Introduction

Summary

The threshold principle, emphasizing territorial and population expansion, was intimately tied to ideas of white citizenship in nineteenth-century America.

Abraham Lincoln’s first annual message to Congress was conveyed with excitement on the front pages of the Scandinavian-American press.¹ Questions surrounding civil war, military service, and slavery set the agenda for Emigranten (the Emigrant) and Hemlandet (the Homeland), and their intimate connection to issues of citizenship and American empire were revealed by the president’s words on December 3, 1861.²

“Fellow Citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives,” the president began.³ Due to the “factious domestic division,” the United States was exposed to a “disrespect abroad.”⁴ One strong nation, Lincoln explained, would ensure a more “durable peace” and “reliable commerce” than would that “same nation broken into hostile fragments.”⁵ Now that Civil War was upon the United States, however, the president recommended Congress’ consideration of a series of war-time legislation.⁶

Mindful of avoiding the term “slavery,” Lincoln explicitly addressed the fate of enslaved people. As “the legal claims of certain persons to the labor and services of certain other persons” had “become forfeited” due to the Confiscation Act of August 8, 1861, formerly enslaved people in the insurgent states would have “to be provided for in some way,” Lincoln specified.⁷

To this end, the president proposed that steps toward colonization – the settlement of Black Americans outside the nation’s borders – be taken.⁸ It “may be well to consider, too,” Lincoln added, “whether the free colored people already in the United States could not, so far as individuals may desire, be included in such colonization.”⁹ To realize colonization plans, acquisition of territory and “appropriation of money” would be necessary: “If it be said that the only legitimate object of acquiring territory is to furnish homes for white men, this measure effects that object, for the emigration of colored men leaves additional room for white men remaining or coming here.”¹⁰

Lincoln’s First Message to Congress, arguing for acquisition of land and funding to remove people of African descent to “a climate congenial to them,” revealed important aspects of his administration’s ideas about white citizenship and empire through expansion. Lincoln’s renewed call for colonization built on political ideas stretching back decades, despite Black people’s opposition and search for alternatives.¹¹

In a developing American empire, “ruled in the interests of white people,” nonwhites were, as Steven Hahn reminds us, forced to “leave or submit.”¹² Debates over colonization and acquisition of territory therefore became closely related “intellectually and politically, as well as chronologically.”¹³ The white supremacist ideology underpinning colonization also justified territorial expansion on the North American continent.¹⁴

Lincoln’s call for territorial acquisition to ensure “one strong nation” was an idea widely shared among intellectuals and politicians in the nineteenth century and one clearly expressed by influential German-born economist Friedrich List, who was shaped “in a profound way” by his experience in the United States between 1825 and 1830.¹⁵

List emphasized the need to secure “a large population and an extensive territory endowed with manifold natural resources,” due to the belief that expansion was needed to establish a healthy nation (and, one might add, empire).¹⁶ The perceived importance of population growth and territorial expansion – what Eric Hobsbawm has called the threshold principle – helped guide policy in the mid-nineteenth-century United States as well as in Europe.¹⁷ According to Hobsbawm, nations had to engage in Grossstaatenbildung (large state building) or at least maintain a threshold of a “sufficient size” in order to preserve their “historical justification.”¹⁸ The alternative, a descent into Kleinstaaterei (a “system of mini-states”), was seen as a sure path to foreign domination or annihilation.¹⁹

The importance of a large population had been pointed out at least since Adam Smith’s 1776 claim that the “most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase of the number of its inhabitants.”²⁰ As an example, J. David Hacker’s argument that “eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political observers equated rapid population growth with economic and political strength” was clearly expressed in the 1850 US census.²¹ The census pointed to an increase in the US population (over five million “whites” between 1840 and 1850) and directly compared its numbers to European powers such as the more populated Great Britain (less than one million people added between 1841 and 1851).²²

Additionally, the republic’s “territorial extent” was now “three times as large as the whole of France, Britain, Austria, Prussia, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Holland, and Denmark, together” and was “of equal extent with the Roman empire, or that of Alexander.”²³

