The Murder of Jim Fisk for the Love of Josie Mansfield

by H. W. Brands

  Stokes’s third trial commences a month into the panic, and with the papers filled with dreadful economic news, it draws far less attention than the first and second trials. The primary novel evidence is a statement by a witness the defense has found who says he saw a pistol in Fisk’s hand at the time of the shooting. The prosecution challenges the statement—Why has the witness surfaced only now? Why can’t he remember more details of the event?—but in other respects the trial tracks the two previous ones.

  The jury this time, more carefully charged than the last, yields a verdict finally favorable, in a comparative sense, to Stokes. He is convicted of manslaughter in the third degree rather than murder in the first. The sentence is four years in prison rather than death.

  “In the list of murders which have disgraced the annals of this City for a score of years,” a graybeard of the fourth estate reflects in sending Stokes off to Sing Sing, “none created a greater excitement than the shooting of James Fisk, Jr., by Edward S. Stokes. Both men had their warm partisans and enemies, and both enjoyed a national celebrity—a celebrity of a character not worthy of emulation. On the one side James Fisk, brilliant, unscrupulous, immoral, and debonair, the beau ideal of the fast, shrewd, go-ahead speculator; on the other hand, Edward S. Stokes, reared in affluence, accustomed to have every impulse and wish gratified, every object obtained. Between them Helen Josephine Mansfield Lawlor, the Aspasia who, by the bending of her thumb, like Nero’s wife, Agrippina, brought the conflict of the arena to a fatal conclusion.”

  Fisk is gone forever, Stokes for the term of his sentence, and Josie …?

  Josie has vanished. Amid the legal wrangling over Stokes’s fate she slipped out of her house on Twenty-third Street and out of the city she turned upside down. Competing rumors put her in contradictory places, but the most plausible indicate an extended European tour. English and some French papers have followed the Fisk murder and the Stokes trials, but Josie’s profile is far lower overseas than in America, and she can hope to disappear among the many other travelers who, in the age of steamships and railroads, are helping launch the modern tourist industry.

  Stokes isn’t constituted for prison life. Sing Sing makes the Tombs look like a health spa, and within months he suffers respiratory ailments that cause the authorities to fear for his survival. They move him to a medical facility at Auburn, where he revives sufficiently to boast to visitors that he is speculating in stocks. He claims to have cleared thirty thousand dollars in recent transactions. He applies for a pardon to Governor Tilden, hoping the anti-Tammany chief executive will look mercifully on his case. But Tilden, whose ambitions have moved beyond breaking Bill Tweed and the Tammany ring to running for president, has no desire to dredge up old scandals. Yet Stokes still manages to exit prison early. His physical condition declines again, and in October 1876, three years into his four-year sentence, he is granted a medical discharge.

  Bill Tweed has no such luck. The Tammany boss manages to get his twelve-year criminal sentence reduced to one year, but he is quickly brought up on a civil suit and reconfined, for debt. He posts bail and then jumps it, fleeing the country to Cuba. By the time he is traced there, he has shipped out for Spain. Spanish authorities discover and arrest him—using, reportedly, a Thomas Nast cartoon for identification—and extradite him back to America. Returned to the Ludlow Street jail, in the heart of the city he once ruled, mere blocks from the courthouse that remains his monument to corruption, forgotten by Tammany Hall, which has moved on without him, Bill Tweed contracts pneumonia and in 1878 breathes his last.

  Jay Gould exhibits greater staying power. After the death of Fisk and the fall of Tweed, Gould gradually regains his financial touch, building a railroad empire in the West and adjoining it to the Western Union telegraph network. His accomplishments win him applause from many of those his enterprises employ, but the old enmities die hard, and his 1892 passing inspires reflection on his days at Erie. “The example he set is a dangerous one to follow,” the New York Herald warns. The World calls Gould “one of the most sinister figures that ever flitted bat-like across the vision of the American people.”

  Stokes reaches the new century but is largely forgotten. He never recaptures the insouciance of his youth, and even the affected nonchalance of certain moments of his post-Fisk phase is more than he can sustain. Friends find him fearful, often paranoid; he seems to think the ghost of Fisk is on his trail. He tries his hand at the hotel trade, purchasing the Hoffman House, his residence at the time of the shooting, but he has to sell it a few years later. He develops kidney disease and dies in November 1901, while America is reeling from another shocking murder, of President William McKinley at Buffalo, which brings the Gilded Age to a belated but resounding close.

  Josie outlasts them all. She remains in Europe for several years, marrying an American lawyer in London in 1891. He seems to love her, not least because, as he tells a visitor, she is the only woman who can save him from drinking himself to death. But she can’t save him from drinking himself insane, and she divorces him for mental incapacity. She returns to Boston, and then Philadelphia. At least one news story puts her in South Dakota. She is said to be an invalid, or in a convent. Several papers report her death.

  Yet she carries on. She crosses the ocean again to Europe, eventually settling in Paris. How she supports herself none can say; her charms are less obvious than they were when she drove Jim Fisk to distraction and Ned Stokes to murder. But something persists, and when her end finally comes, almost sixty years after that fatal meeting on the staircase of the Grand Central Hotel, one devoted acquaintance—the heir to Fisk, or is it to Stokes?—follows her casket to the burial site on Montparnasse and bids Josie Mansfield earthly farewell.

  The story just rendered is true. The characters and events were real; the words attributed to them were their own. Their actions and statements were recorded contemporaneously by journalists and other observers and related at length. New York’s many newspapers, including such major papers as the Herald, the Tribune, the Times, and the World, and smaller papers like the Irish World, provided blow-by-blow and word-by-word coverage of Jim Fisk, Josie Mansfield, Ned Stokes, Jay Gould, Daniel Drew, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and William Tweed. Legal depositions, trial transcripts, and summaries of court proceedings were published in various editions at the time and later. The Erie war and Black Friday triggered probes that culminated in published exposés, most notably Chapters of Erie, by Henry Adams and Charles Francis Adams, Jr., and Investigation into the Causes of the Gold Panic, by the Banking and Currency Committee of the House of Representatives. Context on the speculations and peculations of Fisk, Gould, Tweed, and their ilk comes from the large historical literature on the Gilded Age, to which the present author’s American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865–1900, affords an up-to-date entrée.