There were three strata to this second German migration.  The earlier courses were largely peasants and skilled artisans, those of the decade of the Civil War were mostly of the working classes, and between these came the “Forty-eighters.”  Upon them all, however, peasant, artisan, merchant, and intellectual, their experiences in their native land had made a deep impression.  They all had a background of political philosophy the nucleus of which was individual liberty; they all had a violent distaste for the petty tyrannies and espionages which contact with their own form of government had produced; and in coming to America they all sought, besides farms and jobs, political freedom.  They therefore came in humility, bore in patience the disappointments of the first rough contacts with pioneer America and its nativism, and few, if any, cherished the hope of going back to Germany.  Though some of the intellectual idealists at first had indefinite enthusiasms about a Deutschtum in America, these visions soon vanished.  They expressed no love for the governments they had left, however strong the cords of sentiment bound them to the domestic and institutional customs of their childhood.

This was to a considerable degree an idealistic migration and as such it had a lasting influence upon American life.  The industry of these people and their thrift, even to paring economy, have often been extolled; but other nationalities have worked as hard and as successfully and have spent as sparingly.  The special contribution to America which these Germans made lay in other qualities.  Their artists and musicians and actors planted the first seeds of aesthetic appreciation in the raw West where the repertoire had previously been limited to Money Musk, The Arkansas Traveler, and Old Dog Tray.  The liberal tendencies of German thought mellowed the austere Puritanism of the prevalent theology.  The respect which these people had for intellectual attainments potently influenced the educational system of America from the kindergarten to the newly founded state universities.  Their political convictions led them to espouse with ardor the cause of the Union in the war upon slavery; and their sturdy independence in partisan politics was no small factor in bringing about civil service reform.  They established German newspapers by the hundreds and maintained many German schools and German colleges.  They freely indulged their love for German customs.  But while their sentimentalism was German, their realism was American.  They considered it an honor to become American citizens.  Their leaders became American leaders.  Carl Schurz was not an isolated example.  He was associated with a host of able, careful, constructive Germans.