Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (11 page)

The city’s leading newspapers and reform organizations shared with Charles Trevelyan a loathing for any suggestion that government ought to play a role in shaping, or softening, market forces. The
Evening Post
insisted that the government was under no obligation “to find people employment or food.” Despots followed such a “monstrous” course, the paper argued, but “our republican system of government professes to leave every channel of industry open.” The
New York Times
contended that society’s “less fortunate brethren” could not demand government relief “as a right.” Instead, the paper’s editors argued, relief should be administered as the “moral obligation” of the wealthy.
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These restrictive views on the power of government put the city’s top editors in conflict with a favorite of New York’s Irish immigrant community, Fernando Wood, a colorful, ethically challenged Tammany Hall demagogue who was elected mayor three times in the 1850s. A tall man with elegant taste and an aristocratic bearing, Wood did not have a great deal in common with his loyal Irish constituents. Although born into humble circumstances, he was a wealthy man—he estimated his worth to be $250,000 in 1858—and he lived in comfort uptown, a world away from the slums that were home to his most ardent admirers.
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Although Wood was a Tammany man through and through, he unexpectedly set reformers’ hearts aflame during his first few months as mayor in 1855 when he improved public transportation and fought plans to shrink the size of Central Park, then under construction. But he also took inordinate interest in staffing the Municipal Police Department, leading critics to charge that he favored immigrant hires over the native-born, and Democrats over Whigs and Republicans. Wood’s insistence on total control over law enforcement led the state to disband the municipal police force in the early summer of 1857, replacing it with the state-controlled Metropolitan Police Department. Wood and his officers, however, refused to acknowledge the new police force, a situation that was bound to end badly. And so it did.

On July 16, 1857, Daniel Conover, an appointee of Governor John King, showed up at City Hall for his first day of work as city street commissioner, only to learn that Mayor Wood had appointed another man, Charles Devlin, to the post. Wood was not about to allow King to impose a commissioner as well as a police force on the city. Wood’s Municipals eagerly carried out the mayor’s orders to remove Conover from the building. The would-be commissioner promptly swore out a warrant for the mayor’s arrest, but when a captain of the Metropolitan force attempted to remove Wood from City Hall, the Municipals charged to the mayor’s defense. The Metropolitans then rallied to their captain. The result was a bloody riot between the two police departments inside and on the steps of City Hall. More than fifty officers were injured, one severely, during half an hour of intense skull-cracking. Several units of the New York National Guard marched to the scene to restore order and to make good on the warrant for Wood’s arrest. He submitted peacefully but issued a defiant declaration from his jail cell, referring to the governor’s police force and his would-be street commissioner as “usurpers” of “municipal rights.”
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No demagoguery could hide the city’s disgrace, and Wood’s Municipals were formally disbanded months later by court order. But the riot represented a larger battle for power and influence in New York. Politicians from all parties practiced skull-cracking, bribe-taking, influence-peddling politics that resembled the tactics of the city’s infamous gangs, with names like the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery B’hoys. In 1852, the Whig Party, the main opposition to Tammany Democrats until the rise of the Republican Party, printed eighty thousand fraudulent ballots in an attempt to steal local elections, including a mayoral race. Tammany regularly employed legions of toughs to intimidate and even arrest unfriendly voters. A Tammany sheriff, Jimmy O’Brien, hired as many as two thousand deputies to make their menacing presence known on Election Day. Caleb S. Woodhull, a distinguished attorney, onetime Whig mayor, and the ancestor of an old New York family, made $10,000 on a corrupt ferry-franchise deal in the early 1850s.

Politics in the 1850s in New York was a crooked and violent enterprise. No party and no candidate had a monopoly on the use of intimidation at the polls and the acceptance of rewards for delivering contracts. Even so, no politician could match Fernando Wood for sheer audacity.

