The Devil Soldier (46 page)

How Ward should be buried was as important to Chinese officials as when and where. He was, after all, a Chinese subject, and burial rites
were extremely important in Confucian society. Ultimate responsibility for Ward’s funeral rested with his immediate Chinese superior, Li Hung-chang. After carefully weighing the matter, Li dispatched a memorial to the throne, expressing a view of Ward and his services that would shortly become characteristic of the Chinese government generally. Relieved of any reason to be suspicious or jealous of Ward, Li recalled the American-born commander’s early victories, summing them up with the statement “Thus with few he overcame the many; a meritorious deed that is very rare.” Wu Hsü, said Li, had sent in a petition detailing Ward’s role during the Chung Wang’s January 1862 offensive; based on Wu’s account, Li concluded “that the turning away of the danger and the maintenance of tranquility in those places [the Shanghai region] was chiefly due to the exertions of Ward.”

But Li saved his greatest praise for a retelling of his own experiences with Ward:

From the time of the arrival of Your Majesty’s Minister, Li Hung-chang, at Shanghai, to take charge of affairs, [Ward] was in all respects obedient to the orders he received, and whether he received orders to harass the city of Chin-shan-wei or to force back the rebels at Liu-ho, he was everywhere successful. Still further, he bent all his energy on the recapture of Ch’ing-p’u, and was absorbed in a plan for sweeping away the rebels from Soochow. Such loyalty and valor, issuing from his natural disposition, is extraordinary when compared with these virtues of the best officers of China; and among foreign officers it is not easy to find one worthy of equal honour.

There was, to say the very least, some variance between this assessment of Ward and the reports from provincial officials that Peking had been getting in the weeks before the Ever Victorious Army commander’s death. Li further underlined his new approach with recommendations concerning Ward’s burial:

Your Majesty’s Minister, Li Hung-chang, has already ordered Wu Hsü and others to deck Ward’s body with a Chinese uniform, to provide good sepulture, and to bury him at Sung-chiang, in order to complete the recompense for his valiant defense of the Dynasty.… We owe him our respect, and our deep regret. It is appropriate, therefore, to entreat that your Gracious Majesty do order the Board of Rites to take into consideration suitable posthumous rewards to be bestowed on him, Ward; and that both at Ningpo and at Sung-chiang sacrificial altars be erected to appease the manes of this loyal man.

In the custom of most imperial officials, Li was recording facts not as he knew them to be but in the way that would most benefit Chinese interests. There was real purpose in his depiction of Ward as a wholly loyal and valiant defender of the Manchu dynasty: the Ever Victorious Army would need a new commander soon, and by setting Ward up as the ideal of a naturalized Chinese subject, Li Hung-chang hoped to make his successor fit a mold which Li was well aware Ward himself had never matched.

In replying to Li’s memorial, Prince Kung and the Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi echoed the Kiangsu governor’s tone and intent:

We have read the memorial, and feel that Brigadier Ward, a man of heroic disposition, a soldier without dishonor, deserves Our commendation and compassion. Li Hung-chang has already ordered Wu Hsü and others to attend to the proper rites of sepulture, and We now direct the two Prefects that special temples to his memory be built at Ningpo and Sung-chiang. Let this case be submitted to the Board of Rites, who will propose to Us further honors so as to show our extraordinary consideration towards him, and also that his loyal spirit may rest in peace. This from the Emperor! Respect it!

In another decree, the imperial clique made their true motivations more apparent: “Ward was a foreigner who submitted to China. He was a little arrogant, but he has served China and died while fighting the rebels; therefore he should be rewarded and treated exceptionally well, so that foreign countries will be impressed.”

