While Fritz Rasmussen closed out 1863 thinking about the draft, that same year had begun with discussions about issues of race. In its first editorial of 1863, Hemlandet celebrated “a new epoch” in “this country’s history” as slavery had been abolished, the rebellion’s backbone broken, and freedom reestablished.Footnote ¹ Still, Hemlandet’s articles demonstrated continued widespread feelings of vengeance toward Dakota bands, and the lead-up to emancipation revealed a lack of support for racial equality within the Scandinavian-American community.Footnote ²

Throughout 1862, expressions of racial superiority occurred regularly even among professed anti-slavery officers. On January 15, 1862, Ferdinand Winslöw, chief quartermaster for the Army of the Southwest, described his “elegant free darkie” servant, Homer Grimes, as a “nigger” ready “for any command,” and a few months later Colonel Hans Heg noted his young Black servant working hard while acting as “a good Nigger.”Footnote ³ Additionally, in an undated letter to his Danish-born father, seemingly composed in 1862, seventeen-year-old Charles Adolphus Lund wrote from Racine, Wisconsin: “I do not believe in letting the Negro free, not by a good deal.”Footnote ⁴

Yet military developments prompted renewed assessment of race relations, not least within the Lincoln administration, and the Scandinavian-American press followed events closely. As the main Union Army frantically chased Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia into Maryland during the first half of September 1862, the Scandinavian-American press, drawing on east coast newspapers, published weekly situation reports.Footnote ⁵ In a by-now well-known turn of events, a Union corporal’s discovery of Lee’s Special Order 191, detailing the Confederate Army’s movements, gave the government troops an unprecedented advantage, and the subsequent costly battle around Antietam Creek on September 17 forced the invaders back.Footnote ⁶ The victory gave President Lincoln a successful military pretext for issuing the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, which Emigranten (notably commenting on the proclamation’s military instead of moral impact) described as a “mighty step forward in suppressing the rebellion.”Footnote ⁷ Lincoln’s proclamation proposed to compensate states in the Union that set “immediate or gradual” abolition in motion but, as we have seen, also kept the option of colonization, with freedpeople’s consent, open.Footnote ⁸ Thus, the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation implicitly reinforced a view of white citizenship that was also demonstrated in Secretary Seward’s Homestead Act promotion in Europe and further underlined by his September 30 attempt to open colonization negotiations with Great Britain, France, Holland, and Denmark.Footnote ⁹

Figure 9.1 Ferdinand Winslöw (bottom right) wrote more than 100 letters to his wife, Wilhemina, during the Civil War, as did Hans Heg to his wife, Gunild, and both at times expressed a sense of white racial superiority.

Courtesy Winslow Family Private Collection and Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum Archives.

Yet, even with its underlying premise of a continued white man’s republic, the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was controversial. From 1862 and forward, Democrats, according to Eric Foner, raised fears that “Emancipation would produce ‘scenes of lust and rapine’ in the South and unleash ‘a swarthy inundation of negro laborers and paupers’ on the North.”Footnote ¹⁰ With a message amplified through sympathetic editors, the Democratic Party hammered at the lack of military success, the ineffective leadership, the poor economy, and the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation’s impotence ahead of the 1862 midterms. As Green Bay Advocate editor Charles D. Robinson opined on October 2, 1862, you had to “catch your rabbit” before you could cook it, and the proclamation had no effect until “the States in rebellion” were once again brought “under the jurisdiction of the constitution.”Footnote ¹¹

During this time of economic and military anxiety, Democratic viewpoints, as we have seen, appealed to some Scandinavian-born immigrants in New Denmark, and even among otherwise solid Republican supporters in the Scandinavian community, the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation received a lukewarm reception. Swedish-born Frans O. Danielson, serving in the 29th Iowa, wrote to his siblings that he was glad to hear that the Republican Party had a lot of support back in New Sweden before commenting on the soldiers’ reaction to Lincoln’s proclamation: “There are some bitterly opposed to it but they will have to grin and bear it,” Danielson wrote.Footnote ¹² Perhaps more revealing, Danielson, who had observed runaway slaves up close as part of the Army of the Southwest in Helena, Arkansas, added: “Let me know if you have got Niggers up in Iowa yet, and what you think of freeing them and sending them North. We have got thousands of the buggers down here. For my part I don’t think much of them.”Footnote ¹³

In expressing views of Black people’s inferior status, however, Scandinavian immigrants were far from alone.Footnote ¹⁴ Responding to an equipment request from the Army of the Southwest, Major-General Henry W. Halleck suggested that the army’s commander, Samuel R. Curtis, and his “antislavery politics” were part of a larger problem, as Congress was “so busy discussing the eternal nigger question” that they failed to make the necessary appropriations.Footnote ¹⁵ Moreover, as Curtis’ army advanced toward Helena in the spring and summer of 1862, enslaved people by the thousands “abandoned their masters” and joined the march, which foreshadowed the challenges and criticism of emancipation along the banks of the Mississippi River.Footnote ¹⁶ Curtis, who was closely aligned with German-born anti-slavery radicals in his ranks and personally close with Ferdinand Winslöw, liberally issued free papers and allowed former slaves to sell cotton from nearby plantations, which opened him up to censure from more conservative officers.Footnote ¹⁷

When Curtis was transferred for a higher command in August 1862, his division commander Frederick Steele, an opponent of emancipation, took command at Helena and detailed his view of the Army of the Southwest’s condition in a letter to President Lincoln dated February 15, 1863:

Thus, Steele placed blame for the army’s poor condition on fugitives, but – in shaping conditions on the ground – the Union Army’s white officers bore the primary responsibility. At Helena, some Union officers even took advantage of the situation to advance their personal economic interests by confiscating cotton from nearby plantations. One such officer, among several, was Ferdinand Winslöw. While attempting to control chaotic conditions around Helena, the Danish-born quartermaster sold horses, demanded a stake in a local business, and in all likelihood profited privately from cotton sales that were meant by Curtis to help support the numerous refugees living under desperate conditions.Footnote ¹⁹ In other words, Winslöw, by taking advantage of his position as chief quartermaster, in several instances chose pecuniary gain at the expense of his professed abolitionist values of “equality and freedom.”Footnote ²⁰

Figure 9.2 Major-General Samuel Curtis and Staff photographed in St. Louis in late 1861 or early 1862. Winslöw is seated to the far left.

