William Bryk – Page 6 – City of Smoke

Mr. Wood Is Mayor

December 20, 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union in response to Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency. “Poor South Carolina,” exclaimed James L. Petigru, one of the Palmetto state’s few Unionists. “Too small for a republic, too large for a lunatic asylum.”

December 20, 1860 South Carolina seceded from the Union in response to Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency. “Poor South Carolina,” exclaimed James L. Petigru, one of the Palmetto state’s few Unionists. “Too small for a republic, too large for a lunatic asylum.”

On January 6, 1861, as other Southern states followed suit, Fernando Wood, mayor of the City of New York, issued an official message to the Common Council, a body sometimes called “The Forty Thieves.” Calling secession “a fixed and certain fact,” the Mayor proposed the City secede too, becoming an independent city-state. This, as Abraham Lincoln commented, was like the front doorstep setting up housekeeping on its own.

Wood was born in Philadelphia on June 14, 1812. His mother named her son after the swashbuckling hero of The Three Spaniards, a novel she read during her pregnancy. [In Tweed’s New York, Leo Hershkowitz cites a story that Wood was “reported to have entered New York as the leg of an artificial elephant in a travelling show,” [if this is still Hershk. then either quote it straight or find a way to recast it; this is too termpapery…]and became the manager of a “low groggery” on the waterfront, dealing in liquor and “segars.” In 1839, his business partner, Edward E. Marvine, sued him for fraud, but Wood successfully pled the statute of limitations, which Marvine had missed by a day.

Wood was slender, erect, about six feet tall, and strikingly good-looking, with dark blue eyes and coal black hair. (In later years, he dyed it.) He was dignified, eloquent, and self-possessed: he seems never to have lost his temper. At the age of twenty-eight, he was elected to Congress for one term. Defeated for reelection, Wood went back into business. M.R. Werner, in Tammany Hall, reports that his merchant barque, the John W. Cater, was the first supply ship into San Francisco after the discovery of gold on Sutter’s farm. When its cargo sold at an immense profit, Wood kept it all by cheating a new partner of his fair share. Wood then retired from business and became a statesman.

In 1850, he narrowly lost his first campaign for mayor. Four years later, he ran again. This time, Wood was supported by old toughs from Tammany Hall and young toughs like the Dead Rabbits. These last, a band of thugs who loved fighting for its own sake, had been part of an informal militia, the Roach Guards, named after a prominent liquor dealer. Someone had enlivened a meeting by throwing a dead rabbit into their midst. “Dead rabbit” was then slang for “really tough guy.” [was the term current before? or did the incident create the slant? not clear]The incident was an inspiration.

Today, a politician might reflect for some time before openly accepting support from the Crips or Bloods. [or you could point out that NY pols were following in a noble tradition; Roman elections couldnt’ ahve existed without similar gangs of thugs] Wood had no qualms. After all, the campaign proved violent, and their support was useful. Wood was sanguine: he claimed the people “will elect me Mayor though I should commit a murder in my family between this and the Election.” He was elected by 1,456 votes, receiving 400 more votes in the “Bloody Sixth” ward than there were voters. Some argued this was merely a clerical error.

When Wood was elected[if all his misdeeds had been of a private and eprsonal nature, how did they know he was a baddun? why were they vilifying him?], the Morning Courier and Enquirer wrote:

Well, it now appears that Mr. Wood is Mayor… Supported by none but ignorant foreigners and the most degraded class of Americans, Mr. Wood is Mayor. In spite of the most overwhelming proofs that he is a base defrauder, Mr. Wood is Mayor. Contrary to every precedent in the allotment of honor through a municipal history of nearly two hundred years, Mr. Wood is Mayor. His assertion to us that a murder by his own hands could not prevent his election had reason in it; Mr. Wood is Mayor.

Yet, during his first term of office, Wood proved efficient and hardworking, often personally leading the police in breaking up riots and closing down illegal bars. He maintained a complaint book at City Hall, and often personally investigated entries.

His second term was different. He won by 10,000 votes in 1856, and probably his entire margin of victory was fraudulent. Election Day riots broke out in the First, Sixth, and Seventeenth wards, with the Dead Rabbits battling the Bowery Boys, smashing ballot boxes and terrifying opposition voters. Wood apparently foresaw the advantages of chaos: he had furloughed the police for the day.

Wood now realized his opportunities and he took them. [Isn’t that “Plunkett?”] He sold appointment as corporation counsel, the city’s lawyer, to two different men at the same time, for cash. He sold the police commissionership for $50,000. He sold the street cleaning contract to a high bidder after arranging a $40,000 bribe to the Common Council and a twenty-five percent interest in the profits for his beloved brother Ben. Most memorably, Wood allowed City Hall to be sold at auction to satisfy a judgment against the City. [what does that mean?]

The Legislature in Albany now shortened Wood’s term to one year. They created a state-controlled Metropolitan Police Force and ordered the Municipal Police dissolved. Wood had none of it. Do you mean he “was having none of it?” On June 16, 1857 when the state tried taking over the Street Cleaning Department, Wood ordered the Municipal Police to physically remove the state appointees from their offices, and this was done. The state authorities obtained an order to arrest Wood for inciting a riot. Capt. George Walling, a redoubtable ex-Municipal turned Metropolitan, went into City Hall alone to arrest Wood. The Mayor greeted him cordially, learned of his mission, turned to his Municipals and said, “Men, put that man out.” Walling seized Wood, according to Luc Sante, and began dragging him toward the door. Then the Municipals laid hands upon Walling, freed the Mayor and tossed Walling down the front steps.

Some say they merely escorted him out, for old-time’s sake. [Don’t get it]

The Metropolitans now marched fifty strong from their White Street headquarters to find City Hall held in force by the Municipals. They charged up the front steps as the Municipals issued forth with a cheer to meet them, and the air was filled with the sound of locustwood clubs, which “emitted a sound like a bell”[???source???] on hitting human skulls. The Municipals outnumbered the Metropolitans, and drove them back. The state forces rallied, however, and charged City Hall once more. At this moment, the Dead Rabbits and “a miscellaneous assortment of suckers, soaplocks, Irishmen, and plug-uglies, officiating in a guerrilla capacity,” [???source???] rushed the Metropolitans from the rear.

“The scene was a terrible one,” wrote The New York Times. “Blows upon naked heads fell thick and fast, and men rolled helpless down the steps, to be leaped upon and beaten until life seemed extinct.”

The day was saved by the 7th Regiment, then marching down Broadway to embark for Boston. The Metropolitans requested help. The gallant 7th, drums rolling, flags flying, turned toward City Hall. The Mayor capitulated.

For several weeks the city was patrolled by two police forces working at cross purposes. A Municipal might arrest some thug only to have a Metropolitan set him free. Each side freely raided the other’s precinct houses to liberate prisoners en masse. The gangs found this stimulating: on July 4, 1857 the Dead Rabbits and Bowery Boys started a two-day battle in the area around Mott, Mulberry, Bayard and Elizabeth Streets, leaving eight dead and 100 wounded in a whirl of stones, brickbats, clubs, and gunfire. In the fall, the courts determined that the City’s ancient royal charters were meaningless and the City was no more than a creature of the State. The Municipals hung up their clubs and badges.

Tammany’s 1857 convention nominated Wood by a vote of 100 to five for his only opponent, William M. Tweed, who would be heard from again. Nonetheless, in the fall elections, Wood proved that not even Wood could survive financial panics, police riots, and the foreclosure sale of City Hall. Within a year, however, the Model Mayor defeated his successor for reelection and returned to power. In common with most Democrats, Wood opposed the abolition of slavery out of both personal racism and belief in the City’s dependence on the cotton trade. [the logic of this paragraph is giving me whiplash]

To be sure, he did not publicly dwell upon the lottery concession that his brother Ben and he held in Louisiana, which someone once described as akin to being given a color offset lithographic machine by the Federal Reserve with the injunction: “Now go ahead and print all the one hundred dollar bills you need.” [again, I don’t get this, or how what comes next follows from it] In a speech at New Rochelle in 1859, Wood argued that the city’s prosperity depended on Southern trade, “the wealth which is now annually accumulated by the people…of New York, out of the labor of slavery—the profit, the luxury, the comforts, the necessity, nay, even the very physical existence depending upon products only to be obtained by the continuance of slave labor and the prosperity of the slave master.”

