NORWEGIAN MIGRATION TO AMERICA BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR

Abstract

NORWEGIAN MIGRATION TO AMERICA BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR* By Brynjolf J. Hovde For a generation American historians have been supremely aware of the importance of the frontier in the development of the American people. Professor Frederick Jackson Turner has had the satisfaction, vouchsafed to very few historians, of seeing the thesis that he propounded become almost the obsession of students of American history. It has been an exceedingly fruitful "obsession," and there are adequate reasons to indicate that it has not, even yet, yielded all the results of which it is capable.1 So far, however , the frontier has been studied almost entirely as an isolated phenomenon; usually the frontiersman has been accepted as having arrived, and has then been studied in his new environment. There has been comparatively little emphasis placed upon his European origins. It ought to be obvious, however, and fortunately it is becoming so, that of all American historical phenomena the frontier, the westward thrust of population, is probably least to be considered as an independent unit. The behavior of the individual under frontier conditions was no doubt determined in very large measure by that immediate environment, but no one in this age of the biological and sociological sciences would dispute the contention that the pre-frontier racial and social heredity of the individual must also be taken into account. The interest in the westward movement therefore carried within * Theodore C. Biegen, Norwegian Migration to America, 1825-1860 . (Northfield , Minnesota, The Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1931. xi, 413. $3.50.) 1 Cf. Professor John W. Oliver's interesting résumé of the assessment of the results produced by this school of historians made at the annual meeting of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association at Louisville in 1931, in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 18:218-220 (September, 1931). 162 NORWEGIAN MIGRATION TO AMERICA 163 itself the germ of a new interest, namely that in immigration . There has always been some interest in immigration history , to be sure; but it has been cultivated chiefly by emotional enthusiasts who had not the disciplined critical faculty that is characteristic of the best historical scholars. There are, of course, worthy exceptions to this statement; in the special field of Norwegian immigration, for example, the work of Professor George T. Flom might be mentioned. It remains true, nevertheless, that the brightest prospects for the field of immigration history have come with the assumption of this field by such men as Professors George M. Stephenson, Marcus L. Hansen, and Theodore C. Biegen. Professor Blegen's recently published volume, Norwegian Migration to America , 1825-1860 , affords excellent proof of what may be expected in immigration history when it is cultivated by scholars who have adequate background and preparation. This book is a marker in the literature of its kind, not because it inaugurates the study of Norwegian immigration, for few immigrant groups have been so conscious of their own history as the Norwegian-American; not because it reveals hidden causes and startling movements; but because it presents what will probably for a long time to come prove to be the most exhaustive and most definitive study of a limited period of Norwegian immigration that has been made. The volume is marked by a skillful organization of a highly complex and varied body of material, achieved by a happy blending of the topical and chronological methods of arrangement. The first five chapters deal with the first origins and earliest development of the emigration movement in nineteenth-century Norway, and carry the story down to about 1840. The first chapter contains an adequate, though highly compressed, exposition of the general political, economic , and social conditions of Norway in the nineteenth 164 STUDIES AND RECORDS century, especially during the first quarter. By constant allusions, in specific cases throughout the remainder of the volume, the author makes up very largely for the brevity of this discussion. There is nowhere in either Norwegian or English a more authoritative account of the " Sloopers," the first party of Norwegian emigrants to America (1825), than is to be found in Blegen's second chapter and in the appendix to his book. The third, fourth, and fifth chapters measure up well to...