Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America by Kristen Layne Anderson (review)

The core sources for this work are two German-language daily newspapers in St. Louis in which Anderson finds convincing evidence that German immigrants who arrived after the failed revolution of 1848 gave their political support to the free-soil wing of the Democratic Party. They first supported Senator Thomas Hart Benton until his death in 1858 and then became the rank and file of the city’s Republican Party. Deeply antagonistic toward Know Nothing nativism and eager to demonstrate their trustworthiness as voting citizens, St. Louis Germans aligned themselves with the platform of conservative Republican Frank Blair, who opposed the extension of slavery and linked future emancipation with the colonization abroad of African Americans. Anderson finds that German hostility toward slavery was pragmatic, without the moral imperative of abolitionism. Germans embraced Blair’s slogan of free soil for free white men and advanced their own interests by embracing whiteness not racial equality.

Part of this thesis is supported by the German newspapers. Clearly, Germans were free soilers not abolitionists; their conservative antislavery stance expressed an aspiration to be accepted as reliable participants in St. Louis civil society. But Anderson’s emphasis on whiteness as the pathway to social integration is not directly expressed in the German press. She offers one example of a German newspaper using minstrel-show Negro dialect to ridicule a gathering of free blacks. The dialect appeared in English, suggesting that Germans had internalized this aspect of antebellum popular culture. But whiteness itself did not emerge in the German press in any direct way. Germans struggled against “otherness” by aligning themselves with political leaders who rejected nativist bigotry and the aristocratic pretensions of slaveholders. Anderson demonstrates that St. Louis Germans were not crusaders for racial equality, but she does not demonstrate that they articulated an identity of whiteness. Nor does she make a strong case that the nineteenth-century sense of whiteness extended to Germans. In a source not utilized by Anderson, the daughter of St. Louis’ first mayor complained of the boisterousness of German beer gardens during the war, lamenting that the “dutch and the darkies are the only free people here now.”¹

The Germans’ rejection of the Radical Republican policy of barring once disloyal whites from the polls after the Civil War provides Anderson with further evidence that Germans embraced white privilege and pursued acceptance and respectability as citizens in a nation reunited around themes of white supremacy. But Anderson neglects the more immediate antebellum context shaping German attitudes about slavery and race. Unmentioned is the 1836 lynching of the mulatto boatman Francis McIntosh and the subsequent murder of antislavery newspaper editor Elijah P. Lovejoy. Without this context, Anderson’s judgment that Germans accepted “that nothing could be done about slavery” overlooks the fact that no one in antebellum St. Louis openly advocated the immediate abolition of slavery (18). Given the reticence of even nativeborn Americans like Lovejoy and the Unitarian minister John Greenleaf Eliot (both with deep New England ties) about the topic of slavery, it would have been remarkable to find Germans embracing the language of moral abolitionism. Instead, in the context of Civil War St. Louis, Germans rallied to what southern whites denounced and derided as “black Republicanism.”