The Devil Soldier (8 page)

The Chinese bureaucracy again betrayed the interests of the empire by facilitating the opium trade. Not only was the official, or mandarin, class populated by thousands of opium smokers and eaters but these men simultaneously made fortunes off Western bribes. Increasingly frantic edicts from Peking forbidding the use of opium were useless, and in 1838 one unusually
honest mandarin memorialized to Emperor Tao-kuang:

There are opium dens in every prefecture of the country, and they are kept as a rule by magistrates’ constables and soldiers from the army, who gather together dissolute youngsters from rich local families to indulge in the pipe where they can’t be seen. As most of the clerks in the magistracies share the same taste, they are sure to be protected. I beg your majesty to set a date a year from now after which all smokers who persist in their addiction will be put to death. For mark my words a man will bear the discomfort of a cure if he knows that by doing so he has earned the privilege of dying in bed, whereas indulgence in his craving will bring him to the execution-ground.

But there were opponents of such forceful measures in the government as well, and not all of them were addicted to opium or agents of the trade. Some merely saw the practical problems: “If a man is to fall foul of the law just for taking a pipe of opium,” said one such official, “prisoners will be lined up along the roads, as there won’t be room for them in the gaols. The whole thing is absolutely impracticable.”

In the end, the emperor gave his support to attacking not the demand but the supply side of the opium problem. In 1839 one of the great figures of Manchu history, Imperial Commissioner Lin Tse-hsü, arrived in Canton, forcefully penned the foreigners up in their factories, and flushed 20,000 chests of opium into the sea. It is possible that the Chinese did not realize the extent to which the Western presence in China depended on the drug; it is possible that they believed—of policy as of battle—that a defiant act and a great deal of noise would intimidate their enemy and cause his withdrawal. Instead, the British went to war with typically businesslike determination, and
the Chinese got their first taste of Western combat.

It was a sobering experience. The British, said Chinese commanders, had steamships that could “fly across the water, without wind or tide, with the current or against it,” as well as amazingly accurate cannon that were “mounted on stone platforms, which can be turned in any direction.” As for the Chinese response, lamented
one official, not only were the empire’s cannon antiquated and her troops poorly trained and disciplined but “our military affairs are in the hands of civil officials, who are very likely admirable calligraphists but know nothing of war.” The outcome was inevitable. After putting things right in Canton, the British seized the ports of Amoy, Chefoo, and Ningpo. In June 1842 a British fleet entered the mouth of the Yangtze River and, on its way to Nanking, overpowered Shanghai easily. Nanking offered even less resistance, and on August 29, 1842, an infamous treaty destined to bear that city’s name was signed aboard the British warship
Cornwallis
.

The Treaty of Nanking and the supplementary Treaty of the Bogue
a year later set the pattern of Chinese-Western relations for the remaining life of the Manchu dynasty. In addition to securing pledges of increased trade and tolerance of missionary activities, the English were allowed to establish settlements in four treaty ports besides Canton—Ningpo, Foochow, Amoy, and Shanghai—and were granted the privilege of extraterritoriality, of being governed by their own laws and courts while residing in a foreign country. The French soon secured the same rights the English had exacted, and in 1844 it was the turn of the Americans. Minister plenipotentiary Caleb Cushing negotiated the Treaty of Wanghia, by which the Chinese granted the United States “most favored nation” status: Any advantages already given to any other power—as well as any advantages granted in the future—were automatically conceded to the United States as well.

The Americans made much of their having obtained from the Chinese by friendly negotiation what the British had taken by force, and it was during this period that the peculiarly persistent notion that the Chinese preferred Americans to other foreigners took hold. The assertion was doubtless valid when applied to relations between Western and Chinese merchants, but U.S. officials in China repeatedly warned their superiors against believing that it had any application to dealings with the Manchu rulers of the empire. As one such official said, “It is quite a mistake to suppose that the rulers of China have any
regard
for one nation more than another; that they are more friendly, for instance, towards the Americans than towards the English; they may, perhaps,
fear
the English and Russians more than they do the Americans, but they would be glad if none of them ever came near them.”

