The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  Tweed’s prominent role in the business of the bridge, not to mention that of his three Tammany compatriots, Smith, Connolly, and Sweeny, was, of course, an obvious embarrassment to the Bridge Company at this particular time and many Brooklyn people thought that role and its origins needed explaining. But it was Kingsley’s rather ill-defined position in the management of bridge business and how precisely he was being rewarded for his “services” that now became subjects of the keenest interest.

  Kingsley was a difficult man to figure. His name was a football in Brooklyn, as Beecher would say. On the one hand he was a force for progress, industrious, respected by the respectable (Murphy and Stranahan, most notably), a good citizen if ever there was one. His firm of Kingsley & Keeney was building the Brooklyn Theater, lately the most talked about new building in town. He was one of the commissioners for the new capitol in Albany. His personal success was obvious. He was a kind and devoted family man. He attended church regularly. He was generous with his money, openly compassionate in times of trouble. When news of the Chicago Fire reached Brooklyn that October, he had been among the very first to do something. Along with Kalbfleisch, Judge McCue, and Isaac Van Anden, he had donated $100,000 to aid the stricken city. This “princely contribution” was announced as only the prelude to Brooklyn’s bounty (which it was) and the Eagle, of which Kingsley was part owner, led the campaign to raise more funds.

  Still, there was the political side of the man, as everyone knew, and it was never quite clear just where his business interests stopped and his political interests began. When the Rink Committee people started poking into the financial side of the bridge, it began to look as though his ability to work with machine politicians and to profit thereby was not necessarily limited to the Brooklyn side of the river.

  As it happens neither Tweed nor any of the three other directors from New York had been seen in Brooklyn since Tweed’s “troubles” began in early summer. Only that June, Tweed and Hugh Smith had been appointed once more to the Executive Committee and nobody had raised any objections. But neither man, nor Connolly, nor Sweeny, had had a thing to do with the bridge, or a word to say about it, since then, a decision doubtless strongly encouraged in the offices of the Bridge Company.

  But as the company’s records would show, Tweed had actually appeared at only a very few committee sessions even before his troubles. Of some fifty-eight committee meetings held between September of 1869, when Tweed came over for the opening session, and July of 1871, when the Times opened its attack on him, Tweed had bothered to show up for just six meetings, including the first one—so very few, as a matter of fact, that anyone examining the records afterward would naturally take a special interest in those he did attend. Tweed’s time was exceedingly valuable after all, as everyone could now appreciate, so whenever he did make the effort to come to Brooklyn he must have had some definite purpose in mind.

  The records were only a “synopsis,” the business of each meeting being described in about the briefest, most general language possible, but even so, by looking at those meetings that Tweed attended a pattern emerges. Nearly always some particularly interesting motion was taken up, put forward, often as not, by Tweed himself and, as would be noted, these same motions almost always appeared to be directly beneficial to William Kingsley.

  It was on a motion from Tweed, for example, at the Executive Committee meeting of October 27, 1869, when the bridge was just getting under way, that the members resolved to pay Kingsley & Keeney $46,915.56 for lumber. Kingsley would later explain that the lumber had been bought from a Georgia dealer at the request of John A. Roebling, before the bridge began, in order to take advantage of an especially good price. Since the Bridge Company had no money then, Kingsley said, he had made the purchase in advance. So the committee was merely paying back what he had coming to him. Be that as it may, the record showed that Tweed was the one who urged that Kingsley get his money, plus interest, and naturally that left some people wondering.

  Much more important, however, was the motion passed at the meeting held on July 5, 1870, a meeting at which Tweed appeared after a notable absence of more than six months. This was the day the commission arrangement that Tweed would later divulge was made official policy by the Bridge Company. The resolution, as recorded then, reads as follows:

  Resolved, That fifteen per centum on the amount of expenditure for the construction of the foundation of the towers of the-Bridge on both sides of the river, up to high-water mark, including payments for land, be paid to William C. Kingsley, the General Superintendent, for his services and advances on behalf of this Company, up to the completion of such foundations.

