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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  More letters from Ferd to Nellie Green would follow over the coming months, by turns cloying, vengeful, self-pitying, and riddled with self-serving lies. He accused everyone else of neglecting Ella’s grave: “There are large granite works here in this prison and I am going to have a plain but handsome cross made.… Would that I were buried beside her.”34 (He never ordered up a cross; her grave at Green-Wood remains undifferentiated to this day.) He begged Nellie to send him $50 in an unmarked envelope, in care of a certain prison clerk, assuring her that “this is allowed here.”35 (It was not allowed, of course, as his own postscript made clear: “If you can’t send the money, then simply write me a letter saying you can’t do as I ask, nothing more.”)36 He repeated over and over again that Clarence was all that stood between him and suicide, but he couldn’t remember the date of his son’s birth. And he boasted of how loyal he had been to Ella and how glad he was that she had never doubted his single-minded devotion to her. (He may or may not have been faithful; she certainly knew that he had been caught writing to another woman.)

  He made his son dreamy promises: “When I come, Clarence, we will go off and travel and see all the nice things and sail in a ship and ride in the cars and you shall learn to drive horses and we will have dogs and go fishing and swimming together and we will go down by the big ocean and dig up the sand and catch the crabs and hear the band play.”37

  And he offered the Greens child-raising counsel that had little to do with his boy and everything to do with his continual reflections about himself. Clarence was not to be forced to attend church or Sunday school against his will: “Don’t be too strict in religious matters, for to this I lay much of my misfortune.… You must not think of me as an infidel, for I am not.… [But] I have seen so much deceit and lying among professed Christians that I can’t bring myself to unite with them in worship and be of Christian fellowship.”38 He had ideas about his son’s education, too, strangely like those that had turned out so badly for him. He did not want Clarence to “come into intimate association with that class of boys who are so low-born as to influence him the wrong way.… [Therefore] I believe in Boarding School.… The school I have in mind is conducted by a Presbyterian minister and will be a good, homelike place for him.”39 Ferd also wanted his son to have spending money whenever he liked: “Wealth is only worth what good it can do. Let him feel this. He will be a rich man some day.”40 He saw his son, like everything and everyone else, as an extension of himself: “I mean … that some day Clarence shall help me, or I shall help him, to redeem my name in Wall Street.…”41

  Nellie Green urged Ferd not to dwell on his misfortune but instead to concentrate on those who loved him. His brother and sister no longer mattered to him, he answered; they had left him to his enemies. Without money from them, he was sure to lose his “privileges,” and might even be transferred to Clinton Prison, where he knew no one. “Do not speak to me of others, for I have lost all love for those who in my time of sorest need, leave me to my enemies. That is not love—at least not what I call love. All that loved me are in Heaven.”42

  Ferd’s father was evidently not among those whom he believed loved him. But twice a month the old man set aside the time to write his younger son. His letters were stiff and old-fashioned, filled with the same admonitions Ferd had been ignoring all his life: “Do not despair. Do not be hardened.… Look above for help.”43

  Fancy, on pleasantly hopeful wing, bears me onward a few years when I shall see you a free man, having fully paid the debt to justice. You take up some business not financial in Wall Street.… But in a pleasant village.… Dear Clarence near you at school. Yourself fully fixed in all that is good. Identified with Christ and His church as you once were. Having on you the eyes of your glorified wife and Mother, oft visited by your many stalwart friends, rejoicing to see that the clouds are all dispersed and you are happy again. Why not all these things. With God’s help (which He never refuses) they can be, will be. God grant it.44

  In early 1891, Will arranged for his father to travel to Oxford, where Will was a visiting lecturer in geology. Ferdinand wrote long letters home to the Livingston Republican, just as he had done during the Civil War: hometown readers would be happy, he knew, to hear that every Oxford student attended chapel daily and that only “a limited number of theatrical performances are allowed each year, expurgated of all gross and vicious scenes and words.”45

  That summer, the Wards moved to the Villa Clarenzia, an inn overlooking Lake Geneva at Clarens, Switzerland. At first, Ferdinand was still vigorous enough at seventy-nine to bicycle along the country roads. But as the summer wore on, he sometimes got confused: once, when a maid knocked on his door, he was unable to understand why she didn’t enter when he repeatedly told her to do so in Tamil, the language he hadn’t spoken since leaving India forty-five years earlier.

