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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Mr. Ward’s sermon was about the “Pulpit.” This afternoon he gave us a history of our church … and we liked it better than former discourses of this kind because he did not make such long obituary notices.41

  Geneseo’s ecclesiastical warfare made headlines in the religious press. Rev. Ward’s action amounted to “ecclesiastical freebooting,” the New School New-York Evangelist declared; it was the wicked result of naked “Old School aggression” and unprincipled “lust of numbers.… They [the Old School] have never, by any official act, acknowledged our existence or our right to exist.… They receive a minister from one of our Presbyteries without any papers, as readily as they would a converted Catholic; they will constitute churches from members of our own, without letters, as readily and apparently more greedily than they would from Pagans!”42

  A fellow clergyman published a letter denouncing Ferdinand as devious and hypocritical:

  The Rev. F. D. Ward [whom] I have always esteemed assured me, very recently, that he could not and would not preach to a part of [his former congregation]. He had served them when together and could not consent to be the pastor of a … fragment …; and yet now he consents to … use his influence to destroy a church which he has professed to love and tried for ten years to build up, and devotes himself to exacting another church from its ruins. I fear that like Absalom, he will find that he has listened to the voice of evil counselors, and God has turned their counsel into foolishness.43

  As always, when anyone questioned the path Ferdinand had chosen, it only confirmed his own belief that he had picked the correct one. “We [Old School Presbyterians] are right, not generally, but also in detail,” he later wrote. “There is no other [faith] with so much to admire and so little to condemn.… Such purity of doctrine—such consistency of deportment—such outgoings of zeal and effort are nowhere else to be found.”44

  Outgoings of zeal and effort were the order of the day at the Academy by September 1859, when Jane Shaw Ward walked seven-year-old Ferdie up Temple Hill to enter school for the first time. Orthodoxy’s grip was now complete. Each morning began with the reading of scripture and prayer; more prayers followed tea and preceded supper. Ferdinand Ward supervised Bible recitations every Saturday evening, preached to the students at his new church on Sunday morning, officiated at devotions at the school again that evening, and oversaw recitations from the Shorter Catechism each Monday morning.

  Ferdie’s father was ever present at Temple Hill. So was the example of Ferdie’s sixteen-year-old brother, Will. He was a senior that year, and seemed to embody everything his parents might have hoped for in a son: he was an industrious student with a special interest in science and literature; a committed churchgoer about to enter the Edgehill School in Princeton, New Jersey, to begin studying for the ministry; a public speaker so gifted that even after graduation he was asked to return to the academy to give inspirational talks. (In one of them he warned his listeners against “seeking wealth and fame in this world … without God.”)45

  Will’s “highest happiness,” his mother noted proudly, “always derived from the Highest & Best Source.”46 She urged Ferdie to admire and emulate his older brother in all things, and insisted that Will watch constantly over his younger brother, not only to protect him from bullying by older boys but also to see to it that he behaved always as a clergyman’s son was expected to behave. Over the coming years, neither the admirer nor the admired would much like the role he was expected to play.

  * Levi Ward was one of the new presbytery’s prime organizers. He put up the funds with which to establish three new congregations and eventually built a fourth church of his own, St. Peter’s, just across the road from the Grove.

  † In 1856, Ferdinand published a book-length account of this trip, A Summer Vacation Abroad; or, Notes of a Visit to England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Italy, and Belgium. It is a hodgepodge of sightseeing and Presbyterian orthodoxy: he thought Paris beautiful, for example, but sadly lacking in “a firm and enlightened Christian faith”; after a visit to St. Peter’s in Rome, he boasted, “Did we kneel? Did we make a sign of the cross? Neither!”

  ‡ “Stated supply” clergymen were employed, usually at a minimal salary, to occupy a pulpit in a church that was not then formally seeking a permanent pastor.

  § The family’s income had recently been further reduced as a fresh economic panic paralyzed the stock market and dried up interest payments from the investments Ferdinand had quietly persuaded Levi Ward to make on his wife’s behalf. Jane Shaw Ward to Sarah Ward Brinton, March 9, 1858, Brinton Collection.

