While the city's black population played a negligible role in Tweed's version of democracy, Tammany officials reached out to the Irish, and the attraction was mutual. The Irish constituted a major voting bloc, and Tammany offered a path to mainstream acceptance in America: In the wake of the draft riots, Tammany officials stressed that they had always been War Democrats, opposed to Wood's Peace Democracy, and they had a long tradition of frenzied flag-waving on the Fourth of July to prove their undying patriotism.19
Remarkably, of Tweed's closest associates, Mayor A. Oakey Hall—not the two Irishmen, Connolly and Sweeny—made the most public display of admiration for all things Celtic. The mayor insisted humorously that his initials, A. O. H., stood for the Ancient Order of Hibernians. On Saint Patrick's Day in 1870, Hall mounted a platform to review the parade dressed "in the supposed regalia of an Irish Prince," noted an appreciative observer. "It was not enough for him to put a shamrock on the lapel of his coat . . . to adequately typify his consuming love for the 'Exiles of Erin,' he wore a coat of green material and a flourishing cravat of the same inspiring color."20
A wealthy Harvard graduate, Hall conveyed an aura of literary sophistication but also tried his best to connect with the public, dispensing with the formal greeting, "Your Honor," enjoyed by previous mayors. The sight of an establishment figure reaching out and putting his stamp of approval on Irish American culture helped an embattled minority feel all the more at home in its adopted land.21
As the Democratic resurgence continued in New York, and as Tweed groomed Governor Hoffman to run for the White House in 1872, Mayor Hall became his heir apparent. During the first half of 1871, both Hoffman and Hall focused on building records of achievement they could campaign on, while trying to project at least the impression of their independence from Tweed. Mayor Hall won praise from both parties for taking on the Herculean task of implementing the new charter and demonstrating its advantages over the state commissions that once controlled the city's affairs.22
However, Tweed had duped reformers, led by the venerable Peter Cooper, into supporting a new charter that was in fact designed to facilitate the theft of money from the public treasury. As the city's mercantile elite welcomed the charter and signed new contracts with the city, Tweed drew them into his web. By July 1871, Tweed's unprecedented personal power over the city and state had reached its apex.23
Building on the corrupt system put in place by Fernando Wood during his mayoralty in the 1850s, four men—Tweed, Sweeny, Connolly, and Hall— comprised a "Ring," which divided the kickbacks from padded city contracts. What began as a 10 percent levy on all city and county contracts eventually reached 65 percent in 1869. Some bills sent to Comptroller Connolly's office were not merely padded but entirely invented; others were for work that was never completed, or contracting jobs for the mansions of the Ring members that were billed to the city at exorbitant rates.24
Tweed's share of the total intake of cash reached 25 percent, Connolly's 20, Sweeny's 10, and Hall's 5 percent, with another 5 percent for the bagmen, and the rest for bribing members of the legislatures in the city and at Albany.25In all, an estimated forty-five million dollars was stolen, making the principals extremely wealthy.26*
On July 8, 1871, the Times began publishing extensive revelations of Tweed's corruption, backed up with proof in the form of comptroller's records turned over by an unhappy insider, former sheriff James O'Brien. While the Ring members stonewalled, conferred, and plotted how to betray each other and save themselves, the banks on both sides of the Atlantic that had nourished Tweed's reign soon cut off the city's credit.27
While New York's skyrocketing bonded debt was one vulnerability, the identification of Tammany in the public mind with the Irish and with urban violence, which Tweed's organization had tried to transform ever since July 1863, soon proved to be another key to his downfall. Just four days after the first revelations in the Times, and exactly eight years after the draft riots, on July 12, 1871, rioting between Irish Catholics and Protestant during a parade helped set in motion the end of Tweed's reign and the final phase of the Democracy's resurgence as a national party.28
