European Immigration to Texas in the Nineteenth Century

European immigration in Texas occurred in two substantial waves in the nineteenth century: the first during the three decades preceding the Civil War; the second in the latter two decades of the nineteenth century. Roughly two-thirds of these immigrants hailed from the present Central European countries of Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, and the German-speaking provinces of France, Alsace and Lorraine. Smaller numbers of immigrants came from Scandinavia, Poland, and Great Britain, which at the time included Ireland. An even smaller contingent hailed from the Mediterranean European countries. This study focuses on those nationalities that provided sufficient numbers of immigrants to establish and sustain recognizable communities in Texas where the mother languages and national customs persisted for at least two generations after the original settlers arrived.

Few of these European immigrants who arrived in the nineteenth century were paupers and even fewer were rich. The overwhelming majority came from either agricultural or small trade backgrounds and financed the move by liquidating personal property or cashing in on inheritances. Indeed, in the German speaking areas of Europe, one usually had to prove debt-free status in order to obtain permission to emigrate. Generally speaking, European immigration in Texas mirrored patterns found throughout the Mid-West of the United States and contrasted with patterns of immigration to the big Eastern cities, where a larger percentage of Eastern and Southern Europeans settled along with impoverished Irish immigrants.

Population growth and lack of opportunity were the root cause of the exodus from Europe, but this reality clearly inflamed other factors of a political, religious, and economic nature. It should also be kept in mind that dislocations associated with the Industrial Revolution in England initially fell hardest on rural populations of Central Europe since most farmers had a centuries-long tradition of supplementing meager agricultural incomes with pre-industrial cottage industries, such as nail making or needle fabrication, to name just two of these activities. These cottage industries, increasingly, could no longer compete with the rising flood of cheap manufactured goods from England. Consequently, the agricultural sector faced a two-prong squeeze, the one due to scarcity of land and the other due to the demise of traditional cottage activity during the winter months.

A rising tide of political and social dissatisfaction joined forces with these factors to feed a festering discontent that gathered momentum during the first half of the nineteenth century and spread to all corners of Europe. This eventually culminated in revolution and upheaval in 1848. The collapse of this revolution produced another surge of emigration, the so-called 48s, who were largely political refugees or disaffected intellectuals.