While Fritz Rasmussen closed out 1863 thinking about the draft, that same year had begun with discussions about issues of race. In its first editorial of 1863, Hemlandet celebrated “a new epoch” in “this country’s history” as slavery had been abolished, the rebellion’s backbone broken, and freedom reestablished.Footnote 1 Still, Hemlandet’s articles demonstrated continued widespread feelings of vengeance toward Dakota bands, and the lead-up to emancipation revealed a lack of support for racial equality within the Scandinavian-American community.Footnote 2
Throughout 1862, expressions of racial superiority occurred regularly even among professed anti-slavery officers. On January 15, 1862, Ferdinand Winslöw, chief quartermaster for the Army of the Southwest, described his “elegant free darkie” servant, Homer Grimes, as a “nigger” ready “for any command,” and a few months later Colonel Hans Heg noted his young Black servant working hard while acting as “a good Nigger.”Footnote 3 Additionally, in an undated letter to his Danish-born father, seemingly composed in 1862, seventeen-year-old Charles Adolphus Lund wrote from Racine, Wisconsin: “I do not believe in letting the Negro free, not by a good deal.”Footnote 4
Yet military developments prompted renewed assessment of race relations, not least within the Lincoln administration, and the Scandinavian-American press followed events closely. As the main Union Army frantically chased Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia into Maryland during the first half of September 1862, the Scandinavian-American press, drawing on east coast newspapers, published weekly situation reports.Footnote 5 In a by-now well-known turn of events, a Union corporal’s discovery of Lee’s Special Order 191, detailing the Confederate Army’s movements, gave the government troops an unprecedented advantage, and the subsequent costly battle around Antietam Creek on September 17 forced the invaders back.Footnote 6 The victory gave President Lincoln a successful military pretext for issuing the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, which Emigranten (notably commenting on the proclamation’s military instead of moral impact) described as a “mighty step forward in suppressing the rebellion.”Footnote 7 Lincoln’s proclamation proposed to compensate states in the Union that set “immediate or gradual” abolition in motion but, as we have seen, also kept the option of colonization, with freedpeople’s consent, open.Footnote 8 Thus, the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation implicitly reinforced a view of white citizenship that was also demonstrated in Secretary Seward’s Homestead Act promotion in Europe and further underlined by his September 30 attempt to open colonization negotiations with Great Britain, France, Holland, and Denmark.Footnote 9
Ferdinand Winslöw (bottom right) wrote more than 100 letters to his wife, Wilhemina, during the Civil War, as did Hans Heg to his wife, Gunild, and both at times expressed a sense of white racial superiority.
Yet, even with its underlying premise of a continued white man’s republic, the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was controversial. From 1862 and forward, Democrats, according to Eric Foner, raised fears that “Emancipation would produce ‘scenes of lust and rapine’ in the South and unleash ‘a swarthy inundation of negro laborers and paupers’ on the North.”Footnote 10 With a message amplified through sympathetic editors, the Democratic Party hammered at the lack of military success, the ineffective leadership, the poor economy, and the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation’s impotence ahead of the 1862 midterms. As Green Bay Advocate editor Charles D. Robinson opined on October 2, 1862, you had to “catch your rabbit” before you could cook it, and the proclamation had no effect until “the States in rebellion” were once again brought “under the jurisdiction of the constitution.”Footnote 11
During this time of economic and military anxiety, Democratic viewpoints, as we have seen, appealed to some Scandinavian-born immigrants in New Denmark, and even among otherwise solid Republican supporters in the Scandinavian community, the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation received a lukewarm reception. Swedish-born Frans O. Danielson, serving in the 29th Iowa, wrote to his siblings that he was glad to hear that the Republican Party had a lot of support back in New Sweden before commenting on the soldiers’ reaction to Lincoln’s proclamation: “There are some bitterly opposed to it but they will have to grin and bear it,” Danielson wrote.Footnote 12 Perhaps more revealing, Danielson, who had observed runaway slaves up close as part of the Army of the Southwest in Helena, Arkansas, added: “Let me know if you have got Niggers up in Iowa yet, and what you think of freeing them and sending them North. We have got thousands of the buggers down here. For my part I don’t think much of them.”Footnote 13
In expressing views of Black people’s inferior status, however, Scandinavian immigrants were far from alone.Footnote 14 Responding to an equipment request from the Army of the Southwest, Major-General Henry W. Halleck suggested that the army’s commander, Samuel R. Curtis, and his “antislavery politics” were part of a larger problem, as Congress was “so busy discussing the eternal nigger question” that they failed to make the necessary appropriations.Footnote 15 Moreover, as Curtis’ army advanced toward Helena in the spring and summer of 1862, enslaved people by the thousands “abandoned their masters” and joined the march, which foreshadowed the challenges and criticism of emancipation along the banks of the Mississippi River.Footnote 16 Curtis, who was closely aligned with German-born anti-slavery radicals in his ranks and personally close with Ferdinand Winslöw, liberally issued free papers and allowed former slaves to sell cotton from nearby plantations, which opened him up to censure from more conservative officers.Footnote 17
When Curtis was transferred for a higher command in August 1862, his division commander Frederick Steele, an opponent of emancipation, took command at Helena and detailed his view of the Army of the Southwest’s condition in a letter to President Lincoln dated February 15, 1863:
[In August 1862] our camps and the town of Helena were overrun with fugitive slaves of both sexes, from infancy up to old age. Vice, immorality and distress, the usual accompaniments of vagrancy and destitution followed. The women were prostituted to a fearful extent, I believe by officers as well as by men, the feeble died in the streets in great numbers, from neglect and want. Disease and the elements of disorganization were introduced into my command by these miserable creatures.Footnote 18
Thus, Steele placed blame for the army’s poor condition on fugitives, but – in shaping conditions on the ground – the Union Army’s white officers bore the primary responsibility. At Helena, some Union officers even took advantage of the situation to advance their personal economic interests by confiscating cotton from nearby plantations. One such officer, among several, was Ferdinand Winslöw. While attempting to control chaotic conditions around Helena, the Danish-born quartermaster sold horses, demanded a stake in a local business, and in all likelihood profited privately from cotton sales that were meant by Curtis to help support the numerous refugees living under desperate conditions.Footnote 19 In other words, Winslöw, by taking advantage of his position as chief quartermaster, in several instances chose pecuniary gain at the expense of his professed abolitionist values of “equality and freedom.”Footnote 20
Major-General Samuel Curtis and Staff photographed in St. Louis in late 1861 or early 1862. Winslöw is seated to the far left.
