A Half Century of Expansion and Distribution, 1850-1900.

While the immigration movement from Norway and Sweden was well-established by 1850, and certain to expand, it was numerically unimportant when compared with that from some other countries of Europe. In 1849 the influx from all Scandinavia was slightly more than one per-cent of the total immigration from Europe. Yet the rising stream had, by 1850, worn for itself a clear and definite channel from eastern ports like New York and Boston to such gateways to the Northwest as Chicago and Milwaukee; and through these it continued to flow out over the wilderness of the upper Mississippi Valley extending north of the Missouri and Illinois Rivers and west of the Great Lakes. For more than a half century there have been relatively few variations from this course, tho in the later decades, with an increase in the proportion of skilled laborers among the incoming thousands, certain eastern cities have detained a considerable percentage.

No other marked change in the character and quality of the immigrants has developed since 1850, nor have any new motives appeared, except in the case of the Danes, to be discussed later. In a word, the Scandinavian immigration since 1850 is simply the earlier Scandinavian immigration enlarged in numbers, with broader and deeper significance. The areas of interest in emigration in Europe gradually extended to every part and every class of the three Northern kingdoms; and the localities attractive to Scandinavians in the United States, expanded until eight contiguous States in the Old Northwest and the Newer Northwest showed each a foreign-born population of Northmen numbering more than thirty thousand. In the State of Minnesota they now reach close to a quarter of a million.[147]

The total recorded Scandinavian immigration, according to the statistics of the United States, from 1820 to 1912, is in round numbers 2,200,000. According to the statistics of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, which may be disregarded for inaccuracy before 1850, the total falls about 142,000 short of this figure, a difference which may be easily enough accounted for by persons leaving those countries for a more or less indefinite stay in other parts of Europe, before starting for America.[148] The American statistics in later years have sometimes shown larger numbers than the Swedish, but the discrepancy is accounted for by the fact that a great number of emigrants from Finland have passed through Sweden on their way to America and therefore are counted as Swedes.[149] The totals by decades with the percentages of the whole immigration for the decades, is as follows:[150]

The fluctuations of the annual immigration have been very great, as an inspection of the accompanying chart and the tables in Appendix I, will readily show. The addition of other lines to this chart indicating the fluctuations in the numbers of immigrants from Germany and Ireland, demonstrates that these rather striking variations were chiefly caused by conditions and prospects in America, rather than by circumstances in Europe. In 1849 the total immigration of Norwegians and Swedes passed 2,000, and even reached 3,400, but the terrible scourge of cholera in that year under which so many of the Scandinavians in the West fell, caused a falling off of more than half in 1850. After the panic of 1857, the Danish immigration fell from 1,035 to 252 in one year, while the total from the Northern lands fell steadily from 2,747 to 840 in 1860.

The Civil War disturbed comparatively little the conditions favoring Scandinavian immigration, for the Northwest was never in danger of invasion, and nominal prices for farm produce ranged higher and higher. Furthermore, the Homestead Act of 1862 gave new and cumulative impetus to the immigration which sought farming lands.[151] So from a total of 850 in 1861 (the statistics of Norway show 8,900 emigrants for that year, and those of Sweden, 1,087), the numbers gradually increased, in spite of the war, to 7,258 in 1865. The panic of 1873 did not affect the Scandinavian movement so immediately and seriously as might at first thought be expected, probably because the Northmen were seeking farms in the West, and also because the farmers as a class are about the last to feel the effects of financial crises like that of 1873. As the depression deepened, letters from America to Northern Europe lost their tone of buoyancy and enthusiasm; the eastward flow of passage-money and prepaid tickets almost ceased. At the same time a series of good crops in the three Scandinavian countries caused a rise of wages about 1873, doubling them in some instances.[152] Consequently the current of immigration lost force and volume for several years, the totals dropping, in round numbers, from 35,000 in 1873, to 19,000 in 1874, and to 11,000 in 1877.

After the high-water mark of 105,326 in 1882, reached during the revival of business from 1879 to 1884, the totals did not again fall below 40,000 Scandinavian immigrants per year, until after the industrial and financial stagnation of 1893 to 1896; 62,000 in 1893 became 33,000 in 1894, and 19,000 in 1898. With the prosperity of the first years of the new century in the United States, the number again passed 50,000, reaching another climax in the 77,000 of 1903.

