by Ron Chernow
Never again did Grant undertake such an arduous journey. On Christmas Eve, he returned home after midnight from dinner with friends. After alighting from the cab, he turned to give his driver a Christmas tip and stumbled on the icy pavement. He may have fractured his left hip or torn a thigh muscle and he was confined to bed for several weeks. Days later pleurisy set in, headaches flared up, he was troubled by boils and bedsores, and he suffered insomnia. Through it all, he remained stoical and uncomplaining, even as visitors noticed a profound alteration in him. “He had grown very old-looking,” recalled General George Stannard, “and his face looked as though some great sorrow had befallen him.”54 By February, he moved about the house on crutches, despite rheumatism in his legs, and felt well enough to grouse that he opposed Chester Arthur’s renomination for president, preferring his old Stalwart comrade John Logan.
In March 1884, at the behest of doctors, Grant went with Julia to Old Point Comfort, Virginia, hoping warm weather and physical therapy would alleviate his condition. Later in the month, he traveled to Washington, held court at a local hotel, and received a parade of political visitors. When he ventured a surprise visit to the House of Representatives, a recess was called so that members could pump his hand. Still the symbol of North-South reconciliation, he entertained a delegation of black soldiers and sailors and lent his prestige to a new home for disabled Confederate veterans. Though still lame, Grant summoned up the strength to address veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic before heading back to New York City.
For all his medical troubles, Grant luxuriated in freedom from financial care. As Badeau recalled, “He told me that in December for the first time in his life he had a bank account from which he could draw as freely as he desired,” and he liberally dispensed gifts to his children.55 In this hopeful mood, Grant sketched out in an interview a rosy view of America’s future, with the population booming to one hundred million and manufacturing surging in the South. He reserved fond words for his adopted city: “New York City will . . . retain her ascendancy over all other places in the country, and I expect the people living at the end of the present century will see New York the financial center of the world.”56 Much of this optimism arose from Grant’s continuing delight with Ferdinand Ward, whose wife, Ella, gave birth in March 1884 to a boy named Ferdinand Grant Ward. When a friend warned that Ward’s profits were suspect, Grant didn’t care to listen and pooh-poohed such pedestrian caution. “These are able and experienced businessmen who are engaged with Ward. They would not be likely to take part in any foolish scheme.”57
On his journey through life, Grant had survived many toils and snares and been betrayed by false friends, but his innocent belief in people, inherited from Hannah, was now to suffer one final crushing blow. He would have benefitted from an atom of his father’s cynicism. For three months, Ward had secretly raced about town, borrowing money from four big trust companies to stave off financial disaster. In this frenetic state, he grew pallid and thin. On Sunday afternoon May 4, he unexpectedly visited Grant at East Sixty-Sixth Street and disgorged a woeful tale of how the Marine National Bank had run into trouble and might fail, threatening the $660,000 Grant & Ward held there. To avert this and give the bank time to collect its loans, Ward appealed to Grant to raise $150,000 that would be repaid within twenty-four hours. “I know the General can borrow it if anyone can,” Ward asserted.58 In reality, Ward was rushing to rescue Grant & Ward itself, which owed $1.3 million to the Marine National Bank, premised on fictitious collateral. Of such knowledge, Grant was as innocent as a child.
