BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (35 page)

That night, when the time came for his next meeting with Connolly, Havemeyer arrived promptly at Tilden’s front door but Connolly never came. They waited impatiently for over an hour. Finally, Havemeyer stalked out into the night, grabbed his carriage, and raced across town to Connolly’s house on Park Avenue. Here, he found the comptroller sick in bed in a panic. He’d been pressured again by the mayor and he didn’t know what to do. “[He] said it was crucifying him,” Havemeyer explained, telling the story a few weeks later. Havemeyer sat Connolly down and the two talked quietly well into the night, Mary Connolly probably poking her head in occasionally to offer an opinion. Connolly agreed to reschedule the meeting. “I put a little more backbone in him and made him promise to come to Tilden’s house at 10 o’clock next morning,” Havemeyer recalled.
¹⁶

The next morning, all the conspirators met at Tilden’s house on Gramercy Park for the
coup d-etat
: Tilden, Havemeyer, Connolly, and the lawyers. They’d earlier sent for Andrew Green who’d quickly joined them and agreed to accept the new post of deputy comptroller. All were prominent Democrats, a crucial point in Tilden’s plan; he wanted to show the party cleaning up its own mess, stamping out corruption among its own members. Sitting with Tilden, Connolly balked again at giving up his powers, but Tilden refused to take any nonsense. He laid down the law: The Tweed Ring was going to be crushed, Tilden told him flatly. Connolly, as a criminal, would be destroyed. He had only one chance to survive: “if he threw himself upon the mercy of the public, and evinced a disposition to aid the right, the storm would pass him and beat upon the others.”
¹⁷

Before leaving Tilden’s house, the lawyers drafted three letters to implement the transfer of authority: The first, from Havemeyer to Connolly, laid out the rationale for Connolly’s staying in office and appointing Green as his deputy. The second, from Havemeyer to Andrew Green, urged Green to take the post, and the last, from Connolly to Green, formally offered him the job.
¹⁸
“Slippery Dick” Connolly had become a true sudden convert to reform, and now he had the papers to prove it.

They made the transfer with military precision. That afternoon, Andrew Green, along with Tilden and Connolly, rode downtown and took his oath as deputy comptroller from Judge Barbour of the state Supreme Court, the only judge they could find that day at the new Courthouse. At 5 pm, he arrived at the Comptroller’s Office with a squad of uniformed police and took possession. He posted extra guards at the doors, turned on all the gaslights, and brought in a team of clerks to take stock of the records. He issued a circular saying that all papers sought by the citizen’s committee would be provided and the November interest payment on city bonds would be paid promptly.

That done, he sent announcements to the newspapers. Since most papers did not publish on Sundays, most New Yorkers would not hear of the takeover until Monday morning. In all the public notices, Green mentioned only one person, William Havemeyer, as alone having engineered the complicated transfer of power. He left Tilden’s name out of every document and conversation. Still, word of Tilden’s role began leaking out. “Of course, Mr. Havemeyer is not the real author of this astute manoeuvre,” Manton Marble would write that week in the
New York World
, “he is merely the respectable mask of a shrewder and more subtle brain. But as the cunning contriver has reasons for not avowing his work, we are willing to respect his incognito.”
¹⁹

Once Green had settled in, one of his first visitors to the office would be Samuel Tilden, ready finally to emerge from the shadows and take charge of events. He’d now seized control of the city treasury, snatched it away from Tweed in an instant, and Tweed wouldn’t even know it until Monday morning.

CHAPTER 15

NUMBERS

“ Those were great days for newspaper men. There was hardly a day in which there was not a new sensation or when a reputation was not ruined by a new revelation.”

—
Brooklyn Eagle
reporter
WILLIAM HUDSON
reminiscing years later.
¹

“ The excitement in political circles in consequence of the extraordinary proceedings at the City Hall is greater than anything I have ever seen in New York.”

