Between the summer of 1816 and spring of 1817, at least 35,000 individuals fled the south-west German states of Baden and Württemberg, seeking to escape bitter conditions.Footnote 1 The greater part headed for the United States, others to Russia.Footnote 2 Undeclared migration, of those eligible for military service, in debt, or unable to pay their exit fees, likely inflated the overall number.Footnote 3 The disastrous weather and harvest of 1816, alongside heavy taxation in order to pay for the Napoleonic Wars, helped to produce substantial emigration, concentrated largely in the first months of 1817. The exodus is traditionally regarded as something of an anomaly in German migration patterns, explained by extraordinary conditions, but sitting in isolation to the major German-speaking migration systems of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Historical study of the episode has emphasized this, typically focusing on immediate material conditions, largely omitting detailed consideration of the active networks – logistical, religious, and familial – which conveyed the movement and shaped migration decisions.Footnote 4 This article examines those factors, in order to demonstrate the pivotal nature of 1816/17 in the development of German Atlantic migration. It analyses an episode which was the product of continuities, rather than just material anomalies, and which, in turn, catalysed major change, shifting German migration to America away from its eighteenth-century precedents, and into the model of nineteenth-century mass-migration.
In order to appraise the transitional nature of the episode, and highlight its significance in German Atlantic migration, four elements are considered. First, the structures of German migration to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are surveyed, in order to highlight the differences between the two eras. The mechanics of migration in 1816 and 1817 are then analysed, in order to demonstrate the extent to which the episode was dependent on, and an expression of, the eighteenth-century system. Thereafter, the effect of the exodus on migration models – which was to catalyse the transition between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century patterns – will be analysed. Finally, the analysis will integrate the Rhine exodus of 1816 and 1817 into a broader developmental paradigm of German migration, which bridges the long-standing historiographical separation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century movements.
I
In both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, German migrants featured heavily on American shores, being the most numerous of any European group. Since the 1980s, the mass movement of the nineteenth century has enjoyed extensive historical analysis, covering causation at the point of departure, transport systems and migration networks, and innumerous aspects of settlement and accultration in the United States.Footnote 5 Since the 1990s, analysis of earlier movements to British North America has also enjoyed detailed analysis, which has reached a similar degree of breadth and focus.Footnote 6 Differences in migrant type, migrant source regions, migrant destinations, and models of migrant transit encourage specialization by period, leading to largely separate historiographies. The writing of separate historiographies, however, has tended to weaken analytical enquiry into the connections between periods and systems of migration.Footnote 7 In order to explore the importance of 1816–17 as a connective episode, which bridged patterns and systems of German migration in the Atlantic, it will first be necessary to explore how German migration to America functioned in the eighteenth century, and then in the nineteenth, highlighting the differences between those periods.
In the eighteenth century, more than 100,000 migrants left the south-west German regions of the Electoral Palatinate, Kraichgau, Baden-Durlach, and Duchy of Württemberg, as well as neighbouring Alsace and the Swiss cantons, in order to cross the Atlantic. They landed and settled overwhelmingly in Pennsylvania. At the invitation of William Penn, marginalized religious groups had pioneered the earliest German-American settlement in 1683, founding ‘Germantown’. Their movement, however, was somewhat self-limiting.Footnote 8
Two developments changed this. First, the events of 1709 and thereafter, the commercialization of transport between the Rhine and the Delaware Valley. In 1709–10, some 3,000 south-west Germans were settled in America by the British government, ending the ‘prevailing view that [Atlantic] emigration was a move only acceptable for religious and social outsiders’ and shifting ‘the perception of migration to the American colonies from an extraordinary step to a broadly acceptable option’.Footnote 9
After 1709, the German Atlantic movement quickly developed into a large-scale labour migration. As positive impressions of Pennsylvania gained strength among the general public, the burgeoning commercial connections between Rotterdam, on the Rhine, and Philadelphia secured the extensive German settlement of Penn's colony.Footnote 10 By the early 1720s, British captains operating out of Rotterdam found demand for labour in the colonies to be so great that ‘Palatines’ could be taken to America on credit.Footnote 11 Deposits were accepted, with the fare to be settled in Philadelphia. Hardware brought to the New World could be sold at high prices, in order to pay off passage money. Arrangements could also be made with former countrymen, who might settle the account in exchange for a period of labour.Footnote 12 In this fashion, several years' work could ‘redeem’ the price of the crossing. The ‘redemptioner’ service quickly became a significant commercial operation. Merchants in Rotterdam provided payloads of German ‘freights’ to ship owners and their captains, who sold the passage costs of redemptioners at a mark-up price in the New World.
