Lawlessness in New York

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LAWLESSNESS IN NEW YORK.

Lawlessness in New York is gradually assuming graver and more serious forms. It used to be contented with putting its votaries in office, and swindling the public treasury through the operation of dishonest contracts, and so forth. Then it proceeded to stuff ballot boxes, and drive respectable voters from the polls by threats and violence, thus ensuring the election of notoriously dishonest men to office. Then it endorsed these men in defying the laws, and retaining their ill-gotten power in spite of the Legislature and the Courts—and defended them in their rebellion by main force, even at the cost to the ministers of the law of life and limb. Now the rowdy element, growing bolder by the comparative immunity it has enjoyed thus far, and fearing that the waning influence of its official friends will not much longer avail for its protection, has thrown off the mask; and the heroes who aided to repel the posse of Coroner Perry at the City Hall, have shown themselves in their true colors of assassins and highway robbers. The conflict, it seems, began on Saturday afternoon in the “Bloody Sixth”¹ ward, between a gang calling themselves the “Dead Rabbits,”² and the Bowery boys,³ in Bayard street, near Mulberry. Firearms were freely used, and seven persons killed, and twenty-five or thirty wounded. In the Seventh and Thirteenth wards there were also serious affrays, in which a number of persons, including a policeman, were badly injured. Last evening the fight was renewed in the Sixth ward, when a terrible conflict took place between two factions, and eleven persons were shot, many of whom are supposed to be fatally wounded. The police did all they could to suppress the riots, but they were totally insufficient even to protect themselves from the fury of the mob, and had it not been for the presence of the military, in the very heart of the rioters’ strongholds, there is no knowing where the matter would have ended. A number of policemen were seriously injured by the riot in Bayard street. Another gang stopped the cars in the First avenue, and deliberately, under threats of violence, extorted sums of money from the conductors and passengers.

We passed through Centre street while part of the disturbances were going on, and had opportunities of seeing how much cowardice was mingled with the ferocity of these rioters. The mere cry of “the military,” raised by way of hoax, when not a soldier or policeman was in sight, cleared a whole block in two minutes, on which several hundred had been congregated. The heart of New York is sound. On Broadway but one opinion was expressed. There only wanted a leader to have organised an extempore vigilance committee of decent citizens, who would have swept the Five Points and given peace to the city in a very short time.

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