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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  You may wonder that I write to you, yet I must, for although encouraged by her, I feel that I am not encouraged by you, and I deserve to be left to my own ways, yet do be lenient with me Will, for I cannot bear to feel that your love and interest grow less. I used to see so much of you and now I see so little. Why is it? I know my tendency to extravagance displeases you yet I ask that you will not give me up. If I were to lose your love, I would care but little for this life. I do try hard to do right, yet I seem to fail, but I am doing better than before and with your help I can some day come out all right.

  You do not know, Will, how I try, and you can never know, for you are so different than I am. You know my life at home has been one of indulgence;—I have had everything that home could afford, and my misfortune has always been that of self-indulgence. It seems second-nature to me and it is not easy to break myself of this habit of extravagance. I feel it deeper than you can ever know, and it is only by slow perseverance that I can ever hope to come out a better man. I love money not so much for the pleasure it gives me but for the pleasure it gives others. I spend money for other’s pleasure as well as my own and it is hard for me to reason before acting. I get a thing & give it away and not till after it is gotten do I feel the remorse of having done wrong, but I suffer afterwards.

  You probably think me foolish in not having the will to think before acting; this I acknowledge, it seems at times almost like a disease of which I can only be slowly cured. One cannot break himself of a habit without a long and earnest effort; so with me. I say to myself that I will resist certain things & the next minute I will be doing those very things. I have no power to resist and I feel that this can only be cured by slow and hard self-will.

  Now Will, I cannot believe that I am losing your love, yet I feel that I deserve to, for I do so many things you disapprove of. Remember that I am weak in many points and if possible bear with me for I know that some day I will come out all right.

  I love to dress well, and especially when I go among people like the Robinsons. I do not like to look shoddy but I like to be neat in my dress. In order to be [I] have to spend money and so find it goes faster than I suspected it would.

  I will show you, Will, how in the last month I have spent my money so that you may see where it goes.

  You know that my new coat which I got from home was too short in the sleeves, so I took it to Evans the tailor (the place where you told me to go). He let the cuffs down a little and charged me $2. Now, I little thought he would charge me so much or I would not have gone to him.

  I also found that I must have some new stockings and cuffs, so I got them and they cost me $2.50.

  I have been suffering very much of late with a decayed tooth which has pained me so that I have been kept awake at nights with it. I … made up my mind that I must have it out, so I did & it cost me $2.

  I also felt that I must take some exercise as my strength was growing very weak. I have therefore bought some dumb-bells which cost me $1.50.

  The other night Mr. Atwater [his Brooklyn landlord] asked me if I would go with his wife to see the “Big Bonanza” at the Academy. He had a meeting at hand and could not come in till late. I went, supposing he would pay my way, but he took the $1 I offered.

  Yesterday two more copies of the Shakespeare came in and I paid $1 for them.

  I was invited, as I said, to the Robinsons & know I must have light gloves so I had to pay $1.75 for them.

  Thus you see, Will, I have spent $11.75 for these things. [A total of $244 in today’s terms.] They may seem useless to you yet I did really need most of them & so my money goes.

  What can I do? I want to do right but it seems my fate to do wrong.

  Oh bear with me, Will, a little longer & I will try harder to do better.

  If you could have been where I have been tonight and have received the encouragement I have received from Miss R. you would be more lenient, I know.

  She has asked me to make myself at home at their house. She has asked me to get music and come and she would play while I sang. She has begged me to try & visit Sister [Sarah] at Narragansett [where the Brintons spent their summers] next summer so that we might see each other there. She has consented to go to the watercolor exhibition with me. Her father & Mother have asked me to call whenever and as often as I want to, and when at their house I am happy. Can you blame me then if I feel a desire to look well when with them? I love to go there for they are all so kind and Miss R. and I seem to have so much to say to each other that the evenings with her are to me so pleasant, and if I felt you loved me as ever I would be so happy. Oh Will, I feel all I say & know you will deal justly with me and I will try to do the best I can.

