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A great future is opening before our city.
—From The Brooklyn Eagle, 1869
BROOKLYN in that high summer of 1869 was still a city quite unto itself, with its own paid fire department, police, schools, and a fierce local pride of a kind usually associated with smaller, less worldly places. It had sprung forth all at once, as suddenly as a mining town, on the western tip of Long Island, in King’s County, New York, its population increasing a hundredfold in less than a lifetime. A man like Henry Cruse Murphy could readily recall when Fulton Street was lined with giant elms and an eccentric Hessian gunsmith named John Valentine Swertcope was free to go prowling about Washington’s old fort on the Heights, popping away at songbirds. For nearly two hundred years, from the time it was first settled by Dutch farmers in the early seventeenth century, Brooklyn had changed hardly at all. At the start of the nineteenth century, when talk of a bridge first began, there had been fewer than five thousand people in the entire county, more than a thousand of whom were not there out of choice, being black slaves. Now there were close to 400,000 people who called Brooklyn home. In the words of one little guidebook, Brooklyn had been “transformed” in a generation “from insignificance into metropolitan importance.”
Brooklyn’s population was still less than half that of New York and among a good many New Yorkers it was regarded as a backwater, a familiar enough neighboring horizon, with its ships and church steeples, a place to go hear Beecher or to be buried at Greenwood perhaps, but a hinterland and scarcely worth mentioning in the same breath with New York. But Brooklyn, in fact, was the third-largest city in America and had been for some time. It was a major manufacturing center—for glass, steel, tinware, marble mantels, hats, buggy whips, chemicals, cordage, whiskey, beer, glue. It was a larger seaport than New York, a larger city than Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and growing faster than any of them—faster even than New York, according to the Eagle—even without a bridge.
Already Brooklyn covered an area of twenty-five square miles, which made it larger than the island of Manhattan.
City Hall, with its attendant law offices and chophouses, was the political center of town. The white marble building with Greek columns and new cupola stood on a pie-shaped plot at the juncture of Court, Joralemon, and Fulton Streets, and there, most any day, could be found Brooklyn’s own Commissioners of Water and Sewerage, the Street Commissioner, the City Auditor, the Comptroller, the Keeper of the City Hall, numerous frock-coated aldermen, and the Honorable Martin Kalbfleisch, Mayor, a vain, hard-drinking, foulmouthed little Democrat who would go down in history as “an enigma to the respectable and a delight to the reporter.”
From City Hall, Brooklyn, to City Hall, New York, was less than two miles, but the pulsing salt river between them was a dividing line in more ways than one. The Brooklyn side was still strictly the domain of the Kings County Democrats.
Fulton Street, Old Ferry Road in earlier days, was the business district, Brooklyn’s Broadway, it was said, but really more like its Main Street. From City Hall, Fulton Street sloped off a mile or so to the river, where it ended abruptly and its horsecars made their turnaround in front of the ferryhouse. The Eagle had its offices at the foot of Fulton Street, just up from the ferryhouse, as did the Union, the Republican paper. The banks and insurance offices were there, along with such up-to-date stores as Ovington Brothers China House or Frederick Loeser’s (ladies’ wear and “trimmings”).
Unless a person lived on Long Island there was only one way to get to Brooklyn in 1869 and that was by ferry. Fulton Ferry was the one people meant when they talked of the Brooklyn ferry; it was the “Gateway to Brooklyn” and the one Whitman immortalized in his poem. But it was only one of five different lines, all operated by the Union Ferry Company, each of which had its own slips and ferryhouse and was named after its destination on the New York side. (South Ferry ran from the foot of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn to South Street at the tip of Manhattan, for example. The Wall Street Ferry departed at the foot of Montague Street and Fulton Ferry ran from Fulton Street, Brooklyn, to Fulton Street, New York.) In all, thirteen boats were kept steaming back and forth, night and day, making something over a thousand crossings in twenty-four hours. They had names like Mineola, Montauk, Clinton, and Winona and were 150 and 170 feet or more in length, double-ended, and about six hundred tons on the average.
“What are these huge castles rushing madly across the East River?” wrote a visiting Englishman. “Let us cross in the Montauk from Fulton Ferry [to Brooklyn] and survey the freight. There are fourteen carriages, and the passengers are countless—at least 600. Onward she darts at headlong speed, until, apparently in perilous proximity to her wharf, a frightful collision appears inevitable. The impatient Yankees press—each to be the first to jump ashore. The loud ‘twong’ of a bell is suddenly heard; the powerful engine is quickly reversed, and the way of the vessel is so instantaneously stopped that the dense mass of passengers insensibly leans forward from the sudden check.”
