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

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2012 by Geoffrey C. Ward

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ward, Geoffrey C.

  A disposition to be rich : how a small-town pastor’s son ruined an American president, brought on a Wall Street crash, and made himself the best-hated man in the United States / by Geoffrey C. Ward.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “This is a Borzoi book”—T.p. verso.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95944-7

  1. Ward, Ferdinand De Wilton, 1851–1925. 2. Capitalists and financiers—United States—Biography. 3. Swindlers and swindling—United States—Biography. 4. Financial crises—United States—History—19th century. 5. Ponzi schemes—New York (State)—New York—History—19th century. 6. Grant, Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson), 1822–1885—Friends and associates. 7. Children of clergy—New York (State)—Biography. 8. Ward, F. De W. (Ferdinand De Wilton), 1812–1891. 9. Rochester (N.Y.)—Biography. 10. New York (N.Y.)—Biography. I. Title.

  CT275.W2752W37 2012

  974.7′03092—dc23

  [B] 2011035140

  Jacket image: The Wall Street Hell-Gate by F. Graetz from Puck magazine, May 14, 1884. Courtesy of the author.

  Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson

  v3.1

  A cartoonist for Puck assessed the chaos Ferdinand Ward had caused on Wall Street eight days after his fraudulent brokerage collapsed; in the foreground, Ward’s ruined partner, General Ulysses S. Grant, clings to a spar from the Marine National Bank, the financial institution that went down with the firm.

  For my grandfather, Clarence Ward,

  my father, F. Champion Ward—and

  for my brother, Andrew, who might have

  made a better story out of this material

  but was kind enough not to try

  Family is what counts.

  Everything else is a side-show.

  —F. CHAMPION WARD

  If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton,

  you may as well make it dance.

  —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  THE PURITAN

  ONE The Higher Calling

  TWO Labouring In Hope

  THREE Chastened and Sanctified

  PART TWO

  ONE OF THE WORST BOYS

  FOUR A Contest for Principle & Truth

  FIVE The Triumph of the Monster, “War”

  SIX Suspected of Evil

  PART THREE

  THE YOUNG NAPOLEON OF FINANCE

  SEVEN The Avaricious Spirit

  EIGHT The Bonanza Man

  NINE The Imaginary Business

  TEN Tears of Grateful Joy

  ELEVEN The End Has Come

  PART FOUR

  THE BEST-HATED MAN IN THE UNITED STATES

  TWELVE A Magnificent and Audacious Swindle

  THIRTEEN A Verdict at Last

  FOURTEEN The Model Prisoner

  FIFTEEN All That Loved Me Are in Heaven

  PART FIVE

  THE LOVING FATHER

  SIXTEEN Driven to Desperation

  SEVENTEEN The Kidnapping

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Photographic Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Illustrations

  Other Books by This Author

  Prologue

  On the afternoon of August 8, 1885, the streets of Manhattan were given over to grief. Ulysses S. Grant had died five days earlier, after an agonizing fourteen-month struggle, first against financial ruin and then against throat cancer whose every hideous detail had been reported in the newspapers. Nearly a quarter of a million people had shuffled past the ex-president’s bier at City Hall. Now, his coffin was to be borne north along Broadway to a specially prepared vault in Riverside Park at 122nd Street. No event—not even the funeral procession of Abraham Lincoln along the same street a little more than twenty years earlier—had drawn such crowds to the city. The two-year-old Brooklyn Bridge was closed to vehicles that morning so that Brooklynites could pour across the East River to join their fellow mourners in Manhattan. Passengers occupied each seat and stood in every aisle aboard the trains arriving at Grand Central and Pennsylvania stations; so many extra cars had been added to accommodate them that most trains had to be hauled by two locomotives. Ferries from New Jersey and Staten Island were packed, too, and the new elevated railway brought in some 600,000 more people from the city’s outer regions.

  One onlooker wrote that the entire length of Broadway—shops, offices, hotels, theaters, apartment buildings—was “one sweep of black,” and even the tenement dwellers crowded along the side streets hung their windows with tiny flags and strips of inky ribbon. The vast black and silver hearse was drawn by twenty-four black-draped horses, each accompanied by a black groom dressed in black, and it was followed by a glittering military escort under the command of General Winfield Scott Hancock. Sixty thousand armed men took part in the slow-moving procession, which took five hours to pass. “Broadway moved like a river into which many tributaries poured,” a spectator remembered. “There was one living mass choking the thoroughfare from where the dead lay in state to the grim gates at Riverside opened to receive him.”1

  Somewhere in that living mass stood a slender, alarmingly pale man wearing smoked glasses so that no one would recognize him. The disguise was probably a good idea. Until his arrest the previous spring, Ferdinand Ward had been Grant’s business partner and apparently so skilled that older financiers had hailed him as the “Young Napoleon of Finance.” But now, many held him directly responsible for the late general’s impoverishment—and even, indirectly, for his death. As Ward himself later wrote, with the strange blend of pride and self-pity he always displayed when alluding to his crimes, he had made himself by the age of thirty-three “the best-hated man in the United States.”2 He had no right to be on the street that day, in fact; he had bribed his way out of the Ludlow Street Jail, where he was awaiting the trial for grand larceny that would soon send him to Sing Sing. In this, as in nearly everything else in his long life, he seems simply to have assumed that rules made for others need never apply to him.

