BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (4 page)

Tweed recognized the urgent need of being seen on the street that day. He had made Tammany his club, and Tammany over the years had linked its fate to these same immigrants who were now tearing up the city. Many were his constituents; no one knew them better than Tweed and company.

Tammany Hall—the “Tammany Society or Columbian Order”—had started in New York as a patriotic social club pre-dating the Revolutionary War. It had taken its name from the legendary Delaware Indian chief Tamanend, said to have welcomed William Penn to the New World in 1682 and to have defeated the Evil Spirit in a battle so fierce as to create the Niagara Falls, the Detroit Rapids, and the Ohio River in its wake. That’s why it still called its members “warriors” or “braves,” its leaders “Sachems,” its buildings “Wigwams.” But Tammany long ago had changed stripes and made itself an outright political organ. Its support had decided New York elections since the time of Aaron Burr and Martin Van Buren. Its current meeting hall, the Tammany Hotel at the corner of Nassau and Frankfort Streets near City Hall, had become a synonym for influence.
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Tammany had cast its lot with workingmen and immigrants as early as the 1840s. It campaigned to eliminate property requirements for voting, urged the repeal of New York’s debtors’ prison law, and opposed the Know Nothings in contests throughout the 1840s and 1850s. It had placed Irishmen in high, visible posts, such as Matthew Brennan as city comptroller, John Clancy as county clerk and editor of its newspaper,
The Leader
, and John Kelly as congressman and sheriff. These days, Tammany routinely arranged city jobs for poor men with families and supported Irish churches and charities; its clubs and committees reached deep into local neighborhoods. Any down-and-out New York greenhorn speaking a strange tongue and without a dime, could find a sympathetic Tammany man down at a corner saloon or walking nearby streets. These “ward heelers”—named for their worn-out shoes— became the immigrant’s closest link to power in the strange new world of America.

Unlike rival Democratic clubs, Tammany also had taken a clear Union stand on the Civil War. It had organized its own regiment of soldiers for Lincoln’s army
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OOTNOTE
and required each of its candidates in the 1861 fall elections to sign a pledge supporting the war; once fighting began, it raised money for families of fallen soldiers. As a result, it remained one of the few New York political body credible to all sides: among loyalists for its patriotism, and immigrants for its friendship.

After Tweed had finished escorting Governor Seymour through the city on that second day of rioting, the governor returned to the St. Nicholas Hotel and Tweed returned to the streets. Seymour issued proclamations declaring the city in insurrection and urging crowds to disband, but with little impact. The carnage lasted four days; at its height, mobs captured the Second Avenue armory and looted its guns and rifles, burned several police stations, and pillaged the Brooks Brothers clothing store near Catherine Street. Throughout, Tweed and his allies patrolled the sidewalks, urging calm and keeping leaders abreast of developments. “Supervisor Tweed, Judge [John] McCunn, and Sheriff [Jimmy] Lynch were constantly around [the St. Nicholas Hotel] during the night and communicated to the Governor the news received from up town,” one newspaper noted at the height of battle, “which at one time was of a startling and serious character.”
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By Thursday night, the fighting ended—crushed by force. Five regiments of regular Union army troops had rushed back from Gettysburg to join West Point cadets, police, and over 1,200 volunteers who had taken up arms to help restore order—including a corps of city street workers organized by Tweed as Deputy Street Commissioner. In its aftermath, Tweed saw a city shaken, feeling threatened on every side: by rebel armies, weak political leaders, and the seething mass of foreigners among them apparently ready to erupt as a violent mob. Worse still, crushing the riot had failed to settle the question: Would there be a military draft in New York? And if so, would it spark the city’s poor to rise again in another violent spasm, perhaps more deadly than the first?

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The draft riots left blocks of New York buildings smoldering in ruin and hundreds of families homeless; the stench of death and burning, the sight of black smoke, the sound of marching soldiers, all would linger for days. Police piled dozens of dead near the waterfront—soldiers, bystanders, and rioters alike; newspapers trumpeted wild claims of over a thousand people killed in the melee, though more careful counts put the death toll at about 105. At least eleven black men were found murdered brutally, lynched or disfigured. Damage to property was measured in millions of dollars.