The soldiers on the ground understood the situation clearly. Danish-born Anders M. Koppel wrote about the soldiers’ “disgust” with the “cotton expeditions” in the summer of 1862.Footnote 21 Additionally, Calvin P. Alling, who like Koppel served in the 11th Wisconsin, pointed out Colonel Charles Hovey of the 33rd Illinois Infantry Regiment as one of the central actors engaged in illegal speculation around Helena and wrote that “some of the regiments engaged in stealing and smuggling cotton, in the name of the Government,” but shipped it north to St. Louis and sold it “as their own.”Footnote 22
The cotton speculation going on around Helena in 1862 – and the private gain that followed – led to a “Court of Inquiry” in 1863 that implicated several high-ranking Union officers such as General Curtis (and his quartermaster Winslöw) in an attempt to ascertain, among other things, whether “officers in the service have been engaged, or directly or indirectly participated in traffic in Cotton or other produce on the Mississippi River.”Footnote 23 The court case was mostly presented to the public as a problem of officers overstepping their responsibilities as public servants in relation to the government, but that same government was by 1862 also responsible for providing for thousands of runaways.Footnote 24 The human cost of Union officers’ private profit, however, was only cursorily considered by the court and the press, though the lack of resources in and around Helena, in part due to the cotton traffic, was underscored in a letter – loaded with assumptions about Black people’s capacity for citizenship – written by Acting Assistant Quartermaster B. O. Carr and sent to Winslöw on July 24, 1862:Footnote 25
Capt., There is a perfect “cloud” of negroes being thrown upon me for Sustenance and Support, out of some 50 for whom I draw rations this morning but twelve were working stock, all the rest being women and children. What am I to do with them? If this taking them in and feeding them is to be the order of the day, would it not be well to have some competent man employed to look after them and keep their time; draw their rations; look after their Sanitary Condition. Etc. Etc? As it is, although it is hard to believe that such things can be, Soldiers & Teamsters (white) are according to common reports indulging in intimacy with them which can only be accounted for by the doctrine of Total Deprativity.Footnote 26
Steele and Carr’s description of Black fugitives revealed the unequal power relationships between white soldiers and future freedpeople, as well as an ideology of white superiority that was also mirrored by civilians in the Midwest. In Leslie A. Schwalm’s words:
Among many midwesterners, emancipating and aiding former slaves who intended to stay in the South were viewed as a humanitarian issue. But when former slaves – by their own volition or with the help of others – made their way north, emancipation became an increasingly critical and vigorously debated matter of public policy. Revealing a deep-seated belief in the benefits and necessity of a racially stratified society, many whites assumed that any black gains in the region would diminish their own status and citizenship. For those midwesterners whose understanding of white supremacy had been premised on their right and ability to exclude first Native Americans and then African Americans from the region, the physical mobility of former slaves suggested an undesirable change in racial boundaries and practices in a postslavery nation.Footnote 27
Concerns of freedpeople’s mobility were also voiced in Hemlandet on October 22, 1862. The paper warned that “a certain party” was trying to stir up the Irish as well as the working class by inciting fear of wage-based competition if “masses” of freedpeople should migrate to the North.Footnote 28 Hemlandet, however, reassured its readership that, while “black migration lowers the wages for white labor,” there was no reason to despair:Footnote 29 “The South is the black race’s natural home, the negro thrives the most in the tropical regions.”Footnote 30
News of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation had likely reached civilian Scandinavian-born immigrants a month earlier, when Hemlandet on September 24 announced it as “a fatal blow to the rebellion” and Emigranten a few days later noted that the president would declare “all slaves free” in the states where the rebellion was maintained by the end of the year.Footnote 31 Still, the Scandinavian-American press spent little subsequent editorial energy on emancipation and instead devoted itself mostly to weekly description of military affairs, coverage of the US–Dakota War in Minnesota, and updates on the draft.Footnote 32
A sense of Scandinavian immigrants’ position on emancipation could, however, be gleaned from later published letters and editorials. Henrik (Henry) Syvertsen, a Norwegian immigrant with a degree from the Royal Frederick University in present-day Oslo, was curiously silent on the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation when he penned a letter, focused on military matters, to Emigranten on October 18, 1862, from Kentucky; but later in the war he published a letter in the Norwegian-language Fædrelandet (the Fatherland) about the teachings of phrenology and his belief that “a negro [is] unfit for higher education.”Footnote 33
In his letter, dated May 30, 1864, Syvertsen reinforced his view of racial superiority, as he sought to allay his Scandinavian-American readers’ fear over amalgamation by stating: “I doubt, that a time should come when an educated, moral woman would marry a Negro. The loathsome stench alone that comes off a Negro in the summertime would be an insurmountable obstacle.”Footnote 34 Leading up to the 1864 presidential election, Syvertsen also penned a long letter for Fædrelandet with a sense of sensation and ironic distance about local residents’ reaction to the newly deployed Black provost guards: “Just imagine, that Negroes, whom these aristocratic Lexingtonians always have treated and considered animals, that these now should guard them, that was over the top.”Footnote 35
Fædrelandet, published out of La Crosse, Wisconsin, launched its first edition on January 14, 1864 and claimed to be an unabashedly Union paper, but not because of President Abraham Lincoln, nor because of “Negro emancipation”; rather, it was a Union paper because the pure American republic, created “on liberty and equality,” was a truly “glorious institution in accordance with human and divine law.”Footnote 36
Though the Union war effort by 1864 was intimately tied to liberty through abolition, the connection was less pronounced in Fædrelandet’s coverage.Footnote 37 The paper’s distinction between “Negro emancipation” on the one hand and American foundational values of “Liberty and Equality” on the other indicated that, despite freedpeople’s crucial contributions to the United States military, support for their future economic and political rights in American society could not be taken for granted among opinion leaders in the Scandinavian-American community.Footnote 38
In an April 7, 1865, editorial with distinct echoes of the racial stereotypes put forth by Hemlandet in 1862, Emigranten’s editor Carl Fredrik Solberg penned an editorial asking “what will be done with these freedmen.”Footnote 39 Solberg painted a scenario where freedpeople could “come up here and flood our Northern states” and change the cities’ appearances with “black or yellow skin, their wooly head, and white teeth.” Even more ominously, the editor asked: “Would they not, with government authority, come and acquire space and become our neighbors and (oof!) our in-laws?”Footnote 40 Emigranten continued: “Would not these poor, helpless, poor, wretched, perplexed colored people,” lacking legal rights, come North and cause difficulties as a “new and priviledged class of beggars and paupers?”Footnote 41 The answer, Emigraten assured its readership, was comforting:
The negro does not thrive outside the South. We even have an intelligent Negro’s own word that many blacks from the North will venture South as soon as any colored there can have his full freedom and his weightiest argument was that “the black people is not regarded at all” here in the North.Footnote 42
The racial ideology expressed in the Scandinavian-American public and private spheres regarding emancipation would continue to inform perceptions for years. The conclusion drawn, almost universally, was that slavery was a stain on American democracy and the institution’s demise consequently a blessing, but freedom did not equal a broad embrace of liberty and equality for nonwhites. Moreover, emancipation debates often played a marginal role on the homefront in midwestern communities even as draft legislation sent an ever-increasing proportion of Scandinavian-born men South. Probably hundreds, if not thousands, of Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes witnessed Black soldiers’ war service up close as part of the armed forces where they were confronted directly with the question of freedpeople’s rights. Those left behind, however, mainly discussed the duties of citizenship.
