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Chapter One

“TRUE AMERICANISM”

The Foundations of the Civic Culture

JACOB De La Motta was only thirty-one but already a distinguished doctor with a substantial practice in Savannah, Georgia, and other cities when he was chosen to give the address at the consecration of a new synagogue in Savannah on July 21, 1820. The physician wondered at the good fortune of Jews in the new republic, who, for the first time in history, “stood on the same eminence with other sects.” So taken was La Motta with his own discourse, in which he praised the Constitution as the “palladium of our rights,” that he sent it to ex-presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, two of the most distinguished living Americans. Within a month, Madison thanked him for the copy of his talk, pointing out that the experience of the Jews in Savannah showed that “equal laws, protecting equal rights, are found, as they ought to be presumed, the best guarantee of loyalty and love of country.” A few weeks later, Jefferson wrote that he saw confirmation of two fundamental truths in La Motta’s letter: “that man can govern himself, and that religious freedom is the most effectual anodyne against religious dissension: the maxim of civil government being reversed in that of religion, where its true form is ‘divided we stand, united, we fall.’” The sage of Monticello hoped that Jews would soon be “taking their seats … at the board of government.”¹

Jews, who had been expelled from every major nation of Europe, and who, when permitted to live in them, were usually denied fundamental rights, by 1820 had become active in the politics of several communities in the U.S.² Although they came from different national backgrounds and religious orientations and were scattered throughout the country, Jews were developing a surer, clearer sense of their relationship to other Jews in the country—becoming ethnic—while at the same time developing a growing sense of loyalty to the U.S. in a process of ethnic-Americanization that was first nurtured mainly in colonial Pennsylvania.

Three Ideas About Immigrants and Membership: Massachusetts, Virginia, and Pennsylvania

The Pennsylvania idea was that all white European settlers were welcome into the colony on terms of equal rights. Fueled by the desire of early white settlers for additional immigrants to build a nation and generate prosperity, the Pennsylvania idea would become the basis for U.S. immigration and naturalization policy for white Europeans after the founding of the republic. But the Pennsylvania idea was in competition with two other ideas, the first of which gained prominence in colonial Massachusetts, and the second mainly in the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Virginia and Maryland, called here the Virginia idea. To oversimplify: Pennsylvania sought immigrants who would be good citizens regardless of religious background; Massachusetts wanted as members only those who were religiously pure; and Virginia, with its increasing reliance on a plantation economy, wanted workers as cheaply as it could get them, without necessarily welcoming them to membership in the community.

Early Puritan Massachusetts, believing that the success of its settlement would depend upon the fulfillment of its covenant with God, welcomed only those newcomers who accepted the stringent beliefs and practices of that theocratic community (it turned back sixty English Protestant passengers on the ship Handmaid because of insufficient testimony as to their character and godliness).³ Since the Puritan church was an exclusive fellowship restricted to those who convincingly said they had been redeemed by the saving grace of God and who demonstrated their experience in the ways of grace, not everyone who was permitted to settle was admitted to church membership, a prerequisite for participation in the political community.

The Massachusetts approach became influential in the development of a national ideology of Americanism, but it was too restrictive to form a dominant immigration and naturalization policy for the middle and northern colonies, which sought, not an ideal community (to say nothing of a Utopian one), but capital expansion. Since permanent settlers were valuable economic assets, exclusion of immigrants on the basis of religion seemed to make little economic sense. When local settlers or colonial governors tried to maintain religious exclusivity, investors sometimes countermanded them, as in New Netherlands, where Peter Stuyvesant wanted to bar Jews (and Lutherans) but was obliged to accept them by his sponsors. Maryland, with Catholics in power, excluded Jews from membership; but when a Jewish physician, Jacob Lambrozo, was tried for blasphemy in 1658, he was acquitted and permitted to remain in the colony because he was a useful settler.⁴ Later, after Protestants took control of Maryland and established the Church of England there, they decided it was practical to permit Catholic churches to remain open in order to obtain additional settlers.⁵

Boston, where the Puritan Edward Johnson warned in his pamphlet Wonder-Working Providence (1654) that immigrants would undermine the holy experiment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, tried to hold to a sectarian basis for civic membership for a long time, but eventually succumbed to the desire for settlers to the point of accepting Jews, after rigidly excluding them throughout the seventeenth century.⁶ In 1649, only twelve days after he arrived in Boston with a cargo, Solomon Franco was “warned out” of town and given six shillings a week for up to ten weeks for subsistence until he could get passage to Holland.⁷ The much more prominent Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and the Quaker Mary Dyer were among the dissenting Christians who were forced to leave the colony, and some, including Dyer, were executed for trying to stay.

Long after the hanging of heretics had stopped and Protestant dissenters were numerous, the Massachusetts idea of political membership based on religious affiliation continued to be influential. Before the Hebrew scholar Judah Monis was appointed to teach at Harvard College in 1722, he was compelled to convert publicly from Judaism to Congregationalism.⁸ Even as late as 1762, Isaac Moses was “warned out” of Boston, although he later became a well-known patriot and a leader in the New York City Chamber of Commerce. But in the same year, Aaron Lopez, a Jewish merchant who had been denied citizenship in Rhode Island on the ground that “no person who does not profess the Christian Religion can be admitted free of the Colony,” was given full citizenship in Boston and allowed to strike the phrase “upon the True Faith of a Christian” when signing his oath.⁹ Even Massachusetts began to back away from exclusionary principles to accept immigrants.

Only sixty years after Judah Monis converted in order to be accepted at Harvard, another Boston Jew found it quite easy to live proudly as both a Jew and a prominent citizen in the community. Moses Michael Hays, who helped to found the Boston Atheneum and the First National Bank of Boston and who supported the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard, observed the Jewish Sabbath, held religious services in his home (there was no synagogue as yet), and obeyed the Jewish commandment to do justice by inviting the poor to his dinner table.¹⁰ Established churches would remain in New England for several years (in New Hampshire until 1817, in Connecticut until 1818, and in Massachusetts until 1833), and for a long time after, many Americans thought of the U.S. as a Protestant nation and many more thought of it as a Christian nation. But the idea that membership in the American polity should be based on belonging to a particular faith was overwhelmed by the desire for immigrants.

Planters in Virginia and Maryland began to recruit laborers to maximize tobacco profits early in the seventeenth century. Wanting workers and not visible saints, Virginians soon began to import indentured servants regardless of their religious backgrounds, laborers who would serve those who paid their transportation for a period of four to seven years after which they would become free. Emigration to the Chesapeake for one hundred years after 1607 was eight times as large as to New England.¹¹ The idea of procuring servants to do the dirty jobs and be left outside the political community caught on everywhere. Indentured males outnumbered females six to one. Later, Virginia and all of the South, particularly, would build on the idea of importing workers as cheaply as possible by replacing white indentured servants with black slaves.

