(Note: this is a lightly updated blog published a couple of years ago on another site.)
I followed with great interest a traveling exhibit entitled Utopia: Revisiting a German State that was
shown at the Missouri History Museum from late November 2014 until April 2015.
[1] The exhibit celebrated the 180th
anniversary of the 1834 arrival of about 500 Germans, members of the Giessener
Emigration Society, in St. Louis. They had traveled to Missouri to try to
establish a German state there.
The origin of the exhibit could be traced to an East German
student, Henry Schneider, who about three decades earlier had run across the
story of the Giessener Emigration Society while doing research on a script for
a screen writing class.[2] His efforts
to write a script based on the Society’s experiences faltered, but a couple of decades
later, in 2004, he mentioned the Giessener group to Peter Roloff, a Berlin film
maker, who also became fascinated with its little-known story.
To learn more about the topic, Roloff assembled a group of
friends in the summer of 2005 to discuss the Giessener Emigration Society and
their research about it. The amorphous group, which called itself the Traveling Summer Republic (TSR), held annual summer meetings on the
subject for several years. It invited some historians in Missouri who were
knowledgeable about the Giessener Society to join the meetings. In 2009 and
2011, the group met in Missouri.[3]
The 20 or so members of the TSR -- historians, writers, film makers,
photographers and artists -- curated the Utopia
exhibit, which was managed and financed in part by the city of Giessen. They
also wrote an outstanding and definitive book, Utopia/Aufbruch in die Utopie, in both German and English, to
accompany the exhibit, plus Roloff, the convener of the TSR, made two films about
the topic.[4]
The bilingual
Utopia
exhibit — spanning 3,000 square feet —opened in Giessen in November 2013, then
moved to Bremen in April 2014. The exhibit had a brief stay in Washington, D.C.
before the full exhibit opened at the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis in
November 2014. According to the curators, they wanted the exhibit to convey
both the physical feel of moving great distances and the emotional discomfort
of going from the familiar to the new and unknown. Roloff explained that the
goal was for visitors “to feel somehow the texture of time, of wanting freedom,
of being afraid and maybe not succeeding as you had hoped.”[5] A history of the
exhibit can be found, in German, at this link:
http://www.aufbruch-in-die-utopie.net/downloads/Project%20documentation.pdf
The Arkansas
Connection
For Arkansans interested in the history of German
immigration, the Utopia exhibit had bittersweet elements that inspired some envy of Missouri’s success in
attracting the Giessener Emigration Society.
The thing is, the Giessener group had been planning to settle not in
Missouri, but in the Arkansas Territory. However, as the emigrants gathered in March
1834 to travel from Bremen to Little Rock, they learned that an affiliated
group, the Mainzner Emigration Society, had a miserable experience in Arkansas after
it had journeyed there a year earlier.[6]
Also they were told by a scout who had just returned from Arkansas that it
was an unsuitable site for the planned German state.
The bad experiences of the Mainzner group and the scout were
caused to some extent by bad weather and water-related illnesses. The settlers,
who arrived in Little Rock in May 1833, and the Giessner Society scout, who visited
the city in the late fall, encountered a severe cholera epidemic afflicting
travelers on the Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers. Also they observed devastating
flooding along rivers and streams in Arkansas. Beyond that, they learned the
hard way that malaria was widespread in the territory and discomfort from summer
heat was much greater than expected.
But what if Arkansas’ weather had been better in 1833? I often wondered, as many years ago I researched
the George family, who came to Little Rock as part of the Mainzner group, what
would have happened if Arkansas had had less flooding, cholera, and malaria in 1833.
Would the Mainzner group have had at least modest success? In the absence of
negative reports about the Arkansas Territory, would the Giessener group have
traveled, as planned, to Little Rock and settled in the Arkansas Territory?
Then, would other Germans have followed the Mainzner and Giessener groups to
the Territory? If all of this had happened as planned, would Arkansas have
become the German state desired by the emigrants?
Perhaps examining the experiences of the two emigration
societies can help answer the question of whether Arkansas had a chance of
becoming the German state envisioned by the Mainzner and Giessener Emigration
Societies.
German Emigration
Societies Plan a New German State in the Arkansas Territory
The idea of leaving the numerous duchies, grand-duchies,
princedoms, principalities, and other sovereign entities that comprised Germany
in the 1820s and 1830s appealed to many educated Germans who hoped to escape
political repression and an ailing economy.[7] Interest in emigration was
especially high in the Hessen area of Germany, including its two largest cities
Frankfurt and Wiesbaden, and in neighboring Rheinhessen, where the cities of
Mainz and Worms are located.
