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Comments and Context
WALTER D. KAMPHOEFNER
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BY THE CIVIL WAR, German Americans had overtaken the Irish in immigrant numbers, and with the British in third place for most of the century, German speakers were by far the largest language minority in the nineteenth-century United States. Although most heavily concentrated in the urban and rural Midwest, there were significant German populations in slave states interacting with African Americans in border cities from St. Louis to Baltimore, in New Orleans and other smaller cities along the Mississippi, and in rural settlements above all in Missouri and Texas. |
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Hartmut Keil's exploration of the complicated relationship of the liberal Francis Lieber to slavery brings up fascinating parallels in Missouri and Texas of several other small-scale German slaveholders who became emancipationists and Republicans, even Radical ones. In Texas, Galveston newspaper publisher Ferdinand Flake, though a slaveholder, was a strong critic of the slave trade and secession.1 In the rural Missouri community that was the subject of my dissertation, Latin farmers Friedrich and George Muench each owned a female slave in 1850, but Friedrich became an influential antislavery journalist and a Radical state senator and a member of the antislavery convention, while his brother George was active in lesser capacities. In the next county over, small-scale slave owners Arnold Krekel (cited in Kristen Anderson's essay) and Gustave Bruere were lawyers, German-language newspapermen, and Republican politicians. Krekel raised a Unionist militia company and after the war was one of the leading promoters of the black college that became Lincoln University.2 Further upriver in Osage County, another German Republican slave owner, Bernhard Bruns, along with his wife Jetta, provide some insight into the gender dynamics that often lay behind the decision to purchase slaves. |
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When the Democratic Party of Missouri split into pro- and anti-slavery wings, Bruns held firm to the free-soil faction and later became a zealous Radical Republican by the time of his death in 1864 when he was mayor of the state capital. This might appear paradoxical given the fact that he was a slave owner, and Catholic besides. Part of the explanation is that he was typical of neither. The Bruns family was more than nominally Catholic, and even boarded the bishop when he visited Westphalia, Missouri, but its members were not willing to submit themselves unconditionally to conservative priests, especially not in worldly affairs. It was no easy decision to participate in slavery, as an apologetic letter of April 1845 from Jetta to her brother back home makes clear:
I'm sorry if ... you are offended by the fact that we have blacks. I was truly uneasy about it myself. The blacks are often good for nothing [sehr nichtsnutz]. But our Mary loves the children and is always good natured. I wouldn't want to do without her at any price. The white girls are very pretentious and seldom stay long. Last summer we had a nice girl, but after three months she up and got married, although she had rented herself out for longer.3
Until they moved to Jefferson City in the mid-1850s, the Bruns family continued to own a slave couple with one child. But then Jetta reported something remarkable: "The blacks chose themselves a new master." |
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Immigrants of the servant-keeping class faced a dilemma if they settled in the slave states.4 It was asking enough of bourgeois German women to submit to primitive American conditions at all. Most men, regardless of ideological consistency, were unwilling to ask their wives to do without their accustomed domestic help on top of everything else they had sacrificed. Moreover, white domestic help was hard to come by, often not very dependable, and given the uneven sex ratio, much in demand among fellow ethnics as marriage partners. |
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