The Salzburg Connection
The Beginnings of Austrians in America, 1734–1860
By Günter Bischof
Top Photo: Jerusalem Lutheran Church in New Ebenezer near Rincon, Georgia. It is the oldest continuously worshipping Lutheran Church in America and was built between 1767 and 1769 by the Georgia Salzburgers, with materials mainly prepared by themselves. The walls are 21 inches thick and were made with bricks from clay deposits near the church. Library of Congress
After the Spanish Habsburgs conquered a good part of the New World and, in the course of the 16th century, expanded into the Southeast and Southwest of today’s United States, Austrian immigrants followed. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the local authorities usually documented them as “Aleman” (German) and translated their first names into Spanish.
For example, the documents almost always list Hans Seisenhoffer, a captain working for the Welser Company, as Juan Aleman. According to Spencer Tye, “‘German’ master miners came to the Americas under the command of the Welsers. While the Welsers and the Fuggers, the famous Augsburg trading families, certainly favored South German talent when staffing their offices across Europe and the Americas, they often sought out specialists from outside that region. The Welsers recruited heavily from mining towns in Tirol, Silesia, and further East.” It is quite likely that miners from the Tirol were the first Austrians to come to the New World, but so far nobody has been able to document them as individuals.
The Salzburgers in Ebenezer, Georgia
In 1732, Firmian, the Archbishop of Salzburg, expelled some 16,000 protestants from his Pongau district who had been practicing their religion clandestinely for a couple of centuries. At the time, the archbishopric of Salzburg was one of some 3,000 semi-autonomous provinces of the Holy Roman Empire until it became part of the Habsburg lands in 1803 and in 1918, a state of Austria. Jesuit “missionaries” had visited these districts in the early 1730s to investigate “cryptoProtestant” conventicles.
According to James Van Horn Melton, the Jesuits reported to the Archbishop that the Gastein valley had served as “a breeding ground for heresy in Salzburg” for a long time. After their expulsion, a group of 38 Gastein miners and peasants emigrated to Southern Germany and then on to the new British colony of Georgia, where, in 1734, they founded Ebenezer, the first Austrian community in the American colonies, north of Savannah.
Two more groups of Salzburgers followed. While scholars have traditionally attributed the Salzburgers’ move to Georgia to their desire for religious freedom, Melton argues that the miners in the first group were motivated more by the promise of adventure and risk-taking. Equipped with “spatial and psychological mobility,” they accepted “the perils of migrating to an utterly foreign destination.”
Altogether about 150 Salzburgers settled in Georgia while some 16,000 went to East Prussia. As part of their sponsorship, the Pietist “Francke Foundations” of Halle in Prussia and the “Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge” in London sent two pastors along with them to Georgia. Pastor Johann Martin Boltzius, the spiritual leader of the new Ebenezer community, interpreted his congregation’s move to Georgia in biblical terms, as an exodus of an exceptional group of Pietists seeking salvation in the frontier wilderness.
James Edward Oglethorpe, a member of the British parliament, convinced his government to sponsor the Salzburgers’ Georgia expedition. Like Roman soldiers turned farmers and defenders of the Roman Empire, they received 50 acres of land on the Georgia frontier and were expected to defend this British outpost against French and Spanish colonial rivals, as well as Native Americans.
For the first two decades of its existence, the colony of Georgia was unique among Southern colonies as it expressly prohibited slavery under the assumption that free men would be less prone to rebellion and defend the British southeastern frontier better than a small elite of slave-holding planters would.
The Salzburgers had a rough start in their new home. After their first allotment of remote land had proven to be too sandy and infertile, Ebenezer needed to be resettled on fertile soil. During the first two years of the “seasoning period […] conditions and morale were abysmal.” Eighteen of the initial group of 38 Salzburgers perished from dysentery and malaria in swampy, mosquito-ridden coastal Georgia. Pastor Boltzius played a crucial role in keeping them together throughout the ordeal, thanks to his stern spiritual regime and his community-building measures.
Replenished by new arrivals and having moved to more fertile land, they managed to survive on subsistence farming and prospered by building corn and lumber mills; the women grew silk. A member of the Ebenezer community, Johann Adam Treutlen, who came as an indentured servant from the Palatinate, was elected to Georgia’s first Commons House in 1764. As a leading supporter of American independence in the Georgia colony, he became the first governor of Georgia in 1777. During the American Revolution, Ebenenzer was occupied by rebels and royalists in turn and declined as a result of wide-spread destruction. A trickle of Austrian migrants to the U.S. probably continued throughout the colonial period but they have not been documented.