He dominated Tammany Hall after his first election as mayor, but just as the Democratic Party nationally was coming apart over the Kansas–Nebraska Act, the emergence of the Free Soil Party, and the emerging challenge of the new Republican Party, Tammany, too, was riven with dissent. Wood saw the organization as his personal machine, alienating other Democrats who were cut off from patronage and other spoils. Wood went his own way, splitting with the organization to create his own faction, Mozart Hall, which briefly challenged Tammany for dominance in the late 1850s.

Fernando Wood was a man who made enemies with ease, and with little apparent regret. He was a double-dealer who managed the neat—albeit morally reprehensible—trick of posing as a friend of immigrants in the mid-1850s while secretly joining the Know Nothings, a vicious anti-immigrant group whose members were trained to answer questions about their activities with a simple phrase, “I know nothing.” Wood’s ethical and moral failings did not end there. He sympathized with Southern slaveholders, and when war divided North from South, he sought—unsuccessfully—to declare New York a free city, aligned with neither side. His critics had no shortage of material with which to assail him.
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But the Irish loved him. In the cellars and saloons of downtown Manhattan, Famine Irish immigrants cared little about the cost of municipal government or the tax burden of the rich or even, sadly, the plight of Southern slaves. If Wood did indeed favor the immigrant over the native-born—at least after his short, secret dalliance with the Know Nothings—the Famine Irish could hardly be blamed for expressing their gratitude, even when it was delivered early and often in the roughhouse politics of 1850s New York.

There was, however, much more to the Irish embrace of Wood than jobs, important though they were in the 1850s. Wood was the antithesis of the moralizing British administrators who had presided over the catastrophe that so embittered Famine survivors. From his earliest days as mayor, he advocated an activist municipal government at a time when the city’s commercial and intellectual elites viewed assistance to the poor as “bounties for highwaymen,” as an 1857 headline in the
New York Evening Post
put it. He championed government assistance for the poor and hungry during a deep recession in 1857, and he considered it government’s responsibility to provide work for the unemployed and, even more ambitiously, higher education for the children of the poor. Wood proposed the creation of a free public university so that “the poor man, as well as the rich” could send his children to college.
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Whether Wood acted out of genuine sympathy for the poor is hard to know—he was a slippery fellow. But that hardly mattered to his Irish constituents. What mattered was the sound of a sympathetic voice—and the almost hysterical cry of critics who sounded very much like their brethren across the Atlantic. The
Irish News
, another periodical on the Irish-American community’s expanding newsstand, stated its case for government action in terms that recent immigrants were sure to understand. “When famine stares fifty thousand workmen in the face, when their wives and little ones cry to them for bread, it is not time to be laying down state maxims of economy, quoting Adam Smith or any other politico-economical old fogy.” The invocation of famine and the reference to Adam Smith, the British economist whose work was treated with religious reverence in Victorian Britain, shows that the Irish in New York saw a connection between their plight in Ireland and the conditions—and antagonists—they faced in New York.
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“Mr. Wood is greatly indebted as a politician to what are called by social philosophers the ‘dangerous classes,’” wrote the
Evening Post
in 1857 after the mayor proposed that the city borrow money to purchase fifty thousand pounds each of flour, cornmeal, and potatoes to give to the city’s army of unemployed workers in exchange for their labor on public-works projects. The mayor justified the request by noting that it was October, and winter was approaching. If the city did nothing, “want, destitution, and starvation will pervade the homes of the working men,” he said, adding that the poor did not have the means to “avoid or endure reverses.” Then, turning to language that would sound familiar to members of the workingmen’s movement, Wood added: “Truly it may be said that in New York those who produce everything get nothing, and those who produce nothing get everything.”
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Criticism of Wood became increasingly shrill after this admittedly demagogic speech. John Van Buren, son of former president Martin Van Buren and an important power in New York politics, charged that Wood was attempting to “array the poor against the rich.” The
Evening Post
said that government was not under “any obligation to find people employment or food.” The Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, a private charity, asserted that “foreigners” were scheming to obtain government handouts. The association was the outgrowth of a Protestant evangelical organization called the New York City Tract Society, a group very much like the Bible societies in Ireland that sought to improve the condition of the Irish poor by leading them away from Catholicism. The association was intent on distinguishing between the “worthless” poor and the “modest and deserving” poor, in the words of Robert H. Hartley, the group’s executive secretary. Those who wished the association’s help were required to allow staff, or “visitors,” from the organization to inspect their homes and investigate their private lives and habits.
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These moralistic views of the poor, framed by an unshakable belief in the intellectual and even physical inferiority of Catholics, were variations on the arguments of Charles Trevelyan and other Famine administrators who believed that government had no role in ameliorating the natural law of the marketplace, and that the poor often had only themselves to blame for their plight. Fernando Wood surely was a scoundrel and arguably a traitor, given his overt pro-slaveholder sympathies (although under Wood’s administration, African-Americans obtained licenses as carters after trying and failing to win city approval under previous mayors). But his advocacy for the poor and his insistence on an active government role to help the unemployed were both humane and progressive, and they foreshadowed the actions and rhetoric of Tammany’s Irish-American leaders in the decades to come. As the first mayor elected after the surge of Famine immigrants transformed the city’s demographics, Wood became an important figure in the development of an evolving Irish-American political consciousness rooted in the Famine experience.

