The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  Tweed’s account of what went on behind the scenes is the only one available. It was presented a number of years later and is rather vague on such important details as to just when Murphy came to him for help—whether, for instance, it was before or after Murphy made his bitter fight for the Democratic nomination for governor in 1868, a fight Murphy lost to Tweed’s hand-picked candidate, John Hoffman. The timing, needless to say, would be an interesting part of the story. In any event, it was Murphy, according to Tweed, and Murphy alone, who came to him in Albany to say the Bridge Company needed money from New York, which, as Murphy said, was a matter to be decided by the Common Council.

  Tweed, at that time, was newly arrived at Albany, having recently become “a brother Senator” of Murphy’s, as Tweed put it, representing New York’s Fourth District. He had hired a suite of rooms on the second floor of the Delevan House, where amid potted plants and gleaming sideboards loaded with decanters of whiskey and Holland gin, and with the steady trill of his beloved canaries filling the air, Tweed transacted the people’s business. If one wished something done at the old stone Capitol up the street, one went first to the Delevan House, to the second floor. Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, Vanderbilt, they all made an appearance sooner or later, as did countless lesser “lobbyists,” one of whom later testified that the going price of a vote ranged anywhere from fifty to five hundred dollars. For Vanderbilt alone Tweed is said to have distributed $180,000.

  If Tweed and Murphy did meet in private, as Tweed said they did—to reach an “understanding” about the bridge—it was doubtless there in Tweed’s chambers and it must have been a memorable confrontation. The two of them were like the opposing sides of the same political coin, the one a great, florid mountain done up in a loud suit, the other small, neat, dignified, but tough as a nut and doubtless detesting every minute of the transaction. There they must have sat, face to face, a pair of Tweed’s favorite enameled cuspidors, decorated with rosebuds, stationed conveniently close by.

  According to Tweed he immediately reminded Murphy that he was no longer a member of the Common Council and therefore had nothing to do with its decisions. “But,” said Murphy, “can’t you influence them?” (Tweed, it seems, described this little exchange with a perfectly straight face.)

  “I told him I hadn’t done any lobbying business there, but might if necessary,” Tweed continued.

  “Shortly after he called again. In the meantime I had conversed with a gentleman occupying a position in the Board of Aldermen which entitled him to credence, and he told me the appropriation could be passed by paying for it.” Tweed had asked how much it would cost, but when he tried to recall the answer after so many years, he was unable to say whether it had been $55,000 or $65,000. (Considering the number of “understandings” Tweed took part in, his slip of memory is not surprising.) But a price was agreed on. “I informed Mr. Murphy of that fact. He told me to go ahead and make the negotiation. I did so, and the money was authorized to be appropriated or the bonds issued. I can’t tell the manner in which it was done, but that was the result.”

  Tweed had no trouble recalling the gentleman of “credence” to whom the money was delivered, or who acted as the go-between.

  “With whom did you have dealings?” he was asked during the subsequent investigations.

  “Mr. Thomas Coman,” Tweed answered. (Alderman Coman was a Tammany hack of long standing.)

  “You gave him the sum of money to be paid in bulk to the members of the Board of Aldermen?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Just how the money was actually delivered to him, Tweed never said, but according to a story told later, one fine day all $55,000 or $65,000, whichever it was, came across from Brooklyn in a carpetbag, and there is reason to believe that the man carrying the bag was William C. Kingsley. For even if everything Tweed said was true, Murphy would never have involved himself directly in that part of the transaction; while Kingsley, on the other hand, was not unaccustomed to handling large sums in the line of duty; and it seems most unlikely that either of them would have entrusted such a mission to anybody else. The only thing of interest Kingsley seems to have put in writing on the subject back at the time was a comment to John A. Roebling in a letter dated April 16, 1868. There was among the New York aldermen, he told the engineer, “a strong combination made against the measure [the bridge] by a ring that want to be bought.”

  But however Tweed got the money, he did not turn it over to Alderman Coman until after he, Murphy, and Kingsley had reached still one further “understanding.” Tweed was always very agreeable about passing money along to his political associates and generally he liked to take a little of it for himself, as he probably did in this case. But Tweed by now was no petty grafter. He too was a visionary, with his eye on the future, and bribing a few aldermen was simply not his line any longer, except as a necessary first step in a larger, grander scheme. Tweed was working up an arrangement whereby he and his Ring could get control of the entire bridge.

  First of all Tweed wanted stock in the bridge and he wanted it at a bargain price, he wanted it as a gift actually. It was a courtesy he was accustomed to in such affairs. In his testimony he said Murphy told him there had been some difficulties selling bridge stock in Brooklyn, which was the case, and that additional private investors would be most welcome; whereupon Tweed had immediately suggested that he, Smith, and “Brains” Sweeny might like “to go in the direction of the bridge,” as Tweed phrased it.

  “What inducement was held out to you to become a stockholder in the Brooklyn Bridge?” Tweed would be asked during his soul-baring testimony.

  “As the law then read,” he answered, “five hundred thousand dollars subscribed by individual stockholders would control the entire bridge, the appropriations, expenditures of money and supplies, and everything.”

