During the fall elections of 1853, Cooper's league endorsed reform candidates, mostly Whigs, who rode a wave of nativism into office, and drove out the "Forty Thieves" en masse from the Common Council. Tweed had won a seat in Congress while still an alderman, so his career continued. The new aldermen were less corrupt, but they taxed and spent at a rate even higher than their predecessors—especially for the police department and for education— and the City Reform League, in dismay, severed its ties with them. The reform alliance fragmented further in 1854 when longtime Democrats, including Cooper, accepted Tammany's candidate for mayor, Fernando Wood, who promised to be a strong leader and an agent of change: a Napoleon for New York.12
• • •
"No man ever went into higher office under a deeper cloud of ignominy" than Fernando Wood, declared Horace Greeley's Tribune in 1854 when one of the Tammany demagogues he so detested slithered into the mayoralty of New York City. Fernando Wood's opponents had dredged up compelling testimony about dishonesty in his private finances and business dealings, as well as a secret political alliance with the nativists. Nonetheless, Wood's immigrant base of support remained loyal, preferring him to the overtly anti-immigrant candidates. Wood also garnered votes by pitting the working class against the rich, the "producers" against the "nonproducers." This Jacksonian antimonopoly language was borrowed from the Locofocos, a radical Democratic faction Wood helped lead in 1835 in the wake of the Bank War.13*
Indeed, for the aristocratic merchants and landowners who had traditionally dominated New York politics, Wood's rise represented a dangerous new phenomenon made possible by the Jacksonian era of universal white male suffrage: the emergence of demagogic, professional politicians, completely lacking in social pedigree, who pandered to the newly enfranchised masses.14
The owner of a waterfront grocery-groggery in the 1830s, Fernando Wood rose rapidly within Tammany, and the votes of Irish longshoremen landed him a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1840 at the age of twenty-eight.15Wood became part of Senator John Calhoun's inner circle. Opposing tariffs while defending states' rights and slavery, Wood professed to be a champion of the northern worker, protecting him from labor competition and thus from exploitation by employers. Wood also denounced the "slavery and oppression" of the Irish by the British.16
Wood lost his House seat in 1842 and resumed life in New York as a shipping merchant on the East River waterfront, trading mostly with the southern states. Calhoun, then secretary of state, gave Wood a federal job in New York with minimal duties that supplemented his income and restored some of his political prestige, while cementing his allegiance to the South Carolinian as well as to southern interests. Wood had generally prospered in the 1840s, remarrying after a bitter divorce and using some of his second wife's money to enter the booming Manhattan real estate market. As a politician-turned-speculator with intimate knowledge of the city's neighborhoods and properties, Wood was well positioned, and he made a fortune.17
Once in office as mayor in 1855, Wood saw his popularity soar as he struggled to turn the mayoralty into a bastion for effective, nonpartisan "one-man rule," and bombarded the fiefdoms of the city bureaucracy with imaginative, practical proposals for improving services, sanitation, infrastructure, and parks to meet the needs of the growing city. Dumbfounding his critics, Wood gained a nationwide reputation as the "Model Mayor."18
Wood used his momentum to become the first mayor ever to gain control of Tammany Hall, and as New York's apparent Democratic strongman, he backed proslavery candidate James Buchanan for president in 1856, against the Republican candidate, John C. Fremont. A Democratic paper in Ohio warned voters that Republicans would "turn loose . . . millions of Negroes, to elbow you in the workshops, and compete with you in the fields of honest labor." Democrats in Pittsburgh declared that Fremont's party aimed "to elevate the African race in this country to complete equality of political and economic condition with the white man."19
The polarization of the country—announced by the House vote on the Wilmot Proviso ten years earlier—had reached a dangerous intensity. Marching by torchlight, Republicans shouted their slogan, "Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Men, Fremont!" Indiana Democrats paraded young girls with banners pleading, "Fathers, save us from nigger husbands!"20 Buchanan won, and Wood was reelected to a second two-year term as mayor, supported by merchants who had ties to the South.21
With Louis Napoleon's assumption of power in France as its subtext, a campaign biography of Wood had stressed the need for more mayoral power over the city's budget and bureaucratic departments.
