First Schleswig War
| First Schleswig War | |||||||||
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 Danish soldiers return to Copenhagen in 1849 by Otto Bache (1894) |
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| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| 1,284 killed 4,675 injured Total: 5,959 |
2,128 killed 5,797 injured Total: 7,925 |
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Danish victory
The First Schleswig War (German: Schleswig-Holsteinischer Krieg) or Three Years' War (Danish: Treårskrigen) was the first round of military conflict in southern Denmark and northern Germany rooted in the Schleswig-Holstein Question, contesting the issue of who should control the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. The war, which lasted from 1848 to 1851, also involved troops from Prussia and Sweden. Ultimately, the war resulted in a Danish victory. A second conflict, the Second Schleswig War, erupted in 1864.
At the beginning of 1848, Denmark included the Duchy of Schleswig, and the king of Denmark ruled the duchies of Holstein and Saxe-Lauenburg within the German Confederation. Here the majority of the ethnic Germans in Denmark lived. Germans made up a third of the country's population, and the three duchies were behind a half of Denmark's economy. The Napoleonic Wars, which had ended in 1815, had fanned both Danish and German nationalism. Pan-German ideology had become highly influential in the decades prior to the wars, and writers such as Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) and the Norwegian Peter Andreas Munch (1810-1863) argued that the entire peninsula of Jutland had been populated by Germans before the arrival of the Danes and that therefore Germans could justifiably reclaim it. Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae (1821-1885), an archaeologist who had excavated parts of the Danevirke, countered the pro-German claims, writing pamphlets which argued that there was no way of knowing the language of the earliest inhabitants of Danish territory, that Germans had more solid historical claims to large parts of France and England, and that Slavs by the same reasoning could annex parts of eastern Germany.
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