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

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  He did much better at Princeton, where he discovered art and architecture with one of America’s first full-time art historians, Allan Marquand, and resolved to follow in his footsteps. “When I came home … and told my uncle … he was terribly shocked and taken aback,” he recalled. “The word ‘professor’ applied to bootblacks and ordinary tradesmen and was never considered to have any standing in the community at all. The idea of this boy whom he’d nurtured and sent to college now coming back to be a college professor was very shocking to him.”4

  March 11, 1905, was Clarence’s twenty-first birthday. His lawyer, James McKeen, had warned him to be prepared for fresh assaults by his father. Sure enough, a small blue envelope arrived in the morning mail. It was postmarked Geneseo, and closed with a wax seal in which was stamped an elaborate “W,” for “Ward.” The opening salvo was in his stepmother’s handwriting, but she was clearly speaking for her husband.

  My dear Clarence,

  Best wishes and congratulations on your twenty-first birthday. We have made you a member of the Andrew Warde Association of which you are a direct descendant. The certificate of membership we sent you by today’s mail.‡

  Clarence, dear, your father feels now that you have gained your [majority], he hopes you will be a devoted son, and carry out your mother’s interest in him, and prove yourself worthy of the trust, they both carefully planned for you. He has a copy of all legal papers, your Mother’s will, and everything connected with the trust. It is on these matters he is very anxious to see you, and will meet you in New York, or elsewhere, as you wish, and is waiting for your reply. I know, Clarence, you will learn to love your father, and not fear him, for he loves you dearly. Think of how he has suffered. For eleven long years he has tried to have you with him and now that it rests entirely with you, to make him happy do so, my boy, and I will do everything in my power for you both. Your father feels this long separation deeply, and I have every confidence in you, Clarence, for I feel you will do your duty toward making the best of a great wrong in which you had no control.

  Again, sending many happy returns of the day.

  With love,

  Yours very affectionately,

  Isabelle A. Ward5

  Clarence responded gingerly: he was grateful for Mrs. Ward’s birthday greeting, but he wanted her to know that so far as his mother’s estate was concerned “I have no more power now than I had before, since it is still in trust [until he was twenty-five and would inherit the principal] and I do not see what there could be to discuss with my father about it. If there is anything important that he wants to know, however, I will try to meet him at Mr. McKeen’s office, as he is the only one who can give advice on such matters.”6

  Ferd wrote right back. He was “surprised and hurt,” he said, at the idea that his own son would assume he wanted to talk about his mother’s estate. (That was, of course, precisely what his wife’s letter had said he wanted to do.) It was his parents’ estates he wanted to discuss.

  If you are not man enough at the age of twenty-one, to meet your father as a man should, and talk over a business matter in a fair and frank way, then let me know when you will meet me at McKeen’s office and I will be there, but I see no reason at your age you should deem it necessary to talk with your own father before an attorney. There are certain duties a son owes to a parent, Clarence, and one of them is to at least allow that parent opportunity to be heard before showing the want of confidence that your letter indicates.

  If you start in the world on this tack, my son, I fear you will come to grief.7

  Clarence agreed to see his father. They met for lunch in a dining hall at Princeton. Ferd settled into a seat facing the door, then suddenly paled and asked his son to swap seats with him. Clarence turned around to see what the trouble was. Mark Twain was standing in the doorway, unmistakable in his ice cream suit. Ferd was evidently frightened that if Twain recognized him he would make good on his threat to avenge General Grant. Twain didn’t spot him and was safely ushered to a table on the other side of the room.

  They ordered lunch. Ferd spun out an elaborate story. He was staying with friends in Newark, New Jersey, now, he said. His job in Geneseo had recently been eliminated and he saw no prospect of finding another there. In his desperation he had been forced to borrow $1,000 from his own lawyer, who was now demanding payment. He needed Clarence’s help.

  The last part was true. Nothing else was. Ferd was not visiting friends; he was living in Newark because he had been caught stealing in Geneseo and forced to flee his hometown. His employers had foolishly allowed him to use his courthouse office after hours to do accounts for local businessmen, among them a remarkably gullible fire insurance agent named Henry B. Curtis. Somehow, Ferd had managed to siphon money from seventeen of Curtis’s customers, who thought they were paying premiums to protect their property. His victims had banded together and approached his lawyer, threatening to sue if they weren’t repaid right away. He needed $1,000 to buy them off so that he could move to Manhattan, where he and his wife planned to rent a brown-stone on West Seventy-third Street and take in well-to-do boarders.

  His parents’ wills expressly barred him from using any of the income from their estates to pay his debts, but he had managed to persuade the executor, his cousin Levi, to relinquish his post to a pliant friend who planned to borrow against the principal and then share the proceeds with Ferd. Clarence, as a contingent legatee, was the only potential obstacle. His father pulled from his pocket a pen and a release relinquishing Clarence’s rights to any part of his grandparents’ estates, and insisted he sign it on the spot. “With all the property you have from your Mother,” he said, “you might let me have the small amount left to me by my parents.”8

  Clarence said he would have to check with Mr. McKeen.

