The Emergence of a German America

From Jamestown to Germantown

Most of the residents of Jamestown were Englishmen, but the early history of the colony almost makes it seem like a microcosm of what the United States would become.

For as we saw in the last chapter, Africans were present in Jamestown from the very beginning, albeit involuntarily, and as surprising as it might seem, eight Germans had settled there as early as 1608—five glass makers and three carpenters. In 1621, four millwrights, too, found their way from Hamburg to Jamestown.^[1] These early German settlers were welcomed for their skilled labor, just as the waves of German immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries would be. Frankly, the English settlers during the Jamestown years, the majority of whom were soldiers, often lacked any practical skills for frontier living other than soldiering.

Nevertheless, the first Germans to settle down in Virginia are merely incidental to the story of German America, as there weren’t enough of them to constitute a significant ethnic German community. For the most part, they were assimilated into the English community. ^[2]

Among the founders of the Massachusetts Bay colony who arrived in 1630, there were also a few Germans, although overall New England never attracted a very large German population. ^[3] Whether this reflected early tensions between the English and Germans is difficult to know. Yet by the years before the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin would openly express disdain for the Pennsylvania Germans. We will get to this shortly.

The first place to grow a significant German presence in the British colonies was Germantown. It was founded by thirteen Mennonite families from Krefeld (in western Germany near the border with Holland). Hoping to find a place of religious tolerance, they had been drawn to Pennsylvania by the advertising of its namesake William Penn, the English writer, religious thinker, and influential Quaker. ^[4]

These families were followed soon after by an influx of more Mennonites and some Quakers. Later, other German religious groups—including Moravians, Dunkers, and Schwenkfelders—settled in Pennsylvania alongside Lutherans and Calvinists. Historians sometimes distinguished these groups as “sect people” and “church people,” reflecting the extraordinary religious diversity among German immigrants.^[5]

Germantown, which sat just five miles from Philadelphia, attracted a wide variety of tradesmen—carpenters, locksmiths, shoemakers, tailors, and weavers.^[6]  Because Germantown sat only a few miles from Philadelphia, German artisans and entrepreneurs became an important part of the city’s economy. Businesses connected to the Germantown weavers opened in Philadelphia, while William Rittenhouse established paper mills there. Christopher Sauer later founded a publishing house, which grew to be the largest in the colonies, and published the first successful German newspaper in the colonies.^[7]

Germantown also made a mark in the social history of the colonies in 1688, holding “the first public protest against slavery in North America [when] the German Quaker assembly passed a resolution condemning slavery.” Unfortunately, when the resolution was put forward for discussion at a meeting of the English Quakers, they were too timid to take a position, as the resolution entailed the implication that goods produced by practitioners of slavery ought to be boycotted, and the English Quakers were swayed by economic interests over moral principles.^[8] It is perhaps quite an irony that the first public protest against slavery in North America came from German immigrants rather than from the English colonists who would eventually fight a revolution in the name of liberty.

The Floodgates Open

Throughout the 17th century, the number of German migrants to colonial America remained modest. However, beginning in 1709, a wave of mass migration began that would bring German settlers to the American colonies in unprecedented numbers.^[9]

Many of these migrants came from the Palatine region of southwestern Germany, where families faced severe poverty, war, religious persecution, and the devastating effects of the Great Frost — the coldest European winter in 500 years. It devastated crops and livestock,^[10] and the agricultural crisis it created, together with the ever-present threats of armed conflict and religious persecution that plagued life in the homeland, compelled a significant number of Palatine families to flee their poor villages. Lured by “rumors of free passage and free land to be granted by British authorities,” would-be emigrants crowded the Dutch ports and the outskirts of London.^[11]

While it is difficult to settle on a consistent number regarding just how many Germans immigrated to the American colonies during the Palatine Exodus, the roughly 2,100 people who survived the voyages of 1710 may have represented “the largest single immigration to America in the colonial period.”^[12]

The Palatines were the most dramatic early example of what would become a much broader and more sustained movement. Like the English settlers described in Chapter 3, German immigrants were never a single unified people. They came in waves over the following century and a half, from different regions, with different religious traditions and cultural values, and they settled in different parts of the country. Large sections of Pennsylvania, Upstate New York, and the Shenandoah Valley attracted Lutherans and Calvinists, while Moravians, Mennonites, Amish, and Quakers sought out communities that suited their particular faith. After the War of 1812, German Catholics began arriving in significant numbers.footnote]Wikipedia contributors, “German Americans: Colonial Era,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, (accessed June 21, 2023).[/footnote] What united them was not a common origin but a common destination and a common hope—and the not insignificant fact that they all spoke some version of the same language.

German Pennsylvania

While German-speaking people settled in small or modest numbers in all the colonies from Maine to Georgia, Pennsylvania was by far the preferred destination for Germans who migrated to America in the decades before the Revolution. Indeed, the German presence was so prominent that traversing Pennsylvania in the 18th century might mean that one in three people you met was German, spoke German, and lived according to German customs.^[13] Benjamin Franklin even feared the Germans would become so numerous that the English language would not be preserved and Pennsylvania would become ungovernable! Franklin even went so far as to suggest that there was a significant color line that separated the English from the Germans, declaring that the Germans “will never adopt our language, any more than they can acquire our complexion.” Franklin further disparaged the Germans for their clannishness and their lack of refinement.^[14] The Germans thus became the first immigrant group to attract widespread prejudice from the Anglo inhabitants of colonial America. As we shall see, the practice of racializing non-Anglo newcomers would become a recurrent theme in American history.

