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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Fish got up from the table that evening convinced both that he should invest heavily in Will Ward’s mine and that a partnership that included Buck Grant would be a good idea: it was clear that the general’s son could bring in big money and equally clear that he wouldn’t interfere with business. “Things seemed to look very bright indeed,” Fish remembered.a

  But when Ferd made a formal offer of partnership, Buck surprised both him and Fish by turning them down. He believed Ferd was already “a very rich man,”35 Buck later explained, far too rich to “attach himself to a slow-coach like me.”36 Attaching themselves to that kind of “slow-coach” was precisely what Ferd and Fish wanted to do, of course, and Ferd promised Fish he would keep trying to change young Grant’s mind.

  Buck Grant’s belief that he wasn’t in Ward’s financial league was understandable. In the spring and summer of 1880, Ferd was acting like a very rich man. He returned to Geneseo, checkbook in hand, apparently seeking at one stroke to erase the stain of martyred poverty that had clung to his parents throughout his boyhood and to impress the townspeople who had once gossiped about the feckless preacher’s son who would never amount to anything. His stunned father reported to Sarah just some of what he did for them during his brief, showy stay.

  F in his characteristic kindness put enough to my account in the bank (same to Mother’s) that we are relieved of all anxiety at least for a year.… F is the wonder and the theme of Geneseo for what he did … & still proposes to do. It seems a myth, his financial success. His income for four months is equal to my father’s whole estate. It is amazing and the end is not yet. And his generous heart! It does not seem to me possible. His late visit (including gifts … House-repairing &c) will help scores to live with more comfort. William would do the same if he had it.… How opportune to us all are the [Evening Star] and other mines! Our house & surroundings when completed as F has directed & arranged will (I think) be equal to any in the village with the possible exception of Mrs. Ayrault.…”b

  I have seen so many financial reverses that it [is] with “fear & trembling” I view F & W’s success. All that we can do under Providence is to 1.) urge their putting now in a place beyond peril a sum sufficient for their comfortable support if the worst comes. $50,000 is less than a quarter’s income to F & yet $50,000—at 6 per cent—[would be] enough to support F & E comfortably in a village like Geneseo [and] 2.) use what they give us in a way that shall be permanently beneficial.… But enough upon all this. Let us be grateful—joyous & hopeful.37

  Ferd professed to admire his father, but he rarely paid attention to anything he said. He never even considered putting away money in order to live comfortably in a village like Geneseo. He and Ella had been renting a four-story brown-stuccoed house at 81 Pierrepont Street, just two blocks west of the Green home on Monroe Place in Brooklyn Heights. Now, he bought it, for $40,000 ($866,000 today), and then feverishly began filling it with the sort of art and oriental carpets and ornate furnishings with which he’d dreamed of surrounding himself since his boardinghouse days.

  He started a collection of rare books: original elephant folios of Audubon’s Birds of America and Animals of America; multiple leather-bound sets of Dickens and Shakespeare; Bibles in Arabic, Persian, Urdu; four sets of The Arabian Nights, one with six hundred tipped-in engravings. A book dealer marveled later at how “impulsive and decisive” Ferd was; it had taken him just three minutes to decide to buy a volume that cost $1,600.38

  He haunted Goupil’s art gallery on Broadway, bringing home etchings, bronzes, and canvases by fashionable European artists. Twenty-seven paintings hung in the parlor alone. Most were conventional views of fashionable young women, fox hunts, still-lifes, and landscapes. But Ferd’s prize canvas was Christ Raising Jairus’s Daughter, by Gabriel Max, bought for him by an agent in Paris for $4,500 (almost $97,000 in modern terms). Four feet high and nearly six feet wide, it depicts Christ at the bedside of a teenage girl whom he is about to wake from the dead; a meticulously rendered fly on her arm is meant to make the viewer understand that she is lifeless, not merely a pretty girl asleep.c

  It was a theme perfectly suited to remind guests (and potential investors) that, for all his apparent wealth, Ferd remained a clergyman’s pious son who could be trusted to do the right thing, that their money would be safe in his hands.

  A visitor remembered the Ward house as “one of the richest and most complete in its interior appointments that I have ever seen.”39 Four Irish maids kept the oriental carpets clean and dusted the books and artworks. A French chef and his wife ran the kitchen. An Irish butler announced callers, saw that the wine cellar was fully stocked, and ensured that the staff maintained the lofty standards of service expected by residents of Brooklyn Heights. And in the Ward stable on Love Lane, just behind the house, where Ferd kept four horses, an Irish coachman made certain that the silver mountings on the harness were kept gleaming for the carriage rides Ferd and Ella took through Prospect Park and Green-Wood Cemetery every weekend.

