The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  Kennedy said that after he had set fire to the hotels assigned him, he had gone to Barnum’s museum to see what happened. A few minutes after he arrived at the showplace, fire bells began clanging throughout the city. Kennedy started down a stairway, intending to leave the museum. The thought occurred to him that “it might be fun” to start a panic there. He had one fire bomb left. He cracked it on the edge of a step as one cracks an egg. Instantly it flared up. Kennedy ran out of the burning building and mingled with throngs near the Astor House and the City Hotel. He overheard people muttering that the Rebels were trying to burn down the city.

  The six other Confederate agents had also proceeded with their nefarious work. One, named Ashbrook, had been assigned to destroy the Winter Garden theater. That evening Edwin Booth was playing the role of Julius Caesar to raise money for a statue of Shakespeare. The theater adjoined the La Farge House. After Ashbrook set fire to the hotel, he tossed a bottle of Greek fire into the theater. The audience screamed in terror, but some coolheaded men took charge of the situation and averted a tragedy.

  Headley and Kennedy returned to Broadway to gaze on their handiwork. As Headley later wrote, “there was the wildest excitement imaginable.” The two spies felt their skins tighten as New Yorkers shouted that they would hang the guilty Rebels or burn them at the stake. The agents also suffered pangs of disappointment when they discovered that every blaze had been quickly brought under control, except the fire at the St. Nicholas Hotel, which was badly damaged. Hotel employees had been efficient in dousing the flames, and volunteer firemen had performed heroically. Headley concluded that the New York chemist had purposely made a weak mixture of Greek fire after the Confederates had refused to abandon their plot.

  Instead of scurrying out of the city, the eight Rebel agents stayed the night. Headley parted from Kennedy and found Colonel Martin. About two o’clock in the morning Headley and Martin booked new quarters, where they slumbered until ten o’clock Saturday morning.

  Then they went for breakfast to a Broadway restaurant near Twelfth Street. The place was filled with excited people, reading the morning papers to find out what had happened the night before. Headley and Martin offhandedly ordered food and then bought copies of the papers. Front pages were devoted to news of the fire raid. The Herald said that the city “has undoubtedly had a most wonderful escape.” It was pointed out that although the enemy combustible had blazed up when exposed to air, the flames had failed to take hold on the surfaces of the targets. Headlines told of the “DISCOVERY OF A VAST REBEL CONSPIRACY.” Suspicious black bags had been found in various hotels. Several people already had been arrested. Newspapers printed all the fake names used by the Confederate agents when they had checked into their hotels. Authorities were said to have full knowledge of the plot They predicted that all the villains would be caught, for every avenue of escape was being guarded. All told, nineteen hotels, two theaters, Barnum’s museum, several vessels, and some stores, factories, and lumberyards had been set on fire.

  Headley stiffened a little in his restaurant chair when he read that the clerk at the United States Hotel had given police a description of his looks, manners, and habits and had said that the suspicious-looking man had left a black bag that was entirely empty. Ah, so the clerk had noticed! Headley’s flicker of anxiety had been justified, after all.

  Scanning the papers and noting how specific was the information possessed by officials, Headley and Martin realized that they had been under observation part of the time. Police had arrested a Mr. McDonald, who ran a store where they had sometimes met before registering in the hotels. Had McDonald confessed? Headley and Martin finished breakfast and sauntered out of the restaurant. Because hotelkeepers were offering a $20,000 reward for apprehension of the criminals, New Yorkers by the thousands would be on the lookout for them.

  That evening all eight Rebel agents boarded a northbound train and slipped out of town without detection. Eventually they reached Toronto and safety. From his Canadian sanctuary, Jacob Thompson had to report to Confederate Secretary of State Benjamin that his picked men had failed to burn down New York. Robert Kennedy, the man Headley had bumped into on the Bowery, tried to work his way south through Detroit but was captured. The Union’s double spy had done his work well, and federal authorities did indeed know the identities of the arsonists. Kennedy was brought to New York, tried before a military commission, and hanged at Fort LaFayette.