Crucial to this system were German migrants returning to their old communities; the ‘Newlanders’ who provided the recruiting service needed to maintain the system. The Newlander was often associated with nefarious activity, agreeing to lead emigrants to their riches in America – in exchange for cash – only to pocket the money and auction the migrants to the highest bidders in Rotterdam or Amsterdam. However, enough legitimate connection was forged through this system of personal contact that emigration was significantly stimulated. As the number of Germans traversing the Atlantic increased, so the system gathered pace. By the late 1730s, several thousand arrivals were reaching Philadelphia each year. Temporarily interrupted by the War of Austrian Succession in the 1740s, by mid-century the number of south Germans and Swiss reaching Pennsylvania had become a mass phenomenon; between 1749 and 1754, nearly 40,000 German migrants were landed in Philadelphia, a city that in 1756 had a population of only 17,000.Footnote 13
Although conveyed by a different transit system to later passenger emigration, the mass-migration of the mid-eighteenth century was nevertheless a labour movement of classical migration theory, transplanting large numbers of migrants from an environment of low expected economic utility to one of high expected utility, within well-developed information and transit networks. By removing the largest cost barriers of migration – both the transatlantic passage and initial settlement in the New World – the redemptioner system produced a highly inclusive migration network, dominated by the more marginalized members of the contemporary south-west German economy, in particular tradesmen and labourers.
The states of the Upper Rhine and its tributaries typically practised a system of inheritance that divided property equally among all heirs, allowing for constant household formation and dense populations. By the mid-eighteenth century, when populations had recovered to pre-Thirty Years War levels, those with large endowments of land remained buoyant, and appear to have increasingly employed a strategy of ‘horizontal’ marriage in order to maintain this position.Footnote 14 Those with lesser plots, and greater dependence on wage work, faced greater difficulties. Wage work in almost every branch of trade or industry was subject to guild regulation, which attempted to ensure an equitable distribution of available work by enforcing wage ceilings, and by excluding non-members from encroaching on a particular craft. This had the dual effect of both limiting income and prohibiting alternative earnings. An inelastic income situation was particularly problematic for individuals with large and expanding families, as it was for young individuals facing increasing barriers to entry in a given trade. Consequently, between 1733 and 1761, 61 per cent of German arrivals in Pennsylvania were of trade and labouring backgrounds, compared to 39 per cent who were agriculturalists, essentially inverse proportions to their representation in German society.Footnote 15 In Württemberg, where guilds had virtually ubiquitous occupational and geographic control, this situation was even more acute: between 1749 and 1754, at the high point of German migration into Philadelphia, only 17·7 per cent were agriculturalists, whilst 74·6 per cent were tradesmen and labourers.Footnote 16
After this mid-century high point, German Atlantic networks began to decline in significance. The outbreak of the Seven Years War (1756–63) closed the Atlantic passage, while in 1763 Russian crown lands were made available to German settlers, and heavily incentivized by Catherine the Great.Footnote 17 Some Russian enticements were rescinded at the end of the 1760s, yet American emigration remained low in subsequent decades. Recruiting campaigns for Habsburg Hungary and the outbreak of the American War of Independence once again resulted in minimal New World emigration. Upon the conclusion of the British-American conflict, partitioned Poland became another area for Habsburg and Prussian recruitment. In the 1790s, European conflict then provided further intermittent barriers to significant transnational resettlement.
Sustained emigration to North America did not return to the German states until the late 1820s. From 1829, collapsing agricultural prices led to the onset of emigration among small-scale farmers from Baden and Württemberg. Defensive kinship strategies were no longer sufficient to protect landowners, especially those in locales unable to raise cash-rich crops.Footnote 18 The Atlantic migration on which these individuals now embarked, however, was conducted by different models and networks than in the previous century. German migrants now paid their passage, and while a minority still departed from the Low Countries, the majority departed from ports such as Le Havre, Bremen, Liverpool, and latterly Hamburg. New logistical networks, migration laws, and pronounced subsistence crises quickly brought more German regions into this newly expansive Atlantic migration.
The lifting of emigration restrictions in Hesse in 1832 saw that region join the exodus of neighbouring Baden and Württemberg. From 1832, the increasingly redundant figure of the north-west German Heuerling (lit. ‘hire-ling’), whose income sources of agricultural work, cottage textile production, and seasonal migrant labour were experiencing collapse, also became a major figure in the emigration.Footnote 19 By the late 1840s, the labourer of the German north-east, emancipated by reforms to feudal agriculture, but increasingly superfluous to commercial farming, also began to feature. With the subsistence crisis of 1846/7, a huge surge in emigration occurred, as crop failures spread the migration impetus in to previously unaffected villages and parishes, and intensified the existing movement elsewhere.
Across the Atlantic, German arrivals from the 1830s onwards began to populate new areas, far beyond the greater Pennsylvania region of the previous century. From Ohio and Indiana, west to Wisconsin, and south to Missouri, the Midwest became a hub of dense German settlement. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the family migrations that characterized movement to the Midwest then gave way to a labour migration of youth, with urban hubs like New York and Chicago absorbing large numbers of German maidservants and manual labourers transported via cheap steam passage. The mass movement persisted well into the 1890s, despite occasional intervening barriers, finally declining during the advanced stages of German industrialization.Footnote 20
German Atlantic migration in the nineteenth century differed considerably from emigration during the previous century. The eighteenth-century system had been highly localized, operating largely between the German south-west, Dutch ports of embarkation, and Philadelphia, and was highly dependent on indentured labour. In the nineteenth century, migrants departed from new ports, paid their passage, and arrived as free labour, ready to enter the wage economy immediately. Moreover, they came from across the German states, in an extensive phenomenon that also spread across many regions of the US. At the intersection of these eras sits the episode of 1816–17.
