The cause of Christ consumed pious young people of Ferdinand’s generation. Two members of his own family would go abroad as missionaries: his distant cousin Alonzo Chapin, who sailed for the Sandwich Islands in November 1831, and his niece Maria Ward Chapin Smith, who would accompany her husband, Rev. Eli Smith, to Syria sometime later. Ferdinand was eager to join them. “No one was dependent upon me for a livelihood,” he recalled. “I had a good constitution. I had a full if not an exceptional aptitude to acquire a foreign language.” Above all, he wrote, he was “called loudly to go abroad.”21
But when he told his parents what he had in mind they were horrified. His mother could not bear to have her youngest boy vanish overseas. His father was adamant against his going: Ferdinand’s constitution was far too fragile for the foreign field. He was extremely nearsighted, anxious, still subject to migraines, and too easily agitated when things did not go his way. His father told him he could do just as much good close to home as he could abroad, and that he was far too young to make so momentous a decision.
And so, Ferdinand went off to Princeton in June 1832, knowing that his father and mother were displeased with his plans. “It required a struggle of no ordinary intensity” to leave home this time, he told his sister, and “an agony of struggle at the throne of Grace to make my will bow to the decision of my conscience, a joy mingled with tears.”22
At nineteen, he was the youngest member of his seminary class of ninety-four, severely homesick and initially disheartened by the seminary’s Spartan ways: “Breakfast & Supper same, i.e. bread, molasses, cup of water—no pie!”23 But he was also gratified that “the subject of missions is on every side and in every forum,”24 and especially pleased when one of his teachers told the class, “We should not object to your all going [abroad]. Let the home churches look after themselves. It will do them good.”g
A cloud of fear hung over the entire eastern United States that spring, the likelihood that the cholera pandemic ravaging the Old World was about to descend upon the New. It had begun in Bengal in 1817, reached China by 1820, Moscow in 1830, western Europe the following year. It killed at an appalling rate: fifty-five thousand died in Great Britain, more than twice that number in France. Patients who seemed fine at breakfast were often dead by dinner. Sudden, agonizing cramps led to simultaneous violent diarrhea and vomiting that so dehydrated victims they literally shrank, turned blue, and often became unrecognizable even to family members sitting helpless at their bedsides. No one understood what caused it. Common treatments like camphor, laudanum, charcoal, bleeding, and a mercury compound called calomel either had no effect or made things worse.
Americans prayed that the Atlantic might prove a barrier against it, but the first cases of cholera appeared in New York in early June 1832. Soon, a hundred people were dying in Manhattan every day and the disease was racing inland along the canals and aboard the steamboats of which Americans were so proud.
It reached Rochester on July 12. The first victim lived on South St. Paul Street, only a few blocks from the Wards. A second man fell ill two days later. Soon, there were dozens of fresh cases every day, so many that straw pallets had to be laid out for them beneath a crude open-air shelter on the western bank of the Erie Canal. Ferdinand’s father was asked to chair a public meeting at the courthouse to see what else might be done. He was a physician as well as a leading citizen, but all he could do was call upon the family pastor to offer up a prayer. Everywhere, including Rochester, clergymen declared the outbreak divine punishment, called down upon God’s chosen country for its ingratitude. “Obscene impurities, drunkenness, profanities and infidelity, prevail among us to a fearful extent,” said a pamphlet rushed into print by the American Tract Society. “Iniquity runs down our streets like a river.”25 Four hundred people would fall ill in Rochester before the pandemic burned itself out. One hundred and sixteen died. More than a thousand residents fled into the countryside and found temporary homes in taverns and farmhouses as far as thirty miles away.
