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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  But it was not enough. Many of the men who now sought Grant’s company were rich beyond the imagining of an Ohio tanner’s son—and seemed to be growing richer by the minute. Neither the general nor his wife would be satisfied until he could take his place among them.

  Buck Grant was certain that cutting his father into Grant & Ward’s profits was the quickest way to make that happen. On October 20, he escorted his father downtown to James D. Fish’s rooms above the Marine Bank for a private luncheon with his partners. For all his fame, U. S. Grant was an unprepossessing figure—short, rumpled, reticent, and unimaginative. (Venice would be a lovely place, he’d once said, if only someone would drain its canals.) But he had been a superb military commander, an implacable realist about combat and its costs who had earned his nickname, “Savior of the Union,” at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and Vicksburg; the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor; Petersburg and Appomattox. “The art of war is simple enough,” he once told John Brinton. “Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard and as often as you can and keep moving on.”3 Nor had he ever lost sight of what was at stake beyond the battlefield. When, during Grant’s visit to Germany, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck suggested to him that the Civil War had been fought merely to preserve the Union, the general politely corrected him: “In the beginning, yes. But as soon as slavery fired upon the flag it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain on the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle.”4

  He was the only president since Andrew Jackson to have completed two terms, and when he left office in 1877—feeling like a boy let out of school, he told a friend—he could point to some solid achievements. He had held steady during the Panic of 1873, restored relations with Great Britain that had been badly strained during the Civil War, tried to bring peace to the western plains, sent soldiers south to protect the rights of at least some freedmen and remained concerned about their plight after most members of his own party had lost interest in them. “To Grant more than any other man,” wrote Frederick Douglass, “the Negro owes his enfranchisement and the Indian a humane policy.”5

  But from his early days in the army—when a fast-talking fellow soldier did him and three friends out of their savings—he had shown a fatal inability to recognize dishonesty among those who purported to be his friends. Shortly before the Civil War he’d been gulled again, swapping a sixty-acre Missouri farm for a house in St. Louis that was not actually owned by the man who made the deal. “ ‘No,’ to him was the most difficult word in the English language,” an old admirer remembered;6 capable of sending thousands to their deaths without blinking, he seems to have been made deeply uneasy by one-to-one confrontation. His personal honesty was never questioned, but his presidency nonetheless witnessed so many scandals involving his appointees that editorial writers coined a new word for political corruption: “Grantism.” More puzzling than the amount of highly placed malfeasance that surrounded him was Grant’s reaction to it: he remained stubbornly loyal to many of those forced to resign in disgrace, and seems to have seen them all as comrades-in-arms upon whom it would have been wrong to turn his back while they were under fire.

  Now, when his son’s partners promised him big money for very little work, he believed them. “The great captain of the Union’s salvation,” wrote the financier Henry Clews, “was as helpless as a babe when Ferdinand Ward and James D. Fish moved upon his works.”7

  The firm was recapitalized. Once again, Ferd and Fish contributed mostly valueless paper, Ward explaining that all his ready money was tied up because he was actively interested in so many businesses. Buck paid in another $100,000. The general deposited $50,000, and when Grant’s youngest son, Jesse—just twenty-one but already speculating in mining stocks and on the Produce Exchange—asked to join, he put in another $50,000.

  Each of the Grants was guaranteed $2,000 for living expenses ($43,000 today) every single month, no matter how the firm was faring; in 1884 that sum would grow to $3,000. The rest of their profits were to be left with the firm as working capital.

  Fish, however, now insisted on being treated differently. He wanted every penny of his share turned over to him every month. “That did not strike me as a good arrangement and I told him so,” Ferd would say much later. “But Fish stuck to that point and I finally yielded.”8 He would later claim that his objection had been based on sound business practice; Fish’s insistence on having cash in hand every month meant that a quarter of the firm’s profits was unavailable for reinvestment. In fact, he was against it because it meant that at least one partner had to be regularly paid off in cash, not promises. Fish used most of the money to buy up buildings and building lots all over the growing city.

