The first great financial journalist

T.J. Stiles writes for Bloomberg View about Charles Francis Adams Jr., whom he considers to be the first great financial journalist in American history.

Stiles writes, “He published his finest piece in the North American Review in July 1869. Titled ‘A Chapter of Erie,’ it described the epic battle over the stock of the giant Erie Railway between Cornelius Vanderbilt on one side, and Daniel Drew, Jay Gould and Jim Fisk on the other.

“It was an outlandish episode, and Adams told it with verve and style. ‘The practice of piracy, it was thought, was battered and hung out of existence,’ he began. ‘But the freebooters have only transferred their operations to the land.’

“He vividly sketched the combatants: Though Drew was ‘shrewd, unscrupulous, and very illiterate,’ he wrote, ‘it is impossible to regard Vanderbilt’s methods or aims without recognizing the magnitude of the man’s ideas and conceding his abilities. He involuntarily excites feelings of admiration for himself and alarm for the public.’

“In late 1867 and early 1868, Vanderbilt tried to corner the market in Erie stock. Drew, Erie’s treasurer, sold his own company’s shares short, as was his custom. Drew and his allies, Gould and Fisk, bribed judges, created massive quantities of new shares to flood the market, scampered aboard a ferry to New Jersey to escape an arrest warrant and finally bought off the New York state legislature. Eventually Vanderbilt coerced Drew into selling out the others and repaying his losses, though he gave up his position in Erie stock.”

Read more here. Talking Biz News would argue that it was actually Henry Varnum Poor, editor of the American Railroad Journal from 1849 to 1862, who was actually the first great financial journalist in America.