As for the opium trade, it expanded dramatically following the opening of the new treaty ports. And the spread of the drug was now facilitated by unlikely allies: Protestant missionaries. Considering Chinese paganism a worse sin than opium addiction, these Christian soldiers often found themselves transported on smugglers’ ships and protected by smugglers’ guns. At least one prominent missionary, the Dutchman Karl Friedrich August Gutzlaff—whose translations of the Bible and Christian tracts into Chinese were to become standard works—actually hired himself out as an interpreter for opium dealers,
defiantly declaring that by using their money to finance his missionary labors he was making the devil do the Lord’s work.

The Chinese were quite alive to the fact that Christianity was the spearhead of foreign commercial and political barbarism, and the ferocity of their published attacks on the Westerners’ faith was not surprising: “Those who enter this religion practise sodomy without restraint,” declared
one Chinese pamphlet. “Every seventh day they perform worship which they call the Mass … [and] when the ceremony is over all give themselves up to indiscriminate sexual intercourse.… They call it the ‘Great Communion.’… They reject and ignore the natural relations, and are in other respects like beasts.” A further appeal was made to Chinese reason: “How is it possible for the Son of God (Shang-ti) to take the form of a man and be born?—When sin has once been committed, how is it possible to atone for it?—Before Jesus was born, in whose hand was the government of the universe?—When his body had ascended to heaven, how could he have a grave for men to worship? Preposterous stories, inconsistent with themselves!”

Such strident criticism produced results: Of the comparatively few Chinese peasants who heeded the calls of the foreign missionaries, many met a gruesome end.

But at the same time,
foreign
had a broad application among Chinese peasants. Two hundred years after the invasion of the Manchus, many citizens still considered their Tartar conquerors to fall within that category. The collapse of the Chinese economy and the humiliation of Manchu soldiers in the Opium War heightened the volatility of the disaffected, who sensed that the dynasty was weakening. That Manchu corruption was at least as responsible for China’s predicament as were the Westerners was obvious even to the poorly educated, and before the 1840s were over, rebellion was in the air. “[N]othing is more likely,” wrote Thomas Taylor Meadows, one of Britain’s most perceptive officials on the scene, “now that the prestige of Manchu power in war has received a severe shock in the late encounters with the English, than that a Chinese Belisarius will arise and extirpate or drive into Tartary the Manchu garrisons … who … have greatly deteriorated in the military virtues; while they still retain enough of the insolence of conquerors, to gain themselves the hatred of the Chinese.”

That Belisarius was not destined to rise until two years after the American clipper
Hamilton
sailed out of Hong Kong with a cargo of tea and silk early in 1848. But the
Hamilton’s
young second mate, Frederick Townsend Ward, would return to China several times over the coming decade, and the opportunities offered by the empire’s sickened state were ultimately to hold for him a fatal attraction.

Ward’s military ardor showed no signs of cooling after his return to Salem. Many accounts state that he attempted to gain admittance to West Point but was blocked when the appointment went to a relative of one of Salem’s congressmen. Whether or not this is so, 1848 found Ward enrolled at the American Literary, Scientific and Military Academy, a private institution in Vermont later known as Norwich University. His months at the academy—which offered courses in strategy, tactics, drill, and engineering—provided the only formal military training he would ever receive. Yet despite the great interest he had always shown in land warfare, and in spite of the fact that he was acknowledged to be something of a natural leader, his stay at the academy was a short one. Formal education had never been a strong suit with Ward, and his family’s circumstances apparently would not bear an extended course of study. Given these factors, as well as his father’s consistent hostility toward military pursuits, it is not surprising that December 16, 1849, found Ward putting once more to sea, this time on the
Russell Glover
, captained by his father and bound for San Francisco.

