It was wholly appropriate that the rioters had vented their frustrations on Abraham Florentine, because he epitomized everything Five Pointers resented about the new force. Florentine, a thirty-year-old undertaker, was one of the very few white adult native-born citizens living on Mulberry Bend, the densely populated block bounded by Mulberry, Bayard, Baxter, and Park. In fact, until the 1855 census enumerator reached Florentine’s house at 591/2 Mulberry, he had not recorded a single native-born adult white male among the previous 928 residents. Florentine’s selection for the Metropolitan force (albeit as a temporary officer) seemed to verify the Five Pointers’ charge that the Republicans were discriminating against adopted citizens in their appointments to the new police department.
Florentine’s hiring also lent credibility to the Irish charge that the new department was dominated by Know Nothings. Florentine’s father, Abraham Senior, had been a leader of the anti-Catholic American-Republican party in the Sixth Ward, serving on the organization’s “general executive” and finance committees in the 1840s. Abraham Junior had followed his father into the nativist political ranks. An 1854 Herald advertisement listing “Sixth Ward Reform Nominations” featured young Florentine as the candidate for one of the ward’s three city council seats. This “reform” slate was actually the Know Nothing ticket—the initially secretive nativist party used this ploy throughout the United States to advertise its nominees in 1854. Another Sixth Ward Know Nothing candidate for councilman in 1854, Joseph Souder, was made a Metropolitan sergeant. A large proportion of the rioters harassing the Metropolitans lived on lower Mulberry Street, and some of them undoubtedly knew of Florentine’s affiliations. The sight of their nativist neighbors in Metropolitan uniforms must have both infuriated them and confirmed that the Police Act was part of a Know Nothing conspiracy to humiliate the Irish and destroy their burgeoning political power.26
After so much predawn violence, the morning and afternoon of the Fourth of July were eerily quiet. But late that day, the violence recommenced. Learning that some of their Seventh Ward officers were under attack, Metropolitan commanders in the Sixth dispatched about two dozen patrolmen to assist them. The Sixth Ward policemen had remained in their barracks for most of the day, but at 5:00 p.m. they headed east from their White Street station house, planning to turn south on Baxter and then east onto Bayard, which would carry them across the Bowery to the Seventh Ward.27
Meanwhile, Five Pointers were thronging the streets, escaping from their crowded tenements and enjoying the district’s holiday celebrations. Just before the phalanx of Metropolitans set out from White Street toward the Seventh Ward, a fight broke out on Bayard between Baxter and Mulberry, and an enormous crowd gathered to witness the excitement. “The belligerent parties had just been separated,” the Tribune later reported, “when the cry was heard, ‘The Metropolitans are coming.’” Suddenly gripped by a combination of panic and outrage, some dashed into their tenements, while others stood their ground determined to prevent the Metropolitans from making arrests in a harmless street fight.
When the police turned into Bayard Street moments later, they were set upon by the rabid crowd. The patrolmen’s attempts to create a wall of defense were hampered by “the shower of stones, bricks, oyster-shells, fragments of ironware, and in some instances whole pots and kettles” that rained down upon them from the surrounding tenement windows and rooftops. The assault had been in progress no more than a few minutes when the cry rang out that “the Bowery Boys are coming.” Indeed, two hundred or so men and boys were streaming westward on Bayard in an attempt once again to defend the police from attack. The Metropolitans dashed eastward to take cover behind the advancing Bowery Boys, who took over the fighting; the policemen continued toward the Seventh Ward. The Mulberry Boys, initially shocked at the sudden appearance of their Bowery foes, quickly regrouped and drove the Bowery Boys back to a construction site on the south side of Bayard between Mott and Elizabeth. The retreat proved fortuitous, as the Bowery Boys were able to lay in a new and superior supply of ammunition by helping themselves to the huge pile of bricks meant for construction of a new tenement. Using the brickbats as bludgeons and missiles, the Bowery Boys were able to drive their enemies back to Mott Street.28
At this point, about six o’clock, thirty to forty Metropolitans arrived on the scene in the rear of the Mulberry gang’s line, prompting most of the Mulberry Boys to take cover inside nearby tenements. “Again the bricks and stones were showered from the housetops and windows by the hundred,” commented the Tribune, “many of which struck the officers, causing severe injuries.” The patrolmen—many “with blood streaming over their faces”—were nevertheless able to make about a dozen arrests before they retreated back toward White Street. Once the police had abandoned the front, the full force of Mulberry Boys returned to Bayard to defend against the Bowery Boys’ incursion. They managed to dislodge the enemy from the brick pile and force a retreat to Elizabeth Street.29
