A Disposition to Be Rich: Ferdinand Ward, the Greatest Swindler of the Gilded Age
Page 4
But no member of the Ward family attended, and no part of the Ward fortune was given to them as a wedding gift. Ferdinand’s father was still unable to bear the thought of his youngest son defying him and disappearing overseas. In a letter to Rochester written two days after the wedding, Ferdinand hoped his father would one day learn to love “My dear Jane (now my wife)” and be “willing to address her as Daughter.”44
The American Board booked passage to India aboard the merchant ship Saracen for the Wards and six other couples, all of whom had also recently married in order to qualify for the mission field. Like Ferdinand, William Tracy had attended Princeton Seminary. Clarendon Muzzy had graduated from Andover. Henry Cherry, Edward Cope, and Nathaniel Crane had all attended Auburn, where their fellow passenger Dr. John Steele, who was to act as their physician, had studied medicine. All of them and their wives came from New England or from New England families who had settled in New York and Pennsylvania, all were imbued with the Puritan faith of their forebears, and all expected to reinforce the same new mission among the Tamils at the ancient temple town of Madura,l some 275 miles southeast of Madras.
The evening before they were to board their ship at Boston, a mass farewell meeting was held at the Bowdoin Street Church. Ferdinand, Jane, and the rest of their missionary band were ushered to the front pew. The Gothic interior was kept dim until everyone was seated. Then, a missionary newspaper reported, “precisely at the hour, an additional quantity of gas was suddenly let into the lamps which instantaneously filled the house with a glare of light. At the same moment the organ burst forth into peals which shook the whole edifice, as though the whole congregation were putting forth their acclamation of joy.”45 Several clergymen addressed those about to embark, holding them up as exemplars for all Christians everywhere. “The Lord Jesus has sent you,” Rev. Hubbard Winslow told the missionary band. “He is the head and the apostles are your predecessors.” Like the apostles, these new missionaries might not be “absolutely perfect,” he continued, but they were “eminently holy.”46
Ferdinand had written to his parents that evening, begging them to write to him often in India: “I love you notwithstanding the apparent contradiction of my conduct. Will you pray for me? I have taken a serious step. I need grace, constant grace. We may not meet again on earth. God grant we may above.”47 The next day, November 23, 1836, just moments before the Saracen slipped out of Boston Harbor into the open sea, he scribbled another note:
Dear Father,
Pilot soon leaves. I only say, I am leaving Native-Land, Home—Friends to do good. My motive is, as far as I think, pure.
God bless you all. Love to Mother—dear Mother …
Your son,
Ferdinand48
His mother would write to him from time to time in India over the next few years. His unforgiving father never did.
Ferdinand remembered the four-month voyage to India as “a test of my Christian character.” Each couple aboard the Saracen was assigned one of seven cabins in the first hold. Ferdinand bravely pronounced them “commodious”;49 in fact, each was only six feet wide, with room for no furnishings other than a chair, a table, and two berths, the lowest hung high enough so that trunks and boxes could be slid beneath it. The weather turned bad within a day or two of setting sail, and the Wards and all their fellow missionaries became violently seasick. Loose luggage slammed against the cabin walls. Portholes had to be shut and secured against the waves, cutting off the air. Vomit and seawater sloshed from one side of the heaving cabin floor to the other. The stench was almost unbearable. It took several days before most of the husbands could bring themselves to leave their cabins, and several days more before the wives felt well enough to venture out on deck. One man did not regain his feet for nearly eight weeks, and, according to Ferdinand, none of the women felt fully restored until the voyage ended.
