Jim Fisk
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-12-03

Day 260 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

Jan 6, 1872 - Edward Stokes shoots Jim Fisk, "his rival for... the actress Josie Mansfield." Stokes (who, despite the song, was not rich) spent four years in prison for manslaughter

"Jim Fisk was an American business man who rose from Vermont country peddler to be a Civil War government supply contractor, a cotton speculator, a Wall Street broker, owner of the Narragansett Steamship Lines, owner of the Grand Opera House of New York, Colonel of the Ninth Regiment of the New York National Guard, director of the Erie railroad—and nicknamed “Prince Erie.” He joined Jay Gould and others in a conspiracy to corner the gold of the United States in 1869, was instrumental in bringing on the financial crash of Black Friday, bought, and sold judges, courts, decisions and writs of injunction, was a participant in the corruption of Tweed and Tam­ many. He drove a coach and eight horses around New York soliciting supplies for the Chicago fire sufferers, sent a carload of provisions and clothes to the stricken city, dispensed charity and won a large following of people who believed him a hero of proportions and heart. 

"He managed all things for worldly success till he met Helen Josephine Mansfield, he bought her a house with the winnings of one night's gambling, gave her horses, jewels, opera box tickets, and sent her funny, pompous love letters. She was his plaything; he was her pocketbook. She gave his letters to Edward S. Stokes of Philadelphia, who was the Other Man and who came and lived with her in the house that was a free gift and token. Newspapers published an affidavit of a black butler of this house telling of a plot of Miss Mansfield and Stokes to force Fisk to pay $200,000 to get his letters back, his chuckling, pompous love letters. 

"When Miss Mansfield sued for libel, Fisk’s lawyer declared at the trial, “I expect to show that Mr. Fisk found this lady without a dollar; that after lavishing upon her means enough to have satisfied Cleopatra herself, when the supply ceased, means were resorted to for the purpose of re­newing them. Our defense is that this prosecution has no basis in good faith, nothing but an attempt to extort money. And have I not a right to show, if such be the fact, that finding this lady without a dollar, and having enriched her—although like most riches obtained in this way, it is rapidly disappearing—that she has had resort to this means to replenish her treasury? Cleopatra—aye, like unto her; for as the Egyptian siren queen is spoken of by the grandest of poets, ‘age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.* 

"The defense won. Stokes with a gun met Fisk in the Grand Central Hotel one afternoon and sent two bullets into his victim, who died that night. Stokes was tried and given a life sentence. Melo­dramatic newspaper and pulpit comment followed. Of the three actors in the tragedy, a writer declared, “One goes, how unprepared! to his long home—-one goes to the solitary gloom of a murder­er’s cell—one to a life of deep, dark, ungovernable remorse.” 

And there came a song registering its own viewpoint, using the memory of Jim Fisk, a briber and corruptionist of courts, as an instance in which to lament the ancient fact that the poor get the worst of it when they go into court against the rich.

"Text and tune here are from N. D. Cochran of Toledo, Ohio, who knows much more than most men do about corrupt courts, fixed juries, and crooked judges. The song is melodramatic and has maudlin lines. Yet it has been widely known and sung across decades in which Jim Fisk, his woman, his assassin, and all their follies were for­ gotten and being forgotten were forgiven. It has lived on and had a certain folk song vitality as a cry for justice, as a moan over money and cunning, greed and hypocrisy, so often winning the authorities and the decisions, the power and the glory."