NEW CITIZENS:
GERMAN IMMIGRANTS, AFRICAN AMERICANS, AND THE
RECONSTRUCTION OF CITIZENSHIP, 1865-1877
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate
School of The Ohio State University
By
Alison Clark Efford, M.A.
*****
The Ohio State University
2008
Doctoral Examination Committee:
Professor John L. Brooke, Adviser
Professor Mitchell Snay
Professor Michael L. Benedict
Professor Kevin Boyle
Approved by
____________________________
Adviser
Department of History Graduate Program
ABSTRACT
This work explores how German immigrants influenced the reshaping of
American citizenship following the Civil War and emancipation. It takes a new approach
to old questions: How did African American men achieve citizenship rights under the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments? Why were those rights only inconsistently
protected for over a century? German Americans had a distinctive effect on the outcome
of Reconstruction because they contributed a significant number of votes to the ruling
Republican Party, they remained sensitive to European events, and most of all, they were
acutely conscious of their own status as new American citizens. Drawing on the rich yet
largely untapped supply of German-language periodicals and correspondence in
Missouri, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., I recover the debate over citizenship within the
German-American public sphere and evaluate its national ramifications. Partisan,
religious, and class differences colored how immigrants approached African American
rights. Yet for all the divisions among German Americans, their collective response to
the Revolutions of 1848 and the Franco-Prussian War and German unification in 1870
and 1871 left its mark on the opportunities and disappointments of Reconstruction.
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I never would have finished my dissertation without considerable help. Mitchell
Snay deftly guided this project. His high standards, careful readings, and patient
suggestions somehow allowed me to feel that each breakthrough was mine alone. More
personally, I owe Mitchell so much for showing me the fullness of an academic life.
John Brooke was an unflaggingly enthusiastic and committed adviser. He always seemed
to know exactly when to afflict and when to comfort. Michael Les Benedict’s generous
and incisive critiques pushed me to refine my ideas. Kevin Boyle, having long inspired
me by example, brought fresh insights to my work as I reached the final stages.
The Ohio State University (especially the College of Humanities, the Department
of History, and the Graduate School), the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst,
and the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. provided awards that made it
possible for me to develop my language skills, travel for research, and devote time to my
writing. Archivists in Ohio and Missouri and at the Library of Congress helped me track
down sources. I would especially like to recognize the staff of the Ohio Historical
Society, the Hayes Presidential Center, the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, and
the Roman Catholic archdiocese archives in Cincinnati and St. Louis. At The Ohio State
University Libraries, David Lincove and the interlibrary loan staff acted as though all my
strange enquiries were perfectly reasonable. A course on old German handwriting at the
iii
Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania taught me how to decipher much of what
I uncovered.
Many scholars have challenged and encouraged me. Walter Kamphoefner made
useful observations at a meeting of the Social Science History Association as I began my
research. Later in the process, David Quigley’s comments at an Organization of
American Historians conference were right on target. James McGrath Morris let me read
chapters of his forthcoming biography of Joseph Pulitzer. Kristen Anderson and Adam
Arenson shared their own findings on Civil War Era St. Louis. In Columbus, Audra
Jennings, David Dzurec, Brian Kennedy, Jane Berger, Greg Kupsky, Brian Page, Brian
Feltman, Nathan Kozuskanich, Margaret Sumner, and many others created a stimulating
and supportive intellectual community.
By long-distance telephone call, Murray Efford has engaged with the history of
strange foreign lands, Ramona Clark has commiserated, and Neil Efford has kept his
sister in her place. Finally, my thanks go to Brandon Walton for emotionally
underwriting the whole endeavor.
iv
VITA
February 10, 1979……………………Born - Wellington, New Zealand
2001…………………………………. B.A. History, University of Texas at Arlington
2003…………………………………. M.A. History, The Ohio State University
FIELDS OF STUDY
Major Field: History
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Abstract ……………………………………………………………………….. ii
Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………… iii
Vita ……………………………………………………………………………. v
List of Tables …………………………………………………………………. vii
Chapters:
Introduction …………………………………………………………………… 1
1. The Myth of the Freedom-Loving German, 1848-1865 ………………….. 21
2. “Race Should be as Unimportant as Ancestry”: Debating the Missouri
Constitution of 1865 ………………………………………………………. 67
3. “A Principled Element”: German-American Republicans, 1865-1868 …… 108
4. “White or Black is Now the Question”: German-American Democrats,
1865-1868 …………………………………………………………………. 148
5. Wendepunkt: The Franco-Prussian War and German Unification,
1869-1871 …………………………………………………………………. 186
6. “Not Only on the Other Side of the Ocean!”: The Liberal Republican
Movement, 1870-1872 …………………………………………………...... 224
7. “To Educate Enlightened and Patriotic Citizens”: German Americans,
Religion, and the School Debates of the 1870s …………………………… 271
8. “Entitled to a Living”: German Americans and Social Citizenship,
1873-1877 …………………………………………………………………. 313
Appendix: Tables Summarizing Selected Election Results .………...………… 358
Bibliography ………………………………..…………………………………. 364
vi
LIST OF TABLES
Table
Page
1. Voting in Cleveland’s “German” wards, 1860, 1867, 1868, 1872, and 1876 ..... 357
2. Voting in Cincinnati’s “German” wards, 1860, 1867, 1868, 1872, and 1876 …. 358
3. Voting in St. Louis’s “German” wards, 1860, 1868, 1870, 1872, and 1876 ...... 359
4. Voting in selected “German Democratic” townships in rural Ohio, 1860,
1868, and 1872 ...………………………………………………………………. 360
5. Voting in St. Louis’s “German” wards on referendum on Missouri constitution
of 1865…………………………………………………..……………………… 361
vii
INTRODUCTION
On a June day in 1906, thousands of St. Louisans gathered in Forest Park for the
unveiling of a bronze statue of the German-American Civil War hero Franz Sigel. The
monument was dedicated to the “heroism of the German-American patriots” who had
prevented secessionist militia from seizing the city’s federal arsenal in May 1861.1
German Americans had organized a ceremony befitting the occasion. Elderly veterans
marched in formation, bands played German folk music, and local leaders addressed the
crowd surrounded by American flags. Several speakers commemorated the part German
immigrants had played in “saving Missouri” and preserving the nation’s “unity” and “free
institutions.”2
The St. Louis dedication emphasized nationalism, one of the great themes of the
nineteenth century. A Civil War veteran linked Sigel’s involvement in the failed attempts
to unify Germany in 1848 to his fight to preserve the American Union during the 1860s.
The proceedings largely neglected Sigel’s liberal goals. Like revolutionaries and
reformers around the world, Sigel had fused his nationalism with liberalism, assuming
that citizen rights went hand in hand with the formation of nation-states.3 Yet no one at
1
On the sculpture itself, see Caroline Loughlin and Catherine Anders, Forest Park (Columbia: Junior
League of St. Louis and University of Missouri Press, 1986), 97, 261.
2
“Rettung Missouris”; “Eintracht”; “freiheitlichen Institutionen.” St. Louis Mississippi Blätter [Sunday
edition of the Westliche Post], 24 June 1906. This issue provides two pages of coverage of the unveiling
including a photograph and the text of the speeches.
3
David M. Potter, “The Civil War in the History of the Modern World: A Comparative View,” in The
South and the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 287-99, draws
transnational parallels and uses the term “fusing” to describe the connection between liberalism and
1
the 1906 festivities explained that Sigel had hoped that overthrowing the Grand Duke of
Baden would inaugurate a German republic that safeguarded its citizens’ right to free
speech, jury trials, and political representation. No one mentioned his opposition to
slavery in the United States or his support for African American citizenship rights during
Reconstruction. Indeed, the only speaker who alluded to the postwar years remarked that
Americans had put the issues of the war behind them. Northerners and southerners, he
said, “today stand together, unified.”4 Reflecting on the events forty years earlier from
their vantage point at the turn of the century, German Americans indicated the ultimate
results of the nineteenth century’s struggles. The nationalism of 1848 and the Civil War
had triumphed. Liberalism was in more doubt.
The commemoration illustrated the entwined fate of nation-making and
citizenship in North America and Europe during the nineteenth century. In 1848,
European revolutionaries such as Sigel had demanded greater limits on government and
more effective political representation as well as national consolidation. That same year,
when the United States snatched about half a million square miles of Mexican territory,
increasing numbers of Americans resolved to halt the westward spread of slavery.5 The
northern victory in the Civil War seemed to confirm the ascendancy of these liberal
nationalist visions. Four million former slaves became citizens, and the American state
nationalism. My presentation of these ideas draws more heavily on Thomas Bender, A Nation among
Nations: Americas Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). I further discuss my
historiographical debts below.
4
“… steht heute vereint beisammen.” Ibid.
5
Richard Griswold del Castillo, “Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,” in The United States and Mexico at War:
Nineteenth-Century Expansionism and Conflict, ed. Donald S. Frazier (New York: Simon & Schuster
Macmillan, 1998), 437-38. For works that connect the Civil War to the U.S. invasion of Mexico, see James
M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 34; Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North American,
1500-2000 (New York: Viking, 2005), 274-316.
2
emerged more powerful than ever before. Yet the global association between the nationstate and citizenship rights was not as inevitable as such successes suggested. Bismarck’s
German Empire most clearly represents the triumph of nationalism at the expense of
citizenship. The mighty state forged during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and 1871
lacked the constitutional protections and strong representative institutions that liberals
had sought in 1848.6 For all the differences between the United States and Germany,
Americans also uncoupled nationalism and citizenship when northern and southern
whites determined to reunite at the cost of African American rights in the decades
following 1877.
This dissertation illuminates the connections between the developments in Europe
and the United States by exploring how German immigrants influenced American
citizenship following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. During the
Reconstruction years of 1865 to 1877, the nineteenth-century debate over citizenship was
at its most intense. Historian Heather Cox Richardson has dubbed Reconstruction “the
Era of Citizenship,” a period during which “Americans defined who would be citizens
and what citizenship meant.”7 After the Union victory at Appomattox, the promise of
equal rights seemed to rise up before the former slaves. Republicans in Congress charged
the army with defending African American men’s right to vote in the states of the former
Confederacy, the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly conferred national citizenship on the
6
Potter, “The Civil War in the History of the Modern World,” 298, emphasizes Lincoln and Bismarck’s
“contrasting styles of nationalism.” Telling the story with a focus on the Confederate perspective, Carl N.
Degler has pointed out that Lincoln and Bismarck both in their own ways forged national unity with blood
and iron. Carl N. Degler, “One among Many: The United States and National Self-Determination,” in
Lincoln, the War President: The Gettysburg Lectures, ed. Gabor S. Boritt (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992), 91-119.
7
Heather Cox Richardson, “North and West of Reconstruction: Studies in Political Economy,” in
Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States, ed. Thomas J. Brown (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 69.
3
freed people, and the Fifteenth Amendment wrote the ideal of universal manhood
suffrage into the Constitution in 1870. Yet no sooner had Republicans outlawed racial
discrimination in American elections than their will to enforce Reconstruction began to
subside. African American men did not abruptly cease voting, and their supporters did
not suddenly renounce the Fifteenth Amendment, but after 1872 it slowly became clear
that Republicans could no longer muster enough support for black rights to overcome the
concerted opposition of the white South, their own prejudices, and their partiality for a
nation united under a government limited by a federal constitution.
I seek to explain the arc of Reconstruction citizenship, from its ascent in the late
1860s, though its zenith around 1870 to 1872, and on to its gradual decline during the
1870s. Although no one has carefully examined German immigrants’ part in these
developments, many historians have studied the rise and fall of Reconstruction. Some of
them have questioned the radical potential of the Republican policies of the late 1860s.
They point out that Congress was constrained by northern racism and constitutional
conservatism.8 Other scholars recast Reconstruction’s waning years, emphasizing that
8
The historians who argue Reconstruction was not very radical in light of the alternatives” are labeled
“post-revisionist.” Expressing this position, see Michael Les Benedict, Compromise of Principle:
Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863-1869 (New York: Norton, 1974).
The classic treatment of the racism among northern Republicans is C. Vann Woodward, “Seeds of
Failure in Radical Race Policy,” in New Frontiers of American Reconstruction, ed. Harold M. Hyman
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1966), 125-47. Works that stress the limits of northern
commitment to African American citizenship include William McFeely, Yankee Stepfather: General O.O.
Howard and the Freedmen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968);Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So
Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979); William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction,
1869-1879 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and
the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969).
On the constitutional conservatism of Reconstruction policies, see also Benedict, “Preserving the
Constitution: The Conservative Basis of Radical Reconstruction,” in Preserving the Constitution: Essays on
Politics and the Constitution in the Reconstruction Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 3-22;
Phillip S. Paludan, A Covenant with Death: The Constitution, Law, and Equality in the Civil War Era
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975); and Earl M. Maltz, Civil Rights, the Constitution, and
Congress, 1863-1869 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1990).
4
some Republicans remained committed to black rights beyond 1877.9 Flattening the arc
of Reconstruction, however, misses the hope and disappointment of the period.
Historians sensitive to the African American experience have demonstrated that
Reconstruction was indeed a revolution, if one left “unfinished” or perhaps even
betrayed.10 To explain its failure, some scholars point to the violence and intransigence
of southern whites.11 There is also a growing appreciation of white northerners’ powerful
urge to heal the nation and reconcile with their former enemies.12 These approaches all
help explain the decline of Reconstruction, but they largely overlook the fact that other
countries faced similar ordeals.
The leading interpretation of Reconstruction embeds Republican actions in the
broader context of industrialization. In his influential synthesis, Reconstruction: An
Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, Eric Foner connects African American rights to the
9
See for example Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 18601910 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997); Brooks Simpson, The Reconstruction Presidents
(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998). Historians are beginning to challenge the usefulness of
assuming 1877 was the end of Reconstruction. “Introduction,” in Reconstructions, ed. Brown, 7.
10
“Unfinished” comes from the title of the leading synthesis of Reconstruction, which I discuss in more
detail below. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York:
Harper & Row, 1988). Thomas Bender considers Foner’s title too generous. Bender, A Nation among
Nations, 177.
11
Allen Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (New York:
Harper & Row, 1971); George Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of
Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984); Dan Carter, When the War Was Over: The
Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South, 1865-1867 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1985); Richard Zuczek, State of Rebellion: Reconstruction in South Carolina (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 1996); LeeAnna Keith, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power,
White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Charles Lane,
The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, The Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction
(New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2008); Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).
12
David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2001); Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the
South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Robert W. Burg, “Amnesty,
Civil Rights, and the Meaning of Liberal Republicanism,” American Nineteenth Century History 4, no. 3
(2003): 29-60. William Gillette saw the desire for white reconciliation as one force that would undermine
Reconstruction. Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction.
5
United States’ transformation from a decentralized agrarian republic to an imposing
industrial nation.13 He places Americans’ changing attitudes toward work at the center of
Reconstruction. From the outset, Foner establishes that Radical Republicans held a
“utopian vision of a nation whose citizens enjoyed equality of civil and political rights.”14
But the Radicals only succeeded in enfranchising black men because they won support
from other Republicans who were committed to a “free labor ideology” that predicated
effective republican government on the economic independence of American men.
Although this ideology emerged dominant with Confederate defeat, large-scale industry
with its demand for wage-workers began to render free labor ideas obsolete. Fueled by
the Civil War and Republican tariffs and subsidies, industry was becoming just as
important as independent farmers and shopkeepers. In 1873, American factories
produced 75 percent more goods than they had in 1865, and this growth undercut the
13
Foner drew on a generation of “revisionist” writing on Reconstruction during the 1970s and 1980s, but
he was especially inspired by the older work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a
History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 18601880 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1935). Foner highlighted the entwined nature of race and labor and
eschewed the approach of earlier historians who minimized the African American experience as they
focused on material interests. See for example Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American
Civilization (New York: Macmillan Co., 1927); Howard K. Beale, The Critical Year: A Study of Andrew
Johnson and Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930). Foner distinguished his position from the
argument that northern labor conflict undid the Republican coalition. This argument features in David
Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (New York: Knopf, 1867),
which remains important for its close attention to how Republicans approach the labor issues created by
industrialization.
Since Foner completed his synthesis, other historians have extended his interpretation. See
especially, Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the PostCivil War North, 1865-1901 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Richardson, West from
Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2007); Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of
Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Sven Beckert, The Monied
Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001); David Quigley, The Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction
and the Making of American Democracy (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004); Nancy Cohen, Reconstruction
of American Liberalism, 1865-1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
14
Foner, Reconstruction, 230.
6
Radical impulse.15 Apprehensive of the mounting power of the working class, many
northerners began to empathize with white southerners’ desire to control their black
workforce. Republicans tired of federal intervention on behalf of the freed people. In
Foner’s words, “The erosion of the free labor ideology made possible a resurgence of
overt racism that undermined support for Reconstruction.”16 Industrialization both
overshadowed and subverted African American citizenship. By privileging the changing
dynamic of work, Foner implicitly places Reconstruction in global context.
Thomas Bender demonstrates the potential of more explicitly transnational history
in his description of the trajectory of “freedom in an age of nation-making.” His A Nation
among Nations inspired my opening paragraphs. By tracing transnational connections
and drawing transnational comparisons, Bender shows that a global frame of reference
yields “new and richer explanations for national development.” He urges historians to
explore the nature of the nation by “focusing on its boundaries, the zones of contact and
exchange among people, money, knowledges, and things.”17 Other historians have
already traversed boundaries in their research. Several works compare emancipation
around the world.18 Taking an alternative approach, Mitchell Snay compares the
15
Ibid., 461.
Ibid., 525.
17
Bender, A Nation among Nations, 7. For a compelling case for contextualizing Reconstruction in a
global perspective, see Mark M. Smith, “The Past as a Foreign Country: Reconstruction, Inside and Out,”
in Reconstructions, ed. Brown, 117-40. A useful summary of diplomatic historiography and call for more
attention to the connections between domestic and foreign policy during this period, see Jay Sexton,
“Toward a Synthesis of Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1848-1877,” American Nineteenth Century
History 5 (2004): 50-73.
18
See especially Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1983); Steven Hahn, “Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern
Planters in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review 95 (1990): 75-98; Frederick Cooper,
Thomas Holt, and Rebecca Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in
Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Rebecca J. Scott,
Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2005).
16
7
aspirations of Irish-American Fenians, southern whites, and freed people, revealing how
they developed distinctive nationalisms despite the “hegemonic force of Republican
nationalism.”19 Philip Katz has described the diverse lessons Americans drew from the
Paris Commune of 1871 as they struggled “to define what it meant to be a republic, and
to decide who was fit to participate in such a polity.”20
It makes sense to investigate German Americans’ influence on Reconstruction
citizenship because historians have already established that these immigrants linked the
American and European experiences of nationalization and industrialization. Following
the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the traditional economies of the German
states came under increasing pressure from British industry. When the Revolutions of
1848 failed to create a German nation-state or alleviate economic hardship, many
immigrants in search of economic opportunity joined the political refugees who set their
sights on the United States. By the onset of the Civil War, there were over 1,300,000
German immigrants in the United States and its territories.21 Historians have ably
described how their European backgrounds inspired many of these immigrants to help
defend the American Union and abolish slavery.22
19
Mitchell Snay, Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites: Race and Nationality in the Era of
Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 175; Mitchell Snay, “The Imagined
Republic: The Fenians, Irish American Nationalism, and the Political Culture of Reconstruction,”
Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 112, part 2 (2002): 291-313.
20
Philip Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre: Americans and the Paris Commune (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1998), 90.
21
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Eight Census (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office, 1865), 621.
22
Interestingly, Bender’s A Nation among Nations does not address the Forty-Eighters who came to the
United States. Other historians, however, have. See especially Bruce Levine, The Spirit of 1848: German
Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992),
and the older Carl Wittke, Refugees of Revolution: The German Forty-Eighters in America (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1952; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970).
8
Far less attention has been devoted to the fact that German Americans openly
grappled with implications of the Franco-Prussian War and German unification of 1870
and 1871 at the height of Reconstruction. This oversight is striking since historians
recognize that the 1870s witnessed the beginning of what Daniel Rodgers characterizes as
“an intense, transnational traffic in reform ideas, policies, and legislative devices.”23
Rodgers focuses on how the nations of Europe suggested possible solutions to the social
problems of the industrial age, but Europe would also provide a renewed stream of
migrants who contributed to the cultural fissures and class conflict that many Americans
found so threatening during the late nineteenth century. Over 3,200,000 people
emigrated from Germany between 1866 and 1900, far more than any from any other
country.24 They reinforced the institutions of Roman Catholicism and working-class
activism. I maintain that the new currents emanating from Europe date to 1870 and help
explain why the trajectory of citizenship in the United States in some ways resembled
that in Europe.
Although German Americans reinforced similarities between the two continents,
they would also contribute to the distinctiveness of the United States. As immigrants,
they articulated a vision of American citizenship that did not rely on cultural uniformity.
German immigrants maintained that their identification with Germany complemented
their loyalty to the United States. They emphasized the power of America’s civic creed
to transcend ethnic differences, a forerunner to multiculturalism. On the other hand, in
23
Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 3.
24
Roger Daniels, “The Immigrant Experience in the Gilded Age,” in The Gilded Age: Essays on the
Origins of Modern America, ed. Charles W. Calhoun, 2d ed. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield,
2007), 78-79. Matthew Frye Jacobson suggestively places immigration in the context of Americans’ wider
engagement with the world of the late nineteenth century. Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States
Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).
9
recent decades scholars have shown that many immigrants emphasized the association
between American citizenship and whiteness. Working-class newcomers, especially the
Irish, responded to their subordinate position and ambiguously white status by defining
themselves against African Americans, reifying the divide between black and white.25
Thus Reconstruction presented immigrants with two options. They could use their own
experience as a template for black Americans’ transition from slavery to citizenship, or
they could stress the centrality of whiteness to citizenship and impede racial equality
before the law. Americans had to decide whether emancipation would make black men
into citizens in the same way naturalization had transformed European men?
*****
The concept of citizenship draws together the different roles German Americans
played in Reconstruction. Nineteenth-century Americans agreed that citizenship was a
status predicated on membership in the national community of a republic and that it
conferred a certain set of rights, but the term had various overlapping meanings.26 I
distinguish between the language of citizenship and the law of citizenship. Citizenship
25
Noel Ignatiev described this as an conscious economic strategy while David Roediger emphasized its
psychological aspects. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); and
David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and
New York: Verso, 1991). Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants
and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) addresses the legal and
literary dimensions of becoming white. See also Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America,
1900-1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). See also Eric Arnesen, “Whiteness and
the Historians’ Imagination,” International Labor and Working Class History 60 (2001): 3-32; and Eric
Foner, “Response to Eric Arnesen,” International Labor and Working Class History 60 (2001): 57-60.
On German immigrants and whiteness in late nineteenth-century Philadelphia, see Russell Kazal,
“Irish ‘Race’ and German ‘Nationality’: Catholic Languages of Ethnic Difference in Turn-of the Century
Philadelphia,” in Race and the Production of Modern American Nationalism, ed. Reynolds J. ScottChildress (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), 149-68; Kazal, Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of
German-American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
26
As Derek Heater points out, the relationship between nation and citizenship was new to the nineteenth
century. Before the rise of the nation state, they were “linked to different socio-political entities.” Derek
Heater, A Brief History of Citizenship (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 88.
10
was first of all a language of belonging. Since the founding of the United States, a sense
of shared racial, ethnic, and religious heritage had helped unify Americans. As political
scientist Rogers M. Smith has observed, it was common to maintain that “America was
by rights a white nation, a Protestant nation, a nation in which true Americans were
native-born men with Anglo-Saxon ancestors.”27 Yet German immigrants capitalized on
the fact that the Constitution had defined a community based largely on a civic vision.
American citizens were supposedly knit together by allegiance to a set of shared political
ideals. In describing the characteristics and behaviors that made them “good citizens,”
German immigrants entered the debate over the nature of these ideals and the
fundamental relationship between the state and its citizens.28 By claiming citizenship, the
newcomers influenced how membership in the American community was imagined,
debated, and contested.
The language of citizenship colored binding political and legal decisions. At its
core, Reconstruction was a transformation in the law of citizenship. Its fundamental
question was what rights citizenship conferred on the freed people. During the midnineteenth century, as Mitchell Snay puts it, “Suffrage embodied the fullest manifestation
27
Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1997), 3. Smith’s earlier work placed more emphasis on the communitarianism of
exclusionary ideas of citizenship. See Rogers Smith, “The ‘American Creed’ and American Identity: The
Limits of Liberal Citizenship in the United States,” Western Political Quarterly 41 no. 2 (1988): 225-51.
See also Ned Landsman, “Pluralism, Protestantism, and Prosperity: Crevecoeur’s American Farmer and the
Foundations of American Pluralism,” in Beyond Pluralism: The Conception of Groups and Group
Identities in America, ed. Wendy F. Katkin, Ned C. Landsman, and Andrea Tyree (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1998), 105-24; and Eric Kaufmann, “American Exceptionalism Reconsidered: Anglo-Saxon
Ethnogenesis in the ‘Universal’ Nation, 1776-1850,” Journal of American Studies 33 (1999): 437-57.
28
Scholars identify “good citizenship” as the quality contested in debates over proper civic and political
participation. See for example Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 5-7; and Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A
History of American Civic Life (New York: The Free Press, 1998).
11
of citizenship”29 The laws pertaining to naturalized foreign-born men indicated the
strong connection between American citizenship and the right to vote, but legally it was
not that simple. In several states, resident aliens could vote, but native-born blacks and
women—presumably citizens—could not. In legal fact, there were gradations of
American citizenship as well as variations among the states. The framers of the
Constitution had implied a national citizenship, mandating a national naturalization
policy and entitling citizens of each state to “all privileges and immunities of free citizens
in the several states” in the Comity Clause. Yet America’s fundamental law had left this
key status undefined. Prior to Reconstruction, states had taken the lead in determining
the rights citizens received.30 I touch on the important complications of gender and
federalism, but my main concern reflects that of contemporaries: Would African
American men get to vote?
The language of citizenship met the law of citizenship as Americans debated
African American suffrage in the public sphere. I recover German Americans’
engagement with Reconstruction in this conceptual space, which German philosopher
Jürgen Habermas has described as a deliberative arena lying between the state and private
individuals.31 Habermas’s understanding of the public sphere has prompted historians to
reconsider the role institutions such as the press played in nation formation.32 In an
29
Snay, Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites, 163. See also Eric Foner, “Rights and the Constitution
in Black Life during the Civil War and Reconstruction,” Journal of American History 74 (1987): 867; and
Heater, A Brief History of Citizenship, 65-87.
30
James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608-1877 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1978), 218-24; Smith, Civic Ideals, 115-36.
31
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts of Technology Press, 1989).
32
See for example Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early
American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001); David Waldstreicher, In the Midst
of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North
12
important evaluation and reorientation of this rich literature, John L. Brooke suggests that
the concept of the public sphere has the power to bridge the boundary between the “the
old political history of law and the new political history of language.” He conceives the
public sphere as a communicative space of both authority and dissent, involving both
persuasion (the unequal exchange of cultural signals, particularly language, that “set
boundaries on the possible”) and deliberation (“the structured and privileged assessment
of alternatives among legal equals leading to a binding outcome”).33 My analysis
capitalizes on the interplay between persuasion and deliberation in Reconstruction
politics.
Specifically, I investigate the debate within the German-language public sphere in
Ohio and Missouri. Although German immigrants participated in American politics, they
did so from within a forum circumscribed by language. Literary scholar Brent O.
Peterson has argued that German-language publications created ethnic identity by
forming a community of readers.34 He observes that foreign-language newspapers
imagined the American nation differently than the English-language press, which the
Carolina Press, 1997); Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
33
John L. Brooke, “Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution and the Early
American Republic,” in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early
American Republic, ed. Jeffrey Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 209.
34
Brent O. Peterson, Popular Narratives and Ethnic Identities: Literature and Community in Die
Abendschule (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Peterson, “The ‘Political’ and the German-American
Press,” Yearbook of German-American Studies 23 (1988): 41-48. For other explorations of marginalized
groups pushing their way into the public sphere or establishing autonomous sites of debate, see Nancy
Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in
Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts of Technology
Press, 1991), 109-142; Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an
Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and
Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Joanna Brooks, “The Early
American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic,” William and Mary Quarterly
62 (2005): 67-92.
13
work of Benedict Anderson privileges.35 Sixteen German-language newspapers from
Missouri and Ohio dating from 1865 to 1877 have survived to appear in this study.36 I
also use German and English-language correspondence among editors, politicians, and
religious leaders, reports of mass meetings and speeches, voting records, and the records
of state constitutional conventions to ground the language of citizenship in the activities
of the German-American community and gauge its legal ramifications. I rely on the fact
that German-speaking editors, politicians, and clergymen openly disagreed. They helped
form a German-language network within which German immigrants who had little else in
common debated what it meant to be German-American. For the purposes of this study,
the German-American community consists of those immigrants and their children who
argued in German.
Conceiving of a linguistically segmented public sphere allows me to examine how
German-American attitudes took shape without assuming there was a German-American
consensus. The German-language press reflected the fault lines in the German-American
community. German Americans were divided by political affiliation, religious faith,
class, and geography. In the 1870s, a German-American politician observed, “Wherever
35
Peterson, Popular Narratives and Ethnic Identities, 47. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 4766.
36
For work on the German-American press, see Carl Wittke, The German-Language Press in America
([Lexington]: University of Kentucky Press, 1957); Karl J. R. Arndt and May E. Olsen, German-American
Newspapers and Periodicals, 1732-1955: History and Bibliography (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1961;
reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint Corp.,1965); James M. Bergquist, “The German American Press,” in
The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook, ed. Sally M. Miller (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987), 131-59; Henry Geitz, ed. The German-American Press (Madison: Max
Kade Institute for German-American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1992); and Peter ConollySmith, Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1895-1918
(Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institution, 2004).
14
four Germans gather, you will find five different ideas.”37 In cities such as St. Louis and
Cincinnati, immigrants could choose between daily newspapers presenting Republican
and Democratic viewpoints. The debates between competing editors often took on the
intimate intensity of a bitter family feud. Even the editors of religious publications were
drawn into the fray. Cincinnati’s episcopally sanctioned weekly, the Wahrheits-Freund
(Friend of Truth) was the oldest German-American newspapers for Roman Catholics. Its
editors tried to remain aloof from partisan politics, but they were sometimes driven to
attack their political opponents by name. Working-class immigrants also founded
newspapers to express their own interests. Socialists established St. Louis’s Volksstimme
des Westens (People’s Voice of the West) in disgust at the mainstream press. Despite this
critique, working men’s voices did appear in other newspapers when they voted,
protested, and struck. German Americans in smaller towns and rural areas received some
coverage in urban dailies and weeklies. After all, entrepreneurial editors hoped to sell
them subscriptions through the mail. Yet even quite small centers supported newspapers.
The Fremont Courier in northeast Ohio, for example, served a county with fewer than
2,300 German-born residents.38 Such weeklies reprinted editorials from larger
newspapers, appending their support or disapproval. The very structure of the Germanlanguage press lends itself to a study of how differences among German Americans
textured Reconstruction’s citizenship debates.
37
“Wo sich vier Deutsche versammeln, finden Sie fünf verschieden Ideen.” Der deutsche Pionier 11
(1879): 144.
38
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Ninth Census of the United States, 1870 (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1872), 1:368.
15
Newspapers exposed some divisions, but they obscured others. The Germanlanguage press did not represent the interests of German-American women very well.39
German-speaking women were much less likely to assume public roles during the Civil
War Era than Anglo-American women, especially Anglo-American Republican women.
They had few socially sanctioned opportunities to become community leaders. GermanAmerican newspapers condemned native-born women who achieved power as school
teachers, abolitionists, and advocates of temperance and other reforms. They nearly
unanimously rejected women’s suffrage. Although I do not focus on women, I address
how gender entered German-American arguments over citizenship law.
Whatever their differences, the German-speaking individuals who people this
dissertation all lived in Ohio and Missouri, states of the river-valley Middle West.
Historian Edward Conrad Smith called this region America’s “Borderland,” noting its
importance during the Civil War.40 The white population of the states defined by the
valleys and tributaries of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio Rivers—Missouri,
Kentucky, and West Virginia, as well as the southern portions of Ohio, Illinois and
Indiana—was nearly as large as the white population of the eleven states that seceded.
This region could have sealed Confederate independence. Missouri and Ohio had
welcomed settlers from the slave-holding states farther east and shared trade connections
39
Editors also ignored the fact that German Americans often identified with a particular state in German
Europe and married and socialized with other immigrants who shared their regional background. See
Walter D. Kamphoefner, The Westfalians: From Germany to Missouri (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1987); and Stanley Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City 1845-80
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990).
40
Edward Conrad Smith, The Borderland in the Civil War (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927;
reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1970). Frederick Jackson Turner also ascribed a particular significance to
what he called the “north central states.” Turner, The United States, 1830-1850: The Nation and Its
Sections (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1945), provides an account of the geography, peopling,
economy, politics, and culture of the periods which resembles the work of more recent historians who focus
on the environmental context of human history.
16
to the South. The two states were, however, divided by the border between slavery and
free soil. Under the auspices of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Ohio had always
prohibited slave ownership, and it had received substantial immigration from
northeastern and mid-Atlantic states. Overwhelmingly white, densely populated, and
politically divided, the Buckeye State was an important nineteenth-century electoral
battleground.41 Missouri had been admitted to the Union in 1821 as a slave state.
Although by 1860 more of its residents had been born in the North or abroad than in the
South, nearly 10 percent of its population was enslaved, a fact that would influence its
involvement in Reconstruction.42
German immigrants helped define Missouri and Ohio. The eastern states of New
York and Pennsylvania had the country’s largest German-born populations in 1860, but
proportionally the Middle West was much more German. Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, and
Missouri ranked next in terms of total German-born residents according to the 1860
census. German immigrants made up over 7 percent of the Ohio population and 8
percent of Missouri’s free population. In comparison, New York registered somewhat
less than 7 percent, Pennsylvania had less than 5 percent, and Wisconsin had the national
high of nearly 16 percent.43 Many immigrants found their way into dense and distinctive
settlements in the rural Midwest, especially in the counties extending westward from St.
Louis along the Missouri River, and north from Cincinnati in western Ohio.44 Yet the
41
Only 1.6 percent of Ohio’s total population of 2,339,511 was enumerated as “colored.” U.S. Bureau of
the Census, Abstract of the Eight Census, 598, 595.
42
William E. Parrish, A History of Missouri, vol. 3 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973), 7;
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Eight Census, 596, 598.
43
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Eighth Census, 620-23.
44
Russel L. Gerlach, “Population Origins in Rural Missouri,” Missouri Historical Review 71 (1975): 1-21;
Kamphoefner, Westfalians; Anne Aengenvoort, Migration, Siedlungsbildung, Akkulturation: Die
Auswanderung Nordwestdeutscher nach Ohio, 1830-1914 (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1999).
17
German-born were more urban than the population as a whole. In 1860, about a third of
German Ohioans lived in the state’s three largest urban centers, and nearly 60 percent of
German Missourians lived in St. Louis.45 In Cincinnati and St. Louis, about a quarter of
the population identified as German, and German immigrants outnumbered the next
largest foreign-born group, the Irish. Ohio and Missouri were not typical states, but they
represented two variations on the significant midwestern German-American experience.
*****
This work charts how German Ohioans and Missourians approached American
citizenship—their own and African Americans’—from 1865 to 1877. It first examines
how German immigrants linked nationalism and liberalism, opening opportunities for
African Americans to claim citizenship following emancipation. Chapter 1 describes
how German visions of American citizenship were influenced by the Revolutions of
1848, migrating, and the Civil War. By 1865, the Republican myth of the freedomloving German who championed ethnic diversity and opposed slavery dominated the
German-language public sphere. Chapter 2 focuses on German-born Radical
Republicans in the debate over the Missouri Constitution of 1865. These Radicals
tentatively explored their commonalities with freed people as “new citizens” and
endorsed suffrage for African American men. They argued that free institutions were the
means by which the United Sates incorporated new groups. Although Missouri Radicals
failed to eliminate racial voting qualifications, chapter 3 argues that the Radical principle
of racially inclusive citizenship drowned out the conservative voices within German
Republican ranks. Some German-Republican voters still did not support Ohio and
45
Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 59.
18
Missouri’s referenda on black suffrage, but Democrats failed to attract new German-born
followers to their message that citizenship should be reserved for white men. Chapter 4
shows the limits of German Democrats’ message of racial supremacy.
The year 1870 marked an important turning point. The Franco-Prussian War and
German unification changed the things German Americans emphasized about citizenship.
Ridiculing the French capacity for self-rule and welcoming the new German Empire,
many immigrants seemed increasingly convinced that some peoples simply were not
suited to citizenship. Chapter 5 describes this shift within the German-language public
sphere and shows that some German Americans even questioned whether a selfgoverning citizenry was essential to a great nation. Chapter 6 turns to the impact of
European events on American politics. From 1870 to 1872, German Americans from the
Republican and Democratic parties united to express their new ideas in the Liberal
Republican movement. The Liberal Republicans had a variety of legitimate concerns
about Republican government, but their 1872 campaign subordinated racial justice to the
imperatives of reform and reconciliation between northern and southern whites. The
events of the early 1870s loosened the connection between liberalism and nationalism in
the United States as well as Europe. National unity would come not through equal
citizenship, but at its expense.
My final two chapters examine the conflicts over religion and work that began to
eclipse and transform those of race and Reconstruction after 1872. The dilemmas of an
industrial age of mass migration divided German immigrants in new ways and
strengthened ties between Europe and the United States. As chapter 7 shows,
contemporaries recognized that disputes between American Catholics and Protestants
19
over education echoed divisions in Bismarck’s new German Empire. Such cultural
conflicts would only increase with the influx of working-class Catholics from southern
and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century. Among the newcomers were Germanborn Marxists who participated in the Great Strike of 1877. Chapter 8 addresses this
dramatic labor dispute, which signaled that the United States was not immune to the class
conflict afflicting European cities.
Many prominent German Americans had believed that safeguarding the political
rights of male citizens would solve the problems of the American republic. No longer so
certain, this significant immigrant group recognized that the contested social rights of
citizenship—the right to a living and the right to economic opportunity—would dominate
public debate in Europe and North America for the next half century. The primary
distinctions among German immigrants now rested on how they conceived of the
government’s responsibilities to working-class whites. They left the issue of voting
rights behind, even as women campaigned for access to the ballot box and African
American men struggled to preserve it. These new citizens tied the United States to
global developments. As they did, German immigrants helped build—and then erode—
the connection between national unity and citizenship rights. It was this transformed
nationalism of the late nineteenth century that the unveiling of Sigel’s statue evoked in
1906.
20
CHAPTER 1
THE MYTH OF THE FREEDOM-LOVING GERMAN, 1848-1865
“Missouri ist frei!” announced the St. Charles Demokrat after the Missouri
constitutional convention passed an ordinance abolishing slavery on January 11, 1865.
Of course emancipation was a formality by that point. Abraham Lincoln’s 1862
proclamation had ensured that Union victory would only come, as the Demokrat put it,
“over the grave of slavery.” Yet the president’s policy had not applied to loyal states, so
now Missouri Unionists claimed the distinction of passing their own ordinance several
weeks before Congress proposed the Thirteenth Amendment that would eradicate slavery
in the United States once and for all.1 Although the Civil War was grinding on in the
East, the Demokrat celebrated slavery’s demise. The editor of the German-language
weekly offered his readers free translations of the decree freeing Missouri’s slaves to
send to friends and family back home in Europe.2 He declared that the Germans of St.
Charles County, Missouri could be particularly proud of the part they had played in this
achievement: “They were among those who fought in the foremost ranks of the avant-
1
“Über dem Grabe der Sklaverei.” St. Charles Demokrat, 19 January 1865. As the Demokrat was only
published weekly, many of its readers might have already learned of the emancipation ordinance.
2
St. Charles Demokrat, 26 January 1865.
21
garde of freedom, and they now contribute to the core of those veterans who make the
Radical Party unassailable.”3
The St. Charles Demokrat maintained that German midwesterners were in a
unique position at the end of the Civil War. Even before these immigrants had begun to
debate the particulars of African American citizenship, they had identified themselves as
“freedom-loving.” The tag gained currency outside the German-American community
during the 1860s because many Americans accepted the notion that German Americans
opposed slavery. The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass believed that “a German has
only to be a German to be utterly opposed to slavery,” and Confederate soldiers held a
special contempt for the “abolition Dutch [sic].”4 Yet it is difficult to take German
Americans’ professed love of freedom too seriously. One Anglo-American delegate at
the Missouri convention joked that the constitution’s preamble should express thanks for
the state’s freedom not to God, but to the Germans.5 Early twentieth-century writers
noted the German contribution to Lincoln’s election,6 but since the 1940s historians have
reminded us that immigrant voters did not all fall into line behind the German-American
leaders who had been inspired by the European Revolutions of 1848. In Missouri,
3
“Sie gehörten mit zu denen die in den vordersten Reihen der Avantgarde der Freiheit kämpften und sie
bilden jetzt mit den Kern jener Veteranen, welche die radikale Partei unüberwindlich macht.” St. Charles
Demokrat, 19 January 1865.
4
Frederick Douglass, “Adopted Citizens and Slavery,” Douglass’s Monthly, August 1859, quoted in Bruce
Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 9. For the widespread tendency among Confederates to identify Germans with
abolition, see Everard H. Smith, “Chambersburg: Anatomy of a Confederate Reprisal,” American
Historical Review 96 (1991): 444.
5
Anzeiger des Westens, 7 April 1865.
6
Early pieces that emphasize German Americans’ antislavery tendencies include William E. Dodd, “The
Fight for the Northwest, 1869,” American Historical Review 16 (1911): 774-88. This idea also pervaded
the era’s filiopietistic literature. See for example, Albert B. Faust, The German Element in the United
States with Special Reference to Its Political, Moral, Social, and Educational Influence (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1909), 1:522-67; J.G. Rosengarten, The German Soldier in the Wars of the United States: An
Address Read before the Pionier-Verein at the Hall of the German Society (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott
Co., 1886); and Wilhelm Kaufmann, Die Deutschen im amerikanischen Bürgerkriege (Munich and Berlin:
R. Oldenbourg, 1911).
22
German Americans were overwhelmingly Republican, but in many parts of the Midwest
they remained solidly Democratic, reluctant to support Republicans’ war aims.
Examining voting patterns among German Americans more carefully, many historians
have argued that religious customs, not political ideals, shaped their political loyalties.
Exponents of the “ethnocultural school” have suggested that the German immigrants who
did support the Republican Party identified with the Protestant cultural values it
embodied.7 Scholars are justifiably skeptical of German Americans’ claim that they were
uniquely committed to the abstract principle of freedom.
Yet the myth of the freedom-loving German would influence how German
Americans approached citizenship during Reconstruction. By 1865, German immigrants
had already publicized a powerful vision of American citizenship shaped by their
experiences in Europe, the process of migrating to the United States, and their
7
The reappraisal of German-American voting patterns began with Joseph Schafer, “Who Elected
Lincoln?” American Historical Review 47 (1941): 27-43. For a summary of the historiographical
transition, see the essays in Frederick C. Luebke, ed., Ethnic Voters and the Election of Lincoln (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1973). For an important and reliable evaluation of the analysis of GermanAmerican voting, see Walter D. Kamphoefner, “German-Americans and Civil War Politics: A
Reconsideration of the Ethnocultural Thesis,” Civil War History 37 (1991): 232-45. See also Lesley Ann
Kawaguchi, “Diverging Political Affiliations and Ethnic Perspectives: Philadelphia Germans and
Antebellum Politics,” Journal of American Ethnic History 13 no. 2 (1994): 3-29; Thomas J. Kelso, “The
German-American Vote in the Election of 1860: The Case of Indiana with Supporting Data from Ohio”
(Ph.D. diss., Ball State University, 1968); James M. Bergquist, “The Political Attitudes of the German
Immigrant in Illinois, 1848-1860” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1966).
For a critical survey of the “ethnocultural” school, see Richard L. McCormick, “Ethno-Cultural
Interpretations of Nineteenth-Century Voting Behavior,” Political Science Quarterly 89 (1974): 351-77.
For a defense that argues that the works McCormick labeled “ethnocultural” were more diverse and
nuanced than he suggested, see Ronald P. Formisano, “The Invention of the Ethnocultural Interpretation,”
Journal of American History 99 (1994): 453-77. Significant “ethnocultural” works included Paul
Kleppner, “Lincoln and the Immigrant Vote: A Case of Religious Polarization,” Mid-America 48 (1966):
176-95; Kleppner, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850-1900 (New York:
The Free Press, 1970); and Richard Jensen, “The Religious and Occupational Roots of Party Affiliation:
Indiana and Illinois in the 1870s,” Civil War History 16 (1970): 325-43; Frederick C. Luebke, Immigrants
and Politics: The Germans of Nebraska, 1880-1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969); Ronald
P. Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties in Michigan, 1827-1861 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1971); Joel H. Silbey, The Transformation of American Politics, 1840-1860 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1967).
23
involvement in sectional politics. As historian Bruce Levine has shown, the Revolutions
of 1848 resonated beyond the intellectual elite.8 The campaign for a united German
nation radicalized many working-class immigrants, and it would have an even broader
legacy. The revolutions helped define what it meant to be German-American at midcentury. The Forty-Eighters—as the refugees of the revolutions were known—would
develop a distinctive approach to American citizenship as they participated in the creation
of the Republican Party. German Republicans would carefully distinguish themselves
from the native-born Republicans who emphasized Anglo-Saxon and Protestant values
and the foreign-born Democrats who maintained that the United States was a white man’s
country. For German immigrants in the Republican Party, the American nation had to set
itself against slavery and ethnic intolerance. After four years of bitter warfare, this vision
of citizenship would dominate the German-American public sphere.
*****
Forty-Eighter Jacob Müller later recalled how much the Revolutions of 1848 had
influenced German-American politics during the 1850s. The Cleveland politician
described himself as one of the “the wild young men of the fifties,” immigrants who
believed that the struggle “against every form of bondage” was a central part of Germans’
“cultural mission” in the United States.9 Müller had served as a commissioner under the
short-lived revolutionary government in the Bavarian Palatinate and would later become
8
Levine, The Spirit of 1848.
Jacob Mueller, Memories of a Forty-Eighter: Sketches from the German-American Period of Storm and
Stress in the 1850s, trans. Steven Rowan (Cleveland: Western Reserve Historical Society, 1996), 102, xv,
114.
9
24
the Republican lieutenant governor of Ohio.10 He represented the well-educated exiles
who became German Americans’ most articulate and influential leaders.11 Men such as
Müller may not have typified the immigrants arriving in the United State in the 1850s,
but their ideas appealed to a large constituency of German Americans. Hundreds of
thousands of German peasants, cottage artisans, and craftworkers crossed the Atlantic
when the wave of political activity at the close of the 1840s failed to address the tenuous
economic situation in Europe. The German-born population in the United States more
than doubled from 583,774 in 1850 to 1,276,075 at the end of the decade.12 These
newcomers were not all as politically engaged as Müller, but they overwhelmingly
supported the cause he had fought for: a united German nation governed by the people’s
elected representatives.
The overthrow of French King Louis Philippe in March 1848 triggered a crisis in
the German states that had been several decades in the making. Population growth and
competition from industrial production in Britain had been straining the region’s largely
10
Müller served under the constitution of the Frankfurt Parliament which German monarchs never
recognized. The residents of the Palatinate region recognized its authority briefly during 1848 and 1849
until the Bavarian royal family, which ruled the territory in 1815, reasserted its control.
11
On the German Forty-Eighters, see Wolfgang Hochbruck, Ulrich Bachteler, and Henning Zimmermann,
eds., Achtundvierziger - Forty-Eighters: Die deutschen Revolutionen von 1848/49, die Vereinigten Staaten
und der Amerikanische Bürgerkrieg (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2000); Carl Wittke, “The
German Forty-Eighters: A Centennial Appraisal,” American Historical Review 53 (1948): 711-725; Wittke,
Refugees of Revolution; Charlotte L. Brancaforte, ed., The German Forty-Eighters in the United States
(New York: Peter Lang, 1989); A. E. Zucker, ed., The Forty-Eighters: Political Refugees of the German
Revolution of 1848 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950); Levine, The Spirit of 1848.
There are also a number of relevant biographies. See for example Hans L. Trefousse, Carl
Schurz: A Biography, 2d ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998); Sabine Freitag, Friedrich
Hecker: Biographie eines Republikaners (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1998); Stephen D. Engle, The Yankee
Dutchman: The Life of Franz Sigel (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993).
12
Kathleen Neils Conzen, “Germans,” in The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed.
Stephan Thernstrom, Ann Orlov, and Oscar Handlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1980), 406.
25
agrarian economy since the early nineteenth century.13 European authorities had
loosened feudal obligations, but the landed aristocracy, established churches, and state
bureaucracies had relinquished little of their traditional power by the 1840s. The
elimination of serfdom actually increased the ranks of landless laborers and forced
marginal peasants to supplement their livelihoods by producing goods such as textiles at
home. In many German states, the dismantling of craft guilds made it easier for artisans
to run their own shops, but masters were increasing vulnerable to taxes and competition
from the large-scale operations that were slowly emerging on the continent. In the late
1840s, harvest failures compounded these problems. Finally, in the spring of 1848,
German cities, towns, and villages erupted in protest. Most Germans did not endorse the
class antagonism of Karl Marx. They simply believed that if they were granted civil and
political rights they could frame laws that ensured no one went hungry. In Cologne, the
Prussian city where Marx was publishing his Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a group of
socialists demanded that the city council permit freedom of speech and association,
implement universal manhood suffrage, and establish a popular legislature. One of men
leading the workers’ delegation was August Willich, a former military officer who would
13
My description of the German economic crisis draws on Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 19-41; James J.
Sheehan, German History, 1770-1866 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 451-524. On the effect of
industrialization on migration, see Timothy Anderson, “Proto-Industrialization, Sharecropping, and
Outmigration in Nineteenth-Century Rural Westphalia,” Journal of Peasant Studies 29 (2001): 1-30;
Kamphoefner, The Westfalians, 12-39. For details of the revolutions, see Veit Valentin, 1848: Chapters of
German History, trans. Ethel Talbot Scheffauer (London: Allen and Unwin, 1940; reprint, Hamden, Conn.:
Archon Books, 1965); R.J.W. Evans and Hartmut Pooge von Strandmann, eds., The Revolutions in Europe,
1848-1849: From Reform to Reaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Jonathan Sperber, The
European Revolutions, 1848-1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
26
campaign against slavery in the United States.14 Willich would always maintain that civil
and political rights were inseparable from economic justice.
Germans also tied their demands for citizenship rights to their hopes for a German
nation. Many ordinary Europeans still felt their primary allegiance lay with their town,
duchy, or kingdom, but German nationalism had been on the rise since the late eighteenth
century. The cultural nationalism of intellectuals and artists such as Friedrich Schiller
had inspired politicians who hoped for a German nation-state.15 During the French
occupation of the Napoleonic Wars, German nationalists had formed organizations such
as the Turnverein. The Turners were young men—mostly skilled artisans—who
dedicated themselves to physical training and German patriotism. Their calls for national
unity and democratic reform did not end with Napoleon’s defeat and the Treaty of Vienna
in 1815.16 By the 1840s, Turners and other German liberals had come to assume that
reform would not come without national consolidation. Although they resented the
excesses of the large German states such as Prussia and Bavaria, they still believed that
only a powerful nation-state could overcome the traditional aristocratic and ecclesiastical
privileges that fragmented Europe. The liberalism of 1848 thus encompassed Germans’
hunger for citizenship rights, cultural nationalism, and political nationalism. Students
found this combination particularly appealing. Recalling his days at the University of
Bonn, Carl Schurz reflected, “We young people [believed] that the disintegrated
14
Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 41. On Willich, see Loyd Easton, Hegel’s First American Followers: The
Ohio Hegelians: John B. Stallo, Peter Kaufmann, Moncure Conway, and August Willich (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 1966).
15
For synthesis that impressively blends the story of German cultural nationalism into a politically and
economically grounded synthesis, see Sheehan, German History.
16
On the Turners, see August J. Prahl, “The Turner,” in The Forty-Eighters, ed. Zucker, 79-110; Ralf
Wagner, “Turner Societies and the Socialist Tradition,” in German Workers’ Culture in the United States
1850-1920, ed. Hartmut Keil (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 221-40; Levine, The
Spirit of 1848, 91-95; Wittke, Refugees of Revolution.
27
Fatherland must be moulded [sic] into a united empire with free political institutions.
The fermenting, restless spirit permeating the minds of the educated classes, and finding
expression in the literature of the day, aroused in us boys the warmest enthusiasm.”17
Another future German-American Republican, Friedrich Hassaurek, was similarly
motivated. At only sixteen he joined the student legions in Vienna, sustaining two minor
injuries in street fighting against the Austrian authorities.18
The Revolutions of 1848 had an unmistakably nationalist spirit, but participants
struggled to define who exactly belonged within the German national community. The
German word Volk can be rendered in English as “race,” “nation,” or “people.” During
1848, reformers and revolutionaries strove to balance the somewhat contradictory
connotations of the word Volk. Their central dilemma was how to reconcile their ideas of
a “culture-nation” with their commitment to a “state-nation.” After 1871, German law
would define membership in the German national community largely by blood, but in the
mid-nineteenth-century debates, biological descent vied with other criteria such as
customs, language, and residence within the proposed German state.19 Brian E. Vick
persuasively argues that participants in the Revolutions of 1848 could harmonize their
ideas because they saw the nation as an “organic unity” that constantly evolved to
incorporate different groups and realize cultural progress. They believed free institutions
facilitated national cohesion, which in turn refined the political expression of the nation.20
17
Carl Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1909), 1:73.
Wittke, “Friedrich Hassaurek: Cincinnati’s Leading Forty-Eighter,” Ohio Historical Quarterly 68
(1959): 2-3.
19
Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1992); Eli Nathans, The Politics of Citizenship in Germany: Ethnicity, Utility and
Nationalism (Oxford: Berg, 2004).
20
Brian E. Vick, Defining Germany: The 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 15, 28.
18
28
The conflict over the status of Jewish Germans illustrates Vick’s argument. The
delegates who gathered at the pan-German parliament in Frankfurt am Main in May 1848
expressed a range of anti-Semitic stereotypes. They were prepared, however, to include
Jews in the German Volk, granting them civil and political rights. Even those
revolutionaries who were strongly prejudiced against Jews, such as future Illinoisan
Friedrich Hecker, believed that the minority group could become part of the evolving
nation.21 Vick explains, “As a result of the mixing of cultural and political ideas of
nationality in mid-nineteenth-century German thought, liberal nationalists did not have to
insist on either total exclusion or total absorption of a culturally distinct population in
order to achieve a comfortable and workable degree of national and political unity.”22
In addition to deciding who should be a German citizen, the Frankfurt Parliament
began to consider what rights that citizenship conferred. The parliamentarians were
inspired as much by foreign models as German precedents. Historically, a German
Bürger was a member of the small group of artisans and merchants who resided within
the self-governing towns of the Holy Roman Empire. These politically active men
formed a privileged estate within Europe’s traditional order.23 The rise of absolute
monarchies in the eighteenth century had supplemented this traditional usage of the term
Bürger with another. By the early 1800s, the constitutions of Prussia and Austria used
the term Staatsbürger synonymously with “subject” to refer to an inhabitant who
received protection from the sovereign in return for taxes, loyalty, and military service.
21
Vick, Defining Germany, 97.
Ibid., 97, 85.
23
Manfried Reidel, “Bürger, Staatsbürger, Bürgertum,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches
Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart
Koselleck (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1972), 1:676-78; Mack Walker, German Home Towns:
Community, State, and General Estate, 1648-1871 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971); Sheehan,
German History, 24-40.
22
29
Such minimalist citizenship did not necessarily include a clearly defined set of civil rights
or the responsibility to participate actively in government through the franchise.24
The revolutionaries of 1848 challenged both the declining estate-based order and
the rising monarchical states. The Forty-Eighters associated citizenship with political
participation. The work of Karl von Rotteck inspired men such as Friedrich Hecker. The
political theorist, whom Hecker met in Freiburg in the 1830s, advocated replacing
Baden’s parliamentary system based on traditional estates with a republican government
composed of politically active citizens. His view of citizenship drew in part on classical
and renaissance ideas that propertied men had the virtue and independence to represent
the “community spirit.”25 Rotteck reflected the classical republican emphasis on citizens’
responsibility to the polity, but he also captured the more individualistic ideas circulating
internationally during the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions.26 He maintained
that government existed to protect individuals’ rights. Like many of their
contemporaries, Rotteck and Hecker admired the ideas of the American Revolution and
the republican government the United States had implemented. The Forty-Eighters were
24
At mid-century, the power of parliaments varied among the German states, as did the extent to which the
parliaments represented the traditional estates. James J. Sheehan, “The German States and the European
Revolution,” in Revolution and the Meanings of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Isser Woloch
(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996), 259-60. For the transition in citizenship ideas, see
Reidel, “Bürger, Staatsbürger, Bürgertum,” 683-87, 702-06; Sheehan, German History, 55-71; Nathans,
The Politics of Citizenship in Germany, 37-53.
25
Sabine Freitag, “A Republikaner becomes a Republican: Friedrich Hecker and the Emergence of the
Republican Party,” Yearbook of German-American Studies 33 (1998): 5-17; Freitag, Friedrich Hecker, 6395; Paul Nolte, “Bürgerideal, Gemeinde und Republik: ‘Klassischer Republikanismus’ in frühen deutschen
Liberalismus,” Historische Zeitschrift 254 (1992): 609-56.
26
Otto Dann specifically rejects the idea that classical republicanism was an important strand in German
anti-monarchical thought in the nineteenth century and describes how the Enlightenment tradition mediated
through philosopher Immanuel Kant. Otto Dann, “Kant’s Republicanism and Its Echoes,” in
Republicanism and Liberalism in American and the German States, 1750-1850, ed. Jürgen Heideking and
James A. Henretta (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2002),
53-72.
30
especially sympathetic to the work of Thomas Paine.27 Schurz recalled learning as a
child that the United States was “that young republic where the people were free, without
kings, without counts.”28 Only a minority of the Frankfurt parliamentarians would go as
far as Sigel, Willich, Hecker, and Schurz who both believed there was no place for a
monarch in a state governed by its citizens.
The Frankfurt Parliament divided over whether citizenship automatically
conveyed the right to vote. The hastily assembled deliberative body had been elected by
all “mature independent citizens” of the German states. Different states administered
polling differently, but the qualifier “independent” indicated that women, and perhaps
even men who did not own property, held a non-voting citizenship status.29 Many
conservative delegates were content to reform monarchy without extending suffrage at
all. Middle-class moderates considered stronger representative institutions essential, but
they were reluctant to include poorer German men in political decision making. They
reached conclusions that resembled those of eighteenth-century French revolutionaries
and some of their counterparts across the Atlantic, distinguishing between “active”
citizens whose property ownership provided the independence required to participate in
27
Freitag, Friedrich Hecker, 52; Horst Dippel, Germany and the American Revolution, 1770-1800: A
Sociohistorical Investigation of Late Eighteenth-Century Political Thinking, trans. Bernhard A. Uhlendorf
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); Dipple, Die amerikanische Verfassung in
Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert: Das Dilemma von Politik und Staatsrecht (Goldbach: Keip Verlag,
1994); Hans Erich Bödecker, “The Concept of the Republic in Eighteenth-Century German Thought,” in
Republicanism and Liberalism in American and the German States, ed. Heideking and Henretta, 35-52;
Sheehan, “The German States and the European Revolution,” 247-79; Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 24;
Günter Moltmann, Atlantische Blockpolitik im 19. Jahrhundert: Die Vereinigten Staaten und der deutsche
Liberalismus während der Revolution von 1848/49 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1973); Carl J. Friedrich,
“The European Background,” in The Forty-Eighters, ed. A. E. Zucker, 16-20.
28
Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, 1:29.
29
Sheehan, “The German States and the European Revolutions,” 270; Reidel, “Bürger, Staatsbürger,
Bürgertum,” 1:711-12; Jörg-Detlef Kühne, “Civil Rights and German Constitutional Thought, 1848-1871,”
in German and American Constitutional Thought, ed. Hermann Wellenreuther (Oxford: Berg, 1990), 199232.
31
decision making and “passive” citizens who could not expect political rights.30 In 1848,
German working-class radicals rejected this notion—at least for men—and persuaded
some of their bourgeois supporters to abandon it too.31 Proponents of universal manhood
suffrage were overrepresented among those Germans who found their way to the United
States.32
The divided national parliament finally reached a controversial compromise. It
offered the crown of a united Germany, excluding Austria, to Prussian King Frederick
Wilhelm IV. The parliament’s constitution proposed equal citizenship for men living
with the borders of a German state regardless of religion or ancestry, but it did not settle
the debate over property requirements. The article on “fundamental rights” referred
simply to the right “of the German people” to “a popular representative body.”33 The
issue was moot in any case. Frederick Wilhelm rejected the offer, turning his troops on
protesters in Berlin. After May 1849, only a few radicals resisted the inevitable
reassertion of monarchal power. Committed revolutionaries—including Schurz, Hecker,
and Sigel—organized poorly-armed militias that held out against the authorities in
southwestern states. With Prussia’s aid, it did not take long for Baden and Bavaria’s
authorities to suppress the last of the insurgents. Facing prosecution or simply
30
Sheehan, “The German States and the European Revolution,” 260-61; Bödecker, “The Concept of the
Republic in Eighteenth-Century German Thought,” 36; Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations
of the French Civic Order, 1789-1820s (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994).
31
Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 35-50.
32
Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 22. No American Forty-Eighter accepted Georg Wilhelm Hegel’s
contention that freedom was best expressed through the laws of an absolutist state. For an interpretation of
Hegel’s political ideas that emphasizes their totalitarian propensity, see Leonard Kreiger, The German Idea
of Freedom (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 86-138. Compare Sheehan, German History, 433. Even the
German Americans who were interested in Hegel did not accept absolutism. Easton, Hegel’s First
American Followers; James A. Good, “A World-Historical Idea: The St. Louis Hegelians and the Civil
War,” Journal of American Studies 34 (2000): 447-64.
33
For a translation and discussion, see Jörg-Detlef Kühne, “Civil Rights and German Constitutional
Thought, 1848-1871,” 199-232.
32
disillusioned, many of them left Germany for good. Carl Schurz’s experience became
emblematic of their flight. He escaped through the sewer of a besieged fortress, making
his way from Baden to France, Switzerland, London, and finally to the United States.
Of course reports of the turmoil had crossed the Atlantic ahead of Schurz. Even
before the end of March 1848, Americans, especially earlier German immigrants, were
excited to learn of the republican stirrings in Europe.34 German-American constitutional
scholar Franz Lieber reportedly wept when he informed his students at the University of
South Carolina of the news.35 Across the Mississippi from St. Louis in Belleville,
Illinois, Gustav Körner hoped that the revolutions would transform the land of his birth.
Having fled Europe after participating in a student uprising in 1833, Körner now led the
older generation of immigrants within the Democratic Party.36 “Only through liberty
comes union such as Germany needs,” he declared.37 Editorials in German-American
newspapers and mass meetings in cities throughout the United States indicated that most
German immigrants wholeheartedly agreed.38 When Hecker toured the United States in
1848 and 1849, he routinely drew crowds of thousands. Although he was frustrated that
he failed to raise much money or convince the American government to support the
34
Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 29.
Ibid., 31.
36
Marlin T. Tucker, “Political Leadership in the Illinois-Missouri German Community, 1836-1872” (Ph.D.
diss., University of Illinois, 1968), 9-25.
37
Gustav Koerner, Memoirs of Gustav Koerner, 1809-1896, 2 vols. (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: The Torch Press,
1909), 1: 535.
38
Ibid., 528-41; John G. Gazley, American Opinion of German Unification, 1848-1871 (New York:
Columbia University, 1926; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1970), 454-58; Walter D. Kamphoefner,
“‘Auch unser Deutschland muss einmal frei werden’: The Immigrant Civil War Experience as a Mirror on
Political Conditions in Germany,” in Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and America since
1776, ed. David E. Barclay and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute
and Cambridge University Press, 1997), 87-107.
35
33
European independence movements, he found German Americans’ enthusiasm
gratifying. He eventually settled down in Körner’s home town.39
German Americans generally welcomed the Forty-Eighters, but the new arrivals
created some friction.40 An incident in Cincinnati in 1849 reveals how the ambitious
refugees challenged the established German-American leadership. The teenaged
Friedrich Hassaurek, who would become the city’s most famous Forty-Eighter,
confronted the judge and scholar Johann Bernard Stallo. Stallo had immigrated to Ohio
from the Duchy of Oldenburg as a child and was comfortable in Cincinnati’s Englishspeaking circles, but he remained involved in the German-American community. In
1849, Hassaurek attacked the venerable judge’s position on slavery, the issue that was to
dominate German-American politics during the decade to come. The older man had
always disliked human bondage and had just recommended to a gathering of Kentucky
Democrats south of the Ohio River in Covington that their state pursue gradual
emancipation based on Pennsylvania’s model.41 Hassaurek ridiculed Stallo’s piecemeal
approach. In a series of satirical letters to the German-language Republikaner newspaper,
he posed as the Russian emperor. Hassaurek’s letters complemented “Stallikowski’s”
supposed support of an institution that “brought joy to his princely heart” and expressed
pleasure that there were still places where one was “allowed to breed slaves and have
them whipped.”42 Stallo’s rejoinders showed he was hurt by the public attack. The
39
Freitag, Friedrich Hecker, 145-52.
Koerner, Memoirs of Gustav Koerner, 546-52. Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 58-74; Levine, The
Spirit of 1848, 83-110.
41
Cincinnati Deutscher Republikaner, 16 August 1849. Clipping in box 2, folder, 1, Friedrich Hassaurek
Papers, Ohio Historical Society (hereafter OHS), Columbus, Ohio.
42
“Eine Freude mein fürstliches Herz betroffen … wo man Sklaven erziehen und peitschen lassen darf.”
Cincinnati Deutscher Republikaner [August 1849]. Clipping in box 2, folder 1, Hassaurek Papers, OHS.
40
34
relationship between the two German Cincinnatians would never heal, but it is significant
that they shared an aversion to slavery.
Forty-Eighters saw to it that antislavery took hold among German leaders in Ohio
and Missouri. They could build on practical and principled opposition to slavery. Since
the 1830s, migrants displaced from Germany’s northwestern regions had moved to the
Midwest, hoping to purchase their own farms and recreate their close-knit communities.43
Large-scale agriculture and slave labor conflicted with this vision. In St. Charles County,
wedged at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, German settlers were
much less likely to own slaves than Anglo-Americans, even when they could afford to.44
Arnold Krekel, who would preside over the convention that sealed Missouri
emancipation in 1865, was among the exceptions. A lawyer who had emigrated from
Westphalia as a teenager in 1832, Krekel owned one slave in 1850. Yet when he founded
the St. Charles Demokrat in 1852, he was on his way to becoming a free-soil Democrat
who opposed the extension of slavery.45 Friedrich Münch from neighboring Warren
County took a similar stance. The older man had earned the affectionate moniker “Papa
Münch” through his activities as a politician, journalist, philosopher, poet, and vintner.46
43
Kamphoefner, The Westfalians; Aengenvoort, Migration, Siedlungsbildung, Akkulturation.
Kamphoefner, The Westfalians, 116-17. For similar patterns in another slave-holding state with a large
German-born population, see Kamphoefner, “New Perspectives on Texas Germans and the Confederacy,”
Southwestern Historical Quarterly 102 (1999): 440-55; Sean M. Kelley, “Plantation Frontiers: Race,
Ethnicity, and Family along the Brazos River of Texas, 1821-1886” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at
Austin, 2000).
45
Arndt and Olsen, German-American Newspapers and Periodicals, 246. St. Charles Demokrat, 3
November 1855, quoted in Anita M. Mallinckrodt, From Knights to Pioneers: One German Family in
Westphalia and Missouri (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1994), 285-86. For biographical
information, see History of St. Charles, Montgomery and Warren Counties, Missouri (St. Louis: National
Historical Company, 1885; reprint, St. Louis: Paul V. Cochrane 1969), 199-200; Kamphoefner, The
Westfalians, 117.
46
Tucker, “Political Leadership,” 40-44; William G. Bek, “The Followers of Duden: Friedrich Muench,”
Missouri Historical Review 18 (1924): 413-34; Friedrich Muench, Gesammelte Schriften von Friedrich
Münch, ed. Hugo Muench (St. Louis: C. Witter, 1902), 121-22.
44
35
Krekel and Münch’s constituents along the Missouri River believed slavery replicated the
system of aristocratic privilege they had hoped to leave behind in Europe.
During the 1850s, antislavery propelled the most prominent German Ohioans and
Missourians into the Republican Party where they would refine their ideas of citizenship.
The new party emerged out of the controversy over whether western land would be
opened to slavery. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 overturned the 1820 Missouri
Compromise, which had restricted the spread of the institution to the territory that lay
south of the parallel that extended west from Missouri’s southern border. The act
permitted settlers in Kansas to vote on whether to institute slavery when they applied for
statehood. The Republicans opposed this concession as they opposed any extension of
slavery beyond the states where it was already established. Their free labor ideology held
that the strength of American government lay in the political participation of
economically independent men. German settlers in the West had every reason to agree
that western land must be reserved for farmers and craftsmen and their families, not
masters and their slaves.47 The Republican message resonated with immigrants who had
suffered under the traditional regimes of Europe and now sought to realize their dreams
of farms or workshops of their own. Münch began to campaign nationally for the
Republicans in 1856.48 Krekel opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, and by 1860
he was running as the Republican candidate for Missouri attorney general. Körner helped
establish the Republican Party in Illinois, befriending Abraham Lincoln. In Ohio, Stallo,
47
Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970; reprint, 1995),
249.
48
Tucker, “Political Leadership,” 40-44.
36
Hassaurek, and Müller were all Republicans by 1856, and Schurz, then living in
Wisconsin, also joined the new movement.49
German newspapers in Ohio and Missouri indicated how many GermanAmerican leaders were attracted to antislavery and the Republican Party. The number of
German-language periodicals in the United States doubled in the four years following
1848.50 Newspapers such as Cleveland’s Wächter am Erie and the Toledo Express
strongly opposed the extension of slavery from their inception, and established sheets
such as Cincinnati’s Volksblatt and Deutscher Republikaner took up the antislavery
banner in the early 1850s. By the presidential election of 1856, so many Germanlanguage newspapers supported the Republicans that the remaining Democratic
newspapers in Ohio felt embattled. A respected scholar of the German-American press
has observed that the editors of the Columbus Westbote and the Cincinnati Volksfreund
believed they were fighting a “lone battle.”51 In Missouri, there was no significant
newspaper supporting slavery by 1860. The St. Charles Demokrat had already taken an
antislavery position. The St. Louis Anzeiger des Westens was also a free-soil newspaper,
and its condemnations of slavery became even more strident under the editorship of
Henry Börnstein.52 Börnstein was a Hamburg-born Forty-Eighter, but he had had spent
the revolutionary years among German expatriates in Paris. In 1857, disgruntled
49
Timothy C. Day to Hassaurek, Washington D.C., 24 June 1856, box 2, folder 3, Hassaurek Papers, OHS;
Mueller, Memories of a Forty-Eighter, 151; Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 59-60.
50
Wittke, The German-Language Press in America, 76; Arndt and Olsen, German-American Newspapers,
446, 454-55. A. E. Zucker found more American Forty-Eighters went into journalism than any other
profession. Zucker, Forty Eighters, 270.
51
Wittke, The German-language Press, 140.
52
For the Anzeiger’s early opposition to the extension of slavery, see Tucker, “Political Leadership,” 115.
37
members of the Anzeiger staff left to found an antislavery paper that would become much
more influential, the Westliche Post.53
Although German Republicans often found it difficult to work together, they
managed to purvey an antislavery politics that reinforced their shared ethnic identity.
The Westliche Post mapped out this agenda in its inaugural issue in 1857. The editors
announced that they would endeavor to meet the “demands of the German public” for
European, national, and local news, while they promoted the two great causes of
freedom: immigrant rights and antislavery. Championing the interests of the “adoptive
population” and encouraging the “political and social influence of the German element,”
they suggested, was inseparable from transforming Missouri “into a flourishing free
state.” The Westliche Post reasoned that protecting immigrants would attract more free
settlers who would discourage slavery.54 The Post’s competitor across town, the
Anzeiger, concluded in 1860 that Germans had a distinctive “mission” in the “present
crisis,” because they were “filled with more intensive concepts of freedom, with more
expansive notions of humanity than most peoples of the earth.” The editors maintained
that “the German is an opponent of slavery, and the German is always unfailingly there
when free labor is being defended through law and Constitution against the pressure and
53
Steven Rowan, “German Language Newspapers in St. Louis, 1835-1974,” in The German-American
Experience in Missouri: Essays in Commemoration for the Tricentennial of German Immigration to
America, 1683-1983, ed. Howard W. Marshall and James W. Goodrich (Columbia: Missouri Cultural
Heritage Center, University of Missouri—Columbia, 1986), 45-60.
54
Westliche Post, 27 September 1857, trans. in Steven Rowan, Germans for a Free Missouri: Translations
from the St. Louis Radical Press, 1857-1862 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 50-51. For
similar arguments about the connection between protecting immigrants and restricting slavery, see St.
Charles Demokrat, 10 April 1862, trans. in Anita M. Mallinckrodt, What They Thought, vol. 2, Missouri’s
German Immigrants Assess Their World (Augusta, Missouri: Mallinckrodt Communications and Research,
1995), 4-6.
38
dominance of slavery and the despotic principles of government it brings with it.”55
Although this statement of German-American opposition to slavery was exaggerated, it
captured the powerful combination of ethnic identity and antislavery that infused many
German Americans’ ideas of citizenship.
German Republicans believed the fight against slavery embodied the same
conceptions of nation and citizenship as the Revolutions of 1848. Anglo-American
Republicans also believed their cause was merely one expression of global progress, but
immigrants had firsthand experience.56 Speaking to a crowd in Boston’s Faneuil Hall in
1859, Carl Schurz recalled the efforts of the German nationalists. “I saw my nation,” he
related, “shake her chains in order to burst them, and I heard a gigantic, universal shout
for Liberty rising up to the skies.” Yet Schurz had witnessed that nation “crushed down
again … by the dead weight of customs and institutions and notions and prejudices which
past centuries had heaped upon them.” He told his Massachusetts audience that he had
“instinctively” turned to the United States to pursue his ideals, only to be disappointed by
the institutions of the southern states, which had been “settled under the auspices of
lordly merchants and proprietaries.”57 German Republicans frequently likened
slaveholders to European aristocrats. The Anzeiger described the party’s ideology as
“true democracy that opposes the oligarchy of the South.” The paper went on,
“Humanity is battling barbarism; small property in land and rational agriculture is in
conflict with aristocratic exploitation, and those who want the territories given to the free
55
Anzeiger des Westens, 17 December 1860, trans. in Rowan, Germans for a Free Missouri, 147.
Bender, A Nation among Nations, 123-24.
57
Schurz, “True Americanism,” speech delivered in Boston, 18 April 1859, in Speeches, Correspondence
and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, ed. Frederic Bancroft, 6 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913),
1:50, 53.
56
39
white man and not to the slaveowning baron of the South.”58 The immigrants’ European
experiences only made Republicans’ free labor critique of the South more convincing to
them. At the same time, the transatlantic parallels they identified made it easier for
German Americans to claim a special insight into the American scourge of slavery.
Immigrants did not merely transplant German ideas of citizenship. They formed new
ones inspired by their transatlantic perspective and their status as newcomers in the
United States.
Although they were willing to compare the United States and Germany, GermanAmerican Republicans did not necessarily identify with slaves. They were divided in
their attitudes toward African Americans. Some evidence indicates that German
immigrants were less hostile to African Americans than white Americans as a group. In a
new volume of German-language letters, only two of the twenty-three Republican
correspondents expressed explicit antipathy toward African Americans.59 A few
German-speaking Republicans expressed racial hatred in private, faulting slavery
precisely because they harbored deep prejudice toward African Americans. One German
urged Friedrich Hassaurek to encourage the party to take a course that would ensure that
“Detestable Slaveholding Aristocrats, Contemptible Would be Aristocrats, and Cowardly
58
Anzeiger des Westens, 16 August 1860, trans. in Rowan, Germans for a Free Missouri, 124. For further
examples, see Kamphoefner, “Auch unser Deutschland muss einmal frei werden,” 87-107.
59
Many Republicans expressed prejudice, and vicious anti-black sentiment was common among writers
who declared loyalty to the Democrats. Wolfgang Helbich and Walter D. Kamphoefner, eds., Deutsche im
amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg: Briefe von Front und Farm, 1861-1865 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh,
2002). For an able translation of the latter, see Wolfgang Helbich and Walter D. Kamphoefner, eds.,
Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home, trans. Susan Carter Vogel (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2006). See also Martin Öfele, German-speaking Officers in the United
States Colored Troops, 1863-1867 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2004). Compare to the
analysis of wartime attitudes toward slavery in English-language letters in James M. McPherson, For
Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 11730. On the spectrum of racial attitudes within the Republican Party, see Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free
Men, 261-300.
40
Niggers” would leave the United States for Cuba, thus ridding the country of “3
nuisances at once.”60 During the Civil War, many German-born soldiers who welcomed
the end of slavery were still intent on maintaining social distance between whites and
blacks. There were German Republicans who hoped to exile African Americans from the
continent.61
On the other hand, many rank and file Republican immigrants emphasized the
common humanity they shared with black Americans. Karl and Alwine Frick, a couple
living to the west of St. Louis in Franklin County, tried to explain the war and slavery to
relatives back in Germany. The traitorous slaveholders, Karl wrote in February 1863,
“don’t want to set their slaves free and just want to exploit other humans, that is blacks,
because they don’t regard them as human beings.” The slaves, he explained, were
“driven by white men with whips in their hands and often terribly mistreated and also
poorly fed and so there are black families with 4 to 5 children where the mother and
father are torn apart and sold thousands of miles away.”62 According to a man who grew
up enslaved in Missouri, German immigrants sometimes expressed their concerns
directly to their African American neighbors. In his memoirs, H.C. Bruce commented
that the German population around Brunswick in central Missouri had earned the
suspicion with which local slaveholders regarded them: “They were opposed to slavery
60
Louis Krouskopf to Hassaurek, Pisgah, Ohio, March 1860, box 2, folder 6, Hassaurek Papers, OHS.
For an example of racist expressions of the need for social distance, see Henry A. Kircher to His Father,
Young’s Point, [Louisiana], 19 April 1863, in A German in the Yankee Fatherland: The Civil War Letters
of Henry A. Kircher, ed. Earl J. Hess (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1983), 92. For statements
in support of the colonization of African Americans, see Carl Uterhard to His Mother, Nashville, 20
January 1864, in Deutsche im amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg, ed. Helbich and Kamphoefner, 230.
62
Postmaster and general store owner Karl Frick identified himself among the 24 percent of the county’s
voters who had supported Lincoln in 1860, and he served in the local union militia. Nearly 9 percent of the
Franklin County population was enslaved in 1860. Helbich and Kamphoefner, eds., Germans in the Civil
War, 347-48, 353-55.
61
41
and when they had an opportunity to tell a slave so, without his master’s knowledge, they
often did it.” Bruce indicated that the relationship between an antislavery German
American and an enslaved African American could be quite close, saying, “Slaves never
betrayed a friend; they would stand severe punishment rather than give away a white
friend who favored freedom for all.”63 German Missourians earned a reputation as
friends to African Americans.
Finding themselves among the Radicals in Missouri’s coalition of Unionists
German-American politicians would challenge the racism of other Republicans. The St.
Louis Anzeiger criticized an Anglo-Missourian in 1859 because he debated the slavery
question “not, like we Germans, above all from the humanitarian point of view, but from
the idea of utility.” Dismissing the logic that Missouri was for the “white man” and
blacks should be excluded from the state, the Republican newspaper went on, “Only
understanding reflection and reasoning suffice to kill the old prejudices and that
frightening pride which is based on the feeling of sovereign authority of a white man over
his black fellowmen.”64 Friedrich Münch, writing in the St. Charles Demokrat in 1862,
rejected a proposal to send America’s black population “back” to Africa. Münch
believed African Americans had a right to live and die in the country of their birth.
Although he described African Americans as a “lower race,” he rejected the idea of
biological inferiority. He attributed whites’ higher status to education. He would
63
H.C. Bruce, The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years A Slave, Twenty-Nine Years A Free Man (York, Penn.:
P. Anstadt & Sons, 1895; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 90-91.
64
Anzeiger des Westens, 17 April 1859, quoted and trans. in Walter D. Kamphoefner, “St. Louis Germans
and the Republican Party, 1848-1860,” Mid-America: An Historical Review 57, no. 2 (1975): 82.
42
become a prominent advocate of African American education after the war.65 Before
1865, however, even Münch did not support black suffrage.
The distinctiveness of German Republicanism came not from a specific attitude
toward African Americans, but from the particular way they blended their antislavery
beliefs with the idea of ethnic diversity. This would inform their approach to citizenship
during Reconstruction and distinguish them from many native-born Republicans and
foreign-born Democrats. The Republican Party was largely, as historian Eric Foner puts
it, “an expression of the hopes and fears of northern native-born Protestants.”66 The
center of Republican support was always the Northeast, where native-born abolitionists
regarded slavery as a sin. Inspired by their Protestant traditions and faith, the same
northerners who hoped to end slavery were also suspicious of the customs of the German
and Irish immigrants pouring into the country during the 1850s. Anti-immigrant and
anti-Catholic sentiment fueled the party realignments in the middle of the decade. As the
dispute over Kansas unfolded in 1854 and 1855, the nativist American or Know Nothing
Party achieved brief political prominence—and lasting notoriety among German
Americans—when it won a host of congressional and state races. Northern Know
Nothings committed themselves to antislavery and nativist policies such as restricting
immigrant men’s voting rights. In some places, the Republican Party was closely linked
to Know Nothing leaders and ideas. In Ohio, for example, Republican Salmon P. Chase
65
St. Charles Demokrat, 5 June 1862, trans. in Mallinckrodt, What they Thought, 2:19.
Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 227. For an evocative depiction of the New England reform
tradition that fed the Republican Party ethos, see Scott Gac, Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family
Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reform (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
66
43
became governor in 1855 at the head of a slate that included Know Nothing candidates,
although he rejected all nativist proposals.67
German immigrants in the Midwest played a decisive role in ensuring that the
Republican Party would focus on the issue of slavery, not immigration. Friedrich
Hassaurek helped convince Chase that German votes could compensate for any loss of
nativist support.68 At the national Republican convention in 1856, Körner and Schurz
demanded that the platform exclude any restrictions on foreign-born citizens as a
condition of German support.69 In 1860, the two men were joined at the Chicago
convention by Münch and Krekel from Missouri and Müller and Hassaurek from Ohio.
Their anti-nativist “Dutch Plank” made it into the party’s platform. The Germans were
also prepared to support the compromise presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln,
Körner’s trusted associate who understood the importance of the German vote.70
German immigrants could work with Anglo-Americans in the Republican Party,
but they retained their own approach to American citizenship. They were adamant that
they could be loyal to their adopted homeland without assimilating to Anglo-Saxon
67
Stephen E. Maizlish, The Triumph of Sectionalism: The Transformation of Ohio Politics, 1844-1856
(Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1983), 202-17. Historians who emphasize the contribution of
Anglo-Protestantism to the Republican Party include Michael F. Holt, Forging a Majority: The Formation
of the Republican Party in Pittsburgh, 1848-1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969); and William
E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
In contrast, Tyler Anbinder maintains that although anti-immigrant sentiment was important, slavery was
the decisive factor in the party realignment of the decade, arguing that Know Nothings only won such
extensive support in the North because voters assumed they were antislavery as well as anti-immigrant,
Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850’s (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992).
68
For evidence of specific attempts to neutralize nativism to attract the German vote, see Salmon P. Chase
to Hassaurek, Columbus, Ohio, 7 April 1857, box 2, folder 5, Hassaurek Papers, OHS; Timothy C. Day to
Murat Halstead, Washington, D.C., 29 January 1857, box 1, folder 1, Murat Halstead Papers, Cincinnati
Historical Society (hereafter CHS). Chase’s focus had always been antislavery, so he needed little
persuasion. See also Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 249.
69
Koerner, Memoirs of Gustav Koerner, 2:4.
70
James M. Bergquist, “The Forty-Eighters and the Republican Convention of 1860,” in The German
Forty-Eighters in the United States, ed. Brancaforte, 141- 56.
44
values. Müller recalled his contemporaries’ conviction that “they could not perform a
better service to their new country than to retain the positive qualities of German spirit
and nature, and to hone, improve and domesticate their German characteristics,
particularly through using the German language.” Indeed, German immigrants believed
that German ethnicity only made them better American citizens. According to Müller,
Forty-Eighters believed that they were “saturated with the feeling that their free qualities
made them the best citizens of the Great republic, and that immigrating Germans had a
cultural mission in America.” They certainly were not “to be used simply as raw material
for the construction of a Yankee nation.”71 Even J.B. Stallo conceived of himself as an
ambassador of the “German inquiry and German deeds” that would “spangle the
American banner.”72 Partly in response to the nativism of the 1850s, German immigrants
defended what they saw as their unique contribution. Schurz characterized “the German”
as slightly impractical but “the original leader in the movement of ideas with his spirit of
inquiry and his quiet and thoughtful application.”73 Forty-Eighters had no intention of
abandoning such strengths. Schurz later wrote to his wife that “‘the mission of
Germanism’ in America … can consist in nothing other than a modification of the
American spirit, through the German, while the nationalities melt into one.”74 German
Americans might disagree over exactly what this melting would involve, but they took a
self-consciously pluralist view of citizenship.
71
Mueller, Memories of a Forty-Eighter, 114-15.
From an 1855 speech paraphrased in Easton, Hegel’s First American Followers, 51.
73
Schurz, “True Americanism,” 1:56. Historian Kathleen Neils Conzen suggests that German immigrants
were the first group to create the idea of an ethnic identity that could complement American citizenship.
Kathleen Neils Conzen, “German-Americans and the Invention of Ethnicity,” in America and the Germans,
ed. Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 1:13147.
74
Carl Schurz to Margarethe Schurz, 8 July 1867, in Intimate Letters of Carl Schurz, 1841-1869, ed. and
trans. Joseph Schafer (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1928), 382-83.
