David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  The annual Americus Club Ball in early January had been a triumph. The club stood on a cliff overlooking Long Island Sound, at Greenwich, Connecticut, not far from Tweed’s own summer place. It was as sumptuous as any club in the country and the pinnacle of Tammany social life. On the night of the ball the great halls of the clubhouse were described as “a labyrinth of festoons, flowers, fountains, flags, and fir trees.” To the obvious delight of the club president, Tweed, a thousand canaries chirped in gilded cages hung everywhere about the hall, while on the stage before the dance floor there blazed an immense gaslight rendition of the Tammany banner, the familiar snarling tiger’s head of Tweed’s old Americus Six fire company. Vases of cut flowers lined the walls, and fronting the main entrance was a life-sized photograph of the great man himself, hand-colored with crayons. Some six thousand people were there, the papers said, making it “a gala pageant such as is rarely witnessed anywhere in the world.”

  But later in the month, on the night of the 24th, a sleighing accident had occurred north of Central Park, in which a man named James Watson had been badly injured. Twenty years before, Watson had been behind bars in the Ludlow Street Jail when the warden put him in charge of the prison records because of his exquisite penmanship. But Watson had advanced rapidly in the time since and was now County Auditor and trusted bookkeeper for the Tweed Ring. A week after the accident Watson was dead and so began the fall of the house of Tweed.

  The newspapers made little of Watson’s demise and no one thought much more about it. Such momentous events were taking place elsewhere in the world that public interest in the Ring and its doings had greatly subsided. The Franco-Prussian War, which had begun the summer before in Europe, was coming to a thunderous conclusion. On January 18, in a solemn ceremony at Versailles, the German Empire had been born. Incredibly, France was about to be overthrown. Popular support for the Germans was enormous in the United States and in New York especially. King William I of Germany was described by the papers as an affable, courteous old gentleman and a special favorite of children. Heroic Prussian infantry charged across the illustrated pages of Harper’s Weekly. On January 27, newsboys in the streets were hollering the surrender of Paris. But the bloodshed had continued for months afterward, as civil war broke out within the city, and the New York papers were filled with grisly accounts of hostages murdered by the Communards.

  Not until the last of May was Tweed back in the news to any great degree and even then the occasion was a happy one, the publicity just what Tweed wanted. One of Tweed’s daughters, Miss Mary Amelia Tweed, was being married to Mr. Arthur Ambrose Maginnis of New Orleans and the father of the bride and his friends put on quite a show.

  The wedding took place at seven o’clock on the evening of May 31, 1871, in Trinity Chapel, where, at the appointed hour, “a richly attired audience” watched Tweed, daughter on arm, come slowly, grandly down the aisle to the tune of Mendelssohn’s march. The bride wore white corded silk, “décolleté, with demi-sleeves, and immense court train.” There were orange blossoms in her hair and she carried a huge white bridal bouquet. But the diamonds were what everyone talked about later. “On the bride’s bosom flashed a brooch of immense diamonds,” said the Sun, “and long pendants, set with large solitaire diamonds, sparkled in her ears.” On the white satin shoes she wore there glittered tiny diamond buttons.

  The mother of the bride, attired in salmon-colored silk, also wore “splendid diamonds,” and it was noted that “Mr. Tweed himself wore black evening dress, and a magnificent diamond flashed on his bosom.”

  After the service Tweed put on a reception at his Fifth Avenue mansion, where a blue silk awning and a Brussels carpet had been run out to the curbstone and a huge crowd had gathered in the street. The house was ablaze with lights. A fountain played at one corner. Inside, the rooms were a mass of flowers. “Imagine all this,” one dazzled reporter wrote, “lighted up with the utmost brilliancy, and hundreds of ladies and gentlemen in all the gorgeousness of full dress and flashing with diamonds, listen to the delicious strains of the band and inhale in spirit the sweet perfume which filled the atmosphere, and some inadequate notion can be formed of the magnificence of the scene.”