  Tweed was very familiar with the legislation Murphy had drawn up. According to the law the entire corporation, though representing four and a half million dollars of the people’s money (from the two cities), was actually controlled by the private stockholders. So just as Tweed explained in his testimony, the man with ten shares of stock (a thousand dollars’ worth) had as much say as the City of New York or the City of Brooklyn, with all their millions tied up in the venture.

  “Now, how did you expect to be benefited by becoming one of the subscribers to this bridge?” Tweed’s interrogator asked. Tweed answered with two sentences, the second of which is a classic sample of his gift for understatement.

  “I expected,” Tweed said, “that when the bridge was built by the citizens of New York and Brooklyn, and with their money, it would be a well-paying dividend stock. Then we expected to get employment for a great many laborers and an expenditure of the money for the different articles required to build the bridge.”

  It would not be until after the Tweed Ring collapsed and its incredible thievery was exposed that anyone would be able to appreciate just what Tweed might have in mind when he spoke lightly of “employment for a great many laborers” or “an expenditure of the money for the different articles required.” The truth of the matter was that no politician alive had so keen or cultivated an appreciation for a large, costly, time-consuming public work.

  For example, several years prior to the time Tweed developed an interest in bridgebuilding, he had commenced a new County Courthouse on Chambers Street, just across the park from City Hall, or almost directly in line with where the New York entrance to the bridge was to be. The architect’s plans called for a three-story building, of iron and marble, in the style of a Palladian country house, and it was to cost, according to law, no more than a quarter of a million dollars. At the outset it had looked like a straightforward, relatively modest piece of business. But by 1868 it was still being built and rebuilt—and ever so slowly. The “city fathers” (Tweed’s people) had authorized some additional three million dollars to keep the job going (such an edifice certainly ought to be in keeping with the greatness of New York itself, Tweed would sa
y), and there seemed no end to the number of people needed to work on the structure, or to keep it running smoothly. It took, for example, thirty-two full-time employees just to maintain the heating apparatus. By the time it would be finished, in 1871, Tweed’s courthouse would cost more than thirteen million dollars, or nearly twice the price paid for Alaska.

  The act incorporating the New York Bridge Company had not stipulated a specific ceiling on how much could be spent on the bridge, or even a rough estimate of the ultimate cost, only what the capital stock would be. Roebling’s estimate was a matter of public record, of course, but engineers’ estimates seldom turned out to be accurate, and even so, as round numbers to work with, six to seven million must have struck Tweed as a much better start than he had had with the courthouse.

  But what surely must have set Tweed and his closest associates to doing some very fancy reckoning was the prospect of such an immense, unprecedented piece of construction, where all manner of unexpected developments could call for vast outlays of public money. Three chairs and forty tables for the Chambers Street courthouse had been bought by the City of New York for $179,792. Windows had cost $8,000 apiece. One friend of the Ring, a man named Garvey who would become known as “The Prince of Plasterers,” had been paid by 1869 half a million dollars for his plastering work inside the courthouse, plus a million more to repair what he had done. (That July Garvey’s bill for plastering came to $153,755, and his total bill, for work that should have cost about $20,000, would be nearly three million.) Among the many checks made out for “articles required” for the courthouse, to cite one more example, was one for $41,190.95—for “Brooms, etc.”

  So for Tweed and his friends the bridge must have appeared as the most spectacular of dreams come true.

  “You mean to say you expected to get a percentage out of the materials and labor upon the bridge?” Tweed was asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Was there an understanding with anybody that you should do so?”

  “There was no direct understanding,” Tweed said, only “a kind of implied understanding.”

  Tweed then went on to explain how William Kingsley, too, was to get a percentage of the money spent for materials, according to the arrangement, and that Kingsley was to be the general superintendent of the construction work, with a large say in contracts. A formal confirmation of this part of the bargain would not, however, be agreed to until after the bridge was under way, and Kingsley, in due time, would have a great deal more explaining to do than would Murphy.

  Tweed said the only “understanding” he personally had with Kingsley was that “he was to pay the balance of my stock after I paid the installments of twenty per cent of my stock.”

  “Oh! He was?” exclaimed Tweed’s interrogator. “After you paid the twenty per cent of your stock Mr. Kingsley was to pay the balance of it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Was he to do that for the others?”

  “I think he was, but I don’t know.”

  So the agreement reached was this: Tweed, Smith, and Sweeny were to receive a total of 1,260 shares in the bridge, valued at a hundred dollars a share. The split between them was to be even, 420 shares per man, or $42,000 worth of stock, for which they each were supposed to pay 20 per cent, or $8,400. But the way it finally worked out, they each got 560 shares, so that at a future date they could each turn 140 shares over to another of Tweed’s confederates, who, Tweed decided, had to be in on the arrangement. He was Richard B. Connolly, “Slippery Dick” Connolly, as he was known, Comptroller of the City of New York and therefore a very useful man in any scheme involving the expenditure of public funds. This way all four of them, Tweed, Smith, Sweeny, and Connolly, would wind up with 420 shares, which meant that individually they would be among the largest private stockholders in the East River bridge. Kingsley would be the largest by far. He had arranged to have his construction firm, Kingsley & Keeney, purchase 1,600 shares. Murphy, by contrast, was in for only 100 shares. But in combination Tweed and his friends controlled a grand total of 1,680 shares—or $168,000 in stock. So, right at the start, they had almost as much stock as Murphy and Kingsley combined and Kingsley had paid for the lion’s share and given it to them.

