NEW CITIZENS: GERMAN IMMIGRANTS, AFRICAN AMERICANS, AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CITIZENSHIP, 1865-1877 DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Alison Clark Efford, M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 2008 Doctoral Examination Committee: Professor John L. Brooke, Adviser Approved by Professor Mitchell Snay ____________________________ Adviser Professor Michael L. Benedict Department of History Graduate Program Professor Kevin Boyle ABSTRACT This work explores how German immigrants influenced the reshaping of American citizenship following the Civil War and emancipation. It takes a new approach to old questions: How did African American men achieve citizenship rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments? Why were those rights only inconsistently protected for over a century? German Americans had a distinctive effect on the outcome of Reconstruction because they contributed a significant number of votes to the ruling Republican Party, they remained sensitive to European events, and most of all, they were acutely conscious of their own status as new American citizens. Drawing on the rich yet largely untapped supply of German-language periodicals and correspondence in Missouri, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., I recover the debate over citizenship within the German-American public sphere and evaluate its national ramifications. Partisan, religious, and class differences colored how immigrants approached African American rights. Yet for all the divisions among German Americans, their collective response to the Revolutions of 1848 and the Franco-Prussian War and German unification in 1870 and 1871 left its mark on the opportunities and disappointments of Reconstruction. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I never would have finished my dissertation without considerable help. Mitchell Snay deftly guided this project. His high standards, careful readings, and patient suggestions somehow allowed me to feel that each breakthrough was mine alone. More personally, I owe Mitchell so much for showing me the fullness of an academic life. John Brooke was an unflaggingly enthusiastic and committed adviser. He always seemed to know exactly when to afflict and when to comfort. Michael Les Benedict’s generous and incisive critiques pushed me to refine my ideas. Kevin Boyle, having long inspired me by example, brought fresh insights to my work as I reached the final stages. The Ohio State University (especially the College of Humanities, the Department of History, and the Graduate School), the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst, and the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. provided awards that made it possible for me to develop my language skills, travel for research, and devote time to my writing. Archivists in Ohio and Missouri and at the Library of Congress helped me track down sources. I would especially like to recognize the staff of the Ohio Historical Society, the Hayes Presidential Center, the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, and the Roman Catholic archdiocese archives in Cincinnati and St. Louis. At The Ohio State University Libraries, David Lincove and the interlibrary loan staff acted as though all my strange enquiries were perfectly reasonable. A course on old German handwriting at the iii Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania taught me how to decipher much of what I uncovered. Many scholars have challenged and encouraged me. Walter Kamphoefner made useful observations at a meeting of the Social Science History Association as I began my research. Later in the process, David Quigley’s comments at an Organization of American Historians conference were right on target. James McGrath Morris let me read chapters of his forthcoming biography of Joseph Pulitzer. Kristen Anderson and Adam Arenson shared their own findings on Civil War Era St. Louis. In Columbus, Audra Jennings, David Dzurec, Brian Kennedy, Jane Berger, Greg Kupsky, Brian Page, Brian Feltman, Nathan Kozuskanich, Margaret Sumner, and many others created a stimulating and supportive intellectual community. By long-distance telephone call, Murray Efford has engaged with the history of strange foreign lands, Ramona Clark has commiserated, and Neil Efford has kept his sister in her place. Finally, my thanks go to Brandon Walton for emotionally underwriting the whole endeavor. iv VITA February 10, 1979……………………Born - Wellington, New Zealand 2001…………………………………. B.A. History, University of Texas at Arlington 2003…………………………………. M.A. History, The Ohio State University FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: History v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ……………………………………………………………………….. ii Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………… iii Vita ……………………………………………………………………………. v List of Tables …………………………………………………………………. vii Chapters: Introduction …………………………………………………………………… 1 1. The Myth of the Freedom-Loving German, 1848-1865 ………………….. 