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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  The big shade-trees on the grounds, from one of which depends a hammock filled with satin-covered cushions; a group of cozy easy-chairs on the portico; vases and hanging baskets filled with flowers and trailing plants—all this gave an appearance of wealth which seemed entirely incompatible with the small income which Mrs. Ward says she enjoys.

  While I stood eyeing the house with the curiosity and freedom of a stranger, Mrs. Ward came out the front door and commenced to water and arrange the plants in the swinging baskets on the portico. She wore a dainty morning wrapper of foulard silk, which, despite its flowing proportions, could not conceal the beautiful contour of her graceful figure.

  There was a cold, indifferent look on her face and a certain mechanism about her movements which showed that her mind was not on her work. Could she have been thinking of her dashing young husband,… within the gray stone walls up among the Hudson hills? It seemed more than possible, as once she paused, and, seating herself slowly in one of the chairs, turned her face wearily skyward. She sat like a statue for nearly three minutes, when she caught a glimpse of the motionless spectator near the street, then she got up and disappeared. Mrs. Ward’s home is small, but it is handsomely furnished, and she keeps three servants. If she lives on less than $3,000 or $4,000 per annum she certainly has acquired the faculty of making a dollar go twice as far as the average mortal.25

  The Tribune correspondent had heavily embellished his story. Ella’s house was modest. Her husband had no hidden fortune. Whatever she was spending came from the interest on her share of what was left of her father’s estate. Months of anxiety and loneliness and disillusionment had taken their toll; she now looked far older than she was, matronly and heavyset, unsmiling, peering out at the world through pince-nez.

  Despite everything, she had remained committed to her husband, dutifully writing to him at least once a week, packing and shipping his box of foodstuffs every two months, trying somehow to keep alive a marriage that she must have known by now had been built largely on lies. Ferd’s letters to her are lost, but her letters to him survive and suggest what his must have been like. He constantly asked for things—new shoes, silk handkerchiefs, a lampshade, a tobacco pouch, a sachet, a new razor, the latest novel by H. Rider Haggard. And he never stopped demanding cash—from friends, from family members, from her own bank account. She was “greatly mortified” when he tried to wheedle money out of Dr. Vail, their Stamford minister,26 and angered when he somehow managed to persuade Brentano’s to send him a sheaf of expensive sheet music and then present her with the bill: “This will have to come out of the money which I have set aside for your box,” she told him. “You must remember, Ferd, that my income is smaller than ever.”27

  When he told her he was sending someone to see her on a “business matter,” she saw it for what it was: a scheme to funnel illicit cash to him through an intermediary. “I feel that I would rather not see anyone on business,” she told him. “There is nothing that I care to talk about in regard to my affairs excepting [with] Mr. [James] McKeen [her friend and attorney].”28 And when Ferd spoke of publishing an autobiography intended to bolster his case against a pardon for Fish, she was adamantly opposed: “I would not have you do it for anything. You know how I feel about any more publicity.”29

  The details of her own life did not seem to interest him. She’d had a bleak Christmas, she reported one year, helped decorate the Stamford church for Easter with daisies, buttercups, and ferns, went yachting with old friends off Shippan Point in the summer, and suffered from sick headaches that often kept her housebound. Even the baby’s activities prompted little response from Ferd’s cell. “Bunnie”—Ella’s pet name for Clarence—was “very bright and has a most remarkable memory,” she wrote; at two and a half he could “repeat nearly all the stories in Mother Goose” and sang “a great deal and has such a funny deep voice.”30 When she finally had the boy’s long yellow curls cut and sent a handful of clippings to Sing Sing, Ferd didn’t thank her. He didn’t bother to acknowledge the photographs of Clarence she sent him, either.

