Perhaps out of a desire to emerge from Owen’s shadow, Brennan soon moved downtown and sold “coffee, cakes and oysters” from a small storefront at 89 Cedar Street near Broadway. According to the Herald, Brennan “remained there for four or five years and gained considerable custom.” But by this point, recalled the Tribune years later, “running to fires” had become “the ruling passion” of Brennan’s life. Although a childhood accident had left him with a perceptible limp, Brennan was “fleet of foot, and . . . possessed of extraordinary strength,” precisely the traits of the ideal fireman. Emulating both Owen and his eldest brother, Timothy, Brennan entered the fire department. He spent a few years with Engine Company No. 11 before joining Owen in the Sixth Ward’s Engine Company No. 21.35
Brennan’s transfer to Engine No. 21 probably coincided with his move back to Five Points. The twenty-three-year-old Brennan had relocated there in 1845 when Owen turned over control of Monroe Hall to him. While Owen ascended in Whig circles, “Matt” (as he was universally known) began establishing a base in the ward’s Democratic ranks. The ideal location of his saloon at the intersection of two heavily trafficked thoroughfares ensured brisk business and made Brennan a well-known neighborhood liquor dealer. But it was his election in the late forties as foreman of the politically powerful Engine No. 21, noted the Times years later, that served as Brennan’s “stepping-stone to political preferment.”36
Brennan exuded an air of confidence, strength, and congeniality that made him a natural leader and helped him achieve his prestigious position as company foreman. And in a neighborhood in which fighting and toughness were prerequisites to political power, Brennan’s imposing physical presence also helped him. A friend and newspaper editor described Matthew Brennan at age forty as “a large and robust man, with spreading shoulders, large and arching chest; throat muscular and massive; face singularly open, strong and honest; black hair curling closely round his forehead; a dark brown imperial dropping down from his lower lip, and merging into a small black growth of throat-beard; hazel gray eyes, full of kindly humor and penetration, set under eyebrows rather slight and short; immensely broad round the base of the forehead; and with a nose, not long, but prominent and indicative of energy and courage.” Brennan possessed both the physical and personal traits necessary to ascend through the rough world of Irish-American ward politics.37
As fire company foreman, Brennan commanded a gang of forty or so tough young men who could be counted on to fight at primary meetings and on election day. Such influence had its rewards. In January 1848, he received his first patronage plum—appointment as one of the two ward residents to whom chimney fires were to be reported. Modest though this might seem, city newspapers covering Kelly’s arrest in late 1849 agreed that Brennan was an up-and-coming power in Sixth Ward politics.38
Despite Brennan’s apparently rapid advancement, his political career seemed in jeopardy at midcentury. His support of Foote’s unsuccessful bid to unseat Kelly in 1849 was potentially damaging to his political future, because city Democratic leaders looked disdainfully upon those who failed to fall in line behind the “regular” nominees. Yet a graver threat to Brennan’s ambitions materialized in 1850 in the form of Isaiah Rynders, a political fighter feared even more than Con Donoho or Yankee Sullivan.
The colorful Rynders had reached the peak of his influence after Polk’s election in 1844. He had become even more notorious in 1849 and 1850, helping to incite the bloody Astor Place Riot. Rynders bought dozens of tickets so that his men could attend the theater there in order to harass William Macready, the controversial English actor. He also paid for the printing and distribution of inflammatory handbills that helped whip the crowd surrounding the theater into a fury. A year later, Rynders again received national attention, this time for disrupting an abolitionist convention organized by William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass.
