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Title: The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin

Author: Joseph Schafer

Release Date: November 20, 2017 [EBook #56012]

Language: English

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  THE YANKEE AND THE TEUTON
  IN WISCONSIN

  BY
  JOSEPH SCHAFER

  [Illustration]

  Reprinted from the _Wisconsin Magazine of History_
  Volume VI, No. 2, December, 1922




THE YANKEE AND THE TEUTON IN WISCONSIN

JOSEPH SCHAFER

I. CHARACTERISTIC ATTITUDES TOWARD THE LAND


Wisconsin in its racial character is popularly known to the country at
large as a Teutonic state. That means the state has a German element,
original and derivative, which numerically overshadows the American,
English, Irish, Scandinavian, and other stocks also represented in
the Badger blend. It is not necessary to quarrel with this widely
accepted theorem, though some of the corollaries drawn from it can be
shown to be unhistorical; and one can demonstrate statistically that
if Wisconsin now is, or at any census period was, a Teutonic state
she began her statehood career in 1848 as a Yankee state and thus
continued for many years with consequences social, economic, political,
religious, and moral which no mere racial substitutions have had power
to obliterate. My purpose in the present paper is to present, from
local sources, some discussion of the relations of Yankee and Teuton
to the land--a theme which ought to throw light on the process of
substitution mentioned, revealing how the Teuton came into possession
of vast agricultural areas once firmly held by the Yankee.

The agricultural occupation of southern Wisconsin, which brought the
first tide of immigration from New England, western New York, northern
Pennsylvania, and Ohio--the Yankee element--may be said roughly to
have been accomplished within the years 1835 and 1850. The settlements
which existed prior to 1835 were in the lead region of the southwest,
at Green Bay, and at Prairie du Chien. The population of the lead mines
was predominantly of southern and southwestern origin; that of the
two other localities--the ancient seats of the Indian trade and more
recent centers of military defense--was mainly French-Canadian. When,
in 1836, a territorial census was taken, it was found that the three
areas named had an aggregate population of nearly 9000, of which more
than 5000 was in the lead region included in the then county of Iowa.
The Green Bay region (Brown County) was next, and the Prairie du Chien
settlement (Crawford County) smallest.

The census, however, recognized a new county, Milwaukee, whose
territory had been severed from the earlier Brown County. It was
bounded east by Lake Michigan, south by Illinois, west by a line drawn
due north from the Illinois line to Wisconsin River at the Portage, and
north by a line drawn due east from the Portage to the lake. In terms
of present-day divisions, the Milwaukee County of 1836 embraced all of
Kenosha, Racine, Walworth, Rock, Jefferson, Waukesha, and Milwaukee
counties, nearly all of Ozaukee, Washington, and Dodge, a strip of
eastern Green County, and most of Dane and Columbia. In that imperial
domain the census takers found a grand total of 2900 persons, or almost
exactly one-fourth of the population of the entire territory.

Two significant facts distinguish the Milwaukee County census list
from the lists of Brown, Crawford, and Iowa counties--the recency
of the settlement and the distinctive local origin of the settlers.
These people had only just arrived, most of them in the early months
of 1836. One could almost count on his ten fingers the individuals
who were there prior to the summer of 1835. In reality they were not
yet “settled,” for most of the rude claim huts--mere shelters of the
pre-log house stage--were haunted at night and shadowed at noonday
by men only, resident families being still rare, though many were on
the lakes, at the ports of Milwaukee and Chicago, or on the overland
trail which was to end at the cabin door. It was the prophecy of new
communities, not the actuality, that the census taker chronicled when
he recorded the names of claim takers with the number of persons,
of each sex, comprising their households. We have reason to believe
that the numbers were inscribed almost as cheerfully when the persons
represented by them were still biding in the old home or were en route
west, as when they were physically present in the settler’s cabin or in
the dooryard, eager to be counted.

[Illustration:

  WISCONSIN TERRITORY
  1836

  Drawn by Mary Stuart Foster.]

Unlike the other populations of Wisconsin at that time, the vast
majority of Milwaukee County settlers were Northeasterners. Such
evidence as we have indicates that New York supplied more than half,
the New England states, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan nearly all of
the balance.[1] New York’s title to primacy in peopling Wisconsin is
exhibited, most impressively, in the statistics of the 1850 census. At
that time native Americans constituted 63 per cent of the total and
New Yorkers had 36 per cent of the native majority. Native Americans
predominated in all but three of the twenty-six counties, and in all
but five those who were natives of New York, added to the natives of
Wisconsin, were a majority of the American born. The exceptions were
the four lead mining counties of Grant, Iowa, Lafayette, and Green,
together with Richland, which, however, had so few inhabitants that its
case is divested of any significance.

The three counties which, in 1850, showed a majority of foreign born
inhabitants were Manitowoc, Milwaukee, and Washington (the last named
including the present Ozaukee County); and in each case Germans
constituted more than half of that majority. Together those three
counties had over 20,000, which was considerably more than one-half
of all the Germans (38,054) domiciled in Wisconsin at that time. The
other lake shore counties, together with Calumet, Fond du Lac, Dodge,
Jefferson, and Waukesha, accounted for 15,000 of the balance, leaving
about 3000 scattered over the rest of the state. Thus the area embraced
by Lake Michigan, Lake Winnebago and lower Fox River, the upper reaches
of Rock River, and the south boundary of Jefferson, Waukesha, and
Milwaukee counties was all strongly and in the main distinctively
German.

Investigating the causes which may have operated to concentrate the
German population within such clearly defined geographic limits, our
first inquiry concerns the land on which settlement was taking place.
And here we find that the distinguishing fact marking off the region
in which Germans abounded from most of the other settled or partially
settled areas of the state was its originally thickly wooded character.
In a way almost startling, and superficially conclusive, the German
settlements coincided with the great maple forest of southeastern
Wisconsin, spreading also through the included pine forest on Lake
Michigan south of Green Bay.

Returning now to the Yankee element, we find that although it was
strong in all of the settled districts save the five counties named,
it was more completely dominant in some districts than in others. For
example, in Walworth County the northeastern states furnished 96.5 per
cent of the American population, while 3.5 per cent was furnished by
sixteen other states. The foreign born constituted less than 16 per
cent of the total.[2] Walworth County was a section of the new “Yankee
Land,” which included in its boundaries also the counties of Racine
and Kenosha, Rock, and at that time parts of Waukesha and Jefferson.
Nowhere in that region were foreigners very numerous, and in many
localities non-English speaking foreigners were almost scarce.

Physically, this new Yankee Land comprised those portions of the
prairies and openings of southern Wisconsin which lay not more than
from sixty to seventy-five miles from the lake ports at Milwaukee,
Racine, and Kenosha. The region was just as characteristically “open
country” as that occupied so extensively by Germans was forested. One
land type, the glacial marsh or swale--good for hay and pasture--was
common to the two districts of country. But for the rest, the Yankee’s
land was all ready for the plow if it was prairie, and if oak openings
the labor of felling the scattered trees and dragging them away before
the breaking team was comparatively light.

The German, on the other hand, in order to subdue his land to the
requirements of successful tillage, must attack with ax, mattock,
and firebrand each successive acre, patiently slashing and burning,
hewing and delving, till by dint of unremitting toil extended over an
indefinite number of years his farm became “cleared.”

Shall we therefore repeat, as the sober verdict of history, the
statement often heard, that in settling this new country the Yankee
showed a preference for open land, the German for woodland? On the
face of the census returns that seems to be the case, and if our
evidence were limited to the census such a conclusion would be well
nigh inescapable. Fortunately, he who deals with culture history
problems of the American West has this advantage over the Greenes and
the Lamprechts of Europe, that on such matters his evidence is minutely
particular, while theirs is general to the point of vagueness. No one
will doubt that the Yankee staked his claim in the open lands because
he preferred those lands on account of the ease with which a farm could
be made. The question is, whether the German’s presence in the woods
rather than in the openings or on the prairies was with him a matter of
preference so far as land selection in itself was concerned.

Timber for shelter, fuel, building, and fencing was an important
consideration to all settlers, including the Yankees. In another
connection I have shown, from the records of land entries, that the
Yankee settlers in a prevailingly prairie township of Racine County
took up first every acre of forested land, together with the prairie
lands and marsh lands adjoining the woods, while they shunned for
some years the big, open, unsheltered prairie where farms would be
out of immediate touch with woods.[3] Rather than take treeless lands
near the lake shore, these settlers preferred to go farther inland
where inviting combinations of groves, meadows, and dry prairie
lands, or openings, could still be found in the public domain. Only
gradually did American settlers overcome their natural repugnance to
a shelterless, timberless farm home--a repugnance justified by common
sense, but springing from the habit of generations. When, for economic
reasons, they began to settle on the open prairies, the planting of
quick-growing trees about the farmsteads was always esteemed a work of
fundamental utility.

Yankee agricultural settlers found special inducements for going inland
in search of ideal farm locations, in the glowing advertisements of
Yankee speculators who early pioneered the open country far and wide.
These speculators concerned themselves primarily with water powers for
sawmill and gristmill sites and town sites. Yet power and town sites
both depended for their development on the agricultural occupation
of the surrounding country, and this made the speculators careful to
locate their claims in areas of desirable lands which would soon be
wanted. It also made them doubly active in proclaiming to immigrants
the agricultural advantages of their chosen localities.

One may take up at random the land office records of townships in the
older Wisconsin, and in practically every case find proof that the
speculator was abroad in the land before the arrival of the farmer.
Along the banks of navigable rivers he took up, early, such tracts
as seemed to afford good steamboat landings, which might mean towns
or villages also. Along smaller streams he engrossed potential water
powers. In the prairie regions he seized the timbered tracts which
commonly lay along the streams. And wherever nature seemed to have
sketched the physical basis for a future town, there he drove his
stakes and entered an area large enough at least for a municipal center.

In some portions, particularly of the earliest surveys, the speculator
also absorbed a goodly share of the best farm land, which he held
for an advance when the immigration of farmers became heavy. Other
Americans, aside from Yankees, participated in these speculations,
but the records show that the Yankee’s reputation for alertness and
sagacity in that line is not unmerited. For illustration, the plats of
Dane County townships disclose among the original entrymen who bought
their lands early, the names of well known speculators like James D.
Doty, Lucius Lyon, the Bronsons, Cyrus Woodman, Hazen Cheney, and
C. C. Washburn--all Yankees. In addition, we have distinguished New
Englanders who probably never came west but invested through the agency
of their Yankee correspondents. Among them are Daniel Webster, Edward
Everett, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Caleb Cushing.

To a considerable extent these speculators, in paying for government
lands, employed military land warrants, usually purchased at a heavy
discount. “Scripping” by this means became more common after the
Mexican War. A German immigration leader wrote at the close of 1848:
“There is a man living in Sheboygan who has already placed 344 of these
warrants [each good for 160 acres] on government lands and intends next
spring to place 200 more on tracts lying north of Fox River.”[4] He
did not say the man was a Yankee; possibly he deemed that information
unnecessary. For, although the German sometimes bought warrants of
the brokers in order to save the difference between the price of such
warrants and the land office price of government land, he did not in
the early years of the immigration speculate in farm lands.

Therein was one of the outstanding differences between him and the
Yankee. The German could not be tolled into the interior by golden
promises of unearned increments from the sale of city lots, of mill
sites, or of choice farm lands which were going rapidly. His caution
and his phlegm were a protection. He was not particularly responsive
to the optimistic prophecies of the development of this region or
that region in which this company or that prominent individual had
interests. For these reasons, the German’s motives as a land seeker
were more legitimately economic and social than were those of the
Yankee, and on the basis of such motives we can explain his settlement
in the woods.

In his homeland the German villager loved the forest for its shelter,
its recreational hospitality, and the benefits it conferred in
necessary fuel, timber, bedding, and forage. A large proportion of the
early German immigrants came from south German provinces dominated by
such famous old forests as the Schwartzwald and the Odenwald. From
considerations both of habit and of economy it was natural that in the
New World they should make sure of an abundance of timber on the lands
they sought for future homes. Yet, there is no reason to assume that
the German, any more than the Yankee, courted the grilling labor of
clearing heavily forested land--a labor to him the more formidable for
the want of the Yankee’s training in axmanship and his almost unbroken
tradition of winning fields from forests. Some German pioneers who were
self-helpful struck for the openings and the prairies, and like the
Yankee chose for their farms the ideal combination of wood, marsh, and
open land whenever such a combination could be found within easy reach
of the market.[5]

But Germans were less venturesome than Yankees, or more prudent,
depending on the point of view. In the old home they were accustomed
to haul their farm produce many miles in going to the markets and
fairs. But there the roads were passable at all seasons. In the New
World, where all was in the making, the roads were often impassable and
always--except in winter--so rough and troublesome as to daunt those
who were not to the manner born.[6] Hence the German settler’s idea
of what constituted a safe distance from the lake ports within which
to open a farm differed from the Yankee’s idea. There is one striking
illustration of that difference. Along the Illinois boundary from Lake
Michigan westward was the strip of prairie and openings twenty-four
miles wide and seventy-eight long which was divided into Racine and
Kenosha counties (on the lake), Walworth, and Rock. We have already
called that region the new Yankee Land and have seen the Yankee farmers
spread over it with seeming disregard to distance from the lake ports,
each being intent rather on finding an ideal combination of desirable
kinds of land. The three divisions of the strip contained almost equal
numbers of Yankees--these people evidently believing that canals,
roads, plank roads, and railways would come to them when needed, while
a good farm location once lost was gone forever; and being willing
also, until such improvements should come, to haul their crops sixty or
seventy-five miles to market. Not so the few Germans who entered this
Yankee Land prior to 1850. More than four-fifths of them were in the
section nearest the lake (Racine and Kenosha counties), and less than
one-thirtieth in Rock County, the farthest west of the strip.

The movement into the prairies and openings of the southeast had been
going on for about four years before the Germans began coming to
Wisconsin, and so many selections of first choice, second choice, and
even third choice land had been made that newcomers were already at a
disadvantage in that region, especially if a number of them desired
to settle near together in a body, which was the case of Old Lutheran
congregations who made up the earliest German immigrations. Moreover,
most of the Yankees were business-like farmers who generally planned
for fairly large farms, in order to make money by raising wheat. They
were mainly men who had sold small farms in the East in order to secure
larger, or sons of large farmers. Most of them had money or credit to
enable them to acquire land, construct buildings and fences, buy stock,
and begin farming operations. Having found good land by canvassing the
whole region, they were not to be dislodged until, with the failure of
wheat crops at a later time, the spirit of emigration sent numbers of
them to fresh wheat lands farther west, thus making opportunity for
well-to-do Germans to buy their improved farms, which they did to a
great extent.

Meantime, the forested lands pivoting on Milwaukee, the most promising
of the lake ports, were open to entry at the land office or to
purchase at private sale on easy terms. The Yankee had not altogether
shunned those lands. There, as elsewhere, he had been looking for
good investments, and the project for the Milwaukee and Rock River
Canal, which was to traverse a portion of the forested area through
the present Milwaukee, Waukesha, and Jefferson counties, favored
speculation in farm lands as well as in mill sites and town sites.
Besides, there is evidence that some of the poorer Yankee immigrants
who felt unable at once to maintain themselves on open land farms,
often settled first in the woods, where they began making improvements
with ax and fire, only to sell out promptly at an advance and go to
the prairie or openings to establish permanent farms. But most of the
forested land was still “Congress land” when the Germans began coming
to Wisconsin.

The German “Pilgrims,” as the first colony was called, arrived at
Milwaukee early in October, 1839, their leader being Henry von Rohr.
Within a month they had decided on a location, in the western part of
township 9, range 21 east (the town of Mequon, Ozaukee County), and
had made numerous purchases of government land. They selected a tract
of high, rolling land, heavily timbered, well watered, and with an
extensive marsh near by in the public domain which would furnish free
hay and pasture.[7] The situation was similar to that which was chosen,
near Watertown (in the town of Lebanon), a few years later by a German
colony from the same region. They also took a tract of heavily timbered
upland neighbored by an extensive marsh. “Here,” said their leader, “we
have both wood and hay” (“_Holz und Heu_”).[8]

Many of the colonists in these two congregations were very poor. Those
who had means lent to the indigent to enable them to emigrate. For them
it would have been madness to go to the prairies, where such absolute
necessities as fuel, building material, and fencing might cost ready
money and at best would be difficult to procure. In the woods trees
cut on the spot were used to build cabin and log house, stable, garden
and field enclosure. Some of the German families were months without
draft ox or even cow. All work was performed by hand, including the
carrying of logs from the spot where the trees were felled to the
place where they were to be rolled up to make the cabin wall. To such
settlers, bringing timber from a distance would have been among the
impossibilities. Their place was in the forest, where labor alone was
required for making the beginnings of a self-sustaining home.

In thousands of later instances, Germans who came to Wisconsin on their
own slender means were in a similar case to these early seekers of
religious freedom. An immigrant of 1848, J. F. Diederichs, has left a
diary and letters from which the process of home making in the woods
can be reconstructed.[9] Diederichs, after considerable search, found
eighty acres of good government land nine miles from Manitowoc, where
early in winter he settled down to work alongside of several other
Germans who were as poor as himself. The location was favorable, being
near a port. “What good is there,” he writes, “to possess the finest
land and be 6, 8 or 10 days journey from market.”[10] The first step
was to build a cabin, the next to bring his family from Milwaukee and
with a few dollars borrowed for the purpose to lay in supplies for
them. Then he erected a comfortable log house and continued clearing
till, by the middle of May, he had two acres ready partly for garden
and partly for potatoes, corn, and beans to provide the family with
food. Diederichs realized that “to begin such work at the age of 44 is
some job,” and recognized that not he and his wife but the children
would be the chief beneficiaries. Nevertheless, the joy of creation was
not wholly denied him. He had, he said, the “prettiest” location; house
set on a commanding knoll, with a pure limpid stream flowing within
a few yards of it, along whose course was some open land, making a
“layout for the finest pastures.” And there was timber enough on his
eighty to be worth $30,000 in the home town of Elberfelt. Of this, he
would gladly make his friends in Germany a present of about $20,000
worth!

The question of nearness to market was a determinant also in the cases
of Germans who were well enough off to take open lands. William Dames
found, for himself and associates, a favorable tract near Ripon. It
contained 160 acres prairie, 320 acres openings, and 160 acres of
low prairie or meadow land. The advantages of that neighborhood, he
wrote, were these: first, the prospectively near market, by way of
the Fox River Canal to be completed the following spring; second, the
excellence of the soil; third, the ease with which the land could be
made into productive farms. There one need not subject himself to the
murderous toil incident to farm making in the woods. And, fourth, the
healthfulness of the climate and the superb drinking water.

One bit of information which Dames conveyed to his fellow Germans who
were contemplating immigration to Wisconsin, was that the Yankees (by
which term he described all native Americans) and the Scotch settlers
of that neighborhood were becoming eager to sell their partly improved
farms, preparatory to moving into the newer region north of Fox River.
He advised Germans able to do so to buy such farms, which were to
be had in plenty not only in Fond du Lac County but near Watertown,
near Delafield, and even near Milwaukee--prices varying with the
improvements, nearness to the city, etc. He seemed to think the Germans
but ill adapted to pioneering. Let the German immigrant, he said, buy a
partly cleared farm; then he could follow his calling in ways to which
he was accustomed. Moreover, since such farms produced fairly well even
under the indifferent treatment accorded them by the Yankee farmers,
the German farmer need have no fear of failure.

The advice to purchase farms already begun was widely followed by the
financially competent German immigrants. Ownership records of one
Milwaukee County township show that the lands were originally taken
mainly by Irish and Americans, yet in 1850 nearly one-half of the
settlers were Germans; and there is no reason to regard that case
as singular. Probably the Germans who bought improved farms were as
numerous as those who bought Congress land. Many poor men worked as
farm hands for some years and then bought small improved farms in
preference to buying Congress land.

The experience of an 1849 immigrant, Johannes Kerler, illustrates
the less common case of Germans who arrived with considerable means.
Kerler brought with him to Milwaukee a sum, derived from the sale of
a profitable business, which would have enabled him to buy scores of
mill sites and town sites in the public domain. Instead, he limited his
investment to a 200-acre farm seven miles from the city, paying for the
land, including all crops and livestock, $17 per acre. The buildings
consisted of a log house and a cabin. One-half the farm was divided
between plow land and meadow; the balance--100 acres--supported a dense
forest growth. Kerler at once erected a barn for his cattle, and a
good two-story frame house for the family. Then he went to farming and
quickly transformed the earlier crude homestead into a fruitful and
beautiful farm, the show place of the neighborhood.[11]

Social forces are among the imponderables, and yet their influence
in controlling the distribution of immigration must have been
considerable. The fact that nearly all incoming Germans landed in
Milwaukee, where were acquaintances and often friends, tended in
a hundred subtle ways to attach the newcomers to that community.
Before 1850 Milwaukee had come to be looked upon as a German city.
“There,” said one immigrant, “more German than English is spoken.” It
had its German churches, schools, clubs, societies, and recreational
features, all of which constituted powerful attractions. It was the
most important industrial center of the state, with a relatively large
demand for the labor which with farm work was the poorer immigrant’s
sole means of getting a financial start. In addition, it was the
commercial metropolis, and that the German was firmly tethered to his
market has already become clear.

The construction of the Milwaukee and Mississippi Railroad, begun in
1849 and completed to Prairie du Chien in 1857, partially freed the
German immigrant from his dread of being marooned in the interior.
Desirable government lands accessible to the proposed railroad were
generally taken up several years before the completion of the road,
and among the entrymen in certain districts were many newly arrived
Germans. This was true to some extent in Dane County, but more
noticeably so farther west. In Iowa County and in Grant were sheltered
pleasant and fertile valleys, opening toward the Wisconsin, which would
be served by the railroad when completed, and which had long been in
touch with the world by means of steamers plying on the Wisconsin.
In those valleys, and on the wider ridges between them, the Germans
competed with others for the choicest locations on government and state
lands. Land entry records for two townships in Blue River valley show,
by 1860, out of an aggregate of 122 foreign born families 59 of German
origin, while the American families numbered 93. A similar proportion
doubtless obtained in other towns south of the river.

Directly opposite these townships, in the same survey range but lying
on the north side of Wisconsin River, was the town of Eagle, whose
settlement was almost exactly contemporaneous with that of the Blue
River valley. But Eagle, in 1860, had 20 foreign born families to 108
American, and of the 20 only 13 were German.

Inasmuch as the people on the two banks of the river had a common
market--Muscoda, which was a station on the railroad--and the lands of
Eagle were more fertile and quite as well watered, the question why the
Germans avoided that town and made homes south of the river is surely
interesting, and possibly significant.

There were two important differences between the two districts. In
Blue River the valley land, to use the surveyor’s phrase, was “thinly
timbered with oak,” while in the valley of Mill Creek, or Eagle Creek,
opposite was a dense forest dominated by the sugar maple but containing
big timber of several varieties, and dense undergrowth. In a word, it
was a heavily timbered area. Now the Germans near Lake Michigan had
given ample proof of gallantry in attacking forest covered farms, yet
when the choice was before them of taking such land in Richland County
or easily cleared land of poorer quality in Grant, almost with one
accord they selected the latter.

We cannot be certain that the difference in the timbered character of
the land was the sole motive determining the choice, though doubtless
it was the most important. The railroad ran on the south side of the
river and the principal trading center was on that side. Settlers
in Blue River valley could therefore reach the market by a direct,
unbroken haul with teams over public roads. Those in Eagle at first
were obliged to use the ferry in crossing the river, and later they had
to cross on a toll bridge except in midwinter, if the river was frozen
to a safe depth, when they crossed on the ice. These transportation
conditions might have deterred some Germans from settling north of the
river, even if the lands there had been as lightly timbered as those
on the south side. Taken together, the two causes virtually served to
blockade that district against settlers of their type.

