Pulpit

“The word ‘Texas’ is a certain doom for Czechoslovaks”

According to Sean M Kelly’s book Los Brazos de Dios, in 1860 the lower Brazos area to the south of the Fridel family farm was a majority Black population (55%) with a very small ethnic Mexican and Indigenous population (Grandin 2019, p. 20). I have less information about the populations of the river bottoms of the upper Brazos and Navasota. These areas were less desirable than the lower Brazos lands that were run as plantations, but they were an important foothold area for immigrants and some freed enslaved people after the Civil War. Henry Kurten, a German soldier, had purchased a Mexican land grant there in 1864 and created a pipeline for chain migration, where German immigrants could work his land and then establish farms of their own (Brown n.d.). During the time that Texas was a slave state, the Germans were seen as an oppositional culture– using a family labor system to work their land (Kelley 2010, p. 46). Although Rev. Bergmann, a Silesian who is eventually called a demon by the surviving Texas Moravians, wrings his hands in his letter to Europe and claims that the ‘unlucky’ enslaved people he saw still live better than the Czechs since Texas is a land of milk and honey— implying that Christians who object to chattel slavery still practiced in the United states should adjust to it.

As Kelley notes, networks rooted in German identity were vital, not only to migration itself but also to eventual land acquisition. Although the pattern in which older migrants employed newer ones sometimes provoked charges of exploitation, in most cases it worked. Over 77 percent of German farmers owned their own land in 1850, compared with 69 percent of Anglos. In Cat Spring, 71 percent of German households owned property in 1850, and more than 80 percent did so in 1860 (47).

When German chain migration slowed, Slavic laborers like the Fridels were brought over with the same promise of land. Lured by a letter from a Silesian minister published in a Moravian newspaper promising tracts of plentiful and cheap land, nearly half of the first boat of Czech immigrants died in the crossing or of yellow fever when they reached Texas (46). Once in Texas, Slavs were either considered a non-anglo other, responsible for spreading intemperance (awkwardly called “Bo-Dutchmen” by their Anglo accusers) or considered Anglo themselves, depending on whether it was convenient to count them as a bulwark against ethnic Mexicans (Barber 2010). Czech Texan communities retained their language and culture for a prolonged period of time due to the location of their homesteads and the maintenance of Czech-only schools and churches (Eckertová 2011).

Chain migration was also responsible for the creation of a Czech-speaking enclave within the German settlements, which originated in 1851 when a letter from a Silesian Protestant minister named Ernst Bergmann reached Josef Lesikar in Landskroun on the Bohemia-Moravia border. The letter outlined transportation costs and provided enticing details on agriculture in Cat Spring, so Lesikar quickly organized a party of sixteen families. As it turned out, his wife prevailed upon him to abandon the plan, and he was lucky he did. Half of those who left Landskroun perished in squalid conditions on the Atlantic crossing. Lesikar, however, stayed in touch with a survivor and passed his letters on for publication in the Moravske Noviny, a regional newspaper. In 1853 he organized seventeen more families and left that October for Bremen, although not before obtaining from the local authorities a fraudulent medical exemption from military service for his son. Seven weeks later the party landed in Galveston, and fourteen days after that they arrived in Cat Spring, where they encountered remnants of the previous party of immigrants.

(Kelley 2010)

The Czech Texan population was relatively homogeneous because it passed directly from the Moravian village to Farm Texas. Poverty drove the Moravians to Texas, the prospect of cheap land and trying to escape long-term military service. Nevertheless, they often hesitated to leave
and they put it aside for many years until the letters of the evangelical priest Bergmann finally seduced them- flowery depictions of Texas county and quality soil, and classifieds published in Czech newspapers. (translation)

(Eckertová 2011)

Pastor Bergman arrived in 1849 with a large group of German families in Cat Spring, from where he wrote home [letters](https://wileywiggins.com/matriky//letter.html) calling for others to emigrate. One of the Czechs, who fled from Texas to Iowa writes about him: "As far as the community of Texas is concerned, The Czechoslovaks are not suitable, they have a worse climate, in which our countryman cannot work and are often subject to pernicious yellow fever. I came from there last year and several Czech families told about the sad position of the local Czechs, which Mr. Bergmann, the tricky priest with his enticing letters, coaxed to follow him. They cursed him- that through him they were greatly reduced in wealth and health and many have died; the word 'Texas' is a certain doom for Czechoslovaks, just like Temešský Banát in Hungary ”(Ar USA 33/6, p. 81, archive of the Náprstek Museum in Prague). (translation)

(Eckertová 2011)
  1. Grandin, Greg. 2019. The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company.
  2. Brown, Richard. n.d. “Texas State Historical Association- Kurten, TX.” https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/kurten-tx. Accessed December 25, 2022.
  3. Kelley, Sean M. 2010. Los Brazos De Dios: A Plantation Society in the Texas Borderlands, 1821-1865. Conflicting Worlds. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
  4. Barber, Marian Jean. 2010. “How the Irish, Germans, and Czechs Became Anglo: Race and Identity in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands.” PhD thesis, University of Texas.
  5. Eckertová, Eva. 2011. “Czechs in Texas: Moravian Communities and Tombstones,” 1.