72
45
Schurz outlined a vision of the American community that was expansive enough
to incorporate different ethnic groups. Echoing the Frankfurt parliamentarians’
understanding of the German Volk, he depicted the American nation as constantly
evolving as it embraced new groups of people. Schurz presented these ideas in the 1859
speech “True Americanism.” “It is true,” he observed in Boston, “the Anglo-Saxon
establishes and maintains his ascendancy, but without absolutely absorbing the other
national elements. They modify each other, and their peculiar characteristics are to be
blended together by the all-assimilating power of freedom.” This precisely expressed the
dynamic Vick located among liberal nationalists in Europe in 1848. Understandably,
however, Germans living in the United States had an even greater interest in defining
citizenship in such a way as to include people of diverse backgrounds. Schurz
powerfully put forth a multi-cultural vision of American citizenship: “Every people,
every creed, every class of society has contributed its shared to that wonderful mixture
out of which is to grow the greatest nation of the new world.” Schurz suggested that
“freedom” acted as a vital force binding America’s peoples together. In his ideal nation
there was no place for slavery or laws that impeded immigrant men’s acquisition of
citizenship and voting rights. He compared the 1850 law that compelled northerners to
return fugitive slaves to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1789. He intended his speech to
position the Republican Party steadfastly against slavery and for immigrants.75
Although Schurz was inclined to agree with New England Protestants that Roman
Catholicism “nourished principles which are hardly in accordance with the doctrines of
75
Schurz, “True Americanism,” 1:54, 63.
46
true democracy,” German Republicans also took a distinctive position on religion.76 In
contrast to English-speaking Republicans, most of the German leaders identified
themselves as “freethinkers,” essentially secular humanists. None considered religion
central to his antislavery politics.77 Many Forty-Eighters made bigoted and provocative
displays of anticlericalism. Henry Börnstein, for example, filled the Anzeiger with antiCatholic invective and even published a German-language novel featuring a Jesuit plot in
America’s heartland.78 Many émigrés, however, had grown up among Catholics and
were more sensitive in their critiques. Schurz remembered his Catholic hometown
Libnar fondly, although he had rejected Catholic dogma and tradition at an early age. He
was sure republican institutions would gradually overcome Catholic “superstition.”79
Krekel had been brought up Catholic and still had observant siblings, and Stallo had
actually trained for the priesthood as a young man.80
With an eye to political considerations, German Republicans tried to avoid
religious conflict. Committed to German-American unity, they had no interest in
alienating potential supporters. During the 1850s, Republicans deliberately toned down
their anti-Catholic rhetoric. In 1858, Gustav Körner warned Lincoln not to rely on
Friedrich Hecker’s campaigning because “he cannot conciliate opponents, and amongst
Catholicks [sic] and even orthodox Protestants he is considered as the very Anti-
76
Ibid., 60.
For Friedrich Münch’s understanding of the meaning of being a “Freidenker,” see Muench, Gesammelte
Schriften, 129-31.
78
Heinrich Börnstein, Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis (Cassel: H. Hotop, 1851).
79
Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, 1:30-38; Schurz, “True Americanism,” 1:60.
80
Kamphoefner, “German-Americans and Civil War Politics,” 240; Easton, Hegel's First American
Followers, 28-32. Hassaurek’s Piarist education in Vienna seems only to have made him a more ardent
opponent of the Church. Wittke, “Friedrich Hassaurek,” 2.
77
47
Christ.”81 Körner suggested that Hecker offended members of conservative Protestant
denominations such as the Missouri Synod Lutherans who emigrated when the Prussian
Lutheran Church united Orthodox Lutheran and Reformed Protestant teachings in its
liturgy. Yet there was also the risk that men such as Hecker would scare off Protestant or
non-observant immigrants who associated anti-Catholic campaigning with nativism. It
was safer for German Republicans to unite the vast majority of German immigrants by
condemning laws against alcohol consumption and activities on the Sabbath. To German
immigrants, it seemed that Anglo-American Protestants were more likely than Catholics
to mix religion and politics. For this reason, it is unlikely that German Republicans felt,
as one Anglo-American suggested to Hassaurek, that they shared “nine-tenths” of the
message of the Know Nothings.82 Historians who conclude that the Germans who voted
Republican shared the party’s Reformed Protestant leanings ignore their campaign
rhetoric. German Republicans were secular opponents of slavery who were concerned
that their Anglo-American colleagues would conflate Catholicism and immigration.
German immigrants were especially wary of Protestant women’s involvement in
the Republican Party. Anglo-American antislavery developed within churches and
voluntary societies where women played a significant role. Nineteenth-century feminism
developed in conjunction with the causes of abolitionism and temperance. Following the
Civil War, Anglo-American women would gradually “domesticate politics,” using their
81
Gustav Koerner to Abraham Lincoln, 17 July 1858, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress
(hereafter LC), Washington, D.C., quoted in Tucker, “Political Leadership,” 218.
82
Timothy C. Day to Hassaurek, Washington, D.C., 25 March 1856, box 2, folder 3, Hassaurek Papers,
OHS. When historian Steven Rowan similarly argues that free thinker Henry Börnstein “split the
difference” with nativists. Steven Rowan, “Introduction,” in Memoirs of a Nobody, 19. This reflects the
influence of “ethnocultural” history, which emphasize that confession underpinned German-American
political allegiances.
48
claim to feminine moral authority to campaign for prohibition and women’s suffrage.83
In contrast, German-American antislavery was a very masculine affair, characterized by
the gymnastics, military drills, and male choirs of the Turners. German-American men
had no time for female activists. Well into the twentieth century, German-language
newspapers solidly opposed women’s suffrage.84 Forty-Eighter Mathilda Annecke, who
briefly published a feminist newspaper in Milwaukee in the 1850s, found hardly any
support among her male colleagues in Ohio and Missouri, and apparently relatively little
from other German-born women.85 Few other immigrant women associated with
English-speaking feminists; some denounced them.86 In an 1865 letter to the Westliche
Post, one woman (“M”) defended female immigrants against accusations leveled by
Anglo-American women that they were apathetic to the problems of alcohol abuse. “M”
first expressed sympathy for “Americans,” among whom whiskey was clearly such a
problem. She maintained that German women were as opposed to drunkenness as AngloAmericans, but they believed the problem could best be solved within women’s “natural
83
John R. McKivigan, ed., Abolitionism and Issues of Race and Gender (New York: Garland, 1999); Julie
Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Jean Fagan Yelling, Women and Sisters: The
Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Have: Yale University Press, 1989); Yellin and John C.
Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1994); Scott C. Martin, Devil of the Domestic Sphere: Temperance, Gender and
Middle-Class Ideology (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008); Paula Baker, “The
Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920,” American Historical
Review 89 (1984): 620-47.
84
Wittke, The German-Language Press, 162.
85
On the Milwaukee Frauenzeitung (Women’s Newspaper) Annecke published from 1852 to 1855, see
Annette P. Bus, “Mathilde Anneke and the Suffrage Movement,” in The German Forty-Eighters in the
United States, ed. Brancaforte, 79-92.
86
Anke Ortlepp, “Auf denn, Ihr Schwester!”: Deutschamerikanische Frauenvereine in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, 1844-1914 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004), 18-19; Christiane Harzig, “The Ethnic
Female Public Sphere: German-American Women in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago,” in Midwestern
Women: Work, Community, and Leadership at the Crossroads, ed. Lucy Eldersveld Murphy and Wendy
Hamand Venet (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 141-57.
49
sphere,” the home. Political activism—advocating either temperance laws or suffrage—
would only undermine women’s unique strengths.87
The marginal role of German women in the Republican Party could be traced
back to Europe and the migration experience. Calls for women’s rights had been quickly
marginalized during the Revolutions of 1848.88 The tradition of German liberal
nationalism had not, on the whole, equipped immigrants to question women’s
subordination. German understandings of women’s proper roles varied significantly by
class. On midwestern farms, many Anglo-Americans were shocked to see GermanAmerican women plowing fields alongside their husbands.89 The cooperative norms of
the pre-industrial household were only slowly receding in nineteenth-century Europe, but
the gender ideals of Germany’s growing middle class also influenced the immigrants.
Following the pattern common in other parts of Europe and North America, women’s
role changed with industrialization as production moved outside the home. Members of
Germany’s urban middle class conceived of women as Hausfrauen who assumed an
exclusively domestic role.90 According to pre-industrial and middle-class ideals in
87
Westliche Post, 4 May 1865.
Bonnie S. Anderson, “Frauenemancipation and Beyond: The Use of the Concept of Emancipation by
Early European Feminists,” in Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation,
ed. Katheryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 82-97. The
arguments against women’s suffrage were strikingly similar in German Europe and America. David
Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780-1917 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 234-35.
89
Jon Gjerde, The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 135-221, describes the family roles in rural
Midwestern families with particular insight. See also Linda Schelbitzi Pickle, Contented among Strangers:
Rural German-Speaking Women and their Families in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1996); Christiane Harzig, “Gender, Transatlantic Space, and the Pressence of
German-Speaking People in North America,” in Traveling between Worlds: German-American
Encounters, ed. Thomas Adam and Ruth Gross (College Station: Texas A&M University Press for
University of Texas at Arlington, 2006), 159-68.
90
For a brief outline of the complex transition, see Pickle, Contented among Strangers, 23-40. Other
scholars argue that the change in gender roles predated industrial change, including Marion W. Gray,
88
50
Germany and America, women and men were naturally suited to separate and unequal
roles.
The process of transplanting households and building communities in the United
States reinforced German women’s traditional place in the family. Germans were much
more likely than other groups, such as the Irish, to migrate with close relatives.91
Immigrant men believed that their wives and daughters played a specific role in
establishing German neighborhoods, towns, and farms in America. They were
Kulturträgerinnen, bearers of the culture. Until at least the 1880s, this meant that they
brought up their children to speak German and played an important auxiliary role in
male-led associations.92 Female school teachers, however, were frowned upon.93
Women were to sustain the households that provided a solace to men, protecting, in
Friedrich Münch’s words, “everything that makes our existence precious.”94 GermanAmerican women were expected to prevent the potentially corrosive and dislocating
effects of American individualism, materialism, and ambition. One German-language
monthly approvingly quoted an American reporter who related how many German
Productive Men, Reproductive Women: The Agrarian Household and the Emergence of Separate Spheres
during the German Enlightenment (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000).
91
About 40 percent of nineteenth-century German immigrants were women and girls. They tended to
migrate in family groups. This stood in contrast to the nearly 53 percent of Irish immigrants who were
female. Many Irish women emigrated alone and arrived in the United States young and unmarried .
Conzen, “Germans,” 411; Hasia Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the
Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 31.
92
Ortlepp, “Auf denn, Ihr Schwester!”, 292; Conzen, “Ethnicity as Festive Culture,” 49-50. For evidence
of how heavily German-American women’s gender roles were affected by their ethnic identity and
community-building efforts, see Ortlepp, “Auf denn, Ihr Schwester!”, 257-66; Harzig, “The Ethnic Female
Public Sphere,” 141-57. These studies indicate that German-American women assumed a more public role
after the 1880s.
93
Juliane Jacobi, “Schoolmarm, Volkserzieher, Kantor, and Schulschester: German Teachers among
Immigrants during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in German Influences on Education in the
United States to 1917, ed. Henry Geitz, Jürgen Heideking, and Jurgen Herbst (Washington, D.C. and
Cambridge: The German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 1995), 115-28. For one
example of this disapproval, see Westliche Post, 1 January 1865.
94
“Alles, was unser Dasein werthvoll macht.” Münch, Gesammelte Schriften, 437.
51
immigrants conceived of gender. The observer connected German women’s physical
labor with their “simplicity” and “morality.” “The German,” he wrote, “does not regard
his wife as a mere ornament like the American.” German-American politicians were
apparently thankful that immigrant women retained the “German traits” of “thrift,
honorableness, and active industriousness.”95 They did not encourage their wives and
daughters to contribute to partisan activity like Anglo-American Republican women.
The German Republicans’ attitudes toward ethnicity, religion, and gender
suggested their affinity with the Democratic Party. Indeed, it was just these issues that
had attracted German immigrants to the party of Jackson in previous decades.96 To
sustain their coalition of southerners and working-class immigrants in the North, the
Democrats had developed a view of American citizenship reserved for white men.
Antislavery politicians, Democratic Party spokesmen increasingly warned, would restrict
the voting rights and cultural practices of the foreign-born and elevate African Americans
at the expense of struggling urban workers. This message continued to appeal to many
German immigrants during the 1850s, but German Republicans developed an alternative
form of working-class politics. Forty-Eighters who had fought on behalf of workers in
Europe mobilized against the extension of slavery. Friedrich Hassaurek and August
Willich in Cincinnati and Joseph Weydemeyer in St. Louis argued that ending slavery
would create a more equitably society for all.97 For them, in the words of Bruce Levine,
“The ownership of one human being by another clashed head-on with all the democratic
95
“Der Deutsche betrachtet seine Frau nich wie der Amerikanwer als ein bloßes Ornament”; “Den
deutschen Karakterzug bilden Sparsamkeit, Ehrenhaftigheit und thätige Industrie”; “Eine interessante
Beschreibung der Deutsch-Amerikaner.” Der deutsche Pionier 5 (1873): 246.
96
Chapter 4 focuses on German Democrats.
97
Wittke, “Friedrich Hasssaurek”; Easton, Hegel’s First American Followers; Karl Obermann, Joseph
Weydermeyer: Pioneer of American Socialism (New York: International Publishers, 1947).
52
ideals of 1848 and inevitably stirred bitter memories of the European aristocracy … and
the system of unequal privilege and unfree labor upon which that class rested.”98
Working-class German Republicans held an ethnically inclusive understanding of the
American citizenship quite unlike the Democrats’.
During the 1860 election, the German-Republican vision of American citizenship
demonstrated its power to transcend class and religious divides in Missouri and Ohio.
Friedrich Münch evoked the ethnic flavor of the campaign when he reported on a
Republican event in the “entirely German” Augusta, Missouri. When the hall reversed
for an evening of German speeches was packed full, townspeople crowded at the doors
and windows. Afterwards, members of the local Turnverein paraded with flags and
lanterns in streets illuminated by eight bonfires. A German band played as locals toasted
one of the heroes of 1848, Italian Giuseppe Garibaldi. When the people of Augusta
dispersed, Münch supposed they were committed to Republican politics and retaining
“our German way of life here, for only Germans can enjoy themselves in such a way by
putting thought, heart, and hand to a cause they support.” He seconded New York
Republican William H. Seward’s statement that Missouri was “Germanizing itself to
make itself free.”99
98
Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 149. Levine attributes Republican support among German Americans to the
transplanted “radical democratic” ideology of skilled immigrant workers. He maintains their antislavery
commitment ran deeper than that of earlier immigrants such as Stallo and Körner or the “liberal” FortyEighters such as Schurz, who were uninterested in fundamentally challenging American capitalism. While
his analysis usefully emphasizes the role of working-class radicals, it overlooks the fact that German
Republicanism transcended class boundaries. For an impressive local study that also explores the
interaction of the politics of class and slavery, see Nadel, Little Germany.
99
Anzeiger des Westens, 22 October 1860, trans. in Mallinckrodt, From Knights to Pioneers, 303-04. This
celebration used symbolism common to German-American festivals. See Conzen, “Ethnicity as Festive
Culture,” 44-76.
53
Election returns confirmed Münch’s impression. German Missourians, like
German Illinoisans and Minnesotans, tended to support the Republican Party.100 Walter
D. Kamphoefner’s careful statistical analysis of St. Louis voting reveals that German
voters moved from near unanimous support of the Democrats in St. Louis in 1848 to at
least 80 percent endorsement of Lincoln in 1860.101 Since about half of the Germans in
St. Louis were at least nominally Catholic, Lincoln must have won votes from
Catholics.102 (Willich later remarked that not all Catholics were “dumm;” those in St.
Louis had voted to elect Lincoln.103) St. Louis give a plurality of its votes to Lincoln, but
heavily Swiss and German Gasconade County was the only county in the state to cast a
majority of its votes for Lincoln in 1860.104 Münch and Seward overestimated the
significance of the German vote. Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas won the state by a
narrow plurality. Lincoln ran a distant fourth behind Constitutional Unionist John Bell
and Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge.
The free state of Ohio went for Lincoln in 1860, but its German residents were
less enthusiastic about the Republican candidate. Rural German Ohioans strongly
supported Douglas, but in some small towns they were moving toward the Republican
100
To survey immigrant voting in 1860, see Luebke, ed., Ethnic Voters and the Election of Lincoln.
Kamphoefner, “German-Americans and Civil War Politics,” provides the most rigorous and comprehensive
evaluation of this literature.
101
See Kamphoefner’s meticulous ward-by-ward regression analysis of the German vote in “St. Louis
Germans and the Republican Party,” 69-88.
102
Ibid., 84.
103
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 31 August 1866. The anti-clerical Anzeiger des Westens suggested German
Catholics in St. Louis were enthusiastic Unionists. In contrast to Irish Catholics, it asserted, “The Germans
needed no priestly intervention to join the Union regiment.” Anzeiger des Westens, 16 May 1861, trans. in
Rowan, Germans for a Free Missouri, 224-29.
104
U.S. Census Bureau, Population Schedule of the Eight Census of the United States 1860, manuscript
returns for Gasconade County, Missouri; Dean Burnham, Presidential Ballots, 1836-1892 (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 578.
54
Party.105 Germans throughout the state organized Republican clubs and pleaded for
German campaign speakers. Letters from German-born Republicans in locales such as
Zanesville, Marion, Springfield, Chillicothe, and Dayton convinced Hassaurek and the
chair of the state’s Republican Committee that that “the conversion of the Germans to the
Republican faith is only a question of time.”106 The Democratic Fremont Courier
disapprovingly observed that many German-American workers in Cleveland, Toledo, and
Sandusky voted Republican during the early 1860s.107 As in St. Louis, German
immigrants in Cincinnati probably gave the majority of their votes to Lincoln. Four of
the city’s five most German wards gave Lincoln strong majorities, and contemporaries
concluded that local Germans tended Republican. The Republican Volksblatt newspaper
far outsold the Democratic Volksfreund.108 Cincinnati was another city where some of
the large German-Catholic population must have cast Republican ballots.109 Yet like
their counterparts in Wisconsin and Indiana, German Ohioans in aggregate probably
continued to vote for the Democrats by a slight majority in 1860.110
105
See table 4 in the appendix; Kelso, “The German-American Vote in the Election of 1860.”
William T. Bascon to Hassaurek, Columbus, Ohio, 19 September 1860, and other letters in box 2,
folder 6, Hassaurek Papers, OHS.
107
Fremont Courier, 13 August 1868.
108
See table 2 in the appendix. We lack a comprehensive statistical analysis of Cincinnati, but for
references to convincing contemporary accounts, see Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 252; and Kamphoefner,
“German-Americans and Civil War Politics,” 241. In 1870, the Republican Volksblatt had an estimated
daily circulation of 8,500, while the Democratic Volksfreund only had an estimated 5,500. Arndt and
Olsen, German-American Newspapers, 454, 456. Historian Carl Wittke called the Volksfreund the “leading
German paper in Cincinnati” in 1865. Wittke, “Friedrich Hassaurek,” 12. For corroboration, see Max
Bergheim, Cincinnati in Wort und Bild: Nach authentischen Quellen bearbeitet und zusammengestellt
(Cincinnati: M. & R. Burgheim, 1888), 125.
109
Cincinnati was certainly home to more German Catholics than Protestants, although a meticulous
historian could not determine whether they were a majority of the German-born population in the city.
Joseph M. White, “Religion and Community: Cincinnati Germans, 1814-1870” (Ph.D. diss., University of
Notre Dame, 1980), 47-51.
110
Kamphoefner, “German-Americans and Civil War Politics.”
106
55
After Lincoln’s election, German Republicans took stock. One of Hassaurek’s
Indiana correspondents congratulated him on his role in the “conversion of the Germans,”
which the Indianan saw as decisive in securing the Republican victory.111 Schurz told his
wife that Lincoln had named him “foremost of all” among his campaigners.112 In Ohio
and Missouri, Republicans now dominated the German-language press and served as
German Americans’ most popular and influential leaders. They had developed a set of
ideas about the nation and citizenship that clearly distinguished them from both the
Democrats and most other members of their own party. German Republicans believed
their heritage influenced their opposition to slavery and that Americans must embrace
ethnic diversity and freedom to realize their national destiny. The looming war would
only strengthen the appeal of these ideas and the myth of the freedom-loving German.
*****
In no other state were German Republicans as influential as in Missouri. As slave
states began to secede in the winter of 1860-1861, German Missourians became more
committed to the ideas they had expressed during the previous decade.113 The impending
war forced the border state’s residents to take sides. The overwhelming majority of
delegates at a hastily called constitutional convention in February 1861 hoped Missouri
could remain a slave state within the Union. The Democratic governor-elect Claiborne
Fox Jackson, however, hoped to lead it into the Confederacy. Jackson ignored Lincoln’s
111
“Uebergang der Deutschen.” Guido Ilges to Hassaurek, Vincennes, Indiana, 27 November 1860, box 2,
folder 6, Hassaurek Papers, OHS.
112
Carl Schurz to Margarethe Schurz, Indianapolis, 2 October 1860, in Intimate Letters, ed. and trans.
Schafer, 226.
113
Christian B. Keller argues that Germanimmgirants experience of nativism in the Union Army compelled
them to resist assimilation following the Civil War. Although I think he exaggerates the importance of
specific events, his work conveyes the importance of ethnicity to immigrants involved in the conflict.
Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans: Nativism, Ethnicity, and Civil War Memory (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2007).
56
call for troops in April 1861 and instead mobilized the Missouri State Militia and
recruited like-minded Minute Men as he angled for secession.114 Meanwhile, German
immigrants drilled boldly in St. Louis’s streets, preparing to keep the border state loyal
by force. The Anzeiger exhorted its readers “to Arms!” Börnstein was sure that “no
German capable of bearing arms will fail to defend his hearth, his liberty, and his
Fatherland.”115 He joined Francis P. Blair, Jr., a Democrat-turned-Republican from an
influential political family, and Franz Sigel, whose leadership would later be
commemorated in Forest Park, to organize the Unionist Home Guards. The Anzeiger and
the Westliche Post enthusiastically noted that this “second American revolution”
provided an opportunity for Forty-Eighters to serve the cause of nation and liberty once
more. The Anzeiger observed that the marching columns evoked memories of 1848 and
1849. The Westliche Post hoped Union victory would in turn “echo across the ocean”
and help the nationalist cause in Europe.116 It did not take long for violence to break out.
The events of May 10, 1861 would become a touchstone for the claim that the
freedom-loving Germans saved Missouri for the Union. Anticipating that Governor
Jackson’s forces would seize the city’s federal arsenal, U.S. Army Captain Nathaniel
Lyon decided to take the offensive. Lyon formed a force in which local German
militiamen outnumbered regular troops four-to-one. The Unionists surrounded and
captured the secessionists who had assembled at Camp Jackson south of the arsenal. As
Lyon’s triumphant troops marched the captives through the humid streets of St. Louis,
114
Only four Republicans, all from St. Louis, attended the convention. Parrish, A History of Missouri, 3:6,
8-10.
115
Anzeiger des Westens, 19 April 1861, trans. in Rowan, Germans for a Free Missouri, 180.
116
Anzeiger des Westens, 27 April 1861, and Westliche Post, 8 May 1861, trans. in Rowan, Germans for a
Free Missouri, 187, 202, 203.
57
secessionist civilians taunted them with anti-German slurs. Discipline was already
crumbling when a shot broke through the heckling. The gunfight that ensued left over
twenty people dead.117 It was not a well executed operation, but German Americans were
proud of the sacrifices they made to take Camp Jackson. At the 1863 anniversary of
Lyon’s success, even Unionist leader Charles D. Drake, who had been a Know Nothing
during the 1850s, commended the adoptive citizen, who “becomes my brother through
the holier tie of a devotion to our common country.”118
Although Drake’s comment suggested an amicable relationship among Missouri
Unionists, German Republicans were never comfortable in the wartime coalition. By
July 1861, Federal victories had forced Claiborne Jackson’s secessionist administration
into exile and allowed the constitutional convention to form a loyal government.
Missouri Unionists included “Conservatives,” who initially controlled the government
and hoped to protect the institution of slavery, and “Radicals,” who wanted immediate
emancipation. Germans remained a distinct bloc in the Radical opposition. They
contributed between 60 and 70 of the 178 representatives at a Radical convention in
Jefferson City in June 1862, and the following year a similar meeting passed a resolution
in “heartfelt gratitude” of the Germans.119 By that time, only one German-language
117
Accounts of the affair appeared in the Anzeiger, Westliche Post, and in various reports and memoirs.
For useful narratives, see Parrish, A History of Missouri, 3:11-14; William L. Burton, Melting Pot Soldiers:
The Union’s Ethnic Regiments (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1988), 38-41; Westliche Post, 15 May
1861, trans in Rowan, Germans for a Free Missouri, 217. For the composition of the forces, see Andreas
Dorpalen, “The German Element and the Issues of the Civil War,” in Ethnic Voters and the Election of
Lincoln, ed. Luebke, 78.
118
William Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 1865-1870 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
1965), 5; Charles D. Drake, Manuscript Autobiography, 1879, p. 176l. Western Historical Manuscript
Collection—Columbia (hereafter WHMC—Columbia), Missouri.
119
Jörg Nagler, Fremont contra Lincoln: Die deutsch-amerikanische Opposition in der republikanischen
Partei während des amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1984), 90, 139.
58
newspaper in the state did not endorse its call for immediate emancipation.120 In
November 1864, Germans helped elect a Radical governor, but they would never find it
easy to cooperate with leading Anglo-Americans such as Drake. Drake had not
supported Lincoln in 1860, and had first spoken out against slavery in 1861. He was a
much more consistent supporter of laws restricting the sale of alcohol and Sunday
recreations.121 German immigrants took these policies as a direct affront to their
contribution to Missouri Unionism. They believed that their long-standing antislavery
and their embrace of social diversity made them more committed to freedom than all
other Missourians.
German Radicals in Missouri asserted their independence by criticizing the
Lincoln administration. Their hostility to the Union Army’s moderate approach to
emancipation emerged in the first year of fighting when General John C. Frémont
attempted to use martial law to confiscate the slaves of disloyal Missourians. German
immigrants backed Frémont’s antislavery actions. They appreciated his support of Sigel,
who was already exceedingly popular among German Americans despite his uneven
military performance.122 When Lincoln countermanded Frémont’s confiscation orders
and then replaced him later in 1861, he appeared to be siding with Frank Blair and
Missouri Conservatives. On learning of the growing German-American opposition to the
administration in 1862, Börnstein rushed back from a diplomatic post in Bremen to
support Blair’s campaign for reelection to Congress.123 Although Blair won his race,
120
Ibid., 141.
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 5.
122
Stephen D. Engle, “A Raised Consciousness: Franz Sigel and German Ethnic Identity in the Civil War,”
Yearbook of German-American Studies 34 (1999): 1-17.
123
Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, 376-77.
121
59
German immigrants continued to criticize the president. Blair’s brother, U.S. Postmaster
General Montgomery Blair, warned Lincoln that Missouri’s Germans were
“revolutionists, not reformers” and were “evidently” forming an alliance with the
secessionists.124 Unwilling to alienate Missouri moderates, Lincoln rebuffed a Radical
delegation in 1863 that included several German-American leaders. The Westliche Post
and Cleveland’s Wächter am Erie joined several other German-language middle western
papers that spearheaded Frémont’s campaign for the 1864 Republican presidential
nomination. Frémont wisely withdrew his candidacy before the national convention, but
the Missouri delegation cast the only votes against Lincoln in the opening round of
balloting.125
Not only were German-Missourian leaders resolute Radicals, but their
constituents showed relatively little interest in more conservative forms of Unionism.
Börnstein’s pro-administration Anzeiger lost so many readers and advertisers that his son
sold it when his father returned to Europe.126 The paper’s new proprietors resurrected it
as a Conservative Unionist sheet.127 The Neuer Anzeiger accepted gradual emancipation
as a fait accompli and carefully avoided providing aid to secessionists. But after Lincoln
made emancipation a war aim it supported the Democratic presidential nominee, General
George B. McClellan. It criticized Lincoln from a conservative perspective. Maintaining
a steady stream of invective against the recognized leaders of St. Louis Deutschtum, the
editors characterized German Radicals alternately as fanatical would-be murders of
124
Montgomery Blair to Abraham Lincoln, 18 February 1863, Lincoln Papers, LC, quoted in Nagler,
Fremont contra Lincoln, 112.
125
Nagler, Fremont contra Lincoln, 208-50.
126
Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, 373-75, 383, 385.
127
Ibid., 384; Neuer Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 5 August 1863, 23 September 1864, 1 September
1863, 11 August 1863, 4 June 1864.
60
slaveholders and impotent pawns of their Anglo-American partisans. While its
competitors appealed specifically to “German” ideals, the Neuer Anzeiger embraced the
staples of the Democratic press: warnings against the power amassed by the central
government, heartfelt calls for peace and moderation, and racial scaremongering. Noting
the recruitment of African American soldiers, the editor declared it ludicrous that “in
several months our long-time tobacco-planting and housebroken black house pets [will
be] transformed into musket carriers and soldiers of freedom for Uncle Sam.”128 With
other Conservative Unionist organs, the Neuer Anzeiger joined the Democratic fold
following the war. It found a limited readership among St. Louis Germans. In 1868, the
paper only claimed to represent 30 percent of German-speaking voters in Missouri; its
competitors estimated the proportion at 10 percent.129 The newspaper soon went back to
the simple Anzeiger title, but it was nothing like its predecessor. It was out-of-step with
the Radicalism of German Missourians by the end of the war.
German immigrants in Ohio were more skeptical of emancipation and the war
effort than their counterparts in Missouri. Ohio responded quickly to Lincoln’s call for
troops to defend the Union, but the German population was divided. The GermanOhioan experience better typifies the wartime North. Republican ideas of nation and
citizenship only gradually tightened their hold on German Americans. In some Ohio
cities, German men rushed to put their antislavery politics into action. On April 17,
1861, J.B. Stallo told a crowd gathered at Cincinnati’s Turner Hall that “the Tree of
Liberty wilts unless watered from time to time with blood.” With “burning words,”
128
“... sich in einigen Monaten unsere tabakpflanzenden und hausbrechenden schwarzen Hausthiere von
ehedem Musketentraeger und Soldaten der Freiheit bei Onkel Sam verwandelt ....” Neuer Anzeiger des
Westens Wochen-Blatt, 12 December 1863.
129
Ibid., 23 April 1868.
61
Stallo’s law partner impressed on the audience the need for an all-German regiment.
Recruitment promptly commenced. By the following evening, the ranks were filled,
largely by skilled artisan Turners. Most of the officers elected to lead the Ninth Ohio
Volunteer Infantry Regiment had experience in European armies. One of them, August
Willich, would prove one of the most effective German-American Union generals.130
Prompted by the Wächter am Erie, Cleveland made a similar contribution on a smaller
scale.131 Republican civilians closely followed their German-American regiments and
the Missouri Radicals in the columns of their newspapers.132 During the war, Frederick
Hassaurek served as United States minister in Quito, Ecuador, but he returned to
campaign for Lincoln in 1864. As always, he appealed to German idealism, erroneously
claiming that there had never been a direct defense of slavery in the language of Goethe,
Schiller, and Humboldt. He pointed out that many Germans who had settled in slave
states such as Missouri and Texas supported the Union, joining their Northern brethren,
“foremost among the martyrs of freedom.”133
Some German Ohioans supported the war effort out of patriotism rather than
antislavery conviction. In northeastern Ohio, the Fremont Courier had backed Stephen
Douglas in the election. After Fort Sumter it called for the “citizens of the North” to “put
aside all their differences and personal opinions to show the South with unanimous
130
Gustav Tafel, “Foreword,” [1896] in, We Were the Ninth: A History of the Ninth Regiment, Ohio
Volunteer Infantry, by Constantin Grebner, trans. and ed. Frederic Trautmann (Kent, Ohio: Kent State
University Press, 1987), 5, 6-7.
131
German-American Biographical Pub. Co., Cleveland and its Germans, trans. Steven Rowan (Cleveland:
Western Reserve Historical Society, 1998), 93-94.
132
Unfortunately, no issues of Cincinnati’s Republican Volksblatt survive from this period.
133
Hassaurek, “Philosophical Dissertation on the Issues of 1864,” box 2, folder 7, Hassaurek Papers, OHS.
James Marten, Texas Divided: Loyalty and Dissent in the Lone Star States, 1856-1874 (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1990), 112-22.
62
determination and energy this necessary show of the might of the North”134 The Catholic
Wahrheits-Freund in Cincinnati adopted a studied indifference to the issue of slavery. Its
pages would later calmly express satisfaction that the war had secured the integrity of the
Union. The Wahrheits-Freund would consider its outcome a salutary “world-historical
verdict on the democratic republic.” The editors congratulated themselves that their
disengaged patriotism had saved their readers from suspicions of disloyalty such as those
leveled against Catholics in New York and Chicago.135 On the occasion of the
Wahrheits-Freund’s twentieth-eighth anniversary in 1865, the paper proudly recalled its
wartime independence.136 Yet the paper’s tone hinted at an undercurrent of apathy
toward slavery and the war. German immigrants throughout the North certainly enlisted
in the Union Army. Some observers have concluded that as much as a tenth of the
Federal troops had been born in German-speaking Europe.137 Yet a quantitative survey
of German-language Civil War letters suggests that German-born Federal soldiers were
less likely to express personal commitment to emancipation and Union than their
English-speaking brothers in arms.138 Many German immigrants reluctantly joined the
army to escape penury or became officers for professional experience. In letters they
134
“… daß die Bürger im Norden alle Diferenzen [sic] ihrer Parteien und persönlichen Meinungen bei
Seite setzen, um mit einmüthiger Entschlossenheti und Energie dem Süden diese nothwendige Darlegung
der Macht des Nordens vor Augen zu führen.” Fremont Courier, 2 May 1861.
135
Wahrheits-Freund, 10 May 1865, 12 July 1865.
136
Wahrheits-Freund, 9 August 1865.
137
Estimates of the numbers of German-born soldiers vary significantly. For a summary, see Burton,
Melting Pot Soldiers, 110.
138
Wolfgang Helbich, “German-Born Union Soldiers: Motivation, Ethnicity, and ‘Americanization,’” in
German-American Immigration and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective, ed. Wolfgang Helbich and
Walter D. Kamphoefner (Madison: Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, 2004), 295-325.
McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, provides a point of comparison for Helbich, but he is critical of
McPherson’s methodology. Eleven percent (3) of 27 enlisted German men expressed patriotism compared
to 62 percent of McPherson’s sample of enlisted men who were overwhelmingly native-born, see page 309.
63
often griped about the conduct of the war, particularly what they perceived as the
ubiquitous profiteering.139
The pressure to be patriotic generally kept discontented soldiers’ complaints
private, but several German Ohioans publicly courted charges of disloyalty. A Cleveland
Democrat later reported that he—“like most Germans”—joined the War Democrats in
coalition with Republicans in 1862, but some of his countrymen did not.140 The
Columbus Westbote and Cincinnati Volksfreund remained opposed to the war, repeating
the Democratic slogan, “The Union as it was, the Constitution as it is, and the Negroes
where they are.”141 Both papers blamed “fanatical abolitionists,” including German
Radicals, for creating the conflict in the first place and wanted a compromise with the
seceded states. A few prominent German Democrats supported the controversial proConfederate and anti-war Democrat Clement Vallandigham, who in 1863 ran an
unsuccessful campaign for the Ohio governorship from exile in Canada. Otto Dresel, a
Forty-Eighter who bucked the political tendencies of most of his peers, supported
Vallandigham and presented petitions in the Ohio legislature that sought the exclusion of
black immigrants from the state.142
By the end of the war, however, many Democrats had conceded the power of
Republican ideas among German immigrants. The Westbote and the Volksfreund
resigned themselves to the fact that the war had brought the end of slavery. The
Volksfreund’s editor even took it upon himself to recommend to Democratic members of
139
Many of the letters on which Helbich relies appear in Helbich and Kamphoefner, eds., Deutsche im
amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg.
140
German-American Biographical Pub. Co., Cleveland and its Germans, 85.
141
Columbus Westbote, 28 August 1862.
142
Susanne M. Schick, “‘For God, Mac, and Country’: The Political Worlds of Midwestern Germans
during the Civil War Era” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994), 74.
64
Congress that they support the Thirteenth Amendment in January 1865. He assured them
that knew his readership well enough to relay the “present position of Democrats of
German nationality” and counseled them to ignore “a thousand ossified ward politicians.”
Three-quarters of German Democrats, he reported, supported the amendment abolishing
slavery. Adopting the language he had previously ridiculed, the editor emphasized that
Germans opposed slavery because it was “a moral, social, and political evil,” not because
they believed, as he said Anglo-Americans did, that it had caused the war. He maintained
that his reverence for the U.S. Constitution explained his previous opposition to abolition.
He now supported emancipation by constitutional means like those the Missouri
convention had followed and Congress had begun. In a rare moment of compassion
toward the slave, the paper concluded, “The man whose work made the homeland of
freedom prosperous and respected should at least receive as wages relief from his
chains.”143
The permanent abolition of slavery would force Americans to confront what it
would mean for African Americans to be “frei.” In Washington, the Republican
administration continued to avoid the controversial issue. Lincoln had been clear that
ending slavery did not necessary involve granting African Americans political rights. His
1863 plan for bringing seceded states back into the Union did not include black suffrage.
By 1864, however, the president had privately supported enfranchising some African
American men.144 At that point no German-Republican leader in the Midwest had
143
“Der Mann, durch dessen Arbeit die Heimstätte der Freiheit reich und angesehen wurde, sollte als Lohn
wenigstens eine Erleichterung seiner Ketten erfahren.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 15 January 1865. The
editor later claimed that this newspaper was the first Democratic newspaper in the country to accept the
abolition of slavery. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 3 March 1868.
144
Foner, Reconstruction, 35-37, 49.
65
publicly endorsed such a policy, but German-American identity had become more closely
tied to Radical politics during the war. German Republicans’ claim to American
citizenship was not based on their whiteness or the cultural roots they shared with AngloAmericans. Instead, they were proud of their ethnic difference and their principled
support for abolition. Germans Americans believed they were “freedom-loving” and
upheld “progressive views on human rights.”145 The Wächter am Erie proclaimed, “The
Germans, more than anyone, have fought for this land of freedom!”146 German
Republicans had faith in the power of democratic ideals and institutions to craft a
cosmopolitan nation out of different peoples, a conviction that seemed to auger well for
African American voting rights. In 1865, they would have to decide what exactly it
meant that the United States was, as Schurz put it, “the Republic of equal rights, where
the title of manhood is the title to citizenship.”147
145
146
147
“Freisinnigen Ansichten über Menschenrechte.” St. Charles Demokrat, 26 January 1865.
“Die Deutschen vor Allem diesen Boden der Freiheit erkämpft!” Wächter am Erie, 14 January 1865.
Carl Schurz, “True Americanism,” 1: 57.
66
CHAPTER 2
“RACE SHOULD BE AS UNIMPORTANT AS ANCESTRY”:
DEBATING THE MISSOURI CONSTITUTION OF 1865
Several days after Missouri’s emancipation ordinance was announced, German
Radicals gathered in the St. Louis Turner Hall to celebrate and consider their next move.
One of the speakers that January evening was St. Charles’ Arnold Krekel, who had
returned from service as a Union Army major. Addressing the crowd in his native
language, Krekel recounted the German support for the Republican Party, the German
part in the Camp Jackson Affair, and the German insistence on immediate emancipation.
The major then contemplated what citizenship would mean for Missouri’s freed people.
It was “laughable,” he said, that “skin color” should deprive any male American citizen
of the right to vote. Krekel cautioned the audience, however, that this idea would face
opposition from most Anglo-Americans because “the immigrating German is the only
one who is not biased by prejudice against the negro.” He maintained that the possibility
of a “negro president or governor” held no “horror” for him personally, and he believed
this position resonated with the Turners and other Radicals in the hall.1 Krekel was right.
The meeting elected a committee to communicate its support of black suffrage to
1
“Der einwandernde Deutsche ist der einzige, der von keinem Vorurtheil gegen den Neger befangen ….”;
“lächerlich”; “Hautfarbe”; “ein Neger Präsident oder Gouveneur”; “Schrecken.” Westliche Post, 19
January 1865. On the meeting, see also St. Charles Demokrat, 13 April 1865; Mississippi Blätter, 15
January 1865; Westliche Post, 17 January 1865.
67
Missouri’s constitutional convention.2 One man who attended reported that the “warm
and emotionally uplifting” experience had shown “that the Turners will stand true to the
full principle of freedom, also to the full accomplishment of the same—to the end.”3
Krekel was one of eight German-born delegates elected to the Missouri
convention which met from January to April of 1865. German-American commentators
believed that Krekel and his colleagues would help chart the course of American
Reconstruction and determine the “fate of American Deutschtum.”4 As they debated the
state’s fundamental law, these men would argue that universal manhood suffrage was a
logical extension of German Americans’ wartime Radicalism. Missouri’s German
Republicans had already linked German-American identity to the fight against slavery.
Now they would claim it was “German” to support black men’s demand for the vote. Of
course there were other white Americans who agreed that all male citizens must be
permitted to exercise the franchise, but German Americans would bring an immigrant
perspective to the issue of African American suffrage. Conscious that they were new
citizens themselves, German Radicals depicted tolerance of immigrants and African
Americans as two parts of the same impulse toward inclusive citizenship. Like the
German revolutionaries in 1848, German-American Radicals saw free institutions as the
means by which a nation incorporated peoples from various backgrounds. Labeling their
support of immigrant and African American rights “enlightened Radicalism,” German
2
Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal of the Missouri State Convention Held at the City of St.
Louis, January 6-April 10, 1865 (St. Louis: Missouri Democrat, 1865), 59.
3
“Herzlicheren und das Gefühl erhoberen Eindruck”; “… daß der Turnverein vollem Prinzip der Freiheit
treu, auch zur vollen Ausführung desselben bis zu Ende stehen werde.” Westliche Post, 17 January 1865.
4
“Das Schicksal des amerikanischen Deutschthums.” St. Charles Demokrat, 13 April 1865. German
Texans were also influential Unionists and Republicans, but Texas’s membership in the Confederacy meant
that its reconstruction was shaped by federal policies. Missouri was “reconstructed” from within. Carl H.
Moneyhon, Republicanism in Reconstruction Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980); Marten,
Texas Divided, 146-47.
68
immigrants would make a significant contribution to Radical Republican thought that
historians have overlooked.5
The fact that German Americans’ ethnic identity suffused their Radicalism would
also impose unique limitations on their ideas of citizenship. During the Missouri
convention, German Radicals’ position on black suffrage proved to be as much about
themselves as it was about African Americans. They used their own acquisition of
citizenship as a template, which meant that they abstracted their political agenda from the
reality of black Missourians’ experiences. German Radicals were much more concerned
with the principle of eliminating racial distinctions from Missouri law than in securing
meaningful political participation for African Americans. Many of them would, for
example, accept the idea of literacy requirements. Their understanding of ethnic
community also left its mark on their opposition to women’s suffrage, a cause a few
Anglo-American Radicals were beginning to champion in Missouri at the time. In the
end, no black or female Missourian could vote under the constitution, but the 1865
debates foreshadowed the unusual position of German midwesterners during
Reconstruction.
*****
In early 1865, Missouri Unionists faced the dilemmas that would soon confront
the whole country. The convention had to secure the freed people’s rights and protect the
loyal population from secessionists as the formal conflict came to an end. Many
Americans believed that the border state represented America’s sectional ordeal in
microcosm. German-Illinoisan journalist Caspar Butz observed that Missouri “became
5
Westliche Post, 24 January 1865. Historians of Reconstruction Missouri acknowledge the role of
German Americans. See Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 29-30, 42-43, 116-17, 228-67.
69
typical of all the struggles of the Union.” It was “the first of the border states that was
wrested from the iron grasp of secession, and all the turmoil and battles that still lay in
the future for the United States first made their appearance here.”6 The war had divided
Missourians, with about a third of the white men who fought serving in Confederate
ranks.7 Although the Union Army had controlled St. Louis and Jefferson City, the
capital, since 1861, Confederates did not concede the state. In 1864, General Sterling
Price led twelve thousand men in an unsuccessful raid designed to seize it.8 More
importantly, bitter guerilla fighting wracked rural Missouri during the war.9 Unionists
and secessionists attacked their neighbors. The sixty-six Unionist delegates who arrived
at the St. Louis Mercantile Library on January 6, 1865 were particularly concerned with
suppressing further violence and solidifying their control of the state. The convention
was specifically charged with amending the state’s constitution to end slavery and restrict
the franchise to loyal citizens, but it was also empowered to make amendments “deemed
necessary to the promotion of the public good.”10
Opponents of the convention’s interpretation of the “public good” would make
the 1865 constitution a by-word for Republicans’ vindictive and overzealous approach to
Reconstruction. The disfranchisement of disloyal men would be its most notorious
provision. Former Confederate sympathizers and Conservative Unionists bridled at the
“iron clad oath,” which the constitution would require of all potential voters as well as of
6
“… für alle Kämpfe der Union typisch geworden ist”; “Der erste der Grenzstaaten, welcher der eisernen
Faust der Scession [sic] entrungen wurde, sind auch alle Wirren und Kämpfe, die für die Vereinigten
Staaten noch in der Zukunft ruhen, hier zuerst in Erscheinung gereten.” Butz was agreeing with the
position expressed by Senator Benjamin Gratz Brown. St. Charles Demokrat, 13 April 1865.
7
McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 293.
8
Parrish, A History of Missouri, 3:111-14.
9
Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
10
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 16; Drake, “Autobiography,” 1061.
70
jurors, teachers, lawyers, managers of corporations, and religious leaders. The oath
included an affirmation that the voter had not taken up arms in rebellion, but it went
further. Those who had provided “aid, comfort, countenance, or support to persons
engaged in any such hostility” would also be excluded from the franchise and certain
professions.11 In an extensive elaboration, the constitution would define a Confederate
sympathizer as anyone who had even “by word or deed manifested his adherence to the
cause of such enemies, or his desire for their triumph over the arms of the United States,
or his sympathy with those engaged in exciting or carrying on a rebellion.” Overriding
pervious amnesties, the oath would disqualify a large group of people in the divided
state.12
Before the document was even completed, it would be widely known as the
“Draconian Code.”13 The pejorative label was a play on the name of Charles Drake, who
dominated the convention’s deliberations.14 Defending his leadership, Drake pointed to
the continuing threat that disloyal elements posed to the United States and African
American freedom.15 Seeing no respite from the guerilla hostilities, Drake believed that
the framing of the state constitution was “the last of [Missouri Unionists’] struggles for
11
Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 258.
Ironically, Drake himself had spoken in favor of secession in 1861. He was never disqualified. Parrish,
Missouri under Radical Rule, 27-29. For more on the application of the oath, see chapter 4.
13
The term “Draconian Code” was first used during the convention. See Parrish, Missouri under Radical
Rule, 28. It was so widespread a reference that Drake himself mentioned it. Drake, “Autobiography,”
1091.
14
The convention journal testifies that Drake wielded control from the third day. Reviled from the start by
conservatives, the constitution lost majority support in 1870 when it was significantly amended. From that
time on, the constitution of 1865 was widely stigmatized as vindictive and totalitarian. Historians
continued to portray Drake and his colleagues as “vindictive” and “fanatical” into the 1860s. For a 1960s
historiographical summary, see Fred DeArmond, “Reconstruction in Missouri,” Missouri Historical Review
61 (1967): 364-77. Parrish’s 1965 work is even-handed about the achievements of the constitution, but he
portrays the Radicals as to some extent “fanatical” in their desire to reshape Missouri and “vindictive” in
their determination to keep the Democratic Party from power. Parrish describes Drake’s autobiography as
“highly egotistical.” Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 25-26, 14, 50.
15
For a detailed examination of Missouri’s suffering, see Fellman, Inside War.
12
71
the supremacy of Loyalty in our ill-fated State,” adding, “the indications are that it will
be the fiercest and most desperate.”16 He considered himself best qualified to re-write the
state’s fundamental law. He later boasted, “Seldom, if ever, has a Constitution of one of
the United States been so largely the work of one man as was the Missouri Constitution
of 1865 the work of my head and hand.”17 Radical delegates from the rural districts most
riven by violence made up a majority that supported Drake as he steered debate in the
Committee of the Whole, drafted resolutions behind the scenes, and led the ratification
campaign.18 Three-quarters of the delegates were Radicals; they had opposed slavery
during the war.19 Many of the men gathering in St. Louis appeared in military uniforms,
a reminder that the war continued in the East and a symbol of their Unionist credentials.
As a group they had little political experience. Only fourteen were trained in the law.20
One Conservative sneered that the convention was “composed of inferior materials.
There is not a man in it, of high and general reputation for talents or learning or virtue.”21
Even Drake evaluated the assembled law-makers as well-meaning but inexperienced.22
The convention was never held in high regard. When it first met, the scene in the
small hall of the St. Louis Mercantile Library was not imposing. The windows were
unadorned by curtains, and many of the seats were empty. The only concession to
ostentation in the chamber was the president’s chair, standing on a slightly raised
16
Drake, “Autobiography,” 1088.
Ibid., 1054-55, 1057.
18
Drake’s influence is clear in the official record. Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal. See also
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule; David D. March, “The Campaign for the Ratification of the
Constitution of 1865,” Missouri Historical Review 47 (1953): 223-32.
19
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 14.
20
Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 3-4; Drake counted thirteen. Drake, “Autobiography,”
1056.
21
Edward Bates, The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859-1866, ed. Howard K. Beale (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1933; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), 543.
22
Drake, “Autobiography,” 1054-55.
17
72
platform decorated with red, white, and blue bunting. Few Missourians showed up to
observe the body’s proceedings. Visiting from Chicago in April, Caspar Butz found just
three or four spectators in the narrow gallery.23 After several months, even the ranks of
the delegates were thinning. One German grumbled that the minority he represented had
so little impact on the drafting of the new constitution he might as well go home. Many
of his colleagues did. The convention routinely operated without a third of its
membership.24
Drake was beset by Conservatives, who blasted his radicalism, and Germans, who
felt he was not radical enough. The Conservatives were Democratic-leaning men who
had supported the Union but resisted emancipation. Although they only made up about a
quarter of the convention, they felt that they represented the interests of the Confederate
and neutral Missourians who would have to be reintegrated into the polity even if they
had not participated in the process of electing delegates. Conservatives had significant
supporters such as Congressman Frank Blair, Jr., and Lincoln’s first attorney general,
Edward Bates. They were convinced that Drake was motivated by political ambition and
personal vindictiveness, and they particularly disliked the measures that would
effectively establish partisan control of voter registration.25 Conservatives also began to
air their beliefs about African American citizenship. Although only four delegates voted
against abolishing slavery, many more supported restricting African Americans’ access to
the courts, public education, and the ballot box.
23
St. Charles Demokrat, 13 April 1865.
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 24-25. The rules of the convention were rewritten so a majority
of those present, not of the entire membership was required to pass resolutions. Missouri Constitutional
Convention, Journal, 203.
25
For account by a leading Conservative participant, see William F. Switzler, “Constitutional Conventions
in Missouri, 1865-1875,” Missouri Historical Review 1 (1907): 109-20. Parrish, Missouri under Radical
Rule, 20.
24
73
Conservative opponents of African American voting could build on a long
tradition of excluding blacks from the national community of the United States and cite
numerous court decisions denying them citizenship rights. They were on firm
constitutional ground despite the fact American citizenship had been just as contested
since the founding of the republic as German citizenship had been in the Frankfurt
Parliament of 1848. The U.S. Constitution had not defined the status of citizen. The
framers implied a national citizenship existed when they mandated a national
naturalization policy and entitled the citizens of each state “all privileges and immunities
of free citizens in the several states” in the Comity Clause. Yet this did little to clarify
American citizenship’s boundaries or rights. In the early decades of the Republic, it was
largely states that determined who was a citizen and what rights citizens received.26
Whether states or federal authorities had authority over citizenship would be one of
Reconstruction’s central issues, but the question was not on the table in Missouri.
To justify excluding African American men from political citizenship in Missouri,
Conservatives sought precedents in American political theory and law. For the last
hundred years, Americans had tried to balance two essential strains of citizenship. The
first was inclusive but bore minimal rights and duties. Although Revolutionary Era
thinkers did not dwell on it, American citizenship was in part derived from British
subjecthood. It was patterned on the relationship between subject and monarch that
resembled that in Prussia and Austria. When Americans won independence, their new
governments had to take up the role previously performed by the crown. This lineage
meant that in some circumstances, Americans saw citizenship as a status that merely
26
Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 218-24; Smith, Civic Ideals, 115-36.
74
required the payment of taxes in return for protection from foreign governments. Many
of the American revolutionaries, however, admired classical republican political theory.
Republican political theorists developed an understanding of citizenship that was
exclusive, but embraced extensive rights and duties of active political participation such
as voting, office holding, and military service. The classical republican citizen resembled
the Bürger of the self-governing European towns. Roman political theory had informed
the model of the Italian city-states of the Renaissance, which in turn influenced English
and French theorists during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. A republican citizen
was a man whose landed wealth conveyed sufficient independence from outside
influence and enough of a stake (or “interest”) in the community to empower him to
make decisions for good of the whole.27 Many people who resided within the state would
be excluded from such citizenship.
The American Revolution undermined deference and hierarchy, unleashing forces
that set the inclusive yet passive assumptions about citizenship into confrontation with
the exclusive yet active notion of citizenship. The most significant early challenge came
from white men without property who argued that if the legitimacy of the government
was to rest on the consent of a community of equal citizens, they should be allowed to
participate in politics. Historians have labeled this position “liberal,” identifying it with
philosophers such as John Locke and publicists such as Thomas Paine.28 Working-class
27
For surveys of the extensive historiography of the reception of republican ideas in Colonial and
Revolutionary America, see Robert Shalhope, “Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an
Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly 29 (1972):
49-80; Shalhope, “Republicanism and Early American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly 39
(1982): 334-56; Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American
History 79 (1992): 11-38.
28
The now classical statement of liberalism’s growing dominance following the Revolution is Gordon S.
Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). More specifically
75
Anglo-American men extended the logic of the Revolution, citing their military service,
and playing on the cultural background they shared with many of the Revolutionary elite.
Many members of the founding generation remained troubled by the idea of granting
political rights to so many men. They worried that extending the franchise would erode
republican citizenship’s association with virtue, duty, and independence. John Adams
summed up their concerns when he asked a correspondent in 1776, “Is it not … true, that
Men in general in every Society, who are wholly destitute of Property, are also too little
acquainted with public Affairs to form a Right Judgment, and too dependent upon other
Men to have a Will of their own?”29 To overcome the latter stumbling block, white men
argued that their independence—and therefore their citizenship—rested on their control
of their own labor and their authority as heads of household.30 Many of them achieved
voting rights in the early decades of the American republic. Although they argued in the
republican terms of independence and military service, their efforts helped spread the
new liberal idea of citizenship.
on citizenship and voting, see Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy
in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 9-17; Smith, “The ‘American Creed,’” 229-31;
Heater, A Brief History of Citizenship, 50-57, 65-79; Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage: From
Property to Democracy, 1760-1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 10-12, 62-75.
29
Robert J. Taylor, ed., Papers of John Adams, 13 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1979-), 4:208.
30
Older histories focused on the successful extension of suffrage to most white men. See, for example,
Williamson, American Suffrage. For the arguments justifying the extension of suffrage, see Keyssar, The
Right to Vote, 42-52. In an investigation of state constitutions during the Revolutionary Era, Marc Kruman
argues that the shift from property to tax payment requirements for voters was significant: “Instead of
property serving as a measure of one’s personal independence and attachment to the community, the
taxpayer qualification signified that the elector voted to protect himself and the community against the
oppression by the assembly.” He writes, “suffrage was a natural right more than a privilege.” Marc W.
Kruman, Between Authority and Liberty: State Constitution Making in Revolutionary America (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 94, 97.
76
By the 1850s, Americans used a much more inclusive language of citizenship, and
most states had no property requirements for voting.31 In this new environment, white
men were forced to develop new justifications for the exclusion of women and African
Americans. Their entrenched racial and gendered ideas of the good citizen shaped the
way they reconciled the tension between the new inclusiveness of citizenship and their
understanding of it as a status bearing significant political rights and onerous
responsibilities.32 Women were denied the vote—when the issue even came up—on the
basis that they were “naturally” dependent on men. Marriage defined women’s
normative state, and the act of marriage made women dependent while it made their
husbands independent. All states barred women from voting after 1807 when New Jersey
law changed to exclude them explicitly.33 Yet jurists knew that women’s membership in
the state afforded them some civil protections such as freedom of speech and required
that they perform some duties such as the payment of taxes. The practical and theoretical
solution to this dilemma was a form of second-class, passive citizenship. By 1865,
women’s citizenship became, in Nancy Cott’s words, “a touchstone to justify less-thanparticipatory citizenship.”34
In 1865, however, Missourians focused on the rights of free African American
men. When Americans addressed black men’s place in the United States, they were
defining the ethnic and racial boundaries of their nation. In 1857, Supreme Court Chief
31
Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 26-32.
On “good citizenship,” see Shklar, American Citizenship, 5-7; Schudson, The Good Citizen.
33
Nancy F. Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States,” American Historical Review
103 (1998): 1440-54; Linda Kerber, “The Paradox of Women’s Citizenship in the Early Republic: The
Case of Martin vs. Massachusetts,” American Historical Review 97 (1992): 349-78. For the Revolutionary
origins of such arguments, see Joan R. Gunderson, “Independence and Citizenship and the American
Revolution,” Signs 13 (1987): 59-77.
34
Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States,” 1451.
32
77
Justice Roger Taney had denied former slave Dred Scott American citizenship because he
was descended from Africans.35 Blacks, the judge ruled in Scott v. Sandford, “were not
intended to be embraced in this new political family, which the Constitution brought into
existence, but were intended to be excluded from it.”36 Taney presented ample evidence
that the framers of the Constitution did not see African Americans as equals. How, he
asked, could they have intended to confer United States citizenship rights on black
Americans if they had accepted slavery? Taney’s decision revealed an important current
in American citizenship thought. Just as the Frankfurt Parliamentarians had sought to
explain what bound Germans together as a nation in 1848, Americans had struggled to
identify what made them a natural community. As Rogers M. Smith has argued,
republican or liberal ideas were undoubtedly important, but the nation that the framers
imagined was also Protestant, English-speaking, and white. A sense of an
“ethnocultural” community had always shaped American citizenship law.37 Immigration
would somewhat undermine the notion that the United States was primarily an AngloProtestant land, but whiteness became more important during the country’s early decades.
In 1790, Congress had passed legislation restricting naturalization to white immigrants,
and white Americans had increasingly depicted non-whites as inherently inferior to
themselves, unsuited to independence and political participation.38
35
On the case as a whole, see Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American
Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
36
Benjamin C. Howard, ed., Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the
Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F. Sandford (Washington, D.C.:
Cornelius Wendell, 1857), 12.
37
Smith, “The ‘American Creed,’” 232-40.
38
George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate over Afro-American
Character and Destiny (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny:
The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981);
78
While embracing a racially exclusive view of national community, Taney’s 1857
decision preserved an active view of citizenship that had its roots in classical
republicanism. The judgment concerned Scott’s standing before federal courts, but it also
touched on the issue of the franchise and its relationship to citizenship. Central to
Taney’s argument was the erroneous contention that African Americans had been
excluded from citizenship in every state at the time of the adoption of the Constitution.39
He went on to argue that the Constitution had conferred national citizenship only on those
people who were citizens of their states at ratification. Individual states could not, in
Taney’s opinion, change the terms of the Constitution by altering their own citizenship
laws. He argued that even African American men who were now permitted to vote in the
few states without racial voting qualifications were not American citizens under the
Constitution.40 States might choose to grant free blacks certain privileges, but these did
not amount to constitutional citizenship rights. Although this position primarily involved
the federal structure of American government, it is significant that Taney did not
conceive of a second-class citizenship status for African Americans. His ruling excluded
even free blacks from all civil and political rights as American citizens. He suggested
citizenship could not be divided into active or passive categories. Citizenship was all or
nothing.
Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth
Century America (London: Verso, 1990).
39
Taney ignored the complex body of law concerning black citizenship that had developed since the
founding of the republic. Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Harold M. Hyman and William Wiecek, Equal Justice
under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835-1875 (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); Randall Kennedy,
“Reflections on Citizenship and Diversity,” in Diversity and Citizenship: Rediscovering American
Nationhood, ed. Gary J. Jacobsohn and Susan Dunn (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996),
101-21.
40
Before the Civil War most states explicitly denied free black men the vote. Shklar, American
Citizenship, 43-52; Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 54-60; Smith, Civic Ideals, 212-26.
79
In 1865, Missouri Conservatives did not cite Taney’s ruling in Scott v. Sandford,
but turned instead to the antebellum precedent separating citizenship and the right to vote.
St. Louis’s Conservative Unionist Edward Bates drew on his experience as attorney
general. As Lincoln’s advisor, Bates had conducted a survey of court decisions regarding
citizenship and determined that although emancipation brought African Americans
national citizenship, citizenship did not itself bestow any particular set of rights.41 As
voting had always been the preserve of the states, it was particularly difficult to see
political participation as a right of American citizenship. Other leading Conservatives,
such as Frank Blair also emphatically denied that the freedmen should have the right to
vote even if they were citizens.42 The minority of St. Louis Germans who identified as
Conservatives must have agreed. The Anzeiger des Westens rejected the idea that voting
was either a “human right” or a “citizenship right,” pointing to northern states such as
Ohio that excluded free African American men from the franchise. The editors justified
excluding black men because the “negro race” had never “proved its ability for selfrule.”43 Missouri Conservatives argued that there was more than one kind of citizenship
and sought, as Bates put it, “to disabuse the vulgar mind in regard to the absurd theory of
the exact equality of men.”44
Most of the Radical delegates to the Missouri constitutional convention who made
up the majority also believed that black men deserved a passive form of citizenship.
41
Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States,” 1445; Wang, The Trial of Democracy,
8.
42
Margaret L. Dwight, “Black Suffrage in Missouri, 1865-1877” (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri—
Columbia, 1978), 33-39; William E. Parrish, Frank Blair: Lincoln’s Conservative (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1998), 221-23.
43
“Die Negerrasse hat ihre Befähigung zur Selbstregierung in einem freien Gemeinwesen nirgends in der
Welt und zu keiner Zeit bewiesen.” Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 20 January 1865.
44
Bates, The Diary of Edward Bates, 445.
80
Radicals tended not to employ such derogatory descriptions of African Americans, but
most of them held the same understanding of citizenship as Conservatives. Republicans
had grown accustomed to deflecting Democratic accusations that their policies would
radically transform relations between blacks and whites. In response, Drake and many
other Republicans had distinguished between the civil and political rights of citizens.
Civil rights were legal protections of the natural rights of life, liberty, and property.45
According to the majority in the convention, all citizens deserved such rights.46 They
believed that the political rights of active citizenship, on the other hand, could be
withheld or extended at the discretion of the existing electorate. In March 1865, the
Westliche Post suggested that Drake opposed even a limited implementation of black
suffrage in the convention because he made “a spiteful distinction between black and
white.”47 Drake saw it differently. He believed African American suffrage would hurt
his chances of getting the constitution ratified. The Radical leader was also convinced
that citizenship did not necessarily include voting rights; minors and women were
citizens yet denied the franchise.48
By that point, Missouri’s German Radicals had arrayed behind an inclusive and
active form of citizenship.49 The war years had gradually reinforced the lessons that
German immigrants had drawn from the Revolutions of 1848 and their own experience of
claiming American citizenship. Yet the decision to support black suffrage came quite
quickly at the Turner Hall meeting that Arnold Krekel addressed on January 15. A
45
Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 261-67. For European forerunners, see Heater, A Brief History
of Citizenship, 81-84.
46
Some of Drake’s followers also supported efforts to instate race-neutral suffrage qualifications. See for
example, Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 20-21, 26, 147-48.
47
“Eine gehässige Unterscheidung zwischen schwarz und weiß.” Westliche Post, 25 March 1865.
48
Dwight, “Black Suffrage in Missouri,” 40; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 117.
49
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 116; Dwight, “Black Suffrage in Missouri,” 23, 30-33.
81
number of German immigrants questioned the validity of racial distinctions and the
concept of second-class citizenship before a receptive audience. One speaker emphasized
the centrality of the franchise to the exercise of citizenship, asking, “Is he a free man who
is muzzled on account of his skin color? Or is that a free—not to mention the most
free—state, whose people’s hands are bound in regard to the election their custodians and
lawmakers?” Emil Preetorius, editor of the Westliche Post, declared that “the principles
of freedom and equality” required race-neutral suffrage, even if it was a tricky issue
politically. “Distinctions based on color or race” contravened the “principles of
Declaration of Independence” and must be eliminated. The audience interrupted him
with enthusiastic applause.50
Preetorius’s Westliche Post was becoming the leading voice of German
Radicalism in Missouri and the region. In early January, the newspaper had hesitated to
endorse U.S. Senator Benjamin Gratz Brown’s support of African American suffrage,
editorializing that “special regulation of the franchise may be necessary.”51 On the day of
the Turner Hall meeting, however, Preetorius ran an editorial under the headline
“Onward!” He called the constitutional convention to recognize “the spirit of progress,”
and eliminate the word “white” from the state’s voting qualifications. The paper
considered it crucial that prejudice on the basis of “race, creed, or color” not be enshrined
in law.52 Preetorius tried to position himself as the representative of a large constituency.
He hoped to demonstrate that “the Radical Deutschtum of St. Louis have taken a firm
50
“Sei der ein freier Mann, der auf Grund seiner Hautfarbe für mundtodt erklärt wird? Oder sei das ein
freier, schweige der freieste Staat, dessen Volk sich in Bezug auf die Wahl seiner Verwaher [sic] und
Gesetzgeber die Hände gebunden stehte?” Westliche Post, 17 January 1865.
51
“… worüber besondere Bestimmung nothwendig sein möchten.” Westliche Post, 5, 6 January 1865.
52
“Vorwärts!”; “der Geist des Fortschritts”; “Race, Glauben oder Farbe.” Mississippi Blätter, 15 January
1865.
82
position on the two highly important questions of Reconstruction and voting rights.”53
The Westliche Post was indeed gaining influence. Without significant Radical
competition, it attracted a much larger audience than its Conservative rival, the Anzeiger.
During 1865, the Post’s quarterly advertising revenue doubled, and it adopted a larger
format. The growing daily printed nine thousand copies of each issue in April, but the
editors assumed a readership of about twenty thousand. With a reported annual income
of nearly $100,000, it was more profitable than any other German-language newspaper in
Missouri, Illinois, or Ohio.54
The man responsible for the Westliche Post’s commercial success and editorial
policy was yet another Forty-Eighter.55 Since arriving in St. Louis in 1853, Preetorius
had consistently campaigned for emancipation and distinguished himself as a Radical
leader in the Missouri legislature during the war.56 He was one of the Radical
Missourians who Lincoln had rebuffed in 1863.57 The editor’s close personal friend Carl
Schurz spoke highly of his generosity, enthusiasm, and rectitude; rival newspapermen
accused him of indulging in “superficial bon mots and populist appeals directed at the
portion of the public incapable of thinking for itself.”58 His course during the
constitutional debate suggests there was an element of truth to both assessments. He
53
“… daß in zwei hochwichtigen Fragen, der Reconstructions und der Stimmrechtsfrage, das radikale
Deutschthum von St. Louis fest Position genommen hat.” Westliche Post, 17 January 1865.
54
The revenue figures are from a survey by the Cincinnati Commercial reported in the Westliche Post, 9
February 1866. The paper claimed the enlarged format was based on increased readership. Westliche Post,
14 March 1865. For circulation figures, see Westliche Post, 11 April 1865. See also Harvey Saalburg,
“The Westliche Post of St. Louis: A Daily Newspaper for German-Americans, 1857-1938” (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Missouri, 1967), 140.
55
His co-editor Theodore Olshausen left the paper to return to Germany in April. Westliche Post, 12 April
1865.
56
Zucker, The Forty-Eighters, 328.
57
Nagler, Fremont contra Lincoln, 143.
58
Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, 3:257. “… oberflächliche Schönrederei und
Popularitätshascherei, auf den denkunfähigen Theil des Publikums berechnet.” Anzeiger des Westens
Wochen-Blatt, 29 March 1865.
83
candidly struggled to reconcile ideals and practical politics in a changing environment,
but he was not above exaggerating German support for his views, including his Radical
idea of citizenship.
While the Westliche Post was beginning to campaign for black suffrage, German
delegates in the convention were adopting a similar position. Georg Husmann
represented Gasconade County, the only county in the state to cast a majority of its votes
for Lincoln in 1860. A small, heavily bearded man who spoke unaccented English,
Husmann had emigrated from the Kingdom of Hanover in 1837 as a child. Like most
rural Unionists, the noted viticulturalist and his neighbors keenly felt their vulnerability
to secessionist violence.59 Husmann sat on the convention’s Committee on the Executive
Department with his quieter German-born colleague, Georg Thilenius from Cape
Girardeau. When their committee reported back to the convention, the two men informed
other delegates that they could not endorse using the word “white” to describe qualified
candidates for governor. They protested any distinction in original law “between white,
black, red, or brown.” “We hold,” they said, “that we were not sent here to pander to a
prejudice which may unfortunately exist, but to deal equal justice to all, without regard to
color.”60 Husmann referred to his constituents’ support for his position. A public
meeting in his home town had resolved to support Husmann, charging him with
59
Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 3-4. H.D. Hooker, “George Husmann,” Missouri
Historical Review 23 (1929): 353-60. Husmann wrote to the Missouri’s governor requesting a replacement
for the canon lost in a secessionist raid. Georg Husmann to Thomas Fletcher, Hermann, Missouri, 12 April
1865, box 1, folder 15, Records of Governor Thomas Clement Fletcher, Missouri State Archives (hereafter
MSA), Jefferson City, Missouri.
60
Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 48.
84
continuing his Radical course until Missouri’s constitution represented a “model
document.”61
Charles Drake’s chief opponent among the Radicals, though, was Isidor Busch.
Busch had fled Vienna after the Revolutions of 1848, but he was not one of St. Louis’s
prominent Forty-Eighters. He was a successful businessman and Jewish community
leader, but his political experience was limited to the Missouri special convention called
in 1861.62 St. Louis Germans must have also considered his wartime service as an aide to
General Frémont a relevant qualification when they elected him to the convention.63 The
Westliche Post commended Busch as the delegate who best represented his
constituency.64 Busch revealed on February 14 that he and twenty-five other members of
the convention were prepared to resign if Drake continued to deviate from “sacred
principles.” The following day he unsuccessfully sought to curtail the convention’s
mandate.65 Busch’s actions made such an impression on Drake that the German featured
in his recollections fourteen years later. Drake described Busch as “so far dissatisfied
with the course of things in the convention that he began to threaten.”66
In March, Busch took the convention floor to argue that voting rights for
“colored” men were a “necessary, unavoidable, logical consequence of freedom.”
Apologizing for his “dialect,” he proclaimed that voting was not a privilege; it was “the
61
Westliche Post, 18 January 1865.
Dwight, “Black Suffrage in Missouri,” 23; Nagler, Fremont contra Lincoln, 90; Walter Ehrlich, “Isidor
Bush,” in The Dictionary of Missouri Biography, ed. Lawrence O. Christensen et al. (Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 1999), 138-40.
63
Zucker, The Forty-Eighters, 283.
64
Westliche Post, 18 February 1865. Caspar Butz also respected Busch’s role. St. Charles Demokrat, 13
April 1865.
65
Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 89; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 21.
66
Drake, “Autobiography,” 1061.
62
85
right of everyone who lives in the civil society of a free government.”67 Busch argued
that Missouri had accepted African American men’s citizenship by ending slavery, so it
must allow them to vote. He explicitly rejected the argument that there was a type of
citizenship that did not include voting rights. According to Busch’s interpretation,
citizenship included the franchise, and only three groups of people could justly be
excluded from full citizenship: residents without the necessary reasoning capacity (such
as minors), enemies of public well-being (such as criminals and secessionists), and
residents lacking an “interest” in civil society. At first it seemed that Busch intended to
include all women in this final group. When pressed by other delegates, however, Busch
said a woman who was independent of male support, and “carried the burdens and duties
of citizens” should be able to vote. Such arguments presaged the challenges women’s
status would pose to the German Radicals, but Busch carefully avoided condoning a halfway citizenship. To Busch, arguments about different types of citizen were merely a
pretext for codifying racism.68
Many other Americans argued that a truly republican government must permit all
male citizens to exercise the vote. Some white Radicals adopted the arguments African
Americans had long used in their efforts to win the vote. In the immediate postemancipation years, African Americans began a concerted campaign for suffrage that
capitalized on the rhetoric of the American Revolution. They often referred to the
67
“Farbigen”; “nothwendig, unvermeidliche[,] logische Consequenz der Freiheit”; “… es das Recht Aller
ist, welche in den bürgerlichen Gemeinschaft einer freien Regierung leben.” Busch’s speech was reported
in Westliche Post, 25 March 1865. There is no record of it in the convention’s journal, but on March 23
and 24 the Committee of the Whole considered amendments “particularly the article on Elections and
Qualifications of Voters, Officers, and others.” Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 227-28.
68
“… die Lasten und Pflichten des Bürger trägt.” Westliche Post, 25 March 1865.
86
Declaration of Independence’s assertion that all men were created equal.69 When
Frederick Douglass endorsed African American suffrage in a speech at Boston in January
1865, he assumed that the American tradition was on his side. He said, “I want the
elective franchise, for one, as a colored man, because ours is a peculiar government,
based upon a peculiar idea, and that idea is universal suffrage.”70 African Americans
presented this position in petitions to the Missouri convention.71 Senator Gratz Brown
also described “freedom and the franchise as inseparable” in a letter to the Missouri
Democrat.72
German Radicals also couched their arguments in the language of the American
political canon. They cited the Declaration of Independence as readily as any American.
In their message to the convention, Husmann and Thilenius had registered their opinion
that voting restrictions contradicted the idea that “all men are created equal.”73 German
Radicals particularly honored the legacy of Thomas Paine.74 In late January, the Turner
Hall hosted a Paine celebration on the same day that the Westliche Post’s lead editorial
suggested racial suffrage exclusions “would make a humbug of professions of universal
69
Foner, “Rights and the Constitution in Black Life,” 863-83. In his article, Foner used historian Vincent
Harding’s term “the Great Tradition” to refer to this strand of black resistance. Vincent Harding, There is a
River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981).
70
Frederick Douglass, “What the Black Man Wants,” speech delivered in Boston, 26 January 1865, in The
Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One, Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, ed. John W. Blassingame and
John R. McKivigan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 4:63.
71
Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 53; Dwight, “Black Suffrage in Missouri,” 43-68.
72
“Freiheit und Stimmrecht als unzertrennlich.” Westliche Post, 6 January 1865; Norma L. Peterson,
Freedom and Franchise: The Political Career of B. Gratz Brown (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
1865), 143.
For demands for political citizenship for African American men outside Missouri, see Keyssar,
The Right to Vote, 88; Wang, The Trial of Democracy, 29-31; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 502-56;
Foner, “Rights and the Constitution in Black Life”; Foner, Reconstruction, 221-24; Shklar, American
Citizenship, 51-57.
73
Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 48.
74
Wittke, Refugees of Revolution; Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 93, 106, 223.
87
freedom and equality.”75 Drawing from the same political lexicon, one correspondent
wrote to the Westliche Post that excluding some men from the franchise, “directly
violates the democratic principle of the equality of citizens.”76 German Radicals thought
that African American suffrage would only realize the highest of American ideals. The
Westliche Post reported, “We Germans … are therefore here once again—as so often
before—the ‘true Americans.’”77
Yet German immigrants were inclined to interpret American ideals in a
transnational perspective. They believed the words of the Declaration of Independence
and Thomas Paine represented universal ideals. German Republicans had already made
it clear that they believed the Union cause and the abolition of slavery captured the same
appreciation of nation and citizenship as the Revolutions of 1848. At the public meeting
on January 15, Preetorius charted the Turners’ sacrifices for nationalism on two
continents.78 In 1865, German immigrants saw extending the franchise to African
American men as another measure of global progress. Black suffrage took on a “worldhistorical” significance.79 Busch’s performance in the convention hall of the Mercantile
Library demonstrated Radical immigrants’ willingness to blend their German and
American ideas. He prefaced his argument by saying he found the confidence to share
his opinion in his American citizenship and his “German ways of thinking and reaching
75
“… die kündigte allgemeine Freiheit und Gleichheit zum Humbug gemacht werden soll.” Westliche
Post, 28 January 1865.
76
“… daß dies gegen den demokratischen Grundsatz der Gleichheit der Bürger direct verstoßt.” Westliche
Post, 2 February 1865. Similar language featured in the paper’s editorials. See for example 28 January
1865, 11 February 1865.
77
“Wir Deutsche ... sind also hier wieder einmal, wie oft schon, die ‘wahren Amerikaner.’” Westliche
Post, 15 February 1865.
78
Westliche Post, 16 January 1865.
79
“Weltgeschichtlich.” Westliche Post, 25 March 1865. St. Charles Demokrat, 15 June 1865, printed an
assessment of the American Civil War as a “world-historical” event connected to an international
movement.
88
conclusions.” To his “German” mind, the universal patterns of “world history” and the
lessons of the antislavery campaign justified black suffrage. Missourians had resisted
ending slavery out of “fear and prejudice,” but now they widely recognized their mistake.
Busch believed that it was just as reactionary to deny African American men the vote
based on their color as it had been to enslave them.80 There were other lessons that could
be drawn from the Revolutions of 1848 and the Civil War, but Busch expressed the ideas
embodied in the myth of the freedom-loving German, which prevailed in the Midwest as
the war drew to a close.
African American suffrage became a “German” cause in Missouri because of the
power of the German-American identity immigrants had created during the war. Drake’s
intransigence in the convention allowed Germans to continue to present themselves as
consistent and idealistic in the face of Anglo-American prejudice. From the outset, the
cautious Krekel had warned that “the tolerance of the American in relation to the negro”
would determine the question of African American suffrage.81 Convention observers
quickly spotted the struggle between the Germans and Drake. From Illinois, the
Davenport Demokrat remarked that the deliberations clearly demonstrated “how deeply
the Americans are still stuck in their national and racial prejudice and how far the socalled Radical Americans are from the political positions of the Radical Germans.”82
Cleveland’s Wächter am Erie reached the same conclusion. Germans were combating
80
“Deutsche Denk- und Schlußweise”; “Weltgeschichte”; “Furcht und Vorurtheil.” Westliche Post, 25
March 1865.
81
“Die Toleranz des Amerikaners gegenüber der Neger”; “Schrecken.” Krekel also considered skin color
an insufficient reason to deprive some of “privileges,” indicating he was sympathetic to the constitutional
argument that voting was not an inherent part of citizenship. Westliche Post, 19 January 1865.
82
“Wie tief die Amerikaner noch in Nationalitäts- und Racenverurtheil stecken und wie weit die sich
radikal nennenden Amerikaner von dem freien politischen Standpunkte der radikalen Deutschen entfernt
stehen.” Reprinted in Westliche Post, 27 January 1865. See also Butz’s two-part report reprinted in the St.
Charles Demokrat, 13 and 20 April 1865.
89
“medieval racial prejudice” in the convention. Non-German delegates “could not make
up their minds to apply all social and citizenship rights to negroes, without which
emancipation will not mean much.”83
Missouri’s German-language Radical newspapers launched a full-scale assault on
prejudice (Vorurteil). Back in Krekel’s home town, the St. Charles Demokrat observed
that “prejudice and narrow-heartedness” hampered any further considerations for the
“colored people.” 84 It described the idea of separate schools for white and black children
as “a concession to racial prejudice.”85 This was only one of the many examples of
“spiteful racial discrimination” the Demokrat identified in the final document.86
Correspondents to other Radical papers adopted similar language. One wrote that “the
centuries-old prejudice against the black race … places many obstacles in the way of
implementing all of the implications and measures derived from the promulgated
principles of universal freedom and equality of inhabitants.”87 As German Radicals
depicted it, the problem with prejudice was its irrationality. They denied that skin color
determined an individual’s potential. An anonymous contributor summarized this
argument for the Westliche Post. The strident piece maintained that wisdom was not the
83
“Mittelalterlichen Racenvorurtheil”; “… kann sich nicht entschliessen, den Neger wirklich in alle
gesellschaftlichen und bürgerlichen Recht einzusetzen, ohne die doch eine Emanzipation nicht viel
bedeuten will [sic].” Wächter am Erie, 28 January 1865.
84
“Vorurtheil und Engherzigkeit”; “War dies kaum zu bewundern, indem sicher mit der Freierklärung der
Sklaven Einige das non plus ultra ihres Radikalismus erreicht zu haben glaubten und deßwegen den
Farbigen alle weiteren Zugeständnisse verweigerten.” St. Charles Demokrat, 26 January 1865.
85
“Concession dem Racenvorurtheil.” St. Charles Demokrat, 2 March 1865.
86
“Gehässigen Racen-Unterschieds.” St. Charles Demokrat, 27 April 1865. As is evidenced in quotations
in this chapter, the word “prejudice” appeared frequently in Westliche Post during January, February, and
March 1865.
87
In full, he wrote, “Es ist nicht zu läugnen, und es ist auch leicht zu erklären, daß das Jahrhunderte alte
Vorurtheil gegen die schwarze Rasse, gegen ihre Befähigung und volle Berechtigung gegenüber den
Weißen der augenblicklichen Durchführung aller aus dem verkündigten Grundsatz allgemeiner Freiheit und
Gleichheit der Bewohner abzuleitenden Folgerungen und Maßregeln mancherlei Hindernisse in den Weg
legt oder wengistens zu legen sucht.” Westliche Post, 28 January 1865.
90
exclusive preserve of whites. The correspondent proclaimed that country needed “wise”
(“weise”) not “white” (“weiß”) voters. He ridiculed the idea of a racial voting
qualification because it would not reflect a potential voter’s understanding, character, or
competency. With an intensity untypical of the Westliche Post’s measured style, he
railed that even if none of the “white rulers” of the States exhibited these characteristics,
they would deny the franchise to a black man who embodied them all—a Socrates and
Cicero rolled into one.88
German Radicals believed that racial prejudice and intolerance of immigrants
were similarly irrational. In 1865, they were prepared to describe race and ancestry as
equally illegitimate bases for exclusion from full citizenship. “Differences of race and
color,” the Westliche Post announced, “should be as unimportant as those of belief or
ancestry.”89 Once Missouri’s Radical Germans had decided to support African American
suffrage, they drew on their own experiences to make their arguments. Although German
immigrants were hesitant to identify with former slaves, they had developed an idea of
the American nation that was not monolithic. They did not believe that all citizens must
share the same background for the United States to preserve its core identity. German
Radicals had challenged an ethnocultural approach to citizenship when they declined to
capitalize on their whiteness or Protestant background during the 1850s. These
immigrants’ dynamic view of the nation provided the theoretical basis for incorporating
new groups into the ranks of the citizenry. They did assume that Europeans were better
equipped to take on the duties of citizens, but they also believed that the nation could not
88
“Verstand”; “Charackter”; “Tüchtigkeit.” Westliche Post, 2 February 1865.
“Unterschiede von Race und Farbe ebenso wenig wie solche von Glaube und Abstammung gelten
sollen.” Westliche Post, 20 January 1865.
89
91
develop unless it accepted democratic ideals. Balancing these concerns, a small group of
German-American Radicals determined that emancipation could induct freedmen into
America’s community of citizens exactly as naturalization had incorporated immigrants.
As long as the United States remained true to its principles, it had nothing to fear from
ethnic and racial diversity among its citizens.
The constitutional convention provided German Missourians with many
opportunities to suggest that Anglo-Americans might compromise America’s civic creed
by making immigrants and African Americans victims of their prejudice. Drake
introduced a provision that required that the state’s most populous counties to elect their
representatives to the Missouri House from geographically compact districts. The
practice of conducting at-large elections for county delegates had given German votes
significant weight in St. Louis’s aggregated returns. Busch, Husmann, and the Westliche
Post opposed Drake’s new plan because it would reduce German influence to the few
districts where they were most heavily concentrated.90 The opponents of redistricting
believed it weakened the democratic basis of Missouri government. Another young
German-speaking delegate from St. Louis, William D’Oench, was the plan’s stiffest
critic. A wholesale druggist who had probably participated in the Revolutions of 1848,91
D’Oench would describe the “system of dividing counties into districts” and the
90
Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 262. For a report of the convention debate, Mississippi
Blätter, 19 February 1865. For further discussion of Westliche Post’s position, see 13 April 1865, and 6
June 1865. The delegates presented their position in Westliche Post: Husmann on 19 April 1865, Busch on
16 March 1865, 12 April 1865.
91
William D’Oench was probably the brother of Forty-Eighter journalist Rudolph. An unattributed,
handwritten biography of Rudolph is included in the D’Oench Family Papers at the Missouri Historical
Society. Rudolph was seven years older than constitutional delegate William. According to the 1860
census, William, like Rudolph, was born in Liegnitz, then part of the Prussian province of Silesia, now part
of Poland. U.S. Census Bureau, Population Schedule of the Eight Census of the United States 1860,
manuscript returns for St. Louis, Missouri, 82, 214. D’Oench Family Papers, folder 1, Missouri Historical
Society (hereafter MHS), St. Louis.
92
“undemocratic representation, which recognizes land, not population as the basis of
representation” as two of the “unrepublican features” of the constitution that stood “in
contradiction to true democratic principles and our enlightened times.”92 D’Oench
became a steadfast opponent of Drake, but African American suffrage was never high on
his list of priorities.
In what would prove a more emotive issue, Drake succeeded in inserting a
“morality clause” in Missouri’s Declaration of Rights.93 The section protecting freedom
of religion included a qualification: “The liberty of conscience hereby secured shall not
be so construed as to excuse acts of licentiousness, nor to justify practices inconsistent
with the good order, peace, or safety of the State, or with the rights of others.”94 German
immigrants feared that Anglo-American politicians such as Drake would use this caveat
to impose their Protestant understanding of “public morality” on other Missourians.
Familiar with Drake’s legislative history, immigrants registered this as a targeted attack.
They suspected that the legislature would effectively define public morality as a “belief
in a personal God, in Christ, and in immortality [of the soul].” Making such
qualifications “requirements for citizenship and civil rights” might lead to “inquisition,
despotism and barbarism.”95 The morality clause reawakened German Americans’
insecurities about their own status and power.
92
“System der Districkteintheilung von Counties”; “die undemokratische Repräsentation, welche das
Land, nicht die Bevölkerung als Grundlage er Vertretung anerkennt”; “unrepublikanische Züge”; “mit
wahrhaft demokratischen Grundsätzen und mit unserm aufgeklärten Zeitalter im Widerspruch stehen.”
Westliche Post, 23 April 1865.
93
Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 81-82. Westliche Post, 26 February 1865 used the term
“morality clause.” It appears that the convention rejected a version German Americans considered even
more egregious.
94
Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 256.
95
“Bedingungen bürgerlicher und staatlicher Rechte”; “Glauben an einen persönlichen Gott, an Christus,
an die Unsterblichkeit.” Mississippi Blätter, 19 February 1865.
