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Home , Anzeiger des Westens, August Willich, Baltimore Wecker, Bourbon Democrat, Carl Wilhelm Heine, Caspar Butz

NEW CITIZENS: GERMAN IMMIGRANTS, AFRICAN , AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF , 1865-1877

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The 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? 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 , 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 and the Franco-Prussian War and German unification in 1870 and 1871 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 and at the 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 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, 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 . 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 at Arlington

2003…………………………………. M.A. History, The Ohio State University

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major : 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 ’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- hero . 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 , and local leaders addressed the crowd surrounded by American flags. Several speakers commemorated the part German immigrants had played in “saving Missouri” and preserving ’s “unity” and “free institutions.”2

The St. Louis dedication emphasized , one of the great themes of the

nineteenth century. A Civil War veteran linked Sigel’s involvement in the failed attempts

to unify in 1848 to his fight to preserve the American Union during the 1860s.

The proceedings largely neglected Sigel’s liberal goals. Like and

reformers around the world, Sigel had fused his nationalism with , 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 Blätter [Sunday edition of the ], 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: 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

in the 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 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 of Americans resolved to halt the westward spread of slavery.5 The northern victory in the Civil War seemed to confirm the ascendancy of these liberal nationalist visions. Four million former slaves became citizens, and the American state

nationalism. My presentation of these ideas draws more heavily on Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: Americas Place in World History (: Hill and Wang, 2006). I further discuss my historiographical debts below. 4 “… steht heute vereint beisammen.” Ibid. 5 Richard Griswold del Castillo, “Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,” in The United States and at War: Nineteenth-Century Expansionism and Conflict, ed. Donald S. Frazier (New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1998), 437-38. For works that the Civil War to the U.S. invasion of Mexico, see James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: , 1988), 3- 4; Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North American, 1500-2000 (New York: Viking, 2005), 274-316. 2 emerged more powerful than ever before. Yet the global association between the nation-

state and citizenship rights was not as inevitable as such successes suggested. Bismarck’s

German Empire most clearly represents the triumph of nationalism at the expense of

citizenship. The mighty state forged during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and 1871

lacked the constitutional protections and strong representative institutions that liberals

had sought in 1848.6 For all the differences between the United States and Germany,

Americans also uncoupled nationalism and citizenship when northern and southern

whites determined to reunite at the cost of African American rights in the decades

following 1877.

This dissertation illuminates the connections between the developments in Europe

and the United States by exploring how German immigrants influenced American

citizenship following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. During the

Reconstruction years of 1865 to 1877, the nineteenth-century debate over citizenship was

at its most intense. Historian Heather Cox Richardson has dubbed Reconstruction “the

Era of Citizenship,” a period during which “Americans defined who would be citizens

and what citizenship meant.”7 After the Union victory at Appomattox, the promise of

equal rights seemed to rise up before the former slaves. Republicans in Congress charged

the army with defending African American men’s right to vote in the states of the former

Confederacy, the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly conferred national citizenship on the

6 Potter, “The Civil War in the History of the Modern World,” 298, emphasizes Lincoln and Bismarck’s “contrasting styles of nationalism.” Telling the story with a focus on the Confederate perspective, Carl N. Degler has pointed out that Lincoln and Bismarck both in their own ways forged national unity with blood and . Carl N. Degler, “One among Many: The United States and National Self-Determination,” in Lincoln, the War President: The Gettysburg Lectures, ed. Gabor S. Boritt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 91-119. 7 Heather Cox Richardson, “North and West of Reconstruction: Studies in Political Economy,” in Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States, ed. Thomas J. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 69. 3 freed people, and the Fifteenth Amendment wrote the ideal of universal manhood into the Constitution in 1870. Yet no sooner had Republicans outlawed in American elections than their will to enforce Reconstruction began to subside. African American men did not abruptly cease voting, and their supporters did not suddenly renounce the Fifteenth Amendment, but after 1872 it slowly became clear that Republicans could no longer muster enough support for black rights to overcome the concerted opposition of the white South, their own prejudices, and their partiality for a nation united under a government limited by a federal constitution.

I seek to explain the arc of Reconstruction citizenship, from its ascent in the late

1860s, though its zenith around 1870 to 1872, and on to its gradual decline during the

1870s. Although no one has carefully examined German immigrants’ part in these developments, many historians have studied the rise and fall of Reconstruction. Some of them have questioned the radical potential of the Republican policies of the late 1860s.

They point out that Congress was constrained by northern racism and constitutional .8 Other scholars recast Reconstruction’s waning years, emphasizing that

8 The historians who argue Reconstruction was not very radical in light of the alternatives” are labeled “post-revisionist.” Expressing this position, see Michael Les Benedict, Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863-1869 (New York: Norton, 1974). The classic treatment of the racism among northern Republicans is C. Vann Woodward, “Seeds of Failure in Radical Race Policy,” in New Frontiers of American Reconstruction, ed. Harold M. Hyman (Urbana and : University of Press, 1966), 125-47. Works that stress the limits of northern commitment to African American citizenship include William McFeely, Stepfather: General O.O. Howard and the Freedmen (New Haven: Press, 1968);Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979); William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869-1879 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); Gillette, to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969). On the constitutional conservatism of Reconstruction policies, see also Benedict, “Preserving the Constitution: The Conservative Basis of Radical Reconstruction,” in Preserving the Constitution: Essays on Politics and the Constitution in the (New York: Press, 2006), 3-22; Phillip S. Paludan, A Covenant with Death: The Constitution, Law, and Equality in the Civil War Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975); and Earl M. Maltz, Civil Rights, the Constitution, and Congress, 1863-1869 (Lawrence: University of Press, 1990). 4 some Republicans remained committed to black rights beyond 1877.9 Flattening the arc of Reconstruction, however, misses the hope and disappointment of the period.

Historians sensitive to the African American experience have demonstrated that

Reconstruction was indeed a revolution, if one left “unfinished” or perhaps even betrayed.10 To explain its failure, some scholars point to the violence and intransigence of southern whites.11 There is also a growing appreciation of white northerners’ powerful urge to heal the nation and reconcile with their former enemies.12 These approaches all help explain the decline of Reconstruction, but they largely overlook the fact that other countries faced similar ordeals.

The leading interpretation of Reconstruction embeds Republican actions in the broader context of industrialization. In his influential synthesis, Reconstruction: An

Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, Eric Foner connects African American rights to the

9 See for example Xi Wang, The Trial of : Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860- 1910 (: University of Press, 1997); Brooks Simpson, The Reconstruction Presidents (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998). Historians are beginning to challenge the usefulness of assuming 1877 was the end of Reconstruction. “Introduction,” in Reconstructions, ed. Brown, 7. 10 “Unfinished” comes from the title of the leading synthesis of Reconstruction, which I discuss in more detail below. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). Thomas Bender considers Foner’s title too generous. Bender, A Nation among Nations, 177. 11 Allen Trelease, White Terror: The Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); George Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984); Dan Carter, When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South, 1865-1867 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985); Richard Zuczek, State of Rebellion: Reconstruction in (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996); LeeAnna Keith, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, The Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2008); Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). 12 David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001); Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of Press, 1993); Robert W. Burg, “Amnesty, Civil Rights, and the Meaning of Liberal ,” American Nineteenth Century History 4, no. 3 (2003): 29-60. William Gillette saw the desire for white reconciliation as one force that would undermine Reconstruction. Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction. 5 United States’ transformation from a decentralized agrarian republic to an imposing industrial nation.13 He places Americans’ changing attitudes toward work at the center of

Reconstruction. From the outset, Foner establishes that held a

“utopian vision of a nation whose citizens enjoyed equality of civil and political rights.”14

But the Radicals only succeeded in enfranchising black men because they won support from other Republicans who were committed to a “free labor ideology” that predicated effective republican government on the economic independence of American men.

Although this ideology emerged dominant with Confederate defeat, large-scale industry with its demand for wage-workers began to render free labor ideas obsolete. Fueled by the Civil War and Republican tariffs and subsidies, industry was becoming just as important as independent farmers and shopkeepers. In 1873, American factories produced 75 percent more goods than they had in 1865, and this growth undercut the

13 Foner drew on a generation of “revisionist” writing on Reconstruction during the 1970s and 1980s, but he was especially inspired by the older work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860- 1880 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1935). Foner highlighted the entwined nature of race and labor and eschewed the approach of earlier historians who minimized the African American experience as they focused on material interests. See for example Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan Co., 1927); Howard K. Beale, The Critical Year: A Study of and Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930). Foner distinguished his position from the argument that northern labor conflict undid the Republican coalition. This argument features in David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (New York: Knopf, 1867), which remains important for its close attention to how Republicans approach the labor issues created by industrialization. Since Foner completed his synthesis, other historians have extended his interpretation. See especially, Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post- Civil War North, 1865-1901 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); David Quigley, The Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction and the Making of American Democracy (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004); Nancy Cohen, Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 14 Foner, Reconstruction, 230. 6 Radical impulse.15 Apprehensive of the mounting power of the working class, many

northerners began to empathize with ’ desire to control their black

workforce. Republicans tired of federal intervention on behalf of the freed people. In

Foner’s words, “The erosion of the free labor ideology made possible a resurgence of

overt racism that undermined support for Reconstruction.”16 Industrialization both

overshadowed and subverted African American citizenship. By privileging the changing

dynamic of work, Foner implicitly places Reconstruction in global context.

Thomas Bender demonstrates the potential of more explicitly transnational history

in his description of the trajectory of “freedom in an age of nation-making.” His A Nation among Nations inspired my opening paragraphs. By tracing transnational connections and drawing transnational comparisons, Bender shows that a global frame of reference yields “new and richer explanations for national development.” He urges historians to explore the nature of the nation by “focusing on its boundaries, the zones of contact and exchange among people, money, knowledges, and things.”17 Other historians have

already traversed boundaries in their research. Several works compare emancipation

around the world.18 Taking an alternative approach, Mitchell Snay compares the

15 Ibid., 461. 16 Ibid., 525. 17 Bender, A Nation among Nations, 7. For a compelling case for contextualizing Reconstruction in a global perspective, see Mark M. , “The Past as a Foreign Country: Reconstruction, Inside and Out,” in Reconstructions, ed. Brown, 117-40. A useful summary of diplomatic and call for more attention to the connections between domestic and foreign policy during this period, see Jay Sexton, “Toward a Synthesis of Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1848-1877,” American Nineteenth Century History 5 (2004): 50-73. 18 See especially Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); Steven Hahn, “Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review 95 (1990): 75-98; Frederick Cooper, Thomas Holt, and Rebecca Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). 7 aspirations of Irish-American , southern whites, and freed people, revealing how they developed distinctive despite the “hegemonic force of Republican nationalism.”19 Philip Katz has described the diverse lessons Americans drew from the

Paris Commune of 1871 as they struggled “to define what it meant to be a republic, and

to decide who was fit to participate in such a polity.”20

It makes sense to investigate German Americans’ influence on Reconstruction citizenship because historians have already established that these immigrants linked the

American and European experiences of nationalization and industrialization. Following the conclusion of the in 1815, the traditional economies of the German states came under increasing pressure from British industry. When the Revolutions of

1848 failed to create a German nation-state or alleviate economic hardship, many immigrants in search of economic opportunity joined the political who set their sights on the United States. By the onset of the Civil War, there were over 1,300,000

German immigrants in the United States and its territories.21 Historians have ably

described how their European backgrounds inspired many of these immigrants to help

defend the American Union and abolish slavery.22

19 Mitchell Snay, Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites: Race and in the Era of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 175; Mitchell Snay, “The Imagined Republic: The Fenians, Irish , and the Political Culture of Reconstruction,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 112, part 2 (2002): 291-313. 20 Philip Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre: Americans and the Commune (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 90. 21 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Eight Census (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1865), 621. 22 Interestingly, Bender’s A Nation among Nations does not address the Forty-Eighters who came to the United States. Other historians, however, have. See especially Bruce Levine, The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), and the older Carl Wittke, Refugees of Revolution: The German Forty-Eighters in America (: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1952; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970). 8 Far less attention has been devoted to the fact that German Americans openly grappled with implications of the Franco-Prussian War and German unification of 1870 and 1871 at the height of Reconstruction. This oversight is striking since historians recognize that the 1870s witnessed the beginning of what Daniel Rodgers characterizes as

“an intense, transnational traffic in reform ideas, policies, and legislative devices.”23

Rodgers focuses on how the nations of Europe suggested possible solutions to the social problems of the industrial age, but Europe would also provide a renewed stream of migrants who contributed to the cultural fissures and that many Americans found so threatening during the late nineteenth century. Over 3,200,000 people emigrated from Germany between 1866 and 1900, far more than any from any other country.24 They reinforced the institutions of Roman Catholicism and working-class

activism. I maintain that the new currents emanating from Europe date to 1870 and help

explain why the trajectory of citizenship in the United States in some ways resembled

that in Europe.

Although German Americans reinforced similarities between the two continents,

they would also contribute to the distinctiveness of the United States. As immigrants,

they articulated a vision of American citizenship that did not rely on cultural uniformity.

German immigrants maintained that their identification with Germany complemented

their loyalty to the United States. They emphasized the power of America’s civic creed

to transcend ethnic differences, a forerunner to multiculturalism. On the other hand, in

23 Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 3. 24 Roger Daniels, “The Immigrant Experience in the ,” in The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America, ed. Charles W. Calhoun, 2d ed. (Lanham, : Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 78-79. Matthew Frye Jacobson suggestively places immigration in the context of Americans’ wider engagement with the world of the late nineteenth century. Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000). 9 recent decades scholars have shown that many immigrants emphasized the association between American citizenship and whiteness. Working-class newcomers, especially the

Irish, responded to their subordinate position and ambiguously white status by defining themselves against , reifying the divide between black and white.25

Thus Reconstruction presented immigrants with two options. They could use their own experience as a template for black Americans’ transition from slavery to citizenship, or they could stress the centrality of whiteness to citizenship and impede racial equality before the law. Americans had to decide whether emancipation would make black men into citizens in the same way naturalization had transformed European men?

* * * * *

The concept of citizenship draws together the different roles German Americans played in Reconstruction. Nineteenth-century Americans agreed that citizenship was a status predicated on membership in the national community of a republic and that it conferred a certain set of rights, but the term had various overlapping meanings.26 I distinguish between the language of citizenship and the law of citizenship. Citizenship

25 Noel Ignatiev described this as an conscious economic strategy while David Roediger emphasized its psychological aspects. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); and David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class ( and New York: Verso, 1991). Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) addresses the legal and literary dimensions of becoming white. See also Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). See also Eric Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” International Labor and Working Class History 60 (2001): 3-32; and Eric Foner, “Response to Eric Arnesen,” International Labor and Working Class History 60 (2001): 57-60. On German immigrants and whiteness in late nineteenth-century Philadelphia, see Russell Kazal, “Irish ‘Race’ and German ‘Nationality’: Catholic Languages of Ethnic Difference in Turn-of the Century Philadelphia,” in Race and the Production of Modern American Nationalism, ed. Reynolds J. Scott- Childress (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), 149-68; Kazal, Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity (Princeton: Press, 2004). 26 As Derek Heater points out, the relationship between nation and citizenship was new to the nineteenth century. Before the rise of the nation state, they were “linked to different socio-political entities.” Derek Heater, A Brief History of Citizenship (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 88. 10 was first of all a language of belonging. Since the founding of the United States, a sense

of shared racial, ethnic, and religious heritage had helped unify Americans. As political

scientist Rogers M. Smith has observed, it was common to maintain that “America was by rights a white nation, a Protestant nation, a nation in which true Americans were

native-born men with -Saxon ancestors.”27 Yet German immigrants capitalized on the fact that the Constitution had defined a community based largely on a civic vision.

American citizens were supposedly knit together by allegiance to a set of shared political ideals. In describing the characteristics and behaviors that made them “good citizens,”

German immigrants entered the debate over the nature of these ideals and the fundamental relationship between the state and its citizens.28 By claiming citizenship, the

newcomers influenced how membership in the American community was imagined,

debated, and contested.

The language of citizenship colored binding political and legal decisions. At its

core, Reconstruction was a transformation in the law of citizenship. Its fundamental question was what rights citizenship conferred on the freed people. During the mid- nineteenth century, as Mitchell Snay puts it, “Suffrage embodied the fullest manifestation

27 Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 3. Smith’s earlier work placed more emphasis on the of exclusionary ideas of citizenship. See Rogers Smith, “The ‘American Creed’ and American Identity: The Limits of Liberal Citizenship in the United States,” Western Political Quarterly 41 no. 2 (1988): 225-51. See also Ned Landsman, “Pluralism, , and Prosperity: Crevecoeur’s American Farmer and the Foundations of American Pluralism,” in Beyond Pluralism: The Conception of Groups and Group Identities in America, ed. Wendy F. Katkin, Ned C. Landsman, and Andrea Tyree (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 105-24; and Eric Kaufmann, “ Reconsidered: Anglo-Saxon in the ‘Universal’ Nation, 1776-1850,” Journal of American Studies 33 (1999): 437-57. 28 Scholars identify “good citizenship” as the quality contested in debates over proper civic and political participation. See for example Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 5-7; and Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: The Free Press, 1998). 11 of citizenship”29 The laws pertaining to naturalized foreign-born men indicated the strong connection between American citizenship and the right to vote, but legally it was not that simple. In several states, resident aliens could vote, but native-born blacks and women—presumably citizens—could not. In legal fact, there were gradations of

American citizenship as well as variations among the states. The framers of the

Constitution had implied a national citizenship, mandating a national naturalization policy and entitling citizens of each state to “all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several states” in the Comity Clause. Yet America’s fundamental law had left this key status undefined. Prior to Reconstruction, states had taken the lead in determining the rights citizens received.30 I on the important complications of gender and federalism, but my main concern reflects that of contemporaries: Would African

American men get to vote?

The language of citizenship met the law of citizenship as Americans debated

African American suffrage in the public sphere. I recover German Americans’ engagement with Reconstruction in this conceptual space, which German philosopher

Jürgen Habermas has described as a deliberative arena lying between the state and private individuals.31 Habermas’s understanding of the public sphere has prompted historians to

reconsider the role institutions such as the press played in nation formation.32 In an

29 Snay, Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites, 163. See also Eric Foner, “Rights and the Constitution in Black Life during the Civil War and Reconstruction,” Journal of American History 74 (1987): 867; and Heater, A Brief History of Citizenship, 65-87. 30 James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608-1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 218-24; Smith, Civic Ideals, 115-36. 31 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: of Technology Press, 1989). 32 See for example Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of , 2001); David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North 12 important evaluation and reorientation of this rich literature, John L. Brooke suggests that the concept of the public sphere has the power to the boundary between the “the old political history of law and the new political history of language.” He conceives the public sphere as a communicative space of both authority and dissent, involving both persuasion (the unequal exchange of cultural signals, particularly language, that “set boundaries on the possible”) and deliberation (“the structured and privileged assessment of alternatives among legal equals leading to a binding outcome”).33 My analysis capitalizes on the interplay between persuasion and deliberation in Reconstruction politics.

Specifically, I investigate the debate within the German-language public sphere in

Ohio and Missouri. Although German immigrants participated in American politics, they did so from within a forum circumscribed by language. Literary scholar Brent O.

Peterson has argued that German-language publications created ethnic identity by forming a community of readers.34 He observes that foreign-language imagined the American nation differently than the English-language press, which the

Carolina Press, 1997); Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). 33 John L. Brooke, “Consent, , and the Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution and the Early American Republic,” in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic, ed. Jeffrey Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 209. 34 Brent O. Peterson, Popular Narratives and Ethnic Identities: Literature and Community in Die Abendschule (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Peterson, “The ‘Political’ and the German-American Press,” Yearbook of German-American Studies 23 (1988): 41-48. For other explorations of marginalized groups pushing their way into the public sphere or establishing autonomous sites of debate, see Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts of Technology Press, 1991), 109-142; Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapolis: University of Press, 1993); Joanna Brooks, “The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic,” William and Mary Quarterly 62 (2005): 67-92. 13 work of Benedict Anderson privileges.35 Sixteen German-language newspapers from

Missouri and Ohio dating from 1865 to 1877 have survived to appear in this study.36 I also use German and English-language correspondence among editors, politicians, and religious leaders, reports of mass meetings and speeches, voting records, and the records of state constitutional conventions to ground the language of citizenship in the activities of the German-American community and gauge its legal ramifications. I rely on the fact that German-speaking editors, politicians, and clergymen openly disagreed. They helped form a German-language network within which German immigrants who had little else in common debated what it meant to be German-American. For the purposes of this study, the German-American community consists of those immigrants and their children who argued in German.

Conceiving of a linguistically segmented public sphere allows me to examine how

German-American attitudes took shape without assuming there was a German-American consensus. The German-language press reflected the fault lines in the German-American community. German Americans were divided by political affiliation, religious faith, class, and geography. In the 1870s, a German-American politician observed, “Wherever

35 Peterson, Popular Narratives and Ethnic Identities, 47. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 47- 66. 36 For work on the German-American press, see Carl Wittke, The German-Language Press in America ([Lexington]: University of Press, 1957); Karl J. R. Arndt and May E. Olsen, German-American Newspapers and Periodicals, 1732-1955: History and Bibliography (: Quelle & Meyer, 1961; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint Corp.,1965); James M. Bergquist, “The German American Press,” in The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook, ed. Sally M. Miller (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987), 131-59; Henry Geitz, ed. The German-American Press (Madison: Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, University of -Madison, 1992); and Peter Conolly- Smith, Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1895-1918 (Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institution, 2004). 14 four gather, you will find five different ideas.”37 In cities such as St. Louis and

Cincinnati, immigrants could choose between daily newspapers presenting Republican and Democratic viewpoints. The debates between competing editors often took on the intimate intensity of a bitter feud. Even the editors of religious publications were drawn into the fray. Cincinnati’s episcopally sanctioned weekly, the Wahrheits-Freund

(Friend of Truth) was the oldest German-American newspapers for Roman Catholics. Its

editors tried to remain aloof from partisan politics, but they were sometimes driven to

attack their political opponents by name. Working-class immigrants also founded

newspapers to express their own interests. Socialists established St. Louis’s Volksstimme

des Westens (People’s Voice of the West) in disgust at the mainstream press. Despite this critique, working men’s voices did appear in other newspapers when they voted, protested, and struck. German Americans in smaller towns and rural areas received some coverage in urban dailies and weeklies. After all, entrepreneurial editors hoped to sell them subscriptions through the mail. Yet even quite small centers supported newspapers.

The Fremont Courier in northeast Ohio, for example, served a county with fewer than

2,300 German-born residents.38 Such weeklies reprinted editorials from larger newspapers, appending their support or disapproval. The very structure of the German- language press lends itself to a study of how differences among German Americans textured Reconstruction’s citizenship debates.

37 “Wo sich vier Deutsche versammeln, finden Sie fünf verschieden Ideen.” Der deutsche Pionier 11 (1879): 144. 38 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Ninth Census of the United States, 1870 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1872), 1:368. 15 Newspapers exposed some divisions, but they obscured others. The German- language press did not represent the interests of German-American women very well.39

German-speaking women were much less likely to assume public roles during the Civil

War Era than Anglo-American women, especially Anglo-American Republican women.

They had few socially sanctioned opportunities to become community leaders. German-

American newspapers condemned native-born women who achieved power as school

teachers, abolitionists, and advocates of temperance and other reforms. They nearly

unanimously rejected women’s suffrage. Although I do not focus on women, I address

how gender entered German-American arguments over citizenship law.

Whatever their differences, the German-speaking individuals who people this

dissertation all lived in Ohio and Missouri, states of the river-valley Middle West.

Historian Edward Conrad Smith called this region America’s “Borderland,” noting its

importance during the Civil War.40 The white population of the states defined by the

valleys and tributaries of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio Rivers—Missouri,

Kentucky, and , as well as the southern portions of Ohio, Illinois and

Indiana—was nearly as large as the white population of the eleven states that seceded.

This region could have sealed Confederate independence. Missouri and Ohio had welcomed settlers from the slave-holding states farther east and shared trade connections

39 Editors also ignored the fact that German Americans often identified with a particular state in German Europe and married and socialized with other immigrants who shared their regional background. See Walter D. Kamphoefner, The Westfalians: From Germany to Missouri (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Stanley Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City 1845-80 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990). 40 Edward Conrad Smith, The Borderland in the Civil War (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1970). Frederick Jackson Turner also ascribed a particular significance to what he called the “north central states.” Turner, The United States, 1830-1850: The Nation and Its Sections (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1945), provides an account of the geography, peopling, economy, politics, and culture of the periods which resembles the work of more recent historians who focus on the environmental context of human history. 16 to the South. The two states were, however, divided by the border between slavery and

free soil. Under the auspices of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Ohio had always prohibited slave ownership, and it had received substantial immigration from

northeastern and mid-Atlantic states. Overwhelmingly white, densely populated, and politically divided, the Buckeye State was an important nineteenth-century electoral battleground.41 Missouri had been admitted to the Union in 1821 as a slave state.

Although by 1860 more of its residents had been born in the North or abroad than in the

South, nearly 10 percent of its population was enslaved, a fact that would influence its

involvement in Reconstruction.42

German immigrants helped define Missouri and Ohio. The eastern states of New

York and Pennsylvania had the country’s largest German-born populations in 1860, but proportionally the Middle West was much more German. Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, and

Missouri ranked next in terms of total German-born residents according to the 1860 census. German immigrants made up over 7 percent of the Ohio population and 8 percent of Missouri’s free population. In comparison, New York registered somewhat less than 7 percent, Pennsylvania had less than 5 percent, and Wisconsin had the national high of nearly 16 percent.43 Many immigrants found their way into dense and distinctive

settlements in the rural Midwest, especially in the counties extending westward from St.

Louis along the , and north from Cincinnati in western Ohio.44 Yet the

41 Only 1.6 percent of Ohio’s total population of 2,339,511 was enumerated as “colored.” U.S. Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Eight Census, 598, 595. 42 William E. Parrish, A , vol. 3 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973), 7; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Eight Census, 596, 598. 43 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Eighth Census, 620-23. 44 Russel L. Gerlach, “Population Origins in Rural Missouri,” Missouri Historical Review 71 (1975): 1-21; Kamphoefner, Westfalians; Anne Aengenvoort, Migration, Siedlungsbildung, Akkulturation: Die Auswanderung Nordwestdeutscher nach Ohio, 1830-1914 (: F. Steiner, 1999). 17 German-born were more urban than the population as a whole. In 1860, about a third of

German Ohioans lived in the state’s three largest urban centers, and nearly 60 percent of

German Missourians lived in St. Louis.45 In Cincinnati and St. Louis, about a quarter of

the population identified as German, and German immigrants outnumbered the next

largest foreign-born group, the Irish. Ohio and Missouri were not typical states, but they

represented two variations on the significant midwestern German-American experience.

* * * * *

This work charts how German Ohioans and Missourians approached American

citizenship—their own and African Americans’—from 1865 to 1877. It first examines

how German immigrants linked nationalism and liberalism, opening opportunities for

African Americans to claim citizenship following emancipation. Chapter 1 describes

how German visions of American citizenship were influenced by the Revolutions of

1848, migrating, and the Civil War. By 1865, the Republican myth of the freedom-

loving German who championed ethnic diversity and opposed slavery dominated the

German-language public sphere. Chapter 2 focuses on German-born Radical

Republicans in the debate over the Missouri Constitution of 1865. These Radicals

tentatively explored their commonalities with freed people as “new citizens” and

endorsed suffrage for African American men. They argued that free institutions were the

means by which the United Sates incorporated new groups. Although Missouri Radicals

failed to eliminate racial voting qualifications, chapter 3 argues that the Radical principle

of racially inclusive citizenship drowned out the conservative voices within German

Republican ranks. Some German-Republican voters still did not support Ohio and

45 Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 59. 18 Missouri’s referenda on black suffrage, but Democrats failed to attract new German-born

followers to their message that citizenship should be reserved for white men. Chapter 4

shows the limits of German Democrats’ message of racial supremacy.

The year 1870 marked an important turning point. The Franco-Prussian War and

German unification changed the things German Americans emphasized about citizenship.

Ridiculing the French capacity for self-rule and welcoming the new , many immigrants seemed increasingly convinced that some peoples simply were not

suited to citizenship. Chapter 5 describes this shift within the German-language public

sphere and shows that some German Americans even questioned whether a self-

governing citizenry was essential to a great nation. Chapter 6 turns to the impact of

European events on American politics. From 1870 to 1872, German Americans from the

Republican and Democratic parties united to express their new ideas in the Liberal

Republican movement. The Liberal Republicans had a variety of legitimate concerns

about Republican government, but their 1872 campaign subordinated racial justice to the

imperatives of reform and reconciliation between northern and southern whites. The

events of the early 1870s loosened the connection between liberalism and nationalism in

the United States as well as Europe. National unity would come not through equal

citizenship, but at its expense.

My final two chapters examine the conflicts over religion and work that began to eclipse and transform those of race and Reconstruction after 1872. The dilemmas of an industrial age of mass migration divided German immigrants in new ways and strengthened ties between Europe and the United States. As chapter 7 shows, contemporaries recognized that disputes between American Catholics and Protestants

19 over education echoed divisions in Bismarck’s new German Empire. Such cultural

conflicts would only increase with the influx of working-class Catholics from southern

and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century. Among the newcomers were German- born Marxists who participated in the Great Strike of 1877. Chapter 8 addresses this

dramatic labor dispute, which signaled that the United States was not immune to the class

conflict afflicting European cities.

Many prominent German Americans had believed that safeguarding the political rights of male citizens would solve the problems of the American republic. No longer so certain, this significant immigrant group recognized that the contested social rights of citizenship—the right to a living and the right to economic opportunity—would dominate public debate in Europe and North America for the next half century. The primary distinctions among German immigrants now rested on how they conceived of the government’s responsibilities to working-class whites. They left the issue of voting rights behind, even as women campaigned for access to the ballot box and African

American men struggled to preserve it. These new citizens tied the United States to global developments. As they did, German immigrants helped build—and then erode— the connection between national unity and citizenship rights. It was this transformed nationalism of the late nineteenth century that the unveiling of Sigel’s statue evoked in

1906.

20

CHAPTER 1

THE MYTH OF THE FREEDOM-LOVING GERMAN, 1848-1865

“Missouri ist frei!” announced the St. Charles Demokrat after the Missouri

constitutional convention passed an ordinance abolishing slavery on January 11, 1865.

Of course emancipation was a formality by that point. ’s 1862 proclamation had ensured that Union victory would only come, as the Demokrat put it,

“over the grave of slavery.” Yet the president’s policy had not applied to loyal states, so

now Missouri Unionists claimed the distinction of passing their own ordinance several

weeks before Congress proposed the Thirteenth Amendment that would eradicate slavery

in the United States once and for all.1 Although the Civil War was grinding on in the

East, the Demokrat celebrated slavery’s demise. The editor of the German-language

weekly offered his readers free translations of the decree freeing Missouri’s slaves to

send to friends and family back home in Europe.2 He declared that the Germans of St.

Charles County, Missouri could be particularly proud of the part they had played in this achievement: “They were among those who fought in the foremost ranks of the avant-

1 “Über dem Grabe der Sklaverei.” St. Charles Demokrat, 19 January 1865. As the Demokrat was only published weekly, many of its readers might have already learned of the emancipation ordinance. 2 St. Charles Demokrat, 26 January 1865. 21 garde of freedom, and they now contribute to the core of those veterans who make the

Radical Party unassailable.”3

The St. Charles Demokrat maintained that German midwesterners were in a unique position at the end of the Civil War. Even before these immigrants had begun to debate the particulars of African American citizenship, they had identified themselves as

“freedom-loving.” The tag gained currency outside the German-American community during the 1860s because many Americans accepted the notion that German Americans opposed slavery. The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass believed that “a German has only to be a German to be utterly opposed to slavery,” and Confederate soldiers held a special contempt for the “abolition Dutch [sic].”4 Yet it is difficult to take German

Americans’ professed love of freedom too seriously. One Anglo-American delegate at the Missouri convention joked that the constitution’s preamble should express thanks for the state’s freedom not to God, but to the Germans.5 Early twentieth-century writers noted the German contribution to Lincoln’s election,6 but since the 1940s historians have reminded us that immigrant voters did not all fall into line behind the German-American leaders who had been inspired by the European Revolutions of 1848. In Missouri,

3 “Sie gehörten mit zu denen die in den vordersten Reihen der Avantgarde der Freiheit kämpften und sie bilden mit den Kern jener Veteranen, welche die radikale Partei unüberwindlich macht.” St. Charles Demokrat, 19 January 1865. 4 Frederick Douglass, “Adopted Citizens and Slavery,” Douglass’s Monthly, August 1859, quoted in Bruce Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 9. For the widespread tendency among Confederates to identify Germans with abolition, see Everard H. Smith, “Chambersburg: Anatomy of a Confederate Reprisal,” American Historical Review 96 (1991): 444. 5 , 7 April 1865. 6 Early pieces that emphasize German Americans’ antislavery tendencies include William E. Dodd, “The Fight for the Northwest, 1869,” American Historical Review 16 (1911): 774-88. This idea also pervaded the era’s filiopietistic literature. See for example, Albert B. Faust, The German Element in the United States with Special Reference to Its Political, Moral, Social, and Educational Influence (: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1909), 1:522-67; J.G. Rosengarten, The German Soldier in the Wars of the United States: An Address Read before the Pionier-Verein at the Hall of the German Society (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1886); and Wilhelm Kaufmann, Die Deutschen im amerikanischen Bürgerkriege ( and : R. Oldenbourg, 1911). 22 German Americans were overwhelmingly Republican, but in many parts of the Midwest they remained solidly Democratic, reluctant to support Republicans’ war aims.

Examining voting patterns among German Americans more carefully, many historians have argued that religious customs, not political ideals, shaped their political loyalties.

Exponents of the “ethnocultural school” have suggested that the German immigrants who did support the Republican Party identified with the Protestant cultural values it embodied.7 Scholars are justifiably skeptical of German Americans’ claim that they were uniquely committed to the abstract principle of freedom.

Yet the myth of the freedom-loving German would influence how German

Americans approached citizenship during Reconstruction. By 1865, German immigrants had already publicized a powerful vision of American citizenship shaped by their experiences in Europe, the process of migrating to the United States, and their

7 The reappraisal of German-American voting patterns began with Joseph Schafer, “Who Elected Lincoln?” American Historical Review 47 (1941): 27-43. For a summary of the historiographical transition, see the essays in Frederick C. Luebke, ed., Ethnic Voters and the Election of Lincoln (Lincoln: University of Press, 1973). For an important and reliable evaluation of the analysis of German- American voting, see Walter D. Kamphoefner, “German-Americans and Civil War Politics: A Reconsideration of the Ethnocultural Thesis,” Civil War History 37 (1991): 232-45. See also Lesley Ann Kawaguchi, “Diverging Political Affiliations and Ethnic Perspectives: Philadelphia Germans and Antebellum Politics,” Journal of American Ethnic History 13 no. 2 (1994): 3-29; Thomas J. Kelso, “The German-American Vote in the Election of 1860: The Case of with Supporting Data from Ohio” (Ph.D. diss., Ball State University, 1968); James M. Bergquist, “The Political Attitudes of the German Immigrant in Illinois, 1848-1860” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1966). For a critical survey of the “ethnocultural” school, see Richard L. McCormick, “Ethno-Cultural Interpretations of Nineteenth-Century Voting Behavior,” Political Science Quarterly 89 (1974): 351-77. For a defense that argues that the works McCormick labeled “ethnocultural” were more diverse and nuanced than he suggested, see Ronald P. Formisano, “The Invention of the Ethnocultural Interpretation,” Journal of American History 99 (1994): 453-77. Significant “ethnocultural” works included Paul Kleppner, “Lincoln and the Immigrant Vote: A Case of Religious Polarization,” Mid-America 48 (1966): 176-95; Kleppner, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850-1900 (New York: The Free Press, 1970); and Richard Jensen, “The Religious and Occupational Roots of Party Affiliation: Indiana and Illinois in the 1870s,” Civil War History 16 (1970): 325-43; Frederick C. Luebke, Immigrants and Politics: The Germans of Nebraska, 1880-1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969); Ronald P. Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties in , 1827-1861 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); Joel H. Silbey, The Transformation of American Politics, 1840-1860 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967). 23 involvement in sectional politics. As historian Bruce Levine has shown, the Revolutions

of 1848 resonated beyond the intellectual elite.8 The campaign for a united German

nation radicalized many working-class immigrants, and it would have an even broader

legacy. The revolutions helped define what it meant to be German-American at mid-

century. The Forty-Eighters—as the refugees of the revolutions were known—would

develop a distinctive approach to American citizenship as they participated in the creation

of the Republican Party. German Republicans would carefully distinguish themselves

from the native-born Republicans who emphasized Anglo-Saxon and Protestant values

and the foreign-born Democrats who maintained that the United States was a white man’s

country. For German immigrants in the Republican Party, the American nation had to set

itself against slavery and ethnic intolerance. After four years of bitter warfare, this vision

of citizenship would dominate the German-American public sphere.

* * * * *

Forty-Eighter Jacob Müller later recalled how much the Revolutions of 1848 had

influenced German-American politics during the 1850s. The Cleveland politician

described himself as one of the “the wild young men of the fifties,” immigrants who believed that the struggle “against every form of bondage” was a central part of Germans’

“cultural mission” in the United States.9 Müller had served as a commissioner under the

short-lived government in the Bavarian and would later become

8 Levine, The Spirit of 1848. 9 Jacob Mueller, Memories of a Forty-Eighter: Sketches from the German-American Period of Storm and Stress in the 1850s, trans. Steven Rowan (Cleveland: Western Reserve Historical Society, 1996), 102, xv, 114. 24 the Republican governor of Ohio.10 He represented the well-educated exiles who became German Americans’ most articulate and influential leaders.11 Men such as

Müller may not have typified the immigrants arriving in the United State in the 1850s, but their ideas appealed to a large constituency of German Americans. Hundreds of thousands of German peasants, cottage artisans, and craftworkers crossed the Atlantic when the wave of political activity at the close of the 1840s failed to address the tenuous economic situation in Europe. The German-born population in the United States more than doubled from 583,774 in 1850 to 1,276,075 at the end of the decade.12 These newcomers were not all as politically engaged as Müller, but they overwhelmingly supported the cause he had fought for: a united German nation governed by the people’s elected representatives.

The overthrow of French King Louis Philippe in March 1848 triggered a crisis in the German states that had been several decades in the making. Population growth and competition from industrial production in Britain had been straining the region’s largely

10 Müller served under the constitution of the Parliament which German monarchs never recognized. The residents of the Palatinate region recognized its authority briefly during 1848 and 1849 until the Bavarian royal family, which ruled the territory in 1815, reasserted its control. 11 On the German Forty-Eighters, see Wolfgang Hochbruck, Ulrich Bachteler, and Henning Zimmermann, eds., Achtundvierziger - Forty-Eighters: Die deutschen Revolutionen von 1848/49, die Vereinigten Staaten und der Amerikanische Bürgerkrieg (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2000); Carl Wittke, “The German Forty-Eighters: A Centennial Appraisal,” American Historical Review 53 (1948): 711-725; Wittke, Refugees of Revolution; Charlotte L. Brancaforte, ed., The German Forty-Eighters in the United States (New York: Peter Lang, 1989); A. E. Zucker, ed., The Forty-Eighters: Political Refugees of the German Revolution of 1848 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950); Levine, The Spirit of 1848. There are also a number of relevant biographies. See for example Hans L. Trefousse, : A Biography, 2d ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998); Sabine Freitag, : Biographie eines Republikaners (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1998); Stephen D. Engle, The Yankee Dutchman: The Life of Franz Sigel (Fayetteville: University of Press, 1993). 12 Kathleen Neils Conzen, “Germans,” in The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom, Ann Orlov, and (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), 406. 25 agrarian economy since the early nineteenth century.13 European authorities had loosened feudal obligations, but the landed aristocracy, established churches, and state bureaucracies had relinquished little of their traditional power by the 1840s. The elimination of serfdom actually increased the ranks of landless laborers and forced marginal peasants to supplement their livelihoods by producing goods such as textiles at home. In many German states, the dismantling of craft guilds made it easier for artisans to run their own shops, but masters were increasing vulnerable to taxes and competition from the large-scale operations that were slowly emerging on the continent. In the late

1840s, harvest failures compounded these problems. Finally, in the spring of 1848,

German cities, towns, and villages erupted in protest. Most Germans did not endorse the class antagonism of . They simply believed that if they were granted civil and political rights they could frame laws that ensured no one went hungry. In , the

Prussian city where Marx was publishing his Neue , a group of socialists demanded that the city council permit freedom of speech and association, implement universal manhood suffrage, and establish a popular legislature. One of men leading the workers’ delegation was , a former military officer who would

13 My description of the German economic crisis draws on Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 19-41; James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770-1866 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 451-524. On the effect of industrialization on migration, see Timothy Anderson, “Proto-Industrialization, Sharecropping, and Outmigration in Nineteenth-Century Rural ,” Journal of Peasant Studies 29 (2001): 1-30; Kamphoefner, The Westfalians, 12-39. For details of the revolutions, see Veit Valentin, 1848: Chapters of German History, trans. Ethel Talbot Scheffauer (London: Allen and Unwin, 1940; reprint, Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1965); R.J.W. Evans and Hartmut Pooge von Strandmann, eds., The Revolutions in Europe, 1848-1849: From Reform to Reaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848-1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 26 campaign against slavery in the United States.14 Willich would always maintain that civil and political rights were inseparable from economic justice.

Germans also tied their demands for citizenship rights to their hopes for a German nation. Many ordinary Europeans still felt their primary allegiance lay with their town, duchy, or kingdom, but had been on the rise since the late eighteenth century. The cultural nationalism of intellectuals and artists such as had inspired politicians who hoped for a German nation-state.15 During the French occupation of the Napoleonic Wars, German nationalists had formed organizations such as the Turnverein. The were young men—mostly skilled artisans—who

dedicated themselves to physical training and German patriotism. Their calls for national

unity and democratic reform did not end with ’s defeat and the Treaty of

in 1815.16 By the 1840s, Turners and other German liberals had come to assume that reform would not come without national consolidation. Although they resented the excesses of the large German states such as and , they still believed that only a powerful nation-state could overcome the traditional aristocratic and ecclesiastical privileges that fragmented Europe. The liberalism of 1848 thus encompassed Germans’ hunger for citizenship rights, cultural nationalism, and political nationalism. Students found this combination particularly appealing. Recalling his days at the University of

Bonn, Carl Schurz reflected, “We young people [believed] that the disintegrated

14 Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 41. On Willich, see Loyd Easton, Hegel’s First American Followers: The Ohio Hegelians: John B. Stallo, Peter Kaufmann, Moncure Conway, and August Willich (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966). 15 For synthesis that impressively blends the story of German cultural nationalism into a politically and economically grounded synthesis, see Sheehan, German History. 16 On the Turners, see August J. Prahl, “The Turner,” in The Forty-Eighters, ed. Zucker, 79-110; Ralf Wagner, “Turner Societies and the Socialist ,” in German Workers’ Culture in the United States 1850-1920, ed. Hartmut Keil (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 221-40; Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 91-95; Wittke, Refugees of Revolution. 27 Fatherland must be moulded [sic] into a united empire with free political institutions.

The fermenting, restless spirit permeating the minds of the educated classes, and finding

expression in the literature of the day, aroused in us boys the warmest enthusiasm.”17

Another future German-American Republican, Friedrich Hassaurek, was similarly

motivated. At only sixteen he joined the student legions in Vienna, sustaining two minor

injuries in street fighting against the Austrian authorities.18

The Revolutions of 1848 had an unmistakably nationalist spirit, but participants struggled to define who exactly belonged within the German national community. The

German word Volk can be rendered in English as “race,” “nation,” or “people.” During

1848, reformers and revolutionaries strove to balance the somewhat contradictory connotations of the word Volk. Their central dilemma was how to reconcile their ideas of

a “culture-nation” with their commitment to a “state-nation.” After 1871, German law

would define membership in the German national community largely by blood, but in the

mid-nineteenth-century debates, biological descent vied with other criteria such as

customs, language, and residence within the proposed German state.19 Brian E. Vick persuasively argues that participants in the Revolutions of 1848 could harmonize their ideas because they saw the nation as an “organic unity” that constantly evolved to incorporate different groups and realize cultural . They believed free institutions facilitated national cohesion, which in turn refined the political expression of the nation.20

17 Carl Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1909), 1:73. 18 Wittke, “Friedrich Hassaurek: Cincinnati’s Leading Forty-Eighter,” Ohio Historical Quarterly 68 (1959): 2-3. 19 Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Eli Nathans, The Politics of Citizenship in Germany: Ethnicity, Utility and Nationalism (Oxford: Berg, 2004). 20 Brian E. Vick, Defining Germany: The 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 15, 28. 28 The conflict over the status of Jewish Germans illustrates Vick’s argument. The

delegates who gathered at the pan-German parliament in Frankfurt am Main in May 1848

expressed a range of anti-Semitic . They were prepared, however, to include

Jews in the German Volk, granting them civil and political rights. Even those revolutionaries who were strongly prejudiced against , such as future Illinoisan

Friedrich Hecker, believed that the minority group could become part of the evolving nation.21 Vick explains, “As a result of the mixing of cultural and political ideas of nationality in mid-nineteenth-century German thought, liberal nationalists did not have to insist on either total exclusion or total absorption of a culturally distinct population in to achieve a comfortable and workable degree of national and political unity.”22

In addition to deciding who should be a German citizen, the began to consider what rights that citizenship conferred. The parliamentarians were inspired as much by foreign models as German precedents. Historically, a German

Bürger was a member of the small group of artisans and merchants who resided within the self-governing towns of the . These politically active men formed a privileged estate within Europe’s traditional order.23 The rise of absolute in the eighteenth century had supplemented this traditional usage of the term

Bürger with another. By the early 1800s, the constitutions of Prussia and used the term Staatsbürger synonymously with “subject” to refer to an inhabitant who received protection from the sovereign in return for taxes, loyalty, and military service.

21 Vick, Defining Germany, 97. 22 Ibid., 97, 85. 23 Manfried Reidel, “Bürger, Staatsbürger, Bürgertum,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1972), 1:676-78; Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648-1871 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971); Sheehan, German History, 24-40. 29 Such minimalist citizenship did not necessarily include a clearly defined set of civil rights or the responsibility to participate actively in government through the franchise.24

The revolutionaries of 1848 challenged both the declining estate-based order and the rising monarchical states. The Forty-Eighters associated citizenship with political participation. The work of inspired men such as Friedrich Hecker. The political theorist, whom Hecker met in in the 1830s, advocated replacing

Baden’s parliamentary system based on traditional estates with a republican government composed of politically active citizens. His view of citizenship drew in part on classical and ideas that propertied men had the virtue and independence to represent the “community spirit.”25 Rotteck reflected the classical republican emphasis on citizens’ responsibility to the polity, but he also captured the more individualistic ideas circulating internationally during the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions.26 He maintained that government existed to protect individuals’ rights. Like many of their contemporaries, Rotteck and Hecker admired the ideas of the and the republican government the United States had implemented. The Forty-Eighters were

24 At mid-century, the power of parliaments varied among the German states, as did the extent to which the parliaments represented the traditional estates. James J. Sheehan, “The German States and the European Revolution,” in Revolution and the Meanings of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Isser Woloch (Stanford, : Stanford University Press, 1996), 259-60. For the transition in citizenship ideas, see Reidel, “Bürger, Staatsbürger, Bürgertum,” 683-87, 702-06; Sheehan, German History, 55-71; Nathans, The Politics of Citizenship in Germany, 37-53. 25 Sabine Freitag, “A Republikaner becomes a Republican: Friedrich Hecker and the Emergence of the Republican Party,” Yearbook of German-American Studies 33 (1998): 5-17; Freitag, Friedrich Hecker, 63- 95; Paul Nolte, “Bürgerideal, Gemeinde und Republik: ‘Klassischer Republikanismus’ in frühen deutschen Liberalismus,” Historische Zeitschrift 254 (1992): 609-56. 26 Otto Dann specifically rejects the idea that classical republicanism was an important strand in German anti-monarchical thought in the nineteenth century and describes how the Enlightenment tradition mediated through philosopher Immanuel Kant. Otto Dann, “Kant’s Republicanism and Its Echoes,” in Republicanism and Liberalism in American and the German States, 1750-1850, ed. Jürgen Heideking and James A. Henretta (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2002), 53-72. 30 especially sympathetic to the work of .27 Schurz recalled learning as a child that the United States was “that young republic where the people were free, without kings, without counts.”28 Only a minority of the Frankfurt parliamentarians would go as far as Sigel, Willich, Hecker, and Schurz who both believed there was no place for a monarch in a state governed by its citizens.

The Frankfurt Parliament divided over whether citizenship automatically conveyed the right to vote. The hastily assembled deliberative body had been elected by all “mature independent citizens” of the German states. Different states administered polling differently, but the qualifier “independent” indicated that women, and perhaps even men who did not own property, held a non-voting citizenship status.29 Many

conservative delegates were content to reform without extending suffrage at

all. Middle-class moderates considered stronger representative institutions essential, but

they were reluctant to include poorer German men in political decision making. They

reached conclusions that resembled those of eighteenth-century French revolutionaries

and some of their counterparts across the Atlantic, distinguishing between “active”

citizens whose property ownership provided the independence required to participate in

27 Freitag, Friedrich Hecker, 52; Horst Dippel, Germany and the American Revolution, 1770-1800: A Sociohistorical Investigation of Late Eighteenth-Century Political Thinking, trans. Bernhard A. Uhlendorf (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); Dipple, Die amerikanische Verfassung in Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert: Das Dilemma von Politik und Staatsrecht (Goldbach: Keip Verlag, 1994); Hans Erich Bödecker, “The Concept of the Republic in Eighteenth-Century German Thought,” in Republicanism and Liberalism in American and the German States, ed. Heideking and Henretta, 35-52; Sheehan, “The German States and the European Revolution,” 247-79; Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 24; Günter Moltmann, Atlantische Blockpolitik im 19. Jahrhundert: Die Vereinigten Staaten und der deutsche Liberalismus während der Revolution von 1848/49 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1973); Carl J. Friedrich, “The European Background,” in The Forty-Eighters, ed. A. E. Zucker, 16-20. 28 Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, 1:29. 29 Sheehan, “The German States and the European Revolutions,” 270; Reidel, “Bürger, Staatsbürger, Bürgertum,” 1:711-12; Jörg-Detlef Kühne, “Civil Rights and German Constitutional Thought, 1848-1871,” in German and American Constitutional Thought, ed. Hermann Wellenreuther (Oxford: Berg, 1990), 199- 232. 31 decision making and “passive” citizens who could not expect political rights.30 In 1848,

German working-class radicals rejected this notion—at least for men—and persuaded some of their bourgeois supporters to abandon it too.31 Proponents of universal manhood

suffrage were overrepresented among those Germans who found their way to the United

States.32

The divided national parliament finally reached a controversial compromise. It

offered the crown of a united Germany, excluding Austria, to Prussian King Frederick

Wilhelm IV. The parliament’s constitution proposed equal citizenship for men living

with the borders of a German state regardless of religion or ancestry, but it did not settle

the debate over property requirements. The article on “fundamental rights” referred

simply to the right “of the German people” to “a popular representative body.”33 The

issue was moot in any case. Frederick Wilhelm rejected the offer, turning his troops on protesters in Berlin. After May 1849, only a few radicals resisted the inevitable

reassertion of monarchal power. Committed revolutionaries—including Schurz, Hecker,

and Sigel—organized poorly-armed militias that held out against the authorities in

southwestern states. With Prussia’s aid, it did not take long for Baden and Bavaria’s

authorities to suppress the last of the insurgents. Facing prosecution or simply

30 Sheehan, “The German States and the European Revolution,” 260-61; Bödecker, “The Concept of the Republic in Eighteenth-Century German Thought,” 36; Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789-1820s (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994). 31 Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 35-50. 32 Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 22. No American Forty-Eighter accepted Georg Wilhelm Hegel’s contention that freedom was best expressed through the laws of an absolutist state. For an interpretation of Hegel’s political ideas that emphasizes their totalitarian propensity, see Leonard Kreiger, The German Idea of Freedom (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 86-138. Compare Sheehan, German History, 433. Even the German Americans who were interested in Hegel did not accept absolutism. Easton, Hegel’s First American Followers; James A. Good, “A World-Historical Idea: The St. Louis Hegelians and the Civil War,” Journal of American Studies 34 (2000): 447-64. 33 For a translation and discussion, see Jörg-Detlef Kühne, “Civil Rights and German Constitutional Thought, 1848-1871,” 199-232. 32 disillusioned, many of them left Germany for good. Carl Schurz’s experience became

emblematic of their . He escaped through the sewer of a besieged fortress, making his way from Baden to France, , London, and finally to the United States.

Of course reports of the turmoil had crossed the Atlantic ahead of Schurz. Even

before the end of March 1848, Americans, especially earlier German immigrants, were

excited to learn of the republican stirrings in Europe.34 German-American constitutional scholar Franz Lieber reportedly wept when he informed his students at the University of

South Carolina of the news.35 Across the Mississippi from St. Louis in Belleville,

Illinois, Gustav Körner hoped that the revolutions would transform the land of his birth.

Having fled Europe after participating in a student uprising in 1833, Körner now led the

older generation of immigrants within the .36 “Only through liberty comes union such as Germany needs,” he declared.37 Editorials in German-American newspapers and mass meetings in cities throughout the United States indicated that most

German immigrants wholeheartedly agreed.38 When Hecker toured the United States in

1848 and 1849, he routinely drew crowds of thousands. Although he was frustrated that

he failed to raise much money or convince the American government to support the

34 Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 29. 35 Ibid., 31. 36 Marlin T. Tucker, “Political Leadership in the Illinois-Missouri German Community, 1836-1872” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1968), 9-25. 37 , Memoirs of Gustav Koerner, 1809-1896, 2 vols. (Cedar Rapids, : The Torch Press, 1909), 1: 535. 38 Ibid., 528-41; John G. Gazley, American Opinion of German Unification, 1848-1871 (New York: Columbia University, 1926; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1970), 454-58; Walter D. Kamphoefner, “‘Auch unser Deutschland muss einmal frei werden’: The Immigrant Civil War Experience as a Mirror on Political Conditions in Germany,” in Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and America since 1776, ed. David E. Barclay and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 1997), 87-107. 33 European independence movements, he found German Americans’ enthusiasm

gratifying. He eventually settled down in Körner’s home town.39

German Americans generally welcomed the Forty-Eighters, but the new arrivals

created some friction.40 An incident in Cincinnati in 1849 reveals how the ambitious

refugees challenged the established German-American leadership. The teenaged

Friedrich Hassaurek, who would become the city’s most famous Forty-Eighter,

confronted the judge and scholar Johann Bernard Stallo. Stallo had immigrated to Ohio

from the Duchy of as a child and was comfortable in Cincinnati’s English-

speaking circles, but he remained involved in the German-American community. In

1849, Hassaurek attacked the venerable judge’s position on slavery, the issue that was to

dominate German-American politics during the decade to come. The older man had

always disliked human bondage and had just recommended to a gathering of Kentucky

Democrats south of the in Covington that their state pursue gradual

emancipation based on Pennsylvania’s model.41 Hassaurek ridiculed Stallo’s piecemeal approach. In a series of satirical letters to the German-language Republikaner newspaper,

he posed as the Russian emperor. Hassaurek’s letters complemented “Stallikowski’s”

supposed support of an institution that “brought joy to his princely heart” and expressed pleasure that there were still places where one was “allowed to breed slaves and have

them whipped.”42 Stallo’s rejoinders showed he was hurt by the public attack. The

39 Freitag, Friedrich Hecker, 145-52. 40 Koerner, Memoirs of Gustav Koerner, 546-52. Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 58-74; Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 83-110. 41 Cincinnati Deutscher Republikaner, 16 August 1849. Clipping in box 2, folder, 1, Friedrich Hassaurek Papers, Ohio Historical Society (hereafter OHS), Columbus, Ohio. 42 “Eine Freude mein fürstliches Herz betroffen … wo man Sklaven erziehen und peitschen lassen darf.” Cincinnati Deutscher Republikaner [August 1849]. Clipping in box 2, folder 1, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. 34 relationship between the two German Cincinnatians would never heal, but it is significant

that they shared an aversion to slavery.

Forty-Eighters saw to it that antislavery took hold among German leaders in Ohio and Missouri. They could build on practical and principled opposition to slavery. Since the 1830s, migrants displaced from Germany’s northwestern regions had moved to the

Midwest, hoping to purchase their own farms and recreate their close-knit communities.43

Large-scale agriculture and slave labor conflicted with this vision. In St. Charles County, wedged at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, German settlers were much less likely to own slaves than Anglo-Americans, even when they could afford to.44

Arnold Krekel, who would preside over the convention that sealed Missouri emancipation in 1865, was among the exceptions. A who had emigrated from

Westphalia as a teenager in 1832, Krekel owned one slave in 1850. Yet when he founded the St. Charles Demokrat in 1852, he was on his way to becoming a free-soil Democrat

who opposed the extension of slavery.45 Friedrich Münch from neighboring Warren

County took a similar stance. The older man had earned the affectionate moniker “Papa

Münch” through his activities as a politician, journalist, philosopher, poet, and vintner.46

43 Kamphoefner, The Westfalians; Aengenvoort, Migration, Siedlungsbildung, Akkulturation. 44 Kamphoefner, The Westfalians, 116-17. For similar patterns in another slave-holding state with a large German-born population, see Kamphoefner, “New Perspectives on Texas Germans and the Confederacy,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 102 (1999): 440-55; Sean M. Kelley, “Plantation Frontiers: Race, Ethnicity, and Family along the Brazos River of Texas, 1821-1886” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2000). 45 Arndt and Olsen, German-American Newspapers and Periodicals, 246. St. Charles Demokrat, 3 November 1855, quoted in Anita M. Mallinckrodt, From Knights to Pioneers: One German Family in Westphalia and Missouri (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1994), 285-86. For biographical information, see History of St. Charles, Montgomery and Warren Counties, Missouri (St. Louis: National Historical Company, 1885; reprint, St. Louis: Paul V. Cochrane 1969), 199-200; Kamphoefner, The Westfalians, 117. 46 Tucker, “Political Leadership,” 40-44; William G. Bek, “The Followers of Duden: Friedrich Muench,” Missouri Historical Review 18 (1924): 413-34; Friedrich Muench, Gesammelte Schriften von Friedrich Münch, ed. Hugo Muench (St. Louis: C. Witter, 1902), 121-22. 35 Krekel and Münch’s constituents along the Missouri River believed slavery replicated the

system of aristocratic privilege they had hoped to leave behind in Europe.

During the 1850s, antislavery propelled the most prominent German Ohioans and

Missourians into the Republican Party where they would refine their ideas of citizenship.

