Before I begin the story of the Anderson family, a little information about Sweden seems to be in order. Sweden ranks somewhere in the middle of the countries in Europe with a geographic size of 173,860 square miles and has a population 10.4 million. To give the reader some perspective, it is about the size of California or Japan. Stockholm is its capital. The primary language spoken is, of course, Swedish, though as mentioned in chapter one, English is also spoken by a large number of its inhabitants. Unlike California, Sweden has little arable land. This fact will play a very important role in the emigration to the Americas.
In Sweden’s prehistory and early Middle Ages, the country was largely comprised of two tribes, the Goths and the Svears. A third albeit smaller portion was made up of Sami or as they were more commonly known throughout history as the Lapps. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden are commonly grouped together into a loosely aggregated group known as Scandinavia. Throughout its history, Sweden was a fairly poor nation. However, thanks to the industrial revolution, it is now an economic powerhouse. Its main economic goods are engines and engine parts. Another point of interest that has helped it flourish is that Sweden has managed to remain neutral for most of the last two centuries. This is no small feat considering the number of wars that have been fought in Europe during this time.
The first humans arrived in Sweden by 8,000 BC after the end of the ice age. They were hunters and fishermen, though by 4,000 BC farming became more common. By 2,000 BC farming implements were made using bronze. Finally, by 500 BC, they were made using more durable iron. The Sweds sold slaves, furs, and amber to the Romans. In the 9th century, the Norwegians and Danes turned to raiding and invading. However, the Sweds continued with trading and farming. Though, that is not to say that they didn’t dip their toes in the Viking world. They just went east into East Poland, Ukraine, and Russia via the North Sea. In the 11th century, Sweden became a unified kingdom under one king. Another major change took place approximately 200 years later when Sweden was converted to Christianity. Over the next century or so, Sweden was involved in two crusades to convert Finland and Russia to Eastern Christian Orthodoxy.
During most of its history, the population of Sweden was an overwhelmingly agrarian society. It was divided into three classes. At the bottom were the slaves or serfs. The slave’s life was horrid. They were made to do all the hardest and most unpleasant work. Above the level of the serfs or slaves were the freemen. Their quality of life varied, and those at the lower range enjoyed few luxuries. Their wealth varied greatly, and it depended on the amount of land they owned. Some were quite well off and owned slaves. Above them were the chieftans or earls. They enjoyed all that the country could provide.
In the 13th century Sweden, there were changes in agriculture. Previously, Viking farmers had utilized two large fields. Each year, one was sown with crops while the other was left fallow. By the 13th century, Swedish farmers had begun using the three-field system. Every year, one field was sown with spring crops, one was sown with autumn crops, and one was left fallow. This seems like a small advance, but it made a big difference in the Swedish farmer’s ability to grow more crops. As well as improvements in agriculture, Swedish trade and commerce prospered. New towns were founded while old ones expanded.
Then, in 1280, King Magnus granted the upper class exemption from paying taxes in return for military service. However, in most of Europe, the peasants were serfs, halfway between slaves and freemen. Swedish peasants were never reduced to serfdom. King Valdemar 1250-1275 passed laws that applied to all of Sweden (at that time each province had its own laws). The laws improved the rights of women and strengthened the crown. Finally, in 1350, the Swedish king issued a code of laws for the whole country.
During the Middle Ages, Sweden was not spared the scourges of the Black Plague and lost approximately 1/3 of its population. It has been hypothesized that the trade routes throughout the Middle East and Europe helped to spread the plague. Incessant wars up to the late 1700s and the plague helped to maintain a stable population. It is here that I want to inform the reader that this book is not and should not be a substitute for the history of Sweden. To do the intricate history of the Scandinavian countries, justice would take several volumes. This chapter is just a brief introduction to the subject. This work is, after all, a work of fiction. Once the fighting stopped, population growth became a problem due to the poor soil in Sweden. There simply was not enough food to support the population. This was one of the reasons for mass emigration to the United States. Initially, the establishment disapproved of emigration, thought they eventually saw the light and began to incentivize its citizens to leave Sweden. Lack of food was not the only reason for people to cross the Atlantic. Poverty (lack of social mobility), religious persecution, political constraints, mandatory military service, and Gold Fever, to name a few.
A bit of a side note, most people have heard of the Salem Witch Trials in Colonial , Massachusetts in 1962 and 1963, but what most people don’t know was that there were trials all over Europe around this time, and a lot more innocent women and men were killed then in the colonies. There were even witch trials in Sweden in 1674-1675. They were the Torsaker Witch Trials.
