Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [587]
Irish peasants, German craftsmen, English Chartists—America was their common destination, and it was New York, now the principal western terminus of transatlantic traffic, where they converged. Between 1820 and 1839, better than 667,000 immigrants had arrived in the United States. Some 501,000 (75 percent) of them entered at the Port of New York, a yearly average of around 25,000. Between 1840 and 1859, however, the total number of immigrants soared to 4,242,000. Forty percent were Irish, 32 percent were German, and 16 percent were English. Three out of every four entered at New York, approximately 157,000 per year on the average. In 1854 alone, setting a record that stood for decades, the United States accepted 428,000 immigrants. Of that number, roughly 319,000 (75 percent) descended on Manhattan—more than the entire population of the city in 1840!
Only a minority of these immigrants became permanent residents. Every year, as a general rule, perhaps three of every five departed immediately for the interior. Others moved on after a short stay. Of the more than three million immigrants who passed through the city between 1840 and 1860, maybe one in five or six remained—but this was enough to help drive the population of New York City from 313,000 to 814,000 and that of Brooklyn from 11,000 to 267,000, an aggregate increase of some 757,000 people. In 1845 Manhattan had been half the size of Paris; by 1860 it had over a million inhabitants and had pulled even with the French metropolis.
New York’s surging population wasn’t wholly the result of foreign immigration. The villages of New England, New Jersey, and Long Island continued to export men and women to the city, as they had since the 1790s. The pace of this migration quickened during the 1830s and 1840s as a ramifying network of canals and railroads brought New York’s older agricultural hinterlands into direct competition with more productive farmsteads around the Great Lakes and west toward the Mississippi. Thousands of marginal growers and stockmen left the land altogether and went to Manhattan in hopes of making new lives for themselves; others joined a burgeoning corps of farm laborers, wandering between town and country in search of seasonal employment, here successful, there obliged to subsist “on the good-nature of relatives, landlords, or grocers, so long as they can, and then make their choice between roguery and beggary.” Also on the move were numerous small-town craftsmen and retailers whose livelihoods had been destroyed by the expansion of urban manufacturing.
Although native migrants (sometimes called “buckwheats”) had a good deal in common with their immigrant counterparts—above all, the confusion and resentment of lives thrown into disarray by the advent of new capitalist economies—it was the immigrants, more alien and far more visible, who had the most profound impact on New York. By 1855 over half the city’s residents hailed from outside the United States: 176,000 from Ireland, another ninety-eight thousand from Germany, and thirty-seven thousand from England, Wales, or Scotland. Two of every three adult Manhattanites had been born abroad.
New York City was no novice at handling large-scale immigration, but never before had it confronted anything like this inundation. Where the English had overborne the Dutch in a century-long evolutionary process, this demographic revolution took but twenty years. It was as if a second city had sprung up, virtually overnight—not encamped across the river but superimposed atop the older metropolis. Newcomers in such numbers would not be stirred and dissolved in some metropolitan melting pot.
RECEPTION CENTER
By the early 1840s up to forty passenger ships might drop anchor off Manhattan every day, the biggest carrying as many as a thousand men, women, and children in steerage. As lighters and steamboats shuttled their cargoes to shore, bedlam engulfed the waterfront. Clattering wagons careened