Dead Rabbits, Bowery Boys and the Night of July 4, 1857: How a Corrupt NYC Mayor, a Divided NYPD and an Economic Panic led to a Big Apple Gang War

By July 4, 1857 New York City had been in a nearly perpetual state of civil unrest for over a month, but on that night, as fireworks exploded overhead and thousands gathered in the city’s densely packed dusty and narrow streets to celebrate America’s independence in the midst of the mid-summer heat and humidity--the Big Apple exploded into an outright gang war.

On America’s eighty-first birthday, only a mere three years before secession and then Civil War would tear the nation apart, New York City’s two largest underworld gangs--The Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys--each representing two distinct neighborhoods; two distinct versions of Christianity; and two distinct versions of what each gang believed it meant to be a “real” American, traded gunfire and fought hand to hand with knives and clubs, while Manhattan’s poorest citizens--those recently arrived by the thousands from Ireland, free African-Americans many only recently having escaped bondage in the south and those who could only afford to live in the ramshackle teeming slums of Gotham’s poorest neighborhoods--were caught in the crossfire and swept up in the violence.

As darkness fell across the City a group of unemployed and desperate Dead Rabbits gathered together, many obviously drunk, and began to maraud through the Five Points neighborhood seeking to root out, beat and even murder rival members of the Bowery Boys and other nativist gangs opposed to their interests.  Within hours of the outbreak of the riot violence had spread through most of the city with buildings being firebombed and large groups of rival gang members clashing in the streets.  The police were slow to respond, when and if they responded at all, because New York City’s corrupt Mayor Fernando Wood had decimated, divided and finally refused to fund the police department.

 After a night of mayhem one brave police officer broke through the crowd of gang members fighting in the street, and after having been beaten by the drunken Dead Rabbits and Bowery Boys with his own nightstick and stripped down to his underwear, this police officer who remains unnamed to history, stumbled battered and bloodied into the Metropolitan Police Headquarters on Centre Street which today runs roughly through Chinatown and Little Italy in lower Manhattan.  

This brave officer alerted the police, many of whom probably already knew what was going on but were too afraid due to their small numbers to venture outside in the darkness, to confront the dire situation that the Dead Rabbit Riot had created in lower Manhattan’s slum neighborhoods.  After he gave his alert to the Metropolitan Police the officer collapsed unconscious on the floor.

The New York Times for July 6, 1857 reported the scene thus, “Brickbats, stones and clubs were flying thickly around from windows in all directions…wounded men lay on the sidewalks and were trampled about.  The Dead Rabbits made a combined rush and forced their antagonists up Bayard Street to the Bowery…”

The Dead Rabbits, so named because during one of their meetings a member had supposedly once thrown a rabbit carcass onto the floor and declared, “That’s what we’ll do to our enemies,” or something to that effect--were founded, largely out of self-defense against nativist aggression in the late 1830’s by newly arrived Irish immigrants.  By 1857, carrying banners emblazoned with rabbits impaled on spikes, the Dead Rabbits were New York’s largest criminal enterprise--the largest Irish immigrant organization in America and they controlled all illicit activities in parts of lower Manhattan’s slums particularly along Mulberry Street.  

Bowery Boy Pictured (L) vs Dead Rabbit Pictured (R)

The New York City press, not coincidentally run by mostly white anglo-saxon Protestant males had taken to calling the Dead Rabbits, The Mulberry Rabble--or even more derisively “Catholic Thugs” and never hesitated to run a scandalous story in the papers about the Dead Rabbits use of extortion, blackmail and physical violence to gain wealth and control in New York City’s underworld.