  Ferdinand Ward was my great-grandfather. I can’t remember when I first began to hear stories about him. Nor can I remember who first mentioned him to me. It may have been my late father, who had met his grandfather just once while still a small child, and who remembered him only dimly, as an apparently amiable, impossibly thin old man with a drooping white moustache, rocking on the front porch of a frame house on Staten Island. To a landlocked Ohio boy like my father, the ferry ride across New York Harbor from the Battery had been more memorable than the aged stranger.

  Perhaps it was my grandfather, Clarence Ward, who first spoke of his father to me. Though he was brought up by maternal relatives and had spent little time in Ferdinand’s company, Clarence’s bright blue eyes, even in his eighties, still mirrored fear and pain at the mention of h
is father’s name. Little wonder: Ferdinand had hired a man to kidnap my grandfather when he was just ten years old, flooded him with blackmailing letters as a young man, threatened to see to it that he lost his first job, and, finally, took him to court—all to get his hands on the small legacy left to his son by his own late wife.

  In any case, by the time I was twelve or thirteen, I knew at least the outlines of Ferdinand’s story: pious parents, a Presbyterian minister and his wife, both former missionaries to India; an apparently tranquil boyhood in the lovely village of Geneseo, New York; a move to New York at twenty-one, followed by marriage to a wealthy young woman from Brooklyn Heights, and a swift rise on Wall Street that culminated in the 1880 formation of the firm of Grant & Ward, to include both the former president of the United States and James D. Fish, the president of a large Wall Street financial institution, the Marine National Bank. Four years of flush times followed: summer homes, blooded horses, purebred dogs, jewels from Tiffany, European artworks, lavish generosity to family and friends, the birth of a son.

  Then, disaster: the collapse of first the Marine Bank, then the firm of Grant & Ward, and panic on Wall Street—all of it blamed on Ferdinand Ward. There was Ward’s arrest and that of James Fish, and later two sensational trials that demonstrated that both men had deliberately set out to defraud investors, followed by seven years in prison during which Ferdinand’s wife and both his parents died. Released in 1892, he devoted most of the thirty-three years left to him to harassing the son he barely knew while continuing to hatch schemes by which one person or another was to provide him with money on which to live, funds to which he always seems to have assumed he was somehow entitled. He never changed, never apologized, never explained.

  I wanted to know more. Books didn’t add much. They all focused, understandably enough, on Grant’s tragedy: Ferdinand Ward appeared only as a stock villain, insinuating himself onstage just long enough to ruin the ex-president and his family, then disappearing behind prison walls.

  But I couldn’t help wondering how he had duped so many men who, as he himself liked to say, were old enough to be his father. What accounted for what his mother once called his fatal “disposition to be rich”?3 How could he have been perpetually unrepentant, uninterested in anyone’s troubles but his own, persuaded always that he, and not any of those whose money he misappropriated, was the aggrieved party?

  My grandfather didn’t much like to talk about his father, but I kept after him with a persistence that embarrasses me a little now. One day when I was visiting from college nearly fifty years ago he turned over to me a dusty cardboard carton filled with brittle papers tied into bundles with dirty twine. They were the contents of Ferdinand Ward’s prison trunk, and had rested unread in the closet safe off my grandfather’s study in Oberlin, Ohio, for more than half a century: scores of letters, still in their envelopes; faded photographs; court documents bound with red ribbon; tiny scraps of paper covered on both sides with near-microscopic writing.

  They offered me the first real clues to what my great-grandfather was like. But they also raised as many questions as they answered, and brought me no closer to grasping what made him the man he came to be. He may have been a sociopath, born without a conscience or the ability to empathize, able only to imitate emotions genuinely felt by other people. He unquestionably was a narcissist; nothing ever seems to have mattered to him except himself. But the distinctive blend of self-righteousness and deceit, aggression and victimhood he displayed throughout his life turned out eerily to mirror the distorted personalities of the missionary parents who raised him. Trying to understand those intimate connections and to assess the impact of his depredations on those closest to him—his parents, his bewildered older brother and sister, his wife, and his only child—eventually led me to write the story of a family as well as the biography of a scoundrel. That story begins halfway around the world with half-hidden events that began to unfold fourteen years before Ferdinand Ward was born.

