The history of the Society of St. Tammany, known more commonly as Tammany Hall, is the history of New York and even the history of democracy in the America in microcosm. Founded in 1789, the same year as the ratification of the Constitution, Tammany started out as a social club for “Pure Bred Americans,” but it was the less exclusive and more democratic of the city’s political clubs, founded largely to counter the notables and landed class who crowded around Alexander Hamilton’s Society of the Cincinnati. Both associations were largely made up of Revolutionary War veterans: the Cincinnati was composed of officers with aristocratic pretensions, Tammany of poorer soldiers with republican sympathies. Aaron Burr turned Tammany into the kernel of a party apparatus for electing Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans. (At the famous duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, Burr’s seconds were Tammany “sachems.”)
Tammany Hall was officially registered as a “charitable association” for the benefit widows and orphans and other worthy causes, but it was clear very early on that the major recipients of its charity were to be its own members: by the dawn of the 19th century it had already earned its reputation for corruption. The exclusion of the Irish ended after a large group of Irish immigrants, fed up with being left out, decided to let their grievances be known by invading the hall and giving everyone inside a beating. The Tammany sachems decided, shortly thereafter, to bestow the blessings of democracy on these new Americans. But it was in the middle of the 19th century, as more and more Irish arrived as refugees from the potato famine, that the power of Tammany solidified and its machine system was perfected. It was relatively simple: the penniless Irish would vote Democratic, and they would get patronage jobs and charity. They would be protected from nativists and from the condescensions of Protestant reformers who wanted to shut down their saloons and convert them from Roman Catholicism. If you were drunk and got arrested, Tammany would bail you out and pay for your lawyer. If you were hurt on the job, Tammany would look after your wife and kids. All you had to do was show up to vote, preferably more than once per election. In every ward and district there was a Democratic club to mobilize voters and divvy up charity and patronage.