  Ferd was asked to join the Brooklyn and Kingston country clubs. “He was not what would be called … a society man,” a fellow member of the Brooklyn Club remembered, “though with his family, he moved in refined circles. He was a generous friend of all charitable movements, contributed liberally, and Mrs. Ward participated in many fairs held to give aid to charitable institutions.”40 The Wards gave generously to the Church of the Pilgrims, the Mercantile Library, the Eye and Ear and Homeopathic hospitals, and the Brooklyn Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor. Ferd especially pleased his father by helping to pay for revival services held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that were aimed at bringing the young, still-impressionable clerks of Wall Street to Christ. Ferd himself did not bother to attend.

  Brooklyn neighbors took to calling him the “bonanza man.”

  The same year that he renovated his parents’ parsonage and bought and began furnishing his own home, the Wards also purchased, in Ella’s name, the Champion House in East Haddam, the country inn where Ferd had proposed marriage five years earlier. The quiet old Connecticut River town was the ancestral home of the Green and Champion families; since childhood, Ella and her family had spent summers there to be near relatives and friends. When she learned that the inn was scheduled for demolition, she set out to save—and transform—it. She turned the battered old hotel into what its brochure would describe as a haven of “comfort combined with quietude”: thirty double rooms, all gas lit “at a cost of nearly two thousand dollars”; a formal dining room with dumbwaiters to carry food up from the kitchen and “eliminate all odors of cooking”; a private wharf at which steamboats from New York and Hartford stopped twice a day; a specially built fifty-foot steam launch named the Ella C in her honor that carried guests wherever they wanted to go; and on the terraced lawn the words “Champion House” spelled out in clipped greenery, in living letters large enough to be read from Goodspeeds Landing, half a mile upriver.

  The newly renovated Champion House was advertised as a “select and refined retreat” for well-to-do New Yorkers—the kind of New Yorkers Ferd needed to finance his schemes and among whom he had always craved to be counted. It served another purpose for Ferd as well. He persuaded Ella’s brother, Fred, to take it over as manager, keeping him busy outside the city and away from the family finances, which he was at least officially supposed to help oversee.

  On July 1, 1880, as work got under way on the Champion House, the brokerage firm of Grant & Ward was formally established for “the purchase and sale of stocks and bonds and in any legitimate mode of making money.”41 The new firm’s profits were supposed to be divided equally each month, but Ferd was to be the managing partner. He, and he alone, was to sign the checks, keep the books, and conduct the day-to-day business.

  It had taken months to persuade Buck Grant to sign on—months during which Ferd had privately grown more and more anxious. Rev. Ward’s “fear and trembling” about his son’s ability to hold on to his fortune had been fully
justified. Ferd’s personal account at the Marine Bank now held less than $2,000. The money he had spent on homes and furnishings and gifts for his parents had almost all come from the funds Fish and Buck and a handful of others had invested with him. The profits he claimed to be holding for them—more than $50,000 owed to Fish, nearly $100,000 to Grant (over $1 million and $2 million, respectively, in modern terms)—were only partly real. If either man had demanded full payment, Ferd’s Wall Street career would have ended early, in disgrace. Only by persuading them that far bigger revenues would result from this new partnership was he able keep the facts from coming out.

  Grant & Ward was fraudulent from the start. Ferd, Buck, and Fish were each supposed to contribute $100,000 as capitalization. Young Grant dutifully turned over his full share, including $30,000 in cash and more than $60,000 in valuable Evening Star stock. Fish—who had been encouraged by Ferd to believe that he was shrewdly taking advantage of young Grant’s naïveté—did not contribute a penny in cash; more than half of his “contribution” consisted of IOUs from Ferd, whose share was also almost entirely paper, much of it worthless.

