BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (54 page)

He spent hours preparing for these bi-weekly performances. Tweed asked the aldermen to send him city records, minutes from old aldermen and supervisor meetings, so he could study before answering their detailed questions. It frustrated him that some old friends who could help freshen his memory refused for fear of being blackballed in the press; “men who could inform me and come in to see me are afraid. When they come in they tremble all over until they get out,” he complained.
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At times, the sessions grew heated. When one alderman confronted Tweed with questions raised in a newspaper interview by John Morrissey, the former prize-fighter and recent Tammany power, Tweed answered with a blistering attack on Morrissey’s own record: assaults, burglaries, fighting, gambling, and various terms in an Albany penitentiary. When the aldermen ruled him out of order, Tweed exploded: “Must I sit here and be abused by every thief that stands on the corner, and who chooses to wag his tongue at me, and then be told that I have no opportunity of defending myself? I am tied hand and foot; I am in jail; I have no means of communication with any one outside; I cannot send out a messenger,” he argued. “I shall fight back at everybody that fights at me. I can’t be crushed out because I am unfortunate.”
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Other sessions turned starkly political. Rufus Cowing, the sole Republican on the panel, handed Tweed a full Tammany membership list at one point and asked him to identify each one he’d been associated with during his reign—a way to smear almost half the local Democratic party. Lewis, the committee chairman, objected, calling it a partisan trick and demanded Tweed read a similar list of prominent Republicans. When pressed, though, it was Tweed who found the diplomatic fix. He absolved them all: “I have read it [the list] over carefully, and there is not a name there connected with the Ring frauds,” he said simply.
²³
Pressed another time to explain why his testimony now differed from stonewalling answers he’d given at an earlier probe of Albany corruption, Tweed simply shrugged: “What I swore then was false; what I swear now is true.” Asked why he’d lied in the earlier case, he explained, “men’s families and themselves should be protected all through… done to save men and their families.”
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In mid-October, the proceedings were jolted when the
New York Herald
managed to get its hands on a full copy of Tweed’s original written “confession” from the prior spring and printed the full text, including long lists of people who’d received checks from Tweed over the years, hundreds of names. Most were utterly innocent: grocers, doctors, politicians, or charities. Tweed had to spend hours that day before the aldermen explaining each check to avoid tarnishing reputations. He went out of his way to exonerate leading figures he’d been close to: “I cannot say anything against Mr. [John] Hoffman or Mr. [Thurlow] Weed,” he insisted when asked,
²⁵
and was especially gracious to John Kelly, his current Tammany patron who’d given him the chance to speak: Asked if Kelly had had any role in the scandals, Tweed said: “on the contrary, he was always quarreling with the Ring, and was well known to be opposed to us”
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By the time he stepped down in late October, Tweed had testified for eleven days before the aldermen and answered hundreds of their questions. His testimony filled 375 pages of transcript. More than the fingering of other culprits, most remarkable was what he’d said about himself. He’d taken responsibility for every crime assigned to him. He neither denied, nor boasted, nor glorified his actions, but laid them out in the clinical, unflinching way of a person who’d come to terms. He’d made a clean breast, disclosed his personal finances as well as his political record, with verbatim transcripts printed in the major newspapers. Did he skew his testimony and admit far more crimes than he’d ever actually committed in an attempt to curry favor and improve his odds of being released? Maybe. Tweed certainly had nothing to lose and felt pressure to tell a good story, he had no corroboration for many incidents, and his words had enough gaps to raise doubts. “His testimony is open to a good deal of conjecture if not suspicion,” historian Leo Hershkowitz noted. “How much was true? How much was false? Probably no one will ever know.”
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The aldermen did not stop with Tweed. After he’d finished, they called twenty additional witnesses, including major city contractors, Tweed’s clerk E.A. Woodward, and even prosecutor Wheeler Peckham. Notably missing were the three other core members of the Ring: Oakey Hall and Connolly both in Europe and Peter B. Sweeny, still in New York but hiding behind his generous grant of immunity.
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The testimony, 750 pages altogether, built damning cases against them all. The aldermen’s findings read like a catalogue of greed: Tweed’s “Ring” had “fraudulently diverted” between $25.5 and $45 million from the city and county treasuries just during the three-and-a-half years from January 1868 to July 1, 1871, they concluded. This enormous sum, almost $1 billion in modern dollars, accounted for more than half the increase in the city’s debt load during the period and was divided among dozens of players—Tweed, Connolly, Sweeny, the mayor, the contractors, the bookkeepers, and smaller lieutenants.
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OOTNOTE
29

But as for Tweed’s being the master villain, calling the shots, guiltier than the rest, they said nothing.

Just as damning were their conclusions about the prosecutors. Of all the missing money, their six years of legal wrangling had recovered only $1,119,000, a tiny percent of the total. The bulk came from two dead men: $558,000 paid by James Watson’s estate and $406,000 from Peter Sweeny’s dead brother James. At the same time, Peckham and his lawyers had charged over $240,000 in fees, wiping out a large fraction of the recovery. “At present all the thieves, with one single exception [Tweed], are at large, several of them are living in or near New York, in elegant ease, if not in ostentatious luxury, and all of them claim entire immunity,” the aldermen found.
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The Sweeny settlement particularly rankled them; they found it “incomprehensible,” allowing the “Brains” of the Ring “to save some shred of his own reputation at the expense of that of his dead brother.”
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More months passed and still Tweed sat in jail. Seasons changed again, summer to fall to winter. His cell, unbearably hot in July, gave him chills in December. Depression haunted the old Boss, even after his public testimony.

