The Devil Soldier (6 page)

The exact date of Ward’s introduction to Yang Fang was never recorded, but the energetic young New Englander and the wily old Chinese banker apparently took to each other from the start. Yang did
not, however, hold sufficient bureaucratic power to sanction projects such as the Pirate Suppression Bureau officially, and Ward’s mind was beginning to fill with plans for the protection of Shanghai that went beyond the scope of the bureau. The authority needed to pursue such goals rested with Wu Hsü. Either Ward convinced Admiral Gough to arrange an introduction or the idea was Gough’s own; at any rate, Ward and the taotai finally met, almost certainly in May, with Yang Fang also present.

Wu’s desire to bring Western expertise to bear on the Taiping problem was well known. He could hardly fail to be interested, therefore, when Ward—who, Gough told Wu, was “well trained in the art of war”—offered to organize a small but heavily armed group of free-lance foreigners, lead them into the field, and engage the rebels. The proposed force, said its would-be commander, would prove capable of recapturing vital walled towns and in time even cities. Their pay would be according to a set scale: Ward’s enlisted men would receive approximately fifty American dollars per month (although actual payment would be made in silver Mexican dollars), his officers about two hundred, and Ward himself just over five hundred, plus a handsome bonus for each town recaptured. The amount of the bonus would vary according to the size of the town; but it would, at the very least, reach into the tens of thousands of dollars.

These were heady sums for the place and time. And Wu, Gough’s recommendations notwithstanding, had no hard knowledge of Ward’s background or abilities. Furthermore, Peking was known to look with disapproval on the idea of using Westerners to fight the rebels. Add to this a considerable language barrier and the extent of Ward’s achievement in persuading Wu Hsü to release the vast sums necessary for the training, pay, and equipment of his force becomes clear. True, Wu continued to cover himself in the usual fashion, instructing Yang Fang to take care of the actual payments (most of which were made to Ward through the Pirate Suppression Bureau). And, because Ward was apparently the only man in Shanghai willing to take the field against the rebels, Wu was in no position to be selective. Yet it was still a risk of enormous proportions.

Mere talk would not have persuaded a man of Wu Hsü’s position and experience to take the gamble. Shanghai was full of large talkers, and few of these had ever gained the ear, much less the confidence, of the taotai. There was a real force at work in Ward, one that was apparent to observers and that inspired immediate acceptance of his fantastic claim that he could take a small band of men against the Chung Wang’s legions and come away the victor.

That force had been formed during some fifteen years of adventuring, and during the following two and a half years it would power the evolution of Ward’s small group of mercenaries into a full-fledged army that was crucial to the defeat of the Taipings. The achievement was a lasting one; for, although the conquering hordes of the Chung Wang seemed to represent a “new race of warriors” to some Westerners, the men Ward eventually led against the rebels were the true “new race.” His army was a synthesis of the warlike arts of China and the West, and without it the Chinese empire might not have survived. While forging this unique weapon, Ward lived one of the great adventures in the history of Chinese-Western relations: He rose to become the Chung Wang’s most talented antagonist, snatched his own measure of popularity among the peasants of Kiangsu away from the Taiping general and his cohorts, and finally died a mandarin and a general of the Chinese army—unheard-of honors for a barbarian Westerner.

All this from a man who did not live to see his thirty-first birthday: Ward’s Chinese sponsors were not alone in wondering what could have enabled this American to achieve such heights with such speed.

II
“PERHAPS YOU SMILE …”

Half a world away from the rising star of Shanghai was the fading light of Salem, Massachusetts, once America’s center of international trade but by 1860 wholly overshadowed by Boston and New York. When Frederick Townsend Ward was born here on November 29, 1831, the port was still fighting hard to maintain a share of the Africa, India, and China trades. But the glory days that had seen hundreds of Salem ships coming from and going to every corner of the globe were ending, and the vain struggle to compete only chafed at the nerves of an already cantankerous breed. The citizens of Salem—best known for their 1692 torture and execution of suspected witches—had built a narrow-laned town whose monotonous miles of clapboard and brick gave way to openness and a sense of physical freedom only when they ended: at the waterfront, where the wharves of great trading families such as the Crowninshields stretched out into the sea.

