Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [802]
The Times stories brought to a head a growing international crisis of confidence in New York City’s ability to pay its debts. Earlier in the year, rumors of mismanagement had so undermined trust that only the unimpeachable credentials of the city’s underwriters were keeping New York’s securities afloat. Now overseas bankers refused to extend further credit. The Berlin stock exchange struck the city’s bonds from its official list.
This jolted New York’s financial and mercantile community into action. Mammoth interest payments on outstanding debt were due in weeks, and in a few months twenty-five million dollars’ worth of short-term notes would come due for payment. If the city’s credit collapsed, noted Henry Clews, a leading private banker, every bank in New York might go down with it. It was time, Qews said, to oust “this brazen band of plunderers, root and branch.”
On a Monday evening in early September, after the elite had returned from their summer vacations, a great reform meeting was held at Cooper Union. In attendance, besides Republicans, nativists, civil service reformers, and frightened financiers, were powerful upper-class Democrats, like corporate lawyer Samuel J. Tilden, who had been forced to take a back seat to Tweed; Germans, led by Staats-Zeitung editor Oswald Ottendorfer, who had felt pushed aside by the Irish; and those small property owners, merchants, and manufacturers who feared Tammany corruption would hike taxes and pauperize them.
The meeting quickly agreed that the “wisest and best citizens” should take control of the city government—as intellectuals and reform groups had been arguing since the draft riots. Extremists, Godkin of the Nation among them, talked cholerically of forming a Vigilance Committee to lynch Tweed. Cooler heads established instead an Executive Committee of Citizens and Taxpayers for Financial Reform of the City, popularly known as the Committee of Seventy. Chaired by sugar refiner William Havemeyer, and packed with Bar Association lawyers, it decided to bring Tweed down by choking off the city’s funds. Setting up offices in the Brown Brothers building—making the banking house de facto center of city government—the committee spearheaded a concerted refusal by a thousand property owners to pay municipal taxes until the books of the city were audited. On September 7 they went before Judge Barnard, who now deserted his former comrades and gave them an injunction that barred Comptroller Connolly from issuing new bonds or spending any money. As Tweed later noted, this “destroyed all our power to raise money from the banks or elsewhere and left us trapped.” Crowds of workmen now gathered at City Hall demanding their pay—a crisis relieved only temporarily by Tweed’s handing out fifty thousand dollars from his own pocket. Organized labor turned against him too, even those in the construction trades who had benefited mightily from his programs. On Wednesday, September 13, eight thousand workmen marched in the rain to City Hall to denounce Tammany rule.
Five days later, Comptroller Connolly jumped ship. At Committee of Seventy insistence, he appointed Tilden associate Andrew Haswell Green as acting comptroller. Escorted by a hollow square of mounted policemen, Green took possession of the office, giving investigators access to Ring financial records and further isolating Tweed. (Barnard allowed the city to borrow from the banks again, but only departments not under Tweed’s control.) At the end of October Green and Tilden traced money from city contractors