Minnesota-bound Swedes were tricked into laboring in South after Civil War

Shaking his ax, Carl Jonasson smashed a slab of rancid bacon in the face of Dr. William Walker, a Virginia surgeon who owned a 1,500-acre James River plantation — and, until just recently, 80 enslaved people.

Jonasson's rage was justified. Planning to homestead in Minnesota, he had emigrated from Sweden in July 1865 with his wife, Anna Britta, daughters Christine and Augusta, and 11-year-old twins Anders and Joel. After enduring 43 days at sea, the family met a well-dressed Swede in New York who offered them good jobs near Chicago before heading to Minnesota.

But the man was an agent whose job was to divert immigrants south, filling the labor void left by freed slaves at the end of the Civil War. With neither money nor English language skills, the Jonassons wound up in Richmond, Va., just three months after the Confederate capital fell. Boats shuttled them up the James River to Walker's plantation.

The family was stuck there for nearly eight months, living in ramshackle cabins that had housed slaves. In Virginia's stifling summer heat, so far from Sweden's cool climate, Carl chopped timber to keep Walker warm in winter. He was paid a pittance and grew ill from poor food and hard work.

The Jonassons' immigration detour came to light through the dogged genealogy research of Judy Thomas Malmberg of Lake Elmo. While tracing her husband John's family tree, she learned that Carl and Anna Britta were his great-great-grandparents.

She documented the story through family letters, oral histories and newspaper accounts, and laced her three years of research together into a handsome 127-page book, "Victimized: Swedish Immigrants Labor on a Southern Plantation," which she self-published in 2020.

"I'm still shocked by what I found; it's not very well known," Malmberg said. "But it happened to hundreds of Swedes as wicked plantation owners used so-called runners who blatantly lied to get workers down South, where they were they were paid next to nothing."

"We work hard all day, at night sleep on a hard brick floor," a duped Swede on another Goochland County plantation wrote his cousin in Iowa. "Yes, the slaves are freed, but we are treated almost like slaves."

The New York Times reported in March 1866 how a Swedish immigrant couple working in Virginia were paid by a minister in worthless Confederate money — "a fraud they did not discover until they undertook to pay their fare on the railroad."

Other immigrant groups suffered from similar schemes. According to a Nov. 27, 1865, article in the Washington (D.C) Evening Star, unsuspecting German newcomers were defrauded and enslaved by agents in New York "for the purpose of shipping a cargo of emigrants" southward "to supply white labor."

As relatives up North raised money to help them, the waylaid Swedes pawned what little they had for train fare. The Jonassons finally reached Chicago in March 1866, among 26 Swedes who had just arrived, according to the Swedish-American paper Hemlandet.

"The poor people had been in the rebel states … and barely got away from there, poorer than when they arrived," the paper said.

A month later, Carl's family finally made it to Minnesota. He and his sons worked railroad jobs before homesteading on 160 acres of Nicollet County farm land near Bernadotte, about 16 miles northeast of New Ulm.

Carl became a U.S. citizen in 1873. His name changed first to Carl Johnson — sometimes spelled Charl in official documents — before he settled on Carl Jonasson Essling, perhaps a tribute to his mother, Maja Lisa Edsling.

Carl died at 55 in 1881, after he was gored by a bull while husking corn in his field, and Anna Britta died three years later. Anders took over the farm, which would remain in the family until it was sold in the 1990s. His twin brother, Joel, taught school and worked as a janitor at Gustavus Adolphus in St. Peter.

Malmberg found a 1937 St. Peter Herald article about Anders and Joel Essling, who at the age of 83 were being called "Minnesota's oldest twins." The paper said their family "through some error were entrained for Richmond, Virginia, instead of Minnesota, their original destination" and employed on Walker's "vast estate ... filling a gap left by the freedom of slaves at the close of the Civil War."

"I absolutely couldn't believe that a family of six planning to homestead in Minnesota ended up on a southern plantation," Malmberg told me. "It sounded almost surreal, as if it were made up."

Almost as amazing, she said, was how well the family was doing by 1870, only four years after moving into a mud hut in Minnesota with next to nothing. "Carl and Anna Britta were quite remarkable people, with such a strong work ethic," she said.

Curt Brown's tales about Minnesota's history appear every other Sunday. Readers can send him ideas and suggestions at mnhistory@startribune.com. His latest book looks at 1918 Minnesota, when flu, war and fires converged: strib.mn/MN1918.