The Latest News from the Other Side: ‘America’ in the Freiburger Zeitung of 1876

The Freiburger Zeitung developed into one of the region’s most important newspapers. Established as a municipal gazette in the 1780s, local publisher Eduard Daniel Poppen bought it in the mid-1860s and modernized it, turning the paper into a medium oriented politically toward the National Liberals with an anti-Catholic stance. At this time, Freiburg began to flourish, becoming a regional administrative and economic center with a steadily growing population. Consequently, the sales figures for the Freiburger Zeitung increased, too. By the 1890s, it printed and distributed more copies than any other Freiburg newspaper.³

Compared to other newspapers of the region, the Freiburger Zeitung was rather special. In the 1870s, it printed four pages every day, thus appearing relatively often with a comparatively high volume of news. Furthermore, it mainly addressed the relatively wealthy and well-educated population of the university town. Presumably, this target audience influenced what journalists chose to report in it. Despite these features, though, the Freiburger Zeitung was also typical of German local newspapers in terms of its structure and content. In the mid-1870s, it usually had a lead article followed by short news items about Baden and other German regions of not more than two to five lines each. Another section presented items of a political or economic nature from Europe, and still another provided news from other continents. Among these latter items, those from the United States were the most numerous; in 1876, more than 150 issues of the Freiburger Zeitung contained news from this country. Many such news items could also be read elsewhere, and most were published without a reference to their origin so that it is unclear whether they were sent by correspondents, bought from agencies, or simply taken wholesale from other papers. Therefore, one can assume that the information about the United States in the Freiburger Zeitung was typical of what German readers learned about that country in general.

In order to find out what such a typical German newspaper reported about the United States, the Freiburger Zeitung’s issues of 1876 were systematically analyzed. The majority of the articles on the US was comprised of short items on events of differing importance. Common, for example, were reports about debates or decisions in Congress. In mid-January 1876, readers were informed that a House legal committee had received a report supporting a constitutional amendment that was intended to restrict a president’s term to six years and to forbid more than one re-election. Additionally, in mid-June of that year the paper reported that the House had voted to allow the treasury to release 20 million dollars.⁴ Other political news was recorded as well. At the beginning of the year, for example, readers could follow Spanish-American tensions regarding Cuba.⁵ In March, one news item indicated that the Senate voted to take the then district of New Mexico into the Union, and a bit later the Freiburger Zeitung reported at great length about constant clashes between the US military and Mexican squatters and bandits along the Rio Grande.⁶ Other news items included a short note in late April 1876 reporting that Brazil’s emperor had reached San Francisco,⁷ as well as others about hurricanes and their consequences, as in early May and mid-July.⁸ More interesting for prospective emigrants were, perhaps, irregularly published new items providing information on the arrivals and departures of ships of the greater German shipping lines. In early February, for instance, readers could note that a ship with mail and passengers had left Hamburg for New York and that another one had arrived safely at the North American metropole after a journey of 11 days and 5 hours.⁹ Rather important for the readers of the Freiburger Zeitung who intended to emigrate, to establish business connections, or to maintain contacts with relatives in North America was an advertisement appearing in early May 1876 indicating that the United States had opened a consulate in Mannheim in the northern part of Baden.¹⁰

The year 1876, however, was also when the United States celebrated its centenary, when it invited “the world” to visit its international exhibition in Philadelphia, when its army witnessed a severe defeat in clashes with the Sioux, and when one of the country’s most contentious presidential elections took place. The readers of the Freiburger Zeitung were able to follow all of this closely. The news items related to these particular topics constituted a special kind of coverage in comparison to the others mentioned above. From the vantage point of southern Baden, the Centennial International Exhibition opening in Philadelphia in May 1876 seemed to be a major event. Reporting on it several times, the Freiburger Zeitung mirrored its National-Liberal orientation by highlighting German contributions (including cuckoo clocks from the Black Forest) and comparing their quality and quantity to the contributions of other countries.¹¹ In the spring and summer of that year, the paper also published advertisements of a shipping line offering package tours to Philadelphia and back.¹² Another special event for the Freiburger Zeitung’s reporting about America that year was Independence Day on July 4. On this very date, the newspaper published a poem on the front page celebrating the country as the land of freedom. A week later, an unusually long lead article elaborated on the role Germans had played in US history.¹³

One can see that the coverage of the United States in Freiburg’s main newspaper was very up to date when looking at events in the summer of 1876. In the context of a larger military campaign against Native Americans, a US Army regiment led by George A. Custer suffered a severe defeat at the Little Bighorn River in Montana on June 25.¹⁴ Usually, news items from the East Coast of the United States were no more than three or four days old when they appeared in the Freiburger Zeitung, according to the dates given in the articles. The first items on Custer’s Last Stand in the Midwest, however, were published two weeks after it had occurred, and a more extensive report did not appear until mid-July. What might at first seem to have been slow or late reporting in a provincial German town was, in fact, a consequence of bad information flows in North America. Even there, it took about a week for the first rumors of the military defeat to be published in US papers, for example, in the Chicago Daily Tribune on July 4.¹⁵ More detailed reports appeared two days later in East Coast newspapers, and as early as one day later, the news had reached Europe, as can be seen in news items published in the London Times and the Figaro of Paris.¹⁶ The Freiburger Zeitung—and presumably other German papers, too—followed soon thereafter with a report on July 8.

All of these news items and stories on the United States from the Freiburger Zeitung issues of 1876 make it clear that “ordinary” Germans of the time were able to gain a great deal of various kinds of knowledge about “America” even from their local newspapers. Those who wished to emigrate and those who had family already abroad could not only find out whether the mail had shipped out or when to find a transatlantic sailing but also learn about government debates and military campaigns. Likewise, they could keep up with the major events of the day that were shaping the lives of Americans and the nations’ new immigrants, from the centennial celebrations and the international exhibition in Philadelphia to the Battle of the Little Bighorn. And regardless of what drove them to read these items in the Freiburger Zeitung, they could be sure that the news arrived very rapidly for late nineteenth-century standards.