Still hobbling on crutches, he agreed to see William H. Vanderbilt and plead with him for $150,000. The son of Commodore Vanderbilt, and heir to a vast railroad empire, William was a heavyset man with flaring sideburns. Unlike Grant, he paid dutiful attention to business. At first Grant balked at borrowing from Vanderbilt, afraid he wouldn’t be repaid at once. But Ward insisted that Grant would simply be swapping guaranteed checks with Vanderbilt. Grabbing his crutches, Grant escorted Ward and Buck to Vanderbilt’s palatial Fifth Avenue residence. Receiving the group in his ornate home, Vanderbilt was startled by their request. He had never done such a thing before, he said, but he revered Grant and handed him a check for $150,000. In exchange, Grant gave him a Grant & Ward check with the proviso that he not cash it for a day or two. With Vanderbilt’s check in hand, Ward assured Grant everything was now fine. The former two-term president and hero of the Civil War had been reduced to an errand boy for a young charlatan. When a friend called on him that evening, Grant was in a cheerful mood and invited him to attend a poker game that Tuesday night. “Ward is certainly coming, and the party is made,” he declared.59
The next day, a frantic Ward beseeched Buck to secure another $500,000 loan from William Vanderbilt: “I am very much afraid that the end has come and that, unless something is done to-night, everything will be over to-morrow . . . This is our last hope, Buck, so do all you can.”60 New York City had pulled $1 million from its Marine National account and the bank couldn’t call in loans fast enough to cover the withdrawal. Ward had borrowed and written enormous checks on the bank, despite having nothing substantial on deposit there. The Marine National suffered a shortfall of nearly $1 million with the Clearing House. Armed with a satchel full of cash and securities, which he hoped to use as collateral for a large rescue loan, James D. Fish hastened to the bank association “acting like a man dazed with fright.”61 But his desperate move was insufficient to paper over the yawning deficit. On Tuesday, May 6, when the Marine National Bank closed, angry depositors swarmed outside its padlocked doors, desperate to retrieve their money. As a general partner of Grant & Ward, Fish next made his way to Brooklyn Heights, where Ella Ward told him Ferdie was too tired to see him. Fish brusquely shoved her aside and mounted the stairs only to discover that Ward had slipped out a basement door. Anticipating the collapse of his scheme, Ward had made over the deed of the house to his wife.
Around noon on May 6, Ulysses S. Grant arrived at 2 Wall Street with the serene confidence of a self-styled millionaire who thought he had reaped fabulous profits from his investment. He found a growing crowd mingling on the sidewalk in a strange hubbub of excitement. After entering, Grant moved steadily on his crutches toward Ward’s office, an unlit cigar in his mouth. In a gesture that must have mystified him, people doffed their hats when they saw him. He was promptly intercepted by Buck, who blurted out, “Father, you had better go home. The bank has failed.”62 Grant was stunned, having had no forewarning of the disaster. When Badeau arrived, he found his dazed patron sitting alone. “We are all ruined here,” Grant announced. “The bank has failed. Mr. Ward cannot be found. The securities are locked up in the safe, and he has the key. No one knows where he is.”63 A shattered Grant conferred with Roscoe Conkling, looking “weary and troubled,” a reporter wrote.64
Grant expected Ward to materialize with a soothing explanation, but the young man had vanished and Grant took refuge in his upstairs office. He summoned the cashier George Spencer, who brought out ledgers that had recorded Grant & Ward’s phantom profits. “Spencer,” Grant asked, grasping his armchair, “how is it that man has deceived us all in this way?” The cashier could not elucidate for Grant the mystery of human nature. “I don’t see how I can ever trust any human being again,” Grant said, sinking his face in his hands.65 The whole operation had been a monstrous hoax. As a Marine National director concluded, “The transactions of Grant & Ward constituted the most colossal swindle of the age.”66 Enlightenment came too late for Ulysses S. Grant, who left his Wall Street office for the last time at 2:15 p.m., offering no comment to waiting reporters. “I cannot deny or corroborate the reports current,” Buck told them. “We are nearly $500,000 short. Our safes are locked and until we can find Mr. Ward I cannot say how we stand.”67 It was a damaging admission: Buck and his father lacked access to the firm’s own safe, which they had assumed bulged with $1.3 million in blue-chip securities. As unsophisticated,
in the last analysis, as his father, Buck kept reiterating to him that “Ferd would come out right yet; he had no doubt he would come out right.”68
When Grant took a streetcar uptown, he ran into his old friend James B. Fry, whom he had invited to his poker party that evening. “We will not have the meeting I fixed for tonight,” he informed Fry. “I have bad news.” “Why, general,” said Fry, “I hope it is nothing serious.” “Yes,” Grant said, “the Marine Bank has failed or is about to fail. It owes our firm a large amount, and I suppose we are ruined. When I went downtown this morning I thought I was worth a great deal of money, now I don’t know that I have a dollar; and probably my sons, too, have lost everything.”69
