A Disposition to Be Rich: Ferdinand Ward, the Greatest Swindler of the Gilded Age

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  They had already prospered in Massachusetts and Connecticut for six generations by 1807, when Ferdinand’s grandfather, Deacon Levi Ward, his Yale-educated father, Dr. Levi Ward Jr., their families, and several neighbors all left Haddam, Connecticut, together and joined the stream of New Englanders then headed for the “Genesee Woods,” the dark unbroken forest that blanketed most of western New York. From the first, they considered themselves a cut above their fellow pioneers. Deacon Ward saw to it that his wife rode through the forest in a horse-drawn chaise with leather springs, the first such conveyance ever seen in the New York wilderness (or so his descendants later claimed). Once they reached and cleared the site that was first named “Wardville” and then became part of the village of Bergen, the deacon’s eldest son, Dr. Levi Ward, built his family a frame house with cedar shingles rather than a log cabin, even though his new neighbors found it “somewhat aristocratic.”6

  Ferdinand De Wilton Ward was born in that house on July 9, 1812, the youngest of five boys and the second-to-youngest child in a family of thirteen children (eleven of whom would live to adulthood).§

  His earliest memories included the bright, beaded moccasins worn by the Indian hunters who emerged from the woods from time to time with game to barter, and the distant sound of howling wolves, heard as he lay shivering in bed.

  His father was an unusually successful settler. By the time Ferdinand was born, Dr. Ward was running a provisions store, serving his fifth consecutive term as town supervisor, overseeing mail delivery throughout the region, and acting as land agent for the State of Connecticut, charged with selling off some fifty thousand acres of cleared forest for farmland—and pocketing a handsome commission for every sale.

  But he was not satisfied. In early 1818, when Ferdinand was five and his father was forty-six, his parents moved their large brood twenty miles or so to the east, to what was then called Rochesterville, on the Upper Falls of the Genesee River. Only seven hundred people lived there then, but the tumbling ninety-six-foot cataract at the village’s heart was ideally suited for powering mills and workshops, and there was good reason to believe the tiny village would soon outdo all the surrounding settlements: the New York State legislature had decreed that the 363-mile Erie Canal, connecting Albany on the Hudson to Buffalo on Lake Erie, was to cross the Genesee at Rochester. Work was already under way. Once completed, the canal would link the American heartland for the first time to distant continents—and transform the thickly forested Genesee Valley into fields of ripening wheat for sale to the cities of the East.

  Rochester was about to become the “Flour City”—the nation’s first real boomtown—and Dr. Ward and all his offspring would profit handsomely from its startling growth. Ferdinand grew up in a world in which his father seemed to be everywhere at once, encouraging every new enterprise, urging his neighbors to ever-greater effort, summoning up a city from a forest. He helped lobby to make Rochester the seat of the brand-new Monroe County, opened stores, bought up big tracts of land, cornered the insurance business, helped establish the Rochester City Bank, the first New York financial institution ever chartered outside New York City, as well as the Rochester Savings Bank—and then served as president and director of each. He was a ruling elder of the First Presbyterian Church, helped establish the Female Charitable Society, the County Poor House, the Western House of Refuge, the Rochester Atheneum, the Rochester Society for the Promotion of Temperance. He was a life member of the American Colonization and American Tract Societies, too, and president of the Monroe County Bible Society, the very first in the country, whose goal it was to place a Bible in the hands of every citizen willing to accept one.

  From the largest of the three handsome federal homes he built for himself and his family on North St. Paul Street, he would eventually parcel out his interests among his sons. William, the eldest—known as “Colonel” because he had briefly commanded the local militia—and Levi A. Ward, the next in line, began adult life as their father’s partners in the dry goods business. William never moved very far beyond that status (and would die early, of cholera), and so Levi became his father’s partner in the banking and insurance business, his successor as public benefactor, and, as the years went by, custodian of the family fortune, as well. Henry Meigs Ward, just a year younger than Levi and more interested in reading books and writing poetry than moneymaking, was left to run the Ward “farm,” several hundred acres north of town that were eventually laid out in blocks and sold off, lot by lot, to the newcomers flooding into the city.‖