Revolutionary America and the Habsburg Monarchy
Even though the citizens of the Habsburg Empire were greatly interested in the American Revolution (1776-1783) and fascinated with Benjamin Franklin, Emperor Joseph II never fully recognized the United States after their hard-earned victory in the bloody war against Great Britain and King George III. In 1778, the Continental Congress dispatched William Lee to Vienna to negotiate the new republic’s recognition and establish diplomatic relations. Yet the Imperial Court in Vienna, led by State Chancellor Prince Kaunitz, never granted Lee a formal audience with the Emperor. The court did not want to negotiate with anti-dynastic revolutionaries and upset British royalty. After the Peace Treaty of Paris (1783), Congress gave its representatives in Europe the green light to negotiate a Treaty of Amity and Friendship with the Habsburg Empire. However, Thomas Jefferson, the new U.S. minister in Paris, was not interested in initiating diplomatic relations with the Habsburg Empire and the “whimsical” Emperor Joseph II and used dilatory tactics to postpone negotiations. No treaty was ever signed, and the Habsburg monarchs did not show any “diplomatic interest” in the U.S. republic until 1838.
However, people throughout the Habsburg Monarchy were very interested in the American Revolution. Daily newspapers like the Wienerische Diarium (founded in 1703, today’s Wiener Zeitung is the oldest newspaper in the world) regularly reported about the events unfolding in the course of the American War of Independence.
As long as their publications did not question the authority of the monarchy, newspaper editors were able to maneuver around censorship. Even Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was eventually published; however, the papers did not print the list of grievances against King George III. Even though some were censored, books about the American Revolution reached audiences in the Habsburg Monarchy. Jonathan Singerton analyzed the correspondence between subjects of the Habsburg Monarchy and Benjamin Franklin, who received 177 letters from Austrian admirers in his Paris domicile.
One third of this correspondence was with Dr. Jan Ingenhousz, a Dutch-born physician and scientist who became Empress Maria Theresia’s court physician and who delivered news of the American Revolution to the highest levels of the Habsburg court, including the emperor. The Ingenhousz-Franklin correspondence established a link between the Habsburg lands and the New World. News of the American Revolution also reached the Anglophone salons of Vienna. During the War of Independence, Austrian merchants from Ostende and Trieste lobbied Vienna to negotiate a trade treaty with the British colonies in America.
Under the neutral Austrian flag, merchants from the Austrian Netherlands exported weapons, munitions, and gun powder to the American revolutionaries. Trading interests on the periphery of the Habsburg Empire eventually trumped diplomatic caution, and the Austrian Netherlands dispatched Baron Frederick Eugene de Beelen-Bertholff as the first Austrian trade commissioner (the unaccredited “Imperial Commercial Advisor” from 1882- 85) to Philadelphia. According to Jonathan Singerton, Prince Kaunitz was reluctant to send him and refused to accredit him, wanting “to see what the fate of the colonies will be.”
Trade commissioner Beelen-Bertholff quickly established himself as a premier foreign diplomat in the U.S. capital Philadelphia and sent back valuable reports about trading opportunities in the colonies (including with native Americans such as the Oneida tribe of upstate New York). He also reported on the American national and regional political scene of the mid-1780s.
After the Declaration of Independence, the merchants of Trieste established profitable trade connections with the U.S., importing American tobacco and exporting cloth, Styrian iron products, and Bohemian glass wares (Jefferson’s glass dome at Monticello is made from imported Bohemian glass). No trade treaty was ever signed, yet the entire Monarchy benefited from Beelen- Bertholff ’s trade relations, not only the Netherlands and Trieste. His regular reports to Vienna and Brussels, according to Singerton, made the Habsburg Monarchy “the most well-informed European power” on economic and political developments in the U.S.
Philip Georg Friedrich von Reck traveled with the Salzburgers to Georgia and documented their way to and in the New World. In this drawing, called The Needles, he depicted two ships, the Simonds and the London Merchant passing by the Isle of Wright on their way to Georgia in 1735. The Needles, three large chalk cliffs, can be seen in the background.
