The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  Because New York was predominantly Democratic, whoever controlled the Democratic party controlled the city. In 1868 there was only one Republican ward among the twenty-two wards of the city; therefore, whoever won the Democratic nomination for a given office was sure to be elected. And Boss Tweed dictated nominations. Then, come election day, Tweed’s ward leaders hired bullies to intimidate Republican voters, drifters and crooks were bribed to vote several times each, Tweed judges naturalized thousands of aliens with the understanding they would vote Democratic, and Tweed’s candidates won. Most of the voters were Irish or German and blindly followed Tweed because he had led the local fight against the Know-Nothings.

  The power pattern would not have been effective if decent people had fought it from the start. But, apathetic about politics and zealous about making money, they abdicated their civic responsibilities. The Civil War had stimulated Northern industry. Manufacturing became more important than merchandising. As a result, merchant capitalism gave way to industrial capitalism. The war ushered in a wave of prosperity, and New Yorkers forgot public spirit in greed for profits. They speculated wildly in stocks, hoping to become rich overnight. In 1866 a New York weekly, called the Round Table, said, “A strange craziness is abroad in the land. Some mysterious spirit of evil has led our people into the blindest, wildest infatuation . . . wild and foolish speculation. . . . At least half the people are living beyond their means.”

  According to a member of the Union League: “This decline in the public tone was not confined to the vulgar and ignorant. It affected all ranks and professions, perhaps most marked where it would naturally be least looked for and most abhorrent—in the clerical calling. . . .” Soon Henry Ward Beecher, perhaps the best-known minister in the land, was to be accused of adultery, and although the jury failed to reach an agreement, many people felt that he had been guilty of impropriety. The Union League member continued: “No doubt it (the decline in the public tone) affected injuriously many of the leaders of all parties and every school of politics; the senate, the bench, the bar, and the pulpit, as well as the ranks of trade and the directors of the banks, insurance companies, savings institutions, and even the boards of education.”

  G. T. Strong sadly noted in his diary: “The city government is rotten to the core.”

  Political corruption works two ways: Someone gives, and someone takes. Money-minded men were willing to pay bribes to power-minded Boss Tweed. People were so busy piling up wealth that they didn’t understand what was happening to the city until it was too late. For his part, Tweed gave generously to the poor, who jolly well knew that he was stealing from the rich but considered him a sort of Robin Hood. They thanked the Boss by maintaining him in power. As James Bryce observed: “The government of the rich by the manipulation of the votes of the poor is a new phenomenon in the world.” Just before Christmas one year, so the story goes, Police Justice Edward J. Shandley asked Boss Tweed for a donation for relief of the poor in the Seventh Ward. Tweed promptly wrote out a check for $5,000. When Shandley cried jestingly, “Oh, Boss, put another naught to it!” Tweed grinned, picked up his pen again, said, “Well, here goes!” and raised the $5,000 check to $50,000.

  By January 1, 1869, Boss Tweed was lording it over both the city and the state. On that date his henchman, John T. Hoffman, was sworn in as governor. After he had been admitted to the bar at the age of twenty-one, Hoffman had worked his way up through New York City’s Democratic ranks. Elected city recorder in 1860, he had been the youngest man ever to hold this position. Although he had not been completely enslaved by Tweed and opposed him on one notable occasion, Hoffman had become mayor of New York City on January 1, 1866, with Tweed’s help. Frauds and thefts had flourished during his two-year term in this office, but Hoffman’s name could not be connected with them. In 1868 Tweed had seen to it that Hoffman had been elected governor. Hoffman was tall, slender, and stately and had black eyes. A Sun reporter said that his black mustache made him look like “a Spanish grandee or a first-class German metaphysician.”