Courtesy Sadovnikoff Family Private Collection.

The soldiers on the ground understood the situation clearly. Danish-born Anders M. Koppel wrote about the soldiers’ “disgust” with the “cotton expeditions” in the summer of 1862.Footnote ²¹ Additionally, Calvin P. Alling, who like Koppel served in the 11th Wisconsin, pointed out Colonel Charles Hovey of the 33rd Illinois Infantry Regiment as one of the central actors engaged in illegal speculation around Helena and wrote that “some of the regiments engaged in stealing and smuggling cotton, in the name of the Government,” but shipped it north to St. Louis and sold it “as their own.”Footnote ²²

The cotton speculation going on around Helena in 1862 – and the private gain that followed – led to a “Court of Inquiry” in 1863 that implicated several high-ranking Union officers such as General Curtis (and his quartermaster Winslöw) in an attempt to ascertain, among other things, whether “officers in the service have been engaged, or directly or indirectly participated in traffic in Cotton or other produce on the Mississippi River.”Footnote ²³ The court case was mostly presented to the public as a problem of officers overstepping their responsibilities as public servants in relation to the government, but that same government was by 1862 also responsible for providing for thousands of runaways.Footnote ²⁴ The human cost of Union officers’ private profit, however, was only cursorily considered by the court and the press, though the lack of resources in and around Helena, in part due to the cotton traffic, was underscored in a letter – loaded with assumptions about Black people’s capacity for citizenship – written by Acting Assistant Quartermaster B. O. Carr and sent to Winslöw on July 24, 1862:Footnote ²⁵

Steele and Carr’s description of Black fugitives revealed the unequal power relationships between white soldiers and future freedpeople, as well as an ideology of white superiority that was also mirrored by civilians in the Midwest. In Leslie A. Schwalm’s words:

Concerns of freedpeople’s mobility were also voiced in Hemlandet on October 22, 1862. The paper warned that “a certain party” was trying to stir up the Irish as well as the working class by inciting fear of wage-based competition if “masses” of freedpeople should migrate to the North.Footnote ²⁸ Hemlandet, however, reassured its readership that, while “black migration lowers the wages for white labor,” there was no reason to despair:Footnote ²⁹ “The South is the black race’s natural home, the negro thrives the most in the tropical regions.”Footnote ³⁰

News of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation had likely reached civilian Scandinavian-born immigrants a month earlier, when Hemlandet on September 24 announced it as “a fatal blow to the rebellion” and Emigranten a few days later noted that the president would declare “all slaves free” in the states where the rebellion was maintained by the end of the year.Footnote ³¹ Still, the Scandinavian-American press spent little subsequent editorial energy on emancipation and instead devoted itself mostly to weekly description of military affairs, coverage of the US–Dakota War in Minnesota, and updates on the draft.Footnote ³²

A sense of Scandinavian immigrants’ position on emancipation could, however, be gleaned from later published letters and editorials. Henrik (Henry) Syvertsen, a Norwegian immigrant with a degree from the Royal Frederick University in present-day Oslo, was curiously silent on the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation when he penned a letter, focused on military matters, to Emigranten on October 18, 1862, from Kentucky; but later in the war he published a letter in the Norwegian-language Fædrelandet (the Fatherland) about the teachings of phrenology and his belief that “a negro [is] unfit for higher education.”Footnote ³³

In his letter, dated May 30, 1864, Syvertsen reinforced his view of racial superiority, as he sought to allay his Scandinavian-American readers’ fear over amalgamation by stating: “I doubt, that a time should come when an educated, moral woman would marry a Negro. The loathsome stench alone that comes off a Negro in the summertime would be an insurmountable obstacle.”Footnote ³⁴ Leading up to the 1864 presidential election, Syvertsen also penned a long letter for Fædrelandet with a sense of sensation and ironic distance about local residents’ reaction to the newly deployed Black provost guards: “Just imagine, that Negroes, whom these aristocratic Lexingtonians always have treated and considered animals, that these now should guard them, that was over the top.”Footnote ³⁵

Fædrelandet, published out of La Crosse, Wisconsin, launched its first edition on January 14, 1864 and claimed to be an unabashedly Union paper, but not because of President Abraham Lincoln, nor because of “Negro emancipation”; rather, it was a Union paper because the pure American republic, created “on liberty and equality,” was a truly “glorious institution in accordance with human and divine law.”Footnote ³⁶

Though the Union war effort by 1864 was intimately tied to liberty through abolition, the connection was less pronounced in Fædrelandet’s coverage.Footnote ³⁷ The paper’s distinction between “Negro emancipation” on the one hand and American foundational values of “Liberty and Equality” on the other indicated that, despite freedpeople’s crucial contributions to the United States military, support for their future economic and political rights in American society could not be taken for granted among opinion leaders in the Scandinavian-American community.Footnote ³⁸

