Dean Wagner's Genealogy - Chapter One: Castle Garden

Castle Clinton National Monument

New York City, New York County, New York, USA

Chapter One: Castle Garden

Ellis Island: Gateway to the American Dream
by Pamela Reeves
© 1991
Pages 15-27

When Ellis Island opened in 1892, it marked the passage of immigration from state to federal control, a change sought by Washington for two reasons: to appease the voices in society that were raising objections to the continuing unregulated flow of newcomers; and to deal with the corruption and cronyism that mired down the entire process, especially in New York, where most of the immigrants landed. Between 1880 and 1900, nine million immigrants entered the country, the largest number of new arrivals in any twenty-year period. This alarmed many Americans, in part because of a shift in the nationality of the immigrants. The earliest settlers in the United States were from northern and western Europe, primarily England, Ireland, Germany and the Scandinavian countries. Those nations continued to provide the bulk of immigrants until the late 1800s, when people from southern and eastern Europe began to predominate. By 1896, Italy, Russia, Poland, Spain, Greece, Eastern Europe, and Austria-Hungary were the sources of the majority of immigrants, and they continued to be until 1924, when a stiff immigration-restriction law was imposed.

America was undergoing a major transformation from a rural to an urban society during this period that led to unprecedented prosperity, despite several depressions. In 1880, the census found that only 28 percent of the people lived in urban communities; by 1900 the urban figure had risen to 40 percent. The change was accompanied by huge growth in the iron, steel, mining, and lumber industries and such major developments as the telephone, the automobile, linotyrpe, electric light, the phonograph, and the cash register. These industries and their offshoots required millions of laborers and provided the economic draw for those in less prosperous European nations.

Despite some early mutual distrust, many of the immigrants joined the newly developed American labor unions, eventually becoming a major force in the movement. Their struggle for such rights as the eight-hour work day led to bloody strikes and violent confrontations. In 1886 alone, there were nearly 1,600 strikes involving 600,000 workers, one of them culminating in Chicago's infamous Haymarket Riot, in which eight policemen were killed and more than sixty people wounded.

Many Americans blamed the unions and their immigrant members for the Haymarket deaths, and prejudice against foreigners increased. With federal control of immigration, it was felt, it would be much easier to enforce restrictions that the states were unable or unwilling to impose.

At the same time, in the late 1880s, there was a public outcry against the abuses at New York City's Castle Garden, which had opened in 1855 as the nation's first receiving-station for immigrants. During its thirty-five years of operation, Castle Garden handled nine million immigrants, among them Samuel Gompers (1863), first president of the AFL-CIO, and Jacob Riis (1870), journalist and social reformer.

Castle Garden, at the southern tip of Manhattan, was built by the federal government in 1807 in preparation for the 1812 war with England. After the war the fort was named Castle Clinton in honor of Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York. It was ceded to New York City in the 1820s and later leased to a private firm as an amusement park. By 1839, it had become a fashionable concert hall. Jenny Lind, the Swedish opera singer made her American debut there in 1850, and her outstanding performance spread the name Castle Garden throughout the country.

As the neighborhood around Castle Garden declined, however so did the concert hall. New York authorities decided it would make an ideal place to receive immigrants, who until that point had been allowed to disembark directly into the city after passing through customs (as long as no contagious diseases were found aboard their ship when it docked).

The decision to open a receiving station stemmed in part from the abuses the immigrants encountered when they landed, and also from the often despicable conditions on the ships. New York, as America's largest port since the 1820s, received by far the most immigrants of any city and was particularly aware of the problems.

In 1842, novelist Charles Dickens, who had been touring the United States, traveled back to England first class, but he visited the steerage and was appalled by what he saw In his book American Notes, he contrasted the pleasant life of the upper-deck passengers with the experience of those below:

"We breakfasted at 8, lunched at 12, dined at 3, and took our tea at half past seven. We bad abundance of amusements and dinner was not the least among them... then we had chess for those who played it, whist, cribbage, books, backgammon and shovelboard. In all weathers, fair or foul, calm or windy; we were every one on deck, walking up and down in pairs, lying in the boats, leaning over the side or chatting in a lazy group together. We had no lack of music...."