When two
Hessen brothers-in-law Friedrich Münch, a country priest, and Paul Follenius, a
lawyer in the university city of Giessen, published a pamphlet in 1833 detailing
a plan to establish a German state within the United States, the response was enthusiastic.
The pamphlet was titled “Call and Declaration Concerning an Emigration En Masse
from Germany to the North American States.”[8]
In the “Call
and Declaration,” the plan was summarized as follows:
It is our idea that the better part of the many Germans who have
decided to emigrate should settle as a group, united as a whole in keeping with
the purified and presently existing political form and received into the great
federation of states, so that in this way the survival of German customs, language,
etc. should be secured, so that a free and popular form of life could be
created.”
To be
clear: the plan’s intention was for German settlers to “remain apart from the settled
English and French American population….They did not want to become American.”
Instead they wanted to “extensively cultivate German virtues, German customs,
and the German language, raising their youth in conformity with this.” The goal
was to replant their homeland, minus the political repression, in the United
States.[9]
When the
pamphlet was first published in March 1833, it quickly sold out, and a second
edition was issued in July. It contained the rules governing the Society. They
included a provision prohibiting aristocracy and slavery in the German Colony. Also,
the rules stated that all authority of the Society, including any that was
delegated, “rests alone in the totality of all voting heads of families,
completely equal in rights and obligations.”
According to Münch, the pamphlet
“was excellently received and encouraged us to become bold; thousands wanted to
join us, and to help with the plans necessary for realization.”[10] The planned
site for the new state was, tentatively, Arkansas, which was still a territory
and in 1830 had just over 30,000 residents.
The idea was that similar societies and clubs would be set up
“everywhere in Germany” and that these groups would remain in contact and
support each other until “finally the chosen land (namely the so-called
Territory of Arkansas…whither already
early this year a large group has started) would be populated thoroughly
with Germans.”[11] The emigration would take place in waves until
in about 25 years, 60,000 Germans would have settled an area. At that point,
they could petition Congress to become a state.[12]
The Territory of Arkansas seemed inviting not only because it
was not yet a state and had few people, but also because it was said to have
delightful weather: there were reports that it was a “highland…with the
enchanting climate of the Spanish plateau.” Little Rock was to be a “future
Valencia.” In the “call and declaration” Arkansas was described as a region half
the size of Germany, watered by the Arkansas, Mississippi, the Red and White
Rivers. It was “blessed with all the riches of nature, healthy on its heights,
with the climate of northern Italy, populated with colonies of benign Indians
and scattered Frenchmen from Louisiana.”
Apparently, this optimistic description of Arkansas was
based on travel accounts published during the first decade of the 1800s that
were plagiarized, enhanced, and embellished in a chain of publications,
including an 1832 emigration handbook written by H.W.E. Eggerling. That
handbook was an important source of Follenius’ understanding of Arkansas’
climate and geography.[13]
According to Gert Göbel, an early German settler in Missouri
who knew well several members of the Giessener group:
The society’s original plan was to found
a settlement near Little Rock, Arkansas; a large complex of land was to be
purchased, then of each member would receive 50 acres; the first houses were to
be built communally and as close to one another as possible, just as livestock
food stuff was to be provided from the collective account.[14]
The “call and declaration” prescribed that each home site of
the Society’s colony should have at least 20 undivided acres. Beyond that,
“Primary care should be taken that, even though agriculture will be the chief
occupation, the layout should accommodate the conditions of a future town of
crafts and trade.” In operating the colony, a “common treasury” would be
maintained to cover “unavoidable common expenses.” Among those expenses would
be the school teacher, the physician, and a clerk.
Related details of the plan, according to a German newspaper
(The Hermit) story published in its
April 11, 1834 edition were that the Society would purchase a large connected
territory in Arkansas from the collective account and create a kind of
metropolis with the name “Free City” (Freistadt). Then it would establish
numerous villages from this central point outward. The settling of Freistadt
and the surrounding villages would continue until the settlement had 60,000 citizens.
[15]
It took only a few months in 1833 for the Giessener
Emigration Society sign up 500 members, hold an organizational meeting, and begin
preparing for the first wave of settlers to travel to the United States in the
following year. In the meanwhile, a group affiliated group with the Giessener
Society had departed for America in 1833. This group, the Mainzner Emigration
Society, had assembled 160 to 400 people for the trip to the United States.[16] According to Münch, “As they left Germany in
March 1833, the leaders of the Mainzner Emigration Society saw themselves as
the vanguard of the new movement.”[17] They expected the Giessener settlers to join
them in Arkansas during the following year.
