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By Root 7348 0

fashionable men and women rode along Eighth Avenue in comfortable carriages, matching up street corners or buildings with descriptions in the morning papers. But the forces of order, while triumphant, were also in a fury. One banker declared that the riot eclipsed “the worst religious outrage of the Commune.” A Times editor found it final proof that the “Dangerous Classes” cared nothing for “our liberty or civilization” other than to “come forth in the darkness and in times of disturbance, to plunder and prey on the good things which surround them.” Police Commissioner (and banker) Henry Smith only regretted “that there were not a larger number killed.” As he explained to the Tribune, “in any large city such a lesson was needed every few years. Had one thousand of the rioters been killed, it would have had the effect of completely cowing the remainder.”

Democratic authorities got no points for having ordered out the troops. Their “criminal weakness and vacillation,” the Tribune charged, had encouraged the mob in the first place. One of the reasons many in the upper and middle classes had grudgingly acquiesced in Tammany’s hold on power was its presumed ability to maintain political stability. That saving grace was gone: Tweed could not keep the Irish in line. The time had come, said Congregational minister Merrill Richardson from the pulpit of his fashionable Madison Avenue church, to take back New York City, for if “the higher classes will not govern, the lower classes mil.”

TWEED TOPPLED

Six months earlier, Tweed had seemed impregnable, despite assaults by the New York Times and the vitriolic Harper’s Weekly cartoons of Thomas Nast, which portrayed Tweed as a leering hulk of corruption and Tammany’s inner circle as a conspiratorial Ring. The campaign, long on invective, was short on facts, and the Times insisted the city’s books be examined. Just before the election, Mayor Hall established a blue ribbon panel of six businessmen with unimpeachable reputations—including rentier John Jacob Astor, banker Moses Taylor, and Marshall O. Roberts of the West Side Association—and gave them access to municipal accounts. On election eve, the panel issued its findings. The books had been “faithfully kept,” avowed these leading beneficiaries of Tweed’s policies, and the debt levels were manageable. Tweed and his men swept to victory.

Accordingly, 1871 had looked to be a very good year. On New Year’s Day, A. Oakey Hall was again sworn in as mayor, and John T. Hoffman took office as governor. With luck, by 1872, Hoffman would be president, Hall would move up to governor, and Tweed would become a United States senator. The annual Americus Club Ball, held in early January at Indian Harbor, Connecticut (near Tweed’s summer place at Greenwich), was a jubilant affair. As late as May, Tweed was still riding high. On May 31 he arranged a spectacular wedding, at Trinity Chapel, for his daughter Mary Amelia. At the Delmonico’s-catered reception that followed at Tweed’s Fifth Avenue (and 43rd Street) mansion, guests brought a vast outpouring of dazzling gifts (including forty sets of sterling silver). Tammany’s growth-oriented coalition, like the Gilded Age boom itself, was in fine fettle.

Within weeks, however, the visceral response to the Commune and the Orange Riot had rallied support for the war the Times and Harper’s were waging against Tweedite corruption. On July 22, ten days after the Boyne Day battle, the Times began publishing solid evidence of Ring rascality, turned over to the paper by an aggrieved insider. Day after day, publisher George Jones reproduced whole pages from the cooked account books of James Watson, who until his recent death in a sleighing accident up in Harlem Lane had been the Ring’s trusted bookkeeper. The series culminated in a special fourpage supplement, on July 29, that quickly sold out its run of two hundred thousand copies. Under screaming headlines—“Gigantic Frauds of the Ring Exposed”—the paper detailed Watson’s system of kickbacks. Contractors on public projects padded their bills and slipped the overcharge