The city's Orangemen wanted a permit to march on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, but they had clashed with Catholics at previous celebrations, including the last parade, in 1870, so Mayor Hall denied the permit to forestall any violence. When the Orangemen orchestrated a public outcry for their right to march and accused the mayor of caving in to Catholic threats, Governor Hoffman intervened, and the parade took place under heavy militia protection. Angry Catholics massed along the parade route, a shot rang out, and the militia fired into the crowd. When the conflict was over, more than a hundred people lay dead or wounded. It was the worst violence the city had seen since the draft riots.29
Coming on the heels of the revolutionary Paris Commune that spring, after which many radicals had fled to New York City, the Orange riot brought class tension and fear of communism to a fever pitch.30The Orange riot, blamed by many on the alliance of Tammany and the city's Irish Catholics, revived memories of the draft riots and triggered a strong response from conservative elites—a fear of mob rule and a decisive law-and-order approach to handling the urban poor—which further exacerbated class tensions.31
Journalist Joel Tyler Headley linked the Orange riot and the Paris Commune, lumping the Irish and French radicals together as a threat from overseas, and helping to spark a fresh wave of nativism. Protestant leaders denounced the "supremacy of political Irish Catholics." An influential anti-Tammany pamphlet, with illustrations by Thomas Nast, labeled the "Hibernian Riot" as "communism, Murder, Socialism, Robbery, Arson."32
The pamphlet also signaled that the riot of 1871 had unleashed "the Insurrection of the Capitalists," a backlash that was gathering momentum and would eventually manifest itself in antidemocratic efforts by affluent New Yorkers to restrict suffrage by instituting property requirements for whites as well as blacks. The elite hoped to focus public attention on the rights of the "better classes"—the city's taxpayers—who deserved to be free from mob rule and the wasteful corruption of Tammany Hall.33
The elite saw themselves as crusaders against the excesses of Jacksonian democracy, the new laws of the 1820s and 1830s that created a horde of working-class, foreign-born voters, providing a power base for a new breed of demagogic, professional politician, exemplified by Fernando Wood, William Tweed, and others who had risen from humble origins to positions of great power. The reformers declared that the absence of elite, disinterested men, who had turned away from politics in disgust during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, left a vacuum that was filled by demagogues, who set the stage for the draft riots and the Orange riot and posed a continuing threat to society.34
While the prosecution of the draft rioters in 1863 had helped Hall rise from district attorney to mayor, and Hoffman from city recorder to governor, the Orange riot unraveled their promising careers. The Irish-American excused Hall while pinning the blame on Hoffman for the bloodbath because he had allowed the Protestants to have their anti-Catholic parade. Hall broke off his close working relationship with the governor but could not escape some share of responsibility for the event, and Tammany as a whole suffered, drawing the wrath of both Catholics and nativists. Upstate and city Democrats took sides with the governor and mayor respectively, while Republicans linked Tammany with riots and mayhem. Tweed's machine would come crashing down in part because it failed to keep the fragile peace it had engineered in the wake of the draft riots.35
The Orange riot, however, was only half of Tweed's catastrophic troubles. Because Peter Cooper's Citizens' Association had been discredited by its approval of Tweed's charter, Samuel Tilden and William Havemeyer called a meeting at Cooper Union on September 4, 1871, to launch the Council for Political Reform. Havemeyer, scion of an old New York family, who won the mayoral race twice in the 1840s, represented the breed of elite politician that had been largely absent from city politics in recent decade
s. Tilden had long been in competition with Tammany for control of the party in the city and state. He welcomed the opportunity to bring down Tweed and his circle— without destroying the Democratic party.36
The merchants and financiers at the meeting—including Belmont, Opdyke, and real estate developer Samuel Ruggles—decried the Ring's frauds as an assault on the rights of taxpayers and property owners like themselves. They also agreed to appoint a committee, called the Committee of Seventy, to investigate the accusations in the Times and bring charges against the Ring members. The bipartisan committee would include Havemeyer, a Democrat, as its chairman; Republican Union League members Joseph Choate and Robert Roosevelt;* Democrat-turned-Republican John Dix, picked by Lincoln in 1863 to supervise the resumption of the draft; and wealthy merchants from both parties, such as Theodore Steinway, the piano manufacturer.37
