I have often been asked by friends and business men whether you and I were general or special partners. We were for a time advertised as special, but I think we are virtually and actually general partners, and I think legally we would find that to be our status. The enclosed letter to me from President James of the Lincoln Bank … was received by me and I send you a copy of my reply.…
You may be aware that I am on the notes of G & W as indorser, which I have discounted myself and have had to get negotiated to the extent of $200,000 in aggregate at the same time and at once, which is not a trifling amount for me. It is necessary that the credit of G & W should deservedly stand very high. These notes, as I understand it, are given for no other purpose than to raise money for the payment of grain, etc., purchased to fill the Governmental contracts. Under the circumstances, my dear General, you will see that it is of the most vital importance to me particularly that the credit of the firm shall always be untarnished and unimpaired. I will be happy to meet you at almost any time you may name to talk these matters over.…
With respect and esteem, I am,
sincerely yours
James D. Fish39
The following day, an answer arrived in the general’s own handwriting.
My dear Mr. Fish:
On my arrival in the city this a.m., I find your letter of yesterday with a letter from Thomas L. James, Pres. of Lincoln N. Bank, and copy of your reply to the latter. Your understanding in regard to our liabilities in the firm of Grant & Ward is the same as mine. If you desire it, I am entirely willing that the advertisement of the firm shall be changed so as to express this. Not having been in the city for more than a week I have a large accumulated mail to look over and some business appointments to meet, so that I may not be able to get down to see you today. But if I can, I will before 3 o’clock.
Very truly yours,
U. S. Grant40
Grant never did turn up that afternoon, and his letter made no reference, one way or the other, to the government contracts Fish had asked about. He would later testify he had no memory of ever even reading Fish’s letter—that most likely Ferd had “summarized it” for him, leaving out any mention of the contracts, before he wrote out his response.
It had been a close call for Ferd, but he also saw in it a way to turn things to his advantage. That same day, he handed the hastily scrawled draft of a second letter to the clerk George Spencer and asked him to copy it out right away in his own hand. It was also ostensibly from the general to Fish. Spencer did as he was told, although he later testified that it had been the only time in the history of the firm he’d been asked to do such a thing. Ferd placed the letter on the general’s desk with several others awaiting his signature. A few minutes later, Grant stuck his head in the door and asked if there was anything that needed doing before he left for a few days at his summer home at Long Branch, New Jersey. Ward told him he had several routine letters he’d like to have signed; nothing urgent, but it would be good to get them into the mail. The general did not bother to read any of them; he signed them so fast, according to Spencer, that he barely even sat down. The all-important letter read as follows:
My dear Mr. Fish:
In relation to the matter of discounts kindly made by you for [the] account of Grant & Ward, I would say that I think the investments are safe, and I am willing that Mr. Ward should derive what profit he can for the firm that the use of my name and influence may bring.
Yours very truly,
U. S. Grant41
After the crash, Fish and Ward would clash angrily over the authorship of this letter. Fish claimed he’d known nothing about it; it had been Ferd’s idea and Ferd’s alone. But Ward said they’d cooked it up together. Fish had dictated the original draft, in fact, and then gone over it carefully, suggesting changes they’d both agreed to make. When the general signed it, he would claim, both he and Fish had been delighted.
No one will ever know for certain who was telling the truth. In any case, Ferd now had a letter signed by the general himself perfectly calibrated to reassure wavering investors. Grant seemed to be in on everything; all the firm’s investments were “safe,” it said—presumably including the government contracts—and he appeared to have authorized Ferd to use his name and influence to land still more.
Ward’s pace quickened. “If I get that government contract it will be for 150,000 bushels No. 2 oats,” he told Fish in early August, “and they will cost about sixty-eight cents, profits about $102,000.… If you think best I will try this, if not I will let it go.”42 Fish continued to think it best.
Once, when Fish expressed momentary qualms, Ferd threatened to liquidate the firm: “In this case, of course, I would find a man who would take up all our government notes ($170,000) for which we would give him the profits. I could close the whole thing up in ten days … and then your mind would be relieved.”43 Fish immediately backed down; he could not bear the idea of passing on such profits to anyone else. The younger man might be impetuous, but the results he seemed to be producing remained dazzling—Fish had taken home $100,000 in 1882, and would end up with three times that amount the following year ($2,160,000 and $6,490,000, respectively, in modern terms).
