What a wonderful country! What a future is still in store for you! How everything ferments and boils and germinates and sprouts and blossoms and ripens into fruit!
Friedrich Gerstäcker, describing America to those in Germany, 1850s21
They would rather live like slaves in America than citizens of Weinsberg; even if they were facing death they would not change their decision, because they can not live under the present conditions.
A report to the King of Württemberg, conveying the views of immigrants, 181722
For five seasons the winters came early, the summers seemed cooler, and the harvest was brought in later. Snow that should have melted by May lingered on the hilltops, ponds retained a sheen of ice until June, and frozen drifts remained wedged on the dark side of gullies, to be made deeper by the first snows of autumn. In July, ice storms shriveled the buds on trees. In August, when the oats, rye, and wheat should have been ripening, piercing winds rippled across the fields. And in September, farmers standing in their blackened gardens found themselves peppered with sleet.
Today, climatologists attribute the cold weather that ravaged the Northern Hemisphere in the years following 1813 to a series of volcanic eruptions half a world away. The first was the destruction of the entire cone of La Soufrière on St. Vincent Island in the West Indies in April 1812. Just as this was clearing, Mount Mayon in the Philippines exploded in 1814, pushing an ash-laden vent seven miles into the atmosphere. Then the biggest of them all—Tambora, on Sumbawa in Indonesia, exploded in April 1815. With one blast the height of the mountain was reduced by 4,200 feet, leaving a caldera four miles wide. The explosion at Tambora was heard 800 miles away. Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, commanding a British military force, reported that on Java, 300 miles distant, officers, believing they were under artillery attack, sent the navy to repel pirates. Five hundred miles to the northwest the island of Madura was enveloped in darkness for three days. In the initial explosion, 10,000 people were killed. Over the following months a fine dust circled the globe, filtering the sun’s rays and reflecting light back into the skies. An estimated 82,000 people died of starvation. Crops failed in China, and in Bengal ferocious storms flooded huge areas of the countryside.23
Nowhere in Europe was the weather as bad as in the middle and lower Rhine. It was the worst of times. After a decade of ravaging wars, reserves of food were thin. Potato, beets, and pumpkins, carefully stored in straw beds for the winter, had been seized by the army. Then, after the harvest of the following summer, the new stores had been seized as well. A generation of young men had been conscripted into the service of kings and emperors, never to return, leaving old men, widows, and children to work the fields as best they could. For three seasons the crops had failed and the people in Alsace, Württemberg, and Baden feared that, unless the summer of 1816 brought a bountiful harvest, there wouldn’t be enough food to see them through the winter.
As spring approached, they had reason to hope. Napoleon was confined to the rocky island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic and their kings were at peace. For the first time in several years there was warmth to the sun. They watched buds appear on the fruit trees and vines, and took it as a sign that the natural order of the seasons had returned, and it was time to plant. Then, one afternoon in May, thick, black clouds rolled down the valleys. They remained for a month, and every day it rained, sometimes in torrents, sometimes in a soft drizzle, and at times accompanied by hail and sleet, but never letting up. Fields on the side of hills turned to mud and slid down to the farmlands below. Rivers burst their banks and flooded across towns and villages to a height that had never been known before. When finally, in June, the clouds lifted, a peculiar haze hung in the air and each evening an orange-red sunset lit the horizon. The sun was pale, and in the evenings the temperature dropped below freezing point. On cold mornings the villagers looked in horror at the apricot, pear and peach trees, which should have been bearing fruit, shimmering with icicles. Dismayed farmers stood in soggy fields looking at the stalks of their spring plantings, shriveled to black as though they had been charred by fire. Wearily they cut the stalks, now only of use as animal fodder, and replanted, but hopes of a late harvest were dashed when, in the third week of August, swirling winds brought weather colder and more tempestuous than the oldest inhabitants could remember. Potatoes, parsnips, and carrots became rotten in the ground, and beans were nipped away by the frosts.
Winter approached and a desperate search for food began. On the hillsides, grapes, still green and as small as fingernails, were picked while frozen on the vine. Peasants walking across their fields at midday felt the crackle of frost beneath their feet as they searched for beets that might have survived. Gathering enough to eat became a battle with nature. Snails, mice, moss, thistles, and cats were placed in the stew pot. Children were sent into the forest to search for nuts and berries. Bakers without flour made loaves from oats and potatoes. When even that ran out, they saw no reason to light their ovens at all.
One bitterly cold evening in late 1816, Daniel Müller, a shoemaker from the village of Langensoultzbach in Alsace, in the lower Rhine, fell into conversation with a stranger who was setting up camp for his family in a field behind the churchyard. They were going to America, the man told Daniel. It had taken them a week to come this far, and as soon as they reached the Rhine they would sell their horse and wagon and buy passage down the river to the sea. From there they would take a sailing ship across the Atlantic. Never would they return to this wretched country.
The next morning, Daniel returned as the stranger was packing up. He offered the man half a loaf of potato bread and a bowl of cabbage and sorrel soup. The man passed the food to his wife. As he tucked his children between tea chests and pots and pans, on a wagon pulled by a horse with legs so spindly it seemed unlikely it could stand, he said he was sorry he couldn’t give Daniel something in return. Yet, after a moment’s hesitation, he said he did have something—something so valuable that it would provide for Daniel and his family for life. He pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket and pressed it into the shoemaker’s hand.
That evening, Daniel visited the house of his brother, Henry. The Müller brothers had married two sisters. Daniel had four children and his brother three, and all of them gathered in Henry’s kitchen and sat around the heat of the stove. Henry, aged thirty-eight, was two years older than his brother, and Daniel was anxious to ask him about the piece of paper the stranger had given him. Henry unfolded it and saw that it was an article torn from an illustrated magazine. He held up the page for everyone to see. A lithograph showed a man, his wife, and two children standing in ascending order beside a log cabin built on the plains of Missouri. There were flowers in the front garden, geese in a side yard, and cattle dotted on the pastures beyond. The caption underneath said the family was from Württemberg and that the blooms in the garden had been grown from seeds they had carried from their homeland. Henry then read out how the homesteaders had tamed the savage Indians and had brought them into Christianity, and now traded with them in peace. He read how black people worked the fields and how they were given much better food than any servant in Württemberg. The crops were always abundant and no one ever went to bed hungry. In America there was so much land that everyone could have some of their own.
