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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  I have a proof of Dr. B’s love I could not otherwise have had and he knows that he is marrying one who loves her religion better than him. I know he values me more now than if I had been easily won. The idea of marrying him is no longer repulsive and tho’ I do not love him with the ardor of a young girl [she was now twenty-seven] I know that I do care for him more than for others, and it is only when the thought of leaving you comes that my heart sinks. How can I do that?34

  She did finally do it. Sarah and John Brinton were married at the Grove in Rochester on September 23, 1866. They honeymooned at Niagara Falls, then moved into his mother’s Philadelphia house. The groom’s mother assured Sarah that no one in her home would ever intervene in her “form of worship. Christ has but one church on earth and all who love him … are his disciples and the mere form by which we approach Him is of very minor importance—you will not in the least be interfered with.”35 The newlyweds would do their best to work out a compromise: they agreed to attend different churches on Sunday, but if visitors turned up later in the day, Sarah retreated upstairs so that her Sabbath, at least, would remain inviolate. When wine was poured for dinner guests, she quietly turned her glass upside-down. But Dr. Brinton never forgave his in-laws for the delay they had helped cause in his courtship and actively grew to dislike his mother-in-law, whom he considered small-minded and intrusive.

  The senior Wards never really warmed to their daughter’s in-laws, either. When Sarah became pregnant with her first child, George, Jane asked to be allowed to come to Philadelphia to help with the delivery. Sarah turned her away as gently as she could; her mother-in-law, she said, simply had no extra room. Ferdinand was furious. “That [Mother] has not been there or any of us since your marriage awakens surprise & would especially if it were much longer delayed. She must go & see you. The question is as to the place of her residence while there. Mrs B., you say, has no room. If she were a Minister’s wife she would have to find room—a nook, a closet, somewhere.… There are times when a daughter should have her own mother.”36

  By then, nothing seemed to be going well for the senior Wards. Ferdinand had returned from the war without a job. On weekends he served as stated supply in the tiny town of Phelps, preaching to a congregation his daughter described as “oh so contracted and bigoted.”37 He earned so little, Jane wrote, they were forced to live on the fees he earned at weddings and funerals and had to pay Will’s tuition out of the dwindling principal of her inheritance. Ferdinand made things still more difficult by plunging himself into another long acrimonious battle in Geneseo, opposing the establishment of a free state normal school that seemed sure to make his beloved academy redundant: “When will the New School folks stop this trying to crush the Academy?” he asked Sarah. “They can’t do it. It is folly & wickedness.”a

  He lobbied Freeman Clarke hard to help him land a new job as secretary of the Philadelphia Board of Education and paled visibly when it went to someone else.

  Then, when Dr. Neill, his successor at the Central Church, decided to move on, some parishioners urged Ferdinand to return to the pulpit he had left five years earlier.

  Jane was adamantly opposed; she could not bear the thought of stirring up the old resentments his restoration was sure to inspire.

  He overruled her: “I am again pastor here,” he wrote Sarah in December 1866, “much apparently to the joy of the people but not those nearer home. For the latter I am sorry. But what could I do?… I do wish that Mother were happier. She does not mourn but it is submission rather than cordial approval.… Mother is too intellectual to be attendant on my preaching, I do not satisfy her, I wish it were otherwise but I do my best and can do no more.”38

  By then, Presbyterians across the country were working toward reunion between the Old and New school assemblies. The once-divisive Plan of Union with the Congregationalists had long since been abrogated. The question of slavery had been settled on the battlefield, and hundreds of thousands of freedmen comprised a promising new mission field. The only issues remaining struck most laymen as abstruse and unimportant: who should interview prospective clergymen, for example, or how much leeway those clergymen could have in elucidating the Westminster Confession. In the summer of 1869, all 257 American presbyteries, both Old and New school, would be polled as to whether they wished to reunite; all but three voted to do so. The Presbyterian thirty-years’ war was coming to an end.

