Authors: Vincent J. Cannato
Little Oyster Island would figure into a small piece of early New Amsterdam history. In 1653, Peter Stuyvesant, the director general of the West India Company and de facto ruler of New Amsterdam, was ordered by his bosses to create a municipal government. In February 1653, the new city government met in Fort Amsterdam.
One of the first orders of business that day was a complaint from Joost Goderis, the twenty-something son of a minor Dutch painter. In late January, Goderis had gone in a canoe with a boy “for oysters and pleasure” at Oyster Island. Goderis was interrupted and accosted by Isaack Bedloo and Jacob Buys, who taunted Goderis by shouting: “You cuckold and horned beast, Allard Antony has had your wife down on her back.” Another man, Guliam d’Wys, taunted Goderis that he should let d’Wys have a “sexual connection” with Goderis’s wife, since Antony already had done so. When Goderis, whom one historian had deemed “excitable” and “ill-balanced,” confronted Bedloo at his house, he slapped him. In turn, Bedloo drew a knife and cut Goderis on the neck.
Goderis decided to take his case before the new local government to restore the good name of his wife and the pride of his family. He also hauled in a number of other men, friends of the defendants, who reportedly had witnessed the incident. The witnesses refused to cooperate against their friends and the case dragged on for weeks. One of the men hearing the case was none other than Allard Antony, the alleged cuckolder himself.
Goderis and the others have vanished into history, but Isaack Bedloo lives on. He became a wealthy merchant and later joined other prominent leaders of New Amsterdam in 1664 to convince Stuyvesant to turn over control of New Amsterdam to England. It was a purely business decision. In return, Bedloo received political patronage in the new British colony and was able to purchase Great Oyster Island. Bedloo, like other Dutch settlers under British rule, Anglicized his name to “Bedlow,” which later generations corrupted to “Bedloe,” the name that would eventually attach itself to the island that in 1886 became home to the Statue of Liberty.
Little Oyster Island would also become known as Dyre Island and then Bucking Island in the eighteenth century. Ownership of the island from the late 1690s until 1785 was unclear. In that latter year, an advertisement appeared in a local newspaper offering for sale “that pleasant situated Island, called Oyster Island, lying in York Bay, near Powles’ Hook, together with all its improvements, which are considerable.” In addition to the island, the seller offered two lots in Manhattan, a “few barrels of excellent shad and herrings,” “a quantity of twine,” and “a large Pleasure Sleigh, almost new.”
The seller was Samuel Ellis, a farmer and merchant who resided at 1 Greenwich Street. It is not known when Ellis bought the island, though a notice was found in a 1778 newspaper publicizing the fact that a boat had been found adrift at “Mr. Ellis’s Island.”
Ellis died in 1794, still in possession of his island. His daughter, Catherine Westervelt, was pregnant at the time and Samuel’s will made clear that if she had a boy, it was his wish “that the boy may be baptized by the name of Samuel Ellis.” Ellis was clearly interested in his posterity. With three daughters, he most likely feared his name would not live on past his death, and having a grandson named Samuel Ellis Westervelt was the next best thing. His plans were tragically thwarted. Though Catherine’s child was a boy and christened as his grandfather had ordered, Samuel Ellis Westervelt died young. Yet through the agency of history and luck, the name Ellis would still attach itself to one of the nation’s most famous islands.
Even during Samuel Ellis’s life, the island’s ownership became a matter of some controversy and confusion, as the new government of the United States became interested in the island. In the 1790s, tensions with England continued and the War Department began to devise a strategy for defending its shores. In New York, the military began to fortify the islands of New York Harbor to ward off a possible British naval attack.
Before Samuel Ellis passed away, the city granted to New York State the right to the soil around the island from the high-water mark to the low-water mark. The city felt it had the right to that land, even though the island proper was in private hands.
Over the next few years, the state built earthen fortifications on the island, some of them intruding upon private property. In 1798, Colonel Ebenezer Stevens advised the War Department that a troop barrack there had been completed, along with twelve large guns. However, he reminded his superiors that the island was still in private hands. “I think something ought to be done with respect to purchasing it and the State will cede the jurisdiction to the Federal Government,” Stevens wrote. In 1800, New York State transferred jurisdiction over all the fortified islands in New York Harbor to the federal government, even though it still did not have legal rights over Ellis Island.
In 1807, Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Williams, chief engineer of the United States Army, declared that the fortification at Ellis Island was “totally out of repair.” He drew up new plans for a fortified New York Harbor that included a new fort at Ellis Island. But first the title of the island needed to be settled. The New York governor, Daniel Tompkins, wrote to Williams that although Samuel Ellis had agreed to sell the island, he had died before the deed could be executed. The military works constructed there, wrote Tompkins, “are occupied merely by the permission of the owner whose ancestor assented to it and whose first permission has never been withdrawn by his descendants.”
In response, on April 27, 1808, the sheriff of New York County and a group of selected New Yorkers visited Ellis Island to appraise its value, eventually settling on the figure of $10,000, which astounded Colonel Williams. What the appraisers found on Ellis Island gives us some idea why it may have interested Samuel Ellis as an investor.
It is found to be one of the most lucrative situations for shad fishing by set netts [
sic
] within some distance of this place, yielding annually from 450 to 500 dollars to the occupant from this single circumstance. The Oyster banks being in its vicinity affords an income in the loan of boats, rakes, etc. . . . besides this a considerable advantage results to the occupant from a tavern in the only possible place of communication for people engaged there, between the oyster banks and this city.
Despite Colonel Williams’s reluctance, the government agreed to pay the money to clear up the confusion, and the state then transferred the deed to the federal government. The nation would soon be at war with England, yet when the War of 1812 ended, not a shot had been fired in anger from any of the forts of New York Harbor.
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island empire in many ways, especially with its four-mile-wide harbor sheltered from the rough Atlantic waters. The sand banks that line the Lower Bay south of Coney Island to Sandy Hook act as a natural breakwater, while the Narrows, a twomile-long bottleneck passageway between Staten Island and Brooklyn, protects the placid harbor from stormy seas and ocean waves. Standing at the Battery, staring at the expansive harbor, one cannot help but be soothed by its calm waters.
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.
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.
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
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.