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Eighteenth-century German emigrants from Hanau-Hesse: who went east and who went west

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2018

Simone A. Wegge
Simone A. Wegge*
Affiliation:
College of Staten Island – CUNY & Graduate Center - CUNY
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

During the eighteenth century, Germans from the Hessian county of Hanau-Münzenberg emigrated westward to the American colonies, and east to Hungary, Russia, and other parts of Europe. Using new emigrant data, I examine their age, occupation, and emigration strategies. Those who settled in Pennsylvania were the richest of these emigrants, more likely to travel as intact families and the most networked. The poorest were the Hessians who went to Russia, mostly in 1766. A large percentage of the Hanau-Hessians settled in Pennsylvania, suggesting that eighteenth-century German emigration to Hungary and Russia has possibly been overestimated.

Quitter hanau (hesse) au dix-huitième siècle: qui émigre vers l'est, qui vers l'ouest

Au cours du dix-huitième siècle, des Allemands d'Hanau-Münzenberg ont émigré vers l'Ouest, en direction des colonies d'Amérique et d'autres vers l'Est en direction de la Hongrie, de la Russie et d'autres régions européennes. A partir de données nouvelles sur ces émigrants, leur âge, leur profession et leurs stratégies d’émigration sont étudiés. Les Hessois qui s’établirent en Pennsylvanie étaient les plus riches, les plus susceptibles de voyager avec tous les membres de leur famille et bénéficiaient d'excellents réseaux de relations. Ceux qui se rendirent en Russie, principalement en 1766, étaient les plus pauvres. Une grande partie des Hessois d'Hanau s’établit en Pennsylvanie, ce qui suggère que l’émigration allemande du XVIIIe siècle vers la Hongrie et la Russie a probablement été surestimée.

Deutsche emigranten aus hanau (hessen) im 18. jahrhundert: wer nach osten und wer nach westen ging

Während des 18. Jahrhunderts wanderten Deutsche aus der hessischen Grafschaft Hanau-Münzenberg westwärts in die amerikanischen Kolonien aus, oder ostwärts nach Ungarn, Russland und andere Teile Europas. Ich nutze neue Auswanderungsdaten, um Alter, Berufe und Auswanderungsstrategien zu untersuchen. Diejenigen, die sich in Pennsylvanien niederließen, waren die reichsten dieser Auswanderer, reisten am häufigsten als ganze Familie und verfügten über die besten Netzwerke. Am ärmsten waren die Hessen, die nach Russland gingen, hauptsächlich im Jahre 1766. Ein großer Prozentsatz der hanauer Hessen siedelte sich in Pennsylvanien an, was darauf hindeutet, dass die deutsche Auswanderung im 18. Jahrhundert nach Ungarn und Russland möglicherweise überschätzt worden ist.

Type
Research Article
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , August 2018 , pp. 225 - 253
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

Notes

1 In the eighteenth and in much of the nineteenth centuries, the current German state of Hesse was roughly divided into three principalities: Hesse-Cassel, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Hesse-Nassau. The Free City of Frankfurt was an independent state and bordered Hesse-Cassel to the south. In addition, the Main River served as a small section of this principality's southern border. The current state of Hesse is located in the middle of Germany, somewhat to the west and south. The states that border it include Bavaria to the south and North-Rhine Westphalia to the north. The city of Frankfurt is currently located in this state.

2 One advantage of studying Pennsylvania is the colonial passenger records. See Grubb, F., ‘German immigration to Pennsylvania, 1709 to 1820’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 20 (winter 1990), 417–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Grubb, F., German immigration and servitude in America, 1709–1920 (New York, NY, 2012)Google Scholar; Wokeck, M. S., Trade in strangers: the beginnings of mass migration to North America (University Park, PA, 1999)Google Scholar; Grabbe, H.-J., Vor der grossen Flut: Die europäische Migration in die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, 1783–1820 (Stuttgart, 2001)Google Scholar.

3 For work on eighteenth-century Hessian (Hanau) emigrants, see Auerbach, I., Auswanderung aus Kurhessen: nach Osten oder Westen? (Marburg, 1993), 25–133Google Scholar.

