THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
MIT PULVER UND BLEI: RADICAL GERMAN-AMERICANS AND THE IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
BRANDON T. BENNER SPRING 2017
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for baccalaureate degrees in History and Political Science with honors in History
Reviewed and approved* by the following:
William Blair Walter L. and Helen P. Ferree Professor of Middle American History Thesis Supervisor
Michael Milligan Senior Lecturer of History Honors Adviser
* Signatures are on file in the Schreyer Honors College. i
ABSTRACT
This thesis discusses the political contributions of the German-American radical leftist community in the northern United States during the American Civil War period, and argues that such contributions should be interpreted as having a significant influence on the nation’s development. Seeking political asylum in the United States after the failed European democratic revolutions of 1848, German radicals settled mainly in cities and in the modern-day Midwest.
They established tightly-knit ethnic communities which, through their social infrastructure, facilitated intellectual and political growth for their inhabitants and became bases of mobilization for German immigrant involvement in American politics. Not all German-American radicals held the same goals for their adopted nation, but many saw the Civil War as a catalyst for the advancement of programs like labor rights, public education, and unconditional emancipation of slavery. However, a schism formed between radicals who pursued these goals through violent revolution on the front lines and those who practiced a form of “tempered radicalism” to fit more moderate native political views. This schism met its height during the presidential election of
1864, in which many hardline German radicals backed an opponent to Abraham Lincoln, Major
General John C. Frémont. Ultimately, however, the tempered radicals prevailed, led by the pragmatic political maneuvering of community leaders like Carl Schurz and Franz Sigel. Though some historians interpret the defeat of the revolutionary radicals in 1864 as the end of German-
American radical influence in American politics, this thesis proposes that such influence did not end, but instead shifted leadership and evolved into a more politically pragmatic form. Indeed, the radicalism of these German-Americans helped form the policy of the Federal government in the latter years of the Civil War the beginning of the Reconstruction Era. ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iii
Introduction ...... v
Chapter 1 Radicals in Exile...... 1
Chapter 2 Opportunity for Revolution ...... 26
Chapter 3 Harnessing Revolution ...... 55
Epilogue ...... 80
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 86
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Reflecting on this work that I have completed, I view it as a milestone of my life thus far.
Hardly any life is built by one person alone, however. Thus, I have many people I wish to thank for their kindness and care that they have given me over the long process of writing this thesis.
First, I must thank the brilliant Dr. Bill Blair, who served as my thesis advisor through this process. Since my early days as a freshman in his HIST 130, he recognized the potential in me and encouraged me to pursue it and cultivate it. His patience, understanding, and encouragement through this year of work have enabled me to work harder and create things I never thought I had it in me to make. I must also extend my gratitude to my honors advisor, Mike Milligan. Even on a day where I appeared at his office a disheveled mess and determined that I would never make it at this whole thesis-writing business, he built me up and showed me that with confidence, an individual can reach the heights they hope for. Further in Penn State’s faculty, I am grateful for the patience of all my instructors over the past year who have understood the weight of my obligations and have worked with me to ensure my success in my classes. Indeed, I have all of
Penn State to thank. This amazing university and lively community have given me so many opportunities to learn and expand my life. May no act of mine bring shame to one heart that loves thy name, and may my life but swell thy fame, Dear Old State.
I would be nothing without my friends and family. My parents have shown me that I have the power to create whoever I wish to be. From my mother’s brilliance and my father’s ethics, I was given the tools to build my life. They have urged me forward through the entirety of this thesis. So too have my grandparents on both sides, my Aunt Tam, my Uncle Pat, and all the rest of the folks back home in Juniata County – they all helped foster a love of history in my iv childhood self. To my friends, I owe a debt I could never repay. Their loyalty and kindness kept me fighting even when things seemed bleak. Even the little things from them would help: getting dinner together, singing along to our favorite songs from Hamilton, or the off-hand encouragement posted on my Facebook wall. Finally, I owe my deepest gratitude to my fiancée,
Megan. She knows me and my mind like no one else in this world. Even when I stared at the blank screen and told myself I couldn’t do it, she told me she believed in me no matter what. She urged me to go on – to “write like I need it to survive.” Without her, none of this would have been possible.
I can never claim full credit for the things I do in life – and I do not wish to. All the products of my life will be the sum of all the encouragement, hopes, and care of all the people who have believed in me, and for that, I willingly share the credit for my work with them. Thank you all for standing by me.
I wish to dedicate this thesis not to one particular person, but to many people – the immigrants to this nation. From as far back as 1748 when Johannes Benner – my seventh great- grandfather – stepped off the ship in the port of Philadelphia, I am descended from immigrants.
Almost everyone here is descended from immigrants who poured their life into this nation and its future. Let us never forget that. Let us welcome the next generation of immigrants – wherever they may be from – and let us grant them the American liberty of thought and political expression.
v
Introduction
“Kein Mensch kann sie wissen, kein Jäger erschißen mit Pulver und Blei – Die Gedanken sind frei!”
“No one know them, no hunter can kill them with powder and lead – thoughts are free!”
“Die Gedanken sind frei,” 1848 liberal revolutionary song1
In the United States of the early twenty-first century, intense debate has arisen over the role of the immigrant in America’s cast of characters. While some would welcome the refugee of a far distant land, others would build a wall – a physical one and a rhetorical one – to keep them out. While some call for the celebration of America’s multiculturalism, others insist upon assimilation. This debate is not a new one; indeed, it is one that has been held amidst nearly every American generation since the nation’s birth. The immigration question has always been in the United States because immigrants have always been in the United States. In periods where this debate becomes heated and vitriolic, it is easy for some to forget the stories of how immigrant communities have helped shape the America of today. This is one of those stories.
When German-speaking immigrants arrived in the United States in the early 1850s, they had left war, reprisal, and autocracy behind them across the ocean. They came to a land they had only read about, but nonetheless dreamed of. Carl Schurz, then a young political refugee taking asylum in England in 1851, reminisced years later about his calling to America. “The Fatherland
1 Mark Corwin, Words in World Literature, (Pittsburgh: Dorrance, 2012), 116-117. vi was closed to me. England was to me a foreign country, and would always remain so. Where, then? ‘To America,’ I said to myself.” He and his enclave of fellow refugees had no home to return to. The cause they had risked life and limb for – to build a united democratic nation for all
Germans – had failed, and many of their comrades had fallen with it. But the United States was a beacon of new hope. “The ideals of which I have dreamed and for which I have fought I shall find there, not fully realized, but hopefully struggling for full realization. In that struggle I shall perhaps be able to take some part. It is a new world, a free world, a world of great ideas and aims. In it there is perhaps for me a new home.”2 For Schurz and thousands like him, the United
States was a place to start anew.
The Germans who fled the 1848 Revolution – the “Forty-Eighters,” as they were called – arrived in the United States at one of the most turbulent times in the nation’s history. Issues that were uncomfortably tolerated since the nation’s founding were now reaching the breaking point: sectional division, economic inequality, and the moral dilemma of a nation that proclaimed “that all men are created equal” yet held their fellow man as chattel. Though they were newcomers, these Germans were not content to sit quietly by and keep to themselves. They had already been considered political radicals back in Europe, and they brought that same vigorous radicalism with them to their new home.
The Forty-Eighters looked at the United States through a different lens than most “native- born” Americans. Whereas natives interacted in their political system with a knowledge of norms, implicit values, and traditions, the Forty-Eighters had little of that knowledge. They did not value, for instance, private property the same way natives did – and because of that, they were undeterred in seizing slave-owners’ human “property” once the Civil War broke out. In a
2 Carl Schurz, The Reminiscinces of Carl Schurz Vol. I, (New York: McClure Company, 1907), 399-400. vii way, the Forty-Eighters were radicals in America because they did not understand things that natives simply did by virtue of living in the United States. But at the same time, the Forty-
Eighters were also radicals because they did understand things that natives did not. Natives had spent their whole lives in the American republic, as in many cases did their father, and their father’s father. Natives had come to take their system of government as a given, as an heirloom.
They were separated by time from the days of revolution that forged a nation of liberty from the rule of monarchy. This was, however, the Forty-Eighters’ element. They were born into it, born into the pressures of autocracy. Growing and learning, they studied the heady moral arguments of overturning the status quo in the name of democracy. Finally, they had stood by each other and shed blood for freedom, only to see it crushed before their eyes. They knew what it meant to see a republic snatched away at the point of a bayonet. They knew that true freedom cannot be complacent – it must be fought for. That is why when they saw the world’s one great republic begin to slip toward dissolution, they leapt to its defense. The men and women of the radical
German-American community were unafraid of the challenge before them in this new land. They stood to take up the cause of improving America and entered the fray.
Arguably, these people came out on the other side of the war having made a considerable impact on the conduct, goals, and ethos of the conflict – and remained largely unthanked by native Northern society for their contributions. The Civil War was not an entirely rewarding experience for the radical Germans as they fought through it. On the political stage, they often saw their proposals brushed away as quixotic and brash. In the streets, they were ridiculed as
“damned Dutch.” On the frontlines, they were made the scapegoat of failures of command. Yet they remained a persistent force in the war effort and in the national dialogue of what the war meant. Too often, scholars regard the radical Germans as a failed movement. Many historians, to viii their credit, give the Germans fair recognition for their resilience, progressivism, and patriotism for their adopted home. But these historians still generally come to the conclusion that the
Germans “failed to see the ways in which the United States differed from German Europe.”3
To be true, many radical Germans entered the Civil War as idealists and came out finding that the revolution they dreamed of for Germany did not fully play out in the United States. But let it be stressed that German-American radicalism in the Civil War Era did not fizzle and die out. The flames were lowered, and the fire of idealism did not burn quite as bright, but the heat remained. As many of the Forty-Eighters who marched off and campaigned with the Union
Army certainly learned, a good cook fire must be low, but hot in order to do the job. So too did the flames of the German-American community’s vision for America. Many leaders of that community learned the ways of American politics and through pragmatism brought radical change to a political system where it once may not have been possible. The radicalism remained, but it was steadied – was tempered – by the experience of becoming part of the nation. After the
Civil War, the nativism once focused on Germans turned elsewhere. The Germans had proven themselves that they were not merely foreigners – they truly were Americans. Through this naturalization by fire, their community transcended the label of “immigrant.” But in the process, they managed to bring their own brand of change and liberalism to their new home.
3 Allison Clarke Efford, German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era, (New York: Cambridge University, 2013), 110. 1
Chapter 1
Radicals in Exile
In 1848, the United States would feel the ripples of a shockwave that had erupted across
Europe. The year purported to be one of international revolution; a surge of liberal fervor, fomented by the increasingly anti-monarchist universities and by a burgeoning middle class, rushed through the population. In the German-speaking states from the valley of the Rhine to the reaches of Prussian Poland, nationalism swept the subjects of the various principalities into a zeal for the institutions of democracy. Though many moderate individuals hoped simply for democratic reform in their own little German-speaking state, there emerged a class of radicals who envisioned something greater. Beneath the black, gold, and red tricolor, agitators hoped to smash the arbitrary feudal boundaries which for so long had separated ethnic Germans in central
Europe. The dismantling of the old institutions of feudalism, lords, barons, and kings was but one step toward the ultimate goal; from the radical intelligentsia came the call for democratic institutions to cement the bonds of a new nation-state.4 No longer was there to be Württemberg,
Baden, Bavaria, Austria, Saxony, the Palatinate, and all the other artificial divisions of one natural German people – this uprising struggled to create a single, unified, free nation of
Germany. With the popular establishment of national assemblies and the eruptions of public demonstrations across the region, the revolution of the “Forty-Eighters” had begun in earnest.
4 Shlomo Barer, The Doctors of Revolution: 19th-Century Thinkers Who Changed the World, (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 1064. 2 The liberal nationalist dream of the Forty-Eighters was not to last, however. As 1848 passed into 1849, the staunchly conservative Kingdom of Prussia sent its armies west. The jünker elite of Prussia hoped sweep away the upstart rebellion which threatened to absorb even their mighty state into the united German democracy. Thus, the watchword of the Prussian aristocracy: “Against democrats, soldiers are the only remedy!”5 As resistance to the Prussian backlash melted away through 1849 and warrants were placed for the arrest of the revolutionary leaders, many Forty-Eighters saw no choice but to flee their native homes.6 Amidst these fugitives cast to the wind was a fresh-faced newspaperman-turned-revolutionary soldier, a young native of the Rhineland named Carl Christian Schurz.
Young Schurz’s odyssey following the failed revolution typified the experience of the liberal intelligentsia forced into hiding. He first fled to the city of Zurich in Switzerland, the first enclave of safety for many of his fellow revolutionaries. After traveling to Berlin and assisting compatriots in escaping imprisonment, he went to Edinburgh, then to Paris, then to London.7 By
1852, Schurz, like so many other Forty-Eighters, was a man without a country. Though banished from his homeland, he did not despair for long. Schurz decided upon a new place in which to pursue the fruits of democracy. Writing to his future brother-in-law in the spring of that year,
Schurz mused, “But there are reasons of overpowering weight which decide me to shift my residence from London to America.” One of his co-revolutionaries and mentors, Gottfried
Kinkel, had already gone forth to the United States to test its suitability for a new home, and indeed the place seemed “a broader and more fertile field than I can open myself to [in
5 Ibid, 1075. 6 Efford, German Immigrants, 30-32. 7 Carl Schurz, Intimate Letters of Carl Schurz 1841-1869, trans. Joseph Schafer, (Evansville, WI: Antes, 1929), 71- 104. 3 England].” Schurz had no illusions of easy assimilation and a life of leisure in America: “I do not expect to find any mountains of gold in America, knowing on the contrary that only a vigorous, uninterrupted activity will enable me to succeed there… I am accustomed to work, to work hard.” Yet Schurz, driven perhaps by the enthusiasm of his youth or the idealism of his liberal education, wished “that the goal of my effort be something more than mere bread.”8 In the summer of 1852, Schurz departed the British Isles on a ship destined for Philadelphia. This twenty-three-year-old academic was but one in hundreds of thousands embarking on the voyage to an adopted homeland. Between 1850 and 1860 – the period in which most Forty-Eighters made their journey – the number of German immigrants in the United States surged by no less than 218 percent.9 For many of the Forty-Eighters, arrival in the United States was a rebirth, a redemption. Schurz declared, “If I cannot be the citizen of a free Germany, then I would at least be a citizen of free America.”10
As historian Stephen D. Engle writes, many of the emigrating Forty-Eighters seeking a new life in America “harbored romantic illusions” about what they would find there.11 To these radical supporters of democracy, the United States represented the paragon of free society.
Though prior republics had waxed and waned through history, this one remained. As a rebuke to those who argued that a democratic republic could only survive in a small state, the United States grew and flourished to greater heights with the passage of each decade. The Forty-Eighters were drawn to America’s great experiment, not only out of a desire to live within its bounds, but also out of a call to preserve it for the ages. The noble ideals of the enlightened founders of the United
8 Ibid, 108-109. 9 Campbell Gibson and Emily Lennon, “Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1850 to 1990,” (Washington: US Bureau of the Census, 1999). 10 Schurz, Intimate Letters, 109. 11 Stephen D. Engle, Yankee Dutchman: The Life of Franz Sigel, (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas, 1993), 32. 4 States’ were still celebrated and loved – but it appeared that the people whose families had called the place home since the days had Washington had grown complacent in the pursuit of liberty.
As the institution of slavery persistently thrived and the revolutionary tenets of equality seemed to be superseded by the comforts of wealth and prosperity, it looked as if the fervent fire of
America’s founding had diminished.
The Forty-Eighters were prepared for the imperfections of slavery and unchecked capitalism in the United States, yet upon their arrival they found themselves the target of another growth of inequality. As Germans made their way from the docks and shipyards of New York,
Philadelphia, and other Northern cities, they were met with a hostile and xenophobic welcome.
The nativist Know-Nothing movement had politically crested just as this fresh wave of outsiders arrived. The Forty-Eighters were of course not the only new arrivals to the United States in the antebellum years; supplemented by the immense exodus from Ireland as a result of the potato famine, immigration totals between 1845 and 1854 alone reached an estimated 2,939,000.12
Already bristling with nationalistic swagger after the victory of the Mexican-American War, much of the American population looked leerily upon the refugees now debarking at their shores.
As historians have been suggesting more recently, the German community in the United
States was not of one mind. America had already become home to many thousands who made their way from the Germanic states over the past century, but these Germans were cut from a different cloth from that of the Forty-Eighters. Calling themselves the ‘Greys’ and the Forty-
Eighters the ‘Greens,’ this older generation of Germans were a quieter, comparatively more conservative lot. Many of the Greys – Lutherans and Catholics, along with fringe religious
12 David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis – America Before the Civil War: 1848-1861, (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011), 241. 5 denominations like the Anabaptists, Amish, and Mennonites – voted Democrat for the party’s classic leanings toward the working man. Indeed, an estimated 80 percent of German immigrants living in the United States prior to 1848 were Democrats.13
This, however, was a time of political evolution in the United States. The antebellum wave of immigration to the United States brought with it not just people, but also ideas. These
“Greens” who stood out so sharply from their earlier immigrant brethren were a national shock with their vehemence and idealism. Little like this had been seen on the stage of American politics before. As their old adversary, the Whig Party, splintered, Democratic Greys saw not only a reformation of platforms along sectional issues, but also the infusion of new radical elements from their old homeland in the form of upstart young Greens. These liberal idealists, whose nationalist sentiments from back home threatened to upset the careful integration into
American society that the Greys had slowly made, and whose abolitionist ardor hoped to free an entire race of people and bring them into competition with the average white worker, appeared as a sharp contrast to the life that the Greys had established for themselves in their adopted homeland. The ‘Green’ Forty-Eighters found no sympathy in their cause from the older,
Americanized countrymen.
