WILLIAM MARCY TWEED was a huge man. He stood 5 feet 11 inches tall, and his weight varied from 280 to 320 pounds. Like some other fat men, he was light on his feet, and the ladies said that he waltzed divinely. His head was big and rather pointed. He had coarse features, a prominent nose, a ruddy complexion, a brown beard, and bright blue eyes, which twinkled when he was amused. When angered, he could stare down almost anyone—even a rowdy who held a gun against his potbelly.
Tweed laughed easily. A man of enormous appetite, he consumed gargantuan meals. Endowed with almost limitless energy, he worked most of the time. He was fond of power and money and canaries and flowers and women. Happily married and proud of his wife, Tweed also was devoted to his eight children. Nonetheless, he had two mistresses. One was a tiny blonde who didn’t reach to his shoulder. Tweed lavished $1,800,000 on his kept women, but this meant nothing to a politician who cheated the city out of $5,500,000 in a single morning. Fond of massive jewelry, he wore a huge diamond in the front of his shirt.
Tweed was rough in manners and humor, spouting profanity in basso profundo. His speech was so thick that it was sometimes difficult to understand him. He drank heavily until a doctor said that he was endangering his health. Tweed never smoked and often moralized about the evils of nicotine. Although he quit school at the age of fourteen, Tweed bent college graduates to his iron will. He liked to breed dogs and confusion. He was the first city politician in the United States to be called the Boss. He enslaved New York City and the state of New York, and he planned to put America into one of his huge pockets.
Tweed became the third largest property owner in the city, lived in baronial splendor in a Fifth Avenue mansion, and kept a country house, whose mahogany stables were trimmed in silver. Devoid of religious faith, he believed in just two things—himself and power. He owned a yacht and some people’s souls. He radiated animal magnetism, was a genius at making friends, and remained loyal to them regardless of what they did. He thoroughly understood the mass mind. Tweed looked a little like Falstaff and acted a lot like Captain Kidd, and if he had not been such a monster, he might have been a great man. The complete cynic, he said:
The fact is that New York politics were always dishonest—long before my time. There never was a time when you couldn’t buy the board of aldermen. A politician coming forward takes things as they are. This population is too hopelessly split up into races and factions to govern it under universal suffrage, except by the bribery of patronage or corruption. . . . I don’t think there is ever a fair or honest election in the city of New York.
Unhappily, there was some truth in this. It was by studying the methods of Fernando Wood that Tweed learned to make citizens of aliens so they could vote for him and his henchmen. As historian James Bryce once wrote: “Plunder of the city treasury, especially in the form of jobbing contracts, was no new thing in New York, but it had never before reached such colossal dimensions.”
There was nothing in Tweed’s heritage or the circumstances of his birth that gave a clue to his future. One of his ancestors emigrated here from Scotland, which has a river called Tweed. Three generations of Tweeds had lived in New York City before he was born on April 3, 1823, at 24 Cherry Street. His father, Richard Tweed, made chairs. William was the youngest in a family of three boys and two girls.
Bill Tweed ran with the Cherry Hill gang and soon took command of it. The boys liked to steal pigs’ tails from butchershops and roast them over fires in hidden places. Bill, who was large for his age, could cut off a pig’s tail with one slash of a knife. He worked in his father’s chair factory, became a salesman for a saddle and harness shop, learned bookkeeping, juggled figures for a tobacco firm, did some selling for a brush concern, wound up a junior partner, saved money, and went into the chair business with his father and a brother.
The young men of his day joined volunteer fire companies because firemen wore gaudy uniforms, dashed about the city, and played a big role in politics. Tweed helped organize Americus Fire Engine Company No. 6, known as the Big Six. Its symbol was a tiger—a fact which was to plague Tweed in years to come. Totally without racial or religious prejudice, Tweed befriended Irishmen, Germans, anyone and everyone. In 1850 he made his first bid for public office. He ran for assistant alderman—but lost. Instead of sulking, he did all he could to dilute the strength of the Know-Nothing movement, thus winning more friends among immigrants.
The next year Tweed aimed higher and was elected an alderman. At the time the city council consisted of twenty aldermen and twenty assistant aldermen, nearly all of them so venal that they were openly called the Forty Thieves. Neither position paid a salary, but council members were powerful because they appointed police in their respective wards, granted licenses to saloons, and awarded franchises. It was a grafter’s dreamboat, and away Tweed sailed. For example, only a few weeks after he had become an alderman, Tweed acted for the city in buying land for a new potter’s field. Available were 69 acres on Wards Island worth only about $30,000. Tweed paid $103,450 of the city’s money for the property and then split the difference among his cronies and himself.
Before the end of his two-year term as alderman, Tweed was elected to Congress. A poor public speaker, ignorant of national interests, and bored with Washington, he swilled liquor and chased women instead of attending to business. Coming back to his hometown, he again ran for alderman, but being out of touch with local politics, he was beaten by a Know-Nothing candidate. The defeat endeared him all the more to his foreign-born friends. In 1855 Tweed was elected to the city board of education, whose grafting members sold textbooks and peddled appointments to teachers. To cite just one instance, a crippled young schoolmarm had to slip $75 to the board for her job, which paid only $300 a year. With Tweed’s election to the county board of supervisors in 1857, he really was off and running.
Legally, the city was the creature of the state. Actually, the city enjoyed more independence than the state had intended. This was partly because state, county, and city governments overlapped and clashed and wallowed in such chaos that local politicians seized control. In 1857 the Republican-dominated state legislature tried to break the Democrats’ grip on the city’s political machinery. It took local finances out of the hands of the city council and gave them to a reorganized and strengthened county board of supervisors. Under this new setup six Republicans and six Democrats had to be elected to the board. Upstate Republicans felt that the presence of half a dozen Republicans on the board would guarantee good government. It didn’t.
Besides controlling the city’s purse strings, the county board of supervisors had charge of public improvements and the appointment of election inspectors. The latter power was of vital significance. Inspectors were influential because on election day they watched the polls, and if they could be corrupted, elections could be thrown. Tweed, who always recognized the weak links in a chain, took instant action. The day the inspectors were to be named, one of the six Republican board members did not attend the meeting of the supervisors. Tweed had paid him $2,500 to stay away. Republicans, after all, could be as venal as Democrats. From that day, Tweed dominated the board of supervisors. Now it consisted of six Democrats against five Republicans, and soon other Republican members sold out to Tweed. Firmly in charge of the financial arm of government, Tweed used this power to extend his authority over other branches of the city administration.
Such was the origin of the first Tweed Ring. A writer of the era defined a Tweed Ring as “a hard band in which there is gold all round and without end.” Every contractor, artisan, and merchant wanting to do business with the city had to pay Tweed and his henchmen 15 percent of their total bill before the board of supervisors would grant them a contract. Years later, when confessing his crimes, Tweed said, “Pretty nearly every person who had business with the board of supervisors, or furnished the county with supplies, had a friend on the board of supervisors, and generally with some one member of the Ring. And through that one member they were talked to, and the result was that their bills were sent in and passed, and the percentages were paid on the bills. . . .”
When an overt fix was considered by the board, Tweed induced the two or three Republicans who declined to vote with him to refrain from voting at all. Then, if an indignant citizen howled about the haul, Tweed could cluck, “But, sir, there was only one vote cast against the measure!” Tweed served on the board thirteen years and was elected president four times. Whether president or not, he called the shots at board meetings, shifting from menacing bluster to silky smiles and noisily moving to suspend the rules or to adjourn, as the tactics of the day dictated.
While gathering the board into his smothering bear hug, Tweed also captured Tammany Hall. At first he was influential only in his own Seventh Ward. But his magnetism, quick-wittedness, and energy won the loyalty of some men ruling other wards. This made him a leader. Then he brought the other leaders under his power. This made him the boss.
