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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  When guests didn’t come to him, he went to them. For $15 and up for an evening, Warden Phil Kiernan or Sheriff Alexander Davidson would escort him wherever he wanted to go. He attended the theater (sometimes occupying his old box at the Casino), took long carriage rides through Central Park, dined with friends uptown or at Delmonico’s, and, whenever he felt like it, strolled along Grand Street to the Bowery, where he bought rounds of drinks at the bar run by his friend Patrick Frawley, the Tammany alderman who got a cut of all business done in his district, including profits made from wealthy prisoners like Ferd.

  His seventeen months at Ludlow Street would cost tens of thousands of dollars. At first, the money came from his life insurance policy; he’d cashed it in right away, he later reported, because Grant & Ward’s receiver, Julian Davies, was about to “pounce” and “I thought I might as well get the benefit.”20 When he ran through that money, he threw himself on the mercy of his relatives. Unless they wished to see him cruelly mistreated, he said, they would have to provide him the wherewithal. They did. Ella got several thousand dollars in cash past the guards. Will brought him money, too. Billy Jones, the Ludlow Street janitor, remembered Ferd sending him to Patrick Frawley’s saloon to cash thousand-dollar bills for him and his guests. And when that money, too, began to run low, he persuaded Ella to smuggle a chamois bag filled with her jewelry in to him beneath her clothing—earrings, brooches, necklaces—which he doled out one by one to his jailers, who converted them to cash, always keeping a piece of the action for themselves. “It is the same in jail as everywhere else,” Ferd recalled, “money talks and with it you can do most anything.”21

  On the afternoon of May 27, General Grant’s doorbell rang. A maid opened the door and was startled to see Ferd again standing on the steps. Sheriff Davidson stood just behind him. Ferd offered his card and asked if he could speak to the general. He would only need a minute or two. The maid took the card inside and returned. The answer was no. General Grant had nothing to say to him.

  No one now knows what Ferd hoped to gain from speaking with the man whose family he had ruined and whose reputation for honesty he had at least temporarily tarnished. But it was probably just as well that he wasn’t ushered inside. Jerome Chaffee remembered the general’s mood in the weeks following the crash: “He would suffer for hours in his large arm chair, clutching nervously with his hands at the arm-rests, driving his finger-nails into the hard wood.… One day he said to me, ‘Chaffee, I would kill Ward, as I would a snake. I believe I should do it, too, but I do not wish to be hanged for the killing of such a wretch.’ ”22

  “We are all paupers now,” General Grant told another visitor not long after the crash.23 He was not exaggerating. Buck and Fred Grant lost their homes to creditors. The general’s sister lost her savings. He and Julia retained their houses on East Sixty-sixth Street and in Long Branch, New Jersey, only because William Vanderbilt—to whom they had insisted on turning over all their property as partial payment of their debt to him—urged them to stay on in them as long as they liked. Gifts from friends and strangers paid their household expenses. Grant considered them loans, and pledged to pay them back as soon as he could.

  The financial blow had been bad enough. But James Fish had just done still more damage to the general’s reputation. The banker had been arrested the previous evening on a federal warrant, charged with “misappropriating a large sum of money belonging to a National Bank.” He had not stayed behind bars for long; three friends came up with his $30,000 bail within an hour of his arrest, and as soon as he was released he sought to lighten his own burden of guilt by implicating Grant. “I have in my possession documentary evidence sufficient to fully vindicate me in every particular,” Fish told a reporter. He then had his lawyers produce the two-year-old letters, signed by Grant, that seemed to suggest that the general had been aware that Ferd and Fish were engaged in the dubious government contract business and hoped to profit from it personally.

