Independent Immigrants: A Settlement of Hanoverian Germans in Western Missouri

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Independent Immigrants

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Independent Immigrants A Settlement of Hanoverian Germans in Western Missouri

Robert W. Frizzell University of Missouri Press Columbia and London

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Copyright © 2007 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 11 10 09 08 07 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Frizzell, Robert W., 1947– Independent immigrants : a settlement of Hanoverian Germans in western Missouri / Robert W. Frizzell. p. cm. Summary: “Frizzell examines the American immigrant experience of German peasant farmers from the Kingdom of Hanover, who immigrated to Lafayette County, Missouri, to form a new community centered on the town of Concordia, showing how it differed from other German immigrant communities in America and how it flourished after the Civil War”—Provided by the publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8262-1761-5 (alk. paper) 1. Germans—Missouri—Lafayette County—History—19th century. 2. German Americans—Missouri—Lafayette County—History—19th century. 3. Lafayette County (Mo.)—History—19th century. 4. Concordia (Mo.)—History—19th century. 5. Lafayette County (Mo.)—Emigration and immigration—History— 19th century. 6. Hannover (Germany : Province)—Emigration and immigration— History—19th century. I. Title. F472.L2F75 2007 977.8'4530431—dc22 2007022663

™This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Stephanie Foley Typesetter: BookComp, Inc. Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Minion, Pristina and ICG Papyrus

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For Sue Ann Hamiter Frizzell and Jeffery Christopher Frizzell

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Contents

Preface

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1

Introduction

1. Hanoverian Background 2. Settling in Missouri and Starting Farms 3. Founding Churches and Using the Law 4. The Civil War and Disaster in 5.

Western Missouri Postwar Growth and Development

7 31 64 89 121

Conclusion

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Appendix. Letters of F. J. and Marie Biltz

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Bibliography

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Index

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In 1974, a German schoolteacher and local history enthusiast named Armin Mandel published a book on the history of the small village of Esperke located some thirty kilometers (nineteen miles) north-northwest of the city of Hannover in northwestern Germany. Within his region, Mandel was well known as a local historian, and he is said to have had immense knowledge.1 Mandel filled over two hundred pages with information and musings about the history of a village that never numbered so many as four hundred people—until the bombing of the city of Hannover in World War II forced city dwellers out into nearby villages. Despite his penchant for detail, Mandel’s description of nineteenth-century emigration from the village to America was brief: “Some few Esperkans left the village around 1850 in order to try their luck in America. Links with these families soon broke.”2 Although Esperke could remember no details about its people in America, in the central part of the United States—in the town of Concordia, Missouri, fifty-eight miles east of Kansas City—a few families remembered the name Esperke. When St. Paul’s Lutheran Church published its 150th anniversary history in 1990, included was a list of the ten local men who signed an agreement to found a Germanspeaking church there in 1842. Two of these ten were known to have 1. Rolf-Axel Eberhardt, “Rede anlässig der Einweihlung des Armin-Mandel-Hofes.” 2. “Einige wenige Esperker haben um 1850 das Dorf verlassen, um in Amerika ihr Gluck zu versuchen. Die Verbindung zu diesen Familien brach bald ab” (Armin Mandel, Ein Dorf an der Leine: Esperke/Warmeloh, 138).

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been born in Esperke. The other six whose place of birth is known were born in villages within ten kilometers (six miles) of Esperke.3 It is the aim of this study to retrace, and perhaps to reestablish, those links that broke soon after 1850. It is also to give an account of the early decades of these Hanoverians in America. Since early childhood, I have been interested in the history of the German heritage of the people in and surrounding Concordia. My mother was one of them. My father was not, and the two sets of grandparents contrasted considerably with each other. All four of my grandparents engaged in farming all their lives in west-central Missouri and lived only a dozen or so miles apart. None was wealthy and all four were Protestant believers. But my father’s ancestors were of British descent and most had arrived on this continent, in Maryland and Virginia, in the seventeenth century. My father’s family, although having a rather unusual Scots Gaelic surname, had no sense of belonging to anything other than the group of people most central to what they believed America was all about. Mother’s family was different. My maternal grandparents, who were third generation (and with respect to a few of their ancestors, fourth generation) Missourians, never learned to speak English free of a noticeable German accent. Indeed, for the first nine years of their marriage, until 1929, at home they spoke the north German dialect, Plattdeutsch. My mother learned that tongue before she learned English. When I was a child in the 1950s, my mother’s family, although they had been in Missouri for a century or more, still saw themselves as different from their Anglo neighbors. They sometimes referred to people like my paternal relatives as “old Americans.” The Anglos were Methodists, Disciples of Christ, and Baptists, while the Germans were Lutherans or members of the former German Evangelical Synod that became a part of the UCC (United Church of Christ) in 1957. Neither the Anglo nor the German farmers knew their history in detail. While both groups could tell stories about the Civil War in their area—they were on opposite sides in that war—my grandfather Meyer did not know which part of Germany his ancestors had lived in. My father (who was only fourteen years younger than his father-in-law) did not remember which group of ancestors had come from Kentucky, 3. [Alfred W. Rodewald et al.], Descending Love, Ascending Praise, 1840–1990: St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Concordia, Mo., 18.

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which from Tennessee, nor what other states were also involved in the story. As a librarian with professional training in history, I have researched both stories, the Anglo and the German, for decades. In retracing the links between the former Kingdom of Hanover and western Missouri, I will try to tell the story in such a way that it can be read with satisfaction and perhaps even with pleasure by interested lay people. At the same time, I want to provide worthwhile revelations to American and German immigration historians and to historians of the American Civil War. This is a tall order. The reader will decide to what extent it has been fulfilled. Another goal is to combine both a “rightful pride” with a critical approach. Peter Charles Hoffer sees this as “the almost intolerable burden of the historian.” Although, in the present account, pride may exceed criticism, its author is skeptical enough of all human endeavor and is enough of an outsider among the descendants of these immigrants perhaps to have avoided some of the more obvious filiopietistic pitfalls.4 I wish to thank the Richard Brownlee Fund of the State Historical Society of Missouri and Provost Kichoon Yang of Northwest Missouri State University for research funds. I won a contest sponsored by the German Emigration Center/Deutsches Auswandererhaus in Bremerhaven, Germany, which allowed me to visit both the Lutheran Parish Register Office (Kirchenbuchamt des evangelisch lutheraner Stadtkirchenverband) and the Lower Saxon Archives (Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv) in Hannover for a revealing third time. The staffs of both institutions were most kind, but I wish to thank especially Frau Birgit Klein (2001, 2002, and 2005) at the Parish Register Office, and, at the Archive, Dr. Claudia Becker (2001 trip) and Frau Kirsten Hoffmann (2005 trip). Glenn Morrow at Owens Library, Northwest Missouri State University, has been most diligent in providing scarce materials via interlibrary loan. Since 1980, I have greatly admired the German American research and writing of a fellow Missourian, Professor Walter Kamphoefner of Texas A&M University. He has encouraged me a great deal. Even before I learned of the work of Kamphoefner, the publications of Professor Kathleen Conzen of the University of Chicago provided me a model 4. Peter Charles Hoffer, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, and Fraud in the Writing of American History, 2.

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of what German American historical research and writing should be. Professor Conzen has also provided me with much-appreciated encouragement. I also owe thanks for help and support in this long, long project to Professor Emerita Linda Pickle of Western Kentucky University and Professor Emeritus Adolf Schroeder of the University of Missouri. Many years ago in graduate school, Professor J. Alden Nichols of the University of Illinois first introduced me to the many preunification German states and their political significance. In Concordia, Rev. Alfred W. Rodewald, an important historian of the community in his own right, has been both generous and helpful. My aunt, LaVerna Hemme Meyer, first passed along to me copies of letters written by Louis A. Meyer, my great-grandfather, which sparked a professional interest in the history of the community. Many of the matters I was able to pursue in written records first came to me orally through numerous conversations with Donald Dittmer, a cousin and a local businessman. Finally, my grandfather, Lambert Meyer, much of his life a tenant farmer and educated only through elementary school, told stories of the Missouri German past when I was a child half a century ago, which continue to spur my interest and research efforts. By custom, writers take responsibility for all errors and questionable interpretations in their texts. I deem this custom very just. Despite my best efforts, surely I have made errors and surely others will interpret some facts differently, so in reading this, as in reading any other “factual” text, Caveats Are Merited. For decades, my wife and son have had to put up with my fascination with historical esoterica. To them jointly this book is dedicated.

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In the spring of 1837, twenty-five-year-old Friedrich Frerking deserted the army of the Kingdom of Hanover in northwestern Germany and departed the Old World for St. Louis, Missouri. According to a record in the Lower Saxon State Archives in the city of Hannover, he deserted “mit seiner ganzen Montur”—with his full uniform. Frerking had probably read Gottfried Duden’s German book on the advantages of farming in Missouri. Duden reported that Missouri’s winters tended to be quite mild, but as a soldier and farmer, Frerking knew that an army overcoat might come in handy nevertheless. Had he stayed in Hanover, Frerking would have been released from the army in a few years and could have returned to the village of Esperke. As the oldest son, eventually he could have taken over his father’s small piece of land in the village. But there were twelve other siblings who needed to be provided for. Although law and custom gave all the land to the oldest son, and the tiny farm could not be divided, Frerking nevertheless would have had some obligation to those many brothers and sisters. Perhaps that was his personal motive for wanting more opportunity than a dwarf farm in Hanover could provide.1 1. Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 4932, Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (hereinafter NSHSA), Hannover, Germany. I will abide by the growing convention in English-language scholarship to use the German spelling Hannover to refer to the city and the English spelling Hanover to refer to the kingdom and earlier electorate; Gottfried Duden, Bericht über eine Reise nach den westlichen Staaten Nordamerika’s und einen mehrjährigen Aufenthalt am Missouri (in den Jahren 1824, ’25, ’26 und 1827). I have used the English translation: Gottfried Duden, Report on a Journey to the Western States of North America and a Stay of Several Years along the Missouri (During the Years 1824, ’25, ’26, 1827), 58, 65, 80, 156–57;

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Friedrich Frerking was not the only person in the village of Esperke, some twenty miles north-northwest of the city of Hannover, the capital of the kingdom, with serious plans to go to America. Others considered taking Duden’s advice and availing themselves of the opportunities he had described in the mostly empty new state of Missouri in North America. In the same year, 1837, in the month of May, thirty-nine-year-old Friedrich Dierking sold his farm of perhaps fifty to sixty acres with the idea of starting over in Missouri. Dierking was Frerking’s uncle by marriage. The two probably discussed their plans in detail before Frerking deserted and Dierking sold his farm.2 Dierking, the older and better situated of the two men, was to become the father of a sizeable Hanoverian settlement that grew up beginning in 1838 in the southeastern corner of Lafayette County in western Missouri. Dierking operated a moderately sized farm (Großköthnerstelle) in Esperke, as had his father and grandfather before him. He had been born there in August 1798 and was christened Jürgen Dietrich Friedrich Wilhelm Dierking. Early in 1823, he married Anna Maria Frerking, also of Esperke. After four daughters were born to the Dierkings between 1823 and 1832, on July 4, 1836, Anna gave birth to a son. A superstitious man, or one looking for signs and portents, might have seen his son’s birth date, American Independence Day, as a sign of what he was meant to do; but we do not know if Dierking was superstitious. In any event, in July 1837 the entire family of husband, wife, and five children aged one through fourteen departed from Hanover. Although Bremerhaven, the port of the city of Bremen, was the closest point of embarkation to Esperke, for reasons unknown today, the Dierkings went to Hamburg. There they took passage on the English sailing ship Burmah, which was bound for New York.3 Kirchenbuch Niederstöcken, Kirchenbuchamt, ev. luth. Stadtkirchenverband (hereinafter KBA), Hannover, Germany. Esperke had a chapel rather than a church and thus was within the parish (Kirchspiel) of Niederstöcken; Loberta Runge, Frerking Family History, 12. 2. Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 2117, 2071, 367, NSHSA. 3. Kirchenbuch Niederstöcken, KBA. Three previous historians of the community— William G. Bek, “Survivals of Old Marriage-Customs among the Low Germans of West Missouri”; Harry R. Voigt, Concordia, Missouri: A Centennial History, 6; and Lewis W. Spitz, “History of St. Paul’s Congregation,” 3—have called the German community’s founder “Heinrich Dierking.” For years, including in my article, Robert W. Frizzell, “The Low German Settlements of Western Missouri: Examples of Ethnic Cocoons,” 107, I have accepted their report. How could all three have been mistaken? But after finding multiple

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They did not go alone. In addition to Friedrich Dierking’s family of seven, another eight Esperkans on the Burmah eventually came to Lafayette County. The Dierkings brought along four of Anna Dierking’s nephews—younger brothers of the army deserter Friedrich Frerking— Heinrich, aged twenty-four, Wilhelm, aged twenty-two, Ludwig, aged seventeen, and Adolph, aged twelve. Friedrich Dierking’s sister and brother-in-law, Charlotte Bruns, twenty-six, and Ferdinand Bruns, thirty, a carpenter, sailed with the Esperke group. Friedrich Niemeyer, thirty-one, who had worked in a mill before emigrating, and his wife, Charlotte, twenty-seven, made the voyage as well. Niemeyer was probably Dierking’s cousin, since Dierking’s mother was a Niemeyer. Thus the party consisted of fifteen people, all probably related by blood or marriage to Friedrich W. Dierking. Interspersed with these Esperke migrants who eventually came to Lafayette County are nine additional people designated on the passenger list as Hanoverians and naming Missouri as their final destination. But these nine have not been traced either to Esperke or to Lafayette County. The fifteen men, women, and children of the Dierking party were well armed. They brought a total of fifteen muskets from Hamburg to New York. The seven members of the Dierking family also brought along on the ship nine chests, household utensils, beds, bedding, and a wagon.4 Surviving documents do not reveal the route the Dierkings took from New York to St. Louis. We can only note the routes traveled by other German speakers inspired by Duden during the same decade. The Koepfli and Suppiger party in 1831 crossed the ocean from Le Havre to archival records in Hannover, it now seems inescapable that the Wilhelm Friedrich Dierking who was born in Esperke in 1798, and who left for America in 1837, is indeed the father of the Concordia settlement. Bek erred, although he himself had lived in the community as an adolescent in the 1880s. Spitz’s facts and phraseology make it clear that he relied on Bek. Voigt must have relied on both of them for much of his information about the earliest years. See National Archives, Ship Passenger Lists, New York, Series M235, Microfilm No. 35; and Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 4853, 467, 700, 4932, NSHSA. 4. The passenger list is not fully accurate but is close enough for a relatively certain identification, given its context. On the list, the family name is spelled “Durking.” The two oldest daughters, Maria Friederike and Christine, are listed as males: “Fred” and “Christ.” The Frerking brothers are given the surname “Durking.” The surname Niemeyer is spelled “Nemire.” This is about as accurate as an English ship’s clerk, or even Captain E. H. Webster himself, was likely to be with passengers who spoke limited or no English and whose pronunciation sounded strange to English ears. William Musgrove, later a newspaper editor in Lexington, who took the census in Lafayette County in 1850, was scarcely more accurate with German names.

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New York between June 2 and July 20. Leaving New York City on August 1, they made it to St. Louis on August 28 via the Hudson River, Erie Canal, Lake Erie, canals and rivers in eastern Ohio, and then the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. In 1835, the Wülfing family from Lennep, near Remscheid, Duden’s birthplace, sailed from Bremen to New York between September 16 and October 25. They went partly by steamboat and partly by steam railway from New York to Philadelphia. After a very uncomfortable journey by canal boat across Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh, they went by steamboat down the Ohio to Cincinnati, their initial destination. The trip from New York to Cincinnati lasted from November 6 to December 4. Both Koepfli and Wülfing frequently referred to Duden in their letters describing their journeys. Duden himself had left Rotterdam on June 8, 1824, and arrived in Baltimore on August 14. He bought a wagon and horses and began to drive to St. Louis on August 25. He reached his destination on October 23. Since the Dierkings brought a wagon with them to New York, perhaps they, too, drove to St. Louis after buying horses on the east coast.5 In 1838, in St. Louis, Friedrich Dierking met Dick Mulkey. A dozen years earlier, the Mulkeys, who were Anglo-Americans from Kentucky, had been one of the first families to settle the rolling, partially prairie, partially timbered land of southern Lafayette County in western Missouri. When Dick Mulkey went home to Lafayette County, Dierking accompanied him. In November 1838, the Hanoverian entered 880 acres of government land to the west and south of where the town of Concordia, Missouri, would arise a quarter century later. His fifty to sixty acres in Esperke with its house-barn and possibly other buildings would have sold for more than enough to pay his passage to the New World and provide the standard price of $1,100 for the quantity of government land he obtained.6 Although he bought enough land for at least half a dozen farms of adequate size by American standards, there is no evidence that 5. Joseph Suppiger, Salomon Koepfli, and Kaspar Koepfli, Journey to New Switzerland: Travel Account of the Koepfli and Suppiger Family to St. Louis on the Mississippi and the Founding of New Switzerland in the State of Illinois, 45–127; Gustavus Wulfing, The Letters of Gustavus Wulfing, 10–23; Duden, Report, 17–47. 6. Bek, “Survivals,” 61–62; [Rodewald], Descending Love, 149–50. At the same time Dierking patented the land listed by Rodewald, he also patented the southeast quarter of the northeast quarter of section 13, range 48, township 25 (Original Land Entry Map, Lafayette County Recorder’s Office, Lexington, Missouri); he received 1,500 Reichstahler for just one field of about nine acres in Esperke (Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 2117, NSHSA).

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Friedrich Dierking himself farmed on a significant scale in Missouri for an extended period of time. Instead, a few years after immigration, he turned over much of his land to his eldest daughter’s American husband and sold much of the remainder. Apparently living off his capital, the founder of the community became known to his increasingly numerous Hanoverian neighbors in Lafayette County as “Tröster Dierking,” Dierking the Comforter, for the care and guidance he provided his countrymen after they had made the long and exhausting trip to Missouri and found themselves in a new place where everything was so different from Hanover. And come they did. For half a century and more, Hanoverians and other Germans came directly from Europe, from St. Louis, and from other German American settlements in Missouri and elsewhere. By 1850, there were seventy-two German household heads in the settlement, and fifty-four of these were farming on a sufficient scale to be included in the agriculture schedule of the U.S. census. Twenty years later, in 1870, the census taker counted 375 German household heads. The total population of Germans and their American-born children exceeded two thousand. About two-thirds of these were Hanoverians, most of whom had originated in a small area to the north and west of the city of Hannover extending to the town of Nienburg. This area comprised most of the former Amt (county of) Neustadt am Rübenberge, part of Amt Wölpe, and part of Amt Ricklingen. It was an area perhaps twenty-five miles, or forty kilometers, from one edge to the other. A dozen families came from the village of Esperke itself, which contained only thirty-nine independent households at the beginning of the migration period. It appears that more people came from Esperke than from any other single community.7 7. Frizzell, “Low German Settlements,” 108–9. More population data will be provided in Chapter 5. Figures are aggregated by the author from the manuscript population schedules, Tenth Census of the United States. Amt Ricklingen was combined into Amt Neustadt in 1852. Amt Wölpe was combined into Amt Nienburg in 1859. The former Hanoverian Amt was considerably smaller than a county in the American Midwest, but it performed many analogous administrative functions. Each Amt was divided into Vogtei, which I have translated as “townships.” In the 1820s, except for purposes of the regional legislatures and certain ecclesiastical functions, the old duchies (Herzogtumer), principalities (Fürstentumer), and counties (Grafschaften) were made obsolete as the kingdom was divided into seven Landdrostei, which might be considered provinces. These served as administrative levels between the Ämter and the central government in the capital city. When the Prussians took over in 1866, the Landdrostei became Regierungsbezirke (administrative districts), and their component parts, the Ämter, became Kreise (circles).

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What caused these ordinary German village farmers and artisans to start life over on a new continent in an entirely new environment as American farmers? What kind of society and economy did they leave? An examination of general conditions in the Kingdom of Hanover and the particularities of the village of Esperke will help to answer these questions.1 Although many economic and social conditions were similar over much of northwestern Germany in the early nineteenth century, in order to understand in detail the times as experienced by the immigrants to Freedom Township, it is necessary to know something of the Kingdom of Hanover. Germany was not a politically unified nation until 1871 when the German Empire was proclaimed. Prior to the nineteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire, which covered most of today’s Germany, comprised hundreds of independent political entities, many of them city-states and quite small territories. When Napoleon invaded Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century, he greatly consolidated these small German states. Many of his consolidations were left in place after Germany was liberated from French occupation in 1813–1814. Of the thirty-nine German independent states and cities left in place in 1814, the Kingdom of Hanover, after absorbing a considerable 1. Many scholars have distinguished between European peasants and the supposedly more profit-oriented American farmers, but I have not found evidence of a dramatic change in goals as these people went from Hanover to Missouri, although the opportunities for production and the commodities produced certainly changed.

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amount of new territory, was the fourth largest, behind Austria, Prussia, and Bavaria. Had the Kingdom of Hanover been square, it would have been a bit less than 122 miles on each side; but it was shaped quite irregularly, with large non-Hanoverian territories jutting into, or between, parts of the kingdom. Hanover contained 1.3 million people in 1818, and its population was growing rapidly.2 In contrast to all other German states, Hanover had a special relationship with Great Britain that went back to 1714. In that year, Queen Anne of Great Britain died, leaving no descendants and few remaining Protestant relatives. The British throne passed to Georg Ludwig, Grand Duke of Brunswick-Luneberg, as the state of Hanover was then officially designated. He was a great-grandson of King James I (1566– 1625) of England through his maternal grandmother. He also held the title of elector (Kurfürst), as he was one of only nine German princes who elected the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna. His northern German state was thus informally called the electorate (Kurfürstentum) of Hanover. In London, Georg Ludwig became King George I. It was not until a hundred years later that Hanover, having added territory, itself became a kingdom.3 The British and Hanoverian thrones were to be united for over a century, from 1714 until 1837. Hanover was ruled from London, but with its own German officials, who were usually Hanoverian noblemen, and its own local political traditions. King George I and his son George II frequently returned to Hanover. George I scarcely spoke English at all. George II, who was already thirty-four years old when the family moved to London, always spoke English with a thick German accent. Both kings preferred Hanover to England and traveled to the palace of Herrenhausen just outside the city of Hannover as often as affairs permitted. Only two miles outside Herrenhausen was the village of Garbsen, from which at least one Lafayette County family later emigrated. George III, who inherited the thrones of Britain and the electorate in 1760 and held them for nearly sixty years, never left the island of Great Britain. The thrones of the two kingdoms were separated in 1837—the year Frerking and Dierking came to Missouri. Upon the 2. Abigail Green, Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany, 9. 3. Ragnhild Hatton, George I, Elector and King.

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death of King William IV, British law gave that throne to Victoria, who was to reign for the entire remainder of the nineteenth century. But the law in effect in Hanover gave the continental throne to Victoria’s late father’s younger brother, her uncle Ernst August, the fifth son of King George III. In Hanover, with its very different traditions, the new king had a much more direct role in governing than did his niece in London.4 Down virtually to 1866, when Prussia defeated the Hanoverian army, took over the kingdom, and made it into a Prussian province, Hanover was conservative, traditional, and quite rural. In 1842, 85 percent of the population still lived in villages, mostly agricultural, of 3,500 people or less. The large cities of the region, Bremen and Hamburg, were both independent city-states outside Hanover’s borders.5 Scholars differ as to the character of Hanoverian government and society. Many have seen Hanover as backward. Karl H. Wegert wrote that “The post-1814 recasting of Hanoverian politics represented a major victory for the aristocracy, which proceeded to administer Hanover as though it were little more than a congeries of strictly personal domains. Peasants still laboured to meet a wide range of semifeudal payments. Poverty was endemic. There was much in Hanover that invited criticism.”6 Yet the preponderance of modern scholarly opinion seems to be that while both society and government were quite traditional, and while to protect its ancient privileges, the nobility acted as a very conservative force, nevertheless, the government was generally well-intentioned, interested in improving conditions where practical, and able to implement important beneficial changes. Officials were well educated for their time. After 1771, most government bureaucrats had to possess university degrees. Christopher Bauermeister believes “Hanover was

4. Most governmental functions between Hanover and Britain were entirely separate, but the British did protect Hanoverian subjects from Barbary pirates on the North African coast just as they protected Britons (Nicholas B. Harding, “North African Piracy, the Hanoverian Carrying Trade, and the British State, 1728–1828”). For a bibliography of legal and administrative relations between Hanover and Britain, see ibid., 27nn5–6. 5. Ulrich Hagenah, “Ländliche Gesellschaft im Wandel zwischen 1750 und 1850—das Beispiel Hannover,” 161. 6. Karl H. Wegert, German Radicals Confront the Common People: Revolutionary Politics and Popular Politics, 1789–1849, 122.

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neither the unenlightened despotism nor the incompletely centralized absolutism depicted by its critics; rather, it was an effective and moderately progressive early modern state whose centralized bureaucracy, inspired by cameralist and Enlightenment ideas, held sway over an older corporate system and successfully implemented reform programmes designed to improve aspects of administrative efficiency, agrarian productivity and social welfare.”7 Many of these reforms were quite practical and concerned agriculture. For example, in the eighteenth century the government opened a stud farm at Celle where farmers could have their mares bred, so that in just a generation, Hanover no longer needed to import horses. The government of George II began compulsory fire insurance for the peasantry. The Agricultural Society, also at Celle, which was founded with a contribution from George III himself, at an early time provided cash premiums to those agricultural villages that would divide their common lands. This was thought to make for more efficient use of the land. Although division of most of the village land held in common by the farmers of Esperke did not happen until the nineteenth century, its farmers received government permission to divide one meadow in 1787. The elector (later king) himself, was the lord of Esperke as well as of about half the other villages of Hanover. In an earlier period, as part of the rent for their own farms, peasant proprietors had to work two or more days per week, usually supplying their own team of draft animals, on lands that were farmed directly for the elector. By the middle 1790s, the elector had converted this labor service to an annual cash payment instead.8 A heritage of reasonably activist government was carried over when Hanover became a kingdom in 1814. Within a decade, specialized cabinet departments and bureaus had been created, a new administrative level, the Landdrostei (or provinces), had been put in place between the national government and the long-existing counties (Ämter), and internal tariffs—that is, taxes to move goods from one part of the kingdom to another—had been abolished.9 7. Christopher C. W. Bauermeister, “Hanover: Milde Regierung or Ancien Régime?” 289. 8. Mijndert Bertram, Das Königreich Hannover: Kleine Geschichte eines vergangenen deutschen Staates, 42; Ernst Schubert, “Hannover,” 37; Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 2321, NSHSA. 9. Green, Fatherlands, 39.

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Despite government efforts, described below, to improve the lot of the peasantry, the 1830s and 1840s were difficult times for most rural Hanoverians, including those in the village of Esperke. The population, which had been growing since the mid-seventeenth century, was continuing to grow much faster than agricultural production could be increased with the methods then available and faster than markets could be found for the nonfood items produced. Surplus people stayed put in the villages because at that time there was little industrial and commercial growth in the towns to provide new jobs. Additionally, the domicile law of 1827 required that people be within their village of birth if they were to be eligible for poor relief. In the twenty-one years from 1818 to 1839, the population of Esperke grew by 26 percent, from 275 to 347 people, despite at least sixteen people already having gone to Missouri by the latter year. America, and especially Lafayette County, Missouri, became, for a few decades, the solution to Esperke’s problem of overpopulation. By 1864, after the initial flow of people to America had tapered off, the population of the village was back at its 1818 level. This pattern of population growth was not unique to Esperke. The population of the entire township (Vogtei) of Niederstöcken, which included the villages of Esperke, Klein Grindau, Niederstöcken, Norddrebber, Stöckendrebber, Vesbeck, and Warmeloh, rose and fell in exactly the same pattern, from 1,499 in 1818, to 1,867 in 1839 and then back to about 1,500 in 1864. By the 1860s, the growing industry of the German cities provided an outlet for excess rural population.10 Esperke is in the Geest, or that portion of the northern German Plain that is flat, sandy, and with soil not of the best quality. Frequent rainfall and the general flatness of the land meant that the lowest areas (adjacent to the glacial moraines and lands along the rivers) suffered serious drainage problems. In that part of Hanover, the farmsteads were (and are) clustered together in villages. The villagers, who tilled the land surrounding the villages, grew rye as their most important crop, but also barley, oats, wheat, hay, flax, and potatoes. They kept cattle, hogs, goats, sheep, poultry, and horses. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, chemical fertilizers and better drainage methods were to greatly increase the returns to farming in the Geest. But at midcentury, such productivity was still in the distant future. 10. Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 696, NSHSA.

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As living standards were threatened by population growth, tensions developed between peasant proprietors and those rural residents who had no land or only a tiny bit of land. In Esperke, as everywhere else in northwestern Germany, land was quite unevenly distributed among the farming population. In 1839, Esperke’s 347 people lived in thirty-nine households, all of them farmsteads or miniature farms. The fields, common pastures, woodlands, swampy wastes, peat bogs, and any other scrubland belonging to the village had been divided in 1833, which was rather early for the region. In Calenberg, the old principality that included County Neustadt, at least three-quarters of the divisions of village lands took place between 1830 and 1865. After the division of Esperke’s common lands, there were eight proprietors of full-sized peasant farms (or Vollmeyer), each with an average of 179 Calenberger Morgen, that is, 116 acres of cropland, pasture, forest, swamp, and heath. This might seem to be a great deal for Germany, but not all of the land could be used to much advantage with the methods then available. A ninth peasant, described as a Halbmeyer or Höfner, held 92.6 acres. Then came five large cottagers (Großköthner), who held an average of about sixty acres of land each. The six small cottagers (Kleinköthner) held an average of only 14.4 acres each. Esperke had eight Brinksitzer, whose smallholdings had originally been carved out of forest and wasteland beyond the village fields and meadows. They had an average of 10.4 acres except for one, who had quite a bit more. Finally, among the property owners, there were nine Anbauer, people whose holdings had been created in the preceding century from the village commons, often by order of the sovereign, as the population grew. Each Anbauer had a house and three to five acres—perhaps enough for a small field of rye, a kitchen garden, and pasture for one cow. The last two of these classes of people usually had to supplement their meager agricultural income with some sort of craft work. All these people held their land on a kind of hereditary lease for which they owed annual payments of farm produce and money to the landlords and church.11 At the urging of the government, modernization began in the 1820s and 1830s and dramatically changed the centuries-long farming patterns 11. Stefan Brakensiek, “Agrarian Individualism in Northwestern Germany, 1770–1870,” 144; Mandel, Esperke, 65–87; Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 467, NSHSA.

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of Hanover and Esperke. Between 1822 and 1825, new laws were enacted to encourage division of the common lands (Gemeinheitsteilung), which included the lands (such as forests and peat digs) used in common by several villages, and those used in common by the farmers of only one village. The latter category included not only forests and wastelands, but also pastures and meadows. The farmers of Esperke divided between them 2,659 Morgen, or about 1,600 acres. Along with division of the commons went a necessary consolidation process (Verkoppelung), both of the newly divided land and of land in the old fields. Traditionally, peasants had worked particular strips in large village fields. The strips could be as narrow as thirty feet yet half a mile or more in length. Long strips reduced the number of times the plow had to be turned around. Each farmer had several strips in the same and in different fields, although the best fields were often divided exclusively between the larger farmers. Usually, an entire field had to be worked at the same time and sewn in the same crop by all those who had strips in it. Each farmer had to cross others’ strips to get to his own. Moreover, although animals were individually owned, all the animals were pastured together as a village herd. The villagers decided when to turn the herd into any particular field to graze the stubble, at which point everyone’s crop had to have been harvested. When the commons was divided, each farmer’s old and new holdings were consolidated into his own fields, pastures, meadows, and wasteland. New access paths had to be laid out and old ones eradicated. Division of the commons and consolidation of holdings, both done at the same time, together were a complicated operation. The written agreement, finalized in early 1833, between the thirty-nine large and small proprietors in Esperke, had been in the making since 1817. The agreement needed 324 different clauses or chapters to divide and reapportion twenty-two different expanses of land included in the village.12 In the same years that Hanoverian villagers were dividing and consolidating their land, and especially after a general redemption law was enacted in 1833, peasant proprietors were being urged by the government of the kingdom to redeem, that is, to buy out all of the obligations for labor, farm produce, and money that they owed each year to 12. Hagenah, “Ländliche Gesellschaft,” 175; Mandel, Esperke, 130; Karl Heinz Schneider and Hans Heinrich Seedorf, Bauernbefreiung und Agrarreform in Niedersachsen, 17; Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge., Nr. 5097.

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the landlords, to the church and others for the use of their land. Redemption had in fact been possible in Amt Neustadt since the mideighteenth century, but few farmers had redeemed their obligations before the general redemption law. The new law gave the farmer the right to permanently buy out his annual obligations at twenty-five times their annual value. This gave each farmer more control over such matters as rotation of crops, and it prevented the need to deliver substantial quantities of grain and meat to the government, the church, or to private landlords. The most onerous obligation was usually the tithe, which was originally owed to the church but had fallen into the hands of a variety of wealthy families and foundations centuries earlier. The tithe was owed only on certain fields, but a tenth of the grain of each obligated field had to be delivered to the tithe lord before the peasant could cut his own grain from the field. The field had to be sown in certain crops only or maintained in a particular crop rotation. If the farmer had converted his tithe to an annual monetary payment in the late eighteenth century, when grain prices were high, then when grain prices were low, between 1820 and 1840, he could owe much more money than a tenth of the grain was worth.13 Obligations varied from one village to another, from one farm to another, and even from one field or meadow to another. There was the Meierzins, that is, general rent to the landlord. Peasant proprietors, or sometimes the village in common, owed tithes of livestock and poultry and a variety of smaller obligations. In the village of Rodewald, near Esperke in the County of Neustadt, villagers either individually or collectively paid grain and livestock tithes, land rent, money in place of bodily labor, and labor with a team of horses on the landlord’s farm, a special contribution on Michaelmas (September 29), the Rauchhuhner or one hen for each dwelling (fireplace), and a foal tithe, which was paid in common by the village, as was a special justice tax. The Brinksitzer and Anbauer had to purchase wine for church and government officials on certain formal occasions. All proprietors had to provide wine for the landlord when a new lease agreement was required

13. Otto Niemeyer and Berthold Frost, Die Terra Rodewald: Eine Niedersächsische Landschaft in ihrer räumlichen und geschichtlichen Entwicklung, 233; Schneider and Seedorf, Bauernbefreiung, 26.

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for the farm. Early in the nineteenth century, the village bought out its obligation to send people to guard prisoners in Neustadt.14 Many of these obligations were quite expensive, but others simply provoked and irritated the villagers. Exactly 3,867 goose feathers were collected each year from all the proprietors in County Wölpe, including 134 feathers from the village of Laderholz. Within the village, each full proprietor contributed seven feathers, each cottager five feathers, and each Brinksitzer three feathers. Laderholz redeemed or bought out its goose feather obligation at a very moderate sum per household.15 The obligations were redeemed individually or a few at a time over the course of years. In 1848, only four farms in Esperke had freed themselves of redeemable obligations. The redemption process was still incomplete when the Prussians took over in 1866. As each farm was redeemed, the farmer became an owner rather than a hereditary lessee. He gained independence and the freedom to control his affairs with an aim toward maximizing his profit. At the same time, he was usually left with a large debt to pay for the cost of redemption, there were still substantial taxes to pay to the king, there were special taxes and obligations (such as hauling goods for the army) in times of war, and, after all these were paid, substantial obligations to the community remained, including poor relief and labor to work on the roads. Moreover, the farmer still had to have approval at the county (Amt) level for all contracts concerning inheritance, division of estates (where possible at all), dowries, compensation of siblings, retirement settlements for parents, selling the farm, taking out loans, and so on.16 Although many burdensome taxes, debt, and legal restrictions remained even after redemption, the efforts to modernize Hanoverian agriculture did in fact help the proprietors and especially the larger farmers in each village. At the same time, in what had been a mostly static world, division of the commons, consolidation of holdings, and redemption of annual obligations also provided a demonstration that change was possible and that, for some at least, it could be beneficial. 14. Niemeyer and Frost, Terra Rodewald, 232–33. 15. Dorfchronik Laderholz, 73. 16. The proprietor was supposed to be male, but there are many examples in Esperke and Amt Neustadt of widows with sturdy sons to do the farmwork who functioned for years as proprietors of their late husbands’ farms (Schneider and Seedorf, Bauernbefreiung, 10; Niemeyer and Frost, Terra Rodewald, 234).

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The fact that the world they knew was already in flux probably made it easier for conservative, rural smallholders in Amt Neustadt, this rather out-of-the-way place in northern Germany, to decide to move to another continent—one of the most profound changes a human being can make. In addition to the proprietors, most of whom benefited from the modernization efforts of the 1830s and 1840s, a whole additional stratum of people existed in Esperke and other villages. Villagers in this stratum were harmed by the changes. These people held no hereditary leases at all. They were called Häuslinge, which might be translated as “houselings.” They were the village poor. This stratum had arisen mostly over the course of the previous two centuries due to population growth. In most villages, including Esperke, a peasant property holding or farm was inherited by the eldest son, and if no son existed, by the eldest daughter’s husband. Younger sons who could not find a wife who was the eldest daughter of a proprietor without sons faced such unsatisfactory choices as remaining on a brother’s farm as an unmarried farmhand or making a career of the army. As the population had begun to outgrow available land in earlier centuries, some adults who could not inherit land were allowed to rent two or three acres from a peasant proprietor on a short-term agreement of four years or less. They often lived in an outbuilding or shed, although a small house might also be built for them. They owed the proprietor many days of labor each year for their small plot of land.17 In 1840, there were twenty-seven people living in Esperke who were on the houselings’ protection tax list. These were heads of families and adults with no spouse present in the village. The proportion of Esperkans who were houselings was about a third higher than in the whole of County Neustadt, but not as high as in many other parts of Hanover where the houselings and their families could amount to the majority of the village population. They had to pay a small special protection tax to the sovereign. Not being proprietary members of the village, they were not entitled to the protections of the community nor to community benefits. The one exception was that they were entitled 17. The term Häuslinge was used in Esperke and in the principality of Calenberg. In the Osnabrück district (Landdrostei) of Hanover and in Westfalia, such people were called Heuerleute or Heuerlinge. In Lippe, they were often called Einlieger.

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to poor relief, when required, in the village in which they had been born. As did the smaller proprietors, the houselings, too, often did craft or artisanal work to supplement their meager earnings from agriculture. A government report of 1840 noted fourteen artisans in Esperke—four tailors, two wheelwrights, two shoemakers, and one each wood lathe operator, glazier, mason, blacksmith, cabinetmaker, and trader.18 Division of the common lands robbed the houselings of several privileges important for their subsistence. Before division of the commons, the resident houselings could use the common pasture for a cow and perhaps a few sheep by paying a small grazing fee. They could usually gather firewood in the village forest and fatten a butcher hog on forest acorns in the fall. They might be allowed to cut grass in the swamp for winter hay and gather leaves and moss. All these opportunities were lost when the common lands were divided, since the houselings received no share of the commons. Sometimes, after division of the commons, the houselings were helped because the proprietors needed to hire more labor, but in many areas, when the poor lost long-held village economic rights, a considerable quantity of resentment developed among the different classes of village residents. Another source of income for the poor of northwestern Germany had dried up over the course of the previous few decades. In the second half of the eighteenth century, about fifty men per year from County Neustadt alone, mostly houselings and Brinksitzer, went to the Netherlands in the summer to mow grass for hay, dig peat, make bricks, or labor in other ways. This involved a walk of at least a hundred miles each way. Some continued to go well into the nineteenth century until just before the period of out-migration. But as the Dutch economy declined, so did Holland’s need for migrant labor.19 The most important activity for supplementing income was to spin flax into linen thread, which could either be woven on a handloom into coarse linen cloth within the same household or sold to dealers who would, in turn, export it or provide it to weavers in the region. This source of income declined rapidly just a few years after the first peo-

18. Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 696, 367, NSHSA. 19. Niemeyer and Frost, Terra Rodewald, 210.

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ple began leaving Esperke and its surrounding area for western Missouri. In the 1840s, the price received for coarse linen cloth quickly fell as this type of linen was replaced on the continent by cheaper cotton cloth spun and woven by machine in Great Britain and elsewhere. Between 1838 and 1850, the volume of coarse linen graded and marked at the government grading station (Legge) in Osnabrück fell by 13.2 percent. More importantly, the price per piece fell by 41.9 percent. Linen production and prices in northern Calenberg, where most of the production was of thread rather than cloth, probably moved in much the same way as in Osnabrück.20 Members of all classes in Esperke and other villages of the region could find economic reasons for starting over again in Lafayette County. Those who farmed a substantial quantity of land were oppressed by heavy taxes and dues or heavy debt along with low prices for their grain until after 1840. America could also be the answer for those needing to provide for more than one son. Small proprietors could get the additional land they needed for themselves as well as for multiple sons. Many houselings had to make a change simply because their subsistence was threatened in Hanover by loss of village rights and loss of the ways they used to make a living. Moreover, because they could not raise enough grain for their own bread and to feed their livestock, they were threatened by the very rise in grain prices that benefited the proprietors after 1840. Although members of all the rural classes could find reasons to come to Missouri, the classes did not decide to quit Hanover in equal numbers. Dierking was a large cottager and thus a substantial landholder. None of Esperke’s eight full proprietors, its largest farmers, came to Lafayette County, although a couple of full proprietors from neighboring villages did so. In studying similar northwestern Germans from Westfalia and Lippe who came to Warren and St. Charles counties, Walter Kamphoefner found that most of the immigrants were from the landless class—the people who were called houselings in 20. Walter D. Kamphoefner, The Westfalians: From Germany to Missouri, 16–27; Elisabeth Harder-Gersdorff, “Leinen-Regionen im Vorfeld und im Verlauf der Industrializierung (1780–1914),” 218). In northern Calenberg, the peasants produced much more linen thread than finished cloth (Hagenah, “Ländliche Gesellschaft,” 171).

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Hanoverian passport dated 1856. Courtesy of Schone Family, Huntersville, Indiana/Research and Travel, Dr. Wolfgang Grams.

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Hanover—but small proprietors were more heavily represented at the beginning of the emigration period. Fully conclusive statistical evidence for the immigrants to Freedom Township has not been discovered, but it seems that among the Hanoverians of Lafayette County were a larger share of smallholders: small cottagers, Brinksitzer, and Anbauer, who could sell a small piece of land in Hanover and for the proceeds buy ten to twenty times as much in western Missouri—more than enough, it must have seemed to them, for all their sons, not just the oldest, and perhaps all the grandsons they would have as well.21 Considering the houselings’ threatened subsistence, and the economic constraints on the smallholders of Esperke and other villages in the surrounding counties (Neustadt am Rübenberge, Wölpe, and Ricklingen), western Missouri’s agricultural opportunities in the 1830s and 1840s must have seemed very attractive to much of the village population, whatever its economic status. No doubt the matter of military service also helped to motivate more immigrants than Friedrich Frerking alone. As did most other continental Europeans, Hanoverian peasants had a long history of confronting war and military service, despite the Guelph House’s general policy of renouncing military adventurism. The Leine Valley had been ravaged by foreign troops during the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century. The great-grandparents of one older immigrant to Freedom Township from Laderholz (very near Esperke) had died of hardship after the French army (during the Seven Years’ War, in the mid-eighteenth century) destroyed the mill they operated. Several young men from villages near Esperke, and Jürgen Hr. Niemeyer from Esperke itself, had been conscripted into Napoleon’s army for the invasion of Russia in 1812 and had died in the winter retreat from Moscow. Some two thousand young Hanoverians died in that retreat.22 In Hanover, military conscription was a fact of life for male peasants. From the establishment of the kingdom in 1814 to its demise in 1866, about one-fifth of the men who turned twenty each year were selected by lottery for the army, specifically for the infantry, since the cavalry and 21. Kamphoefner, Westfalians, 42, 44. 22. Schubert, “Hannover,” 46; Walter Selke, Die Müller von Laderholz: Eine Chronik, 21; “Nachweisung über 906 Individuen der zweiten nämenlichen Liste der aus den Feldzug von Jahren 1812 und 1813 aus Rußland nicht zurückgekehrten hiesigen Landes= Einwohner,” printed report in Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 5039, NSHSA.