Opposed to the Dead Rabbits, but also themselves predominantly composed of recently arrived immigrants from Ireland and Scotland were the more benign sounding “Bowery Boys”, but be assured that there was nothing at all benevolent about the Bowery Boys.  The Bowery Boys--so named because the epicenter of their gang was along the docks and waterfronts of lower Manhattan--were a large group of anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant mostly volunteer firemen and blue-collar workers who were closely aligned politically with a burgeoning party called “The Know-Nothings”  

The Know-Nothing’s were a conservative political group that opposed continued immigration, especially Catholic-Irish immigration to the United States.  The heyday of the Know-Nothing Party in American politics, along with the height of Bowery Boys membership and activity in New York City, occurred during the late 1840s and early 1850s at the peak of the Great Potato Famine in Ireland when destitute, desperate and starving Catholic immigrants from the Emerald Isle flooded the ports of the eastern United States.  Due to the unprecedented influx of Irish Catholic immigration to America caused by the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s and 50s many Americans feared that our nation was losing its traditional Protestant identity and sinking into a moral abyss--groups like the Know-Nothing Party and the Bowery Boys developed and flourished as a reaction to this nativist moral panic.

For decades these two groups, at times forming an uneasy alliance, but for the most part existing in a state of perpetual conflict--each struggled for power, influence, wealth and control in New York City.  The Bowery Boys being somewhat more affluent, were active in local politics and had a firm grip on civil service positions in the City, while the Dead Rabbits became the crime bosses of Gotham’s underworld and garnered immense sums of money through control of illegal rackets like gambling, prostitution, boxing and the distribution and production of moonshine alcohol.  Periodically, conflict between the two groups would flare up and result in violence--rarely lasting very long or causing many fatalities, and though the newspapers published scandalous stories about New York’s gangland struggles--for the most part, as long as the Bowery Boys were making their money through political blackmail and the Dead Rabbits were making their money through gambling and prostitution--then both gangs were content to stick to their own neighborhoods while bad-mouthing the other group in the press and warily keeping an eye on each other.

But that all changed in 1857 mainly as a result of one of the largest economic downturns in American history--the Great Panic of 1857.

The Great Panic of 1857, in many ways a precursor to the historically much more well known and infamous Stock Market Crash and subsequent Great Depression of 1929, was caused by the collapse of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, technically America’s biggest bank and insurer of any kind in the mid-nineteenth century.  The Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company’s failure--the result of over speculation and subprime lending--caused lesser banking and lending institutions to also fail which led to widespread unemployment and business closures particularly in the urbanized northeast United States, namely New York City, home to the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys.

When money at the top dried up, as a result of the Great Panic of 1857, the ability to buy political appointments and “pay-to-play” so to speak did too and the Bowery Boys began to go broke.  Also, with tens of thousands of Irish immigrants still coming to New York City daily, and with no work available, and no money to spend, desperation began to set in around the slums of New York, particularly in the Five Points neighborhood and along Mulberry Street.  The Dead Rabbits gained lots of new recruits as a result of the Great Panic of 1857, but because everyone was broke, they too had no money coming in.  Tensions between immigrants and nativists and between Protestants and Catholics went up in New York City as the temperatures rose and as spring turned to summer in 1857. Conditions were ripe for an explosion of civil unrest in Manhattan.

But it could be argued that it wasn’t the Dead Rabbits or the Bowery Boys or even the Panic of 1857 that directly caused the Gang War of July 4-5,  but rather, it could said that the Police, or lack thereof, is what directly caused the powder keg that was Gangland Manhattan to go off on Independence Day night 1857.

Less than three weeks earlier, on June 16, 1857, two competing elements, two competing police forces in New York City established long before the NYPD became known as New York City’s finest, had a riot all their own!  And though no one was killed in what became known  to history as the New York City Police Riot, dozens were injured and the riot itself became a nationwide scandal and a humiliating embarrassment for New York City’s less than reputable Mayor Fernando Wood.

Fernando Wood both New York City’s 73rd and 75th Mayor, one of the few individuals to ever serve two nonconsecutive terms as mayor of the city  was a staunch member of the 19th century Democratic political machine known as Tammany Hall that ran politics in the Big Apple for decades and he was the son of an influential Democratic congressman.

Mayor Fernando Wood

The year 1857 marked the beginning of Wood’s second term as Mayor and by that time he had already earned the approbation of many of New York City’s residents because of his staunchly pro-southern and pro-slavery stance that alientaed many of the City’s poorer residents and more affluent abolitionist minded Protestant citizens as well.  But for all of his pro-slavery and all of his pro-southern sympathies the worst thing that Fernando Wood did while in office was to create his own personal police force, a gang of vigilantes in and of themselves perhaps far worse than either the Dead Rabbits or the Bowery Boys, that he ran in direct opposition to the New York City Police Department which was then called the Metropolitan Police.

