When Hans Mattson rose to speak to fellow Civil War veterans in St. Paul on March 6, 1889, the former officer emphasized the apparent ease with which white Union men and their white rebel counterparts had agreed to “bury the past” in order to shake hands over the war’s “bloody chasm” and together work for a better future.

As commander of a Union force in Arkansas, Mattson was tasked with protecting the local population, overseeing Confederate soldiers’ parole, and enabling the transition to freedom for thousands of formerly enslaved in the state.Footnote ¹ However, the Swedish-born officer, who in 1861 defined the Civil War as a conflict between “freedom and tyranny,” twenty-four years later spent little energy discussing the plight of freedpeople and instead underlined how the federal military from the beginning had encouraged a laissez-faire approach to economic reconstruction in a region devastated by four years of war.Footnote ²

“You must like free and independent citizens, place yourself by industrious labor, as soon as possible, beyond the necessity of federal support,” Mattson instructed farmers around Batesville on May 22, 1865.Footnote ³ On the transition to a free labor economy in the South, the Swedish veteran went on to claim that in the early years of reconstruction, the inhabitants of Arkansas generally “made fair contracts with the liberated slaves and strictly and carefully observed them.”Footnote ⁴ Yet, even if Mattson’s recollection is to be trusted, fair contracts carefully observed were not always the norm, and attempts to maintain an antebellum racial hierarchy were numerous.Footnote ⁵ Toward the end of his speech, Mattson’s memory allowed for as much as he related “one incident of many” that underscored the prevalence of “old slave thinking” in the post-war South.Footnote ⁶

“One day, a very tidy negro woman came and reported that her late master had recently killed her husband,” Mattson recalled. “I sent for the former master. He was a leading physician, a man of fine address and culture, who lived in an elegant mansion near the city. He sat down and told me the story, nearly word for word as the woman did.”Footnote ⁷ Mattson’s speech, as it has been preserved, recounted the incident as follows:

Mattson, true to ideals about equality before the law, sided with the freedwoman; but his comment about her appearance, “a very tidy negro woman,” also showed preconceptions, common among white men, against freedpeople themselves.Footnote ⁹ Implicit in Mattson’s story was the fact that not all newly freed Black women were perceived as “very tidy.”Footnote ¹⁰ As such, the structure of Mattson’s 1889 address to local veterans reflected the fact that many Scandinavian immigrants immediately after the war were primarily concerned with economic betterment, personally and collectively, in a free market economy, but it also implicitly demonstrated the sense of white superiority that continued to inform life in the United States.Footnote ¹¹ Less than a year before Mattson’s speech in Minnesota, two Swedish settlers in Texas, Carl and Fred Landelius, wrote to their sister Hanna in Sweden about cotton growth in Travis County and their belief in a racial hierarchy:

The roots of freedpeople’s poverty received little attention in the Scandinavian enclaves.Footnote ¹³ Neither did the associated paradox between free labor ideology and government redistribution of land to mainly white citizens, what Keri Leigh Merritt has deemed part of “the most comprehensive form of wealth redistribution” in American history.Footnote ¹⁴ But both free labor ideology and homestead policy were used as arguments for continued Republican support. To well-educated Scandinavian immigrants, equality was attained through free labor on one’s own land. The equality envisioned, however, was more economic than racial and social.Footnote ¹⁵

In the early years of reconstruction, there seemed to be clear limits to how far Scandinavian ethnic leaders could envision freedom and justice extending. It was, however, increasingly important for Scandinavian leaders to situate Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish immigrants positively in a postbellum national narrative where the effort to gain political influence only increased. Hans Mattson, for example, wrote specifically about Scandinavian immigrants’ love of liberty, Republican support, and zeal for Civil War service in his English-language memoirs.Footnote ¹⁶

