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The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York
by Tyler Anbinder
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The Nevada had arrived in New York Harbor too late on the thirty-first for its passengers to be processed by immigration officials, so Annie and her shipmates were forced to spend New Year's Eve aboard the steamer. The twenty or so first- and second-class passengers, with private or semiprivate cabins, probably celebrated the occasion slurping New York's famous oysters and sipping champagne with the captain in the ship's elegant (albeit dated) dining salon. The remaining 107 passengers would have been confined either to the small portion of deck where they were allowed to take fresh air or to their fetid, airless steerage quarters in the bowels of the ship.
For the immigrants on the Nevada who, like Annie, would be reuniting in New York with parents, spouses, and other loved ones after years of separation, this last night of waiting, just yards from their destination, must have been excruciating. Add to this anticipation the excitement of New Year's Eve and the din of the celebrations all around them in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey, and we can assume that Annie, Anthony, and Philip probably got very little sleep.
Another person who had reason to sleep restlessly that night was Colonel John B. Weber. The forty-nine-year-old Buffalo native had always brimmed with ambition. Enlisting in the Union army as a private at age eighteen, he achieved the rank of colonel two days before his twenty-first birthday, making him the youngest colonel, North or South, in the entire Civil War. Nor was he lacking in idealism, for the command he chose upon his promotion was one many other Union officers refused — the supervision of a regiment of African American troops drawn from the emancipated slaves of Louisiana. Weber, who as an infantryman had survived some of the bloodiest fighting of the war at Malvern Hill outside Richmond, saw little combat with his black troops, who were stationed in Texas, far from the main theaters of war. At the conclusion of the conflict, Weber entered politics back in Buffalo, serving two terms in Congress. After he lost his bid for a third term in 1888, a political patron secured Weber an appointment as the first federal superintendent of immigration for the port of New York.
Weber's new post was created in the spring of 1890, a moment when responsibility for the processing of immigrants was in flux. In the first two centuries after New York City was founded, immigrants underwent no inspection whatsoever. They did not need passports or any other documents to gain entry into or establish residence in the British colonies or the young United States. Around the time of the American Revolution, doctors began boarding immigrant ships a few miles from the city to inspect the passengers for signs of smallpox, yellow fever, typhus, and (beginning in the nineteenth century) cholera. Sick immigrants, or in some cases everyone on board, would be quarantined on Staten Island, five miles south of Manhattan, until they were either no longer contagious or dead. But other than this fairly cursory medical inspection, immigrants had to meet no requirements of any kind; they simply walked off their ships and onto the streets of New York to begin their new lives in America.
In 1855 New York's commissioners of emigration, whose main jobs to this point had been to run the quarantine and oversee the care of indigent immigrants, decided to create an immigrant reception station at the southern tip of Manhattan in Castle Garden, a cavernous indoor arena built within the surviving walls of a post-Revolutionary fortification known as Castle Clinton. They did so not out of a desire to better inspect the newcomers and thereby protect Americans from them. Rather, the Castle Garden immigration center was founded to protect the immigrants from Americans. Each arriving ship would be met at the docks by a swarm of "immigrant runners," men who would besiege the dazed and bewildered newcomers, grab their luggage, and lead them to boardinghouses whose owners typically gouged them, then held their luggage hostage if the newcomers refused to pay. The commissioners of emigration could not regulate the runners at a hundred different docks all over town, so they made Castle Garden into an immigration depot, hoping that if all the runners had to congregate in a single place, the police could better supervise them and the immigrants could be warned to resist their lures and promises.
Excerpted from City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York by Tyler Anbinder. Copyright © 2016 by Tyler Anbinder. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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