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artillery were composed exclusively of volunteers. Heirs to substantial farms, those studying for the clergy, and certain other classes of young men were exempted. Draftees whose parents had money could buy a replacement. But conscription had always been disliked. An ancestor of Freedom Township immigrant Ludwig Evert was a local electoral official who had been given a permanent wound to the head with a peatdigging spade when he tried to arrest a recalcitrant draftee in the mid-eighteenth century. The draftees after 1815 served one year of active duty and then several months of retraining in each of the next five years. Several of the early settlers of Freedom Township had served in the army, including Conrad Stünkel from Metel, just a few miles from Esperke. Others, such as August Meyer, chose to serve in the American army during the Mexican War. Still, the absence of required military service in Missouri, and even the abolition of required annual county militia musters after 1847, must have seemed a benefit.23 Another important benefit of the New World was that no soldiers were quartered in farmers’ homes in Missouri. In Esperke, Rodewald, and other nearby villages, cavalrymen were assigned by the Obervogt, or king’s official, together with the Bauermeister, or elected leader of the village farmers, to live with selected farmers. Not only did the assigned families have to take a cavalryman into their living quarters and give him meals and a bed, but they also had to provide feed for his horse and a stall as well. The presence of soldiers in the village was not simply expensive for those who had to board them; soldiers disturbed the normal activities of the village. They were notoriously irreverent at the village church services they were required to attend, and they could cause trouble at village dances. Daughters of village farmers liked to dance with the dashing cavalrymen in their bright red uniforms. Jealous young men of the village often started fistfights as a result. Since the British monarch’s tendency to quarter troops in people’s homes had been one of the grievances listed in the American Declaration of Independence, the American government did not quarter troops with citizens.24 23. Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 322, NSHSA; Bertram, Hannover, 108–9; Voigt, Concordia, 6–7. 24. The Hanoverian infantry changed from red coats (like the eighteenth-century British army) to blue (like the Prussians) in the fall of 1837. Apparently some cavalry regiments kept the red coats longer. See Bertram, Hannover, xvi, 110; Mandel, Esperke, 87; and Niemeyer and Frost, Terra Rodewald, 230.

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The question of political rights and representation in bodies that determined public policy is much less clear as a possible factor to motivate emigration. Very few Hanoverian peasants were politically minded. Modern historical research confirms that farmers in the old principality of Calenberg, which included Esperke, were famously loyal to the royal house. Although royal officials at the county level could be tyrannical, most peasants did not doubt the justice of their prince. After 1713, farmers could even sue the king if he was their landlord, and sometimes they won their suits.25 For a few years during the Napoleonic upheaval, the French had occupied Hanover. In 1814, after Napoleon was chased out, King George III’s German officials reestablished the traditional medieval gathering of nobles, high churchmen, and representatives of the towns for each province. Beginning in 1819, the nobles and high church officials met in an upper house. The 1819 constitution, and later ones, provided for representation of peasants along with representatives of the towns in the lower houses of both the provincial legislative body (Landschaft) of Calenberg-Grubenhagen (which included Amt Neustadt) and the general legislature (Ständeversammlung) of the kingdom. But the rules concerning just who could vote for representatives and under what conditions changed several times during the decades in which large numbers of people were emigrating. The 1819 constitution provided for representation of those peasant proprietors who either never had been burdened with annual obligations to landlords or who had redeemed their annual obligations in kind and in money and thus had no feudal (gutsherrschaftlich) dues. The regional and national legislative bodies refused to seat these peasant deputies until 1829. This probably bothered most people in Esperke very little. In 1829, only one farmer in the village—Jürgen Friedrich Timpen— had redeemed his obligations and could vote.26 Beginning in 1833, all landed farmers over the age of twenty-five with permanent leases could vote for members of the lower house even if their feudal dues had not been redeemed. In 1848, the laws were changed again so that even some houselings—those who had been born in the community in which they lived and who paid taxes—had 25. Schubert, “Hannover,” 47–48. 26. Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 734, NSHSA.

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a small role in electing the lower house. One scholar estimates that this extended the franchise to about one-half of all rural male residents over twenty-five years of age. The constitution of 1848 also allowed a few of the wealthiest farmers to help elect a member of the upper house. To do so, they had to be among the 150 people with the highest land tax assessments in their electoral district.27 While all this sounds complex enough, the actual situation was complicated more, owing to “active” and “passive” voting, that is, selecting electors rather than actual members of the legislature. Through these means, some classes were given much more representation proportional to their numbers than were others. For the houselings, there was an additional political issue. Many of the decisions most important to their daily lives, from the distribution of poor relief to the conditions under which firewood was made available, were made collectively by the village. But the “village” meant the Reiheleute—those who were proprietors. The houselings had no right to participate in any village decisions. Whatever the marginalization of the houselings, had there been widespread and acute dissatisfaction with the royal government among peasants in the villages, one would expect this dissatisfaction to have been expressed during the revolutionary upheavals in Germany in 1830–1831 and 1848. In fact, no violent demonstrations against the royal government took place in county Neustadt either in the Revolution of 1830 or in the Revolution of 1848. The former upheaval was marked in Hanover chiefly by disturbances of middle-class townsmen in Osterode and Göttingen, far to the south of County Neustadt. All the same, in spite of the quiet in northern Calenberg, all of Hanover, Esperke included, was ultimately affected by those outbreaks in the southern towns. Partly in response to protests in the south of the kingdom, and partly in response to the revolutionary atmosphere across the continent, a new constitution was granted the kingdom. A new ministry was appointed to be led by the reformer Johan Carl-Bertram Stüve (1798–1872). This new ministry became the government responsible for passing the general redemption law.28 27. Hagenah, “Ländliche Gesellschaft,” 185. 28. Bertram, Hannover, 46–48; Reinhard Oberschelp, Politische Geschichte Niedersachsens 1803–1866, 100 ff.

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A substantial number of people from County Neustadt came to Missouri in the years surrounding 1848, but they should not be considered “Forty-Eighters,” if that term signifies people who had to flee Germany after participating in the revolution. First, in the general continental upheaval that was the revolution, Hanover, which was still largely rural, was the quietest of all the German states. The demonstrations closest to Esperke were more than twenty miles away—one in the city of Hannover and the other in the village of Stolzenau. They serve as rather typical examples of the outbreaks that took place over northwestern Germany.29 On March 16, 1848, a public gathering in the city of Hannover drew up a petition to give to the king. The petition contained twelve demands that were rather typical of the desires of a modernizing middle class. The demands included freedom of the press, right of free assembly and organization, trial by jury, open meetings of the legislature, greater independence for local communities, abolition of restrictions to practice occupations, reduction of the power of the police, and legal equality for members of all religions.30 Three days later, in the town of Münder, an angry crowd of laborers broke windows in the mayor’s house and plundered it. These people too, had a petition; on it were thirteen demands that were typical of the concerns of the village poor, as opposed to the concerns of middle-class townsmen in the city of Hannover. About half the demands concerned obtaining building wood and firewood at fair and fixed prices. The other half had to do mostly with open public records for the community and regional government. In some villages, the farm proprietors themselves petitioned with such desires as to have refunded to them the money they had already paid to redeem their labor service to the landlords as well as to be allowed to hunt game on their own land. In one area in northern Calenberg, houselings demanded that their rent be reduced and regulated and that they be allowed to rent pasture for their cows at a price they could afford. The Stolzenau incident involved poor people breaking windows in the houses of the mayor and others. The hungry crowd became enraged after it was 29. Green, Fatherlands, 44. 30. Heribert Golka and Armin Reese, “Soziale Strömungen der Märzrevolution von 1848 in der Landdrostei Hannover,” 282.

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revealed that the mayor had sold the town’s grain to a Jewish merchant in Hildesheim instead of selling it, at a lower price, no doubt, to the poor. Most of the disturbances in the rural areas near the city of Hannover were caused by houselings and other village poor who could not obtain the bread grain, fuel, building material, or pasture they needed. The area north of the city, including County Neustadt, was “essentially quiet,” perhaps because considerable emigration had already taken place. In Hanover and other parts of Germany, emigration served as a “safety valve” to reduce political discontent.31 The most notable political struggle in these years in Hanover, in contrast to Germany as a whole, was neither in 1830–1831 nor in 1848. Hanover’s biggest confrontation took place in 1837, when the thrones of Britain and Hanover were separated and Ernst August took the Hanoverian crown. He decided to rule by decree, and therefore he abrogated the constitution granted four years earlier by his older brother, King William IV. Seven very distinguished professors at the University in Göttingen, including the Grimm brothers, internationally known for their collection of fairy tales, signed a protest. The king reacted by firing them from their professorships and banning them from the kingdom. Intellectuals all over Europe were outraged. Despite the great prestige of professors in Germany, Ernst August was not overly concerned. He reportedly told his court in language and sentiment reflecting his many years as an army officer on the continent, “Professoren, Huren und Ballettänzerinnen könne man für Geld überall haben.” (Professors, whores, and ballerinas can be had for money everywhere.) The king issued a new constitution in 1840, one that was more conservative than the 1833 constitution he had abrogated. All of this seems to have mattered little to the rural population as a whole or to that portion that immigrated to Missouri. In Freedom Township in western Missouri between 1847 and 1857, three different Hanoverian families, two of them from Esperke, named sons Ernst August. This was almost certainly done in recognition of a respected, if not beloved, monarch back in Hanover— the first sovereign to reside in Hanover in more than a century.32 31. Ibid., 283–88, 299. On the American frontier as a “safety valve” for the German states, see Günter Moltmann, “Nordamerikanische ‘Frontier’ und deutsche Auswanderung—soziale ‘Sicherheitsventile’ im 19. Jahrhundert?” 32. Gordon Craig, The Germans, 125. Another version of the king’s dismissive comment goes, “Professoren und Huren sind immer für Geld zu haben” (“Professors and

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Although the poor in Esperke and similar Hanoverian villages were likely discontented with the social and political structure of their village, expressions from the rural people of discontent with the royal government have not been located for the period before 1860. Indeed, baptisms in Lafayette County imply respect for the king and pride in being Hanoverian. Today, perhaps owing to a large degree to the gripping story of the confessional Lutherans who, coming from Dresden and across upper Saxony, followed Martin Stephan to St. Louis and Perry County in eastern Missouri at the end of the 1830s, there is a tendency in the popular mind in Missouri to attribute religious motivation to all Lutherans leaving Germany in those years. Paul Nagel, a contemporary historian of commanding reputation, even attributes religious motives for immigration to Westfalians and others in eastern Missouri who joined the Kirchenverein des Westens (Church Society of the West), the bitter rivals of the Stephanites, although he can cite no evidence for the attribution. Certainly, Lutherans from the Ückermark in eastern Brandenburg who came to Buffalo, New York, and those from Pomerania who came to Wisconsin, did so primarily because they felt compelled to reject a forced merger of the Lutheran and Reformed confessions in Prussia. The Stephanites left because they feared such a merger was in the offing in the Kingdom of Saxony, because they opposed rationalism in the Saxon State Church, and because their leader was being pressured by church authorities in Dresden owing to his unusual habits.33 Two formidable lines of reasoning refute the supposition of some contemporary descendants of the Esperke and County Neustadt pioneers that their ancestors must have left Europe, at least in part, due to their desire to practice religion in America as they were not allowed to do at home. whores can always be had for money”) and a third is “Professoren haben kein Vaterland. Professoren Huren und Tänzerinnen können überall anheuern, wenn man ihnen ein paar Taler bieten” (“Professors have no fatherland. Professors, whores, and [female] dancers can be signed up anywhere if they are offered a few dollars”) (Susanne Tölke, “Göttinger Sieben protestieren”; Bertram, Hannover, 46–62; [Rodewald], Descending Love, 170–71). The great bulk of the community’s baptisms were at St. Paul’s Church and are transcribed in its sesquicentennial history. 33. Walter O. Forster, Zion on the Mississippi: The Settlement of the Saxon Lutherans in Missouri, 1839–1841; Paul C. Nagel, The German Migration to Missouri: My Family’s Story, 59.

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First, the history of the Hanoverian State Church in these years does not include the type of struggles which would cause a group of believers to find it necessary to leave Hanover. There were no struggles between different confessions. The regent of Hanover made no attempt to force a union of the Lutheran and Reformed confessions or to develop a common liturgy or agenda, as King Frederick William did in Prussia beginning in 1817. The entire former principality of Calenberg was a uniformly Lutheran area. In County Neustadt in 1842, only thirty-seven of the 11,314 residents were not Lutheran. Twentyeight of the thirty-seven non-Lutherans were Jews.34 A confessional movement swept through the Hanoverian Lutheran Church in the middle third of the nineteenth century, as it swept through other Lutheran parts of Germany. While it was not promoted by officials of the Hanoverian State Church or by members of the Consistory of Hannover, neither was it suppressed. Its chief proponent, Ludwig Adolf Petri, enjoyed a pastorate of a church (Kreuzkirche) in the middle of the city from his ordination in 1829 until his death in 1873. The leading historian of the Hanoverian State Church in this period says, “True confessional Lutheranism, formulated through the initiative of a congregational pastor[,] could gain a decisive influence in the Hanoverian State Church without the help of the state or church officials in the Consistory.”35 The second refutation that immigration to Lafayette County was religiously motivated was made directly by an earlier historian of the community who lived in Concordia at a time when sons and daughters of the pioneer generation were still present as elderly people. Writing in 1934, the elder Lewis W. Spitz, then a professor at St. Paul’s College in Concordia and who later became a distinguished historian of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, wrote, referring to the early immigrants from Hanover, “All of them came to seek improvement of economic conditions. They did not come, like the Saxons of Perry

34. Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 700, NSHSA. 35. Translation mine; the original reads, “Das sich in der hannoverschen Landeskirche formierende bekenntnistreue Luthertum konnte durch die Initiative eines Gemeindepfarrers ohne Hilfe des Staates und der konsistorialen Kirchenbehörde einen bestimmenden Einfluß gewinnen” (Hans-Walter Krumwiede, Kirchengeschichte Niedersachsens, 2:324–35).

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County, to transplant the Lutheran faith to this Western soil, but simply as farmers who found the tillage of their small worn-out acres in Germany too meager a source of income.”36 In Esperke and across Hanover, an ever-larger portion of the rural population was finding that it could not, or could only with increasing difficulty, lead the kind and level of material life led by its forebears. A rapidly growing population, the decline of protoindustrial production, and government attempts to modernize agriculture with little concern for the rural poor served as the chief causes. Younger sons and the women who would marry them were affected, as were all those whose fathers did not control farmland sufficient to provide for a family. Gottfried Duden’s Report described a land of rich agricultural opportunities. Although Duden stated that a farm family would need about one thousand Reichstaler (at that time, a bit over seven hundred U.S. dollars) to begin a farm in Missouri, many read his descriptions and believed they could do it for much less. Land was so cheap and wages were so high on the Missouri frontier that it seemed anyone who could swing an ax and plow a furrow could soon have the plentitude of a Hanoverian Vollmeier or full proprietor. Many rural people from Esperke and the surrounding area came to Missouri not to escape the hard work of unmechanized farming, but to have the opportunities for agricultural production similar to those enjoyed by their less numerous ancestors of previous village generations. Their emigration can thus be seen as a fundamentally conservative act.37 Duden was widely read, or at least widely discussed, in Esperke and the surrounding area. The Dierking party was almost surely familiar with Duden. It was Duden who advised farmers that “two long shotguns (duck guns) and good rifles should not be forgotten.” So the Dierking party came with a small arsenal. Duden went across America by wagon, so Dierking brought a wagon from Germany. Duden recommended that a party travel together. The first party from Esperke included fifteen or more people. Duden recommended that land not be bought in large tracts and that an area be chosen where much government land was still available in order to keep the purchase price 36. Spitz, “History of St. Paul’s,” 3. 37. At midcentury, the Reichstahler was valued at 71.4 cents (Walter D. Kamphoefner and Wolfgang Helbich, eds., Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home, 487).

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low. Dierking went to a somewhat remote area of Lafayette County two hundred miles beyond St. Louis, where little land was privately owned. He chose his initial 880 acres in 40-, 80-, 120-, and 160-acre tracts. He probably bought as much as land as he could afford. After all, Duden had advised that a farmer could expect his land to increase twelvefold in value in just twenty years. What other investment was likely to carry less risk and greater return? These former Hanoverian peasants in western Missouri were just as much followers of Duden as were the “Latin farmers,” that is, educated German urbanites, who came in emigration societies to the “Missouri Rhineland” of eastern Missouri. In fact, the only complete copy of Duden’s original book to have been located in Missouri in the second half of the twentieth century was discovered in Concordia.38 As with others who followed Duden’s advice, what the Esperkans and their neighbors endured in the course of a lifetime in Lafayette County did not always conform to the expectations they formed as they sat in County Neustadt reading Duden’s book or as they listened to someone read the early letters that came back to Hanover from the first emigrants.39

38. Duden, Report, 250. A copy of the original edition of this famous book was given by a local family to the Lohoefener House Museum in Concordia about 1980. Although the copy has subsequently been misplaced, the author saw it there about 1980 and was told a local family had preserved it. The book is so rare in Missouri that when, in the 1960s, it was decided to publish a translation, the German text had to be photocopied in Germany and sent to America. Yet no letters home from early Lafayette County immigrants are known to the author, and none are in the Bochumer AuswandererbriefSammlung in the U.S. Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division. 39. The fact that later emigrants from Esperke and neighboring villages followed the Dierkings to Lafayette County demonstrates that letters must have been written back to Hanover.

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2. Settling in Missouri and Starting Farms

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The Dierking emigration party, and those who followed it, built a substantial Hanoverian settlement in southeastern Lafayette County. Gert Göbel described it in the 1860s as a “starke deutsche Niederlassung”—a strong German settlement. The process of building the settlement began slowly and gained momentum gradually. When Frederick W. Dierking patented his 880 acres of land in November 1838, he was described in the application as a resident of St. Louis County. Since at that time the City of St. Louis was still within St. Louis County, the Dierkings were probably living in the city. They may well have stayed there for the winter, moving to Lafayette County only in the spring of 1839.1 Several other Hanoverians patented land near Dierking that year. Perhaps the most illusive is Christian Lehne, who entered forty acres at the Land Office in Lexington on April 25, 1839. Despite the modest size of that acquisition, Lehne was clearly a man of some economic substance. On March 5, 1839, he lent Friedrich Dierking $750, taking in return what amounted to a deed of trust to 760 acres of the land Dierking obtained only five months earlier. On August 8, Lehne returned the land to Dierking along with four hundred additional acres “in consideration of the natural love and affection which I bear to my nephew Friedrich Dierking.” Earlier that very day, Lehne had entered

1. Gert Göbel, Länger als ein Menschenleben in Missouri, 203.

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at the Land Office 160 acres of the land he gave to Dierking located on Blackwater River in Johnson County.2 Lehne was either a bachelor or had lost his immediate family before this time. When Lehne died in Freedom Township in the spring of 1846, probably in early April, Friedrich Rabe submitted a bill to the estate for thirty dollars, “For Washing and Waiting on you during an illness of 4 months and 9 days.” The bulk of Lehne’s estate was composed of money lent at interest to his German American and Anglo-American neighbors. His many clothes, including two dress coats and fourteen linen shirts, along with an ink stand, snuffbox, and spectacles, suggest a man who had known a degree of refinement that would not have been shared by everyone in a small Hanoverian village and would have been difficult to maintain on the Missouri frontier.3 The other Hanoverians who patented land near Dierking in 1839 operated on a much more modest scale, as indeed, they had in County Neustadt. Many of the social, legal, and economic differentiations of Esperke that so separated one farmer from another could not be reproduced in Missouri, but neither did the Hanoverian farmers of Freedom Township in their first Missouri years, or even decades, entirely free themselves of their prior relative positions in County Neustadt. On June 18, 1839, Christian Oetting entered eighty acres at the Land Office. He had inherited his own Anbauerstelle of perhaps three to five acres in the village of Borstel, some ten miles west of Esperke. Although his farm in Hanover was quite small, the fact that he had real property to sell in the Old World allowed him to obtain eighty acres of public land upon arriving in Freedom Township and an additional forty acres less than two years later. On August 6, 1839, Friedrich Niemeyer, who had been a part of the Dierking party that crossed the Atlantic in 1837, entered eighty acres. He was likely the same Friedrich Niemeyer who, as a houseling in Esperke, had rented a small space from a village Brinksitzer. In Freedom Township, in addition to his eighty acres of congressional land, he purchased forty acres from an American. Perhaps he obtained the necessary funds from paid employment in St. 2. Book G, 362–63, Lafayette County Recorder’s Office, Lexington, Missouri; Original Land Entry Map, Johnson County Recorder’s Office, Warrensburg, Missouri. If Dierking was indeed Lehne’s nephew, he must have been a nephew by marriage rather than by blood. 3. File 15–40, Lafayette County Probate Court Office, Lexington, Missouri.

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Christian Oetting’s 1841 Lafayette County tax receipt. Courtesy of Steven and Sharon Oetting.

Louis. Dierking’s brother-in-law, Ferdinand Bruns, had been a carpenter and probably a houseling in Esperke. Not only was he the third son in his family, but also his father had only 14.25 acres (22 Morgen) of land, less than two acres of which was cropland. August 8, 1839, Bruns patented forty acres in Freedom Township. By his death six years later in October 1845, he had obtained an additional forty acres. Heinrich Franke of Hanover entered forty acres of government land on December 14, 1839, although he was barely nineteen years of age.4 At least two other Hanoverian households were present in Freedom Township by the end of 1839. Christian Liever came with his wife and daughters. He had been the schoolmaster in Laderholz, a village a few miles west of Esperke. He purchased partially improved land rather than entering public land. Although already fifty-two years of age when he came to America, he apparently farmed until 1856. On October 17, 1839, his daughter Caroline married Friedrich Thiemann, another Hanoverian immigrant.5 As the decade of the 1840s dawned, the settlement may have consisted of no more than the eight households mentioned above— 4. Our Heritage, Our Mission: 1850–2000, St. John United Church of Christ, Emma, Mo., 44; Kirchenbuch Hagen, Kirchenbuch Niederstöcken, KBA; Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 467, NSHSA; Ferdinand Bruns file, Lafayette County Probate Court Office. Not only did Niemeyer enter the northwest quarter of the southwest quarter of section 30, township 49, range 24, as [Rodewald], Descending Love, 150 reports, but he also entered the southeast quarter of the northwest quarter of section 26, township 49, range 25. His purchase from Christopher and Nancy Mulkey on August 27, 1839, is recorded in Book D, page 167, Lafayette County Recorder’s Office. The four decennial federal censuses between 1850 and 1880 report Franke’s age with complete consistency. 5. Marriage Book B, 139, Lafayette County Recorder’s Office. Justice of the Peace David Mock married the couple. One early source includes the Mock family as among the early Freedom Township Germans, but in fact they came to Missouri from Davidson County, North Carolina, and no later than 1835 (Book F, 265, Lafayette County Recorder’s Office).

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Dierking, Lehne, Oetting, Niemeyer, Bruns, Franke, Liever, and Thiemann. But more settlers followed rapidly. June 4, 1840, brought Friedrich Frerking, who patented 120 acres of land near his uncle Friedrich Dierking and near the others from Esperke and County Neustadt. Three months earlier, he had also patented forty acres of land nine miles to the north in Middleton Township. Dierking, too, patented land there, but neither immigrant held his Middleton Township land for more than a few years. These land entries are the earliest records to come to light concerning Frerking after his unauthorized departure from the Hanoverian army three years earlier. According to Hanoverian government records, he emigrated at the time of his desertion. His wife and son apparently came to America in 1839. Several of Frerking’s siblings are known to have worked in St. Louis before coming to Lafayette County, and it can be surmised that he did the same. Many young men from Hanover and Westfalia who wanted to farm but arrived in St. Louis with little money worked there for wages for a time before moving into the countryside as farmers.6 The Frerkings of Esperke illustrate well the difficulties in confidently tracing Hanoverian villagers of this era. In 1839, in Esperke alone, four of the thirty-nine different Reihestelle, or households that were official members of the community, were occupied by Frerkings: one was a Vollmeier, one a large cottager, another a small cottager, and the last a Brinksitzer. In November 1840, there were also three different houselings named Frerking, two of whom were probably heads of families. Moreover, two of the four Frerking proprietors were named Johann Dietrich Frerking. One was the father of Friedrich Frerking noted above and twelve other children. He had been born November 19, 1786, the son of the cottager Heinrich Ludwig Frerking, and was married in 1811. The other Johann Dietrich Frerking was the son of the Vollmeier Jürgen Heinrich Frerking; this Johann Dietrich was born October 2,

6. Land Entry Map and Deed Record, Recorder of Deeds Office, Lafayette County Courthouse, Lexington, Mo.; Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 367, 4853, 4932, NSHSA; Kamphoefner, Westfalians, 150–52. Runge, who now believes she erred in doing so, wrote that Friedrich Frerking’s son of the same name was born in Esperke in August 1838. But according to the Census of 1900, he was born in Germany a year earlier and he (the child) came to America in 1839 (Runge, Frerking Family, A14; Twelfth Census of 1900, Population Schedule, City of Concordia, entry 225; Loberta Runge, conversation with the author, Higginsville, Mo., January 31, 2007).

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Friedrich Frerking in midlife. He was brought to Missouri from Esperke at age two in 1839, two years after his father deserted the Hanoverian army and left Hanover. Courtesy of Loberta Runge.

1795, and was married in 1822. Despite these difficulties and the need to carefully evaluate all sources, even those created by Hanoverian officials at the time, reasonable confidence can be obtained by comparing multiple sources.7 The family name Bruns was also widely represented in County Neustadt. Johann Heinrich Bruns Sr., who had the resources to purchase 320 acres of land upon his arrival in 1840, starting in the month of March, was perhaps the first German full peasant proprietor (Vollmeier) to settle in Freedom Township. At the age of forty-four, he emigrated with his wife, daughter, and four sons from the village of Büren, about five miles southwest of Esperke. Life could be especially difficult for the earliest settlers of the community due to primitive con7. Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 696, 467, NSHSA; Kirchenbuch Niederstöcken, KBA.

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ditions, the isolation of separate farmsteads, and the enormous amount of physical labor required in creating a fully functioning farm from virgin forest and prairie. All the same, a primitive plentitude was possible in a relatively short time for those who came from Germany with sufficient capital. Bruns serves as a case in point. He died in February 1844, less than four years after arriving in Lafayette County. The inventory of his estate reveals what someone with the resources of a Hanoverian Vollmeier could possess in Missouri after only three or four years of farming. He had five horses, one mule, four yoke of oxen, nine cows, nine yearling cattle, and, already in the early spring, six young calves. He owned eighty hogs. In terms of farm implements, there were five ploughs of various types, including a prairie-breaking plough, a wagon, two sets of harness, two men’s saddles and one sidesaddle, four log chains, and five sleds. While Bruns’s array of tools and household items might seem essential to any frontier farm, many who carved a farm from the wilderness prevailed on virgin land with much less. The Bruns estate included axes, a saw, froe, drawing knife, augur, planes, and chisels, all for clearing timber and working with wood. There were scythe blades, an iron pitchfork, buckets, hammers, a cowbell, and three firearms. For the preparation and serving of food, the estate included a cooking stove, Dutch oven with lid, skillet with lid, coffee mill, pans, stone crocks, and jars. A teakettle, two other kettles, pitcher, and spice box were all made of brass. While there is no mention of table service, other household items included four beds and their “appertinances,” two bedsteads, six chairs, two clocks, a mirror, and nine large chests, the latter quite probably having been brought along from Germany. For creating and dealing with clothing, there was a press, a smoothing iron, four spinning wheels, and a flax reel. If a major reason that Bruns quit County Neustadt was to provide for multiple sons, his will indicates that he was able to do so despite his short tenure in Missouri. The oldest son, Johann Heinrich Jr., received 120 acres. The son Wilhelm received eighty acres. Neither was yet of age, so these lands had to be assigned to a guardian. The son Friedrich, together with his mother, received 120 acres. The will did not make a provision for the last son, Conrad, but he was only about six years old at the time it was written. Interestingly, Bruns’s daughter, the oldest child and already

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married, received livestock—a cow and calf, a yoke of oxen, a colt, and four hogs—but no land.8 The year 1840 also brought Conrad Diedrich Friedrich Stünkel to Freedom Township, where he entered forty acres of government land. He was a younger son of a small cottager in Metel, six miles southsouthwest of Esperke. After serving seven years in the Hanoverian cavalry as a blacksmith, he sailed from Hamburg to New York in 1837. He spent nearly two years in Illinois and then married a German immigrant woman in St. Louis early in 1840 before coming to Lafayette County a few weeks later. Other Stünkels, and at least one from the same village, settled in Freedom Township over the course of the following decade.9 By 1840, it was common for northern Germans wanting to settle in Missouri to sail from Bremen to New Orleans rather than to Baltimore or New York. The trip up the Mississippi River to St. Louis by paddlewheel steamboat was more convenient than over the Appalachians by land and then down the Ohio River. In Duden’s time, it cost almost twice as much to sail to New Orleans compared to arriving on the east coast, but during the 1830s, the cost of passage from Europe to New Orleans fell precipitously. The trip often began in the fall in Hanover and ended in winter in Missouri. Families from the same and nearby villages who were planning to emigrate often traveled together to the port and took passage on the same ship. In the early fall of 1840, fourteen people from Esperke, among them three family heads, made their way down or beside the Leine, Aller, and Weser rivers to Bremerhaven, the port of the city of Bremen. There they boarded the sailing ship Alwina. Its ninety-six immigrant passengers included at least forty from County Neustadt. The ship must have encountered fewer favorable winds than usual, because it did not arrive at New Orleans until January 11, 1841, eighty-eight days later. Some voyages between the same cities took substantially less time. Despite the lengthy time at sea, the Alwina landed with one more passenger on board than had begun

8. Kirchenbuch Dudensen, KBA; Box 18, Henry Bruns Sr., Records of the Lafayette County, Missouri Probate Court, Lexington, Mo. When the author’s parents were married in 1946, his mother received from her father the traditional gift to a married daughter—a cow and calf. 9. Voigt, Concordia, 6–7; Kirchenbuch Basse, KBA.

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the voyage. During its eighty-eight-day voyage, one passenger died but two babies were born. By these years, the voyage across the Atlantic, while usually unpleasant, especially in steerage, cost relatively few lives. After such a long, unpleasant ocean voyage, as many as four weeks could be required to ascend the Mississippi and Missouri rivers from New Orleans to Lexington. Steamships, which cut the ocean voyage to just two weeks between Bremen and New York, became available in the 1850s. However, due to the additional cost of steamers, it was not until the end of the American Civil War that as many as half the immigrants coming to New York arrived in steamers.10 On the Alwina’s long journey, making his way subsequently to Lafayette County, was Johann Heinrich Frerking, his wife, and two young sons. He had been a houseling in Esperke and did not buy land immediately in Lafayette County, but by 1850, he had a farm of 120 acres. What relationship he may have had to any of the seven other Frerking households in Esperke is not known. The Esperke shoemaker Georg Dierking and his wife and two children, also aboard the Alwina, probably never made it to Lafayette County. Dierking may have settled in another rural community, given in to the pull of urban life, or never have been able to accumulate the necessary nest egg to begin farming. From time to time, other Esperkans came to America who either never intended to settle in Lafayette County of simply never got there. An Esperke small cottager, Johann Heinrich Ludwig Brackmann, and his wife, Anne Marie née Gömann, who were both born in the village, were on board the Alwina with their two sons. Before leaving, Brackmann had sold Esperke Hof (farmstead) number 12 with all of 11.7 acres of land to the village shepherd, Johann Friedrich Dierking. While the Brackmanns were at sea, their family increased, as Frau Brackmann was one of the two women who gave birth aboard ship. The Brackmann household in Esperke was an unusual, but not extreme, example of the crowded living conditions characteristic of northwestern German villages at this time. In 1839, the farmstead, unlike most others in Esperke, included two buildings used for residential purposes. 10. National Archives, Ship Passenger Lists, New Orleans, 1841, Series M259, Microfilm No. 21; William Young, Young’s History of Lafayette County, 1:600; Raymond L. Cohn, “The Transition from Sail to Steam in Immigration to the United States,” 472.

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Both of these were not likely to have been very large and both, as did most village dwellings, probably included people on one end of the building and farm animals on the other end. In these two smallish buildings lived seventeen people, ten of whom were adults aged twenty or older. Among the four male and six female adults were two married couples and two widows. Three of the ten adults appear on the houselings’ protection tax list. All ten adults and seven children had only 3 acres of cropland, 5.2 acres of heath pasture, and 2 acres of marshy pasture to farm beyond their craft work and linen production. By the time of the American census in 1850, Heinrich and Marie Brackmann had seven children. They were probably still living in a one-room log cabin, but the crowding of such a living situation would not have seemed unfamiliar to them. What was so very different in Lafayette County was the space outside the cabin. Instead of his 11.7 acres of Hanoverian land, Brackmann in 1850 owned 300 acres in Freedom Township valued at three thousand dollars. He had been able to afford only 80 acres upon arrival in Lafayette County, but in the late 1840s he was able to stretch his purchasing power by buying discounted warrants for government land that had been issued to veterans of the Mexican War. George Brackmann, who appears in the 1850 census of Freedom Township as owning 140 acres of land, and who was in Missouri by 1845, was probably a younger brother of J. H. L. Brackmann.11 Friedrich Brackmann, houseling and cabinetmaker in Esperke, who brought his family to Missouri in 1855 and apparently was still renting a farm in Freedom Township in 1860, was the son of a houseling in Esperke, rather than the son of a small cottager as were the two Brackmann brothers.12 While no full peasant proprietors are known to have emigrated from Esperke, nearby villages sent more full proprietors than just Johann Heinrich Bruns already mentioned. On board the Alwina for its long 11. Mandel, Esperke; Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 2117, 4856, 696, 467, 831, NSHSA; National Archives, Ship Passenger Lists, New Orleans, Series M259, Microfilm No. 21; Young, Lafayette, 2:600; Agriculture Schedule, 1850 Census of Lafayette County, Missouri. The Friedrich Pauling family, which was also aboard the Alwina and which settled in Freedom Township, was also increased by the birth of a son on the voyage, but this was not an Esperke family. 12. Agriculture Schedule, 1860 Census of Lafayette County, Missouri; Kirchenbuch Niederstöcken, KBA; Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 4864, 4858, 367, NSHSA.

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voyage in 1840–1841 were both of the full proprietors (Vollmeier) from the hamlet of Brunnenborstel. This hamlet lay between the villages of Laderholz and Rodewald, from which others came to Lafayette County, and only nine kilometers or five and one-half miles across the fields to the west of Esperke. J. Heinrich and Dorothea Marie Rabe were an older couple, in their fifties. Two of the Rabes’ sons, Heinrich, aged twentyeight, and Friedrich, aged eighteen, also came to make a better life in the New World. Their daughter Dorothea, too, was on the Alwina with her husband, Ludwig Evert, and the younger couple’s four-year-old daughter, Christine. Evert had been a miller at Brunnenborstel and also apparently a full peasant proprietor in his own right. In contrast to his father-in-law and to most Hanoverian peasants coming to Missouri, the village from which Evert emigrated was not the village of his birth. He had been born in 1806 in Horst in County (Amt) Ricklingen, some thirteen miles to the south. There his father and ancestors going back four generations had exercised the office of Vogt or elector’s official of that village and as many as four others. Records indicate that in 1814 a new Vogt was installed in Horst—someone unrelated to the JanssenEvert family who had held the office since 1739. One conjecture is that Vogt Daniel Conrad Evert was replaced after complaints that he had cooperated too closely with the French occupiers when, between 1807 and 1814, Hanover had been a part of Napoleon’s Kingdom of Westfalia. In any event, Ludwig Evert, born son of the Vogt in Horst in 1806, was, at the age of thirty, a miller and full peasant proprietor in the hamlet of Brunnenborstel. By 1850, he had become a farmer in Missouri. There he owned one of the most valuable accumulations of land then held by Germans in Freedom Township—520 acres. He is said to have been able to replace his log cabin with a frame house as early as 1844.13 The fate of Ludwig Evert’s daughter as an adult a quarter century after the family emigrated shows something of the decay of Hanoverian social stigmas that occurred in Missouri. In Germany, a poor houseling’s son ordinarily would not have been seen as a suitable marriage 13. The Vogt represented the central government, not the village residents. Villagers in Rodewald claimed their Vogt had been overly cooperative with the French, but he was not replaced by the reinstalled Hanoverian government (Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 322, NSHSA; Niemeyer and Frost, Terra Rodewald, 263).

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partner for the daughter of a full peasant proprietor. In Missouri, these distinctions seem to have been forgotten within just a few decades. Hans Georg Heinrich Duensing was a houseling and tailor in Suderbruch, just north of Esperke. He married Maria Dorothea Schwabe on May 5, 1839. When they came to Freedom Township twenty years later, they brought along six children. At the time the census was taken in 1860, they had not yet acquired land. By the next census in 1870, Georg appears to have died. His widow, Maria, was living with her second son, Fritz, who had a farm valued at $1,890. But Henry, the first son, had done much better by 1870. He had married Ludwig Evert’s daughter, Christine, after her first husband, Christian H. Ehlers, was killed in the American Civil War. Christine Evert Ehlers’s remarriage gave her new husband control of a farm and furnishings valued at $7,500 in 1870 when he was only twenty-six years of age.14 All through the 1840s and 1850s, Hanoverians continued to arrive in Freedom Township. People from Esperke continued to be among them. At least 26 of the 266 passengers on the General Washington, which landed in New Orleans on November 24, 1845, hailed from Esperke. Many others on board had left nearby villages including Rodewald, Steimbke, Ahlden, and Niederstöcken. Fourteen Frerkings from Esperke were on the ship, including the widowed mother of thirteen, Dorothee Marie Frerking née Sprengel, along with four or five of her children, a daughter-in-law, and others who may have been cousins.15 The General Washington also carried a representative of the smallest class of landed peasants in Esperke, Dietrich Heinrich Ehlers with his wife and two sons. His father, also named Dietrich Heinrich Ehlers, never came to America, but his story is of interest because it further demonstrates the close ties the peasants of Hanover often had with the army. 14. The war victim appears as Heinrich Christian Ehlers on his gravestone but as Christian Heinrich Ehlers in his birth record (Kirchenbuch Garbsen, Kirchenbuch Suderbruch, KBA; Manuscript population schedule, 1870 Census of Lafayette County, Missouri). Although emigrating some eighteen years apart, the Evert and Duensing families must have known each other back in Hanover. The bride’s mother and the groom’s stepmother, although not sisters, were both Rabes from the tiny hamlet of Brunnenborstel. 15. National Archives Ship Passenger Lists, New Orleans, Series M259, Microfilm No. 24. Although the maiden name of the mother of the original Frerking immigrants to Freedom Township is given as “Doretha Sprengel” on her grave marker, a certified copy of her marriage record provides her name as “Dorothee Marie Sprengel” (Runge, Frerking Family, 11).

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Restored grave marker of Dorothee Frerking, who gave birth to thirteen children in Esperke before following many of them to Lafayette County. St. Paul’s Cemetery, Concordia. Photo by the author.

The elder Ehlers, born in a nearby village in 1758, was a career soldier. He was a Feuerwerker or ordnance man for the artillery. He must have spent much of his time handling kegs of black gunpowder. He was still on active duty when, in 1799, he married an Esperke village girl nearly twenty years his junior. He was drawing a military pension by the time his son Dietrich Heinrich, who would come to Missouri in middle age, was born early in 1802. For a time the senior Ehlers kept a small grocery, but in 1808, he bought a tiny piece of village land and became an Anbauer. He died at the age of seventy-nine in 1837. The younger Ehlers inherited his father’s dwarf farmstead and also operated a wood lathe to supplement his income. In July 1845, he sold Esperke farmstead number 31 with its house-barn and three acres of land to Brinksitzer and village spokesman Jürgen Heinrich Clausen. Five years later, Ehlers’s 160 Lafayette County acres were valued at $1,000.16

16. Kirchenbuch Niederstöcken, KBA; Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 2117, NSHSA.

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Houselings continued to emigrate with the smallholders. Heinrich Scheele, a houseling and tailor, came to America in 1844 with his wife and three children. The census taker did not locate him in Lafayette County in 1850, but ten years later he lived there as the owner of a comparatively small farm valued at seven hundred dollars. Perhaps he had worked in St. Louis for some years. Ludwig Hemme, a stonemason from Esperke, who landed in New Orleans aboard the Friedrich Jacob on June 19, 1843, was probably a married laborer in Freedom Township in 1850, but he does not appear in later censuses. He may have been the uncle of Heinrich Friedrich Hemme, who was also a married laborer in Freedom Township in 1850. Ten years later, H. F. Hemme had obtained a small farm and had become the father of four. This Esperke immigrant’s father, Johann Heinrich Dietrich Hemme, owned an Anbauer’s house and tiny acreage (village residence number 30) in Esperke. In 1837, he bought a field in Esperke from the departing Friedrich W. Dierking. The field was low lying and poorly drained. During the course of several wet years, the soil became compacted and very difficult to work. Like most of the smaller farmers in northern Calenberg, Hemme did not own horses; instead, he plowed the land by yoking two milk cows together to pull the plow. Not only did Hemme cripple three good cows in trying to work the difficult soil, but he got very little grain for his efforts. In debt not only for the land but for new cows to replace the crippled ones, he decided to sell the recalcitrant piece of land. Since he could not find a buyer for the entire piece, he petitioned the government to be allowed to sell it in parts as pasture. In 1855, he gave up trying to farm in Hanover and, with his second wife and two youngest sons, decided to follow his older sons and other Esperkans to Missouri. In 1880, at the age of eighty-one, he was still living with his second son, Georg Heinrich Hemme, at the latter’s farm in Saline County just east of Freedom Township.17 Other Esperkans, too, especially those without property, came a decade or more after the initial period of emigration between 1837 and 1845. In the fall of 1856, Heinrich Giesecke, aged nineteen, left for America without permission. Perhaps he wanted to avoid military ser17. Kirchenbuch Niederstöcken, KBA; Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 367, 368, 2117, 4864, NSHSA; Manuscript Population Schedule, Lafayette County, Missouri, U.S. Census of 1860, and Saline County, Missouri, U.S. Census of 1880, Salt Pond Township, entry 364.

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Heinrich Behrens in Laderholz plowing with his milk cows, ca. 1900. Courtesy of Stadtbibliothek Neustadt a. Rbge.

vice for which he would have been eligible in less than a year. His father was the proprietor of holding number 39; that is, he was an Anbauer with three acres of land. In the summer of 1860, young Giesecke had been married within the last year and was renting land in Freedom Township. Ten years later he owned a farm worth two thousand dollars. After an additional decade, he was a farmer in midlife with seven children and a farmhand.18 It is also possible that one or more people who had been sent to America from County Neustadt at community expense eventually came to Freedom Township. Hanover sent more people at public expense to America than did any other German state. County Neustadt sent its share. Most were petty criminals, alcoholics, and chronic vagrants whom the local governments thought would be cheaper to send to America than to feed and house for extended periods. After the ports of New York and Baltimore complained of the practice, such 18. Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 700, 4856, NSHSA; Manuscript Population Schedules, U.S. Censuses, Lafayette County, Missouri, 1860, 1870, 1880.

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people were sent to New Orleans instead. A thirty-seven-year-old unmarried Esperke houseling and alcoholic was transported in 1841. A forty-two-year-old journeyman tailor from Warmeloh, beside Esperke, was sent all the way to St. Louis in 1849 at the expense of Warmeloh taxpayers. He was escorted by one of the Hemmes from Esperke who was apparently traveling on his own to Freedom Township. Neither of the two transportees appears in Lafayette or Saline county census records, although immigrants with the same surname do appear in local census lists.19 In the mid 1840s, two new groups of northwestern Germans who did not originate in the villages near Esperke (that is, not in the counties of Neustadt, Wölpe, and Ricklingen in northern Calenberg) began to settle in Freedom Township. Several decades later, John Holtcamp claimed that his parents, Caspar and Marie Holtcamp, who came in 1845, were the first of the Prussians in Lafayette County. They were followed by many others. Most of these people originated in Grafschaft (county of) Ravensberg, a small northwestern German territory that the Prussians had obtained in 1666. After 1814, Ravensberg was included in the Prussian Westfalian province. The emigration area from which this group of people came to Lafayette County was centered near Spenge to the north of the city of Bielefeld. This area of emigration extended westward across the border of Westfalia into the former Bishopric of Osnabrück, which had become a part of the Kingdom of Hanover in 1814. Ravensberg and Osnabrück were more dependent upon household linen production than was northern Calenberg some fifty miles to the east. A considerably larger share of the Ravensberg and Osnabrück population were poor tenants who held short-term leases from a peasant proprietor, although here these people were called Heuerlinge rather than Häuslinge.20 Perhaps the first Osnabrücker to come to Freedom Township was Franz Walkenhorst, the son of a Heuerling, who came early in 1844 via quite a circuitous route. He was born in 1810 at Schiplage in the Osnabrück district of Hanover, only about a mile from the Prussian 19. Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 1488; Richard J. Evans, “Germany’s Convict Exports.” 20. History of Lafayette County, Missouri, 599; Hermann Uffmann, 100 Jahre Christophoruskirche: Chronik der Kirchengemeinde Neuenkirchen, 102–4, has a good essay on life for Heuerlinge.

