His and Jane’s health deteriorated further, and their sense of futility deepened. Ferdinand wrote a long, urgent appeal for more funds on behalf of the mission, only to have it ignored. Madura received $24,000 in 1845. Jaffna received only a thousand less. But Madras got just $4,000. “It makes us sad,” Ferdinand told Boston. “We will not condemn.… But we feel grieved. We urge the point, though you give us not the men, give us the money.”46 Boston chose to give them neither. “What good has resulted from all this?” Ferdinand wrote and then sadly provided his own answer: “But little that is as yet apparent.… Much apparent good I do not see.… It is labouring in hope.”a
The Wards left Madras to see if several more weeks in Bangalore would again improve their spirits and restore their health. When they returned, Ferdinand was startled to find that Dr. Anderson had responded to his letter expressing his wish to be allowed to come home by writing to Rev. Winslow rather than to him. It was clear from his letter that, while Ferdinand had claimed to have told Winslow of his plans, he had not actually done so. Worse, Anderson had asked for a fuller account of his motives for shifting from Madura to Madras, and Winslow had been unable or unwilling to provide it. Further, the secretary had expressed fear that Ferdinand might simply come home without permission.
Ferdinand had again been caught flouting the rules and misrepresenting the facts and again responded with self-righteous indignation. He had thought his letter was “private,” he told Anderson. He refused to be more specific about the incessant quarreling that had caused him to leave Madura: “Mrs. Ward’s health was not the cause.… I left for reasons that constrained the three Brothers [at Madura] to be unanimous in their approval. Here is where the subject rested & it is enough.” He was not “lawless,” he added, and if he ever did ask formal permission to return to America he would do so on the same ground that had led him to India in the first place—“Duty to God and the Church.”
Surely the Committee does not wish to use their Authority to keep me in India when I think that this is not the place for me.… If I return to America I go not at the urging of friends, not for pleasure, but duty.… As for the charge laid against me that I am not frank, ingenuous, straightforward, &c. I regard them as all apocryphal. They are too freely made and I decidedly plead “not guilty.” As far as necessary I am frank, ingenuous, straightforward & all else that can denote fairness.47
A few weeks later, he again shifted his ground, and formally applied for permission to come home. He was now too ill to remain in India any longer, he said. To persuade Boston—and his fellow missionaries—that he was not malingering, he sent to the American Board on May 31, 1845, a daunting catalog of ailments attested to by the garrison surgeon at Bangalore: malarial fever; “hepatic derangement and other visceral disease”; “Bowel complaint which has greatly reduced … physical strength” already seriously undercut by “great mental exertions in his missionary calling and deep study”; and an “overtaxed” nervous system “inducing Dyspepsia and a tendency to Erysipelas [and] Inflammation of the Lower Extremities.”48
Another hot season in India, the surgeon concluded, would surely kill him. It didn’t. He would spend another eleven unhappy months in Madras before the Prudential Committee in Boston finally granted permission for him and Jane to come home. In April 1846, a little over nine years after they first landed in Madras, the Wards, with their surviving children—Sarah, seven, and William, two—finally set sail for home aboard an American vessel, the Worcester.
Even the sea voyage proved to be filled with tension. The despised fourth Mrs. Winslow happened also to be aboard—she, too, was ill—and by pure happenstance found herself and her child occupying a cabin more spacious and airy than the one the Wards had booked. They immediately suspected Rev. Winslow of favoritism, and refused to exchange a word with his wife during the six-week voyage.b
* Todd’s depression would steadily deepen. He eventually asked to be allowed to resign his post but then to stay on at Madura and try to find some other work. His fellow missionaries insisted he go home. They argued to the American Board that having one of their number jobless and single, no longer preaching God’s word, and evidencing what they called a “diseased mind,” would constitute a “blot” on the mission. Boston eventually agreed. Todd sailed home. He was bitter for a time—he refused the allowance for himself and the children of his second wife to which he was entitled—but his devotion to the mission cause never waivered. In 1858, he went west to Clay County, Kansas, where he preached until his death in 1874 in a one-room schoolhouse he named the Madura Congregational Church.