By paying for a servant’s transportation, Virginia planters became entitled to an additional fifty acres of land. The planters greedily took convicts, vagrants, and paupers from England, Scotland, and Ireland to augment their indentured-servant population. But servants could not be kept as servants forever. When they became free they preferred to work for themselves, taking advantage of the cheap public land available in Virginia and elsewhere. Planters tried to ensure a continuing supply of white indentured workers. Between 1658 and 1666, the Virginia Assembly revised the terms of indenture to give themselves and other masters a longer hold on their workers, essentially adding three additional years to the terms of most servants.¹² For those who ran away and were caught the terms of service were increased by twice the length of time they had been gone, and minor misdemeanors were punished severely, often by adding years of service.¹³ Even so, efforts to import and control white servants proved more costly than slavery. One way to counter the restlessness and rebelliousness of freed poor whites was to buy black slaves and at the same time link the hopes of poor whites for a better life to a social, economic, and political system based largely on racism. By the early 1640s, Virginia courts recognized black men and women and their unborn progeny as property. By the 1660s, there were probably more than a thousand slaves in Virginia, at the bottom of a social system, above them a much larger body of white servants and a vast, growing population of freedmen who had finished their terms of service entitled to set up households. Slavery was also a more efficient way of controlling labor; planters “converted to slavery simply by buying slaves instead of servants.”¹⁴ Less than 8 percent of the Chesapeake population were black slaves in 1680, but by 1710 25 percent.¹⁵

The slave system grew everywhere in the colonies, less in Pennsylvania and New England than elsewhere, but especially in the South. A 1680 act in Virginia which called for thirty lashes on the bare back of any Negro or slave who lifted a hand in opposition against any Christian allowed white servants as well as masters and mistresses to bully slaves without fear of retaliation.¹⁶ In 1691, harsh punishment was prescribed for miscegenation between any white man or woman and a Negro, mulatto, or Indian.¹⁷ In 1705, a new law required masters to give servants ten bushels of Indian corn, thirty shillings of money, and a well-fixed musket at the conclusion of their term and, best of all, fifty acres of land.¹⁸

Pennsylvania, following the leadership of William Penn in 1681, had by the early eighteenth century established a policy of encouraging immigration of Europeans regardless of their religious background and of admitting them to membership in the civic life of the colony on roughly equal terms with native-born Pennsylvanians. As a result, Pennsylvania became home to Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Baptists and Presbyterians from Wales, and a variety of German Pietists. German immigrants, particularly, provided a linguistically and culturally diverse population. By the mid-eighteenth century considerable tension existed between Germans and English-speaking groups and between Germans and Scotch-Irish. The colony, in response, instructed its agents to sell no more land to Scotch-Irishmen in the predominantly German counties of Lancaster and York and to offer money to those who were already there if they would move to the Cumberland Valley.¹⁹

Of the other colonies, New York was most like Pennsylvania in its cultural diversity. Founded by the Dutch, it had had a substantial number of non-English speakers from the beginning. It was not unusual for mid-eighteenth-century Anglo-American politicians in New York to complain that the Hollanders spoke Dutch in public, or that they were clannish and lacked patriotism. Cadwallader Colden, a Scottish-born counselor to the governor, spoke angrily of “dutch boors grossly ignorant and rude who could neither write nor read nor speak English.”²⁰ But Colden, who well understood the need for new settlers, particularly if they were English, warned late in 1761, after he had become lieutenant governor, that if foreigners were made uncomfortable in New York by a difficult naturalization process, they could go easily to other colonies to settle and improve the lands there.²¹ The earlier Colden had wanted newcomers to be “like us.” The later Colden wanted newcomers to settle in New York whether or not they were “like us.” Several leading political figures in Pennsylvania, including Benjamin Franklin, felt similar antipathy to outsiders. Where Colden saw “dutch boors,” Franklin complained of “Palatine Boors,”²² the charge of boorishness based partly on Germans’ resistance to speaking English. By 1753 two of the six printing houses run by Germans in Pennsylvania published in English and two partly in English. Franklin was furious that the remaining two continued to publish only in German. “Why should Pennsylvania,” he asked, “founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, [italics his] who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs any more than they can acquire our complexion?”²³ Franklin eventually overcame his fears of “German boors” and “superstitious Papists,” too.²⁴ Like New York, Pennsylvania wanted settlers for the backcountry.

Unskilled laborers and artisans came not just from Germany but mostly from England, the Scottish highlands, and Ireland (nearly all Protestants). Rampant land speculation drew families—sometimes of substance—not only the single men who came to labor.²⁵ By the time of the Revolution, most of the children and grandchildren of Dutch, French, German, and Swedish immigrants in the colonies spoke English and were otherwise indistinguishable from the children and grandchildren of English settlers, although in Albany, where the Dutch predominated, it was difficult to assemble an English-speaking jury, and several counties in Pennsylvania were overwhelmingly German-speaking.²⁶ Hostility toward speakers of Dutch and German and toward the English-speaking Scotch-Irish, the newest large immigrant group, was widespread, but none of the newcomers were kept from easy naturalization or from participating in politics on roughly equal terms with the native-born. That such persons could be good citizens even though they were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, French Huguenots, German Pietists, or English Quakers had become a commonly accepted idea.

Can Immigrants Learn New Republican Principles?

It was one thing to welcome immigrants to labor. It was quite another to welcome them as citizens. Even Thomas Jefferson wondered shortly after the Revolution if the new nation could accept large numbers of immigrants and maintain its republican principles. But the Pennsylvania ideal of equal rights for white newcomers had no more eloquent apostles than George Mason, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, all of whom came from Virginia, a state that held 40 percent of the slaves in America. Calling the principles that underlie the Declaration of Independence “an expression of the American mind,” “the genuine effusion of the soul of our country,” Jefferson was nonetheless uncertain that immigrants could learn those principles or practice them easily.²⁷ “Our principles,” he wrote in 1781, “are more peculiar than those of any other in the universe,” being based on “a composition of the freest principles of the English Constitution, with others derived from natural right and natural reason.” Against these, “nothing can be more opposed than the maxims of absolute monarchies. Yet, from such, we are to expect the greatest number of emigrants.”

To underscore his concern about immigration as a potentially royalist or otherwise disruptive force, he wrote of immigrants that “they will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness … these principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its directions, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”

Issuing a challenge for generations to come, Jefferson asked, “May not our government be more homogeneous, more peaceful, more durable,” without large-scale immigration? He queried further, “Suppose twenty million of republican Americans [were] thrown all of a sudden into France, what would be the condition of that kingdom? If it would be more turbulent, less happy, less strong, we may believe that the addition of a half million of foreigners to our present numbers would produce a similar effect here.”²⁸ While skeptical about taking vigorous measures to speed immigration, Jefferson did not oppose it, however, and he later became a champion of easy naturalization, partly for partisan reasons, but also because as the nation expanded it needed more settlers.

Capitalism and territorial expansion were the driving forces behind a wide-open immigration policy. But Americans continued to worry about the potentially divisive effects of immigration. In the early seventeenth century, Boston’s John Winthrop had been concerned about religious purity; in mid-eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, Franklin was concerned about linguistic and cultural unity; in 1781, Jefferson’s apprehension about immigration was based on a different idea of membership, that Americans were united by a common set of political beliefs. But how could one test the newcomers for political ideology?