In October, he gave a rare interview to a
New York Herald
reporter he’d met during the aldermen hearing and painted a bleak picture. Sitting at the table in his room at the Ludlow Street Jail, nibbling a piece of oyster pie, Tweed’s face grew animated telling stories: He poked fun at the two Presidents he’d met personally: Franklin Pierce, “almost a nonentity,” and Millard Fillmore, “a poor stick.” Stephen Douglas, the Illinois Senator and 1860 party White House nominee, impressed him more. “I was pretty well acquainted with him. He seemed to be a high-minded man with plenty of temperament,” Tweed recalled. “I was a Douglas democrat up to the beginning of the [Civil] war and a war democrat after that.” Closer to home, he made fun of his own big stomach when the reporter asked about his health. “I have gained nearly one hundred pounds since I came back from Spain. My old clothes begin to fit me again.”
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Turning to his old Tammany cronies, though, made him sour. Of Oakey Hall, Tweed could only shake his head: “I think, [he] has been crazy, or going crazy, for years. He was a dreadfully tiresome fellow, with his weak little puns.” He described Peter Sweeny as “a hard, overbearing, revengeful man. He wants his way and treasures up wrath…. We were so opposite and unlike that we got along very well.” He saved the worst for himself, though: “I was always ambitious to be influential and in control,” he said, explaining his own rise to power. But now looking back, he couldn’t think of a single accomplishment to take pride in: “Nothing. My vanity sees nothing to delight in. I recall nothing eminent.”
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Even now, he looked forward only to one thing, possible freedom. “I should go to New Orleans or to the West. Idleness is my aversion,” he told the reporter, thinking out loud how he’d spend his life if given a new chance. “My son-in-law is in business in New Orleans and I could make myself useful to him as traveling agent or in some other way—enough to give me employment and a living. If I did not go there I would start life far out West.”
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Of politics, he’d had his fill. “I never bother my head about politics. I don’t expect ever to vote again.”
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Outside his jail cell, a movement had started. Tweed’s sheer persistence had captured an audience, especially his days bearing his soul in front of the city aldermen. Now they demanded fairness for the old man. After issuing their report, the aldermen themselves voted 13 to 6 for a resolution calling on the attorney general to free Tweed, recognizing the severity of his punishment, the value of his testimony, and the unfairness of imprisoning him while allowing others to go unpunished. The vote was bipartisan; two Republicans joined Democrats in supporting it while chairman Lewis had joined the Republicans against it.
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At the same time, publisher Hugh Hastings of the
Commercial Advertiser
newspaper began circulating a petition for his release and collected pages of signatures.

A new attorney general replaced Charles Fairchild in Albany in January 1878: Augustus Schoonmaker, a state senator from upstate Kingston, who’d won the post with support from John Kelly and Tammany. The change of faces quickly sparked a new round of efforts to release the former Boss. Schoonmaker had sat on one of the legislative committees investigating Tammany abuse and knew the case well. He recognized he’d been handed a hot potato—from Tilden to O’Conor to Fairchild to Kelly to the Aldermen and now to him.

Still, his political pedigree raised hopes on Ludlow Street. “[Schoonmaker] will, it is believed, be guided by John Kelly in the matter,” even the
New-York Times
reported.
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In February, Tweed’s lawyer John Townsend started the process by submitting a new formal petition on his client’s behalf. Publicly, Schoonmaker kept his distance from the issue: “Tweed’s case must stand, like every other case, on its own merits, legal and equitable,” he told reporters; he was reluctant to act without some “expression of public opinion as would amount to an approval of his course by those who have been injured by his robberies.”
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He was terrified of the possible backlash; still, he kept an open mind.

Townsend’s appeal was followed by one from a higher authority, “Honest John” Kelly himself speaking his mind from New York City. Kelly wrote a public letter to Schoonmaker in mid-March pleading for Tweed’s release on humanitarian grounds, but he couldn’t resist venting his spleen one more time at the broken promises by Schoonmaker’s predecessor. “I feel it to be my duty both as an individual and as a public officer, to urge upon you the discharge of William M. Tweed, who is now confined in the debtor’s prison of this city,” he wrote. “Mr. Fairchild did state to me that he would discharge Mr. Tweed if he made a full confession and surrendered his property,” he argued. “As a citizen I feel that the State is being dishonored by this breach of faith.”
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What happened next behind the scenes is unclear. Schoonmaker apparently reached an informal understanding with Kelly and Townsend and assured them privately in late March that he would let Tweed go once the legislature had gone out of session, easing any political backlash.
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Kelly passed the word to Tweed. “It is doubtless true that Mr. Kelly promised to release him [Tweed.] If Mr. Schoonmaker does not straightway consent to Tweed’s release he will be made to feel the power of Mr. Kelly’s wrath,” a
Utica Observer
reporter wrote around this time.
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Townsend claims that the promise was explicit: “That gentleman [Schoonmaker] gave assurance to Mr. John Kelly, to [me] and others that he would discharge him after the legislature adjourned. This assurance was made in the latter part of March, 1878.”
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Tweed himself, sitting in jail, had survived a minor heart attack that winter and recognized his own time as limited. If he weren’t freed soon, it might not matter at all. Hearing new promises from the politicians in Albany, he had to resist getting excited; the stress exhausted his weak system. As the time for his promised freedom neared, though, he couldn’t help but get his hopes up. Day by day, he waited, feeling the disappointment with each day the news didn’t arrive.