93
German Radicals used Drake’s approach to immigrants’ social habits to link
immigrant rights to the cause of African American suffrage. On January 24, the
Westliche Post ran a bold headline calling its readers to “Arm yourselves!” Preetorius
discerned the rise of a “spirit of intolerance, of narrow-heartedness” as the convention’s
debate moved into the area of morality and religion. The Westliche Post predicted that
“racial intolerance” would triumph in conjunction with religious chauvinism. Both
tendencies ran contrary to “enlightened Radicalism.” How could Drake treat German
immigrants so dismissively, the paper asked, when Missouri “owed its rebirth to the free,
humane, cosmopolitan German spirit”? While Drake was at it, the Westliche Post
taunted, he might as well restrict voting to men who were white and native-born.96 When
Drake did resist extending suffrage to unnaturalized men, German Radicals made much
of his “bigotry.” On the convention floor, Husmann implausibly argued that Drake
opposed alien voting in order to stop African Americans voting in the future. Husmann
contended that immigrants would support race-neutral voting because “every immigrant”
is for “citizenship rights for all.”97 In the end, the 1865 constitution allowed resident
aliens to vote in Missouri.98
96
“Seht gerüstet!”; “der Geist der Unduldsamkeit, der Engherzbigkeit”; “Racenunduldsamkeit”; “im
Namen eines erleuchteten Radikalismus”; “… seine Wiedergeburt dem freien, humanen, cosmopolischen
deutsche Geist verdankt.” Westliche Post, 24 January 1865.
97
Husmann was paraphrased in Westliche Post, 29 March 1865.
98
Surprisingly, the clause that extended suffrage to aliens who had officially registered their intent to
become citizens did not feature in the ratification debate. German Radicals had not promoted it. The
resolution was first introduced as an amendment by the English-born Drake supporter David Bonham on a
day when all but two of the German delegates were absent. Busch later reintroduced a similar measure that
passed. Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 193, 201. Once it passed, German Radicals
welcomed alien suffrage, but it did not dominate their reception of the constitution. St. Charles Demokrat,
13 April 1865. Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 30.
94
Husmann, Preetorius, and other Radicals clearly intended to use the morality
clause to define Missouri’s German-American community as “truly radically minded.”99
In an effort to consolidate the German vote, Preetorius helped organize a series of
protests. Public meetings held in February attracted modest but energetic crowds. Those
present expressed frustration at the way the constitution would affect people who did not
adhere to Drake’s brand of Protestantism. An organizing committee met in the Westliche
Post offices to write up a statement of protest. The four thousand people who signed the
petition that was presented to the convention were likely more interested in their right to
drink than African Americans’ right to vote.100 As they had in the 1850s, Radical leaders
exploited an issue that appealed broadly to German immigrants. Yet legislating morality
genuinely contradicted Radical leaders’ belief that citizenship should not be dependent on
race or religion. It seemed that neither side in the convention debate expressed their ideal
of a secular, cosmopolitan, and liberal state. Conservatives accepted immigrants’
drinking habits but rejected expanding African American rights. Republicans supported
African Americans but hoped to legislate against customs that immigrants considered
central to their ethnic identity. German Radicals were convinced that that the citizenry
must be expanded and religion must be separated from politics. One newspaper
correspondent hoped that “in Missouri religious freedom as well as the emancipation of
the slaves and their absorption into the citizenry of this state will achieve a complete
99
Westliche Post, 17 February 1865.
Westliche Post, 18, 21, 22 February 1865; Mississippi Blätter, 19 February 1865; St. Charles Demokrat,
2 March 1865. The convention rejected any discussion of the petition, and a handful of members tried to
expel one of the Anglo-American delegates who had spoken at the Turner Hall meeting. Missouri
Constitutional Convention, Journal, 102-04.
100
95
victory over the machinations of fanatics and reactionaries.”101 Absurd as it might seem,
the association between drinking and voting could support African Americans’ demands.
For all its potential, however, using immigrant citizenship as a frame of reference
for African American suffrage was limiting. German Radical leaders judged African
Americans harshly in comparison with themselves. Prominent German Americans were
proud of their own education and believed that the time they dedicated to study and
reflection made them some of the United States’ most intelligent voters. Even if they
eschewed biological determinism, German Radicals were skeptical of African Americans
level of Bildung (education and cultural development). The hypothetical black Socrates
who had appeared in the Westliche Post indicated the absurdity of limiting the franchise
to whites. At the same time, however, the example suggested that German Americans
believed that only exceptional African Americans were ready to contribute to American
political life. The correspondent had taken an elitist approach to qualities of the good
citizen. The Westliche Post put it more clearly. The editors wrote, “We consider the
mass of negroes now still totally incapable of exercising the franchise.”102 The
contradiction between this assessment and the paper’s campaign for race-neutral suffrage
was clear to its opponents, but it did not trouble Radicals.103 Indeed, it was much like the
approach of the Frankfurt parliamentarians to Jewish Germans. Many of the
revolutionaries had been anti-Semitic, but they believed that including Jews in the
national community would transform them and ensure that their polity embodied the
101
“… daß in Missouri die religiöse Freiheit ebensowohl wie die Freilassung der Sklaven und ihre
Aufnahme unter die Zahl der Bürger dieses Staates einen vollständigen Sieg erringen wird über die
Umtriebe der Fanatiler und Reaktionäre.” Westliche Post, 19 February 1865.
102
“... wir einmal die Masse der Neger jetzt noch für total unfähig zur Ausübung der Stimmrechts halten.”
Westliche Post, 15 January 1865.
103
Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 10 February 1865.
96
highest of ideals. If the legacy of slavery and prejudice plagued Missouri’s African
Americans just as discriminatory laws inhibited German Jews, granting them suffrage
could only have a salutary effect. German-American Radicals’ prejudices inflected their
struggle to achieve race-neutral policies. They believed equal citizenship was one
component in the process of improving African Americans.
Many German Radicals were prepared to use tests of reading and writing to limit
African American voting. Unlike measures introduced after the Fifteenth Amendment,
the proposed tests were not designed to evade federal prohibitions of racial
discrimination. The Westliche Post and Georg Husmann hoped literacy requirements
could pave the way for African American voting.104 They wanted voters to be judged on
“their service and talent, education and patriotism,” not their race.105 This was a radical
position in 1860s Missouri, but it also reflected German Americans’ ambivalence toward
African Americans. Literacy was first introduced in the convention specifically to
qualify to black suffrage. Despite all his lofty rhetoric, Busch suggested that African
American men only be able to vote in eleven years time and only if they were literate and
of “good moral character.”106 Krekel, who often played a mediating role as the president
of the convention, made a compromise proposal that attracted more debate and publicity.
Krekel’s plan would have directed the legislature to conduct a referendum on whether to
enfranchise “people of color” who had lived in Missouri at the time of emancipation and
either passed a literacy test or had served in the Union’s military forces.107 The Westliche
104
See Husmann’s comments in the convention debate. Westliche Post, 30 March 1865.
“… seinem Verdienst und Talent, seiner Erziehung und seinem Patriotismus.” Mississippi Blätter, 15
January 1865.
106
Westliche Post, 25 March 1865.
107
Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 186-87.
105
97
Post wavered in its support of suffrage requirements for white voters and never clarified
its position on black voters. The paper endorsed an anonymous contributor who worried
that tests were a risky step along the road to a “police state.”108 The final draft of the
constitution did include a provision that would have required literacy of all new Missouri
voters after 1876. It received relatively little public debate and never had a chance to go
into effect before the constitution was abandoned.109
To German Americans’ credit, they promoted public education for African
American children as well as literacy requirements. Most Missouri Radicals were
committed to enhancing the state’s inadequate public school system, but German
immigrants distinguished themselves as supporters of black education. After
emancipation, Friedrich Münch lost no time in introducing a bill “For the Education of
Negro Children” to the Missouri legislature.110 The Westliche Post printed contributions
advocating “compulsory education to nurture citizenship,” especially for African
Americans whose education had been neglected under slavery.111 It endorsed the lengthy
speech of a native-born minister on “Education and the Right to Vote.” Rev. W.G. Eliot
advocated a comprehensive system of compulsory childhood education and evening
classes for adults coupled with a literacy test for all voters. In response, the Westliche
Post commented that the Prussian experience indicated the advantages of mandating
education.112 In the convention, Husmann moved to thank Eliot for his “eloquent and
108
Westliche Post, 30 March 1865.
Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 261. Missouri’s 1875 constitution eliminated the literacy
requirement. Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 377.
110
St. Charles Demokrat, 2 February 1865.
111
Westliche Post, 10 February 1865, 28 January 1865, 3 February 1865, 11 February 1865.
112
Westliche Post, 26 January 1865. For the speech, see 25, 26, and 27 January 1865.
109
98
able address on education, connected with the elective franchise.”113 Those present
wholeheartedly affirmed Husmann’s resolution and set about overhauling the state’s
public education system.114 The proposed 1865 constitution charged the Missouri
legislature with administering a new school fund and seeing to it that every locality
offered free schools to all residents aged five to twenty-one. It permitted the legislature
to compel each child to attend sixteen months of schooling. All state funding would be
provided in proportion to the number of children, “without regard to color,” but the
constitution explicitly allowed local agencies to maintain segregated schools.115
While German Radicals were laboring to educate and enfranchise African
American men, they virtually ignored women’s citizenship. The Anzeiger charged
Radicals with inconsistency: if they accepted women’s status as non-voting citizens, why
did they assume that voting was necessarily a citizenship right for African American
men?116 The attack was typical of Conservatives, who were consistent in their opposition
to any extension of citizenship and voting rights. The Anzeiger raised one of the German
Radicals’ weaknesses. Busch’s speech in the convention demonstrated how poorly
prepared German Radicals were to face this challenge. Busch maintained that unmarried
women were citizens who should be allowed to vote. He advocated that unmarried
women who demonstrated independence in decision making and held a stake in civil
society should be classified as citizens, which meant they could exercise the franchise.
113
Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 53.
The exclusively white antebellum school system had been under-funded and under-attended. Parrish,
Missouri under Radical Rule, 139-41. See chapter 7.
115
Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 272. Many complexities of jurisdiction between state and
local agencies remained. No German delegate supported the amendment allowing segregated schools in
the convention. Busch and D’Oench were present to vote against it. Missouri Constitutional Convention,
Journal, 121-23. For more on education, see chapter 7.
116
Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 10 February 1865.
114
99
Never clarifying how single women could prove their independence and interest in
society, he made it plain that he believed marriage stripped women of citizenship
altogether. He did not question the premise that that a woman’s role in the household
effected her subordination. He embraced gender distinctions, but he was reluctant to
predicate political roles on natural differences between the sexes. He was unwilling to
concede the need for a half-way, less-than-participatory citizenship, so he conceptually
squeezed women into one of two statuses: married non-citizens or unmarried full
citizens.117 Most Radicals simply ignored the Anzeiger’s question. Their silence on
matters of gender provides a telling counterpoint to German Radicals’ position on race.
For all their protestations of abstract idealism, German advocacy of African American
suffrage grew out of a specific ethnic experience. In 1865, German Radicals were willing
to question the racial contours of citizenship, but not its gendered boundaries.
*****
On April 8, 1865, the day before Lee surrendered to Grant in Virginia, Charles
Drake moved that the convention in Missouri approve the document it had spent the
previous months drafting. His motion passed with the support of thirty-eight of the fiftyone delegates present. Drake had engineered a working majority, but he had
conspicuously failed to convince any of the German members to join him. As convention
president, Krekel took a conciliatory position.118 Although he did not participate in the
vote, he was first person to engross the new constitution with his signature, and he would
117
Westliche Post, 25 March 1865.
At first, it seemed that the selection of St. Charles’s Arnold Krekel as president “honored Germans” and
indicated the body’s Radical intent. Mississippi Blätter, 8 January 1865, 15 January 1865; St. Charles
Demokrat, 12 January 1865; Wächter am Erie, 14 January 1865. For Krekel’s understanding of his dual
role as representative of the German community and pragmatic mediator, see Westliche Post, 19 January
1865.
118
100
become one of the few men in Missouri who actively campaigned for its ratification.119
Two of the German delegates were absent on the day of the convention’s final vote, but
the remaining five simply could not stomach endorsing the draft before them. They
opposed the exclusion of non-white men from voting, but they objected to other
provisions as well. The new constitution would reduce the German influence in the
state’s legislature through the districting change, and it left open the possibility that the
state’s lawmakers would regulate issues of public morality such as drinking. In contrast
to the German delegates, the other men who voted against Drake disliked the
constitution’s concessions to African American rights, and they were especially outraged
at the lengths to which voters would have to go to prove their loyalty to the Union.120
German Radicals felt caught between Drake and the Conservatives in the battle
over ratification. They rejected Drake’s version of Radicalism and believed he was
hostile to German Americans. At the same time, they suspected the Conservatives of
disloyalty and considered their approach to citizenship reactionary.121 Despairing of the
constitution itself, German Radicals did not take a strong stand for or against its
ratification. Instead, men such as Preetorius tried to use the two-month campaign to
salvage the moral high ground and consolidate a German constituency around the ideal of
inclusive and participatory citizenship. In post-war Missouri, Radical German leaders
staked out a German-American political position that supported African American
119
Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 247.
For further discussion of the Conservative position, see Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 20-31
and chapter 4.
121
German Radicals openly struggled to weigh the merits of the constitution. See especially Westliche
Post, 15 April 1865, 19 April 1865, 25 April 1865, 3 May 1865, 6 June 1865; St. Charles Demokrat, 6
April 1865, 11 May 1865.
120
101
demands. They emphasized that the proposed constitution failed to protect the rights of
immigrants and freed people.
For all their misgivings, most German Radicals found it difficult to reject Drake’s
constitution outright. Ratification seemed the only way to protect Missouri from violence
and further rebellion. Arnold Krekel and the St. Charles Demokrat quickly decided that
the imperfect constitution was the only way to secure Radical power in the state.122 The
Demokrat would have liked African American men to be able to vote, but its editor
pointed out that the 1865 constitution was an improvement over the existing one, which
dated to 1820.123 Missouri Unionists remained very concerned about their disloyal
neighbors regaining political power. As the ratification campaign began, there was new
evidence of the threats facing the border state. On the weekend of April 15 and 16, as
Missourians were digesting the proposed constitution, they were stunned to learn Lincoln
had been assassinated. Closer to home, murders of African Americans in Missouri
increased markedly during early 1865.124 Sometimes Confederate sympathizers also
targeted Germans who were known for their Radicalism. Krekel was promoting the
constitution at a public meeting when his makeshift stage was set alight.125 Missouri’s
German Radicals sensed the dangers ahead if Conservatives came to power. Most of
them accepted that the “rebels” had relinquished their citizenship rights.
German Missourians made a range of arguments against ratification. D’Oench
and Busch continued to identify as Radicals, but they cooperated with the Conservatives
122
Drake, “Autobiography,” 1161; Westliche Post, 15 April 1865; St. Charles Demokrat, 13 April 1865.
St. Charles Demokrat, 27 April 1865, 4, 11, 18 May 1865.
124
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 106-07.
125
St. Charles Demokrat, 8 June 1865. For the targeting of German immigrants and the post-war
continuation of violence, see Fellman, Inside War, 70-71, 181, 231-42.
123
102
who objected most to the iron clad oath. They found hardly anything in the draft
constitution praiseworthy. The two St. Louis delegates signed an open letter protesting
the constitution primarily because of the oath’s potential to disqualify loyal voters.
German delegates supplied six of the nine signatures. This alliance between Missouri
Conservatives and German Radicals foreshadowed the Liberal Republican coalition that
would undermine Reconstruction in the state in a few years time. In 1865, however, two
of the German-born signatories distanced themselves from the Conservatives. Anton P.
Nixdorf of Miller County publicly disavowed his support of the letter, saying his name
had been included without his knowledge.126 Husmann strenuously distanced himself
from the Conservatives. He made it clear that he opposed the constitution because it left
African American men without the vote, not because it restricted Confederate
sympathizers; it was “not Radical enough.”127 Husmann’s Radicalism could not be
doubted. In a private letter to Governor Thomas Fletcher, he listed Krekel and Benjamin
Gratz Brown among “our weak kneed radical friends” who would vote for the
constitution despite it being “repugnant to every principle” they held.128
Husmann described the Westliche Post’s position on the constitution as
“doubtful.” Opposed to the document in principle, the influential paper vacillated on
ratification.129 Preetorius worried that Radical protests against the constitution only
126
Westliche Post, 15 April 1865. See also Westliche Post, 23 April 1865, 12 April 1865. Despite
Nixdorf’s steady opposition to Drake in the convention, he believed the constitution necessary. Westliche
Post, 27 April 1865.
127
“Nicht radical genug.” Westliche Post, 13 May 1865. Drake, “Autobiography,” 1083-84 also presents
Husmann’s position.
128
The letter is fire-damaged, obscuring part of Husmann’s signature (“Hus”), but it is in Husmann’s hand
and clearly reflects the shared political views and close relationship evidence in other letters. Husmann to
Thomas Fletcher, 5 May 1865, box 1, folder 16, Records of Governor Thomas Clement Fletcher, MSA.
129
Listing the Missouri newspapers’ positions, the Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt placed the
Westliche Post between the two columns representing supporters and opponents. 5 May 1865.
103
played into Conservative hands.130 The editor considered it necessary to disqualify
Confederate sympathizers from voting and public office, but he was uncomfortable with
the idea of writing such temporary exigencies into fundamental law.131 The Westliche
Post ran numerous contributions for and against the constitution, and wavered back and
forth in its editorial position. On election day, the editors summed up their assessment of
the whole issue. Nothing, they wrote, “can move us to endorse with our vote a
constitution in which freedom of belief as well as the equality of all people is not done
justice and which contains a districting division hostile to the influence Deutschtum is
entitled.” They remained, however, highly skeptical of the Conservatives: “No one
believes that the Conservative anti-constitutionalists are serious about the progressive
ideas they now profess. They will show their true face soon enough after the election,
and those Radical anti-constitutionalists who seek to substitute the old Radicals with their
new allies will soon find themselves bitterly disappointed.” The Westliche Post
acknowledged how damaging the split in the Radical Party had been and considered what
the following years would bring. “The guarantees of progress, prosperity and freedom in
Missouri,” according to the paper, “truly only lie, not a splintering, but only—we do not
get tired of repeating this—in a new, firm, and united joining of the Radical Union
Party.” It accepted its readers would “vote according to their conscience” on the
constitution.132
130
Westliche Post, 25 April 1865.
Westliche Post, 23 February 1865.
132
“… konnten uns bewegen, durch unsrer Stimme eine Constitution zu endorsen, die der
Gewissensfreiheit, so wie dem Principe der Gleichheit aller Menschen nicht gerecht geworden ist, und die
eine dem berechtigten Einflusse des Deutschthums feindlich Districtseintheilung enthält”; “Denn glaube
Niemand, daß es den conservativen Anticonstitutionellen Ernst sei um die Fortschrittsideen, als Bekenner
sie sich jetz geberden. Sie werden sich genug nach der Wahl ihr wahres Angesicht wieder zeigen, und
diejenigen radicalen Anti-Constitutionellen, die bei jenen neuen Bundesgenossen Ersatz für die alten
131
104
Election returns suggest that among the loyal Missourians who were qualified to
vote on ratification, German immigrants were less likely to support the constitution than
the native-born. Across the state, the document was ratified by a narrow margin of only
1,862 among a total of 85,478 votes cast.133 Missouri’s Union soldiers and rural voters
were most likely to support it.134 The minority of Missouri Germans who lived in rural
areas were clearly divided. Husmann opposed the constitution, but in Gasconade County,
59 percent of votes went for it. Perhaps it was an indication of his personal influence that
only 27 percent of the inhabitants in his own township supported the constitution.135
Krekel favored the constitution, but in St. Charles County, it garnered only 31 percent of
the votes cast.136 The county’s small German settlements of Augusta and New Melle
supported the document by wide margins, but the pro-constitution St. Charles Demokrat
did not identify a trend among Germans toward ratification. Disappointed, the Demokrat
reflected that some of the people who voted against it believed it would interfere with
their practice of their religious beliefs.137 The constitution received similar support—32
radicalen suchen, werden sich bald bitter enttäusche setzen”; “… wahrlich nicht in einer Zersplitterung,
sonder nur—wir werden dies zu wiederholen nicht müde—in einem neuen, festen und einigen
Zusammenschluß der radicalen Unionspartei liegen die Garantien für den Fortschritt den Wohlstand und
die Freiheit in Missouri”; “Stimmet nach Eurer Ueberzeugung.” Westliche Post, 6 June 1865.
133
The ratification vote was taken based on the suffrage requirements in the document. Voters were white
male citizens (and immigrant men who had declared their intention to become citizens) who took the iron
clad oath. Conservatives urged anyone who had not fought for the Confederacy to take the oath. As the
registration apparatus had not yet been developed, a large number of men who had in some way supported
the Confederacy probably voted in the referendum. Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 44-45.
134
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 48.
135
In Gasconade County the constitution passed 508 to 346. Husmann’s Roark Township voted against it,
84 to 222. Roark Township and Hermann shared the majority Swiss and German make-up of Boeuf
Township to the south, which only cast one vote against the constitution, indicating the results owed more
to Husmann’s personal leadership than voters’ origins. Office of the Secretary of State, Elections Division,
Election Returns, 1846-1992, box 10, folder 10, MSA; U.S. Census Bureau, Population Schedule of the
Eight Census of the United States 1860, manuscript returns for Gasconade County, Missouri.
136
The constitution received 512 votes to 1,133. St. Charles Demokrat, 15 June 1865.
137
Ibid.
105
percent—in St. Louis.138 Most of the heavily German wards returned results consistent
with the city-wide aggregates.139
In the absence of clear evidence as to why Germans opposed the constitution, the
Westliche Post suggested they took a Radical approach to citizenship. The election
showed, the paper editorialized, that one third of St. Louis voters supported the
constitution, one third rejected it because it was too “progressive,” and one third rejected
it because it was not “progressive” enough.140 It maintained that German immigrants
were the mainstay of this last group. Preetorius felt vindicated in November, when St.
Louis elected Joseph Weydemeyer, the German-born socialist and advocate of African
American suffrage, to the position of city auditor.141 Weydemeyer’s narrow victory
confirmed the existence of German Radicalism in the city. Radicalism also flourished
outside St. Louis. In 1866, St. Charles County elected a German man to the Missouri
legislature who reportedly considered African Americans his “political and social
equals,” and according to his opponents, would welcome a black son-in-law.142 German
Missourians elected Radicals who tried to eliminate racial qualifications for suffrage, but
it was unclear how they would have voted in a referendum specifically addressing
African American suffrage.143
138
The constitution received 5,322 votes while 11,248 votes were cast against it. Parrish, Missouri under
Radical Rule, 46.
139
See the tabulations in table 5 in the appendix. In the referendum, the constitution received 30 percent
support in the first ward (366 to 865) and 31 percent support in the second ward (319 to 722). Westliche
Post, 8 June 1865.
140
“Freisinnig.” Westliche Post, 8 June 1865.
141
Westliche Post, 10 November 1865. For Weydemeyer’s victory, see Westliche Post, 8 November
1865. For his position of African American suffrage, see Westliche Post, 8, 13, 14 September 1865;
Obermann, Joseph Weydermeyer.
142
Anzeiger des Westens, 1 November 1866, quoted in Helbich and Kamphoefner, eds., Deutsche im
amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg, 395.
143
Dwight, “Black Suffrage in Missouri,” 54-58.
106
In June 1865, German Radicals in Missouri had failed to enfranchise African
American men. As they had debated the issue, deep fault lines among Missouri Radicals
had emerged. Radicals’ fear of Confederate sympathizers had only just managed to
overcome the ethnic divides in their coalition. The strained relationship between Drake
and the Germans did not auger well for the future of their plan to put the injustice of
slavery and the violence of the Civil War years behind them. As the whole nation
confronted these tasks, however, German Missourians had already shown that immigrant
men’s citizenship could provide a template for African Americans. German-American
Radicalism with all its strengths and limitations would become part of the national
discussion of Reconstruction.
107
CHAPTER 3
“A PRINCIPLED ELEMENT”:
GERMAN-AMERICAN REPUBLICANS, 1865-1868
After a tense day of polling under clear autumn skies, about five thousand excited
Republicans gathered at a downtown Cleveland park on the evening of November 3,
1868 to hear the results of the presidential election come in over the Western Union
telegraph wire. Ohio had gone for the successful Republican presidential candidate,
Ulysses S. Grant. The popular former general had also scored a significant local victory,
winning over 60 percent of the total vote in Cleveland and majorities in four of its five
“German” wards.1 German Cincinnatians contributed to Grant’s win even more
decisively. Of the city’s five most German wards, four gave Grant greater winning
margins than he enjoyed in the city as a whole. All backed Grant more strongly than they
had Lincoln in 1860.2 In Missouri, St. Louis’s German wards yielded similar returns.3
Republican newspapers felt entitled to crow about these results.4 “It does the Deutschtum
1
I define Cleveland’s “German” wards as those where more than 30 percent of the white male residents
over twenty-one were German-born. See the table 1 in the appendix for details.
2
I use newspaper judgments as the basis of my definition See table 2.
3
St. Louis’s “German” wards are defined as wards where over 30 percent of the total population was
German-born based on an 1858 city census. See table 3. Missouri’s voter registration process disqualified
relatively few (697 of 32,635) St. Louis voters for disloyalty. Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 256.
4
“All honor to the brave German Republicans” wrote the Cincinnati Commercial, 5 November 1868.
Democratic papers confirmed the Republican inclination of German voters in Cincinnati in 1868. Steven J.
Ross, Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1788-1890 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 204. The Westliche Post maintained that the votes of St. Louis
Germans had ensured “all citizens of this great land may compete with each other on the path of progress.”
(“… alle Bürger dieses großen Landes auf der Bahn des Fortschritts mit einander wetteifern mögen.”)
Westliche Post, 4 November 1868.
108
in Cleveland particular credit,” the Wächter am Erie commented, “that in this election, by
a very large majority, it stood on the side of right, honesty, justice, and Grant.”5 The
election had confirmed Carl Schurz’s impression of German-American support. The
veteran Republican campaigner had judged, “Even in ’60 the spirit was not better.”6
While they may have exaggerated the Republicanism of German Americans,
Schurz and the newspapers alluded to an important phenomenon: German-born Ohioans
and Missourians who had joined the party before the war supported Grant in 1868. They
turned out for the Republicans in substantial numbers in the metropolitan centers of
Cincinnati and St. Louis, in some smaller Ohio cities such as Cleveland, Toledo, and
Sandusky, and in the swath of German settlement west from St. Louis through central
Missouri. It would be the last presidential election in which German Ohioans and
German Missourians would identify strongly with the Republican Party. When
immigrants cast ballots for Grant in 1868, they supported protecting African Americans’
civil and political rights in the former Confederate states. Congressional Republicans
developed their Reconstruction plans in response to the challenges of compelling former
Confederates to acknowledge the results of the war and fostering a free labor economy in
the place of slavery. The post-war climate played into the hands of a small number of
Radicals who believed that black men should be able to vote, and by 1868, the
Republican Party found itself committed to dramatically reshaping American citizenship
to eliminate racial distinctions. The Republican national platform only endorsed African
5
“Es gereicht dem Deutschthum in Cleveland zur besonderen Ehre, daß es in dieser Wahl mit einer sehr
großen Mehrheit auf Seite des Rechts, der Ehrlichkeit, der Gesetzlichkeit und Grants stand.” Wächter am
Erie, 4 November 1868. The same issue provides the account of election day.
6
“Selbst im Jahre 60 war der Geist nicht besser.” Schurz to Preetorius, Syracuse, 9 September 1868, reel
3, Schurz Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter LC), Washington, D.C. (microfilm edition, 1971).
109
American suffrage as a means to reconstruct the South, and Grant carefully avoided
commenting on the issue during the campaign, but Ohio and Missouri’s Republican
leaders would back referenda to enfranchise their black populations. To German
Americans, the Republican Party would come to stand for the ideal of participatory
citizenship for all American men.
This chapter focuses not on Republican policies, but on how German-speaking
Republicans in Ohio and Missouri represented Congressional Reconstruction.7 German
Republicans would adopt a Radical campaign strategy that I label a Republican “politics
of principle.” They built upon the inclusive and active idea of male citizenship that
German Radicals had pioneered in Missouri in 1865. German-speaking Republican
politicians would justify African American suffrage by appealing to the memory of the
war and the interests of white workers, but they would also argue that all male citizens
simply must be allowed to vote—on principle. Although they were hardly alone in
supporting universal manhood suffrage, German-born Republicans added a distinctive
element to Reconstruction. Anglo-American Republicans would routinely contrast
immigrants and African Americans. They presented African American voters as a
potential counterweight to ignorant and lazy immigrants—chiefly Catholics—who
supported the Democrats. German Radicals, on the other hand, would emphasize the
rights immigrants and African Americans shared as new citizens. They would denounce
racism, compare American and European theories of government, and frame African
American rights in terms of the immigrant experience. American citizenship, they would
7
As Michael Les Benedict observes, historians have spent more time scrutinizing the motives of
prominent Radicals than considering how voters responded to Republican arguments. Benedict, “The
Politics of Reconstruction,” in American Political History: Essays on the State of the Discipline, ed. John
F. Marszalek and Wilson D. Miscamble (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 54-107.
110
tell voters, must transcend both race and ethnicity. With their distinctive immigrant
perspective, German Americans reinforced the coherence of Radicalism as a theory of
citizenship.
Between 1865 and 1868, Radicalism would spread through German Republican
ranks. Those who supported enfranchising the freedmen—Carl Schurz for example—
would rise in the party while conservatives struggled to retain their constituents’ support.
Yet despite Republican advocacy of equal political rights, from 1863 to 1870, black
suffrage referenda would fail in numerous northern states that returned Republican
majorities. Like Anglo-American Republicans, some German Republicans would decline
to vote to enfranchise black men in Ohio in 1867 and in Missouri in 1868. This suggests
that the politics of principle involved a subtle relationship between ideals of citizenship
and German attitudes toward African Americans. Republican German Americans appear
to have found the principle of inclusive political citizenship attractive even if they did not
entirely welcome the prospect of black voters. Indeed, the politics of principle drew
power from the fact it was often attenuated from the practice of African American voting.
German Republicans would continue to judge the rights of citizenship in light of their
own experiences. Their commitment to broad, non-discriminatory citizenship did not
necessarily imply sympathy for African Americans.
*****
Throughout the northern and border states, a relatively small group of Radicals
managed to convince white Republicans who believed African Americans were inferior
to support black rights. The appeals Republicans used to win support for their
Reconstruction plans can be organized into the three rough categories of memory,
111
economic interests, and citizenship ideals.8 First, the raw memory of the conflict
influenced how Ohioans and Missourians reacted to Republican policies. Following the
end of the Civil War, they sensed that former Confederates and their sympathizers did not
accept its most obvious results: the preservation of the Union and emancipation. The
lenient attitude of Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, encouraged the
passage of defiant state laws, known collectively as Black Codes, in late summer and fall
of 1865. Varying by state, these acts restricted the freed people’s property ownership,
movement, and contract rights. Northerners also learned of assaults on and even murders
of black and white Unionists in the South, the sort of occurrences that were a continuing
concern in Missouri. Massive anti-black riots such as those in Memphis and New
Orleans in 1866 shocked Republicans around the country. The violence and
intransigence of white southerners allowed Radicals to promote the enfranchisement of
African American men as a measure necessary to vindicate and secure the Union
sacrifice.9 Such appeals would later be dismissed as “waving the bloody shirt,” a phrase
that suggested Republicans cynically used the memory of the war to partisan ends. In
8
David W. Blight uses this triad, writing, “Reconstruction was at once a struggle over ideas, interests, and
memory.” Blight uses memory much more subtly than I do, but I find his schematic useful. David W.
Blight, Race and Reunion, 51.
9
Blight interprets Reconstruction as “one long referendum on the meaning and memory of the verdict at
Appomattox,” in which Radical Republicans represented the “emancipationist” memory of the war. Blight,
Race and Reunion, 31, 2, 31-63. The Union veterans’ organization, the Grand Army of the Republic,
combined Radical politics and military commemoration during the years 1866 to 1872. Mary Dearing,
Veterans in Politics: The Story of the GAR (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952); James
N. Primm, “The G.A.R. in Missouri,” Journal of Southern History 20 (1954): 356-75; Elmer E. Noyes, “A
History of the Grand Army of the Republic in Ohio from 1866 to 1900” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University,
1945); Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), xiii-xiv.
112
those early years, however, Radicals used the fresh memory of the war to encourage
much needed protections for African Americans and other southern Unionists. 10
White Republicans’ perception of the country’s economic interests also
contributed to Radicals’ surprising success in advocating political citizenship for African
American men. Republicans in Missouri and Ohio were among those who hoped to
stabilize the southern economy as quickly as possible. Ohio would benefit from the
economic revival of the region fed by the Ohio River. Missourians hoped to shake the
stigma of slavery and attract immigration and industrial investment. St. Louis
ambitiously claimed the mantle of “Future Great City of the World.”11 In the late 1860s,
most Republicans believed that establishing a strong free labor system in the place of
slavery would pave the way for economic growth and social harmony.12 They were
reassured that recently enslaved African Americans exhibited the attributes upon which
free labor’s success depended. Republicans portrayed the freed people as hard-working
and committed to self-improvement despite white depredations.13 For many Republicans,
suffrage had the advantage of allowing African Americans to defend their economic
10
For a perceptive description of the aftermath of the war in 1865, see Eric L. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson
and Reconstruction (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1960), 15-41. Foner, Reconstruction, 487-88
provides a brief description of “bloody shirt” rhetoric.
11
The quotation comes from the title of a Reconstruction Era book: L.U. Reavis, Saint Louis: The Future
Great City of the World (St. Louis: C. R. Barns, 1876). Indicative of the post-war energy were the
campaign to move the U.S. capital to St. Louis, the completion of the first bridge across the Mississippi to
Illinois, and the attempt to attract new immigrants. Parrish, A History of Missouri, 3:198-232; Parrish,
Missouri under Radical Rule, 177-227; Norman L. Crockett, “A Study of Confusion: Missouri’s
Immigration Program, 1865-1916,” Missouri Historical Review 57 (1963): 248-60.
12
Foner, Reconstruction, 233-37; Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 6-40. Historians have
successfully refuted the interpretation that Radical Republicans were united by common business interests
and shared a position on tariffs, banks, and the currency. Stanley Coben, “Northeastern Business and
Radical Reconstruction: A Re-Examination,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 46 (1959): 67-90.
13
Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 10-14, 72-75.
113
rights with the least possible federal intervention. Political citizenship for African
Americans could safeguard Republicans’ economic interests and ideals.14
Republicans appealed to memory and interests to create support for African
American citizenship throughout the country, but Reconstruction was driven by radical
ideas. Radicals who were committed to black suffrage helped convert the memory of the
war and northerners’ understanding of their economic interests into policies that reshaped
American citizenship.15 Over Johnson’s veto, Republicans in Congress passed the Civil
Rights Act of 1866, which protected freed people’s legal, property, and contractual rights.
Later that year, they proposed the Fourteenth Amendment to write civil rights provisions
into the Constitution and overturn the controversial exclusion of blacks from American
citizenship that Roger Taney had promulgated in the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling in the
Dred Scott case. For the first time, the Constitution defined national citizenship as a
status based on birth or naturalization, and it prohibited states from abridging “the
privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” Republicans did not yet intend
to enfranchise black men, but the amendment proportionally reduced the Congressional
representation of states that denied adult men the vote.
Following reassuring mid-term Congressional elections in 1866, Republicans in
Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which included manhood suffrage as a
14
Ibid., 41-44, 72.
My interpretation here reflects the “revisionist” assessment of the motives of leading Republicans that
emerged among professional historians during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. For
historiographical summaries, see LaWanda Cox and John H. Cox, “Negro Suffrage and Republican
Politics: The Problem of Motivation in Reconstruction Historiography,” Journal of Southern History 33
(1967): 303-30; Larry Kincaid, “Victims of Circumstance: An Interpretation of Changing Attitudes Toward
Republican Policy Makers and Reconstruction,” Journal of American History 57 (1970): 48-66; Michael
W. Fitzgerald, “Reconstruction Politics and the Politics of Reconstruction,” in Reconstructions, ed. Brown,
91-116. Eric Foner’s Reconstruction represents a culmination of sorts of this interpretive school. For his
historiographical debts, see Foner, Reconstruction, xix-xx.
15
114
condition for the political reintegration of the former Confederate states. Although
Congressional Republicans only advocated black men’s political citizenship in the former
Confederacy until after the 1868 election, party leaders backed suffrage referenda within
northern and border states. In 1867, Republican legislatures in Ohio and Missouri
decided to place black male suffrage before voters, joining states such as Kansas,
Wisconsin, New York, Iowa, and Minnesota.16 Radicals had identified their party with
African American suffrage before they proposed the Fifteenth Amendment. In 1869, this
final Reconstruction amendment prohibited any state from denying citizens the right to
vote on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” 17 Although
women’s suffrage had come up in the debates enough to irritate German-born
Republicans, sex remained a legitimate basis for discrimination under the amended
Constitution.
To understand the national context for developments in Ohio and Missouri, it is
important to remember that Radical ideas were tempered before they were enacted into
law.18 Radicals were constrained by their own racism, constitutional conservatism, and
economic reservations. Their more moderate colleagues and the specter of a potentially
hostile northern electorate also acted as checks.19 Throughout Reconstruction, white
16
Only Iowa and Minnesota, both with small black populations, approved African American suffrage by
referendum during this period, and over fifteen states and territories rejected similar proposals. Historians
recognize, however, that a majority of northern white Republican voters supported African American
suffrage. See Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 89; Foner, Reconstruction, 223; Wang, The Trial of Democracy,
22; Gillette, The Right to Vote, 25-27.
17
For a useful summary of Congressional Republicans’ gradual acceptance of African American suffrage,
see Wang, The Trial of Democracy, 1-48.
18
The significant body of work that emphasizes the conservative limits of Reconstruction is labeled “postrevisionist.” See Foner, Reconstruction, xxi.
19
For the diversity of views among so-called Radicals and the effects of the political process on converting
their ideas into policies, see Benedict, Compromise of Principle. Michael Perman also provides a brief but
thoughtful description of how Radicals drove Republican policy but found their efforts frustrated by the
moderates and conservatives who far outnumbered them. Michael Perman, “The Politics of
115
Radicals compromised, stalled, and equivocated. They were quicker to implement
African American suffrage in southern states than in their own districts. Many northern
Republicans exposed themselves to charges of hypocrisy as they promoted African
American rights as a practical means to ensure loyalty in the states of the old
Confederacy.20 Although Republicans had accepted a more active central government
during the war, they were reluctant to increase federal power to the extent necessary to
protect political rights within states. By the time that legislation and constitutional
amendments had been subjected to the compromises of practical politics, they contained
moderate wording that would later impede enforcement.21 Furthermore, Radicals did not
even come close to uniting behind land redistribution, a policy that African Americans
hoped could secure the autonomy that would make their freedom meaningful.22 Such
economic intervention would have cut against their free labor ideology.
Reconstruction,” in A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction, ed. Lacy K Ford ( Malden, Mass.:
Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 330-31.
Many historians observe that Republicans feared racial equality was a losing issue, especially after
electoral defeats in 1867. See Michael Les Benedict, “The Rout of Radicalism: Republicans and the
Election of 1867,” Civil War History 18 (1972): 334-44. On Ohio, see Robert D. Sawrey, Dubious Victory:
The Reconstruction Debate in Ohio (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 115-19.
20
On balance, I consider Radicals ideologically motivated, but many historians have provided useful
reminders of the limits of Republican thought. For a broad presentation of Republican prejudice and
hypocrisy, see C. Vann Woodward, “Seeds of Failure in Radical Race Policy,” 125-47; and August Maier,
“Negroes in the First and Second Reconstructions of the South,” Civil War History 13 (1967): 114-30.
William Gillette argued that when northern Republicans did promote black suffrage, they were motivated
by the simple desire to profit from black votes. Gillette, The Right to Vote. Felice Bonadio similarly
maintained that Ohio Republicans cynically adopted the “black hobby” of African American suffrage to
gain an edge in contested counties. Bonadio, North of Reconstruction: Ohio Politics, 1865-1870 (New
York: New York University Press, 1970), 92-106. Robert Sawrey identifies a boarder range of motives,
including the hope to avoid hypocrisy. Sawrey, Dubious Victory, 101.
On the economic constraints on Republicans’ approach, see Stanley, From Consent to Contract,
Montgomery, Beyond Equality, and Foner, “Thaddeus Stevens, Confiscation, and Reconstruction,” in
Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War, ed. Foner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980),
128-49.
21
Benedict, “Preserving the Constitution”; Maltz, Civil Rights, the Constitution, and Congress.
22
Foner, Reconstruction, 102-10, 235-37, 309-11; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 398-404; Maier,
“Negroes in the First and Second Reconstructions of the South,” 120-21; Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our
Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2003), 129-59.
116
For all its limitations, Radicalism remained, as historian Eric Foner observes,
“first and foremost a civic ideology, grounded in a definition of American citizenship.”23
Like the German Americans in the Missouri constitutional convention of 1865, Radicals
rejected the notion that any man should be relegated to a second-class form of
citizenship. They believed that male citizenship necessarily included voting rights and
that if the United States was true to its republican ideals, the American nation could
incorporate people from a range of backgrounds. There are signs that this notion
appealed to many voters. In what one historian calls “a delicate dance with public
opinion,” Radicals made the ideal of race-neutral citizenship politically viable.24
Republican campaigners sometimes attempted to detach the notion of equal citizenship
rights from any specific reforms, but they could not ignore the fact that their party stood
for a redefinition of American citizenship even before the 1868 election. Some editors
and politicians provocatively chided the “cowardice and prejudice” of readers who did
not support suffrage.25 Given the existence of Republican voters who rejected suffrage
referenda in northern states and territories, it is tempting to conclude Republicans
retained national majorities despite their professed support of African Americans. Such
an interpretation does not, however, account for the intensifying references to the
23
Foner, Reconstruction, 233. See also Eric Foner, “Reconstruction Revisited,” Reviews in American
History 10, no. 4 (1982): 82-100.
24
Benedict, “The Politics of Reconstruction,” 80; Benedict, Compromise of Principle, 326. Benedict is
unusual in suggesting suffrage could work in Republicans’ favor issue despite voters’ racism. Studies of
individual northern states emphasize divisions among Republicans and voter racism. See Parrish, Missouri
under Radical Rule; Sawrey, Dubious Victory; Bonadio, North of Reconstruction; James C. Mohr, ed.,
Radical Republicans in the North: State Politics during Reconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1976). In contrast, a study of Iowa, which ratified black male suffrage in 1868,
demonstrates how Republicans successfully communicated the principle of racial equality to the electorate.
Robert R. Dykstra, Bright Radical Star: Black Freedom and White Supremacy on the Hawkeye Frontier
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 208-29.
25
See for example Cleveland Leader, 9 October 1867. I include German-language evidence below.
117
principle of equal political rights for all men. As a Radical senator from Kansas
recognized in 1869, “The strength of the Republican party consists in its adherence to
principle, and to that embodiment of its principles, equality of rights among men …. It
was that for which it was organized; and instead of being a source of weakness it is, in
my opinion, a source of strength and power.”26 Regardless of the extent of actual support
for black suffrage among leading Republicans, savvy politicians crafted an attractive
politics of principle. Pleas to implement freedom and equality appeared alongside
emotive appeals to the memories of wartime sacrifices and calculated references to
economic self-interest.
*****
The post-war fortunes of Friedrich Hassaurek demonstrate that a conservative
approach to Reconstruction citizenship failed to captivate German Republicans. Famous
for rallying immigrants against slavery, “popery,” and exploitative working conditions
before the war, Hassaurek returned to Cincinnati from his diplomatic post in Quito,
Ecuador in February 1866 a changed man. A bemused Democratic paper commented
that he had transformed from a Saul into a Paul.27 This Forty-Eighter had put his years of
activism behind him. He agreed with correspondents who referred disparagingly to the
Republicans who supported African American suffrage as “Reds” and “Radicalissimi.”28
The war had reinforced the radicalism of his contemporaries. They had spent four years
combating white southerners and moderate Republicans. Hassaurek, on the other hand,
26
Samuel C. Pomeroy, Congressional Globe, 40th Cong., 3rd sess., 708 (29 January 1869); quoted in
Benedict, Compromise of Principle, 326.
27
Columbus Westbote, 19 April 1866.
28
E. Lee to Hassaurek, Guayaquil, Ecuador, 8 June 1868; C. N. Riotte to Hassaurek, Washington, D.C., 9
April 1868, box 1, folder 5, Hassaurek Papers, OHS.
118
was out of touch with the mood among Ohio’s German-born Republicans.29 He was
assimilating, growing closer to the native-born leaders of the party than he was to his
constituents in German-speaking neighborhoods, which explains some of his creeping
conservatism.30 Ohio’s Anglo-American Republicans warmly accepted Hassaurek as “a
man of intellect and culture” whose “opinion is worth having.”31 Yet Hassaurek’s power
still rested on his leadership of German immigrants.32 Immediately on his return, he
bought a stake in the largest of Cincinnati’s German-language newspapers, the
Republican Volksblatt, and resumed the role of influential editor.33 His conservative
course was shaped by his mistaken conviction that the Republican Party would lose
German votes if it supported African Americans. His belief in the essential conservatism
29
Hassaurek sent at least some of his time in Quito writing a book on his experiences. Friedrich
Hassaurek, Four Years among Spanish-Americans (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1867). During the
war, Hassaurek’s wife also initiated much-publicized divorce proceedings against him on the grounds of
adultery. See Wittke, “Friedrich Hassaurek,” 11; papers in box 1, folder 4, Hassaurek Papers, OHS.
Hassaurek’s correspondence displays his interest in partisan patronage. He sought positions for himself
and his half-brother. For example, see William Penn Nixon to Hassaurek, 23 February 1866, box 2, folder
8; John Sherman to Hassaurek, Washington, D.C., 6 January 1867, box 2, folder 8; Hassaurek to
Rutherford B. Hayes, Cincinnati, 28 March 1869, box 2, folder 10, Hassaurek Papers, OHS.
30
Carl Wittke maintained Hassaurek’s life followed a pattern typical of Forty-Eighters of “gradual
Americanization, and the conversion of rabid young radicals into conservative, successful citizens.”
Wittke, “Friedrich Hassaurek,” 2. Bruce Levine, who makes a Radical hero of Hassaurek during the
antebellum years, endorses the interpretation that growing prosperity and “Americanization” among the
Forty-Eighters contributed to their “conservative drift.” Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 264.
31
Silas Tressadeau to William Henry Smith, Dayton, 13 March 1866, folder 2, William Henry Smith
Papers, OHS. Hassaurek’s associates and correspondents included Senator John Sherman, future president
Rutherford B. Hayes, Congressman James Ashley, and influential Republicans Murat Halstead and Donn
Piatt.
32
His Anglo-American Republican correspondents often asked for favorable billing in his newspaper. See
James Ashley to Hassaurek, Toledo, 15 September 1868, box 2, folder 8, Hassaurek Papers, OHS.
Republicans saw him as a representative of the “German element.” See for example W. Howells to
William Henry Smith, Jefferson, Ohio, 7 May 1867, folder 4, William Henry Smith Papers, OHS.
33
Unfortunately, the Volksblatt for this period has not survived, but its positions were reported in other
Cincinnati papers and the Westliche Post.
119
of German-born voters featured in his exchanges with the Volksblatt’s Washington
correspondent and Ohio Senator John Sherman.34
Assuming that German immigrants rejected racial equality, Hassaurek resisted the
Republican Party’s movement toward suffrage. As early as 1864, Hassaurek had
indicated that he expected that abolition would be the extent of Republican commitment
to African Americans. Once emancipation was achieved, he suggested, the reason for the
party’s existence would disappear.35 In 1866, Hassaurek defended Andrew Johnson
against escalating criticism as the president vetoed bills reauthorizing the Freedmen’s
Bureau and protecting civil rights in February and March.36 Discerning the swing toward
the Democrats in upcoming local elections, he hoped that a version of the Union Party,
led by Johnson and appealing to Democrats, would hold together.37 When that became
impossible, he allied with conservative and moderate Ohio Republicans in an effort to
keep black enfranchisement off the party’s state platform in 1867.38 Hassaurek’s actions
brought him into conflict with more radical German Republicans. When former general
August Willich, encouraged by J.B. Stallo, entered the race for county auditor in
34
C.N. Riotte to Hassaurek, Washington, D.C., 9 April 1868, box 1, folder 5, Hassaurek Papers, OHS;
Hassaurek to John Sherman, 27 January 1868, John Sherman Papers, Library of Congress, quoted in
Sawrey, Dubious Victory, 121.
35
Hassaurek, “Philosophical Dissertation on the Issues of 1864,” box 2, folder 7, Hassaurek Papers, OHS.
36
Cincinnati Commercial, 13 March 1866; Westliche Post, 10, 24, 30 March 1866.
37
Westliche Post, 30 March 1866. For excerpts from an anti-Radical editorial in the Volksblatt later that
year, see Westliche Post, 11 September 1866.
38
J.D. Cox to Hassaurek, Columbus, 13 May 1867; Rufus Spalding to Hassaurek, Washington, D.C.,
December 1867, box 2, folder 8, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. Hassaurek also had strong ties to Heinrich
Börnstein, whom he employed as European correspondent for the Volksblatt. Börnstein’s conservatism had
alienated him from Missouri German Republicans.
In 1868, Hassaurek drafted a version of the Ohio Republican platform that spoke of
Reconstruction only in generalities. See Rutherford B. Hayes to Hassaurek, Columbus, 14 February 1868,
19 February 1868, box 2, folder 10; William H. West to Hassaurek, Columbus, 14 February 1868; S. J.
Critfield to Hassaurek, Columbus, 18 February 1868, box 2, folder 8, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. See also
William Penn Nixon to Hassaurek, Washington, D.C., 23 February 1866, box 2, folder 8, Hassaurek
Papers, OHS.
120
Cincinnati’s Hamilton County, Hassaurek made the conspicuous decision not to support
him. Willich won anyway. 39 Behind the scenes, Hassaurek tried to negotiate the sale of
the Cleveland Wächter am Erie in order to displace its long-time editor and owner, the
Radical August Thieme. In challenging Thieme’s leadership, Hassaurek hoped to
reorient Ohio’s German Republicanism along conservative lines.40
Yet Hassaurek had miscalculated the mood of Ohio’s German Republicans.
Thieme refused to sell his paper or abandon his opinions. Hassaurek, on the other hand,
reluctantly adjusted his arguments to accommodate the party’s direction. In April 1867,
the Republican legislature decided to allow Ohio men to vote on the issue of
enfranchisement, and the Republicans became the party of universal male suffrage.41 In
the weeks before the referendum, Hassaurek informed a German crowd in Cleveland that
“universal suffrage” was necessary. His two-hour speech demonstrated that the Radical
idea of race-neutral citizenship could build on northern anger at apparently unrepentant
white southerners. Johnson and the Democrats, he argued, encouraged the “aristocrats of
the South,” who continued to threaten the safety of the Union and “strove to maintain
slavery under another name.” He spoke of citizenship in terms that related to the
immigrant experience. Sounding like his Radical Landsmänner, Hassaurek compared the
citizenship of immigrants and African Americans and contrasted the status of the
American citizen to the European subject. He explained that the United States was “‘a
39
The Westliche Post supported Willich and described Hassaurek as a wirepuller (“Drahtzieher”).
Westliche Post, 7 August 1866. See also Cincinnati Volksfreund, 14 October 1866; Easton, The Ohio
Hegelians, 197.
40
Rufus Spalding to Hassaurek, Washington, D.C., 29 January 1868; Rufus Spalding to Hassaurek,
Washington, D.C., 4 February 1868, box 2, folder 8; Louis Smithnight to Hassaurek, Cleveland, 18
February 1868; August Thieme to Hassaurek, Cleveland, 8 February 1868, box 1, folder 5, Hassaurek
Papers, OHS.
41
His Democratic opponents noted Hassaurek’s shifting position. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 30, 31
September 1867, 7 October 1867.
121
free nation,’ that is a nation the laws of which grant equal political rights to whites or
blacks, immigrants or native-born.” A vote for the Democrats would be a vote for
version of the European system German Americans had implicitly rejected through
migration—“an aristocracy of race.”42
Employing the German-American politics of principle did not make Hassaurek a
Radical. His speeches often revolved around accusations that Democrats were traitorous,
barbarous, and financially irresponsible.43 Hassaurek also continued to express his
prejudices. A fellow Republican told him that a comment he made in 1868 “expresses
my sentiments so exactly …. If a nigger gets his throat sque[e]zed … a law is pen[n]ed
that niggers’ throats must not be squeezed.”44 Conservative Republican politicians
throughout the Union took the calculated move of supporting African American suffrage
referenda and Grant for president. Hassaurek’s own calculations were finely tuned to the
mood of the German electorate. While this sensitivity would later motivate him to leave
the Republican camp, in 1867 and 1868 it led him to use idealistic language in support of
African American suffrage.
Hassaurek’s shift away from conservative politics indicates the trend toward
radical campaigning in German Republican circles by 1868. The Cincinnati editor
followed the lead of more prominent German-born Republicans who were quicker to
oppose Johnson’s Reconstruction policies. Franz Sigel had become the Union’s most
famous German-American general after his role at Camp Jackson. Despite doubts about
42
“Die Nothwendigkeit des allgemeinen Stimmrechts”; “die Aristokratie des Südens streben nach
Beihaltung von Sklaverei unter einem anderen Names”; “‘Wir sind eine freie Nation,’ das heißt eine
Nation, deren Gesetze gleiche politische Rechte gewährt für Weiße oder Schwarze, Einwanderte oder für
Geborene”; “eine Aristokratie der Race.” Wächter am Erie, 13 September 1867.
43
Ibid.; Cincinnati Commercial, 27 September 1867, 11 October 1867.
44
E. Lee to Hassaurek, Guayaquil, 11 March 1868, box 1, folder 5, Hassaurek Papers, OHS.
122
his military effectiveness, he had risen to the status of ethnic icon. In 1865, Sigel moved
to Baltimore, where he used his fame to campaign against Johnson and for Republicans
who endorsed enfranchising the freedmen.45 The Turnverein also retained its wartime
Radicalism and supported African American suffrage before the 1868 election. The
central committee of the North American Turnerbund circulated a call for Germans to
vote Republican to “secure one of the greatest political and social revolutions in favor of
freedom.” The organization intended to continue to pursue the nationalistic and
democratic goals they had adopted in Germany in “the new fatherland.”46 More
moderate German Republicans joined the resistance to President Johnson after his early
1866 vetoes. Illinoisans Gustav Körner and Friedrich Hecker, the influential Chicago
Illinois Staatszeitung, and the New Yorker Abendpost were not at the forefront of black
suffrage, but they accepted the direction that Congress and the party followed.47
Among Johnson’s early critics, the Westliche Post, the Wächter am Erie, and the
St. Charles Demokrat made the arguments that prevailed among German Republicans.
These Radical papers in Missouri and Ohio advocated a slow and thorough reconstruction
of the seceded states. From the outset they were skeptical that the mere abolition of
slavery would prove sufficient to transform southern society.48 By June 1865, the three
papers worried that Johnson’s policies were encouraging resistance and violence. On
45
Engle, Yankee Dutchman, 212-17. Sigel’s Baltimore newspaper foundered, and he moved to New York
in 1867.
46
“... zur Sicherung einer der großartigen politischen und socialen Umwälzung zu Gunsten der Freiheit.”
Wächter am Erie, 28 September 1868; Westliche Post, 25 January 1866; St. Charles Demokrat, 10 October
1868.
47
Neither Körner nor Hecker actively campaigned for Grant in 1868. Freitag, Friedrich Hecker, 305;
Koerner, Memoirs of Gustav Koerner, 2:458, 481-82; Wittke, The German-Language Press, 155; Westliche
Blätter, 9 March 1866.
48
Westliche Post, 26 January 1865; Wächter am Erie, 29 March 1865, 12 April 1865; St. Charles
Demokrat, 6 July 1865, 20 July 1865, 10 August 1865, 14 September 1865.
123
June 22, the St. Louis Westliche Post observed that loyal former slaves appeared to be
struggling while their traitorous former owners thrived.49 A few days later, it called on
Republicans in Congress to assume leadership of Reconstruction and work toward
“negro” suffrage.50 At first, the Westliche Post argued that although the Constitution
placed suffrage under the control of the states, its spirit, interpreted in light of the
Declaration of Independence, empowered Congress to safeguard citizenship rights.51 The
Democratic Anzeiger des Westens could not let this go unchallenged. After a protracted
debate with its cross-town rival, the Post’s editors took the position common among
Radicals that Congress had the power to legislate African American voting under the
Constitution’s guarantee of “a Republican form of Government” within each state.52 It
retorted that the Anzeiger engaged in “Constitutionshumbug,” a term that encapsulated
the idea that the Democrats used technical appeals to constitutional limits on federal
power to avoid the more fundamental issue of how citizenship should function.53 The
Wächter am Erie also accepted federal intervention to implement suffrage rights. It
advocated treating Confederate states as conquered territories until Congress had a
chance to amend the Constitution.54
Radical editors did not suppose that the majority of German Republicans
automatically shared their opinions, but they saw the persuasive potential of their
49
Westliche Post, 22 June 1865.
Ibid. See also 12 July 1865, 23 August 1865, 24 August 1865, and 29 September 1865. The call for
Congressional action and African American suffrage was repeated at public meetings of “German
Radicals.” For reports, see Wächter am Erie, 31 May 1865; St. Charles Demokrat, 7 December 1865;
Westliche Post, 20 January 1866.
51
Westliche Post, 20, 28 July 1865.
52
Westliche Post, 1 August 1865, 7 October 1865, 27 November 1866; Woechentlich Westliche Post, 23
January 1867. For the same position outside St. Louis, see St. Charles Demokrat, 11 January 1866.
53
Westliche Post, 30 September 1865. For similar sentiment, see Westliche Post, 2 March 1867.
54
Wächter am Erie, 3, 28 June 1865.
50
124
arguments. They incorporated political citizenship for African Americans into a platform
that drew upon their constituents’ memory of the war and economic interests. Like
Anglo-American Republicans, they emphasized that former Confederates and their
Missouri supporters must acknowledge the Union’s military victory. As the St. Charles
Demokrat asked more than once, “Should we reap the fruits of our victory or the rebels?”
The newspaper recognized the attraction of restoring citizenship rights to all southern
whites, but it considered Johnson’s rush to amnesty premature and even dangerous.
Missouri Radicals felt threatened by “rebels” who might take loyalty oaths without
feeling remorse for their actions or a sense of allegiance to the restored Union. The
Demokrat went on to connect the memory of the war to African American rights. It
reported that “‘ex’-rebels” engaged in “barbaric persecution and mishandling of the freed
slaves.”55 The Radical papers consistently described opposition to African American
rights as the type of “unregenerate” behavior that had caused the Civil War and cost
hundreds of thousands of lives.56 In order to prove their own readiness for citizenship,
white southerners must respect the citizenship of African Americans. By ignoring this
fact, they maintained, Johnson was dismissing the principle for which “the people [had]
fought, suffered, and finally triumphed.”57 As Johnson’s presidential term wore on,
55
“Sollen wir die Früchte unseres Sieges ernten oder die Rebellen?”; “Bürgerrecht”; “barbarische
Verfolgung und Mißhandlung der freigelassen Sklaven.” St. Charles Demokrat, 20 July 1865. For another
reference to the “fruits of victory,” see St. Charles Demokrat, 12 October 1865.
56
“Unverbesserlich.” St. Charles Demokrat, 10 August 1865. See also St. Charles Demokrat, 15
February 1866, 28 November 1867; Wächter am Erie, 15 November 1865; Westliche Post, 12 July 1865,
27 September 1865.
57
“Das Volk [hatte] gekämpft, gelitten und endlich gesiegt.” St. Charles Demokrat, 12 October 1865.
125
Radicals became more insistent that all along the North had fought for the “re-shaping of
the South according to the spirit of freedom, human rights, and real democracy.”58
Radical Germans also maintained that empowering African Americans was in the
interests of white workers. Recalling their antebellum arguments about slave labor,
Radicals in Missouri and Ohio argued white workers were at a competitive disadvantage
to those who labored under violent and legal coercion. Emancipation had not secured a
free labor system but an absurd caricature of it.59 The Wächter am Erie used the example
of the British West Indies to argue that abolition alone did not transform an economic
system. Workers must be “given the opportunity to become intelligent citizens.” Armed
with political rights, “the colored population” could “contribute to enriching the
nation.”60 The Radicals agreed that “restricting the franchise to opponents of free
labor”—southern whites as a group—would have the opposite effect.61 In 1868, the St.
Charles Demokrat reprinted an editorial from the Texas Freie Press that sketched the
difficulties of implementing Congressional Reconstruction in the Lone Star State. It
observed that the “slaveholding aristocracy” had given up slavery but not the intent to
control the overwhelmingly black “working class” in the state. The author held out hope
that treating every worker “as a member of political society” would rectify the situation.62
58
“Neugestaltung des Südens im Sinne der Freiheit, der Menschenrechte und ächten Demokratie.” St.
Charles Demokrat, 11 April 1867. In 1868, evidence supporting Radicals’ predictions only mounted as
reports of organized terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan appeared. St. Charles Demokrat, 23
April 1868; Westliche Post, 29 April 1868, 6 May 1868.
59
Westliche Post, 6 September 1865, 1, 21, 30 November 1865, 12 January 1866; Wächter am Erie, 2
September 1865, 9 August 1865.
60
“Falls … ihr die Geglegenheit geboten wird, intelligenter Bürger zu werden… wird die farbige
Bevölkerung dazu beitragen, das Land zu bereichen.” Wächter am Erie, 28 June 1865.
61
“… das Stimmrecht auf die Gegner der freien Arbeit beschränken.” Woechentlich Westliche Post, 30
October 1867. Many editorials connected the franchise to the protection of free labor. See St. Charles
Demokrat, 11 April 1867.
62
“Sklavenhalter-Aristokratie”; “… als ein Glied der staatlichen Gesellschaft.” St. Charles Demokrat, 9
April 1868.
126
Republicans cast African American citizenship as an economic measure in the interests of
the national economy and workers in particular. Free labor ideology conceived of the
two as harmoniously entwined.
Sensing labor conflict’s divisive potential, Republicans steadfastly held that the
“worker question” and the “negro question” were one and the same.63 In the short-term,
this effort was successful. In April 1865, the Westliche Post fought off a challenge for
working-class German votes from the Independent Workingmen’s Ticket in St. Louis
municipal elections. The third party ran a compelling enough campaign among German
immigrants that the Westliche Post printed an extra election special.64 It warned
workers—“Arbeiter, Achtung!”—that the slate was a Conservative conspiracy.65 The
single-issue party was indeed anti-black, and it probably lost the mayoral race because
German St. Louisans did not accept its racism.66 In Cincinnati, conservative forces more
clearly engineered the election of Workingmen’s candidate Samuel F. Cary to Congress
in 1867. Democrats did not run a candidate against Cary in hopes he could attract some
German Republican support.67 This tactic indicates that there was a group of German-
63
“Arbeiterfrage”; “Negerfrage.” Wächter am Erie, 2 September 1865. For the dilemma labor conflict
posed Republicans directly following the war, see David Montgomery, Beyond Equality; Richardson, The
Death of Reconstruction, 64-65; Richardson, West from Appomattox, 64-66; Foner, Reconstruction, 47588; Richard Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in
Chicago, 1864-97 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 17-68. Other works attentive to the
intersections of race, labor, and ethnicity in the Reconstruction politics of the North include Quigley, The
Second Founding, and Beckert, The Monied Metropolis.
64
The labor newspaper representing the party claimed a circulation of 20,000 and included some Germanlanguage material. David Roediger, “Racism, Reconstruction, and the Labor Press: The Rise and Fall of the
St. Louis Daily Press, 1864-1866,” Science and Society 42 (1978): 159, 163-64.
65
Mississippi Blätter, 2 April 1865; Westliche Post, 3 April 1865. It was relieved at the Radical victory.
Westliche Post, 4 April 1865.
66
Roediger, “Racism, Reconstruction, and the Labor Press,” 168.
67
Ross, Workers on the Edge, 202-03. The Cincinnati Volksfreund announced that the Democrats would
not run against Cary and championed his candidacy. It emphasized that Cary represented an independent
movement and printed notices by Cary’s committee describing its desire to win German-born Republicans.
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 23 September 1867, 5 October 1867.
127
born, working-class Republicans who would sooner vote for a Workingmen’s candidate
than a Democrat. Republicans still remained competitive among German-born urban
workers. Men such as Willich and Weydermeyer continued to combine labor activism
and radical positions on race within the Republican Party.68 Furthermore, the Democratic
Party was not an unambiguous choice for men attracted to organized labor. Both major
parties claimed to represent workers’ interests, the Republicans with their promotion of
free labor and the Democrats with their opposition to government spending that
subsidized the business interests.”69 Yet newspapers representing both parties opposed
class conflict, strikes, and government regulation of working conditions.70 In the election
of 1868, they were differentiated by their positions on race and Reconstruction, not on
labor.
Radical editors believed that Republicans could win German votes through “a
firm insistence on principles,” including “granting voting rights to all loyal citizens
without distinction of race, color, or ancestry.”71 Scarcely an editorial on Reconstruction
failed to cite such abstract ideals. German Americans conceded that some Republicans
68
Easton, The Ohio Hegelians; Obermann, Joseph Weydermeyer; Levine, The Spirit of 1848.
Weydermeyer died of Cholera in August 1866.
69
German Democrats campaigning routinely depicted the Republicans as supporters of African Americans
and the “monied aristocracy” and called on “German workers” to realize that they did not share the
interests of these groups. See for example Cincinnati Volksfreund, 23 January 1866; Columbus Westbote, 5
November 1868; Fremont Courier, 3 October 1867, 27 August 1868.
70
On the Republican side, the Westliche Post urged artisans and laborers to form cooperatives to pool their
buying power and develop savings and insurance schemes. Westliche Post, 7 January 1865. The Wächter
am Erie was more supportive of workers’ organization than the other two papers, but it dissuaded workers
from class-based political mobilization. See the issues of 6 August 1865, and 13 September 1867. The St.
Charles Demokrat took a somewhat detached position. See for example 9 May 1867.
Among Democrats, the Cincinnati Volkfreund remained abstract in its support of “workers” and
neutral on eight-hour day legislation during the period 1865 to 1868. Cincinnati Volkfreund, 14 July 1865,
22 February 1866, 23 September 1867. The Anzeiger in St. Louis was firmly opposed to labor organization
and regulating working hours. Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 5 April 1866, 16 August 1866, 9 May
1867.
71
“Eine festes Beharren auf den Grundsätzen …”; “Stimmberechtigung für alle loyalen Bürger ohne
Unterschied der Rasse, Hautfarbe oder Herkunft.” St. Charles Demokrat, 4 November 1867.
128
might support African American suffrage mostly out of a desire to punish former
Confederates, but “principle” held special appeal for German voters.72 An 1867 editorial
in the Westliche Post provides a convenient summary of the arguments Radicals directed
at German Americans. Black suffrage, the paper editorialized, would complete the task
German immigrants had begun when they joined the Republican Party. The St. Louis
newspaper linked Radicalism to ethnic pride:
The Germans have stood from the beginning as a strongly principled element in
the Republican Party. Keeping its great objective firmly in sight, they
consistently marched in the most advanced columns. With few exceptions, they
have not been blinded by the benefits of the spoils of power, but have practiced a
free, independent critique whenever the party threatens to become untrue or
unworthy of its great goal. So they have become a moral power, and have, in the
course of events, exercised a powerful influence …. This influence is today as
necessary as it ever was.73
Radicals sometimes appeared more firmly committed to the principle of raceneutral citizenship than to its practice. German immigrants seemed more comfortable
with abstract principles than they were with the reality of black political power. The
dichotomy between principle and practice had surfaced in 1865 in Missouri when
Radicals made it clear that they would accept delays or literacy requirements as long as
the state constitution did not insert the word “white” as a qualification for voters. The
Wächter am Erie made the difference between principle and practice clear during Ohio’s
black suffrage referendum in 1867. Trying to keep balky Republicans in line, Radical
72
St. Charles Demokrat, 6, 13 December 1866; Westliche Post, 21 January 1866, 3 November 1868. For
other disavowals of vindictiveness, see Wächter am Erie, 12 April 1865; Westliche Post, 21 November
1865.
73
“Die Deutschen haben von Anfang an in der republikanischen Partei gestanden als ein streng
prinzipielles Element. Ihre groszen Endzwecke fest im Auge haltend, sind sie beständig in der
vorgeschrittensten Colonne marchirt. Mit wenigen Ausnahmen haben sie nicht von den Vortheilen des
Gewaltbesitzes verblenden lassen, sondern haben eine freie unabhängige Kritik geübt, so oft die Partei
ihren großen Zwecken untreu oder unwürdig zu werden drohte. So sind sie eine moralische Macht
geworden und haben auf den Gang der Ereignisse einen gewaltigen Einflusz ausgeübt …. Dieser Einfluß
ist heute so nötig, wie er es jemals war.” Woechentlich Westliche Post, 8 May 1867.
129
Ohio Senator Benjamin F. Wade reassured them that the proposed constitutional
amendment was “of no practical significance” given the state’s small black population.
The German paper repeated the comment and pointedly approved it. The Wächter agreed
with Wade that the question was primarily of “great significance in principle.”74 The
implicit message to Cleveland Germans was that they could vote for this “thing of honor”
safely because it would not have any substantive effect.75
In Radical minds, the opposite of principle was not practice but prejudice.
Apparently unafraid of alienating voters, Radicals confronted prejudice—as they
understood it—head on. They used a variety of tactics. First, they described racism as an
impediment to the ideal of a self-governing republic peopled by free and equal male
citizens. Second, they ridiculed the Democratic understanding of the United States as a
“white man’s country” and the Democrats’ use of the “nigger issue.”76 Hardly ever
printing the word “nigger,” Radicals implied that its use by Democrats conveyed their
crassness and spite.77 Only “Democratic Demagogues,” according to the Westliche Post,
stooped to such scurrilous appeals to German voters. Third, the editors sought to counter
any attempts to pit immigrants and African Americans against each other. In sum, the
paper dismissed the suggestion that black enfranchisement would be “a scandal against
its own dignity that the superior white race cannot tolerate.” The Westliche Post believed
74
“Von keiner practischen Bedeutung”; “Von große principieller Bedeutung.” Wächter am Erie, 12
September 1867.
75
“Ehrensache.” Wächter am Erie, 5 October 1867.
76
Wächter am Erie, 21 September 1867, 7 November 1867, 5 September 1868; Westliche Post, 4 August
1865, 19 January 1866, 9 June 1868, 18 September 1868; St. Charles Demokrat, 22 October 1868.
77
In their own articles, they usually used the terms “negro man” (“Neger”) and “colored man” (“Farbiger”)
to refer to African Americans. “Black man” (“Schwarzer”) only occasionally appeared. German speakers
feminized these nouns only when referring specifically to women, for example, “Negerin” (“negro
woman”).
130
that the Germans who allowed themselves “to be caught in such nets” would
“demonstrate their own pitiful deficiency.”78
While many German immigrants remained loyal to the Democratic Party, the
Radicals’ ideas gained ground among German Republicans. The Republican Congress
and Republican state conventions sponsored policies that would transform American
citizenship, and men such as Hassaurek adopted the justifications Radicals had been
using since 1865. The principle of racial equality was an integral part of the Republican
effort to win elections in Ohio and Missouri. German-born politicians frequently tied this
principle to immigrants’ experience of participating in the Revolutions of 1848, of
claiming American citizenship, and of fighting for the Union. On the eve of Grant’s
election, August Willich demonstrated how African American citizenship featured in
German Republican campaigning.79 He addressed Cleveland Germans at overflowing
rallies where a veterans’ organization, the Grant Boys in Blue, sang and paraded with
torches. Even after Ohioans had defeated African American suffrage in the referendum
of 1867, the “celebrated warrior” made black citizenship the centerpiece of the “world
historical” efforts that had involved German Americans in two continents.80 The German
duty to uphold the “principle that all people are born equal” began in “the struggle for
freedom in the old fatherland” in 1848, Willich insisted. He placed Reconstruction in the
78
“Ein Skandal, den die höhere weiße Rasse ihrer eigenen Würden wegen nicht dulden darf”; “Die
Deutschen aber, welche sich mit solchen Körbern fangen ließen, würden sich ein erbärmliches
Armutszeugniß ausstellen.” Woechentlich Westliche Post, 30 October 1867. For a similar rejection of
Democratic race politics, see St. Charles Demokrat, 22 October 1868.
79
Willich’s appearance was typical of rallies that combined military commemoration and political
mobilization. In St. Louis, anniversaries of the defeat of Camp Jackson attracted thousands of German
immigrants, and in St. Charles County, veterans attended annual reunions at Camp Krekel. The speeches
delivered at such occasions filled newspaper columns, often augmented with eye-witness accounts of the
festivities. Westliche Post, 11 May 1866, 11 May 1868; Westliche Post, 22 May 1867; St. Charles
Demokrat, 9, 16 August 1866, 13 August 1868.
80
“Unser gefeierte Krieger”; “Welthistorisch.” Wächter am Erie, 30 September 1868.
131
context of all the nineteenth-century’s upheavals aimed at creating nations controlled by
enfranchised male citizens. He compared white southerners to English aristocrats, the
House of Hapsburg, and the Pope. German-American Democrats had not shaken their
European “feeling of dependence,” he charged. Yet Willich assumed that most German
Americans stood on the side of “progress.” They would, he predicted, “continue to act
for the dominance of the German spirit, in accordance with complete freedom.”81
Contributing to the triumph of Republican policies would bring honor to German
Americans.
As Willich’s addresses indicate, African American suffrage often seemed to be all
about German Americans. German Radicals distained prejudice, but their support for
black political rights was not grounded in the aspirations of the freed people. Although
Republican newspapers reported violence against African Americans with outrage, they
focused on distant atrocities occurring “in the South.”82 Even the Missouri newspapers
provided little coverage of the violence blacks faced closer to home.83 They also
neglected to report the efforts of local African Americans to mobilize politically,
organize schools and churches, and achieve economic independence.84 The Demokrat’s
81
“... dem Grundsatze: ‘Alle Menschen sind gleich geboren’”; “ die Kämpfe der Freiheit im alten
Vaterlande”; “Abhängigkeitsgefühl”; “Die Deutschen des Landes, aber, welche, in ihrer großen Mehrheit
auf Seiten des Fortschritts stehen ... werden fortfahren für die Herrschaft des deutschen Geistes im Sinne
vollkommener Freiheit zu wirken.” Wächter am Erie, 29 September 1868.
82
For example, St. Charles Demokrat, 7 February 1867.
83
Eager to attract immigrants and investments, the Radicals were probably unwilling to tar Missouri as
violent and backward. No lead editorial in the Westliche Post or St. Charles Demokrat focused on local
racial violence from 1865 to Grant’s election. For evidence this represented a significant oversight, see
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 106-10; Michael Fellman, “Emancipation in Missouri,” Missouri
Historical Review 83 (1988): 36-56; John S. Hughs, “Lafayette County in the Aftermath of Slavery, 18611870,” Missouri Historical Review 75 (1980): 51-63.
84
The question of African American expectations of freedom beyond Missouri has produced a rich
literature. There is a general consensus that while African American valued education and political rights,
their politics were grounded in aspirations for personal and community autonomy distinct from the free
labor ideology articulated by white Republicans. See especially, Foner, Reconstruction; and Hahn, A
132
account of the celebration of the second anniversary of the founding of the St. Charles
“colored” mutual aid organization was an exception. The paper condescendingly noted
that the invited speaker, Charles Tandy, was of above average education (“Bildung”) and
spoke correctly and fluently. The Demokrat approved of the way that he encouraged
members of his audience to make themselves “worthy” of citizenship and the franchise
through cultivating their “spirits” and “characters.” The editor was particularly gratified
that Tandy acknowledged the German contribution to emancipation in Missouri.85 The
Westliche Post also turned “the superb speech by the well known colored agitator [John
Mercer] Langston from Ohio” into an occasion for German-American selfcongratulation.86 The editors emphasized that only a small number of Anglo-Americans
attended the Radical meeting. Once again it was German Americans who “contentiously
practice[d] their rights and duties as free citizens,” the Post observed smugly.87
German-American depictions of African Americans reflected their preoccupation
with their own interests. Like many Anglo-Americans, German-American Republicans
Nation under Our Feet, 6-8. For historiography developments since Foner’s synthesis, see John C.
Rodrigue, “Black Agency after Slavery,” in Reconstructions, ed. Brown, 40-65.
The black experience in Reconstruction Missouri demands more attention. For some insights, see
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 110-38; Lawrence O. Christensen, “Black St. Louis: A Study in Race
Relations, 1865-1965” (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1972); Dwight, “Black Suffrage in Missouri”;
Lawrence O. Christensen, “Schools for Blacks: J. Milton Turner in Reconstruction Missouri,” Missouri
Historical Review 76 (1982): 121-35.
Reconstruction was also a “turning point” in the political, religious, and educational struggles
among black Ohioans. See David A. Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860-1915 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1976), 32-43, quotation on p. 41; Nikki M. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom:
Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802-1868 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 161-84; Darrel Bigham,
On Jordan’s Banks: Emancipation and Its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley (Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky, 2006).
85
“Würdig”; “... Ausbildung ihres Geistes, wie ihres Charakters.” St. Charles Demokrat, 3 October 1867.
The newspaper misspelled Tandy’s name (“Tendy”), but the speaker must have been St. Louis’s C. H.
Tandy. Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 303.
86
“Die prächtige Rede des bekannten farbigen Agitators Langston von Ohio.” Westliche Post, 20 January
1866.
87
“Sie üben ihre Rechte und Pflichten als freie Bürger gewissenhaft aus.” Westliche Post, 21 January
1866.
133
expressed confidence that the freed people would perform admirably as free laborers.
Republicans challenged Democratic reports that former slaves were unwilling to work.
Some may have shirked tasks while in bondage, they conceded, “but that had nothing to
do with the entire race”; it was the natural consequence of forced labor.88 Indeed, the
problem Republicans identified following emancipation was that former slaveholders—
the “knights”—expected other people to do their work for them.89 They questioned how
Democrats could judge African American behavior given the exploitative laws and
anarchic atmosphere of the South.
German Radicals also tried to incorporate blacks into their understanding of
international progress. As they had made clear in the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848 and in
the Missouri constitutional convention in 1865, Radicals took it for granted that political
rights and education both cultivated individuals and created strong states. They
understood progress to include improving Bildung (education and cultural development).
Untroubled by passing judgment on others’ accomplishments, German Republicans
patronized African Americans even when they praised individuals like Charles Tandy.
Yet for all its arrogance, Bildung also reflected the assumption that individuals were born
with the capacity to learn and develop regardless of race. Radicals were sure that slavery,
not inherited ability, had held back African Americans before emancipation.90 In
September 1867, the Wächter am Erie reported that the advances made by the freed
people “in their education and the acquisition of skills, finds no parallel in the history of
88
89
90
“Damit hat aber die ganze Race nichts zu thun.” Westliche Post, 12 January 1866.
Wächter am Erie, 9 August 1865.
Woechentlich Westliche Post, 31 July 1867.
134
humanity.”91 Radicals often told their readers that the same forces would uplift
Europeans and Americans of African descent. The Demokrat suggested as much when it
explained that the opposition to education for blacks
emerges from the same source from which the opposition to the so-called overeducation of the lower classes in Europe arises. ‘Keep the people in ignorance
and stupidity, so we can all the more easily control them and exploit them to our
advantage.’ That has always been the motto of the tyrants and aristocrats, and
that is the motto of their noble like-minded counterparts here.92
The newspaper suggested that completing the task of making citizens of former slaves
would only strengthen the United States.
Many Anglo-American Republicans made similar arguments and promoted
similar policies, but German Radicals were unusual in the ways they compared
immigrant and African American citizenship. Some Anglo-American and black Radicals
contrasted patriotic African Americans to immigrants unworthy of citizenship.
Maligning the Irish- and German-American Catholics who voted Democratic in large
numbers, they argued that if the nation could survive the influence of these elements, it
could not be hurt by African American votes. Frederick Douglass once told Bostonians
that if a black man “knows as much when he is sober as an Irishman knows when he is
drunk, he knows enough to vote, on good American principles.”93 Although few
Republicans advocated stripping immigrant men of the vote, a renewed wave of criticism
91
“... in ihrer Erziehung und der Erwerbung von Kenntnissen gemacht haben, keine Parallel in der
Geschichte der Menchheit findet.” Wächter am Erie, 23 September 1867. Similar claims about African
Americans ability to learn or favorable comparisons to whites often occurred in many reports and editorials
on Reconstruction policy. See, for example, Westliche Post, 29 July 1865, 29 September 1865, 6 February
1866, 12 September 1867; Wächter am Erie, 12, 23 September 1867.
92
“… entspringt aus derselben Quelle, aus welcher der Widerstand gegen die sogenannte Ueberbildung der
untern Volksklassen in Europe hervorging. ‘Haltet das Volk in Unwissenheit und Dummheit, damit wir es
desto leichter regieren und zu unserem Vortheil ausbeuten können.’ Das ist der Wahlspruch der Tyrannen
und Aristokraten in Europa von jeher gewesen und das ist der Wahlspruch ihrer edlen Gesinnungsgenossen
hier.” St. Charles Demokrat, 3 October 1867. See chapter 7 for more on education during Reconstruction.
93
Douglass, “What the Black Man Wants,” 4:66.
135
of working-class immigrants, especially Catholics, swept large American cities such as
New York began after the Civil War.94 German Radicals sometimes echoed insults
aimed at Catholics and Irish Americans, but more often they defended immigration as a
boon to the United States, insisting that the United States benefited from the addition of
new groups of citizens. German immigrants thus helped develop a Radical ideology of
citizenship that burgeoned under the exigencies of Reconstruction. In areas where
Republicans counted on German votes, the Radical German idea of citizenship competed
with the nativist justifications of black suffrage.
*****
Between 1865 and 1868, Carl Schurz became the national representative of
German-American ideas. One of the leading white exponents of African American
suffrage in German or English, Schurz perfected the politics of principle and made
Radicalism palatable to a broad spectrum of voters. His political rise contrasted with the
conservative Hassaurek’s post-war fate. The two men were both were young FortyEighters whose participation in the 1860 campaign Lincoln had recognized with
diplomatic appointments. Unlike Hassaurek, however, Schurz decided to return from
overseas early in 1862 to take a brigadier general’s commission in the Union Army. His
command was undistinguished, but his rank augmented his political authority. Schurz
also took full advantage of his speaking skills, which were unequalled by the likes of
94
For the continuing role of nativism, anti-Catholicism, and fear or urban workers within the Republican
Party during Reconstruction, see Ward McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction: The Public School in
the Politics of the 1870s (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Richardson, The Death of
Reconstruction, 38; Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 89. On the campaign to restrict the suffrage of workingclass New Yorkers, which peaked in the mid-1870s, see Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 132-33; Foner,
Reconstruction, 490-93; Quigley, Second Founding, 161-74; Beckert, The Monied Metropolis, 184-85,
207-36; Sven Beckert, “Democracy in the Age of Capital: Contesting Suffrage Rights in Gilded Age New
York,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 146-74.
136
Hassaurek. Already in 1860, Hassaurek resented Schurz’s reputation as the man who had
German Americans “in his pocket.”95 By the time Schurz moved to Missouri in 1867 to
take up co-editorship of the Westliche Post, his lectures were in national demand. In
1871, he commanded the highest fee on the American Literary Bureau’s list of over one
hundred speakers, a distinction he shared with Ralph Waldo Emerson.96
During the post-war years, Schurz refined appeals for African American suffrage
based on upholding the memory of the war, securing emancipation, creating a free labor
economy in the South, and fulfilling the principle of republican government. Sent by
President Johnson to report on the state of the South in the summer of 1865, Schurz
determined that the chief executive’s Reconstruction policies were inadequate. He
launched a concerted Radical drive, documenting the violence and legal proscriptions that
subjugated black workers. Like Radical Germans in Missouri and Ohio, he believed the
vote could make the freedman into “an intelligent, reliable and efficient free laborer and a
good and useful citizen.”97 In 1865, Schurz emphasized that suffrage would promote a
free labor economy in the South without requiring extensive federal intervention.98 He
said he would postpone “moral” arguments for other occasions.99
95
Hassaurek’s attitude toward Schurz is clear from correspondents who declared they shared his position.
Hermann Kreismann to Hassaurek, Washington, D.C., 3 June 1860, box 2, folder 2; Dwight Bannister to
Hassaurek, Columbus, 8 November 1860, box 2, folder 6; Guido Ilges to Hassaurek, Vincennes, Indiana,
27 November 1860, box 2, folder 4, Hassaurek Papers, OHS.
96
C.M. Bresford to Schurz, New York, 26 August 1871, reel 6, Schurz Papers, LC. Schurz’s opponents
accused himself of selling his services as a political speaker as well. Although he sometimes also received
some compensation for his expenses while campaigning, usually the benefits of his political service were
less direct. Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 88.
97
Carl Schurz, Report on the Condition of the South (Senate Executive Documents, 39th Cong., 1st sess.
no. 2, 1865; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969), 32.
98
Works that emphasize Schurz’s economic ideas include, Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 1720; Richard A. Gerber, “Carl Schurz’s Journey from Radical to Liberal Republicanism: A Problem in
Ideological Consistency,” Mid-America 82 (2000): 71-99. Schurz’s Radicalism was colored by his
economic ideas and his reluctance to expand federal power, but he did not reduce African Americans’
citizenship entirely to their role as workers. His travels also reinforced his notion that education would
137
At the Southern Loyalist (Republican) Convention in Philadelphia in 1866,
Schurz exposed English-speakers to the arguments popular among German Radicals. In
a speech on the “logical results of the war,” he appealed to American ideals in the context
of an international movement toward perfecting republican government. He compared
Reconstruction to “every great reformatory movement in society, every revolution in
favor of popular rights, every sudden onward stride in the progress of civilization.”100
Pressing for a manhood suffrage amendment to the Constitution, he observed that “this
Republic will have achieved true glory and secured lasting peace only when she metes
out impartial justice to all her children.”101 The paternal imagery was characteristic of his
habit of setting African Americans apart within his understanding of “the people.” They
could not be excluded, but he conceived of them, like Catholics and poor southern
whites, as people whom citizenship rights must elevate.102 During the next two years, he
alternated between seeking justice for the “negro” as “a wronged member of the human
family,” and assuring his white audiences that black suffrage would save the whole
country “from the odious yoke of grasping aristocracy.”103
transform African Americans. He was surprised, for example, when a “colored man” he met in New
Orleans impressed him with his “fluent and versatile” conversation. He commented to his wife, “There is
no country of the world, save this, in which he would not be received as a gentleman of the upper class.”