  Forgive my many faults & believe that with God’s help I will come out all right.

  You are the only one I have here to go to, so bear with me, for without you I would be all adrift.

  I love you Will & cannot bear to think that we are drawing away from each other. It spoils all my happiness & I care but little for what comes to cheer me if you draw away from me.

  Forgive me if I have spoken too plainly and believe that I feel what I say deeply. I know my faults are many, but not so many that they cannot be lessened by your help.

  Goodnight my own dear Brother. May God lead you to be lenient with your

  Truly grateful & loving

  brother

  Ferd13

  Within weeks of his writing to Will, the Robinsons withdrew their hospitality, just as the Webbs had. Precisely what Ferd did to shake their confidence is unknown, but it was made clear that he was no longer welcome in their parlor.

  He wrote more dolorous letters home. His mother feared for his sanity. Then he seemed to brighten again. When Sarah, now the mother of three children, including three-year-old twins Ward and Jasper Brinton, asked him in July what sort of young women he was meeting in Brooklyn, he eagerly responded.

  I appreciate, dear sister, the interest you take in the young lady acquaintances I make and I shall profit by experience and try to select one suited to all when the time comes. I have become acquainted with a Miss Green, who is a charming young lady, of good family and a Christian girl. We have seen a good deal of each other and I found great pleasure in being in her society. She has gone to East Haddam for the summer and they have kindly invited me to visit them which I shall do.…

  She is rich in her own name and on this account I have to be a little guarded for we are being gossiped about already.14

  Ella Champion Green was quiet, attractive, dark-eyed, empathetic, a teacher in the same Sunday school Ferdinand served as treasurer. Like the Wards, the Greens took extravagant pride in their ancestry; not only had at least one collateral member of the clan arrived in America aboard the Mayflower, but, an enthusiastic family historian claimed, three direct forebears had signed the Magna Carta. Ella’s branch of the family was founded by Captain James Green, a merchant and shipbuilder whose substantial wood-and-stone house, high above the Connecticut River, dominated the village of East Haddam. Its lower floor housed the town’s first bank. The captain had eleven children, six of whom were also prolific, so that by the 1830s Greens and their relatives by marriage filled so many local offices that one by one, all six of his grandsons had to sail downriver to seek their fortunes.†

  Ella’s father, Sidney Green, started out as a cotton broker before the Civil War. By 1875, he was a director of the Union and Marine National Banks, a trustee of the Church of the Pilgrims, and a pillar of Brooklyn Heights society. Ella and her three siblings lived with their parents in an elegant three-story brownstone at 37 Monroe Place; its dark rooms were crowded with expensive furniture, its plaster ceilings handpainted with floral garlands, its tables and mantelpieces thickly forested with statuary.‡

  It was everything for which Ferdinand yearned. Yet for all its elegance, the Green home was not a happy place. There was something introverted, pinched, isolated about the family. Sidney Green was sixty-four and failing by the time Ferdinand f
irst met him. His wife, Mary Gleason Green, was four years younger than he but already showing signs of dementia. All but the youngest of their children were in their twenties; none was married or engaged. Mary, the oldest, was moon-faced, snappish, and reclusive; she would never wed, and until her death at the dawn of the flapper era, insisted on wearing the elaborate hairdos, rigid stays, and rustling floor-length skirts of her girlhood. Fred was nervous, slender, and serious minded, a junior clerk in a Wall Street firm with little aptitude or enthusiasm for business; his proudest boast in later years was that as a schoolboy he and his younger brother, Sidney, had once crossed the East River on the swaying catwalk of the unfinished Brooklyn Bridge. Sidney was the youngest, the pampered child of his parents’ middle age; like Mary, he would remain single, a fat, largely luckless investor, fond of bird shooting (if it didn’t require too-strenuous exertion) and of food—which he insisted on having served to him piping hot, his plate brought gingerly to the table on a heated stove lid by a servant wearing special gloves.