  FIVE

  The Triumph of the Monster, “War”

  War! War!” Ferdinand wrote in his journal on April 13, 1861. To him, the firing on Fort Sumter was the awful but predictable outcome of antislavery meddling by the new Republican Party and its New School Presbyterian allies. He was scornful of Abraham Lincoln—whose irregular church attendance he especially deplored—and he would at least initially admire Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham, the Copperhead leader, whose slogan was “to maintain the Constitution as it is, and to restore the Union as it was.” But, until a compromise peace could somehow be reached, he told a gathering of townspeople, political differences had to be forgotten in the interest of preserving the Union. Secession, like abolitionism, symbolized disorder and therefore had to be crushed.

  That summer, the town’s leading citizen, James S. Wadsworth, newly designated a brigadier general, called upon the citizens of Livingston County to form their own regiment, the 104th New York Volunteer Infantry (later called the “Wadsworth Guards”).*

  By early autumn, some seven hundred young recruits were housed at Camp Union, a big, hastily built barracks at the east end of town.

  Whenever they could, nine-year-old Ferdie and the town’s other small boys walked out North Street to watch the men drill with wooden rifles and listen to the rattle and blare of the army band. Sunday mornings at his father’s church were enlivened by the presence in the back pews of strangers in blue, marched to and from services by their officers. On Thanksgiving day, Ferdie helped his mother, his sister, and the serving girls deliver hot turkeys to the barracks, and on February 25, 1862, when the men of the 104th left for the war, he was among the townspeople at the depot who cheered and waved as their special train of seventeen cars pulled by a bright yellow locomotive disappeared down the tracks.

  Ferdie watched his father vanish down the same tracks in July. Rev. Ward had resigned his pastorate and enrolled for three years as regimental chaplain, intending both to minister to the men and to provide readers of the Livingston Republican with accounts of how their sons and brothers, fathers and husbands were faring at the front. He caught up with the regiment just in time to witness its first full-scale battle, at Cedar Mountain on August 9. No one in the 104th was killed, he reported—“all escaped. Laus Deo!” But “I have visited the hospitals (churches that were) and Oh how sad the scene! It beggars description. Warfare like this is a tragedy. It is no gala day affair.”†

  Over the next few weeks, things got far grimmer. As Ferdinand reported to the newspaper, the regiment was assigned to the Union army of Virginia, under the bumbling and vainglorious general John Pope.

  You are aware that the “Army of the Virginia” under Gen. Pope, destined, as you were told, to strike a blow from which Secessionism was never to recover, marched to the Rapidan, and then—marched back again.… The army retraced their steps exhausted in body and mind, and vexed almost to the point of rage against certain military leaders.… Excessive fatigue from long and hurried marches, scarcity of food and that at very irregular periods, together with the deadly missiles of the enemy have left our once large healthy and vigorous corps sadly diminished in number and efficiency.… In the face of the Surgeon’s declaration that it would be destruction for soldiers to be made to march further for the present, they are ordered further on. The 104th will not mutiny but they will lie down and die. Such is to be the fate of many a brave ma
n.1

  They continued to march and to fight—at Rappahannock Station, Thoroughfare Gap, and Second Bull Run, where a shell narrowly missed Ferdinand while he was helping to lift a wounded soldier into an ambulance. As the army plodded on, he found himself more and more badly weakened by the diarrhea that had first plagued him in India and had often recurred during times of tension since. Eventually, the regiment’s commander ordered him to go home.

  Jane, Sarah, and Ferdie were all relieved that Ferdinand was out of danger. But they were now concerned about eighteen-year-old Will. The war was clearly not going to end quickly, and the Union needed men. There was already talk of a draft, the first in American history. If Congress approved it, Sarah had told her father, “there is nothing to exclude Willie.… He is old enough.… Do you not think the gunboat service will be altogether better for him than on the land?”2 Certainly his mother thought so. Jane wrote to her brother, Acting Master Edward Shaw, who was stationed in Cincinnati, overseeing construction of a 511-ton ironclad river gunboat, the USS Indianola. Shaw pulled strings, and on October 1, 1862, his nephew came aboard as acting master’s mate.