Colonel Fred Grant had now come aboard, as well, not as a partner but as an eager investor. Increasingly envious of the astonishing returns his father and younger brothers seemed to be making, he hoped to get in on the action himself, he told Ferd, but he first wanted to be sure the firm was as solvent as everyone said it was. Ferd just smiled and led him into the safe. He opened a canvas satchel and showed him its contents: a jumble of beautifully engraved bonds and stock certificates. How much was all that worth? Grant asked. Oh, about a million and a half, Ward answered; he’d never had the time to total it all up. The colonel wrote him a check for $10,000 on the spot. Before it was all over, he would advance to Ferd and the firm almost a million and a half dollars of his own.
The Ward money machine still had constantly to be fueled by fresh cash from new investors, the richer the better. When Ferd learned that General Grant was having a dinner for a few business acquaintances, including Cyrus W. Field and William H. Vanderbilt, and that he was not invited, he determined to meet them anyway. Late that evening, just as the Grants and their guests were getting up from the table, the doorbell rang. It was Ferd in formal dress. Might he see the general, just for a moment? Grant appeared in the foyer. Ferd apologized for interrupting. He had stayed in the city to attend the opera, he said, and just wanted to step in to tell the general that he’d “managed to make a little turn today—nothing to do with the firm—but just a little outside speculation and I put you in.” The stock he had shrewdly picked had tripled in value by the close of business. Grant’s share of the profits was $3,000 (nearly $70,000 today), and Ferd thought, since he was in the neighborhood, he might as well just drop off the check. Grant was understandably delighted and insisted that his young partner join his guests in the parlor. There had been no actual investment, of course. The evening cost Ferd $3,000—but, he later said, he considered it “cheap at the price.”44
At least twice a week thereafter, Ferd traveled uptown to join the general’s nearly nightly poker game. Other regulars included old army friends and a handful of just the sort of “men of prominence and influence” whose company Ferd always sought: City Chamberlain J. Nelson Tappan; former New York senator Roscoe Conkling; Stephen Elkins; Bird W. Spencer, the treasurer of the Erie Railroad; and Commodore Cornelius K. Garrison, a onetime riverboat captain who’d made millions in shipping and railroads and gas lighting. All of them would eventually invest heavily in Grant & Ward.
“I think [poker] appealed to [Grant] because he had to bring to it some of the same qualities which caused him to … ‘fight it out along this line if it takes all summer,’ ” Ferd recalled.
Five of us were playing … [including Grant’s old comrade Phil Sheridan]. After the cards were dealt we all came in with the regular ante and we all stood for the raise. When
cards were drawn General Grant took three and General Sheridan stood pat. He bet the limit. We all dropped out with the exception of General Grant. With his usual black stub of a cigar in his mouth he … quietly looked Sheridan over, saw his bet and raised the limit. Sheridan promptly came back with another boost.… General Grant saw that and raised again. Then General Sheridan with his pat hand called. General Grant showed a pair of nines and won the pot.… [He] laughed and said, “I knew you were bluffing, Phil, and I would have kept it up until I had staked my pile.”45
Privately, Ferd claimed to find such evenings wearying. “General Grant liked to have me up to the house and I was anxious to please him,” he remembered. “But there was not much fun in going clear over from Brooklyn and getting home from sixty-sixth street at one or two o’clock in the morning.”46 Still, it wasn’t all wasted time. Between hands one evening, Ferd spied a vase on the mantelpiece filled with $800 in $20 gold pieces given to the general for attending directors’ meetings and then turned over to his wife to help with household expenses. Ferd took Mrs. Grant aside. That money shouldn’t be allowed to just sit there earning nothing, he said; it should be invested on her behalf. Besides, leaving cash out in the open was a terrible temptation for the servants; you couldn’t be too careful these days. After midnight, when he boarded the early-morning ferry for home, his pockets were weighted down with gold.
* They would receive no pensions until Harry Truman left office in 1953 and the Democrats in command of both houses of Congress voted to grant one to him—and to all his successors.