The Irish remained among Wood’s most loyal supporters in all three of his successful mayoral campaigns (1854, 1856, and 1859). In the heavily Irish Sixth Ward, home of the notorious Five Points slum, Wood polled 2,107 votes in the 1856 mayoral election. All other opponents combined polled only 724 votes. Wood’s popularity was no doubt enhanced when he bolted Tammany after a group of civic elites, including Samuel Tilden, a wealthy railroad lawyer, and August Belmont, a banker, joined the society. They and their fellow merchants, bankers, and professionals opposed Wood’s radical solutions to joblessness and poverty. The new powers at Tammany conspired to bring about the mayor’s defeat in a special election just weeks after Wood proposed spending public money on food for the poor. On the eve of that election in December 1857, Congressman Daniel Sickles—a Tammany member and future Civil War general—told President James Buchanan that “the best men in our party” wished to “get rid of Wood” and put in his place a more “reliable” mayor. The Irish vote followed Wood (except in Tammany’s home base in the Sixth Ward) in his vain bid to hold onto his office, an indication that the Irish were more than capable of straying from Tammany on ideological grounds—a lesson Tammany would have to learn and then relearn in the decades to come. Indeed, the Irish again supported Wood when he successfully won back his old office in 1859 while running on an anti-Tammany ticket.
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Wood’s popularity among the Irish in New York was a product of the singular circumstances of the 1850s, a time when tens of thousands of Irish immigrants were recovering from a catastrophe they came to see as a symbol of political powerlessness, official neglect, and callous moralism. It should hardly be a surprise that they rallied behind a mayor who, while tremendously flawed and cynical, appeared to sympathize with their plight and, perhaps not coincidentally, seemed to delight in enraging the city’s moralizing elites.

FOUR

CIVIL WAR

H
e was shrewd, ambitious, and ruthless, qualities that served him well as he rose from a tough city kid to a place of honor as the foreman of one of the city’s best-known volunteer fire companies, Engine Company 6. For William M. Tweed—and for many other young men in New York in the years before the Civil War—the firehouse was a finishing school in the fine art of local politics, for it was there that he learned how to command, how to cultivate alliances, and how to manipulate the system. As the elected leader of his company, Foreman Tweed had a built-in base of supporters as he contemplated bigger and better things. That base only grew larger as he became a neighborhood legend—a magnificent sight with his red shirt and formidable physical presence—swaggering through the streets ahead of his company’s engine, shouting from a speaking trumpet as his men raced to the rescue of their neighbors, and defending his company’s honor and turf when competing companies were foolish enough to race Tweed’s men to a fire. Bill Tweed was a young man in a hurry, and Tammany Hall noticed.