BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (12 page)

Peter B. Sweeny.

In Albany, Tweed chaired the state legislature’s Committee on Municipal Affairs and set right to work when it convened in January 1870. He too wanted home rule, but suited to his own special needs. To draft a plan, he turned to his other stalwart “lunch club” friend, Peter B. Sweeny, the so-called “Brains” of the Ring.

Sweeny, dark-haired, stocky, with heavy mustache and narrow eyes, hated the public spotlight. Son of a New York Irish saloonkeeper, educated at St. Peter’s Roman Catholic School and Columbia College, a lawyer and Tammany insider since the 1850s, Sweeny had won election as district attorney in 1857—his only elected office—only to resign midway through his first trial after getting stage-fright in front of the jury. He avoided public speaking and rarely met with reporters. This secretiveness gave Sweeny a “mysterious glamour around his name,” one observer wrote; others described it as sinister.
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“I am not, and never claimed to be a leader,” Sweeny told a newsman in 1869. “I am simply a passenger in the ship, with the privilege of going ashore if I do not like its management or its course.”
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But Tammany insiders long had respected his brilliance as tactician and negotiator. Described as “a man of education, widely read and of real ability,” Sweeny traveled frequently to Europe and, though a bachelor, was rumored to have a French paramour.
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OOTNOTE

Sweeny had made a public splash in 1866 on being appointed City Chamberlain, responsible for managing the city’s bank accounts. On taking the post, he’d announced that from now on, he’d refuse to keep for himself the interest accrued on city accounts, long considered the job’s richest perquisite worth up to a million dollars over four or five years. “As a taxpayer… I am not willing to receive a great or any sum of money against the public sense of right, however legally justifiable,” he told the newspapers, settling instead for a $10,000 salary and startling reformers who’d always assumed him corrupt. The
New York Herald
called it “a self-denial and a sublime courage never before equaled,” though on closer look the altruism wore thin.
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Sweeny had reportedly paid $60,000 in party contributions for the job and he knew that the practice of keeping interest payments would likely soon be abolished by the legislature; he stood to gain more from a showy public display.
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Next, Sweeny showed his tactical genius again. During sessions of the legislature, Sweeny kept a room in Albany’s Delavan House just down the hall from Tweed’s so the two could talk constantly. He worked there steadily through January and February. After a few weeks, he’d produced a draft charter that legal scholar Charles O’Conor would call “an almost perfect document … under which to administer the affairs of a municipality” unless a “band of thieves [could] place at each checking point one of the members of their own clique.”
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This would be Tweed’s charter.

On its face, it had all the markings of Home Rule; it gave the mayor the power to run the city, eliminated hated Albany interference, and moved municipal powers back home to Manhattan. But the finer print, its subtle web of clauses and sub-clauses, did something more. Within New York, it created effectively a four-person oligopoly: the mayor, the comptroller, the commissioner of parks, and the commissioner of public works, a post combining the old streets department and the Croton Reservoir, intended for Tweed. These four officials would form a board of apportionment that would approve all city spending, fix budgets, and even control judgeships. The city’s elected aldermen, who traditionally controlled the purse, would formally be stripped of this power. The system seemed designed perfectly for Tweed and Connolly to continue their bill-padding and to spend money on whatever they chose.

What’s more, to assure that the right people filled these posts—Tweed, Connolly, and Sweeny—the charter made Oakey Hall’s appointment power absolute by eliminating the aldermen’s traditional authority to confirm nominees. Once in place, no future mayor could fire them; they’d hold their jobs for terms of six to eight years and could be impeached only by special action of all six judges of Common Pleas. And if anything happened to Hall in the meantime, if he left office or was replaced, his appointment function would fall not to an acting mayor but, rather, to the comptroller, Connolly, and nobody else.

Public Works, Tweed’s department, would direct the lion’s share of patronage—the hundreds of laborers who built and fixed the streets and reservoirs—followed by the Parks Department, intended for Sweeny.

Not surprisingly, resistance to this charter was passionate and intense. The resistance came not from Republicans or Upstaters, though. It came instead from within Tweed’s own Tammany club, from rivals who felt excluded from all the gravy. They called themselves “Young Democrats,” and from the start their leaders included Jimmy O’Brien, the county sheriff who just a year before had patrolled the ballot boxes with hundreds of deputies to help Tweed win his 1868 electoral triumph. O’Brien, eighteen years younger than Tweed, would always deny having any personal gripe against the Boss; instead, for O’Brien, the split had begun in an argument over money, Connolly’s refusal to pay some of his vouchers for running the sheriff’s office—possibly full of graft themselves.

O’Brien and his insurgents called themselves “reformers” but their goal soon became transparent: power. At first, it looked like they could settle the whole affair with a simple back-room deal. For weeks, the rebels met secretly with Tweed and hammered out a detailed compromise to divide city offices and commission seats under the charter. “All this was agreed to,” an unnamed “prominent Democratic office holder” told the
New York Sun
at the height of the contest, “and everybody was satisfied. But each man was afraid to trust his comrade.” O’Brien’s rebels worried particularly about Oakey Hall who, as mayor, would have the power to make appointments and easily could renege on the deal. “He is a notorious liar,” one of them called the usually popular mayor. “He never told the truth but once, and then it was by accident and he took off his coat and ran a mile and a half to cover it with a lie.”
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Before signing onto any final compromise, five insurgent Senators insisted on meeting with Tweed and the mayor face to face and swearing an oath. Tweed agreed; he invited them all to his Fifth Avenue mansion one night in early March and had each man literally put his hand on a large family Bible placed on a wooden table and promise to keep his word. Then, having made peace, Tweed feasted them all with lobster and champagne.

