Excerpt from German Immigration to Southern Illinois, 1820-1860: Thesis The first German immigration to the United States occurr ed in the seventeenth century. This migration was due to various causes, but it was particularly due to the economic distress, brought on by the Thirty Years War, and to the desire for relig ious freedom among certain Protestant sects in Germany; These early German immigrants, for the most part, settled at Germantown, and in.other parts of Pennsylvania. During the first decades of the eighteenth century there was a gradual increase in the number of German immigrants. The most of them settled in the valley of the Mohawk and Schoharie Rivers in New York, and in the limestone regions of Pennsylvania. The emigration from Germany'was chiefly religious in character, although the favorable reports from ear lier German settlers in America and the more plentiful means of transportation, no doubt, played an important part in causing the Germans to leave the fatherland. In the eighteenth century also occurred the first German immigration to Illinois. The number of immigrants, however, was very small. Not until after 1850 did emigration directly from Ger many assume large proportions in Illinois. Many causes contributed to this increase in number; the chief reasons were the religious, political, and economic conditions in the fatherland. The glowing reports from Illinois no doubt'strongly reinforced the above causes. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

From acclaimed Abraham Lincoln historian Harold Holzer, a groundbreaking account of Lincoln’s grappling with the politics of immigration against the backdrop of the Civil War. In the three decades before the Civil War, some ten million foreign-born people settled in the United States, forever altering the nation’s demographics, culture, and—perhaps most significantly—voting patterns. America’s newest residents fueled the national economy, but they also wrought enormous changes in the political landscape and exposed an ugly, at times violent, vein of nativist bigotry. Abraham Lincoln’s rise ran parallel to this turmoil; even Lincoln himself did not always rise above it. Tensions over immigration would split and ultimately destroy Lincoln’s Whig Party years before the Civil War. Yet the war made clear just how important immigrants were, and how interwoven they had become in American society. Harold Holzer, winner of the Lincoln Prize, charts Lincoln’s political career through the lens of immigration, from his role as a member of an increasingly nativist political party to his evolution into an immigration champion, a progression that would come at the same time as he refined his views on abolition and Black citizenship. As Holzer writes, “The Civil War could not have been won without Lincoln’s leadership; but it could not have been fought without the immigrant soldiers who served and, by the tens of thousands, died that the ‘nation might live.’” An utterly captivating and illuminating work, Brought Forth on This Continent assesses Lincoln's life and legacy in a wholly original way, unveiling remarkable similarities between the nineteenth century and the twenty-first.