The Murder of Jim Fisk for the Love of Josie Mansfield

by H. W. Brands

  He hails a cab and rides to Josie’s house. But when he gets there he doesn’t go in. He directs the driver around the corner to the Opera House but doesn’t go in there either. He has the driver take him down Broadway and gets out near the Grand Central Hotel, between Amity and Bleecker streets.

  The Grand Central bills itself as the finest hotel in America, and it is without question the largest, with more than six hundred rooms. In the eighteen months since opening it has become the favored accommodation of well-heeled visitors to New York, and scores of rich residents of the city make it their permanent abode.

  Stokes, inwardly still agitated but outwardly calm, enters the hotel and ascends a staircase to the second-floor hallway, which runs north and south, parallel to Broadway. The hotel is moderately busy on this Saturday afternoon, and no one pays this nattily dressed, respectable-looking visitor particular mind. He seems to be waiting for one of the hotel’s guests or residents, as several others in the public areas of the hotel are doing. At five minutes past four o’clock Stokes stands at the head of what the hotel calls the ladies’ staircase, to distinguish it from the main stairway at the opposite end of the hall.

  He is looking down the staircase when Jim Fisk enters it at the bottom. Their eyes meet. Fisk seems surprised, even shocked, to see Stokes. Stokes appears neither surprised nor shocked.

  Fisk is more shocked when Stokes produces a pistol. But Fisk doesn’t move, perhaps not sure that he is seeing what he is seeing. Stokes fires. The bullet hits Fisk in the abdomen. Stokes fires again. This bullet hits Fisk in the upper arm.

  Fisk belatedly turns to escape. He takes a step but stumbles, then falls to the floor.

  Stokes leaves him bleeding in the stairwell. He retreats into the second-floor hallway and walks quickly toward the main staircase. Near the head of the stair is the door to the ladies’ parlor; he enters and tosses his pistol, a four-shot derringer, on one of the sofas. He returns to the hallway and descends the main stairway, walking even more quickly now, for he hears shouts that a man has been shot in the hotel and the assailant is on the loose. As the shouts grow louder he breaks into a run, causing the proprietor of the hotel, who sees Stokes from behind the main desk, to call to him to stop. The owner yells to the porters to catch him.

  Several porters give chase. Stokes dashes down the hallway toward the back doorway to Mercer Street, dodging hotel guests and visitors. He is passing the hotel barbershop, within a few steps of the street, when he loses his footing on the marble floor. He falls awkwardly. He is up again in an instant, but the delay allows the porters to overtake him. They wrestle him to the floor and pin him down. When he ceases to resist, they drag him to the porters’ bench at the foot of the grand stairway and hold him for the arrival of the police.

  Fisk knows nothing of Stokes’s capture. He has staggered to his feet, unaware how seriously he has been wounded. The doorman and other hotel staff assist him up the ladies’ staircase to a vacant suite near the head of the stairs. He collapses on the bed, which immediately becomes soaked in his blood. The doorman and the others are puzzled and alarmed at the amount of the blood, for the arm wound—the only one they can see—appears minor. One of the staff rushes to summon medical help. Two physicians, both of them residents of the hotel, arrive within minutes. They order everyone else out of the room and conduct an examination.

  They quickly discover the abdominal wound and realize it is by far the more serious. They call for additional help, meanwhile making Fisk as comfortable as possible. His pain isn’t great, as shock has set in. He remains conscious, with momentary lapses.

  Two more physicians—surgeons—arrive. One probes the wound to locate the bullet and perhaps extract it. But after exploring several inches into Fisk’s ample torso, he finds nothing and gives up. The physicians agree that the wound is probably mortal, although they are encouraged when Fisk grows more alert and apparently stronger. They concur that the next hour or two, perhaps a bit longer, will be critical.

  The police arrive at the hotel. Stokes is arrested and taken to Fisk’s room. The two men face each other: Stokes standing, silent and sullen; Fisk lying on the blood-soaked bed, breathing heavily and with great effort. Stokes looks away from Fisk, trying to avoid his glance. Fisk looks at Stokes but, in his shock, seems bewildered by the whole sequence of events.

