A Disposition to Be Rich: Ferdinand Ward, the Greatest Swindler of the Gilded Age
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Ward, Ferdinand. “General Grant as I Knew Him.” New York Herald, December 19, 1909.
———. “General Grant an Easy Prey for the Wolves of Finance.” New York Herald, December 26, 1909.
———. “Marine Bank Cause of Crash.” New York Herald, January 2, 1910.
———. “Grant Was the Only One to Give Aid.” New York Herald, January 9, 1910.
———. “General Grant’s Dinner to President Diaz.” New York Herald, January 16, 1910.
Ward, Geoffrey C. “Two Missionaries’ Ordeal by Faith in a Distant Clime.” Smithsonian (August 1990).
Ward, W. S. (William Shaw). “The Koh-i-noor Diamond.” Appleton’s Journal, July 20, 1872.
———. “The New York Aquarium.” Appleton’s Journal, June 24, 1874.
———. “The Brighton Aquarium.” Appleton’s Journal, January 3, 1874.
———. “The Council-House of Canaeadea.” Appleton’s Journal, February 27, 1875.
———. “The New York Aquarium.” Scribner’s Monthly, 13, no. 5 (March 1877).
———. “How We Ran the Vicksburg Batteries.” Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries 14 (July-December 1885), pp. 600–5.
Wheatly, Richard. “The New York Produce Exchange.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 73 (July 1886), pp. 189–218.
Woodward, C. Vann. “The Lowest Ebb.” American Heritage 8, no. 3 (April 1957).
UNPUBLISHED MATERIALS
Audenreid, Sarah Brinton Wentz. A Day at Fourteen-Twenty-Three (March 17th, 1888). Jasper Yeates Brinton Collection.
Heim, Melisa Lewis. Making a Life in India: American Missionary Households in Nineteenth-Century Madurai. PhD dissertation. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1994.
Howard, Dorothy C. Copies of Material on Missionaries to India in the 1830’s—Especially Those Who Sailed Together from Boston to Madras in 1836 on the ‘Saracen.’ Letters from Edward and Emily Cope, 1838–1840.
Raitt, James D. The Champion House. 1975.
Stewart, Elizabeth Hoisington. Nancy Lyman, 1804–1878, Portrait of a Missionary. 1985.
Stofko, Karl P. Ella Champion Green and Her Beloved Champion House Hotel, or East Haddam and the Wall Street Panic of 1884. 2007.
Wagner, Frederick B. Jr. John Hill Brinton, M.D., Reconsidered.
Ward, Andrew, ed. So to Speak: Conversations with Frederick Champion Ward and Duira Baldinger Ward. 1990.
Ward, Ferdinand De Wilton. Diary—No. 1, Extending from January 9th, 1831 to September 20th, 1831.
———. Auto-Biography.
———. Auto-Biography No. 2.
———. Narrative Etc.
PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS
INSERT PAGE
1
Ferdinand Ward portrait, 1836: Brinton Collection; photographed by Julian Nieman
2–3
Jane Shaw: Brinton Collection; photographed by Julian Nieman
Indian street scenes: Brinton Collection; photographed by Julian Nieman
4–5
Paintings of India: Brinton Collection; photographed by Julian Nieman
6–7
Ferdinand Ward photograph, 1855: Brinton Collection; photographed by Julian Nieman Church: County Historical Society
Temple Hill Academy: Livingston County Historical Society
14–15
James Dean Fish: Courtesy of Amy Halsted
Alice Reber Fish: Courtesy of Amy Halsted
Sallie Reber: Museum of the City of New York
16–17
John Brinton portrait by Eakins: The National Museum of Health and Medicine of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, D.C.