Many states required some sign of commitment to the political principles on which the new experiment in self-government depended before admitting immigrants as members of the polity. New York, in language close to that used later in the naturalization law of the federal government, required that any settler who wished to become a citizen “abjure and renounce all allegiance and subjection to all and every foreign king, prince, potentate and state, in all matters ecclesiastical as well as civil.”²⁹ Georgia required an applicant for citizenship (all male) to produce from a circuit or county court judge where he had last resided a certificate verifying “his … Attachment to the liberties or Independence of the United States of America, and also of … Honesty, Probity and Industry.”³⁰ Some states required signs of commitment beyond an oath of allegiance renouncing old and accepting new political principles before they gave newcomers full membership. Virginia naturalized all white persons who had lived in the state for two years and had “evinced a permanent attachment to the state, by having intermarried with a citizen of the Commonwealth, or a citizen of any other of the United States, or purchased lands to the value of one hundred pounds therein.”³¹

Pennsylvania allowed every male foreign settler of good character who took an oath of allegiance to acquire land or other real estate and after a year to become a citizen entitled to all of the rights of natural-born subjects, “except that he shall not be capable of being elected a representative until after two years of residence.”³² Other states made the privileges of naturalized citizens somewhat less than those for the native-born. A white male in South Carolina who resided in the state one year and swore allegiance to it could become a citizen and obtain the privilege of voting for the legislature or the city corporation of Charlestown, but was not eligible for high office unless authorized by a special act of the legislature. In Georgia, a new citizen could not vote for the legislature or hold any office of trust until the completion of a seven-year residence.³³ But these limitations, and others imposed on the rights of Jews to vote in Maryland or to hold office in New Hampshire, were exceptions to the general rule. In contrast to England, where only Protestants who took the sacraments in the Church of England were eligible for naturalization, white male immigrants regardless of their religious affiliation were placed on a clear, fast track to full membership in nearly all of the states of the new nation by the 1830s.

The issues of immigration and naturalization—those crucial questions of membership—were little discussed at the constitutional convention, but such discussion as there was took place within the context of Jefferson’s concern for inviting as members only those who believed in the American idea of self-government and who were capable of practicing it. Although his friend James Madison recognized that there might be a danger in having members who had “foreign predilections,” he trusted that the general electorate would prevent abuses and he thought it wise “to invite foreigners of merit and republican principles.” But there was no certain way to tell which foreigners held republican principles. It was well to argue as Madison did that the new government should be as welcoming as possible to those who “love liberty and wish to partake in its blessings,” but what test could be established before issuing the invitation? Franklin, having overcome his earlier doubts about immigration, thought it sufficient proof of fealty to republican ideals and principles of government if individuals had left the countries of their birth and had chosen to live in the new nation.³⁴ Another Pennsylvanian, Scotland-born James Wilson, whom President Washington would later appoint to the U.S. Supreme Court, referred to the experience of Pennsylvania, where most of the line officers during the Revolution had been foreigners, and noted his own and the foreign birth of other delegates to prove that newcomers could be as devoted to the well-being of a republic as anyone born in the United States.³⁵

Some leaders believed that care should be taken to prepare newcomers by extending the waiting period for naturalization and/or holding office. George Mason, in arguing that no male person be qualified for election to the House of Representatives until he had been a citizen for seven years, was afraid that a rich foreign nation such as Great Britain might send over hostile or at least monarchical persons to infiltrate the legislature. Gouverneur Morris argued that the requirement for admission for election to the Senate should be fourteen years, saying that there are degrees of hospitality one ought to give the stranger. Morris was afraid that newcomers would retain attachment to the interests of the countries from which they emigrated, and engage in what much later would be called ethnic lobbying. “Admit a Frenchman into your Senate,” he said, “and he will study to increase the commerce of France.”³⁶

Eventually, a residency requirement of seven years was established for election to the House, with an additional two years for the Senate (on the ground that the upper chamber has a direct responsibility in foreign affairs and two more years would provide even more time to wean immigrants from their foreign loyalties). The only other distinctions made in the Constitution between native-born and naturalized citizens was that the newcomers would not be eligible for the presidency. The basic questions of a waiting period and other requirements for naturalization itself were not included in the Constitution but were left for Congress to establish in a uniform rule of naturalization in 1790.

When Congress debated the issue no one challenged the proposal to restrict naturalization to white persons, and nothing was said about establishing religious, cultural, or linguistic tests for citizenship, making the terms of membership for whites unprecedentedly liberal, while excluding dark-skinned persons altogether. The argument over the length of the period of residency required before being eligible for citizenship was between a short period of one or two years versus none at all. One advocate of no waiting period, a congressman from Virginia, maintained, “We shall be inconsistent with ourselves, if, after boasting of having opened an asylum for the oppressed of all nations … we make the terms of admission to the full enjoyment of that asylum so hard as is now proposed. It is nothing to us, whether Jews or Roman Catholics settle amongst us; whether subjects or kings, or citizens of free states wish to reside in the United States, they will find it their interest to be good citizens.”³⁷

No one in the debate quarreled openly with the idea that Jews or Roman Catholics might make good citizens. Although several states required officeholders to be Christians, no one pressed that position on the convention. Even liberal Pennsylvania required officeholders to swear that they believed in the divine inspiration of the Old and New Testaments, but there would be no such test for federal officeholders. Religious affiliation was not to be the criterion either for holding office or for becoming citizens in the new republic. But several congressmen wanted to make sure that whatever religious beliefs newcomers might profess, they had sufficient time to learn the political principles of the republic before becoming naturalized citizens. Thomas Hartley of Pennsylvania thought that admission to citizenship should be delayed long enough for immigrants to acquire a “firm attachment to the government.” Michael Stone of Maryland wanted a term of residence prior to naturalization long enough to guarantee that aliens would “have acquired a taste for this kind of government.”³⁸

On the other side were those who thought any period of residence unnecessary. Even two years was too long for Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania, who contrasted his confidence that immigrants would become Americans easily with the more conservative view of New Englanders. Maclay, forgetting the widespread enmity of Pennsylvania’s Anglo-Americans toward German immigrants only a few decades earlier, said that “we Pennsylvanians act as if we believed that God made of one blood all families of the earth; but the eastern people seem to think that he made none but New England folks … these are the men who affect the greatest fear of being contaminated with foreign manners, customs or vices.”³⁹

The Pennsylvania Approach Prevails: Equal Rights Regardless of Religion or Nationality

The Pennsylvania approach to procuring worker-citizens prevailed, as the final passage of the 1790 act put newcomers on a swift and unobstructed single path to what amounted to virtually full citizenship by establishing a residence period of two years in the U.S. prior to admission as a citizen (one year in the state where the applicant resided) and proof that “he is a person of good character” who will “support the Constitution of the United States.”⁴⁰ But the Virginia idea of maintaining a noncitizen labor force also was continued. There would be no entry into the political community by persons of color unless states themselves allowed native-born free blacks to participate.

As immigrants continued to arrive, new arguments were generated about their ability to learn quickly and practice effectively the art of self-government. German Pietists fleeing forced military service, aristocratic French escaping revolutionaries in France, French planters running from the black revolution in Santa Domingo, and Irish men and women escaping from poverty and English domination each had their critics. Although some were disliked because of differences in language, religion, or cultural customs, the arguments about immigration and naturalization again usually were couched in Jeffersonian terms. How capable were the new immigrants of self-government, it was asked again in 1795 when the issue of naturalization was debated in Congress for the second time. Federalist leaders, concerned because most of the newcomers were voting for the Jeffersonians, had a simple partisan reason for desiring a longer residency requirement prior to eligibility for naturalization. Many also clung to the Massachusetts idea that civic membership should be based, as in other societies, on a close affinity of religious and cultural background to those who already were citizens so as to guarantee a national unity of values and sensibilities. Senator Maclay was correct in accusing most New England Federalist leaders of wanting only immigrants who were linguistically, culturally, and religiously like themselves. The New Englanders tended to think of themselves as charter members, the original Anglo-Americans, but when Thomas Sedgewick of Massachusetts argued for a longer residency requirement, he did not do so on the basis of the old Puritan idea of religious and cultural exclusivity, but that the newcomers, having been subjects of “despotic, monarchical and aristocratical” governments would not be qualified “to participate in administering the sovereignty of our country … as soon as they set foot on American ground,” an argument expressed by Jefferson fourteen years earlier.⁴¹

By 1795, Jefferson and his followers had totally repudiated the charter member mentality, tending to accept the Pennsylvania view that European immigrants could learn to become good citizens regardless of their religious or national backgrounds once they came under the influence of the American environment. Jeffersonians wanted to make certain that immigrants with aristocratic backgrounds would convert to the political ideology of republicanism before admitting them to citizenship, and they pushed through a naturalization bill that required any applicant to “make an express renunciation of his title or order of nobility,” comparable to a stipulation in the old New York statute. It was a measure necessary, argued William B. Giles of Virginia, to keep aristocrats from subverting republican government.

