A closer look
Two Views of a "Dead Rabbit"
How does pictorial coverage about an 1850s riot show ways that images of the urban poor expressed and influenced public opinion about immigration?
by Joshua Brown, The Graduate Center, CUNY (Emeritus)
On July 4, 1857, two rival Irish working-class street gangs clashed in the impoverished Five Points district of New York City. The two-day fight, leading to at least eight deaths and numerous injuries, was quickly dubbed the “Dead Rabbit-Bowery Boy Riot” (even though neither gang was actually so named). This incident is a rare instance when national attention focused on these groups of young males who were broadly viewed as the epitome of mid-nineteenth-century urban political and social mayhem. Americans across the country were regaled with accurate and more often fanciful accounts of gang warfare, as well as visual representations of these notorious urban denizens.
An illustration that accompanied Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper’s July 18, 1857, report on the riot depicted an Irish “Dead Rabbit” gang member. In contrast to the ostensibly native-born “Bowery Boy,” he bore the brutish features that would become even more ubiquitous after the Civil War (notably in Thomas Nast’s cartoons published in Harper’s Weekly). These grotesque, apelike caricatures telegraphed to readers the strangeness of the immigrants who had fled famine-wracked Ireland to inhabit the streets of major east coast cities. In their ragged dress, menacing public behavior, unfamiliar customs, and physical appearance, the Irish poor were portrayed as a different, dangerous species—or race, in an era where hierarchical beliefs equated nonwhite status with inferiority. Speaking for many elite New Yorkers and using the racial and xenophobic attitudes. of the time, prominent lawyer George Templeton Strong observed, “Our Celtic fellow citizens are almost as remote from us in temperament and constitution as the Chinese.”
The Leslie’s engraving conveys in succinct and cruel visual terms the dominant view of Irish immigrants in the 1850s; in its depiction of the “Dead Rabbit’s” clothes, it also provides insight about the dire poverty of some of the people who lived in the Five Points neighborhood. But does this and similar popular images from the period actually capture how native-born, middle-class Americans saw the poor and foreign born? Were perceptions in the era couched only in stark and rigid terms?
An oil study by the New York–based genre painter George Henry Hall (1825–1913) reveals another aspect of the ways the immigrant working class was viewed. Rendered shortly after the 1857 riot, Hall’s A Dead Rabbit (also called Study of an Irishman) depicts a mutton-chopped young man naked to the waist, cradling a brick in one hand while caught in a surprising state of repose. With its relatively realistic portrayal of the male figure, its pose, and that brick, Hall’s picture captures a dimension of U.S. society and culture rarely shown in mid-nineteenth-century visual culture: the fear, but also the fascination, that fueled and mitigated class and ethnic conflicts of the era.
In 1882 Hall exchanged A Dead Rabbit for another work he had previously donated to New York’s National Academy of Design, possibly because he had been unable to sell the painting in twenty-four years. Perhaps his picture was a little too insightful for the comfort of his nineteenth-century clientele.
Additional Reading
L. Perry Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (1971; rev. ed., Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997).
Niamh O’Sullivan, The Tombs of a Departed Race: Illustrations of Ireland’s Great Hunger (Hamden, CT: Quinnipiac University Press, 2015).
Joshua Brown, "The Bloody Sixth: The Real Gangs of New York," London Review of Books 25, no. 2 (January 23, 2003).
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