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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  At a Fourth of July celebration, he attacked the Catholic Church and the recent flood of Irish immigrants in flight from the potato famine with such vehemence that some members of his own congregation “were ready to say the parson went too far,” he told Levi afterward.33 But Judge Scott Lord, the highest elected officer in the county and a profoundly conservative church elder with whom the Wards were living until the refitting of the parsonage could be completed, disagreed. He was pleased, he said, that “the waters are mightily stirred.” The address caused “quite a sensation,” Ferdinand wrote. “The cry today is ‘Down with Rome.’ I spoke earnestly and boldly but not hastily. May I be forgiven if I did anyone any wrong.”34

  Levi warned him to be careful: “You can lead by kindness better than pull by logic,” he wrote.35 Ferdinand laughed off his advice. It was his appearance, not his preaching, that put people off, he said. “There is … something about my face that leads others to think that if I am sober I am angry. My children observe it & Willie begs Father not to look so cross simply because I am not laughing or smiling.”36

  Ferdinand’s outbursts did not please his wife, either. She shared his loathing for “popery,” but she often thought him unnecessarily harsh, too eager to preach God’s wrath rather than His forgiveness, and she feared that her husband’s impatience might complicate their lives, just as it had in India. Her enthusiasm for Geneseo was distinctly qualified, too. She was grateful when the family could move into the parsonage: she had had no home of her own for three years, after all, having been forced to live on the charity of her husband’s relatives, with her children in boardinghouses, or with Judge Lord. But nothing else about the little town lifted her spirits. It seemed a dreary, claustrophobic place, in which she came to feel that everyone was judging her and her children. Her girlhood dreams of personally converting the heathen had died in India. She had felt keenly the disgrace of coming home under so much suspicion and lived in fear that the real story might somehow get out. She had no choice now but to live out her life as a small-town parson’s wife, barred again by custom and convention from acting independently of her husband.

  Ferdinand was of little help. He followed more or less the same schedule he had followed in Madura: rising before dawn and emerging from his study only to make pastoral visits, direct Sunday school, visit the Academy, and preach his sermons. There was little time for her or the children—and as her unhappiness increased, so did the amount of time he spent away from home.

  In the late spring of 1850, she suffered the first of a long series of puzzling collapses. Letters list a host of complaints: fatigue, debilitated nerves, “settled neuralgia,” rheumatic joints, recurring fevers, shooting pains, and more. She would undergo the same treatment for all of them: weeks—sometimes many weeks—away from Ferdinand and her family, as a patient at Dr. Henry Foster’s new water-cure facility in Clifton Springs, New York. Foster was a devout Methodist whose pious regimen—formal prayers several times a day, no dancing, no card playing, no coffee or tea—appealed especially to the clergymen, former missionaries, and their wives, to whom he offered his help at a much-reduced fee.

  Treatment was Spartan: a rising bell at six a.m. was followed by a bath in the spring’s sulphurous waters, brisk walks, an unvarying, mostly meatless diet, and long sessions in which the patient was packed in wet sheets.

  Jane did not return to Geneseo until winter, and when she found late the following spring that she was pregnant for a fifth time, she returned immediately to Clifton Springs for another lengthy stay. This new baby was almost surely a surprise and may not have been a welcome one. Jane was thirty-nine at a time when the average life expectancy for white women in the United States was only slightly over forty. Her daughter was thirteen; Will was nine. She had thought childbearing behind her, and child rearing well along. Now she would have to start all over again. Her life would still not be her own.

  Nothing seemed to cheer her. In a bleak letter to her son Will, written from the Geneseo parsonage some years later, Jane Shaw Ward sought to sum up her life. “When I remember that at age 15 I was taken from school to keep house for my father and entertain company of which we had a great amount so as to seldom get an hour for reading, and that as soon as married I was taken off to live among the heathen during 10 of the best years of my life, and since my return home have been shut up in this narrow-minded village, I really wonder that there is any thing in me to interest anybody or that my children are not rather ashamed of me.” Her own life, she concluded, had been “useless,” and her marriage had only served to stifle her: “I do know something of what it is to be thrown day after day with one who differs from you so as to prevent the full and free exhibition of your own identity.”37

  It was into this home, amid these ongoing tensions, two years after his father had formally accepted a permanent pulpit and just a year after his parents finally abandoned all hope of returning to the mission field, that Ferdinand De Wilton Ward Jr. was born—on Friday, November 21, 1851.

  * Much of the evidence relating to the Madura mission’s internal quarrels was deliberately destroyed. This summary is based on an examination of letters separately filed under the names of the individual missionaries involved, in the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Archive, Houghton Library, Harvard University, including Cherry’s confidential report to the American Board, September 20, 1846.

  † Alfred North would move on to occupy pulpits in western New York, Kansas, Missouri, and Wisconsin before his death in 1869.