Other Anglo-Americans complained about the Germans’ “total lack of education.” It was true that as many as a quarter of all Germans in the colonial era were illiterate, as they had come from German principalities offering no compulsory schooling. This situation led the governor of Pennsylvania to support “a plan to establish charity schools among the Germans.” Indeed, in the 1750s–1760s, Anglo authorities opened schools that included German American children, but Christopher Sauer, the first German-language printer and publisher in North America, denounced these schools as “having only a political purpose,” namely to interfere with the language, culture, and religion of the Pennsylvania Germans, and thus to Anglicize German American children. In response, the German community established their own schools with the goal of preserving their language and heritage, thus bringing an end to the charity school movement.^[15]

By 1752, the Pennsylvania Germans numbered about 100,000. Although there were among them a small number of clergymen, teachers, doctors, businessmen, and artisans, the majority were  burghers and farmers. But despite their humble status, they typically embraced “a strong sense of family, a deep religious faith, and a love and pride in their German heritage.”^[16] The same stubborn attachment to their own ways that led German Pennsylvanians to reject the charity schools was equally visible in the way they built their farms, raised their families, and set their tables.

The typical farm family occupied a house located on a hillside in a wooded area. The owner’s name and the year of construction would have been carved in stone or into the wooden frame of the house, just as in Germany. Tile covered roofs were the norm. Outside might be a bakehouse and a smokehouse for preparing breads and meats. A barn constructed from fieldstone and framed in wood would have been essential. Gardens, orchards, and beehives were common. And of course, “food customs reflected those of Germany as well. A typical meal consisted of fresh wurst, roast pig, apples, geese cakes, beer, and molasses candy.”^[17]

The typical family was large, and everyone worked, even the children. Moreover, German farmers, once settled, rarely moved, unlike many Anglo farmers who seemed to have a penchant for moving continually westward. As a result, it is not surprising to find Pennsylvania farms today that have been in the same family since before the American Revolution.^[18]

Forgotten Founders

Although some sectarian groups among the Pennsylvania Germans opposed war and avoided political participation as a matter of religious conviction, most Pennsylvania Germans, who belonged to Lutheran and Reformed churches, took an active part in the American Revolution. Indeed, when the first shots of the American Revolution rang out, German Americans throughout the colonies joined the Continental Army, even forming several all-German American regiments. Moreover, a significant number of Germans rose to positions of command.^[19] One notable example was Peter Muehlenberg, a Lutheran pastor from a prominent Pennsylvania family. Muehlenberg commanded the 8th Virginia Regiment and after the founding of the Republic, served several terms in the House of Representatives and briefly in the Senate.^[20] Benjamin Franklin may have held the Germans in low regard, but surely it is significant that, George Washington, a professional soldier, has so much confidence in his German countrymen that he employed a bodyguard unit—consisting of 53 soldiers and 14 officers—all German American.^[21]

*   *   *

After the successful struggle for American independence, German Americans emerged as a group deeply invested in politics, governance, and the establishment of institutions that would put the new Republic on firm foundations. One example was David Rittenhouse, the great-grandson of William Rittenhouse, who had established the first paper mill in the colonies. David Rittenhouse served on the commission to establish the first U.S. Bank, and he was the first director of the U.S. Mint.^[22]

Rittenhouse resembled Benjamin Franklin in the breadth of his interests, not only in politics and governance, but as a scientist and inventor. He was an “astronomer, … clockmaker, mathematician, surveyor, [and] scientific instrument craftsman,” as well as a “public official.” He was a member of the American Philosophical Society and served for a time as its librarian and secretary. From 1791 to 1796, following Benjamin Franklin’s death in 1790, Rittenhouse served as president of the society. Among his other political activities was the founding of Democratic-Republican Societies in Philadelphia, intended to promote republicanism and democracy and fight aristocratic tendencies in the new nation. ^[23]

The distinction of being the first U.S. Treasurer also goes to a German American, Michael Hillegas, the son of German immigrants. Before the American Revolution, Hillegas had “acquired a considerable fortune from sugar refining, iron manufacturing, and banking, as well as from family businesses” During the Revolutionary War, from 1775, Hillegas served as Treasurer of the United Colonies, a position he continued to hold after the war ended in 1783, until Congress created the Treasury Department in 1789.^[24]

German Americans numbered among the first members of Congress, too. For example, Frederick Augustus Muehlenberg, brother of Peter Muehlenberg, having served in various capacities in the Pennsylvania Assembly, became the first Speaker of the House in the First Congress. He then went on to serve terms in the next three Congresses. Among other German American members of Congress were men such as Simon Driesbach, Charles Schumacher, and Michael Leib. And German Americans who served as governors included Johan Adam Treutlein in Georgia and Simon Snyder in Pennsylvania. In fact, by 1942, twelve of the first twenty-seven governors of Pennsylvania had been German American.^[25]

*   *   *

But German Americans didn’t just help shape the new government. They also helped shape political thinking more broadly, often in a way that would again begin to show the fault lines between themselves and their Anglo countrymen.

In the 1790s, two political coalitions emerged in the United States: the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. The Federalists favored a strong central government, closer ties with Britain, and policies supportive of commerce and established elites. In contrast, the Democratic-Republicans emphasized limited federal power, states’ rights, agrarian interests, and sympathy with revolutionary France. As the debates around these issues began to swirl, most German Americans tended to see the Democratic-Republican party as more aligned with their own interests. In practice, the Federalist’s pro-British (and anti-French) sentiments translated as anti-German and anti-immigrant, except perhaps for Anglo immigrants.^[26]

And the passage of The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 with strong Federalist support, only confirmed German American suspicions. Seeking to restrict immigration and limit criticism of the government, the Acts created an atmosphere of hostility towards immigrants. Many German Americans, felt targeted. Those that may have previously supported the Federalists, often switched their allegiance to the Republican Party, which opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts as destructive to civil liberties. The German American press became largely pro-Republican in the early 1800s, swinging overwhelmingly behind Jefferson during the election of 1800. Later, Jeffersonian Republican Party would become the basis for the emergence of the Democratic Party during the first half of the 19th century, and most German Americans would then remain Democrats “until the question of slavery caused the old parties to disintegrate, resulting in a new political alignment in the 1850s.”^[27]

From the battlefield to the halls of Congress, from the first U.S. Mint to the Speaker’s chair, and from the earliest debates about the shape of American democracy, German Americans helped build the Republic — even if history has not always remembered them for it.

