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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  As to Mr. Ward’s affection for his son; it was not conspicuously manifested while in Thompson, and, upon his sudden departure, he indicated no wish to have Clarence accompany him. No affection was developed on the part of the boy towards his father, and a change from his present home would be extremely repugnant to him.… Whether Mr. Ward’s treatment of Mr. and Mrs. Green, the only persons of all his kith and kin who gave him a welcome when he came out of prison, is such as their great kindness toward him [deserves] we need not discuss now.

  It seems to Mr. Green and to others interested in the boy’s welfare that he should not be turned over to Mr. Ward without more ample assurances from him as to the stability of his expressed purposes and plans than he is at present able to give. If that time ever comes, we feel assured that Clarence will be returned to his father with the hearty consent of all those who are interested in him and in the development, during the transition period of his life, of a manly and noble character.6

  James McKeen complimented Searls on how well he had spelled out the Greens’ case. Now that Ferd had been forced to tell his legal advisers about his attempt to extort money from the Tallmans, he was sure they would “admonish him to let well enough alone. I do not believe they will countenance any kidnap methods.”7 Five months went by without another word from Ferdinand.

  At eight thirty on the morning of September 12, 1894, Clarence—now ten years old—finished his morning oatmeal, threw his book bag over his shoulder, said good-bye to his aunt and uncle, and began the half-mile walk to school with his two cousins. Soon after turning left onto Main Street they were joined by Clarence’s friend Dunbar Ives, son of the Baptist minister. The great arching elms that made the unpaved street into a leafy tunnel were showing the first red and orange signs of autumn.

  Just as the four children reached the front of Rand Chandler’s big house, next door to the schoolhouse, Clarence turned and saw a sleek little runabout of the kind people then called a democrat coming up fast behind them. The horse, a handsome sorrel, slowed, then stopped. Two men were on the seat. Clarence had never seen either of them before. One held the reins. The other leaned down and asked Dunbar Ives if he was Clarence Ward.

  No, he said, and pointed to his companion.

  “Good morning, Clarence,” the stranger said. “Your father wants to see you. You’re to come along with us to Putnam.”

  Clarence was puzzled. He had only seen his father a few times two summers earlier, and he’d been taught to be polite to adults. “I had no reason to think it wasn’t a perfectly bona fide thing,” he remembered many years later. Still, he hesitated. His aunt had warned him that if his father ever turned up he should run home, and if anyone tried to take him away he should start shouting and keep it up until Uncle Fred could get there.

  The stranger jumped down, seized the boy beneath the arms, swung him up onto the seat, and climbed up behind him. The driver whipped up the sorrel, and the democrat clattered southward down Main Street toward Putnam.

  Clarence, squeezed beneath the two strange men, began to shout, “I won’t go! I won’t go!”

  Men and women ran out of their houses, set just a few feet back from the road, to see what was causing the commotion. Some ran after the buggy. “I yelled my best,” Clarence remembered. “The man saw that the people heard me …, so he grabbed me by the throat. Then, he found that I got black in the face—I heard the driver say I did—and he put his hand over my mouth.”8

  Meanwhile, fourteen-year-old Helen Green raced toward home, screaming that her cousin was being kidnapped. Other children on the way to school started shouting too.

  Mrs. Rand Chandler gathered up her skirts and ran to E. S. Backus’s grocery and dry goods store, where there was a telephone station. With the help of Mr. Backus, she reached the authorities in Putnam, alerting them that Clarence and his kidnappers were on their way there, presumably to catch the fast train to New York.

  But as he was speaking, a woman’s voice broke in on the line. Mrs. George Nichols, wife of the president of the Dime Savings Bank of Thompson, was calling from her home on the Putnam road about two miles southwest of town. A fast-moving buggy carrying Clarence Ward and two strangers had just turned off the road in front of her house, she said. They were no longer headed for Putnam but were already trotting along a narrow, meandering dirt track that led north through the village of Grosvenordale to the main road to Webster, just over the Massachusetts border, ten miles away. She could still hear the boy screaming.