Arkansas: The Land of Missed Opportunity, 1833
On April 30,, 1833, the members of the Mainzner
Emigration Society arrived in New Orleans on the Olbers, a 152-foot long sailing
ship that had departed from Bremen on March 5th. Their 55-day trip
took them to the West Indies and past Jamaica on their way to their final
destination. The same ship would take the first group of Giessener Society
settlers to New Orleans the following year.
On May 5th, about 140 of the German settlers continued their
trip, going up the Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers to Little Rock. About 100 of
them were on the Arkansaw steamboat;
another 40 were aboard the Volant. It was a bad time to be on these Rivers.
According to one contemporary observer:
We have got cholera in its most
aggravated type in this [Pulaski] county. Every boat that comes up the Arkansas
is full of it….The cholera is five times as bad as it was last season…Great
parts of our country have been inundated… All the farmers on the rivers are
injured, and some completely ruined. This overflow will be another great source
of sickness for those on the rivers. [18]
George Sandherr, who was in the group on the Arkansaw, wrote to his relatives in
Germany, “The trip up the Mississippi and the Arkansas Rivers went fairly
slowly because the ship was heavily loaded. During this time a young man, 14
years old, fell into the Mississippi and drowned. Also on this voyage, everyone
had more or less violent attacks of the cholera. Ernst Kolb, from Göttenau,
died of it after he was put ashore at the village of Montgomery.” [19]
The Arkansas Gazette reported
on May 22, 1833 that the Arkansaw and
the Volent had arrived in Little Rock
earlier in the month. The article
observed:
The emigrants are mostly composed
of families, appear to be to be intelligent and some of them quite refined, and
have among them a due proportion of mechanics, farmers, etc. and the first
party have their Minister, Physician, and Schoolmaster. All of them appear to
be full-handed and some of them are wealthy.[20 ]
Only 140 of the Society members went to Arkansas because the
others chose to go elsewhere. They could do so because the Emigration Society
had dissolved itself due to bickering and disagreements even before the ship
reached New Orleans; the “common funds” had been redistributed to the families.
This core group followed the original plan to travel to Little
Rock. However, when it got there, its members could not agree on where to
settle. Some wanted to buy land along the Arkansas River; others, who feared
the River land would frequently flood, wanted less risky acreage. Ultimately,
the 140 families ended up going to different five different locations,
including one group to White County. The largest group, which included Gustav Klingelhöffer,
a Lutheran pastor who was a leader of the Society, settled a colony near the
North bank of the Arkansas River. That group regretted its decision in 1835-1836
when their lands were inundated and lives threatened by flooding.[21]
The emigrants who stayed in and around Little Rock were
likely not too impressed with the city. It was a small, crude town of about 500
residents in a county of about 1,000 people. According to adventurer and writer
Friedrich Gerstäcker, who first visited Little Rock in the later part of the
1830s, it was “one of the most awful holes in the United States.” When he
returned a couple of years later, he found that the city had substantially
improved, but he still did not like it, complaining that “every glass of water
I drink tastes a bit like a corpse.”[22]
The lot of most of the settlers was a difficult one. In a
letter Klingelhöffer sent to his brother in June 1834, a year after his arrival
in Little Rock, he told of the toll that sickness has taken on him and other
German settlers in 1833. He reported that he had a fever from January 1834
until the 10th of March. Beginning in June, he had cut back on his work
“mindful of all the bitter experience from last year.” He was restricting his work because “Much of
what may be done in Germany, one must leave off here, if he does not want to
ruin himself.” He mentioned that in the colony, a man named Knapp had recently
died because he did a foolish thing: “He had malaria and during a fever, he lay
down in a spring-fed brook to cool himself.”
Klingelhöffer complained bitterly about the behavior of
Germans in his colony, saying they were the “lowest disgraceful creatures.”
But, of course, he wrote, there are exceptions, and he mentioned those whose actions
he found respectable. Among them was “Roth from Frankfurt,” a single man who
was working a farm by himself. When Klingelhöffer’s wife asked Roth how he was
getting along with “cooking and such,” He replied: “Quite well.” He elaborated,
“I get up early, milk my cow, drink part of the milk along with bread and
cheese spread. Then I work until noon, eat cheese and bread, work until
evening, then eat the same thing, then before going to bed, I spend an hour
with Knapp and Schön, who live nearby.”
At the conclusion of the letter, Klingelhöffer wrote: “I am
just noticing that my letter has assumed too much of my present frame of mind.
