Norwegian-American Studies

9 Twelve Civil War Letters of Col. Hans C. Heg to his Son* edited by E. Biddle Heg The Civil War was a major catalyst in the Americanizing of the Norwegian immigrants who arrived here between 1825 and 1860, molding them in some ways very subtly and in other ways more obviously. Few immigrant Norwegian Americans escaped the influence of this upheaval, if not on the battlefield then certainly on the economic and social fronts. Those on the home scene who assumed the duties of business, farm, and family were passively influenced, adjusting to the attendant deprivations and daily changes, not always aware that they were participants in the struggle of their adopted country. Others, more aggressive, were drawn into the vortex of the war on the several battlefields away from home. On whichever front they found themselves, the immigrants came to feel at home in America during these Civil War years. So it was with Hans Heg, who "became the war hero of the Norwegians , the personal symbol of their contribution to the preservation of the Union."1 His short life is a microcosm of *The following twelve letters by Hans C. Heg were preserved by the Heg family until they were donated to the Norwegian-American Historical Association . In December, 1939, the Association presented the letters to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin at Madison, there to become part of the larger Fowler/VanDoren collection of Heg manuscripts. 177 178 E. Biddle Heg immigrant Americanization; for him as for many others, the Civil War was a decisive stage in this process. For the Norwegian immigrant in the Middle West, one can identify four general phases leading to the Civil War years: the frontier years, the years of settlement, the years of social and cultural beginnings, and the first steps toward political involvement. From 1825 when the first Norwegian immigrants arrived in America, these phases followed swiftly as the tides of immigration flowed west after 1836, when Wisconsin became a territory. By 1840 the frontier years were at their height there. By 1845 the years of settlement had turned villages into towns and towns into cities;2 and this same year the Norwegian immigrants in Wisconsin felt secure enough in their new home to issue a "declaration of independence," the Muskego Manifesto, acknowledging allegiance to their new country and emphasizing the basic philosophy of their Americanization- "freedom and equality," the very principles for which Hans Heg was to give his life just eighteen years later.3 Hans Heg was well prepared for his role as an American when at the age of eleven he arrived on the Wisconsin frontier. Born in Lier on December 21, 1829, to parents who had made the most of individual enterprise in a land of farmers, this youth spent his most impressionable years in the shifting panorama of coastal life in Norway at an inn operated by his father. To young Hans, this inn was like his father's great barn on the shore of Wind Lake in Wisconsin; his eleven years in Norway imbued him with a sense of wide horizons which he later pursued in leading other immigrant settlers farther west, and in his adventuresome trip to the California gold fields in 1849. His strong sense of identity with America was fostered during the ten years before he was twenty-one by an intimate knowledge of the territory in which he lived, its wilderness, its towns and cities, and its people;4 by his close association with the Norwegian- American cultural and political activities of his father. Even, who was a vital participant in the affairs of the Muskego settlement until his death in 1850; and by an Civil War Letters 179 open and friendly warmth of personality that made him admired by those who knew him.5 In 1851, Hans Heg, a wiser, more experienced, and more worldly man, returned to Wisconsin from California to take over his father's farm, and on December 10 of the same year, eleven days before his twenty-second birthday, he married Gunild Einung in "the old log house" on the farm.6 The next ten years Hans devoted to family and career as he...