Some congressmen, though averse to test oaths, also were concerned that fugitive nobility would come to the United States in such numbers as to have undue influence on American politics, and, therefore, Congress accepted James Madison’s position that “when crowds of them [nobility] come here, they should be forced to renounce everything contrary to the spirit of the Constitution.” In its final version, the bill specified that an alien at the time of application for citizenship must “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to every foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty whatever, and particularly by name, the prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, whereof before he was a citizen or subject.”⁴²

The Jeffersonians won on the issue of the renunciation of titles, but the Federalists made some headway on lengthening the residency requirement from two to five years in the U.S. while conceding a one-year residency in a state or territory. Although many Anglo-American congressmen may have found the German and Scotch-Irish newcomers distasteful, they explained their call for a longer waiting period in terms of ideology. Samuel Smith, a Maryland Federalist, for example, argued that aliens would need time to acquire “just ideas of our Constitution and the excellence of our institutions before they were admitted to the rights of a citizen.”⁴³ For Federalists, generally, the fear of foreigners remained strong, not just because they usually voted for the opposition candidates but also because many looked, talked, and worshiped differently from the Yankees.

When the Federalists, whose leadership came from New England, took firm control over both executive and legislative branches of the federal government in 1798, they capitalized on growing anti-alien feeling as a result of the so-called “XYZ Affair,” which implicated the French in an attempt to bribe American commissioners sent to Paris to negotiate a treaty. Congress quickly pushed through a new naturalization act extending the time necessary for a foreigner to become a citizen from five to fourteen years. An Alien Act, also of 1798, required all foreigners to register with the federal government and allowed the president to deport without trial any alien whom he considered “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.”⁴⁴ Although never enforced, the Alien Act was considered a hostile measure by many Scotch-Irish, Irish, and German immigrants, most of whom, particularly those in the West, already were unsympathetic to the conservative policies of President John Adams.

Only four years later, with the Jeffersonians back in control, the residency requirement was changed again to five years; it has never been altered since. But the Federalists continued to sputter against immigration. Meeting at its Hartford convention in 1812, the party passed a resolution urging a constitutional amendment to bar naturalized citizens from elective and civil office. Although the economic imperatives of nation building made it foolish to cut back on incentives for immigration, the Federalists hoped that by lengthening the time required for naturalization from five years to a much longer period and by restricting the privileges of naturalized citizens they could weaken their increasingly powerful political opponents.

Two years later, furious that the opposition party had made it easy for naturalized foreigners to hold “places of trust, honor or profit” in the government, Federalists cloaked their basic xenophobic feelings and political frustration in the language of republican ideology. By giving jobs to the immigrants, the Federalists charged that the party of Jefferson had provided “an inducement to the malcontent subjects of the Old World to come to these States in quest of executive patronage, and to repay it by an abject devotion to executive measures.”⁴⁵ The Federalist solution—that no naturalized citizen should be eligible to become a member of the Senate or the House of Representatives or be permitted to hold any civil office in the federal government—was buried as inimical to the overwhelming American urge for expansion, and the Federalist party soon died.

The Ethnic-Americanization of the Germans

The concern of Jefferson and other republican ideologues was understandable, since most of them lived in a world of Anglo-Americans. The debates on immigration and naturalization policy were not informed by the opinions of immigrants, as such debates would be in the twentieth century. Few of the founding fathers were immigrants. James Wilson, a major author of Article Two of the Constitution, was born in Scotland; Alexander Hamilton was born in the West Indies; the second secretary of the treasury, Albert Gallatin, emigrated from Switzerland. More than 95 percent of the leaders of the Revolution, signers of the Declaration of Independence, and authors of the Constitution had English Protestant backgrounds. Not one signer belonged to the largest non-English-speaking immigrant-ethnic group, the Germans. John Jay wrote in the Federalist Papers that “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors,” even though his own paternal grandfather had been a French Huguenot immigrant and he was Dutch on his mother’s side.⁴⁶ Neither he, Madison, nor Hamilton had anything to say about the German-speaking communities in the Federalist Papers. Jay had exaggerated the cultural unity of Americans probably in order to buttress his argument for the creation of a national government.

New immigration was slight in the first twenty years of the republic, and Dutch and German—the two most widely used foreign languages—became local curiosities in some areas and died out in others. In the churches, American-born ministers were replacing those from abroad and were introducing English in place of German or Dutch in services, although some Pennsylvania German churches resisted the trend, as they do even now. One looked in vain in Tocqueville’s discussions on the press, political associations, the unlimited power of the majority, language and literature, and public associations for any mention of nationality influences or what would later be called ethnicity. But if Tocqueville had been German, or if he had returned fifteen years later, he could hardly have avoided it.⁴⁷

German immigrants and their children, more than any other group, provided a large-scale early example of the process of ethnic-Americanization, in which ancestral loyalties (religious, linguistic, and cultural) are changed (and in some ways strengthened) to American circumstances even as immigrants and their children embrace American political ideals and participate in American political institutions. More than 50,000 immigrants arrived annually beginning in 1832, the year of Tocqueville’s visit, with the exceptions of 1835 and 1838. In the 1840s, a total of 1,713,251 immigrant arrivals were reported, a large majority of them either Irish or German. Some Germans remained separate from the larger society, as do many immigrants from other countries today. In the 1980s, the Hutterite Brethren, with about six thousand members, the largest Christian communal group, continued to speak German even though they were fluent in English. It was their strong religious commitment and not their German nationalism that defined their social system and kept them from social and political assimilation. But the German flavor of the Hutterite colonies, principally in South Dakota and Montana, was unmistakable, even though the largest group of immigrants came to South Dakota more than one hundred years ago.⁴⁸

The Old Order Amish Mennonites, about eighty thousand of whom lived in twenty states in the 1980s (mainly Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana), kept largely to themselves. With other Germans, they began to settle in Pennsylvania from 1727 to 1790; a second wave came after 1815 to Ohio, New York, Indiana, and Illinois. The Amish formed unique farming communities and German enclaves in the U.S. for two and a half centuries, refraining not only from participation in American politics, but, under the strict rules of their church, from modern technology and conveniences.⁴⁹ Other German pietistic communal settlements in Harmony (1805) and Economy (1825), Pennsylvania, Zoar, Ohio (1817), and Amana, Iowa (1843),⁵⁰ disappeared. The vast majority of German settlers in the second quarter of the nineteenth century were not religious pietists at all. They wanted, not to live entirely apart from American society, but to be Germans and Americans, too.