4 See, for example, on Austrian emigration, Steidl, A., Stockhammer, E., Zeitlhofer, H., ‘Relations among internal, continental, and transatlantic migration in late imperial Austria’, Social Science History 31, 1 (2007), 61–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Portuguese emigration, see Borges, M., ‘Many Americas: patterns of transatlantic migration and choice of destination in southern Portugal’, Studi Emigrazione 40, 150 (2003), 351–75Google Scholar. On the discussion of where Swedes went in the US, see Rooth, D.-O. and Scott, K., ‘Three generations in the New World: labour market outcomes of Swedish Americans in the USA, 1880–2000’, Scandinavian Economic History Review 60, 1 (2012), 31–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 For much of the period under examination in this article, the county of Hanau-Münzenberg belonged to the principality of Hesse-Cassel.

6 Auerbach, I., Hessische Auswanderer (HESAUS): Index nach Familiennamen, Nr. 12, Band I, Auswanderer aus Hanau im 18. Jahrhundert (Marburg, 1987), 13Google Scholar.

7 Emigration from the county of Hanau-Münzenberg was highly regulated through charging emigration taxes, and the issuance of official permission and travel documents; see Auerbach, Hessische Auswanderer (HESAUS): Index nach Familiennamen, Nr. 12, Band I, 13–14. Wokeck claims that Germans in the Rhineland area lost their citizenship in the process; see Wokeck, Trade in strangers, 22–3. This applied to everyone, no matter where they moved. For the Hessians who ended up in North America, the long and arduous journey across the Atlantic created an additional disincentive to return back to their homeland. Some indeed did make the journey back, and most of these were adult men visiting with the goal of seeking to settle inheritance matters, accompany other family members back to the New World or engage in business opportunities (export and import trade and the recruitment of other Germans); see Wokeck, Trade in strangers, 31–2.

8 In rest of the principality of Hesse-Cassel, however, emigration only became legally possible in 1831 with passage of a new constitution. See Auerbach, Auswanderung aus Kurhessen, 134.

9 In regards to those who went to North America, see Wokeck, Trade in strangers, p. 29.

10 See Auerbach, Auswanderung aus Kurhessen, 46.

11 See Beiler, R., Immigrant and entrepreneur: the Atlantic World of Caspar Wistar, 1650–1750 (University Park, PA, 2008), 83Google Scholar. Jews settled in various British North American colonies, but in particular in New York and in the colony of South Carolina. For a discussion of religion as a factor among seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German migrants, see Becker-Cantarino, B., ‘Religion and migration: Christian missionaries in North America, Muslim populations in Germany’, in Becker-Cantarino, B. ed., Migration and religion: Christian transatlantic missions, Islamic migration to Germany (Amsterdam, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 These include helping to pay for the migration costs through remittances or pre-paid tickets, assisting newcomers to find employment at the destination, familiarising the newcomer with language and culture, and by providing room and board.

13 See Moch, L., Moving Europeans: migration in western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington, IN, 1992)Google Scholar, and Grubb, F., German immigration and servitude in America, 1709–1920 (New York, 2012)Google Scholar.

14 Wokeck, Trade in strangers; Grubb, German immigration and servitude, 358. See specifically pp. 815–18 in Grubb, F., ‘The end of European immigrant servitude in the United States: an analysis of market collapse, 1772–1835’, Journal of Economic History 54, 4 (1994), 794–824CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Grubb's explanation involves several factors: paying tickets ahead of time in Europe (remittances) was cheaper than paying for them upon disembarkation (redemptions) due to higher risks shippers bore in the latter case. Other changes helped pave the way for the demise of servitude, including the decline in passage fares in the early nineteenth century (more Europeans could afford to pay full fare ahead of time), the advent of consistent and regularly scheduled shipping, and improved financial banking transactions (relatives could more easily and securely buy pre-paid tickets on a boat scheduled to sail on a specific date).

