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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  But the man who really ran things was Principal Keeper Connaughton. “Wardens come and go, the administrations change,” a veteran convict remembered, “but Jimmy remains always smiling, always on duty, alert, vigilant, capable and dominant.”7 Connaughton was a Tammany man who counted among his close friends Ferd’s lawyer, Bourke Cockran, and Henry Jaehne, a New York alderman locked up for massive theft, whose paid-for prison privileges included being allowed to keep two pet dogs and to wander anywhere he liked. Johnny Hope, a cigar-smoking bank burglar, acted as Connaughton’s unofficial assistant and deal maker, selling easy posts for handsome prices and keeping his boss abreast of what other prisoners were up to.

  Poorly trained, poorly paid, and vastly outnumbered, the keepers and guards Connaughton supervised gambled and drank and routinely pilfered state property. “After a man has been a prison officer for a little time, he loses his perception of ownership,” a long time prisoner remembered.

  There are old officers in Sing Sing prison living in rented houses in the village, which they have furnished with tables, chairs, bedsteads, cutlery and tin-ware from the prison; the soap with which their weekly washing is done is similarly obtained, and the oil which they burn is supplied in the same way. It doesn’t make any difference what it is, they will and do take it: bread from the prison bakery; meat for their dogs from the convict if it isn’t good enough to eat themselves, pens, paper, pencils, anything and everything.… The convict who gets along best is he who aids them.8

  Even with time off for good behavior, Ferd’s ten-year sentence was sure to keep him behind bars for six and a half years. For all of that time, he was determined to be among those who got along best.

  Sing Sing was rugged, frightening. There were twelve hundred tiny cells, each just seven feet deep by three feet wide, arranged back to back in six tiers. Each cell contained a bucket, a wash-basin, a filthy straw mattress, and a narrow iron bed frame hooked to the thick stone wall so it could be folded up during daylight hours. Fetid air and fingers of light entered through the iron grate that topped each thick steel door. Cells were icy in winter, stifling in summer, and far too small for exercise—just three steps from front to back. Bedbugs infested the tiers. Men were allowed one bath and a single pair of fresh underwear a week.

  Punishment for infractions, real or imagined, were brutal and severe. Any convict who talked back, one veteran guard recalled, ran the risk of being hustled into his cell and beaten into a “pudding.” More serious offenders were thrown into one of ten special “dark” cells, to subsist in pitch blackness on nothing but bread and water, sometimes for ten days at a time. Men thought to be shirking work were subjected to what Principal Keeper Connaughton called the “weighing machine”—they were handcuffed behind their backs and hung by their wrists with their feet off the floor until they begged to be allowed to return to their jobs. Connaughton claimed that no man ever stood it more than thirty seconds; in fact, he sometimes suspended men for up to thirty minutes, until they passed out. The prison chaplain, Rev. Silas W. Edgerton—whom Ferd’s father considered a friend as well as a colleague—often asked to be present at the weighings, not to offer spiritual solace but because he liked seeing men writhe in pain and plead for mercy. Perhaps not surprisingly, his Sunday sermons were often punctuated by hisses.

  The daily schedule was monotonous and unchanging. Everyone was awakened at 6:15. There were fifteen minutes for washing. Then, inmates were ordered into the corridor to dump out their night buckets and fall into line for breakfast. They marched to the huge, low-ceilinged dining hall in lockstep. Each man held the sides of the man in front of him with both hands while the leader folded his arms and gave the step, accenting it sharply with his left foot, the rest of the men marking time with him, moving down the corridor in perfect cadence like some giant, striped, many-legged insect. A keeper with a club ensured that not a word was spoken. Breakfast, served in silence at long tables, never changed: hash, hunks of bread, and tin cups of “bootleg”—fake coffee brewed from dried peas and charred bread.

  At 7:30, a whistle blew and the men were marched off to work. When Ferd arrived at the stove factory on his first morning, its assistant superintendent recalled, ashes were heaped waist high around the boilers. He asked his boss if he could have a convict to shovel it all up and cart it away. Yes, the boss said—but “don’t take Ward.”