  By then, Fred Green had harnessed his own carriage and started toward Main Street. Pastor Cummings climbed up next to him. E. S. Van Arsdale, a summer resident from New York, ran out of his house with a revolver and handed it up to Fred. He lashed his horses. Other Thompson citizens followed as quickly as they could, some in carriages, some on horseback. If they failed to catch the kidnappers before they crossed the state line and Ferd managed to get his hands on the boy beyond the reach of Connecticut law, they would lose him forever. Just as James McKeen had predicted, once Ferd’s attorney learned that his client had been caught trying to steal money from the widow Tallman after leaving Sing Sing, he had advised him to delay his attempt to get legal custody of his son until he and his new wife were reestablished in his hometown and he had proved himself willing to earn a legitimate living. But neither attorney understood the depth of Ferd’s anger or the obsessive nature of his sense of grievance. For nine years, the world had conspired to deny him those things he deemed rightfully his. Now, his own lawyer wouldn’t help him, and the courts offered no remedy, so he had resolved at last to seize his son.

  Despite all the threats he had made over the past two years, he did not dare do the job himself. Confrontation was not his style. Instead, with the help of Massachusetts state senator Charles Haggerty, a Webster attorney with political connections in Boston, he had devised a brutally simple plan: a paid agent would snatch the boy from in front of his school. First he would pretend to be taking him south to Putnam, where his father would presumably be waiting to put him on the New York train. Then he would head north instead, to Webster, where Ferd would smuggle him aboard the noon train to Boston before anyone knew what had happened.*

  With Haggerty’s help, he had hired a former police detective from Boston named Frank J. Ryder, who was willing to act on his behalf. The two men had arrived in Webster on the previous afternoon’s train and made their way to the best hotel in town, the sprawling two-story Joslin House. Ferd signed the register as “Frank Ward” and picked a room on the second floor where he was to wait for his boy to be delivered to him. Then they had hired a buggy and headed off toward Thompson so that Ryder could get a sense of the lay of the land. Ferd knew the back roads well from his summer visits two years earlier, and he wanted to show his hireling the street that ran past the Thompson schoolhouse where he was to kidnap Clarence the next morning.

  Ryder and J. Duggan, the local liveryman whose horse and runabout he’d hired, had followed Ferd’s plan to the letter. But Clarence’s screams had given away their true destination, and by feinting toward Putnam and then taking a winding country track that linked with the main road to Webster, they had gone well out of their way. Fred Green and his Thompson posse headed straight for Grosvenordale, hoping to cut them off. When they reached the junction, he stopped to ask a small boy picking apples if he had seen a carriage with two men and a boy. Yes, he said. They had just trotted out of sight. They, too, had stopped by the orchard, to ask him if they were on the right road to Webster.

  Fred lashed his team. About four miles from town, he spotted the kidnappers trotting along ahead of him.

  He urged his team into a full-out gallop.

  The gap between them began to close. Clarence saw his uncle’s carriage coming.

  “Come and take me, Uncle! Come and take me!”9

  Duggan whipped his horse. Ryder again tried to muffle the boy’s screams.

  Green drew closer. He dared not fire his borrowed revolver for fear of hitting
the boy. The road was too narrow for one buggy to pass another. The race went on for two miles, three miles, four.

  As they reached the outskirts of Webster, Fred’s weary team began to slow, then fall back.

  A carriage was coming the other way. Webster Constable Joseph C. Love happened to be out for a morning drive. Seeing the runabout hurtling toward him with a stranger holding his hand over a small boy’s mouth, he assumed the child had been hurt in an accident and pulled off the road to let them pass. But Fred Green, coming right behind, stood in the carriage, waving his free arm and shouting that the boy was being kidnapped. Love wheeled his buggy around, made room on the seat for Fred and Pastor Cummings, and started into town after the retreating carriage.

