by H. W. Brands
Fisk responds as she intends. He recognizes that she is throwing him over. “The mist has fallen,” he replies, “and you appear in your true light.” She wants him to leave, and so he will. “Have no fears that I will again come near you.” He encloses a ring she has given him—a ring purchased with his money. “Take it back. Its memory is indecent.” He will pay her outstanding bills. “If there are any unsettled business matters that it is proper for me to arrange, send them to me, and make the explanation as brief as possible. I fain would reach the point where not even the slightest necessity will exist for any intercourse between us. I am in hopes this will end it.”
He signs and sends the letter, only to realize he hasn’t rebutted her claim for the money. He writes a second letter. He reminds her of how much he has spent on her, even after she stopped reciprocating his affections. “You will, therefore, excuse me if I decline your modest request for a still further disbursement of $25,000.” He lets her know he is aware of her relationship with Stokes; the gossips have twittered it for months. A gentleman’s pride and a hope that she would change her mind kept him from mentioning it, but now that it is in the open he relates something else the gossips have said: that Stokes has had to pawn personal possessions to cover debts. Fisk does not intend to redeem Stokes’s goods for him. “I very naturally feel that some part of this amount might be used to release from the pound the property of others, in whose welfare the writer of this does not feel unbounded interest.”
His tone remains distant and proper almost till the end of this missive, when his emotions pour out. “You say that you hope I will take the sense of your letter. There is but one sense to be taken out of it, and that is an epitaph to be cut on the stone at the head of the grave in which Miss Helen Josephine Mansfield has buried her pride. Had she been the same proud-spirited girl that she was when she stood side by side with me … she would not have humbled herself to ask a permanency of one whom she had so deeply wronged, nor would she stoop to be indebted to him for a home which would have furnished a haven of rest, pleasure and debauchery, without cost, to those who had crossed his path and robbed him of the friendship he once felt.…
“Now, pin this letter with the other—the front of this is the back of that—and you will have a telescopic view of yourself, and your character, as you appear to me today; and then, I ask you, turn back from pages of your life’s history, counting each page one week of your life, and see how I looked to thee then, and ask your own guilty heart if you had not better let me alone.”
She realizes she has pushed too far. She visits him and warms his heart once more. He writes in astonishment: “Who supposed for an instant that you would ever cross my path again in a spirit of submission? … You have done that you should be sorry, and I the same.… You acted so differently from your nature that I forgive you.… When your better character comes in contact with mine, we are so much alike.… All now looks bright and beautiful, and my better nature trembles at ideas that were expressed last night.”
And yet he has to distrust his heart, for his mind understands he has lost her to another. “I can see you now as you were last night, when you talked of this man”—Stokes. “Do not deceive yourself: you love him.… Leave me alone; for in me you have nothing left.”
So he says; she thinks differently. She plots with Stokes how they might force a settlement from Fisk. Stokes has read some of the letters Fisk has written her; he and Josie decide Fisk might pay a substantial sum to keep the letters from appearing in the New York papers.
Fisk responds with outrage to the mere suggestion. He will never yield to blackmail, he vows. He backs his promise with action. He spreads word of the attempted extortion, decrying the threatened breach of the inviolability of a gentleman’s correspondence. He launches a lawsuit against Stokes, saying Stokes has tried to swindle him in some of their business dealings. To give bite to the suit, he arranges with a Tammany judge, an associate of Bill Tweed, to have Stokes arrested. He entices one of the servants from Josie’s house into his own employ and pumps the young man for damaging information about Josie and her new paramour.
Josie counters with a lawsuit of her own. She demands the money she says he owes her, adding interest and costs for a total of $50,000. To support her case she sends the newspapers a letter she has recently written him, which the papers happily print. “You and your minions of the Erie Railway Company are endeavoring to circulate that I am attempting to extort money from you by threatened publications of your private letters to me,” she declares. “You know how shamelessly false this is, and yet you encourage and aid it. Had this been my intention, I had a trunk full of your interesting letters, some of which I would blush to say I had received. If you were not wholly devoid of all decency and shame you would do differently—knowing as you do that when your own notes to my order are brought into the Courts, and your letters acknowledging your indebtedness to me, you will appear all the more contemptible and cowardly.… Do you in your sane moments imagine that I will quietly submit to the deliberate and wicked perjury you committed in swearing to these injunction papers? … Unfortunately for yourself, I know you too well and the many crimes you have perpetrated.… You surely recollect the fatal Black Friday. The gold brokers you gave orders to to buy gold, and then repudiated the same, because, as you said, they had no witnesses to the transactions. There was one I recollect in particular—a son of Abraham—who had the courage to swear out an attachment against the Grand Opera House for what was justly due him, and how you and Jay Gould ruined the poor victim by breaking up his business and having him arrested and imprisoned for perjury; and at the same time you premeditated this crime, you well know he held your written order to buy gold, and you were the perjurers.”
