Jubilee Jim : the life of Colonel James Fisk, Jr.

Front matter

A Gift From The Library of Charles Alexander

WJU

As Prince Erie, in the great Wall-street play of "Watering the Stock"

Book Two

I. The Yankee Peddler . 45

II. Jim Goes to Boston . 53

III. War Contracts . 59

IV. Vicksburg . 69

V. Drygoods and Wall Street . 88

VI. Enter Uncle Dan’l . 98

VII. Gould and the Erie . 118

VIII. The Commodore Goes to Law . 131

IX. Exiled to Jersey .... 145

X. JosiE Mansfield . I49

XI. Gould Goes to Albany . 163

XII. Uncle Dan’l Weakens . 187

Book Three Fame

I. The Credit Mobilie'r . 215

II. Tammany Politics . 232

III. The Erie Citadel Captured . 238

IV. Uncle Dan’l’s Waterloo . 242

V. Litigation . 257

[vii]

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

VI. The Grand Opera House . 269

VII. Erie Development . 287

VIII. The Albany and Susquehanna Episode . . . 296

IX. Black Friday . 219

Book Four

I. The Commodore Has Callers . 409

II. Mr Bowles Comes to Grief . 413

III. Harlem Lane . 424

IV. Edward S. Stokes . 427

V. Jim as an Impresario . 432

VI. A Hero to his Men . 438

VII. Colonel of the Ninth . 442

VIII. Light-o’-Love . 462

Book Five

I. Stokes Collects Money . 495

II. Boss Tweed’s Downfall . 498

III. Ceda Talks to Jim . 509

IV. Jim’s Triumph at Bennington . 511

V. Stokes Wants More . 521

VI. Blackmail . 526

VII. Murder . 537

Postscript . 565

(By Charles Evans Hughes)

[ viii ]

BOOK ONE BACKGROUNDS iAil, aaaiaai

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Book One— Backgrounds I

BOYHOOD

OOKING back over a good many years it seems to me that Ceda Garland was always more of a companion to me than anybody else I ever knew. Sometimes rs I didn’t see her or hear from her; but when we met again, as we always did, there never was any strangeness. It was just as though we had never been apart. It happens that sometimes in youth we have bosom friends. We tell them our most secret thoughts and hopes; but after a few years we are surprised and sorry to find that we are no longer interested in them or their affairs, or they in us or ours. In my own life this has happened to me; but I never lost my interest in Ceda Garland, and I know she always kept up her interest in me, God knows why!

She was a golden blonde. I don’t mean that her hair was golden in color, for it wasn’t. It was a shade or two darker than gold and it grew still darker as she grew older. Like the rest of us, she changed from year to year, but always the most noticeable thing about her hair was its thickness and the way it lay on her head and across her forehead, waving a little. There was a flame in it when the light fell on it. The straying threads, at any rate, were golden enough in the sun. At the nape of her neck, it turned rather lighter, and it grew low down there, reaching up in tendrils to join the heavier coils until it became too short to reach and shaded off into the same kind of down as covered her arms and the rest of her, showing silvery against her creamy skin.

Her eyes were not especially large, nor were they deep-set, but they were the shade of blue that the sky is on a cloudless Spring day. Maybe she had some German blood in her. Anyway, she had those eyes. It was almost impossible to look at anything else when she was there. At any rate, I always found it so. It wasn’t just their beautiful color; they were candid, with something appealing and trusting about them. And they almost always looked happy.

She belonged to my boyhood just like Bald Mountain, with its naked granite ledge along the top of the ridge against the sky. It was a great thing for us to climb up there and it was wonderful to look down from the height of that ledge. The bright thread of the Walloomsac River ran along the broad valley south until it made an elbow westward in order to join the Hoosic and in that way reach the Hudson. We used to think how the waters of Roaring Branch, which ran past our houses, were carried down through miles and miles of country until they came to the great City of New York, a wonderland in our minds. It seemed as far away as China.