The fight was primarily between Mathews’s and Kerrigan’s adherents on the one hand, and Brennan’s on the other. The Morning Express reported that one side was composed of “the Bowery Boys, under the leadership of Pat Matthews [sic], a well known Custom House officer, and having headquarters at a drinking house No. 40 Bowery.” The Tribune added that “many of the members of Hose Company No. 14 in Elizabeth street,” the unit associated with Kerrigan, also “belong to the party.” As used by the press, the term “Bowery Boy” now referred not to the colorful subculture that had flourished in the late 1840s and early 1850s, but primarily to the political adherents of Kerrigan and Mathews. The Bowery Boy of 1857 seems to have been more of a sporting man than a “B’hoy.” Stories about the “old sports” of New York described both Mathews and Kerrigan as prominent sporting men. The image of the Bowery Boy published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper after the riot closely resembles a typical sporting man and has little in common with the “soap-locked” and clothes-conscious Bowery B’hoy of 1849. Yet one does find some traces of the “B’hoy” persisting in the 1857 Bowery Boys, especially the strident nationalism, which accounts in part for Kerrigan’s volunteering for action in Mexico, Nicaragua, and the Civil War. Most of the 1857 “Bowery Boys” lived on Elizabeth Street and the Bowery, but many resided on the far side of the Bowery in the Tenth Ward as well.30
Reporters covering the riot stated that the Bowery Boys’ opponents in this struggle were members of a Five Points gang known as the “Dead Rabbits,” and historians have consequently dubbed this conflict the “Dead Rabbit/Bowery Boy Riot.” Yet the neighborhood residents who supposedly composed the ranks of the “Dead Rabbits” were unanimous in their insistence that no gang by that name existed. Instead, they claimed that the group the police initially referred to as the Mulberry Boys was actually the “Roach” or “Roche” Guard, a combination political/social club founded at the beginning of the 1850s in honor of prominent neighborhood saloon-keeper Walter Roche, an 1848 immigrant from County Carlow who at that point operated a popular saloon at 19 Mulberry Street. Marcus Horbelt, a twenty-one-year-old shoemaker residing at 25 Mulberry Street, wrote angrily after the riot to all the major New York dailies to complain about their pejorative depictions of the Roche Guard or “Dead Rabbit Club” as “a gang of Thieves, Five-Pointers, Pickpockets, &c. Now, if your reporter wished to earn $25, I hereby offer to give him, or any other one, that sum of money who will prove, satisfactorily, that a single member of the Guard (by the way, there is no such club as the Dead Rabbits) is a Five-Pointer, a thief or a pickpocket. . . . I say that the young men who compose that Guard are, 1st, honest; 2d, industrious; 3d, young men who follow some lawful occupation for a living.” And another Five Pointer, Harry Molony, informed the Herald that a club called “the ‘Dead Rabbits’ . . . does not nor never did belong to the Sixth ward, to the personal knowledge of one resident in it for twelve years.”31
The press nonetheless persisted in referring to the Bowery Boys’ adversaries as the “Dead Rabbits.�
� Some reporters stated that the Dead Rabbits were an offshoot of the Roche Guard. Divisions within the Roche Guard’s ranks, they said, had led to a secession of some members, who to spite their former allies threw a dead rabbit into one of their meetings, thus earning the secessionists their gruesome nickname. In fact, the most likely source of the term lies elsewhere. One eyewitness to the riot, Metropolitan Thomas Harvey, later testified that “the thieves of the Five Points” were referred to in neighborhood slang as “the ‘dead Rabbit party.’” In an attempt to cast aspersion on their antagonists, the Bowery Boys probably referred to their opponents by this name during the struggle (Horbelt’s letter demonstrates that he and his allies were very sensitive about being associated with the criminals who concentrated at the Five Points intersection). Because most reporters used the Bowery Boys as sources for their stories on the riots, the scribes probably got the term from them. The name so captured the imagination of New Yorkers that the press continued to use it despite the abundant evidence that no such club or gang existed. The Morning Express, for example, initially reported that mourners at one rioter’s funeral wore satin badges inscribed with the words “Dead Rabbit Club,” but the next day admitted that they had actually read “Roach Guard. We mourn our loss.” For more than a decade, “Dead Rabbit” became the standard phrase by which city residents described any scandalously riotous individual or group. But there seems to be no justification for referring to the Bowery Boys’ adversaries by this name.32
Frank Leslie’s depiction of a typical Roche Guard supporter. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, (July 11, 1857). Collection of the Library of Congress.
