James Fisk

James Fisk, also known as “Jubilee Jim Fisk” and the “Barnum of Wall Street,” was born in Pownal in 1834. At the time, his father was superintendent of a mill. His mother died when he was very young and the family moved to Bennington when Fisk was three years old, but he was sent to live in Pownal with a widow named Mrs. Polly Albro. Later, after her death in 1853, Fisk paid $700 dollars to erect a monument over her grave in Oak Hill cemetery that read: “Erected by James Fisk, Jr. In Loving Remembrance of Long-continued Kindness.” 

When Fisk was around eight or nine years old, the family moved to Brattleboro and Fisk became a peddler. In an article about the life of Fisk, author Mark Bushnell writes, “Fisk’s greatest skill--to sell, sell, sell, by any means possible--seems to have been inborn.” He cites an example, according to lore: Fisk’s father was selling women’s shawls along his route, but ran out. Fisk, Jr. had a surplus of tablecloths, which he “touted as the latest fashion in shawls from Boston,” and sold.  

Fisk joined a traveling circus for a number of years, working behind the scenes and enjoying the glamour and flare of it all, and returned to Brattleboro when he was 18. There, he helped his father grow his peddling into a five-wagon business, Fisk & Son. 

A man named Eben Jordan, then president of Marsh and Co. of Boston, which was selling goods to Fisk & Son, noticed how much merchandise Fisk was selling and offered him a job in the city. This point in time marks the beginning of Fisk’s career as a robber baron, leading Parks, in his book on Pownal’s history, to conclude, “certainly Jim Fisk was no one for his former neighbors to be proud of...” During the Civil war and after much convincing, Jordan sent Fisk to Washington to make contracts to produce textiles for the Union Army. Orders came rolling in and soon demand overcame supply. Fisk sent agents to the South to buy massive amounts of cotton contraband and snuck it into the North. He also sold Confederate bonds to European investors, and these shady practices made him rich.

After the war Fisk became a major player on Wall Street, and in 1866 he formed the brokerage firm Fisk & Belden. The firm issued fraudulent stock to cheat Cornelius Vanderbilt out of what today would equal roughly $100 million dollars, and maintain control over the Erie Railroad. According to Bushnell, Fisk and his associates let the railroad fall into despair and pocketed enormous sums of money. 

The next year, after bribing the members of the New York Legislature in order to evade arrest from his previous stunt, Fisk partnered with Jay Gould in an attempt to corner the gold market. They bought as much gold as possible to inflate its price and bribed public officials to keep government owned gold off the market. When President Ulysses Grant caught wind of the scheme he ordered $4,000,000 of government gold sold on the market. The price of gold collapsed which led to intense panic beginning on September 14, 1989, a day long remembered as Black Friday. 

He bought the Grand Opera House in New York and made Josephine Mansfield his mistress, despite being married. Mansfield fell in love with another financier, Edward Stiles Stokes, and the pair blackmailed Fisk, who sued them after apologizing to his wife. Stokes was humiliated when the situation was made public, and he fatally shot Fisk in 1872 on the steps of Grand Central Hotel.

Sources:

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "James Fisk". Encyclopedia Britannica, 28 Mar. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Fisk. Accessed 3 November 2021.

PDF: “James Fisk Murdered” (NYT)

Bushnell article in VT Digger: https://vtdigger.org/2017/02/12/vermont-peddler-wall-street-robber-baron/