† Ferd bought the house for $49,220 from James D. Fish’s younger brother, John D. Fish, cashier of the Marine Bank, who was also serving as executor of the previous owner’s estate. Only its gatehouse survives. New York Herald, November 28, 1885.
‡ Horace Austin Warner Tabor, known as the “father of Leadville,” was a Vermont-born veteran of the western gold and silver camps who had become a multimillionaire as owner of three of Leadville’s richest mines—the Little Pittsburgh, Chrysolite, and Matchless. He had been elected lieutenant governor of Colorado in 1878. Had Rev. Ward met him two years later, he might have laid less stress on Tabor’s judgment of his son’s character; in 1883, Tabor divorced his first wife in order to marry his mistress, a divorcée named Elizabeth Doe—“Baby Doe”—who would one day become the model for the opera The Ballad of Baby Doe.
§ Jay Gould may well have said this—certainly Ferd was thought to be doing astonishingly well—but an extensive search has failed to find any record of it in the newspapers of the time. Ferd may simply have invented it to impress his father.
‖ In 1891, Brinton would write a vivid, anecdotal account of his service in the Civil War, intended for his children and grandchildren alone to read. He wanted them to understand, he wrote, that “then, the War, to all of us, was everything, it was all in all. The past was forgotten; the future we scarcely dared to think of; it was all then the grim present, in which everyone tried to do his best and in which almost every gentleman felt it his duty to take his share.” The book was not published until 1914, seven years after Dr. Brinton’s death. John H. Brinton, Personal Memoirs of John H. Brinton, p. 11.
CHAPTER TEN
Tears of Grateful Joy
Ferd’s partner, James Fish, liked to tell people, “I sleep over the bank.”1 It implied an unusual degree of devotion to his business, presumably comforting to depositors. When he left his old home in Brooklyn, with all its memories of life with two wives and eight children, and moved in above his office, his business associates had thought they understood. His two rooms were elegantly fitted out. An Irish housekeeper saw to his daily needs. The Wall Street ferry was close by, and most mornings he rode it back to Brooklyn to breakfast with the Wards. But the financial district fell silent after the close of business, and some in Fish’s circle worried that he must be lonely.
He was not. He had had another reason for moving to Manhattan: it brought him closer to the night world of the theater that had drawn him since the early 1840s. He told one interviewer that his interest in the performing arts was largely philanthropic: “In the course of time I have often assisted some of those actors who were improvident and [had] exhausted their strength and reached old age poor and unhealthy,” he said.2 But it was actually young actresses, not old actors, that interested him most. He had “the reputation about town of being ‘one of the boys,’ ”3 one newspaperman reported; another described him as “one of the most conspicuous young-old gallants whose recreation is found on the front rows or boxes of theatres and among actresses behind the scenes and elsewhere.”4
His favorite place was the Casino at Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street. A Moorish fantasy featuring a vast horseshoe-shaped theater and New York’s first roof garden, it was the brainchild of the producer and composer Rudolph Aaronson, but it had been built with funds Fish and Ferd had helped collect from some of New York’s biggest investors: Morgan, Vanderbilt, Field, Pierre Lorillard, the tobacco king. Both the Marine Bank and Grant & Ward had invested in the place as well. Ferd, Fish, and Ed Doty, Ferd’s boyhood friend and sometime clerk brought down from Geneseo, served on its board of directors. William McBride, the onetime Geneseo carpenter whose apprentice Ferd had been when he was a schoolboy, was appointed treasurer and delivered the box office receipts to his former student every morning at eleven. Ferd and Fish had a special box at the Casino all their own. Fish occupied it nearly every night.
Aronson hoped the Casino would become the nation’s leading showplace for light and comic opera, but it was the chorus—statuesque, boisterous, lightly clad—that the mostly masculine audience turned out to see. The mother of Lillian Russell, who would one day become the Casino’s greatest star, offered a cold-eyed assessment of the managers for whom her daughter worked. They hired people only “to make money out of them,” she said. “Most of the young men [they] call ‘dudes’ who frequent the Casino are stockholders … in a small way, having paid in a few hundred dollars—the dividend returned being an introduction to the women on the stage, and a promise to make them solid with the same.”5
Fish acted at the Casino more or less as the other dudes did. After the show was over, he was said sometimes to walk one or another of the chorus girls across Thirty-ninth Street to a hideaway in the Mystic Flats, an apartment building he was constructing and had named in honor of his hometown.