The new party emerged out of the controversy over whether western land would be

opened to slavery. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 overturned the 1820 Missouri

Compromise, which had restricted the spread of the institution to the territory that lay

south of the parallel that extended west from Missouri’s southern border. The act permitted settlers in Kansas to vote on whether to institute slavery when they applied for

statehood. The Republicans opposed this concession as they opposed any extension of

slavery beyond the states where it was already established. Their free labor ideology held

that the strength of American government lay in the political participation of

economically independent men. German settlers in the West had every to agree

that western land must be reserved for farmers and craftsmen and their families, not

masters and their slaves.47 The Republican message resonated with immigrants who had suffered under the traditional regimes of Europe and now sought to realize their dreams of farms or workshops of their own. Münch began to campaign nationally for the

Republicans in 1856.48 Krekel opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, and by 1860

he was running as the Republican candidate for Missouri attorney general. Körner helped

establish the Republican Party in Illinois, befriending Abraham Lincoln. In Ohio, Stallo,

47 Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970; reprint, 1995), 249. 48 Tucker, “Political Leadership,” 40-44. 36 Hassaurek, and Müller were all Republicans by 1856, and Schurz, then living in

Wisconsin, also joined the new movement.49

German newspapers in Ohio and Missouri indicated how many German-

American leaders were attracted to antislavery and the Republican Party. The number of

German-language periodicals in the United States doubled in the four years following

1848.50 Newspapers such as Cleveland’s Wächter am Erie and the Toledo Express

strongly opposed the extension of slavery from their inception, and established sheets

such as Cincinnati’s Volksblatt and Deutscher Republikaner took up the antislavery banner in the early 1850s. By the presidential election of 1856, so many German-

language newspapers supported the Republicans that the remaining Democratic

newspapers in Ohio felt embattled. A respected scholar of the German-American press

has observed that the editors of the Columbus Westbote and the Cincinnati Volksfreund believed they were fighting a “lone battle.”51 In Missouri, there was no significant newspaper supporting slavery by 1860. The St. Charles Demokrat had already taken an antislavery position. The St. Louis Anzeiger des Westens was also a free-soil newspaper, and its condemnations of slavery became even more strident under the editorship of

Henry Börnstein.52 Börnstein was a -born Forty-Eighter, but he had had spent the revolutionary years among German expatriates in Paris. In 1857, disgruntled

49 Timothy C. Day to Hassaurek, Washington D.C., 24 June 1856, box 2, folder 3, Hassaurek Papers, OHS; Mueller, Memories of a Forty-Eighter, 151; Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 59-60. 50 Wittke, The German-Language Press in America, 76; Arndt and Olsen, German-American Newspapers, 446, 454-55. A. E. Zucker found more American Forty-Eighters went into journalism than any other profession. Zucker, Forty Eighters, 270. 51 Wittke, The German-language Press, 140. 52 For the Anzeiger’s early opposition to the extension of slavery, see Tucker, “Political Leadership,” 115. 37 members of the Anzeiger staff left to found an antislavery paper that would become much

more influential, the Westliche Post.53

Although German Republicans often found it difficult to work together, they managed to purvey an antislavery politics that reinforced their shared ethnic identity.

The Westliche Post mapped out this agenda in its inaugural issue in 1857. The editors announced that they would endeavor to meet the “demands of the German public” for

European, national, and local news, while they promoted the two great causes of freedom: immigrant rights and antislavery. Championing the interests of the “adoptive population” and encouraging the “political and social influence of the German element,” they suggested, was inseparable from transforming Missouri “into a flourishing free state.” The Westliche Post reasoned that protecting immigrants would attract more free settlers who would discourage slavery.54 The Post’s competitor across town, the

Anzeiger, concluded in 1860 that Germans had a distinctive “mission” in the “present crisis,” because they were “filled with more intensive concepts of freedom, with more expansive notions of humanity than most peoples of the earth.” The editors maintained that “the German is an opponent of slavery, and the German is always unfailingly there when free labor is being defended through law and Constitution against the pressure and

53 Steven Rowan, “ Newspapers in St. Louis, 1835-1974,” in The German-American Experience in Missouri: Essays in Commemoration for the Tricentennial of German Immigration to America, 1683-1983, ed. Howard W. Marshall and James W. Goodrich (Columbia: Missouri Cultural Heritage Center, University of Missouri—Columbia, 1986), 45-60. 54 Westliche Post, 27 September 1857, trans. in Steven Rowan, Germans for a Free Missouri: Translations from the St. Louis Radical Press, 1857-1862 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 50-51. For similar arguments about the connection between protecting immigrants and restricting slavery, see St. Charles Demokrat, 10 April 1862, trans. in Anita M. Mallinckrodt, What They Thought, vol. 2, Missouri’s German Immigrants Assess Their World (Augusta, Missouri: Mallinckrodt Communications and Research, 1995), 4-6. 38 dominance of slavery and the despotic principles of government it brings with it.”55

Although this statement of German-American opposition to slavery was exaggerated, it captured the powerful combination of ethnic identity and antislavery that infused many

German Americans’ ideas of citizenship.

German Republicans believed the fight against slavery embodied the same conceptions of nation and citizenship as the Revolutions of 1848. Anglo-American

Republicans also believed their cause was merely one expression of global progress, but immigrants had firsthand experience.56 Speaking to a crowd in Boston’s Faneuil Hall in

1859, Carl Schurz recalled the efforts of the German nationalists. “I saw my nation,” he

related, “shake her chains in order to burst them, and I heard a gigantic, universal shout

for Liberty rising up to the skies.” Yet Schurz had witnessed that nation “crushed down

again … by the dead weight of customs and institutions and notions and prejudices which past centuries had heaped upon them.” He told his Massachusetts audience that he had

“instinctively” turned to the United States to pursue his ideals, only to be disappointed by the institutions of the southern states, which had been “settled under the auspices of lordly merchants and proprietaries.”57 German Republicans frequently likened

slaveholders to European aristocrats. The Anzeiger described the party’s ideology as

“true democracy that opposes the oligarchy of the South.” The paper went on,

“Humanity is battling barbarism; small property in land and rational agriculture is in conflict with aristocratic exploitation, and those who want the territories given to the free

55 Anzeiger des Westens, 17 December 1860, trans. in Rowan, Germans for a Free Missouri, 147. 56 Bender, A Nation among Nations, 123-24. 57 Schurz, “True ,” speech delivered in Boston, 18 April 1859, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, ed. Frederic Bancroft, 6 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), 1:50, 53. 39 white man and not to the slaveowning baron of the South.”58 The immigrants’ European

experiences only made Republicans’ free labor critique of the South more convincing to

them. At the same time, the transatlantic parallels they identified made it easier for

German Americans to claim a special insight into the American scourge of slavery.

Immigrants did not merely transplant German ideas of citizenship. They formed new

ones inspired by their transatlantic perspective and their status as newcomers in the

United States.

Although they were willing to compare the United States and Germany, German-

American Republicans did not necessarily identify with slaves. They were divided in

their attitudes toward African Americans. Some evidence indicates that German

immigrants were less hostile to African Americans than as a group. In a

new volume of German-language letters, only two of the twenty-three Republican

correspondents expressed explicit antipathy toward African Americans.59 A few

German-speaking Republicans expressed racial hatred in private, faulting slavery precisely because they harbored deep prejudice toward African Americans. One German

urged Friedrich Hassaurek to encourage the party to take a course that would ensure that

“Detestable Slaveholding Aristocrats, Contemptible Would be Aristocrats, and Cowardly

58 Anzeiger des Westens, 16 August 1860, trans. in Rowan, Germans for a Free Missouri, 124. For further examples, see Kamphoefner, “Auch unser Deutschland muss einmal frei werden,” 87-107. 59 Many Republicans expressed prejudice, and vicious anti-black sentiment was common among writers who declared loyalty to . Wolfgang Helbich and Walter D. Kamphoefner, eds., Deutsche im amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg: Briefe von Front und Farm, 1861-1865 (: Ferdinand Schoningh, 2002). For an able translation of the latter, see Wolfgang Helbich and Walter D. Kamphoefner, eds., Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home, trans. Susan Carter Vogel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). See also Martin Öfele, German-speaking Officers in the United States Colored Troops, 1863-1867 (Gainesville: University of Press, 2004). Compare to the analysis of wartime attitudes toward slavery in English-language letters in James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 117- 30. On the spectrum of racial attitudes within the Republican Party, see Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 261-300. 40 ” would leave the United States for Cuba, thus ridding the country of “3 nuisances at once.”60 During the Civil War, many German-born soldiers who welcomed

the end of slavery were still intent on maintaining social distance between whites and blacks. There were German Republicans who hoped to exile African Americans from the continent.61

On the other hand, many rank and file Republican immigrants emphasized the common humanity they shared with black Americans. Karl and Alwine Frick, a couple living to the west of St. Louis in Franklin County, tried to explain the war and slavery to relatives back in Germany. The traitorous slaveholders, Karl wrote in February 1863,

“don’t want to set their slaves free and just want to exploit other humans, that is blacks, because they don’t regard them as human beings.” The slaves, he explained, were

“driven by white men with whips in their hands and often terribly mistreated and also poorly fed and so there are black families with 4 to 5 children where the mother and father are torn apart and sold thousands of miles away.”62 According to a man who grew

up enslaved in Missouri, German immigrants sometimes expressed their concerns

directly to their African American neighbors. In his memoirs, H.C. Bruce commented

that the German population around Brunswick in central Missouri had earned the

suspicion with which local slaveholders regarded them: “They were opposed to slavery

60 Louis Krouskopf to Hassaurek, Pisgah, Ohio, March 1860, box 2, folder 6, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. 61 For an example of racist expressions of the need for social distance, see Henry A. Kircher to His Father, Young’s Point, [Louisiana], 19 April 1863, in A German in the Yankee Fatherland: The Civil War Letters of Henry A. Kircher, ed. Earl J. Hess (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1983), 92. For statements in support of the colonization of African Americans, see Carl Uterhard to His Mother, Nashville, 20 January 1864, in Deutsche im amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg, ed. Helbich and Kamphoefner, 230. 62 Postmaster and general store owner Karl Frick identified himself among the 24 percent of the county’s voters who had supported Lincoln in 1860, and he served in the local union militia. Nearly 9 percent of the Franklin County population was enslaved in 1860. Helbich and Kamphoefner, eds., Germans in the Civil War, 347-48, 353-55. 41 and when they had an opportunity to tell a slave so, without his master’s knowledge, they

often did it.” Bruce indicated that the relationship between an antislavery German

American and an enslaved African American could be quite close, saying, “Slaves never betrayed a friend; they would stand severe punishment rather than give away a white

friend who favored freedom for all.”63 German Missourians earned a reputation as

friends to African Americans.

Finding themselves among the Radicals in Missouri’s coalition of Unionists

German-American politicians would challenge the racism of other Republicans. The St.

Louis Anzeiger criticized an Anglo-Missourian in 1859 because he debated the slavery question “not, like we Germans, above all from the humanitarian point of view, but from the idea of utility.” Dismissing the logic that Missouri was for the “white man” and blacks should be excluded from the state, the Republican newspaper went on, “Only understanding reflection and reasoning suffice to kill the old prejudices and that frightening pride which is based on the feeling of sovereign authority of a white man over his black fellowmen.”64 Friedrich Münch, writing in the St. Charles Demokrat in 1862, rejected a proposal to send America’s black population “back” to . Münch believed African Americans had a right to live and die in the country of their birth.

Although he described African Americans as a “lower race,” he rejected the idea of biological inferiority. He attributed whites’ higher status to education. He would

63 H.C. Bruce, The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years A Slave, Twenty-Nine Years A Free Man (York, Penn.: P. Anstadt & Sons, 1895; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 90-91. 64 Anzeiger des Westens, 17 April 1859, quoted and trans. in Walter D. Kamphoefner, “St. Louis Germans and the Republican Party, 1848-1860,” Mid-America: An Historical Review 57, no. 2 (1975): 82. 42 become a prominent advocate of African American education after the war.65 Before

1865, however, even Münch did not support black suffrage.

The distinctiveness of German Republicanism came not from a specific attitude

toward African Americans, but from the particular way they blended their antislavery beliefs with the idea of ethnic diversity. This would inform their approach to citizenship

during Reconstruction and distinguish them from many native-born Republicans and

foreign-born Democrats. The Republican Party was largely, as historian Eric Foner puts

it, “an expression of the hopes and fears of northern native-born Protestants.”66 The

center of Republican support was always the Northeast, where native-born abolitionists

regarded slavery as a sin. Inspired by their Protestant and faith, the same

northerners who hoped to end slavery were also suspicious of the customs of the German

and Irish immigrants pouring into the country during the 1850s. Anti-immigrant and

anti-Catholic sentiment fueled the party realignments in the middle of the decade. As the

dispute over Kansas unfolded in 1854 and 1855, the nativist American or

Party achieved brief political prominence—and lasting notoriety among German

Americans—when it won a host of congressional and state races. Northern Know

Nothings committed themselves to antislavery and nativist policies such as restricting

immigrant men’s voting rights. In some places, the Republican Party was closely linked

to Know Nothing leaders and ideas. In Ohio, for example, Republican Salmon P. Chase

65 St. Charles Demokrat, 5 June 1862, trans. in Mallinckrodt, What they Thought, 2:19. 66 Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 227. For an evocative depiction of the reform tradition that fed the Republican Party ethos, see Scott Gac, Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reform (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 43 became governor in 1855 at the head of a slate that included Know Nothing candidates, although he rejected all nativist proposals.67

German immigrants in the Midwest played a decisive role in ensuring that the

Republican Party would focus on the issue of slavery, not immigration. Friedrich

Hassaurek helped convince Chase that German votes could compensate for any loss of nativist support.68 At the national Republican convention in 1856, Körner and Schurz demanded that the platform exclude any restrictions on foreign-born citizens as a condition of German support.69 In 1860, the two men were joined at the Chicago convention by Münch and Krekel from Missouri and Müller and Hassaurek from Ohio.

Their anti-nativist “Dutch Plank” made it into the party’s platform. The Germans were also prepared to support the compromise presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln,

Körner’s trusted associate who understood the importance of the German vote.70

German immigrants could work with Anglo-Americans in the Republican Party, but they retained their own approach to American citizenship. They were adamant that they could be loyal to their adopted homeland without assimilating to Anglo-Saxon

67 Stephen E. Maizlish, The Triumph of Sectionalism: The Transformation of Ohio Politics, 1844-1856 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1983), 202-17. Historians who emphasize the contribution of Anglo-Protestantism to the Republican Party include Michael F. Holt, Forging a Majority: The Formation of the Republican Party in , 1848-1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969); and William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). In contrast, Tyler Anbinder maintains that although anti-immigrant sentiment was important, slavery was the decisive factor in the party realignment of the decade, arguing that Know Nothings only won such extensive support in the North because voters assumed they were antislavery as well as anti-immigrant, Anbinder, and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850’s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 68 For evidence of specific attempts to neutralize nativism to attract the German vote, see Salmon P. Chase to Hassaurek, Columbus, Ohio, 7 April 1857, box 2, folder 5, Hassaurek Papers, OHS; Timothy C. Day to Murat Halstead, Washington, D.C., 29 January 1857, box 1, folder 1, Murat Halstead Papers, Cincinnati Historical Society (hereafter CHS). Chase’s focus had always been antislavery, so he needed little persuasion. See also Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 249. 69 Koerner, Memoirs of Gustav Koerner, 2:4. 70 James M. Bergquist, “The Forty-Eighters and the Republican Convention of 1860,” in The German Forty-Eighters in the United States, ed. Brancaforte, 141- 56. 44 values. Müller recalled his contemporaries’ conviction that “they could not perform a better service to their new country than to retain the positive qualities of German spirit and nature, and to hone, improve and domesticate their German characteristics, particularly through using the German language.” Indeed, German immigrants believed that German ethnicity only made them better American citizens. According to Müller,

Forty-Eighters believed that they were “saturated with the feeling that their free qualities made them the best citizens of the Great republic, and that immigrating Germans had a cultural mission in America.” They certainly were not “to be used simply as raw material for the construction of a Yankee nation.”71 Even J.B. Stallo conceived of himself as an

ambassador of the “German inquiry and German deeds” that would “spangle the

American banner.”72 Partly in response to the nativism of the 1850s, German immigrants defended what they saw as their unique contribution. Schurz characterized “the German” as slightly impractical but “the original leader in the movement of ideas with his spirit of inquiry and his quiet and thoughtful application.”73 Forty-Eighters had no intention of abandoning such strengths. Schurz later wrote to his wife that “‘the mission of

Germanism’ in America … can consist in nothing other than a modification of the

American spirit, through the German, while the melt into one.”74 German

Americans might disagree over exactly what this melting would involve, but they took a self-consciously pluralist view of citizenship.

71 Mueller, Memories of a Forty-Eighter, 114-15. 72 From an 1855 speech paraphrased in Easton, Hegel’s First American Followers, 51. 73 Schurz, “True Americanism,” 1:56. Historian Kathleen Neils Conzen suggests that German immigrants were the first group to create the idea of an ethnic identity that could complement American citizenship. Kathleen Neils Conzen, “German-Americans and the Invention of Ethnicity,” in America and the Germans, ed. Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 1:131- 47. 74 Carl Schurz to Margarethe Schurz, 8 July 1867, in Intimate Letters of Carl Schurz, 1841-1869, ed. and trans. Joseph Schafer (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1928), 382-83. 45 Schurz outlined a vision of the American community that was expansive enough

to incorporate different ethnic groups. Echoing the Frankfurt parliamentarians’

understanding of the German Volk, he depicted the American nation as constantly

evolving as it embraced new groups of people. Schurz presented these ideas in the 1859

speech “True Americanism.” “It is true,” he observed in Boston, “the Anglo-Saxon

establishes and maintains his ascendancy, but without absolutely absorbing the other

national elements. They modify each other, and their peculiar characteristics are to be blended together by the all-assimilating power of freedom.” This precisely expressed the

dynamic Vick located among liberal nationalists in Europe in 1848. Understandably,

however, Germans living in the United States had an even greater interest in defining

citizenship in such a way as to include people of diverse backgrounds. Schurz powerfully put forth a multi-cultural vision of American citizenship: “Every people,

every creed, every class of society has contributed its shared to that wonderful mixture

out of which is to grow the greatest nation of the .” Schurz suggested that

“freedom” acted as a vital force binding America’s peoples together. In his ideal nation

there was no place for slavery or laws that impeded immigrant men’s acquisition of

citizenship and voting rights. He compared the 1850 law that compelled northerners to

return fugitive slaves to the of 1789. He intended his speech to position the Republican Party steadfastly against slavery and for immigrants.75

Although Schurz was inclined to agree with New England Protestants that Roman

Catholicism “nourished principles which are hardly in accordance with the doctrines of

75 Schurz, “True Americanism,” 1:54, 63. 46 true democracy,” German Republicans also took a distinctive position on religion.76 In contrast to English-speaking Republicans, most of the German leaders identified themselves as “freethinkers,” essentially secular humanists. None considered religion central to his antislavery politics.77 Many Forty-Eighters made bigoted and provocative displays of anticlericalism. Henry Börnstein, for example, filled the Anzeiger with anti-

Catholic invective and even published a German-language novel featuring a Jesuit plot in

America’s heartland.78 Many émigrés, however, had grown up among Catholics and were more sensitive in their critiques. Schurz remembered his Catholic hometown

Libnar fondly, although he had rejected Catholic and tradition at an early age. He was sure republican institutions would gradually overcome Catholic “superstition.”79

Krekel had been brought up Catholic and still had observant siblings, and Stallo had

actually trained for the priesthood as a young man.80

With an eye to political considerations, German Republicans tried to avoid religious conflict. Committed to German-American unity, they had no interest in alienating potential supporters. During the 1850s, Republicans deliberately toned down their anti-Catholic rhetoric. In 1858, Gustav Körner warned Lincoln not to rely on

Friedrich Hecker’s campaigning because “he cannot conciliate opponents, and amongst

Catholicks [sic] and even orthodox Protestants he is considered as the very Anti-

76 Ibid., 60. 77 For Friedrich Münch’s understanding of the meaning of being a “Freidenker,” see Muench, Gesammelte Schriften, 129-31. 78 Heinrich Börnstein, Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis (Cassel: H. Hotop, 1851). 79 Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, 1:30-38; Schurz, “True Americanism,” 1:60. 80 Kamphoefner, “German-Americans and Civil War Politics,” 240; Easton, Hegel's First American Followers, 28-32. Hassaurek’s Piarist education in Vienna seems only to have made him a more ardent opponent of the Church. Wittke, “Friedrich Hassaurek,” 2. 47 Christ.”81 Körner suggested that Hecker offended members of conservative Protestant denominations such as the Missouri Synod Lutherans who emigrated when the Prussian

Lutheran Church united Orthodox Lutheran and Reformed Protestant teachings in its liturgy. Yet there was also the risk that men such as Hecker would scare off Protestant or non-observant immigrants who associated anti-Catholic campaigning with nativism. It was safer for German Republicans to unite the vast majority of German immigrants by condemning laws against alcohol consumption and activities on the Sabbath. To German immigrants, it seemed that Anglo-American Protestants were more likely than Catholics to mix religion and politics. For this reason, it is unlikely that German Republicans felt, as one Anglo-American suggested to Hassaurek, that they shared “nine-tenths” of the message of the Know Nothings.82 Historians who conclude that the Germans who voted

Republican shared the party’s Reformed Protestant leanings ignore their campaign rhetoric. German Republicans were secular opponents of slavery who were concerned that their Anglo-American colleagues would conflate Catholicism and immigration.

German immigrants were especially wary of Protestant women’s involvement in the Republican Party. Anglo-American antislavery developed within churches and voluntary societies where women played a significant role. Nineteenth-century feminism developed in conjunction with the causes of and temperance. Following the

Civil War, Anglo-American women would gradually “domesticate politics,” using their

81 Gustav Koerner to Abraham Lincoln, 17 July 1858, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter LC), Washington, D.C., quoted in Tucker, “Political Leadership,” 218. 82 Timothy C. Day to Hassaurek, Washington, D.C., 25 March 1856, box 2, folder 3, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. When historian Steven Rowan similarly argues that free thinker Henry Börnstein “split the difference” with nativists. Steven Rowan, “Introduction,” in Memoirs of a Nobody, 19. This reflects the influence of “ethnocultural” history, which emphasize that confession underpinned German-American political allegiances. 48 claim to feminine moral authority to campaign for and women’s suffrage.83

In contrast, German-American antislavery was a very masculine affair, characterized by the gymnastics, military drills, and male choirs of the Turners. German-American men had no time for female activists. Well into the twentieth century, German-language newspapers solidly opposed women’s suffrage.84 Forty-Eighter Mathilda Annecke, who briefly published a feminist newspaper in in the 1850s, found hardly any support among her male colleagues in Ohio and Missouri, and apparently relatively little from other German-born women.85 Few other immigrant women associated with

English-speaking feminists; some denounced them.86 In an 1865 letter to the Westliche

Post, one woman (“M”) defended female immigrants against accusations leveled by

Anglo-American women that they were apathetic to the problems of alcohol abuse. “M” first expressed sympathy for “Americans,” among whom whiskey was clearly such a problem. She maintained that German women were as opposed to drunkenness as Anglo-

Americans, but they believed the problem could best be solved within women’s “natural

83 John R. McKivigan, ed., Abolitionism and Issues of Race and Gender (New York: Garland, 1999); Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Jean Fagan Yelling, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Have: Yale University Press, 1989); Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Scott C. Martin, Devil of the Domestic Sphere: Temperance, Gender and Middle-Class Ideology (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008); Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920,” American Historical Review 89 (1984): 620-47. 84 Wittke, The German-Language Press, 162. 85 On the Milwaukee Frauenzeitung (Women’s Newspaper) Annecke published from 1852 to 1855, see Annette P. , “Mathilde Anneke and the Suffrage Movement,” in The German Forty-Eighters in the United States, ed. Brancaforte, 79-92. 86 Anke Ortlepp, “Auf denn, Ihr Schwester!”: Deutschamerikanische Frauenvereine in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1844-1914 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004), 18-19; Christiane Harzig, “The Ethnic Female Public Sphere: German-American Women in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago,” in Midwestern Women: Work, Community, and Leadership at the Crossroads, ed. Lucy Eldersveld Murphy and Wendy Hamand Venet (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 141-57. 49 sphere,” the home. Political activism—advocating either temperance laws or suffrage— would only undermine women’s unique strengths.87

The marginal role of German women in the Republican Party could be traced back to Europe and the migration experience. Calls for women’s rights had been quickly marginalized during the Revolutions of 1848.88 The tradition of German liberal nationalism had not, on the whole, equipped immigrants to question women’s subordination. German understandings of women’s proper roles varied significantly by class. On midwestern farms, many Anglo-Americans were shocked to see German-

American women plowing fields alongside their husbands.89 The cooperative norms of the pre-industrial household were only slowly receding in nineteenth-century Europe, but the gender ideals of Germany’s growing middle class also influenced the immigrants.

Following the common in other parts of Europe and North America, women’s role changed with industrialization as production moved outside the home. Members of

Germany’s urban middle class conceived of women as Hausfrauen who assumed an exclusively domestic role.90 According to pre-industrial and middle-class ideals in

87 Westliche Post, 4 May 1865. 88 Bonnie S. Anderson, “Frauenemancipation and Beyond: The Use of the Concept of Emancipation by Early European Feminists,” in Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation, ed. Katheryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 82-97. The arguments against women’s suffrage were strikingly similar in German Europe and America. David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A , 1780-1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 234-35. 89 Jon Gjerde, The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 135-221, describes roles in rural Midwestern families with particular insight. See also Linda Schelbitzi Pickle, Contented among Strangers: Rural German-Speaking Women and their Families in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); Christiane Harzig, “Gender, Transatlantic Space, and the Pressence of German-Speaking People in North America,” in Traveling between Worlds: German-American Encounters, ed. Thomas Adam and Ruth Gross (College Station: Texas A&M University Press for University of Texas at Arlington, 2006), 159-68. 90 For a brief outline of the complex transition, see Pickle, Contented among Strangers, 23-40. Other scholars argue that the change in gender roles predated industrial change, including Marion W. Gray, 50 Germany and America, women and men were naturally suited to separate and unequal roles.

The process of transplanting households and building communities in the United

States reinforced German women’s traditional place in the family. Germans were much more likely than other groups, such as the Irish, to migrate with close relatives.91

Immigrant men believed that their wives and daughters played a specific role in establishing German neighborhoods, towns, and farms in America. They were

Kulturträgerinnen, bearers of the culture. Until at least the 1880s, this meant that they brought up their children to speak German and played an important auxiliary role in male-led associations.92 Female school teachers, however, were frowned upon.93

Women were to sustain the households that provided a solace to men, protecting, in

Friedrich Münch’s words, “everything that makes our existence precious.”94 German-

American women were expected to prevent the potentially corrosive and dislocating effects of American individualism, , and ambition. One German-language monthly approvingly quoted an American reporter who related how many German

Productive Men, Reproductive Women: The Agrarian Household and the Emergence of Separate Spheres during the German Enlightenment (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000). 91 About 40 percent of nineteenth-century German immigrants were women and girls. They tended to migrate in family groups. This stood in contrast to the nearly 53 percent of Irish immigrants who were female. Many Irish women emigrated alone and arrived in the United States young and unmarried . Conzen, “Germans,” 411; Hasia Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 31. 92 Ortlepp, “Auf denn, Ihr Schwester!”, 292; Conzen, “Ethnicity as Festive Culture,” 49-50. For evidence of how heavily German-American women’s gender roles were affected by their ethnic identity and community-building efforts, see Ortlepp, “Auf denn, Ihr Schwester!”, 257-66; Harzig, “The Ethnic Female Public Sphere,” 141-57. These studies indicate that German-American women assumed a more public role after the 1880s. 93 Juliane Jacobi, “Schoolmarm, Volkserzieher, Kantor, and Schulschester: German Teachers among Immigrants during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in German Influences on Education in the United States to 1917, ed. Henry Geitz, Jürgen Heideking, and Jurgen Herbst (Washington, D.C. and Cambridge: The German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 1995), 115-28. For one example of this disapproval, see Westliche Post, 1 January 1865. 94 “Alles, was unser Dasein werthvoll macht.” Münch, Gesammelte Schriften, 437. 51 immigrants conceived of gender. The observer connected German women’s physical

labor with their “simplicity” and “morality.” “The German,” he wrote, “does not regard his wife as a mere ornament like the American.” German-American politicians were apparently thankful that immigrant women retained the “German traits” of “thrift, honorableness, and active industriousness.”95 They did not encourage their wives and daughters to contribute to partisan activity like Anglo-American Republican women.

The German Republicans’ attitudes toward ethnicity, religion, and gender suggested their affinity with the Democratic Party. Indeed, it was just these issues that had attracted German immigrants to the party of Jackson in previous decades.96 To sustain their coalition of southerners and working-class immigrants in the North, the

Democrats had developed a view of American citizenship reserved for white men.

Antislavery politicians, Democratic Party spokesmen increasingly warned, would restrict the voting rights and cultural practices of the foreign-born and elevate African Americans at the expense of struggling urban workers. This message continued to appeal to many

German immigrants during the 1850s, but German Republicans developed an alternative form of working-class politics. Forty-Eighters who had fought on behalf of workers in

Europe mobilized against the extension of slavery. Friedrich Hassaurek and August

Willich in Cincinnati and in St. Louis argued that ending slavery would create a more equitably society for all.97 For them, in the words of Bruce Levine,

“The ownership of one human being by another clashed head-on with all the democratic

95 “Der Deutsche betrachtet seine Frau nich wie der Amerikanwer als ein bloßes Ornament”; “Den deutschen Karakterzug bilden Sparsamkeit, Ehrenhaftigheit und thätige Industrie”; “Eine interessante Beschreibung der Deutsch-Amerikaner.” Der deutsche Pionier 5 (1873): 246. 96 Chapter 4 focuses on German Democrats. 97 Wittke, “Friedrich Hasssaurek”; Easton, Hegel’s First American Followers; Karl Obermann, Joseph Weydermeyer: Pioneer of American (New York: International Publishers, 1947). 52 ideals of 1848 and inevitably stirred bitter memories of the European aristocracy … and

the system of unequal privilege and unfree labor upon which that class rested.”98

Working-class German Republicans held an ethnically inclusive understanding of the

American citizenship quite unlike the Democrats’.

During the 1860 election, the German-Republican vision of American citizenship demonstrated its power to transcend class and religious divides in Missouri and Ohio.

Friedrich Münch evoked the ethnic flavor of the campaign when he reported on a

Republican event in the “entirely German” Augusta, Missouri. When the hall reversed for an evening of German speeches was packed full, townspeople crowded at the doors and windows. Afterwards, members of the local Turnverein paraded with flags and lanterns in streets illuminated by eight bonfires. A German band played as locals toasted one of the heroes of 1848, Italian Giuseppe Garibaldi. When the people of Augusta dispersed, Münch supposed they were committed to Republican politics and retaining

“our German way of life here, for only Germans can enjoy themselves in such a way by putting thought, heart, and hand to a cause they support.” He seconded New York

Republican William H. Seward’s statement that Missouri was “Germanizing itself to make itself free.”99

98 Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 149. Levine attributes Republican support among German Americans to the transplanted “radical democratic” ideology of skilled immigrant workers. He maintains their antislavery commitment ran deeper than that of earlier immigrants such as Stallo and Körner or the “liberal” Forty- Eighters such as Schurz, who were uninterested in fundamentally challenging American . While his analysis usefully emphasizes the role of working-class radicals, it overlooks the fact that German Republicanism transcended class boundaries. For an impressive local study that also explores the interaction of the politics of class and slavery, see Nadel, Little Germany. 99 Anzeiger des Westens, 22 October 1860, trans. in Mallinckrodt, From Knights to Pioneers, 303-04. This celebration used symbolism common to German-American festivals. See Conzen, “Ethnicity as Festive Culture,” 44-76. 53 Election returns confirmed Münch’s impression. German Missourians, like

German Illinoisans and Minnesotans, tended to support the Republican Party.100 Walter

D. Kamphoefner’s careful statistical analysis of St. Louis voting reveals that German voters moved from near unanimous support of the Democrats in St. Louis in 1848 to at least 80 percent endorsement of Lincoln in 1860.101 Since about half of the Germans in

St. Louis were at least nominally Catholic, Lincoln must have won votes from

Catholics.102 (Willich later remarked that not all Catholics were “dumm;” those in St.

Louis had voted to elect Lincoln.103) St. Louis give a plurality of its votes to Lincoln, but

heavily Swiss and German Gasconade County was the only county in the state to cast a

majority of its votes for Lincoln in 1860.104 Münch and Seward overestimated the

significance of the German vote. Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas won the state by a

narrow plurality. Lincoln ran a distant fourth behind Constitutional Unionist

and Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge.

The free state of Ohio went for Lincoln in 1860, but its German residents were

less enthusiastic about the Republican candidate. Rural German Ohioans strongly

supported Douglas, but in some small towns they were moving toward the Republican

100 To survey immigrant voting in 1860, see Luebke, ed., Ethnic Voters and the Election of Lincoln. Kamphoefner, “German-Americans and Civil War Politics,” provides the most rigorous and comprehensive evaluation of this literature. 101 See Kamphoefner’s meticulous ward-by-ward regression analysis of the German vote in “St. Louis Germans and the Republican Party,” 69-88. 102 Ibid., 84. 103 Cincinnati Volksfreund, 31 August 1866. The anti-clerical Anzeiger des Westens suggested German Catholics in St. Louis were enthusiastic Unionists. In contrast to , it asserted, “The Germans needed no priestly intervention to join the Union regiment.” Anzeiger des Westens, 16 May 1861, trans. in Rowan, Germans for a Free Missouri, 224-29. 104 U.S. Census Bureau, Population Schedule of the Eight Census of the United States 1860, manuscript returns for Gasconade County, Missouri; Dean Burnham, Presidential Ballots, 1836-1892 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 578. 54 Party.105 Germans throughout the state organized Republican clubs and pleaded for

German campaign speakers. Letters from German-born Republicans in locales such as

Zanesville, Marion, Springfield, Chillicothe, and Dayton convinced Hassaurek and the chair of the state’s Republican Committee that that “the conversion of the Germans to the

Republican faith is only a question of time.”106 The Democratic Fremont Courier disapprovingly observed that many German-American workers in Cleveland, Toledo, and

Sandusky voted Republican during the early 1860s.107 As in St. Louis, German immigrants in Cincinnati probably gave the majority of their votes to Lincoln. Four of the city’s five most German wards gave Lincoln strong majorities, and contemporaries concluded that local Germans tended Republican. The Republican Volksblatt newspaper far outsold the Democratic Volksfreund.108 Cincinnati was another city where some of the large German-Catholic population must have cast Republican ballots.109 Yet like their counterparts in Wisconsin and Indiana, German Ohioans in aggregate probably continued to vote for the Democrats by a slight majority in 1860.110

105 See table 4 in the appendix; Kelso, “The German-American Vote in the Election of 1860.” 106 William T. Bascon to Hassaurek, Columbus, Ohio, 19 September 1860, and other letters in box 2, folder 6, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. 107 Fremont Courier, 13 August 1868. 108 See table 2 in the appendix. We lack a comprehensive statistical analysis of Cincinnati, but for references to convincing contemporary accounts, see Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 252; and Kamphoefner, “German-Americans and Civil War Politics,” 241. In 1870, the Republican Volksblatt had an estimated daily circulation of 8,500, while the Democratic Volksfreund only had an estimated 5,500. Arndt and Olsen, German-American Newspapers, 454, 456. Historian Carl Wittke called the Volksfreund the “leading German paper in Cincinnati” in 1865. Wittke, “Friedrich Hassaurek,” 12. For corroboration, see Max Bergheim, Cincinnati in Wort und : Nach authentischen Quellen bearbeitet und zusammengestellt (Cincinnati: M. & R. Burgheim, 1888), 125. 109 Cincinnati was certainly home to more German Catholics than Protestants, although a meticulous historian could not determine whether they were a majority of the German-born population in the city. Joseph M. White, “Religion and Community: Cincinnati Germans, 1814-1870” (Ph.D. diss., , 1980), 47-51. 110 Kamphoefner, “German-Americans and Civil War Politics.” 55 After Lincoln’s election, German Republicans took stock. One of Hassaurek’s

Indiana correspondents congratulated him on his role in the “conversion of the Germans,” which the Indianan saw as decisive in securing the Republican victory.111 Schurz told his

wife that Lincoln had named him “foremost of all” among his campaigners.112 In Ohio and Missouri, Republicans now dominated the German-language press and served as

German Americans’ most popular and influential leaders. They had developed a set of ideas about the nation and citizenship that clearly distinguished them from both the

Democrats and most other members of their own party. German Republicans believed their heritage influenced their opposition to slavery and that Americans must ethnic diversity and freedom to realize their national destiny. The looming war would only strengthen the appeal of these ideas and the myth of the freedom-loving German.

* * * * *

In no other state were German Republicans as influential as in Missouri. As slave states began to secede in the winter of 1860-1861, German Missourians became more committed to the ideas they had expressed during the previous decade.113 The impending war forced the border state’s residents to take sides. The overwhelming majority of delegates at a hastily called constitutional convention in February 1861 hoped Missouri could remain a slave state within the Union. The Democratic governor-elect Claiborne

Fox Jackson, however, hoped to lead it into the Confederacy. Jackson ignored Lincoln’s

111 “Uebergang der Deutschen.” Guido Ilges to Hassaurek, Vincennes, Indiana, 27 November 1860, box 2, folder 6, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. 112 Carl Schurz to Margarethe Schurz, , 2 October 1860, in Intimate Letters, ed. and trans. Schafer, 226. 113 Christian B. Keller argues that Germanimmgirants experience of nativism in the compelled them to resist assimilation following the Civil War. Although I think he exaggerates the importance of specific events, his work conveyes the importance of ethnicity to immigrants involved in the conflict. Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans: Nativism, Ethnicity, and Civil War Memory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). 56 call for troops in April 1861 and instead mobilized the Missouri State Militia and

recruited like-minded Minute Men as he angled for secession.114 Meanwhile, German immigrants drilled boldly in St. Louis’s streets, preparing to keep the border state loyal by force. The Anzeiger exhorted its readers “to Arms!” Börnstein was sure that “no

German capable of bearing arms will fail to defend his hearth, his liberty, and his

Fatherland.”115 He joined Francis P. Blair, Jr., a Democrat-turned-Republican from an influential political family, and Franz Sigel, whose leadership would later be commemorated in Forest Park, to organize the Unionist Home Guards. The Anzeiger and the Westliche Post enthusiastically noted that this “second American revolution” provided an opportunity for Forty-Eighters to serve the cause of nation and liberty once more. The Anzeiger observed that the marching columns evoked memories of 1848 and

1849. The Westliche Post hoped Union victory would in turn “echo across the ocean” and help the nationalist cause in Europe.116 It did not take long for violence to break out.

The events of , 1861 would become a touchstone for the claim that the freedom-loving Germans saved Missouri for the Union. Anticipating that Governor

Jackson’s forces would seize the city’s federal arsenal, U.S. Army Captain Nathaniel

Lyon decided to take the offensive. Lyon formed a force in which local German militiamen outnumbered regular troops four-to-one. The Unionists surrounded and captured the secessionists who had assembled at Camp Jackson south of the arsenal. As

Lyon’s triumphant troops marched the captives through the humid streets of St. Louis,

114 Only four Republicans, all from St. Louis, attended the convention. Parrish, A History of Missouri, 3:6, 8-10. 115 Anzeiger des Westens, 19 April 1861, trans. in Rowan, Germans for a Free Missouri, 180. 116 Anzeiger des Westens, 27 April 1861, and Westliche Post, 8 May 1861, trans. in Rowan, Germans for a Free Missouri, 187, 202, 203. 57 secessionist civilians taunted them with anti-German slurs. Discipline was already

crumbling when a shot broke through the heckling. The gunfight that ensued left over

twenty people dead.117 It was not a well executed operation, but German Americans were proud of the sacrifices they made to take Camp Jackson. At the 1863 anniversary of

Lyon’s success, even Unionist leader Charles D. Drake, who had been a Know Nothing during the 1850s, commended the adoptive citizen, who “becomes my brother through the holier tie of a devotion to our common country.”118

Although Drake’s comment suggested an amicable relationship among Missouri

Unionists, German Republicans were never comfortable in the wartime coalition. By

July 1861, Federal victories had forced Claiborne Jackson’s secessionist administration

into exile and allowed the constitutional convention to form a loyal government.

Missouri Unionists included “Conservatives,” who initially controlled the government

and hoped to protect the institution of slavery, and “Radicals,” who wanted immediate

emancipation. Germans remained a distinct bloc in the Radical opposition. They

contributed between 60 and 70 of the 178 representatives at a Radical convention in

Jefferson City in June 1862, and the following year a similar meeting passed a resolution

in “heartfelt gratitude” of the Germans.119 By that time, only one German-language

117 Accounts of the affair appeared in the Anzeiger, Westliche Post, and in various reports and memoirs. For useful narratives, see Parrish, A History of Missouri, 3:11-14; William L. Burton, Melting Pot Soldiers: The Union’s Ethnic Regiments (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1988), 38-41; Westliche Post, 15 May 1861, trans in Rowan, Germans for a Free Missouri, 217. For the composition of the forces, see Andreas Dorpalen, “The German Element and the Issues of the Civil War,” in Ethnic Voters and the Election of Lincoln, ed. Luebke, 78. 118 William Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 1865-1870 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1965), 5; Charles D. Drake, Manuscript Autobiography, 1879, p. 176l. Western Historical Manuscript Collection—Columbia (hereafter WHMC—Columbia), Missouri. 119 Jörg Nagler, Fremont contra Lincoln: Die deutsch-amerikanische Opposition in der republikanischen Partei während des amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1984), 90, 139. 58 newspaper in the state did not endorse its call for immediate emancipation.120 In

November 1864, Germans helped elect a Radical governor, but they would never find it easy to cooperate with leading Anglo-Americans such as Drake. Drake had not supported Lincoln in 1860, and had first spoken out against slavery in 1861. He was a much more consistent supporter of laws restricting the sale of alcohol and Sunday recreations.121 German immigrants took these policies as a direct affront to their contribution to Missouri Unionism. They believed that their long-standing antislavery and their embrace of social diversity made them more committed to freedom than all other Missourians.

German Radicals in Missouri asserted their independence by criticizing the

Lincoln administration. Their hostility to the Union Army’s moderate approach to emancipation emerged in the first year of fighting when General John C. Frémont attempted to use martial law to confiscate the slaves of disloyal Missourians. German immigrants backed Frémont’s antislavery actions. They appreciated his support of Sigel, who was already exceedingly popular among German Americans despite his uneven military performance.122 When Lincoln countermanded Frémont’s confiscation orders and then replaced him later in 1861, he appeared to be siding with Frank Blair and

Missouri Conservatives. On learning of the growing German-American opposition to the administration in 1862, Börnstein rushed back from a diplomatic post in to support Blair’s campaign for reelection to Congress.123 Although Blair won his race,

120 Ibid., 141. 121 Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 5. 122 Stephen D. Engle, “A Raised Consciousness: Franz Sigel and German Ethnic Identity in the Civil War,” Yearbook of German-American Studies 34 (1999): 1-17. 123 Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, 376-77. 59 German immigrants continued to criticize the president. Blair’s brother, U.S. Postmaster

General Montgomery Blair, warned Lincoln that Missouri’s Germans were

“revolutionists, not reformers” and were “evidently” forming an alliance with the secessionists.124 Unwilling to alienate Missouri moderates, Lincoln rebuffed a Radical

delegation in 1863 that included several German-American leaders. The Westliche Post

and Cleveland’s Wächter am Erie joined several other German-language middle western papers that spearheaded Frémont’s campaign for the 1864 Republican presidential nomination. Frémont wisely withdrew his candidacy before the national convention, but the Missouri delegation cast the only votes against Lincoln in the opening round of balloting.125

Not only were German-Missourian leaders resolute Radicals, but their

constituents showed relatively little interest in more conservative forms of Unionism.

Börnstein’s pro-administration Anzeiger lost so many readers and advertisers that his son sold it when his father returned to Europe.126 The paper’s new proprietors resurrected it

as a Conservative Unionist sheet.127 The Neuer Anzeiger accepted gradual emancipation

as a fait accompli and carefully avoided providing aid to secessionists. But after Lincoln

made emancipation a war aim it supported the Democratic presidential nominee, General

George B. McClellan. It criticized Lincoln from a conservative perspective. Maintaining

a steady stream of invective against the recognized leaders of St. Louis Deutschtum, the

editors characterized German Radicals alternately as fanatical would-be murders of

124 Montgomery Blair to Abraham Lincoln, 18 February 1863, Lincoln Papers, LC, quoted in Nagler, Fremont contra Lincoln, 112. 125 Nagler, Fremont contra Lincoln, 208-50. 126 Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, 373-75, 383, 385. 127 Ibid., 384; Neuer Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 5 August 1863, 23 September 1864, 1 September 1863, 11 August 1863, 4 June 1864. 60 slaveholders and impotent pawns of their Anglo-American partisans. While its

competitors appealed specifically to “German” ideals, the Neuer Anzeiger embraced the staples of the Democratic press: warnings against the power amassed by the central government, heartfelt calls for peace and moderation, and racial scaremongering. Noting the recruitment of African American soldiers, the editor declared it ludicrous that “in several months our long-time -planting and housebroken black house pets [will be] transformed into musket carriers and soldiers of freedom for Uncle Sam.”128 With

other Conservative Unionist organs, the Neuer Anzeiger joined the Democratic fold following the war. It found a limited readership among St. Louis Germans. In 1868, the paper only claimed to represent 30 percent of German-speaking voters in Missouri; its competitors estimated the proportion at 10 percent.129 The newspaper soon went back to

the simple Anzeiger title, but it was nothing like its predecessor. It was out-of-step with

the Radicalism of German Missourians by the end of the war.

German immigrants in Ohio were more skeptical of emancipation and the war

effort than their counterparts in Missouri. Ohio responded quickly to Lincoln’s call for

troops to defend the Union, but the German population was divided. The German-

Ohioan experience better typifies the wartime North. Republican ideas of nation and

citizenship only gradually tightened their hold on German Americans. In some Ohio

cities, German men rushed to put their antislavery politics into action. On April 17,

1861, J.B. Stallo told a crowd gathered at Cincinnati’s Turner Hall that “the Tree of

Liberty wilts unless watered from time to time with blood.” With “burning words,”

128 “... sich in einigen Monaten unsere tabakpflanzenden und hausbrechenden schwarzen Hausthiere von ehedem Musketentraeger und Soldaten der Freiheit bei Onkel Sam verwandelt ....” Neuer Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 12 December 1863. 129 Ibid., 23 April 1868. 61 Stallo’s law partner impressed on the audience the need for an all-German regiment.

Recruitment promptly commenced. By the following evening, the ranks were filled,

largely by skilled artisan Turners. Most of the officers elected to lead the Ninth Ohio

Volunteer Infantry Regiment had experience in European armies. One of them, August

Willich, would prove one of the most effective German-American Union generals.130

Prompted by the Wächter am Erie, Cleveland made a similar contribution on a smaller

scale.131 Republican civilians closely followed their German-American regiments and

the Missouri Radicals in the columns of their newspapers.132 During the war, Frederick

Hassaurek served as United States in Quito, Ecuador, but he returned to campaign for Lincoln in 1864. As always, he appealed to German idealism, erroneously claiming that there had never been a direct defense of slavery in the language of Goethe,

Schiller, and Humboldt. He pointed out that many Germans who had settled in slave states such as Missouri and Texas supported the Union, joining their Northern brethren,

“foremost among the martyrs of freedom.”133

Some German Ohioans supported the war effort out of patriotism rather than

antislavery conviction. In northeastern Ohio, the Fremont Courier had backed Stephen

Douglas in the election. After Fort Sumter it called for the “citizens of the North” to “put

aside all their differences and personal opinions to show the South with unanimous

130 Gustav Tafel, “Foreword,” [1896] in, We Were the Ninth: A History of the Ninth Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Infantry, by Constantin Grebner, trans. and ed. Frederic Trautmann (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1987), 5, 6-7. 131 German-American Biographical Pub. Co., Cleveland and its Germans, trans. Steven Rowan (Cleveland: Western Reserve Historical Society, 1998), 93-94. 132 Unfortunately, no issues of Cincinnati’s Republican Volksblatt survive from this period. 133 Hassaurek, “Philosophical Dissertation on the Issues of 1864,” box 2, folder 7, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. James Marten, Texas Divided: Loyalty and Dissent in the Lone Star States, 1856-1874 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), 112-22. 62 determination and energy this necessary show of the might of the North”134 The Catholic

Wahrheits-Freund in Cincinnati adopted a studied indifference to the issue of slavery. Its pages would later calmly express satisfaction that the war had secured the integrity of the

Union. The Wahrheits-Freund would consider its outcome a salutary “world-historical verdict on the democratic republic.” The editors congratulated themselves that their disengaged patriotism had saved their readers from suspicions of disloyalty such as those leveled against Catholics in New York and Chicago.135 On the occasion of the

Wahrheits-Freund’s twentieth-eighth anniversary in 1865, the paper proudly recalled its wartime independence.136 Yet the paper’s tone hinted at an undercurrent of apathy

toward slavery and the war. German immigrants throughout the North certainly enlisted

in the Union Army. Some observers have concluded that as much as a tenth of the

Federal troops had been born in German-speaking Europe.137 Yet a quantitative survey of German-language Civil War letters suggests that German-born Federal soldiers were less likely to express personal commitment to emancipation and Union than their

English-speaking brothers in arms.138 Many German immigrants reluctantly joined the army to escape penury or became officers for professional experience. In letters they

134 “… daß die Bürger im Norden alle Diferenzen [sic] ihrer Parteien und persönlichen Meinungen bei Seite setzen, um mit einmüthiger Entschlossenheti und Energie dem Süden diese nothwendige Darlegung der Macht des Nordens vor Augen zu führen.” Fremont Courier, 2 May 1861. 135 Wahrheits-Freund, 10 May 1865, 12 July 1865. 136 Wahrheits-Freund, 9 August 1865. 137 Estimates of the numbers of German-born soldiers vary significantly. For a summary, see Burton, Melting Pot Soldiers, 110. 138 Wolfgang Helbich, “German-Born Union Soldiers: Motivation, Ethnicity, and ‘,’” in German-American Immigration and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective, ed. Wolfgang Helbich and Walter D. Kamphoefner (Madison: Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, 2004), 295-325. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, provides a point of comparison for Helbich, but he is critical of McPherson’s methodology. Eleven percent (3) of 27 enlisted German men expressed patriotism compared to 62 percent of McPherson’s sample of enlisted men who were overwhelmingly native-born, see page 309. 63 often griped about the conduct of the war, particularly what they perceived as the ubiquitous profiteering.139

The pressure to be patriotic generally kept discontented soldiers’ complaints private, but several German Ohioans publicly courted charges of disloyalty. A Cleveland

Democrat later reported that he—“like most Germans”—joined the War Democrats in

coalition with Republicans in 1862, but some of his countrymen did not.140 The

Columbus Westbote and Cincinnati Volksfreund remained opposed to the war, repeating the Democratic slogan, “The Union as it was, the Constitution as it is, and the Negroes where they are.”141 Both papers blamed “fanatical abolitionists,” including German

Radicals, for creating the conflict in the first place and wanted a compromise with the seceded states. A few prominent German Democrats supported the controversial pro-

Confederate and anti-war Democrat Clement Vallandigham, who in 1863 ran an unsuccessful campaign for the Ohio governorship from exile in . Otto Dresel, a

Forty-Eighter who bucked the political tendencies of most of his peers, supported

Vallandigham and presented petitions in the Ohio legislature that sought the exclusion of black immigrants from the state.142

By the end of the war, however, many Democrats had conceded the power of

Republican ideas among German immigrants. The Westbote and the Volksfreund

resigned themselves to the fact that the war had brought the end of slavery. The

Volksfreund’s editor even took it upon himself to recommend to Democratic members of

139 Many of the letters on which Helbich relies appear in Helbich and Kamphoefner, eds., Deutsche im amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg. 140 German-American Biographical Pub. Co., Cleveland and its Germans, 85. 141 Columbus Westbote, 28 August 1862. 142 Susanne M. Schick, “‘For God, Mac, and Country’: The Political Worlds of Midwestern Germans during the Civil War Era” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994), 74. 64 Congress that they support the Thirteenth Amendment in January 1865. He assured them

that knew his readership well enough to relay the “present position of Democrats of

German nationality” and counseled them to ignore “a thousand ossified ward politicians.”

Three-quarters of German Democrats, he reported, supported the amendment abolishing

slavery. Adopting the language he had previously ridiculed, the editor emphasized that

Germans opposed slavery because it was “a moral, social, and political evil,” not because

they believed, as he said Anglo-Americans did, that it had caused the war. He maintained

that his reverence for the U.S. Constitution explained his previous opposition to abolition.

He now supported emancipation by constitutional means like those the Missouri

convention had followed and Congress had begun. In a rare moment of compassion

toward the slave, the paper concluded, “The man whose work made the homeland of

freedom prosperous and respected should at least receive as wages relief from his

chains.”143

The permanent abolition of slavery would force Americans to confront what it

would mean for African Americans to be “frei.” In Washington, the Republican

administration continued to avoid the controversial issue. Lincoln had been clear that

ending slavery did not necessary involve granting African Americans political rights. His

1863 plan for bringing seceded states back into the Union did not include black suffrage.

By 1864, however, the president had privately supported enfranchising some African

American men.144 At that point no German-Republican leader in the Midwest had

143 “Der Mann, durch dessen Arbeit die Heimstätte der Freiheit reich und angesehen wurde, sollte als Lohn wenigstens eine Erleichterung seiner Ketten erfahren.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 15 January 1865. The editor later claimed that this newspaper was the first Democratic newspaper in the country to accept the abolition of slavery. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 3 March 1868. 144 Foner, Reconstruction, 35-37, 49. 65 publicly endorsed such a policy, but German-American identity had become more closely tied to Radical politics during the war. German Republicans’ claim to American citizenship was not based on their whiteness or the cultural roots they shared with Anglo-

Americans. Instead, they were proud of their ethnic difference and their principled support for abolition. Germans Americans believed they were “freedom-loving” and upheld “progressive views on human rights.”145 The Wächter am Erie proclaimed, “The

Germans, more than anyone, have fought for this land of freedom!”146 German

Republicans had faith in the power of democratic ideals and institutions to craft a

cosmopolitan nation out of different peoples, a conviction that seemed to auger well for

African American voting rights. In 1865, they would have to decide what exactly it

meant that the United States was, as Schurz put it, “the Republic of equal rights, where

the title of manhood is the title to citizenship.”147

145 “Freisinnigen Ansichten über Menschenrechte.” St. Charles Demokrat, 26 January 1865. 146 “Die Deutschen vor Allem diesen Boden der Freiheit erkämpft!” Wächter am Erie, 14 January 1865. 147 Carl Schurz, “True Americanism,” 1: 57. 66

CHAPTER 2

“RACE SHOULD BE AS UNIMPORTANT AS ANCESTRY”: DEBATING THE MISSOURI CONSTITUTION OF 1865

Several days after Missouri’s emancipation ordinance was announced, German

Radicals gathered in the St. Louis Turner Hall to celebrate and consider their next move.

One of the speakers that January evening was St. Charles’ Arnold Krekel, who had

returned from service as a Union Army . Addressing the crowd in his native

language, Krekel recounted the German support for the Republican Party, the German part in the Camp Jackson Affair, and the German insistence on immediate emancipation.

The major then contemplated what citizenship would mean for Missouri’s freed people.

It was “laughable,” he said, that “skin color” should deprive any male American citizen

of the right to vote. Krekel cautioned the audience, however, that this idea would face

opposition from most Anglo-Americans because “the immigrating German is the only

one who is not biased by prejudice against the negro.” He maintained that the possibility

of a “negro president or governor” held no “horror” for him personally, and he believed

this position resonated with the Turners and other Radicals in the hall.1 Krekel was right.

The meeting elected a committee to communicate its support of black suffrage to

1 “Der einwandernde Deutsche ist der einzige, der von keinem Vorurtheil gegen den Neger befangen ….”; “lächerlich”; “Hautfarbe”; “ein Neger Präsident oder Gouveneur”; “Schrecken.” Westliche Post, 19 January 1865. On the meeting, see also St. Charles Demokrat, 13 April 1865; Mississippi Blätter, 15 January 1865; Westliche Post, 17 January 1865. 67 Missouri’s constitutional convention.2 One man who attended reported that the “warm

and emotionally uplifting” experience had shown “that the Turners will stand true to the

full principle of freedom, also to the full accomplishment of the same—to the end.”3

Krekel was one of eight German-born delegates elected to the Missouri convention which met from January to April of 1865. German-American commentators believed that Krekel and his colleagues would help chart the course of American

Reconstruction and determine the “fate of American Deutschtum.”4 As they debated the

state’s fundamental law, these men would argue that universal manhood suffrage was a

logical extension of German Americans’ wartime Radicalism. Missouri’s German

Republicans had already linked German-American identity to the fight against slavery.

Now they would claim it was “German” to support black men’s demand for the vote. Of

course there were other white Americans who agreed that all male citizens must be permitted to exercise the franchise, but German Americans would bring an immigrant perspective to the issue of African American suffrage. Conscious that they were new

citizens themselves, German Radicals depicted tolerance of immigrants and African

Americans as two parts of the same impulse toward inclusive citizenship. Like the

German revolutionaries in 1848, German-American Radicals saw free institutions as the

means by which a nation incorporated peoples from various backgrounds. Labeling their

support of immigrant and African American rights “enlightened Radicalism,” German

2 Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal of the Missouri State Convention Held at the City of St. Louis, January 6-April 10, 1865 (St. Louis: Missouri Democrat, 1865), 59. 3 “Herzlicheren und das Gefühl erhoberen Eindruck”; “… daß der Turnverein vollem Prinzip der Freiheit treu, auch zur vollen Ausführung desselben bis zu Ende stehen werde.” Westliche Post, 17 January 1865. 4 “Das Schicksal des amerikanischen Deutschthums.” St. Charles Demokrat, 13 April 1865. German Texans were also influential Unionists and Republicans, but Texas’s membership in the Confederacy meant that its reconstruction was shaped by federal policies. Missouri was “reconstructed” from within. Carl H. Moneyhon, Republicanism in Reconstruction Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980); Marten, Texas Divided, 146-47. 68 immigrants would make a significant contribution to Radical Republican thought that

historians have overlooked.5

The fact that German Americans’ ethnic identity suffused their Radicalism would also impose unique limitations on their ideas of citizenship. During the Missouri convention, German Radicals’ position on black suffrage proved to be as much about themselves as it was about African Americans. They used their own acquisition of citizenship as a template, which meant that they abstracted their political agenda from the reality of black Missourians’ experiences. German Radicals were much more concerned with the principle of eliminating racial distinctions from Missouri law than in securing meaningful political participation for African Americans. Many of them would, for example, accept the idea of literacy requirements. Their understanding of ethnic community also left its mark on their opposition to women’s suffrage, a cause a few

Anglo-American Radicals were beginning to champion in Missouri at the time. In the end, no black or female Missourian could vote under the constitution, but the 1865 debates foreshadowed the unusual position of German midwesterners during

Reconstruction.