  It was customary always to include in the record the name of the member who put forward a motion, but in this case that was not done. The arrangement was not announced in the papers, moreover, the business of the committee still being conducted in private. It had not been discussed at the annual Board of Directors’ meeting a few weeks before or even mentioned, nor would it be when the directors convened again.

  Also, quite interestingly, Tweed was back again at the bridge offices in early September to move that “such amounts as due Wm. C. Kingsley up to the present time…be paid, and that hereafter the amounts, becoming due under said resolution be paid monthly.” By the end of the year, expenditures on the bridge totaled $1,179,-521.40. This meant that a 15 per cent payment to Kingsley came to roughly $175,000. A check for this amount was made out to Kingsley January 3, 1871. If Kingsley’s official connection with the bridge was to be dated from the time he was formally appointed General Superintendent in October 1869, slightly more than a year earlier, then his compensation to date worked out to be a very handsome salary—about seven times that of the President of the United States, as would be noted in the papers.

  Why Tweed took Kingsley’s interests so much to heart is not known for sure. Perhaps, as was speculated, the early “understanding” with the Ring people also included an agreement that Kingsley would turn over part of the 15 per cent in return for Tweed’s support in the Executive Committee or that Kingsley would merely apply part of the 15 per cent to what the four Tammany men owed him for the bridge stock he had handed over. That way nobody would suffer. Tweed, however, would testify that he himself had made no deals at all with Kingsley.

  “Was he to divide the fifteen per cent with you?” Tweed would be asked.

  “I had no understanding with him, sir,” Tweed answered, but then added, “I don’t know anything about the rest.” The rest meaning Smith, Sweeny, and Connolly. What they may have worked out with Kingsley on their own, Tweed could not say.

  But since such arrangements had been shown to be the common practice of the Tweed Ring, a great many people, rightly or not, would conclude that that was just what Kingsley had agreed to. Moreover, it would also be pointed out that buying bridge stock by installments, 10 per cent at a time, which was all that was required and what Kingsley and most stockholders were doing, then drawing 15 per cent on several million dollars in expenditures, was a most attractive proposition from a business point of view.

  Kingsley’s explanation of all this would present a different picture, understandably, but before he felt compelled to speak out publicly in his own defense, some noteworthy changes were made in the arrangement he had with the Bridge Company.

  On November 13, just five days after the Brooklyn and New York elections—when it was very clear that Tweed was finished—the Executive Committee resolved that “the claim of William C. Kingsley under the resolution of July 5, 1870” was “hereby liquidated, with his consent.” For his services in behalf of the bridge the General Superintendent was now to receive “an amount not exceeding $125,000, in full.” No explanation for the change was included in the record and again nothing was said of it in the papers.

  At the end of November Kingsley returned to the Bridge Company the fifty thousand dollars he had been overpaid, according to this new rule—returned it voluntarily, as his admirers would later stre
ss, since there was nothing in the rule saying he had to do so. Again the record contains no explanation. The “construction” account is simply credited with fifty thousand dollars from Mr. Kingsley.

  Presently, sometime in early December 1871, somebody went to the record book containing the old July 5 resolution and made an erasure, changing the “fifteen per centum” Kingsley was to get to read “five per centum.” No mention was made of this in the records. Nothing was said to explain why it was done or by whom.

  Kingsley’s compensation as General Superintendent was to be the central issue to come out of the investigation, but serious questions would also arise concerning the company’s methods for purchasing materials. Who exactly decided what was to be bought from whom? Kingsley’s recommendations, so it appeared, always received the unqualified approval of the Executive Committee. Why were no bids advertised for? And more specifically, why had the Bridge Company in the past two years purchased more than $140,000 worth of lumber from the New York & Brooklyn Saw Mill & Lumber Company, or from that firm’s treasurer, a Mr. Ammerman, when, as was no secret, the General Superintendent was part owner of the firm? With how many other firms doing business with the bridge did Mr. Kingsley have “connections”? The impression was that the General Superintendent was deciding what to buy to build this bridge he had so eagerly wanted the two cities to pay for and that he was deciding to buy quite a lot from himself.