  Shortly after signing on with Grant & Ward, General Grant accepted the presidency of the Mexican Southern Railroad, meant to link Mexico City with Guatemala, the Pacific, and the Gulf of Mexico. As soon as he opened a railroad office on the second floor of the United Bank Building at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway, Grant & Ward moved into a suite of its own downstairs.

  Neither Fish nor the general nor either of his sons was to be found there very often. But Ferd was almost always on the premises, polite, energetic, and eager to add new investors to the firm’s books. The depression had ended. Wall Street was optimistic, expansive, volatile. Ferd had an outsize pair of horns from a Texas longhorn bull hung in the outer office as a symbol of the surging market he hoped to ride to riches. Business mushroomed, attracted by Grant’s name and Ward’s energy. John M. Bradstreet listed Grant & Ward as “gilt-edged.” Its credit was unquestioned. Ferd invested in railroads and silver mines, coal and commodities. “It is my plan to build up a great firm that shall live long after … its founders have passed away,” he assured Buck.9

  “To all of us,” a Wall Street veteran remembered, “[Ward] seemed a lusty, good-natured boy, an amiable visionary who had landed in an accidental prominence as General Grant’s partner. That he was evil-dispositioned not one of us ever conceived … not till jury evidence heaped higher than the Catskills.”10

  Ferd continued to lavish gifts on friends and family: $100 to help rebuild his cousin Rev. George K. Ward’s church in Danville, New York, following a fire; $200 to buy brass instruments for the East Haddam concert band; a big oriental carpet for the parlor of the Brinton home in Philadelphia. “What an elegant present Ferd gave you,” his mother wrote to Sarah. “It does me twice the good that it would had he given it to me. He is indeed a noble-souled boy to give among his relatives when it is needed and when it will not be noised abroad in the world.… I feel the comfort of his generous kindness in the dividends that come from time to time.”11

  The summer after the general joined the firm, Ferd bought and furnished still another home, a twenty-five-acre country estate called “Rosemount” on elm-shaded Strawberry Avenue, the most fashionable street in Stamford, Connecticut.†

  A gatekeeper kept out unwanted visitors. His small house, with its tall, narrow windows and mansard roof in the Second Empire style, mirrored in miniature the big, three-story, twenty-two-room main house that stood several hundred feet back from the road. There were shade trees and formal terraced gardens, too, a fountain, and a windmill. An Irish couple, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Dyer, moved down from Geneseo to occupy the house year-round: Mr. Dyer was the coachman; his wife did the cooking. Another Irish couple, named Shepherd, oversaw a greenhouse meant to keep both Rosemount and the Wards’ Brooklyn house filled with fresh roses all year ’round. Ferd’s stables and barns housed some two dozen horses, including a $10,000 pair of fast mares belonging to General Grant. There were also donkeys and donkey carts, carriages of nearly every kind and size, a herd of Jersey cattle, and fifteen Irish setters that set up a fearful barking whenever a stranger turned up at the gate.

  Jane Shaw Ward found it all too much. “Ferd has had another horse taken to Stamford,” she reported to Sarah, �
��and has sent for still another! The young man who took down the last one [from a horse breeder in Livingston County] says, ‘Mr. Ward was dressed in short pants (to the knees) and long stockings with low shoes!’ I am sorry he will enter into every new fashion so readily. It must make a fool of him.”12

  But most of Ferd’s neighbors, summer commuters like himself, seemed to enjoy his company and could not have failed to be impressed when General Grant himself paid visits to play poker and drive the fast team he kept in the Wards’ stables. The Reverend Richard P. H. Vail of the Presbyterian Church and his wife became among the Wards’ closest friends. Ferd and Ella joined other young couples sailing off Shippan Point, bought shares in the stock company formed to build a new club for what the New York Times called the “wealthy citizens of this town,”13 and liked Stamford so much they bought a second, far smaller, house on South Street in Ella’s name as an investment.

