Westerners whose names had been made through the spread of drug abuse or the disposal of useless weapons at inflated prices was hardly likely to disturb someone like Ward, who was well-acquainted with Chinese affairs as well as with the business practices common in the treaty ports, which he dismissed tersely as “lying, swindling & smuggling.”

The opium trade not only belied the Western community’s attacks on Ward but on a larger scale revealed much about the foreigners’ attitudes toward the Taiping movement. The apparent anxiety of merchants in Shanghai over the rebellion’s potentially adverse effects on trade were curiously inconsistent with existing circumstances, for the Taipings had never posed a threat to Western trade. On the contrary, the rebels had (as Thomas Meadows pointed out) made a special effort from the beginning not to interfere with the shipment of tea and silk down the Yangtze and Huang-pu rivers. This effort had been for the most part successful: Although figures always fluctuated, the rebellion had caused no interruption in exports. In fact, during the crucial years 1860 and 1861, tea and silk shipments actually increased. Of course, the fact that merchants were doing exceptionally well in Shanghai at the time of the Chung Wang’s breakout from Nanking was reason enough for heightened fears about the effects of war on trade. But an equal and perhaps greater cause of alarm—lurking unacknowledged beneath the surface of the debate over how to deal with the rebels—was the drug trade. Opium was the one sector of commerce that the Taipings had made a concerted effort to interrupt, and in so doing they may have committed their greatest error with regard to the Western communities in China.

The buying, selling, and smoking of opium were illegal under Taiping
law, and violations carried the same draconian penalty that China’s Communists would use a century later to finally end the opium problem: death. That opium from British India played a huge part in both China’s debilitation and the prosperity of Shanghai’s Western community in 1860 is beyond question; but because British diplomatic representatives in China were so reluctant to discuss the trade publicly or in dispatches, we may never know how much influence opium actually had on official British policy.