THE MEMORABLE "BLACK FRIDAY"
The next day, "Black Friday," September 24, 1869, was one of tremendous excitement and gloomy apprehension among the money changers. Even the exchanges of foreign countries reflected the perturbation. Gould gave orders to buy all gold in Fisk's name; Fisk's brokers ran the premium up to 151 and then to 161. The market prices of railroad stocks shrank rapidly; failure after failure of Wall Street firms was announced, and fortunes were swept away. Fearing that the price of gold might mount to 200, manufacturers and other business concerns throughout the country frantically directed their agents to buy gold at any price. All this time Gould, through certain brokers, was secretly selling; and while he was doing so, Fisk and Belden by his orders continued to buy.
The Stock Exchange, according to the descriptions of many eye- witnesses, was an extraordinary sight that day. On the most perfunctory occasions the scenes enacted there might have well filled the exotic observer with unmeasured amazement. But never had it presented so thoroughly a riotous, even bedlamic aspect as on this day, Black Friday; never had greed and the fear born of greed, displayed themselves in such frightful forms.
Here could be seen many of the money masters shrieking and roaring, anon rushing about with whitened faces, indescribably contorted, and again bellowing forth this order or that curse with savage energy and wildest gesture. The puny speculators had long since uttered their doleful squeak and plunged down into the limbo of ruin, completely engulfed; only the big speculators, or their commission men, remained in the arena, and many of these like trapped rats scurried about from pillar to post. The little fountain in the "Gold Room" serenely spouted and bubbled as usual, its cadence lost in the awful uproar; over to it rushed man after man splashing its cooling water on his throbbing head. Over all rose a sickening exhalation, the dripping, malodorous sweat of an assemblage worked up to the very limit of mental endurance.
What, may we ask, were these men snarling, cursing and fighting over? Why, quite palpably over the division of wealth that masses of working men, women and children were laboriously producing, too often amid sorrow and death. While elsewhere pinioned labor was humbly doing the world's real work, here in this "Gold Room," greed contested furiously with greed, cunning with cunning over their share of the spoils. Without their structure of law, and Government to enforce it, these men would have been nothing; as it was, they were among the very crests of society; the makers of law, the wielders of power, the pretenders to refinement and culture.
Baffled greed and cunning outmatched and duplicity doubled against itself could be seen in the men who rushed from the "Gold Room" hatless and frenzied—some literally crazed—when the price of gold advanced to 162. In the surrounding streets were howling and impassable crowds, some drawn thither by curiosity and excitement, others by a fancied interest; surely, fancied, for it was but a war of eminent knaves and knavish gamblers. Now this was not a "disorderly mob" of workers such as capitalists and politicians created out of orderly workers' gatherings so as to have a pretext for clubbing and imprisoning; nay it all took place in the "conservative" precincts of sacrosanct Wall Street, the abiding place of "law and order." The participants were composed of the "best classes;" therefore, by all logic it was a scene supereminently sane, respectable and legitimate; the police, worthy defenders of the peace, treated it all with an awed respect.
Suddenly, early in the afternoon, came reports that the United States Treasury was selling gold; they proved to be true. Within fifteen minutes the whole fabric of the gold manipulation had gone to pieces. It is narrated that a mob, bent on lynching, searched for Gould, but that he and Fisk had sneaked away through a back door and had gone uptown.
The general belief was that Gould was irretrievably ruined. That he was secretly selling gold at an exorbitant price was not known; even his own intimates, except perhaps Fisk and Belden, were ignorant of it. All that was known was that he had made contracts for the purchase of enormous quantities of fictitious gold at excessive premiums. As a matter of fact, his underhand sales had brought him eleven or twelve million dollars profit. But if his contracts for purchase were enforced, not only would these profits be wiped out, but also his entire fortune.