American Passage

by Vincent J. Cannato

  Having such a natural port was only part of the equation. Although New York had been a major port for the young Republic, the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 secured the city’s position as the country’s dominant commercial outpost. A chain was now formed from the Atlantic Ocean, through the harbor, up the Hudson River, west across the new canal, into the Great Lakes, to the American heartland.

  New York City was to become the commercial fulcrum of the new nation, connecting the booming Midwest with the markets of Europe and beyond. In the thirty-five years after the opening of the canal, Manhattan’s population went from 123,000 to 813,000. During that same period, 60 percent of all imports and one-third of all exports passed through the Port of New York.

  New York imported woolen and cotton clothing from the factories of England, and expensive silk, lace, ribbons, gloves, and hats for upscale female shoppers. Sugar, coffee, and tea also came through the port. Much as New York monopolized the import of these goods, it also led the way in another kind of European import: immigrants.

  Between 1820 and 1860, 3.7 million immigrants entered through the portal of New York Harbor—some 70 percent of all immigrants to the United States during this time. Those ships streaming up the Narrows into New York Harbor, packed with immigrants, would keep coming throughout the nineteenth century, but to those newcomers Ellis Island meant nothing.

  For the next few decades, Ellis Island would exist in relative obscurity, used by the army and the navy mostly as a munitions depot. Destined to be little more than a footnote in the city’s history, the island did have a front row seat for the unfolding drama that took place across the harbor on the island of Manhattan. It stood watch as a small city began evolving into an urban colossus.

  For immigrants coming to New York in the second half of the nineteenth century, the words on their lips were not Ellis Island, but Castle Garden.

  Chapter 2

  Castle Garden

  The present management of this very important department [Castle Garden] is a scandal and reproach to civilization. —Governor Grover Cleveland, 1883

  Castle Garden is one of the most beneficent institutions in the world.

  —Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June 1884

  ON A HO T AUGUST NIGHT IN 1855, A LINE OF OIL LAMPS lit the early evening sky on lower Broadway in Manhattan. Torch-bearing New Yorkers proceeded down the short hill, past Bowling Green, the tiny oval patch of grass surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, and into the Battery. It was a joyous and raucous affair, part political protest and part social outing, with loud shouting, fireworks, and even the firing of cannons as the crowd marched around the Battery carrying banners in German and English. By the time they had arrived, their numbers had grown to some three thousand people.

  These men, women, and children were responding to an advertisement that had been posted around the city:

  INDIGNATION MEETING!

  citizens of the first ward

  Assemble in your Might, and vindicate your Rights! citizens

  Do you wish to have

  plague and cholera in your midst!

  Do you wish to have your Children laid low with Small Pox

  and Ship Fever?

  New-yorkers

  Will we have our most honored and sacred spot desecrated by the sickly and loathsome Paupers and Refugees of European Workhouses and Prisons?

  Populist mobs were a regular feature in American cities dating back to revolutionary-era protests like those over the Stamp Act. Indignation meetings allowed citizens to blow off steam and flex their collective muscles to authorities.

  The object of the crowd’s indignation on this night was the recent opening of a brand-new immigration depot on a rocky outcropping just off the Battery and connected to it by a footbridge. Castle Garden stood on the site of a fort built in 1811 as part of the defensive fortifications of New York Harbor. When the Marquis de Lafayette visited America in 1824, he first arrived at the fort, where more than five thousand guests welcomed him.

  The old fort was later converted into a music hall where Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” made her American debut in 1850 as part of her cross-country tour financed and publicized by the irrepressible P. T. Barnum. The same seats where the city’s elite once sat to hear Lind were now occupied by immigrants from Ireland and Germany awaiting their chance to enter the country.

  The new immigration station riled the crowd. Organizers billed the protest as an “anti-cholera meeting,” playing on the fears of New Yorkers who had endured a number of cholera outbreaks in years past and blamed immigrants for the disease. “Knaves and speculators,” the notice warned, were “introducing paupers and emigrants infected with cholera, small-pox, ship fever, and all the vices of foreign prisons and workhouses.” The advertisement also appealed to the crowd’s patriotism, calling on New Yorkers to protest the desecration of the hallowed ground of Castle Garden, where Presidents George Washington and Andrew Jackson once stood.

  The indignation meeting succeeded in drawing a large and lusty crowd. When the assembly had settled down at the Battery, someone read a resolution against Castle Garden, and a number of speakers came forth to voice their opposition. One of them was Captain Isaiah Rynders, who began his speech to raucous cheers and the explosions of roman candles and rockets. As the crowd quieted, Rynders told them he had not originally been invited to speak and was sorry that the crowd “did not call upon somebody else, better able than I am to address you.”

  This was an exercise in false modesty, for Rynders was no ordinary speaker and he most clearly belonged at that rally. In fact, Rynders himself was likely the brains behind the protest. Theodore Roosevelt, in his history of New York City, would later describe Rynders as one of “the brutal and turbulent ruffians who led the mob and controlled the politics of the lower wards” who “ruled by force and fraud, and were hand in glove with the disorderly and semi-criminal classes.”