  The dinner was catered by Delmonico’s, but the main attraction was a display of wedding presents in a big room upstairs. The gifts lined all four walls and were said to surpass anything seen since the marriage of the daughter of the Khedive of Egypt two years before. There were forty sets of sterling silver. One piece of jewelry alone was known to have cost $45,000. Peter “Brains” Sweeny gave diamond bracelets “of fabulous magnificence,” and Tweed’s two other fellow stockholders in the Bridge Company, Smith and Connolly, proved equally generous. The Herald came up with an estimated cash value of everything on display: “Seven hundred thousand dollars!”

  The wedding was the high-water mark of the Ring’s opulence and for Tweed it was a great blunder. The public, dazzled and delighted at first, began to ask questions afterward. How could a man who had spent his whole life working in moderately paid positions with the city live in such style? Where did the likes of Police Superintendent Kelso get money enough to buy a wedding gift that, as the papers reported, was the “exact duplicate” of the one presented by Jim Fisk? People said the wedding was proof positive of the corruption the Times had been making such a commotion over and papers other than the Times took up the cry.

  “What a testimony of the loyalty, the royalty, and the abounding East Indian resources of Tammany Hall,” wrote the Herald with bitter sarcasm two days after the wedding. “Was there any Democracy to compare with thy Democracy, in glory, power, and equal rights, under the sun? Never! And it is just the beginning of the good time coming. Don’t talk of Jeff Davis and his absurd Democracy; don’t mention the Democracy of the Paris Commune, as representing true Democratic principles; but come to the fountainhead of Democracy, the old Wigwam, and you will get it there—if you get within the lucky circle of the ‘magic’ Ring.”

  So with summer coming on, the public was ripe for disclosures and as chance would have it things had been happening inside the “lucky circle” that would reveal for the first time and in plain figures examples of such outrageous plunder that Tweed’s wedding expenditures would look rather modest by contrast. The pattern of events was like something from one of the popular melodramas of the time, for it was on the very day of the wedding that a man named Matthew J. O’Rourke quit his job as County Bookkeeper, taking with him a package of documents he had been quietly assembling.

  O’Rourke was a newspaperman who had been hired two months earlier when the County Bookkeeper of longstanding was moved into the late James Watson’s place as County Auditor. For some strange reason Tweed’s people had not bothered to take O’Rourke into their confidence. Moreover, O’Rourke had long had a claim against the city which the Ring had ignored. So he had very carefully copied down a number of choice samples from the ill-fated Watson’s old account books and these he delivered to the offices of The New York Times.

  Watson had been at the nerve center of the Ring. Indeed, if there was “magic” to the Ring, Watson was the unseen assistant who made it work, and as with most grand deceptions the secret was extremely simple.

  Watson merely required everyone who received a contract from the city to increase his bills before submitting them by 50 to 65 per cent. Watson paid the face amount of the bill, then the contractor returned the overcharge in cash, and Watson, like a dutiful paymaster, handed it out within the Ring. Among New York contractors it was commonly said, “You must do just as Jimmy tells you, and you will get your money.”

  Anyone who knew a little bookkeeping could look at Watson’s voucher records and see what was going on. O’Rourke, for example, judged from what he saw that the Ring had made off with $75 million since 1869.

  Watson had worked directly for Comptroller Connolly. Why Connolly had been so careless about whom he let see Watson’s books is hard to fathom. But the books were left so unguarded that t
he Times soon received a second bundle of figures from a man named William Copeland, who had copied down still further revelations. *

  Tweed found out that the Times had the material before any of it appeared in print and he reacted predictably. Figuring that George Jones, publisher of the Times, had his price, like any man, Tweed told Connolly to go see him. Connolly offered Jones five million dollars to kill the story. Jones declined, reportedly saying to Connolly, “I don’t think the devil will ever make a higher bid for me than that.” Connolly persisted. “Why with that sum you could go to Europe and live like a prince,” he said. “Yes,” answered Jones, “but I should know that I was a rascal.”

  To Tweed the time seemed also right for silencing Thomas Nast. A well-known banker was selected to call on Nast. The banker told Nast that his artistic talents were much admired by certain gentlemen, that these same gentlemen thought so highly of Nast that they would be willing to put up $100,000 to help him further develop his genius in Europe. Nast asked if he might get $500,000 to make the trip. “You can,” the banker is supposed to have answered most enthusiastically. “Well, I don’t think I’ll do it,” Nast said. “I made up my mind not long ago to put some of those fellows behind bars, and I am going to put them there.” Whereupon Nast was told to be careful lest he put himself in a coffin first. (Later, after the Times opened fire on him, Tweed said that were he a younger man he would have gone and killed Jones personally.)

