Murphy was quite a different sort. He was Old Brooklyn, he was grace and learning. For a long time he had been considered the handsomest man in town. Where Kingsley and McLaughlin were men of great physical bulk and had made their way up in the world in part because of that, Murphy was small, spare, well knit, and clean-shaven, a refined-looking man with gray hair and sharp, intelligent eyes. Judge McCue called him “cautious and subtle.” Henry Stiles, the Brooklyn historian, described him as “very earnest in manner, a little severe even.” Everybody respected him, it appears, and it is not hard to see why. According to Stiles, “no public man has, probably, passed thus far through the trying ordeal of a legislative career, so entirely free from the taint of corruption.” Once upon a time, as some of his other admirers liked to tell, Henry Murphy had nearly become President of the United States.
John Murphy, his father, a “thorough Jefferson Democrat,” had been a Brooklyn judge, a man of some renown in his own time, who did well enough with one thing and another to send Henry to Columbia, where he was graduated in 1830. In the next few years, while reading law—at the same time young John Roebling was struggling to become a Pennsylvania farmer—Murphy made quite a name for himself. “His pen embellished and enriched” the pages of the North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly. He edited the old Brooklyn Advocate and helped organize the Young Men’s Literary Association of Brooklyn. In 1835 he went into partnership with an attorney named John A. Lott and was soon joined by another named John Vanderbilt, both older men and already prominent in Brooklyn. “From the first his firm was in high favor with Brooklyn people,” reads one biographical sketch, “especially wealthy and conservative old property-holders of Brooklyn, and it soon built up an extensive and lucrative practice.” It also ran the Democratic Party on the Brooklyn side of the river.
In 1841 Murphy founded the Eagle, then more explicitly named the Brooklyn Eagle and Kings County Democrat. The next year he was elected mayor at age thirty-one and commenced his administration by cutting his own salary. He went to Congress presently, served there twice, and distinguished himself by sounding forth against slavery and fostering McAlpine’s dry dock at the Navy Yard. By the time his political career had run its course, he would also serve six terms in the State Senate, try three times for the United States Senate, once for the governorship, and fail every time mainly because of the opposition of one man, William Tweed.
But his closest brush with real glory had come in 1852 at the Democratic National Convention in Baltimore. The convention had been deadlocked after forty-eight ballots, when the Virginia delegation put up a compromise candidate, an old-fashioned party regular from New Hampshire, Franklin Pierce. But the Virginians’ support for Pierce had been anything but unanimous. Murphy had been the other choice and had lost by a single vote. Pierce had a military record, Murphy did not, and apparently that had been the deciding factor. Had Murphy been put up instead, his admirers held, he would have been nominated, elected, and done better as President than did the colorless New Hampshire man. (For one thing, coming as he did from Beecher’s home town, it is doubtful Murphy would have underestimated the abolitionists.)
It was five years after that when Murphy was named the American Minister to The Hague, by Buchanan, and no sooner was he out of the country than Boss McLaughlin swung into action, taking complete control in Brooklyn at the same time Tweed was taking over in New York. “It was not a change for the better,” the Eagle would write in retrospect, many years later, after Murphy was dead. “Deftness in speech was supplanted by deftness in manipulation of votes; dexterity in argument made way for the dexterity which makes one count for two for your side. The deterioration of our political methods began then…”
Recalled from The Hague by Lincoln in 1861, Murphy returned to face other problems as well. A man taken into his law firm had squandered money and left the firm unable to pay its bills. Murphy, who had been planning to retire once he was home again, made good on all the firm’s commitments out of his own savings, which nearly ruined him. As a result he had not only gone back to practicing law, but began taking an interest in various local business propositions, such as the development of Coney Island, which was something he had not done before.
In the years since, it was commonly remarked, there had been a certain air of disappointment about Henry Murphy. Albany was now his only field of political influence and there he appears to have been a rather lonely, incongruous figure, with his literary tastes and perfect manners. But he was immensely influential all the same, and for Brooklyn, a most valuable asset.
