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Forum: German Americans and Their Relations with African Americans during the Mid-Nineteenth Century
INTRODUCTION
WALTER D. KAMPHOEFNER
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THE TOPIC OF THIS forum is one that has seldom been addressed directly in the historical literature, although several historiographic strands touch on it peripherally. The issues of Unionism, antislavery, Republicanism, and racial egalitarianism in the political and social arena are all related and often coincide with one another, but they are not identical. In fact, they form roughly concentric circles ranging from the easiest to the most difficult to support for most nineteenth-century Americans. |
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Most thoroughly investigated has been the political behavior of German Americans in the Civil War era, and particularly in the 1860 election. There is an old chestnut, apparently originating with John Peter Altgeld, that the German vote provided Abraham Lincoln's margin of victory and made him president.1 This viewpoint was tested and challenged, if not totally debunked, over several generations of historiography.2 More recent work has shown that even if a slight majority of Germans remained Democratic in 1860, they were still the social group with the largest net movement in the direction of the Republicans over the decade of the 1850s.3 |
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Even so, the 1860 vote was not necessarily a referendum on race attitudes. Civil War historian Don Fehrenbacher has perceptively observed that the issue of race tended to unite Democrats and divide Republicans, whereas the issue of slavery united Republicans and divided Democrats. The principle of popular sovereignty temporarily allowed Democrats to paper over the differences between southerners hoping it would lead to an expansion of slavery and northerners hoping the opposite.4 The Republican program of blocking the expansion of slavery also had its origins in ambivalence, but it managed to unite idealists who opposed slavery for humanitarian reasons and those racists or pragmatists who wanted to avoid competition with slave labor—or indeed any black neighbors, slave or free—in newly opened western lands. Thus, to establish that a person or an ethnic group voted Republican is still a far cry from determining why. |
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Nor is it clear that German support for Democrats was based primarily on race. Many German Catholics would have agreed with a Luxembourg immigrant chronicler who wrote that "it was only natural that they turned to the Democrats, who were conservative in their principles, well-disposed towards immigrants, opposed to centralization, and supported by other fellow Catholics." They remained Democrats "not because they were friends of the slaveholders, no, but because they did not like the elements that had combined to form the new Republican Party. Instinctively, ... they stood in opposition to the party of centralization and Puritanism."5 Not just southern slaveholders, but also many of the impoverished, immigrants, Catholics, or tipplers (sometimes all wrapped up in one) felt threatened by Republican "do-gooders" with their tendency to improve people whether the ostensible beneficiaries felt the need for it or not. In both the North and South, the issue of nativism clouded the issue of Unionism. |
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When considering the most concrete evidence of Unionism—military service—the evidence is clearer: German Americans were overrepresented in Union ranks and underrepresented among Confederates in relation to their proportion of the military age populations. But even here, the issue remains as to what Germans in blue or gray were fighting for or against: how much of a role did economic motives play in Union enlistment or conscription in Confederate service?6 Evidence from immigrant letters proves valuable in providing nuance, but there is also room for additional quantitative study of recruitment, focusing above all on the economic background of recruits and on date of enlistment in relation to conscription laws in the North and particularly the South. |
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