Here’s a piece of 19^th Century New York City Political and NY Fire Dept History Signed by Multiple NYC Politicians:

FERNANDO WOOD

(1812 - 1881)

CIVIL WAR “TRAITOR” MAYOR OF NEW YORK CITY

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CIVIL WAR “COPPERHEAD” DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSMAN VOTING AGAINST THE 13^th AMENDMENT ABOLISHING SLAVERY!

WOOD PROPOSED THAT NEW YORK CITY SECEDE FROM THE UNION & BECOME A 'FREE TRADE ZONE' FOR BOTH THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ~&~ THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA!   

Wood was a Democrat and member of the Tammany Hall Society. He helped establish Central Park, but his administration was marked by widespread graft and crime. A Peace Democrat opposed to the Civil War, Wood suggested that New York City should leave the Union, and become a free-trade zone. Wood made speeches attacking President Abraham Lincoln and was blamed for causing the Draft Riots in the City. Wood also joined with Clement Vallandigham to form the Peace Democrats (Copperheads). Unlike Vallandigham, Wood was never charged with treason. Wood also served in Congress (1863-65 and 1867-81) where he was a staunch opponent of the Radical Republicans!

~AND~

AZARIAH C. FLAGG

(1790-1873)

WAR OF 1812 MILITIA LT. OF THE AIKEN’S VOLUNTEER RIFLE COMPANY; AMERICAN NEWSPAPER PRINTER, EDITOR; NY ASSEMBLYMAN; SECRETARY OF STATE OF NEW YORK, and NY STATE COMPTROLLER.

~AND~

JOHN H. CHAMBERS

DEPUTY CLERK OF THE COMMON COUNCIL, NEW YORK.

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HERE'S AN ATTRACTIVE DOCUMENT SIGNED BY WOOD as MAYOR of NEW YORK CITY, and FLAGG as NEW YORK CITY COMPTROLLER and CHAMBERS AS DEPUTY CLERK OF THE COMMON COUNCIL, DATED AT NEW YORK CITY, APRIL 1, 1857 – A CHECK DRAWN OFF NEW YORK CITY’S ACCOUNT AT THE SHOE and LEATHER BANK, MADE PAYABLE TO A NEW YORK CITY FIREFIGHTER, “B. AUSTIN.”

The verso bear’s fireman Austin’s signature executed with “His X Mark” and countersigned by the Clerk of the Chief Engineer of the FDNY, Charles A. Gray, who also would later serve as Secretary of the NY Fire Department during the Civil War era.

The piece measures 7½” x 3½ and is in Very Fine Condition.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE HONORABLE

 FERNANDO WOOD

Wood, Fernando (14 June 1812-14 Feb. 1881), mayor of New York City and congressman, was  born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Benjamin Wood, a merchant, and Rebecca  Lehmann. His father's business failures led to an insecure childhood. In 1821 the family  moved to New York City, where Wood attended a private academy until age thirteen. Leaving  home, he supported himself in New York and elsewhere with a variety of low-paying jobs.  In 1831 the tall, handsome, well-mannered young man married Anna W. Taylor, the daughter  of a moderately successful Philadelphia merchant. The following year the couple returned  to New York City where, his father having died, Wood invested his wife's dowry in  business ventures to support his wife, mother, and younger siblings.

Although even his most successful venture, a "grocery" that sold drinks to longshoremen,  made little money, Wood found he could excel in politics. A member of Tammany Hall, the  Democratic club, by 1835, Wood rose to prominence locally as the issue of government  support for banks divided his party. Switching to the antibank position in the panic of  1837, Wood found in antibank Locofocoism a popular ideology (equal rights, hard money,  and antimonopoly), a devoted working class constituency, and an opportunity to lead as he  headed the movement that ousted probank Democrats from Tammany. He attended his first  national Democratic convention in 1840 and was elected to the U.S. House of  Representatives that fall. Meanwhile, however, his childless marriage ended in divorce in  1839.

In Washington, D.C., Wood spoke against Whig banking, tariff, and spending measures  (while voting for expenditures that benefited New York), established friendships with  southern politicians such as Henry Wise and John C. Calhoun (while simultaneously  reporting to northern Democrats such as Martin Van Buren the political plans of the  southerners), and helped Samuel F. B. Morse to get a subsidy for his telegraph. In 1841  he married Anna D. Richardson, with whom he had seven children before her death in 1859.  Her father, a judge, brought him valuable upstate New York political connections.

