BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York by Kenneth D. Ackerman Page A

workmen erected a generation of elegant new buildings: the new Stock Exchange on Wall Street, A.T. Stewart’s “Cast Iron Palace” on Union Square, spectacular mansions along Fifth Avenue, and the new County Courthouse aside City Hall. This wealth stood in stark contrast to the swarms of cold, crippled veterans begging for handouts and the squalor of slums like notorious Five Points, a stone’s throw from City Hall.
    Ships by the hundreds filled its harbor: steamers, schooners, sloops, brigs, and barks from around the world. Gray smoke rising from chimneys of thousands of small factories, breweries, tanneries, and steam-cars tinged the winter sky above rows of Manhattan rooftops, the steeple of Trinity Church towering higher than them all. On Wall Street, New York’s financial markets gushed with wealth. Industries from railroads to telegraphs to textiles, each experiencing dramatic post-war booms, all brought their cash to New York’s Stock Exchange that, in turn, became a battleground for elaborate power struggles among new corporate titans. The Erie Railway War, 1868’s biggest, had pitted 74-year-old “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt, Wall Street’s richest operator, against two unscrupulous upstarts named Jay Gould and James Fisk, Jr. in a fierce battle of watered stock, dueling court orders, and legislative bribery, all for control of a company lamented as the “Scarlet Woman of Wall Street” after years of corrupt management. Stock traders—“a jolly, good-hearted, free-and-easy class of men” to one contemporary—made fortunes in a day and lost them just as quickly. 4
    The congressional investigators already had finished two weeks of testimony by the time Samuel Tilden arrived at the federal courthouse that late December morning; their witnesses so far had painted a damning picture. Robert Murray, the local United States marshal, a stern, clean-shaven man known for supplying Washington friends with the best cigars and brandy entering New York harbor, 5 had detailed the scandal’s most eye-catching feature—an explosion of naturalizations, many fraudulent, turning thousands of greenhorn immigrants into instant certified voting citizens. “I take for granted that the stuffing of ballot-boxes is as great a crime against the law as the commission of burglary or highway robbery,” Murray had told the committee on its opening day. The New York police, he said, obviously did not agree. 6
    Ballot box stuffing, gang intimidation, and repeat voting all had been long staples of New York “democracy,” but the immigrant fraud was new. The city swarmed with foreign-born in 1868; long-term residents found the immigrant neighborhoods a confusion of strange languages and dialects. Tweed himself estimated that foreign-born constituted half to three-fifths of the vote that year in New York City. 7 Over five million immigrants had reached American shores in the 1850s and 1860s. Since the Civil War, record numbers of newcomers entered the city through Castle Garden each month F OOTNOTE —English, French, Swiss, Swedes, and Danes, but by far the majority being Irish and Germans, crammed into the city’s poorest wards.
    Starting that October, Murray had begun tracing rumors of fake citizenship papers—obtained without the immigrant’s actually appearing in court or swearing the required oath. The papers were being sold under-the-table by a man named Rosenberg, later identified in newspapers as a “Teutonic Israelite,” operating from a lager-beer saloon at 6 Centre Street near the courthouse behind a sign reading “Deutsche Amerikanische Demokratische Naturalizations Committee.” 8
    Murray had sent agents to Rosenberg’s Centre Street saloon. They’d purchased dozens of the papers made out to fictitious names, each costing about $2 and carrying an official signature from the New York Supreme Court. Rosenberg himself had bragged to one agent of selling over 7,000 certificates but complained he’d kept only