The New International Encyclopædia/Fisk, James, Jr.

FISK, James, Jr. (1834-72). An American stock speculator. He was born in Bennington, Vt., the son of a peddler, and received scanty schooling. After trying various other occupations, he took up that of his father, and finally attracted the attention of Jordan & Marsh, the Boston merchants, of whom he bought his wares, and as a member of that firm enriched them and himself by shrewd bargaining with the Government and, it was said, by smuggling cotton through the lines during the Civil War. Four years later he opened a brokerage office in New York City. He picked up a precarious living for some time, until Daniel Drew set him up in business with a man named Belden, using them as his agents in his famous struggle with Cornelius Vanderbilt for the control of the Erie Railway. As a result of a compromise, the Drew-Fisk interest combined with the Eldridge-Gould interest, forced the Vanderbilt faction out of the directorate, installing Fisk and Jay Gould in their stead. This marked the beginning of the notorious association of Jay Gould and James Fisk, which terminated only with the death of Fisk. Gould became president of the Erie Railroad, and Fisk the vice-president and comptroller. From their headquarters a campaign of bribery and corruption was carried on that brought under the power of these men city, State, and Federal officials, judges and legislatures, reaching its climax in the gold conspiracy of 1869 and ‘Black Friday,’ when an attempt was made to control President Grant himself. A quarrel with one of his partners, E. S. Stokes, three years later, culminated in his death at the hands of the latter. Consult: Adams, Chapters of Erie, and Other Essays (New York, 1886); Black, Essays (New York, 1890).