The Murder of Jim Fisk for the Love of Josie Mansfield (3 page)

Josie’s arrival prompts Drew to reconsider his partnership
with Fisk. In New York he can ignore most of Fisk’s improprieties, but Jersey City is a small town, and Taylor’s Hotel is even smaller. Josie’s fleshly presence affronts him, and when she and Fisk disport themselves like newlyweds on a honeymoon, Drew has to wonder where Fisk’s priorities lie. Drew attempts to improve the moral tone by attending a nearby church, but the example doesn’t take, and Fisk and Josie carry on as before.

The continuing confrontation with Vanderbilt doesn’t help Drew’s mood. Drew imagines that Vanderbilt will try to kidnap him and carry him back to New York’s jurisdiction; the Commodore has played rough before. So Drew has Fisk and Gould arrange security measures. They persuade the Jersey City police chief to position a special detail around the hotel; to this they add precautions of their own. Fisk hires four boats with a dozen armed men each to patrol the approaches to Jersey City lest Vanderbilt mount an amphibious assault. He enlists dozens more men from the gangs of the neighborhood to stand guard outside and within the hotel, which he jokingly dubs Fort Taylor.

The formidable appearance and dubious character of the impromptu Erie militia make Drew wonder whether the cure isn’t worse than the disease. He increasingly blames Fisk and Gould for his predicament. The stash of money aggravates the strain. Drew considers the $7 million his, since he is the principal shareholder of the Erie and the originator of the scheme by which the money has been acquired. Fisk and Gould believe
they
have a claim to substantial shares of the loot, as partners in the operation. They know Drew’s reputation for double-dealing; they request, then demand, their portions, which Drew declines to cede. The conspiracy starts to unravel.

And so, even as the trio entices the New Jersey legislature into incorporating the Erie as a New Jersey company, to make Vanderbilt think they might
never
return to New York, Drew gets word to the Commodore that he wants to make peace. Fisk and Gould are alert to such a defection, and Fisk monitors all mail, telegrams, and other messages entering and leaving the hotel. But Drew bribes a waiter to get a note past Fisk, and a meeting with Vanderbilt is scheduled.

One Sunday Drew leaves the hotel as if for a Sabbath stroll. Out of sight he slips to the waterfront, where a waiting boat carries him across the Hudson. Not trusting Vanderbilt, he has deliberately chosen Sunday, when arrests in civil cases are suspended. He takes a cab to Vanderbilt’s home in Washington Square. Drew attempts small talk as an icebreaking courtesy; Vanderbilt gruffly gets to the business at hand. They agree that the Erie war has lasted long enough, and they accept the need for a settlement. No details are discussed, and Drew remains edgy. He watches the clock, knowing that if he is still in New York at midnight, he risks being arrested. But he gets away from Washington Square in midevening, and he is across the Hudson before his skiff turns into a pumpkin.

Yet Fisk and Gould have noted his absence and divined his destination. When he returns they declare emphatically that they expect to be included in any subsequent negotiations. Drew explains that he was simply trying to look out for their interests—better than they could themselves, as he has been in the speculating game longer than they have. They don’t believe him. They watch him closely, and when he seems to be preparing to go back to New York again, they insist on joining him.

He still manages to lose them. He says that the meeting is at the Fifth Avenue Hotel but that he has to make a stop before going there. They should proceed; he will meet them. He turns instead toward the home of former judge Edwards Pierrepont, where Vanderbilt is waiting.

The two principals reach an agreement. Drew will retain control of the Erie and will keep the profits he has made on the run-up in the company’s share price, but the Erie will buy back the watered stock he and Fisk and Gould have sold Vanderbilt. Both sides will abandon their legal proceedings.

Drew and Vanderbilt are about to seal the pact when Fisk and Gould burst into the room. Vanderbilt roars with laughter to see Drew’s deception uncovered by his partners. Drew forces a smile and affects not to be upset. He asks Fisk and Gould to join the discussion. The terms are delineated.

Fisk balks at buying back Vanderbilt’s shares, complaining that it will cost the Erie millions. But Gould pulls him aside. They whisper together. Then they return to the table, and Gould, who till now has let Fisk do the talking, says he and Fisk will accept the deal on one condition: that Drew turn control of the company over to them.

Now Drew balks. He has gotten rich from the Erie, and he is loath to lose the chance to get richer still. But he is also reluctant to reopen the battle with Vanderbilt, who bellows delight at Drew’s discomfiture. And he realizes that Fisk and Gould can outvote him if the matter comes before the Erie directors. So he takes his money and walks away from the company, appreciating the irony that he has saved the Erie from his rival only to lose it to his friends.

Josie is happy to return from Jersey, and even happier when
Fisk announces a new home for the reconstructed management of the Erie. Samuel Pike has opened an opera house on Twenty-third Street at Eighth Avenue; its ornate design and elaborate furnishings draw the attention and patronage of the theater set in the city. But Pike encounters cash flow troubles and hints that he might have to sell. Fisk has been an impresario at heart since youth; it tickles his ambition to imagine himself the proprietor of an opera house, with all the opportunities for self-promotion proprietorship entails.

Gould is skeptical, wondering what an opera house has to do with running a railroad. But Fisk’s excitement inclines Gould to believe that the Opera House will keep Fisk busy, leaving Gould to manage the company. He assents to Fisk’s plan, which calls for purchasing the Pike place and refitting the second floor to be headquarters of the Erie.