This was not oratory. By 1860, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the city’s largest industry was garment production, with 398 factories employing 26,857 workers to create clothing worth $22,420,769—largely from Southern cotton. Sugar-refining, the second largest, also depended on Southern cane to refine sugar products worth $19,312,500. These two industries created more than a quarter of the city’s gross industrial product.

Losing Southern raw materials might devastate the city’s economy. As Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace note in Gotham, “the city’s key economic actors—the shipowners who hauled cotton, the bankers who accepted slave property as collateral for loans, the brokers of southern railroad and state bonds, the wholesalers who sent goods south, the editors with large southern subscription bases, the dealers in tobacco, rice and cotton—all had come to profitable terms with its slave economy.” They feared that secession would mean massive Southern defaults: the nonpayment of bills due and owing to New York merchants. Thus, they pressed for conciliation with the South at all costs.

Even in 1860, decades after the United States had abolished the slave trade, ships launched from New York shipyards and financed by New York investors, though flying foreign flags and manned by foreign crews, carried slaves from Africa to Cuba, where the slave trade was still legal, yielding profits as high as $175,000 for a single voyage. Moreover, although New York State abolished slavery on July 4, 1827, the Tammany city government tolerated “blackbirders,” illegal slave importers who operated out of New York. Apparently, District Attorney James Roosevelt refused to prosecute them, believing their activities did not constitute piracy, although federal law defined it as such. Some blackbirders were professional bounty hunters searching for runaway slaves under the Fugitive Slave Act. A few even kidnapped free blacks for sale in the South. It is no wonder that Dan Emmett, a minstrel show composer, premiered “Dixie,” the Southern national anthem, in New York City on April 4, 1859.

The Mayor’s 1861 message argued, based on the effect of the secession crisis on New York City’s trade, the city fathers should anticipate the Union’s collapse with a policy of neutrality among the Northern and Southern states, noting that “With our aggrieved brethren of the Slave States we have friendly relations and a common sympathy.” He said New York City should strike for independence, “peaceably if we can, forcefully if we must.”

Wood was probably the first politician to show New York City provided far more tax revenue to the federal government than it received in public expenditure.

Finally, the Mayor suggested that New York, as a free city, financed through a nominal tariff on imported goods, could abolish all direct taxation on its citizens. Theodore Roosevelt noted in his History of the City of New York that the Common Council “received the message enthusiastically, and had it printed and circulated wholesale.”

While Wood may have contemplated the common good, he surely considered the vast possibilities inherent in running one’s own country. According to Luc Sante, the Common Council approved a plan for merging the three islands of Long, Manhattan and Staten into a new nation, to be called Tri-Insula. Three months later, after the rebels fired on Fort Sumter, the plan was quietly rescinded. The city survived despite more than $300 million in defaulted Southern trade debts and more than 30,000 suddenly unemployed workers. Within months, the Union’s demands for uniforms, rifles, artillery, and warships restored full employment.

Fernando Wood lost the mayoralty in 1861. Realizing the rise of William M. Tweed and his Ring to power was irresistible, he made peace. Wood was nominated to a safe congressional seat and other persons who had paid him approximately $100,000 to $200,000 for various appointments and nominations received them. Wood, aging gracefully, remained in Congress for the rest of his life. Although censured by the 40th Congress for “use of unparliamentary language” and defeated for the speakership in 1875, Wood became chairman of House Ways and Means in 1877. He died in 1881. Wood is buried in Trinity churchyard, at the head of Wall Street. As always, he is near the money.

New York Press, January 9, 2001

The Battle of Brooklyn

At first light, Daniel McCurtin awoke. He checked the weather and then glanced down the Upper Bay toward the open sea. He paused. There had been a change during the night. It was June 19, 1776, and the British had come. General Sir William Howe, commanding His Majesty’s forces in North America, had passed the Narrows with forty-eight men-of-war and transports. Neither McCurtin nor the hundreds of New Yorkers who soon lined the Battery and the waterfront piers had seen anything like it. They had seen nothing yet….

At first light, Daniel McCurtin awoke. He checked the weather and then glanced down the Upper Bay toward the open sea. He paused. There had been a change during the night. It was June 19, 1776, and the British had come. McCurtin, a private in the Continental army, later wrote that the “whole Bay was full of shipping as it ever could be” and the masts of the ships moored by Staten Island “resembled a forest of pine trees with their branches trimmed.” General Sir William Howe, commanding His Majesty’s forces in North America, had passed the Narrows with forty-eight men-of-war and transports. Neither McCurtin nor the hundreds of New Yorkers who soon lined the Battery and the waterfront piers had seen anything like it.

They had seen nothing yet. During the next day, Sir William’s seafaring brother, Admiral Richard, Lord Howe—dark, like most of that family, and popular with his command as his brother was with his (Lord Howe’s sailors called him “Black Dick”)—joined him with 82 more ships. By July 12, more than 150 ships stood off Staten Island; by mid-August, more than 400. King George III and his ministers had assembled the greatest seagoing invasion since the Spanish Armada nearly two centuries before.

On July 12, 1776, the British did three things. First, they landed on Staten Island. The county militia, mustered for home defense, surrendered as one man. Then two frigates, H.M.S. Phoenix and H.M.S. Rose, testing the harbor defenses, swept up the Bay under full sail. The Rose’s commander opened a particularly fine claret as the American artillery fired on him from Red Hook, Governor’s Island, Paulus Hook in New Jersey, and Forts Washington and Lee. They missed. They all missed. They never came close. The two men-of-war cruised some thirty miles north to Tappan Bay and returned a few days later, utterly undamaged.

Finally, the Howe brothers tried to open negotiations. Sir William Howe (“Sir Billy” behind his back) was a civilized man, preferring peace to war. Perhaps it was his sensuality. Howe’s paunch spoke of his weakness for the pleasures of the bottle and the table, even as the presence in his suite of Mrs. Joshua Loring, a charming Bostonian, evidenced a fondness for those of the bed (Sir William had appointed the complaisant Mr. Loring to the lucrative post of His Majesty’s Commissary of Prisoners).

But love of pleasure was not professional incapacity. William Howe, tall, pleasant and taciturn, was in his late 40s. He had held the King’s commission for more than thirty years. A careful, intelligent commander who generally eschewed wasteful frontal assaults against entrenched positions, Howe’s massive popularity with his troops stemmed from their confidence that he would not waste their lives in the pursuit of glory.

Yet Howe could be magnificently, even wildly brave. In September 1759, Howe had scaled the Cliffs of Abraham, leading 4000 troops in the surprise attack on the French at Quebec, still considered among the most audacious feats in military history. On June 17, 1775, at Bunker Hill, he personally led his grenadiers’ second assault against “an incessant stream of fire…more than flesh could endure” from Israel Putnam’s militiamen, and when his men broke and ran, William Howe momentarily remained, defiant and nearly alone on the hillside in his cocked hat and bright scarlet coat, before turning and walking away.

The Howe brothers, knowing war from experience, preferred peace. But how to address the letter to the rebel commander? “General” might seem to recognize the legitimacy of Congress, which had commissioned him. “Colonel,” his highest rank as a militia officer in the King’s service, might be insulting. Ah! the best address for a Virginian gentleman: George Washington, Esq.

In They Fought for New York, John Brick describes the arrival of Lieutenant Brown, R.N. of H.M.S. Eagle, with the letter under flag of truce. He saluted a blue coated colonel at the Battery stairs.

“Sir,” Brown said, “I have a letter from Lord Howe to Mr. Washington.”

“Sir,” replied Colonel Joseph Reed, Philadelphia lawyer turned adjutant general of the United States Army, “we have no person here in our army with that address.”

Opening negotiations is difficult when your foes won’t even accept your mail on a lawyer’s advice.

Sir William then addressed another letter to “George Washington, Esq., etc., etc.” This, too, was refused. The bearer, Lieutenant Colonel James Patterson, Howe’s adjutant general, then asked whether General Washington would care to meet with him.