The migration of that year was stimulated by adverse economic and meteorological conditions, but conveyed by the systems and networks of the eighteenth century. As such, it was a product of continuities. However, it was also a movement that helped to produce profound change; in its aftermath, the financing of German passage in the Atlantic was radically reorganized, and the American settlement choices of subsequent German migrants had shifted firmly to the nineteenth-century pattern. The initial continuities involved in producing the 1816–17 exodus, in the form of logistical, familial, and religious connections in the German Atlantic, will now be explored. The analysis will then examine the pivotal effects of 1816–17 on the subsequent evolution of German migration to America.
II
In 1816 and 1817, connections between the German south-west and the Philadelphia/Pennsylvania region were very much active. Although Eastern Europe had commanded most German immigration since the Atlantic interruptions of the Seven Years and Revolutionary Wars, redemptioner markets remained active when the trade could function. Unlike the other major north Atlantic migration systems of the eighteenth century – the British and Irish passage and indenture trades, and the West African slave trade – the Rhine-Low Country-Delaware Valley system had been left untouched by changes to the British Atlantic after the American War of Independence.Footnote 21 Significantly, American merchants, who had increased their share of the German passenger trade during the 1750s, remained active in that trade after the Revolution, perpetuating the German servant model in Pennsylvania's labour markets.Footnote 22 Their intermittent and understated continuation of the trade became important during the Napoleonic conflicts between 1800 and 1806, when significant numbers of Germans began seeking Atlantic passage, and American ships found themselves a flag of convenience in otherwise blockaded European waters.
It is likely that the period 1800–8 saw 9,000–10,000 German arrivals in American ports, including Baltimore, but primarily Philadelphia, with the peak being 1803–6.Footnote 23 Small-scale American emigration began around 1800, after initial French incursions east of the Rhine, and began to peak before the continental outbreak of the Third Coalition War. After 1806, however, intense blockade activity made the Atlantic passage increasingly difficult, and completely closed it with the blockade of American shipping in 1808. A close examination of the migration during this short window demonstrates the endurance of the eighteenth-century German Atlantic system, despite its lower use since the mid-1760s.
The individuals leaving for America at the turn of the century originated from the same regions that had been involved in previous waves of migration to Pennsylvania, often from the same communities, and were often direct relatives of former migrants. Examining a community in microcosm is illustrative. The village of Ölbronn, in Württemberg, sent at least fifty-four individuals to America in the period 1800–5.Footnote 24 Among them was Georg Jakob Schäfer, a forty-nine-year-old farmer, whose uncle, Johann Michael Schäfer, had emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1752.Footnote 25 News of Johann Michael had returned to the village in the mid-1760s, when Georg Jakob was a boy, confirming that his uncle was in Philadelphia.Footnote 26 Johann Michael was also the uncle of Johanna Holdenrieth (née Schäfer), who left ‘around 1805’ with her farmer husband, and two children.Footnote 27 Three further heads of household departing at the time also had connections by marriage to families whose members had left for Philadelphia in the 1750s; three more were distant relatives of earlier Pennsylvanian migrants. In all, forty-seven of the emigrants in the village around 1800–5 had familial connections to Pennsylvania, ranging from distant to direct.
The individuals who now arranged and received German passenger ships in Philadelphia were, however, no longer the traders of the eighteenth century. Instead, they were new merchants who continued the system as a customary commercial practice, who were willing to arrange Atlantic passage and redemptioner contracts on an ad hoc basis within their general Low Country–Philadelphia trade.Footnote 28 By the third generation of its use, the redemptioner system no longer depended on the management and organization of individual business figures to sustain its operation; as an established commercial and labour market institution, a new generation of merchants in Philadelphia were willing and able to capitalize on turn-of-the-century conditions to profit from the position of their vessels in Europe, and the availability of German passenger ‘freights’.Footnote 29 In the peak years of 1803–6, a third of all German passengers brought to Philadelphia were redemptioners, connected to internal labour markets either by captains themselves or by appointed Philadelphia consignees.Footnote 30 As long as those consignees, and thus the market, existed, the incentive for shippers to furnish supply remained. The short boom of 1800–8 underwrote the validity of existing systems of German passenger commerce, serving as an important prelude to events that would follow a decade later.
The ‘year without a summer’ in 1816 saw a disastrous harvest, which had been preceded by the exhaustion of grain reserves to support Napoleonic forces. It was followed by an extraordinarily harsh winter.Footnote 31 Heavy taxation, levied by local authorities to service war debts, compounded shortages of food and cash. When a young Friederich List and a team of civil servants were sent to investigate the movement in Württemberg during late April and early May, the personal testimonies of those attempting to leave almost uniformly commented on the impossible burdens of taxation placed upon them by local authorities.Footnote 32
Historical attention on the episode has focused on the exceptional conditions faced by the migrants in their home communities, and the conditions they endured during their passage.Footnote 33 This isolates the movement from the active commercial, familial, and religious networks that made it possible. The incentive to leave impoverished villages was obviously high, yet the German south-west was not the only region experiencing post-Napoleonic hardship.Footnote 34 For hardship to become migration, conditions had to be met with information and access. In early 1816, the commercial networks servicing the redemptioner market actively began to channel German passengers into the system, promoting Atlantic migration as a response to initial post-war hardship. The Breisgau region of Baden was the first area in the 1816–17 movement to be pulled into redemptioner labour markets by enterprising shipping interests.