  Democratic newspapers jumped on the story. “The Grants profess to have been entirely ignorant of the tricks that Ward was playing in their names,” said the Rocky Mountain News, “but it requires a tremendous strain on the charity of the public to believe what they say.”24 “Is Ulysses S. Grant Guilty?” asked the editor of the New York Sun, and then provided his own answer: James Fish was Grant’s innocent victim, he wrote, “misled by the written word of a man who has twice been chosen President of the United States.… For the love of money the greatest military reputation of our time has been dimmed and degraded by its possessor. The people look on with shame.”25

  Privately, Grant himself was ashamed. “I could bear all the pecuniary loss if that was all,” he wrote to a friend, “but that I could be so long deceived by a man who I had such opportunity to know is humiliating. Then too to have my name and that of my family associated with what now proves to have been nothing but a fraud for at least two years back.”26

  He was forced to offer a pained public explanation of the two letters to Fish. He had no recollection of either one, he said, but he admitted that he had signed them both. “My confidence in the integrity and business qualifications of the members of the firm of Grant & Ward was such that I have not hesitated to sign my name very often to papers put before me, on a mere statement of the contents without reading them, I am very well aware this was not business-like, but it is the fact.… I have never directly or indirectly sustained a Government Contract taken by the firm of Grant & Ward.”27

  Grant’s denial never quite caught up to the charge. Even his closest friends were embarrassed for him: “He has lost everything,” William Tecumseh Sherman wrote, “and more in reputation.”28

  On June 1, three days after Ferd made his peculiar visit to East Sixty-sixth Street, the Grants closed up their house and moved to their cottage at Long Branch for the summer. The general was glad to be away from headlines and editorials but badly in need of some sort of income. Earlier, he had turned down an offer from the Century Magazine to write articles about the great campaigns he’d led during the Civil War; he disliked revisiting his past and hadn’t really needed the money. Now, when the offer was renewed, he eagerly accepted. He agreed to write four articles for $1,000 each. He would spend the whole summer at it, Julia Grant remembered, “writing, writing, writing for bread,” and even began to think there might be a book in it.

  But as he wrote, something else was bothering him. The day after the Grants arrived at Long Branch, he bit into a peach and recoiled in pain so intense he thought a wasp had somehow been hidden in the fruit. The pain subsided but did not entirely disappear. Dr. Jacob M. Da Costa of Philadelphia was visiting Grant’s next-door neighbor, and was asked to have a look at the general’s throat. (Da Costa happened to be Dr. John Brinton’s brother-in-law as well as his colleague at the Jefferson Medical College.) He was an eminent internist, but no expert on lesions, and when he noticed an unusual-looking growth on the roof of Grant’s mouth he prescribed something to ease the pain but urged the general to see his own physician for a more thorough examination as soon as possible. The Grants’ doctor was vacationing in Europe and not expected back till fall. Grant was busy writing. The appointment would have to wait till October, when his doctor had returned and the Grants were back home in Manhattan.

  On the afternoon of July 23, Rev. Ferdinand De Wilton Ward had an unexpected visitor of his own. James D. Fish had come up from New York to Geneseo, hoping to have a talk with his errant partner’s father. The maid showed the visitor into the dark parsonage parlor and asked him to wait; Rev. Ward was upstairs in his study. He came down the steps slowly, grim-faced, without extending his hand. The two men sat. Fish reminded the older man of how often Rev. Ward had expressed his gratitude for all that Fish had done for his boy, how many times the minister had said he was in his and Mrs. Ward’s thankful prayers. Now, he had a favor to ask. Fish wanted him to persuade his son to “come out manfully and say that I knew nothing about the inside affairs of Grant & Ward. I have lost e
verything … but my good name. I want to keep that.”

  Ferdinand rose from his chair. “I can’t listen to anything against my boy,” Fish remembered his saying. “The law will hold you equally liable.”

  “Yes, equally liable in a business sense, but not in guilt.”

  Ferdinand repeated himself: “I won’t listen to anything against my son.”

  “Oh, Dr. Ward,” Fish recalled saying. “I have done so much for your son. All I want is that he shall do this one act of justice to me. Let him tell the truth. I am a beggar now, but I want to be a beggar with an honorable name.”

  Ferdinand’s expression never changed. “I can’t do it,” he said. “My son, William, will spend his last cent to defend Ferdie, and I will stand by him. Good morning.” Ferdinand stalked from the room. For him, then and always, Ward solidarity took precedence over everything else; whatever sins Ferd might have committed, his son’s accusers would get no help from him.

