Latin Settlement

The settlers were young adventurers or classically educated intellectuals, so-called "Latinists" or "Latin Ones" (German "Lateiner"), sometimes both, but by no means farmers.

It is therefore no wonder that most of them went to bigger cities like San Antonio or Houston after the Civil War and the phenomenon of "Latin Settlements" gradually disappeared.

On his journey to Texas in 1867, German-American author Friedrich Kapp met a former university friend of his, who explained his situation to him thus: "I am not happy in the true sense of the word, but neither I am unhappy, for I live freely and without coercion.

B. Faust speculates that the appellative "Latin settlement" or "Latin farmers" was first used in connection with some German settlers of Belleville/Shiloh, Illinois, a large group of men who had been members of the "Burschenschaften," the German student fraternities of a political cast, which had been made special objects of vengeance by the arbitrary governors of the reactionary period in Germany.

At the university Hecker had fought a duel with Gustav Körner; now these men extended to one another the hand of comradeship in their new home.

[clarification needed] In Belleville, with over 15,000 inhabitants, it happened that for years no native-born American sat in the city council, and that all civic offices were filled by German immigrants.