BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (2 page)

Nast’s final drawing of Tweed before the Boss’s death.

Harper’s Weekly, January 26, 1878.

But self-styled reformers rejected any pity for Tweed. They’d won a great victory by overthrowing Tweed’s corrupt machine and refused to compromise now over misplaced sentiment for a sick old man. The
New-York Times
had dramatically unearthed and disclosed the Tweed Ring’s secret accounts—the greatest journalistic scoop to that time, directly leading to Tweed’s demise. Now it led the assault: “Such talents as [Tweed] had were devoted to cheating the people and robbing the public Treasury,” insisted its lead editorial the next day, adding “his tastes were gross, his life impure, and his influence, both political and personal, more pernicious than that of any other public man of his generation.”
¹⁴

Thomas Nast, the brilliant young illustrator whose cartoons in
Harper’s Weekly
had made Tweed a laughingstock to New York’s illiterate masses, still featured the ex-Boss in his weekly drawings. These days he portrayed Tweed as a tiny parakeet—no longer the fierce Tammany Tiger but instead a pathetic “jailbird” with prison stripes on his feathers and a ball and chain locked to his ankle. Nast’s final drawing of Tweed, published in January 1878, had mocked the appeals for Tweed’s release by showing miniature jailbird Tweed gripped in a giant hand called “Prison,” ready to crush him at a whim. “[I]f it be right that men should be punished for great offenses, there was nothing unkind, unjust, or unreasonable in the punishment of Tweed,”
¹⁵
echoed a
Harper’s Weekly
editorial that week. It was right that Tweed should die in jail a broken man, others said. “Without his boldness and skill the gigantic Ring robberies would not have been committed,” concluded James Gordon Bennett, Jr.’s
New York Herald
.
¹⁶
The “finger of scorn,” as Tom Nast had drawn it, must follow him to the grave.

William Magear Tweed had left enormous footprints on his city; he had built as grandly as he’d stolen. His monuments dotted every corner of Manhattan—the new Brooklyn Bridge rising across the East River, the opulent new County Courthouse by City Hall, the widened, paved streets up Broadway and around Central Park. Just as striking were shadows of his crimes —the huge debt and ruined credit that would haunt city finances for a generation, the broken lives and shattered trust of former friends. Tweed had defined a grimy reality of American politics, perfecting forms of graft and voting-box abuse mimicked by political bosses for the next century, but never on so grand a scale. His fall had created a new role for a free press in the public arena, and his legal persecution had set a tone for political scandals lasting generations.

Fittingly, his most famous quotation is something he never said, at least publicly—“As long as I count the ballots, what are you going to do about it.” Thomas Nast had put the words in his mouth in a
Harper’s Weekly
cartoon in 1871.
¹⁷

The morning after Tweed died in jail, newspapers crammed their front pages with stories of his life and times. Politicians rushed to claim credit for having a hand in his downfall; only a rare friend dared to wax nostalgic for old Tammany Hall. People bought extra copies of the newspapers to save for children and grandchildren; they sensed the passing of a monumental figure. Tweed’s story would dominate church sermons and saloon arguments for weeks. “The career of Tweed was in many respects one of the most remarkable known to our peculiar land of peculiar institutions,” the
Washington Post
noted.
¹⁸
How could one raised so high fall so low?

History would blacken Tweed’s name, portraying him as the worst municipal thief, the most corrupt politician, the craftiest ballot-box fixer—a stereotype used to tarnish entire generations of American political professionals. Already, he’d become a caricature: More people knew Tweed as the comical thug in Nast’s Harper’s Weekly cartoons, the shameless villain in the New-York Times exposes, or the legendary wire-puller of Tammany Hall than as the vital flesh and blood person who’d walked the streets of Gotham for fifty-five years. He left a strange puzzle. Except for his stealing, Tweed would have been a great man; but had he been honest, he wouldn’t have been Tweed and would not have left nearly so great a mark.

• PART I •

RISE

CHAPTER 2

RIOTS

“ As the representative of the Seventh Ward, I will not be bound by a paper from Judge Campbell or any other judge…. I will never permit [them] to direct me how to think or vote, and will continue to do my own thinking and voting despite injunctions or any other papers.”