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border. In America in 1839 after emigrating, he married a Pennsylvania German woman in Cincinnati and united with the German Methodists there. But Franz and Mary Walkenhorst did not come directly to Lafayette County from Cincinnati. Instead, they spent four years at the other large rural settlement of Hanoverians in western Missouri—the Lake Creek Settlement in Benton County some fifty miles to the southeast of Freedom Township. The Lake Creek Hanoverians, in whose midst the town of Cole Camp grew up, are also likely to have been followers of Duden, having begun to come to Benton County about 1835 from Landdrostei Stade between the cities of Bremen and Hamburg.21 Both a brother and a sister joined Franz Walkenhorst in Freedom Township. Considerable numbers of Osnabrückers and Ravensbergers, who may be considered parts of a single northwestern German subculture, followed Walkenhorst and Holtcamp. Walkenhorst also blazed the trail to Lafayette County for some of his old neighbors in Benton County, who had originated in the Stade district of Hanover. All three groups of northwestern Germans in Freedom Township—the original Calenbergers, the Ravensbergers/Osnabrückers, and the people from the Stade area—spoke Plattdeutsch, or Low German. This was the dialect of all of northern Germany, but it varied from one region and even one locality to the next. In fact, there were even things that were said one way in Esperke and said a different way in the adjoining village of Warmeloh. William G. Bek noted the not-untypical Westfalian child at Concordia at the end of the nineteenth century who spoke the Westfalian version of Plattdeutsch with his parents, the Hanoverian (that is, Calenberger) version with his playmates, High German with his pastor and with his teacher at the parochial school, and English with the teacher when he attended public school. Low German was so pervasive in the settlement that even those who settled in Freedom Township from parts of Germany where Plattdeutsch was unknown—such as the Kretzmeyer family from Baden, or Henry Miller, who came with his parents from Bavaria—learned to understand the language. The version of Plattdeutsch spoken by the earliest group of immigrants, those from northern Calenberg (including 21. William F. Walkenhorst, The Walkenhorst Homestead, 25, 27; Richard Seaton and Dorothy A. Bass, Hallelujah in the Forest, 57; Leonard Brauer and Evelyn Goosen, eds., Hier Snackt Wi Plattdütsch: Here We Speak Low German, 334–35.

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Esperke), prevailed in the community. Down to the end of the twentieth century, linguists could trace the Plattdeutsch remembered by elderly residents of Concordia back to the Neustadt area.22 And why not? From Esperke alone, after all, at least forty-two souls had come to the Freedom Township settlement, about every ninth person of the village. These forty-two or more people included no fewer than sixteen adult men, at least ten of whom were accompanied by wives. Seven Esperke couples have been documented as coming to Lafayette County with children born in Hanover. Of the seventy-two German-born heads of households in the settlement in 1850, at least ten had been born in Esperke. It is perhaps an overstatement to speak of the Missouri Hanoverians in Freedom Township in terms of “transplanted villages,” yet the village of Esperke was the “mother village” of Concordia, Missouri, not only because its sons and daughters were first on the scene but also owing to the sheer number of people who came from Esperke itself and from villages nearby.23 By 1850, the Lafayette County settlement that had begun from Esperke was already spreading into adjoining Saline and Johnson counties. It numbered nearly 400 souls, some 285 of whom had been born in Germany. The others were children born in America. About twothirds of the German-born originated in Hanover.24 Economic opportunity made possible such rapid population growth. The community flourished in an economic sense because at a very early time, the immigrants began to grow the same crops as did their Anglo-American neighbors in Lafayette and Saline counties. The “old Americans,” themselves, were at that time starting to prosper to a degree quite unusual on the Missouri frontier. The earliest evidence of abundance among the German farmers is the above-mentioned Johann Heinrich Bruns’s estate inventory. On February 23, 1844, when 22. Kirchenbuch, Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Emma, Missouri; William G. Bek, “‘Der Geist des Deutschtums’ in the State of Missouri,” William G. Bek Papers, Western Historical Manuscripts Collection; Bek, “Survivals,” 60; William D. Keel, “The Low German Dialect of Concordia, Missouri,” 60; William Ballew, “The Low German Dialect of Concordia, Missouri;” Walter D. Kamphoefner, “The Language Transformation in a Missouri Plattdeutsch Community.” 23. See Kamphoefner, Westfalians, 71, for the concept of “transplanted villages.” 24. This figure comes from the 1870 census of population, which was taken by Heinrich Thiemann. When it came to recording the correct German state of birth, he was much more careful than were Americans who took the census.

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the inventory was made, Bruns had one hundred barrels of corn in the crib. Although this crop was unknown at the time in northern Germany, Indian corn or maize was the most common crop in the region and across much of the United States. Few farmers on the American frontier east of the Great Plains, except perhaps in the northernmost parts of the country, prospered without growing substantial quantities. Bruns had 150 dozen sheaves of oats. Apparently he was following the Hanoverian practice of storing the sheaves and threshing them with a flail as the grain was needed. Given the traditional northern European concentration on small grains and the five horses to be fed on the Bruns farm, a considerable quantity of oats is no surprise. The absence of rye is notable. It was, after all, the main staple crop in County Neustadt, and the entire immigrant community had experienced only four or five growing seasons in Lafayette County at this point.25 Perhaps even more notable is that Bruns had eight acres of hemp in the field, along with a hemp cradle. The Hanoverians of Lafayette County differentiated themselves from other German Americans in Missouri and elsewhere largely by producing hemp as a major cash crop for export to the southern states. Only the scale of production and the type of labor used by the Germans to produce hemp differentiated them from the Anglo-American hemp-growers in Lafayette County. During the first two decades of farming by Hanoverians in Lafayette County, the ever-increasing production of cotton in the southern states to meet the demands of cotton mills in New England and Europe in turn caused a strong demand for hemp. The coarse fiber in the stem of the hemp plant was spun and woven into burlap and twisted into rope to wrap and bind bales of cotton. It was in the 1840s that Lafayette and Saline counties first became one of the most important hempproducing areas in America. By 1860, the two adjoining counties were producing more than two-fifths of Missouri’s hemp, and Missouri had surpassed Kentucky as the American state producing the most hemp. In Hanover, much flax, a closely related plant, had been raised, along with some hemp itself, so it may not be surprising that when the 25. In our time, so much American corn is grown in northwest Germany that a trip from the city of Oldenburg southward in the summer can be reminiscent of eastern Illinois.

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Hanoverians encountered a strong market for hemp in Lafayette County, they took advantage of it.26 Lafayette County presented an advantage beyond being well-suited to a cash crop very much in demand. Although the county had only a small amount of rich river floodplain, or bottomland as it is known in the region, its upland soils are more productive than most Missouri soils. It was the combination of relatively productive soil and a cash crop very much in demand that allowed the Freedom Township Germans to enjoy an early frontier prosperity. That prosperity is evident when figures for this settlement from the agriculture schedule of the 1850 census are compared with such figures from other German American frontier settlements. Table 1 compares figures reported for the Germans of Freedom Township with two other communities: farmers from Hessen Darmstadt in central Germany who settled in Washington County, Wisconsin (studied by Helmut Schmahl), and farmers from northwestern Germany, in St. Charles and Warren counties, along the Missouri River immediately west of the St. Louis area (studied by Walter Kamphoefner). The latter area, although in the same state, is some 150 miles east of Lafayette County and in a somewhat different topographical and agricultural region. All three settlements began in the 1830s, although the eastern Missouri settlement is a few years older.27 Farmers at all three settlements, on average, had been able to improve between twenty-five and thirty acres of land. At all three settlements, farmers had purchased substantially more land than they had yet been able to improve, but the western Missouri farms were almost twice as large as farms in the other two settlements. The chief reason may have to do with the potential for earnings from cash crops rather than the cost of land. When the first Hanoverians came to Lafayette County, the land closest to the Missouri River, which was not only the best quality but also most convenient for transporting commodities, 26. Robert W. Frizzell, “Southern Identity in Nineteenth-Century Missouri: Little Dixie’s Slave-Majority Areas and the Transition to Midwestern Farming,” 247–48; James F. Hopkins, A History of the Hemp Industry in Kentucky, 109–11; Reinhard Oberschelp, Niedersachsen 1760–1820: Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft, Kultur im Land Hannover und Nachbargebieten, 1:181–83. 27. Kamphoefner, Westfalians, 127; Helmut Schmahl, “Transplanted not Uprooted: 19th Century Immigrants from Hessen-Darmstadt in Wisconsin.”

improved acres total acreage value of farm ($) value of implements ($) horses mules cows oxen other cattle sheep hogs value of animals ($) wheat (bu.) rye (bu.) corn (maize) (bu.)

29.4 186.4 $1,139.62 $74.35 2.6 0.2 2.7 1.3 4.6 7.4 9.3 $245.59 22.4 0 334.7

25.7 85.9 $732.80 $56.40 0.1 0 1.9 2.0 1.7 0.7 6.2 $116.50 72.4 42.1 18.0

Lafayette County, Mo. Washington County, Wis. Averaged for all farms owned by Germans

25.0 75.5 $414.65 2.6 1.9 2.2 2.1 2.9 6.0 15.0 $135.90 50.0 10.0 201.0

29.4 186.4 $1,139.52 2.7 1.4 2.7 1.5 4.9 8.8 10.8 $245.59 32.7 0 361.5

Lafayette County, Mo. St. Charles and Warren counties, Mo. Average of those who have any

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Acres/value/commodity

Table 1 Comparison of Germans in Lafayette County, Missouri, with Germans in Wisconsin and Eastern Missouri, 1850

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109.6 0.4 20.7 0.2 20.0 0 0.7 116.4 0.8 1.1 1.3 25.1 0 $23.69 $32.70 N=54

63.5 0 1.4 0.8 77.1(?) 0 2.4 98.3 0 1.5 0 0 38.4 ? $17.40 N=916

123.3 10.0 23.3 1.3 22.0 0 6.7 120.9 22.5 1.9 1.4 31.7 0 $27.21 $35.32 N=54

N=833

20.0 10.0 5.0 51.0 200.0 1.5 0 30.0 0 $10.00

40.0 960.0 12.0

Lafayette County, Mo. St. Charles and Warren counties, Mo. Average of those who have any

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Sources: 1850 Agricultural Census Manuscript Schedules, Lafayette County, Missouri; Kamphoefner, Westfalians, 127, 130; Schmahl, “Transplanted.”

oats (bu.) tobacco (lbs.) wool (lbs.) peas and beans (bu.) potatoes (bu.) sweet potatoes buckwheat (bu.) butter (lbs.) cheese (lbs.) hay (tons) hemp (tons) flax (lbs.) maple sugar (lbs.) value of home manufactures ($) value of animals slaughtered ($)

Lafayette County, Mo. Washington County, Wis. averaged for all farms owned by Germans

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Acres/value/commodity

Table 1 continued Comparison of Germans in Lafayette County, Missouri, with Germans in Wisconsin and Eastern Missouri, 1850

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had already been acquired by native-born Americans, mostly of British descent from the upper South. So the Hanoverians went to Freedom Township some fifteen to twenty miles from the river. There, much land was still for sale by the federal government at the standard price of $1.25 per acre. Improvements drove up the price of land steeply. In the Wisconsin example, 30 percent of the land was improved in 1850, and its estimated value averaged to $8.53 per acre. In eastern Missouri, where a slightly larger portion of the farms owned by Germans were improved, the average value was $5.49. The Hanoverians of Lafayette County had managed to improve less than 16 percent of their larger holdings, yet these holdings were valued at $6.11 per acre, more than the land in eastern Missouri, twice as much of which was improved. Land values coincide with most other central measures of prosperity—value of implements, value of livestock, value of animals slaughtered, and amount of crops produced—to indicate relative plentitude. At all three settlements, the crops grown seem to have much more to do with local conditions in the United States than with farming experience brought from Germany. The Hessians of Wisconsin grew a considerable amount of rye, although neither Missouri settlement did so. All three settlements produced wheat—the most in Wisconsin, and least in western Missouri. The west Missourians from Hanover grew considerably more oats than either of the other settlements but enjoyed an even greater preponderance in corn, the most important Missouri crop at the time. Yet the crop that really put the Hanoverians of Lafayette County at an advantage vis-à-vis other German Americans was hemp. While most of the produce of an antebellum frontier farm was consumed by the farmer’s household and livestock, virtually all the hemp produced in Missouri was marketed for cash. In 1849, nine out of ten of the Lafayette County German farms produced an average of 1.5 tons of dew-rotted hemp each. Fifteen to twenty miles away on the bank of the Missouri River, hemp brought $80 to $120 per ton. A Hanoverian Köther, or Brinksitzer or Anbauer, who could afford even a small plot of land, and could learn how to grow and process hemp during his first year in Lafayette County by helping an immigrant neighbor, could make enough money with the very first hemp crop of his own to pay the full price for eighty acres of additional government land. Friedrich Brackmann, for example, reported that when he was twenty-five years old in 1855, he produced two and one-half tons of

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hemp on five acres of land. He sold this hemp to Jo Shelby in Waverly for $115 per ton. This, one suspects, is why the Lafayette County Hanoverians owned more land and could also afford more livestock.28 The hemp culture had wider implications. As hemp made the Missouri Hanoverians prosperous, from the very first years of the 1840s, it also made them very much a part of a global economy or capitalist world system. The hemp fiber they produced held together bales of cotton that had often been produced by slaves. The cotton bales went not only to New England but to Lancashire in old England and to continental cotton mills as well. It was these same cotton mills whose product was ruining the world market for coarse linen and thus driving the rural poor from northwestern Germany. In Missouri, the Hanoverian farmers were indirectly producing for a world market, but this was nothing new to them. Even in the eighteenth century, much of the coarse linen their forefathers produced in Hanoverian villages was shipped to the Americas and made into durable clothing for slaves. Merchants in the New World called this northwestern German linen “Osnaburg.” Missouri Hanoverian farmers—who would give their lives in the early 1860s in the struggle to end slavery in the United States— had been a part of economic processes dependent upon slavery both in their European lives and in their lives in America.29 If Hanoverians benefited from the opportunity to grow and sell hemp in Missouri, their Anglo-American neighbors in the county benefited even more. They had been first on the scene in Lafayette County and had access to more capital. The “old Americans” brought large numbers of African American slaves from Kentucky and Virginia to produce hemp on a large scale. The Freedom Township Hanoverians became highly unusual, indeed, perhaps unique among nineteenthcentury German American settlers, in that they stood just beside an area of lucrative, largely slave-based agriculture far removed from the plantations of the cotton belt. Lafayette County was one of seven counties in west-central Missouri to which the historian R. Douglas Hurt applies

28. Young, Lafayette, 2:600. 29. Oberschelp, Niedersachsen, 183; Jürgen Schlumbohm, “From Peasant Society to Class Society: Some Aspects of Family and Class in a Northwest German Proto-Industrial Parish,” 193; Carl-Hans Hauptmeyer, “Der Raum Hannover im entstehenden Internationalen System,” 224.

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the term “Little Dixie.” In 1860, a quarter of the population of Little Dixie consisted of slaves who were employed in growing hemp and tobacco, and in general farming.Three townships in the entire state, all within Little Dixie, contained a slave majority in the farmlands outside the market villages. One of these was in Lafayette County. In two additional Lafayette County townships, slaves composed more than twofifths of the population. The county as a whole contained 6,374 enslaved persons in 1860, more than any other county in the state.30 Table 2, with data from the census of 1860, on the eve of the American Civil War, compares the German immigrant farmer population of Freedom Township with a sample of the Anglo farmers of the same township and with a sample of the Americans in Dover Township. The Anglos in Freedom Township, mostly in the western part, farmed very much the same kind of land as did the Germans and had just as far to go in order to market their product. Fewer Americans in this township owned slaves, and the number of slaves per owner was smaller than in townships to the north. Few slave owners had more than one field hand. Dover Township, directly on the river, was a different case. More than 40 percent of the population of the whole township consisted of slaves, and more than half of all households included slaves. Looking at the figures, it is clear, first, that the Americans were farming on a considerably larger scale than were the immigrant Germans, even within the same township. Americans had more horses, more oxen, and more hogs. They slaughtered more animals for meat, although they were also probably feeding more mouths per household. They grew more wheat, more corn, more oats, and made more hay and more butter. But the greatest difference was in hemp. About the same proportion of Germans in Freedom Township and Anglos in Dover Township grew hemp, but the Anglo hemp growers, nearly all of them slave owners, grew seven times as much per farm. Germans and natives grew much the same mixture of crops and raised the same livestock, with a few interesting exceptions, which may or may not have much to do with farming as it had been done in the Kingdom of Hanover. First, while rye and barley were probably the 30. R. Douglas Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie, xi–xii; see also Frizzell, “Southern Identity,” 239.

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two most important crops in Hanover, the only rye noted by the census taker in Freedom Township was a few bushels grown by two Americans, and only three of 134 German farmers grew barley. But certain crops do seem to represent vestiges of northwestern Germany; 16.4 percent of the Germans grew buckwheat, while only a third as many natives did so. One German in eight grew flax, and at an average of 46.8 pounds each, not a negligible amount, while area Anglos by 1860 had stopped growing the crop. Of course, as noted in Chapter 1, many rural tenants in northwestern Germany had survived on tiny parcels of land by spinning flax into linen thread or weaving linen cloth on handlooms. Many German households in Freedom Township included a handloom as did that of George Frerking, formerly of Esperke, at his death in 1858. As late as 1880, the elderly Anton Schlomann listed his occupation as weaver.31 If buckwheat and flax seem to be vestiges of the old country, the situation for draft animals would appear to be a case of Germans taking to a Missouri trend faster than their Anglo neighbors. This part of Missouri was a central location for breeding the famous Missouri mule from the time when the first trading expeditions to Santa Fe brought back breeding stock from what was then Mexico in the early 1820s. Mules were almost unknown in Hanover. Yet by 1850, more than one in eight German farmers in Lafayette County owned one or more mules. All the German farmers with mules in 1850 also owned horses. A decade later, 61.2 percent of the Germans owned mules, while only 36.2 percent of the natives in the same township and only 51.4 percent of the natives in Dover Township did so. Mules were cheaper to feed and required less rest than horses during a long day of fieldwork in the heat of the Missouri summer. Is the greater reliance on mules to be attributed to the German desire for economy and industriousness? Accompanying the turn to mules, a larger portion of the Germans compared to natives by 1860 had given up oxen as draft animals. This too is unexpected, since so many Hanoverian smallholders and tenants had farmed in Germany by yoking two milk cows to the plow or cart. And yet, this in itself may have been the reason German immigrant farmers were so eager to own horses. In this and other ways, they 31. Records of the Probate Court of Lafayette County, Lexington, Missouri; 1880 Census of Population, Freedom Township, Lafayette County, Missouri.

$96.02 3.4 2.3 2.5 4.2 10.4 13.3 19.5 $396.99

value of implements

horses mules oxen milk cows other cattle sheep hogs value of livestock

53.8 93.7 147.5 $1,575.39

85.8 61.2 38.0 99.3 82.8 67.2 88.1 99.3

88.1

85.8

82.8 76.1

4.4 2.3 5.4 3.7 9.0 30.2 34.6 $511.86

$112.75

84.5 99.0 183.5 $3,194.52

88.4 36.2 44.8 93.0 74.4 27.9 72.1 100

93.0

72.1

72.1 67.4

Freedom TWP natives amount % with any

4.1 3.3 5.1 5.1 10.0 21.9 58.7 $884.40

$202.00

143.1 168.4 311.5 $4,407.00

94.3 51.4 68.6 100 100 37.1 94.3 100

100

100

100 88.6

Dover TWP natives amount % with any

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improved acres unimproved acres total value of land

Freedom TWP Germans amount % with any

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averages

Table 2 Comparison of German Immigrant Farmers with Native Farmers, Lafayette County, Missouri, 1860

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24.9 655.5 41.1 1.5 35.8 2.9 33.8 14.4 127.5 4.2 46.8 $33.68 $108.88 N=134

wheat corn oats hemp

wool peas and beans potatoes buckwheat butter hay flax value of home manufactures value of animals slaughtered

Source: 1860 Agricultural Census Manuscript Schedules, Lafayette County, Missouri.

67.2 2.6 25 22.5 166.6 7.9 0 $46.67 $154.71 N=43

102.5 1,349.2 109.5 1.5

27.9 79.1

78.8 32.6 60.5 4.7 74.4 48.8

51.2 76.7 46.5 25.6

Freedom TWP natives amount % with any

69.4 6.1 30.6 10.0 203.0 7.0 0 $ 64.28 $ 258.00 N=35

130.0 1,770.0 114.0 10.4

20.0 94.3

20.0 22.9 77.1 2.9 88.6 77.1

37.1 97.1 51.4 42.9

Dover TWP natives amount % with any

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88.1 51.5 88.1 16.4 88.1 53.7 12.7 50.7 83.6

60.5 89.6 50.0 42.5

Freedom TWP Germans amount % with any

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averages

Table 2 continued Comparison of German Immigrant Farmers with Native Farmers, Lafayette County, Missouri, 1860

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Handloom of the type used for home production of linen in Hanover, probably brought from northwestern Germany to Freedom Township. Courtesy of Concordia Area Heritage Museum.

operated from the beginning in Missouri as only the more prosperous farmers could operate in Hanover.32 Although farming could be quite rewarding in Lafayette County, this did not allay the lure of California when gold was discovered there in 1848. A great many Americans assembled in western Missouri, and especially in Jackson County, which adjoined Lafayette County to the

32. While very few Germans in eastern Missouri kept mules in 1850, about the same proportion of Germans in Osage County in central Missouri had begun raising mules by 1850 as had their Lafayette County counterparts. And about the same portion of German farmers had mules in 1870—69 percent in Lafayette County and 62 percent in Osage County. But there was a big difference in 1860. In southeastern Lafayette County, 61 percent of Germans kept mules, while in Osage County the number was only 18 percent (Timothy Gene Anderson, “Immigrants in the World System: Domestic Industry and Industrialization in Northwest Germany and the Migration to Osage County, Missouri, 1835–1900,” 234, 243, 244).

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west, in order to begin the journey across the plains and mountains to California. Six of Freedom Township’s German-born men, four of them young and single, had reached California or were on their way when the census taker called on their Lafayette County households in 1850. For them, all born in County Neustadt or in Westfalia, this was a second great adventure to another world. In some respects, it must have seemed that the California goldfields were as different from the Missouri German farming community as it, in turn, was from peasant villages in northwestern Germany. The oldest known Freedom Township gold-seeker, the forty-four-year-old Christian Oetting, left his wife and seven children in Missouri. His sixteen-year-old son must have had a great deal of responsibility on the 350 acres Oetting owned in Missouri that year. The senior Oetting returned from California only to be killed in the American Civil War a dozen years later. For an Anbauer in Borstel, it had been quite an adventure. Little is known about Heinrich Schmidt (or Henry Smith), who at thirty-five was the other married “gold hunter” listed for the community.33 Esperke-born Ludwig Frerking, the oldest of the unmarried fortuneseekers at the age of thirty, had resided in the household of his brother Friedrich Frerking. Here was another of Tröster Dierking’s nephews. Frerking died on the way to California on September 8, 1850. Casper Uphaus, twenty, had come from Prussia with his parents and siblings to Galveston, Texas, in 1847. After short stays in Galveston and New Orleans, and two years in St. Louis, the family was in Freedom Township by 1850. Uphaus claimed no luck in the goldfields, yet he made a tidy sum hauling water in Sacramento for nine months before returning via Panama to live out his life near Concordia. By 1881, he owned 750 acres of land.34 Another gold hunter, Henry Dierking (Georg Heinrich Dierking), who was also twenty in 1850, had immigrated with his parents and siblings in 1844. His father had been a Halbmeier, the owner of a halfsized regular peasant holding in Büren, southwest of Esperke. In December 1852, after returning from California, the young Dierking 33. 1850 Census of Population, Freedom Township, entry 1361; [Rodewald], Descending Love, 150; 1850 Census, Agriculture Schedule, 797. 34. Runge, Frerking Family, F77; History of Lafayette County, 594; Young, Lafayette, 2:498.

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Christian Oetting’s 1844 naturalization certificate. Courtesy of Steven and Sharon Oetting.

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married Maria Wällner, of the only Mecklenberg family in Freedom Township at that time. In the spring of 1865, after their community had experienced terrible Civil War violence the previous fall, this family abandoned Freedom Township for the safety of the north-central Illinois prairie at Secor. There they lived out their lives.35 Perhaps the most successful German to go to the goldfields from Freedom Township was eighteen-year-old John Holtcamp, who claimed his parents were the first Prussians in the county. He mined in California until 1856, when he returned to Freedom Township with $1,700, with which he bought his own farm.36 When those half-dozen men went to California in 1850 to seek further fortune, they left a relatively prosperous frontier community of four hundred people begun by Hanoverians who were increasingly supplemented by immigrants from Prussian Westfalia. In the next ten years, the German community grew to nearly a thousand people, more than a third of whom were young people born in America. On the eve of the American Civil War, the community was and would remain largely rural with a social and institutional infrastructure that had been developing slowly for the previous two decades.

35. Kirchenbuch Dudensen, KBA; Our Mission, 190; Kirchenbuch, St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Secor, Illinois. For more on the community’s response to the Civil War, see Chapter 4. 36. History of Lafayette County, 599.

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3. Founding Churches and Using the Law

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The first formal community institutions created by Freedom Township Germans were churches. As immigration historians have noted, in ethnic communities the church is typically the “center for the immigrants’ cultural and communal life.” Beyond satisfying the religious impulse itself, a local church was one of the very few institutions an immigrant community could control and enjoy with little or no concern for American laws and customs or for the English language. Thus religious activities contrasted with local government and even with commercial transactions until Germanmanaged stores come into being about two decades after the first immigrants arrived. Before a local German–American commercial network developed, only when going to church or when visiting neighbors could the Hanoverians use their native tongue outside their own households.1 Local control was almost as important as the matter of language. Concern for local control meant that even German American denominations were sometimes viewed with suspicion by members of local congregations, although most of the ministers and leaders of these denominations were themselves immigrants and thus steeped in the ways of Germany, if not Hanover.2 1. Linda Schelbitzki Pickle, Contented among Strangers: Rural German-Speaking Women and Their Families in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest, 81, 78. 2. This conclusion comes from having read the early histories of dozens of rural German American Protestant churches in Missouri and in central Illinois. Pennsylvania Germans had a similar concern for local control (Stephen M. Nolt, Foreigners in Their Own Land: Pennsylvania Germans in the Early Republic, 47–88).

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Immigrant farmers brought with them to Missouri experience in raising livestock and growing crops that served them well in the New World, however different farming conditions had been in Hanover. They brought little or no experience in organizing and managing churches, however. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hanover, the official church of the kingdom, was administered by provincial consistories or boards of ministers and laymen appointed by the king. Local congregations were carefully overseen by the state church hierarchy. It is thus hardly surprising that in Freedom Township, as in most other German American Protestant communities, there was much confusion and difference of opinion in the early years within the community and within congregations about what directions the churches ought to take and how decisions should be made. Owing to such factors as the people’s inexperience with administering churches, continuing influx and out-migration of settlers, and the shortage of properly educated and properly motivated German ministers, many Protestant congregations required from a few years to a few decades to develop a firm identity that could be maintained over the long term. On May 1, 1840, Johann Heinrich Christian Liever baptized the infant Marie Oetting in Freedom Township. St. Paul’s Lutheran Church of Concordia, which even in our time is perhaps the most important institution of the community, looks to this event as its beginning. Until the previous year, Liever had been the village schoolmaster in Laderholz, which was so near Esperke that the residents of both villages were in the same parish. Liever had served as the Laderholz teacher for twenty-six years. Although not ordained, he was experienced in dealing with religious matters. He had worked under the authority of the Hanoverian church ever since he quit the Teachers’ Seminary in Hannover and began teaching at Bevensen in 1809 when he was twenty-two. In addition to reading, writing, arithmetic, and singing, he was required to teach catechism or religion, with catechism being the most crucial. The village schools stood under the supervision of the Consistory of Hannover.3 In Missouri, Liever baptized more than thirty infants, and he held reading services in people’s homes until an ordained Lutheran minister 3. [Rodewald], Descending Love, 29; Dorfchronik, 138–40. The point made by Ernst Schubert, “Niedersachsen um 1700,” 321, concerning the importance of teaching the catechism in the early eighteenth century probably applies equally well a century later.

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arrived in the community more than six years later. With only one term at the Teachers’ Seminary, Liever was not highly educated. Pastor Grütter in Mandelsloh, whose task it was to inspect the schools in Laderholz and nearby villages each year, noted in 1829 that for Liever, “correct speech [meaning High German] and writing are terra incognita.” But Grütter recognized Liever’s basic intelligence and ability by noting, “he knows how to order his thoughts and gives the children occasion to think.” If he taught at that level at the age of forty-two in Laderholz in 1829 before his forty-nine village pupils, he probably conducted services much the same way before his neighboring farmers in Freedom Township a dozen years later.4 While the hardships of the American frontier were proverbial, formidable hardships also confronted the schoolmaster and all other residents who had little or no land in the typical northwestern German village of the early nineteenth century. In Laderholz, a field measuring three-tenths of an acre, an even smaller meadow and garden, together with a small sum of school money provided only a tiny income for Liever and his wife and daughters. In 1826, Superintendent Baldinius noted that the school building in Laderholz, in which Liever and his family also lived, “is most extremely dilapidated, badly sunken on one side. . . . The house is a wretched hut; all the rooms are too low and too small, and most particularly the schoolroom. Some of the children must stand, and some squat on the ground, since there are no more places on the benches. The schoolmaster is often sick and cannot be healthy in the damp and mist in which he has to live.” In keeping with the norms of even well-todo households at that time and place, Baldinius considered it a defect that the building lacked stalls for Liever’s livestock. In 1827 and 1828, the village built a new half-timbered (Fachwerk) schoolhouse with a tile roof instead of thatch. In addition to the schoolroom, there were five dwelling rooms, a cellar, a cow stall, two swine stalls, and a storage room. After emigrating, Christian and Luise Liever would probably never live in such convenient quarters, but the land they obtained in Missouri was most likely an entirely adequate compensation. In 1850, the Liever farm was valued at one thousand dollars, which meant he owned at least a quarter-section (160 acres).5 4. Dorfchronik, 138–40. As late as 1800, village pastors as a rule preached in Plattdeutsch (Schubert, “Hannover,” 45). 5. Dorfchronik, 138–40.

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Two years into his service to the Lutherans of Freedom Township, on July 18, 1842, Mr. Liever joined with nine other farmers in pledging to finance and build a log church building. The eight men of this group whose local origins are known all originated less than ten miles apart in Amt Neustadt and Amt Wölpe. Friedrich Frerking, the eldest of the thirteen Frerking siblings, and J. H. Brackmann were both from Esperke. Conrad Stünkel was from Metel. Along with Liever from Laderholz were Heinrich Rabe and his brother-in-law Ludwig Evert from Brunnenborstel a quarter mile away. Friedrich Fiene, a houseling in Hanover who had married Liever’s daughter Friederike in 1835, was from Niederstöcken. J. H. Bruns, the former Vollmeier from Büren, provided the land. The building was constructed in 1844, with Liever conducting the dedicatory service. The founding of St. Paul’s was a clear example of Germans from Hanover coming together without institutional support of any kind and with only a former village teacher to lead them in creating the church they wanted.6 As indicated in the first chapter, nearly everyone in County Neustadt and in all of northern Calenberg was at least a nominal member of the Hanoverian state Lutheran Church. There may have been no Germans from other areas present in Freedom Township when the agreement to build the church was signed, yet the ten men who signed it constituted not more than half the independent adult German males by then living in the community. Other ways of responding to the religious impulse had been, or soon would be, developed. It was in 1843, the year after the agreement to build St. Paul’s, that the German Methodists established a mission circuit with a stop in Freedom Township. In this case, the impetus came only partly from within the community. Three settlers at the Lake Creek Hanoverian settlement in Benton County had petitioned Dr. Wilhelm Nast, the father of German Methodism, to send them a missionary. In the fall of 1843, Sebastian Barth, who, a dozen years earlier as an adolescent, had come with his parents from Hesse Darmstadt to Pennsylvania, was sent to western Missouri to organize the Osage Mission. Barth established fifteen preaching stations from the mouth of the Osage River 6. [Rodewald], Descending Love, 18, 30, 31. This original independence of the congregation from the Missouri Synod has been recognized by a denominational historian (August R. Suelflow, The Heart of Missouri: A History of the Western District of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, 1854–1954, 19).

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below Jefferson City all the way to Lexington some 150 miles away. In covering the three hundred miles of the circuit every three weeks, Barth wore out three horses the first year. In the summer, he traveled at night when his horse was not so bothered by flies. Barth claimed to have converted a hundred souls during this first year on his large circuit. When in Freedom Township, Barth preached at the home of Heinrich Meyer, just west of the future town of Concordia. The message he brought probably emphasized piety and the emotional experience of being “born again,” or religious enthusiasm. This had been the message of Methodism when it was founded within the Church of England in the eighteenth century by brothers Charles and John Wesley. Wilhelm Nast, an immigrant of Lutheran heritage from the southern German kingdom of Württemberg, translated the basic documents of Methodism into the German language in Cincinnati in the 1830s. According to one source, Heinrich Meyer, himself, had been converted by Nast in Cincinnati before coming to Freedom Township.7 By 1848, there were enough German Methodists in Freedom Township to erect a building for their congregation, which they called Zoar. A decade later, the congregation was made the center of a new Lexington Mission Circuit. In the early years, the German Methodist circuit riders had better luck in converting Freedom Township Germans who were not from northern Calenberg than those who were. Of eleven men known to have been early members of the congregation, seven originated in Prussia or Osnabrück. The other four were probably all from Hanover, but only Heinrich Thiemann, a Halbmeier or proprietor of half a standard village farm in the upper peasant commune (obere Bauernschaft) of the village of Rodewald, has been traced to the Neustadt, Wölpe, or Ricklingen areas.8 In January 1847, Mr. Liever’s band of Lutherans at last obtained an ordained minister. This must have been of great importance to the con7. Richard Seaton, “History of the Concordia Methodist Church”; Seaton and Bass, Hallelujah, 17–18, 58–59; Adam Miller, Experience of the German Methodist Preachers, 251; Oscar Cornelius Nussmann, “The Town of Concordia, Missouri, as a Study in Cultural Conflict,” 48. 8. Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. No. 367, NSHSA; Seaton, “Concordia Methodist Church”; 1850, 1860, and 1870 manuscript census of population schedules, Freedom Township. Certainly it is possible that Heinrich D. Stünkel, an early member whose origins have not been located, came from Metel or a nearby village like other Stünkels.

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gregation on several different levels. In Hanover, the village Lutheran pastor played an important role in things temporal as well as in things spiritual. For example, it was often the pastor who kept the village male hog or boar to which village farmers brought their brood sows when it was time to begin a new litter of piglets. But the first ordained minister of St. Paul’s had little training in such mundane matters.9 Rev. Adolf G. G. Franke had recently graduated from the University of Göttingen, perhaps in liberal arts. He then worked as a teacher in the household of Count Maltzahn. When a call came for Lutheran pastors and teachers to serve new German immigrants on the American frontier, he answered it, expecting to serve as a teacher. Traveling at the expense of his former employer, the count, he arrived in New York on November 16, 1846. After visiting Pastor Wilhelm Sihler in Fort Wayne, Indiana, he was sent to St. Louis to Rev. C. F. W. Walther. Franke was a Hanoverian, but he was from Meinersen, in the easternmost part of the kingdom. Although Franke’s theological training had been sparse, Walther determined that his beliefs were sound. Walther ordained Franke on December 29, 1846, after the young man had been in this country just six weeks, and immediately sent him to work among the Freedom Township Hanoverians. It is almost assured that Franke brought Walther’s version of the Lutheran message to Freedom Township.10 By that time, Walther was the acknowledged leader of the Stephanite Lutherans who, late in 1838, fled Dresden and other places within the Kingdom of Saxony (upper Saxony) owing to their opposition to the policies of the Saxon State Lutheran Church. They believed they were

9. Monika Jenssen, “Viehhaltung um 1800 im Zeichen der Aufklärung,” 358; for those who suspect a misinterpretation of the German text, here is the original: “Üblicherweise hielten Pfarrer oder Bürgermeister den Gemeindeeber.” Until well into the twentieth century, local farmers of “old American” heritage would scoff when a neighbor of Hanoverian heritage across the road suggested that his minister be called in to decide a dispute over the amount of damages owed because of the activities of some escaped pigs or a marauding bull. 10. Suelflow, Heart of Missouri, 19, states that Franke was a graduate in theology of Jena, but apparently this is not so. In 2001, Rev. Dr. Gregory Wismar of Newton, Connecticut, a direct descendant, extensively studied Franke (he uses the correct German spelling, Francke) in Germany. After being in the liberal atmosphere of Göttingen, Franke had wanted to study theology at Jena but was unable to do so (Rev. Dr. Gregory Wismar, LCMS, correspondence with the author, April 27, 28, 2006, and telephone conversation, April 28, 2006).

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defending pure Lutheran doctrine against attempts by the state to corrupt it. In the first issue of Walther’s biweekly newspaper, Der Lutheraner, dated September 7, 1844, he wrote that among its four objectives were to “furnish proof that the Lutheran Church is indeed the ancient true Church of Christ on earth, not merely one of the Christian sects; . . . to expose false doctrines and ungodly practices, paying particular attention to those Lutherans, wrongly so called, who in the guise and garb of Lutheran teacher preach and disseminate error, unbelief, and sectarianism to the prejudice and shame of pure and Scriptural Lutheranism.” Walther was even more vociferous about Methodists—German or otherwise. In July 1844, in a letter to Pastor Wege at the Lake Creek settlement in Benton County, Walther described the Methodists as “false spirits, deceitful laborers, selfappointed or false prophets, in sheep’s clothing, ravening wolves.”11 About three months after Pastor Franke arrived in Lafayette County, Walther and other leaders of the Saxons joined in Chicago with Pastor F. C. D. Wyneken, who had been serving Lutherans in Indiana for nine years, and with German pastors who had been sent to Ohio and other points in the Midwest by the Bavarian confessional Lutheran pastor Wilhelm Loehe. There they organized the “German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States,” later known as the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod. Pastor Franke did not journey from Lafayette County to attend the organizing meeting in Chicago, but he did attend “the synodical convention that was held the next year.”12 In May 1850, Pastor Franke, then twenty-nine, married the youngest of the thirteen Frerking siblings, seventeen-year-old Friederike. She had been in his first confirmation class in 1847. The couple at first lived with her sister Christine and the latter’s husband, John Henry Bruns Jr., who had married the previous year. Less than a year after their marriage, Pastor Franke and his wife left St. Paul’s to lead First Trinity Lutheran Church in Tonawanda, New York, just outside Buffalo. Tonawanda was one of the towns occupied by Pastor Grabau’s Old Lutherans from the Ückermark, in Prussia’s Brandenburg Province in 11. Suelflow, Heart of Missouri, 19; Mary Todd, Authority Vested: A Story of Identity and Change in the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, 68–73; C. F. W. Walther, Letters of C. F. W. Walther: A Selection, 64. 12. [Rodewald], Descending Love, 52; Todd, Authority Vested, 71–77.

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northeastern Germany. After a dispute among Grabau’s followers over congregational rights, First Trinity had become a founding member of the Missouri Synod in 1847. While serving First Trinity, Pastor Franke fell ill in the cold and snowy climate of Buffalo, so he and his wife returned to Lafayette County in order that he could recover with relatives.13 When his successor at St. Paul’s, Rev. Martin Quast, left in March 1853, Franke once again accepted a call from the congregation. This time he stayed three years. Perhaps his most historic accomplishment in this pastorate was to have the congregation formally join the Missouri Synod in 1854. In 1856, he accepted a call to Addison in DuPage County, Illinois, west of Chicago. There, he led the Zion Lutheran congregation until his death in 1879. Although Addison Township lay more than five hundred miles from Freedom Township, many similarities existed between the two German settlements. Zion was more diverse in the regional origins of its members than St. Paul’s, but many of its first families had originated in Amt Stolzenau, Hanover, just to the southwest of Amt Neustadt. A Stünkel family at Zion had originated in Rodewald within Amt Neustadt. Others came from other Amt Neustadt and Amt Wölpe villages. Pastor Franke must have found people at Zion much like his wife’s relatives and the others he had known in Missouri.14 Back in western Missouri, after its pulpit was vacant for two years, St. Paul’s in June 1858 installed J. Nicholas Volkert, a Bavarian from Nuremberg who had been sent to America by Pastor Wilhelm Loehe. Recently, he had served at Schaumburg, Illinois, just to the northwest of Addison. St. Paul’s in Freedom Township hired a teacher for its parish school from Addison, Illinois, and was planning to replace the original log church with a brick one when, fifteen months later, Volkert resigned and returned to northern Illinois. He farmed until returning to the ministry in Minnesota in 1872.15

13. Runge, Frerking Family, M151; 1850 Census, Population Schedule, Freedom Township, entry 1370. 14. Emil Mannhardt, “Die Deutschen in DuPage County”; Ludwig CachandErvendberg, “Das Kirchenbuch der ersten protestantischen Gemeinde von Cook und Du Page County,” 64–74. 15. [Rodewald], Descending Love, 54, 94–95.

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This exchange of ministers and teachers between Hanoverians in northeastern Illinois and western Missouri ended in April 1860, when Franz Julius Biltz was installed in St. Paul’s in Freedom Township. He had been born in Mittel-Frohna in the Kingdom of Saxony and had come to Missouri with an older sister at the age of thirteen with the original body of Stephanite immigrants. He was in the first class of the “log cabin college” (really an elementary and secondary school) at Altenburg in Perry County, Missouri, in 1839. One of the other students there was his future wife, Maria von Wurmb, who had been born at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa as the daughter of Saxon missionary parents. He held short pastorates in Cape Girardeau County, Missouri, in Michigan and in Cumberland, Maryland, before coming to Lafayette County. In Freedom Township, Biltz provided stalwart leadership for both the congregation and the community for the next forty-one years. The new brick church was dedicated on August 12, 1860. In October, the pastor reported that the congregation had 325 members, including 61 voting members (male heads of families) and 86 children in the parish school. This was quite an impressive level of sustained accomplishment over a period of twenty years since Christian Liever had performed the first Lutheran baptism in the community.16 For all the success of the Missouri Synod Lutherans in Freedom Township, the German Methodists were not the only ones to challenge them for the allegiance of German immigrants. It was probably in 1847, the very year in which Franke arrived at St. Paul’s, that another Hanoverian Lutheran minister appeared in the community. He had left Hanover in 1844, but it is unknown whether he was called to Freedom Township from another American location by local farmers or simply, by his own initiative, decided to live near so many people he would have known in Hanover. Friedrich W. Baring (or Bahring) was thirtythree and a candidate in theology—that is, a fully trained minister who had not yet obtained a church—when he left Niederstöcken for America. Niederstöcken is the next village to the northwest of Esperke and is the seat of the parish that included Esperke. He had most likely been educated in Hanover and thus in the theological traditions that were shaped by the history of the Hanoverian Lutheran Church.17 16. Ibid., 54–56, 95–96. 17. Hann. 74 Neustadt Rbge., No. 367, NSHSA.

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St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Concordia. Constructed in 1860, this building was used until 1905. Courtesy of Gary and Judy Beissenherz.

A large majority of the members of St. Paul’s, having called Pastor Franke, supported him and his confessional Lutheran message that must have emphasized a confident faith, correct belief, and the full Lutheran liturgy. A minority left St. Paul’s to follow Baring, who was a native of the locality from which they had emigrated and who may have represented the specifically Hanoverian elements of the Lutheran message. In 1850, Baring’s followers formed a new congregation named St. Johannes (St. John). Two of the ten men who earlier had founded St. Paul’s—the Brunnenborstel brothers-in-law Heinrich Rabe and Ludwig Evert—were among the leaders of the new congregation. In fact, the former gave forty acres of land to the church to serve as its location, its cemetery, and as a glebe (farmable land to support the minister). One of the first two young people to be confirmed in the faith at St. John Church was Louis Fiene, a grandson of St. Paul’s Christian Liever, and whose father, Friedrich Fiene, had been born in Niederstöcken like Baring. There is no evidence of a substantial difference in origins between the founders of St. Paul’s and the early supporters of St. John. Twelve men are said to have supported St. John through a long period of difficulties early in its history. Of the ten for

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whom place of origin can be determined, nine were Hanoverians and one came from Prussian Westfalia. Five of the Hanoverians can be traced to northern Calenberg.18 Evidence is lacking to determine why some immigrants chose one church in Freedom Township and others, with the same Hanoverian religious background, chose another. The St. John Church was two miles closer to the Saline County line than was St. Paul’s, and more of the early members of the former church lived in Saline County. But one suspects that more than physical proximity was at work. While no local discussions of theology have survived from the early years, the theological issues at stake can be grasped by comparing the differences between the theologies of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod and the State Lutheran Church of Hanover. Down through the nineteenth century, Hanoverian Lutheranism retained much of the character that had been set for it in the seventeenth century by Georg Calixtus. He emphasized the importance of leading a Christian life rather than maintaining the purity of doctrine. While upholding Martin Luther’s positions on the key doctrines of predestination and communion, Calixtus preached toleration and tried to lay the groundwork for the eventual reunion of the denominations. Despite its somewhat mild tone and internal struggles over rationalism in the eighteenth century, Hanoverian Lutheranism was entirely orthodox, since the Formula of Concord of 1577 was binding for Hanoverian Lutherans. Yet the Hanoverian Lutheran Catechism of 1790, which was used in providing religious instruction to all the Calenberg immigrants who came to Missouri in the early decades, has been described as “one of the most important Enlightenment instruction books in Lower Saxony.” Roman Catholicism was tolerated in Hanover as a part of the agreement by which the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna elevated the Grand Duke of Hanover to be an elector of the Holy Roman Empire in the late seventeenth century. Legally at least, beginning in 1824, Catholics could sit in the territorial assembly and in the cabinet in Hanover. This was five years before Catholics

18. Our Heritage, 35–45, 156. The names are listed in Robert W. Frizzell, “St. John Church until 1933,” 10. These names were matched against the area census lists for 1860 and 1870 and with the biographical sketches in Our Heritage.

