desired an interview with the senior editor.... He seemed moved
from his usual calm and quiet demeanour. His errand, he said,
related to the Charter which Tweed and his creatures were trying
to get enacted into law. If that should happen, it would give
the city, with all the powers of its government, into the hands
of men who felt no restraint of conscience and who would plunder
it without stint. The city would be ruined, he said, if this
Charter, conceived with a special design to make speculation easy,
passed, and it was altogether important that the _Evening Post_
should resist its passage with all the power of argument which it
possessed, and prevent it if possible. He then, with his usual
perspicacity, pointed out the contrivances for misusing the public
funds which were embodied in the bill.... The _Evening Post_ did
not require Mr. Tilden’s exhortations to oppose the bill, but we
proceeded, by the help of the additional light given us, to hold up
the Charter to the severest censure.
The _Post_ in a series of editorials absolutely riddled the Tweed
Charter. It aimed its main fire, however, at the heart of the
document--its creation of a Board of Special Audit with financial
powers so huge that millions could be stolen by the mere nod of four
or five men, and so well entrenched that only by new State legislation
could these men be reached. This Board was to be composed of the
Mayor, Controller, Chamberlain, and Presidents of the Supervisors and
Aldermen, so that Tweed, Oakey Hall, and Connolly were certain of
places on it. It would seem that those who ran might have read the
perils concealed in the Tweed Charter; while the bribery employed to
pass it was so colossal that it is hard to understand how it was even
temporarily concealed. It is believed that a million was spent in
corrupting legislators; the chairman of the conference committee on
the Charter admitted later that he took $10,000; and it was shown that
Tweed bought five Republican Senators for $40,000 each. Yet many of the
best people of New York looked on complacently while the Republicans
joined hands with the Democrats, and the Charter passed both houses by
enormous majorities.
The _Evening Post_ was powerfully aided in combating this iniquity
by Manton Marble of the _World_ and Dana of the _Sun_. The _Tribune_
was upon the same side, though Greeley did not fail to indulge his
unsurpassed faculty for wabbling; he went to Albany and said that if
he could not get the Charter amended, he would take it as it was,
while his journal continued attacking it. The Union League Club
energetically opposed it. But the Citizens Association, under the
universally esteemed Peter Cooper, was convinced that the Ring had
become conservative, and would now stop stealing and take the side of
the taxpayers. The _Times_, with similar blindness, hailed the passage
of the Tweed Charter as a signal victory for reform, saying (April 6):
If it shall be put into operation by Mayor Hall, with that regard
for the general welfare which we have reason to anticipate, we feel
sure that our citizens will have reason to count yesterday’s work
in the Legislature as most salutary and important.
And Tweed saw that Oakey Hall lost no time in appointing him head of
the Department of Public Works, and otherwise putting it into operation.
Indeed, the Boss now stood at the apex of his career. One of his
creatures, John T. Hoffman, was Governor, another was Mayor, and he,
Hall, and Connolly formed a majority of the Board of Special Audit,
with authority, as the _Post_ said, “to do almost what they please.”
Almost penniless ten years before, Tweed now had a fortune of more
than $3,000,000, and his career had entered upon a period of dazzling
splendor. He acquired a fine mansion at Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth
Street, and at his summer home at Greenwich, Conn., the very stalls
of his horses were mahogany. He had flashing equipages and gave
glittering dinners; he and his retainers fitted up the Americus Club,
in Greenwich, where each member had a private room, in princely style;
and when his daughter was married that summer her gown cost $4,000
and she received gifts worth $100,000. The voters most impressed by
all this were the poor voters among whom in winter Tweed scattered
gifts of coal, provisions, and money. The Ring did not forget its
family connections. Not even President Grant, remarked the _Post_, had
such a taste for nepotism. One of Tweed’s sons was Assistant District
Attorney and another was Commissioner of Riverside Drive; while four of
Sweeney’s relatives had fat places.
As Samuel J. Tilden later sarcastically noted, the _Times_ was unlucky
enough on May 5, 1870, to boast of “reforms made possible by the recent
legislation at Albany.” That May 5 was the day on which the Board of
Special Audit ordered payment of $6,312,500 on the Court House, ninety
per cent. of it graft.
