form and grew degenerate; he proclaimed patriotic views and held
disloyal sentiments; he listened respectfully to public opinion, and
defied it openly in his acts. He did not become a boss. It was ten
years later before William M. Tweed centralised Tammany's power in one
man. But Wood developed the system that made a boss possible. He
dominated the police, he organised the lawless, he allied himself with
the saloon, and he used the judiciary. In 1858, being forced out of
Tammany, he retreated like a wounded tiger to Mozart Hall, organised
an opposition society that took its name from the assembly room in
which it met, and declared with emphasis and expletives that he would
fight Tammany as long as he lived. From that moment his shadow had
kept sachems alarmed, and his presence had thrown conventions into
turmoil.

The arts of the card-sharper and thimble-rigger had been prodigally
employed to save the candidate of Mozart Hall. Even the sachems of
Tammany, to avert disaster, nominated James T. Brady, whose great
popularity it was believed would draw strength from both Opdyke and
Wood; but Brady refused to be used. Opdyke had been a liberal,
progressive Democrat of the Free-Soil type and a pioneer Republican.
He associated with Chase in the Buffalo convention of 1848 and
cooeperated with Greeley in defeating Seward in 1860. He had also
enjoyed the career of a busy and successful merchant, and, although
fifty years old, was destined to take a prominent part in municipal
politics for the next two decades. One term in the Assembly summed up
his office-holding experience; yet in that brief and uneventful period
jobbers learned to shun him and rogues to fear him. This was one
reason why the brilliant and audacious leader of Mozart Hall, in his
death struggle with an honest man, suddenly assumed to be the champion
of public purity.

CHAPTER III

"THE MAD DESPERATION OF REACTION"

1862

Notwithstanding its confidence in General McClellan, whose success in
West Virginia had made him the successor of General Scott, giving him
command of all the United States forces, the North, by midsummer,
became profoundly discouraged. Many events contributed to it. The
defeat at Ball's Bluff on the Potomac, which Roscoe Conkling likened
to the battle of Cannae, because "the very pride and flower of our
young men were among its victims,"[812] had been followed by
conspicuous incompetence at Manassas and humiliating failure on the