In eighteen hundred and seventy
The Charter was purchased by W. M. T.
By eighteen hundred and seventy-one
The Tweed Ring’s stealing had all been done.
By eighteen hundred and seventy-two
The amount of the stealing the people knew.
By eighteen hundred and seventy-three
Most of the thieves had decided to flee.
In eighteen hundred and seventy-four
Tweed was allowed his freedom no more.
This epic starts, as it should, in medias res. An enormous amount of stealing had been done before 1870, and the disclosures of the summer of 1871 were by no means so unexpected as we are likely to think. When A. Oakey Hall was elected Mayor in 1868 on the Tammany ticket, intelligent citizens knew that there existed a Ring of dual character—a corrupt combination of leading Democratic politicians in New York, and a corrupt alliance between them and Republicans at Albany. They knew that the city Ring regularly levied tribute on accounts for supplies, construction, and repairs; and that its head was William M. Tweed, with Peter B. Sweeney, the Chamberlain, and Richard B. Connolly, the Controller, completing its guiding triumvirate. No paper had insisted so constantly upon these facts as the Post. It may claim to have been the leader in the fight against the Ring until the close of 1870, when, with the resignation of Charles Nordhoff as managing editor, it relaxed its efforts, and the Times stepped to the front.
Tweed was a familiar figure to all interested in city affairs—an enormous, bulky personage, his apparent ponderosity belied by his firm, swift step and his piercing eyes, grim lips, and sharp nose. He was a man of inexhaustible energy, a fighter as fresh at midnight as at noon. From his little private office on Duane Street, where a faded sign proclaimed him an attorney-at-law, he would sally out on an instant’s notice to City Hall, to Albany, or to some ward headquarters where a revolt was brewing, and assert his authority with despotic effectiveness. By his untiring activity, his imposing physique, and his combination of cruelty, shrewdness, and audacity, he had risen in fifteen years from his original calling of chair-maker to be a multi-millionaire and dictator of the city. The office on which he chiefly founded this success was his seat on the County Board of Supervisors, which he held continuously after 1857.
His lieutenant, Sweeney, or “the Squire,” was later called by an Aldermanic Committee “the most despicable and dangerous, because the best educated and most cunning of the entire gang.” Nast’s cartoons have made us familiar with his villainous look—his low forehead, heavy brows, thick lips, and bushy hair. Yet he was quiet, retiring, cold, averse to mingling with the crowd or with other politicians, and in a measure cultured; he was a ready writer, his mental operations were keen and quick, and he was held in awe by the Tammany satellites, whom he would pass in the street without recognizing by even a nod. Connolly was the most respectable of the three in appearance, looking, with his trim black broadcloth, close-shaven face, and high, narrow forehead, the very part of a business or municipal treasurer. He was really an ignorant Irish-born bookkeeper, who brought to the Ring plenty of low cunning, the product of a mixture of cowardice and greed, and the quadruple-entry system of bookkeeping which it found so useful.
As early as the municipal election of 1863, when the Evening Post supported Orison Blunt as a reform candidate against the nauseous F. I. A. Boole, the editors were denouncing “that army of scamps which has so long fattened upon the city treasury.” The paper clearly understood how the Ring had originated. For ten years preceding the war, the Republicans had exercised general control of the State government, and the Democrats of the city. The Legislature step by step had reduced the powers of the municipality by entrusting them to State boards and commissions. As a climax to this process, in 1857, it established the powerful New York County Board of Supervisors, a State body composed of six Republicans and six Democrats. But the grafters of the two parties conspired to defeat these ill-planned efforts at reform, and by 1860 discerning men saw that the net result of the transfer of authority had been simply to create two centers of corruption instead of one, and to implicate both parties. Tweed and his fellow-Democrats on the Board of Supervisors quickly gained control by bribing one of the Republicans, and at Albany—
a bargain [said the Evening Post of Aug. 12, 1871] was made between the most prominent factions in the two parties, the Seward-Weed Republicans and the Tammany Democrats, by which the offices were divided between them, and all direct or personal responsibility for official conduct was destroyed. Tammany managed the city vote, in accordance with this bargain; Mr. A. Oakey Hall, the counsel of the combination, drew up the laws which were needed to carry it out; Mr. Thurlow Weed and his lobby friends passed them through the Legislature, and the New York Times gave them all the respectability they could get from its hearty support, in the name of the Republican party.
Immediately after the war the Evening Post asked for a new Charter as the best cure for the evil. The city should again be allowed to rule itself, the editors believed, and this self-government should be exercised through one party, which could be made to answer directly for all acts of the municipal authorities. “Make the Democratic party clearly responsible in this city for all its misgovernment, corruption, and waste, and the people would drive it from power in less than three years.” The existing Charter had four great defects, said the Post in January, 1867: the lack of home rule, the division of the city legislature into two bodies, which impeded business, the failure to withdraw all executive functions from these bodies, and the fact that the Mayor had little real authority or responsibility. “All the successive changes since 1830 have been made upon the same principle of limiting or withdrawing powers that are abused, instead of enforcing an effective responsibility for the abuse. This policy ... has produced the evils which it feared. Never was the administration so ineffective, never was there so much corruption, and never were the people so little interested in choosing their officers with any hope that one class or set will do better than another.”
The charges made by the paper were all general—no guilty men or departments were specified. But it had a pretty clear conception of the extent of the stealing. In April, 1867, it alleged that the city was being robbed of hundreds of thousands in “the monstrous court house swindle”; robbed by the politicians in collusion with the twenty horse railways of the city, of which only three paid the full license tax imposed by law; robbed in the cleaning and repair of the streets; and robbed in the renting and sale of the city’s real estate. In April, 1868, it estimated that the Ring during the previous year had made a half million upon the contracts for the building, repair, and furnishing of the city armories. The failure to name the criminals arose from the inability of even so able a managing editor as Nordhoff to trace the peculations. Since the district attorney, sheriff, courts, aldermen, and even the Legislature were under the Ring’s influence, the secrecy of its transactions seemed impenetrable. Give the city a new government, was the view of the Post, and reform, though not necessarily punishment of the criminals, would follow. “Is New York a colony?” was the title of an editorial in June, 1867. Moreover, the paper was the less concerned to be specific in that it believed mere general denunciation of the Ring was having a much greater effect than was the case. “Thieves Growing Desperate,” ran another editorial caption of April, 1868:
The vampires of the city treasury are well aware of the growing determination of the people to make away with them. They must choose between two alternatives. They must either aim at prolonging their privilege of plunder by moderating and disguising their use of it, or they must steal so enormously for the short time remaining as to compensate them for soon losing their chance.
If Tweed saw this utterance, he must have dropped a contemptuous chuckle over it. He was quite resolved to steal “enormously,” but the “short time” which the Post gave him proved a good three years. Far from being desperate, the Ring was just getting its hand in. The graft on the armories, which the Post accurately estimated at already a half million, ultimately reached three millions, and the graft on the courthouse, which the paper had put at hundreds of thousands, rose steadily until it totaled $9,000,000. Tweed was attaining more and more power as the year 1869 opened. He had just been elected to the State Senate, and could now personally superintend every item of the Ring’s machinations at Albany, while his friend A. Oakey Hall was just taking his seat as Mayor.