On the evening of 4 July 1857 a street war broke out along Bayard Street between Mulberry Street and the Bowery, between the Bowery Boys and the Five Points men the newspapers called the Dead Rabbits. Estimates put the fighters at eight hundred to a thousand, with hundreds more who came to loot. Barricades went up across Bayard Street, bricks and paving stones came off the rooftops, and the fighting ran on into the next day. At least eight people were killed, and some historians count twelve. The police were in no state to stop it. Nearly three weeks earlier, on 16 June, the state's new Metropolitan Police had fought the city's own Municipal Police on the steps of City Hall while trying to arrest Mayor Fernando Wood, and the two forces were still at odds.
On the night of 5 July Major General Charles Sandford marched the Eighth and Seventy-first Regiments in, the same general who had ended the City Hall fight, and the streets went quiet. The name is the riot's oddest part. The historian Tyler Anbinder found no evidence that any Five Points gang called itself the Dead Rabbits, and the historian Joshua Brown has suggested the phrase was slang that reporters picked up and turned into a gang. Its supposed members even paid for a notice in the New York Times denying they had been thieves or rioters. Bayard Street is now in Chinatown, and nothing marks the fight.
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