BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (8 page)

“A day or two before the election, I was in the [Democratic State] committee room at the Metropolitan Hotel,” Tilden explained, “and I then understood that a circular had been issued asking for early election returns…. Some gentleman, I think it was Mr. A. Oakey Hall”—Tilden was not likely to forget Oakey Hall, “Elegant Oakey,” New York’s district attorney and also secretary to Tilden’s own committee—“spoke of it as having been intended to prevent the holding back of returns in the republican districts in the [upstate] country until our vote could be calculated, in order that the returns might then be manipulated.” Hall was charging upstate Republicans with exactly the same scam they were alleging against Tammany.

Tilden then dismissed both charges as unrealistic: “I did not attach any importance to the statement, for the reason that I did not think it probable.” Fixing the count, reporting fake returns simply could not be done, he argued, either by Democrats in New York City or by upstate Republicans.

In fact, later that day, Oakey Hall himself would appear as a witness and tell the congressmen that, yes, he did write the letter, he considered it proper, and he’d had Tilden’s name signed to it “because it was the usage to sign the name of the chairman of the main committee.”
16

The congressmen must have scratched their heads. On its face, Tilden’s story didn’t add up. It was fog within fog. Listening to Tilden’s monotone voice on that cold December morning with sunlight flooding in through wide windows from the street, they had to wonder: If the letter were harmless, then why had Tilden made such a fuss to deny his connection with it? Was he embarrassed at his own stupidity in being tricked? Or was it really a scam after all, with Tilden simply hiding behind a technicality? Was Tilden just as guilty as the others?

If his performance was vague, guarded, but purposeful, it was vintage Samuel Tilden. Tilden doubtless had spent hours planning it, shaping its nuances and calculating its impact. He was playing politics, something he’d done his entire life.

Born in New Lebanon, New York in 1814, Sam Tilden had grown up in a political household. His father, Elam Tilden, a well-connected farmer and grocery store owner, counted as personal friends old-style New York wire-pullers from future president Martin Van Buren to New York U.S. Senator Silas Wright and Governor William Marcy.
F
OOTNOTE
He invited them to plot strategy at the family dinner table for his son, young Sammy, to see. After studying at Yale and New York University, Tilden had settled in New York City in the 1840s to practice law and quickly joined the game. He became the city’s Corporation Counsel in 1843, founded and edited a Democratic partisan newspaper, the
Morning News
, in 1844, and served a term in the state legislature in 1846. He joined Tammany Hall and became a Sachem in 1856. As a lawyer, he prospered—by one account, his clients included fully half the railroads in the northeast United States in the mid-1850s.
17
By the end of the Civil War he’d purchased a large townhouse at 15 Gramercy Park and counted himself financially independent, owning two iron mines, sheaves of railroad stocks, and an office at 43 Wall Street.

Along the way, Tilden also had shown an independent streak. Nominated for state Attorney General in 1856, he’d refused support both from the Know-Nothings and the anti-liquor Prohibitionists, denouncing each for its own intolerance. He lost the election and afterwards defeated the Know-Nothings in a high-profile courtroom drama when they’d challenged the election of a friendly city comptroller using doctored vote tallies.
18
He had campaigned against Lincoln in 1860 and, during the Civil War, co-founded New York’s “Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge” which circulated anti-war, anti-Lincoln tracts.
19

Socially shy, frequently bedridden with colds and flues, Tilden distanced himself from casual human contact. He spent his free hours at the Manhattan Club at 96 Fifth Avenue where he’d paid $500 to become a charter member. “As a rule people did not like Tilden at a first meeting,” a biographer explained. “He seemed cold, self-centered, vain, too cocksure, and too omniscient”; he had an irritating habit of telling people “I told you so” and hesitated about answering direct questions.
20
His bachelorhood raised eyebrows in New York, forcing even friendly biographers to explain how he “found a fairly satisfactory substitute for a sweetheart and children in his absorbing law work,” as one wrote. “His deepest feelings were reserved for a great cause—a reform, a burning party issue or a sacred principle. To him love was merely sexual foolishness.”
21

Things had started well for Sam Tilden in 1868; friends had urged him to seek the New York governorship that year as a steppingstone for the future, perhaps even a run at the White House some day.
22
But then things had turned badly. Tilden found himself drawn into the woes of another person, one of his closest and oldest political friends, Horatio Seymour.

Lightning had struck in July 1868. A deadlocked Democratic convention in New York City had stampeded to Seymour on the 22nd ballot and made him its candidate for president. Seymour, who was chairing the convention at the time, had declined the honor at first; he enjoyed his life as retired elder statesman, practicing law in Utica and attending Democratic functions as a popular speaker.
23
In the excitement, he’d turned instantly to his long-time confidante Sam Tilden. By one account, Seymour ran out from the hall to a nearby lobby and found his friend: “My God Tilden, what shall I do?” he’d asked in a panic, to which Tilden had replied coolly: “Your party has called you, and you will accept.”
24

This reliance by Seymour on Tilden reflected a long bond. Both came from rural upstate towns and shared a background in pre-war New York politics. As wartime governor, Horatio Seymour had often turned to Tilden for advice: “Now that you and others have got me into [a] scrape, I wish you would tell me what to do,” he’d written Tilden in 1862.
25
Tilden had been notably absent during the July 1863 draft riots. He later claimed to be sick in bed at the time, but afterwards he rose to face what he described as “many demands for attention and counsel amid ten days of excitement and bustle,”
26
including traveling to Washington, D.C., as Seymour’s agent to try and convince President Lincoln to stop the draft.
27
Now in 1868, saddled with the nomination, Horatio Seymour turned again to his friend to manage the campaign, which became a disaster from the beginning.

