Fernando Wood
Fernando Wood was an American Democratic Party politician, merchant, and real estate investor who served as the 74th and 76th mayor of New York City. He also represented the city for several terms in the United States House of Representatives.
After rapidly rising through Tammany Hall, Wood served a single term in the U.S. House before returning to private life and building a fortune in real estate speculation and maritime shipping.
He was elected mayor for the first time in 1854 and served three non-consecutive terms. His mayoralty was marked by an almost dictatorial vision of the office and political corruption in the city's appointed offices, including the New York City police force. His political appointments and his advocacy for unilateral reform of the city charter to strengthen his power and grant the city home rule brought him into direct conflict with the Republican state legislature, leading to a charter revision that prematurely ended his second term in office and resulted in his arrest. He returned to the mayor's office for a final term in 1860.
After leaving the mayor's office, Wood was elected to several more terms in the House of Representatives, where he served for sixteen years. In his final two terms in that office, he served as chairman of the powerful House Committee on Ways and Means.
Throughout his career, Wood expressed political sympathies for the Southern United States, including during the American Civil War. He was a member of the Copperhead faction, which opposed the war and called for an immediate peace settlement with the Confederacy. He once suggested to the New York City Council that the city should declare itself an independent city-state, as the "Free City of Tri-insula," in order to continue its profitable cotton trade with the Confederacy. In the House, he was a vocal opponent of President Abraham Lincoln and one of the main opponents of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States.
Early life
Fernando Wood was born in Philadelphia on June 14, 1812. His Spanish forename was chosen by his mother, who found it in The Three Spaniards, an English gothic novel written by George Walker.His father, Benjamin Wood, was a speculator in dry goods who was bankrupted by the Panic of 1819. His mother, Rebecca Wood, was the daughter of a recent German immigrant from Hamburg who had been wounded at the Battle of Yorktown.
Fernando had six siblings: four brothers and two sisters. His brother, named Benjamin Wood after their father, also served in the U.S. Congress. Throughout Fernando Wood's career, Benjamin was his sole trusted ally. As a partner in Wood, Eddy & Company, Benjamin owned and operated southern lotteries in New York City, a lucrative quasi-legal industry that his brother protected as mayor. Benjamin later also managed the affairs of Mozart Hall, the Democratic faction founded in 1859 by Fernando after the brothers lost control of Tammany Hall.
During Fernando's childhood, his father moved the family frequently: from Philadelphia to Shelbyville, Kentucky; New Orleans; Havana, Cuba; Charleston, South Carolina; and finally New York City, where he opened a tobacconist store in 1821. The business failed by 1829 and Benjamin Wood left for Charleston, where he died two years later, impoverished and alone.
Early business
In New York, Fernando enrolled in a private academy run by James Shea of Columbia College. He was educated in grammar, rhetoric, and mathematics. He left school in 1825 at age 13, as his father's business declined, in order to provide for his family. For six years, he worked throughout the Eastern United States in a variety of low-paying jobs, including as a stage actor. In 1831, he married his first wife, Anna W. Taylor, the 16-year old daughter of a Philadelphia merchant.In 1832, Wood returned to New York City to head his mother's household at 140 Greene Street. He struggled in business, often working nights at his wife's wine and tobacconist store on Pearl Street. In 1835, Wood started a ship chandler firm with Francis Secor and Joseph Scoville, but the business failed during the Panic of 1837. He soon opened a bar using his wife's dowry, which he was forced to close because business was so poor. In later years, after parting ways politically, Scoville accused Wood of overcharging drunken bar patrons.
Rise through Tammany Hall
Despite his business failures, Wood was successful in politics. He joined the nascent Jacksonian Democratic Party, possibly influenced by his hatred of the Second Bank of the United States, which he blamed for his father's ruin. In 1836, party leaders elevated him to membership in the fraternal-political Tammany Society, the first rung on the New York Democratic ladder.Tammany Hall was split between moderates, including Wood, and a breakaway faction of radicals known as Locofocos. When the Locofocos formed an independent Equal Rights Party, Wood remained in the Tammany organization, gaining promotion into the organization's Young Men's Committee and becoming its organizing force. However, following the Panic of 1837 and a Locofoco food riot, Wood worked to advance radical anti-bank politics within the Young Men's Committee. Wood's move was politically prescient; in September 1837, President Martin Van Buren, a Tammany Hall ally, signaled approval of Locofocoism. At a meeting later that month, the general Tammany organization voted in favor of Wood's motion to oust the Bank Democrats from the organization. Wood received a host of organization promotions.
