The Devil Soldier (49 page)

Hearing of Wu’s tactics, Harry Ward wrote to his father from New York:

I am astonished at the proceedings.… How Mr. Seward or anyone else can sustain the “last commission!” I cannot understand—it is either a very high handed or a very low and disreputable position to take—I of course cannot advise or suggest to you but feel that you will be able to convince Mr. Burlingame of the injustice of such a course and that if carried out it would be a downright fraud and robbery of Fred’s heirs.… Furthermore I don’t see why the estate should have to pay Fogg & Co. bills—you can make them show books and prove that the articles were used for the Chinese Govt. and I fancy Fogg’s people know it—All of them should blush, if there is any blush in them for such robbery—for Fred made half of them—If Fred were alive and in Shanghai for 24 short hours they would all disgorge and sneak away like whipped curs.

The second arbitration board ordered Wu Hsü to pay the various merchant houses in Shanghai the amounts he said were owed by the Ward estate, but the board would make no judgment concerning the original 110,000 taels claimed by the Ward family until Harry Ward’s accounts had been examined. Frederick G. Ward followed Harry’s advice and went to Peking to enlist Burlingame’s aid. But Burlingame and other legal experts agreed with the arbitration board that Harry’s accounts were essential if a fair decision was to be reached. With no other course available, the elder Ward procured funds (reportedly from his son’s widow, Chang-mei) for a trip back to the United States. But before he could reach Harry he died, of a sudden illness in San Francisco in December 1865.

By 1867 prosecution of the Ward claims had fallen to George Seward, who, with Anson Burlingame’s departure from China, became the new American minister to the Middle Kingdom. Burlingame left his post when he was asked by the Chinese government to head a Chinese mission to the Western powers and negotiate new treaties of trade and friendship. That an American should lead such a mission was no less significant than another American’s once having led a Chinese army; and Burlingame further echoed Ward’s fate when, in the midst of vigorously and successfully representing Chinese interests abroad, he died of exhaustion and pneumonia. In February 1867 George Seward visited the United States and was able to obtain from Harry Ward, just before the latter’s death from an unnamed disease, an accurate accounting of his boat-buying trip. Apparently Harry had commissioned the building of river steamers as originally planned. But, when additional funds for completion and transfer failed to arrive from China following his brother’s death, he was forced to sell the vessels to the Union government at a loss. In 1868 Seward took this information to Wu Hsü, who, having been stripped of his government offices, was now living in comfortable disgrace in Hangchow. Wu continued to insist that Frederick T.
Ward had owed him more money than he had owed Ward, and this defiant attitude, along with the death of Yang Fang, made it obvious to all that if any satisfaction was to be had it would have to come from the Chinese government.

However, Peking claimed that it could not pay the 110,000 taels because, under Chinese law, an oral will was not binding, even if witnessed. Furthermore, Prince
Kung stated that the debt was based on unpaid bonuses for the capture of cities. Kung and most other imperial officials had long disapproved of the bonus system and did not recognize its legitimacy. The will was nothing more than “the mere utterance by Ward of his hope,” said Kung, “and not a recognized obligation that has been left unfulfilled.” Thus did Peking—harried by foreign powers, pressed for funds, and as prone to duplicity as ever—dispense with the dying wishes of the man it had once characterized as a valiant defender of the Manchu dynasty. The legal battle was not yet over, but it was to remain in limbo for the rest of the century.

In Shanghai, Ward’s legacy fared considerably better. At the time of Ward’s death, Li Hung-chang and his superiors had ordered the building of shrines to Ward’s memory in both Ningpo and Sung-chiang. The plan had been aborted when the American chargé, S. Wells Williams, arrogantly declared that such a shrine would not be considered an honor by an American or his family. Since one of the purposes of the planned shrines had been to gain foreign favor, the plan was quickly dropped by the Chinese, and over the next fourteen years Ward’s tumulus was left untended.

But in 1876 Li Hung-chang—who throughout his life never missed an opportunity to honor Ward’s memory—ordered the taotai of Shanghai to inspect Ward’s grave and investigate the possibility of finally erecting some kind of a memorial. The taotai had the tumulus restored, then wrote to the American consul in Shanghai: “Now that the grave is repaired, I think of building a wall around it, and thus protect it from further depredations. I find, too, that there is near the grave a good piece of empty ground on which I am thinking of building a Hall and inscribing within it the ancestral tablet of General Ward in order that all may know that this is the grave of General Ward.” The American consul responded
favorably to this idea, building began, and within the year a date for the hall’s dedication and consecration had been set: May 10, 1877.

