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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  It would not be that easy. Nothing was working out for Ferd. It was not surprising that his time in Stamford yielded no one willing to provide him with a stake. “The Connecticut Valley in the vicinity of Stamford is full of his victims,” an investigator who had helped work up the case that put him behind bars recalled. “Whenever he heard of anyone with a little money he would cultivate that person until he got the money.”21 Stamford citizens were not inclined to let him rob them a second time.

  Ferd kept writing to Thompson. His letters to Clarence were saccharine and filled with self-pity.

  My own dear boy,

  MYour papa sends you love, all the love of his heart, and a sweet goodbye kiss. We will never see each other again, my dear son, but when you grow up you will know the reason why through a friend of papa’s. Try and think kindly of me, my dear son, and remember that while we lived your mama and papa loved you more than anything in the world. May god bless you and keep you happy.

  Your heart-broken papa,

  F. Ward

  (a sweet kiss)22

  To Nellie Green, his tone was very different. As always when caught doing wrong, he blamed it all on others. His brother and sister had looted his parents’ home in Geneseo, he said, leaving him nothing but battered furnishings as his share of their inheritance. (In fact, Sarah had not been in Geneseo since her father’s funeral three years earlier; Will had been there for just half a day; nothing was missing.) If the Greens had not wanted him to do wrong while he was in Thompson, he continued, they should not have put temptations in his path.

  As to my behavior since I left Sing Sing I don’t care if the whole world knows it. I noticed you did not hesitate to encourage my getting cookies, flowers & c. & horses, too. As to my being trusted by anyone on your account, that is utterly false.…

  You say you “Know what I did & what I intended doing,” as to the former I do not care, but as to your knowledge of what I intended doing, you talk foolishly. In your letter you refer to a widow. I suppose you mean Mrs. Tallman. As to my relations with that family, I guess they will say nothing. Perhaps were I to show you some letters you would better know the truth but I am not one to attack unless I am attacked, but if I am attacked you may rest assured I won’t come out the worst.…

  You say I may go back to prison. Do you know that if I looked out the window now and saw a sheriff coming for me I would hail him gladly? What do I care for life or liberty? I am robbed of my father’s estate. I have applied to over 50 people for work. I have answered over 30 advertisements to get work. I have written to Will my exact position but get no answer. I even asked you to keep me till I could get help but this you refused. I am sitting here today, living on the charity of an Irishman, with not a stitch of winter clothes to my name. Old and hungry. [He was forty-one.] I have been for work to everyone I know and many I do not. You talk about getting work, why your own husband can’t earn enough to support his family but has to take my money to do it. You live in comfort. Why? Because you get $600 a year more than you spend from the trust company on Clarence. But your day of sorrow will come.

  I can’t live on nothing, so must borrow money till I get work. If my boy had been given to me, as Ella wished, then I would never have had trouble, but now I will go back to prison and on the shoulders of those who have borne me down shall rest the blame. Life is nothing to me without that boy. I have no home, no money, am cold for want of clothes, can get no work. My own brother keeps me from even the small income left me by my dear mother. What care I for life? If this is your Christian spirit, then I want none of it. Sooner a life and death in prison, than to be free and robbed of my own. That boy some day will right these wrongs. I have written a full history of everything since I left prison and it will be published just as soon as I am arrested or if I die it will come out and when Clarence grows older he will know it all and you may rest assured he will revenge it.

  Here, where dear Ella died, I hope to die, but if I am again put in prison and die there, I have no fear but that a just God will reward me for this cruelly unjust suffering.… When I die from starvation and hunger, then will begin your suffering, if you have a heart beyond greed to get my money for your own use.

  Were it not for my love for my boy, you know that I could have every dollar of his money to myself except what came from the [Greens’] Monroe Place house.… I’ll die willingly for his sake but God will punish you for it all.

  As I told you before if I am left alone. I’ll have that boy if I have to take him.23

  The Greens were alarmed by Ferd’s threats. They sent copies of his letters to Sarah Ward Brinton and asked her how seriously she thought they should take them. She responded with the care and consideration that characterized her throughout her life.

  Let me talk to you a bit about my brother. I understand the whole position and am no stranger to the kind of letters which you received from him. Your duty and obligations begin and end with Clarence. I believe you have done your very best to make the boy happy, honest and true. I feel glad whenever I think of him that he has found so good a home and where he is watched so carefully and loved so tenderly.… You are not only doing what is right in keeping Clarence, but you are doing kindly to the child.

  Ask yourself what could his father do for and with him. What a miserable existence the boy would have without care. I beg you not to allow yourself to be worried or distressed by communications from his father. When a letter comes from him, let Mr. Green, if he pleases, glance over it and then throw it into the fire and do not give it another thought or attempt to reply.