21 2. “Race Should be as Unimportant as Ancestry”: Debating the Missouri Constitution of 1865 ………………………………………………………. 67 3. “A Principled Element”: German-American Republicans, 1865-1868 …… 108 4. “White or Black is Now the Question”: German-American Democrats, 1865-1868 …………………………………………………………………. 148 5. Wendepunkt : The Franco-Prussian War and German Unification, 1869-1871 …………………………………………………………………. 186 6. “Not Only on the Other Side of the Ocean!”: The Liberal Republican Movement, 1870-1872 …………………………………………………...... 224 7. “To Educate Enlightened and Patriotic Citizens”: German Americans, Religion, and the School Debates of the 1870s …………………………… 271 8. “Entitled to a Living”: German Americans and Social Citizenship, 1873-1877 …………………………………………………………………. 313 Appendix: Tables Summarizing Selected Election Results .………...………… 358 Bibliography ………………………………..…………………………………. 364 vi LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1. Voting in Cleveland’s “German” wards, 1860, 1867, 1868, 1872, and 1876 ..... 357 2. Voting in Cincinnati’s “German” wards, 1860, 1867, 1868, 1872, and 1876 …. 358 3. Voting in St. Louis’s “German” wards, 1860, 1868, 1870, 1872, and 1876 ...... 359 4. Voting in selected “German Democratic” townships in rural Ohio, 1860, 1868, and 1872 ...………………………………………………………………. 360 5. Voting in St. Louis’s “German” wards on referendum on Missouri constitution of 1865…………………………………………………..……………………… 361 vii INTRODUCTION On a June day in 1906, thousands of St. Louisans gathered in Forest Park for the unveiling of a bronze statue of the German-American Civil War hero Franz Sigel. The monument was dedicated to the “heroism of the German-American patriots” who had prevented secessionist militia from seizing the city’s federal arsenal in May 1861.1 German Americans had organized a ceremony befitting the occasion. Elderly veterans marched in formation, bands played German folk music, and local leaders addressed the crowd surrounded by American flags. Several speakers commemorated the part German immigrants had played in “saving Missouri” and preserving the nation’s “unity” and “free institutions.”2 The St. Louis dedication emphasized nationalism, one of the great themes of the nineteenth century. A Civil War veteran linked Sigel’s involvement in the failed attempts to unify Germany in 1848 to his fight to preserve the American Union during the 1860s. The proceedings largely neglected Sigel’s liberal goals. Like revolutionaries and reformers around the world, Sigel had fused his nationalism with liberalism, assuming that citizen rights went hand in hand with the formation of nation-states.3 Yet no one at 1 On the sculpture itself, see Caroline Loughlin and Catherine Anders, Forest Park (Columbia: Junior League of St. Louis and University of Missouri Press, 1986), 97, 261. 2 “Rettung Missouris”; “Eintracht”; “freiheitlichen Institutionen.” St. Louis Mississippi Blätter [Sunday edition of the Westliche Post], 24 June 1906. This issue provides two pages of coverage of the unveiling including a photograph and the text of the speeches. 3 David M. Potter, “The Civil War in the History of the Modern World: A Comparative View,” in The South and the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 287-99, draws transnational parallels and uses the term “fusing” to describe the connection between liberalism and 1 the 1906 festivities explained that Sigel had hoped that overthrowing the Grand Duke of Baden would inaugurate a German republic that safeguarded its citizens’ right to free speech, jury trials, and political representation. No one mentioned his opposition to slavery in the United States or his support for African American citizenship rights during Reconstruction. Indeed, the only speaker who alluded to the postwar years remarked that Americans had put the issues of the war behind them. Northerners and southerners, he said, “today stand together, unified.”4 Reflecting on the events forty years earlier from their vantage point at the turn of the century, German Americans indicated the ultimate results of the nineteenth century’s struggles. The nationalism of 1848 and the Civil War had triumphed. Liberalism was in more doubt. The commemoration illustrated the entwined fate of nation-making and citizenship in North America and Europe during the nineteenth century. In 1848, European revolutionaries such as Sigel had demanded greater limits on government and more effective political representation as well as national consolidation. That same year, when the United States snatched about half a million square miles of Mexican territory, increasing numbers