The boat carried about a hundred passengers in steerage, "a little world of poverty" that included people denied entry into America and those who had failed to make a living in their new land.

Some of them had been in America but three days, some but three months, and some had gone out in the last voyage of that very ship in which they were now returning home. Others had sold their clothes to raise the passage-money, and had hardly rags to cover them; others had no food and lived upon the charity of the rest; and one man, it was discovered nearly at the end of the voyage, not before - for he kept his secret close and did not court compassions - had had no sustenance whatever but the bones and scraps of fat he took from the plates used in the after-cabin dinner; when they were put out to be washed.

Dickens demanded an end to the abusive system that allowed shipowners to sell space to unscrupulous men, who then sought out as many poor immigrants as possible to fill it, thereby making a handsome profit while ensuring terrible traveling conditions for the passengers. But with so much money to be made and little government regulation, improvements were slow to come.

In 1845, just three years after Dickens' journey, Ireland was hit with a famine stemming from crop failures of the main peasant food - potatoes. Over the next decade, 1.5 million Irish citizens set out for the United States. The very poorest took the cheaper route to Canada - then called British North America - and many of them were near starvation when they boarded. Immigrants at the time were required to provide their own food for the journey, and it was not uncommon for them to run out of provisions if the ship ran into storms and was at sea for two or three months. Lack of food, poor ventilation in the jam-packed steerage quarters, and contagious diseases took a fearsome toll.

In 1847, the year in which more than 214,000 Irish set out for North America "running away from fever and disease and hunger with money scarcely sufficient to pay passage for and find food for the voyage," 30 percent of those bound for British North America died. The death toll among those sailing for the United States was 9 percent.

News of the deaths shocked both America and Britain and resulted in new laws passed over the next eight years requiring shipowners or their agents to provide food for immigrants during the journey. The ocean liners also were required to have at least two ventilators in steerage and covered hatchways that could be left open even during a storm. New York inspected the ships and imposed penalties for breaking the law but the fines were not high enough to deter greedy shipowners. Death rates on the ships remained high.

At about the same time these new laws were passed, New York decided to turn Castle Garden into a receiving station for the immigrants to protect them from the gaggle of swindlers who accosted them with offers of housing, food, trinkets, and railway tickets as they stepped off the boat.

Irish immigrants who boarded the ocean liners at Liverpool, in England, often fell victim to the network of crooked shippers, innkeepers, ticket agents, porters, and money changers who infested the docks. If the immigrant survived those swindlers, he too frequently met up with the same type of lowlifes when he reached New York. "People may think that if they get safe through Liverpool they are all right," said one immigrant, "but I can assure you that there is greater robberies done in New York on immigrants than there is in Liverpool."

Wrote another immigrant, "I have met with so much deception since we have landed on the shores of the New World that I am fearful of trusting anyone."

To provide the immigrants with a better start, New York officials fenced off Castle Garden, in order to maintain control over those who entered and left the receiving house.

This system improved the immigrant's prospects for a time, and Castle Garden was able to function smoothly due to a drop in the number of newcomers during the years around the Civil War. In 1871, Harper's New Monthly Magazine described the procedure for new arrivals:

"Slowly, one by one the newcomers passed the two officers, whose study it is to register evey immigrant's name, birthplace and destination in large folios.... On they passed, one by one, in single file till a few steps farther down they came to the desk of the so-called booker; a clerk of the Railway Association, whose duty it is to ascertain the destination of each passenger; and furnish him with a printed slip, upon which this is setforth, with the number of tickets wanted, and their cost in currency.

Harper's said this system was a great improvement, since the immigrant paid a fair price for the railroad ticket. The magazine noted that those who bought their tickets outside Castle Garden had often been swindled.

