{"id":753,"date":"2016-12-13T16:22:48","date_gmt":"2016-12-13T21:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/nyc-history\/?p=753"},"modified":"2022-04-08T09:29:07","modified_gmt":"2022-04-08T13:29:07","slug":"morrisey-and-poole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/nyc-history\/2016\/12\/13\/morrisey-and-poole\/","title":{"rendered":"Morrisey and Poole"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Morrissey and William \u201cBill the Butcher\u201d Poole were the heads of their respective gangs, the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys. Morrissey, an Irishman, was affiliated with Tammany Hall while Poole was an enforcer for the Know-Nothing party, a nativist organization that was against the influx of Catholic immigrants. Their rivalry came to a head on February 25, 1855. According to the New York Times<\/em>, \u201cAbout 9 o\u2019clock on Saturday evening, John Morrissey and a gang of ruffians entered a saloon at No. 579 Broadway, called Stanwix Hall where they met Bill Poole\u201d. They fought until the owner of the bar called the police who broke it up. However, the assailants \u201dreturned to Stanwix Hall just after midnight, where they again encountered Poole and made a murderous attack upon him.\u201d Upon his death bed, Poole was claimed to have said, \u201cI think I am a goner<\/em>. If I die, I die a true American; and what grieves me most is, thinking that I\u2019ve been murdered by a set of Irish \u2013 by Morrissey in particular.\u201d<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Although it would seem that violence and gang life would create an unpopular perception of him, it was the opposite. \u201cAs many as a quarter of a million people jammed the streets of lower Manhattan to pay their last respects to the dead butcher. \u2026The crowd surpassed those that turned out for Andrew Jackson\u2019s or Daniel Webster\u2019s or Henry Clay\u2019s obsequies.\u201d<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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John Morrissey and William \u201cBill the Butcher\u201d Poole were the heads of their respective gangs, the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys. Morrissey, an Irishman, was affiliated with Tammany Hall while Poole was an enforcer for the Know-Nothing party, a nativist organization that was against the influx of Catholic immigrants. Their rivalry came to a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3615,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[112,115,114,111,119,118,117],"class_list":["post-753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gangs-of-new-york-19th-century","tag-19th-century","tag-bowery-boys","tag-dead-rabbits","tag-gangs-of-new-york","tag-john-morrissey","tag-nativism","tag-william-poole"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/nyc-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/nyc-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/nyc-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/nyc-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3615"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/nyc-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=753"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/nyc-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":755,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/nyc-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753\/revisions\/755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/nyc-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/nyc-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/nyc-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}