The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin

by Joseph Schafer

But the Know-Nothingism of 1855 was regarded by the Democratic party as sinister because, as that party professed to believe, it had got itself incorporated as an important if not controlling element in the new Republican party. This the Republican leaders and organs denied with vigor, but it is true that the general council of the American party in this state urged the support of the Republican candidates and professed to have contributed 20,000 votes toward the election of Bashford. The Republicans had no objection to Know-Nothing votes, but they feared that the endorsement of their ticket by the Know-Nothings would cost them more foreign born votes than it would gain them nativists. It was tactically wise for the Democrats, and especially the German Democratic press, to keep the “Republican-Know-Nothing” idea before their people—and they made the best use of the opportunity.

“Temperance,” after all, was regarded by the Germans as merely a manifestation of Puritan fanaticism, which must be opposed in the interest of personal liberty. Much as they disliked it, their opposition does not seem to have developed excessive bitterness against the believers in or practicers of temperance. But nativism, which demanded that the suffrage be limited to citizens; that naturalization be made more difficult; that in some departments, as in the army, natives be favored to the exclusion of the foreign born, this they felt to be a deliberate and vicious attack upon the rights of the foreign born as a class. The advocacy of these principles involved much discussion of the unfitness of foreigners, their ignorance, their sordidness, their “un-American” habits and customs, in one important respect their “anti-American” religion.

All of this inevitably roused a bitter, fighting resentment on the part of all foreigners, as it did among radical natives also, and it is well known that many parts of the country suffered in consequence from riots and other manifestations of a class war. In Wisconsin there was less overt hostility than in some states where the foreign elements were not so powerful.[64] The Know-Nothing party as such functioned seriously only in the one year 1855, and its propaganda was relatively mild-mannered.[65] Its chief objects of attack were the foreign born Catholics, which class included a majority of the Irish but only a fraction of the Germans, most of whom—probably—were either Lutheran or Reformed, with an appreciable number of non-churchmen or “free-thinkers.”[66] Nevertheless, nativism, as entangled in the political psychology of this eventful year, had its full share in producing a tragedy in this state also.

It came in the form of a lynching, carried out with hideous barbarism by a body of the ruder Germans of Washington County, in August, 1855. It seems that a sickly, weak witted boy of nineteen, named George DeBar—a native of New York State—felt himself aggrieved by a German farmer and proposed to administer a beating. This he partly accomplished, at the farmer’s home, but his victim fled into the field, where he found a hiding place. Meantime, DeBar ran amuck, and meeting the man’s wife stabbed her severely but not fatally. He next pursued a fifteen-year-old boy, Paul Winderling, who was living with the farmer, attacked him with his pocketknife, and killed him. He then burned the farmer’s cabin. DeBar afterwards solemnly assured his attorneys that the only part of the transaction he could remember was striking the farmer himself with a stone knotted in his handkerchief. The belief was widespread that he became unbalanced mentally at this point, which theory is really the simplest explanation of his horrible crime, committed without assignable motive.

Immediately on DeBar’s arrest a plan was hatched to storm the jail, take him out, and hang him. The death penalty had been abolished at the instance, as many felt, of the Yankee sentimentalists, and the ignorance of some suggested that, since hanging was only justice in a case like this, and the state refused to execute a criminal, the people themselves had a right to take the matter into their own hands. Unfortunately, a similar case had happened two weeks earlier at Janesville, in which the avenging crowd was made up of Americans.[67] It was suggested by some that DeBar was himself a Know-Nothing, or at least trained with the Know-Nothing element, and there were dire whispers about the trial judge, Charles H. Larrabee. Doubtless these rumors were altogether wild. The nineteen-year-old DeBar, practically non compos mentis, was of no possible political consequence, while Judge Larrabee at the time was as sound a Democrat as could be found.[68] But passions once fully aroused hurl reason from its throne, and so it was in this case. The rowdies gathered at a drinking place in West Bend, and decided on a lynching.

