BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (25 page)

After the riot, Governor Hoffman hid behind closed doors at the Clarendon Hotel and quickly left town to Newport, Rhode Island, “by order of his physician,” an aide claimed, saying he needed “absolute quiet and undisturbed repose.”
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Tweed, Sweeny, Connolly, and Hall each refused to see newspapermen or appear on the street that day, fueling bitter ridicule of them as cowards, rich men hiding in their mansions.

Only Oakey Hall, of all the Tammany crowd, finally showed himself. He arrived at City Hall the next morning looking tired but indignant behind his usual
pince nez
glasses and clipped beard. He’d been right all along, he told a
New York Herald
reporter in his office. “There were three regiments of soldiers guarding a hundred and sixty Orangemen, flanked by five hundred policemen,” he explained; without his original order blocking the march, there would have been 5,000 marchers facing 20,000 rioters and many more dead. “I am New York’s housekeeper,” he argued. “Í must not allow lives to be taken unnecessarily…. I am bound to keep the peace.” He dismissed the uproar against his opposition to the march as “a mistaken idea of public liberty being attacked.” As for the anger: “the people [will] vindicate me,” he said. “I have waited for vindication many times before.”
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Friends later described Hall that day as hardly the usual “Elegant Oakey” but rather a man having “wept bitter tears over the ingratitude of his fellow citizens,” insisting “he had not the blood or the stain of the wounded on his head.”
^F
OOTNOTE
20

John Hoffman, who’d staked his future on intruding into the affair and allowing the march, now also found himself crippled politically. Catholics saw blood on his hands. “The Irish element are permanently disaffected toward you,” Peter Sweeny told the governor by letter, trying to console him. Hoffman’s chances of ever becoming President of the United States had vanished in a hail of gunfire. “But your position is a great deal more comfortable than you would occupy as a defeated candidate for the Presidency,” Sweeny wrote, “I think the Republican Press have made such a bugbear of the Tammany Ring that the people would not be likely to elect as President a man supposed to be in sympathy with them.”
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Tweed himself tried to avoid the whole mess. Having left Manhattan altogether after the riot, sailing his yacht across Long Island Sound to his Greenwich country seat, he returned the next day to find his office jammed with panicked callers. He tried to put the best face on disaster. “It was an unfortunate business from beginning to end,” he told people, dismissing the whole affair as if it were an impersonal force of nature like a hurricane or a blizzard, “one of those remarkable fiascoes for which it was impossible to tell who was to blame.”
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Eight years earlier, Tweed and his circle had used the Civil War draft riots to demonstrate Tammany’s ability to deliver effective government to a fractured city. Now he seemed adrift. His two leading public faces, Hoffman and Hall—both of whom had made their names prosecuting draft rioters in 1863—now stood humiliated, the city angry and bloodied. Tammany had failed to manage what New York’s elite saw as the smoldering slum class of immigrants—its implicit social contract with them since the war. Still, his instinct that summer, rather than grappling with the problem, was to spend his free time in Greenwich, enjoying the breezes from Long Island Sound and the chumminess of his Americus Club lodge.

“[The Irish] want more money, and less work, and fewer Protestants, and cheaper whiskey,” pronounced E.L. Godkin in
The Nation
, voicing widespread fears now reduced to raw bigotry. To his circle, the time had come to crack down on the rabble and its most visible symbol besides the Church itself—Tammany Hall.

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One who saw bloodshed and shared the anger from Orange Day was a young reserve soldier with the Seventh Regiment called up that day to march down Eighth Avenue when the militia made its stand:
Harper’s Weekly
illustrator Thomas Nast.
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Lewis Jennings reveled in work these days after the Orange riot, his team of reporters, copywriters, and typesetters spending endless hours at the
New-York Times
editorial rooms as news erupted around them. Jennings had not batted an eyelash at leading the newspaper attacks against Tammany Hall after the massacre—another blast in his ten-month campaign against Boss Tweed. He’d happily joined the chorus of jeers against the mayor: “A correspondent wishes to know whether the initials ‘A.O.H.’ stand for A. Oakey Hall or ‘Ancient Order of Hibernians,’” he asked in an unsigned
Times
article that week, “The public has arrived at the conclusion that the owner of the initials is ‘An Odious Humbug.”
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Six days after the riot, the city remained in shock. The
Times
, like every other newspaper, consumed its front pages in the maudlin aftermath: funerals for rioters and slain national guardsmen, the discovery of more dead as bodies turned up during the week, the witnesses—rioters, guardsmen, and police alike—coming forward to give detailed accounts of their roles in the battle. Jennings printed it all with relish, more flames for the fire.

In the ten days since September 8 when the
Times
had printed its expose of exorbitant city spending on empty and decrepit armories using numbers filched by Matthew O’Rourke from Comptroller Connolly’s own account books, City Hall had found ways to strike back. Jennings increasingly had felt their strong-arm tactics. “I was arrested two or three times a day as the [Tammany] fight grew brisk,” he would write in a later memoir, “but the magistrates, albeit in the ‘Ring,’ never refused bail; and there were gentlemen of the city who stood ready day and night to give bail for me to the extent of five million dollars, had so much been wanted.”
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Now, on Tuesday, July 18, Jennings again worked late at his desk in the
Times
building on Park Row. He remembered it being especially hot that night as he clipped through his routine of assembling the next morning’s paper, editing columns of typeset print, flourishing his pen to sharpen a rhetorical slant or cut a few excess words, barking orders to clerks or reporters, keeping an eye on the clock for the next deadline. Then, at one point, he looked up to see a man standing in his office doorway. Jennings recognized him instantly, but chose not to say a word. As he watched, the man entered the room uninvited.