* * * * *

In early 1865, Missouri Unionists faced the dilemmas that would soon confront the whole country. The convention had to secure the freed people’s rights and protect the loyal population from secessionists as the formal conflict came to an end. Many

Americans believed that the border state represented America’s sectional ordeal in microcosm. German-Illinoisan journalist observed that Missouri “became

5 Westliche Post, 24 January 1865. Historians of Reconstruction Missouri acknowledge the role of German Americans. See Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 29-30, 42-43, 116-17, 228-67. 69 typical of all the struggles of the Union.” It was “the first of the border states that was wrested from the iron grasp of secession, and all the turmoil and battles that still lay in the future for the United States first made their appearance here.”6 The war had divided

Missourians, with about a third of the white men who fought serving in Confederate ranks.7 Although the Union Army had controlled St. Louis and Jefferson City, the

capital, since 1861, Confederates did not concede the state. In 1864, General Sterling

Price led twelve thousand men in an unsuccessful raid designed to seize it.8 More importantly, bitter guerilla fighting wracked rural Missouri during the war.9 Unionists and secessionists attacked their neighbors. The sixty-six Unionist delegates who arrived at the St. Louis Mercantile Library on January 6, 1865 were particularly concerned with suppressing further violence and solidifying their control of the state. The convention was specifically charged with amending the state’s constitution to end slavery and restrict the franchise to loyal citizens, but it was also empowered to make amendments “deemed necessary to the promotion of the public good.”10

Opponents of the convention’s interpretation of the “public good” would make

the 1865 constitution a by-word for Republicans’ vindictive and overzealous approach to

Reconstruction. The of disloyal men would be its most notorious provision. Former Confederate sympathizers and Conservative Unionists bridled at the

“iron clad oath,” which the constitution would require of all potential voters as well as of

6 “… für alle Kämpfe der Union typisch geworden ist”; “Der erste der Grenzstaaten, welcher der eisernen Faust der Scession [sic] entrungen wurde, sind auch alle Wirren und Kämpfe, die für die Vereinigten Staaten noch in der Zukunft ruhen, hier zuerst in Erscheinung gereten.” Butz was agreeing with the position expressed by Senator . St. Charles Demokrat, 13 April 1865. 7 McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 293. 8 Parrish, A History of Missouri, 3:111-14. 9 Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 10 Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 16; Drake, “Autobiography,” 1061. 70 jurors, teachers, , managers of corporations, and religious leaders. The oath included an affirmation that the voter had not taken up arms in rebellion, but it went further. Those who had provided “aid, comfort, countenance, or support to persons engaged in any such hostility” would also be excluded from the franchise and certain professions.11 In an extensive elaboration, the constitution would define a Confederate sympathizer as anyone who had even “by word or deed manifested his adherence to the cause of such enemies, or his desire for their triumph over the arms of the United States, or his sympathy with those engaged in exciting or carrying on a rebellion.” Overriding pervious amnesties, the oath would disqualify a large group of people in the divided state.12

Before the document was even completed, it would be widely known as the

“Draconian Code.”13 The pejorative label was a play on the name of Charles Drake, who dominated the convention’s deliberations.14 Defending his leadership, Drake pointed to the continuing threat that disloyal elements posed to the United States and African

American freedom.15 Seeing no respite from the guerilla hostilities, Drake believed that the framing of the state constitution was “the last of [Missouri Unionists’] struggles for

11 Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 258. 12 Ironically, Drake himself had spoken in favor of secession in 1861. He was never disqualified. Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 27-29. For more on the application of the oath, see chapter 4. 13 The term “Draconian Code” was first used during the convention. See Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 28. It was so widespread a reference that Drake himself mentioned it. Drake, “Autobiography,” 1091. 14 The convention journal testifies that Drake wielded control from the third day. Reviled from the start by conservatives, the constitution lost majority support in 1870 when it was significantly amended. From that time on, the constitution of 1865 was widely stigmatized as vindictive and totalitarian. Historians continued to portray Drake and his colleagues as “vindictive” and “fanatical” into the 1860s. For a 1960s historiographical summary, see Fred DeArmond, “Reconstruction in Missouri,” Missouri Historical Review 61 (1967): 364-77. Parrish’s 1965 work is even-handed about the achievements of the constitution, but he portrays the Radicals as to some extent “fanatical” in their desire to reshape Missouri and “vindictive” in their determination to keep the Democratic Party from power. Parrish describes Drake’s autobiography as “highly egotistical.” Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 25-26, 14, 50. 15 For a detailed examination of Missouri’s suffering, see Fellman, Inside War. 71 the supremacy of Loyalty in our ill-fated State,” adding, “the indications are that it will be the fiercest and most desperate.”16 He considered himself best qualified to re-write the state’s fundamental law. He later boasted, “Seldom, if ever, has a Constitution of one of the United States been so largely the work of one man as was the Missouri Constitution of 1865 the work of my head and hand.”17 Radical delegates from the rural districts most

riven by violence made up a majority that supported Drake as he steered debate in the

Committee of the Whole, drafted resolutions behind the scenes, and led the ratification

campaign.18 Three-quarters of the delegates were Radicals; they had opposed slavery during the war.19 Many of the men gathering in St. Louis appeared in military uniforms, a reminder that the war continued in the East and a symbol of their Unionist credentials.

As a group they had little political experience. Only fourteen were trained in the law.20

One Conservative sneered that the convention was “composed of inferior materials.

There is not a man in it, of high and general reputation for talents or learning or virtue.”21

Even Drake evaluated the assembled law-makers as well-meaning but inexperienced.22

The convention was never held in high regard. When it first met, the scene in the

small hall of the St. Louis Mercantile Library was not imposing. The windows were

unadorned by curtains, and many of the seats were empty. The only concession to

ostentation in the chamber was the president’s chair, standing on a slightly raised

16 Drake, “Autobiography,” 1088. 17 Ibid., 1054-55, 1057. 18 Drake’s influence is clear in the official record. Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal. See also Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule; David D. March, “The Campaign for the Ratification of the Constitution of 1865,” Missouri Historical Review 47 (1953): 223-32. 19 Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 14. 20 Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 3-4; Drake counted thirteen. Drake, “Autobiography,” 1056. 21 Edward Bates, The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859-1866, ed. Howard K. Beale (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1933; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), 543. 22 Drake, “Autobiography,” 1054-55. 72 platform decorated with red, white, and blue bunting. Few Missourians showed up to observe the body’s proceedings. Visiting from Chicago in April, Caspar Butz found just three or four spectators in the narrow gallery.23 After several months, even the ranks of

the delegates were thinning. One German grumbled that the minority he represented had

so little impact on the drafting of the new constitution he might as well go home. Many

of his colleagues did. The convention routinely operated without a third of its

membership.24

Drake was beset by Conservatives, who blasted his radicalism, and Germans, who

felt he was not radical enough. The Conservatives were Democratic-leaning men who

had supported the Union but resisted emancipation. Although they only made up about a

quarter of the convention, they felt that they represented the interests of the Confederate

and neutral Missourians who would have to be reintegrated into the polity even if they

had not participated in the process of electing delegates. Conservatives had significant

supporters such as Congressman Frank Blair, Jr., and Lincoln’s first attorney general,

Edward Bates. They were convinced that Drake was motivated by political ambition and personal vindictiveness, and they particularly disliked the measures that would

effectively establish partisan control of voter registration.25 Conservatives also began to

air their beliefs about African American citizenship. Although only four delegates voted

against abolishing slavery, many more supported restricting African Americans’ access to

the courts, public education, and the ballot box.

23 St. Charles Demokrat, 13 April 1865. 24 Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 24-25. The rules of the convention were rewritten so a majority of those present, not of the entire membership was required to pass resolutions. Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 203. 25 For account by a leading Conservative participant, see William F. Switzler, “Constitutional Conventions in Missouri, 1865-1875,” Missouri Historical Review 1 (1907): 109-20. Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 20. 73 Conservative opponents of African American voting could build on a long tradition of excluding blacks from the national community of the United States and cite numerous court decisions denying them citizenship rights. They were on firm constitutional ground despite the fact American citizenship had been just as contested since the founding of the republic as German citizenship had been in the Frankfurt

Parliament of 1848. The U.S. Constitution had not defined the status of citizen. The framers implied a national citizenship existed when they mandated a national naturalization policy and entitled the citizens of each state “all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several states” in the Comity Clause. Yet this did little to clarify

American citizenship’s boundaries or rights. In the early decades of the Republic, it was largely states that determined who was a citizen and what rights citizens received.26

Whether states or federal authorities had authority over citizenship would be one of

Reconstruction’s central issues, but the question was not on the table in Missouri.

To justify excluding African American men from political citizenship in Missouri,

Conservatives sought precedents in American political theory and law. For the last hundred years, Americans had tried to balance two essential strains of citizenship. The first was inclusive but bore minimal rights and duties. Although Revolutionary Era thinkers did not dwell on it, American citizenship was in part derived from British subjecthood. It was patterned on the relationship between subject and monarch that resembled that in Prussia and Austria. When Americans won independence, their new governments had to take up the role previously performed by the crown. This lineage meant that in some circumstances, Americans saw citizenship as a status that merely

26 Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 218-24; Smith, Civic Ideals, 115-36. 74 required the payment of taxes in return for protection from foreign governments. Many of the American revolutionaries, however, admired classical republican political theory.

Republican political theorists developed an understanding of citizenship that was exclusive, but embraced extensive rights and duties of active political participation such as voting, office holding, and military service. The classical republican citizen resembled the Bürger of the self-governing European towns. Roman political theory had informed

the model of the Italian city-states of the Renaissance, which in turn influenced English

and French theorists during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. A republican citizen

was a man whose landed wealth conveyed sufficient independence from outside

influence and enough of a stake (or “interest”) in the community to empower him to

make decisions for good of the whole.27 Many people who resided within the state would be excluded from such citizenship.

The American Revolution undermined deference and hierarchy, unleashing forces

that set the inclusive yet passive assumptions about citizenship into confrontation with

the exclusive yet active notion of citizenship. The most significant early challenge came

from white men without property who argued that if the of the government

was to rest on the consent of a community of equal citizens, they should be allowed to participate in politics. Historians have labeled this position “liberal,” identifying it with philosophers such as John Locke and publicists such as Thomas Paine.28 Working-class

27 For surveys of the extensive historiography of the reception of republican ideas in Colonial and Revolutionary America, see Robert Shalhope, “Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly 29 (1972): 49-80; Shalhope, “Republicanism and Early American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly 39 (1982): 334-56; Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79 (1992): 11-38. 28 The now classical statement of liberalism’s growing dominance following the Revolution is Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). More specifically 75 Anglo-American men extended the logic of the Revolution, citing their military service, and playing on the cultural background they shared with many of the Revolutionary elite.

Many members of the founding generation remained troubled by the idea of granting political rights to so many men. They worried that extending the franchise would erode republican citizenship’s association with virtue, duty, and independence. summed up their concerns when he asked a correspondent in 1776, “Is it not … true, that

Men in general in every Society, who are wholly destitute of Property, are also too little acquainted with public Affairs to form a Right Judgment, and too dependent upon other

Men to have a Will of their own?”29 To overcome the latter stumbling block, white men argued that their independence—and therefore their citizenship—rested on their control of their own labor and their authority as heads of household.30 Many of them achieved voting rights in the early decades of the American republic. Although they argued in the republican terms of independence and military service, their efforts helped spread the new liberal idea of citizenship.

on citizenship and voting, see Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 9-17; Smith, “The ‘American Creed,’” 229-31; Heater, A Brief History of Citizenship, 50-57, 65-79; Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy, 1760-1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 10-12, 62-75. 29 Robert J. Taylor, ed., Papers of John Adams, 13 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979-), 4:208. 30 Older histories focused on the successful extension of suffrage to most white men. See, for example, Williamson, American Suffrage. For the arguments justifying the extension of suffrage, see Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 42-52. In an investigation of state constitutions during the Revolutionary Era, Marc Kruman argues that the shift from property to tax payment requirements for voters was significant: “Instead of property serving as a measure of one’s personal independence and attachment to the community, the taxpayer qualification signified that the elector voted to protect himself and the community against the oppression by the assembly.” He writes, “suffrage was a natural right more than a privilege.” Marc W. Kruman, Between Authority and Liberty: State Constitution Making in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 94, 97. 76 By the 1850s, Americans used a much more inclusive language of citizenship, and most states had no property requirements for voting.31 In this new environment, white

men were forced to develop new justifications for the exclusion of women and African

Americans. Their entrenched racial and gendered ideas of the good citizen shaped the

way they reconciled the tension between the new inclusiveness of citizenship and their

understanding of it as a status bearing significant political rights and onerous

responsibilities.32 Women were denied the vote—when the issue even came up—on the basis that they were “naturally” dependent on men. Marriage defined women’s normative state, and the act of marriage made women dependent while it made their husbands independent. All states barred women from voting after 1807 when law changed to exclude them explicitly.33 Yet jurists knew that women’s membership in the state afforded them some civil protections such as freedom of speech and required that they perform some duties such as the payment of taxes. The practical and theoretical solution to this dilemma was a form of second-class, passive citizenship. By 1865, women’s citizenship became, in Nancy Cott’s words, “a touchstone to justify less-than- participatory citizenship.”34

In 1865, however, Missourians focused on the rights of free African American men. When Americans addressed black men’s place in the United States, they were defining the ethnic and racial boundaries of their nation. In 1857, Supreme Court Chief

31 Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 26-32. 32 On “good citizenship,” see Shklar, American Citizenship, 5-7; Schudson, The Good Citizen. 33 Nancy F. Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States,” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 1440-54; Linda Kerber, “The Paradox of Women’s Citizenship in the Early Republic: The Case of Martin vs. Massachusetts,” American Historical Review 97 (1992): 349-78. For the Revolutionary origins of such arguments, see Joan R. Gunderson, “Independence and Citizenship and the American Revolution,” Signs 13 (1987): 59-77. 34 Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States,” 1451. 77 Justice Roger Taney had denied former slave Dred Scott American citizenship because he

was descended from Africans.35 Blacks, the judge ruled in Scott v. Sandford, “were not

intended to be embraced in this new political family, which the Constitution brought into

existence, but were intended to be excluded from it.”36 Taney presented ample evidence that the framers of the Constitution did not see African Americans as equals. How, he asked, could they have intended to confer United States citizenship rights on black

Americans if they had accepted slavery? Taney’s decision revealed an important current in American citizenship thought. Just as the Frankfurt Parliamentarians had sought to explain what bound Germans together as a nation in 1848, Americans had struggled to identify what made them a natural community. As Rogers M. Smith has argued, republican or liberal ideas were undoubtedly important, but the nation that the framers imagined was also Protestant, English-speaking, and white. A sense of an

“ethnocultural” community had always shaped American citizenship law.37 Immigration would somewhat undermine the notion that the United States was primarily an Anglo-

Protestant land, but whiteness became more important during the country’s early decades.

In 1790, Congress had passed legislation restricting naturalization to white immigrants, and white Americans had increasingly depicted non-whites as inherently inferior to themselves, unsuited to independence and political participation.38

35 On the case as a whole, see Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 36 Benjamin C. Howard, ed., Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F. Sandford (Washington, D.C.: Cornelius Wendell, 1857), 12. 37 Smith, “The ‘American Creed,’” 232-40. 38 George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate over Afro-American Character and Destiny (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); 78 While embracing a racially exclusive view of national community, Taney’s 1857 decision preserved an active view of citizenship that had its roots in classical republicanism. The judgment concerned Scott’s standing before federal courts, but it also touched on the issue of the franchise and its relationship to citizenship. Central to

Taney’s argument was the erroneous contention that African Americans had been excluded from citizenship in every state at the time of the adoption of the Constitution.39

He went on to argue that the Constitution had conferred national citizenship only on those people who were citizens of their states at ratification. Individual states could not, in

Taney’s opinion, change the terms of the Constitution by altering their own citizenship laws. He argued that even African American men who were now permitted to vote in the few states without racial voting qualifications were not American citizens under the

Constitution.40 States might choose to grant free blacks certain privileges, but these did

not amount to constitutional citizenship rights. Although this position primarily involved

the federal structure of American government, it is significant that Taney did not

conceive of a second-class citizenship status for African Americans. His ruling excluded

even free blacks from all civil and political rights as American citizens. He suggested

citizenship could not be divided into active or passive categories. Citizenship was all or

nothing.

Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America (London: Verso, 1990). 39 Taney ignored the complex body of law concerning black citizenship that had developed since the founding of the republic. Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Harold M. Hyman and William Wiecek, Equal Justice under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835-1875 (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); Randall Kennedy, “Reflections on Citizenship and Diversity,” in Diversity and Citizenship: Rediscovering American Nationhood, ed. Gary J. Jacobsohn and Susan Dunn (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 101-21. 40 Before the Civil War most states explicitly denied free black men the vote. Shklar, American Citizenship, 43-52; Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 54-60; Smith, Civic Ideals, 212-26. 79 In 1865, Missouri Conservatives did not cite Taney’s ruling in Scott v. Sandford, but turned instead to the antebellum precedent separating citizenship and the right to vote.

St. Louis’s Conservative Unionist Edward Bates drew on his experience as attorney

general. As Lincoln’s advisor, Bates had conducted a survey of court decisions regarding

citizenship and determined that although emancipation brought African Americans

national citizenship, citizenship did not itself bestow any particular set of rights.41 As

voting had always been the preserve of the states, it was particularly difficult to see political participation as a right of American citizenship. Other leading Conservatives,

such as Frank Blair also emphatically denied that the freedmen should have the right to

vote even if they were citizens.42 The minority of St. Louis Germans who identified as

Conservatives must have agreed. The Anzeiger des Westens rejected the idea that voting

was either a “human right” or a “citizenship right,” pointing to northern states such as

Ohio that excluded free African American men from the franchise. The editors justified

excluding black men because the “negro race” had never “proved its ability for self-

rule.”43 Missouri Conservatives argued that there was more than one kind of citizenship

and sought, as Bates put it, “to disabuse the vulgar mind in regard to the absurd theory of

the exact equality of men.”44

Most of the Radical delegates to the Missouri constitutional convention who made up the majority also believed that black men deserved a passive form of citizenship.

41 Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States,” 1445; Wang, The Trial of Democracy, 8. 42 Margaret L. Dwight, “Black Suffrage in Missouri, 1865-1877” (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri— Columbia, 1978), 33-39; William E. Parrish, Frank Blair: Lincoln’s Conservative (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 221-23. 43 “Die Negerrasse hat ihre Befähigung zur Selbstregierung in einem freien Gemeinwesen nirgends in der Welt und zu keiner Zeit bewiesen.” Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 20 January 1865. 44 Bates, The Diary of Edward Bates, 445. 80 Radicals tended not to employ such derogatory descriptions of African Americans, but

most of them held the same understanding of citizenship as Conservatives. Republicans

had grown accustomed to deflecting Democratic accusations that their policies would

radically transform relations between blacks and whites. In response, Drake and many

other Republicans had distinguished between the civil and political rights of citizens.

Civil rights were legal protections of the natural rights of life, liberty, and property.45

According to the majority in the convention, all citizens deserved such rights.46 They believed that the political rights of active citizenship, on the other hand, could be withheld or extended at the discretion of the existing electorate. In March 1865, the

Westliche Post suggested that Drake opposed even a limited implementation of black

suffrage in the convention because he made “a spiteful distinction between black and

white.”47 Drake saw it differently. He believed African American suffrage would hurt

his chances of getting the constitution ratified. The Radical leader was also convinced

that citizenship did not necessarily include voting rights; minors and women were

citizens yet denied the franchise.48

By that point, Missouri’s German Radicals had arrayed behind an inclusive and active form of citizenship.49 The war years had gradually reinforced the lessons that

German immigrants had drawn from the Revolutions of 1848 and their own experience of claiming American citizenship. Yet the decision to support black suffrage came quite quickly at the Turner Hall meeting that Arnold Krekel addressed on January 15. A

45 Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 261-67. For European forerunners, see Heater, A Brief History of Citizenship, 81-84. 46 Some of Drake’s followers also supported efforts to instate race-neutral suffrage qualifications. See for example, Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 20-21, 26, 147-48. 47 “Eine gehässige Unterscheidung zwischen schwarz und weiß.” Westliche Post, 25 March 1865. 48 Dwight, “Black Suffrage in Missouri,” 40; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 117. 49 Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 116; Dwight, “Black Suffrage in Missouri,” 23, 30-33. 81 number of German immigrants questioned the validity of racial distinctions and the

concept of second-class citizenship before a receptive audience. One speaker emphasized the centrality of the franchise to the exercise of citizenship, asking, “Is he a free man who is muzzled on account of his skin color? Or is that a free—not to mention the most free—state, whose people’s hands are bound in regard to the election their custodians and lawmakers?” , editor of the Westliche Post, declared that “the principles of freedom and equality” required race-neutral suffrage, even if it was a tricky issue politically. “Distinctions based on color or race” contravened the “principles of

Declaration of Independence” and must be eliminated. The audience interrupted him

with enthusiastic applause.50

Preetorius’s Westliche Post was becoming the leading voice of German

Radicalism in Missouri and the region. In early January, the newspaper had hesitated to

endorse U.S. Senator Benjamin Gratz Brown’s support of African American suffrage,

editorializing that “special regulation of the franchise may be necessary.”51 On the day of

the Turner Hall meeting, however, Preetorius ran an editorial under the headline

“Onward!” He called the constitutional convention to recognize “the spirit of progress,”

and eliminate the word “white” from the state’s voting qualifications. The paper

considered it crucial that prejudice on the basis of “race, creed, or color” not be enshrined

in law.52 Preetorius tried to position himself as the representative of a large constituency.

He hoped to demonstrate that “the Radical Deutschtum of St. Louis have taken a firm

50 “Sei der ein freier Mann, der auf Grund seiner Hautfarbe für mundtodt erklärt wird? Oder sei das ein freier, schweige der freieste Staat, dessen Volk sich in Bezug auf die Wahl seiner Verwaher [sic] und Gesetzgeber die Hände gebunden stehte?” Westliche Post, 17 January 1865. 51 “… worüber besondere Bestimmung nothwendig sein möchten.” Westliche Post, 5, 6 January 1865. 52 “Vorwärts!”; “der Geist des Fortschritts”; “Race, Glauben oder Farbe.” Mississippi Blätter, 15 January 1865. 82 position on the two highly important questions of Reconstruction and voting rights.”53

The Westliche Post was indeed gaining influence. Without significant Radical

competition, it attracted a much larger audience than its Conservative rival, the Anzeiger.

During 1865, the Post’s quarterly advertising revenue doubled, and it adopted a larger

format. The growing daily printed nine thousand copies of each issue in April, but the

editors assumed a readership of about twenty thousand. With a reported annual income

of nearly $100,000, it was more profitable than any other German-language newspaper in

Missouri, Illinois, or Ohio.54

The man responsible for the Westliche Post’s commercial success and editorial policy was yet another Forty-Eighter.55 Since arriving in St. Louis in 1853, Preetorius

had consistently campaigned for emancipation and distinguished himself as a Radical

leader in the Missouri legislature during the war.56 He was one of the Radical

Missourians who Lincoln had rebuffed in 1863.57 The editor’s close personal friend Carl

Schurz spoke highly of his generosity, enthusiasm, and rectitude; rival newspapermen accused him of indulging in “superficial bon mots and populist appeals directed at the portion of the public incapable of thinking for itself.”58 His course during the constitutional debate suggests there was an element of truth to both assessments. He

53 “… daß in zwei hochwichtigen Fragen, der Reconstructions und der Stimmrechtsfrage, das radikale Deutschthum von St. Louis fest Position genommen hat.” Westliche Post, 17 January 1865. 54 The revenue figures are from a survey by the Cincinnati Commercial reported in the Westliche Post, 9 February 1866. The paper claimed the enlarged format was based on increased readership. Westliche Post, 14 March 1865. For circulation figures, see Westliche Post, 11 April 1865. See also Harvey Saalburg, “The Westliche Post of St. Louis: A Daily Newspaper for German-Americans, 1857-1938” (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1967), 140. 55 His co-editor Theodore Olshausen left the paper to return to Germany in April. Westliche Post, 12 April 1865. 56 Zucker, The Forty-Eighters, 328. 57 Nagler, Fremont contra Lincoln, 143. 58 Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, 3:257. “… oberflächliche Schönrederei und Popularitätshascherei, auf den denkunfähigen Theil des Publikums berechnet.” Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 29 March 1865. 83 candidly struggled to reconcile ideals and practical politics in a changing environment, but he was not above exaggerating German support for his views, including his Radical

idea of citizenship.

While the Westliche Post was beginning to campaign for black suffrage, German delegates in the convention were adopting a similar position. Georg Husmann represented Gasconade County, the only county in the state to cast a majority of its votes for Lincoln in 1860. A small, heavily bearded man who spoke unaccented English,

Husmann had emigrated from the Kingdom of in 1837 as a child. Like most rural Unionists, the noted viticulturalist and his neighbors keenly felt their vulnerability to secessionist violence.59 Husmann sat on the convention’s Committee on the Executive

Department with his quieter German-born colleague, Georg Thilenius from Cape

Girardeau. When their committee reported back to the convention, the two men informed other delegates that they could not endorse using the word “white” to describe qualified candidates for governor. They protested any distinction in original law “between white, black, red, or brown.” “We hold,” they said, “that we were not sent here to pander to a prejudice which may unfortunately exist, but to deal equal justice to all, without regard to color.”60 Husmann referred to his constituents’ support for his position. A public meeting in his home town had resolved to support Husmann, charging him with

59 Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 3-4. H.D. Hooker, “George Husmann,” Missouri Historical Review 23 (1929): 353-60. Husmann wrote to the Missouri’s governor requesting a replacement for the canon lost in a secessionist raid. Georg Husmann to Thomas Fletcher, Hermann, Missouri, 12 April 1865, box 1, folder 15, Records of Governor Thomas Clement Fletcher, Missouri State Archives (hereafter MSA), Jefferson City, Missouri. 60 Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 48. 84 continuing his Radical course until Missouri’s constitution represented a “model

document.”61

Charles Drake’s chief opponent among the Radicals, though, was Isidor Busch.

Busch had fled Vienna after the Revolutions of 1848, but he was not one of St. Louis’s prominent Forty-Eighters. He was a successful businessman and Jewish community

leader, but his political experience was limited to the Missouri special convention called

in 1861.62 St. Louis Germans must have also considered his wartime service as an aide to

General Frémont a relevant qualification when they elected him to the convention.63 The

Westliche Post commended Busch as the delegate who best represented his constituency.64 Busch revealed on February 14 that he and twenty-five other members of

the convention were prepared to resign if Drake continued to deviate from “sacred principles.” The following day he unsuccessfully sought to curtail the convention’s

mandate.65 Busch’s actions made such an impression on Drake that the German featured in his recollections fourteen years later. Drake described Busch as “so far dissatisfied with the course of things in the convention that he began to threaten.”66

In March, Busch took the convention floor to argue that voting rights for

“colored” men were a “necessary, unavoidable, logical consequence of freedom.”

Apologizing for his “dialect,” he proclaimed that voting was not a privilege; it was “the

61 Westliche Post, 18 January 1865. 62 Dwight, “Black Suffrage in Missouri,” 23; Nagler, Fremont contra Lincoln, 90; Walter Ehrlich, “Isidor Bush,” in The Dictionary of Missouri Biography, ed. Lawrence O. Christensen et al. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 138-40. 63 Zucker, The Forty-Eighters, 283. 64 Westliche Post, 18 February 1865. Caspar Butz also respected Busch’s role. St. Charles Demokrat, 13 April 1865. 65 Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 89; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 21. 66 Drake, “Autobiography,” 1061. 85 right of everyone who lives in the civil society of a free government.”67 Busch argued

that Missouri had accepted African American men’s citizenship by ending slavery, so it

must allow them to vote. He explicitly rejected the argument that there was a type of

citizenship that did not include voting rights. According to Busch’s interpretation,

citizenship included the franchise, and only three groups of people could justly be

excluded from full citizenship: residents without the necessary reasoning capacity (such

as minors), enemies of public well-being (such as criminals and secessionists), and

residents lacking an “interest” in civil society. At first it seemed that Busch intended to

include all women in this final group. When pressed by other delegates, however, Busch

said a woman who was independent of male support, and “carried the burdens and duties

of citizens” should be able to vote. Such arguments presaged the challenges women’s

status would pose to the German Radicals, but Busch carefully avoided condoning a half-

way citizenship. To Busch, arguments about different types of citizen were merely a pretext for codifying racism.68

Many other Americans argued that a truly republican government must permit all

male citizens to exercise the vote. Some white Radicals adopted the arguments African

Americans had long used in their efforts to win the vote. In the immediate post-

emancipation years, African Americans began a concerted campaign for suffrage that

capitalized on the rhetoric of the American Revolution. They often referred to the

67 “Farbigen”; “nothwendig, unvermeidliche[,] logische Consequenz der Freiheit”; “… es das Recht Aller ist, welche in den bürgerlichen Gemeinschaft einer freien Regierung leben.” Busch’s speech was reported in Westliche Post, 25 March 1865. There is no record of it in the convention’s journal, but on March 23 and 24 the Committee of the Whole considered amendments “particularly the article on Elections and Qualifications of Voters, Officers, and others.” Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 227-28. 68 “… die Lasten und Pflichten des Bürger trägt.” Westliche Post, 25 March 1865. 86 Declaration of Independence’s assertion that all men were created equal.69 When

Frederick Douglass endorsed African American suffrage in a speech at Boston in January

1865, he assumed that the American tradition was on his side. He said, “I want the elective franchise, for one, as a colored man, because ours is a peculiar government, based upon a peculiar idea, and that idea is universal suffrage.”70 African Americans presented this position in petitions to the Missouri convention.71 Senator Gratz Brown also described “freedom and the franchise as inseparable” in a letter to the Missouri

Democrat.72

German Radicals also couched their arguments in the language of the American political canon. They cited the Declaration of Independence as readily as any American.

In their message to the convention, Husmann and Thilenius had registered their opinion that voting restrictions contradicted the idea that “all men are created equal.”73 German

Radicals particularly honored the legacy of Thomas Paine.74 In late January, the Turner

Hall hosted a Paine celebration on the same day that the Westliche Post’s lead editorial suggested racial suffrage exclusions “would make a humbug of professions of universal

69 Foner, “Rights and the Constitution in Black Life,” 863-83. In his article, Foner used historian Vincent Harding’s term “the Great Tradition” to refer to this strand of black resistance. Vincent Harding, There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981). 70 Frederick Douglass, “What the Black Man Wants,” speech delivered in Boston, 26 January 1865, in The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One, Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, ed. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 4:63. 71 Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 53; Dwight, “Black Suffrage in Missouri,” 43-68. 72 “Freiheit und Stimmrecht als unzertrennlich.” Westliche Post, 6 January 1865; Norma L. Peterson, Freedom and Franchise: The Political Career of B. Gratz Brown (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1865), 143. For demands for political citizenship for African American men outside Missouri, see Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 88; Wang, The Trial of Democracy, 29-31; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 502-56; Foner, “Rights and the Constitution in Black Life”; Foner, Reconstruction, 221-24; Shklar, American Citizenship, 51-57. 73 Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 48. 74 Wittke, Refugees of Revolution; Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 93, 106, 223. 87 freedom and equality.”75 Drawing from the same political lexicon, one correspondent

wrote to the Westliche Post that excluding some men from the franchise, “directly violates the democratic principle of the equality of citizens.”76 German Radicals thought that African American suffrage would only realize the highest of American ideals. The

Westliche Post reported, “We Germans … are therefore here once again—as so often before—the ‘true Americans.’”77

Yet German immigrants were inclined to interpret American ideals in a

transnational perspective. They believed the words of the Declaration of Independence

and Thomas Paine represented universal ideals. German Republicans had already made

it clear that they believed the Union cause and the abolition of slavery captured the same

appreciation of nation and citizenship as the Revolutions of 1848. At the public meeting

on January 15, Preetorius charted the Turners’ sacrifices for nationalism on two

continents.78 In 1865, German immigrants saw extending the franchise to African

American men as another measure of global progress. Black suffrage took on a “world- historical” significance.79 Busch’s performance in the convention hall of the Mercantile

Library demonstrated Radical immigrants’ willingness to blend their German and

American ideas. He prefaced his argument by saying he found the confidence to share his opinion in his American citizenship and his “German ways of thinking and reaching

75 “… die kündigte allgemeine Freiheit und Gleichheit zum Humbug gemacht werden soll.” Westliche Post, 28 January 1865. 76 “… daß dies gegen den demokratischen Grundsatz der Gleichheit der Bürger direct verstoßt.” Westliche Post, 2 February 1865. Similar language featured in the paper’s editorials. See for example 28 January 1865, 11 February 1865. 77 “Wir Deutsche ... sind also hier wieder einmal, wie oft schon, die ‘wahren Amerikaner.’” Westliche Post, 15 February 1865. 78 Westliche Post, 16 January 1865. 79 “Weltgeschichtlich.” Westliche Post, 25 March 1865. St. Charles Demokrat, 15 June 1865, printed an assessment of the American Civil War as a “world-historical” event connected to an international movement. 88 conclusions.” To his “German” mind, the universal patterns of “world history” and the

lessons of the antislavery campaign justified black suffrage. Missourians had resisted

ending slavery out of “fear and prejudice,” but now they widely recognized their mistake.

Busch believed that it was just as to deny African American men the vote based on their color as it had been to enslave them.80 There were other lessons that could be drawn from the Revolutions of 1848 and the Civil War, but Busch expressed the ideas

embodied in the myth of the freedom-loving German, which prevailed in the Midwest as

the war drew to a close.

African American suffrage became a “German” cause in Missouri because of the power of the German-American identity immigrants had created during the war. Drake’s intransigence in the convention allowed Germans to continue to present themselves as consistent and idealistic in the face of Anglo-American prejudice. From the outset, the cautious Krekel had warned that “the tolerance of the American in relation to the negro” would determine the question of African American suffrage.81 Convention observers quickly spotted the struggle between the Germans and Drake. From Illinois, the

Davenport Demokrat remarked that the deliberations clearly demonstrated “how deeply

the Americans are still stuck in their national and racial prejudice and how far the so-

called Radical Americans are from the political positions of the Radical Germans.”82

Cleveland’s Wächter am Erie reached the same conclusion. Germans were combating

80 “Deutsche Denk- und Schlußweise”; “Weltgeschichte”; “Furcht und Vorurtheil.” Westliche Post, 25 March 1865. 81 “Die Toleranz des Amerikaners gegenüber der Neger”; “Schrecken.” Krekel also considered skin color an insufficient reason to deprive some of “privileges,” indicating he was sympathetic to the constitutional argument that voting was not an inherent part of citizenship. Westliche Post, 19 January 1865. 82 “Wie tief die Amerikaner noch in Nationalitäts- und Racenverurtheil stecken und wie weit die sich radikal nennenden Amerikaner von dem freien politischen Standpunkte der radikalen Deutschen entfernt stehen.” Reprinted in Westliche Post, 27 January 1865. See also Butz’s two-part report reprinted in the St. Charles Demokrat, 13 and 20 April 1865. 89 “medieval racial prejudice” in the convention. Non-German delegates “could not make

up their minds to apply all social and citizenship rights to negroes, without which

emancipation will not mean much.”83

Missouri’s German-language Radical newspapers launched a full-scale assault on prejudice (Vorurteil). Back in Krekel’s home town, the St. Charles Demokrat observed

that “prejudice and narrow-heartedness” hampered any further considerations for the

“colored people.” 84 It described the idea of separate schools for white and black children

as “a concession to racial prejudice.”85 This was only one of the many examples of

“spiteful racial discrimination” the Demokrat identified in the final document.86

Correspondents to other Radical papers adopted similar language. One wrote that “the centuries-old prejudice against the black race … places many obstacles in the way of implementing all of the implications and measures derived from the promulgated principles of universal freedom and equality of inhabitants.”87 As German Radicals

depicted it, the problem with prejudice was its irrationality. They denied that skin color

determined an individual’s potential. An anonymous contributor summarized this

argument for the Westliche Post. The strident piece maintained that wisdom was not the

83 “Mittelalterlichen Racenvorurtheil”; “… kann sich nicht entschliessen, den Neger wirklich in alle gesellschaftlichen und bürgerlichen Recht einzusetzen, ohne die doch eine Emanzipation nicht viel bedeuten will [sic].” Wächter am Erie, 28 January 1865. 84 “Vorurtheil und Engherzigkeit”; “War dies kaum zu bewundern, indem sicher mit der Freierklärung der Sklaven Einige das non plus ultra ihres Radikalismus erreicht zu haben glaubten und deßwegen den Farbigen alle weiteren Zugeständnisse verweigerten.” St. Charles Demokrat, 26 January 1865. 85 “Concession dem Racenvorurtheil.” St. Charles Demokrat, 2 March 1865. 86 “Gehässigen Racen-Unterschieds.” St. Charles Demokrat, 27 April 1865. As is evidenced in quotations in this chapter, the word “prejudice” appeared frequently in Westliche Post during January, February, and March 1865. 87 In full, he wrote, “Es ist nicht zu läugnen, und es ist auch leicht zu erklären, daß das Jahrhunderte alte Vorurtheil gegen die schwarze Rasse, gegen ihre Befähigung und volle Berechtigung gegenüber den Weißen der augenblicklichen Durchführung aller aus dem verkündigten Grundsatz allgemeiner Freiheit und Gleichheit der Bewohner abzuleitenden Folgerungen und Maßregeln mancherlei Hindernisse in den Weg legt oder wengistens zu legen sucht.” Westliche Post, 28 January 1865. 90 exclusive preserve of whites. The correspondent proclaimed that country needed “wise”

(“weise”) not “white” (“weiß”) voters. He ridiculed the idea of a racial voting

qualification because it would not reflect a potential voter’s understanding, character, or

competency. With an intensity untypical of the Westliche Post’s measured style, he railed that even if none of the “white rulers” of the States exhibited these characteristics, they would deny the franchise to a black man who embodied them all—a Socrates and

Cicero rolled into one.88

German Radicals believed that racial prejudice and intolerance of immigrants

were similarly irrational. In 1865, they were prepared to describe race and ancestry as

equally illegitimate bases for exclusion from full citizenship. “Differences of race and

color,” the Westliche Post announced, “should be as unimportant as those of belief or

ancestry.”89 Once Missouri’s Radical Germans had decided to support African American

suffrage, they drew on their own experiences to make their arguments. Although German

immigrants were hesitant to identify with former slaves, they had developed an idea of

the American nation that was not monolithic. They did not believe that all citizens must

share the same background for the United States to preserve its core identity. German

Radicals had challenged an ethnocultural approach to citizenship when they declined to

capitalize on their whiteness or Protestant background during the 1850s. These

immigrants’ dynamic view of the nation provided the theoretical basis for incorporating

new groups into the ranks of the citizenry. They did assume that Europeans were better

equipped to take on the duties of citizens, but they also believed that the nation could not

88 “Verstand”; “Charackter”; “Tüchtigkeit.” Westliche Post, 2 February 1865. 89 “Unterschiede von Race und Farbe ebenso wenig wie solche von Glaube und Abstammung gelten sollen.” Westliche Post, 20 January 1865. 91 develop unless it accepted democratic ideals. Balancing these concerns, a small group of

German-American Radicals determined that emancipation could induct freedmen into

America’s community of citizens exactly as naturalization had incorporated immigrants.

As long as the United States remained true to its principles, it had nothing to fear from ethnic and racial diversity among its citizens.

The constitutional convention provided German Missourians with many opportunities to suggest that Anglo-Americans might compromise America’s civic creed by making immigrants and African Americans victims of their prejudice. Drake introduced a provision that required that the state’s most populous counties to elect their representatives to the Missouri House from geographically compact districts. The practice of conducting at-large elections for county delegates had given German votes significant weight in St. Louis’s aggregated returns. Busch, Husmann, and the Westliche

Post opposed Drake’s new plan because it would reduce German influence to the few districts where they were most heavily concentrated.90 The opponents of redistricting believed it weakened the democratic basis of Missouri government. Another young

German-speaking delegate from St. Louis, William D’Oench, was the plan’s stiffest

critic. A wholesale druggist who had probably participated in the Revolutions of 1848,91

D’Oench would describe the “system of dividing counties into districts” and the

90 Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 262. For a report of the convention debate, Mississippi Blätter, 19 February 1865. For further discussion of Westliche Post’s position, see 13 April 1865, and 6 June 1865. The delegates presented their position in Westliche Post: Husmann on 19 April 1865, Busch on 16 March 1865, 12 April 1865. 91 William D’Oench was probably the brother of Forty-Eighter journalist Rudolph. An unattributed, handwritten biography of Rudolph is included in the D’Oench Family Papers at the Missouri Historical Society. Rudolph was seven years older than constitutional delegate William. According to the 1860 census, William, like Rudolph, was born in Liegnitz, then part of the Prussian province of , now part of . U.S. Census Bureau, Population Schedule of the Eight Census of the United States 1860, manuscript returns for St. Louis, Missouri, 82, 214. D’Oench Family Papers, folder 1, Missouri Historical Society (hereafter MHS), St. Louis. 92 “undemocratic representation, which recognizes land, not population as the basis of

representation” as two of the “unrepublican features” of the constitution that stood “in

contradiction to true democratic principles and our enlightened times.”92 D’Oench became a steadfast opponent of Drake, but African American suffrage was never high on

his list of priorities.

In what would prove a more emotive issue, Drake succeeded in inserting a

“morality clause” in Missouri’s Declaration of Rights.93 The section protecting included a qualification: “The liberty of conscience hereby secured shall not be so construed as to excuse acts of licentiousness, nor to justify practices inconsistent with the good order, peace, or safety of the State, or with the rights of others.”94 German

immigrants feared that Anglo-American politicians such as Drake would use this caveat

to impose their Protestant understanding of “public morality” on other Missourians.

Familiar with Drake’s legislative history, immigrants registered this as a targeted attack.

They suspected that the legislature would effectively define public morality as a “belief

in a personal God, in Christ, and in immortality [of the soul].” Making such

qualifications “requirements for citizenship and civil rights” might lead to “,

despotism and barbarism.”95 The morality clause reawakened German Americans’

insecurities about their own status and power.

92 “System der Districkteintheilung von Counties”; “die undemokratische Repräsentation, welche das Land, nicht die Bevölkerung als Grundlage er Vertretung anerkennt”; “unrepublikanische Züge”; “mit wahrhaft demokratischen Grundsätzen und mit unserm aufgeklärten Zeitalter im Widerspruch stehen.” Westliche Post, 23 April 1865. 93 Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 81-82. Westliche Post, 26 February 1865 used the term “morality clause.” It appears that the convention rejected a version German Americans considered even more egregious. 94 Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 256. 95 “Bedingungen bürgerlicher und staatlicher Rechte”; “Glauben an einen persönlichen Gott, an Christus, an die Unsterblichkeit.” Mississippi Blätter, 19 February 1865. 93 German Radicals used Drake’s approach to immigrants’ social habits to link

immigrant rights to the cause of African American suffrage. On January 24, the

Westliche Post ran a bold headline calling its readers to “Arm yourselves!” Preetorius discerned the rise of a “spirit of intolerance, of narrow-heartedness” as the convention’s debate moved into the area of morality and religion. The Westliche Post predicted that

“racial intolerance” would triumph in conjunction with religious chauvinism. Both tendencies ran contrary to “enlightened Radicalism.” How could Drake treat German immigrants so dismissively, the paper asked, when Missouri “owed its rebirth to the free, humane, cosmopolitan German spirit”? While Drake was at it, the Westliche Post taunted, he might as well restrict voting to men who were white and native-born.96 When

Drake did resist extending suffrage to unnaturalized men, German Radicals made much of his “bigotry.” On the convention floor, Husmann implausibly argued that Drake opposed alien voting in order to stop African Americans voting in the future. Husmann contended that immigrants would support race-neutral voting because “every immigrant” is for “citizenship rights for all.”97 In the end, the 1865 constitution allowed resident

aliens to vote in Missouri.98

96 “Seht gerüstet!”; “der Geist der Unduldsamkeit, der Engherzbigkeit”; “Racenunduldsamkeit”; “im Namen eines erleuchteten Radikalismus”; “… seine Wiedergeburt dem freien, humanen, cosmopolischen deutsche Geist verdankt.” Westliche Post, 24 January 1865. 97 Husmann was paraphrased in Westliche Post, 29 March 1865. 98 Surprisingly, the clause that extended suffrage to aliens who had officially registered their intent to become citizens did not feature in the ratification debate. German Radicals had not promoted it. The resolution was first introduced as an amendment by the English-born Drake supporter David Bonham on a day when all but two of the German delegates were absent. Busch later reintroduced a similar measure that passed. Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 193, 201. Once it passed, German Radicals welcomed alien suffrage, but it did not dominate their reception of the constitution. St. Charles Demokrat, 13 April 1865. Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 30. 94 Husmann, Preetorius, and other Radicals clearly intended to use the morality clause to define Missouri’s German-American community as “truly radically minded.”99

In an effort to consolidate the German vote, Preetorius helped organize a series of protests. Public meetings held in February attracted modest but energetic crowds. Those present expressed frustration at the way the constitution would affect people who did not adhere to Drake’s brand of Protestantism. An organizing committee met in the Westliche

Post offices to write up a statement of protest. The four thousand people who signed the petition that was presented to the convention were likely more interested in their right to

drink than African Americans’ right to vote.100 As they had in the 1850s, Radical leaders exploited an issue that appealed broadly to German immigrants. Yet legislating morality genuinely contradicted Radical leaders’ belief that citizenship should not be dependent on race or religion. It seemed that neither side in the convention debate expressed their ideal of a secular, cosmopolitan, and liberal state. Conservatives accepted immigrants’ drinking habits but rejected expanding African American rights. Republicans supported

African Americans but hoped to legislate against customs that immigrants considered central to their ethnic identity. German Radicals were convinced that that the citizenry must be expanded and religion must be separated from politics. One newspaper correspondent hoped that “in Missouri religious freedom as well as the emancipation of the slaves and their absorption into the citizenry of this state will achieve a complete

99 Westliche Post, 17 February 1865. 100 Westliche Post, 18, 21, 22 February 1865; Mississippi Blätter, 19 February 1865; St. Charles Demokrat, 2 March 1865. The convention rejected any discussion of the petition, and a handful of members tried to expel one of the Anglo-American delegates who had spoken at the Turner Hall meeting. Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 102-04. 95 victory over the machinations of fanatics and .”101 Absurd as it might seem,

the association between drinking and voting could support African Americans’ demands.

For all its potential, however, using immigrant citizenship as a frame of reference

for African American suffrage was limiting. German Radical leaders judged African

Americans harshly in comparison with themselves. Prominent German Americans were proud of their own education and believed that the time they dedicated to study and reflection made them some of the United States’ most intelligent voters. Even if they eschewed biological determinism, German Radicals were skeptical of African Americans level of Bildung (education and cultural development). The hypothetical black Socrates who had appeared in the Westliche Post indicated the absurdity of limiting the franchise to whites. At the same time, however, the example suggested that German Americans believed that only exceptional African Americans were ready to contribute to American political life. The correspondent had taken an elitist approach to qualities of the good citizen. The Westliche Post put it more clearly. The editors wrote, “We consider the mass of negroes now still totally incapable of exercising the franchise.”102 The contradiction between this assessment and the paper’s campaign for race-neutral suffrage was clear to its opponents, but it did not trouble Radicals.103 Indeed, it was much like the approach of the Frankfurt parliamentarians to Jewish Germans. Many of the revolutionaries had been anti-Semitic, but they believed that including Jews in the national community would transform them and ensure that their polity embodied the

101 “… daß in Missouri die religiöse Freiheit ebensowohl wie die Freilassung der Sklaven und ihre Aufnahme unter die Zahl der Bürger dieses Staates einen vollständigen Sieg erringen wird über die Umtriebe der Fanatiler und Reaktionäre.” Westliche Post, 19 February 1865. 102 “... wir einmal die Masse der Neger jetzt noch für total unfähig zur Ausübung der Stimmrechts halten.” Westliche Post, 15 January 1865. 103 Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 10 February 1865. 96 highest of ideals. If the legacy of slavery and prejudice plagued Missouri’s African

Americans just as discriminatory laws inhibited German Jews, granting them suffrage could only have a salutary effect. German-American Radicals’ prejudices inflected their struggle to achieve race-neutral policies. They believed equal citizenship was one component in the process of improving African Americans.

Many German Radicals were prepared to use tests of reading and writing to limit

African American voting. Unlike measures introduced after the Fifteenth Amendment,

the proposed tests were not designed to evade federal of racial

discrimination. The Westliche Post and Georg Husmann hoped literacy requirements

could pave the way for African American voting.104 They wanted voters to be judged on

“their service and talent, education and patriotism,” not their race.105 This was a radical position in 1860s Missouri, but it also reflected German Americans’ ambivalence toward

African Americans. Literacy was first introduced in the convention specifically to

qualify to black suffrage. Despite all his lofty rhetoric, Busch suggested that African

American men only be able to vote in eleven years time and only if they were literate and

of “good moral character.”106 Krekel, who often played a mediating role as the president of the convention, made a compromise proposal that attracted more debate and publicity.

Krekel’s plan would have directed the legislature to conduct a referendum on whether to enfranchise “people of color” who had lived in Missouri at the time of emancipation and either passed a literacy test or had served in the Union’s military forces.107 The Westliche

104 See Husmann’s comments in the convention debate. Westliche Post, 30 March 1865. 105 “… seinem Verdienst und Talent, seiner Erziehung und seinem Patriotismus.” Mississippi Blätter, 15 January 1865. 106 Westliche Post, 25 March 1865. 107 Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 186-87. 97 Post wavered in its support of suffrage requirements for white voters and never clarified its position on black voters. The paper endorsed an anonymous contributor who worried that tests were a risky step along the road to a “ state.”108 The final draft of the constitution did include a provision that would have required literacy of all new Missouri voters after 1876. It received relatively little public debate and never had a chance to go into effect before the constitution was abandoned.109

To German Americans’ credit, they promoted public education for African

American children as well as literacy requirements. Most Missouri Radicals were

committed to enhancing the state’s inadequate public school system, but German

immigrants distinguished themselves as supporters of black education. After

emancipation, Friedrich Münch lost no time in introducing a bill “For the Education of

Negro Children” to the Missouri legislature.110 The Westliche Post printed contributions advocating “compulsory education to nurture citizenship,” especially for African

Americans whose education had been neglected under slavery.111 It endorsed the lengthy speech of a native-born minister on “Education and the Right to Vote.” Rev. W.G. Eliot advocated a comprehensive system of compulsory childhood education and evening classes for adults coupled with a literacy test for all voters. In response, the Westliche

Post commented that the Prussian experience indicated the advantages of mandating

education.112 In the convention, Husmann moved to thank Eliot for his “eloquent and

108 Westliche Post, 30 March 1865. 109 Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 261. Missouri’s 1875 constitution eliminated the literacy requirement. Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 377. 110 St. Charles Demokrat, 2 February 1865. 111 Westliche Post, 10 February 1865, 28 January 1865, 3 February 1865, 11 February 1865. 112 Westliche Post, 26 January 1865. For the speech, see 25, 26, and 27 January 1865. 98 able address on education, connected with the elective franchise.”113 Those present wholeheartedly affirmed Husmann’s resolution and set about overhauling the state’s public education system.114 The proposed 1865 constitution charged the Missouri legislature with administering a new school fund and seeing to it that every locality offered free schools to all residents aged five to twenty-one. It permitted the legislature to compel each child to attend sixteen months of schooling. All state funding would be provided in proportion to the number of children, “without regard to color,” but the

constitution explicitly allowed local agencies to maintain segregated schools.115

While German Radicals were laboring to educate and enfranchise African

American men, they virtually ignored women’s citizenship. The Anzeiger charged

Radicals with inconsistency: if they accepted women’s status as non-voting citizens, why did they assume that voting was necessarily a citizenship right for African American men?116 The attack was typical of Conservatives, who were consistent in their opposition

to any extension of citizenship and voting rights. The Anzeiger raised one of the German

Radicals’ weaknesses. Busch’s speech in the convention demonstrated how poorly prepared German Radicals were to face this challenge. Busch maintained that unmarried

women were citizens who should be allowed to vote. He advocated that unmarried

women who demonstrated independence in decision making and held a stake in civil

society should be classified as citizens, which meant they could exercise the franchise.

113 Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 53. 114 The exclusively white antebellum school system had been under-funded and under-attended. Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 139-41. See chapter 7. 115 Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 272. Many complexities of jurisdiction between state and local agencies remained. No German delegate supported the amendment allowing segregated schools in the convention. Busch and D’Oench were present to vote against it. Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 121-23. For more on education, see chapter 7. 116 Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 10 February 1865. 99 Never clarifying how single women could prove their independence and interest in society, he made it plain that he believed marriage stripped women of citizenship altogether. He did not question the premise that that a woman’s role in the household effected her subordination. He embraced gender distinctions, but he was reluctant to predicate political roles on natural differences between the sexes. He was unwilling to concede the need for a half-way, less-than-participatory citizenship, so he conceptually squeezed women into one of two statuses: married non-citizens or unmarried full citizens.117 Most Radicals simply ignored the Anzeiger’s question. Their silence on matters of gender provides a telling counterpoint to German Radicals’ position on race.

For all their protestations of abstract idealism, German advocacy of African American suffrage grew out of a specific ethnic experience. In 1865, German Radicals were willing to question the racial contours of citizenship, but not its gendered boundaries.

* * * * *

On April 8, 1865, the day before Lee surrendered to Grant in Virginia, Charles

Drake moved that the convention in Missouri approve the document it had spent the previous months drafting. His motion passed with the support of thirty-eight of the fifty- one delegates present. Drake had engineered a working majority, but he had conspicuously failed to convince any of the German members to join him. As convention president, Krekel took a conciliatory position.118 Although he did not participate in the

vote, he was first person to engross the new constitution with his signature, and he would

117 Westliche Post, 25 March 1865. 118 At first, it seemed that the selection of St. Charles’s Arnold Krekel as president “honored Germans” and indicated the body’s Radical intent. Mississippi Blätter, 8 January 1865, 15 January 1865; St. Charles Demokrat, 12 January 1865; Wächter am Erie, 14 January 1865. For Krekel’s understanding of his dual role as representative of the German community and pragmatic mediator, see Westliche Post, 19 January 1865. 100 become one of the few men in Missouri who actively campaigned for its ratification.119

Two of the German delegates were absent on the day of the convention’s final vote, but

the remaining five simply could not stomach endorsing the draft before them. They

opposed the exclusion of non-white men from voting, but they objected to other provisions as well. The new constitution would reduce the German influence in the

state’s legislature through the districting change, and it left open the possibility that the

state’s lawmakers would regulate issues of public morality such as drinking. In contrast

to the German delegates, the other men who voted against Drake disliked the

constitution’s concessions to African American rights, and they were especially outraged

at the lengths to which voters would have to go to prove their loyalty to the Union.120

German Radicals felt caught between Drake and the Conservatives in the battle

over ratification. They rejected Drake’s version of Radicalism and believed he was

hostile to German Americans. At the same time, they suspected the Conservatives of

disloyalty and considered their approach to citizenship reactionary.121 Despairing of the

constitution itself, German Radicals did not take a strong stand for or against its

ratification. Instead, men such as Preetorius tried to use the two-month campaign to

salvage the moral high ground and consolidate a German constituency around the ideal of

inclusive and participatory citizenship. In post-war Missouri, Radical German leaders

staked out a German-American political position that supported African American

119 Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal, 247. 120 For further discussion of the Conservative position, see Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 20-31 and chapter 4. 121 German Radicals openly struggled to weigh the merits of the constitution. See especially Westliche Post, 15 April 1865, 19 April 1865, 25 April 1865, 3 May 1865, 6 June 1865; St. Charles Demokrat, 6 April 1865, 11 May 1865. 101 demands. They emphasized that the proposed constitution failed to protect the rights of

immigrants and freed people.

For all their misgivings, most German Radicals found it difficult to reject Drake’s constitution outright. Ratification seemed the only way to protect Missouri from violence and further rebellion. Arnold Krekel and the St. Charles Demokrat quickly decided that the imperfect constitution was the only way to secure Radical power in the state.122 The

Demokrat would have liked African American men to be able to vote, but its editor pointed out that the 1865 constitution was an improvement over the existing one, which dated to 1820.123 Missouri Unionists remained very concerned about their disloyal

neighbors regaining political power. As the ratification campaign began, there was new

evidence of the threats facing the border state. On the weekend of April 15 and 16, as

Missourians were digesting the proposed constitution, they were stunned to learn Lincoln

had been assassinated. Closer to home, murders of African Americans in Missouri

increased markedly during early 1865.124 Sometimes Confederate sympathizers also

targeted Germans who were known for their Radicalism. Krekel was promoting the

constitution at a public meeting when his makeshift stage was set alight.125 Missouri’s

German Radicals sensed the dangers ahead if Conservatives came to power. Most of them accepted that the “rebels” had relinquished their citizenship rights.

German Missourians made a range of arguments against ratification. D’Oench and Busch continued to identify as Radicals, but they cooperated with the Conservatives

122 Drake, “Autobiography,” 1161; Westliche Post, 15 April 1865; St. Charles Demokrat, 13 April 1865. 123 St. Charles Demokrat, 27 April 1865, 4, 11, 18 May 1865. 124 Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 106-07. 125 St. Charles Demokrat, 8 June 1865. For the targeting of German immigrants and the post-war continuation of violence, see Fellman, Inside War, 70-71, 181, 231-42. 102 who objected most to the iron clad oath. They found hardly anything in the draft

constitution praiseworthy. The two St. Louis delegates signed an open letter protesting the constitution primarily because of the oath’s potential to disqualify loyal voters.

German delegates supplied six of the nine signatures. This alliance between Missouri

Conservatives and German Radicals foreshadowed the Liberal Republican coalition that

would undermine Reconstruction in the state in a few years time. In 1865, however, two

of the German-born signatories distanced themselves from the Conservatives. Anton P.