The Müller brothers and their wives talked about America for hours while their children fell asleep at their feet. Could there really be a place where no person went hungry? A place where there was enough land for whoever wanted it? Where ordinary people could vote for their own leaders and there were no kings or princes, popes or emperors? Where a man could work at whatever he chose, without seeking the say-so of the guilds? Where armies did not march through the country taking whatever they wanted?
Although they had lived for generations under French rule, the Müllers regarded themselves as Alsatian, rather than French or German. They spoke their own form of Germanic dialect, incomprehensible to most beyond both sides of the border. They cherished their own culture and traditions. They may have been foreigners in France, but Napoleon, hungry for troops, was unconcerned about where they came from—”Who cares if they don’t speak French? Their swords do,” he was reported as saying. The Emperor took his crop of young men into Egypt, then came back for a fresh harvest for the Russian campaign, and then another, young and ready to die for him at Waterloo.
Daniel was known as Schuster (or Shoemaker) Müller in the village and Henry as Schlosser (or Locksmith) Müller. They lived above their shops near each other in the village and their children were constantly in each other’s houses. It was never doubted that if a decision were made to migrate to the United States, both families would travel together.
In the following days, as they considered the idea of abandoning the village and their homes, they began to realize the difficulties they faced. To take such a journey would mean they would never return. To their relatives who remained behind, it would be an absence as permanent as death. The journey could never be made in winter, so they would have to leave at the first sign of spring, in just a few months’ time, and Daniel’s wife, Dorothea, had just given birth to a boy. After her fourth child in eight years, Dorothea remained sickly and she wasn’t sure she was up to such a strenuous journey. She sought the advice of another of her sisters, Eva Kropp, who in turn spoke to her own husband. The Kropps had a fifteen-year-old daughter, also called Eva, and the three of them called around one afternoon and joined a long discussion with the Müller brothers and their wives. Toward the end of the meeting the Kropp family announced that they wanted to emigrate as well. Dorothea’s concerns were brushed aside. They could all travel together, they said, and care for her and her new son until she recovered her strength.
When the families met a week later at Henry’s house, also present was another of Dorothea’s sisters, Margaret, and her husband. There were now four families considering plans to emigrate and individual doubts dissolved in the enthusiasm of numbers. Everyone would look after one another’s children and share the cooking of their food. In America they would farm land next to one another; they would help to build one another’s houses and bring in one another’s crops, and the women would carry lunch to the men as they worked in the fields.
Word that the Müllers were emigrating to the New World spread quickly through the village and beyond. Mr. Koelhoffer, who lived an hour’s walk from Langensoultzbach, said that he would quit his farm tomorrow if the Müller brothers would let his family accompany them to America. Christoph Kirchner and his wife Salomé (a sister of the Müller brothers) asked to join in. Mistress Schultzeheimer, the midwife to the village, said she must come, because after everyone had left, there would be no children to deliver. A big meeting was held—they all would leave together: brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, friends, and neighbors.
Across Germany whole villages fell under the spell of an emigration fever (Auswanderungsfieber, as it was dubbed). Possessing little more than the clothes they stood in, they abandoned their shops, farms, and factories and began the long journey to America. A fantasy paradise awaited them, where fertile, watered pastures teemed with deer and buffalo, the forest trees were straight and strong, the rivers jumped with fish, and the lagoons were alive with all manner of fowl.
The villagers of Langensoultzbach were better off than many of the landless peasants making the journey. After they had sold all they owned, they had enough money for the fare to Holland, then for the crossing of the Atlantic, and a little to spare. They had every reason to be optimistic. They were skilled workers with much to offer the new world. The men were farmers, locksmiths, shoemakers, and storekeepers. The women were cooks, milliners, and midwives. They carried Bibles, food, precious musical instruments, and the tools of their trades.
At the first sign of spring, seven families, over forty souls, walked from Langensoultzbach to the Rhine, where a barge awaited them. Pushed along by a river in flood, they arrived in Holland in twenty-five days. From there, it was but a short distance on foot to Amsterdam.
No sooner had they set out than they became aware that they were walking the same roads as thousands of ragged, starving people. They had joined a torrent of refugees from half a dozen countries. Some had come from as far away as Switzerland and Saxony, all making toward a Dutch port and hopeful, somehow, of getting on a ship to America. A German nobleman, Baron von Fürstenwärther, taking the same route as the immigrants, wrote:
I have found the misery of the greatest part of the emigrants greater, and the condition of all of them more perplexing and helpless than I could imagine. Already on my journey to this place on all roads I met hordes of people who, destitute of everything begged their way. Indescribably large were the multitudes of these unfortunates.…24
After walking for two days, the people from Langensoultzbach entered Amsterdam. By the end of the Napoleonic war, Amsterdam’s glory days as a center of world trade were well behind it, and many of its population of 200,000 were living in deep poverty. The City Fathers, barely coping with the distress of their own citizens, were suddenly confronted by an influx of thousands of immigrants camping wherever they could in the city. It was a tragedy in the making, compounded by the shortage of vessels offering passage to America. Transporting impoverished immigrants was a business of low profitability and almost any other cargo would bring in more money. Over the years it had gained a reputation of attracting only the most brutal of captains and crew. Respectable shipowners wouldn’t even consider dealing in the trade. The only way to make it pay was to cram hundreds of passengers into an ill-prepared ship and then skimp on rations during the voyage.
