The mayor had his critics, but he also had supporters, and many of them were influential city leaders. John Bigelow, a powerful Democrat who left the party to become a Free Soiler and then a Republican, told his many friends that Mayor Wood was the handsomest and most brilliant man he ever met. E. L. Godkin, the editor of The Nation, said he was the Julius Caesar of New York City politics. Many political stars of the 1860s and ’70s owed their success to Wood. “It was in Wood’s school that most Tammany leaders of the next generation learned their politics,” Godkin wrote.23
James Gordon Bennett loved him, at first. “People said he was to be the rowdy’s man, the rum Mayor, the blackguard’s friend and many other things. What a blunder was here,” he wrote in the Herald.24 Regardless of the status of their friendship, which had its ups and downs, the mayor and the editor kept up a busy correspondence over the years, even if their notes were just a paragraph or two long.25
One of Wood’s goals as mayor was to do what was best for the future of the city. Another was to do what was best for Tammany Hall, his political home. The third, and most important, goal was to do what was best for Fernando Wood. He was a politician with seemingly endless visions of himself in high office. His job as mayor could lead him to wherever he wanted to go, he believed. Wood constantly played one power group off against another, took people, organizations, and whole states to court, and politicked from the moment he woke up until the moment he laid his head down on the pillow to sleep late at night.
None of this was easy. Tammany itself, his big supporter, had been torn apart with factional warfare between the hards (liberals) and softs (conservatives), financial groups, the old party base and the new one. Only a master puppeteer could corral all of them as one large political base and stand on it smiling. Wood could do that, at least temporarily. For the moment, in the late 1850s, Tammany appeared to be losing its power. The political organization, like most in the country, was pressured by the pro- and antislavery factions. Many of the antislavery Tammanyites left the organization over the issue and joined the Republicans. Some of the more liberal members joined the Free Soilers. In the very late 1850s, Wood pulled away, too, and formed his own powerhouse, Mozart Hall. In addition to that, the Republican-controlled state legislature crippled Tammany with the new charter revisions of 1857.26
Tammany also suffered because in the late 1850s thousands of New Yorkers had swung over to the antislavery crusade and voted Republican in the city, not Democratic. The Democratic Party had always been able to control the state legislature because of the heavy New York City vote that put so many of its legislators in office. Now they lost numerous state legislative elections to Republicans, and the new Republicans, with a sudden majority, took over the state government.27
The first test of Wood’s political strength and police supremacy came in the spring of 1855, just after he was sworn in, when, under considerable pressure from temperance groups, the state legislature passed a bill shutting down bars and banning the sale of liquor on Sundays, a more formal decree than the previous Sunday closing laws. Wood opposed the laws because so many immigrant groups in the city visited bars on Sunday, their lone day off from work. He also opposed the closing of taverns and liquor stores because many were run by the Irish. As an example, in the Second Ward there were 111 bars and liquor stores, and almost all of them were owned by the Irish. Wood did not want his mostly Irish cops shutting down mostly Irish bars, which would result in Wood losing tens of thousands of mostly Irish votes.28 The immigrants and the Irish had elected him. He said the law was not clear in its enforcement provisions and had the city’s district attorney go to court to challenge it. He won, and the law was nullified. Smiles, and beer, flowed.29
Right in the middle of all of these arguments, Wood suddenly announced that even though the police did not make any arrests or shut any bars on Sunday, it turned out that in 1856 the cops mysteriously made three times as many arrests for violation of the Sunday bar laws as in 1854, a “documented” 878 to 338. His supporters were pleased, and his critics were, naturally, not at all surprised at the phantom statistics.30
Wood had to work with city officials battling health epidemics. Yellow fever struck again in the summer of 1855 and killed hundreds. “Men and women die deserted and without aid,” wrote Strong in his diary. “Corpses rot unburied in desolate houses.… [Even the] wealthy have to strive to procure the interment of wife or child, in a pine box, carried off with others, on a cart and thrown into a common trench.”31
Wood’s wild first term did not gain him the universal love he had expected from Tammany or the Democratic Party. Different groups in Tammany merged in an attempt to prevent his nomination to a second term as mayor. They had succeeded in their efforts to deny him the nomination for governor that year, a job he desperately wanted because he believed that it would catapult him to the presidency. No city mayor had ever been elected president. To get to the White House, Wood felt, he had to run the state. Getting control of the state from City Hall was quite a problem, but it did not intimidate him. Nothing intimidated him. He just had to work harder, that’s all. That ultimate goal, the White House, was too big and too fabulous to ignore.
