BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (34 page)

CHAPTER 14

COUP D’ETAT

“ Oh, yes, I am always cheerful. You know the true philosophy of life is to take things just as they come. How was the clever definition of—let me see, I forget the name—of life? What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind. That’s my philosophy…. [S]ome of my newspaper enemies come out with a rumor that I was insane, mad, and all that, you know. That’s the only reason why I did it, I assure you….”

—Mayor A. Oakey Hall, speaking with a newsman, September 18, 1871.
¹

R
ICHARD Connolly, meanwhile, had reached the end of his rope. In his twenty years at Tammany Hall, Connolly had earned his nickname “Slippery Dick” by his cold-blooded navigation of rough-and-tumble backroom intrigues, double-crossing his friends at the drop of a hat. Now he felt his own head on the chopping block. Hall and Sweeny had turned against him and Tweed stood mute. Things had gone terribly wrong for him. Nine months earlier, Connolly had stood at the top of his game. He’d attended the Americus Club’s annual January ball and been portrayed by a society writer as the happiest of men: “Comptroller Connolly, one of the old school of Irish gentlemen, who know the value of social power and the fascinations of good manners. In the boxes he was gracious, on the [dance] floor he was gallant, and at the table he was trenchant. When called upon loudly for a speech he held up his fork reprovingly, and at once proceeded to discuss his little quail.”
²

Now, Connolly found himself threatened with jail, ruin, and disgrace.
³
His wife Mary pressed him to take a stand. Known as a “headstrong woman, with a fair share of ability, and a greater amount of pluck than women generally possess,”
⁴
Mary held the purse strings in the Connolly household. Connolly had placed most of his fortune in her name—over $3.5 million in unregistered United States bonds alone—and she controlled it firmly. Stories circulated that Mary Connolly insisted her husband not resign, that quitting would be a confession of guilt and disgrace the family.

The week grew increasingly hellish for him. Connolly came to work Tuesday morning, spent a few hours at his office, then was pulled into the daily Board of Apportionment meeting—having to spend more hours closeted with Tweed, Sweeny, and the mayor who’d just asked him publicly to resign.
⁵
After that, he’d returned to his office to find it crawling with reporters. He spent the afternoon behind closed doors, refusing to see anyone except his lawyers, his Deputy Comptroller Richard Storrs, and his bond broker George K. Sistaire (a member of the Astor “whitewash” committee). Midday, he sent word to the newsmen that he was preparing an answer to the mayor’s public demand for his scalp. When one reporter managed to snag him in the hallway, Connolly only shrugged and said he was 62 years old, of failing health and tired of public life, but he refused to quit until “fully vindicated.”
⁶

Late that afternoon, he released his answer to the mayor—a formal letter designed for printing in the newspapers. “I beg leave to differ from your Honor, in thinking the robbery of my office created any ‘sudden or unexpected emergency,’” Connolly wrote, his lawyers doubtless checking his every syllable. “I am happy to assure you that it has effected no serious mischief, the archives of the department containing ample abstracts of all the stolen papers.” Then he laid down his own marker. If he, Connolly, were guilty, then so too was the mayor. “My officials acts have been supervised and approved by your superior vigilance—so far as my administration is questioned, equal responsibility attaches to yourself…. I am unable to submit myself a vicarious sacrifice to satisfy the hungry appetite of adversaries for a victim.”

