German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era by Alison Clark Efford (review)

Ella Lonn’s pioneering work on immigrants in the Civil War in the 1940s and ’50s explored the ways that Irish, German, and other ethnic Americans experienced the war differently and similarly to white Americans of English descent. Interest in ethnicity during the Civil War remains strong among scholars in the twenty-first century, from Susannah Ural’s and Christian Samito’s studies of the Irish to Martine Öfele’s and Christian Keller’s books on German Americans. Alison Clark Efford’s German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era goes beyond the important but old question of the war’s impact on assimilation to examine one immigrant group’s significant impact on politics, citizenship, and racial inequality in U.S. history.

Similar to Samito’s comparison of the Irish and African American pursuit of citizenship during and after the war in Becoming American under Fire (2009), Efford explores the way German immigrants’ hopes of creating a liberal democratic society influenced their understanding and support of the rights of black Americans. Focusing on German Republicans in the midwestern states of Ohio, Wisconsin, and Missouri, she argues that liberal German immigrants greatly valued the rights of individuals and held a very broad view of who could be considered part of the American Volk, or people. This led them to oppose slavery and argue on behalf of the extension of suffrage and citizenship rights to blacks in the 1860s. She importantly observes, however, that they did so from the ethnic lens of their own experience of naturalized citizens. Eventually, the shortcomings of this approach became clear when German Republicans abandoned their liberal beliefs as well as Reconstruction later in the mid-1870s (2–7).

The book begins by examining the story of the German Forty-Eighters, that is revolutionary exiles from the failed democratic uprisings in their native lands in 1848. Upon emigrating to the United States, these liberal Germans brought with them their support of liberal nationalism, or a belief that the support of individual rights strengthened nation-states, and vice versa. While their more conservative fellow Germans allied themselves with the Democratic Party, these men felt more at home with the Republicans, with men such as Carl Schurz campaigning on Abraham Lincoln’s behalf in 1860 and going on to become an important Republican politician in his own right (80–85). During the antebellum period, German Republicans “linked antislavery to immigrant rights,” becoming ardent opponents of the peculiar institution (71–80). After the war, German leaders such as Emil Preetorius, arguing from their own experience as naturalized citizens, strongly supported black rights (101).

Unfortunately, German Republican support of liberalism and African American rights declined at the time of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). The war, avidly followed by the German American press and public, encouraged a new level of ethnic pride in all things German that had negative consequences for their former adherence to liberalism. In supporting German chancelor Otto von Bismarck’s forcible unification of their homeland and his authoritarian domestic policies, German Republicans distanced themselves from their support of liberalism and black rights. Instead of holding their once expansive definition of Volk, German Republicans, increasingly weary of Reconstruction, adopted a more essentialist view of nationality that excluded racial minorities from the rights of full citizenship (156–63).

Efford’s focus on liberal German men in the Midwest suggests further areas for study. Despite her discussion of the role of gender in Germans’ conceptions of citizenship (46–51, 103–4), there are very few female voices in the book. Democratic and conservative German immigrants play only a small role in her study, compared to those who identified as Forty-Eighters or voted Republican. Although her last chapter does address Catholic views of the Kulturkampf and the education debates, telling the larger story of German Catholics before, during, and after the war will help bring new...