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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  If Ward cared anything about his son or had that son’s welfare at heart, he would at least have brought in a respectable woman to take his mother’s place, and not one who was another man’s mistress.

  A personal inserted in the NY Herald worded something like the following—“Quid Pro Quo. Any information relating to F. Ward and B. Storer thankfully received. Green”—will be most likely to bring a little more knowledge to you. In case you need it at any time.

  Yours truly,

  Quid Pro Quo15

  Perhaps fearing further publicity, the Greens did not place an ad in the paper, but James McKeen asked Sidney Green, Fred’s younger brother, to see what he could dig up about Belle Storer in Brooklyn. The results were mixed. The “uncle” who was supposed to have attended her wedding turned out to have been a “myth” invented by Ferd. “She went [to Geneseo], alone, to be married,” McKeen reported, clear evidence that she was estranged from her family. And it seemed at least possible that she and Ferd had lived together in Brooklyn; one reporter said they had roomed in the same boardinghouse before coming to Geneseo. But, McKeen admitted on the eve of the hearing, “thus far nothing has been found which will warrant any attack on the present Mrs. Ward, though there seems little doubt that her antecedents are disreputable.”†

  The hearing was set to begin in the battered old Thompson town hall at one o’clock in the afternoon on Monday, October 8. The town was so enthralled by the drama about to unfold in its midst that school was canceled for the afternoon. Most of Clarence’s schoolmates filed inside the town hall, as did a large number of men and nearly every woman in the village, until every seat was filled. A sizable crowd was left outside hoping to overhear what was being said.

  But by one thirty, no judges or lawyers had appeared. A reporter walked down the street to the office of probate judge George Flint and discovered that he and the lawyers had already begun the hearing there, hoping to avoid what they knew would be a very large crowd. It didn’t work. Word spread, the town hall emptied, and the judge’s small office was quickly filled so completely that he and consulting judge M. A. Shumway of the superior court were forced to lead the lawyers, the witnesses, and the whole crowd back to the town hall and start over again.

  As soon as Flint called for silence, Senator Haggerty of Webster moved that the case be dismissed outright: since Clarence was being unlawfully held in Connecticut, its courts had no jurisdiction; any proceeding affecting the child had to be brought in New York State, the home of his father and therefore Clarence’s real home as well.

  Charles Searls, the Greens’ attorney, and Charles Perkins, a New York lawyer appearing on behalf of the Franklin Trust Company, each argued that section 453 of the Connecticut code empowered the court to appoint a guardian for any child residing within its jurisdiction if the parent was found to be unfit.

  Judge Flint agreed.

  Haggerty then refused to defend against the Greens’ petition. He would neither call nor cross-examine witnesses. His client would not appear, either. There was a murmur of disappointment at this news; everyone in Thompson had hoped to get at least a glimpse of Ferd, whom some in the crowd had threatened to tar and feather if he ever returned to town.

  Searls asked for a judgment by default in the Greens’ favor.

  The judge was sympathetic but thought it important that the petitioners offer enough evidence to make a prima facie case that Ferd was unfit to be his son’s guardian.

  They were happy to oblige. James McKeen began with a litany of Ferd’s dishonest dealings with his late wife and her family. Sidney Green corroborated everything to which the family’s lawyer had testified. Fred Green read out the bills Ferd had left unpaid after visiting Thompson. The female onlookers murmured when they learned he had run up an $11 tab for “bon-bons”16 ($283 today). They murmured again when Ferd’s damning correspondence with Mrs. Tallman was introduced into evidence. Nellie Green read from his menacing letters to her, told of his threat to marry a loose woman, and testified that he had never shown any genuine affection for Clarence when he was in town and had never bothered to send his son so much as a birthday present since his release from prison.

  At the end of the day, the court appointed Frederick D. Green the legal guardian of Clarence Ward. When the boy started toward home with his aunt and uncle their neighbors stood and applauded on the Thompson common.