But if the Germans declined the rôle of foresters, by refusing to
settle in a partially isolated town like Eagle, the Yankees did
the same. New Yorkers and New Englanders were scarcer there than
Prussians or Hanoverians. The town was occupied mainly by families
from Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, Indiana--with a few from Virginia and
North Carolina; in short, by men who had enjoyed or endured a recent
experience as frontiersmen in heavily wooded regions. So many belonged
to the class described by Eggleston in _The Circuit Rider_, _The
Hoosier Schoolmaster_, and _The Graysons_, that the name “Hoosier
Hollow,” applied to one of the coulees, seems perfectly normal.

To the Yankee, we may be sure, the heavy woods in the town of Eagle
were a sufficient deterrent to settlement there. The Germans shunned it
either because they disliked heavy clearing when it could be avoided
and when no compensating advantages offered, as was the case near
the lake shore; or because they disliked the risk and the expense of
crossing the river to market; or for both of these reasons combined.
Probably either reason, singly, would have sufficed.

By way of summary, we may say that as a land seeker the Yankee’s range
exceeded that of the German. Both clung to the lake ports as their
market base. But the Yankee’s optimism painted for him a roseate future
based on an experimental knowledge of material development for which
the German’s imagination was largely unprepared. The New Yorker had
witnessed, in his home state, the almost miraculous transformation
of rural conditions through the construction of a system of canals;
and canal building affected Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Ohio only less
profoundly than the Empire State. To the Yankee, therefore, who cast
his lot in the favored lands of Wisconsin it seemed that nothing could
halt the march of improvement. The chief point was to obtain prompt
possession of the right kind of farm. Having this, he could count on
doing a big agricultural business as a wheat grower, which promised
generous financial rewards. But if for any reason he failed to get the
right kind of farm, if improvements were unexpectedly dilatory, or if
the land ceased to respond to his demand for wheat and more wheat, he
“sold out” with slight compunction and went elsewhere, confident of
success on a new frontier, especially the great wheat plains. To him
land was a desirable commodity, but by no means a sacred trust.

The German, on the other hand, came from a land of very gradual change.
Although agricultural conditions there were actually considerably
modified in the first half of the nineteenth century, he still, for
the most part, looked upon his dwindling patrimony as the basis, not
of a money making business, but of a livelihood. If, by the combined
labor of all members of the household, the family could be fed,
clothed, and sheltered, the heavy obligations to church and state
redeemed, and a few _gulden_ sequestered for times of emergency, the
peasant was content. His land was his home. It had been his father’s,
grandfather’s, great-grandfather’s. The original estate was parted into
ever more and smaller divisions, as generation succeeded generation,
until the tracts of many holders were at last too small to support the
families. These had no choice but to sell and go to the city, or go to
America. This condition was one of the most general economic causes
of the large German immigration to this and other states. When the
German farmer, or other German, came to Wisconsin and bought a piece of
land, one purpose dominated his mind--to make a farm for a home, and
establish a family estate. In the beginning it did not occur to him
to speculate in land, although in this as in other things he proved
an apt pupil. Accustomed to a very limited acreage, he was not like
the Yankee ambitious to secure a large domain. Habituated to intensive
tillage, a partly made farm having ten or twelve acres of cleared land
was to him an ample equipment for making a living in agriculture.
Enlarging fields meant a surplus and mounting prosperity. If he took
raw land, he could count on clearing enough in a couple of winters with
his own hands to raise food crops, and he looked upon the prospect of
spending ten, twenty, or twenty-five years in fully subduing his 80-
or 100-acre farm with no unreasoning dread or carking impatience. The
remark of Diederichs characterized the German preëmptor: “If I once
have land enough under cultivation to raise our food supplies, I will
win through.” Whereas the Yankee wanted to break 40, 60, 80, or 100
acres of prairie or openings the first year, the German contemplated
the possession of a similar acreage of tillable land in ten, fifteen,
or twenty years.

But once in possession of a tract of land, the German tended to hold
on, through good years and bad years, as if his farm were the one
piece of land in the world for him and his. The Yankee, already given
to change in the East, tended in the West, under the stimulus of
machine-aided wheat culture, to regard land lightly, and to abandon one
tract for another on the principle that the supply was inexhaustible
and that one social environment was apt to be as satisfactory as
another. He had before him the great wheat plains, the Pacific coast,
the inland empire and the parks of the Rocky Mountains. Latterly
his range has widened to include the plains of the Assiniboin, the
Saskatchewan, and Peace River. For more than half a century he was
free to roam, to pick and choose land even as he picked and chose in
southern Wisconsin--the slower, more cautious, or more timid German
buying his farm when he was ready to sell.

It was peaceful penetration, involving no sabre rattling but much
canny bargaining, sober casting up of accounts, and cheerful jingling
of specie. The Yankees, more speculative to the last, more imaginative
and space-free, pressed ever toward the borders of the primitive, drawn
by the same lure of wealth quickly and easily acquired which brought
so many of them to the prairies of Wisconsin in the earlier days. The
Germans, fearing distance more than debt, confident in their ability
to make grain crops grow and farm stock fatten if only they had a sure
market for cattle and for crops, remained behind to till the abandoned
fields and occupy the deserted homes. Thus, so far as Wisconsin’s
farming areas are concerned, the shadow of the Yankee has grown less in
the land, while the tribe of the Teuton has increased.

What tendencies may have been induced by the passing of the frontier
and the resurgence of a population deprived of its former temptation
to expand into new regions; what social changes were implied in the
agricultural revolution which compels the daily application of science
to the business of farming; what readjustments in relationships were
involved in the modification of the Teutonic type with the coming upon
the stage of the second and third generations of Germans; how the
Germans in turn have reacted to the competition of groups having their
origin in other foreign countries, like the Scandinavians, Bohemians,
and Poles--all these are questions the answers to which would aid us
to determine “where we are and whither we are tending.” But their
discussion will have to be postponed to later issues of this magazine.




THE YANKEE AND THE TEUTON IN WISCONSIN

JOSEPH SCHAFER

II. DISTINCTIVE TRAITS AS FARMERS


The agricultural traits and peculiarities of the nineteenth century
Yankees were the resultant of partly contradictory forces, some of
them evolutionary, others devolutionary. In England the period of
the Puritan migration to America and the half-century antecedent
thereto was a time of vigorous agricultural change marked by many
improvements in cultivation and in land management. The agrarian
revolution introduced by the transfer of church properties to
laymen was accompanied by enclosures and a widespread tendency to
shift from an uneconomical crop economy to an agriculture governed
by business principles. In this new system the production of farm
animals--especially sheep--the fertilization of the soil, rotation
of crops, and livestock improvement were main factors. Forces and
interests were set in motion at this time which, a century or so later,
made farming the concern of many of England’s leading minds, whose wise
and persistent experimentation benefited the whole civilized world.

The few thousand immigrants to the New England colonies, founders of
America’s Yankeedom, were not all farmers. Some were fishermen, some
were small tradesmen, others craftsmen; a few were professional men
and soldiers. But a goodly proportion were land owners and peasants,
and all had a more or less direct knowledge of the principles and
processes which governed English agriculture. The influence of habit,
always a determining factor in the transfer of civilization from an old
land to a new, caused the occasional reproduction in New England of
some features of English farming, especially under village conditions.
The common field system in Old Salem reflected a disappearing element
in English farm life, while the commons of hay, commons of pasture,
commons of wood, and commons of mast, with their administrative “hay
reeve,” “hog reeve,” “wood reeve,” herdsmen, and shepherds, mark a
natural imitating of the ways of parish life at home.

But there were differences in the conditions “at home” and in America
as wide as those symbolized by the terms “insular,” and “continental,”
applied to the geography of the two countries. Chief among these
differences were the generally forested character of the new-world
land, the necessity of adapting tillage to an unfamiliar climate, in
part to new food cereals, especially Indian corn, and the absolute
dependence upon markets which could be created or opened by the
colonists themselves. It was in fact the problem of a market which so
long subordinated farming proper in New England to a species of country
living in which small patches of arable supplied most of the family’s
food, while forest and stream were the objects of exploitation for
marketable furs, for medicinal plants, and for timber products. Yankee
ingenuity, which justly became proverbial, had an assignable cause. It
was not an inherited quality, or one which was imported and conserved;
it was a distinctively American product, explained by the situation of
the average New England farmer--who was, by force of circumstances,
more of a mechanic and woods worker than a cultivator of the soil. His
house, especially in winter, was a busy workshop where clapboards,
staves, hoops, heading, ax handles, and a variety of other articles of
utility and salability were always in course of manufacture. All the
farm “tinkering” was additional thereto.

In his contest with the forest for a livelihood, the Yankee farmer was
gradually changed from the eastern New England village type to that
of the American “pioneer.” His axmanship was unrivaled, his skill in
woodscraft, his resourcefulness in the face of untried situations
were equal to the best. When the time came for taking agricultural
possession of broad spaces in the northern and western interior, the
Yankee was the instrument, shaped by four generations of American
history, to achieve that object.[12]

This general “handiness” was gained not without a partial loss of
such acquired knowledge and skill in agriculture proper as the
first immigrants brought from England. Close, careful cultivation
was impossible among the stumps and girdled trees of new clearings;
the amplitude of natural meadows and the superabundance of “browse”
relieved settlers from the sharp necessity of providing artificially
for the winter feeding of cattle; the mast of oak trees and the
wealth of nuts, supplementing summer “greens,” roots, grass, and wild
apples, supplied most of the requisites for finishing off pork. Under
these conditions farming even at best was an entirely different thing
from what it had been at home. At its worst, it was a crude process,
affording a vegetative kind of existence, but nothing more. In fact,
farming in the New England states hardly attained the status of a
business until the nineteenth century, though in some portions it
gave the farmer and his family a generous living and afforded a few
luxuries. It made thousands of persons independent proprietors who
could not have reached that station at home; it gave the farmers as a
class a commanding influence in politics and society; “embattled,” it
enabled them to wrest their country’s independence from the awkward
hands of a bungling monarchy. In short, it contributed incalculably
to their importance as men in history. The indications are, however,
that as farmers the fourth generation of _Mayflower_ descendants were
decidedly inferior to the original Pilgrims and Puritans.

The third generation were probably less skillful than the fourth. For,
by the time of the Revolution there were farming areas in southern
New England that were looking up. Timothy Dwight, near the end of the
century, found and recorded some of the evidences of a movement to
improve cultivation, to fertilize the soil, to better the character of
farm livestock--a movement which had been going forward under impulses
communicated from England, where the eighteenth century was peculiarly
fruitful in agricultural development. Dwight was enough of an idealist
to appreciate the limits of the improvement thus far reached. Yet he
did insist, with evident justice, that the farming of the Connecticut
valley and of eastern Massachusetts was at least respectable. Fields
were well cleared and carefully cultivated, clover began to be used
as a feeding and green manure crop, the beginnings had been made
of a system of rotation of crops, livestock was of relatively good
quality--especially in certain Connecticut towns which were already
noted for the weight of the bullocks they furnished to the commissary
department of Washington’s army. By that time, also, leading men
in New England lent their influence toward the building up of the
agricultural interest; agricultural societies were organized and essays
on agriculture came to have considerable vogue. Some importations of
purebred livestock from England took place. The first merino sheep
were brought in from France, then larger numbers from Spain by Consul
William Jarvis. In 1810 Elkanah Watson established his Berkshire County
Agricultural Society, with the county fair which became the model for
subsequent county and state fairs the country over.

When Tom Paine predicted in 1776 that an independent America would
prosper “as long as eating continues to be the custom of Europe,”[13]
he assumed one point about which some doubt might in future arise:
Would Europe always have the wherewithal to purchase American
foodstuffs at prices which would compensate our people for growing
them and delivering them to the market? During the continuance of the
long revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Europe managed to make good
Paine’s prophecy, and prices at the close of the wars ruled high. There
followed the great expansion era which spread American farmers over the
New West, both south and north, into which Yankees entered to a large
extent.

The good prices did not hold. Food could be raised cheaply, but markets
were costly to reach, even with the new wizardry of the steamboat, and
something gigantic was called for in the way of internal improvements.
The answer was at first canals, afterwards railroads. At the same
time, something had to be done by the farmer himself if the entire
structure of American agriculture, now becoming conscious of its own
embarrassments, was not to go down. The answer to this was _better
farming_. It was in 1819, the panic year, that John S. Skinner founded
at Baltimore the _American Farmer_, first of the distinctively farm
journals which almost immediately had a small group of successors.
Among them were the _New England Farmer_, the _Albany Cultivator_, the
_Pennsylvania Farmer_, the _Rural New Yorker_, the _Vermont Farmer_,
the _Ohio Farmer_, etc.

Yankeedom was a good social soil for these journals. The all but
universal literacy of the people, their curiosity, their love of
argument and disputation, their habit of experimentation, all tended
both to give currency to the new ideas presented and to sift the
practical and valuable from the merely theoretic and futile. Thus was
introduced, in a period of prevailing “hard times,” a meliorating
influence destined to reach a very large proportion of the settlers
in those sections, particularly Vermont, western New York, northern
Pennsylvania and Ohio, from which the bulk of the Yankee pioneers of
Wisconsin were drawn a quarter of a century later. The effect of county
and state fairs was to deepen and fructify the influence of the new
agricultural press.

It will be understood that the actual “shoring up” of agricultural
practice came about with relative slowness. Yet, it soon began here
and there, and by a kind of mild infection spread gradually over
wide areas. Only in crisis periods, with the introduction of new
methods to suit new market conditions, was progress ever very rapid.
To illustrate, as early as 1820 Josiah Quincy was advocating and
practising the summer soiling of cattle, especially milch cows, and
demonstrating the profitableness of the system for the region near
Boston. It was a long time before soiling became common even in that
district, but this experiment engendered better care of livestock. The
same careful, experimental farmer demonstrated the economy of using
good-sized whole potatoes for seed, as against the practice of planting
seed ends and small tubers; other farmers were slow to adopt the idea,
which is not yet universally followed, yet some improvement doubtless
came from the publication of Quincy’s findings.

What, then, were the general farming habits of the Yankees who form
the background of Wisconsin’s pioneer age? First of all, they lived in
decent houses which were usually of lumber. Dwight contended that not
one New England village in a hundred was disfigured with the presence
of even one log house. He also gives the result of a count made in 1810
of the log houses along the road from New Haven to Windsor in Vermont,
thence across the Green Mountains to Middlebury, and back by a direct
route to New Haven, a distance of over 460 miles, much of it through
new settlements. It showed only fifteen to Middlebury and thirty-two
on the return route. It seems to have been a matter of pride with
the Yankee to desert his pioneer log house as quickly as possible.
His personal skill with tools, and abundance of saw timber, made the
construction of a frame house a family undertaking calling for labor
indeed, but only a minimum of hired skill; and for little material
involving the outlay of actual money. So the frame houses rose wherever
the Yankees settled. Along the great road from Albany to Buffalo,
in western New York, they began to spring up before the settlements
were ten years old. When, about twenty-five years later, travelers
passed that way they saw many houses of squared, framed timbers,
covered over neatly with boards at the sides and ends, and roofed with
shingles.[14] These common frame houses were sufficiently inartistic,
no doubt. Perhaps, as one traveler remarks, they did look like “huge
packing boxes.” Similar architectural designs can be seen scattered
over the West--and the East, too--at this late date. Still, they were
more commodious than the log houses, and improved the families’ living
conditions. The next stage was likely to mark a very distinct advance.
“In the more cleared and longer settled parts of the country,” says a
none too sympathetic English traveler, “we saw many detached houses,
which might almost be called villas, very neatly got up, with rows of
wooden columns in front, aided by trees and tall shrubs running round
and across the garden which was prettily fenced in, and embellished
with a profusion of flowers.” Yankees had the habit of building by the
roadside, whatever the economic disadvantages of such a situation,
because it enabled them to keep in touch with the world--a reason which
is by no means frivolous, and for them highly characteristic.

We have no such definite account of the Yankee farmers’ barns as of
those of Pennsylvania Germans. It is true that Dwight, speaking for the
older New England, suggests that the barn was apt to be a much better
structure than the house. The custom, however, noted by travelers in
New York and elsewhere, of letting cattle run at large all winter
without shelter other than trees and brush, and perhaps the straw pile
or rick of marsh hay, argues that stabling was furnished for only a
minimum number of work oxen, horses--if such there were--and perhaps in
some cases cows in milk. It undoubtedly was not the practice to house
stock cattle, or even--except in isolated cases--to feed them in sheds.
The advocates of careful sheltering who wrote for the agricultural
journals recognized that the weight of opinion was against sheltering
stock. They compromised with that opinion by recommending sheds for
young stock and dry cows, and warm barns only for milking cows and work
animals.[15] Yet, some of the leading cattle feeders of the Genesee
valley, as late as the year 1842, were content to scatter loads of hay
over meadows and through brush patches for the hundreds of beef cattle
they were wintering.[16]

The livestock, except sheep and pigs, was still by 1840 prevailingly of
no breed. Nevertheless, Durhams and Devons were coming into use. The
Patroon stock of shorthorns, introduced in 1824 from England by Stephen
Van Rensellaer, of Albany, gained its first customers apparently among
the English farmers of western New York, but gradually made its way
among the Yankees as well. Other importations were soon made, so that
by 1840 there were several prominent herds of purebreds in that section
of the state. In 1842 it was said of the Genesee County Fair that “with
the exception of some working oxen and one cow not a single animal of
native cattle was in the yard. All were either pure or grade Durhams or
Devons.... Bulls were shown by some six or seven competitors. Among
them were four thoroughbred ones and one of those imported.”[17] It is
clear that by the time emigration to Wisconsin began to take place,
actual progress had been made and the entire body of Yankee farmers
had been indoctrinated with the idea of better livestock. Sheep and
pigs were already largely improved, the former prevailingly through
the cross with the merinos, the latter with Berkshires and other
English breeds. The Morgan horse, a Vermont product, was gaining wide
popularity.

From what has been said of the care of livestock, it follows that
the possibilities of the farm for the manufacture of fertilizer were
generally neglected. English travelers were apt to insist that this
neglect was universal, but there were, of course, numerous exceptions.
Farming was extensive, not intensive. Lands were cleared by chopping
or “slashing” the timber, burning brush and logs, then harrowing among
the stumps to cover the first-sown wheat seed. In a few years, with the
rotting of the smaller stumps and the roots, the plow could be used,
though always with embarrassment on account of the large stumps which
thickly studded the fields. These disappeared gradually, being allowed
to stand till so fully decayed that a few strokes with ax or mattock
would dislodge them. As late as 1830 many fields in western New York
were stump infested.

[Illustration: A FARM NEAR ROCHESTER, NEW YORK, IN 1827

  From Captain Basil Hall’s _Forty Etchings from Sketches Made with the
  Camera Lucida_. London, 1829]

Wheat was the great, almost the sole, market crop, and it was grown
year after year till the soil ceased to respond. From bumper yields
of twenty-five or thirty bushels per acre the returns fell off to
twenty, fifteen, and then twelve, ten, or even eight. The process of
decline was well under way when the immigration to Wisconsin set in,
and already the turn had come toward a more definite livestock economy,
which in large portions of New York soon gave rise to a system of
factory cheese making. A main reason for the removal to the West, on
the part of farmers whose holdings were too small to make successful
stock farms, or who refused to abandon wheat raising as a business, was
that lands in the West could be had already cleared by nature. Many
half-cleared farms, with customary buildings and fences, could in the
forties be purchased in western New York for from four to eight dollars
per acre. Instead of buying these farms, the young men preferred going
to Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, or Wisconsin, those having such farms for
sale doing likewise after selling out to neighbors, usually the larger
farmers, who elected to remain and change their system of farming. In
Vermont we have a similar story, in Ohio the same. The Yankee farmers
who came to Wisconsin were generally at home either small farmers or
the sons of farmers large or small; while a certain proportion of the
larger farmers, by reason of debt or desire to extend their business,
also sold out and came west to buy cheap lands on the prairies or in
the openings.

       *       *       *       *       *

An agriculture which dates from before the time of Tacitus, and
which acquired permanent characteristics from the influence of Roman
merchants, monastics, and feudatories in Roman and medieval times, was
bound to differ widely and even fundamentally from the agriculture of a
far flung American frontier. The Germans who met the Yankee immigrants
in primitive Wisconsin brought an inheritance of habit and training
analogous to that of the English Puritan emigrants to New England,
but with the difference that the Germans’ training had continued
two hundred years longer, on similar lines. They were old-world
cultivators, the Yankees new-world cultivators.

Tacitus says in one place: “The Germans live scattered and apart, as
a spring, a hill, or a wood entices them.”[18] Nineteenth century
German economists complained that German farmsteads were seated often
most inconveniently with reference to the management of the farm lands
pertaining to them. They had been established, in the days of long ago,
by lakeside, brook, or river under conditions in which access to water
was the most important single consideration. They had never been moved,
although gradually the arable stretched far back from the dwelling, and
the pasture perhaps was located in a wholly detached area.[19] This
description applies to portions of northern Germany where farms were
large and farming had the status of a regular and dignified business.

Many individuals and families came to Wisconsin from districts
like Mecklenburg, Prussia, Pomerania, though in the emigrations of
the 1840’s and fifties the great majority were from southern and
central German states. It will be one of the interesting inquiries
in connection with our study of local influences in Wisconsin towns
(_Domesday Book Studies_), how far the special regional inheritances of
foreign born settlers manifested themselves in Wisconsin communities.
The presumption, about the north German, would be that his farming
operations would tend to be on a large scale, under a business
system which--in this new land--would slough off such anachronisms
as the dislocated farmstead, and present the features of an ideal
establishment. But it may be that the forest was such a powerful
leveler as to obliterate most of the regional distinctions among
immigrants. Our chief concern, at all events, is with that great
body of German farmers, and intending farmers, who came from the
southwestern states of the recent Empire, especially Alsace, Baden,
Württemberg, Rhine Palatinate, Rhenish Prussia, Hesse, Nassau,
Westphalia--to some extent Bavaria and Saxony.

The fundamental facts about the home conditions of these people, so
far as they were farmers at home, were the smallness of their holdings,
their intensive cultivation, and the almost universal village type of
life. Travelers of about 1840 describe the typical middle Rhine country
as a highly cultivated plain without division hedges or fences other
than the tree-bordered roads, with no separate farm dwellings and with
no livestock in sight. The crops of several kinds being arranged in
various shaped fields, patches, and strips, the plain looked like the
proverbial “crazy-quilt.” Villages were huddled at the edges of woods,
and occasionally in the midst of the cultivated area. Their houses,
which were not arranged on a regular plan, were usually large stone
structures, the farm yard, with tools, implements, manure and compost
heaps, occupying a kind of court at the rear.

As a rule, all animals were housed winter and summer. Here was an
important difference to the farming of the north, where large herds
of cattle could be seen pasturing ample meadows, or ruminating in the
shade of buildings or of woods. The soiling system was universally
practiced in summer. Grass land being scarce and precious, feed for the
cows was laboriously gathered along the brookside, in the open spaces
of the forest, along all the roads, in the cemeteries, and the greens
before the houses. The weeds and thinnings from the growing crops went
to the same object. Vegetable tops were a great resource in late summer
and fall, and patches of clover, while insuring green feed, furnished
hay as well. In places the growing of sugar beets for the market was
a leading agricultural enterprise, and the tops of the beets were
carefully cured for winter feed.

The cultivation was intensive both in that it aimed at the maximum
produce from given areas, and in that the crops raised included some
which called for very special care. Some sections grew tobacco, in
connection with which much hand work was indispensable. This crop also
called for care in seed selection, in germinating, and in preparing the
ground for the reception of the young plants. Beet culture for sugar
making involved perhaps not less care, and doubtless more hand labor.
Of similar but less particularity was the growing of root crops for
stock feed, the orcharding, which was general, and the vine dressing,
incident to the business of special districts.

There were, of course, many farmers and farms in the region indicated
and in other contributory regions, which were not so widely different
from the average of those in America. Yet, on the whole, it can be
said that the German husbandman, in training and habit, was analogous
to our modern truck farmer or orchardist, rather than to our general
farmer. He was a specialist in soils, in fertilizing and preparing
them for different crops, in planting, stirring, weeding, irrigating;
in defending plants against insect pests, seasonal irregularities, and
soil peculiarities; he throve by hoeing, dragging, trimming, pruning,
sprouting; by curing and conserving plants, roots, grasses, grains,
and fruits. His livestock economy was incidental, yet very important.
It supplied the necessary fertilizer to maintain soil productivity; it
afforded milk, beef, pork, butter, cheese, wool. It gave him his draft
animals, often cows instead of oxen, and economized every bit of grass
and forage which his situation produced.