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could sit in the British Parliament. The Reformed Church was also tolerated, so that French Huguenots could be invited into Hanover when they were expelled from France in 1685. All the same, the Lutheran Church and the Reformed Church were not merged by the government in Hanover as they were in Prussia beginning in 1817.19 It was not the confessional Lutheranism of Stephan in Dresden or of Loehe in Bavaria or of Grabau in the Ückermark that the members of St. John Church wanted. The evidence points to the fact that they wanted the Hanoverian Lutheranism they had known in their youth in Hanover. As late as November 24, 1868, the members of St. John congregation resolved to use the Hanoverian catechism in both church and school. In September 1865, they had resolved to obtain the Hanoverian hymnal. But the Kingdom of Hanover did not support churches outside its borders, and Pastor Baring died in 1853 at the age of forty-two. Without denominational support, the St. John congregation endured troubled times between 1857 and 1870. The German Evangelical Synod of St. Louis, although not their first choice, was at least a convenient source for reliable ministers, and the congregation joined the synod in 1871, and in doing so at last took on a denominational identity. This only exacerbated St. John’s relations with the local members of the Missouri Synod, both in the St. Paul’s congregation and in the new Holy Cross congregation that had been established two miles beyond the St. John church in 1865. The German Evangelical Synod embodied the very unionist principle that had so troubled the confessional Lutheran movement in Germany. The Evangelical Synod accepted German Protestants whether they were Lutheran or Reformed in background. It held as valid both the Augsburg Confession of the Lutherans and the Heidelberg Catechism of the Reformed. Down to the present, it was not and is not uncommon for local members of one denomination to express negativity about the position of members of the other in casual conversation about religious issues.20 19. Hans-Walter Krumwiede, “Konfessionelle Tradition und landeskirchlich Identität in Hannover (luth) 1814–1869”; John Stroup, The Struggle for Identity in the Clerical Estate: Northwest German Protestant Opposition to Absolutist Policy in the Eighteenth Century, 23; Krumwiede, Kirchengeschichte, 2:277–82. 20. “Protokollbuch,” St. John Church, Emma, Missouri, Minutes of the Congregational Meeting September 11, 1865, and November 24, 1868; Carl E. Schneider, The German Church on the American Frontier, 396–421.

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Whatever kinds of dissatisfactions a variety of believers may have felt, the self-assured Lutheran orthodoxy of the Missouri Synod held great appeal to the religious majority in the Freedom Township community. The insistence of the ministers of the synod on correct doctrine and the consequent need to decline religious fellowship with anyone who did not share the details of that doctrine could produce awkward social situations, but it could also provide a great deal of psychological reassurance to immigrants in a seemingly strange, periodically frightening, and sometimes misunderstood New World. The psychological benefits of membership may have also had a gentler dimension. Andrew Yox, in a recent study of nineteenth-century German American poetry, finds that “the dominant theme was love in the face of lost love”—the lost love being that of parents, other family members, and the community and culture in which the immigrant grew up. Many immigrants found “a new source of endearment” in “their new world confessional German church.” The Missouri Synod’s special emphasis on justification by faith, or the free availability of divine love and eternal salvation to all who will but believe, must have comforted many who felt the pain of familial and other love forsaken in the remove to another continent.21 The last congregation to be established in the community before the Civil War was German Baptist. Members of the community must have heard the missionary Carl Kresse preaching in Lexington. They invited him to come to Freedom Township in December 1850. He was so well received that in 1851, he moved his family from Howard County and started a congregation. Like many rural nineteenth-century Baptist preachers, he was both a full-time farmer and, at the same time, a minister. Apparently he had come from Germany about 1847. He remained in the community until his death in 1896. The congregation constructed a building southeast of the future town of Concordia in 1862. At first, although certainly German, this was not a Hanoverian congregation. None of five couples and three single individuals who were charter members came from Hanover. Nearly all can be traced to Prussia, except Frau Henriette Kresse, who had been born in Anhalt21. Frederick C. Luebke, “The Immigrant Condition as a Factor Contributing to the Conservatism of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod”; Andrew P. Yox, “The Fate of Love: Nineteenth-Century German American Poetry,” 125, 141.

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Dessau, a very small state southeast of the Kingdom of Hanover. Ironically, despite this congregation’s small size and its lack of connection with either the majority immigrant group from Calenberg or with Lutheranism, it produced the only Concordian ever to gain a truly national reputation. The mid-twentieth-century popular radio and television evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman originated in this church, where one of the Kuhlmans was a charter member in 1851.22 Churches of four different denominations were not enough to encompass the entire Freedom Township immigrant community. As late as the early 1850s, the largest group of local immigrants may have been the unchurched. These were people indifferent or hostile to all churches because none of the churches reflected their personal religious views, or because they were indifferent or hostile to religion itself. Back in Hanover, everyone had been required to participate, at least to a limited degree, in the village church. The Hanoverian army used church records of births and baptisms to determine which young men reached the age of twenty in a given year and thus could be conscripted. Of course, no such requirement existed in the United States. If, as suggested above, only half the adult German males then present in the community signed the agreement to construct a building for St. Paul’s in the summer of 1842, the name most conspicuous by its absence from the agreement is that of the community’s founder— Friedrich W. Dierking. Dierking was a concerned man, a kind man, a caring man; he could not have earned the nickname “Tröster” (the Comforter) otherwise. But it would appear from surviving congregational and public records that his concern for others came from what he believed about human beings and their obligations to each other, rather than from what he believed about the commandments of the deity, or at least the commandments of an orthodox Christian deity. It is clear that Dierking had read Duden and believed the latter’s promise of a future of prosperity, peace, and freedom available to any German peasant who could liquidate his assets in Germany for as much as a thousand Reichstaler. Dierking was a man not afraid to stake the future of himself and his relatives on the promises of a lengthy and seemingly rational published report, rather than simply staying with 22. Jerry Kibbins, “The Historical Record of the Concordia Baptist Church,” 112–13; Jamie Buckingham, Daughter of Destiny: Kathryn Kuhlman, Her Story, 17–25.

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the traditional ways and opportunities of his village of birth. It may well be that Duden’s book was not the first book he had read beyond the Bible. Thus he may very well have been exposed to the rationalism of the late Enlightenment as it circulated in Germany in the early postNapoleonic decades. Dierking and his family form a group within the Lafayette County Hanoverian community whose actions stood apart from those of the religious, socially conservative, inward-looking community majority so slow to assimilate to the culture of the surrounding Anglo-American society. So far as is known, although a man of substantial wealth, at least in the early days of the community, Dierking did not join or support any of the local churches. It appears that when he died in 1875, he was not buried from a local church. With respect to his estate, although neighboring farmers Peter Uphaus and John Rodekohr appraised it as was customary, it was administered by Moses Chapman, the AngloAmerican public administrator in Lexington rather than by a local German.23 Apparently, Dierking gathered with him like-minded people or influenced his relatives with his religious views. Of the other adult males of the emigration party that traveled with him to America in 1837, neither Niemeyer, likely his cousin, nor Bruns, his brother-inlaw, joined in the agreement to build St. Paul’s. Further, Dierking’s son, Frederick William Dierking, married a Christine Brackmann on December 4, 1857, when the young man was twenty years of age. Although by that time German pastors were present in the community and most Germans were choosing to be married by one of them, the young couple was married by Thomas Farrell, a local justice of the peace and an American.24 If Dierking’s attitude toward religion was at variance with that of most of his neighbors, his relationship with his daughters and their own subsequent behavior differ even more from the usual patterns of German American farmers and their families. If Dierking was not religious in the usual way, neither was his family patriarchal in the usual sense. The four eldest of Friedrich W. and Anna Maria Dierking’s children were daughters. The oldest daughter, Marie Friederike, or Mary, 23. File 35F16, Lafayette County Probate Court Office, Lexington, Missouri. 24. Marriage Book D, p. 331, Lafayette County Recorder’s Office.

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at the age of seventeen on July 16, 1840, married Andrew Jackson Herd, an American some eight years her senior. Herd’s family lived in Lafayette County, although he had been born in Tennessee and named after the Tennessee resident who had defeated the British at the Battle of New Orleans in the very year of Herd’s birth. Herd and his immigrant bride were married by an American Methodist minister named William A. N. Spratt. The groom owned land where the new couple resided some miles north of the Freedom Township Hanoverian settlement.25 Two months before the marriage of his oldest daughter to a landed farmer, it appears that Tröster Dierking decided to provide for his second daughter. On May 20, 1840, next to land he already owned, he entered forty acres of government land in the name of his daughter Christine, who was not quite fourteen years of age. This has been a source of confusion, because the Land Entry Map for Lafayette County had the original owner of this forty acres as “Christian Dierking.” There was no such person in the community in 1840. The land patent and patent application are quite clear that the land was purchased in the name of “Christine Dierking of Lafayette County.” The confusion is understandable since land was so seldom entered in the name of a young girl, or any female.26 It may have been late in 1843 that Tröster Dierking’s wife, Anna Marie, died. Soon daughter Mary, her husband, Andrew, and their two children moved in with her father. In July 1844, Dierking deeded his son-in-law and daughter 200 acres of land. In 1846, at the age of forty-eight, Dierking apparently decided to liquidate his assets and go out-of-state. In September, he sold 600 acres to the Herds for $1,150, although apparently they never actually paid him the money. Then the next month, Dierking sold his remaining 560 acres to an American Baptist clergyman named Samuel Swinford. Where Dierking went is not documented, but by the time of the 1850 census, he was back in Freedom Township 25. Marriage Book B, p. 143; Deed Book F, p. 98 Lafayette County Recorder’s Office. 26. Patent Certificate No. 18989 dated May 1, 1843, National Archives. This is for the southeast quarter of the southwest quarter of section 3, township 48, range 24. It is possible that this “Christine Dierking” (full name Dorothea Christine Maria Dierking) is the “Mary Dierking” who married Heinrich Franke on January 24, 1845, and spent many years in the community as a farmwife, mother, and parishioner of St. Paul’s. The full names and birthdates of Tröster Dierking’s children are from Kirchenbuch Niederstöcken, KBA.

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living in a household separate from that of the Herds. Apparently he was living from his capital and making no effort to farm. He was married to a woman nineteen years his junior who had been born in New York. Ten years later, this marriage had dissolved, whether by death or divorce is unknown, and Dierking was married to his wife Verlinda, born in Maryland, who would survive him. He had a modest amount of real estate and personal property in 1860. At the time of his death in 1875, beyond some money lent to his son-in-law, the only property listed in probate records consists of a meager list of household goods, four books, sixty chickens, a spinning wheel, and two Lebenswecker—German medical instruments used to treat rheumatism.27 Tröster Dierking seems to have died a rather marginalized member of the community he founded. Whether owing to a preference for private life or to religious and other beliefs at odds with those of the majority of his Hanoverian neighbors, Dierking never led the community after its beginning. When William G. Bek lived in the community in the late 1880s, older settlers remembered how Dierking had helped the early immigrants—yet he cut such a modest figure in the community’s memory that his burial site is unknown today. Mary Dierking Herd proved to be just as much of an individualist as her father. It was just weeks after Tröster Dierking left Missouri in 1846 that the Herds began to quarrel. In May or June of 1847, Mary accused her husband, Andrew, of committing adultery with an American woman in their household—perhaps a servant. Mary sent her away. In the winter of 1848–1849, Andrew’s sister and brother-inlaw died within three months of each other. Their three minor daughters were left as orphans with no relatives in the area other than the Herds. Andrew and Mary took the three girls into their household, which by then also included three sons and a new baby daughter. In July 1849, Mary accused Andrew of adultery with the oldest niece, and she sent the girl away. Andrew responded with violence toward Mary. The latter took her nine-month-old baby, fled the household, and filed for divorce. 27. Petition for Divorce, Mary F. Herd against Andrew J. Herd, filed March 27, 1850, Lafayette County Circuit Court, Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City; Book K, 168, Lafayette County Recorder’s Office; 1850 and 1860 Census, Population Schedule, Freedom Township; File 35F16, Lafayette County Probate Court Office.

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Andrew chose not to appear at divorce proceedings in the Lafayette County Circuit Court. Mary was granted a divorce on May 27, 1850. She received a judgment against her former husband which brought 640 acres of land back to her as alimony and to be held in trust for the benefit of the four children. Granted custody of all four children, she took back her maiden name and for years used the surname Dierking with her children even after she had remarried.28 Andrew J. Herd may well have been the incestuous charlatan that Mary’s lawyer claimed him to be in the divorce petition. But other possibilities also suggest themselves from between the lines of that petition. Could severe temperamental and cultural differences and expectations have led to mounting tensions and jealousy, which in turn produced exaggerated accusations? Could Mary have misinterpreted flirtation for adultery? If that happened, it is not unreasonable to suppose that Herd, intimidated by the financial backing, reputation, and know-how of his father-in-law, may have decided to quit a very difficult marriage. He may have decided simply to give up and depart rather than defend himself in court. The truth may have been difficult for an outsider to determine in 1850 and is impossible to determine with certainty a century and a half later. Whatever aid or inspiration Mary F. Dierking may have had from her father, she had vigorously used the Missouri court system to protect her interests and those of her children in a way that confounds the stereotype and the usual reality of the subservient German housewife. Yet with the divorce and acquisition of the family farmland, she had only begun to assert herself and her property rights. In 1853, Mary Dierking, now thirty years old and with children aged four through eleven, decided to remarry. She would not make the same mistakes with a second husband that she had made with the first. In this marriage, she would not be the newcomer still learning the ways of the society of which she was a part; nor would she marry someone from an entirely different culture. Friedrich Neuhaus was a somewhat more recent immigrant less familiar with American ways, two years younger than Mary, and, since he came from Prussia, perhaps from a 28. Petition for Divorce; Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City; Book R, 142–42, Book T, 179, Lafayette County Recorder’s Office; Book I, p. 213, Johnson County Recorder’s Office.

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Lafayette County Courthouse in Lexington, begun in 1847. Photo by the author.

family somewhat lower on the socioeconomic scale than Tröster Dierking’s family had been even before emigrating. On the day of the wedding, November 4, 1853, the prospective bride and groom concluded a marriage contract (or prenuptial agreement) that was recorded at the courthouse in Lexington: Mary F. Dierking is now the owner in her own right of certain real estate. . . . The parties do covenant and agree with each other as follows: that all the real estate belonging to the said Mary F. Dierking shall after solemnization of the intended marriage continue to be held by her free and exempt from the control of her said intended husband . . . and all the rents, profits, and issues of the said real estate shall ever continue the sole and separate property of the said Mary F. Dierking. . . . The said Mary F. Dierking may allow the said Newhouse [Neuhaus] to enjoy the said rents, issues, and profits of the said real estate and may at her death dispose of the said lands and rents and issues thereof as she may think fit. And the said Mary F. Dierking

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may sell and dispose of the said lands with or without the consent of her said intended husband and may convey the same without her husband joining in such conveyance.29

They were then married by an American clergyman named Allen Wright. The marriage lasted until her death forty years later. In addition to the four children she had already borne with Herd between 1841 and 1848, Mary produced seven children with Friedrich Neuhaus between 1854 and 1867. The Herd brothers, still listed under the name “Dierking” in the 1860 census, at the ages of fifteen, seventeen, and eighteen, were recorded as having attended school in the last year, although few young men in the community attended school after having attained the age of about fourteen. Of course, they and a sister had four hundred acres of land entrusted for their exclusive benefit. In 1860, the Neuhaus family, well endowed with both land and personal property, employed a thirty-five-year-old German farmhand beyond its complement of able sons. In 1870, three young mulatto servants lived in the Neuhaus household—Green Price, twenty-two, Margaret Price, nineteen, and Ivey Price, sixteen.30 In 1891, at the age of sixty-eight, Mary F. Dierking Herd Neuhaus wrote a will. The four children of Andrew Herd, already provided for in the divorce decree forty-one years earlier, received a token five dollars each. So did Henry Neuhaus, the only son by Friedrich Neuhaus. Perhaps he, too, had already been provided for by his parents. Most unusual was Mary’s bequest to her six daughters by Friedrich Neuhaus—Rosetta Tebbencamp, Christine Tiemann, Charlotte Heitmeyer, Matilda Koppenbrink, Amelia Thomas, and Anna Fox. Each of these married women received thirty acres of land—probably rather valuable land, since it was along the railroad and just west of the town of Concordia. Two received the land outright, but each of four others

29. Marriage Book D, 149, Lafayette County Recorder’s Office. This contract would seem to stand in contradiction of Pickle, Contented, 60, who contends that “Women also had no property rights in the state [Missouri] until 1875. Before this, a woman could own land, but all rent and earnings from it were her husband’s to control. . . . Not until 1889 could a married woman own and control her own real estate and be held liable for her own debts.” 30. Marriage Book D, Lafayette County Recorder’s Office, 156; 1870 Census, Population Schedule, Freedom Township.

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was given the land “for her natural life and after death to be divided among the children of her body.” And then, “to my beloved husband, Frederick W. Neuhous [sic]” she left forty acres “with house, furniture, and any and all implements” together with anything remaining after the other bequests. Like her father, she was certainly in the Freedom Township community but seemingly not fully of it. Instead of having her will drawn up and witnessed in Concordia, which by the 1890s was a flourishing town with legal and business expertise, she went to the newer town of Alma, some miles to the north in Middleton Township, to have her will drawn up and witnessed. She died December 1, 1893, and was buried at the cemetery of the German Baptist Church, where her second husband would also be laid to rest after his death several years later. If Tröster Dierking had indeed been converted to a rationalistic, post-Enlightenment belief in progress and the amelioration of the human condition, then Mary’s choice of final resting place was another demonstration that she marched to her own drummer, separate even from that of her father.31 Mary had led a life unusual for a German American woman in the nineteenth century. Although comforted by relative plenty because her father, as a Großköther, a landowner, in Esperke could take the advice of Duden and buy a considerable quantity of land in Missouri, Mary’s life had been anything but easy. At the age of thirteen, she had to give up the presumably comfortable village life of her childhood in Esperke. The oldest child is often the child with the greatest sense of responsibility. She may well have worried along with her parents as she helped them care for four younger siblings when they crossed the ocean by sailing ship and then went overland through half a continent. After perhaps a year in the confusing bustle of St. Louis—to the Dierkings a foreign city whose ways the family could not have fully understood— her family was the first from Hanover to establish itself in the raw forest and prairie of Freedom Township. Less than two years later, at the age of seventeen, she married a twenty-five-year-old American who was very much a part of the Anglo-American culture into which the Germans had come. She had to divorce him and then recover in court the land that had come from her father. Whether or not by intention, 31. File 62F4, Lafayette County Probate Court Office; Marty Helm Brinetti, Tombstone Inscriptions of Lafayette County, Missouri 7:7.

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her father had treated her as a Hanoverian farmer typically treated his oldest son by giving her much of his land.32 Owing to the law and circumstances, her second marriage succeeded. She made sure she retained complete control of her considerable property to such an extent that her husband, in an economic sense, was hardly more than a beloved employee. She bore seven more children and raised all eleven children to adulthood. One suspects she did this because this is what she wanted. Although convenient birth control was not available in rural Missouri at the time, she may have been one of those women, little noticed in our time although not rare, who liked having children. Otherwise, given her resourcefulness, will, and economic independence, one suspects she would have found ways not to. It appears that she provided for all eleven of her children, but she took extraordinary measures for her daughters. Each got land, and those with children received it in such a way that they had no fear a husband could take it from them in a divorce. These women were endowed with land so that they could be married because they wanted to, not because they had to remain married to support themselves and Mary’s grandchildren. This kind of independence of mind and action was scarcely to be expected from a woman who was raised as the daughter of a peasant in a small Calenberg village, however progressive her birth family may have been. In the New World, she blazed a path for herself that was unique.33 A recent study asserts, “Historians (especially those with a feminist perspective) of rural German-American settlements often confront difficult interpretive decisions in assessing the position of women in an environment that seems to have been obviously patriarchal and socially conservative.” As Linda Pickle notes, German American farmwives typically seemed contented in this culture of subservience. They seldom complained that they were expected to do more fieldwork and care of livestock than were the wives of Anglo-American farmers. Because of such typical patterns, the exceptions are all the more striking. Jette 32. He originally may have been expecting to be paid for the land he sold the Herds in 1846 and that Mary received from her husband by court order in 1850. 33. Mary Dierking can be seen as having embodied in her life some of the values of the feminism of our time. Yet it should also be noted that in the early modern period in northwest Germany, families had certain claims when land was transferred to a son-inlaw through a female heir. For example, it was often the case in the eighteenth century that when a son-in-law took over a farm because the proprietor had no sons, that son-in-law took the wife’s surname as it accompanied the farm.

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Bruns, who immigrated with her family at an early time to Westphalia, Missouri, and then lived for decades in Jefferson City, was both independent-minded and far from contented. Mary Dierking, although of a lower socioeconomic stratum and with less opportunity for education, was in even more control of her own life. Perhaps it was such women as Jette Bruns and Mary Dierking that the Scotsman Thomas Hodgskin encountered as he walked across Hanover about 1820. He wrote of the women he met, “With many opportunities, I found that the women of this country are more intelligent than the men. . . . They are great managers of the farmhouse as well as the field.”34 Esperke’s Mary Dierking used American law to create a freedom and economic independence for herself that scarcely could have been imagined by the traditional village society into which she had been born. But American law, especially on the frontier, was flexible. Christian and Luise Liever, the teacher and his wife from Laderholz, meanwhile found a way to make American law serve a very traditional Hanoverian purpose. Their use of the law was not so much conservative as reactionary in the Missouri context. By 1856, the Lievers, aged sixty-nine and sixty-six, were ready to retire from farming. Ordinarily in Hanover, farmers retired early, in their fifties, turning the farm over to an heir—usually the eldest son. The retiree and his wife then lived on the farm in a portion of the heir’s farmhouse or in a separate and considerably smaller retiree’s house. Retirees were called Altenteiler, that is, people with an old person’s portion of the estate. A very elaborate contract was often drawn up that specified exactly the food, livestock feed, and other goods and services that the heir had to provide the retirees for the rest of their lives. Historians have surmised that this custom arose in northwestern Germany not because people failed to love their parents or failed to have a sense of responsibility for them, but because in bad years, conditions in German villages could become so desperate that the heir might favor a spouse and children with what little food was available while slighting elderly parents.35 34. Christiane Harzig, “Gender, Transatlantic Space, and the Presence of GermanSpeaking People in North America,” 159; Pickle, Contented, 76–81; Henrietta GeisbergBruns, Hold Dear, as Always: Jette, a German Immigrant Life in Letters; Hodgskin, quoted in Ernst Schubert, “Land und Leute: Der Zustand des Landes um 1820,” 342. 35. Schubert, “Niedersachsen,” 324.

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The Lievers’ sons-in-law, Friedrich Thiemann and Friedrich Fiene, were both well-established farmers by 1856. So the Lievers made an Altenteil-style contract with Friedrich Dankenbring, who had married their granddaughter Louise Fiene three years earlier. Dankenbring took possession of the Lievers’ farm, which was by then down to fifty acres in size since the Lievers had sold portions of it in earlier years. In return for the fifty acres, Dankenbring agreed to support his wife’s grandparents for the rest of their lives. The elderly couple, if they chose, were to be able to eat at the Dankenbrings’ table so long as they lived “and be furnished good and wholesome diet.” They were also to have annually, for the rest of their lives, “eight pounds of wool, one peck of flaxseed and the ground to sow it upon.” Apparently, they were planning to continue to make the cloth for their own clothing. Quarterly, they were to have four bushels of clean wheat ground into flour, and annually “three barrels of corn . . . one killing hog of 200 pounds weight, six bushels of potatoes, three in the fall and three in the spring, one and one-half dozen eggs per week from the first of February to the first of November, one peck of white beans and the ground to plant them.” As long as they lived, the Lievers were to have forty dollars per year in cash, clean clothing every week, and fuel. The space the old couple and their livestock were to occupy was also specified: “the small stable at the side of the corncrib, for their horse, and the little room of the house, and the shelter on the north side of the room, the room upstairs and half the entry between the two rooms.” The retirees were to retain a stove and all their furniture as well as two cows and a calf and one horse and a colt, which Dankenbring was to feed with his own livestock. When the retirees died, he was to pay their burial expenses and to pay three hundred dollars jointly to the Lievers’ Thiemann grandchildren, in fifty-dollar annual installments. Finally, there was a provision in case the two couples could not get along with each other: “If they disagree and can’t live together in the house as before mentioned, they [the retirees] may live elsewhere and the party of the second part [Dankenbring] is to see that they are cared for so long as they both shall live.”36

36. Book Z, 444–45, Lafayette County Recorder’s Office. I have standardized spelling and capitalization in the quoted material.

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This arrangement, which was spelled out in such extraordinary detail in the office of the recorder of deeds, apparently worked for the parties involved. Both of the retirees were living with the Dankenbrings when the 1860 census was taken, but neither could be found in the 1870 census, presumably having passed away.37 By early 1860, the Freedom Township community of Hanoverians had been in existence for twenty-one years. Its members had broken away from their home villages and the hold of family, friends, neighbors, and all things familiar that accompanied the circumscribed economic opportunities of rural northwestern Germany. They had overcome a natural fear of the unknown to find a promising new location with much available farmland and much demand for what could be produced there. They had obtained land, had learned farming techniques effective in the new environment, and had expanded their initially small fields. They had founded churches—in two cases, with accompanying parish elementary schools. Two of the churches tried to be like the churches of the homeland either were or should have been, and two others, although operating in the German language, embodied Anglo or frontier influences. Those who wished to be free of compulsory support and attendance of any church had been able to do so. Members of the community had learned to use the legal system for their purposes—to secure title to their property, to pass it on to heirs, and to secure their futures in both traditional ways and in ways entirely different from those of the rural villages of Hanover. They had demonstrated to themselves and to everyone else that despite the bountiful opportunities of this new community, people there, just as in other human communities, could fall victim to such relational problems as religious rivalry and painful matrimonial discord. But in 1860, the community’s greatest challenge was still ahead.

37. Like Frederick W. Dierking and wives, the Lievers do not appear in cemetery censuses. Perhaps when the Lievers died, quite probably in the 1860s, they were buried from St. John Church, where their grandson had been confirmed and the Dankenbrings had been married. The congregational records of St. John are fragmentary from this period owing to successive pastors and intervals with no pastor. Perhaps Friedrich Dankenbring did not believe himself obligated by the Altenteil agreement to erect gravestones for the Lievers.

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4. The Civil War and Disaster in Western Missouri

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In the antebellum period, the Germans of southeastern Lafayette County seem to have had little friction with their Anglo-American neighbors over issues that bedeviled other German Americans, especially in urban settings, at the time— nativism, temperance, early calls for women’s rights, or the radical politics of the Forty-Eighters. While the Know-Nothing Party was quite popular in Lafayette and neighboring Saline County in the mid-1850s, its popularity was not necessarily due to antipathy between local Anglo-Missourians and their Hanoverian neighbors. The Know-Nothings came to prominence on the national level in 1854 as a political movement both in opposition to the waves of immigrants then pouring into the United States and in opposition to Roman Catholics. At the same time, the Whig Party, which had been favored in Lafayette County since 1840, broke apart on the national level. Both Lafayette and Saline counties sent Know-Nothings to the Missouri legislature in 1856. Both counties were in the Fifth Congressional District, which sent two Know-Nothings to Congress. Lafayette County resident Robert C. Ewing carried both counties in an unsuccessful bid to become the first Know-Nothing governor of Missouri. Millard Fillmore, whom the Know-Nothings favored for president, also carried both counties.1 1. History of Lafayette County, 270–71; History of Saline County, Missouri, 235, 237, 251, 257; Floyd C. Shoemaker, Missouri and Missourians 1:639; Missouri Revised Statues (1855), 1:349; Lexington American Citizen, August 6, 1856.

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The American Citizen, the Know-Nothing newspaper in Lexington, ran many derisive comments about foreigners in general and even printed stereotypical stories about local drunken Irishmen. Yet the editor, William Musgrove, was careful to avoid negative portrayals of Lafayette County Germans. Shortly before the state election of 1856, Musgrove wrote: “We have frequently spoken of the foreign population in our county; and say it without fear of contradiction, that they will compare favorably with the foreign population of any county in the West. Some of them are highly intelligent, honorable and patriotic gentlemen; and we verily believe that the per centage of this class is greater in Lafayette than in any other county in Missouri.” The editor’s motivation for this statement in a newspaper that was supposedly against immigrants is unclear. But it would seem that some central Missouri political leaders, especially in hemp-growing areas, seized on the Know-Nothing movement, in part, in order to deflect attention from the national conflict over slavery that was obviously approaching. Surely some leaders at the time would have realized that any major and permanent change in the status quo respecting slavery was likely to destroy the profitability of hemp production. Hemp was profitable in the United States owing to a high tariff on the importation of Russian hemp. If the Union were to break apart and Missouri become a part of the South, or if the South were to rule the entire country after winning a sectional war, the tariff would be endangered. The cotton planters who dominated the South, long opposed to high tariffs on principle, were unlikely to support a tariff on a commodity they needed in order to bale their cotton. More obviously, after a possible breakup of the union or after a sectional war, if the North was in charge, Missourians were likely to lose the slaves who produced most of the state’s hemp.2 As the American Civil War approached, if nativism was not a direct issue between the Hanoverians in Lafayette County and their Anglo neighbors, differing opinions about slavery certainly were. In fact, these

2. Lexington American Citizen, July 23, 1856. I have not found statements from politicians of the time recognizing that the hemp tariff would be endangered if Missouri were part of a Southern confederacy. But three decades ago I first made the assertion in print that local leaders probably recognized the danger. The assertion has not been challenged (Robert W. Frizzell, “‘Killed by Rebels’: A Civil War Massacre and Its Aftermath”).

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The Civil War and Disaster in Western Missouri o

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differences brought waves of death and destruction to the Hanoverians over the course of the war. As noted in Chapter 2, Freedom Township was within “Little Dixie,” a seven-county region in central and western Missouri especially reliant on the labor of African American slaves. The 6,374 slaves of Lafayette County in 1860 were quite unevenly dispersed. Lexington Township’s 1,269 slaves who resided on farms and plantations outside the town proper formed a majority of the rural population of that township— nearly 53 percent. Two other townships—Dover and Middleton—had slave populations of more than 40 percent in 1860. Even in Freedom Township, many of the farms in the western part were still in the hands of Anglo-Americans in 1860. Some of these farmers owned slaves so that the township contained 273 bondsmen, making up 16 percent of its population.3 Missouri slave owners recognized the Germans in their midst as opponents of slavery. In both small town and city, German-language newspapers campaigned against the institution. Eduard Mühl was especially active in this regard as editor and publisher of the Hermanner Wochenblatt in Hermann. Beginning in March 1853, for twenty-six weeks he ran on the front page a German-language serialized version of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The two large St. Louis German dailies, Der Anzeiger des Westens and Die Westliche Post, both opposed slavery. In February 1836, less than six months after its founding, the Anzeiger’s then-editor, Wilhelm Weber, denounced a St. Louis mob that had burned to death a black man. German immigrants in general found slavery objectionable both because it did not accord with their idealistic image of America as the land of unlimited opportunity and because they did not like competing with slave labor.4 The attitudes of the Germans toward slavery did not go unnoticed in Little Dixie and in Lafayette County. Claiborne Fox Jackson, from Arrow Rock in Saline County—a slave owner and a leading Missouri 3. Frizzell, “Southern Identity,” 242–43. 4. Siegmar Muehl, “Eduard Mühl, 1800–1854: Missouri Editor, Religious Free Thinker, and Fighter for Human Rights,” 31–34; Steven Rowan, “The Continuation of the German Revolutionary Tradition on American Soil”; A. A. Dunson, “Notes of the Missouri Germans on Slavery,” 355–59; Andreas Dorpalen, “The German Element and the Issues of the Civil War,” 62.

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political defender of slavery, who would be elected governor of the state in 1860—is reported to have said in 1857 “that men from Northern states and Germans seeking homes in Missouri should be met at the threshold, knocked on the head, and driven back.” The same year, Saline County’s William B. Napton, a justice of the Missouri Supreme Court, noted that German radicals and Yankee abolitionists “have gotten possession of St. Louis and made that place as thoroughly hostile to slavery as Chicago.” In the middle 1920s, William F. Walkenhorst, born in Freedom Township in 1844, the son of immigrant Franz Walkenhorst, published a series of sketches about the community of his youth. In a fictional dialogue, he caused a wealthy local slave owner to remark, “every time I think of the slave question, I think of the Dutch.” Local proponents of slavery were correct in assuming that the immigrants of Freedom Township opposed the South’s “peculiar institution.” In his community sketches, Walkenhorst implied that struggling Freedom Township immigrant farmers envied the wealth of the slave owners and disapproved of the indulgences such wealth and power made possible.5 Proof of the political differences between the Germans and their neighbors came in the election of 1860. Lafayette County’s 2,746 voters in the presidential election gave a majority of 57 percent to John Bell from Tennessee, the Constitutional Union Party’s candidate. Bell promised to maintain both slavery and the union just as it had existed for decades, and just as was necessary to maintain the hemp boom. Abraham Lincoln polled just 24 votes in the county—less than 1 percent. Thirteen of the Lincoln votes were cast in the city of Lexington, mostly by workingmen, it was said. The remaining eleven Lincoln votes all came from the precinct at Brockhoff ’s store in eastern Freedom Township. Since the entire vote at that precinct was only ninetyeight, Lincoln received over 11 percent of its votes. But some AngloAmericans also voted at Brockhoff ’s store. Because all the votes for Lincoln in the precinct are known to have been cast by ethnic Germans, the proportion of local Germans voting for Lincoln was well over 11 percent, although certainly not a majority. This precinct gave a plurality of 34 percent to John Bell, but not the majority Bell received in 5. Liberty Tribune, June 29, 1860; William B. Napton, The Union on Trial: The Political Journals of Judge William Barclay Napton, 1829–1883, 51; Walkenhorst, Walkenhorst Homestead, 16.

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Table 3 Presidential Vote, Lafayette County, 1860 Constitutional Unionists Townships

Clay Davis Dover Freedom (Brockhoff ’s store) Freedom (“old polling place”) Lexington Lexington City Middleton Sni-a-bar Washington Total

Bell & Everett

Northern Democrats Douglas & Johnson

Southern Democrats Breckenridge & Lane

Republicans Lincoln & Hamlin

258 42 129 33 81 42 575 188 114 115

52 30 56 32 25 9 301 123 104 42

64 7 58 22 10 2 133 41 15 19

0 0 0 11 0 0 13 0 0 0

1,577

774

371

24

Source: History of Lafayette County, 297, 300.

the entire county. No one in adjacent Saline County voted for Lincoln. In contrast to many German communities in eastern Missouri, the Germans of Freedom Township did not give a majority of their votes to Lincoln. Yet in the midst of the Missouri hemp-growing region and before use of the secret ballot, it is remarkable that anyone at all dared to vote for Lincoln. In the town of Lexington, all the thirteen Lincoln voters were pressured out of town in a relatively short time.6 Exactly who voted for Lincoln in Lafayette County is known because at that time, Missourians cast their votes by voice on election day at the poll. The election clerks wrote each voter’s name under the name of the candidate of his choice (or electors pledged to that candidate) in a poll book. The poll books for the 1860 Lafayette County presidential election were still at the courthouse when the 1881 county history was written. The eleven Lincoln voters in Freedom Township, all Germans, comprised a fairly representative cross-section of this immigrant community. All were farmers, with the probable exception of 6. History of Lafayette County, 297–302; Walter D. Kamphoefner, “Dreissiger and FortyEighter: The Political Influence of Two Generations of German Political Exiles,” 95–99; Kamphoefner and Helbich, Germans in the Civil War, 4–5.

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“I. Eisenstein,” who does not appear in any of the community censuses, even that of 1860, and may have been a merchant, trader, or peripatetic professional who was resident in the community for a relatively short time. The ten who can be located in the census ranged in age from twenty-five to sixty-four. Except two who were still farming with their fathers, all owned land. Only one, Wilhelm Frerking, had an especially valuable holding. This third child among the Frerking thirteen, together with his youngest brother, Dietrich, were the Lincoln voters from Esperke. As a group, these men who voted for Lincoln were unrepresentative of the adult male German population in only two discernable ways. First, nine of the ten who can be located in the census list originated in Hanover; only Heinrich Brinkkötter came from Prussia. By this time, Prussians composed well over 10 percent of the local German population. Second, although most appear in church records, none appear on the lists of founders or more prominent members of any of the local churches.7 The churches had their own views on slavery and on political participation. C. F. W. Walther, head of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, believed that slavery was an institution acceptable to the deity since slavery appeared in both the Old and New Testaments. Further, he believed that Lutherans should accept the government that the deity had appointed over them. An excess of concern with any secular matter was suspect. His writings defending slavery during the Civil War sparked a debate within the Missouri and Norwegian Synods that dragged on until 1868. Even if slavery was not a religious problem for the Lutherans, several of the township’s Lincoln voters had connections with the Missouri Synod, many local Lutherans rushed to defend the Union in 1861, and none owned slaves.8 The township’s Lincoln voters included German Methodists, but the German Methodist position on slavery was quite different from that

7. Wm. H. Meinecke, from Bothmer, north of Esperke, called himself a shoemaker, but he owned as much farmland and personal property as most local farmers (1860 Census of Freedom Township, entry 101); “J. H. Ehlers,” whom the census lists as sixty-two, was probably a man named in family records as Hans Heinrich Ehlers born in Bordenau in Amt Ricklingen in 1796. (Hans is a diminutive for Johannes.) 8. Abdel Ross Wentz, A Basic History of Lutheranism in America, 162–65; Walter D. Kamphoefner, “German-Americans and Civil War Politics: A Reconsideration of the Ethnocultural Thesis,” 238–41.

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of the Lutherans. The Methodist Episcopal Church had broken apart in the United States in 1844 over the issue of slavery. Most Northern Methodists believed that slavery was immoral. Both Northern and Southern Methodist congregations existed in central Missouri. The German Methodist churches were a part of the Northern denomination. Ironically, the only German slave owners in Freedom Township belonged to the German Methodist congregation. Franz Walkenhorst, a lay Methodist exhorter as well as farmer, is reported to have bought a slave woman from Miles Patrick, a neighboring farmer, for ten dollars. If so, this may well have been an act of charity. An adult slave worth only ten dollars must have been largely if not completely incapacitated by age or ailment. Perhaps when Patrick moved from the community, he thought the woman could not endure a lengthy trip. Selling an infirm slave to a benevolent neighbor would have been much easier, in a legal sense, and much more economical, than dealing with the legal and financial requirements of setting her free.9 George Helms was quite a different German slave owner. Also a German Methodist, Helms had married Charlotte, Tröster Dierking’s sister, after Charlotte’s first husband, Ferdinand Bruns, died in 1845. In 1860, George Helms was forty-two and his wife forty-eight. William and Joseph Bruns, aged eighteen and fourteen, were still at home with four Helms half-siblings, aged four through thirteen. This white German American family of eight owned a family of four African American slaves—a male aged thirty-two, a female aged twenty-nine, and two little girls aged four and one. This is why George Helms’s personal property was valued at $3,850, more than twice as much as any other German farmer in the township. The African American family was still living with the Helms family in 1870, so that the treatment they received from their slaveholders/employers must have given them some degree of relative satisfaction. The relationship between the white family and the black family is likely to have been primarily economic, although not as exploitative as some. That one local family of Germans owned slaves made no difference whatever when violence erupted in Missouri between supporters of the Union and the Confederacy. The Hanoverians and other Germans of 9. Young, Lafayette, 1:353. When the sale happened is unknown. Walkenhorst does not appear in either the 1850 or 1860 slave census schedule.

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Freedom Township rallied to the defense of the Union almost to a man when a chain of events led to warfare in Lafayette County and across Missouri. In so doing, they joined Germans from across the state in fighting for the Union. Of all the states containing significant numbers of German immigrants, it was Missouri where the largest portion of the German population fought in the Union army.10 Local violence in Lafayette County preceded the outbreak of military hostilities. On May 2, 1861, a pro-Union rally was announced in Lexington. Before the rally, two shots were fired at a German named Schäfermeier, who lived in Lexington, after he got into an argument about slavery with local rowdies. An estimated five hundred people attended the rally, but “a band of thugs armed to the teeth” appeared. In a scuffle for the American flag, a German named Haerle was wounded and the rally was broken up.11 The Camp Jackson Affair, which began the Civil War in Missouri, occurred on May 10. Elements of the state militia, commanded by a pro-secessionist governor and consisting largely of men and officers who favored the South, encamped just outside St. Louis. Captain Nathaniel Lyon, the Federal commander, believed that these militiamen endangered the St. Louis arsenal. He marched to the camp with an overwhelming force of his own regulars and St. Louis paramilitary units—largely Germans who were members of the various St. Louis Turnvereine (German gymnastic societies). When Lyon ordered the militia to surrender, the outnumbered militia commanders felt compelled to comply. Pro-Southern civilians badly taunted the St. Louis German paramilitary men as they marched their militia prisoners back to the arsenal. After a drunk in the taunting crowd shot one of their officers, these German “Wide Awakes” returned fire, killing some twenty-eight members of the crowd and wounding many others.12

10. Kamphoefner and Helbich, Germans in the Civil War, 8–9. 11. St. Louis Westliche Post, May 8, 1861, in Germans for a Free Missouri: Translations from the St. Louis Radical Press, 191–92. Nicholas Haerle, who was from Cochen in the Prussian Rhine province, was ordered out of Lexington in 1861 and did not return until the end of the war. Unable to serve in the Union army due to his wound, he received a silver pitcher from veterans of both armies after the war for relief work he had done for soldiers of both sides in St. Louis during the war (Young, Lafayette, 2:509). 12. William E. Parrish, A History of Missouri: Vol. III, 1860 to 1875, 14.

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News of this event polarized the whole state in which many had heretofore tried to remain neutral. Governor Jackson and the legislature turned the remaining Missouri militia into a pro-Southern army named the Missouri State Guard. In Lexington, local Southern sympathizers searched the Turner Hall owing to a concern that the Germans in Lexington might have received weapons from Lyon in St. Louis. Ten Union men were given twenty-four hours to leave town, and they did. In the next few days, “a good three hundred persons fled Lexington, mostly Germans,” according to a report in the Westliche Post in St. Louis. But the Post noted that many Union sympathizers remained in Lexington. Further, “The slaveowners, particularly the larger ones who hold many slaves, are not for the secession in Lafayette County, since they would be less assured of their living property under the secession than now is the case.”13 In mid-June, Lyon and his Federal troops went to Jefferson City, where they found that Governor Jackson had fled. On June 17, Lyon’s troops routed elements of the secessionist-minded Missouri State Guard at Boonville. The major State Guard units retreated toward southwestern Missouri. Two days later, the Hanoverians at Cole Camp in Benton County, some fifty miles from Freedom Township, were attacked by secessionists. An American Union man in the area, A. H. W. Cook, had issued a call, perhaps on the order of now General Lyon, for Union men to gather at the farm of a German northeast of Cole Camp. Some nine hundred appeared on June 11 and 12. Half the men were soon sent home because there were no arms for them. The remaining Union men, nearly all Germans, drilled and camped on two farms a quarter of a mile apart. The secessionist majority in Benton County gathered at the county seat in Warsaw. About three o’clock on Sunday morning, June 19, secessionists, both on horseback and on foot, surprised the encamped Germans who were sleeping off the festivities of the night before. The Germans suffered thirty-five to forty killed and perhaps sixty wounded while being driven into the woods and scattered. The secessionists lost six or seven killed and about twenty-five wounded. This attack on their fellow Hanoverians made a profound

13. James Neal Primm, “Missouri, St. Louis, and the Secession Crisis,” 19; St. Louis Westliche Post, May 22, 1861, in Germans for a Free Missouri, 242–43.

