Part 12
These figures are but remotely representative of what is called “the German vote” or the vote of the Austro-Hungarians, as no account is here taken of the first generation born in the United States, the sons of these naturalized Americans, nor of their grandsons.
With the first generation of German Americans, the total vote in 1916 of this element in New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, Missouri, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, Indiana, New Jersey, California, Nebraska, Kansas and the two Dakotas amount to 1,860,500.
New England, which was the center of anti-German sentiment as it is the center of puritanism and Anglo-American hyphenation, contains the smallest number of Germans and the largest number of aliens of any section in the United States; in other words, the lowest percentage of naturalized citizens among the foreign-born white men of the age of 21 and over--40.7 per cent. The highest proportion of naturalized foreign-born above 21 years was in the West North Central division, that is Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas, where the Teutonic element is largely settled. Table 25 of the U. S. Census Bulletin on Population (1910) “Voting Age, Military Age, and Naturalization,” shows that the German aliens 21 years and over, all told, number only 127,103, and the Germans stand at the foot of the list of twenty-nine (alien immigrants) or 9.9 per cent., the highest being 83 per cent. The French aliens in the United States numbered 27.8 per cent., the Scotch 21.8, and the English 19.6. In other words, only 9.9 in every hundred of Germans could not be forced to go to war, but nearly 28 out of every hundred Frenchmen, 21.5 out of every hundred Scotchmen, and more than 19 out of every hundred Englishmen were immune from military duty in the United States, also from the payment of taxes.
There are more German-born persons in the United States of the age of 21 and over than there are persons of any other foreign nationality. Of the total number of foreign-born (6,646,817), Germany is represented by 1,278,667, of whom 69.5 per cent. had been naturalized in 1910. Russia comes next, with 737,120, of whom only 26.1 per cent. were naturalized. There were 437,152 Englishmen of voting age, 59.4 of whom were naturalized, while only 49.6 per cent. out of a total of 59,661 Frenchmen of voting age were entitled to vote.
The following table shows the States containing the largest number of Germans of voting age of all foreign-born citizens:
By Sections:-- Germans Austrians Hungarians East North Central 461,038 166,037 90,577 West ” ” 228,262 63,686 ---- South Atlantic 32,143 10,961 6,007 East South Central 15,154 1,719 ---- Pacific 73,302 23,500 ----
By States:-- Germans Austrians Hungarians New Jersey 60,380 26,082 22,773 Ohio 87,013 38,400 47,852 Indiana 32,123 7,356 9,383 Illinois 159,112 81,883 20,391 Wisconsin 117,661 20,700 6,014 Iowa 52,393 8,580 ---- Missouri 47,038 8,819 5,834 South Dakota 11,964 3,099 ---- Nebraska 31,008 12,184 ---- Kansas 18,910 6,178 ---- Maryland 17,370 3,397 967 Colorado 9,558 8,221 ---- Oregon 10,786 3,622 ---- California 44,712 11,125 ----
In the following States the German-born citizens of voting age constitute the second largest number of foreign-born citizens:
Germans Austrians Hungarians Michigan 65,129 17,698 6,937 Minnesota 57,789 22,261 ---- Texas 24,039 9,767 ----
In Michigan the Germans and Austrians together outnumbered the Canadians 3,588. In Minnesota the Swedes came first, with a total of 67,003, and in Texas the Germans were outnumbered only by Mexicans.
The German-born of voting age in New York State are outnumbered by Russians and Italians, but as 68.2 per cent. of the 215,310 are citizens, only 17.5 per cent. of the Italians and only 24.4 of the Russians had acquired the franchise in 1910, the Germans outclass them numerically as voters. They are third also in Washington with a total of 17,804, next after the Canadians with 20,395 and the Swedes with 19,727. Of the Germans, however, 66.9 per cent. were naturalized while only 55.1 per cent. of the Canadians had their franchise, giving the Germans the advantage when the votes are counted.
Germans Austrians Hungarians New York 215,310 105,889 39,577 Washington 19,727 9,675 ----
In Pennsylvania Germans of voting age are outnumbered by Austrians, Russians and Italians in the order named; but only 12.4 per cent. of the Austrians, 21.9 per cent. of the Russians and 13.7 per cent. of the Italians had the franchise, whereas 66.5 of the Germans were citizens.
In North Dakota the Norwegians, Russians and Canadians outnumbered the Germans in the order named, and here all had become citizens in fairly relative proportion, as also in Montana, where the Germans of voting age were outnumbered by the Canadians, Irish and Austrians.
Germans Austrians Hungarians Pennsylvania 95,539 145,528 68,522 North Dakota 9,160 2,565 1,096 Montana 5,419 6,067 ----
In New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut the total number of German-born voters was only 33,011, Austrians 29,686 and Hungarians 6,377, and these were principally in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Maine had none.