For several days, Daniel Müller called on the warehouses of the canals of Amsterdam asking for news of a vessel which might be sailing to America. Finally, he met a man who told him of a ship preparing to sail. He returned to the camp where the people of his village were staying and told the head of each family to follow him at once. They must purchase their tickets this very day before they were sold to others. Hurriedly they followed him to a warehouse overlooking the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal canal, where in an upstairs room they found the owner of a ship bound for Philadelphia. Gratefully they handed over the last of their savings and he wrote them a receipt and issued them with tickets. They were fortunate, he told them. He had just purchased a man-of-war from the Russian Navy. She was the Rudolph and would be sailing from Helder as soon as he filled her with passengers, and judging from the number of immigrants walking the streets, that shouldn’t take long.
The next day the people from Langensoultzbach packed up their belongings and sailed across the Zuiderzee to the deepwater port of Helder where, in a quiet backwater, their boat halted alongside the Rudolph. They looked at her in horror. She was a lumpy, antiquated hulk, badly in need of paint, with her sails stained with rot. If she had ever been in the service of the Russian Navy, it must have been many years ago. After climbing aboard they stood on a deck of splintered wood and smelled the foul air rising up from stairs leading to the hold. There was no crew to meet them. Instead, thirty or so immigrant families, who had taken over the best cabins, stared at them in open hostility.
The Müller families searched for space below to claim as their own. Of course, those who had arrived first would have to squeeze up, but there wasn’t anyone in charge to whom they could complain. No one on the vessel knew where the crew was. A caretaker came around every few days—an unshaven scarecrow of a man who slept in a shed on the wharf and was usually drunk—but he knew little, and grumbled that he hadn’t been paid for weeks.
A few days later a keelboat pulled alongside the Rudolph, and the passengers leaning over the bulwark watched more people clamber aboard. They told of how they had given the last of their money to a man in Amsterdam on a promise that the Rudolph would sail in just a few days. The newcomers were as poor and as weary as those already on the vessel, but where would they fit? In the bowels of the vessel was a space rank with fetid air and moist underfoot, which had so far been avoided by everyone who had seen it. Men and women with gray skins and dressed in rags descended below, and then returned to the upper deck and looked helplessly around.
Days passed, and still no preparations were made to sail. Then one morning they awoke to find that another fifty people had come aboard overnight. A meeting of the heads of families was held. Over 900 people were now crammed on the vessel and the fear was that the Rudolph’s owner intended to sell even more tickets. Surely he had collected enough money by now to hire a crew and have the vessel depart? The meeting elected Daniel and Henry Müller to go back to Amsterdam and demand that the vessel sail at once.
Sick with worry, the two brothers set off for the city. When they reached the canal, they strode up the stairs of the warehouse, only to find that the door to the office was bolted. After rattling the lock in frustration they went downstairs to speak to a man who ran a chandler’s shop at street level. Yes, he said with a wry smile, he also would like to know where the fellow had gone. He hadn’t paid the rent.
The brothers returned to Helder. They carried news that could have hardly been worse. The master of the Rudolph had disappeared. Everyone’s money had gone with him. He hadn’t paid for the vessel, and the original owners were in the courts claiming ownership. Their ship wasn’t going anywhere.
A quarter of a century later, Madame Hemm told the First District Court of New Orleans of the time she spent on the Rudolph. Nine hundred people remained on the ship, rocking backwards and forwards against the wharf. They hadn’t the means either to continue their journey or to return home, and as a bitter winter descended upon them they were reduced to begging in the streets of Helder.
Madame Hemm was forty-five when she gave this evidence, which made her eighteen when she was on board the Rudolph. She told the court that although her family was from Württemberg, she had become friendly with Daniel Müller’s children. She had played with all of them, but it was with Salomé Müller, a dark, black-eyed child, that she had played the most—insisting to the judge that this explained why she instantly recognized Salomé when she walked through the door of the courtroom.
They waited in enforced idleness, hoping that somehow, by a godsend, the voyage to America could commence. Men who had worked all their lives—farmers, blacksmiths, coopers—were forced to spend their days in idleness as they watched, every few weeks, an immigrant ship, her decks crowded with passengers, slip past them, bound for America. It was cold and wet, and there wasn’t enough food. Several of the passengers died—of hunger, helplessness, disease? Who could tell? Every few weeks a representative of the unpaid owners came to make sure that the Rudolph hadn’t moved. He told them the matter was now before the courts. They showed him their tickets giving them passage to Philadelphia. He shrugged his shoulders. It had nothing to do with him.
Five months passed. Then a port official came aboard one day and told them that a court had ruled that the owners had a right to have their ship returned to them. They must leave the Rudolph immediately. The 900 were to be ferried back to Amsterdam, where they would be looked after, so it was promised, by charities and the city authorities.
There were so many refugees in Amsterdam during those desperate days of 1817 that a quarter of the population was in need of assistance. Charities provided bread, peat for fuel and, occasionally, clothes, blankets, and Bibles. The municipality distributed some food and ran a workhouse. Charities attached to the Catholic Church spoke of their assistance as naked alms, frankly admitting that it was “never so much as to cover half of the elementary needs.”25 To survive, the homeless (which now included the people from Langensoultzbach) did what the homeless always do to survive. They rummaged through garbage, they thieved, they begged, and they went on foraging expeditions to the countryside. But mainly they walked; a shambling, endless journey through the streets of the city and beyond, searching for something to eat. And when the rains came, they began to die. One or two each night, and the municipal authorities came to view the bodies, to satisfy themselves that it wasn’t the plague.
The presence of so many ragged immigrants on the streets of Amsterdam eventually forced the government to announce that it would pay thirty thousand guilders to any ship’s master who would transport them to America. Given the number of passengers involved, thirty thousand guilders was hardly a generous offer and for a time no one came forward. Eventually, however, the immigrants, including the villagers from Langensoultzbach, were told to return to Helder, for a ship was now ready. When they saw her, their hearts sank, for she was another former Russian man-of-war and in even worse condition than the Rudolph. In a cruel irony, the owners had renamed her The New Sea Air.
