Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (7 page)

Behind the scenes, Governor Seward encouraged Hughes to pursue his aggressive campaign against the PSS. “I need not assure you of my sympathy in regard to the ultimate object of your efforts, the education of the poor,” Seward told Hughes. “I content myself therefore with saying that it will afford me great pleasure to consult with you freely on the subject whenever it fits your convenience.” Seward added that Hughes would “have what support is in my power.”
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With Seward’s tacit encouragement, Hughes and his allies again petitioned the Common Council for funds to expand Catholic schools, leading the city legislature to convene two days of public hearings in late October 1840 to consider the matter. The proceedings promised to be tense enough, but when Hughes decided that he would deliver the case for funding himself, rather than rely on a lawyer, the stakes—and public interest—grew enormously. Some of Hughes’s own supporters were concerned that the bishop was taking too big a risk, exposing himself too publicly to his critics. Hughes said he was prepared to “bear insult from morning till night.” And he was ready to reply in kind.
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No Catholic cleric of Hughes’s standing and reputation had ever before addressed the legislature of New York City or so publicly challenged his critics. The Common Council chambers were filled to capacity on the afternoon of October 29, 1840, when the bishop, surrounded by a phalanx of priests, arrived at City Hall for the first day of hearings. Awaiting him were not only the council’s aldermen and assistant aldermen but also hundreds of ordinary New Yorkers, many of whom had never laid eyes on a Catholic priest, never mind a bishop. If they expected him to resemble some imagined picture of the Antichrist, complete with horns and a tail, they were disappointed. His physical presence was not nearly as imposing as his larger-than-life image as an officer in the pope’s army of invasion.

Hughes addressed the council for nearly three hours, until the autumn afternoon gave way to the chill of evening. His Ulster accent, with its ascending cadence taking the edge off even his sternest declarative sentences, marked him as an outsider, a foreigner, as did his very aura as a supposed agent of international popery. It was, therefore, critical that he frame his argument not on religious grounds but as a matter of secular justice. And so he did. “We do not apply [for funding] as a religious body,” he said. “We apply in the identical capacity in which we are taxed—as citizens of the commonwealth, without an encroachment on principle or the violation of any man’s conscience.”
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Opposing Hughes was Hiram Ketchum, a noted anti-Catholic lawyer recruited by an outspoken Protestant supremacist, Reverend William Craig Brownlee, who often insisted that the “great toe” of the pope was “already on our shores” and threatening to stamp out American liberties. Ketchum delivered a bombastic speech of more than two hours, testing the patience of listeners as the night dragged on toward ten o’clock. Noting Hughes’s request that Catholic children be allowed to read the Douay version of the Bible, rather than the King James version, Ketchum played the papist card by asking why a “foreign Potentate” should decide “whether the Bible should be read in our common schools.” Ketchum wondered whether the pope would allow the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution to be read in the city’s public schools. Reporters noticed that Hughes smiled during Ketchum’s performance. He may have been thinking that he could not have chosen a clumsier antagonist.
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The following day, an even larger crowd gathered to hear Hughes do battle with several Protestant ministers who opposed the Catholic position. Hughes framed his argument as particularly American and republican, presenting himself as a guardian of the nation’s values no less zealous than his native-born antagonists. “Now, in our schools, I would teach . . . that when the young tree of American liberty was planted, it was watered with Catholic blood, and that therefore we have as much right to everything common in this country as others,” he said. “We are a portion of this community,” he added. “We desire to be nothing greater than any other portion; we are not content to be made less.”
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Hughes’s performance won him the grudging respect of foes and the undisputed leadership of his flock, marking him as far more than a spiritual leader in the nation’s most important city. The
Catholic Miscellany
, based in South Carolina, described Hughes “not as a priest or a theologian” but as an “earnest advocate of a great civil and religious right.” The secular New York dailies, invariably hostile to the Catholic claim, conceded that Hughes was a formidable antagonist. “No one could hear him without painful regret that such powers of mind . . . and such apparent sincerity of purpose were trammeled with a fake system of religion,” wrote the
New York Observer
.
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Members of the Board of Aldermen were somewhat less impressed. They voted overwhelmingly against the Catholic appeal for a share of school funds. The bishop publicly denounced the “petty array of bigotry” in the Common Council and decided to take his campaign to Albany, home of his ally, Seward. In doing so, Dagger John Hughes became an overt political boss—plotting strategy, making alliances, and mobilizing voters. Ironically, Seward’s fellow Whigs believed that Hughes was working on behalf of Tammany Democrats, the dominant political party in New York City but not yet the advocate of immigrants that it would become. Seward himself denied the charge. “From one end of the state to the other, the complaint rings that Bishop Hughes and his clergy have excited the Catholics against us,” Seward wrote to his fellow Whigs. “I know this to be untrue, totally untrue.” Hughes, the governor wrote, was “my friend. I honor, respect, and confide in him.”
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. . .

