Tweed, as it happens, had been called upon to journey all of a few city blocks to find his promised land. He had been born just to the east of City Hall, toward the river, at No. 1 Cherry Street, a squat red brick house that stood beside No. 1 Cherry Street, which, ironically enough, had once, briefly, been the nation’s first Presidential mansion, the home of George Washington when he took office for the first time and New York was the capital. Both of the houses, Tweed knew, would have to be demolished to make way for the anchorage of the new bridge.
Tweed’s people were hard-working Scotch Protestants, and Cherry Street when he was a boy was still considered a respectable neighborhood. It was said he had been a good student, at mathematics especially, and he had started off quite conscientiously, bookkeeping in a mercantile store. But about the time he reached his full growth, he joined up with a volunteer fire company and discovered politics.
In 1851 the fireman became an alderman, being elected to that Common Council of New York destined to be known as “The Forty Thieves.” From that time on, he would find honest work no longer necessary.
By 1869 Tweed was nearing his zenith. Like Beecher across the way, he was right in his prime. He was School Commissioner, Assistant Street Commissioner, President of the Board of Supervisors of the County of New York, Senator of the State of New York, Chairman of the Democratic Central Committee of New York County, and Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall, the title that pleased him most.
But Tweed was also one of New York’s principal landowners. He was on speaking terms with the rich and powerful, some of whom he also did business with, and he was an extremely generous advertiser in the newspapers. He was in the printing business. One way or another, thousands were in his employ, including several hundred prominent Republicans. Judges rendered decisions according to his requests. Legislators passed or defeated laws as he determined. The Mayor, the charming A. Oakey Hall, did as Tweed wanted and the same could be said of the Governor, John T. Hoffman, who if not an outright stooge was at least “pliable.” As Samuel Tilden would write, it was the first day of January 1869, when Oakey Hall took office, that the Tweed Ring “became completely organized and matured.”
It was also in 1869 that Thomas Nast began his brave, brilliant attack on the Tweed Ring in the pages of Harper’s Weekly, so vividly characterizing Tweed that the true shape and nature of the man would seem to recede and the cartoon figure would become the real Tweed in people’s minds, then and in generations to come. He would be seen as a gross, half-comic character done in quick, sure black line, a figure of corruption incarnate, leering, lecherous, Falstaff with a stickpin.
The portrayal was deadly, as no one knew better than Tweed himself. “I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles,” he is said to have exclaimed when under attack from the press, “my constituents don’t know how to read, but they can’t help seeing them damned pictures.” But it was caricature, for all that; the man was something else again. He was no less corrupt certainly, but he was very much of flesh and blood, and apart from everything else that was said about him, it seems he was both extremely bright and enormously likable.
The Tweed on board the ferry to Brooklyn that September morning was in his mid-forties, married, the father of eight children. What hair he had left was a dark reddish-brown, which he wore in thick clumps about his ears. His mustache was approximately the same color, as was his short, stiff beard. The eyes were bright blue.
But it was the fantastic physical size of the man that set him off in any gathering. He stood five feet eleven, yet he seemed much bigger than that. He had an abnormally big head, big hands, big neck, great, thick sloping shoulders, and a vast, belligerent stomach across which was draped a heavy length of gold watch chain, a gift from his old fire-fighting pals of the Americus Engine Company Number 6. Estimates are that Tweed weighed somewhere near three hundred pounds.
James Bryce, the English historian, who watched Tweed in action with total fascination, considering him one of the phenomena of the American political system, wrote that Tweed’s size was an important part of his professional equipment, since it made the role of “the genial good fellow” that much easier. And by almost every account, Tweed was a most amiable fellow indeed, buoyant, booming, with a fund of stories and a gift for making friends quickly and easily. “Tweed had an abounding vitality,” Bryce wrote, echoing John Roebling’s view of what counted for success, “free and easy manners, plenty of humor, though of a coarse kind, and a jovial swaggering way which won popularity for him among the lower and rougher sort of people.”
Like numerous other swindlers in high places, before and since, Tweed was known to have his “good side”—a combination of small but popular virtues that were taken by thousands upon thousands of loyal followers as obvious proof that he could not possibly be the monster his enemies described. He drank but sparingly. He smoked not at all. He was a devoted, generous father. He was exceptionally charitable. (Come a hard winter, no family in his district went without coal.) And although he kept at least two mistresses, one of whom, a tiny blonde, did not reach his shoulder, he was considered quite charming in his way by the ladies. He loved to dance. He was never ever arrogant. And perhaps most important of all, as Bryce said, he was always loyal to his friends.
But all that aside, Tweed had a genius for organizing things, and more than any other man of his time, he knew how to make politics pay. Precisely how much he and his cohorts managed to steal from the people of New York will never be known for certain, but responsible estimates range from $75 million to $200 million. Tweed himself, personally, probably made off with $30 million before he was deposed.
When the ferry docked at Brooklyn, Tweed went up Fulton Street to the Gas Light Company offices. He had come to attend the very first meeting of the new Executive Committee of the Bridge Company, of which he was one of just six members.