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impression on the Freedom Township settlement. Pastor Franz Biltz of St. Paul’s visited his fellow Missouri Synod pastors Hahn and Johannes in Benton County a few weeks after the military engagement and was shown around the battle site.14 Sometime in June, perhaps before the attack on the Benton County Germans, two Home Guard companies of Freedom Township were issued Federal arms. Some sixty men from the Freedom Township settlement went to Boonville, where Lyon’s men were still encamped awaiting supplies and transport. The Germans joined Captain Frederick Becker’s independent company. Becker’s men were sent to Lexington for garrison duty. As the summer wore on, one of the Home Guard companies grew tired of barracks life, turned in its arms, and disbanded. These men were mostly heads of families who needed to work their farms. The other company, mostly single men, remained in Lexington. While they were away, on August 22, their home community had its first significant brush with local secessionists. Twelve days prior to this Freedom Township encounter, General Lyon, after advancing from Boonville into southwestern Missouri in pursuit of the Missouri State Guard, had been killed in the Federal defeat at Wilson’s Creek outside Springfield. The Missouri State Guard was commanded by General Sterling Price, a former governor and tobacco planter from Chariton County just across the river from Saline County.15 After his victory and before taking his secessionist army back north to the Missouri River, General Price sent his son, Colonel Edwin Price, back to Little Dixie to gather new recruits who might have been heartened by the recent secessionist victory. After camping at Marshall, Edwin Price and twelve hundred men passed through Freedom Township on their way to join Sterling Price at Nevada, Missouri. Colonel Price had Pastor Franz Biltz brought to him for interrogation. Biltz reported that there he encountered dreadfully crude and brutal enlisted men led by courtly officers. The latter assured Biltz that the German community would be left in peace to do its work. Small parties of troops searched the farms of the community for arms and powder, which they confiscated. At Brockhoff ’s store, Edwin Price’s men 14. Brauer and Goosen, Hier Snackt, 181–90; William Arndt, “Several Episodes from the Life of the Sainted Pastor F. J. Biltz,” 43–44. 15. Voigt, Concordia, 11.

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“bought” some two thousand dollars’ worth of goods, leaving promises to pay when the State of Missouri was victorious. Möller’s nearby store was spared. A German named Blume, whom Biltz admitted “had certainly not behaved well toward his American neighbors,” was several times hanged by the neck until blue by the rebel troops. A few days later, many of the community’s horses and mules were gathered and taken. Several German farmers lost all their usable draft animals. The rebels took Biltz’s horse, too, but released it upon learning to whom it belonged. Biltz expressed the opinion that it was better that the Home Guard unit was in Lexington and the local farmers did not have army weapons. Otherwise blood would have been shed.16 In September, General Sterling Price, having been victorious in southwestern Missouri, moved his Missouri State Guard north to capture the town of Lexington from which the Missouri River could be blocked to Federal traffic. In the battle of the hemp bales, September 18–20, Price’s men defeated Colonel James Mulligan’s Chicago Irish troops and the local Unionists, including Becker’s company of Germans that fought beside the Irish. The Federals surrendered and were paroled. Thus they were released to go home after swearing never to reenter the conflict as combatants unless exchanged. But since the federal government did not recognize the Missouri State Guard as an official enemy that could issue valid paroles, many area Germans who had been paroled joined Federal units later in the war. This embittered local Southern sympathizers. Sometime late in 1861 or early in 1862, another event embittered local Anglo-Americans toward the Germans. After goods were stolen from Heinrich Meineke’s store, a local German Home Guard unit searched for them. The unit found the goods nearby in Saline County in the house of an Anglo-American named Grissom. Despite the pleading of Grissom’s wife, in bed after the birth of a child, and her excuse that some of the goods had been received as gifts and others purchased in Sedalia, the Home Guard took Grissom into custody and dispatched three men to take him to Lexington. Since this likely took place after August 30, 1861, when General John C. Frémont proclaimed martial law in Missouri, the arrest was probably legal. What happened next was 16. Letter of F. J. Biltz to his sister, September 4, 1861, published in German in Arndt, “Several Episodes,” 42–44.

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not. For reasons now unrecoverable, instead of taking Grissom to military authorities in Lexington, the guardsmen shot him in the Davis Creek bottom and hid his body in a ditch. The body was found by Grissom’s brother, who swore he would have revenge. Three decades later, the local German language newspaper, reflecting on the incident, said, “The security which had existed up to that time was followed by insatiable revenge.”17 On September 29, 1861, just nine days after his victory at Lexington, General Sterling Price abandoned the county seat of Lafayette County and slowly headed back to the southwestern part of the state. He was fearful because his Arkansas Confederate ally General Ben McCulloch had taken his Texans and Arkansans south several days earlier and because General Frémont in St. Louis was putting together a Federal force that would outnumber Price two to one. For the remaining almost four years of war, Price’s army did not return to the area except on raids. But the depth of Southern support in Little Dixie is demonstrated by the fact that for lack of arms, Price had to leave behind several thousand potential recruits.18 The pro–Southern local populace, occupied by an army fighting against the cause they supported, and under martial law, reacted with strong support for a vicious, terroristic guerrilla movement that harassed the Federal army and the civilians who sided with it. For six or more months per year in 1862, 1863, and 1864, guerrillas, supposedly supporting the Confederate cause, pillaged the countryside and particularly the Union people. The gang led until 1864 by William C. Quantrill was the most widely known if not the most vicious. Of course, these groups had to keep on the move across the western half of the state in order to avoid capture by Federal forces. But their center of gravity while in Missouri during the warm months of the year seemed to be the Sni hills of southeastern Jackson County, only about thirty miles west of Freedom Township. At the same time, bands of nominally pro-Union men, both authorized and not, raided into 17. Parrish, History of Missouri, 36. “Der bisherigen Sicherheit folgte unersättliche Rache” (Higginsville Thalbote, ca. 1891, quoted in Arndt, “Several Episodes,” 49–50). This paragraph simply rewords my own earlier account (Frizzell, “Killed by Rebels,” 378), much of which was taken from an account in the Louis A. Meyer Papers. See also Gilbert Knipmeyer, “Concordia in the Civil War,” 20. 18. Parrish, History of Missouri, 38.

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Missouri from Kansas to liberate slaves, horses, furniture, and whatever else caught their fancy.19 By August 1862, the violence and destruction caused by the guerrillas was so great in western Missouri that Governor Hamilton R. Gamble created a new militia, the Enrolled Missouri Militia (EMM). A law required able-bodied men between eighteen and forty-five to join the new militia or register as disloyal. Those who did the latter opened themselves to heavy taxation or property confiscation in order to pay for the EMM. The Germans of the Freedom Township settlement supplied more than fifty men for the new militia despite fairly liberal exemption possibilities. Captain C. H. Ehlers’s Company C, Seventy-First EMM Regiment was composed entirely of local Germans. Other local Germans joined Company B of the SeventyFirst. Activated immediately upon formation, all the members of the Seventy-First Regiment were from Lafayette and Saline counties. The regiment chased guerrillas around the region for 125 days from August 9 until it was deactivated on December 12, 1862. During that time, on September 18, three of the local Germans serving as militiamen were killed while they were scouting near Wellington in the northwestern part of Lafayette County. The militia had gone west from Lexington to battle Quantrill and had received much the worst of the fight.20 While many of the community’s younger men were away in the Lexington area on duty in the EMM, the guerrillas struck the heart of the Freedom Township settlement. On Sunday evening, October 5, 1862, Pastor Biltz and his wife, Marie, went to the house of the blacksmith Julius Vogt, where several neighbors were gathered. The Vogts

19. Richard S. Brownlee, Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy: Guerrilla Warfare in the West, 1861–1865; Edward E. Leslie, The Devil Knows How to Ride: The True Story of William Clarke Quantrill and his Confederate Raiders. While Brownlee remains the best account of the basic events of this guerrilla war and Leslie’s is the fullest and most up-to-date account of Quantrill, Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War gives the best account of the kinds of terrors experienced by civilians on both sides as they were caught between the warring forces. 20. Young, Lafayette, 1:121–22. This paragraph closely follows my account in “Killed by Rebels,” 379. See also James A. Hamilton, “The Enrolled Missouri Militia: Its Creation and Controversial History”; Knipmeyer, “Concordia,” 23–24; History of Lafayette County, 388–95; Albert Castel, William Clarke Quantrill: His Life and Times, 97; “Civil War Reminiscences,” Meyer Papers; Records of Individuals, 71st EMM, Office of the Adjutant General of Missouri, Jefferson City.

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lived hardly a mile from the church but near several other houses and two stores. This was the spot where the town of Concordia, Missouri, would grow up at the end of the war. Marie Vogt had recently given birth to twin sons, after two pregnancies that had produced daughters. The pastor came to baptize the new babies. After performing another infant baptism earlier in the afternoon, Biltz and family had been delayed by rain in getting to the Vogt residence. The guests had stayed for supper at the Vogts’, and although darkness had fallen sometime earlier, they sat around the table visiting after the meal was finished.21 Someone heard soldiers coming, and before anyone had time to react, as many as sixty shouting, cursing men on horseback surrounded the house. Women, knowing that the bushwhackers often killed men but were not known to harm women, screamed for their husbands to run. Everyone looked for a place to hide. Heinrich Röpe, one of the brothers who operated a mill, dived out the door into the dark toward the summer kitchen but was shot by a guerrilla and wounded. The guerrillas dismounted and pushed their way inside with drawn firearms. They took the remaining men prisoner and began ransacking the house for valuable or useful items. Children screamed in terror until a guerrilla threatened to kill everyone if they were not kept quiet. Many present that terrible night spoke English poorly or not at all and must have been unable to understand much of what was said. Women pleaded, but those who could not speak readily recognizable English were pushed aside with rifle butts. Marie Biltz, an intelligent and well-educated woman, asked them, “What will you do with our husbands?” A guerrilla answered her, “We’ll do to you what you do to us.” This statement linked the raid to Grissom’s murder. According to one source, Grissom’s body had not been found until the previous month. Over and over Marie Biltz pleaded, “You’re not going to harm my husband, are you?” She got a different answer each time, but one time the reply was, “Which one is your husband?” She was quick to reply, “The preacher—he’s the big man.”22 21. Letter of F. J. Biltz to his sister, October 15, 1862, published in German in Arndt, “Several Episodes,” 47–49. 22. Young, Lafayette, 1:347. In a lengthy paragraph concerning the raid, apparently written some years later, Biltz said that when the men, after being taken prisoner, begged for their lives, the guerrillas said they wanted revenge for an injustice that happened to their side: “Wir baten um unser Leben. Man antwortete uns, man wollte Rache nehmen für ihrer Sache widerfahrenes Unrecht.” Biltz’s paragraph is quoted by R. P. Sevin, “Aus schwerer

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The guerrillas took prisoners at the nearby houses as well. Earlier they had stopped at Cook’s store, three miles west of Concordia, where Christian and Henry Oetting had been invited for supper with the Cooks after posting a letter. The Oettings and another German were taken prisoner. The guerrillas took what they wanted from the stores at Concordia and robbed the prisoners at the same time. Biltz lost his good overcoat, watch, money, a cigar case that was a gift from his sister, and other items. Altogether, the plundering of stores and houses lasted for nearly two hours. The guerrillas packed the goods on their horses and left with their prisoners. The whole party rode a short distance and then halted by the spot where the railroad depot would be built in the next decade. The guerrillas ordered three of their prisoners to dismount and then shot them. Heinrich Brockhoff, twenty-six, a married man who kept a store with his younger brother, August, was shot in the face and died instantly. Heinrich Hartmann, forty-three, one of the earliest settlers, who had been in the community for twentyone years, died of his wounds five days later. Joseph Hartmann, thirtyfive years old and a wagonmaker, was only slightly wounded.23 Frau Biltz and Frau Vogt, who had gone to the looted stores and then out into the night to look for their husbands, heard the shots. They encountered the wounded Henry Hartmann and then stumbled over Brockhoff ’s body. His face was unrecognizable, and in her terror, Marie Biltz thought it was the pastor, until she saw that the shirt on the corpse was not her husband’s. She and Marie Vogt went on, and, as she wrote her parents the next morning, “filled the prairie with our shrieks of grief.”24 In the meantime, the bushwhackers rode farther while Biltz and the German next to him exchanged words, prayed, and prepared for death. After about a mile, the party halted again. Christian Oetting, fifty-six, the Anbauer from Borstel who had been in Lafayette County since 1839, except for his time pursuing gold in California, was ordered to dismount and was shot dead.

Zeit”; Letter of Marie Wormb Biltz to her parents, October 6, 1862, published in German in Arndt, “Several Episodes,” 45–47. This letter is reprinted in translation in Voigt, Concordia, 29–31. All the quotations from the letters of Julius and Marie Biltz are my own translations. 23. Voigt, Concordia, 29; letter of F. J. Biltz, October 15, 1862. 24. Letter of Marie Biltz, October 6, 1862.

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After another mile, two more were ordered to dismount and were shot, but each was to recover from his wounds—the new father and blacksmith Julius Vogt, aged thirty, and Casper Heinrich Westerhaus, a thirty-seven-year-old farmer from Prussia. Despite shock and loss of blood, they dragged themselves to Johann Rodekohr’s house, where Frau Luise Rodekohr helped them. Two additional men were freed by their captors. One was forty-four-year-old Fritz Stünkel from Metel, the husband of Charlotte Frerking. The other was the former Esperke houseling Johann H. Frerking, sixty-five years old and frail.25 Fritz Stünkel ran back toward his farm near the church and parsonage. Panting and bathed in sweat despite the rainy October night, he encountered Marie Biltz and Marie Vogt looking for their husbands. To their questions, he replied that he had escaped only through a miracle. He continued, “Oh, you poor women, be calm. Your husbands are dead. I saw Vogt fall and they are certainly not going to let the pastor live!” The women wailed and cried as they ran back across the prairie to their children. There was nothing in Marie Biltz’s conscious mind except a line in a letter received earlier that day from her father, who, like her husband, was a Lutheran minister: “No hair falls from our heads except by His will.” But she admitted, “No words of comfort came to me.” Reunited with her four children—Clara (eleven), Bertha (nine), Theodore (eight), and Adolf (five)—mother and children cried together. Then Julius Vogt, with two serious wounds, came slowly walking back. Certainly, Marie Vogt would have rejoiced that her husband, although badly wounded, was alive. The pastor’s wife also now had reason to hope, for the blacksmith told her that when he himself was shot by the bushwhackers, the pastor was still alive.26 The bushwhacker party, after shooting Vogt and Westerhaus and releasing Stünkel and the elderly Frerking, rode ahead about four miles. 25. Charlotte Frerking Stünkel was the eighth of the thirteen Frerking siblings. 26. Letter of Marie Biltz, October 6, 1862. Vogt was something of an anomaly in Freedom Township. He had worked in Kansas as well as for Shelby and Gratz in Lafayette County. Since he was from Saxe-Weimar, he would have originally spoken a High German dialect, as did Pastor Biltz. Vogt went on to live a long, productive life in spite of wounds to both thigh and shoulder. After recovery, he went to St. Louis to work in manufacturing Union gunboats. At war’s end, he returned to Concordia to sell hardware and agricultural implements and to work at his forge, a task on which he spent fifty years of his life. One of the sons baptized that infamous day became a businessman and, as a Democrat, postmaster of Concordia under President Grover Cleveland (Young, Lafayette, 2:595).

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They still had three prisoners: Heinrich Oetting, twenty-seven, who had seen his father shot dead a few miles back; Biltz; and Louis Mehl, a man who was new to the German community. When the party halted and Biltz was ordered to dismount, one bushwhacker said, “Don’t shoot him. He’s a good man.” According to Marie Biltz, “another stuck out his hand and said, ‘I promised your wife that nothing would happen to you. Now run!’” Years later, Biltz wrote that one of the bushwhackers had stood in front of him, thus shielding him, while insisting that the last three Germans be set free. This man prevailed, and all three Germans were released unharmed.27 The pastor was reunited with his family as the men returned to the Vogt house about midnight. When he got back to them, his wife and children had been outside crying and praying in open air. Biltz had been unable to cry when held by his captors. Upon returning home, he “cried all the more,” but these were tears of joy. Their house had been plundered, but Marie Biltz tried to emphasize that not all was lost. “They did not take everything from us. They did not find my beautiful cups, all the silver and other spoons, and all sorts of the children’s and my clothing.” Nor had the feather beds been taken. This same evening, the guerrillas had killed an American named Braden and had forced his wife to burn their house. Most of the guerrillas who struck in Freedom Township were quite young, like many of the Missouri guerrillas; they were teenagers led by renegades in their twenties. Frau Biltz wrote: “Oh, these were not humans; these were devils in human form—nothing but curses and blows [from them].” Although in later years the pastor was less adamant, shortly after the raid he wrote: “No pleading, no protest helped with these men. They had neither Christian nor human feelings.” However shaken he may have been by the encounter, Biltz found the strength to speak when the dead were buried the next day, although he apparently did not preach a full funeral sermon.28 27. Letter of Marie Biltz, October 6, 1862; R. P. Seven, “Aus schwerer Zeit”; Michael Fellman, “At the Nihilist Edge: Reflections on the Guerrilla Warfare during the American Civil War,” 530, notes the gestures of humanity, completely absurd in the surrounding context, which helped the guerrillas maintain their own self-esteem. 28. At a later time, Biltz mentioned the human feeling (seiner menschlichen Regung) of the bushwhacker who insisted that the pastor and two others be freed (Sevin, “Aus schwerer Zeit,” 71; Letter of F. J. Biltz, October 15, 1862, and letter of Marie Biltz, October 6,

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Who these guerrillas were and who led them was not determined at the time. They were not the main body of Quantrill’s men, because the latter were camped that evening with their leader near Sibley in northeastern Jackson County. Moreover, Federal militiamen on their trail were only a few miles away. In fact, the band that raided the Vogt baptism is quite likely to have been “a small band of exiled Kansas southerners led by Bill Reed,” probably supplemented by men who lived closer to Freedom Township. Reed’s group included Bill and Jim Anderson, who had recently been horse thieves in Kansas. Earlier, in the fall of 1862, they had operated in Jackson County south and east of Kansas City, until Quantrill had taken away their horses and threatened them with death if they continued to rob secessionists along with the Union people. Robbing the latter was, of course, entirely acceptable to Quantrill. The Reed-Anderson bunch then switched to Lafayette and Johnson counties between Lexington and Warrensburg. This is the group thought to be responsible for “terrorizing respected old Colonel Henry C. Chiles in south-central Lafayette County. The raiders took Chiles’s watch, boots, two horses, and eighty dollars, and forced the old pioneer to accompany them for a distance before releasing him unharmed but shaken.” This was on the night of October 1, just four evenings before the raid on Concordia. The parallels with the Concordia raid cannot be ignored.29 The Lafayette County Germans were able to go about their lives for the next nine months without a major incident. As the leaves fell from the trees, making hiding much more difficult, and as the weather grew colder, Quantrill’s band started for Arkansas on November 3. They did not reappear in Missouri until spring. Bill and Jim Anderson spent the winter in Missouri with their gang. By February 7, 1863, the Lexington Union complained that the Andersons “are the men . . . who have robbed every loyal man in that whole country [between Lexington and Warrensburg], of money, silver plate, blankets, horses, and everything else that could be turned into money.” In May, the Andersons joined Dick 1862). It seems to the present writer that while older men can often order that atrocities be committed and can too readily excuse those who commit them, it is young men who usually commit them—men who have not yet learned from personal experience just how much these events damage other individuals, society, and themselves over the long term. 29. Leslie, Devil, 147; Albert Castel and Thomas Goodrich, Bloody Bill Anderson: The Short, Savage Life of a Civil War Guerrilla, 19. Both quotations from Bruce Nichols, Guerrilla Warfare in Civil War Missouri, 1862, 205.

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Yager for a raid deep into Kansas past Council Grove. They all were probably part of the large body of bushwhackers that in June attacked a 150man detachment of the Ninth Kansas Cavalry Regiment at Westport, Missouri, just south of Kansas City, and killed fourteen troopers.30 On July 13, 1863, Anderson and company struck again at the Freedom Township Germans. Only a few details of this encounter have been preserved. The guerrillas killed four young farmers—Conrad Bruns, twenty-five, youngest son of J. H. Bruns Sr., from Büren; Louis Fiene, twenty-eight, born in Laderholz, oldest son of Friedrich Fiene from Niederstöcken and grandson of schoolmaster Christian Liever; Dietrich Karsten, thirty, who had come to America sometime between 1853 and 1860; and William Scharnhorst, twenty-four, who had come to Lafayette County as a small child before 1845 with his parents, Ludwig and Luise Scharnhorst. All these young men were married and fathers. All had been members of Company B, Seventy-First EMM, when it had been on active duty the previous autumn. All lived on farms quite near each other, perhaps along a single road. Anderson’s gang was said to have been wearing Federal uniforms and carrying an American flag. The gang approached from the north at about six in the morning. Perhaps they snatched their four victims from their nearby farms. According to community tradition, the gang lined them up, and when one started to run, all four were shot to death. The next evening, a civilian named Sam Breitenbaugh arrived in Lexington on a steamboat from Kansas City. He wrote General Thomas Ewing, the district Federal commander, that the first thing he heard in Lexington was an account of W. C. Anderson’s attack on the Germans of Freedom Township. He reported that Anderson was leading about forty bushwhackers. Not only were four German men killed, but also a girl was killed and nine men were wounded. If this is true, it would imply that a German Home Guard unit had tried to defend the community, but alternatively, the girl may have been killed and the men wounded in other communities. The gang created mayhem as it moved westward toward Jackson County.31 30. Castel and Goodrich, Bloody Bill, 19. 31. The community has no records or oral tradition to support the death of a girl and wounding of nine men. Knipmeyer, “Concordia,” 23; The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (hereinafter cited as OR), series 1, vol. 22, part II, 377–78.

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“Bloody Bill” Anderson as a guerrilla chieftain. Courtesy of State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia.

Louis Fiene, grandson of Christian Liever and one of the young farmers killed by Anderson’s gang in the raid of July 13, 1863. Courtesy of Donald Dittmer.

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Freedom Township was quiet for the next fifteen months, but the devil himself seemed to be loose in Kansas and in much of Missouri as well in the months immediately following July. While General Thomas Ewing as commander of the District of the Border formulated a plan to quell the guerrillas along the border in both states, an event in Kansas City spurred further action. Ewing had arrested the female relatives of several known guerrilla leaders. They were held on the second floor in a house in Kansas City with other female prisoners below them. On August 13, the building collapsed, killing two of Bill Anderson’s sisters, crippling a third, and killing a sister of guerrilla John McCorkle and another young woman. This infuriated Anderson and many others and probably added a special ferocity to their actions, especially those of the next few days. Just after dawn on August 21, Quantrill, Anderson, and about 450 followers whom they had gathered in Missouri raided Lawrence, Kansas. Riding about the town over a period of several hours, they shot all the males they could find who were old enough to use a gun. Estimates range from 150 to 200 men and boys who were killed. One hundred eighty-five buildings were burned, including most of the business district. Only two or three guerrillas were wounded and one killed at Lawrence, although a few more were shot by pursuers on the way back to Missouri.32 It was only four days later that General Ewing issued Order Number Eleven, which decreed the depopulation within the following fifteen days of most of three Missouri counties bordering Kansas and part of a fourth. Ewing knew he could never quell the guerrillas so long as they received so much aid and comfort from the civilian population. Many refugees who had been ordered from adjoining Jackson and other border counties poured into Lafayette. If the summer guerrilla raid had not been enough, the passage of regular Confederate cavalry troops through Lafayette County in 32. T. J. Stiles, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, 93; Leslie, Devil, 194–98. Much has been written about the young women being confined in an old and unsafe building or the building being deliberately weakened by General Ewing. Leslie maintains, quite convincingly in my opinion, that the supports of the building were cut away by soldiers being confined in the basement of the adjoining building in order to gain access to prostitutes being confined on its first floor. The traditional estimate of the men killed at Lawrence is 150, but Leslie, Devil, 237, makes a strong case for the higher number. Brownlee, Gray Ghosts, 124.

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October, although without incident, must have further frightened many. Joseph O. Shelby, from Waverly in Lafayette County, a man with whom many Germans in Freedom Township had done business before the war, led twelve hundred Confederate cavalrymen on a raid from Arkansas all the way to Saline County. They skirmished in the southeastern part of Saline on October 12. The next day at Marshall, only twenty miles from Freedom Township, Shelby’s force was almost surrounded and was turned back toward Arkansas by a larger Union force that included EMM companies and Freedom Township Germans. The Confederates separated into four parts for the flight back south. Shelby insisted on taking his own portion of the force through his home town of Waverly in Lafayette County. They passed through the town at three in the morning on October 14, then turned and headed straight south on a route that probably took them directly through Freedom Township. But this group, numbering as many as three hundred, was composed of soldiers, not guerrillas, and they did not attack unarmed civilians. Moreover, they hurried to put as much distance as possible between themselves and pursuing Federal forces. The guerrillas, too, including Anderson’s bunch, soon went south for the winter.33 It was nearly a year later, toward the end of the summer of 1864, when General Sterling Price and his Missouri secessionists, long since incorporated into the Confederate army, decided to raid their home state from Arkansas. They came up the eastern side of the state, twelve thousand strong, hoping to capture St. Louis. After being badly defeated by General Ewing at Pilot Knob in the southeastern part of the state, they bypassed St. Louis and turned west along the south bank of the Missouri River. Finding that Jefferson City had been fortified, Price went around it and continued westward into the Little Dixie region, where so many of his men had resided before the war. To some degree in anticipation of Price’s invasion, guerrillas became more active late in the summer of 1864. General Price sent Confederate officers into Missouri to encourage the guerrilla uprising—not that men such as Anderson needed encouragement. Anderson’s band was now killing men for the crime of being ethnically German and scalping cavalrymen from Illinois for sport. On July 20, George Todd, by

33. Daniel O’Flaherty, General Jo Shelby: Undefeated Rebel, 200–207.

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then the commander of most of Quantrill’s men, raided Arrow Rock in eastern Saline County. A small band of guerrillas came through Freedom Township on August 14. They stopped at the farm and hemp factory of H. Christian Ehlers, who had been the captain commanding Company C of the Seventy-First EMM two years earlier. The guerrillas shot and killed Ehlers’s assistant, William Wolters. The proprietor ran to his house and hid under his bed. The guerrillas found him there and shot him. He died of his wounds on August 23.34 For the next several weeks, most of the raids—and there were many—were on the north side of the river. On September 24, Todd’s and Anderson’s combined gang was repelled, with thirteen killed and thirty wounded, when they had the temerity to attack a Union blockhouse in the middle of the town of Fayette in Howard County. Quantrill himself was present outside town, but by this time he held the loyalty of only a handful of followers, who did not participate in the attack. Three days later, the combined gang was encamped outside Centralia in northern Boone County. Anderson took his force into Centralia that morning where they stopped the incoming train and robbed the passengers. The train contained twenty-seven unarmed Union soldiers in uniform who were going home to Iowa on furlough from Atlanta, Georgia. Anderson’s men killed twenty-six in cold blood and then went back to camp with the twenty-seventh soldier as a prisoner, their morning’s work done. At three o’clock that afternoon, a detachment of about 157 men from the recently formed Thirty-Ninth Missouri Infantry Volunteers, a Union unit, rode into town. They were mounted on plough horses and sway-backed mules, in contrast to the guerrillas, who had the best horses that could be stolen. The Union troops, as a mounted infantry unit, were armed only with muzzleloading Enfield rifles and bayonets. Despite his poor mounts and limited arms, the unit’s commander, Major A. V. E. Johnston, decided to avenge the morning’s massacre by going after the guerrillas. After a short ride, Johnston and his men encountered more guerrillas than anticipated—some two hundred. The militiamen were ordered to 34. Brownlee, Gray Ghosts, 198, 204–5. Concerning Ehlers, this oral tradition in the author’s family (the author is a direct descendant) is supported by cemetery and family Bible records. The day after his death, Ehlers’s wife, Christine, gave birth to their only son.

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dismount in order to fire their rifles. They fired a volley as the guerrillas, still out of pistol range, rode up the slope toward them. The rifle volley went high and hit no one. Before the militiamen could reload their single-shot Enfields, the guerrillas rode in close and used their pistols to mow down the militia. Some Union soldiers surrendered but were killed afterward. Skulls were crushed, bodies were mutilated, and scalps were cut from seventeen corpses. The best estimate is that 123 of the 157 Union infantrymen lost their lives, making a total for the day, with the soldiers taken off the train, of 149.35 Histories of the Missouri guerrilla warfare are vague about what the guerrillas did over the next several weeks. As Price’s large army of invasion headed toward St. Louis and then west along the Missouri River, there was much excitement. The newspaper accounts concentrated on Price’s movements and Federal efforts to gather forces sufficient to oppose him. Officers of both armies in official reports focused on the same events. The movements of a few hundred guerrillas were not the focus of observation or reporting. What, in fact, the guerrillas did in that dark time was to perpetrate their last massacre of the western Missouri war. It took place at the edge of Freedom Township, with Germans as the victims. The evening after the Centralia massacre, Anderson’s band split from Todd’s, after Todd objected to Anderson’s men killing Union soldiers who had surrendered. But the various groups gathered again ten days later on October 6, still in Boone County near Rocheport. That evening, they swam their horses across the Missouri River into Cooper County. Telling the story half a century later, John McCorkle, one of the participants, remembered four bands of guerrillas joining together—those of George Todd, Bill Anderson, John Thrailkill, and Tom Todd. As McCorkle remembered it, George Todd took command of the entire group of some 240 men.36 35. Sergeant Thomas M. Goodman, the only Federal soldier whose life was spared by Anderson, reported there were twenty-seven soldiers on the train that morning, but Leslie reports twenty-three (Goodman, Sergeant Thomas M. Goodman’s “Thrilling Record,” 20; Leslie, Devil, 319–28; Stiles, Jesse James, 127). 36. Castel and Goodrich, Bloody Bill, 108, think the guerrillas crossed the river on October 7, but Sergeant Goodman reported that it was on the tenth day of his captivity and on Thursday, both of which were October 6 (Goodman, Sergeant, 56, 60); John McCorkle, Three Years with Quantrill: A True Story, 119.

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The next day, on October 7, Anderson’s band may have been operating alone when it ambushed eleven militiamen or members of the Cooper County Home Guard, most or all of whom were Germans. Seven of the eleven were killed, and one suffered the Anderson signature treatment of being scalped and having his skull smashed.37 The following day, on October 8, having crossed Cooper County from northeast to southwest, George Todd, with a force reported to be 108 men, burned the railroad depot and several houses and killed three civilians at Otterville. But they managed to damage the railroad bridge only lightly before riding to the northwest during the night.38 The next day, the guerrillas must have crossed the northern part of Pettis County after passing through Sedalia, and then must have crossed the boundary into Saline County. There they camped, perhaps east or south of Sweet Springs, which was called Brownsville in those years. The Confederate army was not far behind. That evening, Price’s advanced guard, commanded by General Shelby, entered Boonville. Just who was present at the camp near Brownsville is uncertain. McCorkle remembered Todd, Anderson, and Thrailkill all moving together. Most observers estimated there were 100 to 120 guerrillas. This is too many for Anderson’s band alone but too few for the entire group. The behavior exhibited the next day was characteristic of Anderson’s group, which indicates that at least part of his men were probably with this particular band of horsemen.39 It should be noted that the following account is crafted from fragmentary and sometimes contradictory sources. Bushwhacker John McCorkle’s brief account was written in 1914, half a century after the event. John N. Edwards’s extensive description, although published in 1877, does not accord with considerable other evidence about numbers of men involved and numbers killed. It does nothing to help Edwards’s poor reputation concerning factual accuracy. Louis A. Meyer’s 37. Three members of this militia squad were sons of the Bavarian immigrants Nicholas and Catherine Senderhoff Blank and lived near Prairie Home in eastern Cooper County. Two of the brothers escaped, including the great-grandfather of the historian Paul C. Nagel (Nagel, German Migration, 140). 38. OR, series I, vol. 41, part III, 741. 39. John N. Edwards, Noted Guerrillas, or The Warfare on the Border, 313, says that Anderson stayed on the north side of the river and that this group raid through Cooper, Pettis, Saline, and Lafayette Counties was performed by Todd and David Poole and their followers.

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papers provide a great deal of information that does agree with other sources. Meyer lived all his life on a farm less than a mile from the massacre site. He claimed to have witnessed the battle while hiding in a corn shock. He was eleven years old at the time. In the early 1920s, he combined his own memories with an extensive study of community records and attempts to gather the memories of others. He put all of this into correspondence with Professor William G. Bek, who planned to write of the battle. Other sources are sparse. Many local newspapers suspended publication at the approach of Price’s army, as editors and typesetters were pulled into the Federal militia or set out to join Price. Three surviving accounts, all brief, are in German. The account in the St. Louis Anzeiger des Westens (Western Reporter) of October 21, 1864, is taken from the English-language Lexington Democrat of October 11. No copies of that issue of the Democrat survive. The incident does appear to have been widely known at the time. Three days after the incident, Judge William B. Napton heard an oral account in St. Louis, where he was spending the war, which was exactly accurate as to the number of Germans killed in this western Missouri clash.40 On the morning of October 10, the guerrillas started toward what they called the “Dutch Settlement.” An American named James Graham, a native of Pennsylvania who had lived until recently in Iowa and who ran a watermill on Blackwater Creek, was sympathetic to the Germans. He activated an alarm system by tooting a cow horn, which could be heard by neighboring farmers who, in turn, blew their own horns in a chain or network. Soon, from just west of Brownsville to Cook’s store—a distance of eight or nine miles—Germans knew there was a serious threat to the community.41 The men gathered as quickly as possible, young and old, mounted and afoot, armed and unarmed, apparently in several different spots. A group led by Friedrich Pauling prepared an ambush along the road in the Davis Creek bottomland west of Brownsville, a short distance into Saline County. They fired on the bushwhacker advance guard as it rode along the road, but without hitting anyone. These farmers were 40. McCorkle, Three Years, 119–21; Edwards, Noted Guerrillas; 313–16; Louis A. Meyer, “The Battle at Emma, Mo. as Seen by an Eye Witness,” Papers of Louis A. Meyer; St. Louis Anzeiger des Westens, October 21, 1864; Higginsville Thalbote, ca. 1891; Sevin, “Aus schwerer Zeit”; Napton, Union on Trial, 218. 41. Meyer, “Battle at Emma.”

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poorly armed, and some apparently failed to aim, claiming they could not have another man’s life on their conscience. The advance guerrilla guard raced out into a small prairie and then dashed back into the timber after the Germans, who were in flight. Heinrich Dedeke, a young farmer who lived nearby on the Saline County side of the boundary, continued to reload and fire until he wounded a guerrilla. He was able to hide in the timber and make his escape after being nearly stepped on by a guerrilla’s horse. The main body of guerrillas had already come forward to search for Dedeke when the advance guard sighted more Germans. A Home Guard unit had gathered more than five miles away at St. Paul’s Church. It was a force made up chiefly of men over the age of forty and teenagers. As many as one hundred men appeared, but only half had mounts. The mounted men rode east toward the guerrilla invasion force. When they got to the spot near where Holy Cross Church was soon to be built, some went north to guard a ford on Davis Creek, and the remainder continued eastward. This group probably numbered about twenty-five men. For a time, the guerrillas and Home Guard could not see each other due to a small ridge between them. When Weller Päper and Louis Stünkel, the officers of the Home Guard, saw the first guerrillas come over the ridge, they ordered the Home Guard to fall back to a more defendable position and give battle. This was probably very near the boundary between Lafayette and Saline counties, less than a mile outside Freedom Township. Some members of the Home Guard stood and fought as the hundred guerrillas rode toward them firing their revolvers and shotguns. Other Germans, unused to battle, dropped their weapons and ran for cover. Several guerrillas were wounded, and a few may have been killed as well. Afterward, the guerrillas took a wagon and bedding from a farmer to transport their wounded. Of the Germans—both those who gave battle and those who tried to flee—only five or six escaped, including Johann Dietrich Küster, at home on furlough from Company B, Seventh Missouri State Militia Cavalry, and sixteen-year-old H. D. Bruns Jr., son of Heinrich David Bruns of Esperke. Heinrich Dierking and another man, both wounded, crawled under a corncrib, which the guerrillas burned over them, killing them both. The guerrillas killed other community men at their farms. Seventy-four-year-old Heinrich Wrede was killed while repairing a fence. All together, the guerrillas

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claimed twenty-five German victims that morning, including German Methodist patriarch Franz Walkenhorst.42 The guerrillas committed atrocities as ugly as those at any other guerrilla victory of the war. No Germans were left wounded in the field. The guerrillas killed the wounded. Just as Anderson’s men had done at Centralia, the guerrillas smashed the skulls of their victims. Then they went on to pillage homes in the community. They shot and killed Wilhelm Dickenhorst in his sickbed. The guerrillas shot and killed William Prigmore, a prominent local American farmer, in his yard, not realizing he was a Southern sympathizer. Then they burned his house.43 The bushwhackers tried to burn a dozen houses, but many homes were saved by their female occupants as the horsemen rode away. Louis A. Meyer claimed that the community’s women, even the elderly, were “criminally attacked,” often by multiple men. Although this claim is startling, it should be carefully evaluated. Through most of the war, the so-called bushwhacker code forbade that white women be physically harmed, although their husbands, brothers, and sons could be shot down or bludgeoned to death in front of them. Michael Fellman, the leading historian of Missouri’s guerrilla warfare, believes that although German men “were strung up and shot with special glee” by the guerrillas, “German women were spared rape and murder” owing to their race. Edward E. Leslie, the latest and most thorough student of Quantrill’s activities, holds that although rape by guerrillas was rare, it did sometimes take place. He notes the reports that in Franklin County, even regular soldiers in Shelby’s command raped a German woman and tried to rape others only a few days before the Freedom Township attack. Fellman, himself, notes the case of a guerrilla leader who wrote to a Ralls County farmer, “we cant stand the dutch and negros both.” It should also be noted that over the course of a long war, restraints that are honored in the first years often give way toward the end.44 The most important piece of circumstantial evidence pertaining to this issue is a letter that “Bloody Bill” Anderson wrote to the Lexington 42. Ibid.; History of Lafayette County, 577, 608; Donald Dittmer (a direct descendant of Wrede), letter to the author, May 23, 2006. 43. Meyer, “Battle of Emma”; History of Lafayette County, 413. 44. Meyer, “Battle at Emma”; Nicholas P. Hardeman, “Bushwhacker Activity on the Missouri Border: Letters to Dr. Glen O. Hardeman, 1862–1865,” 270; Fellman, “Nihilist Edge,” 531; Leslie, Devil, 167–68; St. Louis Missouri Democrat, October 13, 1864, as reprinted in Leslie, Devil, 331–32; Fellman, Inside War, 70.

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newspapers on July 7, 1864, three months before the raid on the German settlement. Anderson publicly threatened to carry the war to women and children. He raged against General Brown, the Federal subdistrict commander, for arresting women in Lafayette County who were thought to be aiding the guerrillas. Directly addressing General Brown, in this long letter to the newspapers, Anderson said: “I will have to resort to abusing your ladies if you do not quit imprisoning ours.” There is no reason to suppose that Anderson did not mean this threat to be taken seriously. We know that this bunch of young men gangraped Benjamin Lewis’s black servants in Glasgow just eleven days after the attack on the Freedom Township community. In light of these statements and events, the pertinent question would seem to be not, “Did sexual assault take place as a part of the Freedom Township incident that day?” Instead, the pertinent question is probably, “What was the extent of the sexual assault on these German-speaking women?”45 Afterward, at least a portion of the guerrilla band, including Todd and Anderson—if the latter was along for the ride to Freedom Township— must have turned back to the east. Todd, Anderson, and numerous guerrillas appeared the next morning in Boonville before General Sterling Price and the main body of the Confederate invasion force. The distance of more than forty miles was not too great to be covered by experienced riders in an afternoon, evening, and early morning ride. In Boonville, the Confederate pretender to the governor’s chair, Thomas Reynolds, was appalled by the scalps hanging from the bridles of Anderson’s guerrillas and that these men had to be ordered not to murder the prisoners Shelby had taken when the Boonville Federal garrison surrendered. Price quickly sent the guerrillas across the river to destroy railroad bridges. The main army slowly came westward, spending several days in Saline County at Jonesborough and Grand Pass. M. Jeff Thompson took twelve hundred cavalrymen south to raid Sedalia. While returning to the main Confederate army on October 16, he learned that the Federals were at Cook’s store in force, so he went north from Brownsville rather than traverse the German community. Price’s army went across northern Lafayette County. Combined Union forces defeated Price on October 20–23 at Westport in Jackson County, well within today’s Kansas City 45. OR, series I, vol. 41, part II, 76–77; Castel and Goodrich, Bloody Bill, 121; Fellman, Inside War, xix, 202–4. Not knowing of Anderson’s threat or of the other instances of rape, I arrived at a different conclusion three decades ago (Frizzell, “Killed by Rebels,” 389).

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metropolitan area, and too far from Freedom Township to directly affect its residents. Price was driven south to spend the remaining seven months of the war in Arkansas and Louisiana. George Todd, who had led the raid on the Lafayette County Germans, was killed while scouting for Price near Independence on October 21. Bill Anderson took his men north of the Missouri River into Ray County. There, on October 27, only about a dozen miles northwest of Lexington, near the present town of Orrick, he was killed by a Federal militia unit.46 The Hanoverians and Prussians in Freedom Township found life extremely difficult nevertheless. The twenty-five men they had lost had a median age of about forty—very old for combat casualties. The community lost a significant amount of its accumulated experience and wisdom. A great wave of fear came over the men and women who remained. For a time, the men camped deep in the timber along Blackwater Creek while three families of women and children came together in one house for the night, with the women taking turns keeping watch by the windows. Louis A. Meyer wrote nearly six decades later, “What these women suffered these long dreary nights and no man near to protect them, only the day of judgment will reveal.”47 Perhaps it is surprising that many families did not move to a safer location. But as mentioned in Chapter 2, only Georg Heinrich Dierking, thirty-five, so far as is known, moved his family out of Missouri. He went to farm in the prairie near Secor, in Woodford County, in the northern half of Illinois. His father, at age fifty-nine, originally a Halbmeyer from Büren, was one of the wounded men burned under the corncrib by the guerrillas. But the deceased’s other son, daughter-in-law, and their three children remained in Lafayette County as did most or all the rest. By early spring—a farmer’s traditional time to move—the war was clearly winding down. Freedom Township, whatever its problems, was now home. In the 1840s, the land, so cheap at $1.25 per acre, had been bought at the price of giving up all that was familiar, at the price of enormously hard work, and

46. Stiles, Jesse James, 131–32; OR, series I, vol. 41, part I, 664–66; Castel, Quantrill, 195; Castel and Goodrich, Bloody Bill, 125–26. 47. The ages of twenty of the twenty-five dead are ascertainable. In addition to Wrede, who was seventy-four, another of the victims was sixty-five, and five were in their fifties. But five were also still in their teens (Meyer, “Battle at Emma”).

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“Bloody Bill” Anderson’s corpse, photographed in Richmond, Missouri, October 27, 1864. Courtesy of State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia.

now at a huge price in blood. Altogether, in guerrilla encounters and in regular military service, about forty of the community’s men gave their lives during the war. In the summer of 1860, the census takers counted 211 German American males in the community between the ages of fifteen and forty-five. The community’s Civil War losses make for a death rate of nearly 20 percent of the males of military age. Such a rate was characteristic of the South rather than the North, although these Germans fought for the Union. According to Michael Fellman, the leading historian of the state’s guerrilla conflict, “Missouri . . . produced the most widespread, longestlived and most destructive guerrilla war in the Civil War.” When the number of lives lost, amount of property destroyed, and psychological terror in that terrible conflict are added together, one would be

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Gravestone of Wilhelm Bodenstab, born in Niederstöcken and killed at the age of eighteen in the bushwhacker raid of October 10, 1864. St. John Cemetery, rural Freedom Township. Photograph by the author.

hard-pressed to find a Missouri community that suffered more than the Germans of Freedom Township.48 One of those killed by the guerrillas that terrible day in 1864 was eighteen-year-old Wilhelm Bodenstab. He had been born at Niederstöcken on January 3, 1846, into a houseling’s family. The children of houselings did not have an easy time in Hanover, nor had life been easy in Missouri. When the boy was nine years old, after only a short time in the New World, his father had drowned in Blackwater Creek. Nine years later, Bodenstab, by then a young man, gave his life. His mother and brother had his gravestone inscribed, “Gest. den 10 Okt 1864 durch Mördersband bei Verteidigung seiner Heimath”: “Died October 10, 1864, at the hands of a gang of murderers in the defense of his homeland.” Western Missouri was now the new Heimat or homeland, and it had been defended whatever the cost in blood.