While the origin of the term “Dead Rabbit” is uncertain, it is clear that the Five Pointers referred to by that name were all loyal adherents of Matthew Brennan. When Brennan became police justice in 1854, he put Roche in charge of his Monroe Hall saloon. Roche also served as assistant foreman of Brennan Hose Company No. 60 in 1858. Horbelt was a member of the same fire company. He was also appointed an election inspector for the lower Mulberry Street district for the November 1857 canvass (the polling place was in Roche’s saloon there) and was elected a ward constable in that contest—honors he could not have achieved without Brennan’s approval. The extent to which Roche or Horbelt participated in the actual rioting cannot be determined, though we do know that Fatty Walsh, one leader of the rioters, was affiliated with Brennan as well. The riot was clearly a political fight between the adherents of Brennan on the one hand, and those of Mathews and Kerrigan on the other.33
Five Points women helped defend the neighborhood against the incursions of the police and the Bowery Boys. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (July 11, 1857). Collection of the Library of Congress.
Despite the political overtones of the fighting, men were not the only participants. Women and children allied with the Roche Guard were “busily engaged in gathering and breaking up stones, brickbats, &c., in their aprons and handkerchiefs . . . and carrying them to those on the housetops to fire down on the crowd.” By late afternoon, in order to protect themselves from the continuing rain of rocks, bottles, and bricks, the Bowery Boys at the corner of Elizabeth and Bayard erected a barricade from carts, wagons, and construction materials left on the street. Their adversaries soon followed suit.34
In order to penetrate these defensive fortifications, the rioters around 6:00 p.m. began to take up firearms for the first time, though the Bowery Boys had far more pistols and rifles than did the Roche Guard. “A frightful scene of riot and bloodshed ensued,” reported the Morning Express. “A large number were wounded, and some mortally.” According to the Herald, the scene became one “of indescribable confusion. The crowding, fighting mass in the streets—the howling, shrieking women and children in the upper floors busily engaged in showering every description of missile on the heads of those below, hitting indiscriminately friends and foes—the explosion of firearms, amid the shrieks of the wounded and dying, rendered the scene one of horror and terror.”35
View from the “Dead Rabbit” barricade on Bayard Street, at the corner of either Mulberry or Mott. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (July 11, 1857). Collection of the Library of Congress.