No city or town was more typical of the hypocrisy of pre-Civil War New England than Salem. Preaching puritanism in their churches, Salemites had participated in the American Revolution and then in the War of 1812 by turning their seafaring talents to “privateering,” the gentleman’s euphemism for piracy. Soon thereafter it was abolitionism that became the gospel of choice in New England parlors, yet Salem continued to facilitate that greatest of American crimes, the African slave trade. In the generations before 1861, an estimated 30 percent of all slaves were brought into the United States aboard New England vessels—and
Salem was synonymous with New England shipping. Massachusetts abolitionists might write laws and tracts decrying the evils of the South’s “peculiar institution,” but even at the outbreak of the Civil War masters of Salem ships were being prosecuted for slaving.

The Salem masters were hard and immensely practical men, more than capable of crossing the line between pragmatism and amorality. Uncomfortable with this fact, and with the legacy of their ancestors’ participation in the African slave trade, subsequent generations of Salemites chose to emphasize the port’s seemingly less sordid trade with the Chinese empire. It had been a New England ship that had opened America’s China trade in 1794, and in the following year a full-rigged Salem bark of 310 tons, the
Grand Turk
, had been the second American vessel to reach the Middle Kingdom. At that time only the port of Canton in southern China was open to foreigners, and at first the Salem captains brought primarily goods native to their own region: furs, lead, cotton, and the New England species of the root ginseng (the Chinese belief in the root’s power to restore virility quickly exhausted the empire’s domestic supply). But during the opening decades of the nineteenth century, as American traders discovered the apparently inexhaustible appetite of the Chinese for luxury goods, U.S. ships scoured the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans from Alaska to the Falkland Islands seeking the edible bird’s nests, tortoiseshell, snails, beaver furs, and mother-of-pearl that would command large quantities of tea and silk in the burgeoning Canton markets.

With the coming of the industrial revolution in the West, a new commodity joined tea and silk on the list of principal Chinese exports: cheap human labor. Desperately poor or pitiably naive Chinese were swindled into disingenuous contracts—or simply abducted outright—and then packed into ships and taken abroad to live in conditions that were often as miserable as those they had left behind. Called coolies, these Chinese may not have been outright slaves. But, as in Africa, the morality of the trade did not harmonize with the preachings of New England ministers; yet, as from Africa, New England ships carried the cargo. Nearly every Salem family who could afford them had Chinese servants, and the port eventually became so identified with the China
trade that its parades featured local girls dressed in the finery of Chinese maidens. Underlying this charming veneer, however, was the hard reality of Chinese misfortune.

Thus
one great-grandmother might recall whimsically of Salem during the pre-Civil War era,

The wharves … were lined with ship-chandlers’ and sail-makers’ shops, warehouses, and counting rooms, the sailmakers sitting cross-legged like Turks, sewing the sails with thimbles fastened into the middle of their palm, while the odor of tar and canvas pervaded the premises. The old wharf and sail lofts that fronted the street were favorite resorts of my childhood days and I was never so happy as when allowed to wander about on the old wharf fascinated in watching the loading and unloading of ships that had rounded the point and come lumbering into the port.

Yet other Salem youngsters could detect the dark side of this romance: From his earliest days, the Ward boy called Frederick Townsend showed no attitude toward Salem other than a determined desire to leave it.

How much of this desire was rooted in a simple need to be free from the stifling town and how much was connected to the nature of life in the Ward home is difficult to say. Ward’s family made certain of this after his death when, in a moment of astoundingly narrow-minded destructiveness, they destroyed his personal letters and papers. Although they were both the children of prominent families, Ward’s parents—Frederick Gamaliel and Elizabeth Colburn Ward—changed residences often during their early years together and generally ended up back at the fine brick mansion that was the residence of young Frederick Town-send’s paternal grandfather. Situated near the Crowninshield wharf, the house spoke elegantly of a fine past, as did the poetry with which Ward’s mother embellished her personal writings. But the Ward family, like Salem itself, had passed the crest of its fortunes, and in official town records Ward’s father was described simply as a “mariner.” He would later add ship’s master and ship’s broker to his roster of occupations, but at none of these would he achieve any noteworthy success.