In an April 7, 1865, editorial with distinct echoes of the racial stereotypes put forth by Hemlandet in 1862, Emigranten’s editor Carl Fredrik Solberg penned an editorial asking “what will be done with these freedmen.”Footnote ³⁹ Solberg painted a scenario where freedpeople could “come up here and flood our Northern states” and change the cities’ appearances with “black or yellow skin, their wooly head, and white teeth.” Even more ominously, the editor asked: “Would they not, with government authority, come and acquire space and become our neighbors and (oof!) our in-laws?”Footnote ⁴⁰ Emigranten continued: “Would not these poor, helpless, poor, wretched, perplexed colored people,” lacking legal rights, come North and cause difficulties as a “new and priviledged class of beggars and paupers?”Footnote ⁴¹ The answer, Emigraten assured its readership, was comforting:

The racial ideology expressed in the Scandinavian-American public and private spheres regarding emancipation would continue to inform perceptions for years. The conclusion drawn, almost universally, was that slavery was a stain on American democracy and the institution’s demise consequently a blessing, but freedom did not equal a broad embrace of liberty and equality for nonwhites. Moreover, emancipation debates often played a marginal role on the homefront in midwestern communities even as draft legislation sent an ever-increasing proportion of Scandinavian-born men South. Probably hundreds, if not thousands, of Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes witnessed Black soldiers’ war service up close as part of the armed forces where they were confronted directly with the question of freedpeople’s rights. Those left behind, however, mainly discussed the duties of citizenship.

As we have seen, liberty in the eyes of Scandinavian immigrants often meant a liberal government, freedom of religion, and equality in societal matters. The Lincoln administration’s conscription policy was therefore regularly perceived as undermining the ideal of a limited government protecting individual rights. Yet the paradox between love of liberty and reluctance to defend it was almost completely absent in discussions in the Scandinavian-American public and private spheres by 1864.

A week before Fædrelandet’s first edition, on January 7, 1864, Fritz Rasmussen described correspondence with the local provost marshal about conscription. Rasmussen’s inquiry was prompted by conversations with several inhabitants of New Denmark about avoiding the draft – specifically Rasmussen’s ability to cheaply make out papers vouching for residents who had not declared their intent to naturalize.Footnote ⁴³ Little more than a month later, on February 15, 1864, Rasmussen detailed a special meeting by New Denmark’s residents at the local schoolhouse with the sole purpose “of voting a tax upon the town, to procure Volunteers, so as to avoid the Draft, so much the dread of the community.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Usually local meetings ran long due to disagreement, but this was different. “I must say that I have, as yet, not attended any kind of meeting, for whatever purpose, which have proved so unanimous to the subject matter for consideration as this one,” Rasmussen wrote:Footnote ⁴⁵

On February 24, 1864, Rasmussen again dealt with draft-related issues, as his father-in-law came over and wanted his help with paperwork related to draft exemption.Footnote ⁴⁷ Additionally, in March the Brown County–based vice-consul for Sweden and Norway, Otto Tank, published several “Consular Announcements” in the Scandinavian-American newspapers dealing concretely with the issue of citizenship.Footnote ⁴⁸ Swedish or Norwegian subjects could obtain a consular certificate to ensure exemption from military service, if they paid $2; had sworn testimony certifying their “place of birth,” “age,” “arrival in the United States,” and “places lived”; and confirmed “not having voted nor declared their intent to become citizen of the United States.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The related issues of citizenship, duty, and conscription only took on increased importance given the mounting Union losses in eastern and western theaters during the spring and early summer of 1864 and revealed a continued chasm between ethnic elite rhetoric and the sentiment in Scandinavian communities – though also a realization on the part of Scandinavian editors that the draft issue was a prime concern among their readers.Footnote ⁵⁰

On November 16, 1863, Emigranten had warned its readership that “the conditions for exemption” were “very strict,” but it nevertheless provided a very detailed description of what conditions could lead to draft exemption.Footnote ⁵¹ Emigranten’s message had been clear: it was more the exception than the rule to get out of military service because of one’s physical condition.Footnote ⁵² A week later, however, a reader emphasized that there was also an important legal component to military exemption. On November 23, 1863, a pointed critique aimed at the Norwegian consul in Wisconsin appeared in the pages of Emigranten:

These Norwegians surely fell under the protection of the Norwegian consul, the correspondent B. W. Suckow, argued, and he chastised the allegedly inexperienced representative for consulting American authorities before issuing “protection-documents.” As an example of the consul’s incompetence, Suckow recounted the story of a twenty-four-year-old Norwegian immigrant who sought “protection papers against the draft.”Footnote ⁵³ The consul, however, had stated that the immigrant’s father, who had declared his intention to become a citizen before the son reached legal age, made the son eligible for military service as well. The consul’s interpretation of draft legislation was claimed by the writer to be fallible, as only the father’s full-fledged citizenship could have led to the son being draft-eligible. In the wake of the March 3, 1863, Enrollment Act, which specifically tied draft eligibility to “intention,” the claim seemed tenuous, however.Footnote ⁵⁴

Absent from the discussion in Emigranten was the question of whether a seemingly healthy, twenty-four-year-old Norwegian-born man, who had lived in the United States for a number of years, was actually duty-bound to serve in the military. The American government’s perspective was by 1863 clear: “All able-bodied male citizens” between twenty and forty-five years of age “ought willingly to contribute” to ensure the “maintenance of the Constitution and Union, and the consequent preservation of free government,” but Suckow’s letter indicated a slight shift in the Scandinavian public sphere.Footnote ⁵⁵

By publishing Suckow’s letter, Emigranten now included voices that ran counter to the discourse of duty – so prevalent in the Scandinavian ethnic elite’s push for volunteer recruitment in 1861 and 1862 – and thereby demonstrated an openness to discussing military exemption in an era marked by conscription.Footnote ⁵⁶ By late 1863 it had seemingly become more acceptable within their own communities for Scandinavian immigrants to seek exemption from military service, and Old World officials were increasingly expected to help obtain it.