  But not in Geneseo. “As to the Union between the OS and N Schools,” Ferdinand told his daughter, “I have no doubt that this will eventually be accomplished.”39 But he saw no need for haste. Doctrinal minutiae still mattered to him. He wrote a defiant twenty-page tract, “Why I am an Old School Presbyterian.” demanding that the Old School hold out until the New School surrendered on each and every point, and then he made sure every member of both churches in town received a copy. When the Reverend Isaac Sprague of the rival White Church tried to organize union services, Ferdinand did as little as he could to comply without seeming obdurate. Privately, he and Jane thought Sprague “dictatorial” when he began to call his church “reunited.”40 It would take the Geneseo churches another eleven years to come back together formally.

  The Wards’ fondest hopes for their children rested on Will, whom Jane called her “Darling Child” and whom both she and her husband believed destined to follow him into the pulpit. Not long after returning from the front, Will entered the Williston Seminary, in Easthampton, Massachusetts, as a junior in the classics department, then moved on to Princeton, just as his father had. His parents were delighted when he said he shunned the company of “tipplers.” But he had learned to smoke in the navy, and both his father and his mother exhorted him to stop: a smoking clergyman would never do.

  Will’s real interest was not religion, but science, and, he confided to his mother, he had more and more trouble reconciling the Bible with the new discoveries in geology, archaeology, and church history that seemed to turn up in every morning’s paper. Jane was alarmed at first. “I do not want you to tempt God by the faintest semblance of a doubt,”41 she wrote. But she also tried to be reassuring. While the Bible was “somewhat mystically written,”42 she wrote, its essential moral truth was unassailable. She hadn’t realized that there were different translations of God’s word, but she wasn’t troubled.

  Why not take that one which favors the facts of science most, so long as its other statements do not conflict with the grand & essential truths of the one we adopt? A mere mistake in chronology or in man’s understanding of the length of periods could make no difference in reality, nor nullify the testimony of all the rest. As to the pre-adamite men I cannot see the discrepancy of their existence more than that of pre-adamite animals. Indeed, the wonderful exhuming of cities with people in them of which we have never heard in history, is rather evidence of a pre-Genesis earth altogether, which might have existed for ages and been destroyed or thrown into the chaotic mess that is described … as “without form & void.”43

  When Will eventually transferred from Princeton to the newly established Columbia College of Mines his parents were not unduly alarmed. Their hope was that he would emerge from his studies as something altogether new: a man of God whose faith was only deepened by science; a scientist who never lost sight of the Creator.b

  * General Wadsworth would be killed leading his men during the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. While he was still breathing but unable to resist, rebel troops snipped all the buttons from his coat and stole his silver spurs, his gold watch, his field glasses, and his wallet. His corpse was eventually returned to Geneseo, where nearly every man, woman, and child turned out to say good-bye to the town’s leading citizen. Martin L. Fausold, James W. Wadsworth: The Gentleman from New York, p. 9 footnote.

  † The men of the 104th may have eluded death at Cedar Mountain, but it was all around them. “It was an awful sight,” one private wrote home. “Some of the men was only half-buried. The stench was awful. None of the horses were buried and bushels of maggots was on
them. The feet and legs of dead men was sticking out of their graves. They was not buried deep enough.” Raymond G. Barber and Gary E. Swinson, eds., The Civil War Letters of Charles Barber, Private, 104th New York Volunteer Infantry, p. 81.

  ‡ In the aftermath of this incident, Lt. Com. Ramsay was formally reprimanded by Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles for having “endangered the lives of his officers and men unnecessarily or without an object connected with the public interest or welfare which would justify it.” Despite this official scolding, he ended his naval career as a rear admiral. Daniel F. Kemp, Civil War Letters, A64–97, Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society Archives.

