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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

Your book of contracts opens with “No. 157.” Where are the earlier 156 contracts entered?

  There were no earlier ones.

  Why did you use 157 instead of 1?

  It looked better.

  Who and what did No. 157 represent?

  It didn’t really represent anything.

  Do you mean that nothing was bought or sold, that no service was rendered?

  Nothing whatever.

  How then did you obtain the $23,000 “proceeds” that were entered?

  There were no proceeds.

  How come these figures are called “profits.”

  I wrote them there so as to please our investors.

  Didn’t customers draw on their accounts?

  They were so pleased with the show of big profits that they were only too glad to have their apparent winnings pyramided. They liked my showings very much.

  Did General Grant know anything of how your business was being conducted?

  He knew nothing. He took my word. He had the same information the customers had—and he had the same happiness, while it lasted.

  Ward “interested and amused us all by his perfect frankness,” Putnam remembered. “He evidently felt a sense of pleasure in having been able, youngster as he was, to outwit a number of shrewd, experienced business men.” George Haven Putnam, Memories of a Publisher, pp. 315–317.

  † The novelist John Dos Passos was his illegitimate son.

  ‡ When Fish gave an account of his doomed mission to Geneseo to a reporter for the New York World a year or so later, Rev. Ward was indignant. To publish such a story, involving as it did “aged and heart-oppressed parents,” had been in “bad taste,” he wrote in a letter to the editor. He had indeed once been grateful to Mr. Fish, he said.

  Country-born and country-bred, [my son] was ill-qualified to encounter the pecuniary perils of Wall Street. To have such a counselor seemed to F.W.’s family a fortunate circumstance. He was repeatedly asked in strong terms to have an eye to F.W. lest he make unfortunate investments and, above all, engage in dangerous speculations, and he said that he would. It is not at all impossible that I asked God’s blessings upon him. I often met him at my son’s table at Brooklyn, where he was an ever-welcome guest and was treated as a member of the household.

  He had been forced to remind his surprise visitor “under whose roof you are,” but he denied having been rude: “I was not cordial (how could I be under the circumstances lately occurring) but ungentlemanly I was not.” New York World, July 2 and July 31, 1886.

  § In an interview conducted after the story broke more than a month later, Dr. Phelps went out of his way to blame the victim. She had suffered from chronic stomach trouble, he said, and had been warned to be careful what she ate. “I went to see her the morning of March 9 and found her much worse.… She told me she had eaten a dozen oranges, some stewed clams and … ginger ale. I … told her that in her delicate condition it was enough to kill her. She was a little petulant … and told me she knew what her stomach could stand much better than any doctor could tell her.” By the next evening she was dead. New York Times, May 8, 1885.

  ‖ Root was also a friend and early political ally of young Theodore Roosevelt, who would one day make him first his secretary of war and then his secretary of state.

  THIRTEEN

  A Verdict at Last

  James Fish’s lawyers moved immediately for a new trial. Until that issue was resolved, he was remanded to the Ludlow Street Jail, where a reporter found him the next morning in his own comfortable rooms, smoking a cigar and reading the newspaper accounts of his conviction. He was philosophical at first. “Well, it can’t be helped,” he said, putting down the paper. He continued to maintain his complete innocence, but “I suppose … if a man steals—and perjures himself and does all they say I have—he must take the consequences.… There is one thing certain, however, and that is that badly off as I may appear today”—here, his face reddened and his fists clenched—“there is one who is in a much worse position in the eyes of all honest men.” He pointed toward Ferd’s rooms on the other side of the wall. “There is a man whom I took by the hand as a boy and loaded with favors, and how has he repaid me? Why, I should as soon have thought of one of my own children stabbing me.” Fish said that he had reached an age when rest and quiet mattered most to him; those could be found even in the penitentiary. But “wherever I go … I shall feel happy in the thought that this scoundrel will follow me. I will do all I can to further that end; and although I generally do not harbor malice. I feel that assisting to bring this man to justice will be a public duty.”1