Indeed, ideas of territorial and population expansion, in Hobsbawm’s words, “seemed too obvious to require argument” for nineteenth-century policymakers.²⁴ Still, in his first annual message to Congress, Lincoln expressed pride in the nation’s population growth and concluded his address with the prediction that some Americans alive in 1861 would “live to see” the Union “contain 250,000,000” (if it could be preserved).²⁵

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, several ascending and established American politicians either directly or indirectly articulated their belief in the threshold principle.²⁶ In an 1844 speech entitled “Elements of Empire in America,” William Seward, the future Republican secretary of state, laid out the themes of nonwhite subjugation and expansion when he argued that “expansive territory inseparably belongs to the idea of National Greatness.”²⁷ The following year, James K. Polk took office with an Inaugural Address celebrating the new states “admitted,” the territories created, the population expanded, and the “title of numerous Indian tribes to vast tracts of land” extinguished.²⁸

Moreover, in his first Senate speech in 1850, Seward expressed the view that white Europeans, what he called “the ruling homogeneous family planted at first on the Atlantic shore,” was destined to spread “itself westward” through continued population growth.²⁹ Speaking in Saint Paul, Minnesota, an increasingly attractive locality for Scandinavian immigrants, a decade later Seward explicitly mentioned American expansion north, west, and south as part of a crosscontinent national project and reiterated the idea that “this is the land for the white man.”³⁰ Seward, along with Wisconsin Senator James Doolittle, who spoke of “the great national policy which is to control this continent,” also welcomed annexation of Cuba if slavery was abolished.³¹

As it turned out, the deep-seated belief in continued territorial expansion, and the underlying issue of slavery, was a central cause of the Civil War.³² Fiercely opposed to slavery’s expansion but willing to accept slavery’s temporary survival inside a “cordon” of freedom, leading Republican politicians in the Civil War era supported an expanding white man’s republic.³³

Still, when South Carolina’s leaders voted to secede from the Union on December 20, 1860, their decision threatened an American decline toward Kleinstaaterei.³⁴ Such fears were articulated by Seward on January 12, 1861, when he warned the Senate of a looming “momenteous and disastrous revolution” that imperiled an “empire” that had grown to “thirty-three parts” and “no less than thirty million inhabitants.”³⁵ Seward’s trepidations proved prescient as other states soon followed South Carolina’s lead. By February 1861, representatives from seven southern states were meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, to form a new nation, and two months later four more joined the Confederate States of America.

If states could break away from the Union this easily, then the possibility existed that, in Steven Hahn’s words, “the United States might unravel in a variety of ways and leave the North American continent awash in potentially rivalrous states and confederations.”³⁶

Scandinavian-born men and women, even if unfamiliar with List’s work or Republican oratory, proved receptive to ideas of territorial and (white) population expansion based on free labor, as they generally associated American citizenship with the liberty and equality embodied in landownership but downplayed the violence toward American Indians involved in landtaking.

Consequently, the two main strands of Hobsbawm’s threshold principle – the need to attract “a large population and an extensive territory” – coupled with an exploration of citizenship’s malleable meaning to Scandinavian immigrants constitute the foundation for the following chapters.³⁷

By analyzing eastern political decision-making and western settlement experience – meaning the chronological, intellectual, and political connections between national policies of an American imperial project and their concrete ramifications at the local level – this book details the lived community experience and worldview among Scandinavian-American immigrants.

These transnational connections are significant in order to understand Civil War–era politics at both the ideological and social levels, and the story that unfolds therefore heeds recent calls to combine “micro-historical work in the archives [with] macro-historical frameworks.”³⁸ As an example, foreign-born immigrants resisting military service in their communities took up so much energy in the American Department of State that Ella Lonn later wondered how Secretary of State Seward “had time to attend to any other duties”?³⁹

Civil War Settlers thus contributes to American nineteenth-century historiography along transnational, ethnic, and racial dimensions. First, the book nuances the immigrant populations’ role in the Republican Party’s Civil War–era coalition. In the existing literature, German and Irish immigrants have taken center stage due to their larger share of the population. However, their experience and at least partial attraction to the Democratic Party does not generally represent European immigrants because of differences in religious background, language, settlement patterns, and Old World history.⁴⁰

Second, despite more than 20 percent of the Union army claiming foreign-born roots, the ethnic aspect of the Civil War has only recently attracted wider scholarly attention.⁴¹ The scrutiny of Scandinavian-American immigrants’ ideology adds to a growing body of research examining the evolving definitions of American citizenship and the way citizenship was used to construct, challenge, or maintain racial hierarchies and political power in the Civil War era.