—
New York Tribune
managing editor
WHITELAW REID
to Horace Greeley, September 18, 1871.
²

M
AYOR A. Oakey Hall learned about the
coup d’etat
only the next morning, on Sunday, when a messenger delivered a copy of the
New York Herald
to his weekend home across the river in Milburn, New Jersey where he was breakfasting with his wife Kate. Elegant Oakey must have jumped from his chair. “The Municipal Muddle,” read the headline, next to “Mr. Connolly’s Action.” Below, in tiny block print, appeared the full text of the Connolly-Havemeyer letters effectively surrendering the city Comptroller’s Office to Andrew H. Green—Sam Tilden’s friend—while Connolly kept the fig leaf of a title. And behind it all appeared gray-haired old sugar magnate William Havemeyer, leader of the reformers.
³

Oakey Hall saw the game instantly. He’d been tricked. Connolly had made himself a Trojan horse, a tool for invaders, and made the mayor look ridiculous. It was treason! Hall got up from the table leaving Kate and the family behind. He’d had his own plans that weekend to settle the political impasse: throw Connolly overboard, install George McClellan in his place, and claim credit himself for cleaning up City Hall. Now Slippery Dick and Havemeyer had turned things upside down. “This movement was about the last thing that Sweeny, Tweed and Hall calculated upon,” the
New-York Times
gloated that week with good reason.
⁴

Stepping outside, Oakey Hall saddled his horse and rode at full gallop the six miles across New Jersey flatlands to General McClellan’s house at Mount Orange. First and foremost, he had to learn if his own plan still had any life. McClellan greeted him at the door and invited him in for tea but gave him bad news. He’d gotten cold feet.

Oakey Hall had tempted fate by hitching his wagon to George B. McClellan. McClellan had a timid streak that had cost him dearly during the Civil War. As commander of the Army of the Potomac, his failure to move aggressively before the 1862 battle of Antietam—despite having a copy of Robert E. Lee’s own secret orders in his hands—and his failure to chase Lee’s army afterward had been the last straws prompting President Lincoln to sack him. Two years later as presidential candidate, McClellan’s failure to untangle his own pro-war views from his party’s Copperhead peace platform had cost him the election.

Now, in this newest crisis, “Little Mac” had wavered again. Hearing that party reformers backed Andrew Green for the comptroller’s spot, he’d had second thoughts. When Hall had first raised the idea two days earlier, McClellan had expected to step into a vacant office as a conquering hero, saving the city from chaos. Now he’d be seen merely as a partisan in a fight against Tilden and the Committee of Seventy. That weekend, friends had privately warned him against tying himself to the mayor or Tweed, “whitewashing parties who are as deep in the mud as Connolly is in the mire,” as his advisor William Aspinwall wrote him.
⁵

Oakey Hall, sitting face to face with McClellan that Sunday morning, begged him to reconsider. McClellan tried to be polite. He promised to think it over and give him an answer by the next morning at 10 am, but gave no cause for hope.

With plans unraveling and time slipping, the mayor now left the General’s house, mounted his horse and galloped off to New York City. By the time he reached the Hudson River, took the ferry across, trotted up to City Hall and climbed the stairs to his office, he had another idea. The mayor fancied himself a pretty fine lawyer. After all, he’d been district attorney before becoming mayor and argued thousands of cases before juries. Sitting at his desk, he pulled out the city statute books, opened them up, and peered through his pince nez glasses. Before long, he’d found something. Without talking first with Tweed or Sweeny, both of whom had left town for the weekend, he took pen in hand and wrote two letters. The first was to Connolly: “I am advised that your action in [transferring to Andrew H. Green] all and every power and duty of Comptroller … is equivalent in law to a resignation of your office,” he wrote. “I hereby accept such resignation.”
⁶
Connolly, of course, had not resigned at all, but the mayor was grasping at straws. He couldn’t fire Connolly through the front door, so he’d try tricking him out the back.

Then he wrote a new letter to General McClellan. Little Mac had said he’d take the comptroller’s job only if Connolly had left it vacant; now, as far as Oakey Hall was concerned, vacant it was. “I therefore tender you the office of Comptroller, and earnestly urge you to take it,” he wrote.
⁷
He signed both letters with a flourish and sent them scurrying across town by messenger and provided copies to the newspapers on time to print in their editions the next morning. If George McClellan would only step forward and take the offer, he believed, public pressure to accept him would be unstoppable. Connolly would have to step aside.