The full committee was present according to the official synopsis of the meeting: “Messrs. H. C. Murphy, S. L. Husted, Wm. M. Tweed, J. S. T. Stranahan, Hugh Smith and H. W. Slocum.” The committee had been formed at a directors’ meeting the week before. From here on, it had been agreed, the committee was to make all arrangements for the work and have full control over the business of the company. It was to decide on all appointments, purchase all lands required, decide on all contracts for supplies, audit its own accounts, appoint its own attorney (Alexander McCue), and determine all salaries and all other “compensations.”
Tweed’s interest in the bridge was not new, but only on August 3, following the Roebling funeral, had his name been associated with the great work in any public way. An important directors’ meeting had been held at the Gas Light Company. Colonel Roebling was officially appointed Chief Engineer and six new directors were named to fill the vacancies caused by one death and a total of eight resignations, all quite sudden it seems. Three of the new directors were Brooklyn men—Stranahan, General Slocum, and John W. Lewis. The three others were from New York—Tweed and two of his closest associates, Hugh Smith and Peter Sweeny.
Smith was a Republican, a bank president, and a dear friend of Boss Tweed’s, who had made Smith Police Commissioner. Sweeny, also known as Peter “Brains” Sweeny, was a pudgy, black-haired, sinister-looking man who had been called the sneak thief of Tweed’s entourage, but who preferred to describe himself humbly as “a sort of adviser” to the Boss. Like Tweed, Smith had been named a member of the powerful new Executive Committee and so had the pleasure of watching Tweed perform his first recorded service on behalf of the bridge.
As was frequently his way when commencing an association with a grand public endeavor, Tweed wanted an eminently respectable name also associated with it from the start. So as the Executive Committee got down to business, he urged that Horatio Allen be appointed consulting engineer at an annual salary the same as young Roebling was to get, eight thousand dollars, and that the appointment date from August 1, even though Allen had had no hand in any of the work during that time. A formal motio
n to that effect was presented, passed, and the genial Allen, who was present, immediately accepted. Then, after a few brief formalities were seen to, the meeting broke up and Tweed went back across the river.
There had been no fanfare of any kind and on the surface it might appear that little of importance had been accomplished. But Tweed doubtless felt he had put in quite a good morning.
The sudden death of the elder Roebling had created the single possible flaw in the venture, as Tweed saw it; so he had moved to solve that—or to appear to solve it, which was more important. Irrespective of the skills possessed by the young engineer, without the father in command, a failure of public confidence might develop and bring the bridge to a halt, something Tweed did not want. Tweed was anxious that this project continue for quite some time to come. But now young Roebling was backed up by an engineer of his father’s vintage, whose professional standing was well known, whose character was unimpeachable, who was a founding member of the Union League Club, and so forth. If anyone should one day care to check the record to see who had put him there to safeguard this vast and important undertaking, he would find the name “Wm. M. Tweed.” (Horatio Allen’s professional contribution to the work in the next few years would add up to just about nothing.)
The Tammany chieftain had also made his first entrance onto the Brooklyn scene and not a stir had resulted. He had gone to Brooklyn in good faith and in broad daylight, he had been seen on Fulton Street, he had taken a place among such upright gentlemen as General Slocum and Henry Murphy, he had fixed his name to the greatest municipal enterprise of the day, and no one had raised a hand or a voice to stop him.
For nearly two years more Tweed would play a decisive part in the business of the Bridge Company, traveling to Brooklyn to attend stockholders’ meetings or to serve on the Executive Committee when it served his purpose. He would make no secret of his interest in the bridge, nor did anyone else try to hide, or gloss over, the obvious fact that his was a very powerful voice in bridge affairs. But when it came time for Tweed to explain the earlier stages of organizing the Bridge Company—that business transacted prior to his open association with the project—everything he said would be angrily denounced by the two principals in his version of the story, William Kingsley and Henry Murphy.
Murphy stated there was no truth whatever in anything Tweed said. He denied absolutely playing the role Tweed credited him with, claiming he and Tweed had had no dealings concerning the bridge. And he stuck to that until his dying day. Which one of them, if either, was telling the whole truth will never be known.
But according to Tweed’s version of the story, Murphy was a very different sort of man from the one Henry Stiles depicted and perfectly capable of Tweed’s brand of politics if that was the only way to get what he was after. In late 1867 or early 1868 Murphy had been after a pledge from the City of New York to subscribe to a million and a half dollars’ worth of bridge stock. (Brooklyn’s subscription, exactly twice that amount, had been arranged quite smoothly. The three million dollars from Brooklyn was all set. The remaining shares, a half million dollars’ worth, were to be sold to private citizens.)
Tweed’s account of what went on behind the scenes is the only one available. It was presented a number of years later and is rather vague on such important details as to just when Murphy came to him for help—whether, for instance, it was before or after Murphy made his bitter fight for the Democratic nomination for governor in 1868, a fight Murphy lost to Tweed’s hand-picked candidate, John Hoffman. The timing, needless to say, would be an interesting part of the story. In any event, it was Murphy, according to Tweed, and Murphy alone, who came to him in Albany to say the Bridge Company needed money from New York, which, as Murphy said, was a matter to be decided by the Common Council.