“Hot night,” Jimmy O’Brien said.
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“Warm,” Jennings replied. He noticed that O’Brien was holding a large envelope under his arm.

Jennings had no reason to be friendly to O’Brien, the former sheriff and long-time Tammany hack; he allowed a long silence to hang between them. O’Brien was the last man he’d trust on that hot summer night. O’Brien’s stormy relations with Tweed had been a public soap opera for over a year, and his loyalties shifted like the wind. One day O’Brien touted himself a true-blue reformer, the next day he reverted back into a corrupt hack groveling for his share of graft like all the rest. Jennings certainly knew the rumors that O’Brien had been flirting with newspaper editors about secret ledger books he claimed to have gotten from Connolly’s office. His own publisher George Jones at the
New-York Times
had probably told him about O’Brien’s come-ons. But so far O’Brien had failed to deliver anything to anyone.

For all Jennings knew, the former sheriff had made his peace with Tweed, taken his cash, and now come over at Tweed’s behest to rough up his office.

“You and Tom Nast have had a tough fight,” O’Brien said finally.

“Still have.”

“I said
had
.” With that, O’Brien walked over to Jennings, laid the envelope on his desk, and thumped it with his fist. “Here’s the proof to back up all
The Times
has charged…. They’re copied right out of the city ledgers.” Then he left without saying another word.
^F
OOTNOTE
27

Alone again in his office, Jennings studied the envelope, opened it and, seeing what was inside, he immediately got up from his desk and headed out to find George Jones. Reaching Jones’ office on the top floor, Jennings showed him the envelope and they quickly called in John Foord, the young
Times
reporter who’d been working the Tweed story for months. The next several hours that night, they all studied the reams of handwritten notes and numbers, pages of ledgers that O’Brien had crammed into his envelope. It took them time to appreciate its full import. After ten months of waiting, the evidence they needed had finally dropped from the sky. Whatever information George Jones had perhaps
seen
eight months earlier about the inner doings of the Tweed ring and Connolly’s financial accounts, he now
held
, along with a witness to vouch for it.

Time was wasting; they’d just been handed the scoop of the century.

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Jimmy O’Brien had gone to at least one other newspaper that week after the Orange riot before handing his secret ledgers books to the
New-York Times
. The
New York Sun
, just down the block on Park Row, had turned him away, possibly because its publisher Charles Dana had been out of the building and the managing editor on duty hadn’t wanted to take responsibility.
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Twenty years later, after all the hoopla, O’Brien would still be bragging about the night he gave his damning evidence to the
Times
. With each telling, he’d expand his own role in toppling the Tweed Ring. By the time he laid it out for a newsman in Saratoga in 1891 sitting on the veranda of the Grand Union Hotel, drink in hand and a red geranium flower in his lapel, he’d have made himself the central character. He’d describe how George Jones was “very much frightened” and how he, Jimmy O’Brien, had stiffened his backbone. “[Jones] couldn’t believe the steals were so gigantic,” he’d say, and “he had to depend entirely on my word. He had no means of verifying any of the documents.” O’Brien would tell how he himself had masterminded the entire
New-York Times
campaign, meeting Jones in Saratoga months earlier to lay out the plan: “Now… you have got an opportunity to make a name and a fortune, but you have got to go in boldly and without hesitation and you have got to startle the public into a realization of what those papers mean by immediately calling all those men in the ring thieves and robbers. Then produce these documents to prove the truth of your assertions.”
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But all the bragging would come later. For now, with Tweed still paramount in New York City and the
Times
still gasping in its fight, O’Brien receded back into the shadows to wait for the fireworks.

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Thomas Nast returned home to his small house in Harlem after marching with the Seventh Regiment guards and set immediately to work. Whatever passion had driven Nast in creating his Tweed cartoons so far, the experience of carrying a rifle on Orange Day, seeing bloodshed and perhaps even firing his own round into the mob, compounded it. Sleeping barely four hours a night, virtually ignoring his wife Sarah and their three small children, Nast began producing a torrent of art; each
Harper’s Weekly
edition through July and August would contain multiple cartoons, full-page illustrations, and satires from his pencil. Immediately after the riot, he sat down and drew a dazzling two-page, multi-paneled homage to the battle on Eighth Avenue, captioned “Something that Wouldn’t Blow Over,—July 11 and July 12, 1871.” From his pencil flowed images of heroic guards and police facing horrific hordes of Irish brutes with torches, clubs, and pistols attacking women and civilians, the “Colored Orphan Asylum” burning in the background—a throwback to July 1863. Around this, he drew a half-dozen smaller panels each containing a separate cartoon hammering the same theme: blood on the hands of Tammany. One showed Tweed, Connolly, Sweeny and Hall all cowering on their knees behind the woman’s skirts of Lady Liberty as she leads militiamen and police rallying to protect the American flag, a battle scene as vivid as any from the Civil War; another showed the four as “Slaves of the Greeks,” sitting glumly on the pavement as two ape-like Irishmen hold them as petty captives.
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