  The same January 1, 1869, Abraham Oakey Hall took office as mayor of New York City. After he had been graduated from New York University, he had entered Harvard Law School but left it to go to New Orleans with his family. There he had become a newspaper reporter. He had abandoned this career, entered a New Orleans law office, and then come back to settle in New York City. In 1854 he had shown up in Albany as lobbyist for the Republican party. Hall detested Abraham Lincoln, and after the rail-splitter became President, Hall turned Democrat. Wholly an opportunist and once a fervent Know-Nothing, he switched sides again and became an apologist for the Catholic Church. He wooed local Germans and Irish so cloyingly that he became known as Von O’Hall. His more popular nickname, though, was Elegant Oakey, for he dressed like a dandy. Hall’s debonair appearance amused Tweed. However, the Boss had a sober appreciation of this brilliant eccentric who knew the law so well. Tweed made him mayor. Hoffman was legal and legislative adviser to the Tweed Ring. A small man with a heavy dark mustache and a scrubby black beard, he wore pince-nez on a black string.

  Peter Barr Sweeny was city chamberlain. Next to Tweed, Sweeny was the most important member of the Tweed Ring. He was known as Brains or Bismarck. Sweeny had been born on Park Row, where his father had kept a saloon. He had been graduated from Columbia College, become an astute lawyer, been elected to the state senate, lobbied there for stagecoach companies, and been chosen district attorney here; but he had broken down during the trial of his first case and resigned in humiliation. A quiet reserved man, he was most effective in private offices and in political caucuses held behind closed doors. Well read, Sweeny knew about the fortunes amassed in the rebuilding of Paris under the direction of Baron Haussmann and understood how public improvements may be used for private profit. Despite his erudition and subdued nature, Sweeny became involved with a woman who worked in a Turkish bath and was said to have had a child by her. He was the Tweed Ring’s silent adviser, and his principal job was to control the judiciary. Sweeny was of medium height and slight of build, with a low forehead, deep-set eyes, and black bristly hair and mustache.

  Richard B. Connolly was city comptroller. He acted as financial adviser to the Tweed Ring. Born in Ireland, he had come to America as a young man, worked in Philadelphia as an auctioneer’s clerk, and then moved to New York City. Here he had been appointed to the customhouse, switched to the job of discount clerk in the Bank of North America, and gained local political experience in Tweed’s Seventh Ward. Connolly had served two terms as county clerk, twice been elected to the state senate, become general manager of the Central National bank, and had risen in Tammany Hall. A Uriah Heep in mannerisms, cringing in the presence of Boss Tweed, and tyrannical to his own underlings, Richard Connolly merited the nickname of Slippery Dick. His broad face was clean-shaven, and he brushed his hair forward from his ears.

  Three judges rounded out the inner circle of the Tweed Ring:

  George G. Barnard was presiding justice of the state supreme court. For a while he posed as a reformer, but soon everyone understood that he was Tweed’s vassal. Barnard was handsome of face and figure, overbearing, and insolent.

  Albert Cardozo was a justice of the state supreme court. The only Jewish member of the Tweed Ring and of Portuguese extraction, Cardozo was learned and industrious but was such a scoundrel that he sold justice as a fishwife sells flounders. His son, Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, later redeemed the family name by serving honorably and wisely as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

  John H. McCunn was a judge of the superior court. He had tried to nullify the federal Draft Act during the Draft Riots, and this had brought him to Tweed’s attention. When Tweed barked, McCunn jumped through hoops.

  Tweed himself was the Boss, the leader of Tammany Hall, the president of the county board of supervisors, the street commissioner, and a state senator. Through Hoffman, Hall, Sweeny, Connolly, Barnard, Cardozo, McCunn, and the 12,000 other persons who rece
ived patronage from him, he controlled the entire machinery of the city and state governments—executive, legislative, and judicial—with the sole exception of the court of appeals. He named the men he wanted elected to office—and they were elected. He spelled out the laws he wanted enacted—and they were enacted. Should an innocent dare to bring charges against Tweed or any of his underlings, the Boss lifted a finger, and one of his judges ruled in his favor. He controlled the city police, mostly Irish and Democrats, even paying the police commissioner out of his own pocket. He bought the silence of most newspapers by subsidizing them with unnecessary city advertising and by bribing editors and reporters. He emasculated the New York County Republican committee by buying off its members. He smothered reform movements in money. And by 1869 he was stealing more than $1,000,000 a month from the city treasury.

