BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (31 page)

Tonight, Jones could laugh at the insults. People were buying his newspaper.
New-York Times
circulation had jumped by 40 percent to almost 50,000 copies per day in the two years since Jones had taken over, mostly due to excitement over the Tweed Ring exposures.
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His city was listening to him.

Respectable old-time New Yorkers dominated the platform: 79-year-old James Brown, founder of Brown Brothers’ New York bank (today’s Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.),
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OOTNOTE
opened the rally and handed the chairman’s gavel to 67-year-old William F. Havemeyer, retired sugar merchant, banker, and New York mayor during the 1840s. Behind them sat a startling coalition of city elite: Congressman Robert Roosevelt (the future president’s uncle), German publisher Oswald Ottenderfer, piano maker Theodore Steinway, and a parade of Wall Street chiefains: stock exchange president Henry Clews, bankers Henry Stebbins, Abraham Kuhn, and Joseph Seligman, broker W.R. Vermilye, among many others. All three leading members of the earlier “whitewash” committee—John Jacob Astor, Marshall O. Roberts, and Moses Taylor, now fully chastised by the
Times
and Thomas Nast—sat onstage along with Peter Cooper, all come to make their amends.

Jimmy O’Brien, now happily acknowledging his role as the
Times
’ secret source for its dramatic expose, also came to take a bow.

For the next several hours, speakers took the podium to demand reform while blasting the villains Tweed, Connolly, and Oakey Hall. Corruption must be stopped and frauds punished. “A deadly disease is consuming [the city’s] vitals,” Havemeyer roared from the platform. New York was “a great whale stranded upon a coast and devoured piecemeal by sharks,” repeated Judge James Emott. They recounted the Tammany scandals, the huge debt, the outrageous vouchers, the brazen thefts, citing all the details from the
New-York Times’
front pages. The rhetoric brought the crowd repeatedly to its feet. The new courthouse “has cost you seven millions of dollars—not for building it, but for furnishing, repairing and decorating it,” Emott said to roars of laughter.
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Fists rose in the air as Tweed, Connolly, and Oakey Hall were described as living in “vast estates, of magnificent mansions, of stables that might rival those of the most luxurious of the Roman Emperors, of steam yachts, of picture-galleries and jewels of almost fabulous value”—all paid for with money “stolen” from the city.

Mere allegations? No, they shouted. The Tammany villains stood convicted by their silence. “What are the answers that these men have made [to these] charges?” Emott asked. “They plead guilty,” a voice said. They’d issued “contemptuous denials… flippant evasions [and] studied concealment,” yelled another. They’d “laughed a hollow laugh, and smiled a false smile, and shrugged their coward shoulders…. as these things were told,” lawyer Edwards Pierrepont roared.

Havemeyer, the former mayor, ended his own speech by taunting the crowd with Tweed’s own mythical quote: “I now ask you in conclusion—WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?” The angry voices in Cooper Union Hall that night gave a chilling response: “Send them all to Sing Sing!” yelled some; “Hang them!” shouted others—both drawing “immense applause” according to reporters. Without reform, Tammany would face “the yells of an infuriated mob, the fire and rapine and slaughter, the noise of musketry and cannon,” Edwards Pierrepont declared. Havemeyer’s response to his own question was hardly more gentle: “To eradicate these evils will require the use of the cautery and the knife.”

Nobody in the room blanched at the talk of physical violence. It had already come from the most respectable source: E.L. Godkin’s
The Nation
that still pointed to “the ignorant Irish voting element” as root cause of the scandal.
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Godkin had demanded a “vigilance committee” for Tweed, literally a lynch mob, noting that “the Anglo-Saxon race has never consented long to stand still and be robbed.”
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Pressed to explain himself, Godkin wrote: “in our opinion, Hall, Connolly, Tweed, Barnard and all the class to which they belong… fear no penalty… except a violent death.”
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Tonight in Cooper Union Hall, though, the well-mannered horde of angry respectables hadn’t yet reached the point of finding a rope and a sturdy tree limb. After listening to the speeches, they calmly passed resolutions calling for repeal of the Tweed charter, the resignations of Tweed, Connolly and Hall, and the creation of a blue-ribbon panel to try to recover stolen funds: the Committee of Seventy. George Jones appeared satisfied; all that night he heard his
New-York Times
repeatedly cheered, quoted, and cited as leader of the cause. He understood the anger: New Yorkers felt that they had been played for suckers. And didn’t like it.
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Not everyone in the city was impressed by the Cooper Union affair. Even some reformers found its pomposity and one-sidedness offensive. “Saints Lashing Sinners,” the
New York Sun
called it in its next morning’s headline, dismissing it as so much chest thumping.
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Of all the names connected to it, the most conspicuously absent was that of Samuel J. Tilden. The morning after the meeting, the
New York World
used Tilden as its example in blasting it as partisan and stacked: other Democrats should have “followed the example of Mr. Tilden,” it said, “and kept away from this Custom-house meeting.”
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Two days later, the reformers drew first blood. They marched into the state Supreme Court chambers on Duane Street on Wednesday morning, September 6, and filed a lawsuit to stop the city government in its tracks. They demanded a legal injunction barring the city or county from raising, borrowing, or spending any money unless approved by a new, reformed board of apportionment. The order would also forbid the city from paying a penny more to the New-York Printing Company, the New York Transcript Association, and the Manufacturer Stationers Company, all companies connected to Tweed. As its defendants, the suit named the now-famous “Tweed Ring” foursome: Tweed, Connolly, Sweeny, and the mayor.

