During the 19th and early 20th centuries, about 1.3 million Swedes left Sweden for the United States of America. While the land of the American frontier was a magnet for the rural poor all over Europe, some factors encouraged Swedish emigration in particular. Religious repression and idiosyncrasy practiced by the Swedish Lutheran State Church was widely resented, as was social conservatism and snobbery influenced by the Swedish monarchy. Population growth and crop failures made conditions in the Swedish countryside increasingly bleak. By contrast, reports from early Swedish emigrants painted the American Midwest as an earthly paradise.

According to Joy K. Lintelman, mass migration from Sweden to the United States unfolded in five distinct waves between the 1840s and 1920s. Within this period, hundreds of thousands of Swedish emigrants made their way over and settled in both rural and urban scapes of the United States. Factors which brought migration to a trickle were found on both sides of the Atlantic, with restrictions on immigration placed in the United States and improving social and economic conditions in Sweden being the primary factors.Lintelman, I Go to America, 71-74.

Swedish migration to the United States peaked in the decades after the American Civil War (1861–1865). By 1890 the U.S. census reported a Swedish-American population of nearly 800,000. These rising emigration rates caused great concern in Sweden. However, before any reform could be done to avoid a continuous flow of Swedish citizens fleeing the home land, World War I (1914–1918) broke out and effectively ended the process. From the mid-1920s, there was no longer a Swedish mass emigration.

Early history: the Swedish-American dream

The Swedish West India Company established a colony on the Delaware River in 1638, naming it New Sweden. A small, short-lived colonial settlement, it was lost to the Dutch in New Netherland in 1655.Colenbrander, Koloniale Geschiedenis, 14-15. Until 1656, close to 700 Swedish and Finnish settlers had migrated to the colony, of which perhaps 40% was Finnish; what is now the country of Finland was then part of Sweden, and many Finns had migrated to Sweden proper, particularly Värmland, from whence they came to America.Carlsson, "The New Sweden Colonists", 173-80. Many of the Finns spoke Swedish as a first language, and the clergymen who came to New Sweden were all speakers of Swedish. Finnish was apparently forgotten by 1750 or so; Swedish held on until the late 18th century.Carlsson, "The New Sweden Colonists", 180-81. While generally the Swedes thought of themselves not as colonizers, having been spared the bloody conflicts with indigenous Americans had with other colonists and of having had good relations with them, new research has complicated that idea.Fur, Colonialism in the Margins, 1-2.

The historian H. A. Barton has suggested that the greatest significance of New Sweden was the strong and long-lasting interest in America that the colony generated in Sweden. America was seen as the standard-bearer of liberalism and personal freedom, and became an ideal for liberal Swedes. Their admiration for America was combined with the notion of a past Swedish Golden Age with ancient Nordic ideals. Supposedly corrupted by foreign influences, the timeless "Swedish values" would be recovered by Swedes in the New World. This remained a fundamental theme of Swedish, and later Swedish-American, discussion of America, though the recommended "timeless" values changed over time. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Swedes who called for greater religious freedom would often refer to America as the supreme symbol of it. The emphasis shifted from religion to politics in the 19th century, when liberal citizens of the hierarchic Swedish class society looked with admiration to the American Republicanism and civil rights. In the early 20th century, the Swedish-American dream even embraced the idea of a welfare state responsible for the well-being of all its citizens. Underneath these shifting ideas ran from the start the current which carried all before it in the later 20th century: America as the symbol and dream of unfettered individualism.Barton, A Folk Divided, 5–7.

Swedish debate about the United States remained mostly theoretical before the 19th century, since very few Swedes had any personal experience of the nation. Emigration was illegal and population was seen as the wealth of nations.Kälvemark, 94–96. However, the Swedish population doubled in size between 1750 and 1850 a time of "peace, vaccination, and potatoes",Beijbom, "European Emigration". and as population growth outstripped economic development, it gave rise to fears of overpopulation based on the influential population theory of Thomas Malthus. In the 1830s, the laws against emigration were repealed.Barton, A Folk Divided, 11.

19th century Akenson argues that hard times in Sweden before 1867 produced a strong push effect, but that for cultural reasons most Swedes refused to emigrate and clung on at home. Akenson says the state wanted to keep its population high and: The upper classes' need for a cheap and plentiful labor force, the instinctive willingness of the clergy of the state church to discourage emigration on both moral and social grounds, and the deference of the lower orders to the arcade of powers that hovered above them—all these things formed an architecture of cultural hesitancy concerning emigration.Akenson, Ireland, Sweden, and the Great European Migration, 70.