All of this Ferdinand was forced to learn from the newspapers. For three weeks, no one in his preoccupied family found the time to write to him. And as their silence continued, Ferdinand grew more and more fearful, convinced that the worst had happened. At the best of times, his health was “merely tolerable,” he told Henrietta in a frenzied six-page letter begging for news. But now, haunted by dark thoughts of what might be occurring at home, he could not sleep, waking again and again, “sometimes screaming, sometimes weeping.” He suffered “turns of fainting,” too, which lasted as long as three minutes, “so that I often dread to rise from my seat lest I should fall.” Even when he tried to pray, “excited feelings” deprived him of “the use of reason.”26
In the end, cholera spared the Ward household, but Ferdinand’s parents had to dispatch Henrietta to Princeton to nurse their distraught son back to health. Ferdinand’s extreme anxiety and the alarming symptoms it engendered in him further persuaded his father that he could not possibly endure the rigors of mission life. Ferdinand’s psychological state worried his professors, too, but they were themselves so caught up in the enthusiasm for missions that they continued to offer him only encouragement. Two of them wrote a joint letter assuring the ABCFM that in the end Ferdinand’s “singular prudence and propriety” and his “deep and ardent piety” would more than make up for his delicate health.27
Ferdinand agreed. He was now in a hurry. The full Princeton curriculum required three years to master. As soon as the Presbytery of Rochester licensed him to preach, in the autumn of 1833, he left the seminary rather than wait to graduate. He then had three choices, he recalled: undertaking an overseas mission; joining a mission among emigrants and Indians in the American West; or taking up a tranquil pastorate among “the cultured and reformed.” His family and friends all favored the latter, and were already selecting “ ‘just the place’ ” for him.28 His brother-in-law Freeman Clarke helped arrange for him to occupy a pulpit in Albion, New York, during the summer of 1834 to see how he liked preaching in a small town. He didn’t. The following winter, his father saw to it that he stayed with his sister and brother-in-law in Augusta, Georgia, so that he could venture out to mission stations among the Choctaw and Chickasaw in the hopes that a season of preaching to them might prove satisfyingly exotic. It did not. Nor did he enjoy several weeks standing in for the pastor of Rochester’s Second Presbyterian Church or a summerlong stand at Philadelphia’s fashionable Tenth Street Church—though the latter did allow him to study rudimentary medicine at the Jefferson Medical School, which he hoped would help him to better withstand missionary life.
Ferdinand refused to alter his plans. “My eye is fixed upon a distant point,” he told his sister.29 His mother finally, reluctantly, agreed to let him go. But his father continued to withhold his blessing. “The thought of taking a step which shall contradict his feelings is, to me, most painful,” Ferdinand told Secretary Anderson of the ABCFM. “No son was ever possessed of a kinder parent.… I am the youngest son—and the only one that has taken upon himself any public duties.… My life is fast passing (22 years have already gone) [and] I must soon be in the field.”30
In June 1836, Ferdinand’s application was formally approved, with one proviso: before he embarked for South India that November he must find himself a wife and marry her at least two months before they set sail. It was unwise, the American Board believed, to dispatch even the most god-fearing young men to exotic lands unaccompanied; the temptations of the flesh were too strong for safety. Marriage was “the natural state of man,” in any case, Secretary Anderson had written.31 A missionary needed a wife as much as a minister did, as “friend, counselor, companion, the repository of her husband’s thoughts and feelings, the partaker of his joys, the sharer of his cares and sorrows, and one who is to lighten his toils, and become his nurse in sickness.”32
“The Board say I must marry,” Ferdinand complained to a classmate, “and give to that object my entire time. I do not like it. I want tim
e.… You will hear if anything is effected.”h
Something was effected, and with remarkable speed. In April of the previous year, while preaching in Philadelphia, he had met a young woman named Jane Shaw at the home of a mutual friend. He had liked her “better than any other young lady I had ever seen,” he remembered, but he hadn’t managed to see her again.33