Yet elite rhetoric surrounding the duties of citizenship persisted. As an example, John A. Johnson, who was one of the principal organizers behind the 15th Wisconsin regiment in 1861, addressed the question of duty and sacrifice in a Fourth of July address aimed at an English-speaking audience in 1864.

The speech initially echoed Lincoln’s at Gettysburg in November 1863 and then turned to the importance of territorial growth, with an implicit nod to the threshold principle, before ending with a discussion of duty. “Eighty-eight years ago today,” Johnson noted, “the immortal Continental Congress” made clear to the world that “all men were created free and equal.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Like several Scandinavian-born orators and editors before him, Johnson lauded the nation’s founders for their seemingly infallible commitment to freedom and equality and criticized the slaveholding states for undermining these values:

On the importance of maintaining national unity for the sake of continued territorial and population growth, Johnson added: “No one doubts this. Then our only salvation is to put forth every effort to make every necessary sacrifice of blood and treasure to reunite the shattered Republic.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Yet the rhetoric of “every necessary sacrifice,” by ethnic leaders such as Johnson, was often not shared on the ground in the Scandinavian immigrant enclaves, and increasingly the resistance was reflected in the press.

A little more than a month later, Fædrelandet focused less on the nation’s founding ideals than on the pressing reality of the draft. On August 25, 1864, acknowledging its readership’s hopes and wishes, Fædrelandet noted a sense “that Wisconsin will not have to furnish much more than 12,000 men.”Footnote ⁶⁰ In Illinois, focus was even more clearly directed at draft avoidance. On September 7, 1864, Hemlandet reported to its mainly Swedish-born readership, that the “draft is on everybody’s mind” and added that “every town does whatever possible to dodge it.”Footnote ⁶¹ Hemlandet informed its readers that anyone who was not yet a citizen, had not voted, and had not taken out papers with intent to naturalize could contact “W. H. Church, Clerk of Circuit Court,” in Chicago’s 1st Ward, and get proof of exemption from the draft.Footnote ⁶²

By 1864, the framing of duty by the Scandinavian press was less specifically tied to military service in defense of the nation’s values than to an acceptance of Old World countrymen also contesting the definition and duty of citizenship in order to avoid military service. Residents in New Denmark seemingly explored every exemption option. An increasingly desperate Fritz Rasmussen penned the following complaint in his diary on October 2, 1864, after his neighbor Knud had stopped by to borrow a recent issue of Fædrelandet:

Resigned, Fritz Rasmussen by October 3, 1864, had started to make arrangements for travelling to Green Bay for a medical examination with his brother-in-law James.Footnote ⁶⁴ On October 6, James stopped by to notify Fritz Rasmussen that they had both been drafted along with New Denmark community members Marcus Pedersen, Rasmus “Sejler” (sailor), Anton Christiansen, Johan Hartman, Niels Mogland, Ferdinand Larke (Lærke), and several others. According to Fritz Rasmussen, James “staid [stayed] talking a little while, about which best to do: ‘run away or stand.’”Footnote ⁶⁵

On October 11, Rasmussen went down to James to see if “he had come back from Green Bay and ‘the Provost Marshals Office’ and what might be the news.”Footnote ⁶⁶ James was not home yet, however, and Rasmussen made plans with his countryman Ferdinand Larke to go the following day. When Rasmussen got back to his own place, an Irish community member, in Rasmussen’s diary referred to as Brady’s wife, came to talk and put “forth all Kinds of arguments to induce me to ‘not report’ or ‘run away.’”Footnote ⁶⁷

Yet, in the end, Rasmussen and several other community members could not bring themselves to run away. On a beautiful and mild fall day, October 12, Rasmussen and his travel companions went to Green Bay to report for military service.Footnote ⁶⁸ In the “forenoon” of October 13, Rasmussen went in for his medical examination, hoping to get exempted, and got the impression that a bribe, which was not an uncommon occurrence, could have secured such an outcome.

As J. Matthew Gallman has shown, bribery was so prevalent that numerous humorists with a wide audience portrayed “those weak kneed, cowardly, despicable types who came up with ridiculous schemes to avoid the draft.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Some showed draft dodgers running off to Canada, “creating an expatriate community of cowards in Windsor”; others men dressing up as women; and the cartoonist Austin A. Turner depicted an early draft evader complaining of weakness in his back but in fact carrying a “stack of bills strapped to his back, as a generous bribe to the doctor” (see Figure 9.3).Footnote ⁷⁰

Figure 9.3 Underlining the prevalence of draft resistance, and its echoes in broader American culture, the draftee in this cartoon says, “Doctor I’m weak in the back,” to which the examining surgeon replies, “Yes, I see it – can’t go – too delicate.”

Courtesy Library Company of Philadelphia.