On that morning a group of American and European consular officers joined the taotai of Shanghai on a cruise up the Huang-pu River. Breakfast was served aboard the river steamer that transported them, and, when the party reached the mouth of Sung-chiang Creek, they transshipped to a collection of houseboats and steam launches in order to make their way up that shallow tributary. Soon they had reached Sung-chiang, where a large number of curious citizens had gathered to greet them. The taotai’s bodyguard cleared a path through this crowd, and the notables from Shanghai continued on their way.

They passed by delicately adorned yamens and pagodas, then through a ghostly stretch of open ground where the ruins of what had once been buildings lay rotting and grown over by grass and weeds: a grim reminder to the visitors of both the Taiping rebellion and of why they had come to Sung-chiang that day. Finally, a long, low wall came into sight. The group of dignitaries entered the compound and turned to face the open front of a small temple. Through its entrance could be spied a shrine. Atop the shrine’s altar sat a brazier for the burning of incense. To either side stood memorial columns, both painted blue and each bearing a golden inscription in Chinese. The first declared: “A wonderful hero from beyond the seas, the fame of whose loyalty reaches round the world, has sprinkled China with his azure blood.” The second inscription played on the ancient name of Sung-chiang, which translates to “among the clouds”: “A happy seat among the clouds and temples standing for a thousand springs make known to all his faithful heart.”

Moving on to an open courtyard behind the temple, the visiting dignitaries arrived at a high burial mound, beside which lay a similar but smaller mound. Saplings and shrubs had grown up around the graves of the famous Hua and his faithful dog in the years since their interment, but the memorial compound had been assigned a keeper, and it was hoped that future generations would more closely guard the remains and better attend to the memory of the creator of the Ever Victorious Army.

And indeed for many years an annual pilgrimage was made by officials from Shanghai to the memorial hall to offer sacrifices and pay
respects to Ward’s spirit, and incense was often burned at the shrine by local Chinese. These rituals gave rise to a belief in the West that Ward was worshiped as something of a god by the Chinese. In fact, by the terms of Confucian theology—in which divinities and semidivinities were arranged, quite typically, in bureaucratic order—Ward was given a rank that was closer to sainthood than godhood. But it was an important position, one that demanded (and received) real reverence. Thus if the Western interpretation was a slight exaggeration, it was an understandable one.

By the close of the nineteenth century there were comparatively few Chinese who could actually remember Ward or the Taiping rebellion, but one of these was the most powerful statesman in the empire. Li Hung-chang operated a provincial administration in Tientsin that was little short of a second imperial government, so great was his power and the respect he was accorded by foreign nations. When this great Chinese statesman embarked in 1896 on a world tour that took him to New York, he managed to squeeze half an hour out of his busy schedule to see an elderly woman who had journeyed from Maine to talk with him: Elizabeth Ward, Frederick Townsend’s sister and correspondent. With Elizabeth was Harry Ward’s former wife, now remarried, who was later to destroy Elizabeth’s invaluable collection of letters from her adventurous brother Fred. Perhaps Elizabeth’s record of her meeting with Li Hung-chang was destroyed at the same time. If so, the pity is all the greater, for Li probably revealed more of his genuine feelings about Ward during this encounter than bureaucratic politics had ever allowed him to before.

Elizabeth Ward did not live to see the settlement of the Ward claims against the Chinese government. But in 1902 her sister-in-law made the shrewd move of hiring a pair of eminent international lawyers to pursue the case. John Watson Foster had served as secretary of state under President Benjamin Harrison, and his son-in-law, Robert Lansing, would later fill the same post for Woodrow Wilson. Together these law partners carefully mounted one last effort to gain monetary satisfaction from China’s imperial rulers. In doing so they provided a long overdue reminder of just who Ward had been and what he had done for China.