Improvement of livestock appears to have affected southwestern Germany
prior to 1850 very little as compared with the pastoral countries of
England, Holland, Friesland, and north Germany. The animals kept by the
village farmers were therefore not remarkable for quality. But they
were usually well housed, and the feed and care they received made up
in considerable measure for the absence of superior blood.

The various states of Germany, by 1840, were maintaining schools of
agriculture, a species of experiment stations for the dissemination
of such scientific agricultural information as was then available. To
some extent, therefore, farming was beginning to be scientific. But,
prevailingly it was intensely practical, the appropriate art connected
with the growing of every distinct crop being handed on from father to
son, from farmer to laborer.

One could almost predict how farmers thus trained would react to the
new environment of the Wisconsin wilderness. Taking up a tract of
forested land or buying a farm with a small clearing upon it, their
impulse would be, with the least possible delay, to get a few acres
thoroughly cleared, subdued to the plow, and in a high state of tilth.
Exceptions there were, to be sure, but on the whole the German pioneers
were not content to slash and burn their timber. After the timber was
off, the stumps must come out, forthwith, to make the tract fit for
decent cultivation. Was it the Germans who introduced in land clearing
the custom of “grubbing” instead of “slashing”? This meant felling
the tree by undermining it, chopping off roots underground at a safe
depth, taking out grub and all, instead of cutting it off above ground.
In timber of moderate growth this practice proved fairly expeditious
and highly successful, for once a tract was grubbed, the breaking
plow encountered no serious obstruction. A good “grubber” among later
immigrants could always count on getting jobs from established German
farmers.[20]

To the American, who was content to plow around his stumps every year
for a decade, to cultivate around them, cradle or reap around them,
it seemed that his German neighbor was using some kind of magic to
exorcise his stumps. The magic was merely human muscle, motivated by a
psychology which inhibited rest so long as a single stump remained in
the field.

The German not only used the heaps of farm yard fertilizer which, on
buying out the original entryman, he commonly found on the premises,
but he conserved all that his livestock produced, and frequently,
if not too distant from town or village, became a purchaser of the
commodity of which liverymen, stock yard keepers, and private owners of
cow or horse were anxious to be relieved. The manufacture of fertilizer
was a prime reason for stabling his livestock. The other was his fixed
habit of affording animals such care. Not all Germans built barns at
once, but the majority always tried to provide warm sheds, at least,
whereas Yankee and Southwesterner alike were very prone to allow their
animals to huddle, humped and shivering, all winter on the leeward side
of house or granary, or in clumps of sheltering brush or trees.[21] The
German was willing to occupy his log house longer, if necessary, in
order to gain the means for constructing adequate barns and sheds.

Germans were not one-crop farmers. The lands they occupied, usually
forested, could not be cleared fast enough at best to enable them to
raise wheat on a grand scale, as the Yankees did in the open lands of
the southeast and west. Their arable was extended only a few acres per
year, and while that was being done the German farmers grew a little
of everything--wheat, rye, corn, oats, barley, potatoes, roots. Clover
was to them a favorite forage, hay, and green manure crop. In growing
it, they used gypsum freely. This policy of clover growing, adopted
gradually by all farmers, was one of the means finally relied on by
the wheat farmers to restore the productivity of their abused soils.

In ways such as the above, German farmers helped to save Wisconsin
agriculture in the period of stress when wheat growing failed and
before coöperative dairying entered. They were not the chief influence
in popularizing improved livestock. Credit for that innovation must
be awarded to the Yankees. They had resumed in the eastern states the
English tradition of breeding, and brought it into Wisconsin where, by
means of state and county fairs and an active agricultural press, it
was ultimately borne in upon the minds of all farmers, Germans among
the rest.[22]

Neither did the Germans lead in developing the new agriculture,
of which coöperative dairying was the keystone. Yankee leadership
therein, too, was the dominant influence. Yet, it was the Germans,
Scandinavians, and other foreigners--and numerically Germans were
in the majority--who, by virtue of their agricultural morale, their
steadiness in carrying out plans, their patience and perseverance, have
made the dairy business of Wisconsin the great industry it has become.

Above all, the Germans persisted as farmers. They prospered not
dramatically, like some of the more successful of the Yankee farmers,
but by little and little they saved money, bought more land, better
stock, and built better homes. When Yankee farmers, discouraged or
impoverished by the failure of wheat, offered their farms for sale
preparatory to “going west,” Germans who had managed their smaller
farms more carefully stood ready to buy; when Yankees who were tired
of being “tied to a cow” wanted to go to Montana, Oregon, or Wyoming
to raise steers by wholesale, on the ranching plan, they sold out to
Germans who made the dairy farms pay larger dividends year by year.
When Yankee farmers retired to the city, or went into business, which
in recent decades they have done by thousands, Germans were among
those who were the keenest bidders for their farm properties. In a
word, the German has succeeded agriculturally through the more and
more perfect functioning, in this new land, of qualities imparted by
the training and inheritance which he brought with him from the old
world. On the whole, Germans have kept clear of speculation, preferring
to invest their savings in neighboring lands with which they were
intimately familiar, or to lend to neighboring farmers on farm mortgage
security. In the aggregate, German farmers in Wisconsin have long had
vast sums at interest. The Institute for Research in Land Economics
(University of Wisconsin) has completed investigations which show that
the nation’s area of lowest farm mortgage interest rates (5.2 per cent
or less) coincides very closely with the great maple forest of eastern
Wisconsin, which has been held, from the first, predominantly by German
farmers.

We have no desire to minimize the factor contributed to Wisconsin’s
agriculture by the Yankees. They were the prophets and the organizers
of the farmers’ movement. Their inherent optimism, their speculative
bent, their genius for organization were indispensable to its success.
“Anything is possible to the American people,” shouted the mid-century
American orator from a thousand Fourth of July rostrums, therein merely
reflecting what the mass of his hearers religiously believed. When
agriculture had to be remade in Wisconsin, the Yankee’s intelligence
told him in what ways it must be improved, and his tact, courage, and
address enabled him to enlist and organize the means for remaking it.
When the Yankee was convinced, by his farm paper or by the exhibitions,
that a purebred animal was a good investment, his speculative spirit
sent him to his banker to borrow a thousand dollars, and to a distant
breeder to make what his more timid German neighbor would call a
“mighty risky investment”--for the animal might die! Finally, when
local organization was required to secure a cheese factory, a creamery,
or a dairy board of trade, the Yankee by virtue of his community
leadership was usually able to effect the desired result.

Wisconsin’s almost unique success in agriculture is due to no single
or even dual factor. But among the human elements which have been most
potent in producing the result, none is of more significance than the
fortunate blend in her population of the Yankee and the Teuton.




THE YANKEE AND THE TEUTON IN WISCONSIN

JOSEPH SCHAFER

III. SOME SOCIAL TRAITS OF YANKEES


Harriet Martineau, the English traveler who in 1837 published a book
entitled _Society in America_, was deeply impressed with New England’s
concern for education. “All young people in these villages,” she says,
“are more or less instructed. _Schooling is considered a necessary of
life._[23] I happened to be looking over an old almanac one day, when
I found, among the directions relating to the preparations for winter
on a farm, the following: ‘Secure your cellars from frost. Fasten loose
clapboards and shingles. Secure a good schoolmaster.’”

We do not know what almanac Miss Martineau consulted. But a glance
at a file of the _Farmer’s Almanack_, begun in 1793 by Robert B.
Thomas and circulated by him for more than half a century all over New
England, shows her quotation to be fully justified in spirit if not
in letter. As early at least as the year 1804, Mr. Thomas included
in his directions for the month of November, the indispensable item
of education in connection with other activities: “Now let the noise
of your flail awake your drowsy neighbors. Bank up your cellars. Now
hire a good schoolmaster and send your children to school as much as
possible.”

The nation was young in 1804. Parts of it were new and for that reason
had made but meager educational progress; other parts were backward
for different reasons. But in the older states of New England popular
education had flourished for one hundred and fifty years. This point,
stressed by a score of writers, illustrated by legal enactments,
court decrees, town records, and anniversary sermons, cannot be
over-emphasized in a summary of the social contributions which the
Yankees made to the new western societies they helped to build.
Notwithstanding all that has been written to prove the priority, in
this or that feature of American educational progress, of other social
strains or geographical areas, history may confidently assign to the
Yankee priority in the attainment of universal literacy on an extensive
scale.

Once the Puritan had convinced himself that the temptation to ignorance
came from “ye old deluder Satan,” whose fell purpose was to keep men
from a knowledge of the Scriptures and thus the more readily win them
for his own, he hesitated not to require the maintenance of schools
in all towns and neighborhoods under his jurisdiction. He was also
concerned to recruit an “able and orthodox ministry” to take the places
of the aging pastors who had come from England and to supply the needs
of new settlements. Harvard College could turn out the ministers, if it
had properly prepared young men to work upon. So the larger towns were
required to maintain grammar schools in addition to the common schools.
Thus we have, as early as 1647, provision for schooling from the lowest
rudiments up through the college course.

The original religious motive for maintaining these schools persisted.
But other motives were added as the Puritans perceived how notably
secular interests, as well as religious, were served by schooling.
For one thing, young persons who could read, write, and cipher had a
distinct advantage in worldly matters over those who could not. Cheats
and “humbugs,” of whom every community had its share, made victims of
the ignorant, while they fled from the instructed even as their master,
Satan, was supposed to flee from them. Many New England stories were
designed to carry the lesson, especially to parents, that the best
legacy children could receive was good schooling, without which wealth
and property would quickly melt away.[24]

Apart, also, from such negative worldly advantages as we have named,
one who had enjoyed good schooling might thereby hope to share in many
special social privileges from which the unlettered were debarred. New
England life on the religious side centered in the church, on the civic
side in the town. Each of the two institutions required a full set of
elective officers, ranked according to the importance of the offices
filled, and all of these were chosen from the instructed portion of
the community. To be a deacon in the church or a selectman on the
town board might not be financially remunerative, but it imparted a
dignity to the individual and a social status to the family which
caused these offices to be highly prized. The older theory was that
only good churchmen could fill either type of office. Gradually, the
town offices, which paid something in cash and yielded considerable
political power, came to be sought with increasing frequency by men
who might have no interest in the church. “Jethro Bass” was typical,
not unique, in his scheming to be chosen selectman, and the training
offered by the district school was looked upon as a minimum basis for
such preferment. Said the _Farmer’s Almanack_ for November, 1810: “Send
your children to school. Every boy should have a chance to prepare
himself to do common town business.”

The great majority were satisfied with the elementary training
afforded by the district schools, kept for a few months in winter.
But the presence of learned men in every community and the existence
of secondary schools and colleges tolled a good many on the way to
advanced instruction who had no plans for professional careers.
From farm, factory, and counting-room, even from among those before
the mast, went boys to academy and college, while female seminaries
springing up here and there took care of the educational interests
of selected groups of girls. Such schools were not free, but their
benefits were easy to attain, the principal requisite being pluck
and a willingness to work both at earning money and at the studies.
Girls and boys alike could usually earn their way by teaching in the
common schools. Thus the educational system propagated itself, with
the result that men and women of intelligence, culture, and refinement
became widely dispersed through Yankeedom, and learning was recognized
as an aid to the good life as well as a guarantee of the successful
life. This was a fundamental condition of that literary flowering
which marked the middle decades of the nineteenth century. It insured
the poets, historians, orators, and novelists an audience which waxed
ever larger as province after province in the West was added to New
England’s spiritual empire.

Let us not, however, picture to ourselves a Yankee society wholly
suffused with intellectual and spiritual light. The Yankees had no such
illusions about themselves. Listen to Timothy Dwight’s description of
a class of New Englanders who could not live “in regular society. They
are too idle, too talkative, too passionate, too prodigal, and too
shiftless to acquire either property or character. They are impatient
of the restraints of law, religion and morality, grumble about the
taxes by which rulers, ministers and schoolmasters are supported--at
the same time they are usually possessed, in their own view, of
uncommon wisdom; understand medical science, politics, and religion
better than those who have studied them through life....” He represents
the type as the pioneering or _forester_ class, who had “already
straggled onward from New England” to far distant settlements, and
whose going he was not disposed to lament. “In mercy,” he says, “to
the sober, industrious, and well disposed inhabitants, Providence has
opened in the vast western wilderness a retreat sufficiently alluring
to draw them from the land of their nativity. We have many troubles
even now, but we should have many more if this body of foresters had
remained at home.”[25]

The above citation doubtless contains an element of exaggeration, due
to Dwight’s ingrained conservatism. He was outraged by the radical
views no less than by the erratic and ignorant harangues he heard “by
many a kitchen fire, in every blacksmith’s shop, and in every corner
of the streets....” Yet we must not lose sight of the fact that he
here sketches for us some Yankee social traits of rather extended
application which were important in the building of the West. These
people belonged to the outstandingly non-conformist type. They were
sufficiently independent--contemptuous, one might say--of established
customs and institutions to be willing, with what ignorance or
awkwardness soever, to bring about changes, some of which were sadly
needed. Religiously they were apt to be _come-outers_. It was largely
among this class that were recruited the Millerites, Millennialists,
and original Latter Day Saints, together with many other minor sects
and factions. In politics, when all orthodox New England was Whig,
they were mainly Democratic; many, however, backed the program of
Nativism; in the person of John Brown they exemplified the principle
of direct action as applied to slavery. The social innovator, the
medical quack, and the political demagogue found among them welcome and
encouragement, sometimes to the temporary distress of society, often to
its ultimate benefit. Not unlike the original Puritans who represented
“the dissidence of dissent and the protestantism of the protestant
religion,”[26] they constituted a dynamic social element although
wanting in the intellectual and religious training, the political
morale, and perhaps the heroism which distinguished the original
planters of Massachusetts Bay. They had the spirit of the revolutionary
New Englanders, who were described, not inaptly, as “hard, stubborn,
and indomitably intractable.” They were the backbone of Shays’s
rebellion. In many ways they illustrate the qualities which, at various
times in our later history, have served as the fulcrum of revolutionary
change.

Dwight’s _foresters_ were merely the extreme manifestation, the
caricature, of a much larger class of heady, self sufficient,
opinionated, and troublesome persons who equally with the sober,
church going, instructed, conformist type were the product of New
England conditions. The cords of restraint were drawn so taut in the
parishes and towns, that the person who was determinedly “different”
was compelled to break them and become a kind of social pariah in
order to gain the freedom his soul craved. It was not an accident
that so large a proportion of that class went to the frontier. They
found there a less rigorous church discipline, freedom from taxes for
the support of the established church, and a more flexible state of
society in the midst of which they might hope to function. In western
Massachusetts and Connecticut, in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine,
they were numerous at the opening of the National period. Soon large
numbers emigrated to western New York, to northern Pennsylvania, to
Ohio, thence throughout the West. They made up an appreciable part of
the thronging Yankee immigration which seized upon Wisconsin’s prairies
and oak openings between 1835 and 1850, and their presence has left
its impress upon our social history. Still the experiences of older
frontiers, such as western New York, had already modified the type.

When all necessary deductions have been made, however, the church
remained equally with the school a dominant note in the Yankee’s
social landscape. His “meeting house,” not infrequently in New England
a gem of ecclesiastical architecture, fulfilled his artistic ideal; the
congregation was the “household of faith” which claimed his undeviating
loyalty; the pastor was “guest and philosopher” in his home whenever he
chose to honor it with his presence. To men and women alike, attendance
upon the church services was the principal Sabbath day duty and the
chief physical and mental diversion of the whole week. It was an old
custom to linger after the morning sermon for a social chat either
in the church yard, when the weather permitted, or else at a near-by
tavern; and while the talk was ostensibly about the sermon, gossip,
bits of practical information, and even a shy kind of love making were
often interwoven, tending to make this a genuine community social hour.

The tradition that the minister must be a man of learning was of
incalculable social importance. His advice was called for under every
conceivable circumstance of individual and community need. He assisted
about the employment of schoolmasters and was the unofficial supervisor
of the school. He enjoined upon negligent parents the duty of sending
their children, and he had an eye for the promising boys--lads
o’pairts, as the Scotch say--whom he encouraged to prepare for
professional life. He fitted boys to enter the academy and sometimes
tutored college students. In the rural parish the minister occupied
the church glebe, which made him a farmer with the rest. He was apt to
read more widely and closely in the agricultural press, or in books
on husbandry, than his neighbors, thereby gaining the right to offer
practical suggestions about many everyday matters. Some ministers were
writers for agricultural journals. Many contributed to local newspapers
items of news or discussions of public questions in which their
parishioners were interested with themselves.

The home missionary idea was inherent in the New England system
both as respects religion and education. Older, better established
communities always felt some responsibility for the newer. Since
settlement proceeded largely by the method of planting new townships
of which the raw land was purchased by companies from the colonial
and state governments, it was possible for the larger community to
give an impetus to religion and education under the terms of township
grants. This was accomplished by reserving in each grant three
shares of the land--“one for the first settled minister, one for the
ministry forever, and one for the school.” Other grants of raw land
were made for the support of academies. Here we have the origin of
the system of land grants in aid both of the common schools and of
state universities, in the western states. The grants for religion
necessarily were discontinued after the adoption of the national
constitution.[27]

The religious unity established by the Puritans, and maintained for
a time by the simple method of rigorously excluding those holding
peculiar doctrines, gave way to considerable diversity in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Episcopalianism made some
progress in the older settlements, and Unitarianism created a great
upheaval, while toward the frontiers the Methodists and Baptists
flourished more and more. These several elements, by 1820, were
powerful enough politically to secure the abolition of the ancient tax
for the support of the established (Congregational or Presbyterian)
church--a tax which had long caused ill feeling between West and East,
and no doubt had contributed to the growth of dissenting churches.
These frontier churches had the characteristics of the frontier
populations. Their ministers were less learned, their morale less
exacting, their religion less formal and ritualistic, their ordinances
less regularly and habitually enforced. But there was an emotionalism
which in a measure compensated for defects of training, for looseness
of habit and negligence in the practice of religion. In a word, the
camp meeting type of Christianity prevailed widely along the frontier,
and that type entered Wisconsin Territory with the numerous Methodist
and Baptist settlers from New York and New England. As early as August,
1838, such a camp meeting was held under Methodist leadership in the
woods near Racine; it was attended by hundreds of pioneer families
drawn from the sparsely settled neighborhoods for many miles around.
Its appointments were of the typical frontier kind, though one would
expect less boisterousness in the manifestations of emotion among
those people than seems to have accompanied similar gatherings in the
Southwest.[28]

The stated religious services in early Wisconsin, as in every frontier
region, were apt to be less frequent than in older communities.
Ministers were too few in number and neighborhoods too impecunious to
justify each locality in supporting a minister. The circuit riding
custom prevailed generally among all denominations. One preacher
traveled, on foot, six hundred miles, making the round in six weeks.
Each group of churches also had its conferences, which were occasions
for planning missionary effort, for unitedly attacking special
religious or social abuses, and for promoting constructive community
effort. The ablest speakers addressed such gatherings; the membership
of the churches concerned and others attended, in addition to the
delegates; and important religious, social, or moral results sometimes
flowed from them.

Another peculiar Yankee institution allied at once to the school and
the church, was the lyceum or local coöperative organization for
bringing lecturers to the community. The settlements in southeastern
Wisconsin had their lyceums at an early date, and many distinguished
public men from the East had occasion to visit this new Yankeeland
in the capacity of lecturer. Among them were Horace Greeley, Bayard
Taylor, and James Russell Lowell.

Reform movements, however, though usually receiving valuable aid
from churches, lyceums, mechanics’ institutes, and other permanent
organizations of men for public discussion, had a way of creating
special organizations to propagate themselves. That was true of the
temperance movement, which by the time of the Yankee immigration into
Wisconsin was under vigorous headway. Beginning, in serious form, about
1820, the intervening years witnessed the creation of hundreds of local
temperance societies in New England and New York, and the federation
of these societies into state societies. These central organizations
stimulated the movement by sending out lecturers, conducting a
newspaper propaganda, and issuing special publications. Some of their
tracts are said to have been scattered “like the leaves of autumn,” all
over New England and New York.

One of these tracts affected the social history of Wisconsin very
directly. It is known, traditionally, as “The Ox Discourse,” because
it was based on Exodus 21:28-29: “If an ox gore a man or woman, that
they die: then the ox shall be surely stoned, and his flesh shall not
be eaten; but the owner of the ox shall be quit. But if the ox were
wont to push with his horn in time past, and it hath been testified
to his owner, and he hath not kept him in, but that he hath killed a
man or a woman; the ox shall be stoned, and his owner also shall be
put to death.” The sermon on this text produced a great sensation and
gained many new adherents to the temperance cause. Among these were two
brothers, Samuel F. and Henry Phoenix, who were storekeepers in a New
York village and sold much whisky. They publicly destroyed all the
liquor they had on hand and became crusaders in the temperance cause.
In the spring of 1836 Colonel Samuel F. Phoenix selected in Wisconsin
a “Temperance Colony claim,” on which he settled that summer. Then he
rode to Belmont and induced the first territorial legislature to set
off from Milwaukee County a county to be known as Walworth, in honor
of the chancellor of the state of New York, who was a noted temperance
leader. He named the village begun by him Delavan, in honor of E. C.
Delavan, pioneer temperance editor and at that time chairman of the
executive committee of the New York State Temperance Society. Colonel
Phoenix lectured on temperance, helped to organize early temperance
societies, rebuked his neighbors--especially the New Yorkers--for
employing whisky at raisings, and, before his death in 1840, had
succeeded in giving a powerful impulse to the movement in southeastern
Wisconsin.

Another dramatic figure in early temperance annals was Charles M.
Goodsell, who in 1838 settled at Lake Geneva and built the first mill
operated in Walworth County. He was of Connecticut birth, and his
father owned and managed, among other properties, a whisky distillery.
Goodsell, however, when he came west from New York State, was a most
determined opponent of the traffic in intoxicants. Soon after opening
his mill a local company erected in Lake Geneva a distillery for making
corn whisky. Goodsell warned them, he says, not to expect him to grind
their grain and they installed a grinding apparatus of their own. But,
their machinery proving inadequate, they finally sent a grist of corn
to Goodsell’s mill, demanding, as under the law they had a right to
do, that it be “ground in turn.” Goodsell refused, thereby producing
a tense situation, for the pioneer farmers looked to the distillery
as a cash market for their grain. Finally, the distillers brought
suit, won a verdict, and Goodsell appealed. But meantime, he rode to
Madison, where the legislature was sitting, and procured the adoption
of an amendment to the law regulating milling, to the effect: “Nothing
in this section contained shall be construed to compel the owners or
occupiers of mills to grind for distilling, or for sale or merchant
work.” This proviso, adopted in 1841, remained a feature of the statute
for many years.[29]

It must not be supposed that pioneer Yankee society, even in Walworth
County, was prevailingly of the temperance variety. All testimony, both
of the reformers and of others, tends to show that a large majority
was at first in the opposition. Frontier history would indicate that
excessive indulgence in whisky was apt to be more common during the
primitive phase of settlement than later, due perhaps to the looser
social and religious organization.

Wisconsin may be said to have been born to the temperance agitation
which, in a few years’ time, produced societies pledged to total
abstinence all over the southeastern part of the state and in many
other localities. In March, 1843, a legislative temperance society
was organized with a list of twenty-four signers. The house of
representatives at the time had twenty-six members, the council
thirteen, or a total of thirty-nine. So a decided majority was aligned
with the movement. Moses M. Strong was chosen president, which was
considered a triumph for the cause, and much interest was aroused by
the adherence of William S. Hamilton, who is reported to have addressed
one of the society’s meetings.[30]

The temperance agitation everywhere received a notable impetus from
the adoption in 1851 of the prohibition law by the state of Maine.
Immediately other states moved for the same objective, and in Wisconsin
a referendum vote was taken in 1853 which resulted favorably to
prohibition, though no enactment followed.[31] In that election the
southeastern counties were overwhelmingly for the Maine law. Walworth
gave 1906 votes for it and 733 against, Rock 2494-432, Racine 1456-927.
Milwaukee at the same time voted against prohibition by 4381 to 1243.
This shows where was to be found the powerful opposition to legislation
of this nature, which was destined to increase rather than diminish
with the strengthening of the German element already very numerous.