The word around Green Bay was that it was possible, with the right stack of bills, to find a similar exemption solution in the local examiner’s office, but at the moment of truth Fritz Rasmussen failed to take advantage of the situation:

While Fritz Rasmussen could not bring himself to pay for a fraudulent medical exemption, Ferdinand Larke was willing to pursue other options. The Danish-born blacksmith, who was examined just a few minutes after Rasmussen, “pretended a stiff knee,” “made himself a miserable cribble [sic],” and complained loudly though he, in Rasmussen’s estimation, was as “sound in the leg as if he never had any ailment in it.”Footnote ⁷² In an unexpected turn of events, Larke also told the examining surgeon, who “worked at” him considerably, that Fritz Rasmussen could vouch for his injury.Footnote ⁷³ Put on the spot, Rasmussen explained that he had known Larke for “the last 11 or 12 years” and also bended the truth when adding:

Describing the incident in his diary, Rasmussen was somewhat shocked that Larke “dared to try” without even having consulted or hinted at his intention before turning to his fellow New Denmark resident for support:

Approaches to the draft and medical examination processes underscored the desperate measures foreign-born residents would take to avoid the draft. For some, the strategies for avoiding military service succeeded. Larke, for example, was declared exempt because of “lameness in the right Knee,” while Rasmussen – along with several community members, Norwegian-born Einar Quisling among them – was “held” for the army instead.Footnote ⁷⁵ The news shook Fritz Rasmussen, who could not bring himself to record anything in his diary for two weeks after going to Green Bay. “I have been rather puzzled in my mind; hardly knowing what to lay hands to, on account of the being ‘drafted’ to serve ‘Oncle Samuel’ [sic],” Rasmussen finally wrote on October 26.Footnote ⁷⁶

The thirty-one-year-old immigrant now had to leave his wife and three daughters in New Denmark. As it turned out, Rasmussen would also serve alongside soldiers of native-born, German-born, and Irish-born heritage while experiencing the effects of slavery up close. Thus, Rasmussen – who, like many of his fellow countrymen in Brown County, would have preferred to stay out of the Civil War – had to contemplate the merits and drawbacks of American citizenship to an even greater degree over the following year. Yet when the Danish-born immigrant, weary from countless hours of hard farm work, sat down on October 26, 1864, to take up his diary, optimism about life in America had temporarily vanished. Rasmussen’s entry captured his mood: “Perhaps I may soon come to write with the sword or bayonet, making gory figures. Thou Lord and Ruler of us miserable beings, have mercy upon us and save us from the Evils to come.”Footnote ⁷⁷

As Fritz Rasmussen and other New Denmark community members prepared to travel south, the officers and men of the 15th Wisconsin were getting ready to travel north. The remaining officers and men, that is – the past two years had been trying for the approximately 800 Scandinavians who had originally enlisted. Battles at Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, Pickett’s Mill, and Atlanta had taken such a toll that, by late 1864, only 320 men remained on active duty.Footnote ⁷⁸

Yet, throughout the war, soldiers in the Scandinavian Regiment continued to describe warfare as something Scandinavians withstood better than any other ethnic group. As Henry Syvertsen noted after the regiment’s first major battle in Kentucky on October 8, 1862, “the Norwegians must be a quite peculiar, composed race”; despite “cannonshot after cannonshot and musketvolley after musketvolley thundering” around them, “the coffee pots were immediately over the fire as soon as the order to rest was given.”Footnote ⁷⁹

The narrative of calmness under fire, often traced back to a martial Viking past, was common in descriptions of the Scandinavian Regiment during and after the Civil War.Footnote ⁸⁰ The underlying idea was a sense of Scandinavian superiority that, to some degree, was earned on the battlefield but also reflected in civilian accounts. In his memoirs, for example, former Union officer, Ole Balling, even contended that Abraham Lincoln in the fall of 1864, had greeted him “with great affection” and mentioned that the Norwegians he knew in the Midwest were “the very best settlers.”Footnote ⁸¹

Among the Norwegians in the Midwest who served in the military, the 15th Wisconsin Regiment was the most visible unit and therefore received the most attention in both contemporary and subsequent accounts.Footnote ⁸² For its part, the 15th Wisconsin was hit hardest during the battle of Chicakamauga on September 19 and 20, 1863. Colonel Hans Heg, shortly after having been promoted to brigade commander, fell victim to a sharpshooter’s bullet, while Ole C. Johnson, who succeeded Heg as regimental commander, was captured and sent to Libby Prison in Virginia.Footnote ⁸³ In all, the 15th Wisconsin sustained 177 casualties during the battle, and afterward stories of Hans Heg’s sacrifice, valor, and coolness under fire, along with that of his soldiers, came to exemplify the Scandinavian war effort.Footnote ⁸⁴

Figure 9.4 Portrait of Hans Heg by Herbjørn Gausta. The Norwegian-born colonel fell at the battle of Chickamauga on September 20, 1863.

Courtesy Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum Archives.

Still, the fact that many Scandinavians did not serve in pan-Scandinavian units and instead were scattered in numerous regiments across the midwest was lamented by Fædrelandet on August 25, 1864:

The necessity of gaining ethnic recognition for political gain through units like the 15th Wisconsin, and the underlying premise of pure Scandinavian units performing better than ethnically mixed units, was underscored in the same article by Fædrelandet.Footnote ⁸⁶

Furthermore, the idea of Scandinavian military superiority was on full display in Fædrelandet leading up to the 1864 presidential election. At this moment, agitation against Democrats, not least German and Irish supporters of the Democratic Party, had reached a pinnacle, as demonstrated by the October 13 editorial penned by Fædrelandet’s editors:

Ramping up the anti-Democratic agitation, the editorial also compared writers of Democratic campaign pamphlets with animals, Irish, and “wild-Germans” (Vildtydskere).Footnote ⁸⁸ As a demonstration of the Democratic Party’s lack of appeal among Scandinavians, the 15th Wisconsin, which by late fall of 1864 was finally stationed in the rear to guard a bridge at Whiteside Station, sent a clear message when the soldiers cast their presidential election votes on November 8.Footnote ⁸⁹