The Spirit of 1848

While German Americans were busy embedding themselves in the political life of the new Republic, the flow of new arrivals from Germany had slowed to a trickle. Although German immigration to North America never ceased entirely, it was sharply curtailed for roughly fifty years following the American Revolution, as postwar economic depression and broader political upheavals in Europe disrupted transatlantic migration.^[28] By the 1830s and 1840s, however, immigration had begun to rise steadily. Still, it was not until the revolutions of 1848 that German immigration increased on a scale large enough to fundamentally reshape German America. Astonishingly, more than half a million Germans came to America between 1852 and 1854, pushed by political and economic upheaval in Germany.^[29]

As new German immigrants entered the U.S. in record numbers through the ports of New York and Baltimore in the mid to late 19th century, they flowed into the region around the Great Lakes and along the Ohio River. A smaller but significant number entered in New Orleans and streamed up the Mississippi River to its confluence with the Missouri River just north of St. Louis. By the time the American Civil War broke out (1861–1865), the German population was heavily concentrated in a 200-mile-wide belt stretching across the northern states from New York and Maryland to the Mississippi. Cities like Cincinnati, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Louis had all acquired strong German elements.^[30]

The quickening of German immigration after 1830, and even more so after 1848, was prompted in part by a desire to be rid of the old, hereditary, monarchical systems of privilege characteristic of life in much of Europe. In 1848, widespread demands for democratic reforms in Germany and elsewhere featured impassioned crowds taking to the streets, engaging in protests and sometimes armed confrontations to challenge the established order.^[31] When the revolution failed, many revolutionists had to run for their lives from the aristocracies they had tried to overthrow. Many of them fled to the United States. Although those who had taken an active role in the revolution were but a small minority of the nearly one million Germans who came here in the 1850s, the revolutionists’ idealism was widely shared by the majority of their fellow countrymen.^[32]

The Forty-Eighters, as they would come to be called, were quite diverse in their political views, regional backgrounds, and occupations, but they tended to be united in their dedication to principles of freedom and democracy, and most were fiercely anti-slavery.^[33] Forty-Eighters were also strongly inclined towards active participation in politics, unlike the majority of German immigrants—both those who had come before 1848 and those who would come after—who tended to be disinterested in politics.^[34] Consequently, Forty-Eighters wound up playing a major role in the politics of the immediate pre– and post–Civil War eras.

Another notable characteristic of the Forty-Eighters was their tendency to reject conventional religious belief. Whereas most German Americans were religiously devout, “[t]he typical Forty-Eighter was a freethinker, if not an atheist.”^[35] A freethinker in this context was someone who took the philosophical position that “beliefs should not be formed on the basis of authority, tradition, revelation, or dogma,” but “should instead be reached by other methods such as logic, reason, and empirical observation.”^[36]

*   *   *

The Forty-Eighters arrived in the United States at a time when two major political issues were roiling the country. First, there was the  problem of slavery which had become ever more contentious with the westward expansion of the country. While an uneasy equilibrium had existed between the original northern and southern states with respect to their positions on slavery, the question of whether slavery would be permitted in the new western territories was becoming so divisive in the 1850s that it would only be settled by a civil war.

In 1820, Congress had passed a law known as the Missouri Compromise, which sought to balance the desires of northern states to stop the expansion of slavery, with the desires of southern states to expand slavery. The compromise allowed Missouri to become a new state where slavery would be permitted, while Maine would become a new free state. The compromise further stipulated that in the future, slavery would not be permitted in the western territories north of 36°30′ N latitude—or roughly the line running due west along a line described by Missouri’s southern border. This would have excluded slavery from the Kansas and Nebraska territories when they were conceived decades later.

Unfortunately for abolitionists, in 1854, the Missouri Compromise was undermined by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which granted to the settlers themselves the right to decide the question of slavery in those territories. Violent clashes followed the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act as pro-slavery settlers flooded into Kansas seeking to establish slavery in violation of the agreement that had been established by the Missouri Compromise. These circumstances laid the foundation for the birth of the modern Republican Party (as distinct from the earlier Jeffersonian Republican Party, which had been largely absorbed by a Democratic Party that was becoming ever more wedded to the preservation of slavery). Indeed, the new Republican Party came together primarily in opposition to the expansion of slavery into the western territories, with many Republicans arguing for the eventual abolition of slavery.

Because they were consistent in their dedication to principles of liberty and democracy, Forty-Eighters tended to be adamantly opposed to slavery, which they believed made a mockery of the Declaration of Independence.^[37] Many Forty-Eighters were, therefore, naturally attracted to the new Republican Party.^[38]

The second major political issue of the day that naturally concerned Forty-Eighters was the status of immigrants in the eyes of native-born Americans, especially those of English descent, many of whom were quite likely to define a “true” American as someone that was at least culturally English, if not of English descent. This tended to complicate the political allegiances of Germans, whether they belonged to long-settled German American communities, or whether they were more recent arrivals, like the Forty-Eighters.

Traditionally, German Americans had been Democrats, for the Democratic Party had historically been the immigrant-friendly party, depicting itself as “the natural home of the foreign-born and the national guarantor of their aspirations for liberty, democracy, and opportunity”^[39]—even if it explicitly promised these blessings only to White people.^[40] The Democrats were usually quick to remind immigrants of the party’s historically staunch resistance to “every attempt to abridge the privilege of becoming citizens and the owners of soil,”—a reference to its opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts during the Federalist era.^[41]

Democrats also presented themselves as the defender of workers’ rights. Indeed, the Democrats had significant support in the industrialized, urban North where many Irish and German immigrants, including Germany’s many craftworkers, earned their livings. Generally speaking, “German-American Democratic leadership included large numbers of earlier immigrants,” especially businessmen, manufacturers, newspaper publishers, or conservative ministers—”who were more firmly tied to the economic, political, and ideological status quo than most newcomers.”^[42]

In contrast to long-established, conservative-leaning German Americans—sometimes called “Grays,”—the Forty-Eighters (or “Greens”) were generally more liberal, if not radical. Although both groups  opposed slavery, the Greens were generally more vocal in their opposition, while the Grays were more inclined to put the issue out of mind. These differing political inclinations might help partly explain why Forty-Eighters were quick to support the new, anti-slavery Republican Party when it arose in 1854 during the Kansas-Nebraska furor, while older Germans remained loyal to the Democratic Party despite its pro-slavery platform.^[43]