Crammed into every available space on board a lumbering, rotten ship, the immigrants entered the North Sea at the time of the winter gales. Shortly after they left port, a violent storm fell upon them. The mainmast, rotten to the core, snapped and tumbled in a tangle of rigging and sails to the deck. During a night and a day of dreadful terror, the ship wallowed in mountainous seas. But then, when finally calm seas returned, they “saw the western sun set clear … astern of the ship. Her captain had put her about and was steering for Amsterdam.”26
Dispirited and weary, the passengers waited for what next might befall them. But few peoples are so impoverished that there isn’t some means of taking advantage of them. Mr. Krahnstover, a merchant of Amsterdam, announced that he had three ships at his disposal to take the unfortunate Germans to America. These were no old, converted hulks he was offering, but full-rigged sailing ships: the Emanuel, the brig juffer Johanna, and a brigantine, Johanna Maria. He knew the immigrants had no money to pay for their passage, but there was a way around this. America was truly a land of opportunities. They do things differently there. He gave the head of each family a document and asked him to sign it.
It was a redemption agreement. Its terms allowed the immigrants to travel to America without paying their fares, but when they got there, a frightful cost would be exacted—Krahnstover could sell them and their families into servitude.
Baron von Fürstenwärther, who traveled to America by way of Amsterdam in 1817, obtained a copy of a redemption agreement, similar to, if not the very one, the Müller brothers were required to sign.27
An Amsterdam Ship Contract for Passage to America
We, the undersigned,… hereby assume and obligate ourselves as people of honor.
In the first place, we passengers accept with the above mentioned Captain … (insert name)… our journey from here to … (insert destination) … North America, to behave ourselves quietly during the journey, as good passengers are bound to do, and to be satisfied perfectly with the food specified below and agreed upon by the captain and us, and as regards water and other provisions, if necessity should demand it on account of contrary wind or long journey, to submit to the measures which the captain shall deem necessary.
There followed a schedule of the food to be provided and the cost of passage. For those who could pay in Amsterdam, the price was one hundred and seventy guilders for an adult and eighty-five guilders for a child. For those who couldn’t pay, the adult fare was one hundred and ninety guilders and ninety-five guilders for a child. Then this paragraph:
No passenger shall be permitted without the knowledge of the captain to leave the ship in America, and especially those who have not paid their fare. Should any of the passengers depart in death during the journey the family of such, if he dies beyond half of the way from here shall be required to pay his fare; if he dies this side of half of the way, the loss shall go to the account of the captain.
Just above where the immigrants were required to sign, appeared the words:
We promise to abide by all the above and to this end pledge our persons and our goods, as per right.
This was the essence of a redemption agreement—the power given to the shipowner to sell the immigrants’ persons at journey’s end for a term of years or, if no purchaser could be found, to rifle through their possessions in the search for items of value.
Still a further disappointment awaited the immigrants. Krahnstover’s ships weren’t going to Philadelphia. They were bound for the port of New Orleans in Louisiana. It was a much longer journey, and half a continent away for those who had relatives on the east coast—but it made sense to Krahnstover: in New Orleans, his vessels were assured of an immediate and lucrative return cargo of cotton and sugar.
The immigrants had little choice but to sign. They were refugees trapped in a city weary of their presence, and in the months since leaving home, they had been stripped of their dignity and worn down by defeat and hardship. The few doubters among them were hushed. What did it matter if they were no longer going to Philadelphia? They looked at maps and saw that they were heading further west—to the mouth of the Mississippi fed by a network of inland waterways, deep in the heart of their beloved destination. There they could choose all the land they wanted in an area the size of Europe. And Krahnstover had promised them three ships, instead of one.
But there were more passengers. With new arrivals, their numbers had now swollen to 200 families, 1100 people in all. To accommodate so many, Krahnstover hired workmen to build wooden floors between the upper deck and the hold. He then announced that his ships wouldn’t be sailing together, but one after another, as the carpentry was completed. It took endless discussion and argument among the immigrants to decide who would sail on the first departing ship. The members of the extended Müller clan insisted on remaining together, which meant they would be on the last ship, the Juffer Johanna.
The first to leave was the brigantine Johanna Maria, her deck black with over 250 passengers. Mrs. Fleikener and Madame Hemm were on board. They were young women at the time. Years later, in court, they would recall their sadness at leaving the people they had met on the Rudolph. They had helped each other through sickness, shared their food, and consoled each other during periods of hopelessness and loss.
The next to leave, a week later, was the Emanuel, a fully rigged ship of 300 tons with 350 passengers. Mr. Wagner from Württemberg, then a youngster, and another witness at the trial of Salomé Müller, was on this ship.
Several weeks later, the Juffer Johanna was ready to sail. She was a brig of 370 tons with 500 passengers. On board were the families of Daniel and Henry Müller, the Kropp family, Francis Schuber, the Koelhoffer family, Christoph Kirchner and his wife and daughter, and Madame Carl with her parents. Although emaciated, most were in good health. If anyone was cause for concern, it was Shoemaker Müller’s wife. Dorothea had been ill when she left her home in Alsace, and had been weakened further by the months of worry and hunger. To her, this seemed to be a journey without end, when all she sought was a place where she could rest.
Krahnstover traveled on the Juffer Johanna. Captain Bleeker skippered her, although from the outset it was clear that the man in charge was Krahnstover. Within a day of leaving port he ordered the crew to conduct a search of the immigrants’ luggage, removing firearms and anything else that might conceivably be used as a weapon. No sooner was that done than the crew appeared wearing guns and cudgels. His next announcement was that all food was to be placed in a central store and private stocks wouldn’t be tolerated. He stood on the bridge and watched as his men broke open trunks and upended bags. Little was found—a few sacks of cereal and strips of dried meats—but it was taken just the same.
Bleeker appointed Francis Schuber, a young butcher from Strasburg, as a trustee to dole out the rations to the head of each family. Once a day they lined up and received flour, rice, dried peas, and salted bacon. It was less than had been promised and of the poorest quality, but complaints were brushed aside. The passengers were told that if anyone wanted extra food, it could be purchased from the ship’s store. The same applied to water, which was also in short supply.