The newcomers from Germany found the western part of the United States as a more compatible place to settle than the East. The states and territories along the Great Lakes and the
Mississippi River had a political and social outlook distinct from that of the Eastern states+.
Schurz, having just arrived in Wisconsin and dashing off a letter to his wife, wrote, “I have never seen so many cheerful people as here… The Westerner is sincere, talkative, direct; he makes friends with extraordinary ease, wherever he may be… [I]n conversation you can usually be sure
13 Ibid, 244. 6 of discerning both an open mind and a sound heart.”14 In the West – the frontier hardly thirty years before – all were immigrants, even if they had been born in the United States. The further west one traveled, more and more inhabitants were newcomers and initiates to the places in which they chose to build their new life. Though they were still foreign to this land, the West was a place where political refugees from across the sea may feel at least a little less foreign. “…
[N]o class of foreigners, generally speaking, add so much to the patient, persevering industry, as well as the steady, sober, orderly character of the country,” an Ohio paper published of German immigrants in 1851. “Let them come. There is room enough for the honest, the industrious, the virtuous of every land.”15 Drawn to the social openness of the West, Forty-Eighters settled in the cities of the region. Schurz and his wife came to make their home in the Wisconsin town of
Waterville near Milwaukee. Many others would establish communities in Cleveland, Cincinnati,
Chicago, and – what would be home to one of the largest German-American communities of the region – St. Louis. These communities would ingrain themselves into their surroundings; they would establish newspapers, fraternal organizations, festivals, and political lyceums.
The Forty-Eighters appeared as a truly radical element to the inhabitants of the mid- nineteenth century United States. They had arrived on the largest tide of immigration to date in the nation’s scarcely eighty-year history. They were a group that would not be as open to assimilation as their forebears; indeed, ethnic German pride was one of the roots of the creed and cause that they had promoted at home, and they would go on to celebrate it in folk festivals and beer halls for generations thereafter in America. But most visibly, they were a community that was not content to relegate itself to insular affairs. Indeed, these Germans sought to actively
14 Schurz, Intimate Letters, 138. 15 “Germans in the United States,” Daily Ohio Statesman, April 7, 1851. 7 participate in the political struggle of their adopted home. The American political system recognized the unrest the institution of slavery caused, but opted to let it die out – if it would indeed die out – organically over the course of decades. The Forty-Eighters were not so complacent. Not long after his arrival to America in 1852, Schurz observed the wrongs of that land – slavery, oligarchy, economic inequality – and reflected:
The European revolutionist becomes impatient at this and would like to apply some
vigorous blows… It is my firm conviction that the European revolutionists will drive the
next revolution into a reaction merely [… ] through their desire to improve things quickly
and positively. Every glance into the political life of America strengthens my convictions
that the aim of a revolution can be nothing else than to make room for the will of the
people – […] to overturn the barriers to individual liberty.16
Schurz knew, even so early in his life in the United States, that change to the political status quo would come only through swift, unorthodox action outside of the political system. Schurz and his compatriots had been revolutionaries, and though time would temper them, they retained the ideal that change at times required the use of force.
Not all German-Americans – and even not all Forty-Eighters – believed necessarily in enacting violent revolution. Many Forty-Eighters like Schurz, Friedrich Hecker, and August
Willich would become engaged in the political system and would attempt to enact change by more conventional means. The German-American communities of the West backed candidates who supported their liberal ideals: abolition of slavery, freedom of labor, enfranchisement, works for the public good. But these newcomers arrived at a time of mounting national pressure, when
16 Carl Schurz, Speeches, Correspondence, and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, Volume I, Frederic Bancroft, ed. (New York: Knickerbocker, 1913), 7. 8 sectional tensions grew more vehement and more polarized. Whether they knew it or not, liberal
German-Americans had cast themselves into a formula for coming revolution. It would not be a revolution they themselves would ignite, but it would be one in which they would find their opportunity to rise and incite the rapid evolution they envisioned for the political and societal landscape of their new home.
As the Forty-Eighters settled into life in the United States, they began to reunify after their long journey from refuge in Europe and finally across the Atlantic. The essentials of home- life were falling into place for the Forty-Eighters: a home, a steady job with steady pay, perhaps a family. The maturing Carl Schurz settled in Watertown, Wisconsin, situated roughly halfway between the burgeoning German-American enclave of Milwaukee and the state capital in
Madison. Friedrich Hecker, the militant leader of the radicals who attempted to overthrow the
Grand Duchy of Baden during the Forty-Eight Revolution, made a home on a farm in Illinois. No longer were the Forty-Eighters mere itinerant ideologues without a home; they began to coalesce once more into the active political societies that had flourished in the Väterland.
An instrumental element for political development, discourse, and mobilization for the
Forty-Eighters in the United States were the Turnvereine, or the Turners. Turner clubs were based on organizations liberals formed in the German states before the revolution. They were nominally societies for gymnastics and other forms of athletic recreation, but they worked to foster soundness of mind as well as body. Beneath the surface, Turner clubs were lyceums featuring thought and debate. In the United States, just as they did in Germany, they operated as wellsprings of working-class pride, free thought, and even of socialist philosophy. Indeed, 9 German-American historian Mischa Honeck describes the Turners as “the leading Forty-Eighter organization in the United States” and as “paramilitary” in their zeal and unity.17
In the summer of 1854, for example, the Turners of Bridgeport, Connecticut, held a gathering that more resembled a military send-off to war than a mere celebration of ethnic pride.
Gathering for a day of festivities and ceremonies at a nearby picnicking grove, the local native newspaper reported the Turners performed “a great variety of gymnastic sports accompanied by excellent music from the band.” Yet the occasion took an interesting turn with the arrival of the society’s ladies’ committee for a ceremonial presentation of a banner. Gathering in a circle around the ladies, the ladies presented the Turners with colors “of crimson silk with gold tassels and a border of heavy gold fringe” bearing prominently “an eagle bearing in one claw the horn of plenty and upon its breast rests a sword.” The leader of the women declared to the men “that if the banner were ever borne to battle it must be brought back as a signal of victory, or as a winding sheet, reminding them of the Roman matron, who, upon giving her son a shield, requested that he might bring it back or be brought back upon it.”18
The ceremony recognized that these men were more than a fraternal, intellectual, or political society—they also served as a militia drawn up for the defense and welfare of their community, and their fellow Germans recognized them as such. The Turnvereine were an important element of the ethno-political apparatus for Germans. It acted similarly to the description Amy S. Greenberg had provided for the volunteer fire companies so often formed by
17 Mischa Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848, (Athens, GA: University of Georgia, 2011), 21. 18 “The Turners at the Grove,” Bridgeport Standard, June 2 1854. 10 urban Irish and natives: they acted as a vessel for marshaling political and physical power, as organizations of ethnic pride, political spirit, and community defense.19
Indeed, there would be incidents in which the Turners rallied to defend their fellow
Germans from danger. One such incident occurred in Cincinnati in 1855 when a Know Nothing candidate was defeated in the mayoral election, prompting nativists to take to the streets and attempt an attack upon the city’s German neighborhood. This attack was only thwarted by swift action by the immigrants to call out the Turnverein, who barricaded the neighborhood’s entrances and managed to commandeer a cannon to ward off the raging nativists.20
The Turners of Bridgeport and their ladies seemed to be preparing for something larger, however. These men received a battle flag to bear forth to some struggle; what struggle did they see impending? Was it the threat of nativist resentment against their communities? Or something vaster, something ideological that the nation would face one day? This symbolic rhetoric was not restricted to this lone chapter of the Turnvereine. German-American communities would rally around ideas and world-views, and those concepts they freely shared amongst themselves would gain power over the intervening years until 1861. The symbolism of this ceremony was replicated seven years later as many an American community sent their sons to the front during the American Civil War, with women presenting flags to be borne by the volunteers in battle.
In addition to the Turnvereine, another community institution that helped spread political ideals were newspapers and periodicals. The newspaper of the nineteenth century was one of the most important social and political institutions within a populace. It was a tabulation of local, state, national, and world news, a record of the lives of community members, a measurement of
19 Amy S. Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City, (Princeton: Princeton University, 2014), 109-110 20 Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists, 76. 11 the community’s sentiments and interests, an economic almanac, and a salon for the evaluation and dissemination of political creed. This emphasis on politics was no different for the popular press of the Forty-Eighters from their neighbors. These periodicals attempted to unite the
German immigrants, binding them together through shared ethnic values and world-views. In the fledgling city of Chicago, Forty-Eighters commandeered the existing German-language paper
Illinois Staats-Zeitung and used it to incubate a sprightly and stalwart German community in the city. They turned out daily issues for the community’s consumption, reflecting a vibrant scene of civic life through choirs, social clubs, a Turnverein, and early activism in Republican politics.21
A paper established in Milwaukee advocated for the sharply radical cause of women’s rights;
Mathilde Anneke, a feminist agitator and the wife of noted socialist Forty-Eighter Fritz Anneke, published the first issues of the Deutsche Frauen-Zeitung in March, 1852.22 Meanwhile, the multiplying German haven in St. Louis became a stronghold for Forty-Eighter journalists. The city’s older periodical Anzeiger des Westens found in 1850 a new editor: Heinrich Börnstein, a red newspaperman from Hamburg, among whose professional repertoire was the publishing of the early papers of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.23 Branching off from Anzeiger des Westens in 1857 came Westliche Post with its specialty for sharp political acumen and unornamented realism for national affairs.24
Here spread a range of political viewpoints within the German-American left. Most
Forty-Eighters described themselves as liberal. The concepts they disseminated involved, at their
21 John B. Jentz, “The 48ers and the Politics of the German Labor Movement in Chicago during the Civil War Era: Community Formation and the Rise of a Labor Press,” in The German-American Radical Press: The Shaping of a Left Political Culture, 1850-1940, ed. Elliott Shore et al., (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1992), 50-52. 22 Efford, German Immigrants, 49. 23 Steven Rowan, “Introduction: The Continuation of the German Revolutionary Tradition on American Soil,” in Germans for a Free Missouri: Translations from the St. Louis Radical Press, 1857-1862, trans. Steven Rowan, (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1983), 35-38. 24 Ibid, 41-42. 12 root, the freedom of the individual within society. Individuals were to be given negative rights – that is, they were to be protected against intrusions of the state into their own personal choices
(e.g., many Germans felt encroached upon by laws which banned their beloved social practices of drinking beer and dancing on Sundays). But this liberalism incorporated elements as well of what is today known as modern liberalism. In this case, individuals enjoyed positive rights – they should be guaranteed the right to modes of social advancement (e.g. education’s place in the community was a crucial element of Forty-Eighter ideals).
There were those who did not stop at liberalism however. Socialists like Heinrich
Börnstein argued for a redistribution of the means of production and capital among the working class. August Willich, an officer in the Baden revolutionary army in 1848-49, was a founding member of the Communist League before he came to the United States.25 Forty-Eighters like
Börnstein and Willich were those most likely to be considered “radical” by Americans – and at times even by their fellow Germans. To define radicalism in this case, consider the Forty-
Eighters’ drastic departure in policy preference from typical native political discourse. They often rejected compromise on issues, both with opponents and with allies within a coalition.
They favored expansion of government as a guarantor of individual and social justice.
Furthermore, many of the stances they proposed considered the use coercion or force as a tool in their implementation. This is where the Forty-Eighters’ revolutionary experience entered: meaningful change, the radicals theorized, needed an assertive struggle to destroy society’s complacency regarding the status quo. A shock to the system, so to speak, was what would establish new policy in the nation.
25 Barer, The Doctors of Revolution, 1099. 13 Were all Forty-Eighters – both liberals and socialists – radical? Not necessarily. Many, as they became mainstreamed to the American political system, adopted what can be deemed
“tempered radicalism.” They retained the intent and principles of their revolutionary past, but they adjusted those principles into solutions that were more compatible with American practicality and ideals—typically minus the goal of violent overthrow of a system. Nonetheless, radicals remained an important part of the political dialogue within the German-American community and generated what they felt were solutions to intransigent problems in American society. In the years of the Civil War, this caused them to be some of the first and most ardent to champion more revolutionary measures against the Confederacy—such as the seizing of private property and emancipation of slaves.
Most German leftists, whether radical or liberal, shared some common elements that ended up influencing U.S. politics at the time and that had a bearing on which parties they supported. They were, of course, united in opposing policies against immigrants and detested the nativist movement within American politics. Additionally, they detested slavery and wished to see it confined where it was or ended completely. They also abhorred monarchy and aristocracy and championed democratic government. Anything that tampered with the free expression of the people angered them and struck them as corruption—reactions that were triggered by events in
Kansas which will be discussed below. They also agreed that disunion was a major threat to democracy and looked upon sectionalism as an anathema.
German-American leftists – both liberals and socialists – stood for the strength of labor and the working class. They observed the poor and unemployed of America and sought to provide enough work to alleviate such suffering. It was through sufficient labor, provided by government when necessary, that society could be improved. “[W]hat honorable upstanding 14 worker is going to accept alms,” the socialist Börnstein’s Anzeiger des Westens implored during the Panic of 1857. “A worker wants to earn his bread, through labor of his hands and the sweat of his brow, but he certainly does not want alms… Give the worker work.”26 If the working class controlled its own destiny, the result would be what they dubbed “universal human freedom.”
There was disagreement, however, about whether that freedom was an end or merely a stage in a greater process. Though there would be intellectual debate and conflict between liberal Germans and their red brethren, they would remain unified by the most pressing matter that their adopted nation.
The arrival of the Forty-Eighters occurred in a period where the future of the American political stage looked uncertain. By the early 1850s, the Whig Party was entering its death throes.
The Compromise of 1850 and the question of slavery exacerbated fissures within political coalitions and encouraged the appearance of various single-issue parties along the fringe. One of these parties was the American, or Know Nothing Party. Standing in staunch opposition to the vast wave of immigration the nation received, the nativist Know Nothings operated as a grassroots movement. With little national organization between the various Know Nothing organizations, their anti-immigrant sentiment tended toward vitriol and, in some cases, violence.
In the face of nativist aggression, the German communities not only remained strong in their pride, they also stood resolute in their political fervor. Indeed, the Germans and their Forty-
Eighter ideologues remained an obstinate feature of the American social landscape, both demographically and ideologically. Though of course not all German-Americans were cut from
26 “What Should Be Done with Unemployed Workers,” Anzeiger des Westens, October 22 1857, in Germans for a Free Missouri: Translations from the St. Louis Radical Press, 1857-1862, trans. Steven Rowan, (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1983), 53-54. 15 the same political and philosophical cloth, the many who followed the movement of the Forty-
Eighters would advance an ardently left-wing platform into American politics.
The slavery question had simmered since the United States’ founding, but it was at a dangerous boil when the Forty-Eighters led German-Americans into the national political forum.
The Compromise of 1850 attempted to ease the mounting tension but accomplished little to that end. The Fugitive Slave Act legally forced Northern inhabitants into complicity with slavery’s preservation, infuriating abolitionists. The national strain grew darker still with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. David M. Potter, in his study of the years of political tension leading up to the Civil War, argued, “Few events have swung American history away from its charted course so suddenly or so sharply as the Kansas-Nebraska Act.”27 The act, once passed, repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and permit, pending a popular vote, the extension of slavery into the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. The act ignited a firestorm in the anti-slavery press, but its implications led to graver turmoil. As a referendum was held in Kansas two years later on the question of slavery’s legality there, “border ruffians” crossed over from pro-slavery
Missouri to stuff ballot boxes with illegal votes in favor of their cause. Their actions sparked broad violence across the territory which became known as “Bleeding Kansas.”
The significance of these affairs was not lost on America’s radical Germans. Patrick J.
Kelley demonstrated that the voter fraud and deadly conflict in Kansas “made a mockery of the democratic process,” the election form that the Forty-Eighters considered to be sacred and a goal of their political activity in Europe. In Kansas, they watched a pro-slavery government be elected to power through civil strife and fraudulent elections. What was worse, they observed President
Franklin Pierce’s administration accept that government as legitimate, which lent credence to
27 Potter, Impending Crisis, 167. 16 those who would undermine the democratic systems the Forty-Eighters so cherished. The Forty-
Eighters had come from states and principalities where democracy was an impossibility.
Monarchy was the rule in Europe, and it was that authoritarian form of government that the
Forty-Eighters had struggled so passionately to overturn. To come then to the United States, where the will of the people was said to reign, and see “European-style violence” defacing the purity of democratic institutions was a source of disgust and fury for the Forty-Eighters. It was with the events surrounding Kansas, Kelley argues, the German-American radical left determined to enter the struggle of American sectional politics in earnest. 28
To this point, many German immigrants had considered themselves part of the
Democratic Party. The Democrats, it was felt, protected the working class and the common man.
This protection appeared extended to immigrants as well. With the other choice – the Whig Party
– the Democrats seemed like the most beneficial political organization for most German-
Americans. The Democratic Party would retain many immigrant demographics, like the Irish, through the decade, but the crisis in Kansas caused many Germans to begin looking elsewhere.
German-American leftists were staunch supporters of the antislavery cause; yet the collective reasoning for that support across the community was nuanced and not necessarily monolithic. According to Allison Clarke Efford, the notion of slavery was so abhorrent to
German immigrants that even in the pro-slavery state of Missouri, the sizable Teutonic community there strongly rejected it in relevant elections.29 Was this antithetical stance to slavery a result of deeply held belief in racial equality? Often not. In contrast to the enlightened intelligentsia who they looked to for political mobilization, the rank-and-file German immigrants
28 Patrick J. Kelley, “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, (September 2014), 438-439. 29 Efford, German Immigrants, 56-57. 17 (even some Forty-Eighters like Friedrich Hecker) opposed slavery on the basis of free labor.
