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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Word leaked out. The Ontario presbytery, determined not to give up its church without a fight, passed a resolution charging Ferdinand with bad faith and ordering him to surrender his pulpit. They had the synod adopt it and then sent three clergymen to the June 29, 1857, meeting of the White Church session to deliver its rebuke in person. Ferdinand sat silent as it was read out.

  Resolved. That Brother Ward having now left the Presbytery which installed him … without having asked for a dissolution of the Pastoral relation and without a letter of dismission … it is the judgment of this body, that though the act was disorderly, yet when he connected himself with the Genesee River Presbytery his relation as pastor [of the White Church] ceased to exist and it is only remaining for us, for purposes of order, to declare as we hereby do, the said Pastoral relation is dissolved.16

  The session was still made up mostly of Ferdinand’s allies. They passed a defiant resolution insisting that whatever happened, they wanted him to continue to occupy the moderator’s chair and to remain in the pulpit as “stated supply” if he could not stay on as their permanent pastor.‡

  Ferdinand was encouraged by their support and still persuaded that most of his congregation was with him, but he knew that to complete the desired realignment, something else would be needed. Meanwhile, the ecclesiastical standoff continued, and bitterness steadily grew between Old and New schoolers, Democrats and Republicans, those who continued to consider Ferdinand their beloved pastor and those who had begun to see him as a usurper.

  During her ten years in India, Jane Shaw Ward had often suffered from the impact on others of her husband’s curious combination of ardor and indirection. Now, after ten years in Geneseo, it all seemed to be happening again. When she agreed to settle there, she had counseled Ferdinand to avoid controversy and stick to preaching. Ferdinand found it impossible to heed her advice. As a result, the church to which she and Ferdinand had devoted themselves was now deeply divided. Her uneasiness over that struggle drove her to spend still more time away from home.

  Depression now seemed to settle over her every autumn—grim, numbing, self-hating, hopeless. “Her tendency toward pessimism,” Ferdinand would one day lament to his daughter, “often gets the mastery & is the cause of [misery] to herself & those around her. Oh, that she was as happy in spirit as she is good in act!”17 She had already spent at least three winter months undergoing the water cure at Clifton Springs in 1854, three more in 1855, and another five in 1856. Miss Morison, the nurse and companion most often assigned to her there, had told her again and again that with such a worthy husband and such well-behaved children, she “should be the happiest woman living,” but no number of hours wrapped in wet sheets could make her believe it.18

  In late 1857, as the rancor within the church intensified, Jane began a retreat that would stretch on for fully half a year. Her daughter, Sarah—“Sallie” to her parents—did her best to run the household in her mother’s absence. She was nineteen now, attractive, soft-spoken, suitably religious, and serious beyond her years. She had spent scattered months at girls’ schools in Rochester and Batavia and Elizabeth, New Jersey, attended the Temple Hill Academy, and was sometimes permitted to spend a few days away from home, visiting relatives in New York. But she was rarely allowed to enjoy herself for long. During her mother’s frequent absences, she was called upon to act as hostess for her preoccupied father, take part in all the activities expected of a clergyman’s daughter, oversee the Irish cook and maid, keep the house clean, make sure the washing was done, and care for her younger siblings, Will and Ferdie.

  A clutch of Jane’s letters from Clifton Springs survives, all written in the winter of 1857–1858 and addressed to her children. Each is filled with anxieties and admonitions and unanchored fears about the fate of her family and her own mortality. Shadowy pains kept her from sleep, she reported—in her knees, in a finger, in her left lung, her head, her back. When she did manage to nod off she was awakened by nightmares: in one, she told her daughter, a great wind blew in the parsonage door, smashing Sarah against the wall and rendering her “almost an idiot. Oh, how my heart beat with excitement & horror.”19

  Above all, she feared that rather than follow her husband into the Old School fold, his congregation might instead desert him—and force his family onto the street. Two themes run through her voluminous correspondence: the precarious state of her own soul, and bitterness about money. She always professed not to care about the latter: “The silver and gold are the Lord’s,” she liked to say, and “He giveth it to whom He will.” But nothing angered her more than the fact that He had chosen to give it to her husband’s less pious relatives in Rochester while she had mostly to make do on a parson’s salary.

  Ferdinand’s decision to remain in Geneseo as stated supply had already meant a sharp reduction in his pay. Now, she feared that even that pittance might be snatched away. “We have had years of prosperity, perhaps now the Lord sees best to afflict us,” she wrote. “Oh, may we bear it with Christian submission & cheerfulness.”§

  She agonized over the steady demand her weekly treatments made on the family’s depleted finances, and spread guilt with every letter. Despite the cold at Clifton Springs, she had halved her bill for firewood, she assured Sarah; “you shall not be deprived of one comfort to give me two.”20 “As we are poor,” she told fourteen-year-old Willie, he could expect no Christmas gifts, but he was not to mind because “whatever you do without will add so much to keeping me here. I don’t like to be selfish but some of these days you shall reap the benefits of present-day denial in my stronger efforts to do you good.”21

  Her six-year-old son got a Christmas letter, too.

  Dear Little Ferdie,

  You are a precious little darling and I love you.… I hope you are good and do just what is told you and do not cry at all. I will try to get well fast but you must pray for Mother every night for only God can cure me. There are some little boys here about as big as you but they are rude and wild. I love my Ferdie best. Goodbye dearest child. Don’t spend your pennies for candy but give them all to Sunday School. Try to love the dear Saviour so that we may all meet in heaven.

  Your fond & loving,

  Mother22

  Years of experience helped Sarah and Willie withstand their mother’s morbid, often frantic fears. But it was all still new to Ferdie. He clung to his mother when she was home and was chronically frightened when she was not. His mother’s melancholic holiday greeting, with its suggestion that without his constant prayers she might not survive, so frightened him that it was thought best for Sarah to escort him to Clifton Springs by stagecoach and train so that he could undergo the water cure alongside his mother for what she called his “fearfulness.”23

  It must have been a grim business for a small boy: doused with buckets of cold water, then wrapped so tightly in wet sheets that only his head was free to move for an hour a day—“unless,” his mother wrote, “he gets nervous and cannot stand it.”24

  He did get nervous, was often unable to stand it, and continued to seem terrified of almost everything. His mother blamed the Irish serving girls back home for telling him scary stories; “I have no confidence in these Catholics,” she said.25 When Ferdie was finally escorted back to Geneseo, it was with a warning from Dr. Foster that he should be kept from beginning school for a time and must not be “frightened in any way either for fun or anything else as it might affect his brain.”26

  Ferdie was often genuinely sick when small and, like his father, would remain agitated and anxious all his life. His mother’s ongoing fretfulness about him was at least partly justified. But those early episodes also taught him that illness, real or feigned, would always win her anxious sympathy and help him avoid doing things he did not wish to do.

  In early March, while Jane and Ferdie were still undergoing the cure at Clifton Springs, a letter arrived there from Ferdinand. He could no longer endure the situation within his church, he said, and suggested that no one, not even his wife,
understood the anguish its continuing relationship with the New School caused within him.

  He now thought he saw an opportunity to bring about the change he had been working toward for years and was going to risk everything and seize it. His older brother seems to have been helping behind the scenes. The Reverend James Nichols, who had helped transform the Temple Hill Academy into a citadel of orthodoxy, announced he was leaving to become principal of the Rochester Female Academy; Levi Ward was a trustee of that institution and may have helped arrange the transfer. In any case, as president of the Temple Hill board, Ferdinand was asked to find a successor. His choice was a fellow trustee and another of Levi’s close allies from Rochester, Rev. Charles Ray. He was young, dynamic, and wholeheartedly orthodox—so wholeheartedly that he declared he would take the job only if the White Church agreed immediately to sever its ties to the Ontario presbytery and declare its absolute fidelity to Old School doctrine. Meanwhile, the Old School synod made it known that if Rev. Ray did not get his way it would simply close the academy. This would be a blow to orthodox religious education in western New York, perhaps, but a far more immediate blow to the merchants along Geneseo’s Main Street, who would be denied the pocket money of between two and three hundred students every academic year. Pressure for change accelerated. So did what one newspaper called “anger and agitation” among Geneseo Presbyterians, some of whom had worshipped together more or less harmoniously for nearly half a century.27

  Jane, who had consistently urged her husband to go slow, was now uncharacteristically philosophical. “I feel that Father knows what is best and we ought not to urge him any further against his conscience,” she told Sarah. “He is very, very good and if he does not see it as we see it, it may be owing to our ignorance or his own weakness. Let us leave him with the Lord and try to make him happy at home for I fear some of his church members say a great deal to try him.”28 Besides, she had begun to have visions of her own, visions that seemed to confirm her husband’s understanding of all that was at stake. “We must prepare ourselves for some great event,” she told her daughter.

  I have felt this for 2 years past [roughly from the time Ferdinand secretly signed on with the Old School presbytery] and I believe it is nearer than I expected. Satan has been preparing his work for some time, through Romanism, Mormonism, Spiritualism,… and various other erratic dogmas. Now, God is reviving His work, by gathering together His elect from the 4 quarters of our land & of the world. Each [side] will muster its forces ere long & there will be a grand coalescing of all the evil on one hand and all the good on the other. A contest for principle & truth will ensue and though Truth must & will prevail, the struggle will be desperate. Many who profess to be Christians will fall away while those who truly belong to Christ will either suffer death for His sake or live through all & see the dawn of the Millennium.29

  Jane had come to share Ferdinand’s belief that the worldwide contest for principle and truth was about to be fought out in the tiny village of Geneseo. She and her husband now both saw themselves as part of the Elect, ready, if required, to be martyred in His cause.

  At a meeting of the Geneseo Gospel Society a little over a month later, nineteen of Ferdinand’s closest followers proposed that all male members of the congregation come together to discuss the possibility of altering the church’s “ecclesiastical connections.”30 They acted, Ferdinand remembered, because they were “confident there would be little if any difference of opinion in regard to the propriety of the proposed change.”31 They were wrong. Thirteen opponents immediately countered with a “remonstrance”; there should be no such discussion, it said, since “no good reason for so important a change exists.”32

  In the end, a majority agreed that there was “piety and intelligence enough in our brotherhood to meet and discuss [even this difficult question] with candor and mutual forbearance.”33

  The meeting was held at the White Church at ten in the morning on August 25, 1858. Ferdinand’s close ally, Judge Lord, proposed an informal ballot on which each member could simply note his preference between “Old School” and “New School.” A prominent New Schooler responded by calling instead for “Yeas and Nays” on the proposition that “in the opinion of this church it is inexpedient to change its ecclesiastical relation.”34 A full day of what the recording secretary tactfully described as “free discussion” followed. Then came the vote. Ferdinand and his allies had miscalculated. They lost, thirty to twenty-six.

  Outvoted and humiliated but not chastened, Ferdinand immediately offered his resignation. “It is true the field is the world,” he said from the pulpit in what was meant to be a farewell sermon, “and I … trust I would not long be idle [but] I shall leave this beautiful valley with no ordinary sorrow.” For ten years, he had baptized and married and buried members of the congregation. “Such remembrances crowd my memory today and stir the deepest emotions of my heart—but my brethren, my own self-respect—the dignity that belongs to my character as an ambassador of Christ—the fidelity and jealousy even with which the Christian minister should guard the honor of his Master which may receive a stain through him—points the way clearly and makes my path of duty plain.”35 He planned eventually to move to Rochester, he said, and officiate at St. Peter’s, the Old School church his older brother had built opposite Grove Place, the Ward family compound. The Geneseo Democrat lamented his imminent departure: “Mr. Ward served his people as few others would,” it said, but “the circumstances that induce him to leave are of a character that no other course could be pursued.”36

  But the Old School faction in his congregation wouldn’t hear of his leaving. At an acrid meeting of the session three weeks later, with Ferdinand still in the chair as moderator, Judge Lord asked on behalf of “100 or more” members of the church for formal letters of dismission “for the purpose of organizing a Presbyterian church in connection with the [Old School] Presbytery of Genesee River.”37 They were unanimous in wanting Rev. Ward to be its pastor.

  The session, now badly divided, adjourned without acting, still unable to agree on whether or not officially to sanction the Old Schoolers’ departure. Four days later, 113 of Ferdinand’s supporters, convinced that their requests for letters of dismission were being unfairly delayed, met in the Methodist chapel and voted unanimously to leave the White Church without them.

  It was clear now that neither side would give ground. Geneseo’s Presbyterians were irrevocably split, Dr. Lauderdale wrote, and “the materials of which the two societies [are made are] so discordant that there is no probability of a reunion, at least to all human appearance.”38 On October 25, members of the session met again—this time without Ferdinand or his three closest allies—and passed a special resolution. They deplored the Old Schoolers’ action as “censurable … [and a] grievous [departure] from the wholesome laws and usages of Presbyterianism.” But since rebels also seemed determined in their folly, the session agreed to issue the requested letters “in the spirit of brotherly kindness.”39

  By then, brotherly kindness was a rare commodity among Geneseo Presbyterians. More than half the members of Ferdinand’s former congregation were appalled by what he’d done. Old friends and former parishioners crossed the street rather than speak to him or to his wife; some would continue to shun them for years. The Wards responded in kind, adopting the same self-righteous silence they had employed in India toward those who dared differ with them.

  Nothing in the surviving record indicates what impact the struggle over his father’s church had on Ferdie, already fearful and only seven years old. He can’t have understood the doctrinal issues at stake—most of the adults involved would have been hard-pressed to explain them. But he could not have failed to notice that old friends of his parents had become enemies overnight, that there were now neighbors with whose children he was no longer allowed to play, that his mother was even more anxious and his father more distant and preoccupied than they had been before.

  Ferdinand led his reduced flock less
than half a block up Main Street to the Concert Hall above the Genesee Bank at the corner of South Center (now Chestnut) Street. There, he set about creating a temporary church until a permanent edifice could be built. Before the first meeting was over, Ferdinand’s followers had pledged $6,000 of the $8,000 needed to construct a new Central Presbyterian Church at the corner of Second and Center streets. Jane, now home from Clifton Springs, undertook to buy a silver communion service and began compiling books for the new Sunday school.

  “We have the right material for going ahead,” Dr. Lauderdale reported, “and a more determined set of people you never saw. Our neighbors are perfectly surprised at the result & we are somewhat so ourselves.”40

  Lauderdale’s eight-year-old son, Walter Jr., described the excitement of establishing the new church in a letter to his sister.

  We had a very nice sermon today at our new church by Mr. Ward and got the Sunday School all organized and got the classes all right.… We took the seats today just as we could get them.…

  We kept the same singers but they are trying to get some of them out and now they are trying to get Anna Robinson out—She says that she is going to stay as long as she wants to if it plagues them.… We got the carpet down and cushions in and everything all nice. Mr. Ward has got a new desk and a nice cushion to lay his Bible on and has a nice marble-topped stand and a nice haircloth spring-bottomed chair to sit in.…