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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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Thus, even the few Germans who became slaveholders apparently had personal qualms about the institution, or at least came to support the Republican Party when the opportunity arose. And as in Charleston, the average German in rural Missouri or Texas was much less likely to own slaves than an Anglo-American of similar economic means. In both states, Germans had slightly higher rates of land ownership than Anglos at the same time that they had much lower rates of slaveholding, thus negating economic (or geographic) determinism.5 |
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The city of St. Louis, the subject of Anderson's essay, presents what may be a best-case scenario of German support for Lincoln in 1860 nationwide, and unquestionably by far the best showing the Republican Party made in a slave state. In fact, along with Gasconade, the most heavily German rural county in Missouri, St. Louis County was one of only two carried by Lincoln in any slave state. The Republicans were not even on the ballot in Kentucky, and there were only two counties in the panhandle of (West) Virginia and one in western Maryland where Lincoln's support exceeded 10 percent. In Baltimore, the Lincoln vote fell below 4 percent, most Germans regarding the Breckenridge Democrats as the "regular" Democrats.6 Still, the first German elected to the Maryland legislature was a Republican who had been one of the organizers of a Unionsverein in Baltimore.7 Even a German Catholic newspaper in Louisville that opposed black suffrage after the war argued primarily on environmentalist grounds rather than any inherent racial deficiencies and strongly supported education for African Americans.8 |
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Also in terms of Union recruitment, St. Louis and Missouri stood out: only sixth in the size of its German population, Missouri was second only to New York in the number of German troops who rallied to the Union banner.9 German Americans generally, and especially in St. Louis, fared prominently in the Radical emancipationist movement that, impatient with the slow pace of emancipation under Lincoln, pushed John C. Fremont as a presidential candidate in 1864. The visit of a largely German delegation from Missouri prompted Lincoln's quip that the Radicals were "devils ... to deal with," although he conceded "their faces are set Zionwards."10 |
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As Anderson demonstrates, the black suffrage referendum fared no better in St. Louis than elsewhere in the North, despite strong support in leading German-language journals. But as she also shows, race issues were not the only factors eroding German Republican support. Nor would it be accurate to cast German support for the Liberal Republican movement purely or even primarily in terms of race. Among the bolters were many querulous German Radicals who had opposed Lincoln from the left in 1864. Whatever problems they had with authoritarian Prussia, they still missed the incorruptibility of its bureaucrats.11 Still, after the detour into the Liberal Republican movement, St. Louis Germans largely returned to the Republican fold, whereas their prewar native standard bearers, such as Frank Blair and B. Gratz Brown, ended their careers as Democrats. Even if German racial idealism faded somewhat in later decades, when a city referendum was introduced in 1916 to impose residential segregation, Republican mayor Henry Kiel made speeches in opposition, and German Socialists supplied most of what few white votes were cast against it—though one might question whether they were voting primarily as Germans or as Socialists.12 |
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South Carolina, the subject of Jeff Strickland's essay, presents a bestcase scenario of another sort, the place where Germans were perhaps most integrated into southern society. A recent German dissertation examining and comparing the three largest cities of the South—Charleston, Richmond, and New Orleans—finds the German community of Charleston to be the oldest, richest, most homogeneous, and most prone to slaveholding of the three cities.13 But even here, as Strickland's nuanced essay shows, Germans were not merely ordinary southerners exhibiting the same values and behavior regarding slavery and race as other whites; their unique pattern of behavior extended into Reconstruction, though not, in most instances, to the next generation. |
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This community, too, presents some interesting parallels to Missouri, for example, in the propensity of Germans to trade with slaves. A county-seat German weekly reported in 1855 that the grand jury had indicted forty people for breaking license laws, as usual mostly Germans. And as usual, several persons were accused of trading with Negroes, which was strictly forbidden and severely punished, the paper warned its readers.14 As in South Carolina, during Reconstruction some Missourian Germans took quite a radical position, even tolerating racial intermarriage and also supporting a state university that did not discriminate by race or gender.15 |