Indeed, the experience of Civil War did seem to strengthen support for the Republican Party, not least its economic policy, among Scandinavian immigrants and thereby also strengthen ethnic leaders’ claim to political positions. On April 13, 1868, a brief front-page piece signed “many Scandinavians” appeared in the Chicago Tribune that touted Abraham Lincoln as “the representative and apostle of liberty to the downtrodden and oppressed of every nation on earth,” and it advocated, in essence, a Scandinavian ethnic holiday by “abstaining from ordinary work and festivities” on April 15.Footnote ¹⁷ The Tribune piece was one among numerous indications of Scandinavian support for the Republican Party – and its Civil War–era leaders – in the years immediately after 1865. Among the Civil War veterans, support was especially pronounced. On January 1, 1867, for example, a reunion for the 15th Wisconsin regiment was held at the hall of “The Republican Gymnastic Association” in Madison, with speeches praising the party in power.Footnote ¹⁸

In addition, Hemlandet on March 17, 1868, reported on “Grant Clubs” springing up “all across the country” and encouraged Swedes to attend meetings in Chicago’s 15th Ward.Footnote ¹⁹ Skandinaven on October 7, 1868, reported the organization of a “Scandinavian Grant Club” in Racine County among “the Scandinavians in the towns of Norway and Raymond,” in which everyone pledged to vote for the former Union general in the upcoming election.Footnote ²⁰

Republican loyalty and military experience, in turn, offered post-war opportunities, and numerous ethnic leaders took advantage.Footnote ²¹ Hans Mattson was elected secretary of state for the Republican Party in Minnesota in 1869, Norwegian-born veteran Knute Nelson became a Republican state senator in Minnesota in 1874 and later a US senator, and his countryman and fellow veteran Hans B. Warner served as Wisconsin’s Republican secretary of state from 1878 to 1882.Footnote ²² Fritz Rasmussen, like Mattson, Nelson, Warner, and others, also continued his support for the Republican Party. Despite Rasmussen’s reluctance to serve in the military, and the health problems it later caused him, his wartime experience became a source of pride and a motivation for continued Republican allegiance. Thus, on a clear and pleasant morning, November 3, 1868, Fritz Rasmussen went down to New Denmark’s “townhouse” and gave his “Vote for the High – or General Election,” adding “this time it certainly was ‘electing a General,’ and a Grant too.”Footnote ²³ In the following years, Rasmussen held several positions of trust in the community and regularly lauded American government principles for being “better, than any [that has] yet existed upon earth.”Footnote ²⁴

Figure 12.1 Ulysses S. Grant in the trenches before Vicksburg in 1863. Painting by Ole Balling who spent several weeks with the Union commander in the fall of 1864.

Photo by Fine Art / Corbis Historical / Getty Images.

In this sense, the Scandinavian experience mirrored that of the German veterans, Carl Schurz most prominent among them, who, in Mischa Honeck’s words, understood that “courage in combat and a noble role in victory were important bargaining chips” for “going into business or entering government service.”Footnote ²⁵ Yet, contrary to German Republican leaders in 1868, among whom “radicalism was ascendant,” no forceful principled arguments for Black suffrage appeared in the Scandinavian public sphere.Footnote ²⁶ Instead, Scandinavian immigrants who challenged the Scandinavian-American nonradical Republican orthodoxy during the early years of Reconstruction faced swift backlash.Footnote ²⁷

While still in its infancy, socialist-inspired agitation among Scandinavian immigrants – embodied by the Norwegian-born 1848 revolutionary Marcus Thrane – appeared in the public sphere in 1866. In the opening issue of Marcus Thrane’s Norske Amerikaner (Marcus Thrane’s Norwegian American) on May 25, 1866, Thrane laid forward a “program” that argued for active engagement on behalf of fundamental human rights, not least “every man’s right to vote.”Footnote ²⁸ Without explicitly connecting his editorial to freedmen’s right to vote, Thrane praised the principle of equality in the Declaration of Independence and argued that slavery had always been “inreconcilable with the Republican principle.”Footnote ²⁹ Thrane also stressed women’s central role in the fight for these foundational human rights and tied it concretely to the abolitionist cause.Footnote ³⁰

From Thrane’s perspective, among the most prominent “women and men” who had shaped public opinion against the antithesis of republican government, namely slavery, and helped save this basically “flawless” republican experiment from “failure,” was first and foremost Harriet Beecher Stowe. To Thrane, Stowe was followed by her younger brother Henry Ward Beecher, Charles Sumner, and Abraham Lincoln (“just mentioning his name makes the hearts beat”).Footnote ³¹