Just as eye-catching was the judge they asked to issue the order: George G. Barnard, Tweed’s most loyal pawn on the bench.

Barnard, 42 years old, owed his career to Tweed as much as anyone in New York City: Born in Poughkeepsie, educated in Union College, Barnard had left home for California in 1848 to make his fortune among the original gold miners but returned broke to Manhattan in 1856 to stake his claim in politics. Here, he joined Tammany and befriended “Paps” Tweed. When the job of recorder (judge of the General Sessions court) came open in 1857, Barnard wanted it and asked the Wigwam for its nomination. By one account, he first had to face a rival named Doyle backed by local Tammany strongman Isaiah Rynders. Tweed chaired the meeting the night Tammany chose its slate that year and enjoyed telling the story of how he used his gavel to hand Barnard his victory: “I saw, as the roll proceeded, that Doyle had the majority of delegates. So I said to the secretary: ‘Have a motion made to dispense with calling the roll!’ It was done. ‘All in favor of Mr. Barnard as the nominee of this body say aye. Carried! The meeting is adjourned!’ Well, there was a riot and I was driven into one corner. Isaiah Rynders had a pistol as long as my arm drawn and cocked. Said he: ‘I’ll pay you for this.’ I was scared but I didn’t say so. ‘I’m not afraid of a whole ward of you fighting villains,’ said I, and we got out of it.”
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OOTNOTE
24

With Tweed’s support, Barnard won his race for recorder in 1857, then won a seat as state Supreme Court justice in 1861. He always found ways to repay the Boss, be it by naturalizing thousands of Irish immigrants before Election Day in 1868 or by issuing injunctions for Tweed’s friends Jim Fisk and Jay Gould. During the bitterly-fought 1868 Erie Railway War between Gould and Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, Barnard had loyally matched his judicial decrees to Tweed’s shifting alliances, issuing injunctions first for one side and then the other. “I was the best friend he ever had” Tweed said of Barnard. “I risked my life to get [his judgeship] for him.”
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More recently, though, the two had drifted. Barnard seemed increasingly impressed by his own power. He’d won his last citywide election to the bench by 60,000 votes. “[Y]ou had to waste much time with him, coax him, and make him believe that he was a great man—pat him on the back,” Tweed grumbled.
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Barnard himself complained how “from 1868, and including the granting of the injunction against him, I did not in those years speak six words with Mr. Tweed.”
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Instead, Barnard fell under the spell of Jim Fisk, Prince of the Erie Railway Company, and Fisk’s mistress, Josie Mansfield. He became a regular at Josie’s dinner table and was accused of signing judicial orders in her parlor, though he insisted “I never called at her house except I went there in a party of gentlemen composed to two or more.”
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Hanging around with Fisk and Josie, Barnard suddenly had money to burn. Asked how he happened to be carrying $600 in cash (about $12,000 modern dollars) to pay Fisk once for an off-the-cuff favor, he said: “Why, I presume I got it out of my safe, or else I carried it in my pocket; I’m no pauper.” He happily accepted a three thousand dollar loan once from Gould, new dining room chairs from Fisk, and plenty of smaller favors.
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Dark-haired, with a crisp mustache and brusque manner, Barnard now found himself appealed to by the reformers. Friends found it incredible. There were whispers: “Do you think Judge Barnard would grant an injunction against those who made him?”
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The reformers evidently had reason to think so.

Their first day did not bode well. The reform lawyers arrived at Barnard’s courtroom promptly at 10 am but a clerk announced that Barnard was home in bed, too sick to come to court. A reporter raced over to Barnard’s house on West 24th Street and found him “suffering from the convenient and aristocratic disease, the gout, and his foot … so swollen that he could not stand.”
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Barnard had good reason for cold feet that day; he faced a political crossfire of epic proportions. By granting the injunction, he’d forever burn his bridges with Tweed and Tammany. But if Tweed’s machine were going to sink regardless, why should he, George Barnard, sink with it? By aiding the reformers and giving them their injunction, he could make himself an instant hero. Who knew what opportunities might come his way?

By the next morning, Barnard had made his choice. He arrived promptly in his chambers and called on the reformers to make their case. Barnard had a reputation for making caustic remarks from the bench: When a lawyer in a divorce case once announced that he’d brought the wife to appear in court before him, Barnard had joked “What of it; do you think that I can tell whether a woman will commit adultery [just] by looking at her?”
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This morning, though, as lawyers for the reformers walked him through their argument, he kept his mouth shut. He asked no questions about glaring legal gaps in the case: whether the plaintiff had technical standing to sue, for instance. At the end, he raised just one concern: “[I]f the court should grant your injunction, it would have the intention and effect of stopping the operations of the city government—of stopping the payment of the laborers who work upon the streets, on the public parks, and roads, and prevent them from receiving any money whatever.”
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If workingmen were going to suffer in the crossfire, Barnard wanted his own hands clean. “We have endeavored not to put it so,” said Judge Barrett, one of the lawyers, though the injunction’s plain language said the opposite. Still, the answer was enough to satisfy the judge.

“You are entitled to your order,” Barnard announced. Cheers erupted in the room, but these were quickly silenced. The injunction was temporary, Barnard explained; he’d schedule arguments to continue in his courtroom the next week before making it permanent.

Within minutes, the city exploded in gasps. George Barnard, the ultimate lapdog, had bitten the hand that fed him. Speculation abounded about whether there’d been a fix: “Knowing Barnard as we do, this summary action … can be explained only on the theory that he had been promised the Democratic nomination for Governor,” Denis Tilden Lynch concluded. “There was only one man capable of making good such a promise. This was Tilden.”
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