In general, the variations of the curves for the three nationalities under discussion have been nearly co-incident, as for example the high points in 1873 and 1882, and the low points in 1877, 1885, and 1898. The Danish immigration did not rise proportionately with the other two, especially in 1903, probably because of the democratizing of land-ownership in Denmark, and because of the remarkable improvement in methods of cultivation in the course of the nineteenth century.[153] No such decided improvements took place in the other peninsular kingdoms.

Another feature of the fluctuation is entitled to some consideration. In proportion to the population of those nations, the emigration from Norway and Sweden since 1870 has been very large, and such drafts as were made in the years 1882 or 1903 could not be expected to keep up. The periodicity of the ripening of a good “crop” of eligible emigrants for the great American West seems to have been since 1877 from five to eight years. In this connection it is a noteworthy fact that the population in each of the Scandinavian kingdoms, notwithstanding the great emigrations, has steadily tho slowly increased since 1850.[154] For the last decade of the nineteenth century, the figures for the increase were, Denmark, 16.6%, Norway, 10.6%, Sweden 7.3%, United States 20%.[155] In this statistical distribution, account must also be taken of the Scandinavians of the second generation, born in this country of foreign-born parents, since this element, racially speaking, is just as much an alien stock, with its inheritance of tendencies, temperament, and passions, as were the original immigrants. The census of 1910 enumerated among the foreign-born and the native-born of specified foreign parents:[156]

To these must be added still another group, made up of those persons having a father born in Norway, Sweden, or Denmark, and a mother born in one of the other two countries, in other words, persons of pure Scandinavian descent. The number of such in 1910 was 72,152. It does not include, be it noted, those persons of equally pure Norse blood whose parents, one or both, were born in the United States. The minimum number of Scandinavians, then, in the United States in 1910, who must be taken into account in all calculations and estimates of power and influence exercised by that factor of the population, is 2,428,201. If it were desired to bring the estimate up to date, the immigration of 1910-1913 and an approximation of the increase of the native-born, would have to be included, and the grand total of persons of pure Northern stock would not be far from 2,700,000 at the present time (1913).

The distribution of this vast company to the different States of the Union is a consideration of primary importance. The detailed analysis of the motives, processes, and results of the occupation of the Northwestern States by the children of the Northlands, belongs in later chapters.[157] The reasons why the stream flowed to the north of Mason and Dixon’s Line are a combination of climate and a fear and hatred of slavery. If the movement from Scandinavia had begun fifty years earlier, before the anti-slavery agitation became acute, the New Norway and the New Sweden of the nineteenth century, would doubtless still have been in the North and probably in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, for very much the same reason that the Western Reserve was a New Connecticut.

Desiring ownership of good agricultural land above all else, and finding after 1835 that the best and cheapest was to be found along the advancing frontier west of a north-and-south line drawn through Chicago, the men from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark followed their distant cousins of New England and the Middle States in the great trek into the Any-Man’s-Land of the fertile upper Mississippi Valley.[158] For more than two decades after the Civil War, tho slavery no longer existed in the South, that region was still in the depression and uncertainty of the post-bellum industrial disorganization, and hence unattractive to immigrants of any class. So the tide continued to run high in the Northwest and spread wider and wider because of the traditions of two generations, and because of the attracting power of the Scandinavian mass already comfortably and solidly settled there.

The first States of the Northwest into which the Norwegians and Swedes penetrated, as has been described above, were Illinois and Wisconsin; and in the censuses of 1850 and 1860 Wisconsin held first place in the number of these aliens, showing an increase from 8,885 to 23,265.[159] In 1850, Iowa, in the “far west,” ranked fourth, with 611. Minnesota, which then stretched away to the Rocky Mountains, had 4 Swedes, 7 Norwegians, and 1 Dane.[160] By 1860 Iowa was passed by Minnesota which then had 11,773, and thenceforward the Scandinavians were to keep close step with the westward march of the frontier. In 1870 Minnesota took first place, with 58,837, a position which the State has continued to hold. In 1890 she had within her borders 236,670 foreign-born Northmen, and enough of the second generation to make her Scandinavian population 466,365, or about one-fifth that of Denmark or Norway. The order of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa held good for 1870 and 1880, but Wisconsin and Illinois changed places in the reports of 1890 and 1900. The Dakotas, as one Territory, received their first Norse settler in 1858, but when the census of 1880 was taken there were 17,869, and in 1890, when the Territory was divided into two States, the Scandinavian contingent was more than 65,000 strong.[161] Nebraska illustrated in a similar manner the widening overflow of the steady stream out of the European North; her population of Scandinavian birth which numbered only 3,987 in 1870, grew by direct entry of immigrants, and by the secondary movement of early immigrants out of the middle Northwest, to 16,685 in 1880, and to 40,107 of foreign-born in 1900. According to this last census, Nebraska counted 38,914 native persons of foreign-born Scandinavian parents, showing that the second generation did not fall much behind the first in the habit of frontier-seeking.[162]

