The Epic of New York City (55 page)

The South was in desperate straits. With the opening of 1865 only two Confederate armies were left in the field. Below the Mason and Dixon fine, transportation had broken down, ports were blockaded or captured, Union troops held croplands, hunger spread, the Rebel army's morale was shattered, and civilians demonstrated against the Confederate government. After Atlanta there was nothing left to oppose Sherman, whose men fanned north through South Carolina, inflicting even more damage than they had in Georgia. No single Southern defeat was due to lack of arms, but the will to win had
drained from Rebel hearts. Lee evacuated Richmond, and when the news reached New York, diarist G. T. Strong wrote: “Never before did I hear cheering that came straight from the heart. . . . I walked about on the outskirts of the crowd, shaking hands with everybody, congratulating and being congratulated by scores of men I hardly even knew by sight. Men embraced and hugged each other,
kissed
each other, retreated into doorways to dry their tears and came out again to flourish their hats and hurrah.”

This was on April 3. Three days later, just as twilight softened the city, a young Confederate officer pulled himself out of the Lower Bay, climbed up a seawall, stepped over a fence, and stood on the Battery. Water dripped from his gray tunic with its yellow collar and cuffs; water sloshed from his faded yellow-striped blue trousers. He was Captain William R. Webb of the Second North Carolina Cavalry. Webb was one of 1,500 Rebel prisoners held in Castle Williams on Governors Island. He had escaped, slid into the water, and swum 3,200 feet to the southern tip of Manhattan. A civilian, seeing the dripping man, asked how he had happened to fall into the bay. “I swam across,” Webb replied. “I escaped from the prison stockade over there.” He pointed. “I am Captain Webb of the Confederate army.” The civilian laughed and went about his business. So did other New Yorkers who saw the strange figure, although Webb always identified himself. For three days the Rebel captain wandered about the city. No one bothered to report him to the authorities. Who cared? The war was won.

At 3:45 in the afternoon of Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee of the Confederacy surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant of the Union in the courthouse of Appomattox Village, 95 miles west of Richmond, Virginia. In the evening of Good Friday, April 14, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln as the President sat in Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C. Lincoln died at 7:22 the following morning. When the news reached New York City, men and women sobbed. Strangely, during the week after Lincoln's death the number of arrests in New York for drunkenness and disorder was lower than in any week for many years. On April 24, Lincoln's body lay in state in City Hall on the way to its final resting place in Springfield, Illinois. Even the poorest of New York's poor spent 25 cents for a tiny flag with a scrap of crepe attached.

With the war won and Lincoln dead, the city took stock of itself.
It had supplied the Union army with 15,000 soldiers and contributed $400,000,000 to the war effort. The North came out of the conflict richer than it had entered it, and business in New York had been greatly stimulated. However, the population had dropped from 813,669 to fewer than 727,000.

Now, front and center, there strolled a fat man who licked his chops. They called him Boss Tweed.

Chapter 26

W
ILLIAM
M
ARCY
T
WEED
was a huge man. He stood 5 feet 11 inches tall, and his weight varied from 280 to 320 pounds. Like some other fat men, he was light on his feet, and the ladies said that he waltzed divinely. His head was big and rather pointed. He had coarse features, a prominent nose, a ruddy complexion, a brown beard, and bright blue eyes, which twinkled when he was amused. When angered, he could stare down almost anyone—even a rowdy who held a gun against his potbelly.

Tweed laughed easily. A man of enormous appetite, he consumed gargantuan meals. Endowed with almost limitless energy, he worked most of the time. He was fond of power and money and canaries and
flowers and women. Happily married and proud of his wife, Tweed also was devoted to his eight children. Nonetheless, he had two mistresses. One was a tiny blonde who didn't reach to his shoulder. Tweed lavished $1,800,000 on his kept women, but this meant nothing to a politician who cheated the city out of $5,500,000 in a single morning. Fond of massive jewelry, he wore a huge diamond in the front of his shirt.

Tweed was rough in manners and humor, spouting profanity in basso profundo. His speech was so thick that it was sometimes difficult to understand him. He drank heavily until a doctor said that he was endangering his health. Tweed never smoked and often moralized about the evils of nicotine. Although he quit school at the age of fourteen, Tweed bent college graduates to his iron will. He liked to breed dogs and confusion. He was the first city politician in the United States to be called the Boss. He enslaved New York City and the state of New York, and he planned to put America into one of his huge pockets.

Tweed became the third largest property owner in the city, lived in baronial splendor in a Fifth Avenue mansion, and kept a country house, whose mahogany stables were trimmed in silver. Devoid of religious faith, he believed in just two things—himself and power. He owned a yacht and some people's souls. He radiated animal magnetism, was a genius at making friends, and remained loyal to them regardless of what they did. He thoroughly understood the mass mind. Tweed looked a little like Falstaff and acted a lot like Captain Kidd, and if he had not been such a monster, he might have been a great man. The complete cynic, he said:

Unhappily, there was some truth in this. It was by studying the methods of Fernando Wood that Tweed learned to make citizens of aliens so they could vote for him and his henchmen. As historian James Bryce once wrote: “Plunder of the city treasury, especially in the form of jobbing contracts, was no new thing in New York, but it had never before reached such colossal dimensions.”