But such barefaced looting of the city as had now been carried on for
years could not be continued without arousing public anger, and the
storm soon burst. The share of graft which the Ring exacted from public
contractors had already been shoved up to 85 per cent. The frauds
perpetrated in the city election of May 17, 1870, were so flagrant that
observers gasped. A suspicion that the city’s debts were rising by
leaps and bounds grew into conviction. The _Evening Post_ and _Tribune_
continued their warnings and attacks, and early in the fall the _Times_
fully joined them.
How long these assaults would have continued essentially futile, had it
not been for a dramatic episode, it is hard to say. This episode grew
out of the fact that the Ring, being greedy, made enemies in its own
camp. One of the chief was James O’Brien, who was sheriff 1867–70, and
had a large personal following. O’Brien distributed his money lavishly
while he held office, and retired from a post worth $100,000 a year as
poor as when he entered it. To recompense himself, he presented a claim
for $200,000 to the Board of Special Audit, and this body, which did
not fear him now that he was out of office, rejected it. Tweed knew
that it was a mistake, but was overruled. It happened that in December,
1870, the County Auditor, a loyal servant to Tweed, was fatally injured
in a sleigh accident, and as a result of some transfers which followed,
one of O’Brien’s friends obtained a position in the County Bookkeeper’s
office. There he discovered the bogus accounts used in stealing
millions during the erection of the Courthouse, and placed transcripts
of them in O’Brien’s hands. In vengeful spirit, the ex-sheriff in the
early summer of 1871 brought them to the office of the latest recruit
to the anti-Tweed ranks, the _Times_, and the _Times_ made admirable
use of them.
It would be pleasant for historians of journalism to record that one of
the great New York newspapers itself conducted an investigation into
Tweed’s looting of the city and fully exposed him. If any managing
editor could claim the credit which has to be given an overturned
sleigh and a jealous ex-sheriff, he would be immortal. Why, when
the _Evening Post_ and _Tribune_ had been attacking the régime of
graft for years, did they not cut into the tumor? We may lay part of
the blame on journalistic timidity, and the lack at that time of a
tradition of investigative enterprise in journalism; but the chief
answer lies in the care with which the Ring guarded its secrets. It had
seemed for a moment the previous fall to invite inquiry. Connolly, with
a parade of injured virtue, asked six eminent business men--William B.
Astor, Moses Taylor, Marshall O. Roberts, and others--to inspect his
books, and these six, who commanded public confidence, had reported on
Nov. 1 “that the financial affairs of the city, under the charge of the
Controller, are administered in a correct and faithful manner.” But the
Ring’s real misdeeds were kept under cover.
The vigor with which the _Post_ attacked the Ring slackened during the
early months of 1871. Bryant was engrossed in his translations from
Homer. Nordhoff quarreled with Isaac Henderson over what the latter
thought the undue violence of his denunciation of Tweed, was offered
a long vacation with pay on the understanding that he should look for
another place, and resigned the managing editorship to Charlton Lewis,
who for a time was more cautious of utterance. But by the 1st of July
we find the _Evening Post_ as vehement as ever.
It was particularly aroused against the Ring by the bloody Orange Riot
of July 12, 1871, one of the most disgraceful of the city’s outbreaks.
The previous year an unprovoked attack had been made upon an Orange
picnic at Elm Park by some Irish Catholics who broke down the fence,
assailed men, women, and children with revolvers and stones, killed
three outright, wounded eleven mortally, and seriously injured forty
or fifty. The Orangemen in 1871 prepared to celebrate Boyne Day by
a parade, as they had a perfect right to do, and by July 10 it was
rumored that the hooligans meant to attack them again. That day the
_Post_ published a warning editorial, saying the city authorities
must prepare to quell the mob “by the quickest means.” But Mayor Hall
and Superintendent of Police Kelso issued orders that the police
should disperse, not the assailants, but the Orange procession; and
this made the _Post_ furious. It meant that the Tammany Ring, “with a
cynical contempt for law and order, have taken the part of the mob.”
