The 1869 U.S. financial panic caused by an attempt to corner the gold market was called Black Friday.
The scheme was organized by financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk, who sought to control enough gold to raise its price. They believed that a higher gold price would also benefit wheat exporters and possibly President Ulysses S. Grant’s political allies. Grant eventually ordered the Treasury to sell government gold, breaking the attempted corner.
On 24 September 1869, known as Black Friday, the price of gold fell sharply after the Treasury intervention. Speculators and investors suffered heavy losses, although the wider economy did not collapse in the same way as during some other nineteenth-century panics.
This event is often confused with later stock-market days called Black Monday or Black Tuesday. Black Friday in this historical context refers specifically to the 1869 gold-market episode.