THE SULTAN OF ERIE.

Thames Guardian and Mining Record, Volume I, Issue 172, 27 April 1872, Page 3

THE SULTAN OF ERIE.

(From the Spectator.) The moral of James Fisk’s career, which disgraced a continent, hut only lasted three years, is that under Republican as well as Monarchical institutions the individual is still occasionally the master of the crowd. lie became master in this ease, through bad means and for bad ends, but lie was master nevertheless; and we sec 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 assurance, 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, lie 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 lie 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, wo have no means of telling, but it is believed in New York, and exactly illustrates the capacity, audacity, and hcartlessness of James Fisk. lie soon quilled peddling, tried a general business in Boston where ho frightened Lis partners into buying him oui—and finally lighted in New York, the proper scene for him. In some way to us unknown he had accumulated 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 Air 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, ns wo have said, was a vulgar man, a vain man, a man who could not spell, who loved diamond studs and “loud” clothes generally, who wanted to he first in every walk of life, and A’lio had a profound conviction that ho could make disreputable women, whom lie bought wholesale, love him for himself, hut he was for all that a man of grvat faculties, a vulgar Napoleon, with a rare fertility of mind, great daring in combinations, keen insight into facts, and, wlnit 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 appreciation of tiie grotesque sitle of every phase and incident, the humour which can prompt a man virtually under trial for his whole property to apologise to his Judgi s for a fraud which had failed by saying, “ I saw then it was time for every man to draw iiis 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 mouths ago an “interviewing” reporter ga\o w ffat looks like a curiously vraisemblant account of it, —Fisk walking 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 oil his main idea,—that in New York nothing was strong but 1 lie electorate and the law, that the man who could secure both would he as independent of punishmet as the Sultan. lie did secure both. He admitted Tweed and Sweeny into the hoard, and so enlisted Tammany and its voters ; bought two judges, lialf-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 bail 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 lie did to public credit. Great combinations of capitalists, who, oue would think, could have done f -iy-

I thing, tried to bear him down, but always i in vain, for, in the United States--the two cheeks 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 legislature which would control Erie, the Ring brought up its Irish majority. If you appealed to law, two of tho twelve Judges, each armed with all tho 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 interfered, 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 nu 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 dancing-girls, and from thence issued his orders to hundreds of dependents, and to a mob which admired him as the London mob admired a man of precisely similar character, though more education—Wilkes of Medmcnham Abbey notoriety. If he wanted money, lie took the receipts of tho Erie line, or declared dividends on some preference shares in his own hands, or availed himself of the American practice of raising railway funds, not by debentures, but by an issue of more shares. If anybody questioned his right to issuo them, he bought legal permission—wo make the statement on the authority of the Messrs Adams, the sons of tho lato Minister hero—from tho complaisant Legislature at Albany, ami if tho public shirked the shares he issued a divideud, or a promise of one, and sold the stock to Englishmen. There was always plenty for his wants, and those of his dependents, and when at last the Ring fell and Tammany was paralysed, and tho cud seemed coming, he is said to have devised a plan by which to compromise with tho English shareholders, and walk off unhurt with a great fortune in his pocket. The man, however, like all men of his kind, had tho extra vice which Scripture condemns—insatiableness, the “ superfluity of naughtiness.” 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 resorted 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 tho assassin’s expedient, met him in an hotel and shot him dead. He had had three years of his own way unch '.eked. For three years he had lived as Englishmen hold it impossible to live in America, as a Sultan doing his own will; had laughed at opinion, sneered at suitors, rejoiced in the scathing denunciations of the Press, which ho never prosecuted, and probably never read ; and when at last lie was murdered, the populace, so placable when good men arc 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, utteriy bad, and by English judgment bad as only the lowest of mankind arc bad ; but uneducated, vulgar, vain, and seeker of notoriety as lie was, ho 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 tne 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 prostituted his position to utterly ignoble personal enjoyment, or that unrestrained pursuit of luxury which ho mistook for it. After all, mankind changes little, and Yitellius and Heliogabalus reigned. James Fisk was in no particular way an offspring of Republican, institutions or a discredit to them. He was a vulgar De Alorny, his misuse of the Courts was not much worse than the misuse of the laws of public security under tho Empire, and it is probable that, had he lived, the Committee of Seventy would have crushed 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 institutions 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 overthrown him but a rising, which only gratuitous provocations, 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 Republican 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 organised 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 had 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 lie not have lived his life, and his death have been followed by a fall instead of a rise in all Americau scrip ?