The Murder of Jim Fisk for the Love of Josie Mansfield

by H. W. Brands

  Fisk determines to present his regiment to the city, and he can think of no better venue than the Opera House. The hall is crowded on a Saturday night in May 1870; the staging of The Twelve Temptations has drawn enthusiastic reviews. The curtain is late in rising, and the management has offered no explanation. The atmosphere grows oppressive; the ladies and some men fan themselves to catch a breath.

  Suddenly, just before nine, a commotion is heard outside the theater proper, in the foyer. Necks crane and eyes scan the doors. To no one’s great surprise, Fisk emerges as the source of the hubbub. He enters the hall, dressed in the full regalia of his colonelcy. Behind him, two by two, enter the five hundred men of the Ninth Regiment, stepping lively to the accompaniment of the regimental band. Fisk has saved the best seats for the soldiers, most of whom give the appearance of never having been inside such a theater. Awkwardly and noisily they find their places.

  Fisk beams, proud to show off his theater to his regiment and his regiment to the patrons of his theater. The audience, skeptical at first, allows itself to become part of the spectacle and offers rousing applause to these defenders of the state and their doughty commander.

  Yet one man bucks the tide of good cheer. A constable with a summons makes his way to Fisk, in the presence of the regiment and the regular audience. He hands the colonel the notice that he must answer to the authorities for an outstanding debt. Fisk scans the summons and with theatrical disgust tosses it to the floor. He proceeds to his personal box.

  The constable tries to follow Fisk, but several members of the regiment’s Company K, which deems itself Fisk’s personal bodyguard, block the way. One of the men retrieves the summons and reads it aloud. Messrs. McBride and Williams, grocers, have sued the colonel for alleged delinquency in paying for seventy-five pounds of butter. The total due is $41.25. The audience roars at the incommensurability of the present grand celebration and the measly butter bill. Fisk dramatically glowers and declares that his enemies are trying to upstage him.

  The curtain rises and the scheduled performance begins. Fisk watches the opening act and then repairs to the lobby to greet late arrivals and, at intermission, the rest of the house. He issues directions to the waiters who circulate among the crowd dispensing champagne. He shakes hands with the gentlemen, bows to the ladies, and slaps the backs of his men. At the conclusion of the performance he leads the officers of the regiment into one of the private rooms for a late supper. More champagne mingles with stronger spirits. The officers toast their colonel’s health and generosity; ribald references are made to Messrs. McBride and Williams and the unredeemed butter.

  In the summer of 1871 Bill Tweed finds himself in a quandary. New York’s battling clans of the Irish are at it again, and the Tammany boss is caught in the middle. Protestant Orangemen from Northern Ireland want to parade: to commemorate the victory of William of Orange over Catholic Irish nationalists in the 1690 Battle of the Boyne and to insult the descendants of those Catholic nationalists here in New York. Last year’s Orange parade produced a murderous confrontation between the Orangemen and the Catholic Irish in which eight people died and many were injured. Tweed has tried to avert a reprise by ordering Mayor A. Oakey Hall and police superintendent James Kelso to deny the Orangemen a parade permit for this year.

  But the ban evokes angry protests. A meeting of merchants at the Produce Exchange approves a resolution decrying the “imperious and illegal order” and deprecating “this utter violation of the rights of the people.” The New York Herald declares the ban a fateful step down a slippery road to the kind of repression currently manifested by the radical Commune in Paris, where blood has flowed in the streets and much more seems likely to flow. The Times taunts Tweed, Hall, and Kelso for bowing to the Irish: “City Authorities Overawed by the Roman Catholics.” The same paper prints a letter to the editor demanding, “It is Pope or President for this country,” and “Have Americans any rights now?” The letter’s author signs himself “Old Vet of 1812” and gives his place of residence as “Ireland (late New York).”

  The outcry compels Tweed to reconsider. He confers with Governor John Hoffman, who has come down from Albany, and they direct Mayor Hall and Superintendent Kelso to rescind the ban. The government will not prevent the Orangemen from marching. On the contrary, Hoffman says, the government will enforce the Protestants’ right to assemble and march: “They will be protected to the fullest extent possible by the military and police authorities.”