Very properly, Gov. Hoffman overruled Mayor Hall, and directed that
the Orangemen be protected in any lawful assemblage. On the 12th the
parade formed, and began its march under a strong escort of police and
militia. The more turbulent Irish element was out in force, lining the
route threateningly. As the parade passed along Eighth Avenue near
Twenty-sixth Street, a shot was fired by an Irishman from a second
story window at the Ninth Regiment, and was the signal for other shots
and a shower of brickbats and stones. The order to fire was given,
the Eighty-fourth Regiment--according to the _Post_--was the first
to respond, and before the mob was dispersed the street was full of
the dead and dying. The _Evening Post_ had nothing but praise for the
militia, nothing but abuse for the city government. Bryant penned a
ringing editorial upon Tweed:
New York, like every great city, contains a certain number of idle,
ignorant, and lawless people. But these classes are not dangerous
to our peace, either by their numbers or by their organization.
They are dangerous and injurious only because they are the
tools of Tweed, Sweeney, Oakey Hall, Connolly, and the Ring of
corruptionists of whom these four persons are the leaders. Depose
the Tammany Ring and all danger from the “dangerous classes” will
cease. It is because these know themselves to be supported by the
Ring, because they are employed when they want employment, salaried
when they are idle, succored when they commit petty crimes,
pardoned when they are convicted, and flattered at all times by the
Tammany Ring, that they have become so audacious and restless....
The Tammany Ring purposely panders to the worst and most dangerous
elements and passions of our population. It cares nothing for
liberty, nothing for the rights of the citizen, nothing for the
public peace, for law and order; it cares only to fasten itself
upon the city, and chooses to use, for that end, the most corrupt
and demoralizing means, and the most lawless and dangerous part
of our population. It is the Head of the Mob. It rules by, and
through, and for the Mob; and unless it is struck down New York has
not yet seen the worst part of its history.
It was soon struck down. The _Times_ began the verbatim publication of
O’Brien’s evidence on July 22, 1871, with a masterly analysis of it.
The _Evening Post’s_ editorial that afternoon took the view that the
_Times’s_ evidence was in all probability valid to the last figure,
that the Ring could not disprove it, and that it made the refusal
of the authorities to show their accounts intolerable. During the
seven days that the _Times_ required for publishing all of O’Brien’s
transcripts the _Post_ carried half a dozen editorials pressing this
opinion.
However, the “secret accounts” so courageously brought out by the
_Times_ offered little more than the starting point of the exposure.
They consisted of the dates and amounts of certain payments by
Controller Connolly, their objects, and the names of the men who
received them. The enormous sums disbursed, taken in connection with
the brevity of the time, the inadequacy of the objects, and the
recurrence of the same names as recipients, made the public certain
that the Ring had stolen on a colossal scale. A single carpenter,
for example, had been paid $360,000 for one month’s repairs on the
new Courthouse. But as yet there was no legal proof against any one
official. There was no evidence, sufficient to sustain a civil or
criminal action, which disclosed the principals behind the bogus
accounts. Moreover, redress could not be sought from the Aldermen, who
were allies of the Ring, and powerless under the new Charter anyway;
from the District Attorney, who was Tweed’s friend; from the grand
juries, which were packed; or from the Legislature, which was not in
session. Tweed might well exclaim, “What are you going to do about it?”
The _Times_, the _Post_, and other papers could do no more than
continue their attacks on the Ring, call for exhibition of the city’s
books, and express their faith that in the November election punishment
would be made certain by the choice of a reform Legislature and a
zealous Attorney-General. Several journals did less. The _World_, for
example, was so far misled by Democratic partisanship as to assume
an attitude of apology for the Ring. But the work of the _Times_ and
O’Brien bore its first fruit when on Sept. 4 a great city mass-meeting
was held at which a Committee of Seventy was appointed; and a more
important result followed ten days later when Controller Connolly,
after an interview with Tilden, turned traitor to the Ring, and tried
to save himself by resigning and deputing the reformer, Andrew H.
Green, to take his place.
