BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (5 page)

BOOK: BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York
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For this delicate diplomacy, the supervisors now voted to appoint a special committee of two: Orion Blunt and Big Bill Tweed.

Tweed and Blunt crossed the Hudson River one night in August and rode south by train, traveling in secret. On reaching the wartime Capital, they rode through mud streets cramped with army traffic and soon found themselves ushered into the War Department building on 17th Street—a beehive of activity with military officers dashing urgently with bulletins from the battlefront. At the personal office of the secretary, they found waiting to meet them Stanton himself and James Barnet Fry, the Army Provost Marshal-General responsible for administering the draft nationwide.

Stanton, a veteran Ohio lawyer with gray-streaked beard, spectacles, and prominent eyes, showed them in and gave them his full attention. Sitting face to face with Lincoln’s war ministers, Orison Blunt probably spoke first. As a Republican whose factories sold rifles to the War Department, he spoke the same political dialect as Stanton and Fry. But apparently he turned to Tweed to make the case. “The committee [Blunt and Tweed] were received with great courtesy,” they reported later, and the four men had a “full interchange of views.”
33
Tweed probably addressed Stanton with the same frank directness he’d perfected through years of Tammany back-room huddles, looking him in the eye, patting his shoulder, sharing a confidence. Stanton

listened with the weary patience borne after three years of bloodshed and frustration.

In fact, Lincoln and Stanton had been despairing for weeks at any chance of finding a reliable partner in New York City to help them implement the draft. Governor Seymour had resisted their every overture and Mayor Opdyke remained paralyzed in squabbles with city aldermen. Now this man Tweed had given them an answer. General John Dix, Lincoln’s military overseer, who knew the political currents of Manhattan as well as anyone, had already put in a private good word on their behalf: “Tammany Hall, representing more than half the [Democratic Party], will stand by the government,” he’d written to Stanton in late July, after the shock from the riots had begun to

subside.
34

Whether it was Dix’s private advice, Lincoln’s instructions, Blunt’s political ties, or Tweed’s own charm that won him over, Stanton bought the line. He agreed to the deal. Tammany Hall, through the county supervisors, would run Lincoln’s August draft in New York City. Tweed’s plan made practical sense and Tweed came across as someone he could trust. Stanton “highly commended [the plan] for its patriotism, and as evincing the determination of the citizens of the city and county of New York to aid and sustain the

government in crushing this wicked rebellion, and in vindicating the majesty of the law,” they could later report.
35
They’d become partners in a strange marriage.
F
OOTNOTE
36

With Stanton’s blessing, Tweed and Blunt now hurried back to New York to put their plan in effect. The August draft came and went. Army offices around the city held lotteries, drawing large crowds to watch the spinning wooden wheels pick name after name. On its eve, Governor Seymour warned citizens against disorder and General Dix stationed army troops on the streets, but they weren’t needed. Instead, Tammany vouched for the draft; at every office, its Sachems stood side by side with army officers in their crisp blue uniforms. The wooden wheels selected over a thousand names, and virtually every one of them appealed to the new County Substitute and Relief Committee—Tweed’s committee. In the seventh ward by the East River, the army held its drawing at the old police station at 228 Broome Street and, after a few spins, the wheel actually selected the name of William M. Tweed, Boss of Tammany Hall. The announcement sparked a loud, good-natured cheer from the men in the room.
37
Tweed, if anyone, would have paid the $300 fee from his own pocket to avoid joining the infantry.

Then, all September, Tweed’s committee met in the state Supreme Court chambers at 65 Duane Street, a few doors down from Tweed’s private office. Tweed or Orison Blunt personally questioned almost every appellant under oath. “[I]f the duties of the Board are arduous they appear to be eminent and fair… invariably insisting that the would-be exempt shall first secure a substitute ere he is let off,” a
New York Herald
reporter wrote after sitting through hours of sessions.
38
The
New-York Times
similarly complimented the committee members for “performing their duties with eminent satisfaction to all parties.”
39
By September 29, out of 1,034 draftees appealing to them, Tweed’s committee had found substitutes for 983, another 49 were excused, and only two chose to join the army and go to war.
40

It was a remarkable accomplishment. Lincoln got his soldiers, the city had order, and the poor had relief from a law blatantly unfair to them. “No money, no trust was ever more honestly administered than the loan of the Board of Supervisors,” crowed the journal destined soon to become Tweed’s most bitter enemy—the
New-York Times
.
41

At the same time, a few blocks away, two of Tweed’s Tammany Hall proteges launched aggressive prosecutions against the July lawbreakers. District Attorney A. Oakey Hall and John Hoffman, the presiding judge of New York’s Court of General Sessions—called the Recorder—won indictments against dozens of rioters and put them on immediate public trial. The daily spectacle of looters, arsonists, pickpockets, muggers, and killers from every ethnic background paraded in handcuffs through Hoffman’s courtroom and sentenced to jail terms had a dramatic impact—a show of swift, tough law enforcement, even if juries had to release dozens of offenders because the cases against them were poorly prepared. Newspapers carried long transcripts of the daily court actions, soon making Hall and Hoffman two of the most popular political figures in New York.