Within a week the passengers settled into a routine of daily life. In fine weather, a milling crowd of several hundred shuffled across the decks, avoiding, as best they could, cooking pots, scampering children, and lines of tattered washing. At night, families bedded down in their allotted space below decks, packed so closely together that fleas could jump easily from one body to the next. Ventilation came from an occasional wind gust down the stairs. There was no privacy for the sexes or places of isolation for the sick. During storms the hatches were dropped, and the passengers lay in darkness listening to the waves pounding on the hull and the oak beams groaning.
Some of the drinking water turned foul and had to be tipped overboard. The remaining water, sitting in kegs in the sun, became tainted, but still the passengers thought of little else than the small scoop poured into their cup each morning and in the evenings. Once again it seemed that God was cursing them. Floods and lashing storms had driven them from their lands, and now they were tormented by thirst.
The youngest child of Daniel Müller died two weeks out of Helder, and the very next day Dorothea died—of nothing in particular, it seemed: melancholy, exhaustion, hopelessness. Daniel tucked his son into the crook of his wife’s arm and carried them both onto the deck. He stood there, stone-faced with anger, as the others, fearful of catching whatever mysterious disease had killed his wife and child, peered from behind the mast and only dared to creep closer after he had wrapped them in a canvas sheet. He draped the bundle over his shoulder and, with tears pouring down his cheeks, staggered over to the bulwark and slid it into the sea.
The days turned to weeks, and a second month passed by. Then the third. Water reserves began to run out and rations of food were cut. Little by little the crew extracted the few coins held by the immigrants in exchange for extra supplies. They counted the days. Forty, fifty, sixty. To people who had never seen the sea before, much less ventured to cross it, it seemed endless. Many were weak when they came aboard and their bodies lacked reserves of strength. The ill and the weak began to die, and once the deaths commenced, they continued at the rate of one or two each day. Several passengers, crazed by thirst and despair, jumped overboard. Henry Müller’s wife died.
Children grew up on that voyage. They comforted men and women twice their age. They saw their fathers in tears, as they bellowed out their rage at life, at God, at themselves for taking their families on this journey. Eva Schuber told how, after the death of Dorothea Müller, she, at the age of fifteen, bathed and dressed Dorothea’s three children. Koroline Thomas, who was aged eight, later told the story of how she saved the life of her father, who was dying of thirst, when she discovered that at the back of one of the water casks a drop of water fell every few hours. She placed a small vial under it and twice a day took it to him.28 Husbands nursed mothers whose milk had dried up, and mothers nursed children who became languid in the morning and were dead by nightfall. Even as the hymns were being sung for one, another was preparing to die.
A lawyer, much involved with the welfare of the German community, spoke in court of the horrors faced by the people on that voyage:
I see them now, scantily supplied with provisions, crowded almost to suffocation in their ill-stored prison, delayed by calms, pursuing a circuitous route, and now driven in fury before the raging tempest on the high and giddy waves. I see her people in the solemn burial service, day by day, one after another, committing the worn and wasted forms of their companions to the ocean’s deep, until one half their number is all that is left. There was the burial of a mother, and she left young and helpless orphans.29
It was the might of the Mississippi they saw first, miles out to the sea, advancing like a tawny-colored canal through the blue-green of the ocean. The Juffer Johanna headed toward it, while overhead, gulls, terns, and skimmers circled and swooped. Away in the distance, they saw a line of gray as the cry of “Land, land, America!” came from aloft. If it was America, it was as flat as the Friesland coast. They had expected something grander—a serrated mountain range, perhaps, or a cliff acting as a battlement against invaders. But it was America, they were told. This was America! Their ship, buffeted by the churning foam of the river, headed upstream, following a twisting course marked by buoys through islands of mud and sandbars. At last, at last—they had arrived. They had survived.
Then, after not sighting any other vessels for weeks, those on board the Juffer Johanna were suddenly surrounded by half a dozen ships, all in full sail, making their way to the mouth of the Mississippi. A call went up from some of the passengers that the ship alongside was the Johanna Maria. Mrs. Fleikener and Madame Hemm were on the deck, so close it was possible to shout to them. In joy, they called to each other. Then, in a quite miraculous coincidence, the Emanuel hove into view. The immigrants shouted one to another, across the muddy waters, inquiring how each had fared. The answers cried back were dreadfully similar. They had been becalmed and run out of food and water. Many, many had died. All afternoon, as they passed by vast swamps of shoulder-high grasses, teeming with flocks of geese, more and more names were added to the list of the dead.
Writers give wildly differing estimates of the numbers who died aboard Krahnstover’s vessels. Wheelock S. Upton, writing in 1845, said that there were 800 passengers on the three ships and of them, 450 died. Cable put the total number of passengers at 1,800, of whom 1,200 died. Deiler estimated that 1,100 passengers left Helder and, after consulting maritime records in Louisiana, concluded that 597 arrived in New Orleans, the survivors being: on the Emanuel 200, on the Juffer Johanna 250, and on the Johanna Maria 147.30 It was a rare family who hadn’t experienced death; many had lost several members. Daniel Müller had lost his wife and his youngest child; his brother Henry had lost his wife—an existence so anonymous that no record was kept of her name.
The cause of the tragedy was obvious enough. Given favorable winds the passage from Helder to New Orleans should have taken fifty to sixty days. Krahnstover had hired the dregs of the Amsterdam waterfront as crew and incompetents as captains, and when the wind fell out of the sails, they didn’t know what to do. According to Upton, the “voyage was of the extraordinary duration of four months.” Deiler wrote that the journey took five months. Madame Hemm, a passenger on the Johanna Maria, recalled that it took ninety days.31 The apparent discrepancy arises because three vessels were involved. Krahnstover’s ships barely had provisions for sixty days, and when they ran out of food and water, the immigrants, already in a weakened state when they came aboard, began to die.
