BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (3 page)

New York Governor Horatio Seymour.

Since early that morning, crowds had gathered around City Hall and nearby Printing House Square where the newspaper offices stood; rioters had threatened again to burn down Greeley’s
New York Tribune
and the
New-York Times
, while smashing windows and ransacking nearby shops. Worse violence was unfolding uptown on Ninth Avenue where rioters also had built barricades to fight police. Word of Governor Seymour’s approach quickly rippled through the street and people began congregating at City Hall Park.

When Seymour reached City Hall itself, the building’s marble, columned structure with its cupola and dome rising high above the neighborhood, he climbed up onto the front steps so the crowd could see him and recognize his familiar face: tufts of gray hair, slim build, high forehead, and quick glancing eyes. Seymour, an up-stater from Utica, normally felt more comfortable at a county fair than on teeming city streets, but now he appeared calm. He stood surrounded by police and a handful of officials; lines of armed militiamen—the few remaining in New York—ringed the square. A cheer rose from hoarse voices. Mayor Opdyke stood at Seymour’s side visibly frightened—a newspaper writer described his face as “ghastly white” and his hands as visibly trembling. “In his person he symbolized the fear that possessed the town,” he wrote.
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Seymour glanced out at the crowd and saw mostly well-dressed, respectable-looking men and women. Whether these were rioters, shop owners, office clerks, curiosity seekers or some combination, he probably couldn’t tell. But one thing was clear: they were anti-war, anti-Lincoln, and anti-draft.

Seymour began to speak. Shouting to be heard, he opened with the words “My friends,”
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and announced that he’d just sent his state adjutant-general to Washington, D.C. to request that the government suspend the draft in New York City. Then he implored the crowd to disperse. “If the conscription law will not bear the test of the courts and the Constitution, it will not be enforced,” he promised them,
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and assured them he was their friend and the friend of their families. “[L]eave your interests in my hands and I will take care that justice is done you, and that your families shall be fully protected.”
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At one point during the speech, he turned to a squad of soldiers and said, “Send away those bayonets.”
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After he’d finished, the crowd gave another cheer, loitered around the park some time, then slowly broke up.

Within hours, word of the governor’s speech reverberated through the city. Telegraph wires flashed it across the country. Seymour had buckled; he’d groveled to law-breakers. Law-abiding New Yorkers, the majority of sensible people who feared for their lives and felt disgrace at the riots—whether they supported the draft or not—were appalled. Who would protect them? Certainly not the weak-kneed governor! Local merchant William Goodell took up his pen and scribbled a note to President Lincoln that afternoon saying: “Gov. Seymour has just made a speech to the rioters, the substance of which is—Desist from destroying private property, and I will help you break down the conscription—in other words, the Army of the National Government.” He urged Lincoln immediately to declare martial law.
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If respectable New Yorkers cringed at the sight of Governor Seymour pandering to rioters and Mayor Opdyke trembling at his side, they still could find some confidence in two other men standing nearby that morning on the steps of City Hall as chaos unfolded around them. They had profiles long familiar to the crowd, no-nonsense, capable pillars of one institution in New York City that still seemed able to deal with the violent immigrant thugs. The two made an odd pair: skinny, wiry, energetic A. Oakey Hall, New York’s long-time district attorney, and, at his side, a much larger, heavier man standing a full head taller than the others, looking strong enough to fight anyone he chose, with red hair, full red beard, and a broad face. Both were leaders at Tammany Hall, the “regular” voice of the Democratic Party in the city. The larger man, “Big Bill” Tweed, was a county supervisor and Tammany’s general committee had recently voted him its new chairman.

Almost everyone around City Hall knew his name, but increasingly the Tammany men simply called him “the Boss.”

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Tweed kept his finger on the pulse of the city. Ever since violence had erupted Monday morning, he’d plunged head first into the maelstrom—mixing with rioters and shopkeepers on the street, huddling with political leaders, updating police with tips and rumors. At times, he and his Tammany men seemed all that stood between the city and chaos. When Mayor Opdyke had called New York’s twenty-four aldermen for an emergency City Hall meeting Monday morning and only six came, it was Tweed who rounded up a quorum. Worried about Opdyke’s safety, Tweed had joined those urging him to abandon City Hall for the St. Nicholas Hotel behind a strong police guard. When a vicious mob had surrounded Opdyke’s own house on Fifth Avenue demanding “Bring out the Mayor” and threatening to burn the place down,

it was George Barnard, one of Tweed’s hand-picked judges on the state Supreme Court, who mounted a stoop and shouted: “We still have law” and that “the courts would protect us.” Barnard had asked the crowd to disperse “for the honor of the City.” They’d cheered him and went off to burn someplace else.
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Tweed had seen physical violence all his life on New York streets and didn’t flinch from it now. He walked with the confidence of a man good with his fists. As a child in the 1820s, “Little Bill” Tweed, youngest of four siblings, had to fight for respect with older boys on Cherry Street near the East River where he grew up; eventually, he came to lead the gang of local toughs. Later, as a big strapping teenager, he’d joined the neighborhood volunteer fire squad—the Americus “Big-Six” company. Friends described Tweed as “a tall overgrown man, full of animal spirits [and] a swaggering gait, free and easy manner, the constant use of slang, and the display of a coarse humor greatly in vogue among his firemen associates.”
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The “Big Six” men prided themselves in wearing matching red shirts on their showy dashes to nearby rescues, pulling their shiny brass pump-wagon with ringing bells and a roaring tiger painted as an emblem on its side. Within a few years, they’d voted Tweed their foreman. Their ranks, seventy-five strong, later gave Tweed a solid base for launching a political career, able to produce hundreds of votes on Election Day and provide a platoon of strong-arm bullies as tough as any other street gang.