Once a ferry had landed and its passengers were ashore, the loading gates at the ferryhouse swung open and the waiting room emptied with a sudden rush of clerks and shop girls, day laborers with dinner pails, butchers, storekeepers, delivery boys, bankers, and business people. Outside, the street swarmed with more crowds coming and going, with vendors, dock workers, carriages, carts, farm wagons, and the clanging Fulton Street horsecars. It had been a long time now since the ferry captains and ticket boys knew their regular passengers by sight. One New Yorker who visited Brooklyn and went away quite impressed by the place also commented that he would just as soon stay in New York if living in Brooklyn meant riding on an East River ferry.
Upstream from the ferry slip and the spot where the colossal bridge tower was to rise were the Catherine Street Ferry; the Navy Yard, at Wallabout Bay; the Havemeyers and Elders sugar refinery, which on foggy mornings looked like a great Rhenish castle at the water’s edge; the Roosevelt Street Ferry; and Brooklyn’s famous old shipyards. Henry Steer’s and Webb & Bell were builders of clipper ships before the war. At Samuel Sneeden’s the Swedish genius Ericsson had built the Monitor.
Generally speaking, the East River was considered the best part of the harbor of New York. It had deeper water for wharves than along the Hudson, or North River, as it was also known; it was less affected by prevailing winds, a little less troubled by ice. It was also the safest, most desirable place to build or repair ships and for this reason the Roebling bridge was still a bone of contention along the river. With the yards on the New York side taken into account, the shores of the East River represented one of the greatest concentrations of shipbuilding anywhere on earth.
Downstream from the ferry the waterfront ran beneath the brow of the Heights, on past Red Hook Point, clear around to Gowanus Bay. All told Brooklyn had nearly eight miles of piers, dry docks, grain elevators, and warehouses. The new Atlantic Basin, on Buttermilk Channel, was forty acres in area. More ships tied up in Brooklyn now than in New York and Hoboken combined. From the river the city looked as though it were enclosed behind a protective screen of ship masts and rigging. The sea lanes of the world ended at Brooklyn, an admirer of the city would write years later, but it was as true in 1869, and it was the sea, as much as anything, that gave the place its tone and distinction. Gulls wheeled and cried over the housetops. Sailors mingled with the evening crowds along Fulton Street. The salt air, reputedly, was “pure and bracing…wafted from a thousand miles seaward.”
From half a dozen different high points, from Prospect Park, for example, or from Greenwood Cemetery, the world opened up in all directions and to the south was the Atlantic breaking on the shores of Coney Island. Brooklyn, it was claimed, offered “the most majestic views of land and ocean, with panoramic changes more varied and beautiful than any to be found within the boundaries of any city on this continent,” and apparently that was no exaggeration.
Certainly the view from the Heights was as fine as anything on the eastern seaboard—a sparkling blue and green sweep of 180 degrees, taking in river, bay, Manhattan, the Jersey hills, Staten Island. There were ships everywhere one looked, making for port, heading out to sea. On any summer day in 1869, when the age of sail and the age of steam still overlapped, river and harbor were a ceaseless pageant. New York was the principal reason for most all of it, of course, but Brooklyn had the view.
Old engravings of New York harbor generally show the boats all out of scale, too big, that is, but the shape and nature of the various species represented are a great deal clearer that way and the over-all effect considerably more enjoyable. To judge from such views, there must have been few places on earth where a city dweller could drink in quite so much space and sky or see so much going on that was so everlastingly interesting to watch. The water is filled with schooners, packets, pleasure yachts, gleaming white excursion steamers the size of hotels, and giant iron-hulled, ocean-going sailer-steamers like the new City of Brooklyn, the latest and largest ship on the Inman Line. (At a banquet served on board the City of Brooklyn that spring, at the end of her maiden voyage, the spirit of good fellowship was such, reportedly, that Beecher broke bread with the Democrats.) Freight-car lighters, hay barges, sand barges, countless steam tugs move back and forth, up and down the river, and everywhere, cutting between them, sidling off crab fashion against the tide, are the Brooklyn ferries.
It was a prospect to cleanse the spirit, no doubt, to put things back in proper balance at the end of a long business day. From such a vantage point, New York was clearly not all there was to life on earth. Even the ferries looked like nothing more than clever toys, perfect in every detail, down to the feathers of coal smoke trailing from each funnel. After dark, with their colored lights, they gave the river “a gala appearance.”
