Samuel Cutler "Sam" Ward (January 27, 1814 — May 19, 1884), was an American poet, politician, author, and gourmet, and in the years after the Civil War he was widely known as the "King of the Lobby." He combined delicious food, fine wines, and good conversation to create a new type of lobbying in Washington, DC — social lobbying — over which he reigned for more than a decade.
Early life
Ward was born in New York City into an old New England family and was the eldest of seven children. His father, Samuel Ward III, was a highly respected banker with the firm of Prime, Ward & King. His grandfather, Col. Samuel Ward, Jr. (1756—1832), was a veteran of the Revolutionary War. Sam's mother, Julia Rush Cutler, was related to Francis Marion, the "Swamp Fox" of the American Revolution.
When Ward's mother died while he was a student at the Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts, his father became morbidly obsessed with his children's moral, spiritual, and physical health. It wasn't until he was a student at Columbia College, where he joined the Philolexian Society and from which he graduated in 1831, that he began to learn about the wider world.
The more he learned, the less he wanted to become a banker. He convinced his father first to let him study in Europe. He stayed for four years, mastering several languages, enjoying high society, earning a doctorate degree from the University of Tübingen, and, in Heidelberg, meeting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who became his friend for life.
Career
He returned to New York, married Emily Astor, the eldest daughter of businessman William Backhouse Astor, Sr., in January 1838 and tried to settle into the life of a young banker.
His father died unexpectedly in November 1839. Next, Ward's brother Henry died suddenly of typhoid fever. In February 1841, his wife gave birth to a son, but within days both she and the newborn died. Ward was executor of his father's several-million-dollar estate, partner now in a prestigious banking firm, guardian of his three sisters, a widower, father of a toddler, and 27 years old.
He remarried in 1843, and urged on by his new wife, Ward began speculating on Wall Street. In September 1847, the financial world was stunned by news that Prime, Ward and Co. (King had wisely withdrawn) had collapsed.
California gold rush
Broke, Ward joined the '49ers rushing to California. He opened a store on the San Francisco waterfront; plowed his profits into real estate; claimed he made a quarter of a million dollars in three months; and lost it all when fire destroyed his wharves and warehouses. For a time he operated a ferry in the California wilderness; he alluded to mysterious schemes in Mexico and South America; and he bobbed up in New York a wealthy man again.
He plunged back into speculating and lost all of his money again, and with it went Medora's affection. This time he finagled a berth on a diplomatic mission to Paraguay. When he sailed home in 1859, he brought with him a secret agreement with the president of Paraguay to lobby on that country's behalf and headed to Washington, DC, to begin a new career.
Washington, D.C. Ward was a Democrat with many friends and family in the South. He also believed in gradual emancipation, which put him at odds with his sister, Julia Ward, who would later write "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe. But there was no question that he would remain loyal to the Union. He put his dinner table at the disposal of his neighbor Secretary of State William Henry Seward. His elegant meals, which had already begun to be noticed, provided the perfect cover for Northerners and Southerners looking for neutral ground. In the early days of the war, Ward also traveled through the Confederacy with British journalist William Howard Russell, secretly sending letters full of military details back to Seward for which he surely would have been hanged or shot if exposed.
In 1862, he told Seward he was wrong to think that the Confederacy would have rejoined the Union had war been averted: "I differ from you. I found among the leaders a malignant bitterness and contemptuous hatred of the North which rendered this lesson necessary. within two years they would have formed entangling free trade and free navigation treaties with Europe, and have become a military power hostile to us."
At the war's end, Ward's friends in high places, his savoir faire, his trove of anecdotes and recipes, and his talents for diplomacy augured well for his success in Washington, where the coals were hot and ready for an era of unprecedented growth and corruption that became known as "the Great Barbeque" or "The Gilded Age."