  Now the Catholic Irish protest, in their own, direct fashion. In the early morning of Wednesday, July 12—Orange Day—police discover an effigy hanging from a telegraph pole in front of the liquor store of Owen Finney at 14 Spring Street, not far from Hibernian Hall, the headquarters of New York’s militant Irish. The figure is made to look like a man dressed in orange. The police cut the figure down and inquire among the neighbors as to who might have hoisted it. No one offers any information, with most seeming sullen and others fearful.

  Inside Hibernian Hall a large crowd of Catholics gathers to denounce Tweed and the authorities for reversing the no-parade policy. An undercover journalist has infiltrated the meeting and records the angry oaths. “This is the governor we elected,” one protester sneers of Hoffman. The crowd plots a countermarch of its own. Someone suggests demanding a police escort, lest the marchers be attacked. Another person, more attuned to the spirit in the hall, retorts, “We got arms enough and can do our own fighting.” This elicits loud applause, and a question: “Where are the arms?” The man chairing the meeting, a Mr. Doyle, answers: “There will be enough arms here in half an hour to arm all that are present.” Another man shouts: “How about the volunteers?” Chairman Doyle replies: “We shall have thousands join us when we march out. Arrangements have been made that they shall be supplied if they want them.”

  At this point some notice that the covert journalist isn’t responding with the zeal of the rest. “Reporter in the room,” the chairman bellows. “What are you doing here? We don’t want you.” The next day’s paper will summarize the journalist’s response: “The reporter, knowing the impulsive nature of the Hibernians, wisely concluded to leave the hall and in this way escaped the personal violence which he heard threatened as he went down the stairs.”

  The reporter encounters soldiers and police deploying rapidly around the city: “There was hurrying, in hot haste, of armed men through the streets converging to the several points of rendezvous of the National Guard and of large companies of police officers hurrying to their headquarters at the Central office. It was as if a deadly enemy of the Commonwealth was expected at the gates, and an alarmed people were making hasty preparations for defense. But when it was considered that the enemy was within the community, and that it was an arrogant faction determined by force to deny to others the liberty which it claimed for itself, and that all these preparations were necessary to enforce the laws against those who swore to obey them, every reflecting citizen saw that the crisis was more portentous than if a foreign fleet were bombarding the City, or a foreign host at its gates.”

  The Catholic Irish naturally interpret the situation differently. The Orangemen are provocateurs, they claim, shielded by the Protestant-intimidated establishment. The provocateurs must be punished. Irish workers drop their tools and walk off their jobs all across the city—quarrymen from a construction site at Tenth Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, longshoremen from the docks at the foot of Houston Street, rail workers from the Third Avenue line, thousands of laborers from myriad other sites. Many come willingly; some, threatened with instant dismissal by Protestant employers, have to be taunted or intimidated into joining the swelling crowd of Irish protesters.

  They meet their women and children on both sides of the Orange parade route, along Eighth Avenue above Twenty-first, in time for the early-afternoon start. They fill the sidewalks several rows deep and jam the intersections at the cross streets. They taunt and curse the police and militia who precede the marching Orangemen; many hurl rocks a
nd bottles along with their imprecations. The patrolmen and soldiers suffer the bombardment for a time, but then the police charge the mob, laying about with billy clubs, and the soldiers fire blank rounds of warning. Whether the blanks provoke live fire from the mob or are simply followed by real rounds from the soldiers’ muskets will furnish grist for years of debate; today the question is lost amid the smoke and shrieks that rise above the gun reports and the collision of thousands of angry bodies.