48. Fellman, Inside War, v.

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5. Postwar Growth and Development

o

In spite of its losses of men, livestock, equipment, produce, and even shelter during four years of war, the population and economy of the German community of southeastern Lafayette County recovered quickly in the postwar years. In 1860, there had been 836 Germans and their American-born descendants in Freedom Township. Together with another eighty-three in Salt Pond Township, just across the county line in Saline County, a few on the north side of Davis Creek in eastern Davis Township, and a few others just to the south of Freedom Township in Grover Township of Johnson County, the “German settlement” numbered roughly one thousand persons in about 175 households. Between 1860 and 1870, the community doubled in size, irrespective of its suffering during the war. By five years after the war’s end, the community numbered more than two thousand people and some 375 households in parts of four townships. Almost nine hundred of those people had been born in Germany. With much available land and no reason to limit family size, there were some 1,100 younger people who had been born in America. The community had grown so much that more than a quarter of its people had already spilled out into adjoining townships. Most who had been present in 1860 had persisted through the war to be counted in 1870; 48 percent of the German heads of households who had been present in Freedom and Salt Pond Townships in 1860 were still present in 1870. The families of nine household heads who had been killed in the war were present in 1870; some families of 1860 household heads who had died of natural causes were also present; and since others had 121

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moved over the township lines but were still within the community, the persistence rate for families was 58 percent. This is below the 65 percent persistence rate for the previous decade, but it is rather high for the American frontier nonetheless. This persistence rate seems completely extraordinary in light of the repeated guerrilla attacks on the settlement during the war.1 The new families present in 1870 but not listed in the community in 1860 can be sorted into several categories. The Freedom Township settlement continued to attract both Germans from St. Louis and Germans from other American states. Children aged ten or older who had been born in Missouri resided in thirty-four of these new families. Most were probably living in St. Louis in 1860. Of course, a few of these families may have been missed by the Lafayette County census taker in the previous census. One of the new families of 1870 was in the Cole Camp community in 1860. Children less than ten years old and born in other American states lived in seventeen of the new families. These German American families had come to Missouri sometime after the summer of 1860 and probably after the end of the war. Five of these families contained children born in Illinois, but many other states were represented, including Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, Indiana, and even Kansas, Nebraska, and Arkansas. Thus, Germans who had resided for a time in all of these states came to the Freedom Township settlement in the 1860s. Heinrich and Luise Rehkop, both from Hanover, had stopped over for some years in another country. Their family in 1870 contained an eighteen-year-old born in Hanover, three children born over the course of seven years in Canada West (probably in modern Ontario), and a five-year-old born in Missouri. Of those immigrants who had come directly from Germany since 1860, not all were single individuals. Twelve families had come from Hanover, four from Prussia, and one each from Holstein and Bavaria. Six of these families must have been quite recent immigrants because they had children aged three or younger who were German-born.2 Growth continued during the decade of the 1870s, but new immigration from Germany slowed considerably after the depression of 1. Frizzell, “Low German Settlements,” 107–9, 117. The figures above sometimes differ from those published in 1998 because of the subsequent addition of some outlying areas. 2. This entire paragraph restates Frizzell, “Low German Settlements,” 117.

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Postwar Growth and Development o

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Table 4 Ethnic German Population of Greater Concordia Area 1850

1860

1870

1880

Freedom Township

Households 73 145 246 318 German-born 260 452 594 534 total pop.* 383 836 1,330 1,658 East Freedom Households (197) German-born (335) total pop.* (1,059) West Freedom Households (45) German-born (76) total pop.* (246) Concordia Households (76) German-born (123) total pop.* (353) Salt Pond Township Households 3 16 66 74 German-born 13 51 152 127 total pop.* 14 83 387 380 Grover Township Households 24 36 German-born 57 71 total pop.* 137 217 East Davis Township Households 5 39 82 German-born 17 86 187 total pop.* 36 190 474 All Households 76 166 375 510 German-born 273 520 889 919 total pop.* 397 955 2,044 2,729 *Total ethnic population including the American-born descendants of immigrants Decadal increase

140.6%

114.0%

33.5%

Sources: 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880 Population Census Manuscript Schedules, Lafayette, Saline, and Johnson counties, Missouri.

1873. This is clear from the relatively small number of immigrants from the period from 1875 to 1879 who appeared in Freedom and Salt Pond Townships in the 1900 census of immigrants. The hemp market’s collapse and the growing expense of farmland also helped to slow population growth, but the depression in America of the middle and later 1870s would seem to have been the most important factor (see Table 5). The entire population of German heritage grew to some 2,729 persons between 1870 and 1880 (33.5 percent), and the number of households grew from 375 to 510. The number of persons born in Germany grew by only 3.4 percent as newcomers from Europe barely exceeded

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the number of older immigrants who died or moved elsewhere. In the 1870s, much of the settlement’s expansion was northward into Davis Township. The population of German heritage in eastern Davis Township jumped from 190 to 474 in the 1870s. Some German speakers from Freedom Township families also went a few miles further into southern Middleton Township in a continuing process of buying land from Anglo owners. There they encountered different flows of northwestern German immigrants. In the 1870s, Lafayette and Saline counties began to receive substantial numbers of northwestern German farmers from the “Missouri Rhineland” west of St. Louis and from Illinois. Many of these were young adults whose parents had immigrated to America a generation earlier. Young farm families from the Femme Osage Evangelical Church in St. Charles County came up the Missouri River to found daughter congregations at Napoleon, in the northwestern corner of Lafayette County, and at Levasy, just across the county line in Jackson County. Germans from Femme Osage were joined by others from Gasconade, Osage, and Warren counties in a new congregation at Wellington, appropriately, a few miles east of Napoleon in northwestern Lafayette County. German speakers from the eastern part of Missouri continued infiltrating formerly “old American” parts of Lafayette and Saline counties until the first years of the twentieth century. Sometimes they were joined by new immigrants from Germany. In the 1870s, immigrants came directly from Lippe to the Higginsville area in the center of the county.3 The new town of Alma, on the Chicago and Alton Railroad in southern Middleton Township, which was to become heavily German in subsequent decades, contained only three German families in 1880. Yet some 117 ethnic Germans in eighteen families already lived in the surrounding farmlands of southern Middleton. There, families from Freedom Township were outnumbered in the early years by German speakers from Illinois and from the Cole Camp settlement in Benton County.4 A disproportionate number of younger families across the entire community seemed to be composed of a German-born husband and 3. Henry Bode, Builders of Our Foundations, 170–74, 208; Young, Lafayette, 1:53, 298, 300. 4. Kirchenbuch, Trinity Lutheran Church, Alma, Missouri.

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a Missouri-born wife whose parents had been born in Germany. But there were certainly also new families composed of a couple of Missouri-born young adults all of whose parents had come from Germany. By June 1880, these young Missouri-born couples had already produced 121 third-generation children. This settlement absorbed considerable numbers of the new wave of German immigration to America in the early 1880s that peaked in 1882. As the German settlement spread to new areas, and as ever more Germans bought land from departing Anglo-Americans, much of this wave of the 1880s probably found land in Davis and Middleton Townships of Lafayette County, but in 1900, ninety-three immigrants from the early 1880s lived in the old settlement areas of Freedom and Salt Pond Townships. German immigration to the area continued at a reduced but still substantial rate through the early 1890s. It was probably the Panic of 1893 in America, together with rapid economic growth in Germany, that permanently halted the wave of emigration from northwestern Germany to Lafayette County that had begun fiftyfive years earlier.5 In the postwar period, the growth of this settlement continued to depend heavily upon agriculture. Across the entire Little Dixie region in west and central Missouri, agriculture, in turn, experienced a major structural transformation at the end of the war. The former slave owners endured the most dramatic changes because they lost much of their labor force. It is true that before the war, many small slave owners worked in the fields alongside their slaves and that many slaves remained in the area as wage-laborers after the war. Yet the war gave many slaves opportunities to flee the area. Those who remained could not necessarily be drawn by wages into the same quantity or type of labor that had been extracted from them with the lash when they were enslaved. Many white male owners of farms fled the wartime chaos of the area, too, or died in service with the secessionist or Federal armies. Sometimes their farms went unattended for years. For those prewar farmers who remained at war’s end, the shortage of labor and capital meant that losses of livestock, buildings, supplies of feedstuffs, fencing, and so on could be made up only slowly. In 1870, in Lexington 5. Exact growth figures cannot be calculated for the 1880s because the 1890 manuscript census schedules were destroyed in a U.S. Commerce Department fire in the 1920s.

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o Independent Immigrants Table 5 Year of Immigration for Germans Living in Freedom Township in 1900 1835–1839 1840–1844 1845–1849 1850–1854 1855–1859 1860–1864 1865–1869 1870–1874 1875–1879 1880–1884 1885–1889 1890–1894 1895–1899

7 16 27 42 44 38 42 37 15 93 44 28 0

Source: 1900 Census of Population.

and Dover Townships, both heavily dependent upon slave labor in 1860, there were 36 percent fewer horses than a decade earlier, 38 percent fewer mules, 47 percent fewer milk cows, 52 percent fewer other cattle, and 56 percent fewer hogs than in 1860. The two townships harvested 46 percent less corn (some 150,000 bushels less) in 1869 than in 1859. Even the number of improved acres of farmland in the two townships fell by fully one third as fields went unplanted and Virginia rail fences that had been used for firewood by bivouacked troops, or had rotted away, were not replaced. Prairie grass and saplings once again took over almost fifteen thousand acres of land. Production of the chief cash crop, hemp, fell by almost 72 percent. This was for the crop year 1869. What the growing seasons of 1865 and 1866 were like can only be imagined. In contrast to Lexington and Dover Townships, where so many slaves had dwelled before emancipation, the southern townships of Lafayette County, much less dependent on slavery, experienced rapid economic growth in the late 1860s. Growth in Freedom Township was especially precipitous. The number of improved acres of farmland increased by 53.9 percent, and the number of farms grew by about a quarter from one census year to the next. There were over a quarter more horses and 41 percent more mules in 1870 than in 1860, while herds of cattle by

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1870 were up to their prewar level. There remained 17.5 percent fewer hogs than in 1860, and corn harvesting was still off by nearly 10 percent, but other crops were taking up the slack. The Germans of Freedom Township were the only group of farmers in the entire region after the war who continued to produce hemp at or in excess of their prewar production level. The market for Missouri hemp had been temporarily destroyed during the war when the federal government completely blocked commercial access to the South. Higher prices returned in 1866, but no slaves were then available for the twenty man-days of hard, dirty work required to “break” each ton of hemp fiber. In the county as a whole, hemp production fell by 70.3 percent from 1859 to 1869, that is, from 4,596.5 to 1,377.5 tons. But hemp production among the Germans of Freedom Township more than doubled. The Germans used their own hard labor to break hemp and could therefore respond to rising prices. In the 1859 crop year, fifty-seven German American farmers produced 84.5 tons of hemp. Ten years later, ninetynine German American farmers produced 180 tons. Nine in every ten immigrant farmers in the settlement had grown hemp in 1849, only two in five had done so in 1859, but in 1869, at a time when hemp production was plummeting all around them, the proportion of German Americans in Freedom Township who produced the crop had risen back to three in five. The Germans and their Anglo neighbors generally grew the same crops, but their differing prewar labor sources made for quite a different response to the strong market for hemp that redeveloped for a few years after the war. Since the market for Missouri hemp collapsed for the final time in the early 1870s, as Philippine jute and other materials took its place, it is fortunate that in the years just after the war, Little Dixie turned so heavily to small grains and particularly to wheat as the chief cash crop. From 1859 to 1869, wheat production in Lafayette County rose by 8.4 times from 50,399 to 424,536 bushels. Lafayette County farmers grew more and more wheat to the end of the century and beyond—1,493,040 bushels in 1889 and 1,643,804 bushels in 1919. At first the Germans were a bit behind the trend, since in 1869, hemp still occupied a great deal of their effort. The wheat harvested in Freedom Township rose only 5.2 times from 10,133 bushels in 1859 to 52,079 bushels in 1869. But then production grew in the heavily German township to 186,153 bushels in 1879. Wheat’s role in feeding the burgeoning industrial cities of America

25,335 15,665 1,271 1,965,935 1,080,100 875 554 423 228 909 487 2,228 926 8,264 4,086 271,275 143,320 1,819 1,024 952.5 234.5 10,202 58,327 12,173 17,510

Sources: U.S. Census 8th Report, 1860, and 9th Report, 1870, Agriculture Schedule.

Oats (bu.)

Wheat (bu.)

Hemp (tons)

Hay (tons)

Corn (bu.)

Hogs

Other cattle

Milk cows

85,727 76,823 4,178 5,337,378 4,458,263 2,929 2,827 1,478 1,326 3,201 2,271 8,059 4,476 29,831 15,970 1,072,865 744,758 4,725 2,948 3,623 933 29,646 244,939 39,347 88,577

64,377 90,306 1,504 2,444,918 4,148,109 3,313 4,127 1,347 1,434 3,161 3,260 7,023 5,965 23,484 17,425 899,866 790,211 2,727 4,337 973.5 444.5 20,753 179,585 17,825 180,787

Four southern townships

16,995 26,163 273 618,605 1,183,624 902 1,159 386 544 1,109 1,168 2,392 2,260 5,829 4,807 232,485 212,076 795 1,045 246 204 10,133 52,079 8,610 59,108

Freedom Township

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Mules and asses

Horses on farms

1860 1870 1860 1860 1870 1860 1870 1860 1870 1860 1870 1860 1870 1860 1870 1860 1870 1860 1870 1860 1870 1860 1870 1860 1870

Lexington Township

8/21/07

Rural slaves Value of farms ($)

Improved acres

Four northern townships

Table 6 Civil War’s Varied Impact on Agriculture in Lafayette County

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and Europe created a strong demand for ever more of the grain. The former slave owners were the first to turn to wheat because it required intensive labor only for short periods of time at sowing and harvest. Only when the hemp market plunged for the final time did the Germans turn to wheat as a cash crop to the same extent as did their Anglo neighbors.6 In the immediate years after the war, the production of oats followed much the same trajectory as wheat. County production rose from 57,172 bushels in 1859 to 269,364 bushels in 1869, or 4.7 times. Freedom Township’s production of oats grew faster than that of the whole county in the 1860s. The figures jump from 8,610 bushels in 1859 to 59,108 bushels a decade later. Oats were used primarily to feed livestock rather than people. Much of the oat crop was fed to horses and mules (although oats can also be fed to other animals). Since the number of horses and mules peaked as the optimum amount of cropland was put into production, the demand for oats peaked in a few decades, while the demand for wheat to feed the ever-growing cities continued to rise. Thus it was that wheat and, somewhat more slowly, livestock became the most significant sources of cash for local farmers of all ethnicities in later decades of the nineteenth century. As the decades progressed, even small differences in agricultural production between the Germans and their Anglo neighbors became ever more difficult to find. At an early time, however, the local German farmers developed their own way of protecting themselves from losses by fire. They formed a mutual fire insurance compact. This action contrasted with many Lutheran quarters in America, where such calamities as fire and weather losses were considered acts of God. Where such losses were so regarded, it followed that an effort to minimize the impact of these losses thwarted divine will or showed lack of faith in divine providence. The Hanoverians had experienced compulsory government fire insurance for a century in the Old World, so unlike many other Lutherans, they had no religious scruples against insurance. But in Missouri, they chose a distinctive model of protection. In 1869, local German farmers in Freedom Township formed a mutual insurance compact for aiding those who lost 6. Mary Eschelbach Gregson, “Rural Response to Increased Demand: Crop Choice in the Midwest, 1860–1880,” 332–34.

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houses or household goods owing to fire or lightning. It was called simply the Aid Association. There were no periodic premiums. Each member was simply honor-bound to pay his prorated share of any other member’s covered loss within twenty days of notification that a loss had been sustained. There were no written policies or even certificates of membership until 1930. The Aid Association functioned for sixty-one years completely on word of honor. After the first years, other buildings, such as barns, could be covered, and beginning in 1893, losses from windstorm as well as fire were insurable. Grain, livestock, and farm implements were insured beginning in 1909. There were at least fifty charter members. While the association never had a religious requirement, until 1917, only farmers who understood German well could join.7 The end of the Civil War, in addition to bringing considerable population growth to the settlement and new agricultural growth, also brought the first town. The founding of Concordia thus came only after more than a quarter century of growth and development within the rural German community. The earliest Hanoverian settlers had to go to Dover, some twenty miles across the prairie, for such supplies as salt, shot, gunpowder, and metal tools. For other goods and for the services of county officials, a sixty-mile round-trip to Lexington was required. It took three days by ox-drawn wagon. Nearer towns, including Brownsville in Saline County, came into being in the 1840s. The Georgetown-Lexington stagecoach line running across the western edge of the Hanoverian settlement began operation in 1847. In 1850, Mordecai Cook opened a store on the stagecoach line at a station where horses were changed some two and a half miles west of St. Paul’s Church. In 1851, a U.S. Post Office was opened at Cook’s store.8 By 1860, the nucleus of a village was beginning to develop directly within the German settlement itself. In 1859, Henry and August Brockhoff opened a store on what would become St. Louis Street in the 7. James Adams, Preus of Missouri and the Great Lutheran Civil War, 44–45, explains how an early twentieth-century entrepreneur made a fortune convincing Lutheran farmers that insurance was not irreligious if the insurance company was operated by and for Lutherans; see also Leslie B. Kueck, “Concordia Insurance Company,” 77–79; and “About Concordia Farmers Mutual,” http://www.cfmimo.com/about.html. The organization continues today with a much more conventional business model under the name Concordia Farmers Mutual Insurance Company and is the oldest business in the county. 8. Voigt, Concordia, 35; [Rodewald], Descending Love, 17.

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future town of Concordia, one-half mile south of St. Paul’s Church. About this time, a hotel was also opened on St. Louis Street. By 1862, Moeller’s store had joined Brockhoff ’s along with Vogt’s blacksmith works and several houses. In 1862, Frau Biltz referred to this spot as die Bank, one of the meanings of which can be a “row”—in this case, of buildings. As a village developed, it acquired the name Humboldt, after the great early-nineteenth-century German geographer and naturalist.9 Early in 1865, Pastor Biltz applied to the Postmaster General in Washington for a post office. The petition was granted May 17, and the new post office, with the name Concordia, was set up in the old log parsonage near St. Paul’s Church. In 1868, a town was platted that included St. Louis Street as the easternmost of five north-south streets. A jointstock company of two Anglo-Americans and three Germans platted the town and sold lots. Gradually, the main business district shifted two streets to the west. The joint-stock company used the name Concordia instead of Humboldt. In 1871, the post office was moved from the old parsonage by the church to a store in the business district.10 In terms of the cultural identity of the community, the name change from Humboldt to Concordia may well be significant. The two names embody quite different facets of German American culture. Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was a Prussian from near Berlin who had attended the University of Göttingen in Hanover for a time. As a naturalist, he made significant contributions to geography, botany, geology, navigational astronomy, mineralogy, meteorology, and climatology. In 1799, he began a five-year tour of equatorial South America, Mexico, and Cuba, which produced major advancements of scientific knowledge. On his way home, he visited President Thomas Jefferson at the White House and was inducted into the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia in 1804, a year before being made a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. As the decades progressed, Humboldt became better and better known to American readers through translations of his books and articles into English and by popular articles about him in the American press. According to Aaron Sachs, Humboldt was the most influential scientist in America in the decades 9. Arndt, “Several Episodes,” 45. Actually she wrote “alle in der Bank,” in the dative case. 10. Voigt, Concordia, 36–37.

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before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Humboldt expressed great admiration for American political institutions and called America his second homeland.11 The Germans of Freedom Township probably knew of Humboldt for other reasons. In 1856, a Southerner named J. S. Thrasher, who wanted to promote the annexation of Cuba, published an English translation of Humboldt’s book on the island. But Thrasher omitted the chapter in which Humboldt severely condemned Cuban slavery. Humboldt wrote a protest letter that was translated into English and published in American newspapers. The German American newspapers then picked it up. The new Republican Party reminded German American voters of Humboldt’s condemnation of slavery as a part of the presidential campaigns of John C. Frémont in 1856 and of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Humboldt died in 1859 and was widely hailed in the mainstream American press, despite his expressed hatred of slavery. All of this was happening in the time that the Germans of Freedom Township were choosing a name for their Bank. Humboldt’s name carried prestige with educated Americans, just as it embodied the local Germans’ opposition to slavery and the pride that they took, whatever their personal level of education, in German cultural accomplishments.12 At the same time, Humboldt’s name was problematic beyond the fact that Lafayette County slave owners might have been offended if they read urban newspapers and thus knew of Humboldt’s views on slavery. Humboldt was a secularist, a humanist, a nonbeliever in the Christian message, as were many of the leading thinkers of his time. It may have seemed entirely inappropriate to such a religious-minded man as Pastor Biltz that the village be named for a humanist.13

11. Kirsten Belgum, “Reading Alexander von Humboldt: Cosmopolitan Naturalist with an American Spirit,” 107–8; Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism, 2, 17. 12. Hartmut Keil, “German Immigrants and African-Americans in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” 145–47. It is not known exactly when the name Humboldt came into use for the village. It is recorded that when August Brockhoff ’s estate was inventoried by Fritz Brackmann on October 10, 1863, among the property was “one house and lot in Humboldt,” part of the northeast quarter of the southwest quarter of section 4, township 48, range 24 (Lafayette County Probate Court records, Lexington, Missouri). 13. On leading nineteenth-century English thinkers who were nonbelievers, see A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization.

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In choosing the name Concordia for his post office (and thus the name by which the community would be known to outsiders), Biltz reached deep into the Lutheran past for a Latin term that can mean “hearts in harmony.” Certainly in early 1865 the community needed a heartfelt harmony within itself to ease the pain of severe war wounds that were still quite fresh. The community also needed harmony, at least on certain political essentials, with the surrounding Anglo-Americans in order to insure that the kind of bloodshed that had taken place in the previous years would never happen again. But the name Concordia carried its own historical baggage. It comes from the Formula of Concord finalized by six Lutheran theologians at Bergen Abbey near Magdeburg, Germany, in May 1577. The Formula of Concord and the Book of Concord of 1580, which also included the other central Lutheran confessional documents, became “the authoritative source and guide . . . for the interpretation of the scriptures” for most German Lutherans. This was a concord between the disputatious Reformation-era theologians who followed Martin Luther and Luther’s chief deputy, Philipp Melanchthon. It was not a concord between all Germans, all German Christians, or even all German Protestants. Presumably Pastor Biltz had the universal applicability of the concept of harmony in mind as an ideal. But perhaps for some of those local Germans who had favored the name Humboldt, the name Concordia reminded them of the obscurantist theological wrangling of the sixteenth century—a kind of insistence on theological purity as understood by one party such as was not unknown in Missouri three hundred years later.14 A community named after a religious document written in Germany in 1577 was not likely to find itself fully integrated into a nation founded on the political ideology of the English revolutions of the seventeenth

14. Robert Kolb, “Formula of Concord,” 120. Ironically, Calenberg, where so many Freedom Township Germans originated, was ruled at the time by Duke Julius of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, who, while accepting the Formula theologically, did not join the political settlement that accompanied it. In the modern era, while so many institutions of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod are named Concordia (in Clayton, Missouri; River Forest, Illinois; Ft. Wayne, Indiana; Seward, Nebraska; and so on), the Synod refuses, for theological reasons, to join other Lutherans in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. The name denotes harmony, but it connotes separatism in the name of theological purity.

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century (especially as formulated by Hooker and Locke) and the French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century (especially as formulated by Montesquieu). And indeed, the Germans of Concordia frequently found themselves at odds with their Anglo-American neighbors during the first century of the town’s history. The Civil War did not help with this matter. It has sometimes been claimed that the Civil War Americanized those two hundred thousand Germans who served in the Union armies, and, through them, helped Americanize their ethnic communities as well. Recent scholarship challenges these claims, and such claims certainly do not describe what happened in Lafayette County in the 1860s.15 Evidence as to the limited Americanization of the ethnic community comes from the names chosen for the first streets of the town of Concordia just three years after the end of the war. No streets were named for American founding fathers, presidents, or heroes of the recent war. Two streets were named for the largest northern German cities—Berlin and Hamburg. One street was named for Schiller, one of the most popular German writers among German Americans at the time. Another street was named for Bismarck, the Prussian ministerpresident who had only two years earlier forcibly annexed Hanover to Prussia and had then united all of northern Germany into a confederation. In less than three additional years, Bismarck was to force most of the German states into an empire largely controlled by Prussia. If no Anglo-American cultural icons were honored with street names, neither were any important figures from Hanoverian history. Nor have other evidences of identification with Hanover, apart from continued interest in the Hanoverian Church, come to light from this or any later periods. There was no long history of identification as Hanoverians. Until about 1800, most people in the electorate thought of themselves as residents of one of the older divisions or provinces such as Calenberg or Osnabrück. But it was not simply a short history as Hanoverians and the demise of that kingdom in 1866 that made for a change in the immigrants’ cultural identification between the naming of sons for the Hanoverian king in the 1850s and naming the village streets in the late 1860s. It was the American Civil War, with its hostility and egregious violence against all Germans in western 15. See Wolfgang Helbich’s excellent discussion of the issue in Kamphoefner and Helbich, Germans in the Civil War, 31–33.

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Missouri, that helped immigrants, be they from Hanover, Westfalia, Oldenburg, Baden, or Bavaria, to see themselves as one people— Germans in America, or German Americans. The war did not turn them into Americans similar to the people of Anglo heritage among whom they had settled. It made them German Americans, rather than immigrants from Hanover or another preunification German state.16 Of course, being German in Freedom Township was not identical with being German at other places in America. In Freedom Township, being German implied being Protestant, having a rural mind-set, or at least a preindustrial one, and being familiar with a North German dialect. In many other places in America, for example, Stearns County, Minnesota, being German meant being Catholic. In other places, being German could imply being south German, or being of the urban working or middle classes. But across America, the Civil War helped to make a single ethnic group of the diverse immigrants from the German states. In Lafayette County, this effect was perhaps all the stronger owing to the fact that the immigrant community fell victim to direct attacks by guerrillas. Whatever the cultural underpinnings of its town name and its street names, Concordia grew rapidly in the years just after the Civil War. By 1870, the town had grown to include about 150 people in twenty-five households. The wealthiest man in town was Heinrich Detert, a Prussian who operated a store with his partner, August Hackmann. Detert’s real estate and goods were valued at some twenty thousand dollars. Seven other men in town were also considered merchants by the census taker. John Snyder owned the largest industrial enterprise. He had ten thousand dollars invested in a gristmill with a steam engine, two boilers, and two pairs of burrs or grindstones. He employed four men who in 1869–1870 ground 9,500 sacks of flour and 6,400 bushels of meal. John F. Meyer had $4,600 invested in the community’s other gristmill, where three hired men operated one pair of grindstones driven by a steam engine. This operation annually produced 3,330 barrels of flour and 5,380 bushels of meal. William Meyers put horses on a treadmill to card wool and had carded some seventy-five hundred pounds in five months of operation. The Thiemann brothers ran a sawmill with two circular saws driven by a portable steam engine. In 16. Schubert notes early Hanoverian provincial political identity (“Hannover,” 27).

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six months with three hired hands, they had sawn over 130,000 board feet of lumber worth more than thirty-five hundred dollars. A second steam sawmill in the township, operated by an American, produced about half as much.17 The town had attracted numerous craftsmen by the beginning of the 1870s. Four saddlers and harness makers practiced their craft. Gustav Freund had produced one thousand dollars’ worth of goods in six months. Julius Vogt, the same immigrant who had been shot twice by bushwhackers in 1862, produced $1,550 worth of work as a blacksmith. Blacksmiths William Frerking and Friedrich Kueck were not far behind. The Pennsylvania-born James Graham, after warning the Germans of the approach of George Todd’s bushwhackers in 1864, had moved from Brownsville into Freedom Township by 1870 and was serving as an additional blacksmith. The tinsmith Wilhelm Sodemann had already been at work in the community for several years. The village and its surrounding farmers were keeping busy three carpenters, three tailors, two boot and shoemakers, a stonemason, a brick mason, a butcher, and the wagonmaker Fritz Heisterberg. Three physicians practiced—two Germans and one New Yorker. The three druggists included Heinrich D. Stünkel, a farmer who dispensed homeopathic compounds purchased from a German homeopathic apothecary in St. Louis. There was a hotel and a saloon run by an elderly man from Baden. The Hanoverians and their descendants who made up twothirds of the farming population of the settlement tended to continue practicing agriculture despite opportunities in the town. In 1870, scarcely more than a third of the German businessmen and craftsmen of the town had originated in Hanover. Craftsmen and entrepreneurs from other parts of the old country moved into Freedom Township to serve the increasingly prosperous Hanoverian farmers.18 In the early 1870s, as the town was growing rapidly and experiencing a construction boom, numerous fires of suspicious origin 17. Concordia was not enumerated separately from the Freedom Township in 1870, but clearly entries 1 through 23 of the 1870 population schedule for Freedom Township are a village and not separate farm sites (Freedom Township, 1870 census of population and 1870 census of manufactures). 18. People from other parts of the old country likewise moved in to serve the Hanoverian farmers at Cole Camp in Benton County (Frizzell, “Low German Settlements,” 112, 114).

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Town of Concordia, Missouri, in 1871. Courtesy of Gary and Judy Beissenherz.

destroyed important buildings. In a few months in 1874, three stores, a hotel, two residences, and one saloon were burned. This began to have a quite negative effect on new investment in the town. One fall evening, a lady in the town was awakened at night. Going to her door, she saw that flammable material had been piled there. The arsonist ran away, but the next morning, citizens followed his tracks in the mud to the home of a certain Dr. J. Rush. Inside the house were goods he had stolen from other buildings before they had been torched. Dr. Rush was found hiding outside town, his hiding place having been revealed by the neighing of his horse. A crowd consisting partly of drunken people marched him through town with a rope around his neck. Despite the pleading of the Methodist minister and others, the crowd took Dr. Rush south of town and hanged him. German Americans, too, in this case proved capable of vigilante justice.19

19. Voigt, Concordia, 39–40.

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By 1880, the population of the village of Concordia had more than doubled to 353 since 1870, and this count was soon contested as too low by the town’s residents. For all its population growth since 1870, the town’s manufacturing seems to have remained stable. The two steam-driven gristmills continued to produce about the same amount of wheat flour, much of which was shipped to St. Louis. The saddle and harness business was largely under the control of A. E. Bruns, who employed three workers to manufacture goods worth some seven thousand dollars. Three blacksmiths, including Vogt and Frerking, still practiced their craft, as did Sodemann, the tinner. Two wagonmakers were at work. Retailing and services had expanded considerably so that there were five dry goods stores, five groceries, two hardware stores, two lumber dealers, a bank, two furniture stores, a barbershop, three hotels, a livery stable, a millinery, and four saloons.20 What had made Concordia something of a boomtown in 1870 but had caused manufacturing (although not retailing) to plateau before 1880 was the coming of the railroad. In the summer of 1870, as the census was taken, the Lexington and St. Louis Railroad was being constructed through Concordia. Two railroad contractors were in town, a twenty-eight-year-old born in Ireland and a man two years younger, born in Kentucky. Seventeen Irish, American, and German railroad construction laborers lived under the same roof in town. Excepting one man in his thirties, they ranged in age from eighteen to twenty-six. Although these young men probably spent much of their wages in Concordia, it may have been a relief to many when they left town before the first trains began to run between Lexington and Sedalia through Concordia in March 1871. The same trains that hauled out barrels of flour, sacks of wheat, and live cattle and hogs brought in manufactured goods, thus dampening the demand for some local manufactures. Friedrich Dierking had chosen Freedom Township in 1838 because the early American settlers had, for the most part, bypassed its reasonably good lands because they were not beside the major transportation arteries of the steamboat era. Through the 1840s, much unclaimed land in Freedom Township was available to Dierking and his followers. The Lexington and St. Louis Railroad, soon taken over 20. 1880 Freedom Township Census of Manufactures; History of Lafayette County, 424–26.

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by the Missouri Pacific, brought Concordia and Freedom Township directly into the national transportation grid. This, in turn, allowed a new level of commercialization for farmers, merchants, and larger manufacturers.21 Not everyone in Missouri or in Lafayette County was pleased with the railroads in general or the Lexington and St. Louis in particular. The citizens of Lafayette County had voted in 1859, before the Civil War, to support the Lexington and St. Louis, already in the planning stage, with half a million dollars in county bonds. The Hanoverians had been even more enthusiastic concerning the project than were the general run of Lafayette Countians. The total vote in the county was 1,668 for the bonds and 757 against. In the eastern precinct of Freedom Township, the vote was 136 for and only 8 against. But the war intervened, with all its damage and destruction of wealth, and the railroad changed its proposed route. Most attorneys presumed the planned route changes invalidated the prewar election results. However, in April 1868, after bonds had been voted the previous month for an entirely different railroad through the county, attorneys for the Lexington and St. Louis applied for its half-million dollars in county bonds based on the election held eight and a half years earlier. A court order forced the county, against the will of its elected officials, to issue the bonds in July. In May 1869, George H. Ambrose of Lexington, who had been elected as the presiding commissioner of Lafayette County, became president of the railroad company as well. There was much complaint about Ambrose issuing bonds to himself in his various capacities. Legal charges were brought against him but were later dropped. A county commissioner named Letton was proven to have taken a bribe to turn over some county bonds to the company before the company had fulfilled its required contractual obligations.22 From 1869 to 1875, the third county commissioner, in addition to Ambrose and Letton, was Conrad Stünkel of Freedom Township, born 21. Sources vary as to the date of the first train in Concordia (History of Lafayette County, 327; Voigt, Concordia, 37). It may be that trains came from Sedalia and turned around at Concordia before the track was completed to Lexington. 22. David Thelen, Paths of Resistance: Tradition and Dignity in Industrializing Missouri, 62–70. Until recent decades, the county commissioners were called “judges of the county court,” although this “county court” of three elected “judges” was limited to administering county business and making policy for the county; it was not a court of law. History of Lafayette County, 310–29, has a full account of the various county railroad controversies.

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Notice to the widow of Wilhelm Oetting, dated November 19, 1869, to come to Lexington and apply for damages that were to be caused by constructing the Lexington and St. Louis Railroad across her farm. Courtesy of Steven and Sharon Oetting.

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in Metel, south of Esperke, in 1811, and a farmer just beside St. Paul’s Church since 1840. Stünkel probably supported the railroad and did so with complete integrity. On April 3, 1871, Freedom Township itself subscribed an additional twenty-five thousand dollars in bonds to purchase Lexington and St. Louis stock. The many county and township bonds created a heavy public debt, which brought high taxation rates to the county. By 1875, the county had a bonded indebtedness, mostly for various railroad schemes, of $1,384,099, which was 17.5 percent of its assessed valuation. This situation existed in an era of prolonged and serious deflation, so that if no payment was made on the principal, a bonded debt was worth more in real terms in each successive year. The taxpayers of Lafayette County held conventions in 1874 and again in 1875 to discuss what could be done. Since the bonds were clouded by legal irregularities, it was decided that rather than going to court, the bondholders would be offered a compromise. The holders of most of the bonds would be offered eighty cents per dollar of the bonds’ face value and a reduction of the interest rate from 10 to 6 percent. County voters ratified this compromise on December 30, 1875, and most of the bondholders accepted. But others sued the county, so the court battles went on for years. Although the Freedom Township delegation to the county taxpayers’ convention of 1875 had not included a single German, Judge (county commissioner) Stünkel claimed that he favored some kind of compromise with the bondholders. Neither he nor the other county commissioners ran for reelection.23 That a Freedom Township German could be elected to county office in 1869 was due entirely to a temporary Missouri political situation that resulted from the recent war. For most of the nineteenth century, the Germans were politically out of step with their Anglo neighbors in the county. The 1860 election was discussed in the previous chapter; in the presidential election of 1864, Lafayette County favored McClellan to Lincoln 396 to 346, even though most Southern sympathizers were disenfranchised. At Brockhoff’s store, however, McClellan received only 7 votes to 59 for Lincoln. When General Grant was reelected to the presidency in 1872, the county went for Horace Greeley 2,984 to 1,523, but the East Freedom precinct went for Grant 240 to 22. Missouri’s German 23. History of Lafayette County, 310–29, 576.

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American U.S. senator, Carl Schurz, gave lukewarm support for Greeley, but few Germans liked Greeley, since he was a temperance advocate. In 1872, the majority of the settlement’s ethnic voters rejected the advice of Missouri’s liberal German American U.S. senator in the same way that they had rejected the admonitions of conservative religious leader C. F. W. Walther as they rushed to defend the Union in 1861. The Germans of eastern Freedom Township also voted against the county majority in both constitutional elections of the era. The county voted against the Radical or “Drake” Missouri Constitution of 1865 by a vote of 295 for and 816 against. Freedom Township voted 114 for and only 2 against. As the reconstruction era ended in Missouri and the conservatives (mostly Democrats) wrote a new conservative constitution for the state in 1875, Lafayette County approved it 1,778 to 287. But the Concordia precinct voted only 47 for and 93 against. The Freedom Township Germans were thus quite isolated politically in their county and their state from the end of Radical government in Missouri, when the Democrats gained control of the state, down to the time, in the early twentieth century, when Missouri began once again sometimes to elect Republicans to statewide public office.24 Conrad Stünkel probably owed his office to the infamous Missouri ironclad oath. Under the Drake constitution of 1865, in order to vote, one had to swear he was “innocent of any one of eighty-six different acts of supposed disloyalty to Missouri and to the Union.” These acts included even providing comfort or sending goods or letters to the enemy. By this requirement, most of the Anglo population of Lafayette County was disenfranchised. Although still in effect for voters in 1869, by 1872 the oath was a dead letter. Thus, it was nearly impossible for the local Germans to be elected to countywide office for several decades after the return of conservative government following the election of 1870.25 All around the Lafayette Germans, their former enemies in the late war controlled public policy and political office. The president of the convention that drafted the constitution of 1875 was Waldo P. Johnson, “who had been expelled from the United States Senate in 1862 for 24. Ibid., 300–303. 25. Parrish, History of Missouri, 121, 133. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Missouri oath for clergy and other professionals in January 1867, but the requirement for voters disappeared only in 1871.

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desertion to the Confederacy.” Johnson had been an officer in General Price’s army and had also become a Confederate senator from Missouri. In 1875, Francis M. Cockrell, a former Confederate general, took the U.S. Senate seat from Missouri that was vacated by the German-born Carl Schurz. For four terms after the election of 1878, George G. Vest joined Cockrell in representing Missouri in the U.S. Senate. Earlier, Vest had represented the Missouri Confederate government in exile by serving in both houses of the Confederate Congress in Richmond. After Grover Cleveland was elected to his second term as president of the United States in 1892, he appointed former Confederate general Jo Shelby as U.S. marshal for the western district of Missouri in Kansas City. Before becoming the regional federal marshal, the former Confederate cavalryman had lived for seventeen years almost next door to the Germans at a farm near Aullville, itself in Freedom Township and the next town west of Concordia. In 1884, John Sappington Marmaduke, from Arrow Rock in Saline County and another of Sterling Price’s Missouri Confederate generals, was elected governor of Missouri. He spent summers at Sweet Springs, just east of the German community, at the spa his family was developing at the mineral spring there. The Lafayette County Germans found themselves, despite being on the winning side in a devastating war, governed by former Confederates who were not just Missourians but their near neighbors. The situation provided scant encouragement to participate in public affairs.26 It must have added to the Germans’ feelings of separation from the larger community when a home for infirm or indigent Missouri Confederate veterans, their widows, and their minor children was opened at Higginsville in 1891. Higginsville is in Davis Township, scarcely more than a dozen miles from Concordia. Private donors established the home, but it later operated with Missouri state tax monies. No effort was made at the home or at its cemetery—even including the present-day Missouri State Historic Site—to distinguish between legitimate veterans of the Confederate army or Missouri State Guard and the common guerrillas who rode about the local countryside during the war terrorizing or killing whomever they disliked. 26. Parrish, History of Missouri, 324; O’Flaherty, Jo Shelby, 336, 383. In 1887, Brownsville voted to change its name to Sweet Springs (History of Sweet Springs, 1818–1992, 6–7).

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Among the sixteen hundred persons who resided at the home between 1891 and the death of the last resident veteran in 1950 were more than forty former guerrillas. The home was established and maintained in Lafayette County in blatant disregard of the wartime travail and continuing postwar trauma of the ethnic Germans.27 In the years immediately after the Civil War, some of the former wartime guerrillas—some of the very people who had shot down Germans in Freedom Township—turned to banditry. In their new role as bandits, they often received the same kind of support from the local, rural Anglo-American populace in western Missouri as they had in their former role as guerrillas. Jesse James became the best-known of these bandits both because of his own craving for publicity and due to the efforts of John Newman Edwards, editor of the Kansas City Times and former adjutant with the rank of major to Confederate general Jo Shelby. Edwards, aided by James himself, promoted these men in the press not only as admirable, owing simply to their extreme daring, but as “social bandits,” who, like the legendary Robin Hood, robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. Historians have interpreted the Missouri outlaw phenomenon as resulting from the alienation of the lately defeated Confederates who helped the bandits, as well as an expression of support for the ex-Confederate wing of the postwar Missouri Democratic Party. Public support of the outlaws who so frequently robbed trains can also be linked to public discontent with the railroads and the large amounts of tax monies used in their construction. Historian David Thelen has seen this support as an expression of opposition to post–Civil War industrial capitalism. Whatever the larger cultural significance of Jesse James, the Hanoverians surrounding Concordia viewed him and his men differently than did many of their neighboring Anglo-American farmers.28

27. In 1992, new federal regulations concerning human remains required the Kansas State Historical Society in Topeka to divest itself of several of the bones of guerrilla chieftain William Clarke Quantrill. They had been in a drawer at the society for many decades. A Confederate descendants’ group had the bones buried at the Missouri Confederate Cemetery at Higginsville. Not everyone was pleased. A hand-lettered sign appeared along the road beside the cemetery reading “Quantrill Toxic Waste Dump” (conversation with the site interpreter, Confederate Memorial State Historic Site, Higginsville, Missouri, June 13, 2006). 28. Stiles, Jesse James, 386–87; Thelen, Paths of Resistance, 70–77.

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Many were the times when Jesse James appeared in or near Freedom Township. At the age of seventeen, Jesse James probably rode with the group of one hundred guerrillas who attacked the Freedom Township Germans on October 10, 1864. He and his brother Frank had ridden with the Clay County contingent of Bill Anderson’s force at the Centralia Massacre three weeks earlier, and Edwards puts both Jesse and Frank at the October 10 encounter. What they did there is entirely unknown.29 After the war, in their bandit phase, the James brothers and assorted gang members were not infrequently at the farm of Jo Shelby near Aullville. A former sheriff reported that “many dark, criminal deeds” took place there at the time. Jesse may have been at the Shelby farm for the wedding of John Newman Edwards to Jennie Plattenburg from Dover Township, near the future town of Corder in 1871. At one point in the 1870s, Lafayette County sheriff William B. Young rousted Jesse from bed in a farmhouse near Aullville, but the outlaw got away across Davis Creek. Jo and Betty Shelby nursed Frank James back to health at their home for two and one-half months in 1872. He arrived bleeding at the lungs, but whether this was due to a shotgun blast after the Corydon, Iowa, bank robbery or from tuberculosis is a matter of historical dispute.30 On August 30, 1874, Jesse and Frank James and a member of the Younger gang robbed a stagecoach in Ray County in the Missouri River bottoms just across the river from Lexington. In subsequent days, a detective from St. Louis who had been hired by Lieutenant Governor Charles Phillip Johnson trailed the band of robbers across Lafayette County but reportedly lost the trail “some 18 miles south of Waverly.” That would have been in the vicinity of Concordia.31 After the infamous Northfield, Minnesota, bank robbery in September 1876, Frank and Jesse went to Tennessee, where they remained under cover for several years. During that time, three of 29. Stiles, Jesse James, 119–30; Edwards, Noted Guerrillas, 312–15. Although the likelihood of Jesse James’s presence at the massacre should not be rejected simply because Edwards asserted it, one can safely ignore Edwards’s account of Jesse’s activities there. It was not only in the Kansas City Times that Edwards made every effort, in the most purple prose, to praise Jesse James as one of the most daring figures in history—Edwards used similar hype in Noted Guerrillas. 30. Young, Lafayette, 1:360; O’Flaherty, Jo Shelby, 331–33; Stiles, Jesse James, 214–18. 31. Stiles, Jesse James, 264–65.

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Jesse’s gang—Arthur McCoy, Jim Cummins, who had ridden with Bill Anderson, and one of the Miller brothers—robbed the Concordia Savings Bank. It was about one-thirty in the afternoon of August 29, 1878. Three men came into the bank. Cashier Henry Ficken, a Hanoverian by birth, opened the vault after one of the outlaws pressed a revolver to his head. The men got away with $4,169 in a flour sack. Not far south of town they encountered a crowd of people who were returning from a picnic. The outlaws boasted about their deed as they galloped past on horseback. Although it was “quite well established” as to who was responsible, no one could be proven guilty despite great efforts to trail the robbers.32 In addition to the comings and goings of the James gang through the vicinity and the bank robbery in 1874, other reminders of the war occurred at intervals for many years. During the war, a German father and son had seen bushwhackers in the distance. They jumped from their horse and pony and hid in tall prairie grass. Thus they saved their lives, but the bushwhackers took their mounts. Some years later, as the son was with his father in a nearby town, the young man recognized his pony saddled and standing at a hitching post. The father cautioned his son to be quiet as they finished their business and hurried from the town. In another incident, Julius Vogt, Sr., in the bushwhacker raid of October 5, 1862 received two shots, one in the thigh and one in the shoulder. One of his would-be murderers walked over and kicked him, and said, “The son-of-a-bitch isn’t dead. I’ll shoot him again.” And he did. Even though it was dark, the profile of this man’s face was indelibly impressed on Vogt’s mind. Imagine his feelings when some years later he saw this same man, an itinerate photographer, taking pictures on the streets of Concordia.33

Long years after the war, a farmer from north of Davis Creek in Davis Township periodically brought his wagon to Concordia for supplies. 32. Young, Lafayette, 1:358; Voigt, Concordia, 41. Jesse James made one more trip to the area. In August or September 1879, he returned from Tennessee to Jo Shelby’s farm and began to gather a gang for more robbery. On October 8, they robbed a Chicago and Alton train just east of Independence. Two and a half years later, James was shot in St. Joseph, Missouri, by an accomplice for the reward money (Stiles, Jesse James, 352–53). 33. Voigt, Concordia, 28–29.