  The fix was evidently already in, but over the factory’s din the assistant misunderstood his boss and thought he’d said, “Take Ward.”

  He turned to the keeper and asked him if he could put Ferd to work.

  “Take the devil,” the keeper said. “It serves the son of a bitch right.”9

  Ferd was handed a shovel and did his best, carrying ashes till his hands blistered. But he couldn’t understand how this could be happening to him. He’d already paid to be excused from this sort of thing. He wondered aloud if former mayor Grace, whom he had publicly accused of profiting from the fictional contract business, might somehow be responsible. “Has he got pull enough here to hound me … and make me do a piece of work like this?”10 he asked. He was assured it had been a simple mistake, but he was kept at it long enough for the newspapers to headline their stories: “Shoveling Ashes in Sing Sing; Ward Does His Bit.”11 Then he was shifted to the job he had been meant to have all along: keeping accounts for the shoe contractor.

  Within a day or two, he realized that the single basket of foodstuffs Ella and his mother were allowed to send him every two months would be insufficient for his rarefied tastes. Prison fare was appalling—salt pork, watery stew, codfish on Fridays. He tentatively approached a lifer and asked if, for a price, he’d be willing to accept delivery of another basket and then quietly turn it over to him. The older man told him to go to hell: “You come around here trying to get me into more trouble and I’ll brain you.”12 Ferd backed off.

  It would take time to learn the ropes. A few evenings later, he was lying in his darkened cell when he heard a hoarse whisper coming through the ventilator in the wall behind him. It was a convict named Morgan, locked up on the other side of the wall for grand larceny. He had a proposal to make. As a Sing Sing veteran he knew how lonely prison could be for a newcomer, how difficult it was to confine one’s communication with the outside world to a single letter a month. He could help. He had a way of smuggling mail out undetected, but it would cost Ferd some money. Ferd agreed to pay, though he said it would take him a day or two to get the cash together. He wrote three letters, folded them as small as possible, and poked them through the ventilator.

  All were addressed to the same woman. The New York Tribune identified her only as “a lady in Brooklyn … not his wife.” It’s impossible now to know for certain who she was. But the most likely candidate seems to have been a striking, dark-haired twenty-seven-year-old woman named Isabelle Augusta Storer. We know very little about her other than that she was born at Kreischerville in the township of Westfield on Staten Island, where her father, John W. Storer, was in the clay and brick-making business with his brothers. She was the seventh of ten children born to her mother, Rachel Shea Storer, and seems to have lived with relatives in Brooklyn. She knew both Wards well, and attended Wells College in Aurora, New York, for a single term in 1885—her tuition had possibly been paid by Ferd. Beyond that, she remains a mystery, relevant only because she would reappear in his life nearly a decade later.

  The Tribune reporter, who evidently got a look at one of Ferd’s first letters to the mysterious woman, pronounced it “not emotional. It simply gave a history of Ward in Sing-Sing prison, how he liked black coffee, bacon and a [tiny] cell, with no poker parties and no margins for profits.”

  But for Ella, abandoned with her infant son, newspaper stories about her husband trying to smuggle letters out to an unmarried woman must have been deeply humiliating. Her disappointment and anger may account for the fact that while Ferd kept in his cell nearly all the almost-weekly letters his wife wrote to him in prison, only three brief notes
survive from 1886. At about this time, too, she changed her son’s name from Ferdinand to Clarence.

  In the end, Ferd’s first letters to the mysterious woman were never mailed. Morgan turned them over to Jimmy Connaughton, perhaps because Ferd was slow to pay, possibly to curry favor with the principal keeper. Ferd claimed he hadn’t known he was doing anything wrong. “From that moment to this, Ward has obeyed the rules implicitly,” Connaughton told a reporter several months later. “He has never been subjected to punishment, and would not be if he were here a hundred years. He is a model prisoner.”13

  Connaughton knew firsthand that that was only partly true, that Ferd would always be willing to put up, to pay heavily for special privileges. Among the papers Ferd kept in his cell was a tiny folded slip of lined paper he had addressed to the principal keeper himself.

