When Macready’s Macbeth opened on May 8, Rynders arranged for 50 tickets to be given to his friends, with the idea that they disrupt the performance. Up high in the balconies, they threw rotten eggs, potatoes, and a bottle of a foul-smelling substance called asafetida at the stage, and made so much noise no one could hear the play. When this failed to stop the performance, they resorted to throwing chairs. Eventually the play was called off, and Macready left the theater to the raucous cheering from the balcony.
The remainder of Macready’s performances were to be canceled, but the upper crust of New York society, including John Jacob Astor and Washington Irving, organized a petition to persuade him to stay, so that not all American would be ranked with the barbarous multitudes. Macready decided to stay on: Macbeth would return to the stage that Thursday, May 10. Now it was Judson’s turn to go to work. All over the city, handbills began to appear featuring the question, “WORKINGMEN — SHALL ENGLISH OR AMERICANS RULE THIS CITY?”
The new Whig mayor, Caleb S. Woodhull, was determined to defy the mob and arranged for hundreds of police to guard the theater. He also called on the New York State Militia to muster several companies a few blocks south of Astor Place in Centre Market. By 7 p.m. a crowd of nearly 15,000 people had packed the square. Once the show got began, demonstrators in the upper tiers of the opera house started to make such a racket that they had to be stopped periodically.
During intermission, the police arrested a few of the rowdiest offenders in an attempt to make an example of them. The newly arrested were put in a room underneath the stage, where they tried to light a fire. A rioter inside managed to poke his head through a window to inform the crowd outside that their confederates had been locked up. Around the same time, a police officer in the lobby stuck a hose through one of the windows and began to spray the crowd in Astor Place. At these provocations, the mob went berserk. A sewer had recently been dug on Lafayette Place, and the unearthed paving stones provided a ready supply of missiles to use against the theater and the cops.
Somehow, even though under the constant barrage of paving stones, the play managed to continue inside. By 9 p.m., though, with the police taking heavy casualties and their lines in danger of being broken, the police chief and mayor decided to resort to the militia. The troops attempted a bayonet charge into the crowd, but it was too tightly packed, and rioters managed to wrest muskets away from some soldiers. The commanding officer gave the order to shoot over the rioters’ heads as a warning, to no effect. Finally, the order was given “fire low.” The mob retreated and continued to throw paving stones at the troops, until the militia threatened to use artillery on them, after which the crowd finally dispersed, leaving behind them a scene of carnage. The promise of further violence was suppressed by the heavy presence of troops, who migrated west to Washington Square and turned the park into an armed camp.