Washington received Patterson at his headquarters at 1 Broadway. Patterson explained the “etc., etc.” as terms used in diplomacy when a man’s precise rank was in doubt. Washington replied there was no doubt about his precise rank and that “etc., etc.” could mean “anything-or nothing.” Patterson then suggested negotiations between Lord Howe and Washington. The Commander-in-Chief refused. He was merely a soldier, powerless to negotiate political issues: That was Congress’s domain.

By August 19, 1776, Sir William had 32,000 professional soldiers on Staten Island, including two regiments of Guards, the Black Watch, and 8000 mercenaries, rented for the occasion from the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel. Three days later, he invaded Brooklyn at Gravesend Bay. By noon, he had 15,000 men ashore with scarcely a shot fired.

Although Washington had fortified Brooklyn Heights, building Fort Greene, Fort Putnam and Fort Box, the American forces largely stood forward on the Heights of Guan (now Crown Heights, Stuyvesant Heights, Ocean Hill and Ridgewood). Apparently none of the American commanders knew of the Jamaica Pass, “a deep winding cut” at what is now Broadway Junction, near East New York. This led to the Jamaica Road, roughly parallel to what are now Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue, which curved between the Americans on the Heights of Guan and their fortifications near Brooklyn Heights. During the early morning of August 27, Howe sent 4000 light infantrymen unopposed through the Pass. By dawn, they held the Jamaica Rd.

The Battle of Long Island opened with desultory skirmishing. Several hours after sunrise, two cannons boomed in the American rear. As the British and Hessians in their front suddenly stopped fooling around and began formal attacks, the Americans found Howe’s light infantrymen charging from behind.

The rebel left and center collapsed. Many soldiers simply surrendered. Others fled into the woods. Through the ranks of British grenadiers sprinted Hessian jagers, vanishing into the trees after the rebels. They were green-coated professional huntsmen and gamekeepers, superbly fit, disciplined to an edge of ruthlessness, and armed with short-barreled rifles. They were trained to fight in forests, for at home they tracked poachers and thieves, and tended to take no prisoners. Decades later, the skulls of men run down and bayoneted by the jagers were still turning up on building sites, roadsides and tilled fields.

The American right comprised 1500 troops under General William Alexander, a stocky, jovial Scots eccentric, who, though fighting for a republican cause, claimed the title of Lord Stirling. He had been more than holding his own: Two of his regiments had driven British regulars from a flanking crest and seized the high ground. Stirling had not held the hill for fifteen minutes when thousands of British and German troops unexpectedly smashed into his front. His scouts then told him his left flank was in the air, the American left and center were gone and British regulars were cutting him off.

Stirling, unlike the other American commanders, had apparently studied his ground and even considered possible routes of retreat. He had one left: through marshes to Gowanus Creek, 80 yards wide at the mouth. Even then, his men would be slaughtered in the mud unless the British advance was stopped, if only for an hour.

Stirling, “with grim-faced Scottish fortitude,” detached 250 Marylanders. They were militiamen. This was their first battle. He ordered his officers to move the rest of his command across the Gowanus. Then he rode to the Marylanders and put himself at their head.

They faced 10,000 British and German regulars, advancing in broad ranks two or three lines deep, now confident of victory, the field music’s drummers beating a quick step, the King’s and the regimental colors unfurled. The company-grade officers marched beside their men, swords at the carry, and the field-grade officers rode behind the lines, not out of cowardice but to maintain communications and control. As the enemy’s shooting became effective, the ranks would close up, again and again, while marching forward. At 100 yards or so, they would halt. The soldiers would fire a volley and then charge at a full run, bayonets fixed, probably yelling at the top of their lungs. The effect was intentional: to seem terrifying, invincible and nearly inhuman.

Anyone watching the Guards’ trooping the color on the Queen’s birthday is observing 18th-century tactics. American propaganda trains us to ridicule this kind of magnificent formal spectacle. But the British and Germans fought thus because it usually worked. It certainly did on August 26, 1776. British soldiers generally were, as the Duke of Wellington later called them, “the scum of the earth”: semi-literate at best, thuggish, crude and boisterous. They were controlled through harsh discipline, with floggings ordered on the slightest pretext. Their lives were a constant round of drill and maintenance (blacking boots, polishing buckles, pipe-claying breeches to keep them white and sponge-cleaning the red coats, dry-cleaning being unknown), occasionally interrupted by whoring and drinking. The constant drill strengthened the habit of obedience, enabling officers and non-coms to control and maneuver their men with great flexibility amidst the horror of battle.

But Stirling had seen it before. He told his men that he knew James Grant, the British general commanding the troops on his front, and had been in the House of Commons when Grant had boasted he could march from one end of America to the other with 5000 men. He urged them to prove Grant wrong.

Then his sword flashed from its scabbard, and with a broad sweep, Stirling pointed at the advancing enemy, roared, “Charge!” and spurred his horse forward. The 250 went with him. They charged, broke, withdrew, regrouped and charged again-five times. Because they “fought like wolves,” they bought the time their comrades needed to cross the marshes. Of the 250, 10 men and one officer stumbled by nightfall into the American entrenchments at Brooklyn Heights. Stirling was not among them.

It was only noon. Howe had lost 65 killed and 255 wounded while inflicting more than 2000 casualties on the rebels. One imagines the response of Patton to a demoralized enemy hopelessly off balance with his back to a river. Howe could have ended the war that afternoon, and there would have been no United States. Imagine Elizabeth II’s elegant profile on the shillings in our pockets.

And Sir William Howe said no. His men prepared for a careful assault on the American fortifications. In the harbor, Lord Howe’s captains expected orders to place their ships in the East River between Brooklyn and New York to bottle up Washington in Brooklyn. The orders never came. Lord Howe did not even send out cutters-small boats, manned by expert oarsmen, carrying light cannon in swiveling mounts-to patrol.

More than 220 years later, this remains inexplicable. Probably, the Howe brothers, being half a world away from London, were making policy despite their orders. Thomas Fleming, in Liberty, wrote: “To achieve the kind of [negotiated] peace Admiral Howe envisioned, Washington’s army had to survive. If it was battered into mass surrender in Brooklyn or slaughtered on the East River, hard-liners…would insist on a peace of unconditional surrender, [making] America another Ireland.”

Washington had a genius for retreat. Few things are as difficult as the organized, controlled withdrawal of a defeated army. His mind turned to the 14th Continentals, a regiment of American regulars, mostly sailors in civilian life, largely raised from Marblehead, Massachusetts (characterized by one of his officers as “a dirty erregular stincking place”). Between nightfall on August 26 and August 29, Washington and his staff assembled every boat “that could be kept afloat and had either sails or oars.” The 14th Continentals manned them. The army was gradually withdrawn from the lines and ferried to Manhattan under cover of darkness. At dawn on August 30, the last boats left. One carried George Washington. He had not slept in forty-eighthours.

Washington’s withdrawal from Brooklyn, his army intact, was the first step in his retreat to victory.

New York Press, July 28, 1999

John Morrissey: Wharf Rat, Chicken Thief, Congressman

Elections are dull because politicians are. They can’t help it: only safe, conventional men and women with bland, plausible personalities can raise the kind of money required to pay for television commercials and bulk mailings. Authentic old-fashioned elections—those orgies of repeating, ballot-box stuffing, and election day riots with their torch-lit parades and bonfires, their bunting and barbecues—have vanished from the land.

From New York Press, September 16, 1998

“Elections nowadays are sissy affairs,” complained “Dock Walloper Dick” Butler even seventy years ago. “Nobody gets killed any more and the ambulances and patrol wagons stay in their garages. There’s cheating, of course, but it’s done in a polite, refined manner compared to the olden days. In those times murder and mayhem played a more important part in politics. To be a challenger at the polls you had to be a nifty boxer or an expert marksman. A candidate, especially if he ran against the machine, was lucky to escape with his life. I was lucky—I only had my skull bashed and my front teeth knocked out and my nose broken.”

