Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics by Terry Golway Page A

Metropolitan force attempted to remove Wood from City Hall, the Municipals charged to the mayor’s defense. The Metropolitans then rallied to their captain. The result was a bloody riot between the two police departments inside and on the steps of City Hall. More than fifty officers were injured, one severely, during half an hour of intense skull-cracking. Several units of the New York National Guard marched to the scene to restore order and to make good on the warrant for Wood’s arrest. He submitted peacefully but issued a defiant declaration from his jail cell, referring to the governor’s police force and his would-be street commissioner as “usurpers” of “municipal rights.” 37
    No demagoguery could hide the city’s disgrace, and Wood’s Municipals were formally disbanded months later by court order. But the riot represented a larger battle for power and influence in New York. Politicians from all parties practiced skull-cracking, bribe-taking, influence-peddling politics that resembled the tactics of the city’s infamous gangs, with names like the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery B’hoys. In 1852, the Whig Party, the main opposition to Tammany Democrats until the rise of the Republican Party, printed eighty thousand fraudulent ballots in an attempt to steal local elections, including a mayoral race. Tammany regularly employed legions of toughs to intimidate and even arrest unfriendly voters. A Tammany sheriff, Jimmy O’Brien, hired as many as two thousand deputies to make their menacing presence known on Election Day. Caleb S. Woodhull, a distinguished attorney, onetime Whig mayor, and the ancestor of an old New York family, made $10,000 on a corrupt ferry-franchise deal in the early 1850s.
    Politics in the 1850s in New York was a crooked and violent enterprise. No party and no candidate had a monopoly on the use of intimidation at the polls and the acceptance of rewards for delivering contracts. Even so, no politician could match Fernando Wood for sheer audacity.
    He dominated Tammany Hall after his first election as mayor, but just as the Democratic Party nationally was coming apart over the Kansas–Nebraska Act, the emergence of the Free Soil Party, and the emerging challenge of the new Republican Party, Tammany, too, was riven with dissent. Wood saw the organization as his personal machine, alienating other Democrats who were cut off from patronage and other spoils. Wood went his own way, splitting with the organization to create his own faction, Mozart Hall, which briefly challenged Tammany for dominance in the late 1850s.
    Fernando Wood was a man who made enemies with ease, and with little apparent regret. He was a double-dealer who managed the neat—albeit morally reprehensible—trick of posing as a friend of immigrants in the mid-1850s while secretly joining the Know Nothings, a vicious anti-immigrant group whose members were trained to answer questions about their activities with a simple phrase, “I know nothing.” Wood’s ethical and moral failings did not end there. He sympathized with Southern slaveholders, and when war divided North from South, he sought—unsuccessfully—to declare New York a free city, aligned with neither side. His critics had no shortage of material with which to assail him. 38
    But the Irish loved him. In the cellars and saloons of downtown Manhattan, Famine Irish immigrants cared little about the cost of municipal government or the tax burden of the rich or even, sadly, the plight of Southern slaves. If Wood did indeed favor the immigrant over the native-born—at least after his short, secret dalliance with the Know Nothings—the Famine Irish could hardly be blamed for expressing their gratitude, even when it was delivered early and often in the roughhouse politics of 1850s New York.
    There was, however, much more to the Irish embrace of Wood than jobs, important though they were in the 1850s. Wood was the antithesis of the moralizing British administrators who had