Congressional redistricting and a switch to single member districts cost Wood his congressional seat in 1842. Needing to supplement his income from a chandlery business, he successfully sought from John C. Calhoun in 1844 the patronage post of dispatch agent in New York City for the State Department, which he held until 1847. In 1848 he used  $3,500 of his wife's money as a down payment on land for a new home in the remote  nineteenth ward. The transaction introduced him to the real estate market, the source of  his large fortune. Within twenty years his original parcel was worth $650,000 and he was regularly buying, selling, subdividing, and leasing property throughout the rapidly growing metropolis. In 1848 Wood also persuaded his brother-in-law and some of his friends (on the basis of a forged letter) to invest in a shipload of goods to be sold to gold miners in California. The expedition was successful, but Wood exaggerated his costs when dividing up the profits, causing a lawsuit that eventually resulted in a judgment against Wood as well as useful ammunition for his political enemies.

The division of the Democratic party over slavery extension into the territories brought Wood back to politics after 1848 as a prospective peacemaker between factions. Winning the mayoral nomination in 1850, he was defeated in a general Whig sweep. In 1854,  however, he won the office, was reelected in 1856, defeated in 1857, reelected in 1859,  and defeated again in 1861. Facing a city bitterly divided along ethnic, class, religious, and racial lines, Wood prefigured later political bosses by striving to  address urban problems by assuming personal control of municipal affairs.

Power, however, was not easily centralized. Wood himself headed a factionalized party in a state in which hostility toward urban immigrant populations was growing. His own limited powers were further constricted by a factionalized city council and an often Republican state legislature. Attempting to appeal to businessmen and reformers in his first term, Wood appeared to crack down on prostitution, gambling, and saloons and pushed for the building of Central Park and a municipal university. Responding to working-class Irish immigrants, however, he found ways to avoid enforcing state liquor laws, and during the panic of 1857 he recommended putting the unemployed to work for the city building and repairing public structures. Bridging class lines proved impossible. Wood's desire to control patronage and his ambitions for the governorship frightened similarly ambitious politicians in his own party who engineered his defeat in 1857. Wood responded by forming his own organization, Mozart Hall, in September 1858. Through this society, which he funded and directed, Wood asserted that his followers represented traditional Democratic principles abandoned by Tammany.

Republicans also feared Wood as a demagogue and sought to divert municipal patronage to  their own hands by using their power in the state legislature to form metropolitan  commissions to control New York City's police, supervise the wharves and piers, and even  oversee the construction of a new city hall. Wood created his own municipal police force in opposition to the Metropolitans, and for a time both battled in the streets before the courts ruled against Wood and his force was disbanded. Wood's frustration with state government provides the context to understand his proposal in 1861 that New York City secede from the state and become a free city.

While never fully trusting him, prosouthern Democratic leaders at the national level,  such as James Buchanan, angled for Wood's support in the 1850s. His prosouthern and proslavery associations identified him in many minds as a treasonous Copperhead during  the Civil War, although after Fort Sumter he proposed a million dollar tax levy to raise  troops for the war. Shortly before his mayorship ended in 1861, Wood married Alice F.  Mills, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy retired merchant. They had nine  children.

With enthusiasm for the war dwindling in heavily Democratic New York City, Wood became a Peace Democrat and won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1862. Failing to be reelected in 1864, he was returned in 1866 and served until his death in Hot Springs,  Arkansas. Despite his lengthy congressional service, the minority status of his party  during most of the sessions and his own uncompromising stands on low tariffs and hard  currency limited his leadership role in Congress. He was chair of the Ways and Means  Committee after 1877 but faced more defeats than victories in that position. Although a  gadfly to Republicans in Congress and a hard worker on budget and tax bills, his real  political contributions lay in his earlier organization of New York's immigrant  population and experimentation with ways to address urban problems.

Bibliography

Wood's papers are at the New York Historical Society and New York Public Library. The  best biography is Jerome Mushkat, Fernando Wood: A Political Biography (1990). See also  Samuel A. Pleasants, Fernando Wood of New York (1948). On specific episodes in Wood's  life see James F. Richardson, "Mayor Fernando Wood and the New York Police Force,  1855-1857," New York Historical Society Quarterly 40 (1966): 5-40, and Tyler G. Anbinder,  "Fernando Wood and New York City's Secession from the Union: A Political Reappraisal,"  New York History 68 (1987): 67-92. On Tammany see Leonard Chalmers, "Fernando Wood and  Tammany Hall: The First Phase," New York Historical Society Quarterly 52 (1968): 379-402,  and Chalmers, "Tammany Hall, Fernando Wood, and the Struggle to Control New York City,  1857-1860," New York Historical Society Quarterly 53 (1969): 7-33. An obituary is in the  New York Times, 15 Feb. 1881. [Source: American National Biography]

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