Do not be misled, however; the land is good, the constitution in good, the
people are freedom-loving, but cold and egotistical.”[23]
The situation of the Klingelhöffer colony was grim when George William
Featherstonhaugh visited it in November 1833, just a few months after it was
established. He was in Arkansas conducting a geological survey for the U.S.
government. He wrote:
[In some bottom land
along the Arkansas River] we found some German emigrants temporarily hutted,
who had gone through a variety of adventures since they left their native
faderland [sic]: they had been sick with malaria and were now recovering,
but all their enthusiasm for liberty and America had evaporated; their
resources, too, were nearly exhausted, and, enfeebled and disheartened, they
seemed not to look forward with pleasure any more, but rather to revert to what
they had left behind….These poor people were delighted to converse with me, and
to find that we took an interest in them. I gave them a little money, of which
they stood in great need to purchase meal... [24]
Traugott Bromme, who wrote a guide in 1846 for Germans eager
to emigrate, painted a grim picture of the fate of the Mainzner settlers.
First, he mentioned that he had warned several members of the group that, based
on his first-hand knowledge of Arkansas, they should not settle there, but his
advice had been dismissed by the group’s leaders. Then, he described the
situation in which the settlers had found themselves:
The saddest was that the settlers
suffered constantly from diseases; frequent flooding of the bottom land
worsened the already very unhealthy air, causing numerous fevers from which
hardly one of the Germans was spared, and a full third of the company and most unwarned
successors ended up in a grave within three years. All of the survivors who
were able departed, mostly to Missouri State, but those who were unable to sell
their possessions unfortunately had to stay, even though they had no prospect
of survive on their estates. Many unhappy members of [the Society] still
vegetate in the low lands of Arkansas, cursing their gullibility and their
leaders, who for the most part paid for their deafness with their lives. [25]
Perhaps Bromme was showing some schadenfreude in his
description, and things were not quite so bad. Nevertheless, we do know that within
a few years of their arrival, many, if not most, of the 140 emigrants who
arrived in Little Rock in 1833 had left the state or died. However, several
stayed and some, such as the George Family in Little Rock became prominent
local citizens.[26]
Why, aside from the abysmal weather and health problems in
1833, did the Mainzner Society’s settlers fail?
Writing in the 1860s, Münch suggested that Klingelhöffer and his group
were so taken by the glowing reports about Arkansas that they left for America
without really thinking through their plan. He wrote, “They left before plans
were really complete, before they had the advantage of receiving feedback from
a commission to be sent by the Giessener Society.” He agreed with Traugott Bromme’s
assessment blaming the difficulties encountered by the Mainzner group on haste
and poor planning.[27] As will be discussed later, other, larger factors also
impeded the success of the Society.
The story of Arkansas’ unsuccessful German settlement faded
from history over time. However interest in the group started to revive as post
World War II researchers became interested in Gerstäcker’s rich accounts of his
travels in Arkansas during much of 1838 to 1842.[28] Although Gerstäcker did not tell the story of
the Mainzner settlement, he described in his book Wild Sports in the Far West his encounters with several Germans who
had come to Arkansas in 1833 as part of the group. He became especially good
friends with Klingelhöffer, who Gerstäcker stayed with on his farm in Perry
County.
The efforts to document the story of the Mainzner Emigration
Society got a great boost in the 1970s when a descendant of German emigrants
became interested in it, and as an amateur historian and genealogist, undertook
a remarkable investigation of the topic. We know as much as we do about the
1833 Mainzner Emigration Society largely because of the work of Ruth Yingling Rector,
whose ancestor Sebastian Jüngling had emigrated in the 1840s to White County,
Arkansas, along the Little Red River, where his sister, a part of the 1833
group, had located with her husband and children.[29]
Rector’s research, which began in 1975, took her to archives
in Germany several times. She, with a collaborator in Germany, managed to
identify about 110 of the 140 settlers who were part of the 1833 group.[30] Also, she located letters that the wife of Klingelhöffer
mailed to her parents, starting just before the Olbers departed for New
Orleans. Although illness stopped Rector from writing a planned book on the
topic, her decade of work left a rich trove of documents, research papers, and
other materials that are now in the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies in Little Rock.
A few years after Rector’s death, her work was taken up by
Shirley Schuette, who wrote about the 1833 emigration in her master’s thesis
(which should be a book) and in other papers, including a recent publication in
the Arkansas Historical Quarterly.
Using Rector’s materials and her own research, Schuette has written the most
complete account of the 1833 Mainzner Emigration Society.[31]
Even though the arrival of the Mainzner Emigration Society
settlers in Arkansas in 1833 has not been celebrated in Arkansas as the Giessener
group is being celebrated in Missouri, its story recently has been told more
fully than ever. Likely other related documents await discovery in some musty
archives in Germany, and in future years will we know even more about the group
and this small element of Arkansas’ history.