Thrane’s program – not least his implied socialist ideas (the present danger, Thrane wrote, “is the deep divide” between “wealth and poverty, enlightenment and ignorance”) and his fight for freedom, for Black people’s humanity, and for recognition of women’s central role in the public sphere – seemed increasingly important.Footnote ³² Enlightenment, according to Thrane, was the key issue, as it would ideally lead to the recognition of everyone’s equality regardless of skin color: “Could a Negro work as a carpenter?” Thrane asked and, pointing to the lack of social equality in the post-war North, answered, “There is scarcely a shop where a laborer would continue to work if a Negro should also work there.”Footnote ³³ Change through enlightenment was needed, the editor argued.

Thrane’s ideas, however, also included critique of religion and caused enough concern among Scandinavian ethnic leaders that both Kirkelig Maanedstidende and Emigranten published an anonymous rebuttal titled “A warning for all Christians” against Thrane’s newspaper, despite its alleged small readership.Footnote ³⁴ The letter, as well as the dissemination through the main religious and secular Scandinavian-American publications, testified to a sense of urgency in setting the agenda regarding notions of (economic) equality and morality – and, by extension, notions of American citizenship in post-war American society. In this sense, given Thrane’s admiration for Charles Sumner, the radical wing of the Republican Party received little, if any, support within Scandinavian publications.Footnote ³⁵ Instead the Scandinavian editors’ policy positions aligned closely with those of the former Civil War general Benjamin Butler who, in 1869, addressed southern Republicans and stated: “Now you must help yourself.”Footnote ³⁶ In other words, there could be no long-term governmental help for supporters of freedmen and freedwomen (e.g. opportunities for landownership or legal protection in contractual disputes) in the racialized post-war free market economy.Footnote ³⁷

Among Scandinavian immigrants, not least editors and clergymen, there was little urge to use the Civil War as a stepping-stone to reinvent and extend citizenship rights to the formerly enslaved and to women. Instead, the Scandinavian-American press and clergy devoted space to a multitude of other issues, not least whether slavery was inherently sinful. By debating “last year’s war,” the Scandinavian-born elite essentially made it more difficult to start a conversation about future struggles over the meaning of equality and citizenship.

Any lingering doubt about whether Old World elites, as represented by Old World state churches, attempted to wield a conservative influence over Scandinavian communities in the New World vanished after the Civil War. Marcus Thrane’s Norske Amerikaner, as Terje Leiren has shown, “survived only four months, largely because Thrane’s social and anticlerical views precipitated a bitter feud with the clergy and its supporters.”Footnote ³⁸ Similarly, the 15th Wisconsin regiment’s former chaplain, Claus Clausen, was essentially forced out of the Norwegian Synod when discussions over slavery’s sinfulness erupted anew.Footnote ³⁹

This schism within the Norwegian community had been evident since 1861, when Claus Clausen retracted his statement that slavery was not “in and of itself a sin,” and it reemerged after July 4, 1864, when J. A. Johnson, who had been instrumental in raising the 15th Wisconsin Regiment, sided with the regiment’s former chaplain.Footnote ⁴⁰ By 1865, the Synod leadership was publicly known to view Clausen’s interpretation as “diabolical” and rejected attempts to compromise.Footnote ⁴¹

Throughout the 1860s, the slavery debate raged between conservative Norwegian Synod clergymen with ties to education in the Old World state church and Claus Clausen’s faction who generally stuck to the 1861 statement that slavery was indeed sinful.Footnote ⁴² While the Norwegian Synod seemingly won the theological debate, Claus Clausen won considerable support in Scandinavian-American communities as well. Skandinaven, for example, pointed to Clausen’s popularity in 1867. During a visit to Chicago, Clausen had attracted one of the “largest gathering of Skandinavians [sic] that has ever attended a religious service in America,” Skandinaven reported on January 31, 1867:

The extent to which Skandinaven actually spoke for a Scandinavian “public” is difficult to assess, but the account is supported by a correspondent, identified as a former schoolteacher from Hedemarken in Norway, who wrote home from Primrose, Wisconsin, on February 4, 1868. In his description of the religious conflict, the writer stated that the people had “demonstrated common sense and distanced themselves from the clergy’s arguments.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Only pastor Claus Clausen, according to the letter writer, represented “defense of truth and freedom.”Footnote ⁴⁵

This postbellum slavery debate in the Norwegian Synod, and its leadership’s insistence that slavery “in and of itself” was not sinful, was one of several examples of racial conservatism among Scandinavian-born opinion makers and helped legitimize opposition to equality and thereby citizenship rights for nonwhites.Footnote ⁴⁶ In post-emancipation Scandinavian and American society, the view that white men of Nordic heritage were naturally superior to other ethnic groups, not least Black people previously held in bondage and American Indians, was common and, as we have seen, had found alleged religious and “scientific” support in the Old World for more than a century.Footnote ⁴⁷

Whether through religion or “science,” these racist views were regularly on display in the Scandinavian-American public sphere, and the connection between Scandinavian religious conservatism and reluctance to embrace nonwhites as equal citizens in the United States was made clear in opinion pieces such as the one that appeared in Emigranten on March 16, 1868 linking interpretations of the Bible to racial superiority.

Figure 12.2 Claus Clausen maintained his theological anti-slavery conviction after the Civil War and was consequently thrown out of the Norwegian Synod, again.

Courtesy Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum Archives.

In a piece titled, “Is the Negro an animal or does he have a soul?” an admitted Democrat argued that the differences between white and Black people were so great that the latter could not possibly be a descendent of Adam, whom God had breathed life into, and went on to say that if “the Negro was in [Noah’s] ark (and we believe he was there), he entered as an animal and is an animal to this day.” Moreover, the Norwegian-born writer argued that any mixing of the Black and white race would categorize the offspring as Black and “therefore we believe that only Adam and his descendants have souls and that Negroes are not descendants of Adam.”Footnote ⁴⁸

This line of argument resonated with Emigranten’s editor, who noted that this opinion had been sent to him by an “esteemed” fellow Norwegian and that it did not seem to make sense to do missionary work among people of African descent, for if Black people were just “soulless donkeys or, at best, enlightened mules, then it is after all too much to make them Christian.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Clausen, on the other hand, continued to stress a greater sense of equality (“no Christian could be pro-slavery”) and resigned from the Norwegian Synod on June 28, 1868, when its leadership insisted on different theological interpretations.Footnote ⁵⁰ Along with Clausen, “a dozen or more congregations of the Synod similarly broke away or were split in two.”Footnote ⁵¹ The Synod, with some merit, accused Clausen of holding theologically inconsistent views in a lengthy account published in 1868.Footnote ⁵² Clausen’s eighty-six-page rebuttal reiterated his anti-slavery position and contained unmistakable references to Grundtvig before he “laid down his pen.”Footnote ⁵³

With failing health, partly due to his Civil War service, Clausen instead set his sights on landownership in the South and helped spearhead an ill-fated immigrant colony scheme in Virginia.Footnote ⁵⁴ The colony was partly doomed by the financial crisis of 1873 but did exemplify Scandinavian immigrants’ continued preoccupation with land in the post-war years. Most Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes, however, set their sights west.

Exemplifying Scandinavian immigrant concern with social mobility through landownership and an expanding American empire on the continent, Danish-born Laurence Grönlund, whose writings in time would inspire Edward Bellamy and Eugene Debs, published a piece on the Homestead Act in Fremad (Forward) on April 23, 1868, shortly after his arrival to the United States.Footnote ⁵⁵

