HALF=MOON SERIES EDITED BY MAUD WILDER GOODWIN ALICE CARRINGTON ROYCE RUTH PUTNAM AND EVA PALMER BROWNELL Vol. II., No. a. February, 1898. ttamman\> Dall Galcott Williams, %:ib.2>* Copyright, 1808, by G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS New York London TEbe "ftrUcfeerbocfeer press, New Rochelle, N. Y. Entered at the Post Office, New Rochelle, N. Y., as Second-class Matter Price Ten Cents Per Year, One Dollar MISS SPENCE'S Boarding and Day School for Girls preparatory Bcaoemfc, ano CoHegespreparatore Courses No more than eight pupils constitute any class 6 WEST 48th STREET, with Annex MRS. LESLIE MORGAN'S ™ for (Birls 13 and 15 WEST 86th STREET NEW YORK CITY < < < < Kindergarten, Through College Preparatory Home and Chaperonage THE ANNIE BROWN SCHOOL JSoarfctna an£> Dap Scbooi for Girls Primary, Preparatory, Academic, and Musical Departments. Preparation for College. Special Courses. 7 1 1 —7 1 3—7 1 5—7 1 7 Fifth Avenue : : Mrs. FRANCES FISHER WOOD Resident Principal THE HELBURN SCHOOL 35 WEST 9OTH STREET kindergarten, primary and grammar de- partments, thoroughly graded, sep- arate class-room and teacher for each class. reopens oct. 4th. 4 Ube ftntcfcerbocfcer Qtces, t*ew Borft TAMMANY HALL 31 OY^ 1 1 W &OK SI Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library Gift of Seymour B. Durst Old York Library 33 Half Moon Series Published in the Interest of the New York City History Club. Volume II. Number II. TAMMANY HALL. By TALCOTT WILLIAMS, LL.D., L.H.D. TAMMANY, for nearly a century, has con- stituted the political agency by which the major mass of the voters of New York City has made effective its preferences in regard to the rule of the city for good or for ill to the worst harvest yet reaped in the wide field of universal suffrage. This ruling organization of adult male voters has sometimes been for years together only a plurality of the voters of the city profiting by the divisions of its opponents, and it has sometimes itself divided by fission, a part pre- ferring to use one of the many agencies organ- ized in imitation of Tammany ; but for seventy years there has never been a time at any elec- tion when it was not perfectly clear to every unprejudiced observer that a clear plurality of the voters resident on Manhattan Island, pre- ferred, other things being equal, to re-elect rulers whose primary selection had been de- termined by this political agency. Doters on flDanbattan HsIanD 34 Uammans Iball Ube ^fortunes of Europe It has been associated with the most gigan- tic spoliation of a civilized city known under manhood suffrage, though the aggregate of its levies has been small by the side of the gigan- tic fine inflicted on Paris and France by the military despotism, which ruled both with the applause and approval of liberal England and despotic Europe, from the coup d'etat to Sedan. Until the close of the last century, it was expected in Europe, as it is still expected in all Oriental countries, that those who gov- erned a nation or conducted the higher and more important duties of its religion would enrich themselves in the process. The princely palaces of Rome record the splendid, sump- tuous and successful application of this princi- ple to the fruits of the faith of Christendom. So the " great families" of Europe, their homes, their fortunes, and their rent-rolls, save when the reward of military sack or ser- vice, nearly always represent the lucrative use for private emolument of the control of pub- lic revenue on a larger or smaller scale, through the exercise or inheritance of feudal agencies of rule, or a share in the more modern agen- cies of administration. The faith and the patriotism of men, their fears for the next world and their civil necessities in this, have in all ages up to our own been regarded as the legitimate sources of private fortune, by those who allayed the one or supplied the other. it TEammang Dall 35 It is only under democratic conditions that men are expected to gain power without los- ing their poverty, and even the rapid acquire- ment of wealth by legitimate means during public service, is deemed a cause for scandal and suspicion. To the usual rule of popular institutions that public servants should leave the public service without money and without debts, their stipends permitting not even the honorable acquirement of a competence after years in positions of power and responsibility, Tammany Hall has been not the only excep- tion, but the one most conspicuous, significant, and scandalous. Yet the prodigious and co- lossal thefts of certain of its leaders have never permanently destroyed the confidence of a plurality of the voters of New York City in its value as a political agency, which, by and large, gave them the kind of city government which they preferred. They have returned to its banners, its ballots, and its candidates whenever an exposure too scandalous to be endured drove them from it, and they never more unhesitatingly adhered to their faith in it under untoward circumstances than in the election, which in November, 1897, surren- dered to Tammany the entire government of Greater New York, in whose history and management that of Tammany will, in future, be merged. Tammany, during its periods of success, is 2>emos cratic ConM= tions 36 TTammans ftall tteal Causes the strongest and most convincing argument which exists to-day against the extension of the principle of manhood suffrage to the ad- ministration of urban affairs. The principle itself is only a form of government, or to speak more accurately, a form of the consent, on which all rule rests. The most arbitrary des- potism, in its ultimate analysis, springs from general consent, and the "freest" institutions have no other basis. The issue between the two is, whether this consent shall be exercised by submission, or through the periodical choice of rulers by all the voters of a commu- nity. If the admitted evils of Tammany for a century are the normal fruits of the direct rule of a great city by its voters, free institutions are doomed. The ultimate verdict of civiliza- tion and of honesty will be against the form of government on which, for over two centu- ries, as has been confidently believed, rested the hopes of man and the progress of the race. If, however, these evils are not physiological but pathological, if they are not the normal re- sults of conditions either natural or inevitable, but pathological instead, the normal results of abnormal conditions, then the final fruit and result of this great object lesson on the politi- cal consciousness and convictions of mankind depends upon whether these abnormal con- ditions are reparable or irreparable ; due to circumstance or to human nature, the out- ftammans Iball 37 come of a special environment, or of the gen- eral working of the democratic principle. So momentous are the consequences in- volved in a solution of the cause and work- ing of Tammany Hall that neither its assail- ants nor its supporters, and much less those who discuss it from the general standpoint of past politics or present history, have been able with an even temper to contemplate its disastrous operations, for three generations a constant encouragement to those who hon- estly believe that privilege and the govern- ment of the few are necessary to the happiness and security of the many, and a discourage- ment as perpetual to those whose confidence in the righteousness and worth of the visible recurrent and articulate control of the many, is unshaken even by Tammany Hall. Yet the facts of the case, neither few nor complex, are both accessible and apparent, enacted on a scene more than any other in the world's history, the object of constant unsparing and contemporary record. The largest city of the Western World is situated on an island whose shape, size, and surroundings deprived it of an homogeneous civic population, while its own growth was a part, and the most conspicuous part, of that great stream of emigration which has trans- ferred 15,000,000 persons, or half the present population of the United Kingdom, during the ConMs tfons on flDans battan Asians 3« TTammans foall Confcis tions oif /Dane battan Island last seventy years, from one side of the Atlan- tic to the other. Our daily and practical mo- rality is, in large measure, the result of our consciousness of the social conscience of the community of which we are part. Every man who travels is aware, always by observation, and but too often by experience, of the sudden shattering of moral observance which befalls those of training, character, and years, when