On the whole, the owners of merchant vessels welcomed missionaries: they could be counted on to book passage in groups, for one thing, and they helped fill empty cargo space on outward-bound voyages to distant destinations that did not interest other travelers. Captains forced to spend months with them at sea were generally less enthusiastic: the Massachusetts mariner Nathaniel Ames, for one, thought missionaries “obnoxious cargo” and saw no need ever to choose sides in the ongoing “battle between Calvin and Vishnoo.”50
Captain Joseph P. Thomson, commander of the Saracen, quickly came to share that view. Before the missionaries set sail, Ferdinand recalled, Thomson assured them that during the four-month voyage, “we should have as much preaching & praying as we chose.”51 That turned out to be a great deal. There was a full-scale church service each Sunday morning at which Ferdinand and the other missionaries took turns delivering sermons from the fo’c’sle. But every other morning of the week, the Wards and the other missionaries also held prayer services before breakfast and studied scripture afterward; there was a daily eleven o’clock prayer meeting on deck, then Bible classes after lunch, a lady’s prayer meeting at teatime, and a second on-deck prayer meeting after dinner. Hymns were sung with voices raised in order to be heard over the constant barnyard clamor that emanated from the chickens, ducks, and geese kept in crates on deck, a clamor that rose to a terrified crescendo at the slightest sign of rain.
At first, Captain Thomson found his passengers at least tolerable; he and his wife even attended the Sabbath services on deck for a week or two. But as time went by, he began to find the missionaries’ unremitting piety grating. They insisted on calling one another “Brother” and “Sister,” and seemed always to be trying to impress everyone, including themselves, with the gravity of their endeavor. (“Sprightliness” in private might be justified in some circumstances, Ferdinand told his parents in a letter written aboard the Saracen, but “levity is never admissible in an intelligent—immortal—accountable being.”)52 And the missionaries soon made it clear to Thomson that they saw it as their duty, not only to pray among themselves but also to bring to Christ the Saracen’s entire crew, thirteen hard-drinking, hard-living, tough-talking seamen. To that end, they began to interrupt the sailors’ work at all hours of the day, handing them tracts, offering counsel, and exhorting them to repent. As Ferdinand reported to the Board back in Boston, Thomson finally could stand it no longer.
As we advanced about our course [of converting the crew] his manners changed [and] the strong enmity of [his] natural heart began to manifest itself. He used profane language in our presence & as it was continued we unitedly remonstrated through a committee. But to that remonstrance he gave no heed, continuing a practice which by his own acknowledgment was useless & to us painful on the plea that when he was excited he did not know what he was doing. He kept an uncalled-for watch over us while conversing with the Seamen—often calling them to engage in some employment which was unnecessary & on one occasion, for a cause quite insufficient, prohibited all conversation with the men at any time.53
The missionaries declared a day of fasting and prayer to persuade the captain to change his mind. He did, eventually, but life aboard the ship had been tense from then on, especially during two weeks when the Saracen was becalmed off Ceylon, the sun merciless, the cabins airless and hot, the sea like a polished silver plate stretching away in all directions. When the ship finally dropped anchor off Madras, passengers and captain were equally glad that the voyage had come to an end.
* Modern Chennai.
† The “frozen-water trade” made the Boston entrepreneur Frederic Tudor America’s first postrevolutionary millionaire. Thanks to him and his rivals, New England ice tinkled in glasses from Calcutta to the Caribbean, Sidney to South America. The Saracen was under charter by Tudor’s first partner, Samuel Austin. The quote is from Gavin Weightman, The Frozen-Water Trade: A True Story, p. 200.
‡ Though they saw themselves as pioneers, Americans were actually latecomers to preaching Christianity in South India. Some Indian Christians hold that Saint Thomas himself lived and worked there in the first centu
ry. The Portuguese converted thousands of Tamil-speaking people to Roman Catholicism in Ceylon and South India during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Danish Lutherans established a mission at Tranquebar in 1705. The London-based Anglican Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (later the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel) had been on the ground for more than one hundred years when the Saracen company arrived, and missionaries from the nondenominational London Missionary Society had been at work in India since 1794. Still, the newcomers considered themselves the first bringers of the true Christian message.
§ The Wards were as prolific as they were successful. By the time Deacon Ward, the family patriarch, finally passed away at Bergen in 1839 at the age of ninety-two, twenty-two of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren had died, but three children, twenty-three grandchildren, and sixty-five great-grandchildren still survived—a total of ninety-one living descendants.