She said nothing about Fisk’s iniquities at the time, putting loyalty to him above fidelity to her conscience. But now he has turned on her and is trying to add her to the ranks of his victims, she says. “It is an everlasting shame and disgrace that you should compel one who has grown up with you from nothing to the now great Erie impresario, to go to the Courts for the vindication of her rights which you refuse to adjust for reasons you too well know. It is only four years ago when you revealed to me your scheme of stealing the Erie books. How you fled with them to New Jersey, and I remained there with you nine long weeks. How, when you were buying the Legislature, the many anxious nights I passed with you at the telegraph wire, when you told me it was either a Fisk palace in New-York or a stone palace at Sing Sing, and if the latter, would I take a cottage outside its walls, that my presence would make your rusty irons garlands of roses, and the very stones you would have to hammer and crack appear softer under my influence. You secured your Erie palace, and now use your whole force of Erie officials to slander and injure me.”
She will not be so treated. “I write you this letter to forever contradict all the malicious, wicked abuses you have caused to be circulated.” She says she seeks nothing but fairness and justice; she offers to settle out of court. But she doesn’t expect him to accept her offer. “I only make this proposal to place myself in the proper light and spirit.” If he insists on fighting, she will fight back. She knows he has friends in high places, but she won’t be intimidated. “If you feel your power with the Courts still supreme, and Tammany, though shaken, still able to protect you, pursue your own inclinations; the reward will be yours.”
Josie’s public letter lifts her fight with Fisk to a new level. The correspondence in her possession involves not only Fisk and his failed love affair but the Erie Railroad and those involved in the struggle for its mastery, including high officials of Tammany Hall. Jay Gould has always avoided publicity; now the glare of popular scrutiny follows him everywhere. Bill Tweed, still staggering from the Orange Day riot, appears more vulnerable than ever. All New York takes note.
The lawyers mobilize. They launch additional suits and countersuits. They record depositions and file affidavits. They probe the political connections of judges in search of
sympathetic venues. They furnish reporters with information damaging to their opponents and seek to limit the harm done by their opponents’ releases.
The Fisk side produces a statement by Richard King, the servant lately of Josie’s, who declares that he has overheard Josie, Ned Stokes, and Marietta Williams, Josie’s cousin and housemate, discussing a plan for selling Fisk’s letters to Josie to the newspapers or, alternatively, blackmailing Fisk to prevent the publication. “They said that they could get a large amount of money out of Mr. Fisk in that way,” King testifies. He goes on to quote Josie as saying to Stokes: “I have the letters, and I will give them to you and let you use them to your best advantage and make all you can out of Mr. Fisk.”
Fisk sues Josie and Stokes for blackmail, citing the King statement, and applies for an injunction to bar publication. A judge who owes his position to Bill Tweed grants Fisk the injunction.
Josie retaliates with a libel suit against Fisk. “Each and every one of said conversations are false and untrue,” she swears. Her lawyers publish an affidavit from another servant, Maggie Ward, who claims that Fisk offered her inducements to say what King had said: that Josie and Stokes were trying to blackmail him. “I told Fisk that I would not swear to anything of the kind for the whole Erie Railroad,” Miss Ward says, “as it would be wholly false, wicked and untrue, and he knew it.” She adds that Fisk asked her what she thought of King’s affidavit. “I told him I thought it was awful, and he ought to be ashamed of himself for getting King to make such an affidavit. Fisk then told me I had better tell Miss Mansfield, if I were a friend of hers, to stop making affidavits or drawing papers against him or she would get into great trouble.”
In filing their lawsuit, Josie’s lawyers have chosen their venue wisely. Judge Butler Bixby, presiding over the Yorkville Police Court on the Upper East Side, is a foe of Tweed and Tammany. He signs out an arrest warrant against Fisk and sets bail at $35,000.
The Yorkville arrest clerk carries the warrant to the Opera House. The business of the Erie has gotten Fisk and Gould arrested numerous times; they keep a bail bondsman on staff. Fisk glances at Josie’s warrant and hands it to the bondsman, who prepares the bond for Fisk’s signature. The transaction—arrest, bond, bail—takes but minutes.
The suit goes to trial in November 1871. A large and rowdy audience fills Judge Bixby’s Yorkville court. The demeanor of many of the visitors and the tone of their responses to the testimony suggest a connection to the Erie Railroad, and reporters soon ascertain that Fisk has granted a paid holiday to workers who report this morning to the courthouse instead of the roundhouse.
Josie arrives on time, with Marietta Williams. Fisk comes late, resplendent in his military uniform. He is accompanied by his attorneys, William Beach and Charles Spencer. Josie’s counsel, John McKeon, sits beside Assistant District Attorney John Fellows, who has joined Josie’s lawsuit on grounds that libel is a crime and Fisk needs to be convicted of something.
McKeon opens for Josie’s side with what will prove a theme of the trial: the assertion that Fisk, far from being the fun-loving, even clownish Prince of Erie, is really a dangerous man. Anyone who crosses him, man or woman, does so at hazard to health and limb. “I know the risk a man runs by opposing Mr. Fisk,” McKeon says. “A man’s life is in danger.” But Fisk has finally met his match. “I mean to tell him, and he may sneer at it, the day may come when some developments may be made which will shock this community. Mr. Fisk will find at least one man that cannot be intimidated.”
