Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

Today, I want to introduce you to Samuel Cutler Ward. He's the 19th century forefather of Paul Manafort,

the lobbyist and former Trump campaign chairman on trial near Washington for a number of alleged misdeeds.

Like Manafort, who reportedly owns an ostrich jacket,

Sam Ward had some seriously expensive tastes,

the finest French food and wines,

and suits so well cut,

one biographer wrote that, quote,

no mud seemed to stick.

Just like Manafort, Ward needed to dress to impress.

Not the oligarchs that the former Trump campaign official built a fortune courting and lobbying for around the world,

but the emerging titans of the gilded Age who wanted a favor or two in Congress.

Because more than 150 years before Manafort transformed lobbying by taking the business beyond its traditional home near the White House on K Street, Sam Ward was shaping the craft of lobbying at his home on East Street, hosting

long, gluttonous dinners with politicos and what we now call interest groups.

While Ward was not America's first lobbyist, he was proclaimed then and now as the king of the lobby, which is also the title of a 2001 biography by historian Catherine Alamong Jacob that chronicles how Ward plied his trade in the chaotic ascendant days of Washington following the Civil War.

As described by Jacob, those days sound familiar.

She wrote, quote,

The Capitol was a Tinderbox, growing more volatile each day.

The deepening fissure was splitting the nation open,

and the capital sat squarely on the fault line.

Enter Ward, the son of a New York banker,

who, before arriving in D.C., traveled through Europe,

...