More than an opposition to the moral repercussions of men holding other men in bondage, they were opposed to slavery’s expansion as the proliferation of an unpaid labor source that would steal work from them.30 At this point in the course of the Germans’ involvement in American politics, racial equality was a concept on the fringe even of this radical demographic. Indeed, St.
Louis’ Mississippi Blätter (the Sunday edition of St. Louis’ more moderate Westliche Post) published this view of restricting racial intermixing by restricting slavery:
If the black race could be concentrated in a few states, the sexual mixing would soon
cease. But if the system of slavery and the black race with it spread even wider across the
continent, then racial mixture would accelerate along with it… [Slavery’s expansion]
only works to speed up amalgamation and the demonstrated result of a mongrel race.31
Though many of the Forty-Eighters were not so explicit in their discussion of race relations, a great many – including the socialists among them – viewed slavery not so much as a moral issue or a humanitarian issue, but instead as a class issue. The Forty-Eighter journalist
Friedrich Kapp, who came to settle in New York City, mused, “The problem of slavery is not the problem of the Negro, it is the eternal conflict between a small and privileged class and the great mass of the non-privileged, the eternal struggle between aristocracy and democracy.”32 In contrast with the Blätter’s remarks, however, were those from the Forty-Eighter run Pittsburger
Courier which declared, “We are enemies of slavery, and consider all extension of it treason to
30 Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists, 32-33. 31 “The Ultimate Destiny of the White and Black Races in America,” Mississippi Blätter, October 9 1859, in Germans for a Free Missouri: Translations from the St. Louis Radical Press, 1857-1862, trans. Steven Rowan, (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1983), 85-86. 32 Andre M. Fleche, Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2012), 32. 18 mankind.”33 Though many of the intelligentsia whom the communities looked to made their stance against slavery on moral grounds, it is clear many of the ‘average’ German immigrants in the 1850s opposed it for more practical, personal reasons. But yet, viewing with a common cause the affront raised by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, German immigrants took action.
Seeing an opening in the rift caused by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, radical German immigrant communities nationwide coordinated a meeting to discuss their collective political ideals. Meeting in Louisville in February, 1854, the delegates from each community helped build a substantial manifesto of sentiments held by this massive demographic of immigrants in a tract known as the Louisville Platform. The platform addressed a wide range of concerns and was a remarkably bold first step of the Germans into the national political spotlight. Indeed, the content of this platform attracted considerable attention from the more conservative sectors of American thought. The Daily Commercial Register of Sandusky, Ohio, published a discussion of the platform some weeks after its release. Describing the platform as being “adopted by the ‘German
Liberals’ of Ohio,” the Register records that the German delegates “avow their purpose to become pioneers in the work of reforming the institutions of America.” The platform demanded:
“the ‘final abolition’ of slavery;” distribution of public lands “to all citizens, present and prospective” along with assistance from the national treasury; a banishment of religious laws, including “no Sunday laws, no Thanksgiving days, no prayers in legislative bodies, exclusion of
Catholic Priests and Bishops and banishment of Jesuits;” reforms and expansion of public education, including mandatory attendance and “provision at the expense of the State, for the sustenance, clothing, &c., of all indigent children while in attendance on the schools;” taxation of banks and churches; a progressive tax plan; banishment of unorthodox medical practices;
33 Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists, 30. 19 elimination of temperance laws; reform of caucuses in primary elections.34 This comprehensive list of reforms was among the most radically progressive yet proposed in the United States, and many of these demands’ resemblance to future proposals and policies in American politics lends a remarkable light to the delegates behind the work. In short, the vision of these reformers was far ahead of its time.
Such a sweeping list of proposals, being so far ahead of their time, were met with shock, incredulity, and derision by much of the native press. The Register of Sandusky, Ohio, though lending the platform in points where it felt credit may be due, gently chided the upstart German radicals. “So far as this movement develops a determination on the part of the Germans to do their own thinking, to act independently in political affairs… it deserves commendation,” the
Register admitted. “The true spirit of American citizenship, however, knows no distinction between those of native or foreign birth … and we think the true policy of the latter would be found in sinking their nationality with their allegiance to the despots of the old world and standing forth in their true character as American citizens.”35 The Richmond Whig was not so soft in its criticism. “While, however, we would not restrict [immigrants] in the enjoyment of any right or privilege to which our Republican system entitles them… we would have them modestly stand aside, look on, and learn awhile… and become thoroughly purged of all their fantastic and vicious notions in respect to slavery, socialism, and the like…”36 Native-born Americans brushed aside the Louisville Platform as a quixotic, unachievable bundle of musings from unnaturalized foreign ideologues. The same indictment has come from many historians who condemned the platform to the historical dustbin because of its failure. David M. Potter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
34 “A New Platform,” Daily Commercial Register, April 12 1854. 35 Ibid. 36 “Foreign Population – Reform Parties,” Richmond Whig, April 28 1854. 20 work pays not a sentence to the platform, and the otherwise perceptive Allison Clarke Efford makes only indirect reference to it. Labor historian John B. Jentz, however, offers keen judgement on the platform’s creation, writing, “Although the radicalism of the program doomed this endeavor from the start, both the platform and the larger enterprise of creating a left-leaning
German political movement in American politics remained significant for the history of labor…”37
The Louisville Platform represented the first entry of German intellectuals into the world of American political values and sentiment. The socio-political context of the platform is what lends it its historical importance. When its authors observed the United States in 1854 – a political balance thrown dangerously off, a situation portending armed chaos in Kansas, and the slavery question torn violently back open – they saw a society inching closer toward disunion.
This was the ideal time to foment ideological revolution – a drastic change in the policy and philosophy of American government – and they would be the ones to do it. That is of course not to say that all German immigrants or even all Forty-Eighters were violent revolutionaries; evidence of this is seen in the fact that the platform seemed to be but a flash in the pan. But the mere fact that something so sharp and radical appeared in so pivotal a stage in American history signifies that those behind it saw a pending explosion and a subsequent vacuum. That vacuum would open where tenuous agreements on national issues had once stood. When those agreements collapsed into the dark abyss of war, what would replace them? At this early stage, the socialists and ardent leftists among the Forty-Eighters were already prepared to institute their ideals. This was a premature movement, yes. But it is a harbinger of what a greater majority of their community would do when national conflict and dissolution at last became clear reality.
37 Jentz, “The 48ers and the Politics of the German Labor Movement,” 51-52. 21 The radicalism from the German-American community, which made its debut on the national stage in 1854, rose to greater prominence in the years ahead. The Republican Party attracted Free-Soilers, abolitionists, disillusioned Democrats, Know-Nothings, and other political wanderers. The party ran a candidate for the Presidency in 1856 who attracted interest from radical Germans – John C. Frémont. Frémont was already a celebrity in the United States by the time he was given the Republican nomination. As a young army officer the prior decade,
Frémont attained folk hero status by leading expeditions through the uncharted Rocky Mountains and scouting a rail route to the Pacific. “The Pathfinder,” as he was known, was also married to the daughter of the radically liberal Democratic Senator Thomas Benton. Frémont was a rising star by the time he accepted the Republican Party nomination for the 1856 presidential election, and though he was a native-born American of French-Canadian descent, his image glimmered in the eyes of leftist Germans. However, the nascent Republican Party’s mobilization effort did not yield the needed results and the Presidency was lost to Democrat James Buchanan. Nonetheless, leftist German’s found a bright alternative to the Democratic Party that had enabled the hated
Kansas-Nebraska Act. The Republican Party that Frémont represented was a coalition of a number of political elements, and it courted dissidents of the old party system to rally to its cause. Though Frémont left the stage of politics for the time being, his Republican Party symbolized for Forty-Eighters an opportunity to advance their political vision.
Observing and learning the ways of American politics since his arrival in Wisconsin, Carl
Schurz looked approvingly upon the fertile potential of Republican change. Shortly after the
1856 election, he wrote to an acquaintance, “At last a regular, intense struggle against slavery has arisen in the United States; and the party of freedom, while defeated in the first election 22 contest, despite its youth and deficient organization, has shown so much strength and won so much territory that it can look to the future with the confidence of victory.”38 The coalition of interests which composed the Republican Party suited Schurz and other leftist Germans: restriction of slavery’s expansion, denunciation of the chaos in Kansas, a stand against disunion, free labor. These appealed to the German-American community. Conversely, the German-
American community and its sheer size appealed to the Republican Party. However, there was an issue which stood in the way of Germans immediately joining the Republican coalition: the
Know Nothings who flocked to the party.
Just as many more moderate German immigrants opposed slavery because of its drain on the labor market, Northern Know Nothings opposed it for its potential to rob native, white
Americans of work. Thus, the Republican Party and its determination to contain the spread of slavery appealed to them. The Know Nothings who joined the party would dissuade the interest of a bloc of German immigrant voters. Thus, the party leadership set out to make an appeal to
Germans of all brands – liberal, socialist, radical, and moderate.
When the Republican Party issued its official platform for the 1860 election, it included a provision specifically for the interests of the German bloc. Called the “Dutch Plank,” item number fourteen on the platform declared that the party was “opposed to any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens hitherto accorded to immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired.” The party unequivocally stated that is would ensure “a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized.”39 This was not merely a concession, however; it was an active
38 Schurz, Intimate Letters, 174. 39 “Republican Party Platform of 1860,” The American Presidency Project, accessed December 6, 2016,
German inclusion in the party ranks. And although they may not have been radical enough to suit all Germans, the planks paid attention to several issues that touched on important ideological positions.
The Republican Party, strengthened by the German-American community, nominated
Abraham Lincoln for President of the United States in 1860 at their party convention in Chicago.
As a testament to the alliance between German-American leftists and the Republicans, Carl
Schurz was made a member of the party’s executive committee for the upcoming elections.
Schurz felt confident in Lincoln’s vision for the nation, and he set out to imbue the same confidence in his compatriots. Writing to native-born radical Senator Charles Sumner, Schurz said, “The Republicans of Wisconsin were at first a little disappointed by the result of the
Chicago convention; but that feeling is fast disappearing... I know Mr. Lincoln and I am sure his administration will very favorably disappoint those who look upon him as a ‘conservative’ man.
His impulses are in the right direction, and I think he has courage enough to follow them.”40
Schurz traveled the country as a surrogate for Lincoln and spoke to Germans of all stances. He
40 “Letter to Charles Sumner,” June 8 1860, Reel 1, Carl Schurz Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C, herein referenced as CSP. 24 wrote later in life, “A large part of my work, my specialty, consisted in addressing meetings of
German-born voters in their and my native language… It was a genuine delight to me thus to meet my countrymen who remembered the same old Fatherland that I remembered as the cradle of us all…”41 In late June, the Young Men’s Lincoln and Hamlin Club invited Schurz to come speak in St. Louis, the home of largest and most radical German community.42 One Republican official in northern Ohio urged Schurz to rally his district’s German citizens, “who have been principally acting with the Democratic Party and a favorable impression could be made… If you only knew the state of feeling here and the desire to see you, I know you would not refuse.”43
Schurz’s exertions for the Lincoln ticket paid off, and with the aid of “Dutch” voters, Lincoln was elected President on November 6, 1860.
Lincoln’s victory in the general election was the stroke that finally sent the nation over the precipice of disunion. As South Carolina was joined by other Deep South states in secession from the Union, radical Germans were at the spear’s point for ideological revolution. At last it became clear that the issues the radicals viewed as inhibiting American progress were questions unable to be solved within the political system. Instead, those questions would be settled in armed conflict. War was imminent and the opportunity to infuse radical ideals into the United
States government had arrived. As many Democrats attempted to attain peace with the Southern states through concession and compromise, the German wing of the Republican Party stood firm: it would be Union or war. On April 14, 1861, the Southern insurrectionists opened fire on the
Federal installation at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. The crucible of war had been
41 Carl Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, Vol. Two, 1852-1863, (New York: McClure Company, 1907), 197-198. 42 “Letter from James Peckham,” June 25 1860, Reel 1, CSP. 43 “Letter from H.L. McKee,” August 17 1860, Reel 1, CSP. 25 opened on the United States, and German-Americans rallied to the support of their adopted nation with the zeal of those determined for change. Yet the chapter ahead will show that divided minds continued within German leftist thought as they tried, nearly from the start, to push the country toward a more revolutionary brand of warfare.
26
Chapter 2
Opportunity for Revolution
When the shore batteries of Charleston harbor exploded into the darkness of the early morning hours on April 14, 1861, the precarious balance holding America’s political status quo in place toppled. The fiery rhetoric of Southern “fire-eaters” and the political stand-off of secession was no longer a game of brinksmanship. War at last had erupted, and the conflict between North and South was to end through expending iron, lead, and blood. The tension broken at last, “war fever” swept across North and South. Men of military age, their hearts swelled with patriotism, swarmed to enlistment stations to have their chance at defending their flag and homes. This pugnacious enthusiasm permeated communities of all sorts, including the tightly-knit German-American leftist communities of the North. For years, they had simmered with discontent at the political status quo of the United States. They had lamented the failings of capitalism: poor labor relations, uneven opportunity for education among the classes, inequality of land ownership. They had watched an aristocratic, oligarchic class of slave-owners use the mechanisms of democracy to preserve their system of human bondage. They had even watched those slave-owners drag democratic principles through the Kansas dirt when pro-slavery
Missourians rushed into the state and rigged elections to prevent slavery’s abolition there. The socialist, abolitionist, and liberal wings of the German-American left now saw an opportunity for change through the armed chaos of war.
Before the coming of the Civil War, the German-American radical left had split over how far to go to enact change within their adopted nation. The former revolutionary Forty-Eighters 27 may have been able to foment a general uprising in their homeland, but this was the United
States, not the Rhineland. Their status as immigrants and socio-political outsiders afforded them little leeway to initiate any sort of hostilities. They were as yet foreigners and outsiders in an insular land, and to attempt to launch violent revolution on their own was to open themselves to destruction by nativist backlash. Bleeding Kansas portended a violent enough disturbance of the status quo, but was too limited in scope to bring about national change. With the Civil War came a rift which tore the country in two. The chance had arrived for determined idealists to enact radical solutions to the country’s fundamental issues of slavery and labor inequality.
Achievement of these radical solutions took time, however. The Forty-Eighters and their communities were continually plagued by nativism. Xenophobic prejudice from conservative native-born Americans became prominent following mass emancipation efforts by German troops in Missouri in 1861 and yet again through the scapegoating of the German Eleventh Corps at the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. Such repeated degradations moved a portion of the
German community to anger and isolation as the war progressed, and many even opposed the
Lincoln administration and its conduct of the war in the 1864 presidential election. It was during that election when German radicalism meshed with Radical and mainstream Republican goals for change in the United States government. Figures like Carl Schurz induced cooperation from the more ideologically aggressive sectors of the German-American community, bringing them to the side of Lincoln, and ultimately grafting their sentiments into government action through a form of “tempered radicalism.” In the War of the Rebellion, the German-American left made its stand for the preservation of its adopted home and for the survival of the world’s one great democracy – and it used this opportunity to bring to the table the ideals that they had first raised thirteen years before in their homeland. 28
Across the North in the spring of 1861, Germans sprang to the cause of the Union and an opportunity to perfect it. Here they saw a chance to create a nation envisioned by American leftists, free from the moral stain of slavery and concrete in its unity of states before the national law. Days after Fort Sumter’s surrender, St. Louis’ radical Anzeiger des Westens proclaimed,
“We Germans of St. Louis know that we will not lag behind our brothers in the other states, and when the Union gives the call ‘To Arms!’ and the stars and stripes are unfurled, then no German capable of bearing arms will fail to defend his hearth, his liberty, and his Fatherland.”44 In that city on the tenuous border of North and South, patriotic German-Americans had formed militia companies over the winter and drilled in the small hours of the night in their Turner halls. By
April, they composed entire regiments. One, the 2nd Missouri Infantry, was commanded by the socialist newspaperman Heinrich Börnstein. The 3rd Missouri, meanwhile, was led by Franz
Sigel, the Prussian artillerist turned schoolteacher who had served in the thick of the 1848
Revolution before immigrating to the United States.45 Simultaneously occupying the city with
Southern-sympathizing militias leerily eyeing the local Federal arsenal, St. Louis’ German community soon had its chance at testing its mettle for the Union.
Elsewhere, regiments and companies exclusively made up of Germans enlisted for the cause. With nine companies from New York City’s German community and one from
Philadelphia’s, Colonel Adolph von Steinwehr raised the 29th New York Infantry for a two-year term of enlistment.46 In Cincinnati, avowed communist and contemporary of Marx, August
44 “Not One Word More – Now Arms Will Decide,” Anzeiger des Westens, April 19 1861, in Germans for a Free Missouri: Translations from the St. Louis Radical Press, 1857-1862, trans. Steven Rowan, (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1983), 179-180. 45 Engle, Yankee Dutchman, 53-54. 46 “Twenty-Ninth Regiment (German Infantry),” New York Herald, May 23 1861. 29 Willich rallied his comrades of the Workingmen’s League and filled the ranks of Die Neuner – the 9th Ohio Infantry.47 The Turners, the gymnast politicos who had undergone athletic training and drill for years, lent their hands to the Union. Milwaukee’s Turners embarked in June to form a company within the 5th Wisconsin Infantry. Noting their departure, a city newspaper noted the muscular physique of the company’s officers and added, “The rest of the company is in proportion.”48 The Turners of New York combined their various halls and chapters to form the
20th New York Infantry – the United Turner Rifles – which departed for the front in late spring.49
In all an estimated 150 Turner clubs across the North – coordinated by a Turnerbund council at the national level – led their members to the recruiting stations.50 The Turners transformed their society into not only a political lyceum, but also a source of military mobilization and enthusiasm. Indeed, in a rally celebrating the 9th Ohio’s departure for the front, a speaker roused a “jammed” Turner hall, echoing Jefferson and declaring, “The Tree of Liberty wilts unless watered from time to time with blood.”51 Leftist Germans – Turners, radical liberals, socialists, and communists – converted their political fervor into martial might. These men refused to miss their chance to fight for the Union – namely for the Union of free men and free labor that they envisioned.