Few aspiring statesmen of our time have enjoyed a resume like that of the Hon. John Morrissey, who once told the United States House of Representatives: “I have reached the height of my ambition. I have been a wharf rat, chicken thief, prize fighter, gambler, and Member of Congress.” At times he seemed hard-pressed to separate his various metiers. Once, when irritated during debate, he roared, “If any gentleman on the other side wants his constitution amended just let him step into the rotunda with me.” It was not an empty threat.

Yet Morrissey was enormously popular, simply because he was his own man. His early career hinged on the electoral customs of his day. Each party and faction printed its own ballots. Voters brought a ballot to the polls and dropped it in the box. This simplicity permitted elaborations, exploited by Morrissey and his contemporaries, that are now almost fully comprehended and forbidden by the Election Law. There were repeaters, who voted more than once, either through multiple registrations or under names not their own. Morrissey was a gifted campaigner. “As an organizer of repeaters,” said the great William M. “Boss” Tweed, “he had no superior.”

The Hon. Timothy D. “Big Tim” Sullivan once explained his specialty, the bearded repeater. “When they vote with their whiskers on, you take ’em to a barber and scrape off the chin fringe. Then you vote ’em again with side-lilacs and mustache. Then to the barber again, off comes the sides and you vote ’em a third time with just a mustache. If that ain’t enough, and the box can stand a few more ballots, clean off the mustache and vote ’em plain face.” This made every man “good for four votes.”

A repeater needed some savoir faire. Up in Albany, a scruffy fellow once gave his name to the poll clerks as William Croswell Doane. “You don’t look like Bishop Doane,” a clerk objected. “Fuck you, man,” the repeater replied. “Gimme the goddamn ballot.”

Another technique was the “cannon” ballot, so named because just a few could blow the opposition sky-high. A contemporary of Morrissey’s wrote, “Ballots were easy to get, and we took plenty. Each candidate could get all he wanted. Why, kids even played with them. I got huge stacks of the ballots and carried them home to Mary.”

“Mary, put your irons on the fire,” I told her. She put three or four irons on the coal stove, and when they were nice and hot, we went to work on the ballots. We folded the ballots in sets of ten…and then Mary pressed the bundles of ten until they were thin enough to slip through the slit in the ballot boxes.

I distributed these ballots to my…workers and they slipped in ten at a time while the organization’s men thought they were doing a smart thing by piling in two at a time…One of my repeaters went to the polls twenty times and dropped in ten ballots every time. It was wonderful to see how my men… [preserved] the sanctity of the ballot [to] stop the corruption of Tammany Hall.

A poll clerk vigorously shook the box before opening it for the count, separating the cannon’s individual sheets to prevent its detection.

The Irish-born Morrissey apparently spent his youth learning to fight in barrooms and riverboats. He made his metropolitan debut in the Arena, Captain Isaiah Rynders’s saloon at 28 Park Row, across from City Hall. The Captain was a kind of political consultant, specializing in ballot-box stuffing and general mayhem on a cash retainer basis. Morrissey, whom an Arena habitue had addressed with inadequate respect, asked if any prize fighters were present, took off his cap, and said, “I can lick any man in the place.” Some eight men silently turned from their drinks, grabbed chairs, bottles, and other handy utensils, and rushed him as one. Nonetheless, Morrissey held his own until Rynders hit him under the ear with a spittoon.”

But Rynders, who admired men of spirit, had him carefully nursed until he recovered. Morrissey then became an immigrant runner. He met immigrants at the dock, found them work and shelter, and, after obtaining their pledges to vote the Tammany ticket, helped them obtain American citizenship, a simpler process in those days, that involved merely satisfying a single judge of one’s loyalty to the United States. (The Hon. Fernando Wood, when he was Mayor of New York, once managed to naturalize some 3,500 men in a day by sending them to a judge with preprinted cards requesting his signature as a personal courtesy.)

Once, when armed competitors attempted to drive him from a ship with belaying pins, a commentator described Morrissey clearing the decks “single-handed, like a young Ajax.” Testimony during the Tweed Ring scandals indicated tht the hardworking Morrissey had been convicted of assault with intent to kill and for burglary in 1849, serving 60 days. He was indicted three times in one day in 1857 for three separate assaults with intent to kill. And he was convicted of breach of the peace in 1861 and sentenced to a $50 fine and three months’ hard labor.

Busy as he was, Morrissey continued his professional development as a bare-knuckle boxer under the old London Prize Ring rules, the Marquess of Queensberry having not yet reformed the sweet science. The old rules were brutal: a round ended only when a fighter fell, was knocked down, or was thrown; matches ended when a fighter could not stand up at the beginning of a round. In 1858, Morrissey fought John Heenan, the Benicia Boy, for the Championship of America at Long Point, Canada. They battled for 32 minutes, during which, after Heenan broke his hand on a ring stake, Morrissey beat him into the ground “as a hammer beats a nail.” The New York Times, which found the spectacle a “triumph of brutality,” nonetheless, provided a blow-by-blow account.

Morrissey’s most renowned exploit was recounted by William E. Harding, longtime sporting editor of the late lamented National Police Gazette, in his 1881 biography, John Morrissey: His Life, Battles, and Wrangles, from His Birth in Ireland until He Died a State Senator.

Morrissey, during his visits to New York, became infatuated with a noted Cyprian, Kate Ridgeley, who was a mistress of Tom McCann, a noted rough and tumble fighter…Kate coquettishly pretended to think highly of Morrissey. This inflamed McCann’s jealousy, and when he met his rival in Sandy Lawrence’s house proposed to fight him for an undivided share in Kate’s affections…At the commencement of the fight McCann was successful, and threw Morrissey heavily. As he fell a stove was overturned, a bushel of hot coals rolled out, and Morrissey was forced on them. McCann held him there until the smell of burning flesh filled the room. The bystanders made water on the coals, and the gas and steam arose in McCann’s face and choked and exhausted him. Morrissey then…pounded McCann into insensibility. From that time until the day of his death Morrissey was called “Old Smoke.”

Such a man rose steadily in the world of mid-Victorian New York. He made a substantial fortune and married a beautiful woman. Retiring from the ring in 1859, Morrissey built a clubhouse and bought the racetrack at Saratoga Springs, N.Y., then a genteel watering hole. In 1866, he opened what were reputed to be the world’s most lavish gaming rooms on 24th Street in Manhattan. Some neighbors maintained that his casino lowered the moral tone of the community. Their wives, when the Morrisseys attended grand opera at the Academy of Music, glared at Mrs. Morrissey through mother-of-pearl opera glasses.

On a fuck-you basis, with the help of Tammany, Morrissey ran for Congress from the district in which his casino was located. He won handily and just to be sure nobody missed the point, ran a second time and was re-elected by an even wider margin. To celebrate his second victory, he commissioned a $75,000 pair of opera glasses in diamonds and sapphire from Lemaire of Paris as a gift for his beloved wife. They enabled the delighted Mrs. Morrissey to glare back at her detractors on opening nights.

After the Tweed Ring’s collapse during the early 1870s, Morrissey joined with Samuel Tilden and “Honest” John Kelly to control Tammany Hall. By 1875, he was serving as Police Commissioner, for which his experience with the criminal justice system eminently qualified him. But Tilden was then Governor of New York and running for President, leaving the Hall in the hands of Morrissey and Kelly. Their ambitions clashed. Kelly purged Morrissey, who then, having nothing better to do, won election to the State Senate from Tweed’s old district. Honest John’s followers said that only the district which had elected Tweed would send a vicious thug, a rowdy prize fighter, and a notorious gambler to the State Senate. These criticisms annoyed Morrissey because they hurt his wife’s feelings.

Accordingly, in 1877 he ran for the State Senate from the Seventh District, the most reputable in the City. Tammany orators denounced Morrissey as a gambler, prize fighter, ballot-box stuffer, and burglar. It was also said that when he had been in Congress, he had a percentage in Washington’s leading illegal faro game. All was for naught: Morrissey won by a huge majority.

He had defeated the respectables and the machine politicians alike. But Morrissey did not long enjoy his triumph. He had contracted pneumonia during his last campaign and, failing to shake it off, died at Saratoga on May 1, 1878, at the age of forty-seven. Over 15,000 mourners, including the Lieutenant Governor and the Attorney General, saw the dead statesman to his grave in St. Peter’s Cemetery, Troy, New York, where he lies with his family.