  § Brinton became an expert on gunshot wounds and the world’s leading authority on the eerie phenomenon he called “frozen death”—the strange spectacle of soldiers who had been shot through the brain but whose bodies remained on horseback or in kneeling positions, sometimes clutching their pipes between their teeth, as if still living. “These attitudes were not those of the relaxations of death,” he concluded. “But were rather of a seemingly active character, dependent apparently upon a final muscular action at the last moment of life, in the spasm of which the muscles set and remained rigid and inflexible.”

  His museum became a Washington tourist attraction. Amputee veterans sometimes dropped by with their families to see their missing limbs, preserved in jars. For forty-one years, Gen. Daniel Sickles, who had lost his leg on the second day at Gettysburg, made a point of visiting what was left of it on the battle’s anniversary.

  ‖ Brinton was a formal, unsmiling man, but he did have a sense of humor about himself. One of his favorite stories had him removing a wounded man’s arm at a Washington hospital with such swift skill that a junior surgeon complimented him. Then, Brinton wrote, “I remember well being startled by the voice of [President Lincoln] behind my back, making the solemn inquiry, ‘But how about the soldier?’ ” John H. Brinton, Personal Memoirs of John H. Brinton, p. 265.

  a They did do it, and the normal school eventually put the Temple Hill academy out of business, just as he had feared it would. Ferdinand De Wilton Ward to Sarah Ward, November 20, 1862, Brinton Collection.

  b For all his orthodoxy, Ferdinand had never seen any serious conflict between science and theology, if properly understood. In 1853, when Henry Augustus Ward, the teenage son of his ne’er-do-well brother Henry, alarmed some of the more orthodox members of his family by declaring his interest in becoming a geologist, Ferdinand saw to it that he studied science at the Temple Hill Academy, paying the tuition from his own minister’s salary. Henry Ward went on to become an explorer, museum builder, pioneer taxidermist, and proprietor of Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, supplying colleges and universities with geological cabinets and biological specimens from all over the world. Roswell Ward, Henry A. Ward: Museum Builder to America, pp. 38–39.

  SIX

  Suspected of Evil

  Ferdie had turned fifteen on November 21, 1866, less than a month after Sarah married John Brinton and moved to Philadelphia and Will entered the Columbia School of Mines in New York, and just a few days before his father formally resumed the pastorate of the Central Church. The boy was already a cause for concern. Older parishioners saw only Ferdie’s quiet good manners. “Everybody who speaks of him (outsiders) give him the best character in this respect,” his mother told Will. “He never bullies little boys or does any such cowardly things.”1

  Boys his own age were less generous. He “never applied himself to study,” a Temple Hill schoolmate remembered many years later. “He simply fooled away his time. About the only thing he did well was to write the other boys’ names in books in a Spencerian hand, an accomplishment of which he was very vain.”2

  He blamed nearsightedness for his poor grades. His parents eventually withdrew him from school for fear he would damage his eyes. Private tutoring and “oral learning” did not seem to help. But somehow—despite his supposedly weak vision and inspired perhaps by stories of his father’s work with the mission press at Madras—he took up printing and launched a four-page monthly of his own, the Valley Gem.

  “Ferdie Ward, Editor and Proprietor” addressed his readers directly: “If the ‘Gem’ has not met the expectations of its many readers the cause may be traced to the lack of ability, not of desire and effort on the part of its youthful Editor.”*

  The Gem cost forty cents a year, “payable quarterly in advance,” and was assembled rather than written. Just one copy—dated October 1866—is known to survive. It includes verse by Thackeray, riddles (“Why is a writer of fiction a queer animal? Ans. Because his tale comes out of his head”), and tall stories (“There is a town in Maine where the climate is so good the cemetery committee were obliged to shoot a man to start a graveyard.… A man in Illinois was so absent-minded that on retiring, he put his boots to bed and set himself outside the door”).

