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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  I am all right and not at all homesick but would nevertheless like to be at home.… I have endeavored to make friends with all the boys and think I have, at least they often come to me for advice which I think shows that they look to me a little. The only thing that I object to here is the way the boys keep the Sabbath. They play a good deal which I do not like. I shut myself in my room as much as I can but my chum [roommate] brings boys in and they get to fooling which I do not like for you know I have always been brought up at home to reverence the Sabbath.…

  I remain your loving brother,

  Ferd10

  In fact, Ferd had made few friends at Edgehill, and most of his classmates had learned to distrust him. He was “one of those fellows whom you can never tell whether they are telling the truth or not,” one remembered years later, after his crimes had been uncovered.11 It was he, not his chum, who got to fooling, profaned the Sabbath, and got into trouble for it. He was miserable at school, hostile to the whole idea of becoming a clergyman, and happy to exploit his mother’s chronic worry in order to get back home. He told her his eyes were now so weak he couldn’t see well enough to study after sundown.

  His mother insisted he go to Philadelphia and have them examined. Somehow, he managed to convince an ophthalmologist there that he was not only nearsighted but might, in fact, be going blind. The school sent him home. “It is a very great disappointment to me,” his mother wrote to Sarah, “and will be, I fear, to Ferdie, that he cannot ever look forward to an education.… I had fixed my hopes on Ferd for a minister and now must give that up.”12 Still worse, she wrote, the townspeople who were always watching her and her children for any sign of weakness were now sure to accuse the Wards of pampering their younger son, of “vacillating” and “irresolution.”13 To silence them, she prevailed upon John Brinton to write her a letter attesting to the boy’s poor vision so that she could show it to any Genesean who dared express doubt openly.

  There was little for a seventeen-year-old to do in or near Geneseo. Farmers had few odd jobs in winter. Shopkeepers rarely needed clerks. Ferdinand could not even become an errand boy in Freeman Clarke’s or Levi Ward’s banks, his mother complained, because Rochester members of the Ward clan always got their pick of those positions. Above all, she believed, it was important that her son find something to do in the open air, away from what she called “street influence.”14

  Finally, a post was found for him as apprentice to a local carpenter named William McBride, “a nice, respectable man, a good deal above the common run,” his mother assured her daughter.15 She comforted herself with the thought that carpentry was not necessarily an end in itself: “It may be the stepping-stone to [becoming] an architect which … is a good and respectable business.”16

  And so there he was in the winter of 1869, back home, bundling up and setting off through the snow each morning with a box of tools bought on credit, helping to rehang doors, replace broken panes, repair chairs and tables. At the end of his first two weeks he brought home his pay—one dollar and fifty cents. Jane allowed him to keep fifty cents for “pin money”; the rest she laid by for the future. “I am determined to keep him at it,” she wrote, “for I do not like a vacillating character, and this is in all respects the best thing for him now.” But she remained acutely solicitous of his health, and he made the most of her exaggerated concern. When he said he was overtired, she let him lie late in bed, and once even permitted him to skip the Wednesday-evening church service—something, she vowed, “he will not need to do when he gets more used to work.”

  In the lamplit evenings, while his father bent to his writings in his upstairs study, Ferd worked away at a carpenter’s bench set up off the living room. As he worked, sanding a chair leg or fashioning a trinket box for a neighbor, his mother sat in a nearby rocker reading improving literature aloud to him. “It is very pleasant to have him so near me,” she told Sarah, “and under such good influences while at work.”

  The good influences did not take. Life in the Ward parsonage had taught Ferd that virtue was rarely rewarded, at least not in this world. Vice offered livelier possibilities. Ferd found ways to slip out of the house and elude his mother’s fearful gaze. “When he ceased going to school,” a Temple Hill classmate remembered, “he spent all his time with the [young] ladies.… If the word had been coined … he would have been known as a dude. He was simply an exquisite with nothing to be exquisite on.… His accomplishment was polished manners. He was … very extravagant and always running up bills for his parents to pay.”17 And when he could no longer get credit from one merchant or another for his extravagances—monogrammed handkerchiefs, trinkets for local girls, unauthorized buggy rides—he began to borrow money around town, using sums cadged from one person to pay off another, embarrassing his parents, causing more talk among his father’s parishioners.