Schurz to Margarethe Schurz, New Orleans, 12 September 1865, in Intimate Letters, ed. and trans. Schafer,
351. See also Schurz, Report of the Condition of the South, 43.
99
Schurz, Report on the Condition of the South, 63.
100
Schurz, “Logical Results of the War,” 8 September 1866, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political
Papers of Carl Schurz, 1:377.
101
Ibid., 1:403-04
102
Schurz’s condescension toward Catholics revealed itself in his attitudes toward the village of his birth,
Irish Americans, and the people he had encountered on his Madrid assignment. Schurz, The Reminiscences
of Carl Schurz, 1:30-38; Schurz, “True Americanism,”1: 60; Schurz to his Parents, 19 August 1861; Schurz
to Frederick Althaus, 11 October 1861, in Intimate Letters, 263. He formed his negative opinion of poor
southerners of “Anglo-Saxon” descent in Tennessee during the war. Schurz to [his daughter] Agathe
Schurz, 9 November 1863, in Intimate Letters, 292; Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, 3:58.
103
Schurz, Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 1:446.
138
Republicans acknowledged the power of Schurz’s campaigning when they elected
him temporary chair of the 1868 national convention that nominated Grant. On the
second day of the Chicago meeting, delegates unanimously supported his resolutions
endorsing the principles of the Declaration of Independence and offering mercy to former
Confederates only in proportion to their loyalty. That same day, the Cincinnatian
Hassaurek faced humiliation. Encouraged to take the convention hall’s platform by Ohio
colleagues, he nearly lost his composure when impatient delegates on the floor began to
call for him to cut short his remarks. He tensely struggled through a prepared speech that
proposed “universal amnesty and universal suffrage” for Confederates and freedmen.
The convention rejected the measure that would have drastically undercut Republican
power in states such as Missouri.104
Schurz’s Radical arguments were embedded in his leadership of German
Republicans.105 Despite his stature in the English-speaking world, he continued to
campaign proudly in German.106 Nothing demonstrated his dependence on a German
Republican constituency as clearly as his move to St. Louis in April 1867. Emil
Preetorius had offered Schurz a position that provided income and influence: an interest
in a thriving Republican newspaper in a state where German immigrants played a
decisive political role.107 Schurz fit in well at the Westliche Post. Announcing the new
104
Cincinnati Commercial, 22, 23 May 1868. Again, his opponents made the most of Hassaurek’s
embarrassment and the tensions it revealed in the Republican Party. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 22, 23 May
1868.
105
Many historians ground Schurz’s Radicalism in his experiences of the Revolutions of 1848, but even
his most insightful biographer, Hans Trefousse, does not examine the link that citizenship provides between
Schurz’s ethnic politics and his Radicalism. Trefousse, Carl Schurz.
106
Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 170-71.
107
Schurz to Preetorius, Detroit, 15 July 1866, reel 3, Schurz Papers, LC.
139
partnership, Schurz and Preetorius informed readers that the paper’s “political principles”
would not change.108
Schurz shared the Missouri German Radicals’ strategy, capitalizing on
immigrants’ transatlantic perspective and familiarity with the process of acquiring
citizenship. His speech on the 1867 anniversary of the seizure of Camp Jackson
admonished veterans to serve once again as an example to Europe. When GermanAmerican Radicals had helped make the Union cause a war against slavery, he said, “the
sympathies of the civilized world moved powerfully to our side.” Now, they must lead
the way in making the United States a republic “which is founded on the principle that a
government receives its legal power form the consent of the governed.”109 In extolling
the wartime service of German Americans, Schurz located the power of American
republicanism in its ability to extend meaningful citizenship to new groups of men. In an
English speech welcoming General Philip H. Sheridan to St. Louis in September 1867, he
marveled at the diversity represented in the Union Army. He told the general,
You see Americans, white or black, proud that their country calls them its son
[sic]. You see Irishmen, proud that their ancestors called the green isle their
home. You see the Germans, French, Scandinavians, English, Hungarians, poles,
Bohemians, Italians, Spanish, proud to be united with you through the bond of
common citizenship and the enthusiastic zeal for great common concern, proud to
have fought with you, and always prepared to fight with you again.110
108
Woechentlich Westliche Post, 8 May 1867. Schurz already considered Preetorius and himself
ideologically well matched. Schurz to Preetorius, Detroit, 10 March 1867, reel 3, Schurz Papers, LC;
Woechentlich Westliche Post, 8 May 1867.
109
“… wandte sich die Sympathie der civilisirten Welt mächtig unsere Seite zu”; “welche auf das Princip
gegründet ist, daß eine Regierung ihre rechtmäßige Macht von der Zustimmung der Regierien empfängt.”
Woechentlich Westliche Post, 22 May 1867. Schurz made a remarkably similar speech at the same
occasion the following year. Westliche Post, 11 May 1868.
110
“Sie sehen den Amerikaner, weiß oder schwarz, stolz darauf, daß sein Land Sie seinen Sohn nennt. Sie
sehen den Irländer, stolz darauf, daß Ihre Vorfahren die grüne Insel ihre Heimath nannten. Sie sehen den
Deutschen, den Franzosen, den Scandinavier, den Engländer, den Ungarn, den Polen, den Böhmen, den
Italiener, den Spanier, stolz mit ihnen vereinigt zu sein durch das Band gemeinsamer Bürgerschaft und den
enthusiastischen Eifer für eine gemeinsame große Sache, stolz mit Ihnen gekämpft zu haben, und immer
bereit, wieder mit Ihnen zu kämpfen.” Woechentlich Westliche Post, 11 September 1867.
140
As a leader of immigrants and Radicals, Schurz believed that uniting diverse groups
under “common citizenship” strengthened the United States. When he was not
addressing a military leader of Irish stock such as Sheridan, he disparaged Irish
Americans, but he never suggested denying them the right to vote. The following month,
he rhetorically asked a Cleveland audience where immigrants would be without the vote.
They would still be called “Dutchmen,” not “our German friends.”111 For Schurz,
African American voting was part of the effort to integrate different groups in the
American polity.
*****
In October 1867, Cleveland’s German Republicans greeted Schurz’s Radical
message with unprecedented applause, serenades, canon shots, and parades.112 He sensed
similar approval as he traveled around the country in 1868.113 Diverse audiences—from
the “the critical New York Germans” who attended a speech at the Coopers Union, to the
residents of rural Missouri, where he found himself spending the night in a cart—hailed
him.114 Observers agreed that German support for the Republican Party was at least
holding steady in national elections. They were unsure, however, whether that meant that
German immigrants would support the suffrage referenda. The partisan papers tried to
stay optimistic. In May 1867, following Ohio and Missouri referendum proposals, the
111
Wächter am Erie, 5 October 1867
Ibid., 4 October 1867.
113
Schurz to Preetorius, St. Louis, 23 August 1867; Schurz to Preetorius, Milwaukee, 3 November 1867;
Schurz to Preetorius, Valparaiso, Indiana, 16 August 1868; Schurz to Preetorius, New York, 5 September
1868, reel 3, Schurz Papers, LC. See also Schurz to Margarethe Schurz, Milwaukee, 3 November 1867, in
Intimate Letters, ed. and trans. Schafer, 412.
114
Schurz to Margarethe Schurz, Albany, 7 September 1868, in Intimate Letters, ed. and trans. Schafer,
446. He considered the Missouri leg the “hardest campaign of my life.” Schurz to Preetorius, Sedalia,
Missouri, 30 September 1868, reel 3, Schurz Papers, LC.
112
141
Westliche Post claimed Americans were no longer divided over the question of black
suffrage. The people who had “prophesized the total defeat of the Union Party” if it took
such steps, now courted the black vote.115 After Ohio’s referendum failed, the paper
revised its expectations. It hoped that if the party adhered to the “true principles of
Republicanism,” the public would come around.116 In private, Schurz steeled himself to
“fight through to fight through the negro suffrage matter …. There are still many
prejudices to overcome among the Germans.”117
German Republicans did not unanimously support ballot measures for black
voting in Ohio in 1867 and in Missouri in 1868. The week following Schurz’s Cleveland
speech, only 46 percent of Ohio voters wanted to amend the state’s constitution to
eliminate the word “white” from voting qualifications. At the same time, they gave
Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the governorship by only a slim margin and elected a
Democratic legislature.118 Many “German” wards in Cleveland and Cincinnati actually
cast majorities for African American suffrage. More than 50 percent of voters supported
the amendment in two of Cleveland’s five “German” wards and three of Cincinnati’s.119
On the whole, however, German Americans, like other Americans voted more readily for
Republican candidates than for the suffrage amendment. Since German Ohioans were
probably slightly more Democratic as a group, they can hardly be described as unified
supporters of black voting. The Wächter am Erie acknowledged its disappointment.120
115
“… die totale Niederlage der radikalen Partei prophezeiten.” Woechentlich Westliche Post, 8 May
1867.
116
“Die wahren Grundsätze des Republikanismus.” Woechentlich Westliche Post, 23 October 1867.
117
Schurz to Margarethe Schurz, St. Louis, 11 May 1868, in Intimate Letters, ed. and trans. Schafer, 435.
118
Sawrey, Dubious Victory, 115-16.
119
See tables 1 and 2.
120
Wächter am Erie, 9 October 1867.
142
In Missouri, a much smaller proportion of German Republicans voted to
enfranchise African American men. Although German-born state legislators helped put
the measure on the ballot, their Landsmänner, like nearly 57 percent of Missouri voters,
soundly rejected it.121 St. Louis’s first and second wards, where in 1858 most inhabitants
had been born in German Europe, gave about 72 and 66 percent of their votes to Grant
respectively, but only voted roughly 35 and 22 percent for suffrage.122 None of the rural
counties along the Missouri River, which were home to many settlers from Germany,
gave the amendment majority support.123 A few communities such as Augusta in St.
Charles County bucked this trend.124 Yet the editors at the Westliche Post and the St.
Charles Demokrat understood that German Americans had helped rebuff suffrage.125
Why did the Radical arguments that swayed many German immigrants to vote for
Grant fail to motivate them to vote to enfranchise black men in their own states? There
were many reasons to vote for Grant. The election of 1868 posed a stark choice between
the war hero and the Democrats who defended Johnson’s policies and southern whites.
New York’s Horatio Seymour headed the Democratic ticket, which included Frank Blair
in the vice-presidential slot. In 1868, Blair’s racist invective positioned the Democrats as
the party of unrepentant white supremacy. The man who had already antagonized
Missouri Germans reportedly threatened that Grant would not live long if he were
elected.126 For his part, Grant was not personally a Radical. It must have been clear to
German immigrants, however, that a vote for Republicans during Reconstruction was a
121
Dwight, “Black Suffrage in Missouri,” 52-53, 56.
See table 3 in the appendix.
123
Dwight, “Black Suffrage in Missouri,” 97-100.
124
Office of the Secretary of State, Elections Division, Election Returns, 1846-1992, box 12, folder 3,
MSA.
125
Westliche Post, 5 November 1868; St. Charles Demokrat, 19 November 1868.
126
Parrish, Frank Blair, 256.
122
143
vote in tacit support of African American suffrage. Their Republican newspapers and
politicians supported it, and the Democratic Cincinnati Volksfruend had pointed out as
much during Ohio’s 1867 elections.127
The race card did not play among German-born voters as Democrats hoped and
Republicans feared. German immigrants approached political citizenship for adult men
through the lens of their own struggles in Europe and their own quest for power in the
United States. Even immigrants disinclined to accept political equality with black
Americans were receptive to the rhetoric of citizenship rights when Radicals
disconnected it from African Americans’ experience. One Illinois soldier gave an
indication of how the arguments of radical leaders might play among Republicans who
disliked racial equality. “I am not far enough advanced in civilization,” wrote a Germanspeaking Belleville corporal back in 1863, “that I don’t know the difference between
white and black any more.”128 He identified Radical ideas as “progressive,” but he felt
them in tension with his personal prejudices. In effect, he conceded that there was
dissonance between his racism and his political ideals, but he was reluctant to abandon
either. The Illinoisan was just the sort of Republican who might vote for Grant and
against suffrage.
Ultimately, the motivations of individual voters cannot be recovered, but Radical
arguments must have drowned out the more moderate alternatives in part because they
spoke to Republican immigrants’ understanding of the relationship between citizenship
and the sectional crisis. German immigrants were primed to interpret the Civil War as a
127
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 27 September 1867.
Henry A. Kircher to His Father, Young’s Point, [Louisiana], 19 April 1863, in A German in the Yankee
Fatherland, 92.
128
144
fight to eliminate the inconsistencies in American citizenship because they saw it in the
light of struggles for citizenship in Europe. German Americans also knew they had
profited from citizenship rights in the United States. The war and emancipation were tied
up in their efforts to define themselves as American citizens. African American
citizenship was thus congruent with the German Republican narrative of their role in
American and international history. Reconstruction policies held the larger significance
of providing an example to the world. One German-born New York soldier wrote, “If
Europe wants to be honest, it can take the politics of the United States during the past 4
years as a lofty example.”129 Already in 1865, this fervent Republican worried about
threats to the Union’s struggle to advance “world history.” Many men who were less
ideologically committed had been attracted to such a position by 1868.
Schurz’s selection to represent Missouri in the Senate following Grant’s election
symbolized the extent to which German Republicans helped open unexpected
opportunities for African American men. Collating reactions from the national GermanAmerican press, Schurz’s newspaper interpreted his election in January 1869 as a
vindication of the “principle of total equality of rights of the immigrant with the nativeborn element.” It added, “The name of Senator Schurz is to us only a personification of
this principle.”130 German Republicans around the country—and even some grudging
129
“Wenn Europa aufrichtig sein will, so kann es an der Politik der United States der letzten 4 Jahre ein
grosses erhabenes Beispiel nehmen”; “die Weltgeschichte.” August Horstmann to His Parents, Stevenson,
Alabama, 23 June 1865, in Deutsche im amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg, ed. Helbich and Kamphoefner, 191.
130
“Prinzip der vollkommenen Gleichberechtigung des eingewanderten mit dem eingeborenen Elemente.
Der Name des Senators Schurz ist uns nur die Verkörperung dieses Princips [sic].” Woechentlich
Westliche Post, 27 January 1869.
145
Democrats—agreed that Schurz’s election was an honor.131 German immigrants quickly
claimed him as their representative and flooded him with letters requesting help with
pensions, pardons, and appointments.132 Thousands turned out to serenade Schurz when
he returned from Jefferson City to St. Louis. The Westliche Post characteristically
believed them committed to “equal rights for all.”133 Schurz had been elected as an
immigrant and a supporter of African American suffrage, and he used his acceptance
speech to link citizenship rights for immigrant and black men.134 He told Missouri’s
lawmakers, “You have demonstrated before the world that the people of Missouri have
overcome that prejudice and that narrow-hearted perspective that so easily tarnish the
judgment of politicians, and that Missouri opens the gates wide for all those who have the
courage, the purpose and the ability to contribute to the completion of the great tasks of
this land.” Clarifying that he was not just referring to German Missourians, he
emphasized that “the worker of every race and color [should] possess political rights.”135
It is unlikely that Schurz’s supporters all shared his idea of equality, but it is striking that
the first German-born senator stood for universal male suffrage. Proclaiming a “new era
131
The Democratic Cincinnati Volksfreund, for example, welcomed his election. Cincinnati Volksfreund,
13 January 1868; Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 174-76. Many Democrats were more skeptical: Columbus
Westbote, 28 January 1869; Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 24, 31 December 1868, 28 January 1869.
132
Hans L. Trefousee described Schurz as “universally recognized as the representative of the German
element in the United States.” Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 175. For documents supporting this interpretation,
see reel 4, Schurz Papers, LC; Schurz to L. Benecke, Washington, D.C., 29 February 1869, folder 713,
Louis Benecke Papers, WHMC—Columbia.
133
“Gleiche Rechte für Alle.” Woechentlich Westliche Post, 27 January 1869.
134
Schurz clarified his support of African American suffrage and Confederate disfranchisement in a debate
with his leading rival. Schurz to Benjamin F. Loan, Jefferson City, 7 January 1869, 9 January 1869, reel 3,
Schurz Papers, LC; Woechentlich Westliche Post, 13, 20 January 1869. He also expressed it privately to
Elihu B. Washburne as he solicited leading Radical Republican support for his candidacy. Schurz to E.B.
Washburne, St. Louis, 10 December 1868, container 62, E.B. Washburne Papers, LC.
135
“… haben Sie vor der Welt dargethan, daß das Volk von Missouri jene Vorurtheile und jenen
engherzigen Standpunkt überwunden hat, die so leicht das Urtheil von Politikern trüben, und das Missouri
für alle Diejenigen, welche den Muth, die Absicht und die Fähigkeit haben, an der Vollendung der großen
Aufgaben dieses Landes mitzuarbeiten ….”; “… daß der Arbeiter jeder Rasse und Farbe politische Rechte
besitze.” Woechentlich Westliche Post, 27 January 1869.
146
for Germanism in America,” Schurz arrived in Washington as Congress was about to
pass the Fifteenth Amendment.136
136
Schurz to Margarethe Schurz, St. Louis, 24 January 1869, in Intimate Letters, ed. and trans. Schafer,
467.
147
CHAPTER 4
“WHITE OR BLACK IS NOW THE QUESTION”:
GERMAN-AMERICAN DEMOCRATS, 1865-1868
In January 1866, a German American writing under the penname “Moreau”
warned the readers of the Democratic Cincinnati Volksfreund of the dire situation in
Missouri. The Radicals were using German immigrants as “voting cattle” and “white
niggers” to impose an “outrageous despotism,” he told Ohio Democrats. Moreau claimed
that the powerful voting registrars administering the 1865 constitution’s “fanatical,
unconstitutional test oath” used partisan criteria to determine loyalty. According to him,
the registrars disfranchised any man “who does not hold the nigger higher than himself”
or “had had a friendly word, or even a drink, with a suspected rebel.” Once Radicals had
silenced their opponents, Moreau feared, they would pass “the craziest temperance and
Sabbath legislation” and enfranchise African Americans. He labeled the Westliche Post
the Radical Party’s “nigger house maid” and claimed twenty households around his home
of Jefferson City had already cancelled their subscriptions, taking to reading the Anzeiger
des Westens, the St. Louis paper that supported Missouri’s Conservative Union Party and
shared the Democratic perspective of the Volksfreund.1 In fact, less than a quarter of
German Missourians were Conservatives, but Moreau spoke for these people when he
1
“Stimmvieh”; “weißen Niggern”; “unerhörter Despotismus”; “fanatisch, unconstitutionelle Testeid”; “…
wer den Nigger nicht höher hält, als sich selbst”; “… mit einem vermuthlichen Rebel freundlich
gesprochen oder gar getrunken hat”; “wahnsinnigsten Temperenz- und Sabbath-Gesetze”;
“Niggerhausmagd.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 13 January 1866.
148
expressed incredulity that German immigrants would ally with African Americans and
Radical tyrants.2
Their experience of becoming American inclined German-born Republicans to
endorse African American citizenship. German Conservatives and Democrats would
draw on the same experience to fight it. Between the end of the war and Grant’s election,
the Democratic Party under various names3 defined itself in opposition to Congressional
Reconstruction and black rights. German Democrats would resist state and federal action
on behalf of freed people, especially granting black men the right to vote. As Moreau
hinted, the party’s devotion to limited government would also attract many German
Americans. Democrats championed personal liberty in matters of religion and morality
and a restricted economic role for government. But questions of race and citizenship
dominated American politics during these years. Democratic leaders would encourage
German immigrants to vote as white men and exclude African Americans from political
citizenship. They would pit German immigrants against blacks and emphasize the
whiteness they shared with Irish immigrants and former Confederates. Quite simply,
German Democrats campaigned on white supremacy.
Yet there were limits to the power of whiteness to mobilize German-born voters.
German Democrats were in constant argument with German Republicans, especially
Radical German Republicans, over the ideas of citizenship and German-American
identity circulating in the German-language public sphere. From 1865 to 1868, tirades
such as Moreau’s would not weaken the Republican vote among German Ohioans and
2
See page 61.
When referring specifically to Missouri, I use the “Conservative Unionist” label, but when discussing
national developments, I include Missouri Conservatives and the short-lived National Union Party under
the “Democratic” umbrella.
3
149
Missourians, who apparently were not particularly sensitive about being called “white
niggers.” German-American Democratic editors and politicians would begin to doubt the
value of anti-black and pro-white rhetoric in persuading ordinary German Americans to
vote for their candidates, forcing them to reevaluate their approach. Democrats had to
contend with the Republican dominance of popular understandings of German-American
identity. The most successful German-American newspapers and public figures were
Radical Republicans who had created the myth of the freedom-loving German and argued
that it was “German” to conceive of the American republic as a nation of diverse peoples
where all adult men played an active role in governance. This stood in open conflict with
the Democrats’ central contentions that America was a white nation and even if African
Americans were citizens, they were not the sort of citizens who possessed political rights.
It would be difficult to plead for white solidarity in a German-language public sphere
permeated by Republican views of German-American identity and citizenship. This
chapter reviews the background of German Conservatives in Missouri and German
Democrats in Ohio before examining the extent—the attractions and the limits—of the
idea of racially exclusive citizenship among German Americans.
*****
When Moreau was writing in early 1866, Missouri Conservatives were trying to
rally after the disappointment of the 1865 ratification campaign. The remnants of the
secessionist Democratic Party merged with the Conservative Unionists under the
leadership of men such as Lincoln confidante Frank Blair, Jr. Conservative Unionists
were oriented toward the national Democracy, but they temporarily retained the name
150
that emphasized their wartime loyalty.4 They formed “Johnson Clubs” around the state to
support the president in his struggle with congressional Republicans, and they backed his
National Union movement, which was little more than a Democratic front.5 In St. Louis,
a pro-Johnson demonstration in February 1866 drew a crowd estimated at ten thousand,
and a few months later Conservatives triumphed in municipal elections.6 Meanwhile,
returning Confederates and guerilla fighters were stoking unrest in rural areas. Subjected
to political violence, white Radicals and African Americans formed their own militias.
Mutual aggression and general lawlessness mounted, and Radical Governor Thomas
Fletcher called on federal forces to help secure the peace for the fall elections.7 The
Radical legislature also prepared itself. To implement the strict loyalty provisions of the
new constitution, lawmakers passed a voter registration law that gave county supervisors
appointed by the governor almost unlimited authority to determine whether applicants
had provided “aid, comfort, countenance, or support” to the Confederacy “by word or
deed.” In areas with large Conservative populations, few potential voters were turned
down, but in places traumatized by the internecine violence of the war, Radicals rejected
many disloyal applicants and dissuaded others from attempting to register. In all, an
estimated 35,000 to 50,000 Missourians were disfranchised. The loyalty test contributed
4
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 78-79; Thomas Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in
Missouri, 1865-1871 (Columbia: State Historical Society of Missouri, 1926), 80-81.
5
Edward L. Gambill, Conservative Ordeal: Northern Democrats and Reconstruction, 1865-1868 (Ames:
Iowa State University Press, 1981), 56-74.
6
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 79; Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 7985. The Westliche Post tried to minimize the significance of the Conservative victories, pointing out that
Radicals did much better than they had in the vote on the constitution the previous year. Westliche Post, 24
February 1866, 4, 7 April 1866.
7
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 89-96. Open warfare between the two sides broke out in Lafayette
County following the 1866 elections. Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 100; Anzeiger des Westens
Wochen-Blatt, 27 December 1866.
151
to a succession of Conservative defeats that began in fall 1866 and did not abate until
after the constitution was amended in 1870.8
Few of Missouri’s disfranchised Conservatives were German-born. Conservative
newspapers printed anecdotal reports of German Americans denied registration, but most
of the state’s German-born naturalized citizens—and the recently enfranchised resident
aliens—lived in St. Louis, where their loyalty was rarely challenged.9 The Conservatives
simply attracted few German immigrants. Important Anglo-American leaders essentially
gave up on the German vote. In a private letter to a fellow Democrat, Frank Blair
described a May 1866 campaign appearance in Boonville, where “the Dutch” heckled
him. In response he had “insulted them in the grossest terms & the people shouted &
cheered & they quieted down very quickly.”10 No wonder German Missourians were
reluctant to vote for a Democratic presidential ticket in 1868 with Blair filling its number
two spot.
Several German-speaking Conservative leaders tried to reverse their party’s
fortunes. Forty-Eighter Carl Dänzer at the Anzeiger provided German St. Louisans with
news from a Democratic perspective without sinking to Moreau’s level of profanity. It
8
The uneven application of the loyalty oath makes it difficult to know how many loyal Conservatives were
denied registration and how many disloyal voters were accepted. An 1870 report by a congressional
committee concluded the oath was rigidly enforced and there were even some partisan exclusions, but
Radicals maintained that hundreds of disloyal voters were registered in Conservative counties. Barclay,
The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 77-109, especially 102, 106; Parrish, Missouri under
Radical Rule, 77, 96-98, 241-42. For a compilation of disfranchisement estimates, see Martha Kohl,
“Enforcing a Vision of Community: The Role of the Test Oath in Missouri’s Reconstruction,” Civil War
History 40 (1994): 292-307. Kohl argues that Radicals hoped voter qualifications would help “build the
industrial, industrious, Free-Soil community” (293). This is an improvement on Parrish and Barclay’s
arguments, which suggest Radicals were largely motivated by vindictiveness, but it does not capture the
impact of political violence during this period.
9
The Anzeiger denounced the registration procedure in general terms and claimed a loyal German
American in St. Charles was rejected because of his Conservative beliefs. Anzeiger des Westens WochenBlatt, 4 October 1866.
10
Frank Blair to James Rollins, Boonville, Missouri, 23 May 1866, folder 94, James Rollins Papers,
WHMC—Columbia.
152
seemed ironic to the Westliche Post that Dänzer had been “in the ranks of freedom
fighters” in Germany but now opposed freedom.11 He could be counted on for speeches
decrying Missouri Radicals and Congressional Republicans. Joining Dänzer were two
rising Democrats who formed the nucleus of the Hegelian philosophical movement
known as the St. Louis School. The eccentric Henry Brokmeyer had emigrated from
Minden, Prussia in 1844, but he had only settled in St. Louis in 1858 after a period
studying at Brown University and several years of Thoreau-like seclusion in the
backwoods of Missouri’s Warren County. After the war, he returned to the city from a
brief stint in the Union Army to resume his philosophical enquiries, practice law, and
campaign in German for Conservatives.12 His Württemberg-born friend, J. Gabriel
Woerner, had remained active in local politics during the war. Both men distanced
themselves from the Revolutions of 1848, Forty-Eighters in America, and the ideas of
race-neutral citizenship associated with them.13
The two philosophers’ reading of Hegel led them to emphasize the importance of
fully reuniting the North and the South. Hegel proposed that world history moved
forward through a process of conflict between ideas—thesis and antithesis—which were
11
“In den Reihen der Freiheitskämpfer.” Westliche Post, 24 February 1866. For a biographical sketch, see
Zucker, The Forty-Eighters, 285.
12
Isidor Loeb and F. C. Shoemaker, eds, Journal of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 2
vols. (Jefferson City: State Historical Society of Missouri, 1920), 1:77-78; Cleon Forbes, “The St. Louis
School of Thought,” Missouri Historical Review 25 (1930): 83-101; Denys P. Leighton, “Henry Conrad
Brokmeyer,” in in The Dictionary of Missouri Biography, ed. Christensen, 117-19.
13
Woerner had returned to Germany in 1848 before deciding he could not support the revolutionaries.
Forbes, “The St. Louis School of Thought,” 613-15. Members of the St. Louis School published in the
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, which they founded in 1867. Woerner also wrote a novel and
Brokmeyer an autobiography of his pre-war years. J. Gabriel Woerner, The Rebel’s Daughter: A Story of
Love, Politics, and War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1899); Henry C. Brokmeyer, A Mechanic’s Diary
(Washington, D.C.: E. C. Brokmeyer, 1910). For excerpts of their writings, see William H. Goetzmann,
ed., The American Hegelians: An Intellectual Episode in the History of Western America (New York:
Alfred A, Knopf, 1973); and Michael DeArmey and James A. Good, eds., St. Louis Hegelians, 3 vols.
(Bristol: Thoemmes, 2001).
153
reconciled in synthesis. Brokmeyer and Woener saw reunification as “synthesizing” the
clashing ideologies of the Civil War, ensuring progress. These Hegelians welcomed
slavery’s demise, but their notion of post-war reunion was Democratic; it was a reunion
of white men.14 The party honored them with positions as presidential electors in 1868,
but its German following remained thin.15
Although Ohio Democrats had divided into “war” and “peace” camps, they were
much stronger than Missouri Conservatives in 1865. In Ohio, Democrats had retained a
majority of German-born voters, especially Catholics and unskilled workers. Democrats
were competitive in state races, and they even won the legislative elections of 1867. In
Cincinnati, the Volksfreund represented the strong minority of the city’s German
immigrants who were Democrats. The paper was owned and edited by Johann B. Jeup,
an influential Catholic layman who campaigned for the Democrats and appeared on the
ticket as a presidential elector in 1868.16 The city’s supposedly non-partisan Catholic
14
Following Denton J. Snider, one of the American-born members of the St. Louis School, scholars have
focused more on Brokmeyer and Woerner’s Hegelian justifications of reunification, but their racial
prejudice was also important during Reconstruction. The St. Louis Hegelians’ anti-black sentiment is
obscured in part because their philosophical writing has survived better than their political speeches and
many of them only wrote about the Civil War Era in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Denton J. Snider, The St. Louis Movement in Philosophy, Literature, Education, Psychology, with Chapters
of Autobiography (St. Louis: Sigma Publishing Co., 1920), 27. James Good specifically subordinates
Brokmeyer’s racism to his interest in reconciliation. Good, “A World-Historical Idea,” 450. Matt Erlin
considers the impact of St. Louis Hegelians on racial thinking later in the century. Matt Erlin, “Absolute
Speculation: The St. Louis Hegelians and the Question of American National Identity,” in German Culture
in Nineteenth-Century America: Reception, Adaptation, Transformation, ed. Lynne Tatlock and Matt Erlin
(New York: Camden House, 2005), 89-106. See also Henry A. Pochmann, New England
Transcendentalism and St. Louis Hegelianism: Phases in the History of American Idealism (Philadelphia:
Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation, 1948), 32.
15
Westliche Post, 24 December 1868.
16
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 3 November 1868; Arndt and Olsen, German-American Newspapers, 456.
154
weekly, the Wahrheits-Freund, also supported the Democrats, and the Columbus
Westbote disseminated Democratic news and opinion from the state capital.17
The heart of German Democratic support, however, lay in rural and small-town
Ohio. Some heavily German townships had established a pattern of voting more than
ten-to-one Democratic.18 Bavarian-born Karl Bösel represented a solidly Democratic
western Ohio district in the Ohio House from 1862 to 1865 and in the Ohio Senate from
1870 to 1874.19 Arriving in the United States as a young man in 1833, he had become
wealthy as a merchant and banker in the canal town of New Bremen in what became
Auglaize County. Since being appointed the town’s postmaster under President Martin
Van Buren, Bösel had never turned his back on the Democrats. He would be eulogized
after his death in 1885 as an enemy of “prejudice and bigotry,” remembered for
defending African Americans from a mob of his German-born neighbors in 1847. But
Bösel was no friend of black citizenship. He was not outspoken on racial issues—he
rarely spoke in public at all—but during the war he had voted solidly with Peace
Democrats who sat in the “South Carolina Corner” of the Ohio House of
Representatives.20 In February 1865, he moved that the General Assembly “heartily
17
The Wahrheits-Freund tried to avoid partisanship during the war. See Wahrheits-Freund, 31 May 1865.
This stance appears to have been motivated by a desire to avoid conflict with the Republican administration
and charges of disloyalty. After mid-1865, its mission remained primarily religious, but it became
increasingly partisan. It included pieces that contained politically-loaded racial content, and it took clear
positions on specific parties and politicians.
18
Kelso, “The German-American Vote in the Election of 1860,” 195-96.
19
Bösel represented Auglaize County in the Ohio House and a larger district in the Senate. His own aptly
named German Township gave Democrat Horatio Seymour 61 percent of its 348 votes in the 1868
presidential election. Jackson Township, where over 90 percent of the voters were German-born and
population was more Catholic, gave Seymour 98.7 percent of its 455 votes. Only 6 people cast ballots for
Grant! Ohio Secretary of State, Annual Report 1868, 40; Kelso, “The German-American Vote in the
Election of 1860,” 195; Aengenvoort, Migration, Siedlungsbildung, Akkulturation, 297-98.
20
“Das Vorurtheil und die Vornirtheit.” “Karl Bösel,” Der deutsche Pionier 17 (1885): 221; Karl Bösel,
“Einwanders Reiseabenteuer,” Der deutsche Pionier 3 (1871): 215-17. Another source claims he became
155
congratulate” New Jersey and Delaware for declining to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment
and “tender to them our sympathy and support in such noble and glorious work.”21 It is
hard to uncover rural German Democrats’ opinions on race and citizenship, but a small
northwestern Ohio German-language weekly, the Fremont Courier, was the sort of
newspaper Bösel’s constituents might have read. It took few editorial positions
independent of the party and readily resorted to racism.22
At the core of the Democratic ideology of Bösel and Brokmeyer, Dänzer and Jeup
was what one historian calls “the static constitutionalism of a white-man’s nation.”23
Because protecting African American rights required action on the part of federal and
state authorities, Democrats’ racism reinforced their genuine commitment to ensuring
that constitutional limits restrained government power. Safeguarding individuals from
government abuses remained central to German-born Democrats’ understanding of
American citizenship. German Republicans emphasized the importance of political
participation in citizenship, but Democrats gave equal weight to the protections
postmaster under President James K. Polk (1845-1849). Chapman Bros., Portrait and Biographical Record
of Auglaize, Logan and Shelby Counties, Ohio (Chicago: Chapman Bros., 1892), 545.
Historians have ably reconstructed the insular political culture of rural German enclaves in the
nineteenth-century Midwest. Kathleen Neils Conzen, Making Their Own America: Assimilation Theory
and the German Peasant Pioneer (New York: Berg, 1990); Robert Gross, “The Battle Over the Cold
Spring Dam: Farm-Village Conflict and Contested Identity among Rural German Americans,” Journal of
American Ethnic History 21 (2001): 83-117. On the German settlements in New Bremen and Auglaize
County, see Aengenvoort, Die Auswanderung Nordwestdeutscher nach Ohio; and Karl Bösel, “Ansiedlung
von New-Bremen,” Der deutsche Pionier 1 (1869): 84-87, 118-21.
21
He considered the abolition of slavery “destructive to every hope for union and peace.” His resolution
was rejected by fifty votes to eight. Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Ohio
(Columbus: Richard Nevins, State Printer, 1865), 61: 255-56.
22
The Fremont Courier differs from similar newspapers in that copies of many issues survive. Arndt and
Olsen, German-American Newspapers, 430-93.
23
Joel H. Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860-1868 (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 189. On the Democratic Party during the Civil War and Reconstruction, see
also Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth
Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Jennifer L. Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of
Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Jerome Mushkat, The
Reconstruction of the New York Democracy, 1861-1874 (East Brunswick, N.J.: Associated University
Presses, 1981); Gambill, Conservative Ordeal.
156
citizenship afforded individuals from government. For them, constitutional limits defined
the distinction between being the subject of a European monarch and the citizen of an
American state. They argued that Republican Reconstruction policies were constitutional
innovations that threatened their citizenship by imposing a “military rule,” “Negro rule,”
and “the tyranny of money and aristocracy.”24 They convinced themselves that opposing
black rights was consistent with these core Democratic principles. In reality, of course,
the logical consistency of their ideology depended on excluding African Americans from
the body of citizens whose rights deserved defending. If they had recognized African
Americans as equals, they could not have interpreted protecting black rights as tyrannical.
Nonetheless, to understand German Democrats’ part in the complex Reconstruction
debates, it is important to pay due attention to their ideas of limited government in
economic affairs and religious matters and their commitment to the separation of national
and state authority. Examining each of these three issues also delineates the common
ground between German Democrats and Republicans that would allow them to cooperate
after 1870.
Democrats opposed the Republican policies that had dramatically increased the
economic role of the federal government during the war. Republicans had passed new
taxes, issued bonds to fund the war effort, instituted protective tariffs on imports, granted
public land to railroad companies, and developed a new national banking system.25
Democrats had good reason to believe that together these policies benefited wealthy
24
“Militärherrschaft”; “Negerherrschaft”; “Geld- und Aristokratenherrschaft.” Fremont Courier, 17
September 1867.
25
For useful overviews, see Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican
Economic Policies during the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Leonard P.
Curry, Blueprint for Modern America: Non-Military Legislation of the First Civil War Congress
(Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968).
157
Americans at the expense of “the people.” They channeled public money to financiers,
railroad magnates, and “factory barons.”26 Few federal dollars made their way into the
hands of African Americans, even through the Freedman’s Bureau, but that did not stop
Democrats assuming otherwise.27 Democrats’ sense that big government redistributed
wealth and power away from ordinary white citizens to southern freedmen and eastern
businessmen shaped how they reacted to any single economic policy during
Reconstruction. During the 1868 presidential campaign, the Columbus Westbote told its
readers that Republicans “promise no other prospect for the children [of working people]
than being forced into white slavery through taxation.” A vote for the Democrats was
therefore the only way for white workers “to protect themselves from the cocky,
privileged monied aristocracy.”28
For the time being, German Republicans supported funding the federal presence
in the South, but they agreed with German Democrats on many of the details of economic
policy. In Ohio and Missouri, German immigrants in both parties opposed high tariffs on
imports, which protected American goods from cheap foreign competitors. Many FortyEighters were ideologically committed to free trade as a means to spread progress and
prosperity broadly throughout the world.29 In Ohio and Missouri, German Americans
26
For the Jacksonian roots of these Democratic ideas, see especially Tony A. Freyer, Producers versus
Capitalists: Constitutional Conflict in Antebellum America (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1994).
27
Foner, Reconstruction, 142-43, 248.
28
“… seinen Kindern keine andere Aussicht verheißt, als eine durch Steuern zu Boden gedrückte weiße
Sclaverei”; “… um sich gegen die übermüthige privilegirte Geldaristokratie zu schützen.” Columbus
Westbote, 29 October 1868. For similarly broad expressions of Democrats’ economic differences with
Republicans, see Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 21 January 1866; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 3
November 1868; Fremont Courier, 3 October 1867, 27 August 1868.
29
The issue of tariffs divided Germans in Europe, but free trade ideas were ascendant in universities before
1848 and among the Forty-Eighters who migrated to the United States. Ivo Nikolai Lambi, Free Trade and
Protection in Germany, 1868-1879 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1963), 4, 7; Wittke, Refugees of
Revolution, 256; Freitag, Friedrich Hecker, 20; Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 182. Franz Lieber, an earlier
158
also resented paying inflated prices for products without benefiting from the growth of
domestic manufacturing as easterners did. German immigrants in both parties also
resisted inflationary “soft money” policies. Especially wary of banknotes, they also
opposed the wide circulation of the new paper currency issued as legal tender by the
Department of the Treasury. Commonly called greenbacks, these bills had already
depreciated since their introduction in 1862. German Americans tended to perceive
paper money as the currency of swindle and speculation, of boom and bust. They
believed “hard” gold or silver coins, or notes backed by them, were how honest, thrifty,
and hardworking people like themselves transacted business.30 Departing from this
notion and their Jacksonian heritage, some German Democrats did support a proposal
popularized by Ohioan George H. Pendleton to pay the principal on federal war bonds
not in gold coin, but in greenbacks. Party loyalists in Ohio agreed that Pendleton’s plan
would ensure that wealthy investors would receive the same devalued currency as
workers and soldiers. As one historian put it, “Paper money was too tempting a political
immigrant, was also an active Republican supporter of free trade. See Lieber, Notes on the Fallacies of
American Protectionists, 4th ed. (New York: American Free Trade League, 1870) included in vol. 2, Franz
Lieber Papers, LC.
For German Democratic opposition to high tariffs, see Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 22
November 1866; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 2 February 1867; Columbus Westbote, 27 April 1865; Fremont
Courier, 23 July 1868. German Republican sentiment is presented or reported in Cincinnati Volksfreund,
18 December 1867, 25 July 1868; Wächter am Erie, 7 November 1867; St. Charles Democrat, 7 February
1867; Westliche Post, 5 March 1868.
30
Ohio Republican Jacob Müller described this position well in his reflection on the Panic of 1857.
Mueller, Memories of a Forty-Eighter, 188-91. For his masterfully clear and insightful study of “moral and
ideological considerations” in the post-war money question, see Irwin Unger, The Greenback Era: A Social
and Political History of American Finance, 1865-1879 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 8.
On German Americans’ preference for hard money, see Unger, The Greenback Era, 134, 276;
Wittke, The German-American Press, 160-61. Representing the Democrats, see Cincinnati Volksfreund, 22
July 1868; Columbus Westbote, 20 February 1868; Fremont Courier, 18 July 1868; Anzeiger des Westens
Wochen-Blatt, 20 September 1866. Hard money German Republicans included Gustav Körner, Carl
Schurz, Emil Preetorius, Friedrich Hassaurek, and Franz Lieber. See Westliche Post, 7 January 1867;
Wächter am Erie, 23 November 1867; Koerner, Memoirs of Gustav Koerner, 2: 583; Trefousse, Carl
Schurz, 182; Schurz, Reminiscences, 3:286; Hassaurek to Hayes, Cincinnati, 15 September 1875, and other
letters, box 2, folder 10, Hassaurek Papers, OHS; Franz Lieber to John Sherman, New York, 29 June 1870,
vol. 127, John Sherman Papers, LC.
159
tool to be put aside lightly.”31 German-Ohioan Democrats emphasized that the plan
included in the 1868 national platform was just one part of a comprehensive program that
would also reduce taxation, expenditures, and the national debt.32 German Republicans
accused Democrats of advocating “repudiation” or reneging on the country’s debts.33 As
the years following 1868 would show, German Americans generally remained free
traders and hard money men in both parties, a position that would provide the basis for
them to cooperate to form a third party.
During Reconstruction, German Americans also united in the belief that citizens
should be free from government control in matters of religion and personal morality.
German Democrats hoped to use this perennial issue to win back immigrant men who had
voted Republican because of their support for the Union and opposition to slavery. They
routinely described German Republicans as lackeys or “moors” manipulated by the
“Puritans” within their party who wanted to persecute Catholics and curb harmless
alcohol consumption.34 Missouri provided a prime example. The 1865 constitution had
included a new provision to tax church property, and Charles Drake made no secret of
31
Unger, The Greenback Era, 75, 80-91. See also Sawrey, Dubious Victory, 107-09. German Democratic
resistance to their party’s soft money policies is mentioned in correspondence between Ohio’s Englishspeaking Democrats. G.W. Morgan to William Allen, Cleveland, 4 July 1875, box 18, William Allen
Papers, LC.
32
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 30, 31 September 1867, 9, 18 July 1868; Columbus Westbote, 23 September
1868, 1 October 1868; Fremont Courier, 3 October 1867, 23 July 1868. The St. Louis Anzeiger and
German Cincinnatian politician Charles Reemelin remained in favor of repaying bonds in gold. Anzeiger
des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 24 September 1868, 24 December 1868. Charles Reemelin, The Life of Charles
Reemelin (Cincinnati: Weier and Daiker, 1892), 63, 184.
33
See speeches by Schurz and Müller in Cleveland. Wächter am Erie, 5 October 1867, 29 September
1868. The Democrats repeatedly denied the charge. See, for example, Columbus Westbote, 22 August
1867, 5 September 1867.
34
“Mohr.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 12 June 1866. See also Cincinnati Volksfreund, 27 October 1865, 22
April 1866, 5 October 1867; Columbus Westbote, 14 June 1866; Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 6
December 1866; Fremont Courier, 24 January 1867, 3 September 1867, 17 September 1867, October
1867.
160
targeting the Catholic Church.35 Radicals in the state legislature between 1865 and 1870
went on to tighten laws regulating alcohol and enforce the constitutional requirement that
religious leaders take the loyalty oath.36 Given Radicals’ overt Protestant bias and
reputation for partisan interpretations of loyalty, this smacked of government control of
religion. St. Louis Archbishop Peter Kenrick advised Catholic priests not to swear the
oath, and the German-born leader of the Orthodox Lutheran Missouri Synod, C.F.W.
Walther, only signed it with a “protest” handwritten on the back.37 The Missouri oath
became an emblem of Radical extremism late in 1865, when a young Catholic priest in
Pike County was arrested, fined, and imprisoned for failing to comply. No one accused
John A. Cummings of disloyalty, making his case all the more appealing to the
Democratic and Catholic press. Newspapers around the country followed Cummings v.
Missouri through the appeals process. Cincinnati’s Catholic Wahrheits-Freund
mentioned the Missouri test oath thirteen times in the year from August 1865 to August
1866.38 Finally, in January 1867, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the oath for clergy
35
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 40-42; March, “The Campaign for the Ratification of the
Constitution of 1865,” 228-29; Drake, “Autobiography,” 1097-98.
36
David W. Detjen, The Germans in Missouri, 1900-1918: Prohibition, Neutrality, and Assimilation
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 27; Audrey L. Olson, “St. Louis Germans, 1850-1920:
The Nature of an Immigrant Community and Its Relation to the Assimilation Process” (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Kansas, 1963), 114, 220.
The oath was applied to any leader who engaged in teaching or held property in trust for a
religious organization. Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal (1865), 258.
37
Kenrick and Walther were both sure from the outset that the Supreme Court would overturn the oath.
Peter Kenrick to Rev. J. Meller, St. Louis, 15 September 1865, box 1, folder 3, Archbishop Peter Richard
Kenrick Papers, Archdiocese of St. Louis Archives (hereafter ASLA). C. F. W. Walther, “Oath of
Loyalty,” 25 September 1865, “C. F. W. Walther Research File,” folder 44, August R. Suelflow Papers;
C.F.W. Walther to his brother, St. Louis, 18 September 1865, box 4, folder 38, C.F.W. Walther Papers,
Concordia Historical Institute, St. Louis.
It was not unusual for oath takers to register written “exceptions.” These protests challenged the
state’s right to regulate private sympathies and soothed the consciences of people who had spoken in favor
of the Confederacy. See Judge William Napton, 19 November 1865, “Diary Transcription,” p. 318, folder
4, William Napton Papers, MHS.
38
Wahrheits-Freund, Index, August 1866, 13 September 1865; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 3 September 1865;
Fremont Courier, 1 February 1866; Columbus Westbote, 17 January 1867.
161
and other professionals was unconstitutional because it punished Missourians for actions
allegedly committed before the constitution became law and it imposed penalties without
judicial proceedings.39 Equally important to German Democrats, Missouri’s Radicals had
identified themselves with vindictive Anglo-Protestantism.
Democrats were astonished that German Americans’ dedication to religious
freedom and beer consumption did not turn them all into Democratic voters. Conscious
of their vulnerability, German Republicans continued to struggle with elements of their
own party, claiming “true Radicalism” included freedom from Anglo-Protestant
hegemony. In Missouri, Friedrich Münch confronted fellow Radicals in the legislature as
they debated a bill to restrict Sunday alcohol sales in December 1865.40 When the law
passed, Preetorius at the Westliche Post was among those who helped organize another
large protest in St. Louis.41 In 1867, the Post and the St. Charles Demokrat joined some
Anglo-American Radicals in welcoming the Supreme Court’s decision in Cummings v.
Missouri.42 Although the issue was now moot, the St. Charles newspaper called on the
legislature to amend the constitution to remove the clause subjecting professionals to the
oath. The paper also considered it the duty of German Radicals to confront Drake and his
“arrogant” allies in the Missouri legislature on the taxation of church property and
alcohol regulation. Missouri’s German Radicals argued that they could effectively fight
“Puritan” politics from within the Republican Party. Besides, like the tariff, ethnic
39
On Cummings v. Missouri, see Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 59-62, 114-16;
Barclay, “The Test Oath for Clergy,” Missouri Historical Review 18 (1924): 345-81; Parrish, Missouri
under Radical Rule, 61-75. For the broader context of Cummings v. Missouri and Missouri oath taking, see
Harold Hyman, The Era of the Oath: Northern Loyalty Tests during the Civil War and Reconstruction
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954), 110-14.
40
Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 8 December 1865
41
Westliche Post, 24 February 1866.
42
Woechentlich Westliche Post, 23 January 1867.
162
interests paled in importance beside the great questions of the day: citizenship for African
Americans and the Reconstruction of the former Confederate states.43
Economic and religious matters were important during Reconstruction, but the
distinction between federal and state authority was more central to German Democrats’
thinking on citizenship. Democrats saw federal protection of African Americans’ civil
and political rights as violating the constitutional limitations that defined American
freedom.44 Anzeiger editor Carl Dänzer was particularly adept in articulating this
conviction. Federalism, according to Dänzer, was part of the “essence” of American
citizenship. He argued in March 1866 that national citizenship, which immigrants
achieved on naturalization and former slaves on emancipation, only protected its holders
from foreign powers. The editor concluded that all other rights and privileges emanated
from the states.45 Johnson was thus fully justified in vetoing Congress’s Civil Rights Bill
for it unconstitutionally impinged on the power of states to regulate citizenship. Dänzer
remarked that he hoped that each state would voluntarily enact the bill’s provisions,
suggesting constitutional concerns alone barred him from following his personal instinct
to support African Americans in their quest for education, civil, and political rights.46
Federal control of voting rights in the former Confederacy most directly challenged
states’ traditional sphere of authority.47 As Dänzer quite presciently observed in early
1867, either black voting would be a dead letter or it would take considerable federal
43
“Herrisch.” St. Charles Demokrat, 24 January 1867; Woechentlich Westliche Post, 5 June 1867.
For concern about the power of federal government, see Columbus Westbote, 11 May 1865; Cincinnati
Volksfreund, 30 September 1865, 11 July 1866; Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 15 March 1866;
Fremont Courier, 22 March 1866.
45
“Wesen.” Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 22 March 1866. See also Columbus Westbote, 8 June
1865; Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 19 April 1866.
46
Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 29 March 1866. See also Wahrheits-Freund, 14 February 1866.
47
Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 13 October 1865, 29 March 1866, 6 December 1866.
44
163
commitment to enforce.48 When Republicans rose to the challenge and sent in the army
and Freedmen’s Bureau, he labeled their actions “military despotism.” Such opinions
were not merely demagogic partisan bluster. German Democrats also expressed them
privately. Following Democratic gains in Ohio in 1867, an old friend of Karl Bösel
reflected that “after so long a time of radical misrule, tyranny and destruction, the sober
second thought of an outraged people calls there [sic] violations to account.”49
Yet there was more to Democrats’ opposition to African American citizenship
than constitutional scruples. Democrats differed with Republicans over whether to use
federal power for the specific task of protecting the citizenship of black men. Regardless
of their elaborate distinctions between federal and state citizenship or civil and political
citizenship, at an emotional level, Democratic leaders saw citizenship as an all-or-nothing
affair from which African Americans should be excluded. Like Radical Republicans,
Democratic immigrant men repeatedly associated American citizenship with the right to
vote. In response to the campaign to enfranchise black men, the Cincinnati Volksfreund
pointed out that immigrants had to wait five years before naturalization allowed them to
“demand citizenship and voting rights”50 It hoped to deny African Americans the vote,
“this most valuable right of an American citizen.”51 The Columbus Westbote accused
Radical Republicans of wanting to make “the plantation Negro” suddenly into a “voting
48
Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 28 February 1867.
Wilhelm Lang to [The Ohio Democratic Central Committee], Tiffin, Ohio, 19 November 1867,
Democratic Party Letters, CHS. On Bösel’s friendship with Lang, see Bösel,
“Einwanderers Reiseabenteuer,” 217.
50
“… ehe sie das Bürger und Stimmrecht erlangen können.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 1 April 1866.
51
“Dies theuerste Recht eines amerikanischen Bürgers.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 14 July 1865. It also
described enfranchisement as imparting “full citizenship rights” (“… das volle Bürgerrecht verleihen”).
Cincinnati Volksfruend, 8 October 1867.
49
164
citizen.”52 A few years later, it suggested that without the Radicals, the “Negro” would
have no aspirations to “rise to the level of a voting American citizen.”53 Democratic
newspapers also warned that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of a national
“citizenship” potentially included voting rights.54 Finally, when the Fifteenth
Amendment was proposed in Congress, the Fremont Courier commented that it “made
half-barbarian Negroes into citizens.”55 Democrats may have believed African
Americans should hold some “less-than-participatory” citizenship, but this condition was
scarcely worthy of the name.
German Democrats tapped into the well established connection between
whiteness and citizenship. From the United States’ earliest years as a nation, “all free
white persons” who immigrated into the country could become citizens under the
Naturalization Law of 1790.56 This set an essential pattern that was somewhat
complicated by the fact that all white women were denied political citizenship and even
unnaturalized white men could exercise the franchise in some states. By 1855, twentyfive of the thirty-one states in the Union, including Missouri and Ohio, had racial
exclusions on voting. Most of these defined voters specifically as “white.”57 The
meaning of “whiteness,” however, was contested. Courts had to decide whether
individuals of mixed race were “negro” or “white.” Meanwhile, nineteenth-century
Americans sometimes described immigrants from European countries as members of
52
“… diese Radikalen, die aus dem Plantage Neger, der nie in das A, B, C hineingekommen ist, plötzlich
einen stimmberechtigen Bürger machen wollen.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 14 July 1865.
53
“Sich zu der Würde eines stimmfähigen amerikanischen Bürger zu erheben.” Columbus Westbote, 18
September 1867.
54
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 16 January 1866; Columbus Westbote, 27 September 1867.
55
“Halbbarbarische Neger zu Bürgern zu machen.” Fremont Courier, 18 February 1869.
56
Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 22.
57
Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 354, 363-67.
165
separate “races.”58 Usually they were considered to belong to different white races, but
the whiteness of immigrants from Ireland was “under dispute.”59 Overwhelmingly
Catholic and poor, Irish Americans asserted their whiteness as they sought emotional and
economic security in their new home. Legally, they did not need to “become” white, as
they faced few obstacles to civil and political rights. Since the 1830s, marginalized
immigrants in the North had used the Democratic Party to claim whiteness, forging a
coalition with poor and slaveholding whites in the South. The party’s ideology
emphasized that all blacks were unworthy of citizenship, while all whites, by virtue of
their whiteness, were good citizens.60 Ideas of whiteness and the white privilege that
accompanied it went back centuries in North America and Europe, but Democrats
stressed the connection between whiteness and citizenship in a new way. They embraced
a racism that reflected the popular culture of Irish immigrants in the urban North. As
historian David Roediger emphasizes, whiteness and white supremacy were not just the
tool of elites. They were “creations, in part, of the white working class itself.”61
In some ways, German Democrats behaved like their better studied Irish
counterparts. Before the political upheavals of the 1850s, both German and Irish
immigrants had voted overwhelmingly Democratic. Even during the Civil War Era,
58
Many of the creative and insightful scholars cited below describe the fluidity of whiteness during the
nineteenth century, especially late in the century when more Southern and Eastern Europeans immigrated
to North America, the United States became an imperial power, and the pseudo-science of racial
classification flourished in Europe and North America. I agree with historian Matthew Frye Jacobson, that
racial categories proliferated between the 1840s and 1924, but I question whether the use of the word
“race” to describe distinctions among whites was as significant as he argues. Jacobson, Whiteness of a
Different Color, 1-9.
59
The quotation is from Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 14. See also Ignatiev, How the Irish Became
White. Historian Eric Arneson usefully cautions that in many meaningful ways, Irish Americans were
always white. Arneson, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” 3-32.
60
Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 131-54; Baker, Affairs of Party, 180-81; Roediger,
Wages of Whiteness, 140-43.
61
Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 9-10.
166
German Catholics in most states—but not Missouri—voted more like Irish Catholics than
Reformed Protestant Germans or Forty-Eighters. The segmentation of the GermanAmerican community identified by political and social historians and contemporary
observers seems to suggest that German Democrats’ ideas of race and citizenship had
more in common with Irish Democrats than they did with German Republicans.62
Historians who study the development of racial attitudes within the Democratic Party also
depict working-class German and Irish immigrants in northern cities cooperating to
emphasize the boundaries of whiteness.63
A close reading of German-language newspapers, however, indicates that in Ohio
and Missouri during Reconstruction, there were important differences between how Irish
and German immigrants reacted to racial appeals. German Democratic leaders hoped
that they could use whiteness to appeal to their constituents, but they were not convinced
their arguments resonated with the ordinary German immigrant in the streets of St. Louis
or Cincinnati. Most first-generation German immigrants participated in a political and
popular culture that was distinct from that of Irish Americans.
62
Historian Hartmut Keil points out that this assumption is based on weak evidence. Hartmut Keil,
“German immigrants and African-Americans in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” in Enemy Images in
American History, ed. Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase and Ursula Lehmkuhl (Providence: Berghahn Books,
1997), 137-38.
63
Although Roediger argues different groups of working-class immigrant came together and “the growing
popular sense of whiteness represented a hesitantly emerging consensus holding together a very diverse
white working class,” he is careful not to eliminate the distinction between the Irish and Germans.
Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 97, 14, 118.
Other historians of earlier and later periods provide a more nuanced sense of how German
immigrants learned the importance of whiteness. For a rather speculative approach, see Jon Gjerde, “‘Here
in America There Is Neither King nor Tyrant’: European Encounters with Race, ‘Freedom,’ and Their
European Pasts,” Journal of the Early Republic 9 (1999): 673-90. In an other 1999 essay, historian Russell
Kazal uncovered differences between German and Irish Catholics in late nineteenth-century Philadelphia.
In his 2004 monograph, however, he argued that over the following decades, with generational change,
working-class German Catholics assimilated and became, with the Irish, “white ethnics.” Middle-class and
Protestant German immigrants took a different route, becoming “old stock” with Anglo-Americans. Kazal,
“Irish ‘Race’ and German ‘Nationality,’” 149-68; Kazal, Becoming Old Stock, 252-60, 232-45. See also
the literature on blackface minstrelsy cited below.
167
Leading German Democrats actively sought to reinforce the association between
whiteness and citizenship during Reconstruction. They pushed German Americans to
identify with Irish immigrants and called on them to vote as white men. They commonly
referred to German and Irish immigrants in the same sentence or spoke collectively of
“white” or “European” immigrants, alluding to their shared struggles in America.64 The
Republicans oppressed them all, they argued. The Columbus Westbote warned that the
Republicans intended to steadily erode the rights of immigrants: “Today it is the Irish
Catholics, tomorrow it will be the Germans, and the day after that, foreigners in general
on whom they will turn their well known persecutory rage.”65 As this comment tacitly
acknowledged, however, German immigrants were more secure than the Irish
newcomers. They arrived with more money and skills, allowing them to fill a variety of
occupations and move beyond the slums of the port cities of the East. The confessionally
diverse Germans escaped the worst of the prejudice leveled at the strongly Catholic Irish.
Their whiteness was rarely challenged. 66 Moreau called German Republicans “white
niggers,” but in the context of post-war Missouri, the epithet was as impotent as when it
was applied to native-born Republicans.
Yet Democrats argued that German immigrants’ power in the United States
depended on protecting white privilege. On October 8, 1867, the day Ohioans voted on
state offices and black suffrage, the Volksfreund devoted a full page to convincing readers
64
Wahrheits-Freund, 23 October 1867.
“Heute sind es die irischen Katholiken, morgen werden es die Deutschen, übermorgen die Ausländer
überhaupt sein, gegen die sich ihre bekannte Verfolgungswuth wendet.” Columbus Westbote, 9 March
1865.
66
Historians have unearthed scattered references to German immigrants as non-white. See discussions in
Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 47; Kazal, “Irish ‘Race’ and German ‘Nationality,” 149-68;
Kazal, Becoming Old Stock, 109-29.
65
168
that “white or black is now the question.”67 It reported that Republicans were
questioning the superiority of white immigrants to African Americans. The Cincinnati
newspaper quoted Ohio’s Republican candidate for the lieutenant governorship as saying,
“Today the Negroes are more capable of the intelligent exercise of the right to vote than
the ignorant Germans and Irish.” Ohio’s Radical Senator Benjamin Wade supposedly
compared Germans’ voting abilities to those of the horses they rode. The Volksfreund
asserted that Republicans resented German immigrants’ political influence and success in
America. It conjured up the image of Republicans meeting behind closed doors to
scheme, “We will make the Germans politically dead with the Negroes.” Republicans,
according to this representation, wanted African Americans to vote in order to undermine
the power of immigrants. If the “last barrier between white and black” were dismantled,
black voters would take their power. The message of the day was to vote for the
Democratic slate, “the ticket of the white man.”68
German Democratic politicians suggested that if blacks achieved full American
citizenship, German immigrants’ own would be devalued. Like Republicans, they
compared the process of immigrants and former slaves becoming citizens, but they made
quite a different point. The Volksfreund used emotive language to encourage its readers
not to empathize with African Americans. It asked German immigrants whether they
wanted to give the “the crude, ignorant Negro the highest right [suffrage] immediately,”
67
“Weiß oder Schwarz ist jetzt die Frage.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 8 October 1867.
“Die Neger sind heute mehr befähigt zu intelligenter Ausübung des Stimmrechts, als die unwissenden
Deutsch und Irländer”; “Machen wir die deutschen durch die Neger politisch caput!”; “Letzte Schranke
zwischen Weiß und Schwarz”; “… welches das Ticket des weißen Mannes ist.” Ibid.
Other German Democratic papers in Ohio similarly opposed the “elimination of all political
differentiation between whites and blacks” (“… hebt alle politischen Unterscheidung zwischen den Weißen
und den Schwartzen auf”) during this election season. Columbus Westbote, 18 September 1867; Fremont
Courier, 3 October 1867.
68
169
when they “had had to wait five years, five long, bitter years.” Immigrants “had had to
earn it with sweat and blood, with hunger and heartache, threatened every hour with
enemy bullets.”69 The absurdity of the comparison must have struck even Democratic
partisans, but German Democrats often proclaimed it inconsistent that native-born blacks
should not be allowed to vote immediately when immigrants in most states had to wait
five years to become naturalized citizens.70 Democratic politicians also warned that
centralizing the authority over citizenship and voting in the hands of the Congress would
leave immigrants at the mercy of an unsympathetic Republican-dominated body.71 They
were suspicious when Republican newspapers began to propose that naturalization laws
be reformed after the 1868 election. The Anzeiger found it “striking” that “the loud cry
for the improvement of the naturalization law and for making the process of becoming a
citizen more difficult comes mainly from papers that do not tire of advocating the
immediate granting of voting rights to 700,000 African half-barbarians.” 72 To
Democrats, Republican actions showed that threats to white citizenship accompanied the
extension of black citizenship. Making a logical leap, Democrats suggested that if
political citizenship were no longer exclusively white, the citizenship of whites might no
longer be secure.
69
“… dem rohen, unwissenden Neger das höchste Recht sofort geben”; “… fünf Jahre—fünf lange bittere
Jahre habt warten müssen”; “… haben es mit Schweiß und Blut, mit Hunger und Kummer, stündlich von
feindlichen Kugeln bedroht, sich erwerben müssen.” Cincinnati Volksfruend, 8 October 1867.
70
The Anzeiger called the naturalization period “a five-year enslavement” (“eine fünfjährige ‘Sklaverei’”).
Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 2 July 1868. See also Cincinnati Volksfruend, 11 April 1866, 11
September 1866, 3 October 1867; Wahrheits-Freund, 23 October 1867.
71
Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 3 May 1866.
72
“Das laute Geschrei nach Verbesserung der Naturalisations-Gesetze und Geschwerung des
Bürgerwerdens hauptsächlich von Blättern ausgeht, die nicht müde werden, die sofortige Gewährung des
Stimmrechts an 700,000 afrikanische Halbbarbaren zu befürworten.” Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt,
19 November 1868. For similar sentiment, see Columbus Westbote, 4 March 1869.
170
It sounded like racism emanating from the ranks of the working class, but it was
not. German Democrats were different from Irish Democrats. German Democratic
leaders were not so much reflecting the concerns of the German-American community as
attempting to instigate them. Democratic leaders were trying to convince German
immigrants that race should determine their votes, but their references to whiteness often
reflected the preoccupations of southern elites, not immigrants in Ohio and Missouri.
Before the 1868 election, for example, the “German Democratic Central Committee of
the City of New Orleans” sent out an epistle to sympathetic newspapers around the
country. The German Louisianans appealed to “their brothers in the North and West,”
who had already shown in suffrage referenda that “as white men, as people of
intelligence and education, [they] do not want to be placed on the same level as crude,
uneducated negroes.” The call evoked white solidarity and pride in German cultural
achievements. It was “humiliating, that the Germans, the countrymen of a Schiller and a
Goethe, a Mozart and a Beethoven, a Lessing and a Heine, were subordinated to the
Negro in every respect.” Although the letter mentioned the five-year waiting period for
naturalization, the whiteness it described was not the whiteness that German immigrants
shared with the persecuted Irish. It was the whiteness of the people who claimed to be
rightful leaders of the South, men “gifted with reason and intelligence and equipped with
capital and manpower.”73
73
“Deutsche Brüder … als weiße Männer, als Leute von Intelligenz und Bildung, Euch nicht auf gleiche
Stufe mit dem rohen ungebildeten Neger stellen wollt”; “… erniedrigend, daß die Deutschen, die
Landsleute eines Schiller und Goethe, eines Mozart und Beethoven, eines Lessing und Heine, in jeder
Hinsicht unter den Neger gestellt werden”; “mit Verstand und Intelligenz begabt, mit Kapital und
Arbeitskraft ausgerüstet.” Columbus Westbote, 29 October 1868. The same piece appeared in the Anzeiger
des Westens Wochen-Blatt that day.
171
Indeed, the vast majority of the coverage of race and citizenship in Germanlanguage Democratic newspapers in Missouri and Ohio simply followed the party line
and called for white rule in the South.74 Like Anglo-American Democrats, they depicted
African Americans as lazy, uncivilized, incapable, and violent.75 In sharp contrast to
Republicans, Democrats described African Americans in a malicious and derogatory
tone. Sometimes they indicated that they believed African Americans could lift
themselves from their degraded state. The Wahrheits-Freund compared giving “just
freed slaves in all their crudeness and ignorance” political equality to making a recently
graduated student a government minister. At the same time, however, the Catholic paper
considered African Americans biologically inferior, calling black voting contrary to
“every natural law.”76 Democratic papers frequently claimed African Americans were
inherently inferior to whites. The Columbus Westbote stated that “the negroes belong to
a lower race that in the history of the world has nowhere proved it is capable of higher
culture.”77 The Anzeiger took a similar position when it printed an essay arguing that the
theory of evolution described in Charles Darwin’s 1859 Origin of the Species showed
that any attempts to support blacks would be futile.78 Another correspondent asserted
that African Americans could not be educated.79 Democratic editors also found a
74
On the position of northern Democrats as a group, see Foner, Reconstruction, 31-32, 313-14, 340-41;
Baker, Affairs of Party, 208-58, 349-52.
75
The literature on American racial thinking during the nineteenth century is extensive, but for a useful
treatment that explores the overlap between scientific and older ideas of race, see Horsman, Race and
Manifest Destiny.
76
“Erst befreiten Sklaven in seinen ganzen Rohheit und Unwissenheit”; “jedem Naturgesetz.” WahrheitsFreund, 9 October 1867. Examples of similar sentiment are far too numerous to list individually.
77
“… die Neger einer niedrigen Rasse angehören, die in der ganzen Weltgeschichte nicht nirgends
beweisen hat, daß sie einer höheren Cultur fähig ist.” Columbus Westbote, 18 September 1867.
78
Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 22 March 1866. Anglo-American politicians, including Frank
Blair, were also intrigued by the potential of evolutionary arguments to support white dominance. Foner,
Reconstruction, 340-41.
79
Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 5 September 1867.
172
remarkable number of instances of African Americans raping, murdering, or attacking
innocent German-American women and families.80 They added these alleged incidents—
absent from Republican papers—to the list of reasons to deny African Americans the
franchise and support the often violent efforts of southern whites to maintain power.81
Racism was a striking feature of German Democratic newspapers but an
unreliable campaign technique. Editors doubted that their attempts to persuade their
readers to vote as white men were yielding results. In St. Louis, the Anzeiger avoided the
most intemperate race baiting. The paper never would have printed Moreau’s
correspondence from Jefferson City, littered as it was with obvious exaggerations and the
word “nigger.” Dänzer presented his opinions in more measured and reasonable—even
scientific—terms. He denied that he was prejudiced and even said that he would accept
African American voting rights if it were not for his respect for the Constitution. Taken
in aggregate, the contents of the Anzeiger indicated otherwise, but whenever possible,
Dänzer focused on Republicans’ hypocrisy rather than addressing the issue of black
rights directly. Even before the election of 1868, the Conservative newspaper refined the
moderate stance and tone that increasing numbers of Democrats would adopt following
Grant’s election. It tactically accepted conciliatory policies and compromising rhetoric in
order to compete for votes.82
80
In the German-language papers, the victims were often German-American women and families.
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 12 December 1865, 11 July 1866, 12 September 1867; Columbus Westbote, 19
December 1867, 10 September 1868; Fremont Courier, 15 March 1866; Anzeiger des Westens WochenBlatt, 17 September 1868.
81
German Democrats did not publicly condone terrorism, but they blamed Republicans and African
Americans for provoking the 1866 riots in Memphis and New Orleans and the political violence of groups
such as the Ku Klux Klan. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 8 August 1866; Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 10
May 1866, 9 August 1866, 16 April 1868; Columbus Westbote, 9 August 1866.
82
Following political scientist Austin Ranney, historian Michael Perman contrasts these “competitive”
Democrats to “expressive” Democrats who considered white supremacy a bedrock value. Perman, The
173
While the Anzeiger maintained steady restraint, the Cincinnati Volksfreund
vacillated between torrents of racist vitriol and quiet reconsideration. Throughout 1865
and 1866, editor Johann Jeup repeatedly told his readers that they must vote Democratic
in order to avoid the enfranchisement of “niggers.” Alongside racially charged editorials
and reports, the paper tried to entertain its readers with satirical stories spitefully mocking
African Americans. One spoofed black candidates for municipal offices, while another
presented the “monolog” of a Union Army mule who hoped his military service would
entitle him to vote.83 But when Democrats lost the fall elections in 1866, Jeup
reconsidered his tactics. The Volksfreund printed a piece translated from the Chicago
Times recommending that Democrats sever connections with Johnson and accept black
suffrage: “Are not Negro voting rights unavoidable, and would they not actually be the
shortest way to overcome the whole Negro question?” Jeup was not ready to answer in
the affirmative, but he abruptly reined in his attacks on African Americans.84 In early
1867, he acknowledged that he was deliberately staying silent on Congress’s
Reconstruction policies. 85 Anti-black stories and editorials proliferated again in the
weeks before the fall elections, but they declined when Cincinnati Democrats failed to
convert opposition to black voting into victories for their local candidates. Jeup, like
many other northern Democrats, approached the apparently treacherous issue of race
Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1984), 7-21, 23.
83
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 19 March 1865, 21 October 1866.
84
“Ist das Negerstimmrecht nicht unvermeidlich und würde es nicht der kürzeste Weg sein, um überhaupt
die ganze Negerfrage ein für allemal zu beseitigen?” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 14 November 1866.
85
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 27 February 1867. When Ohio Republicans decided to put African American
suffrage to a referendum, the Volksfreund hardly mentioned it. The editors declared they would not “waste
one more word” on the suffrage referendum except to point out that Republicans were reversing their
previous position. (“Wir wollen heute darüber weiter kein Wort verlieren.”) Cincinnati Volksfreund, 9
April 1867.
174
more cautiously during 1868. He even boasted that the Volksfreund had been the first
Democratic newspaper to announce its support of the Thirteenth Amendment.86 The
editor focused more on the economy, beer and religious freedom, and the Constitution.
The German-American public sphere, in which both Democrats and Republicans
participated, was not fertile ground for arguments based on white supremacy. During the
late 1860s, Radical Republicans remained the leading representatives of the GermanAmerican community in the United States. German Democratic newspapers were filled
with frustrated attacks on German Radicals such as Schurz, Sigel, Willich, the Westliche
Post, and the Cincinnati Volksblatt. Democrats could not ignore German Republicans.
They reported Republican faux pas, elections, appointments, career changes and travels.
The Columbus Westbote complained that “the mainstays and opinion-setters of the
Missouri Radikalissimmi are the German do-gooders and heaven-assailants of St. Louis.
Their political fanaticism, their stubborn intolerance exceeds all bounds.”87 Democrats
could not fathom how these politicians and organs could claim to represent GermanAmerican principles to the world. In a plea to their German Landsleute in the northern
states, the Anzeiger openly expressed its annoyance: “We charge these false
representatives of Deutschtum to American public opinion with dishonesty and injustice
because they maintain that all opponents of the Radical Party are Rebels, opponents of
86
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 3 March 1868.
“Die Hauptstützen und Haupttonangeber der Missouri Radikalissimi sind die deutschen Weltverbesserer
und Himmelstürmer von St. Louis. Ihr politische Fanatismus, ihre starre Unduldsamkeit übersteigen alle
Schranken.” Columbus Westbote, 1 November 1866.
87
175
the Union, and enemies of freedom and progress.”88 To Democrats, it was a mystery how
Republicans had claimed German “honesty and morality” for themselves.89
Even the Cincinnati Germans who chose to buy the Democratic Volksfreund
apparently gave racist arguments a muted response. Many German immigrants did not
like the idea of black men voting, but as one historian found in late nineteenth century
Philadelphia, they just “were not all that invested in whiteness.”90 Or, as another
historian speculates, perhaps they were just beginning the “gradual learning process” of
adopting “racism as practiced in the United States.”91 German immigrants took a minor
part in the spontaneous demonstrations of racial antipathy that flared up in northern cities
during the mid-nineteenth century. They joined the first day of the famous New York
City draft riots of 1863, but they withdrew before the protests degenerated into violence
and looting. Irish-American wage-earners inflicted sexualized and ritualized violence on
African Americans, and a total of at least 105 people died before the Union regiments
called back from Gettysburg could impose order. German immigrants found themselves
targeted for siding with the Republicans, and in one case, protecting a black man from
attackers.92 The German-born were of course capable racism and violence. German
immigrants joined Irish Americans in the ranks of the White Boys in Blue, an
88
“Wir klagen diese falschen Vertreter des Deutschthums vor der öffentlichen Meinung in Amerika der
Unwahrheit und der Ungerechtigkeit an, weil sie behaupten alle Gegner der radikalen Partei in Missouri
seien Rebellen, Gegner der Union, und Feinde der Freiheit und des Fortshritts.” Anzeiger des Westens
Wochen-Blatt, 1 November 1866.
89
“Ehrlichkeit und Moralität.” Fremont Courier, 3 September 1867.
90
Kazal, Becoming Old Stock, 115.
91
This hypothesis directs Hartmut Keil’s research on antebellum relationships between African Americans
and German immigrants in northern cities. Keil, “German immigrants and African-Americans in MidNineteenth Century America,” 138.
92
Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in
the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 23, 26-34.
176
organization of Democratic veterans who caroused and threatened black residents of
Columbus, Ohio before elections in 1867 and 1868.93
An adversarial relationship with blacks, however, was not a mainstay of GermanAmerican identity and popular culture during the mid-nineteenth century. For example,
German immigrants avoided blackface minstrelsy, the art form that provided the cultural
expression of the Democrats’ idea of exclusively white citizenship. Some historians have
described blackface as “the most influential forum for nineteenth-century racial attitudes”
among working-class Americans, and they have been particularly interested in the way it
brought different immigrant groups together as “white ethnics.”94 By the 1840s,
America’s most popular entertainers were white men who blackened their faces and
presented caricatures of African Americans in formulaic but improvised variety routines.
Blackface minstrel acts overwhelmingly depicted black characters who were foolish, selfindulgent, licentious, and subservient, utterly lacking the “self-control of republican
citizens.” Since its dominant messages were anti-black and pro-slavery, this vehicle of
vernacular racism rose in conjunction with the Jacksonian Democratic Party.95 During
the 1860s, blackface reached the pinnacle of both its popularity and its association with
93
Columbus Westbote, 3 October 1867, 1 October 1868.
Baker, Affairs of Party, 213. Blackface minstrelsy was centered in the urban centers of the region
stretching from New York and Pennsylvania west to the upper Mississippi River area. Alexander Saxton,
“Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” American Quarterly 27 (1975): 7.
95
Baker, Affairs of Party, 237. See also Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” 19-23;
Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1974), 65-97. Other scholars emphasize that the racial content of blackface was
ambivalent. See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 15-37; William F. Stowe and David Grimsted, “White-Black
Humor,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 3 (1975): 87-96. One historian specifically argues blackface was not
“political” because it was so pervasive that bore various racial messages and was used by both parties
before emancipation. Mark E. Neeley, Jr., The Boundaries of American Political Culture in the Civil War
Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 97-127. Along these lines, see also William J.
Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular
Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Pres, 1999).
94
177
Democratic politics. After the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, blackface performances
ridiculed African American ambitions, nostalgically depicting slavery as preferable to
citizenship.96 There are many ways to interpret the spectacle of working-class whites
reveling in black impersonations, but men of different ethnic backgrounds were certainly
coming together to celebrate their common whiteness at the expense of African
Americans.97 The comic black faces on the stage allowed the poor white men in the
audiences to feel superior.
If many working-class Ohioans and Missourians honed their sense of whiteness at
blackface shows, German-speakers, as a rule, did not. Most of them had only arrived in
the 1850s, and they did not immediately warm to this quintessentially American
entertainment. There is little evidence that German immigrants were as involved in
blackface as Irish and English immigrants.98 One sample of forty-three blackface
performers working in 1838 found seven born outside of the United States, none of them
Germans.99 While some German immigrants must have frequented minstrel shows, they
were not advertised in German-language newspapers at the height of blackface’s
96
Toll, Blacking Up, 112-28; Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” 23. For the rise of
the business of minstrel performances, see Carl Wittke, Tambo and Bones: A History of the American
Minstrel Stage (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1930), 64.
97
David Roediger argues the potentially subversive class messages of blackface were channeled into the
racial rather than class solidarity. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 127. For arguments that emphasize
blackface’s subversion, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American
Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 259; Stowe and Grimsted, “WhiteBlack Humor,” 80-83.
98
Several works make passing reference to German immigrant involvement in Civil War Era minstrelsy:
Kazal, Becoming Old Stock, 114, 323; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 118; Alan W. C. Green, “‘Jim
Crow’, ‘Zip Coon’: The Northern Origins of Negro Minstrelsy,” Massachusetts Review 11 (1970): 393.
Ultimately, all their claims can be traced back to a 1930s monograph, Carl Wittke’s Tambo and Bones.
Wittke did identify two German-born men in an extensive prosopography including scores of performers.
Wittke, the son of German immigrants and an historian of German immigration was well equipped to
present more evidence of German-American involvement in blackface had it existed. Wittke, Tambo and
Bones, 233, 236.
99
Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” 7.
178
popularity in the1860s. Neither were they standard fare in the numerous Germanlanguage venues in cities such as St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Cleveland.100 In 1883, an
immigrant defending the retention of German “characteristics” in the pages of the
Milwaukee Seebote asked, whether “citizens of German origin” had to attend “Minstrel
Shows” in order to be good Americans. Using the English-language term for the
American art form, he indicated that it was still as foreign to German Americans as
“Camp Meetings” and “women’s crusades.”101 The children of German immigrants
appear only to have adopted the artistic descendants of blackface toward the end of the
century.102
During the 1860s, German Democrats took part in leisure activities that did not
carry blackface minstrelsy’s messages about race and citizenship. German Americans
were somewhat divided along religious and class lines, but they shared a proud tradition
100
It is difficult to prove the absence of German-language blackface in the United States during the 1860s
and 1870s, but my reading of German-language newspapers did not reveal any advertisements or reports of
performances. Studies of German-American theater do not mention it, although they identify the staging of
burlesques and vaudeville-style shows. Alfred H. Nolle, “The German Drama on the St. Louis Stage”
(Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1917), 77-81; John H. Kremling, “German Drama on the
Cleveland Stage: Performances in German and English from 1850 to the Present” (Ph.D. diss., The Ohio
State University, 1976), 190-93; Peter C. Merrill, German-American Urban Culture: Writers and Theaters
in Early Milwaukee (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 25-32.
101
“Charakterzüge”; “Bürger deutschen Ursprungs”; “Weiberkreuzzügen.” Der deutsche Pionier 15
(1883): 130-31. The Cincinnati periodical reprinted an article that first appeared in a Milwaukee
newspaper.
102
For indications that German-American performers only began to stage blackface in German-American
venues toward the end of the century, see Klaus Ensslen, “German-American Working-Class Saloons in
Chicago: Their Social Function in an Ethnic and Class-Specific Context,” in German Workers’ Culture in
the United States 1850-1920, ed. Hartmut Keil (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998),
173, 175; Christine Heiss, “Popular and Working-Class German Theater in Chicago, 1870 to 1910” in
German Workers’ Culture in the United States, ed. Keil, 188-90; Berndt Ostendorf, “‘The Diluted Second
Generation’: German Americans in Music 1870 to 1920,” in German Workers’ Culture in the United
States, ed. Keil, 279; Kazal, Becoming Old Stock, 113-14.
For the role of blackface in the Americanization of various groups of European immigrants during
the 1920s and 1930s, see Michael Rogin, “Making America Home: Racial Masquerade and Ethnic
Assimilation in the Transition to Talking Pictures,” Journal of American History 79 (1992): 1050-77.
179
of sociability characterized by beer-drinking and music.103 A visit to a German
neighborhood saloon was part of the daily routine of the urban immigrant worker. There
men and women found food, entertainment, and political debate as well as beer.104 In
cities such as St. Louis and Cincinnati, families could gather on fine weekends at open-air
beer gardens. Throughout the country, German-American organizations and churches
organized public musical events, sporting demonstrations, and picnics. At the same time
that the Cincinnati Volksfreund was beseeching readers to vote down black suffrage in
October 1867, it advertised a choice of German-language entertainment that included the
German Theater’s production of “The Wallpaper Manufacturer, or ‘A Night in Berlin,’” a
fundraising ball for the Garment Workers Support Society, “Evening Entertainments” at
the Turner Hall, and concerts by various amateur singing societies.105 Participants
sometimes came from a variety of religious and class backgrounds. The Sunday before
the election, a shooting club organized a folk festival attended largely by families that
were at least “independent enough to keep Sunday as a work-free holiday.” The day
featured a procession of Turners, seven different amateur singing groups (one Catholic),
and representatives of a labor federation, all topped off with a sharp shooting
103
Conzen, “Ethnicity as Festive Culture,” in The Invention of Ethnicity, ed. Sollors, 48; Detjen, The
Germans in Missouri, 27-28; Ulrike Skorsetz, “Der Franzose wechselt die Mode, Wir Deutschen dagegen
wechseln die Wirtshäuser: Die Wirtshäuser und Bierkonsum aus der Sicht deutscher Einwanderer im
neunzehnten Jahrhundert,” Yearbook of German-American Studies 31 (1996): 37-44. Tom Goyens, Beer
and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880-1914 (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2007) explores the significance of German sociability to the anarchist movement in late
nineteenth-century New York.
104
Ensslen, “German-American Working-Class Saloons in Chicago,” in German Workers’ Culture in the
United States, ed. Keil, 163-76; Ross, Workers on the Edge, 172-78. For confirmation that women were
welcomed at many German-American venues, see Cincinnati Volksfreund, 15 July 1867.
105
“Deutsche Theater”; “Die Tapeten-Fabrikanten oder ‘Eine Nacht in Berlin’”; “Großer Stiftungs-Ball
gegeben von dem Kleidermacher Unterstützungsverein”; “Abend-Unterhaltung in der Turn-Halle.”
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 3, 23 October 1867.
180
competition.106 The elaborate event required a concentrated German population, but
Turners and singing and shooting groups from small towns often traveled to regional
festivals.107
If blackface minstrelsy created a common whiteness defined against a black
stereotype, German-American popular culture invented a common Germanness
juxtaposed to an Anglo-American stereotype. This proved an obstacle to Democratic
politicians. The well-off immigrants who led German Americans in both of the major
parties believed that the Germans were characterized by the cultured achievements and
decorum represented by the word Bildung. The term had strong middle-class
connotations, but “True Bildung,” as historian Kathleen Neils Conzen has skillfully
demonstrated, “recognized the important role of Geselligkeit—voluntary sociability.”108
Middle-class German Americans, she argues, were prepared to incorporate elements of
working-class culture into their “invented” ethnic identity as they “embarked upon an
uncoordinated but conscious campaign to defend their way of life” from native-born
reformers.109 The effort that had begun before the war was in full swing by the 1860s. It
was exemplified by a group of middle-aged, German-born Cincinnati gentlemen who
formed the German Pioneer Society of Cincinnati an explicitly non-partisan and non-
106
“… unabhängig genug sind, um nicht nur den Sonntag allein für einen von der Arbeit freien Festtag zu
halten ….” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 1 October 1867. It is unclear whether “der Arbeiterbund von
Cincinnati” was the local chapter of the Allgemeine Arbeiter-Bund in den Vereinigten Staaten, a nonMarxist group which formed in 1857 to advocate for higher pay and “equal rights for all regardless of
color, religion, nationality or sex.” Whatever its ideology, the group’s name proclaimed its proud workingclass identity. Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 144-45.
107
For example, a regional “Turnfest” took place in St. Charles in early June 1868. St. Charles Demokrat,
4 June 1868. The Fremont Courier allowed its readers to participate vicariously in a national convention of
German singing groups held in Chicago the following year by devoting five columns to it. Fremont
Courier, 25 June 1865.
108
Conzen, “Ethnicity as Festive Culture,” 49.
109
Ibid., 55.
181
denominational group in 1867, which dedicated itself to “preserv[ing] … the history and
experiences of the German pioneers of Cincinnati.” Its journal included biographies,
histories of German settlements, and articles that showed German immigrants bound
together by a culture of sociability.110
Every German-American newspaper included similar pieces trumpeting the
German contributions to American society. In July 1867, the Volksfreund happily
reported remarks by an Anglo-American politician at a German-American gathering in
Peoria, Illinois. The politician told the crowd, “Today I saw here the wealthiest and most
educated [gebildetsten] Germans of our city sitting together on the same bench with the
least well-off and drinking beer out of the same horn, and all appeared to feel completely
content.”111 German Americans with their “noble, sensible sociability” contrasted not to
African Americans but to Anglo-Americans, who were “no social people.”112 Defensive
but not hostile, German Americans were gratified whenever the individualistic, sober,
materialistic Anglo-Americans recognized Germans’ gift to the United States.
It was difficult for Democrats to use this ostensibly non-partisan model of
German-American identity to consolidate opposition to African American citizenship.
