THE YANKEE AND THE TEUTON
IN WISCONSIN
BY
JOSEPH SCHAFER
Reprinted from the Wisconsin Magazine of History
Volume VI, No. 2, December, 1922
THE YANKEE AND THE TEUTON IN WISCONSIN
Joseph Schafer
I. CHARACTERISTIC ATTITUDES TOWARD THE LAND
Wisconsin in its racial character is popularly known tothe country at large as a Teutonic state. That means thestate has a German element, original and derivative, whichnumerically overshadows the American, English, Irish,Scandinavian, and other stocks also represented in theBadger blend. It is not necessary to quarrel with thiswidely accepted theorem, though some of the corollariesdrawn from it can be shown to be unhistorical; and one candemonstrate statistically that if Wisconsin now is, or at anycensus period was, a Teutonic state she began her statehoodcareer in 1848 as a Yankee state and thus continued formany years with consequences social, economic, political,religious, and moral which no mere racial substitutions havehad power to obliterate. My purpose in the present paperis to present, from local sources, some discussion of the relationsof Yankee and Teuton to the land—a theme whichought to throw light on the process of substitution mentioned,revealing how the Teuton came into possession ofvast agricultural areas once firmly held by the Yankee.
The agricultural occupation of southern Wisconsin,which brought the first tide of immigration from NewEngland, western New York, northern Pennsylvania, andOhio—the Yankee element—may be said roughly to havebeen accomplished within the years 1835 and 1850. Thesettlements which existed prior to 1835 were in the leadregion of the southwest, at Green Bay, and at Prairie duChien. The population of the lead mines was predominantlyof southern and southwestern origin; that of the two otherlocalities—the ancient seats of the Indian trade and morerecent centers of military defense—was mainly French-Canadian.When, in 1836, a territorial census was taken,it was found that the three areas named had an aggregatepopulation of nearly 9000, of which more than 5000 was inthe lead region included in the then county of Iowa. TheGreen Bay region (Brown County) was next, and thePrairie du Chien settlement (Crawford County) smallest.
The census, however, recognized a new county, Milwaukee,whose territory had been severed from the earlierBrown County. It was bounded east by Lake Michigan,south by Illinois, west by a line drawn due north from theIllinois line to Wisconsin River at the Portage, and northby a line drawn due east from the Portage to the lake. Interms of present-day divisions, the Milwaukee County of1836 embraced all of Kenosha, Racine, Walworth, Rock,Jefferson, Waukesha, and Milwaukee counties, nearly all ofOzaukee, Washington, and Dodge, a strip of eastern GreenCounty, and most of Dane and Columbia. In that imperialdomain the census takers found a grand total of 2900 persons,or almost exactly one-fourth of the population of theentire territory.
Two significant facts distinguish the Milwaukee Countycensus list from the lists of Brown, Crawford, and Iowacounties—the recency of the settlement and the distinctivelocal origin of the settlers. These people had only justarrived, most of them in the early months of 1836. Onecould almost count on his ten fingers the individuals whowere there pri