  Ferd moved back to Geneseo, to the old parsonage at the corner of Second Street and Ward Place, surrounded by the books and well-worn furnishings of his boyhood. He opened a small-scale carpentry shop in the house, offering to do the same sort of minor repairs he had done at seventeen. Two old friends, surrogate judge Edward Coyne and the county clerk, William E. Humphrey, jointly hired him as their clerk, at $6 a week, and he was soon walking up Main Street each morning to his office and back again each evening, just as he had when he’d worked for Strang & Adams before leaving for Manhattan twenty-one years before. Except for the absence of his parents and the presence of his new wife, it was as if the fifteen years he’d spent in New York and Stamford—the country houses and blooded horses and evenings on the town—as well as the six and a half years in Sing Sing had all been simply an interruption, a sort of dream.

  Some seventy years later, a woman who grew up just across the street remembered the Wards well. Belle was “vivacious and very blonde [by then]—almost platinum,” she said, a wonderful cook who always kept a crock of freshly baked cookies ready for small visitors. Ferdinand was charming, too, but “queer-looking—like a plucked chicken—with a drooping moustache, an impossibly thin face and a prominent adam’s apple that bobbed up and down when he talked.”17

  His favorite topic continued to be himself, his favorite theme the constant sorrow he claimed to feel at being kept apart from his boy. He told his story so often and with such straight-faced skill that even after the kidnapping most of his fellow citizens sided with him in his efforts to get custody of Clarence. “Those who have known Ferdinand Ward since his return to this village are with him in this matter and interested that he shall succeed in his purpose,” a Rochester reporter wrote after canvassing his neighbors. “His every act since his discharge from prison has been calculated to win back the confidence and esteem which he enjoyed in early life and he finds every citizen of Geneseo as the result his friend and … has the good will of them all.”18

  So long as there was even a remote chance that he might still gain custody of his son—and his son’s income—he kept up his monthly letters to Clarence, writing as if the kidnapping had never occurred. Each letter was addressed to “my dear son” and signed “Your loving father, F. Ward.” Sometimes he spelled out Geneseo attractions he thought might appeal to a boy—a snowy mile-long slope lit by strings of electric lights for nighttime sledding; a dog and a cage full of canaries; the semiprofessional baseball team that rented out the second floor of the parsonage; a minstrel show, organized to raise funds for the Livingston County Historical Society, in which Ferd had played a featured role.

  But more often, his letters were meant merely to make his son and those who were caring for him feel guilty for the misery he himself felt. When the used pair of ice skates he sent his son for Christmas failed to fit—the only gift of which there’s any record—he used the occasion to bemoan his fate: “Papa and Mama did not get anything for Christmas.… Papa used to try to make everybody happy on Xmas and now those that he made happy seem to try to make him unhappy.”19 He also continued to attack the Greens and the care they were providing: “I know you have a poor school and get associated with many boys unfit for you, but try and live above them and be a gentleman.”20 He outdid himself on the anniversary of Ella’s death.

  These are hard days for your papa, for it is just five years ago that your dear mama died and went to Heaven. I know you are young yet and cannot realize what a loss came to us both then, but some day you will know and I will tell you all about her. It seems as if I must have you near me, my boy. Papa is getting old
[he was now forty-three] and feels each year more lonely and needs his boy to cheer and comfort him. I sat last night here in the old house and read over many of your mother’s letters and in almost every one she spoke of you and how happy we might be together. But now she is dead and you, our boy, whom she left me and whom we both loved, are kept from me by your cruel Aunt and Uncle and all because they can’t earn money for themselves but must have that which I earned.21

  Ferd had not been reading Ella’s letters. He had none: he’d left them all behind in Thompson when he fled to avoid the bill collectors.

  Again and again in his letters to Thompson, Ferd made it clear that he remained determined to have his son. Fred Green had won the guardianship battle in probate (and its judgment had subsequently been upheld by a higher court), but no one could be sure what Ferd might still do. For months after the kidnapping, whenever a strange horse and carriage was spotted on the road that led past the Greens’ house, Clarence was told to run to the attic or the woodshed and lock the door from the inside until it was gone. When he went out after dark to collect eggs from the henhouse, he sang hymns to keep up his courage.