Despite these exploits, Rynders could not advance as rapidly within Democratic ranks as he would have liked. Because the most powerful positions within Tammany were chosen by delegates elected from each ward, Rynders needed to establish a base of power in one of these political districts. Given his penchant for violence and intimidation, political weapons that were both accepted and respected in the “bloody Sixth,” his decision to concentrate his political operations there made perfect sense. That no leader or faction had managed to seize control of the ward’s politics in the late 1840s also undoubtedly motivated Rynders. He therefore bought a Sixth Ward saloon (well south of Five Points on Reade Street), rented a house on Pearl Street just a block west of Monroe Hall, and according to Kernan, “quietly awaited an opening.”39
Rynders made his move in the autumn of 1850, announcing his intention to take the district’s nomination for state assembly. Yet Rynders’s move “did not suit the bone and sinew of the ward,” recalled Kernan years later, because Donoho, Brennan, and their allies saw Rynders and his Empire Club thugs as “squatters.” Not easily deterred, Rynders arrived at Dooley’s Long-Room for the primary meeting accompanied by noted fighters Bill Ford, Tom Maguire, John McCleester, and “Hen” Chanfrau—“men who seldom met defeat”—as well as hundreds of other supporters. But Brennan, Donoho, and the rest of Five Points’ Irish-American leaders were not about to cede control of the ward without a fight. “When the hour came to name the chairman,” Kernan recalled, “the fierce onset of Rynders’s friends to defeat [Donoho’s candidate] was met with a bold response. The ball opened and the strife commenced, and ere ten minutes passed away, the hall was cleared of all who stood in opposition to the regular voters of the ward. Rynders and his men met defeat.”
He did not give up. When city Democrats met at Tammany Hall to choose their legislative candidates, Rynders captured the nomination anyway, probably due to support from the Third Ward, which made up the other half of the assembly district. But disgruntled Five Points Democrats had the last laugh. Many refused to vote for the Captain on election day, and as a result he received 350 fewer votes in the Sixth Ward than the other Democratic candidates. This proved to be decisive, as Rynders lost to his Whig opponent by 200 votes. Realizing that Sixth Warders would not accept him as their political leader, Rynders’s “ambition to get a foothold in the glorious old Sixth was quieted ever after.” He soon moved across the Bowery to the Seventh Ward, and stung by his embarrassing defeat, never again ran for elective office. He remained a power in Democratic circles throughout the 1850s, and for his continuing loyalty to the party President James Buchanan made Rynders a U.S. marshal in 1857. But Rynders never again dominated New York politics with the swagger and impudence that had marked his early career. His political comeuppance had been engineered in large measure by the increasingly influential Irish Catholic Democrats of the Sixth Ward.40
“A SERGEANT OR CAPTAIN IS A REAL POWER
IF HE TAKES ANY INTEREST IN POLITICS”
With Rynders no longer a threat to dominate the Sixth Ward, Brennan could concentrate on his own advancement. In the November 1851 race for alderman, Kelly was opposed by his ambitious former protégé, Thomas J. Barr. Unlike Kelly, Barr was far too smart a politician to make an enemy of the up-and-coming Brennan. The two probably came to some sort of understanding before the election, because just a few weeks after Barr’s victory, the alderman-elect helped secure Brennan an appointment to succeed Magnes as Sixth Ward police captain.41
Brennan used his new post to increase his already strong position in Sixth Ward political affairs. “A sergeant or captain is a real power if he takes any interest in politics,” noted Ivins, and Brennan certainly proved this to be the case. He used his authority as captain to appoint a number of his most trusted allies to places on the force. At the end of 1854, these supporters established the M. T. Brennan Hose Company No. 60, both to demonstrate their gratitude to their patron and to rally support for his candidates at primaries and on election days. To ensure control of the polling places (and to discourage the turnout of his adversaries), Brennan moved some of the voting