  In January 1870, in hopes of relieving Jane’s anxiety and straightening out his eighteen-year-old son, Ferdinand escorted him to another boarding school, the Bellefonte Academy in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, in the heart of the Appalachians. “Distance [from Geneseo] short (225 miles),” his father reported to Sarah, “but requiring six [railroads] to reach, & 19½ hours time.”18 The school was housed in a handsome pillared hilltop building and run by an old friend, Rev. James Potter Hughes, who had been Will’s headmaster at Edgehill. It promised to provide the atmosphere of a Christian home. “F. ought to be contented & improve,” his father told Sarah.

  I was pleased by it all, better pleased I fear than F. will be, especially until initiated. No letter from him yet, but rather doleful, I apprehend, when it comes. I am not unwilling to have him feel keenly his absence. His going was of his own seeking. He could have stayed at home and learned just as much had he so willed.… It pains me much to have him away, though a relief, I think, to Mother. When here he has to be watched hourly, day & night. He little knows what cause of anxiety he was to his Mother, to say nothing of self.

  Though a father has less demonstration, he feels equally with a Mother.… I left you at Elizabeth, W’m at Edgehill & F. at Bellefonte & wept to do so. We Fathers do feel, though accused of … lack of heart.19

  Jane Ward had steeled herself as well. “I feel a very great relief … in having Ferdie at school,” she told Sarah. “He would have been ruined here for I was not strict enough with him and now I feel as if God would take him up. He writes me that there is a good deal of religious interest in the village and some of the boys are giving their hearts to Christ and I hope he, too, may become a Christian.”20

  To Will, she was more frank.

  I hope you will write to Ferdie & encourage him to stay [at school], for I feel a great weight lifted from my heart in having yielded him to the care of others under God.… On no account send him any money for some time to come, and then only a very little. He must be taught the value of money, and nothing will teach it so effectively as the want of it. I wish Mr. Hughes might be advised to see that Ferd does not spend money without his knowing just where it goes, and also that he will not allow Ferdie to write home to anyone but Father & me without letting us know it. All this, too, without Mr. [Hughes] knowing (if possible) that we suspect Ferdie of evil.21

  As his father had predicted, Ferd’s letters from school were a torrent of complaints, mostly centered around the “pork & codfish diet,” which he claimed was making him ill.22 He wanted to come home. At first, his mother ignored his pleas. “It will do him no harm to be disciplined on this line,” she told Sarah.

  He has been humored far too much and his character is consequently not a strong one. This reminds me of your remark about “wondering why God had not given your Father & me more of this life’s comforts when we have always served Him.” It is just as necessary for God’s children to be disciplined by privation and want as for ours, in order to [build] their strong characters. Too much indulgence would make us selfish, inconsiderate and weak, just as it has in Ferdie’s case and in all indulged children, so that it is one of the stronge
st proofs of His love that he does not give us all we want or seem to need. I have been led to feel this in seeing how wrongly I have favored Ferdie and I am content with God’s dealings toward me.23

  Her contentment did not last; neither did her resolution. When another self-pitying letter from Ferdie arrived three days later, she sent it to Will right away.

  It shows, dear Willie, a terrible nervous state … arising I suppose from home-sickness which he has not yet been able to shake off. I begin to feel that by persisting in his staying there perhaps we may be acting wrong and the consequences may be bad.… Ferdie is of such a nervous temperament and has been so long now under a state of excitement about his ill conduct and worry about the food there that perhaps we ought to regard the matter in a different light.… It may seem changeable in me, Willie, but … prolonged homesickness, without anything else will often produce death, and in such a nervous system as Ferdie’s it might be fatal. If he were a good Christian like you I would not feel half the anxiety for him that I now do.24

