Eber Brock Ward was raised in modest circumstances, but at twenty-one, was taken into his uncle's thriving shipping business, becoming the principal heir of what was reaching towards a million-dollar business. From this foundation, Ward invested in some of the earliest iron-making businesses in the Great Lakes region, along with acquiring railroad, mining, and lumber properties. A late venture into glass-making rounded out his portfolio. The connections between the resource extraction, transportation, and industrial production leads the author on more than one occasion to argue that Ward should be considered among the pioneers of vertical integration in the United States.
A businessman first and always, Ward had supported the Whigs early and by the 1850s was a committed Republican. Among his closest friends politically was Republican Senator, B. F. Wade. Among the things that united the two men was their unwavering opposition to slavery, which included orders to Ward's captains to assist escaping slaves across the border to Canada.
The loss of Ward’s steamer Atlantic provides some valuable insights into how Ward conducted business in the years following his uncle's death. While Nagle supplies a narrative focused on the newspaper reporting of the incident, the case law reports make interesting reading on their own. The initial trial between Ward and the owners of Ogdensburgh placed all the blame and liability on Ward's vessel. He fought that decision all the way to the United States Supreme Court to ensure that liability was divided evenly. Given the disparity in the value of the two vessels, the owners of the much less valuable Ogdensburgh were then required to pay Ward over $40,000 for the loss of Atlantic. Efforts to collect this brought Ward back to the Supreme Court two more times to extract the maximum recompense from his soon-bankrupted rivals. There are a number of references to Ward as a robber baron; the label is a good fit.
Nagle questions why Ward is not well remembered as an industrialist and then provides the answer. Ward's investments were in individual, albeit complementary, enterprises and his will largely required those investments to be liquidated. Whatever vertical integration there was quickly disintegrated. His timber holdings were passed intact and free of debt to his young, second wife, whose brothers made another fortune buying up Ward's debts at a discount. A few years later, she married a Canadian and moved to Toronto.
Nagle's volume depends on a dispersed collection of Ward papers, along with a wide range of primary printed sources to bring this narrative together. If there is more to be said, especially regarding Samuel Ward's efforts to actually create the fortune to which E.B. Ward contributed and succeeded, this remains a foundational work on one of the key figures in the history of nineteenth-century business in the Great Lakes region. Eber Brock Ward may be the forgotten iron king, but in the history of Great Lakes shipping, his name certainly has not been forgotten and will be even more prominent in the studies that build on Nagle's work.