  Sir:

  There is a man named Harry Johnson locked in cell 56 in the extension. Can’t he be moved to cell 83 and then put me in 56? Please do this for me and I will be very grateful to you.

  Respectfully,

  Ferdinand Ward

  Ferd’s note did the trick. Convict Johnson stayed where he was, but someone—presumably Connaughton himself—scrawled “51” on the back of the note and Ferd was moved to that cell. Ella—who had supplied her husband with the means with which to express his gratitude to the warden—wrote to Ferd that she was pleased to hear that he liked his new cell and was now living with “so few of the other prisoners.”14

  In letters to his parents and his siblings, Ferd always maintained the air of aggrieved innocence he had affected since boarding school days. His mother summarized for Sarah one of the letters he wrote home to Geneseo in the summer of 1886: “It presents a sad account of the unfavorable influences around him and yet a determination to avoid contamination if possible.* Let this be the theme of our prayers that God will keep him from degenerating and help him to follow the best of his instincts as a gentleman and become only more refined as he sees the want of it in others. Pray, too, that he may find favor with the guards and all who are over him.”15

  He did find favor with them. A number were already on his payroll. With cash from friends and family members funneled in to him through compliant guards and keepers, Ferd bought himself a series of easy jobs: he left the shoe factory to become a messenger for Connaughton and was permitted the run of the prison; then he counted shirts washed and ironed by others in the laundry. Finally, he took over an old printing press that ran off letterheads and bills for Perry & Company, using the skills he’d learned as a teenager in Geneseo turning out his Valley Gem.

  His accommodations steadily improved. An oriental rug materialized to warm the stone floor of his cell. A hair mattress replaced the standard-issue heap of straw. Ella embroidered a handsome silk cover with which to hide his bed when it was hooked up to the wall. She sent him a comfortable easy chair, too, a reading lamp, and a steady supply of the especially fragrant tobacco he liked to smoke in an old Dutch pipe. His walls were hung with pictures and memorabilia, including a hand-painted menu bound in red velvet, a souvenir of a dinner given by General Grant in honor of the president of Mexico at which he had been a guest. A reporter for the National Police Gazette who toured Sing Sing in the summer of 1886 pronounced Ferd’s cell “the nicest in the prison.”16

  Despite the privileges he enjoyed, most of the other inmates seem to have liked Ferd, in part because, as always, he was happy to share the wealth other people provided him with. A pickpocket recalled that Ferdinand Ward was “one of the best liked of the convicts I met [in Sing Sing]. He did many a kindness in stir to those who were tough and had few friends.”17 Ferd kept a bottle of whiskey in the print shop so that he could pour a drink for any thirsty keeper or privileged prisoner who happened to drop by. (The alcohol was made and sold to convicts for fifty cents a pint by the prison physician, Dr. Hiram Barber, known as “Butcher Barber” to his patients.)

  On Thanksgiving Day in 1886, when most prisoners were locked in their cells all day, one ex-convict remembered, a keeper named Gale escorted Ferd and four other prisoners to Perry & Company’s stove-fitting shop. Ferd’s companions included two embezzlers, “Allen the Dude” and “Sanctimonious Morse,” a con man called “Hungry Joe,” and James Jameson, identified only as “a negro burglar.” The official story was that the company clerk needed them to help overhaul the company books. But “instead of looking over ledgers … the four white convicts spent the day playing draw-poker, smoking cigars, drinking wine and liquor, and enjoying a delicious collation which had been sent to them by friends in New York. Convict Jameson acted as waiter and Keeper Gale watched the games and took out [40] percent of every pot. The cards, wines and delicacies had been sent by the American Express in four boxes to Perry & Company, but were in reality for the poker players, and were opened by them.” The games went on all day. Ferd ended up winning $7.50 and gave $3 of it to the keeper. “At five o’clock,” the prisoner remembered, Ferd and his friends “were led in a very merry condition back to their cells. They couldn’t walk straight.”18

