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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  It would disgust her & her friends. Also, he must not be allowed to incur a dollar’s debt to be liquidated by what he may get through her. He needs earnest warning in that direction.…

  As to F., we must take him as he is. He has peculiarities of disposition & manner that we would wish were different. With these we must strive to be patient. I think that Mother has made up her mind not to notice his dolorous letters. He is not strong & comes home tired of course (8 AM to 6 PM) & then sits down & pens what he regrets after.

  I had a letter from Mr. Grant which was complimentary of F. in this, that there are things he alone can do & therefore he can’t part with him more than four days. As kind a letter as a businessman can be expected to write. I agree with you in this—if F wants to retain his position he must stay right by. Let a waiting man (& they are “legion”) take his place for a week & F is “nowhere” afterwards. If F. gets married to Miss G he may be rather more independent—not now. You have been a good … and generous brother to F. & he feels it but is at times too high-strung to say so. Now, keep on good terms. Do not let a wall rise between you. See the Greens often. God bless you, dear boy.26

  Jane continued to send checks to cover Ferd’s bills, and provided new “loans” whenever he asked for them. After all, she told Will, “he is still the baby, you know.”27

  Then, in March 1877, with the wedding day just weeks away, there was more trouble. Investments Ferd had made for himself and his prospective father-in-law evidently went sour. Ella’s father complained about Ferd’s unsteady nature and bad advice, and said he was tempted to call off the marriage. “I have no doubt that Mr. G. has lost considerable money of late,” Jane told Will, “which may make him suspicious and perhaps crusty and fearful of everybody.” She continued,

  It will be best, I think, to let everything shape itself and not attempt any arrangement for [Ferd and Ella]. If they are to be married it will be all brought about by a [Power] wiser than we and if not, we must fear lest … we be found “fighting against God.” …

  I look for a little explanation of the sentence in your last “How much this failure of F’s may have to do with Mr. G’s change of [heart]” &c &c. I tremble lest the family admit any ground of suspicion against him. I think he really means and hopes to succeed when he starts. But risks are so precarious nowadays that no one is safe.… When F does come to you to talk over matters try to sympathize tenderly with his present position. It is really very trying and if he [has] brought it upon himself it is all the more depressing and hard to bear. We all need sympathy in our failures as well as in our successes.28

  In the end, the engagement was not ended—but the wedding was postponed again, this time to the fall. Then, a couple of months before the ceremony was scheduled to take place, Ferd suddenly had money with which to cover all his bills back home, begin paying $30 a month for a handsome gold watch and chain for himself, and buy his bride glittering wedding gifts, including a pearl necklace and a diamond cross that cost $350—$7,400 in today’s terms.29 When his mother asked how he had managed it all, Ferd said some of his investments had unexpectedly paid off. Jane was delighted but wary. “If he told you what he told me and you believe him,” she wrote to Will, “it will relieve your mind as to the honesty of his gains.”30

  Will’s mind was not relieved, and a week before the wedding he somehow learned that at least some of Ferdinand’s sudden solvency was due to his having siphoned funds from the Sunday school of the Church of the Pilgrims. He spoke to Ferd about it. Ferd angrily denied he’d done anything wrong. Will told his father, nonetheless. The old man tried to reason with his younger son, then reported back to Will.

  I have had a talk with F. quite as satisfactory as I could expect. I think that he will resign the treasurership. He said that he offered to do so last Sabbath week but Mr. [Charles E.] Hull [the church’s overall treasurer] said no.… I shall do my best but it is a delicate & hard case, as F. is of age & in a new relationship.… We must hope—pray & wait. Oh, that all may be right!§