  The Times began running transcripts from Watson’s account books in early July, starting with some armory frauds O’Rourke had copied down. (Ten old stables rented by the Ring for practically nothing had been sublet to the county as armories for $85,000 a year; the buildings had not been used at all, still the county had paid out nearly half a million dollars just for repairs on them.) Later in the month a special supplement was gotten out by the Times documenting the outlandish courthouse swindles, among other things. Two hundred thousand copies were sold out at once. Horace Greeley wrote in the Tribune that if the Times had its facts straight, then Mayor Oakey Hall and Connolly ought to be breaking rocks in a state prison. In the meantime, however, on July 12, the Ring had been dealt still another blow and, quite unintentionally, by some of its most ardent supporters.

  July 12 was the day for the annual Orangemen’s Parade, in honor of the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne. The event had caused a serious riot the year before, in Elm Park. Some two thousand Protestant Irish Orangemen gathered for a picnic had been set upon by about three times as many Irish Catholics armed with clubs and pistols. The police had arrived eventually, but not before several people had been killed on both sides and scores severely wounded. This year, fearing the same would happen again, Mayor Hall had forbidden the Orangemen to hold their parade. (Though himself a Protestant and of English ancestry, the Elegant Oakey was accustomed to reviewing St. Patrick’s Day parades dressed in a green cassimere suit with shamrock buttons, a bright-green cravat, and green kid gloves.) Hall’s decision provoked a storm of protest. The Ring was pandering to the Catholic rabble it was said. New York had come to a terrible pass if decent people were no longer able to parade peaceably without fear of mob violence.

  As a result Governor Hoffman, probably acting with Tweed’s consent, if not at his direction, came rushing down from Albany to issue a proclamation saying that anyone who wished to “assemble and march in peaceable procession” was at liberty to do so and would get full protection from the police and the military. It was an immensely popular move. Some 160 Orangemen decided to go ahead with their parade. Four regiments of National Guard were ordered to stand by, including the Ninth, in which Tweed’s bosom friend Fisk was a colonel. Catholic priests called for peace and understanding, while it was rumored that in Brooklyn trained gangs of Irish thugs were getting ready for action.

  The line of march was from the Gideon Lodge of Orangemen in Lamartine’s Hall, at Eighth Avenue and 29th Street, downtown to Cooper Union, at Eighth Street and the Bowery. Nothing much happened until the Orangemen reached 26th Street, where the police, marching on either side, had to force a path through a crowd blocking the way. At 25th Street the police were ordered to charge. By then stones and bricks were coming down from housetops. Near the corner of 24th Street a shot was fired. The police said later it came from an upstairs window, but others claimed a rifle went off accidentally among the Ninth Regiment, which had been drawn up at 25th Street, with the comic-looking Fisk prancing about on horseback.

  Whichever the case, the bullet took off part of the head of a private in Company K, of the Ninth. Instantly, without orders, the soldiers opened fire into the crowds. The fusillade was very brief. When it was over, two soldiers, one policeman, and a total of forty-six bystanders, including a number of women and children, were dead.

  (Fisk had dismounted in the midst of all this and disappeared into a saloon, where, it was later learned, he escaped out a back door, scaled several fences, got rid of his uniform in a house on 23rd Street, then fled as swiftly as possible to Long Branch, New Jersey, the fashionable seashore resort.)

  Everyone was furious at the Ring, including most of the Irish Catholics who had long been the very lifeblood of Tammany. Among the Protestants there was angry talk of Irish despotism. “Write on the tombstone of Wednesday’s victims: ‘Murdered by the criminal management of Mayor A. Oakey Hall’” one man commented. Others felt the riot was symptomatic of a larger tragedy. “Behind the folly and wickedness of the Irish,” said The Nation, “there lie American shortcoming, corruption, and indifference.”