Through the last two years of the Civil War, Tweed would position Tammany squarely with the Union. His county recruitment drive for the army would attract scandal: abusive bounty brokers, unqualified soldiers—either prisoners from local jails or immigrants literally straight from New York Harbor—and middlemen stealing fortunes in graft. But it hardly raised an eyebrow compared to the epidemic of war profiteering that had infected the country. Crooked contractors were charging Uncle Sam sky-high prices for everything from diseased horses to defective pistols, spoiled food, and frayed, tattered uniforms. In one case, bribed Brooklyn Navy Yard officers signed receipts for an estimated million dollars in non-existent hardware—nails, paint, and tools—paid for but never delivered.
F
OOTNOTE
By contrast, corruption aside, Tweed’s committee in the last twenty months of the war could boast of paying 116,382 recruits for joining Lincoln’s army.
43

New Yorkers now trusted him, and inside the club his Tammany braves glorified him, electing him a Sachem in August 1863 on top of his chairmanship of the general committee. “He is a live man, in the most vigorous sense—energetic, industrious, courageous and indefatigable,” John Clancy wrote of Tweed that summer in Tammany’s newspaper, the
Leader
. “His vitality is felt in every movement with which he is connected, and he is withal a true man in the highest degree… He never turned his back on a friend or a foe.”
44

For now, the Boss of Tammany was a hero in New York City. Next to this, a few hearsay complaints about ballot box fraud, City Hall graft, and bribery at the Board of Supervisors seemed like very, very small things.

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

Thomas Nast, short and stocky with dark hair, small goatee beard, and boyish face with pointed nose and sharp eyes, stepped crisply along the sidewalk at Franklin Square near Pearl Street one morning in early November 1864—just sixteen months after the draft riots—carrying a large white folder under his arm, then entered the five-story stone edifice of Harper & Brothers, by far the largest building on the street.
45
He climbed the circular iron stairway to the editorial offices upstairs. All the while he noticed peoples’ eyes following him.

Nast enjoyed his extraordinary fame: Harper and Brothers in 1864 was America’s largest publishing house, its biggest book producer and home to its two most popular magazines,
Harper’s Weekly
and
Harper’s Magazine
.
Harper’s Weekly
alone boasted a regular circulation of over 100,000 and a readership estimated at half a million; copies passed hand to hand, especially among soldiers at the front. The company employed over 500 machinists, editors, clerks, artists, writers, and arrangers, making it one of the largest businesses in New York City. And Thomas Nast was Harper’s single most famous employee. Readers across the country, North and South, recognized the crisp “
Th. Nast
” scribbled in tiny neat letters at the bottom of his regular cartoons in
Harper’s Weekly
. They might ignore the scholarly essays penned by editor George W. Curtis but they always jumped ahead to Nast’s eye-catching pictures. What surprised people most on seeing Nast, though, was how young he looked. He was just 24 years old.

Nast’s Civil War drawings had made him a sensation. Since joining the
Harpers Weekly
staff in August 1862, he’d produced a blizzard of work—over thirty featured illustrations in 1863 alone. His debut cover in September 1862, “A Gallant Color-Bearer”—showing a dying Union soldier passing his flag to comrades—had captured the country’s wartime mood, its stark moral shades of right and wrong, courage and cowardice. Nast struck emotions in his work. He vilified Southerners so cuttingly, showing Confederate soldiers burning the land or harassing women and prisoners, that letters to
Harper’s Weekly
from Dixie often contained death threats. His drawings of the home front—wives and children praying at windowsills for absent husbands alongside images of soldiers at the front dreaming of home—touched deep chords. His “Santa Claus in Camp” in late 1862 showed cheery old Saint Nick in stars and stripes handing out gifts to homesick troops.

Fame had come easily to young Tommy Nast, a favorite child of doting parents. Born in 1840 in a military barracks in Landau, Germany, a small town near Alsace, he was the younger of two children. Nast’s father had played trombone in the ninth Bavarian Regiment Band. Settling the family in New York City when Tom was six years old, his father had joined the local Philharmonic Society and made a living playing at Burton’s Theatre on Chambers Street. Young Tommy spoke no English at first—he had to learn it nearly from scratch—but he enjoyed carrying his father’s trombone to

the theatre for the chance to sit by Papa on a miniature seat in the orchestra pit.

Nast loved music, but he quickly showed another talent. He began picking up pencils and drawing pictures almost as soon as he could talk. As a child, he spent hours sketching anything that caught his eye: a favorite toy, Papa’s musician friends, city streets and family members, even himself. His schoolteachers despaired: “Go finish your picture,” one said. “You will never learn to read or figure.”
46
Still, as a thirteen-year-old, Nast had drawn a portrait of Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian revolutionary who’d visited New York in 1851 to rousing cheers, so animated and lifelike that his school master put it on display. Nast saw the famed singer Jenny Lind perform for a huge crowd at New York’s Castle Garden, at the tip of the Battery, and drew a portrait of her as well.

His talent won Nast admission to New York’s respected Academy of Design on 13th Street near Broadway. Here he learned technique under teachers like German painter Theodore Kaufman and illustrator Alfred Fredericks, who jokingly called Nast the “little fat Dutch boy” but cultivated his interest in journalism. In 1856, just fifteen years old and fresh from school, Nast snagged an artist’s job with
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
.
Leslie’s Illustrated
was a new journal launched by a
London Illustrated News
veteran who had brought to New York the latest technology sweeping Europe: commercial-scale wood engraving making possible a new generation of mass-circulation illustrated newspapers.
F
OOTNOTE
A revolution was changing the face of graphic arts in America in the 1850s and Tom Nast was arriving just on time to become its first major celebrity.

BOOK: BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York
12.63Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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