Solms-Braunfels, Prince Carl of b. July 27, 1812; Neustrelitz, Mecklenburg-Strelitz d. November 13, 1876; Rheingrafenstein, Hesse
Directed from 1843 to 1845 the operations of the Adelsverein in Texas. Solms- Braunfels was the object of heated controversy from the day he set foot in Texas as commissioner-general of the association in June 1844.
He has been portrayed as a pretentious, impractical aristocrat, an incompetent administrator incapable of managing finances. He has been dismissed as a pompous military man with romantic dreams of establishing a semifeudal German realm in Texas. Although Solms- Braunfels must bear much of the responsibility for the stranding of thousands of Adelsverein immigrants on the shores of the Gulf of Texas and along inland routes, most other charges against him are, at best, partial truths. A founding member of the Adelsverein, he was familiar with its policies and practices. Yet even when ship after ship, engaged by the Adelsverein to carry the humble German passengers across the Atlantic, arrived before facilities in Texas to shelter them temporarily or means to transport them to the interior had been developed, Solms-Braunfels failed to communicate to the directors of the Adelsverein in Germany the tragedy in the making. While he had prudently acquired land closer to the coast than the distant territory far in the interior of Texas already claimed by the Adelsverein, this new land was still the better part of 200 miles from the tract he bought to serve as a port of entry and named after himself—Carlshafen (today’s Indianola). We lack reliable estimates of the number of colonists who died of dis-
Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels, ca. 1840s. (DeZavala
Papers, 1766 CT Number 0444, Center for American History, University of Texas-Austin)
ease and exposure before reaching their new homes in Texas. The Adelsverein’s speculative character led to fatally unrealistic forecasts of expenses and income.
Solms-Braunfels was left with no alternative but to return to Europe when the organization’s credit in Texas dried up.Solms-Braunfels belonged to the high nobility. Queen Victoria of Great Britain was a close relative. Her consort, Prince Albert, studied together with Solms-Braunfels at the University in Bonn. Solms- Braunfels was not a ruling prince. He made his career in the military, serving as an officer in the Habsburg army in Austria. While he had a strong sense of German patriotism, he also strongly identified himself as a cosmopolitan European. Critical and suspicious of America before journeying to the New World, Solms-Braunfels found much evidence there to support his views.
He arranged a leisurely trip to include some months of travel from Boston down the East Coast to Washington, then westward, down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and finally to Texas. In his diary he finds little of value in the American people. He sees them as motivated largely by desire for material gain.
Solms-Braunfels took a keen interest in military matters. He visited military facilities, talked to officers, assessed the characteristics of fortifications, and generally evaluated U.S. military potential. Perhaps he was already formulating the proposals he presented to Queen Victoria in a long memo in 1846 after his return to Germany. In this document he advocated a European war led by Britain against the United States. With a certain prescience he predicted that the United States, if unhindered, would overtake even Britain as a commercial and industrial power. He outlined a strategy to create major obstacles to American expansion. Although this end was to be accomplished partly by exerting pressure from Canada, the moment was ripe, he argued, to work through Mexico to undo the U.S. annexation of Texas. With the assistance of German settlers in Texas, a European monarch on the throne in Mexico, a British-trained Mexican army, Indian tribes, and freed slaves, Mexico and Texas would form a permanent barrier to U.S.
expansion after its military defeat. Solms- Braunfels was quite explicit that his grand strategy would succeed only if Britain played the major, if partly covert, role in the war he advocated.As best we know, nothing came of Solms-Braunfels’s grand plan. Was it a pipedream? Perhaps, but it constitutes an important instance of negative reactions by Germany and Europe to the rapid growth of the United States in the nineteenth century and beyond. Among the other episodes that come to mind, two threatened to restore to Mexico territories that were lost to the United States and ranged powers outside the Western Hemisphere with Mexico against its neighbor to the north. The first of these episodes involved Archduke Maximilian of Austria, who, with the diplomatic and military backing of the French emperor Napoleon III, acted as emperor of Mexico from 1864 to 1867, while the United States was distracted by the Civil War. The second episode involved the German foreign office in early 1917 prior to U.S. entry into World War I. Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign minister, bruited the idea of an alliance directed against the United States in a telegram sent to his representative in Mexico City. The British intercepted this dispatch and effectively exploited it for propanganda purposes.
After returning to Europe, Solms- Braunfels also published a book that promoted the Adelsverein emigration while cautioning against the greed of English-speaking Americans. Before rejoining the Austrian army, he married his betrothed, Princess Sophie Salm-Salm, after whom he had named a building in the most important town he founded in Texas, New Braunfels.
Walter Struve
See also Adelsverein; Meusebach, John O.;
New Braunsfels, Texas; World War I
References and Further Reading
Fey, Everett Anthony. New Braunfels: The First Founders. 2 vols. Austin, TX: Eakin, 1994.
Solms-Braunfels, Prince Carl of. Texas, 1844— 1845. Houston, TX: Anson Jones, 1936.
------. Voyage to North America, 1844—1845: Prince Carl of Solms’s Texas Diary of People, Places, and Events. Tr. W. M. Von- Maszewski. Denton: German-Texas Heritage Society and University of North Texas, 2000.