  Neither Will nor Sarah believed Ferdie was in mortal danger. Both warned that his troubles at school were not just dietary, that he could well be, in Sarah’s carefully chosen words, “using arguments that are not true” in order to persuade his parents to bring him home again.25 “I cannot bear to think,” his mother answered, “that in the midst of his seeming repentance for the past he is still going on in lying and deceit. It seems at times as if I would be crushed by the hopeless prospect there is before me in regard to him.”26

  Sarah and Will were right. In early March, Rev. Hughes personally escorted Ferdinand to the depot and put him on the train for home. We don’t know what he had been caught doing, but the infraction was so grave in the headmaster’s eyes that there was no question of Ferd’s ever returning to the school; he was formally expelled, not merely suspended. “He himself says he transgressed on purpose,” his mother explained to Sarah, “because he could not stand the food and was sick all the time.… It seems as if he were one of the worst boys and in the most hopeless condition.… What shall we, what can we do with him?”27

  Will wrote that it was his mother’s infinite solicitude for Ferd’s weaknesses that had brought about this latest humiliation. Sarah urged her mother to show her displeasure by silent disapproval at the very least. She couldn’t do it. “I cannot be angry all the time, for my own sake & others even if Ferdie would mind it,” she wrote. “I used to pursue such a course sometimes when you or Willie vexed me, but it did not make you feel as badly as I felt myself.” Besides, she was now convinced her boy was really ill. “The Dr. says he ‘has all the symptoms of Dyspepsia and it must be cured at once,’ ” she reported. “He looks pale and his lips whiten & redden alternately.… He declares that he came home only because of this distress which made him cross and low spirited all the time, indeed completely wretched. But I will say no more now. Only pray.”28

  By January 1871, Ferdinand was well enough to be sent back to boarding school—to Edgehill again, which had moved in 1869 from Princeton to Merchantville, New Jersey, just outside Camden. He lasted just two months this time, before being sent home for reasons that had something to do with an unauthorized visit to a young lady in Philadelphia.

  He had now been sent away three times and three times been sent home again. This time, there were at least superficial signs of repentance. His father noted in the spring of 1871 that the “special blessing of God in revival” was at work within his church. Fifty-one persons entered its congregation on confession of faith. Nineteen-year-old Ferdinand was one of them, at last.

  And in the fall, another of his father’s hopes for him seemed about to be realized—a real job. One of his former teachers at Edgehill got him work as a clerk at the Meridian National Bank in Indianapolis, Indiana. “When you write to him beg him to be accurate in his accounts,” his father urged his daughter, “not attempting to do things fast & not have money lost by carelessness or burglary when in his care.”29

  Ferdinand was home again within two weeks, personally dismissed by the bank’s president. Thirteen years later, the banker would explain that he’d fired Ferdie simply because he smoked and whistled on the job; young men with such weaknesses could not be trusted around money. But it’s hard to believe that proximity to cash hadn’t proved too tempting for Ferdie to resist. In talking to the press when his former clerk had become a notorious swindler, the bank president might simply have been reluctant to admit that his depositors’ funds had ever been at risk while in his care.30

  Hoping, again, to keep Ferdie away from bad companions and teach him the virtues of hard work, his father prevailed upon his old commander, Colonel John R. Strang, to try him out as a clerk in the upstairs office at 51 Main Street he shared with another attorney, James B. Adams. “Ferdie is doing well at the Law Office,” his mother reported to Sarah a few weeks later, “but [doesn’t] quite like the business.”31

  He turned twenty-one on November 21, 1872. Jane was away, visiting Will in New York. Ferdie evidently had several friends in to celebrate. When his mother returned she found him at home, dutifully boiling water for her tea. She was, as always, happy to see him. But that evening, she noticed something amiss in her storeroom. The previous summer, she had placed on a high shelf six full bottles of sweet wine sent to her husband by his brother Levi, exclusively for use at communion. One was now missing, she told Sarah, and the rest had been partly emptied and then clumsily recorked. “I said to Father, ‘So you have been using up my wine since I was gone.’ He looked quite surprised and when I told him the facts he said he had not touched a drop of it. I said, ‘I wonder who could have taken it then.’ ”32

