Tyler Anbinder - City of Dreams: the 400-year epic history of immigrant New York

The Nevada, the ship that carried Annie Moore and her brothers to New York in December 1891.

At the stroke of midnight a mile farther south, seventeen-year-old Annie Moore was probably in her bunk in the aft starboard steerage compartment of the S.S. Nevada, which lay at anchor in New York Harbor off the southern tip of Manhattan. Somewhere close by were Annies younger brothers, fifteen-year-old Anthony and twelve-year-old Philip. The three Moores, all natives of the city of Cork, were coming to New York to join their parents, Matthew and Julia, and their older siblings, twenty-one-year-old Mary and nineteen-year-old Cornelius, who had ventured to America four years earlier and were living in lower Manhattan at 32 Monroe Street, a few blocks from the waterfront, just north of the Brooklyn Bridge.

The Nevada was no luxury liner. It was an exceedingly low and narrow vessel, 346 feet long but only 43 feet wide at its broadest point, with one short exhaust funnel amidships and a mast fore and aft just in case the engines gave out. The ship had been plying the route from Liverpool to New York via Queenstown, County Cork, since 1869, just as steamships had begun to outnumber

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 Years Eve aboard the steamer. The twenty or so first- and second-class passengers, with private or semiprivate cabins, probably celebrated the occasion slurping New Yorks famous oysters and sipping champagne with the captain in the ships 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 Years 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 refusedthe 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

Webers 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.