  Fish showed himself out. He stumbled up Ward Place toward Main Street, turned right, and started toward the depot to board the evening train for New York. “[Rev. Ward] left me alone,” he recalled, “and without one word of kindness or of sympathy. It was one of the most cruel experiences that I have endured in all my misfortunes.”‡

  Fish’s misfortunes were multiplying that summer. His trial was still months away. Without Ferd’s willingness to exonerate him, he saw little chance of ever clearing his name. And he was lonely: after the crash, Sallie Reber Laing, the lovely actress with whom he had kept company since her husband’s death the previous autumn, had left the city and returned to her family in Sandusky, Ohio.

  On August 6th, she took to the stage again for a one-night benefit performance as the lead in Patience to raise funds for the city’s poor. “It was a matter of general remark among those who knew her,” the Cincinnati Inquirer would later report, “that she was not the Sallie of the year before in point of healthful appearance.”29

  In fact, she was three months pregnant. Her baby was due in February.

  James Fish was the father. He was in the audience that evening and may have escorted Sallie back east a day or two later: the Hartford Courant reported that she “sang at a number of private entertainments” in and around his hometown of Mystic later that month; presumably, he would have been with her.30 In any case, by late September she was occupying an elegantly furnished apartment in the brand-new Albert Flats at 23 East Tenth Street, arranged and paid for by her far-older lover, who spoke to no one when he visited and came and went only after dark.

  On October 22, General Grant returned home to Sixty-sixth Street from two downtown appointments. He had news for Julia, both good and bad: he had visited the Century offices, where he’d been offered a contract for a full-fledged memoir that was sure to ease their financial situation, but he also had been told by a specialist to whom his family physician had sent him that the throat pain he’d been experiencing since June was caused by a disease that was “serious, epithelial in character,” and only “sometimes capable of being cured.”31 Though his physician was careful to avoid the term, Grant was suffering from cancer of the tongue. Twice-daily treatments with muriate of cocaine could mask the pain, but nothing could be done about the cancer’s steady growth. The general stopped smoking his beloved cigars and redoubled his efforts to finish his book, hunched over in a little room at the top of the stairs, writing or dictating all morning, preparing notes for the next day’s writing every afternoon. When Grant’s old friend Mark Twain heard that the Century Company had offered him only an author’s standard royalty of 10 percent—no more, he said, than “they would have offered to any Comanche Indian whose book they had reason to believe might sell 3,000 or 4,000 copies”32—he resolved to better the offer and publish the book himself. He pledged 70 percent of the profits and, to demonstrate his seriousness, gave the general an advance of $10,000.

  Grant stuck to his relentless writing schedule all winter, working hour upon hour without so much as a drink of water because of the agony swallowing caused. His condition steadily worsened. He lost weight, felt weak, and wore a knitted cap and a shawl across his knees to fend off the cold that gripped him now, even with all the house fires lit. Battlefield dreams and fear of choking interrupted his sleep. “My tears blind me,” Julia Grant confided to a friend in January. “General Grant is very ill. I cannot write how ill.”33

  Rumors of his condition began to reach the newspapers in February. His doctors denied them at first. Mark Twain dropped by on the 21st. He was shocked by the general’s appearance—emaciated, gray, shrunken—but he complimented him on the news stories suggesting he was on the upswing. “Yes,” Grant smiled, “if it had only been true.”34 One of Grant’s physicians, Dr. John Hancock Douglas, happened to be on hand. Twain asked him if he believed cigar smoking had caused the general’s affliction. There were several causes, the doctor answered, but the most damaging had been the continuing grief caused by his financial disaster. The general took up the subject, his initial anger at Ferdinand Ward now replaced by sadness. He spoke of his former partner as if he were talking about an offending child, Twain noted, without venom or vengefulness, while Twain himself was “inwardly boiling all the time. I was scalping Ward, flaying him alive, breaking him on the wheel, pounding him to jelly, and cursing him with all the profanity known to the one language I am acquainted with, and helping it out in times of difficulty and distress with odds and ends of profanity drawn from the two other languages of which I have a limited knowledge.”35

  Three days later, on February 24, 1885, Sallie Reber gave birth to a baby girl in a rented room in an old farmhouse on the outskirts of Carlstadt, New Jersey. Everything had been arranged in secret. She had quietly left her downtown flat ten days earlier and moved across the Hudson into the home of a nurse-midwife to await her delivery. She told the nurse and attending doctor that her name was Nellie, that her husband had only recently died; Franklin Laing’s name, not James Fish’s, appeared on the birth certificate as the father, even though he had been dead for eighteen months.