‖ Daniel Hand Ward, Deacon Ward’s second son, remains a mystery. He was well enough as a boy to carry mail for his father, but in the voluminous Ward Family Genealogy, only his name and dates (1796–1848) are given. One source suggests he was severely “handicapped,” another calls him “an invalid.” In any case, he seems never to have married or to have taken an active part in any of the family’s many enterprises.
a Elizabeth Ward alone moved away to marry; her husband, Daniel Hand, was a Connecticut-born businessman who made himself enormously wealthy as a merchant in Atlanta. After the Civil War he would leave more than a million dollars to the American Missionary Society for the education of freedmen.
b His roommate, the son of a pastor from New Hartford, Connecticut, was more adventurous than he, Ferdinand remembered many years later, “innately wild and a great grief to fond and too-indulgent parents.” He bought up all the bed cord in town, spent most of the night methodically tying shut every room in every building on the campus, climbed the church steeple, cut the bell rope, and waited for dawn. No church bell rang. There was no chapel, no morning recitation. The culprit was found out and expelled. “Poor boy!” Ward wrote. “He ran away from home, [went west] and was, I am told, heard of no more. Killed by Indians. His face is now before me, bright, pleasant, but with a will untamed and impulses rudderless.” Ferdinand De Wilton Ward, “Letter of 1882,” in Melvin G. Dodge, comp., Fifty Years Ago, pp. 119–120.
c Some of Finney’s listeners were less admiring. Henry Stanton’s future wife, Elizabeth Cady, was taken to hear him as a young girl in the nearby village of York, and remembered him as a “terrifier of human souls.”
I was wrought up to such a pitch that I actually jumped and gazed in the direction to which he pointed, while the picture glowed before my eyes and remained with me for months afterwards.… Fear of the Judgment seized my soul. Visions of the lost haunted my dreams. Mental anguish prostrated my health.
Henry B. Stanton, Random Recollections, pp. 42–43; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More, p. 72.
d Under the 1801 Plan of Union, New England Congregationalists and the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church had agreed to work together, rather than compete, as the frontier moved west. The Wards had been Congregationalists back in Connecticut but had had no difficulty helping to found and enthusiastically support Presbyterian churches once they reached western New York.
e The Marathi-speaking people of western India had been the earliest overseas targets of the American Board. The first five missionaries to India, three with their wives, had sailed for Bombay in 1812. Almost everything had gone wrong. While they were still at sea, one missionary couple and one of the two bachelors declared themselves Baptists and withdrew from the care of the American Board. Before their ship arrived in India, Britain and the United States went to war, so instead of welcoming them British authorities threatened deportation. One couple sailed immediately for Mauritius, where the wife died after giving birth to a dead child and her husband suffered an emotional collapse. Three members of the original party fled to Bombay, where they were placed under house arrest. The married couple, Rev. Samuel Nott and his wife, soon began complaining of economic hardship, ran up heavy debts, demanded the right to make money on the side, and, in 1815, booked passage for home. The American Board privately denounced Nott as a “spoilt child” but covered up his activities for fear of driving away funders. The lone survivor, Rev. Gordon Hall, soldiered on in Bombay until his death. Paul William Harris, Nothing but Christ, pp. 27–29.
f In the end, the Board did manage to establish missions in the Middle East—and in the Sandwich Islands, China, and Africa, as well. But no serious effort was ever made to link the northern and southern ends of Anderson’s chain, and the rest of the field would eventually be left to other denominations: Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists—even Unitarians and Friends—all eventually staked claims to different parts of the Indian subcontinent, the minute doctrinal differences between them providing an endless source of puzzlement to those they hoped to convert. Geoffrey C. Ward, “Two Missionaries’ Ordeal by Faith in a Distant Clime,” Smithsonian (August 1990).
g In the end, seven members of his class would enter the mission field. Ferdinand De Wilton Ward, typed manuscript of Auto-Biography No. 2, p. 3, Brinton Collection; Kenneth Woodrow Henke, letter to the author, December 16, 2008.
h Three years earlier, he had written his sister Henrietta to keep an eye out for a future wife for him. “She must be a Christian, intelligent & not homely.” Ferdinand De Wilton Ward to Henrietta Ward Clarke, July 2, 1833, Freeman Clarke Family Papers, Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, University of Rochester Library.