  “Do try and be faithful,” his mother told her oldest boy.

  Don’t touch a drop of any kind of spirits, or be induced to smoke or play cards for a stake. I know you will never be profane but smoking, drinking & card-playing are so often urged upon young men with such specious reasons that many are beguiled into the first steps and then when God is offended, he sometimes leaves them.… There can be no ruin without the first step. I feel a little disappointed that you have not a room to yourself as I fear it will prevent you retiring in the day to pray alone, but I know if my brother should notice that you take a half hour of any part of the day to be alone, he will be sure not to interrupt you or to want the room at that time. ’Tis but little to give to God out of the 24.…

  Should you go out [sail from Cincinnati] you had better take your flannel shirts and overcoat with you, for there are in every climate raw damp nights and as you have to keep watch at night sometimes you will certainly need them. Remember, you have been delicately brought up and cannot stand every thing.3

  Will promised to be good, say his prayers—and wear his overcoat.

  Meanwhile, for the first time in seventeen years, Ferdinand was without a church. An earnest young pastor named Henry Neill now occupied his former pulpit, so in November he agreed to become stated supply at Groveland, seven miles to the south. Since he planned to be away and Sarah was to spend the winter with his sister Henrietta Clarke in Rochester, Jane and Ferdie moved in with neighbors for the winter. Ferdinand wanted Jane to have a complete rest while she was there and worried that her sleep would be disturbed by Ferdie, who still climbed into his mother’s bed whenever his fears overcame him. He was eleven years old.

  Groveland did not suit Ferdinand. The English couple with whom he boarded was genteel enough, and “the people appear grateful that I have come among them,”4 he told Sarah, but the village was stultifying, the congregation of farmers attentive but uninteresting. Within weeks he resolved to rejoin his regiment. The Livingston Republican applauded his decision. “We are glad for the sake of the brave boys who are now lying sick and wounded. We shall miss you, Dr. Ward, but go where duty calls you—go with our wishes and our prayers.”5

  The 104th was now part of the vast tent city that stretched for miles along the bank of the Potomac at Belle Plain, Virginia. Ferdinand got there just in time to describe to Will the fiasco that came to be called the “mud march.”

  We moved the whole Army of the Potomac under a flaming address from Gen. [Ambrose] Burnside that “we were to meet the enemy, &c!” At night-fall we had marched 6 miles—and at next evening 3 miles farther—& then no more! Stuck in the Mud!… Next morning we beat a retreat to our old quarters which we reached in 48 hours. Result: about four days—traveled 12 miles, saw no foe but mud—met with a defeat—cost to gov’t $1,000,000 & gained nothing but disgrace & discouragement. What now? Burnside is superseded by [General Joseph] Hooker.… The army thrown into panic.…

  How rejoiced I am that you are not in the infantry ranks.… Hold on.… That is not your “Calling.” Aim higher. Serve your country well now, but look beyond. I want to see you get in public life [as a minister]. This I cannot be denied. God bless you my dear boy with a loving heart & obedient life toward the dear Savior!6

  Ferdinand had just taken part in one of the Union’s most ignominious debacles. Will was about to find himself at the center of another. When the USS Indianola joined Admiral David D. Porter’s Mississippi Squadron at Cairo, Illinois, in early 1863, the Mississippi southward from Vicksburg to Port Hudson remained in rebel hands. Repeated attempts by Union vessels to blast their way past the Vicksburg batteries failed until February 2, when a federal ram, Queen of the West, managed to make it through and then began a twelve-day sortie, burning rebel stores and capturing rebel vessels up and down the river. On the night of February 13, the Indianola was ordered to run the Confederate gauntlet and join the campaign of destruction. Will Ward stood watch in the forward gun turret as the ironclad slid as silently as she could toward the fortified town, which overlooked a great bend in the river. A rebel picket opened fire. “As this signal passed along the shore,” Will recalled, “[our] progress was marked by volleys of small arms and signal rockets.… Then came the blinding flash and deafening boom of the great guns.” Eighteen shells were fired at the Union gunboat; all eighteen splashed harmlessly into the river. “Thus,” Will continued, “the moments passed until the last of the batteries was left in the rear, and then the Indianola, having by a defiant whistle proclaimed its victory to friends and foes alike, passed beyond the wall of fire.”7

  The victory lasted just eleven days. The Confederates had already seized and refitted the Queen of the West, and they used her to help batter the Indianola into submission. One man was killed, and everyone else aboard was captured. Will was sent to the notorious Libby Prison in Richmond.

