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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Tracy interrupted. “I object to that. What I want is information concerning the condition of the Marine Bank.”

  “I am prepared to tell you, General,” Fish said, leaning forward, his voice shaking. “Don’t you see the effect of my having been deceived about those contracts? If we had what I supposed we had, there would have been no such collapse as occurred.”37

  Tracy moved that any mention of the supposed contracts be stricken as irrelevant to the simple question at hand. Barrett denied the motion.

  The contracts swindle now seemed fair game. Assistant District Attorney De Lancey Nicoll eagerly pursued the subject on redirect, prompting Fish to describe the promises Ferd had made to him in February 1882: huge profits harvested from secret government contracts secured with behind-the-scenes help from former senator Chaffee, Stephen Elkins, and General Grant himself.

  Tracy was back on his feet. Out of respect for the late general’s memory, he said, the part he and his name had played in the affairs of Grant & Ward should be declared out of bounds. “If the prosecution desires to open this avenue of detraction and drag in the mire the great name of the dead for whom the nation mourns, then upon their head must rest the responsibility. If they desire—”

  Judge Barrett cut in. “General Tracy, I have had enough of this. There is no call for any such remarks. This is merely a matter of law.”38

  Fish was allowed to go on about the contracts for a time before Barrett stopped Nicoll to ask what he was driving at. The assistant district attorney said he hoped to show that it had been Grant & Ward’s constant demands for unsecured cash that had threatened the bank.

  Barrett told him to stop; intriguing as that line of questioning might be, it had no bearing on the question of Ferd’s fraudulent check.

  As a final question for his chief witness, Nicoll asked Fish to describe the evening Ferd had come to his apartment after the crash to apologize. The old man erupted at the question. His face turned red. His voice rose. He raised his arm high above his head to show how he had threatened to crush his visitor with a chair. “I told him he was a black-hearted, treacherous scoundrel, and that if he were not such a contemptible crawling little villain I would kill him in his tracks.” He was shouting now. The defense tried to interrupt; so did Justice Barrett. Fish could not be stopped. He had urged Ferd to “drown himself, hang himself, anything to rid the world of his presence,” while the defendant had cowered on the ground, groveling, whimpering.39

  Ferd sat through it all smiling slightly, one reporter noted, “as though he rather enjoyed seeing the helpless old gentleman in rage and fume.”

  Fish was excused. His brother, Benjamin, the bank’s former paying teller, swore he had been present when his brother and Ward spoke over the telephone about Ward’s worthless checks. Even though his brother had held the receiver close to his ear, Benjamin claimed, he had clearly heard every word Ward had said. Jurors spoke up, expressing skepticism. The court crier was dragooned into holding an imaginary receiver to his ear while the younger Fish showed how close he had been. At first, he said he’d been only six inches away from the mouthpiece; later, he admitted it had been more like eighteen.

  The prosecution rested.

  Justice Barrett invited the defense to present its case.

  Bourke Cockran rose to his feet. His huge voice filled the courtroom and could be distinctly heard in the corridors beyond. He asserted that no one in New York history had ever endured such calumny as his client had suffered over the past eighteen months. He’d been accused of every kind of crime and hounded by the press, by shadowy businessmen, by the members of a “prominent family.” Now, he was the innocent target of the largely uncorroborated testimony of a vengeful felon.

  James D. Fish comes here and, animated by venom, swears to anything that comes into his head, and being utterly irresponsible knows that he cannot be punished.… He is probably working for a pardon and to make Ward a scape-goat. It is an outrage that the liberty of a citizen should be sworn away upon the testimony of a convict, who cannot be punished for perjury because he is already under a sentence which will exceed the small margin that remains to him before he attains his allotted three-score years and ten. It is infamous that the penitentiaries should pour out their vomit for such a purpose as this. This man Fish has been brought from State Prison for a holiday to swear away the life and liberty of Ferdinand Ward.