Carl Schurz, the Forty-Eighter turned Radical Republican, however felt that he might miss his chance to contribute to the Union military effort. Schurz, unlike Franz Sigel or August
47 Loyd D. Easton, Hegel’s First American Followers – The Ohio Hegelians: John B. Stallo, Peter Kaufmann, Moncure Conway, and August Willich, (Athens: Ohio University, 1966), 191. 48 “Departure of the Turner Rifles,” Milwaukee Morning Sentinel, June 24, 1861. 49 “Twentieth Regiment United Turner Rifles,” New York Commercial Advertiser, June 7 1861. 50 Stephen D. Engle, “Yankee Dutchmen: Germans, the Union, and the Construction of a Wartime Identity,” in Civil War Citizens: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in America’s Bloodiest Conflict, ed. Susannah J. Ural, (New York: New York University, 2010), 14. 51 Constantin Grebner, We Were the Ninth: A History of the Ninth Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Infantry April 17, 1861 to June 7, 1864, trans. and ed. Frederic Trautmann, (Kent, OH: Kent State University, 2009), 5. 30 Willich, had fused with the mainstream political environment of the United States. No longer the hot-headed revolutionary of thirteen years prior, Schurz smoothed his abrasive idealism into a form of “tempered radicalism.” He translated his fervor for equality into abolitionism. He turned his frustration with class inequity into Free-Soiler advocacy, determined to keep the open lands of the West free of forced servitude’s competition with the paid workingman. After helping secure “the Dutch vote” for Lincoln in the 1860 election by way of this tempered radicalism,
Schurz was being rewarded with an appointment to an ambassadorship. Through March of 1861, he wrote to his wife from Washington that he waited the determination of which country he would be assigned for his diplomatic duties. “Lincoln desires that I shall go to Sardinia,” he confided to her in a letter on the thirteenth, “and has definitely promised me a mission of the first class.”52 He wrote triumphantly on the twenty-eighth of at last being assigned to Spain. But once at home two weeks later in Wisconsin to prepare for his voyage, the importance of being the newly selected ambassador to Spain fell by the wayside. When news of Sumter’s fall reached
Wisconsin, Schurz hurried to Milwaukee to help raise volunteers. He wrote to his wife, “Last
Monday [April 15] the excitement here was so great that a movement to destroy the printing establishments of the News and the Seebote [Democratic English and German papers] was only barely averted.” Amid the great upheaval, Schurz was nonetheless bound to leave the country for
Spain. He lamented, “The war spirit is universal – all the world wants to march – and I cannot. I almost regret being a foreign minister. If I were only one of the multitude who can follow their impulses!”53 Absent from his letters are references to fiery ideals, revolutionary sentiments, and lofty rhetoric. If Schurz was moved to action by these at all, he did not betray such feelings in his
52 Schurz, Intimate Letters, 250. 53 Ibid, 253. 31 correspondence. Instead, Schurz appeared – like so many native-born Americans – to be pulled along by the emotions of the moment. The war fever notwithstanding, Schurz was still bound to his service of the Lincoln administration. He followed duty’s call and sailed with his wife to
Madrid for the ambassadorship. Before the year’s close, however, he had been given approval from Lincoln to return from his post to engage in the campaign against the rebellion.
War fever flowed through German communities, leaders and followers alike, and called them to the colors. The native press of the North observed with novelty and pride the loyalty and patriotism of these Germans who donned their country’s uniform. Indeed, a Cleveland newspaper, as it reported the departure of the Buckeye State’s “fourth regiment composed exclusively of Germans,” boasted that “[t]here is a strong German element in nearly every regiment raised in Ohio.”54
Yet not all native attention drawn by Union-loving Germans was positive. Although the
Know-Nothings as a political entity had dissolved, nativism remained a force in American life.
On April 19, 1861, a Massachusetts regiment on its way to Washington passed through the city of Baltimore. Situated in a Border State inhabited by slave-owning aristocrats along the
Chesapeake Bay, Baltimore was a city notoriously rife with Secessionist sentiments. While marching through the city, the Massachusetts men were attacked by a mob of Southern sympathizers in what came to be known as the Pratt Street Riot. During the chaos, a rumor spread among the rioting citizens that “two companies of German Turner Riflemen left the city and, proceeding to Washington, enlisted in the army.” Though the rumor proved to be false, a portion of the mob stormed down the street to the city’s Turner hall. The crowd “demolished the things in the bar room, scattered and carried off cigars, and then broke china and glassware,
54 “Another German Regiment,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 4 1861. 32 broke down several doors, but upon the cry that the police were coming left the premises.”55
Similar Border State violence continued in St. Louis where Southern sympathizers formed gangs to scrap with Germans in the streets. They developed secret organizations – calling themselves
Minute Men – which surveilled Germans and other opponents. Thus, Unionist Germans of St.
Louis were forced to conduct political and militia affairs in secret. Many of Franz Sigel and
Heinrich Börnstein’s volunteers were issued their muskets in beer halls to conceal their operations.56
These Germans from St. Louis, along with other German communities in the West, became the foremost bearers of revolutionary ideals as the war became a protracted conflict. The
Civil War, hoped by many on both sides to be a short ninety-day war concluded by a single campaign, developed as into a strategic engagement across half the continent. The Federal government planned a strategy to starve and pummel the enemy into submission across multiple fronts, while the Confederacy prepared to defend itself and outlast the enemy’s will to fight. The war’s armies and campaigns were divided into two geographic sectors: the East and the West.
The Eastern Theater was composed of the regions between and around the seats of the opposing governments, Washington and Richmond. The Western Theater, something of an afterthought by the press that reported on it, extended from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River.
The scope of the Western Theater shifted over time as the key armies in the region fought across
Georgia to the coast and north through the Carolinas. The Western Theater of the war, though immense and strategically important to the each side’s high command, was often neglected by public attention for the more lustrous East. The Eastern Theater was considered by the press,
55 “Details of News from Baltimore – Attack upon the German Turner Hall,” New York World, April 24 1861. 56 Engle, Yankee Dutchman, 52-53. 33 foreign observers, and the Lincoln administration itself to be the main front of the war. The generals in the East’s famed Army of the Potomac were often conservative professional soldiers trained at West Point, or even outright Democrats. Indeed, historian David Work argues that the
Lincoln Administration intentionally granted political opponents prominent commissions in the military so as to make the war a national cause rather than simply a Republican cause.57 Though politics appeared within the Army of the Potomac, ideology rarely worked its way into the army’s strategic aims. Yet the West offered a fertile field for radicals to implement their revolutionary vision of warfare. Far enough away from the view of the major press and often operating in rougher, wider, and more demanding topography, commanders acted with a greater degree of independence. Furthermore, with the Western states home to massive liberal German enclaves, many of the regiments deployed in the Western Theater were heavily composed of leftist “Dutchmen.” In this area, Franz Sigel rose to national attention.
Franz Sigel found himself riding a wave of action amidst the war’s opening shots in the
West. On May 10, 1861, Sigel led one of four German regiments in what became known as the
“Camp Jackson Affair.” As Secessionist militias gathered in St. Louis and gathered at a collecting point named Camp Jackson in the center of the city, it became clear to the Federal commander of the city’s arsenal – Brigadier General Nathaniel Lyon – that an attack was imminent. Receiving orders to march at the break of day, Sigel and his men marched across the city from the arsenal and surrounded the camp. After a sporadic flurry of shots which felled
Federals, Secessionists, and civilians alike, the forces at Camp Jackson surrendered and St. Louis was secured for the Union. Sigel and his fellow Dutchmen had seen their “baptism by fire,” and with it came a realization by the city’s Secessionist citizens that the Germans meant business.
57 David Work, Lincoln’s Political Generals, (Chicago: University of Illinois, 2009), 228. 34 Two days later, as the city seethed with tension and cracked with the occasional bullet from a
Southern marksman, Southern-sympathizing citizens reacted with terror at a circulating rumor of imminent German reprisals upon their homes. Some barricaded their houses while others gathered what belongings they could and fled the city.58 Sigel and his German comrades had not simply proven their loyalty in the eyes of fellow Unionists – they became known even to the enemy that they were stalwart adherents to their nation and would tolerate no treason to their adopted homeland.
After their involvement in the “Camp Jackson Affair” in May, the St. Louis Germans were brigaded together, and Sigel was awarded a brigadier general’s star to command them. The
Germans performed ably in the otherwise disastrous Federal defeat at Wilson’s Creek in August, staving off what otherwise may have developed into a complete rout from the field. Rallying after their retreat, Sigel’s apparent capability of command was recognized and rewarded with command of a division. As the army refitted, it received a new commander: Major General John
C. Frémont, the one-time Republican presidential nominee and darling of the German-American left. The Germans celebrated Frémont’s arrival and waited with anticipation for what he would enact as commander of the region.
Their hopes were quickly fulfilled when on August 30, 1861, Frémont issued an edict which declared martial law over the entirety of Missouri and set free all slaves within his military jurisdiction.59 The proclamation’s language was unflinching:
All persons who shall be taken with arms in their hands within these lines shall be tried
by court-martial, and, if found guilty, will be shot. The property, real and personal, of all
58 Dennis K. Boman, Lincoln and Citizens’ Rights in Civil War Missouri: Balancing Freedom and Security, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2011), 25. 59 Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists, 100-101. 35 persons in the State of Missouri who shall take up arms against the United States, and
who shall be directly proven to have taken active part with their enemies in the field, is
declared to be confiscated to the public use; and their slaves, if any they have, are hereby
declared free.60
Leftist St. Louis was ecstatic at the initiative taken by Frémont to enact such emancipation. A prior act of Congress – the Confiscation Act of 1861 – had given the authority for the United
States government to seize the property directly used to aid the Confederacy, all pending due process of law in federal courts.61 Frémont’s proclamation, however, entirely circumvented due process, the courts, and the limitation on property used only directly in the war effort. It was not enough for a Confederate supporter to retain his chattel simply because he never used them in the war effort. An indication of treason was enough, in the eyes of Frémont and his German supporters, to confiscate private property. Further, Frémont claimed that it was insufficient for the authority to seize property, emancipate slaves, and execute Confederate sympathizers to lie only in the hands of the judicial system. Those decisions were now to be made at the discretion of Frémont and his military administration, free from the potential leniency and sluggishness of civil law.
The Anzeiger des Westens published Frémont’s order and prefaced it, “Whoever reads the following proclamation of the supreme general will see that we are done once and for all with half measures, and that the suppression of rebellion at all costs is to proceed with fearful and bloody seriousness.”62 When the news reached him some weeks later in Spain, Carl Schurz – even with his cooled brand of tempered radicalism – applauded the proclamation. It was a step
60 “The Beginning of the End,” Harper’s Weekly, September 14 1861. 61 Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 1st Session 42 (1861). 62 “Frémont’s Ultimate Measures,” Anzeiger des Westens, September 4, 1861, in Germans for a Free Missouri, 284. 36 toward victory that could only be done militarily, for “application of such means demands more spirit and decision than the government possesses… Were I in America, I should make an attempt on my own hook to win official favor for this radical cure.”63 The chance for revolutionary action had at last come for the radical German-Americans, and they intended to carry it out with vigor.
Sigel’s men marched out into the state’s interior to subdue the enemy and zealously execute Frémont’s order against slave-owners and Southern sympathizers. Sigel’s troops liberated slaves along their route, sometimes employing and even arming them.64 Frémont and
Sigel’s campaign, according to historian Andrew Zimmerman, represented a prime example of social revolution at work in the war. Zimmerman pointed out that Karl Marx, while observing the conduct of the war from Europe, had doubts about the United States government’s capacity for truly revolutionary measures in reforming society; yet the actions of Frémont and Sigel in
Missouri took a bold stride in that direction.65
Sigel had a long personal history of learning and refining his sense of revolutionary warfare. He had been initiated to the concepts of liberalism, democracy, and revolution while only a cadet in Baden in his early twenties. Though trained professionally as a soldier, he had few qualms clashing with even his superiors, whom he viewed as aristocratic and elitist. When the 1848 revolts began in the German states, he joined one of the rebel movements as a junior officer. After the small army he joined marched forth and was easily swept aside by Badensian,
Hessian, and Prussian regulars, he remarked, “none of the [revolutionary] leaders had enough
63 “To Frederick Althaus,” October 11 1862, in Schurz, Intimate Letters, 265. 64 Andrew Zimmerman, “From the Second American Revolution to the First International and Back Again: Marxism, the Popular Front, and the American Civil War,” in The World the Civil War Made, ed. Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2015), 314. 65 Zimmerman, “From the Second American Revolution to the First International,” 316. 37 vision or was cold blooded enough to make a revolutionary army of the mob.”66 When he was later called upon to raise another revolutionary force in 1849, he boldly led them forward in an invasion of enemy-occupied territory. In this campaign, Sigel displayed personal courage in the face of overwhelming odds, being wounded in the head while leading his men in a spirited counterattack against Hessian forces. In time, his revolutionary force dwindled and was shattered by Prussian forces. While an officer more compelled by the traditional rules of war may surrender when all hope of victory was lost, Sigel defiantly led his survivors across the Rhine
River into Switzerland and away from the reach of the Prussians.67 Sigel’s career as a revolutionary soldier was incomplete. Crossing the Rhine closed one revolution behind him in failure, but in the following years as he immigrated to America and made a place for himself there, he simmered with the idealism he had carried with him in 1848 and 1849. The events of
1861 gave Sigel a second chance at the head of a revolutionary army; this time, he had the vision and resolve to carry the revolution forward and bring results.
When Union forces liberated a slave of a Southern sympathizer, they not only affirmed the freedman’s right to free labor by annulling forced servitude, but they also seized the property of the landed class, turning it against the Southern aristocracy. The United States was a nation where property rights were sacrosanct and commanders in the East deferred to them even when they conflicted with their army’s mission to deprive the enemy of the means to carry on the war.
Sigel and Frémont in the West, however, were shattering the status quo.
The aggressive advance of Sigel’s men and Frémont’s declaration threw the regional
Confederate command into a state of shock and rage. General Benjamin McCulloch,
66 Engle, Yankee Dutchman, 9. 67 Ibid, 12-22. 38 commanding the Confederacy’s Western Army, wrote an appeal for more troops to the people of
Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana. He implored Southerners to “drive back the Republican myrmidons that still pollute her soil and threaten to invade your own country, confiscate your property, liberate your slaves, and put to the sword every true Southern man who dares to take up arms in defense of his rights.” Indeed, he indicated with fury that “the proclamation of Major-
General Frémont should warn the South of the ultimate intentions of the North…”68 Outrage was expressed by loyal Unionists as well. A Democratic paper from St. Louis reprinted the horror expressed at the army’s actions by a Louisville paper: “It is an abominable, atrocious and infamous usurpation… a usurpation which, authorized, sanctioned, and approved by the
President, must open the eyes of the entire country and the whole world to the designs of the administration at Washington to crush out the last vestige of free government here.”69
Feeling the pressures from the right wing of his political coalition, President Lincoln and his administration placed intense scrutiny upon Frémont and his German supporters. Lincoln wrote to Frémont about the proclamation, gingerly putting it that the extremity of its provisions
“give me some anxiety.” He warned that “the liberating slaves of traitorous owners, will alarm our Southern Union friends, and turn them against us.” Lincoln thus requested of Frémont “that you will as of your own motion, modify [the emancipation order] so as to conform to… the act of Congress, entitled, “An act to confiscate property used for insurrectionary purposes… a copy of which act I herewith send you.”70 Frémont refused to comply and maintained the proclamation as originally issued.
68 U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880-1902), Series 1, Vol. 3, 700, hereafter cited as O.R. 69 “General Frémont’s Proclamation – More Opinions of the Press,” Daily Missouri Democrat, September 5 1861. 70 “Abraham Lincoln to John C. Frémont,” September 2 1861, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress (herein referred to as A.L.). 39 The Anzeiger des Westens reported on September 18, 1861 the arrival of Postmaster
General Montgomery Blair and Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs in the city of St.
Louis. Arriving to investigate charges of incompetence against Frémont made by conservative
Missouri kingpin Frank Blair, the duo from Washington hoped to confer with Frémont on the status of the war in Missouri. The Anzeiger printed warily, “It is well known that the cabinet in
Washington is filled with ambitious intriguers from Missouri who have watched their lucky star fade and who wish with deadly serious bitterness to rewin their old dictatorship, and that they have decided it is high time to be rid of General Frémont.”71 The political counterrevolution against Frémont, Sigel, and the leftist Germans had begun. An informant wrote to Secretary of
War Simon Cameron of Blair’s criticism of Frémont: “It is alleged against General F. […] that by his inertness, inactivity & want of military knowledge, he has let the rebels run mad over territory in the State he might have saved.” Clear divisions appeared in St. Louis, the informant noting, “the feeling generally in this City is with Blair -- the Germans generally siding with
Frémont.”72 Frémont’s German supporters in the city sensed a plot to supplant the man they saw as leading the way to true justice in the conduct of the war. To St. Louis Germans, “there [was] no other man in the Union who possesse[d] the magnanimity of a patriot ready for any sacrifice and the understanding of what has to be done.” Frémont appeared to embody revolutionary ideals, causing some Germans to conflate their passion for the Union cause with him. “Further, the administration should and must expect that the entire German population of Missouri,” claimed the Anzeiger, “looks up to General Frémont with profound respect and that under his command it goes to meet the enemy with unlimited trust, but without him it holds Missouri to be
71 “Rumors!” Anzeiger des Westens, September 18 1861, in Germans for a Free Missouri, 284-285. 72 “L.W. Hall to Simon Cameron,” September 18, 1861, A.L. 40 lost.”73 The German leftists of the West were making their demand to the Lincoln administration: leave Frémont in command, or risk losing the support of the voting bloc that helped the president to the White House. Indeed, an anonymous two-sentence letter to Lincoln himself threatened ominously, “The dismission [sic] or abuse or neglect of General Frémont or General Siegel [sic] would cost You the rest of confidence and esteem of the whole german population.”74
Frémont stayed the course in his agenda of revolutionary warfare, even despite severe criticism from conservatives in the press and the government. Propelled by his support among the Germans and other abolitionists, Frémont took the war in the West into his own hands.