It appears that the earliest request of an American emigration permit filed in Baden was recorded on 10 April 1816.Footnote 35 The request was made by Gregor Dültner, from Säckingen, on the Rhine, at the southern border with Switzerland. The next request, dated 26 April, was made from the neighbouring district of Lörrach, one day after Dültner was granted permission to leave.Footnote 36 On 16 May, two further emigration reports were made from Säckingen, and one from Schelingen. Between the 18th and the 20th, three further reports were made: two from Schopfheim, and one from Klein Laufenburg.Footnote 37 Four of these five communities, Säckingen, Lörrach, Schopfheim, and Klein Laufenburg, lay in the neighbouring vicinity of the Swiss city of Basel, on the Rhine.Footnote 38
In the September of 1816, the Baden authorities began to express an interest in a boat master from Basel, by the name of Frei, who was believed to be operating a Seelen Spedition – a business of ‘soul shipment’ – from the Swiss city.Footnote 39 It transpired that Frei was forwarding passengers to a contact in Amsterdam, and had promised free transport, food, petty cash, and both land and animal stocks when they reached America.Footnote 40 Such promises were obviously disingenuous, and were reminiscent of the worst practices of Newlander recruitment in the previous century. The spread of nefarious activity was such that in early September, the city council at Basel produced a template contract for migrants, to be made available at the Amsterdam consulate, binding captains to fair treatment, and either a set price for upfront tickets, or a set price for contract redemption, should passengers ‘wish to pay in Philadelphia’.Footnote 41 If pre-war dynastic and religious connections with Austria had traditionally caused south Baden migrants to go east, Rhine networks operating between Basel and the Low Countries now introduced new post-war options, facing west.Footnote 42
By the time the Baden authorities had begun their investigations into Frei, the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania press had already begun advertising arriving German freights. On 26 August, the Lancaster Journal advertised ‘a number of good farmers and tradesmen, of almost every description, who wish to engage themselves for their passage money’ and had recently arrived on the ship Brodershap, from Amsterdam.Footnote 43 Citizens were to apply to Glaser & Smith, of 151 South Front Street, Philadelphia, regarding the German redemptioners.Footnote 44
The redemptioner market had moved into operation as early as the spring and summer of 1816. This was before the worst conditions of the ‘year without a summer’ – the failed harvest and heavy winter – had occurred, and well before emigration began to accelerate. When in early winter material conditions began to decline rapidly, passage information, however questionable, as well as transport networks, were thus already in place and known to communities in affected areas, underwriting the migration surge. Indeed, by the time material need had become acute, the availability of ‘free’ passage from Amsterdam had been widely publicized, not only by shippers themselves, but by the German press, in questionable attempts to deter the practice. On 16 December 1816, the Baden Staats-Zeitung outlined that
One can be taken [to America] without money; but then one is enslaved in the strongest sense of the word…If the American judges him usable, he will pay all freight money, which the European slave must pay off within 8 to 10 years, being provided all the while only with the most frugal sustenance; after this period he is as rich as he had been at the moment of his departure from Europe; and, on foreign soil and far from his loved ones and the friends of his youth, he is doomed to remain a mere day-labourer. There are exceptions, but they are exceedingly rare.Footnote 45
Given the number of individuals departing their home communities, being far from loved ones and associates was not entirely accurate. Moreover, given that after the terrible harvest, the merits of grass and moss as food were discussed, frugal sustenance in America was a minimal deterrent.Footnote 46 And given that ‘mere’ day labouring could not even be gained at home, the ‘exceedingly rare’ exceptions of American success rounded out a reasonable advertisement of prospects in the United States. The opinion of emigrants toward such reporting was made clear during the course of Friedrich List's interviews in the affected Württemberg district of Weinsberg, where the interviewees remarked that they would ‘rather be slaves in America, than citizens in Weinsberg’.Footnote 47
In the first six months of 1817, the emigration reached new dimensions.Footnote 48 In Württemberg, shippers on the Neckar played the same role as those on the Rhine, connecting potential migrants to onward departures from the Low Countries. The emigration from this area was influenced not only by commercial activity and networks, as had stimulated initial movements in southern Baden, but also by particularly strong social networks.