  Jane tried to reason with Ferd too, and urged him once again to confide fully in his older brother. Of course he wanted to be independent, she said, but he should follow his father’s example; Ferdinand Ward was always his own man, but since returning to America he had never made an important decision without consulting his own older brother, Levi. This time, Ferd responded with something like hauteur. He did plan to resign as Sunday school treasurer, he wrote, but “as to going to Will with my business affairs this cannot & will not be done. I am sorry, Mother dear, to refuse anything you ask, but I am determined on this point. If Will is ever troubled about any of my bills let him come to me & I will explain to him. Ella & I will always be glad to see him at our home.”31

  Ferd and Ella Green were finally married at the Church of the Pilgrims on October 20, 1877. For the elder Wards it was not an entirely happy occasion. No member of the Rochester clan bothered to attend: “It is too bad that none of the family feel interested enough to spend a little time and money for this occasion,” Jane wrote Will, “but so it is and we must bear the mortification.”32 The ceremony itself went well enough: Ferd’s father shared the officiating with Dr. Storrs. President Fish of the Marine Bank was among the guests. But at the reception afterward, as Jane had feared, Sidney Green could not be dissuaded from serving champagne to his guests: “I hate the thought of going to see it drunk,” she had written before leaving for New York.33

  A few days after the wedding, the elder Greens invited Will to dine with them and the newlyweds, hoping bygones could become bygones. Will was too “wounded” by his brother’s actions to attend, he said.34 It would be months before the brothers reconciled. When it did finally happen, their mother wept with gratitude. So long as Will continued to look over his younger brother’s shoulder, she wrote, she felt certain Ferdie would not be “tempted to do wrong.”35

  * “I think the [congregation is] getting tired of him,” his wife had confided to her daughter shortly before Ferdinand resigned. “Many never relish him.” The departure was not an entirely happy one, at least from Jane Shaw Ward’s point of view. The session provided a parting gift of just $100, a sum she thought ludicrously grudging. And, she told Sarah, although several parishioners had given farewell dinner parties in their honor, “I have not heard one person say ‘We are sorry you are going to leave us, Mrs. Ward’ but always, ‘We are so sorry Dr. Ward is going to leave us.’ I do not feel badly over this—God knows.… ‘My record is on high.’ That was David’s comfort & shall be mine.” Jane Shaw Ward to Sarah Brinton Ward, n.d. 1873, Brinton Family Papers, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, November 2, 1873.

  † One of them—William Webb Green—did so well that he retired to a splendid home at 235 Central Park West at the age of forty-nine, a millionaire many times over.

  ‡ Nettie Lauderdale, daughter of the Wards’ Geneseo physician and Old School ally Dr. Walter Lauderdale, dropped by the Greens’ during a brief visit to Brooklyn. “We called on Miss Green, Ferd Ward’s intended,” she told her brother. “She has a beautiful home. The parlors are grand. What she can see in that man is too much for me.” Nettie Lauderdale to John Vance Lauderdale, John Vance Lauderdale Papers, Western Americana Division, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  § All was not right, and some years later Mr. Hull—who was a vice president of the Howard Insurance Company as well as the treasurer for the Church of the Pilgrims—told a newspaperman what had happened. Several times Ferd presented bills for the same Sunday school books and supplies and then professed astonishment at the “mixup” when caught. He also persuaded the church to provide him with funds for having scriptural verses written out by a calligrapher, elaborately matted, and framed and hung on the walls of the Sunday-school room. When the bill came back unpaid he muttered that “there’s been some mistake” and begged for forgiveness. “We did not like his way of doing things,” Hull said. “He lied. He evaded matters. We took him to task and he resen
ted it and he finally resigned.” Eventually, Hull wrote him a letter urging him to “effect a radical change in his methods of doing business.”

  Afterward, when Ferd seemed more prosperous and overdue bills continued to turn up at the church, he was allowed quietly to pay them. The Church of the Pilgrims remained scandal-free. Ferdinand De Wilton Ward to William Shaw Ward, October 17, 1877, Brinton Collection; New York Tribune, October 9 and 19, 1885.