South from Bald Mountain we could see Mount Anthony and further on, over the line in Massachusetts, Greylock and the heights of the Berkshires. On the West, beyond the Wal¬ loomsac Valley, were hills and ridges in New York State which kept the Hudson to its southern course. North, around the shoulder of the mountain, the Valley lay between the hills up beyond West Mountain in Shaftsbury, with threads of roads across it and little squares of different colors where the crops were growing in the fields. It is a beautiful valley. It used to look peaceful enough with its meadows and its rounded elm trees, but even the smallest of us knew that it had once been a battleground where the English Red Coats and German Hessians were slaughtered and driven off by the brave Green Mountain Boys under General Warner and other heroes in cocked hats and laced coats and satin knee breeches. This famous victory somehow tinged Ben¬ nington. It set the town apart. The people who lived there never forgot it and they took credit for themselves and the town in a dauntless and military way. But I could never think of the Green Mountain Boys as having come from Bennington. I used to imagine them as fearless dwellers in the shadowy depths of the green sea of spruce and pine and hemlock that tumbles about the feet of Haystack and Stratton as you look east and northeast from the granite ledge on top of Bald Mountain. In that direction there was no opening in the forest. To all appearance no man had ever tried to make a clearing there. I believed that the Green Mountain Boys had come threading their way down through this wilderness, until they poured out to the field of glory by the road that follows down Roaring Branch from the mountains of Glastenbury.

Ceda was the girl I knew best and Jim Fisk was the boy. Probably all the other boys of our age in Bennington would say the same thing about him, though not about her. He had a personality. It impressed everybody and he liked to make an impression. In fact he never lost a chance of doing it. That was his mainspring.

Jim had plenty of energy. Say what you like, he got what he wanted. Most of us want things that we haven’t got the stamina to work for. When we don’t get them, we try to salve our self-love by explanations founded on "ifs.” He never did that.

There were two sides to Jim, though in his case the world saw only one and that wasn’t his best. I knew him. There wasn’t a mean hair in his head.

Everybody liked him. He was the leader among the boys in the village in spite of the fact that his father, who was an unprosperous tin peddler, owed everybody who would trust him. Jim was well built and strong. He was the best wrestler among us and the best jumper. I could run faster than he could and Walter Perkins — "Frog” we called him — could throw a stone farther. But Jim would not compete with us in these things. He stuck to wrestling and jumping. He liked to win. But if he got beaten, he didn’t sulk over it. He laughed and went on to something else.

He had a fair skin, with red in his cheeks and wavy chest¬ nut hair that turned brown when he was older. His eyes were greenish gray and a trifle prominent — the bold kind of eyes. He had plenty of self-confidence — "cheek” we used to call it. He was smart in school, especially in arithmetic. I admired him for this because I could never get my examples to come out right. He used to help me do them. He was always willing and he never made you feel that you were under obligation to him for it. He just did it and then forgot it. It did him good, — gave him the feeling of superi¬ ority that he liked.

He was never at a loss for something interesting to do; he had energy to carry out his ideas and daring where courage or impudence were needed. We were willing followers, all the more because he wasn’t an exacting master. He didn’t abuse his authority. He didn’t maintain his position by force but by popular favor, so to speak. We all liked Jim; nobody was afraid of him.

Bennington was a center for the country round about. The stages stopped there going north and south, and later the railroad ran through there to Rutland. We had a grist mill where the farmers brought in their wheat and corn to be ground, and a sawmill where the lumber came to be cut up. They hauled it down from the mountains mostly in the winter. The big logs of pine and spruce were chained on bob-sleds drawn by yokes of steers. In the summer the same steers drew loads of hay from the fields. They did most of the heavy work and horses were used more for driving. Folks weren’t in so much of a hurry then about their work, but they managed to get it all done. A good deal of the lumber that went into the houses was squared with a broadaxe instead of being sawed. The houses were solid; they stood up against the wind in winter and they were warm enough, though we had only open fires. They were not ugly to look at, either. The post office was in the town and there was a blacksmith, where the horses and oxen were shod, and stores. When we were boy^^e^ery man was a carpenter. A good many could mend a harness or a pair of boots, or solder a leaky pail. Painting a house was not a thing to hire someone to do, nor was laying a stone wall, or building a chimney, or digging a well.

We could have got along all right even if all the roads into Bennington had been blocked. There were vegetables in the cellars, corn and wheat in the bins, salt pork and corned

cn beef in barrels, and smoked hams in the chimneys. There were sheep to supply us with wool and mutton, and calves for veal. Spinning and weaving had not yet been forgotten, though people had begun to buy their cloth ready-made. Of course, we had to get our cotton cloth that way.

