Darmstaedters (The Forty)
Darmstaedters, or “The Forty,” were a group of thirty-four young men from the county of Baden in Germany, who emigrated to the United States in 1847 to form a utopian/Communist settlement in Texas called “Bettina.” About 130 idealistic, utopian communities of all types were established in the United States between 1663 and 1860.
Most of these communities were located in Ohio and the upper Mississippi River valleys, the Great Lakes region, and the mid-Atlantic. Bettina was the one-hundred-and-twenty-fourth—the first in Texas but not the last.The United States in general and Texas especially had inspired young German idealists for years. With his romantic description of Texas and the heroic deeds of the Texans in their struggle for independence, Charles Sealsfield had pointed the way for those who were looking for a better place to live. His novel Das Cajutenbuch oder nationale Charakteristiken (The Cabin Book, or National Characteristics) was first published anonymously in two volumes in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1841. The novel was received with great enthusiasm.
Five men emerged as the guiding spirits of the Darmstaedters: Gustav Schleicher, Ferdinand von Herff, Hermann Spiess, Friedrich Schenck, and Julius Wagner. Outwardly the Darmstaedter (or Gesellschaft der Vierziger [Society of the Forty], as they were called sometimes, too, because of their original number), were represented by Spiess and von Herff, who had originally founded this group seven years earlier. Their first idea had been to establish a German colony in Wisconsin or Iowa, but contact with the Verein zum Schutze deutscher Einwanderer in Texas (Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas, or Adelsverein) made Spiess and von Herff change their plans. They knew, however, that their Communist “touch” would probably alienate the leading men of the Adelsverein.
This was true, as the secretary of the Adelsverein, Dr. Ernst Grosse, had written in 1846 that the governments were afraid of the ghost of communism. For this reason they did not use the word “Communist” to describe their projected settlement in public while they were still in Germany. Count Carl of Castell-Castell from the Adelsverein, Hermann Spiess, and Ferdinand von Herff signed a contract in Wiesbaden on February 11, 1847, which promised the group free transport to their land, free food until their first harvest, 320 acres of free land of their own choice on the grant of the Adelsverein for everyone, and free tools and materials for farming and construction for every settler. To guarantee every one of the Darmstaedter a place to live in Texas, this group was given 500 acres of land on the grant land of the Adelsverein, wherever they chose, for free. In case the settlement plans failed, another 500 acres would be given this group for free. The contract also stated that the group of the Forty under the leadership of Spiess and von Herff was independent from the Adelsverein and therefore not under the control of the society’s officials in Texas. According to the contract, Spiess and von Herff were allowed to enlist other German immigrants to join them. Bringing a group of 600 settlers or more would establish the right of the Forty to settle permanently on the land of the Adelsverein legally.With the help of the Adelsverein, young men from various backgrounds and with varying levels of education sailed from Hamburg to Galveston in May 1847, moved over land to New Braunfels, and from there traveled to the land they had been promised on the north bank of the Llano River on the Fisher-Miller Grant— not far from Fredericksburg, Texas, another German immigrant settlement. Having arrived on this spot on October 1, 1847, they started to build log cabins and called the place Bettina—in honor of the woman who had become one of their guiding spirits, the German author and social visionary Bettina von Arnim.
From the beginning, the Forty had divided the work according to the various skills of each member. Some went on hunting trips to provide the group with meat. Other members cut trees, mended the houses, washed the dishes, and worked in the fields. After a short while, though, the group began to disintegrate, and more and more members left. By 1850 the Darmstaedters had been dissolved. Some had returned to Germany, others had moved to various other states of the union, and a few remained in Texas, where some gained prominence, such as Ferdinand von Herff; Gustav Schleicher, who became Texas’s senator in Washington, D.C.; Friedrich Schenck; and Jacob Kuchler. The reason for Bettina’s failure was mainly internal discord. Having based their settlement project on Communist ideas as articulated in Etienne Cabet’s philosophical novel Voyage en Icarie: roman philosophique et social (Voyage to Icaria, a philosophical and social novel), published in Paris in 1840, they could not agree on a fair distribution of responsibilities and products. Thus, the “forty” became one of the many idealistic Socialist communities in the United States in the nineteenth century that failed shortly after its establishment. Bettina is commemorated, along with the nearby Adelsverein settlements of Castell and Leiningen, by a state historical marker placed in 1964 on the north side of the Llano River across from Castell.Andreas Reichstein
See also Adelsverein; Fredericksburg, Texas; New Braunfels, Texas; Sealsfield, Charles; Texas; Weitling, Wilhelm
References and Further Reading
Bestor, Arthur Eugene, Jr. Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian and Owenite Phases of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663-1829. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950.
Lich, Glen E. The German Texans. San Antonio: University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures, 1981.
Reichstein, Andreas. German Pioneers on the American Frontier. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2001.