  Dr. Ward’s daughters also wielded power, mostly through the men they chose to marry. His oldest daughter, Siba, wed Silas O. Smith, the town’s most prominent merchant. Her younger sister Esther married one of the town’s leading attorneys, Moses Chapin. Susan married another, Samuel L. Selden, who eventually became chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals. Mehitabel and Henrietta married two unrelated men with the same last name, Charles Lee Clarke and Freeman Clarke. The first did well in law; the second did far better as bank president, director of railways and telegraph companies, Whig politician, Republican congressman, and, eventually, Abraham Lincoln’s controller of the currency.a

  In this highly charged company, young Ferdinand was often overlooked. Fourteen years younger than the formidable Levi, he was a frail, anxious little boy, severely nearsighted, subject to crushing migraines that often confined him to a darkened room. At eleven, he nearly died of rheumatic fever. At twelve, he developed St. Vitus’ dance (Sydenham’s chorea), his face and limbs twitching so uncontrollably that he was sent east to live for a year with an uncle in Guilford, Connecticut, away from the forest and swampland his parents believed were the source of his illnesses. He was lonely, homesick, and chronically fearful. When he returned to Rochester, pale and still “convalescent,” his mother and father thought it best to have him tutored at home by the family’s pastor.

  That home could be a grim place. For all his formidable energies, Dr. Ward was “constitutionally subject to low spirits,”7 his wife said, unaccustomed to opposition, often preoccupied, and always severe. Ferdinand’s mother was less forbidding, but conflicted; perpetually solicitous about his fragile health, she was also given to expressing her regret that “I had so many children,” a lament not calculated to cheer her youngest son.8

  Dr. Ward championed progress and promoted charity, but he also opposed any unnecessary change in the way life was lived in Rochester. A neighbor remembered him as the last man in town to wear the queue, ruffled shirts, and buckled shoes that had been fashionable in New England before he came west. He believed, as did many of the Yankee pioneers who helped create Rochester and most of the other towns in western New York, that the New England world from which they had come should be the model followed by everyone everywhere.

  That model included unquestioning observance of the Sabbath. In the Ward homes on North St. Paul Street, everything stopped between Saturday evening and Monday morning. The elder Henry James, who would one day attend college with young Ferdinand, recalled the Sabbaths in his own upstate Presbyterian household. Sunday, he wrote, was the day on which children were taught “not to play, not to dance, not to sing; not to read storybooks, not to con over our school-lessons for Monday even; not to whistle, not to ride the pony, nor to take a walk in the country, nor a swim in the river; nor, in short, to do anything which nature especially craved. Nothing is so hard … for a child as not-to-do.”9

  Dr. Ward was not content just to observe “not-to-do” in his own home; he also wanted the Sabbath honored in every household in Rochester. He was instrumental in passing a town ordinance levying a two-dollar fine on any canal boatman who dared blow his bugle on Sunday, and when his friend and fellow Presbyterian elder Josiah Bissell petitioned Congress to halt the movement of the mails on the Sabbath, Dr. Ward’s signature was near the top of list of the four hundred Rochester citizens who signed the document. He also invested in Bissell’s Pioneer Line, whose canal boats and stagecoaches pledged not to op
erate on Sunday. (His employees would “not swear or drink,” Bissell promised, and at least “some of our taverns will be without bars. Hot coffee shall always be in waiting and free to the drivers.”)10 Both projects failed: Congress rejected the ban on Sunday mail on the grounds that it had no power to legislate with respect to religion; the Pioneer Line collapsed for want of business.