Tilden, while not a member of the Committee of Seventy, as chairman of the state Democratic organization led the party in calling for a full disclosure of the facts. Careful and methodical, Tilden gradually emerged as the party's guiding light. Clearly referring to Tweed in a major speech, Tilden declared, "It is time now to proclaim and to enforce the doctrine that whoever plunders the people, though he steals the livery of Heaven to serve the devil . . . is no Democrat."38
The New York Irish were both the devils and the white knights of the Tweed Ring's demise, which, like the draft riots, exposed the fallacy of anti-Irish stereotypes. The reformers turned to Charles O'Conor, the respected Irish Catholic lawyer whose father, Thomas, had edited the Shamrock, New York's first Irish newspaper. O'Conor was appointed special state attorney general to trace the public funds embezzled by the Ring. Tilden's choice to replace Tweed at the head of Tammany was "Honest" John Kelly, a devout Irish Catholic and untainted former city sheriff.39
A week after the reformers gathered at Cooper Union, the foursome that comprised the Ring met to plot damage control. Mayor Hall suggested that if Comptroller Connolly stepped down, the whole scandal might blow over. Sweeny concurred, while Tweed hung back, appearing to side with Connolly against those who would make him take the fall for the Ring. In a city abuzz with rumor, where little remained secret, or even out of the press, George Templeton Strong caught wind of the meeting. "It is understood," he wrote in his diary, "that Hall and Sweeny are in alliance, offensive and defensive, against Tweed and Conn [oily]—skunk vs. rattlesnake."40
On top of the Orange riot and the investigation of fraud, Tweed's Tammany Hall faced a continuing challenge from New York's labor unions, which were fielding independent candidates and fighting for enforcement of the state's eight-hour law. Despite the rain on September 13, some eight thousand workers marched down Broadway to City Hall, denouncing Tammany and declaring their solidarity with the city's stonecutters, who were striking for an eight-hour day.
Along with American-born, Irish, French, and German workers, a group of African American trade unionists joined the procession, which culminated in a mass meeting at Cooper Union and a resolution to "throw off all allegiance to the Democratic party in the Fall elections." The presence of blacks signaled that the working class had slowly begun, in the wake of the Fifteenth Amendment, to reject Tammany's vision of a whites-only society and to disavow the racial violence of the draft riots.41
The pressures mounted within the Ring and from the investigators. Connolly became the first Ring member to defect and put his fate in the reformers' hands: He contacted Havemeyer, once his boss in the private sector, to ask for a meeting with Tilden. On September 15, Tilden informed Connolly that his political career was over, but also instructed him to remain in office and appoint Andrew Haswell Green as his temporary deputy and successor, as permitted by Tweed's new charter. Ironically, a loophole created to maintain the Ring's hold on the comptroller's office became Tilden's tool for putting his own man in place and bringing the records of the city treasury to light.42
Connolly's supporters, the rank-and-file Irish Democrats of the Twenty-first Ward, believed the comptroller had been forced to take the fall for the rest of the Ring because he was Irish, and they gathered near City Hall on September 16 to protest his treatment. However, once it became clear that Connolly had betrayed the other three men—and effectively abandoned the constituents who depended on him for jobs and promotion—his life was in danger, and a police guard was stationed at his office, where he continued to go every day, as instructed by Tilden. "I should not care to insure his life," wrote George Templeton Strong.43
The reformers also feared the Ring members might incite the masses on their behalf, producing violence on a scale similar to that of the draft riots. By the end of September, stewardship of the city treasury had been turned over to Green, payments had been frozen, and five thousand angry Parks Department laborers had gone without pay for weeks. Under the heading "LET US HAVE NO RIOT," Greeley's Tribune chastised Hall, Tweed, and Sweeny for not cooperating with Green to resolve the crisis and for blaming it on the reformers in order to enrage the workers.
