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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  When he wrote to Sarah a week or so later, those scenes were not what seemed to bother him most.

  Dearly beloved Daughter,…

  My thoughts are very much upon going home but I must be patient. I long for liberty & quiet:—neither is to be found in the army.… The great sins of our army (Generals and all) are intemperance, profanity (blasphemy, rather).… Last week was one of great mental suffering (in part bodily, from the great heat) arising from

  1. nearness of quarters to the tents of several of the most blasphemous, immoral persons I ever heard. How could you endure being where at each moment you are compelled to hear the name of God & Christ & hell in the most irreverent, loathsome connections. Oh, may you be spared the necessity!

  2. The fear of being sent South. I am as far downward as I want to go. If commanded, I of course, must go. But I pray not;

  3. & greatly—our reduced numbers. Some 60 to 70 on parade rather than 600 & more. It depresses greatly. The officers almost all gone. It is sad, sad—So small a parish—So little to do. All these things create an almost intolerable sadness—shall I say, homesickness. Perhaps I ought not to name [these feelings]. They are unsoldierly, childish. I hope that I am not wholly useless—but I long to be at home.13

  In the end, the 104th did march further south, into northern Virginia, in vain pursuit of Lee’s retreating columns.

  On September 15, as Ferdinand struggled to keep up with his regiment, his eldest son undertook what was meant to be a gallant errand some one thousand miles to the southeast. He was now stationed aboard the USS Choctaw, a 280-foot side-wheel steamer that had recently been refitted as an ironclad. After Vicksburg finally surrendered to U.S. Grant on July 4, the Choctaw was assigned to guard the mouth of the Red River. It was warm, sleepy duty interrupted only occasionally by guerillas sniping from the forested shore. The day before, a man in a rowboat under a white flag had brought a scrawled note for the Choctaw’s commander, Lt. Com. Frank M. Ramsay: a young woman was requesting permission to visit a dying relative upriver. Ramsay ordered Will Ward to take several men ashore and deliver her pass in person.

  “When we reached the shore,” a sailor named Daniel F. Kemp recalled, “one man and myself were left in charge of the boat with orders not to leave but to keep a good lookout and be ready to shove off.” Will ordered Landsman Andrew Ryan to keep watch from a ridge, then disappeared from view with Seaman William Gill, headed for the woman’s house—and walked into a trap. Scores of rebel guerillas were hiding in the woods. “We saw Ryan … motioning and calling to Mr. Ward,” Kemp remembered, “and heard loud voices behind the ridge and saw Ryan throw down his musket and run down … towards the house. This was the last we saw of them.” Out of sight, Will and his companions were captured and led away at gunpoint.‡

  Jane got the news in a letter from the Choctaw’s commander on October 6. She wrote to Will at once, though she had no idea where his captors had taken him: “You may well suppose that my heart ached over such intelligence.… I have always said I had rather have you shot than fall into the hands of a lawless band of men who show no mercy. For an hour or more my heart bled for you and it seemed as if my brain would go wild.”14 Then, the postman brought her a second envelope from the Choctaw. Will was no longer being held by the guerillas; they had turned him over to Confederate General Thomas Green, who, in turn, sent Will and his companions on to a prison camp near Alexandria, Louisiana.

  His mother did her best to hide her concern. Outwardly, she remained the selfless, tireless Christian worker she always tried to be, overseeing a women’s book circle, collecting supplies for missions overseas, winding bandages for the wounded. When diphtheria tore through the village, she stoically tended to the sick and dying, too. “One of your little pets has fallen a victim,” she wrote to Will.

  Dear little Harry Lord was taken ill on Monday and died the following Sunday night. I was with him a good deal. One of his recollections of you was … a funny face you had taught him. He made up the face and said, “Willie Ward showed me.” Poor little fellow, he suffered terribly at [the] last. I dressed his corpse and decorated it with flowers which he carried down with him [into] the cold and cheerless earth. Mrs. Lord bears it like a Christian. Freddie Pearson is also dead by the same disease. Little Emma Dean, too, was taken in less than a week. I hope it may not enter our house.15

  Sarah, off visiting relatives, shared that hope. It had been irresponsible for Harry Lord’s mother to ask her mother for help, she wrote. Jane professed to be unafraid.

