In the November election of 1827 was the greatest exhibition of fraud and violence ever seen in the city. “Now,” (says Myers) “were observable the effects brought forth by the suffrage changes of 1822 and 1826.” Repeating flourished and honest voters were beaten and arrested for trying to vote. Next year, in 1828, hundreds, if not thousands, of illegal votes were counted, including those of boys of nineteen and twenty years of age. This practice was continued in the ensuing decade. It was then just one year after the complete triumph of manhood suffrage in New York State that money was first used to influence voting in New York City elections. The city was carried in 1828 by Tammany Hall for Andrew Jackson. Four years later in 1832, and subsequent years, the price of votes in New York City was stated at $5.00 each. Paupers from the almshouse and convicts were voted at the polls. In 1838 Swartwout, a Jackson collector of the port, and an unsavory politician, became a defaulter for $1,200,000, an enormous sum for that time, and Price, the United States district attorney, defaulted for $75,000. Civic frauds were frequent and increasing. An aldermanic committee in 1842 reported that dishonest office holders had recently robbed the city of near $100,000, equivalent to a theft of $2,000,000 from New York City in our time. The wholesale naturalization mill was put in operation, turning out several thousand new voters a year. From 1841 to 1844 the total vote of the city was thus increased about twenty-five per cent in newly naturalized foreigners alone; most of them probably without interest in the country or real understanding of its institutions and history. At the election of 1844 it was estimated that twenty per cent of the votes were fraudulent. The primaries were organized by violence and reeked with fraud. The character of many of the noted city politicians was notoriously bad, including professional gamblers, pugilists and even thieves. About this time the city political gangs began to appear. The ward heelers with a following of repeaters were a new power in politics. In one period of ten months, 1839-1840, there were nineteen riots and twenty murders in a city of only 300,000 population. Mike Walsh’s was the principal gang. The gangs increased in number till in 1856 the Bowery Boys and Dead Rabbits had a pitched street battle in Jackson Street, where ten were killed and eighty wounded.