Nassau Plantation: The Evolution of a Texas German Slave Plantation (review)

The title of this book is pleasantly misleading. It is far more than the history of one plantation. The author has skillfully used the history of Nassau Farm in Fayette County, Texas, established in 1843 by the Adelsverein, the society of German noblemen that sponsored the emigration of more than 5,000 Germans to Texas in 1844 and 1845, as a lens through which to examine the dynamics of the emigration society itself and the rivalries and disagreements that encumbered its board of directors and eventually brought about its financial collapse.

Kearney probes several inherent contradictions in the ambitious program of the Adelsverein, chief among which was the desire to create an aristocratic and hierarchical colony in an intensely democratic frontier culture. He examines the rift in the Adelsverein's board of directors between those who advocated a chain of small German settlements clustered around slave plantations like Nassau and those who wanted to obtain a large land grant and settle it with farmers, and he speculates on the paradox presented by a group of romantic devotees of freedom owning a slave plantation.

He does this by examining the month-to-month history of the plantation's management, including the fatal shootout in October 1847 between two factions of the Adelsverein's Texas administrators, and relating those happenings to the larger events in the Adelsverein's complicated history of mismanagement, indebtedness, and lawsuits, one of which reached the United States Supreme Court.

The author also provides a good deal of hitherto unpublished material on two aristocratic Texas-German families that became associated with Nassau, the von Roeders and the von Rosenbergs, both of which played crucial roles in the cultural life of the region in the 1840s and 1850s. He even explores the career of the mysterious scoundrel Frederich Armand Stubberg, who under the alias of Dr. Schubbert became an official of the Adelsverein and the founder of Fredricksburg, Texas.

The strength of this book lies in the author's use of the seventy-volume transcript of the Solms-Braunfels Archives at the University of Texas's Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, in his ability to unravel the complicated land transactions recorded in the Fayette County Deed Records, and in his analytical acumen and felicitous writing style. Its weakness, if indeed it is one, is the author's tendency to digress into subjects that are peripheral to his main topic, such as the vicissitudes of Texas Germans during the Civil War. However, this reviewer found these digressions rewarding due to the author's mastery of the literature on this subject, which consists largely of privately-published personal reminiscences and family histories, many in German. The book is charmingly illustrated with pencil sketches by the author depicting incidents described in the text.

The last complete history of the Adelsverein and its Texas settlements was Rudolph Biesele's History of the German Settlements in Texas, published in 1930 and written without access to the Solms-Braunfels Archives. James Kearney has a Ph.D. in German, teaches high school German, and manages a family ranch in Colorado County, but he is gifted with the analytical and narrative skills of a seasoned historian. Nassau Plantation is too narrow in scope to completely replace Biesele, but one hopes that Kearney's next book will do just that.