A perfectly healthful place in all seasons and in all respects, Hezekiah Pierrepont had said of these gentle bluffs on the river, the heaped-up leavings of the last of the glaciers. The salt air filled the lungs, and to the rear stretched Long Island, a hundred miles of open country. An enterprising brewer with large cedar-dotted holdings on the Heights, Pierrepont, fifty years before, had advertised lots “for families who may desire to associate in forming a select neighborhood and circle of society, for a summer’s residence, or a whole year…” Gentlemen whose business or profession required “their daily attendance in the city” could not do better, he said. His lots were 25 by 100 feet, many fronting on the river, others on “spacious streets 60 feet wide.” By 1869 shade trees made green canopies over red brick sidewalks, upon which fronted some of the stateliest houses in America. As neighborhoods went, there was nothing in New York to compare to it. The Heights had become everything the brewer promised, all that the name implied.
Few in Manhattan could match Willow, Pierrepont, or Clinton Streets, or Columbia Heights, the street running parallel to the river. Built of brick or brownstone, with rows of tall windows, the houses ran “plump out” to the sidewalk, almost without exception. Most of them were quite grand in dimension, beautifully detailed, with marble sills and cast-iron stair rails. Some, such as the Low place on Columbia Heights, were mansions by any man’s standards. But there was little of the flamboyant display soon to characterize Fifth Avenue. No one house seemed designed for the express purpose of upstaging its neighbor. As the Eagle observed, “Almost everybody appears to have built his house like somebody else.”
The Heights was the unchallenged social, cultural, and moral center of Brooklyn life, with the social and moral part of things taken the most seriously. It was also, one would gather, about as pleasant and lovely a place to live as there was to be found in urban America, then or since. It was not Brooklyn, but it was very often taken to be.
There on the Heights lived the oldest, wealthiest Brooklyn families—the Pierreponts, the Brevoorts, the Lows; A. S. Barnes, the book and hymnal publisher, with his family of ten children; Simeon Baldwin Chittenden, Moses Beach, Gordon Ford. They were second-generation New Englanders, in the main. They were the people who gave habitually to charity drives and figured on the boards of various Brooklyn institutions. Their names on a directors’ list or an incorporating charter meant eminent respectability. They employed the best cooks, sent their sons to Yale or Columbia. On spring evenings along the shore drive to Fort Hamilton, they could be seen riding with “elegant equipages, well-dressed grooms, and spanking teams.” As it happens, most of them were not around that summer of 1869. They had packed off weeks earlier, as was their custom, moving out en masse nearly—children, servants, steamer trunks, picnic hampers—to Oak Bluffs, Newport, Saratoga, or the White Mountains. All through July and August the Eaglecarried regular columns to report their doings.
The heads of such families generally worked in New York, in banking, dry goods, “the China trade.” Some owned the ships that tied up beneath their windows. A few were also men of learning. J. Carson Brevoort, to give just one example, had been educated in Europe and served for a time as private secretary to Washington Irving. He was a recognized authority on American history and entomology. “His knowledge of fish,” it is reported on good authority, “was hardly exceeded by any naturalist and his collection of books and specimens was magnificent and valuable.”
Among such men and in such a setting, New Yorkers of comparable station might well wish to make their home once the bridge was built and the inconvenience of the ferries was no longer an issue.
At Clinton and Pierrepont stood the Brooklyn Club, where, as one visitor noted happily, the members not only referred to one another’s wives on a first-name basis, but their servants as well. Close by were the Mercantile Library, the Long Island Historical Society, and the Music Academy, where the Heights gathered for “uplifting” lectures, amateur theatrical productions and musicals, Johann Strauss on one occasion, and yearly charity balls. In the grand ballroom “one could not move a foot without appearing in mirrors.”
And there, too, on the Heights, stood what was held to be not only the moral and spiritual center of Brooklyn and New York, but of all America. Brooklyn was “The City of Churches,” Talmage and Storrs were among its pastors. But Plymouth Church, a big brick barn of a building on Orange Street, was its foremost institution, bar none, the thing Brooklyn was famous for from one end of the land to the other. For it was there, on an open platform, before a congregation of two thousand or more, that Beecher preached, weekly—except summers—taking the Rocky Mountains as his sounding board, as one man said.
From the photographs there are of Henry Ward Beecher and the volumes of printed sermons, it is a little hard to understand just what all the excitement was about. One eye droops quite noticeably, giving him an unbalanced, slightly unpleasant look. He wore his hair long and loose, as was the custom with many platform spellbinders of the time, and by 1869, at age fifty-six, he was beginning to look a little gray and too well fed. Still, by all accounts, he had a physical vitality, an exuberance that appealed enormously to both men and women. In an age that adored both oratory and showmanship, he was the supreme orator and apparently one of the great performers of all time.