Innumerable familial connections prevailed in Württemberg communities which had sent migrants during the 1800–8 wave. Of broader influence were also 1,000 or so religious Separatists of that era. The Württemberg Separatists were followers of Johann Georg Rapp, who had departed in 1803 to survey land in the United States. The first group of his followers, numbering near 300, landed on the ship Aurora in July 1804, another group of 257 then landed in September, on the ship Atlantic, and a third group, on the ship Margaret, arrived in August.Footnote 49 Others kept coming, until a final large group, of 262, arrived on the Margaret in late August 1805.Footnote 50 The Separatists employed a system of communal funds, allowing for highly organized emigration, which included the payment of all passages, and successful land purchases in the United States. Several communities were founded in Pennsylvania and Ohio by leading figures in the group, the most notable being Rapp's Harmony Society, near Pittsburgh. By 1816, news of the economic security of the Society had been greatly magnified through letters that had reached Germany, and the ‘impression seemed to have gotten about that the Württemberg Separatists who had made good in America could be depended upon to pay the passage of any fellow countrymen’.Footnote 51
Although the Society was not able to offer such provisions, a significant number of those who departed Württemberg in 1816 and 1817 were in direct contact with the group, whose letters had given detailed accounts of land and prospects in America. Whilst investigating departures from Württemberg, Friedrich List repeatedly commented on ‘false’ letters, spreading information about America.Footnote 52 Despite some efforts, his party were unable to track down any documents.Footnote 53 The commission made little effort to pursue evidence of the networks conveying the movement, essentially because they operated on the overt assumption that only lies could induce people to leave the Fatherland, and, secondly, because interviewees appeared to have had little inclination to reveal sources of information, or plans for travel. Instead, they merely took the opportunity to attack the authorities. After the emigration wave subsided, the authorities had better luck uncovering the networks which had carried the movement.
A subject of particular attention was an Antwerp merchant by the name of Heinrich Dirks. As far as the Württemberg authorities were aware, from at least the spring of 1817, if not earlier, Dirks had directly canvassed potential migrants in local pubs, including The Rose, in Heilbronn, and The Anchor, in Horkheim, offering transport to Philadelphia, and contracted boatmen from Heilbronn, Haßmesheim, and Mosbach to carry them to towns on the Dutch border.Footnote 54 When questioned by the Württemberg authorities, one river boatmen said that, ‘as far as he knew, the first of the Württemberg emigrants had actually met Dirks in the Netherlands and had then recommended him to their countrymen’.Footnote 55 Those already familiar with Dirks were the Württemberg Separatists.Footnote 56 Among the main contingent of arrivals who followed Georg Rapp in 1803–5, the last group had indeed embarked from Antwerp.Footnote 57
In 1817, the authorities discovered that Dirks was one of two Antwerp merchants who had been working with Christoph Greulich, a Württemberg Separatist who expressly recognized Rapp as his chief, and who was responsible for co-ordinating passages to America.Footnote 58 In 1817, the authorities believed Greulich to be behind the organization of 500–1,000 emigrants, involving several large groups.Footnote 59 Those who were able to arrange their passage with Heinrich Dirks also discovered that his recommendation was warranted. The river boatman who accompanied Dirks's passengers to Antwerp expressed with surprise to the Württemberg authorities that upon arrival, the group were met with a fully laden, two-mast ship, already prepared for the voyage to Philadelphia.Footnote 60 Dirks's group were not redemptioners; those investigated repeatedly gave the pre-paid ticket price of 170–5 Gulden as a standard fare. However, almost half of all migrants in 1817 did require passage on credit.Footnote 61 If social networks helped better inform large elements of the exodus, commercial contacts connecting the Rhine and Delaware Valleys underwrote the volume of the surge through traditional redemptioner financing.
Emigration in 1816 and 1817 was not just a product of dire circumstances, but of dire circumstances in a region where active logistical and social networks were able to promote and stimulate Atlantic migration as a response. Just as emigration to Russia at that time was directly promoted by semi-official recruitment on behalf of Tsar Alexander I, existing networks directly promoted emigration to the Delaware Valley. The episode also provided a turning point with regard to both Russia and the existing system of Atlantic migration. The exodus of 1817 would mark the last time that Russia, or any other Eastern destination, commanded a significant share of German migration. It would also be the last expression of the Rhine-Low Country-Delaware Valley system, which had carried German Atlantic movements for a century.
III
Up until the exodus of 1816–17, German migration in the Atlantic had operated through mercantile networks, based on customary commercial arrangements between merchants in the New World and the merchants, intermediaries, and emigrants of the Old.Footnote 62 The incumbent system, entrenched by the middle eighteenth century, furnished large volumes of German immigration to early nineteenth-century America well before the regular packet line and regulated passenger service began to service mass-migration. The enduring model of passage on credit was central to the major 1816–17 exodus, both in its initial encouragement of migratory response and in its ability to service demand among those with little means to migrate. Ultimately, however, its ability to service increasingly exceptional demand became strained. If the movement of 1816–17 was dependent on the established redemptioner system, it also caused its collapse.
