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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  He lashed out in all directions. Will leaked a letter outlining what Ferd claimed he was prepared to prove when he finally got a chance to defend himself in court. “The Grant family had drawn out more money from the firm than they’d put in”; Grant’s sons had engaged in the contract business even though they said they had known nothing about it; “a number of prominent men, including bank presidents, etc.,” had also pocketed exorbitant gains on those so-called contracts but had been allowed to remain anonymous.21

  Ferd threatened to reveal their names, then said he could not do so, on advice of counsel. But he also issued a warning: he had copies of all his correspondence; those who attacked him unfairly could expect to be embarrassed. “I am not dead,” he said. “Other people have had their day and I have suffered, but there is an end to everything, and Ferdinand Ward will soon be heard from on his behalf.”22

  Finally, he granted a lengthy interview to a reporter for the New York Herald, providing a detailed history of Grant & Ward, ten densely printed newspaper columns carefully skewed to put the blame for everything that had happened where he always insisted it belonged: on others. If it hadn’t been for foolish investments insisted upon by Fish and the Grants and a sudden downturn on the stock market in early 1882 he would never have had to begin the borrowing that brought about disaster. Fred and Buck Grant had encouraged him to deal in the supposed government contracts, though they denied it. William S. Warner and the anonymous members of his blind pool had victimized him and his firm. The directors of the Marine Bank had approved each and every loan made to Grant & Ward; if they hadn’t understood that there was no collateral supporting some of them, he and Fish alone should not be blamed.

  Ferd made no mention of the chronic deceit that characterized everything he’d done from his days as the Sunday school treasurer at the Church of the Pilgrims through his wholesale looting of the treasury of New York City. Individual investors may or may not have thought the government contracts Ferd described were improper; only he had known that they had never existed at all.

  The Herald’s man had a final question. Ferd had been in jail for months, time enough to have discovered who his real friends were. Had he anything to say about that?

  He had been waiting for the question. He rose dramatically from his chair, strode to the fireplace and gazed out the window for a moment, then returned to his chair. “Well,” he said, tapping his teeth with his tortoise-shell spectacles.

  It seems to me that these men, several of them old enough to be my father, some of whom had made conspicuous fortunes in life before I was born, having utilized me and my endeavors to the tune of millions of dollars of profit, having patted me on the back in the noonday of prosperity, have now turned away and slipped so far to the background that the public look to me alone for explanation, for restitution. I have accepted my position, and, in order that I might do what a man ought, have stripped myself. As to the position occupied by these others who have not been stripped, and who have not stripped themselves, I leave the public to ponder and the courts to determine.23

  In the face of all the damage he’d done, his self-pity and stubborn self-righteousness were breathtaking, but there was something in what he said, nonetheless. A grand jury had charged J. Nelson Tappan with actions “incompatible with the trustworthy and satisfactory discharge of the duties of his office,” but he had been allowed to resign because of ill health and died before any court could move against him. S. Hastings Grant blamed everything on his late co-conspirator—“[Mr. Tappan] was the custodian of the city’s money and I knew very little about banks,” he said—and managed to remain in office until the election of a new mayor.

  The Erie Railroad dismissed Bird W. Spencer, the treasurer and heavy investor who had arranged the train trip to see the Kinzua Viaduct, but he, too, escaped prosecution and would one day retire as president of the People’s Bank and Trust Company of Passaic, New Jersey.