  Your long & excited letter reached me last evening & what shall I say? God sometimes calls us to make personal sacrifices for our friends & His children, and why should we shrink? Has He not set a time for us to die and will He call us away before that time because the force of circumstances and the demands of friendship lead us into danger? Does He not prove to us especially, every day, that no situation of exposure is beyond His control? Has he not kept dear Father & Willie … from perils by land & by water, by gunshots or sickness? I have no fears of Diphtheria or any other malignant disease so long as I can ease the mind of anxious friends or relieve the agony of a sufferer. In my attendance upon dear little Harry Lord I was very careful to wash & change my clothes before coming into Ferdie’s presence and now that the little fellow is dead & buried 4 days, I am as well as ever & Ferdie, too.16

  Ferdie may physically have been well as ever, but the absence of his father and brother at the front and the sudden, capricious deaths of boys and girls he had known and played with all his life can only have added to his terrors. So did the morbid, crippling self-doubt his mother carefully hid from outsiders but could not keep from pouring out onto her children.

  When Sarah innocently confessed that worry over diphtheria back home had upset her stomach, her mother immediately blamed herself; the cause of her daughter’s indigestion was over-spiced food she had unwisely served when Sarah was a little girl in India, she was sure of it. Everything she did as a mother turned out wrong, she said. “In view of the mistakes I have made in bringing up my children … life does not contain much for me. I often & often wish I had been blotted from it as soon as born and not been made the mother of suffering children. My heart goes up, too, in Thanksgiving that God took two of my children in their infancy & thus spared me & them from the results of living.”17

  With the rest of the family away, Ferdie was unable to escape hearing variations on that theme over and over again. He was now his mother’s sole companion in the dark parsonage. It was fragrant with spices imported in wooden boxes from India, but the carpets and curtains and furnishings were drab and worn, shabby testimony to the truth of his mother’s teaching: no one should expect virtue, no matter how conspicuous, ever to be rewarded in this world.

  Will and the two sailors captured with him were imprisoned for six weeks before they were exchanged, long enough for him to develop intermittent fevers and persistent diarrhea. When they got back to the Choctaw, Daniel Kemp remembered, “the two boys seemed as happy and healthy as if they had been on a picnic and … seemed to enjoy the notoriety it gave them, but Mr. Ward, poor man, was simply a living skeleton.… I never saw a live man more emaciated. Whether he ever recovered from the experience I am unable to tell.”18 When Will failed to get better within a couple of weeks, the vessel’s surgeon recommended he be sent home.

  The same week that Will staggered back aboard the Choctaw, his father found an army surgeon in Washington willing formally to certify his own “ongoing trouble” as incurable, and to recommend that he, too, be allowed to go home, just as, twenty years earlier, Ferdinand had found a physician willing to testify to his inability to remain in Madras. The ailment that was responsible for this forced retreat, he assured the readers of his newspaper dispatches, was “not dangerous, though exceedingly irritating and troublesome, rendering life anything but a blessing. Having endured it for five months, I could bear it no longer.”19 He was discharged for disability on Christmas Eve, 1863.

  Thr
ee weeks later, Will was formally discharged from the navy on the same grounds. The war continued, but neither father nor son would see any more of it.

  A little over a year earlier, Freeman Clarke, the husband of Ferdinand’s youngest sister, Henrietta, had been elected to Congress as a Republican. Jane—who shared her husband’s loathing for that party and whose jealousy of the Rochester clan had so intensified over the years that she found it hard to visit there, even for the holidays—sent Henrietta her carefully qualified best wishes.

  My dear sister:

  As I am not going to Thanksgiving this year & shall not be able to present my congratulations, in person, for your good husband’s triumphant election, please therefore accept them in writing. I shall be sorry to miss you from the Rochester circle, though I seldom see you when I visit there now.