Tammany Hall was a general term for two intertwining but separate entities maintained by the Democratic party in New York City. One body was the Tammany Society. This was a social organization, which consisted of clubs scattered throughout the city and catered to the needs of citizens at the grass-roots level. The other body was the New York County Democratic committee. This was a political organization, which exercised the real power. In theory, its governing body was a central committee, but this had so many members that it was cumbersome. In practice, the affairs of the central committee were directed by a small executive committee. Prominent in the executive committee were leaders of the Tammany Society, and this is how the two entities blended. Tweed took over Tammany Hall by being elected grand sachem of the Tammany Society and by gaining control of a majority of the executive committee of the New York County Democratic committee. Now he rode herd on the city’s Democratic party and its primaries and its patronage.
Because New York was predominantly Democratic, whoever controlled the Democratic party controlled the city. In 1868 there was only one Republican ward among the twenty-two wards of the city; therefore, whoever won the Democratic nomination for a given office was sure to be elected. And Boss Tweed dictated nominations. Then, come election day, Tweed’s ward leaders hired bullies to intimidate Republican voters, drifters and crooks were bribed to vote several times each, Tweed judges naturalized thousands of aliens with the understanding they would vote Democratic, and Tweed’s candidates won. Most of the voters were Irish or German and blindly followed Tweed because he had led the local fight against the Know-Nothings.
The power pattern would not have been effective if decent people had fought it from the start. But, apathetic about politics and zealous about making money, they abdicated their civic responsibilities. The Civil War had stimulated Northern industry. Manufacturing became more important than merchandising. As a result, merchant capitalism gave way to industrial capitalism. The war ushered in a wave of prosperity, and New Yorkers forgot public spirit in greed for profits. They speculated wildly in stocks, hoping to become rich overnight. In 1866 a New York weekly, called the Round Table, said, “A strange craziness is abroad in the land. Some mysterious spirit of evil has led our people into the blindest, wildest infatuation . . . wild and foolish speculation. . . . At least half the people are living beyond their means.”
According to a member of the Union League: “This decline in the public tone was not confined to the vulgar and ignorant. It affected all ranks and professions, perhaps most marked where it would naturally be least looked for and most abhorrent—in the clerical calling. . . .” Soon Henry Ward Beecher, perhaps the best-known minister in the land, was to be accused of adultery, and although the jury failed to reach an agreement, many people felt that he had been guilty of impropriety. The Union League member continued: “No doubt it (the decline in the public tone) affected injuriously many of the leaders of all parties and every school of politics; the senate, the bench, the bar, and the pulpit, as well as the ranks of trade and the directors of the banks, insurance companies, savings institutions, and even the boards of education.”
G. T. Strong sadly noted in his diary: “The city government is rotten to the core.”
Political corruption works two ways: Someone gives, and someone takes. Money-minded men were willing to pay bribes to power-minded Boss Tweed. People were so busy piling up wealth that they didn’t understand what was happening to the city until it was too late. For his part, Tweed gave generously to the poor, who jolly well knew that he was stealing from the rich but considered him a sort of Robin Hood. They thanked the Boss by maintaining him in power. As James Bryce observed: “The government of the rich by the manipulation of the votes of the poor is a new phenomenon in the world.” Just before Christmas one year, so the story goes, Police Justice Edward J. Shandley asked Boss Tweed for a donation for relief of the poor in the Seventh Ward. Tweed promptly wrote out a check for $5,000. When Shandley cried jestingly, “Oh, Boss, put another naught to it!” Tweed grinned, picked up his pen again, said, “Well, here goes!” and raised the $5,000 check to $50,000.
By January 1, 1869, Boss Tweed was lording it over both the city and the state. On that date his henchman, John T. Hoffman, was sworn in as governor. After he had been admitted to the bar at the age of twenty-one, Hoffman had worked his way up through New York City’s Democratic ranks. Elected city recorder in 1860, he had been the youngest man ever to hold this position. Although he had not been completely enslaved by Tweed and opposed him on one notable occasion, Hoffman had become mayor of New York City on January 1, 1866, with Tweed’s help. Frauds and thefts had flourished during his two-year term in this office, but Hoffman’s name could not be connected with them. In 1868 Tweed had seen to it that Hoffman had been elected governor. Hoffman was tall, slender, and stately and had black eyes. A Sun reporter said that his black mustache made him look like “a Spanish grandee or a first-class German metaphysician.”
The same January 1, 1869, Abraham Oakey Hall took office as mayor of New York City. After he had been graduated from New York University, he had entered Harvard Law School but left it to go to New Orleans with his family. There he had become a newspaper reporter. He had abandoned this career, entered a New Orleans law office, and then come back to settle in New York City. In 1854 he had shown up in Albany as lobbyist for the Republican party. Hall detested Abraham Lincoln, and after the rail-splitter became President, Hall turned Democrat. Wholly an opportunist and once a fervent Know-Nothing, he switched sides again and became an apologist for the Catholic Church. He wooed local Germans and Irish so cloyingly that he became known as Von O’Hall. His more popular nickname, though, was Elegant Oakey, for he dressed like a dandy. Hall’s debonair appearance amused Tweed. However, the Boss had a sober appreciation of this brilliant eccentric who knew the law so well. Tweed made him mayor. Hoffman was legal and legislative adviser to the Tweed Ring. A small man with a heavy dark mustache and a scrubby black beard, he wore pince-nez on a black string.
Peter Barr Sweeny was city chamberlain. Next to Tweed, Sweeny was the most important member of the Tweed Ring. He was known as Brains or Bismarck. Sweeny had been born on Park Row, where his father had kept a saloon. He had been graduated from Columbia College, become an astute lawyer, been elected to the state senate, lobbied there for stagecoach companies, and been chosen district attorney here; but he had broken down during the trial of his first case and resigned in humiliation. A quiet reserved man, he was most effective in private offices and in political caucuses held behind closed doors. Well read, Sweeny knew about the fortunes amassed in the rebuilding of Paris under the direction of Baron Haussmann and understood how public improvements may be used for private profit. Despite his erudition and subdued nature, Sweeny became involved with a woman who worked in a Turkish bath and was said to have had a child by her. He was the Tweed Ring’s silent adviser, and his principal job was to control the judiciary. Sweeny was of medium height and slight of build, with a low forehead, deep-set eyes, and black bristly hair and mustache.
Richard B. Connolly was city comptroller. He acted as financial adviser to the Tweed Ring. Born in Ireland, he had come to America as a young man, worked in Philadelphia as an auctioneer’s clerk, and then moved to New York City. Here he had been appointed to the customhouse, switched to the job of discount clerk in the Bank of North America, and gained local political experience in Tweed’s Seventh Ward. Connolly had served two terms as county clerk, twice been elected to the state senate, become general manager of the Central National bank, and had risen in Tammany Hall. A Uriah Heep in mannerisms, cringing in the presence of Boss Tweed, and tyrannical to his own underlings, Richard Connolly merited the nickname of Slippery Dick. His broad face was clean-shaven, and he brushed his hair forward from his ears.
Three judges rounded out the inner circle of the Tweed Ring:
George G. Barnard was presiding justice of the state supreme court. For a while he posed as a reformer, but soon everyone understood that he was Tweed’s vassal. Barnard was handsome of face and figure, overbearing, and insolent.
Albert Cardozo was a justice of the state supreme court. The only Jewish member of the Tweed Ring and of Portuguese extraction, Cardozo was learned and industrious but was such a scoundrel that he sold justice as a fishwife sells flounders. His son, Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, later redeemed the family name by serving honorably and wisely as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
John H. McCunn was a judge of the superior court. He had tried to nullify the federal Draft Act during the Draft Riots, and this had brought him to Tweed’s attention. When Tweed barked, McCunn jumped through hoops.
