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

The chief target of this extremely well-informed book is the myth of the universal loyalty to the American Union on the part of German immigrants in Missouri and of their unshakable support for the destruction of slavery and promotion of full citizenship for former slaves as well as free persons of color. Seen from “the outside,” the German community might have seemed unified in its hostility to the slave regime, largely because of the sudden spasm of energy with which refugees of the 1848 revolutions of Europe seized the opportunity to challenge and overthrow the elected state government of Missouri in 1861 in alliance with sympathetic federal military leaders. From “the inside,” it is a very different story.

First of all, the author demonstrates her mastery of the German-language sources available, particularly the newspapers, but she does not overlook English-language sources and scholarly syntheses either. What stands out in her treatment more than in any other is her restoration of complexity of the German immigrants who came to Missouri. There were visionaries such as Friedrich Münch of the Giessen Settlement Society, but there were also adventurers like Heinrich Börnstein, who had published some of Karl Marx’s works in Paris but in Missouri supported Thomas Hart Benton and Francis Preston Blair Jr. There were also many Germans simply trying to find prosperity in a developing land. Many sought to find their places in Missouri by making their peace with a largely southern-oriented population that saw slavery as intrinsic to their way of life. The city of St. Louis, although the great trading center of Missouri, depended less directly on slavery than did its rural hinterland, and where many incorrectly believed that they could live aloof of its presence.

Alongside mouthpieces of the Forty-Eighters, the Anzeiger des Westens and the Westliche Post, there were also German Whig, Catholic, and Saxon-Lutheran journals that promoted a very different vision of the role of slavery in their religious and political lives. Anderson gives these groups a larger role in her story.

Religious tensions beyond the German spectrum influenced how the guerilla war developed outstate. The largely pro-slavery Southern Methodists regarded themselves as the targets of a Union crusade, and the authors did not even know that Heinrich Börnstein prevented his German troops from hanging seven Methodist ministers in the hall of the Missouri State Legislature in Jefferson City in the aftermath of the “Cole Camp Massacre” (Henry Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody: The Missouri Years of an Austrian Radical, 1849–1866, ed. and trans. Steven Rowan [St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1997), 327–28).

What this book does more than any other currently available is to emphasize the continuing presence of non-radical Germans, who felt that they could live and prosper alongside slavery. As early as 1837, Gustav Körner (lieutenant governor of Illinois from 1853 to 1857, not the “German governor of Illinois” as Anderson says on page 99) could already foresee a bloody civil war over slavery looming, fated to envelope Missouri and the entire nation.

The book goes on to portray the increasing complexity of the slavery question in the course of the war, as St. Louis increasingly became a place of refuge for former slaves. The emancipation of slaves did not make black men instant citizens of the United States, let alone of Missouri, even if they enlisted as soldiers. Once the war ended and slavery was formally abolished, much of the old race regime continued, and the radical regime that managed the state achieved only partial success before its own disappearance. The much-touted Liberal Republican revolt against a second term for President Grant was part of a conscious process of “reconciliation.” Many Germans, including old Forty-Eighters “went native” and proved happy to claim the advantages of whiteness in a frankly racist hierarchical...