American Passage by Vincent J. Cannato Read Free Book Online

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