Tweed himself was the Boss, the leader of Tammany Hall, the president of the county board of supervisors, the street commissioner, and a state senator. Through Hoffman, Hall, Sweeny, Connolly, Barnard, Cardozo, McCunn, and the 12,000 other persons who received patronage from him, he controlled the entire machinery of the city and state governments—executive, legislative, and judicial—with the sole exception of the court of appeals. He named the men he wanted elected to office—and they were elected. He spelled out the laws he wanted enacted—and they were enacted. Should an innocent dare to bring charges against Tweed or any of his underlings, the Boss lifted a finger, and one of his judges ruled in his favor. He controlled the city police, mostly Irish and Democrats, even paying the police commissioner out of his own pocket. He bought the silence of most newspapers by subsidizing them with unnecessary city advertising and by bribing editors and reporters. He emasculated the New York County Republican committee by buying off its members. He smothered reform movements in money. And by 1869 he was stealing more than $1,000,000 a month from the city treasury.
This still wasn’t enough to satisfy him. Bloated with success and brazenly confident, Boss Tweed sometimes shut his bright-blue eyes and dreamed of taking over the United States of America. How? He planned to make John T. Hoffman the nation’s President, raise A. Oakey Hall to the governorship of New York State, and himself become a U.S. Senator in order to work his black magic in the upper chamber of the Congress. Connolly would stay home and watch the store as city comptroller. Before he could launch this grandiose scheme, there was one thing Tweed had to do.
He wanted a new city charter. Powerful though he was, he had to tack indirectly toward his goals under the current charter. By streamlining legal technicalities, he would be able to work smoother and faster. For one thing, Tweed hated to ask the state legislature to pass city tax bills. He practically owned the legislature, true, but this cost him a lot of money in bribes. The state’s lawmakers were paid only $300 a year, so they were always eager to milk money from anyone wanting legislation. They would introduce a bill striking at a large corporation—including a city, such as New York—and then wait to be paid to withdraw the obnoxious measure. No railroad ever got a favor without bribes. Bills were attacked and defended in terms of who paid how much to whom. These freebooters worked generally as individuals until Tweed became a state senator. Then he whipped them into a disciplined band, which rode roughshod over the few honest legislators. Handing out greenbacks like cabbage leaves, Boss Tweed was the man to whom every grasping lawmaker looked before voting on any bill.
Tweed paid about $1,000,000 in bribes to get his new city charter passed at Albany, but pass it did. On the afternoon of April 5, 1870, only two of the thirty-two members of the state senate voted against it. Governor Hoffman immediately signed the bill and then handed the pen to a beaming Tweed. That night the Boss held court, dispensing free champagne to all comers. He had explained to the businessmen of New York City that he sought municipal autonomy for their hometown. Peter Cooper and others, who should have known better, believed him. When Tweed returned from the state capital, he was greeted here like a conquering hero.
What did this Tweed charter do? Seemingly it gave control of the city back to the city at the expense of the state, which pleased the advocates of home rule. It increased the power of the mayor by granting him the right to appoint department heads and all other important city officers without anyone’s approval. Before this, the governor had made many of these appointments. What’s more, the mayor could now appoint his favorites for terms of four to eight years, thus assuring continuity of power regardless of reformers. Under the charter it was impossible to discharge department heads for incompetency or dishonesty, except by unanimous consent of the six judges of the court of common pleas. To Tweed, who had bribed a Republican to stay away from a meeting of the board of supervisors, this provision meant nothing; in a crisis one of the six judges would fail to appear. The charter weakened the city council by forbidding it to regulate the affairs of any city department. It wrested control of Central Park from the original commissioners. It ended state supervision of city police.
Worst of all, perhaps, the charter created a board of audit to consist of the mayor (Hall), the comptroller (Connolly), and the commissioner of public works (Tweed, whom Mayor Hall quickly appointed to this new post). According to M. R. Werner in his book Tammany Hall: “The Tweed charter was carte blanche for members of the Ring to enter the city treasury with shovels and load their wagons with gold.” Later, when Tweed was confessing, he explained how this three-man board of audit had enriched the ring: “—The understanding was that the parties to whom we advanced money, and whom we had confidence in, should, through our influence, advance bills for work purporting to be done for the county or the city—more particularly for the county—and they should receive only fifty percent of the amount of their bills.”
In addition to graft and corruption, New Yorkers were plagued with a transportation problem. After the Civil War, traffic became a headache. A state senate committee said that “the transit of freight and passenger trains by ordinary locomotives on the surface of the street is an evil which has already endured too long. . . .” The New York Herald grumbled that “modern martyrdom may be succinctly defined as riding in a New York omnibus.”
Between 1831 and 1858, 8 city railroads had been incorporated. In 1860, 6 of them remained in operation. Additionally, 16 omnibus companies controlled 544 licensed stages over fixed routes to all parts of the city below Fiftieth Street, as well as to neighboring villages. By 1864 there were only 12 such lines and 61,000,000 passengers a year. By 1865 the traffic snarl had become so great that it was almost impossible to get around town. By 1866 a pedestrian bridge had been built across Broadway at Fulton Street. In 1867 the Evening Post complained that workers had to spend more than four hours a day getting to and from their jobs. Mark Twain shook his head over the “torrent of traffic” and accused city officials of winking at the overloading of streetcars. Boss Tweed had both the streetcar and the stage companies in his pocket. All public vehicles were filthy and smelly, lighted at night by one faint kerosene lamp and warmed in winter only by straw strewed on the floor.
Most stores and offices still lay within the downtown area, and employees had to live fairly close to their places of business in order to get to work. Lacking good transportation, they couldn’t spread out. Because Manhattan was long and narrow and because it lacked bridges to Brooklyn and New Jersey, the population could expand in only one direction—north.
The world’s first underground railroad system opened in London in 1863. Then a Michigan railroad man, Hugh B. Willson, raised $5,000,000 to dig a subway in New York under Broadway. Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was slowly acquiring control of the New York Central, snorted that he’d be “underground a damned sight sooner than this thing!” Boss Tweed was against Willson’s subway, too, because it would compete with transit lines he already controlled. Tweed gave the word to Reuben E. Fenton, Hoffman’s predecessor as governor, and Fenton promptly vetoed a bill calling for construction of Willson’s underground railroad. Thus did Tweed delay New York’s subway system by nearly half a century. The New York Times criticized Fenton, saying: “There is not enough room on the surface of the city to accommodate the traffic which its business requires.”
Now the only solution to the traffic problem was to build above the ground—in the air. In 1867 the state legislature authorized construction of an experimental line of elevated railway track stretching the half mile between the Battery and Dey Street along Greenwich Street. It had been suggested by a bearded inventor, named Charles T. Harvey. Tweed laughed, people jeered, and almost nobody thought that the train in the sky would work. On July 1, 1868, a crowd gathered to watch as the frock-coated stovepipe-hatted Harvey took his seat in a dinky car looking a little like a primitive automobile, except for the fact that it perched thirty feet above Greenwich Street. This was not a self-propelled locomotive. Its boiler turned a wheel that wound in a cable and moved the car. To everyone’s astonishment, the vehicle picked up speed of five miles an hour and hit a peak of ten. The trial run of the world’s first elevated had proved a success.
Tweed glowered. Harvey nonetheless got enough financial credit to extend his Ninth Avenue elevated line north toward the Hudson River railroad terminal, at Thirtieth Street near the Hudson River. In 1869 Vanderbilt merged the Hudson line with his New York Central and also broke ground for the first Grand Central terminal, on Forty-second Street at Fourth Avenue. Tweed felt that if Harvey’s elevated ever reached the new depot, it was sure to succeed, so he took action. As a state senator, he pushed through the legislature a bill branding the elevated as a public nuisance and permitting him, as city commissioner of public works, to tear it down within ninety days. However, for the first and only time during the 1870 session of the legislature, the lawmakers crossed Tweed by voting down his bill. Tweed, who had set back New York’s subways, was not permitted to delay its elevateds.
