The Civil War and the End of an Era
“NO COERCION, NO CIVIL WAR”
It is impossible to precisely gauge Five Pointers’ views of slavery. Except for the occasional reference to the issue by a Sixth Ward candidate for political office, we have no means of judging how the average neighborhood resident perceived the “peculiar institution,” except to suggest that Five Pointers’ views on the subject probably mirrored those of the city’s Irish, Catholic, and Democratic press. These papers consistently argued that both abolitionism and the more moderate movement to prevent the creation of additional slave territory threatened the survival of the nation. “We are totally opposed to Abolitionism in every shape;—not because we desire to perpetuate slavery, but to preserve the Union,” announced the Irish-American in 1853. “That slavery is inconsistent with the Declaration of Independence and our Republican Constitution we will not affect to deny,” its editors admitted four years later. But they argued that Americans had been “forced to accept the ‘Institution’ of slavery” as part of the compromises that created the nation, and that those pledges could not subsequently be broken.
Many New York Democrats insisted that slavery was beneficial to blacks and whites alike. The Day Book, a Democratic paper aligned with Mayor Fernando Wood, asserted that “‘slavery,’ or negro subordination to the will and guidance of the superior white man, is a law of nature, a fixed truth, an eternal necessity, an ordinance of the Almighty, in conflict with which the efforts of human power sink into absolute and unspeakable insignificance.” Free blacks such as those in New York had been better off as slaves, maintained the newspaper’s editors, because now they were still subordinate to whites but were not guaranteed the subsistence of food, clothing, and shelter that slaveowners provided.13
Catholic newspapers usually expressed their opposition to the antislavery movement in somewhat less repugnant ways. “None of us, North or South, pretend to think Slavery a blessing,” contended the New York Freeman’s Journal, a Catholic weekly edited by a non-Irishman but perceived in the antebellum years to be the organ of Archbishop John Hughes. “Its warmest defenders, if they are rational, say no more for it than that it is unavoidable in the nature of things; all would be rejoiced to see it abolished to-morrow, if it could be done safely, or consistently with a due regard for the rights and interests of all classes.” However, the Journal insisted that abolishing slavery would never be safe. To those who argued that good Christians must oppose slavery, the Journal retorted that not a single Catholic bishop in the United States had endorsed the abolition movement. Though nominally a non-partisan periodical, the Journal endorsed the Democratic opposition to Republican Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential race. “The Democratic doctrine is not that there is no moral right or wrong about slavery, but that it is not the business of the political power to settle moral questions,” the Journal noted approvingly, adding that only when a majority of Americans North and South could be brought by “moral suasion” to oppose slavery would it be appropriate for politicians to interfere with the institution.14
Irish Americans frequently justified their opposition to abolitionism on the grounds that it would hurt the movement to liberate Ireland. Daniel O’Connell, who fought to repeal the Act of Union that had bound Ireland politically to the United Kingdom, spoke out against American slavery in the early 1840s. “The black spot of slavery rests upon your star spangled banner,” O’Connell wrote, “and no matter what glory you may acquire beneath it, the hideous, damning stain of Slavery remains upon you; and a just Providence will sooner or later, avenge itself for your crime.” After O’Connell’s repeal movement fizzled, many Irishmen cited his diversion into abolitionism as the cause. The Irish-American claimed that his statements on slavery “WERE THE FIRST—THE VERY FIRST—CAUSES OF THE DIVISIONS” which fractured the repeal forces. “American sympathy was a ‘mighty fact’ before then,” but subsequently, “division, disunion, distrust, contention, [and] personal bitterness” doomed the repeal movement to failure. Besides, argued many Irish Americans, the Irish were as much slaves to the English as African Americans were to their masters in the South. Abolitionists ought to focus their attention on the 6 million white slaves in Ireland, insisted the Irish-American, before interceding on behalf of the 3 million black slaves in the United States.15
Thomas Nast’s “This Is a White Man’s Government” perfectly captures the image most Americans had of Five Pointers. Nast, who supported Republican Ulysses S. Grant for the presidency in 1868, depicts what he believes to be the three main sources of support for Grant’s Democratic rival. On the right is August Belmont, representing the greed of Fifth Avenue financiers and other unscrupulous capitalists. In the center is Nathan Bedford Forrest, a leading Confederate cavalry officer during the Civil War and self-proclaimed founder of the Ku Klux Klan afterward. On the left is a Five Points Irishman drawn with simian features. The burning building just behind the Five Pointer is the New York Colored Orphan Asylum, burned by the predominantly Irish-American rioters during the 1863 New York Draft Riots. Harper’s Weekly (September 5, 1868): 568. Collection of the Library of Congress.
Irish Catholics also frequently alluded to abolitionists’ prejudice against them to justify their refusal to endorse the anti-slavery movement. “Irishmen have no [more] bitter enemies, Catholics no fiercer foes, than are nine-tenths of the American Abolitionists,” insisted the Freeman’s Journal in 1843. “Dark, sullen, ferocious bigots as they are, they abhor the name of Ireland and Catholicity.” In the mid-1850s, when the Know Nothing party scored major electoral victories in the Northeast where abolitionism was strongest, the Irish-American asked why “the citizens of New England, who spend their money, their time, their talents, in endeavoring to make the negro free, are so opposed to the ‘foreigner’?”16
One factor that the antebellum Irish never mentioned when explaining their opposition to abolitionism was economic competition from African Americans. It is a staple of writing on the Irish that their opposition to the anti-slavery movement was based on a fear that freed slaves would take their jobs or drive down their already low wages. Yet not a single New York Irish or Catholic periodical surveyed for this study mentioned such a fear. Given the strict segregation of African Americans in the New York antebellum workplace, it really was not an issue. Five Points African Americans worked primarily as chimney sweeps, sailors, waiters, or street peddlers. Even in this last field, the only one populated by significant numbers of antebellum Irishmen, African Americans typically traded items such as buttermilk that whites did not usually sell.