  “My heart felt quite worried,” she told Sarah, “and I feared that perhaps F. might have been helping his friends out of it.… I told him I missed my wine and … wondered if [one of his friends named] John Conway could have used it.… He said there was no wine used … and that he did not believe John would take anything. As to himself, he said he did not know there was any wine in the house. I knew this last was true when I left at any rate, and as the wine was on a high shelf, way back, I did not believe he could have found it or thought of looking for it.”33 The culprit, she finally decided, had been Katy, her daughter’s Irish nurse, who had stayed in the house when Sarah and her two children had visited the previous summer. “From the way the [remaining] bottles were used, each one a half or 2/3 gone and not any one quite empty,” she explained, “I suspect … also that she must have done it as no thief outside would have done exactly that way but rather have taken bottles and all. I therefore feel sure she is not strictly honest but as wine like that would not make her drunk I cannot of course affirm that she took it.”34 In a subsequent letter, Jane would beg her daughter not to mention the pilferage to Katy—who remained a valued part of the Brinton household for years. Once again, she had been unable to blame her errant son for anything.

  A few weeks later, smallpox broke out in Geneseo. Schools closed. Churches stood empty Sunday morning. The stores on Main Street did little Christmas business. On December 17, at the height of the epidemic, Ferd suddenly announced to his parents that he was going to flee the village and spend Christmas with an old Temple Hill friend who now lived in Jersey City.

  Jane struggled to explain his unexpected departure to Sarah.

  He had been working in the Office very hard of late, day & night, so, since the smallpox had appeared in the village and business of all kinds became terribly dull, Mr. Strang told Ferd he might be excused till after the holidays. He had been made terribly nervous and fearful by hearing men talk about the smallpox until he got into such a state—intensified by hard work and confinement—that he would seem all in a terror when he came home. I tried reasoning and persuasion in vain, for I did not think he ought to spend his money so long as he owes it to others.… [But] as soon as Ferdie determined to go I did what I could do to cheer him off and today I received a letter from him which was written in good spirits. I feel now th
at I may throw off some of the responsibility—and anxiety—that I have borne for Ferdie for so many years. For he is of age and must judge for himself. I believe he wants to do right. But he is of a terribly nervous and timid constitution and some allowance must be made.35

  His mother would always find a way to make allowance for Ferdie, no matter what he was accused of doing.

  Then, on Christmas Eve, while staying with his friend in Jersey City, Ferd received a terse note from Colonel Strang: his services were no longer needed. The day after Christmas, Jane Ward swept up Main Street to confront her son’s employer in his office. How could he have treated her boy so badly? Colonel Strang was tactful but unyielding. He liked Ferd very much, he assured her; her son had done everything asked of him “and done it quickly and well.” The problem was simply “pecuniary.” A young law student named Hopkins had asked to be allowed to work for Strang & Adams “without any pay in order to learn the profession.” He had been there some weeks before Ferd went to New York, and after he had left “Mr. A & S talked the matter of their business over and concluded that they could not afford to keep a [paid] clerk when they could get one without pay. [Strang] never asked Ferdie or Father whether Ferd would work for nothing but gave the preference to Hopkins.… Mr. Hopkins goes to that [New School] church which I think is the real reason. God will judge them for such injustice.”36

  No new jobs opened up. His father’s friend and Old School ally Judge Scott Lord gave him occasional documents to copy. A plan to go to work for a judge in nearby Dansville failed to materialize. Will suggested Ferd study law on his own. He dutifully borrowed a copy of Chancellor James Kent’s Commentaries on American Law and began leafing through it in his room in the evenings. He seemed “in earnest,” his mother wrote, and, though it meant “our house will have to go without carpets, my windows without curtains, my furniture without repairs and both Father’s and my wardrobes without replenishing,” his parents were willing to support him for another two years, if at the end of it her boy would have a profession—“a real life work.”37