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Then he would drink in the saloons and go about bragging that he had been a bushwhacker. After obtaining his fill of drink, he would race his horses and wagon down Main Street out of town cursing the “Dutch” and giving the rebel yell. Records demonstrate that he had indeed deserted the Confederate army before the battle of Pea Ridge and had come home to be a bushwhacker.34 There may have been more interaction between Hanoverians and Anglo-Missourians in the earliest decades of the settlement than in the half century after the Civil War. When Christian Lehne died in 1846, he left to the children of his American neighbor Christopher Mulkey much of the estate he had not already given to Tröster Dierking. At the estate auction of Ferdinand Bruns from Esperke, Tröster Dierking’s brother-in-law, in November 1845, nineteen Germans purchased items and seven Americans did so as well. Americans David Mock and Christopher Mulkey had helped Ludwig Scharnhorst and Wilhelm Frerking with the estate inventory. About the same portion of American buyers stepped forward when the entire stock of Brockhoff ’s store was auctioned in March 1863. Of the 102 customers who owed Brockhoff for merchandise when he was killed, some twenty-three appear to have been Anglo-Americans. Just after the war at the estate sale of Conrad Bruns, there were only two Americans who bought items alongside the twenty-three Germans. Later auctions, such as that of the estate of farmer Fritz Niemeyer, held February 8, 1908, were common. All forty buyers at the auction had German names. Part of the increasing separation must have been due to simple geographical proximity. As more and more Germans moved into the area, fewer and fewer Anglo farmers lived close enough to travel conveniently by horsedrawn conveyance to attend an auction among the Germans. But some element of social choice is also likely to have been involved.35 And yet, constructive interaction did take place between the Germans and Anglos in the postwar decades, often in a cooperative manner and on cordial terms. As the Lexington and St. Louis Railroad 34. Ibid., 33. 35. At the Brockhoff auction, two of the more frequent American buyers were Alfred and Edward Dorsey, father and son, who lived in nearby Elmwood Township and had originated in Maryland. They had a German connection: Charlotte Heckrote Dorsey, Alfred’s wife and Edward’s mother, was a Pennsylvania-born German (probate files of the individuals named, Lafayette County Probate Court, Lexington, Missouri).

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was being built through Concordia in 1870 with the support of Conrad Stünkel and much of the German community, former Confederate general Jo Shelby served on the company board of directors. Even closer cooperation between Germans and their ex-Confederate neighbors occurred in platting the town of Concordia. A joint-stock company of five men platted the town in 1868, just three years after the end of the war. The three Germans of the company were merchant Henry Detert and Prussian farmers Herman Uphaus and Henry Westerhaus. Both of the latter were Methodists. Westerhaus was one of the men wounded in the 1862 bushwhacker raid, only six years earlier. The two other members of the company were, rather astonishingly, both former Confederate army officers. Major George P. Gordon lived on a large farm five miles to the north in Davis Township. A street in the new town was even named after Gordon. Colonel George S. Rathbun was a lawyer and director of the railroad in Lexington. Perhaps these interactions need not be taken as an indication of reconciliation, however, for platting a town and selling lots could be considered more a business venture than an expression of social harmony.36 Harry R. Voigt, a twentieth-century historian of the community, described its people in the postwar period thus: “They associated with the English speaking people in so far as they were forced to do so in their business, but they never felt they had the same ideals.” The events of the late war, the community’s postreconstruction political isolation, the state and regional dominance of the ex-Confederate wing of the postreconstruction Missouri Democratic Party, the theological and linguistic exclusivism of the denomination to which perhaps threequarters of the German community owed allegiance, and continued new immigration from Germany, which reinforced and prolonged use of the German language, all contributed to this phenomenon.37 Interactions between Germans and the newly freed African Americans were perhaps even more limited, although in some ways less problematic. Of the first 211 houses visited by census taker Henry Thiemann in 1870 in Freedom Township, fifteen contained white Anglo families, most of whom had originated in Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and other southern states, as had most area Anglos. There were 190 families of 36. Voigt, Concordia, 36; History of Lafayette County, 622–23. 37. Voigt, Concordia, 14.

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German background. The other six families were African Americans. Lee Gordon and his family were independent black farmers. Gordon was probably the “Negro Lee” who bought a horse collar and a heifer at Heinrich Bartels’s estate auction November 22, 1869. Most of the freedmen and freedwomen of the community worked for the Germans as farmhands and servants. As mentioned earlier, Mary Neuhaus had three young mulatto servants in 1870, and George Helms’s former slaves continued to work for the Helms family as laborers after the war. In 1880 and down into the new century, blacks persisted among the Germans. Some must have learned to speak the language of their neighbors and employers. In contrast to neighboring towns such as Sweet Springs and Blackburn, with their black residential sections and segregated black elementary schools, Concordia developed a reputation as a lily-white town. Some said blacks were not allowed in town after sundown, but this was an exaggeration. In 1880, two young families of black laborers lived in Concordia. One of these families included the household head’s hundred-year-old Virginia-born grandmother. Four different black families and one individual lived independently in the rural parts of eastern Freedom Township as laborers among the Germans. Henry Westerhaus and Henry Tebbenkamp each listed a black farmhand as a part of his household. For some years ending in 1884, there was even a black church in town, but the last black person in Concordia itself, a hotel porter, left in the early twentieth century. Yet when Concordia celebrated its centennial in 1960, Harry R. Voigt included in the centennial history book a picture of an older black man along with other area residents who had grown beards for the occasion. For decades after the Civil War, while many blacks would probably not have been especially comfortable living in the German settlement owing to its language and culture, it was certainly possible for limited numbers of blacks to do so.38 The Freedom Township Germans, while relatively separated in a social and cultural sense from other ethnic groups in their region, were also unable to participate fully in the German language culture that flourished in much of the American Midwest in the late nineteenth century. Freedom Township was some two hundred miles from St. 38. Probate files, Lafayette County Probate Court, Lexington, Missouri; Nussmann, “Town of Concordia,” 26; Voigt, Concordia, leaf 27 in the unpaginated section at the end of the book.

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Louis and even farther from other major centers of German American culture. Moreover, in contrast to St. Louis and the Missouri Rhineland in the eastern part of the state, Freedom Township received no Latin Farmers—the university-educated townsmen with romantic dreams of the American frontier as a place where one could return to a simple, natural life on the land. Among the German American populace in many other areas, such Latin Farmers had the education necessary to promote a literate, sophisticated high culture. Within Lafayette County through most of the nineteenth century, the only Germans with higher education, excepting, perhaps, an occasional physician who did not stay long, were some members of the Protestant clergy. The exacting education of the German-speaking clergymen, especially if it had taken place in America, tended to focus the gaze of such men on theological and doctrinal matters. Beyond worship services and doctrinal discussions, opportunities for intellectual stimulation and cultural enrichment were limited. A few books had been brought from Germany, and American books did appear in the community. The books that Heinrich Brockhoff had for sale at his store at the time he was killed in 1862 included biographies of Jesus, Columbus, and George Washington—all apparently in English. C. F. W. Walther did not believe his scattered flocks of true-believing Lutherans should read major St. Louis newspapers edited by impious FortyEighters, but these newspapers were nonetheless sometimes read in Freedom Township. Heinrich Brockhoff’s estate included a bill for advertising in the St. Louis Westliche Post (Western Post). A few people in Concordia still subscribed to that newspaper in the early 1930s, and it carried a regular column of news from Concordia. Agents in both Lexington and Boonville sold subscriptions to the Anzeiger des Westens (Western Reporter) in the late 1850s. In the years just before the Civil War, Christian Oetting subscribed to the St. Louis Wochen-Chronik (Weekly Chronicle). Apparently for the devout Lutheran Oetting, even a Catholic newspaper was preferable to the impious views of the FortyEighters. No doubt some members of St. Paul’s congregation, beyond reading Walther’s official synodical publications, also read the family newspaper he recommended, Die Abendschule (the Evening School), published by Louis Lange. During the newspaper’s fiftieth year, Pastor Biltz was honored as one of only sixty-three people nationally who had received every issue. The estate of George Helms, as noted above, a

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Christian Oetting’s receipt, dated July 15, 1860, for a three-year subscription to a St. Louis German newspaper, the Wochen Chronik or Weekly Chronicle. Courtesy of Steven and Sharon Oetting.

German Methodist, in 1872 included a subscription to the Weltbote (World Messenger), a religious paper published by Charles Trexler in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The post office at Emma, Missouri, four miles east of Concordia and directly on the boundary between Freedom Township in Lafayette County and Salt Pond Township in Saline County, was established in 1888 because one German farmer needed his reading material. Louis A. Meyer, son of the illiterate Hanoverian immigrant August Meyer, was reading a stirring piece of serialized fiction in the Germania, which came once a week by mail from Milwaukee. When the paper did not arrive in Concordia on the appointed day, Meyer hiked the eight-mile round trip only to come home empty-handed. In his disappointment and frustration, Meyer decided to petition for a new post office on the railroad line near his father’s farm. Descendants remember that Meyer’s dining room table was typically piled with reading material and that, despite his elementary school education, partly in German and partly in English, he owned a set of Shakespeare’s plays. Yet surely he was unusual in his community.39

39. Nussmann, “Town of Concordia,” 127; St. Louis Anzeiger des Westens, November 1, 1857; receipt for subscription to the St. Louis Wochen-Chronik for period November 17, 1857–November 17, 1860, in possession of Steven and Sharon Oetting, Concordia, Missouri; Die Abendschule, vol. 50, p. 58.

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In April 1871, Lafayette County’s first German newspaper, the Missouri Thalbote (Missouri Valley Messenger) was begun in Lexington. In 1880, the publisher moved it to Concordia. In September 1893, the Thalbote was moved once more, this time to Higginsville, in the center of the county. As the Thalbote was leaving Concordia, a new English-language weekly, the Concordian, published its first issue.40 Public high schools were not generally available in the area until early in the twentieth century, and even then, German farmers were sometimes slower than their Anglo counterparts in recognizing the need for education beyond simple reading, writing, and arithmetic. Yet as early as 1870, three community adolescents were recorded by the census as “at college,” although we do not know where. It is not surprising that Marie Biltz saw to it that her daughter Berta, seventeen, was being given more education than was available at the parish school sponsored by St. Paul’s Church. William Oetting, seventeen, son of the wealthy farmer Diedrich Oetting, and Adolph Bergmann, fifteen, son of farmer Charles Bergmann, were also receiving education beyond the parochial school or public elementary school. In the early 1880s, Pastor Biltz, who was then president of the western district of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, as it was then still known, became concerned about the lack of trained ministers for the synod’s western district. The latter included most of the nation west of the Mississippi except Iowa and Minnesota. Young men who wanted to become ministers needed additional training before they were ready to attend seminary. Therefore, at Biltz’s urging, the St. Paul’s congregation, aided by the Holy Cross congregation four miles to the east, established a school modeled on the German Gymnasium. The Gymnasium is a quite academic institution equivalent to the American high school and the first year or two of college. Lessons began at this new school, St. Paul’s Academy, in January 1884. The synod took over operation of the institution in 1896 and added a junior college in 1905. The school’s sole purpose, until teacher training programs for both women and men were added in the 1950s, remained to start young men toward a ministerial career. The basic economic, social, and cultural structure of the German American community centered about Concordia, Missouri, changed 40. The Concordian continues to publish at the time of this writing.

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slowly in the thirty years after 1885. At about the same time that the last large wave of German immigrants came into the community, its agricultural economy, then dependent upon shipping by railroad, reached a kind of stasis that would endure until the internal combustion engine came into widespread use. Of course, the German American population continued to grow. William G. Bek, the father of Missouri German history, thought that the population of German ethnicity “belonging to the greater Concordia community” had grown to about 9,600 persons by the beginning of the twentieth century. But Bek included people with origins in Lippe and those with origins in Tecklenburg, Osnabrück, and so on, coming via the Missouri Rhineland, who settled in central and western Lafayette County and northern Saline County late in the nineteenth century. These people were similar to the Hanoverians and Ravensbergers in Freedom Township, but they did not share the latter’s experiences during the early years of the settlement and in the Civil War, nor did they share a prevailing enthusiasm for the Missouri Synod. A more realistic estimate of the greater Concordia community in 1900 would be 5,000 to 6,000 persons.41 Over the decades, many community members left the area for cheaper and more readily available farmland in other places. They may have begun to go to the Horseshoe Creek settlement in Marshall County, Kansas, at the end of the 1850s, only three or four years after Kansas Territory was opened to settlement. After 1871, others went to the Linn-Palmer area in neighboring Washington County, Kansas. Later, the Ft. Morgan, Colorado, and Clara, Texas, vicinities were each popular with young people from Freedom and Davis Townships who needed additional opportunities.42 At the edges of the original community, three new Missouri Synod congregations came into being as a clear result of the expansion of the Freedom Township settlement: Holy Cross at the future town of Emma in 1865, St. Matthew in Ernestville in 1899, and St. Peter in the Flora neighborhood northeast of Concordia in 1900. Trinity Lutheran at Alma included some from the Freedom Township migration stream 41. Bek, “Survivals,” 61, 42. William D. Keel, “Deitsch, Däätsch, Düütsch and Dietsch: The Varieties of Kansas German Dialects after 150 Years of German Settlement in Kansas,” 32, 34.

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narrowly defined, but Trinity contained more northwestern Germans from other migration streams.43 Substantial economic, social, and cultural changes did begin to occur, first at the fringes of the community and then at its core, during the second decade of the twentieth century. The German-born population became ever smaller as the immigrant generations passed away. Public high schools became readily available to adolescents. Although St. Paul’s Church continued to have two German-language services per month all the way down to 1977, English became more and more the language of encounters outside the home, and then English became the language used within the home itself. World War I gave many young men experience outside the community in military service as it also called into question all things German. The internal combustion engine revolutionized first travel and then farmwork. Motion pictures became available locally and then, in the next decade, so did radio. Rural electrification brought mainstream American popular culture directly into farm homes in the form of radio and television to an extent entirely unmatched earlier by newspapers and magazines. Instead of going to western states to farm, more young people who did not inherit farms went to Kansas City or St. Louis for urban employment. The experiences of the more and more acculturated twentieth-century community became ever more like those of the entire rural Midwest. Despite everyday commercial ties between the Germans and neighboring Anglo farmers, despite cooperation between neighbors of different ethnic backgrounds in the more demanding farm tasks such as threshing, despite increasing intermarriage as the twentieth century progressed, and despite the increasing conformity of later generations to the mainstream culture of twentieth-century America, the enmity between many of those of British and German heritage in the area was mutual and long-lasting. In 1960, the Concordia community revisited 43. St. Paul’s Church claims twenty-four “Descendant Congregations in the Area.” In my opinion, most of these result from the migration of people of German heritage from the Missouri Rhineland to Little Dixie, or from the migration of people from “greater Concordia,” in Bek’s phrase, to noncontiguous new towns rather than from the continuous geographical expansion of the original community. Many of the leading families of the Alma congregation had come to Missouri from Illinois ([Rodewald], Descending Love, 55; Kirchenbuch, Trinity Lutheran Church, Alma, Missouri).

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some of the horrors of the Civil War as a part of its centennial celebration. The centennial events were incorporated into the annual Fall Festival. The Koncordia Komical Krew, usually known locally as the KKK, as was its annual custom, had its own parade of floats at the Fall Festival. One float featured a bearded hillbilly about to blast into space by igniting the barrel of moonshine whiskey on which he sat. The caption was “First Bushwhacker on the Moon.” Not only did this parade entry link historic with contemporary “space age” themes, it also linked elements of the local Anglo population to the most negative Ozark and Appalachian stereotypes.44 The culture of the entire Midwest of small towns and rural areas homogenized to a great degree over the course of the twentieth century. Yet the community centered about the town of Concordia has maintained its German American identity. In 1990, according to a U.S. Census report, 70.5 percent of the people of Freedom Township reported German as their first ancestry group and only 29.5 percent identified another ethnicity or none at all.45 Although the only remaining speakers of Low German in Freedom Township are now quite elderly, skits and a church service in the language have been performed in the 1990s. Thus persistent ethnic consciousness has endured for more than 150 years in the midst of a sometimes inhospitable cultural environment. The foundations of this persistent and long-preserved ethnicity had been laid in the antebellum period, as immigrants obtained substantial amounts of land, learned the techniques necessary to make it productive, created sustainable farms, and established the churches as the first and most central community institutions. The Civil War was a great blow to the community, but the Germans emerged from the war ready to create a mature, Midwestern farming community. They built a town, so that Germans could control retail and even some wholesale commercial transactions. Despite their wartime loses, German farmers found themselves in a better position to take advantage of postwar agricultural opportunities 44. This local KKK was entirely unrelated to the better-known group of the same initials (Voigt, Concordia, leaf 11 in the unpaginated section at the end of the book). 45. U.S. Census Bureau, American FactFinder, 1990 Summary Tape File 3, PO33 for Freedom Township, Lafayette County, Missouri.

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than were many of their Anglo neighbors. The Anglos had lost, proportionate to their total holdings, just as many houses, fences, horses, cattle, and other material goods as had the Germans. The better situated of the Anglos, the slaveholders, had also lost a significant share of their labor supply in slaves. The Germans, who had always valued hard work, found themselves advantaged over those who had formerly relied on slave labor in the new postwar economy. The new farm economy in Missouri’s “Little Dixie” favored independent owner-operators who relied more on the labor of family than on hired hands to produce a general array of wheat, feed grains, and livestock. The Germans, except for using a different a cash crop (hemp) before 1870, had been doing the kind of family farming favored in postwar Lafayette County since their earliest years in Missouri. Thus in the postwar period, the Germans quickly recovered from the war and then went on to improve, strengthen, and develop their community infrastructure as they increased the size of their community. In the decades after the Civil War, the community grew stronger and larger. By so doing, it prepared itself to confront twentieth-century pressures of cultural assimilation and economic and technological change.

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Conclusion

o

In the five decades after Tröster Dierking’s emigration from Esperke in 1837, he and perhaps fifteen hundred other German-born adults and children along with Americanborn descendants created a German American farming community so robust and stable that its ethnic distinctiveness would remain obvious through most of the twentieth century. The move from northwestern Germany was a kind of settlement migration or colonization of land—productive land that had been largely bypassed by the first generation of Anglo-American pioneers in western Missouri. Here, as in many other Midwestern locations, were “peasants and artisans seeking room to replicate an intensely local way of life,” in the words of Kathleen Neils Conzen.1 Unlike many other Midwestern Germans, the Hanoverians came to Freedom Township without any discernable leadership from nobles, Latin Farmers, members of the urban middle classes, emigration societies formed in Germany, settlement societies formed in the American cities, or church officials. The first people from Amt Neustadt made a decision to leave after being influenced by Gottfried Duden’s much-read paean to life on the Missouri frontier. Later arrivals made the decision to leave Germany and also chose their community of residence in America because of recommendations and examples of relatives, friends, or acquaintances. This process of chain migration linked many 1. Kathleen Neils Conzen, “Phantom Landscapes of Colonization: Germans in the Making of a Pluralist America,” 12. This essay by Professor Conzen reaches a level of penetration, acumen, and articulateness that few other scholars studying German Americans, and certainly not the present writer, can approach.

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out-of-the-way locations in Europe with similarly obscure places in America in the nineteenth century. It continues today, although more from Latin America and Asia than elsewhere. The Hanoverians made a rational decision based on opportunities to continue working the soil provided by available land in Missouri, coupled with economic pressure caused by overpopulation and the decline of household industry in Hanover. Their decision-making process, and especially its differential timing for the varied segments of the village population, was affected by political and economic initiatives within the Kingdom of Hanover. Efforts by the royal government to modernize agriculture affected all segments of village society, yet there was no attempted religious coercion by the government of Hanover that could have motivated emigration.2 The church became the central institution of the Freedom Township Hanoverians and most similar settlements. The church and accompanying parish schools could be formed along largely familiar lines, using the familiar language and with no more involvement from Americans than was required to register the deed to a small plot of land. Even the latter was not necessary if services were to be held in parishioners’ homes. The largest congregation in Freedom Township, St. Paul’s Lutheran, was begun by farmers and presided over for nearly seven years by a village schoolmaster from Laderholz in Hanover who, at the same time, presided over his own Freedom Township farm. After a few years, German-speaking Protestant ministers became available who had been ordained by the state churches in Germany, and by various groups on this continent that mandated quite varied amounts of education and training. Most such ministers came with a denominational affiliation. The proper selection of both man and denomination proved to be the source of considerable strife in many immigrant communities and new congregations both in Freedom Township and across America.3 Part of the success of the Freedom Township settlement is owed to the fact that Friedrich Dierking had the foresight or good luck to choose 2. The specifically Hanoverian dimension to the decision by rural people to leave northwest Germany has not been spelled out in previous studies, including those by German scholars such as Anne-Katrin Henkel, “Ein besseres Loos zu erringen als das bisherige war”: Ursachsen, Verlauf und Folgewirkungen der hannoverschen Auswanderungsbewegung im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. 3. The major role of the church in immigrant communities has been noted by many historians, for example, Reinhard R. Doerries, “Immigrants and the Church: German Americans in Comparative Perspective,” 10.

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a location where the land was rather productive for Missouri upland. This sets Dierking and his followers somewhat apart from other Germans in Missouri both geographically and economically. Unlike many readers of Duden, Dierking was not so beguiled by the jurist from the Prussian Rhineland that he had to settle as close as possible to Duden’s original cabin. He might have visited the Duden neighborhood, but for Dierking, the cabin was not a shrine he had to be near. It probably helped that Dierking was a practical farmer rather than an intellectual. For him, Missouri must have been the source of opportunities for productive farming rather than a romantic idyll. Furthermore, he was able to foresee the potential of land that did not much resemble the Geest of the northern German plain from which he had come. The few remaining details of Dierking’s life indicate a certain eye for the main chance or perhaps even an entrepreneurial bent that is not usually ascribed to villagers in rural Germany. Thanks to the location Dierking chose, the Freedom Township Germans were more prosperous than most other Missouri German farmers in their early decades. Not only could they grow more corn and wheat with the same effort required by less productive soils, but also they could learn to produce the very profitable hemp. Quite quickly the Freedom Township Germans learned to raise the same crops as did their Anglo-American neighbors. In this they were like Westfalians in Osage County and generally like most nineteenth-century immigrant farmers.4 The settlement paid a terrible price in the American Civil War for its favorable agricultural location. It was in a corner of the county in Missouri’s Little Dixie that held more slaves than did any other. There was probably no other community of recent German immigrants in the United States so near an area of substantial slave-based agriculture and that suffered so much during the Civil War because of its opposition to slavery. By probing into German-language sources, this study confirms the most startling findings of such Civil War historians as Michael Fellman and Albert Castel as to how dreadful the guerrilla warfare in Missouri had become by 1864. The wrenching Civil War experiences of the Lafayette County Germans have been considered only infrequently and briefly by historians of the Civil War in Missouri. The present study attempts to put an account of the murder and mayhem in Freedom 4. Anderson, “Immigrants in the World System”; Kathleen Neils Conzen, “Immigrants and Nineteenth-Century Agricultural History,” 316.

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Township in a form that can be used by Civil War historians who do not read German. It is a story worth noting. Let anyone who wishes to romanticize the exploits of the Missouri guerrillas remember that by the time of Sterling Price’s invasion of Missouri, “Bloody Bill” Anderson and his gang were not only killing prisoners, and scalping and smashing the skills of dead and wounded opponents: they were also most probably gang-raping German immigrant women in addition to African American slaves.5 It is perhaps surprising that after the war, the area surrounding the new town of Concordia became a stronger community and perhaps a stronger ethnic community than ever before. Ethnic historians now generally accept the idea that in America, ethnic culture is in continual flux over time as the forces of Old World regional and linguistic cultures and religions interact and develop with reception and stereotyping by the host culture and the economic and geographic circumstances of the new ethnic community. Multiple factors went into the making of ethnicity in Freedom Township. To be German in Concordia was not the same as being German in other German American enclaves. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Concordia remained specifically northwest German. It was also predominantly (although not exclusively) Lutheran. It is difficult to determine which identification, German or Lutheran, was more important in the decades after the Civil War for the immigrant majority in Freedom Township. In studying three northwest German immigrant communities situated near each other in Ohio—one Catholic, one Lutheran, and one Reformed—a recent historian has come to believe that religion can be more important than regional origin or language in shaping immigrant culture. It would appear that in our own time, the German identity has dissolved faster than Lutheran identity for the people in Freedom Township if not for outsiders. But perhaps this was not the case until well into the twentieth century.6 5. In the mid-1990s, in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, the author heard the great Civil War historian Shelby Foote say, in his rich Mississippi drawl, in a lecture about the Civil War, “Let anybody who thinks this was a wah between gentlemen take a look at what was happenin’ up in Missourah.” 6. Kathleen Neils Conzen, David A. Gerber, Ewa Morawska, George E. Pozzetta, and Rudolph J. Vecoli, “The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the U.S.A.”; Anne [Aengenvoort] Höndgen, “Community versus Separation: A Northwest German Emigrant Settlement Region in Nineteenth-Century Ohio.”

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Freedom Township remained a predominantly agricultural community even after Concordia developed and flourished with construction of the railroad. The Hanoverians, dominant at least in a numerical sense, seemed to prefer agricultural pursuits so long as the requisite land was available to them. In later generations, many gave up farming only with reluctance and some showed even more reluctance in moving out of the community to urban areas. Better to save one’s money in order to buy out an Anglo farmer who had accumulated too much debt. As was typical of so much of rural and small-town German America, this community’s prevailing outlook remained preindustrial through the entire industrial era. Yet except for religious sects including certain orders of Mennonites, this preindustrial outlook among rural German Americans did not include any religious or other preference for outmoded technology. Instead, what it so often meant among the Hanoverians and many others was a refusal to believe that the problems of an industrial working class and an industrial society were structural and could be properly ameliorated by government in support for organized labor and public welfare programs.7 Being northwest German and rural, most early residents of the Concordia area showed a preference in ordinary conversation for Plattdeutsch or Low German, the north German dialect. Standard German was maintained in the churches as a bulwark protecting religion. At St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Pastor Brust, until the end of his pastorate in 1933, encouraged students to use German for the oral examination over the catechism that was a part of the confirmation ceremony. The next minister, Pastor Heilmann, long after his own retirement, continued to conduct two church services per month in German until 1977. Beyond its religious purpose, some people in the local community saw the use of German as a way to emphasize their distinctness from members of the host culture against whom they had historic grievances.8 7. For evidence of the preindustrial outlook of rural and small-town German Americans, see Brent Peterson, Popular Narratives and Ethnic Identity: Literature and Community in Die Abendschule, 185, 201–2, 250; and Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Failure of German-Americanism.” 8. Kamphoefner, “Language Transformation,” 9. When St. John Evangelical and Reformed Church, after World War II, obtained its first minister who could not preach in German, one older member of the church described the state of affairs as “ein große Sinn,” that is, a great sin (Donald Dittmer, interview with the author, Concordia, Mo., November 21, 2003).

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Retention of Old World languages was a chief factor in causing outsiders to make the charge of clannishness not only in the nineteenth century and during the World Wars, but sometimes even afterward. This was a common accusation against nearly all distinctive German American communities. Such communities, be they Lutheran, Catholic, or Mennonite, have been notoriously slow to adopt some characteristics of the host culture. Such communities have often seemed to build up walls of isolation against the host society in order to protect their distinctive religious beliefs, language, preferences in education, occupation, and socializing, and their values concerning gender roles and family relationships. Given the violence between the Freedom Township community and widely supported elements of the host culture during the Civil War, clannishness might seem to have been warranted, or at least understandable. It may be less easy to explain why the two groups of local wartime enemies exhibited such a limited degree of overt hostility to each other in the century after the war. The Freedom Township Germans addressed their problem, nearly unique in its German American context, of how to deal with recently murderous neighbors, with behavior that was rather standard among rural German Americans. They went about their daily affairs interacting with local Anglo-Americans in business relationships and often developing cordial personal relationships with neighboring farmers of the host culture. But rather few of the Germans voted for the political party favored by local Anglos, and the Germans usually restricted their socializing to the homes of their German neighbors, to activities within the German-speaking churches, and to the German-run saloons. With this rather typical German American approach, the war wounds healed over the course of several generations. All in all, one may well ask, “What did these northwest German farmers achieve in Missouri for themselves?” and “What has their achievement meant for America?” In 1931, the historian James Truslow Adams popularized, if he did not invent, the phrase “American Dream”—a dream of a “better, richer, happier life for all our citizens of every rank.” The concept is at least as old as de Tocqueville, who in 1837, the year Friedrich Dierking left Esperke, wrote of “the charm of anticipated success” for Americans. For Adams, the dream was more than just a vision of increasing wealth for all; it was “a dream of a social order in which each man and each

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woman shall be able to attain the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”9 It is in keeping with American cultural tradition as well as appropriate in and of itself to ask whether the Esperkans and those Germans who followed them realized the American Dream and their own dreams in the process of building a new community in Lafayette County, Missouri. First, one must consider the varied dreams or expectations brought to the county by all its new inhabitants in the nineteenth century. While the area that Tröster Dierking chose for himself and his relatives was composed mostly of land still owned by the federal government in 1838, several thousand Americans already lived in the county. Even in one Missouri county, different elements of the population had rather different dreams. Those dreams were not fully compatible. In the unregulated, “dog-eat-dog” struggle to maximize individual wealth that contemporary America has become, the concept of a “competency”—enough land to allow a farmer to provide the basics for himself and his family—sounds quaint at best. But this is exactly what many Anglo-Americans wanted in the century before the American Civil War. They wanted to be able to work on their own lands and live their own lives as they chose. By the early nineteenth century, implicit in this dream of economic independence through an agricultural “competency” were freedom of religion, equality before the law, and a voice in determining who would administer the rather simple society’s minimal government. This dream was realized to an unusually high degree in Missouri’s Little Dixie. The state as a whole was long known as a place where the small farmer was king.10 There was a second Anglo-American agrarian dream in Missouri’s “Little Dixie” and in Lafayette County. While Thomas Jefferson promoted the dream of the independent yeoman farmer, he lived an entirely different style of life. Jefferson lived on a hilltop in Albemarle County, Virginia, in a mansion he designed himself along classical lines. 9. Jim P. Cullen, American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation, 4– 5; James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America, viii, 404. 10. Paul C. Nagel, Missouri: A History, 102–4, 173–74. That Little Dixie included some of Missouri’s best soil and lucrative commercial opportunities in hemp and tobacco did not preclude the small independent farmer. It meant that such farmers enjoyed a somewhat higher material standard of living than was available in many other areas.

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In addition to directing an agricultural enterprise, often from a great distance, he devoted his life to politics and high culture, especially books. Of course, he could do this only because he owned quite a lot of land and many African American slaves. Missouri Supreme Court Justice William B. Napton of Saline County, whose farm Elk Hill was only about twenty-five miles from Concordia, brought a dream of Jefferson’s lifestyle directly to Little Dixie. As a young man, Napton had visited Jefferson’s Monticello and supped with Jefferson’s daughter there. In Missouri, he designed his own quite unusual brick building at his farm to house a large collection of books. In common with many slave owners of his generation, Napton had none of Jefferson’s ambivalence about slavery or a lifestyle based upon the institution. The dream of Napton, and of many others in the area, involved partial or complete freedom from manual labor through the ownership of slaves. The economic and legal foundation of this dream, of course, was destroyed by force of arms during the American Civil War after much difficult warfare both nationally and in Lafayette County. Sadly, force of arms did not suffice to enable the African American former slaves of the area to achieve their own dream of social and economic equality. That dream is still unfulfilled nearly a century and a half later.11 Alongside the dichotomy of Anglo-American agrarian ideals, the German immigrants introduced their own dichotomy of dreams. Gottfried Duden best articulated the first dream of the Freedom Township immigrants. It involved the opportunity for every German male, or at least any who could command a thousand Reichstaler, to create a prosperous, independent farm. In part, this dream probably harkened back to a distant past, perhaps in the early medieval period or even earlier, when the oldest farms in the northwest German villages were developed. At that partly mythical time, the population would have been small enough that each peasant could have had a full complement of land. The new dream of Missouri was not limited to simply having enough land. According to Duden, nature was so rewarding in Missouri that plentitude was possible with much less labor than was required in Germany. Duden also had much to say about the genius of the American government, which did not require high taxes, regimentation, or a network of police spies. 11. Napton, Union on Trial.

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The picture that Duden’s book produced in the minds of peasants in Germany in the 1830s embodied an ideal not greatly different from the contemporaneous Anglo-American ideal of a competency. Of course, the German agrarian ideal was not entirely uniform. Securing the first farm was paramount for those Germans without sufficient land in Europe, while Germans who commanded a reasonable amount of cropland in Germany put more emphasis on opportunities to acquire land for multiple children, the richness of nature, and the political advantages of America. Many Hanoverians and other Germans who came to the Freedom Township settlement did in fact obtain much of what they seem to have wanted as they left Europe, both in terms of land and in terms of respect within their community. All of that came, of course, only with a great deal of labor and sacrifice. Recall, for example, the small cottager Johann Heinrich Ludwig Brackmann, who had seventeen people, including ten adults, living on his 11.7 acres of land in Esperke in 1839; he was able to give a substantial farm near Concordia to each of his six adult sons. Conrad Stünkel, the younger son of a small cottager in Metel, developed a well-equipped farm of 185 acres at the edge of Concordia and earned enough respect in the community to be elected a judge (commissioner) of the county. August Meyer, whose origins in Amt Neustadt are murky and who was illiterate and quite probably illegitimate, obtained 240 acres of farmland. He was respected within his church. He served a term as the official congregational secretary, probably as a kind of honor, despite his inability to read and write. His son presided at many of the congregational meetings of the church in the early twentieth century.12 At the same time, success or the achievement of dreams eluded many. Friedrich Dierking, the first Hanoverian on the scene in Freedom Township, despite his great wealth in land in his first Missouri years, seems to have died in comparative poverty and largely forgotten, or at least irrelevant to the direction in which the community’s majority moved. Johann Heinrich Bruns Sr., from Büren, the first Vollmeier in the new settlement, died at the age of only forty-eight, perhaps owing to frontier hardships. Although many of his grandchildren survived in 12. Young, Lafayette, 2:672; History of Lafayette County, 576; Frizzell, “St. John Church,” 26, 33.

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the community, three of his four sons were killed by guerrillas in 1864 and his fourth son died soon thereafter. In another case, early one frosty morning in March 1870, a former Esperke stonemason was found dead just outside the door of the saloon in Concordia, exactly where he had passed out the night before. He was a drunk in Freedom Township just as he had been a drunk in Esperke.13 Altogether, despite the considerable toll taken by the hardships of the frontier, farm accidents, drownings due to the lack of bridges across the creeks, primitive medical care, and casualties of the Civil War, many men and their sons who could never have become independent and prosperous farmers in northwestern Germany did so in Lafayette County. Whether the richer but cruder material circumstances and the isolation of nineteenth-century American farm life faced by their wives and daughters were beneficial overall to such women is difficult to assess.14 Another dream of life in America existed among certain of the Germans in Freedom Township. This is the dream, held by the followers of Pastor Martin Stephan of Dresden, of being able to practice exactly the form of confessional Lutheranism they thought best without any interference from a state church. It is the contention of the present study that this dream was not brought to Missouri from Calenberg by the farmers who made the trip, but that a great many of them made the dream their own after the followers of Stephan and C. F. W. Walther provided determined and able religious leadership for their community. Most Hanoverians and many Prussians in the community found the intellectual and theological self-assurance and concreteness of Walther’s message to be a bulwark against the doubts and confusion that people experience when they live in such a new, poorly understood, and often hostile or difficult social and material environment.15 Since the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod has been, and continues

13. 1870 Census of Mortality, Freedom Township. It may have given census taker Heinrich Thiemann, a German Methodist and therefore probably a nondrinker, some satisfaction to put a special note about the demise of this alcoholic in the census report. 14. It was commonly said that the American frontier was a benefit to men and dogs but detrimental to women and horses. For extensive treatments of German American women in the region, see Pickle, Contented; and Carol Coburn, Life at Four Corners: Religion, Gender, and Education in a German Lutheran Community. 15. Luebke, “Immigrant Condition,” 19–28.

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to be, such a central institution to the area’s population of German ethnicity, it must be concluded that this part of the local Germans’ dream of America has been achieved. Of course, not all Lafayette County Germans shared the dream of the confessional Lutheran movement. Those who did not were, and are, free to practice religion as they see fit, although this means that the community, like most in America, does not have complete religious harmony. It would seem that the expectations of a better life held by most of the immigrants to Freedom Township were met, although with a level of work and sacrifice few of them probably anticipated. In the early years, the Hanoverians in particular seemed slow to take advantage of nonagricultural economic opportunities, but they practiced farming with considerable success. Although at first their small, fenced patches of cleared woodland and plowed prairie did not compare with the large commercial farms of many of their slave-owning “old American” neighbors, gradually the Germans built up their scale of operation to the economic and managerial optimum for the agricultural technology then available. Throughout their history in Missouri, the Germans and their descendants have bought more and more land once farmed by people of Anglo-American heritage. In that sense, they have been more persistent than their Anglo neighbors, and thus their history conforms to the general pattern for German American farmers. The social life of their community has centered about the churches. This is common for immigrant and rural communities. Since this community, unlike some German American rural communities, has never had denominational unity, secular institutions have also been needed. The early Aid Association or fire insurance society has been mentioned, and there was an early attempt at a public library. At the same time, since most people were members of a Missouri Synod congregation, and since the Missouri Synod forbade membership in secret societies, the fraternal orders never flourished at Concordia as they did in so many other German American communities. The Hanoverians came to Lafayette County for a profoundly conservative purpose. They wanted to reestablish the kind of agricultural plentitude that had become impossible in Hanover due to population growth. They enjoyed political rights and freedom of opinion and of religion in America that were seen as radical demands in Hanover and in Prussia; but since these rights and freedoms were already in place

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for white people in America, defending them became a conservative task in the New World. Slavery grew in Lafayette County beside the German settlement and came to seem to be a threat to it. The local Germans’ idealism concerning improving the condition of the slave should not be disregarded as a motivation to support the Union, but the threat slavery was thought to pose to the Germans’ ideal of agricultural independence was probably the greater concern. The Germans wanted a society of independent farmers, not a society of wealthy white owners and black slaves. Thus the Germans took an antislavery position that was considered radical in America where the U.S. Constitution recognized human slavery. But it was slavery, itself, that would have been considered a radical innovation in farming villages in northwestern Europe in the early nineteenth century. When some forty men of the community gave their lives in the Civil War, it was to conserve their dream of a new homeland of a type they wished they could have enjoyed in the Old World. After the Civil War, the Germans supported the Radical reconstruction government of Missouri and never voted in large numbers for the conservative Democrats, many of them former Confederates, who came to power at the end of the reconstruction period. This was more a legacy of the war than a lack of common interests or a divergent political philosophy between the Germans and the “old Americans,” once the latter had lost their slaves. It was largely due to the bitter heritage of the Civil War in Lafayette County and in Missouri that conservative “old American” farmers and the conservative locals of German heritage did not unite politically until the post-Vietnam period, more than a century after the Civil War. James Truslow Adams thought that the American Dream involved more than just the right to create one’s own material success. He believed the dream required higher values that would emerge via efforts to achieve and excel in the realms of culture and the intellect. While many Germans across America would have agreed, this was not the view of most people of rural northwestern German heritage. The horizons of many of the latter extended scarcely further than the field and the church. With the Germans of Freedom Township and their descendants, Missouri and the nation gained a population that emphasized work, thrift, reliance on self and family, and traditional, confessional Protestant Christianity. At the same time, these people had a German

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respect for the benefits of technology and material improvement. Here was an immigrant German population, many members of which had arrived during or after the failed German Revolution of 1848 but had quite a different political and social perspective from that of the noisy German revolutionaries who settled in such cities as New York, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago. Since the end of reconstruction, this seldom-celebrated conservative population has served as a counterweight to Americans who seek nonmaterial social, intellectual, and cultural innovation. With the exception of the special conditions of the Civil War period, during times when most Americans have favored social change, these tradition-minded people have seemed marginal. When social change has seemed overwhelming, however, these people, whether remaining in agriculture or living in the suburbs and working in modern urban occupations, have seemed central to what America is.

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Appendix Letters of F. J. and Marie Biltz

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Nominally pro-Confederate guerrilla fighters associated with William T. “Bloody Bill” Anderson attacked the Freedom Township German community three separate times during the American Civil War, killing nearly forty men in the three raids. Much more is known about the first raid than about the other two because Lutheran pastor Franz Julius Biltz and his wife, Marie Wormb Biltz, each wrote lengthy letters to their relatives after the 1862 incident, describing what happened. Family members who received these letters preserved them. The pastor also wrote a letter to his sister following a harrowing visit to the community of a large band of new secessionist recruits in 1861. This letter, too, was preserved. The three letters were published in the original German, along with an English-language commentary by William Arndt, in “Several Episodes in the Life of Sainted Pastor F. J. Biltz,” in Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly 6 (July 1933): 41–51. Marie Biltz’s letter was published in English by Harry R. Voigt in Concordia, Missouri: A Centennial History (1960). This letter is published below in my own translation, and the pastor’s letters are published below in my translation—so far as I know, the first translation to English. Their importance for the history of the Civil War in Missouri, the history of the guerrilla raids of that war, and the history of Germans in America should be evident to the reader.

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Cook’s Store, Mo., 4 September 1861 Dear Sister, In this sad and turbulent time, we should certainly write each other more often than usual. We received your letter in the middle of August from which time forward postal service was entirely disrupted here; otherwise I would have answered earlier. I see that you do not remain entirely exempt from the fears of the war. Let’s hope it is confined to mere fear. We were recently rather taken by surprise by the visit of about 1,200 state troops under the leadership of a son of General Price. It was the morning of August 22 when someone brought us the news that the secessionists were coming and that we should flee as quickly as possible. I had no desire to do that, and while the messenger went to the school to tell Broening, they came rushing along and some of them dashed right up to our house. I stood on the porch; they signaled me to come and took me as if I were a prisoner to their camp [missing words due to tear in manuscript] which was located among the whole body of troops. Broening wanted to flee, but the fence prevented this. It was a stroke of luck for our whole area that one company of our Home Guards had gone to Lexington somewhat earlier to be posted there, and the other, which consisted mostly of family men, and was tired of barracks life, had turned in their arms and disbanded. Had they been present, blood would probably have flowed. Although better armed, they would not have been able to prevail. Several others were taken into custody besides me, but most of the men had hidden themselves. The commander questioned me above all and finally assured me that in no way did they want to trouble us. Everyone was to be left in peace to do his work. The common soldiers were hideously rough and brutal, swearing, cursing, and threatening, but the officers were quite courtly. So they departed. A flag that remained behind in the church was taken, and then the camp was burned. The main body then departed while several parties searched farmhouses for arms and powder, which they took with them. Our place, too, was searched. The assurances were not completely honored. For example, at Brockhoff ’s store goods worth $2,000 were bought or taken which are to be paid for when Missouri wins. Moeller’s store was spared. He had closed and thereby kept himself safe. Several days later horses and mules were

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gathered and taken. My horse was taken, too, but was released after someone went to them and told them that it belonged to me. In this way, several have lost all their usable draft animals. Blume (whom Magdalene knows well and who earlier certainly had not behaved well toward his American neighbors) was taken captive and several times hanged until he was blue. Thus we have come through until now with God’s grace and help. Since then 1,200 Illinois troops have come through here going toward Lexington, and still more are to come so that the secessionists will not venture to make a substantial attack. The worst is that nowhere do they stand firm, but as soon as they sniff the enemy on the breeze, they scatter and then after a time they surface again at another place and begin anew. Shortly before this I had visited Hahn and Johannes while we believed it was fully secure here. It is similar there as here except for the sad catastrophe which befell them. I was on the spot where the attack happened. A large barn stood in the woods surrounded by timber on three sides with one side pushing into the open prairie. At the time, up to 400 men were situated there. The attack took place from the woods in the morning shortly before daybreak. Thirty-two men died either immediately or from wounds, including eighteen family heads. But among these were only seven dead in Hahn’s congregation and two in Johannes’. Several of the wounded are still not out of danger. On the side of the attackers, not more than eight to twenty are thought to have fallen. Hardly more than a gunshot away, in another barn, were about as many more who were not aware of the battle for reasons that one would prefer not to mention. While I was there, the air again was disturbed—many secessionists came back from the battle at Springfield whether in flight or to go home was unknown; but overall the like-minded seemed bold again and pulled themselves together. The Union people, particularly Germans, withdrew from their houses or to those lying far off the roads. I hurried home and was stopped once, but I could demonstrate myself to be unsuspicious and so was not bothered further. I came safely through Sedalia and Georgetown, which had been described to me before hand as rather dangerous. I got home Tuesday, and Thursday the procession came through here . . . Your Brother F. J. B.