  Born in upstate New York to a German-American father and an Irish Protestant mother, Rynders gained the title “Captain” not for his war exploits, but from his time running a ship along the Hudson River. A classic “sporting man” of the 1830s and 1840s, Rynders held no steady job, but devoted himself to the leisurely and manly pursuits of gambling, horses, and politics. At one point, he earned a living as a riverboat gambler on the Mississippi River.

  He established a political club called the Empire Club, whose crew of “shoulder hitters” was the political muscle for New York City Democrats. He and his men became a force not only in the seedy underworld of gambling, taverns, and brothels but also in local and national politics. They intimidated voters, broke up opponents’ rallies, and forcibly brought voters to the polls to vote for Democratic candidates. The money brought in from gambling houses and brothels helped support a political organization that could bring out the vote on election day, intimidate opponents, and have enough money left over at the end of the day to make men like Rynders wealthy.

  Many credit Rynders with helping James K. Polk win the presidency in 1844. The Tennessee Democrat would have lost the election had he not won New York by a slim margin. The Captain sealed his fame when he helped instigate the bloody 1849 Astor Place Riot. The following year, he tried to break up a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society led by William Lloyd Garrison, when he stormed the stage to challenge Frederick Douglass, who was in the middle of a speech.

  Why Rynders would oppose the opening of an immigration station speaks to another of his roles. Despite its rhetoric, the mob was not really concerned about the tainting of the patriotic memory of Castle Garden or the health dangers posed by the immigrant station. The antiimmigrant tone was made all the more puzzling considering that much of the crowd was first- and second-generation New Yorkers and that many of the banners were in German. In reality, the protest was about money and control. As it turns out, Rynders was more than just a political operative; he was also the chief of the city’s so-called immigrant runners.

  Midnineteenth-
century New York was a rough and tumble city where the civilizing effects of modernity had not yet smoothed the rough edges of many of its citizens. The struggle for survival predominated, and much of that struggle revolved around business. In the booming commercial emporium of nineteenth-century New York, some people found their business not in trading goods but in another import: greenhorns.

  Though it would only later come specifically to define new immigrants, the term “greenhorn” signified anyone new and unfamiliar to the ways of the big city. One’s clothes, one’s accent, and that faraway— part dazzled and part confused—look in the eyes were a signal to savvy New Yorkers that a greenhorn had arrived.

  There were certainly a lot of greenhorns on the streets of New York. Between 1820 and 1839, New York received about 25,000 immigrants a year. The numbers kept growing every year. During the 1840s, some 1.2 million people came through New York, which handled three-quarters of the nation’s immigrant arrivals. These numbers may not seem that large, until one considers that the population of Manhattan in 1850 was only slightly more than half a million.

  Many New Yorkers looked on these greenhorns with a mix of pity, bemusement, and contempt, but for others these newcomers meant money. The wharves and docks where these immigrants first set foot on American soil were crowded and chaotic. Men like Rynders found opportunity in the chaos. There was profit to be had by exploiting the immigrants’ lack of knowledge and naïveté.

  Rynders was at the top of a corrupt totem pole of politicos, gangsters, gamblers, railroad companies, forwarding agents, tavern owners, boardinghouse keepers, and prostitutes. Their base of operations was the taverns and boardinghouses that lined Greenwich, Washington, and Cedar Streets in lower Manhattan. This area, according to one eyewitness, was home to “one hundred and thirty-nine immigrant runners, drinking at boarding houses for immigrants, prostitutes, rummies, watch stuffers, thimble riggers and pocketbook droppers.” There was money to be made in selling railroad tickets at inflated prices, charging exorbitant rates for rooms at boardinghouses, overcharging immigrants for their baggage by playing with the scales, or even outright thievery and extortion. Confusion was the ally of the runner and the enemy of the immigrant.

  As soon as a ship docked, runners would board it. If the immigrants were from Germany, the runners would speak German; Irish immigrants would encounter runners who hailed from the old sod. If immigrants were not immediately taken in by these entreaties, runners would forcibly take their luggage to a nearby boardinghouse for “safe-keeping.” When immigrants tried to claim their baggage, they were often induced to stay at the boardinghouse with the promise of cheap lodging and meals. When their stay had ended and it was time to move on, these greenhorns would be handed an excessive bill for their room and food and the storage of their luggage. If they could not pay the inflated bill, lodging house owners would keep the baggage as collateral. It was a prosperous racket, and much of the money made in fleecing immigrants went up the chain to Rynders, who was able to run his operations with little interference from city officials. They were all making a good living from immigration, and now Castle Garden was in danger of putting them out of business.

  A committee of the New York State Assembly investigated the situation in the mid-1840s. It had heard the rumors and read the newspaper reports about how runners preyed on immigrants, but the committee confessed that it could not “have believed the extent to which these frauds and outrages have been practiced” until it began to investigate them.

  The federal government was largely uninterested in immigration. Occasionally, Congress would be prodded into action to address the overcrowding that afflicted immigrants traveling across the Atlantic in steerage, but it did little in the way of regulating the flow of immigrants. Despite an undertone of anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment, the growing nation welcomed European immigrants to help settle the country. In the 1840s, President John Tyler lauded “emigrants from all parts of the civilized world, who come among us to partake of the blessings of our free institutions and to aid by their labor to swell the current of our wealth and power.” However, the slaveholding Tyler made clear that his message was for white Europeans only.

