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By Root 7840 0

George W. Walling attempted to deliver a warrant for the mayor’s arrest, only to be tossed out by a group of Municipals. Armed with a second warrant, a much larger force of Metropolitans marched against City Hall. Awaiting them were a massed body of Municipals, supplemented by a large crowd (characterized by George Templeton Strong as a “miscellaneous assortment of suckers, soaplocks, Irishmen, and plug uglies officiating in a guerrilla capacity”). Together, the mayor’s supporters began clubbing and punching the outnumbered Metropolitans away from the seat of government. “The scene was a terrible one,” a Times reporter wrote; “blows upon naked heads fell thick and fast, and men rolled helpless down the steps, to be leaped upon and beaten till life seemed extinct.” The Metropolitans gained the day after the Seventh Regiment came to its rescue, and the warrant was served on Wood. This setback for the mayor was followed by another: on July 2 the Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the state law. Wood knuckled under and disbanded the Municipals late in the afternoon of July 3, leaving the Metropolitans in possession of the field.

The ultrareformers had triumphed over Wood, but it proved to be a shaky victory. Exactly how shaky became clear the very next day.

July 4, 1857, promised, like most Independence Days, to be given over to massive parades, democratic rhetoric, hard drinking, and street brawls. The unenviable task of maintaining a minimal degree of order and decorum was now to be shouldered entirely by the Metropolitans. Their ranks were notably untested. The victorious department refused to hire those who had backed the losing side, choosing instead to swear in a host of special officers, with little or no experience, to flesh out their ranks. All in all, no more than a hundred had had even a month’s experience.

When a small party of Mets patrolling the Chatham Square area in the predawn hours suddenly found themselves under attack by a crowd of young men and boys, they broke and ran. One sought shelter in the saloon headquarters, at 40 Bowery, of the Bowery Boys, a nativist gang, who succeeded in repelling the assailants. At this point, the Dead Rabbits—the Irish Sixth Ward gang whose members were known as ardent Wood supporters—opened up another front on Bayard Street, between Mulberry and Elizabeth; together with the neighborhood’s Irish inhabitants, they attacked a group of thirty Metropolitans. Once again, the on-the-job trainees had to be rescued by a phalanx of two hundred Bowery Boys. While the policemen straggled away from the scene, the gangs and their supporters escalated their encounter. Barricades went up, assembled out of carts, barrels, lumber; brickbats flew (women, it was said, gathered and broke up stones and carried them to their menfolk on the front lines or atop the tenement roofs); then the guns came out. The battle raged for hours, drawing thousands to the scene, and was ended only by the exhaustion of the participants. Twelve died outright or soon thereafter, and thirty-seven were injured. It was the worst riot since Astor Place back in 1849.

The next day, Sunday, violence flared again, but this time it was put down by the

The Dead Rabbits barricade on Bayard Street, from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 18, 1857. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)

National Guard (with Metropolitans placed at the head of the regiments). The streets were swept clean. The Sunday closing laws were enforced.

On Thursday, July 9, fifteen hundred turned out for a meeting at Hamilton Square that had been called to consider “effecting a division of the state, by organizing a new one from the five southern counties.” The mayor showed up but told the crowd it must obey the legislature’s laws. (As a potential gubernatorial candidate, secession of city from state was not, at this point, in his interest.) Passions lowered to a simmer.

They boiled over again the following Sunday, July 12, this time in the heart of Kleindeutschland, at Avenue A and 4th Street. Several thousand Germans taunted