Photo: Library of Congress
Diplomatic Ties at last
According to Nicole Phelps, the U.S. and Austria were equally slow to develop diplomatic relations. Washington sent the first U.S. consul to the busy Habsburg port of Trieste in 1800, but without a clearly defined diplomatic rank, he achieved very little with the court in Vienna. In 1829, the U.S. negotiated its first treaty of commerce and navigation with the Habsburg Empire. It came into force in 1831 and “served as the first instance of official mutual recognition between the U.S. and Habsburg governments.”
The first U.S. consul in Vienna, sent there in 1830, lobbied the government for freer trade policies. In the 1830s, the State Department sent “special tobacco agents” overseas to investigate potential markets for the tobacco-producing Southern states. The Americans did not find it easy to deal with the emperor’s chancellor Prince Klemens Metternich, who, to them, embodied reactionary Catholic Austria and its opposition to liberal revolutions and free trade. In 1820, Prince Metternich appointed Alois Baron Lederer as the first consul general in New York with ViceConsulates to follow in New Orleans (1837), Boston, and Philadelphia (1841).
Finally in 1838, fifty years after the first attempt, the Austrian Empire and the U.S. posted ministers and established diplomatic relations: Henry A. Muhlenberg in Vienna (who was soon replaced by a series of shortlived ministers) and Wenzel Mareschal in Washington. Mareschal’s assistant, Georg von Hülsemann, a German from Hannover, replaced him as chargé d’affaires in 1841 and remained in the U.S. capital until 1863.
Hülsemann represented the Austrian Empire through the stormy period of the 1848/49 revolution, when Hungary declared its independence from the Empire. Vienna almost abandoned relations with the U.S. over Secretary of State Daniel Webster’s quasi-support of Hungarian independence and the warm welcome of the revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth in the U.S., where public opinion was anti-Catholic and anti- Habsburg and pro-Hungarian. While a U.S. Senator proclaimed that Austria “was least of all other powers to be regarded by us,” Hülsemann predicted early on that “the adventurous spirit of this country will lead to trouble with everyone.”
Adventurous Austrians – like the Salzburgers – had emigrated to the U.S. since the days of British colonialism. Between 1821 and 1840, Austrian statistics counted 21,791 persons who left the Monarchy for the U.S. The former Moravian priest Karl Postl was one of them. He left in the late 1820s and adopted the pen name of Charles Sealsfield. He became a prolific Romantic novelist and journalist, penning the anti-Habsburg tract Austria As It Is before he retired in Switzerland. Nikolaus Lenau from Bukovina came to the U.S. in the early 1830s— only to return as a disappointed man after a rough year of farming on the Ohio frontier. Ferdinand Kürnberger recounted Lenau’s experience in his popular americanophobic novel Der Amerika-Müde (1855).
Austrians also fell victim to “gold fever” after gold was discovered in the American River outside of Sacramento, California. In 1851, as Thomas Albrich tells the story, Joseph Steinberger from Kitzbühel, along with three Tyrolean friends, traveled more than 200 days that led them from Bremen around Cape Horn to the Golden State. Upon their arrival in San Francisco in 1852, they broke up and went prospecting in Sacramento and Stockton. None struck it rich. Steinberger exhausted himself and died in San Francisco from tuberculosis in 1853. One of them later returned to the Tyrol.
Many more Austrians have since been following in the Salzburgers’ footsteps, searching for better fortunes in the New World. And while many of them have gone largely unnoticed, a substantial number of those immigrants have been leaving their mark on the United States as we know it today.
Further reading - works cited in this article:
Albrich, Thomas. Goldjäger aus Tirol: “Von Kitzbühel nach Kalifornien über Kufstein”; Das Tagebuch des Joseph Steinberger 1851/52. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2008.
Van Horn Melton, James. Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Phelps Nicole M. U.S.-Habsburg Relations from 1815 to the Paris Peace Conference: Sovereignty Transformed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Singerton, Jonathan. Empires on the Edge – The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy, 1763-1789. PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2018.
Günter Bischof, a native of Mellau, Vorarlberg, is the Austrian Marshall Plan Chair in History at The University of New Orleans, where he also directs the Austrian Marshall Plan Center for European Studies.
This is an excerpt of the book Towards the American Century: Austrians in the United States by Günter Bischof and Hannes Richter (University of New Orleans Press, 2019). More information is available at www.austriainusa.org.