  I want you to come and make me a visit this winter all by yourself, for though I have no girl, I make out to get enough for ourselves to eat and whatever friends may come in. Besides, I do not care much what I give those who, like you, get every luxury at home and so can well afford to live on gravy for a few days. Now do come and let us have a nice quiet cozy visit together which we may both remember with pleasure when you will be mingling with the gay and brilliant diplomats of the great Republic, and I shall be plodding on in my country kitchen among the pots & kettles.

  With ever so much love …

  Your sister20

  Perhaps understandably, Henrietta Clarke chose not to come to Geneseo for that cozy visit. But a year later, she invited twenty-four-year-old Sarah Ward to stay the winter with her family in Washington. Ferdinand had been delighted. “Enjoy yourself just as much as possible,” he told her, “consistent with your duty as a Christian.”21 Her mother professed to be pleased, too; a prolonged visit to Washington would provide Sarah with “an opportunity to see the world”—an opportunity, she never tired of telling her daughter, that her own life as a clergyman’s wife had denied her.

  Sarah would remain part of the Clarke household for the better part of three years. She loved being there. It was a lively, bustling place; there were seven offspring in the house, ranging in age from seven to twenty-nine. The Clarkes were sufficiently religious to reassure Sarah’s parents but open-minded enough to welcome people of all kinds into their parlor. Sarah made her debut at the home of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, attended a levee at the executive mansion, shook hands with the Lincolns and with General Grant, and, after checking with her mother to make sure that occasional theater- or opera-going would not make her an “inconsistent Christian,” was escorted to see Edwin Booth play Hamlet and to hear Gounod’s Faust.22 She attended balls, too, but, like her father before her, always resisted the temptation to dance. “While I have never seen the time when I would yield the point still I have felt it,” she confessed to her mother. “But ’tis the only thing I have denied myself which has cost real effort. And I am pleased I have done it for perhaps it has been the ‘mark’ which has told me to be a Christian.”23 “Washington is no place to be good in,” she added. “The tide in the other direction is too strong.”24

  Above all, she followed the fighting, poring over battle maps in the newspapers, talking with the young officers who came to call, joining a party of some fifty women who toured the Bull Run battlefield in carriages. Eventually, she came to share her uncle’s Republican attitude toward the struggle: “I know Father will think me pretty violent,” she confided to her mother. “I hate secessionists as much as radicalism.”25

  “There is nothing thought of [here] but the war,” she wrote home during the summer of 1864, just after Washington’s defenders had beaten off an attack by Jubal Early’s Confederates.

  You at the North do not realize it as we do here.… Here all are more less affected.… Trains of wounded in ambulances are passing through the city in regiments and brigades.… The city is filled with soldiers and the sights one sees in passing the hospitals are sad enough. I can’t express how glad I am to have been in Washington at this eventful period.… I know of no place I would have preferred to be in Europe or America.26

  The war and the wider world to which her aunt and uncle had introduced her made her want to remain in the capital as long as she could. Besides, there was something else at work, as well.

  Sarah had a serious suitor. Brigadier Surgeon John Hill Brinton was six years older than she and descended from a Quaker family that settled in Pennsylvania in the late seventeenth century, only a few years after the first Wards reached New England. Gen. George Brinton McClellan was his first cousin, and John had initially hoped to join his staff. But he had been sent west early in the war, instead, to serve first under Gen. John Charles Frémont (whom he thought “un-American” because of his fondness for gold braid and brass bands), and then as medical director of the Cairo district under Grant, whom he admired from the moment they met for being “plain, straightforward, peremptory and prompt.”27 He faced enemy fire at his commander’s side at Belmont and during the Siege of Fort Donelson and the Battle of Shiloh and defended him against the charge of alcoholism, cementing a friendship that would last well beyond the war. Then, he had been assigned to Washington to begin a multivolume Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion and to help establish the Army Medical Museum, for which he supervised the collection of thousands of examples of “morbid anatomy” from the battlefields—shattered skulls and severed arms and legs.§

