Black Friday was the 1869 U.S. financial panic triggered by an attempted corner in the gold market.
Financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk tried to control enough gold to drive up its price. Their plan depended partly on influencing government gold sales and limiting the supply available to other buyers. President Ulysses S. Grant became concerned that the scheme was distorting the market and ordered Treasury gold sales.
When the government’s intervention became known on September 24, 1869, gold prices plunged. Speculators and brokers suffered heavy losses, and trading turmoil spread to the stock market. The event became known as Black Friday, although it was not the same event as the much later stock-market crash dates called Black Friday in other contexts.
The episode is also called the Gold Panic of 1869. It exposed the risks of concentrated speculation and insider influence in a financial system that had relatively limited regulation compared with modern markets.