Sarah Ward Brinton portrait: Private Collection
Emma Jane Ward unfinished portrait: Private Collection
21
Grant’s funeral, New York City: The Clarence Davies Collection, Museum of the City of New York
28–29
Clarence Ward: Andrew Ward Collection
Panorama photo of house and grounds: Thompson Historical Society
30–31
Livingston County Historical Society fundraiser: Livingston County Historical Society
32
Clarence Ward with children: Andrew Ward Collection
All other illustrations, including the frontispiece, are from the author’s collection.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Geoffrey C. Ward, former editor of American Heritage and writer of documentary films, is the author of fifteen books, including The Civil War (with Ken Burns and Ric Burns) and A First Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, which won the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography and the 1990 Francis Parkman Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in New York City.
Ferdinand De Wilton Ward, newly ordained as a Presbyterian minister and about to sail for India as a missionary, sat for this portrait by an unknown painter in 1836 so that his family would remember what he looked like if he were to die overseas. (illustration credit 1)
Portrait of Jane Shaw (above), painted just before her marriage to Ferdinand Ward, and (below) paintings of three Indian street scenes—an entertainer, a Hindu mendicant, and an ox-drawn cart—commissioned by her husband for his parents back home in Rochester, New York. The scrawled captions are in his own overconfident hand. (illustration credit 2)
(illustration credit 3)
(illustration credit 4)
The Wards would return from India in disgrace in 1847, but these reminders of the lives they had led there hung in the parlor of their Geneseo, New York, parsonage to the end of their days: the one at the top depicts an overnight encampment on their journey from Madras to Madurai; the other, painted by Ferdinand himself, depicts the Madurai mission where the Wards occupied East House, the structure at the left. (illustration credit 5)
(illustration credit 6)
On his way to Europe for a vacation in the spring of 1855, Ferdinand (at top) stopped at a New York studio to have his likeness captured by the brand-new ambrotype process. The elegant gloves, German binoculars, and ivory-handled umbrella were gifts from wealthy parishioners. Three years later, he would shock his benefactors by splitting their church (middle) and seizing control of Temple Hill Academy (below) in the interest of Old School Presbyterian orthodoxy. (illustration credit 7)
This engraving (above) from the early 1880s, made from a photograph long since lost, is the earliest known image of Ferd Ward. His marriage to Ella Green (middle, photographed by Napoleon Sarony) gave him entrée to the rarified world of Brooklyn Heights; her family home, 37 Monroe Place, is the house with the brick façade at the right of the photograph above.
The elaborately furnished dining room and formal parlor of the Green residence, where Ferd wooed and won his wife—and then talked his widowed mother-in-law into letting him manage the family fortune
Ferd’s elder brother, William Shaw Ward, and his fiancée, Emma Jane Ward, in Leadville, Colorado, 1879. Will Ward’s success in the silver-mining business—and the wealthy friends it won him—would help make Ferd’s swindles possible.
Souvenirs of Ferd’s brief heyday: (above) a stereo view of a weekend visit to an investor’s country home (the Wards are the couple at the right); the art-filled Ward parlor at 81 Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights (bottom) (the samurai sword and elaborate fire screen were gifts from Ulysses S. Grant); and an elaborate hand-painted menu for a dinner at which Ferd was seated among some of the richest and most powerful men in America. It occupied pride of place on the wall of his Sing Sing cell.
James Dean Fish, Ferd’s mentor, partner, and enabler: a seasoned banker with a reputation for cautious conservatism, he conducted a secret liaison with Sallie Reber (bottom), a Gilbert and Sullivan star who bore him a daughter, Alice Reber Fish (above) and then died, just as his trial got under way in Federal Court. (illustration credit 14)
(illustration credit 15)
(illustration credit 16)
In 1878, Dr. John H
. Brinton commissioned his friend Thomas Eakins to paint portraits of himself (top) and his wife, Ferd’s older sister, Sarah Ward Brinton (middle). Six years later, in the spring of 1884, Ferd’s sister-in-law, Emma Jane Ward, began sitting for Eakins, too. Then, Grant & Ward collapsed, her brother-in-law was arrested, and she was never able to return to the artist’s studio. The painting remains unfinished. (illustration credit 17)
Angry depositors and anxious onlookers crowd Wall Street as rumors spread that the Marine National Bank and the firm of Grant & Ward have simultaneously crashed, May 6, 1884.