The extent to which Five Pointers discussed the slavery issue is impossible to determine. By the late 1850s, Congress and the entire Democratic party were divided over the issue of slavery in Kansas, with the Buchanan administration supporting the “Lecompton constitution” that would allow slavery there, while another faction led by Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas opposed it. The Irish-American admitted in early 1858 that Kansas, Douglas, and Lecompton “engage thought, talk, and writing, North and South. . . . Few sounds are uttered without these all-absorbing names being heard.” This was undoubtedly the case even in the Sixth Ward, because whether one supported Buchanan or Douglas on this question determined party nominations and even many patronage appointments. Five Points politico John Clancy could often be found at the Sixth Ward’s Ivy Green saloon regaling patrons with his enthusiasm for the “little giant” from Illinois.17
As the 1860 presidential election approached, sectional issues continued to loom large in Five Points political discussions. The attack on Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner by South Carolinian Preston Brooks in 1856, the Dred Scott decision of 1857, and Buchanan administration support for slavery in Kansas in 1858 all helped convinced most northerners to support Lincoln and the Republican party in 1860. Yet Five Pointers cast few votes for the rail-splitter from Illinois. Despite his visit to Five Points earlier in the year, Lincoln captured just 12 percent of the Sixth Ward vote in 1860, and an even smaller proportion of the ballots cast in the Five Points election districts.18
Five Pointers were deeply ambivalent as southern states began preparing to secede after Lincoln’s victory. Most of the neighborhood’s Irish-American residents probably opposed the breakup of the Union, yet Five Pointers were very reluctant to go to war to stop it. The Irish-American’s editors, for example, did “not believe that this Confederation can be held together by armed force. Even if it could be, it would not be worth the trouble.” Clancy, still in control of the Leader, echoed a similar theme, recommending “no coercion, no civil war.” After the attack on Fort Sumter, when most New Yorkers felt it their patriotic duty to defend the Stars and Stripes, neighborhood residents were distinctly unenthusiastic. When the New York state assembly voted to approve the enlistment of thirty thousand New York volunteers to defend Washington and resist southern aggression, only 6 of the 108 assemblymen opposed the measure. One of the six was Five Points’ representative, William Walsh.19
The secession winter and first months of the war played havoc with the New York economy. Business ground nearly to a halt as anxious merchants and manufacturers cut back on orders and production. The Herald described the suffering of the unemployed poor as “unprecedented.” “Thousands of persons, both male and female, were suddenly deprived of employment,” concurred the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor. Sectors of the economy that had once traded heavily with the South (such as the garment industry) were especially hard hit. The war also crippled the relief work of local charities. “Our wardrobes are empty,” complained the journal of the Five Points Mission in August 1861. Donations of new and used clothing plummeted as northerners instead hoarded garments or directed their castoffs to organizations assisting veterans and their families.20
By the second half of 1861, employment began to pick up, especially after the Confederate victory at the first battle of Bull Run in July convinced northerners that the war would not be a short one. But by 1862, prices skyrocketed while wages for the poor remained relatively stagnant. The retail price of tobacco and whiskey tripled. Food prices also jumped. Tenement rents fell, however, as the precipitous decline in immigration combined with the departure of so many for the battlefields reduced demand.21
It is impossible to determine precisely how many Five Pointers enrolled in the military during the first years of the war. Enlistment records do not record the recruits’ street addresses, and few residents had names unique enough to make their identification possible among the thousands of New York soldiers. Subsequent reports that elections in the Sixth Ward were quiet because those usually engaged in “tipping over ticket boxes . . . are now off to the war” indicate that some of the more rowdy Five Pointers must have enlisted. By the middle of the war, recruitment bonuses became quite substantial, in some cases equaling what a Five Points laborer might earn in six months or more. Irish pride also probably drew some into the army. The all-Irish Sixty-ninth New York Regiment overflowed with volunteers when famed Irish patriot Michael Corcoran became its commander. One, thirty-year-old Johnny Stacom, was an Ivy Green bartender and aspiring politician allied with Brennan and Clancy. He enlisted after the bombardment of Sumter. On April 23, 1861, after receiving a blessing from Archbishop Hughes at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mott Street, the unit marched proudly to the ferries that conveyed the soldiers on the first leg of their journey to Washington. Thirty-eight members of the regiment were killed at Bull Run. Having completed their three-month tour of duty, the Sixty-ninth returned to New York for a heroes’ welcome. Some members reenlisted in a new “Irish Brigade.” Others had had enough of army life. Stacom waited until 1864 before volunteering for another three-month stint in the Irish unit, spending his entire uneventful ninety days besieging Lee’s forces at Petersburg, Virginia.22
“I AM AS GOOD A DEMOCRAT AS YOU ARE”
During the war years, an era in New York politics would come to an end. The violence of sporting men and Five Points brawlers would be overshadowed by a new electoral tool: corruption. In the meantime, the war had dramatic effects on several key individuals. After completing his term as county clerk at the beginning of 1862, Clancy secured an appointment as “Volunteer Aid” to General Francis B. Spinola. Clancy’s main contributions to the war effort came not in this largely ceremonial post, however, but in keeping Tammany from adopting an anti-war stance. Prominent Democrats such as Wood, Isaiah Rynders, and Governor Horatio Seymour publicly advocated compromise with the South, and even pragmatists like Tweed were tempted to adopt such a platform for the sake of Democratic unity. But Clancy insisted through the Leader that Tammany nominate only candidates who fully supported preserving the Union without capitulating to southern demands for the spread of slavery. By 1864, even Republican journals such as the Tribune commended Clancy for almost single-handedly preventing Tammany from adopting a pro-peace policy that would have seriously impeded the prosecution of the war.23
With Clancy no longer in municipal office, Sixth Warders once again lacked a representative in citywide government. Brennan, seen at the outset of the war as one of the most prominent city Democrats, was rarely mentioned in discussions of the most powerful Tammany leaders by 1862. All that changed, however, with the unexpected announcement on November 20 that Democrats had nominated Brennan for the highest office on that year’s municipal election slate—that of city comptroller. This post was far more important than the relatively insignificant and invisible office of city register he had sought unsuccessfully two years earlier. The Leader had called the comptrollership “the most powerful office in the State next to that of Governor—locally and in point of patronage far greater” because of the many “subordinate departments, bureaux, clerkships, and offices of every description” that the incumbent could distribute to party members and factional allies. The huge municipal expenditures associated with the war made the comptrollership especially consequential.
Journalists handicapping the race for the Democratic nomination never considered Brennan, not even as a long shot. Yet factionalism both within Tammany and between it and Mozart Hall created a deadlock. All sides could accept Brennan, though, because he was not too closely linked to any clique and was not perceived as a threat to the future ambitions of the various factional leaders. According to the Times, even Brennan himself must have been surprised when Democratic leaders announced his nomination.24
With Democrats united behind a single slate of candidates for the first time since 1858, Brennan stood little chance of defeat. Yet the influential Herald—which generally supported Democratic candidates—endorsed Brennan’s Republican opponent instead, stating that “we do not believe that Brennan is at all qualified for the office, or fitted for so important a position.” A significant number of Democratic voters apparently found such arguments persuasive, but Brennan still won a large majority of the popular vote on election day, capturing 60 percent citywide and an unprecedented 95 percent in the Sixth Ward.25
When Brennan began his four-year term in January 1863, Five Pointers had achieved political power almost unimaginable a generation earlier. With Republican George Opdyke serving as mayor, Brennan was now the city’s highest-ranking Democratic officeholder. Furthermore, when the two chambers of the city’s legislative branch organized that same month, both elected Five Pointers to preside over their proceedings. Former “Dead Rabbit” William Walsh, just twenty-six years old, became president of the board of aldermen, while the councilmen chose Morgan Jones as their president. Jones, a thirty-three-year-old London native, had emigrated to New York as a small child and became a Centre Street plumber and active Democrat as an early member of Matthew T. Brennan Hose Company No. 60. Jones’s links to Brennan undoubtedly helped him earn his prewar sinecure as “corporation plumber.” Jones had served twice previously as council president before regaining the honor in 1863. Clancy, meanwhile, continued to use his control of the Leader and his status as a Tammany chieftain to influence Democratic policy throughout the city and state.26
Other Five Points politicos increased their influence in the war years as well, none more so than Brennan lieutenants Joseph Dowling and John Jourdan. When Brennan became comptroller, Dowling was appointed to complete his mentor’s term as police justice, and Jourdan succeeded his best friend Dowling as Sixth Ward police captain. Jourdan by this point had already gained citywide fame as a detective, so much so that wealthy New Yorkers regularly sent for him when uptown officers failed to recover their stolen property. Refusing to let anything stand in the way of their crime solving, Dowling and Jourdan (with the connivance of the District Attorney’s Office) established in these years what the Times later called “‘The Police Ring,’ which held a reign of terror over all the criminals. . . . Their power was almost absolute, and instances are known where men arrested secretly at night by Jourdan and his detectives were locked up in the dark cells of the Franklin Street Station for weeks and absolutely starved into confessing their crimes and disgorging their plunder.” Despite these excesses, Dowling ran unopposed for police justice in 1863 when his temporary appointment expired. Even the Republican Times lauded the Democrat Dowling, praising “his integrity of character, his fine capacities and a personal popularity seldom attached to any man.” By mid-war, Dowling and Jourdan were nearly as well known to New Yorkers as Brennan and Clancy.27