Now, with the Board insisting he marry, “Something (I do not remember what) led me to imagine that Miss [Shaw] might view with favor an invitation to be my home-companion to India. I went to the city and called upon her.” He was evidently slow to come to the point: “[We] had many pleasant conversations upon many general subjects and, of course, on Missions. At one time she expressed the opinion that Missionaries ought to go out single. That was enough for me. As I did not desire to receive a negative, I said no more upon the subject but returned home [to Philadelphia].”34
Then he got a note from a friend in New York: he had given up too quickly, it said; he should go back and try again. He boarded a steamboat for the city, and, as it stopped at Matawan Landing, near Fishkill, Jane Shaw herself happened to come aboard. He nervously asked if he could call. She said he could; since her father’s death she had been living at the downtown New York home of her sister and brother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Robert. She would be glad to receive him there.i
Before he made his call, he lunched at a Manhattan restaurant with a friend of hers, Rev. Charles Hall, assistant secretary of the Home Missionary Society. They took a corner table, Ferdinand recalled, and he nervously asked Hall whether he thought Miss Shaw might make a suitable wife for a foreign missionary. “Excellent,” Hall answered. But, he continued, “she is an heiress and may want to go alone—independent of man or Board … You can try and she can but say, ‘No.’ ”35
Ferdinand screwed up his courage, called upon Miss Shaw at her brother-in-law’s home, and, although he had spoken with her just three times, proposed marriage—and “ ’ere long received a Yes, much to my joy.”36
Jane Shaw was twenty-four years old that June, small, wiry, and deaf in one ear. She would always consider herself unattractive. She was slight and stooped even as a child, with a prominent nose and hands and feet larger than she liked. “Altogether I am so ugly,” she would write to her daughter toward the end of her long life. “How often I wonder why I have to be subject to so much mortification as regards my hands and feet. When I am dead please don’t let my hands be laid across my breast but close to my sides.”37
Her girlhood in downtown Manhattan had been comfortable but emotionally parched. Her father, William Shaw, was a successful but preoccupied Irish-born shipping merchant whose fleet sailed between Belfast and New York. Her mother, Elizabeth Johnson, was a frail New Yorker with an inheritance of her own. Jane, the third of six children, lost herself in books, loved studies, developed a reputation for Christian ardor that was at least a match for that of her new fiancé, and dreamed of somehow becoming a missionary. Asked one Sunday morning while still a little girl to contribute something valuable to her church, she had placed in the collection plate a slip of paper on which she had written “Myself.”
Then, when she was fifteen, her mother suddenly died. Jane was taken out of school to serve as her father’s housekeeper and hostess and to act as surrogate mother to her younger sister and two younger brothers. She was too young for the task and very nearly overwhelmed. The church became still more important to her, a refuge as well as a house of worship.
When Rev. Hall was asked to assess her potential as a missionary’s wife, he responded with enthusiasm; her interest in religious work was “not a spasm of romantic feeling but such as may be calculated to inspire her as long as she lives. The temptations of refined & worldly society have not hindered her from being a devoted missionary among the poor, the ignorant and repulsive population on the outskirts of our city.”38 Her own pastor, Rev. Asa D. Smith of the 14th Street Presbyterian Church, was equally positive. Miss Shaw was “uniformly good … uncommonly so,” he wrote, and filled with “an unusually large measure of the Missionary Spirit. God … has been anointing her for the work to which she is now looking.”39
Ferdinand was formally to be ordained as a missionary on August 31. He appointed the 29th as a day of fasting and renewal for himself and his bride-to-be. That evening, she wrote him a letter setting forth her reasons for agreeing to marry him on such short acquaintance. It had little to do with him and everything to do with what she believed to be the cause of Christ. Marriage to Ferdinand would make it possible for her to answer the Call they both had heard.
It was not until the spring of the previous year that she had first felt “a personal duty in relation to the heathen,” she explained. Appeals for help from men and women already in the field—including John Jay Lawrence, an old friend who had sailed for South India in May—had moved her to explore the possibility of going abroad on her own. She had “comparatively few ties that bound me to my native land,” she wrote, and was blessed with a small inheritance to cover her expenses, and so, “after praying with great earnestness to be led to do … what would best glorify God, [I] decided that I would go … if God should see … fit to send me.”
