“Mary Conway.
“Sworn to before me, Sept. 20th, 1871.
“Thos. A. Ledwith, Police Justice.”
In consequence of this disclosure, Baulch and Haggerty were arrested on the charge of stealing the vouchers. Search was made in the Court-House, and the half-charred fragments of the vouchers were found in a room used for the storage of old lumber. Naturally, the Ring endeavored to treat this discovery as a trick of the Comptroller’s, and they furnished the men charged with the theft with able counsel to defend them.
The citizens on their part endeavored to bring matters to a satisfactory termination and secure the punishment of the Ring; but the members of that body met them at every step with defiance and effrontery. They used every means in their power to prevent an investigation of the public accounts, and to defeat the efforts that were made to recover the money they had stolen from the city. Meanwhile the Citizens’ Committee labored faithfully, and, through the efforts of Mr. Tilden, evidence was obtained sufficient to cause the arrest of Mr. Tweed. Garvey, Woodward, and Ingersoll sought safety in flight. Mayor Hall was arrested on the charge of sharing the plunder obtained by the Ring, but the examining magistrate declined to hold him on the charge for lack of evidence against him, and the Grand Jury refused to indict him, for the same reason. Mr. Tweed had been nominated for the State Senate by a constituency composed of the most worthless part of the population, and, in spite of the charges against him, he continued to present himself for the suffrages of these people, by whom he was elected at the November election. In due time the various committees appointed by the citizens made their reports, presenting the facts we have embodied in this chapter. The guilt of the members of the Ring was proven so clearly that no reasonable person could doubt it; but still grave fears were expressed that it would be impossible to bring these men to justice, in consequence of the arts of shrewd counsel and legal quibbles. The determination of the citizens grew with the approach of the elections. Their last great victory over the Ring was achieved at the polls on the 7th of November, when the entire Ring ticket in the city, with but one or two exceptions, was overwhelmingly defeated.
Whether the guilty parties will be punished as they deserve, or whether the citizens will allow the prosecutions they have instituted to flag, the future alone can decide. At the present there is reason to fear that the guilty will escape. Should this fear be realized, the citizens of New York will have abundant cause to regret it. The Ring is badly beaten, but it is not destroyed. Many of its members are still in office, and there are still numbers of its followers ready to do its bidding. Until the last man tainted with the infamy of an alliance with the Ring is removed from office, the people of New York may be sure that the danger is not at an end.
II. PERSONNEL OF THE RING.
Generally speaking, the Ring may be said to include every office-holder in the city, and it is very certain that of late every official has come in for a share of the suspicion with which the people regard the transactions of the Ring. It would be impossible to give an accurate and complete list of the members of that body, for many of them are not yet known to the public; but the recent investigations have shown that it is not composed exclusively of Democrats. A number of Republicans, while openly acting with their party, have been found to be allied with and in the pay of the Ring.
The men who are supposed to have played the most conspicuous parts in the doings of the Ring, and who are believed by the public to be chiefly responsible for its acts, are Mayor A. O. Hall, Richard B. Connolly, William M. Tweed, Peter B. Sweeny, J. H. Ingersoll, Andrew J. Garvey, and E. A. Woodward.
A. Oakey Hall, Mayor of the city, was born in New York, is of American parentage, and is about forty-six years old. He received a good education, and at an early age began the study of the law. He removed to New Orleans soon after, and was for a while in the office of the Hon. John Slidell. He subsequently returned to New York, where he became associated with the late Mr. Nathaniel Blunt, as Assistant District-Attorney. Upon the death of Mr. Blunt, he was elected District-Attorney by the Whig party, and held that position for about twelve years. At the end of that time, he was elected Mayor of New York, to succeed John T. Hoffman, now Governor of the State. For some years he has been a member of the law firm of Brown, Hall & Vanderpoel, which firm enjoys a large and lucrative practice. He is said to be a lawyer of considerable ability, and has undoubtedly had great experience in criminal practice. As a politician, his experience has also been extensive and varied. He began life as a Whig, but became a prominent Know-Nothing in the palmy days of that party. Finding Know-Nothingism a failure, however, he became a Republican, from which party, about nine or ten years ago, he passed over to the Democrats.
A writer in Every Saturday thus speaks of him:
“His Honor has some facility as a writer, and for twenty years has maintained a quasi or direct connection with the press. He is not lacking in the culture of desultory reading, and when he chooses to do so can bear himself like a gentleman. Of such a thing as dignity of character, he appears to have but a faint conception. Pedantry is more to him than profundity, and to tickle the ear of the town with a cheap witticism, he deems a greater thing than to command it with a forcible presentation of grave issues. The essential type of the man was presented to public gaze about two years ago, when he stood on the City Hall steps dressed from head to foot in a suit of green to review a St. Patrick’s procession. He is a harlequin with the literary ambition of a Richelieu. He affects an intimacy with the stage, and has done something in the way of producing plays. He can write clearly and concisely when he will, but prefers to provoke with odd quips and far-fetched conceits. He patronizes journalists and magazine writers with a sort of grotesque familiarity, and readily makes himself at home among the Bohemians of Literature.”
Since his union with the Democracy, Mr. Hall has been the constant and intimate associate of the men who have brought disgrace and loss upon the city, and of late years he has been regarded as one of the leading members of the Ring. It is said openly in New York that he owes his election to the Mayoralty entirely to William M. Tweed. As Mayor of the city, he has been officially connected with many of the transactions by which the city has been defrauded of large sums of money. Some of the most prominent newspapers of the city have denounced him as a thief and a sharer of the stolen money. His friends, on the other hand, have declared their belief that his worst fault was his official approval of the fraudulent warrants. They state that he has never in his manner of living, or in any other way, given evidence of possessing large sums of money, and his legal partner made oath before the Grand Jury that Mr. Hall was not worth over $60,000 or $70,000. It is certain that when the proprietor of the New York Times, which journal had been loud in denouncing Hall as a thief, was called on by the Grand Jury to furnish them with the evidence upon which this charge was based, he was unable to do so, and the Grand Jury was unable to obtain any evidence criminating Mr. Hall personally. His friends declare that his signing the fraudulent warrants was a purely ministerial act, and that having many thousands of them to sign in a year, he was compelled to rely upon the endorsements of the Comptroller and auditing officers.
In the present state of affairs, there is no evidence showing that Mr. Hall derived any personal pecuniary benefit from the frauds upon the treasury. Public sentiment is divided respecting him; many persons believing that he is a sharer in the plunder of the Ring, and others holding the opposite opinion. The most serious charges that have been made against him, have been brought by Mr. John Foley, and Mr. Samuel J. Tilden. The former is the President of the Nineteenth Ward Citizens’ Association, and the latter the leader of the Reform Democracy. Mr. Tilden, in his speech at the Cooper Institute, November 2d, 1871, thus spoke of Mayor Hall:
“These three Auditors met but once. They then passed a resolution which now stands on the records of the city in the handwriting of Mayor Hall. It was passed on his motion, and what was its effect? Did it audit anything? Did it perform the functions? Did it fulfil the trust committed to the Board? Not a