In the summer of 1817, Dutch officialdom was forced to step in and moderate the free-for-all which had developed in its territories. The redemptioner system had allowed migration to swell to its maximum extent, by providing mortgaged access to America to those in the most desperate circumstances: labourers and tradesmen, whose services were no longer in demand from a beleaguered farming community, and who were unable to pay for expensive food. In Württemberg, the occupational makeup of emigration during 1817 was almost identical to the previous high point of redemptioner traffic, during 1749–54. Although the authorities did not distinguish migrants by destination, 71·8 per cent of those departing were tradesmen or labourers, and only 28·2 per cent agriculturalists.Footnote 63 In Baden, figures for those departing the Breisgau during the summer show that 90·4 per cent were wage earners, with a full 43·1 per cent of those who gave an occupation stating ‘day labourer’ as their main source of income.Footnote 64
However, by opening passage to such individuals, the commercial activity conveying the movement triggered its own inundation. Although ships brokers in Amsterdam pursued passenger freights vociferously, and often with great exploitation, by the summer of 1817 the frequency of shipping was not sufficient to clear the ports of those attempting to find passage on credit. As a result, the poorest individuals, often unable to sustain themselves, filled up the dock areas, at great disruption and expense to the local authorities.Footnote 65
This led to legal interventions. On 15 June, Dutch legislation was implemented, with major consequences for both the exodus and for the German Atlantic model as it had existed to that point. A royal edict was issued stating that groups of migrants would not be allowed into Dutch territory unless a substantial Dutch citizen could act as their guarantor, thus removing any need for charity or aid.Footnote 66 This essentially prevented all migrants who paid Swiss and German boatmen to take them north from entering the Netherlands. Only in such instances as those with Heinrich Dirks, where the Dutch merchant directly vouched for passenger groups, would migration be possible. Without such connection to a native citizen, a monetary qualifier was required in order to enter Dutch territory. Leonhard Wörner, who had set out on 12 June for Amsterdam, hoping to join Georg Rapp's Harmony Society, wrote to the Society with news of the blockade:
We wanted to be with you too but we got to Oberwesel in Prussian territory. There we were stopped. Our ship was held up … because so many have returned from Holland because the people were cheated so by ships captains to whom they paid passage and who then made off with it. Now the Dutch have issued orders that whoever cannot pay his entire passage may not come to Holland, for everyone would have to give 200 florins security. Since our money did not suffice, all had to return home. Imagine what an awful thing that was…Now I have nothing more than that which I earn with my hands, for you can imagine that it is hard for such a difficult household. I have six children.Footnote 67
With these measures, the swarm of speculative migration was halted. By stopping those without the necessary contacts or cash at the border, the authorities essentially cut off the supply of redemptioners to ships brokers.
This development had an immediate impact on redemptioner sales and the redemptioner market in the US. Significant historical debate surrounds the abrupt end of the German redemptioner trade around 1820. Much of the historiography regarding the end of the redemptioner trade has focused heavily on American data, studying demand in American labour markets, as well as migrant strategies, in order to explain why the redemptioner business suddenly disappeared.Footnote 68 Several demand-side arguments exist, each of which has proved unsatisfactory. Some of the most long-standing and detailed include the American recession of 1819, which could have suddenly cooled the labour market, or the rise of wage labour as a preferable investment. Demand-side arguments can be refuted through price data: in 1819, the average price paid for redemptioner contracts was actually increasing, whilst the term required for redemption was decreasing, from a standard contract of four years towards a much more favourable two.Footnote 69 Redemptioners were, in 1819, an increasingly valuable commodity, with an apparently better bargaining position.
As Farley Grubb has noted, explanation for the concomitant collapse in numbers, and increase in redemptioner value, must lie in the supply of redemptioner labour.Footnote 70 American markets demonstrated major demand, so collapse must have occurred because far fewer German immigrants indentured themselves. A sudden decrease in the proportion requiring indenture would indicate a rapid increase in the economic standing of those seeking passage; it has been argued, however, that ‘wealth could not have risen enough in one year, from 1819 to 1820 to make all immigrants instantly rich enough to pay their passage in cash’.Footnote 71 Yet it could have risen sufficiently with legislation that only allowed pre-arranged passenger travel, and which enforced a cash baseline on those seeking passage without existing contracts. The most precipitous drop in the share of redemptioners among German migrants to America did not actually occur between 1819 and 1820, but between 1817 and 1819. In this short window, the share of passengers seeking indenture halved, from 42·2 per cent to 20·7 per cent.Footnote 72 In 1820, the figure then fell to 15·3 per cent, and in 1821 to just under 5 per cent.Footnote 73
The introduction of entry qualifiers in 1817 caused this timetable of collapse. The implementation of legislation coincides with the abrupt end of migration in the source regions. From February to May 1817, there were on average 1,290 emigrants per month leaving Württemberg for America.Footnote 74 In June, the number halved, to 640.Footnote 75 Then in July, it stopped. Just 30 migrants declared the United States their end goal.Footnote 76 It is often suggested that the return of failed, destitute migrants put an end to the emigration fever. Such a general explanation does not account for such a stark finish. Nor does the explanation of a strong harvest in 1817; the emigration ended months before the harvest was brought in. The stop in migration happened in the time frame required for ill-fated groups such as Leonhard Wörner's to return from the Prussian–Dutch border, spreading first-hand corroboration of official reports about new laws. No doubt the general return of the destitute played an important role, but events in mid-June 1817 appear to have played a decisive one.
