UBLISHED QUART the STATE HIST0RICA1 OCIETY of WISCONSIN ITTI Mt • • - ^I- H

UBLISHED QUART THE STATE HIST0RICA1 OCIETY OF WISCONSIN ITTI mt • • - ^i- H THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN The STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN is a state-aided corporation whose function is the cultiva- tion and encouragement of the historical interests of the State. To this end it invites your cooperation; membership is open to all, whether residents of Wisconsin or elsewhere. The dues of annual members are two dollars, payable in advance; of life members, twenty dollars, payable once only. Subject to certain exceptions, members receive the publications of the Society, the cost of producing which far exceeds the membership fee. This is rendered possible by reason of the aid accorded the Society by the State. Of the work and ideals of the Society this magazine affords, it is believed, a fair example. With limited means, much has already been accomplished; with ampler funds more might be achieved. So far as is known, not a penny entrusted to the Society has ever been lost or misapplied. Property may be willed to the Society in entire confidence that any trust it assumes will be scrupulously executed. frrr Dili inc The WISCONSIN MAGAZINE OF HISTORY is published quarterly by the Society, at 450 Abnaip Street, Menasha, Wisconsin, in September, December, March, and June, and is distributed to its members and exchanges; others who so desire may receive it for the annual subscription of two dollars, payable in advance; single numbers may be had for fifty cents. All correspondence concerning the magazine should be addressed to the office of the State Historical Society, Madison, Wis. Entered M iecond-class matter, December 17, 1917, at the post office at Menasha, Wisconsin, uncier the act of March 3, 1879. alif ffinllrnmtr Jlrcaa GEORGE BANTA PUBLISHING COMPANY MENASHA, WISCONSIN CARL SCHURZ IN 1879 VOL. VII, NO. 1 SEPT. 1923 THE WISCONSIN MAGAZINE OF HISTORY PUBLICATIONS OF THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCON- SIN. JOSEPH SCHAFER, Superintendent and Editor CONTENTS THE YANKEE AND THE TEUTON IN JWISCONSIN .Joseph Schafer 3 THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN SOON AFTER THE CIYIL WAR Mrs. W. F. Allen 20 THE SCHOONER THAT SUNK THE LADY ELGIN Frances M. Stover 30 FRAGMENT OF AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Jerome A. Watroiis 41 THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY AND GENEALOGICAL RE- SEARCH Arthur Adams 57 THE TRAGEDY OF RICHLAND CITY ; James McManus 63 BEGINNINGS OF THE WATERTOWN SCHOOL SYSTEM William F. Whyte 81 DOCUMENTS: A Circuit Rider in the Old Northwest: Letters of the Reverend John H. Ragatz 93 EDITORIAL COMMENT: The Department of War History; The Sons of the American Revolution and School Histories; The (Whitman Legend Again 103 COMMUNICATIONS : A Wisconsin Educator 108 THE SOCIETY AND THE STATE Ill BOOK REVIEWS 121 The Society as a body is not responsible for statements or opinions advanced in the following pages by contributors COPYRIGHT, 1923,, BY THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN" Paid for out of the George B. Burrows Fund Income THE YANKEE AND THE TEUTON.IN WISCONSIN JOSEPH S CHAFER IV SOME SOCIAL TRAITS OF TEUTONS The year 1832, celebrated in Wisconsin history as the time when the lead miners and other pioneers destroyed the power of the Rock River Indians, was remembered by later- coming German immigrants for a very different reason. It was toward the end of March in that year, the place Trier (Treves), the ancient capital of the western "Csesars," a city which is still rich in the massive ruins of its Roman foretime. As the story goes, the boys of one form in the old Gymnasium were being entertained at the house of a professor, where, boy-like, they were playing indoor games accompanied with much laughter and general hilarity. Suddenly one of their younger classmates rushed breathless into the room, exclaim- ing: "Goethe is dead!"1 During the balance of the evening, the less serious of the youngsters having returned to their interrupted play, this boy engaged with his instructors in eager discussion of Goethe's life and writings. The youth in question was Karl Marx, whose later history exhibits a wide divergence from the exclusively literary career prophesied by his boyhood scholastic interests. The classmate who is authority for this incident continued in Marx's company the Gymnasium studies; he then performed his one year minimum of military service, and having secured some busi- ness experience sailed away as an immigrant to the new world, settling on a Wisconsin farm. In the course of a long life he often reverted to the story of Goethe, whose works, as well as those of Schiller and Lessing, made a part of his home library. These great names never failed to kindle his pride in the 1 The death of Goethe occurred on the twenty-second of March. The news must have taken several days in travel. 