Yet Five Points’ ascent in New York politics came at a time when interest in local politics was waning. Residents who had once followed the factional infighting of New York politicos with intense interest now “generally seemed to regard their movements as of very little consequence,” remarked the Herald. It was the war, of course, that had come to monopolize New Yorkers’ attention. As the bloody conflict dragged on and the death toll mounted, Five Pointers—like most Manhattanites—became increasingly ambivalent about the struggle. This was especially the case after Lincoln announced in September 1862 his plan to promulgate the Emancipation Proclamation at the start of the new year. Many Democrats saw the proclamation as proof of what they had suspected all along—that the war was really being fought to end slavery. New York Catholics “will turn away in disgust,” predicted Archbishop Hughes, if forced to fight for emancipation.28
After Lincoln’s emancipation plans became public, Irish-American New Yorkers became more openly disdainful of the war effort. At a meeting of anti-war Democrats in April 1863, one Irish Catholic judge, John H. McCunn, complained about expending millions of dollars in a war against slavery. According to a newspaper that paraphrased his speech, “he had seen the negro at the mouth of the Congo River, and the Slavery of the South was a paradise in comparison. The negro was a prince in the South compared to his situation at home.” Although the Irish-American and Leader never criticized the proclamation, Clancy’s journal called all interaction with African Americans “repulsive to the white man’s instincts,” and the Irish-American often referred to the Republicans pejoratively as the “Abolition party” and “Abolition fanatics.”29
Emancipation also raised the specter that ex-slaves might one day come north and compete with the Irish for the lowest-paying jobs in the city. Irish Americans feared that the freedmen, accustomed to working for nothing, would accept ridiculously low pay and thus drive down the wages of Irish menial laborers. But again, historians have overestimated economic fears as a source of Irish/black tension. For generations it has been a staple of writing on Civil War New York that in early 1863, employers replaced hundreds of striking Irish longshoremen with African-American scabs, fueling Irish animosity toward emancipation. The historian Edward K. Spann described three thousand strikers in June being “forced to watch as black men, under police protection, took their jobs on the docks.” In fact, white army deserters and convalescents, not black scabs, loaded the ships under police guard. A racially charged clash did take place in April, but there were only two to three hundred strikers, and they too were not replaced by a phalanx of black workers. The wildcat strikers, frustrated that their demand for higher pay had not been met despite the wartime shortage of workers, merely wandered the riverfront looking to vent their frustration on the tiny handful of black dockworkers already employed citywide. Blacks might pose a long-term threat to the job security of Irish Americans, but the wholesale replacement of Irish-American workers by African Americans during the war simply never took place.30
Most Irish criticism of emancipation focused on the racial interaction it would necessitate. The Day Book opposed the use of African Americans in the Union armies, for example, because “equality as soldiers means equality at the ballot-box, equality everywhere,” which would result in the Irish being “degraded to a level with negroes.” When in late June an Irish-American mob in Newburgh, New York, lynched an African American accused of assaulting an Irishwoman, the Irish-American blamed Republicans, whose emancipation policy had “sedulously placed the negro, with all his drawbacks of character and condition, in opposition to the white man.” Republicans, complained the Irish-American, had “thrust the negro again in their [whites’] faces,” even though whites were already “smarting under the reverses” brought about by the war.31
These tensions manifested themselves with deadly results during the 1862 political campaign. Locked in a close battle for reelection, First Ward alderman Henry Smith (a pro-war Democrat also endorsed by the Republicans) hired Five Points ropemaker Denis P. Sullivan to post handbills promoting his candidacy. With 2,500 bills to post, the thirty-three-year-old Sullivan rounded up some Five Points friends to assist him, and the nine men headed downtown with a ladder and two pails of paste on the evening of November 28. Pleased at having completed their work, the boisterous young men were heading home across Greenwich Street at 2:00 a.m. when Sullivan was approached by a gang led by First Ward politico “Big Tom” Byrnes, father-in-law of Smith’s opponent, anti-war Democrat John Fox. When Byrnes and his friends learned that Sullivan was posting bills for Smith, they upbraided and threatened him. “You are working for a nigger and you are a nigger yourself,” one of them shouted at Sullivan, adding that “the man you are working for hires nothing but niggers on the dock.” Sullivan responded, according to his subsequent testimony, that “I am no nigger—I am as good a Democrat as you are.” The former policeman flashed a pistol inside his coat, saying he would not use it if attacked by one man but would if set upon by the entire gang. Undaunted, Byrnes and his mates rushed Sullivan, vowing to “shove the pistol——.” When they threw Sullivan to the ground and struggled for his weapon, Sullivan shot Byrnes dead. The policemen who witnessed the entire quarrel (but apparently feared to intervene) immediately arrested Sullivan for murder.
News of Byrnes’s killing caused a sensation, especially in Democratic circles. Friends of both the accused and the victim immediately attempted to shape the public perception of the case. Just hours after the incident, Sullivan’s companions wrote a letter to the Herald insisting that their friend had acted in self-defense. Councilman John Hogan replied the following day that Sullivan’s comrades could not be trusted, as they were all “residents of that well-known locality, the Five Points,” who had gone to the First Ward “with the intention of provoking a quarrel with the friends of Mr. Fox.” At his February 1863 trial, Sullivan appeared with what the Times called “an able array of counsel” retained by Alderman Smith, who in the intervening weeks had won reelection. To the prosecution’s implication that Sullivan would not have carried a pistol had he not intended to pick a fight, Sullivan’s attorney retorted that the defendant armed himself that night because it “was a well known, though a lamentable fact, that any man who had the temerity to post Republican bills in the First Ward did so at the peril of his life.” Given that Sullivan was lying on the ground surrounded by Byrnes and his men when he fired the fatal shot, the jury reasoned that Sullivan had indeed acted in self-defense and found him not guilty.32
“FOR MANY YEARS THIS LOCALITY
HAS BEEN A MODEL OF GOOD ORDER”
The racial and political pressures that had been building up in New York during the first two years of the war exploded in the spring of 1863, when Congress instituted a draft to supplement dwindling voluntary enrollments. Now Five Pointers who disdained the war might be dragged into it against their will. New York’s Irish Americans were especially angry when the Lincoln administration announced that some non-citizens—those who had declared their intention to become citizens or had voted in an American election—would be eligible for the draft. Many also complained about the conscription clause that allowed a draftee to pay $300 in lieu of enrolling. Low-income New Yorkers such as those from Five Points believed, according to the Herald, that “the draft was an unfair one, inasmuch as the rich could avoid it by paying $300, while the poor man, who was without ‘the greenbacks,’ was compelled to go to the war.”33
When federal officials began choosing the first draftees in mid-July, New Yorkers responded with the bloodiest week in their entire history. The predominantly Irish-American mobs lynched a dozen or more African Americans and terrorized thousands. Hundreds of fires were set. Rioters fought pitched battles with the police and the militia for control of uptown avenues. The homes and businesses of prominent Republicans were looted and ransacked. Symbols of federal power in the city also drew the wrath of the enraged populace in what the Irish-American called “a saturnalia of pillage and violence.”34
New Yorkers assumed that Five Pointers must have played a major role in the Draft Riots’ carnage. A few months after the unrest, when Republican leader Charles Spencer announced the November election results at his party’s city headquarters, he described the Sixth Ward as one populated by that “class of individuals who would like to murder, steal, and burn ad libitum,” an obvious reference to the Draft Riots. Many modern writers have made the same assumption. According to Luc Sante, “the core of the participants unquestionably came from the Five Points.”35
The two most scholarly studies of the riots, in contrast, do not mention a single act of violence occurring in the Sixth Ward, and found few acts of violence uptown that can be traced to Five Pointers. Contemporaries agreed. Clancy seized upon the apparent lack of bloodshed in Five Points to remind New Yorkers that the neighborhood no longer lived up to its violent, dangerous reputation. “While nearly every portion of the city has been the scene of tumultuous outbreak,” asserted Clancy, “the Sixth Ward has maintained its usual uninterrupted quiet. For many years this locality has been a model of good order, and its citizens have much cause for congratulation on having passed through the fearful scenes of the week without a single evidence of excitement. . . . Let us hear no more the libelous epithet ‘Bloody Sixth.’”36
The truth, it turns out, lies somewhere in between the overwrought charges of Sante and the equally exaggerated claims of innocence propounded by Clancy. Of the hundreds of rioters arrested, primarily in uptown wards where the rioting was most fierce, only two of those whose residence could be established lived in Five Points. Instead, most of those indicted lived, as one might expect, in the northern neighborhoods where the disorder was concentrated.37
Nonetheless, Clancy’s claim that the Sixth Ward witnessed not “a single act of disorder” is also patently false. Although the bloodshed and destruction in Five Points were relatively mild compared to the mass murder and wholesale devastation found uptown, the rioting there was terrible nonetheless and terrorized the neighborhood’s African-American residents. The unrest began in Five Points on Monday, July 13, the first day of violence citywide. That afternoon, police discovered that “the negro shanties in Baxter Street were being fired” and that the nearby tenement and meetinghouse at 42 Baxter belonging to the New York African Society for Mutual Relief were also under attack. Captain Jourdan and his men “were soon at the spot, and after a severe fight, in which the force was boldly opposed, the rioters were dispersed, many of them badly injured.” A mob also descended upon “the saloon of Mr. Crook on Chatham St.” to attack the black waiters he employed, but the prompt arrival of police prevented any significant injuries there. Around five-thirty, more anti-black violence erupted, this time in the northeast corner of the neighborhood. According to one account, “some three hundred men, women, and boys attacked the dwellings of colored people in Pell, near Mott Street.” One of the African-American residents, fifty-seven-year-old Elizabeth Hennesy, was severely injured when hit by a flying brick. Meanwhile, at about six o’clock, “upwards of six hundred rioters” near the corner of Leonard and Baxter Streets “attacked a house . . . occupied by some twenty colored families, stoning in the windows, [and] attempting to break in and fire it.” When police arrived, “a severe fight ensued; the rioters were effectively handled, and dozens lay senseless on the street; ultimately they fled.”
