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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  “What do you think is the reason we leave our native country, come to your villages, and expend so much in the education of your children?” he remembered asking a group of priests.

  “You expect by this good deed more certainly to reach Heaven,” said one.

  “Oh, it is your nature,” another answered, “just as it is the nature of the jackal to prowl abroad at night.”30

  By the spring of 1840, Ferdinand and Rev. Daniel Poor had dedicated a mud-walled, thatch-roofed preaching bungalow, the first in Madura,‡ and for the first time the girls’ day school Jane supervised began taking boarding students. But traces of disillusionment had begun to appear in Ferdinand’s letters home. Actual conversions to Christianity remained maddeningly elusive: William Todd, the mission’s founder, had made precisely one convert in five years: a Hindu servant in his own household who converted back again soon after his worn-out master sailed for home. Ferdinand considered the stubbornness with which his students adhered to the faith of their fathers in the face of his repeated assaults a personal affront. In April, he and Jane rode out to watch the annual Chithirai Festival, in which thousands of devotees haul Minakshi and her consort through the streets on huge carved carts in the light of the full moon:

  I went out between daylight and sunrise to see if, among the crowd passing like a flood from the North Gate to the river, I could discern the faces of any of the members of the English School—or others in our service—I met but one lad. I asked him where he was going. “To worship my god,” was his reply. I detained him long enough to tell him what I thought of his god & what the true God thought of his conduct. Again he was in the mighty current borne on to evil & death. I will not say that others of my pupils were not there—I suppose they were—for I had learned that some of them had made vows to dance before [their deity]—but their painted faces & eccentric dress forbade my recognizing them. It was painful—a heartrending spectacle.… It was like a mighty river filling the whole of a wide street, & continuing for many hours. “How long, Oh Lord, how long?” was the exclamation of my heart and I turned away to return home.31

  Jane, Ferdinand reported, was also “deeply pained” at witnessing the same procession, and “had her feelings greatly wounded.”32

  She soon found herself pregnant again. Remembering the difficulties she’d had before Sarah’s birth, Ferdinand insisted in September that he and his little family proceed to Bangalore, with its moderate climate and better medical facilities, to await the new baby. They would stay there four months, boarding with a British clergyman and soaking up the distinctly British atmosphere of this garrison town. “The early mornings [in Bangalore] are as pleasant as anything I can imagine,” a British visitor and friend of the Wards reported. “They have all the sweetness and freshness of an English summer. The air smells of hay and flowers, instead of ditches, dust, fried oil, curry and onions.… There are superb dahlias growing in the gardens, and today I saw a real full-blown hollyhock which was like meeting an old friend.”33

  Jane gave birth to a son on her own twenty-ninth birthday, December 26, 1840. He was named Levi, after Ferdinand’s unyielding father. “Little Sarah, being a native, enjoys fine health,” Ferdinand reported to his sister from Madura a few weeks later. “So plump & healthy. Levi will, we trust, be the same but not so with their parents.” In a postscript, Jane begged for a “few toys & books for my little ones.… My cares increase & I am less & less able to put forth much active effort.… [The] little ones take much of my strength & care.”34

  Her strength did not improve. Her cares multiplied. In July 1841, she and Ferdinand fell ill again. They left Madura, for Trichinopoly this time, 255 miles to the north, where there was a British garrison hospital. Ferdinand’s head pounded inside the swaying palanquin in which he rode, making it impossible to sleep. Little Sarah was still well, he wrote, but infant Levi was now suffering badly from “irruptions,” and Jane’s health was only “mediocre.… I often fear what the end will be.… The climate makes sad drafts on her constitution & especially her nervous system & head.”35

  Jane recovered, and they returned to Madura. But Levi died there in November 1841, at the age of eleven months, and was buried in the walled churchyard.