  Despite his strong prejudices—he disliked Jews, dismissed black troops as slow-witted, and thought most women who volunteered to nurse the wounded worse than useless—he was much admired in Washington: he helped found the exclusive Metropolitan Club, was welcome at the executive mansion, and counted Lincoln’s secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay and the widow of Stephen A. Douglas among his closest friends.‖

  When he began to call on Sarah Ward in 1864, some in her circle were wary of this older bachelor with such strong opinions. One of them sought out Grant himself to ask about the doctor’s character and received what the general later remembered as his “favorable endorsement.”28

  Sarah was intrigued by Brinton. But there was a problem: although his ancestors had been Quakers, he was an Episcopalian. He and his widowed mother and three sisters only sometimes attended Sunday-morning services at the Holy Trinity Church near their Philadelphia home and did not otherwise keep the Sabbath. Worse, wine was drunk at meals, and brandy and cigars were sometimes served afterward.

  Over and over again, Sarah begged her mother for guidance.

  Mother, you know me almost as well as you know yourself.… Do you think my piety is of such [a] deep sort that it can grow and thrive if transplanted from my present home where religion is the [central] element to a home where I will not be sheltered from this world’s attractions! Do you think God has allowed my education to be what it has been so that I might be able to have the test that life would put me to! Do you think my sphere of life would be wider? The world does not possess the charms it used [to] for me. I think in my very heart I can say that I have never wished to change my life for that of those brought up in wealth and temptation. My sincere wish is to do God’s will. I know, Mother, you will say, “God will guide you right.” But do you think these doubts I have come from Him?… It is almost cruel but I feel that I must look to you for advice for there is no one else.29

  Jane, who had met Dr. Brinton at least once and found him dangerously “worldly,” urged her daughter not to marry him simply because of his devotion to her. “We make a great mistake when we immolate self on the altar of a desire for the happiness of another,” she wrote. “God never made it necessary that charity to one should involve cruelty to another of his creatures, even if that creature be oneself. It is false or morbid heroism that prompts to this.… But above all dear Sarah, be true to God. If the interests of your soul are endangered by [this] union …, beware how you run into a snare. This is to me the grand point at issue and for this I have prayed more than any other.”30r />
  Jane was especially upset when Brinton—who had watched scores of men die during the war—told Sarah that in his experience professed Christians were no more serene in the face of death than those who had never been converted. “We must not listen to worldly arguments against Christianity,” she wrote. “We know the word of God is true and that His promises are yea & anon in Christ Jesus alone.”31 The two women exchanged anguished letters about Dr. Brinton’s lack of religious zeal for nearly two years, Jane insisting again and again that Sarah not allow her feelings for him to overwhelm her love of Christ.

  When Congressman Clarke’s term ended, Lincoln appointed him his comptroller of the currency, so Sarah was still living in Washington in January 1866 when Dr. Brinton insisted she make up her mind about marrying him, one way or the other. “I cannot blame him for wanting my decision as soon as possible,” Sarah told her mother. “He has been waiting two years for it and feeling that it is time I knew my own heart and so it is—but I [fear] I shall never know it.”32

  Ferdinand, who had hoped his daughter would marry a Presbyterian clergyman, traveled to Philadelphia to look into Dr. Brinton’s reputation. He may privately have been disappointed to find the prospects of his daughter’s suitor bright and his character unassailable, but he finally advised her that marrying him was the right thing to do. Dr. Brinton obviously loved her and was undeniably a “gentleman”; marriage was a “heavenly appointment”; she should not keep him waiting further; “it is not right. His manliness is compromised.”33

  Her mother took longer to grant her blessing and would never give up the hope that her daughter’s example might one day bring Dr. Brinton into the Presbyterian fold. In January 1866, Sarah finally said yes. “It is indeed a relief to feel that the question of almost two years is decided at last,” she told her mother, “and, though I know it involves much unrest, still I have been more at peace than for months past.” She continued,