But it must have been a tricky balancing act for many German Americans to sort out their political allegiances after the rise of the Republican Party, for while Republicans stood decidedly against slavery, the party also harbored some nativist factions that were hostile to immigrants. The rise of anti-immigrant prejudice corresponded, as it always does, with the dramatic increase in immigration that began in the 1850s. The paranoia that seized  certain Anglo-Americans soon manifested itself in the movement that became know as the Know-Nothing movement, so called because its members, when asked questions about the movement, pretended to “know nothing” about it.^[44]

So the Democratic Party was pro-immigrant but also pro-slavery, and the Republican Party was anti-slavery, but with anti-immigrant factions as well. An anti-slavery immigrant had little choice but to struggle “to evaluate political issues and prioritize them according to their importance.” At any rate, according to Bruce Levine, the available data on voting patterns suggest that “overall, support for the Republican party grew significantly among German working people between 1856 and 1860”^[45] despite the fact that the growing Know-Nothing movement might have made some German Americans think twice about supporting Republicans.

By 1855, Know-Nothings had acquired significant power in seven states, winning governorships and seats in state legislatures, and even gaining seats in the U.S.  Congress. Know-Nothing supporters attacked German American churches, halls, festivities, and picnics, precipitating bloody riots in cities around the country, including in Columbus, Cincinnati, and Louisville. Things got so bad that German Americans felt compelled to form self-defense militias, and violent clashes with Know-Nothing mobs sometimes occurred.^[46] In the end, the approaching national crisis leading up to the outbreak of Civil War along with “the increasing political clout of German-Americans eventually led to the downfall of the Know-Nothings, as German-Americans came to be viewed as essential to victory in the election of 1860.”^[47]

The stage was now set for the defining crisis of the Republic — and German Americans would once again be called upon to prove their loyalty and their commitment to the ideals of freedom and democracy they had carried with them across the Atlantic.

The Most Famous Forty-Eighter

Without a doubt, the most renowned representative of the spirit of 1848, and especially of the essence of the German contribution to that movement, was Carl Schurz. He embodied “its idealism and its ideals, its vigor and independence, its youthful buoyancy and optimism.” Born Karl Schurz on March 2, 1829, in the village of Liblar near Bonn on the Rhine, Schurz was just 19 years old on the eve of the 1848 revolution. Deeply committed to hopes of German unification and a democratization of the government, Schurz had been forced to flee when the revolution failed, going first to Switzerland and then to London. In London, Schurz married Margarethe Meyer of Hamburg, and a month later in August 1852, the young couple immigrated to the United States.^[48]

Schurz’s rise to fame, influence, and respect in America was astounding. It began quietly enough for a newlywed, twenty-three-year-old immigrant landing in New York, with virtually no fluency in English at all. In Schurz’s own words:

Here in America I lived for several years quietly and unobtrusively in an ideal happy family circle. … I studied, observed, and learned assiduously, until at last in the year ’56, when the movement against slavery developed magnificently, I found myself drawn into public life. I knew that I should accomplish something. America is the country for ambitious capability, and the foreigner who studies its conditions thoroughly, and with full appreciation, can procure for himself an even greater field of activity than the native.^[49]

During these first few “quiet years,” Schurz dedicated himself to learning English as quickly as he could, adopting a method that we might today call the “reading method.” It began with the daily reading of a newspaper. Soon he supplemented this by reading “the works of Goldsmith, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Macaulay, the commentaries of Blackstone (as he was looking forward to a legal career), and last of all, because of their enormous vocabulary, the plays of Shakespeare.” After a time, he supplemented this reading with exercises in translation.^[50]

To Schurz, the greatest impulse to human action was the unselfish pursuit of a spiritual objective, and this he found in the pursuit of the abolition of slavery, a cause that would eventually bring him into the orbit of future president Abraham Lincoln. Schurz developed immense admiration and respect for Lincoln at the same time that he developed a deep abhorrence of Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s chief rival, whom Schurz regarded as an avowed defender of the slave system. As Schurz became involved in politics, he initially honed his public speaking skills on German-speaking audiences, learning first how to capture a crowd in his own language before eventually attempting to do it in his adopted language. When the time came, Schurz campaigned for Lincoln in front of German-speaking and English-speaking audiences alike, taking Douglas apart with power and wit. Schurz has often been regarded as instrumental “in helping to bring about the election of Lincoln in 1860.”[Morgan, 230–231.[/footnote]

After Lincoln became president, he appointed Schurz to serve as ambassador to Spain, but when the Civil War broke out, Schurz received a commission to serve as a Union Army general, participating ably as a commander in many well-known battles, including the Second Battle of Bull Run, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Battle of Chattanooga. When the war ended, Schurz resigned from the army. Three years later, he ran to represent the state of Missouri in the U.S. Senate, becoming the first German American to serve in that body, where he dedicated himself to reforming the civil service.^[51]

In 1876, Schurz was appointed by President Rutherford B. Hayes to be Secretary of the Interior, the Department that, among other things, oversaw Indian affairs. Unfortunately, despite his sympathy for the injustices faced by Native people, Schurz’s tenure as Secretary of the Interior might be seen in retrospect as having been marred by his support for the assimilationist policies of the day. In particular, his backing of initiatives like industrial schools, which sought to assimilate Native American children into mainstream culture, can be criticized for contributing to the erosion of indigenous self-determination and cultural heritage.^[52] However, at a time when no one was able to exercise sound judgement on a just path forward in Indian affairs, perhaps it is too much to ask for perfect insight from a man whose moral instincts were otherwise so often correct.

German Americans and the Civil War

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, German Americans and especially Forty-Eighters—as exemplified by Carl Schurz as just discussed above—overwhelmingly sided with the North. There were many reasons for this, and the average German American may have had his or her own reasons, but three possibilities are worth noting here.