Meanwhile, a strange subway was secretly being bored through the ground under Manhattan. The man behind this mystery was a genius, named Alfred Ely Beach. An inventor, he had designed a typewriter, which he jokingly called a literary piano. A publisher, he was co-owner of the New York Sun and had founded a score of other periodicals. For a while he had an office overlooking City Hall and a home at 9 West Twentieth Street, and traffic was so dense that it took him almost an hour to get from one place to the other.
In 1866 Beach began experimenting with pneumatic power, making models of mail tubes. The next year, during the American Institute Fair held in the Fourteenth Street armory, he built a plywood tube six feet in diameter and a block long on the armory floor. Inside this tube was a ten-passenger car. Using a big fan, Beach blew the car from Fourteenth Street to Fifteenth Street and then sucked it back. Hundreds of people enjoyed this ride, and Beach now knew that he could propel a train through a pneumatic tube.
The inventor was aware that Tweed had killed Willson’s hope of building a subway, and he knew about the graft involved in obtaining transit franchises. He decided not to seek a franchise from corrupt city officials, telling his brother, “I won’t pay political blackmail. I say let’s build the subway furtively.” He asked the state legislature for a charter to dig what he characterized as a pneumatic mail tube system under Broadway. In 1868 the bill crossed the desk of State Senator Tweed, who failed to understand its implications. Beach got his charter. Soon he had a gang of laborers burrowing a tunnel 21 feet under Broadway just west of City Hall. This hole in the ground was only 312 feet long, running a single block from Murray Street on the south to Warren Street on the north. The project went on in complete secrecy, the workmen dumping bags of earth into wagons whose wheels were muffled to avoid all noise. The digging was finished in only 58 nights. Then the men bricked in the tunnel, which had an outside diameter of 9 feet and an inside diameter of 8 feet.
On February 26, 1870, New Yorkers awakened to find that they had a one-block subway. The Herald blared: “FASHIONABLE RECEPTION HELD IN THE BOWELS OF THE EARTH!” Tweed was furious. City and state officials, aware of his anger, stayed away from the new marvel, but the people flocked to see it. They were overwhelmed by the subway’s waiting room, which was nearly half as long as the tunnel itself. All was elegance, the walls frescoed, paintings hung here and there, a grand piano standing in stately splendor, a fountain bubbling, and a tank glistening with goldfish—all lighted by zircon lights. Beach purposely had made the waiting room impressive in the hope of winning popular support for the battle he anticipated with Boss Tweed.
New Yorkers were delighted with their pneumatic subway, but Beach still had to ask the state legislators for a new charter. After all, he had built a transit line instead of a pneumatic postal system. What’s more, he wanted to extend his subway the length of Broadway. Now the state governor was John T. Hoffman, whose political future lay with Boss Tweed. The lawmakers passed Beach’s transit bill, but the governor vetoed it. In an editorial the Tribune stormed, “Of course it was to be expected that, as long as Tammany had no hand in the scheme and saw no chance of converting it into a swindle, its influence would be used against it.”
This was in 1871. The next year the people threw Hoffman out of office, and in 1873 a third Beach bill came before the legislature. It won the approval of both the lawmakers and the new governor, John A. Dix. By this time, however, the city was writhing in the grip of a depression, and Beach could not get enough capital to extend or even maintain his subway. Late in 1873 Governor Dix withdrew Beach’s charter with “the greatest reluctance.” Not until the beginning of the twentieth century was New York to get a permanent subway.
In 1871 self-propelled steam locomotives replaced the cable-winding engines on the Ninth Avenue elevated, whose tracks now pushed north of Thirtieth Street. Vanderbilt’s Hudson River railroad thrust even farther north, making it possible for Yonkers to become a separate city in 1872. The same year Vanderbilt wangled through the legislature a bill forcing New York City to pay $4,000,000 to improve the roadway of his New York Central tracks on Park Avenue. On February 1, 1872, the New York Council of Political Reform declared publicly that for a long time the city had been swindled out of at least $1,000,000 a year in the development of surface railroads.
Expansion of elevated railways marked the first real advance in the city’s rapid transit. English visitors liked New York’s elevated better than their own London subway. A German geographer, who saw New York in 1873, said that its transportation facilities were better than those of any European city. Improved transit caused a real estate boom that made ever more money for Tweed and his henchmen. On the inside of everything, they bought property where improvements were to be made and then sold this land to the city at fantastic sums. The strip that became Riverside Drive should have cost only $1,400,000, but the Tweed Ring had run the cost up to $6,000,000 by the time the purchase was made in 1872.
Three years later the state legislature passed the Husted Act, empowering New York’s mayor to appoint the city’s first rapid transit commission. Its members chose elevated railways as the best medium for moving New Yorkers around the city speedily. They also selected Second, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Avenues as routes for these railways. Rail by rail, pillar by pillar, the elevateds took shape overhead; the tracks were thirty feet high in most places and even higher in others. On narrow streets the aerial railroads were built right over sidewalks and almost flush with the sides of buildings.
The Third and Sixth Avenue elevateds were the first to begin operations in 1878. Each train consisted of four cars, painted light green, their interior upholstery finished in dark brown. Trains ran from 5:30 A.M. until midnight. The fare was ten cents a ride except during rush hours, when it cost five cents. Conductors collected tickets threaded with silk as a protection against counterfeiting. The engines started with a jerk that jolted the spines of passengers. The clatter and rumble of the sky trains frightened horses on the streets, while the soot, cinders, and burning coals they dropped infuriated pedestrians and housewives. People living on the second and third floors of tenements, on a level with the passing cars, lacked privacy unless they pulled down their shades. Oil squirted into their parlors when their windows were open. Property values declined all along the elevated lines. Despite these drawbacks, New York now had a transit system of which it could be proud—for a time.
The same could not be said of the interstate Erie Railroad, whose tracks were reaching the Midwest. Its flaking rails sank into rotten ties and undulated beneath the wheels of passing trains. Nonetheless, since it offered the possibility of plunder, a group of rapacious tycoons fought one another for possession of this down-at-the-heels line. Because their fiscal war was waged in New York courts and the Stock Exchange, this railroad was called the Scarlet Woman of Wall Street.
Cornelius Vanderbilt, rapidly developing into the nation’s top railway magnate, wanted this Scarlet Woman. Boss Tweed, who had served as a representative of the Vanderbilt interests in Albany, favored Vanderbilt at first. Judge Barnard therefore issued the injunctions Vanderbilt demanded in the Erie war. Vanderbilt’s chief antagonist was shy, swarthy, wispy Jay Gould, a financial wizard who liked to raise orchids. Gould nervously twisted his feet as he talked, and Mrs. Abram S. Hewitt shuddered and said that he had the eyes of a snake. Gould bribed Tweed to come over to his side by offering him more money than the $19,000 Vanderbilt handed the Tweed Ring. Gould gave the Boss a block of Erie stock, had Tweed and Sweeny elected to the Erie’s board of directors, and paid Tweed $1,500,000 for “legal” services and expenses—Judge Barnard having proclaimed Tweed an attorney-at-law. The judge then handed out the injunctions sought by Gould and denied those Vanderbilt wanted. Gould won the Erie war, and Tweed happily helped him defraud the railway’s investors.
Using the money milked from the Erie, Gould then schemed to corner the market in gold. In the 1860’s the United States was not on the gold standard. Monetary values were expressed in terms of paper money. Gold was scarce, and the scarcity resulted in high interest rates. By 1869 the federal treasury held in reserve $95,000,000 in gold, but only $15,000,000 worth of the precious metal circulated throughout the country. Gould planned to rake in this $15,000,000 and then set his own price on gold. He felt that he could make a fast killing and reap enormous profits before gold could be imported from Europe—provided one thing: provided the federal treasury did not sell any of its $95,000,000 in gold. Vital to his plot was knowledge of what the government might do once he made his move.
As his chief ally Gould picked James Fisk, Jr., a shameless financial buccaneer, who was short and round and merry. “I was born to be bad,” Fisk said of himself. His mustache was “the color of a Jersey cow” and as long and pointed as the spikes of a catfish. Fond of champagne and chorus girls, Fisk was as charming as he was ruthless. He helped the shy Gould by playing host to the important people they set out to capture.
