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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  It all became too much for him. Day after day—and sometimes for as long as two weeks without a break—he recorded his suffering from “sick headache,” “excitement,” “exhaustion & fatigue,” and repeated attacks of dysentery, which he decorously called “an ailment common in this climate” and for which fifteen leeches were once applied by a British physician, to little effect except to further weaken the already-depleted patient.8 Jane was often ill as well.

  The Wards’ frequent illness did not prevent them from taking tea with British clergymen or keep Ferdinand from preaching several times to the British congregation of the Davidson’s Street Church in Blacktown. And when the news reached Madras in August that William IV of England had died two months earlier, Ferdinand was able to drag himself from his sickbed long enough to accompany Jane to the fort to “witness the troops arrayed and hear the proclamation that Princess Victoria is Queen!”9

  Then, after five months in Madras, the Reverends Ward and Tracy and their wives were suddenly told they were to proceed to Madura, after all; there was no longer enough money in the treasury of the Madras mission to pay them.

  On September 19, they set out for Madura, the Hindu bastion that was now to be their home. The journey took twenty days. Ferdinand rode in an oxcart, careful to hew to the economic strictures insisted upon by the American Board. But he saw to it that Jane was carried in a palanquin borne on the shoulders of teams of six men. They chanted in Tamil as they hurried on:

  She’s not heavy, Putterum, Putterum

  Carry her softly, Putterum, Putterum

  Nice little lady, Putterum, Putterum …

  Carry her gently.10

  A cook and a bearer named Gabriel came along too, with two coolies to carry utensils.

  Nights were spent in government rest houses, spaced a day’s travel apart and each cared for by a watchman who could be relied upon to strangle a chicken for the evening meal. The countryside through which they passed was lush and green after the monsoon: thick forests interspersed with rice fields and groves of coconut palms; distant blue hills reminiscent, Ferdinand told the American Board, of upstate New York, “our Fatherland.”11 They crossed the rivers that twisted across their path in circular buffalo-skin boats, thirty feet across. There were troops of monkeys, too, and a huge banyan tree alive with fruit bats. At night the weird far-off wailing of jackals reminded Ferdinand of the sound of the wolves that had haunted his boyhood sleep.

  It all might have seemed like a rare adventure if the Wards’ religious convictions had permitted them to enjoy any of it wholeheartedly. But signs of the faith they had sworn to eradicate were everywhere: “If we are delighted with the appearance of a fresh and shady grove,” Ferdinand wrote, “our spirits sink at the sight of the images its branches hide.”12 Even the friendly villagers who came out to watch them pass—“the poor, degraded, yet immortal beings around me,” Ferdinand called them13—inspired in him only a sense of helplessness: he was still too inarticulate in Tamil to keep them from the fiery doom from which he was sure his Gospel message would otherwise have saved them.

  On October 9, 1837, the Wards and the Tracys at last came within sight of the two giant gopurams of the Sri Minakshi Temple at Madura. Some forty thousand people lived in the temple’s shadow, most of them devotees of Shiva and his local consort, Minakshi. As the little party moved toward the city walls they fell in with a stream of pilgrims, whose joyful shouting of the names of their deities struck Ferdinand and Jane as “demonic.”14

  The Reverend William Todd greeted them within the dusty mission compound. He was just thirty-six, but seemed far older. Todd had established the American outpost three years earlier with the help of just two other missionaries from Jaffna and three Tamil-speaking Ceylonese. It had not been easy. Madura was “inexpressibly filthy,”15 Todd had reported to the American Board not long after he got there: a tangle of narrow, squalid streets filled with refuse, permeated by the stench of sewage and stagnant water, ravaged annually by cholera. The city had once been the capital of the Pandyan kings, in whose tumbled-down former palace a mob had once threatened to kill Todd if he did not stop maligning their gods. But it was now almost exclusively a place of Hindu pilgrimage, “a stronghold of religious debauchery,” Todd told the Board. “Tumultuous processions, wild and fantastic as the dreams of a maniac … pervade the city night and day, making the idolaters drunk with the excess of glare, noise and folly … all in barbarous taste.”16

  Todd’s first wife had died within weeks of her arrival; he had then married a widow (who had herself already buried two missionary husbands), only to watch her die, too. His Ceylonese helpers languished from homesickness. His own physical and psychological health had dangerously deteriorated.*

  Still, despite everything, without ever mastering Tamil and with only sporadic reinforcements from Jaffna and the United States, Todd had organized a small congregation, started thirty-five free primary schools for boys and one for girls, established a secondary school in which students were taught in English, and dispatched missionaries to establish a second mission thirty-eight miles to the northwest in Dindigul. Todd had asked Boston for twenty-seven additional missionaries to carry on and expand his work. He got just seven.

  The most recent newcomers would not prove as helpful as Todd had hoped. Shortly after the Wards moved into a single room on the roof of the bungalow newly assigned to Rev. and Mrs. Crane, Ferdinand met with Todd and the rest of the missionary brethren and was told he and Jane would immediately have to shift again, to the new outpost at Dindigul.

  Ferdinand was again displeased at being told what to do and where to go. This time, after at least one visit to the British assistant surgeon responsible for seeing to the health of Europeans in the district and several days of prayer and “agitating the question,” he announced that he and Jane would not move. Perhaps it was fears about his health that made him do it. Dr. Steele, the mission physician, who had been stationed at Dindigul, was about to leave for Jaffna for his own health; he was suffering from a lung ailment that would eventually be diagnosed as tuberculosis. Without him, Dindigul would be a far more dangerous place. Perhaps Jane already suspected she was pregnant—she would give birth to her first child nine months later—and he did not wish for her to be a two-day ride from the best available care. Whatever the reason, his refusal to follow orders was not popular with his colleagues, the first recorded instance of the “lawlessness” that would alienate his brethren over the years. He evidently understood their annoyance, for thereafter, when meetings of the mission were scheduled, sudden headaches often made it impossible for him to attend.

  A few weeks later, the mission organized three new outstations. Rev. and Mrs. Crane were assigned to one of them. The Wards moved downstairs to take over the bungalow and assume responsibility for mission activities in and around Madura. In his journal, Ferdinand set out the “Ordinary Duties” of his day. He rose at four each morning and spent two and a half hours in his study, writing and praying. At six thirty, he visited the English school. Breakfast with Jane at eight was followed by prayer with the servants on the veranda. He studied Tamil with a local teacher for two hours, lunched with Jane, then returned to his study for two more. The Wards rode out together in what passed for the cool of the evening, had dinner, and—provided he had no services to lead—were in bed by nine. Ferdinand also preached regularly to Madura’s small Anglo-Indian community, and often rode out into the countryside in a bullock-drawn bandy, practicing his still-unsteady Tamil on curious crowds and handing out tracts and pamphlets to anyone who would take them.

  Hard work and hardship could be endured provided hope for the ultimate success of the mission remained high. But events back home had begun to undermine that hope even before the Wards landed at Madras. In March 1837, the United States had begun to feel the effects of the first great financial panic in its history. “No man living has seen such a prostration of business, of enterprise, of hope,” Secretary Anderson warned the missions that s
ummer. “There is yet no symptom of relief, and probably the worst is yet to come. Many of our most munificent friends are among the bankrupts. There is no alternative for us but to lay to for a time as in a storm.”17

  That storm would never fully lift. Fund-raising collapsed. To meet the immediate crisis, the Prudential Committee of the American Board passed a series of stringent cost-cutting resolutions. Recruitment and reinforcements were frozen; no more missionaries would be coming to India, at least not for a time. Each outpost was required drastically to reduce its budget and then stick faithfully to it. All twenty-five schools in Madura would have had to close had it not been for contributions from sympathetic Britons in Madras. To all of this, the missionaries at Madura reluctantly acquiesced.

