The Great Bridge (18 page)

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 having 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.

Judged by the standards of his day, Henry Cruse Murphy was a politician of exceptional quality, as straight as a string, as the saying went. He was also, plainly, an extremely attractive, accomplished human being. But if the only choice came down to compromising his principles or giving up all hope for a bridge in his lifetime, Murphy apparently was not about to let a squeamish conscience stand in the way.

Or possibly he may have figured that the Tweed Ring could not last the five years Roebling had said it would take to build the bridge. That way Tweed would not be around to collect, so to speak, and therefore any pact made with him now was far less chancy and, somehow, less corrupt. Or perhaps Murphy gave no time to any such thoughts. Perhaps, knowing what he did about the financial terms Tweed was accustomed to in his Albany transactions, Murphy concluded that he and the other Brooklyn people were getting off easy. Considering what Tweed might have held them up for, considering what this particular enterprise might be worth to the few who were in on it at the beginning—not to mention its immeasurable value to both communities and the prestige that would be attached to it—$55,000 or $65,000 for some alderman was a bargain price.

The true value of the stock was, of course, another matter and open to question. Its potential value was enormous, just as Tweed said and just as Kingsley, Murphy, Stranahan, Slocum, and the other Brooklyn stockholders fervently believed it would be. The potential power that went with it was also quite enormous obviously. So in this respect Tweed was being handed a very great deal indeed. But the out-of-pocket cost of the gift, for the time being, was relatively little. The real cost would be the size of Tweed’s grip on the work, not the cash in the carpetbag, and only time would tell about that.

As it was, Kingsley & Keeney purchased almost three-quarters of all the private stock (that in their name, plus what Tweed’s stock cost). With the respectable Brooklyn sources for capital that had been counted on suddenly dried up, there was really no choice for Kingsley.

Kingsley’s role in all this would be disclosed soon enough, long before Tweed went on the stand, and it would be said then, in his defense, that his willingness to put up such vast sums to get the bridge started was the most impressive demonstration possible of his unshakable faith in it. The same, of course, could be said for his willingness to do business with Tweed; but of that his admirers would have nothing to say.

That Tweed had the final say on whether a bridge could be started and so had to be dealt with, there is no question. Moreover, there is, as it happens, a memorable example from this very time of the lengths a thoroughly honorable man would have to go if he wished to circumvent Tweed on such matters.

As Murphy and Tweed were making their arrangements in Albany, the editor and publisher of
Scientific American,
Alfred Ely Beach, was setting out to dig New York’s first subway and without Tweed or anyone else knowing about it.

Beach was a most unusual character. At twenty-one he had invented a typewriter, at twenty-two he had become publisher of the New York
Sun,
the first penny paper, which his father, himself an inventor of sorts, had purchased some years earlier. But Beach had grown bored with popular journalism and turned the paper over to his older brother, Moses, soon to take up residence on the Heights and become a pillar at Plymouth Church. (It was Moses Beach who brought to Beecher an olive tree from the Mount of Olives, after a visit to Palestine with Mark Twain and others in 1867, a tour Twain would recount in
The Innocents Abroad.)
Alfred had more interest in the
Scientific American,
which he had acquired at age nineteen, as well as several other schemes, the most important of which was a pneumatic train.