First, because of the German commitment to liberty and equality, Germans could not identify with the Southern cause, i.e., the preservation of “a system that depended on slavery for its livelihood.” Closely associated with this was the fact that the landed aristocracy of the South reminded German immigrants of the European nobility system that they had left Germany to be free from. Secondly, “[m]ost Southern plantation owners were opposed to European immigration” since their economic system did not require it.^[53] The economic system of the North, by contrast, was aligned with the economic interests of immigrants. Thirdly, German Americans opposed the idea of secession. If some of the old-time German farmers were apathetic and failed to see why it should concern them, Forty-Eighters were quick to educate them. Using their old homeland as “glaring proof of the dangers of disunion,” Forty-Eighters pointed out the folly of allowing the only “outstanding republic in the world, whatever its faults” to disintegrate into disunion. German Americans, they argued, had “an obligation to prevent that calamity in their adopted country.”^[54]

So when President Lincoln called for volunteers to serve in the Union Army, German Americans were quick to respond. For example, within two days, German Americans in Cincinnati met in the Turner Hall to form Ohio’s all-German Ninth Infantry Regiment. Over the next several days, enough men had volunteered to form the regiment’s requisite ten companies. “Similar scenes occurred in Chicago, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, and New York.”^[55] Overall, German Americans enlisted in numbers that far exceeded their percentage of the total population. Although people of German ancestry made up less than 5% of the free White population of the United States in 1860, they made up 30% of the Union Army.^[56] Of the 2.5 million soldiers in the Union Army, for instance, 750,000 were German American or German-born immigrants. In fact, “the German-born alone amounted to 216,000,” and the Union Army had about 500 German-born officers.^[57]

However, none of this should be taken to mean that all German Americans approved of the war. Party affiliation—whether or not the German American community of any particular state or locality had voted Democratic in the 1860 election or whether they had swung over to the newly founded Republican Party—predicted in large part the degree of community support for the Union cause. For instance, Germans in “Missouri, Illinois, Minnesota, and the cities of Brooklyn, Buffalo, and perhaps Pittsburgh,” where Republicans had prevailed, were more supportive of the Union cause. But in the states of “Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana, and in New York City, Albany, and Philadelphia,” where Democrats had retained the majority, people were less enthusiastic. Indeed, in Wisconsin in 1862, it became “necessary to impose a draft to meet the state’s troop obligations,” which prompted a local revolt in which “a drunken mob … seized and destroyed the draft lists and drove off the officials in charge.”^[58]

Although the overwhelming majority of Germans who served in the military during the Civil War did so for the Union, there were German Americans that fought for the Confederacy. But compared to the northern German Belt where the vast majority of Germans had settled, the German population in the South was considerably more sparse, and the presence of German Americans in the Confederate Army was therefore correspondingly much smaller. At the time of the Civil War, only about 75,000 Germans lived in southern states, including 15,000 in New Orleans, and not all of them supported the Southern cause, even if there were some that did.^[59] In fact, “[w]hen the war began, many Germans fled North.” Nevertheless, Texas, Virginia, and Louisiana had enough of a German presence to field a number of all-German companies, as did Georgia.^[60]

In the end, whether by conviction or by coincidence, the majority of German Americans could boast that they had fought on the right side in the defining issue of the day—the slavery issue. As Rippley has put it:

For many years after the war, editors of German-language newspapers could proudly place their ethnic brothers behind the cause of equality, justice, and reform, customarily asserting that the Germans were solidly aligned with Lincoln’s principles. Identified with the Great Emancipator, they could forever see themselves as having formed a bulwark against the immorality of slavery, against the illegality of secession, and not least, against the xenophobia of Know-Nothingism.^[61]

*   *   *

The Civil War cemented German Americans’ place in the Republic they had helped defend. And they kept coming. Lured by the Homestead Act of 1862 and by the post-Civil War industrial expansion that produced a desperate need for immigrant labor, Germans continued to arrive in robust numbers until the end of the century. From 1820 to 1900, five million Germans came to America—more than any other group. Their closest rivals were the Irish at 3.8 million and the British at 3 million.^[62]

The Anglo/German Cultural Divide

By the beginning of the 20th century, German communities comprised the largest (or second largest) immigrant group in many cities across the Northeast and Midwest, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Louis, among others. Moreover, German immigrants had introduced many things that seem to us today typically American, for example, new foods and beverages such as hot dogs, pretzels, lager beer, etc.; educational methods and systems like kindergarten, high school, the research university, physical education, and vocational education; holiday traditions including the Christmas tree, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Easter egg hunts.^[63] Anglo Americans had come to see many of these things as parts of American culture.

However, fundamental ideological differences prevented Anglo Americans and German Americans from seeing eye to eye on many issues that went straight to the heart of what it meant to be an American, or indeed to become an American. Anglos “had confidence in the ability of American institutions and culture to incorporate diverse European groups into one national culture and society dominated by a white, English-speaking Protestant majority.” Germans, on the other hand, already politically and economically integrated, did not especially appreciate the notion that immigrants (or their offspring) should be expected to defer in matters of culture to an English-speaking Anglo elite.^[64]

Instead, German Americans “argued for a pluralistic understanding of American society in which the preservation of the ethnic group and its language, culture, and institutional structure was understood as a societal benefit that should be promoted and defended.” To these German Americans, being a true American was a matter of “exemplify[ing] American ideals, especially the idea of liberty,” and “[t]he best way of expressing one’s freedom as an American was to be true to one’s ethnic heritage.” In other words, for German Americans, “being a good American meant being a good German: speaking good German, being active in German social and cultural groups, and displaying the positive characteristics of German immigrants … to other groups.” Believing that “they could pick and choose which aspects of American culture they wished to adopt,” German Americans saw no contradiction in their desire to live in their own neighborhoods, maintain their language, and not marry outside of their group while still being fully American. “In short, German Americans believed that they could assimilate into American society on their own terms, not the terms of the larger, Anglo American English-speaking Protestant majority.”^[65]

