The draft rioting in Five Points resulted in the almost complete abandonment of the district by New York African Americans. The neighborhood’s black population—once numbering well over one thousand—had declined dramatically and steadily ever since the race riot there nearly thirty years earlier, so that by the eve of the Civil War fewer than five hundred African Americans were left, even though the ward’s overall population had doubled. All but a handful of these now decided to leave. Under a headline proclaiming the “Exodus of Blacks from the Five Points,” the Herald reported on Thursday, the seventeenth, that “the fear which has seized the colored population in nearly every part of the city has extended to the blacks of the Sixth ward.” Three days of violence aimed against them convinced Five Pointers of color that “their only safety is in flight.” As a result, “there seems to have been a general exodus of Africans from the Five Points, and the whites are in possession of the whole field.” Some eventually returned. The 1870 census records 132 “colored” Five Points residents, mostly sailors whose ties to the community were tenuous. African Americans from all parts of the city fled to Long Island and other safe havens during the riots, and most of the Five Pointers among them decided never to move back.39
After a one-month delay caused by the riots, the draft for the Sixth Ward finally took place on August 25. Of the 161 Five Pointers drafted, 59 were exempted from service. They received their exemptions either because they were not American citizens, too old or young, physically unfit, no longer lived in the congressional district, or the sole supporters of widowed mothers or other dependents. Eleven of the 161 draftees hired substitutes, an option available only to the neighborhood’s more prosperous residents. Two of the eleven, Caspar Grote and Herman Schilling, were successful Baxter Street grocers. Another, James Nealis, was a scion of one of the ward’s most powerful families. His father and uncle had at various times served as ward policemen, operated a Mulberry Street grocery, and actively participated in ward politics. James himself had spent three years in college “out West” and was one of the men posting bills with Denis Sullivan the night he shot “Big Tom” Byrnes. Two of the other drafted Five Pointers avoided service by paying the $300 commutation fee.40
The most popular way to avoid military service, however, was simply not to show up at the enrollment office after one’s name was called. Fully 88 of the 161 Five Points draftees “failed to report.” Draft dodgers could be arrested, but the understaffed provost marshals did not have the means to track down many evaders. Only a handful of the Five Pointers who failed to report for duty were subsequently arrested; all proved themselves exempt from duty and were released.
In the end, then, only a single Five Points resident was compelled to go to war as a result of the draft. This lone conscript was Hugh Boyle, a twenty-seven-year-old laborer who lived at 24 Mott Street. The blue-eyed, brown-haired Boyle put off enlistment as long as possible after the August 1863 conscription; but in December 1864, he finally claimed his $100 bounty and was mustered in for three years’ duty with the Eighteenth New York Cavalry Regiment. Boyle joined his unit at Gainnie Landing, Louisiana, in January 1865. Five months later, when the war was over but his regiment was preparing to leave for Texas to serve as part of the Union occupation force there, Boyle deserted, absconding with his Remington revolver and a holster.41
“SO LATELY NOTHING BUT A WARD POLITICIAN”
One reason that New York’s Irish Americans reacted so violently to the prospect of a draft was that they were increasingly distrustful of the Tammany leaders who claimed to represent them. When independent Democrat C. Godfrey Gunther defeated the Tammany candidate, Francis I. Boole, in the mayoral contest of 1863, it exposed the organization’s continuing woes. The Irish-American explained Gunther’s victory by observing that “the people, who, for a long while, have not been content with the manner in which the political ‘machines’ have been run for the exclusive profit of a score or two of political dictators, voted for the only candidate who appeared to be running without any machinery at all, and elected him.” Brennan, the top Tammany officeholder, was now perceived as one of those “dictators.”42
Those maligning Tammany increasingly singled out Brennan for condemnation. The most vitriolic attacks came not from Republicans but from the Irish-American. Throwing aside ethnic pride, the journal condemned “the ruling clique of Tammany—which is as much to say, Comptroller Brennan and Peter B. Sweeny,” for nominating for sheriff another Irish American, the Fourteenth Ward’s John Kelly, “without making even a pretence of consulting the wishes of the people. . . . Comptroller Brennan aspires to command the city Democracy; armed with the immense patronage of his position, he rules in Tammany Hall and dictates the course of that organization and the men to whom its support is to be given.” Tammany, insisted the Irish-American, was an “organization which he thus practically owns. . . . The question to be decided in this nomination is whether the people are to have any voice in the management of their own affairs, or whether Comptroller Brennan is to be henceforth the autocrat of the city Democracy, dictating the candidates, and dividing, in undisturbed sovereignty, the spoils amongst his followers.”43
Brennan should have expected, and undoubtedly could withstand, such complaints. One faction or another was always griping about the distribution of the patronage, and the Irish-American’s charge that Brennan “has been using Tammany Hall . . . for his own aggrandizement and the advancement of his own family” was a staple of campaign rhetoric. What may have embarrassed or insulted him, though, was the newspaper’s assertion that Brennan’s ascent through Tammany reflected the utter debasement of a once proud and distinguished organization:
It is but a very few years since Matthew T. Brennan was simply Captain in the Sixth Ward Police—a very respectable office, but one not sought for by politicians with lofty aspirations. Mr. Brennan was looked upon as an efficient officer, and his fellow Democrats, believing him to be devoted to their own principles, deemed it but right to give him a further step; and he was, accordingly, made Police Justice. During the years in which Mr. Brennan was passing through these minor offices, the character of Tammany Hall underwent a complete revolution. [Soon it was run by] a clique of venal, selfish political charlatans [who] maintained themselves there by fraud and trickery. . . . Under such a parvenue regime, it was not surprising that Matthew T. Brennan,—so lately nothing but a Ward politician, glad to accept the small crumbs of local patronage distribution dispensed from the public table,—should be able to procure for himself the nomination for the Comptrollership, the richest and most important office in the gift of the citizens of New York. Here, again, he was aided by his former reputation, circumscribed as it was . . . and his fellow-citizens, trusting to the general belief in his integrity and the soundness of his Democracy, elected him. That trust Matthew T. Brennan has in every way betrayed.44
Because the intra-Democratic truce that had brought about his nomination had collapsed by 1866, Brennan stood no chance of gaining renomination when his term expired at the end of that year. Yet with great fanfare, he disingenuously announced his refusal to run for reelection, complaining in a long, self-aggrandizing letter that he would not remain in office at a time when every public official was assumed to be corrupt. Although his renomination had been considered unlikely, Brennan had accrued enough power in Tammany by that point that the Herald characterized his decision not to fight to retain his post as an “earthquake” for the city’s Democratic party.45
Brennan might have been better able to maintain his elevated position within the Democratic ranks had he still been able to rely on John Clancy to promote his interests. But Clancy had died suddenly on July 1, 1864, at age thirty-five. All agreed that Clancy’s premature death was a tragedy. Just before his death, he had been elected a sachem of the Tammany Society, the most sought after office within the Democratic organization and an honor that reflected his ascent to the very pinnacle of power there. The Herald’s obituary called Clancy “one of th
e most influential democrats in the state.” Even his political enemies sincerely mourned his death. “Under his management,” commented the Republican Times, “the Leader, though thoroughly partisan in politics, became one of the most able, brilliant and readable weeklies ever published in this City.”46
By this point, Sixth Ward primaries were no longer the wild and raucous affairs of Con Donoho’s day. Tammany leaders now dictated the Democratic nominations, so that in most cases, as the Republican attorney and reformer William M. Ivins put it, “the primary is usually only a gathering of the clans to get a drink, and incidentally vote the ticket put into their hands.” In unusual circumstances, however, the primary could revert to rough-and-tumble tactics. New York politico Matthew P. Breen recalled one such postwar primary after Brennan had become comptroller and had moved far uptown. Dowling believed that because Brennan no longer lived in the ward, he ought to cede him control of the district, while Brennan, who continued to maintain a residence on White Street inhabited by his mother, had no intention of giving up his authority. The quarrel reached a climax at the ward primary. “I don’t believe there ever was another such primary held in the City of New York,” recalled Breen years later. “That primary is worth a prominent place in history.” The day before the contest was to be held, adherents of both factions took up positions on all the approaches to the polling place in order to intimidate the other side’s voters and prevent them from reaching the ballot boxes; but because both sides were skilled in such tactics, “the line was made up alternately, or very nearly so, of Brennan and Dowling men.” Despite various fights and arrests for assault and battery, the opposing forces remained in place all night and all the next day until the polls opened on the evening of the second day, with sandwiches and beer provided for each man at the expense of their leaders. On primary night, Brennan’s ticket prevailed. But such primaries were the exception rather than the rule by the postbellum period.47
Election days in Five Points also became relatively tranquil. By the eve of the war, the ward’s new, more peaceful attitude toward elections inspired comments in the press. “The ‘Bloody Sixth,’ yesterday, did nothing to justify its sanguinary cognomen and character,” noted a surprised reporter from the Times in 1860. “The election dawned, and grew, and culminated in its precincts as calmly and gently as a Summer cloud. . . . The policemen stood around the polls like shepherds, and, to follow out the pastoral similie, flocks of voters sported and gamboled in their vicinity as inoffensively as lambs.” Election-related violence did not disappear completely during the war years. But quarrels tended to be small-scale confrontations rather than the neighborhood-wide free-for-alls of the 1840s and ‘50s.48
Physical intimidation ceased to be a significant factor in Five Points voting primarily because politicians perfected another means—electoral fraud—to control the election results. By 1870, the Sixth Ward had become almost as famous for voter fraud as it had been in the prewar years for political violence.