There is to be tonight, at the main entrance of the Central Park, a mass-meeting of these men—men who recognize only that they are about to be dismissed from work. They will not stop to think that they are to be thrown out of employment because the Ring has robbed the treasurer and now refuses to aid the acting treasury of the City in providing new resources . . . We have been told that men prominent in the riots of 1863 will appear at this meeting to-night, and that a man named Burke, the leader of the rioters of that year, will seek to incite like disturbances to-night.
Greeley declared that a "large force of policemen should be in attendance," to "protect these men from the dangerous influence of the leaders of the mob by suppressing every riotous indication on their part."44 In the end, the fifty thousand dollars for the city employees' back pay came from Tweed's pocket, but Green, the acting comptroller, never reimbursed him, on the assumption that the money had been stolen from the city in the first place.45
Having angered both the elite and the working class, Tammany lost badly in city elections that fall, and reformers won control of the state legislature.46 At the end of November, Tilden moved in for the kill by having Connolly arrested in his own office and held for bail of one million dollars. The press initially sympathized with Connolly since he had been cooperating when Tilden betrayed him. The notorious Judge George Barnard, who had used writs of habeas corpus to free prisoners at the height of the draft riots, did the same for Connolly.47
When Tilden produced further evidence against Tweed, the state supreme court issued a warrant for his arrest. Tweed easily posted the million-dollar bond, but his political power, like that of Connolly, Hall, and Sweeny, had been destroyed. On December 30, Tammany Hall voted to expel all four members of the Ring and began a new era under "Honest" John Kelly. Two days later, on January 1, 1872, Connolly and his wife escaped to Europe, reportedly with six million dollars. Sweeny settled the claim of the city against him, and Mayor Hall was acquitted in two separate trials. Tweed, after several trials, an escape from prison, and recapture in Spain, became the only Ring member to end his life behind bars.48
Having purged Tweed from the Democratic party, Tilden gained a national reputation for integrity. Even as he helped complete the revitalization of the party and carried it into the future, his message was still based on traditional Jacksonian principles of local control and limited government. It was a conservative message in the guise of reform: that honest, efficient government should allow free trade but serve the needs of the business community. The hostility to Republican activist government—and the rights of blacks—remained strong.49
When the Tweed Ring began to collapse in the summer of 1871, Greeley had just returned to New York from a tour of the South and continued his campaign for "Universal Amnesty." He saw "the policy of excluding from office the leading men of the South as a very great mistake and a very great injury to the National cause and to the Republican party." During congressional reconstruction, Greeley argu
ed, the military governor of South Carolina
was crippled and enfeebled in his effort to govern that State well by the fact that her best men, her most intelligent men, her most considerate and conservative men, were not available to him as magistrates because of an exclusion whereof Andrew Johnson was the author. He said, "I cannot govern South Carolina as well as I could if I were able to choose the best men to help me, instead of the second-best." I am entirely of that conviction. I believe it was a mistake, when you allowed a million Confederates to vote for Members of Congress, to deny them the right to vote for just such men as they preferred.50
With this elitist emphasis on the "best men" as the appropriate leaders of society, Greeley's ideas and rhetoric were beginning to converge with those of a small but influential group of reformers in the North that included editors, economists, businessmen, and political figures, who shared a dogmatic belief in the tenets of classical British liberalism: faith in the free market and sound money based on the gold standard. In politics as in economics, reform ideology insisted on a minimal role for government.
For liberal reformers, the Tweed Ring and other political machines, both Democratic and Republican, embodied the dangers of big government, namely wasteful tax-and-spend policies and rampant corruption. Members of the Citizens' Association in New York embodied this reform impulse, but its leaders and adherents could be found in both the Northeast and the Midwest—in Boston, Cincinnati, and Chicago—while the movement's doctrines were taking root in colleges across the North. E. L. Godkin of the Nation was a chief exponent of liberal reform, as were the politicians Carl Schurz and James Garfield, both outspoken critics of Reconstruction, and of federal intervention in the South during Grant's first term.51
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