stations from neutral sites to locations associated with his supporters. By 1856, Five Pointers in the ward’s second electoral district had to cast their ballots inside the Brennan Hose Company’s club room at 123 Leonard Street (Brennan lived next door at 121 Leonard). Voters in the fifth district were required to venture inside the “low rum-shop” of Brennan loyalist Walter Roche at 19 Mulberry. Another polling site was located in a “hair-dresser’s saloon” at 6 Franklin Street, across the road from the ward’s police station at 9 Franklin, enabling Brennan’s allies on the force to maintain control. Brennan also probably engineered the transfer of the ward primary contest from Dooley’s Long-Room in the Sixth Ward Hotel, where it had been held for decades, to the friendlier confines of Elm Street’s Ivy Green saloon, another haunt controlled by his supporters.42
In 1854, after nearly three years as police captain, Brennan made his first run for elective office, seeking the influential post of police justice. Although police justices were the first judicial authorities before whom all those accused of misdemeanors and minor felonies were brought, legal training was not considered a prerequisite for the post. The judicial district in question covered not only the Sixth Ward but also the Fourth and Fourteenth, each a heavily Irish-American district. Although these demographics might appear to favor Brennan, Democrats in the other wards nominated their own candidates for the highly prized office. On the eve of the vote, these opponents attempted to blame Brennan for the police department’s role in the arrest of an Irish patriot wanted by the British. Nonetheless, Brennan carried the election by a comfortable margin.43
Brennan had built up an effective electoral machine, but he also succeeded in politics because he was a likable man who made few personal enemies. He was “looked up to by all the poor of his ward and district as a protector and friend,” reported his allies at the Leader. The Herald agreed that “he took a special and personal interest in the poor of his district, and always lent a willing ear to their grievances.” Brennan was also a hard worker, and devoted to “his fireside and family”—he married Margaret Molony in about 1850 and by 1860 they had five children. Unlike some of his fellow politicians, Brennan “lived a temperate life in all things. . . . His habits of living were of the old fashioned type, early to bed and early to rise, up at five o’clock in the morning, winter and summer, and in his office . . . hours before any of his subordinates thought of stirring.” Though a native New Yorker, Brennan and his entire family “spoke Irish and took a pride in it,” a devotion to Gaelic culture that undoubtedly impressed the many recent Irish immigrants among his constituents. Brennan’s popularity was such that state Democrats nominated him for the post of state prison inspector in 1856. Although Brennan and his Democratic running mates were defeated in the November election, the nomination of a Five Points Irish Catholic for statewide office was unprecedented.44
Brennan had a small coterie of especially loyal allies who played an important role in advancing his political career. One of the most important was Joseph Dowling. Dowling was one of the few successful Five Points politicians who had lived in Ireland long enough to remember it, having emigrated at age twelve. Upon arriving in New York in 1838, his family settled in Five Points, where Dowling’s father worked as a shoemaker on Centre Street. Like many immigrant children, young Joseph augmented the family income as a newsboy. Soon he was employed “in the office of old Major Noah’s Times and Messenger, . . . running errands, delivering papers, collecting bills, sweeping out the office and making paste.” Later he worked as a paper folder for the Herald.
By his late teens, Dowling was a regular at Brennan’s saloon, which the Times accurately described years later as “a resort for all the young and rising politicians of the period.” Like most Five Points politicos, young Dowling “was robust and rugged in physique. He wrestled like a professional and his blow from the shoulder might have felled an ox.” He was brave as well; as a teenager he supposedly challenged the renowned Yankee Sullivan to a fight in Brennan’s saloon. Impressed by these qualities, Brennan made Dowling a runner with Engine Company No. 21. According to the Times, “this proved his starting point in political life.” Allying himself with Brennan, Dowling “gradually gained notice as a shrewd and indefatigable worker in ward politics.” In August 1848, Dowling was appointed to the ward’s police force as a reward for his loyal service to the Democratic party. When Brennan became captain, Dowling as sergeant served as his mentor’s right-hand man. And when Brennan became police justice, he made sure that Dowling succeeded him as captain.45
