His worst fears were quickly confirmed. In his official memorandum, Cleveland took note of the “great respectability and business standing” of those who had signed the pardon petition, and then went on to say that, while he did not wish to comment upon the evidence against Fish, the banker’s “actual and willful intent to defraud depends upon inferences somewhat uncertain.”
Ferd fired off two letters to the White House. “That the public should, for one moment, think that Fish had no ‘criminal intent’ to defraud,” he told the president, “is so unjust and cruel that I cannot sit still and quietly submit to the injustice of it.”49 Writing to the president’s secretary, he was considerably more shrill. Cleveland had been wickedly misled, he said.
Surrounded as he doubtless was by men who, from interests better known to me than to you, were strong for [Fish’s] release in any way possible & who knew that I was so situated that my word would stand a poor showing against theirs. They have doubtless persuaded the President that I & I alone am the guilty one & that Fish was but a duped tool subject to my call. I do not believe, Sir, that you will fail to see the injustice of such a one-sided attack. If I could but for an hour have a free & earnest talk with you I could soon convince you who the parties were who, though not appearing on the surface, still from the background worked this matter through.…
As I look on the names of the signers of that petition I find many whose motive for signing the same appear as clear to me as they do not to you.
My trial & conviction on the evidence of Fish & his [brothers], one of whom swore to an alleged conversation with me through a telephone & the other that he heard what I said, though he stood 8 feet from the telephone & in an office where the noises of the street were incessant, must on the face of it seem absurd to you. If you will but try it you will see how impossible it is. Just call up someone through your telephone & then stand 8 feet from the mouth-piece and see if you can hear the answer. Yet this is what I was convicted on, & although I felt deeply the injustice of it all, what could I do against public clamor, which was bound to convict me no matter on what basis. I bore this patiently … & what I have suffered, no man knows. The loss of my dear Mother some months ago seemed to take all heart out of me & I have often longed to see what the end might be, still I have a wife & child, dear to me, & whose love I cherish as much as any man. My family are beyond reproach & though they carry but little weight politically, still I feel that any inquiries you might make would convince you that though I have committed a wrong still I have the instincts of a gentleman & that those instincts suffer most severely from such unjust & cruel attacks.§
Colonel Lamont did not bother to reply.
* Ferd’s avoidance of “contamination” did not include steering clear of dirty jokes. This one, carefully written out in pencil in his own hand so that he wouldn’t forget it, was among the items he kept in his prison trunk.
Two brothers named Moss had a misfortune on the same day. One lost his wife, the other his boat. A lady Scripture-reader sympathized with the one who lost his boat, thinking it was the same who lost his wife.
Lady: “Oh. Mr. Moss, I am sorry for your loss.”
Moss: “Oh, man, it was a loss, but she was rotten the first time I got into her.”
Lady (Horrified): Pray, don’t say that Mr. Moss.”
Moss: “Why the first time I got into her she made water.”
Lady (Trying to find somewhere to run away to): “Horrible!”
Moss: “Why, she had such a crack I had to screw her up and do her bottom over!”
Lady (Almost paralyzed): “Horrible, horrible!”
Moss: “Why, when me and George and John and Bill Blair got into her together, she busted.”
Lady faints.
Author’s collection.
† Referee Cole did not claim that Warner had been aware that the firm’s dealings were fraudulent (though he did not “make a finding of positive good faith” on Warner’s part, either). Nor did he believe Warner had used duress to force Ferd and Ella to transfer their property to him. It would have been perfectly legitimate for him to obtain the transfer if he had been a valid creditor of the firm. But he was not a valid creditor. Since the contracts in which he had invested never existed, the $578,500 worth of obligations Warner claimed the firm owed to him were “mere waste paper and [therefore] could not be enforced against anyone.” Furthermore, when he had taken the Wards’ property he knew the firm was insolvent. New York Herald, March 18, 1886.
‡ He bought himself a handsome country home near Turbridge Wells in England, where he lived until he suffered a fatal heart attack in 1890.
§ Ferd also wrote to New York governor David B. Hill, begging him for a pardon. His tone was just as self-pitying as it had been when writing to President Cleveland.
Dear as liberty would be to me, & severe as my punishment has been for the past three years & three months, neither will compare with the pain inflicted by those who, to cover up their own faults, have sought to blacken me before the eyes of the world as the sole offender & wrecker of the lives & wealth of so many. I am, & always have been ready to take my share of the punishment …, but when a man like James D. Fish, whose career doing our business I know, as no one else does, should endeavor to whitewash himself by [spreading] on me the blackness of his own covering, is more than I can bear. I beg sir, that in reading this letter you will not [treat it] as the outcome of malicious spite, but simply as coming from one who, though in sore trouble, has as deep a feeling of shame & remorse for the ignominy brought by him on his name & family, as ever did any man likewise situated.
Ferd felt no actual shame or remorse, of course, and Governor Hill took no action. Ferdinand Ward to President Grover Cleveland, February 6, 1889; Ferdinand Ward to New York governor David B. Hill, February 6, 1889, author’s collection.
