Chapter VIII: The Old Northwest Territory

The second period to be dealt with covers the years from the first census, 1790, to the eve of the Civil War, 1860, and deals with the organization of our government and the extension of settlement westward to the Pacific. Free land and a very high birthrate among native Americans led to a great increase of the population, so that the white inhabitants of the United States, about three millions and a quarter in 1790, became twenty-seven millions and a half, in 1860, though immigration during the seventy-year period was not over four and a quarter million.

From 1790 to 1820, no official record of immigrant arrivals was kept. Thousands certainly arrived during those thirty years, but it seems probable that they were nearly all English and Scotch.

Just as the termination in 1790 of the preceding period was marked by a racial loss, caused by the expulsion of the Loyalists, so this later period was terminated by an internecine Civil War, costing the country three-fourths of a million Nordic lives, counting killed and died of wounds only. The descendants of those men who gave their lives for their country on both sides would have filled up the West, instead of its being largely populated by the immigrants we recklessly invited to our shores.

During the period referred to (1790-1860), there was, as said, no heavy immigration except from two sources, Ireland and Germany, and both of these occurred in the later portion of the period.

The displacement of agriculture by sheep in Scotland at the beginning of the nineteenth century dispossessed thousands of farmers who moved to America, sometimes with the active assistance of their landlords. The population of some districts, as Perthshire, Argyllshire, and Inverness-shire, fell sharply, because the people, no longer able to make a living, moved away. North America was the favorite destination.

Southern England experienced a similar movement. The price of agricultural products, which had been forced up during the Napoleonic wars, fell steadily for a long time. Farmers could not make a living. The counties of Kent, Hampshire, Somerset, and Surrey were the chief centers of emigration. These people also turned their faces toward North America.

Ireland, too, was in perpetual ferment and the emigration from that island was increased as the result of the abortive revolutionary attempts of the United Irishmen in 1798 and 1803. After the leader of the latter, Robert Emmet, was executed, his elder brother, Thomas A. Emmet, came to New York, practised law, and within a decade became the attorney-general of the state. The Emmets, like most others of these Irish refugees, were Protestants in religion.

Later, in 1845, the potato crop failed in Ireland, and soon after the starving peasantry, many of them from the lower types of western Ireland, swarmed over here. The women became domestic servants and the men day laborers, doing the heavy work of ditch digging and railroad building. They were Roman Catholic and that fact excited animosity in many sections of the country. They were not welcome in the West when they drifted there. It was not unusual to see on the frontier railroad stations and in advertisements in New York newspapers, "No Irish need apply." There was some violence and an American party was organized to check their entrance into local politics, for which they showed great aptitude.

Since then, these Irish have been forced upward in the social scale by later arriving immigrants over whom they had the advantage of speaking English. They became the nucleus in America of the present Roman Catholic Church, which has spread rapidly in this country. The Irish did not take to agriculture and have never shown much liking for the larger industries.

The total number of Irish immigrants during the forties and fifties amounted to more than a million and a half, and that first migration has been followed by a continuous stream of southern Irish down to the last few years when the quota restrictions went into effect.

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As soon as they secured a certain amount of wealth and rose in the social scale, they established schools and colleges of their own, the teachings and, indeed, the existence of which conflict with those of the public-school system of the United States, and to that extent they have impaired the unity of the nation. Some regiments of Irish fought on the Northern side in the Civil War, but the draft riots of New York were caused by the Irish who did not want to fight for the Union. In addition to the shanty Irish there came over some middle-class families of importance.

The second immigration of importance occurred a few years later when a large number of Germans were forced over here by the failure of the Revolution in Germany in 1848. These Germans were very different from those who migrated to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century. Many of them were from northern Germany and were Nordics, including individuals of some culture and distinction. They settled in certain cities of the West, notably in Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Saint Louis. For the most part, however, they took up public land and became hard-working farmers. They did not in the mass improve the population already here intellectually, racially, or physically, and they impaired our national unity, at least for the time being, by the introduction of their own language.

At the end of the period here considered there were in the United States more than one and a quarter millions of German-born, of whom about one-fourth were Roman Catholics. This church, which in 1790 controlled not one in a hundred of the population, could in 1860 count upon one in every nine of the Whites.