  Former mayor Grace always denied that he had invested in Grant & Ward’s government contracts. When Joseph Pulitzer’s garish New York World charged that Grace had known all along that Ferd was dishonest and that he and his confidential secretary, E. H. Tobey, had “shared the profits of Ward’s rascality,” Grace sued Pulitzer for libel. Five days later, however, Tobey was accused of larceny and brought before a grand jury. Called to testify, Grace claimed that if Tobey had done wrong he had “done it all alone.” The case never reached court. Neither did Tobey. When his case was called he did not appear; Mr. Grace had sent him out of the country, all the way to Peru, to work for him in the guano business.24

  Ferd hurried up the broad marble steps of the New York County Courthouse on Chambers Street on Monday morning, October 19. He was escorted by Warden Kiernan, two lawyers, and Will Ward, whom one newspaper described as a “sturdy, stubby figure … the faithful friend who sticks by his brother like a brother.”25

  This was Ferd’s first public appearance since the death of General Grant had intensified the public’s interest in finally seeing him tried for his crimes. Bootblacks and newspaper boys shouted his name. Reporters hurried from their offices on Park Row. Curiosity seekers so clogged the corridors that lawyers had to elbow their way up the stairs and into the court of oyer and terminer—the criminal trial branch of the New York Supreme Court—where more than a hundred spectators were already seated and fifty more stood at the back.

  Ferd took his seat at the defense table. Four times since June, he and his attorneys had been summoned to court to answer a criminal indictment. Four times he had pled not guilty. And four times, the prosecution had pigeonholed the indictment rather than chance a trial in a case undercut by reluctant or uncooperative witnesses. “Anxious to be tried,” one reporter noted, “Ward had begged and implored and beseeched his counsel to be prepared.… Always thin and attenuated, always placid exteriorly, always self-contained and self-poised, Ward bore the scrutiny of a thousand eyes with the easy nonchalance of a man of the world.”26 Others who knew him better noted that he’d lost weight at Ludlow Street, and that he drummed his fingers on the rim of the derby in his lap and nibbled nervously at the fringe of his thin blond moustache.

  The two lawyers seated at his side were among the best in the business. The chief counsel, General Benjamin Franklin Tracy, was a grave, gray-bearded veteran of the Civil War from an old upstate family, a former U.S. attorney, prominent in Republican politics, and widely admired for the cool but relentless skill he brought to cross-examination. His assistant counsel was his mirror opposite: W. Bourke Cockran, clean-shaven, red-faced, Irish born, a Democratic Party orator whose florid style of speechmaking Winston Churchill would one day credit with having helped shape his own. Neither had much confidence that anything but a guilty verdict was possible, given the public mood and the number of accusations that continued to be made against their client, but they were prepared to do their best to get him off—or at least minimize his punishment.

  But once again, the prosecutors startled everyone. District Attorney Randolph B. Martine told the judge he was unable to proceed on the original indictment charging Ferd and Fish with defrauding the Marine Bank, because of a dearth of witnesses: Nathan Daboli, the Marine Bank cashier who had spent weeks testifying at Fish’s trial, was now too ill to come to court; E. H. Tobey, Mayor Grace’s man, had vanished altogether; William Warner, just hit with an unexpected federal indictment charging him with conspiring with Ferd to defraud the Marine Bank, was unlikely to testify against his co-defendant for fear of incriminating himself.

  Martine proposed therefore to try Ferd on a brand-new indictment for grand larceny. He waved a fresh bundle of papers. This indictment alleged that on the morning of May 5, the day before the crash, Ward, already overdrawn at the Marine Bank, deposited a check for $75,000 drawn on the First National Bank, where he had less than $2,500 in his account. Then he wrote an individual check to William S. Warner for $71,800 on the Marine Bank and had it certified on the strength of his earlier deposit, knowing all the time
that that check had been worthless. This constituted a crime under Section 529 of the Penal Code, punishable by ten years in prison.

  “My object was to present the clearest and simplest of all the complaints against him,” Martine later explained to a reporter who asked why he’d decided to proceed with this indictment rather than any of its predecessors, “so that I could make the trial short and effective and call few witnesses. In plain English, I want to convict Ward and I have no doubt that I will, and by choosing the plainest and briefest one I hope to avoid even the possibility of any such mischances as are likely to occur in … long trials.”27

  Under normal circumstances, it might have been risky. James Fish, the principal prosecution witness, was a convicted felon, after all, whose loathing of his former partner was well known and who had nothing to lose by lying. But further delay was politically unacceptable: the district attorney hoped that the public’s anger would help make a jury overlook its suspicion of Fish in the interest of putting Ward permanently behind bars.

