The real sentiments of the bulk of Tammany and of Mozart Hall were to the contrary. Both did their best to paralyze the energies of Lincoln’s administration. In a speech to his Mozart Hall followers at the Volks Garden, on November 27, 1861, Wood charged the national administration with having provoked the war, and said that they (the administration) meant to prolong it while there was a dollar to be stolen from the national Treasury or a drop of Southern blood to be shed. At the Tammany celebration of July 4, 1862, Grand Sachem Nelson J. Waterbury, though expressing loyalty to the Union, averred that it was the President’s duty “to set his foot firmly upon abolitionism and crush it to pieces, and then the soldiers would fight unembarrassed, and victory must soon sit upon the National banners.” Declarations of this kind were generally received with enthusiasm in both halls. At times, however, under the sting of severe public criticism, Tammany Hall made haste to assert its fealty to the Union cause. In September, 1861, Elijah F. Purdy, chairman of its general committee, issued a statement that “Tammany Hall had maintained an unswerving position upon this great question from the time the first gun was fired to the present hour. It has been zealously devoted to the Union, in favor of upholding it with the utmost resources of the nation, and opposed to any action calculated to embarrass the Government or to prevent all loyal men from standing together in solid column for the country.” Tammany put forth the claim that “three-fourths of the volunteer soldiers enlisted in this city and at the seat of war, are Democrats attached to Tammany Hall”; and on October 3, 1861, resolved that with a deep sense of the peril in which the Union and the Constitution were involved by the reckless war being waged for their destruction by armed traitors, it (Tammany Hall) held it to be the first and most sacred duty of every man who loved his country to support the Government.