William M. Tweed has begun to form what will become known as the "Tweed Ring", by having his friends elected to office: George G. Barnard had been elected Recorder of New York City; Peter B. Sweeny had been elected New York County District Attorney; and Richard B. Connolly had been elected City Comptroller.

Tweed was born April 3, 1823 at 1 Cherry Street, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

The son of a third-generation Scottish-Irish chair-maker, Tweed had grown up on Cherry Street.

At the age of eleven, he had left school to learn his father's trade, and then became an apprentice to a saddler.

He had also studied to be a bookkeeper and worked as a brushmaker for a company he had invested in, before eventually joining in the family business in 1852.

On September 29, 1844, he had married Mary Jane C. Skaden, and had lived with her family on Madison Street for two years.

Tweed had become a member of the Odd Fellows and the Masons, and had joined a volunteer fire company, Engine No. 12.

In 1848, at the invitation of state assemblyman John J. Reilly, he and some friends had organized the Americus Fire Company No. 6, also known as the "Big Six", as a volunteer fire company, which took as its symbol a snarling red Bengal tiger, a symbol which will remain associated with Tweed and Tammany Hall for many years.

At the time, volunteer fire companies competed vigorously with each other; some were connected with street gangs and had strong ethnic ties to various immigrant communities.

The competition could be so fierce that buildings would sometimes burn down while the fire companies fought each other.

Tweed had became known for his ax-wielding violence, and had soon been elected the Big Six foreman.

Pressure from Alfred Carlson, the chief engineer, had gotten him thrown out of the crew, but fire companies were also recruiting grounds for political parties at the time, and Tweed's exploits had come to the attention of the Democratic politicians who ran the Seventh Ward, who had put him up for Alderman in 1850, when Tweed was twenty-six.

Losing that election to the Whig candidate, he had run again the next year and won, garnering his first political position.

Tweed had won election to the United States House of Representatives in 1852, but his two-year term was undistinguished.

In an attempt by Republican reformers in Albany, the state capital, to control the Democratic-dominated New York City government, the power of the New York County Board of Supervisors had been beefed up.

The board has twelve members, six appointed by the mayor and six elected, and in 1858 Tweed had been appointed to the board, which became his first vehicle for large-scale graft; Tweed and other supervisors had forced vendors to pay a fifteen percent overcharge to their "ring" in order to do business with the city.

By 1853, Tweed was running the seventh ward for Tammany.

Although he was not trained as a lawyer, Tweed's friend Judge George G. Barnard had certified him as an attorney, and Tweed had opened a law office on Duane Street.

Defeated in his bid for sheriff in 1861, he had become the chairman of the Democratic General Committee shortly after the election, and had then been chosen to be the head of Tammany's general committee in January 1863.

Several months later, in April 1863, he had become "Grand Sachem", and began to be referred to as "Boss", especially after he tightened his hold on power by creating a small executive committee to run the club.

Tweed then took steps to increase his income: he used his law firm to extort money, which was then disguised as legal services; he had himself appointed deputy street commissioner—a position with considerable access to city contractors and funding; he bought the New-York Printing Company, which became the city's official printer, and the city's stationery supplier, the Manufacturing Stationers' Company, and had both companies begin to overcharge for their goods and services.

Boss Tweed had taken control of the New York City government following the election of 1869.

His protégé, John T. Hoffman, the former mayor of the city, had won election as governor, and Tweed had garnered the support of good government reformers like Peter Cooper and the Union League Club, by proposing a new city charter which returned power to City Hall at the expense of the Republican-inspired state commissions.

The new charter had passed, thanks in part to six hundred thousand dollars in bribes Tweed has paid to Republicans, and is signed into law by Hoffman in 1870.

Mandated new elections allow Tammany to take over the city's Common Council when they win all fifteen aldermanic contests.

The new charter puts control of the city's finances in the hands of a Board of Audit, which consists of Tweed, who is Commissioner of Public Works, Mayor A. Oakey Hall and Comptroller Richard "Slippery Dick" Connolly, both Tammany men.

Hall also appoints other Tweed associates to high offices—such as Peter B. Sweeny, who takes over the Department of Public Parks—providing the Tweed Ring with even firmer control of the New York City government and enabling them to defraud the taxpayers of many more millions of dollars.