† The Sandwich Island mission was far more vehement in its response. Several missionaries resigned, charging Boston with being “monopolistic,” “despotic,” “anti-republican,” even “anti-scriptural.” Ferdinand De Wilton Ward, Edward Cope, and Nathaniel M. Crane to the Secretaries of the ABCFM, November 8, 1838, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Archive, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
‡ It would soon be supplanted by the Eastgate Church, in whose belfry was hung a bell shipped all the way from Boston in the hope that it would deny “the natives [who] have no timepieces” any excuse to miss services.
§ Quoted in a confidential letter from Rev. Henry Cherry to the American Board, September 20, 1846. Once Ferdinand had settled in at Madras, he would write to Secretary Anderson in Boston, claiming he had been invited to come to Madras and had only reluctantly accepted. Both letters are in the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Archive, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
‖ Among the roughly 1,800 American and English Protestant missionaries who preached in India between 1800 and 1876, only twenty were actually killed by the people they struggled to convert, and eighteen of those died in the Indian Mutiny of 1857, butchered more because of their white faces than their faith. Of the remaining two, one was clubbed to death by a Sikh zealot at a Punjab village fair in 1864, and the other died in Peshawar the same year at the hands of his own night watchman who, dimly seeing his master padding through the garden in his nightshirt, shot him for a prowler.
a It is hard now not to be scornful of the Wards for ever believing that simply by preaching the Gospel outside the gates of Hindu temples they could somehow bring down the faith that built them, a faith far older than their own. Thousands of pilgrims still stream through the Minakshi temple at Madurai each day; the dark pillared halls lined with deities that horrified the Americans are now lit by electric bulbs, but the eyes of the worshippers making offerings at its busy altars are still filled with the reverence the first missionaries failed to expunge.
The first missionaries’ successors would do better by expecting less, by trying to bring understanding as well as ardor to India, by blending the blessings of literacy and modern medicine and technical skill with the Gospel.
But for all their pretensions, for all the futility of the task the Wards and their colleagues took on with such high hopes and despite the passage of more than a century and a half and the stubborn immutability of India, traces of them remain even in Madurai.
Goats pick their way through the old missionary cemetery; there are several small stones among the larger ones, each identified only by a number, and, although the book that once provided the key to who was buried where seems to have been lost, little Levi Ward presumably lies beneath one of them.
The ecumenical movement has eased the old tensions between Catholic and Protestant converts, and the sectarian bitterness that divided the Protestants of Ferdinand and Jane Ward’s time from one another is largely muffled, too: the Church of South India, established with India’s independence in 1947, brought the major Protestant churches into a single fold, two million strong. When the author visited the old mission compound some twenty years ago, bright-eyed children still studied on the shady verandas where Jane Ward once oversaw their lessons, and the Eastgate church, just across the road, had just celebrated its 150th anniversary. “We are still reaping th
e harvest sewn by those first Americans,” its then pastor told me, while we strolled together around the cool interior of the New England–style meetinghouse. As he spoke, the old bell began to ring, calling the congregation Ferdinand and Jane Ward helped establish to worship once again.
b When her husband learned of the Wards’ baseless charge and self-righteous silence, he felt it necessary to write a lengthy letter to Boston detailing the entirely accidental way in which his wife had found herself more comfortable than her traveling companions in case “any misapprehensions” about it should “reach the ears of its members.”
The fourth Mrs. Winslow died in 1852. “Thus he is left alone,” Ferdinand wrote to his brother, “one would think, for life.” Wrong again. In 1858, Rev. Winslow took a fifth wife. This one managed to outlive him. Miron Winslow to Rufus Anderson, April 12, 1848, Madras Mission’s Annual Report to the ABCFM, January 1, 1845, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Archive, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Ferdinand De Wilton Ward to Levi A. Ward, June 28, 1852, Ward Family Papers, Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, University of Rochester Library.
THREE
Chastened and Sanctified
The Rochester to which the Wards returned in the summer of 1846 had been transformed. The village Ferdinand had known as a boy had become a city, home to more than thirty thousand people, only a small minority of whom now traced their families back to New England. The Ward clan’s world had altered, too. They had sold their homes on North St. Paul Street and now lived clustered together in four big handsome Federal houses on a five-acre plot on the town’s eastern edge they called “Grove Place.” Thirteen different varieties of trees shaded the grounds. Ferdinand’s venerable parents lived there, as did his older brother, Levi, and his family, and his sisters Siba Smith, Susan Selden, and Henrietta Clarke, their husbands, and their children. Cousins played and went to school together and fought to keep the children of Irish immigrants—the “Scio Street urchins,” one family member called them—from jumping the back fence to steal the family’s peaches and pears and chestnuts.1
Ferdinand made his peace with his father. It cannot have been easy. He had disobeyed Dr. Ward by going to India as a missionary, and then, by failing and being forced to come home, he had further let him down. Ferdinand moved his wife and children into the home of his sister, Henrietta Clarke, and left them there while he entered Auburn Seminary in Auburn, New York, where he hoped to complete the course of study his eagerness to go abroad had interrupted. Jane and the children soon joined him, taking two rooms in a boardinghouse. She told her husband that she’d felt shabby and threadbare among all the well-to-do in-laws who had failed to attend her wedding, and she had worried that Sarah and William were too “jungly” for Rochester.
Ferdinand undertook a series of speaking tours by train, preaching on behalf of Indian missions, and began to look around for a pastorate. But he took time out to bring his family back to the Grove again for Thanksgiving, eager for them to experience the family rituals he remembered from his boyhood. Candles appeared in every window of his parents’ home. Before the family sat down to eat, the coachman was dispatched with a carriage full of turkeys and ducks and roasts of beef for the Orphan Asylum and the Home for the Friendless. And after the last pie plate had been carried back to the kitchen, Ferdinand’s father and mother were helped into twin chairs on a raised platform so that their children and their spouses, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren—more than sixty in all—could pass below and receive their blessings.
Grove Place helped safeguard the Wards against the changes occurring all around it, but it could not shield Ferdinand and Jane from the still-smoldering anger of their former colleagues overseas. Their absence from Madura may have temporarily lowered the level of acrimony among the brethren, but it had not eliminated it. Henry Cherry, the clergyman who had been ordained as a missionary alongside Ferdinand before leaving for India and then had become one of his most bitter enemies, married for a third time. His bride was the daughter of a British magistrate whose family had been in India so long that the gossipy wife of one of the Jaffna missionaries told a friend that his new bride might secretly be an Anglo-Indian and therefore likely to “steal.”2 Cherry got wind of the insult, insisted his bride was “as purely European [white] as any of our ladies,”3 and demanded a written apology. He was so outraged when he didn’t get one that he wrote to Boston demanding that his colleague and his wife both be formally reprimanded, setting off an exchange of vitriolic letters that continued for nearly three years.
Meanwhile, the Wards’ rebellious friend John Lawrence and his wife had invited Alfred North, newly widowed and lonely, to live with them at Dindigul. There, depending on whom one believed, he either made improper advances to his hostess or she acted in a wanton and disgraceful way toward him. In any case, Lawrence threw North out of his house. Each then complained about the other to Boston. Always impulsive, Lawrence compounded his problems. Twice, he was authorized to oversee the construction of cottages meant to provide desperate mission families with sanctuary from the annual ravages of cholera and malaria, first in the Sirumalai Hills and then at Kodaikanal, in the Palnis. He paid little attention to the agreed-upon budgets and secretly bought himself land and planted coffee trees on it in violation of a rule that barred missionaries from engaging in private business. Then, he put up a separate house for his wife and children with funds that may or may not have belonged to the mission. When he was called to account by his fellow missionaries, he refused even to attend the meeting.
