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-Project Gutenberg's The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin, by Joseph Schafer
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-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
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-
-Title: The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin
-
-Author: Joseph Schafer
-
-Release Date: November 20, 2017 [EBook #56012]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
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-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE YANKEE AND THE TEUTON ***
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-produced from images generously made available by The
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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.
-
-
-
-
-
-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin, by 
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