As we have seen, liberty in the eyes of Scandinavian immigrants often meant a liberal government, freedom of religion, and equality in societal matters. The Lincoln administration’s conscription policy was therefore regularly perceived as undermining the ideal of a limited government protecting individual rights. Yet the paradox between love of liberty and reluctance to defend it was almost completely absent in discussions in the Scandinavian-American public and private spheres by 1864.
A week before Fædrelandet’s first edition, on January 7, 1864, Fritz Rasmussen described correspondence with the local provost marshal about conscription. Rasmussen’s inquiry was prompted by conversations with several inhabitants of New Denmark about avoiding the draft – specifically Rasmussen’s ability to cheaply make out papers vouching for residents who had not declared their intent to naturalize.Footnote 43 Little more than a month later, on February 15, 1864, Rasmussen detailed a special meeting by New Denmark’s residents at the local schoolhouse with the sole purpose “of voting a tax upon the town, to procure Volunteers, so as to avoid the Draft, so much the dread of the community.”Footnote 44 Usually local meetings ran long due to disagreement, but this was different. “I must say that I have, as yet, not attended any kind of meeting, for whatever purpose, which have proved so unanimous to the subject matter for consideration as this one,” Rasmussen wrote:Footnote 45
Very little Descention [dissent] or opposition brought forward, as those, wishing as to do, plainly felt that internal rebuke, of the thought to do so by learning and seeing the mind of the gathering. It was finally resolved, to have the town authorities procure Volunteers at what price they could get them, though not exceeding $150.00 each; and the whole sum to be emploied [sic], not to exceed $1500.00.Footnote 46
On February 24, 1864, Rasmussen again dealt with draft-related issues, as his father-in-law came over and wanted his help with paperwork related to draft exemption.Footnote 47 Additionally, in March the Brown County–based vice-consul for Sweden and Norway, Otto Tank, published several “Consular Announcements” in the Scandinavian-American newspapers dealing concretely with the issue of citizenship.Footnote 48 Swedish or Norwegian subjects could obtain a consular certificate to ensure exemption from military service, if they paid $2; had sworn testimony certifying their “place of birth,” “age,” “arrival in the United States,” and “places lived”; and confirmed “not having voted nor declared their intent to become citizen of the United States.”Footnote 49 The related issues of citizenship, duty, and conscription only took on increased importance given the mounting Union losses in eastern and western theaters during the spring and early summer of 1864 and revealed a continued chasm between ethnic elite rhetoric and the sentiment in Scandinavian communities – though also a realization on the part of Scandinavian editors that the draft issue was a prime concern among their readers.Footnote 50
On November 16, 1863, Emigranten had warned its readership that “the conditions for exemption” were “very strict,” but it nevertheless provided a very detailed description of what conditions could lead to draft exemption.Footnote 51 Emigranten’s message had been clear: it was more the exception than the rule to get out of military service because of one’s physical condition.Footnote 52 A week later, however, a reader emphasized that there was also an important legal component to military exemption. On November 23, 1863, a pointed critique aimed at the Norwegian consul in Wisconsin appeared in the pages of Emigranten:
There are a number of Norwegians, among the most recent conscripted or drafted men, whose claim to exemption from the draft rests on “no citizenship,” or in other words, who never have voted in municipal or national elections and never having declared intention to become citizen of the United States.
These Norwegians surely fell under the protection of the Norwegian consul, the correspondent B. W. Suckow, argued, and he chastised the allegedly inexperienced representative for consulting American authorities before issuing “protection-documents.” As an example of the consul’s incompetence, Suckow recounted the story of a twenty-four-year-old Norwegian immigrant who sought “protection papers against the draft.”Footnote 53 The consul, however, had stated that the immigrant’s father, who had declared his intention to become a citizen before the son reached legal age, made the son eligible for military service as well. The consul’s interpretation of draft legislation was claimed by the writer to be fallible, as only the father’s full-fledged citizenship could have led to the son being draft-eligible. In the wake of the March 3, 1863, Enrollment Act, which specifically tied draft eligibility to “intention,” the claim seemed tenuous, however.Footnote 54
Absent from the discussion in Emigranten was the question of whether a seemingly healthy, twenty-four-year-old Norwegian-born man, who had lived in the United States for a number of years, was actually duty-bound to serve in the military. The American government’s perspective was by 1863 clear: “All able-bodied male citizens” between twenty and forty-five years of age “ought willingly to contribute” to ensure the “maintenance of the Constitution and Union, and the consequent preservation of free government,” but Suckow’s letter indicated a slight shift in the Scandinavian public sphere.Footnote 55
By publishing Suckow’s letter, Emigranten now included voices that ran counter to the discourse of duty – so prevalent in the Scandinavian ethnic elite’s push for volunteer recruitment in 1861 and 1862 – and thereby demonstrated an openness to discussing military exemption in an era marked by conscription.Footnote 56 By late 1863 it had seemingly become more acceptable within their own communities for Scandinavian immigrants to seek exemption from military service, and Old World officials were increasingly expected to help obtain it.
Yet elite rhetoric surrounding the duties of citizenship persisted. As an example, John A. Johnson, who was one of the principal organizers behind the 15th Wisconsin regiment in 1861, addressed the question of duty and sacrifice in a Fourth of July address aimed at an English-speaking audience in 1864.