  Ferdinand now dreamed more and more of home. News from Rochester was infrequent: “I have been blessed with a girl and afflicted in the loss of a son since hearing from Rochester,” he complained in one letter, “from which you will see that I do not hear very often. My last information from my beloved parents is more than a year old.”36 And again: “[How] I long at times for a little quiet and a breath of fresh air,” he wrote, “a Sabbath of rest, a week of social intercourse—a sight of civilized dwellings—But No!… Mud houses—people with children quite naked—shameless habits—heat dust—noise—idols—desecrated Sabbaths—fawning for favors—deceit—all, all are constantly in view.… To live among [Hindus] is a trial, a task.”37

  To live among his fellow missionaries turned out to be a greater trial, a harder task; it was finally they who would drive the Wards from Madura and then bar them from India itself. It is impossible now to reconstruct precisely what went so badly wrong. Much of the evidence was deliberately destroyed long ago, and only a few surviving clues can be teased from faded letters scattered through several archives.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that the Madura missionaries should fall out among themselves. The Saracen company had all nodded in agreement when the Boston clergyman who saw them off to India declared them imperfect, but they had all also privately concurred when he called them “eminently holy.” When men and women persuaded of their holiness clashed in the South Indian heat, confusion and rancor were the likely result.

  They were hopelessly outnumbered, haunted by illness, underpaid, and frequently out of touch with their superiors in Boston. And because of the financial difficulties brought on by the lingering economic troubles at home, they found themselves in a sometimes bitter battle with the Madras and Jaffna missions over the few resources that remained. Jaffna thought Madras redundant, since both missions operated Tamil printing presses. Madras saw itself as a poor relation of both its sister missions. Madura, far inland, felt isolated and sometimes abandoned. There were genuine differences over policy within the missions, too; some believed the promotion of schools undercut the importance of preaching the Gospel; some wanted to attack the caste system straight on; others thought it best to work within it.

  Still, they were a personally quarrelsome lot. Pronouncing judgment upon one another seemed to provide them with a kind of grim entertainment, and the Wards came in for more than their share of criticism. Although the Board officially sanctioned it, some missionary wives had found unseemly Jane’s determination to make a mark in the world outside her compound by overseeing a girls’ school. The brethren resented the eagerness with which Ferdinand volunteered for prolonged inspection tours that left to his colleagues the daily monotony of seeing to the schools, and they were further irritated by the too-obvious pleasure he took in writing accounts of his own itinerating for the Missionary Herald back home. The Wards’ relative prosperity was also a source of irritation. It had taken not one, but two oxcarts to haul their household goods from Madras to Madura, and not long after their arrival they purchased a cart and four bullocks for their personal use, an extravagance still remembered in the Madura mission seventy years later. Relatives and friends in Rochester and New York sent them clothing, books, and toys for their children often enough to further anger their less-fortunate fellow missionaries. Some of the brethren evidently made their envy plain to their families back home; within a few months of the Wards’ arrival, Dr. Anderson informed Madura that he was aware of rumors that “the younger missionaries” stationed there showed an alarming tendency toward “extravagance in house, furniture, style, dress, etc.”38 The Wards were the youngest missionaries at Madura by several years.

  But most of all, the Wards’ colleagues came to disapprove of the couple’s closeness to Jane’s
old friend John Lawrence, whose religious ardor and unwillingness to follow orders exceeded even theirs: while out walking one morning in January 1837, while the Wards were still at sea, Lawrence had shouldered his way between two women making offerings at an outdoor shrine, called them fools for worshipping idols, and then smashed their deity with his cane. An angry crowd gathered. Pupils deserted the mission schools. Rev. Todd thought it best to send Lawrence out of town, to join Rev. Robert Dwight at Dindigul. There, Lawrence continued to do things his own way, despite growing disapproval from his brethren. Ordered to build a modest preaching bungalow, he constructed a full-scale chapel instead, using funds solicited from devout Britons living in the area. When the quarterly meeting of the mission met at Dindigul in August 1841, most of the brethren declared themselves “aghast” at what he had done, and censured him for disobedience and vainglory. Lawrence stalked from the meeting.