  EIGHT

  The Bonanza Man

  If Ferd Ward married Ella Green in large part because he hoped one day to get his hands on her family fortune, he didn’t have long to wait. On January 20, 1878, just three months after the wedding, his father-in-law, Sidney Green, died of peritonitis, at the age of sixty-seven. Ferd and his brother-in-law, Fred Green, were the executors of his sizable estate—thousands of dollars in cash and stock and tens of thousands more in real estate in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Chicago. Fred Green was two years older than Ferd but only a minor clerk in a small-time investment firm and deferred to him when it came to decisions about the family’s finances.

  That suited Ferd perfectly. His first move, made just a day or two after his father-in-law was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, was to persuade his grieving mother-in-law that she should allow him to use family funds to purchase on her behalf thirty Produce Exchange certificates at $300 each. The Exchange was on the rise, he assured her; over time, the certificates were sure to make her an independently wealthy woman. Five years later, talking to a reporter at the height of his celebrity as a successful stockbroker, he would point to this purchase as proof of his early shrewdness: the certificates were already worth nearly $4,700 apiece, he said then, and were still steadily appreciating; he saw no reason they shouldn’t be worth $10,000 each before too long.

  In fact, he had not bought a single certificate. Instead, he had deposited his widowed mother-in-law’s money into his own personal account. Later, he would do the same thing with most of the rest of her inheritance, falsely claiming to have invested it in stocks and Chicago real estate. She was just the first of hundreds of victims to be ruined by his false promises.

  A few days after pocketing his mother-in-law’s money, Ferd wrote an apparently anguished letter to the president of the Marine Bank, James D. Fish. He felt lost, abandoned without his late father-in-law’s guidance, he said; he was only twenty-six, still too young to succeed in business on his own or to shoulder the burden of his wife’s family. Mr. Fish was fifty-eight, almost twice his age, and had been Mr. Green’s closest friend. If he could consult the older man from time to time to help keep him from making the kind of mistakes into which his inexperience might otherwise lead him he would be forever grateful. Years later, Fish would dismiss this letter as “pathetic,” but at the time he was flattered—and intrigued by the idea of working still more closely with a newcomer whose “enterprise and push,” he said, reminded him of how he himself had been when young. He agreed to do all he could to help. “From that time on I provided Ward with all the money he needed to carry on his dealings in Produce Exchange certificates,” Fish remembered. “Sometimes he would buy two in a day. He always turned over my half of the profits promptly.”1 Ferd soon proposed a fresh notion—buying up odd lots of flour from big-time dealers eager to get rid of them at fifty cents a barrel less than market value, then reselling them at a profit. Fish again loaned him the cash. “It was a very sound-looking scheme … and we made a nice little thing of it.”2

  Like Ferd, Fish had once been a small-town boy struggling to make good in the big city. He, too, came from an old Connecticut family; Fishes had populated his hometown of Mystic since 1674. He was the eldest of nine children of Squire Asa Fish—schoolteacher, state legislator, probate judge, and ship’s chandler, supplier of everything from soap to sailcloth to the fleet of fishing smacks that filled the mouth of the Mystic River each morning and evening. James had come to Manhattan at the age of twenty-two in 1843 to help run a chandlery across from the Fulton Fish Market on South Street. Captains and crews from Mystic and neighboring towns were his first customers, and they often left cash in his vault between voyages because there was then no bank at home.

  At first, he had felt homesick and intimidated by Manhattan. “Sunday nights were the hardest times,” Fish remembered. “Here I was, a young man in a large city, with nowhere to go. I had been to preaching so much in my boyhood that it gave no pleasure to me to hear a heavy discourse at the end of the day.”3 That was like Ferd, too. Instead of going to church, he went to the theater, most often to Mitchell’s Olympic on Broadway between Broad Street and Grand, just off the Bowery. It was a small house, half the price and half the size of its rivals, “a tiny show-box for vaudeville and burlesques,”4 Charles Dickens wrote. It was a favorite both with the swells who sat upstairs and the poor streetwise “b’hoys” who crowded into the pit to see shows known for what one critic called “coarseness and obscenity.”5