Nixdorf of Miller County publicly disavowed his support of the letter, saying his name

had been included without his knowledge.126 Husmann strenuously distanced himself

from the Conservatives. He made it clear that he opposed the constitution because it left

African American men without the vote, not because it restricted Confederate

sympathizers; it was “not Radical enough.”127 Husmann’s Radicalism could not be

doubted. In a private letter to Governor Thomas Fletcher, he listed Krekel and Benjamin

Gratz Brown among “our weak kneed radical friends” who would vote for the

constitution despite it being “repugnant to every principle” they held.128

Husmann described the Westliche Post’s position on the constitution as

“doubtful.” Opposed to the document in principle, the influential paper vacillated on ratification.129 Preetorius worried that Radical protests against the constitution only

126 Westliche Post, 15 April 1865. See also Westliche Post, 23 April 1865, 12 April 1865. Despite Nixdorf’s steady opposition to Drake in the convention, he believed the constitution necessary. Westliche Post, 27 April 1865. 127 “Nicht radical genug.” Westliche Post, 13 May 1865. Drake, “Autobiography,” 1083-84 also presents Husmann’s position. 128 The letter is fire-damaged, obscuring part of Husmann’s signature (“Hus”), but it is in Husmann’s hand and clearly reflects the shared political views and close relationship evidence in other letters. Husmann to Thomas Fletcher, 5 May 1865, box 1, folder 16, Records of Governor Thomas Clement Fletcher, MSA. 129 Listing the Missouri newspapers’ positions, the Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt placed the Westliche Post between the two columns representing supporters and opponents. 5 May 1865. 103 played into Conservative hands.130 The editor considered it necessary to disqualify

Confederate sympathizers from voting and public office, but he was uncomfortable with

the idea of writing such temporary exigencies into fundamental law.131 The Westliche

Post ran numerous contributions for and against the constitution, and wavered back and forth in its editorial position. On election day, the editors summed up their assessment of the whole issue. Nothing, they wrote, “can move us to endorse with our vote a constitution in which freedom of belief as well as the equality of all people is not done justice and which contains a districting hostile to the influence Deutschtum is entitled.” They remained, however, highly skeptical of the Conservatives: “No one believes that the Conservative anti-constitutionalists are serious about the progressive ideas they now profess. They will show their true face soon enough after the election, and those Radical anti-constitutionalists who seek to substitute the old Radicals with their new allies will soon find themselves bitterly disappointed.” The Westliche Post

acknowledged how damaging the split in the Radical Party had been and considered what

the following years would bring. “The guarantees of progress, prosperity and freedom in

Missouri,” according to the paper, “truly only lie, not a splintering, but only—we do not

get tired of repeating this—in a new, firm, and united joining of the Radical Union

Party.” It accepted its readers would “vote according to their conscience” on the

constitution.132

130 Westliche Post, 25 April 1865. 131 Westliche Post, 23 February 1865. 132 “… konnten uns bewegen, durch unsrer Stimme eine Constitution zu endorsen, die der Gewissensfreiheit, so wie dem Principe der Gleichheit aller Menschen nicht gerecht geworden ist, und die eine dem berechtigten Einflusse des Deutschthums feindlich Districtseintheilung enthält”; “Denn glaube Niemand, daß es den conservativen Anticonstitutionellen Ernst sei um die Fortschrittsideen, als Bekenner sie sich jetz geberden. Sie werden sich genug nach der Wahl ihr wahres Angesicht wieder zeigen, und diejenigen radicalen Anti-Constitutionellen, die bei jenen neuen Bundesgenossen Ersatz für die alten 104 Election returns suggest that among the loyal Missourians who were qualified to vote on ratification, German immigrants were less likely to support the constitution than the native-born. Across the state, the document was ratified by a narrow margin of only

1,862 among a total of 85,478 votes cast.133 Missouri’s Union soldiers and rural voters were most likely to support it.134 The minority of Missouri Germans who lived in rural areas were clearly divided. Husmann opposed the constitution, but in Gasconade County,

59 percent of votes went for it. Perhaps it was an indication of his personal influence that only 27 percent of the inhabitants in his own township supported the constitution.135

Krekel favored the constitution, but in St. Charles County, it garnered only 31 percent of the votes cast.136 The county’s small German settlements of Augusta and New Melle supported the document by wide margins, but the pro-constitution St. Charles Demokrat did not identify a trend among Germans toward ratification. Disappointed, the Demokrat reflected that some of the people who voted against it believed it would interfere with their practice of their religious beliefs.137 The constitution received similar support—32

radicalen suchen, werden sich bald bitter enttäusche setzen”; “… wahrlich nicht in einer Zersplitterung, sonder nur—wir werden dies zu wiederholen nicht müde—in einem neuen, festen und einigen Zusammenschluß der radicalen Unionspartei liegen die Garantien für den Fortschritt den Wohlstand und die Freiheit in Missouri”; “Stimmet nach Eurer Ueberzeugung.” Westliche Post, 6 June 1865. 133 The ratification vote was taken based on the suffrage requirements in the document. Voters were white male citizens (and immigrant men who had declared their intention to become citizens) who took the iron clad oath. Conservatives urged anyone who had not fought for the Confederacy to take the oath. As the registration apparatus had not yet been developed, a large number of men who had in some way supported the Confederacy probably voted in the referendum. Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 44-45. 134 Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 48. 135 In Gasconade County the constitution passed 508 to 346. Husmann’s Roark Township voted against it, 84 to 222. Roark Township and Hermann shared the majority Swiss and German make-up of Boeuf Township to the south, which only cast one vote against the constitution, indicating the results owed more to Husmann’s personal leadership than voters’ origins. Office of the Secretary of State, Elections Division, Election Returns, 1846-1992, box 10, folder 10, MSA; U.S. Census Bureau, Population Schedule of the Eight Census of the United States 1860, manuscript returns for Gasconade County, Missouri. 136 The constitution received 512 votes to 1,133. St. Charles Demokrat, 15 June 1865. 137 Ibid. 105 percent—in St. Louis.138 Most of the heavily German wards returned results consistent

with the city-wide aggregates.139

In the absence of clear evidence as to why Germans opposed the constitution, the

Westliche Post suggested they took a Radical approach to citizenship. The election

showed, the paper editorialized, that one third of St. Louis voters supported the

constitution, one third rejected it because it was too “progressive,” and one third rejected

it because it was not “progressive” enough.140 It maintained that German immigrants were the mainstay of this last group. Preetorius felt vindicated in November, when St.

Louis elected Joseph Weydemeyer, the German-born socialist and advocate of African

American suffrage, to the position of city auditor.141 Weydemeyer’s narrow victory

confirmed the existence of German Radicalism in the city. Radicalism also flourished

outside St. Louis. In 1866, St. Charles County elected a German man to the Missouri

legislature who reportedly considered African Americans his “political and social

equals,” and according to his opponents, would welcome a black son-in-law.142 German

Missourians elected Radicals who tried to eliminate racial qualifications for suffrage, but it was unclear how they would have voted in a referendum specifically addressing

African American suffrage.143

138 The constitution received 5,322 votes while 11,248 votes were cast against it. Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 46. 139 See the tabulations in table 5 in the appendix. In the referendum, the constitution received 30 percent support in the first ward (366 to 865) and 31 percent support in the second ward (319 to 722). Westliche Post, 8 June 1865. 140 “Freisinnig.” Westliche Post, 8 June 1865. 141 Westliche Post, 10 November 1865. For Weydemeyer’s victory, see Westliche Post, 8 November 1865. For his position of African American suffrage, see Westliche Post, 8, 13, 14 September 1865; Obermann, Joseph Weydermeyer. 142 Anzeiger des Westens, 1 November 1866, quoted in Helbich and Kamphoefner, eds., Deutsche im amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg, 395. 143 Dwight, “Black Suffrage in Missouri,” 54-58. 106 In June 1865, German Radicals in Missouri had failed to enfranchise African

American men. As they had debated the issue, deep fault lines among Missouri Radicals had emerged. Radicals’ fear of Confederate sympathizers had only just managed to overcome the ethnic divides in their coalition. The strained relationship between Drake and the Germans did not auger well for the future of their plan to put the injustice of slavery and the violence of the Civil War years behind them. As the whole nation confronted these tasks, however, German Missourians had already shown that immigrant men’s citizenship could provide a template for African Americans. German-American

Radicalism with all its strengths and limitations would become part of the national discussion of Reconstruction.

107

CHAPTER 3

“A PRINCIPLED ELEMENT”: GERMAN-AMERICAN REPUBLICANS, 1865-1868

After a tense day of polling under clear autumn skies, about five thousand excited

Republicans gathered at a downtown Cleveland park on the evening of November 3,

1868 to hear the results of the presidential election come in over the Western Union telegraph wire. Ohio had gone for the successful Republican presidential candidate,

Ulysses S. Grant. The popular former general had also scored a significant local victory, winning over 60 percent of the total vote in Cleveland and majorities in four of its five

“German” wards.1 German Cincinnatians contributed to Grant’s win even more decisively. Of the city’s five most German wards, four gave Grant greater winning margins than he enjoyed in the city as a whole. All backed Grant more strongly than they had Lincoln in 1860.2 In Missouri, St. Louis’s German wards yielded similar returns.3

Republican newspapers felt entitled to crow about these results.4 “It does the Deutschtum

1 I define Cleveland’s “German” wards as those where more than 30 percent of the white male residents over twenty-one were German-born. See the table 1 in the appendix for details. 2 I use newspaper judgments as the basis of my definition See table 2. 3 St. Louis’s “German” wards are defined as wards where over 30 percent of the total population was German-born based on an 1858 city census. See table 3. Missouri’s voter registration process disqualified relatively few (697 of 32,635) St. Louis voters for disloyalty. Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 256. 4 “All honor to the brave German Republicans” wrote the Cincinnati Commercial, 5 November 1868. Democratic papers confirmed the Republican inclination of German voters in Cincinnati in 1868. Steven J. Ross, Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1788-1890 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 204. The Westliche Post maintained that the votes of St. Louis Germans had ensured “all citizens of this great land may compete with each other on the path of progress.” (“… alle Bürger dieses großen Landes auf der Bahn des Fortschritts mit einander wetteifern mögen.”) Westliche Post, 4 November 1868. 108 in Cleveland particular credit,” the Wächter am Erie commented, “that in this election, by a very large majority, it stood on the side of right, honesty, justice, and Grant.”5 The

election had confirmed Carl Schurz’s impression of German-American support. The

veteran Republican campaigner had judged, “Even in ’60 the spirit was not better.”6

While they may have exaggerated the Republicanism of German Americans,

Schurz and the newspapers alluded to an important phenomenon: German-born Ohioans and Missourians who had joined the party before the war supported Grant in 1868. They turned out for the Republicans in substantial numbers in the metropolitan centers of

Cincinnati and St. Louis, in some smaller Ohio cities such as Cleveland, Toledo, and

Sandusky, and in the swath of German settlement west from St. Louis through central

Missouri. It would be the last presidential election in which German Ohioans and

German Missourians would identify strongly with the Republican Party. When immigrants cast ballots for Grant in 1868, they supported protecting African Americans’ civil and political rights in the former Confederate states. Congressional Republicans developed their Reconstruction plans in response to the challenges of compelling former

Confederates to acknowledge the results of the war and fostering a free labor economy in the place of slavery. The post-war climate played into the hands of a small number of

Radicals who believed that black men should be able to vote, and by 1868, the

Republican Party found itself committed to dramatically reshaping American citizenship to eliminate racial distinctions. The Republican national platform only endorsed African

5 “Es gereicht dem Deutschthum in Cleveland zur besonderen Ehre, daß es in dieser Wahl mit einer sehr großen Mehrheit auf Seite des Rechts, der Ehrlichkeit, der Gesetzlichkeit und Grants stand.” Wächter am Erie, 4 November 1868. The same issue provides the account of election day. 6 “Selbst im Jahre 60 war der Geist nicht besser.” Schurz to Preetorius, Syracuse, 9 September 1868, reel 3, Schurz Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter LC), Washington, D.C. (microfilm edition, 1971). 109 American suffrage as a means to reconstruct the South, and Grant carefully avoided

commenting on the issue during the campaign, but Ohio and Missouri’s Republican

leaders would back referenda to enfranchise their black populations. To German

Americans, the Republican Party would come to stand for the ideal of participatory citizenship for all American men.

This chapter focuses not on Republican policies, but on how German-speaking

Republicans in Ohio and Missouri represented Congressional Reconstruction.7 German

Republicans would adopt a Radical campaign strategy that I label a Republican “politics

of principle.” They built upon the inclusive and active idea of male citizenship that

German Radicals had pioneered in Missouri in 1865. German-speaking Republican politicians would justify African American suffrage by appealing to the memory of the

war and the interests of white workers, but they would also argue that all male citizens

simply must be allowed to vote—on principle. Although they were hardly alone in

supporting universal manhood suffrage, German-born Republicans added a distinctive

element to Reconstruction. Anglo-American Republicans would routinely contrast

immigrants and African Americans. They presented African American voters as a potential counterweight to ignorant and lazy immigrants—chiefly Catholics—who

supported the Democrats. German Radicals, on the other hand, would emphasize the

rights immigrants and African Americans shared as new citizens. They would denounce

racism, compare American and European theories of government, and frame African

American rights in terms of the immigrant experience. American citizenship, they would

7 As Michael Les Benedict observes, historians have spent more time scrutinizing the motives of prominent Radicals than considering how voters responded to Republican arguments. Benedict, “The Politics of Reconstruction,” in American Political History: Essays on the State of the Discipline, ed. John F. Marszalek and Wilson D. Miscamble (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 54-107. 110 tell voters, must transcend both race and ethnicity. With their distinctive immigrant perspective, German Americans reinforced the coherence of Radicalism as a theory of

citizenship.

Between 1865 and 1868, Radicalism would spread through German Republican

ranks. Those who supported enfranchising the freedmen—Carl Schurz for example—

would rise in the party while conservatives struggled to retain their constituents’ support.

Yet despite Republican advocacy of equal political rights, from 1863 to 1870, black

suffrage referenda would fail in numerous northern states that returned Republican

majorities. Like Anglo-American Republicans, some German Republicans would decline

to vote to enfranchise black men in Ohio in 1867 and in Missouri in 1868. This suggests

that the politics of principle involved a subtle relationship between ideals of citizenship

and German attitudes toward African Americans. Republican German Americans appear

to have found the principle of inclusive political citizenship attractive even if they did not

entirely welcome the prospect of black voters. Indeed, the politics of principle drew power from the fact it was often attenuated from the practice of African American voting.

German Republicans would continue to judge the rights of citizenship in light of their

own experiences. Their commitment to broad, non-discriminatory citizenship did not

necessarily imply sympathy for African Americans.

* * * * *

Throughout the northern and border states, a relatively small group of Radicals

managed to convince white Republicans who believed African Americans were inferior

to support black rights. The appeals Republicans used to win support for their

Reconstruction plans can be organized into the three rough categories of memory,

111 economic interests, and citizenship ideals.8 First, the raw memory of the conflict

influenced how Ohioans and Missourians reacted to Republican policies. Following the

end of the Civil War, they sensed that former Confederates and their sympathizers did not

accept its most obvious results: the preservation of the Union and emancipation. The

lenient attitude of Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, encouraged the passage of defiant state laws, known collectively as Black Codes, in late summer and fall

of 1865. Varying by state, these acts restricted the freed people’s property ownership,

movement, and contract rights. Northerners also learned of assaults on and even murders

of black and white Unionists in the South, the sort of occurrences that were a continuing

concern in Missouri. Massive anti-black riots such as those in Memphis and New

Orleans in 1866 shocked Republicans around the country. The violence and

intransigence of white southerners allowed Radicals to promote the enfranchisement of

African American men as a measure necessary to vindicate and secure the Union

sacrifice.9 Such appeals would later be dismissed as “waving the bloody shirt,” a phrase that suggested Republicans cynically used the memory of the war to partisan ends. In

8 David W. Blight uses this triad, writing, “Reconstruction was at once a struggle over ideas, interests, and memory.” Blight uses memory much more subtly than I do, but I find his schematic useful. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion, 51. 9 Blight interprets Reconstruction as “one long referendum on the meaning and memory of the verdict at Appomattox,” in which Radical Republicans represented the “emancipationist” memory of the war. Blight, Race and Reunion, 31, 2, 31-63. The Union veterans’ organization, the Grand Army of the Republic, combined Radical politics and military commemoration during the years 1866 to 1872. Mary Dearing, Veterans in Politics: The Story of the GAR (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952); James N. Primm, “The G.A.R. in Missouri,” Journal of Southern History 20 (1954): 356-75; Elmer E. Noyes, “A History of the Grand Army of the Republic in Ohio from 1866 to 1900” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1945); Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), xiii-xiv. 112 those early years, however, Radicals used the fresh memory of the war to encourage much needed protections for African Americans and other southern Unionists. 10

White Republicans’ perception of the country’s economic interests also contributed to Radicals’ surprising success in advocating political citizenship for African

American men. Republicans in Missouri and Ohio were among those who hoped to stabilize the southern economy as quickly as possible. Ohio would benefit from the economic revival of the region fed by the Ohio River. Missourians hoped to shake the stigma of slavery and attract immigration and industrial investment. St. Louis ambitiously claimed the mantle of “Future Great City of the World.”11 In the late 1860s, most Republicans believed that establishing a strong free labor system in the place of slavery would pave the way for economic growth and social harmony.12 They were reassured that recently enslaved African Americans exhibited the attributes upon which free labor’s success depended. Republicans portrayed the freed people as hard-working and committed to self-improvement despite white depredations.13 For many Republicans, suffrage had the advantage of allowing African Americans to defend their economic

10 For a perceptive description of the aftermath of the war in 1865, see Eric L. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1960), 15-41. Foner, Reconstruction, 487-88 provides a brief description of “bloody shirt” rhetoric. 11 The quotation comes from the title of a Reconstruction Era book: L.U. Reavis, Louis: The Future Great City of the World (St. Louis: C. R. Barns, 1876). Indicative of the post-war energy were the campaign to move the U.S. capital to St. Louis, the completion of the first bridge across the Mississippi to Illinois, and the attempt to attract new immigrants. Parrish, A History of Missouri, 3:198-232; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 177-227; Norman L. Crockett, “A Study of Confusion: Missouri’s Immigration Program, 1865-1916,” Missouri Historical Review 57 (1963): 248-60. 12 Foner, Reconstruction, 233-37; Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 6-40. Historians have successfully refuted the interpretation that Radical Republicans were united by common business interests and shared a position on tariffs, banks, and the currency. Stanley Coben, “Northeastern Business and Radical Reconstruction: A Re-Examination,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 46 (1959): 67-90. 13 Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 10-14, 72-75. 113 rights with the least possible federal intervention. Political citizenship for African

Americans could safeguard Republicans’ economic interests and ideals.14

Republicans appealed to memory and interests to create support for African

American citizenship throughout the country, but Reconstruction was driven by radical ideas. Radicals who were committed to black suffrage helped convert the memory of the war and northerners’ understanding of their economic interests into policies that reshaped

American citizenship.15 Over Johnson’s veto, Republicans in Congress passed the Civil

Rights Act of 1866, which protected freed people’s legal, property, and contractual rights.

Later that year, they proposed the Fourteenth Amendment to write civil rights provisions into the Constitution and overturn the controversial exclusion of blacks from American citizenship that Roger Taney had promulgated in the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling in the

Dred Scott case. For the first time, the Constitution defined national citizenship as a status based on birth or naturalization, and it prohibited states from abridging “the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” Republicans did not yet intend

to enfranchise black men, but the amendment proportionally reduced the Congressional

representation of states that denied adult men the vote.

Following reassuring mid-term Congressional elections in 1866, Republicans in

Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which included manhood suffrage as a

14 Ibid., 41-44, 72. 15 My interpretation here reflects the “revisionist” assessment of the motives of leading Republicans that emerged among professional historians during the of the 1960s. For historiographical summaries, see LaWanda Cox and John H. Cox, “Negro Suffrage and Republican Politics: The Problem of Motivation in Reconstruction Historiography,” Journal of Southern History 33 (1967): 303-30; Larry Kincaid, “Victims of Circumstance: An Interpretation of Changing Attitudes Toward Republican Policy Makers and Reconstruction,” Journal of American History 57 (1970): 48-66; Michael W. Fitzgerald, “Reconstruction Politics and the Politics of Reconstruction,” in Reconstructions, ed. Brown, 91-116. Eric Foner’s Reconstruction represents a culmination of sorts of this interpretive school. For his historiographical debts, see Foner, Reconstruction, xix-xx. 114 condition for the political reintegration of the former Confederate states. Although

Congressional Republicans only advocated black men’s political citizenship in the former

Confederacy until after the 1868 election, party leaders backed suffrage referenda within

northern and border states. In 1867, Republican legislatures in Ohio and Missouri

decided to place black male suffrage before voters, joining states such as Kansas,

Wisconsin, New York, Iowa, and Minnesota.16 Radicals had identified their party with

African American suffrage before they proposed the Fifteenth Amendment. In 1869, this final Reconstruction amendment prohibited any state from denying citizens the right to vote on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” 17 Although women’s suffrage had come up in the debates enough to irritate German-born

Republicans, sex remained a legitimate basis for discrimination under the amended

Constitution.

To understand the national context for developments in Ohio and Missouri, it is important to remember that Radical ideas were tempered before they were enacted into law.18 Radicals were constrained by their own racism, constitutional conservatism, and economic reservations. Their more moderate colleagues and the specter of a potentially hostile northern electorate also acted as checks.19 Throughout Reconstruction, white

16 Only Iowa and Minnesota, both with small black populations, approved African American suffrage by referendum during this period, and over fifteen states and territories rejected similar proposals. Historians recognize, however, that a majority of northern white Republican voters supported African American suffrage. See Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 89; Foner, Reconstruction, 223; Wang, The Trial of Democracy, 22; Gillette, The Right to Vote, 25-27. 17 For a useful summary of Congressional Republicans’ gradual acceptance of African American suffrage, see Wang, The Trial of Democracy, 1-48. 18 The significant body of work that emphasizes the conservative limits of Reconstruction is labeled “post- revisionist.” See Foner, Reconstruction, xxi. 19 For the diversity of views among so-called Radicals and the effects of the political process on converting their ideas into policies, see Benedict, Compromise of Principle. Michael Perman also provides a brief but thoughtful description of how Radicals drove Republican policy but found their efforts frustrated by the moderates and conservatives who far outnumbered them. Michael Perman, “The Politics of 115 Radicals compromised, stalled, and equivocated. They were quicker to implement

African American suffrage in southern states than in their own districts. Many northern

Republicans exposed themselves to charges of hypocrisy as they promoted African

American rights as a practical means to ensure loyalty in the states of the old

Confederacy.20 Although Republicans had accepted a more active central government during the war, they were reluctant to increase federal power to the extent necessary to protect political rights within states. By the time that legislation and constitutional amendments had been subjected to the compromises of practical politics, they contained moderate wording that would later impede enforcement.21 Furthermore, Radicals did not even come close to uniting behind land redistribution, a policy that African Americans hoped could secure the autonomy that would make their freedom meaningful.22 Such economic intervention would have cut against their free labor ideology.

Reconstruction,” in A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction, ed. Lacy K Ford ( Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 330-31. Many historians observe that Republicans feared racial equality was a losing issue, especially after electoral defeats in 1867. See Michael Les Benedict, “The Rout of Radicalism: Republicans and the Election of 1867,” Civil War History 18 (1972): 334-44. On Ohio, see Robert D. Sawrey, Dubious Victory: The Reconstruction Debate in Ohio (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 115-19. 20 On balance, I consider Radicals ideologically motivated, but many historians have provided useful reminders of the limits of Republican thought. For a broad presentation of Republican prejudice and hypocrisy, see C. Vann Woodward, “Seeds of Failure in Radical Race Policy,” 125-47; and August Maier, “Negroes in the First and Second Reconstructions of the South,” Civil War History 13 (1967): 114-30. William Gillette argued that when northern Republicans did promote black suffrage, they were motivated by the simple desire to profit from black votes. Gillette, The Right to Vote. Felice Bonadio similarly maintained that Ohio Republicans cynically adopted the “black hobby” of African American suffrage to gain an edge in contested counties. Bonadio, North of Reconstruction: Ohio Politics, 1865-1870 (New York: New York University Press, 1970), 92-106. Robert Sawrey identifies a boarder range of motives, including the hope to avoid hypocrisy. Sawrey, Dubious Victory, 101. On the economic constraints on Republicans’ approach, see Stanley, From Consent to Contract, Montgomery, Beyond Equality, and Foner, “, Confiscation, and Reconstruction,” in Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War, ed. Foner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 128-49. 21 Benedict, “Preserving the Constitution”; Maltz, Civil Rights, the Constitution, and Congress. 22 Foner, Reconstruction, 102-10, 235-37, 309-11; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 398-404; Maier, “Negroes in the First and Second Reconstructions of the South,” 120-21; Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 129-59. 116 For all its limitations, Radicalism remained, as historian Eric Foner observes,

“first and foremost a civic ideology, grounded in a definition of American citizenship.”23

Like the German Americans in the Missouri constitutional convention of 1865, Radicals rejected the notion that any man should be relegated to a second-class form of citizenship. They believed that male citizenship necessarily included voting rights and that if the United States was true to its republican ideals, the American nation could incorporate people from a range of backgrounds. There are signs that this notion appealed to many voters. In what one historian calls “a delicate dance with public opinion,” Radicals made the ideal of race-neutral citizenship politically viable.24

Republican campaigners sometimes attempted to detach the notion of equal citizenship

rights from any specific reforms, but they could not ignore the fact that their party stood

for a redefinition of American citizenship even before the 1868 election. Some editors

and politicians provocatively chided the “cowardice and prejudice” of readers who did

not support suffrage.25 Given the existence of Republican voters who rejected suffrage

referenda in northern states and territories, it is tempting to conclude Republicans

retained national majorities despite their professed support of African Americans. Such an interpretation does not, however, account for the intensifying references to the

23 Foner, Reconstruction, 233. See also Eric Foner, “Reconstruction Revisited,” Reviews in American History 10, no. 4 (1982): 82-100. 24 Benedict, “The Politics of Reconstruction,” 80; Benedict, Compromise of Principle, 326. Benedict is unusual in suggesting suffrage could work in Republicans’ favor issue despite voters’ racism. Studies of individual northern states emphasize divisions among Republicans and voter racism. See Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule; Sawrey, Dubious Victory; Bonadio, North of Reconstruction; James C. Mohr, ed., Radical Republicans in the North: State Politics during Reconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). In contrast, a study of Iowa, which ratified black male suffrage in 1868, demonstrates how Republicans successfully communicated the principle of racial equality to the electorate. Robert R. Dykstra, Bright Radical Star: Black Freedom and on the Hawkeye Frontier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 208-29. 25 See for example Cleveland Leader, 9 October 1867. I include German-language evidence below. 117 principle of equal political rights for all men. As a Radical senator from Kansas recognized in 1869, “The strength of the Republican party consists in its adherence to principle, and to that embodiment of its principles, equality of rights among men …. It was that for which it was organized; and instead of being a source of weakness it is, in my opinion, a source of strength and power.”26 Regardless of the extent of actual support for black suffrage among leading Republicans, savvy politicians crafted an attractive politics of principle. Pleas to implement freedom and equality appeared alongside emotive appeals to the memories of wartime sacrifices and calculated references to economic self-interest.

* * * * *

The post-war fortunes of Friedrich Hassaurek demonstrate that a conservative approach to Reconstruction citizenship failed to captivate German Republicans. Famous for rallying immigrants against slavery, “popery,” and exploitative working conditions before the war, Hassaurek returned to Cincinnati from his diplomatic post in Quito,

Ecuador in February 1866 a changed man. A bemused Democratic paper commented that he had transformed from a Saul into a Paul.27 This Forty-Eighter had put his years of activism behind him. He agreed with correspondents who referred disparagingly to the

Republicans who supported African American suffrage as “Reds” and “Radicalissimi.”28

The war had reinforced the radicalism of his contemporaries. They had spent four years combating white southerners and moderate Republicans. Hassaurek, on the other hand,

26 Samuel C. Pomeroy, Congressional Globe, 40th Cong., 3rd sess., 708 (29 January 1869); quoted in Benedict, Compromise of Principle, 326. 27 Columbus Westbote, 19 April 1866. 28 E. Lee to Hassaurek, Guayaquil, Ecuador, 8 June 1868; C. N. Riotte to Hassaurek, Washington, D.C., 9 April 1868, box 1, folder 5, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. 118 was out of touch with the mood among Ohio’s German-born Republicans.29 He was assimilating, growing closer to the native-born leaders of the party than he was to his constituents in German-speaking neighborhoods, which explains some of his creeping conservatism.30 Ohio’s Anglo-American Republicans warmly accepted Hassaurek as “a man of intellect and culture” whose “opinion is worth having.”31 Yet Hassaurek’s power still rested on his leadership of German immigrants.32 Immediately on his return, he bought a stake in the largest of Cincinnati’s German-language newspapers, the

Republican Volksblatt, and resumed the role of influential editor.33 His conservative course was shaped by his mistaken conviction that the Republican Party would lose

German votes if it supported African Americans. His belief in the essential conservatism

29 Hassaurek sent at least some of his time in Quito writing a book on his experiences. Friedrich Hassaurek, Four Years among Spanish-Americans (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1867). During the war, Hassaurek’s wife also initiated much-publicized divorce proceedings against him on the grounds of adultery. See Wittke, “Friedrich Hassaurek,” 11; papers in box 1, folder 4, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. Hassaurek’s correspondence displays his interest in partisan patronage. He sought positions for himself and his half-brother. For example, see Nixon to Hassaurek, 23 February 1866, box 2, folder 8; to Hassaurek, Washington, D.C., 6 January 1867, box 2, folder 8; Hassaurek to Rutherford B. Hayes, Cincinnati, 28 March 1869, box 2, folder 10, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. 30 Carl Wittke maintained Hassaurek’s life followed a pattern typical of Forty-Eighters of “gradual Americanization, and the conversion of rabid young radicals into conservative, successful citizens.” Wittke, “Friedrich Hassaurek,” 2. Bruce Levine, who makes a Radical hero of Hassaurek during the antebellum years, endorses the interpretation that growing prosperity and “Americanization” among the Forty-Eighters contributed to their “conservative drift.” Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 264. 31 Silas Tressadeau to William Henry Smith, Dayton, 13 March 1866, folder 2, William Henry Smith Papers, OHS. Hassaurek’s associates and correspondents included Senator John Sherman, future president Rutherford B. Hayes, Congressman James Ashley, and influential Republicans Murat Halstead and Donn Piatt. 32 His Anglo-American Republican correspondents often asked for favorable billing in his newspaper. See James Ashley to Hassaurek, Toledo, 15 September 1868, box 2, folder 8, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. Republicans saw him as a representative of the “German element.” See for example W. Howells to William Henry Smith, Jefferson, Ohio, 7 May 1867, folder 4, William Henry Smith Papers, OHS. 33 Unfortunately, the Volksblatt for this period has not survived, but its positions were reported in other Cincinnati papers and the Westliche Post. 119 of German-born voters featured in his exchanges with the Volksblatt’s Washington correspondent and Ohio Senator John Sherman.34

Assuming that German immigrants rejected racial equality, Hassaurek resisted the

Republican Party’s movement toward suffrage. As early as 1864, Hassaurek had indicated that he expected that abolition would be the extent of Republican commitment to African Americans. Once emancipation was achieved, he suggested, the reason for the party’s existence would disappear.35 In 1866, Hassaurek defended Andrew Johnson against escalating criticism as the president vetoed bills reauthorizing the Freedmen’s

Bureau and protecting civil rights in February and March.36 Discerning the swing toward the Democrats in upcoming local elections, he hoped that a version of the Union Party, led by Johnson and appealing to Democrats, would hold together.37 When that became impossible, he allied with conservative and moderate Ohio Republicans in an effort to keep black enfranchisement off the party’s state platform in 1867.38 Hassaurek’s actions brought him into conflict with more radical German Republicans. When former general

August Willich, encouraged by J.B. Stallo, entered the race for county auditor in

34 C.N. Riotte to Hassaurek, Washington, D.C., 9 April 1868, box 1, folder 5, Hassaurek Papers, OHS; Hassaurek to John Sherman, 27 January 1868, John Sherman Papers, Library of Congress, quoted in Sawrey, Dubious Victory, 121. 35 Hassaurek, “Philosophical Dissertation on the Issues of 1864,” box 2, folder 7, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. 36 Cincinnati Commercial, 13 March 1866; Westliche Post, 10, 24, 30 March 1866. 37 Westliche Post, 30 March 1866. For excerpts from an anti-Radical editorial in the Volksblatt later that year, see Westliche Post, 11 September 1866. 38 J.D. Cox to Hassaurek, Columbus, 13 May 1867; Rufus Spalding to Hassaurek, Washington, D.C., December 1867, box 2, folder 8, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. Hassaurek also had strong ties to Heinrich Börnstein, whom he employed as European correspondent for the Volksblatt. Börnstein’s conservatism had alienated him from Missouri German Republicans. In 1868, Hassaurek drafted a version of the Ohio Republican platform that spoke of Reconstruction only in generalities. See Rutherford B. Hayes to Hassaurek, Columbus, 14 February 1868, 19 February 1868, box 2, folder 10; William H. West to Hassaurek, Columbus, 14 February 1868; S. J. Critfield to Hassaurek, Columbus, 18 February 1868, box 2, folder 8, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. See also William Penn Nixon to Hassaurek, Washington, D.C., 23 February 1866, box 2, folder 8, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. 120 Cincinnati’s Hamilton County, Hassaurek made the conspicuous decision not to support

him. Willich won anyway. 39 Behind the scenes, Hassaurek tried to negotiate the sale of the Cleveland Wächter am Erie in order to displace its long-time editor and owner, the

Radical August Thieme. In challenging Thieme’s leadership, Hassaurek hoped to reorient Ohio’s German Republicanism along conservative lines.40

Yet Hassaurek had miscalculated the mood of Ohio’s German Republicans.

Thieme refused to sell his paper or abandon his opinions. Hassaurek, on the other hand, reluctantly adjusted his arguments to accommodate the party’s direction. In April 1867, the Republican legislature decided to allow Ohio men to vote on the issue of enfranchisement, and the Republicans became the party of universal male suffrage.41 In the weeks before the referendum, Hassaurek informed a German crowd in Cleveland that

“universal suffrage” was necessary. His two-hour speech demonstrated that the Radical idea of race-neutral citizenship could build on northern anger at apparently unrepentant white southerners. Johnson and the Democrats, he argued, encouraged the “aristocrats of the South,” who continued to threaten the safety of the Union and “strove to maintain slavery under another name.” He spoke of citizenship in terms that related to the immigrant experience. Sounding like his Radical Landsmänner, Hassaurek compared the citizenship of immigrants and African Americans and contrasted the status of the

American citizen to the European subject. He explained that the United States was “‘a

39 The Westliche Post supported Willich and described Hassaurek as a wirepuller (“Drahtzieher”). Westliche Post, 7 August 1866. See also Cincinnati Volksfreund, 14 October 1866; Easton, The Ohio Hegelians, 197. 40 Rufus Spalding to Hassaurek, Washington, D.C., 29 January 1868; Rufus Spalding to Hassaurek, Washington, D.C., 4 February 1868, box 2, folder 8; Louis Smithnight to Hassaurek, Cleveland, 18 February 1868; August Thieme to Hassaurek, Cleveland, 8 February 1868, box 1, folder 5, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. 41 His Democratic opponents noted Hassaurek’s shifting position. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 30, 31 September 1867, 7 October 1867. 121 free nation,’ that is a nation the laws of which grant equal political rights to whites or blacks, immigrants or native-born.” A vote for the Democrats would be a vote for

version of the European system German Americans had implicitly rejected through

migration—“an aristocracy of race.”42

Employing the German-American politics of principle did not make Hassaurek a

Radical. His speeches often revolved around accusations that Democrats were traitorous, barbarous, and financially irresponsible.43 Hassaurek also continued to express his prejudices. A fellow Republican told him that a comment he made in 1868 “expresses my sentiments so exactly …. If a gets his throat sque[e]zed … a law is pen[n]ed that niggers’ throats must not be squeezed.”44 Conservative Republican politicians throughout the Union took the calculated move of supporting African American suffrage referenda and Grant for president. Hassaurek’s own calculations were finely tuned to the mood of the German electorate. While this sensitivity would later motivate him to leave the Republican camp, in 1867 and 1868 it led him to use idealistic language in support of

African American suffrage.

Hassaurek’s shift away from conservative politics indicates the trend toward radical campaigning in German Republican circles by 1868. The Cincinnati editor followed the lead of more prominent German-born Republicans who were quicker to oppose Johnson’s Reconstruction policies. Franz Sigel had become the Union’s most famous German-American general after his role at Camp Jackson. Despite doubts about

42 “Die Nothwendigkeit des allgemeinen Stimmrechts”; “die Aristokratie des Südens streben nach Beihaltung von Sklaverei unter einem anderen Names”; “‘Wir sind eine freie Nation,’ das heißt eine Nation, deren Gesetze gleiche politische Rechte gewährt für Weiße oder Schwarze, Einwanderte oder für Geborene”; “eine Aristokratie der Race.” Wächter am Erie, 13 September 1867. 43 Ibid.; Cincinnati Commercial, 27 September 1867, 11 October 1867. 44 E. Lee to Hassaurek, Guayaquil, 11 March 1868, box 1, folder 5, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. 122 his military effectiveness, he had risen to the status of ethnic icon. In 1865, Sigel moved

to Baltimore, where he used his fame to campaign against Johnson and for Republicans

who endorsed enfranchising the freedmen.45 The Turnverein also retained its wartime

Radicalism and supported African American suffrage before the 1868 election. The

central committee of the North American Turnerbund circulated a call for Germans to

vote Republican to “secure one of the greatest political and social revolutions in favor of

freedom.” The organization intended to continue to pursue the nationalistic and

democratic goals they had adopted in Germany in “the new fatherland.”46 More moderate German Republicans joined the resistance to President Johnson after his early

1866 vetoes. Illinoisans Gustav Körner and Friedrich Hecker, the influential Chicago

Illinois Staatszeitung, and the New Yorker Abendpost were not at the forefront of black suffrage, but they accepted the direction that Congress and the party followed.47

Among Johnson’s early critics, the Westliche Post, the Wächter am Erie, and the

St. Charles Demokrat made the arguments that prevailed among German Republicans.

These Radical papers in Missouri and Ohio advocated a slow and thorough reconstruction

of the seceded states. From the outset they were skeptical that the mere abolition of

slavery would prove sufficient to transform southern society.48 By June 1865, the three papers worried that Johnson’s policies were encouraging resistance and violence. On

45 Engle, Yankee Dutchman, 212-17. Sigel’s Baltimore newspaper foundered, and he moved to New York in 1867. 46 “... zur Sicherung einer der großartigen politischen und socialen Umwälzung zu Gunsten der Freiheit.” Wächter am Erie, 28 September 1868; Westliche Post, 25 January 1866; St. Charles Demokrat, 10 October 1868. 47 Neither Körner nor Hecker actively campaigned for Grant in 1868. Freitag, Friedrich Hecker, 305; Koerner, Memoirs of Gustav Koerner, 2:458, 481-82; Wittke, The German-Language Press, 155; Westliche Blätter, 9 March 1866. 48 Westliche Post, 26 January 1865; Wächter am Erie, 29 March 1865, 12 April 1865; St. Charles Demokrat, 6 July 1865, 20 July 1865, 10 August 1865, 14 September 1865. 123 June 22, the St. Louis Westliche Post observed that loyal former slaves appeared to be struggling while their traitorous former owners thrived.49 A few days later, it called on

Republicans in Congress to assume leadership of Reconstruction and work toward

“negro” suffrage.50 At first, the Westliche Post argued that although the Constitution placed suffrage under the control of the states, its spirit, interpreted in light of the

Declaration of Independence, empowered Congress to safeguard citizenship rights.51 The

Democratic Anzeiger des Westens could not let this go unchallenged. After a protracted

debate with its cross-town rival, the Post’s editors took the position common among

Radicals that Congress had the power to legislate African American voting under the

Constitution’s guarantee of “a Republican form of Government” within each state.52 It retorted that the Anzeiger engaged in “Constitutionshumbug,” a term that encapsulated the idea that the Democrats used technical appeals to constitutional limits on federal power to avoid the more fundamental issue of how citizenship should function.53 The

Wächter am Erie also accepted federal intervention to implement suffrage rights. It advocated treating Confederate states as conquered territories until Congress had a chance to amend the Constitution.54

Radical editors did not suppose that the majority of German Republicans automatically shared their opinions, but they saw the persuasive potential of their

49 Westliche Post, 22 June 1865. 50 Ibid. See also 12 July 1865, 23 August 1865, 24 August 1865, and 29 September 1865. The call for Congressional action and African American suffrage was repeated at public meetings of “German Radicals.” For reports, see Wächter am Erie, 31 May 1865; St. Charles Demokrat, 7 December 1865; Westliche Post, 20 January 1866. 51 Westliche Post, 20, 28 July 1865. 52 Westliche Post, 1 August 1865, 7 October 1865, 27 November 1866; Woechentlich Westliche Post, 23 January 1867. For the same position outside St. Louis, see St. Charles Demokrat, 11 January 1866. 53 Westliche Post, 30 September 1865. For similar sentiment, see Westliche Post, 2 March 1867. 54 Wächter am Erie, 3, 28 June 1865. 124 arguments. They incorporated political citizenship for African Americans into a platform

that drew upon their constituents’ memory of the war and economic interests. Like

Anglo-American Republicans, they emphasized that former Confederates and their

Missouri supporters must acknowledge the Union’s military victory. As the St. Charles

Demokrat asked more than once, “Should we reap the fruits of our victory or the rebels?”

The newspaper recognized the attraction of restoring citizenship rights to all southern whites, but it considered Johnson’s rush to amnesty premature and even dangerous.

Missouri Radicals felt threatened by “rebels” who might take loyalty oaths without feeling remorse for their actions or a sense of allegiance to the restored Union. The

Demokrat went on to connect the memory of the war to African American rights. It reported that “‘ex’-rebels” engaged in “barbaric persecution and mishandling of the freed slaves.”55 The Radical papers consistently described opposition to African American rights as the type of “unregenerate” behavior that had caused the Civil War and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.56 In order to prove their own readiness for citizenship, white southerners must respect the citizenship of African Americans. By ignoring this fact, they maintained, Johnson was dismissing the principle for which “the people [had] fought, suffered, and finally triumphed.”57 As Johnson’s presidential term wore on,

55 “Sollen wir die Früchte unseres Sieges ernten oder die Rebellen?”; “Bürgerrecht”; “barbarische Verfolgung und Mißhandlung der freigelassen Sklaven.” St. Charles Demokrat, 20 July 1865. For another reference to the “fruits of victory,” see St. Charles Demokrat, 12 October 1865. 56 “Unverbesserlich.” St. Charles Demokrat, 10 August 1865. See also St. Charles Demokrat, 15 February 1866, 28 November 1867; Wächter am Erie, 15 November 1865; Westliche Post, 12 July 1865, 27 September 1865. 57 “Das Volk [hatte] gekämpft, gelitten und endlich gesiegt.” St. Charles Demokrat, 12 October 1865. 125 Radicals became more insistent that all along the North had fought for the “re-shaping of

the South according to the spirit of freedom, human rights, and real democracy.”58

Radical Germans also maintained that empowering African Americans was in the interests of white workers. Recalling their antebellum arguments about slave labor,

Radicals in Missouri and Ohio argued white workers were at a competitive disadvantage to those who labored under violent and legal coercion. Emancipation had not secured a free labor system but an absurd caricature of it.59 The Wächter am Erie used the example

of the British West Indies to argue that abolition alone did not transform an economic

system. Workers must be “given the opportunity to become intelligent citizens.” Armed

with political rights, “the colored population” could “contribute to enriching the

nation.”60 The Radicals agreed that “restricting the franchise to opponents of free labor”—southern whites as a group—would have the opposite effect.61 In 1868, the St.

Charles Demokrat reprinted an editorial from the Texas Freie Press that sketched the difficulties of implementing Congressional Reconstruction in the Lone Star State. It observed that the “slaveholding aristocracy” had given up slavery but not the intent to control the overwhelmingly black “working class” in the state. The author held out hope that treating every worker “as a member of political society” would rectify the situation.62

58 “Neugestaltung des Südens im Sinne der Freiheit, der Menschenrechte und ächten Demokratie.” St. Charles Demokrat, 11 April 1867. In 1868, evidence supporting Radicals’ predictions only mounted as reports of organized terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan appeared. St. Charles Demokrat, 23 April 1868; Westliche Post, 29 April 1868, 6 May 1868. 59 Westliche Post, 6 September 1865, 1, 21, 30 November 1865, 12 January 1866; Wächter am Erie, 2 September 1865, 9 August 1865. 60 “Falls … ihr die Geglegenheit geboten wird, intelligenter Bürger zu werden… wird die farbige Bevölkerung dazu beitragen, das Land zu bereichen.” Wächter am Erie, 28 June 1865. 61 “… das Stimmrecht auf die Gegner der freien Arbeit beschränken.” Woechentlich Westliche Post, 30 October 1867. Many editorials connected the franchise to the protection of free labor. See St. Charles Demokrat, 11 April 1867. 62 “Sklavenhalter-Aristokratie”; “… als ein Glied der staatlichen Gesellschaft.” St. Charles Demokrat, 9 April 1868. 126 Republicans cast African American citizenship as an economic measure in the interests of the national economy and workers in particular. Free labor ideology conceived of the two as harmoniously entwined.

Sensing labor conflict’s divisive potential, Republicans steadfastly held that the

“worker question” and the “negro question” were one and the same.63 In the short-term, this effort was successful. In April 1865, the Westliche Post fought off a challenge for working-class German votes from the Independent Workingmen’s Ticket in St. Louis municipal elections. The third party ran a compelling enough campaign among German immigrants that the Westliche Post printed an extra election special.64 It warned workers—“Arbeiter, Achtung!”—that the slate was a Conservative conspiracy.65 The single-issue party was indeed anti-black, and it probably lost the mayoral race because

German St. Louisans did not accept its racism.66 In Cincinnati, conservative forces more clearly engineered the election of Workingmen’s candidate Samuel F. Cary to Congress in 1867. Democrats did not run a candidate against Cary in hopes he could attract some

German Republican support.67 This tactic indicates that there was a group of German-

63 “Arbeiterfrage”; “Negerfrage.” Wächter am Erie, 2 September 1865. For the dilemma labor conflict posed Republicans directly following the war, see David Montgomery, Beyond Equality; Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 64-65; Richardson, West from Appomattox, 64-66; Foner, Reconstruction, 475- 88; Richard Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864-97 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 17-68. Other works attentive to the intersections of race, labor, and ethnicity in the Reconstruction politics of the North include Quigley, The Second Founding, and Beckert, The Monied Metropolis. 64 The labor newspaper representing the party claimed a circulation of 20,000 and included some German- language material. David Roediger, “Racism, Reconstruction, and the Labor Press: The Rise and Fall of the St. Louis Daily Press, 1864-1866,” Science and Society 42 (1978): 159, 163-64. 65 Mississippi Blätter, 2 April 1865; Westliche Post, 3 April 1865. It was relieved at the Radical victory. Westliche Post, 4 April 1865. 66 Roediger, “Racism, Reconstruction, and the Labor Press,” 168. 67 Ross, Workers on the Edge, 202-03. The Cincinnati Volksfreund announced that the Democrats would not run against Cary and championed his candidacy. It emphasized that Cary represented an independent movement and printed notices by Cary’s committee describing its desire to win German-born Republicans. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 23 September 1867, 5 October 1867. 127 born, working-class Republicans who would sooner vote for a Workingmen’s candidate than a Democrat. Republicans still remained competitive among German-born urban workers. Men such as Willich and Weydermeyer continued to combine labor activism and radical positions on race within the Republican Party.68 Furthermore, the Democratic

Party was not an unambiguous choice for men attracted to organized labor. Both major parties claimed to represent workers’ interests, the Republicans with their promotion of free labor and the Democrats with their opposition to government spending that subsidized the business interests.”69 Yet newspapers representing both parties opposed class conflict, strikes, and government regulation of working conditions.70 In the election of 1868, they were differentiated by their positions on race and Reconstruction, not on labor.

Radical editors believed that Republicans could win German votes through “a firm insistence on principles,” including “granting voting rights to all loyal citizens without distinction of race, color, or ancestry.”71 Scarcely an editorial on Reconstruction failed to cite such abstract ideals. German Americans conceded that some Republicans

68 Easton, The Ohio Hegelians; Obermann, Joseph Weydermeyer; Levine, The Spirit of 1848. Weydermeyer died of in August 1866. 69 German Democrats campaigning routinely depicted the Republicans as supporters of African Americans and the “monied aristocracy” and called on “German workers” to realize that they did not share the interests of these groups. See for example Cincinnati Volksfreund, 23 January 1866; Columbus Westbote, 5 November 1868; Fremont Courier, 3 October 1867, 27 August 1868. 70 On the Republican side, the Westliche Post urged artisans and laborers to form cooperatives to pool their buying power and develop savings and insurance schemes. Westliche Post, 7 January 1865. The Wächter am Erie was more supportive of workers’ organization than the other two papers, but it dissuaded workers from class-based political mobilization. See the issues of 6 August 1865, and 13 September 1867. The St. Charles Demokrat took a somewhat detached position. See for example 9 May 1867. Among Democrats, the Cincinnati Volkfreund remained abstract in its support of “workers” and neutral on eight-hour day legislation during the period 1865 to 1868. Cincinnati Volkfreund, 14 July 1865, 22 February 1866, 23 September 1867. The Anzeiger in St. Louis was firmly opposed to labor organization and regulating working hours. Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 5 April 1866, 16 August 1866, 9 May 1867. 71 “Eine festes Beharren auf den Grundsätzen …”; “Stimmberechtigung für alle loyalen Bürger ohne Unterschied der Rasse, Hautfarbe oder Herkunft.” St. Charles Demokrat, 4 November 1867. 128 might support African American suffrage mostly out of a desire to punish former

Confederates, but “principle” held special appeal for German voters.72 An 1867 editorial in the Westliche Post provides a convenient summary of the arguments Radicals directed

at German Americans. Black suffrage, the paper editorialized, would complete the task

German immigrants had begun when they joined the Republican Party. The St. Louis newspaper linked Radicalism to ethnic pride:

The Germans have stood from the beginning as a strongly principled element in the Republican Party. Keeping its great objective firmly in sight, they consistently marched in the most advanced columns. With few exceptions, they have not been blinded by the benefits of the spoils of power, but have practiced a free, independent critique whenever the party threatens to become untrue or unworthy of its great goal. So they have become a moral power, and have, in the course of events, exercised a powerful influence …. This influence is today as necessary as it ever was.73

Radicals sometimes appeared more firmly committed to the principle of race- neutral citizenship than to its practice. German immigrants seemed more comfortable with abstract principles than they were with the reality of black political power. The dichotomy between principle and practice had surfaced in 1865 in Missouri when

Radicals made it clear that they would accept delays or literacy requirements as long as the state constitution did not insert the word “white” as a qualification for voters. The

Wächter am Erie made the difference between principle and practice clear during Ohio’s black suffrage referendum in 1867. Trying to keep balky Republicans in line, Radical

72 St. Charles Demokrat, 6, 13 December 1866; Westliche Post, 21 January 1866, 3 November 1868. For other disavowals of vindictiveness, see Wächter am Erie, 12 April 1865; Westliche Post, 21 November 1865. 73 “Die Deutschen haben von Anfang an in der republikanischen Partei gestanden als ein streng prinzipielles Element. Ihre groszen Endzwecke fest im Auge haltend, sind sie beständig in der vorgeschrittensten Colonne marchirt. Mit wenigen Ausnahmen haben sie nicht von den Vortheilen des Gewaltbesitzes verblenden lassen, sondern haben eine freie unabhängige Kritik geübt, so oft die Partei ihren großen Zwecken untreu oder unwürdig zu werden drohte. So sind sie eine moralische Macht geworden und haben auf den Gang der Ereignisse einen gewaltigen Einflusz ausgeübt …. Dieser Einfluß ist heute so nötig, wie er es jemals war.” Woechentlich Westliche Post, 8 May 1867. 129 Ohio Senator Benjamin F. Wade reassured them that the proposed constitutional

amendment was “of no practical significance” given the state’s small black population.

The German paper repeated the comment and pointedly approved it. The Wächter agreed

with Wade that the question was primarily of “great significance in principle.”74 The

implicit message to Cleveland Germans was that they could vote for this “thing of honor”

safely because it would not have any substantive effect.75

In Radical minds, the opposite of principle was not practice but prejudice.

Apparently unafraid of alienating voters, Radicals confronted prejudice—as they

understood it—head on. They used a variety of tactics. First, they described racism as an

impediment to the ideal of a self-governing republic peopled by free and equal male

citizens. Second, they ridiculed the Democratic understanding of the United States as a

“white man’s country” and the Democrats’ use of the “nigger issue.”76 Hardly ever printing the word “nigger,” Radicals implied that its use by Democrats conveyed their

crassness and spite.77 Only “Democratic Demagogues,” according to the Westliche Post,

stooped to such scurrilous appeals to German voters. Third, the editors sought to counter

any attempts to pit immigrants and African Americans against each other. In sum, the paper dismissed the suggestion that black enfranchisement would be “a scandal against

its own dignity that the superior white race cannot tolerate.” The Westliche Post believed

74 “Von keiner practischen Bedeutung”; “Von große principieller Bedeutung.” Wächter am Erie, 12 September 1867. 75 “Ehrensache.” Wächter am Erie, 5 October 1867. 76 Wächter am Erie, 21 September 1867, 7 November 1867, 5 September 1868; Westliche Post, 4 August 1865, 19 January 1866, 9 June 1868, 18 September 1868; St. Charles Demokrat, 22 October 1868. 77 In their own articles, they usually used the terms “negro man” (“Neger”) and “colored man” (“Farbiger”) to refer to African Americans. “Black man” (“Schwarzer”) only occasionally appeared. German speakers feminized these nouns only when referring specifically to women, for example, “Negerin” (“negro woman”). 130 that the Germans who allowed themselves “to be caught in such nets” would

“demonstrate their own pitiful deficiency.”78

While many German immigrants remained loyal to the Democratic Party, the

Radicals’ ideas gained ground among German Republicans. The Republican Congress

and Republican state conventions sponsored policies that would transform American

citizenship, and men such as Hassaurek adopted the justifications Radicals had been

using since 1865. The principle of racial equality was an integral part of the Republican

effort to win elections in Ohio and Missouri. German-born politicians frequently tied this principle to immigrants’ experience of participating in the Revolutions of 1848, of

claiming American citizenship, and of fighting for the Union. On the eve of Grant’s

election, August Willich demonstrated how African American citizenship featured in

German Republican campaigning.79 He addressed Cleveland Germans at overflowing rallies where a veterans’ organization, the Grant Boys in Blue, sang and paraded with torches. Even after Ohioans had defeated African American suffrage in the referendum of 1867, the “celebrated warrior” made black citizenship the centerpiece of the “world historical” efforts that had involved German Americans in two continents.80 The German duty to uphold the “principle that all people are born equal” began in “the struggle for freedom in the old fatherland” in 1848, Willich insisted. He placed Reconstruction in the

78 “Ein Skandal, den die höhere weiße Rasse ihrer eigenen Würden wegen nicht dulden darf”; “Die Deutschen aber, welche sich mit solchen Körbern fangen ließen, würden sich ein erbärmliches Armutszeugniß ausstellen.” Woechentlich Westliche Post, 30 October 1867. For a similar rejection of Democratic race politics, see St. Charles Demokrat, 22 October 1868. 79 Willich’s appearance was typical of rallies that combined military commemoration and political mobilization. In St. Louis, anniversaries of the defeat of Camp Jackson attracted thousands of German immigrants, and in St. Charles County, veterans attended annual reunions at Camp Krekel. The speeches delivered at such occasions filled newspaper columns, often augmented with eye-witness accounts of the festivities. Westliche Post, 11 May 1866, 11 May 1868; Westliche Post, 22 May 1867; St. Charles Demokrat, 9, 16 August 1866, 13 August 1868. 80 “Unser gefeierte Krieger”; “Welthistorisch.” Wächter am Erie, 30 September 1868. 131 context of all the nineteenth-century’s upheavals aimed at creating nations controlled by enfranchised male citizens. He compared white southerners to English aristocrats, the

House of Hapsburg, and the Pope. German-American Democrats had not shaken their

European “feeling of dependence,” he charged. Yet Willich assumed that most German

Americans stood on the side of “progress.” They would, he predicted, “continue to act for the dominance of the German spirit, in accordance with complete freedom.”81

Contributing to the triumph of Republican policies would bring honor to German

Americans.

As Willich’s addresses indicate, African American suffrage often seemed to be all about German Americans. German Radicals distained prejudice, but their support for black political rights was not grounded in the aspirations of the freed people. Although

Republican newspapers reported violence against African Americans with outrage, they focused on distant atrocities occurring “in the South.”82 Even the Missouri newspapers provided little coverage of the violence blacks faced closer to home.83 They also neglected to report the efforts of local African Americans to mobilize politically, organize schools and churches, and achieve economic independence.84 The Demokrat’s

81 “... dem Grundsatze: ‘Alle Menschen sind gleich geboren’”; “ die Kämpfe der Freiheit im alten Vaterlande”; “Abhängigkeitsgefühl”; “Die Deutschen des Landes, aber, welche, in ihrer großen Mehrheit auf Seiten des Fortschritts stehen ... werden fortfahren für die Herrschaft des deutschen Geistes im Sinne vollkommener Freiheit zu wirken.” Wächter am Erie, 29 September 1868. 82 For example, St. Charles Demokrat, 7 February 1867. 83 Eager to attract immigrants and investments, the Radicals were probably unwilling to tar Missouri as violent and backward. No lead editorial in the Westliche Post or St. Charles Demokrat focused on local racial violence from 1865 to Grant’s election. For evidence this represented a significant oversight, see Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 106-10; Michael Fellman, “Emancipation in Missouri,” Missouri Historical Review 83 (1988): 36-56; John S. Hughs, “Lafayette County in the Aftermath of Slavery, 1861- 1870,” Missouri Historical Review 75 (1980): 51-63. 84 The question of African American expectations of freedom beyond Missouri has produced a rich literature. There is a general consensus that while African American valued education and political rights, their politics were grounded in aspirations for personal and community autonomy distinct from the free labor ideology articulated by white Republicans. See especially, Foner, Reconstruction; and Hahn, A 132 account of the celebration of the second anniversary of the founding of the St. Charles

“colored” mutual aid organization was an exception. The paper condescendingly noted that the invited speaker, Charles Tandy, was of above average education (“Bildung”) and spoke correctly and fluently. The Demokrat approved of the way that he encouraged members of his audience to make themselves “worthy” of citizenship and the franchise through cultivating their “spirits” and “characters.” The editor was particularly gratified that Tandy acknowledged the German contribution to emancipation in Missouri.85 The

Westliche Post also turned “the superb speech by the well known colored agitator [John

Mercer] Langston from Ohio” into an occasion for German-American self- congratulation.86 The editors emphasized that only a small number of Anglo-Americans attended the Radical meeting. Once again it was German Americans who “contentiously practice[d] their rights and duties as free citizens,” the Post observed smugly.87

German-American depictions of African Americans reflected their preoccupation with their own interests. Like many Anglo-Americans, German-American Republicans

Nation under Our Feet, 6-8. For historiography developments since Foner’s synthesis, see John C. Rodrigue, “Black Agency after Slavery,” in Reconstructions, ed. Brown, 40-65. The black experience in Reconstruction Missouri demands more attention. For some insights, see Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 110-38; Lawrence O. Christensen, “Black St. Louis: A Study in Race Relations, 1865-1965” (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1972); Dwight, “Black Suffrage in Missouri”; Lawrence O. Christensen, “Schools for Blacks: J. Milton Turner in Reconstruction Missouri,” Missouri Historical Review 76 (1982): 121-35. Reconstruction was also a “turning point” in the political, religious, and educational struggles among black Ohioans. See David A. Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860-1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 32-43, quotation on p. 41; Nikki M. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802-1868 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 161-84; Darrel Bigham, On Jordan’s Banks: Emancipation and Its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006). 85 “Würdig”; “... Ausbildung ihres Geistes, wie ihres Charakters.” St. Charles Demokrat, 3 October 1867. The newspaper misspelled Tandy’s name (“Tendy”), but the speaker must have been St. Louis’s C. H. Tandy. Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 303. 86 “Die prächtige Rede des bekannten farbigen Agitators Langston von Ohio.” Westliche Post, 20 January 1866. 87 “Sie üben ihre Rechte und Pflichten als freie Bürger gewissenhaft aus.” Westliche Post, 21 January 1866. 133 expressed confidence that the freed people would perform admirably as free laborers.