Without awaiting the approval of Congress or the War Department, on September 21, 1861,
Frémont made by his own authority the appointment of four new major generals in his army – including Franz Sigel.75 The independent appointment of these generals and other lesser officers by Frémont heightened the tension between him and the government even further. By October
24, Frémont had been recalled to Washington by order of the War Department and was at last forced to relinquish command of the Western Department in November, 1861.
The Germans across the North – both East and West – erupted in anger. Germans in
Boston rallied by the hundreds at the city’s Turner hall to support Frémont and his campaign of emancipation.76 In the communist August Willich’s new regiment, the 32nd Indiana, morale plummeted. A soldier identifying himself only as “Z u.B” wrote in a letter to a German-language paper in Louisville, “The news of the removal of Frémont was received by the soldiers in our camp with displeasure, and many are totally disheartened.”77 In St. Louis, throngs of despaired
73 “Rumors!” in Germans for a Free Missouri, 286. 74 “Anonymous to Abraham Lincoln,” September 19, 1861. A.L. 75 John H. Eicher and David J. Eicher, Civil War High Commands, (Stanford: Stanford University, 2001), 38. 76 Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists, 157. 77 Z u.B to Louisville Anzeiger, November 16 1861, in August Willich’s Gallant Dutchmen: Civil War Letters from the 32nd Indiana Infantry, trans. and ed. Joseph R. Reinhart, (Kent, OH: Kent State University, 2006), 40. 41 Germans turned out into the streets. In a report carried by the New York Times, such a scene was described:
The German citizens seemed to be particularly exasperated at the removal and certainly
took no pains to conceal their sentiments on the subject. The lager beer saloons and other
public resorts were thronged with indignant crowds who huzzaed lustily for Frémont, and
gave frequent groans for Frank Blair. In vain it was stated… that were Frémont here he
would be far from counseling any such proceeding as that talked of. Such arguments did
not seem to entirely cool the effervescing indignation.78
After days passed and illusions of Frémont’s return to command dissipated, the Anzeiger lamented, “Betrayal has run its course and the Blair clique has won… Whether our citizens and solders will stand by and watch this act of high treason against their holy cause is up to the people themselves.”79
The removal of General Frémont from command of the Western Department did substantial damage to the German-American left’s support of President Lincoln. This tension grew sharper still as the war entered its second year in 1862. Franz Sigel, vexed by the apparent slight against Germans in Frémont’s removal, found himself placed under the command of Major
General Henry W. Halleck. Sigel viewed Halleck with contempt and mistrust, privately labeling him a “trickster.”80 Sigel grew more and more impatient under a series of irritations. German regiments he had helped raise and promised would fight with him were diverted away from his command and sent elsewhere. Recommendations on how to organize his division more effectively were allegedly ignored. He claimed the department’s commissary had been
78 “Excitement in St. Louis,” New York Times, November 9 1861. 79 “Betrayal Has Run Its Course,” Anzeiger des Westens, November 13 1861, in Germans for a Free Missouri, 288. 80 Engle, Yankee Dutchman, 90. 42 lackadaisical in supplying his division – indeed “he [had] begged in vain for four weeks for stoves and tents for his freezing and overexposed soldiers… [H]undreds could have been sent if there had been the will to do it.”81 Sigel’s displeasure boiled over on Christmas Day, 1861 when he was blindsided with the order that he was to be replaced in command. Perceiving that his command had been snatched away from him by Halleck due to Sigel’s close alliance with
Frémont, Sigel submitted his resignation on December 31.
Germans throughout the Union – seemingly even more hurt by Sigel’s resignation than by Frémont’s removal – turned out in mass rallies to support Sigel. Frémont’s removal, to his
German supporters, appeared as a deceitful backroom case of political intrigue against an ideologically righteous leader. The slights against Sigel, however, appeared as both that and more. The insults against General Sigel were not merely because he was an abolitionist, but because he was a “Dutchman.” Whether this was truly the cause of Halleck and the War
Department’s alleged mistreatment of Sigel is unclear. Yet that was the image that spread through Nativism – that virulent strain of xenophobia multiplied over the country by the Know-
Nothings – appeared to have reared its head toward America’s Germans again. The German community intended to send a message this time that it would no longer accept the negation of their patriotism and loyalty due to simple nativist prejudices.
On January 16, 1862, a rally was held at New York’s Cooper Union with an estimated five thousand in attendance. A committee of the city’s foremost Germans hosted the event, extending invitations to the Turnvereine and other ethnic German organizations of all the surrounding towns and cities. Speakers denounced “the erroneous idea… that lager bier and sauerkraut were the chief favorites of the German life” and memorialized the contributions of
81 “Sigel’s Resignation,” Anzeiger des Westens, January 13 1862, in Germans for a Free Missouri, 299. 43 von Steuben and other Germans to the birth of the United States as a nation. One speaker presented a list of resolutions composed by the committee which declared “that the mass of the
German soldiers fighting under the banner of the Union shall demand that their best and ablest champion be assigned to an honorable sphere of action.” With “a storm of applause by the immense audience,” a committee of three was selected to travel to Washington to present the resolutions personally to President Lincoln.82
The fervor of the German community intrigued the native press and even attracted its sympathy. The most prominent leftist newspapers in the North’s major cities – the New York
Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Chicago Tribune – reflected admiringly on Sigel’s reputation for gallantry and dedication. “He is a bold, dashing, trained, successful officer,” wrote the Inquirer, “and we cannot afford that such as he should believe themselves kept in the background…”83 The staunchly radical Chicago Tribune concluded, “We cannot spare from the service such officers as the country believes Gen. Sigel to be… He is needed in Missouri, and the
War Department should see him restored at any cost…”84 The public outcry in the name of Sigel was so great that the War Department and President Lincoln took action to correct the claimed injustices against the general and to assuage the German community. The War Department refused Sigel’s resignation and reinstated him to command of his division in Missouri. On March
11, 1862, General Frémont was brought back into the field and given command of the newly established Mountain Department in Western Virginia. 85 Ten days later, Sigel was promoted to major general, and shortly thereafter would also be brought to the East alongside Frémont. The
82 “The Sigel Demonstration,” New York Times, January 17 1862. 83 “Why Is General Sigel’s Resignation Necessary,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 13 1862. 84 “Gen. Sigel’s Resignation,” Chicago Tribune, January 11 1862. 85 Eicher and Eicher, Civil War High Commands, 835. 44 return of Frémont and Sigel represented to the German community the government’s recognition of German contributions to the war effort and their adopted nation. The fact that the mass public outcry across the North in support of Sigel was able to affect such a response from the Lincoln administration was indicative of the strength of the American German community. The Germans held political clout, and their protest for Sigel demonstrated that when the community closed ranks, it could be a formidable force. Nativist derision continued to hound the German-American community as the war continued, and in time they came to demonstrate that if pushed too far, they could form a political bloc that could very well threaten the viability of the President’s second term.
German-Americans saw a victory for their community and national image with the reinstatement of Frémont and Sigel to command. By the beginning of June, 1862, Frémont held command over a corps-sized force composed largely of German troops in the Shenandoah
Valley. Franz Sigel, meanwhile was granted a division on its way from the defenses of
Washington. The German community seemed set to watch its heroes lead the way to victory on the field of battle. Indeed, much of the attention and spirit of the community was focused on the performance of their men at the front, and German ethnic pride rode on that performance. Just as it did with the personal successes and defeats of Frémont and Sigel in 1861, the German-
American public’s self-image experienced highs and lows as a result of their ethnicity’s performance at the battlefront through 1862 and 1863.
The 1862 Shenandoah Valley campaigns saw the first of a series of rises and falls in
German-American enthusiasm for the war. The Germans’ beloved General Frémont found himself flummoxed through the month of June, being humiliated by the elusive Confederate 45 General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Frémont was tactically paralyzed at the Battle of Cross
Keys on June 8, 1862, and many German regiments like the 8th New York sustained heavy losses. Frémont’s hold on command began to slip. His men – including the division of Germans
– “were scattered over a wide district of country, not within supporting distance of each other, and… badly organized and in a demoralized condition.”86 When Frémont’s men were reorganized and formed as a corps under the army of rival and fellow Westerner John Pope,
Frémont quietly requested to be relieved of command and left the front lines for the remainder of the war.
Though “the Pathfinder” had left his place of leadership and prominence, German-
Americans still had cause for jubilation; the replacement selected to command the corps was none other than Franz Sigel. The corps’ German division had been roughly handled on campaign and its morale was minimal. But at the word they were to be commanded by the German hero
Sigel, the soldiers reacted with relief and satisfaction. An army correspondent for the
Philadelphia Inquirer noted, “I cannot attempt to describe the demonstrations of the German brigades… [I]t was the quiet, long, deep respiration that men take after they have been standing with bated breath… If there was any lager, Rhenish wine or still Catawba in any of their tents, it was drank…”87 Upon taking command, Sigel reinvigorated his troops – newly designated the
First Corps, Army of Virginia – and imbued in it a stronger esprit de corps. Though imperfect in strategy and logistics, Sigel led his men with courage. He was wounded at the head of his troops at the Second Battle of Bull Run. He was retained in command when his corps was converted
86 O.R., Ser. 1 Vol. 12 (Part II), 20. 87 “Our Shenandoah Valley Letter,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 29 1862. 46 into the Eleventh Corps of the renowned Army of the Potomac. Indeed, Sigel had risen to prominence in the nation’s attention to the war.
Historian Stephen D. Engle, however, points out that Sigel’s rise in the ranks was perhaps not entirely due to his own ability in the field. “It was not surprising,” Engle writes, “that in both election years 1862 and 1864, Sigel would be placed in the field to solidify the Union’s political and military relations with German-Americans.”88 Indeed, the Lincoln Administration’s ear was closely attuned to a particularly valuable ally in the German-American community: the newly returned Carl Schurz. Schurz had made his way back to the United States from his ambassadorship in Spain and was made a brigadier general of United States Volunteers in April of 1862. Yet without a command, the shrewd General Schurz closely monitored the pulse of the
German-American community and Germans within the Union Army. When General Frémont’s corps was placed in General Pope’s Army of Virginia, Schurz was given command of a division within that corps.89 When Frémont suddenly relinquished his command, however, Schurz immediately struck a telegram to President Lincoln. Schurz wired a single sentence: “Let me entreat you to place Sigel in command of this corps.”90 By the day’s end, Sigel had been given command of the Army of Virginia’s First Corps. Indeed, Schurz’s wife wrote in a letter to her family that, “Carl stands very well with Sigel, and for Sigel’s appointment we have Carl alone to thank.”91 Carl Schurz had already earned the respect and attention of Lincoln for helping to acquire the “Dutch vote” in the 1860 election. Through the war, Schurz remained the Lincoln
Administration’s key link to the German-American community and their support of the war.
88 Engle, Yankee Dutchman, 122. 89 Eicher, Civil War High Commands, 474. 90 O.R. Ser. 1 Vol. 51 (Part I), 709. 91“Mrs. Schurz to Her Parents-in-law,” July 15 1862, in Schurz, Intimate Letters, 276. 47 Schurz keenly walked the line between political actor and military officer and used it to his advantage in advancing the agenda of the German radical left. After all, the interests of such
Germans laid not in simply having German generals in high commands; what mattered was whether true political progress and change was being made through the crucible of the war.
Through 1862, Schurz began slowly prodding President Lincoln toward the cause of emancipation. Lincoln had already disapproved of such an act in Frémont’s emancipation of
Confederate-owned slaves the previous year, yet another instance of emancipation at a distant commander’s initiative soon appeared. On May 9, 1862, General David Hunter – a staunch abolitionist and fellow officer of Frémont and Sigel in 1861 Missouri – issued an order which declared the states of Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina “no longer under the protection of the
United States of America, and having taken up arms against said United States.” Hunter established martial law over the region and decreed, “Slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether incompatible; the persons in these three states… heretofore held as slaves, are therefore declared forever free.”92 Hunter took this order a step further and began enlisting and arming freedmen. Schurz had been too distant – across the ocean in Spain – to be at Lincoln’s ear quickly enough to defend Frémont’s emancipation order in 1861, but Schurz was readily on hand to advise the President in the case of Hunter’s order.
A week after the order’s announcement, Schurz wrote to Lincoln and attempted to persuade him of the order’s justice. “I am convinced it must and will come to this all over the
Cotton states during the summer,” Schurz opined, “and a month or two hence a proclamation like
Hunters would be looked upon as the most rational thing in the world.” He assured Lincoln that
“the people will readily acquiesce if you see fit to sustain Hunter in this act.” Cognizant of
92 O.R. Ser. 1 Vol. 14, 341. 48 Lincoln’s likelihood to quash such an order, however, Schurz explained a scenario which in time proved uncannily accurate:
As our armies proceed farther South the force of circumstances will drive us into
measures which were not in the original programme, but which necessity will oblige you
to adopt… The arming of negroes and the liberation of those slaves who offer us aid and
assistances are things which must and will inevitably be done; in fact they are being done,
and it would perhaps be best boldly to tell the whole truth and to acknowledge the
necessity.93
Lincoln nonetheless issued a counter-proclamation which denounced and nullified Hunter’s order, instead urging prudence in dealing with the property of Southern sympathizers. Lincoln referred to a March, 1862 joint resolution of Congress which proposed a gradual emancipation process which proffered conciliation with state governments through reimbursing them the costs of the freed slaves.94 The radical German left was already growing impatient with the pace of emancipation, particularly after the earlier debacle of Frémont’s 1861 confiscation orders. To suggest conciliatory emancipation with Southern states and reimburse them – which seemed to suggest they truly had rightful claim to the “property” that would be set free – would be far short of the mark. Historian Allison Clarke Efford remarks how radical German clamor for emancipation “occasionally interrupted national politics” and that by “[c]riticizing Lincoln’s slowness to come around to emancipation, these immigrants became a real irritant to the Lincoln administration.”95
93 “Carl Schurz to Abraham Lincoln,” May 16 1862, A.L. 94 U.S. Senate Journal, 37th Cong., 2nd sess., March 7 1862, 274. 95 Efford, German Immigrants, 94.
49 But if Schurz felt frustrated by Lincoln’s moderation, he kept that frustration reserved and to himself. After Lincoln’s denunciation of Hunter’s proclamation, Schurz wrote to him patiently, “I was fully prepared for the step you have taken, and although you know well what way my sympathies run, I do not see how you could have acted otherwise, at least at the present moment.” Lincoln knew that such moderation in his decisions would leave him vulnerable to electoral troubles. Schurz was well aware Lincoln “expected to be left without support at the next congressional elections by the Republican party as well as the Democratic; by the latter, because
[he was] too radical and by the former, because [he was] not radical enough.” Schurz remained supportive of Lincoln and trusted his judgement. He understood Lincoln’s obligations as the head of the Republican Party. The party was a coalition of old single-issue factions and splinters from other parties, all bound together by the common ground of the 1860 party platform. Thus,
Lincoln was forced to respond to issues with methods that would offend the fewest party members possible. A strong ally of Lincoln and Republican party insider since early in the 1860 campaign, Schurz grasped Lincoln’s reasoning. “But,” he warned the President, “there are many who do not understand your policy as I do, or rather, there are probably few who do. The majority want to be confirmed in their faith from time to time […] that the principles in which the Republican party originated are safe in your hands.”96
Over time, many German radicals grew frustrated with Lincoln’s moderate stance on the conduct of the war. Repeatedly, the generals they saw as carrying boldly forward the cause of progress were removed or rebuked for their actions. The unity of German communities began to fracture in reaction to incidents like Frémont’s removal or the denunciation of Hunter’s proclamation. Heinrich Börnstein recalled years later:
96 “Carl Schurz to Abraham Lincoln,” May 19 1862, A.L. 50 With this occurred the worst thing that could happen in a land torn by civil war, a split
within the Republican or Union Party, dividing men into the ‘Emancipationists,’ who
called themselves ‘Unconditional Union Men,’ demanding the immediate and
uncompensated abolition of slavery… The ‘Conservative Union Men’… still support[ed]
the gradual elimination of slavery in stages. If this split among Union people was
perilous, it had the even worse result of dissolving German American unity in the
process.97
Indeed, as fissures opened in the general Northern public over how best to carry on (or not carry on) the war, so too did a schism form between German leftists. While some like Schurz and
Börnstein pragmatically adhered to the leadership of President Lincoln’s administration while applying what pressure they could to shift the President further to the left, others began to search for a leader who would prosecute the war as aggressively as they hoped.
