The Forty-eighters were refugees of the failed German Revolution of 1848. They were idealists. They fought to establish a liberal and unified Germany using liberty, democracy and unity as their main tenets. The designation âForty-eighterâ excludes the hundreds of thousands who emigrated from 1848-1852 for mostly economic reasons. It also does not include political refugees from previous periods of political unrest.
There were as many as 4000 Forty-eighters who came to America. Many of the Forty-eighters were young men in their twenties and thirties willing to risk their future. Many of them came from the southwestern Germanic states, from towns like Baden, Hesse, Wurtemburg, the Palatinate and the Rhineland. Many were highly educated professionals: journalists, soldiers, physicians, pastors, bankers, engineers, lawyers, innkeepers and merchants. And many were âfree-thinkersâ or even atheistic in their views.