At the peak of Sweden’s brief but bloody witch panic, Laurentius Christophori Hornaeus, Torsaker parish’s priest, used children’s testimony to accuse 100s of villagers of witchcraft, including his own mother and aunt. It was obtained through coercion and torture, such as putting them in an oven and threatening to light it, whipping them, and dunking them into a hole in a frozen lake. Most of the men were freed, and then on one bloody day, the remaining 71 victims, primarily women, were put to death, beheaded, and burned. Horrifyingly, the witch hunters were careful to behead the accused away from the firewood so it would not be soaked in blood and could still light. Torsaker’s mass execution of accused witches was one of the largest ever recorded in a single day, and it wiped out about a fifth of the region’s female population.
Some people chose to leave Sweden because of the mandatory military service required by the government. In 1860, young men were required to train in the Swedish military for 30 days out of the year. The Swedish conscription laws became increasingly strict and demanding. Some young men decided to leave the country rather than face this conscription.
Since this subject played such a pivotal part in the history of Swedish emigrants, I will delve a little more deeply into this matter. Europe was in the grip of an economic depression. In Sweden, population growth and repeated crop failures were making it increasingly difficult to make a living from the tiny land plots on which at least three quarters of the inhabitants depended. Rural conditions were especially bleak in the stony and unforgiving Småland province, which became the heartland of emigration. Tillable land became more and more scarce, and famine swept the nation, killing 22 out of every 1,000 Swedes. Emigration regulations were eased, and the 1860s saw a massive movement of Swedes fleeing their homeland; between 1861 and 1881, 150,000 traveled to the United States, 100,000 of whom came in just five years, between 1868 and 1873.
The land in the middle western portion of the United States was the antithesis of Sweden. The land was both fertile and bountiful and was definitely the primary draw for most of the immigants. In addition, many immigrants were aggressively recruited by representatives of U.S. steamship lines and railroad companies, as well as by local governments seeking new settlers for remote parts of the country.
The political freedom of the American republic exerted a similar pull. Swedish peasants were some of the most literate in Europe, and consequently had access to the European egalitarian and radical ideas that culminated in the Revolutions of 1848. The clash between Swedish liberalism and a repressive monarchist regime raised political awareness among the disadvantaged, many of whom looked to the U.S. to realize their republican ideals.
The national Church of Sweden had been very strong, and the local clergyman, the präst or kyrkoherde, could exercise a powerful influence for good or ill over parishioners. Yet its’ influence was starting to wane as there was a growth in new thinking, both religious and secular. Many people sought greater freedom of religious expression. A revivalist, Bible based movement grew in protest against what were seen as the limitations of the State Church, which was seen to side with the employers and the ruling classes.
Dissenting religious practitioners also widely resented the treatment they received from the Lutheran State Church through the Conventicle Act. Conflicts between local worshipers and the new churches were most explosive in the countryside, where dissenting self-righteous groups were more active and were more directly under the eye of local law enforcement and the parish priest. Before non-Lutheran churches were granted tolerance in 1809, clampdowns on illegal forms of worship and teaching often provoked whole groups of true christian believers, radical and non-radical alike to leave together, intent on forming their own spiritual communities in the new land. Until 1858, people who practiced another religion faced being fined, put in jail, or exiled from the country. Even though these practices stopped in 1858, many Swedes continued to be intolerant of their fellow countrymen and women who practiced a religion other than that of the state.
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, about 1.3 million Swedes left Sweden for the United States of America. While the land of the American frontier was a magnet for the rural poor all over Europe, According to most immigration historians, mass migration from Sweden to the United States unfolded in five distinct waves between the 1840s and 1920s. Within this period, hundreds of thousands of Swedish emigrants made their way over and settled in both rural and urban scapes of the United States. Factors that brought migration to a trickle were found on both sides of the Atlantic, with restrictions on immigration placed in the United States and improving social and economic conditions in Sweden being the primary factors. The impetus for people to leave Norway and Sweden in the mid-1800s began with a positive development — falling child mortality rates. The population of those countries boomed, but the farmland supply and job opportunities couldn’t keep up.