  No one counts the dead today; survivors are too busy trying to escape the line of fire and bludgeon. Tomorrow coroners and local hospitals will tally some sixty bodies and twice that many wounded. Shopkeepers will wash the blood and gore from around their entryways. Patrick Ford’s Irish World will condemn the “Slaughter on Eighth Avenue” and the Irish neighborhoods will seethe with resentment at the Orangemen and those who took their side. A grand jury headed by foreman Theodore Roosevelt, whose twelve-year-old son, also called Theodore Roosevelt, has observed the violence from the safe distance of the family’s Union Square home, will congratulate Governor Hoffman for taking action that proved “a necessity to preserve the honor of our city.” Police commissioner Henry Smith, a friend of Roosevelt’s, will wonder whether the police and militia should have responded with even greater force. “Had one thousand of the rioters been killed,” Smith will say, “it would have had the effect of completely cowing the remainder.”

  The one thing the two sides agree on is that Bill Tweed is a miserable excuse for a civic leader. In the papers, in meeting halls, on street corners, they pound him unmercifully. The Irish Catholics condemn him as a coward for bending to the Protestants; the Protestants damn him for incompetency in failing to prevent the Irish violence.

  The pummeling drives Tweed closer to Jim Fisk, a rare New Yorker agnostic on the Irish question. Fisk has his own Orange Day story. “On Tuesday night, about twelve o’clock,” the colonel of the Ninth Regiment explains, “I called on Governor Hoffman and Mayor Hall at Police Headquarters and had an interview with those officials in reference to my regiment in the coming trouble. During our powwow I informed the Governor that in case of a riot I expected that the Twenty-third Street Ferry and the Grand Opera House would be assailed by the mob. His Excellency concluded to let the Ninth Regiment protect both places. There being a rumor that a body of Orangemen intended crossing the Twenty-third Street Ferry”—from New Jersey—“to take part in the New York procession, it was decided that should such an attempt be made, the ferry boats should be withdrawn, and they should not be permitted to cross. Governor Hoffman thought he should have enough to do to protect his own people, and was not willing to become responsible for the safety of those belonging to any other city or state.”

  Fisk was ready the next day. “About midday a messenger arrived from the Grand Opera House with the information that a large number of men were crossing the Twenty-third Street Ferry. I immediately went to the Opera House and sent for Jay Gould. I wanted to know of him if the charter”—of the Erie Railroad—“would be violated by stopping the ferry boats. Not being able to find Gould, I took the responsibility upon my own shoulders and telegraphed to Mr. McIntosh, the agent at Jersey City, to stop running the boats. My order was at once obeyed.”

  Meanwhile the Ninth had been mustering at its armory to join the procession in order to protect the Orange marchers. A messenger brought word that the men were all in place. “I started out and began to walk back,” Fisk explains. “As I approached Twenty-fourth Street, the crowd on the sidewalk hooted me and yelled at me.” The Irish crowd knew Fisk as the commander of the Ninth and didn’t like his protecting their historic foes. “I immediately took the middle of the street, and walked on in that way till I came in sight of the Sixth Regiment just ahead. In the meantime the crowd was gathering behind me, when all of a sudden I heard a shot and felt a bullet whiz past me. I went in the ranks of the Sixth, the crowd continuing their hooting until I got to my own regiment.”

  He had left his uniform coat and sword at the armory, but with the parade beginning he had to make do in shirtsleeves and with a borrowed weapon. “I took the major’s sword and assumed command. The procession began to march, and soon after we started a lot of bricks and stones were thrown at us, and in some instances shots were discharged. My men had received instructions before leaving the armory not to fire off their pieces until they should be assaulted by the mob, and not to fire if only stones should be thrown. But should it become so hot that they could not stand it, and should any shots be fired, they were not to wait for any orders, but were to fire into the mob and protect themselves.

  “No attention was paid to the missiles until Walter Pryor was struck by a bullet in the knee, and Harry Page was killed. I was standing within a few feet of him. At that moment discharges of musketry were heard from the head of the line, and my men, becoming excited at the death of one of our best members, opened fire upon the mob. My regiment was a little distance behind the Sixth. The crowd on the east side of Eighth Avenue, into which the troops were firing, now came rushing between the two regiments. I was standing in front of my regiment with Major Hitchcock’s sword in my hand. The mob closed in upon me in an instant, knocked me down, and trampled upon me.