Outside of the Irish and Germans, who were preponderantly Nordic, there was not much immigration of importance. The census of 1860 enumerated 4,138,697 foreign-born persons out of a total of nearly 27,000,000 Whites. England, Scotland, and Canada accounted for most of those who were neither Irish nor German. Thus at the end of this period the racial unity of the United States was still virtually unimpaired.

The French in the old Northwest Territory were negligible in number, amounting to but a few thousands. The number of Mexicans in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico when we took over those countries was but a few thousand more. These Mexicans considered themselves Spanish; but as a matter of fact, the veneer of religion, language, and culture was very thin, and racially most of them were at least seven-eighths Indian. The same condition prevailed in California in 1846; the number of Mexicans being even smaller than in Texas.

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Many of the original Colonial charters granted by the English kings provided for a north and south boundary by latitude, but the western boundary was often defined as the "South Sea," and not unnaturally many of these boundaries overlapped. After the Revolution, the original colonies were induced to cede to the Federal Government their indefinite and conflicting claims to the western lands. This general and important cession of territory had two results: it gave the impoverished Federal Government lands which could be sold for its own benefit, and it led to the establishment of communities which looked to the Federal Government for everything they needed, which in itself was a long step toward unity of government.

In 1787 the western boundaries of New York and Pennsylvania were fixed as they are at present, and out of the country south of the Great Lakes, north of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi was erected the Northwest Territory under the special guardianship of the Federal Government.

This "Northwest Territory" had been seized during the Revolution by an extraordinary group of adventurers and frontiersmen under General George Rogers Clark. Thereby the Thirteen Colonies were in physical possession of these districts south of the Great Lakes when the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783. Without such actual possession of the Old Northwest, it would have remained part of Canada, an outcome which would have limited the growth of the United States westward or, more probably, have led to another war. The reluctance of the British authorities in charge of the outposts in this territory to surrender their forts in accordance with the terms of the treaty, and their alleged backing of the Indians, were among the causes underlying the War of 1812.

As population increased, new States were created in succession out of this territory--Ohio (1803), Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), Michigan (1837), and Wisconsin (1848).

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Ohio's first straggling settlers had pushed northwesterly across the Ohio River during the Revolution, but the first real, permanent settlement was by the New England Company which established Marietta in 1788. This New England immigration, though soon swamped by that from other States, played an important part in the organization of the territory and in the shaping of its future policies.

Scarcely had the Massachusetts group, led by General Rufus Putnam, taken possession of its vast grant around Marietta, when a new group led by Judge J.C. Symmes of Kentucky occupied a grant of a million acres between the Great and Little Miami Rivers, including the sites of Cincinnati, Dayton, and many of the most important of the early settlements of the territory.

Virginia had reserved a military district of more than four million acres to reward its soldiers of the Revolution, and this quickly began to be settled largely by veterans from Kentucky which was at that time, it will be remembered, still a part of Virginia.

Connecticut on the other hand had stipulated for its own Western Reserve of nearly 3,000,000 acres, extending in an oblong, 120 miles, from the boundary of Pennsylvania along Lake Erie, and the settlement of Cleveland marked its nucleus.

Thus Ohio, within a few years after the Revolution, started with four different growing points. The Virginia element increased the most rapidly, partly because of its proximity to Kentucky, partly because of its easy access by the Ohio River, so that the English and Ulster Scots of the southern part of the State soon dominated the whole.

A similar element was continually coming across the Pennsylvania border from the Monongahela country, and before long the Pennsylvania emigration to Ohio became the greatest from any one State, filling up the central part which comprised the great wheat belt. Even as late as the Mexican War, one-fourth of the members of the Ohio Legislature were natives of Pennsylvania, exceeding the members born in any other State, or in all the New England States combined, or in Ohio itself.

Through Kentucky came not merely Virginians but a steady stream of Ulster Scots from North Carolina, many of whom, however, had previously been Virginians. The southern parts of the State, therefore, took on some of the complexion of the slave-holding States, while the northern part was tinged by the culture of New England and the Central States, many coming in from western New York, which from the present point of view is to be regarded as merely an extension of New England.

Thus for a score of years the population of the States to the south and east of Ohio, which, dammed back by hostile Indians, had been ready to overflow for some time, poured into the new territory. Then the flood slackened until after the close of the War of 1812, when it was renewed with vigor. Men from all parts of the United States who had served with the western and northern forces in the War of 1812 had seen the beauties of the new country and determined to settle there as soon as peace was declared and they could dispose of their holdings at home. So far as New England was concerned this tendency was accentuated by two remarkably cold winters in 1816 and 1817, which surpassed the memories of the oldest inhabitants. General economic and social conditions were favorable for a widespread movement of population. The northwestern part of Ohio had been cleared of Indians and was then thrown open to settlement.