The ship reached its destination in May 1850, and for the next twelve to eighteen months Ward’s movements cannot be traced with any certainty. He was forced for a time to remain aboard the
Russell Glover
as shipkeeper while she was in port, a duty he found frustrating. This frustration could only have been aggravated by the madness of the ongoing gold rush in California; indeed there were several reports that Ward tried his hand at prospecting.

More important, Ward claimed in later life to have made the acquaintance during his youth of the great Sardinian revolutionary and Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi, and if that story was more than fanciful boasting, the meeting almost certainly took place during this time. Garibaldi, who had aided nationalist struggles in Latin America
during the 1840s, once again journeyed from Europe to the Western Hemisphere in 1850. Spending almost a year in New York, he sailed in April 1851 for Nicaragua, Panama, and finally Peru, where he remained until the beginning of 1852. This was a dormant period in Garibaldi’s career, during which his personal finances, along with his plans for an Italian nation-state, were in disarray. He spent the sojourn trying to make money rather than inciting revolution. For both Garibaldi and Ward, then, these years were, as
one Garibaldi biographer put it, “uneventful, unrecorded, unmemorable.” But did their paths ever cross?

Ward’s future second-in-command in China, Edward Forester, wrote in 1896 that he first met Ward in South America, although he did not mention a date. However, since most of Ward’s remaining years are accounted for, and since none of them involved travels to points farther south than Mexico, it is possible that the meeting with Forester took place in late 1850 or 1851. This would tend to reinforce the suggestion that during this time Ward took ship from San Francisco south to Panama or even to the port of Callao in Peru. He could easily have found a post on one of the many ships that worked this commonly traveled route, and the trip would have placed him in close proximity to Garibaldi.

The actual circumstances of the encounter, even whether it took place at all, are perhaps less important than Ward’s enthusiasm for Garibaldi and what he represented. The great liberator’s exploits in South America—where he had fought a brutal guerrilla war in Uruguay, married a courageous native woman, and finally emerged a renowned hero—were the stuff of high romance. Garibaldi’s politics may have been ultimately vague (the “liberator” was destined one day to be called dictator and to ride through the streets of Naples in a carriage with King Victor Emmanuel), but his courage, his stamina, and his talent for unconventional warfare were beyond question. These were all qualities that Ward later embodied and prized in other men. And, again like Garibaldi, Ward was inattentive and somewhat inept when dealing with life’s more pragmatic questions, such as earning a living.

Late in 1851 that question came up again, and Ward took his customary step of shipping out on an American trading vessel. Now an experienced officer, he accepted the post of first mate on a bark bound
from San Francisco for Shanghai. The practical decision to return to sea was in no way an indication that Ward’s desire for military employment had subsided. Far from it. As Charles
Schmidt wrote, “he meant some day to fulfil the destiny allotted to him.… In order to get at the final object of his every day study, he took to going to sea, thinking that by observing the difference of chances in other climes he might finally succeed in gaining that object easily. He did not go therefore from choice, or with the intention of becoming a great navigator.”

Ward’s choice of destination, however, may well have been deliberate. For by early 1852 rumors of rebellion and chaos had begun to make their way out of the Chinese empire—rumors that brought more than one foreign soldier of fortune to the treaty ports in the hope of finding a market for his talents.

The year 1850 had witnessed the sudden rise to eminence in China of two men who, though they were enemies, shared dismal personal shortcomings that were destined to bring the empire to the verge of collapse. The first of these was Hsien-feng, son of the old emperor Tao-kuang. While Tao-kuang had never been prescient or progressive in his dealings with the West (even after the Opium War he referred to the British not as adversaries but as “rebels,” demonstrating his continued belief that China occupied a place above all other nations), he had not been entirely foolish. The opening of the five treaty ports had involved a strategy, albeit one of appeasement: By granting the foreigners the right to live and trade in the five cities, it was hoped that their appetite for commerce would be sated enough to make future concessions unnecessary. Therefore, while Tao-kuang was alive the Westerners were given no further cause for serious complaint.