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All three of these essays raise the question of where this alternative value system of Germans originated. It provides clear evidence, if any is needed, that racial antipathies are not primordial, that racism is learned behavior. There are certainly many nuances in German American racial attitudes and behavior, and all three essays do a good job of teasing out the subtleties. In the case of intellectuals such as Lieber and Forty-eighter political refugees, it is no surprise that such heirs of the European Enlightenment would be opposed to slavery, at least in principle. But the evidence in these essays suggests that identification with the ideals of 1848 penetrated farther down on the social scale than most historians have realized, perhaps already in Europe, and certainly in America, where an unrestricted and mostly liberal German-language press promoted these values. This also suggests that the antipathies between the freethinking Forty-eighters and the more religious rank and file of German immigration were not as great as suggested by some historians. Despite pronouncements of leading Lutheran and Catholic clerics that slavery had biblical sanction, their laity—even a village blacksmith like my great-great-grandfather, Conrad Weinrich, from a charter congregation of Missouri Synod Lutheranism—often thought and acted differently.16 |
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These essays all raise the interesting question, most explicitly stated in Strickland's title, of when German immigrants or ethnics entered the American mainstream on matters of race and no longer stood out from their neighbors. There were black-German Republican political coalitions in several Texas counties that survived well after state-level Democratic "redemption" in 1873, although it must be noted that German Republicanism survived longer in areas farther west in the state, where the black population was smaller.17 New Braunfels, with only a 2 percent black population due to its low rate of slaveholding a century earlier, integrated its schools immediately in 1954 when ordered to do so by the Supreme Court. The fact that, even ten years later, less then 6 percent of black Texans were attending integrated schools shows just how unusual this was.18 |
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A 1930 local history in the vicinity of Industry, the oldest German settlement in Texas, relates that a childless immigrant couple, Wilhelm Bartels and his wife, were cared for in their old age by a former slave, Henry Williams, whom they had brought up as an orphan and taught the German language. According to this account, they willed him all their property at their death, and Williams would proudly show a bundle of German letters along with his farm deed. Such invocations of the magnolia myth invite skepticism, but there are possibilities for independent verification. There was indeed a Henry Williams, usually described as a mulatto, to be found in the census in Industry precinct down through 1930, consistently listed as a farm owner. The 1860 slave schedules list no names, only age, color, and gender, but Bartels is listed as owning a seven-year-old mulatto male, who might well be identical with the twenty-seven-year-old Henry Williams listed in 1800. The Census in this era tells nothing about German language ability. But the story's credibility is greatly enhanced by an archival collection of letters by the Bartels in Austin, labeled "gift of Annie and Henry Williams of Industry, 1931."19 Even at the turn of the twenty-first century, a few black Texans spoke fluent German because they grew up among and interacted with Texas Germans.20 |
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The black-German Republican coalition, although it weakened over time, persisted in rural Missouri perhaps longer than anywhere else in the country.
My grandfather on the other side of the family from Weinrich, another ardent St. Charles County Republican, almost got in a fight with a local Democrat in 1948 because he had been transporting blacks to the polls. And as a member of the local school board, he implemented the Brown decision without delay. It was not until the 1960 election that St. Charles County blacks were persuaded by John F. Kennedy to turn Lincoln's picture to the wall.21 |
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NOTES
1. Walter L. Buenger, "Secession and the Texas German Community: Editor Lindheimer vs. Editor Flake," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 82, no. 3 (January 1979): 379–402.
2. Walter D. Kamphoefner, The Westfalians: From Germany to Missouri (Princeton, NJ, 1987), 115–17; Walter D. Kamphoefner, "Friedrich Muench," in Dictionary of Missouri Biography, ed. Lawrence O. Cristiensen et al. (Columbia, MO, 1999), 463–64; Adolf E. Schroeder, "Arnold Krekel," in Dictionary of Missouri Biography, 562–63; Walter D. Kamphoefner and Wolfgang Helbich, eds., Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), 342–45.
