From his unofficial throne atop the bootblack stand in the New York County Courthouse, Tammany Sachem George Washington Plunkitt (1842-1924) used to extol the virtues of Tammany Hall. He gloried in the durability of the city machine that went on "flourishin' forever, like fine old oaks. Say, that's the first poetry I ever worked off. Ain't it great?"
At that, Tammany's roots go deep, and digging among their intricacies has yielded pungent truffles to M. R. Werner (Tammany Hall) and other researchers. The story begins in May 1789, just a few weeks after the U.S. Constitution took effect, when New York City's Society of Tammany adopted its own constitution as a superpatriotic club for 100%-pure Americans. For its patron, the society chose a man whose American credentials could not be questioned: Tammany, sachem (pronounced say-chem) of the Lenni-Lenape (Delaware Indians), from whom legends glowed like beams from an August moon. Tammany (it was said) invented the canoe, discovered corn, beans, crabapples and tobacco (for use in destroying fleas). His most heroic feat was in wrestling the Evil Spirit for 50 days. Finally Tammany upended the Evil Spirit with a hip lock and tried to roll him into the Ohio River. But an immense rock stood in the way, and Tammany failed to conquer evil.
The Society of Tammany was first used as a power instrument by a politician whose contact with the Evil Spirit was more caress than competition: Aaron Burr. In Tammany, which drew its membership from working men and enlisted veterans of the army of the Revolution, Burr saw the perfect political counterfoil to Alexander Hamilton's Society of the Cincinnati, a veterans' organization made up of officers. When Burr and Hamilton dueled at Weehawken, two Tammany sachems were with Burr, one as his second. That night, as Hamilton lay dying, there was a gala celebration at Tammany headquarters in the Long Room of Abraham Martling's Nassau Street tavern.
"Look at the bosses of Tammany Hall," cried George Washington Plunkitt. "What magnificent men! To them New York City owes pretty much all it is today . . . What names in American history compare with them, except Washington's and Lincoln's?" Some notes on some of Tammany's "magnificent men":
FERNANDO WOOD, handsome, 6 ft. tall and every inch a charlatan. His mother, during her lying-in period in the year 1812, was reading a popular novel, The Three Spaniards, that had as its hero a derring-do lad named Fernando. She named the baby Fernando—and he spent the rest of his life trying to live up to her flamboyant hopes, e.g., he was once credited with saving three lovely maidens from a runaway stagecoach and its drunken driver. Born in Philadelphia, Wood went to New York to become an actor, but turned instead to politics and rose to become the first real Boss of Tammany Hall. In 1854 he became Mayor of New York City. During the Civil War years, Fernando Wood was a leader of the Copperheads, Southern sympathizers resident in the North.