  “After the crowd passed me I tried to rise, and found I was hurt about the foot. I cannot say whether I was struck by anything, or received my injuries by being trampled upon. Some of my men, seeing my condition, carried me into a bakery close by. I was taken to the second story and the surgeons examined my foot and found that my ankle was out of joint. They took hold of it and jerked it back into place. The surgeons then left me, and as I was looking out of the window with Captain Spencer I saw the crowd close around the two men of my regiment who had been left in charge of Page’s body. I saw a man make a thrust at one of them with a sword-cane.

  “The next thing I remember was hearing an Irishman, who stood in front of the bakery, cry out, ‘That damned Colonel Fisk is in here. Let’s go in and kill the villain.’ Others said, ‘Hang him.’ Crowds began to gather thick and fast about the door, and fearing that the house was about to be sacked, I seized a heavy cane which had been given me, and left by the back way. I must have jumped over five fences, when I reached a house through which I went, and attempted to pass out by the front door. Looking down the street toward Eighth Avenue, I saw the mob still there. Coming down Ninth Avenue was another crowd, a hard looking set. For a moment I thought there was no possible chance of escape, but on glancing across the street I saw a door open and ran toward it. This house is in Twenty-seventh Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. I went through the hallway to the yard. Here I met a high fence. I found a barrel, mounted it, and climbed over. I climbed several more fences before I became exhausted at last, and started for a house fronting on Twenty-ninth Street. Some woman slammed the door in my face. Seeing a basement window open, I crawled into it, and was confronted by an Irishman, who wanted to know what it all meant. I explained my case to him, and borrowed a pair of old trousers, an old hat and a large coat. When I left the house, the crowds had disappeared from Twenty-ninth Street, having followed the procession down.

  “My first thought was now for a carriage. Seeing none in sight I limped toward Ninth Avenue, and looking down the street I espied one coming up. I hailed the driver, and looking inside saw Jay Gould. The driver stopped, but Gould, not knowing me in my disguise, ordered him to go on again. I explained who I was, and was taken in. The driver took us to the Hoffman House; but I had not been there more than fifteen minutes before a mob collected around the neighborhood. Seeing that danger still followed me, I ordered another coach, and was taken to the Pavonia Ferry, where a number of our tugs are generally stationed. I got on board of one of them and was taken to Sandy Hook. From there I went to Long Beach in the cars. I did not take off my disguise until I reached the Continental Hotel.”

  Fisk’s narrow escape doesn’t impress Josie, who is too enamored of Stokes by now to remember what she saw in Fisk. Stokes reminds
her: Fisk’s money, which still supports her and, to the extent Stokes takes meals and amusement at Josie’s, increasingly supports him. She calculates how she might rid herself of Fisk while retaining access to his money. She recalls Fisk making investments on her behalf, and how he would congratulate her when they paid off. Till now she has been happy to let her winnings ride and be reinvested; she hasn’t even asked for an accounting. She remembers Fisk saying she is twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars to the good; she and Stokes estimate that such a sum might make her independent of Fisk.

  Josie knows how to entice a man; she also knows how to dispense with him. She picks a fight through the notes they exchange when his business takes him away from her. “I never expected so severe a letter from you,” she writes after a mild reproof. “I, of course, feel it was unmerited; but as it is your opinion of me, I accept it with all the sting. You have struck home, and I may say turned the knife around.” She escalates, suddenly and dramatically. “I am anxious to adjust our affairs. I certainly do not wish to annoy you, and that I may be able to do so I write you this last letter.”

  The adjustment she refers to involves money. “You have told me very often that you held some twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars of mine in your keeping,” she says. “I do not know if it is so, but that I may be able to shape my affairs permanently for the future, a part of the amount would place me in a position where I would never have to appeal to you for aught.” She asserts her faithfulness, by her own lights. “I have never had one dollar from any one else.” She seeks simple justice. “I do not ask for anything I have not been led to suppose was mine, and do not ask you to settle what is not entirely convenient for you.”