In the rush of gold-seekers into California after 1848 were many Danes and Swedes, who gave that State in 1860 fifth rank as to the number of Scandinavians; by 1890 these numbered about 42,000, of whom the greater part were of the two nationalities just named. Another frontier region which gained from the Danish immigration between 1850 and 1860 was the Territory of Utah, for the Mormon missionaries seem to have been particularly successful in Denmark, and nearly every convert became an immigrant. Quite in advance of their invasion of Dakota, more than 2,000 Danes had settled in the Mormon Territory, and ten years later Utah counted nearly twice as many Scandinavians as Nebraska, seven-tenths being Danes.

The increasing density of this Scandinavian population in certain localities,—what might be called its vertical distribution—is strikingly illustrated in both urban and rural communities. Chicago had barely emerged from the Fort Dearborn stage when the first Scandinavians walked its streets. Yet within two generations there were found inside of her wide-stretching borders more than 100,000 Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes of foreign birth, and enough of the second generation to give her more than 190,000, so that the city at the head of Lake Michigan was next after Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Christiania,—the largest Scandinavian city in the world.[163] By a similar calculation, Minneapolis would rank sixth or seventh.

Rockford, Illinois, received the first of its signally prosperous Swedish colony about 1853; by 1865 the city had 2,000 Swedes.[164] The census of 1910 credits Rockford with 10,000 foreign born Swedes, and a total of Swedish parentage reaching close to 19,000. One of the west-central counties of Minnesota, Otter Tail, counted (1900) more than half of its 45,000 population of pure Scandinavian blood of the first and second generation of immigrants. Polk county, newer and farther north in the same State, reveals almost sixty per-cent of the same sort of population in a total of 35,000. For some of the still newer and more sparsely settled counties even larger percentages might be obtained.

A closer analysis of the tables of population reveals some further facts as to the distribution of the different nationalities. The Swedes are the most numerous in Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Nebraska, and Kansas; the Norwegians predominate in Wisconsin, North Dakota, and South Dakota, and nearly equal the Swedes in Minnesota where each passes 200,000. The Danes are strongest—they can hardly be called a very important factor in any State—in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Nebraska; in each State they have more than 25,000. Another feature of this varying density of the three groups has to do with the cities. Chicago, Rockford, Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Duluth account for a large proportion of the Swedes of Illinois and Minnesota, and represent the later rather than the earlier stages of distribution. Outside of the cities mentioned, the Norwegians in Minnesota outnumber the Swedes by some 52,000. In North Dakota, the Norwegians are 72% of the foreign-born Scandinavian population, in South Dakota, 56%, and in Wisconsin, 60%, while in Illinois the Swedes are about 70%, and in Michigan and Nebraska, 63% and 59% respectively. The Danes reach their highest percentages of the Scandinavian foreign-born in Utah, 50%, in Nebraska, 34%, and in Iowa, 23%. Large numbers of the later immigrants, especially of the skilled Swedish laborers, have found occupation in New York and Brooklyn, Boston and Worcester, Hartford and Providence. These have raised the proportion of the Swedes in the United States living in cities of more than 25,000, to 36%, while only 28% of the Danes, and 19% of the Norwegians were similarly located in 1900.[165]

Climate, particularly the mean temperature, has also played considerable part in the choice by the immigrants from Northern Europe of the sites for their new homes, though it is an open question whether they would not have been established where they were and when they were even if the climate were different. Certain it is that the few Icelandic settlements are situated in the extreme northern part of Minnesota and North Dakota, and in Southern Manitoba.[166] South of them come, in order, the zones of densest Norwegian population, 49° to 42°, of the Swedish, 48° to 40°, and of Danish, 44° to 38°. The three nationalities thus occupy relatively the same latitudinal position in America as in their homes in the Old North.[167]

