BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (41 page)

BOOK: BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York
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Nast used his money to live well. He and his wife Sarah decided to keep the house in Morristown, New Jersey where they’d moved over the summer to avoid harassment from city bureaucrats and planned to stay there permanently. In December, Sarah would give birth to a new baby daughter, Mabel, their fourth child. Nast had become famous, popular with all except the Irish and Catholics whom he regularly insulted in his cartoons. So famous had he made the faces of his favorite targets—Tweed, Hall, Sweeny and Connolly—that a legion of copy-cats followed him with clever anti-Tammany cartoons in
Leslie’s Illustrated
,
Harper’s Weekly
,
Phunny Phellow
and other magazines. One of them, R. Hoyt, enjoyed drawing Tweed and Hall in exotic costumes, either as Sioux Indians marching off to the “Happy Hunting Ground” or as Japanese Samurai warriors: “Japanese Custom in New York: Tamani Tycooni invite Connolli to Hari-Kari—No-go-he,” read the caption on his parody of the Connolly resignation farce.
23

Nast kept his own focus on Tweed, though, and as the scandal deepened, his images grew darker. He drew a cover for
Harper’s Weekly
in October that showed Tweed, Hall, Sweeny and Connolly facing ultimate justice, standing in the shadow of four nooses, Tweed himself bowing to the gallows, “The Only Thing That They Respect or Fear.”
24
Nast had become the lynch mob. He filled every
Harper’s Weekly
issue that autumn with multiple cartoons on the scandal. When workmen blamed reformers for their lost paychecks, Nast gave them the answer: a cartoon showing a huge vault marked “City Treasury” that was “Empty” to starving workers but “Full” for Tweed and his friends seen toasting themselves with champagne over a sumptuous feast. Tilden’s Apollo Hall reformers printed thousands of copies to use as leaflets in the election campaign.
25

“The only thing they respect or fear.”

Harper’s Weekly, October 21, 1871.

For the Election Day issue, Nast outdid himself. He brushed off an old sketch he’d made during his 1860 travels with Garibaldi of Rome’s ancient coliseum and updated it to show Tweed as Emperor presiding over a gruesome scene on the coliseum floor: the Tammany Tiger, terrifying and fierce with blood dripping from its teeth, having just killed Lady Columbia, symbol of law and liberty, and ready to kill again. “The Tammany Tiger Loose: ‘What are you going to do about it?’” read the caption. Even a child couldn’t miss the point—Tweed the evil dictator, flaunting his power, persecuting the weak. New Yorkers bought over 300,000 copies of the edition; they posted the drawings on newsstands, in saloons and clubs, handed them from neighbor to neighbor, laughed at them over dinner tables, cringing at the villains, appalled at the crimes.

Nast had perfected the art of outrage. In the process, he’d turned Tweed into a vulgar image, a scoundrel, an object of disgust, fat, evil, far removed from a human being. That was how most of New York and the country now knew him.

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

Somehow, he survived. Despite Nast’s cartoons, Tilden’s proofs, the arrest, the disclosures, and the heroic Irish opponent, Tweed won his seat in the New York State Senate that year, defeating Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa by 12,300 votes. Four regiments of state militia soldiers had joined police in guarding the ballot boxes against cheating but that didn’t stop the
New-York Times
from charging fraud and rowdyism
26
in the victory. Rossa himself claimed that he’d out-polled Tweed by 350 votes and been “counted out,” but his appeal went nowhere.

Everything else that Election Day for Tweed spelled disaster. Apollo Hall reformers won every important contest: all fifteen state assemblymen, four out of five state senators, and all fifteen aldermen. Jimmy O’Brien hooked his seat in the Albany state senate and Tilden was elected to the assembly.

“The Tammany Tiger Lose: What are you going to do about it?”

Harper’s Weekly, November 11, 1871.

Meanwhile, the birds started to fly. Andrew Garvey and E.A. Woodward both ran to Canada to avoid prosecutors. Keyser fled south to Florida, a short boat ride from Cuba. Ingersoll had disappeared the morning after Tweed’s arrest, telling friends he’d gone to Portland, Maine on a business trip. “He will be back here,” Tweed told them, “he won’t run.”
27
In fact, Ingersoll ran to Canada, then France, having already sold four of his lots in Manhattan for $45,000 to finance the trip.
28
Henry Hilton resigned from the Parks Department a few days later.
29

Peter Sweeny disappeared as well. He resigned as Parks Commissioner just before Election Day and followed his brother James to St. Catherine’s, Canada, and then Paris, far from American justice.
30
Two weeks later, Oakey Hall recognized realities and appointed Andrew Haswell Green the city’s permanent comptroller, making the
coup d’etat
official.
31
Connolly had resigned two weeks earlier contingent on Hall’s pledge to appoint Green.
32

Connolly too finally met his end. Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, while hanging around his old Comptroller’s Office with his new friends Tilden and Green, he looked up to see Matthew Brennan coming his way. He got up to shake the sheriff’s hand but Brennan brushed it aside. “Mr. Connolly, I’ve got an unpleasant duty to perform,” he told him. “You are my prisoner.”
33

“There must be some mistake,” he had said, turning to Tilden. “Mr. Tilden, the Sheriff has arrested me.”

