As Gould bought the bears sold “short” and the battle became intensely exciting.
Fisk’s assistance was as valuable as Gould expected it to be. He took no stock in the crop theory, but the idea of making the administration a partner in the diabolical enterprise seems to have attracted him. “Nothing,” said Garfield in his report to Congress, “nothing but the scent of corruption could sharpen the appetite of Fisk for the game his leader (Gould) was pursuing. The compounded villainy presented by Gould and Corbin was too tempting a bait.” So Fisk was drawn into the movement when his aid was most needed. This corner was a glittering edifice built on a foundation of deceit and corruption. It could not long stand. The most that Gould and Fisk could do was to frighten the “shorts” into covering before Grant awakened to the realization of how he was being used and issue orders to sell gold. Wall street was soon filled with rumors that the administration was in the deal and the excitement ran high.
“The malign influence,” says the Congressional report already quoted, “which Cataline wielded over the reckless and abandoned youth of Rome finds a fitting parallel in the power which Fisk held in Wall street when, followed by the thugs of Erie and the debauchees of the opera, he swept into the gold-room and defied both the street and the Treasury.”
The magnitude of the conspiracy is shown by the fact that before Black Friday Gould had employed fifty to sixty brokers to make his purchases, and $50,000,000 to $60,000,000 of gold had been bought by William Heath & Co., Woodward, H. K. Enos, E. K. Willard, and others of the brokers. He required all this to advance the price of gold from 135½ to 140½.
Fisk’s entrance into the game was a powerful help to Gould, for it not only furnished another purchaser for gold, but directed public attention from himself to Fisk. The ex-peddler loved to bask in the sun of public notoriety. Gould was timid, but Fisk had the brazen courage of a courtesan.
Gould and Fisk now became exceedingly nervous over the firmness of the President’s policy. He induced Mr. Corbin to write a letter directly to the President himself. This letter, written on the seventeenth, under the influence of Gould’s anxiety, was instantly sent away by a special messenger of Fisk’s, who rode twenty-eight miles on horseback from Pittsburg, and delivered it in person to the President. He read the letter, and had his suspicions at once aroused. He said laconically to the messenger: “It is satisfactory; there is no answer.” He began to see through the game, and at once desired Mrs. Grant to write to Mrs. Corbin requesting her husband to have nothing more to do with the Gould-Fisk gang.
The messenger telegraphed “All right” to the conspirators.
“We now come to the week which was to witness the explosion of all this elaborately constructed mine. On Monday the 20th, gold again rose. Throughout Tuesday and Wednesday, Fisk continued to purchase without limit and forced the price up to 40. At this time, Gould’s firm of Smith, Gould & Martin, through which the operation was conducted, had purchased some $50,000,000, and yet the bears went on selling, although they could only continue the contest by borrowing Gould’s own gold. Gould, on the other hand, could no longer sell and clear himself, for the reason that the sale of $50,000,000 would have broken the market to nothing. The struggle had become intense. The whole country was looking on with astonishment at the battle between the bulls and the bears. All business was deranged and all values unsettled. There were indications of a panic in the stock market; and the bears, in their emergency, were vehemently pressing the government to intervene. Gould now wrote to Mr. Boutwell a letter so inconceivably impudent that it indicates desperation and entire loss of his ordinary coolness:
“Sir: There is a panic in Wall street, engineered by a bear combination. They have withdrawn currency to such an extent that it is impossible to do ordinary business. The Erie company requires $800,000 to disburse. Much of it in Ohio, where an exciting political contest was going on and where we have about ten thousand employed, and the trouble is charged on the administration. Cannot you consistently increase your line of currency?”
From a friend, such a letter would have been an outrage, but from a member of the Tammany ring, the principal object of detestation to the government, such a threat or bribe, whichever it may be called, was incredible. Mr. Gould was, in fact, at his wits’ end. He dreaded a panic and felt that it could no longer be avoided.