i Christopher Robert, married to Jane’s youngest sister, Anna Maria Shaw, was a successful importer of sugar, cotton, and tea and would become president of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad after the Civil War. He shared fully in his sister-in-law’s Presbyterian zeal and would eventually use his wealth to fund a number of religious institutions at home and to provide the initial funds with which Robert College was established just outside Constantinople.
j Her friends were Rev. and Mrs. Elbert Nevius. Because Mrs. Nevius was in frail health, her husband wanted another woman along to help care for her and to teach school in her spare time. When Jane Shaw backed off, his wife’s sister, Miss Azubah C. Condit, agreed to go as an “assistant missionary,” and became perhaps the first single American woman ever to engage in mission work. Mrs. Nevius’s health did not improve and eventually forced her and her husband to abandon the mission field and return home in 1843. His sister-in-law remained overseas, however, became the third wife of Rev. David O. Allen of the Bombay mission, and died just six months later.
k Just under $7,000 in purchasing power today.
l Modern Madurai.
TWO
Labouring in Hope
The Wards spent their first night in Madras in a spacious whitewashed bungalow on the seashore at Royapuram, just north of Fort St. George. It was the new home and headquarters of the Reverend Miron Winslow, the veteran missionary from Jaffna who had earlier told Jane she would not be welcome if she came to Ceylon alone. He had so recently arrived at Madras to set up this new station—intended primarily to provide printed materials in Tamil—that no one aboard the Saracen had known it existed before coming ashore.
Now, Rev. Winslow had another surprise for the Saracen passengers, all of whom had assumed they were to proceed immediately to Madura. Most of the Saracen company would leave by oxcart in mid-April as planned, he said, but the Board had authorized him to retain two of the newcomers to strengthen the new mission run by him and another Jaffna veteran, Dr. John Scudder. He asked the brethren of the Saracen company themselves to decide who among them was to stay behind. At an evening meeting held at the home of Dr. Scudder, they chose Ferdinand and Jane and William Tracy and his wife, Emily.
There is no way of knowing now why the rest of the Saracen company voted as they did. It may have been as simple as the fact that Ferdinand
and Tracy were both Princeton men, while Cherry, Cope, Crane, and Steele had all attended Auburn together and had not wished to be separated. But Ferdinand was not pleased; he felt rejected, set apart, discriminated against. According to his skeletal journal, it took him three days to conclude that “it is my duty to remain at Madras,” and he finally gave in only because it had been “the unanimous opinion of the Brethren” that he do so.1 He would never again so easily defer to his colleagues.
The Wards struggled to adjust to India. “Went among the natives with Mr. Winslow,” Ferdinand noted early on. “Oh, the wretchedness & moral death!”2 April, May, and early June marked the height of summer, with temperatures hovering around 100 degrees. Tempers frayed. “Helped wife move boxes and unpack bedding,” Ferdinand noted after they moved into a rented bungalow of their own at Royapuram. “Got some cross words and quick words. Felt bad all the evening.”3
The sights and sounds of the city streets defeated Ferdinand’s powers of description; they made him feel, he wrote, just as he had after his first visit to New York City, when he “looked with wonder … upon the strange things of Broadway.”4 Some 400,000 people lived in and around Madras, twice the population of New York. Ferdinand commissioned an artist to paint a series of street scenes to be sent home to Rochester: the seaside bungalow in which he and Jane were living; a street barber at work in the open air; a goldsmith tapping at his miniature forge; an entertainer leading a costumed monkey on a string; a Shaivite mendicant, smeared with ash and strung with prayer beads; and another Hindu devotee in the throes of religious fervor, slashing at his own thigh as a symbol of his zeal—a sight, Ferdinand lamented, “seen frequently in the streets.”5
He grew frustrated by the unexpected difficulty of learning Tamil. (“It is a fearfully ugly language,” wrote one English newcomer, “clattering, twittering, chirping, sputtering—like a whole poultry-yard let loose upon one, and not a single singing-bird, not a melodious sound among them.”)6 And he found the languid pace of life insufferable. Patience, he wrote, “requires an amount of Christian feeling which I cannot command to keep peace with the slow method of doing things in this land. That the natives should [demonstrate] this spirit is not strange, but it pervades the whole country. They talk of a week as we do of a day.”7