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Leaving Legally

Today emigration is a choice. In Brunswick it needed a license. A young man of military age could not just buy a ticket, and a state file names George Wesemann at all only because the Duchy had to approve his leaving.

Military service came first. It was assigned by levy and by lot: the young men of an age group in a district were enrolled and drew numbers, and whether a man was called depended on where his number fell against that year’s quota. Many were exempted or failed to appear. Where this system was used, a man could also meet his duty by paying a substitute or trading lots, both for a price. A medical exemption, with a doctor’s certificate, took a man out of the pool whatever number he drew, so a file could record both a lot that was never called and a medical exemption. Service was the state’s reason to care who left. A man who emigrated before he had served was leaving the muster roll, so emigration and conscription were handled in the same papers, and the file went up to a state ministry instead of being settled locally.

An emigration file (Auswanderungsakte) records the whole matter: the request to leave, the decision, the giving up of citizenship or admission to another state, the settling of debts, and any objections. Such files were made at several levels of government, from the district office to the central ministry, and the Lower Saxony State Archive has cataloged the Brunswick series along with those of Osnabrück and East Frisia. A file of this kind is an argument, not a form. The petition had to give the authorities a reason to let the man go, so it describes the family’s circumstances, the applicant’s means or lack of them, and where he was headed, in words chosen to persuade. A phrase like “the family owns no property” was doing work in the petition as well as stating a fact. George’s own file of 1860, told in the Wesemann Family section, is one of these. A consent date is not a sailing date, either. The consent and passport cleared a man to go, and he crossed when passage and season allowed, so a gap of some weeks between consent and arrival is normal.

Emigrants from this district sailed from Bremen. Bremen and Hamburg were the two great German emigrant ports, and Bremen served the Weser valley, with ocean ships working from Bremerhaven because the river port had silted up. Leaving a Weser village for New York by way of Bremen was the usual path.

They left in great numbers and in waves. About 5.5 million people are estimated to have left the German states for overseas between 1816 and 1914, more than a million of them in the single wave of 1846 to 1857, with another wave from 1864 to 1873. The farm crisis of 1846 and 1847, with potato blight and grain shortage, hit country and craft households hardest and drove food prices up sharply. The peak year for crossings to America was 1854.