they suddenly find themselves strangers in a strange city, free from the observation of those who do or may know them. A not dissimilar moral deliquescence is the inevitable result of immigration. If it has furnished more than its proportionate and numerical share of crime, corruption, and imprisonment, the wonder must be that it has not done more. While in London but a small percentage of the population is of foreign birth, while the rapid growth of foreign cities, whose swift in- crease during the present century is often cited by the unfriendly critics of our municipal af- fairs as proof that our urban problems offer no peculiar difficulties, has, with negligible ex- ceptions, drawn its accretion from a sur- rounding population of the same race, language, and institutions; New York City has been a vast sand-dune, without integral relations, swept across the Atlantic and deposited in the most convenient coign of vantage on the coast of North America. Deprived of all the myriad Vammang Ifoail 39 stay and support to sound political action which comes from coherent and uninterrupted mutual personal acquaintance and tradition, these unrelated units represented, for the most part, that precise stratum of society where generations of relentless toil had ingrained the impression that all social institutions worked together for the advantage of the few. It is, inevitably, those who most bitterly feel this disadvantage in the Old World, who seek the New. This great mass, in its diverse language and with very varied traditions, but alike in a past training of profound distrust for both the honesty and good faith of those who enjoy privileges of education, wealth, and refinement, of direction in business, of supremacy in affairs, or of influence through ability, was certain to find its natural and necessary leaders in the members of that class of the community which, by supplying his first wants, comes into direct personal, and more or less selfish or unselfish contact with the stranger laboring with his hands to seek new fortunes in a new home. The class to which he turned for direction could not be the employer, for he represented the restraint and the bourgeois opportunity from which the immigrant fled, and which he hated in his old home and new. It could not be in religion he would find leaders, for through all its early stage, the great mass of immigrants were of a faith deemed alien by the organized mature of tbc Hm= migrants 40 Uammanp Ibali tfteason for ©rgans i3atfon churches of the community to which he came. The small grocer and the liquor-seller, the mechanic foreman or superintendent, and the contractor risen from the ranks of laborers, and for whom he was able to furnish the employ- ment the raw newcomer first seeks, consti- tuted the directing force of society brought most directly in contact with the immigrant and his offspring, new landed or long resident. Coming as strangers and unorganized, the immigrant population fell under the immediate direction of that stratum of society which lay nearest, and which had none of the ob- jectionable features of other strata whose rule was resented, and whose privileges elsewhere were remembered with bitterness. The pre- cise classes which have been described con- stituted, and still constitute, the backbone of Tammany Hall. It is a grave error to confound the natural, praiseworthy, and often sound desire of the men of this class of lesser retail dealers, liquor- sellers, and contractors, to be of political influ- ence, and to bear a share in the business of government, with the organized and continu- ous plunder of some of their higher leaders. To many in the rank and file of Tammany Hall, no pecuniary advantage, but the reverse, has come from their membership. They are in it because, being what they are, and the city what it is, it offers the readiest channel to Uammans iball 41 gratify the laudable wish to be of weight and moment in the community in which one lives. Flagrant and flagitious corruption of voters has existed, but corruption only lubri- cated the machine. It was not its prime motor. The wish and will of a well-organized plurality was this. Tammany has been the agent of this wish. The not infrequent result has been a corruption unexampled under dem- ocratic and liberal institutions, though easily matched among despotisms to whose types, methods, and institutions, Tammany of late constantly tends to revert. These influences would not have become paramount and predominant on Manhattan Island, if it had contained a city normally con- stituted as to its population, or normally housed as to its dwellings. For the first half-century, New York was such a city, and Tammany Hall, while powerful, was not despotic. But be- tween 1840 and 1870, a large portion of the middle class of New York was siphoned off by insular conditions of territory into Brooklyn, which has often had its boss, always its politi- cal independence, and never a Tammany Hall. No insignificant share of the same general class was diverted to the suburban settle- ments of New Jersey and Connecticut. This left New York City without that precise social enclave which might have saved it, and which in all cities and all times is the salva- Ube Class 42 ttammang Iball Domestic Service tion of the commonwealth, the class which filled the trainbands of London in the fight with Charles, and the Continental Army in the fight with George. The instant this class was restored by the charter of Greater New York to the constituents of the city, Tammany Hall was seen to be reduced in its relative vote, though on Manhattan Island it retained its usual plurality. 1 This double circumstance, a population im- migrant in fact or by descent, which found its natural leaders in the lower retail ranks of economic distribution and social direction, and an urban community, in which a valuable and necessary constituent had been decanted off of the island by its shape and by the pres- sure of trade and population, was undoubtedly aggravated by the conditions of American soci- ety. Fugitive in all its relations, American life has reduced to its final contractual nexus the relations of domestic service. Where do- mestic service is personal and continuous, it and the relations which grow up under these conditions, furnish an important agency by which the political opinions of the well-to-do are filtered through all social strata. The American habit of discharging servants in the spring and re-engaging them in the fall, and a domestic habit and attitude which, from faults on both sides, renders this relation still more precarious, completely sundered and separated TTammans 1ball 43 the more fortunate social strata from the less fortunate, in which lie most of the votes of Tammany. Since those in need were, for the most part, strangers in a strange land, without personal relations, a vicarious charity system devel- oped, under which most New Yorkers com- muted the personal service each man and woman owes to those about him in want, into a money payment. While this disbursed the vast sums which render New York City one of the most liberal in its charities the world over, it divorced and deprived these char- ities of the personal influence which is the just fruit of an honest personal charity which seeks, first, not to relieve the needs of another, but to discharge one's own personal debt and duty to society, and the relief of human want. In the end, also, these charities themselves, in more than one instance, became the scandal- ous beneficiaries of Tammany Hall, and were harnessed to the car of its organization, so that their work presented itself to a great mass of the poor and struggling as part of a system which, whether it plundered the rich or not, at least relieved the poverty-stricken. Lastly, there existed the pressure of American life, quite as much a matter of nervous imagi- nation as of actual exertion, and the more seri- ous social fact that a torrid summer drove from the city for a long absence the class which Cbaritics in Hew £orfc 44 TTammans Iball jfounfcas tfon of Uamman^ was most needed for daily personal influence., women of character, cultivation, and well-to- do surroundings. This summer absence de- prived them of the network of myriad contact which insensibly diffuses social ideas. The tenement-house system, due to the limited area of the city, aggravated and exasperated all these conditions by preventing among the great mass of its population those neighbor- hood relations, and that personal acquaintance which are only possible where each family has its separate home. New