Republicans challenged Democratic reports that former slaves were unwilling to work.

Some may have shirked tasks while in bondage, they conceded, “but that had nothing to

do with the entire race”; it was the natural consequence of forced labor.88 Indeed, the problem Republicans identified following emancipation was that former slaveholders— the “knights”—expected other people to do their work for them.89 They questioned how

Democrats could judge African American behavior given the exploitative laws and anarchic atmosphere of the South.

German Radicals also tried to incorporate blacks into their understanding of international progress. As they had made clear in the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848 and in the Missouri constitutional convention in 1865, Radicals took it for granted that political rights and education both cultivated individuals and created strong states. They understood progress to include improving Bildung (education and cultural development).

Untroubled by passing judgment on others’ accomplishments, German Republicans patronized African Americans even when they praised individuals like Charles Tandy.

Yet for all its arrogance, Bildung also reflected the assumption that individuals were born

with the capacity to learn and develop regardless of race. Radicals were sure that slavery,

not inherited ability, had held back African Americans before emancipation.90 In

September 1867, the Wächter am Erie reported that the advances made by the freed people “in their education and the acquisition of skills, finds no parallel in the history of

88 “Damit hat aber die ganze Race nichts zu .” Westliche Post, 12 January 1866. 89 Wächter am Erie, 9 August 1865. 90 Woechentlich Westliche Post, 31 July 1867. 134 humanity.”91 Radicals often told their readers that the same forces would uplift

Europeans and Americans of African descent. The Demokrat suggested as much when it

explained that the opposition to education for blacks

emerges from the same source from which the opposition to the so-called over- education of the lower classes in Europe arises. ‘Keep the people in ignorance and stupidity, so we can all the more easily control them and exploit them to our advantage.’ That has always been the motto of the tyrants and aristocrats, and that is the motto of their noble like-minded counterparts here.92

The newspaper suggested that completing the task of making citizens of former slaves would only strengthen the United States.

Many Anglo-American Republicans made similar arguments and promoted similar policies, but German Radicals were unusual in the ways they compared immigrant and African American citizenship. Some Anglo-American and black Radicals contrasted patriotic African Americans to immigrants unworthy of citizenship.

Maligning the Irish- and German-American Catholics who voted Democratic in large numbers, they argued that if the nation could survive the influence of these elements, it could not be hurt by African American votes. Frederick Douglass once told Bostonians that if a black man “knows as much when he is sober as an Irishman knows when he is drunk, he knows enough to vote, on good American principles.”93 Although few

Republicans advocated stripping immigrant men of the vote, a renewed wave of criticism

91 “... in ihrer Erziehung und der Erwerbung von Kenntnissen gemacht haben, keine Parallel in der Geschichte der Menchheit findet.” Wächter am Erie, 23 September 1867. Similar claims about African Americans ability to learn or favorable comparisons to whites often occurred in many reports and editorials on Reconstruction policy. See, for example, Westliche Post, 29 July 1865, 29 September 1865, 6 February 1866, 12 September 1867; Wächter am Erie, 12, 23 September 1867. 92 “… entspringt aus derselben Quelle, aus welcher der Widerstand gegen die sogenannte Ueberbildung der untern Volksklassen in Europe hervorging. ‘Haltet das Volk in Unwissenheit und Dummheit, damit wir es desto leichter regieren und zu unserem Vortheil ausbeuten können.’ Das ist der Wahlspruch der Tyrannen und Aristokraten in Europa von jeher gewesen und das ist der Wahlspruch ihrer edlen Gesinnungsgenossen hier.” St. Charles Demokrat, 3 October 1867. See chapter 7 for more on education during Reconstruction. 93 Douglass, “What the Black Man Wants,” 4:66. 135 of working-class immigrants, especially Catholics, swept large American cities such as

New York began after the Civil War.94 German Radicals sometimes echoed insults aimed at Catholics and , but more often they defended immigration as a boon to the United States, insisting that the United States benefited from the addition of new groups of citizens. German immigrants thus helped develop a Radical ideology of citizenship that burgeoned under the exigencies of Reconstruction. In areas where

Republicans counted on German votes, the Radical German idea of citizenship competed with the nativist justifications of black suffrage.

* * * * *

Between 1865 and 1868, Carl Schurz became the national representative of

German-American ideas. One of the leading white exponents of African American suffrage in German or English, Schurz perfected the politics of principle and made

Radicalism palatable to a broad spectrum of voters. His political rise contrasted with the conservative Hassaurek’s post-war fate. The two men were both were young Forty-

Eighters whose participation in the 1860 campaign Lincoln had recognized with diplomatic appointments. Unlike Hassaurek, however, Schurz decided to return from overseas early in 1862 to take a brigadier general’s commission in the Union Army. His command was undistinguished, but his rank augmented his political authority. Schurz also took full advantage of his speaking skills, which were unequalled by the likes of

94 For the continuing role of nativism, anti-Catholicism, and fear or urban workers within the Republican Party during Reconstruction, see Ward McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction: The Public School in the Politics of the 1870s (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 38; Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 89. On the campaign to restrict the suffrage of working- class New Yorkers, which peaked in the mid-1870s, see Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 132-33; Foner, Reconstruction, 490-93; Quigley, Second Founding, 161-74; Beckert, The Monied Metropolis, 184-85, 207-36; Sven Beckert, “Democracy in the Age of Capital: Contesting Suffrage Rights in Gilded Age New York,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 146-74. 136 Hassaurek. Already in 1860, Hassaurek resented Schurz’s reputation as the man who had

German Americans “in his pocket.”95 By the time Schurz moved to Missouri in 1867 to take up co-editorship of the Westliche Post, his lectures were in national demand. In

1871, he commanded the highest fee on the American Literary Bureau’s list of over one hundred speakers, a distinction he shared with Ralph Waldo Emerson.96

During the post-war years, Schurz refined appeals for African American suffrage based on upholding the memory of the war, securing emancipation, creating a free labor economy in the South, and fulfilling the principle of republican government. Sent by

President Johnson to report on the state of the South in the summer of 1865, Schurz determined that the chief executive’s Reconstruction policies were inadequate. He launched a concerted Radical drive, documenting the violence and legal proscriptions that subjugated black workers. Like Radical Germans in Missouri and Ohio, he believed the vote could make the freedman into “an intelligent, reliable and efficient free laborer and a good and useful citizen.”97 In 1865, Schurz emphasized that suffrage would promote a

free labor economy in the South without requiring extensive federal intervention.98 He

said he would postpone “moral” arguments for other occasions.99

95 Hassaurek’s attitude toward Schurz is clear from correspondents who declared they shared his position. Hermann Kreismann to Hassaurek, Washington, D.C., 3 June 1860, box 2, folder 2; Dwight Bannister to Hassaurek, Columbus, 8 November 1860, box 2, folder 6; Guido Ilges to Hassaurek, Vincennes, Indiana, 27 November 1860, box 2, folder 4, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. 96 C.M. Bresford to Schurz, New York, 26 August 1871, reel 6, Schurz Papers, LC. Schurz’s opponents accused himself of selling his services as a political speaker as well. Although he sometimes also received some compensation for his expenses while campaigning, usually the benefits of his political service were less direct. Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 88. 97 Carl Schurz, Report on the Condition of the South (Senate Executive Documents, 39th Cong., 1st sess. no. 2, 1865; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969), 32. 98 Works that emphasize Schurz’s economic ideas include, Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 17- 20; Richard A. Gerber, “Carl Schurz’s Journey from Radical to Liberal Republicanism: A Problem in Ideological Consistency,” Mid-America 82 (2000): 71-99. Schurz’s Radicalism was colored by his economic ideas and his reluctance to expand federal power, but he did not reduce African Americans’ citizenship entirely to their role as workers. His travels also reinforced his notion that education would 137 At the Southern Loyalist (Republican) Convention in Philadelphia in 1866,

Schurz exposed English-speakers to the arguments popular among German Radicals. In a speech on the “logical results of the war,” he appealed to American ideals in the context of an international movement toward perfecting republican government. He compared

Reconstruction to “every great reformatory movement in society, every revolution in favor of popular rights, every sudden onward stride in the progress of civilization.”100

Pressing for a manhood suffrage amendment to the Constitution, he observed that “this

Republic will have achieved true glory and secured lasting peace only when she metes

out impartial justice to all her children.”101 The paternal imagery was characteristic of his habit of setting African Americans apart within his understanding of “the people.” They could not be excluded, but he conceived of them, like Catholics and poor southern whites, as people whom citizenship rights must elevate.102 During the next two years, he

alternated between seeking justice for the “negro” as “a wronged member of the human

family,” and assuring his white audiences that black suffrage would save the whole

country “from the odious yoke of grasping aristocracy.”103

transform African Americans. He was surprised, for example, when a “colored man” he met in impressed him with his “fluent and versatile” conversation. He commented to his wife, “There is no country of the world, save this, in which he would not be received as a gentleman of the upper class.” Schurz to Margarethe Schurz, New Orleans, 12 September 1865, in Intimate Letters, ed. and trans. Schafer, 351. See also Schurz, Report of the Condition of the South, 43. 99 Schurz, Report on the Condition of the South, 63. 100 Schurz, “Logical Results of the War,” 8 September 1866, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 1:377. 101 Ibid., 1:403-04 102 Schurz’s condescension toward Catholics revealed itself in his attitudes toward the village of his birth, Irish Americans, and the people he had encountered on his Madrid assignment. Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, 1:30-38; Schurz, “True Americanism,”1: 60; Schurz to his Parents, 19 August 1861; Schurz to Frederick Althaus, 11 October 1861, in Intimate Letters, 263. He formed his negative opinion of poor southerners of “Anglo-Saxon” descent in during the war. Schurz to [his daughter] Agathe Schurz, 9 November 1863, in Intimate Letters, 292; Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, 3:58. 103 Schurz, Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 1:446. 138 Republicans acknowledged the power of Schurz’s campaigning when they elected him temporary chair of the 1868 national convention that nominated Grant. On the second day of the Chicago meeting, delegates unanimously supported his resolutions endorsing the principles of the Declaration of Independence and offering mercy to former

Confederates only in proportion to their loyalty. That same day, the Cincinnatian

Hassaurek faced humiliation. Encouraged to take the convention hall’s platform by Ohio colleagues, he nearly lost his composure when impatient delegates on the floor began to call for him to cut short his remarks. He tensely struggled through a prepared speech that proposed “universal amnesty and universal suffrage” for Confederates and freedmen.

The convention rejected the measure that would have drastically undercut Republican power in states such as Missouri.104

Schurz’s Radical arguments were embedded in his leadership of German

Republicans.105 Despite his stature in the English-speaking world, he continued to campaign proudly in German.106 Nothing demonstrated his dependence on a German

Republican constituency as clearly as his move to St. Louis in April 1867. Emil

Preetorius had offered Schurz a position that provided income and influence: an interest in a thriving Republican newspaper in a state where German immigrants played a decisive political role.107 Schurz fit in well at the Westliche Post. Announcing the new

104 Cincinnati Commercial, 22, 23 May 1868. Again, his opponents made the most of Hassaurek’s embarrassment and the tensions it revealed in the Republican Party. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 22, 23 May 1868. 105 Many historians ground Schurz’s Radicalism in his experiences of the Revolutions of 1848, but even his most insightful biographer, Hans Trefousse, does not examine the link that citizenship provides between Schurz’s ethnic politics and his Radicalism. Trefousse, Carl Schurz. 106 Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 170-71. 107 Schurz to Preetorius, , 15 July 1866, reel 3, Schurz Papers, LC. 139 partnership, Schurz and Preetorius informed readers that the paper’s “political principles” would not change.108

Schurz shared the Missouri German Radicals’ strategy, capitalizing on

immigrants’ transatlantic perspective and familiarity with the process of acquiring

citizenship. His speech on the 1867 anniversary of the seizure of Camp Jackson

admonished veterans to serve once again as an example to Europe. When German-

American Radicals had helped make the Union cause a war against slavery, he said, “the

sympathies of the civilized world moved powerfully to our side.” Now, they must lead

the way in making the United States a republic “which is founded on the principle that a

government receives its legal power form the consent of the governed.”109 In extolling

the wartime service of German Americans, Schurz located the power of American

republicanism in its ability to extend meaningful citizenship to new groups of men. In an

English speech welcoming General Philip H. Sheridan to St. Louis in September 1867, he

marveled at the diversity represented in the Union Army. He told the general,

You see Americans, white or black, proud that their country calls them its son [sic]. You see Irishmen, proud that their ancestors called the green isle their home. You see the Germans, French, Scandinavians, English, , , Bohemians, , Spanish, proud to be united with you through the bond of common citizenship and the enthusiastic zeal for great common concern, proud to have fought with you, and always prepared to fight with you again.110

108 Woechentlich Westliche Post, 8 May 1867. Schurz already considered Preetorius and himself ideologically well matched. Schurz to Preetorius, Detroit, 10 March 1867, reel 3, Schurz Papers, LC; Woechentlich Westliche Post, 8 May 1867. 109 “… wandte sich die Sympathie der civilisirten Welt mächtig unsere Seite zu”; “welche auf das Princip gegründet ist, daß eine Regierung ihre rechtmäßige Macht von der Zustimmung der Regierien empfängt.” Woechentlich Westliche Post, 22 May 1867. Schurz made a remarkably similar speech at the same occasion the following year. Westliche Post, 11 May 1868. 110 “Sie sehen den Amerikaner, weiß oder schwarz, stolz darauf, daß sein Land Sie seinen Sohn nennt. Sie sehen den Irländer, stolz darauf, daß Ihre Vorfahren die grüne Insel ihre Heimath nannten. Sie sehen den Deutschen, den Franzosen, den Scandinavier, den Engländer, den Ungarn, den Polen, den Böhmen, den Italiener, den Spanier, stolz mit ihnen vereinigt zu sein durch das Band gemeinsamer Bürgerschaft und den enthusiastischen Eifer für eine gemeinsame große Sache, stolz mit Ihnen gekämpft zu haben, und immer bereit, wieder mit Ihnen zu kämpfen.” Woechentlich Westliche Post, 11 September 1867. 140

As a leader of immigrants and Radicals, Schurz believed that uniting diverse groups

under “common citizenship” strengthened the United States. When he was not

addressing a military leader of Irish stock such as Sheridan, he disparaged Irish

Americans, but he never suggested denying them the right to vote. The following month,

he rhetorically asked a Cleveland audience where immigrants would be without the vote.

They would still be called “Dutchmen,” not “our German friends.”111 For Schurz,

African American voting was part of the effort to integrate different groups in the

American polity.

* * * * *

In October 1867, Cleveland’s German Republicans greeted Schurz’s Radical

message with unprecedented applause, serenades, canon shots, and parades.112 He sensed similar approval as he traveled around the country in 1868.113 Diverse audiences—from the “the critical New York Germans” who attended a speech at the Coopers Union, to the residents of rural Missouri, where he found himself spending the night in a cart—hailed him.114 Observers agreed that German support for the Republican Party was at least holding steady in national elections. They were unsure, however, whether that meant that

German immigrants would support the suffrage referenda. The partisan papers tried to stay optimistic. In May 1867, following Ohio and Missouri referendum proposals, the

111 Wächter am Erie, 5 October 1867 112 Ibid., 4 October 1867. 113 Schurz to Preetorius, St. Louis, 23 August 1867; Schurz to Preetorius, Milwaukee, 3 November 1867; Schurz to Preetorius, Valparaiso, Indiana, 16 August 1868; Schurz to Preetorius, New York, 5 September 1868, reel 3, Schurz Papers, LC. See also Schurz to Margarethe Schurz, Milwaukee, 3 November 1867, in Intimate Letters, ed. and trans. Schafer, 412. 114 Schurz to Margarethe Schurz, Albany, 7 September 1868, in Intimate Letters, ed. and trans. Schafer, 446. He considered the Missouri leg the “hardest campaign of my life.” Schurz to Preetorius, Sedalia, Missouri, 30 September 1868, reel 3, Schurz Papers, LC. 141 Westliche Post claimed Americans were no longer divided over the question of black

suffrage. The people who had “prophesized the total defeat of the Union Party” if it took

such steps, now courted the black vote.115 After Ohio’s referendum failed, the paper

revised its expectations. It hoped that if the party adhered to the “true principles of

Republicanism,” the public would come around.116 In private, Schurz steeled himself to

“fight through to fight through the negro suffrage matter …. There are still many prejudices to overcome among the Germans.”117

German Republicans did not unanimously support ballot measures for black

voting in Ohio in 1867 and in Missouri in 1868. The week following Schurz’s Cleveland

speech, only 46 percent of Ohio voters wanted to amend the state’s constitution to

eliminate the word “white” from voting qualifications. At the same time, they gave

Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the governorship by only a slim margin and elected a

Democratic legislature.118 Many “German” wards in Cleveland and Cincinnati actually

cast majorities for African American suffrage. More than 50 percent of voters supported

the amendment in two of Cleveland’s five “German” wards and three of Cincinnati’s.119

On the whole, however, German Americans, like other Americans voted more readily for

Republican candidates than for the suffrage amendment. Since German Ohioans were probably slightly more Democratic as a group, they can hardly be described as unified supporters of black voting. The Wächter am Erie acknowledged its disappointment.120

115 “… die totale Niederlage der radikalen Partei prophezeiten.” Woechentlich Westliche Post, 8 May 1867. 116 “Die wahren Grundsätze des Republikanismus.” Woechentlich Westliche Post, 23 October 1867. 117 Schurz to Margarethe Schurz, St. Louis, 11 May 1868, in Intimate Letters, ed. and trans. Schafer, 435. 118 Sawrey, Dubious Victory, 115-16. 119 See tables 1 and 2. 120 Wächter am Erie, 9 October 1867. 142 In Missouri, a much smaller proportion of German Republicans voted to enfranchise African American men. Although German-born state legislators helped put the measure on the ballot, their Landsmänner, like nearly 57 percent of Missouri voters,

soundly rejected it.121 St. Louis’s first and second wards, where in 1858 most inhabitants had been born in German Europe, gave about 72 and 66 percent of their votes to Grant respectively, but only voted roughly 35 and 22 percent for suffrage.122 None of the rural counties along the Missouri River, which were home to many settlers from Germany, gave the amendment majority support.123 A few communities such as Augusta in St.

Charles County bucked this trend.124 Yet the editors at the Westliche Post and the St.

Charles Demokrat understood that German Americans had helped rebuff suffrage.125

Why did the Radical arguments that swayed many German immigrants to vote for

Grant fail to motivate them to vote to enfranchise black men in their own states? There

were many to vote for Grant. The election of 1868 posed a stark choice between

the war hero and the Democrats who defended Johnson’s policies and southern whites.

New York’s headed the Democratic ticket, which included Frank Blair

in the vice-presidential slot. In 1868, Blair’s racist invective positioned the Democrats as

the party of unrepentant white supremacy. The man who had already antagonized

Missouri Germans reportedly threatened that Grant would not live long if he were

elected.126 For his part, Grant was not personally a Radical. It must have been clear to

German immigrants, however, that a vote for Republicans during Reconstruction was a

121 Dwight, “Black Suffrage in Missouri,” 52-53, 56. 122 See table 3 in the appendix. 123 Dwight, “Black Suffrage in Missouri,” 97-100. 124 Office of the Secretary of State, Elections Division, Election Returns, 1846-1992, box 12, folder 3, MSA. 125 Westliche Post, 5 November 1868; St. Charles Demokrat, 19 November 1868. 126 Parrish, Frank Blair, 256. 143 vote in tacit support of African American suffrage. Their Republican newspapers and politicians supported it, and the Democratic Cincinnati Volksfruend had pointed out as

much during Ohio’s 1867 elections.127

The race card did not play among German-born voters as Democrats hoped and

Republicans feared. German immigrants approached political citizenship for adult men through the lens of their own struggles in Europe and their own quest for power in the

United States. Even immigrants disinclined to accept political equality with black

Americans were receptive to the rhetoric of citizenship rights when Radicals disconnected it from African Americans’ experience. One Illinois soldier gave an indication of how the arguments of radical leaders might play among Republicans who disliked racial equality. “I am not far enough advanced in civilization,” wrote a German- speaking Belleville corporal back in 1863, “that I don’t know the difference between white and black any more.”128 He identified Radical ideas as “progressive,” but he felt

them in tension with his personal prejudices. In effect, he conceded that there was

dissonance between his racism and his political ideals, but he was reluctant to abandon

either. The Illinoisan was just the sort of Republican who might vote for Grant and

against suffrage.

Ultimately, the motivations of individual voters cannot be recovered, but Radical

arguments must have drowned out the more moderate alternatives in part because they

spoke to Republican immigrants’ understanding of the relationship between citizenship

and the sectional crisis. German immigrants were primed to interpret the Civil War as a

127 Cincinnati Volksfreund, 27 September 1867. 128 Henry A. Kircher to His Father, Young’s Point, [Louisiana], 19 April 1863, in A German in the Yankee Fatherland, 92. 144 fight to eliminate the inconsistencies in American citizenship because they saw it in the

light of struggles for citizenship in Europe. German Americans also knew they had profited from citizenship rights in the United States. The war and emancipation were tied

up in their efforts to define themselves as American citizens. African American

citizenship was thus congruent with the German Republican narrative of their role in

American and international history. Reconstruction policies held the larger significance

of providing an example to the world. One German-born New York soldier wrote, “If

Europe wants to be honest, it can take the politics of the United States during the past 4

years as a lofty example.”129 Already in 1865, this fervent Republican worried about threats to the Union’s struggle to advance “world history.” Many men who were less ideologically committed had been attracted to such a position by 1868.

Schurz’s selection to represent Missouri in the Senate following Grant’s election symbolized the extent to which German Republicans helped open unexpected opportunities for African American men. Collating reactions from the national German-

American press, Schurz’s newspaper interpreted his election in January 1869 as a vindication of the “principle of total equality of rights of the immigrant with the native- born element.” It added, “The name of Senator Schurz is to us only a personification of this principle.”130 German Republicans around the country—and even some grudging

129 “Wenn Europa aufrichtig sein will, so kann es an der Politik der United States der letzten 4 Jahre ein grosses erhabenes Beispiel nehmen”; “die Weltgeschichte.” August Horstmann to His Parents, Stevenson, , 23 June 1865, in Deutsche im amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg, ed. Helbich and Kamphoefner, 191. 130 “Prinzip der vollkommenen Gleichberechtigung des eingewanderten mit dem eingeborenen Elemente. Der Name des Senators Schurz ist uns nur die Verkörperung dieses Princips [sic].” Woechentlich Westliche Post, 27 January 1869. 145 Democrats—agreed that Schurz’s election was an honor.131 German immigrants quickly claimed him as their representative and flooded him with letters requesting help with pensions, pardons, and appointments.132 Thousands turned out to serenade Schurz when he returned from Jefferson City to St. Louis. The Westliche Post characteristically believed them committed to “equal rights for all.”133 Schurz had been elected as an immigrant and a supporter of African American suffrage, and he used his acceptance speech to link citizenship rights for immigrant and black men.134 He told Missouri’s lawmakers, “You have demonstrated before the world that the people of Missouri have overcome that prejudice and that narrow-hearted perspective that so easily tarnish the judgment of politicians, and that Missouri opens the gates wide for all those who have the courage, the purpose and the ability to contribute to the completion of the great tasks of this land.” Clarifying that he was not just referring to German Missourians, he emphasized that “the worker of every race and color [should] possess political rights.”135

It is unlikely that Schurz’s supporters all shared his idea of equality, but it is striking that the first German-born senator stood for universal male suffrage. Proclaiming a “new era

131 The Democratic Cincinnati Volksfreund, for example, welcomed his election. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 13 January 1868; Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 174-76. Many Democrats were more skeptical: Columbus Westbote, 28 January 1869; Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt, 24, 31 December 1868, 28 January 1869. 132 Hans L. Trefousee described Schurz as “universally recognized as the representative of the German element in the United States.” Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 175. For documents supporting this interpretation, see reel 4, Schurz Papers, LC; Schurz to L. Benecke, Washington, D.C., 29 February 1869, folder 713, Louis Benecke Papers, WHMC—Columbia. 133 “Gleiche Rechte für Alle.” Woechentlich Westliche Post, 27 January 1869. 134 Schurz clarified his support of African American suffrage and Confederate disfranchisement in a debate with his leading rival. Schurz to Benjamin F. Loan, Jefferson City, 7 January 1869, 9 January 1869, reel 3, Schurz Papers, LC; Woechentlich Westliche Post, 13, 20 January 1869. He also expressed it privately to Elihu B. Washburne as he solicited leading Radical Republican support for his candidacy. Schurz to E.B. Washburne, St. Louis, 10 December 1868, container 62, E.B. Washburne Papers, LC. 135 “… haben Sie vor der Welt dargethan, daß das Volk von Missouri jene Vorurtheile und jenen engherzigen Standpunkt überwunden hat, die so leicht das Urtheil von Politikern trüben, und das Missouri für alle Diejenigen, welche den Muth, die Absicht und die Fähigkeit haben, an der Vollendung der großen Aufgaben dieses Landes mitzuarbeiten ….”; “… daß der Arbeiter jeder Rasse und Farbe politische Rechte besitze.” Woechentlich Westliche Post, 27 January 1869. 146 for Germanism in America,” Schurz arrived in Washington as Congress was about to pass the Fifteenth Amendment.136

136 Schurz to Margarethe Schurz, St. Louis, 24 January 1869, in Intimate Letters, ed. and trans. Schafer, 467. 147

CHAPTER 4

“WHITE OR BLACK IS NOW THE QUESTION”: GERMAN-AMERICAN DEMOCRATS, 1865-1868

In January 1866, a German American writing under the penname “Moreau” warned the readers of the Democratic Cincinnati Volksfreund of the dire situation in

Missouri. The Radicals were using German immigrants as “voting cattle” and “white niggers” to impose an “outrageous despotism,” he told Ohio Democrats. Moreau claimed that the powerful voting registrars administering the 1865 constitution’s “fanatical, unconstitutional test oath” used partisan criteria to determine loyalty. According to him, the registrars disfranchised any man “who does not hold the nigger higher than himself” or “had had a friendly word, or even a drink, with a suspected rebel.” Once Radicals had silenced their opponents, Moreau feared, they would pass “the craziest temperance and

Sabbath legislation” and enfranchise African Americans. He labeled the Westliche Post the Radical Party’s “nigger house maid” and claimed twenty households around his home of Jefferson City had already cancelled their subscriptions, taking to reading the Anzeiger des Westens , the St. Louis paper that supported Missouri’s Conservative Union Party and

shared the Democratic perspective of the Volksfreund .1 In fact, less than a quarter of

German Missourians were Conservatives, but Moreau spoke for these people when he

1 “Stimmvieh”; “weißen Niggern”; “unerhörter Despotismus”; “fanatisch, unconstitutionelle Testeid”; “… wer den Nigger nicht höher hält, als sich selbst”; “… mit einem vermuthlichen Rebel freundlich gesprochen oder gar getrunken hat”; “wahnsinnigsten Temperenz- und Sabbath-Gesetze”; “Niggerhausmagd.” Cincinnati Volksfreund , 13 January 1866. 148 expressed incredulity that German immigrants would ally with African Americans and

Radical tyrants.2

Their experience of becoming American inclined German-born Republicans to endorse African American citizenship. German Conservatives and Democrats would draw on the same experience to fight it. Between the end of the war and Grant’s election, the Democratic Party under various names 3 defined itself in opposition to Congressional

Reconstruction and black rights. German Democrats would resist state and federal action on behalf of freed people, especially granting black men the right to vote. As Moreau hinted, the party’s devotion to would also attract many German

Americans. Democrats championed personal liberty in matters of religion and morality and a restricted economic role for government. But questions of race and citizenship dominated American politics during these years. Democratic leaders would encourage

German immigrants to vote as white men and exclude African Americans from political citizenship. They would pit German immigrants against blacks and emphasize the whiteness they shared with Irish immigrants and former Confederates. Quite simply,

German Democrats campaigned on white supremacy.

Yet there were limits to the power of whiteness to mobilize German-born voters.

German Democrats were in constant argument with German Republicans, especially

Radical German Republicans, over the ideas of citizenship and German-American identity circulating in the German-language public sphere. From 1865 to 1868, tirades such as Moreau’s would not weaken the Republican vote among German Ohioans and

2 See page 61. 3 When referring specifically to Missouri, I use the “Conservative Unionist” label, but when discussing national developments, I include Missouri Conservatives and the short-lived National Union Party under the “Democratic” umbrella. 149 Missourians, who apparently were not particularly sensitive about being called “white niggers.” German-American Democratic editors and politicians would begin to doubt the value of anti-black and pro-white rhetoric in persuading ordinary German Americans to vote for their candidates, forcing them to reevaluate their approach. Democrats had to contend with the Republican dominance of popular understandings of German-American identity. The most successful German-American newspapers and public figures were

Radical Republicans who had created the myth of the freedom-loving German and argued that it was “German” to conceive of the American republic as a nation of diverse peoples where all adult men played an active role in governance. This stood in open conflict with the Democrats’ central contentions that America was a white nation and even if African

Americans were citizens, they were not the sort of citizens who possessed political rights.

It would be difficult to plead for white solidarity in a German-language public sphere permeated by Republican views of German-American identity and citizenship. This chapter reviews the background of German Conservatives in Missouri and German

Democrats in Ohio before examining the extent—the attractions and the limits—of the idea of racially exclusive citizenship among German Americans.

* * * * *

When Moreau was writing in early 1866, Missouri Conservatives were trying to

rally after the disappointment of the 1865 ratification campaign. The remnants of the

secessionist Democratic Party merged with the Conservative Unionists under the

leadership of men such as Lincoln confidante Frank Blair, Jr. Conservative Unionists

were oriented toward the national Democracy, but they temporarily retained the name

150 that emphasized their wartime loyalty. 4 They formed “Johnson Clubs” around the state to support the president in his struggle with congressional Republicans, and they backed his

National Union movement, which was little more than a .5 In St. Louis, a pro-Johnson demonstration in February 1866 drew a crowd estimated at ten thousand, and a few months later Conservatives triumphed in municipal elections. 6 Meanwhile,

returning Confederates and guerilla fighters were stoking unrest in rural areas. Subjected

to political violence, white Radicals and African Americans formed their own militias.

Mutual aggression and general lawlessness mounted, and Radical Governor Thomas

Fletcher called on federal forces to help secure the peace for the fall elections.7 The

Radical legislature also prepared itself. To implement the strict loyalty provisions of the new constitution, lawmakers passed a voter registration law that gave county supervisors appointed by the governor almost unlimited authority to determine whether applicants had provided “aid, comfort, countenance, or support” to the Confederacy “by word or deed.” In areas with large Conservative populations, few potential voters were turned down, but in places traumatized by the internecine violence of the war, Radicals rejected many disloyal applicants and dissuaded others from attempting to register. In all, an estimated 35,000 to 50,000 Missourians were disfranchised. The loyalty test contributed

4 Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule , 78-79; Thomas Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 1865-1871 (Columbia: State Historical Society of Missouri, 1926), 80-81. 5 Edward L. Gambill, Conservative Ordeal: Northern Democrats and Reconstruction, 1865-1868 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1981), 56-74. 6 Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule , 79; Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri , 79- 85. The Westliche Post tried to minimize the significance of the Conservative victories, pointing out that Radicals did much better than they had in the vote on the constitution the previous year. Westliche Post , 24 February 1866, 4, 7 April 1866. 7 Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule , 89-96. Open warfare between the two sides broke out in Lafayette County following the 1866 elections. Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule , 100; Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt , 27 December 1866. 151 to a succession of Conservative defeats that began in fall 1866 and did not abate until after the constitution was amended in 1870.8

Few of Missouri’s disfranchised Conservatives were German-born. Conservative newspapers printed anecdotal reports of German Americans denied registration, but most of the state’s German-born naturalized citizens—and the recently enfranchised resident aliens—lived in St. Louis, where their loyalty was rarely challenged.9 The Conservatives simply attracted few German immigrants. Important Anglo-American leaders essentially gave up on the German vote. In a private letter to a fellow Democrat, Frank Blair described a May 1866 campaign appearance in Boonville, where “the Dutch” heckled him. In response he had “insulted them in the grossest terms & the people shouted & cheered & they quieted down very quickly.” 10 No wonder German Missourians were reluctant to vote for a Democratic presidential ticket in 1868 with Blair filling its number two spot.

Several German-speaking Conservative leaders tried to reverse their party’s fortunes. Forty-Eighter Carl Dänzer at the Anzeiger provided German St. Louisans with news from a Democratic perspective without sinking to Moreau’s level of profanity. It

8 The uneven application of the loyalty oath makes it difficult to know how many loyal Conservatives were denied registration and how many disloyal voters were accepted. An 1870 report by a congressional committee concluded the oath was rigidly enforced and there were even some partisan exclusions, but Radicals maintained that hundreds of disloyal voters were registered in Conservative counties. Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri , 77-109, especially 102, 106; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule , 77, 96-98, 241-42. For a compilation of disfranchisement estimates, see Martha Kohl, “Enforcing a Vision of Community: The Role of the Test Oath in Missouri’s Reconstruction,” Civil War History 40 (1994): 292-307. Kohl argues that Radicals hoped voter qualifications would help “build the industrial, industrious, Free-Soil community” (293). This is an improvement on Parrish and Barclay’s arguments, which suggest Radicals were largely motivated by vindictiveness, but it does not capture the impact of political violence during this period. 9 The Anzeiger denounced the registration procedure in general terms and claimed a loyal German American in St. Charles was rejected because of his Conservative beliefs. Anzeiger des Westens Wochen- Blatt , 4 October 1866. 10 Frank Blair to James Rollins, Boonville, Missouri, 23 May 1866, folder 94, James Rollins Papers, WHMC—Columbia. 152 seemed ironic to the Westliche Post that Dänzer had been “in the ranks of freedom fighters” in Germany but now opposed freedom. 11 He could be counted on for speeches decrying Missouri Radicals and Congressional Republicans. Joining Dänzer were two rising Democrats who formed the nucleus of the Hegelian philosophical movement known as the St. Louis School. The eccentric Henry Brokmeyer had emigrated from

Minden, Prussia in 1844, but he had only settled in St. Louis in 1858 after a period studying at Brown University and several years of Thoreau-like seclusion in the backwoods of Missouri’s Warren County. After the war, he returned to the city from a brief stint in the Union Army to resume his philosophical enquiries, practice law, and campaign in German for Conservatives.12 His Württemberg-born friend, J. Gabriel

Woerner, had remained active in local politics during the war. Both men distanced themselves from the Revolutions of 1848, Forty-Eighters in America, and the ideas of race-neutral citizenship associated with them.13

The two philosophers’ reading of Hegel led them to emphasize the importance of fully reuniting the North and the South. Hegel proposed that world history moved forward through a process of conflict between ideas—thesis and antithesis—which were

11 “In den Reihen der Freiheitskämpfer.” Westliche Post , 24 February 1866. For a biographical sketch, see Zucker, The Forty-Eighters , 285. 12 Isidor Loeb and F. C. Shoemaker, eds, Journal of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875 , 2 vols. (Jefferson City: State Historical Society of Missouri, 1920), 1:77-78; Cleon Forbes, “The St. Louis School of Thought,” Missouri Historical Review 25 (1930): 83-101; Denys P. Leighton, “Henry Conrad Brokmeyer,” in in The Dictionary of Missouri Biography , ed. Christensen, 117-19. 13 Woerner had returned to Germany in 1848 before deciding he could not support the revolutionaries. Forbes, “The St. Louis School of Thought,” 613-15. Members of the St. Louis School published in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy , which they founded in 1867. Woerner also wrote a novel and Brokmeyer an autobiography of his pre-war years. J. Gabriel Woerner, The Rebel’s Daughter: A Story of Love, Politics, and War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1899); Henry C. Brokmeyer, A Mechanic’s Diary (Washington, D.C.: E. C. Brokmeyer, 1910). For excerpts of their writings, see William H. Goetzmann, ed., The American Hegelians: An Intellectual Episode in the History of Western America (New York: Alfred A, Knopf, 1973); and Michael DeArmey and James A. Good, eds., St. Louis Hegelians , 3 vols. (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2001). 153 reconciled in synthesis. Brokmeyer and Woener saw reunification as “synthesizing” the clashing ideologies of the Civil War, ensuring progress. These Hegelians welcomed slavery’s demise, but their notion of post-war reunion was Democratic; it was a reunion of white men.14 The party honored them with positions as presidential electors in 1868, but its German following remained thin.15

Although Ohio Democrats had divided into “war” and “peace” camps, they were much stronger than Missouri Conservatives in 1865. In Ohio, Democrats had retained a majority of German-born voters, especially Catholics and unskilled workers. Democrats were competitive in state races, and they even won the legislative elections of 1867. In

Cincinnati, the Volksfreund represented the strong minority of the city’s German immigrants who were Democrats. The paper was owned and edited by Johann B. Jeup, an influential Catholic layman who campaigned for the Democrats and appeared on the ticket as a presidential elector in 1868. 16 The city’s supposedly non-partisan Catholic

14 Following Denton J. Snider, one of the American-born members of the St. Louis School, scholars have focused more on Brokmeyer and Woerner’s Hegelian justifications of reunification, but their racial prejudice was also important during Reconstruction. The St. Louis Hegelians’ anti-black sentiment is obscured in part because their philosophical writing has survived better than their political speeches and many of them only wrote about the Civil War Era in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Denton J. Snider, The St. Louis Movement in Philosophy, Literature, Education, Psychology, with Chapters of Autobiography (St. Louis: Sigma Publishing Co., 1920), 27. James Good specifically subordinates Brokmeyer’s racism to his interest in reconciliation. Good, “A World-Historical Idea,” 450. Matt Erlin considers the impact of St. Louis Hegelians on racial thinking later in the century. Matt Erlin, “Absolute Speculation: The St. Louis Hegelians and the Question of American National Identity,” in German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Reception, Adaptation, Transformation , ed. Lynne Tatlock and Matt Erlin (New York: Camden House, 2005), 89-106. See also Henry A. Pochmann, New England Transcendentalism and St. Louis Hegelianism: Phases in the History of American Idealism (Philadelphia: Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation, 1948), 32. 15 Westliche Post , 24 December 1868. 16 Cincinnati Volksfreund , 3 November 1868; Arndt and Olsen, German-American Newspapers , 456. 154 weekly, the Wahrheits-Freund , also supported the Democrats, and the Columbus

Westbote disseminated Democratic news and opinion from the state capital.17

The heart of German Democratic support, however, lay in rural and small-town

Ohio. Some heavily German townships had established a pattern of voting more than ten-to-one Democratic. 18 Bavarian-born Karl Bösel represented a solidly Democratic

western Ohio in the Ohio House from 1862 to 1865 and in the Ohio Senate from

1870 to 1874.19 Arriving in the United States as a young man in 1833, he had become

wealthy as a merchant and banker in the canal town of New Bremen in what became

Auglaize County. Since being appointed the town’s postmaster under President Martin

Van Buren, Bösel had never turned his back on the Democrats. He would be eulogized

after his death in 1885 as an enemy of “prejudice and bigotry,” remembered for

defending African Americans from a mob of his German-born neighbors in 1847. But

Bösel was no friend of black citizenship. He was not outspoken on racial issues—he

rarely spoke in public at all—but during the war he had voted solidly with Peace

Democrats who sat in the “South Carolina Corner” of the Ohio House of

Representatives. 20 In February 1865, he moved that the General Assembly “heartily

17 The Wahrheits-Freund tried to avoid partisanship during the war. See Wahrheits-Freund , 31 May 1865. This stance appears to have been motivated by a desire to avoid conflict with the Republican administration and charges of disloyalty. After mid-1865, its mission remained primarily religious, but it became increasingly partisan. It included pieces that contained politically-loaded racial content, and it took clear positions on specific parties and politicians. 18 Kelso, “The German-American Vote in the Election of 1860,” 195-96. 19 Bösel represented Auglaize County in the Ohio House and a larger district in the Senate. His own aptly named German Township gave Democrat Horatio Seymour 61 percent of its 348 votes in the 1868 presidential election. Jackson Township, where over 90 percent of the voters were German-born and population was more Catholic, gave Seymour 98.7 percent of its 455 votes. Only 6 people cast ballots for Grant! , Annual Report 1868 , 40; Kelso, “The German-American Vote in the Election of 1860,” 195; Aengenvoort, Migration, Siedlungsbildung, Akkulturation , 297-98. 20 “Das Vorurtheil und die Vornirtheit.” “Karl Bösel,” Der deutsche Pionier 17 (1885): 221; Karl Bösel, “Einwanders Reiseabenteuer,” Der deutsche Pionier 3 (1871): 215-17. Another source claims he became 155 congratulate” New Jersey and for declining to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment and “tender to them our sympathy and support in such noble and glorious work.” 21 It is hard to uncover rural German Democrats’ opinions on race and citizenship, but a small northwestern Ohio German-language weekly, the Fremont Courier , was the sort of newspaper Bösel’s constituents might have read. It took few editorial positions independent of the party and readily resorted to racism.22

At the core of the Democratic ideology of Bösel and Brokmeyer, Dänzer and Jeup was what one historian calls “the static constitutionalism of a white-man’s nation.” 23

Because protecting African American rights required action on the part of federal and state authorities, Democrats’ racism reinforced their genuine commitment to ensuring that constitutional limits restrained government power. Safeguarding individuals from government abuses remained central to German-born Democrats’ understanding of

American citizenship. German Republicans emphasized the importance of political participation in citizenship, but Democrats gave equal weight to the protections postmaster under President James K. Polk (1845-1849). Chapman Bros., Portrait and Biographical Record of Auglaize, Logan and Shelby Counties, Ohio (Chicago: Chapman Bros., 1892), 545. Historians have ably reconstructed the insular political culture of rural German enclaves in the nineteenth-century Midwest. Kathleen Neils Conzen, Making Their Own America: Assimilation Theory and the German Peasant Pioneer (New York: Berg, 1990); Robert Gross, “The Battle Over the Cold Spring Dam: Farm-Village Conflict and Contested Identity among Rural German Americans,” Journal of American Ethnic History 21 (2001): 83-117. On the German settlements in New Bremen and Auglaize County, see Aengenvoort, Die Auswanderung Nordwestdeutscher nach Ohio ; and Karl Bösel, “Ansiedlung von New-Bremen,” Der deutsche Pionier 1 (1869): 84-87, 118-21. 21 He considered the abolition of slavery “destructive to every hope for union and peace.” His resolution was rejected by fifty votes to eight. Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Ohio (Columbus: Richard Nevins, State Printer, 1865), 61: 255-56. 22 The Fremont Courier differs from similar newspapers in that copies of many issues survive. Arndt and Olsen, German-American Newspapers , 430-93. 23 Joel H. Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860-1868 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 189. On the Democratic Party during the Civil War and Reconstruction, see also Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Jennifer L. Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Jerome Mushkat, The Reconstruction of the New York Democracy, 1861-1874 (East Brunswick, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1981); Gambill, Conservative Ordeal . 156 citizenship afforded individuals from government. For them, constitutional limits defined the distinction between being the subject of a European monarch and the citizen of an

American state. They argued that Republican Reconstruction policies were constitutional innovations that threatened their citizenship by imposing a “military rule,” “Negro rule,” and “the tyranny of money and aristocracy.” 24 They convinced themselves that opposing black rights was consistent with these core Democratic principles. In reality, of course, the logical consistency of their ideology depended on excluding African Americans from the body of citizens whose rights deserved defending. If they had recognized African

Americans as equals, they could not have interpreted protecting black rights as tyrannical.

Nonetheless, to understand German Democrats’ part in the complex Reconstruction debates, it is important to pay due attention to their ideas of limited government in economic affairs and religious matters and their commitment to the separation of national and state authority. Examining each of these three issues also delineates the common ground between German Democrats and Republicans that would allow them to cooperate after 1870.

Democrats opposed the Republican policies that had dramatically increased the economic role of the federal government during the war. Republicans had passed new taxes, issued bonds to fund the war effort, instituted protective tariffs on imports, granted public land to railroad companies, and developed a new national banking system.25

Democrats had good reason to believe that together these policies benefited wealthy

24 “Militärherrschaft”; “Negerherrschaft”; “Geld- und Aristokratenherrschaft.” Fremont Courier , 17 September 1867. 25 For useful overviews, see Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Leonard P. Curry, Blueprint for Modern America: Non-Military Legislation of the First Civil War Congress (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968). 157 Americans at the expense of “the people.” They channeled public money to financiers, railroad magnates, and “factory barons.”26 Few federal dollars made their way into the

hands of African Americans, even through the Freedman’s Bureau, but that did not stop

Democrats assuming otherwise. 27 Democrats’ sense that big government redistributed wealth and power away from ordinary white citizens to southern freedmen and eastern businessmen shaped how they reacted to any single economic policy during

Reconstruction. During the 1868 presidential campaign, the Columbus Westbote told its readers that Republicans “promise no other prospect for the children [of working people] than being forced into white slavery through taxation.” A vote for the Democrats was therefore the only way for white workers “to protect themselves from the cocky, privileged monied aristocracy.”28

For the time being, German Republicans supported funding the federal presence in the South, but they agreed with German Democrats on many of the details of economic policy. In Ohio and Missouri, German immigrants in both parties opposed high tariffs on imports, which protected American goods from cheap foreign competitors. Many Forty-

Eighters were ideologically committed to as a means to spread progress and prosperity broadly throughout the world.29 In Ohio and Missouri, German Americans

26 For the Jacksonian roots of these Democratic ideas, see especially Tony A. Freyer, Producers versus Capitalists: Constitutional Conflict in Antebellum America (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994). 27 Foner, Reconstruction , 142-43, 248. 28 “… seinen Kindern keine andere Aussicht verheißt, als eine durch Steuern zu Boden gedrückte weiße Sclaverei”; “… um sich gegen die übermüthige privilegirte Geldaristokratie zu schützen.” Columbus Westbote , 29 October 1868. For similarly broad expressions of Democrats’ economic differences with Republicans, see Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt , 21 January 1866; Cincinnati Volksfreund , 3 November 1868; Fremont Courier , 3 October 1867, 27 August 1868 . 29 The issue of tariffs divided Germans in Europe, but free trade ideas were ascendant in universities before 1848 and among the Forty-Eighters who migrated to the United States. Ivo Nikolai Lambi, Free Trade and Protection in Germany, 1868-1879 (: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1963), 4, 7; Wittke, Refugees of Revolution , 256; Freitag, Friedrich Hecker , 20; Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 182. Franz Lieber, an earlier 158 also resented paying inflated prices for products without benefiting from the growth of domestic manufacturing as easterners did. German immigrants in both parties also resisted inflationary “soft money” policies. Especially wary of banknotes, they also opposed the wide circulation of the new paper currency issued as legal tender by the

Department of the Treasury. Commonly called greenbacks, these bills had already depreciated since their introduction in 1862. German Americans tended to perceive paper money as the currency of swindle and speculation, of boom and bust. They believed “hard” gold or silver coins, or notes backed by them, were how honest, thrifty, and hardworking people like themselves transacted business. 30 Departing from this notion and their Jacksonian heritage, some German Democrats did support a proposal popularized by Ohioan George H. Pendleton to pay the principal on federal war bonds not in gold coin, but in greenbacks. Party loyalists in Ohio agreed that Pendleton’s plan would ensure that wealthy investors would receive the same devalued currency as workers and soldiers. As one historian put it, “Paper money was too tempting a political immigrant, was also an active Republican supporter of free trade. See Lieber, Notes on the Fallacies of American Protectionists , 4 th ed. (New York: American Free Trade League, 1870) included in vol. 2, Franz Lieber Papers, LC. For German Democratic opposition to high tariffs, see Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt , 22 November 1866; Cincinnati Volksfreund , 2 February 1867; Columbus Westbote , 27 April 1865; Fremont Courier , 23 July 1868. German Republican sentiment is presented or reported in Cincinnati Volksfreund , 18 December 1867, 25 July 1868; Wächter am Erie , 7 November 1867; St. Charles Democrat , 7 February 1867; Westliche Post , 5 March 1868. 30 Ohio Republican Jacob Müller described this position well in his reflection on the Panic of 1857. Mueller, Memories of a Forty-Eighter , 188-91. For his masterfully clear and insightful study of “moral and ideological considerations” in the post-war money question, see Irwin Unger, The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865-1879 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 8. On German Americans’ preference for hard money, see Unger, The Greenback Era , 134, 276; Wittke, The German-American Press , 160-61. Representing the Democrats, see Cincinnati Volksfreund , 22 July 1868; Columbus Westbote , 20 February 1868; Fremont Courier , 18 July 1868; Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt , 20 September 1866. Hard money German Republicans included Gustav Körner, Carl Schurz, Emil Preetorius, Friedrich Hassaurek, and Franz Lieber. See Westliche Post , 7 January 1867; Wächter am Erie , 23 November 1867; Koerner, Memoirs of Gustav Koerner , 2: 583; Trefousse, Carl Schurz , 182; Schurz, Reminiscences , 3:286; Hassaurek to Hayes, Cincinnati, 15 September 1875, and other letters, box 2, folder 10, Hassaurek Papers, OHS; Franz Lieber to John Sherman, New York, 29 June 1870, vol. 127, John Sherman Papers, LC. 159 tool to be put aside lightly.” 31 German-Ohioan Democrats emphasized that the plan included in the 1868 national platform was just one part of a comprehensive program that would also reduce taxation, expenditures, and the national debt.32 German Republicans accused Democrats of advocating “repudiation” or reneging on the country’s debts.33 As the years following 1868 would show, German Americans generally remained free traders and hard money men in both parties, a position that would provide the basis for them to cooperate to form a third party.

During Reconstruction, German Americans also united in the belief that citizens should be free from government control in matters of religion and personal morality.

German Democrats hoped to use this perennial issue to win back immigrant men who had voted Republican because of their support for the Union and opposition to slavery. They routinely described German Republicans as lackeys or “” manipulated by the

“” within their party who wanted to persecute Catholics and curb harmless alcohol consumption.34 Missouri provided a prime example. The 1865 constitution had included a new provision to tax church property, and Charles Drake made no secret of

31 Unger, The Greenback Era , 75, 80-91. See also Sawrey, Dubious Victory , 107-09. German Democratic resistance to their party’s soft money policies is mentioned in correspondence between Ohio’s English- speaking Democrats. G.W. Morgan to , Cleveland, 4 July 1875, box 18, William Allen Papers, LC. 32 Cincinnati Volksfreund , 30, 31 September 1867, 9, 18 July 1868; Columbus Westbote , 23 September 1868, 1 October 1868; Fremont Courier , 3 October 1867, 23 July 1868. The St. Louis Anzeiger and German Cincinnatian politician Charles Reemelin remained in favor of repaying bonds in gold. Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt , 24 September 1868, 24 December 1868. Charles Reemelin, The Life of Charles Reemelin (Cincinnati: Weier and Daiker, 1892), 63, 184. 33 See speeches by Schurz and Müller in Cleveland. Wächter am Erie , 5 October 1867, 29 September 1868. The Democrats repeatedly denied the charge. See, for example, Columbus Westbote , 22 August 1867, 5 September 1867. 34 “Mohr.” Cincinnati Volksfreund , 12 June 1866. See also Cincinnati Volksfreund, 27 October 1865, 22 April 1866, 5 October 1867; Columbus Westbote , 14 June 1866; Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt , 6 December 1866; Fremont Courier , 24 January 1867, 3 September 1867, 17 September 1867, October 1867. 160 targeting the . 35 Radicals in the state legislature between 1865 and 1870 went on to tighten laws regulating alcohol and enforce the constitutional requirement that religious leaders take the loyalty oath.36 Given Radicals’ overt Protestant bias and reputation for partisan interpretations of loyalty, this smacked of government control of religion. St. Louis Archbishop Peter Kenrick advised Catholic priests not to swear the oath, and the German-born leader of the Orthodox Lutheran Missouri Synod, C.F.W.

Walther, only signed it with a “protest” handwritten on the back. 37 The Missouri oath became an emblem of Radical extremism late in 1865, when a young Catholic priest in

Pike County was arrested, fined, and imprisoned for failing to comply. No one accused

John A. Cummings of disloyalty, making his case all the more appealing to the

Democratic and Catholic press. Newspapers around the country followed Cummings v.

Missouri through the appeals process. Cincinnati’s Catholic Wahrheits-Freund mentioned the Missouri test oath thirteen times in the year from August 1865 to August

1866. 38 Finally, in January 1867, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the oath for clergy

35 Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule , 40-42; March, “The Campaign for the Ratification of the Constitution of 1865,” 228-29; Drake, “Autobiography,” 1097-98. 36 David W. Detjen, The Germans in Missouri, 1900-1918: Prohibition, Neutrality, and Assimilation (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 27; Audrey L. Olson, “St. Louis Germans, 1850-1920: The Nature of an Immigrant Community and Its Relation to the Assimilation Process” (Ph.D. diss., University of Kansas, 1963), 114, 220. The oath was applied to any leader who engaged in teaching or held property in trust for a religious organization. Missouri Constitutional Convention, Journal (1865), 258. 37 Kenrick and Walther were both sure from the outset that the Supreme Court would overturn the oath. Peter Kenrick to Rev. J. Meller, St. Louis, 15 September 1865, box 1, folder 3, Archbishop Peter Richard Kenrick Papers, Archdiocese of St. Louis Archives (hereafter ASLA). C. F. W. Walther, “Oath of Loyalty,” 25 September 1865, “C. F. W. Walther Research File,” folder 44, August R. Suelflow Papers; C.F.W. Walther to his brother, St. Louis, 18 September 1865, box 4, folder 38, C.F.W. Walther Papers, Concordia Historical Institute, St. Louis. It was not unusual for oath takers to register written “exceptions.” These protests challenged the state’s right to regulate private sympathies and soothed the consciences of people who had spoken in favor of the Confederacy. See Judge William Napton, 19 November 1865, “Diary Transcription,” p. 318, folder 4, William Napton Papers, MHS. 38 Wahrheits-Freund , Index, August 1866, 13 September 1865; Cincinnati Volksfreund , 3 September 1865; Fremont Courier , 1 February 1866; Columbus Westbote , 17 January 1867. 161 and other professionals was unconstitutional because it punished Missourians for actions allegedly committed before the constitution became law and it imposed penalties without judicial proceedings.39 Equally important to German Democrats, Missouri’s Radicals had identified themselves with vindictive Anglo-Protestantism.

Democrats were astonished that German Americans’ dedication to religious freedom and consumption did not turn them all into Democratic voters. Conscious of their vulnerability, German Republicans continued to struggle with elements of their own party, claiming “true Radicalism” included freedom from Anglo-Protestant hegemony. In Missouri, Friedrich Münch confronted fellow Radicals in the legislature as they debated a bill to restrict Sunday alcohol sales in December 1865.40 When the law passed, Preetorius at the Westliche Post was among those who helped organize another large protest in St. Louis.41 In 1867, the Post and the St. Charles Demokrat joined some

Anglo-American Radicals in welcoming the Supreme Court’s decision in Cummings v.

Missouri .42 Although the issue was now moot, the St. Charles newspaper called on the

legislature to amend the constitution to remove the clause subjecting professionals to the

oath. The paper also considered it the duty of German Radicals to confront Drake and his

“arrogant” allies in the Missouri legislature on the taxation of church property and

alcohol regulation. Missouri’s German Radicals argued that they could effectively fight

“Puritan” politics from within the Republican Party. Besides, like the , ethnic

39 On Cummings v. Missouri , see Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri , 59-62, 114-16; Barclay, “The Test Oath for Clergy,” Missouri Historical Review 18 (1924): 345-81; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule , 61-75. For the broader context of Cummings v. Missouri and Missouri oath taking, see Harold Hyman, The Era of the Oath: Northern Loyalty Tests during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954), 110-14. 40 Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt , 8 December 1865 41 Westliche Post , 24 February 1866. 42 Woechentlich Westliche Post , 23 January 1867. 162 interests paled in importance beside the great questions of the day: citizenship for African

Americans and the Reconstruction of the former Confederate states. 43

Economic and religious matters were important during Reconstruction, but the distinction between federal and state authority was more central to German Democrats’ thinking on citizenship. Democrats saw federal protection of African Americans’ civil and political rights as violating the constitutional limitations that defined American freedom.44 Anzeiger editor Carl Dänzer was particularly adept in articulating this conviction. Federalism, according to Dänzer, was part of the “essence” of American citizenship. He argued in March 1866 that national citizenship, which immigrants achieved on naturalization and former slaves on emancipation, only protected its holders from foreign powers. The editor concluded that all other rights and privileges emanated from the states. 45 Johnson was thus fully justified in vetoing Congress’s Civil Rights Bill

for it unconstitutionally impinged on the power of states to regulate citizenship. Dänzer

remarked that he hoped that each state would voluntarily enact the bill’s provisions,

suggesting constitutional concerns alone barred him from following his personal instinct

to support African Americans in their quest for education, civil, and political rights.46

Federal control of voting rights in the former Confederacy most directly challenged

states’ traditional sphere of authority. 47 As Dänzer quite presciently observed in early

1867, either black voting would be a dead letter or it would take considerable federal

43 “Herrisch.” St. Charles Demokrat , 24 January 1867; Woechentlich Westliche Post , 5 June 1867. 44 For concern about the power of federal government, see Columbus Westbote , 11 May 1865; Cincinnati Volksfreund , 30 September 1865, 11 July 1866; Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt , 15 March 1866; Fremont Courier , 22 March 1866. 45 “Wesen.” Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt , 22 March 1866. See also Columbus Westbote , 8 June 1865; Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt , 19 April 1866. 46 Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt , 29 March 1866. See also Wahrheits-Freund , 14 February 1866. 47 Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt , 13 October 1865, 29 March 1866, 6 December 1866. 163 commitment to enforce. 48 When Republicans rose to the challenge and sent in the army

and Freedmen’s Bureau, he labeled their actions “military despotism.” Such opinions

were not merely demagogic partisan bluster. German Democrats also expressed them privately. Following Democratic gains in Ohio in 1867, an old friend of Karl Bösel

reflected that “after so long a time of radical misrule, tyranny and destruction, the sober

second thought of an outraged people calls there [ sic ] violations to account.” 49

Yet there was more to Democrats’ opposition to African American citizenship than constitutional scruples. Democrats differed with Republicans over whether to use federal power for the specific task of protecting the citizenship of black men. Regardless of their elaborate distinctions between federal and state citizenship or civil and political citizenship, at an emotional level, Democratic leaders saw citizenship as an all-or-nothing affair from which African Americans should be excluded. Like Radical Republicans,

Democratic immigrant men repeatedly associated American citizenship with the right to vote. In response to the campaign to enfranchise black men, the Cincinnati Volksfreund pointed out that immigrants had to wait five years before naturalization allowed them to

“demand citizenship and voting rights” 50 It hoped to deny African Americans the vote,

“this most valuable right of an American citizen.” 51 The Columbus Westbote accused

Radical Republicans of wanting to make “the plantation Negro” suddenly into a “voting

48 Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt , 28 February 1867. 49 Wilhelm Lang to [The Ohio Democratic Central Committee], Tiffin, Ohio, 19 November 1867, Democratic Party Letters, CHS. On Bösel’s friendship with Lang, see Bösel, “Einwanderers Reiseabenteuer,” 217. 50 “… ehe sie das Bürger und Stimmrecht können.” Cincinnati Volksfreund , 1 April 1866. 51 “Dies theuerste Recht eines amerikanischen Bürgers.” Cincinnati Volksfreund , 14 July 1865. It also described enfranchisement as imparting “full citizenship rights” (“… das volle Bürgerrecht verleihen”). Cincinnati Volksfruend , 8 October 1867. 164 citizen.” 52 A few years later, it suggested that without the Radicals, the “Negro” would have no aspirations to “rise to the level of a voting American citizen.” 53 Democratic newspapers also warned that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of a national

“citizenship” potentially included voting rights. 54 Finally, when the Fifteenth

Amendment was proposed in Congress, the Fremont Courier commented that it “made half-barbarian Negroes into citizens.” 55 Democrats may have believed African

Americans should hold some “less-than-participatory” citizenship, but this condition was

scarcely worthy of the name.

