Ward was a Republican Whig and supported the abolition of the American system of slavery. He enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War and was wounded three times. However, a close reading of his "Dynamic Sociology" will uncover several statements that would be considered somewhat racist and ethnocentric by today's standards. There are references to the superiority of Western culture and the savagery of the American Indian and black races, made all the more jarring by the modern feel of much of the rest of the book.