Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (15 page)

The violence came to an end after four days, when Union soldiers arrived on the scene fresh from Gettysburg and the federal government suspended the draft in New York indefinitely.

As bodies still lay in the street, decaying in the early summer heat, New Yorkers worried about what would come next. The federal government made it clear that conscription would be enforced again in August, raising the specter of a return to murderous disorder. Some of Tammany’s more distinguished members argued for a direct appeal to Lincoln and to the courts to abolish the draft as unconstitutional. Samuel Tilden, an affluent attorney, was convinced that the constitutional argument was a winner.

Tweed had a different idea. He and his allies proposed a simple, practical measure designed to address what they perceived to be the mob’s core grievance: The city would borrow funds to pay the $300 exemption for those who wished to avoid the draft, and pay bounties to substitutes willing to take the places of the exempted men. The initial payments would come from a $3 million bond issue, which a special agency, the County Substitute and Relief Committee, would supervise and disburse. Of the four committee members, three were from Tammany, including Tweed.

It was an audacious plan from any number of perspectives, not least of which was fiscal. The eventual cost of borrowing funds to purchase exemptions and pay out bounties exceeded $14 million, including interest. The Tammany-controlled council passed the required legislation several times, each time leading to a veto from a horrified Mayor Opdyke until the council finally put the program into place over his objections. The mayor, a member of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, was among those who believed that government benefits ought to flow only to those whose behavior and morals were deemed worthy of charity. Tammany’s program, he complained, “would afford great opportunities for abuse,” in part because of its size. It was, he said, “too unwieldy for the investigation of particular cases.”
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It was without question a gigantic and expensive program. But when the draft resumed in New York, there were no riots. Tammany bought peace, and, after the violence of July, who could say that the cost was too high? As a practical matter, too, the organization mediated the injustice of the draft law—not, as Tilden wished, by launching a quixotic legal campaign on constitutional grounds, but through the most direct means possible: offering nearly every poor potential conscript an equal footing with affluent draft evaders. It was not elegant, but it was effective.

. . .

A week after New York’s antidraft violence ended, Dagger John Hughes, frail and gnarled by rheumatism and just months from death, told his old friend William Seward, now Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, that “some misguided people” believed not that “black labor” would be made “equal to white labor,” but that “black labor shall have local patronage over that of the white man.” Those fears may well have been misguided, but the city’s Irish Catholics knew that they stood to lose government patronage when Republicans were in office. The party’s reform initiatives, with their overtly antiurban, anti-immigrant overtones, offered the Irish a glimpse of where they stood with the Republican Party’s amalgam of abolitionists and nativists.
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The
Irish World
would later complain that in the Republican-dominated Congress of 1871, there were just two Irish-Americans among the 252 members of the House of Representatives and just one U.S. senator. “The negroes, who form but a tenth of the population, have 5 representatives in Congress,” the paper noted, acknowledging fears that the Irish would lose their hard-won access to power under Republican rule. But the
World
’s editors did not find competition between blacks and the Irish as a zero-sum game. Of the number of blacks in Congress, the paper wrote: “This is not too many for the negroes, but see the inequality between them and us.”
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As the war finally drew to a close in 1865, Tweed and Tammany were on the verge of ensuring that the Irish need not worry about losing access to patronage. Tammany emerged from the conflict with a sterling reputation for loyalty—the Tammany regiment fought with conspicuous bravery, and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton praised the organization’s bounty program for helping to fill out the ranks of Union blue when the war’s outcome hung in the balance. Tweed and Tammany were poised to take full advantage of the coming of the Gilded Age, as were the industrialists and financiers who would soon make their fortunes in New York’s postwar boom.

. . .

The nation’s Democrats assembled in a house that Tweed built—the Tammany Society’s brand-new headquarters on Fourteenth Street—for their national convention in 1868. Tweed and Tammany were in their glory, and with good reason. Not only did the Democrats choose their ornate new building for their first presidential convention since the war’s end, but amid the chaos and dealmaking, a Tammany ally, Horatio Seymour, emerged from the smoke-filled rooms as the party’s presidential nominee to face Ulysses Grant. Seymour, the New York governor who had vetoed temperance legislation in 1854, proved to be little more than a sacrificial lamb, the first of a long roster of failed Democratic presidential candidates in the late nineteenth century.

Tweed focused Tammany’s energies on matters closer to home, and with much greater effect. Thanks in part to his strong pro-Union stance during the war, his credibility as a kingmaker was without question. Already the chairman of the General Committee of Tammany Hall, he was elected to the State Senate in 1867 and was named grand sachem of the Tammany Society in 1869. That power allowed him to virtually handpick Tammany candidates for key municipal offices. In 1868, as Seymour ran his vain race against U. S. Grant, Tweed supported New York Mayor John Hoffman to succeed Seymour as governor. When Hoffman won, thanks to the votes of thousands of newly naturalized citizens in Manhattan’s downtown wards, he threw Tammany’s support behind the mayoral candidacy of Abraham Oakey Hall, the district attorney for New York County who had prosecuted some of the anti-draft rioters in 1863. Hall, Tweed felt, was a bit of a lightweight in the two-fisted world of New York politics. “All he needs,” said Tweed, “is ballast.”
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Tweed was happy to have the new mayor preside over civic ceremonies and parades, which Hall did with great flair, while he extended his personal empire. He formed a crucial political alliance with Comptroller Richard Connolly, the city’s chief financial officer and a man known popularly as “Slippery Dick,” giving Tweed almost complete power over New York politics. Even Samuel Tilden, the upper-crust railroad lawyer and ambitious Tammany insider, considered it prudent to answer any summons from Tweed, such as the one that arrived on his desk in late 1868. “I wish to see you on important business,” Tweed wrote, instructing Tilden to stop by his office at 237 Broadway near City Hall—but taking care to leave the business unstated. Tweed also sent his local operatives to see Tilden on Democratic Party business. If Tilden, who fancied himself a reformer, objected, he must have kept it to himself.
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But Tweed’s ambitions went beyond the everyday needs of a mass political organization. He branched out into the city’s booming private sector, aligning himself with two of Wall Street’s most brazen buccaneers, James Fisk and Jay Gould, as they successfully wrested control of the Erie Railroad from Cornelius Vanderbilt. Tweed’s partnership with Fisk and Gould meant that he was in a position to cash in on everything from government contracts to insider trading. But to make his power absolutely complete, Tweed had one more move to make, and he showed that he was as light on his feet as he had been years earlier, before the lavish dinners with Fisk and Gould and the late nights in his Fifth Avenue mansion took their toll on his body. He needed a new charter for New York City, one that would return to city officials the powers that the Republicans in Albany took away before the Civil War.

