Kelly acted with great shrewdness, executive force, knowledge of men, and apparent regard for the public interests and proprieties. He affected extreme modesty, and made it appear that the delegates chose nominees by their own uninfluenced will. At the Judiciary convention in Tammany Hall, in October, 1872, he insisted that each delegate vote; in his speech he said that Tammany should have no more of the times when tickets were made up outside of conventions. Some delegates shouting for the nomination of a man of dubious character, he declared, with the air of a man exerting himself for the good of his party only, that it was time that Tammany Hall should put such a ticket in the field that no man could hold up the finger of scorn at any individual on it. He furthermore caused the appointment of a committee to cooperate in the work of reform with the Bar Association, the Committee of Seventy, the Municipal Taxpayers’ Association and the Liberal Republicans.
At Kelly’s suggestion the Wigwam, in the Fall of 1872, nominated for Mayor, Abraham R. Lawrence, a member of the Committee of Seventy and its counsel, and for Judges of the Supreme and Superior Courts, men of ability and unimpeachable name. Altogether, Tammany took on such a new guise that thousands of voters returned to its support. But the anti-Tammany movement had not yet dissipated its strength, even though it presented a divided front. One wing of this opposition was the new “reform” organization, the “Apollo Hall Democracy,” founded by James O’Brien, who now stood forth as its candidate for Mayor. The other wing, composed of the individuals and associations centering about the Committee of Seventy, nominated William F. Havemeyer.
Tammany had the advantage of a Presidential year, when the obligation of “regularity” could be imposed upon a goodly share of the Democratic voters, and the further advantage of a high order of personal character in its nominees. Nevertheless, Havemeyer won, the vote standing approximately: Havemeyer, 53,806; Lawrence, 45,398; O’Brien, 31,121. The results from several election districts were missing and were never canvassed by the Board of Canvassers. For Horace Greeley, the Democratic Presidential candidate, Tammany Hall carried the city by 23,000 majority.
Mayor Havemeyer’s administration differed greatly from most of the “reform” administrations that had preceded it. Never since the year 1800 had the city revenue been distributed with such great care. The utmost regard was paid to the ordinances dealing with public health and security, and the streets were kept cleaner than ever before. The rowdy and criminal classes were deprived of the free sway they had so long enjoyed. The public school system was improved, and the standard of official character was of a higher type than had been known in many a decade. The city expenditures in 1873 were about $32,000,000, as compared with $36,262,589.41 in 1871, and notwithstanding the tremendous legacy of debt left by the Tweed “ring” to be shouldered by later administrations, Mayor Havemeyer’s administration reduced the city expenses about $8,000,000 in reality, though the bare figures on their face did not show that result.
Mayor Havemeyer complained, as so many of his predecessors had done, of the perverse interference of the Legislature in city affairs—an interference which constantly embarrassed his plans and set back the cause of reform.
The Mayor was not destined to serve his full term. In September, 1874, a bitter quarrel sprang up between him on the one hand and John Kelly and John Morrissey on the other, apparently over the appointment, at Kelly’s request, of Richard Croker to be a Marshal. “When Croker’s appointment was announced,” wrote the Mayor, “I was overwhelmed with a torrent of indignation.” In a public letter addressed to Kelly, Mayor Havemeyer charged that the former, while Sheriff, had obtained $84,482 by fraudulent and illegal receipts, adding this further characterization:
“I think that you were worse than Tweed, except that he was a larger operator. The public knew that Tweed was a bold, reckless man, making no pretensions to purity. You, on the contrary, were always avowing your honesty and wrapped yourself in the mantle of piety. Men who go about with the prefix of ‘honest’ to their names are often rogues.”
Kelly replied that he had acted in the Sheriff’s office as had his predecessors, and brought a libel suit against the Mayor, in the answer to which the latter embodied his charges in full. But on the day the suit was to come to trial Havemeyer fell dead of apoplexy in his office.
During the two years (1872-74) various forces combined to restore Tammany to the old power. The two great parties were struggling for partizan advantage for future State and national elections. This brought about the old party alignment, the reform Democrats, as a rule, acting with the Wigwam, and the reform Republicans drifting to the Republican side. The disreputable classes issued forth in greater force than ever to help replace in power the Tammany that meant to them free sway. The panic of 1873, with the consequent “hard times,” turned great bodies of voters against the dominant party. The “ring” had so thoroughly looted the city that Havemeyer’s administration was forced to practise economy in the public works. The working classes either did not understand the motive of this retrenchment, or did not appreciate it. Out of the 24,500 mechanics in the city during the Winter of 1873-74, 15,000, it was estimated, were unemployed. Tammany now adroitly declared itself in favor of giving public employment to the workers. The Wigwam agents scoured the poorer districts during the campaign of 1874, giving aid to the needy, and gained their support. The agitation against a third term for President Grant; the demand for a low tariff and the denunciation of the Washington “ring,” all had their effect, while the impression which naturally might have been expected from Havemeyer’s charges against Kelly was entirely lost by the former’s slurring allusions to Kelly’s humble birth and early occupation—allusions which threw the sympathy and support of the masses strongly to Kelly and his ticket.
The astonishing consequence was that in November, 1874, Tammany Hall which, in 1871, seemed buried beneath obloquy, elected its candidate for Mayor, William H. Wickham (a diamond merchant and an anti-“ring” Democrat and a member of the Committee of Seventy) by nearly 9,000 majority over all, his vote being 70,071, against 24,226 for Oswald Ottendorfer, the Independent Democratic candidate, and 36,953 for Salem H. Wales, the Republican. At the same election, Tilden, who had also contributed to the downfall of the “ring,” received the solid support of Tammany, and was elected to the Governorship.