Description
The first edition of Investigation Into The Causes Of The Gold Panic, signed by James A. Garfield.
Octavo, [4], 487pp, [1]. Publisher’s brown cloth, title stamped in gilt on the spine. Foxing to endpapers, light foxing and spotting to leafends. Notable wear to the cloth along the lower quarter of the spine, with some surface loss of the cloth, soiling to both boards and wear to tips of the spine. This copy bears the stamp of the Lake County Historical Society in Mentor, Ohio, the hometown of President Garfield. Contemporary gift inscription on the front free endpaper. Housed in a custom gray cloth clamshell, title in gilt on the spine over a black morocco label. (Rupp, 661)
This copy is signed on the front free endpaper: “Respects of J.A. Garfield.”
The Gold Panic of 1869, often called “Black Friday,” occurred on September 24, 1869, when financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk attempted to corner the U.S. gold market by driving up prices through speculative purchases while using political connections within the Grant administration. Their manipulation caused the price of gold to soar to over $160 per ounce before collapsing when the U.S. Treasury, at President Ulysses S. Grant’s direction, released $4 million in gold to stabilize the market. The sudden crash devastated commodity prices and triggered financial turmoil on Wall Street.
In the aftermath, Congress launched an investigation, chaired by Representative James A. Garfield of Ohio, to determine whether members of the administration, including Grant’s brother-in-law Abel Corbin, were complicit. Garfield’s committee concluded that while corruption and insider influence were rampant in the financial dealings surrounding Gould and Fisk, there was no direct evidence implicating President Grant himself in the scheme.
This work, “Investigation Into The Causes Of The Gold Panic,” was published on March 1, 1870, and details the findings of the committee.