As the court and the audience ponder the meaning of this statement—who is the man that will not be intimidated?—Josie is summoned to the witness stand. She relates how Richard King was stolen away from her. “He left my employment without giving any notice whatever. I returned home one afternoon and found he had left.”
District Attorney Fellows reads King’s affidavit alleging the blackmail conspiracy. “Now, Miss Mansfield, will you state whether the conversations here alluded to ever took place?” Fellows asks.
“Never in this world,” Josie replies.
Was there anything true in King’s allegations, or were they entirely false?
“False in every particular.”
Fellows thanks the witness and turns her over to Fisk’s attorney for cross-examination.
Charles Spencer asks her how old she is.
“I will be twenty-four years of age on the 15th of December next, and have resided in this city since 1867. I resided immediately previous in Philadelphia.”
“Are you a married lady?”
“I was married in San Francisco, in 1864, to Mr. Frank Lawlor. I had not been previously married. I only resided in San Francisco a few months. I married in September, and left on the 11th of January following.”
“Have you any recollection, Miss Mansfield, while you were in San Francisco, of Mr. Lawlor’s placing a pistol to a man’s head?”
The question takes Josie by surprise, and the audience as well. She looks plaintively to the judge, who offers no assistance. “Never to my knowledge,” she says hesitantly.
“Have you any recollection of a pistol being placed at a man’s head in your presence?”
She appears pained but determined. “Well,” she says, “I can’t tell unless you tell me by whom, because I don’t remember.”
District Attorney Fellows objects to this line of questioning as irrelevant.
Spencer responds that he is testing the credibility of the witness. In a case of alleged blackmail, he says, he ought to be able to question the general truthfulness of the plaintiff.
Fellows rejoins that the plaintiff’s past personal life has nothing to do with the case at hand. Her marriage, her divorce, and anything pertaining to those, he says, should be excluded.
Spencer reiterates that the credibility of the witness is crucial to her charge of blackmail, as it is a matter of her word against Fisk’s—and King’s.
Judge Bixby accepts Spencer’s arguments and lets the questioning proceed.
“Can you not tell me whether in San Francisco a pistol was pointed in your presence at a man’s head?” Spencer asks again.
“There was a circumstance of that kind,” Josie answers.
“Was it a man by the name of D. W. Pearly?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was it pointed at him by a person of the name of Warren?”
“Yes.”
“Where was Pearly at the time?”
“In the parlor of my mother’s house.”
“Did he sign a check before he went out?”
“Yes.”
“For how much?”
“I have not the remotest idea.”
“Did you hear the amount mentioned?”
“No.”
“Was there any relation subsisting at the time between yourself and the person called Warren?”
“He married my mother.”
“Any between yourself and Mr. Pearly?”
“None whatever.”
“When Warren called and found Pearly inside, what did he say?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Do you recollect Warren coming into the room and charging Pearly with being criminally intimate with you, and telling him he must either be shot or pay?”
The audience is hanging on every word. Stories of Josie’s past have made the rounds in New York; these have included tales of her work as an “actress” in San Francisco and of an abusive stepfather. But those in attendance today suddenly surmise that Josie’s stepfather pimped her out and threatened at least one of her clients with blackmail.
Josie is obviously distressed and flustered. “Nothing of that kind passed at all,” she insists. But then she contradicts herself. “I don’t remember anything about a check. Warren did not shoot Pearly. Pearly left through the door.”
Spencer takes advantage of her discomfiture. “Did he have anything on him except his shirt?”
“He was fully dressed.”
Spencer gives her a skeptic
al look. He lets the image of Josie and her john and her stepfather-pimp, with the gun of the stepfather leveled at the john, who pays his tab before fleeing the scene of the illegal liaison, sans pants, linger in the courtroom for several moments.
Spencer then asks Josie to explain where she got her divorce.
“I got divorced from my husband in New York state,” she answers. “The divorce was signed by Judge Barnard. My husband was served with notice of the divorce in this city.”
Spencer asks how Josie met Fisk.
“I first saw him in the house of Annie Wood, in Thirty-fourth Street. She was an actress, and an acquaintance of my husband.”
“When you became acquainted with Fisk, had you any property?”
“A little.”
“How much personal property had you, outside of your personal ornaments?”
“I might not have had a bank book, but I certainly was not poverty stricken. I have always been well cared for.”
“You appear to be,” Spencer says, nodding knowingly. Some in the audience laugh. “How much personal property did you have at this time?”
Josie’s lawyers object, and the question is excluded.
Spencer ascertains that Josie lived at the America Clubhouse after meeting Fisk. “During the time you resided at this clubhouse, did Fisk pay your board?” he asks.
“No, sir, not to my knowledge, nor did he make me any presents individually.”
“Did he directly or indirectly furnish means for you while you were at the clubhouse?”