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

No state exhibited more contradictory impulses during the Civil War era than did Missouri. A Union slave state with one of the fastest-growing populations in the American West, a gateway to Bleeding Kansas, and home of the Dred Scott decision and some of the worst guerrilla war in American history, Missouri proved to be a vortex of conflict and chaos. A defining element in Missouri's Civil War was the sizable and growing German immigrant population, most of whom were antislavery by 1861.

In recent years historians have come to appreciate and explore the complexity of Civil War Missouri and its centrality in the national debate over slavery. As scholars have come to view the American Civil War in more transnational perspective, the role of German immigrants has rightfully earned greater interest, including deeper exploration of German ethnic identity on both sides of the Atlantic. Emphasis on the diversity of class, regional origin, and religion among German migrants to America has helped to complicate some older myths of a monolithic German American migration and assimilation narrative.

Kristen Layne Anderson's Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America engages with some of the central questions arising from this new scholarship. To what extent did Germans in slaveholding Missouri oppose slavery, how influential were they in pushing Missouri toward emancipation, and how did German American attitudes toward black citizenship and suffrage change after the war?

Though German immigrants wrestled with these questions throughout the state, Anderson focuses almost entirely on the city of Saint Louis. She mined the German-language newspapers thoroughly and paints a convincing portrait of the range of political thought within the German community. The most famous voices were those of the 1848 revolutionaries who established newspapers such as the Westliche Post and pushed for a more radical emancipationist and egalitarian vision throughout the era. Anderson contrasts the voices of radicals with the less well known conservative German voices, including those from the Catholic and the Missouri Synod Lutheran communities. Editors like Karl Dänzer of the Anzeiger des Westens joined forces with the English-language conservative Unionists in the Missouri Republican to offer a counterpoint to radical claims to speak for the entire German population.

The most valuable contribution Anderson provides is her assessment of the change in sentiment within the German American community on a range of sensitive issues surrounding the war. Germans generally said little against slavery before 1854 and passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. After that point they often embraced the view of Senator Thomas Hart Benton and Congressman Frank Blair, who took a free-soil position regarding Kansas and the West. Though very few Germans were outright abolitionists before the Civil War, the community could be counted on to anchor the antiextension Republican Party in the 1860 election in Missouri and the Union cause within the state shortly thereafter. Saint Louis Germans were immediately pitted against secessionists during the deadly Camp Jackson affair of May 1861, where German American soldiers fired into a crowd of rioters. From then on most Germans came to embrace the Union cause in Missouri with vigor.

As guerrilla violence escalated in the state, many German Unionists demanded a more thorough prosecution of the war, including the destruction of the slave system that had made Missouri subject to Confederate ambitions in the first place. Anderson is careful to note that radical Germans held the upper hand in this push for immediate emancipation but that conservative Germans were quick to counter with delaying mechanisms whenever possible. Emancipation arrived in January 1865 with a constitutional amendment and then passage of an entirely new constitution itself. Arguments over the radical Drake Constitution of 1865 divided the German community along religious, class, and ideological lines, especially regarding public schools, black suffrage, Sunday closing laws, and racial segregation. A common call for expanded citizenship rights for African and German...