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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Meanwhile, his parents insisted he run for the post of clerk to the church board of trustees. Those plans, too, went awry. “You ‘feel anxious about Ferd,’ ” Jane wrote Sarah in late January. “So do I. He lost the election to the clerkship.… The New School folks [some of whom evidently now found it more convenient to attend the Central Church] overcame him.… He is weary of idleness. Father gives him copying to do … but he feels worried not to have some regular work.38

  Ferd was now a grown man continuing to lead the life he had led from early boyhood: he was without work, expected to help his parents entertain visiting clergymen, to sing in his father’s choir and accompany his mother to church and prayer services several times a week. “Ferdie is wholly dependent on us now,” his mother told Sarah with what seems to have been a blend of concern and satisfaction. “He has not even 25 cts a week for pocket money unless we give it to him.”39

  Her husband shared all of her concern and none of her satisfaction. Neither he nor Jane was well. His old stomach complaint continued to nag at him. Jane experienced “a nervous tremor over my system,” she told Sarah, occasional chills and “a good deal of head-ache,” and therefore was too ill to travel to Philadelphia, where Sarah was about to give birth again—to twin boys, it turned out. “I am growing old fast,” she wrote, “and am more & more to shrink into myself and withdraw from those whose society I most enjoy.”‡

  And rumors reached the Wards that their youngest child was secretly running with Geneseo’s equivalent of a fast crowd. He was seen spending time with his boyhood friend Herbert Wadsworth, the eccentric and hard-drinking son of the late General Wadsworth.§

  He hunted birds with some of the town’s wealthiest and most worldly gentlemen, including Judge Alfred Conkling, the father of New York’s Republican senator Roscoe Conkling. And he had even been spotted stepping into the tavern of the American Hotel for a quick beer with his friends. All of it alarmed his parents.

  Ferdinand wanted work for his boy, serious work, away from home and right away. He prevailed upon Will to see if he couldn’t try harder to find something for him in New York.

  Nothing materialized. Then, on March 10, 1873, Professor John Torrey—Jane’s brother-in-law and William’s employer at the Assay Office—died at seventy-five in New York City. Will represented the family at the funeral, and afterward encountered S. Hastings Grant—called Seth—an orphaned missionary’s son whom Torrey and his late wife had helped to educate. Grant had just been appointed superintendent of the newly reorganized Produce Exchange on Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan. Will saw his chance. Ferd was bright and eager, he assured Grant; he had fine penmanship and considerable experience in accounts and office work; only his bad eyesight had kept him from college, perhaps even the ministry. Grant said he needed a secretary. If the young man would come to New York right away, he would try him out—and pay him $100 a month. After all, he was almost a member of the family.

  Ferdinand could not have been more pleased. Seth Grant was just the sort of employer he had hoped to find for his unsteady son. He was a deacon of the Old School Madison Square Presbyterian Church, a life member of the American Bible Society, and for seventeen years had been librarian at the Mercantile Library Association, established to provide young clerks like Ferd, newly arrived from the countryside, with improving literature to keep them from succumbing to city temptations.

  On June 20, 1873, Ferdinand noted in his journal, “Ferd left for New York!” “The sky is clear,” he told his son. “To become a felt & admitted necessity is a prime attainment. That you may become more & more so. N.B. Punctuality—care in penmanship & figures—courtesy to all & unimpeachable integrity. I know you will keep these in view. Look upward for all needed moral qualifications.”40

  * A Rochester editor, mindful perhaps of the power the Wards still wielded in his city, welcomed the Gem to the region’s “newspaper circle” with the hope that its “youthful conductor” would be successful, saying his “little paper is filled with good original and well-selected matter, and would be a credit to an older head and hand.”

  No one knows how long Ferdie printed the Gem or how many subscribers it had, but the monthly was successful enough that he was invited to write and print a book of his own the following year, its subject and title now lost. “It is nothing but a sensation tale all of his own concoction and worth nothing except as it gives him something to do,” his mother told Will.

  † Dr. Torrey was married to Jane Shaw Ward’s elder sister, Eliza. He was an explorer, teacher, and America’s leading botanist as well as chief assayer. Despite his kindness to young Will, relations between him and his wife and Will’s parents were sometimes strained, since the Torreys were enthusiastic members of a New School congregation in lower Manhattan.

  ‡ This was at least in part face-saving on Jane’s part; according to one of his descendants, Dr. Brinton wanted to see as little as possible of his mother-in-law. Jane Shaw Ward to Sarah Ward Brinton, April 18, 1873, Brinton Collection.

  § Herbert Wadsworth grew into a would-be inventor and dilettante poet who boasted that he had “written more, in bulk, than Tennyson,” but rarely published any of his output. Alden Hatch, The Wadsworths of the Genesee, p. 119.

