Dr. Anderson sent Ferdinand a summary of the charges. He was stunned.
“I need not tell you, Dear Sir,” Ferdinand wrote back, “of the bitterness of soul this document has caused me.”8 He boarded a train for Boston, stormed into Anderson’s offices, and demanded the opportunity to defend himself. North refused to be in the same room with him but Anderson handed Ferdinand the document North had brought with him from India. When he saw the charges fully spelled out—“62 pages against me [that] strike directly at my ministerial and Christian character”9—he realized his chances of returning to India had vanished. Without the corroborative testimony of John Lawrence and other unnamed witnesses now “in their graves,” Ferdinand could not see how he could mount an effective defense.10
Neither could Dr. Anderson, who was weary of a dispute that had now dragged on for more than three years. Carefully refraining from taking sides, he asked instead that North and Ward both sever their connection with his organization. To save face, each would be allowed to offer an official, if inaccurate, reason for his resignation: Ferdinand claimed his still-precarious health now precluded a return to the field; North developed a sudden urge to study theology at Auburn. With both resignations in hand, Anderson destroyed North’s list of charges and most of the remaining correspondence so that no one would ever know precisely what had happened.†
Late in the evening of Saturday, November 5, 1848, at the end of a jarring ten-hour stagecoach ride from Rochester, Ferdinand stepped down on South Street in the little town of Geneseo, New York. The pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church, known locally as the “White Church,” had recently resigned. The session—the body of ruling elders of the congregation—was looking for a replacement, and Ferdinand had been asked to occupy the pulpit on Sunday morning and speak again at the chapel service in the evening. (His late friend John Lawrence’s parents belonged to the White Church and may have had something to do with the invitation.) “My own thought was a single Sabbath service, and then to return home,” Ferdinand remembered. “I so expressed myself in sincere and emphatic words to gentlemen who called upon me the next morning. Having just returned from a long residency as a Missionary in Southern India, I was ill-fitted for a pastorate in a community like this. But my wishes were overruled.… ‘It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.’ ”11
The session asked him to spend a few days in town, nonetheless, getting to know the place. It didn’t take him long. Geneseo then had fewer than one thousand citizens and just four streets—South, North, Main, and Center. Ferdinand walked them all. There were no sidewalks, he later remembered; here and there raw planks spanned patches of otherwise impassable mud. Trees were scarce, and, for the most part, houses were “few and very plain.”12
The village was older than Bergen or Rochester, established in 1789 by James and William Wadsworth, land-owning brothers from Connecticut whose holdings stretched for thirty miles along the Genesee Valley and whose big homes would eventually anchor the opposite ends of Main Street. They recruited many of Geneseo’s merchants and tradesmen, donated land for churches for worshippers belonging to several denominations, saw to it that their town was made the county seat, and built a high school for Livingston County children on a wooded prominence called Temple Hill. Both brothers had died by the time of Ferdinand’s initial visit, but members of the Wadsworth family remained Geneseo’s most eminent citizens and principal benefactors; most townspeople farmed their lands or served them in some other capacity.
A few weeks later, Ferdinand brought Jane to Geneseo to meet the congregation, see the town, and look over the clapboard house that was to be refurbished for the new minister and his family. It stood at the corner of Second Street and a muddy lane grandly called North Center Street that would one day be renamed Ward Place. To Ferdinand’s relief, “Jane liked what she saw,” he reported to his brother Levi, and he agreed to serve as pastor.13 His beginning yearly salary would be just $700. Ferdinand asked his brother to invest Jane’s $7,500 inheritance from her father (nearly $200,000 today), so that they could supplement his income with the interest it earned, and to keep the arrangement a secret; if the session ever learned that he and Jane had “property,” he told Levi, it would never vote to give him a raise. “That the people [here] will long continue to like me as they seem to now I cannot hope,” Ferdinand wrote, but he still resolved to stay.14 Geneseo would be home to the Wards for the rest of their lives.