  In the summer of 1895, Ferd persuaded Judge Coyne, his boss at the surrogate court, to appoint as his son’s guardian a local attorney and former assemblyman named Otto Kelsey. (Presumably, Kelsey had been promised a share of the proceeds once Ferd had control of his late wife’s estate.) The former assemblyman then applied to the Connecticut courts to compel Clarence’s immediate surrender.

  On January 12, 1896, all the parties converged on the superior court in Hartford. Ferd was in a hurry; under New York law, when a minor reached the age of fourteen he or she could choose between guardians. Clarence was now just eight weeks away from his fourteenth birthday.

  As the proceedings dragged on, Clarence sat between his aunt and uncle, fiddling with a Kodak camera. Ferd sat on the other side of the courtroom with Belle, his lawyers, and three sympathetic ladies from Geneseo, imported to show the town’s solidarity with his cause.

  His attorney charged again that Clarence was being “illegally held and imprisoned”22 by his uncle, and that he was now and always had been a resident of New York, not Connecticut.

  Attorneys for the Greens and for the Franklin Trust hit back hard. It would be an “outrage,” Charles Searls said, to tear Clarence from those who loved him and “deliver him to a stranger.” The boy was a “clever little fellow”23 who ought to be allowed to say where and with whom he wanted to live. Charles Perkins went further: Mr. Kelsey was a straw man, appointed purely to fulfill Ferd’s “mercenary purposes,” he said. “He would not lie awake nights if the child was not delivered to him but the boy and his uncle would lie awake nights if he were removed.”24

  The presiding judge agreed. So did the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors when the case reached it: “The child is not the father’s property,” the court said. “It is a human being, and has rights of its own.”25 Fred and Nellie Green took Clarence home with them to Thompson.

  * There would be no federal law against interstate kidnapping until after the death of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son, thirty-eight years later.

  † It is impossible to know now how many of Quid Quo Pro’s charges were true. Isabelle Storer did attend Wells College. Whether she had ever been anyone’s mistress or visited Ferd in prison is probably unknowable. She was most likely the woman to whom Ferd tried to smuggle letters early in his imprisonment and may have been the one about whom he wrote to Bourke Cockran just before his release. But if they had always planned to marry, it is hard to understand how he could have been courting at least two other women in the weeks after his release—unless he’d simply hoped to find a bride with a fortune of her own. In any case, no matter how colorful Storer’s past may have been, once she and Ferd were married she would stick by her turbulent husband until the end of his life. James McKeen to Charles Searls, October 4, 1894, author’s collection.

  Epilogue

  By the time my grandfather first told me the story of his kidnapping and rescue, he had been head of the art department at Oberlin College and director of its Allen Art Museum for nearly forty years.

  I suppose everyone’s grandfather seems special. Despite everything that had happened to him in the aftermath of his father’s crimes, mine really was. Everyone who lived in Oberlin, Ohio, thought so. He was a masterful teacher but also a master promoter who began his career in charge of an assortment of dusty plaster casts and ended it presiding over one of the great college art collections in the country. A man of boundless optimism and limitless energy, he was persuaded early on, as my brother, Andrew, has written, “that if he didn’t take charge, nothing at all would happen.… He was by nature a conspicuous man. He made his presence and absence felt, and his energy spilled off in a hundred directions. His company was by turns exhilarating and exhausting.”1

  He was a specialist in Romanesque and Gothic architecture who did not believe he fully understood a cathedral unless he had clambered all the way up to sit astride its ridgepole, and he was an eager builder who could not seem to stop adding rooms to his own house.

  For him, problems were always meant to be solved. When a white barber turned away black customers downtown, he helped bankroll an African American competitor and then became one of his first and steadiest customers. When he saw that people from the farming communities surrounding Oberlin—men and women like those he had grown up with in Thompson—were reluctant to attend the loftily cerebral First Church in Oberlin, whose congregation was made up largely of professors and their students, he designed a separate house of worship on the eastern edge of town, helped raise funds to build it, and then served as its pastor for twenty years—although he had never actually been ordained.

