Frederick Townsend Ward
In the early months of 1837, a 23 year-old Chinese guy named Hong Xiuquan failed his civil service exam for the fourth time, had a nervous breakdown, set all of his Confucianist and Buddhist texts and paraphernalia on fire, and declared that he was Jesus Christ’s younger brother sent to purge the world of evil and demons and the Qing Dynasty. He had the local blacksmith from his middle-of-nowhere town forge a giant three-foot-long double-edged broadsword called the Sword for the Extermination of Demons, immediately had that badass sword stolen from him by bandits, and then just started wandering around the countryside preaching a doctrine that was a weird mix between hardcore ultra-militant Protestantism and proto-communist Utopianism, where the religious texts were basically just him writing down his hallucinations and creating bad poetry about how he was going to kill everyone in the world.
By January of 1851, Hong Xiuquan was going by the name Heavenly King, and his God-Worshipping Society had a congregation of around 30,000 converts. The armies of the Chinese Imperial Qing Dynasty came to his small town to David Koresh him for causing too much trouble, but Hong and his followers ambushed the Imperial column, slaughtered them, and declared their town a new independent monarchy called the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace (which, of course, would ironically be in a state of constant war for its entire existence).
Three years after that, the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace conquered Nanjing, the historic southern capital of Imperial China, and established it as their new capital. Their army now numbered nearly 500,000 men and held territory in 17 Chinese provinces.
It was the beginning of the largest and bloodiest civil war in the history of the world.
And if that's not weird enough for you, hold my beer, because we're just getting started.
When American adventurer Frederick Townsend Ward landed on the docks of Shanghai on 4/20 of 1860, he hadn't landed there with the intention of defending the Chinese Emperor from Jesus's kid brother by crashing into hordes of fanatical militant Baptists with a speedboat he customized by strapping a half-dozen bigass cannons onto the front of it. Ward was just kind of a career adventurer, mercenary, and troublemaker, and he was there primarily to find out if his particular skillset of punching, stabbing, and shooting was capable of making him a little bit of extra cash.
Born in Salem, Massachusetts on November 29, 1831, Frederick Townsend Ward's story also begins with academic failure – when he received his rejection letter from West Point he immediately left home, hopped a ship, and started looking for adventures as a mercenary. His early adventures put him all over the map – he left home at fifteen, and by twenty-one he was in Mexico fighting bandits, rebels, and other leftovers from the Mexican-American War. After that he turns up in the Crimea, serving as a French Army officer in combat against the Russians during the Crimean War, but apparently at some point he was forced to resign rather than be dishonorably discharged for insubordination to a commanding officer (awesome). From there he went back to Mexico, I guess, where he might have been a Texas Ranger for a couple years, and then after that he got a job on a ship that smuggled guns into China and Chinese immigrants into California. Or something like that. The dude is pretty mysterious.
Anyway, what we do know is that in 1860 Ward was 29 years old and working as first mate on a gunboat called the Confucius that was part of Shanghai's Pirate Suppression Bureau, which totally sounds like an anime I would watch. Operating out of the Shanghai docks at a time when shanghaiing started being used as a verb that meant "getting jacked over the head with a bottle and forced into military service", Ward sailed up and down the rivers of Jiangsu Province blowing up pirates, bandits, and, ever-more-increasingly, Taiping Crusaders.
Now, by this time, the Heavenly King and his Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace had been crushing Imperial balls up and down the Chinese countryside for almost a decade. The Taiping Rebellion (taiping means "great peace", which is just tremendous) had been incredibly successful against the armies of the Qing Dynasty, smashing the Emperor's cities and armies everywhere they faced them, gathering a huge number of troops, and completely eradicating any cities and slaughtering every person who didn't join them with extreme brutality. Part of their success was due to the Imperial military's extreme corruption, incompetent generals, and all of that, but a lot of it was also that the Taiping had an excellent engineering corps of former coal miners who were well-trained in the use of high explosives, and their typical strategy was to tunnel under enemy walls and bring down the city defenses with subterranean dynamite attacks. Which is pretty freakin' rad. By 1860, the armies of Taiping were almost unstoppable – in the north, they were just 80 miles from the Emperor's Palace in Beijing, and, in the south, they were within a day's march from the walls of Shanghai. From his throne in Nanjing, surrounded by a huge harem of teenage girls and huge piles of drugs, the Heavenly King continued descending into hallucinatory madness, but nobody really seemed to notice, since most of his guys were too busy being psyched up about overthrowing the Imperial system and destroying Confucianism.
Well, all of this caused a pretty big problem for the rich bankers of Shanghai, who were pretty sure they were going to all be set on fire if the Taiping ever entered the city, so these guys started thinking about how they were going to defend the world's busiest port city from literally a million heavily-armed religious zealots that were fanatically devoted to the idea that setting them on fire was a moral imperative.
They found their answer in Frederick Townsend Ward, the random American drifter from the Pirate Suppression Bureau.