That summer, Ferdinand found himself involved in another controversy, this one not of his own making. In a clan so determinedly worthy and relentlessly successful as the Wards of Rochester, it was probably inevitable that at least one member would defy its conventions. Ferdinand’s brother Henry Meigs Ward had always been more or less a misfit. Fond of books, uninterested in business, and relegated to running the family farm, he had married the younger sister of his brother-in-law, Moses Chapin. Her name was Eliza, and her unrelenting religiosity was thought excessive even among the Wards. Sometime while Ferdinand was in India, Henry had begun a secret affair with an Irish serving girl. When he was found out in 1846, he packed a valise, walked out the door, and vanished into the West, leaving behind his wife and three children. Weeks later, Levi received a letter from him. He was in Chicago, living alone in a boardinghouse and happily surveying town lots for a living. He missed his hometown and his children. He did not miss his wife.
Nothing remotely like this had ever happened in the Ward family before. Rochester continued to gossip about it. In the summer of 1849, Levi asked Ferdinand to go to Chicago and see if he could talk some sense into Henry. Surely three years of self-imposed exile were enough. Ferdinand found his brother shabbily dressed and unshaven but still more or less content. He still had no wish to come home, he said, but he did want access to money his father had put aside in trust for him. Ferdinand told him that “we had rather give him $50.00 at Rochester having him near us than send him $5.00 where he is. I said to him verbatim that we could do nothing that would tend to encourage him in his present mode of life. This I repeated again and again.” Then, when Henry started complaining about how his father and the family were treating him, Ferdinand cut him off: “I cannot think it well for members of a family to be talking against a Parent whatever of exceptional conduct may be, in their estimation, apparent.”15 Ferdinand’s other siblings all agreed. In the face of scandal, Ward solidarity was what mattered most—then, and in all the years to come.
On November 5, 1849, a year after accepting the pastorate of the White Church in Geneseo, Ferdinand wrote two letters to Dr. Anderson. In the first, intended for the files, he formally asked for “a dissolution of my connection with the Board.” It was, he said, the “will of Him of whose goodness I have had too ample experience.”16
In the second letter, he was more frank. Since he had Anderson’s assurance that all the old correspondence had been destroyed “& that nothing stands upon your records to indicate what has transpired,” he wanted to confide in the Board’s secretary privately, as a friend, not an official, to let him “look into the secret chambers of my spirit.” Although he remained stunned that his former colleagues had turned against him, he “most truly forgave them,” called upon God to “attend their labours,” and looked forward to the day he would be reunited with them all at the seat of Judgment.
He was still motivated by “love to the heathen,” he continued, and still wished he could somehow go back to live and preach among them, but he was now resigned to seeking other ways to do the Lord’s work. Meanwhile, “I would receive this painful event as from the hand of Him who sees that I need chastisements and whose blows are fewer than my deserts.… My missionary life has not been faultless. In a company of 14, I was … the youngest. My temperament is ardent and I said and did much that I cannot recall with satisfaction. I merit all that I have been called to bear and the one prayer of my heart is that this trial may have the chastening and sanctifying effect which will convert it into a blessing.”17
Th
e Wards would always cling to the official fiction that their delicate health alone had kept them from returning to India. Many years later, looking back over his long life, Ferdinand told his son Will that “one thought is pleasant. I never resigned a position but by protest of those whom I was serving. I was never driven out.”18 But both he and his wife knew they had, in fact, been driven out, by those alongside whom they had worked and lived.
