Quotes From Germans in America:

    In 1848, Johann Bernard Stallo, a Latin teacher and lawyer who had immigrated ten years earlier, described more realistically the ambivalent feelings of those Germans who were in the process of adapting to the New World:

                   Being German-American is a very personal thing. We want and we find external independence here, a free middle-class way of life, uninhibited progress in industrial development, in short, political freedom. To this extent we are completely American. We build our houses the way Americans do, but inside there is a German hearth that glows. We wear an American hat, but under its brim German eyes peer forth from a German face. We love our wives with German fidelity. . . We live according to what is customary in America, but we hold dear our German customs and traditions. We speak English, but we think and feel in German. Our reason speaks with the words of an Anglo-American, but our hearts understand only our mother tongue. While our eyes are fixed on an American horizon, in our souls the dear old German sky arches upward. Our entire emotional lives are, in a word, German, and anything that would satisfy our inner longing must appear in German attire [Cincinnati Volksfreund, Nov. 13, 1 848].

In a similar vein, shortly before the Civil War an article in the Atlantis magazine saw nothing wrong with the notion of becoming
American politically while remaining, for the most part, culturally German. An intellectual Forty-eighter who addressed this
question in 1857 also used the word Schmelztiegel ("melting pot") for the first time as a metaphor of assimilation:

     There has been so much talk about the fact that in this "melting pot" of  the American nation the German nationality would be drowned, that "the German," as the technical term runs, would have to "Americanize." However, we believe that the German does not have to discard his social qualities and customs any more than he needs to deny his intellectual accomplishments, and that he is already sufficiently Americanized once he has acquired ideas about the self-government of a republic. This set of political ideas is the only belt strap that binds together the various population strands of the New World. Anyone who subscribes to this concept is worthy of American citizenship. Hence our Americanization requires nothing else but for us to adopt the ideas of democracy about human rights and the sovereignty of the people in social and political life. It is in this respect very significant that, to become a citizen, one has to fulfill no other conditions than to renounce allegiance to one's former sovereign. You do not have to chew tobacco or go bankrupt, neither speculate in lots, nor be a temperance advocate, and you do not have to run to church, nor capture Black men who are run-away slaves from the South. What Americanizes us completely is simply the decision, the firm conviction, and the capacity to be a free man [anon., Atlantis, Jan. 1857, 4-6].