  When my brother … puts himself industriously to work in some place far from his former life and makes a home where he can provide for his boy it will be time enough to think of giving him up—not before. I see that this thing is worrying you and I want you to put it out of your thoughts and become stoical. If you worry, it will distress your husband and you both have had trouble enough.24

  Will was less willing to take sides. “If F. has any legal claims on the boy and his income it is natural that he should advance them,” he wrote. “As to his claims I have no knowledge whatever but it seems to me that Mr. McKeen, who had so much to do with the matter could tell you at once what claims F. has. As to having any influence over F., I never had any and have not now. Nor was I aware till your letter that any such an attempt was to be made. If I were you I should not worry but would endeavor to obtain some legal opinion on the subject.”25

  Ferd’s threats to the Greens fell off for a time, though Clarence received a brief doleful note from his father every month: “Papa is so lonely without you, but God will give you to me some day I know.”26 “Try and study hard and grow up a smart boy then you can help papa in his work some day.”27 “Cruel people keep you away from me.”28

  His name cropped up in the newspapers now and again. One reporter spotted him in the gallery at the Produce Exchange where he had gotten his start; another heard he planned to get back into the mining business. In February, the New York County district attorney dropped all six of the remaining indictments against him. He found a job, clerking in the office of E. Scott & Company, a religious publisher located on West Twenty-third Street. Will paid for his room and board in Brooklyn, sending checks directly to the landlord so that Ferd would have no access to cash.

  Then, in April, the stock market collapsed, setting off a depression that would last for nearly five years. Within six months 156 railroads would go bankrupt. Four hundred banks collapsed. So did eight thousand businesses. By August, all of Will Ward’s investments had gone bad. His savings were wiped out. The Wards were forced to sell their ranch and big Denver home.

  At first, Ferd was delighted. “Your Uncle Will has failed in business,” he told Clarence, “and all those who treat us cruelly will suffer in [the] same way, I know.”29 It was a sign that God was on his side. But his exultation was quickly tempered when he realized that Will would no longer be paying his living expenses, that he would now have to survive on hi
s salary alone. “May you … never know what it is to suffer for food for I know it now,” he told Clarence in October. “Would that I might take you in my arms and kiss you and then go to Mama, for I am tired of life.”30

  That same month, he told the press he was finishing a book that would vindicate him. He had begun The Founding, Life, and Financial Death of the House of Grant & Ward, he claimed, only because of his son: “The oft-repeated argument that ‘it is all over now and the least said the better’ would be true and would be observed did not the welfare of one in whom I have a greater interest than in anything else, even life itself, demand the clearing up of everything possible in connection with the unfortunate past of the old banking house.” Most of the case he made was all too familiar: his real crime had been his failure, not his methods; those who had profited most from his transactions had gotten away scot-free; had New York Chamberlain Nelson Tappan not fallen ill, city funds would never have been withdrawn from the Marine Bank, whose directors had been fully aware of everything that had gone on and then lied about it under oath.

  In hopes of landing a publisher’s advance, he did add one sensational new charge: “That General Grant supposed he was speculating in government contracts I most emphatically assert. I can, and if necessary, will produce and publish correspondence over autographs that will give undisputed proof of my correctness.”31 But he actually had no proof of Grant’s complicity other than the already-published letter that he—with or without James Fish’s connivance—had talked the general into signing without reading. No publisher was interested. Ferd was falling behind in his rent. Bills were piling up. He needed to do something.

  * The house and farm cost $4,000 and were purchased in Ellen Chaffee Green’s name. No one knows whether she bought them with a small legacy of her own because his funds were entirely wiped out by the failure or because he wanted her to hold title in order to thwart Grant & Ward’s creditors, who might have laid claim to property owned by him. Dr. Karl P. Stofko to the author, October 22, 2010.

  † His earlier attorneys no longer represented him: General Benjamin F. Tracy was now secretary of war; Bourke Cockran had long since concluded that his former client was “unbalanced.”

  ‡ There are several variations of this story, evidently once a favorite in Geneseo; this one was told to the author by the hostess’s niece, Mrs. Esther Page Campbell, August 23, 1971. Another version had the hostess say, “Shall we go into the dining room? Let’s all go together in lock-step.” (Mrs. Irene Beale to the author, May 15, 1981.) Still another version appears in Carl Carmer’s Dark Trees to the Wind, p. 354.

  § James W. “Pop” Graff was a longtime reporter for the City News Association who had befriended Ferd after his arrest, offered him advice on how to deal with the press while in Sing Sing, and stuck with him for a time after his release.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Kidnapping

  In January 1894, Fred Green got another alarming letter from his brother-in-law: if he did not surrender Clarence within one week, Ferd would come to Thompson and take his boy away. No one should try to stop him.

  James McKeen advised the Greens not to respond to this new threat, but instead to consult Charles E. Searls, a local attorney who happened to live right across the street from them, with an eye toward applying to the Thompson probate court to have Fred Green formally named as Clarence’s guardian. Fred was reluctant; a court battle would be costly and prolonged and by no means certain of success. McKeen agreed that the “application might better and more forcibly come from someone in the father’s family. I should suppose William Ward would make it though [the Wards] have all shown rather a disposition to shirk responsibility in these affairs, for which one can hardly blame them.”1 Will, living in far-off Denver, with four children of his own to support and most of his fortune gone, declined to do battle with his younger brother.