Swedish migration to the United States peaked in the decades after the American Civil War (1861–1865). By 1890, the U.S. census reported a Swedish-American population of nearly 800,000. These rising emigration rates caused great concern in Sweden. However, before any reform could be done to avoid a continuous flow of Swedish citizens fleeing the home land, World War I (1914–1918) broke out and effectively ended the process. From the mid-1920s, there was no longer a Swedish mass emigration.
Prior to the mid-1850s, trade in Sweden was controlled by organizations called guilds. A guild was a medieval association of craftsmen or merchants that often held sway over the seats of power. However, in 1846, trade became deregulated. Other changes took place, such as universal primary education and the industrial age being ushered in by the first rail head being built in 1856. Further governmental change took place in the form of constitutional reform. In 1867, the old Riksdag, which was divided into four estates, nobility, clergy, burghers, and peasants, was replaced by a parliament with two houses.
In 1905, Norway became independent from Sweden. Sweden remained neutral during the First World War, and in 1921, universal suffrage was introduced. The 1920s were relatively prosperous for Sweden. However, in the early 1930s, Sweden suffered during the depression. Unemployment rose to 24.9%.
However, in 1932, the Social Democrats formed a coalition with the Agrarian Party. They took steps to help agriculture and also created public work to reduce unemployment. By 1939, the Swedish economy had largely recovered, although unemployment was still very high at 17%.
Sweden again remained neutral during the Second World War. Sweden had maintained a policy of neutrality since 1814, and this policy had served the country well. Nevertheless, in the late 1930s, the Swedish government increased military spending in case of an attack.
The Industrial Revolution affected Sweden later and much more slowly than in most Western European countries. Consequently, the cities and larger towns remained few and small. No real industrial revolution occurred, and developments such as mechanization and the introduction of railways were piecemeal. Sweden had vast resources in talented people, the mountains of metal ores, the enormous forests, and the powerful rivers. These resources were relatively dormant until a breakthrough of the timber industry in the 1850’s, when the wilderness became very valuable. As steam power developed, the sawmill was freed from dependence on rapids. Huge sawmill areas grew up around river outlets such as at Sundsvall and in the Ådalen district in Norrland. Intensive railway building shortened the long distances between the Lapland ore mining areas and the export harbors such as at Luleå. Industrial centers were created around the railways. So Norrland was transformed into a pioneer America type area within Sweden. Many were attracted to the north by the timber and pulp industry.
The Industrial Age came to Sweden in the 1870’s, with the main industries in timber, iron and steel, textiles, and glass. Glass making became very important in Småland. Its’ Kingdom of Glass or Crystal, or Glasriket, in places such as Kosta, Boda, and Orrefors is a popular and significant part of the economy today. The small-scale workshop industry in the previously mentioned bruks developed into modern industrial concerns. The Swedish companies ASEA, Ericsson, SKF, and AGA were all founded in this time. Inventors such as John Ericsson and Alfred Nobel (dynamite and later benefactor of the Nobel prizes) thrived. New industrial districts generated large internal migration, as in Britain. So by 1870 15% of the population worked in mining, construction, manufacturing, etc., and this was 28% at the turn of the century. This seemed to be powerful industrial progress, but it was never strong enough to satisfy the very basic needs of many people. Sweden was not stagnant economically, but if industrialization had come earlier, the industrial areas would have absorbed the population pressure. The slow growth of the industry could not create the ideal society, and urban life was not always attractive. When times got worse, there was no social security. Therefore, an average of two men emigrated for each man occupied by industry.
In the late 1940s and 1950s, a strong welfare state was created in Sweden. Reforms included more generous old-age pensions, child allowances, and health insurance. In 1974, a new constitution was introduced, and the minimum age for voting was reduced to 18. The 1950s and 1960s were years of prosperity for Sweden, and there was full employment. In the late 20th century, the Swedish economy changed greatly, and service industries became much more important. The manufacturing industry declined in importance, and so did agriculture. Today, Sweden is a rich country, and its people have a high standard of living.
A literate people.
Another significant factor was the Act of 1842, establishing compulsory elementary education. The folkskolan -a basic primary school – virtually erased illiteracy and also enabled people to read about America
Where did the idea of emigration come from?
When there seemed to be no chance of moving from the difficulties the idea of leaving Sweden arose.
“When one may not think what one wishes.
When the food runs out.
When a maid may be a maid forever.
When the senses are numbed by indolence.
Then a possibility opens up.
To travel to America.
One can make something of one’s life.
Now that the reader has a somewhat serviceable knowledge of Swedish history, it is time to begin our narration of the Anderson clan saga.