  This still wasn’t enough to satisfy him. Bloated with success and brazenly confident, Boss Tweed sometimes shut his bright-blue eyes and dreamed of taking over the United States of America. How? He planned to make John T. Hoffman the nation’s President, raise A. Oakey Hall to the governorship of New York State, and himself become a U.S. Senator in order to work his black magic in the upper chamber of the Congress. Connolly would stay home and watch the store as city comptroller. Before he could launch this grandiose scheme, there was one thing Tweed had to do.

  He wanted a new city charter. Powerful though he was, he had to tack indirectly toward his goals under the current charter. By streamlining legal technicalities, he would be able to work smoother and faster. For one thing, Tweed hated to ask the state legislature to pass city tax bills. He practically owned the legislature, true, but this cost him a lot of money in bribes. The state’s lawmakers were paid only $300 a year, so they were always eager to milk money from anyone wanting legislation. They would introduce a bill striking at a large corporation—including a city, such as New York—and then wait to be paid to withdraw the obnoxious measure. No railroad ever got a favor without bribes. Bills were attacked and defended in terms of who paid how much to whom. These freebooters worked generally as individuals until Tweed became a state senator. Then he whipped them into a disciplined band, which rode roughshod over the few honest legislators. Handing out greenbacks like cabbage leaves, Boss Tweed was the man to whom every grasping lawmaker looked before voting on any bill.

  Tweed paid about $1,000,000 in bribes to get his new city charter passed at Albany, but pass it did. On the afternoon of April 5, 1870, only two of the thirty-two members of the state senate voted against it. Governor Hoffman immediately signed the bill and then handed the pen to a beaming Tweed. That night the Boss held court, dispensing free champagne to all comers. He had explained to the businessmen of New York City that he sought municipal autonomy for their hometown. Peter Cooper and others, who should have known better, believed him. When Tweed returned from the state capital, he was greeted here like a conquering hero.

  What did this Tweed charter do? Seemingly it gave control of the city back to the city at the expense of the state, which pleased the advocates of home rule. It increased the power of the mayor by granting him the right to appoint department heads and all other important city officers without anyone’s approval. Before this, the governor had made many of these appointments. What’s more, the mayor could now appoint his favorites for terms of four to eight years, thus assuring continuity of power regardless of reformers. Under the charter it was impossible to discharge department heads for incompetency or dishonesty, except by unanimous consent of the six judges of the court of common pleas. To Tweed, who had bribed a Republican to stay away from a meeting of the board of supervisors, this provision meant nothing; in a crisis one of the six judges would fail to appear. The charter weakened the city council by forbidding it to regulate the affairs of any city department. It wrested control of Central Park from the original commissioners. It ended state supervision of city police.

  Worst of all, perhaps, the charter created a board of audit to consist of the mayor (Hall), the comptroller (Connolly), and the commissioner of public works (Tweed, whom Mayor Hall quickly appointed to this new post). According to M. R. Werner in his book Tammany Hall: “The Tweed charter was carte blanche for members of the Ring to enter the city treasury with shovels and load their wagons with gold.” Later, when Tweed was confessing, he explained how this three-man board of audit had enriched the ring: “—The understanding was that the parties to whom we advanced money, and whom we had confidence in, should, through our influence, advance bills for work purporting to be done for the county or the city—more particularly for the county—and they should receive only fifty percent of the amount of their bills.”

  In addition to graft and corruption, New Yorkers were plagued with a transportation problem. After the Civil War, traffic became a headache. A state senate committee said that “the transit of freight and passenger trains by ordinary locomotives on the surface of the street is an evil which has already endured too long. . . .” The New York Herald grumbled that “modern martyrdom may be succinctly defined as riding in a New York omnibus.”

