The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 40, July 1936 - April, 1937 Page: 6
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
contribute materially to the political consolidation of Texas.
. . . Annexation or its rejection decides a matter of great
importance for the future of Germany and the Society."
While they were in Baltimore Prince Solms and Bourgeois
d'Orvanne visited an insane asylum in which many of the in-
mates were German Protestants. These, a physician in the asy-
lum explained, had lost their minds because of the activities of
the numerous sects in the United States among them and of
life on the frontier. Prince Solms regretted it very much and
most urgently requested the Society to send no sectarians with
the first emigrant ships but only Catholics and a reliable Catholic
priest.9
On Thursday, June 6, Prince Solms and Bourgeois d'Orvanne
left Baltimore, arrived that evening in Cumberland, and after a
fifteen-hour trip by stage reached Brownsville, Pennsylvania, dur-
ing the morning of the seventh. "It was the worst night which
I have spent in my whole life," Prince Solms wrote. From
Brownsville they went by boat on the Monongahela to Pittsburg.
They left Pittsburg on the eighth of June. On board the Majestic
on the Ohio Prince Solms got some majestic jolts while writing
his sixth letter on June 10 to mail at Cincinnati. He hoped to
reach New Orleans by the 17th in order that he and Bourgeois
d'Orvanne might sail for Galveston on the steamer New York on
the 20th. He heard everywhere that the annexation of Texas
would be definitely rejected. "God grant it !" he pleaded.10
Upon his arrival in New Orleans in the early morning of June
19 Prince Solms heard that annexation had been rejected. In his
joy and enthusiasm he wrote:
Now we must strike while the iron is hot. I am itching to leave
New Orleans Saturday, at the latest Monday, to call on the Presi-
"S-B A., XLIX, 121-123.
-Ibid., XL1X, 125. Prince Solms was quite determined, it seems, to have
a Catholic priest for the first settlers. In a report which he sent to the
directors of the Society from Port Lavaca on December 23, 1844, after the
first settlers had arrived, he stated that the Catholic priest, whom he had
asked Father Alexander at Baltimore to send him, had not arrived. See
Kalender der Neu Braunfelser Zeitung fiur 1916, p. 45.
"S-B A., XLIX, 124-126. The Texas annexation treaty which John C.
Calhoun and Isaac Van Zandt signed on April 12, 1844, was rejected by the
United States Senate on June 8 following by the decisive vote of 35 to 16.
The discomforts of the trip down the Ohio and the Mississippi could have
been borne more easily by Prince Solms if he had heard of the rejection
of the treaty when he left Pittsburgh on June 8.
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 40, July 1936 - April, 1937, periodical, 1937; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101099/m1/14/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.