  Ferdinand’s father would now frequently find himself on the losing side of such disputes. The character of Rochester’s population was changing fast as newcomers flooded into town, many of them Irish Catholic immigrants, drawn to the region to work on the Erie Canal, who sought new lives but saw no need to change old ways. Still, the old man and his elder sons remained important figures in Rochester, and young Ferdinand shared indirectly in their prominence. When the Marquis de Lafayette visited Rochester in the summer of 1825, Ferdinand’s father was co-chairman of the reception committee, and his thirteen-year-old son was allowed to shake the Revolutionary War hero’s hand. A few weeks later, when Governor DeWitt Clinton’s flotilla of packet boats arrived at Rochester, en route to New York Harbor and the official opening ceremony of the Erie Canal, young Ferdinand and his father were both invited aboard. The Manhattan parade “exceeded anything I ever saw before or expect to see again,” Ferdinand remembered, and Governor Clinton himself pinned a commemorative badge on the proud boy’s shirt.11

  In the autumn of 1827, Ferdinand was fifteen and ready for college. His parents puzzled over what he might do in life. He seemed too frail and highly strung for law or business. Besides, there were older brothers enough to run the family enterprises. Nor did he show any interest in medicine, the field his father had studied at Yale before coming west. But he had always sought his parents’ approval by being the most clearly pious among the boys—the quietest on the Sabbath, the most regular in attendance at Sunday school and evening prayers—and there were as yet no clergymen in the family. Perhaps the pulpit would suit him.

  His father sent him to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, two days away by stagecoach. It was a small Presbyterian institution with a curriculum perfectly suited to a would-be-minister: classical, with an emphasis on public speaking. There were one hundred students at Hamilton, all boys and famously unruly. A few years earlier, several of them had hauled a swivel gun up four flights to the top of Hamilton Hall and fired it through the door of a fellow student’s room, narrowly missing him as he lay sleeping. Subsequent classes celebrated the event on its anniversary each year. At least in retrospect, Ferdinand took no pleasure in that tradition. “A boy who goes to college is ushered into a circle entirely new,” he would remember, “where the motto of each individual is ‘Look out for No. 1’ [and] where selfishness necessarily predominates. Not enjoying the advantages of social intercourse, he soon becomes as uncivilized and as brutish as those around him.”12 So far as we know, Ferdinand’s own brutishness extended only to the stealing and surreptitious roasting of a farmer’s chicken, and the memory of that single “hilarity,” he would write at seventy, served as a lifelong reminder of “my state as a Sinner.”b

  He spent only one term at Hamilton—the school’s president and trustees were locked in a bitter struggle that drove away most of the student body and very nearly destroyed the institution—before transferring to Union College at Schenectady. Its president, the Reverend Eliphalet Nott, was a Presbyterian clergyman liberal-minded enough to have introduced science into the curriculum. His students were well-bred young men from all over the country.

  “Here,” Ferdinand assured his youngest sister, Henrietta, “I shall prepare to act a part in life so as not to be unworthy of myself or a dishonor to my parents.”13 That would not always be easy. Ferdinand’s class had eighty-nine members. Twenty-one would become clergymen. But most followed more worldly pursuits. Some took up smoking. Some tried alcohol despite President Nott’s earnest warning that those who did so were likely spontaneously to burst into bright blue flame. Ferdinand resisted these temptations, and when his classmates attended balls he remained in his room; dancing, his parents had taught him, was frivolous and immoral. But he did join friends in calling upon some of the town’s most eligible young women. “I am much pleased with the Society of Ladies I find here,” he told Henrietta.14 The Albany Microscope, a scandal sheet that specialized in gossip about nearby towns, suggested that Dr. Nott needed to “Ward-off” the advances of a certain student on a young Schenectady lady. “It is the town talk,” Ferdinand told his sister. “High & Low—Rich & Poor—are all asking—Is it true that Mr. Ward is to be married to Miss H?”15 It was not, he assured Henrietta; “She is not a Christian. I need say no more!”16

  When eighteen-year-old Ferdinand came home for the holidays in December 1830, the Reverend Charles Grandison Finney had been leading a revival there for nearly three months—perhaps the first citywide revival in American history. Josiah Bissell, Ferdinand’s father’s old ally in the Sabbatarian struggle, had invited Finney to town. There was a “large budget of evils rolling through our land & among us,” he’d told Finney, the result of rapid changes brought by the Erie Canal. “The people & the church say it cannot be helped—and why do they say this? Because … they know not the power of the Gospel of Jesus. ‘Through Christ Jesus strengthening us we can do all things,’ and if so it is time we were about it.”17