Indeed, German Americans found much in the typical Anglo American attitude and lifestyle that they positively disliked. For one thing, they did not approve of the egalitarian relationships they observed in the Anglo family, especially as reflected in the relationships between children and parents. The German family, with the father as the undisputed head of the household, was clearly more patriarchal. In the world of work and business, German Americans disliked the Anglo penchant for speculative and risky investment, and sometimes even shady business dealing, with the aim of obtaining individual financial wealth. To the German American, the purpose of work was to provide for the support of the family, and the value of work was in its quality, not the salary attached to it. But even more significantly, perhaps, because it directly threatened the German American life style, Germans criticized the tendency of Anglo women to be continually involved in crusades designed to reform society according to Anglo values.^[66]

More concretely, Germans opposed what they saw as Puritan-inspired efforts on the part of zealous Anglo Americans to pass laws against alcohol consumption and Sabbath-breaking. For German Americans, the frequenting of Lokals and beer gardens was a cornerstone of social life in the late 19th and early 20th century. And the designation of Sunday as a day for the whole family to get together with friends to enjoy beer or wine and perhaps a picnic basket at a local park or neighborhood beer garden was another aspect of it.^[67] If Anglo Americans wanted to abstain from alcohol and set Sundays aside for Bible reading, that was certainly their right. But why should they impose it on others?

*   *   *

Nothing illustrates the vitality and self-sufficiency of German American community life more vividly than Kleindeutschland, the great German quarter of New York City. In 1880, German immigrants and their American-born children made up an astounding 549,142 people, or nearly half of New York’s population of 1.2 million, making it the third-largest German-speaking city in the world behind Berlin and Vienna.^[68] As Ziegler-McPherson has elaborated:

In Kleindeutschland, a German immigrant could buy German food and other household items at thousands of German grocery stores, delicatessens, butcher shops, and bakeries; drink German-style lager beer in more than five hundred Lokals (bars); drink beer and listen and dance to German music at eight hundred beer gardens; see a classical German play or new vaudeville skit at three theaters; read more than twenty German-language newspapers and magazines; buy German-language books at Westermann and Company or Ernst Steiger’s or borrow them from the Astor Library; participate in thousands of clubs, fraternal orders, and labor unions; exercise and play sports at two gymnasiums; bank at the Germania Bank, Sender Jarmulowsky’s bank, the German Savings Bank, the German American Bank, or the German Exchange Bank; receive unemployment, injury, or funeral assistance from thousands of mutual benefit societies; and on Sunday, choose from thirty-three churches and synagogues that conducted services in German. Only the public schools in the neighborhood were controlled by outsiders, and even here, some New York City public schools offered instruction in German. Parents could also choose from eleven private German-language schools for their children.^[69]

Moreover, the German community was highly organized, and just as in Germany the Verein (plural, Vereine) played a central role in community social life. Vereine were clubs, associations, or societies, of which there were many different sorts: mutual benefit and charitable societies, homeland societies, and labor unions; choirs, bands, dance clubs, and theater clubs; sports clubs devoted to fencing, gymnastics, and shooting; religious societies, and the list goes on. Indeed, there were thousands of such Vereine in New York, and it was not unusual for a person to belong to more than one.^[70]

As previously mentioned, the prominent role of social drinking and the German notion of how best to spend a Sunday afternoon were particular sources of cultural contention between German and Anglo Americans. In 1880, the typical New Yorker worked a six-day week. German immigrants attended their Vereine (meetings) in the evenings and on Sundays. The meetings were accompanied by social drinking and attended by men, women, and children alike, which was shocking to Anglo Americans (not to mention illegal in New York). In fact, the German and the Anglo conception of the bar or saloon were worlds apart. The traditional Anglo bar, for instance, was exclusively a man’s domain, and the only women that might be tolerated were prostitutes. But for German Americans, bars and beer gardens were family-friendly environments, and visiting the local beer garden was a common way for the family to spend a Sunday afternoon or evening.^[71]

It was a world unto itself — vibrant, confident, and, as it would turn out, deeply vulnerable.

The Great Disappearing Act

The outbreak of World War I was a tragedy, not just for the countries involved, but also for the status of Germans in America. As Ziegler-McPherson has suggested, “Before World War I, German Americans had been the ethnic group best positioned to promote alternative visions of American society and theories of assimilation, and the United States had countless large and small German communities where this alternative understanding of pluralism was developed and lived on a daily basis.”^[72] Yet the end of the war in 1918, “nearly all visible aspects of German culture in New York City had been eliminated,” and by 1930, “the institutions and social activities that had made the German community so visible for so many decades were largely gone.”^[73]

When the United States entered the war against Germany in April 1917, German Americans suddenly found themselves in an impossible position — caught between loyalty to their adopted country and sympathy for the land of their birth.

At first, German Americans, and indeed Americans of all backgrounds, tended to oppose U. S. intervention and urged the United States to remain neutral. “The loudest voices for neutrality were German-language newspapers, who sought to both inform their readers of the German side of the war and to lobby for neutrality,”^[74] while “the English-language press increasingly supported England.” Publicly, President Woodrow Wilson had consistently called for American neutrality, although his actions made it clear that “he was not only pro-English, but anti-German.” In fact, the whole Wilson administration was dominated by Anglo Americans who were clearly pro-British.^[75]

Meanwhile, the U.S. remained neutral for thirty-three months from August, 1914 until April, 1917. During that time, however, German Americans faced increasing hostility, especially from Anglo Americans who increasingly sought to assert the idea of “100 percent Americanism” as the primary way of defining one’s Americanness. According to this position, one could only be 100 percent American, and nothing less. The idea of being a “hyphen,” for example, German-American or Irish-American, was unacceptable.^[76]

After the U. S. entered World War I, an anti-German hysteria took hold of the country. People of German heritage and all things German became its target. German Americans’ loyalty to the United States was questioned. More than six thousand Germans who were legal residents, but not yet naturalized citizens, were rounded up and interned at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, as “enemy aliens.” German language use came under attack in whatever form it took. Twenty-six states passed laws against the use of German anywhere in public. The German American press was censored. The Secret Service often raided the offices of its editors. The post office sometimes refused to deliver German-language publications to subscribers. German language instruction was eliminated from schools, and German language materials were removed from libraries. German American associations and community leaders came under attack amid efforts to shut the organizations down. Individuals of German descent were harassed, threatened, beaten, and lynched. Germans were slandered in the mass media and depicted in hateful and offensive ways in cinema. And even after the war ended, anti-Germanism continued for some time unabated.^[77]

Under such relentless pressure, the survival instinct took over. German Americans responded to these unrelenting attacks by performing what Ziegler-McPherson has described as a “Great Disappearing Act.”