During the Civil War, Republicans had succeeded in infusing it with their own ideas of
citizenship. The Peoria politician whom the Democratic Volksfreund so approvingly
quoted in 1867 was Robert G. Ingersoll, a Republican who that year pushed his brother in
110
“… die Geschichte und Erlebnisse der detuschen Pionier von Cincinnati … aufzubewahren.”
“Constitution des deutschen Pionier-Vereins von Cincinnati,” Der deutsche Pionier 1 (1869): 27-29. In
1877 a similar organization formed with the goal of “supporting and cultivating German literature within a
tight social circle” (“die deutschen Literatur im engen, sozialen Kreise zu pflegen un zu förden”).
Deutscher Literarische Klub, Record Book, 1877-1878, box 1, Deutscher Literarische Klub Records, CHS.
111
“Ich habe heute hier die vermögendsten und gebildetsten Deutschen unserer Stadt auf derselben Bank
mit den wenig Bemittelten zusammen sitzen und Bier aus einem und demselben Horn trinken sehen, und
Alle schienen sich vollständig glücklich zu fühlen.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 15 July 1867.
112
“Edler, vernünftiger Geselligkeit”; “Kein geselliges Volk.” Ibid.
182
Congress to “take the most radical ground.”113 He was addressing assembled Turners,
members of an organization that embodied German sociability and supported African
American suffrage. The Volksfreund reported the concluding admonition of Ingersoll’s
speech: “Stay true to your principles … and the time will soon come, when freedom is
universal and every man will enjoy the fruits of his labor.”114 While the Volksfreund
could try to cast this as a non-partisan message, it was distinctly Republican in the
context of Reconstruction. Staying true to the principles of Ingersoll and the Turners
meant supporting African American citizenship.
German Republicans dominated popular representations of German sociability
and Bildung and had infused them with Republican ideas of citizenship. During the late
1860s, support for an inclusive and participatory form of American citizenship had
become part of the myth of the freedom-loving German. An immigrant writing the
history of German St. Louis from the perspective of the late nineteenth century described
how German sociability and German Republicanism fused in the eyes of AngloAmericans in the late 1860s. “The German approach to life, their way of enjoying life”
had led to the creation of “summer gardens” in the late 1840s and 1850s, but Americans
had found German customs foreign and only frequented the German places of
entertainment after the war. As the book explained, “the shared endurance of danger,
jointly won victories, and the eventual fruits of the casualties it [the war] yielded, brought
the two nationalities closer together.” There was “a powerful respect for the Germans in
certain classes of the population where it had not existed before.” The newfound respect
113
Orvin Larson, Robert G. Ingersoll: A Biography (New York: The Citadel Press, 1962), 87.
“Bleibt den Prinzipien treu … und die Zeit wird bald kommen, wo die Freiheit allgemein sein und Jeder
die Früchte seiner Arbeit … genießen wird.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 15 July 1867.
114
183
“clearly manifested itself beginning during the war and during the second half of the
1860s, in the political arena, but also in daily activities.” Although this account obscured
the tense atmosphere of St. Louis politics during the era, it was a narrative that German
Americans were shaping even in the 1860s. It was Republican because it depicted the
Civil War as a fight for the Union and against slavery and described its “eventual fruits”
as worthy achievements.115
During the 1868 election, the Republican idea that German immigrants stood for
tolerance of immigrants and African Americans reached its peak. With Schurz soon to be
elected to the Senate, it was clear that the events of Reconstruction had created
significant support for the principle of political citizenship for black men. While German
Republicans, especially in St. Louis, had not all supported African American suffrage in
state referenda, Democratic leaders had failed to use the prospect of black voting to
entice Republican voters into Democratic ranks. German Democratic editors even began
to question racism’s efficacy in motivating their own partisans. Rank-and-file German
Democrats were less interested in defining whiteness than Irish Democrats, but they were
also distinguishable from Anglo-Americans within their party. German Democrats
participated in the German-language public sphere. The political defeat of 1868
compounded Democrats’ sense that Republicans were winning the battle to define
German-American identity.
115
“Die Lebensanschauung der Deutschen, ihre Weise, das Leben zu genießzen”; “… gemeinsam
ertragene Gefahren, gemeinschaftlich erkämpfte Siege und die schließlichen Früchter der von ihn
gebrachten Opfer hatten die verschiedenen Nationalitäten einander näher gebracht ….”; “Man hatte in
gewissen Schichten der Bevölkerung einen vorher nicht existirenden, gewaltigen Respekt vor den
Deutschen bekommen, und das hatte sich schon während des Krieges und während der zweiten Hälfte der
sechziger Jahre hier blos auf politischem Gebiete, sondern auch im täglichen Verkehr deutlich
kundgegeben.” E.D. Kargau, St. Louis in früheren Jahren: Ein Gedenkbuch für das Deutschthum (St.
Louis: Aug. Wiebuch & Sohn, 1893), 204-09.
184
After Grant became president, German Democrats became somewhat resigned to
the changes in citizenship they were witnessing. The day after the election, the
Volksfreund revisited a compromise proposal that had already caught the editor’s eye:
“universal suffrage and universal amnesty” for black and white men in the South.116 For
Democrats, this plan would mean abandoning the idea that citizenship would be for
whites only. By February 1869, when the Fifteenth Amendment was making its way
through Congress, Jeup reevaluated the “people’s will.” The paper had warned its
readers that if they voted for Republicans, voting against black suffrage would be
pointless. Voters apparently had not listened, “And, as one can see, it has already come
to this.” After four years of fighting African American suffrage, Jeup reflected, “What
the people will say to this new act of violence by radicalism remains to be seen.”117
116
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 4 November 1868. Jeup had reacted approvingly when New York Republican
Horace Greeley raised the issue in early 1867. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 2 February 1867.
117
“Volkswillen”; “Und soweit sind wir, wie man sieht, bereits gekommen”; “Was das Volk zu diesem
neuen Gewaltstreiche des Radikalismus sagen wird, bleibt abzuwarten.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 2
February 1869. Other Democratic newspapers expressed muted opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment.
Fremont Courier, 4 February 1869; Columbus Westbote, 28 January 1869.
185
CHAPTER 5
WENDEPUNKT:
THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR AND GERMAN UNIFICATION, 1869-1871
The stifling heat did not stop local Germans from packing into the Sandusky,
Ohio courthouse to demonstrate their support for Prussia and the German states that had
rallied to its aid following the French declaration of war on July 19, 1870. They were
determined that they would “not lag behind any city in the republic” in showing their
“loyalty and devotion to the threatened—but therefore all the more ardently loved—
Fatherland.”1 France had gone on the offensive following a diplomatic slight, but in
reality, Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck sought just such an opportunity to
consolidate his kingdom’s rising power. Within a few months, Prussia would capture
France’s Louis Napoleon III, besiege Paris, and found the German Empire.2 In
Sandusky, invited guests from as far away as Detroit and Cleveland heralded this new era
of German unity. Musicians defied the heat to fill the hall with stirring music. August
Thieme, a veteran of the unsuccessful campaign for German unification in 1848 and
editor of the Cleveland Wächter am Erie since 1852, rose to register his approval. The
1
“Hinter keiner Stadt in der Republik zurück”; “Treue und Hingebung für das bedrohte, aber eben deshalb
so heißer geliebte Vaterland.” Wächter am Erie, 5 August 1870.
2
For useful overview of the road to war, see Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German
Conquest of France in 1870-1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 16-40.
186
newspaperman could not hold back his enthusiasm, remarking that “the patriotic fervor in
Sandusky is a match for the hundred-degree heat.”3
The outpouring of German-American pride and solidarity during the FrancoPrussian War and German unification in 1870 and 1871 would mark what the Cincinnati
Volksfreund called “the turning point [Wendepunkt] in the political and social course of
the German element in America.”4 A wave of euphoria swept through German America.
From small-town courthouses to urban parks in Cleveland, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, tens
of thousands of German Americans turned out to celebrate in the summer of 1870. They
would take to the streets again after September 2, when German forces scored a quick
victory over the French at Sedan and captured Napoleon III, and they continued to follow
the war until Prussia’s final victory and Germany’s formal unification redrew the map of
Europe in 1871. Regardless of religion, class, or party, German-speaking Americans
welcomed German unity. The Democratic and pro-Catholic Fremont Courier could
report on the Sandusky rally as enthusiastically as August Thieme’s Radical Republican
and anti-clerical Wächter.5 The message rippled through the German-American press:
for the moment, differences among German immigrants had fallen away.
The Franco-Prussian War would transform how German immigrants approached
American citizenship during Reconstruction. Before 1870, German-American
understandings of citizenship grew out of the immigrants’ experiences of the Revolutions
of 1848, becoming American, and participating in America’s Civil War. German
3
“Die patriotishe Gluth in Sandusky kann es auch mit hundred Grad aufnehmen.” Thieme provided a
detailed description of the event. Wächter am Erie, 5 August 1870. On Thieme, see Mueller, Memories of
a Forty-Eighter, 113-16.
4
“Der Wendepunkt in der politischen und sozialen Bahn des deutschen Elements in Amerika.” Cincinnati
Volksfreund, 14 April 1871.
5
Fremont Courier, 11 August 1870.
187
Republicans, who provided the most influential voices in America’s German-language
public sphere, had assumed that the United States could integrate new citizens into the
national community as long as it was true to the universal ideal of freedom. They
supported enfranchising African American men because they believed in an inclusive and
participatory form of male citizenship. German Democrats had tried to keep American
citizenship exclusively white, but they found it difficult to defend this position in the late
1860s. The Franco-Prussian War would usher in an entirely new Zeitgeist to displace the
Republican and Democratic approaches from the German-American public sphere.
Racial ideas that had been unpopular while German Republicans were fighting for
African American citizenship now surfaced. Contrasting the French and German
peoples, German immigrants in the United States began more seriously to entertain the
notion that members of the German Volk were perhaps racially predisposed to good
citizenship. German Americans reconsidered how differences among races might
influence individuals’ capacity for self-rule.
The new Zeitgeist would also challenge German Americans’ emphasis on
participatory citizenship. During 1870 and 1871, France again declared itself a republic,
the German states unified, and the United States ratified the principle of universal
manhood suffrage in the Fifteenth Amendment. As German immigrants compared the
governments of the French Republic, the German Empire, and the United States they
would be most excited about the new empire’s prospects. This raised a question: Was a
great nation primarily defined by a republican constitution and a community of
enfranchised citizens? Men such as Thieme, who as the youngest delegate in the
Frankfurt Parliament of 1848 had fought in vain for a united and republican Germany,
188
now welcomed the united but imperial Germany.6 To explain their confidence in their
homeland’s future, German Americans would speak less of the fact that the Empire’s
adult male population elected a rather impotent parliament and more of German
character, education, military prowess, and civil service. This shift away from the issue
of voting rights signaled the erosion of the simple dichotomy German Republicans and
Democrats had drawn between monarchies and republics.
These new ideas of Volk and Vaterland would crystallize among German Ohioans
and Missourians at the very time that Republicans faced the challenge of implementing
the Fifteenth Amendment’s principle of equal citizenship. The context of Reconstruction
is vital to understanding the significance of German Americans’ changing approach to
citizenship and government.7 German Americans were not exceptional in reevaluating
Reconstruction or looking abroad for inspiration in the early 1870s. Yet as they had in
6
Mueller, Memories of a Forty-Eighter, 116.
In light of the twentieth-century history of Germany, it is tempting to attribute a sinister exceptionalism
to German Americans. Several historians have identified the 1870s as a period when the GermanAmerican repudiated American values. Guido Dobbert argued the 1870s saw the “modest beginnings” of
“new ethnic chauvinism.” G.A. Dobbert, “German-Americans between New and Old Fatherland, 18701914,” American Quarterly 19 (1967): 669. For a fuller elaboration of his argument that “something went
wrong in the process of assimilating the German-Americans,” see Guido Dobbert, “The Disintegration of
an Immigrant Community: The Cincinnati Germans, 1870-1920” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago,
1965), 4. In contrast, John H. Hawgood maintained that German separatism was already beginning, but
German unification “served to harden German-America to an iron-like firmness in its mould.” Hawgood,
The Tragedy of German-America: The Germans in the United States of America during the Nineteenth
Century—And After (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940), 279.
Historians found the reactions of Forty-Eighters, who had fought so hard for German unity and
freedom, particularly chilling. Carl Wittke ended his monograph on the Forty-Eighters with a description
of how “their earlier devotion to a republican Germany evaporated in the emotional heat of the victory
celebrations of 1871.” Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 355. John G. Gazley observed that Forty-Eighters
“had not forgotten German liberty but had definitely subordinated it, for the time being at least.” Gazley,
American Opinion of German Unification, 500. More recently, Bruce Levine made a similar suggestion.
Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 264-65.
Noted historian of Reconstruction and Schurz biographer, Hans L. Trefousse, argues GermanAmerican enthusiasm was “tempered by a healthy skepticism about conditions in the new Reich.”
Trefousse, “The German-American Immigrants and the newly Founded Reich,” in America and the
Germans, ed. Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1985), 1:171. All the works cited above concede—to a greater or lesser extent—that German Americans
critiqued the new German Empire. I maintain, however, that in the context of Reconstruction, the new
Germany beguiled German immigrants and many other Americans.
7
189
the past, these immigrants provided a tangible link between European developments and
American debates over citizenship. Examining their distinctive and influential position
illuminates Reconstruction’s transatlantic dimensions.
*****
Between the Grant’s inauguration in 1869 and the beginning of the FrancoPrussian War, the Fifteenth Amendment changed the Republican Party. In July 1869, the
Westliche Post, with Senator Carl Schurz still contributing to its editorial policy, mused
over which new issues would replace “those that the Republican Party has finally helped
to victory.”8 “With the Fifteenth Amendment on its way to ratification,” the St. Charles
Demokrat observed, “the Republican Party is entering a new phase …. The heroic age of
Republicanism is over.”9 Many Republicans in Ohio and Missouri agreed with the
editors of these German-language newspapers that African American citizenship was
now secure and it was time for the party to address new challenges.10 One historian
summed up the popular mood with a rhetorical question: “Had not the party completed its
mission?”11
German Radical Republicans had always placed special emphasis on the abstract
goal of eliminating racial distinctions in law. In their campaign for African American
suffrage, German immigrants had thought more about themselves than the freed people
8
“… denen die republikanische Partei endlich zum Triumphe verholfen hat.” Westliche Post WochenBlatt, 28 July 1869. For Schurz’s continued editorial involvement, see Westliche Post Wochen-Blatt, 17
February 1869.
9
“Mit der Vortage des 15. Amendments zur Ratificirung … ist die republikanische Partei in eine neue
Phase … getreten .... Die Heroenzeit des Republikanismus ist vorüber.” St. Charles Demokrat, 15 July
1869.
10
On Missouri, see Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 272. On Ohio, see Sawrey, Dubious Victory,
142-43. For Anglo-American Republicans nationally, see Wang, The Trial of Democracy, 49-53; Foner,
Reconstruction, 449-54; Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 80-81; Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 103.
11
Hans L. Trefousse, The Radical Republicans: Lincoln’s Vanguard for Racial Justice (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1969), 443.
190
and more about principle than practice. It is unsurprising that they believed they had
completed their mission with the constitutional amendment that prohibited the denial of
citizens’ voting rights “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Other Radical Republicans might turn their efforts to eliminating other examples of racial
injustice, but German Radicals would loose interest in freed people’s fate once they
supposed black Americans had all the legal opportunities of European immigrants.12
Illustrating this transition, Schurz only voted for the first of five acts that Congress passed
between 1870 and 1872 implement the Fifteenth Amendment. In May 1870, the senator
explained that he supported the first force bill because he “and thousands of children
from [his] native land” had come to the United States to “enjoy the blessings of liberty
and self-government” and he believed African Americans also deserved such
opportunities. In the same speech, the German-born Radical indicated he would soon
diverge from the Republicans who continued to place high priority on African American
rights. He pointedly rejected unlimited federal involvement on behalf of southern
blacks.13
The passage of the suffrage amendment also affected German Democrats during
the year preceding Europe’s transformative war. Most of the significant German
Democratic leaders in Ohio and Missouri decided to support the “New Departure,” a
strategy adopted by Democrats who believed their political fortunes were best served by
12
James M. McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1975), 13; Wang, The Trial of Democracy, 57, 53-92. Republicans who were
not Radicals clearly supported continued efforts to protect racial equality. For an example, see Richard E.
Welch, Jr., George Frisbie Hoar and the Half-Breed Republicans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1971), 21-27. Hans L. Trefousse presented a nuanced discussion of the “loss of radical influence” in
the Republican Party. He emphasized that Radicals aged and gradually lost popular support in the 1870s.
Trefousse, The Radical Republicans, 442.
13
Schurz, “The Enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment,” 19 May 1870, in Speeches, Correspondence
and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 1:484-509
191
relinquishing overt resistance to African American enfranchisement and distancing
themselves from “Bourbons,” the conservative southern members of their party.14 The
influential Cincinnati Volksfreund opposed the Fifteenth Amendment as late as July
1869, but in August a new editor adopted the New Departure.15 Emil Rothe came to
Cincinnati after a successful career representing Wisconsin’s German-born population in
that state’s legislature. Although known for his ability to relate to working-class German
Americans, he entered the elite and strictly non-partisan circles of Cincinnati’s German
Literary Club and the German Pioneer Society.16 In the first issue of the Volksfreund
under his direction, he announced that he would “support the value of every truly
beneficial achievement of the war.”17 The following day, race and the South were absent
from his list of pressing issues facing the country.18 It was only a subtle change, but two
years later, the Volksfreund would claim to be the first Democratic newspaper in Ohio to
break with southern Democrats and recognize “racial equality before the law and Negro
voting rights.”19
In St. Louis, the Westliche Post observed that the Democracy was “beginning to
cast off the state sovereignty doctrine and the anti-nigger doctrine like a snake its skin.”20
The city’s Anzeiger des Westens followed the “possum policy,” muting its political
14
For an overview of the New Departure, see Foner, Reconstruction, 412-16.
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 9 July 1869.
16
Emil Rothe: Sein Charakter, eine Leben und Wirken [Cincinnati, 1895]. Fick Pamphlet Collection,
German-Americana Collection, University of Cincinnati (hereafter UC).
17
“… jeder wirklich segensreichen Errungenschaft des Kriegs ihren Werth zugestehen ….” Cincinnati
Volksfreund, 19 August 1869.
18
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 20 August 1869.
19
“Der Racengleichheit vor dem Gesetze und des Negerstimmrechtes.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 7 June
1871.
20
“… beginnt die Staaten souveränitäts-Doktrin und die Antinigger-Doktrin abzustreifen, wie die Schlange
ihre Haut.” Westliche Post Wochen-Blatt, 28 July 1869.
15
192
activity while Missouri Republicans fought among themselves.21 Like Democrats in
other border states, Missouri and Ohio partisans believed putting Reconstruction behind
them would help them attract moderate voters from the Republican camp.22 German
Democrats found this approach particularly appealing because they knew German
immigrants disliked Republican economic and social policies. Even before the FrancoPrussian War, then, German Republicans and Democrats believed new issues would
replace the question of African American citizenship.23
German Americans broadly agreed on several of the controversies emerging in
1869, which paved the way for the spirit of unity triggered by the European war.
German-born members of both parties remained troubled by Republican trade and
monetary policies. When he was elected to the Senate, Schurz began to receive letters
from Cincinnati Republican J. B. Stallo and constitutional scholar Franz Lieber urging
him to act to eliminate protective tariffs.24 German-language newspapers continued to
advocate free trade, often listing it among their most urgent concerns. Most Germanlanguage newspapers also continued to support tightening the supply of currency. This
strained German Americans’ position within the parties. In Ohio, German Democrats felt
obliged to compromise on monetary policy for the sake of party harmony. When the
Ohio Democratic Platform included a plan to repay bonds in greenbacks, the Cincinnati
Volksfreund accepted it as an “issue of secondary importance,” which “will be taken care
21
Westliche Post, 16 August 1870; Anzeiger des Westens, 8 September 1870.
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 284; William Hyde to James S. Rollins, St. Louis, 14 February
1870, folder 104, James Rollins Papers, WHMC—Columbia; Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement
in Missouri, 201-03; Perman, The Road to Redemption, 5-21; Richard O. Curry, “Introduction” in
Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), xiii-xxvi.
23
Westliche Post Wochen-Blatt, 29 September 1869.
24
J.B. Stallo to Schurz, Cincinnati, 10 May 1869, and Franz Lieber to Schurz, New York, 11 December
1869, 30 December 1869, reel 4, Schurz Papers, LC.
22
193
of totally on its own by the national development of commercial circumstances.” Yet it
prominently ran the Anzeiger des Westens’ opposing opinion in the next column.25 The
Westliche Post commented that both parties were divided on economic policy. German
Republicans and German Democrats believed in free trade and hard money.26
German-American men in both parties also disliked the new prominence of the
“woman suffrage” campaign and temperance. In 1869, national leaders of the woman
suffrage movement divided over the Fifteenth Amendment, which permitted sex
discrimination in voting.27 In February, activists brought female suffrage before the
legislatures of both Ohio and Missouri. St. Louis became a center of woman suffrage
activity.28 A National Woman Suffrage Convention held in the city in early October
1869 passed resolutions asserting that the spirit of the recently amended Constitution
protected female citizens’ right to vote.29 All prominent German Americans in Missouri
and Ohio found the “agitation for women’s rights” more or less “distasteful,” asserting
that it “originated with Puritans and temperance advocates and with females [Weibern] of
every sort from Massachusetts and Maine who are angry that men cannot bear
25
“Nebenfrage”; “… durch die natürliche Entwicklung der commerciellen Verhältnisse ganz von selbst
sich erledigen wird.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 7 June 1871.
26
Mississippi Blätter, 8 May 1870. See also the discussion in the influential hard-money and Democratic
Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 28 October 1869, 10 June 1871.
27
Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in
America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 162-202.
28
On Ohio, see Cincinnati Volksfreund, 6 February 1869; Carol Lasser, “Party, Propriety, Politics, and
Woman Suffrage in the 1870s: National Developments and Ohio Perspectives,” in New Viewpoints in
Women’s History: Working Papers from the Schlesinger Library 50th Anniversary Conference, March 4-5,
1994, ed. Susan Ware (Cambridge, Mass.: Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College,
1994), 141, 153. On Missouri, see Monica Cook Morris, “The History of Woman Suffrage in Missouri,
1867-1901,” Missouri Historical Review 25 (1930): 70; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 274-78.
29
Morris, “The History of Woman Suffrage in Missouri,” 70; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 27778; Parrish, A History of Missouri, 3: 251-53.
194
children.”30 There is no sign that Schurz ever accepted Susan B. Anthony’s invitation to
speak in support of equal citizenship rights for unhindered by “race or color, sect or
sex.”31 Indelibly linked to temperance, the agitation for women’s rights reminded
German Republicans that they had perhaps as much in common with their Democratic
countrymen as their Republican colleagues from New England.
German Americans would also express strong bi-partisan opposition to political
corruption. Vulnerable to frauds that targeted “greenhorns,” German newcomers saw
corruption as a defining feature of American life.32 As outsiders, immigrants had often
felt excluded from the political networks that distributed choice civil service positions. In
1860, an immigrant carpenter in New York wrote to his parents in Prussia that America
would be better if “not every official stuffed his pockets as full as he can for the short
term of his office.”33 Profiteering in the Union Army further persuaded some immigrants
that “everything is swindle here.”34 A German surgeon serving with a Federal regiment
wrote in late 1864 that “despite the immense advantages that [the United States] has over
30
“Die Weiberrechtsagitation”; “ekelhaft”; “Sie geht von Puritanern und Temperenzlern aus und von
Weibern jener Sorte aus Massachussetts und Maine, welche darüber zürnen, daß nicht Männer die Kinder
bähren.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 20 February 1869. See also Columbus Westbote, 25 February 1869; St.
Charles Demokrat, 11 February 1869, 18 February 1869, 22 April 1869, 3 March 1870, 12 May 1870;
Westliche Post Wochen-Blatt, 10 February 1869, 17 February 1869, 3 November 1869, 1 December 1869,
4 May 1870, 13 June 1870; Anzeiger des Westens, 6 May 1869, 1 July 1869. Showing the importance of
Missouri developments, several lengthy Ohio stories referred specifically to the state. Columbus Westbote,
4 March 1869; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 15 April 1869.
31
Susan B. Anthony to Schurz, New York, 30 December 1865, reel 3, Schurz Papers, LC. Schurz was a
life-long opponent of woman suffrage. Trefousee, Carl Schurz, 264.
32
Surveying letters written during the war years, Wolfgang Helbich found that all of the sixteen
correspondents (out of a sample of fifty-nine) who mentioned corruption considered it particularly
American. Helbich, “German-born Union Soldiers,” 299.
33
“… wo nicht jeder Beamte auf die kurze Dauer seines Amts sich die Taschen so voll schiebts, als er
kann.” Julius Wesslau to His Parents, New York, 26 December 1860, in Deutsche im amerikanischen
Bürgerkrieg, 124.
34
“Es ist hier alles Schwindel.” Wilhelm Francksen to His Father, Stafford, Virginia, 1 March 1863, in
Deutsche im amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg, ed. Helbich and Kamphoefner, 203. For a discussion of wartime
profiteering, see Mark Summers, The Era of Good Stealings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993),
16-24.
195
other countries, there is a broadminded type of person that calls deceit and swindle
cleverness and where everyone endeavors to be clever.”35 An Illinois Union veteran
identified a simple explanation of corruption: for Americans, “the almightily dollar … is
the only goal.”36 An Ohio newspaper concurred: “All of American life and ambition
drives toward acquiring wealth as quickly as possible … everyone accordingly seeks ‘to
do what can be done.’”37 In 1860, Schurz had informed his wife that Republican Party
could not attract the German vote without devoting itself to routing out corruption.38
That year German Americans attending the 1860 Republican National Convention
seriously considered proposing a resolution condemning the spoils system.39 The Civil
War, however, had postponed Schurz’s “war on corruption” for nearly a decade. With
race-neutral suffrage written into the Constitution, the issue would begin to take on
greater significance when a number of cases of political malfeasance were revealed
during 1869.
35
“… trotzt der ungeheuren Vorzüge, die es vor anderen Ländern hat; es ist ein merkwürdiger weitherziger
Menschenschlag hier, der Betrug und Schwindel Klugheit nennt und wo jeder sich bestrebt, klug zu sein.”
Carl Uterhard to His Mother, Atlanta, 2 October 1864, in Deutsche im amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg, ed.
Helbich and Kamphoefner, 234.
36
“Der allmächtige Dollar... der einzige Endzweck.” Eduard Treutlein, 26 May 1871, in Deutsche im
amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg, ed. Helbich and Kamphoefner, 294.
37
“… das ganze amerikanische Leben und Streben dahin geht, so schnell als möglich Reichthumer zu
erwerben …. Jedermann darnach trachtet ‘zu machen, was gemacht werden kann.’” Toledo Express, 27
December 1871.
38
Schurz to Margaretha Schurz, 27 February 1860, Intimate Letters, ed. and trans. Schafer, 208. Schurz
had spoken against political corruption in the 1850s too. Mark W. Summers, The Plundering Generation:
Corruption and the Crisis of the Union, 1849-1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 77, 229,
232.
39
Mueller, Memories of a Forty-Eighter, 205-06. The Cincinnati Volksfreund represented a commonly
held perception when it wrote, “The Germans think more seriously than cunning, speculating politicians.”
(“Die Deutschen sind mehr ernst denkende als schlau spekulierende Politiker.”) Cincinnati Volksfreund, 8
October 1869.
196
“How everything changes,” the Volksfreund noted as it observed the political
landscape late in 1869.40 Even the August Thieme’s idealistic Wächter no longer ran
many stories on African American citizenship. The paper had cheered on the Missouri
Germans who attempted to write black suffrage into their 1865 constitution, arguing
emancipation would mean little without “citizenship rights.”41 Yet by early 1870,
Thieme set his sights on eliminating Republican protectionist tariffs and soft-money
policies and preventing temperance legislation and general corruption.42 The
consequences of the new political stirrings were not yet clear by mid-1870, but the
Republican Westliche Post was not alone in anticipating a significant change. “One
senses the approach of a time,” Schurz’s paper had already printed, “when the old
distinctions between the Republican and Democratic parties as they have existed until
now must fall away.”43 German Americans were ready to move on from the debate over
black suffrage, but they were unsure what came next. The German community was as
riddled with personal antagonisms and class and religious tensions as it had always been,
but many German-born politicians were inspired by the potential for German immigrants
to unite over free trade, hard money, alcohol consumption policy, and civil service
reform. The stage was set for them to reconsider the racial boundaries and the political
rights of citizenship.
*****
40
“Wie sich Alles ändert.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 21 August 1869.
“Bürgerlichen Recht.” Wächter am Erie, 21, 28 January 1865.
42
Wächter am Erie, 4 May 1870.
43
“Man merkt das Herannahen einer Zeit, in der die alten Gegensätze zwischen der republikanischen und
demokratischen Partei, wie sie bisher existirten, wegfallen müssen ….” Westliche Post Wochen-Blatt, 28
July 1869.
41
197
“War at Last,” announced the New York Times on July 16, 1870. The conflict
between France and Prussia remained in the headlines well into the following year.44 The
war that would reshape Europe also had a dramatic effect on German America. As one
contributor to the Westliche Post noted, the establishment of a reliable telegraph
connection with Europe in 1866 allowed Americans personally to “experience such a
magnificent spectacle.”45 The transatlantic cable had already relayed news of the
deteriorating relationship between the long-standing European foes. France and Prussia
had disagreed over whether a nephew of Prussian King Wilhelm I should accept the
Spanish throne. As the newspapers explained to their readers, the dispute over the
Spanish succession was only the latest episode in the strained relationship between the
French and Prussian ruling dynasties. Bismarck had been stoking Wilhelm I’s imperial
ambitions since Prussia’s decisive victory over Austria in 1866. The German state’s
growing regional influence concerned Napoleon III, who also hoped a popular war
against an old enemy would shore up his domestic support. Both sides welcomed the
Franco-Prussian War as a chance to decide who would dominate Europe.
Once the fighting began, the press fed the American appetite for news of what one
German-language newspaper identified as “the greatest event of the century.”46 Ohio
Governor Rutherford B. Hayes received a letter from a friend in New York informing
him that “the war telegrams make immense excitement here as much as our own war[.]
44
New York Times, 16 July 1870. On July 14, the French army mobilized its reserves. The official
declaration of war came on the 19th.
45
“… ein so grandiose Schauspiel erleben ….” Westliche Post, 16 September 1870.
46
“Das großartigste Ereigniß [sic] des Jahrhunderts.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 10 August 1870.
198
Extras are out at all times of day.”47 The American press was experiencing explosive
growth, and the burgeoning urban dailies competed to cover the war. Large newspapers
printed maps of the theater of war, used bold headlines, and supplemented war
correspondence with late-breaking telegraph reports. Cincinnati Commercial editor
Murat Halstead happened to be vacationing in Europe at the onset of hostilities, and he
rushed to provide first-hand coverage of the war. Rebuffed by the French, he traveled
with the Prussian army and mailed exclusive reports back to readers at home.48
Americans’ response to the unfolding war was politicized from the start. The
Cleveland Leader observed, “Though the war is on the opposite side of the globe from
us, it divides almost as rigidly as did the question of slavery.”49 In fact, Americans’
attitudes toward slavery predicted the positions they would take on the Franco-Prussian
War. President Grant noted to the American ambassador in Paris that “every
unreconstructed rebel sympathizes with France, without exception, while the loyal
element is almost as universally the other way.”50 Protestant Republicans in the North
were the most enthusiastic supporters of Prussia, which had remained neutral during the
47
J. A. Joel to Rutherford B. Hayes, New York, 25 August 1870, reel 19, Rutherford B. Hayes Papers,
Library of Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center (hereafter HPC), Fremont, Ohio (microfilm edition).
The Cincinnati Commercial complemented the coverage of the war by the Cincinnati German-language
dailies and mocked the local Enquirer for its ignorance of Europe. Cincinnati Commercial, 20 July 1870.
48
On Halstead, see Murat Halstead to Mary Banks Halstead, Brussels, 28 August 1870, box 3, folder 27,
Murat Halstead Papers, CHS; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 1 September 1870; Donald Walter Curl, “An
American Reporter and the Franco-Prussian War,” Journalism Quarterly 49 (1972): 480-88. On the
newspaper coverage, see Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre, 63-66; Mark W. Summers, The Press
Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1865-1878 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
49
Cleveland Leader, 27 August 1870.
50
Ulysses S. Grant to Elihu B. Washburne, Long Branch, N.J., 22 August 1870, in The Papers of Ulysses
S. Grant, ed. John Y. Simon (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-),
20:254-59.
199
Civil War while France continued to trade with the Confederate States.51 Governor
Hayes, an Ohio Methodist, wrote to a relative, “How good the news of Prussia flogging
Napoleon.”52 Leading Republican newspapers such as the Springfield (Mass.) Daily
Republican, the New York Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, the Cincinnati Commercial, the
Cleveland Leader, and the Missouri Democrat all supported Prussia.53 In August, the
Ohio Republican convention passed a resolution expressing “sympathy with the heroic
efforts of Germany to achieve and defend its national unity.”54 Democrats might have
been right to consider this a cynical “‘Sympathy’-Schwindel” to win German votes, but
the parties genuinely differed.55 Democratic newspapers, including the New York World,
the Cincinnati Enquirer, and the Missouri Republican, acknowledged that Napoleon III
brought the war upon himself, but alerted their audience to Bismarck’s provocations.
Democrats expressed sympathy for the French people, who had supported the young
Union in winning independence from Britain.56 English-speaking Roman Catholics also
identified with the French for religious reasons.57 In letters to the Irish-born Cincinnati
51
As the Cleveland Leader emphasized, religious, sectional, and partisan motives reinforced each other.
Cleveland Leader, 22 July 1870. The most comprehensive description of American public opinion on the
war remains Gazley, American Opinion of German Unification, 320-424.
52
Rutherford B. Hayes to His Uncle, Milwaukee, 8 August 1870, reel 171, Hayes Papers, HPC.
53
For a break down of newspaper sympathies, see Cincinnati Enquirer, 23 July 1870. See also Gazley,
American Opinion of German Unification, 320-34.
54
“… unsere Sympathie mit dem heroische Bestreben Deutschlands seine nationale Einigkeit zu wahren
und zu vertheidigen.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 12 August 1870. On the August 10 resolution, see also
Westliche Post, 13 August 1870; Cincinnati Enquirer, 17 August 1870; Wochenblatt der New-Yorker
Staats-Zeitung, 27 August 1870.
55
Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 27 August 1870.
56
Cincinnati Enquirer, 30 July 1870; New York World, 16, 17 July 1870. The Republican New York Times
also suggested Bismarck had helped instigate the conflict. New York Times, 19, 20 July 1870.
57
One of Rutherford B. Hayes correspondents summed up public opinion: “The mass hope the Germans
will win, but the Irish or Roman Catholics hope France will win.” J. A. Joel to Hayes, New York, 25
August 1870, reel 19, Hayes Papers, HPC. Some Anglo-Americans explicitly supported Prussia because it
was Protestant. See, for example, Cincinnati Commercial, 8 July 1870.
200
Archbishop John Purcell, an Ohio priest described the war as religious one between the
Catholic French and Protestant Prussians. He naturally sided with France.58
The German-American community showed no such partisan and religious
divisions. German immigrants supported Prussia “as a man.”59 Scattered reports of
minority opposition to the war amounted to little.60 Like their counterparts in the
southern German states of Baden, Württemberg, and Bavaria, German-American
Catholics fell into line behind Prussia. German Catholics in America adamantly rejected
the notion that France and Germany were locked in a religious war.61 Catholic organs
and Democratic sheets catering to a large Catholic readership claimed that “the Catholic
church is more free and happy in Prussia, than she is in France.”62 Although more
restrained than the secular press, the Catholic Wahrheits-Freund in Cincinnati remarked
that it was pleased that “the best times of German history have returned, and the same
self-sacrificing enthusiasm and devotion to the Fatherland, which flared up in 1813 with
such strength, is now breaking out.”63 German Catholic support of Prussia caused some
tension with their Irish-born brethren. A St. Louis lawyer traveling in South Carolina
58
John N. Thisse to John Purcell, Springfield, Ohio, 18 August 1870, box 22, Thisse to Purcell, New
Orleans, 5 March 1871, box 26, Archbishop John Baptist Purcell Papers, Archives of the Archdiocese of
Cincinnati (hereafter AAC).
59
“Wie einen Mann.” Anzeiger des Westens, 18 July 1870. The article includes review of newspaper
opinion. See also Wächter am Erie, 19, 20 July 1870; Fremont Courier, 21 July 1870; Cincinnati
Volksfreund, 26 July 1870; Cincinnati Commercial, 22 July 1870; Wochenblatt der New-Yorker StaatsZeitung, 23 July 170. I cannot find issues of the Columbus Westbote and the Westliche Post for the month
of July 1870.
60
English-speaking Democrats tried to stir up divisions among German Americans. Cincinnati Enquirer,
23 July 1870.
61
Wahrheits-Freund, 27 July 1870, 7 September 1870; Fremont Courier, 21 July 1870, 4, 18 August
1870; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 22 August 1870.
62
Quoted in English. Fremont Courier, 11 August 1870; Wahrheits-Freund, 7 September 1870;
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 2 August 1870. For reviews of the English and German-language Catholic press
on the war, see Cincinnati Volksfreund, 26 August 1870.
63
“Die schönsten Zeiten der deutschen Geschichte sind zurückgekehrt und dieselbe opferfreudige
Begeisterung und Hingebung an das Vaterland, die im Jahre 1813 mit solcher Stärke aufflammte, ist jetzt
hervor gebrochen.” Wahrheits-Freund, 27 July 1870.
201
remarked to a colleague that “our Gallic and Tutonic [sic] citizens are disposed to reherse
[sic] the war in miniature.”64 His correspondent back in Missouri would not have been
surprised. A mixed German-Irish parish in St. Louis split when Father Peter Wigger
offered prayers for the success of the Prussian Army. Cincinnati Archbishop Purcell
assured his support to both sides, which did not satisfy some German loyalists.65
Working-class German Americans joined the prevailing German nationalism.
Although one New York socialist organization resolved, “The interests of workers
demand a fraternity of workers of all lands for the overthrow of all monarchs,” major
German-language newspapers commented how isolated such defections were.66 AngloAmerican eyewitnesses reported unanimous support for Prussia in German
neighborhoods such as Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine.67 Indeed, socialists stood alongside
Democrats and Republicans, Catholics and Protestants at the countless rallies and
fundraisers held throughout the country.68 In New York’s Steinway Hall on July 22,
1870, Carl Schurz joined a host of eminent German Americans, including Forty-Eighter
Adolf Douai, who edited the socialist New York Arbeiter-Union. Douai acknowledged
“glowing” with patriotism, despite the fact that “as a social reformer” he could not
consider this the “highest” sentiment. “There will be no individual,” he predicted, “who
64
R.K. Charles to John Darby, Darlington, S.C., 9 August 1870, box 4, John Fletcher Darby Papers, MHS.
J. N. Adelrich Benziger, sworn statement, Cincinnati, 10 February 1871, Purcell Papers, AAC; William
B. Faherty, The St. Louis German Catholics (St. Louis: Reedy Press, 2004), 57. On divisions among
Cincinnati Catholics, see also Cincinnati Volksfreund, 22 August 1870. The Catholic Rev. A. Schwenniger
spoke at Cincinnati peace festivities in February 1871. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 6 February 1871.
66
“Die Interessen der Arbeiter erfordern eine Verbrüderung der Arbeiter aller Länder zum Sturz aller
Monarchen.” Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 6 August 1870.
67
Cincinnati Commercial, 16 July 1870.
68
The New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung claimed it would be impossible to report all the sympathy meetings.
Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 23 July 1870. There were gatherings in cities from New
Orleans to Boston, and in smaller centers such as Toledo, Dayton, Jefferson City, and LaGrange, Missouri.
Westliche Post, 8, 1, 2 August 1870; Cincinnati Commercial, 20 July 1870; Westliche Post, 3 August 1870,
19 October 1870. Sometimes reports of spontaneous neighborhood celebrations also appeared in the
newspapers. Westliche Post, 8, 9 August 1870.
65
202
is not filled with a sense of his faithfulness to the old Fatherland.”69 When Douai did
express heavy criticism of Prussia in his workers’ newspaper, subscribers reportedly
abandoned him, leaving the publication to fold.70
With the rest of the world, German Americans were surprised when on
September 2, 1870, after only six weeks of fighting, German forces won a decisive battle
at the French town of Sedan. The Germans captured Napoleon III and were clearly on
their way to winning the war. In the United States, fundraising and sympathy meetings
gave way seamlessly to celebrations of the victory. German St. Louisans had the good
luck to have organized a large fundraising fair for Sunday, September 4. Learning of the
extent of the German triumph, an estimated 10,000 to 25,000 men, women, and children
crowed into Concordia Park for the “unity festival” (“Verbrüderungsfest”). A women’s
committee ensured St. Louis Germans could buy refreshments. Local brewers provided
free beer. By all reports, the celebration raised over $20,000 for German widows and
orphans.71 It was the sort of occasion that made its way into letters and memoirs. An
Anglo-American wrote to his father that it was a “grand affair.”72 In 1893, a German
American believed the parade of church groups, Turners, singing societies, and lodges
69
“Die Social-Reformer erkenneten den Patriotismus nicht für das Hochste an, aber es sei schön, sich auch
einmal davon durch glühen zu lassen und so würden sie darin keinem der deutschen Landsleute zurück
stehen und es werde keinen Einzigen geben, der nicht seine Schuldigkeit gegen das alte Vaterland erfüllte.”
Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 23 July 1870.
Boston radical Forty-Eighter, Karl Heinzen, criticized German-Americans’ martial enthusiasm,
but he became an ostracized “lone wolf.” Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 255-56. A group of Hanoverians
in Chicago faced similar opposition. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 25 July 1870.
70
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 3 August 1870; Wittke, The German American Press, 166. On Douai, see
Justine Davis Randers-Pehrson, Adolf Douai, 1819-1888: The Turbulent Life of a German Forty-Eighter in
the Homeland and in the United States (New York: Peter Lang, 2000).
71
Westliche Post, 5 September 1870; Anzeiger des Westens, 5 September 1870; New York Times, 5
September 1870.
72
James H. Rollins to James S. Rollins, 5 September 1870, folder 106, Rollins Papers, WHMC—
Columbia. See also A. Rühl to Louis Benecke, St Louis, 13 September 1870, folder 721, Benecke Papers,
WHMC—Columbia
203
was “down to the present day, the largest that has been seen here.”73 In Ohio, Cincinnati
Germans celebrated the Sedan victory in fine fashion with bonfires, music, artillery
salvos, and fireworks, but they were less forthcoming with donations.74 In Cleveland, the
situation was reversed. The city’s German Aid Society sent a steady flow of funds to
help victims of the war, but local Germans were less demonstrative.75
For all the celebrations, peace did not come with Napoleon III’s surrender.
France’s interim government hastily declared the state a republic and resolved to continue
fighting. Anglo-American support for Prussia ebbed as the German armies laid siege to
Paris, waiting for the Third French Republic to cede the historically contested regions of
Alsace and Lorraine.76 The Democratic New York World believed the hearts of the
American people must “go out in fervent, forward sympathy with a great, heroic nation,
their ancient ally, [France,] who … courageously holds aloft the banner of free
institutions and places itself in the van of a great republican movement in Europe.”77
Most Democrats and even some Anglo-American Republicans agreed.78 German
73
“… bis auf den heutigen Tag der größte, den man hier gesehen hat.” Kargau, St. Louis in früheren
Jahren, 209.
74
Organizers complained Cincinnati “had as yet not shown itself as liberal as other cities” in donations.
Cincinnati Commercial, 8 September 1870. See also Cincinnati Volksfruend, 8 September 1870; Anton
Eichhoff, In der neuen Heimath: geschichtliche Mittheilung über die deutschen Einwanderer in allen
Theilen der Union (New York: E. Steiger & Co., 1884), 300.
75
Wächter am Erie, 21 July 1870; Cleveland Leader, 9, 15, 29, 30 August 1870 3, 15 September 1870.
76
These regions were inhabited by French and German-speakers and had belonged to the Holy Roman
Empire of the German Nation until 1582. Prussia considered their annexation a point of national security
and pride. Warwo, The Franco-Prussian War, 230.
77
New York World, 6 September 1870.
78
Among the Democrats, see Cincinnati Enquirer, 9 September 1870, 23, 31 January 1871. Exhibiting a
cautious shift in sympathies were the Republican New York Tribune, 7 September 1870; Chicago Tribune,
7 September 1870; Cincinnati Commercial, 8 September 1870. Some Republican papers remained highly
skeptical of the new republic: The Nation, 15, 22, 29, September 1870; Cleveland Leader, 5, 6, 7, 9
September 1870. Newspapers commented on growing support of France, even if their own position did not
change dramatically. Cincinnati Commercial, 8 September 1870.
Regretting the change apparent in the English-language newspapers were St. Charles Demokrat, 6
October 1870; Westliche Post, 14, 20 September 1870; Cincinnati Volksfruend, 20 September 1870;
Wächter am Erie, 5 September 1870. For a summary, see Gazley, American Opinion of German
204
Americans, however, read the news from Europe differently. Putting little store in what
they regarded as the chimera of French republicanism, they believed Germans were dying
because the French were too proud to admit defeat.79 German immigrants remained
sensitive to the war news, anxious about relatives and acquaintances serving on the front
lines. One man in central Missouri wrote to a friend, “My 5th army corps at home, in
which I have a number of brothers and cousins and a great many friends, has been
holding out very bravely everywhere, though it has also suffered dreadful losses, but I
still don’t know if members of my family are among them. I haven’t received a letter
from home in over a month.”80 As the war dragged on, casualties mounted until long
after its results were clear. In January 1871, Wilhelm I became the German Emperor and
Paris finally fell to Prussian bombardment. When formal peace negotiations between the
belligerents concluded in May, the war had confirmed the Westliche Post’s assessment
that “no strike was made by the brave armies beyond the Ocean without its effect also
being felt here.”81
*****
The war in Europe not only brought German immigrants together, it transformed
the discussion of citizenship in the German-American public sphere. A shifting
Unification. 383-89. See also Franz Lieber to Hamilton Fish, New York, 17 September 1870, Hamilton
Fish Papers, LC.
79
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 19 October 1870; St. Charles Demokrat, 22 September 1870; Westliche Post, 14
September 1870; Wächter am Erie, 6 September 1870. Even the Catholic Wahrheits-Freund supported the
annexation of Alsace and Lorraine to the German Empire, remarkably arguing that Catholics in the area
welcomed German rule. Wahrheits-Freund, 30 November 1870.
80
“Mein heitmatliches 5tes Armeecorps, in dem ich eine Anzahl Brüder und Cousins habe, sowie eine
große Menge Bekannter, hat sich sehr brav gehalten, überall, aber auch furchtbar gelitten, doch weiß ich
noch nicht, ob Gliede meiner Familie dabei sind. Ich habe seit über 1 Monat keinen Brief von Hause.”
Theodore Boehm to Louis Benecke, Dalton, Missouri, 28 September 1870, folder 722, Benecke Papers,
WHMC—Columbia. See similar concern in Fritz Herzberg to Louis Benecke, Magdeburg, 11 August
1870, folder 721, Benecke Papers, WHMC—Columbia.
81
“Kein Schlag ward von den tapfern Armeen jenseits des Oceans geführt, ohne auch hier seiner Wirkung
empfunden zu werden.” Westliche Post, 13 December 1870.
205
understanding of the word Volk would indicate a new emphasis in how immigrants
understood membership within a national community. During the Revolutions of 1848
liberal nationalists had combined the racial, cultural, and political aspects of the term
Volk to define the German nation as an evolving entity that could harness the power of
the principle of freedom to incorporate various groups into a dynamic whole. In the
United States, many Forty-Eighters had found that this model provided a basis for their
own integration into the American nation and justified African American suffrage. In
1870, however, the Franco-Prussian War quite suddenly popularized the more racial
understandings of the German Volk that had been circulating in Europe and the United
States since the late eighteenth century. For many Europeans, Prussia’s success
confirmed the theory expounded by early nineteenth-century German historians such as
Barthold George Niebuhr: race drove history.82 Bismarck was among those who
interpreted Prussia’s victories over France as a triumph of the German race.83 German
Americans did not unanimously accept this explanation, but many voices in the Germanlanguage public sphere began to suggest that the traits that defined the German Volk
perhaps ran in their German blood, rather than their German culture or their German
language.84 When German Americans began to describe their own superiority in more
racialized terms, they weakened the sense that the nation could integrate an array of new
citizens.
82
Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, D.C.: The Woodrow Wilson
Center Press, 1996), 235-50.
83
Ibid., 287-315.
84
On the concept of Volk (plural Völker) during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, see Vick,
Defining Germany, 20-22; Reinhard Koselleck, “Volk, Nation, Nationalismus, Masse,” in Geschichtliche
Grundbegriffe, 7: 380-89; Werner Conze, “Rasse,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 5:148-57.
206
While some Anglo-Americans saw the Franco-Prussian War as a spat between
Napoleon III and Bismarck, German Americans considered it a Volks-Krieg, a clash of
the French and German Völker.85 They immediately recognized that the unification of
the German states (with the notable exception of Austria) would transform Europe.
August Thieme’s reliably Radical Cleveland Wächter am Erie eagerly welcomed the
fighting: “The day of the great, long-predicted decision has come—the struggle not
between dynasties but between two Völker is erupting, the deep-rooted antipathy between
Romandom and Germandom demands a bloody resolution.”86 The St. Charles Demokrat
asked, “Who does Germany wage war against?” Not Napoleon III alone, it concluded,
but the French Volk. The very fact that the emperor had declared war to generate
domestic support demonstrated how deeply the French people were implicated in his
aggressive actions. The Missouri newspaper believed the French and German Völker
would vie for control of Europe.87 In keeping with this position, the German-language
newspapers insisted on referring to the conflict as the “German-French War.” At stake,
editors maintained, was the future of the whole German Volk, not just the Prussian state.88
One New York newspaper went further and did describe the conflict between
France and the German states as a race war. The powerful Democratic New-Yorker
85
Westliche Post, 29 August 1870. In the English-language press, Democrats were most likely to see the
war primarily as one waged between monarchs. See Cincinnati Enquirer, 29 July 1870, and New York
World, 20 July 1870. Some Republicans also referred to the war as a dynastic conflict, although they
tended also to identify the German cause with the German people’s struggle for unification and liberty. See
Chicago Tribune, 18 July 1870; Springfield (Mass.) Daily Republican, 16 July 1870; Cleveland Leader, 23
July 1870, and 8 August 1870; The Nation, 14 July 1870.
86
“Der Tag der grossen, längstvorhergesehenen Entscheidung ist gekomment—der Kampf nicht zwischen
Dynastien, sondern zwischen zwei Völkern bricht los, die tiefgewurzelte Abneigung zwischen
Romanenthum und Germanenthum verlangt die blutige Entscheidung.” Wächter am Erie, 16 July 1870.
87
“Gegen wen führt Deutschland Krieg?” St. Charles Demokrat, 4 August 1870.
88
The Cincinnati Volksfreund, 31 August 1870, protested the nomenclature used by English-language
papers.
207
Staats-Zeitung predicted the war would continue until it was decided “whether the
Germanic or the Latin race henceforth would be the leader in the affairs of nations
[Völkerleben].” Unlike most German-language newspapers, the Staats-Zeitung defined
the Germanic race to include the English, while the Latin race contained at least the
French and the Spanish. Following German intellectual trends between 1815 and 1870,
conceived of world history as a struggle between races.89 Taking a sweeping approach,
the newspaper explained that the English had fought the French and Spanish for control
of the Americas in the eighteenth century, the Germans and English had fought the
French during the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century, and now the
Germans and French were at it again. The Staats-Zeitung suggested that boundaries
between the two races were permeable: France owed what strength it did possess to the
incorporation of a Germanic element.90 The careful grouping of European nationalities
into larger white “races” was unusual among German Americans of the era, but it was
only the most extreme example of a general phenomenon: German Americans were
identifying themselves as members of a Volk defined by more than language or culture.91
Back in Missouri, however, Carl Dänzer at the St. Louis Anzeiger responded to
the New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, critiquing the idea of a “Germanic race.” Although the
Anzeiger and the Staats-Zeitung both represented the Democratic Party, Dänzer objected
to the “outdated classification into three great race-groups of the Volk of Europe who are
increasingly all jumbled up by our industrial century.” He believed that referring to
89
Exactly how races were labeled and defined varied. Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea, 235-76.
“… ob die germanische oder die latinische Race fortan die Führerschaft in Völkerleben soll.”
Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 23 July 1870.
91
German Americans usually reserved the term “Race” (or “Rasse”) to describe the difference between
whites and black, and considered themselves a “Germanic” minority in an Anglo-Saxon land. That is not
to say that they would be totally unfamiliar with designations such as “Teutonic,” “Germanic,” “Celtic,”
“Latin,” and “Slavic.” Kazal, Becoming Old Stock,118-29.
90
208
Germanic, Latin, and Slavic races played into the hands of Napoleon III, who was trying
to secure support from Spain, Italy, and Portugal.92 It was in Germany’s interest, then,
not to elevate the conflict to the level of race war. Besides, Dänzer understood German
unification quite differently. “Bands distinguished by [differences in] intellectual life and
other characteristics [Volksindividualitäten]” were coming together as “a political
organism of shared material interests.” The interests of states, he emphasized, had
nothing to do with “blood ties to the tribes that founded this or that empire a millennium
ago.”93 Dänzer’s reaction demonstrates the fluidity of German-American racial ideas at
the time, but the sober tone of his appraisal was out of step with German-American
public opinion. Many German Americans might have agreed with him that the German
Volk was not a race, but neither was it merely a group of people who shared material
interests. Dänzer’s purely political definition of Germany did not capture the cultural,
linguistic, and even racial solidarity immigrants felt with Germans in Europe. The
celebrations of 1870 and 1871 reverberated with examples of German Americans
identifying themselves as members of a Volk in ascendancy.
Having revitalized their connections to the German Volk, German Ohioans and
Missourians went on to compare their capacity for self-rule to that of the French. Like
their contemporaries in Europe, German-American Republicans and Democrats
comfortably blended cultural and near-racial explanations of German superiority.94 At
Cincinnati’s celebration of the Sedan victory, the venerable Republican Judge J.B. Stallo
92
“… almodischen Classifikation der, von unserem industriellen Jahrhundert mehr und mehr
durcheinander geschüttelten Völker Europas in die drei großen Racengruppen.” Aneiger des Westens, 25
July 1870.
93
“… des politischen Organismus an die Gemeinschaft der materiellen Interesse, des geistigen Lebens und
anderer Volksindividualitäten bildenden Bande ….”; “… die Blutsverwandschaft der Stamme, welche vor
einem Jahrtausend dieses und jenes Reich gegründet.” Ibid.
94
Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea, 274-76.
209
told the excited crowd—or at least the portion that could hear him—that “we can proudly
say that the customs and instincts of the German Volk have always been to free selfdetermination.” Although he was careful not to gloat at the humiliation of the French, he
believed that they had received their comeuppance. According to the jurist, France
sought to dominate other peoples instead of establishing “self-rule” at home. “For the
French,” Stallo maintained, “there is no difference between freedom and anarchy.”95 The
Cincinnatian alluded to France’s turbulent past, but he spoke not only of history but of
the customs, instincts, and qualities of a Volk. Franz Lieber, the respected constitutional
scholar who had lived in the United States since the 1830s, confided to his friend,
Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, that he believed all France’s “king-less governments
had been democratic despotisms” because “the French have never respected what civil
liberty is.”96 Editors of the Cincinnati Volksfruend also drew on their reading of history.
The leading Democratic German-language newspaper maintained that since the
Napoleonic Wars, “The French peasant has essentially remained as he was then, ignorant
in the highest degree, but the German masses have advanced in general education
[Bildung].”97 Therein lay the reason for the Germans’ remarkable successes in the early
95
“Wir können mit Stolz sagen, daß die Wohnheiten und Instinkte des deutschen Volks stets die der freien
Selbstbestimmung gewesen sind”; “Selbstherrschung”; “Der Unterschied zwischen Freiheit und Anarchie
besteht fur die Franzosen nicht.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 8 September 1870.
96
Francis Lieber to Hamilton Fish, New York, 17 September 1870, Fish Papers, LC. Known for his
conservative nationalism, Lieber emphasized that freedom brought with it responsibilities. His letterhead
bore the motto, “No right without its duties. No duty without its rights.”
97
“Der französische Bauer ist im Wesentlich geblieben wie er damals war, unwissened im höchsten Grade,
die deutschen Massen aber sind seit der Zeit weit in allgemeiner Bildung fortgeschritten.” Cincinnati
Volksfreund, 19 July 1870.
At the New York meeting in Steinway Hall, former Republican governor of Wisconsin, Edward
Salomon, attributed the conflict to “the backwardness of the French Volk itself, which, despite its muchpraised civilization, still languishes in medieval bands” (“… der Verkerhtheit des französichen Volkes
selbst, das trotz seiner geprisenen Civilisation noch in mittelalterlichen Banden schmachtet”). Wochenblatt
der New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 23 July 1870. On Salomon, see Robert Sobel and John Raimo, eds.,
210
weeks of the war.98 The St. Charles Demokrat was convinced that somehow Germans’
“more peace loving character” and their “deeper education [Bildung]” would see them to
victory.99 Cleveland’s Wächter am Erie claimed the Germans “understand the meaning
of freedom better than anyone else.”100 After Sedan, the Westliche Post also described
Prussia’s success in constructing a powerful nation-state as emanating from the German
character. The war gave “the nation an external position of power that corresponded to
its moral and intellectual greatness.”101
Many Anglo-Americans, especially Republicans, also believed that characteristics
necessary for self-rule were innate in the German Volk. Writing for the Republican
Cincinnati Commercial, Murat Halstead gratified German Americans with dispatches
testifying that “every hour that I have been on German soil has increased my estimate of
the German nation. They have the brain and muscle, and the country, to take undisputed
hereafter the first place among the powers of Europe.”102 The Cleveland Leader was
similarly impressed by the “imperturbable Teutons.”103 The influential Republicanleaning New York weekly The Nation led American papers in its enthusiasm for
describing an essential difference between the French and Germans. In an August 1870
issue, editor E.L. Godkin identified himself as an admirer of the skill, efficiency, and
physical strength of the German soldier and ran an exuberant letter hailing the German
Biographical Directory of the Governors of the United States, 1789-1978 (Westport, Conn.: Meckler
Books, 1978), 4:1725-26.
98
“In der kürzlich ausserordentlich vorgeschrittenen intellektullen Bildung des deutschen Volkes ....”
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 9 August 1870.
99
“Friedfertigeren Charakter”; “tiefere Bildung.” St. Charles Demokrat, 4 August 1870.
100
Wächter am Erie, 21 July 1865.
101
“… der Nation eine äußere Machtstellung zu geben, welcher ihrer sittlichen und geistigen Größe
entspräche.” Westliche Post, 5 September 1870.
102
Cincinnati Commercial, 31 August 1870. For the German-American reaction to these and other
observations, see Cincinnati Volksfreund, 1 September 1870, 23 August 1870.
103
Cleveland Leader, 23 September 1870.
211
Volk.104 The Nation’s correspondent was Forty-Eighter Friedrich Kapp, a sometime
resident of New York who had returned to his native Prussia for good earlier that year.105
Kapp described the German people rising against “the infuriated hordes of duped
Frenchmen.” Americans, Kapp urged, must support the Germans in the “war between the
Teutonic and Latin races.”106 By endorsing Kapp’s position, Godkin showed that the
conflict also influenced how Anglo-Americans perceived race and self-rule.
In the long run, contrary to Carl Dänzer’s expectations, the idea of biological
distinctions among white races would become more accepted.107 In the short term, the
idea that an individual’s ability to become an active citizen was shaped by deeply-seated
differences among groups of people would make it easier for many German Americans
and Anglo-Americans to abandon African American suffrage as their preferred means to
perfect American government. If French peasants were not ready to rule themselves,
were the Americans who had recently been enslaved? The Franco-Prussian War raised
enough doubt to ease the way for German Republicans to cooperate with people who
were convinced that the answer was no. The rise of racial thinking among German
Americans would weaken German Republicans’ resolve to defend African American
citizenship.
*****
104
The Nation, 11 August 1870. See also William M. Armstrong, E. L. Godkin and American Foreign
Policy, 1865-1900 (New York: Bookman Associates, 1957), 112-13.
105
For Kapp’s own experience of his disillusion with the United States and reintegration into German
politics after 1870, see Friedrich Kapp, Vom radikalen Fruhsozialisten des Vormärz zum liberalen
Parteipolitiker des Bismarckreichs: Briefe 1843-1884, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler (Frankfurt am Main: Insel
Verlag, 1969).
106
The Nation, 11 August 1870.
107
On the development of late nineteenth-century racial hierarchies, see Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different
Color, 39-90.
212
As German Americans increasingly saw nations as racial groups, they became
less interested in the role of free political institutions in binding citizens together. During
the 1860s German Republicans had emphasized that staying true to republican ideals
gave the United States the power to turn European peasants and African American slaves
into citizens. German immigrants had maintained that true freedom came only when
inherited privileges were eliminated and citizens were enfranchised to control
government. Such assumptions lay at the heart of German Republicans’ support for
African American suffrage. In the emotional response to German unification, citizens’
right to participate in government became less important. German Americans’ simple
juxtaposition of monarchies and republics began to disintegrate. Observing the emerging
German Empire with admiration, many German immigrants found themselves in the
peculiar position of arguing that a monarchy could be more republican than a republic.
“Just as monarchy is compatible with the greatest freedom of a Volk,” the New-Yorker
Staats-Zeitung asserted in September 1870, “so too a republic can allow the greatest
tyranny.”108 As the New York paper indicated, German Americans remained committed
to the republican goal of safeguarding freedom by avoiding tyranny on the one hand and
anarchy on the other. Nonetheless, something was clearly changing. Now they found
themselves suggesting that the character of a people and sound administrative institutions
were just as important as effective representative government.
German Americans never simply rejected the republican tenet of manhood
suffrage. Indeed, immigrants were proud that, as they had expected, the constitution of
108
“… mit der Monarchie die grösste Freiheit eines Volkes vereinbar ist, so auch die Republik die grösste
Tyranny zulassen kann.” Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 9 September 1870
213
the German Empire boasted a parliament chosen by its adult male population.109 The
Reichstag, however, had little power. It could not initiate legislation or remove from
office Chancellor Bismarck, who controlled the Empire’s administrative departments and
military. Members of the nobility also retained many of their traditional privileges within
the individual states. Conscious of these deficiencies, German Americans hopefully
expected further reforms to follow. The Cincinnati Volksfreund looked to the federal
structure of the emerging polity, maintaining that the states would retain enough power to
guarantee “German freedom.”110 The paper’s editors were optimistic that the German
Volk would support the Reichstag if it acted in accordance with the popular will, giving
monarchs no choice but to “handle it very carefully.”111 The St. Charles Demokrat
assured readers that the Empire’s central administration would be powerful enough to
neutralize the aristocracy. It preached patience, adding, “As soon as the German Volk
feels the need for a republic, it will also know to achieve one.”112 Carl Schurz simply
assured Hamilton Fish that in spite of Prussia’s “monarchical form of government[,] it
will also turn out to be the most progressive power, steadily progressive.”113 Like
Schurz, most German Americans believed their enthusiasm for Germany flowed from the
same political principles that made them so loyal to the Union.114 Letting their emotions
109
St. Charles Demokrat reminded readers that under Prussian direction, the parliament of the North
German Confederation was based on universal suffrage (“allgemeine Stimmrecht”). St. Charles Demokrat,
21 July 1870.
110
“Deutscher Freiheit.” Cincinnati Volksfruend, 29 October 1870.
111
“… von den Monarchen sehr vorsichtig behandelt warden wird.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 21
November 1870.
112
“Sobald das deutsche Volk das Bedürfniß nach einer Republik fühlen wird, wird es auch eine zu
schaffen wissen.” St. Charles Demokrat, 1 December 1870.
113
Schurz to Hamilton Fish, St. Louis, 10 September 1870, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political
Papers of Carl Schurz, 1:519-20.
114
See J.B. Stallo’s speech in Cincinnati Volksfreund, 8 September 1870. The most prominent German
Americans such as Wisconsin’s Edward Salomon were careful to remind immigrants—and to reassure any
native-born observers—that their sympathies for Germany must be tempered by their “duties as citizens of
214
run away with them, they convinced themselves that it was only a matter of time before
their faith in Germany would be vindicated.115
In the initial rush to rally to the side of Prussia, however, German Americans were
prepared to support a monarchy run by the conservative Count Bismarck. Those
German-American leaders who had been exiled after 1848 for their opposition to German
monarchies had assumed that meaningful representative government would accompany
German unity. In 1870, though, it became clear that German unification would be forged
by a regime headed by a monarch who claimed to be divinely appointed and still wielded
much power over government. To explain their position, German Americans turned to
Realpolitik. Like their countrymen in Europe, they accepted Bismarck’s 1862 assessment
that the great questions facing Germany would not be resolved “by speeches and majority
decisions … but by iron and blood.” In a piece reprinted in the Cincinnati Volksfreund, a
Chicago editor commended Bismarck for his prophetic analysis. The author encouraged
German Americans to see Bismarck as an appropriate agent of the change for which the
Forty-Eighters had fought: “Their [the Forty-Eighters’] youthful dream of a united
Germany has become a living, tangible reality—perhaps by other means than they had in
mind—perhaps under a different tricolor than the black, red, and gold, but what
difference does that make?”116 The wartime celebrations, speeches, and editorials
this [the American] republic” (“Pflichten als Bürger dieser Republik”). Wochenblatt der New-Yorker
Staats-Zeitung, 23 July 1870.
115
As the excitement of the war and unification faded over the following years, many would become more
critical of German government. Trefousee, “German-American Immigrants and the Newly Founded
Reich,” 165-73.
116
The Volksfreund paraphrased Bismarck’s famous statement. “… durch Majoritätsbeschlüsse, Reden
&c., sondern nur durch Eisen und Blut”; “Ihr Jugendtraum vom einigen Deutschland ist zur lebendigen,
greifbaren Wirklichkeit geworden.—Wohl mit andern Mitteln, als sie im Sinne hatten,—wohl unter einer
andern Tricolore, als der schwartzrothgoldenen ... doch was thut Das?” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 11 August
1870.
215
endorsed this position.117 German Americans—even the Forty-Eighters—were prepared
to sacrifice their republican principles and reconfigure their nationalist dreams.
Once Prussia’s adversary had become the French Third Republic, German
Americans began to argue that it was possible for a monarchy to govern better than a
republic. There was reason enough to doubt the French Republic’s future. After its
defeat at Prussian hands in 1871, the new government would be challenged by the Paris
Commune, returning the country to turmoil.118 Unlike the majority of Americans,
however, German Americans showed an unusual unanimity in their stubborn skepticism
of the new French government. It was a “slight of hand” to attract international sympathy
reported the St. Charles Demokrat.119 This was not a real republic, Thieme at the
Wächter am Erie seconded. It did not emanate from the people.120 The Westliche Post
chided Americans for their naïve attraction to the word “republic.” The editors
questioned how they could fail to see “that a republic born in craziness has only a
desperately small chance of survival.”121 A Westliche Post correspondent further
protested that, “in fact, the German people, not the French, have made a great,
overwhelming revolution: a revolution without empty phrases or boasts, but world-
117
German-American support of German unification under control Prussian was ubiquitous. For explicit
references, see Cincinnati Volksfreund, 18 July 1870, 10 August 1870, 29 October 1870; Fremont Courier,
1 December 1870; St. Charles Demokrat, 21 July 1870; Westliche Post, 29 August 1870; Anzeiger des
Westens, 18 July 1870; Wächter am Erie, 19 July 1870. For a statement from the Turnerbund, see
Westliche Post, 2 August 1870. See also, Lawrence S. Thompson and Frank X. Brown, “The FortyEighters in Politics,” in The Forty-Eighters, ed. Zucker, 152; Gazley, American Opinion of German
Unification, 456-500; Wittke, The German-Language Press in America, 165-68; Wittke, Refugees of
Revolution, 345-64.
118
Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre, adeptly describes the Commune and American reaction.
119
“Gaukenspiel.” St. Charles Demokrat, 22 September 1870.
120
Wächter am Erie, 6 September 1870.
121
“… daß eine im Wahnsinn geborene Republik nur verzweifelt wenig Aussichten auf ein Fortbestehen
hat.” Westliche Post, 14 September 1870. See also Westliche Post, 28 September 1870; Fremont Courier,
25 September 1870.
216
shaking and world-changing.”122 Joining the chorus, a speaker at a St. Louis fundraising
event ridiculed French efforts: “Prayers of necessity are not devotion, and a republican
form of state forced upon a Volk that has degenerated into slavery is not a republic.”
Adding further confusion as to the nature of a true republic, she remarked, “Germany is
today, without bearing the name, closer in reality to the concept of the true essence of a
free state than Paris with all its republicanism.”123 Such statements demonstrated how
profoundly European events had blurred the distinction between monarchies and
republics in the minds of German Americans.
If a hereditary nobility and enfranchised citizenry did not distinguish Germany
from France, what did? In answering this question, German immigrants drew lessons
they would apply to the United States. Many editorials and speeches returned to the
theme of the differences between the Germans and the French. There was broad
agreement with the Republican Judge J.B. Stallo that “no republic can be made overnight
merely by proclaiming it; it must be developed slowly and gradually within a Volk, in its
minor institutions, in its everyday actions and intentions.”124 This cautious depiction of
state building challenged the Republican argument that enfranchising former slaves
would ensure a republican form of government in the South. Stallo himself had only
122
“In der That, das deutsche Volk, nicht das französische, hat eine große überwältigende Revolution in
vier Wochen gemacht: eine Revolution ohne Phrasen und Prahlerei, aber welterschütternd und
neugestaltend.” Westliche Post, 16 September 1870.
Friedrich Münch was unusual in expressing an apparently sincere desire and measure of optimism
that that the French could achieve a real republic. St. Charles Demokrat, 22 September 1870.
123
“Erzwungene Gebete sind keine Andacht, und eine republikanische Staatform, durch Zufall einem
sclavisch entarteten Volke aufoctroyiert, ist keine Republik”; “Deutschland ist heute, ohne das es den
Namen führt, in Wirklichkeit dem Begriff wahren freistaatlichen Wesens näher als Paris mit seinem ganzen
Republikanismus.” Mississippi Blätter, 25 September 1870. Women were significant in the fundraising
efforts during the Franco-Prussian War, but this is the only printed example of an address by a woman. Its
content did not distinguish it from men’s speeches.
124
“Man kann keine Republik machen über Nacht, indem man sie proclamirt; sie muß langsam und
allmälig [sic] in dem Innern eines Volks, seinen kleinen Einrichtungen, seinem alltäglichen Thun und
Wollen zur Ausbildung kommen.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 8 September 1870.
217
gradually accepted African American suffrage, so this was no ideological about-face.125
In 1870, however, the judge had the great weight of German public opinion behind him.
The reorientation of that year did not manifest itself in reflective and scholarly treatises as
much as in stormy and passionate outbursts in the public sphere.
German Americans did begin to allude to certain institutions that nurtured
German superiority. In their more charitable moments, German-American leaders might
assert that “the present French spirit is the product of a crazy government system. It has
been systematically repressed, step by step, in the service of an individual [Napoleon
III].”126 The same was not true of the German “spirit” under the ascendant Wilhelm I.
German immigrants credited the Prussian king with running an administration that was
not only efficient, but salutary, elevating ordinary Germans above their French
counterparts. Different newspapers found different things to admire in Germany, from
education to tax collection. The St. Charles Demokrat focused on education. Any Volk
claiming to belong to the “civilized nations” in the nineteenth century, its editors
maintained, must provide education to its children. The French failure in this regard was
evidenced in the illiterate soldiers filling German prison camps.127 The Prussian system,
however, rated “far above the American,” according to a recent report.”128 German
Americans interpreted the Prussian battle victories themselves as products of superior
education and organization, not militarism. These feats seemed to indicate Prussian taxes
were put into service on behalf of the Volk rather than lining the pockets of officials,
125
Easton, Hegel’s First American Followers, 60.
“Der heutige französische Geist ist das Produkt eines verrüchten Riegierungssystems. Systematisch
wurde er von Stufe zu Stufe herabgerückt im Dienste eines Einzelnen.” Cincinnati Volksfruend, 21 July
1870.
127
“Die civilisirten Nationen.” St. Charles Demokrat, 26 January 1871.
128
“… weit über das amerikanische gestellt.” St. Charles Demokrat, 15 December 1870.
126
218
wealthy manufacturers, or aristocrats.129 Cincinnati Volksfreund editor Emil Rothe was
convinced that Prussian military training was itself “a republican institution and purveyor
of culture” among the German masses.130 German Americans remained republicans,
while admiring the new European power. When they tried to explain the tension this
created, they focused on the administrative achievements of Prussia and its empire, not
citizen representation in government.
German-American Democrats believed that United States under the Grant
administration did not compare well to the German Empire. The New-Yorker StaatsZeitung questioned whether “the American Volk is an example for all the other nations on
earth.”131 Rothe at the Volksfreund also attacked his adopted homeland: “Not everything
that is popular here [in the United States] … is republican and not everything that is
actually in principle republican is popular here.”132 Never an advocate of black suffrage,
Rothe worried that in foisting it on the states’ unwilling white population, Republicans
had contributed to the vice eroding American politics. “Corruption, special interest
legislation, and privileges,” he lamented, “characterize our public life in such a
conspicuous way that we must blush when we hold up our current state of affairs,
republican in name only, as an example for other Völker to imitate.”133 The new
Cincinnatian was indignant that Republicans, “utopians, who themselves have no regard
129
For an example that spells out this conclusion, see Cincinnati Volksfreund, 29 September 1870.
“Ein republikanisches Institut und Kulturmittel.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 13 February 1871. Rothe
was apparently alone in his preoccupation with the salubrious effects of compulsory military training.
131
“… das amerikanische Volk ein Musterbild für alle anderen Nationen der Erde sei.” New-Yorker
Staats-Zeitung, 3 September 1870.
132
“Es ist nicht Alles, was hier [in the United States] populär … republikanisch, und es ist auch nicht Alles
was wirklich im Prinzipe republikanisch ist, hier populär.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 31 January 1871.
133
“Ausnahmegesetze und Privilegien charakterisiren unser öffentliches Leben in so auffälligen Weise,
daß wire erröthen müssen, wenn wir unsere gegenwärtigen, wirklich nur dem Namen nach republikanische
Zustände, anderen Völkern als Muster zur Nachnahmung ausstellen sollten.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 6
February 1871.
130
219
for any constitution,” tried to tell Germans that the United States, “where we
unfortunately face corruption and lack political character at every step … is the yardstick
of all politics.”134 For German Democrats such as Rothe, the moral of the FrancoPrussian War for the United States was obvious: Some peoples—the French, African
Americans—were not well suited to citizenship, and enfranchising them would prove at
best a fruitless exercise. In fact, the Democrats argued, Republicans’ single-minded
focus on African American suffrage had produced government abuses. Americans could
learn from German institutions how to reverse them. German unification reinforced
German Democrats’ opposition to the principles girding Republican Reconstruction.
Significantly, those German immigrants who had supported the Republican Party
also concurred that the Grant administration could learn from Germany. The war broke
out just as German Republicans were becoming frustrated. Americans seemed reluctant
to reform their government because they were convinced it was, in the words of
Cincinnati maverick Republican Friedrich Hassaurek, “the best government under the
sun.”135 As the form of the German Empire’s government became clear, Republicans
identified elements worthy of emulation. Schurz’s Westliche Post assured readers “the
constitution of Germany is in certain respects more democratic than that of the United
States.”136 Following these first tentative steps toward a new transatlantic comparison,
the Republican St. Charles Demokrat chimed in with an example. The Demokrat
134
“Schwärmer, welche selbst auf keine Constitution Rücksicht nehmen ….”; “… wo wir leider der
Corruption und der politischen Charakterlosigkeit auf jedem Schritte begegnen … der Maßstab aller Politik
… ist.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 25 August 1870.
135
Westliche Post, 20 October 1870.
136
“Und die Verfassung Deutschlands ist in gewissem Sinne noch demokratischer, als die der Ver.
Staaten.” Mississippi Blätter, 18 December 1870. The paper pointed to the ability of Germans to have
their “citizenship” rights throughout the Empire, which had only recently been added to the U.S.
Constitution.
220
maintained that the power of the German Kaiser was more circumscribed than that of the
American president. “The German protector [the Emperor],” for example, “cannot, like
the president of the United States, hire and suddenly fire thousands of officials according
to mere whim. Rather, his hands are absolutely bound by law and custom. Even if he
just wanted to drive the poorest gate inscriber or highway toll collector, who was guilty
of nothing, from office on mere whim, a cry of indignation would go out through the land
and teach him that the era of patriarchal despotism was long gone.”137 The comparison
did not reflect well on President Grant. The Demokrat, which had supported the former
general’s presidential bid, was signaling that change was afoot among Ohio, and
especially Missouri, Republicans. No longer motivated by African American citizenship,
the Demokrat was looking to focus on the new issue of civil service reform.
Some native-born Republicans agreed that German government held lessons for
the United States, especially the growing group of self-proclaimed reformers.138 The
same Anglo-Americans who sought to rid the United States of corruption, demagoguery,
and fiscal irresponsibility maintained that Germans made better citizens than the French.
They respected German institutions. Some reformers were content to observe the
processes at work in Europe. Horace White at the Chicago Tribune believed,
“Republican Germany is passing through a transition stage much like our own recent
development from a slaveholding league of sovereign States to a national union of free
137
“Der deutsche Schirmherr kann nicht wie der Präsident der Ver. Staaten, nach bloser [sic] Laune
Tausende von Beamten anstellen und plötzlich absetzen, sondern es werden ihm in dieser Beziehung durch
Gesetz und Herkommen die Hände vollständig gebunden. Wenn er aus bloßer Laune auch nur der ärmsten
Thorschreiber, oder Chausseegeldeinnehmer, der sich Nichts hätte zu Schulden kommen lassen, aus seinem
Amte jagen wollte, würde ein Schrei der Entrüstung durch das Land gehen und ihn darüber belehren, daß
die Zeit des patriarchalischen Despotismus längst vorbei ist.” St. Charles Demokrat, 9 March 1871.
138
In contrast to the reformers, President Grant believed that in the German constitution “the American
people see an attempt to reproduce in Europe some of the best features of our own.” Ulysses S. Grant to
Congress, Washington, D.C., 7 February 1871, in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 21:163.
221
states.”139 The Republican Cleveland Leader observed that Germany, “though an empire
in name … is by no means an empire in the old sense of the term.”140 A Cleveland
Republican who kept a journal of his travels in Europe during the war was not altogether
approving of the way Prussia was “gobbling” up German states. Yet he still supported
Prussia “in this unjust war” and observed, “This is sure to be a great Empire. Governed
wisely and well by intelligent and harmonious rulers, and according to my observations,
is more than a match for the boasting French adversary.”141
Other reform-minded Republicans praised German government more effusively.
The Nation’s E.L. Godkin, who so respected the German Volk, was also impressed by
Prussian institutions. In August 1870, he explained that Prussian military prowess and
wealth “is the result of sixty years of patient training, of contentment with slow gains, of
respect for knowledge and for discipline, of close attention to the education of children,
and of constant remembrance that a man is bound to labor for the state no less in his
home than in the ranks of the army.” Inspired by the authoritarian regime, Godkin noted,
“The lesson is full of instruction for all of us as well as for France.”142 Like German
Americans, The Nation’s editor rejected the “sentimentalism” of those inspired by the
French Republic, focusing on the potential of a united Germany: “We look on her
[France’s] decline, terrible and full of suffering as the process is, and the rise of Germany
and of German habits of thought into supremacy, as one of the greatest gains humanity
139
Chicago Tribune, 20 July 1870. See also Cincinnati Commercial, 27 January 1871.
Cleveland Leader, 16 December 1870.
141
Randall Palmer Wade, 27 July 1870, Travel Journals, 1:158, Western Reserve Historical Society
(hereafter WRHS), Cleveland.
142
The Nation, 25 August 1870.
140
222
has made.”143 Men such as Godkin hinted at the ideas that would allow reformers to join
German Americans in leaving the Republican Party and cooperating with politicians who
resisted African American citizenship.
Although German Ohioans and Missourians perceived that they stood at a
Wendepunkt in history, a turning point is only meaningful in light of what went before
and what would come after. Before August Thieme arrived at Sandusky to exhort
German immigrants to support Prussia, he had labored for a German republic in 1848 and
mobilized Cleveland Germans to oppose slavery. Although he had consistently
supported African American men’s right to full citizenship, he became frustrated with
Grant’s administration after the Fifteenth Amendment was on its way to ratification. It
must have been with relief that Thieme turned to the more cheering news coming from
Germany. Among those describing the conflict as a war between Völker, he attacked
German Americans who failed to support Prussia and ridiculed the French and their new
republic.144 He could not share Godkin’s attraction to authoritarian institutions, but he
was swept up in the Zeitgeist, that spirit of pride and hope that filled the Sandusky
courthouse.145 He and other German Americans like him would ride its current out of the
Republican Party and into a coalition that championed free trade, civil service reform,
and—ultimately more importantly—the return of southern government to white hands.
143
Ibid., 29 September 1870.
Zucker, Forty-Eighters, 348; Wächter am Erie, 5, 6 September 1870; Wittke, Refugees of Revolution,
356.
145
For additional evidence, see Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 350-51, 356-58.
144
223
CHAPTER 6
“NOT ONLY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE OCEAN!”:
THE GERMAN-AMERICAN LIBERAL REPUBLICANS, 1870-1872
On September 2, 1870, Napoleon III surrendered to Prussian forces at the French
town of Sedan. Sedan Day, which the new German Empire would recognize as a
national holiday, was also the day that German Americans and many other delegates
walked out of the Missouri Republican convention in Jefferson City. At a meeting
chaired by Senator Carl Schurz, the 250-odd bolters called for civil service reform, free
trade, and reconciliation between former Confederates and Unionists.1 The Liberal
Republican movement they founded would culminate two years later in a challenge to
Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency. Dissenting from the Grant administration’s
Reconstruction policies, German Liberals would connect the transformative events in
Jefferson City and Europe. “Show that the Germans can decide battles not only on the
other side of the Ocean!” urged the St. Charles Demokrat during the Missouri campaign
in 1870.2 German Americans’ response to German unification helped shape the third
party movement that would precipitate the decline of Reconstruction.
So many German-American newspapers and politicians in Missouri and Ohio
joined Schurz and the Demokrat between 1870 and 1872 that a number of German
1
For the number of defectors, see Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 246.
“Also auf, zeigt, daß die Deutschen nicht blos jenseits des Oceans Schlachten entscheiden können!” St.
Charles Demokrat, 3 November 1870.
2
224
immigrants would come to see the Liberal Republican Party as the new embodiment of
their mission in the Untied States. When Schurz later reflected on the movement’s
origins, he said that German Americans “had joined it in Masse [sic]” and “in some
Western states they formed the whole backbone of the movement.”3 Yet with the
exception of one German-language article, historians have not studied the German-born
Liberals.4 Historical treatments of the Liberals focus on the Republicans who were
attracted to liberal economic reform and the moderate southern and border-state
Democrats who were intent on ending Republican rule and reuniting white Unionists and
Confederates.5 Attention to these two parts of the Liberal coalition has provided
important insights into what motivated so many white Americans to sacrifice African
American rights to the priorities of “reform and reconciliation.” Eric Foner builds on the
work of older historians such as John G. Sproat to emphasize the role of the Republican
3
Schurz to Horace Greeley, Washington, D.C., 6 May 1872, reel 7, Schurz Papers, LC.
Historians who recognize that German Americans participated in the Liberal Republican movement have
explained it by emphasizing Schurz’s leadership, pointing to the “ethnocultural” divide between German
and Anglo-American Republicans over alcohol, or describing the economic characteristics that Germanborn and Anglo-American Liberals shared. Gerber, “Carl Schurz’s Journey from Radical to Liberal
Republican”; Andrew L. Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 1-24; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 228-34, 287313; Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 162, 219, 272; Kleppner, The Cross of
Culture, 111; Michael E. McGerr, “The Meaning of Liberal Republicanism: The Case of Ohio,” Civil War
History 28 (1982): 310.
American historians have paid scant attention to a 1988 German-language article that argues that
the Liberal Republican movement was an expression of “ethnic politics.” Jörg Nagler, “Deutschamerikaner
und das Liberal Republican Movement 1872,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 33, no. 4 (1988): 415-38.
Although Nagler’s analysis resembles my own in emphasizing German Americans, it does not delve into
German Liberals’ ideology or situate the movement in broader context.
5
Richard A. Gerber, “The Liberals of 1872 in Historiographical Perspective,” The Journal of American
History 62 (1975): 40-75. Although it was apparent to many in the 1870s that reform and reconciliation
would come at the expense of African American rights, professional historians have only chosen to focus
on this fact since the 1960s. Patrick W. Riddleberger, “The Radicals’ Abandonment of the Negro during
Reconstruction,” The Journal of Negro History 45, no. 2 (1960): 88-102.
In his 2006 book, The Doom of Reconstruction, Andrew Slap maintains Liberal Republicans were
motivated by classical republican understandings of party, corruption, and nation. By minimizing the
salience of race in the 1872 election and distinguishing between the ideological “liberal republican
movement” that began in 1870 and the calculating “Liberal Republican Party” of 1872, Slap’s
interpretation in some ways harks back to Earle D. Ross, The Liberal Republican Movement (New York: H.
Holt and Company, 1919).
4
225
“metropolitan cosmopolitans” of the North. These men were attracted to fiscal
conservatism, the protection of property rights, and government retrenchment.6 They
redefined “reform” to mean “rule by the ‘best men’ rather than the purging American life
of racial inequality.”7 Historians have also shown that the Liberal movement attracted
support from border state residents who were especially eager to put the animosity of the
war years behind them.8
Investigating German Americans places the Liberal Republican movement in the
context of global shifts in nationalism and citizenship. The new party gradually came to
represent a set of compromises to the nationalist visions of the Revolutions of 1848 and
Radical Reconstruction. Previously, German Republicans had argued that free
institutions and equal citizenship were powerful enough to forge an American nation
from various peoples. By 1872, the Liberal Republican movement would express more
muted expectations of American citizenship. Drawing some inspiration from their
reception of the Franco-Prussian War and German unification, Liberals maintained
American political institutions must be reformed to counteract the influence of unfit
voters. Their version of reform found a counterpart in the new ideas of race provoked by
6
Foner, Reconstruction, 518, 460. The classic work situating the Liberal Republican movement within the
trend among reformers toward liberal economics is John G. Sproat, “The Best Men”: Liberal Reformers in
the Gilded Age (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 1-44. Sproat’s understanding of the Liberal
Republicans has found a place in more recent scholarship that examines both the limits of Republicans’
free labor ideology in fulfilling freed people’s aspirations and the erosion of free labor ideology during
Reconstruction. Along similar lines, Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 102-04, argues that Liberal
Reformers began to see African Americans as a group as asking for special government protections rather
than participating in a free-labor economy.
