Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [661]
Such acknowledgment grated on nativist nerves, but it was when the Irish decided that same year to march on July 4 as well—staking a claim to American nationalism—that violence erupted. Anti-Catholics had been wrought up already by the arrival in June 1853 of papal nuncio Monsignor Gaetano Bedini, a notorious reactionary who had helped brutally suppress the 1849 republican revolution in Rome. Nativists were convinced his mission was (as Bishop Hughes had boasted) to subjugate the American republic. Tempers were taut, therefore, when the Ancient Order of Hibernians announced it would hold its own Independence Day parade, which would then link up with the official one.
Early on the Fourth, five hundred marchers clad in green scarves and green badges set out from the Hibernians’ headquarters, arrayed in eight divisions. Proceeding west on 14th Street toward Eighth Avenue they held aloft a twelve-foot-high banner depicting George Washington shaking hands with Daniel O’Connell. At 10:30 A.M., the Hibernians reached Abingdon Square in Greenwich Village, a community still dominated by native-born artisans and professionals. An altercation with a stagecoach driver annoyed at having his way blocked by Catholics exploded into violence. Led by a notorious nativist gang called the Short Boys, a huge crowd of local nativists, including local volunteer firemen summoned by ringing bells, descended on the marchers, screaming, “Kill the Catholic sons of bitches!” and brandishing knives. A mass of enraged men—Hibernians in green scarves, nativists in red shirts—were swirled in battle when the unabashedly nativist Ninth Ward police arrived and waded in against the Hibernians. Scores of Irish were bloodied, their Washington-O’Connell banner was shredded, and thirty of their number were subsequently indicted for riot.
Street skirmishes became commonplace that fall when evangelical Protestant preachers, most of them obscure artisans and laborers, ventured into Irish neighborhoods spewing incendiary views about the “Scarlet Whore of Babylon” and the morals of Irish women. Other preachers held forth at the East River shipyard owned by Mayor Jacob Westervelt, where they were hailed by throngs of cheering Protestants and heckled by crowds of Catholics, in assemblages reaching twenty thousand people.
Kleindeutschland too was on the move, as were its enemies. For their 1851 celebration of Pentecost, commemorated in Germany by festivals in the woods, some ten to twelve thousand assembled at City Hall Park, then crossed to Hoboken. The Short Boys showed up and overthrew tables and insulted females until a disciplined contingent of Turners in sharply pressed white uniforms drove them off. When the revelers headed back to the ferry, however, the Short Boys struck again, reinforced by Jersey nativists armed with pistols, swords, clubs, and spike-covered poles. The Turners launched a counterattack, and a sanguinary two-hour battle ensued; at least one was killed and dozens wounded before the military arrived from Jersey City.
The Turners promptly demonstrated their fearlessness by returning to Hoboken for their own Turnfest, a gymnastics jamboree. It became an annual event, one of the most popular in German New York, and from then on Turners marched at the head and tail of almost all Kleindeutschland parades (except religious processions). In addition, the Germans formed Schiitzenvereine (shooting clubs) and militia companies. By 1853 there were seventeen hundred German militiamen, 28 percent of the city’s total force; added to the twenty-six hundred Irish militiamen and contingents of French, Scotch, Italians, Portuguese, and Jews, this meant that more than two-thirds of New York’s six thousand uniformed militia were foreign born. The immigrants were establishing their