From the time of the Maine law agitation the communities dominated
by Yankees were generally found arrayed in favor of any proposal for
limiting or suppressing the liquor traffic, although, as we shall see
in later articles, no large proportion of their voters ever joined the
Prohibition party. They did not succeed in abolishing drunkenness,
though it became very unfashionable to indulge heavily in spirituous
liquors and the proportion of total abstainers among the younger
generation steadily increased. Yankees furnished a very small per cent
of those who gained their livelihood through occupations connected
directly with intoxicating liquors, except as such traffic was carried
on incidentally as a feature of the drug business. The disfavor with
which saloon keeping, brewing, and distilling have long been regarded
among that class of the population is explained by the fervor and
thoroughness of the early temperance campaigns.

Because of their attitude on the liquor question, on Sunday laws, and
other matters pertaining to the regulation of conduct, the Yankees have
always been looked upon by other social strains as straight-laced and
gloomy. In this judgment men have been influenced more than they are
aware by the traditions of Puritanism which it was supposed the Yankees
inherited. They recalled the story of how Bradford stopped Christmas
revelers and sent them to work; they pictured Puritan children as
forbidden to laugh and talk on the Sabbath day; and some may have heard
the story of how Washington, while president, was once stopped by a
Connecticut tithing man who must be informed why His Excellency fared
forth on the Lord’s Day instead of resting at his inn or attending
public worship.[32]

Two remarks may be made on this point. First, while Puritanism
unquestionably had a somber discipline, there was not lacking even
among Puritans the play instinct which persisted in cropping out
despite all efforts of the authorities at repression. Second, the
nineteenth century Yankees register a wide departure from early
Puritanism in their social proclivities, and the difference was
particularly marked in the West. Even church services were modified to
fit the needs of the less resolute souls. Music became an important
feature and it was adapted more or less to special occasions.[33]
Sunday Blue Laws were gradually relaxed, though never abandoned
in principle. Well-to-do city people allowed themselves vacation
trips, visits to watering places, and to scenic wonders like Niagara
Falls.[34] In town and country alike dancing became an amusement of
almost universal vogue, though protested by some religionists, and
rural neighborhoods found bowling such a fascinating game for men and
boys that the almanac maker thought well to caution his readers against
over-indulgence therein.[35] Ball playing, picnicing, sleighing,
coasting, skating were among the outdoor sports much indulged in
by Yankees, while family and neighborhood visiting, the quilting
bee, donation parties, church socials, and the like furnished indoor
recreation. The circus and the “cattle show” were events in the western
Yankeeland equal in social significance to Artillery Day in Boston.

Thus, while it is true that Yankees were a sober people, of
prevailingly serious mien and purpose, they were not averse to the
relaxations of play and recreation. The question whether or not the
Yankees were fun loving cannot be answered by yes or no. If we mean by
fun the rollicking joviality characteristic of irresponsible, carefree
folk, the answer is no. Many Yankees found their best fun in work
or business. To the David Harum type, which was fairly numerous, a
horse trade was more fun than a picnic. Some Boston merchants were so
immersed in their business that, though very pious, they nevertheless
spent Sunday afternoon going over their books and writing business
letters.[36] Being serious minded, they tended to make their chief
concern an obsession, and could hardly be happy away from it. But the
majority were quite as ready to amuse themselves out of working hours,
as are the Italians or other social stocks that have a reputation for
fun and frolic.

The Yankees also found intellectual enjoyment in cultivating quickness
of retort, in giving utterance to clever if homely aphorisms, and in
a kind of whimsical humor. These traits emerge in their vernacular
literature like “Major Jack Downing’s” _Thirty Years out of the
Senate_, and especially Lowell’s _Biglow Papers_. “The squire’ll have
a parson in his barn a preachin’ to his cattle one o’ these days, see
if he don’t,” said one of “Tim Bunker’s” shiftless neighbors by way
of summarizing the squire’s over-niceness in caring for his Jersey
cows. “Ez big ez wat hogs dream on when they’re most too fat to
snore”; “that man is mean enough to steal acorns from a blind hog”;
“the coppers ain’t all tails”; “pop’lar as a hen with one chicken”;
“quicker’n greased lightnin’”; “a hen’s time ain’t much”; “handy as a
pocket in a shirt”; “he’s a whole team and the dog under the wagon”;
“so thievish they had to take in their stone walls at night”; “so black
that charcoal made a chalk mark on him”; “painted so like marble that
it sank in water”--the above are all Yankeeisms of approved lineage and
illustrate a characteristic type of Yankee humor. The example below is
of a rarer sort. “Pretty heavy thunder you have here,” said the English
Captain Basil Hall to a lounger in front of a Massachusetts tavern.
“Waal, we do,” came the drawling reply, “considerin’ the number of the
inhabitants.”

About the time that Yankees began to emigrate to Wisconsin a talented
French writer, Michel Chevalier, gave the world a brilliant and on the
whole favorable characterization of them. “The Yankee,” he says, “is
reserved, cautious, distrustful; he is thoughtful and pensive, but
equable; his manners are without grace, modest but dignified, cold,
and often unprepossessing; he is narrow in his ideas, but practical,
and possessing the idea of the proper, he never rises to the grand.
He has nothing chivalric about him and yet he is adventurous, and he
loves a roving life. His imagination is active and original, producing,
however, not poetry but drollery. The Yankee is the laborious ant;
he is industrious and sober and, on the sterile soil of New England,
niggardly; transplanted to the promised land in the west he continues
moderate in his habits, but less inclined to count the cents. In New
England he has a large share of prudence, but once thrown into the
midst of the treasures of the west he becomes a speculator, a gambler
even, although he has a great horror of cards, dice, and all games of
chance and even of skill except the innocent game of bowls.” Chevalier
also says: “The fusion of the European with the Yankee takes place
but slowly, even on the new soil of the west; for the Yankee is not a
man of promiscuous society; he believes that Adam’s oldest son was a
Yankee.”

The Yankee was not more boastful than other types of Americans, though
his talent for exaggerative description was marked. Yet he had a
pronounced national obsession and was uncompromising in his patriotism:
“This land o’ourn, I tell ye’s got to be a better country than man ever
see,” was put into a Yankee’s mouth by one of their own spokesmen and
represents the Yankee type of mild jingoism. It is full cousin to that
other sentiment which also this writer assigns to him:

  Resolved, that other nations all, if set longside of us,
  For vartoo, larnin, chiverlry, aint noways wuth a cuss.[37]

These are but cruder expressions of ideas dating from the Revolutionary
War, and of which Timothy Dwight, who was not a poet by predestination,
gave us in verse a noble example:

  Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise,
  The queen of the world, and child of the skies!
  Thy genius commands thee; with rapture behold,
  While ages on ages thy splendors unfold.
  Thy reign is the last, and the noblest of time,
  Most fruitful thy soil, most inviting thy clime;
  Let the crimes of the east ne’er encrimson thy name,
  Be freedom, and science, and virtue, thy fame.

It need not be supposed that all Yankees who came to Wisconsin or
other western states were familiar with these glowing lines. But it is
almost certain that, in the common schools of Yankeedom, most of them
had thrilled to the matchless cadences of Webster’s reply to Hayne.
What more was needed, by way of literary support, to a pride of country
which, if a trifle ungenerous to others, was based on facts all had
experienced.




THE YANKEE AND THE TEUTON IN WISCONSIN

JOSEPH SCHAFER

IV. SOME SOCIAL TRAITS OF TEUTONS


The year 1832, celebrated in Wisconsin history as the time when the
lead miners and other pioneers destroyed the power of the Rock River
Indians, was remembered by later-coming German immigrants for a very
different reason. It was toward the end of March in that year, the
place Trier (Treves), the ancient capital of the western “Cæsars,” a
city which is still rich in the massive ruins of its Roman foretime.
As the story goes, the boys of one form in the old _Gymnasium_ were
being entertained at the house of a professor, where, boy-like, they
were playing indoor games accompanied with much laughter and general
hilarity. Suddenly one of their younger classmates rushed breathless
into the room, exclaiming: “Goethe is dead!”[38] During the balance
of the evening, the less serious of the youngsters having returned to
their interrupted play, this boy engaged with his instructors in eager
discussion of Goethe’s life and writings.

The youth in question was Karl Marx, whose later history exhibits a
wide divergence from the exclusively literary career prophesied by
his boyhood scholastic interests. The classmate who is authority for
this incident continued in Marx’s company the _Gymnasium_ studies; he
then performed his one year minimum of military service, and having
secured some business experience sailed away as an immigrant to the
new world, settling on a Wisconsin farm. In the course of a long life
he often reverted to the story of Goethe, whose works, as well as
those of Schiller and Lessing, made a part of his home library. These
great names never failed to kindle his pride in the intellectual
achievements of the German people, whose governments at the time of
his emigration in 1841 seemed to him a compound of despotism and
inefficiency.[39]

Doubtless there were Germans of the immigration to Wisconsin who
knew not Goethe, or if in a hazy way they did know who he was, had
no intellectual right to judge his merits. But the more intelligent
were sure to possess some knowledge of the writings of their greatest
poet and of lesser men who still were great in the world’s estimation.
Hence it was that Germans who at that period went to the new world,
while acknowledging by their flight the political, economic, and social
obstacles to a successful life in Prussia, Bavaria, Baden, Westphalia,
or Luxemburg, were always able to maintain a self-respecting attitude
when confronted with the pretensions of those Americans who were
unsympathetic, jingoistic, or boastful. German immigrants might grant
much to superior cleverness, to the stupendous achievements of a
liberty loving race, domiciled in a peaceful continent and dowered with
free lands and boundless opportunity; but they remembered that _William
Tell_ and _Faust_ and _The Laocoön_ were written by Germans.

Though many immigrants were far from being literary, they doubtless
possessed, on the average, a knowledge of German masterpieces
fully equivalent to the knowledge which Americans possessed of the
English Classics. For education was looking up, and while most of
the immigrants from German states, like those from other European
countries, were of the peasant class, which was usually the most
backward, still by 1840 nearly all were sure to have enjoyed some
systematic schooling. At an earlier period this might have been
otherwise. The condition of limited serfdom, removed but a generation
earlier, operated powerfully to neutralize such benevolent plans for
universal instruction as kings and ministers proclaimed. For the
peasants were directly subordinate to the local lords, who often felt
“that an ignorant labor supply was less likely to seek to better its
condition by demands upon them....”[40] The great national reform
movement which came to fruition after the close of the Napoleonic wars
swept away many of the disabilities of the common people, and developed
in Prussia and other states a system of universal education as the
surest means of national upbuilding.

The excellencies of the Prussian school system prior to 1840 became the
theme of flattering reports on the part of educators in many lands.
The celebrated philosopher Victor Cousin made it the basis for his
plan of educational reform in France; the Scotch, English, and Irish
discussed it; Horace Mann proclaimed it to the school authorities of
Massachusetts, and Calvin E. Stowe recommended it to the legislature of
Ohio. That system may not have possessed all of the virtues which the
ordinances quoted by Cousin imply.[41] Yet it had the one excellence to
which educationally all others are subsidiary--a well-trained teaching
force. Indeed, if there is anything which seems miraculous in the swift
and thoroughgoing transformation of school conditions in Prussia during
the first forty years of the nineteenth century, it is explained by
the provision which the state made for normal schools and the supply,
through their agency, of teachers enough to man all the schools. “In
the lowest school in the smallest and obscurest village,” says Horace
Mann, “or for the poorest class in overcrowded cities; in the schools
connected with pauper establishments, with houses of correction or
with prisons--in all these there was a teacher of mature age, of
simple, unaffected and decorous manners.” Mann also made it clear
that every such teacher was possessed of adequate scholarship and
special training for the work of the schoolroom.[42] Such a statement
could not be made at that time about Massachusetts, where popular
education was already two hundred years old, nor could it be made with
equal confidence of other German countries, though several of these
approximated the Prussian standard and most of them were earnestly
promoting education along the same lines and by the use of similar
means.

We must therefore regard the generation of the German exodus from
which Wisconsin profited so largely in the later 1840’s and the
1850’s, as almost universally literate and usually well grounded in
the rudiments of an education. The intelligent, reading, writing, and
slow but careful figuring German peasant immigrants constituted the
best testimonial to the efficacy of German systems of instruction for
the common people. The _Gymnasia_, the _real Schule_, the universities,
sent forth representatives of the highest German culture to honor
the learned professions, the literary, philosophical, and scientific
circles of America.

On the basis of formal school instruction alone, the historian of early
Wisconsin would be compelled to assign first place in social fitness to
the immigrants from Germany. Neither the Irish, the English, nor even
the Yankee pioneers on the average had enjoyed as thorough a training
as had Prussians, Saxons, Hessians, or Badeners. Yet, school training
is never all there is of education, and it may constitute but a small
portion of it. No one questions that the social character of Prussian
and other German peasants was far higher in 1840 than it had been in
1800, and this was due to a variety of causes, of which schooling was
only one. In part it was due to the abolition of serfdom, in part to
the reorganization of municipal life; also, largely to the religious
agitation of the period, to the movements for political reform, and
especially to the widespread, momentous, and gripping spirit of
nationalism.

Nevertheless, despite their superb educational equipment plus other
incentives, the Prussians still seemed to intelligent American
observers in a very retarded social condition. Horace Mann, who wrote
most enthusiastically of their schools and was sympathetic toward the
Germans in every respect, in a passage of almost classic force and
beauty written in 1843, tells us why education in Prussia accomplished
for the people so much less than one might expect. For one thing,
he says, the pupils left school too early--at the age of fourteen,
which was their time for beginning regular and heavy work. Then, too,
books for further self-instruction were lacking. There was in Prussia
nothing analogous to the Massachusetts district school libraries.
“But,” he continues, “the most potent cause of Prussian backwardness
and incompetency is this--when the children come out from the school
they have little use either for the faculties that have been developed,
or for the knowledge that has been acquired. Their resources have not
been brought into demand; their powers are not roused or strengthened
by exercise. Our common phrases, ‘the active duties of life’; ‘the
responsibilities of citizenship’; ‘the stage, the career, of action’;
‘the obligations to posterity’;--would be strange sounding words in
the Prussian ear.... Now, although there is a sleeping ocean in the
bosom of every child that is born into the world, yet if no freshening,
life-giving breeze ever sweeps across its surface, why should it not
repose in dark stagnation forever.” The bill of particulars with which
the great educator clinches his indictment of the Prussian system,
while it aims to describe accurately only the then existing condition
in Prussia, might be equally applicable to almost any other absolutist,
paternalistic state. All responsibility for the people’s welfare was
assumed by the monarch, who in turn was actively aided by a hierarchy
of officials in state and church, in the central government and the
local administrative areas.

Of this officialdom, particularly in its military and civil aspects,
the nobility was not merely the corner stone but the essential part
of the structure. The church, loyal to its traditions, was much more
democratic, men of every class being found in each of its official
grades. The newly developed educational system gave to the common man
another significant opportunity, since teaching candidates were drawn
in large numbers from the middle and lower classes, and were given
at public expense the training necessary to fit them for permanent
positions in the various types of schools. On the whole, however, life
beyond the school, which among Americans of that day commonly yielded
the major part of education, was in Prussia far less fruitful. For, the
American, whose formal schooling had been limited, was sure to multiply
its efficacy many times through the intensely original character of his
activities. In these he was apt to employ everything he had learned,
and constantly to learn more for the sake of applying the new knowledge
to challenging situations.

The contrast between the average Prussian’s life and the average
American’s life was sharp and decisive. The boy leaving school at
fourteen in Frederick William’s country was thrust at once into a
routine of severe labor, controlled by others. Either he might be on
a farm, where his duties were fixed by custom and minutely directed
by parent or employer; or he might be apprenticed to a trade which
would give him seven years under an exacting master. Assuming that
he remained in his native region, his career thenceforth would be
determined with the minimum of personal effort. The American boy whose
schooling stopped at an early age might go west and start a new farm
home in a new environment, with every incentive toward employing his
best powers to win unusual success; he might go to the city and engage
in some business; attend school to prepare for a profession; or settle
down on the ancestral acres under social and economic conditions which
called for almost continuous readjustments, and kept his mind on the
stretch to bring these about.

The governmental arrangements in America were inherently educational;
in Prussia they were the reverse, save when, with revolutionary fury,
the people rose to seek their destruction or reform. In Prussia, says
Horace Mann, “the subject has no officers to choose, no inquiry into
the character or eligibility of candidates to make, no vote to give.
He has no laws to enact or abolish. He has no questions about peace or
war, finance, taxes, tariffs, post office, or internal improvements to
decide or discuss. He is not asked where a road shall be laid, or how a
bridge shall be built, although in the one case he has to perform the
labor and in the other to supply the materials.... The tax gatherer
tells him how much he is to pay, the ecclesiastical authority plans a
church which he must build; and his spiritual guide, who has been set
over him by another, prepares a creed and a confession of faith all
ready for his signature. He is directed alike how he must obey his King
and worship his God.”

The schools of Prussia inculcated religion and morality as sedulously
as they taught geography, singing, and writing, the methods used
being highly praised by American pedagogical experts. This universal
insistence on the ethical content of life could not fail to produce
results more or less in harmony with the aims of great ethical
philosophers, like Kant of Königsberg, a teacher of the learned whose
“categorical imperative,” popularized in that epoch, has not yet gone
into the philosophical discard. The average German immigrants of the
1840’s knew little of Kant or the Kantian school of ethics. But of
honesty, truthfulness, and fidelity to the plighted word they knew
much, because those were practical virtues with which in school if not
at home all were indoctrinated. Thrift and industry were additional but
fundamental virtues which were widely diffused. It is hard for an empty
sack to stand upright. The reason why in America a German’s note was
more often worth face value than that of some other classes was because
the German usually labored unceasingly and saved what he earned, thus
enabling him to meet his obligation.[43]

They were not all saints, these Germans, and in the matter of personal
morality the Prussians particularly seem in those days to have deserved
much of the criticism directed against them.[44] However, it is not
necessary to regard even the Prussians as more lax than most other
continentals, and their character is always explainable as a vulgarized
aping of the low if gilded immoralities of court and aristocracy.
Matters of this sort do not lend themselves readily to statistical
inquiry. But it can hardly be doubted that in France, Prussia, Austria,
or any other country of continental Europe the private morals of the
common people were better on the whole than those of the upper classes.
In America, where immigrants from those countries came into contact
with a self-governing people of simple habits and prevailingly high
ideals of personal conduct, though with numerous individual divergences
from the type, sharp attention was bound to be directed to this feature
in the character of foreigners, and the Germans attracted their full
share of suspicion and disfavor from the stricter sort of Americans.

Such suspicions were heightened by certain social customs of the
Germans to which Americans reacted adversely. Sunday amusements were
all but universal among them. Travelers in Germany dwell upon the
gaiety observed in the villages, or in the city parks and the beer
gardens, the distinctive costumes of different localities lending
color and interest to the scenes. Music was cultivated in every
German community; all Germans could sing and a large proportion could
perform on musical instruments. One was “as certain to see a violin
as a blackboard in every schoolroom.”[45] Wherever Germans gathered
together--and Sunday, since it was the weekly holiday, was their day
for assembling--there was singing and dancing, usually accompanied by
the drinking of beer or wine to stimulate hilarity. This drinking was
not necessarily excessive, because most Germans were moderate in their
appetites for alcohol, some were unable to spend much, and all were
economical (_sparsam_). The dances differed from those favored in this
country, being mainly “round dances,” and the standards of decorum in
the relations of the sexes were different also. No wonder that, when
German families settled in groups near our own people, Yankee fathers
and mothers often shook their heads doubtfully in contemplating the
influence upon their children of these unfamiliar social customs.

It is probable that the vigor with which among this resilient people
amusements were carried on had a definite relation to the intensity,
monotony, and sordidness of the labor from which they were a recoil. At
all events, with more leisure on week days and an opportunity to do his
work under pleasanter conditions, the German readily adapted himself to
a type of relaxation which was less boisterous and more genteel. His
work and his living being what they were, it is doubtful if anything
better in the form of amusements could have been expected of him.
Travelers from England and America, on their visits to Germany, were
impressed with the wholesomeness of the Sunday picnics, the rambles
through the forests, the frolics on the village greens and in the parks
adjacent to the towns and cities.[46]

With all his sociability, joviality, and occasional levity, the German
was not devoid of an element of austerity. This was one secret of his
ability to achieve. Whatever the work might be, he settled himself to
its performance with a grim determination expressive of century-long
training. The mechanic, from his apprentice years, was habituated to
long hours of unremitting but improving toil. The farmer (_bauer_)
was a traditional daylight-saver and a night-worker besides, such
excessive labor being compulsory under the system of serfdom, when the
peasant’s time was levied upon to a very large extent by the lord. The
German schools inculcated similar habits of relentless application
to the work in hand, and even the government bureaus, under rigorous
task-masters like old Friedrich Wilhelm and his son Frederick the
Great, enforced compliance with the ideal of a patient, steady “grind”
which not inaptly typified the German in the eyes of other peoples. The
German often performed less work in the time consumed than an alert
Yankee would have performed in a shorter day; his tools and implements
were generally awkward and inefficacious; even in scholarship he not
infrequently took the long way around to reach his goal--but he usually
reached it because he had no notion of turning back or of stopping
at a halfway point on his job. Persistent rather than brilliant,
more industrious than inventive, the German toiled on, content if he
always had something to show for his labor. The contrast, in that
generation, between the German at work and the German at play is the
contrast between a man governed by an intense purpose to accomplish
a given task, whether interesting or not, and the same man intent on
accomplishing nothing with every physical, intellectual, and emotional
evidence of enjoying the process. Some men carry into their play the
morale which governs them in their work; others import into their work
the spirit of their play. In the case of the mid-nineteenth century
German the two aspects of his existence, work and play, differed in
spirit quite as much as in content.

The Germans had their Puritan sects, like the Moravians and other
pietists, whose attitude was distinctly other-worldly, to whom play
was a sedate if not a solemn activity. Such people disapproved of
dancing and beer drinking Germans quite as heartily as of profane
whiskey drinking and quarrelsome Americans or Irish. Individuals and
colonies of the pietistic classes passed into the emigrations, and
thus Wisconsin’s German population contained most of the elements to
be found at the same time in the German states. This illustrates one
difficulty in generalizing about social characteristics; there are so
many exceptions to be noted that the generalization loses much of its
validity.

Craftsmanship was a prevalent accomplishment among the Germans of
the early emigration. Every shipload of emigrants of which we have a
social analysis had a large proportion of craftsmen, who were either
established members of the city and village industrial class, or else
belonged to the peasantry and had learned a craft in order to improve
their status. Trades were learned exclusively under the apprenticeship
system, the candidate usually living in the master’s home and giving
service at the master’s will. When he reached the journeyman stage he
was privileged to find work for himself, a quest which though usually
fruitful in educational results often proved disappointing from a
monetary point of view. In those cases the journeyman was peculiarly
open to the temptation to emigrate. Arrived in this country, the
chances of finding employment in the line of his training varied.
Sometimes they were excellent, at other times poor, depending mainly
upon the craft represented. Carpenters were in great demand, as were
also blacksmiths, wheelwrights, millwrights, masons, bricklayers,
plasterers, and in general all representatives of the building trades
and of trades ministering to farmers. Others were in occasional demand.
But, if a dyer, or a slater, or a cabinet maker, or a silversmith, or
a tile maker, or a weaver, or a wood carver happened to find himself
in America without a market for his peculiar skill, he always had the
resource of taking land and commencing as a farmer. Many craftsmen,
indeed, came with the set purpose of doing that immediately upon their
arrival; others contemplated a farming career after a period devoted
to their specialty. In some or all of these ways Germans trained as
craftsmen came to be widely distributed over the farming areas of
Wisconsin as well as among the cities, towns, and villages.