Grant was correct. He and his three sons had plowed their life savings into the criminal venture. Instead of being worth $1 million, Grant was suddenly worth $80 and Julia $130. The magical profits had evaporated overnight. In the coming days, as evidence of Ward’s giant fraud emerged, Grant discovered that checks he had given to him for deposit in the Marine National Bank had been diverted into Ward’s own bank account. Similarly, the rapacious Ward had taken money from Grant for railroad bonds that were never bought, even as Grant’s bank books registered punctual dividend payments. The final reckoning revealed the wholesale looting of hapless clients: the firm owed investors $16,792,647 against a paltry $68,174.30 in assets.70
The day after it went bust, the Young Napoleon of Finance, in a paroxysm of weeping, hand-wringing hysterics, confessed his sins to Ulysses and Buck Grant. In later testimony, Buck said Ward broke down and admitted he had been “a wicked thief and a great rascal” who had cheated the Grant family from the outset. Grant then told Ward “that the least he could do would be to tell the truth in the matter. Ward promised to do so.”71 Just when he least expected it, the wheel of fortune had thrown Grant back into a forgotten world of hardship, reminiscent of prewar days. Dazed and stunned, he receded into a defeated solitude. When James Fish confronted Ward, he was far less patient than Grant. “I advised him to go and commit suicide,” Fish said. “Drown himself, hang himself.”72 Fish unpacked a string of expletives, cursing Ward as “a miserable dirty reptile,” then picked up a chair and threatened to smash it over his head. Ward “crouched down on the floor at my feet and held up his hands and whined like a puppy.”73
The honorable Grant agonized over the $150,000 Grant & Ward had borrowed from William H. Vanderbilt. The day after the firm’s failure, he went to Vanderbilt to convey to him title to his East Sixty-Sixth Street house. In a profound act of contrition, the ruined ex-president was ready to transfer his worldly possessions to one of America’s richest men. Vanderbilt accepted Grant’s East Sixty-Sixth Street residence on condition that the Grants stay there. He also decided that, after Grant died, he would take the swords, medals, trophies, and memorabilia Grant had gathered from the Civil War and his round-the-world trip and donate them to the federal government. Grant even deeded to Vanderbilt ownership of his St. Louis property. Meanwhile the push was renewed in Congress to place Grant on the retired army list with the rank and pay of general of the army.
For the moment, the Grants were flat broke, and, when they paid the domestic help, the checks bounced. By a grim irony, Grant couldn’t collect anything from the $250,000 trust fund bestowed upon him by rich businessmen because the money had been invested by Ward in the bonds of a defaulted company. “We are all paupers now,” Grant said bluntly as he and Julia awoke from their highfalutin dreamworld of riches.74 “Imagine the shock to us,” wrote Julia, “who thought we were independently wealthy.”75 The Grants returned to a state of misery they thought they had long ago escaped. Reeling from the shock, Grant succumbed to a murderous rage, recalled former senator Chaffee. “The General would suffer for hours in his large arm chair, clutching nervously with his hands at the arm-rests, driving his finger-nails into the hard wood . . . One day he said to me, ‘Chaffee, I would kill Ward, as I would a snake. I believe I should do it, too, but I do not wish to be hanged for the killing of such a wretch.’”76 Beyond financial hardship, Grant cringed with embarrassment at having been duped by Ward. He avoided society and stopped reading newspapers to spare himself the rage.
The business luminaries who had championed Grant now seemed to desert him and he had to scrounge for basic necessities. Had it not been for the kindness of a stranger and a foreigner he wouldn’t have been able to pay household bills. His trusted Mexican friend Matías Romero came and offered a $1,000 loan that Grant rebuffed; in response, Romero simply walked out of the room, leaving the check on the table. Romero estimated that Grant had only $18 left. Out of the blue, a veteran named Charles Wood, manager of a brush factory in upstate New York, sent Grant a $500 check and offered him a $1,000 interest-free loan for a year, renewable if necessary. Grant accepted this charity with everlasting relief. In his note, Wood tipped his hat to Grant by saying the payment was “for services ending about April 1865.”77
The ruin was general for the Grant family. Convinced he would be enriched quickly, Fred had borrowed heavily to invest with Ward and now stood $500,000 in debt. His daughter long remembered her father coming home pale and troubled and retiring to an upstairs bedroom with her mother. “Her cry of surprise and distress rang out, and then loud questions and quiet replies floated to the hall below, where we children sat, frightened.”78 Creditors foreclosed on their house, forcing them into cheaper lodgings in Morristown, New Jersey. Jesse had deposited all of his savings with Grant & Ward, some the day before the failure, and he too was wiped out. Across the Atlantic, Nellie suffered losses and not only because she had sacrificed her $12,000 investment with Ward. For two years, Grant had been sending her remittances for the children. “When the General became impoverished through the rascality of Ferdinand Ward,” wrote one newspaper, he regretted “that his poverty would prevent him from assisting Nellie, who was practically supported by his bounty.”79 Even one of Grant’s sisters and a nephew lost their investments in Grant & Ward.
