Dead Rabbits riot

The Dead Rabbits riot was a two-day civil disturbance in New York City resulting from what was originally a small-scale street fight between members of the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys into a citywide gang war which lasted from July 4–5, 1857. Taking advantage of the disorganized state of the city's police force, brought about by the conflict between the Municipal and Metropolitan police, the fighting would spiral into widespread looting and damage of property by gangsters and other criminals from all parts of the city. It is estimated that between 800 and 1,000 gang members took part in the riots, along with several hundred others who used the disturbance to loot the Bowery area. It was the largest disturbance since the Astor Place Riot in 1849, and the biggest scene of gang violence, unsurpassed until the New York Draft Riots of 1863. Order was restored only by the New York State Militia, supported by detachments of city police, under Major-General Charles W. Sandford.^[1]

Events

George Henry Hall, A Dead Rabbit, 1858. Also entitled Study of the Nude, or Study of an Irishman, it depicts a man meant to represent one of the Dead Rabbits gang members from the Dead Rabbits Riot of July 4, 1857 in New York City's Lower East Side slums.

On the evening of July 4, 1857, while the rest of New York was celebrating Independence Day, members of the Dead Rabbits led a coalition of street gangs from the Five Points, with exception of the Roach Guards with whom they had been fighting,^[2] into The Bowery to raid a clubhouse occupied by the Bowery Boys and the Atlantic Guards. They were confronted outside the building by their rivals and were driven back after vicious street fighting, the Five Pointers retreating to Paradise Square.

Some fighting continued as far away as Pearl and Chatham Streets, in the northern half of Park Row, but no police were dispatched. With the exception of a few nearby Metropolitan patrolmen, who were seriously injured, each police faction claimed the responsibility lay with the other. Police inactivity caused the situation to escalate in the next few hours.^[3][4]

The following morning, the Five Pointers returned to the Bowery with the Roach Guards and attacked the Green Dragon, a popular Broome Street resort and meeting place for the Bowery Boys and other local criminals. They managed to surprise the Bowery gangsters inside the building and, armed with iron bars and large paving blocks, they proceeded to wreck the bar room, rip up the floor of the dance hall and drink all the alcohol in the place. News of the incident quickly reached the Bowery Boys, who then called upon other gangs of the Bowery to join them and confronted the Five Pointers at Bayard Street, where one of the largest street gang battles in the city's history occurred.^[3]

At around 10:00 a.m., amid savage fighting, a lone patrolman bravely used his club to move through the gangsters in an attempt to take the ring leaders into custody. He was knocked down and attacked by the crowd, however, stripped of his uniform, and beaten with his own nightstick. He managed to crawl back to the sidewalk and, wearing only his cotton drawers, he ran towards the Metropolitan headquarters on White Street, where he informed the precinct of the fighting before he collapsed.

A small police squad was sent out to break up the fighting but, upon reaching Centre Street, the gangs turned against the police, who were forced to retreat after several officers were injured. They made a second attempt, this time fighting their way into the mob, and arrested two men believed to be the leaders. The gangsters responded by storming into the low houses lining The Bowery and Bayard Street, forcing residents out, and climbed to the rooftops, where they proceeded to shower the Metropolitan officers with stones and brick bats until they fled from the area.^[2][3]

When the police left without their prisoners, the fighting stopped for a few moments. The truce lasted only an hour or two as fighting resumed near The Tombs,^[2] supposedly brought about by a group of women from the Five Points who had provoked the Dead Rabbits into attacking the Bowery gangs. Bringing reinforcements, the participants were estimated at between 800 and 1000, armed with bludgeons, paving stones, brick bats, axes, pitchforks, and other weapons. Several hundred other criminals also arrived in the area, mostly burglars and thieves, who were not affiliated with either side and simply took the opportunity for looting. Residents and store owners all along the Bowery, as well as on Baxter, Bayard, Elizabeth, and Mulberry streets, were forced to barricade their buildings and protect themselves with pistols and muskets.^[3]