The speech initially echoed Lincoln’s at Gettysburg in November 1863 and then turned to the importance of territorial growth, with an implicit nod to the threshold principle, before ending with a discussion of duty. “Eighty-eight years ago today,” Johnson noted, “the immortal Continental Congress” made clear to the world that “all men were created free and equal.”Footnote 57 Like several Scandinavian-born orators and editors before him, Johnson lauded the nation’s founders for their seemingly infallible commitment to freedom and equality and criticized the slaveholding states for undermining these values:
It has been said by some, “why not let the South go?” Have we not without their territory enough resources to make the greatest nation on earth. We have one foot upon the Atlantic the other upon the Pacific with territory between of almost exhaustless fertility, enough to farm 50 great States capable of supporting more than 100 millions of people … but if the South may secede why may not any other section, or even single states. And where would it end if a section or state as soon as it felt a little aggrieved should practice the doctrine of secession? Would we not soon be divided into immensurable petty states, without the power to protect our industry or commerce or to enforce respect from foreign nations?Footnote 58
On the importance of maintaining national unity for the sake of continued territorial and population growth, Johnson added: “No one doubts this. Then our only salvation is to put forth every effort to make every necessary sacrifice of blood and treasure to reunite the shattered Republic.”Footnote 59 Yet the rhetoric of “every necessary sacrifice,” by ethnic leaders such as Johnson, was often not shared on the ground in the Scandinavian immigrant enclaves, and increasingly the resistance was reflected in the press.
A little more than a month later, Fædrelandet focused less on the nation’s founding ideals than on the pressing reality of the draft. On August 25, 1864, acknowledging its readership’s hopes and wishes, Fædrelandet noted a sense “that Wisconsin will not have to furnish much more than 12,000 men.”Footnote 60 In Illinois, focus was even more clearly directed at draft avoidance. On September 7, 1864, Hemlandet reported to its mainly Swedish-born readership, that the “draft is on everybody’s mind” and added that “every town does whatever possible to dodge it.”Footnote 61 Hemlandet informed its readers that anyone who was not yet a citizen, had not voted, and had not taken out papers with intent to naturalize could contact “W. H. Church, Clerk of Circuit Court,” in Chicago’s 1st Ward, and get proof of exemption from the draft.Footnote 62
By 1864, the framing of duty by the Scandinavian press was less specifically tied to military service in defense of the nation’s values than to an acceptance of Old World countrymen also contesting the definition and duty of citizenship in order to avoid military service. Residents in New Denmark seemingly explored every exemption option. An increasingly desperate Fritz Rasmussen penned the following complaint in his diary on October 2, 1864, after his neighbor Knud had stopped by to borrow a recent issue of Fædrelandet:
So goes Sunday, even with Monday, worrying and drudging; more so now, under the dreadfull [sic] anxiety of the “War” i.e. the fear of being drafted, to “serve my Country” (?) Yes, to serve a few overrich, vainglorious and diabolical creatures, in the shape of human beings. … Honest, Hold [old], Hoary “Abe” is certainly to[o] honest and old, for the position he holds, blessed be the generous heart to the contrary!Footnote 63
Resigned, Fritz Rasmussen by October 3, 1864, had started to make arrangements for travelling to Green Bay for a medical examination with his brother-in-law James.Footnote 64 On October 6, James stopped by to notify Fritz Rasmussen that they had both been drafted along with New Denmark community members Marcus Pedersen, Rasmus “Sejler” (sailor), Anton Christiansen, Johan Hartman, Niels Mogland, Ferdinand Larke (Lærke), and several others. According to Fritz Rasmussen, James “staid [stayed] talking a little while, about which best to do: ‘run away or stand.’”Footnote 65
On October 11, Rasmussen went down to James to see if “he had come back from Green Bay and ‘the Provost Marshals Office’ and what might be the news.”Footnote 66 James was not home yet, however, and Rasmussen made plans with his countryman Ferdinand Larke to go the following day. When Rasmussen got back to his own place, an Irish community member, in Rasmussen’s diary referred to as Brady’s wife, came to talk and put “forth all Kinds of arguments to induce me to ‘not report’ or ‘run away.’”Footnote 67
Yet, in the end, Rasmussen and several other community members could not bring themselves to run away. On a beautiful and mild fall day, October 12, Rasmussen and his travel companions went to Green Bay to report for military service.Footnote 68 In the “forenoon” of October 13, Rasmussen went in for his medical examination, hoping to get exempted, and got the impression that a bribe, which was not an uncommon occurrence, could have secured such an outcome.
As J. Matthew Gallman has shown, bribery was so prevalent that numerous humorists with a wide audience portrayed “those weak kneed, cowardly, despicable types who came up with ridiculous schemes to avoid the draft.”Footnote 69 Some showed draft dodgers running off to Canada, “creating an expatriate community of cowards in Windsor”; others men dressing up as women; and the cartoonist Austin A. Turner depicted an early draft evader complaining of weakness in his back but in fact carrying a “stack of bills strapped to his back, as a generous bribe to the doctor” (see Figure 9.3).Footnote 70
Underlining the prevalence of draft resistance, and its echoes in broader American culture, the draftee in this cartoon says, “Doctor I’m weak in the back,” to which the examining surgeon replies, “Yes, I see it – can’t go – too delicate.”
The word around Green Bay was that it was possible, with the right stack of bills, to find a similar exemption solution in the local examiner’s office, but at the moment of truth Fritz Rasmussen failed to take advantage of the situation:
If I had only been bold and present-minded enough, I might, I think, very probably have been exemted [sic] for, I had or to all appearances, was given, all the chance, that the Doctor possibly could give a person, to offer a bribe, if really he would have taken any, as the general belief is that he does.Footnote 71
While Fritz Rasmussen could not bring himself to pay for a fraudulent medical exemption, Ferdinand Larke was willing to pursue other options. The Danish-born blacksmith, who was examined just a few minutes after Rasmussen, “pretended a stiff knee,” “made himself a miserable cribble [sic],” and complained loudly though he, in Rasmussen’s estimation, was as “sound in the leg as if he never had any ailment in it.”Footnote 72 In an unexpected turn of events, Larke also told the examining surgeon, who “worked at” him considerably, that Fritz Rasmussen could vouch for his injury.Footnote 73 Put on the spot, Rasmussen explained that he had known Larke for “the last 11 or 12 years” and also bended the truth when adding:
[I] had often heard him tell of suffering extremely, in that knee once; [and] had allways [sic] thought that he drew that leg a little awkward, when walking; yes: that he was considered an upright character, through our neighborhood; that I didn’t think it nescessary [sic] to make use of cloroform [sic].