Yes, German Americans continued to meet with friends and socialize, but these gatherings were more often informal than formal, and groups no longer chose to identify themselves as German to their neighbors and the larger community … There was no more parading around the street on the way to or from a Verein celebration; the picnics and festivals that had attracted thousands were over.^[78]

German Americans had simply become one among the many ethnic groups in the city with no special prominence.

Weathering World War II

When the Second World War broke out, German Americans rightly worried about the possibility of once again becoming victims of anti-German hysteria. But while the war did engender renewed anti-German sentiment, its severity compared to that which had accompanied the First World War was mitigated by a number of factors.

First, the visibility of German Americans as a distinctive ethnic group had been greatly reduced following their “great disappearing act” after World War I. Therefore, there were fewer targets to excite anti-German hysteria. Secondly, while German Americans had spoken out in defense of Germany during the First World War, they either maintained a firmly isolationist or neutral position, or were openly critical of Hitler’s Germany during the Second World War. Moreover, President Franklin Roosevelt was more careful not to speak out against the German American community as Woodrow Wilson had done twenty years earlier, therefore not encouraging anti-German sentiment. (However, nearly 11,000 German Americans did find themselves interned upon suspicion of “potential for espionage or sabotage.”^[79] although this paled in comparison to the more than 100,000 Japanese Americans that were interned based on no reason other than race.)^[80]

*   *   *

In the immediate aftermath of the Nazi takeover of Germany, more than a million Germans fled to escape tyranny and persecution. Two hundred thousand of them came to the U.S., among them scientists, artists, musicians, writers, philosophers, doctors, architects, and actors, many of whom were Jewish.

No doubt the most famous was Albert Einstein, the theoretical physicist whose special and general theories of relativity had already revolutionized our understanding of space, time, and the universe. But Einstein was more than a scientist — he was a public intellectual and humanitarian who used his extraordinary fame to speak out against militarism, nationalism, and racial injustice. Having fled Nazi persecution, he understood from personal experience what it meant to be driven from one’s home by hatred and ideology. He became an American citizen in 1940 and remained in the United States until his death in 1955, spending his final years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Einstein was perhaps the most luminous example of a broader phenomenon—the enrichment of American intellectual and cultural life by refugees from Nazi tyranny. From 1941 to 1950, a quarter of a million more German-speaking immigrants came to the U.S., displaced from eastern and southeastern Europe and the old eastern German provinces. In the 1950s and 1960s, as Germany rebuilt, another three-quarter of a million followed. These newcomers, together with the remarkable recovery of West Germany, the turnaround in U.S.-German relations, and the reassuring fact that Dwight D. Eisenhower—Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe and President from 1952 to 1960—was himself of German descent, gradually rehabilitated German American identity. By the 1970s, Oktoberfest celebrations were returning to cities like Cincinnati and Milwaukee, and for the first time in decades, Americans of German descent could speak openly of their heritage without embarrassment or suspicion.

German American Identity Today

Despite the openness to celebrations of ethnic identity brought about by the ethnic heritage revivals of the ’60s and ’70’s and the multicultural movement of the ’80s and ’90s, most Americans of German descent no longer identify strongly as German American. Most are clearly aware of their German family background and remain perfectly willing to report it in ancestry surveys. They may even casually embrace certain German cultural elements, such as attending a local Oktoberfest or enjoying German cuisine, but this in itself doesn’t make them much different from Americans with no German heritage at all who may do the same thing.

At the same time, data from the 2020 United States Census indicate that “German” (either alone or in combination with other ancestries) is the most frequently reported ancestry in the United States today. People of German ancestry comprise about 12.8% of the U.S. population, a proportion which is greater than any other ethnic group. “English” and “Irish,” in nearly equal proportions (about 9.5%), are the second and third most frequently reported ancestries.^[81]

It might seem surprising that people of German descent outnumber those of English descent, but it is important to keep in mind that census data is based on self-reporting, and individuals may choose how they wish to identify their ancestry or ethnicity. It is therefore possible that people of German descent only appear to outnumber people of English descent because the latter do not specifically identify as English; rather they may simply identify as “American,” which is the fourth most frequently reported ethnicity (5.3%). But it is also possible that some people of German descent do not identify as such and identify as “American” as well. Either way people of German ancestry make up a significant proportion of America’s multi-ethnic society, clearly vying with Anglo Americans for the status as the largest ethnic group in the U.S.

And although individuals of German ancestry tend not to openly proclaim their German heritage as their ancestors once did, communities in the Midwest, like Cincinnati or Milwaukee, where 19th century German settlement was most concentrated, still seem willing to display their German ethnic roots. On the other hand, signs of German ethnicity are barely noticeable in the Mid-Atlantic, where most 18th century German settlement occurred and which in the 19th century was “a close second to the Midwest as a destination for … German newcomers.”^[82]

But for most German Americans today, the answer to the question “Who am I?” no longer includes the word German — and yet the German presence in American life, from its institutions and its politics to its foods and its festivals, remains woven into the fabric of the nation, whether Americans know it or not.

For Further Analysis/Discussion/Reflection

The Emergence of a German America

• • Germans were among the earliest settlers of Jamestown, welcomed for skills the English settlers largely lacked. Along with the Africans discussed in the previous chapter, their presence complicates the popular image of America as an English creation. What does this suggest about who actually built the country?
  • German immigrants came from many different regions and religious traditions. In what ways does their diversity parallel the diversity among the English settlers described in Chapter 3?
  • Benjamin Franklin complained that Germans would never adopt “our language” or “our complexion.” What is surprising about an immigrant society making such complaints? And what does Franklin’s reference to “complexion” tell you about how some Americans were already thinking about race and who truly belonged?
  • The German community rejected the Anglo-run charity schools and established their own. What does this tell you about how German Pennsylvanians understood their identity as Americans?