Fighting continued until early afternoon, when a larger police force arrived, sent by Police Commissioner Simeon Draper, and marched in close formation towards the mob. After hard fighting, they cleared the streets forcing both the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys into the buildings and to the rooftops once again.^[2] The police followed the gangsters, using their clubs at every opportunity, and began arresting large numbers of men. Some refused to surrender to police, such as one man who, while fighting police, fell off the roof of a Baxter Street tenement fracturing his skull. He was promptly killed by Bowery gangsters on the ground, who stomped him to death.^[4] Two leaders of the Dead Rabbits were finally arrested by police despite heavy resistance from fellow gang members. The police took them to a nearby police precinct followed by a group of Bowery Boys.^[3]

Fighting resumed as soon as the police left. Barricades were set up with push carts and stones from which gangsters fired weapons, hurled bricks and used clubs against their enemies. One of these, a Dead Rabbit, stepped in front of his barricade used his pistol to kill two Bowery Boys and wound two others despite heavy fire. He was finally knocked unconscious, reportedly by a small boy whose brother was a Bowery Boy, and who had crawled along the barricade and hit the Dead Rabbit with a brick bat from behind.^[3]

The police returned to the area but were unable to re-enter, forced to retreat several times with heavy losses, and that evening, they called upon Captain Isaiah Rynders to use his influence to stop the battle. Rynders, then the political boss of the Sixth Ward, was long associated with the underworld and it was thought that he could force them to stop. He agreed and, upon his arrival between 6:00–7:00 p.m., he addressed the gangsters from the barricades. Although he tried to reason with them by telling them the futility of fighting, they refused to listen, and Rynders was forced to escape, in the company of his henchmen, when the mob responded by throwing rocks at him. He then traveled to the Metropolitan Police Headquarters where he advised Draper to call in the military.^[2][4] Meanwhile, fires had been set to two or three houses while residents remained under siege by looters and thugs.^[3]

At around 9:00 p.m., the Eighth and the Seventy-First Regiments of the New York State Militia under Major-General Charles W. Sandford marched down White and Worth Streets with fixed bayonets. Accompanied by two police detachments of 75 men each, they moved ahead of the guardsmen clubbing gangsters and rioters. Although neither regiment was at full strength, the show of force was enough to panic the gangsters to flee back to their hideouts. The fighting ceased from then on, with 500 men remaining at the City Arsenal until 4:00 a.m. although police and national guardsmen continued to patrol the district for the rest of the night and into the next day.^[2][3]

Aftermath

During the two days, eight men were killed and between thirty ^[2] to a hundred others injured, roughly half requiring to be hospitalized. It was believed that many gang members were carried off by their friends and, over the next few days, those who were killed in the fighting were buried in cellars, hidden passageways and other locations in the Five Points and Paradise Square. Many known "sluggers" from both sides were noticeably absent from the area following the riot. According to underworld legend, these sites would be used for secret burials by street gangs for the next several decades.^[3][4]

Afterwards, occasional violence against Bowery Boys who ventured into the Five Points was reported although none of these attacks reached the levels seen during the riots. The most serious incident occurred the next day, when a group of Bowery Boys fought members of the Kerryonians in Centre Street, but they were chased back to the Bowery and Chatham Square by the time police arrived. Sporadic fighting continued for another week, most being confined in German-American neighborhoods in the East Side and the East River by younger criminals emulating the Irish gangs.

Many of the Five Points gangs, most notably the Dead Rabbits, resented the implications made by police and newspapers that they had been involved in criminal activity. The Dead Rabbits paid for a letter to the New York Times, denying those assertions.^[3]

In popular culture

• A book of poetry by Richard Griffin, The Dead Rabbit Riot, A.D. 1857: And Other Poems, was published in 1915.
• The Dead Rabbit Riot was featured in the History Channel documentary television series History's Mysteries in 1998.
• The Dead Rabbits, the Five Points, and a large riot are portrayed in the movie Gangs of New York.

See also

• History of New York City (1855–97)

References

Further reading

• Anbinder, Tyler. Five Points: the 19th-century New York City neighborhood that invented tap dance, stole elections, and became the world's most notorious slum (Simon and Schuster, 2001)
• Clark, Emmons. History of the Seventh Regiment of New York, 1806–1889. Vol. I. New York: The Seventh Regiment, 1890.
• Francis, Augustus Theodore. History of the 71st Regiment, N.G., N.Y., American Guard. New York: The Veterans Association, 1919.
• Katz, Helena. Gang Wars: Blood and Guts on the Streets of Early New York (2005)