The backward state of the city, its filthy and neglected condition and the chaotic state of public improvements and expenditures, excited little public discussion. The Common Councils were composed of men of inferior mind. It is told of one of them that hearing that the King of France had taken umbrage he ran home post haste to get his atlas and find out the location of that particular spot. In the exclusive charge of such a body New York City would have struggled along but slowly had it not been for the courage and genius of the man who at one stroke started it on a dazzling career of prosperity. This was De Witt Clinton.
No sooner did a Republican Council of Appointment step into office, early in 1815, than Tammany Hall pressed for the removal of Clinton as Mayor and announced that John Ferguson, the Grand Sachem of the Society, would have to be appointed in his place.[1] The Council, at the head of which was Gov. Tompkins, wavered and delayed, Tompkins not caring to offend the friends of Clinton by the latter’s summary removal. At this the entire Tammany representation, which had gone to Albany for the purpose, grew furious and threatened that not only would they nominate no ticket the next Spring, but would see that none of their friends should accept office under the Council, did it fail to remove Clinton. This action implied the turning out of the Council of Appointment at the next election. Yielding to these menaces, the Council removed Clinton. Then by a compromise, Ferguson was made Mayor until the National Government should appoint him Naval Officer when Jacob Radcliff (Mayor 1810-1811) was to succeed him—an arrangement which was carried out.[2]
The Wigwam was overjoyed at having struck down Clinton, and now expected many years of supremacy. From youth Clinton’s sole occupation had been politics. He had spent his yearly salaries and was deeply in debt. His political aspirations seemed doomed. Stripped, as he appeared, of a party or even a fraction of one, the Sachems felt sure of his retirement to private life forever. In this belief they were as much animated by personal as by political enmity. Clinton had sneered at or ridiculed nearly all of them, and he spoke of them habitually in withering terms.
Besides, to enlarge their power in the city they needed the Mayor’s office. The Mayor had the right to appoint a Deputy Mayor from among the Aldermen, the Deputy Mayor acting with full power in his absence. The Mayor could convene the Common Council, and he appointed and licensed marshals, porters, carriers, cartmen, carmen, cryers, scullers and scavengers, and removed them at pleasure. He licensed tavern-keepers and all who sold excisable liquors by retail. The Mayor, the Deputy Mayor, Recorder and Aldermen were ex-officio Justices of the Peace, and were empowered to hold Courts of General Sessions. The Mayor, Recorder and Aldermen were also Justices of Oyer and Terminer; and the Mayor, Deputy Mayor and Recorder could preside over the Court of Common Pleas with or without the Aldermen. The gathering of all this power into its own control gave further strength to Tammany Hall.
But the expressions of regret at Clinton’s removal were so spontaneous and sincere that Tammany feigned participation in them and took the utmost pains to represent the removal as only a political exigency. The Common Council (which was now Federalist) passed, on March 21, 1815, a vote of thanks to Clinton for his able administration.[3] Curiously, the very Wigwam men who had made it their business to undertake the tedious travel over bad roads to Albany to effect his removal (Aldermen Smith, George Buckmaster, Mann and Burtis) voted loudest in favor of the resolution.
Out of office, Clinton found time to agitate for the building of a navigable canal between the great western lakes and the tide waters of the Hudson. The idea of this enterprise was not original with him. It had been suggested over thirty years before, but it was he who carried it forward to success. The bigotry and animus with which it was assailed were amazing. Tammany Hall frequently passed resolutions denouncing the project as impracticable and chimerical, declaring that the canal would make a ditch fit to bury its author in. At Albany the Tammany representatives greeted the project with a burst of mockery, and placed obstacle after obstacle in its path.
In the intervals of warring upon Clinton, Tammany was adroitly seizing every post of vantage in the city. The Burr men ruled its councils and directed the policy and nominations of the Republican, or, as it was getting to be more generally known, the Democratic-Republican party. Three men, in particular, were foremost as leaders—George Buckmaster, a boat builder; Roger Strong and Benjamin Prince, a druggist and physician. Teunis Wortman, one of the energetic leaders in 1807-10, was now not quite so conspicuous. What the Wigwam lacked to make its rule in the city complete was a majority in the Common Council. The committees of the Council not only had the exclusive power of expenditures, but they invariably refused an acceptable accounting.[4] The Federalists, though vanishing as a party owing to their attitude in the recent war, still managed, through local dissensions among the Republicans, to retain control of the Common Council. The Federalists, therefore, held the key to the purse. It had always been customary for the Mayor to appoint the Common Council committees from the party which happened to be dominant.
Established forms meant nothing to Mayor Radcliff and to Buckmaster[5] and other Tammany Aldermen, who late in December, 1815, decided to turn out the Federalist chairmen of committees and put Tammany men in their places. Radcliff imprudently printed a handbill of officers he intended appointing, copies of which he sent to his partizans. A copy fell into a Federalist’s hands. At the next meeting, before the Mayor could get a chance to act, the Federalist majority altered the rules so as to vest in future the appointment of all committees in a majority of the board. The Sachems were so enraged at Radcliff’s bungling that they declared they would have him removed from office. About a year afterward they carried out their threat.
In 1816 Tammany elected not only its Congress and Assembly ticket, but a Common Council, by over 1000 majority out of 9000 votes. This victory was the result of the wily policy of further disrupting the Federalist party by nominating its most popular men. Walter Bowne, a late Federalist, an enemy of Clinton and a man of standing in the community, was one of those nominated by Tammany Hall for State Senator, and the support of the wealthy was solicited by the selection of men of their own class, such as Col. Rutgers, said to be the richest man in the State.
Most of Tammany’s early members, certainly the leaders, were now rich and had stepped into the upper middle class; but their wealth could not quite secure them admittance to that stiff aristocracy above them, which demanded something more of a passport than the possession of money. Another body of members were the small tradesmen and the like, to whom denunciations of the aristocracy were extremely palatable. A third class, that of the mechanics and laborers, believed that Tammany Hall exclusively represented them in its onslaughts on the aristocracy. From the demands of these various interests arose the singular sight of Tammany Hall winning the support of the rich by systematically catering to them; of the middle class, which it reflected, and of the poor, in whose interests it claimed to work. The spirit of the Tammany Society was well illustrated in its odd address on public affairs in 1817, wherein it lamented the spread of the foreign game of billiards among the aristocratic youth and the prevalence of vice among the lower classes. Again, in May, 1817, the Tammany majority of the Common Council, under pressure from the religious element, passed an ordinance fining every person $5 who should hunt, shoot, fish, spar or play on Sunday—a law which cut off from the poor their favorite pastimes.