An appropriate plot of ground was eventually selected in Sung-chiang,
and Ward was finally laid to rest. The funeral was a solemn and elaborate affair, the heterogenous procession symbolizing all that the fallen soldier had been in life. Officers and men of the Ever Victorious Army, Chinese mandarins and military leaders, and British naval and army officers (Admiral Hope was in Japan at the time) all marched solemnly together behind a gun carriage, on which lay Ward’s coffin. Ward had been dressed in his mandarin’s robes, minus his blue-button cap and black Manchu boots. The gun carriage was drawn by Ward’s bodyguard, preceded, according to Charles
Schmidt, “by the Staff band playing the dead march in [Handel’s] Saul.” Schmidt reported that a British chaplain read a burial service at the grave site: hardly in keeping with traditional Chinese ceremony. An equal source of consternation for those Chinese present must have been the fact that Ward’s dog was buried in a small grave next to him. Following the internment there were salvos by the rifle and artillery battalions, and the Ever Victorious Army immediately entered an official three-month period of mourning. A tumulus was built up over Ward’s grave and a smaller one over that of his mastiff. And with that the principal participants in the ongoing war against the Taipings returned to the business of suppression.

There is no record of precisely what happened to Chang-mei in the months following Ward’s funeral. Certainly, there was never any chance that either Wu Hsü or her father would have paid Chang-mei the money Ward wished and thus given her some hope of an independent existence. Although she had been living at Sung-chiang during the summer of 1862, there is no subsequent mention of her in connection with that city, suggesting that after her husband’s death Chang-mei returned to her father’s home in Shanghai. The biography of Shen Chu-jeng, the boy the Wards reportedly adopted, states only that after Ward’s burial “Mrs. Ward became very ill with extreme grief and died the following year in Shanghai. Shen was in charge of her funeral, and sent her coffin back to Ningpo.”

On October 2, 1862, Lieutenant Thomas Lyster of the Royal Engineers wrote to his father to say that the British regulars in Shanghai had not killed any Taipings recently, “although they have managed to kill General Ward. I saw him a short time ago, and was to have gone on an
expedition with him. I liked the old fellow very much.” Some weeks later Lyster, visiting Sung-chiang, further informed his father that “[p]oor old Ward is buried here in Chinese fashion—his coffin over-ground. This place was his headquarters. He came out to China as mate of a ship, outlawed from America, and has died worth a million and a half. He was often wounded, and people had the idea he could not be shot.”

The discussion of who would succeed Ward as commander of the Ever Victorious Army quickly became a debate—and an acrimonious one. In his published recollections, Forester claimed that he immediately assumed overall command of the force, but in fact he was second in line behind Burgevine. Burgevine was still badly hampered by the wound he had received in the spring, but he wasted no time after Ward’s death in writing to George Seward, the young American consul in Shanghai, to say that “in consequence of the death of Major-General Ward, the command of the Imperial troops stationed at Sung-chiang has devolved upon me as Senior Officer acting under the authority of this province.” But certain British officers and officials—most notably General Staveley—did not immediately recognize Burgevine’s claim and attempted to finally bring the Ever Victorious Army under British control by having one of Her Majesty’s officers appointed to command it. The French similarly angled to gain control over the Ever Victorious Army by pointing out that, in light of the activities of Tardif de Moidrey, Prosper Giquel, and Le Brethon de Caligny, a French officer would be singularly suited to carry on Ward’s work.

The issue was not settled immediately, although military developments highlighted the need for a decisive solution. Forester returned to Ningpo, where in early October he assisted Captain Dew and the Franco-Chinese troops in clearing the thirty-mile radius around that port. Forester then resigned his commission and soon cut his deal with Yang Fang and Wu Hsü for Ward’s account book. In the meantime, the Chung Wang was stepping up his attack on Tseng Kuo-fan’s forces outside Nanking, forcing Tseng to reconsider his position on allowing the Ever Victorious Army to support his Hunan troops. Tseng finally did authorize such a mission for the army he so deeply distrusted, but the
Ever Victorious Army could not go to Nanking until it had an unchallenged new leader.

General Staveley’s attempts to block Burgevine’s bid to succeed Ward were eventually stymied, not because Burgevine was clearly the best man for the job but because he had taken the fortuitous step of following Ward into Chinese citizenship: the imperial government’s first requirement, at the time, for an Ever Victorious Army commander. In addition, Burgevine’s cause was supported by Admiral Hope, who knew of Ward’s respect for Burgevine above all his other officers and who spoke up for Burgevine largely in remembrance of his dead comrade. Against a backdrop of false Chinese praise and jealous scheming by General Staveley, Hope’s genuine loyalty to Ward stood out all the more clearly during October. Not only did the admiral insist to Forester and others that the Ever Victorious Army continued to be called Ward’s Chinese Corps, and that its officers maintain practices that had enjoyed Ward’s special attention (such as the training of Chinese officers) but late in October he wrote to Frederick Bruce in Peking to request a series of tributes to the corps’s creator:

I shall feel obliged by your explaining to Prince Kung the practice which prevails with European Nations of placing on their colours the names of the battles in which they have been successful, and those of the Towns which they have taken, and by your acquainting him that I think it would be highly beneficial to the Esprit de Corps of Ward’s Chinese if the Emperor should decree that they should carry on their colours the names of Ch’ing-p’u and Tz’u-ch’i, the former having been captured by themselves alone, and the latter having been the scene of Col. Ward’s death, and stormed by them.

Hope then repeated his desire concerning the force’s title: “I should further deem it a personal favor that the Corps should retain in future the name of ‘Ward’s Chinese,’ which it now bears and which would be a graceful compliment to the officer by whom it was raised, and who fell at their head.”

These and other of Hope’s tributes to Ward were echoed by Anson
Burlingame in Peking, who also supported the nomination of Burgevine to take over the Ever Victorious Army. Like Hope, Burlingame knew that Burgevine would have been Ward’s choice, and his advocacy was based on strong loyalty to his fallen friend. Late in October, Burlingame dispatched official word of Ward’s death to Secretary of State Seward and President Lincoln in Washington. Burlingame made the most of Ward’s national origins, calling his fellow New Englander

an American who had risen by his capacity and courage to the highest rank in the Chinese service.… General Ward was originally from Salem, Massachusetts, where he has relatives yet living, and had seen service in Mexico, the Crimea, and, he was sorry to say, with the notorious Walker. He fought at the head of a Chinese force called into existence and trained by himself, countless battles, and always with success. Indeed he taught the Chinese their strength, and laid the foundations of the only force with which their government can hope to defeat the rebellion.

Recalling Ward’s offer to contribute ten thousand taels toward the building of “the strongest[,] darkest & deepest Hotel in the country for the blackguards Jeff[erson Davis] & Cabinet,” Burlingame went on to urge: “Let this wish, though unexecuted, find worthy record in the archives of his native land, to show that neither self exile, nor foreign service, nor the incidents of a stormy life could extinguish from the breast of this wandering child of the Republic the fires of a truly loyal heart.”

Of Burgevine, Burlingame said that the Carolinian had “taken part in all the conflicts with Ward, and common fame spoke well of him.” This opinion was shared by Frederick Bruce. And with such powerful supporters—and because he satisfied the Chinese requirement that he become a Chinese subject and submit to imperial military authority—Burgevine was finally named to command the Ever Victorious Army. But very quickly, Hope, Burlingame, and Bruce, not to mention the imperial government, were given ample reason to doubt their selection. At Sung-chiang, where Ward had used a skillful blend of guile and intimidation to nullify the power of the local mandarins, Burgevine
quickly gained a reputation as a tactless bully: “The authorities,” wrote England’s Chaloner Alabaster some months later, “useless under Ward, were indignant under Burgevine.” Doubtless this situation was adversely affected—as indeed all of Burgevine’s actions were—by his ever-increasing reliance on alcohol to ease the pain of his pelvic wound. As Dr. Macgowan noted, Burgevine “had undertaken, while recovering from the wound, to fortify his constitution by the use of stimulants, which he was assured were tonic; so that, what with morning cocktails, and brandy-smashes through the day … it was clear that a crisis could not long be averted.”

Incontestable proof of the destructive effects of Burgevine’s drinking, as well as of the considerable differences between Ward and Burgevine, came during an Allied attack on Chia-ting on October 23. The only Taiping stronghold left in the Shanghai thirty-mile radius, Chia-ting was taken by a detachment of the Ever Victorious Army working with British naval forces under Admiral Hope and military units under General Staveley. Following the battle, several witnesses reported that rebel prisoners taken by the Ever Victorious Army were executed summarily, a policy Ward had carefully avoided. Furthermore, the manner of execution sparked revulsion in Chinese and Western observers alike. Apparently having heard of the same thing being done to Sepoy rebels in India, Burgevine either ordered or allowed the rebels to be strapped across the mouths of cannon and blown to pieces.