The Ledgers of St. Matthew’s German Lutheran Church
Charleston, South Carolina
To my knowledge, there was no public notice given when, in _____, the recently digitized records of St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in Charleston, South Carolina, were added as a Lowcountry Digital Library collection. Nonetheless, the LCDL’s efforts “to connect the public with the SC Lowcountry’s rich history and culture by providing online access to primary source materials,” has made it possible to create a searchable database of those church records—principally, three large handwritten ledgers containing birth, baptism, confirmation, marriage, and death data— painstakingly maintained during the eighty-three years between 1840 and 1923. The database is intended to facilitate genealogical research and, as well, to encourage further examination of the demographics of this singularly homogeneous German immigrant community founded almost two hundred years ago. Access to these ledger records enables a better understanding of the acculturation process by which this ethnic minority wove itself into the fabric of Charleston, one of the “America’s most historic” cities.
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BELL:
In his 1996 University of South Carolina dissertation, “‘Hurrah für dies süsse, dies sonnige Leben’: The Anomaly of Charleston, South Carolina’s Antebellum German-America,” Michael Everette Bell was the first to examine comprehensively the nineteenth-century German community in Charleston. Thus not until 1996 was there a clear picture of how that ethnic community had been formed, or how German immigrants experienced life among the antebellum society of the South Carolina Lowcountry. The title of his work begs the question of just how sweet and sunny the immigrant’s life actually was, and the “anomaly” suggests that the Charleston context was different than what was to be found elsewhere.
The fact that Bell chose as his dissertation topic an analysis and description of the Charleston German community indicates that he was working in unchartered territory, indeed, that his work would present—primarily for the academic community—something that was still unknown just a few years before the turn of the twenty-first century. Bell’s comprehensive analysis, now almost a quarter-century old, confirms the earlier assertion that the nature of Charleston’s German ethnic community has been something of a closely held secret. Had the dissertation not been an academic exercise, it would have been a revelation to local history buffs, as well as to present-day Charlestonians who can—should they be interested—trace their origins back to those who emigrated from German lands to come to Charleston.
In his dissertation (published in book form in 1999) Bell distinguished the nineteenth- century group, the Neudeutsch (new Germans), from the earlier, colonial-era, fully- acculturated, group of German Charlestonians, the Altdeutsch (old Germans).12 He has determined that the influx of immigrants to Charleston that started in the early 1830s met with little resistance from the native population which had already accepted Germans into their midst, albeit fewer in number. The number of Neudeutsche immigrating during the thirty years from 1830 up to the Civil War was, while noticeable, never so large as to appear threatening. Immigrants settling in other areas of the United States frequently met with resistance from nativist groups, but a similar anti-immigrant bias was not in evidence in Charleston.
The resident population existing with its enormous slave population had little reason to worry about additional white Europeans arriving, who, with usable skills, would contribute in positive ways to the local economy. This relatively homogeneous group of immigrants seemed more than willing to adopt the ways of the southern, coastal society taking them in. They appeared ready to join with the native population rather than set themselves apart in their own enclave to pursue their foreign ways. According to Bell, some two-thirds of them were from the state of Hannover, and many of them came from the same local area in a corner of northwest Germany. If the German Friendly Society had been established in 1766 to address “German interests” in the city, the Freundschaftsbund was founded in 1832 to assist in melding similar German “ interests” with those of the host society. Understandably, more than half the number of single immigrant German males (according to Bell, 56 percent) sought German wives among the immigrant community, marrying in Charleston to establish families with native-born children.
German couples might immigrate together with their first-born, with subsequent issue born once the family was settled, however tenuously, in Charleston. Bell’s data indicate that no more than 30 percent would own their own home, the others living in shared quarters or renting, Not every immigrant family would count among the financially successful.
By 1850, Charleston’s ethnic German community would constitute 11.56 percent of the free white population.13 Bell suggests that by mid-century, the Neudeutsch community had come of age, enjoying “acceptance and approbation in the eyes of their fellow Charlestonians” and “able to participate in the life of the city at all levels, including the ‘peculiar institution’.” He proposes that the ethnic community developed as it did largely under the leadership of a select group of influential individuals, primary among them, the triumvirate of John Andreas Wagener, Franz Melchers, and Heinrich Wieting.
In Charleston by 1833, the young and energetic John Andreas Wagener was an inveterate organizer. He founded a German Fire Engine Company; by 1839, he was instrumental in establishing a “German” Lutheran church (St. Matthew’s) and in 1843 started the Teutonenbund, “a society for ‘the encouragement of German literature, song, culture, and the improvement of German thought and character.” Bell suggests that Wagener’s influence in the Neudeutsch community was “almost overwhelming. By his thirty-second birthday he had helped start three German ethnic organizations, a weekly newspaper, served as an officer in two different military companies, and become a notary in Charleston—all within the span of fourteen years.” Only a few years later, Wagener was instrumental in creating the Deutsche Ansiedlungs Gesellschaft von Charleston, the “German Colonization Society of Charleston.” Under his primary leadership, the organization bought a large tract of land in the northwest corner of South Carolina, where immigrant families ultimately established the town of Walhalla, South Carolina.16
