THE SULTAN OF ERIE.
THE moral of James Fisk's career, which disgraced a conti- nent, but only lasted three years, is that under Repub- lican as well as Monarchical institutions the individual is still occasionally the master of the crowd. He became master in this case, through bad means and for bad ends, but he was master nevertheless ; and we see no proof that a good man, if equally daring and equally independent of opinion, might not succeed in New York in achieving very much greater objects, and making an equally distinct impress of his own personality. In 1863, Mr. James Fisk was a Vermont pedlar, with great courage, limitless esurience, and originality enough to be the noted pedlar of his district. He could barely write, he could not spell—in a letter of his not a year old he tells his mistress "Erie is saif "—and he needed at all times collision and discussion with some safer friend like Jay Gould to compress his wonderful inventiveness into a working form ; but even as a pedlar his boldness so alarmed his father, that the old man protested against the partnership, whereupon the son asked him what he would take for his business, paid him there and then, offered him high wages, and sent his father off as his hired man on a thirty-mile journey, to establish the alteration of their respective positions. Whether that story is true or not we have no means of telling, but it is believed in New York, and exactly illustrates the capacity, audacity, and heartlessness of James Fisk. He soon quitted peddling, tried a general business in Boston—where he frightened his partners into buying him out—and finally lighted in New York, the proper scene for him. In some way to us unknown he had accumu- lated some capital, bought shares in the Erie Railway, helped Daniel Drew, the dictator of that line—an inferior Hudson, with less honesty and less daring—and on the final retirement of that worthy after his great battle with Vanderbilt, who had tried to make all New York railways his private property, and nearly succeeded, Fisk found himself, with Mr. Jay Gould, virtual master of the Erie Railway, a grand concern, producing three millions of dollars a year, and allowed his real nature to blossom out. It was a nature worth a moment's analysis. Fisk, as we have said, was a vulgar man, a vain man, a man who could not spell, who loved diamond studs and "load '' clothes generally, who wanted to be first in every walk of life, and who had a profound conviction that he could make disreputable women, whom he bought wholesale, love him for himself ; but he was for all that a man of great faculties, a vulgar Napoleon, with a rare fertility of mind, great daring in combinations, keen insight into facts, and what is extremely rare in that kind of character, genuine humour of the Western rather than the New England kind, the humour that is based upon an instinctive appre- ciation of the grotesque side of every phrase and incident, the humour which can prompt a man virtually under trial for his whole property to apologize to his judges for a fraud which had failed by saying, "I saw then it was time for every man to draw his own corpse out of the road." Once placed in a position of advantage, he had the brain to do two things,—to discern clearly where the weak point of New York institutions lay, and to ally himself with a colleague, Mr. Jay Gould, whose powers exactly supplemented his own deficiencies. We know nothing, of course, of the relation between the two men, but twelve months ago an " interviewing " reporter gave what looks like a curiously vraisemblant account of it,—Fisk walk- ing restlessly up and down the Board-room, pouring out scheme after scheme, whereat the slower and stronger brain smiled and queried, till at last some idea seemed bright, and was then welded into a plan. 'Whatever it was, the two worked together, and Fisk, complete master of Erie, was able to act on his main idea,—that in New York nothing was strong but the electorate and the law, that the man who could secure both would be as independent of punishment as a Sultan. He did secure both. He
• admitted Tweed and Sweeny into the Board, and so enlisted Tammany and its voters ; bought two judges, half-a-dozen barristers, and if we read New York accounts aright, the • grand jury—empanelled, be it remembered, by an officer who was in the Ring—and thenceforward defied mankind. No King of the bad old times, no Sultan of our day, was ever more utterly beyond the control of opinion, or of numbers, • or of the written law. Respectable Americans loathed his name as a disgrace to the Union. He never was throughout his career in a decent New York house. Religious Americans -would, if they had the power, have punished him under Acts still existing, though nearly inoperative in New York, against habitual lewdness, for his offensively defiant mode of life. Rich Americans would have been delighted to hang him for the injury he did to public credit. Great combinations of capital- ists, who, one would think, could have done anything, tried to bear him down, but always in vain, for in the United States the two checks upon individualism, good and bad, are the electorate and the law, and neither could be brought to bear against James Fisk. If you appealed to the people to elect a Legis- lature which would control Erie, the Ring brought up its Irish majority. If you appealed to law, two of the twelve judges, each armed with all the powers of a Court of Chancery, issued " injunctions " to stay proceedings, or to execute James Fisk's will. Force was out of the question unless Washington inter- fered, and Washington had no excuse for interfering. The Erie scandal was all State business, and within the State Fisk had the • control of a regiment maintained by himself, and any number of big-built ruffians at five dollars a day. He bought an Opera House, furnished it like a palace, fortified it like a feudal tower—till a sheriff with a writ who entered it would have taken his life in his hand—stocked it with a harem of danc- ing-girls, and from thence issued his orders to hundreds