Third, this book contributes to the English-language scholarship of Scandinavian-American immigration where Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish writers have frequently sought to accentuate narrow ethnic and national contributions to American history, not least in terms of patriotism and civic contributions, despite significant evidence of necessary pan-Scandinavian cultural and political cooperation in the years surrounding the Civil War.⁴² This study recalibrates those claims to show that many Scandinavian-born immigrants, often publicly embracing a common Scandinavian identity, were reluctant to accept the citizenship duty of military service and after emancipation remained reluctant to embrace equal citizen rights for freedpeople.⁴³

Lastly, the Scandinavian scholarly contribution to American historiography has mainly been focused inwardly on the Scandinavian communities, while immigrants’ encounters with other ethnic groups have taken a back seat. As Gunlög Fur has pointed out, “settlement and [Indian] removal is rarely discussed in the same context, and in most immigration history, these processes remain unconnected.”⁴⁴ Building on Fur and other contemporary Scandinavian American historians, this study redirects the historiographical focus in order to emphasize Scandinavian collaboration, encounters, and entanglements with other ethnic groups as these interactions became increasingly important in the Civil War era.⁴⁵

Thus, inspired by Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur’s effort to investigate “precisely how the changes that rippled out from the Civil War did – and did not – echo in people’s lives and communities,” the book is guided by the following questions:⁴⁶

• How did Old World ideology, not least related to territory and population, inform Scandinavian immigrants’ attempt to navigate life in the New World?

• Why did Scandinavian immigrants overwhelmingly support the Republican Party between 1860 and 1868 when Irish and German immigrants, among other ethnic groups, did not?

• How did implicit and explicit American definitions of citizenship impact perceptions of ethnic identity and belonging among Scandinavian immigrants?

Methodologically, Civil War Settlers adapts the German and Italian schools of microhistory (focusing on community studies and marginal individuals, respectively) based on the premise that “microscopic observation will reveal factors previously unobserved.”⁴⁷

The following chapters provide a “thick description” of New Denmark, a small immigrant community in Wisconsin’s Brown County, by utilizing a previously untapped wealth of letters, diaries, and memoirs, which are bolstered by census data, pension records, and draft rolls.⁴⁸ New Denmark was not “representative” or “typical,” since, as Stephen Kantrowitz rightly notes, “no community was,” but it did play an important part in the Scandinavian-American chain migration that picked up speed by the 1840s with Wisconsin as a central hub.⁴⁹ Along with slightly older and slightly bigger Scandinavian immigrant communities in Wisconsin such as Muskego and New Upsala, New Denmark served as an important early link between Old World Scandinavia and the United States. Moreover, the lack of attention paid to New Denmark and its inhabitants by historians is in and of itself methodologically important. As Carlo Ginzburg argued in his now famous The Cheese and the Worms, through deep engagement with a “modest individual who is himself lacking in significance” it is possible to “trace, as in a microcosm, the characteristics of an entire social stratum in a specific historical period.”⁵⁰ Accordingly, the centrality of historical actors’ own “point of view” is here accentuated and their words and behavior illuminated.⁵¹

Furthermore, the researcher’s role in the constructed narrative is laid bare in microhistorical writing in order to allow the reader to follow the researcher’s narrowing of the interpretive range based on the available information while weighing the impact of structural factors in relation to individual agency.⁵² Central to this understanding of historical writing is the conviction that it is impossible to reproduce exactly “what really happened,” yet it is possible to construct convincing historical narratives “in search of meaning” through microhistorical methodology.⁵³ To achieve this end, scholars of microhistory, in Giovanni Levi’s words, take the “highly specific and individual” as a starting point to analyze how a word, a concept, or an event was perceived in order to establish “its meaning in the light of its own specific context.”⁵⁴

