America 1844 by John Bicknell

Author:John Bicknell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2015-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

BOUND FOR TEXAS

Overlanders headed for California and Oregon were not the only emigrants on the move in 1844. At the very moment that the Texas annexation debate was heating up in Congress, a prince was crossing the Atlantic Ocean with ideas of planting a German colony in the Lone Star Republic. If Thomas Hart Benton had known about Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels, a nephew of Queen Victoria and a college friend of Prince Albert, he might have enlisted the German blue blood.

Prince Carl was a leader in the Mainzer Verein, the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants to Texas, founded in Germany in 1842 for the purpose of buying land in and providing transportation to the Lone Star Republic. Neither Prince Carl nor the other nobles involved in the venture were interested in becoming Americans, and they loudly opposed annexation.

Inspired by tales of the land of plenty sent home by earlier German immigrants such as Moses Schallenberger’s late parents and the ancestors of Henry Sager, the Adelsverein (noble association), so called because it was made up of twenty-one noblemen, began raising money and recruiting would-be emigrants, who were promised a cut-rate voyage by ship from Europe to Texas, wagons to take them to their land grants, a prebuilt house, seed and farm implements, schools, and churches. With such inducements, the German states, in the early throes of the unrest that would eventually lead to revolution in 1848, were a target-rich market. Hundreds of recruits were signed up.

As is often the case, things were not quite as shiny as the marketing department portrayed. The first contract the Adelsverein made for a land purchase expired before any emigrants arrived, so a new plot had to be found and purchased. That land, more than a hundred miles from civilization and not particularly fertile, happened to be occupied by Comanches. Construction of housing, schools, and churches lagged. So two leaders of the organization—Prince Carl and Alexander Bourgeois d’Orvanne, a land speculator and the group’s colonial director, whom the prince would come to dislike—were selected to travel to Texas ahead of the first wave of emigrants to speed affairs along.

On May 19, as the Oregon- and California-bound overlanders were pushing away from the Missouri River, the two men departed Liverpool aboard the steamer Caledonia. “The weather was beautiful,” Prince Carl wrote in his diary, but he quickly developed a bad case of seasickness and suffered from one malady or another for most of the voyage. Once they struck land, in Boston, on June 1, their mode of transportation changed to rail, but the complaints continued. “Had a terrible night,” he wrote on June 14, “the heat, mosquitoes, roaches.” They traveled through New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. They were less than a hundred miles from the Capitol on the day the Senate voted down annexation, but their train turned westward and took them on to Pittsburgh, then turned south to Cincinnati and finally reached New Orleans on June 19.

Ten days’ rest and recuperation in Henry

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.