—Tweed, urging fellow aldermen to defy a judge’s order forbidding their approval of a franchise to run streetcars on Broadway, December 28, 1852. The franchise motion carried; the judge, Campbell, cited Tweed and fourteen other aldermen for contempt.
¹

T
WEED never joined the Union army during the Civil War. He was 38 years old when fighting started in 1861, too old for the infantry though not for the officer corps. He stayed behind, but he didn’t escape. Instead, the war with all its rage and violence came to Tweed where he lived in New York City.

-------------------------

New York Governor Horatio Seymour was spending a long summer weekend at the New Jersey seashore on Monday morning, July 13, 1863, traveling by carriage along the sand dunes near Long Branch, when two riders on horseback in military uniforms overtook him. One of the horsemen handed him a telegram which he immediately tore open and read: Violence had broken out in New York City. Seymour’s presence was requested immediately. Sparking the outbreak—the military draft.
²

The news didn’t surprise Seymour. As governor, Seymour had warned President Abraham Lincoln for weeks against imposing the unpopular new draft law on New York City. People wouldn’t stand for it, he’d argued. Seymour had seen New Yorkers’ views turn ugly against Lincoln’s war after two years of carnage and defeats. Whatever patriotic surge had followed the initial Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in 1861 had long since disappeared among poor families who saw husbands, fathers, and brothers butchered in Virginia battlefields under Lincoln’s incompetent generals. The draft—the first federal conscription in America, enacted only that March after Washington had grown alarmed over a sharp drop-off in volunteers—had become a special sore point. One enrolling officer in Indiana had already been shot dead by opponents that month trying to enforce it.

Seymour, a 53-year old Peace Democrat, had already made political hay by blasting Lincoln over the draft. He’d declared the law unconstitutional and demanded a court test before a single local conscript was called. He’d railed against the law’s most hated feature, the “commutation” rule that allowed sons of wealthy families to buy their way out for $300—an impossible amount for most of New York’s working poor. It only again proved that Lincoln’s “rich man’s war” against the South had become a “poor man’s fight,” the organized killing of northern Irishmen to save and coddle southern blacks.
³

Enemies called Seymour a “copperhead”—like the poisonous snake, a favorite insult flung at anti-war Democrats—and New York had more than any other Northern city.

These passions had reached a breaking point in New York by mid-1863. The city’s population had exploded in size since the 1830s, more than tripling to 800,000. Now, more than half its residents were foreign-born, mostly Irish and German immigrants crammed into teeming slums amid grinding poverty. Many immigrants had volunteered and fought bravely for the Union, but they saw no honor in a draft, only hardship for workingmen with families to feed. Irishmen particularly felt no quarrel with Southerners and no sympathy for blacks or slaves who, once freed, easily could come north to New York and steal their jobs.

Just weeks earlier, Irish workers had gone on strike at New York’s riverside docks demanding better wages, only to see black strikebreakers brought in from Southern states and protected at bayonet-point by Union army soldiers. These tensions had caused even Horace Greeley, the Republican firebrand publisher of the
New York Tribune
, abolitionist and war hawk, to urge delay in starting the draft.

Speaking at Brooklyn’s Academy of Music on July 4, Seymour had fanned the flames again by criticizing Lincoln’s military failures and proclaimed “the bloody, treasonable, revolutionary doctrine of public necessity”—the basis for the draft law—“could be used by a mob as well as by a government.”
⁴
Critics later would call Seymour’s speech a call to arms, as if the riots a few days later were Seymour’s own invention.

News the next week of a Union military victory at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, brought little comfort; long lists of dead and crippled soldiers filled the newspapers, some 23,040 Union boys dead, wounded and missing—more seas of blood for Lincoln’s war.

Army officials had ignored Seymour’s warnings and decided to begin the draft on Saturday morning, July 11, at their office on Third Avenue and 46th street—an uptown neighborhood they considered safe and loyal. They spun a large wooden wheel to pick names of conscripts, which were then printed in the newspapers on Sunday. An unsettling quiet had hung over the city that Sabbath as troublemakers had a full day to sit around, stew at the news, and plan.

Now, on Monday morning, July 13, the street gave its answer.