It took the three vessels sixteen days to sail the 100 miles up the winding Mississippi to New Orleans. The passengers watched keelboats and steamers making their way downstream to the Gulf of Mexico. They saw whole trees, roots, and branches float past in the muddy waters. At times the ships moved so close to the levee of the river, they could have jumped ashore. They passed through lush meadows, dotted with neat red-roofed cottages. They saw orange and peach trees in blossom and cattle grazing in green pastures. Here was America, just as they imagined it to be. They sailed by large plantation houses set amid fields of sugarcane and saw for the first time people with black skins—a line of them working in a cane field, while a man sitting on a horse watched over them.
They awoke on the morning of March 6,1818, to see a dusky smear hovering in the sky to the north, and were told it was caused by wood fires burning in the kitchens of New Orleans. An hour later, the three ships rounded a bend and there before them was a grand city sitting flush on the banks of the river, the buildings pinked in the warmth of the morning sun. They saw warehouses, smoking factory chimneys, a line of brick terraces and a tiered cathedral with three spires pointing to the heavens. Tied up alongside the banks of the levee, as far as they could see, were hundreds of ships, while busy little ferries crossed backward and forward to a village on the opposite bank.
From the mouth of the Mississippi, Krahnstover had mailed news of his ships’ expected arrival in New Orleans, and for several days an item ran in the Louisiana Gazette advertising the cargo he carried:
Mr. Krahnstover, supercargo of the ship Juffer Johanna, lately arrived from Amsterdam, begs leave to inform the inhabitants of Louisiana who may want Servants of different ages and sexes, laborers, farmers, gardeners, mechanics, etc., that he has brought several Swiss and German passengers who wished to emigrate to the country, which may prove to be very serviceable in their respective capacities. For particulars apply on board or at the store of Mr. T. W. Am Ende, Toulouse St.32
It had been the dream of those accompanying Daniel and Henry Müller that everyone from Langensoultzbach would own adjoining farms and assist each other as neighbors, but now the awful reality struck home: they would be scattered like leaves in the wind to wherever their new masters took them. They would own nothing. They would be servants. Daniel and Henry now prayed for something far less ambitious—only that they would be able to stay together, two widowers with six children between them. A wealthy farmer, perhaps someone with a large estate, might take them as a whole.
When the Emanuel, the juffer Johanna, and the Johanna Maria docked in New Orleans, Krahnstover didn’t allow his passengers to disembark. Fearful that some might run away, he posted guards near the gangplanks. For hours the immigrants stood on deck watching ships and steamers pass by. Evening came and they could hear the noise and activity of the city across the apron of the wharf, while on the other side of the river, too wide for anyone to swim, they could see the lights of Algiers. Surely it would be their last night on board? In apprehension and hope they waited for the morning, when Americans were to come to bid for them.
The next day a noisy throng of farmers, merchants and commercial gentlemen and their wives gathered on the levee to visit each of the three vessels in turn. Some wanted families to take into rural Louisiana. Others wanted men to act as overseers of slave gangs on cotton plantations while their wives worked as cooks and maids in the big house. Engineers were looking for strong men to help build the wharves and canals being constructed in the city. Merchants sought skilled tradesmen in printing and tailoring.
The bargaining, such as it was, was conducted through the captain of each ship. His interest in the welfare of the immigrant families was quite limited—he hardly cared how many years of servitude were settled upon, so long as the purchaser paid enough to cover any amount owing on the fare. The immigrants were at a disadvantage at every turn. They had no idea of their own value, or what their masters intended for them after they were sold. The negotiations were conducted in a tongue they didn’t understand and, when they were concluded, the newcomers were taken before a notary or a parish judge and asked to sign an indenture in a language they couldn’t read.
History hasn’t left a description of the sale of the people from Krahnstover’s vessels in New Orleans in 1818; however, an idea of what happened to them may be gauged from the experiences of the shiploads of redemptioners from Amsterdam who arrived in Baltimore and Philadelphia in the same year. A German writer, Johannes Ulrich Buechler, wrote of his visit to a redemptioners’ market aboard the Hope, in Baltimore:
… many ladies and gentlemen came to inspect the new arrivals and to confer with the ship owner who had with him an exact list of all families and persons who had not paid and also those who had paid in Amsterdam. I noticed that these ladies and gentlemen had in view especially small children and young people and I believe if there had been thousands of boys and girls on this ship, they would all have found desirable places.…
At first boys and daughters from 9 to 20 years were selected, also small children. As soon as they had agreed about the price, the purchasers departed with the young people they had bought. Then came a selection from the rest—farmers, artisans, etc.—so that I thought the ship would be empty in two days.