  There had been no fraud on Ward’s part, in any case. Fish had needed no assurances from Ferd before certifying the check in question; he had known the bank’s condition was dire and simply wanted to try to save himself as well as his institution. Testimony based on telephone conversations had never been used in court before, and Benjamin Fish’s inability to say how far he’d been from the earpiece when he claimed to have heard and recognized Ferd’s voice showed how utterly unreliable his testimony had been.

  The district attorney had hoped Ferd himself would testify on his own behalf so that he could establish a record on which other indictments might be based. But Ferd’s lawyers would not him let him anywhere near the witness stand. Instead, General Tracy called just three witnesses. None did their client much good.

  William Warner, who had changed his mind about testifying, said that it had been he, not Ferd, who’d had his check certified; Ward had handed it to him in his office as payment for one of many obligations coming due that week. But he became agitated and nervous when asked by Nicoll to explain the nature of his transactions with Ward.

  William C. Smith, the broker who’d handled Grant & Ward’s transactions on Wall Street, claimed he had had no sense of impending crisis in the spring of 1885; it was the bank, not his part of the business, that had been in trouble, he said. But then he admitted he couldn’t recall how things actually stood on May 5th or how much money he’d helped to raise or anything at all about the firm’s relations with the city of New York.

  Finally, General Tracy asked Julian Davies, the firm’s receiver, to read off an impressive-sounding list of securities he’d found in its vault after the crash—but on redirect the prosecutor showed that none of them had actually belonged to Grant & Ward.

  “Perhaps you would like to know how much money I found in the assets?” Davies asked.

  “I would.”

  “There were $700 in the office and the bank accounts were all overdrawn.”

  During all of this disastrous testimony, a reporter noted, “Fish seemed to take delight in observing the nervous manifestations of his former friend and partner. Like a cat watching a mouse, Fish sat for more than two hours a few feet from Ward, with his eyes fixed on the prisoner’s face.”

  At 7:20 in the evening on October 28, after closing statements from both sides, Justice Barrett sent the jury off to deliberate. Buck Grant had joined the crowd now, wearing a mourning band in honor of his father and eager to see Ward punished at last. Ferd and his counsel waited an hour or so. Then, escorted by Warden Kiernan and the Ludlow Street janitor, Billy Smith, he strolled to a saloon for a ham sandwich and a glass of beer.

  On the way back to court he lit up a cigar and talked with a reporter for the Sun. As they walked along, he did his best to seem cheerful. “You newspapermen, instead of abusing me, should be my warmest friends, for have I not kept you pretty busy for over a year?” He thought his chances for acquittal were poor, and wanted to know the worst just as soon as possible. “If I am convicted I shall go up the river at once. I would rather be anywhere than in the Tombs.” But he wasn’t through, he warned. He was being railroaded to halt further investigations, but the powerful, faceless figures behind the prosecution should not take too much comfort in its success: “I have a great many letters … that will prove interesting to a great many persons and I know a great deal that has not yet been made public.”

  The jury filed back into the courtroom at 12:40 in the morning. Despite the lateness of the hour, most of the spectators’ seats were still filled.

  At the defendant’s table, Ferd gnawed at his mou
stache and passed a hand over his eyes.

  He was asked to stand. He rose, and then stared at the floor.

  “Gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?” the clerk asked.

  “We have agreed,” foreman Huntoon answered.

  “And do you find the prisoner at the bar guilty or not guilty?”

  Ferd lifted his head. His hands shook.

  “Guilty.”40

  Before sentencing Ferd, Judge Barrett paid tribute to the members of the jury. The trial had been truly impartial, he said; most men would not have needed even to leave their seats to come to a guilty verdict. Then, he addressed the defendant.

