Wisconsin's first settlement was at the lead mines of the southwestern part and attracted largely Ulster Scots from Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. A little later these were reinforced by another Nordic group of Englishmen from Cornwall who formed an important element in that region.
The second migration scattered agricultural communities throughout the southeastern part of Wisconsin along the lake shore. This immigration was almost wholly from the New England States and the New England part of New York State, and was accomplished roughly in the years 1835 to 1850. By 1847 when Statehood was achieved the territory had a population of nearly 250,000 and was virtually a New England colony.
Of the seventy-six men who composed the second Constitutional Convention, one-third came from New York, one-third from New England, and the rest were a scattering.
During the decade which ended with the Federal Census of 1850, the growth of the State had been nearly 900 per cent, a record rarely exceeded in America. This extraordinary surge was due largely to the sudden arrival of a foreign element which has ever since made Wisconsin a State apart from all the others. Even as early as 1850 one-third of the population was actually foreign-born. Of the foreign-born who came to the State during the territorial period, the British Isles contributed about one-half and foreign-language groups the other half. The English-speaking immigrants soon blended with the native population, with the exception of the Roman Catholic Irish who were less easily assimilated. In the decade before the Civil War there was a stream of Belgian immigrants amounting to at least 15,000. Some hundreds of Russians also came in and the Scandinavians had begun to arrive, although they did not play an important part until after the Civil War. Danes and Norwegians were beginning to come in some numbers but few Swedes as yet.
The great immigration of this period was the German, which introduced another partly Alpine element into the overwhelmingly Nordic population of the United States. These had begun to come after 1830, when the Revolution in France had stirred up similar, but less successful, political upheavals in the parts of South Germany adjoining France. Many of the politically discontented decided to leave the country or were obliged to do so, and they found in Wisconsin conditions particularly to their liking. In the first place the State offered a variety of climate and soil that was not dissimilar to that in which they were brought up. In the second place land was cheap and good and there was much forest land for which the Germans showed a notable preference. Not only was the possession of timber an asset, but it was to the German immigrant a mark of social status. Forests had largely disappeared in Germany, except on the great estates of the nobility. Hence, to own a piece of forest land was a mark of superiority. Only the few could afford the forest land in Germany but in Wisconsin every small farmer could feel himself as good as the Duke or Prince whose yoke he had renounced. A third important attraction after Statehood was a provision that the alien could vote after only one year's residence. This gave the Germans a political importance without delay which they lost no time in using.
German settlement in the United States follows a belt beginning with Pennsylvania and running due west through Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri. This was partly due to an avoidance of the Southern States with whose products they were not familiar and with whose land system and slave labor they were not sympathetic. Being in this belt Wisconsin immediately took and retained such a prominence that patriots from the "Fatherland" seriously urged that it become a genuine German colony.
The Pennsylvania Dutch had already shown how little disposed the German-speaking peoples were to become citizens of a new country with a whole heart, and the new tide of immigration followed this example. They attacked the public-school system from the beginning and insisted on having their own schools and on having their children taught German in the American schools. They kept their own social organization and even went so far as to get the State laws published in the German language in Indiana in 1858. This tendency toward hyphenation has made the Germans a less valuable element in the American population up to the present time than they should have been.
The early German immigration to Wisconsin was on the whole from southern and central Germany, and was pre-dominantly Alpine in race and Roman Catholic in religion. Statehood in Wisconsin coincided with the unsuccessful Revolution of 1848 in Germany which started the real flood of German immigration that reached its maximum numbers in 1854, and continued with noticeable strength for more than a generation longer.
The principal Nordic emigration in the '40s was from Pomerania and Brandenburg, and many of the South Germans, while largely Alpine, were Protestants rather than Catholics. In 1863, just after the end of the period here considered, the church authorities reported that Wisconsin contained 225,000 German Lutherans as against 105,000 German Catholics. After that the Germans pressed more and more into the northern and central regions of the State.
Wisconsin then at the end of the period here considered (1860) had probably the largest non-Nordic population of any of the American States, although even here the Nordics were in a great majority. With one-third of its population foreign-born, it was surpassed in this respect only by California.