Now, how to govern so huge, so densely packed a mass; how to unite or at least keep harmonious, so many, so powerful discordant elements; how to reconcile their antipathies, subdue their jealousies; how to manage the newly-landed hordes of poor; how to please all, or at least keep all quiet—these present a complicated problem, the solution of which requires a wise man . . . A demand for more power would probably be unpopular. Therefore it is a brave thing to demand it, and patiently set to work to prove that it is needed. The man who demands it is brave; the man who obtains it is capable, and if capable, a fit ruler for you and for me.22
Fernando Wood
If the campaign biography lacked subtlety, so did Wood's use of the Municipal Police to ensure his reelection. During his first term, Wood had shown his reform zeal by strengthening the force and loudly putting criminals on notice that the city's new chief executive stood for law and order; Wood delighted even harsh critics like Horace Greeley by running telegraph wires from every precinct house to the police Central Office, the headquarters on Mulberry Street. With the new "magical" wires, Greeley's Tribune envisioned the police swiftly massing officers where they were needed most.23
Less visibly, however, Wood had turned the police department into a patronage mill, filling its ranks with immigrant supporters, then systematically levying contributions from the officers to fund his reelection. During the campaign, patrolmen were reassigned or given time off so the gangs of thugs on Wood's payroll could start riots at his opponents' rallies, attacking their speakers with rocks and bricks. At the polls, the mayor's toughs harassed voters, stuffed ballot boxes, and stole returns. While Wood's nativist rivals were also guilty of such violence and traditional Tammany-style intimidation and fraud, the autocratic mayor knew no bounds. Without any legal authority, Wood suspended the Board of Police Commissioners on which he sat, to silence his outraged colleagues.24
"Fernandy Wood!" a crowd of the mayor's supporters chanted on the steps of City Hall. "Down with the Black Republicans!" Wood's mob, sneered Republican attorney George Templeton Strong, was a "miscellaneous assortment of suckers, soap locks, Irishmen, and plug uglies officiating in a guerilla capacity." Also protecting Mayor Wood on June 16, 1857, was a cordon of Municipal policemen surrounding the building.25
While the nascent Republican party that Horace Greeley helped create had lost the 1856 presidential election, it won several important northern states and alarmed southern conservatives; in New York, Republicans won the governor's office and control of the state legislature, setting the stage for a showdown with Mayor Wood.
A few months into Wood's second term, in mid-April 1857, the state legislature had passed the blatantly partisan Metropolitan Police Act, replacing New York City's Municipal Police with the "Metropolitans," run by a five-member, state-appointed commission. The metropolitan area was defined as New York, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Westchester County, and the commission had free rein not only over the police but over the enforcement of election laws, health codes, and Sabbath closings. The two seats on the commission occupied by Mayor Wood and his Brooklyn counterpart were merely honorific, and the three Republican commissioners held all the power.26
Coupled with the Liquor Excise Law, which created stringent regulations and costly liquor licenses, the Sunday closings attacked the foundations of Democratic power in the city's wards: The saloons and grocery-groggeries were the local nerve centers of the p
olitical machine and sources of revenue from liquor industry lobbyists. The new laws, passed by a coalition of Republicans, nativists, and temperance advocates, also infuriated German and Irish Catholic laborers by policing their leisure time.27
Wood had challenged the police bill in court as unconstitutional and in the interim had stubbornly refused to disband his Municipals. He fanned the flames of Democratic resentment toward centralized state authority when he talked of a "subjugated city" in a "feeble state of vassalage" and used Jacksonian rhetoric about "the sovereign people."28Meanwhile, New Yorkers had endured a crime spree while the two police forces evicted each other from station houses and freed each other's prisoners.