FIFTEEN
All That Loved Me Are in Heaven
A crowd of newspapermen and townspeople was waiting as James D. Fish emerged from Auburn Prison on the morning of May 11, 1889. He seemed “transformed” by his time behind bars, one reporter wrote. “His face looked fresh and pink with health. His rather small and furtive black eyes snapped with excitement. His step was firm, his movements vigorous.”1 He looked neither right nor left, and spoke to no one as he climbed into a waiting carriage. “In an instant the phaeton was whirring up State Street at a spanking trot, leaving the crowd of curiosity-seekers staring stupidly at its wake of eddying dust.”2 The carriage zigzagged through town for a time, trying to lose the reporters who pursued it, then clattered to a stop at the corner of Park Avenue and Nelson Street.
There, another newspaperman continued, “a beautiful sight met [Fish’s] view. Just where the road crests the hill … stood another phaeton with a beautiful team attached and in the carriage, with smiling faces, his two children, Anna, his heroic daughter, who had planned this little scheme for his escaping the rude curiosity of the crowd and his little daughter, [Alice], poor dead Sallie Reber’s child, in a red frock and with one of those wide-brimmed expanses of straw wreathed with blossoms which all the tots wear these days.”3 The little girl handed her father a bunch of lilacs, then climbed onto his knee for the ride to the depot. “The old man held [the bouquet] proudly … during the drive, sniffing its fragrance now and then, and now and then stopping to hug young Miss Fish. A happier, more contented trio seldom set out on a rare May morning for a lovely country drive.… Oh, how sweet freedom must have been to the worried, prison-worn old man. To think of that dark cavern of misery … and then to think of plunging from that free as the air and into such a laughing, foliage-waving, flower-bedecked, madcap May morning as was that of yesterday!”*
Newspaper stories like that, describing his old partner walking free and being reunited with his family while he himself remained in prison, set Ferd off again. Ella again begged him to say nothing to the press. His father told him not to take Fish’s release “too much to heart.”4 But Ferd demanded that Bourke Cockran go
to the newspapers and protest on his behalf. Cockran refused. Ferd accused him of betrayal, of abandonment, of believing him guilty when he was innocent. Cockran wrote to correct the record.
I have never entertained the slightest doubt of the guilt of James D. Fish, nor the falsity of the testimony which he gave against you. But I can conceive no advantage to you which can flow from my expression of dissatisfaction on the course of the late president in commuting his sentence. The hardship of imprisonment to a man of your character and association is painfully evident to me and is never without my warmest sympathy. If I could befriend you in any way, I would not hesitate to extend to you some practical proof of the warmth of my sympathy, but I am helpless either to shorten the term of your punishment or to mitigate its severity. When I advised you to bear your captivity with patience, I gave you the only advice which I knew would be useful to you. It is of course easy for one who is free to exhort a captive to patience, but … to encourage you to entertain hopes of liberation would be to subject you to bitter disappointment and I sincerely trust you will do me the justice to believe that nobody regrets more than I do, the hopelessness of any attempt to secure a commutation of your sentence.5
Ferd would have to serve at least three and a half more years in Sing Sing. To maintain the status he had enjoyed so far would require access to more cash. His malleable mother was gone. His father was adamantly opposed to sending him money, as were his brother and sister and most of his old friends. His only potential source of funds was his weary wife.
Relations between the two had not improved. Ella continued to resent his lack of interest in the lonely life his imprisonment forced her to live. When she found the love letters Ferd had written to her during their courtship while cleaning out her parents’ house, she asked what he would like done with them—hoping he would think them precious and ask that they be saved. He did not bother to respond. “As my letters do not seem to interest you very much,” she told him the following week, “I will not write today.”6
Not even Clarence could cheer her. The normal noises of a boy at play caused her head to throb. She did not dare take him to church for fear he would cause a “row.”7 She was, she said, “depressed and sad … as blue as indigo.”8
James McKeen had convinced her to stop spending down the principal of her estate to finance her husband’s comforts, but Ferd knew she still had a drawer full of jewelry as well as a few trinkets given to her by General Grant. (What little remained of the jewelry she had smuggled to Ferd at Ludlow Street had been smuggled out again just before he went on trial.) He wanted the immediate use of all of it.
In July, he sent her another message through a shadowy intermediary. He had already had to sell off a gold watch General Grant had given him, he said, now he needed her to sell more valuables and somehow get the proceeds to him right away. She refused.
Dear Ferd,
I shall send this letter by way of Tarrytown but after this shall only write through the regular means. As regards the watch, of course as it is sold there is not much that I can say. I feel very badly about it. I think after taking about 25 or 30 thousand dollars of my jewels and 6 thousand dollars of my money after the failure [respectively $610,000, $722,000, and $144,000 in modern terms] you might at least leave me what little I have left. I would not care if it was going to do you the least good, but it will only be taken by those you employ for their own purse.