He signed the letter as a gentleman: “Very respectfully, your obedient servant. Richard B. Connolly.”
⁷

That afternoon, he felt the pressure rise another notch: 250 city employees, laborers from the Croton Waterworks and uptown streets, came marching downtown to the Courthouse and pushed their way into the building to demand their salaries, frozen by Judge Barnard’s injunction. The city owed each of them four to six weeks’ pay for work already performed. When police blocked them from going upstairs, they began shouting “Give us our money” and “Our families must have food” and “Why don’t Connolly sign the payrolls if he isn’t going to resign?” Connolly was out at the time and police finally drove the crowd outside. “If we don’t get our money we will dig a grave for Slippery Dick,” one of them grumbled while skulking away.
⁸

When Connolly came back and heard about the incident, he recognized the game afoot. His enemies were trying to destroy him politically by blaming him for the workers’ plight. He immediately sat down and, ignoring Barnard’s injunction, he wrote out a warrant providing money for the mens’ salaries, signed it, and sent it to the mayor for approval. When nobody could find Oakey Hall, Connolly personally took the warrant and walked it across the street to the Broadway Bank and tried to draw the money on his own signature, but the bank teller refused. He was terrified of violating protocol, he said, with so many investigations afoot.
⁹

Then, returning to his office, Connolly heard the latest rumor—that if he didn’t resign, police were preparing to arrest him for malfeasance.

About this time, he finally snapped. Enough was enough. Richard Connolly was nobody’s fool and nobody’s scapegoat. He had friends. He didn’t have to swallow this abuse. He’d kept up his large following in the Irish community and had contacts among the city’s bankers. That night, he finally took matters into his own hands: He waited until after dark to avoid being seen. Then, traveling alone, he threaded his way across town to the home of an old acquaintance he hadn’t seen in years: William Havemeyer—the retired sugar merchant, former New York mayor, and now leader of the reformers who’d chaired the mass meeting at Cooper Union and been appointed co-chair of the reformers’ Committee of Seventy. Connolly as a young man had once worked as clerk in a bank Havemeyer owned and they’d stayed in touch ever since. Now he needed the older man’s advice.

Havemeyer enjoyed telling the story of what happened that night: “One evening Connolly came to see me. I knew he would come,” he explained. “He said they all wanted him to resign, and that the pressure was very strong. I gave him two pieces of advice. I told him; if he were innocent, not to resign, because it would be taken as evidence of guilt, and I told him, if he were guilty, not to resign, because… every little cur about the office would besmear him to curry favor with his successor.”
¹⁰

They spoke for several hours, until nearly 11 p.m. Connolly told Havemeyer all about his problems: the internal bickering within the Ring, the efforts to destroy him. He said nothing about his own crimes, the complex schemes he’d devised to skim “percentages” from city contractors, but Havemeyer didn’t press him. At some point, a messenger interrupted them; Sweeny and Hall had sent word insisting they needed to see Connolly again right away—probably to renew their arm-twisting.

Connolly said he had to go. But before leaving, Havemeyer gave him one more piece of advice: He should get himself a good lawyer, in fact the best lawyer in New York City. He should go and talk to Samuel J. Tilden. Tilden would be glad to see him.

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Tilden had followed the Tweed drama from his perches on Wall Street and Gramercy Park, but only at a distance. He’d stayed away from the Cooper Union reform meeting on September 4 and, if he played any behind-the-scenes role in the Barnard injunction, he left no record of it. He read newspaper accounts of the new Committee of Seventy, how it met every day but accomplished nothing, but he didn’t join it. “They got together and talked a great deal,” complained even Havemeyer, the group’s co-chairman, “everybody had a new thing to propose, and it became a regular debating club.”
¹¹
Tilden heard the gossip about the rift between Oakey Hall and Dick Connolly and enjoyed the latest joke: “When rogues fall out, honest men get their due.”
¹²

In early September, he began laying his plans. He sent a circular to 26,000 state party leaders about their upcoming convention in Rochester and placed the Tammany frauds atop the agenda: “Wherever the gangrene of corruption has reached the Democratic party we must take a knife and cut it out by the roots,” he said.
¹³
But beyond this, he kept to himself. When rumors in mid-September connected him to secret talks over Connolly’s plight at the Comptroller’s Office, he denied them flatly: “I know nothing about it. I have had nothing to do with it,” he told a reporter. “The statement, so far as it concerns me, is a pure fiction. I had no conversation whatever, directly or indirectly, with any one, or any connection with any negotiation, either for the resignation of Mr. Connolly, or for the appointment of anybody in his place.”
¹⁴

His friends Manton Marble and August Belmont cornered him at the Manhattan Club for advice on the situation, but Tilden gave them none.