  In such a household, Ferd seemed a fresh breeze. He had a gentle, confiding air, told amusing but decorous stories, dressed in modest good taste, and, with Ella seated at the piano, sang the right sort of parlor love songs in a pleasing tenor. He also began quietly to talk business with her father. He explained the easy profits he could make buying up membership certificates on the Produce Exchange and then lending them to men who wanted to do business there temporarily. All he needed was a little capital. Mr. Green agreed to provide some and was initially delighted with his half of the profits—$2,500 ($50,000 in today’s dollars) in the first year alone.15

  Sidney Green was a director of one of the city’s largest financial institutions, the Marine National Bank at 78–80 Wall Street. In the late spring of 1875 he agreed to serve for a time as its chief cashier. Ferd began to stop by to see him there at lunchtime, and his frequent visits and intense whispered conversations eventually drew the curiosity of the bank’s president, James D. Fish.

  “Green, who is that young man?” he asked after one of the younger man’s visits.

  “That is Ferdinand Ward,” Green answered. “I regard him as a very bright young fellow. In fact, I expect that if everything turns out well,… [he] will marry one of my daughters.”16

  On August 14, 1875, Jane Ward got a frantic letter from Ferd. Two weeks spent standing in for his vacationing employer had been more than he could bear, he wrote; he’d been to the doctor, and had been advised to flee the city for a week of “quiet time all alone.”17 He thought he would spend it in East Haddam. Ella Green was there—though he did not tell his mother so—spending the season with her family at a summer hotel overlooking the Connecticut River, named the Champion House after one of her maternal ancestors; he’d already been there to see her once that summer. His mother sent Ferd’s letter to Will, with instructions to consult the doctor to see if her youngest son was telling the truth about his condition and, if so, to advance him the money for his passage upriver if he really needed it.

  Ferd went to East Haddam and, ten days later, wrote a formal letter to his parents announcing his engagement. They were delighted—and relieved. His mother was happily seated at her writing table, halfway through a letter welcoming Miss Green to the family, when a telegram arrived from Ferd: “Do not act till you hear further from me.”18

  “Is the poor boy to be disappointed again?” she asked Will. “Has he any secret enemy who dogs his movements and creates barriers to his happiness?”19 He was his own worst enemy, of course, and evidently had been seen to be moving too quickly. It took several days before he and Ella could persuade her startled parents that they were serious, and his prospective father-in-law insisted that Ferd pay off all his outstanding debts before the wedding could take place. Ferd assured him he had nothing to worry about.

  His father wrote a letter to Sidney Green immediately afterward, meant to reassure him about his son and the family from which he came.

  Fathers are less demonstrative than Mothers but your daughter may be assured that what is lacking in this direction will be fully made up by Mrs. Ward, my dear Mrs. Dr. Brinton of Phila., and others in my large household. I have but one daughter and she is very dear to me—as I doubt not this second will soon become. I am quite ready to pledge to you and Mrs. Green all I can do to make your dear child happy. She will, as F has, I presume, told you, be introduced to a large circle.…

  We are a united household—not an element in the least divisive—and are all [church] communicants—principally Presbyterian. If my son ever goes astray—if he ever brings sorrow to your daughter or yourselves (which I do not predict)—it will be under protest of his entire family for three generations.

  If apology is needful for introducing these facts—as to F’s family, it is that you may know to whom your daughter is to be related, We are a plain—New England (on my side)—household.

  As to my son, he has been taught that integrity—industry—courtesy—and economy are essential—to success and happiness. So long as his Mother lives he will have a rare counselor. I cannot but think that your daughter is safe (under God) in committing herself to him and I know that she will be to him a great blessing. We long to greet [her]—as we promise her a large place in our heart and a cordial welcome to our home. And the same to her Parents.