However, as the watch is gone, I need say no more! I, of course, would never take you any more money. I felt very badly about it. I would try always to get it to you in some way as you seem to want that more than anything else, but I never could take it again to you.9
His demands only accelerated. He insisted she sell a silver pitcher and send him the proceeds, then suggested she pry the diamond from a favorite brooch and see what she could get for it. “I have the little gold bird but would not care to take the diamond out of it,” she answered, “but if you wish I will send you the one in my wedding ring.”10
Even those bitter words did not deter her husband. On the morning of October 3, a stranger knocked on Ella’s front door. He would not give his name, but he had a letter from Mr. Ward, he said. He would return later in the day for her answer.
Ella closed the door and tore open the envelope. It was a list of items Ferd wanted sold or smuggled in to him. She answered right away.
At first I thought that I would send you back no reply, but as I presume your messenger would think that rather strange I will send a few words. 1st as to the [diamond] clips, I have already sent them. 2nd I have no piece of silver to give you and this you know for I told you so. As to the pen-knife, paper cutter, pencils [all items valuable because they had been gifts from General Grant]—those I will send to you in the proper way.…
As to the diamond I will not take that out of the bird but you can have the one that I wrote about [from her wedding ring], as I do not care for that.
This letter I will leave for the man that you send, but I do not care to see him, as I told you last time you sent one that I should not see another. I also will probably not write you again for some time as I have nothing of interest to write … but will send you word if any of us are sick.
I feel very much discouraged over you and feel that unless you can get something out of me that you care for little else. You need not feel badly about this letter, but I have felt that I must take a stand or I should have nothing left.
Yours,
Ella11
For the first time in all her letters to Sing Sing she failed to add the word “love.”
Ferd remained eerily oblivious of her feelings. In early November, the Green house on Monroe Place was sold for $23,000. He determined to get his hands on at least a portion of that sum. From Ludlow Street—and then from Sing Sing—he had been forced to watch, helpless, as, one by one, all the possessions in which he had taken such pride were auctioned off to others. His books and paintings had gone first: his prize canvas, Christ Raising Jairus’s Daughter, garnered just $1,300, less than a third of what he’d paid for it. The furnishings of the Pierrepont Street house followed, 400 lots of curtain rods and cooking pots, clocks and oriental carpets, tables and chairs, thirteen bottles of whiskey, 150 bottles of sherry, half a case of Apollinaire water, a buggy, and a sleigh. A billiard table valued at $800 and complete with cues, racks, bridges, and three sets of ivory balls fetched only $115. Ferd’s own carved ash bedstead, billed by the auctioneer as a precious “souvenir of one of the greatest men of the age—of his kind,”12 brought just $47.
Rosemount, the Ward’s sprawling Stamford estate, was thought to be worth $60,000 at the time of the crash, but a New York financier snapped it up for just over half that sum. The furnishings also went for a fraction of what they had cost, except for one leather-covered chair prized by the buyer because General Grant was said once to have occupied it.
Each sale had increased Ferd’s anger and resentment: others continued to benefit from his misfortune; not one cent was coming to him. He would not now willingly let the sale of the Greens’ house go by without somehow participating in the profits. He demanded that Ella send her share of the proceeds from this latest sale to him immediately, so that he could invest them.
Again, she said no.
I am very sorry that anything of a business nature should come between us, for there can be but one thing for me to do, and that is to refuse to engage in anything connected to your work. I feel that the little that I have I must have invested very safely and also in something I know about. I care very little about money now, beyond what will keep me and Clarence in comfort. I think you need not fear for the future for with what I have we can live when you get out and you will be able I assume to find something to do. I am sorry to disappoint you.13
On Friday, November 22, 1889, Ella made her way once more to Sing Sing. She took with her a Thanksgiving box: a turkey, celery, crackers, and a jar of preserves made by his late mother. Ferdinand’s thirty-seventh birthday had fal
len on the previous day. It was an especially stormy visit. He wept and denounced her for denying him the comforts he needed, for robbing him of money he was convinced was his.
After she got home she wrote him a brief note: “I was very sorry to leave you on Friday feeling so badly.… I hope you feel differently about some matters before I see you again.”14
Influenza swept through the mid-Atlantic states in early January 1890. It hit Philadelphia especially hard. Everyone in the Brinton household except Sarah, the doctor, and the servants who waited on them fell ill. Caring for them all, Sarah told her father, “leaves one very inert.”15 On the twelfth, her oldest son, George, came home from the Bethlehem Steel Works in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with a raging fever. He had been working there as a supervisor since his graduation from the University of Pennsylvania two years earlier. George was twenty-one years old, six feet four inches tall, a star athlete who had excelled in every college sport from tug-of-war to tennis and set records at the standing long jump and the hammer throw.†
He was worshipped by his younger brothers and adored by his mother, who often leaned upon him when the demands of her large brood momentarily grew too great.
All the beds at 1423 Spruce Street were taken. She gave him her own, the bed in which he’d been born. The rest of the household slowly returned to health. George did not. He developed pneumonia. His father and his uncle, Dr. Da Costa, administered every remedy they knew: cocaine, opium, quinine, codeine. Nothing helped. At 5:39 a.m. on January 24, George slipped away. His mother seemed inconsolable.
A Disposition to Be Rich: Ferdinand Ward, the Greatest Swindler of the Gilded Age Page 35