The violence continued into the evening. Around 8:00 p.m., “a mob of six hundred” terrorized 104 and 105 Park Street, African-American boardinghouses located near the corner of Mott. In order to disperse them, the police “made a charge; had to fight hand-to-hand, [and] using locusts [billy clubs] effectively, beat and scattered the rioters.” The final melee that night was “a riot in . . . a locality known as Cow Bay,” where for thirty years the largest concentration of African Americans in the neighborhood had lived. Police again successfully scattered a crowd menacing the three-story tenements there. Rumors that the rioters torched the nearby Five Points Mission—repeated to this day—were totally unfounded.
The bloodshed subsided considerably in the Sixth Ward on the following day, though sporadic attacks on Five Points African Americans continued. That morning, a mob gathered on Leonard Street “assaulting and beating colored people.” The police rescued six African Americans from the rabid throng “and brought them in safety to the station.” On Wednesday morning, police again had to disperse “a mob in Centre, near Worth Street, who were assailing every colored person they met.” In the evening, rioters returned again to the block just north of the Five Points intersection, where “there were many demonstrations against the dwellings [at] Nos. 38 and 40 Baxter Street, occupied by colored people.” Police once more managed to subdue the mob, “sometimes with and sometimes without a battle.” This was apparently the last of the violence, though it raged on uptown for three more days.38
The draft rioting in Five Points resulted in the almost complete abandonment of the district by New York African Americans. The neighborhood’s black population—once numbering well over one thousand—had declined dramatically and steadily ever since the race riot there nearly thirty years earlier, so that by the eve of the Civil War fewer than five hundred African Americans were left, even though the ward’s overall population had doubled. All but a handful of these now decided to leave. Under a headline proclaiming the “Exodus of Blacks from the Five Points,” the Herald reported on Thursday, the seventeenth, that “the fear which has seized the colored population in nearly every part of the city has extended to the blacks of the Sixth ward.” Three days of violence aimed against them convinced Five Pointers of color that “their only safety is in flight.” As a result, “there seems to have been a general exodus of Africans from the Five Points, and the whites are in possession of the whole field.” Some eventually returned. The 1870 census records 132 “colored” Five Points residents, mostly sailors whose ties to the community were tenuous. African Americans from all parts of the city fled to Long Island and other safe havens during the riots, and most of the Five Pointers among them decided never to move back.39
After a one-month delay caused by the riots, the draft for the Sixth Ward finally took place on August 25. Of the 161 Five Pointers drafted, 59 were exempted from service. They received their exemptions either because they were not American citizens, too old or young, physically unfit, no longer lived in the congressional district, or the sole supporters of widowed mothers or other dependents. Eleven of the 161 draftees hired substitutes, an option available only to the neighborhood’s more prosperous residents. Two of the eleven, Caspar Grote and Herman Schilling, were successful Baxter Street grocers. Another, James Nealis, was a scion of one of the ward’s most powerful families. His father and uncle had at various times served as ward policemen, operated a Mulberry Street grocery, and actively participated in ward politics. James himself had spent three years in college “out West” and was one of the men posting bills with Denis Sullivan the night he shot “Big Tom” Byrnes. Two of the other drafted Five Pointers avoided service by paying the $300 commutation fee.40
The most popular way to avoid military service, however, was simply not to show up at the enrollment office after one’s name was called. Fully 88 of the 161 Five Points draftees “failed to report.” Draft dodgers could be arrested, but the understaffed provost marshals did not have the means to track down many evaders. Only a handful of the Five Pointers who failed to report for duty were subsequently arrested; all proved themselves exempt from duty and were released.
In the end, then, only a single Five Points resident was compelled to go to war as a result of the draft. This lone conscript was Hugh Boyle, a twenty-seven-year-old laborer who lived at 24 Mott Street. The blue-eyed, brown-haired Boyle put off enlistment as long as possible after the August 1863 conscription; but in December 1864, he finally claimed his $100 bounty and was mustered in for three years’ duty with the Eighteenth New York Cavalry Regiment. Boyle joined his unit at Gainnie Landing, Louisiana, in January 1865. Five months later, when the war was over but his regiment was preparing to leave for Texas to serve as part of the Union occupation force there, Boyle deserted, absconding with his Remington revolver and a holster.41
“SO LATELY NOTHING BUT A WARD POLITICIAN”
One reason that New York’s Irish Americans reacted so violently to the prospect of a draft was that they were increasingly distrustful of the Tammany leaders who claimed to represent them. When independent Democrat C. Godfrey Gunther defeated the Tammany candidate, Francis I. Boole, in the mayoral contest of 1863, it exposed the organization’s continuing woes. The Irish-American explained Gunther’s victory by observing that “the people, who, for a long while, have not been content with the manner in which the political ‘machines’ have been run for the exclusive profit of a score or two of political dictators, voted for the only candidate who appeared to be running without any machinery at all, and elected him.” Brennan, the top Tammany officeholder, was now perceived as one of those “dictators.”42
Those maligning Tammany increasingly singled out Brennan for condemnation. The most vitriolic attacks came not from Republicans but from the Irish-American. Throwing aside ethnic pride, the journal condemned “the ruling clique of Tammany—which is as much to say, Comptroller Brennan and Peter B. Sweeny,” for nominating for sheriff another Irish American, the Fourteenth Ward’s John Kelly, “without making even a pretence of consulting the wishes of the people. . . . Comptroller Brennan aspires to command the city Democracy; armed with the immense patronage of his position, he rules in Tammany Hall and dictates the course of that organization and the men to whom its support is to be given.” Tammany, insisted the Irish-American, was an “organization which he thus practically owns. . . . The question to be decided in this nomination is whether the people are to have any voice in the management of their own affairs, or whether Comptroller Brennan is to be henceforth the autocrat of the city Democracy, dictating the candidates, and dividing, in undisturbed sovereignty, the spoils amongst his followers.”43
Brennan should have expected, and undoubtedly could withstand, such complaints. One faction or another was always griping about the distribution of the patronage, and the Irish-American’s charge that Brennan “has been using Tammany Hall . . . for his own aggrandizement and the advancement of his own family” was a staple of campaign rhetoric. What may have embarrassed or insulted him, though, was the newspaper’s assertion that Brennan’s ascent through Tammany reflected the utter debasement of a once proud and distinguished organization:
It is but a very few years since Matthew T. Brennan was simply Captain in the Sixth Ward Police—a very respectable office, but one not sought for by politicians with lofty aspirations. Mr. Brennan was looked upon as an efficient officer, and his fellow Democrats, believing him to be devoted to their own principles, deemed it but right to give him a further step; and he was, accordingly, made Police Justice. During the years in which Mr. Brennan was passing through these minor offices, the character of Tammany Hall underwent a complete revolution. [Soon it was run by] a clique of venal, selfish political charlatans [who] maintained themselves there by fraud and trickery. . . . Under such a parvenue regime, it was not surprising that Matthew T. Brennan,—so lately nothing but a Ward politician, glad to accept the small crumbs of local patronage distribution dispensed from the public table,—should be able to procure for himself the nomination for the Comptrollership, the richest and most important office in the gift of the citizens of New York. Here, again, he was aided by his former reputation, circumscribed as it was . . . and his fellow-citizens, trusting to the general belief in his integrity and the soundness of his Democracy, elected him. That trust Matthew T. Brennan has in every way betrayed.44