Privately he turned more and more to his family, his books, his scholarly interest in Brooklyn history. At the moment, he was finishing up a translation of a journal kept by two Dutchmen during a trip to New Netherlands in 1679, something he had found in an Amsterdam bookshop. * This was his third such translation and the library where he, Kingsley, and McCue held their historic conversation housed what would one day be evaluated as among the two or three finest collections of early Americana in the entire country. “Mr. Murphy only failed as a politician,” said one Brooklyn observer of the time; “in all else his life was a grand success.”
In talent, disposition, age, background, physique, in just about every way, Kingsley and Murphy were as different as they could be, opposite and complementary, and they worked superbly together.
Murphy “threw himself” into the bridge enterprise. He drafted an incorporating charter and “with great energy…enlisted the interest of his friends,” his prominent, respectable friends, to be more exact. The thirty-eight directors he rounded up included the mayors of both cities, such presentable Brooklyn Democrats as McCue and Isaac van Anden, owner of the Eagle, and for the Republicans and old Brooklyn, Simeon Chittenden, J. Carson Brevoort, and Henry E. Pierrepont (son of Hezekiah). He also talked up the bridge at every opportunity and took framed copies of a bridge Julius Adams had designed with him to Albany to pass about among his fellow legislators. To no one’s surprise, the Eagle gave him full support. “Every Brooklynite, resident or capitalist, is interested in bridging the East River,” wrote Thomas Kinsella.
The bill was submitted on January 25, 1867, and passed on April 16. Neither Murphy nor Kingsley, nor the name of any engineer, was listed as having any association with the proposed project.
The New York Bridge Company, a private corporation, was to have the power to purchase any real estate needed for the bridge and its approaches and to fix tolls. The legislation fixed the capital stock at five million dollars, with power to increase it, and gave the cities of Brooklyn and New York authority to subscribe to as much of the stock as determined by their respective Common Councils. The stock was to be valued at a hundred dollars a share. The company was to be run by a president who would be elected annually. In time this document of Henry Murphy’s creation would be looked upon as little better than a license to steal, but at this stage, for some reason, nobody seems to have regarded it that way.
Kingsley was to line up private money and see about the engineer. Perhaps his initial impulse had been to go along with Julius Adams, as he had led Adams to believe he would. But that seems doubtful. Adams would have been a bad choice and it is known that Murphy never entertained the idea for a minute. Adams had no reputation and had never built a bridge of any consequence. Indeed, one might well wonder why Adams was ever brought into the picture in the first place were it not for some comments made later by Washington Roebling in his private notebooks, where, it happens, a very great deal about the bridge would be said that does not appear in the official records or the various old “histories.”
Adams had been nothing more than a straw man all along, according to the young engineer. His role had been not so much to design a bridge as to concoct the lowest possible estimate for a bridge. That way the real engineer, if he seriously wanted the job, would have to pare his figures to the bone, which in turn would give the promoters of the scheme a more attractive price tag to talk about. The point was to
work a little businesslike deception right at the start, before any real plans had even been drawn up. “Adams surpassed himself by an estimate of $2,000,000,” Washington Roebling wrote. As a result John A. Roebling was forced to trim his own estimate by more than one million dollars, knowing perfectly well what was going on and that his figure was ridiculous.
Then Kingsley and Murphy did some more cutting of their own to arrive at the five-million-dollar figure used in the Albany bill.
In May 1867, a month after the bill was passed, a meeting of the New York Bridge Company was held in the Supreme Court chambers at the County Courthouse in Brooklyn. Henry Murphy was appointed to fill a vacancy caused by the death of one of the directors. At a meeting three days later, Henry Murphy was elected president, and a week after that John A. Roebling was appointed Chief Engineer with full authority to design any sort of bridge he wished. A man had been selected, rather than a particular plan—Roebling had no real plan at that point. Kingsley said later the very nature of the enterprise demanded someone of towering reputation. The name Roebling was “invaluable to this enterprise in its infancy,” Kingsley would explain. There could not be a breath of doubt or suspicion concerning the integrity of the builder.
