Belgians in Michigan

Belgian Emigration to Michigan,1830-1870

17 BelgianEmigrationtoMichigan, 1830-1870 Tradition of Hard Work, Family Solidarity, and Religious Devotion In the Flemish folk-park at Bokrijk in Limburg there has been a painstaking effort to reconstruct the social environment of Flemish peasants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In those reconstructed dwellings from the poorest to the more prosperous the importance of religious symbolism is striking. A critic might assert that this is a modern imposition or interpretation , but there has been an effort to be true to the context of these peoples’ social lives, in fact the social environment from which many of the nineteenth-century Flemish immigrants to Michigan came. The Flemish peasants and artisans, who came to Michigan in the nineteenth century, were undoubtedly more adventurous than those who remained behind. They probably brought with them an ability and a willingness to innovate, but they also, in general, brought with them shared cultural characteristics: a tradition of hard work, family solidarity within a context of paternalism, Catholic religious belief, and frequently devotion. When they were injected into this strange new environment, semi-frontier and very Protestant, they sought meaning and support from what was familiar: family and religion. They also found an additional bond of support that had deep roots in Flemish history, Flemish identity, and Flemish hardheaded resistance to cultural absorption by an alien ethnicity. Alice Kessler-Harris has written, “at least 18 B ernard A. Cook until the end of the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth century , diverse sets of assumptions and goals divided Americans.”20 How the Flemish in Michigan understood their lives can be deduced from their home life, their organizations, their rituals, and their symbolic acts. The parish, the parish school, the tavern, the club, and the mutual aid association are all windows into the way the Flemish immigrants envisioned themselves and what they valued. Home life issues would certainly include questions about those whom they married, the solidity of those marriages, and the number of children they had. Much of the evidence for this study is anecdotal, but from that evidence it appears that the Flemish very frequently married other Flemings, at the very least other Catholics, that marriages generally lasted until the death of one’s spouse, and that children were numerous. The Flemish seemed to want to go to church with other Flemish and to have their children educated in Catholic schools. Their Catholic religion provided a link with their old lives in Belgium and provided stability and meaning in a strange new world. Sailing from Antwerp Most Flemish emigrants embarked from Antwerp on a newly established Antwerp-New York steamship line. Belgium had become an independent kingdom in 1830. However, the Dutch king did not reconcile himself to his loss until international pressure forced him to do so in 1839. After the Dutch gained their independence from Spain, Antwerp, Belgium’s most important port, had been blockaded by the Dutch, since the mouth of its river, the Scheldt, was controlled by the Netherlands. Napoleon forced the Dutch to open access to the port, and when Belgium became part of the Netherlands in 1815, after the defeat of Napoleon, the port remained open. However, after the Dutch were expelled, they imposed heavy tolls on commerce to Antwerp. It was only in 1862 that Belgium purchased from the Dutch the right of free access of ships to the city. The city began to flourish again economically, and contact with America was facilitated. The emigration of poor Flemish people was subsidized by the Belgian government, which wished to export its burdensome and potentially disruptive poor. American land promoters in the Midwest and labor recruiters also assisted the migration of Belgians. They recruited Belgians in the 1830s to work as timber workers and miners BELGIANS IN MICHIGAN 19 in the Upper Peninsula. In the period before the Civil War many Flemish peasants settled in Marquette and Delta counties of the Upper Peninsula.21 A Belgian community developed during the 1830s around the lumber mills of Iron Mountain. The Hungry Forties During the 1840s, Flanders was struck first by a decline of the linen industry, which was apparent by 1841, and then by an agricultural and industrial crisis between 1845 and 1850.22 The textile industry had flourished during the Napoleonic period, when Flanders supplied uniforms for Napoleon’s armies. After the old Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) became part of the Netherlands, France imposed a...