  All the police want is for Fisk to identify Stokes as his assailant. Fisk does so but says nothing to Stokes. He then falls back on his pillow. Stokes remains silent, neither denying the identification nor affirming it. He is led away.

  The police hustle him out of the hotel and along the sidewalk the half block to the Fifteenth Precinct station house on Mercer Street. A growing crowd, attracted by the commotion, trails the police and the prisoner. The captain on duty at the station house tells Stokes he is going to ask him some questions. “You can answer them or not, as you please.”

  “I will answer nothing,” Stokes responds.

  “Will you give me your name?”

  “Certainly. My name is Edward S. Stokes. I will give you that but nothing more.”

  He proves as good as his word. The captain orders him placed in a cell.

  The police now concentrate on Fisk. Informed by the doctors that Fisk is dying, the captain dispatches the police coroner to take Fisk’s antemortem statement, which like other deathbed testimony, is presumptively more reliable than most other statements. Six witnesses, residents of the hotel and the neighborhood, are summoned as a coroner’s jury, to corroborate the coroner’s record. As they enter Fisk’s room they file past Jay Gould and Bill Tweed, who have heard the news and hurried to the hotel. Whether the purpose of Gould and Tweed is to comfort their partner or keep delirium or approaching judgment from loosening his tongue about their shared secrets, they don’t say.

  Fisk is lying on his back covered with blankets. His wounded arm is outside the covers, elevated to slow the bleeding. His head is propped on pillows.

  The coroner begins by asking Fisk’s name and residence. Fisk provides them, his voice just above a whisper.

  “Do you believe that you are about to die?” the coroner asks. This question must be answered in the affirmative for the testimony to qualify as specially truthful.

  “I feel I am in a very critical condition,” Fisk answers.

  This isn’t good enough for the coroner. “Have you any hopes of recovery?” he asks.

  “I hope so.”

  This fails the test, too. Perhaps the coroner appreciates the irony of asking Fisk to abandon hope for life in order to identify the man who has brought about his imminent death. Perhaps, inured to death, the coroner is inured to irony as well. In any event, he proceeds. “Are you willing to make a true statement of the manner in which you received the injuries?”

  “I am.”

  Fisk is sworn and gives his statement. With considerable effort he retraces the events since arriving at the hotel. He says he recognized Stokes at the head of the stairs and saw something in his hand. He says he saw the flash from the pistol muzzle and heard the report of the powder about the same time he felt the first bullet pierce his abdomen. He describes being hit the second time and falling. He remembers being helped to the room and identifying Stokes.

  The statement requires less than two minutes. It is shortly transcribed, and Fisk signs it in a shaking hand.

  The coroner’s jury delivers a succinct report: “That James Fisk, Jr., came to his injuries by pistol-shot wounds, at the hands of Edward S. Stokes, at the Grand Central Hotel, Jan. 6, 1872.”

  By this time half of New York, it seems, has heard of the shooting. The crowd continues to grow on the street outside the Grand Central Hotel, with as many as can push past the police finding their way into the lobby. They are intensely curious but in a somber, respectful way. They whisper questions on Fisk’s condition and chances; those on the inside relay to the outdoor contingent the updates posted at the foot of the main stairway. Some mutter assessments of Stokes and his motive in the
shooting. Night falls, and they maintain their vigil.

  Fisk, still in the bedroom of suite 213, drifts in and out of consciousness. At ten o’clock he queries the attending physician: “Doctor, is there an even chance of my getting well again?” When transmitted to those downstairs and outside, the phrasing of Fisk’s plea for encouragement is taken as evidence of how hard the speculative, odds-reckoning spirit dies. The doctor replies with comforting assurance; Fisk nods and drifts off again.

  Fisk’s personal attorney draws up a will. Fisk is roused to sign it; Jay Gould appends his signature as witness. The terms of the will are not formally disclosed, but hotel staff tell friends who tell the press that most of Fisk’s money will go to his wife, with some for his sister and father and an endowment for the Ninth Regiment. Gould is named as executor of the will.

