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would restore home rule to the metropolis by abolishing all the new state commissions and transferring their functions to ten departments controlled by the city (and Tweed). After thirteen years, power over the police force would be returned to the municipality, along with dominion over its own health, fire prevention, education, public works, charities, buildings, and docks. The proposed charter further strengthened City Hall, making all department heads mayoral appointees, and further hedged the Common Council, requiring it to muster a three-fourths vote on all bills involving expenditures. The charter also allowed the city virtually unlimited borrowing power for specified improvements.

Reformers were surprised but delighted. Tweed had proposed a simplified, centralized, fiscally responsible, and potentially effective city government. Peter Cooper of the Citizens Association strongly urged passage. So did the Union League Club, Horace Greeley, and a long list of prominent businessmen headed by banker James Brown and rentier John Jacob Astor. Even the Republican minority supported it, either reassured by promises that a strong voter registration law would be enacted or won over by hard cash—some six hundred thousand dollars’ worth, Tweed later admitted. Governor Hoffman signed the charter into law in April 1870. In May Democrats easily won charter-mandated special elections for the Common Council, sweeping all fifteen aldermanic slots (one going to a budding politico named George W. Plunkitt).

Despite their acquiescence on the charter, Republicans, like their Klan-beleaguered southern counterparts, were not prepared to accept Tammany’s electoral triumph without protest. Since 1868 Republicans had been compiling statistical evidence of Tammany wrongdoing. They leveled charges of straight-out fraud (some wards had more voters than residents), and they accused Tammany of mass-producing new citizens. Tammany Judge McCunn naturalized 2,109 petitioners in one day, a rate of three per minute—with “as much celerity,” the Tribune observed caustically, “as is displayed in converting swine into pork at a Cincinnati packing house.”

Republicans appealed to Washington, where their party still reigned. A sympathetic Republican Congress investigated in 1869 and agreed that “crimes against the elective franchise” had been committed. The “crimes” were only metaphorical, however, because Tammany practices contravened no existing law. Congress closed this loophole in 1870 with two pieces of legislation. An Enforcement Act—aimed at crushing both Ku Klux Klan resistance to southern Reconstruction governments and Tammany-style practices in northern cities—imposed penalties for obstructing or intimidating voters and authorized federal marshals or troops to supervise elections. A second law, the Naturalization Act, extended the waiting period between naturalization and voting by six months and established machinery to supervise voter registration.

New York Republicans used the new legislation to full effect in 1870. Federally appointed officials scrutinized registration proceedings and clapped some Democrats in jail even before election day. On October 25 President Grant ordered several regiments to the city’s harbor forts and dispatched two warships to the East and Hudson rivers.

Democrats portrayed themselves as martyred defenders of civil rights and home rule. At a torchlight parade, Tweed told fifty thousand partisans to scrupulously obey the law on November 8. Tammany more or less followed orders—the courts created only two thousand new citizens, compared to the sixty thousand they’d turned out two years earlier—and Republicans had to admit it was a fair election. Which made the results—a total Democratic sweep—all the more galling.

The new charter had established a powerful municipal government, but that power belonged to Tweed. The trio of Tweed and his comrades Mayor A. Oakey Hall and Comptroller Richard Connolly constituted the new Board of Supervisors that controlled city finances, and Mayor Hall swiftly appointed his colleagues