Word of continuing dissension in the Madura mission reached Boston. Questions were asked. Henry Cherry, responding on behalf of his brethren, denied they had ever been “disorderly”; all would have been peaceful at Madura, he said, had the Lawrences and Wards never been assigned there.*
The quarrel between John Lawrence and Alfred North continued for months. Charges and countercharges made their slow way back and forth between South India and Boston with no sign of compromise on either side. Finally, Dr. Anderson ordered both men home to appear before him.
Ferdinand knew little of all this until a few days after Thanksgiving, when he received a letter from Boston. Rev. Anderson had heard a rumor that Ferdinand had helped provide private unauthorized funds for his friend Lawrence and asked for an explanation. Stung once again at the suggestion that he could have done anything wrong or acted out of anything but the loftiest motives, Ferdinand composed a hasty answer. Not long after he had arrived in Boston from India, he’d been introduced to a Mr. Wordsworth, a Revolutionary War pensioner who had asked him how he might safely send $200 in two installments to his friend Mrs. Lawrence, who was said to be in “very embarrassed circumstances” at Dindigul. Ferdinand had suggested a way to send the first $100 (some $1,800 in today’s dollars), using a courier whom he knew to be reliable. “This is all I have to do with the case,” he told Anderson. “I was not asked as to the necessity of the case or the expediency of sending the sum. I said that it would be most welcome” but had “remained ignorant as to Mrs. Lawrence’s ‘pecuniary state.’ ”
Then, unable to control his temper at having his actions questioned, and still resentful of the economies the Prudential Committee had insisted upon, Ferdinand went on to lash its members with gratuitous sarcasm.
When I left India at least 2/3 of the members of the Madura Mission were in debt. Whether this rose from extravagance or the small salaries is not for me to say but I state the fact. This feature is not peculiar to Madura. Others of our Missions are in the same state.…
As to Mr. Lawrence, you are informed of my opinion of him as a devoted Christian and a laborious and successful missionary. He has … my most sincere affection and respect. As is not unusual, he is better versed in theology than in banking and is more successful in debate than in bargaining.4
Ferdinand evidently felt himself in a strong position. He was convinced he’d done nothing wrong and equally sure tha
t his old friend John Lawrence would soon be on hand to make everything clear.
He was mistaken. The Lawrences had set out for home from Dindigul a few days after Ferdinand’s letter was mailed, but months of fever and severe dysentery had fatally weakened his old friend. Lawrence made it only as far as the coastal city of Tranquebar, where he died on the day after Christmas. Mrs. Lawrence, left with three children and a dead husband, saw to it that he was buried, then hurled all of his correspondence into the sea. Ferdinand was now without any prospect of having access to the papers or eliciting the testimony with which he had hoped to defend himself.
“My health is much improved,” Ferdinand had assured Dr. Anderson and the Board not long after coming home. “Mrs. W. is also much better. I love India and yet anticipate a return to that land. When, I cannot say.”5
If his former colleagues at Madura had their say, the answer would be never. Henry Cherry had already made that clear in his letter to Boston: the Wards had been troublemakers from the moment they arrived in India, he charged; they had failed to accede to the wishes of the majority, adopted a policy of “non-intercourse”6—that is, silence—toward those of whom they disapproved, refused to respond to the mission’s calls for greater economies, openly defied regulations meant to apply to all.
Then, in the autumn of 1847, Alfred North arrived home, carrying with him a lengthy official defense of the mission’s actions regarding Lawrence and his allies. “The abominable conduct of the Wards” could never be forgiven, North said; if Ferdinand were to try to return to India and reestablish friendly relations with his former colleagues, “I can assure him that the remembrance of the numerous annoyances he has inflicted upon them for these ten years is too vivid and their personal knowledge of him too intimate, to allow them to listen.”7
A Disposition to Be Rich: Ferdinand Ward, the Greatest Swindler of the Gilded Age Page 7