This second great flood of immigration into Ohio was in general of the same character as the first, bringing into the State from all sides an almost purely Nordic population of British ancestry, except for the small element of Pennsylvania Dutch who for a while kept much to themselves, maintained their own customs and their own language, and thus cut themselves off largely from the march of progress. Their Alemannish dialect was rapidly becoming almost as far out of line with the literary language of Germany as it was with the English language of their adopted home.

Later Ohio received a quarter of a million of German and Irish immigrants. But of the 2,339,511 inhabitants whom the State contained in 1860, a million and a half were born in the State itself.

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Indiana, a typical American State, owes nothing worth mentioning to the original French population. In early days it must be considered little more than an extension of Kentucky. Virginia had set aside a large tract for rewarding the men of George Rogers Clark's expedition and these were the original land agents, so to speak, for the territory. But all along the border a frontier population drifted there across the Ohio River. As late as 1850 there were twice as many Southern people in Indiana as there were from the Middle States and New England put together. A good share of these were from Kentucky, which means that they or their parents were previously from Virginia or North Carolina.

That Indiana was in sympathy a Northern State bears testimony to the fact that these migrants had little in common except original racial stock with the older slave-holding population. The Ulster Scots were the largest element, although there were also many Quakers from North and South Carolina, some of whom were of Huguenot descent. It was this element which made of Indiana a principal route of the "Underground Railroad," as the system of smuggling runaway slaves out of the slave States was called. But in the southern part of the State there was much sympathy with the slaveholders.

The settlement of Indiana falls almost entirely in the nineteenth century, the number of people there prior to 1800 being negligible and confined for the most part to lands under the protection of the little post of Vincennes. On the northerly side of the Ohio River, at the Falls, the settlement of the tract of 149,000 acres, which Virginia had conveyed in 1786 to General Clark and his soldiers, was well under way.

The rapid settlement of Indiana was a part of the great westward movement beginning with the panic of 1819, and the hard times that followed. The price of cotton was steadily declining in the South and it was easy for the poorer farmer heavily in debt to sell out or simply pack up and quit, moving on to free and richer land in a new country. Many of the Ulster Scots in the South were hostile to slavery, while others of them, strongly Jacksonian in politics, were opposed to nullification and shared the reputed death-bed regret of the hero of New Orleans that he had not hanged John C. Calhoun. South Carolina therefore sent a large contingent of Ulster Scots to the new territory, in addition to the general immigration which has already been mentioned.

The Southern stream was met in the old Northwest Territory by the stream of New Englanders coming over the line of the Erie Canal after crossing the Hudson at the great break in the highlands near Albany. Many of the settlers of northern Indiana had tarried for a season in Ohio and moved westward as they had a chance to harvest the unearned increment by selling their farms at a profit and migrating to take up cheaper land and start again.

Indiana missed the main flood of foreign immigration in the generation before the Civil War. The Germans were going elsewhere because of clannishness, while the Irish avoided Indiana because of its lack of great cities. By the time the Scandinavian flood began to come in, land values in Indiana were already high and the new settlers went farther west and north.

Indiana, therefore, of the States in the Northwest Territory is the most nearly Nordic in population and the most nearly American, and, at the end of the period under consideration, it represented an overwhelmingly native-born population originating, in not very unequal parts, from the Northern and Southern States, respectively. Though the foreign element was rapidly gaining ground, it had not begun to make itself felt even as late as 1833 when northern Indiana was a wilderness, while southern Indiana was already well peopled from Kentucky, Tennessee and the Carolinas.

The development of internal improvements together with the general migration from Northern States to all points west brought a complete change in the political complexion of the State. In 1836, alone, land sales in Indiana amounted to 3,000,000 acres and in the decade from 1840 to 1850 the population of counties bordering the new Ohio canal increased 400 per cent, while the State began to look to New York as an outlet for its products rather than to New Orleans.