As captains and brokers were free to continue filling their hulls with passengers already waiting in port, through late 1817 and 1818 large numbers of redemptioner passengers continued to be embarked. Some of the most terrible accounts of migrant exploitation arise from this period.Footnote 77 By 1819, however, the supply had begun to dwindle, as qualifying laws began to affect the number seeking credit. A small peak in departures was achieved in 1819 as return migrants from the United States had begun to recruit their countrymen; however, there was a marked drop in redemptioner passengers, and a general increase in the standard of migrants was noted.Footnote 78
It is worth considering migrant strategies to account for the smaller percentage that still entered redemptioner contracts in 1819. The 200 florins of personal capital required for a prepaid ticket or to enter the Netherlands was a significant amount of money, and some individuals may have chosen to enter the Netherlands, but not pay their passage, in order to retain as much capital as possible for life in America. This factor, along with a generally dwindling supply, would help to explain the stronger bargaining position behind shortened labour periods negotiated by the final redemptioners arriving in 1819.Footnote 79
The shift away from redemptioning toward paid passage during the minor echo emigration of 1819 was the first sign of the major changes which the 1816/17 incident produced. The exodus happened at the confluence of many other important developments and, as a result, was able to change fundamentally patterns of German Atlantic migration, and German transnational migration more generally. Placing the incident in the context of these developments is necessary in order to understand the major changes in the German Atlantic which pivoted on the consequences of ‘the year without a summer’.
Ending the supply of poorer migrants, and thus redemptioners, was the first and most instantly notable effect. The permanency of this change would be ensured by wider developments in US–European shipping. Regulation of poorer migrants (pursued in Hamburg, as well as the Low Countries, after 1817), alongside commercial developments in the Atlantic during the 1820s, diverted future migrants to alternative points of departure, and into a separate model of migration. Key to that model was an increased frequency of departure to the United States from other European ports, whose regular trade in bulk commodities allowed the introduction of the packet line, and a regular timetable of departures. This increased frequency led to a lower price for passage fares. Prices remained high enough to keep the poorest migrants excluded from migration, but low enough that when emigration again became economically desirable, small peasants and artisans could find passage from ports such as Le Havre, which traded with the United States in cottons, and Bremen, which had cultivated a strong trade in American tobacco.Footnote 80 With this simplification of commerce, the more complex transaction of redemptioner passage failed to find replication in the newly ascendant ports. A small number of migrants still left from the Low Countries, but it is worth noting that these were, for obvious reasons, no longer the poorest. That distinction largely went to those leaving via Liverpool, where ticket prices were low, and where time spent waiting in port was the shortest in Europe, lowering the overall cost of migration.Footnote 81
Changes in legislation and commerce after 1817 therefore directed German migrants away from the Low Countries, whilst holding the poorest migrants out of migration altogether. This shift altered the economic status of the next generation of German-American migrants in favour of those with the capital to finance their journey.Footnote 82 If the confluence of legal policies in 1817 and new trade realities thereafter ended the redemptioner model for financing German Atlantic transit, the events of 1816–17 also fundamentally altered settlement goals for future German Atlantic migrants.
Those who had come in both 1800–8, and in larger numbers from 1816 to 1819 entered a United States which had opened up the congressional land of the Old North-West, and they began to settle it. Separatist leaders such as Rapp had sought out the Midwest during the earlier period, in turn attracting large numbers of co-religionists during 1816–17.Footnote 83 Secular inland migration among the 1816–19 arrivals was also carried by information of opportunity in the West, and for some, their disadvantaged labour market position. Whilst the sale of servitude contracts across state lines was illegal, many redemptioners found themselves subject to ‘soul-driving’, with their initial contracts made in Philadelphia for less than $80, before they were moved en bloc for speculative amounts at the labour markets of the frontier.Footnote 84 Many German immigrants of significant means also operated in the Midwestern territory of Ohio, where they utilized the indentured labour of their countrymen, and pioneered the region's commerce.Footnote 85 For many others, the Midwest simply offered a new and fertile region, the settlement of which was characterized neither by extraordinary success, nor initial periods of servitude. Of uniform consequence to this westward movement, however, was the information that returned to the Old World regarding the new scope of settlement opportunity in America, beyond Pennsylvania.
The strength of migrant communications in both setting and consolidating the goals and strategies of future migrants has been extensively examined.Footnote 86 Beyond private correspondence, however, the mainstream publicity generated by the exodus of 1816/17 also elevated Atlantic migration from a phenomenon of local significance in the German south-west, to one which received national attention. Prominent writers and figures who took an interest in the migration during and after the episode, and who followed those migrants to America, produced some of the most influential publications on the American Midwest to appear in the German language.Footnote 87
Between the private correspondence of those who had left permanently and the prominent writings of the travellers who followed, German attention on areas of American settlement shifted decisively away from Pennsylvania, and on to Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Missouri, which would provide a frontier for later movements into Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan, thus determining the dominant pattern of nineteenth-century German settlement in the United States.
From how the Atlantic passage was financed, to where future immigrants sought their settlement, the entire pattern of German migration to America was altered by the post-Napoleonic exodus. Against the wider background contexts of westward American expansion, and alterations in Atlantic commerce, the pivotal events of 1816/17 collapsed the German redemptioner system and delivered extensive new information of the frontier. The episode thus transformed German Atlantic movement from its colonial contexts to the contexts of the early American Republic.