They would never lose their interest in the subcontinent. Ferdinand continued to speak on behalf of the missions, persuaded British friends in Madras to send him spices so that Jane could make him the Indian dishes he had learned to love, and had already completed a book about India that would be published by Scribner’s later that year. India and the Hindoos: Being a Popular View of the Geography, History, Government, Manners, Customs, Literature and Religion of That Ancient People; with an Account of Christian Missions Among Them is an odd volume, compulsively encyclopedic both in the number of topics it takes up—everything from fauna to funeral practices—and in the overconfident ignorance it displays about a great many of them. (“The giraffe,” the author assures his readers, “can be met with occasionally in the northwest provinces”;19 while the horn of the Indian rhinoceros “projects, not infrequently, thirty inches upward. So long as the animal is quiet, this appendage lies loose between the nostrils; but when excited, the muscular tension is so great that it becomes immovably fixed, and can be darted into a tree to the depth of several inches.”)20 Still, India and the Hindoos is also filled with its author’s fascination with the subcontinent and its people, whom, he wrote, “I love” and now would never see again. “Though there be night the ‘morning cometh,’ ” he wrote on its final page. “This must be our motto, to warm our zeal and nerve our arm, to cheer our despondency and strengthen our faith—‘FAINT YET PURSUING.’ ”
If Ferdinand felt divinely chastened by the way he was forced from his chosen field, as he claimed he did in his last letter to Secretary Anderson, he would not show much evidence of it in his new one. The same strange combination of unchecked ardor, self-righteousness, and deviousness that had alienated those with whom he differed in India would eventually be brought to bear on the people of his Geneseo congregation and their neighbors.
Some of the problems he faced were those of the church he served. During the years he and Jane were overseas, the American Presbyterian Church had split in two. The Plan of Union, drawn up between Presbyterians and Congregationalists in 1801, had enabled them to work together to create new congregations as the frontier moved west, but it had begun to come apart even before the Saracen company sailed for India.
The issues between the two sides were sometimes hard to understand. “Their contentions and janglings are so ridiculous, so wicked, so outrageous,” Charles Finney wrote before the final division came, “that no doubt there is a jubilee in hell every year about the time of the [annual Presbyterian] General Assembly.”21 But Calvinist orthodoxy was at the core of the debate: conservative Presbyterians began to call themselves adherents of an “Old School” and questioned the legitimacy of any congregation that dared entertain the slightest doubt about the doctrine of original sin, or permitted Congregational ways of governance to supersede Presbyterian polity, or that failed to adhere strictly to the letter of the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms. Because Old School Presbyterians deplored what they called “the widespread and ever restless spirit of radicalism,”22 they also frowned on revivals and abhorred abolitionism.
At the 1837 general assembly, an Old School majority had finally voted to abrogate the Plan of Union and “exscind”—that is, expel—four synods, comprising 553 churches, that had been formed under its rules. This included most of the churches in western New York. The exiled New School churches then banded together to form a rival organization. For the next three decades, there would be two Presbyterian churches—Old School and New School—each insisting on its own exclusive legitimacy, each with its own pulpits and preachers, newspapers and seminaries, synods and presbyteries and general assembly.‡
Church historians would call it the “Presbyterian thirty-years’ war,” and Geneseo would become one of its battlefields. Ever since the division, two presbyteries belonging to the exscinded synod of Geneva had sought to remain above the struggle—Rochester (which had initially licensed Ferdinand to preach) and Ontario (to which his new church belonged). They saw themselves as “Presbyterian original [author’s italics], without either of the appendages of Old or New School.”23 Although both synods were at least formally linked to the New School assembly, their ranks included a large number of conservative pastors and laymen and so neither sent commissioners to its annual meetings.
In Geneseo, the result was that each Sunday morning, the pews of Ferdinand’s church were filled with adherents of both camps on the lookout for evidence that their new pastor favored one over the other. Ferdinand did favor Old School doctrine (though he would never lose his enthusiasm for the kind of revivalism that had brought him to Christ). The Wards of Rochester had always been implacably orthodox, and he had learned most of his theology at the Princeton Seminary, where the principal, Rev. Charles Hodge, liked to boast, “a new idea never originated.”§
“My feelings must greatly change before I am one of that [New School] body,” Ferdinand told his brother. “I say but little among the people about it, but such are my views.”24 Still, so long as the Ontario presbytery maintained what Ferdinand called its “masterful inactivity” and remained aloof from the New School assembly, he would do his best to keep all his parishioners content.
