This plan was tried vigorously. Hired newspapers filled their editorial pages with arguments. Every mail brought pamphlets, papers, memorials, arguments, etc., to the silent President. Wherever he turned, some one was at hand to pour into his ear a plea for the poor country. If the Government would sell no gold, the conspirators would have the market in their own hands. Men having contracts to furnish gold would have to buy of them at any price. There was no word from Grant, but the conspirators continued to buy up gold. Gould took in a partner:
“Fisk was told that Corbin had enlisted the interests of persons high in authority, that the President, Mrs. Grant, General Porter, and General Butterfield were corruptly interested in the movement, and that the Secretary of the Treasury had been forbidden to sell gold. Though these declarations were wickedly false, as the evidence abundantly shows, yet the compounded villainy presented by Gould and Corbin was too tempting a bait for Fisk to resist. He joined the movement at once, and brought to its aid all the force of his magnetic and infectious enthusiasm. The malign influence which Catiline wielded over the reckless and abandoned youth of Rome, finds a fitting parallel in the power which Fisk carried into Wall Street, when, followed by the thugs of Erie and the debauchees of the Opera House, he swept into the gold-room and defied both the Street and the Treasury. Indeed, the whole gold movement is not an unworthy copy of that great conspiracy to lay Rome in ashes and deluge its streets in blood, for the purpose of enriching those who were to apply the torch and wield the dagger.
“With the great revenue of the Erie Railway Company at their command, and having converted the Tenth National Bank into a manufactory of certified checks to be used as cash at their pleasure, they terrified all opponents by the gigantic power of their combination, and amazed and dazzled the dissolute gamblers of Wall Street by declaring that they had in league with them the chief officers of the National Government.
“They gradually pushed the price of gold from one hundred and thirty-five and one-half, where it stood on the morning of the thirteenth of September, until, on the evening of Wednesday, the twenty-second, they held it firm at one hundred and forty and one-half.
“The conspirators had bought sixty millions of gold up to that date. Every thing depended on Grant’s preventing the sale of gold by the Treasury. Brother-in-law Corbin was to manage that. Every cent advance in gold added $15,000 to Corbin’s profit. On the 17th, it was determined to have Corbin write a long letter to the President.
“The letter contained no reference to the private speculation of Corbin, but urged the President not to interfere in the fight then going on between the bulls and bears, nor to allow the Secretary of the Treasury to do so by any sales of gold. The letter also repeated the old arguments in regard to transportation of the crops.
“While Corbin was writing it, Gould called upon Fisk to furnish his most faithful servant to carry the letter. W. O. Chapin was designated as the messenger, and early on the following morning went to Mr. Corbin’s house and received it, together with a note to General Porter. He was instructed to proceed with all possible haste, and telegraph Fisk as soon as the letter was delivered. He reached Pittsburgh a little after midnight, and, proceeding at once by carriage to Washington, Pennsylvania, thirty miles distant, delivered the letter to the President, and, after waiting some time, asked if there was any answer. The President told him there was no answer, and he hurried away to the nearest telegraph office and sent to Mr. Fisk this dispatch: ‘Letters delivered all right,’ and then returned to New York. Mr. Fisk appears to have interpreted the ‘all right’ of the dispatch as an answer to the doctrine of the Corbin letter, and says he proceeded in his enormous purchases upon that supposition. This letter, which Corbin had led his co-conspirators to trust as their safeguard against interference from Mr. Boutwell, finally proved their ruin. Its effect was the very reverse of what they anticipated. The letter would have been like hundreds of other letters received by the President, if it had not been for the fact that it was sent by a special messenger from New York to Washington, Pennsylvania, the messenger having to take a carriage and ride some twenty-eight miles from Pittsburgh. This letter, sent in that way, urging a certain policy on the administration, taken in connection with some rumors that had got into the newspapers at that time as to Mr. Corbin’s having become a great bull in gold, excited the President’s suspicions, and he believed that Mr. Corbin must have a pecuniary interest in those speculations; that he was not actuated simply by a desire to see a certain policy carried out for the benefit of the administration. Feeling in that way, he suggested to Mrs. Grant to say, in a letter she was writing to Mrs. Corbin, that rumors had reached her that Mr. Corbin was connected with speculators in New York, and that she hoped that if this was so he would disengage himself from them at once; that he (the President) was very much distressed at such rumors. She wrote a letter that evening. It was received in New York on the evening of Wednesday, the twenty-second. Late that night Mr. Gould called at Corbin’s house. Corbin disclosed the contents of the letter, and they sat down to consider its significance. This letter created the utmost alarm in the minds of both of these conspirators. The picture of these two men that night, as presented in the evidence, is a remarkable one. Shut up in the library, near midnight, Corbin was bending over the table and straining with dim eyes to decipher and read the contents of a letter, written in pencil, to his wife, while the great gold gambler, looking over his shoulder, caught with his sharper vision every word.”
Corbin tried to get Gould to buy him out, so as to tell the President he had no interest in the market. Gould, too, plotted to save himself by ruining his co-conspirators. They held a meeting. Gould secretly sold to Fisk and his associates. The latter, of course, had no idea that it was Gould they were buying out. The meeting resolved to force gold up to 160 on the next day (“Black Friday”), publish a list of all firms who had contracts to furnish gold, offer to settle with them at the price named before three o’clock, but threatening higher prices to all who delayed:
“While this desperate work was going on in New York, its alarming and ruinous effects were reaching and paralyzing the business of the whole country, and carrying terror and ruin to thousands. Business men everywhere, from Boston to San Francisco, read disaster in every new bulletin. The price of gold fluctuated so rapidly that the telegraphic indicators could not keep pace with its movement. The complicated mechanism of these indicators is moved by the electric current carried over telegraphic wires directly from the gold-room, and it is in evidence that in many instances these wires were melted or burned off in the efforts of the operators to keep up with the news.
“The President returned from Pennsylvania to Washington on Thursday, the twenty-third, and that evening had a consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury concerning the condition of the gold market. The testimony of Mr. Boutwell shows that both the President and himself concurred in the opinion that they should, if possible, avoid any interference on the part of the Government in a contest where both parties were struggling for private gain; but both agreed that if the price of gold should be forced still higher, so as to threaten a general financial panic, it would be their duty to interfere and protect the business interests of the country. The next morning the price advanced rapidly, and telegrams poured into Washington from all parts of the country, exhibiting the general alarm, and urging the Government to interfere, and, if possible, prevent a financial crisis.”