From 1820, the date of the founding of Indianapolis, to 1860, Indiana had twice quadrupled her population and from almost purely American stock. During these forty years, it is calculated that a million people came to the Northwest from the slave States of the South. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Indiana had a population of 1,350,000 of which only about one in eleven was foreign-born. More than half of the aliens were from Germany, and Indiana seems to have attracted particularly the Nordic element, since Prussia contributed the largest quota. Ireland was represented by only 24,000 persons at that time and like the smaller French and English groups, they were scattered through the State and soon became lost in the general mass.

This distinctive character of Indiana, almost purely American, Protestant, and Nordic in 1860, gives the key to much of its history since then. As elsewhere the immediate surrounding States had contributed the bulk of the population. The census returns showed that the ten States constituting the birthplace of the largest number of Hoosiers in that year were, in order of importance: Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, New Jersey, and Illinois. So far as the New England element was represented, it had come almost wholly through other States.

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Illinois, like Ohio, had attracted a few settlers before the Revolution, mainly to the neighborhood of the half-dozen little French trading posts. The French population of this district had never been large, and when it was taken over by Great Britain in 1763, most of the French inhabitants who could get away hastened to do so, either returning to Canada or going down the river to Saint Louis or New Orleans.

With the withdrawal of the little French garrisons only a few hundred persons of French ancestry were left in the territory. These were of two different origins. Part had come down from Canada and represented the "Habitant" French, who were largely Alpine. The remainder had come up the river from New Orleans and represented a more heterogeneous and probably inferior group. Some of the Canadians brought their families; but for the most part the French element was made up of single men who formed loose alliances with Indian squaws. For these various reasons the French influence on the subsequent population of the region is too negligible to justify consideration.

The raid made by the Kentuckians under George Rogers Clark during the Revolution had given the Americans a more detailed knowledge of this region, and by 1800 several thousand of them had already drifted across the border and started settlements. This immigration increased up to the outbreak of Indian hostilities in 1811 followed by the War of 1812 which almost completely checked settlement along the old western frontier.

After the declaration of peace and the opening up of land sales in 1814 and 1816, Illinois began to have a real boom. By this time the choicest locations in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky had either been taken by settlers or bought by speculators, so that the new arrival looking for a bonanza turned to Illinois or Missouri.

Following the general rule of migration in the United States, which was not broken until the gold rush to California in 1849 introduced new conditions, the settlement of Illinois was mostly from the States closest to it, and at the beginning was almost wholly from the South, particularly from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. Insignificant little Shawneetown, on the Ohio River just below the mouth of the Wabash, gave easy access to the lower end of Illinois--that "Egypt" which is still a Southern Democratic stronghold. For a short time it was even the seat of government.

In this population the presence of a sprinkling of Northerners from Pennsylvania was resented and an occasional stray Yankee was scarcely tolerated. The settlement of the northern part of the State by New Englanders was made to a marked extent by colonies or organized groups, and from the early thirties one reads continually of the movement of caravans from all the New England States and western New York. Here again the opening of the Erie Canal gave easy access to northern Illinois by water. Prior to that time the lead mines in the northwestern part of Illinois and the southwestern part of Wisconsin had been the main attraction, and had been developed almost entirely by the Southerners.

In general, it may be said that up to that time three-fourths of the population of Illinois came from south of the Mason and Dixon line, with Kentucky making the largest single contribution, although a small foreign element was already arriving, mainly from the British Isles.

At the date of Statehood in 1818, Illinois may be said to have been dominated by the Ulster Scots who had come in from the southern Piedmont. These represented, on the whole, a class which for lack of wealth and other reasons had not been slaveholders, and had no particular sympathy with slavery, having found by personal experience that the presence of slave labor was disadvantageous to a large part of the white population. As a matter of fact, probably not more than one Southern family in four ever owned a slave.

The population required of a new State for admission to the Union in 1818 was 40,000. By the beginning of the Civil War the population of Illinois had increased to a million and three quarters. Obviously this change in little more than a generation represented only in small part the natural increase of the original settlers from Kentucky and Virginia. So rapidly, indeed, did the forces of progress act in Illinois that many of the old-timers packed up and moved on, as had happened during the previous generation among their parents, and Illinois in the following generation will be found strongly represented in the early migration to California, Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado. To show how little slave-holding sentiment there was in the early Illinois population, in spite of its Southern origin, it is interesting to note that most of the Illinois contingent in Kansas were Free-State men whom the South regarded as enemies to its cause.

