He was the Donald Trump of the Gilded Age — flamboyant, ambitious, egregious. He glittered when he walked, his peacock wardrobe shrieking, his diamond rings sparkling, his strawberry-blond ringlets curling just so around his face. “Jubilee Jim,” they called him; “the Prince of Erie.” He preferred James Fisk Jr., but he was willing to accept whatever made headlines.
He was a Vermont peddler who had migrated to Boston in search of easier marks and fatter profits; he had moved again, to New York during the Civil War, for similar reasons. He fell in with a fast crowd. His mentor was Daniel Drew, who recalled when Broadway was a cattle trail from the hinterlands to the city. Jay Gould, the Mephistopheles of the speculative arts, became a partner, and together Fisk, Drew and Gould battled Cornelius Vanderbilt for control of the Erie Railroad. The company was dubbed the “Scarlet Woman of Wall Street” for how it seduced and succumbed to men with money, and the Erie war evolved into an epic of double-dealing and bogus shares, culminating in the flight of Fisk, Drew and Gould across the Hudson with millions from the corporate treasury. Drew sought a truce with Vanderbilt by betraying Fisk and Gould; they outfoxed him and wound up with the railroad.
They subsequently needed a new headquarters, or so Fisk persuaded the abstemious Gould. Samuel Pike’s lavish but struggling opera house at Eighth Avenue and 23rd Street was just the thing. Fisk would run the theater while Gould managed the railroad from offices upstairs.
Gould managed more than the railroad. During the summer of 1869, he laid plans to grasp the holy grail of speculation: control of the nation’s gold supply. Stealthily he started purchasing gold. Fisk got wind of the scheme and insisted on joining. This changed the strategy entirely, for Fisk could do nothing by stealth. He bellowed his orders across the Gold Room, the trading venue at New and Wall streets. Gold’s price climbed higher and higher, alarming honest investors.
The conspirators came within a whisker of completing their coup; only the 11th hour intervention of the US Treasury prevented the duo from cornering the market. But so far had the plot proceeded that its foiling was almost as damaging; the Treasury’s sale of government gold sent the financial markets reeling. Investors howled for the heads of Fisk and Gould, who escaped lynching only by barricading themselves behind the heavy oak doors of the Erie offices at the Opera House. “It was each man drag out his own corpse,” Fisk later remarked.
But all was not bleak. Fisk took comfort in the arms of a 22-year-old, conspicuously not his wife, named Josie Mansfield. Josie had charms of face and form that had driven men wild since she was a teen, and she had a way of making herself appear vulnerable that caused Fisk to take her under his protection. She told him she couldn’t afford better than the modest dress she was wearing when they met; he bought her a wardrobe. She said he had fallen behind on her rent; he bought her a house. She said he was so smart about business; he gave her stock tips and the money to purchase shares.
She was grateful, after her fashion. She entertained Fisk and his friends, including some of the most powerful men in New York. William Tweed, the boss of Tammany Hall, was a regular; through Tweed, Josie learned how the city was really governed.
Another of Fisk’s associates was fascinating in an entirely different way. Ned Stokes was a dangerously handsome ne’er-do-well who made Fisk seem fat and old. Stokes was married, too, but wedlock constrained him as little as it did Fisk.
For months Fisk perceived nothing amiss. Gradually, however, he caught on: He realized that she had played him for a fool, taking his money while bestowing her affections on Stokes. She audaciously asked him for more money; he refused. She said he owed her the money; it was the proceeds from trading done on her own account. He refused again.
Josie and Stokes pondered how to force Fisk to pay. She had kept love letters from Fisk; he doubtless didn’t want the world to read them. She hinted that the letters might find their way to the New York papers, which would pay her for them if he would not.
Fisk sued to prevent publication. Josie countersued. The trials were covered in great detail, from the curve of Josie’s neck and the fit of her dress to the frequency of Stokes’ visits. Josie’s account quavered under cross-examination by Fisk’s expensive lawyers, who drove her from the witness stand in tears.
Stokes was unnerved by this display of Fisk’s power; he was outraged when a prosecutor friendly to Tweed and Fisk persuaded a grand jury to indict him for blackmail.
In his fear and anger he sought out Fisk. He took a cab to the Opera House; not finding him there, he went on to the Grand Central Hotel, on Broadway between Amity and Bleecker. Fisk frequented the hotel, the newest and finest in New York.
There Stokes lay in wait. And when Fisk arrived, Stokes confronted him in the stairwell. He pulled a small pistol from under his coat and shot Fisk twice, once in the abdomen and once in the arm. Stokes ran through the hotel but he slipped on the marble tile and before he could regain his feet the hotel’s alert porters wrestled him to a halt.
Fisk’s funeral parade proved the event of the season. Tens of thousands turned out: his friends to see him off, his enemies to make sure he was dead, the rest to see what all the fuss was about. Stokes missed the parade. He spent the day in The Tombs awaiting his murder trial. He wound up in Sing Sing.
Josie, too, skipped the parade, and then skipped town. Resourceful as always, she found a new man, a new name, a new life. She lived far into the 20th century, by which time her role in the great murder scandal of the Gilded Age was but a memory.
H. W. Brands is the author of “The Murder of Jim Fisk for the Love of Josie Mansfield” (Anchor), out now.