Ulysses S. Grant was President of the United States at the time, so Gould and Fisk cultivated Abel Rathbone Corbin, who had married Grant’s sister. Into their scheme they drew Daniel Butterfield, whom Grant had named as head of the New York subtreasury without really studying his qualifications. Gould and Fisk were unable to involve Grant’s private secretary, Horace Potter, but they did entertain the President himself. Fisk called himself an admiral because he owned a fleet of steamships plying the waters off Long Island, and he and Gould took Grant sailing. They tried to worm out of him some hint about the treasury’s gold policy. They implied that if the United States kept gold at a high price, this would help sell American grain in Europe, thus aiding the American farmer. Grant kept mum. The plotters decided to go ahead anyway. Corbin wrote an article entitled “Grant’s Financial Policy,” and Gould managed to get all but the last paragraph printed in the New York Times as an editorial.
Since the nation was on a paper standard, gold was bought and sold as a speculative commodity. The trading took place in the Gold Exchange, established in 1864 on the corner of Broad Street and Exchange Place. Everyone called it the Gold Room. In the center of the room stood a fountain containing a bronze statue of Cupid, a dolphin in its arms. A tiny stream of water spouted from Cupid’s head to a basin below. A mechanical indicator inside the room and another on an outdoor wall over the sidewalk told the current price of gold. Such was the setting of the most frenetic day thus far in the history of Wall Street.
On September 2, 1869, Gould bought $3,000,000 worth of gold through more than 40 brokers. The price rose 5 points in two days. Because Gould told Fisk that President Grant had forbidden Secretary of the Treasury George S. Boutwell to sell any of the government’s gold reserve, Fisk also began buying. As the price of gold soared, other traders became suspicious, and newspapers urged the government to break up the gold conspiracy. Secretary Boutwell hurried from Washington to New York, looked into the situation, but decided to do nothing until instructions arrived from Grant. It was difficult to reach the President, who was visiting a small Pennsylvania town. When at last he heard the news, he became disturbed. Grant got back to Washington on September 22, and that day gold closed at 140½ points. The next day, when it reached 144, the panic began. Throughout the nation, manufacturers and other businessmen, thinking that gold might hit a peak of 200, ordered their agents to buy at any price.
Then came Friday, September 24, 1869—infamous Black Friday. Brokers in the Gold Room and crowds on the sidewalk outside watched apprehensively as the price of gold went up, up, up. This meant ruin for hundreds of thousands of Americans, because bankers’ paper was unsalable except at a high premium, while merchants’ paper could hardly be sold at any price. Gold transactions that day amounted to more than $400,000,000. As telegraph lines dit-dah-ditted the news across the country, business from Boston to San Francisco ground to a halt. Speculators, merchants, and workers realized that their futures depended on what was happening in New York’s Gold Room.
In Washington the President and Secretary Boutwell were kept informed of minute-by-minute developments. When the price reached 160 at about 11:30 A.M., one man fainted in the Gold Room, and many wept openly. Secretary Boutwell nervously suggested to President Grant that they sell $3,000,000 of the nation’s gold reserve. Grant mentioned $5,000,000, but Boutwell wired the subtreasury in New York to sell $4,000,000. Butterfield, the man in charge of the subtreasury, may have tipped off Jay Gould about the selling order, for now Gould switched tactics and began unloading. Jim Fisk, unaware that Gould was doublecrossing him, urged his broker, Albert Speyer, to buy more and more and more. A few minutes before noon, when gold reached its high of 162½, everyone learned that the New York subtreasury intended to sell $4,000,000 worth of gold the next day.
Fortunes were lost. Wall Street brokerage houses failed. Railway stocks shrank. The nation’s business was paralyzed. An observer in the Gold Room wrote that “the spectacle was one such as Dante might have seen in the inferno.” Half a dozen men went temporarily mad. A broker, named Solomon Mahler, slunk home and killed himself. A little man with glassy eyes staggered about the floor, croaking, “I’m Albert Speyer! Some people have threatened to shoot me. Well, shoot! Shoot!” Men cursed and screamed and laughed maniacally and dashed from one trading post to another. Their nerves were tighter than the gut of an Indian’s bow. Half-moons of sweat stained the armpits of their jackets. From time to time they wobbled to the fountain to dash cool water on their burning faces.
The frenzy inside the Gold Room reached the people on the sidewalk outside, fermenting the crowd into a mob that howled for the hides of Jay Gould and Jim Fisk. A national guard regiment was ordered to stand by to “quell the riot in Wall Street.” But Boss Tweed, forever loyal to fellow scoundrels, gave the plotters police protection. Gould, who had failed to corner all the gold in circulation but who nonetheless made a profit of $11,000,000, said smoothly, “I regret very much this depression in financial circles, but I predicted it long ago. I was in no way instrumental in producing the panic.” Fisk, who had lost money but soon found a way to repudiate his contracts, spoke with his usual impudence: “A fellow can’t have a little innocent fun without everybody raising a halloo and going wild.”
Greedy to the last, neither cared about the suffering they had inflicted on numberless innocents. Tweed didn’t care, either.
Monarch of all he surveyed, affecting the grand manner in public, and arrogant to friend and foe alike, Tweed had become giddy with success. A once great city had degenerated into Tweedsville. While the Boss ate oysters at Delmonico’s, rode behind sleek trotting horses, cruised aboard his yacht, and beamed on champagne-swilling cronies, New York fell into ruins.
It was filthier than Naples. Dirty streets and defective sewer pipes resulted in abnormally high death rates. Tweed’s stables were superior to any tenement in town. Public buildings sagged into dilapidation for want of proper maintenance. Produce was unloaded on rotting wharves. Every day was Mardi Gras for thieves and harlots. The annual tax levy rose from an average of $4.33 per person in 1860 to $25.11 in 1870. Between 1869 and 1870 the city debt soared from $36,000,000, to $97,000,000, and the town teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. G. T. Strong lamented in his diary: “To be a citizen of New York is a disgrace.”
Tweed became arrogant because he became careless, and he became careless because it had been so easy to plunder the city. For example, in a couple of hours one morning Tweed and his henchmen stole more than $5,500,000. Here’s how it happened: Under the new Tweed charter the new board of audit consisted of Tweed, Hall, and Connolly. At one of the board’s first meetings, on May 5, 1870, the trio authorized the payment of an additional $6,300,000 for the new courthouse they were building. Nearly 90 percent of this sum was padding, and they pocketed the extra $5,500,000. The same day six Negroes were arrested for playing penny poker in the basement of 208 West Thirtieth Street.
When the sands of time begin to run out for any man, it is difficult to detect the first grain, but for Tweed it may have begun to trickle into infinity on December 24, 1869. On that date Harper’s Weekly published a cartoon showing members of the ring breaking into a big box marked “Taxpayers’ and Tenants’ Hard Cash.” Fletcher Harper owned this courageous magazine, and George William Curtis was its editor. The cartoon came from the pen of German-born Thomas Nast, who wore his hair crew cut in the fashion of Prussian officers. A fierce handlebar mustache and pointed beard emphasized the virility of this clear-eyed man. A gifted cartoonist and caricaturist, Nast created the symbolic Republican elephant and Democratic donkey, and soon he was to paint some stripes on Tammany.
In the spring of 1870 Comptroller Connolly complained that he wasn’t getting a big enough cut of the loot. He told Tweed that other members of the ring would be unable to swindle the city at all without him. Tweed asked what he had in mind. Connolly said he wanted 20 percent instead of just 10. Tweed decided that this could be managed by doublecrossing Mayor Hall and City Chamberlain Sweeny. From that time on, Hall and Sweeny got what they thought was 20 percent of the take, although it was really only 10 percent.