Describing the incident in his diary, Rasmussen was somewhat shocked that Larke “dared to try” without even having consulted or hinted at his intention before turning to his fellow New Denmark resident for support:
During the scuffling, Ferdinand once cried out most pitiable and said “Oh ‘Doctor’ I didn’t come here to get hurt. I came to be examined.” To which the Surgeon answered: “No, but we are not here to be fooled.” But most assuredly as I have heard Ferd. to have said since – they were most damnably fooled. By nine oclock P.M. on the 13th we again made home, most dreadfully tired; and, I, by no means very contended [sic].Footnote 74
Approaches to the draft and medical examination processes underscored the desperate measures foreign-born residents would take to avoid the draft. For some, the strategies for avoiding military service succeeded. Larke, for example, was declared exempt because of “lameness in the right Knee,” while Rasmussen – along with several community members, Norwegian-born Einar Quisling among them – was “held” for the army instead.Footnote 75 The news shook Fritz Rasmussen, who could not bring himself to record anything in his diary for two weeks after going to Green Bay. “I have been rather puzzled in my mind; hardly knowing what to lay hands to, on account of the being ‘drafted’ to serve ‘Oncle Samuel’ [sic],” Rasmussen finally wrote on October 26.Footnote 76
The thirty-one-year-old immigrant now had to leave his wife and three daughters in New Denmark. As it turned out, Rasmussen would also serve alongside soldiers of native-born, German-born, and Irish-born heritage while experiencing the effects of slavery up close. Thus, Rasmussen – who, like many of his fellow countrymen in Brown County, would have preferred to stay out of the Civil War – had to contemplate the merits and drawbacks of American citizenship to an even greater degree over the following year. Yet when the Danish-born immigrant, weary from countless hours of hard farm work, sat down on October 26, 1864, to take up his diary, optimism about life in America had temporarily vanished. Rasmussen’s entry captured his mood: “Perhaps I may soon come to write with the sword or bayonet, making gory figures. Thou Lord and Ruler of us miserable beings, have mercy upon us and save us from the Evils to come.”Footnote 77
As Fritz Rasmussen and other New Denmark community members prepared to travel south, the officers and men of the 15th Wisconsin were getting ready to travel north. The remaining officers and men, that is – the past two years had been trying for the approximately 800 Scandinavians who had originally enlisted. Battles at Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, Pickett’s Mill, and Atlanta had taken such a toll that, by late 1864, only 320 men remained on active duty.Footnote 78
Yet, throughout the war, soldiers in the Scandinavian Regiment continued to describe warfare as something Scandinavians withstood better than any other ethnic group. As Henry Syvertsen noted after the regiment’s first major battle in Kentucky on October 8, 1862, “the Norwegians must be a quite peculiar, composed race”; despite “cannonshot after cannonshot and musketvolley after musketvolley thundering” around them, “the coffee pots were immediately over the fire as soon as the order to rest was given.”Footnote 79
The narrative of calmness under fire, often traced back to a martial Viking past, was common in descriptions of the Scandinavian Regiment during and after the Civil War.Footnote 80 The underlying idea was a sense of Scandinavian superiority that, to some degree, was earned on the battlefield but also reflected in civilian accounts. In his memoirs, for example, former Union officer, Ole Balling, even contended that Abraham Lincoln in the fall of 1864, had greeted him “with great affection” and mentioned that the Norwegians he knew in the Midwest were “the very best settlers.”Footnote 81
Among the Norwegians in the Midwest who served in the military, the 15th Wisconsin Regiment was the most visible unit and therefore received the most attention in both contemporary and subsequent accounts.Footnote 82 For its part, the 15th Wisconsin was hit hardest during the battle of Chicakamauga on September 19 and 20, 1863. Colonel Hans Heg, shortly after having been promoted to brigade commander, fell victim to a sharpshooter’s bullet, while Ole C. Johnson, who succeeded Heg as regimental commander, was captured and sent to Libby Prison in Virginia.Footnote 83 In all, the 15th Wisconsin sustained 177 casualties during the battle, and afterward stories of Hans Heg’s sacrifice, valor, and coolness under fire, along with that of his soldiers, came to exemplify the Scandinavian war effort.Footnote 84
Portrait of Hans Heg by Herbjørn Gausta. The Norwegian-born colonel fell at the battle of Chickamauga on September 20, 1863.
Still, the fact that many Scandinavians did not serve in pan-Scandinavian units and instead were scattered in numerous regiments across the midwest was lamented by Fædrelandet on August 25, 1864:
Unity makes for strength and respectability. Heg wanted his countrymen to reap the full fruit of what they did for the fatherland. He realized that if Norwegians were shoved into the American regiments under the American regimental names, then the Americans would appropriate all the officers’ positions – everything that would yield money and honor – and only leave the Norwegians the cold honor to cover the battlefield with its bodies, without even in death mentioning their actual names.Footnote 85
The necessity of gaining ethnic recognition for political gain through units like the 15th Wisconsin, and the underlying premise of pure Scandinavian units performing better than ethnically mixed units, was underscored in the same article by Fædrelandet.Footnote 86
Furthermore, the idea of Scandinavian military superiority was on full display in Fædrelandet leading up to the 1864 presidential election. At this moment, agitation against Democrats, not least German and Irish supporters of the Democratic Party, had reached a pinnacle, as demonstrated by the October 13 editorial penned by Fædrelandet’s editors:
In the Democratic meetings some big-name Gentlemen are sitting intelligently, a smile on their lip and clever stratagem behind their ears, but the masses are formed by the Irish and Germans, who never knew what the constitution contained and blindly follow their leaders’ say … When we see Norwegian farmers among this crowd, we have to believe that either they seek office at the presidential election or they have degraded themselves to being equals with the Irish and intellectually inferior Germans.Footnote 87
Ramping up the anti-Democratic agitation, the editorial also compared writers of Democratic campaign pamphlets with animals, Irish, and “wild-Germans” (Vildtydskere).Footnote 88 As a demonstration of the Democratic Party’s lack of appeal among Scandinavians, the 15th Wisconsin, which by late fall of 1864 was finally stationed in the rear to guard a bridge at Whiteside Station, sent a clear message when the soldiers cast their presidential election votes on November 8.Footnote 89
Through votes for presidential electors, state superintendent, members of congress, state senators, members of assembly, and county officers, it became clear that Abraham Lincoln’s Union Party continued to enjoy overwhelming support. With Company B detached at Lookout Creek, 177 soldiers in the 15th Wisconsin Regiment had their votes registered in the surviving records, and 176 votes (99 percent) were cast for electors who supported Abraham Lincoln.Footnote 90