The Drunkard and the Dancing Master

Even today, when people often change careers, General Edward Ferrero’s resume might seem startling. The son of Italian political refugees, the future general was practically raised on the shining floors of the dance academy’s his father ran at the northeast corner of 14th Street and 6th Avenue, becoming a dancer, choreographer, and teacher, even teaching dancing to the cadets at West Point. Yet the dance master was also a lieutenant colonel in the New York National Guard….

Even today, when people often change careers, General Edward Ferrero’s resume might seem startling. The son of Italian political refugees, he was born in Granada, Spain on January 18, 1831 and arrived in New York while still an infant. Edward’s father taught dance. He opened a school at the northeast corner of 14th Street and 6th Avenue. The future general was practically raised on the academy’s shining floors, becoming a dancer, choreographer, and teacher, even teaching dancing to the cadets at West Point. He is generally described as charming, witty, and good-humored, with beautifully polished manners and exquisite personal grace.

Yet the dance master was also a lieutenant colonel in the New York National Guard. After the secessionists fired on Fort Sumter in 1861, Ferrero recruited the 51st New York, a new regiment of roughly 1000 men, at his own expense. He was commissioned its colonel on October 14. In an army of the inexperienced, Ferrero’s peacetime soldiering made him look pretty good. He knew something about moving units about a parade ground (what is drill, after all, but choreography?). Besides, he was a teacher: he knew how to train men.

His regiment was assigned to General Ambrose E. Burnside’s North Carolina expedition. Burnside was a West Pointer, a veteran of garrison duty during the Mexican War, and a major general of the Rhode Island militia. Burnside seemed the stereotype of a mid-Victorian general: broad-shouldered and firm-jawed, with a steady gaze and flamboyant muttonchop whiskers. (The term “sideburns” comes from his name.) Despite his formidable appearance, the Rhode Islander was genial and kindly, the soul of truth and honor, and as unsuited to command an army by virtue of poor judgment and lack of common sense as any man with stars on his shoulders in the history of the Republic. But Lincoln liked Burnside and believed him far more competent than he was—one of his rare misreadings of character.

Burnside gave Colonel Ferrero command of a brigade—three regiments, roughly 3000 men. At Roanoke Island, Ferrero led his men ashore: they took the first fortified redoubt captured in the war. In light of his successes, Lincoln gave Burnside command of the Union’s major fighting force in the East, the Army of the Potomac. At Antietam, Burnside rigidly insisted on crossing a small stream by sending men piecemeal across a narrow stone bridge within range of Confederate cannon. They could have waded. The result was slaughter.

Ferrero fought well, winning promotion to brigadier general on September 10, 1862. Three months later, he fought under Burnside again at Fredericksburg, when the Rhode Islander repeatedly sent the Army of the Potomac uphill against entrenched Confederate artillery, losing 13,000 men in a day.

Burnside was not working out. Lincoln transferred him to command of the Ninth Corps, a then-independent unit consisting of roughly 25,000 men that supported the Army of the Potomac without being part of it. Ferrero, then only thirty-three years old, would command its Fourth Division, consisting entirely of African-American soldiers, many former slaves from Maryland.

By the summer of 1864, the Civil War in the East was a grim reaping. The Union had finally found a commander with the habit of victory. At thirty-eight, Ulysses S. Grant had been a washed-up clerk in his family’s store in Galena, Illinois. At forty-one, he was general-in-chief of the Union armies. Grant was quiet, unpretentious, even seedy. His rumpled exterior concealed, as Jean Edward Smith wrote, “a formidable intellect and a rock-solid self-confidence…a topographer’s feel for landscape, a photographic memory when it came to maps, a command of the English language at its incisive best.”

Grant understood that the Union’s superior resources would wear the Confederacy away, if only he engaged the enemy and never let go. His opponent, General Robert E. Lee, for his part understood Grant and his strategy. After three years, Lee knew Southern independence would rest on dragging out the war through the November elections. If Northern voters, weary of fighting, turned out Lincoln and the Republicans, the incoming Democrats would make peace.

On May 4, 1864, Grant crossed Virginia’s Rapidan River with 120,000 men. There, in the gloomy woodland known as the Wilderness, which Bruce Catton called “the last place on earth for armies to fight,” he engaged Lee in a rapid succession of bloody battles: The Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, and Yellow Tavern. On May 20, Grant again advanced, attempting to outflank Lee, forcing Lee to move to keep ahead of him. On June 3, Grant had reached Cold Harbor, seven miles east of Richmond, the Confederate capital.

That day, Grant sent three corps, tens of thousands of men, charging across an open field against Confederate artillery. He did it repeatedly, only stopping some seven thousand casualties later. It was not that he had lost so many men—casualties are in the nature of the business—it was that he had wasted them, and Grant could not justify it even to himself. He had taken 60,000 casualties in one month’s hard fighting, nearly half the men with whom he had crossed the Rapidan. But the Union could replace them, while the Confederacy could no longer replace the 30,000 casualties Grant had inflicted on Lee.

Within a week, Grant moved yet again, this time in secret. On June 15, barely ten days after Cold Harbor, Lee realized he had been outfoxed for once when the Union army attacked the Confederate rail hub at Petersburg, Virginia. Lee’s luck was with him: the local Confederate commander held Grant off for three days, until Lee arrived in force on June 18. Now the armies dug in, erecting a line of forts and trenches that stretched some forty miles from Richmond to Petersburg. It was the first modern trench warfare: its students would apply its lessons fifty years later on the Western Front.

And, as on the Western Front, the result was stalemate. The frustration that had prompted Grant to order frontal assaults at Cold Harbor also led him to entertain radical means to break through Lee’s lines outside Petersburg. They wouldn’t work, either.

Unlike many Union officers assigned to command black troops, Ferrero seems to have had no reservations about their military virtues. Most of them were new to soldiering: he drilled and trained them vigorously.

East of Petersburg, the armies were closest at Elliott’s Salient, also called Pegram’s Salient. This was a Confederate artillery emplacement held by Johnson’s Division, an under-strength unit of a few thousand men commanded by Major General Bushrod Johnson, barely 500 feet from Burnside’s Ninth Corps.

One of Burnside’s regiments was the 48th Pennsylvania, an infantry regiment recruited among Schuylkill County coalminers. Even its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants, was a mining engineer. During their bull sessions, Pleasants’ men devised a plan. They would dig a 500-foot-long tunnel beneath the Confederate trenches and fill it with explosives to blast a hole in Lee’s line. A division would then attack through the breach. Pleasants proposed the scheme to Burnside, who approved it and obtained the begrudging consent of Gen. George Meade, who commanded the Army of the Potomac, and of General Grant.

Burnside selected the Fourth Division—Ferrero’s command—to spearhead the attack. Ferrero’s men were fresh, having been held in reserve. After the explosion, Ferrero’s mission would be to advance around the crater, clearing Confederate stragglers from their trenches. Then three more divisions would move through the breach to seize Cemetery Hill, about 500 yards beyond. The hill overlooked Petersburg itself: its control would make Lee’s position untenable. Ferrero immediately began training his men for the assault.

On June 25, 1864, the Pennsylvanians began digging the tunnel with picks and shovels, finishing it on July 23. The main shaft was 586 feet long and four and a half feet wide, with two lateral galleries, or branches, totaling 75 feet, extending beneath the Confederate entrenchments. Over the next four days, the Pennsylvanians packed 320 kegs of black powder, totaling 8000 pounds, into the galleries. Then they installed the fuse.

Within twelve hours of the attack, however, General Meade dropped his own bomb. Meade had just survived a congressional investigation into his conduct at Gettysburg a year before. If this attack failed, Meade wanted no political repercussions for ordering black soldiers to the slaughter. Accordingly, he ordered Burnside to substitute a white division for Ferrero’s as the assault’s first wave.

The change of plan was so sudden that some of Ferrero’s commanders did not learn of it until after midnight on the morning of battle.

