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The Involvement of North Germany's Port Cities and Merchants in the American Civil War, 1861-65

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The Involvement of North Germany's Port Cities and Merchants in the American Civil War, 1861-65 Vol. 5 Traversea 2015 "The means of doing us a great deal of injury": The involvement of North Germany's port cities and merchants in the American Civil War, 1861-65 Patrick Gaul Current scholarship analyses the American Civil War as a global shock that affected people and places throughout the transatlantic world.1 But curiously, the role of Central Europe and its major Atlantic ports and merchants has mostly been neglected by this historiographic trend so far. This is rather astonishing, since Hamburg, Bremen, and their hinterlands played a crucial role for the global impacts of North America's bloodiest conflict. This article argues that people of Northern Germany were not merely passive recipients of the Civil War. Supported by extending networks of transatlantic trade and migration, individuals from the port cities of Hamburg, Bremen and their surroundings actively influenced the conflict in North America. As we shall see, North German overseas merchants shipped large amounts of weapons from Bremen and Hamburg to both the Union and the Confederate armies and had a large share in the covert trade with Southern cotton. Using their multilateral business connections with branches in Germany, the United States, and Mexico, the merchants acted as influential elements that transformed the war in North America into a global conflict. The active role of North German merchants not only provokes a realignment of traditionalist accounts of Central European partisanship during the American Civil War, it also underscores the region's entanglement with American slavery over the course of the mid-nineteenth Century.2 Cities and their hinterlands have always had the potential to become transnational spaces of linkages and connections. Port cities in particular are settings where people and commodities are constantly exchanged beyond national borders and are thereby embedded in networks of trade, migration and communication.3 In the nineteenth century, Hamburg, Bremen and their immediate surroundings (parts of the Kingdom of Hanover and the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg) were the continental hubs of emigration to America and gateways for American slave labor products, 1 For recent publications see Enrico Dal Lago: The Age of Lincoln and Cavour. Comparative Perspectives on Nineteenth- Century American and Italian Nation-Building, Basingstoke, 2015; Don H. Doyle: The Cause of All Nations. An International History of the Civil War, New York, 2015; Douglas Egerton: Rethinking Atlantic Historiography in a Postcolonial Era. The Civil War in a Global Perspective, in: The Journal of the Civil War Era, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2011, 79-95; Andrew Fleche: The Revolution of 1861. The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict, Chapel Hill, 2012; Patrick J. Kelly: The European Revolutions of 1848 and the Transnational Turn in Civil War History, in: The Journal of the Civil War Era, Vol. 4, No. 3, 2014, 431-443; Brian Schoen: The Fragile Fabrics of Union. Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War, Baltimore, 2011. 2 The amount of studies for the field of slavery is still modest. A few pertinent works dealing especially with Central Europe's connectedness with the Atlantic world are Jochen Meissner, Ulrich Mücke and Klaus Weber: Schwarzes Amerika. Eine Geschichte der Sklaverei ,München, 2008; Sam Mustafa: Merchants and Migrations. Germans and Americans in Connection, 1776-1835, Hants, 2001; Magnus Ressel: Hamburg und die Niederelbe im atlantischen Sklavenhandel der Frühen Neuzeit, in: WerkstattGeschichte, Vol. 23, No. 66-67, 2015, 75-96. Klaus Weber: Deutsche Kaufleute im Atlantikhandel 1680 - 1830 : Unternehmen und Familien in Hamburg, Cádiz und Bordeaux, München 2004; Ibid.: Deutschland, der atlantische Sklavenhandel und die Plantagenwirtschaft der Neuen Welt, Journal of Modern European History, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2009, 37–67; Ibid.: Mitteleuropa und der transatlantische Sklavenhandel: eine lange Geschichte, in: WerkstattGeschichte, Vol. 23, No. 66-67, 2015, 7-30. 