Starting soon after the convention, enemies had dragged out Seymour’s wartime Copperhead record and painted him as a weak-willed traitor and possibly insane. Then, after suffering weeks of attacks, Democrats lost contests in all four “October states”
F
OOTNOTE
—key indicators that the ticket was headed toward electoral doom. Party leaders who had forced the presidential nomination down Seymour’s throat in July now panicked. Manton Marble, publisher of the
New York World
and one of Tilden’s Manhattan Club cronies, led a chorus of demands: either drop Seymour’s running mate, former Union General Frank Blair, from the ticket or drop Seymour himself. Telegrams flooded Tilden’s New York office from across the country: “Call your committee together, withdraw Seymour & nominate [President Andrew] Johnson or [Supreme Court Justice Salmon P.] Chase. Act and win,” wired one frustrated backer from Washington, D.C.; “Patriotism clearly commands withdrawal of Seymour and nomination of Chase,” insisted another.
F
OOTNOTE
8

Facing collapse of the national campaign, Tilden had rushed to Utica and found Seymour himself willing to step aside. However, both agreed that such a last-minute shuffle would sink the party in local contests coast to coast. They decided to hold firm. “No authority or possibility to change front. All friends consider it totally impracticable, and equivalent to disbanding our forces,” Tilden announced in a public letter cosigned with party leaders August Belmont and Augustus Schell. “We in New York are not panic-stricken.”
29
Privately, Tilden knew the presidency was lost, and with it had gone his own chances for higher office for the foreseeable future.

After Election Day, he faced another indignity—bickering over money. Tilden had sunk $10,000 of his own cash into Seymour’s 1868 defeat—an amount big enough to dent even his sizable bankroll—but the Democratic Party had spent thousands more based on Tilden’s promises. In late October, Tweed—who’d given Tilden his own $5,000 check as an early campaign contribution—began pressing him to settle accounts. Tilden ignored repeated calls for a meeting to decide who should pay the mounting pile of bills. Tammany apparently got stuck with most of them.
30

And now, sitting before a congressional committee, Tilden faced the final embarrassment of a voting scandal, complete with a forged letter dragging his name in the mud. He had a reputation to protect in 1868—a possible future in politics, his standing with the city’s elite, his legal practice. This was no time to quarrel with Boss Tweed and his Tammany crowd. Tweed might be a rival but, so far, he wasn’t an enemy. This day, December 30, 1868, testifying to the congressmen, Tilden would swallow his pride, make no damaging charges, and protect himself.

The more the congressmen pressed, the more Tilden back-pedaled. They asked him about the phony naturalizations and repeat voting and Tilden, the state party chairman, threw up his hands: “I did not know very much of the details of the minor committees,” he claimed. “There was generally some officer about the City Hall who looked after all these matters; but I had nothing to do with naturalization at all.”
31
The committee didn’t keep him long in the grand jury room that morning—Tilden’s testimony covers a scant three pages of the thousand-page transcript. On each point, the congressmen took Tilden’s story at face value, even Tilden’s explanation of the forged letter. In their final report, they’d describe it as “A. Oakey Hall’s Secret Circular”—not Tilden’s.

After he’d finished testifying, Tilden left the courthouse, stepped outside onto Chambers Street, and returned uptown to his busy legal practice. There was money to make in 1868 and plenty of time for politics later. But he couldn’t shake the scandal that had tarred his name. Months later, long after the congressmen had issued their final report, Horace Greeley would publicly blast him in an open letter, published in the
New York Tribune
: “Mr. Tilden, you cannot escape responsibility,” Greeley railed. “For you were at least a passive accomplice in the giant frauds of last November. Your name was used, without public protest … [a]nd you, not merely by silence but by positive assumption, have covered those frauds with the mantle of your respectability… you are as deeply implicated in them to-day as though your name were Tweed, O’Brien, or Oakey Hall.”
32

Tilden never answered Greeley’s charge. He’d pick his own day and his own way to make known his feelings about Bill Tweed and Oakey Hall.

-------------------------

Next came Tweed, ushered into the committee’s private room moments after Sam Tilden had left. The contrast could not have been sharper. Unlike Tilden’s cold personality, Tweed lit up the room. Big and boisterous, he knew how to lavish the congressmen with humor, look them in the eye, slap shoulders, shake hands, crack a joke, share a confidence, poke fun at his own girth. Tweed dressed sharply these days—he’d grown wealthy since the war. But his black suit, gold watch chain, and stiff collar only accentuated his most prominent new physical feature, a bulging stomach. Good food had become his favorite vice. “I was never drunk in my life,” he’d tell a newspaper writer later. “I have never smoked a cigar nor chewed a piece of tobacco. I never liked whiskey. Being a man of large body, I am fond of eating.”
33

Tweed too had come to the committee this morning to declare his innocence. He sat down at the table, filled the large leather chair with his 300 pounds, and swore to tell the truth. It took little prompting to start him talking:

“State your official position,” Congressman Kerr asked at the outset as the others looked on.
34

“I am deputy street commissioner, member of the board of supervisors, and State senator,” Tweed answered, ticking off his official titles as a clerk taking longhand notes struggled to keep up. And more: “I was chairman of the general committee at Tammany Hall.”

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