  Fish was at first reluctant to reemerge before the public; he said he hated being “made a Jumbo.” But in the end he could not resist the opportunity to testify against Ferd, whose “punishment is about the only thing I care to live to see.”28

  Ferd again pled not guilty. Justice George C. Barrett, a Tammany jurist with exaggerated sideburns and a reputation for moving his cases right along, gave the defense just three days to prepare for trial on the new charges. When General Tracy argued that he needed more time, the judge said it shouldn’t take long to find out whether or not his client had had money in his account when he wrote his check. He would see everyone Thursday morning at ten o’clock.

  A thick oak bar blocked the door of the courthouse when Ferd and his team arrived that morning. The officer who let them pass was stationed there to make sure the crowds were more carefully controlled than they had been for Ferd’s first appearance. Shortly after the voir dire began, the district attorney moved that since Ferd was now a criminal defendant he should be moved from his comfortable lodgings at Ludlow Street to the big, noisome, Egyptian-style city jail called the Tombs. Judge Barrett agreed.

  Warden Kiernan walked him there that evening, stopping for a last drink along the way for old times’ sake. The Tombs was not a pleasant place: it stank of sewage, rats scurried along the corridors, and prisoners were packed three and four at a time into narrow cells built for one. Ferd somehow got a cell to himself on the second tier. He refused to speak to the common criminals on either side of him and saw to it that dinner was brought in to him from outside every evening.

  It took four wearying days for the lawyers to work their way through nearly seven hundred potential jurors, trying to find a dozen men who had not already made up their minds about the guilt of Ferdinand Ward. The last man seated had him confused with the Brooklyn pastor Henry Ward Beecher. The jurors picked as their foreman an ice cream manufacturer named Moses Huntoon.

  Shortly after noon on Monday the 26th, the twelve men took their seats in the jury box and District Attorney Martine finally began outlining the state’s case. “You are to try the defendant upon this charge and upon no other,” he said when he was finished. Then, he added helpfully, “You are not to try him on the charge of having, by fraud and deceit, obtained from General Grant and his family all the money they ever had and sending the great soldier down to the grave heartbroken. Neither are you to try him upon having by fraud and deceit sent an old man to the penitentiary who had treated him like a son.”29

  General Tracy was on his feet. “I emphatically object,” he said. The district attorney was seeking to prejudice the jury against his client even before the testimony began.30

  Martine said he was merely making it clear what the jurors were to consider and what they were to ignore. Judge Barrett overruled the defense.

  Fish was called to the stand. He had been staying under guard for several days at the Murray Hill Hotel waiting for this moment. Assistant District Attorney Ambrose H. Purdy had escorted him to the Casino one evening, where the two men watched the chorus from the same box Fish had once shared with Ferd. Fish’s daughter brought his eight-month-old infant to his room so that he could see her. Former associates dropped by too, and Purdy suggested to some that they begin the process of applying for a presidential pardon for their old friend. It would be a fitting reward for the contribution he was about to make to the cause of justice, he said.

  Now, Fish settled into the witness chair, he looked younger and more vigorous than he’d seemed when he himself had been on trial. He wore a crisply pressed dark suit and a blindingly white shirt with an old-fashioned upstanding collar. He crossed his legs and, staring down at Ferd, began polishing his spectacles with a silk handkerchief, eager to reveal to the world what he called “the true inwardness of Ward’s villainy.”31

  Before he could begin doing so, General Tracy was on his feet again. He moved that because of the district attorney’s improper opening statement, the jury should be discharged and a new one empaneled.

  “I can hardly suppose you are making that motion seriously,” Judge Barrett said.

  “I am making it most seriously.”

  “Then I will most seriously decline to entertain it.”

  Purdy asked the witness to identify himself.