In the words of Albert Bigelow Paine, "their methods were curiously simple and primitive. There were no skilful manipulations of figures, making detection difficult ... Connolly, as Controller, had charge of the books, and declined to show them. With his fellows, he also 'controlled' the courts and most of the bar." (Paine, Albert B. (1974). Th. Nast, His Period and His Pictures. Princeton: Pyne Press, p. 143)

Tweed's downfall comes in the wake of the Orange riot of 1871, which occurs after Tammany Hall bans a parade of Irish Protestants celebrating an historical victory against Catholicism, because of a riot the year before in which eight people died when a crowd of Irish laborers attacked the paraders.

Under strong pressure from the newspapers and the Protestant elite of the city, Tammany had reversed course, and the march had been allowed to proceed, with protection from city policemen and state militia.

The result is an even larger riot in which over sixty people are killed and more than one hundred and fifty injured on July 12.

Although Tammany's electoral power base is largely centered in the Irish immigrant population, it also needs the city's elite to acquiesce in its rule, and this is conditional on the machine's ability to control the actions of their people, but the July riot shows that this capability is not nearly as strong as had been supposed.

Tweed had for months been under attack from the New York Times and Thomas Nast, the cartoonist from Harper's Weekly, but their campaign has had only limited success in gaining traction.

They had been able to force an examination of the city's books, but the blue-ribbon commission of six businessmen appointed by Mayor A. Oakey Hall, a Tammany man, which includes John Jacob Astor III, banker Moses Taylor and others who benefit from Tammany's actions, had found that the books had been "faithfully kept", letting the air out of the effort to dethrone Tweed.

The response to the Orange riot of 1871 changes everything, and only days afterwards the Times/Nast campaign begins to garner popular support.

More importantly, the Times has started to receive inside information from County Sheriff James O'Brien, whose support for Tweed has fluctuated during Tammany's reign.

O'Brien had tried to blackmail Tammany by threatening to expose the ring's embezzlement to the press, and when this had failed, he had provided the evidence he had collected to the Times.

Shortly afterward, county auditor Matthew J. O'Rourke had supplied additional details to the Times, which had reportedly been offered five million dollars to not publish the evidence.

The Times has also obtained the accounts of the recently deceased James Watson, who had been the Tweed Ring's bookkeeper, and these are published daily, culminating in a special four-page supplement on July 29 headlined "Gigantic Frauds of the Ring Exposed".

Tweed begins in August to transfer ownership in his real-estate empire and other investments to his family members.

The New York City Comptroller resigns shortly thereafter, appointing Andrew Haswell Green, an associate of Samuel J. Tilden's, as his replacement.

Green loosens the purse strings again, allowing city departments not under Tammany control to borrow money to operate.

Green and Tilden have the city's records closely examined, and discover money that had gone directly from city contractors into Tweed's pocket.

The following day, they have Tweed arrested.

Jay Gould, like Tweed, had become the subject of political cartoons by Thomas Nast in 1869.

In October 1871, when Tweed is held on one million dollars bail, Gould is the chief bondsman.

The exposés provoke an international crisis of confidence in New York City's finances, and, in particular, in its ability to repay its debts.

European investors are heavily positioned in the city's bonds and are already nervous about its management—only the reputations of the underwriters are preventing a run on the city's securities.

New York's financial and business community knows that if the city's credit were to collapse, it could potentially bring down with it every bank in the city.

Thus, the city's elite meet at Cooper Union in September to discuss political reform: but for the first time, the conversation included not only the usual reformers, but also Democratic bigwigs such as Samuel J. Tilden, who had been thrust aside during Tammany's elevation.

Although some at the meeting advocate lynching Tweed, the general consensus is that the "wisest and best citizens" should take over the governance of the city and attempt to restore investor confidence.

The result is the formation of the Executive Committee of Citizens and Taxpayers for Financial Reform of the City (also known as "the Committee of Seventy"), which attacks Tammany by cutting off the city's funding.

Property owners refuse to pay their municipal taxes, and a judge—Tweed's old friend George Barnard, no less—enjoins the city Comptroller from issuing bonds or spending money.

Unpaid workers turn against Tweed, marching en masse to City Hall demanding to be paid.

Tweed doles out some funds from his own purse—fifty thousand dollars—but it isn't sufficient to alleviate the crisis, and Tammany begins to lose its essential base.