  Ferd was furious. “I have done everything in my power to gain your affection Clarence,” he wrote a few days later, “but it seems of no avail, and now I feel that the time has come when sentiment must be set aside and I must act. I have known much injustice for the sake of my affection for you, but as it brings no return, I am determined to see that my rights are protected. You will avoid all this trouble by signing that release and in doing so no later than Saturday.”9

  Clarence did not sign, but he did agree that the Franklin Trust should pay the thousand dollars needed to keep his father out of prison.

  Within weeks, Ferd was making still more demands. This time even Clarence, who had remained courteous if detached when dealing with his father, was angered. “Your last letter,” he told him, “was so unjust that I am induced by it to take the stand that I can do nothing for you.… I would be pleased if you would avoid the mockery of signing ‘your loving father’ in any further communications which you may have with me.”10

  Ferd paid no attention. When Clarence graduated from Princeton in June, he asked him to “accept a Father’s love and congratulations”—and promptly threatened to sue for the jewels he continued to claim had belonged to him and not to Clarence’s mother. Five years of lies and harangues and threatened lawsuits followed.

  Clarence consulted McKeen and other attorneys, but he also seems always to have been anxious that no actual injustice be done to his father. He traveled to Geneseo and Rochester to see for himself what was going on, and conferred with his uncle Will and aunt Sarah, even though neither one had been willing to take him in after his mother died. Over and over again he said he wanted nothing to which he was not entitled.

  Through it all, Clarence also did his best to lead a normal life. The summer after his graduation, his ex-roommate Charles Adams introduced him to his wife’s younger sister, Miss Helen Eshbaugh. A Mount Holyoke sophomore from Montclair, New Jersey, with a personality both “witty and angular,” according to one of her grandchildren, she was studying biology, intending to become a schoolteacher. She and Clarence clung to one another, perhaps in part because each had had to live with a legacy of scandal: her father, D. O. Eshbaugh, the Pennsylvania-born
president of the New England Loan and Trust Company, had drowned himself after his firm went bankrupt in 1898, leaving Helen’s mother with six children to raise. Clarence wrote Helen poems, took the train from Princeton up to Mount Holyoke to see her nearly every weekend, bought his mother’s engagement ring from the Franklin Trust for $675, and then asked her to marry him.

  The wedding took place in July 1907; throughout their lives together, she would provide him with the loving admiration he craved and the sense of equilibrium he needed.

  Two weeks after Clarence was married, Ferd attacked him again, his anger evidently intensified by his son’s happiness. He felt “the most violent hostility toward his son,” one of his own lawyers reported to Clarence, “and wants measures taken which will deprive you of your property, even though he admits he cannot get anything for himself.”11

  When Ferd could find no lawyer willing to undertake his baseless suit against the Franklin Trust, he concocted an elaborate scheme in partnership with a New Jersey warehouseman named Thomas Morton. Morton was to sue him to collect payment on a large fictitious loan. Ferd would then declare bankruptcy so that Morton could claim the jewels Ferd falsely said were his. The co-conspirators would split the profits, if there were any. Mr. McKeen had grown so weary of Ferd’s shamelessness that he told Clarence “if you were not his son, I should be inclined to advise you to hunt him up and give him a good, old-fashioned licking. He is, and has always been a physical coward.”12

  The bankruptcy hearing took place in Newark shortly after Clarence’s twenty-fifth birthday in 1909, the date on which the principal of his mother’s estate and the jewels should all have been turned over to him. Ferd, Clarence, and McKeen testified. All the New York papers covered it. The case came to nothing. Morton backed off. The principal of the estate and Ella Ward’s jewels were finally turned over to her son. He used a sizable portion of the money to build himself a house in Montclair, New Jersey. He had a daughter now, named Helen after her mother.

  Everything seemed to be over, at last, but Ferd hadn’t quite given up. In December 1910, he began publishing a series of weekly articles about Grant & Ward in the Sunday supplement of the New York Herald. There was nothing new in any of them—in his version of the crash he remained always the victim, never the villain—but, gussied up with splashy double-page illustrations, they put him back into the news, where he always liked to be.

  He had been threatening to publish an account of his career ever since he was locked up in the Ludlow Street Jail, and had once claimed he’d written it only because he wanted his boy—about whom he cared more “than life itself”13—to understand the great wrong that had been done him. Now, he hoped to wield it as a weapon against that same son.

  “You have doubtless read my articles on Gen’l. Grant which appeared in the New York Sunday Herald of Dec. 19, 26, Jan 2, 9 & 16th,” he wrote Clarence on January 26, 1911.

  I have been asked to write another article giving a history of my own life and that of my immediate family. I dislike very much to do this, but as it is absolutely necessary for me to have money enough to live on, and as you insist on keeping from me what is rightfully my own, I have no choice as I cannot starve.

  I have asked nothing from you but what is rightfully my own and as every dollar you now possess came from me, it seems only right that you should consider this, as well as your dear Mother’s wishes and act justly with me.

  I write this simply that you may know my position in the matter and not censure me for not letting you know my intentions.

