BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (7 page)

Samuel J. Tilden.

The seven Committee members
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had arrived from Washington, D.C. in mid-December and taken rooms at New York’s Astor House on Broadway at Barclay Street, the elegant six-story hotel built by John Jacob Astor in the 1830s that featured central indoor heat and one of the city’s best eateries. Some congressmen brought along their wives to enjoy the Christmas shopping on Broadway’s “Ladies Mile” below Madison Square with its famous stores like A.T. Stewart’s, Lord & Taylor, R.H. Macy’s, and Tiffany’s jewelry shop. City scions like William E. Dodge, founder of Phelps, Dodge & Company, feted the congressmen with private receptions.
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America had prospered since the Civil War, and New York had gobbled up more than its share. Its population had surged past 900,000 and construction clogged streets as workmen erected a generation of elegant new buildings: the new Stock Exchange on Wall Street, A.T. Stewart’s “Cast Iron Palace” on Union Square, spectacular mansions along Fifth Avenue, and the new County Courthouse aside City Hall. This wealth stood in stark contrast to the swarms of cold, crippled veterans begging for handouts and the squalor of slums like notorious Five Points, a stone’s throw from City Hall.

Ships by the hundreds filled its harbor: steamers, schooners, sloops, brigs, and barks from around the world. Gray smoke rising from chimneys of thousands of small factories, breweries, tanneries, and steam-cars tinged the winter sky above rows of Manhattan rooftops, the steeple of Trinity Church towering higher than them all. On Wall Street, New York’s financial markets gushed with wealth. Industries from railroads to telegraphs to textiles, each experiencing dramatic post-war booms, all brought their cash to New York’s Stock Exchange that, in turn, became a battleground for elaborate power struggles among new corporate titans. The Erie Railway War, 1868’s biggest, had pitted 74-year-old “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt, Wall Street’s richest operator, against two unscrupulous upstarts named Jay Gould and James Fisk, Jr. in a fierce battle of watered stock, dueling court orders, and legislative bribery, all for control of a company lamented as the “Scarlet Woman of Wall Street” after years of corrupt management. Stock traders—“a jolly, good-hearted, free-and-easy class of men” to one contemporary—made fortunes in a day and lost them just as quickly.
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The congressional investigators already had finished two weeks of testimony by the time Samuel Tilden arrived at the federal courthouse that late December morning; their witnesses so far had painted a damning picture. Robert Murray, the local United States marshal, a stern, clean-shaven man known for supplying Washington friends with the best cigars and brandy entering New York harbor,
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had detailed the scandal’s most eye-catching feature—an explosion of naturalizations, many fraudulent, turning thousands of greenhorn immigrants into instant certified voting citizens. “I take for granted that the stuffing of ballot-boxes is as great a crime against the law as the commission of burglary or highway robbery,” Murray had told the committee on its opening day. The New York police, he said, obviously did not agree.
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Ballot box stuffing, gang intimidation, and repeat voting all had been long staples of New York “democracy,” but the immigrant fraud was new. The city swarmed with foreign-born in 1868; long-term residents found the immigrant neighborhoods a confusion of strange languages and dialects. Tweed himself estimated that foreign-born constituted half to three-fifths of the vote that year in New York City.
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Over five million immigrants had reached American shores in the 1850s and 1860s. Since the Civil War, record numbers of newcomers entered the city through Castle Garden each month
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—English, French, Swiss, Swedes, and Danes, but by far the majority being Irish and Germans, crammed into the city’s poorest wards.

Starting that October, Murray had begun tracing rumors of fake citizenship papers—obtained without the immigrant’s actually appearing in court or swearing the required oath. The papers were being sold under-the-table by a man named Rosenberg, later identified in newspapers as a “Teutonic Israelite,” operating from a lager-beer saloon at 6 Centre Street near the courthouse behind a sign reading
“Deutsche Amerikanische Demokratische Naturalizations Committee.”
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Murray had sent agents to Rosenberg’s Centre Street saloon. They’d purchased dozens of the papers made out to fictitious names, each costing about $2 and carrying an official signature from the New York Supreme Court. Rosenberg himself had bragged to one agent of selling over 7,000 certificates but complained he’d kept only pennies of the fees, the rest going to bribe court officials and political higher-ups.

Murray had arrested Rosenberg on federal charges just two weeks before Election Day and locked him away in the Ludlow Street Jail.
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When friendly newspapers began to dig deeper, they found local judges undeterred by the one arrest, stamping out new citizens at an alarming pace. One in particular, George Barnard of the State Supreme Court, had been running a virtual factory: “a system was established whereby four oaths could be administered at once…. Six or eight [immigrants] put their hands on the Bible—some put the right hand and some the left—and as many more place hands on another Bible.” Many of the oath-takers lied, were underage, didn’t meet the residency requirement, didn’t understand the questions, or were imposters.
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The image of hordes of Irish Catholic vagabonds, fresh off the boat, cheating the system by the thousands and herded like cattle to vote the Tammany ticket, rankled old-time, affluent, taxpaying New Yorkers who saw their own votes being nullified by intruders. Beyond the usual anti-immigrant griping, they began voicing a new complaint: that universal suffrage itself, a reform of the 1840s, had failed in cities like New York, allowing mobs of ignorant sheep to prop up corrupt governments. Local New York judges stood for election and George Barnard specifically ran on Tweed’s Tammany ticket. No wonder he’d been so helpful, critics charged. Ultimately, the congressional investigators would find that local judges like Barnard had processed 41,112 new citizenships in the weeks before that year’s election—a startling number comprising almost a third of all the votes cast in New York City that year. They’d claim that thousands of additional fake papers had been issued and used to doctor registration lists.