7
Foner, Reconstruction, 527.
8
Although historians have long noted the appeal of reconciliation and compromise to border state
Republicans, recent interpretations have revealed new insights into the meaning of reconciliation to Liberal
Republicans. Jacqueline Balk and Ari Hoogenboom, “The Origins of Border State Liberal
Republicanism,” in Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment: The Border States during Reconstruction,
ed. Richard O. Curry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), 220-44; Blight, Race and Reunion, 122-29;
Burg, “Amnesty, Civil Rights, and the Meaning of Liberal Republicanism,” 29-60.
226
the European war. Stereotypes of different groups’ supposed natural capacity for selfrule had a new impact in the German-language public sphere. Although German Liberals
never renounced the Radical tenet of African American suffrage, they were among those
arguing that curtailing measures to protect citizenship would hasten national
reunification. In effect, they loosened the connection between liberalism and
nationalism.
This chapter considers the ways in which Americans’ changing approach to
citizenship was part of a transatlantic trend. It locates the origins of the Liberal
Republican Party in Missouri in 1870, where German Americans centered their campaign
on lifting proscriptions on former Confederates as they celebrated German victories in
Europe. I go on describe how the significance of Liberal Republicanism became clear
during 1871 and 1872 as the movement’s leaders compromised with Democrats whose
primary concern was overturning Republican rule and marginalizing African Americans.
German ideas of reform fueled Liberals’ doubts about the readiness of African Americans
for citizenship. Even as the implications of their position were becoming apparent, most
German-American Liberals persisted in their negative appraisals of how African
Americans were exercising citizenship. Eventually, German Americans would see the
Liberal Republican movement as a “tragedy of errors.”9 The party collapsed after failing
to unseat Grant. But the 1872 campaign would nonetheless spell “the doom of
Reconstruction,” sapping Republicans’ will to defend black southerners and turning the
country’s attention toward the new issues of the Gilded Age.
*****
9
“Trauerspiel.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 4 May 1872.
227
In Missouri, the Franco-Prussian War provided the backdrop for the final stages
of a split among Republicans that had been years in the making. As Schurz’s Westliche
Post reminded its readers after the Jefferson City convention in September 1870, “In
reality, the disharmony between the German Republicans and Mr. Drake and his special
friends and followers does not just date back to September 1st.”10 German immigrants
had never found it easy to cooperate with the temperance “fanatic” who had engineered
the constitution of 1865 and now served alongside Schurz in the Senate. Personal
rivalries and squabbles over beer strained the Missouri Republican Party, but the two
factions coalesced around substantive differences over policy. Like the majority of
German immigrants in both parties, Schurz’s faction championed hard money and free
trade, while Drake supported the Republican administration’s unsecured greenbacks and
protective tariffs.11 Schurz opposed Grant’s foreign policy, especially his efforts to annex
the Republic of Santo Domingo, but Drake became one of the president’s most loyal
supporters.12
At the heart of the conflict among Missouri Republicans, however, were questions
of citizenship. Under Drake’s leadership, the Missouri constitution convention of 1865
had excluded all African Americans and Confederate sympathizers from exercising the
franchise. At the time, German Republicans had supported black suffrage and expressed
milder misgivings about the test oath that disfranchised disloyal Missourians. They had
seen the oath as a temporary expedient. At the national Republican Convention in 1868,
10
“Die Disharmoie zwischen den deutschen Republikaner und Herrn Drake und seine speziellen Freunden
und Anhänger datirt in der That nicht erst vom 1. September.” Westliche Post, 1 October 1870.
11
For a description of the growing divide between factions of the Missouri Republican Party, see
Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 182-96; Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 150-182; Parrish,
Missouri under Radical Rule, 268-99; Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, 1-24.
12
Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 186-88, 191-95.
228
Schurz had introduced a resolution supporting political rights for former Confederates as
soon as they posed no threat to the nation. In his 1869 senatorial campaign, he had again
called for amnesty for Confederates once African Americans could vote.13 With the
ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, Schurz believed it was time for the
Missouri Republican Party to lift the test oath. As early as June 1870, his Westliche Post
endorsed a gubernatorial candidate who had been calling for “universal suffrage and
universal amnesty” for Confederates and African Americans since 1866, Benjamin Gratz
Brown.14
In Missouri, championing repeal of the test oath was consistent with GermanRepublican leaders’ long-standing commitment to a form of male citizenship that was
inclusive and participatory. In 1870, Schurz argued that German immigrants wanted to
reconcile with their former opponents for the same reason they had supported African
American voting: their commitment to equal citizenship. In the weeks before the
Missouri convention, the Westliche Post reminded St. Louis Germans that Gratz Brown
had shared the “German idea of emancipation” before the war, consistently supporting
the Radical policy of black suffrage, which “we can describe as essentially German.”
(The paper conveniently ignored the fact that German voters had rejected African
American suffrage in the 1868 referendum.) Now, the Westliche Post announced, it was
naturally “Brown and only Brown who had declared himself clearly and explicitly in
13
Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, 3:285; Woechentlich Westliche Post, 13, 20 January 1869;
Benjamin F. Loan to Schurz, Jefferson City, 7 January 1869; Schurz to Benjamin F. Loan, Jefferson City, 7
January 1869, reel 3, Schurz Papers, LC.
14
Westliche Post, 26 June 1870; Westliche Post, 24 August 1870; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule,
288-89. The English-language newspaper, the St. Louis Missouri Democrat, also supported Gratz Brown.
See Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 288-89.
229
favor of the lifting of the test oath and the voting restrictions.”15 Schurz’s paper
reiterated this theme after the nomination: “Now the Germans of Missouri stand again in
the first row among those who are eliminating the dividing line of disfranchisement,
restoring equal rights to everyone, and thereby prepared to extend the hand of
reconciliation to former enemies.”16 German Missourians considered themselves
magnanimous advocates of equal rights for African Americans and whites. They had
always been most concerned with the abstract principle of race-neutral suffrage. Having
achieved their goal, they saw little reason to prevent former Confederates from voting
any longer.
Arnold Krekel, the St. Charles man who had presided over the constitutional
convention in 1865, elaborated on the theme of consistency in a public speech in August
1870. Krekel began by commemorating those who had “sacrificed their lives for the
fatherland” beside Franz Sigel at Camp Jackson in 1861. They had helped achieve
“equal justice before the law in the preserved Union.” In Krekel’s mind, the North had
triumphed because its people had united behind the principle of “self-determination.”
Given that commitment, Krekel explained that he had only reluctantly accepted
disfranchising Confederate sympathizers for the “safe-guarding of the achievements of
the war.” Now he believed that overturning the test oath was necessary to “achieve the
15
“Fast allein unter den Amerikanern schon lange Jahre vor dem Bürgerkriege mit dem deutschen
Emancipationsideen aufrichtig sympathisirte”; “… wir als wesentlich deutsche bezeichnen dürfen”; “… mit
der endlichen Aufheben von Testeid und Stimmrechtsbeschränkung … Brown und nur Brown hat sich klar
und deutlich darüber erklärt.” Westliche Post, 24 August 1870.
16
“Nun stehen die Deutschen Missouri’s wieder in erster Reihe unter denen, welche die Scheidungslinie
der Entrechnungen auszulöschen, die gleichen Rechte Aller widerherzustellen, und somit den ehemaligen
Feinden die Versöhnungshand zu bieten bereit sind.” Westliche Post, 25 October 1870.
230
full recovery of the commonwealth.”17 Krekel reflected on the potential price of the
policy he now proposed. “I have no doubt,” he said, “that a part of our population would
strip negroes’ rights if it lay within their power.” Yet Krekel, who was now a federal
judge, believed that the Constitution and the franchise would allow African Americans to
protect themselves. At the same time, he hoped that Missouri would make African
Americans eligible to hold elective office, an issue that the Fifteenth Amendment had not
addressed. Krekel’s speech also referred to Europe. He told his audience that the
transformative power of the liberal nationalist principle of “self-determination” was at
work as he spoke. The German Volk had freely chosen to rise up and join together to
defeat the French royal family, who had “selfish goals in their sights and forget or ignore
the interest of the Volk.” For Krekel, lifting voting exclusions and forming the German
Empire embodied the ideas of 1848 and the American Civil War. Ultimately, the
consequences of the Liberal Republican movement—and German unification—would
depend on whether he was right.18
The majority of Missouri Republicans who followed Drake did not share Krekel’s
optimism about what would happen if former Confederates returned to full citizenship.
They knew amnesty might well put Democrats hostile to Reconstruction in control of the
state government. Drake wanted to retain political power, and his supporters from
violence-plagued rural Missouri genuinely worried for the safety of black and white
17
“… opferten ihr Leben für’s Vaterland”; “Gleichberechtigung vor dem Gesetzen in der erhaltenen
Union”; “Selbstregierung”; “Sicherstellung der Kriegserrungenschaften”; “Daß ein Theil unserer
Bevölkerung den Neger rechtlos machen würde, wenn es in ihrer Macht läge, daran zweifle ich nicht”; “…
wir den höchsten Aufschwung des Gemeinwesens nicht erreichen können”; “selbstsüchtige Zwecke im
Auge und vergißt oder mißachte … das Interesse des Volkes.” St. Charles Demokrat, 18 August 1870. For
another report of the meeting, see Westliche Post, 12 August 1870.
18
“Gleichberechtung vor dem Gesetzen.” St. Charles Demokrat, 18 August 1870.
231
Republicans.19 In February 1870, Drake’s partisans had reluctantly accepted the state
legislature’s decision to allow Missourians to vote on the repeal of the test oath, but they
were not prepared to put the weight of the Republican Party behind it.20 They had no
intention of nominating Gratz Brown for governor. Sensing the strength of their
opponents in the upcoming convention, Drake’s regulars turned to newly enfranchised
African American voters. The state Republican Party decided to apportion one African
American delegate for every 150 black men—or fraction thereof—in each county.
Because many counties had fewer that 150 adult male African Americans, the convention
would seat one delegate for every 94 African American men in the state, but only one
representative for every 136 white Republican voters in the state.21 The 180 black
delegates would hold the balance of power in the 781-strong gathering in September.
The struggle over the Missouri Republican Party came to a head at the convention
in Jefferson City. German Americans accused the regulars of manipulating party rules to
prevent Gratz Brown’s nomination. Even men who were sympathetic to African
Americans objected to the distribution of Republican delegates. Krekel declared, “Such
intrigue must destroy [the regulars] themselves or the party.”22 The St. Charles
Demokrat presented the issue in ethnic terms: the regular Republicans did “not want any
German votes[.] Negro votes form their main support.” The newspaper added, “Far be it
from us to want to advocate racial prejudice, but it was really somewhat strong tobacco to
19
For an extended expression of Drake’s position, see Charles D. Drake, “Betrayal of the Republican Party
in Missouri,” Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 3rd sess., App. 1-8 (16 December 1870).
20
Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 173-75, 184, 188-91.
21
Westliche Post, 3 August 1870; Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 235; Parrish,
Missouri under Radical Rule, 289-90.
22
“Solche Ränke müssen sich selbst oder die Partei ruiniren.” St. Charles Demokrat, 18 August 1872.
232
expect that 90 Negro votes would count for as much as 140 votes from whites.”23 The
so-called “Liberals” in the convention sought to cut African American representation and
push through a resolution that strongly supported eliminating loyalty requirements for
voters. But they were in the minority. Finding the regulars intractable after three days of
heated debate, about a third of the delegates, including the whole German contingent
from St. Louis, stormed out.24 The defectors proceeded to form a rival party and
nominate Gratz Brown to run for governor.25 The Liberal Republicans drafted a platform
that supported hard money, free trade, and civil service reform.26 Most significantly, the
new party affirmed that Republican principles required that no one be denied the vote
based on their political beliefs and “that the time has come, that the demands of public
security, on which the disfranchisement of a great number of citizens could be grounded,
have clearly ceased to exist.”27
German Missourians in the Liberal Republican Party portrayed African
Americans somewhat differently following the convention. They believed that accepting
reconciliation would allow African Americans to win the sympathy of their enemies.
Schurz, for example, urged “colored people” to vote to re-enfranchise Confederates to
“establish that fraternal feeling between you and all other classes of citizens, which is so
23
“… will … keine deutschen Stimmen, Negerstimmen bilden ihre Grundpfeiler. Es ist ferne von uns
Racenvorurtheile befürworten zu wollen, aber es war doch etwas starker Tabak, zu verlangen, daß 90
Negerstimmen ebenso viel gelten sollten, als 140 Stimmen von Weißen.” St. Charles Demokrat, 17
September 1870. For similar sentiment, see Westliche Post, 13 October 1870.
24
On the convention, see Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 233-49; Parrish,
Missouri under Radical Rule, 291-99. It is difficult to trace all the individuals involved in the walk-out, but
on the German delegates, see Westliche Post, 3 September 1870.
25
The Liberal slate included two German-born men; the regular ticket had none. St. Charles Demokrat, 8
September 1870.
26
St. Charles Demokrat, 8 September 1870.
27
“Daß die Zeit gekommen ist, da die Erfordernisse der öffentlichen Sicherheit, durch welche allein die
Entrechtung einer großen Zahl der Bürger begründet werden könnte, offenbar aufgehört haben zu
existiren.” St. Charles Demokrat, 8 September 1870.
233
essential to your welfare.”28 Once it became clear that the new black voters believed
their interests lay with the regular Republicans, the German-language press became
hostile. German immigrants interpreted African Americans’ choice as an indication that
they lacked the judgment required to vote responsibly. Just before the November
election, the St. Charles Demokrat remarked that the efforts of African American
politicians—“all the invective of colored stumping billboards”—could not stop the
Liberals being elected.29 When African American leader J. Milton Turner spoke in St.
Charles, the paper reported that “he has a right slimy gift of the gab and so may well have
general success with an ignorant and uneducated [ungebildeten] class of people as the
colored still is at this time.” Local whites gathered to express their opposition to Turner
as he spoke. Cheers for Gratz Brown filled the streets and saloons of St. Charles for over
an hour following the speech. If the regular Republicans wanted to hand an
overwhelming victory to Gratz Brown, the Demokrat suggested, “They should send over
a few more colored house boys.”30 Despite African Americans’ clear support for
Republicans, the paper also warned that “the politically still childlike negro element”
might cooperate with Democratic “Copperheads.”31 Missouri’s German-language
newspapers referred to African Americans in a new tone.
28
Schurz, “Address to the People of Missouri,” 10 September 1870, in Speeches, Correspondence and
Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 1:517. As prominent Civil War historian James McPherson has shown,
some former abolitionists hoped “moral suasion” could succeed where “legal coercion” failed. James
McPherson, “Grant or Greeley: The Abolitionist Dilemma in the Election of 1872,” American Historical
Review 71 (1965): 43-61.
29
“Alle Schmähreden farbiger Stumplakaten.” St. Charles Demokrat, 3 November 1870.
30
“… er ein ordentlich schmiertes Maulwerk hat und deßhalb wohl bei einer unwissenden und
ungebildeten Menschenklasse, wie die farbige dermalen noch ist, im Allgemeinen Erfolg haben mag”; “…
so dürfen sie nur noch ein paar farbige Hausknechte herschicken.” St. Charles Demokrat, 27 October
1870. On African American campaigning in Missouri, see Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 301-04.
31
“Das politisch noch kindische Neger-Element.” St. Charles Demokrat, 12 January 1871,
234
In reality, the freed people grasped the political situation better than German
Liberals. Democrats were intent on manipulating German Americans, not African
Americans. Before the September convention, Democrats had encouraged the Liberals
by announcing they would not contest the governorship if Gratz Brown was nominated.
The Democratic “possum policy” was intended to reassure Liberal Republicans that their
former opponents were prepared to accept “universal suffrage” if “universal amnesty”
came with it.32 James S. Rollins, a prominent Missouri Democrat who corresponded with
Schurz and Frank Blair, Jr., actually visited the Liberals’ convention in Jefferson City.33
Rollins’ son wrote from St. Louis to agree with his father that the Liberals’ resolutions
were “sound and fit.”34 On reading the platform, Carl Dänzer at the Democratic St. Louis
Anzeiger des Westens observed it would “find little contradiction from the ranks of the
Democratic Party.”35 Of course Democrats hoped to regain power for themselves. One
of Rollins’ Democratic friends was pleased that the Republican split would allow “the
best men of all parties to unite on the basis of Jefferson democracy.”36 Dänzer wrote that
the Liberals were in reality “the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.” He believed that
victories in congressional, legislative, and country races in 1870 would position the
Democrats to win elections in the following years “under their own flag.” The Anzeiger
did not hide the fact that once in government, Democrats would ignore Liberals’
32
Westliche Post, 16 August 1870; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 305. On other newspapers, see
Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 251; Curry, “Introduction” in Radicalism, Racism,
and Party Realignment, xix.
33
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 297
34
James H. Rollins to James S. Rollins, 5 September 1870, folder 106, Rollins Papers, WHMC—
Columbia.
35
“… in den Reihen der demokratischen Partei wenig Widerspruch finden wird.” Anzeiger des Westens, 8
September 1870. For discussion of the Democratic position, see Mississippi Blätter, 4 September 1870;
Westliche Post, 11 November 1870.
36
Thomas J. Gannt to Rollins, St Louis, 8 November 1870, Rollins Papers, WHMC—Columbia.
235
professed concern in African Americans’ rights. Dänzer did not like the Liberals’ plan to
eliminate racial qualifications for office holding, but he told readers that the change
would not make much difference.37 He consistently informed them that they could be
comfortable voting for Gratz Brown because the Liberal Republicans were merely a
“transitional party.”38
German Liberals were much too caught up in the sense that they were once again
making world history to pay much attention to the Democrats. The two months
preceding the Missouri election of 1870 coincided with the most dramatic news from
Europe. German Americans’ excitement over the future of Germany colored the
campaign. The Liberal Republican Party passed a resolution in support of the German
forces. It recognized that the United States must remain neutral in the conflict between
France and Prussia. Yet the Liberals added, “We cannot forget, however, that the
German nation [Nation] bestowed the full measure of its sympathy and support on us
during our civil war, and we do not hesitate one moment to show our sympathy for the
efforts of the Germans to preserve and defend their national unity.”39 German
immigrants once more explicitly linked nation-making in North America and Europe,
assuming that United States and the German Empire were moving forward together. In
September and October 1870, German Americans actually believed that they might profit
from emulating their counterparts in Europe. The Westliche Post urged German
Missourians to act “over here like over there.” The editors maintained that the Liberal
37
“Der liberale Flugel der demokratischen Partei”; “unter ihrer eigenen Flagge.” Anzeiger des Westens, 8
Spetember 1870.
38
“Uebergangspartei.” Anzeiger des Westens, 4 November 1870.
39
“Können wir aber nicht vergessen, daß uns in unserem Bürgerkriege die Sympathieen u. die
Unterstützung der deutschen Nation in vollem Maße zu Theil wurden und zögern wir keinen Augenblick,
den Bestrebungen der Deutschen, ihre nationale Einheit zu bewahren un zu vertheidigen, unsere unbedingte
Sympathie zu zollen.” Anzeiger des Westens, 8 September 1870.
236
Republicans represented the principles that German Americans had fought for in two
continents. Germans in Europe, they were sure, would complete their task of creating
and defending an independent state “with German thoroughness.” They argued that
Germans in America must do the same: “We, … who have for years been resting on the
laurels of the great Union victory, in which we took a glorious part, can we say the same
of ourselves?”40 Before the implications of the war in Europe or the political turmoil in
Missouri were clear, German Americans took it for granted that both struggles embodied
the same impulse toward national building and extending citizenship rights as the
Revolutions of 1848 and the Civil War.
Native-born Liberal Republicans also capitalized on German-American pride.
German Americans had distained Frank Blair’s conservative position during the Civil
War and his racist vice-presidential campaign in 1868. Now Blair won them back by
praising Germans’ “instinctive love of freedom.” He asserted, “The current struggle
against the oppressive tyranny and injustice of Missouri Radicals is owed to the courage
and the fidelity to principle of the same element in the party.” The Westliche Post even
saw fit to quote Schurz’s old foe.41 Gratz Brown had always played to the German vote.
His enthusiastic support of Prussia allowed the Liberals explore the connections between
Europe and the United States. According to the Westliche Post, Gratz Brown—“friend of
the Germans”—carried all their hopes for the future: “Just as Gratz Brown was the first
prominent America statesman who expressed his fullest sympathies unashamedly and
40
“Hüben wie drüben”; “mit deutscher Gründlichkeit”; “Wir aber, die wir schon seit jahren auf den
Lorbeeren der großen Unionsiege, an denen wir unsern Ruhmreichen Antheil annehmen, ruhen, können wir
von uns dasselbe sagen?” Mississippi Blätter, 30 October 1870.
41
“Ihre instinctive Liebe zur Freiheit”; “… daß der jetzige Kampf gegen die drückende Tyrannei und
Unrechtigkeit des Missourier Radilismus [sic] nur dem Muthe und der Principientreue desselben Elements
in der Partei verdankt wurde.” Westliche Post, 24 October 1870.
237
emphatically with our brothers beyond the ocean, who are fighting for the old Fatherland,
he was also the first to take an equally resolute and consistent position before the people
on all the great questions of the present.”42
Throughout Missouri, German immigrants backed Gratz Brown and echoed the
arguments of the St. Louis and St. Charles leaders. One of Carl Schurz’s campaign stops
inspired German immigrants in Lafayette County to form a local Liberal organization.
Germans were “natural” Liberals, the immigrants in the county east of Kansas City wrote
to the Westliche Post. They had been the first “who hurried to the flag at the outbreak of
the rebellion,” and now that African Americans could vote, they were the first to “who
extend the hand of reconciliation.” German Liberals expected that their county’s
disfranchised Confederates, who had a particularly violent reputation, would be suitably
grateful.43 Further east along the Missouri River in Chariton County, German Americans
also provided Liberal leadership. Louis Benecke, a twenty-seven year old who had only
naturalized after he was mustered out of Union service in 1865, ran for election to the
state senate. Proud of walking out of the Jefferson Convention with Schurz, he
considered it “unnecessary to recount” the Liberal platform in his campaign flyer.44
42
“Freund der Deutschen”; “Wie Gratz Brown der erste prominent amerikanische Staatsmann war, der
unseren, jenseits des Oceans für’s alte deutsche Vaterland kampfenden Brüder seine vollsten Sympathien
unverhohlen und nachdrücklich aussprach, so ist er auch der Erste gewesen, … der in allen großen Fragen
der Gegenwart eine ebenso entschiedene, wie consequente Stellung vor dem Volke eingenommen hat.”
Westliche Post, 8 November 1870.
43
“… die beim Ausbruch der Rebellion zur Fahne eilten”; “… welche die Hand zur Versöhnung reichen.”
Westliche Post, 2 November 1870. For Schurz’s campaign itinerary, see Mississippi Blätter, 23 October
1870. On local violence, see Hughs, “Lafayette County in the Aftermath of Slavery.”
44
Louis Benecke, “To the Voters,” 19 October 1870, folder 1484, Louis Benecke Papers, WHMCColumbia. For a biography of Benecke, see the online collection inventory. University of Missouri and
State Historical Society of Missouri, “Benecke Family Papers Inventory,” Western Historical Manuscript
Collection—Columbia, http://whmc.umsystem.edu/invent/3825.html (accessed 4 April 2008).
238
Benecke corresponded with several Liberal Republicans around the state.45 One of his
German-speaking friends organized the “Brown Party” in another Chariton County
township. Although the friend considered his own township a Liberal “stronghold,” he
knew some farmers worried about splitting the Republican Party. Someone had to “prod
them a little.”46
In the end, Missouri’s German voters supported Gratz Brown “in a solid phalanx”
in the November 8, 1870 election.47 State-wide, the Liberal Republican beat his rival in
the governor’s race by nearly 40,000 votes, despite the influence of about 20,000 African
Americans.48 The repeal of the test oath passed even more convincingly.49 Gratz Brown
won every precinct in St. Charles and St. Louis, and he dominated the German counties
along the Missouri River.50 St. Louis also returned German Liberal Republican Gustavus
Finkelnburg to the U.S. House of Representatives, and Louis Benecke was elected to the
state senate.51 Yet much of Gratz Brown’s support came from voters who identified
primarily with the Democrats. Liberals secured only 21 of the 138 seats in Missouri’s
45
Schurz knew Benecke well enough to offer his respects to Benecke’s wife. Schurz to L Benecke Esq.,
Washington, D.C., 29 February 1869, folder 713, Benecke Papers, WHMC—Columbia. See also further
correspondence in folders 1483, 1484, 1485, 1491, and 1492.
46
“… sie ein Wenig anspornt.” Theodore Boehme to Louis Benecke, Dalton, Missouri, 28 September
1870, folder 722, Benecke Papers, WHMC—Columbia.
47
Quotation in a letter forwarded to Gratz Brown: James B. Colegan to C.J. Cornoin, Lincoln, Missouri,
28 August 1871, box 1, folder 9, Records of Governor Benjamin Gratz Brown, Office of Governor, MSA.
48
Brown won 104,374 votes to his opponent McClurg’s 63,336. Barclay, The Liberal Republican
Movement in Missouri, 269. On African American voters, see Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement
in Missouri, 261-62; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 307-08.
49
Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 269.
50
See table 3 in the appendix. Westliche Post, 12 November 1870; Office of the Secretary of State,
Elections Division, Election Returns, 1846-1992, box 12, folder 22, 29, 36, MSA. On the central counties,
see also Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 269. Gasconade County, for example,
gave Brown 73.4 percent of its 1,062 votes.
51
Westliche Post, 11 November 1870. G.W. Wood to Louis Benecke, Weston, Missouri, 16 November
1870, folder 1484; Robert Benecke to Louis Benecke, St. Louis, 15 November 1870, folder 724, Benecke
Papers, WHMC—Columbia.
239
lower house, while Democrats won 77.52 Because the Liberals did not even hold the
balance of power in the legislature, the Anzeiger des Westens was justified in interpreting
the Missouri election of 1870 as an unequivocal “Democratic Party victory.”53 Gratz
Brown acknowledged this fact. He told a crowd, “In this election I recognize that my
obligations are in the largest measure due to the Democratic party.”54 The new governor
paid this political debt by supporting the election of the Democratic leader Blair to the
U.S. Senate.55 The Anzeiger’s assessment had proved correct.
The Democrats took advantage of Schurz and other German politicians. Frank
Blair explained the situation in a letter to Rollins. If the Liberals in the state legislature
had cooperated with the regular Republicans, they could have prevented his Senate
appointment. But his strategy had counted on the Germans. “If we treat them with
consideration,” he wrote, “they will unite with me cordially, as they agree with me on the
currency[,] taxation & tariff questions—which questions are likely to assure the greatest
prominence in the next contest.” He believed that “backed by the Germans of Missouri
we [the Democrats] can carry the other German vote in the next presidential election.”
He intended “to play for this vote and enter the next contest for the Presidency certain
and decisive.” Because Blair considered Schurz “as much the leader of the Germans in
America, as Bismarck is in Europe,” he especially cultivated his relationship with
52
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 310.
“Sieg der demokratischen Partei.” Anzeiger des Westens, 9 November 1870. In the long-term the
Anzeiger’s assessment proved accurate. Curry, “Introduction” in Radicalism, Racism, and Party
Realignment, xix; Kleppner, The Third Electoral System, 119-20.
54
Missouri Democrat, 15 November 1870 quoted in Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, 20.
55
Drake resigned from the Senate when Grant appointed him a judge on the Court of Claims. Parrish,
Missouri under Radical Rule, 314.
53
240
Missouri’s other senator.56 After Blair joined Schurz in Washington, he reported to
Rollins, “Schurz & I are on excellent terms. He is very friendly and talkative.”57 Blair
asked Rollins to help him convince Schurz “that the state is irretrievably lost to the
Republicans but that he will be supported & maintained by the Democracy.”58 Rollins
cooperated, writing to Schurz to compliment him on a speech that he found “a splendid
effort.” Rollins added that “hyde-bound [sic] partisans” would “never forgive you for
this speech.”59 The Democrats wanted to distance Schurz from the Republican Party and
harness the power of his opposition to Grant and Drake for themselves.
Men such as Rollins and Blair persuaded Schurz that he could control the Liberal
Republican movement and it could be a powerful political force. Privately, Schurz
confided to Preetorius that he was concerned about Gratz Brown’s cooperation with the
Democratic majority in the state legislature.60 Yet in late 1870, he seemed eager to
overlook the possible consequences of Democratic rule. Remarkably susceptible to
Democrats’ flattery, Schurz believed he could control them, not vice versa. He wrote to
Benecke that he and Blair had met and agreed Missouri Democrats would not call a
convention to overturn the constitution of 1865.61 The tone of the letter suggested that
Schurz felt they had come to a joint decision. In reality, Schurz could have done little to
56
Frank Blair, Jr. to James S. Rollins, St. Louis, 18 December 1870, folder 106, Rollins Papers, WHMC—
Columbia.
57
Frank Blair, Jr., to James S. Rollins, Washington D.C., 16 February 1871, folder 107, Rollins Papers,
WHMC—Columbia. See also Frank Blair to James S. Rollins, St. Louis, 28 December 1870, folder 106,
Rollins Papers, WHMC—Columbia.
58
Frank Blair to James S. Rollins, Washington, D.C., 16 February 1871, folder 107, Rollins Papers,
WHMC—Columbia. Blair had referred obliquely to similar efforts in earlier letters. See Frank Blair, Jr.,
to James S. Rollins, St. Louis, 28 December 1870, folder 106, Rollins Papers, WHMC—Columbia.
59
James S. Rollins to Schurz, Columbia, 25 December 1870, reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC.
60
“Es ist sehr fatal, daß wir kein Majorität in der Legislatur haben.” Schurz to Emil Preetorius, New York,
16 November 1870, reel 89, Schurz Papers, LC.
61
Schurz to Louis Benecke, Washington, D.C., 2 February 1871, folder 1492, Benecke Papers, WHMC—
Columbia.
241
stop a convention. Blair probably only held back because he sought Schurz’s cooperation
in the 1872 presidential election. William Grosvernor, the editor of St. Louis’s major
English-language Liberal newspaper captured Schurz’s assumptions. In a private letter to
Schurz, Grosvernor wrote that Blair went to Washington, “with an idea of cooperating as
far as he possibly could with liberal Republicans like yourself, and I believe, if you
encourage instead of fighting him you can do much to keep him straight, or straighter.”62
Gratz Brown also sought to reassure Schurz that the Liberal Republicans would
not simply do the Democrats’ bidding. He wrote, “In the great victory in Missouri you
were the true hero and … for our success we were more indebted to your prudence,
sagacity, and indomitable canvass than to all other causes combined.” The governorelect told Schurz, “I have no intention of abandoning any of the principles of my
lifetime.”63 Schurz took his overblown praise at face value, describing the letter to
Preetorius as “very nice.”64 He apparently accepted that the governor had the power to
implement his “principles.” Schurz and Preetorius reassured the Westliche Post’s
readers. The paper reviewed Gratz Brown’s early support of African American voting
and office-holding and quoted him thanking a Democratic audience for casting ballots
“for the equal rights of all people.”65 According to Schurz’s paper, “When the Missouri
Democrats voted for the same principles and men that they had previously most ardently
62
William Grosvenor to Schurz, St. Louis, 16 February 1870, reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC.
Benjamin Gratz Brown to Schurz, St. Louis, 26 November 1870, reel 4, Schurz Papers, LC. For further
evidence that Gratz Brown acknowledged his German support, see correspondence in box 1, folders 9, 13,
21, 27, and 28, Records of Benjamin Gratz Brown, Office of Governor, MSA.
64
“Sehr schön.” Schurz to Emil Preetorius, Washington, D.C., 4 December 1870, reel 89, Schurz Papers,
LC.
65
“… für die gleichen Rechte aller Menschen.” Westliche Post, 2 December 1870.
63
242
fought against, then they certainly went to the Republicans and not these to them.”66 The
Westliche Post refuted President Grant’s accusation that the Missouri Liberal
Republicans resembled anti-Republican movements that were returning Virginia and
Tennessee to Democratic rule.67 By the end of 1870, Schurz should have known better.
*****
Encouraged by Blair, Rollins, Grosvenor, and Gratz Brown, Schurz prepared to
replicate his mistake on a national scale. On December 15, 1870, he rose in the Senate to
present a carefully prepared blueprint for a drive against Grant. Describing his
performance to Preetorius as “gentle in form but sharp in content,” Schurz consciously
adopted a “distinctly Republican tone.”68 He focused on reform and reconciliation and
appealed to national unity and equal citizenship. A “conciliatory policy,” had been
necessary in Missouri, he maintained, so that the “southern people” would “identify their
interests, aspirations, and hopes with the new order of things.”69 Any system “which
imposes all the duties and burdens of citizenship without coupling with them the
corresponding rights” would inflame dissent and contravene his deepest principles.70
Now that “political citizenship had been conferred upon the race lately in slavery,”
Schurz maintained, Republicans should lift the temporary voting proscriptions on former
66
“Wenn die Missourier Demokraten in der letzten Wahl fur dieselben Grundsätze und Männer stimmten,
welche sie vorher immer aufs leidenschaftlichste bekämpft hatten, so gingen sicherlich sie zu den
Repulikanern und nicht diese zu ihnen.” Westliche Post, 2 December 1870. See also Westliche Post, 27
September 1870, 11, 26 November 1870.
67
Westliche Post, 22 September 1870.
68
“Distinkt republikanischen Ton.” Schurz to Emil Preetorius, 19 December 1870, reel 89, Schurz Papers,
LC. “In der Form sehr ruhig … aber im Inhalt scharf.” Schurz to Emil Preetorius, Washington, D.C., 12
December 1870, reel 89, Schurz Papers, LC.
69
Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 3rd sess., 118 (15 December 1870).
70
Ibid., 119.
243
Confederates.71 He outlined the ideas that underpinned the compromises he would make
during the next year. Overturning the test oath, he said, was a step toward “purifying”
Missouri politics. Administering the oath had allowed partisan registrars to “exercise a
judicial power over the right of citizens to vote,” and the whole system had become “the
very incarnation of arbitrary party despotism.”72 Although Schurz did not directly blame
African Americans, they were certainly implicated in such corruption. Schurz recounted
the role of black delegates in the Missouri Republican convention. He explained that
Drake’s faction had used “colored agitators” to manipulate black voters with “all the
artifices of demagogism [sic].”73 The imperatives of reconciliation and reform now
placed the burden on African Americans to prove their fitness for self-rule to white
Republicans who were increasingly skeptical.
Schurz’s speech appealed to what would be three of the movement’s main
national constituencies: border-state Democrats, northern reformers within the
Republican Party, and German Americans. In Missouri, Ohio, and other border states,
many Democrats assured Schurz that most white southerners would accept equality
before the law for African Americans. A group of Confederate veterans in Nashville
pledged, “We honor and revere the national flag as the herald of that day when all the
races of men, of all ranks and conditions, will be redeemed and delivered from all species
of political and mental thralldom.”74 Notable reformers who were attracted to civil
service reform and free trade also joined Schurz as he opposed Grant, first within the
71
Ibid., 118.
Blair helped provide material for Schurz’s speech. Schurz to James S. Rollins, St. Louis, 8 November
1870 and Washington, D.C., 5 December 1870, folder 106, Rollins Papers, WHMC—Columbia.
73
Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 3rd sess., 122, 121, 120 (15 December 1870).
74
F.T. Reid et al. [Confederate veterans] to Schurz, Nashville, 21 September1871; John Ruhm to Schurz,
Nashville, 21 September 1871, reel 6, Schurz Papers, LC.
72
244
Republican Party and then outside it. The senator corresponded with men such as E.L.
Godkin of The Nation, Charles Nordhoff of the New York Evening Post, Horace White of
the Chicago Tribune, Murat Halstead of the Cincinnati Commercial, and Cincinnati
Republican Jacob D. Cox.
Schurz also always intended to attract German immigrants from the Republican
and Democratic camps. During 1871, he received a gratifying response. About a quarter
of the letters from around the country that reached his office during 1871 and 1872 were
penned in the careful Old German script of immigrants writing to their “German
Senator.”75 Some Republican correspondents worried that Schurz was playing into the
hands of the Democrats, but far more wrote to encourage him to challenge Grant.76 The
proprietor of the Detroit Abend-Post und Familien-Blätter assured Schurz that his paper
had mirrored Schurz’s course since Schurz had arrived on the American political scene.
He requested a translation of a recent speech “in the interests of the whole Deutschtum of
the state of Michigan.”77 One Iowa German, who chose to write in English, described
Schurz’s confrontation with Drake and the Grant administration as a “noble undertaking,
and every republican, who is not blinded by party prejudices must at once see that yours
is the right and true position.” He added, “Being a German, I feel proud and grateful that
you have done so, and think that with but few exceptions, the German element of the
republican party take the same view.”78
75
Of the 485 letters collected in Schurz’s “General Correspondence” between June 8, 1871 and May 6,
1872, 128 (26.4 percent) were written in German. Reels 6 and 7, Schurz Papers, LC.
76
For examples of these letters, see reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC.
77
“Im Interesse des gesammten Deutschthums des Staates Michigan .…” August Marxhausen to Schurz,
Detroit, 3 April 1871, reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC.
78
Leavitt J. Lusch to Schurz, Waterloo, Iowa, 10 April 1870, reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC.
245
Many German Republicans in Ohio identified with the Liberal Republican
movement. Friedrich Hassaurek at the Republican Cincinnati Volksblatt had denounced
local Republicans for corruption in October 1870, but he found it impossible to join local
Democrats. German-speaking Democrats leveled relentless personal attacks against
Hassaurek, and Cincinnati’s English-speaking Democrats supported France in its war
with Prussia. Emil Rothe’s Democratic Volksfreund called Hassaurek a hypocrite,
remarking that he had helped elect the Republican administration he now criticized.79
Unperturbed, Hassaurek helped form the Central Republican Association of Hamilton
County in March 1871.80 Like Missouri’s Liberal Republican Party, the association
devoted itself to removing political disabilities “imposed for participation in the
rebellion,” abolishing protective duties, and reforming the system of political patronage.81
A resurgence in temperance campaigning helped persuade German immigrants to
contemplate leaving the Republican Party.82 The Wächter am Erie in strongly
Republican Cleveland was reluctant to divide the party in September 1871. By March
1872, however, the Wächter would observe that German Republicans were
“unanimously” against Grant and the regular party organization. It backed the Liberals.83
In the Ohio cities of Columbus and Dayton, about 35 percent of Liberal Republican
79
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 10 October 1870.
Insert in Cincinnati Volksblatt, 19 September 1872; Hassaurek to Schurz, Cincinnati, 26 March, 1871;
H.W. Thompson to Schurz, Cincinnati, 27 March 1871, 15 May 1871; Jacob D. Cox to Schurz, Cincinnati,
27 December 1870; Schurz to Jacob D. Cox, Washington, D.C., 4 April 1871, reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC.
On the Cincinnati organization, see also Horace White to Schurz, Chicago, 25 December 1870, reel 5,
Schurz Papers, LC; Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, 22-23; Westliche Post, 1 November 1870.
81
See enclosure in Friedrich Hassaurek to Schurz, Cincinnati, 26 March, 1871, reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC.
82
A.W. Moulton to William H. Smith, 26 July 1871; Warren M. Bateman to William H. Smith, Glendale,
Ohio, 29 July 1871, box 3, folder 1, William H. Smith Papers, OHS; Rutherford B. Hayes to W.K. Rogers,
Cincinnati, 19 April 1872; Rutherford B. Hayes to S. Birchard, Cincinnati, 23 April 1872, reel 172, Hayes
Papers, HPC; William Grosvenor to Schurz, St. Louis, 11 May 1871, reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC; Kleppner,
The Cross of Culture, 111.
83
“Einstimmig.” Wächter am Erie, 15 March 1872. Compare to the earlier reluctance to consider a third
party, Wächter am Erie, 28 September 1871.
80
246
leaders were German-born.84 “There is tumult everywhere among the German
Republicans,” the Democratic Columbus Westbote noted approvingly in February 1872,
“and the pleasant time when they all followed the party banner through thick and thin is,
thank God, over.”85
The meaning of Liberal Republicanism emerged as German Republicans built a
coalition with New Departure Democrats and Republican reformers in 1871 and 1872.
To some extent, the movement signified different things to its different constituencies.
Each group had its own particular political goals. Each hoped to control it. Liberal
Republicans, however, took a distinctive approach to overcoming their divisions.
German Americans illustrate Liberal compromises particularly well, partly because they
were so eager to unite the German-speaking community and partly because Schurz
personally dedicated himself to forming a nationally viable political movement. After
their Missouri victory in 1870, German Liberals linked reform to white rule. They
believed northerners and southerners could unite behind the idea of clean government
dominated by the “better sort” of citizen. Even before Liberals’ decisive split with
Republicans in May of 1872, their campaigning reflected a growing doubt that extending
full citizenship to all American men was enough to perfect the United States.
One of the central strands of Liberal Republicanism was the conviction that
America’s system of partisan civil service appointments allowed selfishly-motivated
individuals to manipulate unintelligent voters for their own gain. German Americans
counted Drake among the United States’ corrupt politicians. He had only confirmed their
84
McGerr, “The Meaning of Liberal Republicanism: The Case of Ohio,” 308-11.
“Es ist rumort überall unter den deutschen Republikanern, und die schöne Zeit, wo sie der
republikanischen Parteifahne durch Dick und Dünn folgten, ist gottlob vorüben.” Columbus Westbote, 14
February 1872.
85
247
fears when he cut Missouri Liberals off from federal and state patronage following the
September 1870 split.86 President Grant displayed similar weaknesses. He had a
penchant for appointing friends and family members to posts they abused.87 German
immigrants acknowledged that Democrats were often equally unscrupulous. In 1871,
they felt proud of their role in bringing down corrupt the Tammany Hall Ring of
Democratic boss William M. Tweed in New York City.88 German Americans understood
their distaste for corruption to be an ethnic not a partisan concern. “Smart” Yankees
seemed to prey upon honest Germans. In a letter to the Democratic Columbus Westbote,
an Ohio immigrant referred to Tweed’s downfall, maintaining “we see how Germans
from both parties have rebelled against the great swindling of city officials, and the fact
that this reform has been achieved owes much to their activity—such an invigorating
influence.” He believed the same dynamic was at work in Missouri: “It sometimes seems
to me that the time is no longer distant when America’s Germans will contribute to
ending the great corruption which is notorious everywhere.”89
As the Liberal Republican movement gained strength between 1870 and 1872, the
Franco-Prussian War prompted German Americans to reflect on the origins of their
opposition to corruption. The Germans’ “respect for the Prussian Civil Service was
86
Westliche Post, 27 September 1870; Mississippi Blätter, 9 October 1870; Parrish, Missouri under
Radical Rule, 308-09.
87
On Grant’s use of patronage, see Summers, The Era of Good Stealings, 89-106.
88
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 5 September 1871, 17 November 1871; Columbus Westbote, 4 January 1871.
On the downfall of the Tweed Ring from July to November 1871 with mention of German involvement,
see Alexander B. Callow, Jr., The Tweed Ring (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 253-78. See
also a handwritten account of Franz Sigel and Oswald Ottendorfer’s involvement in fighting the Tweed
Ring in 1871 dated 20 October 1872. container 5, Franz Sigel Papers, WRHS.
89
“… sehen wir, wie vereinigt die Deutschen beider Parteien sich gegen die großen Schwindeleien der
Stadtbeamten auflehnten, und ihrer Thätigkeit, so wiederen Einfluß ist viel zu verdanken, daß diese Reform
zu Stand gebracht wurde”; “Es will mir manchmal scheinen, daß die Zeit nicht mehr ferne ist, wo die
Deutschen Amerika’s viel dazu beitragen werden, der großen Corruption, welche sich überall kund that, ein
Ende machen.” Columbus Westbote, 4 January 1872.
248
axiomatic,” Schurz’s most thorough biographer has written.90 This is an exaggeration,
but immigrants’ German background indeed informed the position they took in the
United States. During the Napoleonic Era, Prussia had developed a strongly independent
civil service, earning a reputation for being a “bureaucratic monarchy.”91 In the decades
before 1848, the assumptions underpinning the Beamtenstaat (administrative state)
spread more widely through German-speaking Europe. Defending his native Prussia,
Georg Hegel had argued that bureaucrats mediated between the people and the
government, uncorrupted by the market. Neutral, rational, and well trained, they ideally
ensured political stability while remaining responsive to society’s needs.92 Hegel’s
justification of a non-partisan civil service aligned with his belief that individual freedom
could be realized within the structures of an authoritarian state.93 The revolutionaries of
1848 rejected this assumption and were often highly critical of the Beamtenstaat, but they
remained attracted to the idea of a civil service unsullied by partisan politics. As one
historian put it, “Torn between the Scylla of patronage and the Charybdis of bureaucracy,
the German is clearly predisposed toward the latter and the Forty-eighter was no
exception.” 94 References to “American corruption” struck a nerve with German
immigrants of all backgrounds.95
German Americans’ hope that the Prussian state might be vehicle for German
progress made them more favorably disposed to its institutions at just the time that
90
Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 183.
Sheehan, German History, 299.
92
The arguments were made in Hegel’s 1821 Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Sheehan, German
History, 425-33.
93
Kreiger, The German Idea of Freedom, 125-38.
94
Carl J. Friedrich, “The European Background,” in The Forty-Eighters, ed. Zucker, 23. For a useful
discussion of this dynamic, see Freitag, Friedrich Hecker, 80, 207, 315-17.
95
Foner, Reconstruction, 488-94.
91
249
Liberal Republicanism was developing. In the course of their war reporting, Germanlanguage newspapers praised the efficiency of the Prussian military, the most striking
example of Prussian administration at work. German-American leaders were pleased
when foreign reporters commended the Prussian civil service for its “admirable” system
of oversight. According to one article, Prussia ensured “that bribery is reduced to a
minimum and outright fraud borders on the impossible.”96 Some German immigrants
went on to make more explicit transatlantic comparisons. The editors of the Republican
St. Charles Demokrat thought it remarkable that attempts to improve the American civil
service were met with the response that such “defects are inseparable from our republican
form of government.” Americans’ acceptance of corruption meant “this Volk is loosing
respect in the eyes of all other civilized nations.”97 The Democratic Cincinnati
Volksfreund agreed with the New York World that the current state of affairs was an
“embarrassing” consequence of Republican Party rule. The Volksfreund quoted the New
York paper, printing, “In other countries dishonest officials are more summarily
prosecuted than here.” Every corrupt official in Prussia, the article claimed, was in jail.98
Leading German Liberal Republicans thought American political corruption could
be overcome by adopting some features of the professionalized Prussian system. Their
approach differed from that of Anglo-American reformers, who initially understood
corruption within the framework of classical republicanism. Anglo-Americans were
96
“Bewunderungswürdig”; “… daß Bestechung auf ein Minimum reduciert wird, und absolute Betrug an
Unmöglichkeit grenzt.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 23 December 1871.
97
“… die Uebelstände wären unzertrennlich von unserer republikanischen Regierungsform”; “… dieses
Volk in den Augen aller civilisirten Nationen an Achtung verliert.” St. Charles Demokrat, 21 September
1871.
98
“Peinlich”; “In andern Ländern die unehrlichen Beamten mehr summarisch bestraft warden, als hier.”
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 9 November 1871. For a later interpretation with similar emphasis, see “The Civil
Service: Speech of Charles Reemelin: At Defiance, August 22, 1876,” newspaper clipping from the
Cincinnati Commercial, Reemelin Papers, CHS.
250
accustomed to exhorting politicians and voters to show public virtue.99 Schurz, in
contrast, had already tried to pass legislation in 1869 creating a civil service commission.
The examination system he proposed would have resembled Prussia’s, making
government appointments dependent on merit, not party loyalty.100 The senator used a
subsequent attempt in January 1871 to call attention to the “demoralization which the
now prevailing mode of distributing office has introduced into the body politic.”101 He
posited that American senators were so used to the spoils system that they could not
objectively assess its corrosive effects. Although Schurz did not directly tell American
lawmakers that they should emulate the German Empire, he suggested that they needed a
comparative perspective. Schurz encouraged members of his audience to imagine that
they had left the United States as children. From abroad, they had learned the principles
of American government and studied “the theories and observed the practice of other
Governments in different parts of the world.” “Imagine then,” Schurz said, “you had
come back about the 4th of March of the year after a presidential election which had
resulted in a change of party.”102 He depicted the frantic scramble for offices that
99
I suspect Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, xxii-xxv, 120-25, exaggerates the importance of classical
republicanism by the 1870s, but it certainly influenced the Anglo-American language of corruption. See
also Ari Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement, 1865-1883
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 7; Summers, The Era of Good Stealings, 9; Summers, The
Plundering Generation; Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: John Wiley & Sons,
1978), 166-70.
The German Liberal Republicans bore some resemblance to the “liberal reform public
intellectuals” of the Gilded Age, who Nancy Cohen describes as accepting administrative reforms after
1865. There is no evidence, however, that German-born Liberal Republicans in 1872 conformed to her
characterization of reformers who traded liberalism and democracy for government-supported corporate
capitalism. Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 17.
100
Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., 61 (20 December 1869); Hoogenboom, Outlawing the
Spoils, 71-72; Trefousee, Carl Schurz, 184-85; Woechentlich Westliche Post, 29 December 1869.
101
Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 3rd sess., App. 68 (27 January 1871). Schurz’s Westliche Post
avoided transatlantic parallels in its discussion of corruption. See for example Westliche Post, 1 November
1870.
102
Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 3rd sess., App. 69 (27 January 1871).
251
accompanied any inauguration. It was more sinister than politicians rewarding their
friends, he agued. Recommendations were traded and sold, and once in office,
bureaucrats embezzled and bribed. According to Schurz, if the American system
permitted such abuses, it must change.
Even in 1871 and 1872, however, some German immigrants did not see the
heavy-handed Prussian civil service as entirely positive. The Liberal Republican
candidate for lieutenant governor of Illinois, Gustav Körner, observed that the American
civil service must be reformed while still “avoid[ing] the cliffs of a European
bureaucracy.”103 Another Illinois Forty-Eighter, Friedrich Hecker, expressed similar
sentiment in a speech on “Civil Servants in the Princely State and in the Volksstaat.” He
raged that “in no civilized or half-civilized country in the world, not even in Turkey, is
[as] exorbitant [a] power in regard to the appointment and dismissal of officers placed in
the hands of an individual as here.” Still, he emphasized that a republic should not
emulate a monarchy, especially Prussia.104 Even in their dissent, these immigrants
showed that the Franco-Prussian War had raised the profile of administrative reform in
time to make it central to the meaning of the Liberal Republican movement.
German Liberals were genuinely concerned about corruption, but the logic of the
reform they proposed included an attack on the influence of supposedly unsophisticated
voters. A more tightly controlled civil service would take appointment power out of the
hands of poor voters and the politicians who represented them. Liberal Republicanism’s
reform ethos thus recast the discussion of the racial component of good citizenship
103
“… die Klippen einer europäischen Buraukratie vermeidet.” Cincinnati Volksblatt, 31 August 1870.
“Die Beamten im Fürststaate und im Volksstaate”; “In keinem civilisirten oder halbcivilisirten Lande
der Welt, selbst nicht in der Turkei, ist eine masslose Gewalt, in Beziehung auf Ernennung und Absetzung
der Beamten in die Hände eines Einzelnen gelegt als hier.” Westliche Post, 7 February 1872.
104
252
among German immigrants who had been Radical Republicans. This shift drew strength
from Europe. German Americans were reading a steady stream of articles about the
German Volk, “march[ing] at the head of true civilization” in Europe.105 Voices in the
German-language public sphere were already contemplating the idea that fitness for
citizenship stemmed as much from a Volk’s racial background as from free political
institutions. The conflict in Europe had prompted a negative assessment of the French
Volk despite the Third Republic’s interest in representative government. As the Liberal
Republican movement emerged, German Americans were grounding their optimism for
the German Empire in the instincts and administrative institutions of the German Volk.
German Liberals believed that former Confederates were among “the best citizens
of the South” and these people had to be brought back into the political community for
the United States to achieve national greatness. The St. Charles Demokrat, for example,
argued in December 1871 that the Republican policies of the previous few years had
stripped the power of leaders who “had enjoyed the respect and trust of the southern
people during the rebellion.” Furthermore, during Reconstruction, “The administration
of the South provoked dissatisfaction among the more influential classes.” In some ways,
the Demokrat’s argument was quite pragmatic. It implied that to safeguard the gains of
Reconstruction, Republicans must win over former Confederates in the South. The
newspaper did not justify “the alleged acts of violence that are supposedly practiced
there.” Yet the editor hoped to counter “the apathy that grips the most educated class of
citizens in the South, through which the brute-like negroes and thieving carpet-baggers
won the upper hand and drove the southern states in quick step toward social and
105
“… an der Spitze der wahren Civilisation marchierten.” Westliche Post, 5 September 1870.
253
financial ruin.” In previous years, the St. Charles Demokrat had seen slavery as the root
of southern problems and equal citizenship as the primary method to overcome it. Its
analysis had now changed. Equal citizenship apparently had not been sufficient. The
Liberals believed that reconstructing the South depended on reviving the influence of
white southerners who were naturally suited to leadership.106
German Liberals subtly reconceived themselves as “best men” instead of
freedom-loving Germans. They certainly counted themselves among “the educated
[gebildete] class of the population.” The St. Charles Democrat argued that they must
counterbalance corrupt elements, the “professional politicians and the voting cattle under
their leadership.”107 In one 1872 issue, the Demokrat demonstrated how its new
depictions of German immigrants paralleled its changing approach to African Americans.
It ran two articles, “The Germans” and the “The Black Band,” in adjacent columns. The
first article explained that the world had much for which to thank notable Germans such
as Martin Luther, Bismarck, Prussian General Helmuth von Moltke, and Schurz.
Whereas the Demokrat had previously identified fighting for equal rights as part of the
German mission in America, it now declared, “The Germans have set themselves the task
in America of freeing America from corruption, social hypocrisy, and crazy temperance.”
The Demokrat also reported on a convention that African Americans had organized in
New Orleans to support Grant. It was a “disaster,” the piece explained, because the
106
“Die besten Bürger des Südens”; “während der Rebellion die Achtung und das vertrauen des südlichen
Volkes genossen hat”; “der Verwaltung des Südens die Unzufriedenheit unter der einflußreicheren Klasse
vervorgerufen wurden”; “angeblichen Gewaltthaten die dort verübt worden sein sollen”; “… der Apathie
welche unter der gebildeten Klasse der Bürger in den Südstaaten um sich gegriffen und wodurch der
verthierte Neger und diebische Carpetbägger die Oberhand gewann und die Südstaaten im Sturmschritte
dem gesellschaftlichen und finanziellen Ruin entgegenführte.” St. Charles Demokrat, 14 December 1871.
107
“Die gebildete Klasse der Bevölkerung”; “die beste Bürger”; “Fachpolitiker”; “unter ihrer Leitung
Stimmvieh.” St. Charles Demokrat, 28 September 1871.
254
delegates were too foolish to understand the shortcomings of “Massa Grant.” The
newspaper declared that the convention’s resolutions proved “that the colored population
and its ignorance has been use to win votes for corruption through pitiful flattery.”108
All along, newspapers such as the St. Charles Demokrat and leaders such as Carl
Schurz had maintained it would take time to incorporate the freed people into the national
community, but before a presidential election had even been conducted under the
Fifteenth Amendment, they seemed to loose patience. The old faith in the power of
republican institutions to create a nation from diverse peoples no longer dominated the
German-language public sphere. Schurz’s opposition to the United States’ annexation of
Santo Domingo (today the Dominican Republic) reflected his personal doubt. Schurz
opposed what he saw as Grant’s imperial ambitions, but in January 1871 he told the
Senate that the real question was, “Is the incorporation of that part of the globe and the
people inhabiting it quite compatible with the integrity, safety, perpetuity, and
progressive development of our institutions which we value so highly?” He denied that
he “lack[ed] faith in the efficiency of republican institutions,” but he added that “I trust
we have lived too long and seen too much to believe that the mere absence of a king is
sufficient to make a true republic, and that you have only to place the ballot in the hands
of the multitude to make them citizens fit to sustain the fabric of self government.”
Senators were surprised to learn that Schurz’s argument came down to climate. He
approved of annexing Canada because the North American climate allowed “our free
108
“Die Deutschen”; “Die schwarze Bande”; “Kladderadatsch”; “… daß man die farbige Bevölkerung und
ihre Unwissenheit benutzt hat, um durch erbärmlich Schmeichelei ihre Stimmen für Corruption … zu
gewinnen”; “Die Deutschen haben sich in Amerika die Aufgabe gestellt, Amerika von der politischen
Corruption, der socialen Heuchlerei und der wahnsinnigen Temperenzlerei zu befreien.” St. Charles
Demokrat, 2 May 1872.
255
institutions to exhibit a wonderful power in blending and assimilating the most
heterogeneous elements.” The senator maintained that the Tropics, in contrast, were
“congenial ground” to the “mixed Latin, Indian, and African races,” who “cannot even be
reached by our teachings.”109
Schurz’s Radical credentials allowed him to use the racialized notion of reform to
bridge the gap between border-state Democrats and Republican reformers. German
Democrats in Missouri and Ohio encouraged the Liberal Republicans. The editors of the
St. Louis Anzeiger des Westens, the Columbus Westbote, and the Cincinnati Volksfreund
remained wary that Democrats might be exploited by Liberals who “remain with one foot
in the party from which all the trouble now emanates,” but during 1871 they praised
Schurz’s actions.110 German Democrats were proud that the “German senator” was
confronting the “giant” of the Grant administration, and they agreed with him on tariffs,
temperance, and German unification.111 His racially charged reform agenda also suited
them. Late in 1871, the Cincinnati Volksfreund indicated the converging positions of the
Liberals and the New Departure Democrats. Editor Emil Rothe began by explaining that
Democrats could not “be blamed for their now abandoned opposition to the rash
extension of civil equality to a class of people still incapable of self-rule.” He intended to
put such issues behind him: “All these questions, in which the Democratic Party was in
conflict with the Zeitgeist, are now settled.” Corruption was the new problem plaguing
109
Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 3rd sess., App. 26, 27, 29 (11 January 1871). For background, see
Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 186-88, 191-95.
110
“… noch mit einem Fuße in der Partei stehen blieben, von der jetzt alles Unheil herkommt.” Cincinnati
Volksfreund, 21 November 1871. See also St. Charles Demokrat, 4 May 1871; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 24,
30 November 1871, 4, 11 December 1871, 2, 8 February 1872, 19, 27 March 1872, 2, 8 April 1872;
Columbus Westbote, 10 April 1872; Anzeiger des Westens, 3, 26, 28 March 1872, 11, 27 April 1872. For a
survey of newspaper positions, see Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 250-57; Wittke, The German-American
Press in America, 155-58.
111
“Der Riese.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 10 November 1870.
256
the nation. The Volksfreund directly linked political decay to Republican Reconstruction.
Democrats linked corruption to “centralization,” “party-tyranny, “carpetbaggery,” “saberrule,” and “military despotism,” terms they routinely used in reference to the
enfranchisement of African Americans in the South.112 Rothe clearly judged that
Democrats’ chances of ousting Grant were better served by an alliance with Liberals than
by continued association with the “Democrats who cling to the old and belong to a
bygone era.”113 German Democrats accepted the Fifteenth Amendment, but they still
resisted the ideal of racially inclusive citizenship that it represented.
Ultimately, the former Radicals’ concessions were more significant than
Democrats’. German Liberal Republicans chose to cooperate with elements hostile
toward African American citizenship, even as the implications of such a stance became
clear. Back in 1870, Krekel had acknowledged that some of the supporters of the Liberal
Republican movement in Missouri would strip the freed people of their rights if they
could. Former Republicans had believed that they could maintain control by holding the
balance of power. They had insisted that Democrats who voted for the third party ticket
demonstrated their acceptance of the Fifteenth Amendment. Following the election of
Gratz Brown, however, Schurz courted southern whites, becoming more dependent on
the votes of the Democrats who had proven capable of manipulating him. German
112
“Ihre jetzt aufgegebene Opposition gegen die vorschnelle bürgerliche Gleichstellung einer noch zur
Selbstregierung unfähigen Volksklasse kann ihr auch nicht zum Vorwurfe [sic] gerechnen”; “Aber alle
diese Fragen, in welchen die demokratische Partei in Conflict mit dem Zeitgeiste gewesen ist, sind jetzt
erledigt”; “Corruption”; “Centralisation”; “Parteityrannei”; Carpetbaggerei”; “Säbelherrschaft”;
“Militärdespotie.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 11 November 1871. See also Anzieger des Westens, 24 August
1872.
113
“Am Alten klebende und einer vergangenen Zeit angehörige Demokraten.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 21
November 1871.
257
Americans’ message of reform became ever more closely tied to Democrats’ desire for
white rule in the South.
As the public face of Liberal Republicanism, Schurz’s appeals to white
southerners exposed the compromises inherent in the movement. He demonstrated that
he was more interested in white rule than equal citizenship when he continued to speak of
“amnesty” after hardly any restrictions remained on former Confederates. In Missouri,
the Liberals’ support of amnesty had meant overturning the state’s unusually sweeping
proscriptions of Confederate sympathizers.114 At the national level, however, no law
excluded former Confederates from voting, and by the early 1870s only a few hundred
southern leaders were still barred from office-holding under the Fourteenth
Amendment.115 Schurz introduced a Senate bill to remove these disabilities in December
1870. But this “amnesty” was largely symbolic. It symbolized that Liberal Republicans
intended to return southern governments to white hands by removing federal support for
African Americans.116
White southerners who violently subverted the Fifteenth Amendment provided
the starkest indicator of the potential impact of “reconciliation.”117 In his 1865 Report on
the Condition of the South, Schurz had documented that southern whites had used
violence to keep former slaves subjugated. At that time, he had thought that giving
African Americans the vote would allow them to protect themselves. By 1869 and 1870,
114
For the stringency of the provisions in Missouri in comparison to other states, see Foner,
Reconstruction, 42.
115
Foner, Reconstruction, 504; James A. Rawley, “The General Amnesty Act of 1872: A Note,”
Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (1960): 481-82. For the stringency of the Missouri provisions, see
Foner, Reconstruction, 42.
116
Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 3rd sess., 118 (15 December 1870). Schurz made an even stronger
speech in 1872. Congressional Globe, 42nd Cong., 2nd sess., 698-703 (30 January 1872).
117
Rable, But There Was No Peace; Keith, The Colfax Massacre.
258
however, it was apparent that terrorism could also undermine voting rights.
Organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia not only
targeted black schools and churches, they intimidated Republican voters. Violence was
the worst in areas were African American majorities could decide elections, but it also
surfaced in Missouri, which Schurz claimed was “in a more peaceful and orderly
condition than it ever had been.”118 In 1870, Wilhelm Schreck, an itinerant preacher who
like Schurz hailed from Prussia’s western territories, wrote to the senator from
Warrenton, Missouri to relate an event that had transpired on election day in November.
A group of “rebels” had cried out “Hurrah for Jef Davis,” the former president of the
Confederacy. When German Union veterans countered with “and a rope to hang him,”
the secessionists took out revolvers, forcing them to take the comment back. The
preacher, who described himself as a supporter of “human rights,” believed it was “still
far too early to give such people the vote.” As a religious man, he understood the value
of forgiveness, but before it was given “a change of heart must also take place.” His
Warren County neighbors still wanted “to wipe the D___ Dutch like us from the face of
the earth.”119 This was just one example of the violence marring elections during 1870.
Schurz’s response to the violent abrogation of voting rights was at the heart of the
Liberal Republican movement. In April 1871, he was one of the few Republicans in
Congress to vote against the third piece of legislation designed to implement the Fifteenth
Amendment. The bill that became known as the Ku Klux Klan Act was an ambitious
118
Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 3rd sess., 119 (15 December 1870).
“Menschen Rechte”; “… noch viel zu frühzeitig solche Leute daß [sic] Stimmrecht zu geben”; “Es muß
auch eine Sinnes Ae[n]derung stattfinden”; “die D Dutch wie uns … von der Erde vertilgen.” Wilhelm
Schreck to Schurz, Warrenton, Missouri, 12 December 1870, reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC. For warnings that
the Liberal Republicans’ faith in former Confederates was misplaced, see for example William Gilman,
Springfield, Missouri, 28 February 1871, reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC.
119
259
extension of federal power. It made it a federal crime for an individual to interfere with
citizenship rights. The act empowered the president to declare martial law and suspend
the writ of habeus corpus to protect African American voters.120 In his statement of
opposition, Schurz acknowledged the problem of Klan attacks and intimidation, but he
explained that the potential abuse of federal power outweighed his concern for the
victims of such violence. He opposed the bill “because I consider the rights and liberties
of the whole American people of still higher importance than the interests of those in the
South whose dangers and sufferings appeal so strongly to our sympathy.” Schurz placed
his hope in the sort of arrangement the parties had brokered in Missouri. He believed a
conciliatory stance would “dissolve that bond of common grievance which binds the law
and order loving Democrats of the South to the lawless element” and “strengthen the
influence and power of the honest element in the Republican party of the South by
refusing our countenance to the selfish schemers and tricksters who, under all sorts of
pretexts, continually invoke the aid of the national Government to sustain them in
power.”121 Other Liberal Republicans had more modest objections to the Ku Klux Klan
Act. The St. Charles Demokrat considered political violence a “sensitive issue,”
emphasizing that the only real problem with the legislation was the power it gave the
“tyrannical” Grant.122
Liberal Republican discussions of terrorism in the South minimized its
significance. As federal prosecutors were moving against the Klan in South Carolina in
September 1871, Schurz made a major speech reaching out to the white South at
120
Foner, Reconstruction, 454-59; Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 196; Wang, The Trial of Democracy, 83-86.
Congressional Globe, 42nd Cong., 1st sess., 687, 688 (14 April 1871).
122
“Heikle Sache.” St. Charles Demokrat, 6 April 1871. “Herrschsucht.” St. Charles Demokrat, 20 April
1871.
121
260
Nashville, Tennessee.123 He condemned “acts of violence and persecution inflicted by a
certain class of the Southern population upon Republicans and colored people,” but he
absolved most southern whites of culpability. The Liberal leader described the reaction
of the white South to African American political activity as natural considering “all the
traditions of her people,” and he depicted African Americans as “inexperienced” voters
controlled by “unscrupulous and rapacious demagogues.” Stressing the value of “local
government,” Schurz assured his audience that even the atrocities committed by white
terrorists did not warrant the Grant administration’s actions in South Carolina.124 He
sympathized with whites whom he believed were subjected to vindictive and corrupt rule
by African Americans and their self-serving white supporters. Schurz’s efforts appeal to
southern Democrats publicized the fact that a victory for the Liberal Republicans might
endanger the implementation of the Fifteenth Amendment’s principle of inclusive and
participatory citizenship. Reconstruction produced a unique political climate in 1871, but
German Liberals demonstrated that the United States was responding to some of the same
forces at work across the Atlantic. Orderly government by “best men” seemed as
important to the nation as safeguarding citizens’ right to vote.
*****
In 1872, the future of the Liberal Republican movement depended on the outcome
of a national convention scheduled to meet in Cincinnati that May. One German-born
Liberal Republican from Indiana later remembered, “Never have so many Germans taken
123
On the South Carolina trials, see Lou Falkner Williams, The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials,
1871-1872 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996). On the profile of Schurz’s speech in the national
press, see Murat Halstead to Schurz, Cincinnati, 18 September 1871, reel 6, Schurz Papers, LC.
124
Schurz, “The Need for Reform and a New Party,” Nashville, Tennessee, 20 September 1871, in
Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 2: 261, 277, 264, 267, 283-84, 277-78.
261
part in a convention.”125 German Americans from around the region gathered in
Cincinnati eager to play a decisive role in American politics.126 From Missouri came
Friedrich Münch, Carl Schurz, Joseph Pulitzer, Louis Benecke, and Karl Dänzer.
Illinois’ Gustav Körner, Caspar Butz, and Friedrich Hecker attended, and August
Thieme, Friedrich Hassaurek, Charles Reemelin, and J.B. Stallo represented the host
state.127 Many other notable immigrants awaited telegraph reports from the
“extraordinary” convention.128 Indeed, it is easier to list the prominent German Ohioans
and Missourians who remained with the Republican Party in May 1872. Cleveland’s
Jacob Müller, for example, was serving as Lieutenant Governor of Ohio and refrained
from leaving the Republicans until his term expired in 1873.129 Nationally, war hero
Franz Sigel, constitutional scholar Franz Lieber, and Chicago editor Hermann Raster all
rejected the allure of the third party.130 Although Ohio and Missouri played an unusually
125
“Niemals haben sich an einer Konvention so viele Deutsche beteiligt.” W.A. Fritsch, Aus Amerika:
Alte und Neue Heimat (Stardgard i. Pom: Verlag von Wilhelm Prange, [c. 1905-1908]), 50. Fick Pamphlet
Collection, German-Americana Collection, UC.
126
On the convention organization, see James S. Rollins to Schurz, Jefferson City, 4 February 1872, reel 6,
Schurz Papers, LC; St. Charles Demokrat, 28 March 1872; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 26 January 1872; Slap,
The Doom of Reconstruction, 132.
127
Reemelin, The Life of Charles Reemelin, 202; Koerner, Memoirs of Gustav Koerner, 2:557; Cincinnati
Volksfreund, 29 April 1872, 2 May 1872; St. Charles Demokrat, 30 November 1871; Westliche Post, 17
April 1872; Wittke, “Friedrich Hassaurek,” 12. Hassaurek did not take a formal role in the convention, but
given his residence in Cincinnati and his activity on behalf of the Liberal Republicans, I suspect his
biographer is correct that he attended. See box 2, folder 10, Hassaurek Papers, OHS; Rutherford B. Hayes
to S. Birchard, Cincinnati, 15 September 1872, reel 172, Hayes Papers, HPC.
Many other German Americans attended the concurrent meeting of the national Reform and
Reunion Party, a New Departure Democratic organization. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 3 May 1872.
128
“Außergewöhnliche.” St. Charles Demokrat, 9 May 1872; Wächter am Erie, 1 May 1872.
129
Toledo Express, 10 January 1872; Columbus Westbote, 21 February 1872, 30 March 1872; Cincinnati
Volksblatt, 31 August 1872; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 12 January 1872; Cleveland Anzeiger, 16 August
1872; “Jacob Mueller” in The Dictionary of Cleveland Biography, ed. David D. Van Tassel and John J.
Grabowski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 324; Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 254.
130
Cleveland Anzeiger, 10 August 1872; Columbus Westbote, 27 April 1872; Engle, The Yankee
Dutchman, 222; Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 254. Lieber died before the presidential election.
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 4 October 1872.
262
strong part in the movement, German Republicans across the country joined it.131 The
Indiana delegate was not far off the mark when he observed that “nearly all prominent
leaders of Deutschtum” gathered at the convention.132
From the perspective of German Liberal Republicans, everything went wrong in
Cincinnati. The national convention struggled to find a candidate who would unite them.
German-born delegates favored Boston’s Charles Francis Adams, the son and grandson
of presidents who had served as a Republican in Congress and as ambassador to the
United Kingdom, or Lyman Trumbull, an Illinois senator who had taken an independent
position in the Republican Party since his vote for Andrew Johnson’s acquittal on
impeachment charges. The two other leading candidates were Horace Greeley, the
eccentric editor of the New York Tribune who supported tariffs and temperance, and
Gratz Brown, who had grown much closer to the Democrats since 1870. When Frank
Blair arrived in Cincinnati he arranged for Gratz Brown to withdraw his candidacy at the
last moment and support Greeley in return for the vice-presidential nomination. There
were still more delegates who preferred either Adams or Trumbull, but Greeley’s able
campaign manager took advantage of the confusion to win a majority.133
Unable to hide his intense disappointment at this outcome, Schurz was, in Blair’s
words, “cut to the quick.”134 One German participant wrote, “A trickster, raised in the
slimy politics of then Missouri—Gratz Brown—was able, by combining with a few
tricksters in other states, to nominate Horace Greely, and turn the whole body into a
131
For a more extensive list, see Nagler, “Deutschamerikaner und das Liberal Republican Movement
1872.”
132
“Fast alle prominenten Führer des Deutschthums.” W.A. Fritsch, Aus Amerika, 50.
133
Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, 158-63.
134
Frank Blair, Jr., to James S. Rollins, 9 May 1872, Frank Blair, Jr., to James S. Rollins, Washington,
D.C., 25 May 1872, folder 122, Rollins Papers, WHMC—Columbia. See also Koerner, Memoirs of Gustav
Koerner, 2: 557.
263
mockery of itself, I shall never forget that adjournment.”135 The nomination had “created
a total fiasco,” the Cincinnati Wahrheits-Freund declared, “and with it the entire Liberal
Republican movement had found a sad end;” it had “committed suicide.”136 German
Americans found few redeeming characteristics in Greeley, who had not even joined
other Anglo-American Liberals in supporting Prussia in the European war.137 German
Liberals saw the New Yorker’s nomination as the defeat of the principled Germans at the
hands of the conniving Yankees.138 The Volksfreund wrote, “Honesty, intelligence and
talent, which were all represented there in unusual measure, were outsmarted, oppressed,
and roguishly mishandled by the spirit of haggling, wire-pulling, and baseness.”139 In its
postmortem, the Wächter am Erie compared the “pragmatic” Anglo-Americans to the
“theoretical” Germans.140 Future president Rutherford B. Hayes agreed that the Germans
were the “honest” element in convention in a letter to his son.141
Schurz and the other prominent German Liberal Republicans only reluctantly
stood by their candidate. In a personal letter, Schurz told Greeley that he found the
circumstances surrounding the nomination “painful.” He believed the “the whole
character and aspect of the movement is changed.” Since he believed German
immigrants had flocked to the party because they “cared … about the moral tendency of
the movement,” he judged that they had little interest in helping elect Greeley. Schurz
135
Reemelin, The Life of Charles Reemelin, 202. See also Columbus Westbote, 15 May 1872.
“… gründlich Fiasko gemacht, und die ganze liberal republikanische Bewegung hat damit ein trauriges
Ende gefunden”; “Selbsmord begangen.” Cincinnati Wahrheits-Freund, 8 May 1872.
137
New York Tribune, 22 August 1870, 5, 7, 12, 27 September 1870.
138
Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, 159-63; Matthew T. Downey, “Horace Greeley and the Politicians:
The Liberal Republican Convention in 1872,” The Journal of American History 53 (1967): 727-50.
139
“… wurden Ehrlichkeit, Intelligenz und Talent, die alle dort in seltenem Maaße vertreten waren, vom
Schachergeister, von der Drathziegerei und von der Gemeinheit übervortheilt, unterdrückt und bübisch
mißhandelt.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 6 May 1872.
140
Wächter am Erie, 11 M ay 1872.
141
Rutherford B. Hayes to His Son, Cincinnati, 9 May 1872, reel 172, Hayes Papers, HPC.
136
264
related that “the most prominent German leaders of the West” were now determined to
oppose the Liberal ticket.142 He briefly considered organizing an alternative nomination,
but decided to support Greeley and court the Democratic Party’s aid. Even before the
nomination, Schurz had hoped the Democrats would endorse a Liberal Republican
candidate.143 In July, the Democratic Party grudgingly nominated Greeley. No German
Democrat in Ohio and Missouri really liked the New Yorker, but by November the
Cincinnati Volksfreund, the Fremont Courier, and the Columbus Westbote had all
decided that if the choice was between Greeley and Grant, they would support Greeley.144
In the end, the original German Liberal newspapers such as the Westliche Post, the St.
Charles Demokrat, the Wächter am Erie, and the Cincinnati Volksblatt came out for
him.145 A speech by Hassaurek that ran in the Volksblatt summed up their campaign
rhetoric. Hassaurek had no difficulty cooperating with Democrats who “recognized the
equality of all people before the law.” He believed that Greeley would reform the civil
service, free the South from “carpet-bagger rule,” and effect the reconciliation necessary
to reestablish “harmony and fraternal feeling.”146
Although the largest German-language newspapers in Ohio and Missouri at least
tepidly supported Greeley, some important figures did not. In September Judge Stallo
told a St. Louis crowd that they only reconciliation he could accept would be one “with
142
Schurz to Horace Greeley, Washington, D.C., 6 May 1872, reel 7, Schurz Papers, LC.
August Belmont to Schurz, Vincennes, Indiana, 23 April 1872, reel 7, Schurz Papers, LC.
144
The Columbus Westbote supported the Democratic nomination of Greeley as early as mid-May.
Columbus Westbote, 15 May 1872. The Cincinnati Volksfreund and the Fremont Courier accepted Greeley
once it became clear he would be nominated. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 3 July 1872. Fremont Courier, 20
June 1872. For a survey of the German-language press, see Cincinnati Volksfreund, 13 June 1872, 1 July
1872. See also Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, 199-221.
145
Wächter am Erie, 11 May 1872; Cincinnati Volksblatt, 18 September 1872; St. Charles Demokrat, 9
May 1872.
146
“… die Gleichheit aller Menschen vor dem Gesetz anerkennt”; “Eintracht und Brüderlickkeit.”
Cincinnati Volksblatt, 19 September 1872.
143
265
an acknowledgement of the rights of those who were freed by the war and “a coming
together of the races in the South.” He asked, “Will the emancipated slaves stand
together with their former masters when they [the masters] join … with a party whose
doctrines only mean oppression and slavery to them?147 The Toledo Express, a
Republican newspaper since before the war, printed Stallo’s speech. Two other Germanlanguage newspapers also represented the regular Republicans in Ohio. The Cincinnati
Courier had been founded as a regular counterweight to the reform-oriented Volksblatt in
1869. It announced in favor of Grant once the Democrats had nominated the unpalatable
Greeley.148 Anglo-Americans established the Cleveland Anzeiger to espouse the
Republican Party line in German in August 1872.149 The Republicans declared they
stood for “national unity, freedom, and equality.” The Cleveland Anzeiger wrote,
“Hooray for Grant, the much maligned and yet taciturn savior of the Union in war and in
peace.”150 The Republicans associated Greeley with the terrorism in the South,
questioned his ability to implement reform, and reminded German immigrants of his
stance on temperance.151 Yet some opponents of Greeley had no interest in supporting
Grant either. Democratic-leaning periodicals such as the St. Louis Anzeiger, the
147
“… eine Anerkennung der Rechte derjenigen, die durch den Krieg befriet sind”; “ein Zusammenstehen
der Racen im Süden”; “Werden die emancipirten Sclaven mit ihren früheren Herren zusammenstehn, wenn
diese … mit der Partei sich verbinden, deren Lehre für sie nur Unterdrückung und Sclaverei meint?”
Toledo Express, 21 Septebmer 1872. For other reports, see Westliche Post, 18 September 1872; Cincinnati
Volksfreund, 3 October 1872.
148
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 15 July 1872. On the founding of the Courier, see Arndt and Olsen, GermanAmerican Newspapers, 438; Max Burgheim, Cincinnati in Wort und Bild: Nach authentischen Quellen
bearbeitet und zusammengestellt (Cincinnati: M. & R. Burgheim, 1888), 138.
149
Cleveland Anzeiger, 5 August 1872.
150
“Nationaleinheit, Freiheit und Gleichheit”; “Hurrah für Grant den vielverleumdeten, und doch
schweigsamen, Retter der Union im Krieg und im Freiden.” Cleveland Anzeiger, 5 August 1872. See also
Toledo Express, 2 March 1872. On regular Republican papers in other states, see Cincinnati Volksfreund,
24 April 1872.
151
Cleveland Anzeiger, 2, 6, 9, 10, 15 August 1872, 2 September 1872; Toledo Express, 24, 26 September
1872, 25, 28 October 1872, 1 November 1872.
266
Cincinnati Wahrheits-Freund, and the new St. Louis Amerika believed if Greeley was
elected he would maintain protective tariffs, support temperance activists, and ignore the
authority of state governments.152 The Amerika even recommended that its readers
register a protest vote for the Bourbon Democrat candidate in November.153
In black Missourians’ and Ohioans’ first presidential election, Grant won
convincingly with about 55 percent of the nation’s popular vote. Thanks to Greeley,
German-American voters could not send a clear message in 1872.154 Grant won Ohio
again, and Cleveland’s German wards did not reveal any shift away from the Civil War
hero.155 German-born voters probably did contribute to transforming Cincinnati from a
city that had gone for Grant in 1868 into one that went for Greeley. Three of the four
wards identified as German Republican strongholds in 1868 gave Grant a smaller
proportion of their votes. In the Seventh Ward, for example, the incumbent’s returns fell
dramatically from about 73 percent to about 48 percent.156 Yet Grant still claimed
majorities in the other three wards. Overall, the Volksfreund was probably right when it
calculated that German Cincinnatians had tipped: less than half of them now voted
Republican. Since rural Ohio Democrats turned out for Greeley, the Democratic paper
was probably was probably right to assert that as many as four of every five German
Ohioan voters supported the Democratic-Liberal Republican ticket.157
152
Wahrheits-Freund, 8 May 1872. On the St. Louis Anzeiger, see Toledo Express, 28 October 1872.
Amerika, 27 October 1872.
154
McGerr, “The Meaning of Liberal Republicanism: The Case of Ohio,” 319-20.
155
See table 1 in the appendix.
156
See table 2 in the appendix.
157
See table 4 in the appendix. The Volksfreund analysis was partly based on the Liberal Republican vote
in the October state elections. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 14 October 1872, 6 November 1872.
153
267
In contrast to Ohio, Missouri was one of only six states—four in the border region
and two in the South—that returned Liberal Republican majorities.158 Greeley won 56
percent of the Missouri vote, but far fewer voters in heavily German areas supported the
presidential candidate than had supported Gratz Brown for governor two years earlier.
Among five German wards that had overwhelming endorsed Brown in 1870, Greeley
won narrow victories. None of these wards supported the Republican candidate who ran
for governor in November 1872, allowing Democrats to end the interlude of Liberal
Republican power in the state.159 German St. Louisans would continue to lean much
more Republican than the city or state as a whole, but the 1872 election was a watershed.
The centrality of the Republican Party to German-Missourian identity was a thing of the
past.
The Liberal Republicans had failed at the polls, but their movement had important
consequences for the direction of Reconstruction. By 1872, the burst of constitutional
activity that had transformed American citizenship was spent. The last quarter of the
nineteenth century would prove to be the “doldrums” of progress in American voting
rights.160 During the 1872 campaign, the national Democratic Party gave up all efforts to
repeal the Fifteenth Amendment, but it condoned other methods of undermining African
American political power. The Republican Party continued to identify with the plight of
the freed people, but Republicans signaled that they understood that northern sympathy
158
The other states were Kentucky, Maryland, Tennessee, Texas, and Georgia. Burnham, Presidential
Ballots, 165-229.
159
See table 3. Six strongly German counties identified by historian Paul Kleppner dropped from
supporting Gratz Brown with 75.2 percent in 1870 to giving Greeley only 44.2 percent in 1872. Kleppner,
The Third Electoral System, 111.
160
Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 196.
268
for the white South would make it harder for them to protect black rights.161 A majority
of Republicans in Congress backed the largely symbolic Amnesty Act of May 1872, and
their national platform essentially adopted the Liberal planks of civil service reform,
amnesty, and local government at their national convention.162 Liberal Republican
descriptions of Reconstruction constrained Republican action. German immigrants who
participated in the third party had helped legitimize the idea that the whole project of
extending African American citizenship had been corrupt, vindictive, and foolhardy.163
Liberal Republicans had encouraged the notion that national reconciliation would
have to come at the expense of racial equality. Without quite grasping the impact of the
compromises they had made between 1870 and 1872, German immigrants had
contributed to the idea that North and South would only reunite when northern
Republicans stopped intervening on behalf of black southerners. This position involved
nothing less than pitting national unity against the protection of citizenship rights. In the
final analysis, German Liberal Republicans had eroded the connection between
nationalism and liberalism. They had compromised the understanding of citizenship and
nation that had fueled the Revolutions of 1848 and Radical Reconstruction. In his
ambitious interpretation of American history in global perspective, A Nation among
Nations, Thomas Bender’s describes this transition. By the end of the century, he argues,
“While some of the national ambitions of 1848 had been realized …, liberal
161
Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, 164-99; Foner, Reconstruction, 509-11; Wang, The Trial of
Democracy, 120-21, 161-64, 300; Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 107-11.
162
Rawley, “The General Amnesty Act of 1872,” 482; Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, 185-86;
Proceedings of the Liberal Republican Convention, in Cincinnati, May 1st, 2nd and 3rd, 1872 (New York:
Baker & Godwin, Printers, 1872), 19-21; Proceedings of the National Union Republican Party Held at
Philadelphia in 1872 ([Philadelphia]: Charles W. Johnson, 1903), 51-52.
163
Andrew Slap makes the connection between Liberal Republicans and the “Lost Cause” interpretation of
Reconstruction. Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, 181-86, 199-221
269
achievements had been compromised.”164 At the same time that Bismarck was, in David
Potter’s words, “carefully dissociating liberalism from nationalism in Germany,” the
United States was moving in the same direction.165
Carl Schurz identified the German Empire as a model of national unity. In early
1872, he pointed out that German politicians who had participated in the Revolutionaries
of 1848 now sat in the parliament of the German Empire. Forty-Eighters had reconciled
with their old monarchical opponents. Schurz had himself enjoyed a cordial visit with
the Iron Chancellor in 1868.166 The German-born senator believed that the United States,
the “great Republic of the new world which marches in the very vanguard of modern
civilization,” should at least learn from—and ideally surpass—the “example of wisdom is
set by other nations.”167 A few years later he could have pursued the comparison further.
German Republicans were willing to compromise racial justice and voting rights to
reunite North and South just as European liberals were compromising the ideals of
constitutionally limited government and effective popular representation to unite the
German states behind Bismarck. Most German immigrants would not remain uncritical
supporters of Bismarck, but Americans became more interested in what they could learn
from Germany during the Gilded Age. This would be particularly true as they
contemplated how to educate good citizens and address the new inequalities created by
industrial work.
164
Bender, A Nation among Nations, 179, 177.
Potter, “The Civil War in the History of the Modern World,” 297.
166
Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 165-66.
167
Schurz, “General Amnesty,” speech made in the U.S. Senate, 30 January 1872, in Speeches,
Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 2:338.