  Many years later, a fellow commuter remembered riding the train back and forth from Stamford with Ferd.

  He liked to talk of the stock market. Was in no way a know-it-all, but he had his theories that he reveled in expatiating on. He was the first Wall Streeter I ever knew to go in for charts. He was just as glib about “cycles” as are the patterers today. One morning I said to him: “Do you really think you can bob a lot of lines up and down a foolscap sheet, illustrating what you call past performance, and from those ink tangles tell what’s on the way for tomorrow?”

  And he answered:

  “Sure markets! Markets are just repeating echoes.”

  I pursued: “Have you ever tried your notions out—put your funniness into action, with real dollars up?”

  He came back: “Yes sir, I have done that”—and what an ingratiating smile he flourished!—“I am going to keep at it right along till, being plenty patient, I prove I’m right.”14

  In the summer of 1881, Rev. Ward traveled west again to visit Will and Kate. (Ferd had paid for his train tickets and also arranged for a subsequent voyage to England.) Leadville was still a wide-open boomtown. Ferdinand can’t have been pleased with the downtown casino which featured a stained-glass window and called itself “the Little Church on the Corner.” He must have deplored the big, jostling crowds of miners who still elbowed their way in and out of the saloons and gambling rooms on the Sabbath. And he couldn’t help being concerned that whenever his son went out after dark, he still carried a pistol in his pocket. But the mountains were beautiful, the weather “perfect,” and there was a handsome redbrick Presbyterian church just down the street. (Will had helped fund it and attended services there every Sunday.) The old man was astonished by the progress that had been made in less than three years: the population had grown from fewer than fifteen hundred to almost sixteen thousand. There were now twenty-eight miles of streets; some thirty mines and fourteen smelters working day and night; thirteen schools, six churches, and three hospitals; gaslights and water pipes and telephones; and a post office with fourteen full-time clerks, which, Ferdinand was told, “did a larger business than any other between St. Louis and San Francisco.”15

  In a letter to his daughter he could not contain his pride in the part his elder son was playing in it all.

  W & [Kate] … & their friends most agreeable @ W’s delightful home on Capitol Hill, the pleasantest location “by all odds” in this “camp.” … As to William I w’d say this that if ever a family had cause to be proud of a Son & Brother we have of William. Take him “all in all” I never knew his superior. He unites in a rare degree of intelligence, courtesy, simplicity, enterprise & immovable principle. Meet him in the street, on horse or afoot & you w’d judge from his dress that he was a day laborer and yet for authority in mines &c he is at the head. A common looking man said to me yesterday “all of W.S.’s (as all style W) family may be well proud of him,” adding this: “His two excellences are (1) He is the same to all—high & low & (2) he can [not] be bought.…” In a long conversation with Gov Tabor‡ he told me that [the Evening Star] was the best managed mine in camp & Wm the first man for character & influence in Leadville.”16

  Eventually, William would manage or share ownership of other mines: in Leadville, the Morning Star and the Kennebec and his father-in-law’s Little Giant; in Adelaide City, the Terrible Mining Company; in Independence, the Farwell Consolidated Mining Company; and, in Gunnison, the Ward Consolidated Company, the Adams Prospecting Company, and the Sterling Mining Company.

  Sooner or later, Mary Hallock Foote wrote, “persons who got rich in Leadville moved to Denver.” The William Wards did so, too, in December 1881. William built himself a big, handsome house at 1280 Grant Street, just two blocks from the state capitol, in the heart of the city’s most fashionable neighborhood. He also bought a 2,500-acre ranch not far from town and called it “Alfalfa-Fields,” and he established the William S. Ward Fellowship in Economic Geology at Princeton in order to encourage young alumni to seek the kind of success that study and hard work had won for him in the mining field.