  On August 11, Kate Ward reported to Nellie Green, “he passed away in perfect peace.”

  We have buried his remains for the time being in the little cemetery here, one of the most lovely places you could imagine. Some day we shall remove his remains to Temple Hill to rest by the side of his life-long companion.

  Poor Ferd, it does seem as tho’ fortune is determined to spare him nothing. With his hard life within those granite walls comes death after death of those he loves best till he will face the world when he comes out with half his world gone!46

  If Ferd grieved for his father, there is no record of it.

  In late 1891, as his release day grew near, Ferd finally got some good news. The U.S. district attorney had dropped the two remaining federal indictments against him, on the grounds that he had already been found guilty of his most serious crimes, had served his time, and had not appealed his sentence. Six state charges against him remained, however, and he wrote Bourke Cockran, now a New York congressman, begging him to help have them dismissed them as well.

  If you would now aid me in getting the indictments quashed, it would be a still greater relief for then I could start out anew, unhampered by fear of future trouble.

  To tell you the truth, Sir, I want to marry again. I have secured the affections of one of the sweetest girls living, whose family stands high in the community & one with whose help I feel sure I may regain my good name, but I feel that it would be unjust to her for me to take such a step before I was beyond doubt, a free man.

  I know you will agree with me in this & will help me in my effort to make a home for my boy as well as an honest living for myself.

  No one but my immediate family know of this, & I beg that you will keep it entirely secret for the present, as I wish to avoid any public notoriety for her.47

  It’s hard to know how much truth there was to Ferd’s giddy secret. He had actually told his family nothing about wedding plans and may, in fact, have had none; during his first weeks of freedom he would not act like even a secretly engaged man. But if there really was a “sweetest girl” with whom he had at least discussed marriage, she was most likely Isabelle Storer, the Brooklyn woman with whom he had been caught communicating early in his term.

  In any case, he told the Greens nothing at all about his future plans except that he was determined to have his son: “As to the future [I] will send for Clarence as soon as I go out. Please either see that his wardrobe is sufficient for a long trip or let me know what he needs and I will get it.”48 Fred Green was sufficiently alarmed by what this might mean for the little boy that he sent Ferd’s letter on to James McKeen and asked him how to deal with Ferd if he really did turn up and demand his son. McKeen urged him to hold the line.

  If Clarence’s father should appear on his release, as he will probably do, you will have to be governed by circumstances. I cannot suppose he would seek to take the child away forcibly or otherwise than with the latter’s free volition and after an agreement with the Trust Company as to any new agreement.

  In the imagined case of his seeking to take the child away …, in your place, as his Uncle, and having his care by arrangeme
nt with the Trustee, you should keep the child. The father’s only proper remedy would be a writ of habeas corpus, requiring you to produce the child before a court or judge whose disposition of the matter would be your full protection. I write this, of course, with no anticipation of any trouble of the kind. But [the best] course [is to] not hesitate a moment to take a firm stand in behalf of the child’s protection, having no fear that any parental rights of his father go [to] the length of warranting any despotic conduct.49

  Ferdinand Ward rose early on his last day in prison, Saturday, April 30, 1892. He shuffled in silence to breakfast with his fellow prisoners, just as he had each morning since he’d arrived at Sing Sing. But when the other prisoners were marched off to work, he was escorted to the warden’s office instead.

  Augustus Brush was gone, replaced just a few weeks earlier by William F. Brown, a Democratic boss from Newburgh. At first, Ferd had worried that the new warden might withdraw the privileges he had bought and paid for during the Brush regime, and he’d worked overtime to win Brown’s favor. He turned out reams of calendars and balance sheets and “fancy printing,” which Brown declared “almost marvelous,”50 and he turned on all the charm he had once used to persuade veteran financiers to trust him. He told such compelling stories of Wall Street that the new warden once took him home to dinner to hear more, and he made such a plaintive case against his in-laws that Brown put him in touch with a lawyer friend in Newburgh who specialized in estate and custody cases.

  Brown was completely won over. “Ward, like all the rest who come to us from the educated and cultivated ranks of life, was a good prisoner,” Brown assured the Brooklyn Eagle the morning of Ferd’s release.

  He was always a gentleman … perfectly tractable and obedient … a man that we all liked and thoroughly appreciated. I hope he will find some of his old friends who will gather around him. No one knows what a man of his sensitive nature suffers in six long years of imprisonment. He is not like a common criminal; take for instance the man that [will be] discharged with him this morning, who is a horse thief, and has been in nearly every prison in the country. He cannot stay away from here six weeks to save his life.… I expect him back any time inside of two months. Ward is however made of different stuff.51

  Brown handed back to Ferd everything he had had with him when he entered Sing Sing—his gold watch, the gold matchbox given to him by General Grant, two automatic pencils, his alligator wallet, and $185.77 in cash. With them went the standard $10 given to all freed prisoners, an additional $20.45 he had earned working as the prison printer, a new prison-made suit, and a railroad ticket marked “Convict—Half-Fare.”

  The prison-issue suit was evidently not to Ferd’s liking. When he emerged from the prison gate at eight fifty he was wearing a finely tailored tan outfit and patent-leather shoes from the old days, with a matching topcoat and derby. He carried a folded pair of tan gloves. To the clutch of New York newspapermen waiting in hopes of an interview, he looked pale but jaunty. Jimmy Connaughton and half a dozen jailers walked him to a waiting carriage. After he had swung himself up into the seat, they took turns shaking his hand and wishing him luck.

  For once, he had nothing to say to the press; everything depended on getting possession of the eight-year-old son who did not know him. Instead, as the team started off toward the railroad station, he waved and shouted, “I’m off to see my boy!”52

  * Fish refused ever again to speak to the press. He returned to his old house on Henry Street in Brooklyn, where his sister Prudence and his son-in-law Uriah H. Dudley now lived. He wrote a pamphlet about his early business career in which the Marine Bank was never mentioned, collected books and prints, and stayed away from Wall Street. He died in Brooklyn in 1912 at the age of ninety-three. New York Herald, May 12, 1889.

  † He was so well muscled and athletically skilled that the photographer Eadweard Muybridge had him pose for his camera in the nude, throwing a hammer and heaving a twenty-pound rock, as part of his pioneering study of human and animal locomotion.

  ‡ Mrs. Bradley Martin was a leader of New York society. In London in the autumn of 1889, her alcoholic nineteen-year-old son, Sherman, married Annie Munn, a woman who was eleven years older than he and said to have been a concert-hall entertainer. His father—fresh from a hunting vacation in Scotland during which he and his guests bagged seventy stags and two thousand pheasants—announced that he would have nothing more to do with his son unless he stopped drinking and ended the marriage. The young Martin was persuaded to take a “world tour” with his tutor and without his wife—who refused repeated offers of large sums of money to agree to a divorce and ran advertisements charging her husband’s parents with abduction. Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic delighted in the story. Back in Manhattan in 1894, the young man collapsed after spending several weeks undergoing treatment for alcoholism. He was carried to his family’s home on West Twentieth Street—where he fell dead of what the family physician called “apoplexy of the brain.”

  Charles F. Wadsworth, who had served as his father’s aide during the Civil War, never recovered from it. He spent nearly every evening of his postwar life drinking himself senseless in the bar of the American Hotel in Geneseo. Whatever the weather, a carriage and driver waited outside to take him home at closing time. The New York Times, December 3, 1889, December 23, 1894; Alden Hatch, The Wadsworths of the Genesee, p. 100.

  § Even if Clarence were to die before the age of twenty-five, Ferdinand was to receive only the interest on half of Ella’s estate; the principal was to go to her sister, Mary. Last Will and Testament of Mrs. Ella C. Ward, April 19, 1889, author’s collection.

  SIXTEEN

  Driven to Desperation

  Randolph H. Chandler was a successful lawyer, sometime state legislator, and one of Thompson, Connecticut’s, most prosperous citizens—prosperous enough to travel in Europe, where a stranger once asked him where he came from.

  “Thompson, Connecticut,” he answered.

  Where’s that?

  “Well,” he said, “it’s one mile from Quaddick and a mile and a half from Brandy Hill.”1

  To outsiders, Thompson was just an especially handsome New England village in the northeastern corner of Connecticut: forty-odd houses arranged around a triangular common and along the three dusty elm-shaded tracks that formed it; two churches—Congregational and Baptist; a one-room schoolhouse; an old inn; a general store; a town hall; and a sturdy little Greek Revival bank.

  But for eight-year-old Clarence Ward, brought to Thompson to live two years earlier, in 1890, it had become the world. Its center was the big white Early Republican house behind the Congregational church to which his uncle Fred Green and his aunt Nellie and their two daughters had moved in the summer of 1885.*

  Green was gruff and taciturn, short and stubby with a black beard grown to mask a receding chin. Clarence would remember that he was “a kindly man of mediocre accomplishments.”2 He had loved his late sister, but the collapse of Grant & Ward had wiped out his savings, and he remained embittered by what her husband had done to him and his family. He had been forced to give up his job as manager of the Champion House and now found himself rising at four each morning, trying to make ends meet selling eggs and milk, apples and peaches and vegetables produced on eight nearby acres. “He wasn’t really a farmer,” Clarence recalled. “He tried but he’d had no training for it. He called his enterprise the ‘Thompson Fruit and Poultry Farm,’ but I doubt if he ever earned any money.”3 The monthly stipend for Clarence’s food and clothing formed a sizable portion of the family income.

  Aunt Nellie Green was warmer, abler, better read than her husband, an affectionate and caring surrogate mother for the boy. And Clarence had quickly become accustomed to the regular rhythm of the Green household. Each school day began with oatmeal for breakfast, followed by a half-mile walk to the one-room schoolhouse next door to Rand Chandler’s house in which children in all eight grades learned their lessons from a single teacher, Miss Fan
ny Mills. Clarence was “usually quiet,” his teacher reported, “or at least sufficiently so as to make little or no disturbance.”4 At recess, he and the other children played a single-base variation of baseball called “Old Cat.” After school, he wandered home with his two cousins, Helen, four years older than he, and Florence, one year younger, dawdling along the tops of the old stone walls that ran in and out of the neighbors’ yards, and stopping at the big rock outcropping behind their house that they called the “post office” to see if some schoolmate had left a message for them slipped between the stones. Supper was at six. Bed followed promptly at half past seven.

  Sundays were filled by services at the Congregational church. Fred Green was superintendent of the Sunday school. His wife sang in the choir and taught the girls’ class. Clarence was so impressed by the attention the congregation paid to the minister, Rev. George H. Cummings, that he began delivering his own sermons from the landing in his uncle’s house while his worshipful cousin Florence listened down below.

  By April 1892, Clarence had spent one-quarter of his life in Thompson. His memories of his mother and the lonely life they had led together in Stamford had begun to blur. He had never known his father, had never even been told where he was or why he could not come to see him. That was all about to change.

  As the train slowed, chuffing its way into Putnam—the depot nearest to Thompson—Ferdinand Ward was waiting impatiently between the cars, his blue eyes bright and expectant. It was a beautiful spring day, and things seemed at last to be turning his way. He leaped down onto the platform, a porter puffing along behind with his valise, hurried into the adjacent livery stable, and ordered up the fastest horse and carriage in town to take him to Thompson.