^{Midnight, April 2, 1865}

IT HAD BEEN A LONG SATURDAY NIGHT for James Fisk Jr. His unkempt blond hair marked the hours he had been running his hands through it, while his waffle-weave suit struggled to hold in his girth. Bones of Fisk’s food of choice — turkey—— were strewn about. As the clock rounded midnight, and Fisk rattled his many rings against the desk, he started to wonder whether tonight was the night. Maybe he should have just had a good sleep and come to the telegraph office in the morning.

But for Fisk, stockbroker and financial schemer, every minute, every second, counted. Had he stayed at home, he would have paced the night away. He might as well camp out at this Boston office of the American Telegraph Company. At any moment, in those predawn Sunday hours, he anticipated an end for General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Each puff of Fisk’s cigar brought him closer to it, so he hoped.

Nearly 500 miles to the south in Washington, D.C., President Abraham Lincoln anxiously waited at the War Department for the same news. Slumped in a chair, his linen jacket hanging off his wiry frame, Lincoln loomed large in the small room at the Winder Building on 17th Street. Next to Lincoln sat a stick he carried at the urging of his wife, Mary Todd, protection against a possible assault. Lincoln’s presence in the room originally came from necessity — he could get work done there. The White House next door had become overrun by party dignitaries, office seekers, and lingerers.

Lincoln had come to know the telegraph operators and cipher breakers stationed at desks around the room, and had made it a habit to flip through new messages. When he finished reading through a pile, he seemed to always have a sarcastic comment ready to elicit a chuckle from the room.

Lincoln’s and Fisk’s interest in the events in and around Petersburg, Virginia, early that morning could not be farther apart. Where Lincoln saw the last gasp of an insurrection that had cost some 750,000 lives and paved the way to a more perfect union free of the national sin of slavery, Fisk saw dollar signs. Lots of them.

As the sun crept into the Sunday sky outside the telegraph office, Fisk wondered if his excitement was premature. Then it happened. The office roared to life. The wires sputtered with fragments of news. The Confederate forces could not hold off the Union juggernaut of General Ulysses S. Grant. Casualties and desertion had taken their toll on the Army of Northern Virginia and now a Union force in the predawn hours of Sunday, April 2, had punched a hole in the wafer-thin line.

Wartime protocols meant military messages took priority on the wires. But rules had never stopped Fisk before. He bribed the telegraph officer to send out a message in between the clacking of military wires. The destination: Halifax, Nova Scotia. The message: “Go!”

With one word, James Fisk unleashed one of the greatest financial schemes in American history.