Nor were we younger men alone in our disillusionment. Others had been deceived; the leading citizens of New York had associated themselves in business with the imposing dictator. I still have an advertisement of the New York (Viaduct) Railroad Company, and in the list of its directors the name of William M. Tweed appears between that of A. T. Stewart and August Belmont; Richard B. Connolly next to Joseph Seligman; John Jacob Astor has A. Oakey Hall on one side and Peter B. Sweeney on the other; immediately after Sweeney comes Levi P. Morton. The “Big Four” of Tammany were in good company.
How far the Ring might have extended its power, it is impossible to say. Tweed had promoted Hoffman from the mayoralty to the governorship and no doubt intended to present him as a presidential candidate in ’72. Amongst my clippings I find one which shows that the West was already considering Hoffman as a national figure. It is from a New York newspaper and quotes the Western press as announcing the following slate:
R. Gratz Brown of Missouri, President; John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, Vice-President; Governor Hoffman of New York, Secretary of State; Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, Secretary of the Treasury; General Hancock of Pennsylvania, Secretary of War; Thomas A. Hendricks of Indiana, Secretary of the Interior; Horace Greeley of New York, Postmaster-General; George H. Pendleton of Ohio, Attorney-General.
As it happened, Greeley became a presidential and Gratz Brown a vice-presidential candidate; Hancock subsequently ran for president, and Hendricks achieved the vice-presidency; but the serious and uncontradicted publication of that slate indicated the direction of Tweed’s ambitions at the time when Samuel J. Tilden wrought his downfall and relegated Hoffman into obscurity.
In the reaction from these disclosures, Tilden became the younger generation’s hero: he had rescued New York from corruption. I was so impressed with his services that, when my fellow law-student, Michael Sigerson, ran for the State Assembly, while Tilden sought the presidency, I made my first entry into politics--before I was even a voter--by giving several October nights, in 1876, to speech-making for Tilden and Sigerson in the latter’s district on the Lower East Side.