  U.S. Attorney Root felt the same way. But nearly a year after the crash, no grand jury had issued a criminal indictment against Ferdinand Ward. Rival jurisdictions were part of the problem. “This office would only be too glad to bring Mr. Ward to trial,” one of Root’s assistants said, “but as long as he is protected by a civil process from the state courts we can’t do it.”2

  But the real problem lay deeper. In order to convict Ferd of a crime, prosecutors needed reliable witnesses to testify against him, and those with whom he had done business, winners and losers alike, were proving reluctant to talk about it. Ferd’s assignee, George Holt, put it best. “There is no doubt that Ward’s contracts were shams and he could be indicted for the offences if witnesses could be procured who would swear that he had pretended that he actually had contracts. Those men who made money by him are, naturally, not anxious to come forward, and those who were summoned before the Grand Jury could not remember the circumstances or pretended not to. The truth is that most of those who invested did so without asking any questions.”3 To testify honestly about Ferd’s promises, then, was publicly to admit either venality or an embarrassing willingness to suspend disbelief. Either admission would badly undercut a man’s reputation on Wall Street.*

  On May 3, Dr. Phelps, the New Jersey doctor who had attended Sallie Reber during her final days, came to see Fish at Ludlow Street. He was worried. Reporters from the New York Times had been poking around Carlstadt. They had already talked with the woman in whose house Sallie had died and the station agent who had helped arrange for her body to be shipped into the city. It seemed only a matter of a day or two before the story of the relationship between the banker and the stage star turned up in the newspapers. That evening, the doctor sent Sallie’s brother-in-law the coded message they’d agreed upon.

  To Frank A. Layman, Sandusky

  Look Out for Breakers; Letter on the Way.

  Phelps

  On May 7, a year and a day since Fish’s world had collapsed, the front page of the morning New York Times carried a long, lurid story headlined “SALLIE REBER’S SAD DEATH; A MYSTERY IN WHICH JAMES D. FISH IS CONCERNED; SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES CONNECTING WITH THE AFFAIR.” That same day, Frank Layman assured a Sandusky reporter that there was no mystery, no scandal: Fish and his sister-in-law had secretly been married in May 1884, at about the time of the crash, he said. “In order to escape the notoriety that might ensue,” he continued, “Sallie stipulated that the marriage should be kept secret until such time as he was free again” and had insisted on maintaining this silence until the day she died. “In justice to Mr. Fish,” he added, “he has been anxious from the first to make known the marriage and [now that he’s been] absolved by the family from secrecy will do so today.”4

  But Fish didn’t. When a reporter somehow got into the jail the following morning, asking for a comment, he was evasive. He had been acquainted with Mrs. Laing, of course: “She was as pure and noble a soul as ever I knew. Any suggestion of impropriety on her part is a foul calumny.” But, when asked if he had married her, he confirmed only that he had been her “benefactor.” The reporter pointed out that on the day Dr. Phelps signed the baby’s birth certificate naming Sallie’s late husband as the baby’s father, Franklin Laing had been dead for a year and a half; Fish said only that it did seem “somewhat singular.”5

  As soon as his jailhouse interview moved
on the wires, an anxious telegram arrived from Layman: “Daily News wires me you deny marriage with Sallie. Is it true? Answer immediately.”

  “I do not deny it and shall not do so,” Fish wired back.

  Eventually, he summoned his old friend George Alfred Townsend, the financial reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, to help him coordinate his story with the one Layman was telling. He had begun calling on Sallie after her husband’s death, he said, and, “being a widower and without any home of my own, I thought I was rich enough to take a wife and spend some of my remaining life with a companion.” But Sallie had initially been reluctant: married actresses had a hard time finding work, she’d said, and her mother had not approved of widows remarrying for at least a year. But in the spring of 1884, when Fish still thought himself worth at least a million dollars, he had pressed his suit and she had agreed. No date was set, but, “finding myself loved by this young lady, I was anxious to marry her as soon as possible. Suddenly came my failure. I then felt all the more lonesome and in need of domestic life. She, perhaps, took an additional interest in me from my misfortune.… It was like her to prove her attachment to me in marrying me in the midst of these reverses.”6