York for half a cen- tury has been berthed, not housed. Tammany Hall began in a secret organiza- tion, the Tammany Society or Columbian Order, whose membership was drawn from the precise stratum already described. Organ- ized a little over a century ago, the political drift of this Society, and the political organiza- tion which grew out of it, was for forty years towards universal suffrage ; for forty years its tumultuous gatherings directed a growing im- migrant population, and for nearly thirty, the heads of this body have led a well-organized body of all classes, partly foreign and partly native, for the exclusive object of ruling the city. The earliest of these periods ended„with the first elected mayor in 1834. It saw the destruction of the more or less aristocratic society of the colonial period, and the opening of the Erie Canal, both incidents in ZTammang Ibali 45 the commercial expansion, which in England led to the Reform Bill, and in this country to universal white male suffrage. The next period ran to the end of the war, and saw New York established as the gate of the West, while here, 1865 to 1870, the centralization of Federal power, with the destruction of slavery, was accomplished, and household suffrage established in England. The third, covering the last thirty years, has been marked by the transformation in all fields of individual into corporate activity and the multiplication of a myriad complex and specialized agencies, through which a population of 73,000,000 nominally carries on its varied business — social, economic, and political — through insti- tutions originally devised for a population of 3,000,000, and still bearing their old names. The Tammany Society, which on its cele- bration of theter-centennial of Columbus's dis- covery in 1792, became also the Columbian Order, was organized by William Mooney, 8 an upholsterer by trade, and its first celebra- tion, May 12, 1789, on the banks of the Hud- son, is usually treated as the beginning of the society, though its original organization took place at the City Hall, and it was itself an imi- tation of an earlier Philadelphia society. In New York, as elsewhere, the close of the war saw return to power the colonial better class, recruited by those who had led the Revolution. TKIWltam ADooneg 46 Uammans Ifoall Humbet of Dotes Cast Tammany stood for popular resistance to this. New York City had a restricted suffrage based on a property qualification, and the ancient forty-shilling homeholder of the English bor- ough. The population of the city in 1790, was 33,131, and its voters numbered 5,184,' of whom half, or 2,661, were of the forty-shil- ling class, not owning freeholds to the value of £20. Even at this early date, a majority of voters were without a property stake, and less than one-fourth, or 1,209, ne ^ over ^100 of realty. Of these voters less than one-half came to the polls, though it is a persistent political fiction that in earlier and better days all good citizens, when all citizens were good, both voted and attended the primary. In 1789, when George Clinton defeated Robert Yates, only 2,760* votes were cast, or less than half the vote lists. To-day a vote of 90 per cent, of the registry is the normal pro- portion, and the registry is nearly this pro- portion of the vote. Where in 1790, 54 per cent, of the registered voters seek the polls, the proportion now is for the most part over 90 per cent. In addition, on the usual basis, New York in 1790, would have had with its population a vote of about 6,600, so that about 1,500 persons must have been disfranchised. An important work which Tammany has dis- charged, and one essential to the final success of our institutions, is of breeding the habit of {Tammany 1ball 47 voting. Abroad, in France, for instance, not over half the voters vote. However, it has failed at other points, Tammany has always been faithful to the work of extending the basis of suffrage, so far as white males were concerned, and in drilling them to the habit of voting. There is to-day no voting body of equal size, or approaching its size, which so fully exer- cises its political right to vote as that on Man- hattan Island. The work of ensuring that this vote shall be cast to the best interests of the city remains to be done. In 1789, government was still in the hands of the few. The inauguration of Washington was a turning-point in more than Federal af- fairs, and the Tammany Society represented more than one of its events. As the Indian was driven back from the coast, and his character and habits became legendary, there sprang up an innocent admiration for quali- ties which Cooper was soon to make a part of fiction, and which were never a part of fact. The Middle States, in particular, had been brought into close contact with Indians of a tribe and type less savage and more peaceful than any along the coast. Among the Lenni Lenape Indians, Tamanend, whose grave is still cherished, 6 and whose memory was long revered, was a chief who signed one of Penn's treaties, purchasing part of Philadelphia. He became, during the Revolution, the pseudopa- Uamanent>, tbe flnMan Chief 48 Uammany Iball Zxibce an& Uotems tron saint of the younger officers and men of the line. His day, May 12th, replaced that of St. George. There was also in this aboriginal worship and admiration, relic and reflection of Rousseau's apotheosis of primitive man and the dawn of a protest against English suprem- acy, always strongest in an American com- munity in the stratum from which Tammany's membership was drawn. In organizing the new society in New York, but one of many, the ritual and organization of an Iroquois lodge was imitated, and the "long room" at Mart- ling's had its name, not from its length, but because this was the term, still familiar, applied by the Indian to his tribal assembly-room. The Tammany Society was, therefore, divided into thirteen tribes, 6 each with its totem, and while the Society itself remained active in its membership and meetings, each initiate was assigned to one of these tribes. Time and tendencies are, however, stronger in deter- mining totems than paper constitutions and rituals. The symbol upon which Tammany and the public have finally settled, with the agreeable unanimity of the captor and his prey, has been the Tammany Tiger, first em- blazoned on the engine of "Big Six," 7 and conspicuous under Tweed in the heavy gold badge of the Americus Club. The year 8 in the ritual of the Society was divided into the four seasons, and their elaborate and artificial return TTammans Iball 49 to the savage still appears after a century in the advertised notices of the meetings of the Society, jostling more modern forms and phrases. These mild fooleries were all only part of a like spirit perpetually out-cropping in our cities in "Sir Knights," in regalia, and in rituals of whose complexion, extent, and important influence on the character of indi- viduals many of those who deem themselves familiar with American society are profoundly ignorant. Tammany's original political action was along lines suggested by the " Committee of Correspondence," whose revolutionary plots, success has turned into patriotic projects. It formed the usual medium of inter-state political action in the first forty years after the close of the Revolution, and slowly de- veloped into its present system of party government. Similar Tammany societies had been organized in other States. That in Philadelphia, parent of all the rest, was first organized May i, 1772, 9 when the sons of King Tammany met at the house of James Byrns to celebrate the memory of a chieftain already associated with American opposi- tion to the European spirit. Reorganized in imitation of the New York exemplar, the Tammany Society, or Columbian Order of Philadelphia, at the Columbia Wigwam, on the Schuylkill, showed its opposition May 12, ©tber Societies 5° TTammang foall Creel: 1798, to Federalism and its sympathy with the French. It paraded in costume in honor of Jefferson's election, its Wiskinski to the front, carrying a key ; it celebrated, in 1802, the acquisition of Louisiana, always supported the ruling demagogues of a day of demagogues, and its celebrations were still in progress in 1814. In Rhode Island 10 it was not until 1 8 19 that a Tammany Society was organized and continued for five years with various branches and much success to lead the Demo- cratic party to short-lived victory. These societies, wherever organized, displayed everywhere the same revolt of the class newly arrived to the suffrage, or desiring it, and made in