  But the final emergency resolution passed by the committee struck the missionaries as a personal betrayal. The Wards and all their colleagues had left home expecting to remain permanently at their posts, but with the understanding that if the state of their health demanded it, the brethren with whom they served could authorize their return to the United States at the Board’s expense. Now, Boston decreed it would no longer be “proper for any missionary to visit the United States except by invitation or permission.… It is better that our missionaries should die on the field of battle, than to return to camp in a wounded or disabled state.… As the missionary does more good by living among the heathen, so he does more good by dying among them.”18

  Ferdinand and two other members of the mission sent off a strongly worded protest on behalf of their Madura brethren. A missionary’s colleagues knew far more about his health than anyone in Boston could possibly know, they wrote; it took eight to twelve months for messages to move back and forth between continents, far too long to save lives; and while it might be true that dying abroad would inspire more financial support from American churches, it was also undeniable that “Whatever of evil occurs to Missionaries is joy to the Heathens.” The Brahmins of Madura already liked to say that the goddess Minakshi would not tolerate missionaries: Why else would both of Rev. Todd’s wives have died?

  “With sincere respect and Christian affection,” they called upon the committee to rescind its order.†

  It would not. There was to be no easy retreat.

  Meanwhile, as Jane’s pregnancy progressed, nature harassed the mission. There were monsoon rains and months of relentless heat, Ferdinand told his sister, Henrietta.

  As we have no window glass here, where light came wind & sand came, too, & it was trying indeed. There was no escape. I dislike wind & hot wind bearing on its bosom a load of fine sand which it deposits on the table—books—paper—hand—face—in food & etc. This is most disagreeable. These winds bring with them fever—headache—low spirits &c.… It is now evening, but the wind is whistling out of doors. Not the healthful whistle of a Genesee North Easter which, though it reddens the cheek, causes the blood to flow with a quick step & the body to assume a strong, plastic form. No, no, but hot, hot, hot.19

  Bookshelves stood away from walls to discourage the omnivorous white ants; the legs of all the chairs and tables, bureaus and beds rested in brass cups filled with water to bar the armies of ants that filed across the bamboo matting from climbing upward. Ferdinand killed a great spider that had made its home overnight in his shoe; its body “was nearly the size of the palm of my hand,…” he wrote, “olive brown, and covered with a soft down.”20

  The mosquitoes began to swarm at dusk. Bats fed on them, squealing in and out of the windows and sometimes entangling themselves in the netting that shrouded Jane and Ferdinand’s bed. Clouds of moths and winged ants whirled around the hissing lamps. And even after the lamps were extinguished, fat pale-green geckos clung to the ceiling, waiting for insect prey: sometimes they missed their kill and fell, hitting the floor with a smack loud enough to wake a fitful sleeper.

  Jane suffered most and often found herself alone. While Ferdinand went about beneath his umbrella, she huddled inside the mission bungalow, its doors and windows darkened by thick mats of woven grass, her only companions the servants who wet down the mats with bucketfuls of water and the boy who dozed outside with the rope that pulled the creaking punkah back and forth, tied to his big toe.

  Her pregnancy proved difficult. Ferdinand’s journals are studded with notes that she was having “a bad day.” The British doctor visited frequently.

  Ferdinand recorded the final hours of his wife’s pregnancy:

  July 16 Jane’s “confinement” commenced at 10 yesterday morning & continued with great severity until today at 10 AM she became the loving mother of a living infant—a Daughter. Praised be the name of the Lord!

  July 18 Jane quite comfortable. The Lord is good to her in her distress. We praise Him. Wrote to Mother.21

  The infant was named Sarah, after one of Jane’s sisters.

  A little over a month later, Ferdinand rode off on still another itinerating tour. “Oh, my beloved Husband,” Jane wrote.