  Only Ferdinand and one other missionary stood by him. Ferdinand’s colleagues seem never to have forgiven him for that—or for the icy hauteur with which he and Jane subsequently refused, for weeks at a time, even to speak to those who dared to differ with them.

  At midnight on September 25, 1842, Ferdinand sat writing to his sister Henrietta by lamplight. “I am in the sickroom of our physician Dr. Steele,” Ferdinand wrote. “Consumption is hastening him to the grave. A few weeks, perhaps a few days, will close his earthly existence.” He apologized for not having written lately. His head ached continuously now, he said. Jane was pregnant for a third time and still weak from intermittent fevers that had not left her since the death of her infant son eleven months before. A box sent from Rochester a year earlier had never arrived. Another, filled with mail from home, had leaked, making most of the letters illegible.

  “The sixth year of my absence from America is hastening to its close,” he continued. “How many the changes that have occurred during that period.” His grandfather, Deacon Levi Ward, had died since he’d left home. So had his older brother, William. And he had only recently learned that less than a year after marrying Rev. Eli Smith, his niece Maria Chapin Smith had died in childbirth at the American Board’s Beirut mission. “How close upon each other tread the footsteps of joy & sorrow,” he wrote, “of the marriage greeting & the funereal sob …, Mary’s wedding & Mary’s funeral!” He had still not heard a word from his disapproving father. “How few of my anticipations of usefulness have been realized. How little have I done in comparison with what I expected to accomplish. The nature of mission life—its … magnitude of duties—its severity of trials—can be known only by experience.”39

  Dr. Steele would die nine days later, leaving the Madura mission without a physician and Jane without anyone to treat her fevers or oversee her pregnancy. Over the protests of his fellow missionaries, Ferdinand insisted that they flee yet again, this time one hundred miles to the southwest, to Courtallam (modern Kuttalam] in the Western Ghats, where, Ferdinand later remembered, “during the … western monsoon, the clouds are so driven as to cause almost hourly showers, giving to the air a delightful and invigorating coolness.”40 While they were there, Ferdinand and Jane resolved not to return permanently to Madura. Its climate was unhealthy, there was now no doctor nearby, and, perhaps most importantly, the brethren and their wives were openly hostile.

  Moving from one sparsely manned mission to another without the assent of one’s colleagues was unheard of, an act of open rebellion. Rather than face his colleagues in person, Ferdinand wrote privately to Rev. Winslow, asking for permission to rejoin the Madras mission, where he and his wife could be close to medical care. He said nothing whatsoever about his difficulties with his fellow missionaries at Madura—with some of whom he was still not speaking. Always shorthanded, Rev. Winslow wrote right back, eager to strengthen his chronically overworked outpost. With Winslow’s written permission in hand, Ferdinand then wrote a letter to be read aloud at the annual meeting of the Madura mission on February 2.

  After “most deliberate and prayerful thought,” it said, he had resolved to “change the field of missionary labours.”

  I deem it unnecessary to go into a detail of reasons. These are obvious, I apprehend, to you all. It is enough to say that health & usefulness of myself & family & the best interests of the mission make [a move] such as this not only desirable but absolutely necessary.…

  I trust there will be no opposition to the request. A longer continuance where I now am, while it may add somewhat to the numerical force of the Mission & the amount of effort put forth in the instruction of the people, will be the continuance of great unhappiness to myself & family (if not more serious consequences pertaining to health & life) & an injury to the best of causes & most important of interests.