German Democrats tapped into the well established connection between

whiteness and citizenship. From the United States’ earliest years as a nation, “all free

white persons” who immigrated into the country could become citizens under the

Naturalization Law of 1790. 56 This set an essential pattern that was somewhat complicated by the fact that all white women were denied political citizenship and even unnaturalized white men could exercise the franchise in some states. By 1855, twenty- five of the thirty-one states in the Union, including Missouri and Ohio, had racial exclusions on voting. Most of these defined voters specifically as “white.” 57 The meaning of “whiteness,” however, was contested. Courts had to decide whether individuals of mixed race were “negro” or “white.” Meanwhile, nineteenth-century

Americans sometimes described immigrants from European countries as members of

52 “… diese Radikalen, die aus dem Plantage Neger, der nie in das A, B, C hineingekommen ist, plötzlich einen stimmberechtigen Bürger machen wollen.” Cincinnati Volksfreund , 14 July 1865. 53 “Sich zu der Würde eines stimmfähigen amerikanischen Bürger zu erheben.” Columbus Westbote , 18 September 1867. 54 Cincinnati Volksfreund , 16 January 1866; Columbus Westbote , 27 September 1867. 55 “Halbbarbarische Neger zu Bürgern zu machen.” Fremont Courier , 18 February 1869. 56 Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color , 22. 57 Keyssar, The Right to Vote , 354, 363-67. 165 separate “races.” 58 Usually they were considered to belong to different white races, but

the whiteness of immigrants from was “under dispute.”59 Overwhelmingly

Catholic and poor, Irish Americans asserted their whiteness as they sought emotional and

economic security in their new home. Legally, they did not need to “become” white, as

they faced few obstacles to civil and political rights. Since the 1830s, marginalized

immigrants in the North had used the Democratic Party to claim whiteness, forging a

coalition with poor and slaveholding whites in the South. The party’s ideology

emphasized that all blacks were unworthy of citizenship, while all whites, by virtue of

their whiteness, were good citizens. 60 Ideas of whiteness and the that

accompanied it went back centuries in North America and Europe, but Democrats

stressed the connection between whiteness and citizenship in a new way. They embraced

a racism that reflected the popular culture of Irish immigrants in the urban North. As

historian David Roediger emphasizes, whiteness and white supremacy were not just the

tool of elites. They were “creations, in part, of the white working class itself.”61

In some ways, German Democrats behaved like their better studied Irish

counterparts. Before the political upheavals of the 1850s, both German and Irish

immigrants had voted overwhelmingly Democratic. Even during the Civil War Era,

58 Many of the creative and insightful scholars cited below describe the fluidity of whiteness during the nineteenth century, especially late in the century when more Southern and Eastern Europeans immigrated to North America, the United States became an imperial power, and the pseudo-science of racial classification flourished in Europe and North America. I agree with historian Matthew Frye Jacobson, that racial categories proliferated between the 1840s and 1924, but I question whether the use of the word “race” to describe distinctions among whites was as significant as he argues. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color , 1-9. 59 The quotation is from Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness , 14. See also Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White . Historian Eric Arneson usefully cautions that in many meaningful ways, Irish Americans were always white. Arneson, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” 3-32. 60 Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic , 131-54; Baker, Affairs of Party , 180-81; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness , 140-43. 61 Roediger, Wages of Whiteness , 9-10. 166 German Catholics in most states—but not Missouri—voted more like Irish Catholics than

Reformed Protestant Germans or Forty-Eighters. The segmentation of the German-

American community identified by political and social historians and contemporary observers seems to suggest that German Democrats’ ideas of race and citizenship had more in common with Irish Democrats than they did with German Republicans. 62

Historians who study the development of racial attitudes within the Democratic Party also depict working-class German and Irish immigrants in northern cities cooperating to emphasize the boundaries of whiteness.63

A close reading of German-language newspapers, however, indicates that in Ohio and Missouri during Reconstruction, there were important differences between how Irish and German immigrants reacted to racial appeals. German Democratic leaders hoped that they could use whiteness to appeal to their constituents, but they were not convinced their arguments resonated with the ordinary German immigrant in the streets of St. Louis or Cincinnati. Most first-generation German immigrants participated in a political and popular culture that was distinct from that of Irish Americans.

62 Historian Hartmut Keil points out that this assumption is based on weak evidence. Hartmut Keil, “German immigrants and African-Americans in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” in Enemy Images in American History , ed. Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase and Ursula Lehmkuhl (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1997), 137-38. 63 Although Roediger argues different groups of working-class immigrant came together and “the growing popular sense of whiteness represented a hesitantly emerging consensus holding together a very diverse white working class,” he is careful not to eliminate the distinction between the Irish and Germans. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness , 97, 14, 118. Other historians of earlier and later periods provide a more nuanced sense of how German immigrants learned the importance of whiteness. For a rather speculative approach, see Jon Gjerde, “‘Here in America There Is Neither King nor Tyrant’: European Encounters with Race, ‘Freedom,’ and Their European Pasts,” Journal of the Early Republic 9 (1999): 673-90. In an other 1999 essay, historian Russell Kazal uncovered differences between German and Irish Catholics in late nineteenth-century Philadelphia. In his 2004 monograph, however, he argued that over the following decades, with generational change, working-class German Catholics assimilated and became, with the Irish, “white ethnics.” Middle-class and Protestant German immigrants took a different route, becoming “old stock” with Anglo-Americans. Kazal, “Irish ‘Race’ and German ‘Nationality,’” 149-68; Kazal, Becoming Old Stock , 252-60, 232-45. See also the literature on blackface minstrelsy cited below. 167 Leading German Democrats actively sought to reinforce the association between whiteness and citizenship during Reconstruction. They pushed German Americans to identify with Irish immigrants and called on them to vote as white men. They commonly referred to German and Irish immigrants in the same sentence or spoke collectively of

“white” or “European” immigrants, alluding to their shared struggles in America.64 The

Republicans oppressed them all, they argued. The Columbus Westbote warned that the

Republicans intended to steadily erode the rights of immigrants: “Today it is the Irish

Catholics, tomorrow it will be the Germans, and the day after that, foreigners in general on whom they will turn their well known persecutory rage.” 65 As this comment tacitly acknowledged, however, German immigrants were more secure than the Irish newcomers. They arrived with more money and skills, allowing them to fill a variety of occupations and move beyond the slums of the port cities of the East. The confessionally diverse Germans escaped the worst of the prejudice leveled at the strongly Catholic Irish.

Their whiteness was rarely challenged. 66 Moreau called German Republicans “white

niggers,” but in the context of post-war Missouri, the epithet was as impotent as when it

was applied to native-born Republicans.

Yet Democrats argued that German immigrants’ power in the United States

depended on protecting white privilege. On October 8, 1867, the day Ohioans voted on

state offices and black suffrage, the Volksfreund devoted a full page to convincing readers

64 Wahrheits-Freund , 23 October 1867. 65 “Heute sind es die irischen Katholiken, morgen werden es die Deutschen, übermorgen die Ausländer überhaupt sein, gegen die sich ihre bekannte Verfolgungswuth wendet.” Columbus Westbote , 9 March 1865. 66 Historians have unearthed scattered references to German immigrants as non-white. See discussions in Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color , 47; Kazal, “Irish ‘Race’ and German ‘Nationality,” 149-68; Kazal, Becoming Old Stock , 109-29. 168 that “white or black is now the question.”67 It reported that Republicans were

questioning the superiority of white immigrants to African Americans. The Cincinnati

newspaper quoted Ohio’s Republican candidate for the lieutenant governorship as saying,

“Today the Negroes are more capable of the intelligent exercise of the right to vote than

the ignorant Germans and Irish.” Ohio’s Radical Senator Benjamin Wade supposedly

compared Germans’ voting abilities to those of the horses they rode. The Volksfreund asserted that Republicans resented German immigrants’ political influence and success in

America. It conjured up the image of Republicans meeting behind closed doors to scheme, “We will make the Germans politically dead with the Negroes.” Republicans, according to this representation, wanted African Americans to vote in order to undermine the power of immigrants. If the “last barrier between white and black” were dismantled, black voters would take their power. The message of the day was to vote for the

Democratic slate, “the ticket of the white man.” 68

German Democratic politicians suggested that if blacks achieved full American citizenship, German immigrants’ own would be devalued. Like Republicans, they compared the process of immigrants and former slaves becoming citizens, but they made quite a different point. The Volksfreund used emotive language to encourage its readers not to empathize with African Americans. It asked German immigrants whether they wanted to give the “the crude, ignorant Negro the highest right [suffrage] immediately,”

67 “Weiß oder Schwarz ist jetzt die Frage.” Cincinnati Volksfreund , 8 October 1867. 68 “Die Neger sind heute mehr befähigt zu intelligenter Ausübung des Stimmrechts, als die unwissenden Deutsch und Irländer”; “Machen wir die deutschen durch die Neger politisch caput!”; “Letzte Schranke zwischen Weiß und Schwarz”; “… welches das Ticket des weißen Mannes ist.” Ibid. Other German Democratic papers in Ohio similarly opposed the “elimination of all political differentiation between whites and blacks” (“… hebt alle politischen Unterscheidung zwischen den Weißen und den Schwartzen auf”) during this election season . Columbus Westbote , 18 September 1867; Fremont Courier , 3 October 1867. 169 when they “had had to wait five years, five long, bitter years.” Immigrants “had had to earn it with sweat and blood, with hunger and heartache, threatened every hour with enemy bullets.” 69 The absurdity of the comparison must have struck even Democratic partisans, but German Democrats often proclaimed it inconsistent that native-born blacks

should not be allowed to vote immediately when immigrants in most states had to wait

five years to become naturalized citizens.70 Democratic politicians also warned that

centralizing the authority over citizenship and voting in the hands of the Congress would

leave immigrants at the mercy of an unsympathetic Republican-dominated body.71 They were suspicious when Republican newspapers began to propose that naturalization laws be reformed after the 1868 election. The Anzeiger found it “striking” that “the loud cry for the improvement of the naturalization law and for making the process of becoming a citizen more difficult comes mainly from papers that do not tire of advocating the immediate granting of voting rights to 700,000 African half-barbarians.” 72 To

Democrats, Republican actions showed that threats to white citizenship accompanied the extension of black citizenship. Making a logical leap, Democrats suggested that if political citizenship were no longer exclusively white, the citizenship of whites might no

longer be secure.

69 “… dem rohen, unwissenden Neger das höchste Recht sofort geben”; “… fünf Jahre—fünf lange bittere Jahre habt warten müssen”; “… haben es mit Schweiß und Blut, mit Hunger und Kummer, stündlich von feindlichen Kugeln bedroht, sich erwerben müssen.” Cincinnati Volksfruend , 8 October 1867. 70 The Anzeiger called the naturalization period “a five-year enslavement” (“eine fünfjährige ‘Sklaverei’”). Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt , 2 July 1868. See also Cincinnati Volksfruend , 11 April 1866, 11 September 1866, 3 October 1867; Wahrheits-Freund , 23 October 1867. 71 Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt , 3 May 1866. 72 “Das laute Geschrei nach Verbesserung der Naturalisations-Gesetze und Geschwerung des Bürgerwerdens hauptsächlich von Blättern ausgeht, die nicht müde werden, die sofortige Gewährung des Stimmrechts an 700,000 afrikanische Halbbarbaren zu befürworten.” Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt , 19 November 1868. For similar sentiment, see Columbus Westbote , 4 March 1869. 170 It sounded like racism emanating from the ranks of the working class, but it was not. German Democrats were different from Irish Democrats. German Democratic leaders were not so much reflecting the concerns of the German-American community as attempting to instigate them. Democratic leaders were trying to convince German immigrants that race should determine their votes, but their references to whiteness often reflected the preoccupations of southern elites, not immigrants in Ohio and Missouri.

Before the 1868 election, for example, the “German Democratic Central Committee of the City of New Orleans” sent out an epistle to sympathetic newspapers around the country. The German Louisianans appealed to “their brothers in the North and West,” who had already shown in suffrage referenda that “as white men, as people of intelligence and education, [they] do not want to be placed on the same level as crude, uneducated negroes.” The call evoked white solidarity and pride in German cultural

achievements. It was “humiliating, that the Germans, the countrymen of a Schiller and a

Goethe, a Mozart and a Beethoven, a Lessing and a Heine, were subordinated to the

Negro in every respect.” Although the letter mentioned the five-year waiting period for

naturalization, the whiteness it described was not the whiteness that German immigrants

shared with the persecuted Irish. It was the whiteness of the people who claimed to be

rightful leaders of the South, men “gifted with reason and intelligence and equipped with

capital and manpower.” 73

73 “Deutsche Brüder … als weiße Männer, als Leute von Intelligenz und Bildung, Euch nicht auf gleiche Stufe mit dem rohen ungebildeten Neger stellen wollt”; “… erniedrigend, daß die Deutschen, die Landsleute eines Schiller und Goethe, eines Mozart und Beethoven, eines Lessing und Heine, in jeder Hinsicht unter den Neger gestellt werden”; “mit Verstand und Intelligenz begabt, mit Kapital und Arbeitskraft ausgerüstet.” Columbus Westbote , 29 October 1868. The same piece appeared in the Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt that day. 171 Indeed, the vast majority of the coverage of race and citizenship in German- language Democratic newspapers in Missouri and Ohio simply followed the party line and called for white rule in the South.74 Like Anglo-American Democrats, they depicted

African Americans as lazy, uncivilized, incapable, and violent. 75 In sharp contrast to

Republicans, Democrats described African Americans in a malicious and derogatory

tone. Sometimes they indicated that they believed African Americans could lift

themselves from their degraded state. The Wahrheits-Freund compared giving “just

freed slaves in all their crudeness and ignorance” political equality to making a recently

graduated student a government minister. At the same time, however, the Catholic paper

considered African Americans biologically inferior, calling black voting contrary to

“every .” 76 Democratic papers frequently claimed African Americans were

inherently inferior to whites. The Columbus Westbote stated that “the negroes belong to

a lower race that in the history of the world has nowhere proved it is capable of higher

culture.” 77 The Anzeiger took a similar position when it printed an essay arguing that the

theory of evolution described in Charles Darwin’s 1859 Origin of the Species showed

that any attempts to support blacks would be futile.78 Another correspondent asserted that African Americans could not be educated. 79 Democratic editors also found a

74 On the position of northern Democrats as a group, see Foner, Reconstruction , 31-32, 313-14, 340-41; Baker, Affairs of Party , 208-58, 349-52. 75 The literature on American racial thinking during the nineteenth century is extensive, but for a useful treatment that explores the overlap between scientific and older ideas of race, see Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny . 76 “Erst befreiten Sklaven in seinen ganzen Rohheit und Unwissenheit”; “jedem Naturgesetz.” Wahrheits- Freund , 9 October 1867. Examples of similar sentiment are far too numerous to list individually. 77 “… die Neger einer niedrigen Rasse angehören, die in der ganzen Weltgeschichte nicht nirgends beweisen hat, daß sie einer höheren Cultur fähig ist.” Columbus Westbote , 18 September 1867. 78 Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt , 22 March 1866. Anglo-American politicians, including Frank Blair, were also intrigued by the potential of evolutionary arguments to support white dominance. Foner, Reconstruction , 340-41. 79 Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt , 5 September 1867. 172 remarkable number of instances of African Americans raping, murdering, or attacking innocent German-American women and families.80 They added these alleged incidents—

absent from Republican papers—to the list of reasons to deny African Americans the

franchise and support the often violent efforts of southern whites to maintain power. 81

Racism was a striking feature of German Democratic newspapers but an unreliable campaign technique. Editors doubted that their attempts to persuade their readers to vote as white men were yielding results. In St. Louis, the Anzeiger avoided the

most intemperate race baiting. The paper never would have printed Moreau’s

correspondence from Jefferson City, littered as it was with obvious exaggerations and the

word “nigger.” Dänzer presented his opinions in more measured and reasonable—even

scientific—terms. He denied that he was prejudiced and even said that he would accept

African American voting rights if it were not for his respect for the Constitution. Taken

in aggregate, the contents of the Anzeiger indicated otherwise, but whenever possible,

Dänzer focused on Republicans’ hypocrisy rather than addressing the issue of black rights directly. Even before the election of 1868, the Conservative newspaper refined the moderate stance and tone that increasing numbers of Democrats would adopt following

Grant’s election. It tactically accepted conciliatory policies and compromising rhetoric in order to compete for votes. 82

80 In the German-language papers, the victims were often German-American women and families. Cincinnati Volksfreund , 12 December 1865, 11 July 1866, 12 September 1867; Columbus Westbote , 19 December 1867, 10 September 1868; Fremont Courier , 15 March 1866; Anzeiger des Westens Wochen- Blatt , 17 September 1868. 81 German Democrats did not publicly condone terrorism, but they blamed Republicans and African Americans for provoking the 1866 riots in Memphis and New Orleans and the political violence of groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Cincinnati Volksfreund , 8 August 1866; Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt , 10 May 1866, 9 August 1866, 16 April 1868; Columbus Westbote , 9 August 1866. 82 Following political scientist Austin Ranney, historian Michael Perman contrasts these “competitive” Democrats to “expressive” Democrats who considered white supremacy a bedrock value. Perman, The 173 While the Anzeiger maintained steady restraint, the Cincinnati Volksfreund

vacillated between torrents of racist vitriol and quiet reconsideration. Throughout 1865

and 1866, editor Johann Jeup repeatedly told his readers that they must vote Democratic

in order to avoid the enfranchisement of “niggers.” Alongside racially charged editorials

and reports, the paper tried to entertain its readers with satirical stories spitefully mocking

African Americans. One spoofed black candidates for municipal offices, while another presented the “monolog” of a Union Army mule who hoped his military service would

entitle him to vote. 83 But when Democrats lost the fall elections in 1866, Jeup reconsidered his tactics. The Volksfreund printed a piece translated from the Chicago

Times recommending that Democrats sever connections with Johnson and accept black suffrage: “Are not Negro voting rights unavoidable, and would they not actually be the shortest way to overcome the whole Negro question?” Jeup was not ready to answer in the affirmative, but he abruptly reined in his attacks on African Americans. 84 In early

1867, he acknowledged that he was deliberately staying silent on Congress’s

Reconstruction policies. 85 Anti-black stories and editorials proliferated again in the

weeks before the fall elections, but they declined when Cincinnati Democrats failed to

convert opposition to black voting into victories for their local candidates. Jeup, like

many other northern Democrats, approached the apparently treacherous issue of race

Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 7-21, 23. 83 Cincinnati Volksfreund , 19 March 1865, 21 October 1866. 84 “Ist das Negerstimmrech t nicht unvermeidlich und würde es nicht der kürzeste Weg sein, um überhaupt die ganze Negerfrage ein für allemal zu beseitigen?” Cincinnati Volksfreund , 14 November 1866. 85 Cincinnati Volksfreund , 27 February 1867. When Ohio Republicans decided to put African American suffrage to a referendum, the Volksfreund hardly mentioned it. The editors declared they would not “waste one more word” on the suffrage referendum except to point out that Republicans were reversing their previous position. (“Wir wollen heute darüber weiter kein Wort verlieren.”) Cincinnati Volksfreund , 9 April 1867. 174 more cautiously during 1868. He even boasted that the Volksfreund had been the first

Democratic newspaper to announce its support of the Thirteenth Amendment. 86 The

editor focused more on the economy, beer and religious freedom, and the Constitution.

The German-American public sphere, in which both Democrats and Republicans participated, was not fertile ground for arguments based on white supremacy. During the

late 1860s, Radical Republicans remained the leading representatives of the German-

American community in the United States. German Democratic newspapers were filled

with frustrated attacks on German Radicals such as Schurz, Sigel, Willich, the Westliche

Post , and the Cincinnati Volksblatt . Democrats could not ignore German Republicans.

They reported Republican faux pas , elections, appointments, career changes and travels.

The Columbus Westbote complained that “the mainstays and opinion-setters of the

Missouri Radikalissimmi are the German do-gooders and heaven-assailants of St. Louis.

Their political fanaticism, their stubborn intolerance exceeds all bounds.” 87 Democrats could not fathom how these politicians and organs could claim to represent German-

American principles to the world. In a plea to their German Landsleute in the northern states, the Anzeiger openly expressed its annoyance: “We charge these false representatives of Deutschtum to American public opinion with dishonesty and injustice because they maintain that all opponents of the Radical Party are Rebels, opponents of

86 Cincinnati Volksfreund , 3 March 1868. 87 “Die Hauptstützen und Haupttonangeber der Missouri Radikalissimi sind die deutschen Weltverbesserer und Himmelstürmer von St. Louis. Ihr politische Fanatismus, ihre starre Unduldsamkeit übersteigen alle Schranken.” Columbus Westbote , 1 November 1866. 175 the Union, and enemies of freedom and progress.” 88 To Democrats, it was a mystery how

Republicans had claimed German “honesty and morality” for themselves.89

Even the Cincinnati Germans who chose to buy the Democratic Volksfreund

apparently gave racist arguments a muted response. Many German immigrants did not

like the idea of black men voting, but as one historian found in late nineteenth century

Philadelphia, they just “were not all that invested in whiteness.” 90 Or, as another historian speculates, perhaps they were just beginning the “gradual learning process” of adopting “racism as practiced in the United States.” 91 German immigrants took a minor part in the spontaneous demonstrations of racial antipathy that flared up in northern cities during the mid-nineteenth century. They joined the first day of the famous New York

City draft riots of 1863, but they withdrew before the protests degenerated into violence and looting. Irish-American wage-earners inflicted sexualized and ritualized violence on

African Americans, and a total of at least 105 people died before the Union regiments called back from Gettysburg could impose order. German immigrants found themselves targeted for siding with the Republicans, and in one case, protecting a black man from attackers. 92 The German-born were of course capable racism and violence. German immigrants joined Irish Americans in the ranks of the White Boys in Blue, an

88 “Wir klagen diese falschen Vertreter des Deutschthums vor der öffentlichen Meinung in Amerika der Unwahrheit und der Ungerechtigkeit an, weil sie behaupten alle Gegner der radikalen Partei in Missouri seien Rebellen, Gegner der Union, und Feinde der Freiheit und des Fortshritts.” Anzeiger des Westens Wochen-Blatt , 1 November 1866. 89 “Ehrlichkeit und Moralität.” Fremont Courier , 3 September 1867. 90 Kazal, Becoming Old Stock , 115. 91 This hypothesis directs Hartmut Keil’s research on antebellum relationships between African Americans and German immigrants in northern cities. Keil, “German immigrants and African-Americans in Mid- Nineteenth Century America,” 138. 92 Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 23, 26-34. 176 organization of Democratic veterans who caroused and threatened black residents of

Columbus, Ohio before elections in 1867 and 1868.93

An adversarial relationship with blacks, however, was not a mainstay of German-

American identity and popular culture during the mid-nineteenth century. For example,

German immigrants avoided blackface minstrelsy, the art form that provided the cultural expression of the Democrats’ idea of exclusively white citizenship. Some historians have described blackface as “the most influential forum for nineteenth-century racial attitudes” among working-class Americans, and they have been particularly interested in the way it brought different immigrant groups together as “white ethnics.”94 By the 1840s,

America’s most popular entertainers were white men who blackened their faces and presented caricatures of African Americans in formulaic but improvised variety routines.

Blackface minstrel acts overwhelmingly depicted black characters who were foolish, self- indulgent, licentious, and subservient, utterly lacking the “self-control of republican citizens.” Since its dominant messages were anti-black and pro-slavery, this vehicle of vernacular racism rose in conjunction with the Jacksonian Democratic Party.95 During the 1860s, blackface reached the pinnacle of both its popularity and its association with

93 Columbus Westbote , 3 October 1867, 1 October 1868. 94 Baker, Affairs of Party , 213. Blackface minstrelsy was centered in the urban centers of the region stretching from New York and Pennsylvania west to the upper area. Alexander Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” American Quarterly 27 (1975): 7. 95 Baker, Affairs of Party , 237. See also Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” 19-23; Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 65-97. Other scholars emphasize that the racial content of blackface was ambivalent. See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 15-37; William F. Stowe and David Grimsted, “White-Black Humor,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 3 (1975): 87-96. One historian specifically argues blackface was not “political” because it was so pervasive that bore various racial messages and was used by both parties before emancipation. Mark E. Neeley, Jr., The Boundaries of American Political Culture in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 97-127. Along these lines, see also William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Pres, 1999). 177 Democratic politics. After the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, blackface performances ridiculed African American ambitions, nostalgically depicting slavery as preferable to citizenship.96 There are many ways to interpret the spectacle of working-class whites reveling in black impersonations, but men of different ethnic backgrounds were certainly coming together to celebrate their common whiteness at the expense of African

Americans.97 The comic black faces on the stage allowed the men in the audiences to feel superior.

If many working-class Ohioans and Missourians honed their sense of whiteness at blackface shows, German-speakers, as a rule, did not. Most of them had only arrived in the 1850s, and they did not immediately warm to this quintessentially American entertainment. There is little evidence that German immigrants were as involved in blackface as Irish and English immigrants.98 One sample of forty-three blackface performers working in 1838 found seven born outside of the United States, none of them

Germans. 99 While some German immigrants must have frequented minstrel shows, they were not advertised in German-language newspapers at the height of blackface’s

96 Toll, Blacking Up , 112-28; Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” 23. For the rise of the business of minstrel performances, see Carl Wittke, Tambo and Bones: A History of the American Minstrel Stage (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1930), 64. 97 David Roediger argues the potentially subversive class messages of blackface were channeled into the racial rather than class solidarity. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness , 127. For arguments that emphasize blackface’s subversion, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 259; Stowe and Grimsted, “White- Black Humor,” 80-83. 98 Several works make passing reference to German immigrant involvement in Civil War Era minstrelsy: Kazal, Becoming Old Stock , 114, 323; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness , 118; Alan W. C. Green, “‘Jim Crow’, ‘Zip Coon’: The Northern Origins of Negro Minstrelsy,” Massachusetts Review 11 (1970): 393. Ultimately, all their claims can be traced back to a 1930s monograph, Carl Wittke’s Tambo and Bones . Wittke did identify two German-born men in an extensive prosopography including scores of performers. Wittke, the son of German immigrants and an historian of German immigration was well equipped to present more evidence of German-American involvement in blackface had it existed. Wittke, Tambo and Bones , 233, 236. 99 Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” 7. 178 popularity in the1860s. Neither were they standard fare in the numerous German- language venues in cities such as St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Cleveland.100 In 1883, an immigrant defending the retention of German “characteristics” in the pages of the

Milwaukee Seebote asked, whether “citizens of German origin” had to attend “Minstrel

Shows” in order to be good Americans. Using the English-language term for the

American art form, he indicated that it was still as foreign to German Americans as

“Camp Meetings” and “women’s crusades.” 101 The children of German immigrants appear only to have adopted the artistic descendants of blackface toward the end of the century. 102

During the 1860s, German Democrats took part in leisure activities that did not carry blackface minstrelsy’s messages about race and citizenship. German Americans were somewhat divided along religious and class lines, but they shared a proud tradition

100 It is difficult to prove the absence of German-language blackface in the United States during the 1860s and 1870s, but my reading of German-language newspapers did not reveal any advertisements or reports of performances. Studies of German-American theater do not mention it, although they identify the staging of burlesques and vaudeville-style shows. Alfred H. Nolle, “The German Drama on the St. Louis Stage” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1917), 77-81; John H. Kremling, “German Drama on the Cleveland Stage: Performances in German and English from 1850 to the Present” (Ph.D. diss., The Ohio State University, 1976), 190-93; Peter C. Merrill, German-American Urban Culture: Writers and Theaters in Early Milwaukee (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 25-32. 101 “Charakterzüge”; “Bürger deutschen Ursprungs”; “Weiberkreuzzügen.” Der deutsche Pionier 15 (1883): 130-31. The Cincinnati periodical reprinted an article that first appeared in a Milwaukee newspaper. 102 For indications that German-American performers only began to stage blackface in German-American venues toward the end of the century, see Klaus Ensslen, “German-American Working-Class Saloons in Chicago: Their Social Function in an Ethnic and Class-Specific Context,” in German Workers’ Culture in the United States 1850-1920 , ed. Hartmut Keil (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 173, 175; Christine Heiss, “Popular and Working-Class German Theater in Chicago, 1870 to 1910” in German Workers’ Culture in the United States , ed. Keil, 188-90; Berndt Ostendorf, “‘The Diluted Second Generation’: German Americans in Music 1870 to 1920,” in German Workers’ Culture in the United States , ed. Keil, 279; Kazal, Becoming Old Stock , 113-14. For the role of blackface in the Americanization of various groups of European immigrants during the 1920s and 1930s, see Michael Rogin, “Making America Home: Racial Masquerade and Ethnic Assimilation in the Transition to Talking Pictures,” Journal of American History 79 (1992): 1050-77. 179 of sociability characterized by beer-drinking and music. 103 A visit to a German neighborhood saloon was part of the daily routine of the urban immigrant worker. There men and women found food, entertainment, and political debate as well as beer. 104 In

cities such as St. Louis and Cincinnati, families could gather on fine weekends at open-air beer gardens. Throughout the country, German-American organizations and churches

organized public musical events, sporting demonstrations, and picnics. At the same time

that the Cincinnati Volksfreund was beseeching readers to vote down black suffrage in

October 1867, it advertised a choice of German-language entertainment that included the

German Theater’s production of “The Wallpaper Manufacturer, or ‘A Night in Berlin,’” a

fundraising ball for the Garment Workers Support Society, “Evening Entertainments” at

the Turner Hall, and concerts by various amateur singing societies.105 Participants

sometimes came from a variety of religious and class backgrounds. The Sunday before

the election, a shooting club organized a folk festival attended largely by families that

were at least “independent enough to keep Sunday as a work-free holiday.” The day

featured a procession of Turners, seven different amateur singing groups (one Catholic),

and representatives of a labor federation, all topped off with a sharp shooting

103 Conzen, “Ethnicity as Festive Culture,” in The Invention of Ethnicity , ed. Sollors, 48; Detjen, The Germans in Missouri , 27-28; Ulrike Skorsetz, “Der Franzose wechselt die Mode, Wir Deutschen dagegen wechseln die Wirtshäuser: Die Wirtshäuser und Bierkonsum aus der Sicht deutscher Einwanderer im neunzehnten Jahrhundert,” Yearbook of German-American Studies 31 (1996): 37-44. Tom Goyens, Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880-1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007) explores the significance of German sociability to the anarchist movement in late nineteenth-century New York. 104 Ensslen, “German-American Working-Class Saloons in Chicago,” in German Workers’ Culture in the United States , ed. Keil, 163-76; Ross, Workers on the Edge , 172-78. For confirmation that women were welcomed at many German-American venues, see Cincinnati Volksfreund , 15 July 1867. 105 “Deutsche Theater”; “Die Tapeten-Fabrikanten oder ‘Eine Nacht in Berlin’”; “Großer Stiftungs-Ball gegeben von dem Kleidermacher Unterstützungsverein”; “Abend-Unterhaltung in der Turn-.” Cincinnati Volksfreund , 3, 23 October 1867. 180 competition. 106 The elaborate event required a concentrated German population, but

Turners and singing and shooting groups from small towns often traveled to regional festivals. 107

If blackface minstrelsy created a common whiteness defined against a black , German-American popular culture invented a common Germanness juxtaposed to an Anglo-American stereotype. This proved an obstacle to Democratic politicians. The well-off immigrants who led German Americans in both of the major parties believed that the Germans were characterized by the cultured achievements and decorum represented by the word Bildung . The term had strong middle-class connotations, but “True Bildung ,” as historian Kathleen Neils Conzen has skillfully demonstrated, “recognized the important role of Geselligkeit —voluntary sociability.” 108

Middle-class German Americans, she argues, were prepared to incorporate elements of working-class culture into their “invented” ethnic identity as they “embarked upon an uncoordinated but conscious campaign to defend their way of life” from native-born reformers. 109 The effort that had begun before the war was in full swing by the 1860s. It was exemplified by a group of middle-aged, German-born Cincinnati gentlemen who formed the German Pioneer Society of Cincinnati an explicitly non-partisan and non-

106 “… unabhängig genug sind, um nicht nur den Sonntag allein für einen von der Arbeit freien Festtag zu halten ….” Cincinnati Volksfreund , 1 October 1867. It is unclear whether “der Arbeiterbund von Cincinnati” was the local chapter of the Allgemeine Arbeiter-Bund in den Vereinigten Staaten, a non- Marxist group which formed in 1857 to advocate for higher pay and “equal rights for all regardless of color, religion, nationality or sex.” Whatever its ideology, the group’s name proclaimed its proud working- class identity. Levine, The Spirit of 1848 , 144-45. 107 For example, a regional “Turnfest” took place in St. Charles in early June 1868. St. Charles Demokrat , 4 June 1868. The Fremont Courier allowed its readers to participate vicariously in a national convention of German singing groups held in Chicago the following year by devoting five columns to it. Fremont Courier , 25 June 1865. 108 Conzen, “Ethnicity as Festive Culture,” 49. 109 Ibid., 55. 181 denominational group in 1867, which dedicated itself to “preserv[ing] … the history and experiences of the German pioneers of Cincinnati.” Its journal included biographies, histories of German settlements, and articles that showed German immigrants bound together by a culture of sociability. 110

Every German-American newspaper included similar pieces trumpeting the

German contributions to American society. In July 1867, the Volksfreund happily reported remarks by an Anglo-American politician at a German-American gathering in

Peoria, Illinois. The politician told the crowd, “Today I saw here the wealthiest and most educated [ gebildetsten ] Germans of our city sitting together on the same bench with the least well-off and drinking beer out of the same horn, and all appeared to feel completely content.” 111 German Americans with their “noble, sensible sociability” contrasted not to

African Americans but to Anglo-Americans, who were “no social people.” 112 Defensive but not hostile, German Americans were gratified whenever the individualistic, sober, materialistic Anglo-Americans recognized Germans’ gift to the United States.

It was difficult for Democrats to use this ostensibly non-partisan model of

German-American identity to consolidate opposition to African American citizenship.

During the Civil War, Republicans had succeeded in infusing it with their own ideas of citizenship. The Peoria politician whom the Democratic Volksfreund so approvingly quoted in 1867 was Robert G. Ingersoll, a Republican who that year pushed his brother in

110 “… die Geschichte und Erlebnisse der detuschen Pionier von Cincinnati … aufzubewahren.” “Constitution des deutschen Pionier-Vereins von Cincinnati,” Der deutsche Pionier 1 (1869): 27-29. In 1877 a similar organization formed with the goal of “supporting and cultivating within a tight social circle” (“die deutschen Literatur im engen, sozialen Kreise zu pflegen un zu förden”). Deutscher Literarische Klub, Record Book, 1877-1878, box 1, Deutscher Literarische Klub Records, CHS. 111 “Ich habe heute hier die vermögendsten und gebildetsten Deutschen unserer Stadt auf derselben Bank mit den wenig Bemittelten zusammen sitzen und Bier aus einem und demselben Horn trinken sehen, und Alle schienen sich vollständig glücklich zu fühlen.” Cincinnati Volksfreund , 15 July 1867. 112 “Edler, vernünftiger Geselligkeit”; “Kein geselliges Volk.” Ibid. 182 Congress to “take the most radical ground.”113 He was addressing assembled Turners, members of an organization that embodied German sociability and supported African

American suffrage. The Volksfreund reported the concluding admonition of Ingersoll’s speech: “Stay true to your principles … and the time will soon come, when freedom is universal and every man will enjoy the fruits of his labor.” 114 While the Volksfreund

could try to cast this as a non-partisan message, it was distinctly Republican in the

context of Reconstruction. Staying true to the principles of Ingersoll and the Turners

meant supporting African American citizenship.

German Republicans dominated popular representations of German sociability

and Bildung and had infused them with Republican ideas of citizenship. During the late

1860s, support for an inclusive and participatory form of American citizenship had become part of the myth of the freedom-loving German. An immigrant writing the

history of German St. Louis from the perspective of the late nineteenth century described

how German sociability and German Republicanism fused in the eyes of Anglo-

Americans in the late 1860s. “The German approach to life, their way of enjoying life”

had led to the creation of “summer gardens” in the late 1840s and 1850s, but Americans

had found German customs foreign and only frequented the German places of

entertainment after the war. As the book explained, “the shared endurance of danger, jointly won victories, and the eventual fruits of the casualties it [the war] yielded, brought

the two nationalities closer together.” There was “a powerful respect for the Germans in

certain classes of the population where it had not existed before.” The newfound respect

113 Orvin Larson, Robert G. Ingersoll: A Biography (New York: The Citadel Press, 1962), 87. 114 “Bleibt den Prinzipien treu … und die Zeit wird bald kommen, wo die Freiheit allgemein sein und Jeder die Früchte seiner Arbeit … genießen wird.” Cincinnati Volksfreund , 15 July 1867. 183 “clearly manifested itself beginning during the war and during the second half of the

1860s, in the political arena, but also in daily activities.” Although this account obscured the tense atmosphere of St. Louis politics during the era, it was a narrative that German

Americans were shaping even in the 1860s. It was Republican because it depicted the

Civil War as a fight for the Union and against slavery and described its “eventual fruits” as worthy achievements.115

During the 1868 election, the Republican idea that German immigrants stood for tolerance of immigrants and African Americans reached its peak. With Schurz soon to be elected to the Senate, it was clear that the events of Reconstruction had created significant support for the principle of political citizenship for black men. While German

Republicans, especially in St. Louis, had not all supported African American suffrage in state referenda, Democratic leaders had failed to use the prospect of black voting to entice Republican voters into Democratic ranks. German Democratic editors even began to question racism’s efficacy in motivating their own partisans. Rank-and-file German

Democrats were less interested in defining whiteness than Irish Democrats, but they were also distinguishable from Anglo-Americans within their party. German Democrats participated in the German-language public sphere. The political defeat of 1868

compounded Democrats’ sense that Republicans were winning the battle to define

German-American identity.

115 “Die Lebensanschauung der Deutschen, ihre Weise, das Leben zu genießzen”; “… gemeinsam ertragene Gefahren, gemeinschaftlich erkämpfte Siege und die schließlichen Früchter der von ihn gebrachten Opfer hatten die verschiedenen Nationalitäten einander näher gebracht ….”; “Man hatte in gewissen Schichten der Bevölkerung einen vorher nicht existirenden, gewaltigen Respekt vor den Deutschen bekommen, und das hatte sich schon während des Krieges und während der zweiten Hälfte der sechziger Jahre hier blos auf politischem Gebiete, sondern auch im täglichen Verkehr deutlich kundgegeben.” E.D. Kargau, St. Louis in früheren Jahren: Ein Gedenkbuch für das Deutschthum (St. Louis: Aug. Wiebuch & Sohn, 1893), 204-09. 184 After Grant became president, German Democrats became somewhat resigned to the changes in citizenship they were witnessing. The day after the election, the

Volksfreund revisited a compromise proposal that had already caught the editor’s eye:

“universal suffrage and universal amnesty” for black and white men in the South. 116 For

Democrats, this plan would mean abandoning the idea that citizenship would be for

whites only. By February 1869, when the Fifteenth Amendment was making its way

through Congress, Jeup reevaluated the “people’s will.” The paper had warned its

readers that if they voted for Republicans, voting against black suffrage would be pointless. Voters apparently had not listened, “And, as one can see, it has already come

to this.” After four years of fighting African American suffrage, Jeup reflected, “What

the people will say to this new act of violence by radicalism remains to be seen.” 117

116 Cincinnati Volksfreund , 4 November 1868. Jeup had reacted approvingly when New York Republican raised the issue in early 1867. Cincinnati Volksfreund , 2 February 1867. 117 “Volkswillen”; “Und soweit sind wir, wie man sieht, bereits gekommen”; “Was das Volk zu diesem neuen Gewaltstreiche des Radikalismus sagen wird, bleibt abzuwarten.” Cincinnati Volksfreund , 2 February 1869. Other Democratic newspapers expressed muted opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment. Fremont Courier , 4 February 1869; Columbus Westbote , 28 January 1869. 185

CHAPTER 5

WENDEPUNKT: THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR AND GERMAN UNIFICATION, 1869-1871

The stifling heat did not stop local Germans from packing into the Sandusky,

Ohio courthouse to demonstrate their support for Prussia and the German states that had rallied to its aid following the French declaration of war on July 19, 1870. They were determined that they would “not lag behind any city in the republic” in showing their

“loyalty and devotion to the threatened—but therefore all the more ardently loved—

Fatherland.”1 France had gone on the offensive following a diplomatic slight, but in reality, Prussian Prime Minister sought just such an opportunity to consolidate his kingdom’s rising power. Within a few months, Prussia would capture

France’s Louis Napoleon III, besiege Paris, and found the German Empire.2 In

Sandusky, invited guests from as far away as Detroit and Cleveland heralded this new era

of German unity. Musicians defied the heat to fill the hall with stirring music. August

Thieme, a veteran of the unsuccessful campaign for German unification in 1848 and

editor of the Cleveland Wächter am Erie since 1852, rose to register his approval. The

1 “Hinter keiner Stadt in der Republik zurück”; “Treue und Hingebung für das bedrohte, aber eben deshalb so heißer geliebte Vaterland.” Wächter am Erie, 5 August 1870. 2 For useful overview of the road to war, see Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870-1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 16-40. 186 newspaperman could not hold back his enthusiasm, remarking that “the patriotic fervor in

Sandusky is a match for the hundred-degree heat.”3

The outpouring of German-American pride and solidarity during the Franco-

Prussian War and German unification in 1870 and 1871 would mark what the Cincinnati

Volksfreund called “the turning point [Wendepunkt] in the political and social course of the German element in America.”4 A wave of euphoria swept through German America.

From small-town courthouses to urban parks in Cleveland, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, tens of thousands of German Americans turned out to celebrate in the summer of 1870. They would take to the streets again after September 2, when German forces scored a quick victory over the French at Sedan and captured Napoleon III, and they continued to follow the war until Prussia’s final victory and Germany’s formal unification redrew the map of

Europe in 1871. Regardless of religion, class, or party, German-speaking Americans welcomed German unity. The Democratic and pro-Catholic Fremont Courier could report on the Sandusky rally as enthusiastically as August Thieme’s Radical Republican and anti-clerical Wächter.5 The message rippled through the German-American press: for the moment, differences among German immigrants had fallen away.

The Franco-Prussian War would transform how German immigrants approached

American citizenship during Reconstruction. Before 1870, German-American understandings of citizenship grew out of the immigrants’ experiences of the Revolutions of 1848, becoming American, and participating in America’s Civil War. German

3 “Die patriotishe Gluth in Sandusky kann es auch mit hundred Grad aufnehmen.” Thieme provided a detailed description of the event. Wächter am Erie, 5 August 1870. On Thieme, see Mueller, Memories of a Forty-Eighter, 113-16. 4 “Der Wendepunkt in der politischen und sozialen Bahn des deutschen Elements in Amerika.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 14 April 1871. 5 Fremont Courier, 11 August 1870. 187 Republicans, who provided the most influential voices in America’s German-language public sphere, had assumed that the United States could integrate new citizens into the

national community as long as it was true to the universal ideal of freedom. They

supported enfranchising African American men because they believed in an inclusive and participatory form of male citizenship. German Democrats had tried to keep American

citizenship exclusively white, but they found it difficult to defend this position in the late

1860s. The Franco-Prussian War would usher in an entirely new Zeitgeist to displace the

Republican and Democratic approaches from the German-American public sphere.

Racial ideas that had been unpopular while German Republicans were fighting for

African American citizenship now surfaced. Contrasting the French and German peoples, German immigrants in the United States began more seriously to entertain the

notion that members of the German Volk were perhaps racially predisposed to good

citizenship. German Americans reconsidered how differences among races might

influence individuals’ capacity for self-rule.

The new Zeitgeist would also challenge German Americans’ emphasis on participatory citizenship. During 1870 and 1871, France again declared itself a republic,

the German states unified, and the United States ratified the principle of universal

manhood suffrage in the Fifteenth Amendment. As German immigrants compared the

governments of the French Republic, the German Empire, and the United States they

would be most excited about the new empire’s prospects. This raised a question: Was a

great nation primarily defined by a republican constitution and a community of

enfranchised citizens? Men such as Thieme, who as the youngest delegate in the

Frankfurt Parliament of 1848 had fought in vain for a united and republican Germany,

188 now welcomed the united but imperial Germany.6 To explain their confidence in their homeland’s future, German Americans would speak less of the fact that the Empire’s adult male population elected a rather impotent parliament and more of German character, education, military prowess, and civil service. This shift away from the issue of voting rights signaled the erosion of the simple dichotomy German Republicans and

Democrats had drawn between monarchies and republics.

These new ideas of Volk and Vaterland would crystallize among German Ohioans and Missourians at the very time that Republicans faced the challenge of implementing the Fifteenth Amendment’s principle of equal citizenship. The context of Reconstruction is vital to understanding the significance of German Americans’ changing approach to citizenship and government.7 German Americans were not exceptional in reevaluating

Reconstruction or looking abroad for inspiration in the early 1870s. Yet as they had in

6 Mueller, Memories of a Forty-Eighter, 116. 7 In light of the twentieth-century history of Germany, it is tempting to attribute a sinister exceptionalism to German Americans. Several historians have identified the 1870s as a period when the German- American repudiated American values. Guido Dobbert argued the 1870s saw the “modest beginnings” of “new ethnic chauvinism.” G.A. Dobbert, “German-Americans between New and Old Fatherland, 1870- 1914,” American Quarterly 19 (1967): 669. For a fuller elaboration of his argument that “something went wrong in the process of assimilating the German-Americans,” see Guido Dobbert, “The Disintegration of an Immigrant Community: The Cincinnati Germans, 1870-1920” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1965), 4. In contrast, John H. Hawgood maintained that German separatism was already beginning, but German unification “served to harden German-America to an iron-like firmness in its mould.” Hawgood, The Tragedy of German-America: The Germans in the United States of America during the Nineteenth Century—And After (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940), 279. Historians found the reactions of Forty-Eighters, who had fought so hard for German unity and freedom, particularly chilling. Carl Wittke ended his monograph on the Forty-Eighters with a description of how “their earlier devotion to a republican Germany evaporated in the emotional heat of the victory celebrations of 1871.” Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 355. John G. Gazley observed that Forty-Eighters “had not forgotten German liberty but had definitely subordinated it, for the time being at least.” Gazley, American Opinion of German Unification, 500. More recently, Bruce Levine made a similar suggestion. Levine, The Spirit of 1848, 264-65. Noted historian of Reconstruction and Schurz biographer, Hans L. Trefousse, argues German- American enthusiasm was “tempered by a healthy skepticism about conditions in the new Reich.” Trefousse, “The German-American Immigrants and the newly Founded Reich,” in America and the Germans, ed. Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 1:171. All the works cited above concede—to a greater or lesser extent—that German Americans critiqued the new German Empire. I maintain, however, that in the context of Reconstruction, the new Germany beguiled German immigrants and many other Americans. 189 the past, these immigrants provided a tangible link between European developments and

American debates over citizenship. Examining their distinctive and influential position illuminates Reconstruction’s transatlantic dimensions.

* * * * *

Between the Grant’s inauguration in 1869 and the beginning of the Franco-

Prussian War, the Fifteenth Amendment changed the Republican Party. In July 1869, the

Westliche Post, with Senator Carl Schurz still contributing to its editorial policy, mused over which new issues would replace “those that the Republican Party has finally helped to victory.”8 “With the Fifteenth Amendment on its way to ratification,” the St. Charles

Demokrat observed, “the Republican Party is entering a new phase …. The heroic age of

Republicanism is over.”9 Many Republicans in Ohio and Missouri agreed with the

editors of these German-language newspapers that African American citizenship was

now secure and it was time for the party to address new challenges.10 One historian summed up the popular mood with a rhetorical question: “Had not the party completed its mission?”11

German Radical Republicans had always placed special emphasis on the abstract

goal of eliminating racial distinctions in law. In their campaign for African American

suffrage, German immigrants had thought more about themselves than the freed people

8 “… denen die republikanische Partei endlich zum Triumphe verholfen hat.” Westliche Post Wochen- Blatt, 28 July 1869. For Schurz’s continued editorial involvement, see Westliche Post Wochen-Blatt, 17 February 1869. 9 “Mit der Vortage des 15. Amendments zur Ratificirung … ist die republikanische Partei in eine neue Phase … getreten .... Die Heroenzeit des Republikanismus ist vorüber.” St. Charles Demokrat, 15 July 1869. 10 On Missouri, see Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 272. On Ohio, see Sawrey, Dubious Victory, 142-43. For Anglo-American Republicans nationally, see Wang, The Trial of Democracy, 49-53; Foner, Reconstruction, 449-54; Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 80-81; Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 103. 11 Hans L. Trefousse, The Radical Republicans: Lincoln’s Vanguard for Racial Justice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 443. 190 and more about principle than practice. It is unsurprising that they believed they had

completed their mission with the constitutional amendment that prohibited the denial of

citizens’ voting rights “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Other Radical Republicans might turn their efforts to eliminating other examples of racial

injustice, but German Radicals would loose interest in freed people’s fate once they

supposed black Americans had all the legal opportunities of European immigrants.12

Illustrating this transition, Schurz only voted for the first of five acts that Congress passed

between 1870 and 1872 implement the Fifteenth Amendment. In May 1870, the senator

explained that he supported the first force bill because he “and thousands of children

from [his] native land” had come to the United States to “enjoy the blessings of liberty

and self-government” and he believed African Americans also deserved such

opportunities. In the same speech, the German-born Radical indicated he would soon

diverge from the Republicans who continued to place high priority on African American

rights. He pointedly rejected unlimited federal involvement on behalf of southern blacks.13

The passage of the suffrage amendment also affected German Democrats during

the year preceding Europe’s transformative war. Most of the significant German

Democratic leaders in Ohio and Missouri decided to support the “New Departure,” a

strategy adopted by Democrats who believed their political fortunes were best served by

12 James M. McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 13; Wang, The Trial of Democracy, 57, 53-92. Republicans who were not Radicals clearly supported continued efforts to protect racial equality. For an example, see Richard E. Welch, Jr., George Frisbie Hoar and the Half-Breed Republicans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 21-27. Hans L. Trefousse presented a nuanced discussion of the “loss of radical influence” in the Republican Party. He emphasized that Radicals aged and gradually lost popular support in the 1870s. Trefousse, The Radical Republicans, 442. 13 Schurz, “The Enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment,” 19 May 1870, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 1:484-509 191 relinquishing overt resistance to African American enfranchisement and distancing

themselves from “Bourbons,” the conservative southern members of their party.14 The

influential Cincinnati Volksfreund opposed the Fifteenth Amendment as late as July

1869, but in August a new editor adopted the New Departure.15 Emil Rothe came to

Cincinnati after a successful career representing Wisconsin’s German-born population in that state’s legislature. Although known for his ability to relate to working-class German

Americans, he entered the elite and strictly non-partisan circles of Cincinnati’s German

Literary Club and the German Pioneer Society.16 In the first issue of the Volksfreund under his direction, he announced that he would “support the value of every truly beneficial achievement of the war.”17 The following day, race and the South were absent from his list of pressing issues facing the country.18 It was only a subtle change, but two

years later, the Volksfreund would claim to be the first Democratic newspaper in Ohio to break with and recognize “racial equality before the law and Negro

voting rights.”19

In St. Louis, the Westliche Post observed that the Democracy was “beginning to cast off the state sovereignty doctrine and the anti-nigger doctrine like a snake its skin.”20

The city’s Anzeiger des Westens followed the “possum policy,” muting its political

14 For an overview of the New Departure, see Foner, Reconstruction, 412-16. 15 Cincinnati Volksfreund, 9 July 1869. 16 Emil Rothe: Sein Charakter, eine Leben und Wirken [Cincinnati, 1895]. Fick Pamphlet Collection, German-Americana Collection, University of Cincinnati (hereafter UC). 17 “… jeder wirklich segensreichen Errungenschaft des Kriegs ihren Werth zugestehen ….” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 19 August 1869. 18 Cincinnati Volksfreund, 20 August 1869. 19 “Der Racengleichheit vor dem Gesetze und des Negerstimmrechtes.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 7 June 1871. 20 “… beginnt die Staaten souveränitäts-Doktrin und die Antinigger-Doktrin abzustreifen, wie die Schlange ihre Haut.” Westliche Post Wochen-Blatt, 28 July 1869. 192 activity while Missouri Republicans fought among themselves.21 Like Democrats in

other border states, Missouri and Ohio partisans believed putting Reconstruction behind

them would help them attract moderate voters from the Republican camp.22 German

Democrats found this approach particularly appealing because they knew German

immigrants disliked Republican economic and social policies. Even before the Franco-

Prussian War, then, German Republicans and Democrats believed new issues would

replace the question of African American citizenship.23

German Americans broadly agreed on several of the controversies emerging in

1869, which paved the way for the spirit of unity triggered by the European war.

German-born members of both parties remained troubled by Republican trade and

monetary policies. When he was elected to the Senate, Schurz began to receive letters

from Cincinnati Republican J. B. Stallo and constitutional scholar Franz Lieber urging

him to act to eliminate protective tariffs.24 German-language newspapers continued to

advocate free trade, often listing it among their most urgent concerns. Most German-

language newspapers also continued to support tightening the supply of currency. This

strained German Americans’ position within the parties. In Ohio, German Democrats felt

obliged to compromise on monetary policy for the sake of party harmony. When the

Ohio Democratic Platform included a plan to repay bonds in greenbacks, the Cincinnati

Volksfreund accepted it as an “issue of secondary importance,” which “will be taken care

21 Westliche Post, 16 August 1870; Anzeiger des Westens, 8 September 1870. 22 Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 284; William Hyde to James S. Rollins, St. Louis, 14 February 1870, folder 104, James Rollins Papers, WHMC—Columbia; Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 201-03; Perman, The Road to Redemption, 5-21; Richard O. Curry, “Introduction” in Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), xiii-xxvi. 23 Westliche Post Wochen-Blatt, 29 September 1869. 24 J.B. Stallo to Schurz, Cincinnati, 10 May 1869, and Franz Lieber to Schurz, New York, 11 December 1869, 30 December 1869, reel 4, Schurz Papers, LC. 193 of totally on its own by the national development of commercial circumstances.” Yet it prominently ran the Anzeiger des Westens’ opposing opinion in the next column.25 The

Westliche Post commented that both parties were divided on economic policy. German

Republicans and German Democrats believed in free trade and hard money.26

German-American men in both parties also disliked the new prominence of the

“woman suffrage” campaign and temperance. In 1869, national leaders of the woman suffrage movement divided over the Fifteenth Amendment, which permitted sex discrimination in voting.27 In February, activists brought female suffrage before the

legislatures of both Ohio and Missouri. St. Louis became a center of woman suffrage

activity.28 A National Woman Suffrage Convention held in the city in early October

1869 passed resolutions asserting that the spirit of the recently amended Constitution protected female citizens’ right to vote.29 All prominent German Americans in Missouri and Ohio found the “agitation for women’s rights” more or less “distasteful,” asserting that it “originated with Puritans and temperance advocates and with females [Weibern] of every sort from Massachusetts and who are angry that men cannot bear

25 “Nebenfrage”; “… durch die natürliche Entwicklung der commerciellen Verhältnisse ganz von selbst sich erledigen wird.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 7 June 1871. 26 Mississippi Blätter, 8 May 1870. See also the discussion in the influential hard-money and Democratic Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 28 October 1869, 10 June 1871. 27 Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 162-202. 28 On Ohio, see Cincinnati Volksfreund, 6 February 1869; Carol Lasser, “Party, Propriety, Politics, and Woman Suffrage in the 1870s: National Developments and Ohio Perspectives,” in New Viewpoints in Women’s History: Working Papers from the Schlesinger Library 50th Anniversary Conference, March 4-5, 1994, ed. Susan Ware (Cambridge, Mass.: Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, 1994), 141, 153. On Missouri, see Monica Cook Morris, “The History of Woman Suffrage in Missouri, 1867-1901,” Missouri Historical Review 25 (1930): 70; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 274-78. 29 Morris, “The History of Woman Suffrage in Missouri,” 70; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 277- 78; Parrish, A History of Missouri, 3: 251-53. 194 children.”30 There is no sign that Schurz ever accepted Susan B. Anthony’s invitation to speak in support of equal citizenship rights for unhindered by “race or color, sect or sex.”31 Indelibly linked to temperance, the agitation for women’s rights reminded

German Republicans that they had perhaps as much in common with their Democratic countrymen as their Republican colleagues from New England.