  Fish and Ferd had grown closer. The banker’s second wife had died in December 1879, and soon afterward he had moved from the house he had shared with her in Brooklyn into a small flat above his Wall Street bank. Ferd assured him he should consider himself part of the Ward family, and the lonely old man began crossing the East River back to Brooklyn by ferry each morning to have breakfast with the Wards. A portrait of a bull’s head hung over the sideboard, a fierce-eyed symbol of the Wall Street optimism upon which Grant & Ward would rely. Ferd was unfailingly solicitous. “If the [morning] was very slippery in winter,” Fish remembered, “he would assist me [back] down the hill to the ferry. ‘I’ve got to be very careful of you Mr. Fish,’ he would say, ‘for you are my benefactor. I can’t afford to lose the best friend I have in the world, the man to whom I owe all I have.’ ”

  A special telephone line was installed between Fish’s office at the bank and Ferd’s desk at Grant & Ward so that the two men could talk business several times a day. The firm did well at first, investing in the stocks of two railroads, the St. Louis and San Francisco (of which Fish was president) and the Third Avenue Elevated (of which he was a director). Both exceeded expectations. Ferd claimed to be reaping other big profits, too, in mining stocks and flour contracts—all of them the result of fevered buying and selling, the details of which he kept even from his breakfast guest.

  When Buck Grant tried to play a more active role in the firm’s business, Ferd pulled him up sharply. “I supposed at first I was going to find opportunities to make money,” Buck remembered.42 One day he stepped behind Ferd’s curtain to tell him that on behalf of the firm he had bought shares in the Manhattan Railway Company. Ferd told him he’d done wrong. The stock was a poor risk, and in any case only Ferd himself was authorized to act for Grant & Ward. Buck ruefully reassigned the transaction to his personal account—and promptly lost $6,000. “The result made me think Ward smarter than ever,” he recalled; after that, “I was reduced to doing nothing. I was sort of a customer of the firm.”43

  He was a happy customer, though—so happy that after less than three months he wanted his father to share in his good fortune and join Grant & Ward. The senior Grants were coming to Manhattan in late October, when Buck was to marry Fannie Chaffee. The groom-to-be wanted the general to meet Ferd and Fish while he was in town. Nothing could have pleased them more.

  * Fish’s memory was selective. After the president of the failed Brooklyn Trust Company killed himself in 1873 rather than face embezzlement charges, Fish and two other members of the board of directors were accused of having personally contracted to finance completion of the New Haven, Middletown and Willimantic Railroad, using funds improperly loaned by the bank.

  Again, in the spring of 1875, a committee appointed by the bondholders of the bankrupt Chicago, Danville and Vincennes Railroad charged Fish and his fellow directors with failing to lay the length of track for which they’d contracted, pocketing company funds, and issuing fictitious reports to cover up their malfeasance. The bondholders sued to recover the money. Fish and James W. Elwell, vice president of the Marine Bank and a fellow director of the bankrupt railroad, countersued for moneys they claimed were owed them by the bondholders. Illinois banks and other railroad companies got involved. The case would drag on for fifteen years, finally reaching the U.S. Supreme Court in 1890. It upheld a lower-court decision that had called a halt to the litigation and forced Elwell to abandon his fight for the funds.

  In neither case was the question of Fish’s guilt or innocence resolved in court. Middletown (CT) Daily Constitution, September 19, 1873; Financier, April 17, 1875; Elwell v. Fosdick. No. 216, Supreme Court of the United States, 134 U.S. 500; 10 S. Ct. 598; 33 L. Ed. 98; 1890 U.S. LEXIS 1989; argued March 19, 20, 1890/decided, March 31, 1890.

  † The five-story building, built in two sections with two large apartments on each floor, promised its tenants a “revolution in living.” Louis Comfort Tiffany took the top floor of one section and turned it into a Moorish-style palace, its walls painted Indian red, its foyer lit by stained-glass windows. Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York 1880, p. 542.

  ‡ Mary Hallock Foote was the model for the heroine of Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Angle of Repose, in which both Will and Ferdinand Ward make brief appearances under their own names.

  § General Artemas Ward was a worthy but ponderous patriot from Shrewsbury, Massachusetts—he had considerable difficulty getting on and off his horse—who directed the defenses of Boston until George Washington arrived there in July 1775. Ward was not pleased when the Virginian assumed command, regarding it, according to Washington’s biographer James Thomas Flexner, as “an insult not only to himself personally but to that only admirable and virtuous section of the universe, New England.” Although he would later become a Federalist and a member of the House of Representatives, he never got over his personal resentment at being supplanted by Washington. During his last days he suffered greatly from gout. “This day,” he wrote from Philadelphia on February 22, 1792, “is the President’s birthday & there is a mighty fuss in this City on that account. Being unwell I am excused from taking any part therein, & that gives me no pain, but rather pleasure.” Rodman W. Paul, ed. A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote, p. 197; James Thomas Flexner, George Washington in the American Revolution, 1775–1783, p. 29; Charles Martyn, The Life of Artemas Ward, p. 305.