Tweed, at that time, was newly arrived at Albany, having recently become “a brother Senator” of Murphy’s, as Tweed put it, representing New York’s Fourth District. He had hired a suite of rooms on the second floor of the Delevan House, where amid potted plants and gleaming sideboards loaded with decanters of whiskey and Holland gin, and with the steady trill of his beloved canaries filling the air, Tweed transacted the people’s business. If one wished something done at the old stone Capitol up the street, one went first to the Delevan House, to the second floor. Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, Vanderbilt, they all made an appearance sooner or later, as did countless lesser “lobbyists,” one of whom later testified that the going price of a vote ranged anywhere from fifty to five hundred dollars. For Vanderbilt alone Tweed is said to have distributed $180,000.
If Tweed and Murphy did meet in private, as Tweed said they did—to reach an “understanding” about the bridge—it was doubtless there in Tweed’s chambers and it must have been a memorable confrontation. The two of them were like the opposing sides of the same political coin, the one a great, florid mountain done up in a loud suit, the other small, neat, dignified, but tough as a nut and doubtless detesting every minute of the transaction. There they must have sat, face to face, a pair of Tweed’s favorite enameled cuspidors, decorated with rosebuds, stationed conveniently close by.
According to Tweed he immediately reminded Murphy that he was no longer a member of the Common Council and therefore had nothing to do with its decisions. “But,” said Murphy, “can’t you influence them?” (Tweed, it seems, described this little exchange with a perfectly straight face.)
“I told him I hadn’t done any lobbying business there, but might if necessary,” Tweed continued.
“Shortly after he called again. In the meantime I had conversed with a gentleman occupying a position in the Board of Aldermen which entitled him to credence, and he told me the appropriation could be passed by paying for it.” Tweed had asked how much it would cost, but when he tried to recall the answer after so many years, he was unable to say whether it had been $55,000 or $65,000. (Considering the number of “understandings” Tweed took part in, his slip of memory is not surprising.) But a price was agreed on. “I informed Mr. Murphy of that fact. He told me to go ahead and make the negotiation. I did so, and the money was authorized to be appropriated or the bonds issued. I can’t tell the manner in which it was done, but that was the result.”
Tweed had no trouble recalling the gentleman of “credence” to whom the money was delivered, or who acted as the go-between.
“With whom did you have dealings?” he was asked during the subsequent investigations.
“Mr. Thomas Coman,” Tweed answered. (Alderman Coman was a Tammany hack of long standing.)
“You gave him the sum of money to be paid in bulk to the members of the Board of Aldermen?”
“Yes, sir.”
Just how the money was actually delivered to him, Tweed never said, but according to a story told later, one fine day all $55,000 or $65,000, whichever it was, came across from Brooklyn in a carpetbag, and there is reason to believe that the man carrying the bag was William C. Kingsley. For even if everything Tweed said was true, Murphy would never have involved himself directly in that part of the transaction; while Kingsley, on the other hand, was not unaccustomed to handling large sums in the line of duty; and it seems most unlikely that either of them would have entrusted such a mission to anybody else. The only thing of interest Kingsley seems to have put in writing on the subject back at the time was a comment to John A. Roebling in a letter dated April 16, 1868. There was among the New York aldermen, he told the engineer, “a strong combination made against the measure [the bridge] by a ring that want to be bought.”
But however Tweed got the money, he did not turn it over to Alderman Coman until after he, Murphy, and Kingsley had reached still one further “understanding.” Tweed was always very agreeable about passing money along to his political associates and generally he liked to take a little of it for himself, as he probably did in this case. But Tweed by now was no petty grafter. He too was a visionary, with his eye on the future, and bribing a few aldermen was simply not his line any longer, except as a necessary fi
rst step in a larger, grander scheme. Tweed was working up an arrangement whereby he and his Ring could get control of the entire bridge.
First of all Tweed wanted stock in the bridge and he wanted it at a bargain price, he wanted it as a gift actually. It was a courtesy he was accustomed to in such affairs. In his testimony he said Murphy told him there had been some difficulties selling bridge stock in Brooklyn, which was the case, and that additional private investors would be most welcome; whereupon Tweed had immediately suggested that he, Smith, and “Brains” Sweeny might like “to go in the direction of the bridge,” as Tweed phrased it.
“What inducement was held out to you to become a stockholder in the Brooklyn Bridge?” Tweed would be asked during his soul-baring testimony.
“As the law then read,” he answered, “five hundred thousand dollars subscribed by individual stockholders would control the entire bridge, the appropriations, expenditures of money and supplies, and everything.”
Tweed was very familiar with the legislation Murphy had drawn up. According to the law the entire corporation, though representing four and a half million dollars of the people’s money (from the two cities), was actually controlled by the private stockholders. So just as Tweed explained in his testimony, the man with ten shares of stock (a thousand dollars’ worth) had as much say as the City of New York or the City of Brooklyn, with all their millions tied up in the venture.
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