Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [609]
Tight security screened out many of Rynders’s ticket holders, and their yells about discrimination against those who didn’t have “kid gloves and a white vest, damn ‘em!” merged with the general roar. The play commenced promptly at 7:30. Anti-Macready forces as promptly disrupted it. The actors went into dumb-show mode while police made their way through the audience, seizing and arresting protestors.
Outside, the crowd, now grown to ten thousand, began hurling paving stones, which smashed through the windows and sailed into the audience. Massing their ranks, the crowd rammed at the doors, intent on breaking in. The police, way out of their depth, called on the militia for support, which arrived at 9:15 P.M. and took up positions. The crowd pressed forward, wrestling with the militia. Matsell warned the crowd that force would be used, a notification drowned out by enraged voices crying, “Burn the damned den of the aristocracy!” One fellow in a red flannel shirt bared his breast, screaming, “Fire, fire you damned sons of bitches; you durs’n’t fire, you durs’n’t fire.” But they did, first in the air, then directly into the bodies massed in front of them. Moving up Astor Place, they discharged several more volleys, working relentlessly now to clear the area.
Soldiers fire on rioters outside the Astor Place Theater, May 10, 1849. Lithograph by Nathaniel Currier. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
When it was over, eighteen of the crowd lay dead, none of them Rynders’s men, most bystanders. Four more would die within the week. Over 150 were wounded or injured, and 117 were arrested, mostly workingmen: coopers, printers, butchers, carpenters, servants, sailmakers, machinists, clerks, masons, bakers, plumbers, and laborers. Of the twenty-two killed, seven were Irish laborers.
Friday, May 11, the day after the riot, the streets bristled with a display of civilian and military power: a thousand special deputies, two thousand infantry, a squadron of cavalry, four troops of horse artillery. Handbills went up around town calling for a mass rally at City Hall Park that evening, and at six P.M. an enraged crowd cheered speakers who condemned the mayor, police, and military. Rynders declared that mass murder had been perpetrated “to please the aristocracy of the city at the expense of the lives of inoffensive citizens—to please an aristocratic Englishman backed by a few sycophantic Americans. (Loud cries of indignation.)” Mike Walsh called for a murder prosecution, told the crowd to arm itself in future frays and said that only his high respect for the law restrained him from urging the crowd to emulate their European counterparts and mount the barricades. Several thousand auditors boiled out of the park, roaring for vengeance, and marched up to Astor Place to confront the troops again. They hurled stones from behind hastily erected barricades, but the militia leveled their muskets, fixed bayonets, and charged, and the crowd dispersed. The June Days were not to be replayed in Manhattan. Not yet.
The danger passed, the gentry rejoiced. The old Whig warhorse James Watson Webb applauded the troops in his Courier and Enquirer and underscored a larger message the bloody affair had delivered: “The promptness of authorities in calling out the armed forces and the unwavering steadiness with which the citizens obeyed the order to fire upon the assembled mob, was,” Webb declared, “an excellent advertisement to the Capitalists of the old world, that they might send their property to New York and rely upon the certainty that it would be safe from the clutches of red republicanism, or chartists, or communionists [sic] of