Through votes for presidential electors, state superintendent, members of congress, state senators, members of assembly, and county officers, it became clear that Abraham Lincoln’s Union Party continued to enjoy overwhelming support. With Company B detached at Lookout Creek, 177 soldiers in the 15th Wisconsin Regiment had their votes registered in the surviving records, and 176 votes (99 percent) were cast for electors who supported Abraham Lincoln.Footnote ⁹⁰

Norwegian-born Second Lieutenant George Hovden of Company G marked the election in his diary and noted that everyone in the company “went for Lincoln.”Footnote ⁹¹ A little north, at US hospital no. 8 in Nashville, Tennessee, Gunvold Johnsrud, who served in the 16th Minnesota Infantry on November 4, 1864, wrote about the “great Union Procession for the A. Lincoln & Johnson party,” held in the streets ahead of the election, and added: “It was quite a wonder to see so many lights at one time and place.” During the election, four days later, the Norwegian-born Johnsrud offered the assessment that “little Mack will have a poor show for president.”Footnote ⁹²

In Arkansas, a Swedish-born correspondent to Hemlandet reported that the 3rd Minnesota, which included a Scandinavian company, had voted before leaving Pine Bluff. “All the votes ‘cast’ were for Abraham Lincoln,” the correspondent noted, though “one or two intended to vote for Mac but refrained from doing so, out of shame, when they saw how everyone else voted (they were ‘conscripts’).”Footnote ⁹³

Reporting about a mock vote involving his “invalid company” in Lexington, Kentucky, Henry Syvertsen distanced himself from the Democratic candidate George McClellan and reported it as a “happy sign of the times” that 44 out of 50 supported Lincoln.Footnote ⁹⁴ Moreover, Ole Steensland, an imprisoned Norwegian-born soldier from the 15th Wisconsin, later remembered how support for Lincoln remained strong even in the infamous Georgia prison camp Andersonville where thousands died from illness and malnutrition.Footnote ⁹⁵

The Scandinavian soldiers thereby helped justify the rationale behind the Lincoln administration’s decision to let soldiers vote. Wisconsin Republicans had taken the lead regarding this electoral issue, and several other states modeled their voting practice after Wisconsin’s example.Footnote ⁹⁷ Across the country, more than three out of four soldiers, 78 percent, supported Abraham Lincoln in the 1864 election, and the Scandinavian 15th Wisconsin Regiment’s 176 out of 177 votes for the incumbent turned out to be the strongest support for the president among any Wisconsin regiment.Footnote ⁹⁸ In the 9th Wisconsin Regiment, made up of a sizeable German contingent, close to 80 percent of the soldiers (396 out of 498) supported Lincoln, while that number was less than 30 percent in the 17th Wisconsin, a predominantly Irish regiment.Footnote ⁹⁹

Such voting patterns among Scandinavians, Germans, and Irish extended outside of Wisconsin’s military units.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ As Walter Kamphoefner and Wolfgang Helbich have pointed out, the “percentage of support” for Lincoln among Germans “declined slightly” between 1860 and 1864, and Milwaukee, with its strong German influence, “was one of only two big cities where Lincoln lost ground between elections.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Even more pronounced was Irish-American opposition to Lincoln. As Susannah Ural has shown, “Irish-Americans turned out in droves” to vote for George McClellan in 1864, which, in one example, led to 90 percent of the vote in a heavily Irish New York ward being cast for Lincoln’s opponent.Footnote ¹⁰²

The Scandinavian immigrant vote in New Denmark was less clear. Despite his frustrations with the Lincoln administration, Fritz Rasmussen probably supported the sitting president, whom he had described as “honest” a month earlier. Yet in the same diary entry Rasmussen, as we have seen, also maintained that Lincoln was too “old, for the position he holds.”Footnote ¹⁰³ In his diary, Rasmussen wrote that he had gone “to schoolhouse No. 1 for election,” but in contrast to 1860, where he voted “for Abraham Lincoln and H. Hamlin,” he did not disclose which candidates received his support in 1864.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Fritz Rasmussen did, however, maintain, or at least regain, his admiration for Lincoln, and if he followed the recommendations in the Scandinavian-language newspapers circulating in New Denmark, he would again have voted “for Lincoln.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

If Fritz Rasmussen did indeed vote for Lincoln, he likely did so along with most Scandinavian immigrants.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Even along the Pearl River in the deep South, Christian Koch, who had been navigating life between New Orleans and his home in Hancock County since 1862, was clear about his political preferences.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ “I am glad Lincoln is elected again, I dont [sic] want to see peace now till the South is whipped, if it last 10 years longer, I begin to feel as if I could help to fight them myself,” Koch wrote.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

In the end, Lincoln won all the states in the North, with the exception of New Jersey, and also enjoyed electoral success in states such as Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia. Emigranten celebrated the president’s reelection on November 14, 1864, while praising the voters’ support of the “war policy hitherto followed to suppress the rebellion.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Lincoln’s reelection ensured that the conscripted New Denmark farmers would have to help suppress the rebellion and ensure emancipation. Two months later, Fritz Rasmussen therefore started his own journey toward the deep South along with 150 other closely guarded draftees.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Fritz Rasmussen left Madison as part of the 14th Wisconsin Regiment on a clear, cold Tuesday, January 17, 1865, en route to join the Union campaign against Mobile in Alabama.Footnote ¹¹¹ For months the draft had impacted life in Wisconsin, and for months it would continue to do so. Thus, in one of Edward Rasmussen’s first letters to his son in the army, dated January 23, 1865, he included information on the draft that demonstrated how closely the community followed the quota system and how much they by 1865 knew about it:

Additionally, on February 20, 1865, Rasmussen’s in-laws, Ane and N. C. Hansen, referenced the impending draft scheduled for March, which seemed to make it impossible for any of the remaining foreign-born men to avoid military service. Consequently, several Danish immigrants struck out for Green Bay to voluntarily enlist and procure the $300 bonus associated therewith.Footnote ¹¹³