A brilliant pantomimist and mimic, he could turn in an instant from radiant joy to real tears to thundering, righteous anger—whichever was called for. He used no notes and began his sermons very softly, as though holding a private conversation with the front pews. But then all at once the “full, round, sonorous” voice would fill the church. Mark Twain, who watched in awe from the gallery one Sunday, wrote, “He went marching up and down the stage, sawing his arms in the air, hurling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry, and exploding mines of eloquence, halting now and then to stamp his foot three times in succession to emphasize a point.”
America had never produced anything quite like this man. Except possibly for Grant, no one alive was so highly regarded. His sermons were read avidly in the newspapers, and gotten up in book form they outsold the most popular fiction. Sunday-morning ferries to Brooklyn were known as “Beecher boats.” The easiest way to find Plymouth Church from the ferry landing was to follow the crowd.
One could look through the hundreds, the thousands, of speeches and sermons delivered by Beecher during the years the bridge was being planned and built and doubtless find a Beecher quote on the subject. There was little in life he did not have something to say about, and particularly if it was a matter of popular interest. Perhaps, like the merchants on Fulton Street, he envisioned whole new elements of New York society suddenly discovering Brooklyn once the great span arched the river. On Sundays it might even become “Beecher’s Bridge.” Of greater interest, however, is what Brooklyn thought of him, what he meant to Brooklyn.
His name was in the papers almost daily, which suggests people never tired of reading about him—what he had to say on free trade or growing onions or the vagaries of the weather. He was regarded as a master of conversation, when in truth he seems to have been more a master of the monologue. His entrance into any Brooklyn auditorium or public gathering was the immediate signal for an ovation, and the plot he had picked out at Greenwood for himself and his stiff, severe-looking wife was a tourist attraction.
The rich and the famous paid him all kinds of homage—Lincoln once said he was the greatest man in America—and Plymouth Church paid him twenty thousand dollars a year, or the same as the President of the United States received. And nobody thought that out of line. It is perhaps impossible to imagine the hold he had on his time.
“Our institutions live in him,” said the Eagle, “our thoughts as a nation breathe in him, our muscular Christianity finds in him the most vigorous champion. He is the Hercules of American Protestantism…”
The presence of such an individual would give a place a certain aura, needless to say, and was certainly a factor in determining the kind of people who had been choosing the Heights as a place to live over the twenty-odd years since Beecher first arrived there—not all of whom, it ought to be said, were excessively wealthy or prominent socially. Perhaps the most fitting description of people on the Heights at the time the bridge was about to be built is one written of the Plymouth Church congregation by a visiting reporter from Massachusetts. “A more intelligent body of people one would rarely find,” he said. “A phrenologist would praise their intellectual developments, while there is a look of cheerful hearty satisfaction on most of their faces, as if they relished life and were seldom troubled with the blues…It is a well-to-do body also; not aristocratic or fashionable, though a score or more came in their carriages, but prudent and prosperous, as if they lived in good houses and both earned and enjoyed worldly comforts.”
There was more to be said for Brooklyn. Gas rates were reasonable. Taxes were still lower than in New York. The schools were far superior. Local government was reputed to be honest, which it was not, but in contrast to the way things were done on the other side of the river, it looked pretty good. Streets were reasonably well lighted after dark and for a city of its size there was little crime. The drinking water was delicious.
The Eagle, Brooklyn’s leading daily, was certainly another amenity, and Thomas Kinsella, its editor, who was soon to become a Congressman as well, was regarded as a perfect example of how far a deserving immigrant boy could rise in America.
Jobs happened also to be plentiful in Brooklyn just then. Charles Dickens, after a recent visit, dismissed Brooklyn as “a sort of sleeping place” for New York. But from the statistics available, it appears New York employed considerably less than half of Brooklyn’s wage earners, perhaps even as few as one in three.
In any event, theirs was the fit place to live, most Brooklyn people felt. It was the more truly American city. New York, for all its enticements, was regarded as a monstrous, cold place, overcrowded, overpriced, bewildering—unwholesome. In Brooklyn a clerk could own a home. Of the five hundred miles of streets Brooklyn land speculators liked to exclaim over (“five miles for every one in New York”) only half had anything built on them as yet.
Brooklyn had its shortcomings, of course. Even the best restaurants and shops were second-rate compared to those in New York. The air in the neighborhood of Peter Cooper’s glue factory was not exactly that of the open sea and the average Brooklyn saloon, according to one source, smelled like a kennel. Nor was Brooklyn innocent of the filth and squalor so commonly attributed to “the modern Babel” across the way. The tenements on the “flats,” south of the Navy Yard, where a large part of Brooklyn’s Irish lived, were as foul as any in New York.
