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

BOOK REVIEWS 90 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY and editors. Engaging recent scholarship, he finds that dissenters presented a real threat to the war effort, but argues that the Republicans also used that threat opportunistically to their political advantage, timing their attacks to help win elections. Authorities trampled on civil liberties and violated the rights of those whose opposition might have presented Midwesterners with political alternative. Union Heartland breaks new interpretative ground and raises many questions for further research. With so much more to do, future studies will likely challenge or change many of the arguments presented here. But to the authors’ and editors’ credit this book leaves one wanting more. A. James Fuller University of Indianapolis German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era Alison Clark Efford After the Civil War, “Radical” Republicans oversaw the abolition of slavery and legally secured African Americans’ voting rights in 1869. Yet shortly thereafter many of the architects of African American freedom became complacent and all but ignored the plight of freedmen. This “arc of Reconstruction” has beset scholarship for decades. Historian Alison Clark Efford’s new book provides an unforeseen intervention, contending that German immigrants’ approach to race, ethnicity, gender, and political economy gave impetus to the African American freedom struggle and ultimately reshaped American citizenship law. Examining the political ideology of German newcomers in Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin, Efford features (and translates) many undigested German-language sources that convey the nuances of local German American flavor and at the same time reveal profound transnational crosscurrents. During the 1860s, German immigrants in the Midwest constituted some of themostoutspokenadvocatesofblackcivilrights, but the 1870s saw a retreat from Reconstruction and African American suffrage. Efford analyzes in detail for the first time how the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 wrought broad German American support for German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck, an “undisputedly illiberal nationalist,” Alison Clark Efford. German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 274 pp. ISBN: 9781107031937 (cloth), $95.00. BOOK REVIEWS WINTER 2013 91 and led to the dismantling of “liberal nationalism ” in America. The wave of German immigrants who fled Europe to the U.S. after the Revolutions of 1848, nicknamed “Forty-Eighters,” infused American politics with their own version of “liberal nationalism .” They reaffirmed Abraham Lincoln’s idea that keeping the Union intact was essential to preserving individual rights but argued further that emancipating and enfranchising African American men offered the only sure way to guarantee the survival of the nation. Through what Efford calls the “German-language public sphere,” many outspoken German immigrant advocates of universal manhood suffrage asserted that German American identity flowed from culture, not race. The festive culture—the theaters and bier gartens—bespoke such a claim, but Efford shows how over the next decade German Americans widened the conceptual gap between ethnicity and race. Efford focuses on the rise of the German Republicans to show how their version of antislavery linked African American emancipation and suffrage to immigrant rights. The “logic of immigrant antislavery,” Clifford argues, suggested that African Americans as an ethnic group could follow Germans to American citizenship. However, German Americans also constructed their own ethnicity in contrast to the supposed “racial” identity of African Americans. Though at times idiosyncratic, German Republicans’ vision of liberal nationalism, or individual rights for everyone regardless of color, hardened considerably during the Civil War. Efford reminds us that even after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment it remained uncertain whether African Americans would acquire the right to vote or would hold a status comparable to women as disenfranchised “citizens.” Skirting the issue of women’s suffrage, German Republicans opposed passive or “second-class” citizenship because they believed individual rights would be secured only by making enfranchisement a condition of American citizenship. Yet the distinct transatlantic outlook that bolstered German liberal nationalism shifted decisively in 1870, as German American support for Bismarck’s nationalism revealed their willingness to suspend a liberal approach to citizenship for the sake of bureaucratic effectiveness and national unity. Historians tend to see German communities in America well entrenched by 1870, but as Efford explains the Franco-Prussian War sparked a communal wendepunkt, or “turning point,” and...