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out a plan. 32 The idea was simple: Certain categories of people—police, firemen, and state militiamen—had to be exempted from the draft to stay home and protect the city. Others, like poor workmen with families to feed—those who could never afford the $300 commutation fee—should be eligible for case-by-case relief. But instead of simply purchasing exemptions for these people—an approach that shortchanged the army—they’d find substitute recruits and use the city treasury to pay whatever bonus the market demanded, tapping a special $2 million fund financed by bonds to be sold on Wall Street. If a draftee chose to join the army, he could keep $300 as a reward. This way, Lincoln’s army would get its soldiers and the people would get relief.
    To make life and death rulings on individual cases, they’d create a special six-member County Substitute and Relief Committee with three Republicans and three Democrats, including the mayor, Orison Blunt, and Tweed.
    So far, so good; city leaders all applauded the plan. But it lacked a crucial ingredient. Lincoln’s government in Washington controlled the military draft and local county supervisors in New York City had no power to tamper with it. Unless Lincoln and his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, agreed to count the locally-bought New York substitutes toward their federal draft quotas, the plan could not take effect. To close this deal, someone had to go to Washington, D.C. and sell the plan to Lincoln’s government, a tough job given Lincoln’s hard line so far.
    For this delicate diplomacy, the supervisors now voted to appoint a special committee of two: Orion Blunt and Big Bill Tweed.
    Tweed and Blunt crossed the Hudson River one night in August and rode south by train, traveling in secret. On reaching the wartime Capital, they rode through mud streets cramped with army traffic and soon found themselves ushered into the War Department building on 17th Street—a beehive of activity with military officers dashing urgently with bulletins from the battlefront. At the personal office of the secretary, they found waiting to meet them Stanton himself and James Barnet Fry, the Army Provost Marshal-General responsible for administering the draft nationwide.
    Stanton, a veteran Ohio lawyer with gray-streaked beard, spectacles, and prominent eyes, showed them in and gave them his full attention. Sitting face to face with Lincoln’s war ministers, Orison Blunt probably spoke first. As a Republican whose factories sold rifles to the War Department, he spoke the same political dialect as Stanton and Fry. But apparently he turned to Tweed to make the case. “The committee [Blunt and Tweed] were received with great courtesy,” they reported later, and the four men had a “full interchange of views.” 33 Tweed probably addressed Stanton with the same frank directness he’d perfected through years of Tammany back-room huddles, looking him in the eye, patting his shoulder, sharing a confidence. Stanton
    listened with the weary patience borne after three years of bloodshed and frustration.
    In fact, Lincoln and Stanton had been despairing for weeks at any chance of finding a reliable partner in New York City to help them implement the draft. Governor Seymour had resisted their every overture and Mayor Opdyke remained paralyzed in squabbles with city aldermen. Now this man Tweed had given them an answer. General John Dix, Lincoln’s military overseer, who knew the political currents of Manhattan as well as anyone, had already put in a private good word on their behalf: “Tammany Hall, representing more than half the [Democratic Party], will stand by the government,” he’d written to Stanton in late July, after the shock from the riots had begun to
    subside. 34
    Whether it was Dix’s private advice, Lincoln’s instructions, Blunt’s political ties, or Tweed’s own charm that won him over, Stanton bought the line. He agreed to the deal. Tammany Hall, through the county