  The lectern and the pulpit suited him equally; each afforded him an audience. He seemed to be in perpetual need of the attention he’d been denied as a boy, and he could be petulant if he lost at cards or was interrupted when he thought he had the floor. But he was also a loving and attentive husband and father and grandfather; for him, holidays—marked by bravura carving of the turkey he insisted he and he alone knew how to roast—were celebrations of the kind of family closeness that meant everything to him, perhaps because he’d known so little of it when he was young.

  In his spare time he built cathedrals the size of Volkswagens on his sun porch, painstakingly put together from his collection of fifty thousand stone blocks, complete with flying buttresses, soaring arches, and stained-glass windows that glowed from within, meant to dazzle his grandchildren at Christmastime.

  For seven years—from 1897 to 1905—Ferdinand vanished from Clarence’s life. Once it was clear that he could not immediately win legal possession of his son or access to the boy’s income, he saw no need to feign further interest in him. There would be time enough for that once Clarence reached the age of twenty-one. For all Ferd’s supposed suffering at being kept from his son, he made no effort whatsoever to keep track of what was actually happening to him.*

  At fifteen, Clarence had been devastated when Nellie Green, the aunt who had treated him always as if he were her own child, died of cancer. We have no record of how Ferd took this news when it reached him, but, judging by the pleasure he had taken in the financial disaster suffered by his own brother a few years earlier, it must have been with something like delight.

  The impact on Clarence was unmistakable. His aunt had loved him; he could never quite be sure his uncle did. Asked many years later about the man who raised him, Clarence could say only that Fred Green had “always been good” to him and “appreciative of the fact that I did a lot for him, especially after his wife … died, to make his life more comfortable.”2 The boy found himself splitting wood and trimming the wicks of all the oil lamps in the house; he fed the chickens, groomed the horses, shoveled out the stable, peddled milk from door to door at a nickel a quart, and learned to cook for the whole family. He never complained. By working with such energy and devotion he ea
rned his uncle’s terse gratitude, but never his open affection.

  Clarence would work extra hard to win people over to the end of his life. When Ferd was still trying to persuade everyone that his boy belonged with him, he had expressed contempt for the sort of young people with whom he was supposedly being forced to consort in Thompson. In fact, those with whom Clarence spent the most time came from just the sort of families his father would have liked to cultivate: the self-styled “Summer Crowd,” like the four sons and two daughters of Norman B. Ream, a Chicago steel and railroad magnate so rich that his offspring and their friends could race their big tally-ho along seven miles of macadam road without ever leaving his vast estate, and so influential that he could order express trains on the New Haven line halted at Thompson so that frequent guests like Robert Todd Lincoln could get on and off. They were “a snobbish crowd,” Clarence admitted, but he made himself welcome among them with the energy and enthusiasm he brought to every game of euchre and croquet, every picnic and sing-along and taffy pull.3

  He attended high school for three years in Putnam, where he won a $10 gold piece and a set of Shakespeare for his skill at debating. He then spent a year preparing for Princeton at the newly established British-style Pomfret boarding school. There, he found the odds stacked against him. He entered in the sixth and final form, while most of his classmates had been there since the school’s founding. He was too small to do well in the team sports that mattered most to his fellow students. Then, too, he remembered, “my uncle knew nothing about what boys wore. I was sent up to Pomfret with a pair of trousers … such as you wore with a cutaway coat, and with [cologne], and with things which were not at all in accord with what the boys at Pomfret … were used to. They were known as ‘Peck’s Bad Boys’ then,† and were supposed to have been sent there because their families couldn’t handle them. They picked on me and made my life miserable.” He was so homesick for Thompson that he regularly wandered a mile or so out of town to a hilltop just to have a glimpse of the far-off steeple of the Congregational church.