“EVERY CONCEIVABLE FORM OF FRAUD WAS PRACTICED”
Charges of widespread voter fraud had occasionally surfaced in New York in the antebellum period. During the 1830s and 1840s, party leaders often accused their adversaries of “importing” voters from outside the city and state to cast ballots in important contests. In response to the growing conviction among native-born Americans that immigrant thugs cast multiple ballots or exercised the franchise before receiving their naturalization papers, the state legislature in 1859 enacted one of the nation’s first voter-registration laws. Though Republicans felt certain that the new law would limit or eliminate fraudulent voting, politicos merely found new means to improperly influence the outcome of close elections.49
This became evident in 1863 with the contest for state Superior Court judge. Tammany nominated city judge John H. McCunn, a native of northern Ireland who had arrived in America as a teenaged sailor and worked as a cabinetmaker before entering the legal profession. Even many Democratic newspapers condemned the nomination, insisting that McCunn was a political hack wholly unqualified for the post. The Times labeled him “probably the worst man that ever offered himself as a candidate for a judgeship in any civilized country.” Despite the Democratic majority that year, McCunn received 20,000 fewer votes than the other Democratic candidates, and preliminary returns on election night indicated that he had lost the election by a mere handful of votes.50
Tammany leaders, not about to let a few dozen ballots stand between them and the judgeship, decided to carry the election by rigging the returns from Five Points. Results had already been released (albeit in preliminary form), so the vote counters altered their tally to make it appear as if a few numerals had simply been transposed or misread in the original returns. Revising the results without changing the total number of votes cast was no mean mathematical feat, but the Sixth Ward polling officials managed to pull it off:
Whether this scheme was hatched within Sixth Ward Democratic circles or imposed upon Five Pointers by other Tammany officials is impossible to determine. Coordination between the two must have been necessary. How the Sixth Warders managed to slip the changes past Republican ballot inspectors is also uncertain. Democrats might have resorted to bribery, though Matthew Brennan’s brother Owen, one of the ward’s Republican leaders, may have facilitated the subterfuge. In any case, that swing of 260 votes between McCunn and his nearest rival gave McCunn the election. He would soon play a key role in expanding election fraud to even greater heights.51
Over the remainder of the decade, voting fraud would reach levels never seen before or since in New York City. Revising the vote count continued to be a favorite ploy. Tweed later described to investigators how his election inspectors would “count the ballots in bulk, or without counting them announce the result in bulk, or change from one to the other, as the case may have been.” Another tactic was to permit those who were ineligible—especially immigrants who had not yet received their naturalization papers—to cast ballots anyway. The most popular method of fraudulent voting, however, was “repeating,” finding party loyalists who would cast multiple ballots at each election.52
All these strategies were pursued in the postbellum years to an extent and with a shamelessness unprecedented even in New York politics. This was especially true in Five Points. The New York Tribune in 1867 singled out the Fourth and Sixth Wards as those with the most fraudulent registrations. With a presidential election at stake the following year, the illegal voting in New York increased further still. “Never in the history of popular suffrage in any country was there so bold, general, well organized and thoroughly executed an attempt made” to carry an election “by frauds . . . as at the Presidential election of 1868,” wrote a Republican who subsequently investigated the contest. “. . . Every conceivable form of fraud was practiced, and every crime possible to be committed against the elective franchise, was perpetrated with the most unblushing effrontery.” The Nation agreed that “election frauds on such an enormous scale have never been witnessed in this country.”53
Fraudulent naturalizations were one method used to augment the Democratic vote. McCunn naturalized 27,897 people in 1868 and another Tammany judge, George G. Barnard, granted citizenship to 10,070 more. In order to process so many applications, these judges dispensed with all pretense of normal judicial procedure, banning the press from their courtrooms to prevent word of the irregular proceedings from leaking out. Journalists would have found it strange, for example, that a single New Yorker, Patrick Goff, was able to serve as a witness for 2,162 naturalization applicants in the autumn of 1868, verifying both their date of arrival in the United States and their good character. On three October days alone, the apparently well-known Goff served as a witness for more than 1,000 applicants. Had such judges merely been streamlining the citizenship process to ensure the naturalization of deserving immigrants before the election, one might excuse such behavior. But many of these naturalization documents were generated by Tammany specifically to make repeat
voting possible. One court clerk later testified that he brought forty naturalization certificates to Five Points on election day so that repeaters could use them to verify false identities and cast fraudulent ballots. Thousands of certificates were probably issued in the names of nonexistent immigrants, and others were given to immigrants who were not yet eligible.54
Voting more than once required registering more than once, and by 1868 Tammany leaders had systematized multiple registration. William H. Hendrick, for example, was hired in that year by Peter Norton (brother of state senator Mike Norton) to join a gang of repeaters operating in the Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Wards. In each ward, the men would visit the saloon of a Tammany leader, who would provide the gang members with the false names, addresses, and voting districts where they should register. Usually these addresses were buildings owned or occupied by the politicos themselves, so that if necessary the ward heelers could testify that the repeaters were their lessees. After registering about three times each in the Eighth and Fourteenth Wards, Hendrick and his partners proceeded to the Sixth Ward, where they visited the Bowery saloon of Alderman Edward Cuddy. From behind the bar, Cuddy produced a ledger book with hundreds of fictitious names and addresses. He gave each repeater a slip of paper with a name and Five Points address to use. They were told that after registering, they should return to Norton’s place to receive their pay and be sure on election day to vote at all the places they had registered. Subsequent testimony would reveal that hundreds—and perhaps more than one thousand men—had fraudulently registered in the Sixth Ward for the 1868 elections.55
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