And that wasn’t all: The prior afternoon, William Hendrick, an unemployed saloon gambler, had told the congressmen how he’d been part of a “gang of repeaters”—forty men who’d met in a liquor store on Bleecker Street just before Election Day, been lavished with whiskey, then went out and registered to vote up to twenty-five times each, using fake names and addresses provided by local party fixers.
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During the hearings, the congressmen would hear dozens more such stories. Repeat voting might be an old game, but never before had they heard it done so brazenly and on such an organized large scale.

Samuel Tilden, of course, considered himself far above any such grimy street tricks. He was a nationally prominent figure. Ushered into the committee’s private room that morning, he found himself facing four congressmen across a wooden table with a nearby clerk. The committee was meeting in a grand jury room designed for secrecy—they’d decided to take testimony behind closed doors. Witnesses had to appear alone without counsel. Michael Kerr, a red-bearded Indiana trial lawyer and senior Democrat on the panel, had been working for weeks with local Democrats to refute the fraud charges. He had arranged for Tilden and Tweed to come today and plead their innocence. But Tilden had a special problem—what we today would call a “smoking gun.”

“State to the Committee what relations you bore during the last political campaign to the political parties in this State,” Kerr asked Tilden once he’d taken his seat and sworn an oath.
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“I was chairman of the [D]emocratic State committee.” Samuel Tilden had a round, clean-shaven face, short hair, blue eyes and high forehead; he spoke in a bland, colorless voice. Sickly since childhood, isolated and protected by his mother, treated with laudanum that would weaken his digestion for life, Tilden’s skin had a sallow complexion—despite his daily regimen of walking or riding horseback. His mouth appeared uneven; Tilden had lost several teeth as a youngster and later had the rest removed and all replaced. A lifelong bachelor, he dressed formally: Prince Albert coats with stiff high collars and black ties though, according to one friend, “his clothes never seemed to fit him quite right.”
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Kerr now reached across the table and handed Tilden a sheet of paper which showed signs of having been mass-printed. It bore the letterhead “Rooms of the Democratic State Committee”—Tilden’s committee. It had the words “Privately and Strictly Confidential” written across the top and Tilden’s own name signed at the bottom.

“Look at this circular… purporting to be issued by you,” Kerr directed him, “and state to the committee whether you were the author of it or not.”

“I was not,” Tilden answered with a calm perfected in dozens of courtrooms over a long career.

“Do you know personally who was the author of it?”

“I do not.”

The letter and Tilden’s denial already had caused a public uproar. The letter had been telegraphed to hundreds of New York politicos just before Election Day. On its face, it looked like directions for a scam dictated

by Tilden himself: “Please at once communicate with some reliable person

in three or four principal towns and in each city of your county, and request him (expenses duly arranged for at this end) to telegraph to William M. Tweed, Tammany Hall, at the minute of closing the polls … such person’s estimate of the vote,” it read. “
There is of course, an important object to be obtained
.” The letter then explained that by firing off preliminary vote counts instantly after the polls closed, they could exploit the usual half-hour delay before actual results normally began to flow over the wires. “Give orders to watch carefully the count,” it went on. “Yours very truly, Samuel J. Tilden, chairman.”
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Critics saw the implication clearly: that Tammany wire-pullers had wanted an early count of upstate votes—mostly Republican—so they could doctor the count downstate in New York City to produce a big enough Democratic majority to carry the state. In fact, that seemed to be exactly what had happened: Over 200 such telegrams, sent in reply to Tilden’s letter, had reached Tammany Hall on election night, and Seymour had beaten Grant statewide by precisely 10,000 votes—a suspiciously neat margin.
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Tilden had disowned the letter immediately when it first surfaced in newspapers in early November.
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Now he repeated the same denials for the congressmen.

Kerr continued: “State whether you, as chairman of the democratic State committee, distributed this circular by the mails, yourself, or procured it to be distributed.”

“I did not,” Tilden repeated. “I did not know of its being done, and I did not authorize it to be done”
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“Do you know whether Mr. Tweed did it or not?”

Tweed. Did he wince at the name? “I do not,” Tilden said.

If any congressmen doubted Sam Tilden’s word, they were gentlemen and didn’t say so. But then Tilden went farther. “I will state what I do know of it,” he said, apparently prompted by the mention of Tweed. But instead of taking the opportunity now to defend his honor by blasting the letter as a forgery and scam, he backtracked. He tried to brush it off as harmless—a well-intentioned safeguard against frauds by upstate Republicans.