15 Massey, D., Arango, J., Hugo, G., Kouaoci, A., Pellegrino, A. and Taylor, J. E., Worlds in motion: understanding international migration at the end of the millennium (Oxford, 1998), 45Google Scholar. See also Massey's definition in an earlier work: Massey, D., ‘Social structure, household strategies, and the cumulative causation of migration’, Population Index 56 (1990), 3–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 D. Massey et al., Worlds in motion, 45–8.

17 Data on the Hanau emigrants are in Auerbach, Hessische Auswanderer (HESAUS), Nr. 12, Band I.

18 Inge Auerbach refers to other lists of emigrants who went to Hungary developed from ‘additional sources’, by which I believe she means non-governmental or non-official documents; see Auerbach, Hessische Auswanderer (HESAUS), Nr. 12, Band I, 14. Emigrating illegally was a tradition that did not die out, as Hessians emigrated illegally a century later: a large percentage of the 1852–1857 Hesse-Cassel emigrants recorded in the Hessian archives left under ‘illegal’ circumstances; namely they did not have permission to do so from the principality. See Auerbach, , Hessische Auswanderer (HESAUS): Index nach Familiennamen, Nr. 12, Band II, Auswanderer aus Hessen-Kassel 1840–1850 (Marburg, 1987–1988), 16Google Scholar.

19 For more details, see Auerbach, Auswanderung aus Kurhessen, 41, also Reimann, A., Auswanderungen aus hessisschen Territorien nach Südwesteuropa im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Darmstadt: 1986)Google Scholar.

20 For an explanation in English of Hacker's data and contribution to the literature, see Fogleman, A., ‘Progress and possibilities in migration studies: the contributions of Werner Hacker to the study of German migration to Pennsylvania’, Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 56, 4 (1989), 318–29Google Scholar.

21 See Auerbach, Auswanderung aus Kurhessen, 41.

22 See Burgert, A. K., Eighteenth-century emigrants from German-speaking lands to North America, vol. I: the northern Kraichgau (Breinigsville, PA, 1983)Google Scholar; and Fogelman, A., Hopeful journeys: German immigration, settlement, and political culture in Colonial America, 1771–1775 (Philadelphia, 1996), 64, 166CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 The records in Auerbach, Hessische Auswanderer listed all instances when emigrants showed up in government documents for a total of 1,775 observations (individual emigrants). In a few cases, heads of households were listed but without accompanying names of family members; if the number accompanying the head of household was listed, I adjusted the data so that all of these family members were counted. In several cases the same person was listed in two or three different archival records, and I eliminated duplicate observations. After these adjustments, 1,605 individuals remain (summarised in Table 1). A number of records may be still be duplicates, and a further culling of about 2 to 4 per cent might be appropriate, but the overall story would not be changed.

24 Philadelphia passenger lists have been published in R. B. Strassburger, Pennsylvania German pioneers, 3 vols. (Norristown, PA, 1934). One can look for Hanau emigrants who went to Pennsylvania in the Philadelphia passenger records, and one comes across cases of one family member listed in the Hanau records and more men from the same family listed in the Philadelphia records, which means that the German emigration records missed some emigrants. The extent of this is not clear at this point. Detailed records from Russian church registers and including information on Germans who settled in the Volga Region of Russia can be found in Stumpp, K., The emigration from Germany to Russia in the years 1763 to 1862 (Lincoln, NE, 1973)Google Scholar; it remains to be seen how Stumpp's lists compare to those used in this article.

25 Wokeck, Trade in strangers, 45–6. These pages list 111,211 emigrants as having arrived in the years 1683 to 1775. In terms of a later period, Grubb details that ship manifest documents record a total of 89,544 German passengers arriving in Pennsylvania between 1727 and 1820; see Grubb, ‘German immigration to Pennsylvania, 1709 to 1820’, 419.

26 Hessians probably made up more than 10 per cent of the immigrants arriving in Philadelphia in the years 1798 to 1808. See Grubb, German immigration and servitude in America, 22.

27 These records can be found in Strassburger, Pennsylvania German Pioneers.

28 Fenske, H., ‘International migration: Germany in the eighteenth century’, Central European History 13 (1980), 332–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 See Wokeck, Trade in strangers, 8–9; see also Fertig, Georg, Lokales Leben, atlantische Welt: Die Entscheidung zur Auswanderung vom Rhein nach Nordamerika im 18. Jahrhundert (Osnabrück, 2000), 69Google Scholar.