German Americans would also express strong bi-partisan opposition to political corruption. Vulnerable to frauds that targeted “greenhorns,” German newcomers saw corruption as a defining feature of American life.32 As outsiders, immigrants had often felt excluded from the political networks that distributed choice civil service positions. In

1860, an immigrant carpenter in New York wrote to his parents in Prussia that America would be better if “not every official stuffed his pockets as full as he can for the short term of his office.”33 Profiteering in the Union Army further persuaded some immigrants that “everything is swindle here.”34 A German surgeon serving with a Federal regiment wrote in late 1864 that “despite the immense advantages that [the United States] has over

30 “Die Weiberrechtsagitation”; “ekelhaft”; “Sie geht von Puritanern und Temperenzlern aus und von Weibern jener Sorte aus Massachussetts und Maine, welche darüber zürnen, daß nicht Männer die Kinder bähren.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 20 February 1869. See also Columbus Westbote, 25 February 1869; St. Charles Demokrat, 11 February 1869, 18 February 1869, 22 April 1869, 3 March 1870, 12 May 1870; Westliche Post Wochen-Blatt, 10 February 1869, 17 February 1869, 3 November 1869, 1 December 1869, 4 May 1870, 13 June 1870; Anzeiger des Westens, 6 May 1869, 1 July 1869. Showing the importance of Missouri developments, several lengthy Ohio stories referred specifically to the state. Columbus Westbote, 4 March 1869; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 15 April 1869. 31 Susan B. Anthony to Schurz, New York, 30 December 1865, reel 3, Schurz Papers, LC. Schurz was a life-long opponent of woman suffrage. Trefousee, Carl Schurz, 264. 32 Surveying letters written during the war years, Wolfgang Helbich found that all of the sixteen correspondents (out of a sample of fifty-nine) who mentioned corruption considered it particularly American. Helbich, “German-born Union Soldiers,” 299. 33 “… wo nicht jeder Beamte auf die kurze Dauer seines Amts sich die Taschen so voll schiebts, als er kann.” Julius Wesslau to His Parents, New York, 26 December 1860, in Deutsche im amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg, 124. 34 “Es ist hier alles Schwindel.” Wilhelm Francksen to His Father, Stafford, Virginia, 1 March 1863, in Deutsche im amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg, ed. Helbich and Kamphoefner, 203. For a discussion of wartime profiteering, see Mark Summers, The Era of Good Stealings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 16-24. 195 other countries, there is a broadminded type of person that calls deceit and swindle cleverness and where everyone endeavors to be clever.”35 An Illinois Union veteran identified a simple explanation of corruption: for Americans, “the almightily dollar … is the only goal.”36 An Ohio newspaper concurred: “All of American life and ambition drives toward acquiring wealth as quickly as possible … everyone accordingly seeks ‘to do what can be done.’”37 In 1860, Schurz had informed his wife that Republican Party could not attract the German vote without devoting itself to routing out corruption.38

That year German Americans attending the 1860 Republican National Convention seriously considered proposing a resolution condemning the spoils system.39 The Civil

War, however, had postponed Schurz’s “war on corruption” for nearly a decade. With race-neutral suffrage written into the Constitution, the issue would begin to take on greater significance when a number of cases of political malfeasance were revealed during 1869.

35 “… trotzt der ungeheuren Vorzüge, die es vor anderen Ländern hat; es ist ein merkwürdiger weitherziger Menschenschlag hier, der Betrug und Schwindel Klugheit nennt und wo jeder sich bestrebt, klug zu sein.” Carl Uterhard to His Mother, , 2 October 1864, in Deutsche im amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg, ed. Helbich and Kamphoefner, 234. 36 “Der allmächtige Dollar... der einzige Endzweck.” Eduard Treutlein, 26 May 1871, in Deutsche im amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg, ed. Helbich and Kamphoefner, 294. 37 “… das ganze amerikanische Leben und Streben dahin geht, so schnell als möglich Reichthumer zu erwerben …. Jedermann darnach trachtet ‘zu machen, was gemacht werden kann.’” Toledo Express, 27 December 1871. 38 Schurz to Margaretha Schurz, 27 February 1860, Intimate Letters, ed. and trans. Schafer, 208. Schurz had spoken against political corruption in the 1850s too. Mark W. Summers, The Plundering Generation: Corruption and the Crisis of the Union, 1849-1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 77, 229, 232. 39 Mueller, Memories of a Forty-Eighter, 205-06. The Cincinnati Volksfreund represented a commonly held perception when it wrote, “The Germans think more seriously than cunning, speculating politicians.” (“Die Deutschen sind mehr ernst denkende als schlau spekulierende Politiker.”) Cincinnati Volksfreund, 8 October 1869. 196 “How everything changes,” the Volksfreund noted as it observed the political landscape late in 1869.40 Even the August Thieme’s idealistic Wächter no longer ran

many stories on African American citizenship. The paper had cheered on the Missouri

Germans who attempted to write black suffrage into their 1865 constitution, arguing

emancipation would mean little without “citizenship rights.”41 Yet by early 1870,

Thieme set his sights on eliminating Republican protectionist tariffs and soft-money policies and preventing temperance legislation and general corruption.42 The

consequences of the new political stirrings were not yet clear by mid-1870, but the

Republican Westliche Post was not alone in anticipating a significant change. “One

senses the approach of a time,” Schurz’s paper had already printed, “when the old

distinctions between the Republican and Democratic parties as they have existed until

now must fall away.”43 German Americans were ready to move on from the debate over black suffrage, but they were unsure what came next. The German community was as riddled with personal antagonisms and class and religious tensions as it had always been, but many German-born politicians were inspired by the potential for German immigrants to unite over free trade, hard money, alcohol consumption policy, and civil service reform. The stage was set for them to reconsider the racial boundaries and the political rights of citizenship.

* * * * *

40 “Wie sich Alles ändert.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 21 August 1869. 41 “Bürgerlichen Recht.” Wächter am Erie, 21, 28 January 1865. 42 Wächter am Erie, 4 May 1870. 43 “Man merkt das Herannahen einer Zeit, in der die alten Gegensätze zwischen der republikanischen und demokratischen Partei, wie sie bisher existirten, wegfallen müssen ….” Westliche Post Wochen-Blatt, 28 July 1869. 197 “War at Last,” announced on July 16, 1870. The conflict between France and Prussia remained in the headlines well into the following year.44 The

war that would reshape Europe also had a dramatic effect on German America. As one

contributor to the Westliche Post noted, the establishment of a reliable telegraph

connection with Europe in 1866 allowed Americans personally to “experience such a

magnificent spectacle.”45 The transatlantic cable had already relayed news of the

deteriorating relationship between the long-standing European foes. France and Prussia

had disagreed over whether a nephew of Prussian King Wilhelm I should accept the

Spanish throne. As the newspapers explained to their readers, the dispute over the

Spanish succession was only the latest episode in the strained relationship between the

French and Prussian ruling dynasties. Bismarck had been stoking Wilhelm I’s imperial

ambitions since Prussia’s decisive victory over Austria in 1866. The German state’s

growing regional influence concerned Napoleon III, who also hoped a popular war

against an old enemy would shore up his domestic support. Both sides welcomed the

Franco-Prussian War as a chance to decide who would dominate Europe.

Once the fighting began, the press fed the American appetite for news of what one

German-language newspaper identified as “the greatest event of the century.”46 Ohio

Governor Rutherford B. Hayes received a letter from a friend in New York informing him that “the war telegrams make immense excitement here as much as our own war[.]

44 New York Times, 16 July 1870. On July 14, the French army mobilized its reserves. The official declaration of war came on the 19th. 45 “… ein so grandiose Schauspiel erleben ….” Westliche Post, 16 September 1870. 46 “Das großartigste Ereigniß [sic] des Jahrhunderts.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 10 August 1870. 198 Extras are out at all times of day.”47 The American press was experiencing explosive

growth, and the burgeoning urban dailies competed to cover the war. Large newspapers printed maps of the theater of war, used bold headlines, and supplemented war

correspondence with late-breaking telegraph reports. Cincinnati Commercial editor

Murat Halstead happened to be vacationing in Europe at the onset of hostilities, and he

rushed to provide first-hand coverage of the war. Rebuffed by the French, he traveled

with the and mailed exclusive reports back to readers at home.48

Americans’ response to the war was politicized from the start. The

Cleveland Leader observed, “Though the war is on the opposite side of the globe from us, it divides almost as rigidly as did the question of slavery.”49 In fact, Americans’

attitudes toward slavery predicted the positions they would take on the Franco-Prussian

War. President Grant noted to the American ambassador in Paris that “every

unreconstructed rebel sympathizes with France, without exception, while the loyal

element is almost as universally the other way.”50 Protestant Republicans in the North were the most enthusiastic supporters of Prussia, which had remained neutral during the

47 J. A. Joel to Rutherford B. Hayes, New York, 25 August 1870, reel 19, Rutherford B. Hayes Papers, Library of Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center (hereafter HPC), Fremont, Ohio (microfilm edition). The Cincinnati Commercial complemented the coverage of the war by the Cincinnati German-language dailies and mocked the local Enquirer for its ignorance of Europe. Cincinnati Commercial, 20 July 1870. 48 On Halstead, see Murat Halstead to Mary Banks Halstead, , 28 August 1870, box 3, folder 27, Murat Halstead Papers, CHS; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 1 September 1870; Donald Walter Curl, “An American Reporter and the Franco-Prussian War,” Journalism Quarterly 49 (1972): 480-88. On the newspaper coverage, see Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre, 63-66; Mark W. Summers, The Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1865-1878 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 49 Cleveland Leader, 27 August 1870. 50 Ulysses S. Grant to Elihu B. Washburne, Long Branch, N.J., 22 August 1870, in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. John Y. Simon (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-), 20:254-59. 199 Civil War while France continued to trade with the Confederate States.51 Governor

Hayes, an Ohio Methodist, wrote to a relative, “How good the news of Prussia flogging

Napoleon.”52 Leading Republican newspapers such as the Springfield (Mass.) Daily

Republican, the New York Tribune, the , the Cincinnati Commercial, the

Cleveland Leader, and the Missouri Democrat all supported Prussia.53 In August, the

Ohio Republican convention passed a resolution expressing “sympathy with the heroic efforts of Germany to achieve and defend its national unity.”54 Democrats might have been right to consider this a cynical “‘Sympathy’-Schwindel” to win German votes, but the parties genuinely differed.55 Democratic newspapers, including the New York World, the Cincinnati Enquirer, and the , acknowledged that Napoleon III brought the war upon himself, but alerted their audience to Bismarck’s provocations.

Democrats expressed sympathy for the , who had supported the young

Union in winning independence from Britain.56 English-speaking Roman Catholics also identified with the French for religious reasons.57 In letters to the Irish-born Cincinnati

51 As the Cleveland Leader emphasized, religious, sectional, and partisan motives reinforced each other. Cleveland Leader, 22 July 1870. The most comprehensive description of American public opinion on the war remains Gazley, American Opinion of German Unification, 320-424. 52 Rutherford B. Hayes to His Uncle, Milwaukee, 8 August 1870, reel 171, Hayes Papers, HPC. 53 For a break down of newspaper sympathies, see Cincinnati Enquirer, 23 July 1870. See also Gazley, American Opinion of German Unification, 320-34. 54 “… unsere Sympathie mit dem heroische Bestreben Deutschlands seine nationale Einigkeit zu wahren und zu vertheidigen.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 12 August 1870. On the August 10 resolution, see also Westliche Post, 13 August 1870; Cincinnati Enquirer, 17 August 1870; Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 27 August 1870. 55 Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 27 August 1870. 56 Cincinnati Enquirer, 30 July 1870; New York World, 16, 17 July 1870. The Republican New York Times also suggested Bismarck had helped instigate the conflict. New York Times, 19, 20 July 1870. 57 One of Rutherford B. Hayes correspondents summed up public opinion: “The mass hope the Germans will win, but the Irish or Roman Catholics hope France will win.” J. A. Joel to Hayes, New York, 25 August 1870, reel 19, Hayes Papers, HPC. Some Anglo-Americans explicitly supported Prussia because it was Protestant. See, for example, Cincinnati Commercial, 8 July 1870. 200 Archbishop John Purcell, an Ohio priest described the war as religious one between the

Catholic French and Protestant Prussians. He naturally sided with France.58

The German-American community showed no such partisan and religious divisions. German immigrants supported Prussia “as a man.”59 Scattered reports of minority opposition to the war amounted to little.60 Like their counterparts in the southern German states of Baden, Württemberg, and Bavaria, German-American

Catholics fell into line behind Prussia. German Catholics in America adamantly rejected the notion that France and Germany were locked in a .61 Catholic organs and Democratic sheets catering to a large Catholic readership claimed that “the Catholic church is more free and happy in Prussia, than she is in France.”62 Although more restrained than the secular press, the Catholic Wahrheits-Freund in Cincinnati remarked that it was pleased that “the best times of German history have returned, and the same self-sacrificing enthusiasm and devotion to the Fatherland, which flared up in 1813 with such strength, is now breaking out.”63 German Catholic support of Prussia caused some tension with their Irish-born brethren. A St. Louis lawyer traveling in South Carolina

58 John N. Thisse to John Purcell, Springfield, Ohio, 18 August 1870, box 22, Thisse to Purcell, New Orleans, 5 March 1871, box 26, Archbishop John Baptist Purcell Papers, Archives of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati (hereafter AAC). 59 “Wie einen Mann.” Anzeiger des Westens, 18 July 1870. The article includes review of newspaper opinion. See also Wächter am Erie, 19, 20 July 1870; Fremont Courier, 21 July 1870; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 26 July 1870; Cincinnati Commercial, 22 July 1870; Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staats- Zeitung, 23 July 170. I cannot find issues of the Columbus Westbote and the Westliche Post for the month of July 1870. 60 English-speaking Democrats tried to stir up divisions among German Americans. Cincinnati Enquirer, 23 July 1870. 61 Wahrheits-Freund, 27 July 1870, 7 September 1870; Fremont Courier, 21 July 1870, 4, 18 August 1870; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 22 August 1870. 62 Quoted in English. Fremont Courier, 11 August 1870; Wahrheits-Freund, 7 September 1870; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 2 August 1870. For reviews of the English and German-language Catholic press on the war, see Cincinnati Volksfreund, 26 August 1870. 63 “Die schönsten Zeiten der deutschen Geschichte sind zurückgekehrt und dieselbe opferfreudige Begeisterung und Hingebung an das Vaterland, die im Jahre 1813 mit solcher Stärke aufflammte, ist jetzt hervor gebrochen.” Wahrheits-Freund, 27 July 1870. 201 remarked to a colleague that “our Gallic and Tutonic [sic] citizens are disposed to reherse

[sic] the war in miniature.”64 His correspondent back in Missouri would not have been

surprised. A mixed German-Irish in St. Louis split when Father Peter Wigger

offered prayers for the success of the Prussian Army. Cincinnati Archbishop Purcell

assured his support to both sides, which did not satisfy some German loyalists.65

Working-class German Americans joined the prevailing German nationalism.

Although one New York socialist organization resolved, “The interests of workers demand a fraternity of workers of all lands for the overthrow of all monarchs,” major

German-language newspapers commented how isolated such defections were.66 Anglo-

American eyewitnesses reported unanimous support for Prussia in German

neighborhoods such as Cincinnati’s Over-the-.67 Indeed, socialists stood alongside

Democrats and Republicans, Catholics and Protestants at the countless rallies and

fundraisers held throughout the country.68 In New York’s Steinway Hall on July 22,

1870, Carl Schurz joined a host of eminent German Americans, including Forty-Eighter

Adolf Douai, who edited the socialist New York Arbeiter-Union. Douai acknowledged

“glowing” with patriotism, despite the fact that “as a social reformer” he could not consider this the “highest” sentiment. “There will be no individual,” he predicted, “who

64 R.K. Charles to John Darby, Darlington, S.C., 9 August 1870, box 4, John Fletcher Darby Papers, MHS. 65 J. N. Adelrich Benziger, sworn statement, Cincinnati, 10 February 1871, Purcell Papers, AAC; William B. Faherty, The St. Louis German Catholics (St. Louis: Reedy Press, 2004), 57. On divisions among Cincinnati Catholics, see also Cincinnati Volksfreund, 22 August 1870. The Catholic Rev. A. Schwenniger spoke at Cincinnati peace festivities in February 1871. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 6 February 1871. 66 “Die Interessen der Arbeiter erfordern eine Verbrüderung der Arbeiter aller Länder zum Sturz aller Monarchen.” Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 6 August 1870. 67 Cincinnati Commercial, 16 July 1870. 68 The New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung claimed it would be impossible to report all the sympathy meetings. Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 23 July 1870. There were gatherings in cities from New Orleans to Boston, and in smaller centers such as Toledo, Dayton, Jefferson City, and LaGrange, Missouri. Westliche Post, 8, 1, 2 August 1870; Cincinnati Commercial, 20 July 1870; Westliche Post, 3 August 1870, 19 October 1870. Sometimes reports of spontaneous neighborhood celebrations also appeared in the newspapers. Westliche Post, 8, 9 August 1870. 202 is not filled with a sense of his faithfulness to the old Fatherland.”69 When Douai did express heavy criticism of Prussia in his workers’ newspaper, subscribers reportedly abandoned him, leaving the publication to fold.70

With the rest of the world, German Americans were surprised when on

September 2, 1870, after only six weeks of fighting, German forces won a decisive battle at the French town of Sedan. The Germans captured Napoleon III and were clearly on their way to winning the war. In the United States, fundraising and sympathy meetings gave way seamlessly to celebrations of the victory. German St. Louisans had the good luck to have organized a large fundraising fair for Sunday, September 4. Learning of the extent of the German triumph, an estimated 10,000 to 25,000 men, women, and children crowed into Concordia Park for the “unity festival” (“Verbrüderungsfest”). A women’s committee ensured St. Louis Germans could buy refreshments. Local brewers provided free beer. By all reports, the celebration raised over $20,000 for German widows and orphans.71 It was the sort of occasion that made its way into letters and memoirs. An

Anglo-American wrote to his father that it was a “grand affair.”72 In 1893, a German

American believed the parade of church groups, Turners, singing societies, and lodges

69 “Die Social-Reformer erkenneten den Patriotismus nicht für das Hochste an, aber es sei schön, sich auch einmal davon durch glühen zu lassen und so würden sie darin keinem der deutschen Landsleute zurück stehen und es werde keinen Einzigen geben, der nicht seine Schuldigkeit gegen das alte Vaterland erfüllte.” Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 23 July 1870. Boston radical Forty-Eighter, , criticized German-Americans’ martial enthusiasm, but he became an ostracized “lone wolf.” Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 255-56. A group of Hanoverians in Chicago faced similar opposition. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 25 July 1870. 70 Cincinnati Volksfreund, 3 August 1870; Wittke, The German American Press, 166. On Douai, see Justine Davis Randers-Pehrson, Adolf Douai, 1819-1888: The Turbulent Life of a German Forty-Eighter in the Homeland and in the United States (New York: Peter Lang, 2000). 71 Westliche Post, 5 September 1870; Anzeiger des Westens, 5 September 1870; New York Times, 5 September 1870. 72 James H. Rollins to James S. Rollins, 5 September 1870, folder 106, Rollins Papers, WHMC— Columbia. See also A. Rühl to Louis Benecke, St Louis, 13 September 1870, folder 721, Benecke Papers, WHMC—Columbia 203 was “down to the present day, the largest that has been seen here.”73 In Ohio, Cincinnati

Germans celebrated the Sedan victory in fine fashion with bonfires, music, artillery salvos, and fireworks, but they were less forthcoming with donations.74 In Cleveland, the situation was reversed. The city’s German Aid Society sent a steady flow of funds to help victims of the war, but local Germans were less demonstrative.75

For all the celebrations, peace did not come with Napoleon III’s surrender.

France’s interim government hastily declared the state a republic and resolved to continue fighting. Anglo-American support for Prussia ebbed as the German armies laid siege to

Paris, waiting for the Third French Republic to cede the historically contested regions of

Alsace and .76 The Democratic New York World believed the hearts of the

American people must “go out in fervent, forward sympathy with a great, heroic nation, their ancient ally, [France,] who … courageously holds aloft the banner of free institutions and places itself in the van of a great republican movement in Europe.”77

Most Democrats and even some Anglo-American Republicans agreed.78 German

73 “… bis auf den heutigen Tag der größte, den man hier gesehen hat.” Kargau, St. Louis in früheren Jahren, 209. 74 Organizers complained Cincinnati “had as yet not shown itself as liberal as other cities” in donations. Cincinnati Commercial, 8 September 1870. See also Cincinnati Volksfruend, 8 September 1870; Anton Eichhoff, In der neuen Heimath: geschichtliche Mittheilung über die deutschen Einwanderer in allen Theilen der Union (New York: E. Steiger & Co., 1884), 300. 75 Wächter am Erie, 21 July 1870; Cleveland Leader, 9, 15, 29, 30 August 1870 3, 15 September 1870. 76 These regions were inhabited by French and German-speakers and had belonged to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation until 1582. Prussia considered their annexation a point of national security and pride. Warwo, The Franco-Prussian War, 230. 77 New York World, 6 September 1870. 78 Among the Democrats, see Cincinnati Enquirer, 9 September 1870, 23, 31 January 1871. Exhibiting a cautious shift in sympathies were the Republican New York Tribune, 7 September 1870; Chicago Tribune, 7 September 1870; Cincinnati Commercial, 8 September 1870. Some Republican papers remained highly skeptical of the new republic: The Nation, 15, 22, 29, September 1870; Cleveland Leader, 5, 6, 7, 9 September 1870. Newspapers commented on growing support of France, even if their own position did not change dramatically. Cincinnati Commercial, 8 September 1870. Regretting the change apparent in the English-language newspapers were St. Charles Demokrat, 6 October 1870; Westliche Post, 14, 20 September 1870; Cincinnati Volksfruend, 20 September 1870; Wächter am Erie, 5 September 1870. For a summary, see Gazley, American Opinion of German 204 Americans, however, read the news from Europe differently. Putting little store in what

they regarded as the chimera of French republicanism, they believed Germans were dying because the French were too proud to admit defeat.79 German immigrants remained sensitive to the war news, anxious about relatives and acquaintances serving on the front lines. One man in central Missouri wrote to a friend, “My 5th army corps at home, in

which I have a number of brothers and cousins and a great many friends, has been

holding out very bravely everywhere, though it has also suffered dreadful losses, but I

still don’t know if members of my family are among them. I haven’t received a letter

from home in over a month.”80 As the war dragged on, casualties mounted until long

after its results were clear. In January 1871, Wilhelm I became the German Emperor and

Paris finally fell to Prussian bombardment. When formal peace negotiations between the belligerents concluded in May, the war had confirmed the Westliche Post’s assessment

that “no strike was made by the brave armies beyond the Ocean without its effect also being felt here.”81

* * * * *

The war in Europe not only brought German immigrants together, it transformed

the discussion of citizenship in the German-American public sphere. A shifting

Unification. 383-89. See also Franz Lieber to Hamilton Fish, New York, 17 September 1870, Hamilton Fish Papers, LC. 79 Cincinnati Volksfreund, 19 October 1870; St. Charles Demokrat, 22 September 1870; Westliche Post, 14 September 1870; Wächter am Erie, 6 September 1870. Even the Catholic Wahrheits-Freund supported the annexation of and Lorraine to the German Empire, remarkably arguing that Catholics in the area welcomed German rule. Wahrheits-Freund, 30 November 1870. 80 “Mein heitmatliches 5tes Armeecorps, in dem ich eine Anzahl Brüder und Cousins habe, sowie eine große Menge Bekannter, hat sich sehr brav gehalten, überall, aber auch furchtbar gelitten, doch weiß ich noch nicht, ob Gliede meiner Familie dabei sind. Ich habe seit über 1 Monat keinen Brief von Hause.” Theodore Boehm to Louis Benecke, Dalton, Missouri, 28 September 1870, folder 722, Benecke Papers, WHMC—Columbia. See similar concern in Fritz Herzberg to Louis Benecke, , 11 August 1870, folder 721, Benecke Papers, WHMC—Columbia. 81 “Kein Schlag ward von den tapfern Armeen jenseits des Oceans geführt, ohne auch hier seiner Wirkung empfunden zu werden.” Westliche Post, 13 December 1870. 205 understanding of the word Volk would indicate a new emphasis in how immigrants understood membership within a national community. During the Revolutions of 1848 liberal nationalists had combined the racial, cultural, and political aspects of the term

Volk to define the German nation as an evolving entity that could harness the power of

the principle of freedom to incorporate various groups into a dynamic whole. In the

United States, many Forty-Eighters had found that this model provided a basis for their

own integration into the American nation and justified African American suffrage. In

1870, however, the Franco-Prussian War quite suddenly popularized the more racial

understandings of the German Volk that had been circulating in Europe and the United

States since the late eighteenth century. For many Europeans, Prussia’s success

confirmed the theory expounded by early nineteenth-century German historians such as

Barthold George Niebuhr: race drove history.82 Bismarck was among those who

interpreted Prussia’s victories over France as a triumph of the German race.83 German

Americans did not unanimously accept this explanation, but many voices in the German- language public sphere began to suggest that the traits that defined the German Volk perhaps ran in their German blood, rather than their German culture or their German language.84 When German Americans began to describe their own superiority in more racialized terms, they weakened the sense that the nation could integrate an array of new citizens.

82 Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, D.C.: The Center Press, 1996), 235-50. 83 Ibid., 287-315. 84 On the concept of Volk (plural Völker) during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, see Vick, Defining Germany, 20-22; Reinhard Koselleck, “Volk, Nation, Nationalismus, Masse,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 7: 380-89; Werner Conze, “Rasse,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 5:148-57. 206 While some Anglo-Americans saw the Franco-Prussian War as a spat between

Napoleon III and Bismarck, German Americans considered it a Volks-Krieg, a clash of the French and German Völker.85 They immediately recognized that the unification of

the German states (with the notable exception of Austria) would transform Europe.

August Thieme’s reliably Radical Cleveland Wächter am Erie eagerly welcomed the

fighting: “The day of the great, long-predicted decision has come—the struggle not between dynasties but between two Völker is erupting, the deep-rooted antipathy between

Romandom and Germandom demands a bloody resolution.”86 The St. Charles Demokrat

asked, “Who does Germany wage war against?” Not Napoleon III alone, it concluded, but the French Volk. The very fact that the emperor had declared war to generate

domestic support demonstrated how deeply the French people were implicated in his

aggressive actions. The Missouri newspaper believed the French and German Völker

would vie for control of Europe.87 In keeping with this position, the German-language

newspapers insisted on referring to the conflict as the “German-French War.” At stake,

editors maintained, was the future of the whole German Volk, not just the Prussian state.88

One New York newspaper went further and did describe the conflict between

France and the German states as a race war. The powerful Democratic New-Yorker

85 Westliche Post, 29 August 1870. In the English-language press, Democrats were most likely to see the war primarily as one waged between monarchs. See Cincinnati Enquirer, 29 July 1870, and New York World, 20 July 1870. Some Republicans also referred to the war as a dynastic conflict, although they tended also to identify the German cause with the German people’s struggle for unification and liberty. See Chicago Tribune, 18 July 1870; Springfield (Mass.) Daily Republican, 16 July 1870; Cleveland Leader, 23 July 1870, and 8 August 1870; The Nation, 14 July 1870. 86 “Der Tag der grossen, längstvorhergesehenen Entscheidung ist gekomment—der Kampf nicht zwischen Dynastien, sondern zwischen zwei Völkern bricht los, die tiefgewurzelte Abneigung zwischen Romanenthum und Germanenthum verlangt die blutige Entscheidung.” Wächter am Erie, 16 July 1870. 87 “Gegen wen führt Deutschland Krieg?” St. Charles Demokrat, 4 August 1870. 88 The Cincinnati Volksfreund, 31 August 1870, protested the nomenclature used by English-language papers. 207 Staats-Zeitung predicted the war would continue until it was decided “whether the

Germanic or the race henceforth would be the leader in the affairs of nations

[Völkerleben].” Unlike most German-language newspapers, the Staats-Zeitung defined the Germanic race to include the English, while the Latin race contained at least the

French and the Spanish. Following German intellectual trends between 1815 and 1870, conceived of world history as a struggle between races.89 Taking a sweeping approach, the newspaper explained that the English had fought the French and Spanish for control of the Americas in the eighteenth century, the Germans and English had fought the

French during the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century, and now the

Germans and French were at it again. The Staats-Zeitung suggested that boundaries between the two races were permeable: France owed what strength it did possess to the incorporation of a Germanic element.90 The careful grouping of European nationalities into larger white “races” was unusual among German Americans of the era, but it was only the most extreme example of a general phenomenon: German Americans were identifying themselves as members of a Volk defined by more than language or culture.91

Back in Missouri, however, Carl Dänzer at the St. Louis Anzeiger responded to

the New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, critiquing the idea of a “Germanic race.” Although the

Anzeiger and the Staats-Zeitung both represented the Democratic Party, Dänzer objected to the “outdated classification into three great race-groups of the Volk of Europe who are increasingly all jumbled up by our industrial century.” He believed that referring to

89 Exactly how races were labeled and defined varied. Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea, 235-76. 90 “… ob die germanische oder die latinische Race fortan die Führerschaft in Völkerleben soll.” Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 23 July 1870. 91 German Americans usually reserved the term “Race” (or “Rasse”) to describe the difference between whites and black, and considered themselves a “Germanic” minority in an Anglo-Saxon land. That is not to say that they would be totally unfamiliar with designations such as “Teutonic,” “Germanic,” “Celtic,” “Latin,” and “Slavic.” Kazal, Becoming Old Stock,118-29. 208 Germanic, Latin, and Slavic races played into the hands of Napoleon III, who was trying

to secure support from , , and Portugal.92 It was in Germany’s interest, then,

not to elevate the conflict to the level of race war. Besides, Dänzer understood German

unification quite differently. “Bands distinguished by [differences in] intellectual life and

other characteristics [Volksindividualitäten]” were coming together as “a political

organism of shared material interests.” The interests of states, he emphasized, had

nothing to do with “blood ties to the tribes that founded this or that empire a millennium

ago.”93 Dänzer’s reaction demonstrates the fluidity of German-American racial ideas at the time, but the sober tone of his appraisal was out of step with German-American public opinion. Many German Americans might have agreed with him that the German

Volk was not a race, but neither was it merely a group of people who shared material

interests. Dänzer’s purely political definition of Germany did not capture the cultural,

linguistic, and even racial solidarity immigrants felt with Germans in Europe. The

celebrations of 1870 and 1871 reverberated with examples of German Americans

identifying themselves as members of a Volk in ascendancy.

Having revitalized their connections to the German Volk, German Ohioans and

Missourians went on to compare their capacity for self-rule to that of the French. Like

their contemporaries in Europe, German-American Republicans and Democrats

comfortably blended cultural and near-racial explanations of German superiority.94 At

Cincinnati’s celebration of the Sedan victory, the venerable Republican Judge J.B. Stallo

92 “… almodischen Classifikation der, von unserem industriellen Jahrhundert mehr und mehr durcheinander geschüttelten Völker Europas in die drei großen Racengruppen.” Aneiger des Westens, 25 July 1870. 93 “… des politischen Organismus an die Gemeinschaft der materiellen Interesse, des geistigen Lebens und anderer Volksindividualitäten bildenden Bande ….”; “… die Blutsverwandschaft der Stamme, welche vor einem Jahrtausend dieses und jenes Reich gegründet.” Ibid. 94 Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea, 274-76. 209 told the excited crowd—or at least the portion that could hear him—that “we can proudly say that the customs and instincts of the German Volk have always been to free self-

determination.” Although he was careful not to gloat at the humiliation of the French, he believed that they had received their comeuppance. According to the jurist, France

sought to dominate other peoples instead of establishing “self-rule” at home. “For the

French,” Stallo maintained, “there is no difference between freedom and anarchy.”95 The

Cincinnatian alluded to France’s turbulent past, but he spoke not only of history but of

the customs, instincts, and qualities of a Volk. Franz Lieber, the respected constitutional

scholar who had lived in the United States since the 1830s, confided to his friend,

Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, that he believed all France’s “king-less governments

had been democratic despotisms” because “the French have never respected what civil

liberty is.”96 Editors of the Cincinnati Volksfruend also drew on their reading of history.

The leading Democratic German-language newspaper maintained that since the

Napoleonic Wars, “The French peasant has essentially remained as he was then, ignorant in the highest degree, but the German masses have advanced in general education

[Bildung].”97 Therein lay the reason for the Germans’ remarkable successes in the early

95 “Wir können mit Stolz sagen, daß die Wohnheiten und Instinkte des deutschen Volks stets die der freien Selbstbestimmung gewesen sind”; “Selbstherrschung”; “Der Unterschied zwischen Freiheit und Anarchie besteht fur die Franzosen nicht.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 8 September 1870. 96 to Hamilton Fish, New York, 17 September 1870, Fish Papers, LC. Known for his conservative nationalism, Lieber emphasized that freedom brought with it responsibilities. His letterhead bore the motto, “No right without its duties. No duty without its rights.” 97 “Der französische Bauer ist im Wesentlich geblieben wie er damals war, unwissened im höchsten Grade, die deutschen Massen aber sind seit der Zeit weit in allgemeiner Bildung fortgeschritten.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 19 July 1870. At the New York meeting in Steinway Hall, former Republican governor of Wisconsin, , attributed the conflict to “the backwardness of the French Volk itself, which, despite its much- praised civilization, still languishes in medieval bands” (“… der Verkerhtheit des französichen Volkes selbst, das trotz seiner geprisenen Civilisation noch in mittelalterlichen Banden schmachtet”). Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 23 July 1870. On Salomon, see Robert Sobel and John Raimo, eds., 210 weeks of the war.98 The St. Charles Demokrat was convinced that somehow Germans’

“more peace loving character” and their “deeper education [Bildung]” would see them to

victory.99 Cleveland’s Wächter am Erie claimed the Germans “understand the meaning of freedom better than anyone else.”100 After Sedan, the Westliche Post also described

Prussia’s success in constructing a powerful nation-state as emanating from the German

character. The war gave “the nation an external position of power that corresponded to

its moral and intellectual greatness.”101

Many Anglo-Americans, especially Republicans, also believed that characteristics

necessary for self-rule were innate in the German Volk. Writing for the Republican

Cincinnati Commercial, Murat Halstead gratified German Americans with dispatches testifying that “every hour that I have been on German soil has increased my estimate of the German nation. They have the brain and muscle, and the country, to take undisputed hereafter the first place among the powers of Europe.”102 The Cleveland Leader was similarly impressed by the “imperturbable Teutons.”103 The influential Republican- leaning New York weekly The Nation led American papers in its enthusiasm for describing an essential difference between the French and Germans. In an August 1870 issue, editor E.L. Godkin identified himself as an admirer of the skill, efficiency, and physical strength of the German soldier and ran an exuberant letter hailing the German

Biographical Directory of the Governors of the United States, 1789-1978 (Westport, Conn.: Meckler Books, 1978), 4:1725-26. 98 “In der kürzlich ausserordentlich vorgeschrittenen intellektullen Bildung des deutschen Volkes ....” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 9 August 1870. 99 “Friedfertigeren Charakter”; “tiefere Bildung.” St. Charles Demokrat, 4 August 1870. 100 Wächter am Erie, 21 July 1865. 101 “… der Nation eine äußere Machtstellung zu geben, welcher ihrer sittlichen und geistigen Größe entspräche.” Westliche Post, 5 September 1870. 102 Cincinnati Commercial, 31 August 1870. For the German-American reaction to these and other observations, see Cincinnati Volksfreund, 1 September 1870, 23 August 1870. 103 Cleveland Leader, 23 September 1870. 211 Volk.104 The Nation’s correspondent was Forty-Eighter , a sometime resident of New York who had returned to his native Prussia for good earlier that year.105

Kapp described the German people rising against “the infuriated hordes of duped

Frenchmen.” Americans, Kapp urged, must support the Germans in the “war between the

Teutonic and Latin races.”106 By endorsing Kapp’s position, Godkin showed that the conflict also influenced how Anglo-Americans perceived race and self-rule.

In the long run, contrary to Carl Dänzer’s expectations, the idea of biological distinctions among white races would become more accepted.107 In the short term, the

idea that an individual’s ability to become an active citizen was shaped by deeply-seated

differences among groups of people would make it easier for many German Americans

and Anglo-Americans to abandon African American suffrage as their preferred means to perfect American government. If French peasants were not ready to rule themselves,

were the Americans who had recently been enslaved? The Franco-Prussian War raised

enough doubt to ease the way for German Republicans to cooperate with people who

were convinced that the answer was no. The rise of racial thinking among German

Americans would weaken German Republicans’ resolve to defend African American

citizenship.

* * * * *

104 The Nation, 11 August 1870. See also William M. Armstrong, E. L. Godkin and American Foreign Policy, 1865-1900 (New York: Bookman Associates, 1957), 112-13. 105 For Kapp’s own experience of his disillusion with the United States and reintegration into German politics after 1870, see Friedrich Kapp, Vom radikalen Fruhsozialisten des Vormärz zum liberalen Parteipolitiker des Bismarckreichs: Briefe 1843-1884, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1969). 106 The Nation, 11 August 1870. 107 On the development of late nineteenth-century racial hierarchies, see Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 39-90. 212 As German Americans increasingly saw nations as racial groups, they became

less interested in the role of free political institutions in binding citizens together. During

the 1860s German Republicans had emphasized that staying true to republican ideals

gave the United States the power to turn European peasants and African American slaves

into citizens. German immigrants had maintained that true freedom came only when

inherited privileges were eliminated and citizens were enfranchised to control

government. Such assumptions lay at the heart of German Republicans’ support for

African American suffrage. In the emotional response to German unification, citizens’

right to participate in government became less important. German Americans’ simple juxtaposition of monarchies and republics began to disintegrate. Observing the emerging

German Empire with admiration, many German immigrants found themselves in the peculiar position of arguing that a monarchy could be more republican than a republic.

“Just as monarchy is compatible with the greatest freedom of a Volk,” the New-Yorker

Staats-Zeitung asserted in September 1870, “so too a republic can allow the greatest

tyranny.”108 As the New York paper indicated, German Americans remained committed

to the republican goal of safeguarding freedom by avoiding tyranny on the one hand and

anarchy on the other. Nonetheless, something was clearly changing. Now they found

themselves suggesting that the character of a people and sound administrative institutions

were just as important as effective representative government.

German Americans never simply rejected the republican tenet of manhood

suffrage. Indeed, immigrants were proud that, as they had expected, the constitution of

108 “… mit der Monarchie die grösste Freiheit eines Volkes vereinbar ist, so auch die Republik die grösste Tyranny zulassen kann.” Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 9 September 1870 213 the German Empire boasted a parliament chosen by its adult male population.109 The

Reichstag, however, had little power. It could not initiate legislation or remove from office Chancellor Bismarck, who controlled the Empire’s administrative departments and military. Members of the nobility also retained many of their traditional privileges within the individual states. Conscious of these deficiencies, German Americans hopefully expected further reforms to follow. The Cincinnati Volksfreund looked to the federal structure of the emerging polity, maintaining that the states would retain enough power to guarantee “German freedom.”110 The paper’s editors were optimistic that the German

Volk would support the Reichstag if it acted in accordance with the popular will, giving

monarchs no choice but to “handle it very carefully.”111 The St. Charles Demokrat assured readers that the Empire’s central administration would be powerful enough to neutralize the aristocracy. It preached patience, adding, “As soon as the German Volk

feels the need for a republic, it will also know to achieve one.”112 Carl Schurz simply assured Hamilton Fish that in spite of Prussia’s “monarchical form of government[,] it will also turn out to be the most progressive power, steadily progressive.”113 Like

Schurz, most German Americans believed their enthusiasm for Germany flowed from the

same political principles that made them so loyal to the Union.114 Letting their emotions

109 St. Charles Demokrat reminded readers that under Prussian direction, the parliament of the North was based on universal suffrage (“allgemeine Stimmrecht”). St. Charles Demokrat, 21 July 1870. 110 “Deutscher Freiheit.” Cincinnati Volksfruend, 29 October 1870. 111 “… von den Monarchen sehr vorsichtig behandelt warden wird.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 21 November 1870. 112 “Sobald das deutsche Volk das Bedürfniß nach einer Republik fühlen wird, wird es auch eine zu schaffen wissen.” St. Charles Demokrat, 1 December 1870. 113 Schurz to Hamilton Fish, St. Louis, 10 September 1870, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 1:519-20. 114 See J.B. Stallo’s speech in Cincinnati Volksfreund, 8 September 1870. The most prominent German Americans such as Wisconsin’s Edward Salomon were careful to remind immigrants—and to reassure any native-born observers—that their sympathies for Germany must be tempered by their “duties as citizens of 214 run away with them, they convinced themselves that it was only a matter of time before

their faith in Germany would be vindicated.115

In the initial rush to rally to the side of Prussia, however, German Americans were prepared to support a monarchy run by the conservative Count Bismarck. Those

German-American leaders who had been exiled after 1848 for their opposition to German monarchies had assumed that meaningful representative government would accompany

German unity. In 1870, though, it became clear that German unification would be forged by a regime headed by a monarch who claimed to be divinely appointed and still wielded much power over government. To explain their position, German Americans turned to

Realpolitik. Like their countrymen in Europe, they accepted Bismarck’s 1862 assessment that the great questions facing Germany would not be resolved “by speeches and majority decisions … but by iron and blood.” In a piece reprinted in the Cincinnati Volksfreund, a

Chicago editor commended Bismarck for his prophetic analysis. The author encouraged

German Americans to see Bismarck as an appropriate agent of the change for which the

Forty-Eighters had fought: “Their [the Forty-Eighters’] youthful dream of a united

Germany has become a living, tangible reality—perhaps by other means than they had in mind—perhaps under a different tricolor than the black, red, and gold, but what difference does that make?”116 The wartime celebrations, speeches, and editorials

this [the American] republic” (“Pflichten als Bürger dieser Republik”). Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 23 July 1870. 115 As the excitement of the war and unification faded over the following years, many would become more critical of German government. Trefousee, “German-American Immigrants and the Newly Founded Reich,” 165-73. 116 The Volksfreund paraphrased Bismarck’s famous statement. “… durch Majoritätsbeschlüsse, Reden &c., sondern nur durch Eisen und Blut”; “Ihr Jugendtraum vom einigen Deutschland ist zur lebendigen, greifbaren Wirklichkeit geworden.—Wohl mit andern Mitteln, als sie im Sinne hatten,—wohl unter einer andern Tricolore, als der schwartzrothgoldenen ... doch was thut Das?” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 11 August 1870. 215 endorsed this position.117 German Americans—even the Forty-Eighters—were prepared to sacrifice their republican principles and reconfigure their nationalist dreams.

Once Prussia’s adversary had become the French Third Republic, German

Americans began to argue that it was possible for a monarchy to govern better than a republic. There was reason enough to doubt the French Republic’s future. After its defeat at Prussian hands in 1871, the new government would be challenged by the Paris

Commune, returning the country to turmoil.118 Unlike the majority of Americans,

however, German Americans showed an unusual unanimity in their stubborn skepticism

of the new French government. It was a “slight of hand” to attract international sympathy

reported the St. Charles Demokrat.119 This was not a real republic, Thieme at the

Wächter am Erie seconded. It did not emanate from the people.120 The Westliche Post chided Americans for their naïve attraction to the word “republic.” The editors questioned how they could fail to see “that a republic born in craziness has only a desperately small chance of survival.”121 A Westliche Post correspondent further protested that, “in fact, the German people, not the French, have made a great,

overwhelming revolution: a revolution without empty phrases or boasts, but world-

117 German-American support of German unification under control Prussian was ubiquitous. For explicit references, see Cincinnati Volksfreund, 18 July 1870, 10 August 1870, 29 October 1870; Fremont Courier, 1 December 1870; St. Charles Demokrat, 21 July 1870; Westliche Post, 29 August 1870; Anzeiger des Westens, 18 July 1870; Wächter am Erie, 19 July 1870. For a statement from the Turnerbund, see Westliche Post, 2 August 1870. See also, Lawrence S. Thompson and Frank X. Brown, “The Forty- Eighters in Politics,” in The Forty-Eighters, ed. Zucker, 152; Gazley, American Opinion of German Unification, 456-500; Wittke, The German-Language Press in America, 165-68; Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 345-64. 118 Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre, adeptly describes the Commune and American reaction. 119 “Gaukenspiel.” St. Charles Demokrat, 22 September 1870. 120 Wächter am Erie, 6 September 1870. 121 “… daß eine im Wahnsinn geborene Republik nur verzweifelt wenig Aussichten auf ein Fortbestehen hat.” Westliche Post, 14 September 1870. See also Westliche Post, 28 September 1870; Fremont Courier, 25 September 1870. 216 shaking and world-changing.”122 Joining the chorus, a speaker at a St. Louis fundraising event ridiculed French efforts: “Prayers of necessity are not devotion, and a republican form of state forced upon a Volk that has degenerated into slavery is not a republic.”

Adding further confusion as to the nature of a true republic, she remarked, “Germany is today, without bearing the name, closer in reality to the concept of the true essence of a free state than Paris with all its republicanism.”123 Such statements demonstrated how profoundly European events had blurred the distinction between monarchies and

republics in the minds of German Americans.

If a hereditary nobility and enfranchised citizenry did not distinguish Germany

from France, what did? In answering this question, German immigrants drew lessons

they would apply to the United States. Many editorials and speeches returned to the

theme of the differences between the Germans and the French. There was broad

agreement with the Republican Judge J.B. Stallo that “no republic can be made overnight

merely by proclaiming it; it must be developed slowly and gradually within a Volk, in its minor institutions, in its everyday actions and intentions.”124 This cautious depiction of state building challenged the Republican argument that enfranchising former slaves would ensure a republican form of government in the South. Stallo himself had only

122 “In der That, das deutsche Volk, nicht das französische, hat eine große überwältigende Revolution in vier Wochen gemacht: eine Revolution ohne Phrasen und Prahlerei, aber welterschütternd und neugestaltend.” Westliche Post, 16 September 1870. Friedrich Münch was unusual in expressing an apparently sincere desire and measure of optimism that that the French could achieve a real republic. St. Charles Demokrat, 22 September 1870. 123 “Erzwungene Gebete sind keine Andacht, und eine republikanische Staatform, durch Zufall einem sclavisch entarteten Volke aufoctroyiert, ist keine Republik”; “Deutschland ist heute, ohne das es den Namen führt, in Wirklichkeit dem Begriff wahren freistaatlichen Wesens näher als Paris mit seinem ganzen Republikanismus.” Mississippi Blätter, 25 September 1870. Women were significant in the fundraising efforts during the Franco-Prussian War, but this is the only printed example of an address by a woman. Its content did not distinguish it from men’s speeches. 124 “Man kann keine Republik machen über Nacht, indem man sie proclamirt; sie muß langsam und allmälig [sic] in dem Innern eines Volks, seinen kleinen Einrichtungen, seinem alltäglichen Thun und Wollen zur Ausbildung kommen.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 8 September 1870. 217 gradually accepted African American suffrage, so this was no ideological about-face.125

In 1870, however, the judge had the great weight of German public opinion behind him.

The reorientation of that year did not manifest itself in reflective and scholarly treatises as much as in stormy and passionate outbursts in the public sphere.

German Americans did begin to allude to certain institutions that nurtured

German superiority. In their more charitable moments, German-American leaders might assert that “the present French spirit is the product of a crazy government system. It has been systematically repressed, step by step, in the service of an individual [Napoleon

III].”126 The same was not true of the German “spirit” under the ascendant Wilhelm I.

German immigrants credited the Prussian king with running an administration that was

not only efficient, but salutary, elevating ordinary Germans above their French

counterparts. Different newspapers found different things to admire in Germany, from

education to tax collection. The St. Charles Demokrat focused on education. Any Volk

claiming to belong to the “civilized nations” in the nineteenth century, its editors

maintained, must provide education to its children. The French failure in this regard was

evidenced in the illiterate soldiers filling German prison camps.127 The Prussian system, however, rated “far above the American,” according to a recent report.”128 German

Americans interpreted the Prussian battle victories themselves as products of superior

education and organization, not militarism. These feats seemed to indicate Prussian taxes

were put into service on behalf of the Volk rather than lining the pockets of officials,

125 Easton, Hegel’s First American Followers, 60. 126 “Der heutige französische Geist ist das Produkt eines verrüchten Riegierungssystems. Systematisch wurde er von Stufe zu Stufe herabgerückt im Dienste eines Einzelnen.” Cincinnati Volksfruend, 21 July 1870. 127 “Die civilisirten Nationen.” St. Charles Demokrat, 26 January 1871. 128 “… weit über das amerikanische gestellt.” St. Charles Demokrat, 15 December 1870. 218 wealthy manufacturers, or aristocrats.129 Cincinnati Volksfreund editor Emil Rothe was

convinced that Prussian military training was itself “a republican institution and purveyor

of culture” among the German masses.130 German Americans remained republicans, while admiring the new European power. When they tried to explain the tension this created, they focused on the administrative achievements of Prussia and its empire, not citizen representation in government.

German-American Democrats believed that United States under the Grant administration did not compare well to the German Empire. The New-Yorker Staats-

Zeitung questioned whether “the American Volk is an example for all the other nations on earth.”131 Rothe at the Volksfreund also attacked his adopted homeland: “Not everything

that is popular here [in the United States] … is republican and not everything that is

actually in principle republican is popular here.”132 Never an advocate of black suffrage,

Rothe worried that in foisting it on the states’ unwilling white population, Republicans had contributed to the vice eroding American politics. “Corruption, special interest legislation, and privileges,” he lamented, “characterize our public life in such a conspicuous way that we must blush when we hold up our current state of affairs, republican in name only, as an example for other Völker to imitate.”133 The new

Cincinnatian was indignant that Republicans, “utopians, who themselves have no regard

129 For an example that spells out this conclusion, see Cincinnati Volksfreund, 29 September 1870. 130 “Ein republikanisches Institut und Kulturmittel.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 13 February 1871. Rothe was apparently alone in his preoccupation with the salubrious effects of compulsory military training. 131 “… das amerikanische Volk ein Musterbild für alle anderen Nationen der Erde sei.” New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 3 September 1870. 132 “Es ist nicht Alles, was hier [in the United States] populär … republikanisch, und es ist auch nicht Alles was wirklich im Prinzipe republikanisch ist, hier populär.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 31 January 1871. 133 “Ausnahmegesetze und Privilegien charakterisiren unser öffentliches Leben in so auffälligen Weise, daß wire erröthen müssen, wenn wir unsere gegenwärtigen, wirklich nur dem Namen nach republikanische Zustände, anderen Völkern als Muster zur Nachnahmung ausstellen sollten.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 6 February 1871. 219 for any constitution,” tried to tell Germans that the United States, “where we unfortunately face corruption and lack political character at every step … is the yardstick

of all politics.”134 For German Democrats such as Rothe, the moral of the Franco-

Prussian War for the United States was obvious: Some peoples—the French, African

Americans—were not well suited to citizenship, and enfranchising them would prove at best a fruitless exercise. In fact, the Democrats argued, Republicans’ single-minded focus on African American suffrage had produced government abuses. Americans could learn from German institutions how to reverse them. German unification reinforced

German Democrats’ opposition to the principles girding Republican Reconstruction.

Significantly, those German immigrants who had supported the Republican Party also concurred that the Grant administration could learn from Germany. The war broke out just as German Republicans were becoming frustrated. Americans seemed reluctant to reform their government because they were convinced it was, in the words of

Cincinnati maverick Republican Friedrich Hassaurek, “the best government under the sun.”135 As the form of the German Empire’s government became clear, Republicans identified elements worthy of emulation. Schurz’s Westliche Post assured readers “the constitution of Germany is in certain respects more democratic than that of the United

States.”136 Following these first tentative steps toward a new transatlantic comparison,

the Republican St. Charles Demokrat chimed in with an example. The Demokrat

134 “Schwärmer, welche selbst auf keine Constitution Rücksicht nehmen ….”; “… wo wir leider der Corruption und der politischen Charakterlosigkeit auf jedem Schritte begegnen … der Maßstab aller Politik … ist.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 25 August 1870. 135 Westliche Post, 20 October 1870. 136 “Und die Verfassung Deutschlands ist in gewissem Sinne noch demokratischer, als die der Ver. Staaten.” Mississippi Blätter, 18 December 1870. The paper pointed to the ability of Germans to have their “citizenship” rights throughout the Empire, which had only recently been added to the U.S. Constitution. 220 maintained that the power of the German Kaiser was more circumscribed than that of the

American president. “The German protector [the Emperor],” for example, “cannot, like

the president of the United States, hire and suddenly fire thousands of officials according

to mere whim. Rather, his hands are absolutely bound by law and custom. Even if he just wanted to drive the poorest gate inscriber or highway toll collector, who was guilty

of nothing, from office on mere whim, a cry of indignation would go out through the land

and teach him that the era of patriarchal despotism was long gone.”137 The comparison

did not reflect well on President Grant. The Demokrat, which had supported the former

general’s presidential bid, was signaling that change was afoot among Ohio, and

especially Missouri, Republicans. No longer motivated by African American citizenship,

the Demokrat was looking to focus on the new issue of civil service reform.

Some native-born Republicans agreed that German government held lessons for

the United States, especially the growing group of self-proclaimed reformers.138 The

same Anglo-Americans who sought to rid the United States of corruption, demagoguery,

and fiscal irresponsibility maintained that Germans made better citizens than the French.

They respected German institutions. Some reformers were content to observe the processes at work in Europe. Horace White at the Chicago Tribune believed,

“Republican Germany is passing through a transition stage much like our own recent development from a slaveholding league of sovereign States to a national union of free

137 “Der deutsche Schirmherr kann nicht wie der Präsident der Ver. Staaten, nach bloser [sic] Laune Tausende von Beamten anstellen und plötzlich absetzen, sondern es werden ihm in dieser Beziehung durch Gesetz und Herkommen die Hände vollständig gebunden. Wenn er aus bloßer Laune auch nur der ärmsten Thorschreiber, oder Chausseegeldeinnehmer, der sich Nichts hätte zu Schulden kommen lassen, aus seinem Amte jagen wollte, würde ein Schrei der Entrüstung durch das Land gehen und ihn darüber belehren, daß die Zeit des patriarchalischen Despotismus längst vorbei ist.” St. Charles Demokrat, 9 March 1871. 138 In contrast to the reformers, President Grant believed that in the German constitution “the American people see an attempt to reproduce in Europe some of the best features of our own.” Ulysses S. Grant to Congress, Washington, D.C., 7 February 1871, in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 21:163. 221 states.”139 The Republican Cleveland Leader observed that Germany, “though an empire

in name … is by no means an empire in the old sense of the term.”140 A Cleveland

Republican who kept a journal of his travels in Europe during the war was not altogether approving of the way Prussia was “gobbling” up German states. Yet he still supported

Prussia “in this unjust war” and observed, “This is sure to be a great Empire. Governed wisely and well by intelligent and harmonious rulers, and according to my observations, is more than a match for the boasting French adversary.”141

Other reform-minded Republicans praised German government more effusively.

The Nation’s E.L. Godkin, who so respected the German Volk, was also impressed by

Prussian institutions. In August 1870, he explained that Prussian military prowess and wealth “is the result of sixty years of patient training, of contentment with slow gains, of respect for knowledge and for discipline, of close attention to the education of children, and of constant remembrance that a man is bound to labor for the state no less in his home than in the ranks of the army.” Inspired by the authoritarian regime, Godkin noted,

“The lesson is full of instruction for all of us as well as for France.”142 Like German

Americans, The Nation’s editor rejected the “sentimentalism” of those inspired by the

French Republic, focusing on the potential of a united Germany: “We look on her

[France’s] decline, terrible and full of suffering as the process is, and the rise of Germany and of German habits of thought into supremacy, as one of the greatest gains humanity

139 Chicago Tribune, 20 July 1870. See also Cincinnati Commercial, 27 January 1871. 140 Cleveland Leader, 16 December 1870. 141 Randall Palmer Wade, 27 July 1870, Travel Journals, 1:158, Western Reserve Historical Society (hereafter WRHS), Cleveland. 142 The Nation, 25 August 1870. 222 has made.”143 Men such as Godkin hinted at the ideas that would allow reformers to join

German Americans in leaving the Republican Party and cooperating with politicians who

resisted African American citizenship.

Although German Ohioans and Missourians perceived that they stood at a

Wendepunkt in history, a turning point is only meaningful in light of what went before and what would come after. Before August Thieme arrived at Sandusky to exhort

German immigrants to support Prussia, he had labored for a German republic in 1848 and mobilized Cleveland Germans to oppose slavery. Although he had consistently supported African American men’s right to full citizenship, he became frustrated with

Grant’s administration after the Fifteenth Amendment was on its way to ratification. It must have been with relief that Thieme turned to the more cheering news coming from

Germany. Among those describing the conflict as a war between Völker, he attacked

German Americans who failed to support Prussia and ridiculed the French and their new republic.144 He could not share Godkin’s attraction to authoritarian institutions, but he was swept up in the Zeitgeist, that spirit of pride and hope that filled the Sandusky courthouse.145 He and other German Americans like him would ride its current out of the

Republican Party and into a coalition that championed free trade, civil service reform, and—ultimately more importantly—the return of southern government to white hands.

143 Ibid., 29 September 1870. 144 Zucker, Forty-Eighters, 348; Wächter am Erie, 5, 6 September 1870; Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 356. 145 For additional evidence, see Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 350-51, 356-58. 223

CHAPTER 6

“NOT ONLY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE OCEAN!”: THE GERMAN-AMERICAN LIBERAL REPUBLICANS, 1870-1872

On September 2, 1870, Napoleon III surrendered to Prussian forces at the French town of Sedan. Sedan Day, which the new German Empire would recognize as a national holiday, was also the day that German Americans and many other delegates walked out of the Missouri Republican convention in Jefferson City. At a meeting chaired by Senator Carl Schurz, the 250-odd bolters called for civil service reform, free trade, and reconciliation between former Confederates and Unionists.1 The Liberal

Republican movement they founded would culminate two years later in a challenge to

Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency. Dissenting from the Grant administration’s

Reconstruction policies, German Liberals would connect the transformative events in

Jefferson City and Europe. “Show that the Germans can decide battles not only on the

other side of the Ocean!” urged the St. Charles Demokrat during the Missouri campaign

in 1870.2 German Americans’ response to German unification helped shape the third party movement that would precipitate the decline of Reconstruction.