On the following day, a Sunday and a beautiful day, ladies and gentlemen as well as farmers and many other persons came to visit the parents and the remaining immigrants and brought bread, apples, tidbits and other things for the little children. Some of the girls who had left the ship only the day before, on Saturday, came back dressed in French clothing so that I would not have recognized them, had they not made themselves known.…
Now let me explain how these people were traded off for their debt. Mechanics had to serve from one and a half to two and two and a half years, according to their abilities; peasant families three to three and a half years; girls of 16 to 20 years of age, up to four years; children from 2 to 12 and 15 years of age must remain till their 20th year or more, some of them even for life. During this time they forget their mother tongue as well as their parents, for in such houses nothing but English is spoken. Children from 2 to 15 years of age have been separated from their parents. Some parties have paid off their whole debt for the trip in this way, by surrendering their children. Separated from their parents, these children often never find each other again….33
Henry Bradshaw Fearon, an Englishman, “in company with a boot-maker of this city,” visited the brig Bubona, docked at the wharves of the Delaware River in Philadelphia:
As we ascended the side of this hulk, a most revolting scene of want and misery presented itself. The eye involuntarily turned for some relief from the horrible picture of human suffering.… [The boot-maker] enquired if there were any shoemakers on board. The captain advanced:… He called in the Dutch language for shoemakers, and never can I forget the scene which followed. The poor fellows came running up with unspeakable delight, no doubt anticipating a relief from their loathsome dungeon. Their clothes, if rags deserve that denomination, actually perfumed the air. Some were without shirts, others had this article of dress, but of a quality as coarse as the worst packing cloth. I enquired of several if they could speak English. They smiled, and gabbled, “No Engly, no Engly,—one Engly ‘talk ship.’” The deck was filthy. The cooking, washing, and necessary departments were close together. Such is the mercenary barbarity of the Americans who are engaged in this trade, that they crammed into one of those vessels 500 passengers, 80 of whom died on the passage. The price for women is about 70 dollars, men 80 dollars, boys 60 dollars. When they saw at our departures that we had not purchased, their countenances fell to that standard of stupid gloom which seemed to place them a link below rational beings.34
In the Southern states, redemptioners were in competition with slaves, and as the price of slaves steadily increased over the years, redemptioners were seen by many to be the better bargain. Redemptioners were cheaper—as a rule of thumb, five or six could be purchased for the price of one slave, although it should be kept in mind that the buyer was only getting servitude for a term of years, rather than labor for life. An added advantage was that when redemptioners became ill, or unproductive through injury, they could be released to fend for themselves, while a master was morally and legally obliged to provide for his slaves until their death.*
Louisiana law specifically provided that the redemptioner’s contract of servitude was “equivalent to a sale” and a master could “correct [that is, whip] his indentured servant for negligence or other misbehavior, provided he did so with moderation.” The master, for his part, was obliged to provide the redemptioner with “good and sufficient food, meat, drink, washing, and lodgings.”35
Just as slaves ran away, so did redemptioners, and it was common to see, side by side, newspaper advertisements for their recovery. The following notices, all relating to Germans (very probably brought to New Orleans in Krahnstover’s ships), appeared in the Louisiana Gazette.36
Redemptioners Escaped!
A German family, consisting of a father, whose name is Andreas Thomas, and of a mother and four children, have gone off without serving the time stipulated in their engagements. Notice is hereby given that those who may harbor any individual of the family aforesaid or give them employ, will be prosecuted according to law. A reward will be paid for placing the said Thomas in the hands of the sheriff who has an order to arrest him.
Sixty Dollars Reward
Absconded from the subscriber’s employ on the 6th inst., Four German Redemptioners—they are all young men, well made, and of middle size, and were dressed in Russian sheeting pantaloons, and shirts, red waist-coats and boots.
Ten Dollars reward and all reasonable charges will be paid for their apprehension and also 20 Dollars for John Miller, a sailor who enticed them away. Miller speaks Dutch and broken English, has an impediment in his speech, wears a blue cloth jacket, yellow vest and duck pantaloons, has been in the army and is much addicted to drink.
Captains of vessels and others are cautioned against harboring the above named runaways.
H.W. Palfry
Ran away last evening from the subscriber, Two German Redemptioners, namely:
George Stroule, about 28 years of age, 5 feet, 7 inches high, dark complexion and slender make; had on a blue jacket and gray pantaloons with other clothes of the fashion of his country.
Marion Mowry, wife of the said Stroule, about 30 years of age, nearly as tall as her husband, a little pock marked and dressed in the manner of her country.
The above reward will be paid for securing these redemptioners in jail or bringing them to
Lewis Mageonie,
On the Canal, suburb Marigny
By the end of that first day, the services of more than half of the passengers on Krahnstover’s ships had been sold. Madame Hemm was engaged by a family in Baton Rouge. Mrs. Fleikener, then in her teens, was taken to work as a domestic at the plantation of Maunsell White, one of the capitalist giants of Louisiana and founder of the Improvement Bank. Mistress Schultzeheimer went to look after the master’s children on the Hopkins plantation, just outside New Orleans. Madame Carl became a domestic for a wealthy Creole family in the French Quarter. Dorothy Kirchner, the teenage daughter of Christoph and Salomé Kirchner, went to a plantation three miles downriver from the city.
Those staying on board watched enviously as the people who had been sold readied themselves to depart. There was barely time for farewells—their new masters awaited. As those leaving packed their bags they whispered to their friends the names of the men who had bought them and where they were going—places with strange names: St. Charles, Iberville, Pointe Coupée, New Iberia, Rapides. A few were being taken to states upriver: Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri. Somehow, they would keep in contact, they promised. Somehow.
Both the Müller brothers were left behind. In a society where blacks did the manual work, shoemakers and locksmiths weren’t in high demand. The future Eva Schuber, then a fifteen-year-old member of the Kropp family, also remained. An open-faced girl with the sturdy stature of a strong worker, she could have been sold ten times over, but her parents refused. They had set their hopes on a purchaser taking the whole family.
The next day, sales weren’t so brisk. The pick of the passengers had been taken, and Krahnstover feared that with so many redemptioners on offer, he had oversupplied the market. Still, purchasers came, and as the days passed, his ships slowly emptied. Each morning the Müller brothers waited with their children on the main deck, and each afternoon they remained unsold. It was an experience of bewildering humiliation. In Langensoultzbach they were valued as skilled tradesmen, yet here in America they were unwanted. They began to wonder how long they would have to remain on board. Under the terms of their redemption contract, the cost of keeping them alive while in port was added to their price, so they were becoming more expensive as each day passed.
At the end of the week, Eva Kropp’s parents, worn down by the prospect of being imprisoned indefinitely, agreed to sell their daughter separately, but at least they were all to remain in New Orleans. Eva was engaged as a domestic to a Creole woman, Madame Borgnette, who ran a boarding school for young ladies in Chartres Street, while her parents took positions in a house in the Faubourg Marigny.