The possession of special skill in any line, like the possession of
special scientific knowledge, raises a man in social estimation, and
every trained worker properly regards himself with satisfaction as
being not quite “as other men are.” In addition to the social training
which came to him as an incident of his apprenticeship and journeyman’s
experience, the German craftsman often was able to challenge the
respect and admiration of his American neighbors by making articles of
cunning workmanship which to them seemed wonderful because they did
not understand the processes involved. Agriculture being regarded as
an unskilled occupation, the artisan farmer also was very apt to lord
it over the peasant farmer of his own nationality. Craftsmanship, in a
word, established a kind of rank among Germans in this country because
it was a recognized means of personal and social progress at home.

Statistics are impossible to procure, but the testimony of men and
women familiar with early conditions in Wisconsin proves that the
German population of the state in early days varied quite as widely
in social characteristics as did the American population, though
America had no distinctive peasant class. Accordingly, although in the
beginnings of American contacts with their Prussian or Westphalian
neighbors these were lumped together indiscriminately as “Dutchmen,”
differences soon began to emerge. In the course of a few years a
class of “fine old Germans” was recognized in almost every community
to supplement the well-known type of “fine old Yankee gentlemen.”
These select Germans were very apt to be men who had been trained as
craftsmen, or men who had enjoyed the advanced scientific or literary
instruction afforded in the higher schools and the universities of the
homeland. In the cities, especially Milwaukee, were many Germans who
had been prominent in business lines as well as in the professions.

The question has sometimes arisen why so many of the second-generation
Germans appear inferior in social character to their immigrant parents.
A hint of the reason is found in what has just been said. Whatever
elements of superiority were shown by the immigrant artisan-farmers or
the highly educated Germans, the social advantages accruing therefrom
were personal, and in a slightly developed western society could not
be handed on to the next generation. In the cities it frequently was
possible for men of high ideals and fine social status to provide
equivalent opportunities for their children. But not so on frontier
farms. There it was a rare case when an education or training like
that received by the father in the old country could be supplied.
Accordingly, the sons of the most intelligent, dignified, and worthy
German farmer, if they became farmers in succession, might perhaps
turn out mere farmers, with none of the graces or exceptional social
virtues of the parents, and little except the memory of a parent’s
high respectability to distinguish them from the farmer sons of the
clumsiest peasant.

However, this is but half the story. If the superior Germans reared
families incapable of remaining on their own social plane, other types
of Germans, who in their own persons counted for less, frequently
had the happiness to see their children advance to a position
perceptibly higher than their own. Natural gifts, industry, the social
opportunities which yield to the key of economic success availed much.
Sometimes the presence of a good school, a wise and helpful pastor or
some other worthy friend gave the necessary impulse. The process, in
fact, does not differ essentially from that which, throughout American
pioneer history, has enabled the deserving to press forward and
permitted the weak, indolent, or vicious to fall behind in the social
competition. It is impossible to say how many German families made a
step, or several steps, upward, and how many others slipped back. The
delinquents may perhaps exceed the meritorious in number, but probably
not, and the impression that the children of German immigrants shame
their parents is almost certainly an illusion which would be likely to
disappear if the facts were fully known.

The social institutions of Wisconsin, based on the earlier Yankee and
southwestern immigrations, were profoundly influenced by the German
immigration of the late forties and the fifties of last century.
Milwaukee, the center of German influence (the _Deutsche Athen_),
became a city in which the German language was spoken and read by
many English speaking persons, in order to facilitate communication
and trade with the numerically dominant German element. The Germans
maintained advanced schools for instruction in both English and
German; their parochial schools were conducted mainly in German; the
immigrants themselves felt no compulsion to learn English, and their
children, in many cases, however well educated, spoke the language of
the country with very imperfect accent.

The universal respect in which the German language was held, and the
extent to which it was affected by others than Germans, provided an
admirable social soil for the development of German music and the
cultivation of German literature. Hardly had the immigrants established
themselves when, in 1847, they founded at Milwaukee their first singing
society, which was followed three years later by the famous and
far-reaching _Musikverein_. A German theater followed promptly, and
became a permanent feature of Milwaukee’s intellectual life.[47] The
_Turnverein_ fostered in America Father Jahn’s conception of athletics,
while restaurants and beer gardens gave an old world, continental
atmosphere to public recreation. Holidays assumed a German aspect. The
_Christ Child_ displaced _St. Nicholas_ not alone in Milwaukee, but
in scores of towns, villages, and hamlets, and innumerable farm homes
scattered over Wisconsin. The joyous German _Weinacht_ made way easily
against the more somber Puritan Christmas, which, however, had already
brightened a good deal in its progress from the seventeenth century to
the nineteenth century.

In general, Germans did not insist with extreme pertinacity upon the
retention of their own social customs, and wherever people of that
nationality were intermingled with a larger number of Americans, the
process by which they assimilated American habits of living, American
social usages, and even ways of acting, speaking, and thinking was very
rapid. In the schools of a Yankee neighborhood the children of German
settlers, in many cases, could not be distinguished by their manner
of speech from the Yankee children. On the other hand, in communities
made up wholly or mainly of Germans, the grandchildren continue to
have trouble with the _th_ sound in English words, and manifest other
linguistic peculiarities. And this difference is merely symptomatic. To
this day, it is easy to reconstruct, in case of the average person of
German descent, the atmosphere in which he was brought up. If he comes
from Milwaukee, or from some rural “Dutch settlement,” that fact is
usually clear from a hundred trifling intimations. If he was brought
up in a non-German community (so adaptable is the race), a change of
name from the German _Weiss_ to the English _White_, or from _Schwartz_
to _Black_, would ordinarily suffice to disguise the fact that he is
of German descent at all. Germans thus brought up are apt to have made
their religious affiliations and their intimate social relationships
harmonize with those of the leading American element of the community,
so that these quite as much as their speech would tend to conceal their
racial origin.

Wisconsin writers have made much of the fact that emigrating German
revolutionists came to this state largely in 1848 and the years
following. That fact, significant as bringing to Wisconsin Carl Schurz,
who became the most noted liberal American statesman and publicist of
German birth, has perhaps been overstressed. At least, it can safely be
said that for every revolutionist disembarked at Milwaukee or Sheboygan
or Manitowoc, probably a full score of plain, everyday, conventional
Germans filtered into the state’s population during the same time.
The important point about the revolutionists is not their relative
numbers, but their character and the leadership they helped to supply
in the affairs of the new commonwealth. Newspaper editors who possessed
exceptional literary and scholastic attainments came from that class;
some found their way into the legislature, and many served the cause
of liberal government on the local plane.

The name of Schurz was one to conjure with, as American politicians
were quick to discover. He figured prominently in Wisconsin state
politics only a few years, but as a national leader his influence in
attaching the Germans to the causes he advocated was especially strong
in this state, which claimed him as her own. Schurz’s high character
and attainments, coupled with his political successes in this country,
were a source of pride to thousands of Wisconsin Germans who shared
not at all his revolutionary views. Enough that, like Goethe, he was
a great German, and that he had gained the respect and confidence
of large sections of the American people. It ministered to the
self-respect of the average German settler to feel that his people had
contributed something of value to the life of the nation and state.

Later arrivals from Germany, and especially from Prussia, brought
with them an intense pride of nationalism and enthusiasm for German
achievement in the wars against Austria and against France. The
difference in attitude between immigrants of 1880 and those of forty
years earlier was antipodal. Many of the former had served in the
victorious wars and abounded in military incidents and in stories of
Bismarck, of Kaiser Wilhelm I, and Crown Prince Frederick William
(_Unser Fritz_). These men obviously belonged to a new generation of
Germans, and they have exerted a powerful influence upon our recent
history. But the Germans who deserve special recognition along with
the Yankees, as founders of the commonwealth and its institutions,
are those of the earlier immigrations from a Fatherland which as yet
was united only in culture, while politically its states remained
dissevered.




THE YANKEE AND THE TEUTON IN WISCONSIN

JOSEPH SCHAFER

V. SOCIAL HARMONIES AND DISCORDS


The “Sons of the Pilgrims” of Milwaukee held in December, 1850, their
customary banquet to celebrate the historic landing on Plymouth Rock.
The occasion was one which stimulated the flow of oratory and the
display of quaint Yankee humor and sparkling wit. Among the toasts,
some of which embodied genuine wisdom, was the following: “Our adopted
state. She has gathered her sons from many lands and given them all a
home amid her bounty and her beauty. May the elements of strength and
greatness peculiar to each be here transplanted and united to form a
perfect commonwealth.”[48]

The sentiment was notably generous, voiced as it was by one out of
the many and diverse population elements, and we now see that it was
also prophetic. But the attainment of the ideal here advanced was not
to result from an effortless, unconscious process. Much history is
involved in the relations of Yankee and Teuton--to say nothing of other
stocks--which reveals a general tendency to helpful coöperation, but
presents, on the other hand, episodes marked by animosity, jealousy,
and social estrangement. If there were social harmonies, there were
also discords.

As early as 1850 Milwaukee contained more Germans than Yankees. Out
of an aggregate population of 20,059 the census taker had designated
3880 as natives of the New England states and New York, while 5958
were born in Germany. The entire American element (aside from natives
of Wisconsin, who were children of the foreign born as well as of the
American born) amounted to 5113, while the number of foreigners was
12,036. Of these, more than 3000 were Irish and about 1300 English.
Thus the German was numerically the dominant social factor in the city.

Nevertheless, in all but numbers the Yankee element remained, as it
had been from the beginning of the town’s growth, in a position of
acknowledged leadership. There would be no difficulty in proving that
socially, industrially, and commercially the places of power were
occupied by the “down-easters,” while in politics, although their
control was being challenged from one side or another, they were still
far from recognizing a master.

Yankees were the promoters of those far-reaching improvements, like
the various plank roads, and especially the railroads, which were
destined to unite the extensive new settlements with Milwaukee and
thus guarantee the future greatness of the city. They were largely
engaged in the carrying trade on the Lakes. They controlled the flour
milling business, the leading industry of the city, in which was
concentrated probably more capital than was invested in all other lines
of manufacturing carried on at that time. They were also prominent in
wholesale merchandising and owned the most pretentious retail stores.

Their general preëminence in the professions was undisputed. They had
most of the lawyers, a large proportion of the physicians, the editors
of English language papers, the Protestant clergymen, the teachers.
Public opinion, with a reservation to be stated presently, was mainly
of their making, both in the city itself and--through the agency of a
widely read newspaper press--in the state at large. On all questions
affecting public education, social morality, health, and recreation, as
well as business or industry, the American portion of the community was
very apt to mass behind Yankee leadership; and the English speaking
section of the foreign population was not averse to doing the same,
at least under ordinary circumstances. Often, indeed, such was the
prestige of the Yankees, their initiative was followed unquestioningly
by American and foreigner alike.

But the weight of numbers being with the Germans, the bulk of whom did
not speak or read English--though there were numerous exceptions,--it
was natural that there should have developed a community leadership
within their own group, and such leadership would be determinative in
cases of divergence from American ideas. The presence of this great
body of non-English speaking persons, clothed with political power
and wielding also a goodly share of economic power, especially as
manifested in consumption, tended in itself to generate a more amiable
attitude and more moderate policies on the part of the dominant class.

For the Germans were a coherent, prosperous, and growing element in the
city. They began coming in 1839, and during the succeeding decade the
annual accretions waxed gradually larger. After the revolution of 1848
the tide of emigration, especially from the countries and provinces
along the Rhine, was swollen to unprecedented proportions, Milwaukee
and the whole state profiting largely therefrom. But, already before
1850 Milwaukee’s streets, business places, and homes were so habituated
to German speech, that most visitors unhesitatingly described it as a
German city. “In the colony of Herman alone,” wrote Carl de Haas in
1848, “among all the United States is the population so preponderantly
German.”[49] This writer also says, as do other chroniclers of
his race, that not alone the speech of his country, but also the
national habits and customs prevailed exceedingly in Milwaukee;
that the Americans made many concessions to the Germanism of the
environment--merchants, for example, learning the language themselves,
or at least keeping clerks in their establishments who could speak it,
in order to attract German trade.

The emigration which began in 1839 as a religious movement, a
congregation of Old Lutherans fleeing the pressure of the illiberal
policy of Prussia’s king, was continued thereafter mainly from economic
and social motives. An examination of the census schedules of 1850
for Milwaukee reveals its general character better than volumes of
reminiscent testimony. The census shows that, among the 5958 Germans in
the city, 1165 (if the count is accurate) were craftsmen. There were
house carpenters, ship carpenters, smiths, wheelwrights, millwrights,
cabinet makers, masons, plasterers, painters, brickmakers, tailors,
shoemakers, saddlers, watchmakers, coppersmiths, silversmiths and
goldsmiths, barbers, bakers, brewers, cigar makers, musicians, sailors,
and many more. In contrast to the large number of craftsmen, those
employed at common labor numbered only 461, while the aggregate of
those who may be described as business men was 248. A total of 45
persons fall in the class of professional men. Many, even of the
laborers, possessed some property, thus showing that they were of a
substantial, home-making type. A good many of the craftsmen owned
homes, some of the business men were possessed of real estate to
an appreciable extent, and there were a very few capitalists whose
properties were valued at from $20,000 to $50,000.

The significance to the city of having among the population so large
a body of thoroughly trained and skilled artisans cannot readily be
overstated. It toned up all building operations and enabled them to
keep pace with the city’s rapidly growing needs; it facilitated the
establishment and expansion of industries depending upon a full supply
of skilled labor; it gave the city a fine body of industrious, well
paid residents as homemakers and citizens--at a time when American
artisans were very prone to seek land and raise farm produce. American
business and industrial leaders in Milwaukee appreciated the German
craftsmen who contributed largely to the prosperity of the city; and
the same may be said of the common laborers.

The appearance of Germans with capital which sought investment in lines
of business already pursued by Americans was no doubt less welcome,
and to some it may have seemed like an intrusion. Generally, however,
Germans began their business enterprises on so modest a scale, and
built them up so gradually, that no serious economic dislocations could
have been felt in consequence. In some cases the German business men
merely undertook to meet demands created by the presence of their own
people, which demands were not fully cared for by existing American
enterprise. Perhaps no better illustration of this tendency can be
found than the local tobacco trade. “Groceries,” of course, carried
the “plug tobacco” used so widely in those days by Americans of all
classes, while drug stores handled cigars. But smoking was more nearly
universal among European immigrants than among Americans. Germans
accordingly set up tobacco shops, which usually included a department
for the manufacture of cigars. The investments were all small, ranging
from $50 to $4000, but the payroll was of some consequence to the
city and the output considerable. It is believed that all firms of
tobacconists or cigar manufacturers listed by the census takers in 1850
were Germans.

Another industry in which Germans were prominent in 1850 was tanning.
This they did not monopolize, for several non-German tanners were
operating at the same time. But G. Pfister and Company, Tanners, had
an investment of $35,000 and, employing thirty-five men, manufactured
an annual product valued at $45,000, while all other tanneries taken
together had an aggregate investment of less than $7500.

In boot and shoe manufacturing one American firm was far in the
lead.[50] Yet, on a smaller scale, German firms were participating in
the business actively, while German craftsmen were an important element
in the success of all shoe manufacturers. A similar statement will hold
true in the department of brickmaking. A large number of Germans worked
in the brickyards as experts, and several had small plants of their
own. But the big brickyard of the city was not managed by Germans.[51]
There was one single rope maker, who was a German, and also one glove
and mitten manufacturer, who was also German. Both of these industries
were small.

There remains the historically important Milwaukee industry of
beer-brewing, popularly supposed to have been introduced by immigrants
from Munich and other centers of beer manufacture in the fatherland.
The census lists a total of ten establishments designated as breweries.
Of these, seven were owned by Germans and three by non-Germans. The
investments by the latter aggregated $27,000, those of the former
$20,900. But the sum of the annual products of the German breweries
was $41,062, while the aggregate product of the others was $32,425.
The non-German brewery which had the largest investment was doing an
annual business valued at less than the investment, while one of the
German breweries having only $3000 invested reported a product valued
at $18,000.[52]

When we consider mercantile lines as distinguished from the industrial,
Germans were prominent in those which called for moderate investments.
They had many small grocery stores scattered through the city, a number
of meat markets, and of course a goodly proportion of liquor saloons.
There were also several German clothing stores, confectioneries, and
bakeries. That their business men expected to sell almost exclusively
to Germans is indicated by the fact that for the most part they
advertised only in the German language papers--the _Wisconsin Banner_
and the _Volksfreund_,--not in the English papers. On the other hand,
the American merchants, as we have already seen, catered to the German
trade by providing German salesmen,[53] and they also advertised
extensively in the German papers.

There were German taverns which did a thriving trade; the restaurants
made the sojourner from Berlin feel at home; and the German beer
gardens were the despair of the pious Yankee mothers of boys. So
indispensable did German musicians become, that when the Sons of the
Pilgrims banqueted, a brass band directed by a German bandmaster
discoursed “martial as well as festive” music.

One other form of coöperation between Yankee and Teuton deserves to be
mentioned--the employment of German girls in Yankee homes. This custom,
testified to by German writers and indicated unmistakably by the
census, was widespread. Such service was an immediate resource to the
poorer immigrant families, and a boon to the American families as well.
By that means numbers of future German homemakers came promptly into
possession of the manners and customs of the Yankees, acquired their
speech, and gained some insight into their distinctive views of life.

The least numerous of the special classes into which we have analyzed
the German population of Milwaukee, in 1850, was the professional
class. Yet it is not for that reason least important, for the little
group of forty-five[54] persons contained most of the individuals
whose views swayed public opinion among the 6000 Milwaukee Germans.
Among them were two newspaper editors, each in charge of a German
language paper. There were six lawyers, nine teachers, and eleven
clergymen and preachers. Four of the preachers are described as German
Lutheran, one was Evangelical, and one Methodist.[55] Two, Joseph
Salzman and Franz Fusseden, were Catholic priests. One, F. W. Helfer,
was called a “rationalist preacher.” Two, John Mühlhauser and G.
Klügel, were merely called preachers.

It is not strange that medicine, among all the professions, should
have had the strongest representation. A physician, wherever trained,
is equipped to practice anywhere, while a lawyer, clergyman, editor,
or teacher is obliged to prepare for service by first fitting himself
into the community he is to serve. German medical education was far
superior to American at that time, and, in the western states at least,
the supply of trained physicians was below the requirements. There were
communities in Wisconsin where not one-fourth of the practitioners
were graduates of medical schools or had honestly earned the title of
“doctor.”[56] This condition made a splendid opportunity for German
physicians, who could hope to win the patronage of Americans as well
as Germans. That the prospect was alluring to them is shown by the
fact that Milwaukee at the census date in 1850 had seventeen German
physicians, some of them already men of note in the community.

The Yankees and the Germans came into such close and intimate contacts
in Milwaukee, that it is easier to study their normal attitudes
there than in the outlying portions of the state. On the whole those
relations, in the period terminating with the Civil War, appear to
have been marked by mutual respect, if not active friendship. At all
events, if there were differences causing ill will on one side or
the other, these--so far as they were the outgrowth of the social,
economic, or commercial interplay of the two groups--rarely became
serious enough to be reflected in the public press. The prosperity of
the city, providing usually full employment and adequate returns to
all who wanted to work, made the bond between capitalist and employees
satisfactory, and this solved one important aspect of the class
problem. The absence of any decided public interest in the immigrant
problem as affecting the city--other than politically--is a fact which
obtrudes itself upon one who canvasses the Milwaukee papers, English
and German, during the fourteen years which intervened between the
first constitutional convention and the election of Abraham Lincoln to
the presidency.

Yet, there are not wanting evidences that the two groups were quite
distinct and that the Germans, as a foreign group, were sensitively
class conscious. This is shown, for example, by the race appeals in
their business advertisements. To call attention to one’s nationality
when offering services of a personal nature, like those of the
physician, or the dentist, or even the druggist, is reasonable and
correct. But there is no good ground for assuming that nationality
makes a difference to the purchaser of lime. Why then the advertisement
of a _Deutsche Kalk Haus_ (German lime house), unless there was a
feeling that the German dealer would be favored by German buyers simply
because he was German? This is a typical example which goes to show the
existence of a city within a city, a German Milwaukee which tended to
live its own group life, for which, as already explained, it possessed,
within itself, great facilities.

Occasionally some relatively minor happening threw this feeling of
separateness into strong relief, as when, in 1850, a German scholar
published in the Milwaukee papers of his language the story of his
relations with the chancellor and board of regents of the University.
He thought they had promised him a chair, but afterwards they made it
plain that no contract had been closed with him. He may or may not
have had cause of complaint. But what he professed to do was to lay
the whole matter before the Germans of Wisconsin, in order that they
might know how the board of regents “flouts the wishes of the German
citizens,” how it keeps its promises “to Germans,” and how little it
regards the rules of ordinary courtesy “in dealing with Germans.”[57]
No doubt the design was to bring political pressure to bear on the
regents, but the device would not have been resorted to had not the
recognized racial unity among the Germans rendered that a hopeful plan.

In a society like the present Milwaukee, where inter-racial marriages
are a daily occurrence, and one is rarely conscious of race in
cases of that kind, the condition of seventy years ago seems almost
incomprehensible. For, a close scrutiny of the entire census record
for Milwaukee in 1850 reveals that marriages between Germans and
Americans of all derivations at that time were excessively rare. The
aggregate number of such unions was twelve. But of marriages between
Yankees and Germans I can provisionally identify only six, as follows:
Margaret, twenty-six years of age, born in Germany, was the wife of
John H. Butler, a livery-stable keeper, born in New York. Hiram Brooks,
twenty-seven, born in New York, was married to Mary, twenty-three, born
in Hesse Darmstadt. James Ridgeway, thirty, a cooper, native of New
York, was married to Mary, born in Prussia. Abram Davis, twenty-five,
a cooper, born in New York, was married to C--, twenty-three, native
of Bavaria. Joseph Stadter, thirty-three, physician, rated at $2000,
who was born in Bavaria, was married to Sarah Ann, nineteen, born
in New York (but a female who was a member of the family, and may
have been this woman’s mother, bore a German name). Finally, William
Stamm, thirty-two, painter, native of Bremen, was married to Lucy,
twenty-eight, a native of Massachusetts.

It is not possible to determine how many of the American born persons
represented in the six cases may have belonged to German families, but
doubtless some did. At all events, we can assert that in Milwaukee
at that time, with its nearly 6000 Germans and nearly 4000 Yankees,
not more than six cases can be found of marriages between them. No
commentary is needed to establish the fact of the virtual segregation
of the two great population groups.[58] If Chevalier, the French
philosopher, was right in his conviction that “the Yankee is not a man
of promiscuous society,” it is equally true that the German at that
time was excessively clannish. His clannishness was due, no doubt, to
natural and inevitable causes, but the fact needs to be recognized by
the student of history.

This disposition on the part of Germans to “hang together” was promptly
discovered by American politicians and exploited for partisan and
personal ends. The outstanding fact of the political history of the
period under review is the attachment of the immigrant Germans to the
Democratic party. That relation was all but absolute and universal
during the 1840’s, though a gradual change took place in the last half
of the next decade. There was nothing mysterious about it. Germans
found the country, on their arrival, living under a Democratic
administration, to which they looked for favors and usually not in
vain. The Democratic party was liberal in the bestowal of lands; it
contended manfully against the principle of monopoly, especially in
banking and other corporate activities; and it emphasized the doctrine
of the equality of all men. The Germans, like the Irish and, in fact,
all immigrants, were strongly attracted by the principles professed
in Democratic platforms. The very word “democracy,” had its winning
appeal. “Democracy,” wrote the editor of the _Banner_ in 1850, “is a
glorious word. There are few other words, in any language, which can
be compared to it. To the poor man it is peculiarly precious since he
is aware that he owes to it his escape from the serfdom in which his
oppressors held him, and can now look up into heaven and thank his
God that he has ceased to be a serf. Democracy knows no distinctions
between man and man. She sets all upon the broad foundation of
equality.”[59]

The enormous prestige gained by the Democratic party under Jackson’s
leadership easily floated the administrations of Van Buren and Polk.
But, as an influence toward captivating the foreign element in
Wisconsin, no other Democratic principle had quite the efficacy of the
liberal suffrage provision which the party in power adopted at the
beginning of our history as a state.