Toward the end of the summer of 1870 James Taylor died. He had been Tweed’s partner in the New York Printing Company, which, not surprisingly, did far more business than other printing firms. Taylor also had been one of the three directors of the New York Times. While Taylor was alive, the Times did not attack Tweed, but now that he was dead, the influential morning paper fell under the control of George Jones, who detested the Boss. Although no one confused George Jones with St. George, he began hunting the dragon.
On September 20, 1870, the Times published its first attack—not as a news article on page one, but as an editorial inside the paper. It was written by the Times’ managing editor, Louis J. Jennings, who wielded his pen like a broadsword. Born in England, Jennings had worked on newspapers in London and India, and years after the Tweed exposé he returned to Great Britain and wound up as a Member of Parliament. Now, day after day, Jennings lambasted Tweed, making such charges as: “No Caliph, Khan or Caesar has risen to power or opulence more rapidly than Tweed I. Ten years ago this monarch was pursuing the humble occupation of a chairmaker in an obscure street in this city. He now rules the State as Napoleon ruled France, or as the Medici ruled Florence. . . .” Jennings dealt mainly in invective because the Times lacked enough hard facts to make the kill.
In January, 1871, Jimmy Watson died as the result of a sleighing accident. His official tide was county auditor, but his unofficial job was bookkeeper and paymaster for the Tweed Ring. The Times could howl its head off about the way the city was run, but proof of corruption could only be obtained by access to the ring’s books, and no one but Connolly and Watson ever saw these doctored documents. So far the Times didn’t know that Watson had issued a $66,000 voucher to an imaginary man with the outlandish name of Philippo Donnoruma or that the fellow who had cashed it had signed it with the anglicized name of Philip Dummy. If you’re going to bilk the public, you may as well have some fun while doing it. Although Watson’s salary was only $1,500 a year, he had become a millionaire and lived in a mansion at 42d Street and Madison Avenue. The sleighing accident happened on January 24 at the corner of 8th Avenue and 130th Street. Newspaper readers tilted their eyebrows and pulled down the corners of their mouths when they read that Watson’s mare, killed in the collision, was worth $10,000. For the week that Watson lingered on his deathbed, Tweed kept some of his plug-uglies handy to thwart a last-minute confession.
In the spring of 1871 James O’Brien decided that he, too, wanted a bigger slice of the melon. Tweed had made O’Brien county sheriff. This office paid no salary; but the sheriff was entitled to keep all the fees he collected, and they were enormous. O’Brien panted for power, as well as plunder. He dreamed of displacing Tweed as grand sachem of Tammany and Hall as mayor of New York. O’Brien helped organize a maverick group within Tammany, known as the Young Democracy, only to have Tweed beat its ears off. But when O’Brien finished his profitable term as sheriff, he brazenly submitted a bill for $350,000 in “extras” he claimed the county owed him. Tweed, the granddaddy of grifters, wasn’t going to let an upstart get away with a haul like that. He bellowed like a wounded rhinoceros and stamped his foot, and that was that. Or so Tweed thought. O’Brien withdrew his claim and returned to the fold of tweedledum democracy. Secretly, though, O’Brien decided to try to get the goods on the Boss and blackmail him.
After Watson’s death a nonentity, named Stephen C. Lyons, was made county auditor, but he soon faded from sight. Matthew J. O’Rourke, former military editor of a newspaper, became the new auditor. Connolly’s faith in O’Rourke was misplaced, for he began copying incriminating terms from the secret books of the ring. About the same time O’Brien asked Connolly to find a job for his friend William Copeland. Connolly thought O’Brien had made his peace with the Boss; after all, the former sheriff was trustee of a group collecting funds to raise a statue of Tweed. So Connolly obliged O’Brien by putting Copeland to work on some books in his office. A spy for O’Brien, Copeland also started copying fraudulent accounts. No one knows if O’Rourke and Copeland were aware that each was playing the same dangerous game.
Copeland fed facts and figures to O’Brien. O’Brien then told the Boss he would publish this proof unless he got the $350,000 he wanted. Tweed apparently considered this a bluff. But soon thereafter O’Brien called at the office of the Sun with evidence of the ring’s corruption under one arm. No one there would touch this dynamite. O’Brien then trudged to the Times, which kept calling for an examination of the city’s financial records. If all was well, the paper argued, why object to publication of the figures? The Evening Post, which sided with Tweed, protested righteously that Connolly could not open these books because only city aldermen had this power.
One steaming hot night in the first week of July, 1871, the balding O’Brien opened the door of Jennings’ office at the Times. The former sheriff mopped his brow and said vaguely, “Hot night.” The managing editor replied in a flat voice, “Yes. Hot.” O’Brien fingered a big paper envelope he carried and said, “You and Tom Nast have had a tough fight.” Jennings nodded and said, “Still have.” O’Brien remarked, “I said—had.” He laid the envelope on Jennings’ desk and added, “Here’s the proof to back up all that the Times has charged. They’re copied right out of the city ledgers.” Jennings’ muscles tightened, but he did not move until O’Brien left his office. Then he pounced on the envelope.
A couple of days later O’Rourke also came to the Times with his copies of the ring’s books. His data included some information missing from the O’Brien collection. Now the Times had the hard facts and figures with which to expose the most astonishing story of graft in the history of New York.
On July 8, 1871, the newspaper began publishing the inside story of the Tweed Ring. At first Tweed shrugged this off as a partisan attack by a Republican journal, but the Times kept it up day after day, revealing one secret after another. In its July 22 issue it printed this front-page headline: “THE SECRET ACCOUNTS . . . PROOFS OF UNDOUBTED FRAUDS BROUGHT TO LIGHT . . . WARRANTS SIGNED BY HALL AND CONNOLLY UNDER FALSE PRETENSES.”
This and subsequent revelations told of fraud so cunning and monumental that it was appalling. Contractors and merchants overcharged the city at the behest of the ring and then kicked back the excess to ring members. Some bills were absolutely false in both amounts and prices. The city was charged for work never done. Streetlamps were often painted on rainy days so that the paint would run off immediately, thus creating extra work and giving more pay to Tweed’s followers. The city paid money to imaginary persons, imaginary firms, and imaginary charitable institutions. In six weeks alone the Boss added 1,300 names to the city payroll, which ultimately rose from 12,000 to nearly 15,000 persons. Some did no work whatsoever. William “Pudding” Long, who walked Tweed’s dogs, was paid $100 a month as an interpreter, although he couldn’t read or write any language.
The permit bureau spent $2,842 to collect $6 worth of permits. Andrew J. Garvey, the ring’s plasterer, got $133,187 for two days’ work. George S. Miller, its carpenter, was paid $360,747 for one month’s work. At $14 per ream of paper, plus other marked-up items, the city’s stationery bill for one year came to $1,000,000. The city paid $170,729 for 35 to 40 chairs and 3 or 4 tables. At $5 per chair this sum would have entitled the city to 34,145 chairs, and if they had been placed side by side in a straight line, they would have reached the 4½ miles from City Hall to the arsenal in Central Park opposite East Sixty-fourth Street.
The prime catch-all for this graft was the new County Courthouse, located behind City Hall, on the corner of Chambers and Centre streets, just west of the present Municipal Building. It gained renown as the House That Tweed Built In 1858 a bill authorizing its construction and providing $250,000 for this purpose had been passed. Work began in 1862, but before it was finished, it needed many repairs. By 1867 some of its rooms had been put to use, but the structure wasn’t completed until 1872. Its total cost came to more than $12,000,000. At the most, the building and all its equipment couldn’t have cost more than $3,000,000, but of course, Tweed and his fellow rogues pocketed the other $9,000,000. The North American Review estimated that the three-story courthouse cost New York taxpayers more than four times the cost of the Houses of Parliament.
The Nation, a weekly magazine founded in New York in 1865, now joined the Times in attacking the Tweed Ring. Back in 1868 the Nation had daringly used the phrase “the notorious Supervisor Tweed,” but it had not crusaded so vigorously as either the Times or Harper’s Weekly. The Nation’s editor was liberal Irish-born Edwin Lawrence Godkin, a Utilitarian philosopher.