  In 1850, Henry Cherry would also be quietly forced to sever his ties with the American Board. He remained a turbulent figure. He was tried for “Oberlinism” by the synod of Geneva. In 1859, he was dismissed by the presbytery of Florida for “dishonesty, duplicity & defamation of the community” involving “serious criminality.” (He claimed he’d been let go purely because he had advocated the cause of “freedom, not slavery.”) During the Civil War he served in Tennessee as chaplain of the 10th Michigan Cavalry. In 1865, a church in Kalamazoo, Michigan, removed him for what it called “gross immorality.” He died in Pompey, New York, in 1891.

  Mary Lawrence, the widow of the Wards’ impetuous ally, taught school in Ballston, New York, until shortly before her death at the age of seventy-two.

  ‡ Both Old and New schools followed the system of Presbytery polity developed by John Calvin in Geneva, carried by John Knox to Scotland, and brought to America by Scottish immigrants. It was intended to balance authority between the denomination and the congregation.

  To prevent power from ever falling into the hands of an individual patriarch, congregations elect presbyters to serve on assemblies. The assemblies, in turn, exercise authority over congregations. Regional groups of congregations form a presbytery. Groups of presbyteries are governed by a synod. Together, the synods compose the annual general assembly. Meanwhile, local congregations govern themselves through a board of elected elders called the Session. A senior minister moderates its meetings, which are headed by the clerk of session; neither official has a vote in the deliberations.

  § At least in retrospect, Ferdinand was embarrassed at ever having so much as flirted with religious nonconformity. While at Princeton, he remembered, he and seven friends privately formed a club for an object he later called “quite plausible but very perilous.” Four argued that Jesus was divine and therefore worthy of being “worshipped as God.” The other four took the position that he was merely “a created being, great wise and good—but only to be honoured, not adored.… The danger was … that the latter four would find so much on their side that they would adopt [it as] their own.” Ferdinand regretted ever taking part: “With religious error as with pitch,” he wrote, “the less handled the safer.” Ferdinand De Wilton Ward, typed manuscript of Auto-Biography No. 2, p. 1, Brinton Collection.

  FOUR

  A Contest for Principle & Truth

  As an adult, the younger Ferdinand Ward—“Ferdie,” then “Ferd,” to his family—wa
s rarely reluctant to talk about himself, even when the law had closed in and it would have been far better to keep his own counsel. Even so, he did not often muse aloud about his life before Wall Street. But in two letters written from his Sing Sing cell to the sister-in-law who was looking after his son, he did make suggestions about the boy’s care that reflected his own memories of the way he had himself been raised.

  I have felt in my own case the evil of too strict a religious training. Let [my boy] ever feel his Sunday School a pleasure, not a burden. Be temperate with him in everything.… My experience in this matter teaches me that the boy, who in early years has religion forced on him, never grows out of the dread of it. I shall never get over the dread I felt in my youth of the 2 long sermons each Sunday and the Wednesday evening prayer meetings. They did me no good and only added to my dread of such things when I got older.1

  It was not religion itself that filled Ferdie with dread. It was the fact that the grim and often frightening exhortations to which he was subjected were delivered by his own father, and that he had to hear them in the company of his troubled, perpetually worried mother, whose conviction that the worst was yet to come rarely lifted for more than a moment. For him, as for his parents, faith seems more often to have been a source of chaos than comfort.

  We know almost nothing else about his first few years. He was said to have been a blond, blue-eyed, eager little boy; his father once tried to account for what he called his youngest child’s “weakness of purpose” by saying that as a baby he had been “greatly petted, for he was very handsome.”2 But he was also small for his age and frail. When Ferdie was ten months old, cholera swept through Geneseo. He caught it and nearly died. Three years later, according to his father’s spare journal, he fell ill again, with “congestion of lungs” this time, and ran a fever so high he suffered convulsions; five months after that, he was again “very sick.”3

  Scores of letters from his parents survive; not one of them contains winsome stories about his first attempts to walk or talk or learn to get along with playmates. His older siblings’ achievements or amusements are not often mentioned, either, for that matter. Their mother was rarely able to see in her children anything other than bleak evidence of her own inadequacy, while their father’s life was taken up with pastoral duties and the bitter doctrinal and political quarrels that would eventually divide their tranquil town.

  In April 1852, five months after Ferdie’s birth, his father set out for the annual spring meeting of the Ontario presbytery. He was apprehensive. Peace among his divided parishioners continued to depend on the presbytery maintaining its neutrality by continuing to refuse to send commissioners to the New School general assembly. But neutrality was growing harder and harder to maintain. Passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 had intensified the ongoing war between the Old and New schools. In the North, both factions officially deplored slavery, but most Old Schoolers were also adamant that the church had no legitimate part to play in the struggle against it. Too close a relationship with politics of any kind, they believed, smacked of “man-worship.” Clergymen who urged parishioners to hide runaway slaves from their masters in defiance of federal law were “busy-bodies,”4 Ferdinand told his flock. He deplored what he called “Garrisonian emanations which goad the South so terribly with no good results to the cause of freedom.… I do wish that church officers would keep out of violent party politics.… It is bad, bad, bad [and wounds] the cause of Christ.”5