The railroad is one of the state’s largest employers, and the New York papers report the relocation as a major event. Some applaud the move to larger quarters as overdue; others question the extravagance even by the generous standards of the Gilded Age. The same papers carry a simultaneous announcement that the Erie is building a new ferry terminal at the foot of Twenty-third Street, just a few blocks from the Opera House. Proximity to the Erie offices is one consideration; another is readier access to the railroad stations of midtown. The Erie will operate a horse railway from the ferry to the Opera House and the stations, ensuring the swiftest travel for its customers. Observers of the late flight to Jersey cheekily remark that the new arrangement will also facilitate fast getaways for the Erie directors, should the necessity again arise.

The possibility appears quite real. Dan Drew leaves the road literally a wreck: in the week of his departure an Erie night express from Buffalo careens off rails that were supposed to have been replaced with fresh ones funded by money he is discovered to have diverted to his own pocket. Four cars plunge over a cliff, somersault several times, burst into flames (from upset stoves employed to heat the cars), and wedge into the bottom of a narrow canyon, trapping the passengers, twenty-two of whom burn horribly to death. The “Erie Slaughter,” the papers call it, and it reminds the public—and the new Erie directors—that a railroad is a serious business, not simply the plaything of speculators.

Yet Fisk can’t take anything very seriously for long. He lets Gould run the Erie and revels in his role as master of ceremonies at the renamed Grand Opera House. He entertains more lavishly than before, hosting pre-performance receptions and post-performance suppers for special guests and members of the casts.

Josie is often on his arm and in his personal box. She mingles with professional actresses and dancers, who swirl about Fisk as though he is the most important, powerful, and attractive man in New York. The presence at the Opera House of other important men—elected officials, judges, business associates—tends to confirm the impression. Champagne flows freely; cigar smoke clouds the air. The Opera House has many private rooms where Fisk’s guests can get to know one another better.

Fisk visits these rooms, but he ends most evenings at Josie’s house, just around the corner. It is his home away from home, and he spends more nights there than in his own house—and many more nights than he spends at the Boston home of Mrs. Fisk. Moralists like Dan Drew shudder at Fisk’s flouting of the conventional code, but in his own way he is the soul of domesticity. Josie will remark how often he comes home—that is, to her house—in the evening and promptly falls asleep, too exhausted from playing the Prince of Erie, as the papers call him, to do any of the scandalous things ascribed to him.

On these nights she looks around her house, at her dresses and diamonds and furniture and paintings, and concludes that she has done well for herself. And yet, as her eye falls on Fisk, slumped in an armchair with his coat thrown off, his stomach bulging over his belt, his jowls hiding his cravat, his snores shaking the paintings and the silver, she wonders if there isn’t more to a young woman’s life.

William Tweed enjoys the company of Fisk and Josie at the
Opera House and often at Josie’s afterward. He feels an affinity with Fisk as another who has climbed from humble beginnings to the top of his profession—New York politics, in Tweed’s case. Like Fisk he displayed an early flair for persuasion, talking friends into forming the Americus Fire Company No. 6, a volunteer unit that branched out from firefighting to other worthy activities. His Manhattan neighbors voted him their alderman in the decade before the Civil War, and then their congressman. But his heart remained in his home city, and after two years in Washington he returned to New York, where he sat on the board of supervisors before being elected to the New York state senate in Albany. His most important positions, however, have always been with the political machine that controls Democratic politics in New York City. He has a gift for the rough-hewn politics of urban democracy; his intuition tells him what people want and need, and what they are willing to pay for it. He has cultivated friends and fought off rivals until, in the half decade after the Civil War, he becomes the master of Tammany Hall, as the Democratic machine is universally known, for one of its gathering spots. By virtue of his leadership of Tammany, Bill Tweed is among the most powerful men in America’s largest and richest city.

To the respectable classes of New York, Tammany stands for everything that is corrupt in politics. It blatantly buys the votes of poor immigrants, paying for them with goods and services furnished from public funds. Tweed and his Tammany ring don’t deny that they help themselves to the spoils of politics, but they contend that victors have a right to the spoils. Besides, they say, they are the agents of democracy, taking men where they find them, even in the gutter, and bringing them to the altar of American politics, the polls on election day. Someone has to set the Irish and other immigrants on the path to assimilation, and who better than Tammany?

Yet Tweed has been testing the limits of the city’s tolerance of graft. Contractors complain not so much at having to kick part of their compensation from the city back to Tweed and his cronies; this has long been standard practice in New York. But the size of the bribes required to do business with the bosses has grown dramatically under Tweed, till the contractors wonder if the returns on their payments make Tammany’s patronage worth the trouble. Editors and other keepers of the public conscience complain that Tweed is selling out the general interest to please the Irish, the immigrant group that forms the predominant element of the Tammany coalition.

Tweed can stand the criticism, but like Jim Fisk he appreciates diversions from his day job. He first encountered Fisk and Gould at the end of the Erie war against Vanderbilt, when the two entreated Albany for preferment for their railroad. Tweed answered their entreaties and in exchange received a position on the Erie’s board of directors.

The relationship serves both parties. The Erie directors get Tweed’s help on matters of law and politics. When the Erie needs permission to lay new track or build a depot, when the Erie wants a change in its corporate charter, when the Erie requires a favorable judicial ruling, Tweed and Tammany deliver. Tweed and his cronies receive advice on investing from two of Wall Street’s best-placed insiders, and direct payments from the Erie treasury when cash is needed. As the speculators and the politico confer behind the oak doors of the Erie offices, as Fisk and Tweed share Fisk’s box at the Opera House and Fisk’s whiskey at Josie’s—the abstemious Gould stays home with his wife—they spin a web of reciprocal influence. The Erie circle and the Tweed ring overlap and interlock; what strengthens one strengthens the other, what threatens one threatens both.