  And that was about the size of the bargain, if Tweed’s story is to be believed, which probably it should be, considering the circumstances under which it was presented.

  His testimony was delivered under oath on September 18, 1877, exactly eight years and a day after his appearance at the first meeting of the Executive Committee. By then he was a very changed man. He was in jail, sick, disheartened, deserted by his friends. Furthermore, he had been led to believe that if he made a clean breast of things he would not only be released, but would be granted immunity from any further prosecution. With no one left of the old crowd to protect, with his own name long since synonymous with villainy, there was really very little reason for him to tell anything but the truth. He had nothing to lose and, it appeared to him, quite a lot to gain. So it seems reasonable that his account, except for incidental details, was close to what happened.

  The stock arrangement was, of course, all in the records and quite as Tweed described it. The recorded breakdown on stock ownership, as of the autumn of 1869, as the bridge got under way, reads as follows:

  Kingsley & Keeney . . . . . . . . . . 1,600 shares

  J. S. T. Stranahan. . . . . . . . . . 100 "

  H. W. Slocum. . . . . . . . . . 500 "

  Hugh Smith. . . . . . . . . . 560 "

  W. M. Tweed. . . . . . . . . . 560 "

  P. B. Sweeny. . . . . . . . . . 560 "

  W. Hunter, Jr.. . . . . . . . . . 50 "

  J. H. Prentice. . . . . . . . . . 50 "

  J. W. Lewis. . . . . . . . . . 50 "

  G. T. Jenks. . . . . . . . . . 50 "

  H. C. Murphy. . . . . . . . . . 100 "

  Alexander McCue. . . . . . . . . . 100 "

  Martin Kalbfleisch. . . . . . . . . . 200 "

  S. L. Husted. . . . . . . . . . 200 "

  Isaac Van Anden. . . . . . . . . . 200 "

  Samuel McLean. . . . . . . . . . 50 "

  William Marshall. . . . . . . . . . 50 "

  Arthur W. Benson. . . . . . . . . . 20 "

  It is a list that reveals several very interesting points that Tweed neglected to raise in his testimony. It shows, for example, that of the thirty-eight directors listed in the incorporating charter of 1867, only nine (Prentice, Jenks, McCue, Husted, Kalbfleisch, Van Anden, McLean, Marshall, and Benson) thought enough of the venture or the people now involved with it to put any money into it, and all together they held fewer shares than Kingsley’s construction company. There were, to be sure, several of the original directors who were not stockholders but who were serving still as directors, including some with the impressive Brooklyn names, such as Simeon Chittenden. But a number of other esteemed figures had departed entirely—Andrew H. Green of New York, as a notable example—and the control now, very obviously, rested with the gentlemen named in the top third of the list.

  But the list showed something more as well. The only New York people on it were Tweed, Smith, and Sweeny. Not a single resident of New York listed in the original charter had subscribed for any stock. So if Tweed did not control a majority of all the stock, he was at least in absolute control of both the private and public commitment from the City of New York.

  The part of Tweed’s story that remains open to question, and must ever remain so, is the role he attributed to Murphy. By the time Tweed’s disclosures were made, a sizable segment of the press, not to mention the public, was ready to believe every last word he said, both the press and the public having by then concluded that all public works, however noble, were rife with corruption, and that virtually every last politician, and Democrats in particular, were guilty until proved otherwise. Murphy and Kingsley both were very quick to deny playing any such part as Tweed described, although Murphy, during a rare interview in his Bay Ridge home, would admit to ha
ving at least heard of such dealings. He told reporters that after the bridge was under way he had heard rumors of money having changed hands and that he had been “greatly surprised” by the news. He also admitted that possibly Tweed could have been paid off by somebody without his, Murphy’s, knowing about it (which would seem to leave Kingsley in a rather bad light), and in conclusion he offered the following thought on why somebody—in theory at any rate—might have struck such a bargain with the Tammany devil across the water:

  “Mr. Tweed was a power in New York then,” Murphy said, “and nothing could be done in the Common Council and hardly in Albany without his help. You know how he controlled everything at that time, and therefore he was the proper person to see, when anything was wanted in the way of legislation, to secure his influence for any measures that were to be passed.”

  And this, in retrospect, seems the most charitable and very likely the most plausible explanation for the entire arrangement with Tweed. It also suggests that just maybe Tweed was also in on passing the original charter, Chapter 399 of the Laws of 1867, and the wording of it as well (“…when anything was wanted in the way of legislation…for any measures that were to be passed,” Murphy said).

  It is always possible, of course, that to settle some old score Tweed decided he would just smear Henry Murphy before his time in court was over. It is possible, but not likely. Tweed was not that sort, for one thing. And the hard truth seems to be that if a bridge was to be built, Tweed had to have a hand in it, a large hand. Otherwise there would be no bridge. It was that simple.