Among Grant’s children, Buck, who had imagined he was worth $1.7 million, was perhaps the most visible casualty. Hypnotized by Ward’s legerdemain, he had invested income from his wife’s fortune in the firm and borrowed money from his rich father-in-law that he could never repay. “So confident were we all that Grant & Ward were making piles of money that we invested everything we could get,” he told a journalist.80 After the failure, newspapers reported that Buck had fled to Canada to evade the law. When a reporter went to East Sixty-Sixth Street for confirmation, the stout Julia materialized in a black satin dress, her face flushed, her eyes bright with indignation. “Why should my son go to Canada?” she asked. “Why should he be afraid of being arrested? Why should anybody want to arrest him? Is my son a thief?” Tears stood in her eyes. “You have the thief under arrest,” she said bitterly, “the man who has robbed and ruined us.”81
As Grant shrank from the garish glare of unwanted publicity, the humiliation was excruciating. He had been employed as bait to attract victims to Ward’s machinations, dealing a savage blow to his renown. “For the love of money,” wrote the New York Sun, “the greatest military reputation of our time has been dimmed and degraded by its possessor.”82 Grant was exposed as the same hapless hayseed who had bungled business deals in his early years. One newspaper editorial noted that the imaginary government contracts obtained by Grant & Ward were instrumental in Ward’s deceiving gullible investors: “The conclusion is inescapable that a large number of persons were drawn into the maelstrom by a belief that Gen. Grant’s influence was used in some highly improper way, to the detriment of the government and the benefit of Grant & Ward.”83 Some in the Democratic press called for Grant’s criminal prosecution and even some Republicans saw him as less a victim of fraud than an accomplice. An especially critical perspective issued privately from Sherman, who couldn’t resist gloating over Grant’s downfall, as if his friend’s life were a morality play whose sorry ending he had long foreseen. “Look at Gra
nt now,” he wrote. “His experience in the White House poisoned his mind, and tempted his family to yearn for that Sort of honor.”84
At the same time there emerged an immense outpouring of sympathy for Grant. He was still America’s most famous man, the remarkable general who had won the war for Lincoln, protected the freed slaves, and kept America at peace during his presidency. The Washington Post expressed some of this compassion: “Compared with the distinguished services he has rendered, his faults are not to be considered. If he had possessed a broader but keener aptitude for business, he might never have been duped by a Wall Street adventurer; but the fact of his misfortunes in one direction can never eclipse the brilliancy of his successes in another.”85
The demise of Grant & Ward had widespread repercussions. The stock market plunged, two banks shut down, and seven brokerage houses failed. On May 26, James Fish was arrested and, when released on bail, tried futilely to shift blame to his partners. Ferdinand Ward, arrested on May 21, described to a federal grand jury the inner operation of the scheme, telling how “he simply borrowed from Peter to pay Paul.”86 He fully exonerated Grant from complicity: “He knew nothing. He took my word. He had the same information the customers had—and he had the same happiness, while it lasted.”87 Ward was eager to blame his victims, who had lacked even minimal curiosity and never asked to see the government contracts he allegedly obtained. He was completely coldhearted about the ruin he had visited upon scores of people: “They were so pleased with the show of big profits that they were only too glad to have their apparent winnings pyramided.”88 Incapable of remorse, the delusional Ward maintained until his death that he had sought to protect Grant instead of ruining him. As late as 1910, he said, “I believe General Grant . . . knew that . . . I did not rob the firm, but rather that I did everything in my power to save it from downfall. He was a just man, and no matter how he might have suffered, I believe he was fair in his judgment of me and realized what a burden I had carried along for those years.”89