Free Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics by Terry Golway

reserved for one religious denomination. The bishop asserted that, rather than intriguing against the traditions of the United States, he and his fellow Catholics embraced the nation’s ideals. “My feelings and habits and thoughts have been so much identified with all that is American that I had almost forgotten I was a foreigner, until recent circumstances have brought it too painfully to my recollection,” he told Harper. In one of a series of letters to the influential Stone, Hughes continued to argue that in a nation like the United States, place of birth was immaterial—he described himself as “an American who knows and prizes the rights secured by the American Constitution.” 53
    Harper captured the mayoralty in 1844, to the astonishment of the Democratic and Whig Parties. In mid-May of that year, just weeks before Harper was scheduled to take office, Bishop Hughes was summoned to City Hall to meet with the city’s outgoing mayor, Robert Morris, a veteran leader of Tammany Hall. Morris was deeply concerned about the possibility of violence in the streets. Nativists already had set fire to Catholic churches in Philadelphia, and there were rumors that mobs from the City of Brotherly Love might march north to attack Catholics in New York.
    Hughes had responded to those rumors with a threat of his own. If “a single Catholic Church is burned in New York,” he announced, New York would “become a second Moscow.” Hughes’s reference to Russia’s capital, nearly destroyed by fire in 1812 during the Napoleonic Wars, was not lost on the city’s nervous political and mercantile leaders. 54
    Mayor Morris thought it prudent to take the measure of the man who was so outspoken on behalf of the city’s largest immigrant group. Even if Hughes had blunted the threat from Philadelphia, Morris knew that Harper’s supporters were planning a potentially explosive rally near City Hall to mark the incoming mayor’s inauguration. Morris desperately wished to know how Hughes’s fellow Irish Catholics might react to such a demonstration. It was a sign of Tammany Hall’s isolation from the city’s immigrant population in 1844 that Morris was obliged to consult with Hughes about the temper of Catholic opinion, rather than call on Tammany’s own intelligence-gathering operation.
    The mayor, an affluent Protestant like most of the city’s political leaders, opened his meeting with Hughes with a question. Acknowledging the church burnings in Philadelphia, Morris asked the bishop whether he was concerned about similar incidents in New York. “Are you afraid that some of your churches will be burned?” he asked.
    No, responded Hughes. “I am afraid that some of yours will be burned.” 55
    Morris’s reaction is unrecorded, but Hughes’s calmly worded threat no doubt made its way from City Hall to the streets. The planned nativist rally near City Hall was canceled soon after the mayor’s meeting with Hughes. No churches of any denomination were set alight in New York.
    Dagger John Hughes’s confrontational style and demands for a more inclusive urban political culture made him the first effective political boss of the New York Irish. He also provided Tammany Hall’s future leaders with one of their core beliefs: New York contained multitudes, and those multitudes deserved a share of political power rather than lectures in Americanism. Hughes’s embrace of pluralism was summed up in a letter he wrote to Mayor Harper shortly after the avowed nativist took office. “I even now can remember my reflections on first beholding the American flag,” Hughes wrote. “It never crossed my mind that a time might come when that flag, the emblem of . . . freedom . . . should be divided by apportioning its stars to the citizens of native birth and its stripes only as the portion of the naturalized foreigner.” 56
    James Harper served only one term of a single year. He left office in the middle of 1845, pronouncing himself satisfied