  The South was in desperate straits. With the opening of 1865 only two Confederate armies were left in the field. Below the Mason and Dixon fine, transportation had broken down, ports were blockaded or captured, Union troops held croplands, hunger spread, the Rebel army’s morale was shattered, and civilians demonstrated against the Confederate government. After Atlanta there was nothing left to oppose Sherman, whose men fanned north through South Carolina, inflicting even more damage than they had in Georgia. No single Southern defeat was due to lack of arms, but the will to win had drained from Rebel hearts. Lee evacuated Richmond, and when the news reached New York, diarist G. T. Strong wrote: “Never before did I hear cheering that came straight from the heart. . . . I walked about on the outskirts of the crowd, shaking hands with everybody, congratulating and being congratulated by scores of men I hardly even knew by sight. Men embraced and hugged each other, kissed each other, retreated into doorways to dry their tears and came out again to flourish their hats and hurrah.”

  This was on April 3. Three days later, just as twilight softened the city, a young Confederate officer pulled himself out of the Lower Bay, climbed up a seawall, stepped over a fence, and stood on the Battery. Water dripped from his gray tunic with its yellow collar and cuffs; water sloshed from his faded yellow-striped blue trousers. He was Captain William R. Webb of the Second North Carolina Cavalry. Webb was one of 1,500 Rebel prisoners held in Castle Williams on Governors Island. He had escaped, slid into the water, and swum 3,200 feet to the southern tip of Manhattan. A civilian, seeing the dripping man, asked how he had happened to fall into the bay. “I swam across,” Webb replied. “I escaped from the prison stockade over there.” He pointed. “I am Captain Webb of the Confederate army.” The civilian laughed and went about his business. So did other New Yorkers who saw the strange figure, although Webb always identified himself. For three days the Rebel captain wandered about the city. No one bothered to report him to the authorities. Who cared? The war was won.

  At 3:45 in the afternoon of Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee of the Confederacy surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant of the Union in the courthouse of Appomattox Village, 95 miles west of Richmond, Virginia. In the evening of Good Friday, April 14, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln as the President sat in Ford’s Theatre, in Washington, D.C. Lincoln died at 7:22 the following morning. When the news reached New York City, men and women sobbed. Strangely, during the week after Lincoln’s death the number of arrests in New York for drunkenness and disorder was lower than in any week for many years. On April 24, Lincoln’s body lay in state in City Hall on the way to its final resting place in Springfield, Illinois. Even the poorest of New York’s poor spent 25 cents for a tiny flag with a scrap of crepe attached.

  With the war won and Lincoln dead, the city took stock of itself. It had supplied the Union army with 15,000 soldiers and contributed $400,000,000 to the war effort. The North came out of the conflict richer than it had entered it, and business in New York had been greatly stimulated. However, the population had dropped from 813,669 to fewer than 727,000.

  Now, front and center, there strolled a fat man who licked his chops. They called him Boss Tweed.

  Chapter 26

  THE TWEED SCANDALS

  WILLIAM MARCY TWEED was a huge man. He stood 5 feet 11 inches tall, and his weight varied from 280 to 320 pounds. Like some other fat men, he was light on his feet, and the ladies said that he waltzed divinely. His head was big and rather pointed. He had coarse features, a prominent nose, a ruddy complexion, a brown beard, and bright bl
ue eyes, which twinkled when he was amused. When angered, he could stare down almost anyone—even a rowdy who held a gun against his potbelly.

  Tweed laughed easily. A man of enormous appetite, he consumed gargantuan meals. Endowed with almost limitless energy, he worked most of the time. He was fond of power and money and canaries and flowers and women. Happily married and proud of his wife, Tweed also was devoted to his eight children. Nonetheless, he had two mistresses. One was a tiny blonde who didn’t reach to his shoulder. Tweed lavished $1,800,000 on his kept women, but this meant nothing to a politician who cheated the city out of $5,500,000 in a single morning. Fond of massive jewelry, he wore a huge diamond in the front of his shirt.