The explanation of the choice of Chief Engineer was worded thusly in the official company records: “Confidence on the part of the public and of those whose money was to be invested in the undertaking would best be insured by employing the Engineer who had achieved the most successful results, and who was thus most likely to accomplish this great enterprise.” No other engineer was ever considered.
Roebling’s salary was to be eight thousand dollars a year, but any work he did until the bridge actually got under way was strictly on speculation.
Things were moving very fast that spring of 1867. Roebling was told to proceed at once with his surveys and come up with a proposal. He was also led to understand that Kingsley, who was neither a director nor officer of the new company, would personally cover any expenses involved, although nothing was put in writing about it. Test borings were made and in two months’ time, having scrapped all his earlier sketches, Roebling was back in Brooklyn with his plan. At the first meeting of the Bridge Company’s newly formed Board of Directors, a Committee on Plans and Surveys recommended “the immediate commencement of the work.”
That was in October. But more than a year would pass before another meeting was held. Nor would there be any noticeable progress made on even the most preliminary construction. Three thousand new buildings went up in Brooklyn in 1868—churches, stores, banks, more factories, an ice-skating rink, row on row of plain-fronted brick and brownstone houses that sold about as fast as they were finished—but to judge by actions, not words, the Great Bridge was no more than a great figment of the imagination, nothing but a lot of politicians’ talk, by all appearances. The New York Bridge Company was nothing more than a name on paper as far as most people could tell. The famous engineer from Trenton was nowhere to be seen.
The delay, however, was not due to any indifference or lack of sincerity on the part of Kingsley or Murphy, or of Roebling certainly. The problem was in New York City. Back at the start of the century, when Thomas Pope’s “Rainbow Bridge” had been a favorite topic of conversation in Brooklyn, it was said that the only thing needed to bring a bridge about was “a combination of opinion.” Thus was the case now. Now especially that it had become something more than just a Brooklyn dream, the bridge could no longer be considered wholly a Brooklyn enterprise.
So it would be 1869 before the bridge was at last under way. And it would be the end of that summer of 1869, a full two years later, before things were finally settled behind the scenes. By then, of course, Roebling was dead. And only then did William Tweed emerge publicly as one of the leading spirits behind Brooklyn’s bridge.
6
The Proper Person to See
Who owns the City of New York today? The Devil!
—HENRY WARD BEECHER
ON THE MORNING of September 17, 1869, William Tweed took the Fulton Ferry to Brooklyn. The day was fine, the sun shining, a light, cool breeze blowing over the water. Tweed had a strong attachment to the river. Its sounds and smells, South Street and the ships docking there, were part of the New York he had known since childhood. Twice, when he was an alderman, he had voted to establish additional ferry lines to Brooklyn, in return for which he had been nicely reimbursed with several thousand dollars in cash. He was much younger then and that had seemed a handsome sum. But for his vote for the ferry to Brooklyn’s predominantly Irish Williamsburg section, he had also received a promise of support for his Congressional ambitions. The Williamsburg people had proved as good as their word and in 1853 he had gone off to Washington, a Congressman at age twenty-nine. The life on the Potomac had had no appeal for him, however, and he gladly gave it up after a single term. There were better things to be doing at home.
Now, as the big boat swept out into the river, its bell clanging, there stretched behind him the largest, richest, noisiest city in America, over which he and a few indispensable associates ruled supreme.
New York then, as later, was the country’s financial capital. It was the seat of mighty newspapers—Greeley’s Tribune, James Gordon Bennett’s Herald, the Sun, the World, the Evening Post, the Times. It was the place where fashions were decided on and the center of fashionable society. It was home for the Astors, and it was home for P. T. Barnum, Samuel F. B. Morse, and Herman Melville. New York set the example, as somebody said. It had power, style, more Jews, more Irish, more priests and pickpockets and private art collections, more of just about everything than any city in the country. There were hotels with French waiters and five hundred rooms, theaters numbered in the twenties. As a contemporary book on the city stated on its opening page, Broadway, the principal street, was “paved, policed, and lighted for fifteen miles.” Pretty girls and rich men were too plentiful to count.