30 See Fogleman, ‘Progress and possibilities in migration studies’, 326.

31 The total of 1,553 is smaller than the total of Hessian emigrants in Table 1, since the year of departure is missing for a handful of emigrants. In addition, for others the destination was lacking.

32 The Seven Years’ War produced delays in travel, and increased insurance costs on ships, which increased passage fares and freight rates; see Grubb, German immigration and servitude in America, 29–31. The area of fighting also included parts of the American colonies; see Wokeck, Trade in strangers, 14. The war probably made gaining official permission to emigrate more difficult during this period.

33 See Grubb, German immigration and servitude in America, 28.

34 Emigrants classified as having gone to North America may well still have ended up in Pennsylvania. Wokeck has identified a secular downward trend in German emigration after 1770; see Wokeck, Trade in strangers, 44.

35 Throughout her reign Empress Maria Theresa adopted an Austrian version of the German language as the language used at court and in her administration; see Hoerder, D., Cultures in contact: world migration in the second millennium (Durham, NC, 2002), 285CrossRefGoogle Scholar. She thus may have preferred recruiting and supporting immigrants who spoke German.

36 Unfortunately, the Hanau-Hessian data do not provide the religious identity of individual emigrants.

37 For information on incentives the Habsburgs used to attract German colonists, see Engelmann, N., The Banat Germans, trans. Michels, John M. (Freilassing, Bavaria, 1987), 10–12Google Scholar, also Paikert, G. C., The Danube Swabians: German populations in Hungary, Rumania and Yugoslavia and Hitler's impact on their patterns (The Hague, 1967), 25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Engelmann, The Banat Germans, 10–12.

39 Koch, F., The Volga Germans: in Russia and the Americas, from 1763 to the present (University Park, PA, 1977), 6–8Google Scholar.

40 Koch, The Volga Germans, 5–8. She may have run out of money for the project and/or decided that enough immigrants had been recruited.

41 To get to the Volga region, emigrants from German states would first travel inland to the port of Lübeck, sail across the Baltic Sea to Kronstadt (near St Petersburg), and then make the journey across Lake Ladoga to get to the mouth of the River Volkhov, which led to Lake Ilmen and eventually to the Volga River. See Koch, The Volga Germans, 20–1.

42 Koch, The Volga Germans, 20.

43 See Wokeck, Trade in strangers, 2–3.

44 For the pattern of autumn arrival, see Grubb, German immigration and servitude in America, 34–5.

45 See Strassburger, Pennsylvania German Pioneers: (i) Johann Peter Engel, 378, 379, 381, vol. I; (ii) Johannes Huth, 444, vol. I; (iii) Konrad Lohra, 614, 616, 618, vol. I, under ‘Conrad Lohr’.

46 Wokeck, Trade in strangers, 113–14.

47 Ibid., 114–16.

48 For more details, see G. T. Fox, ‘Studies in the rural history of Upper Hesse, 1650–1830’ (PhD dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1976), 393–405. Through the first half of the eighteenth century, one gulden was worth 60 kreuzer (Xr.). One gulden was also worth two thirds of a thaler.

49 In addition, one pound sterling was worth 21 shillings. See Fertig, Lokales Leben, atlantische Welt, 422.

50 See Auerbach, Auswanderung aus Kurhessen, 18–19.

51 See Grubb, German immigration and servitude in America, 310.

52 See Grubb, ‘German immigration to Pennsylvania, 1709 to 1820’, 432, Table 5. Grubb also provided occupational distributions for 1815–1820, but this period is less interesting for comparative purposes since the Hanau emigrants for which records exist had moved to Pennsylvania by 1770.

53 The vast majority of occupations reported were for men. A handful of women reported occupations; a common one for women was farmer, and to a large degree these were widows.