The collapse of his firm ruined Ulysses S. Grant; throat cancer would kill him. Every detail of his illness, including visits by his doctors (above), was reported in the press. Just weeks before the general died on July 23, 1885, he and his family appeared on the porch of their borrowed cottage at Mount McGregor, New York (below). Ferd’s gullible partner, Ulysses Grant, Jr.—known as “Buck”—sits at the left, just below his mother, Julia Dent Grant. His sister, Nellie Grant-Sartoris, wears the light dress; his brothers Fred and Jesse are to the general’s right.
The New York crowds that lined Broadway to watch Grant’s funeral on August 8, 1885 (below) dwarfed those that grieved for Abraham Lincoln twenty years earlier. Ferd was somewhere in the throng, having bribed his guards at the Ludlow Street Jail so that he could watch his partner’s coffin pass by. His trial for grand larceny began some six weeks later. In this courtroom scene from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (above), Ferd’s flamboyant attorney, W. Bourke Cockran, questions a prospective juror while Will Ward whispers into his brother’s ear.
(illustration credit 21)
The public clamored to see Ferd punished: the comic artist Frederick Opper published the cartoon (at top) while Ward was still on trial. After his conviction, Leslie’s staff artists followed him to Sing Sing, where one picked him out of a line of convicts depositing their spoons after dinner (middle), and another caught him trying to cross the prison courtyard without being recognized (bottom).
Ferd’s crimes and imprisonment bewildered his parents, shown here in their later years. Rev. Ward wears his Civil War chaplain’s uniform on the day he was called upon to preside over a memorial service for U. S. Grant, the commander his son had ruined. The horse and carriage (below) was a gift from Ferd that his creditors allowed them to keep; Will, home on a brief visit, holds the reins.
Ella Ward, shamed by her husband’s crimes and harassed by his relentless demands for money, aged rapidly while he was in prison. When this photograph (bottom) was made shortly before her death in 1890, she was not yet thirty-eight. Her son, Clarence (above), was just five then, and had no memory of his father.
Clarence Ward at eleven (below) and the handsome Federal-style home in Thompson, Connecticut, where he lived with his uncle and aunt, Fred and Nellie Green. After his father tried to kidnap him, he had orders to run to the barn at the left and hide whenever a strange carriage came up the street. (illustration credit 28)
(illustration credit 29)
Despite Ferd’s crimes, the townspeople of Geneseo continued to treat him as one of their own. In 1895, he took part in a minstrel show meant to raise funds for the Livingston County Historical Society—he’s the small man with the large adam’s-apple seated third from the right in the second row. A decade later, he would be forced to flee his hometown after he was caught stealing money from seventeen citizens, including several of his fellow minstrels. (illustration credit 30–31)
Ferd Ward in 1911 (above), about the time he finally ran out of schemes for seizing his son’s assets, and his son, Clarence (below), reveling in his own children, Frederick Champion Ward and Helen Ward, on the lawn of their home in New Brunswick, New Jersey, that same year. (illustration credit 32)
ALSO BY GEOFFREY C. WARD
Treasures of the Maharajahs
Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt, 1882–1905
A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of FDR
The Civil War: An Illustrated History (with Ric and Ken Burns)
American Originals: The Private Worlds of Some Singular Men and Women
Tiger-Wallahs: Encounters with the Men Who Tried to Save the Greatest of the Great Cats (with Diane Raines Ward)
Baseball: An Illustrated History (with Ken Burns)
Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley
The West: An Illustrated History
The Year of the Tiger (with Michael Nichols)
Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (with Ken Burns)
Jazz: A History of America’s Music (with Ken Burns)
Mark Twain (with Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns)
Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson
The War: An Intimate Portrait of America, 1941–1945 (with Ken Burns)