  I have nothing to say further to affect you. Probably it would be useless. You have remained throughout the trial apparently insensible of your condition and unrepentant.… You have done more than any other man ever did for undermining commercial honor and affecting injuriously financial confidence. Yet your demeanor shows no repentance whatever. I simply content myself with passing judgment upon you that you be confined in the State Prison at hard labor for ten years.41

  Shortly after two that afternoon, a closed carriage stopped in front of the Forty-second Street entrance to Grand Central Depot. Four men got down and hurried inside. Two were lawmen—Sheriff Alexander Davidson of New York County, and Warden Kiernan. Ed Doty, carrying a black box tied with twine that contained a change of underwear for his boyhood friend and former boss, struggled to keep up as the group crossed the waiting room beneath the vast glass-and-iron ceiling.

  It was the fourth man—small and slender with a blond moustache, wearing an elegantly tailored suit and smoking a cigar—who quickly drew a crowd. Ferd Ward had first passed through Grand Central a dozen years before. He had been penniless then, anxious but eager and anonymous. He had no more money now than he’d had when he arrived—was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, in fact—and was almost universally reviled. The 2:30 train that would carry him north along the Hudson to Sing Sing was about to pull out. As Ward and his escorts hurried across the waiting room and down the long stone platform between hissing trains old acquaintances nodded to him. Ferd nodded back, but when one stepped forward and tried to speak to him, he moved past without replying.

  The little party filed into the smoking car and settled into the dusty velvet-covered swivel seats. Several reporters got on too, and just as the train started to move, newsboys appeared on the platform, shouting, “Evening papers! Evening papers! Sentence of Ferdinand Ward!”

  Ferd kept his composure for a time, chatting quietly with his escorts. But when the train reached Spuyten Duyvil in the Bronx and the broad Hudson swept into view, he fell silent and let the hand that held his cigar fall to his side.

  * At least one investor’s lawyer sought to explain to a judge Ward’s power over such a large host of men who, in hindsight, should have known better than to do business with him.

  I do not believe there was any man ever brought into personal contact with Ferdinand Ward without feeling … his wonderful arithmetical power and glibness in the statement of facts and results, the amazing honesty of tone which he adopted, the skill with which he surrounded himself with everything which indicated the man of education, refinement and taste, as well as the man of prosperity—a rising man. Anyone who saw him with the prestige thrown around him by his relation to the bank president and the Grants and by his former success, and with all his peculiar surroundings, must have believed that he was in contact with an extraordinary man. This is a fascination which we all recognize in the case of politicians and also in the case of women. He had the power of fixing his eyes on a man and willing the dollars out of his pocket, such as no man ever had since the world was. I am thankful that while I may have been exposed to other fascinations, I never, never was brought in contact with Mr. Ferdinand Ward before his failure.

  Argument of Charles B. Alexander, representing George C. Holt as Assignee, &c.; against William S. Warner before Supreme Court, City and County of New York, Grant & Ward Bankruptcy Collection, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

  † No document attesting to their marriage at any time in 1884 survives in the municipal archives of any of New York’s five boroughs.

  ‡ Grant’s book, Personal Memoirs, was published that winter. In February 1886, Twain presented Julia Grant with her first royalty check, for $200,000, the largest in publishing history up to that time. With it, she was able to pay off many of her husband’s creditors. Eventually, 300,000 two-volume sets were sold and she would earn more than $420,000—almost $10 million today.

  FOURTEEN

  The Model Prisoner

  At first glance, Sing Sing looked more like an oddly compacted industrial city than a traditional prison. A cluster of tall redbrick factory chimneys streamed black smoke into the sky above the Hudson. White clouds of steam rose from a warren of workshops. New York’s largest prison was also the largest source of involuntary labor in the United States. When Ferd arrived, virtually all of the 1,500 inmates who lived in the sixty-year-old, six-story stone cellblock that dominated the complex spent six days a week performing contract labor. As many as 900 men were marched to the Perry & Company stove works each morning; some 200 more labored in the Bay State Shoe Factory; another 160 toiled in a vast laundry, washing, drying, and starching 2,400 shirts a day. Scores more made cabinets and furniture, forged chains, fashioned harnesses, and hacked away at the marble and limestone quarries that honeycombed the nearby hillside. Freight trains rattled through the prison grounds on a special spur that led down to two riverfront quays where sailing ships and steamboats came and went all day, their decks piled high with prison-made stoves and shoes, bookcases and coiled lengths of chain for distribution up and down the river. “The steam screeched through factory whistles,” a visitor reported, “pigeons cooed on the gutters, lines of convicts tramped to and fro, adjacent mill wheels flew around like lightning,… ceaseless activity dominated all the place.”1