  That our son has satisfied his employers at the “Exchange” appears in a unanimous vote to raise his salary. If not too prosaic in such a letter allow me to suggest through you to your daughter that he be not ever with her too late in the evening. He is not strong and needs all his strength that sleep brings to his daily duties. He ought to be (I tell him) in his own room at 10 o’clock. You and I have been as he is and know the difficulty of parting with one we dearly and early love. Pardon this very practical suggestion.

  A long letter this and far from sentimental. I write as I would speak. Pray make my true esteem acceptable to your wife—daughter—household.

  Hoping in our time to meet you all and that there may be before our children a long—happy life.

  Affectionately yours,

  F De W Ward20

  Will was by no means sure Ella Green would be safe under Ferd’s care; nor was he convinced integrity and industry were essential to his brother’s nature. Neither was Sarah. She wrote an anguished letter to her parents: she felt uncomfortable with what was happening; Ella was evidently a lovely girl; the Greens were innocent people; shouldn’t they at least gently be alerted to Ferdinand’s weaknesses?

  Her father replied to Sarah right away. The family was to say nothing. “Ferdinand is an enigma,” he admitted, writing in his big, overwrought hand. “I cannot understand him,” but “I want to emphasize just one point.”

  It is about F & saying this I will [say] no more. We all know F. well—too well for him to deceive us & sufficiently to enlist all our patience. F. is greatly lacking in frankness & true nobility. It is hard to trust his word or confide in him as to anything. This we know too well. There is no use in denying it & it cannot but affect us. (I mean—Mother—W’m—you—and me.) But what shall we do? Cast him off? This we cannot do. He is a member of the family. “If one suffer so do all.”

  My idea is 1) pray for him—daily—fervently. This is fundamental.

  2) Write to him. Frankly—cheerfully—encompassingly. Don’t tell him his faults—but have them in mind when writing. Urge him to be noble, open-hearted, thankful for what he has.

  3) Above all things there must be family oneness. That is our family trait. “Ward clannishness” is our title & one in which we glory. We don’t agree on politics—business—&c &c, but as a family we are & must be one. It is not so in all households but must be so in ours. Don’t turn a cold face to F.

  4) Write to Ella G. If near … go at once to see her

  The future of F. we cannot surmise. But we must do our best to keep him right. Don’t let him have to say that any one of us cast him off. We may keep to ourselves what we think but act toward him fra
nkly. F. loves Wm greatly & I am not at all surprised. But enough on a painful subject. There are but three of you. Oh, be a unit in affection!21

  There would be no warning for the Greens. Ferd’s true nature, like Ferdinand’s own disgrace in India, would be kept a closely guarded family secret. Instead, Ferdinand traveled to Brooklyn to meet his son’s prospective bride. “I was very much pleased with Ella,” he wrote to Will afterward. “If she is as she appears F. is to be congratulated & may he be worthy of her. This should be our prayer. I had to tell Mother (she asked) if there was wine. I did not see F. drink. Perhaps he did, but not to my knowledge.”22

  Despite Ferdinand’s diplomacy, his son’s courtship did not go smoothly. The wedding date was put off from the spring of 1876 to that winter, then again to the spring of 1877, entirely because of what his father called Ferd’s “queerness and wrongness.”23 Ferd exaggerated to Ella the amount of money he was making and was found out. His debts rose rather than fell. He now claimed one eye had been blinded by overwork, that he was rapidly losing sight in the other, and that he would have to seek some other kind of employment unless further financial help was forthcoming. When his mother, who believed marriage “might be the making of him,” came up with the money for an engagement ring, his father approved: “I want him settled in a home,” he wrote.24 Again and again, Ferd claimed he was about to pay his debts, failed to do so, was found out, asked to be forgiven, then ran up more bills. At one point, he let slip to Will his intense interest in gaining access to the Green family fortune—in just one year his prospective father-in-law had earned the modern equivalent of almost a million and a half dollars25—and got a sermon from his father: “I warned him against any intimation or hint that he ever thought of Ella’s money,” the old man told Will.