In an attempt to appeal to the left, Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation
Proclamation on September 22, 1862. The measure threatened that if the Southern states did not end their rebellion and return to the Union, a full Emancipation Proclamation would be issued on
January 1, 1863 declaring all the slaves of those states free. The proclamation infuriated
Democrats and other opponents of emancipation. Yet many German leftists remained unmoved – the proclamation only threatened emancipation as a bargaining chip for peace, and even if that bargain was not accepted, it would still only free the slaves of states in rebellion while leaving those of loyal slave states in bondage.98 Lincoln’s preliminary proclamation came as too little too late to shore up Republican electoral dominance in the November elections. The 1862 mid-term
97 Henry Boernstein (Heinrich Börnstein), Memoirs of a Nobody: The Missouri Years of an Austrian Radical, 1849- 1866, trans. and ed. Steven Rowan, (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society, 1997), 372. 98 Efford, German Immigrants, 94. 51 elections – as most mid-term elections tend to be – was a setback for the President’s party. Amid the rising tide of a Democratic anti-war movement – the “Peace Democrats” – and the fallout from Lincoln’s proclamation, Democrats gained seats in state legislatures and the House of
Representatives. Republicans still retained a majority in both houses of Congress, but in an election which was viewed as a referendum on the Emancipation, Republican losses did not bode well.99
Carl Schurz, encamped with his troops in Virginia, wrote a blunt letter to Lincoln:
Will you, after the great political defeat we have suffered, listen a moment to the words
of a true friend who means to serve you faithfully, and in whose judgement you once,
perhaps, reposed some confidence? The defeat of the Administration is owing [not] to
your proclamations… I can speak openly, for you must know I am your friend. The
defeat of the Administration is the Administration’s own fault.
Schurz urged Lincoln, in the wake of this unsightly defeat, to curry favor with the left, which he had neglected for too long. Schurz explained the party’s poor showing in areas they should have won, “Many of your friends had no longer any heart for the Administration as soon as they felt justified in believing that the Administration had no heart for them.”100 Schurz’s warnings proved more and more prophetic in the new year of 1863.
The year of 1863 brought anger and discord to both the German-American community and to the North as a whole.
99 James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, (New York: Oxford University, 1988), 561- 563. 100 “Carl Schurz to Abraham Lincoln,” November 8 1862, A.L. 52 In the early fall of 1863, newspapers across the North began noting significant rumblings from assemblies of German Republicans. Cities with German concentrations found these communities selecting delegates to attend a special convention held specifically for the German left. The New York Times reported on October 9, “The loyal Republican organization formed recently by the German citizens of New-York, and known as the ‘National Club,’ met in force… for the purpose of electing delegates to attend the great Convention of German Republicans to be held at Cleveland, Ohio, on the 18th inst.” The Germans of New York and other cities made their intentions clear: “They urge the organization of a German loyal radical party throughout the
Union… with a view to give more vigor and efficiency to their aid of liberal principles as maintained by the advanced Republicans.”101 This convention was to be no minor movement, but a mass mobilization of the disillusioned left. A newspaper in Providence, Rhode Island declared,
“The Convention will be made up of delegates from every German political association in the
United States outside the pickets of the rebel army.”102 Indeed, the Cleveland Convention sought to send a message that it meant to be reckoned with.
On October 26, 1863, a week following the gathering of the Germans in Cleveland, a city newspaper published the convention’s declarations to the country. The platform the convention established held nothing back. The platform’s preamble read:
The present, more than any previous time, admonishes us to recognize, in the
proclamation of equal human rights by the Declaration of Independence, the only true
fundamental law of republican life, unfortunately disregarded already in the Constitution
and still more in party politics. To establish and preserve the harmony between the
101 “The German National Club – Election of Delegates to the Cleveland and Utica Conventions,” New York Times, October 9 1863. 102 “A National German Convention,” Providence Evening Press, October 3 1863. 53 Constitution, as well as politics, and the fundamental law, is the only means… of
converting an ostensible republic into a true one.103
The platform’s goals were bold and unflinching. The Germans of the convention first demanded that “under no circumstances” could the war end through compromise with the Confederacy – only through absolute defeat of the enemy. They were willing to commit all the resources of the
North to reuniting the nation, and strictly under their own terms. They announced that “the security of peace is only attainable in the removal of the cause of the war, i.e., of slavery.”
Indeed, the convention intended for the war’s end to bring about a South fully subjugated by military domination and placed under the direct control of Congress. Even the land itself was not to be left to the devices of former secessionists: “The lands confiscated by the United States
Government during the war, should be given in small portions only to actual settlers, as far as they have not been granted to the soldiers of the Republic and to the liberated slaves.”104
The convention did not stop there. They called for an amendment to the Constitution which abolished slavery and ensured the equality of freedmen. To amend the Constitution of the
United States was – and is still – no small proposal. It was even more radical a proposal considering the Constitution had been amended only twice since 1789 – two procedural alterations to the judiciary and the election process. The amendment they envisioned would do nothing less than change the socio-political structure of the entire nation. The idea of an emancipation amendment was as of yet so radical that it was denounced by no less a figure than
Attorney General Edward Bates. For foreigners like to Germans in Cleveland to demand such an amendment to their adopted country’s Constitution belied to him a “practical ignorance of our
103 “German Radical Convention,” Cleveland Morning Leader, October 26 1863. 104 Ibid. 54 political institutions and of the very meaning of the phrase ‘Liberty by Law.’”105 The convention appeared undeterred by the eventuality of such derision, as they went further to demand that
Congress “take care of popular education not only among the liberated slaves, but also among the rebels, in all the reconquered territories under its jurisdiction.”
In a show of determination and fortitude, the convention concluded its platform with a final set of resolutions. “Resolved,” read the first, “That the German Convention, and the organization to be created by it, places itself on an entirely independent footing. It forms no part of any existing parties, and cannot recognize any party obligations.” These Germans had decidedly made their departure from the Republican Party – they now advanced on their own bent. “Resolved,” said the next, “That the Convention takes most decidedly the part of the brave emancipationists of Missouri, so cruelly persecuted under the connivance of the
Administration[.]” The Germans of the convention would not relent in their pursuit of abolition, even when surrounded by enemies. “Resolved,” another resolution affirmed, “That we inscribe upon our banner the words of General Jackson, ‘THE UNION MUST AND SHALL BE
PRESERVED,’ and that we pledge ourselves to assist the Government of the United States with all means within our reach, in the struggle for the suppression of the slaveholder rebellion.” The final resolution declared Cleveland to be the headquarters of the new German Radical organization. The deed was done, and the radical Germans of the United States had boldly taken its stand for its beliefs. The year of 1863 was but the beginning of the German Radical uprising, for 1864 would bring a bid for nothing short of the Presidency. Their chosen man for the job:
General John C. Frémont.
105 Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment, (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2001), 40.
55
Chapter 3
Harnessing Revolution
The upheaval launched by the portion of the German-American community supporting the Radical Democracy platform came at a time already rife with political and military uncertainty. By the election year of 1864, the war had gone on for three years, and still no end appeared close at hand. In the late spring, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant – the newly appointed commander of all Union armies in the field – was directing the Eastern Theater’s
Army of the Potomac through northern Virginia in a push toward Richmond. This campaign slogged on day after day, leaving behind it staggering casualties that shocked the North. The war-weary Northern public reeled at the butcher’s bill left after each battle. The single week of
May 5-12, containing the horrific Battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, rendered an unprecedented 32,000 killed, wounded, and missing in the Army of the Potomac.106 As Union forces remained stalled in front of Richmond, it appeared that despite all the blood and capital previously spent along with this renewed push toward Richmond, the war would continue to drag on.
As the war slogged along in a seeming stalemate during the late spring of 1864, German radical opposition reached its peak. An anonymous correspondent in Cincinnati writing to the
Democratic antiwar firebrand Clement Vallandigham on May 22, 1864, noted the German city’s frustration with the war. “I find the main hope of the Republicans here is centered in [Major
General William T.] Sherman,” he reflected. “They seem to regard Grant’s expedition a failure,
106 McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 732. 56 and unless Sherman can take Atlanta that the game is played out, with the South the winner.”
Almost gleefully, he added, “I find… that the Germans are deserting the Administration by scores. Conscription, taxation, and the removal of Sigel have brought them to reflection, and the stampede that is going on is wonderful.” War-weariness and unrest multiplied considerably in the Northern public through the war’s middle years. In March 1863, Congress had passed the
Enrollment Act, a nationwide draft that, when activated that summer, sparked a week of riots in
New York City and other cities. Taxes remained elevated as the pressure to fund the war mounted higher and higher for the Lincoln Administration.
The Germans in particular grew indignant once more at the sacking of Franz Sigel after his disastrous Shenandoah Valley campaign in the spring of 1864. The morale of the German-
American community was sinking lower and lower and it began to turn into hostility to the administration. The impact of this mood was demonstrated in the spring of 1864 when many
Union regiments’ three-year enlistment terms expired. Soldiers were faced with the choice of reenlisting to see the war through, or to take their pay and return home – many Germans chose the latter. Vallandigham’s anonymous correspondent noted the return of Die Neuner, August
Willich’s band of Turners and Workingmen from Cincinnati that enlisted in the war’s first weeks. “The Ninth Ohio, all Germans, 670 strong, came home Thursday. Their time is out and they refuse to re-enlist. They all damn Lincoln.”107
Radical German anger at last took full-form when on May 31, 1864, a second convention in Cleveland officially nominated the politically insurgent Major General John C. Frémont for the presidency of the United States. The only condition for Frémont’s withdrawal from the race, he declared, was if the Republican Party abandoned Lincoln in favor of a new, more progressive
107 O.R., Ser. 2, Vol. 7, p. 358-359. 57 nominee.108 The German far left had thrown down the gauntlet to compromise and moderation in the face of war. It had crossed the Rubicon and wagered its political capital in a gambit for political idealism.
Had elements of the German left at last gone too far? No longer were they merely protesting for the reinstatement of this or that general, or making concessions to the Republican
Party for the sake of mollifying a political coalition. They now took direct aim at seizing the office of the Chief Executive and driving out the man they believed had disappointed them.
Lincoln, of course, was reelected for a second term, and in the election’s aftermath, it appeared that the German left had perhaps expended the last of its political power. As historian Christian
B. Keller argues, “Split among Democrats, Republicans, and Frémont radicals, the Germans had lost much of their previous clout with the administration and could do little to protest…”109
However, it appears that what occurred was not so much a loss of clout as it was a change of direction and leadership. Carl Schurz, that old Forty-Eighter who arrived in Wisconsin and faithfully followed Lincoln from the beginning, was the man able to tame the revolutionary fervor of the German far left. Like a lightning rod, he harnessed the rogue idealism of the
Frémonter Germans and channeled it to preserving the Union. Schurz remained a radical, but the brand of tempered radicalism that he and others carried forth – indeed an early manifestation of
108 Jonathan W. White, Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2014), 98-99. 109 Christian B. Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans: Nativism, Ethnicity, and Civil War Memory, (New York: Fordham University, 2007), 142. 58 realpolitik – was a tool through which to effect real change in a nation enduring in the throes of war and finally rebuilding from the ashes.
At the close of the year of 1863, the German-American community looked back on a year of disappointment, arguably even more disappointing than it was for the Northern public in general. The Germans found themselves yet again dogged by nativist ire, this time as a result of portrayals of German troops’ performance on the front lines of the war. One of the most stinging and frustrating events in the community’s memory of the war struck on May 2, 1863. The Army of the Potomac – with the mostly-German Eleventh Corps in tow – was marching confidently out into its first campaign of the year. Gathering around a forest crossroads called Chancellorsville, the army engaged General Robert E. Lee’s outnumbered Confederates. The Eleventh Corps occupied a quiet position on the army’s right flank, removed from the main sector of battle. On
May 2, the second day of battle, Carl Schurz – commanding one of the corps’ three divisions – recalled feeling uneasy about his men’s situation. Schurz remembered watching a distant column of Confederate troops marching through the forest, and “[i]nstantly it flashed upon my mind that it was Stonewall Jackson, the ‘great flanker,’ marching towards our right, to envelop it and attack us in flank and rear.” Schurz claimed he pleaded with the corps’ native-born commander, Major
General Oliver O. Howard, to prepare for impending attack, yet Howard demurred.110 Late that afternoon, Lieutenant General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s Confederates emerged from the woods and fell upon the Eleventh Corps.
Schurz reported that he and his men rallied and stood against Jackson’s onslaught for an hour and a half, and never received reinforcements or aid from the rest of the army. Stunned and
110 Carl Schurz, Reminiscences, Vol. Two, 1852-1863, 416-421. 59 beaten, the Army of the Potomac withdrew from Chancellorsville two days later and returned to its winter camps. There, Schurz recalled, “we of the Eleventh Corps had to meet a trial far more severe than all the dangers and fatigues of the disastrous campaign.” Newspapers from across the country were peddling exaggerated accounts of the “Flying Dutchmen” fleeing before the enemy, “and how, in short, the whole failure of the Army of the Potomac was owing to the scandalous poltroonery of the Eleventh Corps… [T]he verdict of condemnation and contempt seemed to be universal.”111 Things improved little after the Eleventh Corps was forced into a fighting retreat in the face of overwhelming numbers three months later at the Battle of
Gettysburg. Germans across the North became scapegoats and the targets of scorn.
By the coming of fall, German-Americans watched their beloved, battered Eleventh
Corps be sent to the West, jammed in a stalemate around Chattanooga. Carl Schurz remained there with his division, static and restless. Franz Sigel commanded the military district of the
Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania as little more than a glorified home guard, quelling draft riots and corralling conscripts. Other German general officers like August Willich and Peter Osterhaus were ignored by the War Department, left without recognition or promotion despite meritorious service.112 Though many of these perceived slights were at best unintentional, the German-
American community guarded its reputation rigidly. Thus, when word reached Washington of the upcoming Cleveland convention in October, Lincoln and his administration scrambled to placate the Germans.
Sigel remained an instrument which the Lincoln Administration still could use to appeal to Germans, regardless of his political stance. Despite his removal from front-line command,
111 Ibid, 433. 112 Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 144. 60 Sigel remained a legend and folk hero to his fellow Germans immigrants. The prior few months had found the general in a shadow of despair and introspection. He privately fumed over his removal from the front and went about his work dutifully, but unsatisfied. His anger turned to sorrow in August with the death of his father at home in the German states.113 Grieving and depressed, Sigel sought a return to prominence and purpose in the national eye. The Lincoln
Administration provided him that return. Sensing the mounting German discontent that finally erupted in October, 1863, President Lincoln and the Republican Party tapped Sigel to spearhead an oratory campaign spanning the states of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Traveling town to town, city to city for thirty days, Sigel acted as Lincoln’s hand to bring what Germans he could back into the fold. He rallied support to Lincoln and railed against Democratic
“Copperheads” who sought peace and reconciliation with the Confederacy.114 Concluding his tour in Ohio, Sigel embarked for Cleveland to be himself a delegate at the German Radical
Convention. In a letter passed from Postmaster-General Blair to the hands of the President, a
German Republican from Baltimore attested, “[The Maryland delegates] told me, that they, with the Delegates of Missouri, Kentucky, New York and with Gen Sigel as a delegate for
Pennsylvania protested against the doings of the delegates of the other states, saying that in their opinion the other states were too radical…”115 Sigel – once the hard and fiery revolutionary of the Baden uprising who insisted that its leaders were not “coldblooded” enough – apparently had softened his worldview, and had openly done so in the face of his peers and admirers who had
113 Engle, Yankee Dutchman, 163. 114 Work, Lincoln’s Political Generals, 218. 115 “A. Van Reuth to Montgomery Blair,” October 23 1863, A.L. 61 once cheered him on in Missouri. Whether by his true political feelings or by ambition for regained prominence, the radicalism of Sigel had been tempered.
Historians vary on the significance they accord to Sigel’s political campaigns for Lincoln in the fall of 1863. One of Sigel’s foremost modern biographers, Stephen D. Engle, affords little more than a paragraph to this short period of Sigel’s service during the war – and only a sentence or two makes reference to his support of Lincoln at all.116 Perhaps to a historian encompassing the wide range of Sigel’s travels and experiences through his life, this thirty-day mid-war venture into politics may rightly seem but a small detail in the man’s life. But when measuring Sigel’s denunciation of the Cleveland platform and support of Lincoln against the backdrop of campaign politics as a whole for the 1864 presidential race, other historians see an event of broader importance. Mischa Honeck, placing this speaking tour and the Cleveland Convention in the context of the German vote in the 1864 election, marks this as a substantial blow against the cause of Radical Democracy and its German supporters. Indeed, Honeck describes Lincoln’s
German opponents as at this moment seeing “their chances for success go down the drain.”117
Seeing their beloved hero of the battlefield turn away from their “too radical” platform doubtless spread disappointment through the ranks of German Frémonters. Yet moving into 1864, the
Radical Democracy movement continued to grow and pose a threat to Lincoln’s reelection.
The fervor of the German radicals for General Frémont began to grow and multiply, stretching beyond the German strongholds of the West and toward native-born radicals in the
East. Renowned abolitionist and activist Wendell Phillips was sent an English-translated copy of the Cleveland Platform from the convention’s organizers. Honeck describes this as a stroke of
116 Engle, Yankee Dutchman, 163-164. 117 Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists, 162. 62 opportunity for the German radicals and argues that 1864 saw Phillips expressing views that
“seemed all but identical to those of the German American anti-Lincoln faction.”118 Phillips and other abolitionists began taking up the cause of Frémont in New England, New York, and
Pennsylvania. Collaborating with German radicals in the West, committees began to form of native-born Republicans dissatisfied with Lincoln.