It was an amazing decision. Ferrero had trained his men for weeks in anticipation of the assault. The other divisions were unprepared. Moreover, although Ferrero’s men had never been in close contact with the enemy, they were anxious to fight. Of course, Burnside had his orders, but a competent commander would have chosen Ferrero’s replacement as assault leader based upon his subordinates’ qualities. Burnside had his division commanders draw lots. James Ledlie won. No one worse could have been chosen.

A thirty-two-year-old civil engineer, born in Utica, New York, James Hewitt Ledlie had been commissioned a major in 1861, rising to brigadier general by the end of 1862. He had generally avoided combat in various district and post commands. This was probably good for all concerned. As Ezra Warner wrote in Generals in Blue, Ledlie was “an arrant physical coward” who hit the bottle under stress. Nonetheless, in May 1864, he was assigned to command a brigade in the Ninth Corps. A month later, he was given command of the First Division of the Ninth Corps, even though his subordinates were already complaining of his poor performance on the battlefield and his drinking habits.

Ledlie’s First Division, though weary and demoralized from weeks of fighting without relief and completely unprepared for this new assignment, was to enter the breach. At 3:30 a.m., zero hour, they were standing to. No explosion. After 4 a.m., the 48th Pennsylvania reported that the fuse had died out some forty feet short of the explosives. Lieutenant Jacob Douty and Sergeant Henry Rees entered the gallery and reignited the fuse. They had barely emerged from the tunnel’s mouth at 4:45 a.m. when the spark reached the explosives.

General Bushrod Johnson had anticipated a Union attempt to breach his lines through a frontal assault. Nothing had prepared him or his men for this. The earth shook for miles around. Then the ground burst like a volcano beneath the Confederate artillerists and infantrymen in the trenches in what Johnson’s official report called an upheaval “of an immense column of more than 100,000 cubic feet of earth.” Cannon, timbers, and men rose with it, flipping end over end in the air. Nine Southern infantry companies simply vanished.

As the column rose some 200 feet, 170 feet of Confederate entrenchment disintegrated, leaving a crater 135 feet long, 97 feet wide and 30 feet deep, littered with twisted pieces of iron, shattered wheels, broken cannon, human fragments, and half-buried screaming men. Nearly 150 pieces of Union artillery then opened fire upon the Confederate positions in what Johnson later called “the heaviest artillery fire known to our oldest officers in the field.”

Ledlie’s incompetence bore fruit from the first moment. He had failed to provide for ladders or steps: his men had to struggle to get out of their own trenches. His officers did not know where they were going once they reached the Crater because Ledlie had not briefed them on their new goal, Cemetery Hill, and their route to it.

The explosion and the enormous pit had struck Ledlie’s troops with awe. As they stumbled forward from the dust and smoke, their discipline failed: they could not resist the temptation to crowd forward to look into the hole. The attack slowed and stopped. The various units mingled together, breaking the lines of command. Officers could not find their men in the crowd. Fire began coming from the other side.

Good troops recover from the shock of disaster and Johnson’s men were very good. His surviving infantry and artillery began firing on the flanks of the advancing federal columns. Now, instead of advancing around the Crater, Ledlie’s troops began entering it to take shelter from enemy fire.

At a depth of thirty feet, getting into the Crater was easy. Getting out of it was not. Half an hour after they had stepped off, Ledlie’s command was huddled in a confused, leaderless mass at the bottom of the pit. Unit after unit backed up after them, leaving thousands of men either crammed into the Crater or stalled in no man’s land—useless as combat troops, but excellent targets. Even the Confederates found the slowness of the Union’s advance inexplicable. One observer noted that Johnson’s division had been so shaken that “there was nothing on the Confederate side to prevent the orderly [advance] of any column through the breach which had been effected, cutting the Confederate army in twain.”

Thus the First Division stalled. Its commander was not present to restore order, clear the trenches, and resume the advance. General Ledlie was huddled “in a bombproof shelter ten rods [165 feet] in the rear of the main line,” plying himself with a bottle of rum borrowed from a regimental surgeon. He couldn’t observe the fighting or pass instructions to his officers. A court of inquiry later found that “Had the division [been] led by a resolute, intelligent commander, it would have gained the crest in fifteen minutes after the explosion, and before any serious opposition could have been made to it.”

Within minutes of the explosion, Johnson had dispatched his aides to the Confederate divisions on his flanks for reinforcements. On his right flank was William Mahone’s Virginians. Johnson’s aide, an English volunteer named Smith, promptly galloped back to report Mahone was on the march.

Brigadier General William Mahone was not yet thirty-eight years old when Smith dashed up to his headquarters. Though the son of an innkeeper, Mahone had graduated from Virginia Military Institute, having paid his tuition from the proceeds of a card game at his father’s tavern.

He had been a college professor and professional railroader before entering the Confederate army in 1861. And his handsome and strong-willed wife Otelia Butler, mother of their thirteen children and a character in her own right, was nearly as famous as Mahone.

Mahone had transformed his command into what the authors of the encyclopedic Confederate Military History have described as “a remarkably spirited and unified organization which was inspired with a strong esprit [de] corps, and distinguished for readiness to take all chances in either defense or assault.” Moreover, Petersburg was Mahone’s hometown. (As Grant had quipped of Meade defending his native Pennsylvania at Gettysburg, “A rooster fights for his own dung hill.”)

Burnside sent in two more divisions. They either froze in no man’s land or took cover in the Crater. Then Burnside sent in Ferrero’s Fourth Division. They had to stop in the front line of the Federal trenches because other troops were blocking their way. Then Ferrero was ordered to advance. Then he was ordered to halt. Then he was ordered to advance. By now, his men were taking enemy fire and unable to protect themselves. They rushed forward. Some obeyed their orders, charging around the pit. Others stopped in no man’s land. Still more rushed into the Crater, hopelessly entangling themselves with the mob that had once been Ledlie’s command. Ferrero was not there. He was back in the bombproof with Ledlie, sharing the bottle.

Burnside, still farther in the rear, had been so sure of success that his baggage had been ordered packed for the advance into Petersburg. He disbelieved the bad news about the assault and kept sending troops up to the Crater. His attention was further distracted by the presence of the remarkably temperamental and profane General Meade, who began squabbling with him over the failure of the attack. The only fly on the wall was Horace Porter, one of Grant’s staff officers: he later claimed that day’s arguments between Generals Burnside and Meade “went far towards confirming one’s belief in the wealth and flexibility of the English language as a medium of personal dispute.” At 9:45 a.m., Grant and Meade flatly ordered Burnside to break off the offensive and withdraw. Burnside did not forward the order to his troops for nearly three more hours.

In the meantime, Mahone’s Virginians had come to the Crater, filling the breach in the Confederate lines created by the explosion. Then at 9 a.m., while Mahone was redeploying his command—moving them into place for a counterattack—part of Ferrero’s Fourth Division, having passed the Crater as originally planned, advanced upon him in line of battle. Only half of Mahone’s command was in place. He charged anyway.

The Virginians came boiling out of a ravine, smashing head-on into the Federals, and in a serious of ferocious charges, killed or forced back every Federal soldier who had gone beyond the Crater. Johnson’s artillery encouraged the bluecoats on their way with canister—shells filled with musket balls that scattered in all directions after exploding.

Between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m., as Johnson reported, Confederate artillerists began using mortars—small, short-range artillery with high trajectory—to drop explosive shells “with remarkable precision” into the mass of men huddled at the bottom of the pit. Then the rebel infantry pressed to the Crater’s rim, hiring into the nearly helpless Federal troops floundering in “their huge, earthen barrel.”

Around noon, Mahone’s command charged into the pit, driving out the survivors in hand-to-hand fighting. Many Confederates had been told Ferrero’s division was under orders to take no prisoners. Now they returned the compliment, shooting and bayoneting every black soldier they could find.

By mid-afternoon, the fighting was over. Bodies lay four and five deep on the floor of the Crater. The Union suffered 3,798 to 5,300 casualties. Of these, half were from Ferrero’s African-American division, who had stood their ground and fought and died. Nevertheless, The New York Times reported that the black soldiery had fallen “out of the range of fire after several advances forward,” an evasive suggestion that they had run away. Indeed, Northern journalists seem to have been nearly as one in blaming Negro troops for the defeat. An unnamed special correspondent wrote that their conduct “was as disgraceful as it proved disastrous to themselves.” This was simply untrue: it would have been news to one of Ferrero’s men, Sergeant Decatur Dorsey of the 19^th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, who won the Medal of Honor for saving his company colors from a Confederate charge and rallying his men to advance.