all places the same appeal in parade, buck-tail, and ritual. The original Tammany Society was at first welcomed as an aid to the effort Washington was making at the opening of his Adminis- tration to conciliate all classes at home, and receive peace on our Indian frontier. A year after its first organization, when Col. Mari- nus Willett brought to New York a deputa- tion of Creek Indians, they were the guests of Tammany Society during their visit. The occasion was serious. Our Western march was barred at the north by the British forts and at the south by the Creeks and Chero- kees, the most powerful confederacy on our frontier. Their reception and entertainment XTammanp 1baU 51 at the new Federal capital by the Tammany Society, in full costume and regalia, was a public service whose importance it is not easy now to appreciate. Before three years had passed, the Tam- many Society was in full, though unavowed, opposition to Washington's Administration, its first conspicuous sign of changing views being its elaborate celebration 11 of the landing of Columbus, October 12, 1792, whose odes, inscriptions, and ceremonies were devoted to the pledge that : Secure for ever and entire The Rights of Man shall here remain. — language which in that day and date was the dialect of the supporter of France and the opponent of the policy of Washington. Two months later the Society met, Decem- ber 27, 1792, to celebrate the victory of Dumouriez 13 — a meeting whose last midnight and perhaps maudlin toast expressed the fer- vent hope that the American fair would ever keep their favors for the Republican brave. Nor from that day to this has the elaborate political machinery of Tammany Hall failed to appreciate the necessity of keeping in close union the social pleasures and the political action of great masses of voters. The winter ball and the summer excursion, whose heavy expense is no small part of the annual budget Jfrencb Influence 52 Ttammang Ibaii 1Rew J£le= tnents fn IRew Jgork 1798 of a district leader to-day, echo the determi- nation of the toast in Brom Martling's Hall a century ago. The Revolution had been precipitated, as far as physical force was concerned, by " Lib- erty Boys," led by a few men who repre- sented the secondary colonial aristocracy of wealth, for which Adams stood in Massa- chusetts, Clinton in New York, and Morris in Pennsylvania. Ten years after the struggle found the officer better rewarded than the private both by Legislatures and the public. Mooney had been a violent " Liberty Boy." He and his found little to admire in the wait- ing policy of Washington. The turmoil of Europe added immigration to domestic fer- ment, and the Revolution of '98 sent to New York the ablest Irish immigrants of the cen- tury, the last immigration of birth, abroad. With it closed colonial conditions of political emigration. Thenceforward European emi- gration was economic. New York's trade was gaining what Philadelphia lost by yellow fever. The Tammany Society became the nucleus about which centred the unsatisfied turbulence of the Revolution, the rapidly in- creasing ranks of labor deprived of a vote, and the new wave of immigration stung to bitter revolt against Federalism by the Alien and Sedition laws of 1798. The immediate local leader was Daniel D. Tompkins, a young XTammanE Dall 53 graduate of Columbia, who began his political career by marrying the daughter of the Alder- man of his ward, and, having married her, demonstrated his right to become a district leader by carrying his ward, the Seventh, and reversing, in 1800, the Federal majority of 200 in the year before. He ended his typical Tammany career under charges of pecuniary dishonesty. His integrity was in the end vin- dicated, but only at the expense of his admin- istrative ability. 13 For ten years, after George Clinton, in 1789, by a narrow majority of 429, defeated Robert Yates, the candidate of a conserva- tive reaction, the rapid development of poli- tics went on. The population doubled. The voters increased but two thirds; in 1801, 8,088. The men without a vote trebled. Dan- gers environ a democratic community when population outstrips voters. The halves of the city pulled apart. Realty owners over S500 in value doubled. Men owning $100 to $500 nearly disappeared. The landless 40- shilling householder more than doubled. The landless voteless men trebled. Tammany steadily gravitated from social to political ac- tion. It denounced Jay's treaty, and the dis- tinguished author of the Louisiana code began his public career by flinging the missile which cut open the face of Hamilton. It went in a body to help fortify Governor's Island when flDen witbout Dotes 54 TTammans Iball Uammans Meetings war with England looked near. It welcomed Priestley, but his New York friends did not, as in Philadelphia, attend his sermons. Its reception to the discoverer of oxygen was the last sign of the scientific interest which, in 1790, led to an American Historical Museum, first opened in the City Hall, and removed later by Gardiner Baker, its founder and cura- tor, to the open triangular space where Broad and Pearl join. Three weeks after its recep- tion to the fugitive from the mob of Birming- ham, the society surrendered to the curator its museum on condition that it should bear its name, and that its members should enjoy a family free ticket, an early application of the principle of free passes which has distin- guished the Society for a century. Meeting, as most of the societies of the day did, in a tavern, Tammany began at Borden's in lower Broadway, and its annual procession on May 12th, "St. Tammany," and July 4th, for the " long talks " and "short talks " of its cele- bration, marched up Broadway with feathers and leggins to the old Presbyterian Church on Wall Street or to the Brick Church which faced City Hall Square, on the triangle at whose apex is the New York Times building. In 1798, it moved to Martling's, on the south- east corner of Nassau and Spruce Streets. This long, low building, opening on Nassau, was kept by " Brom " Martling (Abraham B. Uammans Iball 55 Martling), and for twenty years, even after a new hall was built, the members of the Soci- ety, and the political party which clustered about it, were known as " Martling men." The use of Tammany as a political term did not begin in 1818, but until that date was in- frequent. It became common, not because the Tammany Society itself grew more imme- diate in its political action, but because it had built the first of its permanent homes. Incor- porated in 1805, during the next ten years Tammany Hall men held the most lucrative posts in a Federal administration far more ex- travagant in the emoluments of its offices than in the present day, when salaries have replaced fees. The city itself was passing through a period of rapid commercial expan- sion, whose first check was the embargo, which Tammany supported, with the result, as a fruit of the policy of which the embargo was a part, that the relative growth of the city was less than one half as rapid in the sec- ond decade of the century as in the first. In 181 1, at the end of the first decade, Colonel Rutgers was able to raise $28,000, a large sum, but no more than a single Tammany Federal officer had drawn in a year as fees, and "Martling's Long Room" was replaced, not far from its site, by the first Tammany Hall, at the corner of Frankfort Street and Park Row. The walls of the building then erected still XEbe jfirst JBuHMng 1811 56 TEammang 1ball jfuneral t>onor0 stand, the office of the New York San. It held originally a hall and hotel, where board was $7 a week, the second leading hotel of the city. It had behind it the shipyards and tan- neries on the East River. It had before it the City Hall. The better residence quarter was passing up the island, along another channel in whose currents Tammany Hall has never found the stream to grind its mill. " Martling's Long Room " had been the re- sort of " Sons of Liberty " and of the " Sons of 1776." The close connection was one of the causes which made it natural for Tammany Society to give funeral honors to the bones of the Revolutionary prisoners of war, of whom 11,500 had sickened and died in Brit- ish prison-hulks, treated with no more and no less inhumanity than was the brutal custom of the day. Congress had neglected, in 180^, the memorial of the Society. In 1807, Tam- many appointed a committee, and a year later, May 26, 1808, Tammany Society in its regalia, the buck-tail conspicuous, led a civic procession which buried the bleached bones, and returned to the