3 For the global role of cities and the meaning of urbanization in the 19th century see Jürgen Osterhammel: Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, München, 2009, 356 ff. and 402 ff. For recent approaches in the historiography of port cities see the introductory remarks by Lars Amenda & Malte Fuhrmann: Hafenstädte in globaler Perspektive. In: Comparativ, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2007, 7-11. Page 17 Vol. 5 Traversea 2015 namely cotton, coffee, tobacco and sugar. Before the Civil War, cotton harvested by slaves on American plantations was brought from Hamburg and Bremen to inland spinning centers like the Kingdom of Saxony. During the war, the small kingdom and several other German states suffered severely from the cotton famine the conflict had caused.4 Shortly after the conflict had ended, Saxony's commercial chamber summarized that "the cotton famine [caused by the Civil War] has reminded us of the intimate connection between politics and economy."5 Several German papers and authors agreed on that assessment in one way or another.6 For Central European contemporaries, the most palpable ramifications of the American Civil War were its economic impact.7 What contemporaries acknowledged immediately, historians would later treat rather dismally. Studies about the war's consequences in Central Europe are often relying on diplomatic sources and neglect the powerful synergy of conviction and commerce. Such studies suggest that contention and partisanship in German-speaking Europe during the American Civil War proceeded solely on a political scale.8 Actors and factions considered democratic or liberal were supposed to be in favor of the Union, whereas supposed conservative individuals and organs were said to be attracted to the Confederacy's war aims. In the end, popular support for the Union and its world- famous Wiederhersteller (restorer) Abraham Lincoln seemed to have won the hearts of the majority of the German-speaking population.9 However, this notion needs to be readjusted. It overlooks the economic conditions that influence individual actions and habits affected by long distance-trade and its remarkable power to change and destabilize spatial and social relations.10 The Civil War's impact in Northern Germany reveals a strong discrepancy in established historiographical tendencies. Older studies neglect the fact that relations between the various German states and the United States ante 1871 were based first and foremost on commercial pillars.11 Entanglements between Europe and the United States were primarily woven by cotton fabrics, harvested by the hands of slaves. Formal expressions of political loyalty, represented by treaties or inter-state alliances, lacked the power or simply did not exist in the manner they would later in the nineteenth century. Two major perquisites need to be considered if a solid historiographical readjustment of 4 Enno Eimers: Preußen und die USA 1850 bis 1867. Transatlantische Wechselwirkungen, Berlin 2004, 458 ff.; W.O. Henderson: The Cotton Famine on the Continent, 1861-5, in: The Economic History Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1932, 195– 207; Hubert Kiesewetter: Die Industrialisierung Sachsens, München 2007, 537-542. 5Deutsche Industrie-Zeitung, January 4th, 1866 (all translations: PG). 6 As early as August 1861, Germany's most influential publisher Johann Georg von Cotta observed that "this unfortunate war of brothers [acts] tremendously and disadvantageously on Europe's commerce and industry." See Cotta to Herman Raster, August 30th, 1861; Copierbuch V, Cotta-Archives, Marbach. Similar accounts can be found in Constantin Frantz: Die Ereignisse in Amerika in ihrer Rückwirkung auf Deutschland, Berlin, 1861, 5; Friedrich Kühne: Bericht über die Lage und den Handel der Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika, New York, 1865, 3; John Lothrop Motley to William H. Seward, August 25th 1862, in: Papers relating to the foreign relations of the United States, Vol. I, Washington, 1862. 7 Egerton: Rethinking, 81. 8 Doris Bernhard: Die Haltung der liberalen Presse in Österreich zum amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg, Wien, 1963; Jordan Donaldson & Edwin J. Pratt: Europe and the American Civil War, London, 1931; Wilhelm Kaufmann: Die Deutschen im amerikanischen Bürgerkriege, München & Berlin, 1911; Michael Loeffler: Preußens und Sachsens Beziehungen zu den USA während des Sezessionskrieges, 1860-1865, 1999; Alfred Loidolt: Die Beziehungen Österreichs zu den Vereinigten Staaten zur Zeit des amerikanischen Bürgerkrieges 1861-1865, Wien, 1949; Raphael Lutz: Die Beziehungen zwischen Deutschland und den Vereinigten Staaten während des Sezessionskrieges, Heidelberg, 1911; Ingeborg Lymphius: Die diplomatischen Beziehungen zwischen Österreich und den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika während des amerikanischen Bürgerkrieges, Wien, 1966; Baldur E. Pfeiffer: Deutschland und der Amerikanische Bürgerkrieg 1861-1865, Mainz, 1971. 9Max Lange: Abraham Lincoln der Wiederhersteller der Nordamerikanischen Union...,Leipzig, 1866; A stimulating overview on German images of Abraham Lincoln is delivered by Horst Dippel: Die Lincoln-Rezeption in Deutschland, in: Amerikastudien/American Studies, Vol. 56. No. 3, 2011, 331–345. 10 Kenneth Pomeranz: Handel, in: Ulinka Rublack [ed.]: Die Neue Geschichte, Frankfurt, 2013, 161 ff. 11 Mustafa: Merchants, 2, 255-260. Page 18 Vol. 5 Traversea 2015 Central Europe's position during the Civil War is to be realized. First, global commodity chains always initiate multilateral spaces of interaction, and are, hence, not linear.12 Trade between
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