Jim Fisk: Circus Runaway, Black Friday Gold Raider, Murdered at 36

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In January 1872, tens of thousands of working-class New Yorkers wept in the streets for James Fisk Jr., a man who had bribed judges, manipulated a president, and helped crash the gold market. This episode traces how a boy born in Vermont in 1835 ran away to join a circus, learned how to sell a spectacle, and carried that showmanship into peddling dry goods, Civil War army contracts, cotton smuggling, and a ruthless short sale of Confederate bonds in London.

On Wall Street, Fisk joined Daniel Drew and Jay Gould in the Erie War, printing fresh shares to dilute Cornelius Vanderbilt and buying the votes in Albany that made the scheme legal. Then came the attempt to corner gold, which ended on Black Friday, September 24, 1869, when President Grant released Treasury reserves. His private life proved just as reckless: a public affair with Josie Mansfield, an extortion plot by Edward Stiles Stokes, and a fatal ambush on the staircase of the Grand Central Hotel.

• Knowing the siege of Petersburg was ending, Fisk sent an agent on a fast boat to London to short Confederate bonds before the news crossed the Atlantic.
• Fisk and Gould put Boss Tweed on the Erie board, then carried suitcases of cash to Albany to pass a law retroactively legalizing the stock they had already printed.
• He installed Josie Mansfield in an apartment on West 23rd Street and built a covered passage connecting it to the Erie Railroad offices.
• A week after the shooting, the New York Herald published all 39 of the supposedly damning letters. They were ordinary love letters, and Stokes, after three trials, served just four years in Sing Sing.
• In June 1872 a newspaper in Porvoo, Finland printed a baseless rumor that Fisk had left money to Finnish relatives, and families were still chasing the imaginary inheritance decades later.