In Michigan the makers of the state constitution had granted the
voting privilege to all aliens who were _bona fide_ residents and
who had declared their intention to become citizens. That clause in
her organic law drew the criticism of Whig members of Congress, but
she was admitted to the union in spite of their opposition, and thus
was established the principle that men might be voters without being
citizens. When, in 1846, the territorial legislature of Wisconsin
provided by law for the holding of a constitutional convention, a
similar proviso was made to govern the election of delegates to the
convention.

In Milwaukee County the Democrats nominated eight candidates for
delegates. Dr. Franz Huebschmann was the sole German named. The
_Wisconsin Banner_, while remarking that Germans constituting one-third
of the population were to have but a single delegate, urged Germans to
vote as one man for him. He was needed, said the editor, especially
to contend for equality in the voting privilege, for which he had
striven manfully during the past three years. In the neighbor county
of Washington, Germans were urged to support two Irish candidates who
favored equality of the voting privilege and whom the Whigs (so it was
asserted) were trying to defeat by the same wiles they employed against
Huebschmann. The moral of the _Banner_ editorials was: “Don’t trust the
Whigs. They have always opposed the rights of the foreign born.”[60] In
preparation for the vote on delegates, Milwaukee Germans who had not
declared their intention were given every direction for completing that
formality, and the indications are that a large number of voters were
newly made for the occasion.

Dr. Huebschmann, in the first convention, was a powerful advocate of
equality, giving as the chief ground in favor of the principle that
it would tend to bring Americans and foreigners into more harmonious
relations with one another. “The more distinctions you make between
them politically,” he said, “the more you delay this great end
[amalgamation], which is so essential to the future welfare of this
state. And, in fact, I regard only one measure equally important as the
political equality which I ask for, and that is a good common school
system.... Political equality and good schools will make the people of
Wisconsin an enlightened and happy people. They will make them one
people.”[61]

On the educational question Huebschmann found the Yankee majority
of the convention eager to welcome his coöperation. On the subject
of suffrage their unity was less complete. While party lines were
not strictly drawn, the chief contenders for equality were leading
Democrats and the chief opponents leading Whigs. But both conventions
adopted the principle, the first not quite frankly, and with the
admission of Wisconsin into the union all foreign born persons who had
resided in the state one year prior to any election had the right to
vote, provided they had declared their intention to become citizens of
the United States.

The adoption of such a liberal suffrage provision in the teeth of the
nativist movement which had affected all parts of the country more or
less, was considered a great triumph of Democratic principles. And
there is no doubt about the gratitude of adoptive citizens to the party
which secured them the boon. To the Germans it seemed thenceforward a
simple question of loyalty to support the Democratic party, through
thick and thin, through good report and evil report. Inasmuch as the
Democratic party also supported the Germans’ views on the subject of
temperance (prohibition), soon to become a burning issue,[62] and in
their contest with the more serious manifestations of Know-Nothingism,
which in this state reached its climax somewhat later, one almost
wonders how any of the Germans were able to detach themselves from
that party, despite its failure to represent them on the slavery and
free-soil issues.

The temperance movement and nativism were the chief grounds of
political contention between Germans and Yankees during this period.
The first of these broke, in 1853-55, on the rock of German--which
meant Democratic--opposition. For, although a referendum vote had gone
in favor of the enactment of a “Maine Law,” the Democratic legislature
chosen at the same time refused to accept the result as mandatory,
and did not pass the law. And when the first Republican legislature
did pass such a law, in the early months of the year 1855, Barstow,
the Democratic governor, vetoed the bill. Never thereafter did the
temperance issue become as acute as it had been during the seven years
immediately following statehood, but it is not strange that their
record on that question was one of the standing arguments against
Republicanism among the German voters.[63]

The Know-Nothing issue, which was supposed to be dying out at the
time of the Wisconsin constitutional conventions, 1846-1848, revived
after the Mexican War, figured prominently in the defeat of General
Scott in 1852, and in this state as well as in some other states rose
to dramatic and even tragic interest in 1855. Thereafter it declined,
to pass away for the time being with the election of Lincoln and the
engulfing of the nation in war.

But the Know-Nothingism of 1855 was regarded by the Democratic party
as sinister because, as that party professed to believe, it had got
itself incorporated as an important if not controlling element in the
new Republican party. This the Republican leaders and organs denied
with vigor, but it is true that the general council of the _American_
party in this state urged the support of the Republican candidates
and professed to have contributed 20,000 votes toward the election of
Bashford. The Republicans had no objection to Know-Nothing votes, but
they feared that the endorsement of their ticket by the Know-Nothings
would cost them more foreign born votes than it would gain them
nativists. It was tactically wise for the Democrats, and especially the
German Democratic press, to keep the “Republican-Know-Nothing” idea
before their people--and they made the best use of the opportunity.

“Temperance,” after all, was regarded by the Germans as merely
a manifestation of Puritan fanaticism, which must be opposed in
the interest of personal liberty. Much as they disliked it, their
opposition does not seem to have developed excessive bitterness against
the believers in or practicers of temperance. But nativism, which
demanded that the suffrage be limited to citizens; that naturalization
be made more difficult; that in some departments, as in the army,
natives be favored to the exclusion of the foreign born, this they
felt to be a deliberate and vicious attack upon the rights of the
foreign born as a class. The advocacy of these principles involved
much discussion of the unfitness of foreigners, their ignorance, their
sordidness, their “un-American” habits and customs, in one important
respect their “anti-American” religion.

All of this inevitably roused a bitter, fighting resentment on the
part of all foreigners, as it did among radical natives also, and it
is well known that many parts of the country suffered in consequence
from riots and other manifestations of a class war. In Wisconsin
there was less overt hostility than in some states where the foreign
elements were not so powerful.[64] The Know-Nothing party as such
functioned seriously only in the one year 1855, and its propaganda was
relatively mild-mannered.[65] Its chief objects of attack were the
foreign born Catholics, which class included a majority of the Irish
but only a fraction of the Germans, most of whom--probably--were either
Lutheran or Reformed, with an appreciable number of non-churchmen
or “free-thinkers.”[66] Nevertheless, nativism, as entangled in the
political psychology of this eventful year, had its full share in
producing a tragedy in this state also.

It came in the form of a lynching, carried out with hideous barbarism
by a body of the ruder Germans of Washington County, in August,
1855. It seems that a sickly, weak witted boy of nineteen, named
George DeBar--a native of New York State--felt himself aggrieved by
a German farmer and proposed to administer a beating. This he partly
accomplished, at the farmer’s home, but his victim fled into the field,
where he found a hiding place. Meantime, DeBar ran amuck, and meeting
the man’s wife stabbed her severely but not fatally. He next pursued a
fifteen-year-old boy, Paul Winderling, who was living with the farmer,
attacked him with his pocketknife, and killed him. He then burned the
farmer’s cabin. DeBar afterwards solemnly assured his attorneys that
the only part of the transaction he could remember was striking the
farmer himself with a stone knotted in his handkerchief. The belief
was widespread that he became unbalanced mentally at this point, which
theory is really the simplest explanation of his horrible crime,
committed without assignable motive.

Immediately on DeBar’s arrest a plan was hatched to storm the jail,
take him out, and hang him. The death penalty had been abolished at
the instance, as many felt, of the Yankee sentimentalists, and the
ignorance of some suggested that, since hanging was only justice in
a case like this, and the state refused to execute a criminal, the
people themselves had a right to take the matter into their own
hands. Unfortunately, a similar case had happened two weeks earlier at
Janesville, in which the avenging crowd was made up of Americans.[67]
It was suggested by some that DeBar was himself a Know-Nothing, or
at least trained with the Know-Nothing element, and there were dire
whispers about the trial judge, Charles H. Larrabee. Doubtless these
rumors were altogether wild. The nineteen-year-old DeBar, practically
_non compos mentis_, was of no possible political consequence, while
Judge Larrabee at the time was as sound a Democrat as could be
found.[68] But passions once fully aroused hurl reason from its throne,
and so it was in this case. The rowdies gathered at a drinking place in
West Bend, and decided on a lynching.

Judge Larrabee convened a special session of court, impaneled a grand
jury, and having summoned two companies of militia--the Union Guards of
Ozaukee County, a German company, and the Washington Guards, another
German company, of Milwaukee--to come up for the protection of the
prisoner, had him conveyed to the courthouse and examined. The grand
jury brought in a true bill, charging murder in the first degree.
To this the prisoner, on the advice of his attorneys, pleaded “not
guilty.” The multitude which had been permitted to press into the
court room, despite the judge’s instruction to the militia to limit
the number to the seating capacity of the room, fairly raged when they
found a trial would be required, and before the prisoner took many
steps in the direction of the jail, they seized him and made way with
him.

The severest censure was leveled against the militia companies and
their leaders. All the American writers whose statements appear in the
_Sentinel_ charge that these companies fraternized with the lynching
party, and practically assert that they had an understanding by which
the prisoner was to be given up to them. The captain of the Milwaukee
company, who was a veteran of the Mexican War--though a German
immigrant--insisted with vigor that his company did all it could to
prevent the lynching. He did not speak for the Union Guards of Ozaukee.
All witnesses agree that one of the Union Guard officers, Lieutenant
Beger, performed his duty manfully and heroically, but the weight of
the testimony condemns the companies as organizations, and especially
their captains. It would seem that two companies of militia, if well
led, ought to have been able with the butts of their guns to hold off a
rabble of three hundred men, and no witness puts the number higher than
that, while some declare the rush was made by not more than thirty-five
men.

In the Milwaukee captain’s statement, as in the statements of other
German apologists for the militia, we come at once upon the political
note. They could not expect the “Know-Nothing American writers” to tell
the truth about the tragedy. In other words, they found in the politics
of the time an opportunity to charge prejudice against Americans, and
by that means to dodge the real issue. Two German writers of West Bend,
one of them the undersheriff, bitterly denounced both the militia
companies and the lynchers, and both more than hint that the passions
which led to the lynching were partly religious. Here, undoubtedly, we
come upon one of the signs of division among the Germans themselves. It
is possible that these two Germans were politically opposed to the main
body of their fellow-countrymen, for by this time a light minority had
already been attracted away from the Democratic party. However, we do
not know that this was true, and merely call attention to the several
psychological attitudes which, from the testimony, we know the case
disclosed.

Of greatest interest is the attitude of English and German language
papers of Democratic and Republican proclivities. The _Sentinel_
continued to admit contributions on the West Bend tragedy for
approximately two weeks. It also published the results of an
investigation made on the ground by one of its staff, and a petition to
the governor, said to have been signed by 186 residents of Washington
County, who asked for the disbandment of the two accused companies
and the withdrawal of their officers’ commissions. But the _Sentinel_
does not appear to have tried by means of the incident to influence
the political situation which was about to become superheated. At all
events, what it published would all have been legitimate as news. On
the other hand, the _Banner und Volksfreund_,[69] while condemning the
lynching, made no demand for the punishment of the lynchers. It tried
to exculpate the militia companies (accepting the Milwaukee captain’s
testimony as against all other evidence), and deliberately charged
that the _Sentinel_, in publishing the above-mentioned petition, was
playing for political advantage. This charge was absurd on its face,
for the success of the new Republican movement which the _Sentinel_ had
espoused depended on its ability to detach Germans from the Democratic
party, which assuredly could not be done by playing into the hands of
the Know-Nothings, and the _Sentinel_ did not hesitate to declare the
Know-Nothing support a handicap to the party.

Both American and German testimony discloses the existence in
Washington County of a strong German party of law and order. They
deplored the lynching and urged the apprehension and trial of the
ringleaders. They realized that the crime would put a stigma upon their
race as well as upon the county and the state. But, as a matter of
fact, although some of the lynchers were identified in the verdict of
the coroner’s jury, it must be recorded that no earnest effort was made
to punish them.[70] Nor was any step of an official character taken (so
far as I have been able to find) to determine the guilt or innocence of
the militia companies and their officers. In fact, the Democratic press
of the state, evidently fearful of sacrificing some German Democratic
votes, which that year were all needed, deliberately tried to darken
council by confounding this case in principle not only with the
Mayberry case, which it resembled, but also with another of an entirely
different nature, to which we must give passing attention.

In the previous year, 1854, occurred at Milwaukee the famous Glover
rescue. Glover was a runaway slave who had been apprehended by his
self-styled owner, brutally man-handled, and confined in the Milwaukee
County jail for safekeeping. Sherman M. Booth, editor of the _Daily
Free Democrat_, one of the founders of the Republican party, a vigorous
free-soil and antislavery partisan, and the man in the state who was
perhaps most feared and hated by the Democracy, had argued hotly for
the protection of Glover’s rights against the man claiming him under
the “unconstitutional” compromise law of 1850. Booth called a public
meeting at the courthouse for the purpose, as he claimed, of concerting
measures for helping Glover without the use of force. But the upshot
was a rescue party which battered down the door of the jail, took
Glover out, and by various shifts and transfers on the underground
railway, carried him to Canada and freedom. Booth was then made to
suffer for all that had been done; he was tried in the federal court,
convicted, fined, and given a jail sentence.

We cannot go into the details of the Booth case, a _cause célèbre_ in
ante-Civil War political history. But the Democratic papers, after the
DeBar lynching, ostentatiously bemoaned the fact that due to recent
events “neither national nor state laws” could hereafter be enforced
in Wisconsin. The beginning of the trouble was the setting at naught
of the national law for the rendition of slaves, in which the arch
Republican Booth was ringleader. The Mayberry lynching and the DeBar
lynching followed in natural sequence. These editors did not choose to
analyze the difference between the Glover case and the others--the fact
that the one was a rescue performed at their own risk by philanthropic
men, the others brutal killings committed by men crazed with the lust
of blood vengeance. In other words, the Democratic press, including
those papers printed in the German language, attempted the impossible
feat of arranging in the same straight line the “higher law” and the
lower law.

Of course, the Republican press retorted handsomely, and probably
with considerable political effect, that if the apologists for mob
law in Kansas were “in favor of the execution of the fugitive slave
act in Wisconsin” they would like their avowal to that effect.[71] It
is well known that during the 1855 campaign, as in the previous year,
a good many Germans were converted from their old-time Democratic
allegiance.[72] But both parties were too intent on their immediate
political objects to risk pressing for an investigation of the West
Bend tragedy, which might have alienated a large section of the German
vote in three German counties.

It is not impossible that politics was responsible for the severity of
the onslaught upon the militia companies, since the nativist propaganda
for an exclusively American militia would be quick to seize upon such
an opportunity, and it is not to be supposed that the politics of the
case was all on one side. Yet, unless the governor was in possession of
facts which were withheld from the public, the least that could be said
against the companies is that they exhibited criminal inefficiency.
From this distance, it looks as if politics affected the Republican
attitude as well as the Democratic; as if crime was condoned in the
interest of party success, since one party was intent on holding its
former German adherents and the other was determined to take as many of
them as possible into the opposition camp.

Whether or not the incident leaves the stain of blood on the path
of Wisconsin politics, it marks the nearest approach to a race war
between Germans and Americans which this general period affords. And
by Americans we practically mean Yankees. For it was a truth which the
German press sensed instinctively, that the Republican party--made
up of “shreds and patches,” as was said,--embracing prohibitionists,
abolitionists, free-soilers, nativists, and Whigs, was dominated by
the “Puritan” element.[73] A glance at the history of its origin in
Wisconsin will at least convince the reader of its Yankee paternity.[74]

However, the Republican party changed radically in character
during the next few years, and as the German population came to be
distributed between it and the Democratic party, a healthier social
tone was the result. The political campaign of 1856, when Frémont was
candidate for the presidency, was conducted with such enthusiasm by
Wisconsin Republicans, as to make serious inroads on the Democratic
German vote. A number of prominent German leaders took the stump
for Frémont, speaking in the German language to German audiences
with telling effect. Thereafter, in successive state campaigns and
in the presidential canvass of 1860, the Germans of Wisconsin were
electrified by the compelling oratory of their greatest campaigner,
Carl Schurz, to whom the success of the Lincoln ticket, both in
Wisconsin and other western states harboring many Germans, was largely
due. Such participation was doing much to justify the prophecy of Dr.
Huebschmann--that political equality would help to make the people of
Wisconsin “one people.”


[Illustration:

  _Photo by Edward C. Nelson_

  WM. STEPHEN HAMILTON, FOUNDER OF MUSCODA]




MUSCODA, 1763-1856

JOSEPH SCHAFER


The light which local inquiry can shed upon general history is well
illustrated from a variety of viewpoints in the story of the Wisconsin
village which is the subject of this sketch.

Muscoda as a present-day railway station is inconspicuously located on
the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul line, Prairie du Chien division,
at the distance of fifty-six miles almost due west from Madison, one
hundred and fifty-two from Milwaukee; it is forty-two miles east from
Prairie du Chien. The village was begun at the river bank on the south
side of Wisconsin River, in section 1, township 8 north, range 1 west
of the fourth principal meridian. It stretches south from the river
toward the flanking hills about three-fourths of a mile, the main
portion now clustering about the depot, whereas the “Old Town” lay
farther north and hugged the river bank.

The ground on which Muscoda stands is a portion of the sandy plain,
the outwash of the erosion process by which the Wisconsin and its
larger tributaries worked their way through the sandstone stratum. The
upper courses of these tributaries and the smaller streams which feed
them have laid down flood bottoms of rich alluvium. Often, too, the
bench land of their valleys is a fertile limestone soil intermingled
with clayey patches and occasional streaks of sand. These are all
characteristics of the “Driftless Area,” as the geologists have named
this region, because the various primordial movements of glacial
ice, so influential in modifying the topography elsewhere, passed
around instead of over it, leaving no “drift” upon it. The terrain
is just what the eroding waters in the course of countless ages made
it--a system of regular valleys perfectly drained and bounded by
symmetrically sculptured hills or bluffs, which exhibit a level sky
line and decrease in altitude steadily till at the heads of the streams
they merge in the great plateau or “prairie” of southern Wisconsin. The
valleys make natural and not ill-graded highways from the prairie to
the Wisconsin River, while the ranges of bluffs separating them appear
like promontories running out fingerwise from the main plateau and
terminating either where two smaller streams converge or at the edge of
the lower plain laid down by the Wisconsin.

The principal stream entering the Wisconsin from the south, in the
neighborhood of Muscoda, is Blue River--the “Riviere Bleu” of the
French traders. It has several head streams rising in township 6-1 E,
and a large affluent named the Fennimore rising in 6-1 W, the Six Mile
Creek, rising in 7-1 E and Sandy Branch which heads in 8-1 E. There are
also several small branches entering the Fennimore from 7-2 W. In its
lower course the Blue River swerves to the west, entering the Wisconsin
near Blue River Station, in Township 8-2 W, but its rich upper valleys
and those of its tributaries have always been mainly within the trade
area of Muscoda. North of the Wisconsin the valleys most intimately
associated with Muscoda are Indian Creek, Eagle Creek, and Knapp’s
Creek in Richland County. The “Sand Prairie,” by which name the sandy
plain along the Wisconsin on the south side has long been known, and a
narrow tract of shelving land between the river and the hills on the
north are also within the Muscoda area.

Since the bluffs are mostly rough land, with only limited areas
on their summits where the soil is deep, free from stones, and
sufficiently even for cultivation, and the sand prairie comparatively
infertile, Muscoda as a trade center suffers from the low average
productivity of her territory. Still, from pioneer days the long
valleys beyond the sand prairie have yielded abundant harvests;
the roads through them from the high prairie to the south opened to
Muscoda’s merchants for some years a great trade in livestock and
grain beyond her legitimate boundaries; while the cross ranges which
run out from the high prairie northward approximately fifteen miles
forced the only rival railway,[75] when it came, back upon the great
ridge, leaving the north trending valleys still as a whole tributary to
Muscoda.


THE BACKGROUND

According to Father Verwyst, a distinguished authority, the name
Muscoda is a corruption of the Chippewa word “Mashkodeng” which means
“prairie.” A similar corruption occurs in the name “Muscatine,” a town
in Iowa, and there was a tribe of Indians on the Upper Fox River called
Mascouten (prairie Indians).

The earlier name of the place was English Prairie, and while it is
clear that geography suggested “Prairie” (or Savannah), there are
various traditions to explain the association of the word “English”
with it. One is that some English families were settled there as early
as 1812 and that they were massacred by the Indians. Another, that the
place was so named from the fact that Colonel McKay, who descended the
river in 1814 with a regiment of British troops to capture Prairie
du Chien, encamped at this place which thereafter was called English
Prairie.

A more hopeful clue to the origin of the name occurs in the journal of
Willard Keyes, a young New Englander who passed down the river with a
party in 1817. He writes, under date of August 29, 1817: “pass a place
called ‘English meadow’ from an English trader and his son, said to
have been murdered there by the savages, 20 Leagues to Prairie du
Chien.”[76] Now, the fact of “an English trader and his son” being
murdered at some point on the Wisconsin River between the Portage and
Prairie du Chien is well established. In the journal of Lieut. James
Gorrell, the first English commandant at Green Bay after the ejection
of the French, we read, under date of June 14, 1763: “The traders came
down from the Sack [Sauk] country, and confirmed the news of Landsing
and his son being killed by the French.” When all the Sauk and Foxes
had arrived at Green Bay a few days later they told Gorrell that their
people were all in tears “for the loss of two English traders who were
killed by the French in their lands, and begged leave ... to cut them
[the French] in pieces.”[77]

In the following summer, 1764, Garrit Roseboom testified, that “about
the latter end of April, 1763, he was going from the Bay [Green Bay] to
the Soaks [Sauk] to look for his Partner Abrah[a]m Lancing who had been
up there, being told that he was killed, that on his way he met some
Indians coming down with some Packs [of furs], which he knew to be his,
and which they said he could have for paying the carriage. That both
the French and Indians told him, Mr. Lancing and his son were killed
by two Frenchmen” who were servants of Mr. Lansing and who afterwards
escaped to the Illinois Indians.[78]

When we reflect how persistent is the memory of great tragedies and
recall that some of the French traders and voyageurs who were on the
river when the murder took place remained there for many years and
handed down the traditions of the river to their successors, it is not
hard to believe that it was the story of Abraham Lansing and his son,
slightly altered, which Willard Keyes heard from the rivermen as his
boat drifted along the “English meadow” in 1817. The French traders
in whose company he was would not be likely to ascribe the murder to
their own people so long as there were “savages” who might just as
well serve as scapegoats. We may consider it almost certain, then,
that the place came to be called English Prairie from the gruesome
crime of 1763, which had occurred almost three-quarters of a century
before the postoffice of that name was established, and more than half
a century prior to the voyage of Willard Keyes. Jonathan Carver, who
visited a village of the Fox Indians at that place in 1766, does not
use the name; but neither does he mention the story of the murder which
occurred only three years before.

No definite information about the fur trade at English Prairie, aside
from the record in Lansing’s case, has come down to us. Tradition
has it that Laurent Rolette, brother of the famous Prairie du Chien
trader, Joseph Rolette, traded there for some years, going later to the
Portage. It appears also that some time before the arrival of white
settlers a trader named Armstrong operated in that neighborhood. But
no details have been preserved and we can only infer from the fact
that Indians were still numerous when settlers came that the trade at
English Prairie in earlier times was probably important.

It was the Black Hawk War and the treaties following it that produced
the revolutionary change in the life of the natives in this region.
From that time forward Indians could live south of the river only on
sufferance, though they were permitted to roam the forests to the
northward for about a quarter of a century longer. During the Black
Hawk War a detachment of Colonel Henry Dodge’s Mounted Volunteers
went to English Prairie, another detachment going at the same time to
Prairie du Chien. Between them these two bodies of troops scoured both
sides of the Wisconsin from the mouth to the Portage, dislodging all
natives. English Prairie was also the camping ground for a military
company composed of friendly Indians recruited at Green Bay and led to
Prairie du Chien by Samuel C. Stambaugh in July, 1832. The route of
march was from Green Bay to the Portage, thence to Sugar Creek (near
Blue Mounds), thence to Fort Dodge (Dodgeville), thence to English
Prairie, thence to Prairie du Chien “with one other camping between.”


RELATION TO THE LEAD MINES

History repeats itself in making the Indian War of 1832 the impulse to
a great new expansion movement among American pioneers. Just as the
Pequod War of 1638 by familiarizing the coast settlers of Massachusetts
with the rich lands of the interior enticed them westward, and as the
Seven Years’ War destroyed the last obstacle to western and northern
expansion in New England, so in a very real sense this war made the
beginnings of the agricultural settlement in Wisconsin. Immediately
after the Black Hawk War the survey of the lands in southern Wisconsin
began. In the four years, 1832 to 1836, the entire region from the
Illinois line north to the Wisconsin, the Fox, and Green Bay, and from
the Mississippi to Lake Michigan, was checked off into townships and
sections. Hardy, resourceful government surveyors, with their crews
(usually two chainmen and one axman) traversed every square mile,
whether prairie, forest, valley, or bluff. In 1834 a land office was
opened at Mineral Point for the sale of lands in the western portion of
Michigan Territory (as it was then).

The ranges of townships numbered 1 W and 1 E, of which the townships
numbered eight (Muscoda and Pulaski) bounded by the Wisconsin, were
for some years the northernmost, were surveyed by Sylvester Sibley in
1833. The next year those lands were offered for sale and some tracts
along the river were actually sold to private individuals. Among the
purchasers were Thomas Jefferson Parrish and Charles Bracken, who
were well-known lead miners and smelters living farther south. Others
among the early land owners of Township 8-1 W have been identified as
mining men.

[Illustration: THE LEAD REGION

  After Owens’ Geological Chart, 1839; drawn by Mary Stuart Foster]

The lead mines, while known and worked by Indians and a few traders
for many years, received the first large body of emigrants in 1828,
when several thousand came scattering out widely over the territory
which now constitutes Grant, Iowa, and Lafayette counties in Wisconsin,
together with adjacent parts of Iowa. These were the lead miners who
under Dodge and Hamilton fought the Black Hawk War. It was these hardy
pioneers who as troopers patrolled the Wisconsin River and who finally
delivered the coup de grace to Black Hawk’s band far to the north on
the banks of the Mississippi.

Many of the lead miners were shrewd business men always on the lookout
for good financial prospects. With the knowledge of new regions
gained during the war, either from personal observation or from
reliable report, with the sense of a new era opening to settlement and
expansion in the region dependent for transportation facilities on the
Mississippi and Wisconsin rivers, it is not strange that some of them
should have been interested in river points lying as far outside the
mineral belt proper as did English Prairie.


A RIVER PORT

For it is clear that it was water and not lead that the pioneers of
Muscoda sought. Surveyors and prospectors had found no hopeful signs of
mineral north of townships 6-1 W and 7-1 E. A few years later (1839)
Dr. David Dale Owen, the geologist, made his famous survey of the lead
region and excluded from it everything north of the heads of Blue River
in townships 6 and 7-1 E. When the lands in township 8-1 W were offered
for sale in November, 1834, it was precisely the river front lots and
subdivisions which were taken first. Parrish entered fractional lots
2 and 3 of section 1; Frederick Bronson the northeast fraction of the
southeast quarter of section 1; Isaac Bronson the south half of the
southeast fractional quarter; Garrit V. Denniston the southeast half
of the fractional southwest quarter; and Denniston and Charles Bracken
fraction No. 4 of fractional section 1. Other water front tracts in
section 2 were bought by Denniston at this time; between 1836 and 1841
other tracts in the same sections were bought by others. All of these
lands were obviously deemed favorable locations for a prospective town
dependent on river transportation.

The way in which the village was begun, by the erection of a smelting
furnace, is rather startling, in view of the absence of lead in the
region adjacent. The motives which induced Colonel William S. Hamilton
of Wiota to build a furnace at English Prairie can only be conjectured.

Colonel Hamilton was the son of the great Alexander Hamilton,
Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury. As a lad of seventeen in 1814
he entered West Point but resigned in 1817 to accept a commission as
deputy surveyor-general under Col. William Rector, surveyor-general
for Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas. From that time young Hamilton
was almost continuously in the West, though he made one trip east, on
horseback, to see his mother. He was in Wisconsin as early as 1825 and
in 1827 began his career as a lead miner and smelter in what is now
Lafayette County at Wiota or Hamilton’s Diggings. He took part in the
Indian troubles of 1827, and also in the Black Hawk War.

It is not known with certainty when Hamilton established his furnace
at English Prairie. Tradition says it was in the year 1835. If the
furnace was operating then, it is strange that so careful an observer
as Featherstonhaugh, who dropped down the Wisconsin in August, 1835
and stopped at English Prairie to draw a sketch of its landscape,
should have failed to note that fact.[79] We are probably justified
in asserting that the furnace was not there at that time. But we know
it was there in 1837, for Captain Frederick Marryat, a famous English
writer who descended the river in that year, saw “a small settlement
called the English prairie” where there was a “smelting-house and a
steam saw-mill.”[80] I incline to think the year 1836 was the date
of its beginning. In 1835 Hamilton was a candidate for member of the
Council from the western part of Michigan Territory. His canvass was
conducted in the lead mining region and his advertisement appeared
in the Galena papers. He was elected to and became president of the
so-called “Rump” Council which met at Green Bay January 1, 1836 and
sat for two weeks. During that session the town of Cassville, on the
Mississippi, was designated as the territorial capital, Hamilton making
the principal argument in favor of the movement. Much interest was
manifested in internal improvements designed to develop a through line
of transportation via the Wisconsin and Fox rivers.[81] The territory
of Wisconsin was just being organized by Congressional action and great
expectations were being awakened in consequence.

The miners and smelters had theretofore sold their lead through the
commission merchants of Galena, by whom it was sent to St. Louis.
But as new mines were opened farther and farther north, the cost of
transportation to Galena--by means of the “sucker teams”[82]--steadily
increased. Moreover, in the year 1836-37 the price of lead declined
so alarmingly that little of it was made and the smelters had nearly
all ceased to operate. Yet, it was felt that prices would rise again
promptly in response to the demand for lead. In the same period, due
no doubt partly to the hardships of the miners and smelters, there was
widespread and loud dissatisfaction with the treatment accorded the
lead owners by the Galena middlemen. Efforts were made to establish
some other lead shipping port as a rival to Galena, which helps to
explain the rise of both Cassville and Potosi.

The inference from these facts is that Hamilton probably thought he
saw in a smelter located at the steamboat landing at English Prairie a
possibility of immediate profit, even though margins were very narrow,
and a chance to build up a flourishing business. He could buy the
cheapest ore--that which was produced near the northern edge of the
lead region, Centerville, Wingville, and Highland. The haul from those
places would be short and all down grade and if the mineral were taken
direct from the mines there would be no rehandling until the bars of
pure lead were ready to be dumped from the furnace floor into the hold
of the steamer. The teams employed to bring down the raw mineral could
carry freight back the fifteen or twenty miles to the mines much more
cheaply than it could be transported from Galena or Cassville three
or four times as far. Finally, abundant supplies of wood were at hand
to feed the furnace, and French rivermen were a source from which to
recruit labor.

To an enterprising, speculative, acquisitive character like Hamilton,
who had no family to tie him to a particular spot, such arguments would
appeal strongly, and there is no inherent reason why the venture should
not have succeeded. Hamilton operated the furnace, either personally or
by proxy, at least till 1838 and possibly longer, selling it finally to
Thomas Jefferson Parrish, whose principal mining and smelting business
was located at the head of Blue River, afterwards Montfort.

The fact that Parrish owned the ground at the steamboat landing
and that in 1837 he was postmaster at English Prairie (then called
Savannah) suggests that he may have been a partner in the business from
the first and perhaps local manager of the furnace. At all events,
Hamilton continued his business at Wiota and very soon cut loose
entirely from the English Prairie venture.[83] That place, under the
name of Savannah or English Prairie, was a calling place for river
steamers as early as 1838 and is scheduled as forty-one miles from
the mouth of the Wisconsin.[84] It was said that the only boat which
regularly plied on the river in that year was the _Science_, piloted by
Captain Clark, who made his first voyage in June, 1838.[85] But there
were doubtless visits from steamers running to Fort Winnebago (Portage)
during that and earlier years.

In one of the Milwaukee papers for 1841 is a statement that “four
sucker teams” had brought in lead from Thomas Parrish’s furnace “near
Muscoday in Grant County.” This reference has been taken as proof
that the Muscoda furnace was still in operation. I think it refers
not to the Muscoda furnace but to one of several furnaces Parrish was
conducting in the lead region near the heads of Blue River. The phrase
“near Muscoday” used as far from the lead region as Milwaukee may very
well mean some place fifteen or twenty miles from the Wisconsin; and
the word “near” instead of “at” certainly excludes Muscoda itself.
Setting this evidence aside, there is no proof that the Muscoda furnace
was operated as late as 1841. Nor, on the other hand, is there proof of
its earlier discontinuance. We simply do not know how long it was kept
alive or how large a business it developed at the “Landing.”


SIGNS OF HARD TIMES

Two things suggest that the little village failed to develop a “boom”
or even to gain a basis for healthy growth. These are the land
entries in the territory adjacent and the story of the post office.
Practically, there were no new entries of land between the years
1841 and 1849. This is true for all the townships in the tributary
region--7, 8, and 9, range 1 W, and 7, 8, and 9, range 1 E. The post
office under the name of Savannah appears in the government list for
the first time in the report for 1837. At that time Thomas J. Parrish
was postmaster. In 1839 S. A. Holley was postmaster, the office then
being listed as English Prairie. The postmaster’s compensation was
$5.68. Charles Stephenson’s compensation in 1841 was even smaller,
$3.36, the net proceeds of the office amounting to only $7.55. In 1843,
for the first time, the post office was called Muscoda. The postmaster
was Levi J. D. Parrish, who received as compensation $9.29, the net
proceeds of the office having risen to $16.51.

It is probable that most of the seeming prosperity of 1843 was due to
the presence of the land office, which had been removed from Mineral
Point to Muscoda in 1842. Some have charged that the change was brought
about through James D. Doty’s influence in order to save the town.
If so, the scheme failed, for the land office promptly went back to
Mineral Point in 1843, and May 16, 1845, the post office department
discontinued the office at Muscoda. Muscoda was not listed in the post
office report for 1847 or in the report for 1849. In 1851 it reappears,
with James Moore as postmaster. Now the compensation is $39.74 and the
net proceeds $53.09. The exact date of its restoration is not given
but it must have been as early as 1850, and possibly 1849 or even
1847.[86]


BEGINNINGS OF SETTLEMENT

The reopening of the Muscoda post office, about 1850, synchronizes with
the first movement of pioneer farmers into the good lands tributary
to that place. A number of tracts of land were purchased by actual
settlers in this and adjoining townships in the years 1849 to 1851.
Indeed, Conrad Kircher’s purchase dates from 1847. Charles Miller and
Emanuel Dunston bought land in 1849; Isaac Dale and Moses Manlove in
1851. We know also that the Moore family owned land at Muscoda as early
as 1851. Across the river, in township 9-1 W, Robert Galloway, William
Pickering, William and Andrew Miller, and two or three others bought
in 1849; several in 1850; and a few others before 1854, when the great
rush came.

A similar story can be told for township 9-1 E (now Orion) where
J. H. Schuermann and Daniel Mainwaring (settlers) bought lands in
1849; Albert C. Dooley in 1850; and Jacob Roggy in 1851. One of the
purchasers of 1848, John H. Siegrist, was probably the earliest actual
settler in the township. A half dozen families bought in township 8-1
E as early as 1849; and a few others were added before 1854. A very
few settlers were to be found in township 7-1 W prior to 1854, and
while there were a good many settlers and miners in township 7-1 E,
the greater part of that township was served from Highland where a
post office was established as early at least as 1847 and where there
was much lead mining activity, and from Blue River which had a post
office from 1839. These mining centers doubtless drew their supplies
from the steamers unloading at Muscoda, for the road to the river
at that point had been open for many years, but settlement was more
numerous and local activity much more intense, as revealed by the post
office returns. The Highland post office led the Muscoda post office in
importance for just about ten years--from 1847 to 1856. With the coming
of the railroad, Muscoda drew ahead.


THE RAILROAD

If one had no other evidence than the sales of land at the United
States Land Office, it would still be clear that in the years 1854 to
1856 something important was astir affecting the value of lands in
those townships (7, 8, and 9-1 W, and 7, 8, and 9-1 E) which pivot on
Muscoda as the trading point. For, while up to 1854 only scattering
tracts of land had been entered, and those largely by speculators using
military land warrants in making payment to the government, by 1856
nearly every forty-acre subdivision of first-rate land and much of the
second-rate land also was under private ownership. And the state lands
in the townships had also been purchased to the same extent. Besides,
the vast majority of the purchasers of government land during those
years were actual settlers, with only an occasional speculator.[87]

These facts challenge attention and call for an explanation. Wisconsin
had been in course of settlement for about two decades. The earliest
settlements were in the southeastern and eastern parts of the state
where the economic support was the market reached by the Great Lakes
and the Erie Canal; and in the southwestern section where the basis of
prosperity had been lead-mining. The lead found its market mainly down
the Mississippi, though increasingly the superiority of the route open
to the lake ports had impressed itself upon the people.

At the legislative session of 1841-42 a bill was introduced for the
chartering of a railroad from Milwaukee, via Madison, to Potosi.
Despite continuous effort, the first railroad bill to pass, in 1847,
provided only for a railroad from Milwaukee to Waukesha. In 1848 this
was by law extended to the Mississippi.

The agitation of plans for a railroad from Lake Michigan to the
Mississippi tended to give the lake route an overshadowing importance
in the popular mind. Actual construction work on the Milwaukee-Waukesha
section began in 1849; that portion of the road was completed by the
end of the year 1850, and in another year it was practically completed
to Whitewater on Rock River. It reached Madison in the year 1854.

The intention of the company had been to build to the Wisconsin River
so as to intercept steamboat transportation at or near Arena. Thence
the road might run along the river to its mouth, or it might run along
the ridge between the Wisconsin and the south flowing streams, reaching
the Mississippi at some point, like Potosi, lower down. By the year
1853 it had been determined to follow the Wisconsin Valley route to
the Mississippi, and during that summer the line was surveyed from the
mouth of Black Earth Creek to Prairie du Chien.

It can easily be imagined how the clangor of railway construction
echoed in the minds and hearts of intending settlers. That they should
have watched, with greedy eye, the reports of progress of the location
of the road and hurried away to the land office as soon as it was
definitely located, to buy the good lands adjacent to the right-of-way,
is a perfectly normal phenomenon. The township plats showing original
purchasers of the government land tell the story. In section 1,
township 7-1 W, four forty-acre tracts were bought in 1854; eleven in
1855; and one in 1856. In section 2, one in 1854; twelve in 1855; and
two in 1857. A single forty had been bought as early as 1847. The other
sections of that township show very similar dates and proportions in
the entries; the same is true of the other townships of the group. The
1854 entrymen were those who pursued the railway surveyors with keenest
determination. The slower ones came mainly in the two years following,
during which trains actually were put on the roadbed. In October, 1856,
the village of Muscoda, which had maintained a precarious existence
for twenty years, awoke to newness of life at the sound of the puffing
locomotive. And the beginning of permanent prosperity for the village
meant the beginning of prosperity for the rural neighborhood tributary
to it.




POPULAR CENSORSHIP OF HISTORY TEXTS

JOSEPH SCHAFER


Wisconsin has now a unique law on the subject of school history texts.
That law provides, section 1:

    No history or other textbook shall be adopted for use or be in any
    district school, city school, vocational school or high school
    which falsifies the facts regarding the War of Independence or the
    War of 1812 or which defames our nation’s founders or misrepresents
    the ideals and cause for which they struggled and sacrificed, or
    which contains propaganda favorable to any foreign government.

The method provided in other sections of the law for banishing
textbooks which have been adopted but which are repugnant to the above
provision is as follows: Upon complaint of any five citizens, filed
with the state superintendent of public instruction, a hearing shall
be arranged, to be held before the state superintendent or his deputy,
in the county from which the complaint came. Previous notice must
have been given through the press to the public and by mail to the
complainants and to the publishers of the textbook complained of. A
decision must be rendered within ten days. If the book shall be found
obnoxious to the provisions of the law, that fact shall be noted by
the state superintendent in the list of books for schools which he
publishes annually. Thereafter the book so listed may be used only
during the remainder of the year in which the state superintendent
publishes it as proscribed. The penalty for retaining it beyond the
time limit, shall be the loss to the school or district concerned of
the state aid normally falling to its share.

The passage of this bill in the senate with only one vote against it,
created a good deal of surprise, which changed to admiration for the
oratorical powers of its author and sponsor, Senator John Cashman of
Manitowoc County, when it was learned that his impassioned appeal to
patriotism figuratively swept senators “off their feet.”

History students can have no quarrel with the motive assigned by
Senator Cashman for the passage of this law. He says: “The history
of a nation is its proudest asset. It includes the record of its
great men, their ideals, sacrifices, and achievements. To preserve
that history in all its original purity and teach it to the rising
generations is a nation’s first duty.” With every word in that stirring
exordium the historically minded man or woman will cordially agree.
Thoughtful persons, whether historians or not, will also sympathize
with Senator Cashman when he undertakes to rebuke anything approaching
levity in characterizing the fathers of the Republic or captiousness in
criticizing their policies, motives, and achievements. Unfortunately,
there always have been among writers some who display a certain air
of “smartness” or superciliousness which hardly comports with the
inherent dignity of the historian’s office, or with the aim of doing
equal and exact justice to all persons and to all causes discussed.
Yet it will probably be no light task to convince an impartial umpire
that writers of textbooks which have been adopted for use in the
schools, after careful scrutiny by boards of education and other school
officers responsible to the people, have been guilty of “treason
to the nation,” as Senator Cashman seems to think has often been
the case.[88] The framers of the constitution, with wise prevision,
limited the application of the word “treason” in such a way as to
exclude that indefinite class of crimes known elsewhere under the name
of _constructive treason_, which in England and other countries had
provided a favorable soil for plotters of revenge against individuals
and in times of high tension always yielded a sinister harvest of
oppression and suffering. So they defined treason against the United
States narrowly as consisting only in “levying war against them or
in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort,” and they
also provided that conviction under a charge of treason could be
secured only on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act or
confession in open court.

This view of the fathers as relates to treason was of course lost sight
of during the Civil War, when in the North it used to be fashionable
for men to pillory as “fool” or “traitor” (with an emphatic expletive)
anyone who had the temerity to vote the Democratic ticket; it was
lost sight of in the recent war when men were called traitors because
they refused to buy liberty bonds or because they declared the draft
a violation of the rights of the individual; and it is likewise
lost sight of when we condemn under the term treason opinions on
history which we may regard as too favorable to our nation’s one-time
enemies, or too contemptuous of the characters or the acts of our own
distinguished men of a past age. It would be strange if the impulses
engendered by the war and the peace were not reflected more or less in
editions of books prepared since 1917. It is probably true that some
authors have overstressed the “hands across the sea” sentiment, while
others perhaps lean unduly in an opposite direction. But that any of
them have been guilty of treasonable acts or even intentions is what no
one who knows the historical profession can believe without the most
explicit proof.

But this question of treason aside, the problem still remains to
determine what is the history of our country “in all its original
purity.” What shall be the test of purity inasmuch as, happily, there
is no established list of authorized books or records from which
writers must derive their facts? Are they not compelled either to
investigate each point for themselves or to accept as probably correct
the results of other men’s investigations? To be sure, every important
event creates its own legend or tradition, and such legends tend to
be preserved and to be handed down from generation to generation. But
legends are not history. No one worthy to rank as a careful historian
would presume to write the history of the Great War on the basis of
legends now crystallizing about it. No more can one write the history
of the Revolution on such a legendary basis. This view, that much
which once was thought to be history but was in fact mere legend, is
not in any sense new. James Russell Lowell, who ranks among the very
distinguished Americans of the last generation, wrote, in 1864, that
the early reports of the battle of Lexington claimed for the Yankee
minutemen a non-resistant attitude.

    The Anglo Saxon could not fight without the law on his side. But
    later, when the battle became a matter of local pride, the muskets
    that had been fired at the Red coats under Pitcairn almost rivalled
    in number the pieces of furniture that came over in the Mayflower.
    Indeed, whoever has talked much with Revolutionary pensioners knows
    that those honored veterans were no less remarkable for imagination
    than for patriotism. It should seem that there is nothing on
    which so little reliance can be placed as facts, especially when
    related by one who saw them. It is no slight help to our charity to
    recollect that, in disputable matters, every man sees according to
    his prejudices, and is stone blind to whatever he did not expect or
    did not mean to see. Even where no personal bias can be suspected,
    contemporary and popular evidence is to be taken with great
    caution, so exceedingly careless are men as to exact truth, and
    such poor observers, for the most part of what goes on under their
    eyes.[89]

It is hardly necessary at this late day to insist that no writer is
justified in building his narrative of events on unverified tradition.
He must try to penetrate to the truth that lies behind the legend
(which in some cases will differ very widely from the legend itself).
It is no easy task at best to perform a successful piece of historical
research, and the questions on which final agreements have been reached
are not numerous. Accordingly, if the law should be so construed
as to enforce banishment from the schools of any book which can be
proved incorrect in some of its alleged facts without regard to their
importance, no textbooks will be left in the schools, for none are
impeccable. True, the Cashman law would condemn only for falsifying
the history of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, leaving four
other foreign wars in which our country has engaged, and the great
Civil War, to be treated without other restraint than that contained
in the last clause of section 1, denouncing propaganda in favor of any
foreign government. But under that sole provision it might still prove
embarrassing for a writer to tell the truth about the Mexican War and
possibly the others also, for the term propaganda--as the whole world
has learned lately--is a most elastic one. Presumably, the propaganda
test applies as well to other phases of history as to the military
phases, wherefore an author of a textbook is apt, under a strict
construction of this law, to be hauled into court on the charge of
propaganda if he should consider it his duty to say a single thing in
commendation of any other nation. For, will there not always be found,
in any school district, five citizens whose views collide with those of
the author; and if so, what is to prevent a case being called? Surely a
word in favor of France would be resented by some; a word in favor of
Great Britain would be resented by others; a word in favor of Germany
would offend still others; and so on through the list. In the present
mournful state of general unrest and want of confidence among nations,
an author would tread unsafely on any ground outside the “three-mile
limit.”

It does not follow from the fact that under the law it is easy to
bring cases, that convictions would be equally easy. Presumably the
state superintendent has had knowledge of all books now in use in the
schools and, in effect if not in form, has approved them. This he would
not have done had he considered any of them purveyors of treason or
excessively faulty in statement. Moreover, as judge in cases that may
arise under this law, the superintendent will be bound to take judicial
notice of some things. For example, it is common knowledge that no
history text is perfect either on its factual side, in its literary
qualities, or in the author’s perspective of events; that few writers
display at all times perfect taste, and none perfect judgment, in
their criticisms of men and their comments on historical actions and
movements; that a given textbook may be valuable, despite minor defects
in all of the above points, by reason of its superior arrangement, its
psychological adaptation to children’s needs, and the success with
which it communicates to them the main features and the spirit of
American history. He will also be obliged to rule that the truth is not
malicious propaganda and he is bound to maintain an author’s right to
liberty of research.