Norwegian-born Second Lieutenant George Hovden of Company G marked the election in his diary and noted that everyone in the company “went for Lincoln.”Footnote 91 A little north, at US hospital no. 8 in Nashville, Tennessee, Gunvold Johnsrud, who served in the 16th Minnesota Infantry on November 4, 1864, wrote about the “great Union Procession for the A. Lincoln & Johnson party,” held in the streets ahead of the election, and added: “It was quite a wonder to see so many lights at one time and place.” During the election, four days later, the Norwegian-born Johnsrud offered the assessment that “little Mack will have a poor show for president.”Footnote 92
In Arkansas, a Swedish-born correspondent to Hemlandet reported that the 3rd Minnesota, which included a Scandinavian company, had voted before leaving Pine Bluff. “All the votes ‘cast’ were for Abraham Lincoln,” the correspondent noted, though “one or two intended to vote for Mac but refrained from doing so, out of shame, when they saw how everyone else voted (they were ‘conscripts’).”Footnote 93
Reporting about a mock vote involving his “invalid company” in Lexington, Kentucky, Henry Syvertsen distanced himself from the Democratic candidate George McClellan and reported it as a “happy sign of the times” that 44 out of 50 supported Lincoln.Footnote 94 Moreover, Ole Steensland, an imprisoned Norwegian-born soldier from the 15th Wisconsin, later remembered how support for Lincoln remained strong even in the infamous Georgia prison camp Andersonville where thousands died from illness and malnutrition.Footnote 95
The New Yorkers went around with ballots and said “vote for little Mac(Clellan) and let us have peace and get out of here and not lie here to rot for Lincoln and the Negroes.” We said: Vote for Lincoln; – a Man, who is loyal to the Unions and will not give up until he has [clamped] down on the Confederacy.Footnote 96
The Scandinavian soldiers thereby helped justify the rationale behind the Lincoln administration’s decision to let soldiers vote. Wisconsin Republicans had taken the lead regarding this electoral issue, and several other states modeled their voting practice after Wisconsin’s example.Footnote 97 Across the country, more than three out of four soldiers, 78 percent, supported Abraham Lincoln in the 1864 election, and the Scandinavian 15th Wisconsin Regiment’s 176 out of 177 votes for the incumbent turned out to be the strongest support for the president among any Wisconsin regiment.Footnote 98 In the 9th Wisconsin Regiment, made up of a sizeable German contingent, close to 80 percent of the soldiers (396 out of 498) supported Lincoln, while that number was less than 30 percent in the 17th Wisconsin, a predominantly Irish regiment.Footnote 99
Such voting patterns among Scandinavians, Germans, and Irish extended outside of Wisconsin’s military units.Footnote 100 As Walter Kamphoefner and Wolfgang Helbich have pointed out, the “percentage of support” for Lincoln among Germans “declined slightly” between 1860 and 1864, and Milwaukee, with its strong German influence, “was one of only two big cities where Lincoln lost ground between elections.”Footnote 101 Even more pronounced was Irish-American opposition to Lincoln. As Susannah Ural has shown, “Irish-Americans turned out in droves” to vote for George McClellan in 1864, which, in one example, led to 90 percent of the vote in a heavily Irish New York ward being cast for Lincoln’s opponent.Footnote 102
The Scandinavian immigrant vote in New Denmark was less clear. Despite his frustrations with the Lincoln administration, Fritz Rasmussen probably supported the sitting president, whom he had described as “honest” a month earlier. Yet in the same diary entry Rasmussen, as we have seen, also maintained that Lincoln was too “old, for the position he holds.”Footnote 103 In his diary, Rasmussen wrote that he had gone “to schoolhouse No. 1 for election,” but in contrast to 1860, where he voted “for Abraham Lincoln and H. Hamlin,” he did not disclose which candidates received his support in 1864.Footnote 104 Fritz Rasmussen did, however, maintain, or at least regain, his admiration for Lincoln, and if he followed the recommendations in the Scandinavian-language newspapers circulating in New Denmark, he would again have voted “for Lincoln.”Footnote 105
If Fritz Rasmussen did indeed vote for Lincoln, he likely did so along with most Scandinavian immigrants.Footnote 106 Even along the Pearl River in the deep South, Christian Koch, who had been navigating life between New Orleans and his home in Hancock County since 1862, was clear about his political preferences.Footnote 107 “I am glad Lincoln is elected again, I dont [sic] want to see peace now till the South is whipped, if it last 10 years longer, I begin to feel as if I could help to fight them myself,” Koch wrote.Footnote 108
In the end, Lincoln won all the states in the North, with the exception of New Jersey, and also enjoyed electoral success in states such as Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia. Emigranten celebrated the president’s reelection on November 14, 1864, while praising the voters’ support of the “war policy hitherto followed to suppress the rebellion.”Footnote 109
Lincoln’s reelection ensured that the conscripted New Denmark farmers would have to help suppress the rebellion and ensure emancipation. Two months later, Fritz Rasmussen therefore started his own journey toward the deep South along with 150 other closely guarded draftees.Footnote 110
Fritz Rasmussen left Madison as part of the 14th Wisconsin Regiment on a clear, cold Tuesday, January 17, 1865, en route to join the Union campaign against Mobile in Alabama.Footnote 111 For months the draft had impacted life in Wisconsin, and for months it would continue to do so. Thus, in one of Edward Rasmussen’s first letters to his son in the army, dated January 23, 1865, he included information on the draft that demonstrated how closely the community followed the quota system and how much they by 1865 knew about it:
Now the draft is again upon us and this time I am thinking that it will be the last as here will not be many remaining for additional drafting. I saw in the [Green Bay] Advocate that Green Bay must deliver 45 of their able-bodied men and since there are here in this town around 30 and they therefore must have 12 men but will draft 24, then it will soon even out.Footnote 112
Additionally, on February 20, 1865, Rasmussen’s in-laws, Ane and N. C. Hansen, referenced the impending draft scheduled for March, which seemed to make it impossible for any of the remaining foreign-born men to avoid military service. Consequently, several Danish immigrants struck out for Green Bay to voluntarily enlist and procure the $300 bonus associated therewith.Footnote 113
Fritz Rasmussen’s brother-in-law, Celius Christiansen, who was drafted in 1862 but avoided service by hiring a substitute, likely knew that he was on the short list for the upcoming draft and volunteered in Green Bay along with at least ten other New Denmark residents, which caused “quite a commotion” in the immigrant community.Footnote 114 The problem, as Fritz Rasmussen’s father described it, was that by volunteering in Green Bay and being paid there, the volunteers would be credited there and not in New Denmark, which likely meant that “the few remaining will have to go as soldiers since there will be no one left to draft from.”Footnote 115