For the fight was won, as the _Evening Post_ recognized, when the party
of good government gained the Controller’s books. Tilden obtained the
legal opinion of Charles O’Conor, whose name carried the greatest
weight, affirming the right of Mr. Green to hold the office, and gave
it to the _Evening Post_ of Sept. 18 for exclusive publication. It
caused Mayor Hall to abandon instantly his intention of trying to
eject Mr. Green. With the Controllership in their hands, the reformers
were able to protect the city records from destruction, to undertake
their careful examination, and to find the clues to judicial proofs
lying in the Broadway Bank and elsewhere--clues of which Tilden made
admirable use. “New York will carry down through the memory and history
of the coming years,” said the _Post_, “the fact that Mr. Tilden threw
a flood of light into the widened breach of this fortress of fraud,
and that he and Mr. Havemeyer, as the only means of saving the city
from bankruptcy, thrust perforce ... Mr. Andrew H. Green, whom they
knew to be of stern and honest stuff, into the charge of the depleted
treasury.” It was only a few months before the leading Ring members
were in jail or exile.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
INDEPENDENCE IN POLITICS: THE ELECTIONS OF ’72 AND ’76
If any one had told Bryant and Godwin in 1865 that within a half dozen
years the party which led the crusade against slavery to victory, and
which had carried the nation through the furnace of the war, would seem
intolerable to many for its moral laxity and inefficiency, he would
not have been believed. It was then the party of youthful idealism,
of enthusiasm in a great moral cause, of vigorous achievement. Yet in
1872 the _Evening Post_ all but abandoned the Republican banner--it
would have done so had the reform elements found a fit leader; and in
1876 the temptation to secede was presented in a new and equally strong
form. Though it stayed with the party, in neither campaign did the
paper surrender a jot of its independence, and in neither did it give
the Republicans enthusiastic support.
There was but one tenable position in the election of 1868 for a
journal which had supported Lincoln and the Union throughout the
war--to follow Grant; for the Democrats could not be trusted with
Reconstruction, while they offended all believers in sound finance
by proposing to pay the war bonds in greenbacks. The _Evening Post_
declared itself for Grant on Dec. 2, 1867, and published frequent
editorials advocating his nomination until it took place six months
later. It expressed a wholehearted faith in his courage, patient good
temper, administrative energy, and judgment of subordinates. This
belief was shared by others as discerning as Bryant. Lowell informed
Leslie Stephen that Grant had always chosen able lieutenants, that he
was not pliable, and that he would make good use of his opportunity to
be an independent President.
The cordiality of the _Evening Post_ for Grant was increased by its
distaste for his Democratic rival. Bryant wrote to his friend Salmon
P. Chase before the Democratic Convention, urging him to take a
receptive attitude, and Chase replied hopefully; but it was Horatio
Seymour who obtained the nomination, and for Seymour the _Post_ had
only contempt. A mere local politician, it termed him; it recalled how
as the “copperhead” Governor of New York he had displayed a plentiful
lack of both dignity and sagacity, and it believed him a weak creature,
who would be controlled by dangerous men like George H. Pendleton and
Francis Blair.
The _Times_ was heartily for Grant, and so was the _Sun_, Charles A.
Dana helping write the campaign biography of him. The _Tribune_ was of
course loyally Republican. It had to forget a good many rash--though,
as it proved, too nearly true--words of the previous year, when,
irritated by Grant’s loyalty to President Johnson, it had said that
his prominence in politics was due merely to “the dazzling and
seductive splendor of military fame,” and that he would make “a timid,
hesitating, unsympathetic President.” But the _Tribune_ was used to
retracting impolitic judgments, and was soon fighting with the _World_
in that hammer and tongs style of which Greeley and Manton Marble were
masters.
The disillusionment that followed so rapidly upon Grant’s inauguration
was bitter to the whole of the decent Republican press. It is one
of the most creditable chapters in American journalism that so many
newspapers--Greeley’s _Tribune_, Horace White’s Chicago _Tribune_,
Samuel Bowles’s Springfield _Republican_, Murat Halstead’s Cincinnati
_Commercial_, and the _Evening Post_--had the courage to assert their
independence of the Republican party when it fell into unworthy hands.
Grant’s failure was more bitter to the _Evening Post_, the Springfield
_Republican_, and other low-tariff journals than it was to the
high-tariff New York _Tribune_; it was more painful to the _Evening
Post_ and other organs which advocated a mild Southern policy than to
the _Nation_, which advocated a fairly severe one. But they all took
a protestant attitude which was far in advance of that of the general
public.