The following table shows the number of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians who were citizens in 1910, including those who had taken out their first papers:
Germans 1,017,037 Austrians 208,550 Hungarians 62,366 --------- Total 1,287,953
In addition, the citizenship of a total of 240,953 Germans, Austrians and Hungarians had not been reported. The following shows the number of Irish, Swedes, Swiss and Hollanders of voting age in 1910, including those who had applied for their first citizenship papers:
Irish 439,973 Swedes 259,305 Hollanders 40,332 Swiss 49,364 -------- Total 788,974
Other States in which German-born naturalized males of 21 or over lead all other foreign-born are:
Kentucky 7,380 Tennessee 1,509 Alabama 1,255 Mississippi 647 Arkansas 2,203 Louisiana 2,739 Oklahoma 4,071 Idaho 2,133 Wyoming 1,091 New Mexico 804 Arizona 852 Nevada 922 Delaware 903 District of Columbia 1,952 Virginia 1,547 North Carolina 365 South Carolina 570 Georgia 1,174 West Virginia 2,137 Florida 925
In West Virginia the total number of Italians was 11,561 against only 3,392 Germans, but only 748 Italians had become citizens against 2,137 Germans; and in Arizona there were 2,196 English as compared with 1,324 Germans, but 825 Germans had become citizens as compared with 832 English-born.
Of the 234,285 Russians in New York only 92,269 had become naturalized and taken out their first papers. In Minnesota were 52,133 Swedish voters, in Illinois 43,618, in Iowa 10,636, in Wisconsin 11,532, in Nebraska 10,000, in Washington 13,393, and in California 11,076.
=The German Element in American Life.=--The following commentary of Carl Schurz on the influence of the Germans in America is worthy of note:
“Friedrich Kapp, in his ‘History of the Germans in the State of New York,’ says: ‘In the battle waged to subdue the new world, the Latins supplied officers without an army, the English an army with officers, and the Germans an army without officers.’ This is signally true as regards the Germans. They emigrated to America and settled here as squatters without eminent official leadership. They became parts of already existing communities, in which a majority population of other nationality played a dominant role. Unlike ‘the army with officers,’ they possessed no official writers of history to record their deeds and sayings in regular reports. They had lost their political connection with their native land, and whatever interest they inspired at home was of a personal or family nature. Besides this, they were strongly isolated from communion with the predominating nationality by the difference in language and frequently were forced into the unfavorable position of an alien element. These various circumstances combined to accord them a rather superficial, stepmotherly treatment in the history of the American people, as written by the dominant nationality.”--From the introduction to Kapp’s “Die Deutschen im Staate New York.”
While Prof. Nearing, Douglas Campbell, Dr. Griffis and others have shown that the Americans are not an English people, the latter--including Scotch and Welsh--constituting only 30 per cent. of the American people, the advantage as historians, which the English-speaking element enjoyed from the beginning of our life as a nation, prompted them to assume the name of “Americans” and to regard the people of all other races and their descendants as usurping an unwarranted right in calling themselves Americans, so that today an American with a German name, as the war has shown, is somehow in a tolerated class distinct from his Anglo-American neighbors.
“Yet the first distinctive American frontier was not created alone by the movement of population westward from the older settlements; like every successive frontier in our history it became the Mecca of emigrants from British and Continental lands. Before 1700 exiled Huguenots and refugees from the (German) Palatinate began to seek the new world, and during the eighteenth century men of non-English stock poured by thousands into the up-country of Pennsylvania and of the South. In 1700 the foreign population of the colonies was slight; in 1775 it is estimated that 225,000 Germans and 385,000 Scotch-Irish, together nearly one-fifth of the entire population, lived within the provinces that won independence.”--“The Beginning of the American People,” by Prof. Carl L. Becker, University of Kansas; Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1915; p. 177.
Elson, in his “History of the United States,” p. 198, says that in New England and the South the people were almost wholly of English stock, though New England was of more purely English stock than was the South, with a sprinkling of Scotch-Irish and other nationalities, and especially in the South, of French Huguenots and Germans. “In the middle colonies less than half the population was English; the Dutch of New York, the Germans of Pennsylvania, the Swedes of Delaware and the Irish of all these colonies, together with small numbers of other nationalities, made up more than half the population.” He gives the total population of the colonies in 1760 at approximately 1,600,000.
