William Tweed enjoys the company of Fisk and Josie at the Opera House and often at Josie’s afterward. He feels an affinity with Fisk as another who has climbed from humble beginnings to the top of his profession—New York politics, in Tweed’s case. Like Fisk he displayed an early flair for persuasion, talking friends into forming the Americus Fire Company No. 6, a volunteer unit that branched out from firefighting to other worthy activities. His Manhattan neighbors voted him their alderman in the decade before the Civil War, and then their congressman. But his heart remained in his home city, and after two years in Washington he returned to New York, where he sat on the board of supervisors before being elected to the New York state senate in Albany. His most important positions, however, have always been with the political machine that controls Democratic politics in New York City. He has a gift for the rough-hewn politics of urban democracy; his intuition tells him what people want and need, and what they are willing to pay for it. He has cultivated friends and fought off rivals until, in the half decade after the Civil War, he becomes the master of Tammany Hall, as the Democratic machine is universally known, for one of its gathering spots. By virtue of his leadership of Tammany, Bill Tweed is among the most powerful men in America’s largest and richest city.

To the respectable classes of New York, Tammany stands for everything that is corrupt in politics. It blatantly buys the votes of poor immigrants, paying for them with goods and services furnished from public funds. Tweed and his Tammany ring don’t deny that they help themselves to the spoils of politics, but they contend that victors have a right to the spoils. Besides, they say, they are the agents of democracy, taking men where they find them, even in the gutter, and bringing them to the altar of American politics, the polls on election day. Someone has to set the Irish and other immigrants on the path to assimilation, and who better than Tammany?

Yet Tweed has been testing the limits of the city’s tolerance of graft. Contractors complain not so much at having to kick part of their compensation from the city back to Tweed and his cronies; this has long been standard practice in New York. But the size of the bribes required to do business with the bosses has grown dramatically under Tweed, till the contractors wonder if the returns on their payments make Tammany’s patronage worth the trouble. Editors and other keepers of the public conscience complain that Tweed is selling out the general interest to please the Irish, the immigrant group that forms the predominant element of the Tammany coalition.

Tweed can stand the criticism, but like Jim Fisk he appreciates diversions from his day job. He first encountered Fisk and Gould at the end of the Erie war against Vanderbilt, when the two entreated Albany for preferment for their railroad. Tweed answered their entreaties and in exchange received a position on the Erie’s board of directors.

The relationship serves both parties. The Erie directors get Tweed’s help on matters of law and politics. When the Erie needs permission to lay new track or build a depot, when the Erie wants a change in its corporate charter, when the Erie requires a favorable judicial ruling, Tweed and Tammany deliver. Tweed and his cronies receive advice on investing from two of Wall Street’s best-placed insiders, and direct payments from the Erie treasury when cash is needed. As the speculators and the politico confer behind the oak doors of the Erie offices, as Fisk and Tweed share Fisk’s box at the Opera House and Fisk’s whiskey at Josie’s—the abstemious Gould stays home with his wife—they spin a web of reciprocal influence. The Erie circle and the Tweed ring overlap and interlock; what strengthens one strengthens the other, what threatens one threatens both.