Finding Utopia in
Missouri, Sort Of
The 500 people selected to be members of the Giessener
Emigration Society were a balance of different types of craftsmen, agriculturalists,
and people working in professions. The Society leaders did not welcome poor,
lower class applicants such as farm hands, day laborers, journeymen, and others
without skills or education. These types of people were deterred from
participating by the high cost: those selected had to pay upfront for
transatlantic transportation, a passport, money to be used to buy land, and
other common costs.[32]
After the goal of 500 participants was reached, Society
members began the often difficult and usually painful process of preparing to
depart from their jobs, homes, and homeland. They divided into two groups; one
was made up of emigrants who could depart earlier than the others.
Two
ships sailed from Bremenhaven in 1834 to take members of the Giessener Emigration
Society to the United States. The first ship, the Olbers, took about 240
Society members to New Orleans under the leadership of Paul Follenius. It
departed on March 31, arriving on June 2nd, a troubled 63-day trip.
Shortly
before it departed, the group heard the report of two men who Giessener Society
had sent to scout possible settlement locations in Arkansas and Missouri. They
warned Follenius and the group against settling in Arkansas, telling them that
“The climate there was unsupportable; the land was boggy and unusable in many
places. The best territories were already in the hands of slave owners.”[33] Further,
they reported that the “Klingelhöffer Society had dissolved and was in sad
shape,” plus they had in November encountered there a foot of snow.”[34]
One
of the scouts, a trusted and good friend of Münch, wrote him privately, “For heaven’s
sake, do not leave your position! America may be a good land for a sturdy
worker, but not for an educated German.” [35] But it was too late. Münch had
left his job and was in the middle of preparations to depart.
At
the beginning of the voyage, several passengers on the Olbers came down with
smallpox and deaths followed, including a young child of Follenius. In addition
to the problems caused by sickness, the conditions on the ship stirred
discontent among the society members, in part because while most people were in
steerage, some wealthier members of the Society had booked themselves into
cabins.
After
getting to New Orleans, the group headed by steamboat to St. Louis. Unfortunately,
the cholera epidemic that that afflicted the 1833 Mainzner group was still
around, hitting the Giessener group very hard, with 40 dying. In the middle of
the trip, Follenius became very ill and had to leave the boat to recover. By
that time, the group had had enough: they decided to dissolve the society and
distribute the common funds; when the steamboat got to St. Louis, the emigrants
scattered.[36]
In
the meanwhile, departure date of the second ship was unexpectedly delayed from
early May to June 3rd. Although
260 society members had traveled to the Bremen area in late April for the
voyage, the ship that was to take them, the Eberhard, sank on its return trip
from America.[37]
The month-long
wait was painful and expensive. When a replacement ship, the Medora, was
finally procured, only 197 of the original 260 emigrants were on the ship as it
departed on June 3. The voyage lasted just over seven weeks, arriving in
Baltimore at the end of July. While the passengers liked the two-year-old ship,
they disliked the captain, complaining he fed them with spoiled meat and gave them
rank water to drink. After arriving in Baltimore in late July, the society
members were on their own to meet up in Wheeling, Ohio to travel together down
the Mississippi to St. Louis.
News
of the problems with the first group reached Münch before his group boarded the
steamboat to travel to St. Louis. Though the settlers were upset by the news,
he convinced them to continue the trip as planned. When they arrived in St.
Louis, they found the Society’s finances were in disarray because of the haphazard
distribution of common funds to the first group. According to Münch, “The worst
thing was that while Follenius and his family lay sick in Paducah, the
treasurer and the bookkeeper had taken the cash to St. Louis, and there had
divided the money among the surviving members, in what now appeared a very
inaccurate manner, and then deposited an amount smaller than was due us, in St.
Louis.”[38]
Seeing
the hopeless situation, the remaining members of the Society voted to dissolve
it. Accusations and disputes followed. At the last large meeting of the Society
in St. Louis, “furious fights and riots broke out as well as the threat of
violence against Paul Follenius, because he had been taken to be responsible
for the financial misery.”[39]
After the
Society dissolved, several of its members – including Münch and Folleius -- moved
to an area near St. Charles, Missouri. Although the settlers lived near each
other, they were not part of a communal settlement. Münch become a successful
farmer, writer, and politician. Also, he was among the leaders that helped
insure Missouri did not become part of the confederacy.[40]
Looking at the history of the
Giessener Emigration Society, Dorris Keeven-Frank, executive director of the
Missouri Germans Consortium, observed, “Of course, the Giessen Emigration
Society was a complete failure.” Nevertheless, she noted, “The immigrants [who
had been members of the Society] succeeded individually in building lives in
America, although they saw enough in the New World to know that it was far from
utopia.”[41]
In the ante-bellum years that
followed the failure to establish the “utopia,” Arkansas and Missouri had
vastly different patterns of settlement. Between 1833 and 1850, few German
immigrants settled in Arkansas. The 1850 census showed that only 599 Arkansans
had been born in Germany. On the other hand, Missouri had a healthy influx of
German immigrants: in 1850, 45,049 (7.4%) of Missouri’s 605,424 residents had
been born in Germany.[42] It was the
second highest percentage among all states.