15 Ibid., 92-93.
It was John Andreas Wagener, as Bell explains, who, as he became ever more prominent in the German community, changed what had become the “established route to social and economic acceptance” for Charleston’s immigrants. The ladder to success, if one followed the Altdeutsch protocol, was to join St. John’s Lutheran Church, then, through congregational connections, establish a viable business operation, become naturalized, join the country’s first German militia, the German Fusiliers, and ultimately become a member of the German Friendly Society. Under Wagener’s leadership and within the framework of the numerous ethnic organizations he founded, the Neudeutsche found it possible to by-pass the Altdeutsch sequence of steps to find their own, more expedited, way to acceptance in Charleston’s social order. 17 Wagener would later hold the rank of Colonel in the Confederate Army and would be elected as Charleston’s forty-third mayor from 1871 to 1873. He died in Walhalla, the Lutheran town in upstate South Carolina he had founded, in 1876, aged sixty.
16 There had been other German colonization/emigration societies. Walter Kamphoefner cites three: the small groups from Giessen and Solingen going to eastern Missouri, and the larger Adelsverein, a group of some seven thousand “led by a group of German nobles to colonize Texas in the mid-1840s.” None of them were successful. “Immigrant Epistolary and Epistemology: On the Motivators and Mentality of Nineteenth-Century German Immigrants,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 28, No. 3 (Spring, 2009), 40-41. Wagener’s success in organizing the Deutsche Ansiedlungs Gesellschaft von Charleston was unique in that it was founded to encourage individual immigrants and immigrant families already in Charleston to establish a separate settlement in another area of the state.
17 Bell, “‘Hurrah . . .’,” 94.
As the editor of the Deutsche Zeitung, the news source of the German community, published from 1853 until December of 1917, Franz Adolph Melchers had come to Charleston in 1843. Bell argues that Melchers “worked diligently to convey the attitudes of antebellum Charleston to the German community, and to transmit the attitudes of Charleston’s Germans to others in the city and to other German communities in the United States.”18 Melchers’s Deutsche Zeitung served effectively as a bridge between the immigrant community and the host society. As its editor and publisher, Melchers spoke for and to his fellow Germans, exercising considerable influence on the attitudes of the Neudeutsche, as well the Altdeutsche and their fellow native Charlestonians, while facilitating the ethnic community’s on-going process of acculturation.
The success of the Germans who had come to Charleston in the early 1830s helped set the stage for the wave of immigrants that would follow in their footsteps. But for those arriving after 1830, the several factors weighing heavily on the decision to emigrate—whether published “propaganda” and/or misinformation promising unlimited opportunity and unfettered freedom to do as one chose, or persistent recruiting “agents” extolling the opportunities to be had in the young republic, or the enticing idea of cheap land to be owned and farmed unencumbered by laws and rules—were likely overruled by the pull of the long- standing connections that Charleston had with the North German communities in the vicinity of Bremen. The result was a chain migration pattern that set up in the early 1840s, and which exchanged emigrants for goods from America. By 1843, steamships plied the Weser, and before long, ”emigrant” trains arrived at Bremerhaven every two weeks during the season from marshaling point elsewhere in Germany.19
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18 Ibid., 170
The city of Bremen and its port of Bremerhaven almost immediately passed legislation aimed at protecting the emigrants who waited there to board ships to take them to their U.S. destinations. In 1832 and 1834, laws were passed that regulated inns and other accommodations providing temporary shelter, and requiring ships leaving port to provide adequate space for passengers and to carry sufficient food supplies for a crossing that could take up to three months. Shipping companies were required to carry insurance in the event of shipwreck on European shores. In the mid-forties, the authorities in Bremen undertook to comply with new American regulations stipulating an increase in the amount of space per passenger and “forbidding the embarkation of a criminal or a deserter on pain of a hundred- thaler fine imposed upon the captain.” By 1849, an emigrant hostel, the Auswanderungshaus had been built, a facility able to feed 3500 emigrants and to sleep 2000 at a time. In 1853, almost sixty-five percent of the 58,000-plus emigrants passing through Bremen and Bremerhaven made use of the Auswanderungshaus.20 Bremerhaven would become the most popular embarkation point for the majority of nineteenth-century emigrants from northern and central Europe. For the emigrant families living in the northwest corner of Hanover, Bremerhaven lay literally on their doorstep.
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19 Mack Walker, Germany and the Emigration 1816-1885 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964,) 88.
The third member of the triumvirate who was instrumental in establishing the Charleston German immigrant community was Captain Heinrich Wieting. In the employ of the Bremen shipping company of N. Gloystein Söhne (N.Gloystein & Sons), Wieting commanded three ships, the Johann Friedrich, the Gauss, and the Copernicus from the 1840s to the late 1860s, usually twice a year, bringing on average some 200 emigrants to Charleston each trip. The record of Wieting’s departures from Bremerhaven and arrivals in Charleston and New York is shown in the list of Wieting’s sailings: 21
20 Ibid., 89.
21 Taken from “Was fernern vorkömmt werde ich prompt berichten”: Der Auswanderer-Kapitän Heinrich Wieting Briefe 1847 bis 1856, Jörn Bullerdiek and Daniel Tilgner, eds. (Bremen: Temmen, 2008), 285.