The reason that Wood recruited and formed his own so-called “Municipal” Police Force, comprised almost entirely of New York City Democrats, was that in April of 1857 the New York State Legislature had voted to take control of the New York City Police Department, then called the Metropolitan Police, out of the hands of Wood due to corruption, fraud and kickbacks on behalf of his mayoral administration.  In fact, Mayor Wood was so corrupt that by the end of 1857 the New York State Legislature voted to kick him out of office altogether after having served just over a year of his second term, but that removal from office still lay several months in the future at this point.

For two months from April until mid June of 1857 two essentially armed and competing police forces--one the Metropolitan Police the precursors of the modern NYPD and the other the so-called Municipal Police made up of supporters of Mayor Fernando Wood--patrolled the streets of New York City.  On June 16, 1857 that tenuous situation, having two different police forces in America’s largest city, finally boiled over into the New York City Police Riot of 1857.

The riot occurred outside New York’s City Hall when Mayor Fernando Wood had members of his Municipal Police Force forcibly remove then Metropolitan Police Commissioner Daniel D. Conover from the building, which the Municipal Police ever loyal to the dictates of Fernando Wood, did rather roughly.  Only hours after this happened members of the Metropolitan Police Force showed up at City Hall and a riot ensued as members of New York City’s two warring police forces fought one another on the steps of the building.

New York City Police Riot June 16, 1857

During the Police Riot of June 1857, despite there being dozens of injuries, fortunately no one was killed and damage to the City was limited almost exclusively to the immediate area around City Hall.  However, the mayhem, death and destruction caused by the Dead Rabbit Riot less than one month later was the largest seen in New York City since the American Revolution.

The Dead Rabbit Riot went on for an astounding three days!  Given the fact that the Big Apple’s police force thanks to the nefarious deeds of Mayor Fernando Wood was practically at war with itself, no meaningful response to the riot could be coordinated and launched by members of the local constabulary and the violence simply went on unchecked.  It wasn’t until the end of the week, when New York State Militia finally arrived in Manhattan on orders from the State Legislature that the violence began to subside.

It’s believed that between eight and as many as thirty plus people may have lost their lives in the New York City rioting that began on the night of July 4, 1857 and that upwards of a thousand people may have been injured.  But, because many victims were dragged into back alleys and hidden by their friends, or lost and unaccounted for in the narrow labyrinth of slums in Victorian Era Manhattan, it is impossible for historians or researchers to get a true grasp on how deadly the Dead Rabbit Riot might actually have been.

In an interesting twist, the affluent Dead Rabbits attempted to claim later on, after the violence ended, that their group had no part whatsoever in the riot itself that bears their name.  They blamed the entire affair on a less reputable and not as well-known group of Irish-American thugs called the Roach Guards who were a group of brigands and pick-pockets that inhabited the infamous Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan.  Surprisingly, to this day there are some historians that still support that view!

Whatever or whoever the groups were that participated in the so-called “Dead Rabbit Riot” of July 4, 1857 it’s interesting how romanticized the spectre of mid-nineteenth century gang violence has become in our society.  Novels have been written about the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys, History Channel documentaries have been made about them and even Martin Scorsese glorified their exploits in a major motion picture 2002’s The Gangs of New York.

The Dead Rabbit Riot of 1857 was the most violent incident in New York City history since the American Revolution and the largest riot until the New York City Draft Riot in response to compulsory service in the Civil War left much of Manhattan in flames during 1863.  Not surprisingly, both the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys were major players in that later riot as well.

Unfortunately, violence has long been a part of the Big Apple and of all of America’s urban centers since our nation’s founding.  Wherever large concentrations of people from diverse backgrounds congregate there is likely to be strife, but at least, we today can be thankful for the brave men and women of the NYPD and other police forces around the country that work day in and day out to ensure that another incident like the Dead Rabbit Riot of 1857 never happens and goes unchecked again.