  Now, Ferdinand had been instructed by his church’s session again to do whatever he could at the meeting to keep the presbytery from aligning itself any more closely with the New School. By his own account, his was the foremost voice in opposition to change. “I spoke for half an hour,” he assured Levi, “and was enabled to hold the attention of all (Ladies, lots of them, & gentlemen) to the close,”6 but in the end, he and his allies were outvoted, twenty to twelve. The New-York Evangelist, speaking for the New School, expressed its delight that the Ontario presbytery had at last “decided to … wheel into line.” “The benefits and beauty of union,” it promised, “far surpass, in importance and comfort, all the possible advantages of a dissociated and independent position.”7

  The benefits and beauty of union were lost on Ferdinand Ward. “The ship is high and dry on the shore of New Schoolism,” he reported to his brother, and he now faced what he saw as a crisis of conscience. It would be impossible, he wrote, for him to pastor “for [any] length of time in a decidedly New School church.”8 For a year or so after the vote, he hoped his session might make things easy for him by agreeing not to “have anything more to do with the presbytery,” but in the end it preferred simply to submit a “strong minute” in protest of the realignment and remain at least technically within the New School fold.9

  That was not good enough for Ferdinand. The growing success of the Temple Hill Academy (which now had some three hundred students, both boys and girls) was turning the village into what he called a “center of Old School influence” and deepening the dissension within his congregation. “Church and Academy ought to be under one ecclesiastical jurisdiction,”10 he wrote, and he began to see it as his duty to bring about that realignment—directly if he could, deviously if there were no other way. “The apple is not quite ripe though perfecting if I do not err,” he told his brother. Meanwhile, he added, “it seems advisable to be a little quiet.”11

  But Ferdinand Ward was incapable of being quiet. In early 1854, the struggle between the Old and New schools divided the faithful of the nearby Rochester presbytery, the presbytery to which Ferdinand had initially belonged and the last in the state to have maintained its neutrality. When its delegates, too, voted to send commissioners to the New School assembly, five of the city’s best-known orthodox clergymen—all close associates of Ferdinand and Levi Ward—left to unite with the competing Old School presbytery of Rochester City.*

  Inspired by their example, and possibly urged on by Levi, Ferdinand startled a meeting of his own presbytery by asking for a formal letter of dismission that would allow him to join its own Old School rival.

  When the church elder who had accompanied him to the meeting began to weep at the thought of the divisiveness Rev. Ward’s departure was sure to cause in Geneseo, Ferdinand withdrew the request. But when he got home he repeated it, in writing this time.

  A delegation of concerned elders and clergymen from the presbytery soon came to see him in his crowded, book-lined study. They stayed for two hours. Ferdinand told them that his conscience would no longer allow him to remain even distantly attached to the New School. If he truly felt that way, they said, the “honorable” course was simply to resign.12

  He was willing to do that, he answered, provided no “outside influence” was exerted upon his church to maintain its traditional ties after he had left its pulpit. He did not say so outright, but it was clear to his inquisitors that he planned to lead his congregation into union with the Old School. The committee told him that they could not agree to such an “unpresbyterial” proposal, and would “never consent to stand still and see the church carried over to the O.S. without an effort to prevent it,” one of his visitors recalled. “There was no disposition to retain him against his wish, but how could we dismiss a pastor of one of our churches to another presbytery, especially one not in correspondence with us?”13

  Ferdinand and the committee members shook hands. Neither side had budged. They would not set him free. He did not feel he could continue for long under their jurisdiction, and he wasn’t sure what to do next. The stomach trouble that had tormented him in India returned. His chronic Monday-morning migraines intensified, too, and he was forced to spend more and more time in his darkened bedroom.

  A summer spent abroad, paid for by wealthy parishioners concerned about his health, raised his spirits,† but it would take him two years to make his next move—years during which the same division over what was finally to be done about slavery and its extension that menaced the American Union further thr
eatened the unity of the White Church. By 1856, the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic American, or “Know Nothing,” Party, for which Ferdinand had most recently voted, was on its last legs, and the Whig Party, to which most of the Wards of Rochester had owed their first allegiance, had splintered over slavery. Like most Americans, Ferdinand’s parishioners had begun to identify themselves either with the Democrats, who saw slavery’s extension as a matter for the voters to decide, or with the new Republican Party, which promised no new slave states and no slavery in the territories. The New School faction within the church was overwhelmingly Republican.

  Ferdinand and the Old Schoolers were Democrats, for the most part, who shared the views (if not always the vehemence) of the Ward family physician and ruling church elder, Dr. Walter Lauderdale. To him, Republicans were nothing but “political croakers …, lunatics who scant at the Constitution & farewell counsels of Washington & Jefferson & trample them under their feet & who wish to ride into power on the ruins of those sacred relics.”14

  Some time that autumn—and with behind-the-scenes backing from at least two prominent parishioners (most likely Dr. Lauderdale and Judge Lord)—Ferdinand quietly approached the recently established presbytery of the Genesee River, part of the Old School synod of Buffalo, with a proposal: if it was willing to add him to its roll of clergymen without his having been formally dismissed from the Ontario presbytery, he and his allies stood ready to bring the White Church over to the Old School. On October 15, 1856, Ferdinand was officially—and secretly—“received” into their presbytery, then sat back and waited for the right moment to persuade his congregation to join it, too.15