Rasmussen’s wife Sidsel made the same point when she wrote to her husband from New Denmark on March 22, 1865, and revealed in a new letter the following day that the draft’s pressure exacerbated ethnic tension in the community: “Dennis Devan was drafted and ran away like every other Irishman. [Johan] Goldsmidt was also Drafted and had to go.”Footnote 116 Yet also within the Danish immigrant community, the draft revealed both ethnic and class tension. Indicating the continued conflict between German and Irish immigrants and their Scandinavian counterparts, not least perceptions of who was bearing, and who was skirting, the duties of citizenship, Fritz Rasmussen’s father notified his son of the draft’s results on March 23, 1865:
The draft has come to an end here 14 days ago and now I believe it will end for good, as there is not one single able-bodied man left fit for service. Here the draft was later. Linhardt, Mads Rasmussen, Anders Petersen, Goldsmidt, Dines Duan [Dennis Devan], Hofman and several Germans and Irish but all three Danes were rejected and they only got a hold of a few Germans. The rest had run away.Footnote 117
Edward Rasmussen also recounted a story of a failed attempt at bribery by Goldsmidt, who as a result was compelled to serve even without a medical examination, before turning his attention to the community volunteers that had enlisted. “That concludes the draft,” Rasmussen asserted.Footnote 118 Otherwise, most of the Rasmussen family letters sent to Fritz revolved around concern for his safety, local news (a town election on April 4 and a deadly smallpox outbreak in May), and national news from the war (the fall of Richmond and Petersburg).Footnote 119
One topic completely absent from the letters sent south to Fritz Rasmussen was the issue of emancipation and the plight of four million freedpeople after the end of hostilities. This was perhaps not surprising given the relatively small number of free Black people living in the Upper Midwest (in Brown County, Wisconsin, twenty “free colored” out of approximately 12,000 residents were counted in the 1860 census), but while the New Denmark letter-writers may never have met a Black community member, they would have known about policy debates through newspapers circulating in town.Footnote 120 Moreover, thoughts on abolition, and the fight to achieve it, had clearly taken on increased importance outside of Brown County.
For Fritz Rasmussen, the shared fate of soldiering created an even greater sense of solidarity, also across ethnic lines, for the already class-conscious Wisconsin farmer. As an example, the thirty-one-year-old immigrant’s first letters home from the campaign against Mobile in March 1865 detailed spending miserable, rainy days huddled up on a pile of coal with his Irish comrade-in-arms Patrick Terry, and a week later sharing his tobacco with a Prussian-born neighbor from New Denmark named George Böhme.Footnote 121 Yet in Alabama’s subtropical climate, surrounded by unknown and often unwashed men, the drafted farmer had come down with a painful bout of diarrhea. Weakened by hot flashes and chills, Rasmussen time and again had to leave the ranks and let yellowish pus mixed with bloody stool fertilize the swamps of Alabama. “I am seemingly in no small danger of losing this fragile life, either by enemy bullets or disease in this climate,” Fritz Rasmussen warned his wife Sidsel in a letter on March 24.Footnote 122 Three days later, the Army of West Mississippi came into contact with Conferederate defenders by Mobile Bay in Alabama, and, judging by the way the Danish draftee recorded the encounter, he thought he was going to lose his life in the confrontation.Footnote 123
The noise, Rasmussen wrote, was intense, almost to the point of deafening. Only when darkness fell over southern Alabama did the shooting wane, but even then the Danish immigrant’s life was still in danger due to feverish shivering and, by day, the continued Confederate bombardment.Footnote 124 Over the following days, one shell landed in a group of soldiers but only knocked over their coffee pot; another snapped a pine like a twig; a third tore the head off a man; and as the siege around Mobile’s Spanish Fort and Fort Blakely continued, Rasmussen reported on several wounds suffered by both Black and white soldiers in his vicinity:Footnote 125
This morning an Indian was carried in, shot in the head, and who was, I think, drawing his last breaths. Just as we had had dinner they started to throw shells in here again so one was not safe anywhere and an old poor English-man (Isaac Brigham) who had gone as a “substitute” and like me came from Green Bay had his right leg torn a quarter off three inches below the knee by a piece of a bomb.Footnote 126
Rasmussen’s military experience, shared with thousands of comrades, strengthened his sense of belonging to a national community and in some ways mirrored that of the Irish and Black soldiers.Footnote 127 As Christian Samito has pointed out, “military service had explicit links to citizenship and inclusion as part of the American people,” and the fact that Rasmussen and others of Scandinavian heritage served alongside American Indians, Germans, Irish, English, and native-born soldiers helped shape a broader view of American citizenship.Footnote 128
Fritz Rasmussen in his writings regularly exhibited concern for, and friendship with, fellow soldiers of many different backgrounds.Footnote 129 The reluctant recruit sympathetically described a fellow soldier of Stockbridge Indian heritage who helped an ill Irish-born comrade-in-arms; and on March 30, 1865, he mourned another Stockbridge Indian friend from northern Wisconsin, Thomas Anthony, who had died of illness:Footnote 130
This saddened me even more than if it had been someone from a different part of the country[.] This man was, so to speak, from home and we had practically formed a brotherly relationship that, for my part went closer to the heart than perhaps his but which encouraged me more than any others except my comrade Terry.Footnote 131
Interestingly, Rasmussen’s statement alludes both to the entanglement of Native Americans and white European settlers and the distance between them.Footnote 132 On the one hand, the Danish immigrant felt a real bond between him and Anthony based on their mutual Wisconsin background, but Rasmussen also realized that the warm “brotherly” feelings were not necessarily shared by Anthony, who in his lifetime would have witnessed large-scale European settlement on American Indian land in the Midwest.Footnote 133 Though motivations for joining the military were multifarious among Native people, Anthony’s volunteer service is noteworthy due to the association between martial manhood and American citizenship.Footnote 134 Thomas Anthony’s service in a regular military unit such as the 14th Wisconsin could well have been motivated by economic concerns but could also potentially have been a way to establish a claim to citizenship.Footnote 135