It must also be noted that not only American settlement, but German migrant departures as a whole were decisively influenced by the favourable reports of those who had gone West during the exodus. When emigration re-emerged in the 1830s, German migration goals were almost exclusively concentrated on the United States, with Eastern European destinations, settled for generations by German migrants, no longer commanding popular attention.Footnote 88
The Rhine exodus of 1816 and 1817 was thus a transformative moment: it ushered the downfall of an established transit system, and paved the transition into the next period of German Atlantic movement. It signified a phase-shift in the long-run development of German international migration.
IV
Mass migration between Europe and the United States has been characterized as a four-stage process.Footnote 89 This characterization outlines an introductory stage, followed by a more persistent growth period, and eventually a saturation phase of sustained, heavy emigration, before a final period of decline.Footnote 90 The introduction phase provides contact with, and information regarding, migratory destinations. When favourable information is acted upon at the point of origin, emigration is introduced as a local socio-economic strategy.Footnote 91 This period remains haphazard and prone to interruption, before a more sustained period begins – a growth stage – at which point the migration remains strongly selective, ‘both in terms of individuals and geographical regions’.Footnote 92 The greater consistency and volume of migration in the growth stage then leads to improved transportation networks, and greater diffusion of knowledge regarding migratory opportunity, causing numerical and spatial expansion in the movement, eventually reaching saturation, which persists until conditions in the region of origin and destination begin to reach parity in the estimation of potential migrants, causing emigration to decline.
This paradigm does not acknowledge a prescriptive chronology, or a smooth developmental curve; changing circumstances in specific regions of origin and destination, as well as intervening barriers in the migration network, can cause the various stages to stall, dip, or precipitously climb along the way, but the self-generative trend, as well as parity-induced decline, remain well corroborated dynamics of the European-Atlantic pattern.Footnote 93
It is a paradigm that fits the German Atlantic pattern well, encompassing its evolution across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Existing studies of German migration in the eighteenth-century Atlantic tend to use the post-1754 or 1776 period of low American emigration as a sign of decline in an incumbent model.Footnote 94 This was not the case. The system and networks involved did not disappear, and emigration between the German south-west and North America did not decline because of parity between the regions; a large volume of former migration was simply diverted by lack of access and the frequent appearance of more easily reached options. The evidence examined here has demonstrated the extent to which the movement of 1816–17 (and, prior to that, 1800–8) was dependent on and produced by the model of German Atlantic migration in use since the 1720s. Rather than cutting off German migration in the Atlantic in 1754 simply because volume dipped, the more obvious point to cut off the eighteenth-century system is after the exodus of 1816–17, which induced fundamental changes in the migration pattern.
The extent to which 1816–17 was dependent on prior systems of migration, and in turn influenced the future development and spread of German migration in the Atlantic, also highlights the difficulty in separating eighteenth-century German migration to America from nineteenth-century migration. Although this may be historiographically preferable, in order to explore both the nuances of different migration systems and the arrival of immigrants into distinctly separate American political entities, it passes over crucial connections and evolutions in the actual migration pattern, which are fundamental to understanding the long-run development of German migration in the Atlantic World. Whilst eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German migration to the New World differed, it does not follow that the two movements were isolated or separate.
Without any arbitrary separation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migration, and being aware, through the study of 1816–17, of how much the latter built directly on the former, the introductory phase of German migration to America might be appropriately considered as taking place across a ‘long eighteenth century’, from 1683 to 1817. This would allow the growth of emigration during the 1830s and 1840s – in volume and geographical reach – to assume its obviously suitable denomination of a ‘growth stage’ in the developing pattern. The absolute numerical peaks of emigration, from the middle 1850s to the early 1890s, would then constitute a saturation period, whilst the decline phase is clearly marked from the middle 1890s until the outbreak of the Great War.
This periodization incorporates the long-run development of German migration in the Atlantic into an appropriate paradigm, allowing each period to be understood as an evolution from its predecessor. Key to this is an understanding of the phase-shifts between each period. 1816/17 constituted such a phase-shift, but more research is required into the shift between the growth and saturation stages; it is clear that by the mid-1850s, the movements had taken on a new dynamic. In 1854, the volume of emigration was unprecedented, and by 1856, the first steam liners had been introduced in German ports. Moreover, in this period, the emigration moved decisively from a migration of families to one of single individuals. Whether the subsistence crises from 1846 to 1854 constituted a prolonged but momentous shift requires detailed investigation. In terms of the shift into decline, specific wage-ratio research for Germany will help to contextualize the obvious downshift which occurred in migration after 1892.
V
It is also noteworthy that in offering a long-run developmental paradigm, the periodization of study should not be diminished, but enhanced to an even finer degree. The research advice of Frank Thistlethwaite remains, as always, salient; whilst the macro-level provides a necessary backdrop, it is only by studying at the micro-level that we can comprehend meaningful changes in the migration pattern.Footnote 95 An exhaustive historiography has allowed scholars of German migration to America to understand the major periods of migration between German Europe and North America. The next step is to understand transitions; those periods at which perceptible and significant changes were introduced into, and produced by, incumbent systems. This approach can enhance both our understanding at the macro-level, of evolving systems from their first innovations to their final decline, and, clearly, at the micro-level, where close historical and archival research can reveal the intricate mechanics and variables involved in the evolution of regional migrations.
