Boss Tweed

Boss Tweed

Thomas Allen, editor

In The United States Unmasked: A Search into the Causes of the Rise and Progress of These States, and an Exposure Of Their Present Material and Moral Condition (London, Ontario: J. H. Vivian, 1878), pages 139–140, G. Manigault discusses Boss Tweed. William Magear “Boss” Tweed (1823–1878) was a politician who was the political boss of Tammany Hall, the executive committee of New York City’s Democratic Party organization. About Tweed, he writes:

When Mr. Charles O’Connor, sacrificing for a time his professional interests to his patriotism, devoted himself to ferreting out the official rascalities of the notorious “Boss” Tweed and his colleagues, by which they had robbed the city of New York of twenty-five millions of dollars, six of which millions at least went into the pocket of Tweed alone — after Mr. O’Connor had made those monstrous rascalities, and especially Tweed’s, manifest to all men, but before he could obtain his criminal conviction, Tweed’s constituents, the mob of New York, sent him back as a senator in the State senate, to Albany, the very scene of many of his most remarkable acts of corruption. Could he even now wriggle himself out of the clutches of the Law, while yet retaining some of his plunder, they are quite capable of sending him back again to fill the senatorial chair as the representative most worthy of his constituents.* [Manigault’s footnote: This was written before Tweed's death in the penitentiary.]

Boss Tweed, we believe, was originally a chair-maker, or chair painter, or of some such trade, but got his title of “Boss” by becoming a master workman in a very different line. But let no man imagine that Boss Tweed is an anomalous character, or has run an anomalous career. He is simply a well marked type of a numerous, and many of them still prosperous class of officials, to be found in every considerable municipal corporation, in every State government, in every department of the U. S. government, in the house of Representatives and the Senate, in the cabinet and the diplomatic corps. Many of them, like Boss Tweed, have come to grief. But not a few, whose tortuous and dishonest careers are well known, still retain popular favour and high place.

More historical articles.