  The job of regulating immigration was left to states like Massachusetts and New York, which passed laws continuing colonial policies restricting the immigration of criminals, paupers, or those with contagious diseases. States charged ship owners a head tax for each immigrant to pay for the care of poor and sick immigrants and required the posting of a bond for those immigrants deemed likely to become public charges. Although state laws would foreshadow the future of federal immigration regulation, they were weakly enforced, and few immigrants were excluded.

  It would be up to private individuals and organizations to protect immigrants from abuse. Ethnic solidarity prompted the creation of immigrant aid societies. New York’s Irish already had some success in this endeavor, forming the Irish Emigrant Society in 1841 to “afford advice, information, aid and protection, to emigrants from Ireland, and generally to promote their welfare.” In 1847, it teamed up with the German Society and lobbied New York State to create the Board of Commissioners of Emigration, which consisted of the mayors of New York and Brooklyn, the heads of the German and Irish Emigrant Societies, and six others appointed by the governor.

  A head tax of $1 would be assessed on each immigrant, to be collected by the board. With the money, the board opened the Emigrant Hospital and Refuge on Ward’s Island to care for sick immigrants. By 1854, the board was caring for over 2,500 immigrant patients.

  The timing of the idea could not have been better. In 1847, the potato famine in Ireland had begun to drive out large numbers of Irish. For the next few years, poor Irish refugees, fleeing starvation and death, flooded American ports. Nearly 3 million immigrants landed in the United States from 1845 to 1854. Many of them ended up in New York City. Between 1840 and 1850, Manhattan’s population increased by 65 percent; by 1855 over one-half of the city’s 629,904 residents were immigrants and over one-quarter of New Yorkers hailed from Ireland.

  If the Board of Commissioners was going to be successful in protecting this flood of immigrants from the predations of runners, it would need its own reception center for new arrivals, a place where immigrants would be processed, their needs met, and their interests protected. For this purpose, in April 1855, the board chose Castle Garden as its immigration depot.

  The Board of Commissioners laid out the major benefits of Castle Garden. First and foremost, it would allow for a quicker and easier landing for immigrants and free them from the clutches of immigrant runners, allowing them to land “without having their means impaired, their morals corrupted, and probably their persons diseased.” The board would also begin keeping track of the numbers of immigrants arriving and where they were heading.

  The altruism of the board and its interest in the welfare of immigrants was genuine. Not surprisingly, it ran into a good deal of resistance to its idea of converting what had formerly been the city’s premier music hall into an immigration-processing station. City officials were leery of the idea. This would be a state-run program—generating lots of money through the head tax—right in their backyard, and all local officials would get were two seats on the ten-person board.

  Wealthy New Yorkers and businessmen in the city’s First Ward also opposed the plan, fearing that an immigrant depot in their neighborhood would cause a decline in property values. They worried that immigrants would bring “pestilential and disagreeable odors” that would blow into the windows of respectable homes in the summertime. Many had hoped that the newly expanded Battery around Castle Garden would become a pleasant harbor-view promenade, but the board had thwarted those plans.

  The Times editorialized against the plans for Castle Garden, writing that “one of the delights of the City for nearly thirty years” would “be a delight no more. Hereafter it is to be a nuisance . . . an offence to the eye, and an ugly obstacle to a view of the magnificent moving panor
ama of our glorious Bay.” One of those prosperous New Yorkers unhappy with Castle Garden was railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who lived across the street from the Battery and would lend his name to the August indignation meeting. Even with such opponents, Castle Garden opened as planned.

  On Castle Garden’s first day, as immigrants streamed through its doors, a group of runners gathered outside, shouting at and intimidating Castle Garden workers. One member of the board was forced to pull a gun on the rowdies. That first night, after midnight, a handful of runners—a “foul brood of villains who have so long fattened upon the plunder of emigrants,” one newspaper called them—tried to crash through the doors of Castle Garden to wreak havoc, but were turned away.

  Having failed to stop the opening of Castle Garden, Rynders and his supporters took to the streets in mid-August three days after the station opened. Rynders claimed to be merely seeking “open, fair competition among the emigrant forwarders” and opposed any attempt by the state to grant a monopoly over the business of handling immigrants. In other words, the state of New York and the Board of Commissioners were squeezing Rynders and his men out of business.

  After the final speaker addressed the gathering, the crowd left the Battery to the strains of “Yankee Doodle” and took their torchlight procession back through the streets of the city’s First Ward. The Times was not fooled by the patriotic rhetoric or the claims that Castle Garden would endanger the city’s health. The organizers of the indignation meeting, the paper informed its readers, “were the emigrant runners, baggage smashers, boarding-house keepers, and other professional gentry, who have long filled their own pockets by robbing emigrants upon their first arrival.” The Daily Tribune was even more blunt, seeing the meeting as a way “to devise means to throw the immigrants again into the hands of the thieves . . . who have grown rich by robbing strangers.”