  At half past four on the morning of Sunday, January 7, Fisk awakens sufficiently to ask how he is doing. The doctor responds, “Nicely.” Fisk nods and fades again, this time for several hours as the opiates administered for his postshock pain take effect.

  At seven o’clock, as the city is slowly waking to the Christian Sabbath, Mrs. Fisk arrives. She has, till now, ignored the scandal surrounding her husband; she has kept to her house in Boston and avoided the press. But she can’t, and won’t, ignore her husband in his dying moments. She received the news of the shooting via telegraph and has taken the overnight train. She steps past the shivering vigil keepers as she enters the hotel; they whisper and point as she goes by. She climbs the stairs to her husband’s room.

  At eight o’clock the physicians who have worked on Fisk gather. They take his vital signs—pulse rate 130, respiration 20—even as he continues to sleep. The pulse is too fast and the breathing too shallow for one so heavily sedated. They post a new bulletin: “Col. Fisk is sinking.”

  His breathing grows more labored. Mrs. Fisk begins to sob and then to wail. A friend who has accompanied her from Boston tries to calm her, to little effect.

  Fisk’s breathing grows fainter. At 10:40 it stops, then comes in spasmodic gasps. At 10:45 it stops again and does not resume. The doctors declare him dead. He is thirty-six years old.

  Josie is in seclusion in her house on Twenty-third Street. She learned of the shooting an hour after it occurred, from a reporter seeking a reaction. Stunned by the news, she slammed the door in the reporter’s face and has remained behind drawn curtains since.

  The silence from her house feeds rumors that she has fled the city. The rumors sound plausible, considering her unsettled state in court on the afternoon of the shooting. New Yorkers want to know the whereabouts of the most notorious woman in their city; the authorities will certainly wish to question her in connection with the shooting.

  One reporter plants himself at her residence. He sees nothing: no movement and only the faintest light within. After a long time he ascends the steps and rings the doorbell. Nothing happens. The outside door remains bolted; the hallway is dark. He turns to leave.

  But then he hears the bolt being pulled and the door handle turn. A quavering woman’s voice asks through the narrow opening: “What do you want, sir?”

  He pulls a card from his wallet, identifying him, and scribbles in the corner: “On business.” He asks the woman to give the card to Miss Mansfield.

  The door closes. He wonders whether to stay or go, and decides to stay. The woman returns after a few minutes. “Unless it is very important,” she says, “Miss Mansfield can’t see you.”

  But this time she has opened the door a crack wider. The reporter peers through. By the flicker of a gas lamp opposite the door, he recognizes the woman as Josie Mansfield herself.

  The reporter declines to press his luck, not least since he has achieved the principal aim of his surveillance: to discover whether Josie is still in the city. He says he will call again when it is more convenient.

  He descends the stairs to Twenty-third Street, walks the several steps to the corner, and turns onto Eighth Avenue. Suddenly a policeman with a grimy shawl around his neck, to ward off the cold, and a dirty mass of red hair hurries across the street and waves his nightstick in the reporter’s face. “What was you doing in there?” the officer demands.

  “In where?” the reporter says.

  “In Miss Mansfield’s.”

  “I was doing nothing in there, because I was not in.”

  “Didn’t I see you with my own eyes, coming out? Come along, you’re my prisoner.” He grabs the reporter by the shoulder.

  “All right,” the reporter says, and lets himself be taken to the precinct house on Twentieth Street. There he is charged with coming out of Miss Mansfield’s residence.

  The reporter denies that he has been in the house, before asking why this should be a crime. He says he can prove he wasn’t in the house; Miss Mansfield will be happy to testify to that.

  The sergeant on duty sends a second patrolman back to the house, with another of the reporter’s cards. In a few minutes the second man returns and says Miss Mansfield has corroborated the reporter’s story.

  The sergeant takes the reporter aside. He explains that the arresting patrolman is new on the job and perhaps overeager. The police higher-ups have given the order to guard the Mansfield house lest Miss Mansfield try to escape. The patrolman must have thought the reporter was the lady in disguise.

  The reporter accepts the sergeant’s apology and leaves to file his story.