  Incarceration was meant to punish, according to New York’s superintendent of prisons; rehabilitation was a “senseless notion” dreamed up by “morbid sentimentalists.”2 Prisoners were to pay for their upkeep with their hard work—and were to be kept at it by a combination of strict discipline and unapologetic brutality.

  When Ferd ducked beneath the ivy that overhung the main entrance to the prison and disappeared inside, he was entering a world unlike any he had ever known. Newspapermen were barred from following him very far, but Jimmy Connaughton, the big, beefy, red-faced principal keeper, later came out to tell them what had gone on. Ferd was escorted to the chaplain’s office and asked to wait, facing the wall, arms folded, forbidden to speak, until the prison clerk appeared.

  Name?

  Ferdinand Ward.

  Age?

  Thirty-three.

  Occupation?

  Banker.

  Religion?

  Protestant.

  Had he attended Sunday school? He had.

  He stood five feet nine and a half inches; weighed 130 pounds; had blue, deep-set eyes; “a long rather large and crooked nose,” and “a long neck and large Adam’s apple.”3

  He affirmed that he could read and write, drank alcohol, used tobacco moderately, and had never been in prison before. He agreed to sign the form authorizing prison officials to read all his mail, coming in and going out: he could receive an unlimited number of letters but was permitted to mail just one envelope a month. Contact with his family was severely limited, too: they could send him a box of eatables every sixty days, and he was permitted a single visitor for only half an hour every other month.

  He was issued a striped uniform and told to bathe. He turned over the contents of his pockets, including an alligator-skin wallet and $185.77 in cash, to be held until his release. The doctor pronounced him able-bodied enough to start work in the stove factory on Monday morning.

  Then he was escorted to cell number 927, on the fourth tier on the northern side of the prison, fac
ing away from the river. His neighbor on one side was a burglar; on the other side was a lifer in for first-degree manslaughter.

  “We shall have no difficulty with Ward,” Connaughton assured the reporters as they started back toward the city. “He has come here in the right spirit, and intends to do his duty. He will be shown no favors. We are favorably impressed with his conduct, and I predict that he will get through without even a reprimand.”4

  Throughout the process, Ferd had been polite, deferential, and eager to please, as he almost always was. But things weren’t quite as they seemed. During his first hour or so in prison, Ferd had almost surely been asked another question Connaughton had not told the newspapermen about, a question asked of every newcomer: Could he be counted on to “put up?”5—that is, to come up with enough money to pay off guards and keepers for the soft jobs and special privileges most prisoners could not afford.

  Sing Sing was every bit as corrupt as the Ludlow Street Jail had been. “The world of ‘touch’ does not end for the convicted prisoner when he leaves the county prison,” one of Ferd’s fellow prisoners wrote. “In fact, he really is only entering it when he gets to Sing Sing and the value of money is nowhere more assured than within the prison walls themselves.”6

  Ferd understood the uses of money better than most, and he quickly sized up the officials he would need to please. Warden Augustus A. Brush was technically in charge. A corpulent gray-bearded martinet, he was also the Republican boss of the 1st Assembly District of Dutchess County. Once, when a prisoner threatened to reveal that thousands of dollars were missing from the accounts of just one of the contract businesses under the warden’s supervision, Brush saw to it that the potential whistleblower was shunted off to an asylum to assure his silence.