From the Battery northward for five miles or so, nearly every last piece of available space had been built up, and on toward the outskirts, near the new park, which had been so optimistically named Central Park, the city had a “straggling, unfinished look.” Downtown the noise was fearsome most of the day, the traffic terrible, the air thick with the smell of horse manure. Along Broadway the fast-moving throngs were more than the average person could take for very long and most women would have agreed with the Reverend Mr. Beecher’s famous sister, Mrs. Stowe, never a timid spirit, who wrote a friend that New York “always kills me—dazzles, dizzies—astonishes, confounds, and overpowers poor little me.”
Strangers to the city sensed an uncommon and offensive preoccupation with self-interest and the almighty dollar. “The light of Mammon gleams on nearly every face in Broadway and Wall Street,” wrote a visitor from England. And two years earlier, after arriving from California, Mark Twain said of New York, “Every man seems to feel he has got the duties of two lifetimes to accomplish in one, and so rushes, rushes, and never has time to be companionable—never has time at his disposal to fool away on matters which do not involve dollars and duty and business.”
Contrasts were everywhere, sharp and frequently appalling. The glistening new carriages that streamed through Central Park on Sundays reminded one French traveler of filigreed jewelry, but of the domain of the Irish and the Negro, between Broadway and the Hudson, the same man wrote, “Nothing could be more depressingly miserable than these wooden hovels, these long muddy streets, and this impoverished population.” An English writer said the whole city, generally speaking, was “one of the worst lighted, worst paved, worst kept cities in the world.”
Homeless children loose in the streets numbered in the thousands. The permanent floating population of homeless children, beggars, drifters, petty thieves, and prostitutes was said to be perhaps 100,000. Bawdyhouses advertised openly in the newspapers. Prostitutes were said to be “more numerous, more dangerous and more shameful than anywhere else on the continent.” Probably that was so. The most
influential woman in town was an abortionist, Madame Restell, who lived in a big showy house on Fifth Avenue, across from where the new St. Patrick’s Cathedral was being built.
But nowhere else was quite so much happening every day or was there so much opportunity for the young, the talented, the ambitious, not to mention the lucky or the unscrupulous. Yesterday’s ragpicker or coal heaver was today’s millionaire (a new word). It not only happened in stories, it happened. A. T. Stewart had once been an ordinary shopkeeper, living over a store with his wife in a single room. Cornelius Vanderbilt began penniless, everyone knew.
The city was the undisputed center of the new America that had been emerging since the war. It was a place of a thousand and one overnight schemes, some brilliant, some preposterous, some plain evil, and all, it seemed, calling for enormous outlays of capital and pure nerve. It was the great gathering place for every imaginable kind of promoter, inventor, pitchman, entrepreneur, self-proclaimed visionary or ordinary crook, and nobody, it seemed, could remain bored there for too terribly long, whatever his condition.
Moreover, if only New York could have produced a Jim Fisk or a Tweed, as its critics liked to say, perhaps only New York could have produced a Peter Cooper or a Thomas Nast. And while the opening of the West was the great, popular human drama of the time, New York was the central attraction of a smaller, less celebrated, and colorful, but no less important and purposeful, migration in the opposite direction—eastward to the big cities. “The West is best for the person who is seeking a home,” wrote a young Swedish immigrant upon arriving in Kansas in June of 1869, but added, “The East’s large cities offer a rich field for clever money lovers,” thereby crystallizing what to him and countless others like him seemed the two most compelling and divergent choices in American life. And as he and his kind streamed out onto the American plains, it was to New York that a Mark Twain headed from the gold fields of California or an only moderately rich young Andrew Carnegie moved from Pittsburgh, or that an even younger and penniless Thomas Edison of Ohio would set himself up in business that same June.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 90