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most beneficent institutions in the world.
— Harper’s New Monthly Magazine , June 1884
    ON A HO T AUGUST NIGHT IN 1855, A LINE OF OIL LAMPS lit the early evening sky on lower Broadway in Manhattan. Torch-bearing New Yorkers proceeded down the short hill, past Bowling Green, the tiny oval patch of grass surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, and into the Battery. It was a joyous and raucous affair, part political protest and part social outing, with loud shouting, fireworks, and even the firing of cannons as the crowd marched around the Battery carrying banners in German and English. By the time they had arrived, their numbers had grown to some three thousand people.
These men, women, and children were responding to an advertisement that had been posted around the city:
    INDIGNATION MEETING!
citizens of the first ward
Assemble in your Might, and vindicate your Rights! citizens
Do you wish to have
plague and cholera in your midst!
Do you wish to have your Children laid low with Small Pox
and Ship Fever?
New-yorkers
    Will we have our most honored and sacred spot desecrated by the sickly and loathsome Paupers and Refugees of European Workhouses and Prisons?
    Populist mobs were a regular feature in American cities dating back to revolutionary-era protests like those over the Stamp Act. Indignation meetings allowed citizens to blow off steam and flex their collective muscles to authorities.
    The object of the crowd’s indignation on this night was the recent opening of a brand-new immigration depot on a rocky outcropping just off the Battery and connected to it by a footbridge. Castle Garden stood on the site of a fort built in 1811 as part of the defensive fortifications of New York Harbor. When the Marquis de Lafayette visited America in 1824, he first arrived at the fort, where more than five thousand guests welcomed him.
    The old fort was later converted into a music hall where Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” made her American debut in 1850 as part of her cross-country tour financed and publicized by the irrepressible P. T. Barnum. The same seats where the city’s elite once sat to hear Lind were now occupied by immigrants from Ireland and Germany awaiting their chance to enter the country.
    The new immigration station riled the crowd. Organizers billed the protest as an “anti-cholera meeting,” playing on the fears of New Yorkers who had endured a number of cholera outbreaks in years past and blamed immigrants for the disease. “Knaves and speculators,” the notice warned, were “introducing paupers and emigrants infected with cholera, small-pox, ship fever, and all the vices of foreign prisons and workhouses.” The advertisement also appealed to the crowd’s patriotism, calling on New Yorkers to protest the desecration of the hallowed ground of Castle Garden, where Presidents George Washington and Andrew Jackson once stood.
    The indignation meeting succeeded in drawing a large and lusty crowd. When the assembly had settled down at the Battery, someone read a resolution against Castle Garden, and a number of speakers came forth to voice their opposition. One of them was Captain Isaiah Rynders, who began his speech to raucous cheers and the explosions of roman candles and rockets. As the crowd quieted, Rynders told them he had not originally been invited to speak and was sorry that the crowd “did not call upon somebody else, better able than I am to address you.”
    This was an exercise in false modesty, for Rynders was no ordinary speaker and he most clearly belonged at that rally. In fact, Rynders himself was likely the brains behind the protest. Theodore Roosevelt, in his history of New York City, would later describe Rynders as one of “the brutal and turbulent ruffians who led the mob and controlled the politics of the lower wards” who “ruled by force and fraud, and were hand in glove with the disorderly and semi-criminal classes.”
    Born in upstate New York to a German-American father and an