  The Joslin House had been established half a century earlier as a temperance establishment, but its new owners had thoughtfully installed a barroom between the attached livery stable and the hotel lobby so that every visitor had a chance at a drink before checking in.

  Duggan drove his lathered horse into the stable. Ryder jumped down and carried the boy into the barroom. The bartender looked startled. Ryder told him some men were following him, and tossed him a $5 gold piece for his promise to tell them he hadn’t seen him or the boy.

  He raced up the stairs with Clarence over his shoulder, carried him down the corridor, and opened the door to the room where Ferd had promised to be waiting. He wasn’t there. Ryder put the boy down and warned him not to make a sound.

  That morning was meant to mark Ferd’s greatest triumph, the end of almost a decade of failure and frustration. He had defied his lawyer, outwitted the courts, outmaneuvered the Greens, and was about to gain control of his boy—and with it immediate access to the interest from his wife’s estate and potential command of the principal, as well. Everything seemed to be going as planned, but he had still been anxious, agitated, unable to sit still. He paced the room, repeatedly consulted his father’s gold watch, peered out the window, then suddenly decided to step down the street for a quick shave. It had taken him and Ryder about an hour and a half to cover the back roads from Thompson to Webster the previous evening, and so when he left his hotel room at about nine thirty and headed for the barber shop, he thought he still had roughly half an hour to wait before the boy was finally in his hands.

  But he had miscalculated. He and Ryder had been trotting when they’d timed their travel. His agents were now at the end of a galloping, headlong race. Ferd was seated in the barber’s chair, feet up, towel around his shoulders, chin lathered, when the runabout carrying Clarence and the kidnappers flashed past the shop window. By the time he’d wiped off the lather, paid the barber, and stepped outside, Fred Green and Constable Love were already in sight, followed by a stream of carriages and mounted men from Thompson, some waving pistols. Ferd shrank back into the doorway, then slipped down the street in search of his lawyer, Senator Haggerty.

  A minute or two after Clarence and his kidnapper climbed the stairs to Ferd’s room, Fred Green burst through the door of the bar. He asked if anyone had seen a man and a small boy.

  The bartender Ryder had bribed shook his head. But a customer nursing a midmorning beer in the back of the room silently pointed upstairs.

  Green took the steps two at a time. He banged on the door of Ferd’s room. Ryder opened it, thinking it must be the boy’s father.

  Green pushed his way in. Clarence tried to run to his uncle. The kidnapper held on to him.

  “What right have you with that boy?” Green shouted.”

  His father is here.”

  “Where?”

  “He’ll be here in a minute.”

  “I demand that you give me the child.”

  “By what authority?”

  “By this authority,” said Constable Love, stepping into the room and throwing open his coat to display his badge. “And if you don’t turn over the child, I’ll put you under arrest.”10

  The Boston detective backed down. He hadn’t bargained for jail time.

  Fred Green and the constable led Clarence down the stairs, anxious to get him back across the Connecticut line before his missing father could be found. By now, a crowd of townspeople had gathered in front of the hotel. Buggies from Thompson filled the street. The crowd was angry. When someone cursed Frank Ryder, he displayed his Boston detective’s badge—“as large as a soup plate,” one reporter wrote—and tried to “overawe the country folks.” “I was taking the boy home to his loving father,” he said.

  “Yes and half-strangled him on the way,” an angry farmer answered.11

  As Green and Love lifted Clarence up onto the seat of the constable’s carriage, the red marks left by Ryder’s fingers could be seen on the boy’s neck.

  Haggerty thought it best to pretend he had known nothing of the kidnap plan in advance. “I had been in court trying a case and was on the street looking at the fun,” he told a newspaperman, “when somebody told me that Ward wanted to see me. I made my way through the crowd and spoke to Ward and he said he wanted to see me at my office.”

  Haggerty told Ferd there was no time to talk. “There is your boy,” he said, “and if you want to keep that boy in Massachusetts you must act quickly.” Ferd held back.