Because the intra-Democratic truce that had brought about his nomination had collapsed by 1866, Brennan stood no chance of gaining renomination when his term expired at the end of that year. Yet with great fanfare, he disingenuously announced his refusal to run for reelection, complaining in a long, self-aggrandizing letter that he would not remain in office at a time when every public official was assumed to be corrupt. Although his renomination had been considered unlikely, Brennan had accrued enough power in Tammany by that point that the Herald characterized his decision not to fight to retain his post as an “earthquake” for the city’s Democratic party.45
Brennan might have been better able to maintain his elevated position within the Democratic ranks had he still been able to rely on John Clancy to promote his interests. But Clancy had died suddenly on July 1, 1864, at age thirty-five. All agreed that Clancy’s premature death was a tragedy. Just before his death, he had been elected a sachem of the Tammany Society, the most sought after office within the Democratic organization and an honor that reflected his ascent to the very pinnacle of power there. The Herald’s obituary called Clancy “one of the most influential democrats in the state.” Even his political enemies sincerely mourned his death. “Under his management,” commented the Republican Times, “the Leader, though thoroughly partisan in politics, became one of the most able, brilliant and readable weeklies ever published in this City.”46
By this point, Sixth Ward primaries were no longer the wild and raucous affairs of Con Donoho’s day. Tammany leaders now dictated the Democratic nominations, so that in most cases, as the Republican attorney and reformer William M. Ivins put it, “the primary is usually only a gathering of the clans to get a drink, and incidentally vote the ticket put into their hands.” In unusual circumstances, however, the primary could revert to rough-and-tumble tactics. New York politico Matthew P. Breen recalled one such postwar primary after Brennan had become comptroller and had moved far uptown. Dowling believed that because Brennan no longer lived in the ward, he ought to cede him control of the district, while Brennan, who continued to maintain a residence on White Street inhabited by his mother, had no intention of giving up his authority. The quarrel reached a climax at the ward primary. “I don’t believe there ever was another such primary held in the City of New York,” recalled Breen years later. “That primary is worth a prominent place in history.” The day before the contest was to be held, adherents of both factions took up positions on all the approaches to the polling place in order to intimidate the other side’s voters and prevent them from reaching the ballot boxes; but because both sides were skilled in such tactics, “the line was made up alternately, or very nearly so, of Brennan and Dowling men.” Despite various fights and arrests for assault and battery, the opposing forces remained in place all night and all the next day until the polls opened on the evening of the second day, with sandwiches and beer provided for each man at the expense of their leaders. On primary night, Brennan’s ticket prevailed. But such primaries were the exception rather than the rule by the postbellum period.47
Election days in Five Points also became relatively tranquil. By the eve of the war, the ward’s new, more peaceful attitude toward elections inspired comments in the press. “The ‘Bloody Sixth,’ yesterday, did nothing to justify its sanguinary cognomen and character,” noted a surprised reporter from the Times in 1860. “The election dawned, and grew, and culminated in its precincts as calmly and gently as a Summer cloud. . . . The policemen stood around the polls like shepherds, and, to follow out the pastoral similie, flocks of voters sported and gamboled in their vicinity as inoffensively as lambs.” Election-related violence did not disappear completely during the war years. But quarrels tended to be small-scale confrontations rather than the neighborhood-wide free-for-alls of the 1840s and ‘50s.48
Physical intimidation ceased to be a significant factor in Five Points voting primarily because politicians perfected another means—electoral fraud—to control the election results. By 1870, the Sixth Ward had become almost as famous for voter fraud as it had been in the prewar years for political violence.
“EVERY CONCEIVABLE FORM OF FRAUD WAS PRACTICED”
Charges of widespread voter fraud had occasionally surfaced in New York in the antebellum period. During the 1830s and 1840s, party leaders often accused their adversaries of “importing” voters from outside the city and state to cast ballots in important contests. In response to the growing conviction among native-born Americans that immigrant thugs cast multiple ballots or exercised the franchise before receiving their naturalization papers, the state legislature in 1859 enacted one of the nation’s first voter-registration laws. Though Republicans felt certain that the new law would limit or eliminate fraudulent voting, politicos merely found new means to improperly influence the outcome of close elections.49
This became evident in 1863 with the contest for state Superior Court judge. Tammany nominated city judge John H. McCunn, a native of northern Ireland who had arrived in America as a teenaged sailor and worked as a cabinetmaker before entering the legal profession. Even many Democratic newspapers condemned the nomination, insisting that McCunn was a political hack wholly unqualified for the post. The Times labeled him “probably the worst man that ever offered himself as a candidate for a judgeship in any civilized country.” Despite the Democratic majority that year, McCunn received 20,000 fewer votes than the other Democratic candidates, and preliminary returns on election night indicated that he had lost the election by a mere handful of votes.50
Tammany leaders, not about to let a few dozen ballots stand between them and the judgeship, decided to carry the election by rigging the returns from Five Points. Results had already been released (albeit in preliminary form), so the vote counters altered their tally to make it appear as if a few numerals had simply been transposed or misread in the original returns. Revising the results without changing the total number of votes cast was no mean mathematical feat, but the Sixth Ward polling officials managed to pull it off:
Whether this scheme was hatched within Sixth Ward Democratic circles or imposed upon Five Pointers by other Tammany officials is impossible to determine. Coordination between the two must have been necessary. How the Sixth Warders managed to slip the changes past Republican ballot inspectors is also uncertain. Democrats might have resorted to bribery, though Matthew Brennan’s brother Owen, one of the ward’s Republican leaders, may have facilitated the subterfuge. In any case, that swing of 260 votes between McCunn and his nearest rival gave McCunn the election. He would soon play a key role in expanding election fraud to even greater heights.51
Over the remainder of the decade, voting fraud would reach levels never seen before or since in New York City. Revising the vote count continued to be a favorite ploy. Tweed later described to investigators how his election inspectors would “count the ballots in bulk, or without counting them announce the result in bulk, or change from one to the other, as the case may have been.” Another tactic was to permit those who were ineligible—especially immigrants who had not yet received their naturalization papers—to cast ballots anyway. The most popular method of fraudulent voting, however, was “repeating,” finding party loyalists who would cast multiple ballots at each election.52
All these strategies were pursued in the postbellum years to an extent and with a shamelessness unprecedented even in New York politics. This was especially true in Five Points. The New York Tribune in 1867 singled out the Fourth and Sixth Wards as those with the most fraudulent registrations. With a presidential election at stake the following year, the illegal voting in New York increased further still. “Never in the history of popular suffrage in any country was there so bold, general, well organized and thoroughly executed an attempt made” to carry an election “by frauds . . . as at the Presidential election of 1868,” wrote a Republican who subsequently investigated the contest. “. . . Every conceivable form of fraud was practiced, and every crime possible to be committed against the elective franchise, was perpetrated with the most unblushing effrontery.” The Nation agreed that “election frauds on such an enormous scale have never been witnessed in this country.”53
Fraudulent naturalizations were one method used to augment the Democratic vote. McCunn naturalized 27,897 people in 1868 and another Tammany judge, George G. Barnard, granted citizenship to 10,070 more. In order to process so many applications, these judges dispensed with all pretense of normal judicial procedure, banning the press from their courtrooms to prevent word of the irregular proceedings from leaking out. Journalists would have found it strange, for example, that a single New Yorker, Patrick Goff, was able to serve as a witness for 2,162 naturalization applicants in the autumn of 1868, verifying both their date of arrival in the United States and their good character. On three October days alone, the apparently well-known Goff served as a witness for more than 1,000 applicants. Had such judges merely been streamlining the citizenship process to ensure the naturalization of deserving immigrants before the election, one might excuse such behavior. But many of these naturalization documents were generated by Tammany specifically to make repeat voting possible. One court clerk later testified that he brought forty naturalization certificates to Five Points on election day so that repeaters could use them to verify false identities and cast fraudulent ballots. Thousands of certificates were probably issued in the names of nonexistent immigrants, and others were given to immigrants who were not yet eligible.54
