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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Dear Father,

  We bury our boy tomorrow at eleven. Will I ever be reconciled? I cannot see God. Where is he? I am crushed and broken. Pray for me and for John. Thank you for your sympathy. I would not have you here. Just write.

  Your own daughter.16

  A day or two later, she wrote to her father again. The faith he believed had been his greatest gift to her was failing: “I see no light. I cannot pray. I cannot work. I cannot do anything.… I am quiet and cool just as you would have me be, but my heart is nearly broken.… So far, I see nothing but life without my boy.… I know there is a God but I am too stunned to seek Him and He does not come unbidden.… Pray for us dear Father that light may shine out of darkness.”17

  From Sing Sing, Ferdinand dutifully expressed sorrow at his nephew’s death. But, as always, his own circumstances and struggles remained uppermost in his mind. He was angry that Ella now seemed to be skipping every opportunity to visit him in prison: one week she said she had twisted her foot; later, she said she was simply too tired to come; looking after Clarence—whose nurse she’d had to let go to save money—had worn her out. Ferd expressed no sympathy. To him it was all abandonment; he and he alone remained the victim of his crimes.

  In early March, the New York Herald ran a gaudy series exposing corruption at the Ludlow Street Jail, where Ferd had spent seventeen expensive months before he was sent to Sing Sing. The headlines caused a sensation: “Money Laughs at Both Jail and Jailers”; “Ludlow Street Jail a Pleasure Resort”; “A Man Who Will Pay Exorbitantly Can Live Like a Lord and Walk Abroad When Ever He Takes the Notion”; “Caged Financiers in Clover.”18 Hoping to keep selling papers, the editor sent a reporter up to Sing Sing to see if Ferdinand Ward, perhaps the jail’s most famously pampered prisoner, would be willing to comment. He feigned reluctance at first. “I have had all the notoriety I want,” he said. But he hadn’t. He welcomed the chance to be back in the newspapers, to complain again about his victimization, to get back at the officials who had fleeced him. Yes, indeed, he said, he’d spent thousands of dollars for special privileges while locked up in Ludlow Street, “because I had it and knew I would have to pay for everything I got.” He described in detail his after-dinner cigars, his strolls along Grand Street, carriage rides through Central Park, evenings out at the Casino, all paid for in cash. And he carefully named the officials whom he had bribed—warden Phil Kiernan, sheriff Alexander Davidson, and deputy sheriff David McGonigal.

  Money could buy you everything you wanted, he said.

  “Everything but escape from jail?”

  “Oh, bosh!” Ferd answered. He could have escaped easily, and “so could anybody who had the privileges I paid for.”

  “Well, why didn’t you?”

  “Simply because I made up my mind to face the music, that is all.”19

  Having spoken so freely to the Herald, Ferd panicked. Fearing that the Sing Sing officials whom he was now paying off might do away with him rather than run the risk of his someday naming them, too, he wrote a letter to the editor of the rival New York World claiming he had been misquoted.

  He was still uneasy several weeks later. A reporter friend reassured him that his old friends in Manhattan had been bolstered by his denial: “I have heard many people say that they would have despised you had you left them to think that you had accepted favors at the jail and then betrayed those who took you into their confidence. I have assured all such that you are no traitor.”20 Then the newspaperman went on to offer the same counsel Ferd had ignored so many times before: “Let me advise you in the future not to see or talk to a reporter or in fact to anyone else in whom you have not the most implicit confidence.”21

  Ferdinand was incapable of following that kind of guidance. Newspaper interviews kept him at the center of things, where he was always sure he belonged. Fame and notoriety were interchangeable for him. He had loved being the “Young Napoleon of Finance,” and, despite all that had befallen him, part of him relished being America’s best-hated man, too. Now he wanted the world to see him as he saw himself, as the victim of the unreasonable avarice of others.

  Rev. Ferdinand De Wilton Ward was alone now in the old Geneseo parsonage. Ellen, the Irish housekeeper who had worked for Jane, saw to the cooking and tidying up. But the old man spent most of every day in his dark study hard at work on what would be his last book, Suggestive Scripture Questions: Sixty Questions with Expository and Practical Answers. Nonetheless, the plight of his youngest child continued to torment him. He told Sarah of his anguish in a letter on April 6, 1890.

  I was awakened at one o’clock this morning with thoughts of F. & could not go to sleep. I said to myself “Are Sarah & William to suffer in their children what your mother & I have in him?” Why not? Was not F. brought up well? It won’t do to cast him off. He has done wrong, but he is my son and your & William’s brother. He has been generous to us. You see it in your parlor—I in my house, without & within. But you say, “It was not his money.” Much of it was & we are benefited. He has done nothing low & beastly. Your friend, Mrs. Bradley Martin, has a son who when intoxicated married a lewd actress; General Wadsworth had a son who died of delirium tremens in an insane asylum.…‡ F. is none such. His morals are sure.22

  On the morning of April 9, 1890, three days after his father paid tribute to his morals, Ferd was at work in his print shop. By then, the convict labor system had been done away with. The stove works for which he had printed letterheads had closed down, and most convicts remained locked in their cells most of the day. But Ferd’s skill at printing had caught the attention of the prison authorities and he had been put to work knocking out copies of the exacting prison rules he routinely flouted, printing hymns for the chaplains at Auburn and Clinton as well as Sing Sing, and producing elaborate visiting cards for Warden Brush and other prison officials, featuring a view of the prison yard engraved by an incarcerated forger. Ferd enjoyed the proximity to power his shop afforded—Principal Keeper Connaughton’s office was right next door—as well as the privileges for which his wife’s money had paid: he now enjoyed special evening meals served to him in the hospital; was allowed to wear a straw hat rather than the standard-issue striped cap his fellow prisoners wore; and got to play with a resident spaniel and the two puppies she had chosen to give birth to beneath his press. Even Ferd seemed at least momentarily pleased at how things were going. “I am very glad to learn from your letter that you are so comfortable,” Ella wrote him. “You seem to have the idea that I do not want you to have any comforts. You are mistaken in this. I am certainly very glad to have you have all the comforts that it is possible for you to have.”

  Then, everything changed. A guard handed him a telegram. Ella had died suddenly in Stamford.

  “Peritonitis” was the official cause, but the physician who signed the death certificate was also a family friend, and years later Clarence would be told that his mother’s ever-growing reliance on patent medicines laced with alcohol had been at least partly responsible for her death. In the end, he would retain only a single vivid memory of her: sitting next to his mother on the stairs of the Stamford house during a thunderstorm and wondering if the crashing sounds outside would ever stop.

  Prison rules forbade Warden Brush from allowing Ferd out to attend the funeral. His sister, still in mourning for her own son, came to see him and took with her to Stamford a rose from the Sing Sing greenhouse with instructions to place it in Ella’s hand before her burial. Clarence remembered his nurse handing him pieces of candy to keep him quiet during the funeral. Ella was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, next to her parents and the infant she and Ferd had lost.

  Ferd made the most of Ella’s death. He saw to it that the newspapers were notified that he had cruelly been kept from his wife’s graveside, and he carefully kept all the letters of sympathy he received from strangers, responding especially warmly to those whose writers seemed most likely to have access to cash. But for him, the real tragedy was that he now had no im
mediate prospect of any money of his own. Back in June 1887, Ferdinand’s late father and mother had signed more or less identical wills, dividing their modest estates into three parts. Sarah and Will each received a third. The remaining third was to be invested and the “interest, dividends and income” paid to Ferdinand by his siblings “from time to time” for his “comfort, maintenance and support” and for no other purpose. Will and their cousin Levi F. Ward were the executors.

  No ready cash there.

  Now, Ella’s will, drawn up with James McKeen’s help and quietly signed by her in the spring of 1889, proved still more disappointing. Her estate—amounting to some $30,000 ($730,000 today)—was to be devoted entirely to “the use, support, education and maintenance” of Clarence until he became twenty-five, when “the principal, together with any income remaining unapplied shall be conveyed, set over and paid to him.”§

  Ferd—who had been banking on inheriting everything himself and was now entitled to nothing—vowed to fight. He would argue always that his wife’s estate had come from him. It had not.

  In 1881, he had talked his mother-in-law into selling Ella several Chicago house lots for the nominal consideration of $20,000 ($433,000 today). Ferd had then supposedly invested all of that cash in Tonawanda Valley and Cuba Railroad bonds on Mrs. Green’s behalf; over the next four years, he had given her periodic reports showing how splendidly they were doing. When Grant & Ward collapsed, a Brooklyn lawyer named Hiland G. Batcheller, who had lost heavily with the firm, went to court in Chicago and had Ella’s real estate holdings attached. He argued that they had really belonged to Ferd all along, and that he had actually paid his mother-in-law on his wife’s behalf in order to shield him from creditors like himself. Batcheller might have had a case had Ferd ever actually purchased the bonds. But it turned out that he had never done so—and had been insolvent at the time of the supposed purchase, in any case. James McKeen successfully had the attachment lifted and the property reassigned to Mrs. Green. The lots were afterward sold for some $60,000, and the bulk of Ella’s estate was her third of the proceeds from this sale.23

  Questions about the disposition of Ella’s property and what to do about her six-year-old son did not bring out the best in either the Green or the Ward families. Ferd had done too much damage to them all. Ella’s younger brother, Sidney, fled to the South rather than get involved. Her older sister, Mary, seemed concerned only that her imprisoned brother-in-law get nothing that was not his: “I can’t endure to think of Mama’s property going to Ferdinand Ward who was actually the cause of her death,” she wrote.24

  Ella had named Will and Levi Ward as her executors, rather than her own siblings. She knew that Ferd would object to the terms she had set and told McKeen that members of her own family had suffered so grievously in their dealings with her husband that it seemed only fair that his relatives should bear the responsibility of countering his demands. But Levi Ward immediately relinquished his rights as executor. As a banker and insurance executive with a reputation to uphold in Rochester, he did not wish to bring further embarrassment to his family by mixing in Ferd’s affairs. Will Ward hurried home from Europe but then did the same; he had had enough of his brother’s dealings. Nor was he willing to take Clarence back to Europe with him; his excuse was that Kate was ill (in fact, she was simply pregnant with their fourth and last child).25

  Despite the recent loss of her eldest son, Sarah Ward Brinton wanted to care for Clarence, but Dr. Brinton would not hear of it. If the boy came to live in his house it would inevitably mean renewed contact with Ferd, and he wanted nothing more to do with the brother-in-law who had bankrupted his old commander and brought scandal to his family. “It has been a great grief to me that I could not take him,” Sarah told Ferd. “Had I been able to have my own way, there would have been no question as to who was to have Clarence. I want the boy and I know Ella would have preferred me to have him, and … the responsibility I would not have minded. But I am helpless to do what I would in the matter. John is the head and in all questions of our home life I have yielded to him.… I want you to understand this and never think I refused to help you in your need.”26

  Instead, it was decided that at least for the immediate future Fred Green and his wife, Ellen Chaffee Green, known as “Nellie,” would take Clarence to live with them and their two little girls on their chicken farm in Thompson, Connecticut. A weekly stipend from the Franklin Trust would pay for his upkeep. “I am sure [Fred] will do well by Clarence,” Sarah assured Ferd. “[He] impressed me as being a very kind and gentle man. He loves Clarence but of course he is not going to keep him unless you wish it.”27

  Ferd was not reassured. The flurry of letters he wrote denouncing everyone involved have been lost, but the surviving replies from those he wounded hint at how he was thinking. When he denounced Will for abandoning him, Kate Ward assured him that while “at first, of course, [her husband’s decision to relinquish his executorship] looked hard, I am sure it must be for the best. They all think so and at any rate whatever has been done has been done with the best intentions and judgment possible. How I wish there was more we could do to comfort you.”28 Sarah, too, told him he was being unjust to Will. “He does feel very much for you … dear Ferd, never again let a reproachful thought come into your heart toward this, the best and truest of brothers.”29

  As always, it was money that mattered most to Ferd. As Ella’s widower, he demanded the right to administer her trust, even though state law expressly forbade prisoners from playing that role. “I appreciate the trying helplessness of your position,” wrote James McKeen, Ella’s friend and attorney, “and [would] certainly not willingly be a party to any scheme which took wrongful advantage to thwart your just desires. Not the least claim of your wife to the esteem of all who have had occasion to know her during these trying years was her adherence to you and the promotion of your welfare in good and ill repute.”30

  Nothing could calm Ferd down. He offered objection after objection to having the Greens care for his son, tried to block weekly payments to them, threatened to join his own creditors in a suit against Clarence and Ella’s estate rather than see any of it fall into Fred Green’s hands. And he repeatedly accused McKeen of poisoning the minds of members of his own family against him. “Your brother and cousin [gave] reasons for not accepting the trust which are such that it would be ungracious for me to press them further,” McKeen replied. “You again write as if I had used some influence or advice to ‘persuade’ your ‘brother not to act.’ You must know that I did all in my power to persuade him or your cousin to act.… [Mrs. Ward’s] sufferings have won from your creditors a kindly feeling towards her and I do not think they would applaud your appearance as their champion and against your boy.”31

  Ferd did not get around to writing to his boy until July 13, nearly three months after Ella’s death. Though his letter is painstakingly written in block capitals—in the apparent hope that Clarence himself might read it—it includes not a word about how his son might be feeling at the loss of his mother. It is, as always, all about Ferd.

  MY DEAR SON:

  THIS LETTER IS FROM YOUR FATHER WHOM YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN TO KNOW, BUT WHO THINKS OF YOU ALL THE TIME AND WHO LOVES YOU DEARLY. YOU MAY NEVER SEE ME CLARENCE, BUT WHEN YOU GROW UP YOU WILL LEARN OF ME, AND I WANT YOU TO TRY AND LOVE ME, FOR YOU ARE ALL I HAVE ON EARTH TO LOVE NOW. YOUR DEAR MOTHER LOVED ME TO THE END IN SPITE OF ALL THE CRUEL WRONGS DONE TO ME FOR SHE KNEW ME TO BE TRUE TO HER, AND WHEN SHE DIED I LOST THE LAST AND ONLY FRIEND I HAD, BUT MY BOY WHEN OTHERS SPEAK TO YOU OF ME, TRY TO BELIEVE THAT I LOVE YOU AND WOULD COME TO YOU IF I COULD.

  I MAY SOMEDAY COME AND SEE YOU, AND WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY IN SPITE OF MY ENEMIES, BUT IF I DIE, CLARENCE, YOU MUST TRY AND LIVE A GOOD LIFE. YOU MUST TRUST NO ONE, FOR PEOPLE WILL PRETEND TO BE YOUR FRIENDS TILL YOU GET INTO TROUBLE, AND THEN THEY WILL BELIEVE ANYTHING OF YOU.

  GOODBYE MY DEAR BOY. GOD BLESS YOU AND MAKE YOU AS TRUE A MAN AS YOUR DEAR MOTHER WAS A WOMAN.


  YOUR LOVING FATHER

  FERDINAND WARD

  WON’T YOU PLEASE

  WRITE TO ME?32

  Fred Green was a reticent man who mostly kept his anger at the damage Ferd had done to his family to himself; Clarence would be almost fully grown before his uncle told him what he really thought of the boy’s father. But he could not bring himself to answer Ferd’s letters. That duty would always fall to his patient wife, Nellie.

  Dear Mr. Ward,

  Clarence was very happy to receive your letter a few days ago and wishes me to send his love and to say that he will be very glad to see you when you come home. I hope you do not think Fred and I are not friends of yours. We will always be glad to do whatever we can for you. What you may have done or may not have done we do not know, but we do know that we are not perfect enough ourselves to condemn another too hastily. And Clarence will never be taught by us anything but love and respect for you. He is very well and happy and good and we grow [more] fond of him every day.…

  There is to be a private school started in Thompson this fall which [their older daughter] Helen and Clarence will attend.

  We had a little kitten which died not long since. Clarence made a coffin from bits of boards which he covered with glass and trimmed beautifully with myrtle and daisies. We were all called out in turn to admire it. Then Florence [their younger daughter] and Clarence put it in a little express cart and asked our minister if he would preach at the funeral. They were so earnest about it and so sure that they were doing just the right thing that our minister did not even smile but excused himself because he had a previous engagement. So back they came and Clarence preached and they both sang and had a lovely time. But when the time came for the burial they both decided that the coffin was far too pretty to be covered up, so they dumped the kitty into the ground and saved the coffin for future service.… And so they play, as busy as can be all day long.33