  Between 1831 and 1858, 8 city railroads had been incorporated. In 1860, 6 of them remained in operation. Additionally, 16 omnibus companies controlled 544 licensed stages over fixed routes to all parts of the city below Fiftieth Street, as well as to neighboring villages. By 1864 there were only 12 such lines and 61,000,000 passengers a year. By 1865 the traffic snarl had become so great that it was almost impossible to get around town. By 1866 a pedestrian bridge had been built across Broadway at Fulton Street. In 1867 the Evening Post complained that workers had to spend more than four hours a day getting to and from their jobs. Mark Twain shook his head over the “torrent of traffic” and accused city officials of winking at the overloading of streetcars. Boss Tweed had both the streetcar and the stage companies in his pocket. All public vehicles were filthy and smelly, lighted at night by one faint kerosene lamp and warmed in winter only by straw strewed on the floor.

  Most stores and offices still lay within the downtown area, and employees had to live fairly close to their places of business in order to get to work. Lacking good transportation, they couldn’t spread out. Because Manhattan was long and narrow and because it lacked bridges to Brooklyn and New Jersey, the population could expand in only one direction—north.

  The world’s first underground railroad system opened in London in 1863. Then a Michigan railroad man, Hugh B. Willson, raised $5,000,000 to dig a subway in New York under Broadway. Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was slowly acquiring control of the New York Central, snorted that he’d be “underground a damned sight sooner than this thing!” Boss Tweed was against Willson’s subway, too, because it would compete with transit lines he already controlled. Tweed gave the word to Reuben E. Fenton, Hoffman’s predecessor as governor, and Fenton promptly vetoed a bill calling for construction of Willson’s underground railroad. Thus did Tweed delay New York’s subway system by nearly half a century. The New York Times criticized Fenton, saying: “There is not enough room on the surface of the city to accommodate the traffic which its business requires.”

  Now the only solution to the traffic problem was to build above the ground—in the air. In 1867 the state legislature authorized construction of an experimental line of elevated railway track stretching the half mile between the Battery and Dey Street along Greenwich Street. It had been suggested by a bearded inventor, named Charles T. Harvey. Tweed laughed, people jeered, and almost nobody thought that the train in the sky would work. On July 1, 1868, a crowd gathered to watch as the frock-coated stovepipe-hatted Harvey took his seat in a dinky car looking a little like a primitive automobile, except for the fact that it perched thirty feet above Greenwich Street. This was not a self-propelled locomotive. Its boiler turned a wheel that wound in a cable and moved the car. To everyone’s astonishment, the vehicle picked up speed of five miles an hour and hit a peak of ten. The trial run of the world’s first elevated had proved a success.

  Tweed glowere
d. Harvey nonetheless got enough financial credit to extend his Ninth Avenue elevated line north toward the Hudson River railroad terminal, at Thirtieth Street near the Hudson River. In 1869 Vanderbilt merged the Hudson line with his New York Central and also broke ground for the first Grand Central terminal, on Forty-second Street at Fourth Avenue. Tweed felt that if Harvey’s elevated ever reached the new depot, it was sure to succeed, so he took action. As a state senator, he pushed through the legislature a bill branding the elevated as a public nuisance and permitting him, as city commissioner of public works, to tear it down within ninety days. However, for the first and only time during the 1870 session of the legislature, the lawmakers crossed Tweed by voting down his bill. Tweed, who had set back New York’s subways, was not permitted to delay its elevateds.

  Meanwhile, a strange subway was secretly being bored through the ground under Manhattan. The man behind this mystery was a genius, named Alfred Ely Beach. An inventor, he had designed a typewriter, which he jokingly called a literary piano. A publisher, he was co-owner of the New York Sun and had founded a score of other periodicals. For a while he had an office overlooking City Hall and a home at 9 West Twentieth Street, and traffic was so dense that it took him almost an hour to get from one place to the other.