Voting more than once required registering more than once, and by 1868 Tammany leaders had systematized multiple registration. William H. Hendrick, for example, was hired in that year by Peter Norton (brother of state senator Mike Norton) to join a gang of repeaters operating in the Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Wards. In each ward, the men would visit the saloon of a Tammany leader, who would provide the gang members with the false names, addresses, and voting districts where they should register. Usually these addresses were buildings owned or occupied by the politicos themselves, so that if necessary the ward heelers could testify that the repeaters were their lessees. After registering about three times each in the Eighth and Fourteenth Wards, Hendrick and his partners proceeded to the Sixth Ward, where they visited the Bowery saloon of Alderman Edward Cuddy. From behind the bar, Cuddy produced a ledger book with hundreds of fictitious names and addresses. He gave each repeater a slip of paper with a name and Five Points address to use. They were told that after registering, they should return to Norton’s place to receive their pay and be sure on election day to vote at all the places they had registered. Subsequent testimony would reveal that hundreds—and perhaps more than one thousand men—had fraudulently registered in the Sixth Ward for the 1868 elections.55
The army of repeaters sent to the polls on election day in 1868 was part of a desperate attempt to carry the state for both Tweed’s handpicked gubernatorial candidate, John T. Hoffman, and Democratic presidential candidate Horatio Seymour, who faced almost certain defeat at the hands of Republican war hero Ulysses S. Grant. Many came from outside Five Points to vote illegally in the neighborhood. Edward Cobb of Hester Street, for example, later admitted that for thirty dollars he voted the Democratic ticket fifteen or sixteen times, including at least once at Five Points’ Bayard Street polling place. Cobb reported that he saw Cuddy leading gangs of repeaters around the neighborhood that day. In many cases, Five Pointers invaded other districts to cast illicit ballots. Among them was James Clark of Mott Street, who testified later that for eight dollars he voted the Democratic ticket “eight or nine times in the 10th and 7th wards.”
But repeating was especially heavy in Five Points. One observer saw men at the polling place on Elizabeth Street just north of Bayard exchanging clothing with each other before going in to vote, either because they had already voted there or because they feared that a poll watcher might remember that they had cast ballots elsewhere earlier in the day. After depositing their ballots, the men went around the corner to the voting booths on Bayard, where a man furnished the repeaters with slips of paper listing the names and addresses they would use there. Others entering the polling place on Baxter Street also exchanged hats and coats with each other before casting their ballots.56
Why did Republican election inspectors acquiesce to such blatant fraud? Some were threatened with physical violence; others were drugged; still others had their registration books stolen. Some were probably bribed. And many who protested were simply ignored. In one Five Points election district, the Republican inspector tried many times to challenge voters he did not recognize as neighborhood residents. But his Democratic counterpart would snarl, “‘You be damned!’ and took the vote and put it in the box.” The Republican noted that as the day wore on and the crowds thinned, the Democratic inspectors would look at the registration book, copy down some names, and leave the room momentarily. A few minutes later, in would come a large group to vote upon those very names. Republicans who arrived late in the day to cast ballots often found their names had already been voted upon.57
All these facts came out in a congressional investigation in the winter of 1868–69. Yet the glare of public attention did nothing to curb the fraudulent voting. In fact, the number of votes cast in the Sixth Ward continued to escalate suspiciously, even though the subsequent elections were far less important than the 1868 presidential contest:
The number of ballots cast in the Sixth Ward increased 80 percent from 1867 to 1869, even though only one tenement was built in the district in that interval and others were torn down to make room for commercial buildings. The cities of Hartford and Providence, each with 50,000 inhabitants, did not cast as many votes in 1869 as did this single New York ward with only 21,000 residents. The 1870 census revealed that more ballots were regularly deposited in one Five Points precinct than there were men, women, boys, and girls living there. In other Five Points districts, there were more voters than adult male citizens eligible to cast ballots.58
Motivated in large measure by these revelations, Congress included provisions in two 1870 statutes that empowered federal officials to monitor and punish electoral fraud, though they could do so only in balloting for national office. The U.S. Attorney General consequently appointed lawyer John I. Davenport as a U.S. commissioner with wide-ranging powers to prevent and punish fraudulent voting in New York. Legislation enacted in 1871 and 1872 enhanced Davenport’s authority. The federal election inspectors who monitored balloting as a result of this legislation significantly diminished the illegal voting that had become so rampant in the Sixth Ward since the war:
The presence of federal inspectors scared away many repeaters, while others willing to vote repeatedly in the state contest would not do so in the national balloting for fear of arrest.59
Although federal legislation may have drastically reduced repeat voting, it did not deter Tammany entirely. Instead, the Democratic machine merely modified its tactics. If Democrats could not bring illicit voters to the polls, they would merely miscount those ballots that were cast. As usual, such practices were especially common in Five Points. Only 153 of the 283 registered voters visited the polls at 5 Mott Street on election day in November 1870. Nonetheless, Democratic inspectors announced that 280 votes had been cast—275 for Hoffman (in his bid for reelection as governor) and 5 for his Republican opponent—even though Republican poll watchers swore that at least thirty Republicans had cast ballots. In another Five Points precinct, inspectors reported that Hoffman had received 318 of 319 votes, prompting nine Republicans who had voted for his opponent there to write to the Sun asking what had become of their ballots. By focusing their fraud in Five Points, Tammany leaders further sullied the neighborhood’s reputation and established it in New Yorkers’ minds as the locus of Tammany’s electoral crimes.60
“MATT. BRENNAN IS NOT AN HONEST OFFICIAL”
Though Five Pointers continued to flourish in city politics, their ability to maintain their positions was increasingly dependent on the whims of “Boss” Tweed. Police Justice Joseph Dowling became an intimate Tweed ally—not a member of the Boss’s inner circle like Mayor A. Oakey Hall or Clancy’s mentor Peter Barr Sweeny, but an important supporter nonetheless. Dowling’s status was reflected in his selection (along with Hall and Sweeny) as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1868. Jourdan, Dowling’s right-hand man, was appointed citywide superintendent of police in April 1870. Of the major Five Points politicians, only the Walsh brothers and Brennan remained aloof from Tweed. The Walshes actively opposed the Boss, refusing to cooperate with Tammany as long as Tweed controlled the organization. They were consequently frozen out of political office in the immediate postwar years. Brennan remained faithful to Tammany, though he kept his distance from Tweed. Yet in 1870, seeking a candidate with a reputation for honesty, Tweed acquiesced in Brennan’s nomination for county sheriff in return for his endorsement of the Boss’s candidates for mayor and comptroller. Brennan and the other Democrats easily carried the election.61