  “I paid one shilling,” Fish recalled, “and took my seat in the pit, and I saw around me men who have since been worth millions.”6 His favorite performer was a winsome soprano named Mary Taylor—“our Mary” to smitten and impatient admirers like Fish, who sometimes drowned out the other performers by chanting her name to bring her onstage before her scripted entrance. She was a capable singer but best known for her “tender side-long looks” and for her splendid legs, whose outlines could be seen when she played “breeches roles”—daring men’s parts that required her to appear in tight trousers. “When that woman married,” Fish recalled, “I somehow felt that it was a personal blow at me.”7 Even as an old man, he kept an ambrotype of her hanging in his office, and he would be drawn to opening nights—and young actresses—all his life.

  In 1843, Fish married Mary Esther Blodgett, a hometown girl, and moved to a house on Henry Street in Brooklyn. She bore him seven children before she died at forty-six. By the time he met Ferd he had married again, to Isabelle Rogers from Illinois, who had given him still another son.

  Meanwhile, his progress in business had been slow but steady. He expanded his chandlery to outfit ships from everywhere and made more money by selling cargo salvaged from wrecked vessels. He chartered freight and passenger ships of his own, too, and then, in 1853, helped establish the Marine Bank. Many of its first depositors were his friends and neighbors from Mystic. In 1861, the directors elected him its president; five years later, under his leadership, it became part of the new national bank system, created to provide a reliable means for marketing the federal bonds that helped fund the Civil War. (Ferd’s uncle Freeman Clarke supervised it for a time as U.S. comptroller of the currency.) National banks were meant to be more reliable and conservative than their competitors and therefore had to submit to quarterly inspection by a federally appointed national bank examiner; they were also discouraged from lending against real estate collateral and required to hold roughly one-quarter of their deposits in reserve against emergency.

  By the time Fish befriended Ferd, the banker was “one of the best known figures about Wall Street,” a friend recalled, “a stout, short, pleasant-faced man,” bald, with a white fringe of Quaker-style beard. Competitors muttered that his bank was a sort of Fish “family asylum”8 because he named his brother, Benjamin, chief cashier, and created posts for two of his sons, as well as his brother-in-law, daughter, and nephew. But most agreed that when it came to overseeing everyday business, Fish remained “a perfect autocrat,… able, shrewd and honorable.”9 When he took over the bank it had less than $500,000 in deposits; by 1880, it had nearly $5 million ($108 million in today’s terms). Because the Marine Bank still took days to conduct its meticulous quarterly audit while more up-to-date banks completed theirs within hours, some on Wall Street considered it “somewhat old fogeyish.”10

  Fish was especially proud of his reputation for rectitude. Over some forty years in business, he once said, “I never failed to pay 100 cents on the dollar whenever any obligation became due … and I often paid when I could have wri
ggled out of it.… I have had the settlement of many trusts as executor, administrator, receiver, and trustee. No claim was ever made of unfaithfulness that I can remember.”*

  For all his hard work, “Mr. Fish had never made great money,” a friend recalled. “He believed in waiting and letting things develop.”11 When Fish began working with Ferd the U.S. economy was still gripped by a severe depression that had begun within a few weeks of the younger man’s arrival in New York in 1873. More than three million men remained jobless. Wages for those still working had fallen. Banks and brokerages and insurance houses had gone out of business. Half the railroads in the country were in receivership. Part of Fish’s initial willingness to ally himself with Ferd seems to have been that even in the worst of economic times the younger man seemed so certain big money could still be made. “If at any time you feel that you must call in these loans on certificates, I will raise the money,” Ferd assured Fish during one of their earliest dealings, “but I feel the larger the venture in our hands, the better it will be for us, for I watch them carefully and as things look now there is every chance of their going up.… They are a splendid thing when watched.”12 Fish agreed. Happy with the tidy profits Ward paid to him each month, he did not call in his loans.