278 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNIST
family name was spelled Tödt. Caroline, as she was known to her
family, was the daughter and eldest child of Christian Friedrich
Toedt, an honest, hard-working locksmith whose shop was in the
rear of the building in which he lived with his family. Caroline
was born June 19, 1832, and baptized six days later in the Lutheran
faith. The family lived in a substantial, middle-class home, prob
ably in moderate circumstances. A huge two-foot key hung over
the front door as a symbol of the father's craft.
When Caroline was twenty years old the head of the house
decided to go to the United States. On the Southerner, a con
verted, cotton-carrying, sailing vessel, the family made the dif
ficult voyage from Hamburg to New York in sixty-four days as
part of the huge German immigration of the 1850's. They pro
ceeded at once into upstate New York, where the father bought
a small farm in Herkimer County, near Utica, a region in which
the newcomers found several friends and neighbors from their old
home in Mecklenburg. The twenty-year old daughter, already a
skillful seamstress, went to work in Utica for a milliner at fifty
cents a week plus board and room.
Before long, Caroline Toedt was summoned to New York City
by an uncle, John Toedt, to help care for his sick wife, Mathilda.
John Toedt, a skilled worker in leather, did fine bookbinding and
leather gilding and belonged to one of the early German craft
organizations of the 1850's. In this connection he became ac
quainted with Wilhelm Weitling, and the latter frequently visited
him in his home on the Bowery. There he met the niece who was
nursing her aunt back to health, and it may be assumed that not
all of the tailor's visits to the Toedt home had to do strictly with
the business of the labor movement. In due time Weitling jour
neyed to Herkimer County to ask the father for the hand of Caro
line in marriage.
The young couple were married in upstate New York, prob
ably in Utica, but they moved at once to New York City. Some
time after they had established their new home there, they were
joined by Caroline's sister, Johanna, who was eight years her