  The Rink Committee would not be ready to report its conclusions until early spring the following year, 1872. By then Tweed had fallen on terrible times.

  The elections had been over only a few days when Peter “Brains” Sweeny resigned his office as President of the Park Board and departed as swiftly as possible for France. Hugh Smith also fled the country, while Connolly by now was doing all he could to ingratiate himself with the New York Committee of Seventy. Only Tweed remained and his arrest seemed a matter of days.

  Then it happened. On December 15 Tweed had been indicted by a Grand Jury on 120 counts. The following evening he was arrested by an old confederate, Sheriff Matthew T. Brennan, who came personally to Tweed’s office to conduct the historic ceremony. Touching Tweed lightly on the shoulder, Brennan said, giggling, “You’re the man I’m after, I guess.”

  To nobody’s surprise Tweed got out on bail almost immediately. His first night as a “prisoner” he spent in the Metropolitan Hotel, which he owned. But he was forced to resign from the Public Works Department and on December 29 at Tammany Hall he was voted out of power as Grand Sachem.

  Because the courts seemed unable to decide whether the county or the state had the right to bring Tweed to justice, it would be another year before he would go on trial. But his world was crumbling all around. On January 6 Jim Fisk was shot down in the Grand Central Hotel by Edward Stokes. Fisk had once swindled the wealthy Stokes out of the ownership of a Brooklyn oil refinery and Stokes for his part had been pursuing Fisk’s mistress, Josie Mansfield, with considerable success.

  Tweed was among those at Fisk’s bedside as he lay dying. When Fisk expired at last, Tweed was beside himself. Of all the innumerable characters he had been in league with over the years, Fisk had been the most fun. The papers made much of the broken Tweed and his grief. Ten thousand people turned out to view the last remains of Fisk, lying in state, as it were, in his Erie Railroad office, but none would be so overcome as the former strong man of Tammany. The Eagle described the scene:

  Most of all affected was William M. Tweed. He cried like a child. His sobs were heard all over the house and while his hand, trembling as if with ague, continually stroked the broad and placid forehead of his dear friend, his hot tears dropped like a rain shower into the coffin.

  For a very large part of the public, Fisk’s murder seemed the just vengeance of the Almighty. From Plymouth Church came the voice of Beecher describing Fisk as “that supreme mountebank of fortune,” “absolutely without moral sense,” “absolutely devoid of shame,” “abominable in his lusts” and proclaiming that “by the hand of a fellow culprit, God’s providence struck him to the ground.”

  Tweed’s arrest, the Fisk murder, Stokes on trial, smallpox in Brooklyn, the annual Assembly Ball at the Music Academy (“In the United States there is no pleasanter place than is our city socially…” said the Union); Talmage preaching out against Fielding and Dumas as obscene literature, Bill Cody playing in Brooklyn, the new Metropolitan Museum of Art opening in New York; talk of the upcoming Presidential elections, two thousand skaters on the lake in Prospect Park, and the East River spanned by gigantic cakes of ice—there was ever so much to read and talk about through that winter of 1871-72. But only rarely would there be anything in the papers about the actual building of the bridge. There was plenty of talk certainly about what the Rink Committee might turn up. But when Roebling announced in mid-December that the New York caisson was ready to begin its descent, only a line or two appeared in the papers. Not until later would it be considered a matter of the greatest interest, or would some observers find a certain irony in the idea that the New York foundation for the bridge was being sunk in a sewer.