  New York receives the news of Fisk’s death with mixed emotions. Horace Greeley lectures Wall Street and America for having produced such a sorry specimen of humanity. “Fiction furnishes few personages more absurd in qualities and in fortune,” the Tribune editor and self-anointed conscience of liberalism declares. “Even the story of Aladdin ceases to seem so impossible when we think of this illiterate Vermonter stepping almost without an interval from his cart of notions to take the reins of a great corporation, to purchase today a fleet and tomorrow a theater, to make today a panic and tomorrow a statute, to buy legislatures and prima donnas, to dazzle Wall Street with the brilliancy of his thefts and Central Park with the splendor of his equipages.… It is not creditable to our society and our civilization that such careers are possible.” But Fisk could have done worse, Greeley admits. “He was no hypocrite—if that is any praise. When he devoured the widow’s substance, he differed from many of his associates in refraining from the pretense of long prayers. In the household circle where he was known before he became the James Fisk, Jr., of history, he will be sincerely mourned and wept. Perhaps it is as well that we should leave his story as it is known to the world—a warning and a lesson.”

  Fisk’s colleagues and the general public gather at the hotel to see the body, which is placed in an open coffin in the parlor outside the bedroom where he died. Jay Gould, weary from the long night, rests blankly in a chair a few feet from the coffin as mourners file past. “It was a picture never seen before and never to be seen again,” an eyewitness records: “the dead Fisk, gazed upon by hundreds, with pity only because of the manner of his death, and the living Gould sitting unmoved beside the corpse, to be looked upon with abhorrence by many who passed, for the deeds which he had wrought with him who was dead.”

  Just before the coffin is closed, Bill Tweed arrives. He doesn’t want to be seen, especially not now. The public reaction to the Orange Day riot emboldened the state’s attorney to investigate the activities of Tweed’s Tammany ring; indictments are imminent. Tweed judges that the less public fraternizing with Fisk and Gould the better. But he feels sad for Fisk and wants to see his partner in collusion one last time. He waits until everyone else, including Gould, has gone. He slips into the parlor for a moment’s view. He follows the coffin as it is carried through the halls of the hotel to the rear entrance on Mercer Street. Only when the wooden box passes out the door does he turn aside and disappear down another hallway.

  Fisk’s fellow militiamen mourn his passing. “It is with deep regret that the Brigadier-General commanding announce
s the death of Col. James Fisk, Jr., Ninth Regiment Infantry,” his superior proclaims. “His loss will be sincerely felt, and his place in the National Guard not easily filled.” Fisk’s lieutenant issues an order to the Ninth: “This command will assemble at the armory in full dress uniform (white cross and body belts and white gloves), with crape on the left arm, on Monday, Jan. 8, to pay the last tribute of respect to our lamented Colonel. Assembly at 12 o’clock M.”

  When that hour arrives, the body is lying in state at the Opera House. The city has turned out in force to bid farewell to the Prince of Erie, to watch the parade that transports the body to the train for Vermont, to see if the Irish and the Orangemen will battle again, to determine whether Tweed will show his face in public.

  The parade goes off without a hitch. The Irish tribes leave their shillelaghs at home. Tweed stays away.

  The coffin is placed on the train, which pulls out of the station at three. Fisk returns, finally, to his native state.

  Jim Fisk

  Josie Mansfield

  Ned Stokes

  Cornelius Vanderbilt

  Jay Gould

  William Tweed

  Wall Street

  Vanderbilt and Fisk at work

  The Grand Opera House

  The Gold Room on Black Friday

  The morning after

  The Orange Day riot

  The Grand Central Hotel

  The fatal meeting

  Mourning Fisk, after a fashion

  The Tombs

  Ned Stokes, meantime, sleeps soundly in the Tombs. He appears to be at peace with himself, greeting his keepers at the New York City jail with a smile as they deliver breakfast and the morning papers. He ignores the stares of the other inmates, who gawk and point at this gentleman among them. He seems unaware of the two hundred extra policemen mustered by the city to guard his cell against the possible wrath of the Ninth Regiment at the assassination of their beloved patron. His brother brings him collars, cuffs, cravats, and socks from the Hoffman House, so that Stokes may be presentable when his lawyers arrive to discuss his case.