4 . Joseph Schafer intellectual achievements of the German people, whose governments at the time of his emigration in 1841 seemed to him a compound of despotism and inefficiency.2 Doubtless there were Germans of the immigration to Wis- consin who knew not Goethe, or if in a hazy way they did know who he was, had no intellectual right to judge his merits. But the more intelligent were sure to possess some knowledge of the writings of their greatest poet and of lesser men who still were great in the world's estimation. Hence it was that Germans who at that period went to the new world, while acknowledging by their flight the political, economic, and social obstacles to a successful life in Prussia, Bavaria, Baden, Westphalia, or Luxemburg, were always able to maintain a self-respecting attitude when confronted with the pretensions of those Americans who were unsympathetic, jingoistic, or boastful. German immigrants might grant much to superior cleverness, to the stupendous achievements of a liberty loving race, domiciled in a peaceful continent and dowered with free lands and boundless opportunity; but they remembered that William Tell and Faust and The Laocoon were written by Germans. Though many immigrants were far from being literary, they doubtless possessed, on the average, a knowledge of German masterpieces fully equivalent to the knowledge which Americans possessed of the English Classics. For education was looking up, and while most of the immigrants from German states, like those from other European countries, were of the peasant class, which was usually the most backward, still by 1840 nearly all were sure to have enjoyed some systematic schooling. At an earlier period this might have been otherwise. The condition of limited serfdom, re- moved but a generation earlier, operated powerfully to neu- tralize such benevolent plans for universal instruction as kings 2 Prussians were apt to console themselves for the pusillanimity of King Frederick William III by harking back to the really strong if ruthless monarchy of Frederick the Great, familiarly spoken of as Der Alte Fritz. Yankee and Teuton 5 and ministers proclaimed. For the peasants were directly subordinate to the local lords, who often felt "that an ignor- ant labor supply was less likely to seek to better its condition by demands upon them. ."3 The great national reform movement which came to fruition after the close of the Napo- leonic wars swept away many of the disabilities of the com- mon people, and developed in Prussia and other states a system of universal education as the surest means of national upbuilding. The excellencies of the Prussian school system prior to 1840 became the theme of flattering reports on the part of educators in many lands. The celebrated philosopher Victor Cousin made it the basis for his plan of educational reform in France; the Scotch, English, and Irish discussed it; Horace Mann proclaimed it to the school authorities of Massachu- setts, and Calvin E. Stowe recommended it to the legislature of Ohio. That system may not have possessed all of the virtues which the ordinances quoted by Cousin imply.4 Yet it had the one excellence to which educationally all others are subsidiary—a well-trained teaching force. Indeed, if there is anything which seems miraculous in the swift and thorough- going transformation of school conditions in Prussia during the first forty years of the nineteenth century, it is explained by the provision which the state made for normal schools and the supply, through their agency, of teachers enough to man all the schools. "In the lowest school in the smallest and ob- scurest village," says Horace Mann, "or for the poorest class in overcrowded cities; in the schools connected with pauper establishments, with houses of correction or with prisons—in all these there was a teacher of mature age, of simple, un- affected and decorous manners." Mann also made it clear that every such teacher was possessed of adequate scholarship 3 Guy Stanton Ford, 8Vefoi and the Era of Reform in Prussia, 1807-1815 (Princeton, N. J., 1922), 185. 4 Victor Cousin, Report on the State of Public Instruction in Prussia. Trans- lated by Sarah Austin. London, 1834. 6 Joseph Schafer and special training for the work of the schoolroom.5 Such a statement could not be made at that time about Massachu- setts, where popular education was already two hundred years old, nor could it be made with equal confidence of other German countries, though several of these approximated the Prussian standard and most of them were earnestly promot- ing education along the same lines and by the use of similar means. We must therefore regard the generation of the German exodus from which [Wisconsin profited so largely in the later 1840's and the 1850's, as almost universally literate and usually well grounded in the rudiments of an education.

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