54 See Bailyn, B., Voyagers to the west: passage in the peopling of the America on the eve of the revolution (New York, 1986), 26–7Google Scholar; here Bailyn describes how so many immigrants to the North American British colonies settled in rural places and extended the frontier.

55 See Grubb, ‘German immigration to Pennsylvania, 1709 to 1820’, 432, Table 5.

56 For the emigrants who went to other German and European destinations, 5.2 per cent are listed with the occupational code of ‘AN’, which does not exist. I suspect what was meant was ‘SN’ or tailor (‘SN’ for Schneider in German). So either this adjustment is correct, or the 5.2 per cent belong in the ‘Others’ category.

57 See Blanning, T., Frederick the Great: King of Prussia (New York, 2016)Google Scholar.

58 In terms of well-known porcelain firms in Hungary that have survived to this day, the Herend firm traces its founding back to 1826, the Hollóhazí firm back to 1777.

59 One of the more financially successful examples is that of Caspar Wistar, who emigrated from the Pfalz to Pennsylvania, worked first as a labourer and eventually became an extremely wealthy landowner in Pennsylvania. See Beiler, Immigrant and entrepreneur. Wistar's grandson was also named Caspar Wistar and became a prominent physician and citizen in Philadelphia; a botanist gave the plant ‘wisteria’ its name in honor of the younger Caspar.

60 See Wokeck, Trade in strangers, 28–9.

61 See Grubb, ‘German immigration to Pennsylvania, 1709 to 1820’, 427, Table 4. Grubb provides other data from 1787–1807 and 1816–1820, but the earlier period is more comparable to the Hanau data, given that all the recorded Hanau emigrants who settled in Pennsylvania arrived before 1771. The other samples provided by Grubb show roughly comparable age distributions.

62 See Auerbach, Auswanderung aus Kurhessen, 38–40. She comments on p. 40 that before every inspection or review of troops, it was often the case that young men emigrated to avoid military duty.

63 The number of persons who went to North America (excluding Pennsylvania) and for whom information on age exists is particularly small, making one hesitant to assume too much.

64 This is a problem with the eighteenth-century data on Hanau-Hessians as well as the nineteenth-century data on those from the principality of Hesse-Cassel. Of chief interest to authorities was the cash being exported; hence married men and widowed women were more interesting than accompanying wives. For a discussion of this issues, see Auerbach, Auswanderung aus Kurhessen, 18–19.

65 A rough examination of Stumpp's Volga emigrant lists shows that some undercounting of wives exists, but that the majority of the men listed as single in the Hanau-Hesse records are also listed as single in Stumpp's records. See Auerbach, Hessische Auswanderer (HESAUS): Index nach Familiennamen, Nr. 12, Band I; Stumpp, The emigration from Germany to Russia, 117–65.

66 The population sizes from the 1832 population census, a proxy for size of population in the eighteenth century, were 840 individuals for Killianstädten, 1,346 for Windecken and 2,402 for Steinau. People also left from Killianstädten for Hungary and from Steinau for both Hungary and Russia. Relatively, these were big places, as median population size of villages at this time was somewhere between three and four hundred people.

67 On the details of cumulative causation and the quote on a ‘strong dynamic momentum’, see Massey, ‘Social structure, household strategies’, 8, 17. This emigration cycle and the use of the term ‘inverted U-shape’ is described in Massey et al., Worlds in motion, 49. For examples of how first emigrants could be vastly different from the emigrants who follow them, see Wegge, S. A., ‘Chain migration and information networks: evidence from nineteenth-century Hesse-Cassel’, Journal of Economic History 58, 4 (1998), 957–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 It is possible that some of the North American-bound in the first half of the 1740s were going to Pennsylvania.

69 I am assuming that any possible undercounting affected each destination group to the same degree.

70 See Lesger, C., Lucassen, L. and Schrover, M., ‘Is there life outside the migrant network? German immigrants in nineteenth-century Netherlands and the need for a more balanced migration typology’, Annales de Démographie Historique (2002), 29–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 30.

71 See Granovetter, M., ‘The impact of social structure on economic outcomes’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, 1 (2005), 33–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Here, Granovetter emphasises weak social ties as being important in the contemporary world.