The Bloody Sixth

Joshua Brown

  • The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld by Herbert Asbury
    Arrow, 366 pp, £6.99, January 2003, ISBN 0 09 943674 4
  • Gangs of New York directed by Martin Scorsese
    December 2002

Under the headline ‘The Dead Rabbits Immortalised’, the New York Evening Post reported on 10 July 1857 that a one-penny song sheet was selling feverishly ‘in the lower part of the city’. Written by ‘Saugerties Bard’ and to be sung to the popular Dan Emmett minstrel tune ‘Jordan’, it began:

They had a dreadful fight upon last Saturday night,
The papers gave the news accordin’;
Guns, pistols, clubs and sticks, hot water
and old bricks,
Which drove them on the other side of Jordan.
Then pull off the coat and roll up the sleeve,
For Bayard is a hard street to travel;
So pull off the coat and roll up the sleeve,
The Bloody Sixth is a hard ward to travel I believe.

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[*] Plume, 544 pp.,$16, October 2002, 0 4522 8361 2.

Vol. 25 No. 2 · 23 January 2003 » Joshua Brown » The Bloody Sixth (print version)
Pages 33-34 | 3209 words