  She felt deserted. Her brothers and sister visited only rarely; none of them could understand why she remained so loyal to the man who had done so much damage to their family. Her mother, in Brooklyn, was sinking into severe dementia that at least one newspaper attributed to the shock of her son-in-law’s betrayal. Ella took Clarence to the Champion House, where she and Ferd had once entertained their New York friends, but left quickly, feeling “rather lonesome as there is no one here I care for.”31

  When Ferd suggested that she and the boy move in with his parents—in order to keep her inheritance intact and available to him on his release—Ella rejected the idea outright. “Do not let my future trouble you,” she told him. “I could not go to Geneseo and I feel that it would not be best, either for your mother or myself.”32 She was right about that. Her mother-in-law, who had always disapproved of Ella’s “worldly” family, was also scornful and dismissive of her personally. “I hope Ella has been to see you—Poor thing,” Jane Shaw Ward wrote to her daughter in the summer of 1886. “She has not been well and I suppose is troubled about many things. She insisted on sending Ferd a box though I begged her not to. It was to be sent tomorrow to arrive with mine, or about the same time. I wish she might not send every time for I can do it a great deal better than she. She does not say a word about coming here, but I will not urge it. Perhaps bye and bye she will come.”33 She never did.

  To numb her headaches and perhaps also to blunt the increasing loneliness she felt, Ella began to rely more and more on alcohol-laced “female tonics” prescribed by her family physician. In mid-September of 1887, she failed to appear in the visitors’ room at Sing Sing as promised. “I suppose you are wondering why you do not hear from me,” she told her husband a few days later. “I had a very severe fall last week. I was just stepping down the stairs when I turned my foot and down I went the whole length. The girls picked me up as I was insensible. After I recovered I sent for the doctor and found no bones broken, but I am very much bruised and have a fearful-looking eye. I am better although not able to leave my door today but in a few days I shall be all right.”34

  Three photographs—now tea-colored and faded—were taken in Ferdinand De Wilton Ward’s tiny second-floor study in Geneseo sometime in the late 1880s. The room is a dark, claustrophobic place. Books are shelved in double rows—leather-bound sets with titles in gilt, massive reference volumes, miniature prayer books. There are heaps of manuscript, too, and piles of journals and stacks of small notes impaled on spikes. Newspaper clippings are pinned to the edges of the bookshelves, along with maps, lists, and two large photographs of a mummy’s desiccated face, meant to remind visitors of man’s mortality. The old man himself sits at the heart of these defenses, wearing a high clerical collar and self-consciously holding a pen above a blank sheet of paper. His long, pouchy face is composed, unreadable, as if he were determined to withhold from the intrusive photographer any hint of the impact of the disgrace his son had brought to him and to his family.

  Publicly, he stood steadfastly at Ferd’s side. When a Boston columnist argued that his son and Fish were equally guilty and that the banker therefore deserved no pardon, he sent him a letter of thanks.

  Most heartily do I thank you for your true and manly utterances that cannot but tell for justice regarding my son. For nearly three years Mr. Fish took two meals a day at his table and was treated [as] a parent. My child did wrong. He himself admits it. But he was a country lad. In Wall Street he met those who were old enough to be his father; temptations were presented, and he was not old enough to see the result; nor strong enough to resist. He has no desire to have Mr. Fish kept in prison, but he does not wish to bear all the burden of his evil doing. My boy is not chargeable with immorality, but is gentlemanly, generous, moral and an idol in a large domestic circle among whom are my brother-in-law, Hon. Freeman Clark, late Hon. Samuel G. Selden, etc., etc., etc.35

  But privately, he could n
ot bear to see his boy locked up. In September 1887, he told Sarah he planned a trip to meetings of clergymen in Auburn, New York City, Princeton, and Stamford. “Here is a question—to be seriously pondered—don’t answer hastily—ask your good husband’s opinion. Is it needful or desirable for me to stop at Sing Sing? My strong feeling is against it. I don’t think that F [would] like to have me.… If I must see F, I shall. Don’t say ought [about the] above in letters to Mother.”36

  Jane Shaw Ward was photographed separately at about the same time. Small and shrunken, she sits dwarfed by a cane rocker she and her husband had managed to bring home with them from India forty years before. On the wall behind her hangs a Seneca mask, a relic of her husband’s boyhood in the Bergen woods. She wears an old-fashioned lace cap to cover her thinning white hair. Her eyes stare mournfully away, and she keeps her clasped hands partly hidden in her skirt because she continued to think they were too large to look well. She seems utterly alone, cut off from the world by deafness and old age and the unimaginable things her son has been convicted of doing.