  How chequered with joy and sorrow is this life of ours! Another & another & another is hurried to eternity.… Brother and Sister Tracy called to [Ceylon] to bury their beloved infant—by the side of all who have died from our company since we left America.… [Mrs. Cherry had died by then; so had the Muzzys’ first child.]

  Oh what feelings of horror & trembling come over my whole frame. You cannot know a Mother’s feelings. Oh, if God should see fit to call our little Sarah, I think my heart would break.… I feel your absence very much. May the Lord help you my dear Husband & give you back to us in His own good time.22

  Despite the toll taken by climate and worry and frequent loneliness, Jane Ward remained determined to do at least some of the Lord’s work that had driven her into marriage in the first place. Ferdinand sympathized, but the American Board did not encourage it. “The first duty of a missionary’s wife is to have a smiling face,” a veteran member of the Jaffna mission once explained. “A female belongs to her compound. That is her peculiar sphere.”23 The Board’s corresponding secretary, Samuel Worcester, spelled out the important but distinctly limited role missionary wives were expected to play: it was by “example,” not by active preaching, that they were to contribute to the cause. “Woman was designed,” he said, “to be an help meet for man”; her proper role was “to help the Brethren” and to present always to the unconverted “an example of the purity and dignity and kindliness—the salutary and vivifying influence, the attractive and celestial excellence—which Christianity can impart to the female character.”24

  If she could not go out on her own in search of souls to save as her husband could, she would have them come to her. In this, at least, she had the backing of the Board; the one role outside the household thought fit for mission wives was what Dr. Anderson called “the whole business of female education.”25 Jane was allowed to organize a school for girls, who met on the veranda of her home each morning to learn arithmetic and needlework, reading and writing in English and Tamil, Christian scripture, and “the natural history of birds.”

  It was something, but it was not enough for her, not what she had bargained for when she agreed to marry a man she barely knew. “I expected to go among the people and talk Truth with them—Argue—exhort, entreat and postulate,” Ferdinand quoted her as having complained. “But how disappointed [I am]. I can’t speak. The language is against me. I can’t get out. The heat and [infant] forbid. I have lost my strength and my nerves are unstrung, my constitution shattered. I am worthless.”26 That same sense of personal worthlessness and perpetual disappointment would recur throughout her long life, darkening the atmosphere around her, eventually affecting each of her children.

  “Madura is ready to receive the Truth,” Ferdinand had written not long after he arrived, “and so is India.”27 But, for the most part, he found that those whom he and Jane had come so far to save were impervious to his message of salvation. Members of the small Muslim minority in Madura, he wrote, were “in manner cold and repulsive” and “in religion most b
igotedly attached to [their] own modes of faith and worship … unique, grotesque, ludicrous, senseless and pitiable.”28 The Hindu majority struck him as still more debased. “View the gods of India,” he urged mission supporters back home, “false to their word, thievish, licentious, ambitious, murderous, all indeed that is repellent, malignant and vile … is it surprising that there is perjury, and injustice, and wickedness the land over?”29

  Few of those who attended the mission schools or listened to missionary sermons did so out of religious conviction: lower-caste parents sent their children to study because no other schools would take them; higher-caste boys were willing to attend the secondary school because the English they mastered there would help ensure a good job with the British. The handful who claimed genuine conversion were for the most part untouchables; already excluded from Hindu worship, they saw little to lose and at least the possibility of something to be gained in adopting the faith professed by their rulers.

  Meanwhile, the caste Hindus who filled the streets of Minakshi’s city saw no reason to abandon their religion, though their priests did enjoy debating doctrine with the black-clad foreign holy men, whom they called “Swami” out of courtesy. Even Ferdinand confessed that he did not always come off best in these encounters. “Many a person who can fill a pulpit in America or England with respectability and credit,” he admitted, “would undoubtedly break down if called to make an attempt among the Hindoos; and this not for want of mental strength or furniture, but from the peculiar manner in which objections are presented, and the confidence with which they are uttered.”