3. Letter of Jetta Bruns, Westphalia [Mo.], April 18, 1845, Nordamerika-Briefsammlung, Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, trans. W.D.K. See also Adolf E. Schroeder, ed. and trans., Hold Dear, As Always: Jetta, A German Immigrant Life in Letters (Columbia, MO, 1988), 130–31, 162.
4. Cornelia Küffner, "Texas-Germans' Attitudes toward Slavery: Biedermeier Sentiments and Class-Consciousness in Austin, Colorado, and Fayette Counties" (master's thesis, University of Houston, 1994).
5. Kamphoefner, The Westfalians, 115–17; Walter D. Kamphoefner, "New Perspectives on Texas Germans and the Confederacy," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 102, no. 4 (April 1999): 441–55.
6. Donald Scott Barton, "Divided Houses: The Civil War Party System in the Border States" (PhD diss., Texas A&M University, 1991); Martin Lorenz-Meyer, "United in Difference: The German Community in Nativist Baltimore and the Presidential Elections of 1860," Yearbook of German-American Studies 35 (2000): 1–26.
7. Kamphoefner and Helbich, eds., Germans in the Civil War, 73–76.
8. Walter D. Kamphoefner, "Liberal Catholicism, Up to a Point: The Social and Political Outlook of the Louisville Katholische Glaubensbote, 1866–1886," Yearbook of German-American Studies 31 (1996): 13–23.
9. Kamphoefner and Helbich, eds., Germans in the Civil War, 8–10.
10. Jörg Nagler, Frémont contra Lincoln: Die deutsch-amerikanische Opposition in der Republikanischen Partei während des amerikanischen Bürgerkriegs (Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 1984).
11. Jörg Nagler, "Deutschamerikaner und das Liberal Republican Movement 1872," Amerikastudien 33 (1989): 415–38.
12. James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764–1980, 3rd ed. (St. Louis, MO, 1998), 411–13; St. Louis Labor, March 4, 1916, in St. Louis, ed. Selwyn K. Troen and Glenn E. Holt (New York, 1977), 84.
13. Andrea Mehrländer, "'Gott gebe uns bald bessere Zeiten ...': Die Deutschen von Charleston, Richmond und New Orleans im Amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg, 1861–1865" (PhD diss., Ruhr-University Bochum, 1998).
14. St. Charles Demokrat, June 2, 1855.
15. Kamphoefner and Helbich, eds., Germans in the Civil War, 346–47.
16. Bruce Levine, The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana, IL, 1992); Kamphoefner and Helbich, eds., Germans in the Civil War, 346–47.
17. For two explorations of this question, see Sean Michael Kelley, "Plantation Frontiers: Race, Ethnicity, and Family along the Brazos River of Texas, 1821–1886" (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2000); Walter D. Kamphoefner, "German Texans: In the Mainstream or Backwaters of Lone Star Society?" Yearbook of German-American Studies 38 (2003): 119–38.
18. Gene B. Preuss, "Within Those Walls: The African American School and Community in Lubbock and New Braunfels, Texas," Sound Historian (1998): 36–43; D. C. Heath, U.S. History Transparency Set (Lexington, MA, 1996), vol. 2, Table 43.
19. C. W. Schmidt, Footprints of Five Generations (New Ulm, TX, 1930), 88; Bartels Papers, collection description, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.
20. Küffner, "Texas-Germans' Attitudes toward Slavery," 8–9.
21. Walter Diederich served on the school board in Augusta, St. Charles County, Missouri. Steve Ehlmann, Crossroads: A History of St. Charles County, Missouri (St. Charles, MO, 2004); personal conversation, June 25, 2007 with Ehlmann, a junior law partner with a venerable Republican leader of the county.
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