165
270
CHAPTER 7
“TO EDUCATE ENLIGHTENED AND PATRIOTIC CITIZENS”:
GERMAN AMERICANS, RELIGION, AND THE SCHOOL DEBATES OF THE 1870s
“American citizens’ attachment to their public schools bears witness to their
republican character,” one German American wrote to the Westliche Post in 1870. He
added that “the common school [Volksschule] is a crucial republican institution,”
explaining, “In the common school, ideas that only theoretically exist in political
institutions and popular sovereignty are first put into practice.”1 Essentially, this was the
Republican Party’s position. Education had been central to Republican plans for
reconstructing the nation following the Civil War. Indeed, one historian describes the
public school issue as “the soul of the Republican program in the 1870s.”2 Always
supporters of public education for their own children, northern Republicans responded to
the freed people’s demand for education in the South and the challenge of instructing
immigrant children in America’s cities. The Freedmen’s Bureau, Republican state
governments, and municipal school boards invested in education, hoping to transform
African Americans and young immigrants into good citizens. Republicans hoped that as
1
“Die Anhänglichkeit der amerikanischen Bürger an ihre öffentlichen Freischulen legt ein Zeigniß ab für
ihren republikanischen Charakter”; “Die Volksschule ist eine wesentliche, republikanische Institution”;
“Die Gedanken, welche nur in der Theorie, in politischen Institutionen und in der Volkssouveränität
existiren, werden erst in der Volksschule praktisch gemacht ….” Westliche Post, 13 June 1870.
2
McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction, 6. William J Harris identified education the “cornerstone”
of Republicans’ Reoncstruction efforts in Mississippi. Harris, “The Creed of the Carpetbaggers: The Case
of Mississippi,” Journal of Southern History 40 91974): 199-224. For a useful description of Republicans
and education in a northern state, see James C. Mohr, The Radical Republicans and Reform in New York
during Reconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 153-201.
271
children learned to read and write, they would also learn the value of self-reliance and the
habits of democracy. As the letter in the Post put it, schooling promised to calm the
“unsettling influence” of recent developments, including “the acquisition of citizenship
rights.”3
The Westliche Post’s correspondent believed most people were “in agreement on
the main points” of education.4 He was dead wrong. Although public education would
win wide support among German Americans, African Americans, and native-born
Republicans, it remained deeply controversial. Americans fought over schools because
they helped define who was a citizen and what citizenship meant. Most Democrats in the
South were hostile to public education because they did not want to pay to educate
“another man’s child,” especially when that child was black.5 Southern Democrats had
no intention of using education to foster African American citizenship. In northern and
western states, including Ohio and Missouri, the Catholic Church would also challenge
Republican plans. Although many Catholic parents happily sent their children to public
schools, most Catholic leaders rejected them as godless institutions. They would seek
public funding for their own parochial schools. The struggle among Catholics,
Protestants, and secularists—who believed publicly funded teachers should not discuss
religious values at all—ensured that education would not be the simple panacea
3
“Beunruhigenden Einflusses”; “Erlangung des Bürgerrechts.” Westliche Post, 13 June 1870.
“… in der Hauptsache harmoniren.” Westliche Post, 13 June 1870.
5
Floyd C. Shoemaker and Isidor Loeb, eds., Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875,
12 vols. (Columbia: The State Historical Society of Missouri, 1930-1944), 9:113.
4
272
Republicans sought. Schools, historians have observed, were a “battlefield of social
change.”6
German-Catholic clergymen and lay leaders spearheaded campaigns to secure
public contributions to Catholic schools. At the same time, German-Catholic parents
tried to remove Protestant hymns and the King James Bible from the public classroom.
German-American leaders from both parties joined this campaign to secularize education.
They maintained that no public money should ever support Catholic or Protestant
indoctrination. All German Americans witnessed the backlash this position provoked
from Anglo-American Protestants. Native-born Republicans believed Catholic education
and public schooling that did not mention of God or the Bible eroded the Protestant
values that formed the non-sectarian foundation of the American nation.
6
Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars, New York City, 1805-1973: A History of the Public Schools as
Battlefield of Social Change (New York: Basic Books, 1974). The national fate of public education during
Reconstruction is usefully delineated in a skillful analysis of the U.S. Office of Education. Donald R.
Warren, To Enforce Education: A History of the Founding Years of the United States Office of Education
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974). On the antebellum precedents for conflict over public
schooling, see Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). I include further references to the extensive literature on religion and
the public schools below.
Generations of African American scholars have recognized “the inextricable ties between
citizenship in a democratic society and popular education.” James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks
in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 1. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black
Reconstruction in America showed the centrality of education to Reconstruction. Du Bois emphasized the
themes to which later scholars would return: the great importance freed people put on education, the
development of southern education under the administrations of white and black Republicans during
Reconstruction, and white Democrats’ vicious attacks on African American education. See also W.E.B. Du
Bois, The Common School and the Negro American (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1991); Henry Allen
Bullock, A History of Negro Education in the South from 1619 to the Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1967); Ronald E. Burchart, Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction:
Freedmen’s Education, 1862-1875 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980); William P. Vaughn,
Schools For All: The Blacks & Public Education in the South, 1865-1877 (Lexington: The University Press
of Kentucky, 1974); Heather Williams, “‘Clothing Themselves in Intelligence’: The Freedpeople,
Schooling, and Northern Teachers, 1861-1871,” Journal of African American History 87 (2002): 372-90;
McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy, 143-298; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 472-501; Foner,
Reconstruction, 96-102.
273
The role of German Americans in the school wars of the 1870s illustrates the
emergence of a new cultural and political environment following the Fifteenth
Amendment and German Unification. After a decade in abeyance, religious tensions
would again become a central feature of American public life. This time, however,
Prussian schools and the Prussian Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church within the
German Empire would be inescapable points of reference for American Protestants,
Catholics, and secularists. Many Anglo-Protestant Republicans would admire the way
Bismarck tried to use education to establish a distinctly Protestant national culture. They
considered it one of the lessons the New World could learn from the Old. Although
German immigrants had first alerted Americans to the German Empire’s strengths, most
of them rejected the idea that American schools should teach citizens to conform to
Anglo-Americans’ Protestant values. This chapter explores the role of German
immigrants and German precedents in the Reconstruction debate over public education.
It concludes by considering how the issue of education indicated the divides of the
decades to come. In 1875, native-born Missouri Democrats would overturn the state’s
controversial education system, limiting African Americans’ opportunities to put the
principle of equal citizenship into practice during the Gilded Age.
*****
Transatlantic educational ties were well established before Reconstruction.
Horace Mann, the famous Massachusetts educator, had traveled to Prussia to report on
the kingdom’s public schools in 1843.7 Mann had praised Prussia’s provision of free and
7
Horace Mann, Report of an Educational Tour in Germany, and Parts of Great Britain and Ireland
(London: Simkin, Marshall, and Company, 1846). On Mann’s career, see Jonathan Messerli, Horace
Mann: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1972). For a useful analysis of Mann’s report, see Karl-Ernst
274
compulsory public elementary schooling and its national network of graded secondary
and tertiary institutions. In a published report, he described professionally trained
German teachers, who followed such German-speaking theorists as Henry Pestalozzi and
Friedrich Diesterweg.8 The Prussian teachers Mann observed followed a liberal
pedagogy that encouraged students to think independently. Such instruction was an
inspiring alternative to the rote memorization Mann was familiar with in New England
schools. A strict Calvinist by upbringing, Mann was less taken by the “sectarianism” of
all Prussian schools. He recorded with distaste watching a Catholic priest explain
transubstantiation. He noted, however, that religious instruction was kept separate from
other lessons. If a school contained Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed Protestant
children, they were divided for separate religious lessons. This compromise had, in fact,
developed as the Prussian Ministry of Spiritual, Educational, and Medical Affairs
centralized the kingdom’s school system, assuming a function previously performed by
churches.9
Writing in the 1840s, Mann was troubled by the contradiction between Prussia’s
apparently progressive schools and its authoritarian leadership. He could only resolve the
inconsistency with a prophecy: “No one who witnesses that quiet, noiseless development
Jeismann, “American Observations Concerning the Prussian Educational System in the Nineteenth
Century,” in German Influences on Education in the United States, ed. Geitz, Heideking, and Herbst, 2142. See also Karl A. Schleunes, Schooling and Society: The Politics of Education in Prussia and Bavaria,
1750-1900 (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 1-3, 108-12; John A. Walz, German Influence in American Education
and Culture (Philadelphia: Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation, 1936), 7-46; Daniel Fallon, “German
Influences on American Education,” in The German-American Encounter, ed. Trommler and Shore, 77-87.
On nineteenth-century German influences on American philosophy and literature more generally, see
Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences, 1600-1900
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957).
8
Jeismann, “American Observations Concerning the Prussian Educational System,” in German Influences
on Education in the United States, ed. Geitz, Heideking, and Herbst, 32.
9
Ibid., 27; Mann, Report of an Educational Tour in Germany, 153-54.
275
of mind which is now going forward in Prussia through the agency of its educational
institutions can hesitate to predict that the time is not far distant when the people will
assert their right to a participation in their own government.”10 Unbeknown to Mann, the
Prussian monarchy feared just such an eventuality. Since 1819, Prussian authorities had
tried to reverse pedagogical innovations and counter the growing power of professional
teachers.11
Concerned with nation and citizenship, German educators had played a significant
role in the Revolutions of 1848. Many of them had emigrated to the United States with
other Forty-Eighters.12 Disappointed by the staid instruction they found in poorly funded
schools in the United States, they set out to make their mark on American education. At
the elementary and secondary level, German-American teachers were overwhelmingly
male, and they served as community leaders.13 Before he became a famous general,
Franz Sigel had taught in St. Louis during the 1850s.14 Teachers defended their status by
organizing professional associations.15 German-American teachers’ societies supported
10
Mann, Report of an Educational Tour in Germany, and Parts of Great Britain and Ireland, 204.
On both progressive education reforms and reactions against them, see Bettina Goldberg, “The FortyEighters and the School System in America: The Theory and Practices of Reform,” in The German FortyEighters in the United States, ed. Brancaforte, 204-06; David Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1880-1918:
The Long Nineteenth Century, 2d ed. (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 63-64, 160-61;
Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (London: Allen Lane,
2006), 406-07.
12
Schleunes, Schooling and Society, 128; Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 300-309; Goldberg, “The FortyEighters and the School System in America,” in The German Forty-Eighters in the United States, ed.
Brancaforte, 206-07.
13
Based on the example of German educator Friedrich Fröbel, Margarethe Schurz founded what was
possibly America’s first Kindergarten in 1856 while her husband Carl was still an unsuccessful Wisconsin
politician. Ann Taylor Allen, “American and German Women in the Kindergarten Movement, 18501914,” in German Influences on Education in the United States, ed. Geitz, Heideking, and Herbst, 87-88.
There is some disagreement over whether Margaretha Schurz was indeed the first. Many German
Americans became interested in the Kindergarten movement during the 1850s. Wittke, Refugees of
Revolution, 307.
14
Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 302.
15
New professional organizations were formed in response to the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. KarlHeinz Günther, “Interdependence between Democratic Pedagogy in Germany and the Development of
11
276
German-language instruction. German Cincinnatians had pioneered bilingual public
education in the United States in 1840. By 1875, over half of Cincinnati school children
attended bilingual schools that used German as the language of instruction for up to half
of each school day.16 St. Louis also began to employ German-speaking teachers before
the Civil War. By 1870, thirty-seven of St. Louis’s fifty public schools provided some
instruction in German.17 German-American teachers also promoted innovative German
pedagogy. The Westliche Post chastised the superintendent of St. Louis schools, William
Torrey Harris, for reading too much Hegel and not enough Pestalozzi and Diesterweg.
Harris, who would go on to lead the National Bureau of Education, became famous for
his dedication to the Hegelian idea that individual freedom could best be realized through
collective institutions. The Post believed the Connecticut-born Hegelian had adopted the
wrong part of the German tradition.18
German Americans’ influence on American education grew in the favorable
climate of Republican rule that followed the Civil War.19 German Americans were
among those white Missourians who responded quickly to freed people’s demand for
Education in the United States in the Nineteenth Century,” in German Influences on Education in the
United States, ed. Geitz, Heideking, and Herbst, 46-47; Jacobi, “Schoolmarm, Volkserzieher, Kantor, and
Schulschester,” 115-28; Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 308-09.
16
Carolyn R. Toth, German-English Bilingual Schools in America: The Cincinnati Tradition in Historical
Context (New York: P. Lang, 1990), 57-58, 61-62.
17
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 152; Kurt F. Leidecker, Yankee Teacher: The Life of William
Torrey Harris (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946), 273-75; Kanter, “Class, Ethnicity, and
Socialist Politics: St. Louis, 1876-1881,” 45; Westliche Post, 13 July 1872.
18
Westliche Post, 6 May 1870; Leidecker, Yankee Teacher; John S. Roberts, William T. Harris: A Critical
Study of his Educational and Related Philosophical Views (Washington, D.C.: National Education
Association of the United States, 1924); Frances B. Harmon, The Social Philosophy of the St. Louis
Hegelians (New York: Columbia University, 2943), 82-96.
19
Jurgen Herbst, “Introduction,” in German Influences on Education in the United States, ed. Geitz,
Heideking, and Herbst, 11. Historians have documented the increasing post-war interest in German
education, especially in American universities. Pochmann, German Culture in America; Charles F.
Thwing, The American and the German University: One Hundred Years of History (New York: The
Macmillan Company, 1928), 106-74.
277
education in Missouri.20 Georg Husmann had helped the state establish a modern school
system in the constitution of 1865. In the legislature, Friedrich Münch had introduced a
bill to lift the prohibitions on black education. In 1866, Münch refused to vote for any
legislation that required local school districts to provide segregated schooling.21 During
the late 1860s, Missouri Republicans required school boards to provide elementary
schools for African Americans when more than twenty black children lived in their
district. The legislature empowered the state superintendent to intervene when local
authorities failed to act.22 In the private arena, St. Charles’s Arnold Krekel joined the
board of the Lincoln Institute, which members of the 62nd United States Colored Infantry
founded in 1866 to serve African Americans.23
German Americans across the political spectrum believed the state had an interest
in educating its citizens. The Democratic Cincinnati Volksfreund had backed public
schooling since 1853. The paper maintained it was important that every person have the
opportunity “to acquire the skills that are necessary to recognize duties as a member of
civil society, as a citizen of a great free state, and … because the state and consequently
every citizen has the duty to care about the fact that the freedom granted to us is not
endangered by ignorance and degeneration of individual citizens.” The Volksfruend’s
editors believed they represented most German Americans, including “the rank and file
20
For the efforts among black Missourians, see for example Irving Dillard, “James Milton Turner: A Little
Known Benefactor of His People,” The Journal of Negro History 19 (1934): 377.
21
Worried that too few people knew about his principled opposition to school segregation, Münch wrote to
the Westliche Post. He urged readers to consider “how the future, indeed the very near future, would judge
our behavior” (“wie die Zukunft, ja schon die nahe Zukunft, über unser Handeln richten wird”). Westliche
Post, 24 February 1866.
22
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 121-25; Henry S. Williams, “The Development of the Negro
Public Schools System in Missouri,” The Journal of Negro History 5 (1920): 137-43; W. Sherman Savage,
“Legal Provisions for Negro Schools in Missouri, 1865 to 1890,” Journal of Negro History 16 (1931): 30912.
23
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 128-30.
278
of our German Catholics.” 24 More controversially, the Volksfreund joined its Republican
competitor, the Volksblatt and the St. Louis Westliche Post in advocating compulsory
schooling.25 Calls for mandatory school attendance were an editorial staple in the St.
Charles Demokrat. In a nod to the Prussian education system, the Missouri paper dubbed
“Schulzwang” the “German idea.”26 The Westliche Post and Carl Schurz supported
expanding the power of the federal Bureau of Education, which the Republican Congress
established in 1867 to collect and disseminate information about education.27 Even
Missouri’s German Democrats supported strong state oversight of education.28
Unlike many native-born Republicans, German Americans hoped schools could
nurture good citizens without requiring cultural homogeneity. German Americans saw
teachers as facilitators of a cultural exchange that would transform the United States as it
forged citizens out of newcomers. In education as in politics, German-American leaders
devoted their careers to the “modification of the American spirit, through the German.”29
This is apparent in their defense of German-language instruction. In 1873, the St. Louis
Anzeiger des Westens indignantly asserted that bilingual education was “in the interests
of American citizenship.” It would ensure that German-speaking children “were woven
24
“… sich die Kenntnisse zu erwerben, welche nötig sind, seine Pflichten als Mitglied der bürgerlichen
Gesellschaft, als Bürger eines großen Freistaates zu kennen und ... weil der Staat und somit jeder Bürger
die Verpflichtung hat, dafür zu sorgen, daß die uns verliehene Freiheit nicht durch Unwissenheit oder
Verwilderung einzelner Bürger gefährdet werde”; “Der Masse unserer deutschen Katholiken.” Cincinnati
Volksfreund, 19 July 1869.
25
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 21 October 1869; Westliche Post, 10, 11 February 1865, 15 March 1865. On
the Volksblatt, see commentary in Wahrheits-Freund, 14 July 1869.
26
St. Charles Demokrat, 11 May 1871. For ongoing concern, see St. Charles Demokrat, 6 July 1871, 27
February 1873, 10 April 1873, 28 January 1875. Münch had been supporting compulsory schooling in
letters to the Westliche Post since at least the time of the 1865 constitutional convention. Westliche Post, 3
February 1865.
27
Westliche Post, 8 December 1870; McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction, 19; Warren, To Enforce
Education.
28
See Henry Spaunhorst’s speech in the Missouri legislature reported in the Wahrheits-Freund, 15
February 1870. On the Anzeiger des Westens, see Amerika, 9 February 1874.
29
Schurz to Margarethe Schurz, 8 July 1867, in Intimate Letters of Carl Schurz, 383.
279
into the whole population precisely in their most impressionable years.” More
significantly, however, the children of “the older Anglo-Saxon or already American
population will also be enlightened by the communication between them and the
Germans, and through their knowledge of German literature, the Americans will acquire
access to the intellectual activity of the German people, which will allow them to honor
and respect the newly immigrated.” According to the Anzeiger, school administrators
had no place making children conform to Anglo-Protestant values for the state had
“nothing to do with the beliefs of its citizens.”30 German Americans believed that
everyone would benefit if public schools provided a space where Americans could learn
from each other.
*****
German-American Catholic leaders were also wary of Anglo-Protestant
hegemony, but they differed with their Protestant and unchurched Landsmänner on
education. Since their position had a disproportional influence on this facet of the debate
over citizenship, it is worth examining in depth. For decades, the Church had tried to
distance Catholics from the rest of the German-American community. Catholics had
good reason to distrust the Forty-Eighters, whose anti-clericalism sometimes lapsed into a
bigoted condemnation of all things Catholic. In 1853, for example, Friedrich Hassaurek
30
“Aus Motiven ihres amerikanischen Bürgerthums”; “… gerade in ihren empfänglichsten Lebensjahren
so gründlich in die Gesammtbevölkerung des Landes verwebt”; “Der ältrern angelsächsischen oder bereits
amerikanischen Bevölkerung wird der Verkehr zwischen ihnen und den Deutschen ebenfalls erleuchtert
und durch ihre Kenntniß der deutschen Literatur erlangen die Amerikaner eine Einsicht in die geistige
Thätigkeit des deutschen Volkes, die sie die Neu-Eingewanderten ehren und achten läßt”; “… hat es mit
dem Glauben seiner Bürger nicht[s] zu thun.” Anzeiger des Westens, 11 September 1873. I have found no
evidence of any German-language newspaper that rejected bilingual education during the 1860s or 1870s.
All newspapers, relying as they did on a German-speaking readership, leapt to defend it. One
correspondent to the Toldeo Express described German-language instruction as a “right” (“Recht”). Toledo
Express, 21 February 1872. For similar sentiment, see for example Toledo Express, 27 March 1872;
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 28 September 1871, 3 October 1871.
280
had roused Cincinnati’s non-Catholics to protest the visit of papal envoy Gaetano Bedini.
Hassaurek had legitimate concerns that Bedini was implicated in the executions of Italian
nationalists, but the freethinking editor used intemperate rhetoric to stir up such antiCatholic animosity that the ensuing riots resulted in one death.31 The tension between
Catholics and other German Americans had subsided somewhat during the Civil War. In
their political campaigning, German Republicans such as Hassaurek had avoided religion
and focused on slavery. In urban centers such as St. Louis and Cincinnati, some German
Catholics has responded to their efforts by voting for Republican candidates. Religious
conflict among German Americans had remained muted before 1870. During the early
months of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Catholics proved nearly as excited as other
German-speaking Americans.
In 1870, however, religion was again becoming a point of controversy in Missouri
and Ohio. National and international developments shaped this trend. Following the
ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, native-born Republicans rededicated themselves
to the Protestant values that had always infused their politics. The Republican Party
began what one historian identifies as “an ambitious effort to forge a national culture,
heavy with evangelical overtones that demanded social conformity.”32 American
Republicans were part of an international shift.33 Nationalists around the world were
challenging traditional religious authorities, seeking new ways to turn popular piety to
31
John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003),
25; White, Religion and Community: Cincinnati Germans, 34-49.
32
McAfree, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction, 5.
33
For an excellent encapsulation of this transition, see McGreevy, Catholic and American Freedom, 9126. Investigating the German experience, Helmut Walser Smith usefully argues that Catholics were not
anti-nationalist. They “rarely questioned the legitimacy of the national state as it was founded,” but “to a
certain extent, [they] wrested German nationalism from its exclusive association with Protestant tradition,”
forming an alternative nationalism.” Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict:
Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 137-38.
281
state advantage. In Europe, Catholics were caught between Bismarck’s nationalizing
forces and the authority of the Pope. Responding to the new threat of Protestant
nationalism, the Twentieth Vatican Council in 1870 asserted the dogma of papal
infallibility. While a few Catholic theologians, such as Munich professor Ignaz
Döllinger, contested the assertion of papal power, the challenge of nationalism actually
reinvigorated popular piety and political expressions of Roman Catholicism.
By 1870, German Catholics had already put down strong roots in the United
States. A minority in the Irish-led American Church, they congregated in “national
parishes” led by German-speaking priests.34 St. Louis and Cincinnati were important
Catholic centers that seeded strongly German-Catholic settlements in their rural
hinterlands.35 German Catholics relied on education to perpetuate the faith. In the
Midwest, an estimated two thirds of the German parishes established schools within two
years of their founding.36 According to contemporary observers, nearly thirteen thousand
children in Cincinnati and over eight thousand children in St. Louis attended parochial
schools in 1870. Many of these students were either the children of German-born parents
or German-born themselves.37
34
Kathleen Neils Conzen, “German Catholics in America,” in The Encyclopedia of American Catholic
History, ed. Michael Glazier and Thomas J. Shelley (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1997), 575.
35
Along with Milwaukee, St. Louis and Cincinnati marked the corners of what one historian identifies as a
triangle of German-Catholic settlement. Colman J. Barry, The Catholic Church and German Americans
(Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1853), 45. See also Georg Timpe, ed., Katholisches
Deutschthum in den Vereinigten Staaten: Ein Querschnitt (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder & Co., 1937).
36
Lacking the incentive of preserving foreign-language instruction, only one-quarter of Irish-American
Catholic parishes opened schools during their first two years. Conzen, “German Catholics in America,”
578. For German pride in this, see Wahrheits-Freund, 14 February 1866.
37
On Cincinnati, see F. Michael Perko, A Time to Favor Zion: The Ecology of Religion and School
Development on the Urban Frontier, Cincinnati, 1830-1870 (Chicago: Educational Studies Press, 1988),
209; Harold M. Helfman, “The Cincinnati ‘Bible War,’ 1869-1870,” Ohio State Archaeological and
Historical Quarterly 60 (1951): 370. Helfman reported 12,000-15,000 students, citing the Cincinnati
Commercial, 10 September 1869. Another report counted 8,305 in 1869. It excluded boarding schools and
academies run by Catholic sisterhoods; White, “Religion and Community: Cincinnati Germans, 1814-
282
Catholics were proud of their educational achievements, which helped
distinguished them within the German-American community. The most influential
German-speaking proponent of Catholic education in Cincinnati was Anton B.
Schwenniger, a priest, who like Carl Schurz had studied at Bonn University.38 In 1870,
Schwenniger assumed editorship of the country’s oldest German-language Catholic
weekly, Cincinnati’s Wahrheits-Freund. Bearing Archbishop John B. Purcell’s
imprimatur, Schwenniger’s paper claimed a circulation of 13,000 that year, far more than
any of the city’s secular German-language dailies.39 In St. Louis, German Catholics were
also led by a newspaperman, Henry J. Spaunhorst, a Hanover-born entrepreneur who
founded the Amerika in 1872.40 The new sheet proclaimed itself “a newspaper for truth
and justice.” 41 Spaunhorst was too busy serving as a state senator and leading national
Catholic organizations to edit the paper personally, but his Catholic faith and Democratic
politics guided its content.42
Both Schwenniger and Spaunhorst both believed it was impossible to inculcate
the “morality and piety” necessary for children to become good citizens without attending
to their religious development. 43 The Amerika wrote, “There can be no proper education
1870,” 293. On St. Louis, see Michael Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads: The Phelan
Miscalculation and the Education Amendment of 1870,” Missouri Historical Review 95 (2001): 380.
Henry Spaunhorst believed half of all Missouri school children attended private institutions. WahrheitsFreund, 15 February 1870.
38
New York Times, 3 April 1897.
39
Arndt and Olsen, German-American Newspapers, 454, 456, 457. See also Georg Timpe, “Hundert Jahre
katholischer deutscher Presse,” in Katholisches Deutschthum in den Vereinigten Staaten, ed. Timpe, 4-33.
40
Loeb and Shoemaker, eds., Journal of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 107-08
41
In 1869, for example, he intervened to ask the Missouri governor to pardon an immigrant who had
fought with the police after his stepson had entered an altercation with his landlord. Henry J. Spaunhorst to
Joseph W. McClurg, St. Louis, 8 March 1869, box 1, folder 19, Records of Governor Joseph W. McClurg,
Office of Governor, MSA.
42
For Spaunhorst’s understanding of the newspaper’s mission, see its inaugural issue. Amerika, 17
October 1870.
43
“Sittlichkeit und Gottesfurcht.” Wahrheits-Freund, 12 July 1865.
283
of the youth where worldly instruction is carefully divided from moral education and
without imparting respect of the fear of God, who is the origin of all wisdom.”44 The
Wahrheits-Freund explained to readers that Catholic schools produced good citizens
because “in all circumstances, a religious person is a better citizen than an unreligious
one.”45 Along with other Catholic authorities, German-Catholic leaders condemned the
“godless” public schools.46 In a speech before the Missouri legislature in January 1870,
Spaunhorst observed that “the fruits of the public school system reveal themselves all
around us.” According to the layman, they included political corruption, abortion, and
even “the prevention of natural reproduction.”47 The Amerika and the Wahrheits-Freund
agreed that “no good Catholic” could enroll his or her children in a “system of education
without a religious purpose.”48 Yet Schwenniger and Spaunhorst knew there were plenty
of “bad” Catholic parents. An estimated seven thousand or more Catholic children
attended the St. Louis public schools in 1870.49 St. Louis Archbishop Peter R. Kenrick
had to restrain parish priests who wanted to deny their parents absolution.50 In
Cincinnati, the Wahrheits-Freund noted that 30 percent of the students at one local school
44
“Es kann keine richtige Erziehung der Jugend geben, wo der weltliche Unterrichtung sorgfältig von der
moralischen Erziehung getrennt ist, und ohne Rücksicht auf die Furcht Gottes, die der Anfang aller
Weisheit ist, ertheilt wird.” Amerika, 4 November 1873.
45
“… ein religiöser Mensch unter allen Umständen ein besser Bürger ist, als ein religionslöser.”
Wahrheits-Freund, 1 September 1869.
46
“Godless” reference in James A. J. Burns to John B. Purcell, Springfield, Ohio, 26 February 6 1873, box
28, Archbishop Purcell Papers, ACC.
47
“Die Früchte des öffentlichen Schulsystems von Amerika zeigen sich rings um uns her,” “die
Verhinderung der natürlichen Fortpflanzung.” Wahrheits-Freund, 15 February 1870.
48
“Kein guter Katholik” (bold in original). Wahrheits-Freund, 28 July 1869. “Erziehungssystem ohne
religiösen Zweck.” Wahrheits-Freund, 15 February 1870.
49
For the St. Louis estimates, see Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 380.
50
Peter R. Kenrick to H. Van der Sanden, St. Louis, 21 December 1866, 26 April 1869, 6 Apr 1869, box 1,
folder 4, Archbishop Peter R. Kenrick Papers, ASLA.
284
were Catholic. Schwenniger tried concertedly to convince parents to abandon public
schools.51
Spaunhorst and Schwenniger considered it unconscionable that Catholic parents
should pay taxes to support public schools that their children ought not to attend. “Is it
just,” Schwenniger asked, “to compel someone to pay for something for which he can
have no use?”52 He explained to his fellow Missouri senators that “I do not want the state
to dictate the manner of school education that should be imparted to our children when
the same is contrary to our conscience and convictions.”53 In order to defend “freedom of
religion,” political representatives of Ohio and Missouri German Catholicism argued, the
state should “collect the public school funds and distribute them equally among
everyone.”54 In other words, tax-payers should pay for Catholics to provide religious
education to their children.
Catholic demands prompted a conflict that became known as the “Bible Wars,”
which revolved around what values the American people should pay to teach their future
citizens. In 1869, New York City’s Boss Tweed briefly secured public funding of
parochial schools, slipping a provision into a tax levy bill that passed the New York state
legislature.55 In Cincinnati, Schwenniger took the unusual step of entering in a bitter
51
Wahrheits-Freund, 26 April 1871, 3 May 1871. For the division between Catholic parents and Catholic
leaders, see the Wächter am Erie, 21 September 1869, 18 November 1869.
52
“Ob es Recht sei,” Schwenniger asked, “Jemanden zu zwingen, für irgend etwas zu zahlen, von dem er
keinen Nutzen haben darf.” Wahrheits-Freund, 14 July 1869. See also Wahrheits-Freund, 1 February
1871, 19 April 1871.
53
“Ich will nicht, daß der Staat die Art und Weise der Schulbildung vorschreibt, welche unsern Kindern
ertheilt werden soll, wennn [sic] dieselbe unserem Gewissen und unseren Urberzeugungen zuwider ist.”
Wahrheits-Freund, 15 February 1870.
54
“Religionsfreiheit” Wahrheits-Freund, 12 July 1865. “… die öffentlichen Schulfonds einsammlen und
gleichmäßig unter Alle vertheilen.” Wahrheits-Freund, 14 July 1869.
55
Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 373; Lloyd P. Jorgenson, The State and the Non-Public
School, 1825-1925 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 112-14; McGreevy, Catholicism and
American Freedom, 115; Ravitch, The Great School Wars, New York City, 1-104. On Catholics an
285
print debate with “Herr Hassaurek” at the Republican Volksblatt and “Herr Rothe” at the
Democratic Volksfreund, freethinkers who represented the mainstream German-American
view that public funds should not support religious education, either Catholic or
Protestant.56 Schwenniger ran signed editorials in the Wahrheits-Freund defending taxpayer subsidies of Catholic schools. In early 1870, Catholic leaders in Missouri tried to
emulate Tweed’s actions. One of Spaunhorst’s Irish-Catholic colleagues in the Missouri
legislature surreptitiously included a provision for appropriating funds for private St.
Louis schools that educated children for free.57 All these demands for public funding
quickly created a controversy that Schwenniger observed “stirs all of America like a
whirlwind.”58
In Missouri and Ohio, secularism was nearly as inflammatory as Catholicism. In
August 1869, members of the Cincinnati Board of Education sought a compromise
between Catholic and Protestant leaders. They planned to ban Protestant practices
objectionable to Catholics from the city’s public schools in preparation for consolidating
parochial schools under public control. The Cincinnati board voted twenty-two-to-fifteen
to prohibit religious texts and songs in the common schools.59 The majority included lay
Catholics who represented the interests of all those observant parents who wanted to send
education before the Civil War, see Jay P. Dolan, The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German
Catholics, 1815-1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 99-120.
56
Wahrheits-Freund, 14 July 1869, 28 July 1869
57
Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 383-84.
58
“… ganz Amerika wie im Wirbelwind bewegt.” Wahrheits-Freund, 1 September 1869.
59
On Harris, see Jorgenson, The State and the Non-Public School, 133, 156; Leidecker, Yankee Teacher,
291-93; Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 378; McGreevy, Catholicism and American
Freedom, 117-18. On Cincinnati, see Helfman, “The Cincinnati ‘Bible War,’” 370-71. See also Bernard
Mandel, “Religion in the Public Schools of Ohio,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 58
(1949): 185-206; Stephan F. Brumberg, “The Cincinnati Bible War (1869-1873) and its Impact on the
Education of the City’s Protestants, Catholics, and Jews,” The American Jewish Archives Journal 45 no. 2
(2002): 11-46.
286
their children to free public schools but were offended by the insensitivity of Protestant
teachers.60 Archbishop Purcell’s brother had encouraged these Cincinnatians to believe
Catholic authorities supported their proposal, but Purcell and Schwenniger quickly turned
against any merger plans. The Wahrheits-Freund took the stance that “Catholics are
specifically bound by their conscience to condemn a school system that categorically
bans any religious instruction.”61 The paper declared, “No compromise as long as it
infringes a principle that is sacred to us.”62
Most German Americans, however, joined the forces of secularization. Weighing
in on the issue in August 1869, the Cincinnati Volksfreund empathized with Catholic
students who “were subjected to puritanical rules.” The paper condemned all obstacles
that stood in the way of Catholic parents sending their children to public schools. Yet
like Republican organs, this Democratic sheet maintained that “the separate education of
future citizens is not in accord with our republican national life.” The consolidated,
secular system the school board proposed would be “a step toward the implementation of
the principles [of the] Declaration of Independence.” The Volksfreund believed German
immigrants deserved some of the credit for the plan for they had provided a
counterweight to native-born Protestants by challenging practices the paper called
“fanatical encroachments.” Somewhat misleadingly, the Volksfreund suggested that
immigrants had brought with them the experience of “non-sectarian” schooling in
60
See for example a priest’s letter to Purcell about the public schools of Yellow Springs, Ohio. James A.
J. Burns to John B. Purcell, Springfield, Ohio, 26 February 1873, box 28, Archbishop Purcell Papers, ACC.
In St. Louis, Superintendent Harris already made public schools essentially secular. Hoey, “Missouri
Education at the Crossroads,” 380.
61
“Die Katholiken nämlich in ihrem Gewissen verbunden, ein Schulsystem zu verurtheilen, welches jeden
religiösen Unterricht grundsätzlich verbannt.” Wahrheits-Freund, 1 September 1869; Helfman, “The
Cincinnati ‘Bible War,’” 378-79.
62
“Kein Compromiß, sobald ein Prinzip durch dasselbe angetastet wird, das uns heilig ist.” WahrheitsFreund, 1 September 1869. See also Wahrheits-Freund, 26 April 1871, 3 May 1871.
287
Europe. Ignoring the religious content of German schooling that did endure, the editors
pointed out that German schools had raised the “level of education” of “the whole people
[Volk],” Catholics, Protestants, Reform Protestants, and Jews.63
The Volksfreund was right that secular public schooling was a point of “nonpartisan” agreement among German Americans.64 The Cincinnati’s Volksblatt,
Cleveland’s Wächter am Erie, St. Charles’s Demokrat, and St. Louis’s Westliche Post
and Anzeiger agreed that public funding of any religious education threatened Missouri
and Ohio’s “free schools.” It would “alienate the citizens of this great republic, who
consist of so many diverse elements, from each other” and halt the progressive trend
toward secular education.65 Missouri’s Liberal Republican Party, which had briefly
united most of the state’s German Democrats and Republicans, included a plank in its
1870 platform denying parochial schools public funding.66
Many Anglo-Americans opposed secular schooling just as strongly as they
opposed funding Catholic schools. Indeed, they sometimes equated the two tendencies.
Protestants around the country depicted the Cincinnati Board of Education’s decision to
prohibit Bible readings as a victory of “Scheming Priestcraft.”67 Among the protests,
63
“… unter die puritanische Regel gezwungen wurden”; “Die getrennte Erziehung der zukünftiger Bürger
und Bürgerinnen derselben Stadt und desselben Staates ist nicht im Einklage mit unserem republikanischen
Staats- und Volksleben.” “ein Schritt zur Verwirkung der Grundsatze … [der] UnabhängigkeitsErklärung”; “fanatischen Uebergriffe”; “Simultanschulen”; “Bildungsstufe”; “das ganze Volk.” Cincinnati
Volksfreund, 28 August 1869. The newspaper approved of the Prussian system of allowing parents to
choose which religious instruction their children attended.
64
“Unparteilichkeit.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 2 September 1869.
65
“Freischulen”; “… die aus so verschiedenen Elementen bestehenden Bürger dieser großen Republik für
immer einander … entfremden.” Cincinnati Volksblatt quoted in the Wahrheits-Freund, 14 July 1869. See
also Anzeiger des Westens, 11 September 1873; Westliche Post Wochen-Blatt, 10 November 1869; Wächter
am Erie, 23 March 1869; St. Charles Demokrat, 30 September 1869.
66
Westliche Post, 3 September 1870.
67
Jorgenson, The State and the Non-Public School, 120; Helfman, “The Cincinnati ‘Bible War,’” 379-80;
Amory D. Mayo, Religion in the Common Schools: Three Lectures Delivered in the City of Cincinnati, in
October, 1869 (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1869).
288
petitioning, and public meetings of the “Bible Wars,” the defenders of reading scripture
seemed to forget that the Catholic Church did not support secular schools. Yet as Amory
Mayo, a conservative Unitarian minister who sat on the school board, noted, AngloAmericans were “suddenly appalled by the fear that a Catholic and an Atheistic sect have
struck hands to divide, distract, and wholly change that great institution [the public
school system].”68 The city’s English-language press, with the exception of Murat
Halstead’s Cincinnati Commercial, vigorously opposed the prohibition of Bible
reading.69 Most native-born editors shared Mayo’s view that the Bible only imparted the
non-sectarian Protestant morality that the American founders had acknowledged as “the
supreme law of human life.”70 Anglo-Missourians expressed similar opinions. The
Missouri Superintendent of Education argued “moral and religious education” must be
included in state schools.71 In 1869, the Missouri State Teachers’ Association met in a
Baptist church in Kansas City and opened with a reading of scripture.72 A majority of
Anglo-Americans in Ohio and Missouri believed American citizens must be exposed to
Protestant values.
In Missouri, German-American secularists united with Anglo-American
Protestants to oppose any public funding of parochial schools. The budding Germanspeaking journalist, Joseph Pulitzer, was the first to call on the Missouri House to
reconsider the bill that allowed public money to go to Catholic schools.73 Although he
68
Mayo, Religion in the Common Schools, 13; McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction, 28.
Helfman, “The Cincinnati ‘Bible War,’” 380; Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 377.
70
Mayo, Religion in the Common Schools, 14.
71
Thomas Parker, Report of the Superintendent of Public Schools in the State of Missouri to the TwentyFourth General Assembly, Adjourned Session (Jefferson City: Ellwood Kirby, 1869), 34. Quoted in Hoey,
“Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 377.
72
Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 378.
73
St. Charles Demokrat, 3 March 1870; Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 385.
69
289
would go on to great fame in New York, the Hungarian-born Missouri Representative
was still very much a protégé of his employers, Carl Schurz and Emil Preetorius at the
Westliche Post.74 Other men associated with St. Louis’s German establishment also
stepped in to oppose dividing the public school fund. A German-American lawyer
involved in the Westliche Post’s business and political endeavors rushed to Jefferson City
with Superintendent Harris to represent the school district.75 German-American state
senator Henry Gottschalk proposed a sweeping amendment to the Missouri Constitution
that would prohibit public funding of any sectarian organizations.76 Gottschalk’s
amendment won overwhelming support from Missouri legislators, and in November
1870, over 92 percent of Missouri voters ratified it. Even counties with a large GermanCatholic population and St. Louis itself supported banning public funding of private
schools.77 Catholic leaders such as Spaunhorst were isolated on the loosing side of the
controversy.
In contrast to Missouri, Ohio found German-American secularists at odds with
Anglo-American Protestants. The bulk of German Cincinnatians supported the school
board’s step of taking the Bible out of the classroom, while Anglo-Protestants fought the
measure. In February 1870, the Superior Court of Cincinnati ruled by a two-to-one
majority that “our common schools can not be secularized under the Constitution of
74
Saalberg, “The Westliche Post of St. Louis,” 185-228.
St. Charles Demokrat, 3 March 1870. On the lawyer, James Taussig, see Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 162.
76
Loeb and Shoemaker, eds., Journal of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 85-86; Hoey,
“Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 385-86. Ohio’s 1851 constitutional already barred “religious
sects” from “any part of the school funds of this state.” Ohio Constitutional Convention, Official Report of
the Proceedings and Debates of the Third Constitutional Convention of Ohio, 2 vols. (Cleveland: W.S.
Robison & Co., 1873-1874), 1:xxx.
77
The state’s aggregate vote was 126,118 to 10,789. About 65 percent of voters in heavily German and
Catholic Osage County supported the amendment, as did about 83 percent of voters in St. Louis County.
Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 390-91.
75
290
Ohio,” which as a “Christian” state encouraged schools “as means of instruction in
religion, morality and knowledge.”78 The following month, German Americans gathered
in the Arbeiter Hall to express their opinion on the “Bible question.” Chaired by a
Protestant pastor, Republican politician August Willich, Democratic editor Emil Rothe,
and Republican judge J.B. Stallo, the meeting passed resolutions protesting the court’s
decision. This group of Cincinnati Germans was convinced “that only a free school,
independent from very confessional character can educate enlightened and patriotic
citizens.” They opposed “Bible reading as well as the singing of spiritual songs in state
schools.”79 In April 1870, Cincinnati voters endorsed the school board decision and the
Arbeiter Hall resolutions, voting by a convincing majority to return the “anti-Bible”
representatives to the school board.80
The German-Ohioan supporters of secular education eventually triumphed. The
Cincinnati case was appealed to the Supreme Court of Ohio, where Stallo continued to
lend his legal talent and immigrant perspective to the Bible reading prohibition. The
judge and philosopher had trained for the Catholic priesthood before he turned to
Hegelian philosophy, decided to identify as a freethinker, and married a Protestant
woman. From the first, his legal arguments had focused on explaining why Bible reading
in schools was offensive to Catholics. Not only did Catholics relate to the Bible
differently than Protestants, he argued, but teachers were never “abstract, non78
Helfman, “The Cincinnati ‘Bible War,’” 381, 385. Quotation from the Opinion of Judge Marcellus B.
Hagans, Superior Court of Cincinnati, 15 February 1870, in John D. Minor et al., The Bible in the Public
Schools: Arguments before the Superior Court of Cincinnati in the Case of Minor v. Board of Education of
Cincinnati (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1870), 370, 371. For the Judgment, see pages 419-20.
79
“Bibelfrage”; “… daß nur eine freie Schule, unabhängig von jeden confessionellen Charakter, im Stande
ist, aufgeklärte und vaterlandsliebende Bürger zu erziehen”; “das Bibellesen sowohl, wie das Absingen
geistlicher Lieder in den Staatsschulen.” St. Charles Demokrat, 7 April 1870. The Wahrheits-Freund
reported Catholics displeased but distanced itself form the issue. Wahrheits-Freund, 23 February 1870.
80
Helfman, “The Cincinnati ‘Bible War,’” 386.
291
denominational Christians.” He observed that if the Bible “be read at all as the exponent
of religious truth, explanations of a critical nature … should be added.”81 He reasoned
that because the Bible could not be read without interpretation, it was impossible to use
scripture to teach non-sectarian morality. Stallo also challenged the lower court’s notion
that the United States was a Christian country: “If this is a Christian country, in the sense
that the non-Christians have no rights which the Christians are bound to respect, or in the
narrower sense, that the Christians enjoy rights and privileges, which the law denies to
the non-Christians, the time has come for the refluence of the wave which has brought so
many millions of European thinkers and laborers to the shores of the new Western
world.”82 Immigration, in Stallo’s eyes, had fundamentally changed the country. When
the Ohio Supreme Court ruled in Stallo’s favor in December 1872, it confirmed that those
waves of immigrants had transformed American citizenship. There was no going back.83
*****
Meanwhile, events in Europe gave Americans a perspective on the association
between religious education and nation-making. American citizens of all backgrounds
could plainly see their own controversy paralleled to the one unleashed by the German
policies that became know collectively as the Kulturkampf. Like many American
Republicans, Chancellor Bismarck believed that German Catholics’ loyalty to Rome
81
Minor et al., The Bible in the Public Schools, 65.
Ibid., 71-72.
83
The court did not prohibit Bible reading in Ohio public schools, but rather defended the right of the
Cincinnati Board of Education to exclude religious texts from the classroom. On the rise of secularism, see
Helfman, “The Cincinnati ‘Bible War,’” 386; Perko, A Time to Favor Zion, 204-05. For a useful
documentary history of secularization in all the states, see also, Samuel W. Brown, The Secularization of
American Education (New York City: Columbia University Teachers College, 1912).
82
292
threatened the “unity won on the battlefield.”84 Himself a pietistic Lutheran repulsed by
Catholicism, Bismarck capitalized on anti-Catholic hysteria and the secular impulses
among German liberals. The German Empire’s attack on the Catholic Church was more
concerted than that of any other state. In 1871, it became a prosecutable offense for a
priest to use the pulpit to communicate any message deemed “political.” The following
year, members of Catholic religious orders were prohibited from any part in German
public education.85 The Jesuit order was expelled from German territory, and in 1873,
the state took control of training and appointing Catholic clergy. German authorities tried
their best to enforce these laws and passed further discriminatory legislation until in
1878, over half of Prussia’s priests were in exile or in prison.86 Sensing that he was only
encouraging Catholics to defend their faith, Bismarck let the campaign wane at the end of
the decade when a new pope was elected.87
Facing anti-Catholicism in the Untied States, German-American Catholics
identified with the victims of the Kulturkampf. Catholic newspapers such as the Amerika
and the Wahrheits-Freund included news of the Prussian-led attacks on Catholics in
nearly every issue during the years following 1871. Catholic organizations sponsored
lectures reporting on Bismarck’s persecutions.88 In August 1872, 750 German-Catholic
84
Otto von Bismarck, Die gesammelten Werke (Berlin: O. Stollberg, 1924), 15:332. Quoted and translated
in Ronald J. Ross, The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf: Catholicism and State Power in Imperial
Germany (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1998), 11. For a succinct
recounting of the conclusions reached in the extensive German-language literature, see Clark, Iron
Kingdom, 568-76.
85
Bismarck was most directly concerned with Polish Catholics who retained control over schools in
Prussia’s eastern territories and the residents of Alsace and Lorraine who remained loyal to France despite
Prussian annexation. Erich Schmidt-Volkmar, Der Kulturkampf in Deutschland, 1871-1890 (Göttingen:
Musterschmidt-Verlag, 1962), 73-74.
86
Ross, The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, 7.
87
Ibid.; Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984), 207-52; Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 42-49.
88
Wahrheits-Freund, 8 January 1873; Amerika, 4 November 1872
293
Cincinnatians gathered to protest the German chancellor’s policies. An exiled Jesuit
priest addressed the group, which resolved “to assure our brothers in Germany that their
sad situation hurts us deeply.”89 American Catholics received other firsthand reports. A
priest traveling in northern Germany wrote to Archbishop Purcell that “there cannot be
another country on the globe, where under the cloak of liberal concessions and national
demands the church received harder blow, than in this empire of blood and iron.”90 A
German Cincinnatian studying at an Austrian seminary related the worsening situation to
the archbishop. He believed that Bismarck had his sights on “the total extinction of
Catholic life and the subjection of our holy church to the will and caprice of infidel
rulers.”91 By the time the young seminarian returned to the United States in 1875,
German Catholics had begun to emigrate to escape the Kulturkampf.92 A priest in
Springfield, Ohio reported that five young men had joined his parish from the heavily
Catholic territory of Lorraine, which Prussia had acquired from France as a condition of
the 1871 peace settlement.93 A correspondent to the Wahrheits-Freund noted that
Prussian persecution had swelled the ranks of German-American Catholicism.94
German-born Catholics still saw the United States as a haven, but their solidarity
with their persecuted brethren made Catholicism’s transnational reach more apparent.
Church leaders counseled world-wide unity and vigilance against the threats of
89
“… unsere Glaubensbrüder in Deutschland zu versichern, daß uns ihre traurige Lage tief schmerzt.”
Westliche Post, 7 August 1872; Cincinnati Volksblatt, 5 August 1872.
90
Bernhard H. Engbers to John B. Purcell, Münster, Germany, 4 January 1872, box 27, Purcell Papers,
AAC.
91
Charles S. Kemper, to John B. Purcell, Innsbruck, Austria, 22 November 1872, box 27, Purcell Papers,
AAC.
92
Michael Phayer, “German Catholic Immigrants: Historical Background,” in The Encyclopedia of
American Catholic History, ed. Glazier and Shelley, 569-71.
93
J.N. Thisse to John B. Purcell, Springfield, Ohio 27 September 1872 box 27, Purcell Papers, AAC.
94
Wahrheits-Fruend, 8 January 1873.
294
Protestantism, secularism, and nationalism.95 Reviewing the developments of 1872, the
Amerika identified a “great war” between the Church and its enemies. On one side, stood
the faithful, the Vatican, and the German bishops. On the other, massed such men as
Charles Darwin, renegade priest Ignaz Döllinger, Otto von Bismarck, and German
Marxist Karl Liebknecht.96 Rather than see Europe’s rising nation states as bearers of
progress, German-American Catholic authorities believed modern Europe was sinking
back “into the bare old heathenism” of pre-Christian Europe. “It was an appalling
slavery,” the Amerika wrote, “a nameless misery, in which the hellish principle of the
whole pagan world sunk as if into a chasm. A chasm—whether the constitutional form
was republican or monarchical.”97 Though American Church leaders certainly preferred
a secular republic to a Protestant monarchy, Catholic periodicals feared the antiCatholicism expressed by Protestant and unchurched Americans. For those Catholics
who had chosen immigration, North America was still a better place to be Catholic than
Europe. Yet nowhere were Catholics safe from the rising force of nationalism.
The Amerika found it particularly ominous that “since the last Franco-German
war, it has become so common to depict everything American as terrible, everything
95
Wahrheits-Freund, 1 February 1871. For German-American Catholics’ paradoxical support of religious
freedom and opposition to secularism, see especially Jon Gjerde, Minds of the West. See also Conzen,
“Immigrant Religion and the Public Sphere: the German Catholic Milieu in America,” in GermanAmerican Immigration and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective, ed. Helbich and Kamphoefner, 69-116;
Conzen, “Immigrant Religion and the Republic: German Catholics in Nineteenth-Century America,”
German Historical Institute Bulletin 35 (2004): 43-56; Philip Gleason, The Conservative Reformers:
German-American Catholics and the Social Order (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968);
John T. McGreevy, “Catholicism in the United States and the Problem of Diversity: The View form
History,” in What’s Left? Liberal American Catholics, ed. Mary Jo Weaver (Bloomington: University of
Indiana Press, 1999), 191-204.
96
Amerika, 31 December 1872. For similar sentiment, see Wahrheits-Freund, 25 January 1871.
97
“… in das nackte alte Heidenthum”; “Es war eine entsetzliche Sklaverei, ein namenloses Elend, in
welches dieser höllische Grundsatz die ganze heidenische Welt wie in einen Abgrund versenkt hat. In
einem Abgrund; mochte die Form der Verfassung republikanisch oder monarchisch sein.” Amerika, 21
October 1872. See also Wahrheits-Freund, 1 February 1871.
295
German as exemplary.”98 Germany was increasingly a model for the United States
following the Civil War. “There can be little doubt,” a German historian remarks “that in
the half-century following the American Civil War, Americans began to look to Germany
for suggestions and inspiration in coping with the mounting problems of a mushrooming
industrial civilization.”99 Unification signaled Germany’s progress, making Americans
more interested than ever in German education. In 1873, the St. Charles Demokrat
observed that in earlier years any criticism of the Untied States had been met with the
retort: “Well, why don’t you leave if you don’t like it here?” Now, the editor sensed a
“gratifying” change in English-language lectures, magazines, reviews, and daily
conversation: “the beginning of self-criticism.” No longer did Americans claim “there is
no other land in the whole world like America.”100 Comparisons between American and
German schooling, Friedrich Münch noted in 1875, “almost always turn out in favor of
the latter.”101 Yet Münch himself counseled caution. He concluded that although the
German education system could boast compulsory schooling, better prepared teachers,
98
“Seit dem letzten deutsch-französischen Kriege ist es so üblich geworden, alles amerikanische als
erbärmlich, alles deutschländisch aber als musterhaft zu bezeichnen.” Wahrheits-Freund, 1 January 1873.
For more evidence that Americans were increasingly interested in Germany, especially German education,
see Amerika, 22 October 1872, 2 November 1872, 24 November 1872; St. Charles Demokrat, 27 February
1873; “Ein Amerikaner uber europäische Schulen,” Der deutsche Pionier 5 (1872): 249-50; “Der Haß
anderer Nationen gegen Deutschland,” Der deutsche Pionier 5 (1873): 299-301; Carl Türke, Rom und
Amerika: Eine Culturskizze allen patriotischen Bürgern der Vereinigten Staaten gewidmet (Cincinnati,
1875), Fick Pamphlet Collection, German-Americana Collection, University of Cincinnati; Charles Phelps
Taft, “The German University and the American College: An essay delivered before the Cincinnati Literary
Club, January 7, 1871,” manuscript scrapbooks, vol. 1., 337-64, The Literary Club of Cincinnati Records,
CHS.
99
Jurgen Herbst, “Introduction,” in German Influences on Education in the United States, ed. Geitz,
Heideking, and Herbst, 11.
100
“Well, warum gehst Du nicht fort, wenn es Dir hier nicht gefällt?”; “erfreulich”; “der Beginn der
Selbstkritik”; “es ist in der ganzen Welt kein Land wie Amerika.” St. Charles Demokrat, 13 March 1873.
101
“… fast immer zu Gunsten der letzteren ausfallen.” St. Charles Demokrat, 3 June 1875.
296
and more advanced pedagogy, it was subject to more sectarian control than American
schools.102
German Americans’ response to the Kulturkampf reflected the slightly more
critical approach to the German Empire that developed after their euphoric optimism of
1870. On the one hand, leading German Americans saw the separation of church and
state as an important part of Germany’s political development and believed that the
Catholic Church was an obstacle to German unity. The Democratic Cincinnati
Volksfreund defended Bismarck’s assertion of control over Catholic authorities in
Prussia’s Polish eastern territories, believing that together with the local aristocracy, the
Church threatened “the one true principle of the course toward national, political, and
religious equality.”103 Catholics brought the Kulturkampf upon themselves, the paper
suggested with “tactless language, ‘with or without episcopal approval,’” which “not
infrequently irritates.”104 The Republican Volksblatt similarly defended Prussia’s efforts
to incorporate its new westerns territories of Alsace and Lorraine, which were
overwhelmingly Catholic. The newspaper considered it necessary to compel loyalty in
regions where the Catholic Church actively resisted annexation. Imperial rule with the
cultural “Germanization” it entailed could only end “once the foundations of intellectual,
industrial, and commercial intercourse between Germany and Alsace are laid.”105 The
102
St. Charles Demokrat, 3 June 1875.
“Das einzig richtige Prinzip der nationalen, politischen und religiösen Gleichberechtigung Bahn.”
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 7 March 1872.
104
“… taktlose Sprache ‘mit oder ohne bischofliche Approbation’”; “nicht selten Aegerniß gibt.”
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 22 August 1872.
105
“Wenn die Grundlagen geistigen, gewerblichen und kommerziellen Verkehres zwischen Deutschland
und dem Elsaß wieder gelegt sind …” Cincinnati Volksblatt, 1 November 1872. On German-American
reactions to the annexation, see Trefousse, “German American Immigrants and the Newly Founded Reich,”
in America and the Germans, ed. Trommler and McVeigh, 162. On Alsace and Lorraine, see Michael B.
Gross, The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
103
297
self-consciously secular mainstream German-American press accepted that there were
times when the state had an interest in interfering with religion.106
German-American politicians and editors were ambivalent, however, about how
the Kulturkampf was conducted. Democrats were particularly wary of endorsing
religious persecution. “What, by heaven, do the maintenance of the lessons of their
church and the instruction of the youth by the living religious have to do with the future,
power, and glory of the German Empire?” asked the Volksfreund in 1872.107 Even the
Republican Westliche Post, no friend of the Catholic Church, was uncomfortable with the
Kulturkampf. “The core of the great controversy,” in the editors’ opinion, was whether
the German administration was balancing religious freedom against legitimate
restrictions on those forces that threatened the state:
The state has no right to limit or even to want to control the freedom of opinion
and conscience of its citizens. So that it cannot do that, even if it were inclined to,
the constitutions of all free states have outlined the principle that the state have
nothing to do with the church as such. But does that give any church the right to
misuse its power over the minds of its believers to subvert the necessary authority
of the state over its citizens?108
Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 240-43. On the efforts to “Germanize” the
western territories, see Dan P. Silverman, Reluctant Union: Alsace-Lorraine and Imperial Germany, 18711918 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1972).
106
Wächter am Erie, 24, 26 February 1872; New-Yorker Staatszeitung, 29 December 1873; Franz von
Löher, “Der Haß anderer Nationen gegen Deutschland,” Der deutsche Pionier 5 (1873): 300. On the
Anzeiger des Westens, see Amerika, 9 November 1873. On the Westliche Post, see Freitag, Friedrich
Hecker, 439-51. See also M. Orestes Kolbeck, American Opinion on the Kulturkampf, 1871-1882
(Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1942), 42-43.
107
“Was beim Himmel, haben der Verfechtung der Lehren ihrer Kirche und dem Unterrichts der Jugend
lebenden Ordensgeistliche mit der Zukunft, Kraft und Herrlichkeit des neu entstandenen deutschen Reichs
zu thun?” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 22 June 1872.
108
“Der Kern der großen Streitfrage”; “Der Staat hat kein Recht, die Meinungs- und Gewissens-Freiheit
seiner Bürger einschränken oder gar controlliren zu wollen. Damit er Das nicht thun kann, selbst wenn er
dazu geneigt wäre, haben die Verfassungen aller freien Staaten den Grundsatz [dar]gestellt, daß der Staate
mit der Kirche als solche nichts zu schaffen habe. Aber giebt Das irgend einer Kirche das Recht, ihre
Macht über die Gemüther ihrer Gläubigen, zur Untergrabung der nothwendigen Autorität des Staats über
dessen Bürger zu mißbrauchen?” Westliche Post, 9 July 1872.
298
In 1872, the Westliche Post was reluctant to take sides. In any case, many GermanAmerican observers agreed that the German administration’s anti-Catholic policies
had not furthered its own goals. The success of the Catholic Central Party in
Reichstag elections in 1874 seemed to confirm that the Kulturkampf only strengthened
Catholic solidarity.109 Perhaps German Americans’ uncertainty about how to
approach the persecution of Catholics is best illustrated by the scarcity of editorials
addressing the subject. Many editors printed cable news and correspondence
announcing the unfolding restrictions on the Catholic Church without registering their
own opinions.110
As German Americans became more skeptical of Bismarck’s policies, AngloAmerican Protestants expressed increasing interest. Those Americans who supported
Bible reading in public schools felt more affinity for the Kulturkampf than the secular
German Americans who had opposed it. They gave German Americans cause to fear the
overtly Protestant control in the United States and the German Empire.111 The Wächter
am Erie, for example, protested the way that native-born Protestants tried to use the
international “church dispute” to divide German Americans.112 Many Anglo-American
Protestants admired the restrictions Bismarck placed on the Catholic Church.113 In
109
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 22 August 1872; Westliche Post, 9 July 1872.
Westliche Post, 22 July 1872; Columbus Westbote, 3, 22 May 1873; Cincinnati Volksblatt, 12 May
1873; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 16, 17 January 1874. To some extent, the absence of editorials on the
Kulturkampf reflects trends within the newspaper industry. German-American newspapers were
increasingly viable commercial concerns rather than partisan mouthpieces. This transition led to a
reduction in all editorial content, but editors still expressed their political opinions and could have taken a
stronger stand on the Kulturkampf.
111
A German-born Cincinnati pastor provided an unusual exception, publishing a pamphlet in support of
the Kulturkampf in 1875. Türke, Rom und Amerika.
112
“Kirchenstreit.” Wächter am Erie, 10 September 1875. See also Kolbeck, American Opinion on the
Kulturkampf, 42-43.
113
Kolbeck, American Opinion on the Kulturkampf, 14-49.
110
299
private, President Grant expressed pleasure that the German Empire was a Protestant
power.114 Ohioan Rutherford B. Hayes went further and during his 1875 gubernatorial
campaign styled himself as a crusader in the international fight against Catholicism. One
of Hayes’ correspondents recommended that the rising Republican study the laws that
Bismarck had implemented, as “no statesman of moderntimes [sic] has understood so
well how to handle this [the Catholic] question.”115 Although Hayes was no Bismarck,
he believed Protestant Republicans could unite around the issues of temperance, antiCatholicism, and “non-sectarian” public schools.116 A handful of established GermanAmerican politicians, such as Carl Schurz, would reconcile Hayes’ Protestant antiCatholicism with their own secular anti-Catholicism. As we shall see, however, most of
the prominent German Americans of the Civil War Era would be alienated by the
Republicans’ resurgent Protestant nationalism.
*****
During the last three decades of the century, immigration from southern and
eastern Europe would exacerbate cultural tensions, and Jim Crow would entrench racial
segregation, but the contours of the Gilded Age debate over how to use schools to initiate
new citizens into the American national community took form during Reconstruction.
The conventions elected to revisit the Ohio constitution in 1873 and the Missouri
constitution in 1875 provided a forum for the positions that had emerged in the previous
114
William T. Sherman to Ulysses S. Grant, St. Louis, 10 August 1867, in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant,
ed. Simon, 17: 482-83. See also, Tyler Anbinder, “Ulysses S. Grant, Nativist,” Civil War History 43
(1997): 119-41.
115
Daniel Ullman to Rutherford B. Hayes, Grand View-on-Hudson, N.Y., 20 January 1877, reel 55, Hayes
Papers, HPC.
116
For more evidence that this was a conscious campaign strategy, see McAfee, Religion, Race, and
Reconstruction, 178-80.
300
years.117 Both conventions were somewhat anticlimactic, but they captured Americans’
attitudes toward public education. Each convention revealed that European institutions
had captured the American imagination since 1870, although some delegates found this a
worrying trend. During the deliberations, different groups staked out their positions on
education. German-American secularists and their allies had won important legal and
practical victories, but they faced powerful opposition from native-born Protestants who
believed public schools should instill Protestant values in America’s youth. Although a
few Catholics continued to challenge Protestant hegemony, Catholic Americans were
divided. Finally, there were no African Americans in either convention. The absence of
black delegates indicated the marginalized position from which African Americans would
have to campaign for educational parity. Ten years earlier, black Missourians had seized
education as a route to full citizenship, but in 1875 Democrats threatened the concessions
they had won. The education debates illuminate the state of black citizenship as
Reconstruction was drawing to a close.
During the constitutional conventions in Missouri and Ohio, delegates speculated
on whether Europe had anything to teach the United States about educating its citizens.
They repeatedly invoked the German Empire as a state that provided well-funded,
comprehensive education to its people. A Massachusetts-born Republican who lived
among German immigrants in northeastern Ohio assured his state’s convention that
“Prussia owes her superiority and strength to-day to her compulsory schools.” He saw
strength and justice in the Prussian system, proclaiming, “She stands forth the first nation
in the galaxy of nations, powerful and grand, and it is because she is so just to her poor—
117
The Ohio constitutional convention lasted into 1874, shifting its deliberations from Columbus to
Cincinnati in late 1873.
301
her common people.”118 Another delegate agreed that “it is her vigorous system of
compulsory education that, in sixty years, has raised her [Prussia] from a bankrupt and
conquered petty kingdom to the ruling empire of Europe, and made her the seat and home
of intelligence, industry and wealth.” This Ohioan believed that Prussian power rested on
a broad foundation of engaged individuals. He cited “reliable statistics” from Germany
to show that education had “enable[d] the citizen to vote with intelligence.”119 Prussia’s
admirers did not see Germans as subjects of Wilhelm I. Instead, Germans were
“citizens.” Those Americans who promoted the Prussian example believed Horace
Mann’s prophecy of the 1840s was coming true. Prussia was rising. They thought its
well educated population had ensured the kingdom’s industrial progress and military
might and was now demanding increasing control over its own governance.
Prussia was a familiar point of reference, but many Americans remained skeptical
that American citizens should be educated like European subjects. Missouri’s nativeborn Democrats were particularly suspicious of the German Empire.120 All but seven of
the sixty-eight delegates who gathered in Jefferson City in the spring of 1875 belonged to
the party that was only just regaining power. Over half of the delegates had served in the
Confederate army or actively supported the Confederacy.121 Since the lifting of voting
118
For Anson Pease’s speech, see Ohio Constitutional Convention, Official Report, vol. 2, pt. 2, 2216. For
biographical information, see Ohio Constitutional Convention, Official Report, 1:iii; U.S. Census Bureau,
Population Schedule of the Ninth Census of the United States 1870, manuscript returns for Massillon City,
Stark County, Ohio, 23.
119
Ohio Constitutional Convention, Official Report, vol. 2, pt. 2, 2245.
120
In the Ohio convention, principal William P. Kerr of Licking County spoke against compulsory
schooling along Prussian lines, saying, “Prussia has the best system in the world to make artificial men—
soldiers for Emperor William—those who will grace a despotism. But we do not desire that kind of men
trained up here, nor that system of education that makes such men.” Physician George W. Hill of Ashland
County rejected the “Prussian system of compulsory education, which makes men mere plastic figures of
the state.” Ohio Constitutional Convention, Official Report, vol. 2 pt. 2, 2192, 2238.
121
Floyd C. Shoemaker, “Personnel of the Convention,” in Journal of the Missouri Constitutional
Convention of 1875, ed. Loeb and Shoemaker, 1: 67, 64-65.
302
prohibitions in 1870, such men had briefly lent their support to Liberal Republicans
before inaugurating several decades of Democratic rule with the election of a Democratic
governor and U.S. senator in 1872.122 Most of these Democrats agreed with a Kentuckyborn Unionist who claimed the educational system the Republicans had established in the
state in 1865 was “founded and administered on the theory that the children of the people
belong to the State, and that the State is empowered to rear and educate them in such a
manner that they become the servants and defendants of the State.” He believed it was
“impossible to disguise the fact that there is a manifest and growing tendency of public
opinion to drift into the European system to the great danger of the subversion of our
republican institutions.”123 A Confederate who had been forced to flee Missouri during
the war echoed this point, asserting that public education was fundamentally “antidemocratic and anti-republican.”124 The role German-Americans had played in the
Republican Party no doubt intensified the Democrats’ distrust of foreign influences. Yet
even those Americans who recoiled at the thought of learning from Europe understood
that Prussia was considered an educational standard. A St. Louis Democrat, for example,
claimed that French and German schools were stronger in “constant & unremitting
attention to the foundations of learning before the higher branches.” Further debate
122
Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 323-24.
Shoemaker and Loeb, eds., Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 9:74. On Elijah
H. Norton of Platte County, see Leopard, “Biographical Sketches of the Delegates,” in Journal of the
Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, ed. Loeb and Shoemaker, 1:98.
124
Shoemaker and Loeb, eds. Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 9:113. On
Phillip Pipkin, see Leopard, “Biographical Sketches of the Delegates,” in Journal of the Missouri
Constitutional Convention of 1875, ed. Loeb and Shoemaker, 1:110-11.
123
303
revealed he was using this example to justify reducing public instruction to an absolute
minimum.125
German immigrants in the Missouri and Ohio conventions identified themselves
as strong supporters of comprehensive and secular public schooling. In Missouri, where
the very future of the public school was in doubt, four of the five German-born delegates
fought for education. One of only of six Republicans in the convention, Charles D.
Eitzen had long served as mayor in the German settlement of Hermann and took an active
role in managing its public schools.126 Perhaps because his Republican constituency in
Gasconade County was outnumbered in the convention, he hardly spoke. One of his few
contributions was a resolution to oppose shortening the period of time during which
Missouri children would be eligible for free schooling.127
Two German-speaking Democrats joined Eitzen in defending the Republicans’
education system. A Hegelian philosopher and close associate of Superintendent Harris,
Henry Brokmeyer, believed that the convention should compel every child to attend
school. “I would like to see in this State,” he told the other delegates, “a system of
education which will commence with the lowest branches & end with the highest; and
every dollar I have in the world I would place at the service of the State in establishing
such a system.” Showing his characteristically Hegelian trust in strong institutions, he
declared that education was essential to the relationship between the state and
individuals. In a republic, he explained, citizens instituted laws and had a duty to obey
125
Shoemaker and Loeb, eds. Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 9:106. On
Albert Todd, see Leopard, “Biographical Sketches of the Delegates,” in Journal of the Missouri
Constitutional Convention of 1875, ed. Loeb and Shoemaker, 1:110-11.
126
Buel Leopard, “Biographical Sketches of the Delegates,” in Journal of the Missouri Constitutional
Convention of 1875, ed. Loeb and Shoemaker, 1:83-84.
127
Shoemaker and Loeb, eds. Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 9:53.
304
them. Only education could ensure they were “capable of instituting good laws” and
“receive[d] intelligence sufficient to understand those duties.”128 Joseph Pulitzer, who
had recently left the Westliche Post and joined the Democratic Party, also showed his
intellectual debt to Brokmeyer’s Hegelian circle. The popular newspaperman argued that
“the state is not a volunteer organization.” Since citizens had to obey laws and pay taxes,
they all benefited from being educated enough to understand the law and prevent
unnecessary public spending.129
In the Ohio convention, where the evenly balanced parties both supported public
education, German-American delegates sought to bar religious lessons from all the state’s
public schools.130 Julius Freiburg, a Bavarian-born merchant and manufacturer, tactfully
voiced his opposition to public funding of sectarian schools. The Jewish Cincinnatian
said that as a member of a religious minority he identified with Catholics. At least in the
United States, he remarked, they did “not meddle in other people’s belief.” Yet Freiburg
worried that funding Catholic schools would prompt every other sect to claim their share,
eroding the state’s ability to provide free education. The Jewish population, he pointed
out, had little trouble with Cincinnati’s secular public schools. He estimated that
although only about one in every twenty-three Cincinnatians was Jewish, as many as one
in three of the Queen City’s high school students came from Jewish families. “The Jews
are not afraid that their children will have any foolishness pumped into them by sending
128
Ibid., 9:70, 72, 71.
Ibid., 9:129, 130.
130
Forty-eight Democrats, fifty Republicans, four Liberal Republicans, and three independents composed
the Ohio convention when it first met. Columbus Westbote, 17 May 1873. Cleveland Republican and
freethinker Jacob Müller also tried unsuccessfully to remove any reference to God from the constitution’s
preamble. He said his constituents had not sent him to Columbus and then Cincinnati “to make a
declaration as to God.” Julius Freiburg pointed out that many terrible things had been done by
governments claiming divine inspiration. Ohio Constitutional Convention, Official Report, vol. 2, pt. 2,
1746, 1751-2.
129
305
them to common schools,” he concluded, “as they believe that their parental control is
strong enough over them to pump all out that might be instilled.”131
Although the Ohio convention welcomed Freiburg’s speech with laughter,
education remained a sensitive issue.132 Joseph Carbery, an Irish-born Catholic, bravely
tried to ensure some of the state’s education fund would go to private schools. Carbery
presented the same arguments Catholic leaders had used in earlier years, and once again
Catholic Ohioans were divided. Other delegates said a minority of their coreligionists
took Carbery’s position. They worried that he was only provoking anti-Catholic
feeling.133 Catholic fears were justified. One delegate angrily described Carbery’s plan
as one where “the people will be taxed in order to educate a race of bigots.”134 As this
comment suggests, Carbery’s opponents expressed a hostility that incorporated deep
prejudice as well as legitimate concerns about sponsoring Catholic instruction. Most of
those who took the floor stated they were in favor of schools “open to all—offensive to
none,” but some derided the Church.135 Claiming neutrality as an “unregenerate sinner,”
an Akron representative summed up the tenor of these remarks:
I, as a citizen, and high representative of the State, must combat the intolerable
insolence of this [Catholic] church government, that aims at the total protection of
individual independence to the one-man power at Rome, that proposes to put the
education of the children of our grand young free State whose aspirations are born
of God, under the control of the monkish minions of that shameless spiritual
despotism, the essence of whose power is founded in blasphemy and falsehood. It
131
Ohio Constitutional Convention, Official Report, vol. 2 pt. 2, 2258.
In the Missouri convention, Henry Spaunhorst had no desire to rehash the conflict of 1870 by
requesting public funding of Catholic schools. He focused instead on an unsuccessful bid to exempt church
property from taxation. In an effort to justify reducing state support of education, a few Anglo-American
delegates complained that St. Louis schools were anti-religious, but this was not central to the debate.
Shoemaker and Loeb, eds. Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 8:337-38, 9:341,
10:45-86.
133
Ohio Constitutional Convention, Official Report, vol. 2, pt. 3, 2333.
134
Ibid., vol. 2, pt. 2, 2280.
135
Ibid., vol. 2, pt. 2, 2237.
132
306
is an impious attack upon the advancing intelligence of the age, and intended to
check the growth of our liberalizing aspirations, and deliberately designed to
crush our manhood, and enslave our conscience to blind subserviency to the
dogmas and dominion of effete superstitions, the worst of all despotisms.136
A Wood County delegate accused Carbery of starting a conflict that could “exceed the
bodily suffering produced by the rack, under the Inquisition.”137
If education could not bridge the divide between Catholic and Protestant
Americans, it held little chance of integrating African Americans into the American
political community as full citizens. No black delegate represented the approximately 2
percent of Ohioans and the 6 percent of Missourians who were African American, but
race still shaped the debates. Missouri delegates presented their racial opinions as they
considered including a section in the Bill of Rights that outlawed slavery. No one
doubted that slavery was a thing of the past, but the majority of the convention liked the
symbolism of the prohibition. Some members, such as German-American Liberal
Republican Louis Gottschalk, welcomed it as a demonstration of goodwill toward the
freed people.138 For others, constitutionally declaring slavery dead symbolized the
illegitimacy of the Republican bodies that had passed Missouri’s emancipation
proclamation of 1865 and the Thirteenth Amendment. They hoped the anti-slavery
clause would mark the end of state action on behalf of African Americans. A former
Confederate colonel was relieved that “the thunder of the Republican party is departing
forever, & that the glorious negro question on which they have subsisted for ten years in
136
137
138
Ibid., vol. 2, pt. 2, 2233.
Ibid., vol. 2, pt. 3, 2188.
Shoemaker and Loeb, eds. Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 4: 292
307
this country is about to die in Missouri.”139 One Kentucky-born Democrat still resented
the time spent on what he referred to as the “nigger proposition.” He asked, “Are we
convened with a view to operate in the interests of the nigger?”140
Democrats resented the way Republicans had made African American education
part of their Reconstruction program. During 1874, Massachusetts senator Charles
Sumner had campaigned to pass federal legislation prohibiting segregated schools.
Congress had passed Sumner’s Civil Rights Bill after the august Republican’s death
without including schooling. The national debate had served, however, to remind
Democrats that comprehensive public schooling entailed both centralization and
obligations to African Americans.141 In the Missouri convention, an out-state delegate
described the political context of public school building in Missouri. Many of his
constituents had lost the right to vote at the time that the county built an “extravagant”
school for which they were still paying.142 Another Democrat grudgingly accepted that
the state must educate its black citizens, despite his conclusion that it had been
“unnatural” to make “citizens of the African population of this State.”143 For the majority
of the convention, the fact that the state’s community of the citizens now included
African Americans appears to have increased their hostility toward public education.
Education, the argument went, was an individual responsibility: “Where a man who is not
industrious enough, who has not thrift enough, who is not enterprising enough to provide
139
Ibid., 4:301. On Junius Holliday, see Leopard, “Biographical Sketches of the Delegates,” in Journal of
the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, ed. Loeb and Shoemaker, 1:88-89.
140
Shoemaker and Loeb, eds. Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 4:307, 306.
141
McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction, 125-49.
142
Shoemaker and Loeb, eds. Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 9:128.
143
Ibid., 4:330-31.
308
some means for the education of his child, is not fit to raise a child.”144 One delegate saw
public education as a slippery slope that could lead to other social provisions such as the
state being obliged to clothe “a pauper Negro.”145
Missouri’s 1875 constitution reflected these Democratic prejudices. When it
came to a vote, the Democratic majority in the convention dismissed Pulitzer’s and
Brokmeyer’s vision of comprehensive education as “utopian.”146 Article XI on education
included a new mandate requiring racial segregation in all the state’s public schools.147
Decentralization and divestment saw to it that this separate provision of education would
not be equal. Democrats slightly reduced the number of years that Missouri children
would be eligible for public schooling.148 They gave county governments more say in
school spending, no longer charging the legislature with distributing school funds so as to
“equalize the amount appropriate for common schools throughout the state.”149 These
measures made a difference on the ground. In 1878, Missouri’s superintendent of
education detailed how school district officials evaded allocating their share of
educational funds to African Americans. In many rural parts of the state, local authorities
failed to enumerate African American children for the purposes of establishing schools.
144
Ibid., 9:118.
Ibid., 9:114.
146
Ibid., 9:266.
147
Loeb, “Constitutions and Constitutional Conventions in Missouri” in Journal of the Missouri
Constitutional Convention of 1875, ed. Loeb and Shoemaker, 1:41.
148
This was despite the admitted popularity of public education among white Missourians. See for
example Shoemaker and Loeb, eds. Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 9:139.
149
Democrats also symbolically eliminated a clause empowering the legislature to make education
compulsory. Loeb, “Constitutions and Constitutional Conventions in Missouri,” in Journal of the Missouri
Constitutional Convention of 1875, ed. Loeb and Shoemaker, 1:40-41. A historian of Missouri writing in
the 1940s described the change as salutary: “The former centralized scheme was dissolved for a democratic
system in which the people were given almost complete control over schools.” Floyd C. Shoemaker,
Missouri and Missourians: Land of Contrasts and People of Achievements (Chicago: Lewis Publishing
Company, 1943), 2:664-65. See also Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 131-32; St. Charles Demokrat,
28 January 1875.
145
309
When challenged by black leaders, the local governments would obstruct any enquiries
until it was too late in the school year to organize the necessary staff and facilities.150
Although African American schools in Ohio also received inadequate support, the
constitution that voters rejected in 1874 did not systematically undermine education.
Even with Democrats in power, the Ohio legislature declined to mandate either
integration or segregation.151
Despite glaring deficiencies, African Americans had more educational
opportunities in Missouri than in most southern states. At century’s end, Missouri would
still lead all other former slave states in the percentage of black children aged five to nine
attending school.152 In other states that avoided federal Reconstruction, African
American public education had hardly got off the ground. Delaware made no movement
toward providing education to African American students, while Kentucky and Maryland
never established more than the theoretical basis for black education. In the states of the
former Confederacy, African Americans, northern philanthropists, and the Freedmen’s
Bureau had taken the lead in establishing schools, and Republican state governments
followed with the infrastructure to support them. Texas, for example, established a state
150
Williams, “The Development of the Negro Public Schools System in Missouri,” 157-58; Savage,
“Legal Provisions for Negro Schools,” 313-15.
151
Ohio Constitutional Convention, Official Report, vol. 2, pt. 2, 2239-41. Republicans tried to
desegregate Ohio schools in the late 1870s. Leonard E. Erickson, “The Color Line in Ohio Public Schools,
1829-1890” (Ph.D. diss., The Ohio State University, 1960), 181-296, 347-50. Ohio’s African Americans
led the nation in challenging the unequal education from 1834 to 1903. J. Morgan Kousser, Dead End: The
Development of Nineteenth-Century Litigation on Racial Discrimination in Schools (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1986), 58-59. See also Frederick A. McGinnis, The Education of Negroes in Ohio (Wilberforce,
Ohio: Curless Printing Company, 1962), 44-70. In 1874, the Ohio constitutional convention rejected a
proposal to require segregated schooling. Ohio Constitutional Convention, Official Report, vol. 2, pt. 2,
2239-41.
152
Anderson, The Education of Southern Blacks, 151. Earlier studies produced slightly different statistics,
but Missouri remained in the top two or three former slave states in African American school attendance.
Du Bois, The Common School and the Negro American, 23; Williams, “The Development of the Negro
Public Schools System in Missouri,” 159.
310
board of education led by an able young Prussian-born man who oversaw the distribution
of state taxes, teacher certification, and even compulsory elementary schooling in
separate black and white schools. Local school authorities and white terrorists resisted
these innovations, and when Democrats regained control of the Texas legislature in 1872,
they began to dismantle the whole system, dispersing school funds to private entities and
abolishing the office of state superintendent. Around the South, “Redeemers” marked the
end of Reconstruction by assailing public education.153
By the time Missouri voters overwhelmingly ratified the new constitution in
October 1875, it was clear that Reconstruction was on the wane. Although black
Missourians voted in the referendum, the state’s Democratic majority signaled it would
not actively defend African American citizenship. Education had emerged as an issue
that immigrants, native-born whites, and African Americans would contest during the
Gilded Age.
The German Empire had assumed a distinctive place in the debate over how to
educate new citizens. Offering an alternative path to national greatness, Germany had
become a polarizing yet unavoidable presence in American discussions of the future.
German Americans had a hand in all of these developments, but their political power was
in doubt. The sense of shared mission that pervaded the German-American public sphere
153
On Texas, see Carl H. Moneyhon, “Public Education and Texas Reconstruction Politics, 1871-1874,”
Southwestern Historical Quarterly 92 (1989): 393-416, and McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction,
94-95. An early twentieth-century education professor in North Carolina argued that the South was not far
behind the North in education policies, but his own tabulation of Reconstruction’s educational
advancements suggest otherwise. Edgar Wallace Knight, The Influence of Reconstruction on Education in
the South (New York: Columbia University Teachers College, 1913; reprint, New York: Arno Press and the
New York Times, 1972), 91-94. For more reliable summaries, see Anderson, The Education of Blacks in
the South, 4-32, Burchart, Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction; Vaughn, Schools For
All, 24-48; McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction.
311
from 1870 to 1872 was dissipating. The economic hardships of the 1870s would test it
even further.
312
CHAPTER 8
“ENTITLED TO A LIVING”:
GERMAN AMERICANS AND SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP, 1873-1877
The great railroad strike of 1877 reached St. Louis on Tuesday, July 24. Perhaps
ten thousand people turned out that evening to show their solidarity with the strikers. The
racially integrated working-class crowd at the Lucas Market cheered through speeches in
German and English organized by the Marxist Workingmen’s Party. The mass meeting
finally culminated in a call for a city-wide general strike. At midnight, Sergeant John
Finn telegraphed his impression of the “immense meeting” to the War Department’s
Chief Signal Officer in Washington.1 Finn believed revolution was in the air. The
speakers had “deprecated” violence unless it was “made necessary by attack on them,”
but the army officer felt that “the General drift of speeches was in favor of Determination
to gain their objective or die.” The Workingmen’s Party’s goals were broader than those
of the railroad workers who had first triggered the national wave of industrial action. The
group called on Congress to ban child labor, mandate an eight-hour day, and appropriate
“two or three hundred millions of dollars to be applied for the benefit of the working
people.”2 The St. Louis strike’s Executive Committee explained it was “the duty of the
1
On Finn, see David Roediger, “‘Not Only the Ruling Classes to Overcome but also the So-Called Mob’:
Class, Skill and Community in the St. Louis General Strike of 1877,” The Journal of Social History 19
(1985): 219.
2
John Finn to Chief Signal Officer, telegram, St. Louis, 24 July 1877, series 4, reel 70, Hayes Papers,
HPC. For summaries of the notoriously inconsistent newspaper accounts, see David T. Burbank, Reign of
313
government to enact such laws as will ensure equal justice to all the people of the
nation.” In particular it maintained, “Every man willing to perform a use to society is
entitled to a living.”3
The workers’ demands for social and economic rights brought St. Louis to a
standstill for the rest of that week in the summer of 1877. Their remarkable protests
expressed what English sociologist T.H. Marshall termed “social citizenship.” Writing in
the 1940s, Marshall argued that in contrast to civil and political citizenship, social
citizenship was intended to mitigate the consequences of economic inequality. Social
citizenship encompassed a range of rights, from “the right to a modicum of economic
welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the
life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society.”4 Examining
British history, Marshall observed that the eighteenth century had been the formative
period for civil rights, while political citizenship had taken root during the nineteenth
century. He saw social citizenship essentially as a twentieth-century phenomenon.5
Marshall’s model has limited power to explain the status of women and African
Americans in the United States, but it does capture an important transition. During the
1870s, white workingmen in northern and western cities were beginning to shift their
focus from political to social rights.6
the Rabble: The St. Louis General Strike of 1877 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966), 53-58; Philip S.
Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (New York: Monad Press, 1977), 171-75.
3
Executive Committee, “Proclamation,” broadside, St. Louis, 25 July 1877, Social Democratic Labor
Party Records, 1871-1877, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. Reproduction in Burbank, Reign of the
Rabble, frontspiece. The German portion appeared in the Westliche Post, 26 July 1877.
4
T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University,
1950), 11.
5
Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, 21
6
For critiques of Marshall’s approach, see Margaret R. Sommers, “Citizenship and the Place of the Public
Sphere: Law, Community, and Political Culture in the Transition to Democracy,” American Sociological
314
Black farmers and workers in the South—among the most impoverished
Americans—also hoped government agencies would protect them from the punishing
post-war economy. Yet the fact that black and white workers pursued social citizenship
would increase the general resistance to all concessions to African Americans. The
events of 1877 would consolidate the transition that had begun between 1870 and 1872.
Labor conflict fueled northern support for the sort of reform that had first been expressed
in the Liberal Republican movement. Although Republican and Democratic politicians
in the North came to accept the Fifteenth Amendment, their fear of a workers’ revolution
eroded their sympathy for African Americans. As Eric Foner has influentially argued,
“Class and racial prejudice reinforced one another, as the reformers’ concern with
distancing themselves from the lower orders at home went hand in hand with a growing
insensitivity to the egalitarian aspirations of the former slaves.”7 It was a change in
emphasis rather than an ideological about-face, but this development was significant.
Overcoming southern whites’ hostility to African American political rights would have
required the sustained use of federal power. Republicans had always been divided and
ambivalent about expanding the purview of the federal government. In light of workers’
demands, African Americans’ pleas for protection against southern whites would appear
to be one of many unreasonable demands for special state action. The strikes would also
Review 58 (1993): 587-620; Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped
American Citizenship (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).
7
Foner, Reconstruction, 497-98. Foner’s work drew in part on the insights of older historians, particularly
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, and Montgomery, Beyond Equality. Other historians have extended
Foner’s argument about entwined nature of economic ideology, racial ideas, and Reconstruction politics.