A few "countercultural" deviants from the mainstream did leave and showed the way. The severe economic hardship of the "Great Deprivation" of 1867 to 1869, finally overcame the reluctance and the floodgates opened to produce an "emigration culture".Akenson, Ireland, Sweden, and the Great European Migration, 1815–1914 pp. 37–39

European mass emigration: push and pull Large-scale European emigration to the United States started in the 1840s in Britain, Ireland and Germany. That was followed by a rising wave after 1850 from most Northern European countries, and in turn by Central and Southern Europe. Research into the forces behind this European mass emigration has relied on sophisticated statistical methods.Åkerman, passim. One theory which has gained wide acceptance is Jerome's analysis in 1926 of the "push and pull" factors—the impulses to emigration generated by conditions in Europe and the U.S. respectively. Jerome found that fluctuations in emigration co-varied more with economic developments in the U.S. than in Europe, and deduced that the pull was stronger than the push.Norman, 150–153. Jerome's conclusions have been challenged, but still form the basis of much work on the subject.Runblom and Norman, 315.Norman, passim.

Emigration patterns in the Nordic countries—Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland—show striking variation. Nordic mass emigration started in Norway, which also retained the highest rate throughout the century. Swedish emigration got underway in the early 1840s, and had the third-highest rate in all of Europe, after Ireland and Norway. Denmark had a consistently low rate of emigration, while Iceland had a late start but soon reached levels comparable to Norway. Finland, whose mass emigration did not start until the late 1880s, and at the time part of the Russian Empire, is usually classified as part of the Eastern European wave.

Crossing the Atlantic

The first European emigrants travelled in the holds of sailing cargo ships. With the advent of the age of steam, an efficient transatlantic passenger transport mechanism was established at the end of the 1860s. It was based on huge ocean liners run by international shipping lines, most prominently Cunard, White Star, and Inman. The speed and capacity of the large steamships meant that tickets became cheaper. From the Swedish port towns of Stockholm, Malmö and Gothenburg, transport companies operated various routes, some of them with complex early stages and consequently a long and trying journey on the road and at sea. Thus North German transport agencies relied on the regular Stockholm—Lübeck steamship service to bring Swedish emigrants to Lübeck, and from there on German train services to take them to Hamburg or Bremen. There they would board ships to the British ports of Southampton and Liverpool and change to one of the great transatlantic liners bound for New York. The majority of Swedish emigrants, however, travelled from Gothenburg to Hull, UK, on dedicated boats run by the Wilson Line, then by train across Britain to Liverpool and the big ships.Brattne and Åkerman, 179–181.

During the later 19th century, the major shipping lines financed Swedish emigrant agents and paid for the production of large quantities of emigration propaganda. Much of this promotional material, such as leaflets, was produced by immigration promoters in the U.S. Propaganda and advertising by shipping line agents was often blamed for emigration by the conservative Swedish ruling class, which grew increasingly alarmed at seeing the agricultural labor force leave the country. It was a Swedish 19th-century cliché to blame the falling ticket prices and the pro-emigration propaganda of the transport system for the craze of emigration, but modern historians have varying views about the real importance of such factors. Brattne and Åkerman have examined the advertising campaigns and the ticket prices as a possible third force between push and pull. They conclude that neither advertisements nor pricing had any decisive influence on Swedish emigration. While the companies remain unwilling, , to open their archives to researchers, the limited sources available suggest that ticket prices did drop in the 1880s, but remained on average artificially high because of cartels and price-fixing.Brattne and Åkerman, 179–181, 186–189, 199–200. On the other hand, H. A. Barton states that the cost of crossing the Atlantic dropped drastically between 1865 and 1890, encouraging poorer Swedes to emigrate.Barton, 38. The research of Brattne and Åkerman has shown that the leaflets sent out by the shipping line agents to prospective emigrants would not so much celebrate conditions in the New World, as simply emphasize the comforts and advantages of the particular company. Descriptions of life in America were unvarnished, and the general advice to emigrants brief and factual. Newspaper advertising, while very common, tended to be repetitive and stereotyped in content.Brattne and Åkerman, 187–192.

Mid-19th century

Swedish mass migration took off in the spring of 1841 with the departure of Uppsala University graduate Gustaf Unonius (1810–1902) together with his wife, a maid, and two students. This small group founded a settlement they named New Upsala in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, and began to clear the wilderness, full of enthusiasm for frontier life in "one of the most beautiful valleys the world can offer".Unonius, quoted in Barton, A Folk Divided, 13. Though he would eventually become disillusioned with life in the U.S. and return to Sweden, his reports in praise of the simple and virtuous pioneer life, published in the liberal newspaper Aftonbladet, had already begun to draw Swedes westward.Pehrson, Den nya världen, 239–240, 260–261.