Thousands of white European immigrants united around republican principles, just as Jefferson had hoped they would but feared they might not. Tocqueville saw that immigrants quickly claimed the principles of republican government as their own, sharing in the cult of the glorious Fourth of July (the Declaration of Independence was read aloud on village greens and main streets) and the worship of “god-like Washington,” whose birthday was made a national holiday in 1799 and was, like the Fourth of July, an occasion for teachers and preachers to talk about the virtues of American liberty and opportunity.⁵¹ Without using the term, Tocqueville described the civic culture as a unifying set of principles of and practices in government. “It is possible to conceive the surprising liberty that the Americans enjoy,” he wrote, and “some idea likewise may be formed of their extreme equality; but the political activity that pervades the United States must be seen to be understood.”

No sooner do you set foot upon American ground than you are stunned by a kind of tumult; a confused clamor is heard on every side, and a thousand simultaneous voices demand the satisfaction of their social wants. Everything is in motion around you; here the people of one quarter of a town are met to decide upon the building of a church; there the election of a representative is going on; a little farther, the delegates of a district are hastening to the town in order to consult upon some local improvements; in another place, the laborers of a village quit their plows to deliberate on the project of a road or a public school. Meetings are called for the sole purpose of declaring their disapprobation of the conduct of government; while in other assemblies, citizens salute the authorities of the day as the fathers of their country.⁵²

Tocqueville discovered that what distinguished the American national spirit, character, and identity was not sectarian religion or ancestry but a culture of politics. The Americans were not a Protestant nation in the same sense that the French were a Catholic nation, or the Germans a folk. The unifying culture of the U.S. was not religious or racial but political.

One might expect an immigrant from England, someone whose language and political institutions were not dissimilar from those of the Americans, to grasp the idea of the civic culture, as did Frances Wright, a naturalized citizen, who said, “They are Americans who, having complied with the Constitutional regulations of the United States … wed the principles of America’s Declaration to their hearts and render the duties of American citizens practically in their lives.”⁵³ Thousands of Germans sought to establish a new Germany in the American West, but most of them, and especially their children, became German-Americans who embraced and practiced the civic culture.

Between 1850 and 1900, the Germans, who settled principally on farms in the north central and middle Atlantic states, were never less than a quarter of all foreign-born,⁵⁴ and during the First World War, when the principal enemy of the U.S. was Germany, they were the largest first-generation immigrant group. At the advent of the Second World War, again with Germany the enemy, there were more first- and second-generation Americans of German origin than of any other nationality.⁵⁵ But by then, the vast majority of German-Americans were so assimilated that they were indistinguishable from the descendants of most English immigrants, except perhaps for their names, as in the case of two of the best known battle commanders, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz and General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

A German visitor, Francis J. Grund, who came from Bohemia in the early 1820s, wrote extensively on the process of ethnic-Americanization only three years after Tocqueville had written on democracy in America.⁵⁶ He saw that Germans wanted to retain their ties to the German culture, observing that “there are now villages in the states of Pennsylvania and Ohio, and even in the new state of Illinois, where no other language is spoken” but German.⁵⁷ He noted that the thousands of immigrants coming annually did not disperse and mix with the Anglo-Americans, “but increased the settlements which are already established by their countrymen, or settle in their immediate neighborhood.” The Germans, Grund noted, “hardly feel that they are strangers in the land of their adoption,” because they developed the habit “of remaining together, and settling whole townships or villages,” making “their exile less painful” and enabling them “to transfer a part of their own country to the vast solitudes of the New World.”⁵⁸

The newcomers “find friends, relatives,” Grund said, and establish social lives together based on newspapers, churches, schools, food, and the celebration of holidays. Having a substantial number of educated immigrants among them, most Germans lived within largely self-contained ethnic communities. Grund wrote that the newcomers might find that “their officers of justice will be Germans; their physicians and—if they should be so unfortunate as to need them—their lawyers. It will appear to them as if a portion of the land of their fathers had, by some magic, been transplanted to the New World.”⁵⁹

Grund wrote about the Germans as if they had come from a common background in the Old Country. Actually, they were divided between Protestants and Catholics, spoke different dialects, and had different regional and political loyalties, but after a short time in the U.S. they went through a process of reconfiguration of their ancestral identity. Immigrants of different backgrounds found it was to their advantage to establish a new identity as ethnic-Americans, although the term obviously had not been invented. The process of reconfiguring their ancestral identity was one other groups would go through, too, including various Filipino and Chinese dialect groups, Italian paisani, and Jews from many national backgrounds. For all of them, the reconfiguration of identity became and still is a mechanism for bridging differences and enlarging common interests and habits. It was and is also a way of gaining protection against the surprises and dangers of the new environment, and of making claims within it.

The civic culture, with its principles of separation of church and state and the right of free speech and assembly, facilitated and protected the expression of ancestral cultural values and sensibilities and, in so doing, sanctioned the system of voluntary pluralism by which ethnic groups could mobilize their economic and political interests. In the cities, they formed workers’ associations, district and regional societies, fraternal orders, such as German-speaking lodges of the Masons, and Turnvereine (physical culture societies). German debating societies, amateur theatrical groups, and singing societies appeared in the 1830s and 1840s. Pre-Lenten carnivals, outdoor folk fests, and annual German Day celebrations became common. Summer beer gardens and German taverns became gathering places. By 1860, there was approximately one German tavern for every thirty German households in Milwaukee.⁶⁰ The German churches and their parochial schools reflected the intention of Germans to remain true to their ancestral culture, and provided a basis for the establishment of the central-verein in 1855 as a national union of parish mutual benefit associations.⁶¹

Economic Self-Interest and Patriotism

The French immigrant Crèvecoeur wrote about the relationship of economic opportunity to national patriotism in the early 1770s, saying that newcomers “ought … to love this country much better than that wherein either he or his forefathers were born,” because “here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded on the basis of nature, self interest.… From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample substance. [italics mine]—This is an American.”⁶²

Most published letters from English and German and Scandinavian immigrants echoed that theme, and their individual economic success in the new land understandably promoted their love for it. Perhaps the immigrants who were disappointed in the new land did not write as often as those who were pleased. Probably as many as one-third of all immigrants went back to their homelands. Loneliness and illness were common. So was hostility from others. But many who remained told a story of opportunity and reward, as one English immigrant in Virginia did in 1818, writing, “If a man be industrious and steady, he reaps the fruit of his own labor.”⁶³ From Paterson, New Jersey, came an immigrant’s report, “to us, who have long been half-starved in England, it appears like a continual feast … no fawning, cringing adulation here: the squire and the mechanic converse as familiarly as weavers do in England. We call no man master here.”⁶⁴ An immigrant writing from Pennsylvania to his brothers and his sisters instructed them that “every industrious farmer may become a freeholder of the United States by paying eighty dollars, being the first installment for a quarter of a section of land; and though he has not a shilling left, he may easily gain as much off the land as will pay the other installments, before they become due. The land being his own, there is no limit to his prosperity; no proud tyrant can lord it over him.”⁶⁵ Another man from Philadelphia told his family, “I can by my own labor (mind you) procure all the good that this world affords in eating, drinking or clothing; and not work above ten hours a day. For heaven’s sake, Father, do come and end your days in a country, where the labouring bee enjoys the honey which he collects.”⁶⁶ A young man from a small town in Illinois wrote his mother, “I now sit down in a country, where fortune is within my reach. I suffered a little for want of money, but I now look beyond all that.… Lands such as you never saw, which you may use for three years, and then it wants no manure. I have purchased one hundred and sixty acres on a fine level plain.”⁶⁷

German immigrants wrote home in the same vein. One of them, writing in 1820, said, “No family is so poor that it does not have at least two horses … the farmer lives in a situation which is infinitely superior to that of the German farmer of the same property.”⁶⁸ A woman in Germantown, Pennsylvania, wrote her mother, “I wish you were all as well off as we are now: there is no want of meat and drink here.”⁶⁹ Germans and other immigrants and their children were the beneficiaries of preemption, a well-established custom by 1800, which consisted of establishing a prior claim on public land by living on it and improving it, and by the Pre-emption Act of 1841, which for fifty years made it possible for any alien intending to become a citizen to preempt a 160-acre farm from the public domain, live on it, and work it, and then buy it at a price no higher than that set at public auction without the trouble of having to go to auction.