The Confederacy had lost from 1,032 to 1,500 men. The assault had been, as Grant wrote, a “stupendous failure.” He would besiege Petersburg for another eight months.

The U.S. Army convened a court of inquiry, which heard testimony for sixteen days. They found Burnside and Ledlie at fault. Only now, after Antietam and Fredericksburg and the Crater, was Burnside finally relieved of command. Ledlie resigned his commission in January 1865, having been literally read out of the service on Grant’s orders. Ferrero was found responsible for having been “where he could not see the operation of his troops [or know] the position of the two brigades of his division or whether they had taken Cemetery Hill.”

Robert E. Lee promoted Mahone to major general before sundown on the day of battle. Mahone fought until the very end and surrendered with Lee at Appomattox. His neighbors elected him mayor of Petersburg; his fellow Virginians, U.S. Senator, from which office he dominated the politics of the Old Dominion. His Atlantic, Mississippi & Ohio Railway was a direct ancestor of today’s Norfolk Southern. Once, when Mahone was standing beside one of its steam locomotives, someone asked him the meaning of the initials “A. M. & O.” painted on its tender. “All Mine and Otelia’s,” he replied.

Ambrose E. Burnside resigned his commission on April 15, 1865. Rhode Island welcomed him as a conquering hero. His warm, charismatic personality overcame his consistent history of military debacle to see him three times elected governor and, in 1874, U.S. senator, which office he held until his death on September 13, 1881. Six years later in Providence, on July 4, 1887, the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations dedicated an equestrian statue to its beloved incompetent.

James Ledlie, that “arrant physical coward,” made a fortune in building and promoting western and southern railroads. In 1882, he died of dropsy and jaundice at the St. Mark’s Hotel in New Brighton, Staten Island. His New York Times obituary does not mention the Battle of the Crater. Ledlie, Nevada, which was named for him in 1880, became a ghost town after his Nevada Central Railroad was torn up in 1938. At last report, all that remained was a collapsed wooden building and a solitary telegraph pole.

Edward Ferrero never ceased to praise his men for their courage under fire at the Crater. Despite the court of inquiry’s finding, he was brevetted major general on December 2, 1864 for “meritorious service.” After he was mustered out of the army in 1865, Ferrero returned to New York, and, over the next three decades, operated a succession of splendid ballrooms and catering halls that, from their descriptions in the contemporary press, seem precursors to such institutions as Leonard’s of Great Neck. He died in his home at 111 West 7^th street on Monday, December 11, 1899. His New York Times obituary, like that of Ledlie, does not mention the Crater, either. He lies in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. His most enduring work, The Art of Dancing, has been reprinted and may be found on Amazon.com.

New York Press, January 14 & 28, 2003

My Neighbors Got It Wrong

Back on October 30, 2010, I announced my intention to vote for Tom Vendittelli, the Libertarian candidate for U.S. Representative from the 13^th District of New York. http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/5585 My motives were simple (although I admit a general sympathy for political independents and insurgents of all kinds). The Establishment party opponents, Democratic Congressman Michael E. McMahon and Republican challenger Michael G. Grimm, had harassed my wife and me with up to ten telephone calls a day. Mr. Venditelli and his friends had not.

I find such interruptions extremely annoying at the best of times. I was enraged when the candidates’ volunteer callers began arguing with my wife about why she should listen to them. As I knew neither McMahon nor Grimm, I took their measure from the people who supported them. Hence Tom Vendittelli. At least his followers weren’t harassing me in my home.

I thought my readers and neighbors here in Bay Ridge, some of whom had also complained to me about the calls and the empty glossy mailings jamming their mailboxes, might join me in protesting this abuse by voting for Mr. Vendittelli. I knew nothing about him beyond the materials on his website. But Tom was clearly sincere about his libertarianism. He’d left me alone.

My neighbors apparently didn’t share my concerns. The New York State Board of Elections’ official results were: Grimm, 65,024; McMahon, 60,773; Vendittelli, 929. Out of 126,726 votes, Tom had polled less than one percent. As he noted on Facebook, “We lost by a nose.”

While my neighbors clearly disagree with me, I can only note that next year, the politicians will be back, harassing me in party games.

When Politics Comes Calling

A neighbor talked with me over the back fence:

I live in the 13th Congressional District, which includes Staten Island and the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. During the last two weeks, Michael McMahon, Democrat-Independence, and Michael Grimm, Republican-Conservative, have barraged my wife and me with the usual meaningless glossy direct mail and telephone calls from recording devices and volunteers.

Although we are on both the Federal and State do not call lists, the politicians are exempt from such restrictions. After all, they wrote the laws creating them.

The telephone calls from machines are bad enough. We thought those were appalling, in fact, until we started getting calls from volunteers. Most of the callers are rude, touchy, and obnoxious. They’re largely working from scripts. They become aggressive or insulted when we tell them we’re not interested. They’re are poor advertisements for their candidates.

Everything about the way they behave and talk suggests that our lives are unimportant when set against the necessity of this or that faceless, indistinguishable candidate getting elected.

So, as we know neither McMahon nor Grimm, we can take their measure as men only from the people who support them.

That’s why we’re voting for the third candidate, Tom Vendittelli, Libertarian. Of him, we know nothing, but he’s clearly sincere about his libertarianism: he and his volunteers have left us alone. Perhaps he’ll do the same when he’s in Congress.

Campaign Lit, Part 1

The use of the word “literature” to describe the campaign fliers and pamphlets that fill our mailboxes at this time of year has always intrigued me. Usually, the stuff reminds me of Talleyrand’s observation that language exists to conceal truth. Sometimes, though, the truth will out. Today’s example is a mail piece from the affable Bob Capano, a lawyer, long-time political appointee, adjunct professor, and genuinely nice guy who is presently the Republican candidate for the local City Council seat against the incumbent, who is a Democrat.

Like most local Republicans, Mr. Capano strongly supports the re-election of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Mr. Capano’s literature complains that local residents are being bled dry with parking and sanitation fines. He argues that this is the fault of the incumbent City Councilman, who tends to oppose the Mayor. Mr. Capano suggests that he should be elected in place of the incumbent because, as he is more likely to get along with the Mayor than the incumbent, Mr. Capano is more likely to “sit down with Mayor Mike Bloomberg and get him to understand things from our perspective.” In other words, Mr. Capano can stop the ticketing.

There is a flaw in Mr. Capano’s argument. Ticketing was meant as a means of enforcing public order without invoking criminal sanctions. Better to ticket someone who parks when no parking is allowed or who fails to keep the sidewalk clean in front of his store than to haul them off in cuffs.

But for at least a generation, these laws and regulations have been abused into a mere source of revenue. Indeed, the City budget projects receiving a certain amount of income from such fines. Anecdotal evidence has long suggested that supervisors pressure their subordinates into filling a quota of tickets every month.

Mr. Capano’s argument is founded on the premise that excessive ticketing is oppressive. Indeed, extracting money unreasonably from a citizen sounds like tyranny to me. But who is the tyrant? Who heads the City government whose agents oppress those whom Mr. Capano would represent, the “middle class residents of Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, and Bensonhurst”? None other than Mr. Bloomberg, whose re-election Mr. Capano supports.

Mmm. Am I alone in sensing a logical disconnect here?

Diploma Mill Redux

I have a long-time love affair with the underworld of diploma mills which, in a society overawed by credentials, is an unending source of amusement and entertaining copy.

So I was unsurprised to learn that, as recently as February 2007, the New York City Department of Investigation reported that fourteen city firefighters had used bogus diplomas, purchased from St. Regis University (an on-line institution, supposedly located in Liberia) to seek promotion to officer positions such as deputy chief, battalion chief, and captain. This stemmed from a relatively new Departmental policy requiring college credits as well as practical firefighting experience to gain promotion.