The city’s Catholics, following Hughes’s lead, established a special committee that organized meetings at the parish level designed to pressure the state legislature into acting on Governor Seward’s words. Lawmakers asked one of Seward’s top aides, John Spencer, to investigate the Catholic demands. As Spencer was doing so, New York voters went to the polls for a round of municipal elections. Tammany Democrats easily captured the mayor’s office and control of the Common Council, but the lone alderman who had supported the Catholic petition for public funding, Daniel Pentz, was defeated for reelection. Bishop Hughes’s new newspaper, the
Freeman’s Journal
, contended that Pentz was the victim of anti-Catholic bigotry.
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In late April, after the municipal elections in New York, Spencer released his report on the city’s school controversy. It was a stunning blow for the Public School Society. Spencer agreed with Catholic claims that the society’s notion of nonsectarianism was, in fact, a form of Protestantism. He assailed the PSS for appalling enrollment figures—the result, he said, of the society’s refusal to accommodate the values of parents. The Spencer report recommended a new, decentralized system of ward-based public schools under the control of elected trustees. It also recommended that Catholic schools that educated poor children (nearly all of them did) receive public money while remaining under the control of Catholic authorities.

The Spencer report was a landmark challenge to Anglo-Protestant cultural power in New York City. The issues Spencer raised were the very issues Hughes had raised, issues that called into question the right of a majority population to dictate the terms of citizenship, cultural authority, and civic engagement in a diverse, pluralistic society. The state legislature, concerned about Catholic sensibilities but also fearing nativist backlash, decided in May 1841 to postpone consideration of a school reform bill until the new year—well after the fall’s state legislative elections.

Hughes chose this moment to intervene in politics as no Catholic clergyman had done before and none has since. On October 29, 1841, he announced the formation of a separate Catholic political party, dubbed the “Carroll Hall ticket” for the venue in which Hughes made his announcement. The bishop did nothing to hide his prominent role as the de facto chairman and organizer of the Carroll Hall ticket. In fact, after insisting that it was “not my province to mingle in politics,” he publicly announced the names of candidates who had his personal approval.

“We have now resolved to give our suffrage in favor of no man who is an enemy to us . . . and to support every friend we can find among men of all political parties,” he told a crowd of supporters. “You have often voted for others, and they did not vote for you, but now you are determined to uphold with your own votes, your own rights.” On Election Day, he told the audience: “Go, like free men, with dignity and calmness, entertaining due respect for your fellow citizens and their opinions, and deposit your votes.” Hughes’s listeners waved their hats, stomped their feet, and shouted themselves hoarse as the bishop finished this remarkably overt intervention in a tightly contested election.
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The Carroll Hall ticket was a curious amalgam. Of the thirteen State Assembly candidates Hughes endorsed, ten already were on the ballot as candidates of the Democratic Party, and of those ten, seven told the
New York
Evening Post
that they supported the Public School Society, even though Hughes insisted that they supported the Spencer report’s recommendations. Three State Assembly candidates and two State Senate candidates ran exclusively on the Carroll Hall ticket. One of them was the radical union organizer Mike Walsh, an Irish-Protestant immigrant who regarded the city’s reformers as “a fanatical hypocritical set of imbecile humbugs.”
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Hughes’s intervention provoked a furious reaction from the city’s leading newspapers. Pro-Whig papers insisted that Hughes was a tool of Tammany Hall; Democratic papers argued that the bishop was plotting with Seward and the Whigs against Tammany Democrats. It’s hardly a wonder the newspapers were confused—when one of the city’s leading nativists, Samuel Morse, and the anti-Catholic
Journal of Commerce
endorsed a ticket of their own to oppose Hughes and Carroll Hall, three of the presumably nativist candidates on the Morse–
Journal
ticket also had Hughes’s endorsement! Some candidates apparently found much to admire in both the Hughes and the Morse positions.