Grönlund criticized American politicians for being too focused on “corporations and monopolies” at the expense of the “great mass which produce what the legislators consume.”Footnote ⁵⁶ One notable exemption to the pattern, “an oasis in the desert,” was the Homestead Act, which Grönlund a few weeks later called a politically mandated leveller that allowed poor Old World immigrants to finally enjoy “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Impressed with the speed by which “liberal ideas” had spread in the United States to protect poor people against the powerful, Grönlund argued that the nation’s moral character had been elevated, as the people could now enjoy the fruits of their own labor by “sitting under one’s own grapewine and fig tree.”Footnote ⁵⁸ To Grönlund, landownership yielded an almost “holy satisfaction.”Footnote ⁵⁹ What is “life worth,” Grönlund asked, “if robbed of all convenience and comfort to the point where life consists of misery, degradation, and poverty”?Footnote ⁶⁰ Entirely missing from Grönlund’s lengthy texts, however, were questions of Native people’s religious connection, and right, to the land. Such omissions, conscious or not, continued among Scandinavians for decades and helped settlers justify land appropriation.Footnote ⁶¹

To a greater degree than other foreign-born groups such as the German and Irish, Scandinavian immigrants settled predominantly in rural areas (see Figure 12.3).Footnote ⁶² For this reason, the Homestead Act, predicated on population growth and territorial expansion, was central to Scandinavian immigrants’ visions of an American self-sufficient, moral citizenship and remained so for years. Conversely, high-level political attempts at territorial expansion into the Caribbean, where few Norwegian, Swedish, or Danish farmers imagined themselves settling, received much less attention.

Figure 12.3 “Norsk Hotel” (Norwegian hotel) reads the sign above the entrance where four unidentified people are standing in an otherwise rural Iowa setting. The photo thereby exemplifies Norwegian immigrants’ continued attachment to Old World language and culture in rural America, what Jon Gjerde has called “complementary identity.”

Courtesy Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum Archives.

To Scandinavian settlers, and many Americans, a contiguous American empire was the aim. Scandinavian immigrants’ support was of such scale that “several questions” regarding the Homestead Act arrived at the Skandinaven offices in Wisconsin within just one week in 1868. The queries prompted Skandinaven’s editors, who knew that this law was one of the “most important for the Norwegian settlers,” to, once again, publish answers to these frequently asked questions.Footnote ⁶³

Notably, Scandinavian immigrants after the Civil War started casting their gaze even further west. A Norwegian-born settler wrote from Minnesota in early 1868 that “3 ½ years ago there was not a white man in sight. Wild Indians and deer were the only living creatures,” but now numerous Norwegian, Swedish, and American settlements were part of the immediate surroundings.Footnote ⁶⁴ Just a few months later, the Swedish-born pastor Sven Gustaf Larson relayed news of a small but increasing Swedish community in Jewell County, Kansas, where more than twenty-five countrymen each had laid claim to 160 homestead acres. As an indication of these Scandinavian settlers’ mindset, Larson recounted a conversation with the land commissioner in Junction City who had promised that there would be enough Homestead land for half of Sweden, to which the pastor in his letter to Hemlandet remarked, “Why not say all of Sweden’s population if one takes Nebraska and other western states into consideration.”Footnote ⁶⁵ That the remaining valuable Native land in Kansas would soon be available for purchase “for the usual government price” was taken for granted by Larson in a subsequent dispatch.Footnote ⁶⁶ The same argument – free land formerly inhabited by American Indians, soon to be available through the Homestead Act or for sale at $1.25 an acre – appeared time and again in the Scandinavian-American texts.Footnote ⁶⁷

As far back as 1838, Ole Rynning had noted how “the Indians have now been moved far west away from” the borders of Illinois, and by early 1869 a Swedish correspondent reported home about potential landtaking on “[so-called] Osage-Indian land” in southern Kansas but warned against taking land in western Kansas “as long as the bloodthirsty Indians there frequently make their greetings.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Further north, despite an anonymous correspondent in 1864 imploring Fædrelandet’s readers to recognize the immense “suffering” inflicted on Native people following their removal from Minnesota, the dispossession continued in the Dakotas.Footnote ⁶⁹ Karen V. Hansen explains:

Despite Chief Waanatan’s plea, white settlers, Scandinavians among them, continued to move onto American Indian land and within decades came to occupy much of the land around Spirit Lake that had otherwise been set aside for Dakota bands following the 1862 war in Minnesota.Footnote ⁷¹ White supremacy was, as Barbara Fields reminds us, “a set of political programs,” among other things, and the Homestead Act, with its requirement for citizenship or stated intent to naturalize, was one such example.Footnote ⁷² Many Scandinavian-Americans saw landownership or opportunities for upward social mobility, along with political participation, as a right that came along with their understanding of American citizenship.Footnote ⁷³ In the process, Scandinavian immigrants often supported a social hierarchy where American Indians and nonwhite people were deemed inferior. Still, in 1864, Fædrelandet’s anonymous correspondent described Native people in the Dakota territory as “sick, naked, about to die of hunger, and defenseless”; and several descriptions of “suffering poor” freedpeople, who, in Frederick Douglass’ words, were “literally turned loose, naked, hungry, and destitute, to the open sky” after the Civil War, also appeared in the Scandinavian-American public sphere.Footnote ⁷⁴ Initiatives to help alleviate nonwhite poverty, organized by Scandinavian-born immigrants, however, remained rare. Instead, Scandinavian community leaders, when advocating economic assistance to groups in precarious circumstances, prioritized resources to local Scandinavian-American aid societies or collections on behalf of Old World communities suffering from starvation or deep poverty.

While Scandinavian immigrants generally subscribed to the “free labor” ideology underlying their idea of “liberty and equality,” these ethnic mutual aid initiatives also testified to immigrants’ awareness of the market revolution’s potential fallibility.Footnote ⁷⁵ White skin, a Protestant upbringing, and a relatively high educational level due to Old World compulsory education enabled many Scandinavian immigrants to steer clear of the most “exploitative class relationships,” but hard work did not always yield economic success.Footnote ⁷⁶

This realization had, in part, led three Scandinavians in New York to form an association in the summer of 1844 to socialize and provide help in case a fellow countryman fell on hard times.Footnote ⁷⁷ This Scandinavian Association established in a small house on Cherry Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side had the added purpose, according to a later travel writer, of bringing Scandinavians together to counterbalance “German, Irish, and all the other foreign nations who already have societies here.”Footnote ⁷⁸ The Scandinavian Association’s minutes – and its underlying mutual aid idea, which inspired similar associations in the Midwest – was a reminder that Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish immigrants regularly needed a helping hand to stay afloat in the American labor market.Footnote ⁷⁹

Scandinavian immigrants in Wisconsin and Illinois also set up several mutual aid societies in 1868 as hunger in Norway became a factor that increasingly pushed people in the Old World toward the Midwest. The Swedish association Swea and “the Emigrant Aid Association” worked both separately and collaboratively to establish a shelter in Chicago.Footnote ⁸⁰ Moreover, John A. Johnson in Wisconsin organized a collection of funds for needy immigrants to be sent to Fædrelandet’s editor or distributed through aid societies and pastors in Chicago or Milwaukee.Footnote ⁸¹

The Scandinavian immigrant elite, however, who specifically advocated American landownership as a means for achieving equality and liberty when leaving the Old World, were conspicuously silent on the topic of land- (and by extension wealth-) redistribution in the wake of the Civil War and by 1868 were more interested in white ethnic economic issues than in national aid initiatives on behalf of nonwhites. In short, Scandinavian-Americans in the post-war moment proved more interested in organizing help for their former fellow citizens from the Old World than they were in helping American Indians, on whose lands they often settled, or in helping the newly emancipated, and soon to be fellow, American citizens navigate the structural pitfalls of a free labor economy.Footnote ⁸²

By 1868 the work to ensure political and civil rights for freedpeople seemed finished in the eyes of the Scandinavian-American editors. The former Confederate States were slowly adopting the rewritten Constitution that formally ended slavery within the United States, and now financial matters could again occupy the minds and newspaper pages in Scandinavian communities. The economic opportunities that had led the Civil War–era Scandinavian immigrants to the United States in the first place were now to be utilized, Homestead Act in hand, with freedpeople’s and American Indians’ rights taking a back seat to the renewed focus on agricultural and industrial growth.

Yet, even as Scandinavian-American communities pushed issues of reconstruction into the background, continued discussions over citizenship rights in Washington, DC, turned out to have important implications for the attainment of contiguous and noncontiguous American empire