Connolly had considered himself safe under protection of the reformers. After all, he’d helped them win the game by handing over his office at the height of the crisis. Now he learned how wrong he’d been. Tilden came over, looked at the arrest order, and simply nodded. “What is the bail, Mr. Brennan,” he asked. It was $1 million, the same as Tweed’s and signed by the same judge in Albany. “I am surprised at this. But it is so, Richard.” Tilden actually had little reason for surprise; the arrest was based on Tilden’s own affidavit signed just a few hours earlier.

Of all the arrests, Connolly’s became the oddest farce. Rather than take him to jail, the sheriff agreed to let him first visit a few allies to try and raise bail. They lunched together at Delmonico’s restaurant on Beaver street—Connolly, Tilden, Brennan, and William Havemeyer. Unable to find bondsmen, Connolly spent the next four nights at the New York Hotel in custody of police guards as his lawyers negotiated for his freedom. At one point, they actually reached a deal. The prosecutors, recognizing Connolly’s help in surrendering the Comptroller’s Office, agreed to free him and let him settle his entire case with the government—which on its face demanded repayment of the same $6.3 million as Tweed’s—by paying just $1 million in restitution and promising to testify against other Ring defendants.

They went to Connolly’s house on Park Avenue to settle the bargain, but here things went awry. It was Mrs. Connolly, the ex-comptroller’s wife, who controlled their household money, and she now took over the talks. As the hour grew late and time came to ante up, she left the lawyers in the parlor, went upstairs, then returned a few minutes later with $1 million worth of United States treasury bonds—the agreed price. As she laid them on the table, though, Charles O’Conor, the lead prosecutor, hesitated. If she could produce this much money so easily, he though, there must be plenty more. He now demanded an additional $500,000.

Mary Connolly balked. She refused to pay another dime. Her husband pulled her aside and begged her frantically to relent: “I must pay $1,500,000 or go to jail,” he insisted.
34

“Richard, go to jail!” she told him.

So he did. Connolly spent all that December at the Ludlow Street Jail; friends who accompanied him there heard him cry as guards locked his cell door behind him. He stayed there until New Year’s Day when Sheriff Brennan finally agreed to lower the bond and let him go. On leaving the jail, Connolly promptly went home, packed his bags, and left New York for Connecticut. From there, he reached Canada, then sailed to Europe where he’d already sent much of his fortune. Connolly would spend the next ten years in Egypt, Switzerland, and France growing sick with Bright’s disease, poor, and depressed, never to see American shores again.

Horace Greeley, finding the whole situation amusing, scribbled an epigram on Slippery Dick’s flight: “Dick cut and ran; so proved himself, for once, a
non est
man.”
35

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

Of all the famous “Tweed Ring,” only Tweed and Elegant Oakey Hall remained in New York City. All the others had gone. For Tweed, too, the noose tightened. The same week as Dick Connolly fled, Tweed finally resigned his post as New York’s Commissioner of Public Works and gave up his seat as a director of the Erie Railway Company.
36
By now, he’d transferred title on another fifteen of his city real estate holdings to his son Richard, including his Duane Street office and his Broadway property on 21st Street, totaling some $2 million in value and allowing Richard to qualify as a bail bondsman.
37
Tweed had almost nothing left. His yacht, the
William M. Tweed
, was seen in Bridgeport, Connecticut, bobbing behind a tugboat apparently being towed away to escape creditors.

In mid-December, a Grand Jury met in New York City and indicted Tweed on charges similar to those in the earlier O’Conor complaint and Sheriff Brennan came to arrest him again. As before, his sons and lawyers rushed to his side. But this time, instead of greeting Brennan with a friendly “Good Morning,” Tweed asked wearily: “Must I go to prison tonight?”
38
Brennan took Tweed into custody at the Metropolitan Hotel and rode with him in a carriage down to the Tombs on Centre Street. Here, a judge ordered him held without bail; Tweed only escaped a night in the penitentiary by the good graces of Judge George Barnard who intervened on his behalf. Barnard issued a writ of
habeas corpus
, set bail at $5,000, and allowed the Boss to go home to the Metropolitan Hotel, a tired, sad man.
39

Just before New Year’s Eve, Tammany Hall itself, Tweed’s club for twenty years, threw him overboard as well. Weeks earlier, the Tammany Sachems had asked Tweed to resign and save them the trouble, but Tweed had dragged his feet. Now, they met privately, without Tweed even in the room, and voted to replace him as Grand Sachem with banker Augustus Schell. The day before, Tammany’s General Committee had met and removed Tweed as its chairman.
40

BOOK: BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York
12.54Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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