All administrations begin with a sort of political honeymoon, in which
every one gives the new President a fair field, and criticism is
temporarily reserved. For some months the _Post_ tried hard to believe
that Grant was destined to solve satisfactorily all the problems
bequeathed him by Andrew Johnson. It praised his inaugural speech
highly. The principal task before him, it declared, was to get rid of
the bummers, camp-followers, and contractors:
The first and especial work which Gen. Grant undertakes is to
clear the government of those who take its money without giving an
equivalent; lobbyists, railway projectors, speculators in grants
of every form, whisky thieves, revenue swindlers, gold sharks, and
the whole train of useless and costly hangers-on. These men are no
longer an outside band of robbers who are unimportant enough to
be disregarded. They have grown to be a great power; if united,
perhaps they would be the greatest political power in the land.
It is a work scarcely second to that of destroying Lee’s army
itself, to destroy the system of plunder which now threatens our
institutions. (Feb. 9, 1869.)
The task second in importance, the _Evening Post_ believed, was a
sharp reduction in the wartime tariff, which David A. Wells, Special
Commissioner of Revenue, had just shown to be miraculously effective
in making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Under it, said Bryant,
the pig-iron manufacturers doubled their capital annually, while the
workmen lived worse than before; one of the two companies which enjoyed
a monopoly of salt had earned $4,600,000 on a capital of $600,000 in
seven years; and the lumber companies, Canadian competition being shut
out, were piling up enormous fortunes while housing grew ever costlier.
The _Post_ demanded also a revision of the uneconomic wartime revenue
system, under which 16,000 different articles were taxed; they might
advantageously be reduced to fewer than 200. It asked for measures
paving the way to a resumption of specie payments, such as the
accumulation of a large gold reserve in the Treasury, and the passage
of legislation authorizing contracts to pay in gold. Railway jobbery,
involving the wasteful distribution of the national domain, should be
stopped, while civil service reform was prominent in the _Evening Post_
programme. Of course, it wished military rule in the South brought to
an end as speedily as possible, and the States placed upon their old
footing.
But all of Bryant’s and Parke Godwin’s high expectations failed. The
_Post_ thought Grant’s Cabinet weak, and was especially shocked by his
choice of the protectionist George S. Boutwell to be Secretary of the
Treasury. It was equally offended by the selection of Elihu Washburne
to be Minister to France, and Gen. Daniel Sickles to Spain--Spanish
relations then being highly important on account of Cuba. There was no
change in the tariff until 1870, when a new act reduced the duties on
only one important protected commodity, pig iron, while it increased
them on a half dozen. The revenue system was left in its complex
iniquity. Secretary Boutwell did nothing effective to bring the nation
back to a specie basis, while the _Evening Post_ sharply condemned
his action in the “Black Friday” crisis (September, 1869) in selling
$4,000,000 worth of gold without notice, and thus breaking the corner
in gold which Jay Gould and James Fisk, jr., were trying to build up.
This, it said, was taking sides unnecessarily in a battle between two
sets of gamblers, when the Treasury had always before acted on the
principle that all sales of gold should be public, with ample advance
notice of the amounts to be sold, and should be ordered solely upon
public grounds, without reference to speculation. Reconstruction,
going from bad to worse, was by 1870 a confused mixture of grasping
carpet-baggers, downtrodden whites, corrupt Legislatures, and ignorant,
poverty-stricken negro voters. Grant’s one marked display of energy had
been in an effort to force the annexation of Santo Domingo, a measure
which the _Post_ abominated.
Two months after Grant’s administration began, the Chicago _Tribune_
harshly attacked him. The _Post_ then pleaded for patience, but by
midsummer of 1870 it was growing restive.
The last straw for the _Evening Post_ was Grant’s dismissal of
his two ablest Cabinet members. He asked for the resignation of
Attorney-General Ebenezer Hoar in June, 1870, sacrificing him for the
votes of Southern Senators promised in behalf of the Santo Domingo
treaty. Four months later, Gen. Jacob Cox was forced out of the
Interior Department simply because the politicians wished to raid it
for spoils. Already Sumner had been deprived, by Grant’s orders, of the
chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, a slap in
the face to the great body of liberal and intellectual Northerners who
had admired Sumner ever since he had come forward as an anti-slavery
leader. The dismissal of Motley from the post of Minister to England in
the fall of 1870 angered Bryant, as it did all other American men of
letters. When Secretary Cox resigned, the _Post_ headed its editorial
(Oct. 31, 1870): “General Grant’s Unconditional Surrender”--meaning his
surrender to the politicians: