Dead Rabbits

Irish gang in the sixth ward; the term "dead rabbit" was a slang term for a rowdy. The gang supported Mayor Fernando Wood and was apparently known as the Mulberry Street Boys until a riot with the rival nativist gang the Bowery Boys in the Five Points on 4 July 1857, which was prompted by the formation of a new state police force and the enactment of liquor laws intended partly to undermine Wood's power. The Metropolitan Police were driven from the neighborhood by the Mulberry Street Boys and were then replaced by the Bowery Boys. The violence of the riot (twelve persons were killed) prompted the renaming of the Mulberry Street Boys by the press and the police. Although little is known about the gang apart from hearsay, later chroniclers considered the Dead Rabbits the most violent gang of the mid nineteenth century.

Joshua Brown: "The 'Dead Rabbit'-Bowery Boy Riot: An Analysis of the Antebellum New York Gang" (thesis, Columbia University, 1976)

-Joshua Brown