See Stanley, From Bondage to Contract; Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 83-121; Nancy Cohen,
Reconstruction of American Liberalism; and Beckert, The Monied Metropolis, 172-265.
315
test the biracial working-class cooperation evident at the St. Louis rally. The initial
reactions to the turmoil of 1877 anticipated the challenges of the Gilded Age.
Disproportionately urban and working-class, German Americans played a leading
role in what became known as the “Great Strike” of 1877. Like the education
controversy, labor strife demonstrated how much the German-American community had
changed since 1870. The working-class protests revealed class divisions and drew public
attention on a new generation of German-American organizers. Established GermanAmerican leaders worried that the work stoppages showcased the fact that German
immigrants helped introduce Marxism to the United States. German-American
participation in the events of July 1877 illuminates the transatlantic dilemma of
industrialization in the late nineteenth century. The strike does not provide a neat
conclusion to German immigrants’ influence on American citizenship. Rather, this
chapter argues that German-American demands for social citizenship in Ohio and
Missouri in 1877 contributed to the untidy and painful transition from the Reconstruction
debate over political rights to the Gilded Age contest over social rights. It first outlines
how German Americans approached economic inequality and how Republicans and
Democrats failed to address the problem during the election 1876. To conclude, I
consider the implications of the drama of 1877 for the decades to come.
*****
The economic depression that lasted from 1873 to 1878 compelled German
Missourians and German Ohioans to articulate their ideas about the economic and social
rights that adhered to citizenship. In September 1873, the company of Civil War
financier Jay Cooke collapsed, triggering a panic. The wave of bank failures quickly
316
escalated into a full-scale depression that spread throughout the United States and
beyond. By September, Missouri railroads, mines, and iron works were laying off
workers. After two years of economic crisis, only about a fifth of those American wage
workers who remained employed had steady work, and many saw their wages cut by up
to 45 percent.8 In Cincinnati, hundreds of the least fortunate begged officials for work
and bread each day, and tens of thousands of the city’s homeless slept on basement floors
in police stations each night.9 It was enough to convince some immigrants to consider
returning to Germany.10 Farmers also suffered during the 1870s as plummeting land
prices compounded the effects of already low agricultural profits. During a tour of his
county in late 1873, the editor of the St. Charles Demokrat reported that farms were still
productive, but western farmers were falling further into debt.11 Some southern planters
who were unable to pay wages in cash offered their workers sharecropping contracts.
Many of the modest number of African Americans who had bought their own farms or
who paid rent in cash were pushed into sharecropping or wage labor.12 One federal
official estimated that the blacks of low-country Georgia owned less property at the end
of the 1870s than they had as slaves.13 “Times are hard,” Carl Schurz recognized in
1875, “business is languishing; our industries are depressed; thousands of laborers are
8
Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877, 20. See also Foner, Reconstruction, 512-24.
Ross, Workers on the Edge, 240-44.
10
There is no evidence that many immigrants chose to return to Europe, which was also feeling the effects
of the depression, but several newspapers ran pieces to discourage the step that they believed some
immigrants were contemplating. Amerika, 2 June 1875; St. Charles Demokrat, 10 June 1875.
11
St. Charles Demokrat, 27 November 1873.
12
Foner, Reconstruction, 537.
13
Congressional Globe, 46th Cong., 2nd sess., Senate Report 693, pt. 2, 261. Cited in Foner,
Reconstruction, 537.
9
317
without work; the poor are growing poorer; the country is full of distress; something must
be done to afford relief …. The question is what that something should be.”14
Democrats offered a simple answer: vote Republicans out of office. The panic of
1873 only reinforced their conviction that Republican economic policies befitted a few
well-connected speculators at the expense of the great majority of Americans. “The
government,” the Fremont Courier lamented, “is not run in the interests of the people
[Volk], but in the interests of the rulers.”15 Democrats had evidence that Republicans
perpetrated frauds to line their own pockets. In 1872, an investigation into Crédit
Mobilier, a dummy company formed by stockholders of the Union Pacific Railroad,
revealed that investors had paid off congressmen to conceal the fact that federally
subsidized contracts were not subject to open bidding. Yet when the Democratic
Cincinnati Volksfruend identified “Schwindel” as the “true cause” of the financial crisis,
the editor did not distinguish between outright fraud and the policies that he believed
stacked the American economy against honest farmers, workers, and businessmen.16 All
along, German Democrats had disapproved of Republicans’ “fraudulent” politics of
granting public land to railroad companies, protecting domestic manufacturers with
tariffs, and manipulating the supply of greenbacks.17 Jay Cooke, the Volksfruend
reminded its readers, had profited from the Republican land grants that had fueled the
railroad boom of the 1860s.18 Democrats did not conceal their sense of vindication. The
14
Schurz, “Honest Money,” Speech delivered in Cincinnati, 27 September 1875, in Speeches,
Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 3: 161, 184
15
“Die Regierung wird nicht im Interresse des Volkes, sondern im Interresse der Regierend geführt.”
Fremont Courier, 9 October 1873.
16
“Schwindel”; “eigentlich Ursache.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 24 September 1873.
17
“Schwindelhaften Regierungspolitik.” Columbus Westbote, 5 November 1873.
18
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 24 September 1873.
318
Columbus Westbote coolly judged the panic a “beneficent storm, which would bring
wholesome lessons and wholesome consequences with it.”19
Leading German-American Democrats critiqued Republican economic policy, but
they did not embrace an alternative view of citizenship that included social or economic
rights. Since they believed government interference on behalf of special interests had
caused the economic crisis, most prominent German Democrats maintained that less
government involvement in the economy would remedy it. They assumed that halting aid
to the wealthy would benefit “the great middle” of Americans and avoid the necessity of
government relief to the poor.20 A correspondent to the Volksfreund summed up the
mainstream Democratic view: “Property owners have no legitimate [rechtlich] obligation
to provide for the wellbeing of their less well-off fellow citizens; they are certainly
morally obliged to, but no one has the right [Recht] to compel them to.” In short, “Poor
people have no legitimate [rechtlichen] claim on anyone for their advancement.”
“However,” the writer continued, “the property-less working classes have the full right to
demand such laws from the state which secure the fruits of their labor and give them the
opportunity to become property-owners themselves.” The writer’s main example was the
19
“Wohlthätiges Gewitter, das heilsame Lehren und heilsame Folgen mit sich brachte”; “legitimate
Geschäft.” Columbus Westbote, 1 October 1873.
20
I owe my understanding of this position in great part to Heather Cox Richardson’s expansive synthesis,
West from Appomattox, which expertly recaptures the middle-class ideas that came to dominate the rhetoric
of mainstream American politicians during the late nineteenth century. As she puts it, “On one hand, they
believed, were hard working Americans—those who believed that success came through hard work and
that all Americans were working their way up together. On the other hand were special interests—those
who believed that they were fundamental conflicts in society that must be adjusted by the federal
government.” Richardson, West from Appomattox, 1-2. I have some reservations about how much
interpretive weight should be given to contemporaries’ claims they represented the great majority of
Americans. Nancy Cohen’s alternative interpretation emphasizes that “liberal reform public intellectuals”
of the period “posited an active role for the state in society and economy, even as it justified constraints on
democracy and the ascendancy of corporate capitalism.” Politicians may not have championed this change,
but many influential Americans did not see the corporations merely as another special interest group.
Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 5.
319
elimination of tariffs, which disproportionately taxed the poor by inflating prices for
staples while protecting wealthy manufacturers from foreign competitors. For most
Democrats before 1877, abolishing the “monopoly-economic system” was the only
acceptable way to help suffering workers.21
Like many other Americans, the editors of the Volksfreund distinguished between
“respectable workers” and “loafers” based largely on whether they accepted its view of
citizens’ legitimate claims on the state.22 During scattered strikes in the late 1860s and
early 1870s, most German Democrats joined the Columbus Westbote in accepting that
“workers have an absolute right to strike for higher wages and use all legal means to
improve their situation.” Yet they suspected that when workers did organize, they did not
confine themselves to legitimate tactics or reasonable demands on individual employers.
Facing the reality of worker mobilization and demands for legislation such as the eighthour day, many Democrats worried that workers would become a “tyranny” as dangerous
to the wellbeing of the American people as the “monopolists.”23 This severe approach
persisted even in the winter of 1873 as layoffs curbed labor organization and pushed
many people to the brink of starvation. The Westbote claimed most workers—“at least
the German ones”—had “taken care of the necessary supplies for cellar and kitchen in
21
“… haben die Besitzenden die rechtliche Verpflichtung für das Wohl ihrer unbemittelten Mitbürger zu
sorgen; moralisch sind sie allerdings dazu bewogen, aber sie dazu zu zwingen had Niemand das Recht”;
“Die armen Leuten … haben an Niemanden einen rechtlichen Anspruch zu ihrem Fortkommen”; “Wohl
aber haben die unbemittelten Arbeiter-Klassen das volle Recht, von dem Staate solche Gesetze zu
verlangen, welche ihnen die Früchte ihres Schweitzen sichern und ihnen die Möglichkeit geben, selbst
Besitzer zu werden”; “Monopol-Wirthschaften.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 13 June 1872. See also,
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 13, 26 April 1872, 17 January 1872; Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staatszeitung,
22 November 1873.
22
“Ordentliche Arbeiter”; “Loafers.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 13 June 1872. Richardson, The Death of
Reconstruction, 88-89.
23
“Die Arbeiter haben ein vollkommens Recht, für höheren Lohn auszustehen und alle rechtlichen Mittel
anzuwenden um ihre Lage zu verbessern”; “Tyrannei.” Columbus Westbote, 23 April 1873. For other
examples, see Cincinnati Volksfreund, 3 August 1870, 28 October 1871, 13, 20, 21, 25 June 1872.
320
good time.” Times might be harder in towns larger than Columbus, the paper conceded,
but that was partly because “in cities such as New York too many opportunities offer
themselves to workers to squander away their pennies.” Instead of putting money away
“for a rainy day,” workers had reportedly chosen to live extravagantly.24 The Westbote
suggested that worthy workers saved their wages and acted as independent citizens;
unworthy workers wasted their money and organized to advance their special, class-based
interests. Workers’ welfare was therefore their own responsibility, not a citizenship right.
German Democrats often couched their understanding of workers’ rights in
partisan terms, but they essentially agreed with German politicians and editors who
identified themselves as independents or Republicans. Independent since the Liberal
debacle of 1872, the Cincinnati Volksblatt believed “the whole system” that the
Republican Party had developed had caused the financial crisis: “It is based on
inequitable preference and the extortion of the working, farming, and middle class in the
interests of the few finance and stock kings.”25 Even men such as Carl Schurz and
Friedrich Hecker, who had rejoined the Republican Party, remained critical of railroad
subsidies, paper money, and high tariffs.26 Leading German independents and
Republicans agreed with Democrats that even the widespread economic hardship of the
24
“Die meisten Arbeiter, wenigstens die deutschen”; “… sorgen bei Zeiten für nöthigen Vorräthe in Keller
und Küche”; “in Städten wie New York beiten sich dem Arbeiter auch zu viele Gelegenheiten, um seinen
Sparpfennig totzuschlagen”; “für einen nassen Tag.” Columbus Westbote, 5 November 1873. See also the
Cincinnati Volksfreund’s condemnation of socialism, 3 August 1870.
25
“Das ganze System”; “Es beruht auf ungerechter Bevorzugung und auf Aussaugung des Arbeiter-,
Bauern- und Mittelstandes im Interesse der wenigen Finanz- und Bösenkönige.” Cincinnati Volksblatt, 25
September 1873. On the Volkblatt’s political independence, see Cincinnati Volksblatt, 5 July 1876. For
German Republicans’ continued commitment to hard money policies, see Cincinnati Volksblatt; 31 May
1873, 2 November 1876; Cleveland Anzeiger 24 July 1876; Westliche Post, 6 October 1876; St. Charles
Demokrat, 7 October 1875.
26
On Hecker, see Freitag, Friedrich Hecker, 348-55, 452-86. More detailed treatment of Schurz’s position
follows below.
321
depression did not require Americans to rethink the government’s social obligations. The
Volksblatt longed for “pecuniary independence” and “equal justice” for all but not
government aid to the unfortunate.27
During the 1870s, many farmers and workers in Ohio and Missouri believed that
increasing the supply of paper money would assist struggling Americans. In some ways,
this “Greenbackism” was appealing because it allowed its proponents to avoid making
social claims on the government. They were ostensibly reasserting the economic
autonomy of independent producers and workers in the face of the rising “monopolies.”28
Yet their program required new government action to redistribute financial resources to
the regions and classes that the panic had affected most, and after the strike of 1877 labor
groups helped form a Greenback-Labor Party.29 Most German Americans, however,
were adverse to the popular manipulation of currency. Some Marxists believed it
distracted from their central task of mobilizing the working classes, but for men such as
Schurz, the policy seemed acknowledge citizens had social rights.30 In 1875, the
outgoing senator from Missouri stumped on behalf of Rutherford B. Hayes, who again
sought election to the Ohio governorship, this time against stiff opposition from a soft-
27
“Pekuniären Unabhängigkeit”; “gleiche Gerechtigkeit für Alle.” Cincinnati Volksblatt, 25 September
1873.
28
David Montomery emphasizes that the greenback movement allowed various reformers to coalesce one
last time behind “the illusion of harmonious society.” Montgomery, Beyond Equality, 446.
29
Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol 1, From Colonial Times to the
Founding of the American Federation of Labor (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 475-88; Foner,
Reconstruction, 521-22.
30
Friedrich A. Sorge, Friedrich A. Sorge’s Labor Movement in the United States: A History of the
American Working Class form Colonial Times to 1890, ed. Philip S. Foner and Brewster Chamberlin
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), 156; Philip S. Foner, The Workingmen’s Party of the United
States: A History of the First Marxist Party in the Americas (Minneapolis: MEP Publications, 1984), 95-96;
Montgomery, Beyond Equality, 442. Gretchen Ritter, a historically-minded political scientist, has provided
a detailed examination of how the currency issue cut across partisan lines and reflected different
understandings of citizenship. Ritter, Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the
Politics of Finance in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 5-6, 29, 63.
322
money Democrat.31 Schurz summarized the hard-money position at Cincinnati’s Turner
Hall in September. He mocked the inflationists’ depiction of economic redistribution:
Prosperity is to revive at once; every man, woman and child is to have plenty of
money …. The laboring man will command the situation; he will have to work
less and get higher wages for it than ever; and in an incredibly short time we shall
all be rich; or rather, while now the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, then
the rich will get poor and the poor will get rich, the ‘money power’ will be
broken ….
Schurz argued that inflation would only benefit unscrupulous borrowers, “speculators,
who, instead of following the path of frugal and steady industry, tried quickly to get rich
on their wits.” He believed that sound monetary policies, “the strictest maintenance of
the limitations of governmental power,” and “economical conduct in our public affairs”
were the only ways to protect “worthy laborers.”32
German Americans’ rejection of paper money stood out in Ohio and Missouri.
Immigrants in rural areas did not participate in the Grange, a fraternal order of white
farmers that was founded in 1867 to combine social functions, purchasing and
distribution cooperatives, and non-partisan lobbying for the government to increase the
money supply and regulate railroad prices. In the black belt of the South, planters used
the Grange to advance their campaign for white control.33 The order’s strength, however,
lay in the West. Between May 1873 and January 1875 the number of Granges in
Missouri rose nearly ten-fold to 2,009, more than in any other state.34 Although German
31
Encouraged by former Liberal Republicans, Schurz was clearly looking to further his career by
supporting Republican liberals and to shore up his influence German voters. See Trefousee, Carl Schurz,
225-26.
32
Schurz, “Honest Money,” speech delivered in Cincinnati, 27 September 1875, in Speeches,
Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 3: 190-91, 201, 167, 193.
33
Foner, Reconstruction, 548-49.
34
Solon J. Buck, The Granger Movement: A Study of Agricultural Organization and Its Political,
Economic, and Social Manifestations, 1870-1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1913), table
between pages 58 and 59. Buck’s work remains useful for its political focus, while other works emphasize
323
immigrants were a significant minority of Missouri farmers, they contributed little to this
proliferation.35 Advertisements calling “every sensible Farmer to join the Grangers” ran
in the pages of the St. Charles Demokrat. 36 The editor cautiously advised readers to
examine the resolutions passed at various Grange meetings. On his 1873 survey of St.
Charles County, he reported that one Grange member, “like most of the thinking farmers
with whom we had the opportunity to speak about the Granger movement, … was not
totally convinced that [it] was ‘exactly the thing’ either.”37 The small-town newspaper’s
opposition to inflationary policies did not waver.38 In northwestern Ohio, the Fremont
Courier found that fewer than six German Americans were involved in the “Farmers’
Movement” in Sandusky County.39 The St. Louis Amerika added that the Grange’s
“foolish secrecy business,” acceptance of an active role for women, and inclination
toward temperance repelled German Catholics.40
Although largely uninterested in Greenbackism, German immigrants had always
taken a prominent role in labor radicalism in Ohio and Missouri’s urban centers. As
historian Bruce Levine has demonstrated, working-class refugees from the Revolutions of
1848 brought a commitment to “radical democracy” with them to the United States.41
the organization’s social activities. See for example D. Sven Nordin, Rich Harvest: A History of the
Grange, 1867-1900 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1974). Foner, Reconstruction, 548.
35
Gerlach, “Population Origins in Rural Missouri,” 1-21.
36
“Jedem vernünftigen Farmer … sich den Grangers anzuschließen.” St. Charles Demokrat, 26 June
1873, 14 August 1873, 4 September 1873, 9 October 1873, 4 March 1875.
37
“Wie die meisten denkenden Farmer, mit dennen wir über die Granger-Bewegung zu sprechen
Gelegenheit hatten, war auch unser Gastgeber nicht ganz überzeugt, daß dieselbe ‘gerade das Ding’ sei.”
St. Charles Demokrat, 27 November 1873.
38
Across the state line in Illinois, Gustav Koerner observed that “the German press and the Germans
generally opposed this reckless and, in the end, most disastrous policy” of increasing the money supply as
well as the Grange itself. Koerner, Memoirs of Gustav Koerner, 2:583.
39
Fremont Courier, 9 June 1873.
40
“Alberne Geheimnißkrämerei.” Amerika, 6 February 1874. See also Cincinnati Volksblatt, 31 May
1873.
41
Levine, The Spirit of 1848.
324
During the early 1850s, men such as August Willich, Joseph Weydemeyer, and even the
young Friedrich Hassaurek had organized protests and strikes for wage increases and
labor protections. Willich and Weydemeyer were Marxists who sought to develop class
consciousness among American workers. These men, like most labor leaders in the
United States and Germany, blended their social goals with a profound respect for the
republican tradition.42 During the 1850s, German-American workers were committed to
free labor ideology, convinced that ending slavery would realize the principles of the
Declaration of Independence and improve all workers’ lot. Willich’s biographer
observed, “For Willich socialism was essentially and specifically the implementation of
republican principles.”43 Like St. Louis’s Weydemeyer, Willich held office as a
Republican, commanded troops during the Civil War, and campaigned for African
American suffrage.44 By the late 1860s, however, Weydemeyer was dead and Willich
had retired to a small town in western Ohio. Historians agree that the Civil War
“absorbed the idealism of the early German immigrants, and the socialist movement had
to begin again in the Sixties.”45
42
On the United States, see Wilentz, Chants Democratic; Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: The
Knights of Labor and American Democracy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Nick Salvatore,
Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982). On Germany, see
Hartmut Keil, “An Ambivalent Identity: The Attitude of German Socialist Immigrants toward American
Political Institutions and American Citizenship,” in In the Shadow of the Staue of Liberty, ed. Marianne
Debouzy (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1988), 257-73; Hartmut Keil, “German
Working-Class Immigration and the Social Democratic Tradition of Germany,” in German Workers’
Culture in the United States, ed. Keil, 1-23.
43
Easton, Hegel’s First American Followers, 187.
44
Ibid.; Obermann, Joseph Weydemeyer.
45
Thomas W. Gavett, Development of the Labor Movement in Milwaukee (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1965), 27; Schnierov, Labor and Urban Politics, 54; John B. Jentz, “The 48ers and the
Politics of the German Labor Movement in Chicago during the Civil War Era,” in The German-American
Radical Press: The Shaping of a Left Political Culture, 1850-1940, ed. Elliott Shore, Ken Fones-Wolf, and
James P. Danky (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 49, 58-60; Montgomery, Beyond Equality,
167; Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 264; Foner, The Workingmen’s Party, 10; David T. Burbank, “The First
International in St. Louis,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin 18 (1962): 166; Philip S. Foner,
325
After the Civil War, a new generation of German-speaking socialists pursued a
more orthodox and internationalist Marxism. Although they appreciated the right to vote,
the newcomers had a more ambivalent relationship to the American political system and
American citizenship than their predecessors.46 The International Workingmen’s
Association—the First International—had been founded in London in 1864. By 1872,
there were nine sections of the International in the United States, and a disproportionate
number of their 5,000 members were German-speaking.47 The American Marxists sent
delegates to European congresses and were drawn into the tangled battles unfolding on
the continent and in England.48 In 1876, they formed the Workingmen’s Party of the
United States to further their domestic legislative aims and promote labor unionization.
The German Americans who dominated the Workingmen’s Party emphasized that they
did not consider the political system of “this middle-class Republic” sufficient to abolish
the wage system and create a classless society. German-speaking Marxists were already
frustrated with native-born radicals whose interest in a variety of reform activities
repeatedly drew them into electoral races.49 Committed to the international class
struggle, the Workingmen’s Party was wary of American partisan politics. It would not
“Introduction,” in Friedrich A. Sorge’s Labor Movement in the United States, 8. Friedrich A. Sorge and
Adolph Douai were among the few members of the earlier generation who remained active socialists.
Douai personally made the transition to a more internationalist Marxism. Nadel, Little Germany, 141-54.
46
Keil, “An Ambivalent Identity,” 257-73; Dirk Hoerder, “The German-American Labor Press and Its
Views of the Political Institutions in the United States,” in The German American Radical Press, ed. Shore,
Fones-Wolf, and Danky, 190-91; Roediger, “‘Not Only the Ruling Classes to Overcome,’” 227. On
international solidarity in the labor movement more generally, see Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor
Movement, 409-13.
47
Philip S. Foner, The Workingmen’s Party, 12-14, 19.
48
After a split at a congress held at The Hague in 1872, the First International relocated its headquarters in
New York, but it disbanded four years later. Philip S. Foner, The Workingmen’s Party, 17-19.
49
Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 18481876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 155. Messer-Kruse argues that the failure of
socialism in the United States had much to do with German-born socialists’ failure to appreciate the
American reform tradition. For all its merits, this interpretation does not adequately address the earlier
generation German-American Marxists who fought for abolition and black suffrage.
326
“enter into a political campaign before being strong enough to exercise a perceptible
interest.” The party suggested that although local sections might contest some races, they
should “abstain from all political movements in general for the present and to turn their
back on the ballot box.”50
The Workingmen’s Party explicitly embraced the concept of social citizenship.
The party’s German-language organ in St. Louis would outline its appraisal of the limits
of political citizenship in its first issue, which appeared after the Great Strike. The
Volksstimme des Westens began by renouncing the Republican Party’s free labor
arguments: “We cannot find the slightest evidence that work in the North has become
freer since the abolition of slavery.” The editors concluded that universal manhood
suffrage had proved inadequate to protect workers. They characterized “political rights”
as “only empty words.” Democratic and Republican candidates might promise
everything to working-class voters, but “at the first conflict between capital and labor,
they unthinkingly and unfeelingly without examination position themselves on the side of
the first.” Despite its critique of the political system, the St. Louis Workingmen’s Party
would contest local elections. Its leaders intended to use partisan activity to champion
the idea that citizens possessed rights beyond those of mere political participation. They
pledged themselves to “set[ting] out the causes of [the worker’s] afflictions and seek[ing]
moral and material rights.”51 Specifically, these Marxists advocated public ownership of
50
Philip S. Foner, ed., The Formation of the Workingmen’s Party of the United States: Proceedings of the
Union Congress Held at Philadelphia, July 19-22, 1876 (New York: American Institute for Marxist
Studies, 1976), 33-34. Philip S. Foner, The Workingmen’s Party, provides details of the party’s activities
during its brief existence under this name during 1876 and 1877.
51
“Freie Arbeit”; “... können wir … nicht den geringsten Anhaltspunkt dafür finden, daß die Arbeit im
Norden seit der Abschaffung der Sklaverei freier geworden sei”; “politischen Rechte”; “nur ein leeres
Wort”; “... beim ersten Conflict zwischen Kapital und Arbeit ohne Prüfung, unbedenklich und rücksichtslos
327
railroads, public works relief, legislation mandating an eight-hour day, and an end to
child labor.52
Some groups of German-American workers were less interested in social rights.
The Cleveland Biene (Bee) represented German Americans who critiqued the emerging
industrial order and felt disillusioned with the political process, but still saw citizenship in
essentially political terms. A federation of craft unions took the Biene’s inaugural issue
to press in August 1873, the month following the outbreak of the panic. The editors
expressed skilled workers’ understanding of the “worker question.” The Biene’s first
editorial declared, “The power of individual people has disappeared vis-à-vis the power
of capital and in factories the worker is nothing more than a cog in a machine.” The
paper believed that workers did not need new social rights, but “the recovery of their
individuality.” To that end, “workers must unite and form associations for the defense of
their wages and their lives.”53 The Biene remained optimistic that the “outlook” was
improving for workers to use their political power to regain their independence.54 The
paper urged workers to support policies that would undermine “monopolies”: a return to
specie-backed currency, the elimination of the protective tariff, the outlawing of railroad
price fixing, the devolution of the powers of the presidency, and the popular election of
auf Seiten des ersteren stellen”; “... die Ursache seiner Bedrängnisse klar und deutlich auseinandersetzt und
moralische und materielle Rechte erstreben.” St. Louis Volksstimme des Westens, 1 September 1877.
52
For enumeration of the Marxists goals, see Philip S. Foner, The Workingmen’s Party, 34-35; Roediger,
“Not Only the Ruling Classes to Overcome,” 213; Ross, Workers on the Edge, 250; Schnierov, Labor and
Urban Politics, 54-55; Burbank, Reign of the Rabble, 19.
53
“Arbeiter-Frage”; “Gegenüber der Kapitalkraft ist die individuelle Menschenkraft verschwunden und ist
der Arbeiter in den Fabrikanen nicht mehr als das Räderwerk der Maschinen”; “die Wiedergewinnung ihrer
Individualität”; “… müssen die Arbeiter sich vereinigen und die Genossenschaften bilden zur
Vertheidigung ihres Lohnes und ihres Lebens.” Biene, 6 August 1873.
54
“Die Aussichtenbessern sich.” Biene, 20 August 1873.
328
senators.55 None of these planks approached the assertion of social rights that appeared
in the Volksstimme’s columns.
Many German-language newspapers came and went during the 1870s, but the
Biene’s failure after less than a year of publication symbolizes the challenges facing labor
organizations between 1873 and 1877. Times were so hard that employers could easily
replace striking workers from the ranks of the unemployed. Despite the weakness of
unions, Americans were increasingly suspicious of working-class activism. Since May
1871, they had worried that the United States might suffer the violent turmoil that had
thrown France into civil war when “the masses” had seized control of Parisian
government. The conflict surrounding the “Paris Commune” had resulted in some 25,000
deaths.56 In the United States, municipal authorities had also violently suppressed
protests. In New York, mounted police had attacked a mass meeting of unemployed
workers who gathered in Tompkins Square in 1874 to demand public works
employment.57 Compounding middle-class fears, there were new accusations that
African American workers in the South were using their political power to secure social
concessions. A New York Daily Tribune reporter, James S. Pike, published accounts
alleging that the South Carolina government was “plundering the property-holders of the
state” to support corrupt politicians and the undeserving poor.58 In this hostile climate, it
is unsurprising that the number of unionized workers declined precipitously and strikes
55
Biene, 17 September 1873, 20 August 1873.
Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre, 19.
57
Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 448. On other demonstrations of
the unemployed, see Ross, Workers of the Edge, 247-51; Herbert G. Gutman, “The Failure of the
Movement by the Unemployed for Public Works in 1873,” Political Science Quarterly 80 (1965): 254-76.
58
Pike’s reports for the Tribune formed the basis for a book. James S. Pike, The Prostrate State: South
Carolina under Negro Government (New York: Loring & Mussey, 1935; reprint, New York: D. Appleton,
1974), 179. I rely on Heather Cox Richardson’s analysis. Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 1047.
56
329
dwindled.59 By the mid-1870s, the Workingmen’s Party had only recruited 600 Germanspeaking members in St. Louis.60 The Cincinnati branch had a total membership of only
500.61 Yet Americans would learn that this was an unreliable gauge of workers’ support
for social rights.
*****
During the centennial year of 1876, no American could miss the attacks
tormenting African Americans in the South or the poverty afflicting the nation. Rather
than generating new solutions to these problems, however, the presidential election
campaign confirmed that the two major parties had been converging during the
depression.62 Both parties promised to protect workers by limiting the power of special
interests, and neither embraced the idea of social citizenship. Democrats emphasized that
they would reduce protective tariffs. Republicans focused on returning the currency to
the gold standard. Members of both parties fell over each other in their efforts to position
themselves as the true reformers who would end corrupt relationships between
businessmen and politicians. The Republicans said they would conduct “a thorough and
lasting reform of the public service,” while their opponents pointed out that “waste and
fraud” had thrived on the Republican watch.63
Democrats and Republicans announced that they would uphold the Fifteenth
Amendment. The Democrats’ national platform affirmed the party’s “devotion to the
59
Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 439-55.
Burbank, Reign of the Rabble, 19.
61
Ross, Workers on the Edge, 250.
62
On the declining strength within the Republican Party of “Sentimental Reformers” who accepted “the
ideal of popular use of governmental machinery to promote the common good,” see Foner, Reconstruction,
335-447. (Quotation on page 447.) For the national convergence of the parties see Richardson, The Death
of Reconstruction, 88-89, 110, 120; Foner, Reconstruction, 488-99, 512-24.
63
“Ein durchgreifende und dauernde Reform des öffenlishen Dienstes.” Westliche Post, 6 November
1876. Donald B. Johnson, ed., National Party Platforms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 49.
60
330
Constitution of the United States with its amendments” and paid lip service to “the
equality of all citizens before just laws of their own enactment.”64 In Ohio and Missouri,
Democrats assured voters that southern whites “now only harbor the hope of joining us in
upholding the common rights of American local self-determination in brotherly union
under the old flag with one constitution and one fate.”65 Of course such statements were
designed to obscure the fact that southern Democrats still ran on white supremacy,
cooperating with terrorists who sought to disenfranchise African Americans in what
would be a very bloody campaign season.
Republicans still ran as the party of “the full realization of the principle of
political freedom and equality for all without respect of descent and race.”66 They were
beginning to concede, however, that their ability to protect their southern supporters was
in fact tightly constrained. In its effort to balance state and federal powers, the Supreme
Court had made it more difficult to enforce equal protection and eliminate raciallymotivated voting discrimination. The Slaughterhouse cases of 1873 had narrowly
defined the rights that stemmed from national citizenship, declaring the federal
government could not intervene to protect rights that properly adhered to state
citizenship. In 1876, the decision handed down in U.S. v. Cruikshank specifically denied
federal authorities the authority to step in to prosecute individuals who violated African
American rights. They could only act against states. The white men who had killed over
64
Johnson, ed., National Party Platforms, 49.
“… jetzt nur den Wünch hege, gemeinsam mit uns die gemeinsamen Rechte der amerikanischen lokalen
Selbstregierung in brüderliche Vereinigung unter der alten Fahne, mit Einer Verfassung und Einer [sic]
Schicksals-Bestimmung, aufrechtzuhalten.” Translation of an open letter from Samuel J. Tilden, New
York, 24 October 1876, in Fremont Courier, 2 November 1876.
66
“Die vollständige Durchführung des Grundsatzes der politischen Freiheit und gleichheit Aller ohne
Rücksicht auf Abstammung und Rasse.” Cleveland Anzeiger, 24 July 1876.
65
331
one hundred black Louisianans in the 1873 Colfax Massacre went unpunished.67 These
court decisions had undermined the power of those Radical Republicans who were still
prepared to use federal power to protect black rights. Although they were still outraged
at travesties such as Colfax, northern Republicans’ resolve was waning. Afraid of a voter
backlash, Grant had declined to send troops to Mississippi to protect black and white
Republicans facing defiant violence in the 1875 elections. Democrats had effectively
nullified the post-war amendments and “redeemed” Mississippi.68 Clear differences on
race remained between the parties, but they were diminishing.
Knowing they must balance their northern and southern constituencies, both
parties carefully selected sites for their national conventions in 1876. Republicans met in
Cincinnati, a city on the river that had formerly divided slave and free states. Ohio was
entitled to twenty-two electoral votes—only New York and Pennsylvania qualified for
more—and it had recently returned to Republican hands after a Democratic victory in
1874. Indicating the state’s significance, the hotly contested nomination finally went to
Rutherford B. Hayes. Not a well-known national figure, the governor brought with him a
record of largely avoiding questions of African American citizenship in favor the issues
of hard money, honest government, and anti-Catholicism.69 Schurz welcomed the
outcome of the convention, remarking to another former Liberal that the Republican
67
Justices noted that attorneys representing the Grant administration failed to present arguments proving
the racial motivations of the defendants. Although this affected their rulings, it did not alter the
implications of the case. Michael Les Benedict, “Preserving Federalism: Reconstruction and the Waite
Court,” Supreme Court Review (1978): 39-79.
68
Foner, Reconstruction, 557-63.
69
A postmortem in the Democratic Columbus Westbote referenced the conflict over public funding of
Catholic schools, declaring the “Nigger question” had been replaced by the “School question.” Columbus
Westbote, 13 October 1875. See Forrest W. Clonts, “The Political Campaign of 1875 in Ohio” (M.A.
thesis, The Ohio State University, 1921). On Hayes’ anti-Catholic stance, see Rutherford B. Hayes to John
Sherman, Fremont, Ohio, 7 August 1876, vol. 129, John Sherman Papers, LC.
332
platform was “our platform in every word with a pledge of an honest man as a candidate
for the Presidency attached to it.”70 After Schurz and Hayes met at the Columbus train
station in early July, Hayes’ secretary assured a Cincinnati Republican, “I have no doubt
he will be with us.”71 Schurz assumed an active role in Hayes’ campaign.
German immigrants were a much more significant presence among the
Democrats. Many German-American politicians had never returned to the Republican
Party after opposing Grant in 1872. Gustav Körner later recalled that the Liberal
campaign had eased the way for him to “act with the regenerated Democracy.”72 He
found good company in Forty-Eighters such as Joseph Pulitzer, who had become a
Democrat, withdrawing his investment in the Westliche Post in 1873.73 In Cleveland,
August Thieme had taken the Wächter am Erie over to the Democrats after 1872.74
Thieme’ long-time friend, Jacob Müller, left the Republican Party in 1873, ostensibly
because he opposed its inflationary currency policy.75 The Cincinnati Volksblatt—which
by 1876 claimed to be the largest German-language newspaper in the West76—had been
politically independent since 1872. Editor Friedrich Hassaurek had attempted to revive a
70
Schurz to Murat Halstead, New York, 14 February, 3 May, 30 May, 7 June 1876, folders 6 and 7,
Halstead Papers, CHS. Hayes had not been Schurz’s first choice. See also E. Bruce Thompson, “The
Bristow Presidential Boom of 1876,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 32 (1945): 3-30; Schurz to
Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Fort Washington, Penn., 9 July 1876, in Speeches, Correspondence and
Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 3: 258.
71
Alfred E. Lee to Smith, Columbus, 3 July 1876, folder 4, Smith Papers, OHS. Cincinnati Volksblatt, 10
July 1876; Trefousee, Carl Schurz, 228. Hayes’ secretary actually knew the former senator better than his
employer. Alfred E. Lee had served in Schurz’s division during the Civil War and the two men had briefly
worked together at the Detroit Post.
72
Koerner, Memoirs of Gustav Koerner, 2:565, 597-98.
73
Saalberg, “The Westliche Post,” 225-26.
74
Columbus Westbote, 16 April 1873; Fremont Courier, 14 September 1876.
75
“Jacob Mueller,” in The Dictionary of Cleveland Biography, 324; Westliche Post, 12 October 1876.
Mueller apparently did not reconsider his choice when President Grant vetoed an “Inflation Bill” supported
by many Ohio Democrats.
76
Cincinnati Volksblatt, 16 July 1876.
333
third party in 1873 to “help elect nominees of the Dems & Liberals.”77 During Hayes’
1875 run for the governorship, he had written, “Of course I shall vote for Hays [sic],” but
Hassaurek made it equally clear he would not campaign for him.78 Before the
presidential election, the Volksblatt’s shareholders had voted narrowly to support Hayes.
Hassaurek promptly announced to readers that his “own convictions” dictated that he
resign as editor.79 Franz Sigel, who had supported Grant in 1872, now threw his support
to the Democrats.80 Of course new Republican politicians and editors emerged, and
Schurz’s Westliche Post and the St. Charles Demokrat backed Hayes, but many leading
Forty-Eighters had written off the Republican Party by 1876.
Democrats chose St. Louis for their convention because it symbolized their
returning ascendancy among German Americans and in the South while avoiding any
association with disloyalty. Democrats had dominated Missouri politics since the defeat
of Liberal Republicanism in 1872. German Americans were among those who worked
hard to ensure that the Democratic presidential candidate would support Reconstruction’s
constitutional amendments, civil service reform, and fiscal conservatism. An old German
Cincinnatian later claimed credit for the nomination of Samuel J. Tilden, a hard-money
New Yorker whose record of opposition to the Tweed Ring allowed him to claim the
mantle of reformer. Carl Reemelin, who had withdrawn from party politics during the
77
Thomas Ewing to Friedrich Hassaurek, Columbus, 7 June 1873, Don Piatt to Friedrich Hassaurek, 8 July
1873, Thomas Ewing to Friedrich Hassaurek, Lancaster, Ohio, 2 June 1873, Roeliff Brinkerhoff,
Columbus, 12 July 1873, Roeliff Brinkerhoff to Hassaurek, Mansfield, Ohio, 23 April 1873, Thomas A.
Hendricks, Indianapolis, 16 July 1873, box 2, folder 9, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. See also Wittke,
“Friedrich Hassuarek,” 13.
78
Friedrich Hassaurek to Rutherford B. Hayes, Cincinnati, 15 September 1875, box 2, folder 10,
Hassaurek Papers, OHS. Wittke, “Friedrich Hassuarek,” 13.
79
“Eigene Ueberzeugung.” Cincinnati Volksblatt, 11 July 1876. See also the building tension, Cincinnati
Volksblatt, 7 July 1876. Democrats welcomed Hassaurek. Fremont Courier, 22, 29 July 1876.
80
Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 258-60.
334
Civil War, arrived at St. Louis with plans to “form a combination of all prominent
Germans, that I could gather in St. Louis in a public declaration that the Germans in the
United States were in favor of Tilden.”81 Carl Dänzer at the Anzeiger, he learned, already
had a similar plan. The two men joined forces to organize a German-American
committee which drew up resolutions supporting Tilden. Körner believed Tilden won the
support of the “overwhelming majority” of former Liberal Republicans, and Democrats
“spoke confidently of the Germans.”82 Judge J.B. Stallo even sent an endorsement from
Cincinnati.83 A Republican informant at the St. Louis convention reported, “It is now
more than ever important that Gov Hayes’ letter of acceptance shd. have no uncertain
stand on civil service.” Republicans believed Tilden’s nomination had attracted more
German Americans to the Democratic Party.84
During the autumn of 1876, Hayes and Tilden fought fiercely for German votes.
Schurz campaigned tirelessly for Hayes. In dozens of letters, he reported his activities to
Hayes and tried to persuade the candidate to adopt positions that would appeal to German
Americans and former Liberal Republicans. The two men essentially agreed on currency
policy and civil service reform, but Schurz encouraged Hayes to be more forceful in
articulating his personal views. A strong anti-corruption stance, he maintained, “would
rally to your support as a strong working power a large majority of the independent
element, especially also of the independent Germans.”85 Two days later, he wrote, “I
81
Reemelin, The Life of Charles Reemelin, 218.
Koerner, Memoirs of Gustav Koerner, 2:605; William H. Smith to Hayes, Chicago, 1 July 1876, reel 41,
Hayes Papers, HPC.
83
W.M. Dickson to Hayes, Avondale, 30 June 1876, reel 40, Hayes Papers, HPC. See also Manning Force
to Hayes, Cincinnati, 9 September 1876, reel 46, Hayes Papers, HPC.
84
Enclosure in William H. Smith to Hayes, Chicago, 1 July 1876, reel 41, Hayes Papers, HPC.
85
Schurz to Rutherford B. Hayes, Fort Washington, Penn., 21 June 1876, in Speeches, Correspondence
and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 3:252. A confidante reported that a strong statement on civil service
82
335
have since received information … especially concerning the Germans East and West …
which impresses me more than ever with the extreme importance of a broad, bold and
striking declaration … of your own opinions and determined purpose in favor of a
straightforward strong specie-payment policy, the purification of the Government and a
non-partisan civil service with tenure of office on good behavior.”86 He maintained the
“reform question” was the “controlling” issue for German Americans.87
Schurz considered southern policy less important to German-American voters.88
He encouraged the Republican nominee to move away from “old war issues” and on to
“the living questions” of the future. Schurz advocated “policy of justice and conciliation,
[rather] than in an attempt to rake up old animosities and in a mere repetition of old
cries.”89 Hayes needed Schurz’s support, but he was uncomfortable with the idea of
backing “local self-government.” It seemed to him “to smack of the bowie knife and the
revolver.” He wrote to Schurz, “‘Local self-government’ has nullified the 15th
amendment in several States, and is in a fair way to nullify the 14th and 13th.” Hayes
then hinted that he was prepared to compromise: “But I do favor a policy based on the
observance of all parts of the Constitution—the new as well as the old, and therefore I
suppose you and I are substantially agreed on the topic.”90 It was such balancing that
reform would be necessary to “secure the influence of Schurz.” W.D. Bickham to Hayes, Cincinnati, 25
June 1876, reel 40, Hayes Papers, HPC.
86
Schurz to Rutherford B. Hayes, Fort Washington, Penn., 23 June 1876, in Speeches, Correspondence
and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 3:252. For corroboration of Schurz’s impression, see S.W. Gurney to
Hayes, Milwaukee, 30 June 1876, M.A. Jacobi to Hayes, Cincinnati, 30 June 1876, reel 40, Hayes Papers,
HPC.
87
Schurz to Hayes, 25 September 1876, Schurz-Hayes Correspondence, HPC.
88
Ibid.
89
Schurz to Rutherford B. Hayes, Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, 21 June 1876, in Speeches,
Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 3:249.
90
Hayes to Schurz, Columbus, 27 June 1876, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl
Schurz, 3:254.
336
allowed Republicans to speak of African American rights without indicating exactly what
they would do to protect them. On the stump, Schurz proclaimed Republicans’
commitment to “an excellent execution of the laws, joined with a just, conciliatory and
honorable policy toward the people of the South.”91 The smaller German-language
Republican newspapers addressed the plight of southern blacks, but the editors of the
influential Cincinnati Volksblatt and Westliche Post, like their Democratic opponents at
the Cincinnati Volksfreund and St. Louis Anzeiger, stressed other issues.92
Schurz also worked hard to overcome Hayes’ association with nativism. The
candidate’s wife, Lucy Hayes, was a well-known temperance activist, and Hayes had
taken a prominent anti-Catholic position in the school debates of the previous years.
Alluding to Bismarck’s policies, the Democratic Cincinnati Volksfreund accused Schurz
of participating in a “Culturkampf” against Catholics and selling out to a party hostile to
immigrants.93 Schurz and other German Republicans sought assurances from Hayes that
he was not prejudiced against immigrants, and they publicly denied the Ohioan was a
“Know-Nothing.”94 At the same time, German Republicans embraced Hayes’ antiCatholicism more overtly than they had before. The small Cleveland Anzeiger wrote,
“Well, the majority of Germans in the U. States have sympathy neither for ex-rebeldom
91
This quotation is from a summation Schurz made of his views in a letter intended for publication in the
New-Yorker Staatszeitung. Schurz to Oswald Ottendorfer, Fort Washington, Penn., 22 July 1876, in
Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 3:279.
92
For Republican references to the violence and unrepentant “rebels” in the South, see Cleveland
Anzeiger, 24, 25, 26 July 1876; Cincinnati Volksblatt, 27 October 1876, 3 November 1876;
93
Cincinnati Volksfruend, 6 July 1876.
94
Hayes to Schurz, Columbus, 15 September 1876, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of
Carl Schurz, 3:338
337
nor for communion with the Catholic Irishdom.”95 Republicans stood, it told readers, for
the “security of our institutions against the instruction of a powerful hierarchy, which is
obedient to the commands of a powerful foreign church leader.”96 The issues of the Civil
War and African American citizenship no longer subordinated all others.
The German-American vote was up for grabs. Schurz relayed to Hayes, “A large
majority of the German voters, and among them very many who always went with the
Republicans, are now inclined toward Tilden. I can assure you that I know this to be
so.”97 The returns bore out this assessment, but as the Westliche Post pointed out, it was
hardly as if “99 out of 100 Germans vote[d] Democratic.”98 In each of Cleveland’s five
German wards, Hayes won a smaller percentage of the vote than Grant had in 1868. He
still won majorities in two, as he did in the entire city.99 The German-Republican vote in
Cincinnati did not measurably decline. Four of its five heavily German wards voted
strongly for Hayes, far exceeding his razor-fine majorities in Cincinnati and Ohio as a
whole.100 In St. Louis, all but one of the five most German wards registered much lower
support for Hayes in 1876 than Grant in 1868. A majority of voters in four out of five of
these wards, however, still supported Hayes. That was a significant result considering the
95
“Die Deutschen in den Ver. Staaten haben nun einmal in ihrer Mehrheit weder für das Exrebellenthum
noch für die Gemeinschaft mit dem katholischen Irländerthum irgend welche Sympathien.” Cleveland
Anzeiger, 25 July 1876.
96
“Sicherstellung unserer Institutionen gegen die Ausbildung einer mächtigen Heirarchie, welche den
Befehlen eines im Ausland wohenden Kirchenoberhauptes gohorsamen ist.” Cleveland Anzeiger, 24 July
1876.
97
Schurz to Hayes, Fort Washington, Penn., 7 August 1876, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political
Papers of Carl Schurz, 3:280.
98
“99 Hundertstel der Deutschen stimmen demokratisch.” Westliche Post, 12 October 1876.
99
See table 1.
100
See table 2. An Anglo-American Democrat reported this frustrating exception a colleague. James J.
Farran to William Allen, Cincinnati, 17 September 1876, box 19, William Allen Papers, LC.
338
Republican won less than 46 percent of the city-wide vote, and he polled even lower in
the state.101
In the days following the November election, Americans did not know whether
Ohio or Missouri had voted for the next president of the United States. The outcome
hinged on results from the violently contested states of South Carolina, Louisiana, and
Florida. The Republicans who administered the elections in those southern states
invalidated returns from the counties worst affected by political violence. Democrats
protested this move, setting in motion a crisis that was not resolved until the next year.
After a series of complex negotiations in Washington, Democratic members of the House
of Representatives cleared the way for the final count of the electoral votes, which
favored Hayes. The exact terms of the compromise reached in March 1877 cannot be
known, but they resulted in President Hayes indicating that he would not use the army to
protect the rights of southern blacks. He ordered troops to stand down in South Carolina
and Louisiana, capitulating to the southern Democrats whose return to local power
depended on suppressing the African American vote. In another sign that he was
resigned to white rule in the South, Hayes nominated Schurz to become Secretary of the
Interior. Although Republicans continued to try to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
amendments in the South as the courts and public opinion allowed, Reconstruction ended
with the concessions that Hayes made to secure the presidency in 1877.102
*****
101
See table 3. The Grant’s 1872 election does not provide a useful point of comparison because of the
Liberal Republican challenge.
102
Foner, Reconstruction, 575-82. On continuing federal attempts to enforce of voting rights, see Wang,
The Trial of Democracy, 134-215.
339
As much as Hayes tried to avoid it, the issue of social citizenship broke into the
headlines soon after his inauguration. The Great Strike showed that German Americans,
from Hayes’ cabinet to the streets of St. Louis, would find themselves at the center of the
controversies of the coming age. Carl Schurz would press President Hayes to respond
forcefully to the uprising. During the campaign, Schurz had demonstrated that he was
unsympathetic to struggling workers and the unemployed. “There is no ‘social question’
in America,” he asserted at one point.103 German-born trade unionists, Marxists,
workers, and the occasional Democrat condemned this remark. They would maintain that
their Landsmann had failed to recognize that the poor suffered nearly as much in the
United States as in Europe. Tens of thousands of Americans took to the streets the
summer of 1877 because they felt politicians such as Schurz had failed them. They
protested that the two main political parties had ignored Americans’ legitimate social
rights. Their demands for social citizenship suddenly transfixed the nation.
On July 16, workers on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad left their posts to protest
the latest in a series of deep wage cuts. When the news reached Martinsburg, West
Virginia, the town’s unionized railroad employees took control of rail yards and stopped
all freight on the “B & O.” In response, President Hayes authorized the use of regular
army troops against the strikers.104 The interruption of rail traffic and intervention by
military forces would come to characterize the strikes. During the two weeks that
followed, railroad workers walked of the job throughout the country, and protesters from
103
“Es giebt keine soziale Frage in Amerika.” Volksstimme des Westens, 3 September 1877; Cincinnati
Volksblatt, 24 July 1877.
104
Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877, 33-54. On the strikes, see also Robert V. Bruce,
1877: Year of Violence (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959). A recent work argues that in part the Great
Strike represented a protest of railroads’ incursion into urban spaces. David O. Stowell, Streets, Railroads,
and the Great Strike of 1877 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). See also Stowell, ed., The
Great Strikes of 1877 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).
340
New York to California expressed their solidarity with the labor action. In Pittsburgh
state troops killed at least twenty unarmed strike supporters on July 21.105 The outraged
community burned and destroyed industrial property. Such violence was generally
avoided, but protestors stopped trains and damaged buildings in towns and cities across
North America. In Columbus, Ohio, for example, workers gathered as soon as they
learned of the massacre in Pittsburgh. The Columbus Westbote reported that the meeting
had decided to let trains pass until outside “agitators” and “scoundrels” interfered.
Monday the 23rd was “a day of great commotion” as “the wildest rumors flew through
the city,” but all the excitement amounted to little more than a few reports of property
damage. The Westbote credited Ohio National Guard regiments and the hasty assembly
citizens’ militia with preventing immanent unrest.106
In Cincinnati, the Marxist Workingmen’s Party with its substantially German
membership supported the strikers.107 Representatives of the party met on the 23rd to
denounce the railroads and the governments that used armed force to support them. They
also called for calm, posting guards to protect property and calling workers to use the
political process to implement their goals. An African American party organizer, Peter
H. Clark, articulated the Marxist view of class conflict and stressed his opposition to the
private ownership of property, but he concluded that “in any case, the ballot box is the
best place for American citizens to seek remedy for grievances.”108 At first, the
Democratic Volksfreund believed “that in the present strikes the blame lies more on the
105
Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877, 63-65.
“Wühler”; “Schurken”; “ein Tag der größten Aufregung. Die wildesten gerüchte durchflogen die
Stadt.” Columbus Westbote, 25 July 1877.
107
Marxists also played an important role in Chicago. See Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, 70-76.
108
“Der Stimmkasten sei für amerikanisch Bürger unter allen Umstanden der beste Ort, um Abhülfe fur
Uebelstande zu suchen.” Cincinnati Volksblatt, 23 July 1877. See also, Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor
Uprising of 1877, 130-32, 223-34
106
341
side of the railroad companies than on the side of the workers.” It distanced the
legitimate strikers from incidents of violence and arson, suggesting, “Everywhere the
rioters are not workers but work-shy rabble.”109 Its tune changed slightly once Cincinnati
police arrested the strike organizers and Workingmen’s Party leaders. Halting rail traffic,
the paper decided, was an unacceptable interference with private property and the
strikers’ “unlawful conduct must therefore be all the more condemned.”110 That was
essentially the position of the Republican Volksblatt, which had been more hostile to the
strikers all along.111 Editors at both Cincinnati newspapers were relieved when the strike
ended and the protests were suppressed.
Although the strikes convulsed the whole nation, events in St. Louis were,
according to a leading historian of the subject, “unique in the history of the American
labor movement.”112 Only in St. Louis did the strike take on the character of a “labor
revolution.”113 The Workingmen’s Party established undisputed—albeit tenuous—
control of an estimated twenty thousand protestors, mounting a comprehensive general
strike.114 The possibility that Marxists could act as representatives of the St. Louis “mob”
alarmed municipal leaders as much as any violence. By casting doubt on the idea that
political citizenship and free labor were sufficient to defend meaningful equality, the St.
109
“… daß in den gegenwärtigen Strikes die Schuld mehr auf Seiten der Eisenbahngesellschaften, als auf
Seiten der Arbeiter liegt.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 23 July 1877. “Die Tumultuanten sind überall nicht
Arbeiter, sondern arbeitsscheues Gesindel.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 25 July 1877.
110
For the strike leaders’ non-voilence, see Bassler to the Chief Signal Officer, telegram, Cincinnati, 25
July 1877, series 4, reel 70, Hayes Papers, HPC. “… gesetzwidriges Gebahren muß daher auch um so
energischer verdammt werden.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 28 July 1877.
111
Cincinnati Volksblatt, 21, 23 July 1877. For snippets of other reactions in the Cincinnati press, see
James Matthew Morris, “The Road to Trade Unionism: Organized Labor in Cincinnati to 1893” (Ph.D.
diss., University of Cincinnati, 1969), 162-70.
112
Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877, 157.
113
“Arbeiterrevolution.” Westliche Post, 26 July 1877.
114
Burbank, The Reign of the Rabble, 167.
342
Louis strikers posed a fundamental challenge to the United States. To urban elites and
many middle-class Americans, it seemed that “a dangerous element” threatened the
political system they had fought so hard to achieve.115
Before 1870, the older generation of German-American leaders had been
prominent proponents of political citizenship. In 1877, new German-American leaders
became conspicuous champions of social citizenship. Prussian-born Albert Currlin was
one of the most active members of the Executive Committee that the Workingmen’s
Party created to coordinate the strike effort in St. Louis. Unlike the city’s recognized
German-American leaders, Currlin had not yet been born at the time of the Revolutions
of 1848. He emigrated to the United States in his early twenties in 1874, becoming an
active socialist in New York and Philadelphia before taking a paid position with the St.
Louis Workingmen’s Party.116 The man the Westliche Post dismissed as a “journeyman
baker” spoke in German at the strike’s daily rallies.117 From the outset, Currlin struck
back at what he considered establishment organs and their notion of American
exceptionalism. He ridiculed Schurz’s remark the pervious year that there was no “social
question” in the United States. Thinly veiling a personal attack, Currlin remarked that the
Hayes administration “consists of capitalists and lawyers.”118 In order for workers to
control government and reap a fair share of the nation’s wealth, he insisted, they must
unite behind the general strike. His opponents would consider this incitement, but
Currlin and the Executive Committee repeatedly sought to prevent lawlessness and
115
“Ein gefährliches Element.” Anzeiger des Westens, 23 July 1877.
Burbank, Reign of the Rabble, 18. For a slightly different description of the elusive labor activist, see
Kanter, “Class, Ethnicity, and Socialist Politics,” 39-40.
117
“Bäckergesellen.” Westliche Post, 28 July 1877.
118
“Soziale Frage”; “… besteht aus Kapitalisten und Advokaten.” Anzeiger des Westens, 24 July 1877.
116
343
negotiate an end to the work stoppage.119 They even formed a special guard to protect
property and safeguard the mail.
One meeting in particular symbolized the challenge men such as Currlin
presented to older leaders. On Friday, July 27, Currlin arrived at the office of St. Louis’s
German-born mayor, Henry Overstolz, seeking the release of Workingmen’s Party
members who had been arrested in a raid on their headquarters earlier that afternoon.
Speaking in German, Overstolz reportedly asked Currlin whether he was an American
citizen and why he had “incited” the workers. According to the Westliche Post, Currlin
explained he was not yet naturalized, saying defiantly, “I was already a member of the
Commune in Germany.”120 Overstolz had him arrested. The press depiction of this
incident is not consistent with Currlin’s increasingly conciliatory toward the end of the
week, but it captures municipal leaders’ fear of his internationalist vision.121 Currlin
believed that the political citizenship that Overstolz’s generation had so treasured had not
set the United States apart from Europe. Overstolz and Schurz’s Post, on the other hand,
were committed to the American political and economic system and anxious to distance
themselves from any hint of disloyalty. The Post was incredulous that “Currlin appeared
to consider himself a martyr for the cause of freedom.”122
Contemporaries debated exactly how many German Americans supported
Currlin’s cause. Disassociating itself from the strike, the Westliche Post claimed early in
119
“Aufreitzen.” Westliche Post, 25 July 1877. Burbank, Reign of the Rabble, 71-73, 82-83, 101-02, 114,
122, 136.
120
“Aufgehetzt”; “Ich bin ein Mitgield der Commune schon in Deutschland gewesen.” Westliche Post, 28
July 1877.
121
Burbank, Reign of the Rabble, 146. For other German-born socialists’ naturalization, see Keil, “An
Ambivalent Identity,” 268.
122
“Currlin schien sich als Märtyrer für die Sache der Freiheit zu betrachten.” Westliche Post, 28 July
1877.
344
the week that “among the Germans in particular, rich and poor stand fast together when it
comes to driving murderous incendiaries into the open.”123 Since the Republican
newspaper characterized the whole episode as violent, it was suggesting that few German
Americans were involved in the week’s protests. In fact, of course, immigrants could
both deplore violence and support the strike. The Anzeiger des Westens also approached
the issue of German strike participation obliquely. On Thursday, the editor had “no
doubt” that “German citizens” would sign up to participate in the militias organizing to
oppose the strike.124 Both main newspapers avoided assessing the proportion of strikers
and protesters who were German-born. It turned out that German Americans were
overrepresented both among the leaders of the Committee of Public Safety that opposed
the strike and the rank and file strikers they arrested on Friday. According to the St.
Louis Times, over 60 percent of the seventy-three arrested strikers were “German.”125 In
retrospect, even the St. Louis Anzeiger had to concede “the unpleasant appearance that
Germans played a prominent role in the late strike-disturbances.”126 As if to drive home
this point, five strongly German wards would elect Workingmen’s Party candidates to the
city’s school board just a few months later.127 Many German Americans repudiated the
approach of the two main parties.
123
“Unter den Deutschen namentlich stehen hier Arm und Reich fest zusammen, wo es gilt, Mordbrenner
zu Baaren treiben.” Westliche Post, 24 July 1877.
124
“Keine Zweifel”; “die deutschen Bürger.” Anzeiger des Westens, 25 July 1877.
125
Roediger, “Not Only the Ruling Classes to Overcome,” 216, 228, 230.
126
“… die unangenehme Erscheinung, daß bei letzten Strikerunruhen die Deutschen eine hervorrangende
Rolle gespielt haben.” Anzeiger des Westens, 2 August 1877.
127
Kanter, “Class, Ethnicity, and Socialist Politics,” 45, 48-49. Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising
of 1877, 222.
345
In their fear that all German Americans would be tarred by the strikes, St. Louis’s
German-American editors took the most strenuous anti-strike stand in the city.128 The
Democratic Anzeiger rejected organized workers’ attempts to distinguish themselves
from the “rabble.” The paper considered “impeding” replacement workers and disrupting
railroad traffic illegitimate tactics. The Anzeiger maintained that strike organizers
actively sought the participation of violent elements in their demonstrations. All the
people involved were “enemies of civil society and public welfare, enemies whom the
state must overpower and bring to submission.”129 Similar comments made the Westliche
Post a particular target of the Workingmen’s Party. The broadside announcing the
general strike warned German Americans that Schurz’s paper “indulged in the coarsest
lies and calumny about us.”130 In turn, the Westliche Post resolved to take off the “kid
gloves.”131 By Thursday, there were picketers outside its offices. A railroad executive
who hoped to hasten federal action telegrammed Schurz in Washington to tell him the
“mob” was “now threatening” his newspaper.132 It actually became a point of pride for
Schurz and his partners. “The enmity of the communists,” they announced, “is more
agreeable to us than their friendship.”133 No one could accuse the Anzeiger or the
Westliche Post of quiescence.
128
For a comparison with the English-language newspapers, see Burbank, Reign of the Rabble, 131.
“Gesindel”; “verhindern”; “… Feinde der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft und der öffenlichen Wohlfahrt,
Feinde die der Staat überwältigen und zum Gehorsam zwingen muß.” Anzeiger des Westens, 24 July 1877.
130
“… sich in gröbster Lüge und Gemeinheit über uns.” Westliche Post, 26 July 1877.
131
“Glaçehandschuhe.” Westliche Post, 28 July 1877.
132
James H. Wilson to Schurz, telegram, St. Louis, 26 July 1877, reel 18, Schurz Papers, LC.
133
“Der Haß der Communisten ist uns angenehmer, als ihre Freundschaft.” Westliche Post, 27 July 1877.
After the strikes were suppressed, the paper proudly ran a piece from the Baltimore Wecker, which
recognized its anti-communist stand. Westliche Post, 31 July 1877. See also Westliche Post, 26, 27 July
1876, 1 August 1877.
129
346
German-American newspapers were unwilling to recognize that the promise of
American political citizenship failed to satisfy all German immigrants. They rejected the
idea that the strikes expressed class-based interests, avoiding the fact that, as the British
consul in St. Louis observed, “a large portion of the public” appeared to see the strikes “a
legitimate mode of warfare.”134 Instead, German-American newspaper editors
interpreted events through a lens that separated worthy and unworthy citizens. They
believed worthy workers accepted the limits of American citizenship and demanded little
of their government, while the unworthy poor preferred to agitate for government
protection. Throughout the week of St. Louis strikes, the Westliche Post and the
Anzeiger characterized the strike leaders as betraying worthy workers. On Thursday, the
Westliche Post explained that it had nothing against “the real workers” but it opposed the
“political bummers,” who “constantly provoke the honest workers into insurrection in the
most criminal and damnable ways.”135 The Anzeiger asked, “Does any rational person
believe that the circumstances of the working classes can be improved in this way?” It
suggested that the strikers and protesters did not understand the real interests of the
working class. According to the Democratic newspaper, Americans who wanted to work
would only suffer.136 Both newspapers identified a struggle not between labor and
capital, but between good and bad citizens. They resisted any analysis of the strikes that
would legitimize the Workingmen’s Party’s class-based critique of American citizenship.
134
Quoted in Burbank, Reign of the Rabble, 64.
“Die wirklichen Arbeiter”; “politischen Bummler”; “Diejenigen welche in der verbrecherischsten und
verdammungswürdigsten Weise den ehrlichen Arbeiter beständig zum Aufruhr … reizen.” Westliche Post,
26 July 1877.
136
“Glaubt ein Vernünftiger, daß die Lage der arbeitenden Klassen auf dieser Weise gebesssert werden
kann?” Anzeiger des Westens, 24 July 1877.
135
347
The Westliche Post and the Anzeiger des Westens led calls for a government
crackdown. The Westliche Post supported the intervention of state and federal troops in
Pennsylvania, and its editors joined their competitor Carl Dänzer of the Anzeiger among
the “most respected business leaders” who belonged to the Committee of Public
Safety.137 The Anzeiger was the first to suggest a preemptive attack. On Tuesday,
Dänzer asserted that the national “disorder” must be “ended, and when it can not happen
in a friendly manner, it must happen with the application of all force that the law puts at
the disposal of the authorities.”138 “What are we waiting for?” the lead editorial asked a
few days later. Factories and rail yards were closed, and “bands of youths pipe and drum
their way through the city.” The newspaper urged action before any criminal acts were
committed: “There are already signs that the reigning anarchy may turn into robbery,
plundering, and bloodshed.”139
It was ironic that the Democrats supported city, state, and federal action against
strikers because they might infringe other citizens’ rights. For over a decade, they had
resisted federal intervention on behalf of African American rights. Now they were eager
to call on federal troops to protect property and disperse protesters before they even
became violent. Following the strikes, the Westliche Post reflected on the change in the
Democrats’ tone. “All the Democratic newspapers,” it noted, “shouted themselves hoarse
calling for federal protection during the past week; they only felt safe again once federal
troops were marching in the streets, and two Democratic governors were the first who
137
“Angesehenste Geschäftsleute.” Westliche Post, 25 July 1877. See also Westliche Post, 26 July 1877.
“Unordnung”; “... muß ein Ende gemacht werden, und wenn es nicht in Gutem geschehen kann, muß es
mit Anwendung aller Gewalt, welche die Gesetze den Behörden zur Verfügung stellen, geschehe.”
Anzeiger des Westens, 24 July 1877.
139
“Worauf wartet man noch?”; “Banden von halbwüchsigen Pfifern und Trommlern durch die Stadt”;
“Schon zeigen sich die Anzeichen, daß die herrschende Anarchie jeden Augenblick in Raub, Plünderung
und Blutvergießen umschlagen mag.” Anzeiger des Westens, 25 July 1877.
138
348
telegraphed with most urgency for the national army.”140 The paper exaggerated
somewhat. The Cincinnati Volksfreund, for example, would have prefered that local
volunteers and state troops had been used to suppress the uprisings.141 To add to the
incongruity of the situation, the Westliche Post was itself also vulnerable to such a
critique. Since 1870, Schurz had hoped Republicans would renounce their military
commitment to African Americans in the South. In 1877, not only did his newspaper
support federal mobilization against the strikes, Schurz prompted Hayes’ decisive
response. Six companies of U.S. regulars left Fort Leavenworth, Kansas for St. Louis
early in the week.142 The German-American leaders of the Civil War Era reached a bipartisan consensus that suppressing working-class protest was a legitimate use of federal
power.
Class divisions within St. Louis’s German-American community were only
becoming more evident, but the old elite and the new labor leaders came to agree on race.
As in Cincinnati, the protests in St. Louis had initially suggested the potential for
working-class cooperation across racial lines. On Monday, African American speakers
had mounted the platform beside Albert Currlin to address welcoming integrated
audiences.143 At the Tuesday evening rally, a black steamboat worker asked whether
working-class St. Louisans would stand by strikers at the levee regardless of color.
140
“Alle demokratische Zeitungen riefen sich heiser um Bundesschutz während der letzten Woche, sie
fühlten sich erst wieder sicher, wenn die Bundestruppen in den Straßen marschirten, und zwei
demokratische Gouverneure waren die ersten, die auf’s bringendste um Bundesmilitär telegraphirten.”
Westliche Post, 1 August 1877.
141
Cincinnati Volksfreund, 25 July 1877.
142
James H. Wilson to Schurz, telegram, reel 18, Schurz Papers, LC; Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor
Uprising of 1877, 165; Burbank, Reign of the Rabble, 21-22.
143
Burbank, Reign of the Rabble, 33, 73, 118; Roediger, “Not Only the Ruling Classes to Overcome,” 225.
349
Voices from the crowd assured him they would.144 Yet as David Roediger has pointed
out, white racism eventually helped undo the strikes. Currlin said as much as he tried to
defend himself against felony charges of riot. In an interview riddled with racial epithets
that Joseph Weydemeyer never would have employed, Currlin said the Executive
Committee had decided to call of mass meetings when “a gang of niggers” had turned the
general strike into disorderly “mob” actions.145 He told the St. Louis Times, “We did all
we could to get the crowd to disperse and to dissuade any white men from going with the
niggers.”146
Currlin’s antipathy was no doubt real, but it was also calculated to appeal to men
such as the editors of the Westliche Post and Anzeiger, who claimed that “Negro
‘roustabouts’ played a opinion-forming role among the masses of strikers.147 The
Westliche Post observed on Thursday that a parade of sriking workers the previous
afternoon had attracted “a rear gaurd of colored deck hands and vagabonds of the worst
sort numbering in the hundreds.” It editorialized, “It is an absolute fact that many dark
figures that came up out of their dens on the levy joined in on the demonstrations
yesterday to make off with anything that wasn’t riveted or nailed down in case there was
a disturbance of the peace.” Furthermore, “The so-called ‘roust-abouts’ are playing a
leading part in the demonstrations and everyone who reads the daily police reports knows
144
Burbank, Reign of the Rabble, 54; Roediger, “Not Only the Ruling Classes to Overcome,” 225.
Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877, 207-08; Roediger, “Not Only the Ruling Classes to
Overcome,” 225. This insight inspired Roediger’s tremendously influential 1991 book, Wages of
Whiteness. See especially Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 167-70.
146
Burbank, Reign of the Rabble, 72-73.
147
“Neger ‘Roustabouts”; “eine tonangebende Rolle spielten”; “Haufen ‘Strikers.’” Anzeiger des Westens,
26 July 1877.
145
350
what is expected of them if it comes to a disturbance of the peace.”148 Perhaps because
arrest lists disproved their allegations, newspapers made racial attacks only a minor
feature of their denunciations of the strikes.149 Yet both working-class and elite leaders
in the border state recoiled at the thought of integrated labor organization.
To Anglo-Americans, the events of July 1877 revealed a foreign menace, not an
African American one. In the wake of the mass arrests that ended the St. Louis strike,
German-American leaders had to grapple with the fact that many strikers had brought
European ideas to the United States. The St. Louis Anzeiger printed a story from the
New-Yorker Staatszeitung that aimed to reassure Anglo-Americans that most German
Americans “condemned the socialist delusion.” Yet the German-American writer knew
that “in this country, socialism is a foreign growth.” He chose to identify with the
American tradition, proclaiming, “Socialism is and remains a European plant, which will
never thrive in this country.” In recent years, the article maintained, socialism had spread
in France, Germany, and Russia. That was understandable, according to the piece,
because the “paternal” aspects of socialists’ goals made some sense within the traditional
structures of the Old World. Yet they had no place in a republic. In this analysis, the
recent turmoil had come to America with “immigrants infected with the sickness of
socialism” who did not understand how citizenship worked in a republic.150 Forgetting
148
“... eine nach Hundereten zählende Arriere-Garde von frabigen Deckarbeitern und Strolchen der
allerschlimmsten Sort.”; “Es ist eine ausgemachte Thatsache, daß an den gestrigen Demonstrationen, sich
viele dunkle Gestalten betheiligten, die aus ihren Schlupfwinklen an der Levee in die Stadt
hinaufgekommen waren, um im Falle einer Ruhestörung sich mit dem zu bereichen, was nicht niet und
nagelfest ist. Die sogenannten ‘Roust-abouts’ nahmen einen hervorragenden Antheil an den
Demonstrationen und was sich von ihnen erwarten läßt, wenn es zu einer Ruhestörung kommt, weiß jeder
der die täglichen Polizei-Berichte liest.” Westliche Post, 26 July 1877.
149
Roediger, “Not Only the Ruling Classes to Overcome,” 225-26, 232.
150
“... die socialistischen Hirngespinnst … verdammt”; “der Socialismus in diesem Lande ein
ausländisches Gewächs sei”; “Der Socialismus ist und bleibt eine europäische Pflanze, die in diesem
351
their own internationalism of recent years, most German-American newspaper editors
condemned “the Internationale.” Reluctantly, they acknowledged that German
Americans had once again proved a conduit for European ideas.
German-American leaders sought to reassure Americans that many German
brought more palatable understandings of citizenship and political economy to the United
States. The syndicated New-Yorker Staatszeitung piece reminded readers of the FortyEighters, who had come to the United States “to enjoy the blessings of free, constitutional
self-government.”151 As Bruce Levine has observed, such revisionism failed to capture
the radicalism German Forty-Eighters during the 1850s and 1860s.152 Many of them had
taken the position that the United States must enfranchise all male citizens if it was to live
up to its founding ideals. If all American men could participate in democratic
government, the Radicals had hoped, the nation’s social problems would solve
themselves. In 1865, a few prominent German Americans had argued that the
transformation of immigrants into citizens provided a model for African American men
to acquire voting rights. Haltingly, this idea had spread within the German-American
Republican leadership. In Ohio, a majority of the German-born Republicans accepted it
by 1867. In Missouri, many German Republicans did not vote for African American
suffrage in the state referendum of 1868, but their political activity had nonetheless
helped open opportunities for African American men. Congress had sent the Fifteenth
Amendment to the states for ratification in 1869. After that point, even newspapers such
Landes nie gedeihen wird”; “väterliche”; “der mit der Krankeiheit des Socialismus behaftete Einwanderer.”
Anzeiger des Westens, 2 August 1877.
151
“… um die Segungen einer freien, verfassungsmäßigen Selbstregierung zu genießen.” Anzeiger des
Westens, 2 August 1877.
152
Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 263-71.
352
as the Staatszeitung and the Anzeiger joined most German Ohioans and Missourians in
grudgingly accepting African American suffrage.
Although the New-Yorker Staatszeitung’s 1877 observation misrepresented the
Forty-Eighters’ early careers in the United States, it did reflect the accommodations they
had made since 1870. No sooner had racial exclusions from voting been constitutionally
prohibited than political citizenship began to loose some of its appeal. In 1870,
developments in North America and Europe conspired to erode Forty-Eighters’ certainty
that the widespread citizenship would solve the dilemmas that confronted many
countries. The Franco-Prussian War and German unification had prompted them to
question whether all men were equally capable of exercising good citizenship and led
them to reconsider the relative merits of republics and monarchies. In the Liberal
Republican movement from 1870 to 1872, German Republicans had joined German
Democrats in emphasizing the necessity for reform and reconciliation, compromising
their commitment to African American rights. They had strained the connection between
nationalism and liberalism. German Missourians and Ohioans in both parties still hoped
that public schools would allow American men of diverse backgrounds to learn the skills
of citizenship and heal the nation’s divisions. But during the early 1870s, the struggle
over education had shown how difficult it would be to use common schools to unite
Americans.
The Great Strike presented a more fundamental challenge to American
citizenship. In Thomas Bender’s words, “Industrialism effectively brought an end to the
practical utility of the republican tradition and laissez-faire political economy.”153 In July
153
Bender, A Nation among Nations, 257.
353
1877, German-American elites rejected the notion of social citizenship, but their response
to the labor unrest signaled that they too were rethinking the relationship between the
state and its citizens. Frightened to leave the future of the United States in the hands of
the urban working class, they advocated the heavy-handed use of military force and
arbitrary arrests to suppress non-violent industrial action. In the decades that followed,
Americans would accept a range of less authoritarian and more creative responses to the
problems created by industrialization.154 In August 1877, a New Yorker wrote to Schurz
at the Department of the Interior suggesting that the United States form a federal labor
bureau to “organize the labouring class against itself.” It would prevent “the organization
is now going on in the laboring class,” which could make the next outbreak more
effective than the one that had just passed.155 In 1884, Congress would respond to such
suggestions by forming the Bureau of Labor in the Department of the Interior. There
would always be reformers who were more sympathetic to working-class appeals and did
not see such innovations merely as an opportunity to manipulate workers. African
American leaders and some whites would also publicize the double burden African
Americans faced because their economic marginality was compounded by racism and
contraventions of their political rights. Yet American race relations foundered in the late
nineteenth century despite the rising popularity of various Progressive reforms.156 It
154
For example, Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics emphasizes the importance of reactions that
transcended class divides in late nineteenth-century Chicago.
155
[Sender’s name illegible] to Schurz, New York, 7 August 1877, reel 18, Schurz Papers, LC.
156
David W. Southern, The Progressive Era and Race: Reaction and Reform, 1900-1917 (Wheeling,
Illinois: Harlan Davidson, 2005); McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy, 299-394; Axel R. Schäfer, “W.E.B.
Du Bois, German Social Thought, and the Racial Divide in American Progressivism, 1892-1909,” Journal
of American History 88 (2001): 925-49; David W. Southern, The Malignant Heritage: Yankee Progressives
and the Negro Question, 1901–1914 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1968); Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn,
Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890–1945
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Ronald C. White, Jr., Liberty and Justice for All:
354
would be nearly a century before white reformers again focused their energies on the
legacy of slavery and racial prejudice as they had between 1865 and 1870.
During the final decades of the nineteenth century, many of the responses to
industrialization were transatlantic. In Germany, Bismarck feared the growing political
influence of the Social Democratic Party and industrial unrest. The chancellor used two
attempts to assassinate Emperor Wilhelm I in 1878 as a pretext to secure a series of
repressive laws that banned societies with “social-democratic, socialist, or communist”
tendencies.157 To counter the continued popularity of socialism and reinforce the power
of his administration, Bismarck also provided state support for workers. In the early
1880s, the Reichstag passed three compulsory insurance schemes to protect Germans
against the risk of sickness and accident and provide for them in old age or in case of
prolonged incapacitation.158 Germany’s “socialism from above” reflected Bismarck’s
ambition and the peculiarities of the German Empire. As one economist has put it, “In a
sense, social rights were granted to prevent having to grant enlarged political rights.”159
Such an approach might seem antithetical to political thought in the United States, but
Racial Reform and the Social Gospel, 1877–1925 (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990); Ralph E. Luker,
The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1991); Eileen L. McDonagh, “The ‘Welfare Rights State’ and the ‘Civil Rights
State’: Policy Paradox and State Building in the Progressive Era,” Studies in American Political
Development 7 (1993): 225–71.
157
Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1870-1918, 198; Vernon L. Lidtke, The Outlawed Party: Social
Democracy in Germany, 1878-1890 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 70-78; Gerhard A.
Ritter, Social Welfare in Germany and Britain: Origins and Development, trans. Kim Traynor (Leamington
Spa, United Kingdom: Berg, 1983), 32-33.
158
Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 222-25; Axel R. Schäfer, American Progressives and German Social
Reform, 1875-1920 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000), 184-88; Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 155-75;
Daniel Levine, Poverty and Society: The Growth of the American Welfare States in International
Comparison (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 63-68; Ritter, Social Welfare in
Germany and Britain, 17-82; Gaston V. Rimlinger, Welfare Policy and Industrialization in Europe,
America, and Russia (New York: Jon Wiley & Sons, 1971), 89-130; Jürgen Tampke, “Bismarck’s Social
Legislation: A Genuine Breakthrough?” in The Emergence of the Welfare State in Britain and Germany,
1850-1950, ed. M.J. Mommsen (London: Croom Helm and the German Historical Institute, 1981), 71-83;
Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 221-26.
159
Rimlinger, Welfare Policy and Industrialization, 112.
355
industrial poverty was a massive challenge to the American tradition. Americans drew
what inspiration they could from the political experiments in Europe. Schurz’s New
York correspondent who advocated a labor bureau had perhaps been inspired by the
response of the German administration to the economic crisis of the 1870s. At the other
end of the political spectrum, the Social Democratic Party leader, Eugene V. Debs,
considered social insurance along German lines a program that could contribute to “the
democratizing of the whole of society,” reconciling the American republican tradition
with workers’ needs.160 Deb’s party began to include compulsory social insurance in its
platform in 1900, and the Progressive Party adopted a similar plank in 1916.161 Although
it was not until the great Depression of the 1930s that it would be seriously considered on
a national level, the German system provoked considerable debate at the turn of the
twentieth century.
In 1877, German Americans still could not predict the initiatives that transatlantic
networks would convey, but they knew that they bore some responsibility for alerting
Americans to the inspiring lessons and cautionary tales that emanated from across the
Atlantic. Like the Cincinnati “Bible Wars,” St. Louis’s Great Strike demonstrated what a
turning point 1870 had been. Socialism and efforts to counter it were transatlantic
answers to the dilemma upon which German Americans agreed: the Fifteenth
Amendment had not solved all America’s problems. Americans still valued the right to
vote. Women’s campaign for suffrage would emphasize how important the ballot box
160
Johnson, ed., National Party Platforms, 140. For how this fit into Debs’ approach, see Salvatore,
Eugene V. Debs.
161
Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 242-45; Levine, Poverty and Society, 167-72; Johnson, ed. National Party
Platforms, 128, 142, 166, 177, 211; Schäfer, American Progressives and German Social Reform, 184-88. I
found Thomas Bender’s discussion of “paths away from laissez faire” indispensable to this description.
Bender, A Nation among Nations, 263-71.
356
remained. Yet disenchantment with the power of political citizenship transformed the
context within which African Americans would struggle to protect their political and
social rights.
357
APPENDIX
TABLES SUMMARIZING
SELECTED ELECTION RESULTS
358
359
32.0
37.1
54.3
47.8
60.9
32.3
7.2
4
5
6
7
11
City-wide total
State-wide total
67
45
67
64
44
58
52.3
Lincoln (R)
for president
in 1860 (%)
68.1
31.5
59.1
45.4
37.4
49.7
46
66.3
42.1
68.5
58.1
49.3
61.2
54.0
Amend Ohio
Grant (R) for
constitution to
president in
allow black men 1868 (%)
to vote in 1867
(%)
64.3
44.1
71.9
54.6
51.6
64.3
53.2
Grant (R)
for president
in 1872 (%)
58.2
36.0
63.6
49.2
44.8
52.6
50.2
Hayes (R)
for president
in 1876
Cleveland “German” wards defined as wards where over 30 percent white males over 21 were German-born based on 1860 manuscript census. Thomas
W. Kremm, “The Rise of the Republican Party in Cleveland, 1848-1860” (Ph.D. diss, Kent State University, 1974), 301.
Ohio-wide German-born population based on total German-born as percentage of total population according to the 1860 census. Bureau of the Census,
Abstract of the Eight Census, 621-23.
Cleveland results from Kremm, “The Rise of the Republican Party in Cleveland,” 291; Ohio Secretary of State, Annual Report, 1873 (Columbus: State
Printers, 1874), 103; Cleveland Leader, 9 October 1867, 8 November 1876.
Ohio results from Sawrey, Dubious Victory, 115; Ohio Secretary of State, Annual Report, 1868 (Columbus: Columbus Printing, 1869), 47, 103-6, 10910; Burnham, Presidential Ballots, 676-77.
Table 1: Voting in Cleveland’s “German” wards, 1860, 1867, 1868, 1872, and 1876
Germanborn among
white males
over 21 (%)
Ward
360
71.8
36.0
69.2
75.9
57.1
52.3
7
9
10
11
12
City-wide total
Amend Ohio
constitution to
allow black men to
vote in 1867 (%)
58.5
19.7
62.9
59.5
48.4
45.4
72.6
37.5
72.3
78.6
58.1
56.3
Grant for president
in 1868 (%)
47.7
50.1
56.5
58.2
55.4
44.7
Grant (R) for
president in 1872
(%)
55.8
56.5
65.4
65.2
67.0
50.7
Hayes (R) for
president in
1876 (%)
Cincinnati “German” wards defined by the Republican Cincinnati Commercial, 5 November 1868. It also labeled the eighteenth and nineteenth wards
“German,” but I exclude these wards because they did not exist in 1860.
Election results from Cincinnati Enquirer, 8 November 1860; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 11 October 1867, 6 November 1872, 12 November 1876; Ohio
Secretary of State, Annual Report, 1868, 54.
Table 2: Voting in Cincinnati’s “German” wards, 1860, 1867, 1868, 1872, and 1876
Lincoln for
president in 1860
(%)
Ward
361
58.9
55.4
33.9
31.0
36.8
33.1
1
2
3
8
10
Citywide
total
Statewide
total
10.3
65.5
65.0
44.8
46.3
46.5
41.6
Lincoln (R)
for president
in 1860 (%)
42.7
35.4
22.1
38.7
30.4
32.0
32.7
57.0
71.9
66.2
69.4
50.1
42.7
54.6
Amend
Grant (R)
constitution to for president
allow black
in 1868 (%)
men to vote in
1868 (%)
62.2
88.1
94.5
92.5
64.4
74.6
78.7
Brown (LR)
for
Governor in
1870 (%)
44.0
46.3
48.5
51.4
49.1
37.0
45.8
Grant (R)
for
president
in 1872
(%)
43.7
46.8
45.1
49.8
49.7
37.3
46.7
Henderson
(R) for
governor
in 1872
(%)
41.4
57.4
55.8
50.3
51.6
38.0
45.9
Hayes (R)
for
president
in 1876
(%)
St. Louis “German” wards defined as wards where over 30 percent of the total population was German-born based on an 1858 city census. Kellner,
“The German Element on the Urban Frontier,” 320. Missouri-wide German population based on German-born as percentage of total free
population according to the 1860 census. Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Eight Census, 621-23.
St. Louis results from Westliche Post, 5 November 1868, 12 November 1870, 8 November 1872, 9 November 1876.
Missouri results from Missouri Republican, 8 November 1860; Parrish, A History of Missouri, 3:3; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 258;
Burnham, Presidential Ballots, 570-71; Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 269; Shoemaker, Missouri and Missourians,
2:21.
Table 3: Voting in St. Louis’s “German” wards, 1860, 1868, 1870, 1872, and 1876
8.3
Germanborn among
total
population
in 1858 (%)
Ward
362
Douglas (D)
for president
in 1860 (%)
94.2
72.1
76.0
79.7
83.3
74.6
97.6
85.5
93.2
79.7
76.7
82.8
Seymour (D)
for president
in 1868 (%)
98.7
78.6
84.2
92.8
83.9
79.6
100.0
87.7
96.2
79.3
86.5
79.8
Greeley (LR) for
president in
1872 (%)
98.3
80.4
84.8
89.3
83.7
79.3
83.5
81.3
77.6
81.1
80.1
74.4
Townships selected because they showed a high proportion of Democratic voters and German-born men based on the 1860 census in Kelso, “The
German-American Vote in the Election of 1860,” 195.
Election results from Ohio Secretary of State, Annual Report, 1868, 40-73; Ohio Secretary of State, Annual Report 1873, 92-129.
Table 4: Voting in selected “German Democratic” townships in rural Ohio, 1860, 1868, and 1872
Auglaize, Jackson
Crawford, Vernon
Crawford, cranberry
Crawford, Chatfield
Henry, Monroe
Holmes, Paint
Mercer, Marion
Mercer, Recovery
Mercer, Granville
Monroe, Summit
Ottawa, Salem
Pike, Beaver
County, Township
363
29.7
31.0
32.6
39.9
49.9
32.1
51.1
8.3
For
adoption of
constitution
in 1865 (%)
Germanborn among
total
population
in 1858 (%)
58.9
55.4
33.9
31.0
36.8
33.1
St. Louis “German” wards defined as wards where over 30 percent of the total population was German-born based on an 1858 city census. Kellner,
“The German Element on the Urban Frontier,” 320. Missouri-wide German population based on German-born as percentage of total free
population according to the 1860 census. Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Eight Census, 621-23.
St. Louis results from Westliche Post, 8 June 1865.
State-wide results from Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 46.
Table 5: Voting in St. Louis’s “German” wards on referendum on Missouri constitution of 1865
1
2
3
8
10
City-wide
total
State-wide
total
Ward
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8. DISSERTATIONS
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399