• of dependants, and to a mob which admired him as the London mob admired a man of precisely similar character, -though more education,Wilkes of Medmenham-Abbey notoriety. If he wanted money he took the receipts of the Erie line, or declared dividends on some preference shares in his own hands,
• or availed himself of the American practice of raising rail- way funds, not by debentures, but by an issue of more shares. If anybody questioned his right to issue them, he bought legal permission—we make the statement on the authority of the Messrs. Adams, the sons of the late Minister here—from the complaisant Legislature at Albany, and if the public shirked the shares he issued a dividend, or a promise of one, and sold the stock to Englishmen. There was always plenty for his wants, and those of his dependants, and when at last the Ring fell and Tammany was paralyzed, and the end seemed coming he is said to have devised a plan by which to compromise with the English shareholders, and walk off unhurt with a great fortune in his pocket. The man, how- ever, like all men of his kind, had the extra vice which Scrip- ture condemns,—insatiableness, the "superfluity of naughti- ness." He fought with a dealer in Wall Street named Stokes for the favour of a mistress who had deserted him, and whom he seems to have loved as Samson loved Delilah, writing to her all about his management of Erie, the mysterious secret of his strength, and appears in his reliance on his hirelings to have re- sorted to his usual weapon, despotism under legal forms. Three times, it is said, he succeeded in arresting Stokes on criminal charges, until his opponent, maddened as rebels are maddened by the hopelessness of legal redress, resorted to the assassin's expedient, met him in a hotel and shot him dead. He had had three years of his own way unchecked. For three years he had lived as Englishmen hold it impossible to live in America, as a Sultan doing his own will ; had defied the law, the customs, the very instincts of the society around him ; had laughed at opinion, sneered at suitors, rejoiced in the scath- ing denunciations of the Press, which he never prosecuted, and probably never read ; and when at last he was murdered, the populace, so placable when good men are killed, rose to insist on instant vengeance on his murderer, who, for aught they knew, might have sustained unendurable provocation. The man was, by every kind of criterion, utterly bad, and by Eng- lish judgment bad as only the lowest of mankind are bad ; but uneducated, vulgar, vain, and seeker of notoriety as he was, he still found in himself something before which the crowd gave way, not without admiration. That something may have been merely audacity, before which, whether evil or good, the crowd invariably shrinks ; but to us it seems to have been audacity born of insight, clear, cold, intellectual insight to discern where in the institutions around him the secret of power lay. He mastered that secret by corrupt means instead of by violent means, and was from that moment set free of all the usual restraints on power, free as an Oriental Prince who, like him, would probably have prosti- tuted his position to utterly ignoble personal enjoyment, or that unrestrained pursuit of luxury which he mistook for it. After all, mankind changes little, and Vitellius and Helioga- balus reigned.
James Fisk was in no particular way an offspring of Republican institutions or a discredit to them. He was a vulgar De Morny, his misuse of the Courts was not much worse than the misuse of the laws of public security under the Empire, and it is probable that had he lived, the Committee of Seventy would have crashed Erie and the Opera House as they have crushed Tammany and the Municipal Council. But his career wakes in our minds some fear for Republican institu- tions when based upon an electorate so strange. It has risen to put down corruption, no doubt ; but suppose Fisk to have been a little less insatiable, a little abler, a little more penetrated with political wisdom, to have distributed instead of trying to absorb prosperity, to have been cultivated, and to have been cautious, to have been in fact Napoleon instead of Fisk, it seems to us he might have ruled New York for life with a certain acceptance. Nothing could have over- thrown him but a rising, which only gratuitous provocation, robbery beyond all necessity, insults to opinion which brought no advantage, could ever have provoked. The man did reign for three years, and why not for thirty ? It is not that Re- publican institutions make the people weak, for when the provocation arises, the people is terribly strong ; but that they make them so contented, so indisposed to revolt, and so reluctant to risk pleasant lives and embark on an unknown sea. If the South had organized itself for passive resistance, firing on nobody, keeping strictly within State Laws and ignoring the Federal Government, would the North have risen to battle ? If James Fisk had used his bad power for popular ends, had been a man of the domesticities instead of a Sultan, and had allowed his shareholders something instead of stealing all, might he not have lived his life, and his death have been followed by a fall instead of a rise in all American scrip ?
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