But Delmonico’s, Barnum’s museum, evenings at the theater, Wall Street, adventure, all the “delights” of New York were readily available over the river. That, after all, was one of the most appealing things about Brooklyn—it had New York at such easy reach, it offered the best of both worlds.
As for those unpleasant neighborhoods by the Navy Yard, well, most people never ventured down such streets or had any real idea of the life that went on there; and, naturally, what most people believed to be the truth was more important at the time than any latter-day objective appraisal of how things were. People then were still inclined to form opinions more from experience than information and it was the experience of most Brooklyn people that between their city and the other one, there was no comparison.
Moreover, the bridge was going to make things better still. Like most of their countrymen, Brooklyn people, the newcomers especially, were essentially expectant at heart, optimistic, looking forward, believing fervently in the future. How much was already known of the politics the bridge involved, one wonders, or of the various bargains that had been struck? How much was even suspected? How many people had speculated seriously on what the real cost of the bridge might be?
There is a story about where and when the bridge scheme was hatched in Brooklyn and a plaque that commemorates the event, in Owl’s Head Park, near the place where Henry Cruse Murphy’s house once stood.
The winter of 1866-67 was as severe as any on record. Ice conditions on the river were so bad on several occasions that a traveler by train from Albany could reach New York in less time than a commuter from Brooklyn could. Roebling’s bridge had opened in Cincinnati with national acclaim and every Brooklyn paper was demanding a bridge to New York.
Then, on the night of December 21, 1866, young William Kingsley, convinced the time was ripe to get a bridge bill before the Albany legislature, decided to ride down to Bay Ridge to call on Henry Murphy. The night was bitterly cold, no night to be out, according to the story, and Bay Ridge was a good four-mile drive. Kingsley was accompanied by Judge Alexander McCue, a close friend of Murphy’s, who went along, he said later, merely to give Kingsley what support he could, for Murphy then was known to be “far from persuaded of the practicability of the enterprise.”
Kingsley had been conferring since summer with Julius Adams on the engineering involved, and in the library of Murphy’s palatial home, beside a log fire, the conversation went on until past midnight. Murphy is said to have been highly skeptical at first, even hostile to the whole idea of a bridge. Kingsley is supposed to have responded with mounting enthusiasm for his subject, meeting Murphy’s every argument with sharp, convincing rejoinders. Describing the scene later, McCue said of Kingsley, “His unexhausting and unresting mind, matchless in its clarity and invincible in its force, was my wonder and admiration.” After a time Murphy was listening as though under a spell.
By the time they were at the door saying good night, Murphy had been converted. What exactly Kingsley said to him during the course of the evening was never revealed, however. All McCue said was that nobody could have withstood Kingsley’s onslaught of facts and figures.
Possibly the story is true. Possibly Henry Murphy, like earlier patrician figures in Brooklyn, saw the bridge as a threat to a whole way of life. Old General Johnson, Brooklyn’s “first and foremost citizen” when Murphy was a young man, had declared during his campaign for mayor in 1833 that Brooklyn and New York had nothing whatever in common, in “object, interest, or feeling,” and that the river dividing them was a wonderful thing for Brooklyn. During the War of 1812 the general had been put in charge of Fort Greene, to stand in wait for an invasion of Long Island that never materialized. Later he had grown gravely concerned about an invasion of another kind. He liked Brooklyn the way it was, and said so. There were still people who felt that way, not many, but some, and perhaps Murphy was of the same mind.
But it does not seem very likely—if only in light of Murphy’s total, unwavering devotion to the bridge from that night on. Furthermore, nearly ten years before, in 1857, the year of Roebling’s letters in the Tribune and Journal of Commerce, Murphy said most emphatically that the East River would soon cease to divide Brooklyn and New York. Speaking at a farewell dinner in his honor at the Mansion House, just before leaving for the Netherlands, he had hailed the “spirit of advancement” stirring in Brooklyn and suggested that the new water works was only a sample of the monumental enterprise such a community was capable of. Even the Tammany guests had applauded.
But be that as it may, Kingsley was unquestionably the spearhead of the bridge idea in 1867, and he would have more at stake in the venture ahead than any other one man, with the single, notable exception of Washington Roebling. Kingsley and Murphy were the two most powerful, influential Democrats in Brooklyn—Boss McLaughlin not included—and the Brooklyn Democrats had just about all the political power and influence there was to have in Brooklyn. So whether it was that particular night by the log fire that the two of them struck their bargain is nowhere near so important to the story of the bridge as are the men themselves.