The political wings of the party fought hard to end Wood’s career but failed. The indefatigable Wood worked hard to merge all the groups in Tammany and at the same time build a large, personal political machine that he was convinced could override the power of Tammany and carry him first to the governor’s mansion in Albany and then to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Summing up his first few years in office, he modestly proclaimed that “I have made myself useful in the office of Mayor. My success in removing many evils, and in the introduction of reforms of great benefit, has exceeded my expectations.”32
Wood had considerable support in his bid to be the first man ever elected to two consecutive terms as mayor. Immigrants, especially the Irish, loved him. He was a reformer and had, in fact, reformed numerous parts of the city’s political machinery. Nationally, he was pro-South, and city businessmen, especially in shipping, admired him for that because the antislavery crusaders, the new Republicans and old Whigs, now dead or dying, were trying to build hurdles to northern trade with the southern states.33
And, too, he had his brother, Ben, who adored him and had since childhood. Ben’s never-ending support for his brother, personally and in the pages of his newspaper, helped him retain power and hold off those Tammanyites who wanted to destroy him.34
One big reason for Wood’s overall popularity with Tammany and the city Democrats, though, was his remarkable ability to rig an election. He sent his thugs to the Tammany primary conclave, and they won support. Then he employed street toughs, including rowdy street gangs, to campaign against his foes, spent money for influence and bribes, and mastered all the forms of skulduggery in political life.
He had help from above, too. In the middle of the 1856 campaign, the well-connected Lorenzo Shepard died at the age of thirty-six. Shepard was a major power broker within Tammany and a man who might have steered James Libby, Wood’s foe, to victory. The other Tammany leaders, including the newly elected William Tweed, were considered too young and too powerless. Shepard’s death “has created an entirely new phase in city politics, and gives Mayor Wood the vantage ground and position,” wrote someone at the Herald.35
Wood ran a hard campaign and won with 44.5 percent of the vote in a five-way race. Wood not only was reelected mayor but carried into office a large number of Democrats. The Tammanyites won eleven Common Council seats to the Republicans’ five. The American Party won none. The Democrats captured a solid majority of seats in the city’s Common Council for the first time in years and helped Democratic presidential candidate James Buchanan win the state’s electoral votes with a big plurality in New York City. Those state electoral votes carried him to victory in a three-way presidential race. On top of all of that, the Democratic candidate for governor, the one whom the party preferred over Wood, lost, bringing a smile
to Wood’s face.36
As always, Wood had been overly nervous about the election, as he was about any contest in which he was involved. As an example, in his 1861 race he was sure the Republicans, who hated him, were getting both President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward to mount a national movement against him. Seward’s son had to calm him down. “The administration … does not in any way interfere in the popular elections. [Your letter] affords him [Seward] much pleasure to be assured of your support of the Union which, in the present alarming crisis, is the cause of the country itself,” Fred Seward wrote to the mayor.37
On the day after the election, Fernando Wood had complete control of the Common Council, the Democratic Party, and Tammany Hall. Tammany would hold general control for two more decades, making itself not only the country’s most powerful political machine but the most powerful city political machine in American history.
It was a machine, though, that did not want to give up its control of the police to the new, reformed police commission. Everybody wanted to reform the police. Tammany and the mayor would reform the police department, all right, but reform it in a way that did not give the police less power but gave them more.
Wood had an odd view of the New York police department. He not only saw it as a department of law enforcers who worked for the city, not the state; he saw it as a department of law enforcers who worked explicitly for him. They were his personal bodyguard. He told everybody this throughout his terms as mayor and told those who disagreed that they were wrong and not fit to be New Yorkers. He expressed it best on the first day he took office, in his inaugural speech. “This [police] department of the city government is placed more directly under the supervision of the Mayor than [any] others. With the restricted power of appointment and removal, I feel much responsibility and concern.… There is an apparent want of efficiency and energy which must arise … from want of nerve and vigilance from those who direct it. It shall be my aim to remedy these omissions.”
