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1. German Americans, Know Nothings, and the Outbreak of the War
- Fordham University Press
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1 German Americans, Know Nothings, and the Outbreak of the War T he most significant reason Chancellorsville later became so important for German Americans had to do with a pre–Civil War sociopolitical movement called the ‘‘Know Nothing’’ or ‘‘American’’ Party. This nativistic, anti-immigrant group of Anglo Americans strove to curtail immigrant voting rights, attacked immigrant religion and culture—especially German and Irish beer, whiskey, and Catholicism—blamed those groups for fomenting crime, and urged quick assimilation of immigrant communities into the mainstream of American life. Although the Know Nothings were themselves a party created mainly out of irrational xenophobia, they represented a powerful and deep-set impulse within American society that inherently distrusted the foreigner and associated with him much that was perceived as negative in nineteenth-century American life: unemployment, lethargy, immorality, and Romanism. German-born immigrants (who numbered almost a third of the foreignborn population in 1860, 1,301,136 souls) not only were forced to confront this threat against their collective rights in the 1850s, but also were struggling to define themselves within American society as an ethnic group and sort out internal differences that kept them strongly divided. Many of these differences stemmed from the old country, where Prussians and Badeners, Hessians and Saxons had either lined up on opposite sides during the many European wars of the last hundred years or adhered to differing religious doctrines. Most of them also spoke diverse dialects of German, which hindered easy communication . As if these inherent issues were not enough to discourage unity, geographic particularism within and among the various urban German communities (often called ‘‘little Germanies’’) and political partisanship joined the mix to complicate everything. Despite these centrifugal forces, a spirit of ‘‘Deutschtum ,’’ or pan–German American consciousness, began to sweep across the country as the 1850s progressed.1 As the crisis over slavery in the territories came to a head late in the decade, German Americans also found themselves being increasingly drawn into the sectional debate. Although 90 percent of them lived in the north, they divided sharply between the Democratic and Republican Party based in part on which organization they perceived offered the most protection from nativism. UnforPAGE 10 ................. 16469$ $CH1 05-07-07 14:32:51 PS German Americans, Know Nothings, and the Outbreak of the War 11 tunately, both parties waffled back and forth on this salient issue so that by April 1861 the Germans of the North were hard pressed to find a political home that truly satisfied the majority of their concerns. As Stan Nadel argues, many began to look increasingly toward each other, toward a loose-knit sense of Deutschtum as a means to secure both their unique ethnic culture and political rights. Another scholar put it more succinctly: ‘‘The nativist crisis of the fifties, followed by the crisis of slavery and the Civil War . . . created the hyphen by making the Germans in America first of all conscious and then self-conscious as a foreign group in American politics,’’ whereas before they had simply been isolated, squabbling enclaves of German-speaking immigrants. Enthusiastic home-front support of the newly enlisted German troops and ethnic leaders like Franz Sigel proved that the North’s German American communities had clearly begun to raise their ethnic consciousness well before the fateful spring of 1863.2 Immigrants, Nativists, and Antebellum Politics Starting in the 1830s, and continuing up to the war itself, wave after wave of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and, to a lesser extent, Scandinavia, set sail from their homelands in Europe and emigrated to the United States in search of political freedom, economic opportunity, and cheap western land on which to build their new lives. By 1860 there were over four million of them, composing thirteen percent of the American population. Most of them landed in the major port cities of the northeast and remained there, joining the great German and Irish neighborhoods of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore. A sizeable number, however, found their way to the Midwest and either congregated in that section’s booming cities or in small, rural communities, often ethnically segregated. Many realized their dreams of owning their own land, thanks to federal and state government incentives that made property in the backcountry affordable to those with a few dollars in the bank. The mid- to late 1840s and early 1850s saw a marked jump in immigration, mainly as a result of the Irish Potato famines and the suppression of the democratic revolutions in...