Had a political cartoonist of the time decided to do a simplified illustrated key to Kings County politics, circa 1867, he might have drawn a bird’s-eye view of Brooklyn with Beecher commanding the Heights—just to orient people—and behind Beecher’s back, Boss McLaughlin, looking a little dull-witted, holding City Hall in the palm of his hand. At the foot of Fulton Street, beside an office labeled KINGSLEY & KEENEY, CONTRACTORS, would be the strapping young Kingsley, energetically cranking a cement mixer that spews out something marked $$$. And down the bay, off to himself, gazing from a tower window at his “villa,” his eyes on some distant horizon and looking very senatorial, would be Henry Murphy, noble as a Roman.
In their different ways both Kingsley and Murphy were very impressive men. Kingsley was all of thirty-four in 1867, which made him young enough to be Henry Murphy’s son. Hard, resourceful, ambitious, he had established himself in business in Brooklyn the same year Murphy went to The Hague, 1857, a depression year. He came to town not knowing a soul, apparently. He had been a school teacher and also a construction boss on canals in Pennsylvania and on railroads in the Midwest. For a brief time he had worked on the Portage Railroad at Johnstown (where perhaps he heard tales of Roebling installing his iron rope a decade before). His prime attribute in that earlier time appears to have been an ability for snuffing out strikes.
Now he was Brooklyn’s most prosperous contractor. He had paved streets, put down sewers, built the big storage reservoir at Hempstead, built much of Prospect Park, some of Central Park, branched out into the lumber business, the granite business, bought up real estate, and became “identified” with Brooklyn’s gas company and banking interests. Just ten years after stepping off the Fulton Ferry, a total stranger, and with no money to speak of, he was worth close to a million dollars and was one of the best-known men in Brooklyn.
Boss McLaughlin had taken an almost immediate liking to him. McLaughlin himself had been nothing more than a waterfront gang leader until 1856, when, as a reward for services rendered locally in the campaign to put Buchanan in the White House, he had been appointed “Boss Laborer” at the Navy Yard. It was not long before he was “Boss” of all Brooklyn. He was, in fact, the first political manipulator to be called “Boss,” a name he never cared for. Soft-spoken, dingy-looking, a man who played dominoes for off-hours excitement, he walked about Brooklyn with his shoulders thrown back, his great stomach thrust forward. His silk hat was always last year’s and brushed the wrong way. And yet there was something “about the bearing of his round head, and the quiet keen look of his small blue eyes that betrays the leader.” It must have been something of the same look that he himself spotted in Kingsley the first time the two laid eyes on one another.
McLaughlin had just begun to organize “The Brooklyn Ring.” With Henry Murphy out of the country, he was moving fast. Kingsley got a few paving contracts to start, then work on the water works. Kingsley’s interests in politics became very great. In no time the young man was reputed to be the most effective money raiser in the party and nobody, it was said, was closer to the Boss. For McLaughlin, plainly, he was a valuable find.
Well over six feet tall, powerfully built, with broad shoulders and a deep chest, Kingsley “cut a striking figure in the street.” His face, smooth and honest-looking, was set off by a fine head of wavy dark-red hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He looked people right in the eye and was obviously many cuts above Boss Hugh McLaughlin. Even the New York World, which normally had no use for Kings County Democrats, credited him with “plausible” manners.
Kingsley was Irish, but like Tweed, he was a Protestant. He was also a natural politician but, having no gift for public speaking and no apparent yearning for public office, preferred working behind the scenes. Like McLaughlin he gave no signs of aspiring to more power than could be had right at home in Brooklyn. Between them—the boss politician and the boss contractor—they had worked out a very pleasant, profitable partnership. But unlike McLaughlin, Kingsley had what another generation would call “upward mobility.” He had the potential of going very far.
Murphy was quite a different sort. He was Old Brooklyn, he was grace and learning. For a long time he had been considered the handsomest man in town. Where Kingsley and McLaughlin were men of great physical bulk and had made their way up in the world in part because of that, Murphy was small, spare, well knit, and clean-shaven, a refined-looking man with gray hair and sharp, intelligent eyes. Judge McCue called him “cautious and subtle.” Henry Stiles, the Brooklyn historian, described him as “very earnest in manner, a little severe even.” Everybody respected him, it appears, and it is not hard to see why. According to Stiles, “no public man has, probably, passed thus far through the trying ordeal of a legislative career, so entirely free from the taint of corruption.” Once upon a time, as some of his other admirers liked to tell, Henry Murphy had nearly become President of the United States.