As for Andrew Green, that interloper who now occupied the Comptroller’s Office, the mayor could only sneer. Green was an invader, and Hall had determined to snub him. When a messenger delivered a copy of Green’s oath of office to be filed that morning, the mayor’s chief clerk, Charles Joline, flung it on the floor in front of a crowd of reporters and let it sit there while he read a newspaper. A few hours later, he returned it to Green unopened. Later, on the mayor’s orders, Joline sent a letter to all city department heads: “I am directed by the Mayor to inform you that he does not recognize either Richard B. Connolly as Comptroller or Andrew H. Green as Deputy or Acting Comptroller.”
⁸
As the hours passed from Sunday to Monday, crowds gathered around the City Hall and Courthouse buildings that sat beside each other in City Hall Park. Rumors spread that the mayor planned to install McClellan by force, sending squads of policemen storming into the Comptroller’s Office and occupying it at gunpoint.

The mayor trotted up Broadway to the Manhattan Club for dinner on Sunday night, probably hobnobbing with the chef after holding court in the smoking parlor to poke fun at the political mess. The next morning, on Monday, he left his City Hall office and rode across town to the Department of Docks near the East River waterfront where McClellan worked as chief engineer. The General had made his final decision: He wanted no part of the comptroller’s job, he told the mayor. He had no desire to cross swords with the reformers. In fact, before even seeing the mayor that day, McClellan had already said so to a reporter from the
New-York Times
who’d trekked out to his New Jersey home the night before: “There is not a word of truth in the report,” he’d insisted. “I can assure you that I declined verbally and emphatically to Mr. Hall.”
⁹

Elegant Oakey knew his game was up. He left McClellan’s office, rode his carriage back through the crowded cobblestone streets of lower Manhattan and stopped on Broadway for a private talk with Tweed at the Public Works Department. Tweed’s reaction could not have been pleasant. Once asked if he ever planned to make Hall governor, Tweed had laughed, saying “it would take too much time to pull his wires, and he’d be sure to go off half-cocked when he ought to be as mum as a ghost.”
¹⁰
He may have told the mayor so to his face now. In any event, a newspaper man saw Hall leaving Tweed’s office an hour or so later “in a state of considerable excitement.”
¹¹

The mayor walked across Broadway back to City Hall, invited a few newsmen into his office, and called their attention to his choice of clothes: “Gentlemen, some of you yesterday said that I had received a severe check,” he said, referring to his setbacks with Connolly and McClellan “and,
in testimonium veritatis
, I have, as you see, put on a check suit.”
¹²
If anyone laughed at the pun, they wouldn’t say so. William Havemeyer, watching from a distance, thought the mayor had lost his sanity. “Hall is as crazy as a bed-bug,” he told friends. “He shows that by the way he fights.”
¹³

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

Meanwhile, across City Hall Park, wide-awake Andrew Green was living out his worst nightmare. As the city’s new deputy comptroller, he faced a frigid reception. Beyond the defiance from Mayor Hall—the Tammany crowd quickly took to calling him “Handy Andy”—he faced brewing street-riots, open rejection from city department heads, and fiscal calamity. Fearing violence from the outset, Green asked twenty armed police guards to keep garrison in his office day and night and burned lamps constantly in all the windows. After the mayor had refused to accept his oath of office—a legally meaningless act—Green heard rumors that Hall planned to send police storming into his office to toss him out and put McClellan in his place. Green’s own police guards braced for battle in the corridors. “McClellan will have to walk over a good many dead bodies,” one was overheard saying.
¹⁴

Isolated at every turn, Green found himself linked to an ironic partner, Slippery Dick Connolly, the only city official who’d talk to him.

Nothing in Andrew Green’s long career had prepared him quite for this. A life-long bachelor at 52 years old, Green, slender with dark beard and mild eyes, had come to New York City as a teenager from rural Worchester, Massachusetts, studied law, dabbled in Tammany politics, and formed a lifelong bond with another bachelor, Samuel Tilden—joining Tilden’s law practice for a short time in the 1840s. Since then, Green had emerged as New York’s premier civic innovator. He’d headed the Board of Education in the 1840s but made his real mark leading the Central Park Commission since 1857. Here, he’d backed Frederick Law Olmstead’s innovative pastoral design for the park, created the new Museum of Natural History, won authority from the Albany legislature as planner for all northern Manhattan, and earned a spotless record for honesty.