The legislative elections of 1841 were a Democratic triumph, as they captured both houses of the legislature from Seward’s Whigs. All ten Democratic State Assembly candidates endorsed by Carroll Hall won, but a more meaningful result came in the three Assembly districts in which Hughes’s candidates ran separate campaigns and proved to be spoilers, splitting the Democrats and allowing Whigs to prevail. The message was clear: Irish Catholics could hold the balance of power between the Whigs and the Democrats. Tammany Hall had tried to evade the public school issue until now, but the election of 1841 put an end to the Hall’s straddling. The city’s Whigs, on the other hand, moved in the other direction, appalled by the spectacle of a Catholic bishop functioning as a de facto political boss, even if that boss happened to be friendly with the Whig governor, Seward.

In the opening weeks of the new legislative session, the chairman of the Assembly’s schools committee, William Maclay, a Democrat from New York City, introduced a new school-reform bill that portrayed the Public School Society as an unaccountable private monopoly that had lost the public’s confidence. He proposed that the school system be run on a ward level, as the Spencer report had recommended, accountable to locally elected trustees and other ward-based officials. There was, however, no mention of religious instruction in publicly funded district schools. The wording was intentionally agnostic, so to speak. It neither mandated nor barred religious instruction.

The Maclay bill passed the State Assembly thanks to the overwhelming support of Democrats. Bishop Hughes, who met with Maclay prior to the vote, was delighted with the result, even though the bill did not achieve his goal of public funding for Catholic schools. He told Seward that he was willing to give the new system “a fair trial.”
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When the bill seemed stalled in the State Senate in April 1842, Hughes made preparations to field another independent Catholic political ticket, this one in the city’s looming elections for mayor and the Common Council that same month. Catholic candidates promised to wage a campaign against any incumbents who supported the “aristocratic” and “anti-republican” principles of the Public School Society—the notion of Irish Catholics defining what was “republican” and what was not would have struck critics as incomprehensible.
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Democrats understood the threat Hughes posed, but opposition to the bill was so intense that supporters agreed to a painful compromise: The Senate version of the bill contained new language that prohibited sectarian religious instruction in public schools. The original wording had been studiously vague on the subject of religion, but the Senate version removed any middle ground. With the modified language, the bill passed the legislature, and the Public School Society’s monopoly passed into history. New York City’s Catholic leaders celebrated the defeat of an “oligarchy” based on “anti-republican principles,” language that emphasized that the city’s mostly immigrant Catholics were on the side of bedrock American values, while its antagonists were the stewards of an outdated aristocracy.
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A portion of the city’s electorate did not share the Catholics’ joy or their analysis of the Public School Society. Walt Whitman, writing in the journal
Aurora,
complained that passage of the Maclay bill would allow the “teaching of Catholic superstition.” He was disappointed that his fellow Democrats had caved in to Hughes and the “filthy Irish rabble” he led. Two days after passage of the Maclay bill, when voters went to the polls to choose a mayor and aldermen, gangs rampaged through the heavily Irish Sixth Ward and then moved on to assail Hughes’s residence adjacent to the old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street. Little damage was done, but the message was unmistakable.
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