  The marriage had taken place almost precisely nine months before their daughter was born, Fish asserted, though no one in either her family or his had been told about it at the time. He was oddly vague about the details, too. Sometimes he said the marriage had taken place on May 20, sometimes on May 28. There was no church wedding; no civil ceremony, either.†

  Instead, Fish said, on the advice of an old friend, New York Supreme Court Justice Charles Donohue, he and Sallie had been “married according to the laws of New York in a perfectly regular way. We signed a written contract of marriage which is now in the possession of [Sallie’s] mother in Sandusky.”7

  Judge Benedict rejected Fish’s request for a new trial and summoned him back to his courtroom for sentencing. He had been convicted on seven counts, each of which carried a ten-year term in prison. “A more shameful or more lawless abuse of the powers of the president of a National Bank can scarcely be imagined,”8 the judge said. Fish bowed his head. But because of the defendant’s age, he would be allowed to serve them concurrently at Auburn Prison in Auburn, New York.

  Before he left, Fish arranged for his baby—now named Alice Reber Fish, after Sallie’s younger sister—to be cared for by his unmarried daughter, Annie, who moved with the infant to a boardinghouse in Auburn to be near him. “We can’t believe it is his,” she said, “but as he says it is we have taken it in and will give it a home.”9

  At some point, the Reber family had a headstone placed above Sallie Reber’s grave at the Oakland cemetery in Sandusky, formally identifying her as “The wife of James D. Fish.” But evidently even her daughter remained unsure whether that was true. Alice inherited her mother’s theatrical trunk and kept it with her all of her long life. But one member of the family remembered that she never dared open it, perhaps because she was afraid of what its contents might reveal about the relationship between the father she knew and loved and her mother, the actress who died after giving her birth.

  On July 1, three days after James Fish entered Auburn Prison, Mark Twain visited General Grant again, this time at a friend’s cottage at Mount McGregor in the hills above Saratoga Springs, New York. The dying man had gone there with his family in the hope that the clear, dry mountain air would make him more comfortable. The manuscript of his memoir—now planned for two volumes—was finished, and he was hard at work on revising the galleys. His visitor sat with him on the porch. Buck and Jesse Grant were there, too. Grant was a shrunken figure now, wearing a winter coat and top hat and swathed in blankets despite the summer sun. His voice mostly gone, he communicated by writing on little slips of paper. The subject of Fish’s imprisonment came up. Jesse said ten years was far too light a sentence for a man like him. Buck agreed, cursing his name. Twain cursed him, too. Grant listened, then scrawled a note: “He was not as bad as the other.”10

  Fred Grant preferred not to talk about the disaster. “Father is letting you see that the Grant family are a pack of fools, Mr. Clemens,” he said.

  The general disagreed, Twain remembered. “He said in substance that … when Ward laid siege to a man that man would turn out to be a fool, too—as much of a fool as any Grant.” Was Hugh J. Jewett, president of the Erie Railroad, a fool? He lost tens of thousands when the Marine Bank failed. He named other prominent businessmen whom Ferd had gulled, including one who had paid him $300,000 for a share in a mine that was not for sale, and another whom he had robbed of $300,000 “without giving him a scrap of anything to show that the transaction had taken place and today that man is not among the prosecutors of Ward at all for the reason … that he would rather lose all that money than have the fact get out that he was deceived in so childish a way.”11

  Twain was unconvinced at first. But then he put himself in the embarrassed investors’ place “and confessed … it was a hundred to one that I would have done the very thing that [they] had done, and I was thoroughly well aware that … there was not a preacher nor a widow in Christendom who would not have done it; for these people are always seeking investments that pay illegitimately large sums; and they never, or seldom, stop to inquire into the nature of the business.”12

  Three weeks later, General Grant declared that he had done all he could do to finish his memoirs: he had revised the galleys of the first volume; the manuscript of the second was ready for the printer. “Do not,” he wrote in a note he handed to Fred, “let the memory of me interfere with the progress of the book.”‡