He had not seen fit to send her, at least not at first. She made arrangements to accompany a British Baptist couple to a mission in Orissa, on India’s eastern coast, only to have them rescind the invitation when they were assigned elsewhere. She consulted Rev. Miron Winslow, who was home on a brief visit after spending more than a quarter of a century in the American Board’s first mission to the Tamils at Jaffna, Ceylon, to see whether she might be welcome there. She was not. He told her firmly that there was no room for single women in the mission field. Another missionary couple asked her to accompany them to Java, but “the … arguments of judicious friends against my going out single, led me to hold back and … decide on remaining at home.” She had been bitterly disappointed at her own timidity, she wrote, “and my weak, sinful heart began to grow cold and selfish.”j
Then, she told Ferdinand, he had entered her life. She saw it as a sign from God.
My heavenly Father at length opened a way for me to the very field on which my heart was first fixed and the call seemed so decidedly one of his own making, and His providence in it so marked and peculiar that I was led to consider and pray over it until my feelings were so enlisted and my views of duty so clear, that the present determination to go in company with one of his dear servants was made, and with humble gratitude I now hold myself in readiness to do, to be, and to suffer whatever He may will concerning me.…
Do you think that the above narration contains anything that should cause you to believe I have been called to go with you? If so, I am yours, for now you know all and I feel happy to think that my heart has really unburdened itself to you. I prayed that God would direct me what to say and I know and feel that He has. This has been in many respects a pleasant day to me, and I have been enabled to pray with much earnestness for my beloved Ferdinand. My heart feels lighter under the firm conviction that if it should after all be best for me not to go, God will prevent me. Oh, it is pleasant to feel that we are His and he will use us for Himself.
Still continue to pray for me my dear friend. The time draws near when we are to take solemn vows upon us and I will need much, very much grace to qualify me for a situation so responsible, conspicuous and solemn. May God prepare you to bear the responsibilities and trials which a union with me may impose upon you. Sometimes I fear that you will not be happy with me, my disposition is yet unknown to you. The weaknesses of my character have not yet been developed, and you know but little of her whom you so tenderly love. Oh, that you may not be forced to discover any thing that will forfeit that affection.…
Farewell my much loved friend, may your heart and your trust be in Heaven.
With fond affection I am
Yours,
Jane40
Two days after she finished her letter to Ferdinand, on August 31, 1836, he and an
other newly minted minister, Rev. Henry Cherry, were ordained as missionaries to South India in the First Presbyterian church at Rochester. The enterprise upon which they were about to embark, said the presiding pastor, promised “the certainty of success. The Spirit of God is with His servants, light is dawning in every quarter of the world.”41 As the two young missionaries left the church surrounded by tearful well-wishers, a hymn especially composed and performed for the occasion echoed in their ears.
Trusting in Christ, go, heralds, rear
The Gospel standard, void of fear;
Go, seek with joy your destined home, And preach a Saviour there unknown
Yes, Christian heroes, go—proclaim
Salvation in Immanuel’s name
To distant climes the tidings bear, And plant the Rose of Sharon there.42
The congregation’s tears were understandable. It was presumed that missionaries would live out their lives abroad. Withdrawal from the field, one early missionary wrote, was an admission of failure, “a lasting stigma.”43 India was at least four months away, unimaginably strange, haunted by mysterious fevers; of the ninety-one missionaries, assistant missionaries, and their wives whom the American Board had sent to Ceylon and India since 1815, twenty-one had already died, as had many of their children. Both Ferdinand and Jane arranged to sit for portraits so that if they did not return their friends and families might remember what they had looked like.
They were married on September 16 in New York City. Jane’s brother-in-law, Christopher Robert, appeared as a witness for the couple and loaned them $300 with which to start their lives together.k
A Disposition to Be Rich: Ferdinand Ward, the Greatest Swindler of the Gilded Age Page 3