Other land acts followed, which made many Germans, among others, capitalists quickly. To bring settlers to Oregon and New Mexico, Congress passed the Donation Act in 1850 to give each citizen settler 320 acres (double the usual), 640 acres to married couples. Wanting to build four transcontinental railroads after the Civil War, the government made huge land grants to investors, who advertised in Europe for settlers to live alongside the line; and during the war, in 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act to give 160 acres anywhere in the public domain to any citizen or intended citizen who would farm the land for five years. Nothing gave immigrants a stake in American society so quickly as the ownership of land, and German and Scandinavian immigrant beneficiaries of such largess might have asked, as John Fisher, the English immigrant in Michigan did, “is not this a land in which one may be proud to be received as a citicen? … Is this not a land in which one may be happy to fix one’s destany?”⁷⁰

Francis Grund noted that Germans depended upon Germans for their “principal means of support.”⁷¹ Independently owned farms constituted classic examples of family-capitalist organization, usually selling to other Germans what they could not use for themselves. Germans in the cities tended to extend their economic activities with other Germans in a system of ethnic networking that became common for all major immigrant groups in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was not difficult for Germans to succeed in trade, Grund found, because their countrymen preferred to patronize them over others. Although a relatively high proportion of German immigrants became farmers, a majority found work in cities, where families, cousins, and landsmen from the same town or region could work together in taverns and other food-related business such as baking, butchering, brewing and distilling. Other services were provided within the German community by restaurant keepers, barbers, dairymen, tailors, and a small number of professionals, such as musicians, teachers, and doctors.

As was true for the vast majority of workers in all large immigrant groups, the work was extremely hard, particularly for unskilled laborers in St. Louis or Detroit (the Irish absorbed most unskilled jobs in New York and Boston), and Germans, especially after the Civil War, formed German trade unions and took a large role in the International Working Men’s Association in America, established in 1869 as the branch of the first Communist international. But the vast majority of Germans and their children, like other immigrants, were capitalists par excellence, working, saving, investing as individuals and families, and using ethnic connections to help build a business, provide a service, or supply a need. Even industrial workers, skilled or unskilled, accepted the general American view that economic opportunities would be better for their children.⁷²

Grund emphasized economic opportunity in explaining the obvious affection and loyalty that many Germans quickly gave to the U.S. when he asked rhetorically, “what Unites the citizens of a country more effectually than their common stakes of rights and property?”⁷³ By holding out to all persons (meaning mainly white males) “without distinction of birth of parentage” the hope of acquiring property, the nation bound its newcomers to the polity. But Grund wrote much more about rights than economic opportunity. He was, like Tocqueville, fascinated by the American preoccupation with politics. He also saw the civic culture as pervasive. “Every town and village in America has its peculiar republican government, based on the principle of election, and is, within its own sphere, as free and independent as a sovereign state.… Freedom takes its root at home, in the native village or town of an American…. In every place, in every walk of life, an American finds some rallying point or centre of political attachment.”⁷⁴ “The Americans,” wrote the German immigrant, “present the singular spectacle of a people united together by no other ties than those of excellent laws and equal justice.”⁷⁵

John Quincy Adams wrote to a German baron that newcomers who “cast off the European skin, never to resume it” can expect as citizens “equal rights with those of the natives of the country.”⁷⁶ Whatever Adams meant by casting off the European skin, he said nothing about abandoning the German language or giving up beer-drinking, or modifying the German Christmas (which soon became popular in America), or about converting from Lutheranism to Congregationalism. Voluntary pluralism was not only compatible with patriotism but reinforced it, as in the case of Dr. Jacob De La Motta, who extolled the Constitution and republican principles—in effect, the civic culture—because it guaranteed his freedom to be a Jew.

In the process of ethnic-Americanization, the Germans, as other immigrant groups would also do, not only created ethnic organizations based on American models, such as the volunteer fire militia companies and Masonic lodges, they also joined patriotic fraternal associations that included non-Germans, such as the Improved Order of Redmen, which preached “an ultra-patriotic Americanism connected with the republican iconography of the American Revolution.”⁷⁷ Like other self-consciously Americanist organizations, the Improved Order of Redmen used the name and symbols of Indians, an ugly travesty from an Indian point of view, as a way by which immigrants could quickly claim common ground with other whites who had come before them.

An offshoot of an earlier organization, the order, with about nineteen tribes in Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, and about 1,300 members by 1844–1845, had by midcentury grown to forty-five tribes and 3,200 members. Americanist in rhetoric and symbol, it concentrated mainly on social and fraternal activities, paying benefits to members, widows, and orphans. It had a disproportionate number of German-American leaders, and by June 1850 seven of the sixteen active chapters in Philadelphia were composed of German-Americans, six of which conducted their affairs in German.⁷⁸ Eventually, the German chapters split off to create their own Order of Redmen, a fraternity of German-Americans, because they resented efforts on the part of the Great Council to restrict the use of German and to dampen the enthusiasm of German-Americans for meeting in taverns and accompanying funeral processions with brass band music.⁷⁹

The period 1830–1860 saw the emergence of ethnic-American leaders, persons tied by affection and culture to other immigrants and their children but who also participated broadly in American civic and political life. Victor Greene has identified several such immigrant leaders among the Germans. In Charleston, South Carolina, Johann Andreas Wagener became a real estate agent for Germans seeking property and a notary public to those needing official interpretation.⁸⁰ He took the lead in building the Charleston German Society and participated in starting a German Masonic lodge, a group theater, and a charity association. But he also urged immigrants to be Americans and to utilize their political rights. Celebrating the American idea of self-government, he saw ethnic organizations as a way to make effective American citizens.

Charles Reemelin, a journalist and politician in Cincinnati in the 1840s, fought to preserve the German language and established the first German Society. By 1848 he had been elected three times to the Ohio legislature and served as a representative to the state constitutional convention, arguing always that the preservation of immigrant cultures and languages would make the newcomers more loyal to the nation’s democratic ideals.⁸¹

According to Greene, the most successful German-American leader in the 1840s and 1850s was Francis Arnold Hoffman of northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. Minister, teacher, journalist, banker, and politician and a successful recruiter of German immigrants for the Illinois Central Railroad in later years, he was elected lieutenant governor of Illinois during the Civil War. Like other ethnic-American leaders, he was a vigorous advocate of preserving the old culture while urging his fellow ethnics to practice American citizenship and become loyal to the new government.⁸² In Milwaukee, Dr. Franz Huebshmann, a doctor, organized several German cultural societies and founded Milwaukee’s first German newspaper, aiming to mobilize Germans into an active voting group. He pushed for a liberal suffrage provision for foreigners in the new state constitution and for German-speaking clerks in the post office, and fought successfully against attempts by Anglo-Americans to impose restrictions on the sale of beer. While fighting for the interests of Germans and German-Americans, he preached love for “our new free Fatherland, the country of free elections … freedom, equality and independence.”⁸³

These ethnic-American leaders often began their public careers by defending what others saw as parochial German interests. But very quickly they illustrated Tocqueville’s central principle that participation in American civic life, understandably driven by parochial interests at first, often leads to a wider patriotism. Ethnic politicians must form coalitions to advance the interests of their constituents. They must use the rhetoric and symbols, and generally obey the rules, of the common civic culture.

