By Frank Boles
Today’s heated political discussion over immigration, with
its often strident rhetoric about immigrants, was not always a part of
America’s political discourse. Before the Civil War and continuing during
Reconstruction, the state of Michigan not only welcomed immigrants, it paid
people to recruit settlers to migrate from Europe to the United States. A
product of this work, Der Staat Michigan,
published in 1859, was recently obtained by the Clarke Historical Library staff
from a book dealer in Austria.
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| Der Staat Michigan, 1859, front & back Cover |
Germans had been early settlers in the state. German immigrants founded a colony near Ann Arbor in the 1830s. In 1845, a second large group of German immigrants began to settle in along the Cass River, in an area that would become Frankenmuth. Between 1845 and the beginning of the Civil War, Germans immigrants came to Michigan in increasing numbers. Part of this immigration resulted from forces that pushed people out of their homeland. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, significant crop failures plagued many German farmers. The failure of the liberal revolt of 1848 also meant a large number of politically active Germans had good reason to fear retaliation from the government officials they had tried to unseat, and thus, they found it expedient to place a great deal of distance between themselves and those who remained in political power.
But “push” was not the only reason Germans came to Michigan.
The state government of Michigan also actively “pulled” German immigrants. In
the 1840s, many of the state’s political leaders had come to have high regard for
Germans. These immigrants had demonstrated devout religious belief and economic
energy, both of which struck resonant chords with the political leadership of
the day. In addition, German immigrants were often either educated already or
very much interested in establishing educational institutions for their
children.
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| Der Staat Michigan, 1859. Map of Michigan with information on Ingham, Eaton, Ionia, Montcalm, and Kent Counties. |
To obtain more of what Michigan’s legislators saw as an ideal foreign settler, they passed a law in 1845 to fund a “foreign emigration agent” in New York City to “encourage immigration into the state and travel on our public railroads.” Governor John Barry appointed John Almy to the position. Almy quickly wrote a six-page pamphlet in German extolling the state’s virtues. State government paid for five thousand copies of the pamphlet and it distributed not only in New York City but also to emigration societies and U.S. government consul offices overseas.
In 1850, Michigan’s governor, John S. Barry, let a bill
continuing this outreach to German immigrants die on his desk. Barry was
reported to believe that the state was now so well known to potential
immigrants that further publicly-funded efforts to attract them to Michigan were
unnecessary. Others disagreed with that assessment. In 1859, the legislature
established the position of Commissioner of Emigration. Two well- known members
of Detroit’s German community were appointed to the post – one working out of
Detroit while the other was in New York City.
One of the two men, Rudolph Diepenbeck, was the former
editor of a German-language newspaper. In 1859, he wrote in German and had
published Der Staat Michigan, a 48-page
pamphlet, which he used as a tool to recruit more Germans to come to Michigan.
By 1860, there were 38,787 German immigrants in Michigan,
about five percent of the state’s total population of 749,113.
Michigan’s political leaders’ interest in German immigrants
only increased after the Civil War. In 1869, the legislature sent the Michigan
Commissioner of Emigration to Germany, where he set up an office in Hamburg.
There the commissioner regularly published an eight-page “magazine” extolling
the state to anyone willing to read it. Although the office in Hamburg was
closed in 1874, the office of Commissioner on Emigration continued until 1885.
The person who held that office continued to print publications in German, and
later Dutch.
While the exact number of German immigrants will never be
known, C. Warren Vander Hill’s Settling
of the Great Lakes Frontier: Immigrant to Michigan, 1837-1924, offers a
best guess that in 1920, of the state’s 3,723,000 residents, 670,000, or around
eighteen percent of the population, were either German immigrants or their
descendants.
Der Staat Michigan
is an important historical publication that documents this long effort by the
state to recruit foreign immigrants. The copy in the Clarke is particularly
important in that only three other copies of this publication are known to
exist. Two are found in German libraries while the third is preserved in
Boston. It’s impossible to say when a copy of the pamphlet was last seen in
Michigan, but we are very pleased to bring a research copy of Der Staat Michigan back to the state
from which it came.