  She took what she called “melancholy pleasure in packing poor Ferdie’s box”37 and agonized over his ceaseless requests for cash. “This brings me to the oft-repeated subject of money,” she told him in one letter. “I do not know how to get it to you without acting underhanded. If you will only tell me just how I can honestly send it, you shall have $6 or $8 every month and I would not consider it wasted at all.”38

  Then, on December 30, 1887, she received from Ferd the letter she had hoped for all her life. He said he had at last become a committed Christian: “I feel Mother dear that, hard as this imprisonment is, it is going to be the best thing for me, for it has brought before me the evil of my ways and I feel from day to day a growing rest in God’s promises & mercy. I never felt so before, but now it seems at times as if He was right here in my cell and I talk to Him and tell Him all I feel and it brings comfort & hope & new courage.”39

  Jane reported her joy at his conversion to Sarah.

  Ferd’s father was not so easily persuaded by his son’s newfound piety. For one thing, his profession of faith was accompanied by yet another request for money to be sent to him by way of an errant keeper. “Oh, that he may not be deceiving himself & is respecting his religious feelings,” he wrote.40 “Doesn’t he know the consequences to us & to him to be perilous should we send it? He cannot need it for lawful purposes. Doesn’t he know that many are watching to see him do wrong & thus keep him where he is through the full term of his sentence? We must not send him a dime. Our motive is right, though he may not see it.”41

  Ferd did not see it, and continued to shower his mother with bitter complaints. His tone had not changed since he’d been a homesick schoolboy. He complained again about his eyes, about the hard work he was forced to do. Will was being cruel to him. Ella was seeking to punish him by failing to visit frequently enough. No one would send him any cash, even though other prisoners had plenty of it.

  His mother wrote him three times a week—“Letter writing is the great relief of her burdened heart,” her husband said42—but her letters showed as little understanding of her son’s true nature as they ever had. He was not to dwell on “the sad and discouraging features” of life in prison, she told him.

  Try, dear, to find a little joy in turning your thoughts upon those who love you outside of your sin and sorrow, who when they think of you rejoice to know that once you did all you could to make them happy and who find a great deal of enjoyment in what you have done. Think of me in my carriage driving friends about to see the country and taking great pleasure in the many improvements of the place and the furniture your kindness provided for the home. Think of Will, too, with his wife and children and Sallie with all her hopes and comforts with her family. I know you think of these things but I want you to have joy in our happiness and comforts and don’t compare and contrast your own condition with ours. It is a true saying that there is no happiness so great in this life as in knowing of the happiness of those we love and rejoicing in it. It will lessen one’s despondency and keep the mind from giving way. So, let your imagination picture all the comfort and happiness that those whom you love are enjoying even though you cannot partake in the same.43

  Ferd was incapable of partaking in such joy. In his own eyes he remained a perpetual sufferer; the happiness of others was only a reminder of his own unhappiness, evidence of how unfairly the world continued to treat him.

  “Above all, dear,” his mother told him on August 17, 1888, “don’t dwell on the fear that you may die in prison.”

  God will take care of that as he has done in thousands of cases before and if He should be allowed would not the freedom from sin and sorrow be joyful to you …? If you cannot live to redeem your own character, Christ will redeem it for you. Leave it all with Him, dear, and don’t be afraid.