When Brennan took office as sheriff in January 1871, Tweed was at the pinnacle of his power. As a state senator representing the district that included Five Points, he had pushed through the legislature a new city charter that further entrenched his power. Tweed collected millions of dollars annually in kickbacks from contractors on city construction projects. He also collected obscene profits from businesses he owned that held city contracts. As president of the Board of Supervisors, Tweed and a fellow supervisor, Five Pointer Walter Roche (after whom the Roche Guard gang of the 1850s had been named), cooperated to demand payoffs from those who sought to have bills brought before that legislative body. Tweed was also assistant city street commissioner, and used that office to secure Roche the post of commissioner of street openings. Venal yet ingratiating, corpulent yet graceful, Tweed by 1871 ruled New York like Lorenzo de’ Medici. He dispensed jobs, bribes, and charitable donations—even food and shoes—to ensure a large and varied base of support while simultaneously using electoral fraud to maintain the sham that he and his regime were popularly elected. Few could resist his charms or defy his commands.62
Yet in selecting Brennan for the sheriff’s post, Tweed had sown the seeds of his own downfall. Brennan’s predecessor in the lucrative post, James O’Brien, apparently coveted another term in office. When Tweed spurned O’Brien’s efforts to secure the Democratic nomination (supposedly as punishment for O’Brien’s treachery in a factional dispute), O’Brien decided to seek revenge and began leaking evidence of Tweed’s crimes to the New York Times, which printed the revelations in July 1871. Tweed nonetheless stood for reelection to the state senate that fall, staying in the race even after authorities indicted him on civil fraud charges less than two weeks before the election.63
Fearing that a policeman arresting the Boss might bring him before Dowling or some other judge “in the Tweed interest,” prosecutors gave the warrants for his arrest to Brennan, who dutifully carried out the delicate task of arresting the most powerful man in New York. The forewarned press was on hand when, on October 27, Brennan entered Tweed’s office, tapped the apparently bemused Boss on the shoulder, and declared, “You’re my man!” Thomas Nast’s image of the scene for Harper’s Weekly contains the only known likeness of Brennan. Despite the apparently cool relations between the two men, Brennan did not make things too unpleasant for Tweed. The sheriff allowed the Tammany leader to begin his detention at a hotel owned by Tweed’s son, where the prisoner was given a spacious suite of rooms. Reporters arriving to interview Tweed found him “regaling himself in the apartments of his friend Judge Dowling,” who just happened to live in the adjoining suite. The Times later charged that Dowling kept several potential prosecution witnesses in jail on trumped-up charges in order to prevent them from testifying against the Tammany chieftain.64
Sensing Tweed’s vulnerability even before his arrest, Republicans had recruited as his opponent in the senate campaign Cork native Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, an Irish freedom fighter who had arrived in New York earlier in 1871 after the British released him and a half dozen other Fenian movement leaders from confinement in Tasmania. Tweed’s adversaries believed that the support Rossa might gain from the large Cork and Kerry populations in the Fourth and Sixth Wards could carry the revolutionary to victory, but on election night Tweed was declared the winner. In fact, Rossa apparently outpolled Tweed by 350 votes, but Tammany election officials “counted out” Rossa in order to perpetuate Tweed’s reign. The eccentric Rossa eventually became proprietor of a Five Points saloon “whose atmosphere,” according to one neighborhood historian, “seethed with hatred of Britain.”65
Meanwhile, Tweed’s empire began to collapse. In December, he was arraigned on criminal charges. Soon thereafter he was expelled from the Tammany Society and forced to resign his municipal offices. After two years of legal maneuvering, Tweed was finally convicted of fraud in November 1873 and sentenced to twelve years in prison.66
Sheriff Brennan, center, arresting Boss Tweed, October 27, 1871. Harper’s Weekly (November 18, 1871): 1084. Collection of the author.
Like all New Yorkers of modest means, Five Pointers viewed Boss Tweed’s demise with mixed emotions. One neighborhood saloonkeeper recalled a few years later that “the majority of people with whom I talked believe that the prosecutors of Tweed did wrong” in punishing him so severely. “Tweed has thousands among the poor today, who bless him. He kept the poor employed, and they would have done anything for him.” Jacob Riis found the same attitude toward the Boss still prevalent twenty years later. Tweed’s “name is even now one to conjure with in the Sixth Ward,” reported Riis. “He never ‘squealed,’ and he was ‘so good to the poor.’”67
Even though these statements probably exaggerated Tweed’s popularity in Five Points, neighborhood residents had benefited from the Boss’s reign in a variety of ways. Any Democratic leader would have supplied jobs to his most loyal political followers. Con Donoho had done so when Tweed was just a teenager. But under Tweed, such opportunities had expanded significantly. In addition, it was only when Tweed reached the height of his influence that the city’s Catholic churches, which for years had sought government subsidies for their parochial schools, finally received assistance. Five Points’ Transfiguration parish school received a grant of $11,500 in 1869 and slightly larger sums in each of the next two years before Tweed’s fall from grace, when such funding ceased.68
With Tweed’s indictment, his henchmen came under scrutiny, including his Five Points allies. In February 1872, Roche was arrested for absconding with funds from the bankrupt Bowling Green Savings Bank, of which he was vice president. The Times speculated that Roche might have been plundering the Bowling Green to save the Guardian Savings Bank, where the onetime saloonkeeper also served as vice president while Tweed acted as president. Roche had induced many Tammany politicos, including Brennan, to deposit large sums in the Guardian. By early 1874, however, Roche had still not been brought to trial, and he apparently never served any jail time.69
Despite his reputation for honesty and relative aloofness from Tweed, Brennan also came under suspicion as the Tweed Ring collapsed. Even before Tweed’s indictment, the Tribune published a series of reports charging that the sheriff’s Ludlow Street jail levied outrageous fees on prisoners, keeping the proceeds for himself and his cronies. Brennan also apparently inflated the bills he submitted to the city for making arrests and seizing goods. In one such case, he charged the city $419. After complaints by the defendant, a judge in November 1872 examined the sheriff’s actual expenses and reduced the fee to $19. Month after month, the Times published editorials condemning “Brennan’s blackmail” and excoriating the Five Pointer for his “career of plunder.” One case of “plunder” involved Monroe Hall, the building that housed Brennan’s saloon. In 1863, Brennan had signed a ten-year lease to rent part of the building to the Second District Civil Court for an outrageous $2,800 per year. When Tweed Ring plundering reached its height in 1870, charged the Times, Brennan had had the audacity to have the board of aldermen annul that agreement and increase the rent to an astounding $7,500. “MATT. BRENNAN,” the Times solemnly concluded, “is not an honest official.”70
Brennan tried desperately to maintain his position in city politics and the Democratic party. In theory, Tweed’s downfall might have helped Brennan advance, inasmuch as the Boss and his Ring leaders had all either been indicted or fled the country. Yet Brennan was never able to win acceptance from the “reform” wing of the party headed by “Honest John” Kelly either, especially as the press continued to condemn the extravagant fees levied by his sheriff’s office. In the fall of 1873, the Times reported gleefully that Brennan had failed to get his handpicked choices selected to represent the city at the Democratic state convention. A few weeks later, his candidate for state assembly also lost a primary battle. Brennan himself was denied renomination that fall, as Tammany chose a slate of reform candidates associated with Kelly that included William Walsh as the nominee for county clerk. Brennan would have to serve out his remaining days as sheriff as a political outsider.71
In the end, Brennan’s involvement with the Ring did land him in jail, though not for the reasons one would expect. Just before Christmas 1873, with only a few days remaining in Brennan’s term, Tweed associate Henry W. Genet was convicted of stealing city building supplies and funds by submitting fictitious work vouchers. Genet, whom the Times later called “one of the most vulgar, brutal, and defiant of the Ring conspirators,” was remanded to the custody of William H. Shields, Brennan’s chief deputy and husband of his favorite niece. Shields, as he often did with prominent convicts, allowed the prisoner to enjoy himself in the short interim until his sentencing. A month earlier, Shields had offered the same privilege to the convicted Tweed, who had spent each of the three days before his sentencing with the “Stable Gang” of politicos who congregated at a Five Points livery stable. Shields allowed Genet to attend a gala “going away” party in his honor at which virtually every important city Democrat made an appearance. Before escorting Genet to his sentencing on December 22, Shields allowed him to return home for a last visit with his wife. While the deputy sat unsuspectingly in the parlor, “Prince Hal” escaped out a back window. Within hours, he was on his way to Canada, and from there he set sail for Europe. For allowing Genet to escape, the incensed trial judge fined Shields and Brennan $250 each and sentenced them to thirty days in jail. On January 8, 1874, just a few days after stepping down as sheriff, the humiliated Brennan returned to the Ludlow Street jail he had presided over for three years, this time as a prisoner.72