On the evening of March 18, 1864, “quite a large number of people” met at New York
City’s Cooper Institute, where Lincoln four years prior had famously campaigned for his fellow
Republicans’ support as for the party nomination. This time, however, the audience was one aligned against him. This was a meeting of the “Frémont Campaign Club,” meeting to “consider the propriety of nominating him for the Presidency of the United States.” Heading this rally were some of the city’s notable Radical Republican figures, including Horace Greeley of the New
York Herald. Before the assembled crowd, the organizers of the rally announced their official nomination of General Frémont for the presidency. The speaker declared Frémont “the true representative of the instincts of the hour, and as the natural leader of that earnest, progressive, republican democracy which, disdaining any conservatism of exploded errors, merges all party yearnings in devotion to the country.”119 As applause and adulation subsided, the speaker then read the Frémont campaign’s official platform for all to hear. The platform echoed the one passed by the German Radical convention five months earlier. The platform declared its pursuit of nothing less than unconditional surrender from the Confederacy – “with adequate penalties for treason, and no amnesty except to absolute submission,” with no civil liberties extended “as an inducement to the rebels to forswear themselves.” To what the Democratic paper World noted as
118 Ibid, 162-163. 119 “Frémont versus Lincoln,” New York World, March 19 1864. 63 “great applause,” the speaker announced the plank of “absolute equality of all men before the law, without distinction of race and color.” The platform committed to an “extension of the beneficent principles of the Homestead law, and a liberal distribution of bounty lands among all soldiers.” It is uncertain whether this simply referred to broad distribution of western lands to veterans as practiced after prior wars, or if the “extension” and “liberal distribution” referred to
“land confiscated by the United States Government during the war” as the Germans proposed in
October.120 The platform did, however, contain a short nod to the Germans in Cleveland and across the North – it promoted “a liberal system of foreign immigration.”
With a salutatory speech by Horace Greeley, the rally made its final commitment to support Frémont in 1864. Though Frémont still awaited the confirmation of an official party convention, the gloves were off. The following morning, the left-wing New York World announced via its front page, “FRÉMONT versus LINCOLN – The Radical Candidate for the
Presidency Nominated… NEGRO EQUALITY DEMANDED – Scathing Review of Mr.
Lincoln’s Political and Military Career.”121 It soon became apparent that Frémont was not merely a flash in the pan, as other whispered contenders for the presidency dropped out. Salmon Chase, the Treasury Secretary, had been pushed by some other left-wing sectors of the Republican
Party, but renounced his bid in early March as Frémont gained momentum.
Historians writing on the topic generally concur that the Frémonter movement was at the height of its power by the mid-spring of 1864. Though they agree on this point, they have diverged over how much power the Frémont movement had amassed. Jonathan W. White, in his narrative of Lincoln’s reelection, allows a paltry two paragraphs for Frémont’s candidacy and
120 “German Radical Convention,” Cleveland Morning Leader, October 26 1863. 121 “Frémont versus Lincoln,” New York World, March 18 1864. 64 mentions little to nothing regarding German discontent with the Lincoln Administration. White writes the Frémont movement off with a disdainful description of the convention by Henry W.
Halleck as “a mass of corruption and humbugs.”122 James McPherson interestingly describes
Frémont’s candidacy as a “trial balloon” which “became airborne, carrying as strange a group of passengers as American politics ever produced.” McPherson’s prognosis of the Frémonters amounts to “a coalition of abolitionists and radical German-Americans” and some backroom- dealing Republicans “hoping to use [Frémont] as a cat’s-paw to scratch Lincoln from the ticket and bring Chase back to life.”123 Mischa Honeck is, however, somewhat more appreciative of the movement’s breadth of support among radicals. He remarks on how quickly pro-Frémont sentiment appeared to spread amidst the North’s German communities and abolitionist circles.124
Yet William Frank Zornow conveys the Frémont movement’s strength most accurately.
He documents how a radical leftist German newspaper editor noted in February 1864, that “the
Germans controlled 400,000 votes, but whether all these would support Frémont was a moot question.” Beyond just Frémont’s German supporters, he notes, “Several observers who were close to the movement reported conflicting estimates of strength.”125 Indeed, an accurate estimation of the power Frémont wielded in the spring of 1864 is difficult to provide. The political ebb and flow became more turbulent as the weeks and months passed. Other candidates
122 White, Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln, 98-99. 123 McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 715. 124 Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists, 164-166. 125 William Frank Zornow, Lincoln & the Party Divided, (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972), 75.
65 waxed and waned, the war kept public opinion on edge, and the base of voters the Frémont movement had focused its coalition on determining which way the political winds would blow.
In May 1864, the Frémonters hoped to make their boldest statement to the country. From across their political coalition – from the German radicals, from the abolitionists, and from “War
Democrats” who opposed reconciliation with the South – came three calls for an official convention to be held declaring a party and ticket. These calls appeared in the press affixed with the names of prominent, native-born radicals like Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady
Stanton. Each message decried the faults of the Lincoln Administration and urged other dissatisfied citizens to send delegates to the coming national convention. The convention for the new Radical Democracy faction was to be held in Cleveland, just the same as the Radical
German convention seven months earlier. To appear more palatable to native-born citizens, explains Zornow, the convention was headed by natives but featured six Germans out of the fourteen commissioners for drawing up the convention’s resolutions.126
The convention held its first session on May 31, 1864, and issued the resolutions of its official platform. The resolutions followed the lead of the Radical German convention and the nomination assembly at the Cooper Institute. It called for preservation of free speech, restoration of habeas corpus, and a constitutional amendment banning slavery. However, it included one bold policy that the nomination assembly had wavered on – Resolution No. 13 demanded “that the confiscation of the lands of the rebels, and their distribution among the soldiers and actual settlers, is a measure of justice.”127 This unabashedly revolutionary measure denoted a sharp rise
126 Zornow, Lincoln & the Party Divided, 85. 127 Ibid, 80. 66 in the uncompromising timbre of the Radical Democracy. But the issuance of this radical platform became one of the last high points of the Frémont movement.
The following sessions saw the German Frémonters frustrated by the connivances of other blocs bent on the replacement of Lincoln. A cabal of War Democrats from New York hoped to nominate Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant as the party’s choice, while other War
Democrats favored the eventual Democratic nominee, former Major General George B.
McClellan. Here, the weakness of the Frémont movement appeared. The convention descended into debate over which candidate would be the nominee. McClellan was widely ruled out as a possibility, and the War Democrats – ironically unwilling to abide by Frémont’s radicalism despite attending the convention of the Radical Democracy – pulled away from the table. Eastern delegates favoring Grant feuded with western delegates favoring Frémont, until Frémont was nominated with former Brigadier General John Cochrane as his running mate. Frémont accepted in absentia, writing a letter in which he blasted Lincoln and even offered to drop out of the race should the main Republican leadership reject the president for reelection and select a more radical nominee. Yet this letter deflated radical Germans. Frémont approved of each plank of the platform – except the confiscation and redistribution of Southern lands. This, Zornow points out, is the moment in time in which Frémont effectively sank himself and his support with German leftists.128
The blows to the Frémont movement continued. On June 7-8, 1864, the Republican Party
–renaming itself the National Union Party for the course of the election – held its convention in
Baltimore. For radical Germans who had just watched their beloved General Frémont repudiate the most stringent of their plans to punish the rebellious Southern aristocracy, the Baltimore
128 Ibid, 83-86. 67 convention was likely the final nail in the coffin. President Lincoln – who according to Lincoln biographer David Donald was little more than “amused” by news of the Cleveland convention – was renominated by the Baltimore convention with scarcely any opposition.129
Lincoln and his party effectively faced the German radicals with a carrot and a stick. The stick was most evident – either support Lincoln, or the wasted votes for Frémont will do little more than give the election to the Democrats. But in the party platform lay the carrot. True, it did not include the fiery retribution of land redistribution, but in Resolution No. 3 was a noted shift the German left had waited for: “… We are in favor, furthermore, of such an amendment to the
Constitution… as shall terminate and forever prohibit the existence of Slavery within the limits of the jurisdiction of the United States.” The Germans had been some of the earliest to call for such an amendment, and to see this resolution in the platform of the nation’s leading party was the fruition of the Germans’ efforts. To receive the attention specifically of the Germans, the platform also included in its eighth resolution a nod toward the continued welcoming of immigrants, “which in the past has added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation.”130
Though Frémont and his most ardent German supporters continued the campaign, the
Radical Democracy fizzled. A dark-horse candidate already, Frémont had managed to disappoint the strongest portion of his base by refusing to support one of the platform’s key pillars. The other key pillar had been carried away by Lincoln; according to historian Michael Vorenberg,
Lincoln affirmed to confidants shortly before the Baltimore convention that the resolution for an
129 David Herbert Donald, Lincoln, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 503-505. 130 “Republican Party Platform of 1864,” The American Presidency Project, accessed March 27, 2017,
Democracy platform co-opted, the movement caved.
Many German leftists began to move on from the failed Frémont movement. Heinrich
Börnstein, the Lincoln-supporting former editor of St. Louis’ Anzeiger des Westens, recalled that even since the first sparks of support for Frémont in the West in 1861, the Frémont movement was “in hindsight only a straw fire that soon flickered out.”132 On the frontlines of the siege of
Atlanta in early July, Captain Rudolph Mueller of the 82nd Illinois deliberated on the political climate in the North. Mueller was serving in an almost fully-German regiment raised by the old
Forty-Eighter Friedrich Hecker, who had since given up command of the regiment to return to
Illinois and engage in the Republican Party’s campaigns that year. Mueller wrote a letter to
Hecker and reflected on the political situation at hand:
It is difficult to find one’s way in this political chaos… Corruption everywhere, above
and below; to live or not to live is less the question than to make the best of it. One
cannot go for Frémont; for Lincoln, this sleepy head, in any case only with reluctance.
What’s left? Is one supposed to wait for the rejuvenation of the corroded democracy?133
It cannot be said whether most Germans felt so jaded in their appraisal of the situation as Capt.
Mueller did, yet the motif remains – radical Germans had watched Frémont the Pathfinder
131 Vorenberg, Final Freedom, 121-123. 132 Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, 372. 133 Eric Benjaminson, “A Regiment of Immigrants: The 82nd Illinois Volunteer Infantry and the Letters of Captain Rudolph Mueller,” in Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society Vol. 94 No. 2 (2001), 169. 69 disappoint them and sputter out, and now their only real choice was a leader who had left them unsatisfied over the past four years.
The Lincoln campaign needed to court the German left to solidify chances of a victory in
November. The radical Germans would likely not cast their lot with the Democrats, who sought to make peace with the Confederacy and allow the continued proliferation of slavery. But if this faction was not placated and was left to its own devices, it might have cast enough third-party votes to subtract support from Lincoln and push the Democrats over the edge. Lincoln, however, had at his disposal the means to win the Germans over: Carl Schurz.
Lincoln’s old surrogate with the Germans, Schurz had been far from the scene of political intrigue earlier in the election season. Serving with the Union Army in the Western Theatre, he had been rotated from the front and was placed in command of a training camp in Nashville,
Tennessee. When not administering drill to raw conscripts being prepared for service at the front, he languished in camp. The monotonous duty and free time he was allotted to, he recalled,
“permitted me to plod through several volumes of Herbert Spencer, and to carry on a somewhat active correspondence with friends in Washington…” Yet as he remained informed by his correspondence, Schurz remembered, “The political intelligence brought by letters and newspapers was by no means cheering.”134
News of the rising German-American divide over Lincoln arrived and foretold of the growing threat to the president’s reelection. Schurz had been apprehensive about the power of
Frémont over the German radicals; in March, Schurz had sent a warning to the president by way
134 Schurz, Reminiscences, Vol. Three, 1863-1869, 98. 70 of Lincoln’s secretary, John G. Nicolay, who wrote, “[Schurz] is under the impression that the
German movement for Frémont is earnest and will be pretty strong, and that they seriously intend to run him as a third candidate.”135 Schurz proposed in letters to Lincoln that he temporarily leave his position in the army and begin campaigning for Lincoln’s reelection.
Lincoln however refused him, responding, “I perceive no objection to your making a political speech when you are where one is to be made; but quite surely speaking in the North, and fighting in the South, at the same time, are not possible.” To take Schurz from active service, use him as a campaign tool, and then return him to the army, Lincoln explained, would not be justifiable.136 Thus, Schurz remained consigned to his post in Nashville. Though Frémont began to struggle as the race continued into the summer, Schurz realized that even without The
Pathfinder to lead it, a strong element of radical opposition to Lincoln still lingered. Frémonter sentiment still had the potential to sow discord within the Republican voter base, cause the appearance of unity amongst Democrats by comparison, and pose a general threat for the election in November. “I did not, indeed, seriously apprehend that Mr. Lincoln’s nomination could be prevented. But the question was, whether the efforts made to prevent it would not have a demoralizing effect upon the party, and put his success at the election in jeopardy.”137 Though
Frémont’s cause was flagging, the threat of disillusioned German leftists remained real.
Schurz determined that this was the time to return to the political stage and to serve the
Republican cause. He realized that his radical brethren who propped up Frémont and Radical
Democracy – “the most impetuous of the impatient” – did little but threaten the liberal causes
135 “John G. Nicolay to Abraham Lincoln,” March 30 1864, A.L. 136 “To Carl Schurz,” Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 7, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 1953), 262. 137 Schurz, Reminiscences, Vol. 3, 1863-1869, 100. 71 they stood for.138 Opposition to Lincoln’s reelection at this crucial time may very well result in the Democrats seizing power and threatening the continuance of the war. This was an existential crisis to the goals of almost all the German-American left: abolishing slavery, restoring the
Union, providing more openness and support for immigrants, dismantling the power of the
Southern aristocracy, and so many other plans for the nation. President Lincoln’s reelection depended on the war’s progress, and by the bloody summer of 1864, that progress was slow.
Scholars like James McPherson argue that the summer of 1864 was one of the lowest points for the Northern public’s morale during the war, with financial markets wavering and newspapers wondering how much longer the Northern people could continue.139 All eyes were set on the battlefront, though appearances remained grim. “The result of the political campaign will undoubtedly depend much upon the results of our military operations,” Schurz wrote to his parents, “… Let us hope for the best.”140 With the slogging pace of the war adding to the uncertainty of the electoral balance between Lincoln and the Democrats, Schurz decided he would assist personally in tipping the scales toward Lincoln.
Schurz made preparations to obtain a furlough from the military and get onto the campaign trail. He did not have to go far to get the Lincoln campaign’s ear – the military governor of Tennessee who resided in Nashville was none other than Lincoln’s new running mate, Andrew Johnson. On July 13, 1864, Johnson wired Lincoln and informed him [punctuation added]:
Maj Genl Carl Shurz [sic] is here[. H]is command is not a very active one[. H]e is
anxious to be placed in a position where he can render more service to the Country &
138 Ibid, 99. 139 McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 742. 140 “To His Parents,” July 5 1864, in Schurz, Intimate Letters, 302-303. 72 distinction & credit to himself[. T]his telegram is the result of a note received from him
& I hope it will be consistent with your views & the public interest to gratify him in his
desire[.]141
This time, Lincoln relented. Schurz reminisced upon this second appeal to join the campaign, “In
[Lincoln’s] reply he observed that if I did do, it would be at the risk of my active employment in the army. I was willing to take the risk unconditionally, and asked… to be relieved of my duties.”142 Returning from the occupied South, Schurz set up a temporary residence with his family in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and set to work preparing his entreaties to the people of the
North.
The Lincoln campaign bided its time until the end of the Democratic National
Convention. Held in Chicago at the end of August, the convention selected as its nominee the former commander of the Army of the Potomac, George B. McClellan. “The campaign did not become spirited until after the Democratic National Convention,” Schurz remembered, “But then it started in good earnest, and the prospects brightened at once.”143 Schurz was dispatched to appeal to German-Americans who had become disillusioned with the Lincoln Administration.
Requests for Schurz’s appeal to the Germans flowed in from across the North. Former secretary of war and Pennsylvania political patriarch Simon Cameron wrote to the Executive Mansion and requested an appearance from Schurz in Pennsylvania – “he would benefit the cause very much,”
Cameron added.144 A senator from Wisconsin wrote to Secretary of State William Seward requesting assistance with a German-heavy county whose citizens proclaimed themselves “for
141 “Andrew Johnson to Abraham Lincoln,” July 13 1864, A.L. 142 Schurz, Reminiscences, Vol. 3, 1863-1869, 101. 143 Ibid, 105. 144 “Simon Cameron to John G. Nicolay,” September 13 1864, A.L. 73 the Union & to be radical” and stood staunchly opposed to Lincoln. “The specification is that
[Lincoln] has been unfriendly & unjust to Genl. Siegel [sic] and Carl Schurz… My conclusion is that Genl Schurz ought to be required to set that People right. I am assured he can easily do it.”145 Schurz commenced a tour of the North and spoke before as many German audiences as he could rally. “I made many speeches in New York, Pennsylvania, and the Western States as far as
Wisconsin,” Schurz later wrote.146
Schurz’s devotion to the Republican platform and to Lincoln were undeniable and did not go unnoticed by his fellow German radicals. Indeed, he was criticized by some of his German compatriots, who wondered how he could still stand by Lincoln. Schurz had received such questions in a letter from Theodore Petrasch, one of his oldest friends and comrades from his early immersion into liberalism back in the German provinces. He replied to his old ally and made an impassioned defense of his convictions:
Perhaps you were surprised when I came out publicly for the present administration…
We are engaged in a war in which the existence of the nation – and that means everything
– is involved. A party has arisen in the country which threatens to throw away all the
results of the war… The government has unquestionably committed great errors… but
this is all incidental. The main thing is that the policy of the government moves in the
right direction – that is to say, the slaveholder will be overthrown and slavery abolished.