In the city of Buffalo in the 1830s and 1840s, German Protestants tried to establish a public school in which some instruction would be in German as was permitted in several states.⁸⁴ Having just come to Buffalo in the 1830s, the Germans were fragmented by differences in religion and regional background. The religious difference was particularly important, because German Catholics were less interested in having German taught in the public schools than in gaining support for their parochial schools, although both won the city council’s agreement to publish its proceedings in German. The immediate battle over the creation of a neighborhood school that offered instruction in German was lost, because of the Protestant-Catholic split; but as a result of the campaign two German immigrants became active in the Democratic party and the political influence of German-Americans in Buffalo generally increased.⁸⁵

Francis Grund saw that influence growing elsewhere. Germans were so numerous in Pennsylvania in the early 1830s that he thought none but a German-American would have a chance at being elected governor. In Ohio, Maryland, Illinois, and New York, Germans were voting in increasing numbers. In New York City, he noted regarding the mayoral election that “the German vote becomes a matter of great solicitude with politicians of all ranks and persuasions.”⁸⁶ German newspapers (thirty alone in Pennsylvania) were full of political news. Grund himself wrote a campaign biography of presidential candidate William Henry Harrison.⁸⁷

The Anglo-American nativists of the 1850s did not appreciate attempts by Germans to advance their cultural and linguistic interests in the name of Americanism. The Massachusetts idea was still strong, not only in New England but also among transplanted New Englanders in the Midwest. In his farewell address, George Washington had said the Americans were united by “the same religion, manners, habits and political principles.” But now there were a great many people whose manners and habits, and in some cases religion, were different. Nativists saw those differences as compromising their capacity for Americanization. But under the rules of naturalization and the political system, nothing could stop Germans from claiming an American identity as their own. Phillip Schaff, an immigrant active in the movement to Americanize the German church for more than thirty years in the mid-nineteenth century, wrote in 1855 that “the American’s digestive power is really astonishing. How many thousands and millions of Europeans has his stomach already received! And yet he has only grown firmer and healthier thereby.”⁸⁸ He saw that “over this confused diversity there broods after all a higher unity.”⁸⁹

Abraham Lincoln, with his considerable experience in electoral politics, observed in 1860 that even though the immigrants of his time, the largest group of which were German, could not identify personally with the Revolution and the early days of the republic, they felt “a part of us …” because “when they look through that old Declaration of Independence, they find that those old men say that ‘we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel … that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence,” and, Lincoln concluded, “so they are.”⁹⁰

Lincoln already had become friends with Carl Schurz, a German immigrant who helped to organize the new Republican party in Wisconsin in 1856, only four years after he had arrived. Still not a citizen, Schurz was almost elected lieutenant governor of that state in 1857. He would later serve as a diplomat, a general, as a U.S. senator, and as secretary of the interior. In 1859, he was invited to give a speech in Boston’s cradle of revolution, Faneuil Hall; he spoke as a newly naturalized citizen and in a thick German accent on “True Americanism.”

In the heartland of the Americanist movement and aware of Massachusetts’s preoccupation with Catholic immigration, Schurz praised the founding myth of the U.S. as an asylum for those seeking freedom and opportunity regardless of their nationality or religion. He proudly claimed the heritage of Bunker Hill, Charlestown, Lexington, John Hancock, and Benjamin Franklin as his own, and asserted that the nation had been founded as a “great colony of free humanity which has not old England alone but the world for its mother country.” “True Americanism,” he maintained, is based on belief in “that system of government, which makes the protection of individual rights a matter of common interest.”⁹¹ This idea, “liberty and equal rights common to all,” said Schurz, was the incentive for all immigrants, including Irish Catholics, to love their adopted country. “Around the banner of liberty … all the languages of civilized mankind are spoken, every creed is protected, every right is sacred.”⁹²

The German story of ethnic-Americanization would be repeated in roughly the same manner by all other major ethnic groups who came voluntarily. A minority of immigrants and their children would separate themselves from the mainstream and live in small ethnic enclaves for at least two or three generations. A large majority, after establishing ethnic churches, fraternal and mutual aid associations, and ethnic economic networks, would begin to participate in the wider economic marketplace and in the arenas of American politics, and become strongly patriotic in the process.

By the mid-twentieth century, German-Americans would become the only large ethnic group to disappear as a serious ethnic political force, partly because of anti-German sentiment during the First World War but also because of the passage of time and extensive intermarriage. Yet from the earliest days of the republic through the nineteenth century, no immigrant-ethnic group, including the Irish, had a larger ethnic press.

Between 1862 and 1945, forty-three German-born Americans were elected to Congress; most had worked their way through the civic culture as elected officials in their home towns or states.⁹³ In examining the careers of seven who were explicitly German-American leaders when they ran for office, Willi Paul Adams found that

the “ethnic” politician who … wanted to be an effective servant of his constituency could not limit himself to act as ambassador of the ethnic group that voted him into office. He had to participate fully in the all-American political game, and he was likely to be forced by his hometown newspapers to explain his moves to his constituents, and by doing so he educated them in American ways. By achieving the ultimate, getting a World’s Fair to your home town, as St. Louis Congressman Richard Bartholdt did in 1904, you scored a point for your group by doing something for the whole community.⁹⁴

Politicians like Bartholdt were quintessential examples of ethnic-Americanization. Representing German-American sensibilities and interests to a wider audience, they expressed and taught the principles of the civic culture to their own constituents. It was Bartholdt who persuaded Congress to appropriate money to erect a statue of General von Steuben, a hero of the Revolution, across from the White House next to those of Lafayette and Rochambeau so that future generations would be “reminded of what the men of German blood had contributed to the cause of American independence.”⁹⁵ The example was repeated on a lesser scale in the naming of streets, squares, and smaller monuments in cities and towns throughout the country after Poles, Jews, Italians, Irish, Swedes, Norwegians, African-Americans, and now Hispanics and East Asians to symbolize the contribution of the diversity of Americans in defending American freedom in successive wars.

The Civil Religion Sanctifies the Civic Culture

By saying that every right is “sacred,” Carl Schurz had adopted the vocabulary of the civic culture’s own religion. Twenty-five years earlier, Francis Grund had written that “their political doctrines have become the religion and the confession of the people … like the truths of Christianity, they have their apostles and their martyrs.”⁹⁶ Americans transmit their political principles as “their faith to their children,” and “every newcomer is initiated into its creed, and soon becomes a convert to it; for if he should not, they would shun him as given to idolatry.”⁹⁷ Liberty, said Grund, was “not only the bond of union,” but also “the confession, the religion, the life of Americans.”⁹⁸

The religion of republicanism was something quite different from sectarian religions. While other nations felt chosen or blessed by God or gods, Americans were evolving what twentieth-century scholars would call a “civil religion,”⁹⁹ in which they felt a special mission to live up to the ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence and attributed to the authority of God (“they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights …”). Jews of old had covenanted to follow the laws of Yahweh. The Americans, in accepting their blessings, took on other obligations. Swearing allegiance to the Constitution, paying homage to the almost sainted Washington and to the Declaration of Independence, they, by implication, promised to fulfill the founding myth of the nation as a divinely inspired asylum for those who sought liberty and opportunity.