“When the Chinese officials declared that there were no revenues to maintain [Ward’s] soldiers,”
Foster and Lansing wrote of Ward’s days in command of the Ever Victorious Army, “he unhesitatingly used the money which he had received as a recompense for his own services, relying upon the ultimate success of the Imperialists and the good faith of the Chinese Government to be refunded the sums advanced.” Foster and Lansing then carefully reviewed the claims of Wu Hsü during the estate arbitrations, characterizing the former taotai’s assessments as erroneous, “to use no harsher term.” Foster and Lansing’s logic was irrefutable, but the two men realized that the Chinese government—which had been forced to pay huge indemnities for its sponsorship of the Boxers in 1900—might not have the money to settle accounts with Ward’s heirs. Foster quickly saw that the best chance of gaining a settlement was to suggest that the money be taken from the indemnities the Chinese government was currently paying to the United States. Accordingly, he and Lansing addressed their closing arguments to Washington as well as to Peking:

[I]t is hardly becoming the Government of the United States to allow the reputation of one of its distinguished citizens to be clouded by neglect and by failure to have his just dues recognized.… Mr. Burlingame stated that General Ward was a man of great wealth. Li Hung-chang during his visit to America expressed a high appreciation of his services and said that he should have died a rich man. But it is now known that all that he had accumulated had been advanced to the Chinese Government when in sore need, and that he relied upon its good faith for its return.… It is confidently believed that if the Government of the United States … shall instruct its minister at Peking to ask the attention of the Foreign Office [Tsungli Yamen] to this long delayed claim, it will now take it into its favorable consideration.

The tactic worked, and a sum of 368,237 American dollars was finally paid—out of the Boxer indemnity fund—to the Ward estate. Oddly enough, the only beneficiary was Harry’s ex-wife, a woman who
had not been born into the Ward family, had married out of it by the time of the settlement, and subsequently proved cataclysmically destructive to Frederick Townsend Ward’s legacy and memory by destroying his letters. Irony seemed forever destined to surround Ward’s name.

With the settlement of the estate claims, Ward’s recession into obscurity picked up pace. In the United States, knowledge of his career seemed limited to a few interested citizens of Salem, Massachusetts. One of these citizens, traveling in Italy in 1897, had made a remarkable find, as she later recalled:

I was coming out of the dining room at Hotel Eden in Rome at lunch time and saw Rear-Admiral Bogle, now on the retired list, but for over forty years in the English Navy, showing two bullets to a gentleman. I had got well-acquainted with the Admiral, and I said: “What are these?” He said, “There is the bullet that killed General Ward.” I pricked up my ears and thought at once of General Ward of Salem, who bore a part in suppressing the Chinese Rebellion. I found it was our Ward, and that he [Admiral Bogle, formerly Lieutenant Bogle of the
Hardy
] was in the fight and knew him very well.

The bullet—actually a musket ball—was eventually sent to the Essex Institute in Salem, which, using a bequest from Elizabeth Ward, soon established a division of Oriental studies named for Frederick Townsend Ward. Ward’s few personal belongings, including his mandarin’s cap and boots, were collected at the institute and remain carefully stored there to this day.

As for the memorial hall at Sung-chiang, after the Chinese revolution of 1911 it fell into disrepair and was not rehabilitated until the 1920s, when the American Legion undertook the job. The
Nationalist Chinese, following their assumption of power, took an interest in Ward and the Ever Victorious Army (perhaps as part of their campaign to strengthen their ties to the United States) and on at least one occasion acknowledged a debt to him: In 1934 a Nationalist general who had defended Shanghai from the Japanese visited America and stopped at Ward’s empty grave in Salem’s Harmony Grove Cemetery. Not without effect
the general commented, “We both fought to save Shanghai—he gave his life.”

But the combination of Japanese occupation during the Second World War and Communist rule after 1949 spelled the end of any appreciable acknowledgment of Ward and the Ever Victorious Army within China, or, indeed, throughout the world. That the Japanese should have ransacked Ward’s memorial hall is not surprising, given their attitude toward things American during their period of expansion. But the systematic efforts of the Chinese Communist party to erase all tributes to Ward were even more disillusioning than simpleminded Japanese destructiveness. Having destroyed the memorial hall and whatever other tokens of remembrance or respect to a man they considered an imperialist servant they could find, China’s Communists went on to revise the history of the Taiping era in order to paint Ward’s efforts in the worst possible light. They then dug up Ward’s bones—as well as those of his dog—carefully hid or destroyed them, and, having razed the memorial hall and sacked the grave, paved their grounds and built a public park. All of this seems at first simply callous. Yet the effort was so calculated, so systematic that one soon detects in it more than mere disapproval: There is fear, as well.