The German-American Press

the space of one year, seven separate editors attempted to guide it,
and in early 1850 the name was changed. Newly christened Der
Wahre Republikaner, the paper foundered soon thereafter.12
The failure of Die Glocke did not deter other newspaper
ventures, however. In fact, the decade of the 1850s was a time
of almost frenzied journalistic activity. It was this decade which
saw the greatest influx of German immigrants through the port
of New Orleans. In 1853 alone, over 40,000 German refugees
were processed through New Orleans customs.13 Although the
overwhelming number of immigrants moved on into the midwestern
regions of the United States, enough of them remained in New
Orleans, if even for only a few days or weeks, to give this southern
port city an increasingly Germanic flavor. By official tally of the U.S.
Census, New Orleans in 1850 had 11,425 German-born inhabitants.14
Furthermore, among those immigrants, both those passing through
and those staying, were the exiles of the Revolutions of 1848, many
of them highly learned and well-to-do. These new immigrants
demanded and often were able to produce greater quantities of
German-language literature. For these and other reasons, a plethora
of German newspapers now came into being.15
Most of the newspapers established in the 1850s were printed
in the outlying regions of the city where the Germans had
concentrated. Three such German centers were Jefferson City,
a separate municipality later joined to New Orleans as the third
voter district; secondly, the independent community of Lafayette,
later incorporated as New Orleans' fourth voter district; and thirdly,
Carrollton, also an independent town in those days and subsequently
added to the main city as the 7th voter district. All of these
communities were imbued with a strong sense of civic patriotism and
rivalry. Here in their localities, the Germans developed their own
schools, churches, and civic clubs. It was not unusual, therefore,
that they should also attempt to establish their own newspapers.
Virtually all of these literary endeavors failed in short order, for
various reasons.
The first such literary undertaking was the Lousiana Zuschauer.
It was actually the continuation of an English newspaper, the
Louisiana Spectator, an organ transformed into a German newspaper
on June 1, 1850, and supporting the Whig cause in Jefferson City.
No copies of this paper are extant. It enjoyed an excellent reputation

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