Throughout 1871, the “special stinkpot”–as George Templeton Strong called it–of the Fisk-Mansfield-Stokes triangle had steadily gained in aromatic force.19 Shortly after New Year’s Day 1871, the jilted and bitter Fisk, still a director of the Brooklyn Oil Refinery Company, had managed to document General Manager Stokes’s confiscation of some $250,000 in company funds for personal use. Fisk swore out a warrant for embezzlement and had Stokes put in handcuffs. When Stokes got off on a technicality, he immediately turned around and slapped Fisk with a $200,000 suit for malicious prosecution: an action eventually settled out of court when Fisk agreed to purchase the Stokes family’s interest in Brooklyn Oil. (The deal provided the profligate Stokes with a one-time windfall but cut off his access to the Brooklyn Oil Refinery Company’s accounts, which he’d previously used as his private bank.) A short while later, Stokes exhibited an egregious degree of unreliability and bad faith when, despite his agreement with Fisk, he revived his action. Later that spring, the two men agreed to take their dispute to a neutral referee. Attorney Clarence A. Seward eventually ruled that Stokes–fast running through the money from Fisk’s buyout while trying to support Mansfield in style–had no further claim against the prince of Erie save for an additional $10,000 as compensation for a single night of Fisk-orchestrated imprisonment.
Stokes spent the last of the extra $10,000 in September, at which point he embarked upon yet another run at Fisk’s wallet. This time Stokes accused Fisk of stealing corporate funds from both Brooklyn Oil and the Erie, thefts purportedly documented in letters Fisk had written Josie Mansfield before their split. Stokes’s game here was to induce Fisk to buy him off. The evidentiary letters did not, in fact, touch on any aspect of Fisk’s business life. But they did cover topics far more intimate and potentially embarrassing.20 Thus, when Fisk’s friends urged him to allow publication of the correspondence and be done with it, he refused. “You may laugh at me,” he wrote on 27 October, “but I tell you I can’t put up on a signboard some of the purest thoughts that ever stirred me. . . . They may curse me for this, and damn me for that, and ridicule me for something else–but, by the Lord, this is my heart that you want me to make a show of, and I won’t.”21 Shortly, Stokes made an outright offer to sell the letters to Fisk for $15,000, and Fisk took the bait. Then, after the money had been paid and Stokes once again reneged, Fisk had him arrested on a charge of blackmail.
Fisk interrupted his tiresome contest with Stokes only once that autumn, to organize the gathering and transport of supplies for the relief of Chicagoans after the Great Fire. Just as energetic as he’d been when mobilizing aid for the soldiers at Antietam almost ten years before, Fisk personally drove an express wagon–a sign “Contributions Received Here for Chicago” painted on its side–about the streets of New York on the evening of 10 October. Door to door he went, stopping wherever a hand waved out a window, gathering goods. At the same time, in response to an announcement appearing over Gould’s signature in the New York dailies, wholesalers and charitable relief organizations delivered large lots of food, clothes, blankets, and medical supplies to the Opera House. Later that evening, in the lobby of the theater, Fisk supervised more than a hundred volunteers as they organized the goods for transshipping to the Erie terminal at Jersey City and placement on a well-publicized Erie train bound west.
Once Chicago was saved, Fisk returned to more basic matters. On 26 November, Josie testified at court proceedings related to Stokes’s fraud action. In the process, under skillful cross-examination by attorney William A. Beach, she was made to sound like what she was: a manipulative, money-hungry seductress. Within a few weeks, on 6 January 1872, Justice B. H. Bixbey threw out the Stokes suit altogether. That same morning, a grand jury indicted both Stokes and Mansfield on Fisk’s charge of blackmail, issuing warrants for their arrest. After receiving word of the indictments, an enraged Stokes stopped at Josie’s home on West Twenty-third Street and then went to Castle Erie, where he demanded to see Fisk. The prince, however, was not on the premises. Fisk, an overly chatty Erie guard informed Stokes, was at luncheon across town, after which he’d be on his way to an appointment at the Grand Central Hotel in Greenwich Village.22
Stokes hailed a cab and reached the Grand Central around 4 P.M., shortly before Fisk’s scheduled arrival. Richard Wandle, a professional gambler who knew Stokes well, happened to be lounging in front of the Grand Central when Stokes arrived. Wandle saw Stokes jump out of the cab and then dart at “not quite a run, but between a run and a fast walk,” into the ladies’ entrance, some twenty yards from the main doors.23 Once inside, Stokes took the ladies’ stairs to the second-floor lobby, where hotel employees noticed him pacing back and forth in an agitated state. A few minutes later, Wandle saw Fisk casually step down from a private coach and go in by the same entrance Stokes had used. Then the gambler heard gunfire: two loud rounds with a slight pause between them.
