Infected...................................

     Periods of speculation had always fostered dishonesty, but in the nineteenth-century American stock market this tendency was even more pronounced.  The corruption of speculation was not limited to company promoters and stock operators; it infected the entire political class of the 1860s.

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     Having burnt their fingers at direct speculation, the New York legislators reverted to the more certain profits of bribery. ... Gould subsequently travelled to Albany with half a million dollars in cash - needless to say, the money technically belonged to Erie shareholders - in order to bribe the legislators to validate retrospectively the new issue of shares.   Vanderbilt played the same game but was defeated by Gould at (what Adams called) the "legislative broker's board, where votes are daily counted."  The total expenditure on bribes in Albany during the summer of 1868 was estimated to exceed a million dollars.

-Edward Chancellor,   Devil Take The Hindmost:  A History Of Financial Speculation