As the dust settled, anger erupted on all sides. Two opposing camps dominated a chorus of shrill voices: Loyal Republicans, nativists, and merchants all demanded a crackdown. Traitors must be crushed and the city surrendered to federal troops—martial law. Someone had to control the rowdy immigrants; why not the army? The draft must go forward, even at gunpoint, and Copperheads like their own Governor Seymour should be run out of town.
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Just as defiantly, Peace Democrats demanded that Washington end the draft and threatened violence at any attempt to reinstate it. Many Irishmen felt shame for the July riots, but that didn’t lessen their hatred of conscription. Governor Seymour, having returned to the state capitol in Albany, led the appeal. He barraged President Lincoln with letters and emissaries
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pleading with him to abandon the draft, at least until the underlying statute, the Conscription Act, could be tested in the courts—a process promising to take months or years. New York already had furnished more than its fair share of soldiers through volunteer enlistments and state militia call-ups, he argued, and sent reams of statistics to prove his point.
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From the White House, the city heard only a hard line. Abraham Lincoln had a war to fight and his generals desperately needed soldiers. If he suspended the draft in New York, how could he continue it in Philadelphia, Chicago, or any other northern city? Lincoln had studied Seymour’s appeals and rejected them all. “We are contending with an enemy who… drives every able bodied man he can reach into his ranks, very much as a butcher drives bullocks into a slaughter pen,” he wrote to Seymour in early August.
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When Seymour suggested waiting first to see the result of New York’s volunteer recruitment drive before renewing the draft, Lincoln threw it back in his face: “Looking to
time
, as heretofore, I am unwilling to give up a drafted man now, even for the
certainty
, much less the mere
chance
, of getting a volunteer
hereafter,
” he replied.
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Instead of delay, Lincoln demanded speed. He ordered that the draft resume immediately in New York, with new lotteries beginning in mid-August, and sent 10,000 federal troops marching to the city under command of Major General John A. Dix, a no-nonsense, 65-year-old officer with deep roots in New York politics. As a final step, Lincoln issued to Dix a blank-check authority to proclaim martial law at his discretion.
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If military rule was the only way to force the draft on New York, then Lincoln was prepared to have Dix impose it.
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As this test of wills unfolded on the national stage, local officials fell into hopeless squabbling. In late July, New York’s Copperhead-dominated aldermen met in City Hall and concocted a plan to sabotage any effort by Lincoln’s War Department to reintroduce the draft. They proposed to make $3 million in City funds available to purchase a $300 exemption for any local man drafted into the army who refused to go—standing the Conscription Act’s hated $300 commutation clause on its head. Mayor Opdyke had vetoed it promptly, arguing that the plan would yield no soldiers and was simply a slap at Lincoln. All July and August, Opdyke and the aldermen traded insults across City Hall.
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Bill Tweed, the new Boss of Tammany Hall, didn’t involve himself directly in this haggling at first. He had other things in his life that summer: politics, money-making, and his new baby son, Charles, born just before the riots. But listening to the stream of visitors in his Duane Street office, hobnobbing around City Hall and Tammany, or visiting neighborhood clubs, he heard endless complaints: Was nobody capable of running the city? Anyone could see the danger: For Lincoln to force a federal draft on New York, someone had to convince the poor to accept it as fair. Otherwise, tempers would explode and violence would erupt again, just as in July.

This was no time for fancy speeches. It was a job for practical men: Politicians.

Among his official roles in New York in 1863, Tweed held a seat on the New York County Board of Supervisors, the local body that met in City Hall and held principal legislative power for the city and county—managing elections, approving treasury disbursements, hiring courtrooms and armories and issuing bonds.
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OOTNOTE
State law required this twelve-member panel to be evenly balanced with six Democrats and six Republicans, but Tammany had dominated it for years. Tweed remembered first joining the board in 1858 when senior Democrats had paid $2,500 to one Republican simply for staying home when the board chose voting inspectors—allowing Tammany to place its own reliable men in charge on Election Day when it stuffed the ballot boxes.
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Within a year, Tweed came to lead this hard-nosed group.

Usually, these supervisors busied themselves with one particular selfish matter: graft. Any contractor wanting to get paid by the county for work performed had to include in his bill an extra amount of padding—a “percentage,” usually 15 percent—to pay the politicians. He’d pass the money directly to Tweed who’d split it with other supervisors who played the game. Tweed had an arrangement with two other Democratic supervisors; they’d meet privately before meetings in Tweed’s office on Duane Street and decide which bills to approve and which to block. “[T]here was hardly a time when our three votes wouldn’t carry most anything,” he later boasted, and usually only the contractors who paid the tithe got their support.
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But now, in late July, things had changed. With the mayor, governor, and aldermen all locking horns and violence threatening the city, these county supervisors suddenly found themselves perhaps the only arm of local government able to function.

Sometime in mid-August, Tweed pulled aside Orion Blunt, the senior Republican on the Board of Supervisors, for a private talk. The two men saw eye-to-eye; neither wanted to see their city plunged into another riot. Blunt was an industrialist, a gun-maker who’d seen his factories suffer in the July violence.
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OOTNOTE
31
Both recognized the problem: no new draft could go smoothly in New York unless it squarely addressed the basic unfairness of the federal law—its $300 commutation clause. The poor had to be treated equal to the rich; immigrants and workmen needed to know that the lottery was fair. At the same time, Lincoln needed troops for the army, and the only group able to fix things was the Board of Supervisors.

Tweed and Blunt decided to work together—and to avoid squabbling, they included Mayor Opdyke as well. On August 28, just as army offices around town were starting to select names in Lincoln’s newest round of draft lotteries, Tweed and Blunt called together a special public meeting of the county supervisors at City Hall and quickly hammered out a plan.
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The idea was simple: Certain categories of people—police, firemen, and state militiamen—had to be exempted from the draft to stay home and protect the city. Others, like poor workmen with families to feed—those who could never afford the $300 commutation fee—should be eligible for case-by-case relief. But instead of simply purchasing exemptions for these people—an approach that shortchanged the army—they’d find substitute recruits and use the city treasury to pay whatever bonus the market demanded, tapping a special $2 million fund financed by bonds to be sold on Wall Street. If a draftee chose to join the army, he could keep $300 as a reward. This way, Lincoln’s army would get its soldiers and the people would get relief.

To make life and death rulings on individual cases, they’d create a special six-member County Substitute and Relief Committee with three Republicans and three Democrats, including the mayor, Orison Blunt, and Tweed.

So far, so good; city leaders all applauded the plan. But it lacked a crucial ingredient. Lincoln’s government in Washington controlled the military draft and local county supervisors in New York City had no power to tamper with it. Unless Lincoln and his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, agreed to count the locally-bought New York substitutes toward their federal draft quotas, the plan could not take effect. To close this deal, someone had to go to Washington, D.C. and sell the plan to Lincoln’s government, a tough job given Lincoln’s hard line so far.