Background
Thomas Ward was born on June 8, 1807 in Newark, N. J. , the son of Thomas Ward, a well-to-do and prominent citizen of that city, who was a representative in Congress, 1813-17.
dramatist musician playwright poet
Thomas Ward was born on June 8, 1807 in Newark, N. J. , the son of Thomas Ward, a well-to-do and prominent citizen of that city, who was a representative in Congress, 1813-17.
In 1823 he studied at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) and, although official record is wanting, is supposed to have taken the degree of M. D. at Rutgers Medical College, New York City, founded in 1825 under the leadership of David Hosack and S. L. Mitchill. He studied and traveled in Europe for a time, then returned to New York City to practise his profession for two or three years.
But he had ample private means, and, finding himself more interested in "skirmishing with the muse" than in practising medicine, he was soon giving all his time to the literary and musical occupations of a wealthy amateur. His earliest book, published anonymously, was A Month of Freedom, an American Poem (1837), a descriptive-historical-moral effusion in blank verse concerned with a month's vacation spent traveling to Washington, the Catskills, Lake George, Niagara Falls, and elsewhere. It is full of Romantic clichés and drenched in Byronism, but has occasional felicities. Ward published a series of verse tales in the Knickerbocker Magazine under the pseudonym of "Flaccus, " and in 1842 these and other fugitive verses were collected and published as Passaic, a Group of Poems Touching That River: with Other Musings, by Flaccus. The tales deal with legends of the Passaic Valley, and are somewhat less romantic than the earlier book; they are followed by "Musings" and by shorter verses under the headings "Humorous, " "Serious, " "National, " and "Satirical. " It is thoroughly uninspired verse, but won some attention at the time. At the close of the Civil War Ward published a slender pamphlet called War Lyrics (1865), breathing fiery patriotism but a desire for reconciliation after victory. Meanwhile he had married (evidently some years before the publication of Passaic) and had made his house on Forty-seventh Street just west of Fifth Avenue the scene of production for various amateur operettas performed for charity. For at least two of these Ward wrote both words and music. The earlier, Flora, or the Gipsy's Frolic (1858), was first produced by a company of wealthy amateurs at "Land's End, " Huntington, L. I, on July 30, 1857. The next year it was published, and undoubtedly it was many times performed in the large hall which Ward constructed during the war to house his amateur theatricals in the Forty-seventh Street mansion. In 1869 was published Ward's second operetta, The Fair Truant, first produced there on May 2, 1867. In all it is said that forty or fifty of these entertainments were given between 1862 and 1872, producing some $40, 000, all of which was devoted to charitable purposes. In 1860 Ward edited a book entitled The Road Made Plain to Fortune for the Million. In 1866 he read an original poem at the bi-centennial celebration of the founding of his native Newark. His last literary labor was a centennial address, delivered before the New York Society Library in 1872.
(Lang:- English, Pages 71. Reprinted in 2015 with the help...)
He was married and had at least one child who grew to maturity, a daughter Kate.