For every one of the old-timers who moved farther west, a dozen Yankees arrived along with many Pennsylvanians, while the Southern immigration almost entirely stopped, having been diverted to Texas or to territories beyond the Mississippi.

The people who left the slave-holding States in the decade prior to the Civil War were largely seeking free soil themselves. This movement of some of the best Nordic stock out of the South just before and at the beginning of the Civil War has not been given as much importance as it deserves. It was a factor in the weakening of the South and the strengthening of the North. While slavery was a curse in the opinion of many an owner of a great plantation, he was caught in the system and felt that he could not get away. The poor man, on the other hand, found conditions less and less to his liking and many of the more intelligent decided to get out of a country where they were obliged to compete with Negro slaves and were looked down upon by their white neighbors. In this way the lands along the Illinois Central Railway became a lode-stone for ambitious and dissatisfied farmers from Tennessee, Alabama, and even from Georgia. With the outbreak of hostilities this trickle became temporarily a torrent as political refugees who did not care to remain in a slave-holding republic at war with the American Union began to seek freer air.

The railroads developed a new specialty in transporting whole families with their furniture and agricultural implements to points in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, while steamers made their way up the Mississippi crowded with refugees and great numbers of Missourians crossed the river to Illinois with all their worldly goods. Many of the latter returned home after Missouri was cleared of secession, but their place was taken by new streams of Southerners released by the victories of Union armies and coming to join friends and relatives in southern and central Illinois.

The decline of leadership in the South after the war was not due entirely to the loss of its men on the battle-field. Although this was by far the principal factor, another important one was the flight from the South of many of those who were not in sympathy with the fire-eating politicians who had forced secession upon often unwilling communities.

Before this time, however, the streams of foreign-born which poured into the Mississippi Valley had already begun to influence the composition of the population of Illinois, so that even in 1850 one in four was of alien birth. The largest element was German, who formed farming communities, mainly in the northern and central part of the State. By 1860 there were 130,000 of them in Illinois, together with others who had also come from Pennsylvania.

Ireland sent the group of second importance, and the great internal improvements in this period were largely the product of their labor. As elsewhere the Irish showed little inclination for farming, which had proved so ruinous to them in Ireland, and they made a restless floating population in the large cities. In 1860 they represented four times as large a proportion of the population of Chicago as they did of the State as a whole.

The State attracted a large English immigration. The Illinois Central Railroad had been built to a considerable extent with English capital, and the stockholders saw a chance to increase the value of their shares by promoting emigration to the lands owned by the company, so that by 1860 there were 41,000 English-born in the State.

Another large element of English descent, which had come into the State in an extraordinary way, had already left. This was the group of Mormon converts who were brought over from 1840 onward. By 1844 it was estimated that of the 16,000 Mormon arrivals, 10,000 were English. Most of these went west to Utah later, or were scattered within a few years.

The last important Nordic element in the State was that of the Scandinavians who had only begun to come before the Civil War, at which time there were little more than 10,000 of them in the State as against 87,000 Irish.

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Michigan, owing to its proximity to Canada, and the importance of Detroit as a headquarters, had a distinct French atmosphere in its early days. Unlike those in some of the more distant settlements, the French inhabitants at Detroit did not intermarry frequently with the Indians, and they represent therefore a relatively pure French Canadian stock. American immigration was slow, and not until 1805 did the inhabitants become numerous enough to warrant a separate territory. As late as the beginning of the War of 1812 four-fifths of the 5000 people in Michigan were French. In 1817 the first steamboat appeared on the waters of Lake Erie and the Erie Canal was begun, and from that time the Americanization of the territory was rapid.

By 1830 a hundred ships, both steam and sail, were on the Lakes, and a daily line ran between Buffalo and Detroit. In 1836 when the State Constitution was adopted the population was nearly 100,000, mainly from New England and its extension in western New York. The Empire State can very definitely be called the parent of Michigan.

Many of the New England farmers who had bought farms from the great land companies in western New York found themselves unable or unwilling to complete their payments and sold their equities for enough to buy government land in Michigan and move their families, while from the rocky hills of Vermont a steady stream came without any intervening stop. By this time many of the French Canadians had moved out, and of eighty-nine names signed to the Constitution of 1835, not more than three can be identified as French.