  “My name is James D. Fish. I am sixty-six years old. I am an inmate of Auburn penitentiary, having been sent there under a sentence of ten years at hard labor. And by occupation I am a convict.”32

  Purdy showed him Ferd’s check for $71,800, made out to William S. Warner. He had personally certified it, Fish said, after Ferd told him over the telephone that there was money to cover it in his account at the First National Bank. He’d spoken with Ward hundreds of times on that telephone, Fish said. His voice had been unmistakable; so was his reassuring message.

  “Did you trust in that statement?”

  “Most implicitly,” he answered, almost shouting. “I believed him to be an honorable and truthful man—a man with whom I would have trusted everything I had in God’s world.”33

  “Do you know the defendant? Do you recognize him here in the court?”

  Fish leaned down, peering over the heads of the attorneys sitting between him and the defense table, and glared at Ferd. “Yes,” he said, “that—is—the man.”

  Ferd glared back.

  General Tracy handled the cross-examination. If his client were to have any chance at all, he needed to destroy Fish’s credibility. Ferd always contended that it was Fish’s troubled bank, not Grant & Ward’s demands, that had brought on the crash: how else to explain Fish’s pressure on him in the preceding days to raise money to shore it up?

  Ferd had armed his lawyers with nineteen letters from his former partner showing that Fish had been anxious about the health of his bank for more than two years. The most damaging was written a little over a month before the crash.

  (Private) March 29, 1884

  My dear Mr. Ward: “Life is short” as we often have it quoted to us.… We carry an immense burden, that no other bank would, for the company and for many of their employees, and on collateral that no other bank would recognize. If the bank cannot be relieved of some of it I shall leave as sure as anything in the world. I see no prospects of things getting better with them.

  Yours.

  J. D. Fish34

  What had he meant? Tracy asked. He had merely been “annoyed,” not really worried, when he wrote it, Fish said. Business hadn’t been as bad as all that. By saying he would “leave,”35 he had merely meant that he would one day retire.

  The letters showed that Fish was an unreliable chronicler of his bank’s history, just as Ferd knew they would. Fish had been fully aware that the loans he had approved to Grant & Ward and its employees were questionable, at best; he’d known also that Ferd and the firm were frequently overdrawn; he had always been afraid that everything might end in disaster.

  But the same documents also presented serious problems f
or the defense because they showed that at the heart of all of Fish’s anxieties were Ferd’s business practices: he repeatedly asked his young partner to replenish his overdrawn accounts, explain what was going on, bring securities back to the bank to satisfy the National Bank examiner. “Grant & Ward were at the bottom of it all,” Fish said several times. “I had constant trouble with Ward. The promises that he did not keep and the heavy loans to his firm kept us always in a state of annoyance and uncertainty.”36

  Tracy pushed on, nonetheless. Had Fish believed all the money loaned to Ferd and to the firm had been amply secured? He had. He had thought his bank was “well secured and solid as a rock”—and he hadn’t known on May 5 that Ferd had taken away his satchel filled with securities.

  Tracy asked that the reference to the satchel be stricken as irrelevant. Barrett sustained him.

  But hadn’t Fish actually believed on May 5th that if he didn’t certify Ferd’s check, his bank as well as his firm would have been ruined?

  Fish struggled to explain. His actions had been dictated by who had signed the check, he said. If the bank had refused to certify a check written by a comparative stranger like William Warner, it would have had no serious impact. But if a large check to an outsider had been rejected—a check written and signed by Ward, who was both a director of the bank and a partner of its president—the news would have spread fast and cast serious doubt on the bank’s health.

  Tracy pounced: then Fish had certified the check because failure to do so would have brought ruin?

  “I did not say that.”

  “Well, did you not believe that?”

  “I believed the bank and Mr. Ward were perfectly sound. If we had possessed all those millions of dollars of government contracts that Ward said we had, there would have been no trouble. With such securities in hand we could have got aid from other banks. I did not know until the morning of May 6, 1884, that those government contracts were myths.”