The Last Letter Home

PREFACE THE COUNTRY THAT CHANGED THEM

This is the last installment of a story about a group of people who left their homes in Ljuder parish, Sweden, and emigrated to North America.

These immigrants settled in the St. Croix Valley of Minnesota, in the land of the Chippewas and the Sioux. It was a wild-growing region, never before touched by ax or plow. When the settlers had built their abodes and secured their daily needs they began also to concern themselves with their spiritual requirements. According to their ability they organized for a life beyond their corporal needs: They built churches and schools, they employed ministers and teachers, they agreed upon laws for peaceful community life with equal rights for all. They elected councils to solve their quarrels and mete out justice among them. In their frontier world they had to start everything from the very beginning. They changed the land that had received them and created for themselves a new community.

The region these immigrants helped develop was admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state, and they themselves became citizens of the United States.

But this alone did not guarantee them peace and security in their new land. After ten years in the New World their existence was threatened to its very foundations. Within the Union such great antagonism had arisen between opposing factions that it resulted in a four-year, utterly bloody civil war. And while this was still going on, their own new, free state was shaken by another internal strife: The Indians who had been forced to vacate their ancestral hunting grounds by the ever-encroaching settlers started an uprising to drive them out and regain their land.

The gift of liberty so generously extended to the immigrants made great demands on the recipients: It saddled the settlers with responsibilities that had been unknown to them in their native country. The United States demanded of its citizens talents never needed in their homeland. In Sweden they had been subjects of temporal and spiritual authorities they themselves had not elected, and — like people not of age — they had had a government over them to decide what was best and most beneficial for them. Here in the New World they were citizens of age: They themselves elected their government, and they elected as their officials men who had their confidence and who would serve the people rather than hold them in obedience.

The ability wholly to govern themselves was exacted of the settlers. And the necessity to decide for themselves forced and stimulated them to new efforts and developed in them new strength. In exercising their newfound liberty the immigrants gained the experience which gave them the strength to build their new society.

Thus, in turn, the immigrant-citizens were changed by their new country. They changed the country and the United States of America changed them.