The Garlands didn’t live exactly in the village but half a mile or so away up the Branch. Ceda was one of a brood of tow-heads, and the only attractive one. All the others seemed like caricatures of her. Her older sister, Alma, had the same blue eyes, but she was fat and shapeless and awkward; the twins, Mabel and Maud, had her hair and skin, but their eyes were green and their figures lanky and flat-chested; there was a freckled boy and a baby. They were as poor as Job’s cat. That didn’t make any difference. Poverty wasn’t regarded as a fault — scarcely a misfortune. The family lived in a weather-beaten house on a strip of land beside the stream, and an upland pasture above, among the ledges. It was a meager farm and the women had to hoe the potatoes and corn and vegetables while Garland worked out his yoke of steers to earn money to buy what he lacked land to raise. The mother was a worried-looking woman of wrecked appearance and narrow chest, whose stringy hair was always escaping from the knot at the back of her head and flying about her hollow cheeks in But she had Ceda’s eyes.

My father was a Unitarian minister and I think he must have been a rather uncommon man. His marriage was a love match, of which I was the only offspring. He died of typhus fever before I was a year old, having got the disease on a visit to Five Points in New York, where typhus was then nearly always to be found.

He gave me one thing of great value and that was the ability to enjoy books, and especially poetry. The reading of books has always been my most valuable resource. Perhaps it has helped to make me a spectator, rather than a man of action; but when all is said and done it has enabled me to enjoy my life and at least to relish what I have seen and heard.

We lived, my mother and I, just at the edge of the village, where the Roaring Branch road comes in from the east, and the Fisks lived a little farther along, between us and the Garlands. We east-enders formed a group by ourselves. Besides Jim and Ceda and me, there were "Frog” Perkins, who could imitate a bullfrog so you couldn’t tell the differ¬ ence, "Sandy” Smith, with straw-colored hair, and Tommy Thompson. The Perkins and Smith families lived beyond the Garlands and the Thompsons lived near us. My mother had a small income, paid to her by her brother Joel, from the rent of some farm land her father had owned, and she increased it by giving music lessons and sometimes by dress¬ making. She and I lived alone in the small weather-beaten pleasant house which stood under a large horse-chestnut tree close to the road. At the back of it was the kitchen. Next to that was the woodshed, overgrown with woodbine and facing the South, looking out upon the vegetable garden. There was the well and the well-sweep that we continued to use for drawing water long after a good many other people were using pumps. There were apple trees further along and a barn in which we kept our cow, "Daisy,” and the pigs. My boyhood existence was centered here. It was my job to keep the weeds out of the garden, feed the cow and the pigs, and pile up the wood in the shed. My mother and I were good friends and I liked my part of the work. Her praise was always reward enough. Without saying a word she was able to make me feel very uncomfortable if I hadn’t done anything that I ought to have done.

My name among the boys was "Rabbits.” Jim gave it to me on account of two rabbits I caught one winter in a boxtrap that I set in the pine grove just over the stone wall behind our house, in the pasture. They were common gray rabbits and I kept them in a cage I made out of an old wooden box by putting wires across the front of it. I cut a door in the back, which fastened with a button, and the bottom of the box was covered with hay in which the rabbits munched their apples and carrots. I began by keeping them in the kitchen, but they smelt so that my mother had me carry the cage out into the woodshed. These rabbits were objects of much interest. Jim thought up a plan to take advantage of it by forming what he called the Bennington Fur and Skin Company. His idea was that my pair of rabbits would breed and he figured out the average growth of the family and the length of time it would take for them to get large enough to be killed and skinned. Members of the company were en¬ rolled upon payment of twenty-five cents each to Jim and all were required to sign an agreement that these contribu¬ tions should be invested in the business, and that the con¬ tributors should not expect to get them back. Each member of the company was to provide himself with a pair of rabbits and encourage them to produce their kind for the benefit of the company.

It was a great scheme. We elected Jim president and treasurer. He knew more about it than anybody else because he had invented it, and he was constantly adding new details which kept us interested and aroused debate. At one time we had twelve members, though not all of them kept rabbits. We used to hold meetings in an underground resort that we construaed at the top of Squaw Hill, which was a mound of sand and clay on our farm not far from the pine grove. We dug a square pit there about seven feet long, five feet wide, and five feet deep. Then we laid poles across the top, put brush over them, and replaced the turf so that no sign of the hole was left. To reach the retreat it was necessary to crawl through a tunnel which began on the side of the hill. We had a piece of rusty stove pipe which we pushed up through the roof when we wanted to make a fire inside, and there we assembled to discuss the plans and progress of the com¬ pany.