weather-beaten, unpainted structure which had survived the Revolution. Its bar-room was on Spruce, its kitchen on Nassau. Its "long room" ran parallel with the latter. Built when a mere road ran before it up the island, the street had risen in grade. The floor of the hall was reached by two Uammanp Ibali 57 or three descending steps. Uncouth, dirty, stained, the merest shanty, it was known by Federalist opponents as "the pig-pen." It deserved the name. Its selection, and Bor- den's, the churches in which the Society held its larger and more decorous meetings, Camp- bell's in Greenwich village, where its May and summer outings were held, all bespoke the small merchant, retailer, and mechanic, out of whose ranks the Tammany machine was to grow and to control the vast foreign vote of the future. The Federal party lost its power and its head together, and drove the immigrant into Democratic support by passing the Alien and Sedition laws. In spite of this it won the Congressional election of 1798, and the scan- dal attending Burr's Manhattan Bank charter gave the Federalists the city by 900 majority in 1799. Sinking step by step, from Wash- ington to Clinton, and from Clinton to Tam- many, he came to New York, organized the landless vote, which could not elect a Gov- ernor but could determine the choice of Fed- eral electors, and the spring election of 1800 saw the first New York contest in which voters were enrolled, canvassed, and voted with ordered precision. " Faggot "-voters were created by uniting a number of men in the ownership of the same property, poor men were deeded free-holds, the Society kept open TTbe afiret Victors 58 XTammans Iball ^Beginnings of political fjistors house in its hall, voters were carried to the poll, the last man was voted, and the first victory of Tammany Hall was won. Jefferson was elected President and Tam- many was placed in the relative position which it has ever since occupied. In New York City it had opposed to it, the well-to-do, the better-educated, and the mass of property- holders. In the State, the State Administra- tion and the vote of the State was in general marshalled in the opposing party. The in- stant its leader, Aaron Burr, appeared in Washington, where he had been nominated for Vice-President, and began to act for him- self in national affairs, Tammany broke with him and united with his enemies, as Tam- many has dealt ever since with every political leader in New York State of its own party who with or without its votes, rose to a na- tional position and began a national career. Lastly, without backing in the Northern States, except in the Tammany societies of the larger cities, the new organization found its natural allies in the Southern slave States, and re- ceived first from Jefferson and later from Madi- son and Monroe the aid of Federal patronage, which, as Governor DeWitt Clinton charged twenty years later, was "an organized and disciplined corps in our elections."" The political history of Tammany Hall be- gan with this victory. The Society and its TTammans ttmll 59 committee of correspondence gave a nucleus for political action, secrecy, and contact with other States. The "general meeting" gath- ered voters for assemblies which ratified nominations and passed resolutions already decided in the Society. Federal offices gave patronage and the Albany Legislature a long series of corrupt transactions in which nearly all public men shared. When Burr, in 1804, was nominated for Governor, Tammany Hall, following Jefferson's wishes and its own inclination, supported Morgan Lewis. He was nominated at a Legislative caucus, whose chairman, Ebenezer Purdy, was later expelled from the Senate for corrupt practices; and whose clerk, Solomon Southwick, was later charged with bribery in procuring the charter of the Bank of America. 15 DeWitt Clinton, the municipal rival of Burr, resigned his seat in the United States Senate to become Mayor, a post with four times the salary of the Federal position and proportionately greater power, the first instance, frequent through the century, of a Tammany man preferring the better-filled manger of its service to the higher but emptier stall of a national career. As with all its Mayors, Tammany early gave him the alterna- tives of submission, retirement, or the organ- ization of his own political machine. Men like Clinton, Wood, and Grace have done the last. Men like Hone and Hewitt, the second. DetUttt Clinton 1812-1818 6o UammanE iball Elections Other more recent Tammany Mayors have se- lected the first. The precise difference in Clinton's case had as its occasion, not its cause, his sentence of Gulian C. Verplanck for his share in the riot which marked public disapproval of the Fed- eralist sympathies of the Columbia College authorities. Separating himself from the sys- tem which placed in a caucus of Congressmen, at Washington the nomination of President, De Witt Clinton began the modern national con- vention, and organized the alliance between the interior of New York and the Federal Whig and Republican vote of the city which oppo- sition to Tammany has marshalled through the century on all State and National issues. Tammany had developed from its own ranks, Tompkins, its leader in this struggle ; he had the support of Ambrose Spencer and other Federal office-holders under him. Tammany Hall vigorously supported the war of 1812, a most important public service. It aided in op- posing Federal aid to the Canals, which were, under De Witt Clinton, at length built after political victories, due to his city machine, which organized a lower level than Tammany, as Wood and Morrissey did later, and the in- terior rural vote, first Tompkins's and later his. Through all, Tammany steadily held its grip on the city. In 1818, its entire ticket for Congress and its corporation officers were chosen by Uammans t)all 61 1,200 majority. 16 In 18 19, its average majority on Assemblymen was 2,301 and on Senators, elected by a limited suffrage, 850. 17 One year later, the ''Tammanies," thanks to various coalitions in the State, had 41 Assemblymen, the Federals 39, and the Clintonian Republicans 46. These dissensions in Democracy, Niles lamented, as Democratic editors did like divi- sions due to like causes seventy and eighty years later. 18 From year to year, through this period, the Tammany Society and the General Meeting issued addresses to the branches of the one, and the Democratic-Republican fellow- citizens of the other, deploring in 18 17 the spread of the "foreign" game of billiards among the upper, and vice among the lower ; and in 1 8 19 19 its address led Adams, who with Jefferson and Madison responded to its utter- ances, to wish it success " in discountenancing all pernicious customs and usages, and devia- tion from a wise and virtuous national econ- omy." Through all its first period, Tammany spoke with the accent of a middle-class preci- sian. In the next period, it sank to the street- rough. In the close of the third, grew up the intimate connection of some, not all, of its leaders, with the semi-criminal classes. But this affected only a part. The great mass of the active membership of Tammany Hall as a political organization has always consisted of the civic stratum made up of daily labor with stone an& dbanges 62 XTamman^ Iball "{Transition 182U1830 its immediate direction in the stratum just above. A Tammany "general meeting" began the movement which ended in the constitution of 1 82 1 and white male suffrage. This somewhat increased the number of voters, but not much. Under a restricted suffrage, the ingenuity of politicians manufactured a registry of 19,925 voters in New York City in 1821, where the census in 1826 could count only 18,283 adult male citizens. The real change was an in- crease in the habit of voting. In 1826, only 31.12 per cent, of the voters voted ; in 1828, 75.69 ; and by 1840, 91.96 percent. — themodern average. Nor had naturalization added much to the vote. Even in 1840, the New York Assembly had in it but one person of foreign birth 50 and 75 were native to the State. In 1855, New York City still had 46,173 native and 42,704 naturalized voters ; in 1855, 51,500 native and 77,475 naturalized ; in 1875, 90,- 973 native and 141,179 naturalized. This eloquent proportion remains the rule. Yet the earlier American municipality was a filthy, pestilential city, enduring countless nuisances, with a general death-rate comparable to the tenement-house districts of seventy years later. Tammany shared with the rest our transi- tion period, 1820- 1830, Buck-tails casting in their lot with Van Buren's Jackson men, and Clintonians developing into anti-Masons — Tammany frnll 63 spurred by the wide influence of secret soci- eties like Tammany — and Whigs. For a few years, an election of mayor by the aldermen put Tammany at a disadvantage, as the Whigs held the less populous wards, and the succes- sive ballotings were full of shameless scandal. When a constitutional amendment, 1833, made the mayoralty elective, Cornelius A. Lawrence was nominated, 1834, after old forms. Posters announced the "general meeting." A flag was hoisted over Tammany Hall. The hall was open to all comers. He polled 1 7, 575 votes, and his Whig opponent, Gulian C. Ver- planck, 17,373. Since then the tides of votes have ebbed and flowed with a periodical regularity. 