Frederick Townsend was the oldest of four children, and he remained close to two of his younger siblings—his brother Henry and his sister Elizabeth—throughout his thirty years. Henry, known to his brother as Harry, would eventually follow Fred to China and become his partner in a broad range of projects. Elizabeth was her eldest brother’s principal confidante and correspondent. (She kept Ward’s letters and papers carefully stored for decades in four large trunks; it was her executors, a group of cousins as well as her sister-in-law, Harry’s widow, who saw to the destruction of these documents.) According to Ward’s fellow Salemite and first biographer,
Robert S. Rantoul, Fred himself was an unusually quiet child, who uttered no words for the first three years of his life, “and was at last betrayed into speech by an incident which called for action. The cat was breaking into the bird cage, and he rushed, with his first articulate words, to summon his mother. Months elapsed before he spoke again.”

In one history of Salem shipping and sailing, Ward’s father is described as “a stern disciplinarian of the quarterdeck,” and there are many indications that he attempted to apply his shipboard principles at home. His chosen method of swimming instruction, for example, was to strip his young sons and throw them off the wharf, diving in after them to demonstrate his own technique. To be sure, the boys became expert swimmers. But Fred also became famous in Salem for repeating a unique prank: He would deliberately fall off the wharf and feign drowning simply to observe the panic created among adults above. This apparent instinct for making a game of a stern experience was destined to stick—although in later years the games would become quite deadly.

Daniel Jerome Macgowan—an American Baptist missionary and physician who went to China in 1843 and practiced medicine for nearly two decades in the port of Ningpo—was one of the first men to put together a rough sketch of Ward’s China exploits. And although he had no intimate knowledge of Ward’s early life, Macgowan knew enough of the friction between Ward and his father to mention it in his relatively brief account. The elder Ward was apparently “a severe man,” said Macgowan, “whose severity was often complained of in after life by his son.” Yet Fred’s father indulged him in at least one area: sailing. Apparently
intending that his oldest son should follow family tradition, the elder Ward trained his boy to be a master seaman, and by the age of twelve Fred was allowed to sail the family’s fifteen-ton sloop
Vivid
on his own.

Ward’s schoolmates, interviewed by Robert Rantoul at the turn of the century, still remembered with clarity his singular courage and, beyond that, recklessness. Unafraid to take the
Vivid
out at night or in foul weather, Fred often placed himself in tricky situations. Rantoul cites one case in 1843 when Fred transported a group of women, among them his own mother,
to the town of Beverly. Returning in darkness, the sloop encountered a violent storm: “The situation was full of peril. Towards midnight they reached home safe to find the town awake with panic. Throughout the scene Ward sat with a firm hand on the tiller, speechless as the sphynx.” The boy’s brief assessment of the incident was typical: “When the lightning-flashes showed us who were there, I wished myself at home. It would have been all right if it had not been for the women.”

Yet ultimately the sea was not to bind but to further separate Ward and his father. For sailing was the boy’s reality, not his dream, and as he reached adolescence his hopes turned to the prospect of becoming a soldier. In 1846 the United States went to war with Mexico, and early in 1847 one of Daniel Webster’s sons raised a company of volunteers and paraded them through the streets of Salem. Ward, not yet sixteen, was determined to join the effort. In the company of another Salem youth, he set out one night to follow the troops. The boys’ plan and path were discovered before daylight, however, and Ward was brought back to face his father’s displeasure.

Ward’s mother, by contrast, viewed her son’s martial longings with somewhat more sympathy—that, at any rate, was the view expressed by
Charles Schmidt, later one of Ward’s officers in China and a man who had, by his own reckoning, “a very intimate acquaintance” with Ward. “The seeds—the germ—of command were so strongly imbedded in him,” wrote Schmidt,