Summarizing the matter of location, the great bulk of the Scandinavian immigrants went into the Northwest, 78% of them during the first fifty years of the movement, and about 70% of the total. Out of the immigration of the different nationalities, 81% of the Norwegians are in the Northwest, 60% of the Danes, and 59% of the Swedes, the percentage of the last being brought down, in comparison with the Norwegians, by the fact that nearly 100,000 Swedes are found in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania.[168]

The Civil War occurred before the numbers and expansion of the Norse element of the country’s population had much passed a promising beginning; the 75,000 present in 1860 could not be expected to play any large and leading rÔle. Yet the one dramatic and heroic chapter in the whole story of the progress of the Scandinavians in America is that dealing with their part in that great struggle, in which many hundreds of them gave their strength and their lives for the unity and safety of their adopted country no less bravely and no less cheerfully than did the native-born American. The men from Thelemark and Smaaland and the sons of Massachusetts and Michigan were inspired by the same fine and pure motives; they hated slavery and loved the flag under whose folds they realized their hopes and dreams.[169] By temperament, by religion, by education, by tradition, men of Norse parentage were fitted to participate in upholding a cause so essentially right and high.

In the short space of this volume, details of the loyal services of companies made up wholly or in large part of Swedes and Norwegians must be omitted, and the laurels won by such men as General Stohlbrand, who was made a brigadier by President Lincoln himself,[170] Colonel H. C. Heg,[171] Colonel Mattson,[172] and Lieutenant Colonel Porter C. Olson,[173] must be passed by with mere allusions.

The Fifteenth Wisconsin Regiment of Volunteers, consisting of about 900 men, whose organization was decided upon at a mass meeting held in the Capitol at Madison, in September, 1861, was made up almost entirely of Norwegians and Swedes, some of whom had been in the United States less than a year. Hans C. Heg, one of the early leaders of the Norwegian immigration into Wisconsin, was appointed colonel of the regiment and began organization at Camp Randall, near Madison, in the following December.[174] The roster of officers indicates plainly their origin, including such names as Rev. C. L. Clausen, Thorkildson, Hansen, Grinager, Skofstad, Ingmundson, Tjentland, and Solberg.[175] The regiment left for the front in March, 1862, and participated in the operations of the next three years in Kentucky, Tennessee and northern Georgia. It was mustered out at Chattanooga in February, 1865, having lost about 300, quite one-third of its total enlistment, from deaths in battle or in the hospitals, including Colonel Heg, who was killed at Chickamauga.[176] Its record is summed up by the military historian of Wisconsin who states that it was “one of the bravest and most efficient regiments that Wisconsin sent to the field.”[177]

Besides this Scandinavian regiment, there were several others in which the Norse element was large. Company C of the 43d Illinois Regiment was made up of Swedes, serving under Captain Arosenius. It was organized in the spring of 1862 and mustered out in the fall of 1865, with an honorable record of services faithfully and uncomplainingly performed.[178] Company D of the 57th Illinois Regiment, which served from the autumn of 1861 to July, 1864,[179] and Company D of the 3d Minnesota Regiment, which was mustered in at about the same time,[180] were composed of Scandinavians. A sprinkling of Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes appears in the lists of many of the regiments of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and many of these men rose to the ranks of commissioned officers.[181] The Adjutant General of Minnesota in 1866 estimated that of the enlistments from that State, at least 800 were Norwegians, 675 Swedes, and 25 Danes. “In numerous instances the nativity of the soldiers is omitted; and it is not easy to count correctly all the names in such publications; hence it is fair to estimate that 2,000 Scandinavians from Minnesota enlisted under the Stars and Stripes.... One-eighth of the total population of the State enlisted under the Union flag; while at the same time one out of every six Scandinavians in Minnesota, as well as in Wisconsin, fought for his adopted country.”[182]

Everywhere the story of their services in the army is creditable, and it is not strange that the survivors are proud of their war records as the badge of loyal Americanism. They did not go into the war for mere love of adventure, nor for love of fighting, for men in large numbers do not leave their families and their half-developed farms for flimsy and temporary reasons. They loved the new country they had made their own, with a love that was measurable in the high terms of sacrifice, even to the shedding of blood and to death. The stock out of which Gustavus Adolphus made brave and effective soldiers had not degenerated through lapse of time nor through transplanting.

Though John Ericsson was in no wise connected with the regular Swedish immigration movement, nor with Swedish settlement in the Northwest, the United States owes him too large a debt for what has sometimes been called the salvation of the Union through the agency of his “Monitor”, to warrant the omission of his name from among those Swedes who served American freedom during the Civil War.[183]