U.S. Representative (1841–43)
1840 election
In October 1840, Wood's rise culminated with a nomination for the United States House of Representatives at just 28 years old. At this time, New York City elected its four members of the House on a single ticket. Wood campaigned on Anglophobic themes to appeal to Irish voters in the city, suggesting that "British stockjobbers" funded the Whig campaign in gold. He engaged in a war of words with New York American editor Charles King, who revealed that Wood had been found liable for $2,143.90 in overdraft fees after he fraudulently withdrew from his bank on the basis of a bookkeeping error.In response, Wood published the statements of two of the referees in his case, a letter from the bank's Whig attorney, and a letter from his own attorney, which Wood combined to argue the bank had maligned him to help the Whig Party.
Wood and his Democratic running mates unseated the incumbent Whig ticket, though Wood received the fewest votes and only won his seat by 886 votes. The bank scandal remained a sore spot for Wood for years.
27th Congress
In Congress, Wood served on the Public Buildings and Grounds Committee. He sought out the mentorship of Henry Clay, who had become estranged from the Whigs over his break with President John Tyler, and Southern Democrats like John C. Calhoun, Henry A. Wise, and James K. Polk. Wood's voting record was markedly pro-Southern and pro-slavery, more so than any other New York congressman.On economic issues, Wood was an orthodox Democrat, favoring hard money, deflation, and free trade. However, he supported federal funding in New York, including appropriations for harbor improvements, fortifications, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Wood was also a staunch backer of federal subsidies for Samuel F.B. Morse's experimental telegraph. He was a vocal opponent of protectionist tariffs proposed by House Ways and Means chairman Millard Fillmore.
Wood also lobbied the U.S. State Department for protections for Irish political prisoners, some of whom were naturalized Americans, whom the British forcibly resettled on Tasmania.
1842 election
Wood expected to run for re-election in 1842, but the New York City district was split into four separate districts by a congressional mandate.Wood lived in the new fifth district, also home to popular incumbent John McKeon. To avoid facing McKeon in a primary, Wood relocated to a strong Whig district, the sixth, where instead he faced incumbent James I. Roosevelt and former Congressman Ely Moore for the Democratic nomination. After Roosevelt withdrew, Wood won a one-vote plurality in the primary, but fell short of the required majority. Moore withdrew in favor of McKeon, who had lost the nomination in his original district. McKeon won, and Wood covertly undermined him in the general election, invoking McKeon's Irish heritage and suggesting McKeon was a secret abolitionist. McKeon lost to Whig Hamilton Fish.
Return to business
In need of funds and expecting his first child, Wood left politics after 1842 to reopen his ship chandler firm on the East River, announcing to his friends that he was "entirely out of politics."To accrue necessary capital, Wood begged Henry A. Wise for a patronage appointment as the State Department's local despatch agent, despite previously having tried to abolish the role when he was a congressman. Though Secretary of State Abel Upshur refused, he was soon killed in an accident aboard the USS Princeton and succeeded by John C. Calhoun, who granted Wood the appointment on May 8, 1844.
With his government job as a subsidy and political power base, Wood expanded his business and rented a new home in upper Manhattan with three servants. Except for his efforts on behalf of presidential nominee James K. Polk and in defense of his own patronage position, he remained largely outside politics.
1844 presidential election
In advance of the 1844 Democratic National Convention, which was expected to be a showdown between Calhoun and Martin Van Buren, Wood acted as a double agent on behalf of Van Buren. Calhoun supporters, seeking to peel Tammany away from Van Buren, invited Wood to strategy meetings and sought his advice on courting New York delegates. However, Wood covertly passed this information to Van Buren. Though Calhoun never found Wood out, the affair left Van Buren suspicious of Wood's character and the former President's son, John Van Buren, became Wood's political rival for the next two decades.After the nomination went to dark horse James K. Polk, Wood renewed their friendship and launched into a campaign for Polk in New York City, New Jersey, and the Southern Tier. Wood used his political connections to Polk to save his patronage job under new Secretary of State James Buchanan.