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By Root 7742 0

the cultural spines of two different class worlds. On the west: Broadway, with its retail shops, department stores, monster hotels, and porpoise-parade of the fashionable. On the east: the Bowery, the thoroughfare of sportsmen, dandies, gangsters, and fire laddies. The thoroughfares, however, were not exactly parallel. At one point—Astor Place, just south of Union Square—the two avenues, and worlds, collided. And at just that point of convergence, capping it and in a sense claiming it, entrepreneurs had erected a splendid opera house for the exclusive enjoyment of the Broadway world’s most self-proclaimedly aristocratic segment.

It was the combination of the “English” Macready and the “aristocratic” opera house that had so aroused the ire of native American and Irish immigrant alike, but it was not these animosities that made the May 7 affair (and its explosive aftermath) remarkable. What made this fracas different was the response of the city’s upper classes.

They were not amused. Against the frightening backdrop of the 1848 European revolutions and the alarmingly autonomous politics and culture of New York’s working-class quarters, the theater riot no longer seemed innocent. It appeared to signal a new aggressiveness, a willingness to break out of the Bowery world and invade Broadway’s. The elite had built an institution behind whose august portals they could take refuge from the vulgarity of the streets. Now a senseless mob had violated their inner sanctum. The barbarians were at—indeed well past—the gates. It was too much. It was time to act. It was time to draw a line and say thus far and no farther.

Forty-seven of the city’s most prominent citizens sent Macready a joint letter urging him to return to the opera house stage. They assured him “that the good sense and respect for order prevailing in this community will sustain you on the subsequent nights of your performance.” Macready agreed. Then they published the letter in the papers. Their gauntlet thus thrown down, they set about assembling the firepower necessary to sustain their challenge. They turned to the newly elected Whig mayor, Caleb S. Woodhull, and insisted he protect the lawful rights and personal liberty of actor Macready.

At a City Hall meeting on the morning of Thursday, May 10, with Macready scheduled to reappear that evening, Police Chief Matsell informed Mayor Woodhull that he lacked the force to quell a serious riot. Terrified of chaos on his second day in office, the mayor ordered General Charles Sandford, commander of the military forces in New York City, to have his men ready in Washington Square Park. Sandford called out two hundred of the elite’s crack militia, the Twenty-seventh Regiment—since 1847 renumbered and renamed as the Seventh Regiment—along with two troops of horse, one troop of light artillery, and two companies of hussars, 350 men altogether. In addition, 150 police were placed inside the theater and another hundred on its perimeter; still more were dispatched to guard nearby homes of the wealthy.

The Bowery responded to the challenge. Captain Isaiah Rynders swung into action. Forrest’s most ardent backer, the man who had distributed tickets to barroom habitues and mobilized hundreds more for the initial May 7 affair, and the Tammany stalwart who had made a career out of exploiting resentment against the social and cultural elite, Rynders now salivated at the chance to embarrass the new Whig administration. Devising a handbill, he had copies printed, delivered to a Park Row tavern, and then distributed to runners, who on Wednesday, May 9, posted them at saloons and eateries throughout the city. “SHALL AMERICANS or ENGLISH RULE IN THIS CITY?” it demanded to know, and it called on all workingmen to “express their opinions this night at the ENGLISH ARISTOCRATIC OPERA HOUSE!” It was signed by the “American Committee,” a group headed by Rynders’s chief assistant, Ned Buntline, author the previous year of Myster-ies and Miseries of New York, saga of a city riven along class lines.

Tickets to the performance, along with marching