Wood also asserted the right to name the city's street commissioner, and when the governor's appointee entered City Hall to take office on June 16, Wood had him thrown out by the Municipals. When Captain George W. Walling, of the Metropolitan force, tried to arrest Wood—"for blocking the appointment, for assault, and for inciting a riot"—Walling was ejected by the Municipals and thugs guarding the mayor. Walling returned with a phalanx of Metropolitans, and a bloody riot erupted on the front steps. The mob and the Municipals clubbed their opponents relentlessly and gained the upper hand until the city recorder summoned the Seventh Regiment, which happened to be parading on Broadway. Wood was arrested but quickly arranged bail through a friendly judge. On July 2, the courts upheld the Metropolitan Police Act, and the following day Wood finally dissolved his Municipals.29
The Metropolitan Police headquarters at 300 Mulberry Street
On July 4, the Metropolitans began walking their beats and became embroiled in riots: Street gangs, one of which had campaigned for Wood, targeted them as political enemies, wounding or killing several officers. Rioting continued the following day, and the militia had to be brought in to suppress it. It was the worst riot since Astor Place in 1849, with twelve people killed and thirty-seven wounded. A week later thousands of Germans battled police and militia regiments in Kleindeutschland to protest the closing of saloons.* The next day, the funeral for a German blacksmith killed in the riot made its way up Broadway—ten thousand people and a band of musicians with a banner in German: Victim of the Metropolitan Police. At a rally afterward, speakers protested the oppressive acts of the Republican legislators.30
Broadway, where the angry immigrant workers marched, was the dividing line between New York's rich and poor, marking the chasm between their customs, values, and politics.31 Revered by his immigrant constituents, Wood had come to be associated by the elite with the precariousness of law and order in the growing city. The New York Times blamed Wood for opening the door to mob rule with his "disorganizing and reckless opposition to the laws of the State."32
Observing the situation from the South, planter, writer, and proslavery propagandist Edmund Ruffin went farther, noting in his diary that "the recent fighting between the separate police forces of the city & the state of New York . . . seems very much like the beginning of a civil war, which the Federal government may have to interfere [with] to quell." Sizing up New York City's tendency to support the South, Ruffin continued, "I wish that the city would secede & form a separate state, with the consent of the Federal government." With two senators in Washington, Ruffin reasoned, New York City would be an asset to the South.33
Less than six months later, in the fall of 1857, a sharp decline in European demand for American wheat drove down farm prices and the value of railroad stocks. When jittery midwestern businessmen tried to retrieve some of their capital, their New York bankers were caught short, having recklessly made dubious loans to other banks and to speculators in the stock market. The banks called in their matured loans, and the sudden contraction of credit ruined numerous businesses, setting off another panic, a worldwide financial crisis resulting in massive unemployment.34
Ruffin marveled at "accounts of awful omen, in the city of New York." Winter had not yet arrived, he noted, and already thousands of hungry laborers, "instigated & led by foreigners," had rallied and were marching through the city "demanding work & bread." This menacing mob would soon be thirty thousand strong, Ruffin wrote. "Half that number of desperate villains can sack & burn the city, & murder its best inhabitants. This fate I predicted for New York, whenever the dissolution of the union shall remove the conservative influence of the south & of its institution of slavery. But the fulfillment seems impending, or openly threatened, sooner than I expected."35
When Wood proposed unprecedented public works projects and food distribution to the laborers as part of their pay, he lost whatever remained of his elite support. Then, when Wood could not deliver on his proposals, workers blamed him and marched on City Hall.36 "Matters look very much like the incidents of the beginnings in Paris of the first French revolution," Ruffin entered in his diary. "The mayor has to be protected by a guard of 50 police-men—&U.S. troops have been sent from the neighboring fort to guard the public treasury in the custom-house. The mayor, [Fernando] Wood, had at first encouraged the kindling of the flame by his own Jacobin declarations."37
Expanding their control over city affairs, Republicans in Albany moved the mayoral race to off years to punish Wood, so he faced a run for reelection that fall instead of a year later. Members of Wood's own party fused with Republicans and nativist Know Nothings to defeat him by a narrow margin.38
Along with Wood's proposals to relieve the poor, housing regulation was put on hold in 1857. With overcrowding and disease, by 1856 more New Yorkers were dying every year than were being born. Reformers, including John Griscom, had prevailed on the state legislature's Tenement House Committee to address the crisis of the city's slums. In 1857, members of the committee toured the slums and produced a report detailing the abominable conditions.