  “Ferdie busy at the press though unable to [see well enough to] read,” his puzzled father noted. “I don’t know what we shall do with him.” Neither of his parents could disguise their disappointment that he showed none of the “peculiar interest in religion” they expected from all their children. When his mother insisted he go to Rochester to hear the “Sweet Singer of Methodism,” Ira D. Sankey, preach on judgment, she reported that he returned to Geneseo more “rebellious and stubborn” than he had been before boarding the train. She was further distressed when he refused formally to join his father’s church on the grounds that the congregation was filled with hypocrites.

  But it was more than that. It was increasingly clear within the family that something more than weak eyes or the “nervousness” and tendency to fall ill he had displayed since infancy was wrong with Ferdie. His parents had always known he had a “timid spirit,” Jane wrote, but now there was evidence of a “weak conscience” as well.3 He had begun to spend money that was not his. “Ferdie very wrongly hired a cutter two or three times without our knowledge,” Jane wrote Will the following spring, “amounting to five dollars! [More than $90 today.] He has promised to pay it from his press & I shall keep him to it.”4

  But she did not keep him to it. Nor did he pay it back. Instead, he ran up more bills and left them for her to find out about and be forced to pay. She would always indulge him, partly perhaps as a form of unacknowledged penance for what she believed to have been her own failure as a mother, and partly because it seems to have suited her to keep him dependent on her. And he, in turn, never seems to have evinced the slightest genuine remorse for anything he did. The cumulative trauma of his childhood—his father’s remoteness, his mother’s depression, the tension between his parents and between them and many of their neighbors, the constant dread of death and damnation that hung over the dark parsonage—evidently helped convince him early on that no matter what happened he was always a victim, perpetually blameless. He was “weak,” he would sometimes admit, but he was never wicked.

  It was impossible for Jane Shaw Ward ever fully to understand her son. His father saw him simply as “an enigma.”5 But both were right to be worried about his conscience; it would eventually become clear that he had none.

  At the Columbia School of Mines, Will was struggling with his own conscience. His faith remained strong—many years later, his younger son would remember him as “a strict Presbyterian” and “a Calvinist through and through”6—but he did not hear the call to preach. For months, he wrestled with the question of what to do with his life. So did his mother—weeping, praying, sometimes feeling so helpless, she told him, that she wished for death.

  Such a consciousness of wasting energies that can never be recovered, such a sense of utter nothingness, took possession of me yesterday that I cried unto God with my whole heart to be taken to Him. It never seemed to me such a reality that the world could not & would not miss me, and that it would be “far better to depart & be with Christ.” I felt so anxious for this change that it was a real disappointment when I waked this morning to find myself still here, and
I could not restrain my tears.7

  In the end, despite his mother’s morose letters, in the face of his father’s repeated declaration that “there is no employment on earth which [can] compete with that of preaching Christ,”8 Will abandoned the idea of becoming a clergyman. Instead, after he graduated, he worked for an inventor who shared a patent with him for an improved bottle for nursing infants and then commandeered the profits. He left that job to become directing chemist at the Rumford Chemical Works near Providence, Rhode Island, overseeing the manufacture of a lemon-lime tonic called Horsford’s Acid Phosphate, then gave that up and went to work as an assayer in the United States Assay Office on Wall Street, under the supervision of his uncle Dr. John Torrey.†

  He would remain at that post for ten years. His father eventually got over his disappointment at his son’s failure to follow in his footsteps: “I now only hope that you may do good through your scientific attainments.… Aim at the highest attainment in goodness and intellect. You have rare qualities. Use them with industry. God will bless you.”9

  Neither of the older Ward children had fulfilled their parents’ dreams—Sarah had married outside her church, Will had given up the clergy. Only Ferdie was left. He was sent off to Edgehill at sixteen, just as his older brother had been, and with the same aim in mind: to prepare him for the pulpit.

  His first letter known to have survived was written to Will at the start of his second term there on September 7, 1868. In it, the pattern he would follow all his life was already established. He was determined always to be seen as the Good Boy everyone insisted he must be. In order to maintain that fiction, he would always be willing to misrepresent the facts.