The hill got its name from a story that an Indian Squaw had buried the body of her child there before she migrated to Canada with her tribe after the Englishmen won in the French and Indian War, and that she came back for the bones years later when she was nearly a hundred years old, and carried them away with her to Canada in a bag. This story gave the little hill a romantic, slightly ghostly reputa¬ tion which, with the concealment of our underground cham¬ ber, inspired us with the idea of organizing ourselves into a secret society, with signs, passwords, and initiation cere¬ monies. We called ourselves the United Redskins and our regalia consisted of headdresses of chicken feathers. Our weapons were wooden tomahawks and scalping knives, and we carried enemy "scalps” made of rope and horsehair. We stained our hands and faces when we had anything suitable for that purpose, such as grapes or elderberries. Our secret words were Indian in character, invented or borrowed from

Cooper’s stories, Longfellow’s poems, and such local Indian names as that of the Winooski River. A part of our initiation ceremony consisted of smoking the "peace pipe’’ after secret oaths of the most fearful character had been administered and repeated. The use of tobacco in this pipe made several of the United Redskins so sick that we substituted dried sweet-fern. For the bolder members, such as Jim, there was a secret store of tobacco in the Wigwam, as we called our retreat.

Jim was our Great Spirit, and his authority was absolute. The rest of us were Sachems, Chiefs, Scouts, and Warriors, according to rank. It is sufficient to have been a boy to realize the possibilities of this organization — the exploring expeditions, the following of trails, the stalking of game, real or imaginary, the waging of war, the building of camp¬ fires and signalling with their smoke, the significant marking of trees, the conveyance of news by arrangement of twigs or bark, and the perfection of the war cry, especially after dark.

I have always remembered the pleasant coolness of the October air on Saturday afternoon, the pale blue sky, and the great astonishing blaze of the autumn foliage when a detach¬ ment of United Redskin Scouts set out silently up the hillside to gather chestnuts in the enemy’s territory. Frog led the way as Chief because he knew where to find the chestnut trees, and the rest of us followed, each stepping silently into the footprints of the Scout in front of him so as to prevent hostile Indians from calculating from our trail how many we were. We used the utmost caution to prevent making any noises such as the snapping of a twig underfoot or the disturbance of a stone. We were surrounded — in imagination

— by deadly foes and our wily caution was laid aside only when we reached the chestnut trees and began clubbing the burrs out of the branches. There is a knack in opening a chestnut burr without getting pricked, just as there is in stepping on one with bare feet. We were adepts in both. We all went barefoot until frost came.

The heydey of the United Redskins was short — ^but more delightful than we knew at the time. Our ages ranged from thirteen to fifteen and our company began to break up almost immediately. Vivid are the recollections of that fall, the last when we were all together. I can shut my eyes and see

the Valley _ a carpet of yellow and brown and green in a

thousand shades of earth and withering vegetation, with the ring of dark blue hills around it, lying against the pale, misty sky. Here and there rose a curl of smoke where a farmer was burning brush. The wheat and rye had been carted in from the yellow stubble, but the brown rustling shocks of corn stood in the fields while the ears were hardening, and we used them as lodges in our Indian tribal operations. The winter apples, red, green, and russet, hung ripe on the trees. Loads of windfalls were being carried to the cider mill to be ground and pressed. No drink was ever more delicious than the sweet cider that we sucked up through the bungholes of fermenting barrels with long rye straws. The mellow air throbbed with the beating of flails while the oats were threshed out on smooth barn floors. It was fun to throw down fresh bundles from the mow and cut their binders with the heavy hay-knife, so that the threshers might spread the straw evenly. It was fun to help them turn it, with the aid of the flail-handle, and to experiment with the flail at the risk of hitting ourselves on the back of the head with its tongue, while trying to get the little twist of the elbow that enables the thresher to deliver the stroke.

Then the leaves rained down from the trees and we experienced the delight of scuffling our feet through drifts of them along the road. We helped to rake them up when the men banked the houses with them for the winter to keep the cellars warm. Then came the white frost which changed the world to silver until the sun shone upon it, and the fearsome joys of hog-killing, which gave us curious knowledge of digestive and other physical apparatus as we watched the disclosures incident to disemboweling the familiar pigs. The corn was picked and evenings were devoted to husking bees, with distributions of cider that had begun to grow acid and kissings following the discovery of red ears. The delights of the fall days were endless.

One October night, when the Hunters’ Moon was full, I remember we made an expedition to the lowlands along the Walloomsac in search of skunks. The affairs of the Fur Company had been stagnant all summer and Jim had an idea that we might revive them by capturing skunks on the moon¬ lit plains where they were in the habit of ranging for the purpose of digging white grubs out of the dry turf. They seemed to be particularly fond of these grubs, which were also excellent bait for fish. Jim admitted that it was a haxardous business to hunt skunks with only the short clubs that we carried, but he had the plan of campaign all reasoned out.