Whether it [the government] moves in that direction prudently or imprudently, slowly or
145 “Timothy O. Howe to William H. Seward,” August 4 1864, A.L. 146 Schurz, Reminiscences, Vol. 3, 1863-1869, 106. 74 rapidly, is a matter of indifference against the question of whether a policy should be
adopted which would move in another, an opposite and destructive, direction.147
In other words, the choice was clear – the only way for the Union and liberty to prevail was through Lincoln. Only he could lead the nation out of the hellish conflict that divided it.
Concluding his appraisal of the president, he mused, “I will make a prophecy which may perhaps sound strange at this moment. In fifty years, perhaps much sooner,” Schurz predicted, “Lincoln’s name will stand written upon the honor roll of the American Republic next to that of
Washington, and there it will remain for all time. The children of those who now disparage him will bless him.” Schurz was fully convinced Lincoln was destined to be the savior of the nation, and Schurz was willing to wager his reputation on it with his radical peers.
On September 3, 1864, President Lincoln and his campaign received news that historians believe changed the course of the campaign. Word reached the president that day that two days before, Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s forces had broken through the Confederate stronghold at Atlanta and seized the city.148 With one of the last stalwart holdouts of the Deep
South fallen and its defending army shattered, the war swung sharply in the Union’s favor.
Sensing the opportunity, Schurz moved to strike. He commenced a speaking tour of whirlwind pace, speaking in both English and German wherever he was invited. On September 16, 1864,
Schurz was invited by Philadelphia’s Union League to speak at the city’s Concert Hall before a
“crowded and enthusiastic audience.”149 The Providence Evening Press pronounced it “one of the most powerful, pointed and logical addresses we have ever been privileged to read.”150 On
147 “To Theodore Petrasch,” October 12 1864, in Schurz, Intimate Letters, 306-307. 148 Zornow, Lincoln & the Party Divided, 142. 149 “A Vast Throng in Philadelphia – Powerful Address by Carl Schurz,” Albany Journal, September 20 1864. 150 “Gen. Carl Schurz,” Providence Evening Press, September 19 1864. 75 October 7, 1864, he appeared before a massive crowd in Brooklyn’s Academy of Music and gave a sweeping speech he titled “The Treason of Slavery.”151 This “Great Speech” was published in full across the front page of his local Milwaukee Daily Sentinel the following week.152
Schurz moved with indefatigable energy from venue to venue across the North to reinforce a Lincoln victory – especially one with the aid of his fellow Germans. So associated was Schurz with the radical German community that the press mistakenly described him as “one of the earliest and warmest supporters of Frémont;” indeed, he had not supported the
Pathfinder’s campaign at all. But his success among his comrades was noted: “… But like all the supporters of the General, [Schurz] gives his influence for the Union nominees.”153 Schurz, with his staunch advocacy of Lincoln, had taken a frenetic off-shoot of his fellow radicals and led them back into the fold of the Republicans. He kept his ideals, but tempered them into a form which fit reality – a form that could compromise and adjust to the rolling waves of the political process.
With his chances of victory next to nil, Frémont’s movement was finished. The candidate officially dropped out of the race on September 22 after making a deal with the Lincoln
Administration for the removal of the conservative Republican Montgomery Blair from the office of postmaster-general, which dispensed an enormous amount of patronage. German
Frémonters – particularly those from St. Louis – at least saw a long-hated enemy removed from office and the conservative wing of the Republican/National Union Party reduced in power. But yet without their candidate, they sat in a political limbo. This is where Schurz found them – their
151 Schurz, Speeches, Correspondence, and Political Papers, vol. 1, 225. 152 “Great Speech of General Carl Schurz,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, October 15 1864. 153 “General Carl Schurz,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, September 21 1864. 76 idealistic fervor met with failure. Schurz co-opted them into the realism he had come to learn with Lincoln.
Across the North, the formerly agitated German radicals continued to turn to Lincoln. In late September, the president learned in a letter from one of his old German allies, Gustave
Koerner, that even the most radical German enclaves of the West now favored his reelection.
Koerner reported meeting with “some of the most leading Germans in Cincinnati who had heretofore favored Frémont” and finding them “rapidly beating a retreat.” “In fact they told me that they would vote for you,” he added. Even in St. Louis, the cradle of German-American radicalism, “the mass I believe is also turning,” Koerner reported.154 The turn of the Germans – and particularly Schurz’s success in influencing them – was even evident from the war’s front lines. With Sherman’s army in Atlanta, the sardonic Capt. Rudolph Mueller of the 82nd Illinois reflected, “Schurz is on the stump and is thought by many to be clever. At any rate… he will also be pushed overboard as soon as Lincoln sits firmly in the saddle… Frémont is now at an end along with St. Louis German radicalism…”155 As the election of 1864 came to a close, Schurz became a new de facto leader of the German-American left. He had used his talents, leftist sentiments, and the opportunity of the moment to influence his compatriots and bring them to the side of victory.
Lincoln of course was reelected to the presidency. Though he was not “pushed overboard” as Capt. Mueller predicted, Schurz still had a war to help fight. Reporting to the army’s Veteran Reserve Corps, he used his notoriety to raise troops to finish out the war. As the final assaults were made on the Confederate capital at Richmond, he journeyed to the Federal
154 “Gustave P. Koerner to Abraham Lincoln,” September 22 1864, A.L. 155 Benjaminson, “A Regiment of Immigrants,” 175. 77 command center at City Point, Virginia. He wrote to his wife on April 3, 1865, “The news has just come that Richmond is ours. I told you before that things would wind up quickly, but it goes faster than I expected.”156 Soon came the surrender of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern
Virginia at Appomattox, so Schurz went further south to join the Union army in North Carolina where Sherman was about to bring Gen. Joseph Johnston’s army to its knees. He wrote his wife from Sherman’s headquarters on April 14, 1865, and asked, “Do you know the beautiful song
“Now all, all must change” [Jetzt muss sich alles, alles wenden]? This is my mood. For when I see anything that pleases me I always think the best is that the war is coming to an end and I may go to my home…”157
It was in Raleigh that Schurz learned of the nation’s last tragic moment before the war ended. The same night Schurz wrote of how “Now all, all must change,” President Lincoln met his final destiny at Ford’s Theatre. The German-American community’s old fallen hero, Franz
Sigel, was in Washington that night. Sigel’s biographer describes that with the murder of
Lincoln, Sigel became “disillusioned by American society” and soon withdrew sullenly into private life.158 Schurz described to his wife the shock of the tragedy, writing, “A thunderclap from the blue sky could not have struck us more unexpectedly and frightfully.” He reflected on what was to come for the war-torn nation, and what may have been:
The murderer who did this deed has killed the best friend of the South… The people of
the South may thank God that the war is over. If this army had been obliged to march
once more upon the enemy, not a single house would have been left standing in their
path… If the war were continued now, it would resemble the campaigns of Attila… It
156 Schurz, Intimate Letters, 327. 157 Ibid, 334. 158 Engle, Yankee Dutchman, 211. 78 will be long before I can live down these impressions. Our triumph is no longer
jubilant.159
This was the tone with which Schurz carried forward into the great challenge after the war – rebuilding the country.
Though he resigned his military position in the late spring, Schurz remained in public service and chose to assist the new president, Andrew Johnson, in building the foundations for
Reconstruction. The new representative of the German-American left now set to work with a
Tennessean from the Democratic right to decide how best to build peace from the ashes of war.
He looked upon the great task of Reconstruction and remembered Lincoln: “Lincoln indeed was not the enlightened mind who could grasp the whole tendency of a period; but through clear observation and slow decision, he always at last came to the right view.” Schurz knew that if
Lincoln were still alive, he would attempt to satisfy as much of his political coalition as he could, but – just as he had in eventually initiating the Thirteenth Amendment and freeing America’s slaves for good – he would make the most just and righteous decision.
But fate was not so kind as to allow Lincoln to preside over Reconstruction. Schurz wrote to a friend, “Johnson, I fear, is a narrower mind… The problem which remains for us to solve is in one respect more difficult than those problems already solved.” The Civil War was but the beginning of the nation’s challenge. The violence of revolution had come and passed – now was the time for revolution to affect true change in American society. “The Union must be reconstructed upon the basis of the results of the great social revolution brought during the war in the South,” wrote Schurz. “A free labor society must be established and built up on the ruins of
159 Schurz, Speeches, Correspondence, and Political Papers, vol. 1, 252-253. 79 the slave labor society.”160 Four long years of war had led to the time that the German radicals had dreamed of since they first arrived as the old Forty-Eighters. Now was the time to truly reform society.
160 Schurz, Intimate Letters, 340-341. 80 Epilogue: Radical Reconstruction from a Tempered Radical
The gradual turn of the German-American left toward Lincoln and the coming of the
Civil War’s conclusion brought the once outlying radicals onto the main stage of American politics. Carl Schurz – once that young, intrepid revolutionary making his way to the “broader and more fertile field” of America – was not the only leader of the German-American left who emerged from the war; yet he represented just how far the radical Germans had come since their arrival. Though Lincoln was gone and replaced by the conservative Andrew Johnson, Schurz remained close to the administration. Even in the first weeks and months following the close of the war, Schurz advised the Federal government. As the conspirators involved in Lincoln’s assassination were brought to trial before a military tribunal in Washington, he wrote directly to
Johnson. In a display of his core beliefs as a principled liberal, he warned Johnson of the threat to liberty such a military tribunal – rather than a civil trial – could be, even as it applied to the killers of Lincoln. “You will admit that a military commission is an anomaly in the judicial system of this Republic,” Schurz wrote. “This is the most important state-trial this country ever had. The whole civilized world will scrutinize its proceedings, and it will go far to determine the opinion of mankind as to the character of our government and institutions.”161
Schurz held no qualms about sharing his views on policy, which even Johnson noticed.
This led the president to task the blunt and forward Schurz with taking a journey into the defeated South to ascertain the best path forward for Reconstruction. Northerners remained unsure about the extent of resistance that may still exist in the South and whether defeated
161 Schurz, Speeches, Correspondence, and Political Papers, vol. 1, 256-257. 81 Confederates would accept the terms of defeat: repudiate secession and accept national authority, end slavery, and recognize the loss of reclaiming their war debts. Possibly to balance Schurz,
Johnson also dispatched Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant to make his own investigation. Though
Schurz and Grant were tasked with the same mission, they came to vastly different conclusions.
But the mission ensured that the German leader remained a stalwart among Radical Republicans influencing broader political and social reforms in American society.
From July to October, 1865, Schurz traveled from state to state, speaking with both black and white Southerners; former slave-owners and former slaves; Unionists and former
Secessionists; civilians and surrendered Confederate soldiers. By the close of 1865, he had seen all he needed to see to make an informed judgement. He submitted his report alongside that of
Gen. Grant to be read before Congress. Grant’s report comprised a paltry nine paragraphs, in which he declared he was “satisfied that the mass of thinking men of the south accept the present situation of affairs in good faith.” One of the few problems Grant did list was that “the freedman’s mind does not seem to be disabused of the idea that a freedman has the right to live without care or provision for the future.”162 Besides this, Grant appeared convinced that the presence of Federal troops in the South for the time being would help the South to be soon on the path to restored relations with the federal government.
Schurz, however, saw an entirely different view of the South and detailed all of it he could. When Grant and Schurz’s reports were published together by Congress, Schurz’s report and all of its addenda comprised 103 out of the publication’s 108 pages. The South Schurz depicted was one of injustice, violence, and chaos. He contended that the South may no longer
162 Carl Schurz and Ulysses Simpson Grant, Message of the President of the United States, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1865), 106-108. 82 have been in open insurrection, but it was far from peaceful. He wrote that “there are still localities where it is unsafe for a man wearing the federal uniform… to be abroad outside of the immediate reach of our garrisons…. The murders of agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau have been noticed in the public papers.”163 Schurz reported on depredations committed upon Southern
Unionists by roving bands of vigilantes and slaves in unoccupied territory who were kept unaware of emancipation by planters. Schurz posited:
The solution of the social problem in the south, if left to the free action of the southern
people, will depend upon two things: 1, upon the ideas entertained by the whites, the
“ruling class,” of the problem, and the manner in which they act upon their ideas; and 2,
upon the capacity and conduct of the colored people.164
Schurz then diligently attached report after report from commanders of the local occupying troops that supported his observations.
Schurz concluded that peace in the South and justice for freedmen could only be guaranteed “by continuing the control of the national government in the States lately in rebellion until free labor is fully developed and firmly established.” He also concluded with one radical proposition: “It will hardly be possible to secure the freeman against oppressive class legislation and private persecution, unless he be endowed with a certain measure of political power.”165 Schurz did not seem to advocate quite the revolutionary social order that other radicals did. Some officers of the Freedman’s Bureau – the portion of the military occupation that ensured the rights of freedmen in the South – called for a stringent policy of land redistribution. Though his addenda featured reports from Freedman’s Bureau officers
163 Ibid, 7. 164 Ibid, 16. 165 Ibid, 45-46. 83 recommending the forcible confiscation of land by the government, Schurz, however, deftly avoided advocating such a policy in his own words.166 Instead, Schurz called for continued military occupation of the South as a means of bolstering what he felt was the most effective method of change – black male suffrage. To Schurz, this was the best way to give freedmen true freedom as citizens. “The only manner in which…” Schurz concluded, “the southern people can be induced to grant to the freedman some measure of self-protecting power in the form of suffrage, is to make it a condition precedent to ‘readmission.’”167 Schurz laid down the ultimatum that the Federal government came to use with Southern states seeking readmission to the Union over the following years: martial law would not be rescinded in Southern states until they constitutionally affirmed the civil and political rights of freedmen.
Schurz initiated what historian Allison Clarke Efford describes as “the liberal nationalist reasoning that would lead the whole Republican Party toward the Fifteenth Amendment.”168
German radicalism approved and supported civil rights for freedmen, which Congress addressed in the Civil Rights Acts of spring 1866. Schurz and his fellow German radicals joined together with native-born leftists to initiate the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
Indeed, even German social organizations like the Turnvereine took up the call for these measures.169 Through 1866, German leftist communities became bolder and bolder in their support of Radical Reconstruction and rejection of Johnson’s conservative approach to the
South.
166 Ibid, 91. 167 Ibid, 44. 168 Efford, German Immigrants, 117. 169 Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists, 174-175. 84 In 1866, the Radical Republicans seized a mighty majority in Congress, and the German radicals along with them reached a crest of power. Through tempered radicalism – the pragmatic adjustment of their ideals to the practice of American politics – German-American leftists found their place in policy-making. Schurz may have been one of the first to use this approach over the years of the Civil War, but in time, he certainly was not the only one.
However, it is not difficult to see him as symbolic of tempered radicalism’s success. Though he briefly moved to St. Louis and became the editor of the Westliche Post, he did not stay there for long. In 1868, he was elected to represent Missouri in the United States Senate, and in 1876 was appointed secretary of the interior in the Hayes Administration. He was arguably one of the foremost German-Americans of the nineteenth century and passed away in 1906 having lived a long life of public service.
As one may expect, German radical leftists and their struggle in America did not solve every issue, or enjoy success with their entire agenda. Historians Mischa Honeck and Allison
Clarke Efford both note that though the Germans had significant success achieving universal male suffrage through the Fifteenth Amendment, German radicalism eventually became overtaken by the rising movement for women’s suffrage. First-wave feminists like Susan B.
Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were keenly aware of the fact that universal male suffrage was placed higher in importance than female suffrage in the German agenda. As the 1860s came to a close, it was at that juncture that the radical leftist coalition the Germans had helped build began to splinter.170 That, however, is seemingly the nature of radical politics – what may have been radical and revolutionary to one generation, once achieved, stops too short for the radicals of the next generation.
170 Ibid, 176. 85 The contributions of immigrant firebrands, despite whatever limitations, helped shift the status quo toward greater equality in American life. They consistently pressured Lincoln to prosecute the war in more ideological terms – to make the war not just about the reclamation of the Union, but also of the elimination of the most heinous moral stain on the nation’s legacy. In the end, they found themselves on the right side of history. They were some of the first to advocate for measures that society today considers hallmark breakthroughs in American liberty
– the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Their idealism, though perhaps quixotic early on, gave them the vision to see with clear eyes the greatest problems of their adopted land. With the crucible of war, they became truly Americans, and found themselves ingrained into the fiber of the nation’s post-war politics. Through this experience, some of them exemplified by the likes of Schurz learned pragmatism – indeed, their newly-tempered radicalism helped bring their once extreme ideological goals to reality. 86
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ACADEMIC VITA
Brandon T. Benner [email protected] 7515 Rt. 235, Thompsontown, PA 17094
Education The Pennsylvania State University Majors: History, Political Science Honors: History
Thesis Title: Mit Pulver und Blei: Radical-German Americans and the Ideological Struggle of the Civil War Thesis Supervisor: William Blair
Work Experience ❖ Penn State Residence Life – University Park, PA (January, 2015 – May, 2017) ▪ Position: Resident Assistant (RA) ▪ Duties: Maintain safe, active, and accepting living environment for first-year students; duties involve conflict mediation, community building, policy enforcement, and counseling. ❖ Richards Civil War Era Center – University Park, PA (Sept., 2015 – Dec., 2016) ▪ Position: Research Assistant ▪ Duties: Assisted University faculty in research regarding Reconstruction Era following American Civil War. ❖ Gettysburg National Military Park – Gettysburg, PA (Summer, 2014; Summer, 2015) ▪ Position: Interpretive Intern ▪ Duties: Assisted public in understanding the Battle of Gettysburg by constructing and presenting interpretive programs. Conducted children’s programming in both assistant and lead capacities. Other duties included staffing visitor center information desk, assisting visitors with research on ancestors, clerical duties, and living history programming.
Community Service
❖ Penn State IFC/Panhellenic Dance Marathon (THON) (2013 – 2017) ❖ Civil War Trust (2014 – present) ❖ Civil War Reenacting/Living History Demonstrations (2007 – present)