  Your Father

  Ferdinand Ward14

  James McKeen assured Clarence he needn’t worry. He was quite sure no such offer had ever been made by the Herald. His father continued to suffer from “hallucinations in money matters.”15

  A few weeks later, Belle Ward bustled into the office of Edward Day, Clarence’s New Jersey attorney. She had a “compromise” to offer, she said. Her husband now wanted $2,500 from Clarence, she said ($58,200 today), plus “the diamonds.”16 If he didn’t get everything he wanted, he would publish a story about his cruel and ungrateful son and she would personally call upon the president and faculty of Rutgers University, where Clarence was now an associate professor, in order to blacken his name.

  Day laughed her out of his office, but Clarence took her threat seriously enough to ask for an appointment with the president of Rutgers, the Reverend Dr. William Henry Steele Demarest. He wanted to make sure Demarest understood who his father was; if he felt the presence on the faculty of a swindler’s son would embarrass the institution, he was willing to resign. President Demarest told him to go back to the classroom and not to worry; the sins of the father would not be visited on him.

  Six years later, when Clarence was interviewed by the president of Oberlin College, Henry Churchill King, to see if he was the right man to head its art department, he would again make sure everyone understood that his father was Ferdinand Ward. King saw no problem, either.

  Clarence and Helen Ward would spend the rest of their lives in Oberlin, where they raised their children—my aunt Helen and my father, Frederick Champion Ward. But Clarence made few concessions to the Midwest. Rural New England was evident in his unchanging, unmistakable accent; in his refusal to wear a coat or a hat during the coldest Ohio winters; in his politics—he was a lifelong Republican, just as almost everyone in Thompson had been.§

  By the time the younger Wards got to Oberlin in 1917, Ferd and his wife had found at least a temporary home in her father’s old house on Staten Island. He was too frail to look for work—or so he claimed—and Clarence began sending him $20 a month out of his professor’s salary to live on.

  One summer, when Clarence and Helen were visiting the East Coast, they took their children to Staten Island so that Ferd could see his grandchildren. My father remembered only that he was thin and pale and seemed far older than his wife: “She was his promoter,” he said. “I remember her saying, ‘Remember your grandfather and write to him.”17 They only stayed about twenty minutes.

  Many years later, when one of his grandchildren asked Clarence why he had bothered to make that visit, and why he had provided Ferd financial support after all the trouble he had caused him over so many years, he seemed genuinely surprised by the question. “He was my father, after all,” he said.

  Ferdinand Ward outlived his son’s attorney, James McKeen, who died in 1911; his own old partner James D. Fish, who passed away the following year at ninety-three; his long-suffering brother, Will, who died on his own seventy-fourth birthday in 1917; and his patient sister, Sarah Ward Brinton, who followed Will in 1924, at the age of eighty-seven.

  Ferd finally died of nephritis in a boardinghouse in White Plains, New York, on March 3, 1925. He was seventy-three. Isabelle Storer Ward died the following year. Both were buried in the Green family plot at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. It fell to Clarence to make all the arrangements.

  Fifty-five years later, I was fortunate enough to speak separately with the last two people to have known Ferdinand Ward well.

  Jasper Yeats Brinton, Sarah Ward Brinton’s fourth son, was ninety-three then, home on a visit from Cairo, where he had been a judge on the International Court for many years. He had the same deep-set blue eyes and generous nose that Ferdinand De Wilton Ward and Ferdinand Ward and Clarence Ward had all possessed. Like his father before him, he saw himself as the guardian of the Brinton family’s long and distinguished history, and ninety years after the fall of Grant & Ward he was still reluctant to discuss its impact upon his parents. He had never heard anyone so much as hint that Uncle Ferd was “anything but guilty,” he said. “I’m sorry to say it, especially to you, but during his visits he always had a slippery air. Always full of ideas and schemes and wanting to be introduced.” The judge had a hoard of family letters—more than a thousand of them—and was willing to share them with me. But when I asked if he knew what had happened to a box of documents dating from the time of the crash that Ferd was believed to
have left with his sister for safekeeping, he brightened. “I burned them,” he said, spreading his long fingers out toward his visitor. “With these hands.”

  The judge’s first wife, Alice Bates McFadden, then Mrs. Laurence Eyre, had a different impression. She had only recently married Jasper Brinton when Ferd came to call in 1910. No member of the family had ever so much as mentioned “Uncle Ferd” to her beforehand, she remembered. But he explained who he was, and she invited him in for tea. He told her his long sad story, and by the end of the afternoon she had taken it upon herself to make him feel welcome in her husband’s family. He had also managed to borrow $500. “I knew him well and liked him immensely.” She smiled. “He could charm the birds from the trees.” She never got her money back.

  * Shortly after Ferd’s final bid for custody was rejected, Claude Bragdon, a young architect based in Rochester, began visiting Geneseo to oversee construction of a new colonial-style county courthouse at the north end of Main Street. From time to time, he remembered, he had reason to drop into the old county clerk’s office.

  There, I sometimes saw a poorly-dressed old-looking man whose face had the unnatural pallor of mushrooms grown in a cellar.

  “Do you know who that man is?” Judge Coyne once asked me. “That is Ferdinand Ward.”