The article also noted that immigrants could exchange their money inside Castle Garden, where the fair trading-rates were posted daily.

Outside Castle Garden, however the rule was still "traveler beware," as a case recited bv Robert Louis Stevenson attested. In "The Amateur Emigrant" he described two young men - M'Naughten and a friend - who landed in New York, traveled to Boston, spent the day carousing, and set out at midnight to find an inn. They settled on a cheap hotel: The room had a bed, a chair and a couple of framed pictures, "one close above the head of the bed, and the other opposite the foot, and both curtained:"

Curtained portraits were in fashion at the time, especially for "works of art more than usually skittish in the subject."

Perhaps anticipating such a picture, M'Naughten's companion pulled back one of the curtains and "was startlingly disappointed." The curtains covered not a portrait but a hole in the wall that would allow anyone outside the room to reach through and take a purse from the sleeping traveler - or even strangle him.

M'Naughten and his comrade stared at each other like Vasco's seamen, 'with a wild surmise' and then the latter; catching up the lamp, ran to the other frame and roughly raised the curtain. There he stood, petrified; and M'Naughten, who had followed, grasped him by the wrist in terror. They could see into another room, larger in size than that which they occupied, where three men sat crouching and silent in the dark. For a second or so these five persons looked each other in the eyes, then the curtain was dropped and M'Naughten and his friend made but one bolt of it out of the room and downstairs.... They gave up all notion of a bed and walked the streets of Boston till the morning.

Despite all the perils of travel, immigration by the 1880s was again on the rise, and attitudes toward the newcomers were becoming increasingly negative. There had been race riots in San Francisco against the Chinese, who comprised seventeen percent of the population and worked for low wages for railroad builders. Feelings ran so strong that in 1882 Congress banned Chinese immigrants from entering the United States. Another law passed that same year excluded "any convict, lunatic, idiot or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge," Three years later in 1885, labor unions succeeded in getting a law passed to stop businessmen from importing men willing to work for little money, which undercut the wage minimums the unions had finally been able to win. This Alien Contract Labor Law was administered by federal agents, working side by side with state authorities at Castle Garden.

In this atmosphere, concern for the welfare of the immigrant declined and so did the state of the bureaucracy at Castle Garden. New York newspapers, led by Joseph Pulitzer's The World, charged that the swindlers who had long lurked outside the receiving station had now insinuated themselves inside and that cheating, misleading, and stealing were running rampant. In 1887, in an article titled "Cogent Reasons for the Abolition of the Emigration Commission," The World complained especially about the contract on rail transportation for immigrants leaving New York that Castle Garden had awarded to a few lines:

It [Castle Garden] was organized in order that the hundreds of thousands of immigrants that come to these shores every year might be protected and cared for until they reached their destination; but instead of doing this, the commission throws the immigrants into the hands of a heartless railroad pool that treats them most shamefully and squeezes all it can out of them.... The immigrants are not only huddled like cattle in the uncomfortable and foul-smelling cars of this unlawful pool, that run on a freight schedule, taking two days instead of one to reach Chicago, but they are deprived of the right to select by which one even of the pool lines they shall purchase their tickets, and are charged exorbitant rates for baggage.

The World also cited a number of cases of immigrants being detained for no good reason and mistreated in the process. Especially galling was the case of Ingjerd Jonson, a single woman with a child who had come to the United States to live with her sister and other family members.

Even though her relatives came forward and assured authorities that Jonson would not wind up as "an object for public charity," she was detained at Castle Garden for days. The World said she was forced to sleep on bare wooden benches, was given only bread and milk to eat, and complained that she had been "criminally assaulted by George Ivern, one of the employees of the Garden."

The World demanded an investigation into the case, and Jonson eventually was turned over to her relatives.

Her case and others cited in newspapers led to several investigations and reports, culminating in 1890 with a decision by Washington to take immigration totally out of New York's hands and make it a federal charge. The stage was set for Ellis Island to make its debut - but not without a lot of controversy and delay.