In sum, by reducing the analytical scale to a relatively small group of Scandinavian-born men and women, focusing on seemingly marginal communities and individuals, highlighting their point of view in their own words, and placing the interpretations in a contemporary historiographical context, certain historical explanations, presented in the pages that follow, gain credence over others.⁵⁵

In Part I, Civil War Settlers details the impact of the 1848 revolution in Europe and North America in terms of renewed ideas about liberty, struggles over territory, and Caribbean emancipation. Additionally, the importance of Old World colonial culture, religion, and scientific racism are highlighted as keys to unlocking Scandinavian-born men and women’s perception of citizenship and empire in the New World. Scandinavian immigrants’ understanding of American citizenship rights was often articulated as liberty and equality, which led to widespread opposition to slavery, but this understanding of citizenship paradoxically did often not include nonwhites. Scandinavian immigrants, not least the Scandinavian elite, perceiving themselves as superior to other ethnic groups, directly and indirectly supported an American imperial project defined by territorial expansion and conflict with nonwhite and, to an extent, non-Protestant peoples.⁵⁶

Furthermore, Part I delves into the question of why Scandinavian immigrants’ understanding of American citizenship led them almost unanimously to support the Republican Party by 1860. As the Republican Party, partially prompted by its interest in German-born voters, retreated somewhat from nativist policies and built a coalition on homestead advocacy, free labor ideology, and anti-slavery, Scandinavian immigrants increasingly embraced the party’s platform.

At a time when Scandinavian-American civic participation grew through involvement in local, statewide, and national elections, Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes embraced the possibilities of American equality and pointed to these democratic opportunities as departures from Old World monarchical and religious practice. Economic equality and free labor ideology, which in the Scandinavian view meant an opportunity to improve one’s social standing through landownership and hard work, were some of the key pull factors associated with American citizenship.

As the antebellum era came to a close, Scandinavian immigrants’ Old World experience and New World settlement patterns in rural enclaves built around strands of Lutheran religion, separated Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish immigrants from many Irish and German settlers to such an extent that the Scandinavians – whether the issue was landownership, access to credit, or ties to a political spoils system – came to see themselves in opposition to and in competition with these larger, more urban and Catholic ethnic groups, many of whom supported the Democratic Party.⁵⁷

Part II details the Scandinavian immigrant experience during the Civil War and argues that Scandinavian ethnic leaders successfully constructed a public pan-Scandinavian ethnic identity to spur military mobilization in late 1861. When the Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish immigrants initially went to war, many rhetorically did so “for God and Country” – an invocation adapted from the Old World rallying cry “For God, King, and Country” – and over time benefited economically and politically from such service. Several Scandinavian-born officers became political leaders after the war, and several enlisted specifically to make sure German and Irish immigrants did not profit disproportionately in terms of political office-holding after the war.

Moreover, this part of the book explores the fierce religious and ideological debate within the Scandinavian-American church over slavery’s sinfulness. In this religious and political controversy, Old World currents of white superiority revealed themselves among the state church–affiliated clergy and, from their congregation members’ standpoint, came dangerously close to pro-slavery paternalist arguments (e.g. rejection of the nation’s egalitarian principles) used by Southern planters.⁵⁸ Part II demonstrates the nuances along class lines of Scandinavians’ commitment to a white man’s republic, as the majority of Scandinavian immigrants openly opposed slavery and empathized with the enslaved, but a larger share of the well-educated immigrants openly opposed racial equality. Still, they all, consciously or unconsciously, participated in, and often supported, a settler colonialist project which, in Patrick Wolfe’s words, was predicated on “access to territory.”⁵⁹

Additionally, underscoring the ideological, rhetorical, and chronological connection between colonization and Indian removal, the intense colonization negotiations initiated by the Danish government and in revised form consummated in 1862 occurred simultaneously with Scandinavian immigrants increasingly settling on former Dakota land in Minnesota. The subsequent 1862 US–Dakota War left lasting imprints on Scandinavian immigrants’ perceptions of American Indians in Minnesota and, broadly speaking, strengthened the commitment to landtaking and opposition to indigenous people’s citizenship rights.⁶⁰ Underlining the centrality of racism to both colonization and Indian dispossession schemes, Scandinavian-born men by 1862 referred to both enslaved Africans and American Indians as “savages.”⁶¹