Thomas Nast’s cartoons in Harper’s also became more frequent and savage now, and his drawings made Tweed look like a bloated vulture. On November 11, 1871, Nast created the emblem of the predatory Tammany tiger, inspired by the tiger painted on the fire engine belonging to the Big Six, Tweed’s onetime volunteer fire company. The cartoons frightened Tweed, who rumbled, “Let’s stop them damned pictures! I don’t care much what the papers write about me—my constituents can’t read. But—dammit!—they can see pictures!” (Indeed, nearly half the people of New York were foreign-born, and most of Tweed’s supporters were illiterate.)
The Boss, who really did care what was written about him, now counterattacked. He growled that if he were twenty-five years younger, he would kill Times owner George Jones with his bare hands, and he mumbled something about having Thomas Nast horsewhipped. Ring members pointed out that the Times’ managing editor, Jennings, was an Englishman and married to an actress. They spread rumors that Jennings had been discharged from the London Times for printing lies. The New York Sun, still aligned with Tweed, archly commented that “the decline of the New York Times in everything that entitles a paper to respect and confidence has been rapid and complete. . . .”
Charles Nordhoff was fired as managing editor of the Evening Post for criticizing Tweed; then the Post stoutly defended the Boss. Mayor Hall forbade all city employees to eat in the basement of the nearby Times Building. The mayor also upheld Tweed in Hall’s own newspaper, the Leader. Ring members then tried, but failed, to prove that the real estate title to the Times Building was defective. Tweed thought of trying to buy the Times itself, but George Jones snorted that he wouldn’t sell under any circumstances. Next, the ring caused a bill to be passed in the state legislature, and Tweed’s vassal, Governor Hoffman, signed it. This weasel-worded law gave the appellate division of the state supreme court the power to hold any critic of Tweed or his ring in contempt of court and send him to jail. Two of the three appellate judges, Barnard and Cardozo, were owned by Tweed.
His whisper squads now spread the lie that Nast had left Germany to escape military service, although Nast had been a child of six when he had landed in New York. The cartoonist received threatening letters; one enclosed a drawing of him with a thread tied around his neck like a noose. Harper’s Weekly was owned by Harper & Brothers, and now the Boss banned all their books from public schools. Fletcher Harper refused to be frightened into silence. A Tweed emissary offered Nast a $50,000 bribe to drop his attacks on the ring and leave for Europe. Nast refused. “Slippery Dick” Connolly offered George Jones of the Times the fantastic sum of $5,000,000 to forget the whole thing. Jones not only brushed this aside but dared the ring to sue the Times for libel.
Tweed, usually a master of mob psychology, now made a damaging mistake. For the first and only time during a newspaper interview he lost his temper when reporters badgered him about the disclosures in the Times. “Well,” he snarled, “what are you going to do about it?” He failed to anticipate an utterance of a character in a book, by Alfred Henry Lewis, entitled The Boss: “Th’ public is a sheep, while ye do no more than just rob them. But if ye insult it, it’s a wolf!”
The righteous and outraged wolves held a historic mass meeting in Cooper Union on the sweltering evening of September 4, 1871. So hot and sticky was the Great Hall that aging Peter Cooper, G. T. Strong, and other dignitaries adjourned to a nearby committee room. This was the meeting that brought to the surface an undercover adversary of Boss Tweed—the masterful and emotionless politician Samuel J. Tilden. Slight of figure and racked by illness, Tilden had a big nose and small eyes. His droopy left eyelid lent him a baleful look. Snake-cold, withdrawn, and ignorant of human nature, a man who thought five times before doing anything, Tilden had become a millionaire as a corporation lawyer, and he had risen to power in the Democratic party. When the Tammany tiger first began stalking the city, Tilden belonged to the organization and must have known much of what was going on. He held his tongue, however, for he hoped to become President of the United States, and it would have been unwise to cross Tweed prematurely. Now that Tweed seemed to be on the run, Tilden closed in for the kill, thinking that this would further his political future.
William F. Havemeyer, a sugar merchant and former mayor of New York, chaired the Cooper Union meeting. Many of the city’s leading business and professional men were there, the Times’ exposé having convinced them of Tweed’s venality. When attorney Joseph H. Choate mentioned Tweed’s name, there arose cries of “Pitch into the Boss! Give it to him! He deserves it!” Two days before, the Nation had hinted that Tweed should be lynched; the usually responsible magazine declared that such violence would no more constitute a real lynching than had the execution of Robespierre, the French revolutionary who had loosed the Reign of Terror on Paris. On this tense torrid evening Judge James Emmott shouted, “Now, what are you going to do with these men?” People screamed, “Hang them!” Serious consideration was given to forming a vigilance committee like that which Californians had organized in the days of the gold rush. Wiser heads prevailed, however. A respectable Committee of Seventy was set up under Tilden’s leadership. Resolutions were passed, and a program was presented for prosecuting the Tweed Ring. One of the seventy committee members was John Foley, chosen for his Irish name since most of Tweed’s followers were Irish.
Two days after the mass meeting Foley brought a taxpayer’s suit asking for an injunction to restrain the mayor, comptroller, and others from (1) paying any city money to anyone and (2) issuing any more bonds. When the case was given to Judge Barnard, who liked to whittle, some people felt that it was like presenting a matchstick to an ax killer. Foley’s suit would end up on the floor among other wood shavings from the judge’s pocketknife. Everyone understood the significance of the suit, for it marked the very first time that Tweed’s total power had been challenged in a court of law. To the stunned surprise of all—especially Tweed—Judge Barnard granted the injunction. Samuel J. Tilden apparently promised to make Barnard governor of New York State if he doublecrossed Tweed, and this is just what the judge did. Barnard’s betrayal nearly drove Tweed insane. He even considered suicide.
Then Comptroller Connolly, quaking with fear, visited Tilden, babbled about some of the frauds, and threw himself on the mercy of the reformers. On the night of September 11, 1871, someone broke into Connolly’s office and stole 3,500 incriminating vouchers, which were burned in the City Hall furnace. This may have been done at the suggestion of Mayor Hall, who now called on Connolly to resign. Tilden advised Connolly to appoint Andrew H. Green, one of the Committee of Seventy, deputy comptroller with the full powers of comptroller. After Green had taken office on September 18, it was reported that Mayor Hall had gone mad and was tearing out his hair. Duplicates of the burned vouchers, or most of them, rested in a bank used by ring members, and now the duplicates fell into the hands of the Tilden forces. Here was more proof of corruption.
Charles O’Conor was named the state’s special attorney general to prosecute Tweed. A week later Tilden swore out a complaining affidavit. A grand jury indicted the Boss on 120 counts, boiling down to the charge that the board of audit had passed fake claims and that much of the plunder had been paid to Tweed. About 1:30 P.M. on December 16, 1871, Sheriff Matthew Brennan, one of Tweed’s creatures, had to arrest the Boss in his own private office in the department of public works at 237 Broadway. Jay Gould of the Erie Railroad and other friends instantly put up bail for Tweed. The Boss soon resigned as commissioner of public works, as a director of the Erie, and as grand sachem of Tammany. However, he clung to his office of state senator.
Tweed’s trial did not begin for more than a year, his lawyers winning one postponement after another on the grounds that they needed time for preparation. He was represented by seven eminent attorneys, including Elihu Root, who later became United States Secretary of State under President Theodore Roosevelt. Mayor A. Oakey Hall stubbornly finished his term in City Hall but was succeeded on January 1, 1873, by William F. Havemeyer, mayor for the third and last time.