Two months later, in a lengthy letter to reformer James Gerard, the mayor again held his ground and told Gerard that “New York can only be saved from a rule of corruption engendered by the devotees of the three great vices—namely intemperance, gambling and debauchery, but by the strong one-man power [leader] who, with a bold and fearless hand [makes rules].” He told Gerard, as he told others, that the mayor would not share police power with anyone.38
Just two weeks earlier, Wood, in a packed auditorium at Tammany Hall, told his supporters, jammed into each row and standing in the aisles, who wildly cheered him on, that “the Mayor ought to be the active head of the police. Why? He executes the laws, as the police execute the laws.” He scoffed at the new police commissioners, telling the crowd that dozens of unqualified men were trying to land those jobs only because they received a hefty $8,000 salary. The mayor alone, he said, should be in charge, “without hindrance or molestation.” The crowd roared its approval.39
He also told New Yorkers that the courts were getting in the way of how he wanted to run the police department and the city. “The judiciary is not the proper authority for determining police matters; nor are its members qualified,” he said.40
The mayor told the Common Council that the city should not have to pay for all of the salaries of its policemen. Hundreds of policemen patrolled the docks to protect shipping, and so the shipping companies should pay their salaries. The railroads were very profitable, he said, because the police protected all of them. The railroad moguls should pay the salaries of those police, the mayor argued. Those industries refused to pay police salaries, despite several pleas from the mayor.41
Wood not only took complete control of the police but started numerous new protocols in the department. As an example, he reorganized each of the precincts to make all of them directly responsible to him. He created a complaint book in which any New Yorker, anonymously, could file police corruption or brutality charges against any patrolman (Wood never really read it, though). The mayor knew about all the complaints from the populace about law enforcement. “There is dissatisfaction in the public mind with the inefficiency of the police. Let there be none!” he shouted, adding that “good police are destructive of disorder, vice and crime.”42
He would not give in an inch to anyone who tried to take his police power away from him. Once, the Common Council demanded that he release the names of all the police he hired and all those he dismissed, certain that if they had a chance to study the list they would find numerous examples of corruption and cronyism. The mayor refused to deliver it, citing his “executive privilege” to withhold important documents.43
And whenever members of the Common Council, or civic leaders, tried to talk to him about reform in the police department he simply told them, with great pride, that “each policeman is a sentinel” and then walked away from them.44
If all of that failed, he bragged that he had to “protect the department” from all in the state and national government who were trying to wreck it and that he “did it for the people, not myself.” He knew, and everyone knew, that nothing symbolized the city more than the police, and that if Wood could control the force, and make it better, all would appreciate it, and him. It was always one of his chief priorities.45
All of those frustrated by his stand fumed about him. He blithely answered that none of them knew what they were talking about, except him. “No man but myself could appreciate the critical state of our social condition,” he continually told people.46
Captain George Walling cringed at remarks such as that from the mayor. Walling knew, and all the police knew, that the mayor had made himself the dictator of the police force, assuming all control, despite the newly created commission. Walling, especially, did not like the political overtones of the police administration. Walling said, though, that there was nothing they could do about it. As the years went by, many other officers, like Walling, began to fear Wood’s intense control of the police.
One of Wood’s more outrageous ideas was to have New York City secede from the United States and form its own country. City merchants had lengthy and very close ties to the South because they sold millions of dollars’ worth of merchandise to southerners. The political strife between the northern and southern states was driven by the slavery issue. It was very bad for business. So the mayor tried to get the Common Council to declare New York a separate country so it could continue to do business with the South as a nonaligned nation and, at the same time, continue its prosperous business with the North. He was voted down.47
The mayor of New York had tens of thousands of supporters and just as many critics. His opponents were astounded by some of his policies and often wrote critical pamphlets about him, accusing him of everything from common misdemeanors to grand conspiracies to defrauding the public. One was Abijah Ingraham. He did not gloss over his feelings of hatred for the mayor, titling his pamphlet A Biography of Fernando Wood: A History of the Forgeries, Perjuries, and Other Crimes of Our “Model Mayor.” In it, Ingraham charged Wood with conspiring with others to commit fraud in the sales of eggs, ducks, turkeys, oysters, beef, pork, cigars, brooms, paper, tobacco, glass, and even matches. “He is a merciless shylock,” wrote Ingraham.
Wood’s tormentor, without veiling his language, called the mayor a crook. “If ever existed a criminal whose coolness surpassed his crimes, it is the hero of these pages. If there ever lived a culprit whose callousness exceeded his criminality, it is our ‘model Mayor.’… Fernando Wood has been a depredator in the bank, in the counting house, at the merchant’s desk and in the mayoralty chair,” he said.48
The mayor paid no attention to charges such as these because they got in the way of his drive to be the president. That drive was a strenuous one. Wood worked hard to ingratiate himself with President Buchanan, but none of it made any impression on the president or people in his cabinet. Wood told Buchanan he had supported him and rounded up tens of thousands of votes for him in the 1856 elections. He then expecte
d Buchanan to back him for governor, but the president did not. Wood then decided to run for reelection to City Hall and told all who would listen that he had a letter from the president urging him to do so. When asked to produce it, Wood told all that he had “lost” the phantom letter.
Wood ignored Buchanan’s snubs and moved right on, setting his sights on the presidency and writing Buchanan that he could control all of New York City for him and had enormous influence with the city’s newspapers and would woo their editors in order to gain their support for the president.
He did not know that Henry Wikoff, an old friend of Buchanan’s, had sent the president scathing denunciations of Wood. In one of his letters, Wikoff charged that the mayor was a cheat. In a second, he said he was a liar, and in a third, he said that Wood had “vaulting ambitions” for his own sake.49
His goal of running the country seemed very reachable to the mayor. Buchanan was elected in a three-way race in 1856 and appeared to be quite weak as a national leader and certain not to be renominated. The Republicans in 1860 would surely nominate New York senator William Seward for president. The Democrats seemed to be leaning toward Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, the popular “Little Giant” of American politics. Wood believed that Douglas’s support would fade if he was ever challenged on his fabled Kansas-Nebraska Act, which declared that if the people wanted slavery in the midwestern territories, they should have it. That idea made Douglas wildly popular in the slave-ridden South. What if the people voted against slavery in those same referendums, though? What would Douglas say about that? And wouldn’t the Democrats want a strong urban candidate from the Northeast such as Wood? He had a chance, and he would do all he could to grab it.
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