  The deadline passed. Ferd did not turn up in Thompson. Then, on March 18, the Greens got startling news from a Geneseo attorney, Lockwood R. Doty: his client, Clarence’s father, was about to remarry and move back to Geneseo to provide his son with a real home of his own, he said; it was therefore now time to give the boy up.

  Then began a skirmish between attorneys, Ferd’s lawyer threatening court action unless the boy was surrendered to his father, and the Greens’ attorneys warning Ferd not to try it. Before the Greens could even consider turning Clarence over to his father, Charles Searls wrote, both they and the Franklin Trust needed to know how Ferd was financially fixed and whom he was going to marry. Under Connecticut law, he added, a child’s relatives or the selectmen of the town where the child lived could ask the court to appoint a guardian when the natural parent was deemed an “unfit person.”

  We sincerely hope that circumstances may not arise which will remedy it necessary for the courts to pass upon the question of Mr. Ward’s fitness, moral or in other respects, to assume the custody of this child and the oversight of his intellectual and moral training. We trust that no such investigation of Mr. Ward’s past or present, as must be involved in any such hearing, may become necessary, for the sake of the father as well as the son.2

  Four days later, the newspapers answered at least one of the Greens’ questions.

  WILL MARRY MISS STORER

  FERDINAND WARD TO BE MARRIED TODAY IN HIS BOYHOOD HOME TO A RESIDENT OF BROOKLYN

  GENESEO, N.Y. MARCH 20, 1894—Ferdinand Ward reached this village two weeks ago and put up at the Big Tree Inn. Geneseo was Mr. Ward’s boyhood home, and he has frequently made visits here of two or three day’s duration. A little more importance was attached to this visit, however, from the fact that it was longer than usual.

  A young woman stopped at the Big Tree Inn about a week ago and registered as Miss Belle Storer of Brooklyn, N.Y., and immediately afterward Mr. Ward changed his residence to the home of Dr. J. A. West.

  Miss Storer and Ward were frequently seen in the streets together, and it was rumored that they were about to be married. I learned that the rumor is true and that they will be married at the home of Dr. West tomorrow.3

  More details appeared the following day.

  Only the most intimate friends of the parties were present, among them being John Storer of New York City, the uncle of the bride, with whom she lived and with whom Mr. Ward boarded when in the city. The groom has been here about two weeks and the bride about ten days. The bride is a comely brunette of majestic appearance and looks like one who cared nothing for what the world might say about her husband and the vicissitudes of life through which he had passed.

  In an interview, Mr. Ward said he had formulated no plans for the future further than to go to New York to conclude some business, then to return to Geneseo, occupy the old homestead and bring his … son here to live and educate him.

  The bride is not reputed be wealthy, but is said to have good prospects.4

  A few days later, Lockwood Doty responded to Charles Searls on Ferd’s behalf. Since Clarence’s legal residence was really with his father in New York State, Connecticut law was irrelevant, he argued, and the issue of his alleged fitness or unfitness therefore out of bounds. His financial condition was no one’s business but his own, either; the Franklin Trust had no legitimate say as to whom it made its payments on Clarence’s behalf.

  “Mr. Ward was married Thursday of last week and is preparing to occupy his old home with his wife and boy,” Doty continued.

  The lady whom he married appears to be in every way estimable.… Geneseo has one of the best Normal schools in the State, the climate is unsurpassed, and the surroundings altogether are of a character to make it most desirable for the health and proper development of Clarence, and I am satisfied that every attention will be paid to his welfare.…

  There is but little left to Mr. Ward save his family to yield any satisfaction in his life, and I think it would be extremely ungracious on the part of Mr. Green to thwart him in so natural and humane a purpose as securing possession of his boy. I have advised the co
urse which has been taken to the end that Mr. Ward may be absolved from any imputation of hasty or improvident action, although most men in a similar situation would be tempted to act impetuously.5

  Searls conferred with McKeen, then wrote a long, careful response on behalf of them both. The Connecticut courts were sure to assert jurisdiction; Clarence and his late mother had been residents of that state ever since Ferd had been sent to Sing Sing. Then he issued a blunt warning in the most courtly possible terms.

  We beg to emphasize … that we have not the least doubt of your good faith and the honest belief entertained by you concerning these matters, but the writer is confident that there are facts in the case unknown to you. His residence being in Thompson, he saw something of Mr. Ward during his stay there, and while entertaining personally none but the most kindly feelings towards him, does not believe that the happiness or welfare of Clarence will be enhanced by a change at present in his surroundings. It is not necessary at this time, as bearing on the question of “fitness,” to refer to any details of Mr. Ward’s life in Thompson or to certain correspondence [with the Tallmans] which has passed under the writer’s observation as indicative of one of its phases; with regard to which correspondence, its cause and consequences, Mr. Ward has doubtless advised you. [If he had not done so, Searls knew, he would have to do it now.]