Pennsylvania is sometimes called “The American German’s Holy Land.” Let us see why. Today, as the tourist visits Heidelberg on the Neckar, sails down the Rhine from Spires or Mannheim to Cologne, he sees many ivy-mantled ruins, which show how terribly Louis XIV of France desolated this region during his ferocious wars. Angry at the Germans and Dutch for sheltering his hunted Huguenots, he invaded the Rhine Palatinate, which became for a whole generation the scene of French fire, pillage, rapine and slaughter. Added to these troubles of war and politics, were those of religious persecutions; for, according as the prince electors were Protestants or Catholics, so the people were expected to change as suited their rulers, who compelled their subjects to be of the same faith. Tired of their long-endured miseries, the Palatine Germans, early in the eighteenth century, fled to England. Under the protection and kindly care of the British government, they were aided to come to America. About 5,000 settled in the Hudson, Mohawk and Schoharie valleys in New York, and over 25,000 in Pennsylvania, chiefly in the Schuylkill and Swatara region between Bethlehem and Harrisburg. Later came Germans from other parts of the Fatherland, making Colonists rich in the sturdy virtues of the Teutonic race.
Though poor, these Germans were very intelligent, holding on to their Bibles and having plenty of schools and schoolmasters. In the little Mennonite meeting house at Germantown, on the 18th of February, 1688, they declared against the unlawfulness of holding their fellowmen in bondage, and raised the first ecclesiastical protest against slavery in America. In Penn’s Colony also the first book written and published in America against slavery was by one of these German Christians. The Penn Germans also published the first Bible in any European tongue ever printed in America. It was they who first called Washington “the father of his country.” In their dialect, still surviving in some places, made up of old German and modern expressions, some pretty poems and charming stories have been written. Tenacious in holding their lands, thorough in method, appreciative of most of what is truest and best in our nation’s life, but not easily led away by mere novelties and justly distrustful of what is false and unjust, even though called “American,” the Germans have furnished in our national composite an element of conservatism that bodes well for the future of the republic.... Here worked and lived the first American astronomer, Rittenhouse, and here (Pennsylvania) originated many first things which have so powerfully influenced the nation at large.... Here lived Daniel Pastorius, then the most learned man in America. (“The Romance of American Colonization,” by Dr. William Elliot Griffis.)
The disposition of the New England school of historians, with some distinguished exceptions, to glorify everything of Puritan origin and belittle everything of non-English origin in American life, is strongly manifest in their writings about the early Palatine immigration. They were merely hewers of wood and drawers of water, or coolies. But the evidence of Franklin, Washington and Jefferson is to the contrary, and their history in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and North and South Carolina puts the New England historians to shame. With their disparaging comments may be contrasted the words in which Macaulay describes the same people:
Honest, laborious men, who had once been thriving burghers of Mannheim and Heidelberg, or who had cultivated the wine on the banks of the Neckar and the Rhine. Their ingenuity and their diligence could not fail to enrich any land which should afford them an asylum.
Sanford H. Cobb says: “The story of the Palatines challenges our sympathy, admiration and reverence, and is as well worth telling as that of any other colonial immigration. We may concede that their influence on the future development of the country and its institutions was not equal to the formative power exerted by some other contingents. Certainly, they have not left so many broad and deep marks upon our history as have the Puritans of New England, and yet their story is not without definite and permanent monuments of beneficence toward American life and institutions. At least one among the very greatest of the safeguards of American liberty--the Freedom of the Press--is distinctly traceable to the resolute boldness of a Palatine.” (“The Story of the Palatines,” Putnam’s Sons, 1897, p. 5, Introduction.)
And very emphatic are the words of Judge Benton in his “History of Herkimer County:”
The particulars of the immigration of the Palatines are worthy of extended notice. The events which produced the movement in the heart of an old and polished European nation to seek a refuge and a home on the western continent, are quite as legitimate a subject of American history as the oft-repeated relation of the experience of the Pilgrim Fathers.
Germans were among the first immigrants in the South along with the English, and many a proud Virginian has German blood in his veins. President Wilson’s second wife is a Bolling. The first attempts to colonize Virginia were discouraging failures. Of the first 105 bachelor colonists sent out from England in 1606, half called themselves “gentlemen,” young men without a trade and with no practical experience as colonists. The others were laborers, tradesmen and mechanics, and two singers and a chaplain. Among the leaders Capt. John Smith was the most noted as he was the most able. The Jamestown colony was reduced to forty men when Captain Newport on his return from England brought additional numbers of colonists, and the “Phoenix” later arrived with seventy more settlers and the languishing colony was still later reinforced by seventy immigrants, among whom were two women. The marriage of John Laydon and Ann Burras was the occasion of the first wedding in Virginia.
“Better far than a batch of the average immigrants,” writes Dr. Griffis, “was the reinforcements of some German and Polish mechanics brought over to manufacture glass. These Germans were the first of a great company that have contributed powerfully to build up the industry and commerce of Virginia--the mother of states and statesmen! There still stands on the east side of Timber Neck Bay, on the north side of the York River, a stone chimney with a mighty fireplace nearly eight feet wide, built by these Germans.”