Although the Giessener Society
members did not get their “utopia” -- the German state they wanted – those who
stayed in Missouri did get a state in which Germans played an important role in
its economy and politics. The influence of the Germans in Missouri was most
apparent when the Civil War came. The German population was influential in both
keeping Missouri in the Union and in populating the military units that fought
battles against Arkansas’ confederate forces. Ultimately, they played a big role
in helping the Union Army gain military control of most of Arkansas.
Did Arkansas’ Weather
in 1833 Change the Course of U.S. History?
Back to the question of whether Arkansas had a chance of
becoming the German state envisioned by the Mainzner and Giessener Emigration
Societies if the weather had been better. The answer seems to be “no.” The experiences of the two Emigration
Societies suggest that weather was a minor factor in their failure. Even with
the best weather and mildest health problems in 1833, the Mainzner Society’s
colony in Arkansas would most likely have failed because of human nature and
because of the reality of life in Arkansas.
It was no accident that the Mainzner Society fell apart
before its arrival in New Orleans and that the members of the first group of
the Giessener Society ended their participation in it before arriving in St.
Louis. Although each group was made up of educated people who disliked the
political situation in their home states, most group members had not known each
other before they joined the Society. They were not bound to each other by
blood, friendship, or religious beliefs. Without ties stronger than dislike of
the political situation in Germany, they had little basis for deep mutual trust
or shared sacrifice.
The problems of a lack of mutual trust and an unwillingness
for shared sacrifice were compounded by the absence of strong leadership. As
voluntary associations with democratic decision making rules, Society leaders
could not make decisions to force people to do anything they did not want to do
(outside of actions required by the written Society rules). Thus, to be
effective, the leaders needed to be highly persuasive, preferably charismatic.
Apparently, the leaders of both Societies leaders were neither.
Without effective leadership and trust, the two Emigration
Societies faltered as they faced the inevitable hardships and the need to overcome
difficult hurdles to achieve their goals. Neither was able to overcome even the
initial stresses of a long and miserable journey. As the discomforts and
illnesses increased, the Society’s bonds were not strong enough to hold the
group together.[43]
Even if the Mainzner Emigration Society had been able to
overcome its human problems, it likely would have been unable to create a
successful colony in the Arkansas Territory or in other nearby states. As Rolf
Schmidt observed in his chapter in Utopia/Aufbruch in die Utopie,
“neither in Missouri nor Illinois nor Arkansas was there enough settlement area
for a common enclosed colony.”[44]
The Arkansas Territory was particularly unsuited for a large
settlement. The state was still mostly an undeveloped wilderness. Aside from slave
holders growing cotton in its south, most of its residents scratched out a
subsistence living by small scale farming and by hunting. Creating larger
farms, as Bromme pointed out in his 1843 guide, would have been difficult
because “Wheat did not grow there; cotton was too often damaged by frost to be
sustainably cultivated for profit; and there was no market in Little Rock for
the remaining products.”[45]
The development of a large, viable colony would have
depended on its ability to sell crops and other goods outside the territory.
However, Arkansas still had only crude means of transportation. Even the
Arkansas River provided only sporadic transportation links to the outside world
(according to Featherstonhaugh, it was navigable only four months a year). Göebel wrote about the Arkansas territory at
the time: [“C]ommunication with the rest of the world was sparse and irregular
because out of this wilderness, other than the annual cotton crop of the large
slave holders, there was little or nothing to get from there.”[46]
If it had been possible to build a large colony in the
Arkansas Territory, the Mainzner Emigration Society likely could not have done
it with the type of settlers it brought to Arkansas. It lacked the laborers and
famers who could have supplied the needed back-breaking work to tame a
wilderness. Like the Giessener group, “many participants [of the Mainzner
group] were simply not capable of the difficult manual labor involved.”[47] The
advice Munch’s friend had given him also applied to the Mainzner group:
Arkansas was no place for educated Germans.