  ‖ Jane’s enthusiasm was more qualified than her husband’s: she was relieved to know that his future daughter-in-law’s family was “thoroughly respectable,” but she remained troubled that Kate “lacks in the one thing needful”—she was a Congregationalist, not a Presbyterian. Jane Shaw Ward to Sarah Ward Brinton, December 27, 1879; Ferdinand De Wilton Ward to Sarah Ward Brinton, December 31, 1879, Brinton Collection.

  a Fish’s decision to invest in the Evening Star, at least, turned out to be a good one: on investments of $500, profits of $14,000 were realized in “a very short period time.” Charles B. Alexander, “Argument on Defendant’s Motion for Judgment,” in George C. Holt, as Assignee, &C., against William S. Warner, and Others, Supreme Court, City and County of New York, p. 52; New York World, July 2, 1886.

  b Mrs. Ayrault was the wealthy widow of the town banker, Allen Ayrault, whose large, handsome house on Main Street would later become the Big Tree Inn.

  Ferdinand did not list all of Ferd’s gifts; he also bought the disused old Session House for his father and had it lined with shelves to house his father’s library, and he purchased a horse and carriage and hired a coachman so that his parents no longer had to make their way along the village’s muddy streets on foot.

  c Vincent van Gogh, who saw a photograph of this painting in 1877, told his brother it was “particularly fine.” A New York critic who looked over Ferd’s collection when it was auction
ed off after the crash took a very different view: “Mr. Ward’s pictures,” he wrote, “were largely rubbish, the sort that a rich man without much taste would be likely to buy.… Gabriel Max’s ‘Raising of Jairus’s Daughter’—including the carefully painted fly on the young woman’s arm—was sold to a gentleman who, not inappropriately, presented it to the Presbyterian Hospital, although he would have done better still had he sent it to the Morgue.” The painting is now at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The Art Amateur: A Monthly Devoted to Art in the Household (February 1885).

  NINE

  The Imaginary Business

  In 1880, Ulysses S. Grant was still the best-known American on earth. He and Julia had been back in the United States for more than a year at that point, after a triumphal tour of the world that had seen big crowds turn out to cheer them from London and Paris to Benares and Tokyo. Life in the modest home the people of Galena, Illinois, had built for them now seemed hopelessly humdrum. Thanks mostly to poor timing and inept political advice, the ex-president had been denied his party’s nomination for what would have been a third term in the White House in 1880. He had loyally campaigned for his party’s nominee, Ohio Congressman James A. Garfield—although he privately believed Garfield hadn’t “the backbone of an angleworm”1—then checked into the Fifth Avenue Hotel, still harboring hopes of somehow winning back the White House in 1884.

  Meanwhile, at fifty-eight, he needed to make some money—in those years, ex-presidents had no retirement funds to fall back on.*

  He had been forced to give up his military pension when he became a civilian to enter politics, and Democrats had blocked repeated efforts by Republican congressmen to restore him to the army roster after he left the White House.

  Twenty Wall Street admirers raised a $250,000 trust fund for him in gratitude for his service to the Union; its income was meant to make it possible for the Grants to live comfortably in Manhattan. Meanwhile, a second group of wealthy men, including the Philadelphia publisher George W. Childs and the New York bankers Anthony Drexel and J. Pierpont Morgan, put up another $100,000 to help the Grants buy a brownstone at 3 East Sixty-sixth Street, just off Central Park. “It was much larger and more expensive than we had intended,” Julia would admit, “but it was so new and sweet and large that this quite outweighed our more prudential scruples.”2 The Grants filled it with symbols of the general’s victories in battle and the gifts he had received during their long sojourn abroad: medals and decorations and a miniature gold version of the table on which Robert E. Lee had signed the articles of capitulation to end the Civil War; gold-headed canes and presentation swords in scabbards studded with diamonds; framed documents granting him the freedom of most of the major cities in the British Isles; a gold-enameled cigar box from the king of Siam; a pair of immense elephant tusks presented by an Indian maharaja; and a library of some five thousand leather-bound volumes given to the general by the people of Boston.