Military service did often lead to increased standing in the surrounding society, not least among white Americans with political power. Native people, however, continued to struggle to achieve recognition as citizens in Wisconsin and elsewhere for years after the Civil War.Footnote 136 American Indians, for example, were notably absent when Republican congressman George S. Boutwell, on the Fourth of July, 1865, pointed to the service by “whites and negroes born on this continent,” as well as “the Irish and the Germans” and “representatives from every European race,” as proof that they all deserved voting rights and, by extension, recognition as citizens.Footnote 137
For many, war service was therefore not without importance – but even in this final push to reunite the nation was also not without risk. While digging trenches outside Fort Spanish by Mobile Bay, Fritz Rasmussen on April 6 described one shell wounding twenty-one men, filling the trench with smoke, and the blast wave nearly concussing the entire unit.Footnote 138 On April 8, Rasmussen and several veterans was shocked “terribly and horribly” by a rifle bullet cutting the neck artery of a fellow soldier while another hit an “Indian” from Rasmussen’s own company in the leg.Footnote 139 Mercifully, by 5:30 p.m. on April 8, the end of the campaign was in sight. In a mass bombardment, more than ninety-six artillery pieces opened fire on the forts around Mobile and, according to one witness observing from a safe distance, created a moment of almost surreal beauty: “The fire of so many large guns, and the loud explosion of shells, produced one of those sublime scenes which seldom occur, even in the grandest operations of war,” recalled Brigadier General (and later US Minister to Sweden and Norway) Christopher C. Andrews.Footnote 140
The bombardment set a chain reaction in motion. The 8th Iowa initiated the attack and succeeded in planting the American flag on top of the breastworks despite fierce Confederate resistance before the defenders retreated further into the fortress. For a brief moment, Rasmussen thought his regiment would be called upon to finish the attack. Shortly before midnight on April 8 Rasmussen and his fellow soldiers were sent to the frontlines “double quick, forward march!” and from this vantage point witnessed other units move toward the breastworks.Footnote 141 “We expected to see and hear a horrendous sight every moment,” Rasmussen wrote.Footnote 142 But the Confederate defenders were gone. Spanish Fort was in Union hands. The following day, on April 9, Fort Blakely fell, and Ferdinand Winslöw – the 9th Iowa’s former quartermaster, who seemed on the cusp of another logistics appointment in Major General Edward Canby’s army – wrote to his wife Wilhemina about the elation.Footnote 143 Winslöw arrived in Canby’s camp just as the battle ended and found his brother-in-law, Christian Christensen, who had helped recruit the war’s first Scandinavian company, along with several high-ranking generals.
I had hardly been there half an hour before one Aide-de-Camp after another came with the glorious news of the assault on and taking of Fort Blakely. So there were congratulations, and as the night set in, and the camp fires shone all around in these magnificent pine woods and everything around looked like a fairy-world all the Generals – Steele, A. J. Smith, Carr, Granger, Osterhaus and others sat down in a circle back of Christensen’s tent around the quiet, happy Canby, who lit and smoked his cigarre [sic] with an apparent delight and gusto.Footnote 144
The fact that Winslöw had brought along “all kinds of nice” food and a “demi-john with 5 gallons of whiskey” likely did nothing to dampen the mood, and when the Union Army entered Montgomery, the Confederacy’s first capital city, three days later, it was an important step toward territorial reunification.Footnote 145
Ferdinand Winslöw (left) surprised his brother-in-law, Christian Christensen, in Alabama in April of 1865, and they likely had this photo taken together in New Orleans shortly thereafter.
Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Stephan Vaugh Shipman, from Madison, Wisconsin, described the occupation of Montgomery in his diary and noted that they “reached the City about 9 o’clock and amid loud cheering the Flag was run up over the State House where the first rebel Congress met!”Footnote 146 The end of combat, however, raised larger questions about the nation’s future, not least the role of freedpeople. According to William Warren Rogers Jr., the “sentiments of rejoicing blacks were not in doubt,” and that was also the way Fritz Rasmussen described his experience around Montgomery on April 22, 1865.Footnote 147 As his regiment prepared to march through Montgomery to a camp a few miles outside of town, Rasmussen touched on the unit’s experience with the formerly enslaved. “This morning we again drew rations for two days that should last for three,” Rasmussen wrote, giving the reason that “Negroes” were “rushing to our lines” and causing depleted rations for the soldiers due to the larger numbers of mouths to feed.Footnote 148 The reaction among the soldiers was mixed, Rasmussen wrote: “Many find it hard but many just laugh and think that they thereby have a good excuse for ‘fourage’ (stealing).”Footnote 149
Rasmussen himself seems to have been more sympathetic to the plight of freedpeople. But if he specifically recorded his impression of marching through Montgomery on April 23, 1865, those diary pages have now been lost. Rasmussen did, however, describe the experience many years later. When asked to recount his war experience almost a half century afterward, the reluctant veteran’s memory allowed for the following:
I helped occupy “the Rebel Capital City” and [I] marched in to the high-pitched tune of “Yankee Doodle” but hardly saw a white person, on the contrary cheered by the black, many of whom could be called white, especially the women.Footnote 150
In his recollection, Rasmussen likely alluded to the sexual violence inflicted on enslaved women by their masters before and during the Civil War, and the attempts to cling to such patterns of domination among white southerners when they returned after the war.Footnote 151 Throughout 1865, Rasmussen and other Union soldiers serving in the deep South had a chance to immerse themselves more in their surroundings and consequently also contemplate southern society then and now, not least the impact of emancipation. By July 1865, Rasmussen’s critique of the Old World nobility and the New World elite mirrored, in important ways, his thoughts on slavery and his antipathy toward slaveowners.
What spendour, yes to put it plainly, Paradise – these people have lived in, not to speak of money or riches, it is therefore no wonder that they became haughty and arrogant. … It is also no wonder that when war came that they fought for their slavery, since without slavery their circumstances can not possible [sic] be what they were before. But, whether splendor for them or not, I say, splendid, splendid that slavery is abolished.Footnote 152
Thus, Rasmussen interpreted the Civil War as a class conflict; but it was still not clear how much support for abolition also meant support for freedpeople’s equality and citizenship rights. Such discussions were playing themselves out at all levels of American society, not least among the Republican leadership in Washington, DC, where plans of freedpeople’s future role in the nation were made simultaneously with plans for expanding the nation’s territory and population.
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