Fritz Rasmussen’s brother-in-law, Celius Christiansen, who was drafted in 1862 but avoided service by hiring a substitute, likely knew that he was on the short list for the upcoming draft and volunteered in Green Bay along with at least ten other New Denmark residents, which caused “quite a commotion” in the immigrant community.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The problem, as Fritz Rasmussen’s father described it, was that by volunteering in Green Bay and being paid there, the volunteers would be credited there and not in New Denmark, which likely meant that “the few remaining will have to go as soldiers since there will be no one left to draft from.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

Rasmussen’s wife Sidsel made the same point when she wrote to her husband from New Denmark on March 22, 1865, and revealed in a new letter the following day that the draft’s pressure exacerbated ethnic tension in the community: “Dennis Devan was drafted and ran away like every other Irishman. [Johan] Goldsmidt was also Drafted and had to go.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Yet also within the Danish immigrant community, the draft revealed both ethnic and class tension. Indicating the continued conflict between German and Irish immigrants and their Scandinavian counterparts, not least perceptions of who was bearing, and who was skirting, the duties of citizenship, Fritz Rasmussen’s father notified his son of the draft’s results on March 23, 1865:

Edward Rasmussen also recounted a story of a failed attempt at bribery by Goldsmidt, who as a result was compelled to serve even without a medical examination, before turning his attention to the community volunteers that had enlisted. “That concludes the draft,” Rasmussen asserted.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Otherwise, most of the Rasmussen family letters sent to Fritz revolved around concern for his safety, local news (a town election on April 4 and a deadly smallpox outbreak in May), and national news from the war (the fall of Richmond and Petersburg).Footnote ¹¹⁹

One topic completely absent from the letters sent south to Fritz Rasmussen was the issue of emancipation and the plight of four million freedpeople after the end of hostilities. This was perhaps not surprising given the relatively small number of free Black people living in the Upper Midwest (in Brown County, Wisconsin, twenty “free colored” out of approximately 12,000 residents were counted in the 1860 census), but while the New Denmark letter-writers may never have met a Black community member, they would have known about policy debates through newspapers circulating in town.Footnote ¹²⁰ Moreover, thoughts on abolition, and the fight to achieve it, had clearly taken on increased importance outside of Brown County.

For Fritz Rasmussen, the shared fate of soldiering created an even greater sense of solidarity, also across ethnic lines, for the already class-conscious Wisconsin farmer. As an example, the thirty-one-year-old immigrant’s first letters home from the campaign against Mobile in March 1865 detailed spending miserable, rainy days huddled up on a pile of coal with his Irish comrade-in-arms Patrick Terry, and a week later sharing his tobacco with a Prussian-born neighbor from New Denmark named George Böhme.Footnote ¹²¹ Yet in Alabama’s subtropical climate, surrounded by unknown and often unwashed men, the drafted farmer had come down with a painful bout of diarrhea. Weakened by hot flashes and chills, Rasmussen time and again had to leave the ranks and let yellowish pus mixed with bloody stool fertilize the swamps of Alabama. “I am seemingly in no small danger of losing this fragile life, either by enemy bullets or disease in this climate,” Fritz Rasmussen warned his wife Sidsel in a letter on March 24.Footnote ¹²² Three days later, the Army of West Mississippi came into contact with Conferederate defenders by Mobile Bay in Alabama, and, judging by the way the Danish draftee recorded the encounter, he thought he was going to lose his life in the confrontation.Footnote ¹²³

The noise, Rasmussen wrote, was intense, almost to the point of deafening. Only when darkness fell over southern Alabama did the shooting wane, but even then the Danish immigrant’s life was still in danger due to feverish shivering and, by day, the continued Confederate bombardment.Footnote ¹²⁴ Over the following days, one shell landed in a group of soldiers but only knocked over their coffee pot; another snapped a pine like a twig; a third tore the head off a man; and as the siege around Mobile’s Spanish Fort and Fort Blakely continued, Rasmussen reported on several wounds suffered by both Black and white soldiers in his vicinity:Footnote ¹²⁵

Rasmussen’s military experience, shared with thousands of comrades, strengthened his sense of belonging to a national community and in some ways mirrored that of the Irish and Black soldiers.Footnote ¹²⁷ As Christian Samito has pointed out, “military service had explicit links to citizenship and inclusion as part of the American people,” and the fact that Rasmussen and others of Scandinavian heritage served alongside American Indians, Germans, Irish, English, and native-born soldiers helped shape a broader view of American citizenship.Footnote ¹²⁸

Fritz Rasmussen in his writings regularly exhibited concern for, and friendship with, fellow soldiers of many different backgrounds.Footnote ¹²⁹ The reluctant recruit sympathetically described a fellow soldier of Stockbridge Indian heritage who helped an ill Irish-born comrade-in-arms; and on March 30, 1865, he mourned another Stockbridge Indian friend from northern Wisconsin, Thomas Anthony, who had died of illness:Footnote ¹³⁰

Interestingly, Rasmussen’s statement alludes both to the entanglement of Native Americans and white European settlers and the distance between them.Footnote ¹³² On the one hand, the Danish immigrant felt a real bond between him and Anthony based on their mutual Wisconsin background, but Rasmussen also realized that the warm “brotherly” feelings were not necessarily shared by Anthony, who in his lifetime would have witnessed large-scale European settlement on American Indian land in the Midwest.Footnote ¹³³ Though motivations for joining the military were multifarious among Native people, Anthony’s volunteer service is noteworthy due to the association between martial manhood and American citizenship.Footnote ¹³⁴ Thomas Anthony’s service in a regular military unit such as the 14th Wisconsin could well have been motivated by economic concerns but could also potentially have been a way to establish a claim to citizenship.Footnote ¹³⁵