Then, one afternoon, opportunity knocked. A messenger interrupted Tilden at his Wall Street office with word that someone wanted to see him, Richard B. Connolly himself. Connolly had sent a friend to ask for an appointment. Tilden answered immediately: Yes, he said, he’d be glad to see the embattled comptroller. They should meet as soon as possible, but not in his office. They needed to meet someplace private where they wouldn’t be seen, such as Tilden’s own home. The next morning would be fine.

It must have been an odd moment: Tilden and Richard Connolly, the stiff Swallowtail lawyer and the big, back-slapping Irish pol, sitting alone together in Tilden’s Gramercy Park brownstone, perhaps sipping tea, talking face to face in quiet tones, looking out the window at elegant horse-drawn carriages on the pretty tree-lined street. Tilden and Connolly had met over the years but rarely mixed. They belonged to separate worlds. Connolly held a membership in Tilden’s upper crust Manhattan Club but seldom came; he preferred the cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking crowd at Tammany or Tweed’s Americus lodge. Connolly probably needed a few minutes to make himself comfortable; once he did, he gave Tilden his proposition: He was in a fix and needed a good lawyer and Havemeyer had recommended Tilden as the best. Would he do it?

Tilden answered quickly: No, he said. “I could not be his counsel, or assume any fiduciary relations toward him,” he explained later. Tilden had bigger plans and Connolly was just one piece on his chessboard. Being Connolly’s lawyer might get in the way. But that hardly ended the matter. Tilden had an important message for Connolly:
¹⁵
He must
not
resign his post as comptroller. His office was vital to the reformers, and Connolly owed them a duty to hold it. His quitting would only give Tweed and Oakey Hall the chance to fill it with one of their own crooked friends. Instead, if Connolly wanted Sam Tilden’s help, he’d have to make a clean breast and surrender himself to the law. That meant giving up his power, his patronage, and any leadership role in the local party.

For a lifelong politician like Connolly, these terms must have sounded steep. Still, he swallowed and agreed. When Tilden asked for a few hours’ time to develop a plan, he promised to meet him again at Tilden’s house that night. This time, they’d expand the group to include Havemeyer and Connolly’s personal lawyers.

After Connolly left his home, Tilden headed downtown to Wall Street and his law office to study the problem. He quickly found what he wanted: There was an obscure provision in the city charter—Tweed’s charter—that allowed the comptroller temporarily to transfer all his powers to a deputy while keeping his own job at the same time—a routine device to assure continuity in case the comptroller decided to take a vacation in Europe or had to leave work for a few weeks to nurse a cold. This gave Tilden an idea: Under this provision, Connolly could hold onto the comptrollership—blocking the mayor from replacing him in the office—but surrender real power to a deputy hand-picked by the reformers. This new deputy would become
de facto
the new comptroller and the mayor could not fire him. Tilden would be taking Tweed’s own charter, which made Tweed’s and Connolly’s jobs untouchable, and using it against them.

And by capturing the Comptroller’s Office—the linchpin of city finance—Tilden could effectively checkmate Tammany Hall. Tweed and his crowd wouldn’t be able to spend a dime of taxpayer money without his blessing.

To play the role of new deputy comptroller, though, Tilden would need a person with special qualities: solid reform credentials, knowledge of city government, and plenty of backbone to stand up against harassment and threats. Most important, he’d need someone fiercely loyal to him. He happened to have just the right person in mind: Andrew Haswell Green. Green, the longtime Central Park commissioner recently pushed aside by Peter Sweeny, had been Tilden’s close friend for thirty years. Both were life-long bachelors and, in 1845, they’d been law partners for a short time. Green had been itching to get back into government and, since his recent run-in with Sweeny, he had no sympathy for Tammany Hall.