While they did not consider the deeper causes of poverty—rent increases combined with lower wages—or the proposals of land reformers that the government should create a large volume of public housing, the legislators did call for legal action, and New York State's first housing code was soon put on paper. However, builders and owners protested the new regulations, and they would not be enacted for another decade. Unchecked, the slums continued to deteriorate.39
Because they arrived on disease-ridden ships, many immigrants were quarantined on Staten Island before being deported or allowed to proceed to New York City's slums. In September 1858, Edmund Ruffin noted with great interest "the burning, by a mob, of all the quarantine buildings of Staten Island," which "shows a disregard to law which is ominous of much worse results in New York."40
With his brother Ben as sole adviser, Fernando Wood resurrected himself, buying the New York Daily News as a mouthpiece and later making Ben the editor. Betrayed by Tammany in the last election and unable to take it over, Wood rebelled and created his own organization, Mozart Hall (named after the hotel near Bond Street and Broadway where it met), and announced that he would run for mayor again.41Attempting to compete with Tammany for control of the New York State party before the presidential race, Wood arrived early at the state Democratic convention in Syracuse in 1859, and his thugs, in a clash of fists and brandished knives and guns, took control of the proceedings with a shocking display of brute force, solidifying Wood's reputation nationally as a ruthless and lawless villain.42
Astonishingly, Wood went on to win his third term as mayor of New York in the fall of 1859, helped by a divided opposition. He also fanned the flames of social, racial, and sectional conflict. The Wood brothers' Daily News denounced his wealthy opponents as "a kid-glove, scented, silk stocking, poodle-headed, degenerate aristocracy" that exploited "the hardworking, bone and sinew, hard-fisted, noble, laboring-men of New York" and regarded the working classes as "outside barbarians." Wood used his Locofoco arguments about the "producing class" bearing the tax burden while the idle rich did not pay. Recalling his stand against the Republicans in Albany, Wood cast himself as the "Champion of Municipal Rights."43
Most ominously, Wood introduced the national slavery cont
roversy into the mayoral campaign, which coincided with John Brown's abortive raid on a federal installation at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia—an attempt to steal weapons and arm southern slaves for a massive rebellion. The raid had reinforced southern fears of radical antislavery forces in the North and hardened positions on both sides. Wood exploited the event, calling Brown a "bastard of a demagogue" fathered by "Black Republicans" and stressing New York City's reliance on southern trade: "The South is our best customer. She pays the best prices, and pays promptly." The Wood brothers also capitalized on Irish Anglophobia by claiming that Brown was a pawn in an English scheme to divide and defeat the United States.44
The Irish-American declared that abolitionists were also plotting to incriminate Irish workers and get them fired from their factory jobs. On December 10, 1859, the paper reprinted a notice, purportedly from an anonymous committee of southerners, that had been sent to thousands of Irishmen. It read in part:
TO THE IRISH FRIENDS OF THE SOUTH
IN THE NORTHERN CITIES
(Confidential)
The South looks to its Irish friends in the large free cities to effect a diversion in its favor . . . In the great cities prominent freesoilers and abolitionists own large factories, stores, and granaries, in which vast sums (made out of the South) are invested. This fact furnishes a means of checking their aggressions in the South, and the Irish friends of the South are relied on to make the check effective.—Property is proverbially timid. Whenever a hay stack or cotton gin is burned at the South by freesoil emissaries, let a large factory, or a plethoric store, or an immense granary be given to the flames . . . gather large mobs of your brethren . . . for every dollar's worth of injury to your enemies in the Northern factories, ec.ec., by riot or the torch, the South will amply compensate, and, besides, furnish you a safe refuge and a homestead.
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