  Fish was preoccupied that month, huddling each morning with his lawyers, preparing for the trial that was about to begin in federal court: he faced twenty-five counts, all of them having to do with his willingness to approve fictitious loans without collateral in defiance of the National Banking Act. But every other day or so during Sallie’s confinement he had found time to take the train out to Carlstadt, bringing fruit and flowers. After Sallie gave birth he went again and again to see his new daughter—and ninth child.

  His trial was finally to start on the morning of March 11. As the banker left his apartment in the Mystic Flats to go to court, a messenger handed him a telegram. It was from Carlstadt. Sallie Reber had died the previous evening. She had fallen ill two days earlier, suffering from a sudden fever that soared so high she became delirious. Fish had been at her bedside the previous afternoon. Dr. J. W. Phelps of Rutherford Park, the attending physician, who had been reluctant to get involved at all, listed “acute gastritis” as the cause of death. It is impossible to know the truth, but it seems more likely that she suffered from puerperal (or “childbed”) fever, the form of fast-acting septicemia that was the leading killer of childbearing women in the nineteenth century. There were two possible motives for the doctor to have misrepresented the facts: to spare an unmarried woman’s family the knowledge that she had given birth in secret, or to cover up his own incompetence, since puerperal fever was most often the result of careless medical care.§

  Fish was stunned. His trial was about to get under way. “I had little time to consider what was my duty,” he remembered. In fact, he did nothing at all for twenty-four hours, then sent a wire to Sallie’s brother-in-law, Frank A. Layman, telling him of her death. Layman, who was the editor of the Sandusky Evening Journal, wired back that he and Sallie’s unmarried sister, Alice, would arrive in New York the following evening. As soon as he got there, he summoned Dr. Phelps to the Mystic Flats and asked h
im what had happened. (Fish left the room as soon as he arrived; Alice remained out of earshot as well.) The news that Sallie had been pregnant came as a shock; so did the fact that her baby had survived. Layman begged the doctor to say nothing about any of it; the news would only add to the grief of his aged mother-in-law and Sallie’s sister: “For God’s sake,” he said, “don’t tell Alice.”36 Phelps and Layman agreed that everything would be kept secret, but if either ever suspected the truth was going to get out he was to wire the other immediately with the message, “Breakers Ahead,” so that they could get their stories straight.

  Fish temporarily entrusted the infant to the brother of Fish’s first wife, J. Blodgett, who was the janitor of the Mystic Flats.

  Meanwhile, Sallie’s corpse had been shipped to Luke Clarke’s Sons, undertakers, on Twenty-third Street in Manhattan. “The body was prepared in my rooms,” Clarke remembered. “Mr. Fish was present when the girl was laid in her coffin. She was kept here until the following Sunday [when Layman and Alice Reber escorted her home to Sandusky for burial], and he came to look at her every day.”37

  The United States Post Office and Courthouse at Broadway and Park Row was not the tallest building in Manhattan, but it was among the most conspicuous and certainly the most grandiose. Built to embody federal might in the aftermath of the 1863 draft riots that had threatened to destroy the city, it was a trapezoidal Second Empire architectural extravaganza, a full city block of balconies and pillars and walls ten feet thick, topped by an array of Mansard roofs and canopies, a tall lantern, and a still-taller central dome. The Astor House across the street looked as it if could be stowed away in some corner of its basement, one critic wrote, and it seemed to shrink nearby City Hall to the “size of some old-fashioned toy.”38

  A sixty-foot ceiling dwarfed the lawyers and witnesses, newspapermen and curiosity seekers who crowded each day into the second-floor courtroom in which James Fish was being tried before federal judge Charles Linnaeus Benedict, a veteran jurist appointed to his post by Abraham Lincoln.