“I saw Edward Stokes at the head of the stairs,” the dying Fisk would soon tell a city coroner as part of a dictated antemortem statement. “As soon as I saw him I noticed he had something in his hand.”24 Fisk was halfway up the ladies’ stairs when the first shot sliced into his abdomen, sending him tumbling back down to the bottom. Rising, Fisk took a second bullet in the left arm, at which point Stokes, still at the top of the stairs, turned away from his victim. Crossing the second-floor lobby, Stokes tossed his gun, a four-chambered Colt, under a sofa and then walked down the Grand Central’s main staircase to the first-floor lobby, where he announced that someone had been shot. “Yes,” shouted a bellboy running after him, who’d seen it all, “and you are the man that did it.”25 Stokes, muttering to himself, then sat waiting while the same boy ran to fetch police from the nearby Mercer Street station.
Fisk at first seemed well enough. Leaning on the arm of the hotel’s resident physician, he was able to walk up the stairs and cross a short hallway to a private parlor. There the doctor, Thomas H. Tripler, laid him out on a couch. Ignoring the relatively minor wound to Fisk’s arm, Tripler cut away the financier’s shirt to explore the damage at his gut. The doctor’s probe went to a depth of four inches without touching metal. The slug, buried deep in Fisk’s intestines, could not be found. Fisk’s blood ran black. Informed that his wound was mortal, Fisk asked that attorneys Thomas Shearman and David Dudley Field be called, so that he might dictate his will. He also requested that his wife, Lucy, be summoned from Boston.26 Captain Thomas Byrnes of the New York City police later recalled that when he escorted Stokes into the room, Fisk “laid there as if he had no pain at all.” Stokes, meanwhile, “wore a rigidly dignified air, with a face perfectly immovable, expressive only of intense passion strongly suppressed.” When Byrnes asked Fisk to identify his assailant, Fisk nodded and answered, “Yes, that’s the man who shot me. That’s Ned Stokes.”27
Fisk died slowly. The indicted Tweed–at liberty on bail of $1 million supplied by Gould–came and joined Shearman and Field in the deathwatch, as did Gould. At first composed, the normally unreadable Gould eventually broke down under the strain. “Everyone,” noted an observer, “was suddenly startled by seeing [Gould] bow his head upon his hands and weep unrestrainedly with deep, audible sobs.”28 At one point an Erie messenger came and whispered in Gould’s ear, after which Gould buttonholed Byrnes and suggested precautions be taken to beef up the guard at the Tombs, the city prison where Stokes had been taken. Rumor had it that the Ninth New York planned to march, seize Stokes, and string him up from the roof of Castle Erie. As a precaution, New York City police superintendent John Kelso posted 250 uniforms about the jail.