  The problem was, however, that most of the people who could have organized any sort of movement against Tweed were out of town for the summer. The Times continued its assault day after day, but nothing happened. When Tweed was pressed to comment on what the Times was printing about him, he exclaimed defiantly, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

  As it was, nothing would be done about it until the end of the summer, when a mass meeting was called at Cooper Union on the night of Monday, September 4. Former Mayor William Havemeyer presided, thousands attended. In no time the rather refined and reserved-looking crowd was in a fine frenzy. “There is no power like the power of the people armed, aroused, and kindled with the enthusiasm of a righteous wrath!” said Judge James Emott from the speaker’s platform. No more could there be any denying the frauds of the Ring, he said, and in obvious answer to Tweed’s now famous retort, he asked, “Now, what are you going to do about these men?” “Hang them!” shouted voices from the audience.

  A so-called Committee of Seventy was organized that night, and included among its membership some of the most distinguished names in New York—Judge Emott, Robert Roosevelt, Andrew Green, who had been a pallbearer at John A. Roebling’s funeral, and Abram Hewitt. Also among them was Samuel J. Tilden, a wealthy friend and New York neighbor of Hewitt’s. Tilden was a rather cold, calculating corporation lawyer and a Tammany Democrat of great ambition, who had had little derogatory to say about Tweed prior to this, but who now took charge of the committee and shortly became known as the leader of the entire reform movement.

  The campaign to destroy the Ring was on in earnest. On September 12 someone broke into Comptroller Connolly’s offices and stole all the vouchers for the year 1870. The theft was a great mystery according to city officials. But in Harper’s Weekly Nast pictured Connolly, Sweeny, Tweed, and Hall looking highly ridiculous as they proclaimed their innocence and a few weeks later Nast had the same group cowering in the shadow of a gallows.

  Secretly, Tweed began transferring all his real estate holdings to his son. Hall tried to get Connolly to resign, while Connolly, terrified the others were about to throw him to the lions, consulted with Tilden, who told him to take a leave of absence and appoint the upright Andrew Green as Acting Comptroller. This was done. Armed guards were stationed in the Comptroller’s office to watch over what remained of the records. The reformers had achieved a beachhead.

  Tweed, however, was anything but placid throug
h all this. He had power aplenty still and he had no intention of giving up without a fight. The real test, he knew, the only one that mattered, would be in November, at the polls. His own term as State Senator would expire on December 31.

  First he had himself unanimously re-elected chairman of the General Committee of Tammany Hall. Then he went off to the Democratic state convention at Rochester, taking along a gang of New York thugs to remind any wavering delegates where their sympathies lay. Bribes were handed out liberally. Tilden and some other reform delegates put up a fight of sorts, but Tweed was in control the whole time and everyone knew it. He got the nominations he wanted, including his own.

  Back on the Lower East Side of New York the day after the convention ended, Tweed stood before some twenty thousand cheering followers, in Tweed Plaza, doffed a little Scotch cap, bowed low, and said the following:

  At home again amidst the haunts of my childhood and scenes where I had been always surrounded by friends, I feel I can safely place myself and my record, all I have performed as a public official plainly before your gaze. The manner in which I have been received tonight has sent a throb to my heart, but I would be unjust to myself and unjust to those who have seen fit to entrust me with office if at times like these, when to be a Democrat, when to hold a public office is to be aspersed and condemned without trial, traduced without stint, there was not felt to be engraven on my heart the proud satisfaction that as a public officer, I can go to the friends of my childhood, take them by the hand, take them in a friendly manner, and saying to them, “There is my record,” and finding that it meets with their approval.

  For most Americans the evils of the Tweed Ring were the natural outgrowth of the essential evil of big cities. New York being the biggest of big cities, it would quite naturally produce a Tweed. New York simply got what New York deserved was the feeling. The city was mostly foreign-born after all, better than half Roman Catholic. The golden age of representative government had lasted less than a hundred years learned men were saying gloomily. Jefferson had been right about what cities would do to American life. The future now belonged to the alien rabble and the likes of Tweed. “Perhaps the title ‘Boss of New York’ will grow into permanence and figure in history like that of the doge of Venice,” wrote George Templeton Strong in his diary. Even Walt Whitman of Brooklyn, who celebrated the “power, fullness, and motion” of New York in his Democratic Vistas published that year, wrote savagely of the “deep disease” of America, which he diagnosed as “hollowness at heart.