  SEVEN

  The Avaricious Spirit

  The Produce Exchange, at Whitehall and Pearl streets in lower Manhattan, where Ferd now went to work, was everything Geneseo was not: clamorous, frantic, fast moving. Its heart was the vast high-ceilinged “call room” in which hundreds of brokers and shipping agents in top hats crowded around long tables examining samples of grain, then raced one another to one of three telegraph offices in the building to wire bids to other brokers and shipping agents in Omaha and Chicago and Kansas City, Liverpool and London. It was a minute-by-minute business, prices rising and falling as brokers tried to outguess one another as to what the future, final price of a commodity might be. Critics charged that its hectic pace, made possible by the telegraph and the postwar explosion of railroad building, encouraged reckless gambling. The president of the Exchange, Franklin Edson, was unmoved: “Most people in this country have a desire to become rich quickly,” he said. “We are born speculators, as likely to gamble on grain as to speculate in stocks.”1

  At his stand-up desk adjacent to the superintendent’s office, Ferd struggled to keep track of it all, recording in enormous ledgers the big profits being made buying and selling carloads of flour and corn and wheat, bacon and butter and cheese, that brokers never even saw. He did well enough to make himself a “felt & admitted necessity” to his exacting employer, just as his father had hoped he would, and was soon promoted to confidential clerk, privy to every transaction. But the work was arduous—Mr. Grant prided himself on the fact that no mathematical errors were ever committed in his office—and the hours were long. Ferd left the Fourth Avenue rooms he shared with Will early enough every morning to reach work two hours before the opening bell, and he kept at it long after the building emptied.

  The pace was unlike anything he had ever known. And he resented the close watch his mother insisted his brother keep over him. Will, she reported happily to Sarah, “sees just how [Ferd’s] money goes, how much he sends home to pay debts and what he denies himself to do it. I know that this lesson will be good for him.”2

  From the first, he seems to have been conflicted: excited to be at last away from home and out from under his mother’s prying eye but frightened of failure; weary of being treated like a child and at the same time unable to imagine being treated any other way. He sent home a stream of querulous letters suggesting it was all too much: his weak eyes were getting worse; a doctor had told him that a painful boil on his neck had been caused by “city air” and could not be cured so long as he stayed in New York.

  His father, who had finally left his church after a combined total of twenty years and taken up new duties as district secretary of the American Bible Society, insisted that Ferd stay where he was.*

  “The cloud
s have been dense,” he told Sarah, “but a little light dawns. He was in Geneseo quite long enough.”

  His mother was less sure. “He told me something of his weakness and poor health but the half was not told,” Jane told her daughter after Ferd made a brief visit to Geneseo during the summer of 1874. “He is really miserably thin, pale and dejected, cannot eat, does not care to go out and seems terribly depressed.”3 Even a visit to a cousin’s cottage on nearby Hemlock Lake failed to revive his spirits, she told Will:

  He came back entirely exhausted so that when I went to call him at 8 o’clock this morning he still felt all worried and complained of pain in his back.… It is the result of a whole year’s standing on his feet and leaning over a desk. Why is it that these grasping money-makers are so hard-hearted? Why cannot they feel enough for a weak clerk, to say nothing of a strong one, to let him sit at his desk? How can they see the young withering down under their exertions and undermining their competition for life just to please a whim? I think you ought to speak to Mr. Grant and tell him that Ferdie is not able to bear it.4

  Neither of Ferd’s siblings took his lamentations seriously. Both believed he was up to his old tricks, malingering to avoid work, elicit sympathy—and winkle funds—from their mother, whose indulgence of his excesses still seemed boundless. Neither his alleged ill health, his aching back, nor his old debts kept him from running up more bills while he was at home—at the tailor’s, the boot maker’s, the livery stable. “I do not believe ten thousand a year would suffice him,” his mother admitted to Will. “May God correct his avaricious spirit, and never let him feel as many have done as [if] we are off on a picnic.”5

  “All of his years have been lived in our flush times,” a Wall Street veteran would write ten years later, trying to explain Ferd’s actions amid the wreckage of Grant & Ward.

  He came with the impulses of youth into the very center of business, starting at the Produce Exchange … where men were “on the jump” during business hours and there is not time to stop and read character, but each man takes every other man to be perfectly solvent because he is there in the building, doing business. In this life of action without much forethought, young Ward instantly matured, like a beefsteak broiled on the fire which comes to us both rare and done. All he wanted was capital to carry out the ideas he saw as clear before him as his nose in the glass.6

  Ferd would never stop complaining that he was being worked too hard, but his proximity to the big money being made all around him only intensified the avaricious spirit about which his mother worried. He had also begun to see opportunities afforded to him by his position at the Produce Exchange. As confidential clerk to the superintendent, he was empowered to buy the membership certificates of retiring members for $240 to $250 apiece, then sell them to new would-be traders eager to try to make their own fortunes at a profit of anywhere from $10 to $50. And he was convinced early on that these memberships would appreciate steadily in value. (Business at the Exchange was steadily expanding; plans were already being drawn up for a vast new headquarters to be built opposite Bowling Green to accommodate it all.)

  All he needed was cash to get started. The quickest way to gain access to it was to find himself a wealthy wife. He went about his search with a kind of steady, calculating resolve he’d never shown before. To seem more prosperous and more promising than he really was, he wrote home for money with which to buy a suitably elegant new overcoat and trousers. When his mother gently suggested he wait until at least some of his hometown debts were paid before incurring new ones, he responded with icy defiance.