By 6:20 A.M. on 7 January, when Lucy arrived from Boston, Fisk was comatose with morphine. He died at 10:45 A.M. A few minutes after that, according to a reporter for the New York Sun, a poorly dressed woman carrying a small child showed up at the parlor door. She insisted on paying her respects, explaining that although she’d never met him, Fisk had for six months kept her and her children from starvation.29 As an editorialist commented
at the time, New York was full of people who had either received or were aware of Fisk’s many charitable gestures. “They remembered that he had once been a poor, toiling lad who had wrought his success out of hard, earnest effort; that his steps upwards, while decked with a gaudy, semi-barbaric show, were marked by strong traces of liberality and generosity of spirit that threw for the time the faults of his nature in the shade.”30 Meanwhile Mansfield, under protective guard at the house Fisk had bought for her, characteristically focused on herself when giving a comment to the press. “I wish it to be distinctly understood,” she said, “that I am in no way connected with the sad affair. I have my own reputation to maintain.”31
Interviewed at Castle Erie a few hours after Fisk breathed his last, Gould made the depth of his grief clear. “I cannot sufficiently give expression to the extent I suffer over the catastrophe. We have been working together for five or six years and during that time not the slightest unpleasantness has ever arisen between us. He was genial in his habits and beloved by all who had any dealings with him.” As to Fisk’s tastes for wine and women, Gould commented: “Since the dissolution of whatever tie has existed between him and Mrs. Mansfield, he has been a changed man. He had ceased to practice many of the old habits of which he has been accused, and was in every sense becoming what all who loved him desired he should be. His old associations were being rapidly broken up, and if he had lived some time longer a complete reform would have taken place in his whole conduct, though I do not for an instant say that his improprieties were so heinous as they have been generally represented to be.”32
The following day, 8 January, Colonel James Fisk’s uniformed body lay in state at the Grand Opera House. By the time the doors closed at 2 P.M., 20,000 New Yorkers had paid their respects. A short while later, the soldiers of the Ninth escorted Fisk on the first leg of his trip home to Brattleboro. “As far as the eye could see along 23rd Street,” reported the Herald, “the sidewalks were lined with people closely packed, and the occupants of the houses along the street, with many invited friends . . . occupied the windows.”33 Only Josie’s mansion sat shuttered. A line of coaches followed the hearse. Jay and Ellie Gould sat in the first, along with Lucy. At the old New Haven Railway Station (at Fourth Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, soon to be the site of the first Madison Square Garden), Fisk’s militiamen placed the casket aboard a crepe-covered car pulled by a crepe-covered engine. Nine hours later, when Fisk rolled into his old hometown, 5,000 neighbors turned out in the dead of night to welcome him. He lay in his father’s Revere House until noon on the 9th, at which point his kin carried him to Prospect Hill Cemetery, the same graveyard he’d half-jokingly paid to fence a few years before.
Ned Stokes’s family hired the best criminal lawyers money could buy. His first trial ended in a hung jury amid charges of tampering. The second concluded with a first-degree murder conviction and a sentence of death, both of which were eventually set aside after aggressive footwork by Stokes’s attorneys. A third jury finally found Stokes guilty of manslaughter, for which he served four years in Sing Sing. Thereafter, even though he was not welcome in any respectable club, Stokes remained in New York City, where he died in 1901 at the age of sixty. As for Mansfield, she fled to Europe not long after the murder, there to remain for twenty-five years. She was occasionally an actress, occasionally a whore, and at one point the unhappy wife of a rich but drunken American expatriate, Robert Livingston Reade. The year 1899 found the divorced and aging Josie living off the charity of a brother in Watertown, South Dakota. The brother died ten years later, at which point Josie returned to Europe–specifically, Paris–where she led an impoverished existence for another twenty-two years, dying in 1931 at the age of eighty-three.