  Finney found fertile ground in Rochester. One evening, so many listeners climbed up to the gallery of the Wards’ family church, the First Presbyterian, that the stone walls began to spread and plaster sifted down onto the congregation. Panicked men and women pushed through the doors and dove through the windows for fear the building was about to collapse. Other Protestant churches threw open their doors to the temporarily homeless Presbyterians so that Finney could continue his great work. “All Rochester was moved that winter,” one clergyman remembered. “The atmosphere … seemed to be affected. You could not go upon the streets, and hear any conversations, except on religion.”18

  On New Year’s Eve, at the newly repaired First Church, Finney’s coworker Theodore Weld preached against alcohol with such explosive ardor that eight grocers, cowering in their pews, vowed never again to sell whiskey to anyone. The next day, surrounded by applauding townspeople, several of them ordered their stock rolled out onto Exchange Street, smashed the barrels, and watched the contents flow into the gutter.

  To Ferdinand, the would-be clergyman, this was a miracle, vivid proof that Christ was at work in the streets of his hometown. And when Finney himself strode to the pulpit two days later, Ferdinand and Henrietta were among his most avid listeners.

  Henry Stanton, a law student who had watched Finney in action a few weeks earlier, captured the evangelist’s impact on even the most normally unexcitable listener. Tall and grave, with blue eyes that seemed almost to glow, Stanton remembered, “[Finney’s] way over an audience was wonderful.” He went on,

  While depicting the glories or the terrors of the world to come, he trod the pulpit like a giant.… As he would stand with his face towards the side gallery, and then involuntarily wheel around, the audience in that part of the house towards which he would throw his arm would dodge as if he were hurling something at them. In describing the sliding of a sinner to perdition, he would lift his long finger towards the ceiling and slowly bring it down till it pointed to the area in front of the pulpit, when half his hearers in the rear of the house would rise unconsciously to their feet to see him descend into the pit below.c

  Ferdinand and Henrietta were among those who rose unconsciously to their feet that evening and then pledged themselves to Christ, just two of the more than one hundred men and women who officially joined the church that month alone. If Ferdinand had ever doubted that he should devote himself to the ministry, those doubts now vanished. Henceforth, he wrote his sister after he had returned to college, all his thoughts would be “of one class … Religion … a subject upon which we should dwell every moment.”19 He issued admonition after admonition over the next few months, excoriat
ing Rochester’s backsliders and exhorting his sister to pray, morning, noon, and night.

  In July 1831, two weeks before his graduation from Union, he and his roommate walked seven miles into the countryside so that eighteen-year-old Ferdinand could preach his first sermon, to a schoolhouse filled with farmers and their wives. The text he chose could have been his life’s motto: “He that is not for me is against me.”20

  Ferdinand planned to spend a year at home before entering Princeton Theological Seminary. The pulpit was now no longer enough for him. He had what he believed to be a higher calling in mind: he was privately determined to become a missionary to the heathen overseas.

  The missionary ranks he sought to join had begun forming in 1810, when New England Congregationalists established the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). Presbyterian and Reformed churches lent their united support two years later.d

  Historians differ as to precisely what accounted for the extraordinary enthusiasm for foreign missions that gripped New England and upstate New York in the early nineteenth century, but it is clear that the Puritan denominations, whose old-time supremacy had been undermined at home by new and less austere faiths, found a timely new cause in mission work among Native Americans at home and unbelievers abroad. Meanwhile, the widespread belief that the End was fast approaching—Theodore Weld said it was sure to come before 1850—suggested there was no time to waste in turning the nations of the world to Christ.

  To achieve this goal in Europe and Asia, Secretary Rufus Anderson of the American Board foresaw “a chain of [mission] posts, extending from Ceylon through the Tamil nation of southern India, the Mahrattas,e the Rajpoots, and Afghanistan, Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor to Constantinople and into European Turkey.”f