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homely tie led him to learn his father's trade, and by the time he was twenty he opened a tobacco shop in Pearl Street. An enthusiastic admirer of Andrew Jackson, and even then an absorbed fol­lower of politics, the young cigarmaker attended to business so desultorily that within three years he was bankrupt. For a year he went back to clerk­ing and then in 1836 disposed of whatever doubt remained of his fitness as a future Tammany leader by opening a saloon. Profits on the whiskey he sold at three cents a glass or so to the longshore­men and sailors who frequented his place, one block from the waterfront, did not, cheaply and crudely home-made though the stuff was, suit the greedy youth to whom the accumulation of money had always been one of life's chief aims. Before he had been in his new business very long he was augment­ing his income from a more prolific source.

With money stolen from his drunken and be­fuddled customers, and possibly otherwise acquired, he purchased a sailing ship, and soon a second and a third, and engaged in coastal trade. By 1840, al­though only twenty-eight years old, he already was considered a rich man and was able to win election to Congress. In the years that followed he profited still further in real estate transactions, always with a political tinge, that left the City proportionately poorer as they made Wood wealthier and also from

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