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o Appendix

October 6, 1862 Dear Parents! Oh, where should I begin to describe to you the horrors of last night? I am hard pressed to write to you about it. First, thank God with me for my Biltz was lost and is found again; he was dead and yet he lives still. Oh, thank him, our God. Had he not sent his angel, I would now be a poor widow. Oh, the godless bushwhackers have murdered again. What will become of us? We are in fear and terror, and shaken to our innermost depths. But I will try in my disturbed state to describe our terror to you. Yesterday evening, on Sunday, we were all at the row, as the place is called where two stores and several houses stand, at a baptism at Vogts’. As we sat enjoying ourselves at the table, a man in the house cried out, “Soldiers are coming!” Before we could think about it, we heard raging tumult; the whole house was surrounded in a flash and a mass of cursing, armed men forced themselves inside. Such confusion! The many children cried; women screamed for their husbands to flee. One of them, Mr. Röpe, tried to escape out the door, but they shot after him. He managed to get to the cellar despite a bad wound. They took Vogt, Möller, Biltz, and others into custody. Then they began plundering. They packed up everything they could use. They took the men with them to the stores where everything was taken. I asked, “What will you do with our husbands?” The answer was, “We’ll do to you like you did to us.” Oh, these were not humans; these were devils in human form— nothing but curses and blows. “Keep the children quiet or we will shoot all of you, you damned Union people! Don’t let any more live!” And so forth. Those who could not speak English well they shoved aside with rifle butts. I asked repeatedly, for the answer was different each time, “Oh, you’re not going to harm my husband, are you?” Oh, all of us prayed and pleaded. One said, “Be quiet. Nothing will happen to him.” The other laughed and uttered a terrible curse. I did not stop but continued pleading, “Don’t let anything happen to my husband!” “Which one is your husband?” was always the question.

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“The preacher—he’s the big man.” We hoped for the best. After they had filled their pockets and packed their horses, the command came, “Move out!” Mrs. Vogt and I dared afterward to go to the store, but our husbands were elsewhere. All of a sudden, more shots came. We went farther. There someone came tottering along. “Hartman, is that you?” “Oh, I’ve been shot. Others are lying over there.” “Oh, those are our husbands! One is lying in the road entirely dead!” He had been shot in the face. I fell upon him and thought it would be Biltz, but I saw from the shirt that it was not him. It was Mr. Brockhoff. We did not find the other one. We ran ahead and filled the prairie with our shrieks of grief. We came to the next farm. There came our closest neighbor, Fr. Stünkel, panting and bathed in sweat. “Oh, where are our husbands?” He said, “They had me with them, too. Through a miracle, I escaped.” “Was the Pastor along, too?” Among these sixty men in the night, he could not say. “Oh, you poor women, be calm—your husbands are dead. I saw Vogt fall, and they certainly are not going to let the Pastor live.” We cried, “Oh, look for them anyway!” Oh, God, the wailing, the cries! We ran back again. No words of comfort came to me. There was nothing except what was in Papa’s letter that I had gotten the same morning: “No hair falls from our heads except by His will.” The children were crying. Oh, it would have moved a stone to pity. “Our good Papa is dead!” Suddenly we noticed Vogt slowly walking up. “I am not dead yet, but I have two bad wounds. When they shot me, they still had the Pastor with them.” The other man who was shot with Vogt was dead. They had made two dismount and shot them down, then several times they rode on for a stretch then did it again until Biltz and one other remained on horseback. They saw what had happened to the others but still tried to comfort each other. Suddenly their time came, too: “Climb down!” Biltz climbed down and positioned himself. Then one of them said, “Don’t shoot him. He’s

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a good man.” Another stuck out his hand and said, “I promised your wife that nothing bad would happen to you. Now run!” The other man did not want to climb down, and begged them to take him with them. They took him with them for another distance but later set him free still living. In the meantime, I had been with the children outside in the open air on our knees. I knew no comfort; I saw nothing but strife. We all prayed aloud; ah, overly loud. Everyone wailed and cried, “Oh, our Pastor is dead!” And then he came without them having bent a hair on his head. Thank you! Thank you for that, Lord! We now have two dead and five wounded of whom one will certainly die soon—all family heads. Biltz was completely undressed. He had his best clothes on—his only neat looking coat, watch, some money, etc. He did not want to put on the old tattered coat which they forced on him, but a shotgun stuck in his chest soon convinced him. Oh, how happy we were when we came back into the house; and it made no difference to us that our house, too, had been plundered. They did not take everything from us. They did not find my beautiful cups, all the silver and other spoons, and all sorts of the children’s and my clothing, woolen coats and the like, my few good clothes, and those of the girls. They left us the feather beds. Thank God. He heard my prayer. Yet what still awaits us, God alone knows. The same evening that they were here, they came to an American, Mr. Braden, shot him dead, and compelled his wife to set the house afire herself. But Braden also shot at them and hit the leader, whom the militia, hurrying after them, found severely wounded in a house. They don’t find these bands, so when our soldiers are away, they’re here again. Biltz will write, too, but he is quite exhausted. God strengthened him enough that he could speak at the burial of the two who died. Everyone cried and wailed: What will become of us? Oh, how precious to us now is the comfort from the work of God! On Sunday when all this happened, earlier Biltz had preached a real sermon and we sang “Who Knows How Near My End?” without foreseeing the danger of that day. Yet many had an inexplicable fear as a foreboding. Oh, may the Lord stand by us and give us only his mercy. As you are able, let the Perry County relatives know how we are. Pray, pray for us. This asks your Marie.

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Cook’s Store, Mo., 15 October 1862 Dear Sister, I received your letter a few days ago, and although I do not have a great desire to write, I must answer you so that you learn what has come to us and so that you can thank God with us and will be able to help us call on him for his further protection. We think of you and now all the more so, as you may diligently remember us before God. Perhaps all sorts of rumors are coming from St. Louis to Perry County, and perhaps quite overblown, and thus I, myself, have to write. It was on the 5th of this month (16th Sunday past Trinity) as we sat together at an infant baptism in the neighborhood (Vogt’s) we were suddenly raided by a band of bushwhackers. In the wink of an eye before we knew if they were friend or foe, the house was encircled and all the men were gathered with those in neighboring houses and taken prisoner. One feared nothing too evil since these bandits had, up to now, always been content with robbery and plundering. This they did now among the cries and shrieks of the wives and children, and they were especially efficient at taking items from the stores. I lost my good overcoat, watch, money, cigar case (the one sister Emilie had sent me), etc. At last their horses had been well packed, and we thought that everything would soon be over, when they took us eleven prisoners with them as fast as their horses would gallop. After a short stretch, they stopped and three were led off to the side and shot, of whom one (Heinr. Brockhoff) was dead on the spot. Hartmann died five days later, and the wagon maker, the third, was only lightly wounded. We went further and we noted then where we were. The man who was next to me and I spoke to each other, prayed, and summoned the hand of God for us and our families, and prepared to die. We rode about a mile farther, and another was ordered to dismount and was shot. It was the old Oetting. We went another mile and again men were shot—Vogt and Westerhaus—but as later came to light, not fatally. They find themselves on the mend. Furthermore, two were let go—Fritz Stünkel and the old Frerking. The last three—the young Oetting, myself, and a stranger—had to accompany them an additional four miles, and then they let us go. You can imagine how much dread the wives and those who stayed back with

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them suffered, since when he returned, Fritz Stünkel said to the women that they had no hope, for their husbands were all dead and it was a miracle that he got away from them. What joy as by and by some came back! Now the tears were tears of joy! On the way out I could cry no tears, but upon returning, I cried all the more. No pleading, no protest helped with these men. They had neither Christian nor human feelings. They shot Heinrich Röpe at the house as he tried to flee—it is strange how it all happened. It was a rainy night. Because of this, I had to stop at another house for a baptism, and we stopped again owing to the rain, so we didn’t reach Vogt’s until evening. Were it not for the rain, most would have been at home. Meanwhile when we returned home toward midnight, we found that our house, too, had been looted. For all that may have taken place, we once again remain protected from the terrible events by the good hand of God. The same Sunday, thirteen years earlier, had been our wedding day. These times too have their great blessings. Many of those affected have learned what they would not learn in peaceful quiet times despite mild chastisement. And others hold, “For those who love God, all things work for the best.” What still remains ahead of us we certainly do not know; but not a hair on our heads can be disturbed contrary to the will of God, and with this confidence and the diligent encouragement to prayer and beseeching God we will go to meet the future. We now have more human protection, but we cannot put our trust in that. May he want you to enjoy through grace a similar protection by means of his will! I want to write Gruber that he should stay where he is for the present. I will continue the school until it is more peaceful and secure . . . In heartfelt love, your brother, J. Biltz.

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Louis on the Mississippi and the Founding of New Switzerland in the State of Illinois. Trans. Raymond J. Spahn. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. Thelen, David. Paths of Resistance: Tradition and Dignity in Industrializing Missouri. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Todd, Mary. Authority Vested: A Story of Identity and Change in the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000. Tölke, Susanne.“Göttinger Sieben protestieren.” Das Kalenderblatt in Bayern2 Radio, http://www.br-online.ed/wissen-bildung/kalenderblatt/druck version/2002/kb20021118.html. Uffmann, Hermann. 100 Jahre Christophoruskirche: Chronik der Kirchengemeinde Neuenkirchen. Neuenkirchen bei Melle, Germany: the church, [1987]. Voigt, Harry R. Concordia, Missouri: A Centennial History. Concordia, Mo.: Centennial Committee, 1960. Walkenhorst, William F. The Walkenhorst Homestead. Concordia, Mo.: Concordian, 1976. Walther, C. F. W. Letters of C. F. W. Walther: A Selection. Ed. and trans. Carl S. Meyer. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Series I. Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1888. Wegert, Karl H. German Radicals Confront the Common People: Revolutionary Politics and Popular Politics, 1789–1849. Mainz, Germany: Philipp von Zabern, 1992. Wentz, Abdel Ross. A Basic History of Lutheranism in America. Rev. ed. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1964. Wilson, A. N. God’s Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization. New York: Norton, 1999. Wulfing, Gustavus. The Letters of Gustavus Wulfing. Trans. Carl Hirsch. Fulton, Mo.: Ovid Bell Press, 1941. Young, William. Young’s History of Lafayette County. 2 vols. Indianapolis: B. F. Bowen, 1910. Yox, Andrew P. “The Fate of Love: Nineteenth-Century German American Poetry.” In Adams and Gross, Traveling between Worlds, 124–45.

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Abendschule, Die, 150 Adams, James Truslow (1878–1949), 162, 168 Addison, Ill., 71 African Americans (freedmen), 148–49, 164. See also Slavery and slaves Agricultural Society (Celle, Hanover), 11 Alma, Mo., 84, 124, 153 Altenberg, Mo., 72 Alwina (sailing ship), 38–41 Ambrose, George H. (1826?–1890?), 139 American Citizen, 90 American dream, 162, 168 Anderson, Jim (1842?–?), 106 Anderson, William T. (“Bloody Bill,” 1840–1864): raids in 1862–1863, 106– 7; sisters killed, 109, 109n32; Centralia raid, 111–12, 145; raid of Oct. 10, 1864, 113, 113n39; letters to newspapers, 116; killed, 118; atrocities, 160 Anglo-Missourians: farming practices, 49–50; scale of farming, 56; as slave owners, 56; relations with German neighbors, 89, 91–92, 147–48, 154–55, 168; expropriation by Germans, 125, 167; support for bandits, 144; postwar disadvantages, 156; mentioned, 84 Anzeiger des Westens, 91, 114, 150 Arrow Rock, Mo., 91, 111, 143 Aullville, Mo., 143, 145 Baltimore, Md., 4, 38, 45 Banditry, 144–46

Baring, Rev. Friedrich W. (1811–1853), 72–73, 75 Bartels, Heinrich (1832–1869), 149 Barth, Rev. Sebastian, 67–68 Bauermeister, Christopher, 10 Becker, Capt. Frederick, 98–99 Bek, William G. (1873–1948), 2n3, 48, 80, 114, 153 Bell, John (1797–1869), 92 Benton County Hanoverian Settlement. See Cole Camp, Mo. Bergmann, Adolph (1855–1908), 152 Bergmann, Charles (1829–1909), 152 Berlin, Germany, 131, 134 Bevensen, Germany, 65 Biltz, Rev. Franz Julius (1825–1908): background, 72; installed at St. Paul’s, 72; visits Benton County, 98; visited by Edwin Price, 98–99; captured by bushwhackers, 101–3; freed, 105; opinion of bushwhackers, 105, 105n28; obtains post office, 131; names town, 132–33; longtime Abendschule subscriber, 150; establishes academy, 152 Biltz, Marie von Wurmb (1830–1891): background, 72; confronts bushwhackers, 102–4; opinion of bushwhackers, 105; daughter is educated, 152; mentioned, 131 Bismarck, Otto von (1815–1898), 134 Blackwater Creek, 33, 118, 120 Bodenstab, Wilhelm (1846–1864), 120

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Bonaparte, Napoléon (1769–1821), 7, 21, 23 Book of Concord, 133 Books, 150 Boone County, Mo., 112 Boonville, Mo., 97, 113, 117 Borstel, Germany, 33, 61, 103 Brackmann, Anne Marie Gömann (1806– 1870), 39 Brackmann, Christine, 78 Brackmann, Friedrich D. (1807–1864), 40 Brackmann, George (1812–1858), 40 Brackmann, Georg Friedrich (1830– 1914), 54, 132n12 Brackmann, Johann Heinrich Ludwig (1804–1880), 39–40, 67, 165 Bremen, Germany, 2, 38–39, 48 Bremerhaven, Germany, 2 Brinkkötter, Heinrich (1832–1807), 94 Brockhoff, August (1832?–1863), 103, 130, 132n12, 147n34 Brockhoff, Heinrich (1831–1862), 103, 130, 150 Brockhoff ’s store, 92, 98, 130, 141 Brown, Gen. Egbert B. (1816–1902), 117 Brownsville, Mo. See Sweet Springs, Mo. Brunnenborstel, Germany, 41, 73 Bruns, A. E., 138 Bruns, Charlotte Dierking, 3, 95 Bruns, Christine Frerking (1830–1857), 70 Bruns, Conrad (1838–1863), 37, 107, 147 Bruns, Ferdinand (1805?–1845), 3, 34, 78, 95, 147 Bruns, Friedrich (1829–1864), 37 Bruns, Henriette Geisberg (“Jette”), 85– 86 Bruns, Henry David, Jr. (1838–?), 115 Bruns, Johann Heinrich, Jr. (1827–1864), 37, 70 Bruns, Johann Heinrich, Sr. (1796–1844), 36–37, 49–50, 67, 107, 165 Bruns, Joseph (1836–?), 95 Bruns, Wilhelm (1832?–1884), 37, 95 Brust, Rev. L. Frederick (1859–1936), 161 Buffalo, N.Y., 27, 70 Büren, Germany, 36, 61, 107 Burmah (sailing ship), 2–3 “Bushwhacker code,” 116

Calenberg (former principality): nomenclature of tenants, 17n17; linen production, 19, 19n20, 46; legislative body (Landschaft), 23; politics, 23–25; draft animals, 44; language, 48; religion, 67, 68, 74, 133n14, 166; political identification, 134; mentioned, 74, 77, 85. See also Hanover, Electorate Calixtus, Georg (1586–1656), 74 Camp Jackson Affair, 96 Capitalist world system, 55 Carding mill, 135 Cash crops, 51, 126–27, 156 Castel, Albert, 159 Catechism of 1790 (Hanover), 74 Cattle, 12, 25, 37, 44, 87, 126, 138, 156 Centralia Massacre, 111–12, 145 Chain migration, 157 Chiles, Col. Henry C. (1818–?), 106 Cincinnati, Ohio, 4, 48, 68 Civil War, American: local casualties, 61, 118–19, 166; begins, 96; guerrilla warfare, 100–120; Americanization of Germans, 134; shared experience of, 153; atrocities, 155, 159–60; local political aftermath, 168; mentioned, 39, 42, 90, 159, 164 “Clannishness,” 162 Clara, Texas, 153 Clausen, Jürgen Heinrich, 43 Cleveland, Pres. Grover (1837–1908), 143 Cockrell, Sen. Francis M. (1834–1915), 143 Cole Camp, Mo., settlement: Concordia settlers from, 48, 122, 124; German Methodists in, 67; Civil War battle 97; mentioned, 70, 136n18 Commons, division of (Gemeinheitsteilung): Calenberg, 13; Esperke, 14; houselings’ privileges lost, 18 “Competency,” 163 Concordia, Mo., settlement: population, 49, 63, 121–25, 153; proportion of Hanoverians, 49, 49n24; type of farming, 49–50; religious diversity, 75; defense of Union, 96; Germans’ persistence in, 118, 121–22; residents’ relations with Anglo-Missourians, 124, 147–48, 154–55, 162; ethnic self-

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Index o identification, 134–35; isolation from wider German American culture, 149– 50; agricultural stasis, 153; daughter settlements, 153; price paid for agricultural advantage, 159; residents’ dreams of success, 164–67; place in American culture and history, 169. See also Freedom Township Concordia, Mo., town of: location, ix; relation to Esperke, 49; Humboldt as precursor, 131; named, 133; street names, 134; business and manufacturing 135–36; census enumeration, 136n17; arson, 137; growth, 138; rail connection, 138; platted, 148; African Americans in, 148–49; newspapers, 152; centennial, 155 Concordian, 152 Concordia Savings Bank, 146 Consolidation of lands (Verkoppelung), 14 Constitutional Union Party, 92 Conzen, Kathleen Neils, 157 Cook, A. H. W., 97 Cook, Mordecai, 130 Cook’s store, 103, 114, 117, 130 Cooper County ambush, 113 Corn (maize), 50, 50n25, 56, 87, 126–27, 159 Cummins, Jim, 146 Dankenbring, Friedrich (1833?–?), 87–88, 88n37 Dankenbring, Louise Fiene (1837–?), 87– 88, 88n37 Davis Creek, 100, 114–15, 121, 145–46 Davis Township, 121, 124–25, 143, 146, 148, 153 Dedeke, Heinrich (1839–?), 115 Democrat, Lexington, Mo., 114 Democratic Party, 142, 148 Detert, Heinrich (1835?–?), 135, 148 Dickenhorst, F. Wilhelm, (1812–1864), 116 Dierking, Anna Maria Frerking (1793– 1843?), 2, 79 Dierking, Christine (1826–?), 79, 79n26 Dierking, Christine Brackmann (1840?– 1866?), 78 Dierking, Frederick William (1836–?), 2, 78

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Dierking, Friedrich W. (Jürgen Dietrich Friedrich Wilhelm, “Tröster,” 1798– 1875): confusion of name, 2n3; migration, 2–5; land patented, 4n6; reliance on Duden, 29–30; settlement in Lafayette County, 31; sells Esperke land, 44; unchurched, 77; death, 78; sells Missouri land, 79, 85n32; estate contents, 80; marginalization, 80, 165; agricultural realism, 158–59; mentioned, 8, 19, 31, 34, 95, 138, 157, 162–63 Dierking, Georg, 39 Dierking, Georg Heinrich (1830–1901), 61, 118 Dierking, Heinrich (1805–1864), 61, 115, 118 Dierking, Johann Friedrich, 39 Dierking, Maria Wällner (1833?–1900), 63 Dierking, Verlinda (1833?–?), 80 Dover, Mo., 130 Dover Township: agricultural production, 56, 126; slaves, 91 Drake Constitution, 142 Dresden, Germany, 27, 69 Duden, Gottfried (1785–1855): read in Esperke, 1; emigration advice, 29–30; modern scarcity of book, 30n38; inspired Cole Camp immigrants, 48; Dierking not beguiled by, 159; dream of emigration, 164–65; mentioned, 84, 157 Duensing, Christine Evert Ehlers (1836– 1873), 41–42 Duensing, Dorothea Schwabe (1817– 1886), 42 Duensing, Friedrich (Fritz) (1843–?), 42 Duensing, Hans Georg Heinrich (1811– ?), 42 Duensing, Henry (1839–?), 42 DuPage County, Ill., 71 Edwards, John Newman (1839–1889), 113, 144–45, 145n29 Ehlers, Christian Heinrich (or Heinrich Christian) (1830–1864), 42, 42n14, 101, 111 Ehlers, Dietrich Heinrich, Jr. (1802– 1882), 42–43

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Ehlers, Dietrich Heinrich, Sr. (1758– 1837), 42–42 Ehlers, J. H., 94n7 Eisenstein, I., 94 Election of 1860: local results, 92–93; voting method, 93 Emma, Mo., 151, 153 Enrolled Missouri Militia, 101 Ernestville, Mo., 153 Ernst August, king of Hanover (1771– 1851): becomes king, 10; Göttingen Seven, 26; boys named for, 26, 134 Esperke, Germany: published history, ix; early emigrants, 1–2, 5; parish, 2n1; division of commons, 11, 14; farm products, 12; population growth, 12; farm sizes, 13; houselings and artisans, 17–18; soldiers quartered in, 22; voters, 23; politics of village poor, 27; reasons for emigration from, 29; Frerking households in, 35; crowded households, 39–40; emigrants from, 42–45, 49; language of, 48–49; as “mother village,” 49; sons who voted for Lincoln, 94; mentioned, 19, 33, 84, 115, 165–66 Ethnicity, nature of, 160 Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hanover, 28, 65, 67, 72, 74 Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States. See Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod Evert, Daniel Conrad (1767–?), 41 Evert, Dorothea Rabe (1816–1893), 41 Evert, Ludwig (1806–1864), 41, 67, 73 Ewing, Robert C. (1795?–1870?), 89 Ewing, Gen. Thomas, Jr. (1829–1896), 109–10 Ex-Confederates, political domination of state, 142–43 Farm equipment and household goods, 37 Farming, preference of Hanoverian immigrants for, 136 Fellman, Michael, 116, 119, 159 Femme Osage Evangelical Church, 124 Ficken, Henry (1843–?), 146 Fiene, Friederike Liever (1812–1884), 67 Fiene, Friedrich (1808–1879), 67, 73, 87, 107

Fiene, Louis (1835–1863), 73, 107 Firearms, brought from Germany, 3, 29 Fire insurance, 11, 129–30, 130n7 First Trinity Lutheran Church, Tonawanda, N.Y., 70 Flax, 18, 50, 57 Foote, Shelby, 160n5 Formula of Concord (1577), 74, 133 “Forty-Eighters,” 25 Fox, Anna, née Neuhaus (1867?–?), 83 Franke, Rev. Adolf G. G. (1821?–1879), 69–71, 69n10 Franke, Friederike Frerking (1833–1890), 70 Franke, Heinrich (1821–1859?), 34 Fraternal orders, 167 Freedom Township: available land, 54; Anglo and German farms compared, 56–57; gold hunters from, 61, 63; German accomplishments in, 88; slaves, 91; voters for Lincoln, 92; E. Price’s visit, 98–99; guerrilla raid of Oct. 5, 1862, 101–6; guerrilla raid of July 13, 1863, 107; traversed by Shelby’s troops, 110; attack of Oct. 10, 1864, 114–17; 1880s immigrants, 125; postwar economic growth, 125; national transport grid, 139; railroad stock subscription, 141; postwar election returns, 141–42; James Gang in, 145–46; ethnic mix in 1870, 148–49; mentioned, 21, 33, 40, 66, 124. See also Concordia, Mo., settlement Frémont, Gen. John C. (1813–1890), 99– 100, 132 Frerking, Adolph (1825–1912), 3 Frerking, Dietrich (1828–?), 94 Frerking, Dorothea Marie Sprengel (1792–1868), 42 Frerking, Friedrich (1812–1869): deserts Hanoverian army, 1; acquires land, 35; wife and son immigrate, 35; son’s birth date, 35n6; covenants to found church, 67; mentioned, 8, 21, 61 Frerking, George (1816–1857), 57 Frerking, Heinrich (1813–1875?), 3 Frerking, Johann Heinrich (1798–1875), 39, 104 Frerking, Ludwig (1820–1850), 3, 61 Frerking, Wilhelm (1814–1884), 3, 94, 136, 138, 147

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Index o Freund, Gustav (1837–1895), 136 Friedrich Jacob (sailing ship), 44 Ft. Morgan, Colo., 153 Garbsen, Germany, 8 Gasconade County, Mo., 124 Geest (landform), 12, 159 General Washington (sailing ship), 42 George I, king of Great Britain (Georg Ludwig, Grand Duke of BrunswickLuneberg) (1660–1727), 8 George II, king of Great Britain (1683– 1760), 8 George III, king of Great Britain (1738– 1820), 8, 10–11 German Baptist Church, 76–77 German Evangelical Synod of St. Louis (later of North America), x, 27, 75 German Language: retention, 154, 161n8; importance of sources in, 159 Germania, 151 Germany: political divisions, 7; uneven distribution of land, 13 Giesecke, Heinrich, (1837–1923), 44 Global economy, 55 Göbel, Gert (1816–1896), 31 Gold Rush, California, 60–61, 63, 103 Goodman, Sgt. Thomas, 112n35 Gordon, Maj. George P. (1828–1909), 148 Gordon, Lee, 149 Göttingen, Germany, 24 Göttingen Seven, 26 Göttingen University, 26, 69, 131 Grabau, Rev. J. A. A. (1804–1879), 70–71 Graham, James, 114, 136 Grain prices, 15, 19 Greeley, Horace (1811–1872), 141–42 Grissom murder, 99–100, 102 Grist mill, 135, 138 Guerrillas: local support of, 100, 143; atrocities by, 112, 116, 105nn27–28, 160, 160n5; postwar encounters with, 146–47 Haerle, Nicholas, 96n11 Hamburg, Germany, 2, 38, 48, 134 Handlooms, 57 Hannover, Germany (city), ix, 1, 25 Hannover, Consistory, 65 Hanover, army of: conscription, 21–22, 77; uniforms, 22n24; mentioned, ix, 42

197

Hanover, Electorate (Kurfürstentum) and Kingdom (Königreich): spelling, 1n1; civil subdivisions, 5n7; size, 8; size of population, 8; relationship to Britain, 8, 10n4; annexed by Prussia 10, 134; character of government, 10–11; becomes kingdom, 11; sovereign as landlord, 11; domicile law of 1827, 12; women, 16n16, 86; losses in French invasion of Russia, 21; general legislature (Ständeversammlung), 23; enfranchisement of peasantry, 23–24; peasant attitudes to politics, 24; revolutions of 1830 and 1848, 24–26; disturbance of 1837, 26; confessionalism tolerated, 28; Protestants not merged, 28, 75; value of currency, 29n37; religious tolerance, 74–75; retirement contracts, 86; subjects’ political identification 134, mentioned, xi, 1. See also Calenberg Hartmann, Heinrich (1820–1862), 103 Hartmann, Joseph (1825–?), 103 Heidelberg Catechism, 75 Heilmann, Rev. Oscar (1887–1981), 161 Heisterberg, Fritz (1838–1907), 136 Heitmeyer, Charlotte Neuhaus (1862– 1914), 83 Helms, Charlotte Dierking Bruns (1811– 1881) 3, 95 Helms, George (1819–1872), 95, 149, 150 Hemme, Georg Heinrich, (1833–1909), 44 Hemme, Heinrich Friedrich (1828–?), 44 Hemme, Johann Heinrich Dietrich (1799–1886), 44 Hemme, Ludwig (1812?–?), 44 Hemp, 50, 54–56, 90, 90n2, 127, 159 Herd, Andrew Jackson (1816?–?), 79–81 Hermanner Wochenblatt, 91 Hessen-Darmstadt, Germany, 51 Heuerlinge. See Houselings Higginsville, Mo., 124, 143, 152 Higher education, 152 High schools, 152 Hodgskin, Thomas (1787–1869), 86 Hoffer, Peter Charles, xi Holtcamp, Caspar (1810?–?), 46 Holtcamp, John (1832–?), 46, 63 Holy Cross Lutheran Church, 75, 115, 153

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Home guard, 98, 99, 115 Hooker, Richard (1554?–1600), 134 Horses, 11, 37, 44, 57, 99, 126 Horseshoe Creek Settlement, 153 Horst, Germany, 41 Houselings (Häuslinge): described, 17; differently termed across northwest Germany, 17n17; losses from division of commons, 18: threatened subsistence, 19; emigration, 44 Huguenots, 75 Humboldt, Alexander von (1769–1859), 131–32 Humboldt, Mo., 131, 132n12 Illinois, 38, 122, 124 Immigrant churches, management, 64–65 Immigrant identity, 134–35 Immigration and immigrants: families, 122; postwar, 122; third generation, 125; leadership, 157; long-term benefits, 166 “Ironclad oath,” 142 Jackson, Gov. Claiborne Fox (1806– 1862), 91, 97 Jackson County, Mo., 60, 100, 106 James, Frank (1843–1915), 145 James, Jesse (1847–1882), 144–45, 145n29, 146n32 Jefferson, Pres. Thomas (1743–1826), 131, 163 Jefferson City, Mo., 68, 110 Johnson, Sen. Waldo P. (1817–1885), 142–43 Johnson County, Mo., 33, 106 Johnston, Maj. A. V. E., 111 Kamphoefner, Walter D., 51 Kansas City, Mo., 107, 117, 154 Kansas raiders, 100–101 Karsten, Dietrich (1833?–1863), 107 Kentucky, 4, 50, 55 Kirchenverein des Westens. See German Evangelical Synod of St. Louis Know-Nothing Party, 89 Koepfli and Suppiger Party, 3–4 Koncordia Komical Krew, 155, 155n44 Koppenbrink, Matilda Neuhaus (1862?– ?), 83 Kresse, Rev. Carl (1811–1896), 76

Kuhlman, Katherine (1907–1976), 77 Küster, Johann Dietrich (1827?–?), 115 Laderholz, Germany, 16, 34, 41, 65–66, 86, 158 Lafayette County, Mo.: solution to Esperke’s overpopulation, 12; hemp production, 50, 127; soils, 51; slaves, 91; wheat and oats production, 127, 129; bonded indebtedness, 141; taxpayers’ convention, 141; mentioned, 3, 30, 31, 40, 101, 106, 153 Lake Creek Settlement, Benton County, Mo. See Cole Camp, Mo. Land values, 54 Lange, Louis (1829–1893), 150 “Latin Farmers,” 30, 150, 157 Lawrence (Kans.) Massacre, 109 Lehne, Christian (?–1846), 31, 33, 147 Leine River, 38 Leslie, Edward E., 116 Lexington, Battle of, 99 Lexington, Mo.: votes for Lincoln in, 92; pro-Union rally, 96; Germans flee, 97; Turner Hall searched, 97; mentioned, 39, 68, 76, 99, 107, 116, 130, 138, 152 Lexington and St. Louis Railroad, 138–39, 147 Lexington Township: slaves, 91; effects of Civil War, 125–26 Lexington Union, 106 Liever, Johann Heinrich Christian (1787– 1860?): immigrates, 34; Hanoverian background, 65; farm, 66; teaching ability, 66; founds St. Paul’s, 67; retirement contract, 86–87; presumed death, 88, 88n37; mentioned, 73, 107 Liever, Luise (1793?–1860?), 86, 88 Lincoln, Abraham (1809–1865), 92–93, 132 Linen production, household: in northwest Germany, 18–19, 19n20, 55; in Ravensberg, 46; in Freedom Township, 57 Lippe (principality), 19, 124, 153 “Little Dixie” region: slave-based agriculture, 55–56, 91; postwar agricultural transformation, 125–27, 156; “competency” goal achieved, 163, 163n10; mentioned, 110, 159 Locke, John (1632–1704), 134

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Index o Loehe, Rev. Wilhelm (1808–1872), 70–71, 75 Lower Saxon State Archives (Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv), 1 Low German. See Plattdeutsch Luther, Dr. Martin (1483–1546), 74, 133 Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod: founding meeting, 70; theology compared to Hanoverian church, 74– 75; attitudes to slavery, 94; theological separation, 133n14; takes over St. Paul’s Academy, 152; western district, 152; new congregations, 153; centrality of role, 167 Lutheran confessionalism, 28, 75 Lutheraner, 70 Lutheran pastor, community role of, 69 Lynching, 137 Lyon, Gen. Nathaniel (1818–1861), 96–98 Maltzahn, Graf von, 69 Mandel, Armin (1919–1996), ix Mandelsloh, Germany, 66 Marmaduke, Gov. John Sappington (1833–1887), 143 Marshall, Mo., 98, 110 Marshall County, Kan., 153 Martial law, 99 Massacre accounts, 113–14 McCorkle, John (1838–?), 109, 113 McCoy, Arthur (1825–1880), 146 Mehl, Louis, 105 Meinecke, Wm. H., 94n7 Meinecke’s store, 99 Melanchthon, Philipp (1497–1560), 133 Metel, Germany, 22, 38, 141 Methodists, German American: circuit in western Missouri, 67–68; position on slavery, 95; slave owners, 95; mentioned, 48. See also Zoar congregation Meyer, August (1819–1901), 22, 165 Meyer, Heinrich (1811?–?) 68 Meyer, John F. (1833–1878), 135 Meyer, Louis A. (1853–1927), 113–14, 116, 151 Meyers, William, 135 Middleton Township, 35, 91, 124–25 Migrant labor to Netherlands (Hollandgängerei), 18

199

Ministers, shortage of, 65 Mississippi River, 4, 38 Missouri Confederate Veterans’ Home and Cemetery, 143–44, 144n27 Missouri Constitution of 1865, 142 Missouri Constitution of 1875, 142 Missouri Pacific Railroad, 139 Missouri “Rhineland,” 30, 124, 150, 153 Missouri State Guard, 97, 99 Missouri Thalbote, 152 Mock, David, 147 Modernization of rural life, 154 Moeller’s store, 131 Montesquieu, Baron de (1689–1755), 134 Monticello, 164 Mühl, Eduard (1800–1854), 91 Mules, 37, 57, 60n31, 126 Mulkey, Christopher, 147 Mulkey, Dick, 4 Mulligan, Col. James (1829–1864), 99 Münder, Germany, 25 Musgrove, William (?–1857), 3n4, 90 Nagel, Paul, 27, 113n37 Napoleon, Mo., 124 Napton, William B. (1808–1883), 92, 114, 164 Nast, Dr. Wilhelm (1807–1899), 67–68 Nativism, 89 Neuhaus, Friedrich (1825–1904), 81–84 Neuhaus, Marie Friederike Dierking Herd (1823–1893): first marriage, 79; marital problems and divorce, 80–81; remarries, 81–83; prenuptial contract, 82–83; children, 83; will, 83–84; burial, 84; unusual life, 84–85 Neustadt am Rübenberge (Amt): migration from, 5; labor migration to Holland, 18; religious census, 28; immigrants from, 38, 61; reasons for leaving, 157; mentioned, 21, 24, 30, 33, 68, 71 New Orleans, La., 38–39, 42, 46, 61 New York City, 2–3, 39, 45 Niederstöcken, Germany, 12, 72–73, 107, 120 Niederstöcken (Vogtei), 12 Niemeyer, Charlotte (1810–?), 3 Niemeyer, Friedrich (1806–?) 3, 33, 34n4 Niemeyer, Fritz (1846–1906), 147

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Niemeyer, Jürgen Hr. (?–1812), 21 Northfield, Minn., bank robbery, 145 Oats, 50, 56, 129 Oetting, Christian (1806–1862): background, 33; to California, 61; murdered, 103; subscribed to WochenChronik, 150 Oetting, Dietrich (1813?–?), 152 Oetting, Henry (1835–1881), 103, 105 Oetting, Marie (1840–1920), 65 Oetting, William (1853?–?), 152 Ohio River, 4, 38 “Old Americans.” See Anglo-Missourians “Old Lutherans,” 70 Order Number Eleven, 109 Osage County, Mo., 60n31, 124, 159 Osage Mission, 67 Osnabrück, Germany, 19 Osnabrück (bishopric), 46 Osnabrück (Hanoverian province), 46, 153 “Osnaburg.” See Linen production, household Otterville, Mo., 113 Oxen, 57 Panic of 1873, 122–23 Panic of 1893, 125 Päper, Weller (1841–1864), 115 Paroles, disputed, 99 Patrick, Miles, 95 Pauling, Friedrich (1842–?), 114 Peasant proprietors’ obligations, 14–16 Perry County, Mo., 27–29, 72 Petri, Rev. Ludwig Adolf (1801–1873), 28 Pickle, Linda S., 85 Pilot Knob, battle, 110 Plattdeutsch (language), 48–49, 155, 161 Plowing with cows, 44, 57 Population growth: Concordia settlement, 5, 49, 121; Hanover, 8, 12, 17, 29; Esperke, 12 Preindustrial mentality, 161 Price, Col. Edwin, 98 Price, Gen. Sterling (1809–1867), 98–100, 110, 112, 117–18 Price (Neuhaus servant family), 83 Prigmore, William (1804–1864), 116 Protestants, German American, 65

Prussia (kingdom): civil subdivisions, 5n7; annexes Hanover, 10, 16, 134; forced merger of confessions, 27–28, 75; mentioned, 8, 22n24 Prussians in Freedom Township, 46, 61, 68, 74, 76, 81, 94, 104, 122, 135, 148 Psychological reassurance, 76 Quantrill, William C. (1837–1864), 100– 101, 106, 111, 144n27 Quartering of troops, 22 Quast, Rev. Martin, 71 Rabe, Dorothea Marie Hessen (1788– 1852), 41 Rabe, Friedrich (1823–1900?), 33, 41 Rabe, Heinrich (1812–1875), 41, 67, 73 Rabe, Johann Heinrich (1786–1852), 41 Railroad bonds controversy, 139, 141 Rape, 116, 117n45, 160 Rathbun, Col. George, S. 148 Ravensberg (Grafschaft), 46, 48, 153 Ray County, Mo., 118, 145 Redemption of services (Auflösung), 14– 15 Reed, Bill, 106 Reformed Confession, 27–28, 75, 160 Rehkop, Heinrich (1823–1902), 122 Rehkop, Luise (1827–1895), 122 Religious unionism, 75 Republican Party, 132, 142 Retirees, needs of, 86 Revolution of 1848, 25–26 Reynolds, Thomas C. (1821–1887), 117 Ricklingen (Amt); 5, 21, 41, 68 Rocheport, Mo., 112 Rodekohr, Johann (1811?–?), 104 Rodekohr, Luise (1823?–?), 104 Rodewald, Germany, 22, 42, 68, 71 Röpe, Heinrich (1825?–1895?), 102 Rush, Dr. J. (?–1874), 137 Rye, 12, 13, 50, 54, 56 Sachs, Aaron, 131 Sacramento, Calif., 61 Saline County, Mo.: Germans in, 44, 153; hemp production, 50; St. John Church near, 74; Know-Nothings, 89; guerrillas ambushed in, 115; Price lingers in, 117; mentioned, 101, 113, 164 Saw mill, 135–36

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Index o Saxony (kingdom), 27, 72 Scalping, 112–13, 117 Scharnhorst, Ludwig (1793?–1879), 107, 147 Scharnhorst, William (1839?–1863), 107 Scheele, Heinrich (1812–1867), 44 Schiller, Friedrich (1759–1805), 134 Schiplage, Germany 46 Schlomann, Anton (1812–1874), 57 Schmahl, Heinrich, 51 Schmidt, Heinrich (?–1872?), 61 Schurz, Sen. Carl (1829–1906), 142–43 Secor, Ill., 63 Sedalia, Mo., 99, 113, 117, 138, 139n21 Settlement migration, 157 Seventy-First EMM Regiment, 101 Shelby, Gen. Joseph O. (1830–1897): buys hemp, 55; 1863 cavalry raid, 109–10; U.S. marshal, 143; aids James brothers, 145; railroad official, 148; mentioned, 113 Sibley, Mo., 106 Sihler, Rev. Wilhelm (1801–1885), 69 Slavery and slaves: linen produced for, 55; importance in Little Dixie, 56; uneven distribution, 56, 126; opposed by German Americans, 91; conflicting American Dreams of, 163–64, 168 Smallholders, 13, 19 Sni Hills, 100 Snyder, John, 135 Social stigmas, decay in America, 41–42 Sodemann, Wilhelm (1844?–?), 136 South America, 131 Spenge, Germany, 46 Spitz, Lewis W. (1895–1996), 2n3, 28 Stade, Germany, 48 State Lutheran Church of Hanover. See Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hanover St. Charles County, Mo., 19, 51, 124 Steamships, hasten ocean crossing, 39 Stearns County, Minn., 135 Steimbke, Germany, 42 Stephan, Rev. Martin (1777–1846), 27, 75, 166 Stephanites, 69, 72 St. John Church, 73 St. Louis, Mo.: immigrant destination, 1, 27, 46; route from east coast to, 3–4; employment in, 35, 44, 104n26, 154;

201

Dierking family in, 84; Price bypasses, 110, 112; mentioned, 5, 30–31, 38, 51, 61, 69, 75, 91–92, 96, 100, 114, 122, 124, 136, 138, 145, 150, 154, 169 St. Louis Street, 130–31 St. Matthew’s Church, 153 Stolzenau, Germany, 25–26 St. Paul’s Academy (later College), 28, 152 St. Paul’s Lutheran Church: 150th anniversary, ix; founding, 65, 67; leadership, 67, 158; exchange with Addison, Ill., 71–72; dramatic growth, 72; schism of 1847, 73; Home Guard gathers, 115; members’ reading, 150; daughter congregations, 154n43 St. Peter’s Church, Flora, 153 Stünkel, Charlotte Frerking (1823–1899), 104 Stünkel, Conrad (1811–1884): background, 38; founder of St. Paul’s Church, 67; county commissioner, 139, 141; success, 165; mentioned, 22, 148 Stünkel, Fritz (1818–1874), 104 Stünkel, Heinrich D. (1808–1876), 68n8, 136 Stünkel, Louis (1820–1864), 115 Stünkel family, 71 Stüve, Johan Carl-Bertram (1798–1872), 24 Suderbruch, Germany, 42 Sweet Springs, Mo. 113, 114, 117, 130, 143 Tebbenkamp, Henry, 149 Tebbenkamp, Rosetta Neuhaus (1854– 1931), 83 Thelen, David, 144 Thiemann, Caroline Liever (1820?–?), 34 Thiemann, Friedrich (1802?–?), 34, 87 Thiemann, Heinrich (1834?–?), 68, 148, 166n13 Thomas, Amelia Neuhaus, 83 Thompson, Gen. M. Jeff (1826–1876), 117 Thraikill, John (1838?–1898?), 113 Thrasher, J. S., 132 Tiemann, Christine, Neuhaus (1857?–?), 83 Thirty Years’ War, 21 Timpen, Jürgen Friedrich, 23 Tocqueville, Alexis de (1805–1859), 162

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Todd, George (?–1864), 110–13, 117–18 Todd, Tom, 112 Train robbery, 144 Transportation of undesirables, 45–46 Trinity Lutheran Church, 153 Turner Hall, 97 Unchurched population, 77 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 91 Unionists robbed, 106 Union of British and Hanoverian thrones, 8 United States Constitution, 168 Uphaus, Casper (1824–1908), 61 Uphaus, Herman, 148 Vest, Sen. George G. (1830–1904), 143 Vogt, Julius (1832–1915), 101, 104, 104n26, 136 Vogt, Marie (1829–1906), 102–4 Vogt, office of, 41 Voigt, Harry R., 2n3, 148–49 Volkert, Rev. J. Nicholas, 71 Walkenhorst, Franz, (1810–1864), 46, 48, 92, 95, 116 Walkenhorst, William F. (1844–1927), 92 Walther, Rev. Carl F. W. (1811–1887): ordained Franke, 69; opinion of other Lutherans and Methodists, 70; opinions of slavery, 94; mentioned, 142, 166 Warmeloh, Germany, 46, 48 Warren County, Mo., 19, 51, 124 Warsaw, Mo., 97 Washington County, Kans., 153 Washington County, Wisc., 51

Waverly, Mo., 55, 110, 145 Weber, Wilhelm, 91 Wegert, Karl H., 10 Wellington, Mo., 101 Weltbote, 151 Westerhaus, Casper Heinrich (1825– 1896), 104, 148–49 Westfalia, Germany: immigrants from, 19, 61, 74, 135, 159; motivation of emigrants, 27; includes Ravensberg, 46 Westfalia (Napoleonic kingdom) 41 Westliche Post 91, 97, 150 Westport, Mo., 107, 117 Wheat, 54, 56, 127, 129, 159 Whig Party, 89 Wilson’s Creek, Battle of, 98 Wisconsin, 27, 122 Wochen-Chronik, 150 Wölpe, Germany, 5, 21, 68 Wolters, William (1848–1864), 111 Women: ownership of property, 83n29; independence of, 85; suffering after raids, 118; benefits of immigration for, 166, 166n14 Wrede, Heinrich (1790–1864), 115 Wülfing Party, 4 Wyneken, Rev. F. C. D. (1820–1876), 70 Young, Sheriff William B. (1842–1915?), 145 Yox, Andrew P., 76 Zion Lutheran Church, Addison Township, Ill., 71 Zoar congregation, geographical origins, 68

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