Forgotten Founders

• • Benjamin Franklin disparaged the Germans as unfit to be truly American, yet George Washington trusted them with his life. What does this contradiction suggest about the difference between cultural prejudice and practical reality?
  • The first U.S. Treasurer, the first Speaker of the House, and the first director of the U.S. Mint were all German Americans. Does the evidence in this section support the chapter’s title “Forgotten Founders”? What might explain why such contributions have been overlooked?
  • What specific features of Federalist politics alienated German Americans, and what does this tell us about how immigrant communities navigate political choices in their adopted country?

The Spirit of 1848

• • The typical Forty-Eighter was described as a freethinker — someone who formed beliefs through reason and observation rather than religious authority or tradition. How did this set them apart not only from other immigrant groups but from the more established German American community they joined?
  • In the 1850s, the pro-immigrant party was pro-slavery and the anti-slavery party harbored nativists hostile to immigrants. How did German Americans navigate this impossible choice, and does their dilemma remind you of any political situations today?
  • The Know-Nothing movement’s attacks on German Americans echo Benjamin Franklin’s earlier hostility toward German immigrants. Why do you think nativist movements keep reappearing in American history despite the country’s identity as a nation of immigrants?

The Most Famous Forty-Eighter

• • Carl Schurz arrived in America at twenty-three with no English and no connections, yet within a decade was campaigning for Abraham Lincoln before both German and English-speaking audiences. What qualities and strategies made such a remarkable transformation possible?
  • Schurz wrote that America offers the ambitious foreigner an even greater field of activity than the native-born. Looking at the evidence of his own life and the lives of other immigrants discussed in this book, do you think there is something about the immigration experience itself that tends to produce exceptional individuals?
  • Schurz spent his life fighting for freedom and justice, yet supported policies that forced Indigenous children to abandon their language and culture. The text suggests he was not unusual — almost every European who encountered Indigenous peoples shared similar blind spots. How is it possible for a person to be genuinely committed to justice in some areas while failing to see injustice in others? Can you think of any modern examples of this kind of selective moral vision?

German Americans and the Civil War

• • The text identifies three reasons why German Americans overwhelmingly sided with the Union. Which of the three do you find most compelling, and why?
  • German Americans made up less than 5% of the free White population in 1860 but contributed 30% of the Union Army. How does this fact sit alongside the chapter’s title “Forgotten Founders”?
  • Not all German Americans supported the Union — some were indifferent, and a small number even fought for the Confederacy. Does this surprise you given what you have read about German Americans’ commitment to liberty and democracy? How do you account for it?

The Anglo/German Cultural Divide

• • German Americans contributed hot dogs, Christmas trees, kindergarten, the research university, and much more to what Americans now consider their own culture. Some argue there is no single American culture — only a layered accumulation of contributions from many groups. Others argue there is an ideological core to American identity — a commitment to liberty, democracy, and the rule of law — and that cultural practices are merely decoration. Which view do you find more convincing?
  • Kleindeutschland was a thriving, self-sufficient German community that showed no signs of fading before World War I devastated it almost overnight. Do you think it would have survived and persisted indefinitely if the wars had not intervened? Or does every immigrant community eventually dissolve into the mainstream regardless of its vitality?
  • German Americans in Kleindeutschland maintained their own language, institutions, and way of life while considering themselves fully American. Can you think of any communities in the United States or elsewhere today that are navigating a similar tension between preserving their own culture and participating in the mainstream?

The Great Disappearing Act

• • During World War I, twenty-six states passed laws against the use of German in public, German language instruction was eliminated from schools, and German language materials were removed from libraries. Why do you think nativists so often target language when they want to suppress a culture? Can you think of other examples from history or from the world today?
  • After decades of proudly maintaining their German identity in America, German Americans were forced to make themselves invisible almost overnight. If you had been a German American in 1917, which aspects of your identity do you think would have been hardest to surrender?
  • Looking back at the chapters you have already read, what other examples of non-Anglo groups being scapegoated during periods of national anxiety can you identify? Does the pattern follow a predictable logic?

Weathering World War II

• • German Americans faced far less severe persecution during World War II than during World War I despite the fact that the United States was again at war with Germany. What factors does the text identify as contributing to this difference?
  • During World War II, more than 100,000 Japanese Americans were interned based on no reason other than their racial background, while only about 11,000 German Americans faced internment. What do you think accounts for that stark difference in treatment?
  • Albert Einstein was welcomed in America because of his extraordinary fame and scientific value. Not all Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany were so fortunate. What do you think determined who was welcomed and who was turned away?

German American Identity Today

• • German Americans were once the most visible and self-confident ethnic community in America. Today their identity has largely faded into the mainstream. Is this a success story, a loss, or both?

Media Attributions

• Gallery Images – Historical Houses in Germantown, Pennsylvania
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• Farm with a Pennsylvania German–style barn © Nicholas A. Tonelli is licensed under a CC BY (Attribution) license
• Peter Muehlenberg © Author Unknown is licensed under a Public Domain license
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• Frederick Augustus Conrad Muhlenberg © Joseph Wright is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Missouri Compromise © User:Golbez. is licensed under a CC BY-SA (Attribution ShareAlike) license
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• 20th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment German Officer Corps © Unknown/James Steakley is licensed under a Public Domain license
• German Beer Garden © Alfred Fredericks is licensed under a All Rights Reserved license. Used with permission under Fair Use
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• Dormitory of Interned Germans © Bain News Service is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Albert Einstein © Orren Jack Turner is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Immigrants 1850-2022 © Migration Policy Institute. Adapted here for non-commercial educational purposes under fair use. The graph is not covered by this book’s Creative Commons license.
• Percentage of Americans with German Ancestry © Abbasi786786 is licensed under a CC BY-SA (Attribution ShareAlike) license