  Tweed was rough in manners and humor, spouting profanity in basso profundo. His speech was so thick that it was sometimes difficult to understand him. He drank heavily until a doctor said that he was endangering his health. Tweed never smoked and often moralized about the evils of nicotine. Although he quit school at the age of fourteen, Tweed bent college graduates to his iron will. He liked to breed dogs and confusion. He was the first city politician in the United States to be called the Boss. He enslaved New York City and the state of New York, and he planned to put America into one of his huge pockets.

  Tweed became the third largest property owner in the city, lived in baronial splendor in a Fifth Avenue mansion, and kept a country house, whose mahogany stables were trimmed in silver. Devoid of religious faith, he believed in just two things—himself and power. He owned a yacht and some people’s souls. He radiated animal magnetism, was a genius at making friends, and remained loyal to them regardless of what they did. He thoroughly understood the mass mind. Tweed looked a little like Falstaff and acted a lot like Captain Kidd, and if he had not been such a monster, he might have been a great man. The complete cynic, he said:

  The fact is that New York politics were always dishonest—long before my time. There never was a time when you couldn’t buy the board of aldermen. A politician coming forward takes things as they are. This population is too hopelessly split up into races and factions to govern it under universal suffrage, except by the bribery of patronage or corruption. . . . I don’t think there is ever a fair or honest election in the city of New York.

  Unhappily, there was some truth in this. It was by studying the methods of Fernando Wood that Tweed learned to make citizens of aliens so they could vote for him and his henchmen. As historian James Bryce once wrote: “Plunder of the city treasury, especially in the form of jobbing contracts, was no new thing in New York, but it had never before reached such colossal dimensions.”

  There was nothing in Tweed’s heritage or the circumstances of his birth that gave a clue to his future. One of his ancestors emigrated here from Scotland, which has a river called Tweed. Three generations of Tweeds had lived in New York City before he was born on April 3, 1823, at 24 Cherry Street. His father, Richard Tweed, made chairs. William was the youngest in a family of three boys and two girls.

  Bill Tweed ran with the Cherry Hill gang and soon took command of it. The boys liked to steal pigs’ tails from butchershops and roast them over fires in hidden places. Bill, who was large for his age, could cut off a pig’s tail with one slash of a knife. He worked in his father’s chair factory, became a salesman for a saddle and harness shop, learned bookkeeping, juggled figures for a tobacco firm, did some selling for a brush concern, wound up a junior partner, saved money, and went into the chair business with his father and a brother.

  The young men of his day joined volunteer fire companies because firemen wore gaudy uniforms, dashed about the city, and played a big role in politics. Tweed helped organize Americus Fire Engine Company No. 6, known as the Big Six. Its symbol was a tiger—a fact which was to plague Tweed in years to come. Totally without racial or religious prejudice, Tweed befriended Irishmen, Germans, anyone and everyone. In 1850 he made his first bid for public office. He ran for assistant alderman—but lost. Instead of sulking, he did all he could to dilute the strength of the Know-Nothing movement, thus winning more friends among immigrants.

  The next year Tweed aimed higher and was elected an alderman. At the time the city council consisted of twenty aldermen and twenty assistant aldermen, nearly all of them so venal that they were openly called the Forty Thieves. Neither position paid a salary, but council members were powerful because they appointed police in their respective wards, granted licenses to saloons, and awarded franchises. It was a grafter’s dreamboat, and away Tweed sailed. For example, only a few weeks after he had become an alderman, Tweed acted for the city in buying land for a new potter’s field. Available were 69 acres on Wards Island worth only about $30,000. Tweed paid $103,450 of the city’s money for the property and then split the difference among his cronies and himself.

