[6] New York Journal and Patriotic Register, May 15, 1793.
[7] This statement of Hammond probably refers to May 12, 1797.
CHAPTER II
AARON BURR AT THE HELM
1798-1802
The second period of the Tammany Society began about 1798. Relieved of its Federalist members, it became purely partizan. As yet it was not an “organization,” in the modern political sense; it did not seek the enrollment and regimentation of voters. Its nature was more that of a private political club, which sought to influence elections by speeches, pamphlets and social means. It shifted its quarters from Barden’s Tavern to the “Long Room,” a place kept by a sometime Sachem, Abraham or “Brom” Martling,[1] at the corner of Nassau and Spruce streets. This Wigwam was a forlorn, one-story wooden building attached to Martling’s Tavern, near, or partly overlapping, the spot where subsequently Tammany Hall erected its first building—recently the Sun newspaper building. No larger than a good-sized room the Wigwam was contemptuously styled by the Federalists “the Pig Pen.” In that year New York City had only 58,000 inhabitants. The Wigwam stood on the very outskirts of the city. But it formed a social rendezvous very popular with the “Bucktails” of the time. Every night men gathered there to drink, smoke and “swap” stories. Fitz-Greene Halleck has written of a later time:
“There’s a barrel of porter at Tammany Hall,
And the Bucktails are swigging it all the night long;
In the time of my boyhood ’twas pleasant to call