Four of the fourteen were actually promoted on the strength of these counterfeit credentials, including Daniel O’Gara, who was advanced to Battalion Chief after obtaining a St. Regis baccalaureate for $550.

At the end of the scandal, the fourteen paid fines totaling some $136,000. According to the New York Post, those who had been promoted kept their jobs because they had all, since their promotions, obtained enough legitimate credits to qualify for their new jobs.

Requiescat L.D. Knox

On May 29, 2009, The New York Times published the obituary of L. D. “None of the Above” Knox, 80, a farmer and politician from Winnsboro, Louisiana who had crusaded for over forty years to make “None of the Above” an option on the Pelican State’s ballots.
In 1979, he went so far as to make “None of the Above” his additional middle name and used it thereafter whenever he ran for office.

In 1979, he went so far as to make “None of the Above” his additional middle name and used it thereafter whenever he ran for office. The Times states:

His aim—allowing voters to call for a new election with new candidates by voting for “none of the above”—remained his main plank in subsequent elections.

“The people of this country have never had a free election,” he said in 1991. “We don’t have a right to reject candidates. We have to take the lesser of the evils.”

From his notices in papers across Louisiana, Mr. Knox seems to have been well-liked and respected, although most of his electoral defeats were one-sided blowouts.

Yet, as I argued in 2004, the “None of the Above” option has increasing appeal when many elections are effectively uncontested—as in the case of the upcoming New York City mayoralty, where billionaire incumbent Michael Bloomberg’s unlimited funds effectively push his opponents completely out of the public eye.

Just Say “NOTA”

From New York Press, Janury 21, 2004

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to throw out the old papers piled up on my desk. I’m not a pack rat like the Bronx guy who spent two days trapped in his apartment under an avalanche of his own magazines and newspapers, but I’ve a weakness for letting interesting documents accumulate. So, late on the afternoon of January 1, 2004, I went to work.

One thing I turned up was the New York City Campaign Finance Board’s Voter Guide for the General Election of November 4, 2003. I kept it for laughs after reading the statements published in it by the candidates in my city council district. Although the Democratic incumbent, an affable party hack, seemed pleasant enough, his pompous, jargon-ridden prose indicted him for bad thinking. His sole opponent, a Democrat who, having lost his party’s primary in September, had been nominated by the Republicans, was more interested in advertising his East Harlem restaurant—complete with directions—than public policy. I don’t know about his food, but publicizing one’s business with taxpayers’ money seems to betray bad taste, if not bad ethics. Neither man would have satisfied James Madison’s hope that our elections should feature candidates “who possess the most attractive merit.”

What to do about such losers? In New York, nothing. One of these guys was going to be elected. Furthermore, as we now know, despite their assaults on liberty and property (tax hikes of 18 percent on residential property and nearly 2000 percent on cigarettes, banning smoking in bars, and laws penalizing this newspaper’s street boxes), every incumbent city council member seeking re-election in November was returned to City Hall. Much of the reason wasn’t apathy. The incumbents were mostly unopposed at the general election, or opposed only by characters you would vote for only as a joke. The same was true of last year’s judicial elections in Manhattan. Nor is this a phenomenon peculiar to New York: in 2002, seventy-eight of the 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives were uncontested by one of the two major parties, which usually meant no contest at all.

Mere elections—even honest elections—are no symptom of democracy. For example, a generation ago in the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship held regular and contested elections. However, the only opposition candidates allowed on the ballot were wackos: the Filipino equivalent of our Prohibitionists, Greenbackers, and Lyndon LaRouche. Electable opponents had an odd way of being bumped off. And we all know now that Yugoslavia’s Milosevic repeatedly won freely contested elections on the road to ethnic cleansing. Democracy is more than a ritual we observe every November. At any rate, it should be.

A workable alternative to New York’s system of bad choice/no choice has been used in Nevada for a generation. One of the Silver State’s attractions (beside the absence of state income tax) is its voters’ right to vote against all candidates. Since 1975, under The Nevada Revised Statutes 293.269, ballots for statewide office or for president and vice president must always include “None of these Candidates.”

Consequently, sometimes you can beat somebody with nobody. In 1976, “None of these Candidates” won the Republican congressional primary with 47.3 percent of the vote, much to the embarrassment of the hack perennial candidates left far behind. Two years later, it won the Democratic congressional primary. In the 1980 Democratic presidential primary, it outpolled Senator Edward Kennedy and nearly defeated President Carter. It won the 1986 Democratic primary for state treasurer, beating five real candidates, and beat Ralph Nader in the 1996 Green presidential primary. Two years ago, in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, “None of these Candidates” embarrassed the machine candidate (who openly favored raising taxes) by polling 24 percent of the vote to his 35 percent (a topless dancer came in third with 21 percent).

But Nevada law still lets the candidate with the most votes be elected or nominated, even if “None of these Candidates” wins. It’s a safety valve, not a barrier to the hacks. A better option would be to require a new election if “None of these Candidates” outpolled the candidates, with the losers barred from the ballot. This is the practice in Russia and a few Eastern European countries, where voters may simply reject all the candidates and try again.

The option of voting for “None of these Candidates” or “None of the Above”—NOTA for short—enjoys support on both left and right. The Wall Street Journal endorsed NOTA in 1996, after Representative Wes Cooley of Oregon was re-nominated despite being exposed as both a fraud and a phony war hero. Although unopposed at the Republican primary, Cooley received only 23,000 votes while 31,000 voters cast blank ballots or various write-ins. The voters had no effective way to deny his re-nomination. This was two years after Representative Mel Reynolds of Illinois was re-elected unopposed following his post-primary indictment for raping a minor, possession of child pornography, and obstruction of justice. (Later convicted, forced to resign, and imprisoned, Reynolds was pardoned by President Clinton on his last day in office so he could work as a youth counselor for the Reverend Jesse Jackson).

And the hits just keep on coming. Some of us remember the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial runoff between Klansman/hustler/racist agitator David Duke (now imprisoned for mail fraud) and the flamboyantly dishonest Edwin Edwards (now imprisoned for fraud, racketeering, and extortion). Then, it was a choice between vulgarity and obscenity. Governor Edwards, whose supporters proclaimed, “Vote for the crook. It’s important,” later quipped that the only folks who didn’t vote for him were one-armed people: they couldn’t hold their noses and pull the lever by his name at the same time.

Others may recall some local elections in New York, such as the 1987 Bronx district attorney’s race in which the effectively unopposed incumbent died before Election Day, requiring voters to elect a corpse; or the death of West Side Representative Ted Weiss in September 1992, which permitted the Democratic machine to anoint a loyalist assemblyman as his successor and then a party district leader as the assemblyman’s successor, all without a single primary.

Presently then, New Yorkers have three empty options in elections such as the one in my city council district last November: voting for one or another empty suit; writing in someone’s name (which will not be counted); or not voting. None of them matter. But adopting NOTA would let voters simply reject unacceptable candidates and try again. Even an unopposed candidate might lose if the voters found him unworthy, or felt they just didn’t know enough to make an informed decision.

Some oppose NOTA because holding a new election every time “None of these Candidates” won might be expensive. Against this is the possibility of defeating unqualified hacks who merely know how to game the system and whose incompetence would probably lead to inefficiency and waste at the taxpayers’ expense. More absurd is the possibility of a series of elections in which “None of these Candidates” wins, instead of allowing on the ballot better candidates who actually wage informative campaigns on relevant issues. (And some political puritans argue that the Nevada option would let voters avoid making hard choices: as if most Americans weren’t already avoiding such decisions by simply not voting at all.)

Of course we all understand that most of these arguments are mere eyewash to conceal the hacks’ self-interest. Having spent nearly fifteen years in City Hall, I speak from personal experience in suggesting that most politicians only pay lip service to democracy. For them, the paramount issue is controlling the system. Anything that weakens that control is unacceptable. They don’t have to read Machiavelli to understand that.

Yet, as Dr. John Pitney suggests in “The Right to Vote No,” NOTA really may come down to first principles. If free government is really based on the consent of the governed, the people should have a clear way of effectively withholding their consent from candidates who are unworthy, unknown, or unopposed. Otherwise, they simply may passively withdraw their consent. Perhaps, by not voting, they’re doing that already.