Why Did So Many Germans Come to the Midwest in the 1800s?

Did slavery in the Deep South drive German emigration to the Midwest?

My grandma, Marian Gaertner (nee Lovekamp) — All of her ancestors came from the Osnabrück region of Northern Europe

What about the potato?

Or the Haitian Revolution?

Or the removal of Indigenous people from their homelands?

All of them? None of them?

I think everything is connected and it is worth pursuing connections in history because they can tell us something about our present-day situation.

What could German emigration have to do with slavery? I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

I was reading a book set in the Southern United States during slavery and the author referred to the fabric of the clothing worn by an enslaved person as “osnaburg.” That rang a bell for me. My own German-heritage grandmother’s ancestors all came over in the mid-1800s from the Osnabrück region of northern Europe.

Questions abound. Why would enslaved people on a cotton plantation not be wearing cotton clothing? What even is osnaburg? And why is that name similar to my Grandma’s ancestral home?

A little googling helps. Osnaburg is the name given to a rough fabric made from flax. The center of production for flax and osnaburg was the city of Osnabrück and the rural area around it. Osnaburg was actually also produced throughout the British Isles and Northern Europe and was an important fabric for colonial North America too.

The production of fabric from flax was a huge economic boon for people in Northern Europe in the 1700s and 1800s. Before the Industrial Revolution, fabric was mostly produced in homes. This was the fabled “cottage industry.” Flax was grown on small farms and transformed on the farms into a value-added product.

I have a theory.

My theory is that a flood of cheap cotton from slave states in America killed the cottage industry in flax in the Osnabrück region, driving emigration.

When Eli Whitney patented a mechanical cotton gin in 1794, it exponentially increased the speed of removing cotton seeds from the fibers. The cotton gin changed the economics of growing cotton at the same time as the new nation of the United…