But the deal lasted barely twenty-four hours; it collapsed when O’Brien’s insurgents demanded more and Tweed refused to let them have it. “[T]he greediness of the Young Democrats made Tweed break his word,” the same source told the
Sun
.
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“They were young, they were unscrupulous, they were very hungry,” journalist Charles Wingate wrote of the Young Democrats.
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A showdown became unavoidable.

Charges of foul play flew back and forth across the capitol in Albany: Tweed claimed that his enemies were buying votes at $7,000 to $10,000 apiece to kill his charter. Later, Tweed admitted that he himself entered the bribery contest with a flourish, doling out a fortune in pay-offs.
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Then as now, the Albany legislature was divided into two chambers, the Assembly and the Senate. To handle the Assembly members, Tweed turned to experienced lobbyist A.D. Barber whose business was “to walk up and down the hill and talk to people,” as Tweed put it later.
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He didn’t remember exactly how much money he gave Barber to distribute among the legislators, but it was certainly a lot, totaling “hundreds of thousands” of dollars.

For the state senators, Tweed handled things himself. He invited several for personal talks in his Delavan House suite—which had a private rear exit for members to come and go unseen—and ultimately claimed to pay a total of $200,000 in cash, to be divided $40,000 apiece among five Republicans. To other senators, he gave jobs, or jobs to their friends, or help in their businesses. He later made Barber himself a deputy collector of assessments paying a salary of over $10,000 per year
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and sent checks for $67,250 in 1869 and 1870 to Democratic senator Michael Norton. Norton appreciated the favor enough to send Tweed a Clarence carriage and team as a gift, with a note reading “My greatest wish is that you may live long and enjoy it!”
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One newspaperman reputedly barged into Tweed’s Delavan House suite just as he was sorting out cash for the senators; he promptly demanded a $40,000 cut for himself to keep quiet and Tweed apparently had no choice but to pay.
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The contest grew close. Each side declared “war to the knife” and the rebels appealed for help to anyone in Tammany whose toes Tweed had stepped on during his rise to power. As their strength grew, so did their ambition; perhaps they could topple Tweed altogether, not just in Albany but at Tammany itself. The fight shifted back and forth between Albany and New York City. Its climax came one night in late March when O’Brien’s insurgents finally thought they had enough support to face Tweed directly in his own Wigwam. They demanded a meeting of Tammany’s general committee to settle things; Tweed agreed and set the date for Monday night, March 28, at 7:30 pm. A few days before the meeting, Tweed muddied the waters by resigning his post as deputy street commissioner and circulating a rumor he’d been fired.
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When the Young Democrats gathered at nearby Irving Hall before the confrontation to find their courage in a few shots of whiskey, they counted 174 Tammany committeemen, a majority, under their tent.

Tweed, too, spent the day making plans. “He sat in his [Duane Street] private office calm, collected, and cool,” wrote a newspaperman who’d come by to watch, “and received each visitor with a smile and thanks.”
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Behind closed doors, he railed at his ingrate enemies: “They’ve killed me dead, they think,” he told one supporter, “perhaps they have, but I’m Tweed now and I’ll be bound if I don’t show that I mean to kick the lid off the coffin pretty lively.”
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To another: “It has become a personal fight against me, and I would rather lose my life than lose a fight.”
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He waited until after sunset to spring his trap: When the Young Democrats arrived at Tammany Hall that night for the meeting, they found themselves locked out, standing in the street with no place to go. Tweed, flexing his muscle as Tammany’s Grand Sachem, had shut them out. He’d called his friend Henry Smith, commissioner of New York’s Metropolitan Police, and told him that a riot might occur at Tammany that night. Smith had responded by sending over 800 police officers to the neighborhood, blocking all entrances to the Tammany building as well as the nearby Bryant’s Minstrel Hall. By 7:30 pm that night, an estimated 5,000 people jammed the streets around Tammany and Union Square, standing outside in a cold driving rain, including as many friends of the Boss as enemies. Police refused to let anyone inside Tammany without a ticket signed personally by Tweed. When a reporter found Tweed that night “calmly reposing in the house of one of his most trusted friends” and asked him about the police raid, Tweed must have worn a delicious grin. He knew nothing, he claimed. “It astonished me.”
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The Young Democrats’ found their meeting cancelled and, by the next morning, their votes had vanished, scared away by the shifting fortunes.

Meanwhile, Tweed struck behind their backs in Albany. While O’Brien and his friends were still crying in their beer, Tweed had his own friends in Albany introduce the Sweeny-drafted charter in the legislature and rush it through the assembly. It passed 116 to 5; he’d cut a deal with Republicans allowing them to pass an election reform bill
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along with the charter and promising them a share of the spoils—a handful of patronage jobs.