"The Rich Against the Poor"

BRUCE MCCONACHIE: Well, there's this antagonism between Forrest and Macready that goes back really to Forrest's first tour in England in the 1830s. But the riot itself is less about the actors per se than it is about the kinds of social and class and national antagonisms in the American theater between supporters of the English actor Macready and supporters of Forrest. So it's not so much a personal problem between the two performers as it is a kind of antagonism that moves beyond their personal relations, and their relations as performers.

The champions of Forrest are Tammany Hall Democrats. Their voters are working class Americans, think of themselves as strongly patriotic. They are re-fighting, in a way, the Revolutionary War.

Macready seems to be the "pet of princes," as he's called in their propaganda, and they denounce Macready as a symbol of aristocratic oppression. Not simply English oppression, but the oppression faced by working men, patriotic working men, by their own employers. These are, of course, rising capitalists who control the factories and the shipping in New York City. And a lot of them are understood to be aristocrats in the British fashion.

So the dynamics of the riot take on the proportions of genuine class antagonism. When all of this erupts in 1849, as many of the newspapers say at the time, it's "the rich against the poor."