  Without work to do, what Twain called the general’s “tedious weariness” rapidly increased. “I do not sleep though I sometimes doze a little,” he wrote to one of his physicians. “If up I am talked to and in my effort to answer cause pain. The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.”13 Word spread that he was sinking. The newspapers resumed their lugubrious drumbeat: “General Grant’s Death Imminent”; “The End Near”; “General Grant not Expected to Survive the Night.”14

  He died on the morning of July 23. Two weeks of national mourning followed. Messages of condolence arrived from North and South alike. The climax was a vast slow-moving Manhattan procession up Broadway to the hastily constructed vault at 122nd Street that was to hold the general’s body until a suitably grand tomb could be completed.

  Ferd paid his way out of jail that afternoon to watch it pass. Smoked glasses kept him from being recognized; they also made it impossible for anyone to know how he really felt at Grant’s passing. He always claimed that he genuinely grieved for his former partner, but he also knew that the public reaction to the general’s death would make his efforts at least to share the blame for all that had happened immeasurably more difficult.

  His mother felt no ambivalence. She had not forgotten that the general and his sons had said terrible things about her boy. She told Sarah how much she deplored “this furor over Gen’l Grant.… It must indeed seem, as you say, a grand farce in the eyes of a God who ‘will not give His glory to another’ and before whom such ‘hero worship’ is wicked idolatry. It is 2 o’clock and Father has just left to attend the services to be held in the courthouse yard from 2 till 5 this PM. He, as chaplain of the G.A.R., had to be present but he will take no part in the services. How disgusting the papers have been about [the general]. I am glad I am not his wife nor any connexion of his.”15

  Ferdinand Ward was not merely “the plunderer of Grant,” said the Washington Post, but also “in the estimate of many his murderer.”16 Threatening letters flooded the Ludlow Street Jail. Some were anonymous; others were signed by Union veterans eager to avenge their old commander. Ferd was now, as he himself said, “the best-hated man in the United States,” his name a nationwide byword for swindling and chicanery.

  A Reno dry goods merchant used Ferd in a newspaper adverti
sement:

  Ferdinand Ward is said to be an expert

  in “robbing Peter to pay Paul;”

  not so with

  Gallatin & Folsom, for they give their customers a fair shake on every proposition.17

  A New York songwriter named M. H. Rosenfeld rushed out a tune called “I’ve Just Been Down to the Bank,” dedicated to “Ferdinand Ward, Esq., Hotel du Ludlow, N.Y.” The authors of a new manual of phrenology published that fall included a portrait of “Ferdinand Ward, False Financier,” with a caption helpfully explaining that his “low-top head, very broad from side to side,” revealed “Secretiveness, Cunning, Acquisitiveness, Destructiveness.”18

  Public anger was exacerbated by the fact that nearly sixteen months after Ferd’s arrest he had yet to face a single charge in court. Elihu Root had helped to get six indictments handed down against him before leaving office in July. Ferd had pled not guilty to all of them, and his lawyers had prepared his defense against each. But the trials had all been postponed at the last minute, largely because prosecutors weren’t sure they had enough witnesses on hand willing to admit to their own folly or venality while implicating Ferd.

  Now, the editors of the National Police Gazette suggested that if the “Arch Thief” weren’t formally tried and convicted soon, there was another remedy: “Unless Ferdinand Ward be brought to the bar shortly, and the penalty of his fatal theft be visited upon him, the rude justice of revenge will break into his comfortable cell and swing him in the pitiless air as other thieves and villains have, ere this, been less justly swung. See if it doesn’t.”19

  Talk like that enraged Ferd. “I consider it extraordinary—I might say outrageous,” he told a newspaperman. “I am hammered at by the press day in and day out as leading a luxurious life in Ludlow Street Jail and yet I am always ready for trial, brought into court time and time again … simply to be utilized as a pretext for new abuse.… My counsel are ready. The people are not. It is mysterious.”20