  ONE

  The Higher Calling

  Shortly after dawn on March 20, 1837, at the end of a four-month voyage from Boston, the captain of the American merchant ship Saracen sighted the green Coromandel coast of South India and set his course northward along it, headed for the British port city of Madras.*

  The Saracen was carrying three distinctive products from New England. Two were in great demand: bales of the rugged cotton twill then called “jeans,” and more than one hundred tons of ice, cut from Massachusetts ponds into big blue-green blocks, then carefully packed into the Saracen’s hold, surrounded by layers of lumber, hay, sawdust, and tanbark to minimize melting over the course of the long voyage. For the British, suffering in the Indian heat, the regular arrival of American ice was a godsend. “The stoppage of the Bank of Bengal here could hardly exceed the excitement of a failure, during our hot weather, of the ice!” one Briton wrote. “And the arrival of our English mail is not more anxiously expected than that of an American Ice-ship, when supplies run low.”†

  The third New England export aboard the Saracen—Puritanism—would find a less cordial welcome. The ship’s sole passengers were six American missionaries and their wives as well as a physician and his wife dedicated to their care. They stood silently together on the quarterdeck, gazing at the distant shoreline. They had left friends and families and endured 118 days at sea in order to help bring their brand of Protestantism to the unconverted millions of the subcontinent, to create what one veteran missionary called “New England in India.”‡

  Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale and a founder of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, under whose auspices they had embarked, had set their ambitious agenda: it was their charge, he wrote, to hasten the time “when the Romish cathedral, the mosque, and the pagoda, shall not have one stone left upon another, which shall not be thrown down.”1

  For the little group on deck, prospects of hastening that time did not look immediately reassuring. Every landmark they saw that day underscored the enormity of the task they faced: a beachfront cluster of carved Hindu structures at Mahabalipuram had withstood the pounding surf for more than a thousand years; the gleaming white Cathedral of Saint Thomas, built by the Portuguese and said to mark the original tomb of the apostle, symbolized for the Americans not Christianity but “popery,” more sinister even than the native “heathen” faith they had been sent to supplant; and when they at last came within sight of Fort St. George, the big coastal bastion from which Britons governed the vast Madras presidency, the carved gopurams of more Hindu temples and the scattered domes of Muslim mosques appeared above “Blacktown,” the jumble of mud huts and whitewashed houses that had grown up in the shadow of its walls. The missionaries’ worst fears had been confirmed: the city was clearly the home of “errorists of every name and grade.”2

  Walls of foaming surf made it impossible for large vessels to get anywhere near the shore at Madras. So the captain of the Saracen lowered her sails two miles offshore and waited for orders from the harbormaster telling him where to drop anchor among the scores of merchant vessels and hundreds of smaller fishing boats already bobbing in the Madras Roads.

  The Americans watched as two crudely fashioned catamarans—teak logs lashed together, each paddled by three kneeling men—struggled out toward them through the waves. Despite the still-bright late-afternoon sun, the missionaries were clad in black; their wives wore the long-sleeved dresses with full skirts and many petticoats thought suitable for the wives of clergymen back home. When the first catamaran reached the Saracen and its occupants clambered up the side to deliver anchoring instructions to the captain, the sight of them, dark skins shiny with sweat, naked but for loincloths and standing only a few feet away, drove several of the women and at least two of the men to their cabins to weep with shock and pray for strength.

  “These are the Hindus, these the people among whom we came to dwell!” the Reverend Ferdinand De Wilton Ward remembered saying to his wife, Jane Shaw Ward, that e
vening as they settled into their berths to try to get at least a little sleep before going ashore the next morning.3 Ward had celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday at sea; his wife was seven months older. Everything they had seen that day suggested that the gulf between New England and the ancient land to which they and their companions expected to devote the rest of their lives was wider than they’d imagined, the challenge of conversion greater than they’d dreamed. If the little band of missionaries was to have any impact on India at all, they would have to work together as one, Ward would write, bound up in “a united labor of love,” with each member careful always to display consistent “patience and forbearance.”4

  But neither he nor his wife was prepared to remain united with anyone else for long. Neither was patient or forbearing, either. In the end it was not the immovability of India but the Wards’ own intransigence and stubborn self-regard that would first drive the couple home in disgrace and then create the claustrophobic, embittered world that helped warp the personality of their younger son.

  Rev. Ferdinand De Wilton Ward, the swindler’s father and namesake, had been brought up to believe that his family, the Wards of Rochester, New York, were better than other people: more upright, more principled, more godly, and—perhaps as a reward for all that conspicuous virtue—bound to be more successful. Their prosperity and prominence, they believed, were inextricably linked with what Rev. Ward would call “their ancestral, heroic, puritan piety of which they were never, for an hour, ashamed.”5