The Puritans of early colonial New England preached that they had been chosen to effectuate a divine plan for the salvation of souls. The apostles and prophets of the new republic preached that it had been chosen to save refugees and immigrants from tyranny and want. No one before had described their nation, as Washington did, as “an Asylum … to the oppressed and needy of the Earth.”¹⁰⁰ Jefferson asked, “Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on the globe?” when arguing for a short period of residency for aliens to become eligible for citizenship.¹⁰¹ Not only was “the bosom of America,” in Washington’s maternal phrase, “open to receive … the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions,” but they were “welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges.”¹⁰²

James Otis wrote, “There can be no prescription old enough to supersede the law of Nature and the grant of God Almighty, who has given to all men a national right to be free.”¹⁰³ The spread of liberty to all, justified as a natural, God-given right, became the American national mission. That sense of mission pushed Americans toward a powerful emotional and spiritual national patriotism. Franklin called the Revolution a “glorious task assigned to us by Providence,” and Adams considered the settlement of the American colonies “as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”¹⁰⁴ Washington wrote to the Jewish congregations of Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, and Richmond that “The power and goodness of the Almighty were strongly manifested in the events of our late glorious revolution. —and his kind interposition in our behalf has been no less visible in the establishment of our present equal government.”¹⁰⁵ Jefferson wrote to a friend in 1787 during deliberations on the new Constitution, “Our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master. Could the contrary of this be proved, I should conclude, either that there is no God, or that he is a malevolent being.”¹⁰⁶

Not just the politicians but also ministers and educators believed that the American experiment in government was providential. Samuel Cooper declared in 1790, upon the inauguration of the new Massachusetts Constitution, that America was a new Israel, designed as “a theater for the display of some of the most astounding dispensations of His Providence.” The new constitution was a thing of beauty and godliness, maintained Cooper, because the power of the government was so intricately balanced as to protect liberty. The president of Yale College, Ezra Stiles, preached before the General Assembly of Connecticut in 1783, singing hosannahs to the new Zion: “this will be a great, a very great nation … when the Lord should have made his American Israel high above all nations which He has made, in numbers, and in praise, and in name, and in honor!”¹⁰⁷ Two generations later, Phillips Brooks said, “I do not know how a man can be an American and not get something with regard to God’s purpose as to this great land.”¹⁰⁸

The American experiment in representative self-government was blessed, but the congregation—the members of the polity—were covenanted as partners of God in fulfilling the promise of the blessing. The civic culture, with its emphasis on individual choice and voluntary pluralism, made it possible for sectarian religious groups to go unmolested even if they did not participate in the republic. Germans provided some of the best examples of such groups, such as the Old Order Amish, who chose not to vote or run for office or even participate in the wider economic marketplace. They governed themselves without becoming governors of the republic. But the vast majority of immigrants and their children embraced the vocabulary, liturgy, and icons of the civil religion as they participated increasingly in the civic culture, and they did it while holding on to their ancestral sectarian religions.

In the early 1770s, Crèvecoeur observed that Americans were much more religious than Europeans. But for the vast majority of immigrants and their descendants, sectarian religion was put in the service of the civic culture. By the early decades of the republic, some Jewish congregations had already altered their liturgy to pray in their Sabbath service for the president and the people of the United States, the “citizens of one common country.”¹⁰⁹ In Worcester, Massachusetts, in the 1890s, Swedes mingled their hymns and “The Star-Spangled Banner” in celebrating Independence Day. In 1896, a divinity student spoke on the relationship of the American Revolution to Christ’s message of liberty to the world.¹¹⁰ The “public religion,” as Franklin called it, promoted a general disposition to be religious as a sign that one was a good American, a believer in the providential mission of the American nation. This new patriotic religion, the “religion of democracy,” as Lord Bryce called it in the late nineteenth century,¹¹¹ did not replace sectarian religions but, paradoxically, encouraged sectarian religious affiliation while uniting sectarians in feelings of national patriotism which helped to blur the edges of doctrinal differences.

Sectarian religions did not hold the passion of their adherents as much as they did in Europe, but, as Grund observed, the promotion of religion seemed “essential to the Constitution” of Americans. “Religion presides over their councils, aids in the execution of the laws, and adds to the dignity of the judges.”¹¹² Here was the most amazing paradox of all. Crèvecoeur observed that religious freedom led to a kind of religious “indifferentism.”¹¹³ The modern word would be “toleration,” as exemplified by Jefferson’s remarks during the debate over the proposal to disestablish the Anglican Church in Virginia. “It does me no injury,” he said, “for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”¹¹⁴

The separation of state and church was strengthened in the ensuing years: disestablishment in Virginia (1788); the proclamation of religious freedom in the Northwest Ordinance as policy for the territories and new states (1787); the passage of the Constitution with a sixth article barring a religious test for holding public office (1789) and a First Amendment prohibiting Congress from making any law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise (1791).

Toleration meant that it was hard for foreign visitors to tell Presbyterians and Congregationalists apart, and even Baptists and Presbyterians seemed to converge in doctrinal and organizational matters, but it did not mean toleration for the village atheist. Grund, who wrote that it was “with the solemnities of religion that the Declaration of Independence is yet annually read to the people from the pulpit,” and that “Americans look upon religion as a promoter of civil and political liberty,” also noted that Americans “should belong to some persuasion or other, lest his fellow-citizens should consider him an outcast from society.”¹¹⁵ Almost 125 years later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a descendant of a sectarian German Pietist family, said Americans should belong to some religious group but that it did not matter which one.

In accepting the Pennsylvania idea that European immigrants could become members of the polity on a basis of equal rights with native-born citizens regardless of the country they came from or the religion they believed in, Americans laid the basis for the civic culture that emerged in the early decades of the Republic: Article VI of the Constitution (prohibition of a religious test for holding any office or public trust); the First Amendment (separation of church and state, freedom of religion, freedom of speech); and later the Fourteenth Amendment (equal protection of the laws). But not all of the Massachusetts idea had been lost. The view that entry into political membership should be based on one’s religious affiliation had been defeated, but it would surface repeatedly in opposition to Irish Catholic immigration and naturalization. The view of the Puritans that the settlement of the new land was providential and that the settlers had entered into a covenant with God to create a new life for men and women led to the sanctification of the civic culture by the civil religion. Massachusetts could claim a large share in the origins of the civil religion, including the national motto (“In God We Trust”); the references to divine guidance and inspiration in major presidential speeches; the prayers that open every session of Congress; the references to God in the Pledge of Allegiance and in patriotic songs (“My Country ’Tis of Thee,” “America the Beautiful,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and “God Bless America”). The civic culture was born in Pennsylvania; the civil religion had its origins in theocratic Massachusetts.

By 1845, membership in the civic culture was still limited to white persons, a large majority of whom were Protestants. In the South, about 40 percent of the population was enslaved. Slavery was a massive contradiction to the ideals, principles, and institutions of the civic culture. But slave revolts were put down ruthlessly. Racism—belief in the inherent inferiority of persons of color—enabled most whites to ignore or even rationalize the contradiction. Some faced it and feared its consequences. Tocqueville saw conflict between whites and blacks in the South as inevitable. He called it a “danger” which “perpetually haunts the imagination of Americans, like a painful dream.”¹¹⁶ Grund saw the situation of free blacks in the North as worse than that of enslaved blacks. Whites, he predicted, would drive them to the meanest employment and their eventual ruin.¹¹⁷ The sympathy of Tocqueville and Grund for blacks was distant, even cold, for they were enamored with another story, that of white Americans’ democracy.