It would be no easy task, even for Tweed. Upstate legislators despised the city, but they also rather enjoyed the bribes they received from time to time in exchange for voting in the city’s interests. If they surrendered their enormous power over the city’s police and fire departments and other agencies, Tweed and his friends would have no reason to bring wads of cash with them to Albany.

As chairman of the State Senate’s Committee on Municipal Affairs, Tweed was not without traditional influence. But persuading his colleagues to cede their control over the city required more than collegial horse-trading and even bare-knuckle threats. It required cash. Opponents of the new charter spent freely, and so did Tweed, although only Tweed earned the disapproval of history for this corruption. The proposed charter gave the mayor the right to appoint four people to a new oversight board with no input required from the Common Council. The new board would have absolute power over the city’s finances. Tweed knew that Mayor Hall would be delighted to defer to Tammany’s wisdom in the selection of the board’s members.

What’s more, the charter gave the mayor power to appoint commissioners, which seemed like a simple matter of justice. Why, after all, should upstaters in Albany have that power? But, once appointed, the commissioners could not be fired—they would fill out their terms regardless of the mayor’s desires. Under the guise of returning power to City Hall, the charter actually provided Tweed with the opportunity to put his allies in powerful positions, knowing that, once installed, they could not be removed.

The charter eventually passed, but not before Tweed and his allies handed over hundreds of thousands in bribes. If it was a corrupt business, well, some reformers in New York were less interested in the process than in the results. The new Tweed charter was welcomed in the city as a genuine reform. It certainly streamlined the chaotic budget process—four men, not a committee of a legislature, were in charge of the city’s finances. It was all very efficient, very businesslike.

Peter Cooper, one of the city’s great industrialists and the voice of the reform movement, signaled his approval of both the charter and of Tweed himself. The
New York Sun
soon afterward suggested that the city erect a statue of Tweed, until the man himself intervened. “Statues,” he wrote, “are not erected to living men, but to those who have ended their careers.” Tweed was in the prime of life, and of his career. Statues could wait.
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The mayor was quick to make use of the broad new powers Tweed had arranged for him. He needed a new commissioner of public works, and he knew exactly who would fit the bill. State Senator William Tweed, chairman of the General Committee of Tammany Hall and grand sachem of the Tammany Society, received a letter from the mayor requesting that he assume control of the Public Works Department. Hundreds of jobs and millions in contracts would be at Tweed’s disposal. Naturally, the senator was delighted to accept the mayor’s kind offer.

People started calling Tweed by a new name: “Boss.”

FIVE

A TAMMANY RIOT

T
he fateful year of 1871 began with a parade, with no less a figure than Boss Tweed at its head, the grandest of grand marshals. But the parade’s true honorees were five Irish political exiles, freshly arrived from Her Majesty’s most notorious prisons and prepared to resume their agitation on Ireland’s behalf in New York. The exiles’ arrival in late January touched off a race like few others in New York’s raucous political history, for it literally was a race.

With the exiles docked off Staten Island awaiting clearance from quarantine officials, a Tammany-sponsored boat churned through New York Harbor in hopes of overtaking a Republican boat that somehow had gotten a head start from the docks of Lower Manhattan. Each boat carried an Irishman with an impressive political title and an official greeting from high-ranking officials. The Republicans sent Thomas Murphy, who was President Ulysses Grant’s choice to hold the patronage-rich job of collector of the Port of New York. His mission: Beat Tammany to the punch, welcome the exiles on behalf of the Grant administration, persuade them to come ashore on the Republican cutter, and win the gratitude of the Irish community. It was not such a quixotic mission: The Irish in New York certainly were loyal Democrats in local elections, where Tammany was dominant, but on a national level, Republicans had reason to believe they might make inroads with a group that had fought for the Union with such conspicuous bravery.

In the Tammany boat, anxiously peering west toward The Narrows, was a Famine immigrant named Richard O’Gorman, now a judge. He carried with him a message of welcome to the city from none other than State Senator William Tweed. If he didn’t beat the Republicans, there would be hell to pay.

The exiles had just finished a card game on the deck of the SS
Cuba
, and one of them, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, was seven pounds richer for the experience, after having told his traveling companions that he had never played a card game in his life. Nobody seemed to mind—after serving years in prison for their role in an abortive rebellion in Ireland, they were free men.
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