  12

  How Natural, Right, and Proper

  Although the bridge from every element of its use and from the source of its finances, is considered a public enterprise, yet it is entirely a private corporation in which the public has no voice…

  —DEMAS BARNES

  THE SENSATIONAL Stokes trial dragged on for months in early 1872, keeping the excesses of Fisk’s (and Tweed’s) unsavory world very much in the public mind at the time when the Rink Committee began presenting its findings. Predictably, Tweed’s former association with the bridge was made much of. But Kingsley’s “compensation,” the possible reasons for it, and his relationship to the Saw Mill & Lumber Company were the heart of the committee’s case.

  The Eagle immediately jumped to the defense of the Bridge Company. “It is true that Tweed, Connolly, and Sweeny are among the subscribers to this stock…but what corporation would have refused the cooperation of these men one year ago?” Kingsley was the man who got the bridge going, assumed the responsibility, and so “would have been justified in asking for any contracts the Bridge Company had to give, on the condition that he would do as well by the Company as any other contractor.” Furthermore, if the people of Brooklyn were not able to trust the likes of Murphy, Stranahan, Demas Barnes, or Henry Slocum to see that an enterprise was run legitimately, then whom were they to trust?

  Kingsley himself replied right after that, by letter to the Eagle and the Union, rather than through an interview, since, he said, he wanted his answer worded properly.

  The letter, however, was an angry tirade and raised new doubts about the man. The Bridge Company was composed of Brooklyn’s first citizens, all men to be trusted, he said, echoing the Eagle’s theme and citing the same names over again. To suggest that the company was being mismanaged, to malign the reputation of anyone connected with the bridge, was to be against the bridge, and to be against the bridge was to be against Brooklyn and against progress. The Committee of Fifty was made up of “vagabonds and scoundrels,” plus “a parcel of old fogies, who have accumulated wealth, though by their connection with the old farm titles of Brooklyn…and who have been made rich by the very progress they have persistently resisted.” These were the people, he said, who had been against the water works, the park, “every railroad track.” The landed gentry were out to block the people’s bridge was the theme.

  As for his dealings with Tweed, Kingsley answered with a question of his own, again sounding quite a lot like Thomas Kinsella or whoever wrote the Eagle editorial, except that Kingsley was perfectly frank about how far back that relationship actually dated. “Will any man whose memory goes back five years dare hazard his veracity by saying that the Company were unwise at that time in soliciting the co-operation of Tweed, Sweeny, and Connolly…?” Besides, Kingsley said that in his dealings with Tweed and the other Tammany people, he had found “their characters were then at l
east infinitely better” than those of the men on the Committee of Fifty.

  Then he said something he regretted later. He said he had paid for everything in getting the bridge under way and was “out of pocket more than a quarter of a million before a blow was struck.” (It was the same figure, interestingly, he had said he would be richer by had he avoided politics.) And as a kind of blanket justification for all those things he had done that seemed even the slightest bit suspect, he said, “I wanted to build the bridge.”

  “Every man must have somewhere an objective in life with which a greater [good] than money allies him,” he said. “My objective is to build the bridge.”

  The committee quickly responded with its own letter to the Eagle, saying it was ridiculous to tell the public to relax and be confident just because men of money and position were in charge. The committee also wanted to know, if the Bridge Company was employing a Chief Engineer, not to mention a consulting engineer and four assistant engineers, why William Kingsley’s services were so all-important and what exactly was he doing? In addition, the committee was now most interested to know how Kingsley had managed to spend a quarter of a million dollars. This new figure of Kingsley’s was exactly twice as much as anyone had ever implied he had spent. Moreover, the committee had been led to understand, by officials at the bridge offices, that the $125,000 Kingsley received from the company was mainly to cover those earlier expenses, all of which could be itemized supposedly. If that was so, then for what purposes had the rest of the money been used? And did not the people of Brooklyn deserve an honest accounting of such transactions? Perhaps he had been extremely liberal in Albany to get the sort of legislation that would allow private stockholders such free rein with the people’s money?