  Constable Love’s buggy started down the street toward Thompson. Love held the reins. Clarence sat safely between him and his uncle Fred. The little army from Thompson fell in behind them.

  “If Ferdinand Ward had told me to act as his counsel instead of telling me he wanted to consult,” Haggerty continued, “I would have put my hands on young Ward, ‘This boy is ours.’ Neither Frederick D. Green nor any constable or Connecticut farmer would have taken the boy out of Massachusetts unless by due process of law.”12

  In the end, no one was arrested: since the boy had been taken in Connecticut it was unclear whether a case against his kidnappers could be made to stick in Massachusetts. Ferd paid the hotel bill. Then he and Ryder hurried to the depot and stepped onto the northbound train, without the boy they had come to steal.

  The New York Herald summarized the day’s events: “Ferdinand Ward, late of Wall Street, but more lately of Sing Sing, must have lost much of his cunning, for his attempt to kidnap his own son was a dramatic fiasco.”

  The failure was bad enough from Ferd’s point of view, but ridicule was intolerable. He bought space for a personal reply the following day.

  A CARD FROM FERDINAND WARD

  To The Editor Of The Herald:—

  Your story in this morning’s paper is in every respect most cruelly unjust and not true in nearly every point.

  The boy came willingly and no force was used of any kind. I can’t believe that you could knowingly have let such falsehoods appear. I have but one desire, and that is to gain the custody of my child, and were you similarly situated, I feel sure you would feel as I do.

  I do not ask or expect any of the income of his estate, although every dollar of it came from me. I have a home for my boy and I want him with me, and he will gladly come.

  The Greens have poisoned his mind against me, for the income they get from the estate is all they have to live on, and hence their lies and slanders. I thought the HERALD meant to be just, but it seems that I can’t expect that even from it.

  I will prove before the courts soon that I am in the right in this matter, and so convince you of how cruel this article is.

  FERDINAND WARD

  GENESEO, N.Y. Sept. 14, 1894.13

  It is impossible to know how much or how little of what Ferd wrote he had actually come to believe, but every assertion he made was untrue. The boy had been terrified. Force was used. Ferd desperately wanted access to his son’s income. Ella’s estate had not come from him. Until the kidnapping, the Greens had been scrupulous in keeping their opinion of Ferd from his son.

  But now, they petitioned the probate court in Thompson to have Fred Green appointed as Clarence’s legal guardian. A hearing was scheduled for October 8.

  James McKeen and Charles Searls believed that the
kidnapping alone would go a long way toward demonstrating Ferd’s “unfitness” for having his son restored to him. But they wanted as much additional evidence as they could gather. Nellie Green remembered that at one point during a shrill exchange with Ferd, he had threatened that if the Greens and his brother and sister were not more generous with him, he would have no choice but to marry what he called a “dissolute woman.”14 Five days after Ferd’s notice appeared, Fred Green received an anonymous letter that seemed to suggest that he had done just that.

  New York

  September 18, 1894

  Dear Sir, If you want to keep the boy and beat Ward, why don’t you attack the character of Belle Storer the woman he married, and show she is not a proper person, or he either for that matter, to have control of the boy, you can do it safely as she was for years the mistress of a certain man and Ward knew it when he married her.

  She is the woman Ward sent to Wells College and paid one term’s tuition for just before he was sent to Sing-Sing. She is the woman who constantly visited him all the time he was in prison. She is the woman your sister, Mrs. Ward, knew he was infatuated with, and intended to take up with again when he came out as he has done, for the scheme was cut and dried long before your sister died and she knew or suspected it.

  The Storer woman never married Ward because she cared anything about him, but she thought as he did that he was going to get the money that was left to the boy and she would do anything for money, and marrying anyone that had it. Ward don’t want the boy but he does want the money that was left to the boy. The boy’s mother was smart enough to keep him from getting control of it, for the money would come in very nicely to support himself and the woman who was your sister’s and is your son’s worst enemy.