American’s great historian, George Bancroft, in his introduction to Kapp’s “Life of Steuben,” writes: “The Americans of that day, who were of German birth or descent, formed a large part of the population of the United States; they cannot well be reckoned at less than a twelfth of the whole, and perhaps formed even a larger proportion of the insurgent people. At the commencement of the Revolution we hear little of them, not from their want of zeal in the good cause, but from their modesty. They kept themselves purposely in the background, leaving it to those of English origin to discuss the violations of English liberties and to decide whether the time for giving battle had come. But when the resolution was taken, no part of the country was more determined in its patriotism than the German counties of Pennsylvania and Virginia. Neither they nor their descendants have laid claim to all the praise that was their due.”
In 1734 a number of German Lutheran communities were flourishing in Northern Virginia, and in a work dealing with Virginia conditions, which appeared in London in 1724, Governor Spotswood is mentioned as having founded the town of Germania, named for the Germans whom Queen Anne had sent over, but who abandoned that region, it seems, on account of religious intolerance. The same work mentions a colony of Germans from the Palatinate who had been presented with a large section of land and who were prosperous, happy and exceedingly hospitable. Many of their descendants attained to fame and fortune, as B. William Wirt, remembered as one of the most distinguished jurists in America, and Karl Minnigerode, for many years rector of St. Paul’s Church in Richmond, among whose parishioners was Jefferson Davis.
Many Germans immigrated to the Carolinas from Germany as well as Pennsylvania, before the Revolution. A large number came from Pennsylvania in 1745, and in 1751 the Mennonites bought 900,000 acres from the English government in North Carolina and founded numerous colonies which still survive. One colony on the Yadkin, known as the Buffalo Creek Colony, at the time sent abroad $384 for the purchase of German books. After 1840 the interrupted flow of German immigration was resumed.
When the German immigration into South Carolina began is a matter of dispute, but when a colony of immigrants from Salzburg reached Charleston in 1743, they found there German settlers by whom they were heartily welcomed. As early as 1674 many Lutherans, to escape the oppression of English rule in New York, settled along the Ashley, near the future site of Charleston.
It is probable from printed evidence that the first German in South Carolina was Rev. Peter Fabian, who accompanied an expedition sent by the English Carolina Company to that colony in 1663.
In 1732, under the leadership of John Peter Purry, 170 German-Swiss founded Purrysburg on the Savannah River, and were followed in a year or two by 200 more. Orangeburg was founded about the same time by Germans from Switzerland and the Palatinate. Likewise Lexington was founded by Germans, and in 1742 Germans founded a settlement on the island of St. Simons, south of Savannah. In 1763 two shiploads of German immigrants arrived at Charleston from London.
Before the Revolution the Gospel was preached in sixteen German churches in the colony, and at the outbreak of the Revolution the German Fusiliers was the name given to an organization of German and German-Swiss volunteers which still exists. As early as 1766 a German Society was founded in Charleston and numbered upward of 100 members at the beginning of the Revolution. It gave 2,000 pounds to the patriotic cause, and after the conclusion of peace erected its own school, at which annually twenty children of the poor were taught free of charge. Dr. Griffis speaks of the ship “Phoenix,” from New York, “which brought Germans, who built Jamestown on the Stone River.”
Many of the Palatine Germans and Swiss had already settled in the Carolinas, he continues; now into Georgia came Germans from farther East, besides many of the Moravians. In the Austrian Salzburg, prelatical bigotry had become unbearable to the Lutherans. Thirty thousand of these Bible-reading Christians had fled into Holland and England. Being invited to settle in Georgia, they took the oath of allegiance to the British King and crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
In March, 1734, the ship “Purisburg,” having on board 87 Salzburgers with their ministers, arrived in the colony. Warmly welcomed, they founded the town of Ebenezer. The next year more of these sober, industrious and strongly religious people of Germany came over. The Moravians, who followed quickly began missionary work among the Indians. After them again followed German Lutherans, Moravians, English immigrants, Scotch-Irish, Quaker, Mennonites and others. “Thus in Georgia, as in the Carolinas and Virginia, there was formed a miniature New Europe, having a varied population, with many sterling qualities.”
The first whites to settle within the territory comprising the present State of Ohio were the German Moravians who founded the towns of Schoenbrunn, Gnadenhütten, Lichtenau and Salem. David Zeisberger on May 3, 1772, with a number of converted Indians, founded the first Christian community in Ohio. Mrs. Johann George Jungmann was the first white married woman. She and her husband came from Bethlehem, Pa. At Schoenbrunn and Gnadenhütten, Zeisberger wrote a spelling book and reader in the Delaware language which was printed in Philadelphia.