But just a few hundred yards south of the White Church stood a newly established outpost of Old School orthodoxy, the Temple Hill Academy. It had once been the Livingston County High School, founded by the Wadsworths in 1827, and its first teachers, recruited from Harvard, had been carefully instructed to avoid any form of religious “narrow-mindedness” that might keep a scholar from “the undisturbed observance” of his or her own faith.25 But shortly after the Wards came to town, the Old School synod of Buffalo persuaded the board of trustees to let it take control. As Presbyterian pastor, Ferdinand was appointed to the academy board and found himself in the midst of an increasingly bitter dispute over what should and should not be taught there and what sort of relationship the academy should have with his church.
The synod intended to expand the school and transform it into a “Synodical Academy” run along strict orthodox lines, and appointed as president of its board an especially determined conservative, the Reverend A. Lloyd. Ferdinand liked him at first—he was “a superior person,” he told Levi, and shared the Ward family’s preference for institutions “decidedly Christian & theologically Old School Presbyterian.”26 But Ferdinand preferred that the shift toward orthodoxy be gradual—funds still had to be raised, the teachers had to be brought gradually into line—and Rev. Lloyd turned out to be rash and intractable. He sought to remove from the board anyone connected with the White Church because of its distant link to the New School synod, and even proposed that academy students be forbidden to attend services there for fear of being exposed to what he deliberately mischaracterized as Ferdinand’s “odious (N. School) preaching.” “The villagers [rose] up in arms against him,” Ferdinand wrote, and Lloyd was eventually outvoted and forced to resign.27 A more tactful Old School clergyman, Rev. James Nichols, was hired as principal to smooth the transition, and Ferdinand himself began teaching at Temple Hill. “I hold a catechetical class this evening & commence a course of Theological sermons next Sabbath,” he reported to Levi. “1st topic: ‘Nature & importance of Truth.’ ”28
Given the intensity of doctrinal feeling at the time, it might have been impossible for anyone to steer a successful middle course between the two factions in a town as small as Geneseo for very long. To have done so would have required extraordinary diplomatic skill and a willingness to seek creative compromise. Ferdinand had neither, but, as he told his brother, he hur
led himself into his pastoral duties with all the fervor he had demonstrated in Madura and Madras.
The last week was one of somewhat varied occupations. Sabbath morning and Saturday night I preached two written sermons, lectured twice (one written)—conducted the monthly Concert [a coming-together of the congregation]—officiated at a wedding, a baptism, & two funerals (addresses at each)—spent half a day in presiding over the Board of Trustees [of the academy] (as they elected me President for another year, though I said “Nay”)—another half day at a [Gospel] Society meeting—wrote one full sermon & skeleton of another—made a dozen pastoral calls—rewrote & sent to press a chapter of my forthcoming book29—attended two Railroad meetings [to discuss plans to connect Geneseo with Avon and Rochester]—& do not neglect my own household in any apparent respects … my position is no sinecure. But oh, the little I do in comparison with what is needed.30
He was hard on himself, but, as always, harder on others. From the first, he thought his congregation ungrateful. The church elders were shirking their duty: “They are rich, can do [more] and ought to at once.”31 They didn’t pay him enough and weren’t sufficiently appreciative of the sacrifice he was making in agreeing to serve the spiritual needs of their little town. He threatened to leave unless his salary was raised and his church was expanded. The session eventually granted him an additional hundred dollars a month, and voted to add a brand-new steeple to the church, to enlarge it to accommodate fifty new pews, and to build a large session house on Second Street that came to be called the “Ward Annex.”
He never let up on the townspeople. He deplored the stubborn persistence of “Sabbath-desecrating—drunkenness, [and] gambling” and was enraged when the Anglican Church dared welcome one of his parishioners into its fold: “I have an increasing contempt for the whole system of ecumenicism,” he wrote, “and will not throw the might of influence which accompanies my personal presence in that direction.”32 He got up a petition signed by more than 450 women demanding that the Livingston County Board of Excise stop issuing licenses for the sale of alcohol; when it was voted down on the grounds that, if permits were not provided, liquor would be sold anyway, he denounced its members, some of whom had been his friends, as wicked and immoral.
A Disposition to Be Rich: Ferdinand Ward, the Greatest Swindler of the Gilded Age Page 8