The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin

by Joseph Schafer

The census, however, recognized a new county, Milwaukee, whose territory had been severed from the earlier Brown County. It was bounded east by Lake Michigan, south by Illinois, west by a line drawn due north from the Illinois line to Wisconsin River at the Portage, and north by a line drawn due east from the Portage to the lake. In terms of present-day divisions, the Milwaukee County of 1836 embraced all of Kenosha, Racine, Walworth, Rock, Jefferson, Waukesha, and Milwaukee counties, nearly all of Ozaukee, Washington, and Dodge, a strip of eastern Green County, and most of Dane and Columbia. In that imperial domain the census takers found a grand total of 2900 persons, or almost exactly one-fourth of the population of the entire territory.

Two significant facts distinguish the Milwaukee County census list from the lists of Brown, Crawford, and Iowa counties—the recency of the settlement and the distinctive local origin of the settlers. These people had only just arrived, most of them in the early months of 1836. One could almost count on his ten fingers the individuals who were there prior to the summer of 1835. In reality they were not yet “settled,” for most of the rude claim huts—mere shelters of the pre-log house stage—were haunted at night and shadowed at noonday by men only, resident families being still rare, though many were on the lakes, at the ports of Milwaukee and Chicago, or on the overland trail which was to end at the cabin door. It was the prophecy of new communities, not the actuality, that the census taker chronicled when he recorded the names of claim takers with the number of persons, of each sex, comprising their households. We have reason to believe that the numbers were inscribed almost as cheerfully when the persons represented by them were still biding in the old home or were en route west, as when they were physically present in the settler’s cabin or in the dooryard, eager to be counted.

Unlike the other populations of Wisconsin at that time, the vast majority of Milwaukee County settlers were Northeasterners. Such evidence as we have indicates that New York supplied more than half, the New England states, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan nearly all of the balance.[1] New York’s title to primacy in peopling Wisconsin is exhibited, most impressively, in the statistics of the 1850 census. At that time native Americans constituted 63 per cent of the total and New Yorkers had 36 per cent of the native majority. Native Americans predominated in all but three of the twenty-six counties, and in all but five those who were natives of New York, added to the natives of Wisconsin, were a majority of the American born. The exceptions were the four lead mining counties of Grant, Iowa, Lafayette, and Green, together with Richland, which, however, had so few inhabitants that its case is divested of any significance.

The three counties which, in 1850, showed a majority of foreign born inhabitants were Manitowoc, Milwaukee, and Washington (the last named including the present Ozaukee County); and in each case Germans constituted more than half of that majority. Together those three counties had over 20,000, which was considerably more than one-half of all the Germans (38,054) domiciled in Wisconsin at that time. The other lake shore counties, together with Calumet, Fond du Lac, Dodge, Jefferson, and Waukesha, accounted for 15,000 of the balance, leaving about 3000 scattered over the rest of the state. Thus the area embraced by Lake Michigan, Lake Winnebago and lower Fox River, the upper reaches of Rock River, and the south boundary of Jefferson, Waukesha, and Milwaukee counties was all strongly and in the main distinctively German.

Investigating the causes which may have operated to concentrate the German population within such clearly defined geographic limits, our first inquiry concerns the land on which settlement was taking place. And here we find that the distinguishing fact marking off the region in which Germans abounded from most of the other settled or partially settled areas of the state was its originally thickly wooded character. In a way almost startling, and superficially conclusive, the German settlements coincided with the great maple forest of southeastern Wisconsin, spreading also through the included pine forest on Lake Michigan south of Green Bay.

Returning now to the Yankee element, we find that although it was strong in all of the settled districts save the five counties named, it was more completely dominant in some districts than in others. For example, in Walworth County the northeastern states furnished 96.5 per cent of the American population, while 3.5 per cent was furnished by sixteen other states. The foreign born constituted less than 16 per cent of the total.[2] Walworth County was a section of the new “Yankee Land,” which included in its boundaries also the counties of Racine and Kenosha, Rock, and at that time parts of Waukesha and Jefferson. Nowhere in that region were foreigners very numerous, and in many localities non-English speaking foreigners were almost scarce.

Physically, this new Yankee Land comprised those portions of the prairies and openings of southern Wisconsin which lay not more than from sixty to seventy-five miles from the lake ports at Milwaukee, Racine, and Kenosha. The region was just as characteristically “open country” as that occupied so extensively by Germans was forested. One land type, the glacial marsh or swale—good for hay and pasture—was common to the two districts of country. But for the rest, the Yankee’s land was all ready for the plow if it was prairie, and if oak openings the labor of felling the scattered trees and dragging them away before the breaking team was comparatively light.

The German, on the other hand, in order to subdue his land to the requirements of successful tillage, must attack with ax, mattock, and firebrand each successive acre, patiently slashing and burning, hewing and delving, till by dint of unremitting toil extended over an indefinite number of years his farm became “cleared.”

Shall we therefore repeat, as the sober verdict of history, the statement often heard, that in settling this new country the Yankee showed a preference for open land, the German for woodland? On the face of the census returns that seems to be the case, and if our evidence were limited to the census such a conclusion would be well nigh inescapable. Fortunately, he who deals with culture history problems of the American West has this advantage over the Greenes and the Lamprechts of Europe, that on such matters his evidence is minutely particular, while theirs is general to the point of vagueness. No one will doubt that the Yankee staked his claim in the open lands because he preferred those lands on account of the ease with which a farm could be made. The question is, whether the German’s presence in the woods rather than in the openings or on the prairies was with him a matter of preference so far as land selection in itself was concerned.