John Murphy, his father, a “thorough Jefferson Democrat,” had been a Brooklyn judge, a man of some renown in his own time, who did well enough with one thing and another to send Henry to Columbia, where he was graduated in 1830. In the next few years, while reading law—at the same time young John Roebling was struggling to become a Pennsylvania farmer—Murphy made quite a name for himself. “His pen embellished and enriched” the pages of the North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly. He edited the old Brooklyn Advocate and helped organize the Young Men’s Literary Association of Brooklyn. In 1835 he went into partnership with an attorney named John A. Lott and was soon joined by another named John Vanderbilt, both older men and already prominent in Brooklyn. “From the first his firm was in high favor with Brooklyn people,” reads one biographical sketch, “especially wealthy and conservative old property-holders of Brooklyn, and it soon built up an extensive and lucrative practice.” It also ran the Democratic Party on the Brooklyn side of the river.
In 1841 Murphy founded the Eagle, then more explicitly named the Brooklyn Eagle and Kings County Democrat. The next year he was elected mayor at age thirty-one and commenced his administration by cutting his own salary. He went to Congress presently, served there twice, and distinguished himself by sounding forth against slavery and fostering McAlpine’s dry dock at the Navy Yard. By the time his political career had run its course, he would also serve six terms in the State Senate, try three times for the United States Senate, once for the governorship, and fail every time mainly because of the opposition of one man, William Tweed.
But his closest brush with real glory had come in 1852 at the Democratic National Convention in Baltimore. The convention had been deadlocked after forty-eight ballots, when the Virginia delegation put up a compromise candidate, an old-fashioned party regular from New Hampshire, Franklin Pierce. But the Virginians’ support for Pierce had been anything but unanimous. Murphy had been the other choice and had lost by a single vote. Pierce had a military record, Murphy did not, and apparently that had been the deciding factor. Had Murphy been put up instead, his admirers held, he would have been nominated, elected, and done better as President than did the colorless New Hampshire man. (For one thing, coming as he did from Beecher’s home town, it is doubtful Murphy would have underestimated the abolitionists.)
It was five years after that when Murphy was named the American Minister to The Hague, by Buchanan, and no sooner was he out of the country than Boss McLaughlin swung into action, taking complete control in Brooklyn at the same time Tweed was taking over in New York. “It was not a change for the better,” the Eagle would write in retrospect, many years later, after Murphy was dead. “Deftness in speech was supplanted by deftness in manipulation of votes; dexterity in argument made way for the dexterity which makes one count for two for your side. The deterioration of our political methods began then…”
Recalled from The Hague by Lincoln in 1861, Murphy returned to face other problems as well. A man taken into his law firm had squandered money and left the firm unable to pay its bills. Murphy, who had been planning to retire once he was home again, made good on all the firm’s commitments out of his own savings, which nearly ruined him. As a result he had not only gone back to practicing law, but began taking an interest in various local business propositions, such as the development of Coney Island, which was something he had not done before.
In the years since, it was commonly remarked, there had been a certain air of disappointment about Henry Murphy. Albany was now his only field of political influence and there he appears to have been a rather lonely, incongruous figure, with his literary tastes and perfect manners. But he was immensely influential all the same, and for Brooklyn, a most valuable asset.
Privately he turned more and more to his family, his books, his scholarly interest in Brooklyn history. At the moment, he was finishing up a translation of a journal kept by two Dutchmen during a trip to New Netherlands in 1679, something he had found in an Amsterdam bookshop. * This was his third such translation and the library where he, Kingsley, and McCue held their historic conversation housed what would one day be evaluated as among the two or three finest collections of early Americana in the entire country. “Mr. Murphy only failed as a politician,” said one Brooklyn observer of the time; “in all else his life was a grand success.”
In talent, disposition, age, background, physique, in just about every way, Kingsley and Murphy were as different as they could be, opposite and complementary, and they worked superbly together.
Murphy “threw himself” into the bridge enterprise. He drafted an incorporating charter and “with great energy…enlisted the interest of his friends,” his prominent, respectable friends, to be more exact. The thirty-eight directors he rounded up included the mayors of both cities, such presentable Brooklyn Democrats as McCue and Isaac van Anden, owner of the Eagle, and for the Republicans and old Brooklyn, Simeon Chittenden, J. Carson Brevoort, and Henry E. Pierrepont (son of Hezekiah). He also talked up the bridge at every opportunity and took framed copies of a bridge Julius Adams had designed with him to Albany to pass about among his fellow legislators. To no one’s surprise, the Eagle gave him full support. “Every Brooklynite, resident or capitalist, is interested in bridging the East River,” wrote Thomas Kinsella.
The bill was submitted on January 25, 1867, and passed on April 16. Neither Murphy nor Kingsley, nor the name of any engineer, was listed as having any association with the proposed project.
