page_title: Dead Rabbits
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Dead Rabbits / History
context_page_description: The Dead Rabbits was the name of an Irish American criminal street gang active in Lower Manhattan in the 1830s to 1850s. The Dead Rabbits were so named after a dead rabbit was thrown into the center of the room during a gang meeting, prompting some members to treat this as an omen, withdraw, and form an independent gang. Their battle symbol was a dead rabbit on a pike. They often clashed with Nativist political groups who viewed Irish Catholics as a threatening and criminal subculture. The Dead Rabbits were given the nicknames the "Mulberry Boys" and the "Mulberry Street Boys" by the New York City Police Department because they were known to have operated along Mulberry Street in the Five Points.
context_section_description: The original Dead Rabbits were founded by disgruntled gang members of the Roach Guards, who became the largest Irish crime organization in early 19th-century Manhattan, having well over 100 members when called up for action. Their chief rival gang was the Bowery Boys, native-born New Yorkers who supported the Know Nothing anti-immigrant political party.
  These two rival gangs fought more than 200 gang battles in a span of 10 years, beginning in 1834, and they often outmanned the police force and even the state militias. They were also in the forefront of the Dead Rabbits Riot of 1857, and the 1863 New York Draft Riots in the American Civil War. Besides street-fighting, the Dead Rabbits supported politicians such as Fernando Wood and the Tammany Hall machine, whose platforms included the welfare and benefit of immigrant groups and minorities, and under the leadership of Isaiah Rynders the gang acted as enforcers to violently persuade voters during elections to vote for their candidates. According to legend, one of the most feared Dead Rabbits was "Hell-Cat Maggie", a woman who reportedly filed her teeth to points and wore brass fingernails into battle. One of the most prominent Dead Rabbit gang leaders, John Morrissey, would later become a Democratic State Senator and member of the U.S. House of Representatives who vigorously represented Irish-American Roman Catholics for years to come.
  New York's Democrats were divided into two camps: those who supported Mayor Fernando Wood and those who opposed him. The Bowery gangs were among the latter, while the Dead Rabbits were supporters of Wood. Thus, the Bowery Boys threw their support in league with state Republicans, who proposed legislation that would strip Wood of certain powers and place them in the hands of Albany. One of these proposals was to disband the Municipal Police Department, in which Wood's supporters had a controlling interest, and replace it with a state-run Metropolitan Police Department. Wood refused to disband his Municipal Department, and so for the first half of 1857, the two rival departments battled it out on the streets of the city until the courts ordered the Municipals to disband that July. On July 4, a riot occurred between the Dead Rabbits and the Metropolitan Police, and the Bowery gangs against the Municipal Police, Mulberry Street Boys, Roach Guards, and Dead Rabbits in Bayard Street.
  There was a similar gang in Liverpool, England, in the late 19th century, which mobilized as a militia in times of crisis.
caption: George Catlin painting of the Five Points area of lower Manhattan in 1827 the slum territory of the "Dead Rabbits" and the other Irish criminal gangs
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