  “How prosperous W & F are in business & how generous!” their father told Sarah. “Strange to see two country boys hand in glove with Pres. Grant—[William H.] Vanderbilt—&c &c. while Jay Gould pronounces F as one of the rising men of NY.§

  W & F are in business conservative & cautious—honest & shrewd. If it be the will of God may their prosperity continue & above all may not wealth imperil their spiritual interests! For this, let us ever pray.”17

  Will Ward was everything his father said he was. Ferd was not.

  In mid-December 1881, Jane Shaw Ward received a letter from Brooklyn. Ella was about to give birth. There had evidently been an earlier miscarriage, and for this delivery Ferd seems to have wanted his mother nearby. For some reason, perhaps because she did not feel Ella really wanted her, she did not go. “I think that Mother makes a mistake in not accepting Ferd’s beseeching invitation,” his father told Sarah. “But she must do as she thinks best.”18

  The baby was born dead on December 19 and buried the next day in the Green family plot at Green-Wood. None of Ella’s letters from the years before the crash survive. Nor do anyone else’s that might have cast light on how she or her husband felt about their loss. But the next evening, Ferd evidently felt well enough to stroll over to the flag-filled banquet hall of the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Montague Street and take his place at table G at the big New England Society dinner held to celebrate the 261st anniversary of the landing of the pilgrims. General Grant was the guest of honor but left most of the speaking to what he called the “unadulterated Pilgrims”19 who surrounded him. The speeches and toasts, brandy and cigars went on well past midnight.

  Some six weeks after the baby’s burial, Ferd’s mother left home for a rare visit to her children in Philadelphia and Brooklyn. Jane disliked travel, always thought herself too drab for the big city, and was never able to keep to herself her disapproval of even the slightest departure from her sense of piety and decorum. Her husband could not accompany her—he was now serving as stated supply in the tiny village of Rushford—so Maggie, the senior Wards’ Irish housekeeper, served as her escort.

  Their first stop was the Brinton home at 1423 Spruce Street in the Society Hill district of Philadelphia. The narrow three-story brick house was alive with grandchildren: George, already nearly six feet tall at thirteen; John, eleven; Ward, nine; Jasper, three; and Sarah, not quite two. There were three servants, too, as well as Sarah, the doctor, and his unmarried sister, Mary. Somehow, room was found for both visitors.

  Several years earlier, Dr. Brinton had commissioned his friend Thomas Eakins to paint portraits of himself and his wife. Each captured something of the sitter’s essence. The bearded doctor’s full-length portrait dominated the dark office in which it had been painted. He was a formidable man: a highly respected surgeon at the Jefferson Hospital, he had already helped establish the Philadelphia Academy of Surgery and the American Surgical Association, and he would soon succeed the celebrated Dr. Samuel D. Gross as chief of
practical surgery at Jefferson Medical College. He was “devoted to the patriarchal,” one of his boys remembered, a member of Philadelphia’s oldest clubs who saw himself as the “faithful guardian of the House of Brinton.” Ancestral portraits lined his walls. Specially built cabinets held ledger books and parchment deeds dating back to the 1680s. The children were forbidden to climb onto two chairs in the front hall because George Washington and Lafayette had sat on them. Brinton was also interested in the history he himself had witnessed, and especially revered his old commander, General Grant, whom he considered “one of our nation’s greatest men.”‖

  Sarah’s somber, pensive Eakins portrait hung in the parlor. “She was slight in figure,” her son Jasper recalled, “but her frail body sheltered an indomitable spirit. She was never ill, that is to say, she never admitted it; nor did any sorrow—and she had heavy ones—permit her to add to others’ grief by a surrender to her own.”20 Her son did not exaggerate the number or weight of the tragedies she would endure. When she posed for Eakins in 1878, she had already survived her first sorrow: two years earlier, Ward Brinton’s twin brother, the first Jasper Brinton, had fallen from the third-floor nursery window and died.