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Title: The Bloody Sixth!
Creator: Walt Whitman [unsigned in original]
Date: April 9, 1842
Whitman Archive ID: per.00583
Source: New York Aurora 9 April 1842: [2]. Our transcription is based on a digital image of an original issue. Original issue held at the Paterson Free Public Library, Paterson, NJ. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the journalism, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Noah Hayes, Jason Stacy, Sydney Bauman, and Kevin McMullen
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The Bloody Sixth!—
A great fight came off last evening between Mike Walsh's Spartans1 and some bullying Irishmen, at Dunn's, in Centre street.2 The Spartans routed the Paddies in magnificent style. We hope the latter will hereafter have better manners.
We like this young Walsh and his society, we are free to say. True, they are occasionally rather fond of a "muss," but they are imbued with the true blue American spirit, after all. If they ever want any aid that can be given by a well circulated daily paper, let them come to us.
Notes:
1. The Spartans were a nativist group of American-born and Irish Protestants that feared the rise of the Irish Catholics in New York. Mike Walsh (1810–1859) was a Spartan leader, and would later go on to serve as a U.S. Representative from New York, from 1853–1855. See Peter Adams, Bowery Boys: Street Corner Radicals and the Politics of Rebellion (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005). [back]
2. Centre Street, in the Lower Manhattan area of New York City, extends from Park Row to the intersection of Lafayette and Spring Streets. In the nineteenth century, it was less than a block from the Five Points intersection in the city's 6th Ward. [back]