Judge Larrabee convened a special session of court, impaneled a grand jury, and having summoned two companies of militia—the Union Guards of Ozaukee County, a German company, and the Washington Guards, another German company, of Milwaukee—to come up for the protection of the prisoner, had him conveyed to the courthouse and examined. The grand jury brought in a true bill, charging murder in the first degree. To this the prisoner, on the advice of his attorneys, pleaded “not guilty.” The multitude which had been permitted to press into the court room, despite the judge’s instruction to the militia to limit the number to the seating capacity of the room, fairly raged when they found a trial would be required, and before the prisoner took many steps in the direction of the jail, they seized him and made way with him.

The severest censure was leveled against the militia companies and their leaders. All the American writers whose statements appear in the Sentinel charge that these companies fraternized with the lynching party, and practically assert that they had an understanding by which the prisoner was to be given up to them. The captain of the Milwaukee company, who was a veteran of the Mexican War—though a German immigrant—insisted with vigor that his company did all it could to prevent the lynching. He did not speak for the Union Guards of Ozaukee. All witnesses agree that one of the Union Guard officers, Lieutenant Beger, performed his duty manfully and heroically, but the weight of the testimony condemns the companies as organizations, and especially their captains. It would seem that two companies of militia, if well led, ought to have been able with the butts of their guns to hold off a rabble of three hundred men, and no witness puts the number higher than that, while some declare the rush was made by not more than thirty-five men.

In the Milwaukee captain’s statement, as in the statements of other German apologists for the militia, we come at once upon the political note. They could not expect the “Know-Nothing American writers” to tell the truth about the tragedy. In other words, they found in the politics of the time an opportunity to charge prejudice against Americans, and by that means to dodge the real issue. Two German writers of West Bend, one of them the undersheriff, bitterly denounced both the militia companies and the lynchers, and both more than hint that the passions which led to the lynching were partly religious. Here, undoubtedly, we come upon one of the signs of division among the Germans themselves. It is possible that these two Germans were politically opposed to the main body of their fellow-countrymen, for by this time a light minority had already been attracted away from the Democratic party. However, we do not know that this was true, and merely call attention to the several psychological attitudes which, from the testimony, we know the case disclosed.

Of greatest interest is the attitude of English and German language papers of Democratic and Republican proclivities. The Sentinel continued to admit contributions on the West Bend tragedy for approximately two weeks. It also published the results of an investigation made on the ground by one of its staff, and a petition to the governor, said to have been signed by 186 residents of Washington County, who asked for the disbandment of the two accused companies and the withdrawal of their officers’ commissions. But the Sentinel does not appear to have tried by means of the incident to influence the political situation which was about to become superheated. At all events, what it published would all have been legitimate as news. On the other hand, the Banner und Volksfreund,[69] while condemning the lynching, made no demand for the punishment of the lynchers. It tried to exculpate the militia companies (accepting the Milwaukee captain’s testimony as against all other evidence), and deliberately charged that the Sentinel, in publishing the above-mentioned petition, was playing for political advantage. This charge was absurd on its face, for the success of the new Republican movement which the Sentinel had espoused depended on its ability to detach Germans from the Democratic party, which assuredly could not be done by playing into the hands of the Know-Nothings, and the Sentinel did not hesitate to declare the Know-Nothing support a handicap to the party.

Both American and German testimony discloses the existence in Washington County of a strong German party of law and order. They deplored the lynching and urged the apprehension and trial of the ringleaders. They realized that the crime would put a stigma upon their race as well as upon the county and the state. But, as a matter of fact, although some of the lynchers were identified in the verdict of the coroner’s jury, it must be recorded that no earnest effort was made to punish them.[70] Nor was any step of an official character taken (so far as I have been able to find) to determine the guilt or innocence of the militia companies and their officers. In fact, the Democratic press of the state, evidently fearful of sacrificing some German Democratic votes, which that year were all needed, deliberately tried to darken council by confounding this case in principle not only with the Mayberry case, which it resembled, but also with another of an entirely different nature, to which we must give passing attention.