Clearly, he did not always sleep over the bank. He did not confine himself to the Casino, either. On November 25, 1882, he attended the New York premiere of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe at the Standard Theatre. The critics didn’t like it. They thought the show—a lampoon of the House of Lords disguised as a fairy tale—too British for an American audience. The company was mediocre. Miss Sallie Reber, who played the female lead, was picked out for special criticism: one critic called her “wooden,” another said she “acted and sang very badly.”6
James Fish thought she was wonderful, and the air of personal tragedy that surrounded her only added to her appeal. She had been singing in public since her debut at fifteen in her hometown of Sandusky, Ohio. In her mid-twenties she was a featured performer with Patrick Gilmore’s Famous Band at Gilmore’s Garden on Madison Square in Manhattan: “She is pretty,” one critic wrote after seeing her there, “has a good voice and was rightfully encored whenever she appeared.”7 She had gone on to become a star with Ruben’s Grand English Opera Company and the D’Oyly Carte organization. Then, at thirty-one, she had abandoned her career to marry Franklin F. R. Laing, a wealthy suitor from Brooklyn. It was a terrible mistake. His parents cut off his allowance rather than accept an actress into the family, and he turned out to be an alcoholic, often abusive, unable or unwilling to earn a living. The couple took a room in a boardinghouse on West Thirty-fourth Street. She went back to work to pay the rent. Laing’s brutality sometimes drove her out into the street at night. He made a nuisance of himself at the theaters where she played, spent three months in a home for inebriates, and emerged fr
om the experience drinking still more heavily. Sallie had the sympathy of the whole theater world; earlier that year, friends had organized a “Grand Complimentary Concert to Miss Sallie Reber” at Steinway Hall to raise funds on her behalf.
At sixty-three, Fish was one year short of twice Sallie’s age, but he was smitten, nonetheless: she was an actress, beautiful, delicate, and in need of help. He came back to see her several times, sitting in the front row and sending armloads of flowers backstage. When she was replaced in Iolanthe by a younger actress in January 1883, he provided sympathy, as well. And after Sallie’s husband died of drink that autumn, he attended the funeral, where, he later said, “I saw some members of her family and confirmed the impression I already had, that she was a well-bred girl, that I need not be ashamed of her company.”8 He started to call regularly at the boardinghouse where she and her younger sister, Alice, were living. “As a friend of Miss Reber, I naturally felt interested in all her troubles,” he remembered. “I occasionally took her out to dine and had reason to think that my association with her was agreeable. The more I saw of her the more I appreciated her good qualities and the more my regard for her increased. I may say that the feeling was reciprocated.” Soon, he seemed to be accompanying her everywhere.
Fish genuinely loved the theater but never permitted his love for it to outweigh his concern for revenues. Early in 1883, he and Ferd bought the Booth Theatre at Twenty-third and Sixth for more than half a million dollars. The creation of the great tragedian Edwin Booth, it had once been the most elegant showplace in America, with a lobby and grand staircase carved from Carrara marble, frescoes and busts of great actors and favorite characters from Shakespeare, seats for 1,750 spectators, and a stage on which shoals of supernumeraries had room to move without bumping into one another. At the theater’s opening in 1869, the New York World had declared that “no such temple consecrated to the drama has ever been reared before.”9 Booth went bankrupt in 1874; the theater hung on for nine more years under a series of unsuccessful managers before finally having to close its doors. Fish and Ferd attended the final performance, an actor’s benefit of Romeo and Juliet starring Maurice Barrymore and the Polish-born star Madame Modjeska. “We sat in a box together,” Ferd remembered, and after the final curtain an actor stepped forward and “denounced Mr. Fish and myself as men of deep avarice.… We were more amused than disturbed.”10 They ordered the theater razed and installed on the wall of the business block with which they replaced it a brass plaque that read “This Building was Erected by James D. Fish and Ferdinand Ward.”
A Disposition to Be Rich: Ferdinand Ward, the Greatest Swindler of the Gilded Age Page 22