Meanwhile, the immigrants already released into the city complained bitterly to their new masters about the deaths and deprivations aboard Krahnstover’s ships, and the brutality of the crews. As news of their ill-treatment spread, several gentlemen in the German community of New Orleans were so outraged by what had occurred that they engaged counsel to pursue Krahnstover in court. One of those hired was a young lawyer in the city named John Randolph Grymes. In the telling of the story of the Lost German Slave Girl, Grymes reappeared a quarter of a century later to represent the slave owners opposed to Salomé Müller’s bid for freedom. The papers associated with the lawsuit against Krahnstover have been lost and it is difficult to know what happened. However, one thing is clear: Grymes wasn’t able to achieve anything for his clients.* It isn’t apparent why the action fizzled—one would have thought that since half of Krahnstover’s passengers had died during the voyage, there would have been a good chance of successfully suing him for something—but then again, these were more robust times, as this report in the Louisiana Gazette, published a week after the immigrants’ arrival, demonstrates:
German Redemptioners
The public attention has been much occupied the last few days with this description of emigrants that have lately arrived from Amsterdam. The novelty of the circumstance has excited feelings of much interest, and many reports, it is believed, have gone abroad, calculated to make a very unfavorable impression as to the usage of those people on the passage, & their introduction here to servitude. It is always gratifying to see public sympathy enlisted on the side of humanity; & it is the glory of our country that the oppressed and the poor of all nations find in our Land an asylum of protecting justice: but we ought, at the same time guard against any impressions which arise only from our feelings, and are not supported either by the existence of facts, or the intrinsic welfare of the objects of our commiseration. These emigrants have come here under special engagement to redeem the expense of their passage hither by voluntary servitude.… That there are many privations and sufferings incidental to a voyage of this nature, is undeniable; but from the appearance of those people now in our city, we should not conclude that their case has been more than ordinarily so. The servitude they have to submit to here, is not of a grievous kind, and probably will leave them more vitally free than the political institutions of their own country.…37
The deaths of hundreds of immigrants may not have unduly disturbed the citizens of New Orleans, but then it was discovered that Krahnstover had sold several German families to free blacks. This was something to be concerned about. One of the most sacred taboos of the South had been broken—white people had become the servants of those with colored skin. The Louisiana legislature was in session at the time, and so strong was the sense of outrage that within two days of being advised of what had occurred, it had passed legislation undoing the sales. It was declared to be “the duty of the attorney general” to notify the people of color who had engaged white people that such an engagement was contrary to the true intent and meaning of the law. The Act went on: If “free people of color shall refuse or neglect to comply with the said notice, the attorney general shall immediately commence an action against them to have the contract rescinded….”
The legislature also took the opportunity to make some minor amendments to the law relating to redemptioners. There was no general attack on the system; quite the contrary, the revisions confirmed the right to hold immigrants as prisoners until they were sold. It was declared:
That it shall be lawful for the master, owner, or consignee of any vessel importing redemptioners into this state … to keep and detain said redemptioners on board the vessel wherein they were imported, until the price of their passage be paid, or until they be bound to service pursuant to the provisions of this act.
Some remedial provisions were also passed. The legislature gave notice that twelve months after the passing of the act, if any ship arrived in the state with more than “two persons for every three tons of the burthen of such vessels,” or if the passengers had not been “well supplied with good and sufficient meat and drink, particularly fresh water,” the shipowners would forfeit their right to sell the passengers as redemptioners. Another law provided “That when any white persons are imported into this state as redemptioners, it shall be the duty of the Governor … to appoint two or more discreet and suitable persons, well acquainted with the language of such redemptioners to be guardians.” It was the duty of the guardians to board every vessel importing redemptioners and inquire into the contracts they may have made, and whether they had been cruelly treated during the voyage.38
These reforms, having effect only for the future, were of no assistance to the Müller brothers. Every day for two weeks Henry and Daniel stood on the deck of the Juffer Johanna with their children, waiting in vain for someone to purchase them. Every night for two weeks, after the children had gone to sleep, the brothers anxiously discussed their fate. Surely, said Henry, his brother must realize that it was unlikely that they would ever be sold complete as two families. Couldn’t he see that the buyers coming on board were interested only in their children? It had to be faced that the best they could hope for now was that each of them would be able to keep their children with them.
One day, at the beginning of the third week, Henry returned to the cabin to announce to Daniel that he had had enough. He couldn’t bear the thought of remaining another day on the ship that had taken the lives of his wife and so many of the people from his village. There was a farmer on the deck who would keep the family together, and he was going upstairs to agree to his terms. He begged his brother not to judge him too harshly. There was no other way. He thrust a copy of his new master’s address into his brother’s hands. He was going to Bayou Sara. The farmer had said it wasn’t too distant, just four days sailing up the Mississippi. Henry promised to write as soon as he arrived. They would only be apart for a few years. He took Daniel into a quick embrace and departed.
Carrying everything they possessed, Henry and his three children followed their new master down the gangplank and stepped onto American soil. After all the sacrifices, heartache, and death, they had arrived. This was America, but they were no longer free. Their passage to America had been paid three times—once by themselves, once by the Dutch government, and, finally, by their own servitude.
A week later a man dressed in rags, and clearly ill, rang the bell at the entrance of Madame Borgnette’s school for young ladies in the French Quarter. Peering shyly from behind his legs was a boy and two young girls. The door was opened by the femme de chambre, who, after ascertaining their business, directed them to the scullery, via a lane at the side of the house. There Daniel Müller found Eva Kropp, her sleeves rolled up, scrubbing a large blackened pot. She looked at him in alarm. He was dreadfully thin and black shadows circled his eyes. His shoes were held together with string, the cuffs of his shirt were frayed, and his children were dressed in ill-fitting garments, obviously the gift of some charity. He had good news, he told Eva. They had somewhere to go. He had bound himself and Jacob, Dorothea, and Salomé to work for a wealthy landowner in Attakapas. They were to set sail that afternoon in a keelboat.
Eva Kropp drew the children to her waist. She asked how he could possibly look after three young children. She pleaded with him to at least let her take the youngest. It would only be until he called for her and then he could have her back. Daniel shook his head. Salomé would be staying with him. He was her father and he would never give her up. He began to cry. Ashamed of earning the pity of a fifteen-year-old girl, he then turned away and, taking Salomé’s hand, walked off while his other two children followed behind.