  Meanwhile, elsewhere in Virginia, the Union army undertook a new campaign. The 104th New York fought again at Fitzhugh’s Crossing and then was held in reserve at Chancellorsville. On the fourth day of that battle, Ferdinand reported to the Livingston Republican, he helped officiate at what was meant to be a solemn ceremony.

  At three in the afternoon the chaplains passed across the valley to hold services appropriate to the day.… The Brigade was drawn up on three sides of a hollow square, in columns, by division, closed in mass. On the fourth side stood the officiating clergymen, Campbell of the 107th [New York], Cook of the 94th [New York], Mr. Bullions of the 16th Maine, and Ward of the 104th N.Y. In the rear lay another Brigade, thus swelling the audience to about three thousand persons. The exercises consisted of reading the scriptures, singing, addresses which were listened to with most reverential attention and even witnessed by many across the stream, and perhaps by some among the hills who were very soon to send among us the instruments of destruction. The words of benediction had hardly passed your correspondent’s lips when there came toward us the hissing shell, and then another and another—passing just above our Regiment, but doing fatal work among those in the rear. What a change! A moment since songs to the Prince of Peace, now the triumph of the Monster, “War;” now salvation to the soul and anon death to the body. There were those who heard of Jesus on that occasion for the last time.8

  One of the thousands of Union men lined up to listen that afternoon, Major Abner Small of the 16th Maine, remembered hearing something else: “The chaplains had urged the men ‘to shrink not from the terrible ordeal through which we were called to pass, brave and heroic, and God being our shield we would have nothing to fear’ when came a slight puff of smoke, followed by another, and yet another, and yet another … just across the river, and then a rushing sound like trains of cars and terrific explosions all around us.” Even these terrifying sounds, Small recalled, were “almost drowned out by the shouts and laughter of the men as the brave chaplains, hat
less and bookless, with coat-tails streaming in the wind, went madly to the rear over stone walls, through hedges and ditches, followed by shouts of ‘Stand firm! Be brave and heroic and put your trust in the Lord.’ ”9

  Twenty days later, the crew of the Indianola was exchanged at Fortress Monroe, and Will started for home on leave. “How nice it is to feel that he is at last out of the hands of rebels,” Sarah wrote to her father. “I doubt whether he will be contented to remain here [in Geneseo] long. The village is so quiet.… There are no boys of his age in it at present.” A friend had told her, she continued, that a returning soldier had said “that he loved only two men in the world. One was [General George] McClellan & the other was Mr. Ward. I am not surprised to know the men are all so fond of you, Father.”10

  The men were fond of him and he did his best on their behalf. “Often and often when on some hot and dusty march has he dismounted from his wee little [horse] ‘Charger,’ ” one veteran remembered, “and put up in his place some limping, tired, poor sickening boy, when the good old Dominie would trudge along with the rest and indeed it always took the stoutest to tire him out.”11 But in June, his chronic ailment returned, and as the regiment moved across Pennsylvania to help blunt Robert E. Lee’s thrust toward Philadelphia, he was often forced to ride in a litter, dehydrated and unable to sleep.

  On July 1, 1863, the Wadsworth Guards were camped a few miles southwest of Gettysburg. When the fighting around Seminary Ridge began that morning, 333 men of the 104th were alive and well; when it ended, 194 of them were dead, wounded, or missing. Ferdinand spent a week with burial parties, praying over the bloated, fly-blown dead. “I committed twenty-four to their hastily dug graves (twelve Union and twelve Confederates),” he wrote. “No word more perfectly describes the scene and results than Satanic.… And the lonely graves—fields covered with them.… Sad scenes!”12