Regardless of settlement opportunities in the Arkansas
Territory, the Mainzner group would likely have chosen to avoid Little Rock
(and the Arkansas Territory) if its members had known of the city’s and the territory’s
reputation as a place where criminals came to escape the law. As Arkansas
historian S. Charles Bolton wrote, “Arkansas Territory was a violent place
where duels occurred frequently, brawls were commonplace, and murder was something
about which the average citizen might reasonably worry. Moreover there was a
significant population of counterfeiters, horse thieves and other professional
criminals. In truth both lawlessness and shiftlessness were important parts of
Arkansas Territory.”[48]
Gerstäcker summed up how people saw Little Rock in the late
1830s: It was “a backward looking
corrupt place, and the boatmen on the Mississippi sing, not without reason”
Little
Rock in Arkansas
The
damnest place I ever saw.[49]
It seems doubtful that educated Germans would desire to live
in such surroundings even if they had been successful in developing their
colony. Clearly, the Arkansas Territory could
never be mistaken for a potential Utopia.
Enjoying the Utopia
Traveling Exhibition
The realization that Arkansas most likely was not robbed of
a German state by bad weather made it easier for Arkansans to enjoy the
celebration of the Giessener Immigration Society’s arrival in Missouri and,
through the exhibition, to learn more about its own 1833 German settlement.
The members of the Traveling Summer Republic did an
outstanding job researching this part of Germany’s and Missouri’s history,
impressively unearthing facts about what happened and why, plus vividly telling
the story of the Society. Their work as presented in the exhibit, the book, and
the films should enrich the knowledge of everyone interested in the history
German immigration in the United States.
*****************************
Notes
[2] See Henry Schneider. 2014. The America Weary, Utopia/Aufbruch in die Utopie, Edition
Falkenberg. pp. 289-292.
[6] The Mainzner Emigration Society has also been called by
various authors the Rheinhessen Immigration Society and the Wormser Emigration
Society. Apparently, it did not have an official name. I first became
interested in the 1833 German emigrants in the middle 1970s when doing
historical research on a prominent Little Rock family, the George Family, who
were part of the group. See Dan Durning.
1975. Those Enterprising Georges: Early German Settlers in Little Rock. Pulaski County Historical Review,
June.p. 21-37. This article is available
at this link: https://www.scribd.com/doc/69940474/Those-Enterprising-Georges-Early-German-Settlers-in-Little-Rock
Recently, the story of the Mainzner Emigration Society was
told in an article in an issue of the Arkansas
Historical Quarterly that was devoted to article about Friedrich Gerstäcke: Shirley Schuette. 2014. Friedrich
Gerstäcker’s Friends in Arkansas. Arkansas
Historical Quarterly, LXXIII (1), pp. 102 – 114.
[8] This
title is used by Dorris Keevan-Frank in an on-line article, The 1833 Call for
Emigration: The Giessen Emigration Society, at this link: http://mo-germans.com/exhibits/a-call-for-emigration-the-giessen-emigration-society/ Schuete (2014, see note 6) translated the
German title as “Invitation and explanation in regard to large scale migration
out of Germany to the Free States of North America.” Another translation, “Call
and Declaration on the Subject of Mass Migration from Germany of the North American
Free State”, is used in Utopia/Aufbruch
in die Utopie, p 94. The German title is:
Aufforderung und Erklärung in
Betreff einer Auswanderung in Grossen aus Deutchland in die nordamerikanishen
Freistaaten. A translated copy of
his brochure can be purchased through this link: http://mo-germans.com/call-and-declaration-on-the-subject-of-mass-emigration/
[9] Utopia/Aufbruch in die Utopie, p. 98.
‘
[10] Münch
quoted in Utopia/Aufbruch in die Utopie,
p. 93.
[11] Münch quoted in Hella Hübsch and Ruth Rector. n.d. Emigrants to Arkansas, 1833: On the search
for names and places of origin of a German traveling group. Manuscript in
the Rector Papers at the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies,
[12] Utopia/Aufbruch in die Utopie, p. 72.
The “call and declaration” pamphlet, after describing the
benevolent environment of Arkansas, stated that “we shall not depart until we
are thoroughly informed on the conditions there.” It suggested that the Society
would send a commission to scout the areas to be settled, which it did.
[14] Gert Göbel. 1877. Länger
als ein Menschenleben in Missouri. Verlag Wiebusch und Sohn, St. Louis, quoted
in Utopia/Aufbruch in die Utopie, p. 94. For
a biographical sketch of Göbel, see Walter D Kamphoefner and Adolf E.
Schroeder, Gert Goebel and the Giessen Emigration Society, in Utopia/Aufbruch in die Utopie, pp. 267-
283.