  Trusting that the request will be at once complied with,

  I remain yours most truly,

  F. DW. Ward41

  The brethren were stunned at what amounted to a haughty fait accompli, but even though it would mean more work for everyone—the newly widowed Mrs. Steele, for example, would find herself in charge of the girls’ boarding school Jane had been running—not a single member of the mission objected to the Wards’ departure. “When they left Madura (without a dissenting voice),” Henry Cherry remembered later, “Brother [Levi] Spaulding [at Jaffna] wrote to Brother Dwight [at Madura]—‘I consider your Mission stronger now than it was before they left.’ ”§

  At Madras, the Wards took up residence at Royapuram—where they had spent their first night in India—and hurled themselves into mission work, as if driven to prove their dedication to Christ all over again. Their third child, William Shaw Ward (named for Jane’s father), was born there on May 26, 1843. He survived. But a fourth child, a girl named Maria (named for Ferdinand’s late missionary niece, Maria Chapin Smith), would die within a few days of her birth in May of the following year. Somehow, between pregnancies and periods of grieving, Jane found time to run another girls’ boarding school. Meanwhile, Ferdinand preached wherever he could, supervised six day schools in the city, regularly visited schools in surrounding villages, and preached at five services a week—four in Tamil and one in English. He also wrote—pamphlets, children’s books, editorials for a Tamil temperance weekly called Aurora—and learned to work a printing press so that he could help the mission printer, Phineas R. Hunt, turn out millions of pages of tracts for distribution along the roadsides.

  Missionaries were rarely in much danger from Hindus or Muslims.‖

  But in Madras, at least, Roman Catholics, whom Ferdinand and his colleagues believed at best deluded, were another matter. “Protestants are the only true Christians,” Ferdinand wrote in The Elements of Geography for Little Children, a little book he wrote for use in mission schools. Catholics returned his scorn: Royapuram was largely a Catholic neighborhood and sometimes when he held services in a preaching bungalow located there, angry crowds tore up his tracts, gathered outside to jeer and throw stones, and lit noxious compounds of “sulphur, pepper and deleterious drugs” outside the windows to smoke out his listeners. Once, when none of that seemed to work, they set the structure itself ablaze. Ferdinand had it rebuilt and resumed preaching.42

  But here, too, some of the Wards’ worst problems were self-inflicted. In January 1844, roughly a year after they left Madura, cholera swept through that city. At one point, more than fifty people were dying every day. Henry Cherry’s second wife, Jane, was among them. So were Minerva North, the wife of Alfred North, newly arrived, and Rev. Robert Dwight.

  Dwight’s widow, Mary Billings Wright, moved with her children to Madras, where, after several months, Rev. Winslow, himself now a widower for the third time, proposed that they be married. The Wards were appalled; such a marriage, less than a year after Dwight’s death and to a much older man who had already buried three wives, struck them as unseemly, even un-Christian. They made their feelings known.

  “[Mrs. Dwight’s] situation in Madras is not very comfortable under present circumstances,” wrote Rev. Crane that Dec
ember.

  She would be comfortable at Brother Hunt’s but the Wards do not approve of her remaining at all in Madras, I mean for the future. They will not easily forgive, either her or Brother Winslow for entering into matrimonial engagements. Perhaps I use too strong a word, but I mean to say that they are highly displeased with the arrangement that is to unite them in marriage. I regret that they should feel so, for it will only tend to make both parties uncomfortable when they might all be made most happy by the arrangement.43

  When Mrs. Dwight refused to retreat to the mission at Jaffna, the Wards’ response was simply to stop speaking to their old friend’s widow. Rev. Winslow, who had cordially welcomed the Wards to India in 1837 and had subsequently arranged for Ferdinand to rejoin his mission, was understandably indignant. Ferdinand stopped talking to him, too, and did not attend his wedding in March 1845.

  By then, Ferdinand just wanted to go home. “The world is a different place to me now than it was ten years ago,” he told his sister. “So dear Papa told me it would be & so it is.”44

  He wrote to Dr. Anderson. “When I came to India it was with a wish & expectation to die here,” he said. “Nothing but a strong sense of duty could alter my resolution in this respect.” But “long & prayerful consideration” now led him to believe he could serve God, “my family & my own soul” best by returning to America, “at least for some time.”45 He was not yet asking for formal permission to leave, he said, and did not plan to do so until he was sure a replacement could be found, but he also wanted his superiors to start looking for one right away.