  You have many loving friends and you must not dwell on the sad features of your life or the unjust charges that may be brought against you. It is not God’s fault that men are unjust or unkind, and as to the terrible life of a prison, remember dear, that you would never have been brought to it if you had been faithful to God. Try then to serve your time with courage and hope and don’t fear dying in prison, for Christ will be just as near you there as anywhere, and the world is a dangerous place to live in. Just make up your mind that you are better off in prison than you would be in Wall Street with your old disposition to be rich.44

  A month or so after she wrote that letter, Jane Shaw Ward fell ill with “catarrhal fever”—acute influenza. She died early on the morning of October 6, 1888, at the age of seventy-six.

  Her funeral was held in the Central Presbyterian Church two days later. Sarah was unable to attend. But William hurried east to help his grieving father get through the ceremony. Ella and four-year-old Clarence were there, too.

  Cousin George K. Ward of Danville was one of the four clergymen of different faiths who officiated. Reverend Joseph Kitteridge delivered the sermon. Jane Shaw Ward, he said, had been “a modest, retiring woman, almost morbidly sensitive to publicity” but a tireless and effective worker in the cause of Christianity—altogether “a woman worth emulating.” The congregation joined in the words of her favorite hymn:

  My hope is built on nothing less

  Than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.

  I dare not trust the sweetest frame,

  But wholly lean on Jesus’ name.

  On Christ the solid rock I stand,

  All other ground is sinking sand.

  All other ground is sinking sand.

  Friends and former parishioners bore the body to Edge Hill Cemetery. Clergymen of all denominations filed along behind, accompanied by scores of townspeople. Many downtown businesses closed. Jane’s fellow members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union passed a resolution in praise of her “blameless life.” The Young Ladies’ Missionary Society had the grave lined with evergreen boughs. There were banked floral tributes, as well—including a crown and cross of carnations and white roses and a pillow of mixed blossoms with “REST” picked out in heliotrope.

  Six weeks later, Ferdinand’s mother-in-law died at 37 Monroe Place, her children at her side. Ella was shattered: “How sad it is to feel that you are in your old home for the last time,” she wrote Ferd. “I am sitting in the backroom upstairs and looking at papa’s pictures and my thoughts go back to when he was with me.”45 Ferdinand was unmoved: he knew Mrs. Green’s offspring blamed him for her decline; it had begun, they believed, when it became clear that her son-in-law had stolen her fortune and most of theirs. He was convinced that Ella’s siblings would somehow now cheat her out of her legacy, a legacy in which he had hoped one day to share. Ella tried to reassure him. Her brothers and sister would never take advantage of her, she said, and in any case her lawyer, James McKeen, was there to protect her interests. This was of little comfort to Ferd: her interests concerned him only as far as they coincided with his own, and he knew that McKeen�
��who had attended his trial, had listened to his testimony before Referee Cole, and knew how he had plundered the Green family fortune—was hostile to him.

  Ferd hoped that Will might intervene on his behalf, but in January 1889, he and Kate and their family set sail for Europe. Will was to represent Colorado at the upcoming Paris Exposition. It was an honor to have been asked. It was also a way to get out from under the pressure of his imprisoned brother’s inexhaustible demands. On New Year’s Day, he wrote a farewell letter to Ferd.

  My first letter of the New Year will be to you my dear brother and with it the wish that the year may not be more sad or heavy than you can bear.

  I sail on Saturday and shall not see you till my return. I wish to send you a word of love—of brother love, constant and sincere—although I know that you do not think I love you as I do. Words are vain at times and I will not write them but all I can say is that you have never had nor will you have in life a truer heart near you than mine.

  Your loving brother,

  Will46

  A few weeks later, more bad news: on January 29, President Grover Cleveland commuted James Fish’s sentence. He was to be released on May 11.

  Ferd was livid. Bourke Cockran begged him to keep his anger to himself; it would not advance his cause. “I hope you will be very careful in the ‘Fish’ matter,” Ella wrote, “and say nothing to the papers.”47 She was too late. Ferd had already told a visiting reporter that he was “pleased” by the news, so long as the commutation was “based on the grounds of [Fish’s] age, failing health and that he has suffered enough for the crime. My opinion would be different if it has come through further vilification of me.”48