[15] The first page of the newspaper is reproduced in Utopia/Aufbruch in die Utopie, p. 106 and
quoted on page 98.
[16] The actual number of members of the Mainzner Emigration
Societies who traveled to the United States is not known. The New Orleans
landing records for the date of their arrival are missing. Some writers state that
the 140 people who went to Little Rock were about a 1/3 of the total membership
of the Society; others assert that only about 20 did not go to Little Rock,
indicating a total of about 160 people were in the group.
[17] Münch quoted in Shirley Schuette. 2005. Strangers in the Land: The German Presence
in Nineteenth Century Arkansas. Master Thesis for an M.A. in Public
History, UALR
[18] Hiram Whittington. 1986. Hiram Whittington Letters in Authentic Voices: Arkansas Culture
1541-1860, Sarah Fountain, ed. University of Central Arkansas Press.
[19] Report of Louis Reuter concerning the emigration of his
brothers-in-law [Carl and George] Sandherr to America in 1833” in Ruth Yingling
Rector. n.d. A German Emigration to
Arkansas, manuscript in Rector papers at the Butler Center for Arkansas
Studies.
[20] Arkansas Gazette,
May 22, 1833, transcribed in Rector, A
German Emigration to Arkansas (see note 19)
[21] Schuette, 2005 and Schuette 2014 (See notes 6 and 17).
[22] Friedrich Gerstäcker. 1844. Streif- und Jagdzüge durch die Vereinigten Staaten Nord-Amerika,
volume 2 (1844), p. 29. Available as free Google e-book. Published in English in edited form as Wild Sports in the Far West.
[24] William Featherstonhaugh. 1844. Excursions through the Slave States, pp. 167-168 (Free Google
e-book).
[25] Traugott Bromme. 1846. Rathgeber für Auswanderungslustige. (Free Google e-book).
[26] Dan
Durning. 1975. (See note 6).
[27] See Bromme (1846) note 25; Friedrich Münch.1864. Zur Geschichte der deutschen
Einwangerung. Deutsch-Amerikanische
Monatsheft für Politik, Wissenschaft und Literature, vol. 1, p. 484 (Free
Google e-book).
[28] Clarence Evans, a native Arkansas, did the most
interesting and detailed research on Gerstäcker’s travels in Arkansas. Two
examples of his early publications are:
Clarence Evans. 1947. Friedrich Gerstäcker: Social Chronicler of the
Arkansas Frontier. Arkansas Historical
Quarterly, 6, pp. 440-449 and Clarence Evans. 1951. Gerstäcker and the
Conwells of White River Valley. Arkansas
Historical Quarterly, 10, pp 1-36. Evan’s papers are available at the
Arkansas Studies Institute in Little Rock.
[30] Hella Hübsch and Ruth Rector. 1982. Auswanderer nach
Arkansas (USA) 1833. Auf der suche nach Namen and Herkunftsorten einer
deutschen Reisengesellschaft.” Hessische
Familienkund, June, 117-122 (a copy of this article is in the Rector papers
at the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies).
[31] Schuette, 2005 and Schuette 2014. See notes 6 and 17.
[32] Utopia/Aufbruch
in die Utopie, p. 93.
[33] Briefe von Deutschland aus
Nordamerica.
1836. Quoted in Utopia/Aufbruch
in die Utopie, p.
94.
[34]
Münch 1864, p. 487 (see note 27).
[35]
Münch 1864, p. 487 (see note 27).
[36] Letters from Germans out of North America,
1836. Quoted in Utopia/Aufbruch
in die Utopie, p.
140.
[39] Utopia/Aufbruch in die Utopie, p. 144
[40] For the story of Münch and
other Germans in Missouri after 1834, see Dorris Keevan-Franke “Missouri –
“Where the Sun Shines,” Utopia/Aufbruch
in die Utopie, pp. 173-260.
[42] Farley
Grubb. 2011. German Immigration and
Servitude in America, 1709-1914. Routledge
[43] Utopia/Aufbruch
in die Utopie,
p. 147.
[44] Utopia/Aufbruch
in die Utopie,
p. 146.
[45] Bromme. 1846. (See note 25).
[46] Göbel 1877, p. 147 (See note 14).
[47] Utopia/Aufbruch
in die Utopie,
p. 84.
[48] S. Charles Bolton. 1993. Territorial Ambition: Land and Society in Arkansas 1800-1840. The
University of Arkansas Press, p. 2.
[49] Friedrich
Gerstäcker. 1844. Streif- und Jagdzüge
durch die Vereinigten Staaten Nord-Amerika, volume 1, p. 139. Available as
free Google e-book.