Fisk’s estate was found to comprise just under $1 million, not nearly as much as some might have guessed, but more than adequate. Despite numerous published accounts to the contrary, Fisk left Lucy set for life. Living in Boston with Fanny Harrod, Lucy routinely turned to Gould for advice in matters of finance. Writing in 1881 to dispel rumors of his neglect, Lucy described Gould as “the only friend of Mr. Fisk who has responded to my actual needs and wants since his death.”34 Lucy died in 1912 at the age of seventy-six. Today she lies with Jim and the rest of the Fisk family at Prospect Hill, beneath an ornate monument created by sculptor Larkin Mead at a cost of $25,000. “On one side of the shaft is cut a portrait medallion of Jim as he looked when alive,” wrote Fisk’s old friend Fuller in 1927. “At the four corners of the massive base sit four marble young women: one has a locomotive carved on a chaplet which encircles her brow. She represents railroading. The second represents commerce by water. The third figure typifies the stage. The fourth stands for trade in the broadest sense. Thousands of visitors have looked upon the memorial of one of Vermont’s sons, and a good many of them have carried home chips of Italian marble which they managed to break off and steal as souvenirs. They have made the monument more fitted to commemorate Jim’s career–striking from many aspects, picturesque, but blemished.”35
After his murder, Fisk received the most gentle treatment by the media. Sensing an appealing human interest story, writers worked industriously to amplify Fisk’s persona as a benevolent rake, a generous thief, and the most well-intentioned of frauds. In the process, they continued their habit of contrasting Fisk with his presumed darker half, the latter’s reputation sinking further still. At least one editorial went so far as to say the wrong member of the Gould-Fisk team had been shot. The public also chimed in. “We should not judge too harshly of James Fisk,” wrote one Colonel J. G. Dudley in a letter published by the Herald. “He was a creature of circumstances–a legitimate fruit of the state of public and private morality existing when he began his career. He found legislatures corrupt and he purchased them; he found judges venal and he bribed them; he found a large part of society fond of vulgar display, dash and barbaric magnificence and he gratified the taste of that portion of society. . . . [Nevertheless] the closing scenes of his deathbed condoned for much of the waywardness of his life.” But if the writer forgave Fisk for being a product of his time and environment, he did not extend the same courtesy to Gould. “Let the mantle of charity cover [Fisk’s] sins–and may it be long before his counterpart [Gould] appear to dazzle and vex the world again.”36
Later on, some reporters would even claim that it was Fisk who, through his force of personality, had held the Erie together as an enterprise, Gould tagging along as an unwelcome appendage. “The majority of the board of directors,” the Sun would report, “were enemies of Gould, and were desirous of forcing him from the Presidency. But they were nearly all warm friends of Col. Fisk, and out of respect to his wishes they suffered their opposition to lie dormant until after his death. Stokes’s bullet killed Jay Gould’s power at the same time it took away Col. Fisk’s life.”37
In fact, things were nowhere near this simple.
Chapter 22
A DAMNED VILLAIN
FISK HAD RESIGNED as vice president and controller of Erie several weeks before the murder. Although he remained on the Erie board, he knew full well that a change was afoot and that soon he would be out. In what seemed a last-ditch effort to maintain control of the railroad in the face of challenges from McHenry and the British shareholders, Gould had written on 11 December 1871 to two of the most respected men on Wall Street with a proposal for a new Erie board of directors. Addressing Levi P. Morton (future New York governor and U.S. vice president) and William Butler Duncan (partner in the eminent Wall Street firm of Duncan & Sherman), Gould suggested a new board contrived to collect “the best railway and financial talent in the country.” Such an assembly would, Gould believed, instill new faith in the Erie across world financial markets. Gould’s ideal list of board members included Morton, Duncan, and himself along with August Belmont, J. P. Morgan, Erastus Corning (representing Vanderbilt’s New York Central), James F. Joy (representing the Michigan Central), Vanderbilt son-in-law Horace F. Clark (representing Vanderbilt
’s Lake Shore & Michigan Southern), John Jacob Astor, and other worthies. All these gentlemen would have a voice, although Gould would remain at the helm, “the permanent organization of the company to be selected by Messrs. William Butler Duncan, Levi P. Morton, and myself.”1 Noticeably absent from Gould’s roster were the names Fisk, Lane, and Tweed. Also out of the loop were Gould’s brother-in-law Miller and his brother, Abram.
At the time that Fisk died, Duncan, armed with Gould’s memo plus 280,000 Erie shares controlled by Gould, was abroad in England on a mission to woo large-block British shareholders. McHenry, meanwhile, was in the same country engaged in a far more successful effort to seduce the same elements. McHenry’s assistant in this endeavor was a former Gould public relations man. George Crouch had recently jumped his boss’s sinking ship, traveled to Britain, and filled the ears of British investors with tales of shady dealings within Castle Erie: fraud, larceny, and an executive committee drunk with both power and greed.
Dark Genius of Wall Street Page 23