  Ferd’s chronic conviction that he was suffering for sins of which others were at least equally guilty deepened when federal indictments against William S. Warner and his brother-in-law, J. Henry Work, for stealing from the Marine Bank were dropped on a technicality. Referee Hamilton Cole, appointed to decide to whom Ferd’s assets should be assigned, did finally overturn the midnight conveyances Ferd and Ella had been forced to make: Warner was ordered to give up the titles to all the property he’d taken from them and to pay to Ferd’s creditors $1,401,908.79 (all of the supposed profits he had made on his investments in phantom contracts, plus interest accrued since the crash).†

  Ferd was pleased to hear that Warner was now nearly as penniless as he was. Ella was pleased as well, even though he’d run out on a $500 bill at the Champion House: “He has no money now, they say,” she told her husband.19 When the State of New York belatedly moved against Warner for violating its banking laws, he managed to escape arrest and flee the country with his wife and children.‡

  Ferd found at least some consolation in the fact that James Fish was still behind bars. And so when word reached him that Fish’s sons, John, Irving, and Dean, had begun circulating a petition among the banker’s old associates aimed at securing a presidential pardon for their father, he wrote right away to Grover Cleveland to protest. He had no desire to stand in the way of Mr. Fish’s freedom, he said; after all, his former partner was an old man and hadn’t long to live. But he did not wish to be left alone to shoulder the blame for the failures of Grant & Ward and the Marine Bank, either, and so asked “most respectfully” that before the president acted he acquaint himself with “certain facts and letters” he would be happy to provide.20

  Colonel Daniel S. Lamont, private and military secretary to the president, wrote back to say that, while no such petition had yet arrived, if one did Ferd would be informed.

  Word of Ferd’s letter somehow reached Auburn Prison. Fish immediately agreed to speak at length with two reporters for the New York World, eager to drum up public sympathy for himself and further blacken his ex-partner’s name. He professed no interest in going free: “Were it not for my children,” he claimed, “I would rather end my days here.… All I want to show is that I have never been anything but an honest man.” Ward was to blame for everything. He was a toady, a liar, an ingrate, a thief. Fish went on for two hours. His “dignity and refinement” impressed his visitors, whose story appeared beneath a sympathetic headline: “It Was a Great Tragedy in Which the Old Man Was an Actor.”21

  When the published interview was shown to Ferd at Sing Sing a few days later, he responded in kind. Fish was every bit as guilty as he was. The Marine Bank had been “rotten” for years before it collapsed. He now claimed the phony checks for which he’d been sent to prison had actually been written at Fish’s suggestion; they had been “dummies,” never meant to go through. With his former partner’s connivance he had writt
en similar checks “hundreds of times” to improve appearances at the bank. “Fish pretends he was ignorant about what this contract business was,” he continued. “Well, perhaps he was: but if so, it was because he wanted to be.… Fish didn’t care where the money came from so long as he got his monthly dividends.”22

  As soon as the pardon petition, signed by scores of businessmen, reached the White House, Ferd wrote the president again, demanding to know what it said: “If [Fish] in his application seeks to make me the sole instigator & prosecutor of the troubles which wrecked the firm of Grant & Ward & the Marine Bank, I do most earnestly desire to defend myself by presenting certain facts & letters which have not met the public eye & which, I feel Sir, will convince you that he stands equally guilty with myself.”23

  Nothing angered Ferd more than the widespread notion that he had somehow squirreled away a fortune. “There are people right here in this prison who think I have got a lot of money—a million or so stowed away,” he told the World. “But I am poor; I haven’t anything, although I don’t suppose you could make the public think so. They tell all sorts of stories about my family.… My wife is living on $1,500 a year.”24

  When the skeptical editor of the Baltimore American read those words he asked a reporter traveling to Stamford on other business to see what he could find out about Ella’s finances. She and Clarence were now living in the house she owned at 18 South Street. The newspaperman spent an afternoon across the road with his notepad.

  From what I heard and saw I was convinced that if Mrs. Ward really does live on less than $1,500 per annum she is as peculiarly talented in financial management as her enterprising husband. Her house is a large three-story dwelling. A sweeping carriage drive leads past the portico on the side, and in the rear is a well-appointed stable sheltering three horses.