Horatio Seymour, on receiving the news in his carriage by the New Jersey seashore, decided to leave at once for New York City. But he chose to travel alone and refused to let his nephew accompany him. Riots, after all, were nothing new to New York
^F
OOTNOTE
and, as governor, he’d only be taking a back seat to police unless things got out of hand. Besides, the early reports Monday gave little warning of how ugly this latest outburst would turn.

Seymour took a wayward route. Instead of catching a direct steamboat from Long Branch to Manhattan or an immediate train and ferry through Jersey City—either of which would have gotten him to the city by mid-afternoon that day—he traveled inland, stopped and spent the night in New Jersey, and then waited until mid-morning the next day, Tuesday, July 14, before riding a steam-ferry from Jersey City across the Hudson to Manhattan, hoping perhaps the crisis would have blown over by then. Instead, things had deteriorated badly.

As Seymour reached the city and stepped onto the pier, he heard sounds of battle from all directions—gunshots, screams, breaking glass, angry voices. He saw smoke billowing from rows of burning buildings and smelled the acrid odor of gunpowder. Squads of police ran in all directions. Rioters had cut telegraph lines and crippled city communications—panic and rumor had replaced logic and sense. Seymour followed a small entourage to a line of carriages that snaked through narrow streets to Broadway and then north to the St. Nicholas Hotel near Spring Street where he kept a room. Here, Seymour walked past rows of police guards; inside, he found New York Mayor George Opdyke, a 58-year old Republican millionaire dry-goods merchant, tall and gaunt, who’d been elected a year earlier with no political back-ground beyond a single term in the state legislature. Opdyke had fled City Hall the prior morning fearing mob violence and moved his office to the Hotel.

Sitting with Opdyke behind closed doors, Seymour now heard the police, militia, and sheriff’s office give their reports. They painted an awful picture: When army officials had resumed the draft Monday morning, July 13, bands of mostly Irish workmen had come prepared to stop them. They’d cut telegraph lines and congregated initially at the draft office on Third Avenue. There, led by a squad of volunteer firemen, they’d forced their way inside, smashed the selection wheel and set the building ablaze. Soon, the same firemen who’d led the initial charge—the so-called “Black Joke Company”—were fighting the mob to control flames spreading to surrounding buildings. Crowds then began murderous rampages through the city, burning shops, smashing windows, looting, and killing. They made blacks a special target, attacking and burning the Colored Orphan’s Asylum on 43rd Street and lynching several black men from street-lamps. They’d threatened the Park Row buildings of the
New York Tribune
and
New-York Times
—both supporters of Lincoln and the war—and even mobbed Mayor Opdyke’s house on Fifth Avenue. Early that morning, they’d recognized Police Superintendent John Kennedy walking on the street and beat him senseless.

Uptown, New York’s wealthiest residents fled by the thousands, driven to panic as rioters targeted posh Republican homes for looting and window breaking. The rich packed rail cars, steamboats, stagecoaches, and any other conveyance headed across the Hudson or East Rivers for safety in Brooklyn, Westchester, or New Jersey. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Only weeks earlier, Seymour had sent the bulk of New York’s own state militia—over 16,000 armed men—marching into Pennsylvania to join in opposing Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the North, culminating in the Gettysburg bloodbath. As a result, the city stood unguarded.

Tuesday morning brought no let-up; the battle had resumed with even greater violence. Rioters fought police from behind street barricades they’d built; sounds of screams and gunfire filled the air along with the stench of burning wood and flesh. With no army to protect them and police badly outnumbered, citizens at the Stock Exchange, the Merchants Exchange, and the Union League had organized volunteers to take up rifles to defend their neighborhoods.

Horatio Seymour appeared shaken at the news. But after an hour or so, he seemed to find himself. As the highest-ranking government official present, he decided to act. He stood up from his seat, walked downstairs to the lobby of the hotel and stepped out into the street where people could see him; he heard a few cheers, then began to walk the dozen blocks down Broadway to City Hall as other officials straggled behind. Seymour recognized that many of these rioters were his own followers. Perhaps they’d listen to reason; perhaps they’d listen to him. He had decided to appeal directly, personally, to the mob and ask them to stop.