The Devil Soldier by Caleb Carr Read Free Book Online Page B

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—andSalem 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