Military service did often lead to increased standing in the surrounding society, not least among white Americans with political power. Native people, however, continued to struggle to achieve recognition as citizens in Wisconsin and elsewhere for years after the Civil War.Footnote ¹³⁶ American Indians, for example, were notably absent when Republican congressman George S. Boutwell, on the Fourth of July, 1865, pointed to the service by “whites and negroes born on this continent,” as well as “the Irish and the Germans” and “representatives from every European race,” as proof that they all deserved voting rights and, by extension, recognition as citizens.Footnote ¹³⁷

For many, war service was therefore not without importance – but even in this final push to reunite the nation was also not without risk. While digging trenches outside Fort Spanish by Mobile Bay, Fritz Rasmussen on April 6 described one shell wounding twenty-one men, filling the trench with smoke, and the blast wave nearly concussing the entire unit.Footnote ¹³⁸ On April 8, Rasmussen and several veterans was shocked “terribly and horribly” by a rifle bullet cutting the neck artery of a fellow soldier while another hit an “Indian” from Rasmussen’s own company in the leg.Footnote ¹³⁹ Mercifully, by 5:30 p.m. on April 8, the end of the campaign was in sight. In a mass bombardment, more than ninety-six artillery pieces opened fire on the forts around Mobile and, according to one witness observing from a safe distance, created a moment of almost surreal beauty: “The fire of so many large guns, and the loud explosion of shells, produced one of those sublime scenes which seldom occur, even in the grandest operations of war,” recalled Brigadier General (and later US Minister to Sweden and Norway) Christopher C. Andrews.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

The bombardment set a chain reaction in motion. The 8th Iowa initiated the attack and succeeded in planting the American flag on top of the breastworks despite fierce Confederate resistance before the defenders retreated further into the fortress. For a brief moment, Rasmussen thought his regiment would be called upon to finish the attack. Shortly before midnight on April 8 Rasmussen and his fellow soldiers were sent to the frontlines “double quick, forward march!” and from this vantage point witnessed other units move toward the breastworks.Footnote ¹⁴¹ “We expected to see and hear a horrendous sight every moment,” Rasmussen wrote.Footnote ¹⁴² But the Confederate defenders were gone. Spanish Fort was in Union hands. The following day, on April 9, Fort Blakely fell, and Ferdinand Winslöw – the 9th Iowa’s former quartermaster, who seemed on the cusp of another logistics appointment in Major General Edward Canby’s army – wrote to his wife Wilhemina about the elation.Footnote ¹⁴³ Winslöw arrived in Canby’s camp just as the battle ended and found his brother-in-law, Christian Christensen, who had helped recruit the war’s first Scandinavian company, along with several high-ranking generals.

The fact that Winslöw had brought along “all kinds of nice” food and a “demi-john with 5 gallons of whiskey” likely did nothing to dampen the mood, and when the Union Army entered Montgomery, the Confederacy’s first capital city, three days later, it was an important step toward territorial reunification.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Figure 9.5 Ferdinand Winslöw (left) surprised his brother-in-law, Christian Christensen, in Alabama in April of 1865, and they likely had this photo taken together in New Orleans shortly thereafter.

Courtesy Sadovnikoff Family Private Collection.

Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Stephan Vaugh Shipman, from Madison, Wisconsin, described the occupation of Montgomery in his diary and noted that they “reached the City about 9 o’clock and amid loud cheering the Flag was run up over the State House where the first rebel Congress met!”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The end of combat, however, raised larger questions about the nation’s future, not least the role of freedpeople. According to William Warren Rogers Jr., the “sentiments of rejoicing blacks were not in doubt,” and that was also the way Fritz Rasmussen described his experience around Montgomery on April 22, 1865.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ As his regiment prepared to march through Montgomery to a camp a few miles outside of town, Rasmussen touched on the unit’s experience with the formerly enslaved. “This morning we again drew rations for two days that should last for three,” Rasmussen wrote, giving the reason that “Negroes” were “rushing to our lines” and causing depleted rations for the soldiers due to the larger numbers of mouths to feed.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The reaction among the soldiers was mixed, Rasmussen wrote: “Many find it hard but many just laugh and think that they thereby have a good excuse for ‘fourage’ (stealing).”Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Rasmussen himself seems to have been more sympathetic to the plight of freedpeople. But if he specifically recorded his impression of marching through Montgomery on April 23, 1865, those diary pages have now been lost. Rasmussen did, however, describe the experience many years later. When asked to recount his war experience almost a half century afterward, the reluctant veteran’s memory allowed for the following:

In his recollection, Rasmussen likely alluded to the sexual violence inflicted on enslaved women by their masters before and during the Civil War, and the attempts to cling to such patterns of domination among white southerners when they returned after the war.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Throughout 1865, Rasmussen and other Union soldiers serving in the deep South had a chance to immerse themselves more in their surroundings and consequently also contemplate southern society then and now, not least the impact of emancipation. By July 1865, Rasmussen’s critique of the Old World nobility and the New World elite mirrored, in important ways, his thoughts on slavery and his antipathy toward slaveowners.

Thus, Rasmussen interpreted the Civil War as a class conflict; but it was still not clear how much support for abolition also meant support for freedpeople’s equality and citizenship rights. Such discussions were playing themselves out at all levels of American society, not least among the Republican leadership in Washington, DC, where plans of freedpeople’s future role in the nation were made simultaneously with plans for expanding the nation’s territory and population.