81 Tammany held five successive terms and the opposition two; the organiza- tion elected five mayors and the opposition one ; Tammany two and the opposition one ; Tammany one and the opposition two ; Tam- many three and the opposition four ; Tam- many four and the opposition one; Tammany two and the opposition one ; two candidates endorsed by Tammany and the opposition one ; a compromise candidate and Tammany three ; the opposition one, and Tammany the last. This steady alternation has given Tam- many about two thirds of the mayors, and its periods of defeat and victory have only been broken (during the war) by Fernando Wood and the Mozart Hall Democracy. BIternas Hon Of X>0tC9 64 Uammanp Iball Gbanges 1835*1838 Tammany Hall, in full communion with Jackson, was already in fatal alliance v/ith Southerners, who figured as prominently as its speech-makers then as now. 23 In 1831, the Hall made the serious blunder of trying to support Jackson and to sympathize with South Carolina in the same resolutions. New York was roused, and a great meeting of merchants passed an uncompromising resolution. The blunder severed a reputable vote never re- gained. The Equal Rights, or, as we should say, labor party, in 1829 cut off another body of voters. Growing, the new labor party in October, 1835, started from its Bowery head- quarters 53 and stormed the 1 1 general meeting " in a riot which gave birth to the " loco-foco " party, which owes its name to the matches used when the Tammany janitor turned off the gas. In 1837, after two Tammany vic- tories, the split cost the mayoralty, — Aaron Clark, Whig, 17,044; John D. Morgan, Demo- crat, 13,763 ; and Moses Jaques, bolter, 4,- 239. Again, in 1838, Tammany was defeated, borne down by the scandal of wholesale de- falcations, Samuel Swartwout, Collector, for $1,200,000, and William M. Price, District Attorney, for $75,000. Both fled, and neither was pursued. The public conscience was in- conceivably low. ' 1 Defalcations are no crime, " said a leading New York paper 24 in a cynical vein. For five years, for the pendulum swung XTammanp 1ball 65 back in 1839, ^ saac L. Varian winning by a narrow majority, Tammany Hall elected its mayor by a constantly increasing plurality and an enlarging poll, which, in 1844, prompted charges of fraud from Whigs who found, as often since, that Tammany won as well with- out Federal and State patronage as with. Twice, 1844 and 1845, the American party elected its candidate, James Harper, but dis- appeared as rapidly as it had arisen, and, in 1846, Tammany elected W. F. Havemeyer by the crushing majority of 6,822. The victory was decisive. The city was passing out of its provincial stage. A police force was about to be organized. The water works were completed. The internal trade and foreign commerce of the city were about to enter on the amazing expansion which cul- minated in 1857. The adoption of a new con- stitution and its re-apportionment gave the Democrats an advantage retained for thirty years. Immigration was transforming the city. When the Mayor first became elective, American workmen and Whig majorities held the first to the fifth wards in the lower end of the Island and went up the ridge with the eighth and fifteenth wards. The new foreign element had settled in the low ground of the sixth, and the seventh and ninth to fourteenth were Tammany. Fifteen years later, the lower end of the Island was Irish and Democratic, ©rowing Supreme 66 Uammany Ibali ©rowing Suprems \850*\853 and the AmericanWhig mechanic was elbowed north and west, coloring the seventh, ninth, and thirteenth wards, long Whig and later Re- publican. If Tammany lost two or three elections, 1847, 1849, in part because its vigorous sup- port of the Mexican War was unpopular, its supremacy was growing, and in 1850, Fernan- do Wood, the first man who attempted to be boss in Tammany Hall after fifty years of joint leadership, organized the brute vote which ra- diated from the ' ' bloody Sixth. " Beaten for the first two-year term by Ambrose C. Kingsland, Whig, who polled the Free Soil Democratic vote, predecessors of the 1 ' State Democ- racy," two years later, 1852-1856, Wood was laid aside for Jacob A. Westervelt, who was pulled through by the Presidency and Seymour, in 1852, with 10,000 majority. In 1853, the Democratic party split into "Softs" and "Hards." Slavery is the cause usually assigned. 1 The real one was that the " Hards," the repu- table office-holders, were vainly trying to hold power against the rising tide of rowdy " plug- ugly " and bruiser led by Wood and organized in "clubs," "gangs," and fire engine compa- nies, and all the manifold machinery by which an ignorant foreign vote and a depraved native vote as ignorant, was manned, managed, ma- nipulated, and made ready to share and dare the plunder of the city ten years later under XTammang Dall Tweed. Winning the regular Tammany nomination in 1854, Wood was elected over a divided vote, polling but 20,033 out °f 5^'" 972 votes cast. With his term began the re- version to earlier methods in the attempt to govern New York from Albany through a non- partisan police. It failed, and only gave a new demonstration that Tammany's power is inde- pendent of mere patronage. Enjoying boss control of party machinery, Wood, in 1856, polled ninety-nine votes against ten for all other candidates in the regular Tammany con- vention." A most reputable bolting conven- tion nominated James C. Libby. He polled scarcely 5,000 votes and Wood 34,566, a plu- rality of 9,384 over his next antagonist, Isaac O. Baker, the Know-nothing candidate. In the regular course, Wood would have become and remained the first boss of Tammany Hall. His respectable opponents had control, how- ever, of the Tammany Society. A hot canvass, in 1857, ended in the selection of a Board of Sachems, who, by a vote of seven to six, closed the doors on Wood and his General Committee. For the first time, the Tammany Society, which is only the landlord of the political body which leases its hall, exercised its singular power of deciding between rival organizations. Again in 1872, it closed its doors. During the last illness of John Kelly, it was deemed possible that it might be 68 ZTammang 1ball Close of tbc called upon again to decide between rival claimants. Driven from Tammany Hall, Wood found the city alarmed and aroused, and, in 1857, he was defeated by Daniel F. Tiemann, a Demo- cratic candidate who gathered to his support all dissentient elements, the first instance in the history of the city. Organizing Mozart Hall, in 1859, Wood defeated divided op- ponents and was elected Mayor a third time in a canvass in which the Democratic vote was evenly divided. The war now broke the continuity of local traditions. Tammany Hall organized a regiment, the 426. New York, and sent it to the front, and its monument, with its Indian wigwam and Indian chief, was dedicated at Gettysburg, September 24, 1891. 