Immigrants in the Valley: Irish, Germans, and Americans in the Upper Mississippi Country, 1830-1860

Thousands of newcomers flocked into the Upper Mississippi country in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, and Minnesota received immigrants from most areas of Europe, as well as Americans from the Upper South, New England, and the Middle Atlantic states. They all carried with them religious beliefs, experiences, and expectations that differed widely, attitudes and opinions which often threw them into conflict with each other.

German and Irish settlers predominated in the European influx, fleeing oppression and hard times in their homelands. Author Mark Wyman shows how the early struggles with the British, the potato famine, and a difficult land tenure system made Irishmen quick to take offense when proselytizers and employers pressured them in America. Germans, Wyman explains, frequently came from a tradition of religious dissension and areas of overly-fragmented landholdings-a background crucial to their reactions to Midwestern events.

New Englanders, who dominated much of the economic and political life in Upper Mississippi communities, tended to look down on the Southerners and Europeans who moved into the region with them. The Yankees, as they were called, often arrived with a reforming mission in mind-a mission others resented. As these diverse groups spread across the Midwest in the years between 1830 and 1860, they frequently clashed over such issues as drinking, public schools, and the proper observance of the Sabbath. Even slavery, the issue that became overriding by 1860, affected the newly arrived peoples of the "Great Valley" in differing ways.

Drawing extensively on family letters sent home to Europe, missionary reports, employment records, and other diverse materials, this book shows the interplay between the major groups traveling the roads and waterways into the Upper Mississippi Valley during those crucial decades. Immigrants in the Valley is a lively, extensively-illustrated account which will help Americans everywhere better understand t