  Before the end of his two-year term as alderman, Tweed was elected to Congress. A poor public speaker, ignorant of national interests, and bored with Washington, he swilled liquor and chased women instead of attending to business. Coming back to his hometown, he again ran for alderman, but being out of touch with local politics, he was beaten by a Know-Nothing candidate. The defeat endeared him all the more to his foreign-born friends. In 1855 Tweed was elected to the city board of education, whose grafting members sold textbooks and peddled appointments to teachers. To cite just one instance, a crippled young schoolmarm had to slip $75 to the board for her job, which paid only $300 a year. With Tweed’s election to the county board of supervisors in 1857, he really was off and running.

  Legally, the city was the creature of the state. Actually, the city enjoyed more independence than the state had intended. This was partly because state, county, and city governments overlapped and clashed and wallowed in such chaos that local politicians seized control. In 1857 the Republican-dominated state legislature tried to break the Democrats’ grip on the city’s political machinery. It took local finances out of the hands of the city council and gave them to a reorganized and strengthened county board of supervisors. Under this new setup six Republicans and six Democrats had to be elected to the board. Upstate Republicans felt that the presence of half a dozen Republicans on the board would guarantee good government. It didn’t.

  Besides controlling the city’s purse strings, the county board of supervisors had charge of public improvements and the appointment of election inspectors. The latter power was of vital significance. Inspectors were influential because on election day they watched the polls, and if they could be corrupted, elections could be thrown. Tweed, who always recognized the weak links in a chain, took instant action. The day the inspectors were to be named, one of the six Republican board members did not attend the meeting of the supervisors. Tweed had paid him $2,500 to stay away. Republicans, after all, could be as venal as Democrats. From that day, Tweed dominated the board of supervisors. Now it consisted of six Democrats against five Republicans, and soon other Republican members sold out to Tweed. Firmly in charge of the financial arm of government, Tweed used this power to extend his authority over other branches of the city administration.

  Such was the origin of the first Tweed Ring. A writer of the era defined a Tweed Ring as “a hard band in which there is gold all round and without end.” Every contractor, artisan, and merchant wanting to do business with the city had to pay Tweed and his henchmen 15 percent of their total bill before the board of supervisors would grant them a contract. Years later, when confessing his crimes, Tweed said, “Pretty nearly every person who had business with the board of supervisors, or furnished the county with supplies, had a friend on the board of supervisors, and generally with some one member of the Ring. And through that one member they were talked to, and the result was that their bills were sent in and passed, and the percentages were paid on the bills. . . .”

  When an overt fix was considered by the board, Tweed induced the two or three Republicans who declined to vote with him to refrain from voting at all. Then, if an indignant citizen howled about the haul, Tweed could cluck, “But, s
ir, there was only one vote cast against the measure!” Tweed served on the board thirteen years and was elected president four times. Whether president or not, he called the shots at board meetings, shifting from menacing bluster to silky smiles and noisily moving to suspend the rules or to adjourn, as the tactics of the day dictated.

  While gathering the board into his smothering bear hug, Tweed also captured Tammany Hall. At first he was influential only in his own Seventh Ward. But his magnetism, quick-wittedness, and energy won the loyalty of some men ruling other wards. This made him a leader. Then he brought the other leaders under his power. This made him the boss.

  Tammany Hall was a general term for two intertwining but separate entities maintained by the Democratic party in New York City. One body was the Tammany Society. This was a social organization, which consisted of clubs scattered throughout the city and catered to the needs of citizens at the grass-roots level. The other body was the New York County Democratic committee. This was a political organization, which exercised the real power. In theory, its governing body was a central committee, but this had so many members that it was cumbersome. In practice, the affairs of the central committee were directed by a small executive committee. Prominent in the executive committee were leaders of the Tammany Society, and this is how the two entities blended. Tweed took over Tammany Hall by being elected grand sachem of the Tammany Society and by gaining control of a majority of the executive committee of the New York County Democratic committee. Now he rode herd on the city’s Democratic party and its primaries and its patronage.