At last, on January 7, 1873, Tweed was brought into the court of oyer and terminer. Tilden, who hoped to be elected governor despite his alleged promise to Judge Barnard, testified against Tweed. So did Andrew J. Garvey, whom the Times called the “Prince of Plasterers.” Garvey squirmed in the witness chair and during a recess was approached by Tweed, who growled into his ear. Later, when Garvey was asked what the Boss said to him, the plasterer replied piously, “His language was blaphemous.” Despite the judge’s instructions, which almost demanded a verdict of guilty, the trial ended in a hung jury. Nine jurors held out for acquittal, while three wanted to find Tweed guilty. Most were men of low character, intelligence, and education, and one had lobbied for Tweed in Albany. Almost everyone believed that Tweed’s lawyers had packed the hung jury.
Tweed’s second trial began on November 5, 1873. This time the prosecutors went to great pains to keep Tweed henchmen off the jury. Nine days were spent in picking the jurors, but the trial itself lasted only four days. The same facts were presented more briefly. This time Garvey was not called, and Tweed exercised his legal right not to take the witness stand. This second jury found the Boss guilty of 102 offenses. Three days later he was brought back to court for sentencing. Judge Noah Davis said in part:
Holding high public office, honored and respected by large classes of the community in which you lived, and, I have no doubt, beloved by your associates, you with all these trusts devolved upon you, with all the opportunity you had, by the faithful discharge of your duty, saw fit to pervert the powers with which you were clothed in a manner more infamous, more outrageous, than any instance of like character which the history of the civilized world contains!
Tweed’s lips quivered as the judge then sentenced him to 12 years in prison and fined him $12,750. The date was November 19, 1873.
But the court of appeals soon reduced Tweed’s sentence to a mere year in jail and a token fine of $250. When Tweed was registered at the Tombs, the warden asked his occupation. Chins held high, Tweed replied, “Statesman.” Religion? “I have none.” In the Tombs the Boss enjoyed relative luxury, for he occupied a room, not a cell. Cracked windows were replaced with new glass panes, the floor was covered with a dark-green rug, five chairs were provided for visitors, and the famous prisoner could ease his bulk into either a leather lounge or a rocking chair.
Tweed later was removed to the county’s grim penitentiary on Blackwells Island. While he sat it out there, Samuel J. Tilden was elected governor for having helped put the Boss behind bars, and a new law enabled the state to sue for money stolen from the public treasury.
Tweed served the full year. The day of his release he was rearrested because a $6,000,000 civil suit had been filed against him. Bail was set at the unheard-of sum of $3,000,000. Unable to provide this security, Tweed was taken to the Ludlow Street Jail for debtors. This county jail, located in the rear of the Essex Market, extended from Ludlow to Essex Street. As a member of the county board of supervisors, Tweed had overseen construction of the brick prison, in which he now became an unwilling guest. Each of its eighty-seven cells was ten feet square, but the Boss occupied the warden’s quarters, consisting of two rooms. There Tweed took up residence on January 15, 1875.
How much did the Tweed Ring steal? The exact amount will never be known because the reformers couldn’t find every document revealing the true figures. But apparently Tweed and his henchmen filched about $30,000,000 in cash. Considering the bribes paid to the ring by rich men for cutting their taxes, the plunder from the rigged sale of franchises, the issuance of bonds at extravagant interest rates, plus the sale of other privileges, taxpayers probably lost a total of $200,000,000.
What happened to Tweed’s cronies? None suffered so much as the Boss himself. Cunningly having assigned their spoils to their wives, brothers, and close friends, most of them fled to Canada, England, and Europe. Mayor Hall was tried, but when a juror died, the trial had to be called off; at his second trial he was acquitted. Judge Barnard was impeached. Judge Cardozo resigned under pressure. Judge McCunn was deposed and died of heartbreak three days later. The new city fathers, realizing that the loot was beyond the law’s reach, promised immunity to Connolly, Sweeny, Garvey, and others if they would give back part of the swag. How much did the city recover? After all expenses had been deducted, a mere $876,241 of the $30,000,000 to $200,000,000 that had been stolen.
Tweed’s Fifth Avenue mansion and other properties were attached to repay a portion of his thievery. On October 8, 1875, the state supreme court denied his appeal from the huge civil suit pending against him. The Boss worried about his fate if he lost this new case. Meantime, his status as a prisoner was more like the life of Riley than that of Jean Valjean. Almost every afternoon he strolled out of the Ludlow Street Jail, flanked by two guards, stepped into a carriage, drove to the sparcely settled northern section of the city, took a pleasant walk, and then stopped to dine with his wife en route back to jail.
Late in the afternoon of December 4, 1875, Tweed got out of the carriage in front of the brownstone house his family now occupied at 647 Madison Avenue, between Fifty-ninth and Sixtieth streets. On that day’s outing he was accompanied by William M. Tweed, Jr.; Warden Dunham; and a deputy keeper, named Edward Hagan. As Tweed walked up the stoop, he looked for and found a secret mark on one of the steps. Once inside the four men sat down in the parlor, where they were joined by Tweed’s son-in-law. Darkness fell, and the gas lamps were lighted. About 6:15 P.M. the Boss said that he would like to go upstairs to see his wife. He left. Five minutes later the warden turned to young Tweed and said they’d better leave. Tweed’s son climbed the stairs. A moment later he clattered back down, shouting that he couldn’t find his father. Tweed’s overcoat still hung on a rack in the hall, but he had escaped. While the warden and deputy keeper nervously searched the house, young Tweed tugged at his hair and screamed that his father had ruined the family.
Tweed had paid $60,000 for help in making his getaway. He may have had the assistance of a smuggler, named Lawrence, with whom he had struck up a friendship in the Ludlow Street Jail. The faint mark on the stoop had told Tweed that this was the chosen day. Instead of going upstairs in his home, Tweed had walked out the back door and cut through his backyard to Fourth (now Park) Avenue. The split second he reached the avenue, a wagon drew up close, and a man’s hand reached out and groped toward him. Another confederate, posing as a pedestrian, muttered, “All right—get in!” Tweed crawled into the wagon, and once inside he was covered up. The vehicle jogged across town to a Hudson River pier, where the Boss was transferred to a rowboat. Under the cover of December darkness he was rowed to the New Jersey shore.
After landing, he was whisked to an old farmhouse in a lonely wooded area back of the Palisades, and there he hid for three months. He shaved off his whiskers, clipped his hair, donned a wig, and wore gold-rimmed spectacles. So far as any rambler could tell, he was an infirm gentleman, named John Secor, who needed rest and fresh air. Following his ninety-day confinement in New Jersey, Tweed was smuggled to a shad fisherman’s hut on Staten Island.
From there a small schooner took him to Florida, and for a while he hid out in the Everglades. Next, he rode a fishing smack to Santiago, Cuba. He left Santiago in a bark, named the Carmen, and on September 6, 1876, landed at Vigo, Spain. By this time he had been traced to Cuba, where it was learned that he had departed for Spain. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish asked Spanish authorities to arrest Tweed. Although Spain and the United States had no mutual extradition treaty, the Spaniards voluntarily obliged. They sent to London for a photograph of Tweed, but none being available, they used a Nast caricature of the Boss.
Tweed was arrested, and the U.S. cruiser Franklin sped from the Mediterranean to Spain to bring him back to America. When the ship steamed into New York Harbor, the broken Boss was transferred to a tug that put him ashore at Pier 46, where a curious crowd had gathered. Tweed was now gaunt and poor. Picking his way down a plank from tug to pier, he lost his balance, fell forward, and tumbled into a heap of coal.
Back in the Ludlow Street Jail, Tweed learned that his fair-weather friends had escaped prosecution by turning state’s evidence and returning part of their loot. He raged. For the first time he offered to confess everything and did so—fruitlessly. He later said that he had been promised his freedom if he would testify, but the promise was not kept. Cared for in jail by a faithful Negro servant, recognizing passersby, and reciting their personal histories, Tweed finally caught a cold that developed into bronchial pneumonia. He began to die on the morning of April 12, 1878. That noon the clock on the nearby Essex Market started to bong the hour, and just as its last stroke reverberated throughout the jail, William Marcy Tweed died.