Missouri, at the commencement of the war, had two hundred thousand Germans in a population of little more than one million. Almost to a man, they were loyal, and among the first who sprang to arms.
In the South, they were always regarded with suspicion. The Rebels succeeded in dragooning but very few of them into their ranks. Honor to the loyal Germans!
According to some unknown philosopher, "an Englishman or a Yankee is capital; an Irishman is labor; but a German is capital and labor both." Cincinnati, at the outbreak of the Rebellion, contained about seventy thousand German citizens, who for many years had contributed largely to her growth and prosperity.
A visit to their distinctive locality, called "Over the Rhine," with its German daily papers, German signs, and German conversation, is a peep at Faderland.
Cincinnati is nearer than Hamburg, the Miami canal more readily crossed than the Atlantic, and that "sweet German accent," with which General Scott was once enraptured, is no less musical in the Queen City than in the land of Schiller and Göethe. Why, then, should one go to Germany, unless, indeed, like Bayard Taylor, he goes for a wife? The multitudinous maidens—light-eyed and blonde-haired—in these German streets, would seem to remove even that excuse.
When Young America becomes jovial, he takes four or five boon companions to a drinking saloon, pours down half a glass of raw brandy, and lights a cigar. Continuing this programme through the day, he ends, perhaps, by being carried home on a shutter or conducted to the watch-house.
But the German, at the close of the summer day, strolls with his wife and two or three of his twelve children (the orthodox number in well-regulated Teutonic families) to one of the great airy halls or gardens abounding in his portion of the city. Calling for Rhein wine, Catawba, or "zwei glass lager bier und zwei pretzel," they sit an hour or two, chatting with friends, and then return to their homes like rational beings after rational enjoyment. The halls contain hundreds of people, who gesticulate more and talk louder during their mildest social intercourse than the same number of Americans would in an affray causing the murder of half the company; but the presence of women and children guarantees decorous language and deportment.
The laws of migration are curious. One is, that people ordinarily go due west. The Massachusetts man goes to northern Ohio, Wisconsin, or Minnesota; the Ohioan to Kansas; the Tennesseean to southern Missouri; the Mississippian to Texas. Great excitements, like those of Kansas and California, draw men off their parallel of latitude; but this is the general law. Another is, that the Irish remain near the sea-coast, while the Germans seek the interior. They constitute four-fifths of the foreign population of every western city.
The Early Days of Cincinnati.
In 1788, a few months before the first settlement of Cincinnati, seven hundred and forty acres of land were bought for five hundred dollars. The tract is now the heart of the city, and appraised at many millions. As it passed from hand to hand, colossal fortunes were realized from it; but its original purchaser, then one of the largest western land-owners, at his death did not leave property enough to secure against want his surviving son. Until 1862, that son resided in Cincinnati, a pensioner upon the bounty of relatives. As, in the autumn of life, he walked the streets of that busy city, it must have been a strange reflection that among all its broad acres of which his father was sole proprietor, he did not own land enough for his last resting-place. "Give him a little earth for charity!"