By this point, people from all over the city had flocked to the Sixth Ward to witness the riot. Minister Lyman Abbott rented a room on an upper floor of a boardinghouse at the corner of Bayard and the Bowery in order to observe the spectacle. Richard Henry Dana Jr., who since his visits to Five Points brothels had published Two Years Before the Mast, was also there. When he asked who was engaged in the battle, an onlooker told Dana that the struggle was “between our chaps & the Bowery boys.” Dana noted in his diary that “the fight was chiefly with fire-arms, tho’ there were occasional rushes & retreats, assaults and repulses of large bodies, armed with bricks & clubs, & here & there a strong man made long bowls with pieces of brick. On the side walk not far from me, was a pool of blood, as if a hog had been killed, & a lad of 16 came out of a house with a bandage over his face, & a long-nine [cigar] in his mouth, swaggering off with the air of a hero.” Observing the conflict was almost as dangerous as participating in it. A stray bullet struck and killed a young spectator at a Bayard Street window near Abbott’s.36
Despite the escalating casualty rate, the Roche Guard and its allies fought on in defense of their turf. “The recklessness of some of the men seemed almost unaccountable,” exclaimed the Tribune. “One of the Dead Rabbits stood for [a] full fifteen minutes on the top of the brick pile throwing bricks at the Bowery boys, while at the same time the bullets were whistling by in a fearfully ominous manner. . . . A woman displayed remarkable bravery at this time” as well. “Several times she came out of Mott street to the brick pile, filled her apron with bricks and carried them into Mott street.” Bowery Boys called on her to stop but when she returned for more, they threw bricks at her. When she came back yet again, they shot at her. She only stopped when a man “came out and carried her forcibly into Mott street.” After the shooting tapered off momentarily around seven o’clock, Isaiah Rynders made an effort to broker a truce. Both sides jeered the Captain, however, “and seeing a boy shot down beside him, he acted the wiser part and retired.”37
The riot finally ended around eight o’clock. According to most press accounts, a former policeman from the Nineteenth Ward named Shangles convinced each side to cease and desist by telling them (inaccurately) that the militia was on its way to restore order. Clancy later insisted, however, that he, Dowling, and Brennan had persuaded the rioters to go home. Whatever the case, “each faction then slowly dispersed—the Atlantic Boys to the Bowery and the ‘Dead Rabbits’ to their haunts in Mulberry and the streets in the lower part of the Ward.”38
As news of the cease-fire spread, Five Pointers swarmed out of neighborhood tenements and into district pharmacies—the de facto medical clinics of the day—to see if their loved ones were among the dead or wounded. “So great was the anxiety to obtain this information,” reported the Times, “that the windows of several of the drug stores were broken and the doors forced. Women and children rushed forward frantically for their husbands, fathers, and brothers, and their cries and lamentations made this the gloomiest portion of the day.” Twelve New Yorkers lay dead. Thirty-seven of the wounded were admitted to New York Hospital, but the Times estimated that two or three times that number were treated in their homes out of fear the authorities might prosecute the injured for their part in what a number of newspapers called the Sixth Ward’s “civil war.” “The greatest injury was done . . . to the Mulberry-street ‘crowd,’ as they were not so well armed as their Bowery antagonists,” noted the Times. “Not one of the Bowery boys was fatally injured,” concurred the Tribune, “. . . nearly all of the killed being of the Dead Rabbit crowd.”39
Despite having inflicted the overwhelming majority of the serious injuries, the Bowery Boys were not the ones prosecuted for rioting. Authorities may have justified this bias on the grounds that the Bowery Boys initially had e
ntered the fray in defense of the police. Prosecutors indicted only the six men arrested by the Metropolitans when the new police made their second foray into Bayard Street during the initial stages of the riot. Police had observed them throwing bricks into the crowd or attacking officers attempting to make arrests.
None of the men indicted for rioting hired an attorney and all presented the same defense: that they had merely been watching or passing by when apprehended. Barney Gallagher, a tailor who like all his codefendants could not sign his name to his statement, told the court that “I’m a poor man and han’t had money to fee a lawyer nor anybody else. I was going through the street peaceably to my family with my little week’s earnings, and didn’t do nothin to nobody.” Only Clancy appeared on behalf of the defendants, peppering the prosecution witnesses with questions in an attempt to poke holes in their cases. The New York press condemned the aldermen for taking the side of the riot’s instigators, but Clancy insisted to the Times that he acted “from motives of charity, only, to help those men who were without friends.” The alderman’s efforts were in vain, however, as the judge found all the defendants guilty. Clancy did win a suspended sentence for a sixteen-year-old rioter, but the remaining five received the maximum permissible punishment—six months in prison. New York’s Irish-American community perceived the verdicts and sentences as evidence of both selective prosecution and prejudice. “The principle evidence against some of those who have been sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and hard labor was, that they had unmistakably Irish names,” complained the New York Citizen, “and happened to be in the street, and perhaps wounded while the riots were going on!” Those responsible for the deaths of the Roche Guard members and its allies, in contrast, went unpunished.40
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