Even more important to Brennan’s success than Dowling was another loyal ally, John Clancy. Clancy was born in the Sixth Ward on March 5, 1829, the son of “an Irish patriot, who had fought against England on several bloody fields.” Other than this familiar refrain, however, Clancy’s early years were very different from those of Five Points politicians such as Brennan and Dowling. Most Five Pointers left school to help support their families; Clancy was such a gifted student that his parents allowed him to attend “the grammar school of Columbia College” well into his teens. After working for a number of years as the junior associate of a “commercial merchant” on Water Street, Clancy moved to Savannah, where he wrote essays for several journals. He soon returned to the Sixth Ward and studied law in the office of attorney (and future Tweed Ring insider) Peter Barr Sweeny, who became Clancy’s “dearest friend and most intimate associate.”46
Sweeny’s uncle, Sixth Ward Alderman Thomas J. Barr, must have facilitated Clancy’s entry into Five Points politics, because he had few of the qualities one usually associates with the neighborhood’s politicians. Whereas the biography of virtually every Sixth Ward politician emphasizes the subject’s fighting prowess, Clancy’s stressed that he had a “slender figure” and “blue eyes, soft as a woman’s in their affectionate expression.” Other Five Points politicos were known for their street smarts, but Clancy was bookish (though he never did complete his legal studies), erudite, and “a graceful and polished writer.” Clancy did serve in the fire department, demonstrating his leadership skills by becoming foreman of Engine Company No. 28. This may have helped him win the respect of the neighborhood’s rougher element. Whatever the case, Clancy’s advancement in Sixth Ward politics was unprecedented. In 1853, without holding any of the usual minor patronage posts, or serving in the ward’s police or fire departments (Engine No. 28 was located elsewhere), the twenty-four-year-old Clancy was elected to one of the ward’s seats on the new board of councilmen, a body created to replace the board of assistant aldermen. He was reelected in November 1854, and was elected ward alderman in 1855. After his reelection in November 1856, Clancy’s colleagues made him president of the board of aldermen, a great honor for a twenty-seven-year-old who four years earlier was literally unknown in city political circles.
Clancy’s remarkable rise to prominence was facilitated by his involvement with the New York Leader, a weekly newspaper that became the Tammany organ in 1855. Clancy began contributing to the Leader as soon as it became affiliated with Tammany, and his work on the paper made him a well-known figure to all the city’s Democratic strongmen. In February 1857, weeks after the aldermen chose him as their president, Clancy became one of the paper’s editors. But just as important to Clancy’s success was his alliance with Brennan. Founding members of the M. T. Brennan Hose Company No. 60 elected Clancy as their inaugural foreman.
In their capacities as police justice, president of the board of aldermen, and Tammany editor, the thirty-four-year-old Brennan and the twenty-seven-year-old Clancy had climbed further in Tammany’s ranks by the beginning of 1857 than had any previous Sixth Ward Irish Catholics. Their accomplishments would have been almost unimaginable to the previous generation of Five Pointers. Only in the 1830s had Irish Catholics wrested control of the ward’s politics from the old elite. Even after they had succeeded in overturning the old order, a Catholic Five Pointer of Con Donoho’s day could at best aspire to a term as ward alderman. Tammany was still firmly
in the hands of leaders who were happy to take the Irishmen’s votes, but refused to give them major offices either in the party or in citywide government. But the new generation of Irish Catholic politicians refused to accept such limitations. Led by Brennan and Clancy, these Five Pointers would play a major role in reshaping the dynamics of political power in Civil War–era New York.47
6
PROLOGUE
“THIS PHENOMENON, ‘JUBA’”
CHARLES DICKENS WAS NOT impressed by New York during his 1841 tour. He found the streets filthy, the buildings insubstantial and unimpressive, and his hosts coarse and unsophisticated. Dickens’s published account of the trip, American Notes, overflows with sarcasm and condescension. But there was one part of his tour that Dickens loved: his visit to a Five Points dance hall.
Victorian Englishmen such as Dickens might sneer disdainfully at most American arts and letters, but they were fascinated by African-American culture. Dickens’s introduction to black American dance took place on Orange Street at Almack’s, one of the many black-run dance emporiums then operating in Five Points. He was enthralled from the moment he walked in and descended into the narrow, low-ceilinged basement dance room. “Heyday! the landlady of Almacks’s thrives!” Dickens declared, describing her as “a buxom fat mulatto woman, with sparkling eyes, whose head is daintily ornamented with a handkerchief of many colours.”
Five Points Page 20