Brennan’s ensuing decline was remarkably swift. Breen recalled that Brennan, “a very proud man, was then getting old, and was so deeply mortified by his imprisonment and the abuse he received from the public press that he never recovered his former self. After getting out of prison he kept to his house, and although up to this episode he was one of the most popular men in New York, he never again took any further interest in public affairs.”73
“AN ERA IN NEW-YORK POLITICS SO ENTIRELY
OF THE PAST THAT IT SEEMS LIKE ANCIENT HISTORY”
“Mr. Brennan was the product of an era in New-York politics so entirely of the past that it seems like ancient history,” asserted the Times when it announced that Brennan had died on January 19, 1879, at age fifty-six. The Times was right. Ward primaries were no longer decided by knockdown, drag-out brawls. Polling places were no longer dominated by gangs seeking to prevent certain voters from casting their ballots. Service in the police or fire departments was no longer a prerequisite to political advancement. And gone were the days when Irish Catholics were all but barred from citywide offices.74
The old era of New York politics also seemed a thing of the past because while Brennan died young by modern standards, he had outlived almost all of his Five Points political contemporaries. Yankee Sullivan committed suicide in a San Francisco jail cell in 1855 while in his late forties. Clancy died during the Civil War at thirty-five. Jourdan passed away suddenly in 1870 at thirty-nine, only a few months after becoming the city’s police superintendent. McCunn, whose naturalization frauds were just a few of his many crimes, was impeached and removed from office by a unanimous vote of the state senate on July 2, 1872. Literally mortified, McCunn died at age forty-seven just four days later. William Walsh passed away prematurely as well, in March 1878 at age forty-two, soon after completing his term as county clerk. Tweed died in jail a month later at fifty.75
Brennan also outlived his former protégé Dowling, who succumbed to kidney failure in 1876 at age fifty. Despite Dowling’s connections to the Tweed Ring, New Yorkers eulogized “Old Baldy” with particular fondness. “With the death of ‘Joe’ Dowling is lost one of the best known Irishmen among us,” commented the Herald. Breen aptly described the colorful Dowling as “one of the most remarkable characters that has ever appeared in the history of New York politics.” Dowling had remained a police justice until about 1874, when the state legislature reorganized the police courts and eliminated his district. He thoroughly enjoyed retirement, traveling extensively in England and on the Continent. While in London, he became the toast of the town after pummeling into submission thieves he caught attempting to plunder the house of the magistrate with whom he was staying. Upon his return to New York, according to one biographer, Dowling “amused himself with speculation in various enterprises, particularly theatres.” He also owned about a half-dozen tenements. Dowling appears to have been a successful investor, for at his death he left a fortune estimated to be worth from $150,000 to as much as $500,000 (the equivalent of $2–$7 million today). Nor was it uncommon for once impoverished Five Points politicians to die with such substantial assets. According to the Times, Jourdan too left “a large fortune, a portion of which he acquired by inheritance and the remainder by honest industry in his profession.” The meaning of the phrase “honest industry” was probably better captured in the famous account of Tammany by George W. Plunkitt, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, in which he explained that politicians reaped fortunes through “honest graft,” investment opportunities that depended on insider information available only to the politically well connected.76
Brennan was not so lucky. A reform-minded comptroller refused to pay most of his outstanding claims against the city for services rendered as sheriff. Brennan sued, but the courts ruled against him. At the same time, many New Yorkers sued him, claiming that the sheriff or his deputies had overcharged for their services. To pay his legal fees and the judgments against him in these civil suits, Brennan was forced to sell most of his assets—primarily real estate—at depressed prices during the severe recession of 1874 and 1875. As a result, noted the Times, “he retired to private life with hardly a competence.” According to the Tribune, Brennan “died poor.”77
Remnants of both the brawling and corrupt eras of Five Points politics would persist after Brennan’s death. One Five Pointer, in particular, rose to fame by the old rules. Recall the seven-year-old bootblack and newsboy named Tim Sullivan, who in 1870 lived with his mother, four siblings, stepfather, and three boarders in a run-down tenement apartment at 25 Baxter Street just south of the Five Points intersection. Born in New York, Sullivan was the son of Lansdowne immigrants from County Kerry who upon their arrival were among the very poorest of the Five Points poor. Sullivan hustled to earn every possible penny to help his struggling family, because his mother bore Tim’s unreliable stepfather four more children after 1870.
Young Tim became quite an entrepreneur. In his various jobs delivering newspapers, he developed a network of contacts among the city’s newsboys and periodicals dealers. He often gave orphans and runaways just starting as newsboys their first stack of newspapers for free, both to help the struggling street urchins and win their loyalty. In his teenaged years, he began to work after school in the news plants themselves, but simultaneously became a newspaper distributor as well, because distribution managers knew that his web of newsboys could guarantee the sale of their papers throughout Manhattan. “Every new newspaper that come out, I obtained employment on, on account of my connection with the newsdealers all over the City of New York,” Sullivan recalled in 1902. Sullivan’s income from these operations must have been significant, because by his late teens he was ready to open his first saloon, and by his early twenties he purportedly had interests in three or four.
Sullivan was also a very popular young man. According to Sixth Ward lore, Sullivan in 1886 came upon a noted “pugilist” beating a woman on Centre Street near the Tombs. When the man refused to heed Sullivan’s warning to desist, Sullivan challenged the fighter himself and bested the bully. This battle “is still sweet in the memories of old Sixth warders,” commented the Herald nearly twenty years later. From that day on, its reporter wrote, the “‘young element’” in the district “hailed him as their chief” and “forced Thomas P. Walsh . . . to nominate Mr. Sullivan to the Assembly in 1886.” Walsh, who at this point headed the anti-Tammany “County Democracy” in the Sixth Ward, probably needed little persuading to nominate the twenty-three-year-old Sullivan. Leaders of the County Democracy were always looking for popular new personalities who might challenge the Tammany incumbents. “Five Points Sullivan” lived up to Walsh’s expectations, defeating his Tammany rival despite his youth and lack of political experience. Sullivan soon began cooperating with Tammany (as did Walsh), and quickly moved up through the ranks. He eventually served in both the state senate and the U.S. House of Representatives.
Sullivan’s power in Tammany eventually surpassed even Brennan’s. By the turn of the century, he was known as “Big Tim” Sullivan, “the political ruler of down-town New York.” Some observers considered him the second most powerful politician in the city, after Tammany “boss” Richard Croker. Sullivan also became quite wealthy. Critics charged that he built his fortune from payoffs extorted from gambling and prostitution syndicates in his district. Sullivan insisted that he had never taken a bribe in his life, and that his substantial income derived from shrewd investments in vaudeville theaters and other legitimate business enterprises. Whatever the case, Sullivan remembered his humble origins and shared his wealth with his less fortunate constituents, giving away thousands of pairs of shoes and Christmas dinners each year.78
Still, Big Tim was now the exception rather than the rule. And in many ways, Five Points was also a very different neighborhood. By 1870, it was much less poverty-stricken than it had been in the 1830s and ’40s. The “Arch Block,” the “Big Flat,” and “Gotham Court,” all in other neighborhoods, had become the most infamous tenements in the city. “Hell’s Kitchen” aroused more fear and dread. And so might the story of Five Points have ended, but for the tremendous influx in the late 1870s and 1880s of Italians and Asians, whose arrival would once again make the neighborhood notorious for disease, crime, and overcrowding.79
