American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [32]
Forged in the fire of the Civil War, Weber’s life resembled that of many Northerners at the time. At fourteen, he volunteered as the color bearer for the local militia. When war broke out a few years later, the eighteen-year-old volunteered for service. He survived the war without a scratch, despite having seen his share of combat, and made his way quickly through the ranks, going from private to colonel before his twenty-first birthday. In 1864, he helped organize and lead the 89th United States Colored Infantry. At twenty-one, Weber left the army, returned home to New York, and prepared to take an active role in civic affairs.
He started a family and became a large landowner and a grocer. Like many of the Union soldiers who survived the killing fields of the Civil War, Weber’s postwar life was defined by membership in the local post of the Grand Army of the Republic and the Republican Party. Weber ran for Erie County sheriff in 1870, but narrowly lost to a Democrat named Grover Cleveland. Weber would later win the post in his second attempt, then go on to serve two terms in the House of Representatives.
In return for helping a fellow Civil War officer named Benjamin Harrison win the Republican presidential nomination in 1888, Weber was given the job of commissioner of immigration at the Port of New York, overseeing the construction of the new facilities at Ellis Island as well as the processing of immigrants at the Barge Office until Ellis Island was open. He was also given an additional task. In 1891, Treasury Secretary Charles Foster asked him to chair a five-man commission to travel to Europe and report on immigration. This was the first time the federal government sought to investigate the reasons why Europeans were emigrating to America.
The government wanted answers to very specific questions. Why were Europeans coming to the United States? Was immigration being “promoted or stimulated by steamship or other carrying companies or their agents for the resulting passenger business”? To what extent were “criminals, insane persons, idiots, and other defectives, paupers or persons likely to become a public charge, and persons afflicted with loathsome or dangerous contagious disease” encouraged to emigrate?
There was an additional reason for the trip. Before Weber set sail for Europe, President Harrison summoned him to a seaside cottage in Cape May, New Jersey, where the president was vacationing. Harrison wanted Weber to investigate the condition of Russian Jews. Upon arriving in London, where he would meet the other four members of the commission, Weber would choose one of the four to accompany him to Russia. Weber had to leave for Europe only three days after he received his instructions. The other commissioners, whom Weber had never met, were already waiting in London.
Once in London, Weber chose Dr. Walter Kempster as his traveling companion, leaving the other three members of the commission free to conduct their own investigations. Kempster was born in London and arrived in upstate New York as a young boy. Like Weber, he was a former Civil War officer, having served at Gettysburg. After the war, Kempster became one of the nation’s leading alienists, making the study of the human brain his specialty. He worked at a number of mental hospitals in New York before moving to Wisconsin. In 1881, Kempster served as one of the witnesses for the prosecution in the trial of Charles Guiteau, the assassin of President James A. Garfield.
Beginning in late July 1891, Weber and Kempster city-hopped from Liverpool to Paris, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Minsk, Wilna, Bialystok, Grodno, Warsaw, Cracow, Budapest, and Vienna. They ended their trip in early October