An analysis of the record provides a good sense of the traffic across the Atlantic during those years, and particularly the role that Charleston played on the receiving end. While Wieting sailed on occasion to other ports, his transatlantic passages with immigrants and goods were only between New York or Charleston and Bremerhaven. Some of his passengers were undoubtedly immigrants returning from visits back to the homeland, but the majority disembarking in New York or Charleston would have been immigrants following those relatives or friends who had preceded them, not travelers. Wieting’s eight trips to New York carried a total of 1465 passengers, while the twenty-five trips to Charleston brought 3,350 passengers to their southern destination. The average length of the trip was more than a month, sometimes almost two months, under conditions that were trying, in spite of everything Wieting and the Bremen authorities did to make the passage tolerable.
Although other ships traveled regularly between Charleston and Bremerhaven (it was relatively inexpensive—a third-class ticket was less than forty dollars), it was Wieting’s caring and personalized concern for the well-being of his passengers, as well as his regular schedule, that helped to anchor the chain of migration from Bremerhaven to Charleston. Those whom he had brought were a magnet for friends and relatives in the communities close to Bremen still contemplating emigration. Moreover, Wieting was a “local”: born 1815 in the village of Rönnebeck, about 30 km from Bremen, by the time he was working for the Gloysteins his name would have been familiar to the households in the small communities around Bremen and Bremerhaven. In Charleston, while waiting for his ship to be readied for the return voyage, he participated in the life of the Charleston German community as if he were a Charleston resident. His veneration by the Germans he had been instrumental in bringing to the city was known on both sides of the Atlantic. On his last trip from Bremerhaven to Charleston, Wieting contracted typhus and died in Charleston in December 1868. His death was a heartfelt loss to the Charleston community. A notice of his death was reported in the Wochenzeitschrift für Vegesack und Umgebung (Weekly for Vegesack and Surrounding Area) and stated that “. . . only rarely was there a captain who enjoyed as much popularity among those who knew him, here as well as on the other side of the ocean.” (“. . . denn wohl selten gab es einen Capitain, der im Kreise aller derer, die ihn kannten, hier sowohl wie jenseits des Oceans sich einer gröβeren Popularität erfreute.”) A large monument in Charleston’s Bethany Cemetery attests to the significant role Wieting played in establishing the city’s nineteenth-century German community.
That Wieting sailings would serve to encourage so many emigrants from the area is attested in the lists of passengers who traveled with him. The list of passengers embarking in Bremerhaven was published regularly in the local German newspaper, the Deutsche Zeitung, approximately two weeks before the expected arrival date, furnishing the names of the passengers as well as the towns they came from. While in any given list there are many citations of localities in other German states, the majority of the names and places of origin consistently indicate that Wieting’s passengers were from towns and villages close to Bremen and Bremerhaven. Andrea Mehrländer claims that “more than 73% of the Germans in Charleston were Protestants who came from the northwestern German states of Hannover, Oldenburg, and Holstein,” and that Wieting transported “more than three-quarters of all Charleston Germans across the Atlantic.”22 For many of the Germans who immigrated to Charleston during the 1840s and 1850s, it was Wieting who brought them to a place where they would benefit from the financial and social infrastructure that Wagener had helped to create, and where they would be tutored by the Deutsche Zeitung‘s editor, Franz Melchers, as he “translated Charleston and America to the new immigrants, interpreting the city’s institutions in the immigrants’ own language.”23
By 1860, Charleston’s German ethnic community was well established. During the decade prior to the Civil War, it had successfully transitioned to become remarkably one with the Charleston community. The German immigrants had let themselves in, had uncharacteristically settled throughout the city rather than forming a distinct ethnic enclave, and had set about to quietly find their place in their newly adopted home. Their successes were in spite of the fact that they had entered a host society that was perpetually on edge; that continually felt threatened by a minority population that was difficult to control; that was accosted by political issues such as nullification, states’ rights, and political-party squabbles more and more oriented to regional differences; that struggled against a developing and increasingly viral abolitionist movement that hemmed in and interfered with the status quo. By mid-century, the 1,817 Germans in Charleston represented 39 percent of Charleston’s foreign- born and 9.1 percent of the free white population. The free whites themselves, 20,012 in number, were 46.6 percent of the city’s total population. 19,532 enslaved blacks represented 45.4 percent of the total, free blacks, 8.0 percent.24
22 “’With more Freedom and Independence than the Yankees’: The Germans of Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans during the American Civil War,” in Civil War Citizens: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in America’s Bloodiest Conflict, Susannah J. Ural, ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 65.
23 Bell, “‘Hurrah . . .’,” 254.
Mehrländer
Jones