One day, a wealthy Shanghai banker named Yang Feng approached Ward about possibly hiring him to help defend Shanghai against this rampaging army of gunslinging fanatics. Ward was a pretty relentless self-promoter who loved to talk a big game about himself, and this guy was of course super in to the idea of raising his own Mercenary company and then using it to crush his enemies. He created the Shanghai Foreign Arms Corps, which is just a fancy way of saying he wandered the wharfs and docks of Shanghai recruiting Royal Navy deserters, longshoremen, and basically any white guy he could find who happened to be hanging out by the ocean and was interested in getting paid $100 a month to shoot people in the face.
Ward's mission was pretty basic – form an international mercenary organization, which was super illegal because both the United States and Great Britain (and the rest of Europe) had officially declared neutrality during the conflict, raise an army, and then take Songjiang, a heavily-fortified city at a crucial crossroads just a day's march from the walls of Shanghai. Yang Feng and the businessmen of Shanghai would pay Ward and his men a salary, outfit them with uniforms and weapons, and then pay them $100,000 if they captured the city. Ok, sure thing.
Now of course, this is all going on in the year 1860, at a time when most Europeans didn't really have any respect for the intelligence or fighting ability of anyone who wasn't European, so when Ward and the Shanghai Foreign Arms Corps marched out to capture Songjiang they really didn't have any clue what they were going up against or any respect for their enemy. The Corps stomped through the swamplands, won a small battle against some Taiping skirmishers, got super pumped up out of their minds, slammed enough rum to drown a pirate and then drunkenly assaulted the walls of Songjiang in a drunken rage and were completely crushed into oblivion by a competent well-prepared defensive position of angry zealots with rifled muskets and heavy artillery.
Ok, that wasn't a great start, and Ward limped back to Shanghai with the shattered remnants of his army, most of whom deserted him immediately after the battle. Realizing that hiring an army of degenerate drifters, drunken fishermen, and Royal Navy rejects probably wasn't the best way to build an effective infantry brigade, Ward then replenished his ranks with a crew of badass Filipino warriors who had happened to be in port when he got back. He added these guys to what was left of his Foreign Arms Corps and attacked Songjiang again, this time with a regiment of Imperial Qing soldiers there to help back him up. The plan was pretty basic – Ward and the Filipinos snuck up to the walls of Songjiang in the dead of night, dragging a couple huge-ass cannons with them, and blasted the front gate to pieces at point-blank range with the guns. When that blew open, Ward and a couple of his brave compatriots rushed forward with barrels of gunpowder, braving a hail of Taiping gunfire until they reached the interior gate (it was a double-walled city) and blew that up as well. Ward personally led the attack through the breach, firing a six-shooter in each hand, and rushed into the city to take it from the rebels.
Once he was in the walls, Ward fired off a signal flare telling the Qing army to come in and help exploit the breach, but the Imperial forces ignored it and just left Ward in there to die.
Surrounded on all sides by hardcore Taiping warriors, Ward and the men from Manila fought ferociously, hacking with machetes, firing rifles and pistols, and wheeling around artillery, and, against all odds, when the smoke cleared they held the city. Of the 200 men in his command, only Ward and 40 others survived.
A month later Ward moved to attack the city of Qingpu, but by this point the Taiping were ready for him. The Taiping commander in the region, Zhong Wang (the Heavenly King re-named all of his top commanders Wang, which I know I'm not supposed to think is funny but I can't help it), heavily reinforced the city walls, and when Ward and his depleted forces attacked they were greeted by like 20,000 Taiping warriors in entrenched firing positions. Ward took a bullet to the face and his Corps was driven back with very heavy casualties.
It took Frederick Townsend Ward a few months to recover from having his jaw shattered by a musketball, and while he was recovering he spent a lot of time getting yelled at by various governmental representatives. The Qing were mad at Yang Feng for hiring foreign devils to fight for China. The UK was mad because Ward was violating their neutrality and threatening to get Europe involved in this war (which they didn't want to do because they were just going to wait it out and set up trade rights with whoever won). And the US was also mad, because they were having a Civil War of their own and that sort of thing can put anybody in a pretty bad mood.
Two things ended up happening from this – first, Frederick Townsend Ward avoided prosecution by renouncing his American citizenship, marrying Yang Feng's daughter, and becoming an Imperial Chinese subject. Second, the British arrested him and threw him in a prison ship in the middle of Shanghai harbor.
He escaped his cell on the brig in the middle of the night, squeezed out through a narrow porthole on the side of the ship, swam through the freezing waters to a skiff that had been brought up by a couple of his Filipino sergeants, and rowed back to Shanghai. He had a job to do, and a city to defend, and all of his time laid up in recovery had given him plenty of time to come up with a new plan on how to make that happen.
Ward’s new Corps.