Lastly, despite later hagiographic ethnic accounts, enlistment enthusiasm was low among Scandinavian immigrants, not least the Danes and Swedes; even in 1861 and by 1862, the pan-Scandinavianism on display through the earlier formation of purely ethnic Scandinavian military units was challenged by Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish immigrants’ reluctance to volunteer for military service. The draft resistance exposed fault lines between the Scandinavian elite and their countrymen without formal education, as the latter’s draft resistance complicated ethnic leaders’ aspirations for later political gain.

For many Scandinavian-born farmers, the coercive Old World state, from which they had fled, found a new form in New World draft legislation and spurred widespread forms of resistance such as renouncing interest in American citizenship in Scandinavian enclaves. This draft resistance has generally been overlooked historiographically, but a close examination of rural Wisconsin enclaves nuances James McPherson’s statement that “virtually all those who denounced and resisted the militia draft were Democrats” and, building on Tyler Anbinder, shows concretely how “immigrants employed” citizenship, or lack thereof, as a means to obtain exemptions from the draft.⁶²

Part III analyzes the post–Civil War era along two main strands: on the one hand, the American government’s interest in imperial expansion into the Caribbean through the purchase of the Danish West Indies; and on the other hand, Scandinavian immigrants’ engagement with contiguous expansion and debates over universal citizenship.

This final part of the book shows the Homestead Act’s centrality to Scandinavian immigrants’ economic aspirations after the Civil War and demonstrates the continued discrepancy between their egalitarian idealism and a racial reality centered on whiteness. Scandinavian immigrants’ enthusiasm for landownership opportunities did not extend to enthusiasm for freedpeople’s economic opportunities or regard for indigenous peoples’ landholding rights.

Emancipation highlighted the issue of equal rights for the formerly enslaved, and in the Scandinavian communities these debates revealed well-educated immigrants’ reservations about freedpeople’s potential for full and equal citizenship. Using the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson as a pretext, the Scandinavian elite publicly started to abandon reconstruction no later than 1868 to focus their collective political energy on issues of more evident self-interest such as economic growth, agricultural opportunities, and industrial development. In the process, Scandinavian Civil War veterans and community leaders underscored the importance of a white complementary identity, meaning “the dual loyalties to nation and subgroup,” by exhibiting greater solidarity with recently arrived Old World countrymen than they did with recently emancipated fellow Black citizens.⁶³

On women’s citizenship rights, Scandinavian-born men continued to perceive of themselves as the main economic and practical decision-makers even as the women in Midwestern settlements at times during the war were elevated to being heads of their households. Moreover, the Scandinavian-American press, often emphasizing women’s subordinate role, ran letters ridiculing the emerging post-war women’s movement and left little room inside or outside the home for Scandinavian women’s social or political aspirations, including voting, which was deemed central to Scandinavian immigrant men’s understanding of citizenship.

Lastly, the attempted purchase of the Danish West Indies, initiated by the Lincoln administration in 1865 but rejected by the Senate in 1870, is here explained in the context of domestic American reconstruction politics, which led to a lack of political will in Congress to fund the transaction. Political conflict between the Johnson administration and Congress, centered on freedpeople, clearly outweighed any personal relationships, however strong, that Danish diplomats had built in the United States.

As an example of the threshold principle’s importance, the widening asymmetrical power relationship between the United States, stepping more forcefully onto the global political scene, and Denmark, a declining international power following the loss of territory at the hands of Prussia and Austria in the Second Schleswig War of 1864, allowed the Senate to ignore an agreed-upon treaty with international impunity.

This last part of Civil War Settlers thereby details the chronology of continued American attempts at territorial and population growth, while the Danish fear of falling under a crucial threshold, or being incorporated into the German Confederation, is shown to be an important variable in the ongoing negotiations between Denmark and the United States.⁶⁴

The early American attempts to build a Grossstaat through war with Mexico and the Danish fear of descending into Kleinstaaterei by losing German-speaking territory through revolutionary violence can, in important respects, be traced to 1848, which is where this study begins.