The tide of alien immigration at this period was late in reaching Michigan. A group not found elsewhere was that of Dutchmen who came like some of the earlier settlers, seeking religious tolerance and freedom. The town of Holland has been a centre for them since 1847. Of the 749,113 inhabitants of the State in 1860, one-fifth were foreign-born, divided not unequally between English, Irish, Germans, and mixed Canadians.

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Wisconsin's first settlement was at the lead mines of the southwestern part and attracted largely Ulster Scots from Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. A little later these were reinforced by another Nordic group of Englishmen from Cornwall who formed an important element in that region.

The second migration scattered agricultural communities throughout the southeastern part of Wisconsin along the lake shore. This immigration was almost wholly from the New England States and the New England part of New York State, and was accomplished roughly in the years 1835 to 1850. By 1847 when Statehood was achieved the territory had a population of nearly 250,000 and was virtually a New England colony.

Of the seventy-six men who composed the second Constitutional Convention, one-third came from New York, one-third from New England, and the rest were a scattering.

During the decade which ended with the Federal Census of 1850, the growth of the State had been nearly 900 per cent, a record rarely exceeded in America. This extraordinary surge was due largely to the sudden arrival of a foreign element which has ever since made Wisconsin a State apart from all the others. Even as early as 1850 one-third of the population was actually foreign-born. Of the foreign-born who came to the State during the territorial period, the British Isles contributed about one-half and foreign-language groups the other half. The English-speaking immigrants soon blended with the native population, with the exception of the Roman Catholic Irish who were less easily assimilated. In the decade before the Civil War there was a stream of Belgian immigrants amounting to at least 15,000. Some hundreds of Russians also came in and the Scandinavians had begun to arrive, although they did not play an important part until after the Civil War. Danes and Norwegians were beginning to come in some numbers but few Swedes as yet.

The great immigration of this period was the German, which introduced another partly Alpine element into the overwhelmingly Nordic population of the United States. These had begun to come after 1830, when the Revolution in France had stirred up similar, but less successful, political upheavals in the parts of South Germany adjoining France. Many of the politically discontented decided to leave the country or were obliged to do so, and they found in Wisconsin conditions particularly to their liking. In the first place the State offered a variety of climate and soil that was not dissimilar to that in which they were brought up. In the second place land was cheap and good and there was much forest land for which the Germans showed a notable preference. Not only was the possession of timber an asset, but it was to the German immigrant a mark of social status. Forests had largely disappeared in Germany, except on the great estates of the nobility. Hence, to own a piece of forest land was a mark of superiority. Only the few could afford the forest land in Germany but in Wisconsin every small farmer could feel himself as good as the Duke or Prince whose yoke he had renounced. A third important attraction after Statehood was a provision that the alien could vote after only one year's residence. This gave the Germans a political importance without delay which they lost no time in using.

German settlement in the United States follows a belt beginning with Pennsylvania and running due west through Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri. This was partly due to an avoidance of the Southern States with whose products they were not familiar and with whose land system and slave labor they were not sympathetic. Being in this belt Wisconsin immediately took and retained such a prominence that patriots from the "Fatherland" seriously urged that it become a genuine German colony.

The Pennsylvania Dutch had already shown how little disposed the German-speaking peoples were to become citizens of a new country with a whole heart, and the new tide of immigration followed this example. They attacked the public-school system from the beginning and insisted on having their own schools and on having their children taught German in the American schools. They kept their own social organization and even went so far as to get the State laws published in the German language in Indiana in 1858. This tendency toward hyphenation has made the Germans a less valuable element in the American population up to the present time than they should have been.

The early German immigration to Wisconsin was on the whole from southern and central Germany, and was pre-dominantly Alpine in race and Roman Catholic in religion. Statehood in Wisconsin coincided with the unsuccessful Revolution of 1848 in Germany which started the real flood of German immigration that reached its maximum numbers in 1854, and continued with noticeable strength for more than a generation longer.

The principal Nordic emigration in the '40s was from Pomerania and Brandenburg, and many of the South Germans, while largely Alpine, were Protestants rather than Catholics. In 1863, just after the end of the period here considered, the church authorities reported that Wisconsin contained 225,000 German Lutherans as against 105,000 German Catholics. After that the Germans pressed more and more into the northern and central regions of the State.

Wisconsin then at the end of the period here considered (1860) had probably the largest non-Nordic population of any of the American States, although even here the Nordics were in a great majority. With one-third of its population foreign-born, it was surpassed in this respect only by California.