With the city now surrounded and besieged by the armies of Zhong Wang and his nearly 200,000 Taiping revolutionaries, Ward abandoned the idea of just hiring white people and got to work building a new type of mercenary corps – one that incorporated local Shanghai people as soldiers and fighters. Building around his core crew of the surviving Western and Filipino soldiers that had survived his previous expeditions, Ward recruited nearly 3,000 Chinese soldiers, most of them just able-bodied civilians who were sick and tired of these Taiping nutjobs burning, looting, and murdering anyone who didn't convert to their crazy religion. He outfitted everyone with modern arms and uniforms, drilled and trained them in everything from small-unit tactics to the operation of heavy artillery, and organized his units into companies with designated officers, sergeants, snipers, artillerymen, and logistical elements. He brought in every artillery piece he could find, imported brand-new breech-loader rifles from Prussia that were light-years beyond even the rifles that were currently being used in the American Civil War, and even got his hands on a few gunboats that he loaded up with additional cannons and weapons.
At first, the locals of Shanghai talked a lot of trash about Ward's new corps. These guys were decked out in European-style uniforms with green turbans and marched around in Western military style, causing some of the Imperial troops to refer to the Corps as "imitation foreign devils."
When they saw these guys in action at the Battle of Shanghai in 1861, they stopped laughing.
Because these guys wrecked shit.
Ward's Corps took part in the defense of Shanghai, joining up with Western and Imperial forces to drive off a massive assault by nearly 120,000 Taiping soldiers, but they really started to take on a reputation a few months later, when Zhong Wang was trying to bring up a reinforcement column of nearly 20,000 additional soldiers. Frederick Townsend Ward, at the head of his new ultra-modern fighting force, figured out where the reinforcements were and raced his guys 25 miles over snow and frozen rivers in the dead of January to attack the vanguard. With an assault team of just 500 men, Ward attacked the city of Guangfulin with such a rapid and daring assault that he drove off the entire relief column – nearly 20,000 guys, chased off by 500. He followed it up by taking those guys and defeating two other Taiping brigades, striking with lightning efficiency, hitting hard, and then driving back the enemy. By the end of the campaign, Ward's corps stopped being called "Imitation Foreign Devils," and earned a new official title, bestowed upon them by the Emperor himself:
The Ever-Victorious Army.
Frederick Townsend Ward quickly became a master of fighting the enemy throughout the swamps and wetlands of Jiangsu Province. He'd use his gunboats to zip up and down the canals and rivers, assault enemy positions from the directions they least expected it, breach the walls with scaling ladders, open fire with revolvers, breech-loaders, and artillery, crush his foes, and then peel out of there on gunboats before reinforcements arrived (I picture this going down like that scene in Act of Valor with Civil War tech). Ward himself personally led the attacks, carrying just a drill instructor-style swagger stick and wearing civilian clothes, and the fact that he kept on doing this even after being wounded fourteen damn times (including having a finger blown off by a musketball) led some soldiers on both sides to whisper that maybe this guy had some crazy magical powers or something. Ward, of course, did nothing to discourage these thoughts.
this is Chinese Gordon with the EVA but you get the idea.
Winning battle after battle and making life incredibly hard for Taiping forces across the province made Ward an instant celebrity, and eventually he was even given the rank of Imperial General of the Second Rank – the Imperial Chinese equivalent of a Lieutenant-General. Zhong Wang got so pissed at one point that he personally attacked Ward's Ever-Victorious Army with a force of 20,000 men, but Ward and his 2,000 guys dug in to heavily-fortified trenches, waited for Wang to get close, and then opened up on him with camouflaged artillery from every direction that ripped the assault apart and drove back the attack with heavy losses.
Ward and the Ever-Victorious Army helped turn the tide of the Taiping Rebellion in Jiangsu, but, sadly, the EVA's commander wouldn't survive to see the final defeat of the Heavenly King. At the Battle of Cixi in September 1862, Ward was hit in the stomach by a musketball while leading a charge on the enemy walls. He demanded to say on the battlefield long enough to watch his men scale the walls, overrun the defenders, and raise the flag with his name on it above the walls of the city, and died knowing that his men were just a few miles from the walls of the Heavenly King's palace.
Ward would be replaced by a British officer known as Chinese Gordon, whose story I will tell on this website in the relatively near future, and Gordon would lead the Ever-Victorious Army through the end of the war. Joined by Imperial troops, and other guerilla forces such as Zeng Guofan's Hunan Braves, the armies of Qing Dynasty China slowly pushed back the rebel forces and regained control of China. The Heavenly King died in June of 1864, just before the fall of Nanjing, and his last commander, Zhong Wang, was executed by "death from a thousand cuts" on August 7, 1864, marking the end of the Taiping Rebellion.
Frederick Townsend Ward remains the most honored American soldier in Chinese history. The Qing Dynasty built a monument to him in Nanjing (Mao bulldozed it in the 1950s), and the site of his death has a small shrine for him with a headstone. American Legion Post Number One in China is named for him, one of the greatest (and strangest) unsung heroes in American military history.