It goes without saying that if a book is palpably and grossly
inaccurate; if it gives the child a wholly erroneous view of history;
if it is crassly censorious of America’s great men; if it is written
in a spirit tending to destroy American ideals; if it tends to make
boys and girls ashamed of American character and achievements, not
in exceptional instances here and there, but generally; then there
would hardly be a question about the duty of getting rid of it with
all convenient promptness. But would it not be strange if, with the
superintendent and other educational experts on guard, such a book had
got itself adopted? On general principles one would expect that only
in the rarest cases would this law come into operation; for it ought
not to be easy for a thoroughly unworthy book to elude the critical
eyes of publishers, editors, school superintendents, teachers, and
school boards, to be finally detected and exposed by some school patron
or other private citizen. No doubt such cases are possible, but one
could hardly conceive them to be of common occurrence. Misgivings are
aroused, therefore, by the report that at the legislative hearing
Senator Cashman denounced, by name, five well known and widely used
textbooks.

If the Senator’s historical views, as published in the _Senate Journal_
under date of March 1, 1923, are intended to be made the platform in
a campaign to purify the history teaching of our schools, the upshot
may prove widely different from what is now anticipated; for among
those views, the derivation of which is not indicated, are some which
it would be difficult to find expressed in any existing textbook. For
example, Senator Cashman holds that our country is indebted to Holland
“for town and county representation in a legislature.” Americans
have long been taught that, in the picturesque phrase of John Fiske,
“self-government _broke out_ in Virginia” in 1619 by reason of the
fact that these people were English. We are aware of no investigations
which have brought forth evidence compelling the abandonment of that
view, though some very extravagant claims have been made for the
Dutch influence upon both colonial politics and colonial education.
He also holds that “our free public school system came from Prussia.”
If by this were meant merely that Prussian influence has been felt in
the creation of a system of state supervision of education, and in
the strengthening of a school system already in existence, we would
gladly concur. But the statement is too sweeping to admit of such an
interpretation. Wisconsin Germans ought to be very glad to assign to
New England colonies and states the chief influence in giving us the
public school system because, in the present state of research, that
appears to be where the credit belongs. To all that the Senator says
about the selection of immigrants for America, the development in the
colonies themselves of a new and vivid love of liberty which found
expression in the Declaration of Independence, the stupid tyranny of
George III, and the heroic sufferings and achievements of patriots in
the Revolution, we utter a hearty Amen; realizing, of course, that his
statement is necessarily a crowded summary, cast in oratorical mould,
and not designed as a complete exposition of his views. But, in thus
concurring we do not yield up our sympathy with the aphorism of Edmund
Burke, that in their reaction to tyranny the colonists “are descendants
of Englishmen.”

The same reservations might be made with reference to Senator Cashman’s
statement on the constitution. And yet a fair interpretation of what
he says on that subject compels us to class him with those extreme
worshipers of that document who, like the authors of the New York
teachers’ test oath, would maintain the constitution, unchanged, at
any cost. Speaking of the fathers and their work, he says: “Then
they wrote and the states adopted the supreme law of the land, the
American constitution, the most sublime public document that ever
came forth from the mind and soul of man, establishing a system of
government based upon the consent of the governed, with religious
liberty protected, inherent rights guaranteed, _to be written in
indestructible letters into the pages of the nation’s laws_.” [Editor’s
italics.] It is a well known view of the present progressives, as
it was of the framers themselves, that, great as was the original
constitution, it was still far from being perfect. Also, most
progressives now accept in principle the conclusions of Charles A.
Beard, the historian whose recent investigations on this point are
now well known, that the constitution represents a partial reaction
from the democracy of the Revolution, and was designed in part to set
limitations upon the popular will. While venerating the constitution,
progressives in the main believe that such restrictions as the
legislative election of senators, the appointment and life tenure
of judges (some would include the mode of electing the president),
were intentionally anti-democratic, and that these and other defects
which time has revealed ought to be subject to modification whenever
the people desire the changes. The mode of amendment having been
designed to make changes difficult, or impossible (though in recent
years several changes have been adopted), leading progressives have
long held that that fundamental article ought to be amended first in
order to facilitate other changes. This was Justice John B. Winslow’s
opinion, put forth in 1912; it was the burden of an important plank
in the La Follette national platform the same year; that doctrine was
preached, at least in spirit, by the late President Roosevelt. In
short, it is a progressive principle that the constitution must cease
to be a fetish--a dead hand upon the present and the future--and must
be adjusted, from time to time, to existing social, economic, and
political conditions. The document represents, for the time, a mighty
triumph of constructive statesmanship, so progressive leaders believe,
and it should not be changed “for light or transient causes,” much less
revolutionized, but “it was designed for a rural or semi-rural state.”
The men who made it “however able could not anticipate or solve the new
problems of life and government which have come upon us in the last
half century.”[90]

To follow Senator Cashman’s outline of American history into the
recent period to the all-engrossing event of the World War and
America’s participation therein would be fruitless. Not one of us can
conscientiously claim to be an impartial investigator with respect
to things which have wrenched our souls. We cannot abdicate our own
personalities. In treating the war, all that any historian at present
could hope to do would be to state his views with becoming restraint
and concede that those views may ultimately prove to be quite wrong.
A censorship law of fifty years hence (if our people shall then still
adhere to the censorship idea) would be sure to condemn the teaching
of what some of us now piously believe with reference to this feature
of history; just as a censorship law of today, if it included in its
scope the Civil War, would condemn the teaching of some things which
nearly one-half the voters of Wisconsin sincerely believed in 1864.
“Time is the great sifter and winnower of truth,” and we must consent
to leave these matters to the investigators of our grandchildren’s
generation. Yet the gravest danger to be feared from the law we are
now discussing lies in the psychological probability that every second
man’s opinion of a given history will be based not on what the author
says about the Revolution, or the Constitution, or the War of 1812,
but on what he says about the recent war and the League of Nations. In
other words, the reader who is prejudiced against an author on account
of his last chapter, which is almost sure to be unsatisfactory to many,
will find the first, the middle, and all other chapters reeking with
faults, and this even while personally he may be unconscious of having
imbibed a prejudice at all.

There is a possibility that, as an engine for expelling books now
used, the law will become a dead letter, first, because it may prove
unexpectedly difficult for a dissatisfied citizen to persuade four
others to act with him in making complaint, which however is not
probable; second, because of the clamor of those in the district who
are not keen for or against the book, but who realize that if it is
thrown out all old copies will be worthless and they will have to pay
for new books at the opening of the next school year; third, because
the first cases brought may go against the complainants and discourage
others from multiplying complaints. But, the popular psychology
being what it is, there is an equal chance that the law may foster
a widespread disposition to attack history books, geography books,
civics books, and even readers; that it may keep educational matters
in a state of turmoil, engendering much social bitterness due to
the clashing of parties and interests over questions raised in the
school-book fights. In such controversies teachers would be the first
to suffer, because their opinions would be called for at once, which
would place them between two fires; and no surer way could be found
to degrade the social influence of our schools than by keeping the
teachers in a state of perpetual anxiety.

We have reason to think that Senator Cashman, an acknowledged friend
and promoter of education, would deeply deplore such a result. If he
had anticipated anything of the kind, doubtless he would have refrained
from offering his bill. But laws, like children, when they get out of
hand, have a way of surprising their progenitors. However, we have the
law and must use it to the best ends.

If every one in position of leadership or authority in relation
to it--and among those are members of this Society--shall feel a
responsibility for guiding discussion into proper channels; if debate
on school-book questions shall be kept not merely free but also
parliamentary in form and spirit; if we all insist that differences
of view must be treated tolerantly; if we can secure from the public
toward the arguments and facts in these cases a measure of that
openness of mind which characterizes the American juror sworn to try a
case fairly on the evidence, it may be possible to mitigate or prevent
the evils apprehended.

And if, without discouraging research, the law shall merely enforce
through future adoptions the idea that good taste is as obligatory upon
the textbook maker as good manners are upon the private individual,
one point will have been gained. We trust this may not be won at the
expense of a disposition to whittle down the truth to fit a supposed
demand, or that it will result in substituting books written by
dishonest or spineless persons for those written by men and women of
real character and scholarship.

In the midst of the late war the school supervisors of a western
state discovered what they believed to be propaganda favorable to one
of America’s enemies, and demanded the expulsion of the book from the
schools. The superintendent, being a wise and thoughtful man, prepared
and printed a page of corrective criticism, which all teachers were
asked to paste in the accused book and to teach to the children with
the regular text. By that simple device he saved the people of the
state many thousands of dollars which would have been paid for an
inferior text, if the book had been expelled. If the law shall permit
such a handling of the borderline cases, does it not seem that in a
time when we are at peace with all nations, we could act with equal
calmness, equal justice to authors or publishers, and equal regard for
the interests of the people who have to buy school books?




FOOTNOTES:


[1] As the tide of emigration from the northeastern states rose higher,
it bore along a goodly number who were not of the old American stock,
particularly English and Irish, with some Scotch and Germans. Yet, many
of these were natives of the states named and, if foreign born, had
enjoyed so long an apprenticeship to the Yankee system of life as to
enable them faithfully to represent it.

[2] Of whom England, Ireland, Scotland, and Canada combined furnished
1920, Germany 460, and Norway 340.

[3] _Wisconsin Domesday Book, General Studies_, I. _History of
Agriculture in Wisconsin_, chap. 2.

[4] William Dames, _Wie Sieht Es in Wiskonsin Aus_ (Meurs, 1849).

[5] For example, see William Dames, _Wie Sieht Es in Wiskonsin Aus_.

[6] See J. F. Diederichs, _Diary_. Translated by Emil Baensch. Account
of a trip from Milwaukee to Manitowoc.

[7] Those who filed with von Rohr and on the same day (Nov. 5, 1839)
took up most of sections 17, 18, 19, and 20. All of these lands were
described by the surveyor as “second rate” and all had a heavy forest
covering consisting of sugar maple, lynn, birch, alder, black and white
oak, ash, elm, ironwood, etc., together with some cedar in the swamps.
The land lay on both sides of the creek, along which was some meadow,
but the big marsh was farther east.

[8] William F. Whyte, “Settlement of Lebanon,” in Wisconsin Historical
Society, _Proceedings_, 1915, 105.

[9] MS. translation by Emil Baensch.

[10] Page 29 in printed German edition.

[11] This farm, located in the town of Greenfield, Milwaukee County,
was afterwards divided among Kerler’s three sons. A portion of it, at
least, is I believe still in the possession of the family. Louis F.
Frank, _Pioneer Jahre_ (Milwaukee, 1911).

[12] Michel Chevalier, _Society, Manners, and Politics in the United
States_ (Boston, 1839), chap. x, 112-113, 117, says: “Loading a wagon
with a plough, a bed, a barrel of salt meat, the indispensable supply
of tea and molasses, a Bible and a wife, and with his axe on his
shoulder, the Yankee sets out for the West, without a servant, without
an assistant, often without a companion, to build himself a log hut,
six hundred miles from his father’s roof, and clear away a spot for a
farm in the midst of the boundless forest.... He is incomparable as a
pioneer, unequalled as a settler of the wilderness.”

[13] See his _Common Sense_ (Philadelphia, 1791).

[14] See Captain Basil Hall, _Travels in North America in the Years
1827 and 1828_ (Edinburgh, 1829), i, 130.

[15] _American Agriculturist_, i, (1842), 115 ff.

[16] Captain Robert Barclay, _Agricultural Tour in the United States_
... (London, 1842), 41.

[17] _American Agriculturist_, i, 311.

[18] _Germania_ (translated slightly differently in University of
Pennsylvania _Translations and Reprints_), 11.

[19] J. H. von Thünen, _Der Isolierte Staat_ (Berlin, 1875), 103 ff.,
“Ueber die Lage der Höfe in Mecklenburg.”

[20] In southwestern Wisconsin, about 1870, a respectable German farmer
announced to his relatives the marriage of his daughter to a man who
had arrived but recently and had the status of a mere laborer. To parry
all questions about the suitability of the groom, who was known to be
addicted to liquor and other vices, the farmer added: “I’m very willing
to give him my daughter, for he is the best ‘grubber’ I’ve ever had on
my farm.”

[21] When John Kerler settled near Milwaukee in 1848, he bought a farm
on which was no provision for sheltering livestock other than work
animals. He built a barn at once, refusing to permit, for a single
winter, the cruel American practice of leaving cattle out in the cold.
His case is typical.

[22] See the author’s _History of Agriculture in Wisconsin_ (Madison,
1922), _passim_.

[23] Editor’s italics.

[24] An example is in Abram E. Brown, _Legends of Old Bedford_ (Boston,
1892).

[25] Timothy Dwight, _Travels in New England and New York_ (New Haven,
Conn., 1821), ii, 459, 462.

[26] Edmund Burke, _On Conciliation_.

[27] The Ohio Company’s grant, 1787, contained a reservation for
religion as well as grants for education. Joseph Schafer, _Origin of
the System of Land Grants in Aid of Education_, Wisconsin University
_Bulletin_, History Series, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Madison, 1902).

[28] See Edward Eggleston, _The Circuit Rider_ and _The Graysons_.

[29] Goodsell, who was one of the founders of Beloit College, removed
later to Northfield, Minnesota, and became one of the founders of
Carlton College. S. A. Dwinnell, Reedsburg (Wis.) _Free Press_,
December 24, 1874.

[30] _Madison City Express_, March 14, March 23, and April 27, 1843.
Strong and Hamilton are not reputed to have been total abstainers.

[31] The vote stood, for prohibition, 27,519; against, 24,109.

[32] The story was printed in the _Columbian Centinel_, Boston,
December, 1789.

[33] See _Diary of Sarah Connell Ayer_ (Portland, Me., 1910), 227.

[34] See _Almon Danforth Hodges and His Neighbors_ (Boston, 1909),
217-218.

[35] “At sun two hours high,” says the _Farmer’s Almanack_, 1815,
“the day is finished and away goes men and boys to the bowling alley.
Haying, hoeing, plowing, sowing all must give way to sport and toddy.
Now this is no way for a farmer. It will do for the city lads to sport
and relax in this way, and so there are proper times and seasons for
farmers to take pleasure of this sort, for I agree that all work and no
play makes Jack a dull boy.”

[36] See _Hodges and His Neighbors_, 94.

[37] J. R. Lowell, _Biglow Papers_.

[38] The death of Goethe occurred on the twenty-second of March. The
news must have taken several days in travel.

[39] Prussians were apt to console themselves for the pusillanimity
of King Frederick William III by harking back to the really strong if
ruthless monarchy of Frederick the Great, familiarly spoken of as _Der
Alte Fritz_.

[40] Guy Stanton Ford, _Stein and the Era of Reform in Prussia,
1807-1815_ (Princeton, N. J., 1922), 185.

[41] Victor Cousin, _Report on the State of Public Instruction in
Prussia_. Translated by Sarah Austin. London, 1834.

[42] See _Life and Works of Horace Mann_ (Boston, 1891), iii, 346 ff.

[43] Cf. Franklin’s views on the comparative thrift of English and of
German laborers, and note his tentative explanation of the difference.
_The Complete Works of Benjamin Franklin_ (compiled and edited by
John Bigelow, New York and London, 1887), ii, 291 ff. Letter to Peter
Collinson, dated Philadelphia, 9 May, 1753.

[44] By writers like Samuel Laing, in his _Notes of a Traveller on the
Social and Political State of France, Prussia, Switzerland, Italy, and
Other Parts of Europe_ (London, 1854), especially 108-115.

[45] _Life and Works of Horace Mann_ (Boston, 1891), iii, 346 ff. See
also _Reminiscences of Carl Schurz_ (New York, 1907), i, 40.

[46] See William Howitt, _Rural and Domestic Life of Germany_ (London,
1842), _passim_. That portion of Carl Schurz’s work (see note 8 _ante_)
which describes his boyhood life at Liblar throws much light on the
amusements indulged in by the people. There is a delightful account of
the Schützenfest, or marksmanship contest, on pages 45-48 and pages
81-83.

[47] Albert Bernhard Faust, _The German Element in the United States_
(Boston, 1909), ii, 472.

[48] _Daily Free Democrat_, December 27, 1850.

[49] _Nordamerika, Wisconsin, Calumet. Winke für Auswanderer_ (edition
of 1849), 64.

[50] Bradley and Metcalf.

[51] It was managed by G. and J. Burnham, who had an investment of
$10,000.

[52] This was John Braun’s. Best and Company had the largest investment
among the German brewers, $7400, but their output was only $11,250.
Other German brewers were Weizt, Englehardt, Stolz and Schuder, H.
Nunnemacher, and H. Beverung.

[53] If our count is correct, the 1850 census lists as “clerks”
fifty-one Germans. Doubtless many of these were serving in American
stores.

[54] Or thirty-six, if we omit the teachers, some of whom at least were
probably not liberally educated.

[55] The Lutherans included a Fr. Lachner, C. Eisenmeyer, and Ludwig
Dulitz; the Evangelical preacher was Christian Holl, and the Methodist,
Christian Barth.

[56] The Western Medical Society of Wisconsin, representing the
counties of Grant, Iowa, and Lafayette, reported in December, 1850,
that out of sixty persons engaged in the practice of medicine in that
area, only twelve were entitled to be called “doctor.” _Daily Free
Democrat_, January 8, 1850.

[57] “The University and the Germans,” _Daily Wisconsin Banner_, August
23, 1850.

[58] The remaining cases of marriages between Germans and Americans
were briefly as follows: A whitewasher, born in Pennsylvania, was
married to a German woman; tailor, born “in U. S.,” married to
a German; a weaver, born in Germany, married to a woman born in
Pennsylvania; a laborer, born in Ohio, married to a German woman; a
stage driver, born in Ohio, married to a German woman; a minister (M.
E.), native of Hanover, married to a woman born in Illinois.

[59] _Daily Wisconsin Banner_, August 1, 1850 (translation).

[60] _Wisconsin Banner_, August 29, 1846.

[61] _Wis. Hist. Colls._, xxvii, 235.

[62] See this magazine, vi, 395-398 (June, 1923).

[63] “Events teach us,” said the _Banner und Volksfreund_, October 15,
1855 (in the thick of the bitter Barstow-Bashford campaign), “that
the Shanghais (Republicans) despite their prating of antislavery,
are further removed from actual human freedom than the slaveholders
themselves. The occurrences of the past year, during which the
Shanghais have been dominant in various state legislatures, have shown
us that this party is the incubator of the temperance law.” This line
was followed vigorously through the campaign.

[64] Note, for example, the Louisville, Kentucky, riots in which
the Germans were driven from the city. The Wisconsin Democracy, in
August, 1855, made that the excuse for a resolution refusing seats in
the convention to men of Know-Nothing proclivities. See _Argus and
Democrat_ (Madison), August 29, 1855.

[65] See the _Milwaukee American_, 1855-1856, which was the party organ.

[66] Those belonging to the Turner Society are generally classified as
“free thinkers.” The _Turner Zeitung_, national organ of the Society
in 1855, was Republican in its politics, which probably influenced the
result in Wisconsin.

[67] The Mayberry lynching. The lynchers were loggers from an up-river
camp belonging to the murdered man.

[68] See his letter, MS, to Lyman Draper, August 28, 1855.

[69] In the year 1855 the _Wisconsin Banner_ and the _Volksfreund_ were
united and became the _Wisconsin Banner und Volksfreund_.

[70] “Fifteen participators in the lynching affair were indicted and
tried for the murder of DeBar in May, 1856. They were acquitted, as the
testimony did not sustain the allegation that ‘he came to his death by
hanging,’ _there being a reasonable doubt as to his being alive when he
was hung the last time_.” _History of Washington and Ozaukee Counties_
(1881), 358. Editor’s italics.

[71] See a brilliant editorial by Colonel David Atwood, in the _Daily
State Journal_ at Madison, for August 13, 1855.

[72] See the article in _Banner und Volksfreund_, July 28, 1855,
entitled “The So-Called Republicans:” “We encounter in the _Watertown
Anzeiger_ the following appropriate article concerning the so-called
Republican (vulgarly Shanghai) party, by which so many Germans were
duped at the last election and which expects to repeat the same
swindling tactics in the approaching election.” (Translation). The
election of Coles Bashford as governor was due in part to German votes.

[73] “The temperance swindle,” says _Banner und Volksfreund_, October
16, 1855, “is an outflow of Puritan bigotry and comports with other of
their pious pretensions, for example, such a rigorous observance of the
Sabbath as will reduce all sociability to the condition of a Puritan
graveyard. For this sort of thing, also, is the Republican party the
fruitful soil. The Know-Nothings harmonize, in these matters, with the
Republicans.”

[74] Success was to render it practically as cosmopolitan as a
protracted career of triumphs had long since rendered the Democratic
party.

[75] The Chicago and Northwestern. It follows in the sector south of
Muscoda the old military road from Fort Winnebago to Fort Crawford.
Towns taking some of Muscoda’s former trade are Montfort, Fennimore,
and Cobb.

[76] _Wisconsin Magazine of History_, III, 352.

[77] _Wisconsin Historical Collections_, I, 38, 41.

[78] _Wis. Hist. Colls._ XVIII, 263-64.

[79] Featherstonhaugh was obviously in error in calling that stopping
place Prairie de la Bay. The context shows it must have been English
Prairie. See his _A Canoe Voyage on the Minnay Sotor_, I, 199-201.

[80] _Wis. Hist. Colls._ XIV, 147.

[81] The Portage canal was begun in 1836 by a private company. Its
completion was promised in 1837. See Governor Dodge’s message to the
Legislative Assembly, Belmont, Oct. 26, 1836.

[82] Ox-teams owned by Illinois farmers.

[83] Hamilton went to California during the gold rush, finding,
however, not a fortune but an untimely grave.

[84] See Abel, Henry I. Geographical, Geological, and Statistical Chart
of Wisconsin and Iowa, Phila. 1838. The fare for passengers from St.
Louis to Helena (it was doubtless the same to Savannah) was in the
cabin from $10 to $15 and on the deck from $2 to $4.

[85] Smith, William R., _Observations_, 44.

[86] If the office was not open in 1847 it is hard to explain the
language used by a correspondent of the Prairie du Chien _Patriot_,
Feb. 23, 1847, who says: “The mail from ... Mineral Point to Muskoda
goes but once a week. There is no post office in Richland County; their
post office is at Muskoda.” The census of 1846 assigns to the northern
district of Grant County 1,482 persons. It is possible to identify in
the lists of heads of families six families whose later homes were at
or near Muscoda. They are John D. Parrish, James Smith, Manuel Denston
[Dunston?], Thomas Waters, Wm. Garland, and Richard Hall. All of these
are met with again in the census returns for Dec. 1, 1847, where the
“Muscoday Precinct of Grant County” is listed separately. The precinct
seems to have included townships 7 and 8-1 W and townships 7 and 8-2 W,
or the present towns of Muscoda, Castle Rock, Watterstown, and Hickory
Grove. That precinct is credited with thirteen families aggregating 77
persons. Aside from the families mentioned above (except Denston) we
find the names of S. [R?] Carver, J. Moore, N. Head, M. Manlove, D.
Manlove, I. Dale, S. Smith, D. Smith, and A. Mills. Garland is credited
with a family consisting of nine males and two females, which confirms
the statement in the county history that he was managing a hotel in
Muscoda at that time. Moses Manlove has a family of seven males and
five females which suggests a second hotel or “boarding house.” Most
of the other families mentioned probably lived some distance from
Muscoda on farms. Aside from those in Muscoda Precinct of Grant County,
several families living in Iowa County, township 8 1-E, must have
depended for their supplies either on Muscoda or on Highland. These
were John Pettygrove, A. Palmer, A. Bolster, three Knowlton families,
Mathias Schafer, Henry Gottschall, Vincent Dziewanawski, and the two
Wallbridges. If Richland County settlers really were, as reported,
getting their mail at Muscoda, that would mean, according to the
census, that 235 persons living north of the Wisconsin must have done
some trading at that place. The county history says the old log house
once used as the land office served in 1847 as the store.

[87] This is not true of the state lands, which went mainly to
speculators first, then to settlers.

[88] Speech of Senator Cashman, _Wisconsin Magazine of History_, vi,
444-449 (June, 1923).

[89] Essay on _The Rebellion_.

[90] John B. Winslow, quoted in _La Follette’s Magazine_, vol. iv, no.
20, p. 6.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Text in italics is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been preserved from the original.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.





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