26 Of the steady service of the regiment, its record in thirty-six battles and engagements is a suffi- cient proof. The war period saw George Opdyke, the only Mayor New York has ever had elected on a Republican ticket, chosen by 613 votes over two Democratic candidates, Wood and Gunther. Two years later a brief- lived " Hall," led by John McKeon, elected C. Godfrey Gunther over a combined Tam- many and Mozart Hall candidate by 6,524 votes. The close of the war found Tammany Hall, whose local ranks were bitterly disloyal, di- vided, defeated, and discredited. If it promptly Ttammang Iball 69 rose to supreme civic power and decided the national Democratic nomination in 1868, it was because it represented certain stable social conditions and a permanent political force. New York was now a city, and no accretion of population or territory has altered its char- acter. Its great population was, and for forty years and more was destined to remain, with a majority of foreign birth. With this ma- jority was associated another great stratum, descendants of the Irish immigration of twenty years before. The two were crowded to- gether in a great tract of dense population, the needs of whose days and the amusements of whose nights were furnished by the grocer, the retailer, and the liquor-seller, while the associations best known and most familiar were those of the volunteer fire company, the beer garden, and the "club" dance-house. Reorganized with district leaders drawn from these sources, Tammany Hall was led by Tweed in the riotous assault of its chiefs on the city treasury, while the rank and file be- lieved themselves on the high road to regain the Democratic supremacy enjoyed before the war. After the fall of Tweed, crushed by the revelation of his wholesale plunder — though if he had gone to England instead of to jail he might have returned to power — Tammany was again reorganized by John Kelly, a man of a different type, sober, patient, industrious, IRcorganfs 3ation 7° UammanE IDail rbe "Killers of Uams mans and of such honesty as was possible for a man bred in his surroundings. Of the three bosses of Tammany Hall, I once reported the sentence of the first for his embezzlements, and the trial of the third for murder; the second once said to me, when, in a moment of youthfulenthusiasm, I urged on him the demerits of a local candidate for district judge, " If I go into these local fights, I can't pick good men for the Supreme Court, which is my business." To this busi- ness, he devoted himself for ten years of pa- tient and stubborn assiduity, accepting the evils he found and increasing them by con- solidating the power of the organization he led — in some sort its Augustus. He found it a horde. He left it apolitical army. In 1 87 1 , by bolting the nomination of Lucius Robinson, he detached this army from all allegiance but that of Tammany Hall. This supreme stroke of statecraft completed the slow development of a century by rendering the boss of Tam- many a supreme ruler within his political limits. Twice he elected his mayors, Wick- ham, 1874, and Ely, 1876; once he was de- feated, Schell by Cooper, 1878, and twice he accepted a coalition Democrat, Grace, 1880, and Edson, 1882, but he ended with the elec- tion, 1884, of Grant, a straight Tammany can- didate. After his death, John Kelly was succeeded by Richard Croker, a man whose reign is still too incomplete to admit of com- UammanE Dall 71 plete analysis. An investigation in 1894 showed, however, that the early and direct plunder of Tweed had been replaced in the city government of New York by indirect pillage through blackmail, whose responsibility Tam- many shares with other political organizations, but in which its portion was larger, its methods more systematic, and its evil success more complete. The political army which has raised these three bosses to despotic rule, and won this extraordinary succession of political victories through a century, has slowly reached its present organization under which a single man exercises unchallenged supremacy. When New York had 5,000 voters, a single hall en- abled a majority of the majority of these voters to meet and decide the nominations and the general policy of the party. This " general meeting" is, by two channels of succession, the lineal predecessor of the Gen- eral Committee which now crowds Tammany Hall, able to accommodate only a third of the body which is supposed to meet there. During the first thirty years of Tammany, the " general meeting" had two functions; it directly made nominations and issued ad- dresses, which later became platforms. This use of the " general meeting " survives in the direct use of the ' ' general committee" as a county convention to nominate county officers Ubc "©eneral faceting " 72 TTamntans 1ball Ube Meetings without calling primaries or electing delegates for the purpose. The "general committee" is to-day, however, the symbol rather than the survival of the " general meeting," which was once the ultimate authority in Tammany Hall. At the "general meetings " committees were appointed to prepare addresses and to carry on the campaign. These also acted as "com- mittees of correspondence," following Revo- lutionary precedent, an atrophied organ still surviving in the "Committee on Correspon- dence." 27 Each ward, at an early day, had its ward committee, appointed at a general meet- ing of the ward. The same machinery ex- isted in Congressional and legislative districts when these were created. There is a curious political myth that at some early period the general body of voters attended their meetings and made them the direct utterance of popular will as apart from that of politicians directly interested in office-holding and the profits of place and influence. For this legend there is ab- solutely no evidence whatever. When Tam- many Hall, at its primaries in September, 1897, polled 35,000 votes, 28 a larger vote was cast than had ever been before recorded, and there is every reason to believe that it was also a larger proportion of the vote cast in New York City for Tammany candidates at the last election. These " general meetings " and pri- XTamman^ Ifoall 73 maries began in the grossest disorder. Clin- ton's meetings, which drew from a social stratum lower than that of Tammany Hall, were regularly mobbed. The ward meetings from 1820 to 1840 were the constant scene of boisterous and violent combat. From 1840 to 1870 they were normally in the hands of the bully, the black-leg, and the prize-fighter. Tamed by a police, efficient, with all its black- mail, in preserving external order, they have been for the past quarter-century incompara- bly more orderly, no more corrupt, and no less illusive expressions of the popular will than in the past. Until the passage of the "Cassidy resolu- tion," 29 in the State Convention of 1871, the ward and its election district were the units of political representation. By 1822, the ephemeral " general committee," most of whose members were also members of the Tammany Society, and sometimes acted through it, were consolidated in a perma- nent "general council" of three members from each of the eleven wards, into which (1825) the city was divided. New wards increased the membership to forty-five, and in 1836 to seventy-five. There was here for nearly twenty years a ward general committee, a "general meeting" which tumultuously acted for the party, and a network of local ward and district committees. These last often filled Civic 3atfons 74 UammattE Iball ■References NOTES AND REFERENCES. 1. In 1897, the vote of the Tammany candidate for Mayor was in New York City (Manhattan and Bronx), 16,607 l ess * nan the united vote of its opponents, and in Greater New York (whose total vote was only 75 per cent, greater than that of New York) its own total vote fell 51,562 short of the total of its oppo- nents, or nearly fourfold its New York minority. 2. The first officers were William Mooney, White Mat- lock, Oliver Glenn, Philip Hone, James Tyler, John Campbell, Gabriel Furman, John Burger, Jonathan Pierce. 3. New York State Census, 1855, p. ix. 4. Hammond's Political History of New York, i., 41. 5. Grave of Tamanend. H. C. Mercer, Magazine of American History, March, 1893. 6. New York was the Eagle tribe ; Delaware, Tiger ; Virginia, Wolf ; North Carolina, Buffalo ; Pennsyl- vania, Bee ; Connecticut, Beaver ; New Hampshire, Squirrel ; Maryland, Fox ; New Jersey, Tortoise ; Rhode Island, Eel ; South Carolina, Dog. 7. " Big Six" was the term applied to Engine Company No. 6, in the Sixth Ward, the foreman of whose big "double-decker " was William M. Tweed. 8. The year was divided into the seasons of Snows, Blos- soms, Fruits, and Hunting. 9. Scharf-Westcott's History of Philadelphia, i., 265. 10. Marcus W. Jerregan, Tammany Societies of Rhode Island. 1 1 . Edward F. Delancy, New York Historical Society, Oct. 4, 1894. 12. American Daily Advertiser, Jan. 3, 1793. 1 3. In 1806, Tompkins was elected Governor of New York, and in 181 6, Vice-President of the United States. TEammang 1ball 79 14. Niles Register, N. S., vii. , 208. 15. Hugh J. Hastings's Ancient American Politics, p. 28. 16. Niles Register, xii., 192. 17. Niles Register, N. S., ii., 192. 18. Niles Register, N. S., ix., 354. 19. Niles Register, N. S., v., 387. 20. Hazard's United States Register, ii., 140. 2 1 . Thomas E. V. Smith, " Elections of New York." New York Historical Society, 1893. 22. Niles Register, 4th S., vii., 295. 