While the Clintons were searching for a good pretext to overthrow Burr, the latter injudiciously supplied it himself when in 1804 he opposed the election of Morgan Lewis, his own party’s nominee for Governor. Burr’s action gave rise to much acrimony; and from that time he was ostracized by every part of the Republican party in New York except the chiefs of the Tammany Society, or Martling Men. He fell altogether into disgrace with the general public when he shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel, July 11, 1804. Tammany, however, still clung to him. Two of Tammany’s chiefs—Nathaniel Pendleton and William P. Van Ness—accompanied Burr to the field; John Swartwout, another chief, was at Burr’s house awaiting his return. The Tammany men looked upon much of the excitement over Hamilton’s death as manufactured. But as if to yield to public opinion, the society on July 13 issued a notice to its members to join in the procession to pay the “last tribute of respect to the manes of Hamilton.”
In the inflamed state of public feeling which condemned everything connected with Burr and caused his indictment in two States, the Sachems knew it would be unwise for a time to make any attempt to restore him to political power. They found their opportunity in December, 1805, when, strangely enough, De Witt Clinton, forced by the exigencies of politics, made overtures to form a union with the Burrites in order to resist the powerful Livingston family, which, with Gov. Morgan Lewis at its head, was threatening the Clinton family. The Burrites thought they would get the better of the bargain and be able to reinstate their chief.
The negotiators met secretly February 20, 1806, at Dyde’s Hotel. John Swartwout and the other Tammany chiefs insisted as conditions of the union that Burr should be recognized as a Republican; that his friends should be well cared for in the distribution of offices, and that “Burrism” should never be urged as an objection against them. The Clintons, anxious to beat down the Livingstons, were ready to agree to these terms, knowing that Burr’s prestige was utterly swept away and that any effort of his followers to thrust him forward again would be a failure. Clintonites and Burrites set to drinking hilariously as a token of good will. But their joy was premature.
When the body of the Tammany men learned of the arrangement they were aroused. The Sachems drew off, and the Tammany Society continued to revile Clinton and to be reviled in return.
It was just before this that the Tammany Hall political organization, as apparently distinct from the Tammany Society, was created. In 1805 the society made application for, and obtained from the Legislature, the charter, which still remains in force, incorporating it as a benevolent and charitable body “for the purpose of affording relief to the indigent and distressed members of said association, their widows and orphans and others who may be proper objects of their charity.”
The wording of the charter deluded only the simple. Everybody knew that the society was the center around which the Republican politics of the city revolved. It had its public and its secret aspects. “This society,” says Longworth’s American Almanac, New York Register and City Directory for 1807-1808, in a description of Tammany, “has a constitution in two parts—public and private—the public relates to all external or public matters; and the private, to the arcana and all transactions which do not meet the public eye, and on which its code of laws are founded.”
The Sachems knew that to continue appearing as a political club would be most impolitic. Year after year since 1798 the criticisms directed at the self-appointed task of providing candidates for the popular suffrage grew louder. In 1806 these murmurings extended to Tammany’s own voters. Honest Republicans began to voice their suspicions of caucuses which never met and public meetings called by nobody knew whom. The Sachems, though perfectly satisfied with the established forms which gave them such direct authority, wisely recognized the need of a change.
It was agreed that the Republicans should assemble in each ward to choose a ward committee of three and that these ward committees should constitute a general committee, which should have the power of convening all public meetings of the party and of making preparatory arrangements for approaching elections. This was the origin of the Tammany Hall General Committee, which, consisting then of thirty members, has been expanded in present times to over five thousand members.
At about the same time each of the ten wards began sending seven delegates to Martling’s, the seventy forming a nominating committee, which alone had the right to nominate candidates. The seventy met in open convention. At times each member would have a candidate for the Assembly, to which the city then sent eleven members. These improvements on the old method gave, naturally, an air of real democracy to the proceedings of the Tammany faction in the city and had the effect of softening public criticism. Yet behind the scenes the former leaders contrived to bring things about pretty much as they planned.
The action of the nominating committee was not final, however. It was a strict rule that the committee’s nominations be submitted to the wards and to a later meeting of all the Republican electors who chose to attend and who would vote their approval or disapproval. If a name were voted down, another candidate was substituted by the meeting itself. This was called the “great popular meeting,” and its design was supposed to vest fully in the Republican voters the choice of the candidates for whom they were to vote. But in those days, as has always been the case, most voters were so engrossed in their ordinary occupations that they gave little more attention to politics than to vote; and the leaders, except on special occasions, found it easy to fill the great popular meeting, as well as other meetings, with their friends and creatures, sending out runners, and often in the winter, sleighs, for the dilatory. To the general and nominating committees was added, several years later, a correspondence committee, which was empowered to call meetings of the party when necessary, the leaders having found the general committee too slow and cumbersome a means through which to reach that important end.