BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York Read Free

portraying him as the worst municipal thief, the most corrupt politician, the craftiest ballot-box fixer—a stereotype used to tarnish entire generations of American political professionals. Already, he’d become a caricature: More people knew Tweed as the comical thug in Nast’s Harper’s Weekly cartoons, the shameless villain in the New-York Times exposes, or the legendary wire-puller of Tammany Hall than as the vital flesh and blood person who’d walked the streets of Gotham for fifty-five years. He left a strange puzzle. Except for his stealing, Tweed would have been a great man; but had he been honest, he wouldn’t have been Tweed and would not have left nearly so great a mark.

• PART I •
    RISE

CHAPTER 2
    RIOTS

“ As the representative of the Seventh Ward, I will not be bound by a paper from Judge Campbell or any other judge…. I will never permit [them] to direct me how to think or vote, and will continue to do my own thinking and voting despite injunctions or any other papers.”
—Tweed, urging fellow aldermen to defy a judge’s order forbidding their approval of a franchise to run streetcars on Broadway, December 28, 1852. The franchise motion carried; the judge, Campbell, cited Tweed and fourteen other aldermen for contempt. 1

    T WEED never joined the Union army during the Civil War. He was 38 years old when fighting started in 1861, too old for the infantry though not for the officer corps. He stayed behind, but he didn’t escape. Instead, the war with all its rage and violence came to Tweed where he lived in New York City.

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    New York Governor Horatio Seymour was spending a long summer weekend at the New Jersey seashore on Monday morning, July 13, 1863, traveling by carriage along the sand dunes near Long Branch, when two riders on horseback in military uniforms overtook him. One of the horsemen handed him a telegram which he immediately tore open and read: Violence had broken out in New York City. Seymour’s presence was requested immediately. Sparking the outbreak—the military draft. 2
    The news didn’t surprise Seymour. As governor, Seymour had warned President Abraham Lincoln for weeks against imposing the unpopular new draft law on New York City. People wouldn’t stand for it, he’d argued. Seymour had seen New Yorkers’ views turn ugly against Lincoln’s war after two years of carnage and defeats. Whatever patriotic surge had followed the initial Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in 1861 had long since disappeared among poor families who saw husbands, fathers, and brothers butchered in Virginia battlefields under Lincoln’s incompetent generals. The draft—the first federal conscription in America, enacted only that March after Washington had grown alarmed over a sharp drop-off in volunteers—had become a special sore point. One enrolling officer in Indiana had already been shot dead by opponents that month trying to enforce it.
    Seymour, a 53-year old Peace Democrat, had already made political hay by blasting Lincoln over the draft. He’d declared the law unconstitutional and demanded a court test before a single local conscript was called. He’d railed against the law’s most hated feature, the “commutation” rule that allowed sons of wealthy families to buy their way out for $300—an impossible amount for most of New York’s working poor. It only again proved that Lincoln’s “rich man’s war” against the South had become a “poor man’s fight,” the organized killing of northern Irishmen to save and coddle southern blacks. 3
    Enemies called Seymour a “copperhead”—like the poisonous snake, a favorite insult flung at anti-war Democrats—and New York had more than any other Northern city.
    These passions had reached a breaking point in New York by mid-1863. The city’s population had exploded in size since the 1830s, more than tripling to 800,000. Now, more than half its residents were foreign-born, mostly Irish and German