23. Niles Register, 4th S., xiii., 163. 24. New York Herald, Dec. 10, 1838. 25. The Tammany Hall Democracy, 1875, p. 38. 26. Tammany Hall Souvenir, 1893, p. 71. 27. By-Laws General Committee of Tammany Hall, viii., 2, 1893. 28. New York Sun, Sept. 25, 1897. 29. This resolution required the New York Democracy to elect delegates by assembly districts. Dotes an5 "{References GENEALOGICAL RESEARCH. Mr. Eben Putnam, of Salem, Hass., a competent genealogist, will undertake searches of a genealogical character. Personal attention given to the New England field, and advice given regarding research in Europe. Mr. Putnam has conducted a number of searches in England with more than the usual success and has the advantage of personal experience in the examination of English records, as well as personal acquaintance with his chosen correspondents abroad. Sample copies of Putnam's Historical Magazine will be forwarded to inquirers mentioning this advertisement. Mr. Putnam may be addressed either at Salem or Danvers, Mass. Putnam's Ancestral Charts (for recording ancestry) at G. P. Putnam's Sons, and Brentanos. gap*** jcrw Historic rgovk Among the subjects of the papers will be the following : Now ready, Sept. x, 1897. I.— Cbe Staot 1>uj26 of IRcw Smsteroam. By Alice Morse Earle. 11.— "Ring's College. By John B. Pink. III. — Bnnetje San'S Jfarm. By Ruth Putnam. IV. — "dHall Street. By Oswald Garrison Villard. v.— Governor's tfslano. By Blanche Wilder Bellamy. vi.— Gbe fourteen flMles IRounD. By Alfred Bishop Mason and Mary Murdoch Mason. vii.— Gbe Citt> Gbest of Hew SmsterDam. By E. Dana Durand. VIII.— Jfort BmSterDam. By Maud Wilder Goodwin. IX.— ©10 <3reenWiCb. By Elizabeth Bisland. x. and xi.— ©id Udells ano XClater*Courses. Parts I. and II. By George E. Waring, Jr. xii.— Zbc JBowerg. By Edward Ringwood Hewitt and Mary Ashley Hewitt. Barnard College 343 MADISON AVENUE COURSES IN AMERICAN HISTORY For Undergraduates* General course, read- ing, recitations and lectures. — Three hours a week: H. A. Cushing, A.M. For Graduates* Political History of the Colonies and of the American Revolution. — This investigation course, extending through two years, deals in the first year with the settlement of the Colonies and their development in the seventeenth century, and in the second year with the growth of the system of colonial administration, the conflict with the French, and the revolt of the Colonies. The work of the students consists chiefly in the study of topics from the original sources, with a formal account of the results of such study. — Two hours a week for two years: Professor Herbert L. Osgood, Ph.D. These courses are open not only to candidates for degrees, but to special students who can show ability to read French and German, and can satisfy the Dean and Faculty of their general competence. *ghz Jfcmthert* Workman atrd gamptott School 4z Jktowl <& is a twenty-page monthly published by the Hampton Institute in Virginia in the interest of the two races it represents — the Negro and the Indian. It is a record of the practical working out of the race problems, not only at Hampton but at Tuskegee and other schools, and contains much interesting matter from graduates in the field and from prominent students and writers representing the best thought of the country. A few pages are devoted each month to the local affairs of the School, to letters from Negroes and Indians in the South and West, to folk-lore, and to reviews of books bearing upon race problems. Subscription, $1.00 a year. This may be sent to Rev. H. B. FRISSELL, Hampton, Va. Xittle 5ourne\>8 SERIES FOR 1898 Little Journeys to the Homes of American Statesmen DESCRIBED BY ELBERT HUBBARD No. h George Washington. " Benjamin Franklin. n 3, Alexander Hamilton. tt 4, Samuel Adams. << 5, John Hancock. << 6, John Quincy Adams. << 7, Thomas Jefferson. a 8, Daniel Webster. 9, Henry Clay. a John Jay. a Wm. H. Seward. << 12, Abraham Lincoln. The above papers, which will form the series of Little yourneys for the year 1898, will be issued monthly beginning in January. The numbers will be printed uniform in size with the series of 1897, and each number will have a portrait as frontispiece. 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Printed on deckel edged paper, nth edi- tion. 16% gilt top $1.25 "A Venetian June bespeaks its materials by its title, and very full the little story is of the picturesqueness, the novelty, the beauty, of life in the city of gondolas and gondoliers — a strong and able work, showing serious* aess of motive and strength of touch." — Literary World, PRATT PORTRAITS. Sketched in a New England Suburb. 13th edition. With 13 full-page illustrations by George Sloane. 8°, gilt top . . $2.00 " 'The lines the author cuts in her vignette are sharp and clear, but she has, too, not alone the knack of color, but, what is rarer, the gift of humor." — New York Times. PEAK AND PRAIRIE. From a Colorado Sketch-book, 3rd edition. 16°. With a frontis- piece by Louis Loeb $1.00 '* We may say that the jaded reader fagged with the strenuous art of the passing hour, who chances to select this volume to cheer the hours, will throw up his hat for sheer joy at having hit upon a book in which morbid- ness and self-consciousness are conspicuous, by their absence." — New York Times. G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, New York and London. Zhe IRewest jfiction Lost Man's Lane. By Anna Katharine Green, author of " That Affair Next Door," " The Leavenworth Case," etc. No. 29 in the "Hudson Library." 16 , paper, 5octs.; cloth, $1.00. In the Midst of Life. Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. By Ambrose Bierce. 12 , gilt top, $1.25. "Mr. Bierce portrays the most appalling scenes with a deliberation, a force, and a precision that are rarely seen. The realization of Walt Whitman s 4 Speci- men Days ' is pale compared with that of 4 In the Midst of Life.' It is a thing that one reads breathlessly and shudderingly. ... A remarkable literary- feat. "Scottish Leader. Boston Neighbours. In Town and Out. By Agnes Blake Poor. 12 , gilt top, $1.25. 44 A series of clever stories and character studies by a shrewd observer of men, women, and things. A companion volume to Miss Fuller's 44 Pratt Portraits." The Confession of Stephen Whapshare. By Emma Brooke, author of "A Superfluous Woman," etc. No. 28 in the "Hudson Library." i6°, paper, 50 cts., cloth, $1.00. 44 If we begin to read 4 The Confession of Stephen Whapshare ' the chances are we shall not lay down the book before the closing page. Miss Brooke has com- posed a clever, strong, and original tale. She will go far,' doubtless, for among other gifts she possesses a grave and cultured style." — London Telegraph. John Marmaduke. A Romance of the English Invasion of Ireland in 1649. By Samuel Harden Church, author of "Life of Cromwell." Fourth edition. Illustrated, 12 , $1.25 t 44 The author has produced a thoroughly interesting story, abounding in stir- ring scenes, which force themselves on the attention of his readers, and, peopled with a sufficiency of clear-drawn, vivid, life-like characters, the loveliest of whom, the heroine, Catharine Dillon, is an unforgetable woman."— A^". Y. Mail and Express. G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, New York and London The City History Club of New York <$> The City History Club aims to awaken a general interest in the history and traditions of New York, believing that such interest is one of the surest guarantees of civic improvement. Its work is car- ried on through three channels : 1. — A Normal Class 2. — Popular Classes 3. — Public Lectures For further information, conditions of member- ship, etc., address Secretary City History Club, It West 50th Street, New York. Gbe Ibalf^flDoon Series Series of 1898 Published monthly. Per number, iocts. Subscription price for the 12 numbers, $1.00 The Second Series of the Half Moon Papers will commence in January, 1898, with a paper on "Slavery in Old New York," by Edwin V. Morgan. Among other subjects treated will be "Tammany Hall," by Talcott Williams; tl Old Family Names," by Berthold Fernow ; "Bowling Green," by Spencer Trask ; " Prisons and Punishments," by Elizabeth Dike Lewis ; " Breuklen," by Harrington Putnam ; " Old Taverns and Posting Inns," by Elizabeth Brown Cutting ; " The New York Press in the 18th Century," by Char- lotte M. Martin and Benjamin Ellis Martin ; " Neutral Ground," by Charles Pryer ; " Old Hospitals," by Francke H. Bosworth ; " Old Schools and Schoolmasters," by Tunis G. Bergen. G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS New York and London