There was nothing in Tweed's heritage or the circumstances of his birth that gave a clue to his future. One of his ancestors emigrated here from Scotland, which has a river called Tweed. Three generations of Tweeds had lived in New York City before he was born on April 3, 1823, at 24 Cherry Street. His father, Richard Tweed, made chairs. William was the youngest in a family of three boys and two girls.

Bill Tweed ran with the Cherry Hill gang and soon took command of it. The boys liked to steal pigs' tails from butchershops and roast them over fires in hidden places. Bill, who was large for his age, could cut off a pig's tail with one slash of a knife. He worked in his father's chair factory, became a salesman for a saddle and harness shop, learned bookkeeping, juggled figures for a tobacco firm, did some selling for a brush concern, wound up a junior partner, saved money, and went into the chair business with his father and a brother.

The young men of his day joined volunteer fire companies because firemen wore gaudy uniforms, dashed about the city, and played a big role in politics. Tweed helped organize Americus Fire Engine Company No. 6, known as the Big Six. Its symbol was a tiger—a fact which was to plague Tweed in years to come. Totally without racial or religious prejudice, Tweed befriended Irishmen, Germans, anyone and everyone. In 1850 he made his first bid for public office. He ran for assistant alderman—but lost. Instead of sulking, he did all he could to dilute the strength of the Know-Nothing movement, thus winning more friends among immigrants.

The next year Tweed aimed higher and was elected an alderman. At the time the city council consisted of twenty aldermen and twenty assistant aldermen, nearly all of them so venal that they were openly called the Forty Thieves. Neither position paid a salary, but council members were powerful because they appointed police in their respective wards, granted licenses to saloons, and awarded franchises. It was a grafter's dreamboat, and away Tweed sailed. For example, only a few weeks after he had become an alderman, Tweed acted for the city in buying land for a new potter's field. Available were 69 acres on Wards Island worth only about $30,000. Tweed paid $103,450 of the city's money for the property and then split the difference among his cronies and himself.

Before the end of his two-year term as alderman, Tweed was elected to Congress. A poor public speaker, ignorant of national interests, and bored with Washington, he swilled liquor and chased women
instead of attending to business. Coming back to his hometown, he again ran for alderman, but being out of touch with local politics, he was beaten by a Know-Nothing candidate. The defeat endeared him all the more to his foreign-born friends. In 1855 Tweed was elected to the city board of education, whose grafting members sold textbooks and peddled appointments to teachers. To cite just one instance, a crippled young schoolmarm had to slip $75 to the board for her job, which paid only $300 a year. With Tweed's election to the county board of supervisors in 1857, he really was off and running.

Legally, the city was the creature of the state. Actually, the city enjoyed more independence than the state had intended. This was partly because state, county, and city governments overlapped and clashed and wallowed in such chaos that local politicians seized control. In 1857 the Republican-dominated state legislature tried to break the Democrats' grip on the city's political machinery. It took local finances out of the hands of the city council and gave them to a reorganized and strengthened county board of supervisors. Under this new setup six Republicans and six Democrats had to be elected to the board. Upstate Republicans felt that the presence of half a dozen Republicans on the board would guarantee good government. It didn't.

Besides controlling the city's purse strings, the county board of supervisors had charge of public improvements and the appointment of election inspectors. The latter power was of vital significance. Inspectors were influential because on election day they watched the polls, and if they could be corrupted, elections could be thrown. Tweed, who always recognized the weak links in a chain, took instant action. The day the inspectors were to be named, one of the six Republican board members did not attend the meeting of the supervisors. Tweed had paid him $2,500 to stay away. Republicans, after all, could be as venal as Democrats. From that day, Tweed dominated the board of supervisors. Now it consisted of six Democrats against five Republicans, and soon other Republican members sold out to Tweed. Firmly in charge of the financial arm of government, Tweed used this power to extend his authority over other branches of the city administration.

Such was the origin of the first Tweed Ring. A writer of the era defined a Tweed Ring as “a hard band in which there is gold all round and without end.” Every contractor, artisan, and merchant wanting to do business with the city had to pay Tweed and his
henchmen 15 percent of their total bill before the board of supervisors would grant them a contract. Years later, when confessing his crimes, Tweed said, “Pretty nearly every person who had business with the board of supervisors, or furnished the county with supplies, had a friend on the board of supervisors, and generally with some one member of the Ring. And through that one member they were talked to, and the result was that their bills were sent in and passed, and the percentages were paid on the bills. . . .”