Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home

Introduction

INTRODUCTION German Immigrants and Politics in the Civil War Era The events of theyear 1848 had major ramifications both for the United States in general and for its German American population in particular—consequences that would be especially felt from 1860 to 1865. For the American republic, 1848 saw the successful conclusion of thewar with Mexico and ratification of the peace terms.Texas was secured in its generous boundaries reaching to the Rio Grande, and California and most of the intervening territory was annexed from Mexico. But the Mexican War itself had been a bone of contention between North and South, and the resulting territorial acquisitions once again brought the latent question of the expansion of slavery to the top of the national agenda. In Germany the March revolutions of 1848 brought a springtime of hope for democratization, national unification, and greater international recognition . Prince Metternich, the symbol of reaction for a generation, fled Vienna, and Prussia saw the prospect of a constitutional monarchy. On May 18, 1848, an elected national assembly met at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt in an attempt to establish a new Germany based on liberty, democracy, and national unity. By the next year these hopes were dashed, and several thousand German revolutionaries found themselves in European exile, which was for most of them just a way station on the road to America. Although these ‘‘Fortyeighters ’’ accounted for less than 1 percent of the Germans who immigrated to the United States in the 1850s, they had a significance far greater than their numbers, leavening the whole loaf, as it were, with their democratic and egalitarian ideals. Within a decade of their arrival, a number of Forty-eighters met on Civil War battlefields with veterans of the Mexican War: some as allies, some as adversaries.1 Waging war on Mexico proved to be an easier task than disposing of the spoils. Slavery had been prohibited by Mexican law in the newly annexed areas, and southerners were already threatening secession in the fall of 1849 if their ‘‘rights’’ to human property were not respected. Ultimately, a legislative solution was achieved in the Compromise of 1850, but it was a grudging settle1 . Friedrich (1950), 3–9. 2 Introduction ment at best; one historian has called it an armistice.2 If all the compromise accomplished was to delay the outbreak of the Civil War by eleven years, this delay helped assure a northern victory. Every year brought a greater population advantage for the North. In relative terms, the 1850s saw the heaviest rate of immigration the nation has ever experienced. The years from 1850 to 1860 inclusive brought an influx of over a million Germans and nearly as many Irish. There was a net increase between the two censuses of nearly 700,000 Germans, more than doubling their numbers. Moreover, the concentration of immigrants in the northern states, already high to begin with, intensified during the decade, and it was higher for Germans than for other major groups. While only about one-third of the Union’s net population gain in the decade before the Civil War was attributable to immigration, its impact on military potential was even greater because of its demographic makeup: disproportionately young, male adults.3 Negligible as the 70,000 Germans in the eleven Confederate states were, nearly 20,000 of them resided in New Orleans, which was in Union hands from May 1862 on. Well educated and articulate, the Forty-eighters who arrived in the early 1850s provided an important stimulus to immigrant cultural life and political participation. They nearly doubled the size of the German-language press in just four years, founded numerous Turnvereine* that were hotbeds of republican idealism, and flocked to the newly established Republican Party, viewing the crusade against slavery as a continuation of their revolutionary struggles in Germany. Historians are still debating, however, to what extent their ideals were shared by the rank and file.4 The bulk of the German newcomers had more in common with their Irish counterparts than with their Forty-eighter countrymen. They were first and foremost economic refugees, even if they were not quite as desperately poor as the average Irish immigrant and were blessed with more marketable skills. Still, the distinction between economic and political motives for emigration is not as clear in practice as it might appear in theory. The economic burdens of the German lower classes were related to their political impotence and their lack of...