472 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and. Letters. 
the material advantages that men ordinarily cherish, in an effort 
to bring to their distracted countrymen liberty of thought and 
action. A hundred thousand of these political refugees and 
their sympathizers came to America in that stirring period of 
storm and stress when Die Wacht am Rhein became the expres¬ 
sion of nationalist spirit. They were young; they were fired 
with enthusiasm, with energy; they possessed skill of pen and 
of speech. In all the leading cities of the United States east 
of the Mississippi they exerted a potential influence in the edu¬ 
cational movements of the time, and naturally their activity soon 
extended to the significant political movements that fore¬ 
shadowed the great struggle of the Sixties'. 
For reas'ons which it is necessary to mention but briefly here, 
Wisconsin attracted a large element of the political exiles. 2 In 
1844 Moritz Sbhoeffler established a German printing office in 
Milwaukee, and his press turned out thousands of pamphlets 
descriptive of Wisconsin’s attractiveness. These were distrib¬ 
uted in the various provinces of Germany and guided thousands 
of immigrants hither. 3 The state seconded these efforts a little 
later on by establishing a bureau of immigration, whose repre¬ 
sentatives met the newcomers in Hew York City and encouraged 
them to proceed to Wisconsin. In Milwaukee, German immi¬ 
grants arrived by the hundreds every week. German newspapers 
multiplied; German schools' were established; German art, Ger¬ 
man song, German literature and German social life received 
an impetus that caused Milwaukee to become known as the a Ger¬ 
man Athens of America,.” The Banner und Yolksfround estab¬ 
lished a department which it called a Wisconsin’s Deutsche Dich- 
terhalle” (Wisconsin’s German Temple of Poesy), and the ready 
pens of the Forty-Eighters contributed thereto a mass of litera¬ 
ture of great originality, richness and beauty. 4 About the same 
2 Carl Schurz became the most noted among them. He was a candi¬ 
date for lieutenant governor on the Republican ticket in Wisconsin in 
1856. In 1859 he tried unsuccessfully to secure the Republican nomina¬ 
tion for governor. See letters of Carl Schurz to Congressman John F. 
Potter printed in The Milwaukee Sentinel April 1, 1900 (edited by 
Henry E. Legler). See also A. M. Thomson’s Political History of Wis¬ 
consin. 
3 Letter of Moritz Schoeffler to the Wisconsin Editorial Association 
at Oshkosh, 1869. Proceedings, p. 19. 
4 Wisconsin’s Deutsch-Amerikaner, Vol. 2. p. 5. 