"They can’t throw any stink unless they’re facin’ your way,’’ he assured us. "They pur it on their tails and then they jerk their tails forwards and sprinkle it on you over their own heads. The thing to do when we see one will be for some of us to stand in front and keep him facin’ our way, while Rabbits, here, or Frog, creeps up behind and whacks him with the club across his back. Once you hit him on his back, he can’t do nuthin’ more.”

This seemed plausible, but nevertheless I was secretly very much afraid we might find a skunk and I was relieved when we came home without having seen any.

Jim made one more attempt, a little later, after winter had set in, to get the Fur Company going. He projected the cap¬ ture of a Canada lynx that had been seen by a teamster beside the road along Roaring Branch some distance above the Garland place. The Garlands had an old shot-gun that had once been a flint-lock and had been made over for percussion caps. We got a little powder, which we poured into a powder horn, and a box of caps. We loaded the gun with nails and screws as being more deadly than shot, and set off to find the "link.” We allowed Ceda to go with us in view of the fact that she had supplied the gun. We found the tracks of the animal in the snow and followed them through the woods, under the drooping snow-laden branches of the hemlocks and the spruces, but we didn’t catch up with the "link.” Darkness ended the hunt. As we turned back, Jim showed us what would have happened if we had overtaken the lynx. He aimed the old gun at the trunk of an oak tree and fired. The missiles that it contained tore the rugged bark and buzzed off through the air in every direction. With the report, several partridges that had gone to roost in a thick hemlock over our heads flew out with a sudden whirring of wings that frightened us by its unexpectedness. The next day a snow storm covered the lynx’s tracks.

That spring the Fisk family moved to Brattleboro. The United Redskins and the Fur and Skin Company went out of existence. With them went our boyhood.

I have given only a faint idea of the many activities and events that filled our long days. The river was a source of endless pleasures. It is not a large river. It comes down from Camel’s Hump and the North in a succession of rapids and shallows from pool to pool. I knew not only every foot of it, but all the trout brooks for miles around. We swam in the pools and we built rafts to sail on. We made fires and roasted our fish on forked sticks and ate them. We got as sunburned as it was possible to be. Sometimes Ceda was with us. She did everything that we did, including swimming, but this wasn’t often and we never "told on her” because we knew her mother wouldn’t approve of it.

I haven’t said anything about our hunt for birds’ nests in the early summer. We collected the eggs, blew the insides out, and swapped different kinds among ourselves. There was a henhawk’s nest somewhere up in the cliff on top of Bald Mountain, but we could never find it, no matter how carefully we watched the hawks wheeling in wide, slow circles high up against the sky and screaming to each other.

I haven’t described the exploring expeditions that we made into the woods and mountains, and I’ve omitted our coasting in the winter and our skating, with a great bonfire blazing on the bank where we could sit on logs and warm ourselves. Sometimes my mother and other grown-up people would come out with us to sit by the fire and watch us skate and laugh and talk of their own young days.

Perhaps it is just as well that I haven’t detailed the tricks and pranks that we played in the village. These were con¬ stant and various and Jim, who always loved practical jokes, invented most of them. Anybody who has lived in the coun¬ try knows how filled with events are the uneventful lives of country-folks. The pop-corn parties we had, and the molasses candy pulls! All that part of our lives ended for me too soon.

II Change

That summer of 1850 after Jim, with his father and step¬ mother and his half-sister Minna, moved away, I saw a good deal more of Ceda Garland. I was sixteen years old in Feb¬ ruary that year and she was sixteen in April. My voice finished changing, and I began to look anxiously for signs of a moustache. I was made conscious of the fact that Ceda’s being a girl made a great difference between us.

In other ways, too, that year for me was a year of change. I stopped going to school and went to work, hiring out to anybody that would pay me. I wasn't specially strong; I never was, being under six feet and always rather spare; but I was willing and I wanted to help my mother all I could. So I worked for what I could get, and that was more often imder than over a dollar a day. I kept on taking care of our garden, and I did the chores. It was usually eight o’clock before I got through — sometimes later. It was hard work but it did me more good than harm because it taught me how to do a lot of things that I picked up from the different men I worked for. Most of the things that had to be done around a farm I knew already and I wasn’t long in learning those