  Dear Mother

  Your last is at hand. I will have to act as necessity requires, but will not buy the clothes until absolutely necessary. I shall have hardly enough left this month to last me a week, so if I am entirely out, I must borrow. I will say no more to Mother on the matter.…

  In haste.

  Goodbye

  Your loving son

  Ferdie7

  To forestall further borrowing, his mother ordered George Goode, Geneseo’s best tailor, to make up the clothes he had asked for in secret; they would be a “surprise gift,” she told his exasperated older brother.8

  Ferd wrote home again. He was now unable to pay any part of his share of the rent, he said. Will, forced to come up with the money out of a salary that had recently been cut, was furious, and saw to it that his brother moved to cheaper lodgings at 72 Clinton Street, across the East River in Brooklyn Heights.

  Will may have meant the move as punishment: he would wash his hands of his brother’s affairs many times over the coming months, only to find himself drawn back into them again, unable to resist his mother’s pleas to help nudge Ferd back toward the straight and narrow. But his younger brother could not have been more pleased with his banishment to Brooklyn. He liked its shady streets lined with handsome brownstones and he liked still more the glimpses he got of the splendid lives being led behind their doors. An elderly resident remembered Brooklyn Heights as it was when Ferd first moved there.

  Sumptuous drawing rooms with … beautiful mirrors, crystal chandeliers, heavy furniture, Moquette and Aubusson carpets in patterns woven for the room, costly ceilings decorated by Italian artists; … grand receptions, the house filled with flowers, soft music, with gracious women … to help receive, and the dining room tables gleaming with cut glass and silver, with tempting edibles in as fascinating array as a French chef could devise. Terrapin was then in vogue, with champagne freely flowing. No matron of those days would think of introducing her daughter to Society, other than from her own home. The invitations … were delivered from house to house by the hostess in her carriage, coachman and footman wearing white gloves, the latter running up and down the front steps delivering the invitations with great ceremony.…

  Those were the days of beautiful horses and fine harness with mountings of silver and brass. How many buckles would the gentleman have on his new harness? Would he have single letters or monograms?… Very fast horses were the fashion, pater familias having a pair of horses for the family use, with two or three fast horses for himself.9

  Ferd was determined to be a part of all of it. He cultivated a moustache to make himself seem more mature, accelerated his purchase of stylish clothes on borrowed funds, and joined one of the most fashionable churches in the neighborhood, the Church of the Pilgrims, at the corner of Henry and Remsen streets. It was Congregational rather than Presbyterian, but Ferd’s father admired the preaching of its celebrated pastor, Rev. Richard Storrs, nonetheless. “There are no jokes nor stories to provoke laughter, no sudden outbursts nor apropos allusions to excite applause,” a contemporary wrote; Storrs was “a Puritan preacher [who] dispenses the Word of God soberly and piously to the sons and daughters of the Puritans.”10 And Ferdinand especially liked the fact that the church’s New England origins had been so important to its congregation that the architect had included a fragment of the actual Plymouth Rock in its lobby wall.

  This was the kind of world Ferd knew well. He was expert at mingling with parishioners; he had been doing it all his life. He was amiable, soft-spoken, well mannered, and eager to fit in. “I have made many kind friends [within the congregation],” he assured Sarah, “and they all seem to take an interest in me.” When he volunteered to help with the Sunday school as a “means of doing good,” the superintendent was so impressed by his rare combination of apparent piety and accounting skill that he made him its treasurer.11

  Each weekday morning, Ferd made his way down to the Montague Street Ferry slip with the other junior clerks and office boys to catch the first boat to Wall Street at seven. The fare was a penny. It doubled after nine, when the older, more successful, passengers came aboard—bankers, brokers, chief executives, the privileged owners of the homes and stables Ferd envied, who smoked their cigars and read their newspapers and had their boots blacked as they steamed toward Manhattan. A young man knew he had advanced in business when he joined the rank of the two-cent-fare payers. Ferd War
d saw no reason to wait.

  On the evening of March 18, 1875, he sat up late in his Brooklyn boardinghouse writing a long, agitated letter to Will across the river. His search for a well-to-do wife was gathering steam. He’d already clumsily tried to ingratiate himself with a wealthy young woman named Webb, cadged a ring from his sister to present to her, and then somehow done something that so alarmed her parents that his mother felt compelled to write them a letter to “exonerate” him.12

  Now, he had zeroed in on another young woman from Brooklyn Heights. Her first name is lost but her last name was Robinson. The frenzied late-night letter inspired by his infatuation with her—and with the world of luxury and comfort an alliance with her would open up to him—revealed more about his turbulent inner life than anything else he ever wrote. He is, by turns, obsequious and aggrieved, a perpetual victim whose status somehow makes him immune from ever doing wrong, rendered giddy by thoughts of money and the guilty pleasure he gets from spending it—especially when it does not really belong to him.

  Dear Will,

  It is 11 o’clock and I have just returned from a lovely, and need I say, most pleasantly spent evening with Miss Robinson. I received a note from her day before yesterday asking my company this evening, and I have been [to see her] and now here I am in my room, too excited to sleep, for I feel that I have made myself agreeable to her.…