Shrewd and outgoing, Tweed won friends. He attended the public school on Chrystie Street and showed a quick grasp of numbers. His father Richard, a chair-maker and third generation of Tweeds in America, traced his family’s roots back to the Scottish town of Kelso on the river Tweed in the mid-1700s. Richard Tweed doted on his son and recognized talents in him. He stretched his money to send young Bill to a boarding school in New Jersey for a year of math and accounting. Tweed also taught his son business, making him an apprentice in his chair-making shop and then sending him to run errands and keep books for a nearby saddle-maker. When he bought into a brush-making business on Pearl Street—about two blocks from home—his son Bill became its bookkeeper and soon earned enough money to buy a stake in the business for himself. By the next spring, 1844, 21-year-old Bill Tweed had built a big enough nest-egg to marry 17-year-old Mary Jane Skaden, his sweetheart and neighbor since boyhood. He and his bride moved into a top-floor room in her father’s house at 193 Madison Street to start their lives together.

Local Tammany politicos saw talent in the young Tweed whose sharp blue eyes, towering build, and friendly manner had already made him a popular figure. In 1843, they asked him to run for city alderman on their ticket, but he declined, still wanting to make money in brush-making. As a rising young businessman, though, Tweed saw politics all around him in New York City. He saw merchants prosper by playing ball with politicians and he enjoyed telling a story about the first time he came out to vote. It was on Election Day in 1844, a presidential year featuring a hard-fought contest between Democrat James K. Polk and Henry Clay, the Kentucky Whig. He watched outright vote-buying on the street and then pulled aside a local poll-watcher to ask how many votes he expected to be cast altogether in the city that day. The old-timer happily explained that of the 45,000 eligible voters, usually about 8 percent stayed home, even in a presidential year.

Tweed did the math for himself. That left about 41,000, which was the number actually cast four years earlier in 1840. The next morning, he laughed out loud at seeing the result printed in the newspapers: 55,086 ballots had been counted in New York for Polk and Clay, an abrupt jump of more than 14,000.
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Young Bill Tweed had marveled at the brazen theft, a product of ballot-box stuffing, bully-boy tactics, and pure lying, the stuff of New York “democracy” in the mid-1800s. Yet politicians got away with it, and they seemed like decent men in their own way. Many wouldn’t steal a dime from a blind stranger and would move mountains to help friends, yet wouldn’t sneeze at fixing a vote or skimming a city contract.

Now that he’d learned the game, Tweed jumped at the next chance. When Tammany made him another offer in 1851, he took it. Now 28 years old, Tweed lost a narrow contest for assistant alderman that year, but success came quickly. In 1852, voters in his Seventh Ward neighborhood
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OOTNOTE
did make him an alderman—joining a group already famous as the “forty thieves”—and in 1853 they sent him to Washington, D.C. as United States congressman. Tweed hated the national legislature; he found it dull and spent most of his official time bickering over a postmastership for an obscure constituent and haggling over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which he supported.
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He lasted just one term. Asked years later about returning as a U.S. senator, he cringed: “what for? I can’t talk, and I know it. And to spend my time in hearing a lot of snoozers discuss the tariff and the particulars of a contract to carry the mails from Paducah to Schoharie, I don’t think I’m doing that just now.”
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Back home in 1854, Tweed refused a nomination from the nativist “Know-Nothings,”
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OOTNOTE
making him popular with Irish and German immigrants already swelling New York’s poorer neighborhoods—despite his having been an officer in the Order of United Americans, a local anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant club, in the late 1840s.
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He became a school commission member in 1856, a county supervisor in 1858, and deputy street commissioner in 1861, then bankrupted himself in a losing race for sheriff that year. By then, Tweed had given up brush-making to give politics his full attention and he’d figured out how to make money at it. He opened a private law office at 95 Duane Street where he used his city contacts to “fix” problems for paying customers.

Tammany’s general committee had topped off Bill Tweed’s rise by electing him its chairman in January of 1863—just six months before the draft riots. By now, Tweed and Mary Jane, his wife of 18 years, lived in their own home at 127 Henry Street. They’d moved out of Mary Jane’s father’s house in 1847 after the birth of their first child, William Jr., to avoid having him spoiled by doting grandparents: “If I don’t [move] the folks will pet my boy to death,” Tweed complained.
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On July 10 that year, only three days before the riots, Mary Jane had made Tweed a father for the ninth time by giving birth to a new baby son, Charles. As two of their children had died in infancy, that left a total of seven, three sons and four daughters ranging in age from newborn to 18 years. Even with the maids Tweed hired as help, the load made Mary Jane a virtual household slave caring for their brood.

On Tuesday morning, July 14, 1863, as Governor Horatio Seymour arrived in New York by ferry from New Jersey to face the draft riots exploding through the city, it was Tammany chief Bill Tweed who met him at the Hudson River pier, shook his hand and escorted him to the St. Nicholas Hotel, then walked with him up Broadway to City Hall for his “My Friends” speech. Afterwards, it was Tweed who led Seymour through Manhattan for two more speeches in riot-torn neighborhoods. Tweed sat side-by-side with him that day in the governor’s carriage as it threaded narrow streets behind police guards. Crowds recognized the two men instantly; as the carriage passed, rioters would stop for a moment as men raised hats, women waved handkerchiefs, and cheers rose.
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