The New York Bridge Company, a private corporation, was to have the power to purchase any real estate needed for the bridge and its approaches and to fix tolls. The legislation fixed the capital stock at five million dollars, with power to increase it, and gave the cities of Brooklyn and New York authority to subscribe to as much of the stock as determined by their respective Common Councils. The stock was to be valued at a hundred dollars a share. The company was to be run by a president who would be elected annually. In time this document of Henry Murphy’s creation would be looked upon as little better than a license to steal, but at this stage, for some reason, nobody seems to have regarded it that way.
Kingsley was to line up private money and see about the engineer. Perhaps his initial impulse had been to go along with Julius Adams, as he had led Adams to believe he would. But that seems doubtful. Adams would have been a bad choice and it is known that Murphy never entertained the idea for a minute. Adams had no reputation and had never built a bridge of any consequence. Indeed, one might well wonder why Adams was ever brought into the picture in the first place were it not for some comments made later by Washington Roebling in his private notebooks, where, it happens, a very great deal about the bridge would be said that does not appear in the official records or the various old “histories.”
Adams had been nothing more than a straw man all along, according to the young engineer. His role had been not so much to design a bridge as to concoct the lowest possible estimate for a bridge. That way the real engineer, if he seriously wanted the job, would have to pare his figures to the bone, which in turn would give the promoters of the scheme a more attractive price tag to talk about. The point was to work a little businesslike deception right at the start, before any real plans had even been drawn up. “Adams surpassed himself by an estimate of $2,000,000,” Washington Roebling wrote. As a result John A. Roebling was forced to trim his own estimate by more than one million dollars, knowing perfectly well what was going on and that his figure was ridiculous.
Then Kingsley and Murphy did some more cutting of their own to arrive at the five-million-dollar figure used in the Albany bill.
In May 1867, a month after the bill was passed, a meeting of the New York Bridge Company was held in the Supreme Court chambers at the County Courthouse in Brooklyn. Henry Murphy was appointed to fill a vacancy caused by the death of one of the directors. At a meeting three days later, Henry Murphy was elected president, and a week after that John A. Roebling was appointed Chief Engineer with full authority to design any sort of bridge he wished. A man had been selected, rather than a particular plan—Roebling had no real plan at that point. Kingsley said later the very nature of the enterprise demanded someone of towering reputation. The name Roebling was “invaluable to this enterprise in its infancy,” Kingsley would explain. There could not be a breath of doubt or suspicion concerning the integrity of the builder.
The explanation of the choice of Chief Engineer was worded thusly in the official company records: “Confidence on the part of the public and of those whose money was to be invested in the undertaking would best be insured by employing the Engineer who had achieved the most successful results, and who was thus most likely to accomplish this great enterprise.” No other engineer was ever considered.
Roebling’s salary was to be eight thousand dollars a year, but any work he did until the bridge actually got under way was strictly on speculation.
Things were moving very fast that spring of 1867. Roebling was told to proceed at once with his surveys and come up with a proposal. He was also led to understand that Kingsley, who was neither a director nor officer of the new company, would personally cover any expenses involved, although nothing was put in writing about it. Test borings were made and in two months’ time, having scrapped all his earlier sketches, Roebling was back in Brooklyn with his plan. At the first meeting of the Bridge Company’s newly formed Board of Directors, a Committee on Plans and Surveys recommended “the immediate commencement of the work.”
That was in October. But more than a year would pass before another meeting was held. Nor would there be any noticeable progress made on even the most preliminary construction. Three thousand new buildings went up in Brooklyn in 1868—churches, stores, banks, more factories, an ice-skating rink, row on row of plain-fronted brick and brownstone houses that sold about as fast as they were finished—but to judge by actions, not words, the Great Bridge was no more than a great figment of the imagination, nothing but a lot of politicians’ talk, by all appearances. The New York Bridge Company was nothing more than a name on paper as far as most people could tell. The famous engineer from Trenton was nowhere to be seen.
The delay, however, was not due to any indifference or lack of sincerity on the part of Kingsley or Murphy, or of Roebling certainly. The problem was in New York City. Back at the start of the century, when Thomas Pope’s “Rainbow Bridge” had been a favorite topic of conversation in Brooklyn, it was said that the only thing needed to bring a bridge about was “a combination of opinion.” Thus was the case now. Now especially that it had become something more than just a Brooklyn dream, the bridge could no longer be considered wholly a Brooklyn enterprise.
So it would be 1869 before the bridge was at last under way. And it would be the end of that summer of 1869, a full two years later, before things were finally settled behind the scenes. By then, of course, Roebling was dead. And only then did William Tweed emerge publicly as one of the leading spirits behind Brooklyn’s bridge.