So many German-American newspapers and politicians in Missouri and Ohio joined Schurz and the Demokrat between 1870 and 1872 that a number of German

1 For the number of defectors, see Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 246. 2 “Also auf, zeigt, daß die Deutschen nicht blos jenseits des Oceans Schlachten entscheiden können!” St. Charles Demokrat, 3 November 1870. 224 immigrants would come to see the Liberal Republican Party as the new embodiment of their mission in the Untied States. When Schurz later reflected on the movement’s origins, he said that German Americans “had joined it in Masse [sic]” and “in some

Western states they formed the whole backbone of the movement.”3 Yet with the exception of one German-language article, historians have not studied the German-born

Liberals.4 Historical treatments of the Liberals focus on the Republicans who were attracted to liberal economic reform and the moderate southern and border-state

Democrats who were intent on ending Republican rule and reuniting white Unionists and

Confederates.5 Attention to these two parts of the Liberal coalition has provided important insights into what motivated so many white Americans to sacrifice African

American rights to the priorities of “reform and reconciliation.” Eric Foner builds on the work of older historians such as John G. Sproat to emphasize the role of the Republican

3 Schurz to Horace Greeley, Washington, D.C., 6 May 1872, reel 7, Schurz Papers, LC. 4 Historians who recognize that German Americans participated in the Liberal Republican movement have explained it by emphasizing Schurz’s leadership, pointing to the “ethnocultural” divide between German and Anglo-American Republicans over alcohol, or describing the economic characteristics that German- born and Anglo-American Liberals shared. Gerber, “Carl Schurz’s Journey from Radical to Liberal Republican”; Andrew L. Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 1-24; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 228-34, 287- 313; Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 162, 219, 272; Kleppner, The Cross of Culture, 111; Michael E. McGerr, “The Meaning of Liberal Republicanism: The Case of Ohio,” Civil War History 28 (1982): 310. American historians have paid scant attention to a 1988 German-language article that argues that the Liberal Republican movement was an expression of “ethnic politics.” Jörg Nagler, “Deutschamerikaner und das Liberal Republican Movement 1872,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 33, no. 4 (1988): 415-38. Although Nagler’s analysis resembles my own in emphasizing German Americans, it does not delve into German Liberals’ ideology or situate the movement in broader context. 5 Richard A. Gerber, “The Liberals of 1872 in Historiographical Perspective,” The Journal of American History 62 (1975): 40-75. Although it was apparent to many in the 1870s that reform and reconciliation would come at the expense of African American rights, professional historians have only chosen to focus on this fact since the 1960s. Patrick W. Riddleberger, “The Radicals’ Abandonment of the Negro during Reconstruction,” The Journal of Negro History 45, no. 2 (1960): 88-102. In his 2006 book, The Doom of Reconstruction, Andrew Slap maintains Liberal Republicans were motivated by classical republican understandings of party, corruption, and nation. By minimizing the salience of race in the 1872 election and distinguishing between the ideological “liberal republican movement” that began in 1870 and the calculating “Liberal Republican Party” of 1872, Slap’s interpretation in some ways harks back to Earle D. Ross, The Liberal Republican Movement (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1919). 225 “metropolitan cosmopolitans” of the North. These men were attracted to , the protection of property rights, and government retrenchment.6 They redefined “reform” to mean “rule by the ‘best men’ rather than the purging American life of racial inequality.”7 Historians have also shown that the Liberal movement attracted support from border state residents who were especially eager to put the animosity of the war years behind them.8

Investigating German Americans places the Liberal Republican movement in the context of global shifts in nationalism and citizenship. The new party gradually came to represent a set of compromises to the nationalist visions of the Revolutions of 1848 and

Radical Reconstruction. Previously, German Republicans had argued that free institutions and equal citizenship were powerful enough to forge an American nation from various peoples. By 1872, the Liberal Republican movement would express more muted expectations of American citizenship. Drawing some inspiration from their reception of the Franco-Prussian War and German unification, Liberals maintained

American political institutions must be reformed to counteract the influence of unfit voters. Their version of reform found a counterpart in the new ideas of race provoked by

6 Foner, Reconstruction, 518, 460. The classic work situating the Liberal Republican movement within the trend among reformers toward liberal economics is John G. Sproat, “The Best Men”: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 1-44. Sproat’s understanding of the Liberal Republicans has found a place in more recent scholarship that examines both the limits of Republicans’ free labor ideology in fulfilling freed people’s aspirations and the erosion of free labor ideology during Reconstruction. Along similar lines, Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 102-04, argues that Liberal Reformers began to see African Americans as a group as asking for special government protections rather than participating in a free-labor economy. 7 Foner, Reconstruction, 527. 8 Although historians have long noted the appeal of reconciliation and compromise to border state Republicans, recent interpretations have revealed new insights into the meaning of reconciliation to Liberal Republicans. Jacqueline Balk and Ari Hoogenboom, “The Origins of Border State Liberal Republicanism,” in Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment: The Border States during Reconstruction, ed. Richard O. Curry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), 220-44; Blight, Race and Reunion, 122-29; Burg, “Amnesty, Civil Rights, and the Meaning of Liberal Republicanism,” 29-60. 226 the European war. Stereotypes of different groups’ supposed natural capacity for self-

rule had a new impact in the German-language public sphere. Although German Liberals

never renounced the Radical tenet of African American suffrage, they were among those

arguing that curtailing measures to protect citizenship would hasten national

reunification. In effect, they loosened the connection between liberalism and

nationalism.

This chapter considers the ways in which Americans’ changing approach to citizenship was part of a transatlantic trend. It locates the origins of the Liberal

Republican Party in Missouri in 1870, where German Americans centered their campaign on lifting proscriptions on former Confederates as they celebrated German victories in

Europe. I go on describe how the significance of Liberal Republicanism became clear during 1871 and 1872 as the movement’s leaders compromised with Democrats whose primary concern was overturning Republican rule and marginalizing African Americans.

German ideas of reform fueled Liberals’ doubts about the readiness of African Americans for citizenship. Even as the implications of their position were becoming apparent, most

German-American Liberals persisted in their negative appraisals of how African

Americans were exercising citizenship. Eventually, German Americans would see the

Liberal Republican movement as a “tragedy of errors.”9 The party collapsed after failing to unseat Grant. But the 1872 campaign would nonetheless spell “the doom of

Reconstruction,” sapping Republicans’ will to defend black southerners and turning the country’s attention toward the new issues of the Gilded Age.

* * * * *

9 “Trauerspiel.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 4 May 1872. 227 In Missouri, the Franco-Prussian War provided the backdrop for the final stages

of a split among Republicans that had been years in the making. As Schurz’s Westliche

Post reminded its readers after the Jefferson City convention in September 1870, “In reality, the disharmony between the German Republicans and Mr. Drake and his special friends and followers does not just date back to September 1st.”10 German immigrants had never found it easy to cooperate with the temperance “fanatic” who had engineered the constitution of 1865 and now served alongside Schurz in the Senate. Personal rivalries and squabbles over beer strained the Missouri Republican Party, but the two factions coalesced around substantive differences over policy. Like the majority of

German immigrants in both parties, Schurz’s faction championed hard money and free trade, while Drake supported the Republican administration’s unsecured greenbacks and protective tariffs.11 Schurz opposed Grant’s foreign policy, especially his efforts to annex the Republic of Santo Domingo, but Drake became one of the president’s most loyal supporters.12

At the heart of the conflict among Missouri Republicans, however, were questions of citizenship. Under Drake’s leadership, the Missouri constitution convention of 1865 had excluded all African Americans and Confederate sympathizers from exercising the franchise. At the time, German Republicans had supported black suffrage and expressed milder misgivings about the test oath that disfranchised disloyal Missourians. They had seen the oath as a temporary expedient. At the national Republican Convention in 1868,

10 “Die Disharmoie zwischen den deutschen Republikaner und Herrn Drake und seine speziellen Freunden und Anhänger datirt in der That nicht erst vom 1. September.” Westliche Post, 1 October 1870. 11 For a description of the growing divide between factions of the Missouri Republican Party, see Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 182-96; Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 150-182; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 268-99; Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, 1-24. 12 Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 186-88, 191-95. 228 Schurz had introduced a resolution supporting political rights for former Confederates as

soon as they posed no threat to the nation. In his 1869 senatorial campaign, he had again

called for amnesty for Confederates once African Americans could vote.13 With the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, Schurz believed it was time for the

Missouri Republican Party to lift the test oath. As early as June 1870, his Westliche Post endorsed a gubernatorial candidate who had been calling for “universal suffrage and universal amnesty” for Confederates and African Americans since 1866, Benjamin Gratz

Brown.14

In Missouri, championing repeal of the test oath was consistent with German-

Republican leaders’ long-standing commitment to a form of male citizenship that was inclusive and participatory. In 1870, Schurz argued that German immigrants wanted to reconcile with their former opponents for the same reason they had supported African

American voting: their commitment to equal citizenship. In the weeks before the

Missouri convention, the Westliche Post reminded St. Louis Germans that Gratz Brown

had shared the “German idea of emancipation” before the war, consistently supporting

the Radical policy of black suffrage, which “we can describe as essentially German.”

(The paper conveniently ignored the fact that German voters had rejected African

American suffrage in the 1868 referendum.) Now, the Westliche Post announced, it was naturally “Brown and only Brown who had declared himself clearly and explicitly in

13 Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, 3:285; Woechentlich Westliche Post, 13, 20 January 1869; Benjamin F. Loan to Schurz, Jefferson City, 7 January 1869; Schurz to Benjamin F. Loan, Jefferson City, 7 January 1869, reel 3, Schurz Papers, LC. 14 Westliche Post, 26 June 1870; Westliche Post, 24 August 1870; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 288-89. The English-language newspaper, the St. Louis Missouri Democrat, also supported Gratz Brown. See Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 288-89. 229 favor of the lifting of the test oath and the voting restrictions.”15 Schurz’s paper reiterated this theme after the nomination: “Now the Germans of Missouri stand again in the first row among those who are eliminating the dividing line of disfranchisement, restoring equal rights to everyone, and thereby prepared to extend the hand of reconciliation to former enemies.”16 German Missourians considered themselves magnanimous advocates of equal rights for African Americans and whites. They had always been most concerned with the abstract principle of race-neutral suffrage. Having achieved their goal, they saw little reason to prevent former Confederates from voting any longer.

Arnold Krekel, the St. Charles man who had presided over the constitutional convention in 1865, elaborated on the theme of consistency in a public speech in August

1870. Krekel began by commemorating those who had “sacrificed their lives for the fatherland” beside Franz Sigel at Camp Jackson in 1861. They had helped achieve

“equal justice before the law in the preserved Union.” In Krekel’s mind, the North had triumphed because its people had united behind the principle of “self-determination.”

Given that commitment, Krekel explained that he had only reluctantly accepted disfranchising Confederate sympathizers for the “safe-guarding of the achievements of the war.” Now he believed that overturning the test oath was necessary to “achieve the

15 “Fast allein unter den Amerikanern schon lange Jahre vor dem Bürgerkriege mit dem deutschen Emancipationsideen aufrichtig sympathisirte”; “… wir als wesentlich deutsche bezeichnen dürfen”; “… mit der endlichen Aufheben von Testeid und Stimmrechtsbeschränkung … Brown und nur Brown hat sich klar und deutlich darüber erklärt.” Westliche Post, 24 August 1870. 16 “ stehen die Deutschen Missouri’s wieder in erster Reihe unter denen, welche die Scheidungslinie der Entrechnungen auszulöschen, die gleichen Rechte Aller widerherzustellen, und somit den ehemaligen Feinden die Versöhnungshand zu bieten bereit sind.” Westliche Post, 25 October 1870. 230 full recovery of the commonwealth.”17 Krekel reflected on the potential price of the policy he now proposed. “I have no doubt,” he said, “that a part of our population would strip negroes’ rights if it lay within their power.” Yet Krekel, who was now a federal judge, believed that the Constitution and the franchise would allow African Americans to protect themselves. At the same time, he hoped that Missouri would make African

Americans eligible to hold elective office, an issue that the Fifteenth Amendment had not addressed. Krekel’s speech also referred to Europe. He told his audience that the transformative power of the liberal nationalist principle of “self-determination” was at work as he spoke. The German Volk had freely chosen to rise up and join together to defeat the French royal family, who had “selfish goals in their sights and forget or ignore the interest of the Volk.” For Krekel, lifting voting exclusions and forming the German

Empire embodied the ideas of 1848 and the American Civil War. Ultimately, the consequences of the Liberal Republican movement—and German unification—would depend on whether he was right.18

The majority of Missouri Republicans who followed Drake did not share Krekel’s optimism about what would happen if former Confederates returned to full citizenship.

They knew amnesty might well put Democrats hostile to Reconstruction in control of the state government. Drake wanted to retain political power, and his supporters from violence-plagued rural Missouri genuinely worried for the safety of black and white

17 “… opferten ihr Leben für’s Vaterland”; “Gleichberechtigung vor dem Gesetzen in der erhaltenen Union”; “Selbstregierung”; “Sicherstellung der Kriegserrungenschaften”; “Daß ein Theil unserer Bevölkerung den Neger rechtlos machen würde, wenn es in ihrer Macht läge, daran zweifle ich nicht”; “… wir den höchsten Aufschwung des Gemeinwesens nicht erreichen können”; “selbstsüchtige Zwecke im Auge und vergißt oder mißachte … das Interesse des Volkes.” St. Charles Demokrat, 18 August 1870. For another report of the meeting, see Westliche Post, 12 August 1870. 18 “Gleichberechtung vor dem Gesetzen.” St. Charles Demokrat, 18 August 1870. 231 Republicans.19 In February 1870, Drake’s partisans had reluctantly accepted the state legislature’s decision to allow Missourians to vote on the repeal of the test oath, but they were not prepared to put the weight of the Republican Party behind it.20 They had no

intention of nominating Gratz Brown for governor. Sensing the strength of their

opponents in the upcoming convention, Drake’s regulars turned to newly enfranchised

African American voters. The state Republican Party decided to apportion one African

American delegate for every 150 black men—or fraction thereof—in each county.

Because many counties had fewer that 150 adult male African Americans, the convention

would seat one delegate for every 94 African American men in the state, but only one

representative for every 136 white Republican voters in the state.21 The 180 black

delegates would hold the balance of power in the 781-strong gathering in September.

The struggle over the Missouri Republican Party came to a head at the convention in Jefferson City. German Americans accused the regulars of manipulating party rules to prevent Gratz Brown’s nomination. Even men who were sympathetic to African

Americans objected to the distribution of Republican delegates. Krekel declared, “Such intrigue must destroy [the regulars] themselves or the party.”22 The St. Charles

Demokrat presented the issue in ethnic terms: the regular Republicans did “not want any

German votes[.] Negro votes form their main support.” The newspaper added, “Far be it

from us to want to advocate racial prejudice, but it was really somewhat strong tobacco to

19 For an extended expression of Drake’s position, see Charles D. Drake, “Betrayal of the Republican Party in Missouri,” Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 3rd sess., App. 1-8 (16 December 1870). 20 Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 173-75, 184, 188-91. 21 Westliche Post, 3 August 1870; Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 235; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 289-90. 22 “Solche Ränke müssen sich selbst oder die Partei ruiniren.” St. Charles Demokrat, 18 August 1872. 232 expect that 90 Negro votes would count for as much as 140 votes from whites.”23 The

so-called “Liberals” in the convention sought to cut African American representation and push through a resolution that strongly supported eliminating loyalty requirements for

voters. But they were in the minority. Finding the regulars intractable after three days of

heated debate, about a third of the delegates, including the whole German contingent

from St. Louis, stormed out.24 The defectors proceeded to form a rival party and

nominate Gratz Brown to run for governor.25 The Liberal Republicans drafted a platform that supported hard money, free trade, and civil service reform.26 Most significantly, the new party affirmed that Republican principles required that no one be denied the vote based on their political beliefs and “that the time has come, that the demands of public security, on which the disfranchisement of a great number of citizens could be grounded, have clearly ceased to exist.”27

German Missourians in the Liberal Republican Party portrayed African

Americans somewhat differently following the convention. They believed that accepting reconciliation would allow African Americans to win the sympathy of their enemies.

Schurz, for example, urged “colored people” to vote to re-enfranchise Confederates to

“establish that fraternal feeling between you and all other classes of citizens, which is so

23 “… will … keine deutschen Stimmen, Negerstimmen bilden ihre Grundpfeiler. Es ist ferne von uns Racenvorurtheile befürworten zu wollen, aber es war doch etwas starker Tabak, zu verlangen, daß 90 Negerstimmen ebenso viel gelten sollten, als 140 Stimmen von Weißen.” St. Charles Demokrat, 17 September 1870. For similar sentiment, see Westliche Post, 13 October 1870. 24 On the convention, see Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 233-49; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 291-99. It is difficult to trace all the individuals involved in the walk-out, but on the German delegates, see Westliche Post, 3 September 1870. 25 The Liberal slate included two German-born men; the regular ticket had none. St. Charles Demokrat, 8 September 1870. 26 St. Charles Demokrat, 8 September 1870. 27 “Daß die Zeit gekommen ist, da die Erfordernisse der öffentlichen Sicherheit, durch welche allein die Entrechtung einer großen Zahl der Bürger begründet werden könnte, offenbar aufgehört haben zu existiren.” St. Charles Demokrat, 8 September 1870. 233 essential to your welfare.”28 Once it became clear that the new black voters believed their interests lay with the regular Republicans, the German-language press became hostile. German immigrants interpreted African Americans’ choice as an indication that they lacked the judgment required to vote responsibly. Just before the November election, the St. Charles Demokrat remarked that the efforts of African American politicians—“all the invective of colored stumping billboards”—could not stop the

Liberals being elected.29 When African American leader J. Milton Turner spoke in St.

Charles, the paper reported that “he has a right slimy gift of the gab and so may well have

general success with an ignorant and uneducated [ungebildeten] class of people as the colored still is at this time.” Local whites gathered to express their opposition to Turner as he spoke. Cheers for Gratz Brown filled the streets and saloons of St. Charles for over an hour following the speech. If the regular Republicans wanted to hand an overwhelming victory to Gratz Brown, the Demokrat suggested, “They should send over a few more colored house boys.”30 Despite African Americans’ clear support for

Republicans, the paper also warned that “the politically still childlike negro element”

might cooperate with Democratic “Copperheads.”31 Missouri’s German-language

newspapers referred to African Americans in a new tone.

28 Schurz, “Address to the People of Missouri,” 10 September 1870, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 1:517. As prominent Civil War historian James McPherson has shown, some former abolitionists hoped “moral suasion” could succeed where “legal coercion” failed. James McPherson, “Grant or Greeley: The Abolitionist Dilemma in the Election of 1872,” American Historical Review 71 (1965): 43-61. 29 “Alle Schmähreden farbiger Stumplakaten.” St. Charles Demokrat, 3 November 1870. 30 “… er ein ordentlich schmiertes Maulwerk hat und deßhalb wohl bei einer unwissenden und ungebildeten Menschenklasse, wie die farbige dermalen noch ist, im Allgemeinen Erfolg haben mag”; “… so dürfen sie nur noch ein paar farbige Hausknechte herschicken.” St. Charles Demokrat, 27 October 1870. On African American campaigning in Missouri, see Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 301-04. 31 “Das politisch noch kindische Neger-Element.” St. Charles Demokrat, 12 January 1871, 234 In reality, the freed people grasped the political situation better than German

Liberals. Democrats were intent on manipulating German Americans, not African

Americans. Before the September convention, Democrats had encouraged the Liberals by announcing they would not contest the governorship if Gratz Brown was nominated.

The Democratic “possum policy” was intended to reassure Liberal Republicans that their former opponents were prepared to accept “universal suffrage” if “universal amnesty” came with it.32 James S. Rollins, a prominent Missouri Democrat who corresponded with

Schurz and Frank Blair, Jr., actually visited the Liberals’ convention in Jefferson City.33

Rollins’ son wrote from St. Louis to agree with his father that the Liberals’ resolutions

were “sound and fit.”34 On reading the platform, Carl Dänzer at the Democratic St. Louis

Anzeiger des Westens observed it would “find little contradiction from the ranks of the

Democratic Party.”35 Of course Democrats hoped to regain power for themselves. One

of Rollins’ Democratic friends was pleased that the Republican split would allow “the best men of all parties to unite on the basis of Jefferson democracy.”36 Dänzer wrote that

the Liberals were in reality “the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.” He believed that

victories in congressional, legislative, and country races in 1870 would position the

Democrats to win elections in the following years “under their own flag.” The Anzeiger

did not hide the fact that once in government, Democrats would ignore Liberals’

32 Westliche Post, 16 August 1870; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 305. On other newspapers, see Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 251; Curry, “Introduction” in Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment, xix. 33 Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 297 34 James H. Rollins to James S. Rollins, 5 September 1870, folder 106, Rollins Papers, WHMC— Columbia. 35 “… in den Reihen der demokratischen Partei wenig Widerspruch finden wird.” Anzeiger des Westens, 8 September 1870. For discussion of the Democratic position, see Mississippi Blätter, 4 September 1870; Westliche Post, 11 November 1870. 36 Thomas J. Gannt to Rollins, St Louis, 8 November 1870, Rollins Papers, WHMC—Columbia. 235 professed concern in African Americans’ rights. Dänzer did not like the Liberals’ plan to eliminate racial qualifications for office holding, but he told readers that the change would not make much difference.37 He consistently informed them that they could be comfortable voting for Gratz Brown because the Liberal Republicans were merely a

“transitional party.”38

German Liberals were much too caught up in the sense that they were once again making world history to pay much attention to the Democrats. The two months preceding the Missouri election of 1870 coincided with the most dramatic news from

Europe. German Americans’ excitement over the future of Germany colored the campaign. The Liberal Republican Party passed a resolution in support of the German forces. It recognized that the United States must remain neutral in the conflict between

France and Prussia. Yet the Liberals added, “We cannot forget, however, that the

German nation [Nation] bestowed the full measure of its sympathy and support on us during our civil war, and we do not hesitate one moment to show our sympathy for the efforts of the Germans to preserve and defend their national unity.”39 German

immigrants once more explicitly linked nation-making in North America and Europe,

assuming that United States and the German Empire were moving forward together. In

September and October 1870, German Americans actually believed that they might profit

from emulating their counterparts in Europe. The Westliche Post urged German

Missourians to act “over here like over there.” The editors maintained that the Liberal

37 “Der liberale Flugel der demokratischen Partei”; “unter ihrer eigenen Flagge.” Anzeiger des Westens, 8 Spetember 1870. 38 “Uebergangspartei.” Anzeiger des Westens, 4 November 1870. 39 “Können wir aber nicht vergessen, daß uns in unserem Bürgerkriege die Sympathieen u. die Unterstützung der deutschen Nation in vollem Maße zu Theil wurden und zögern wir keinen Augenblick, den Bestrebungen der Deutschen, ihre nationale Einheit zu bewahren un zu vertheidigen, unsere unbedingte Sympathie zu zollen.” Anzeiger des Westens, 8 September 1870. 236 Republicans represented the principles that German Americans had fought for in two

continents. Germans in Europe, they were sure, would complete their task of creating

and defending an independent state “with German thoroughness.” They argued that

Germans in America must do the same: “We, … who have for years been resting on the

laurels of the great Union victory, in which we took a glorious part, can we say the same

of ourselves?”40 Before the implications of the war in Europe or the political turmoil in

Missouri were clear, German Americans took it for granted that both struggles embodied the same impulse toward national building and extending citizenship rights as the

Revolutions of 1848 and the Civil War.

Native-born Liberal Republicans also capitalized on German-American pride.

German Americans had distained Frank Blair’s conservative position during the Civil

War and his racist vice-presidential campaign in 1868. Now Blair won them back by praising Germans’ “instinctive love of freedom.” He asserted, “The current struggle

against the oppressive tyranny and injustice of Missouri Radicals is owed to the courage

and the fidelity to principle of the same element in the party.” The Westliche Post even

saw fit to quote Schurz’s old foe.41 Gratz Brown had always played to the German vote.

His enthusiastic support of Prussia allowed the Liberals explore the connections between

Europe and the United States. According to the Westliche Post, Gratz Brown—“friend of

the Germans”—carried all their hopes for the future: “Just as Gratz Brown was the first prominent America statesman who expressed his fullest sympathies unashamedly and

40 “Hüben wie drüben”; “mit deutscher Gründlichkeit”; “Wir aber, die wir schon seit jahren auf den Lorbeeren der großen Unionsiege, an denen wir unsern Ruhmreichen Antheil annehmen, ruhen, können wir von uns dasselbe sagen?” Mississippi Blätter, 30 October 1870. 41 “Ihre instinctive Liebe zur Freiheit”; “… daß der jetzige Kampf gegen die drückende Tyrannei und Unrechtigkeit des Missourier Radilismus [sic] nur dem Muthe und der Principientreue desselben Elements in der Partei verdankt wurde.” Westliche Post, 24 October 1870. 237 emphatically with our brothers beyond the ocean, who are fighting for the old Fatherland,

he was also the first to take an equally resolute and consistent position before the people on all the great questions of the present.”42

Throughout Missouri, German immigrants backed Gratz Brown and echoed the arguments of the St. Louis and St. Charles leaders. One of Carl Schurz’s campaign stops inspired German immigrants in Lafayette County to form a local Liberal organization.

Germans were “natural” Liberals, the immigrants in the county east of Kansas City wrote to the Westliche Post. They had been the first “who hurried to the flag at the outbreak of

the rebellion,” and now that African Americans could vote, they were the first to “who

extend the hand of reconciliation.” German Liberals expected that their county’s

disfranchised Confederates, who had a particularly violent reputation, would be suitably

grateful.43 Further east along the Missouri River in Chariton County, German Americans also provided Liberal leadership. Louis Benecke, a twenty-seven year old who had only naturalized after he was mustered out of Union service in 1865, ran for election to the state senate. Proud of walking out of the Jefferson Convention with Schurz, he considered it “unnecessary to recount” the Liberal platform in his campaign flyer.44

42 “Freund der Deutschen”; “Wie Gratz Brown der erste prominent amerikanische Staatsmann war, der unseren, jenseits des Oceans für’s alte deutsche Vaterland kampfenden Brüder seine vollsten Sympathien unverhohlen und nachdrücklich aussprach, so ist er auch der Erste gewesen, … der in allen großen Fragen der Gegenwart eine ebenso entschiedene, wie consequente Stellung vor dem Volke eingenommen hat.” Westliche Post, 8 November 1870. 43 “… die beim Ausbruch der Rebellion zur Fahne eilten”; “… welche die Hand zur Versöhnung reichen.” Westliche Post, 2 November 1870. For Schurz’s campaign itinerary, see Mississippi Blätter, 23 October 1870. On local violence, see Hughs, “Lafayette County in the Aftermath of Slavery.” 44 Louis Benecke, “To the Voters,” 19 October 1870, folder 1484, Louis Benecke Papers, WHMC- Columbia. For a biography of Benecke, see the online collection inventory. University of Missouri and State Historical Society of Missouri, “Benecke Family Papers Inventory,” Western Historical Manuscript Collection—Columbia, http://whmc.umsystem.edu/invent/3825.html (accessed 4 April 2008). 238 Benecke corresponded with several Liberal Republicans around the state.45 One of his

German-speaking friends organized the “Brown Party” in another Chariton County township. Although the friend considered his own township a Liberal “stronghold,” he knew some farmers worried about splitting the Republican Party. Someone had to “prod them a little.”46

In the end, Missouri’s German voters supported Gratz Brown “in a solid phalanx” in the November 8, 1870 election.47 State-wide, the Liberal Republican beat his rival in the governor’s race by nearly 40,000 votes, despite the influence of about 20,000 African

Americans.48 The repeal of the test oath passed even more convincingly.49 Gratz Brown won every precinct in St. Charles and St. Louis, and he dominated the German counties along the Missouri River.50 St. Louis also returned German Liberal Republican Gustavus

Finkelnburg to the U.S. House of Representatives, and Louis Benecke was elected to the state senate.51 Yet much of Gratz Brown’s support came from voters who identified primarily with the Democrats. Liberals secured only 21 of the 138 seats in Missouri’s

45 Schurz knew Benecke well enough to offer his respects to Benecke’s wife. Schurz to L Benecke Esq., Washington, D.C., 29 February 1869, folder 713, Benecke Papers, WHMC—Columbia. See also further correspondence in folders 1483, 1484, 1485, 1491, and 1492. 46 “… sie ein Wenig anspornt.” Theodore Boehme to Louis Benecke, Dalton, Missouri, 28 September 1870, folder 722, Benecke Papers, WHMC—Columbia. 47 Quotation in a letter forwarded to Gratz Brown: James B. Colegan to C.J. Cornoin, Lincoln, Missouri, 28 August 1871, box 1, folder 9, Records of Governor Benjamin Gratz Brown, Office of Governor, MSA. 48 Brown won 104,374 votes to his opponent McClurg’s 63,336. Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 269. On African American voters, see Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 261-62; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 307-08. 49 Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 269. 50 See table 3 in the appendix. Westliche Post, 12 November 1870; Office of the Secretary of State, Elections Division, Election Returns, 1846-1992, box 12, folder 22, 29, 36, MSA. On the central counties, see also Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 269. Gasconade County, for example, gave Brown 73.4 percent of its 1,062 votes. 51 Westliche Post, 11 November 1870. G.W. Wood to Louis Benecke, Weston, Missouri, 16 November 1870, folder 1484; Robert Benecke to Louis Benecke, St. Louis, 15 November 1870, folder 724, Benecke Papers, WHMC—Columbia. 239 lower house, while Democrats won 77.52 Because the Liberals did not even hold the balance of power in the legislature, the Anzeiger des Westens was justified in interpreting the Missouri election of 1870 as an unequivocal “Democratic Party victory.”53 Gratz

Brown acknowledged this fact. He told a crowd, “In this election I recognize that my

obligations are in the largest measure due to the Democratic party.”54 The new governor paid this political debt by supporting the election of the Democratic leader Blair to the

U.S. Senate.55 The Anzeiger’s assessment had proved correct.

The Democrats took advantage of Schurz and other German politicians. Frank

Blair explained the situation in a letter to Rollins. If the Liberals in the state legislature had cooperated with the regular Republicans, they could have prevented his Senate appointment. But his strategy had counted on the Germans. “If we treat them with consideration,” he wrote, “they will unite with me cordially, as they agree with me on the currency[,] taxation & tariff questions—which questions are likely to assure the greatest prominence in the next contest.” He believed that “backed by the Germans of Missouri we [the Democrats] can carry the other German vote in the next presidential election.”

He intended “to play for this vote and enter the next contest for the Presidency certain and decisive.” Because Blair considered Schurz “as much the leader of the Germans in

America, as Bismarck is in Europe,” he especially cultivated his relationship with

52 Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 310. 53 “Sieg der demokratischen Partei.” Anzeiger des Westens, 9 November 1870. In the long-term the Anzeiger’s assessment proved accurate. Curry, “Introduction” in Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment, xix; Kleppner, The Third Electoral System, 119-20. 54 Missouri Democrat, 15 November 1870 quoted in Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, 20. 55 Drake resigned from the Senate when Grant appointed him a judge on the Court of Claims. Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 314. 240 Missouri’s other senator.56 After Blair joined Schurz in Washington, he reported to

Rollins, “Schurz & I are on excellent terms. He is very friendly and talkative.”57 Blair asked Rollins to help him convince Schurz “that the state is irretrievably lost to the

Republicans but that he will be supported & maintained by the Democracy.”58 Rollins

cooperated, writing to Schurz to compliment him on a speech that he found “a splendid

effort.” Rollins added that “hyde-bound [sic] partisans” would “never forgive you for

this speech.”59 The Democrats wanted to distance Schurz from the Republican Party and harness the power of his opposition to Grant and Drake for themselves.

Men such as Rollins and Blair persuaded Schurz that he could control the Liberal

Republican movement and it could be a powerful political force. Privately, Schurz confided to Preetorius that he was concerned about Gratz Brown’s cooperation with the

Democratic majority in the state legislature.60 Yet in late 1870, he seemed eager to overlook the possible consequences of Democratic rule. Remarkably susceptible to

Democrats’ flattery, Schurz believed he could control them, not vice versa. He wrote to

Benecke that he and Blair had met and agreed Missouri Democrats would not call a convention to overturn the constitution of 1865.61 The tone of the letter suggested that

Schurz felt they had come to a joint decision. In reality, Schurz could have done little to

56 Frank Blair, Jr. to James S. Rollins, St. Louis, 18 December 1870, folder 106, Rollins Papers, WHMC— Columbia. 57 Frank Blair, Jr., to James S. Rollins, Washington D.C., 16 February 1871, folder 107, Rollins Papers, WHMC—Columbia. See also Frank Blair to James S. Rollins, St. Louis, 28 December 1870, folder 106, Rollins Papers, WHMC—Columbia. 58 Frank Blair to James S. Rollins, Washington, D.C., 16 February 1871, folder 107, Rollins Papers, WHMC—Columbia. Blair had referred obliquely to similar efforts in earlier letters. See Frank Blair, Jr., to James S. Rollins, St. Louis, 28 December 1870, folder 106, Rollins Papers, WHMC—Columbia. 59 James S. Rollins to Schurz, Columbia, 25 December 1870, reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC. 60 “Es ist sehr fatal, daß wir kein Majorität in der Legislatur haben.” Schurz to Emil Preetorius, New York, 16 November 1870, reel 89, Schurz Papers, LC. 61 Schurz to Louis Benecke, Washington, D.C., 2 February 1871, folder 1492, Benecke Papers, WHMC— Columbia. 241 stop a convention. Blair probably only held back because he sought Schurz’s cooperation

in the 1872 presidential election. William Grosvernor, the editor of St. Louis’s major

English-language Liberal newspaper captured Schurz’s assumptions. In a private letter to

Schurz, Grosvernor wrote that Blair went to Washington, “with an idea of cooperating as

far as he possibly could with liberal Republicans like yourself, and I believe, if you

encourage instead of fighting him you can do much to keep him straight, or straighter.”62

Gratz Brown also sought to reassure Schurz that the Liberal Republicans would not simply do the Democrats’ bidding. He wrote, “In the great victory in Missouri you were the true hero and … for our success we were more indebted to your prudence, sagacity, and indomitable canvass than to all other causes combined.” The governor- elect told Schurz, “I have no intention of abandoning any of the principles of my lifetime.”63 Schurz took his overblown praise at face value, describing the letter to

Preetorius as “very nice.”64 He apparently accepted that the governor had the power to

implement his “principles.” Schurz and Preetorius reassured the Westliche Post’s

readers. The paper reviewed Gratz Brown’s early support of African American voting

and office-holding and quoted him thanking a Democratic audience for casting ballots

“for the equal rights of all people.”65 According to Schurz’s paper, “When the Missouri

Democrats voted for the same principles and men that they had previously most ardently

62 William Grosvenor to Schurz, St. Louis, 16 February 1870, reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC. 63 Benjamin Gratz Brown to Schurz, St. Louis, 26 November 1870, reel 4, Schurz Papers, LC. For further evidence that Gratz Brown acknowledged his German support, see correspondence in box 1, folders 9, 13, 21, 27, and 28, Records of Benjamin Gratz Brown, Office of Governor, MSA. 64 “Sehr schön.” Schurz to Emil Preetorius, Washington, D.C., 4 December 1870, reel 89, Schurz Papers, LC. 65 “… für die gleichen Rechte aller Menschen.” Westliche Post, 2 December 1870. 242 fought against, then they certainly went to the Republicans and not these to them.”66 The

Westliche Post refuted President Grant’s accusation that the Missouri Liberal

Republicans resembled anti-Republican movements that were returning Virginia and

Tennessee to Democratic rule.67 By the end of 1870, Schurz should have known better.

* * * * *

Encouraged by Blair, Rollins, Grosvenor, and Gratz Brown, Schurz prepared to replicate his mistake on a national scale. On December 15, 1870, he rose in the Senate to present a carefully prepared blueprint for a drive against Grant. Describing his performance to Preetorius as “gentle in form but sharp in content,” Schurz consciously adopted a “distinctly Republican tone.”68 He focused on reform and reconciliation and

appealed to national unity and equal citizenship. A “conciliatory policy,” had been

necessary in Missouri, he maintained, so that the “southern people” would “identify their

interests, aspirations, and hopes with the of things.”69 Any system “which imposes all the duties and burdens of citizenship without coupling with them the corresponding rights” would inflame dissent and contravene his deepest principles.70

Now that “political citizenship had been conferred upon the race lately in slavery,”

Schurz maintained, Republicans should lift the temporary voting proscriptions on former

66 “Wenn die Missourier Demokraten in der letzten Wahl fur dieselben Grundsätze und Männer stimmten, welche sie vorher immer aufs leidenschaftlichste bekämpft hatten, so gingen sicherlich sie zu den Repulikanern und nicht diese zu ihnen.” Westliche Post, 2 December 1870. See also Westliche Post, 27 September 1870, 11, 26 November 1870. 67 Westliche Post, 22 September 1870. 68 “Distinkt republikanischen Ton.” Schurz to Emil Preetorius, 19 December 1870, reel 89, Schurz Papers, LC. “In der Form sehr ruhig … aber im Inhalt scharf.” Schurz to Emil Preetorius, Washington, D.C., 12 December 1870, reel 89, Schurz Papers, LC. 69 Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 3rd sess., 118 (15 December 1870). 70 Ibid., 119. 243 Confederates.71 He outlined the ideas that underpinned the compromises he would make during the next year. Overturning the test oath, he said, was a step toward “purifying”

Missouri politics. Administering the oath had allowed partisan registrars to “exercise a judicial power over the right of citizens to vote,” and the whole system had become “the very incarnation of arbitrary party despotism.”72 Although Schurz did not directly blame

African Americans, they were certainly implicated in such corruption. Schurz recounted the role of black delegates in the Missouri Republican convention. He explained that

Drake’s faction had used “colored agitators” to manipulate black voters with “all the artifices of demagogism [sic].”73 The imperatives of reconciliation and reform now placed the burden on African Americans to prove their fitness for self-rule to white

Republicans who were increasingly skeptical.

Schurz’s speech appealed to what would be three of the movement’s main national constituencies: border-state Democrats, northern reformers within the

Republican Party, and German Americans. In Missouri, Ohio, and other border states, many Democrats assured Schurz that most white southerners would accept equality before the law for African Americans. A group of Confederate veterans in Nashville pledged, “We honor and revere the national flag as the herald of that day when all the races of men, of all ranks and conditions, will be redeemed and delivered from all species of political and mental thralldom.”74 Notable reformers who were attracted to civil service reform and free trade also joined Schurz as he opposed Grant, first within the

71 Ibid., 118. 72 Blair helped provide material for Schurz’s speech. Schurz to James S. Rollins, St. Louis, 8 November 1870 and Washington, D.C., 5 December 1870, folder 106, Rollins Papers, WHMC—Columbia. 73 Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 3rd sess., 122, 121, 120 (15 December 1870). 74 F.T. Reid et al. [Confederate veterans] to Schurz, Nashville, 21 September1871; John Ruhm to Schurz, Nashville, 21 September 1871, reel 6, Schurz Papers, LC. 244 Republican Party and then outside it. The senator corresponded with men such as E.L.

Godkin of The Nation, Charles Nordhoff of the New York Evening Post, Horace White of

the Chicago Tribune, Murat Halstead of the Cincinnati Commercial, and Cincinnati

Republican Jacob D. Cox.

Schurz also always intended to attract German immigrants from the Republican

and Democratic camps. During 1871, he received a gratifying response. About a quarter

of the letters from around the country that reached his office during 1871 and 1872 were penned in the careful Old German script of immigrants writing to their “German

Senator.”75 Some Republican correspondents worried that Schurz was playing into the hands of the Democrats, but far more wrote to encourage him to challenge Grant.76 The proprietor of the Detroit Abend-Post und Familien-Blätter assured Schurz that his paper had mirrored Schurz’s course since Schurz had arrived on the American political scene.

He requested a translation of a recent speech “in the interests of the whole Deutschtum of the state of Michigan.”77 One Iowa German, who chose to write in English, described

Schurz’s confrontation with Drake and the Grant administration as a “noble undertaking, and every republican, who is not blinded by party prejudices must at once see that yours is the right and true position.” He added, “Being a German, I feel proud and grateful that you have done so, and think that with but few exceptions, the German element of the republican party take the same view.”78

75 Of the 485 letters collected in Schurz’s “General Correspondence” between June 8, 1871 and May 6, 1872, 128 (26.4 percent) were written in German. Reels 6 and 7, Schurz Papers, LC. 76 For examples of these letters, see reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC. 77 “Im Interesse des gesammten Deutschthums des Staates Michigan .…” August Marxhausen to Schurz, Detroit, 3 April 1871, reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC. 78 Leavitt J. Lusch to Schurz, Waterloo, Iowa, 10 April 1870, reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC. 245 Many German Republicans in Ohio identified with the Liberal Republican movement. Friedrich Hassaurek at the Republican Cincinnati Volksblatt had denounced local Republicans for corruption in October 1870, but he found it impossible to join local

Democrats. German-speaking Democrats leveled relentless personal attacks against

Hassaurek, and Cincinnati’s English-speaking Democrats supported France in its war with Prussia. Emil Rothe’s Democratic Volksfreund called Hassaurek a hypocrite, remarking that he had helped elect the Republican administration he now criticized.79

Unperturbed, Hassaurek helped form the Central Republican Association of Hamilton

County in March 1871.80 Like Missouri’s Liberal Republican Party, the association

devoted itself to removing political disabilities “imposed for participation in the

rebellion,” abolishing protective duties, and reforming the system of political patronage.81

A resurgence in temperance campaigning helped persuade German immigrants to

contemplate leaving the Republican Party.82 The Wächter am Erie in strongly

Republican Cleveland was reluctant to divide the party in September 1871. By March

1872, however, the Wächter would observe that German Republicans were

“unanimously” against Grant and the regular party organization. It backed the Liberals.83

In the Ohio cities of Columbus and Dayton, about 35 percent of Liberal Republican

79 Cincinnati Volksfreund, 10 October 1870. 80 Insert in Cincinnati Volksblatt, 19 September 1872; Hassaurek to Schurz, Cincinnati, 26 March, 1871; H.W. Thompson to Schurz, Cincinnati, 27 March 1871, 15 May 1871; Jacob D. Cox to Schurz, Cincinnati, 27 December 1870; Schurz to Jacob D. Cox, Washington, D.C., 4 April 1871, reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC. On the Cincinnati organization, see also Horace White to Schurz, Chicago, 25 December 1870, reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC; Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, 22-23; Westliche Post, 1 November 1870. 81 See enclosure in Friedrich Hassaurek to Schurz, Cincinnati, 26 March, 1871, reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC. 82 A.W. Moulton to William H. Smith, 26 July 1871; Warren M. Bateman to William H. Smith, Glendale, Ohio, 29 July 1871, box 3, folder 1, William H. Smith Papers, OHS; Rutherford B. Hayes to W.K. Rogers, Cincinnati, 19 April 1872; Rutherford B. Hayes to S. Birchard, Cincinnati, 23 April 1872, reel 172, Hayes Papers, HPC; William Grosvenor to Schurz, St. Louis, 11 May 1871, reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC; Kleppner, The Cross of Culture, 111. 83 “Einstimmig.” Wächter am Erie, 15 March 1872. Compare to the earlier reluctance to consider a third party, Wächter am Erie, 28 September 1871. 246 leaders were German-born.84 “There is tumult everywhere among the German

Republicans,” the Democratic Columbus Westbote noted approvingly in February 1872,

“and the pleasant time when they all followed the party banner through thick and thin is,

thank God, over.”85

The meaning of Liberal Republicanism emerged as German Republicans built a

coalition with New Departure Democrats and Republican reformers in 1871 and 1872.

To some extent, the movement signified different things to its different constituencies.

Each group had its own particular political goals. Each hoped to control it. Liberal

Republicans, however, took a distinctive approach to overcoming their divisions.

German Americans illustrate Liberal compromises particularly well, partly because they

were so eager to unite the German-speaking community and partly because Schurz personally dedicated himself to forming a nationally viable political movement. After their Missouri victory in 1870, German Liberals linked reform to white rule. They believed northerners and southerners could unite behind the idea of clean government dominated by the “better sort” of citizen. Even before Liberals’ decisive split with

Republicans in May of 1872, their campaigning reflected a growing doubt that extending full citizenship to all American men was enough to perfect the United States.

One of the central strands of Liberal Republicanism was the conviction that

America’s system of partisan civil service appointments allowed selfishly-motivated

individuals to manipulate unintelligent voters for their own gain. German Americans

counted Drake among the United States’ corrupt politicians. He had only confirmed their

84 McGerr, “The Meaning of Liberal Republicanism: The Case of Ohio,” 308-11. 85 “Es ist rumort überall unter den deutschen Republikanern, und die schöne Zeit, wo sie der republikanischen Parteifahne durch Dick und Dünn folgten, ist gottlob vorüben.” Columbus Westbote, 14 February 1872. 247 fears when he cut Missouri Liberals off from federal and state patronage following the

September 1870 split.86 President Grant displayed similar weaknesses. He had a penchant for appointing friends and family members to posts they abused.87 German

immigrants acknowledged that Democrats were often equally unscrupulous. In 1871,

they felt proud of their role in bringing down corrupt the Ring of

Democratic boss William M. Tweed in New York City.88 German Americans understood

their distaste for corruption to be an ethnic not a partisan concern. “Smart”

seemed to prey upon honest Germans. In a letter to the Democratic Columbus Westbote,

an Ohio immigrant referred to Tweed’s downfall, maintaining “we see how Germans

from both parties have rebelled against the great swindling of city officials, and the fact

that this reform has been achieved owes much to their activity—such an invigorating

influence.” He believed the same dynamic was at work in Missouri: “It sometimes seems

to me that the time is no longer distant when America’s Germans will contribute to

ending the great corruption which is notorious everywhere.”89

As the Liberal Republican movement gained strength between 1870 and 1872, the

Franco-Prussian War prompted German Americans to reflect on the origins of their

opposition to corruption. The Germans’ “respect for the Prussian Civil Service was

86 Westliche Post, 27 September 1870; Mississippi Blätter, 9 October 1870; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 308-09. 87 On Grant’s use of patronage, see Summers, The Era of Good Stealings, 89-106. 88 Cincinnati Volksfreund, 5 September 1871, 17 November 1871; Columbus Westbote, 4 January 1871. On the downfall of the Tweed Ring from July to November 1871 with mention of German involvement, see Alexander B. Callow, Jr., The Tweed Ring (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 253-78. See also a handwritten account of Franz Sigel and ’s involvement in fighting the Tweed Ring in 1871 dated 20 October 1872. container 5, Franz Sigel Papers, WRHS. 89 “… sehen wir, wie vereinigt die Deutschen beider Parteien sich gegen die großen Schwindeleien der Stadtbeamten auflehnten, und ihrer Thätigkeit, so wiederen Einfluß ist viel zu verdanken, daß diese Reform zu Stand gebracht wurde”; “Es will mir manchmal scheinen, daß die Zeit nicht mehr ferne ist, wo die Deutschen Amerika’s viel dazu beitragen werden, der großen Corruption, welche sich überall kund that, ein Ende machen.” Columbus Westbote, 4 January 1872. 248 axiomatic,” Schurz’s most thorough biographer has written.90 This is an exaggeration, but immigrants’ German background indeed informed the position they took in the

United States. During the Napoleonic Era, Prussia had developed a strongly independent

civil service, earning a reputation for being a “bureaucratic monarchy.”91 In the decades before 1848, the assumptions underpinning the Beamtenstaat (administrative state)

spread more widely through German-speaking Europe. Defending his native Prussia,

Georg Hegel had argued that bureaucrats mediated between the people and the

government, uncorrupted by the market. Neutral, rational, and well trained, they ideally

ensured political stability while remaining responsive to society’s needs.92 Hegel’s justification of a non-partisan civil service aligned with his belief that individual freedom

could be realized within the structures of an authoritarian state.93 The revolutionaries of

1848 rejected this assumption and were often highly critical of the Beamtenstaat, but they remained attracted to the idea of a civil service unsullied by partisan politics. As one historian put it, “Torn between the Scylla of patronage and the Charybdis of bureaucracy, the German is clearly predisposed toward the latter and the Forty-eighter was no exception.” 94 References to “American corruption” struck a nerve with German immigrants of all backgrounds.95

German Americans’ hope that the Prussian state might be vehicle for German progress made them more favorably disposed to its institutions at just the time that

90 Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 183. 91 Sheehan, German History, 299. 92 The arguments were made in Hegel’s 1821 Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Sheehan, German History, 425-33. 93 Kreiger, The German Idea of Freedom, 125-38. 94 Carl J. Friedrich, “The European Background,” in The Forty-Eighters, ed. Zucker, 23. For a useful discussion of this dynamic, see Freitag, Friedrich Hecker, 80, 207, 315-17. 95 Foner, Reconstruction, 488-94. 249 Liberal Republicanism was developing. In the course of their war reporting, German-

language newspapers praised the efficiency of the Prussian military, the most striking

example of Prussian administration at work. German-American leaders were pleased

when foreign reporters commended the Prussian civil service for its “admirable” system

of oversight. According to one article, Prussia ensured “that bribery is reduced to a

minimum and outright fraud borders on the impossible.”96 Some German immigrants went on to make more explicit transatlantic comparisons. The editors of the Republican

St. Charles Demokrat thought it remarkable that attempts to improve the American civil

service were met with the response that such “defects are inseparable from our republican

form of government.” Americans’ acceptance of corruption meant “this Volk is loosing

respect in the eyes of all other civilized nations.”97 The Democratic Cincinnati

Volksfreund agreed with the New York World that the current state of affairs was an

“embarrassing” consequence of Republican Party rule. The Volksfreund quoted the New

York paper, printing, “In other countries dishonest officials are more summarily prosecuted than here.” Every corrupt official in Prussia, the article claimed, was in jail.98

Leading German Liberal Republicans thought American political corruption could be overcome by adopting some features of the professionalized Prussian system. Their approach differed from that of Anglo-American reformers, who initially understood corruption within the framework of classical republicanism. Anglo-Americans were

96 “Bewunderungswürdig”; “… daß Bestechung auf ein Minimum reduciert wird, und absolute Betrug an Unmöglichkeit grenzt.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 23 December 1871. 97 “… die Uebelstände wären unzertrennlich von unserer republikanischen Regierungsform”; “… dieses Volk in den Augen aller civilisirten Nationen an Achtung verliert.” St. Charles Demokrat, 21 September 1871. 98 “Peinlich”; “In andern Ländern die unehrlichen Beamten mehr summarisch bestraft warden, als hier.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 9 November 1871. For a later interpretation with similar emphasis, see “The Civil Service: Speech of Charles Reemelin: At Defiance, August 22, 1876,” newspaper clipping from the Cincinnati Commercial, Reemelin Papers, CHS. 250 accustomed to exhorting politicians and voters to show public virtue.99 Schurz, in contrast, had already tried to pass legislation in 1869 creating a civil service commission.

The examination system he proposed would have resembled Prussia’s, making government appointments dependent on merit, not party loyalty.100 The senator used a subsequent attempt in January 1871 to call attention to the “demoralization which the now prevailing mode of distributing office has introduced into the body politic.”101 He posited that American senators were so used to the spoils system that they could not objectively assess its corrosive effects. Although Schurz did not directly tell American lawmakers that they should emulate the German Empire, he suggested that they needed a comparative perspective. Schurz encouraged members of his audience to imagine that they had left the United States as children. From abroad, they had learned the principles of American government and studied “the theories and observed the practice of other

Governments in different parts of the world.” “Imagine then,” Schurz said, “you had come back about the 4th of March of the year after a presidential election which had resulted in a change of party.”102 He depicted the frantic scramble for offices that

99 I suspect Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, xxii-xxv, 120-25, exaggerates the importance of classical republicanism by the 1870s, but it certainly influenced the Anglo-American language of corruption. See also Ari Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement, 1865-1883 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 7; Summers, The Era of Good Stealings, 9; Summers, The Plundering Generation; Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1978), 166-70. The German Liberal Republicans bore some resemblance to the “liberal reform public intellectuals” of the Gilded Age, who Nancy Cohen describes as accepting administrative reforms after 1865. There is no evidence, however, that German-born Liberal Republicans in 1872 conformed to her characterization of reformers who traded liberalism and democracy for government-supported corporate capitalism. Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 17. 100 Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., 61 (20 December 1869); Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils, 71-72; Trefousee, Carl Schurz, 184-85; Woechentlich Westliche Post, 29 December 1869. 101 Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 3rd sess., App. 68 (27 January 1871). Schurz’s Westliche Post avoided transatlantic parallels in its discussion of corruption. See for example Westliche Post, 1 November 1870. 102 Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 3rd sess., App. 69 (27 January 1871). 251 accompanied any inauguration. It was more sinister than politicians rewarding their

friends, he agued. Recommendations were traded and sold, and once in office, bureaucrats embezzled and bribed. According to Schurz, if the American system permitted such abuses, it must change.

Even in 1871 and 1872, however, some German immigrants did not see the

heavy-handed Prussian civil service as entirely positive. The Liberal Republican

candidate for lieutenant , Gustav Körner, observed that the American

civil service must be reformed while still “avoid[ing] the cliffs of a European bureaucracy.”103 Another Illinois Forty-Eighter, Friedrich Hecker, expressed similar

sentiment in a speech on “Civil Servants in the Princely State and in the Volksstaat.” He

raged that “in no civilized or half-civilized country in the world, not even in , is

[as] exorbitant [a] power in regard to the appointment and dismissal of officers placed in

the hands of an individual as here.” Still, he emphasized that a republic should not

emulate a monarchy, especially Prussia.104 Even in their dissent, these immigrants showed that the Franco-Prussian War had raised the profile of administrative reform in time to make it central to the meaning of the Liberal Republican movement.

German Liberals were genuinely concerned about corruption, but the logic of the reform they proposed included an attack on the influence of supposedly unsophisticated voters. A more tightly controlled civil service would take appointment power out of the hands of poor voters and the politicians who represented them. Liberal Republicanism’s reform ethos thus recast the discussion of the racial component of good citizenship

103 “… die Klippen einer europäischen Buraukratie vermeidet.” Cincinnati Volksblatt, 31 August 1870. 104 “Die Beamten im Fürststaate und im Volksstaate”; “In keinem civilisirten oder halbcivilisirten Lande der Welt, selbst nicht in der Turkei, ist eine masslose Gewalt, in Beziehung auf Ernennung und Absetzung der Beamten in die Hände eines Einzelnen gelegt als hier.” Westliche Post, 7 February 1872. 252 among German immigrants who had been Radical Republicans. This shift drew strength

from Europe. German Americans were reading a steady stream of articles about the

German Volk, “march[ing] at the head of true civilization” in Europe.105 Voices in the

German-language public sphere were already contemplating the idea that fitness for

citizenship stemmed as much from a Volk’s racial background as from free political

institutions. The conflict in Europe had prompted a negative assessment of the French

Volk despite the Third Republic’s interest in representative government. As the Liberal

Republican movement emerged, German Americans were grounding their optimism for

the German Empire in the instincts and administrative institutions of the German Volk.

German Liberals believed that former Confederates were among “the best citizens

of the South” and these people had to be brought back into the political community for

the United States to achieve national greatness. The St. Charles Demokrat, for example,

argued in December 1871 that the Republican policies of the previous few years had

stripped the power of leaders who “had enjoyed the respect and trust of the southern people during the rebellion.” Furthermore, during Reconstruction, “The administration

of the South provoked dissatisfaction among the more influential classes.” In some ways,

the Demokrat’s argument was quite pragmatic. It implied that to safeguard the gains of

Reconstruction, Republicans must win over former Confederates in the South. The

newspaper did not justify “the alleged acts of violence that are supposedly practiced

there.” Yet the editor hoped to counter “the apathy that grips the most educated class of

citizens in the South, through which the brute-like negroes and thieving carpet-baggers

won the upper hand and drove the southern states in quick step toward social and

105 “… an der Spitze der wahren Civilisation marchierten.” Westliche Post, 5 September 1870. 253 financial ruin.” In previous years, the St. Charles Demokrat had seen slavery as the root

of southern problems and equal citizenship as the primary method to overcome it. Its

analysis had now changed. Equal citizenship apparently had not been sufficient. The

Liberals believed that reconstructing the South depended on reviving the influence of

white southerners who were naturally suited to leadership.106

German Liberals subtly reconceived themselves as “best men” instead of

freedom-loving Germans. They certainly counted themselves among “the educated

[gebildete] class of the population.” The St. Charles Democrat argued that they must counterbalance corrupt elements, the “professional politicians and the voting cattle under their leadership.”107 In one 1872 issue, the Demokrat demonstrated how its new depictions of German immigrants paralleled its changing approach to African Americans.

It ran two articles, “The Germans” and the “The Black Band,” in adjacent columns. The first article explained that the world had much for which to thank notable Germans such as , Bismarck, Prussian General Helmuth von Moltke, and Schurz.

Whereas the Demokrat had previously identified fighting for equal rights as part of the

German mission in America, it now declared, “The Germans have set themselves the task in America of freeing America from corruption, social hypocrisy, and crazy temperance.”

The Demokrat also reported on a convention that African Americans had organized in

New Orleans to support Grant. It was a “disaster,” the piece explained, because the

106 “Die besten Bürger des Südens”; “während der Rebellion die Achtung und das vertrauen des südlichen Volkes genossen hat”; “der Verwaltung des Südens die Unzufriedenheit unter der einflußreicheren Klasse vervorgerufen wurden”; “angeblichen Gewaltthaten die dort verübt worden sein sollen”; “… der Apathie welche unter der gebildeten Klasse der Bürger in den Südstaaten um sich gegriffen und wodurch der verthierte Neger und diebische Carpetbägger die Oberhand gewann und die Südstaaten im Sturmschritte dem gesellschaftlichen und finanziellen Ruin entgegenführte.” St. Charles Demokrat, 14 December 1871. 107 “Die gebildete Klasse der Bevölkerung”; “die beste Bürger”; “Fachpolitiker”; “unter ihrer Leitung Stimmvieh.” St. Charles Demokrat, 28 September 1871. 254 delegates were too foolish to understand the shortcomings of “Massa Grant.” The

newspaper declared that the convention’s resolutions proved “that the colored population

and its ignorance has been use to win votes for corruption through pitiful flattery.”108

All along, newspapers such as the St. Charles Demokrat and leaders such as Carl

Schurz had maintained it would take time to incorporate the freed people into the national

community, but before a presidential election had even been conducted under the

Fifteenth Amendment, they seemed to loose patience. The old faith in the power of

republican institutions to create a nation from diverse peoples no longer dominated the

German-language public sphere. Schurz’s opposition to the United States’ annexation of

Santo Domingo (today the ) reflected his personal doubt. Schurz

opposed what he saw as Grant’s imperial ambitions, but in January 1871 he told the

Senate that the real question was, “Is the incorporation of that part of the globe and the people inhabiting it quite compatible with the integrity, safety, perpetuity, and progressive development of our institutions which we value so highly?” He denied that

he “lack[ed] faith in the efficiency of republican institutions,” but he added that “I trust

we have lived too long and seen too much to believe that the mere absence of a king is

sufficient to make a true republic, and that you have only to place the ballot in the hands

of the multitude to make them citizens fit to sustain the fabric of self government.”

Senators were surprised to learn that Schurz’s argument came down to climate. He

approved of annexing Canada because the North American climate allowed “our free

108 “Die Deutschen”; “Die schwarze Bande”; “Kladderadatsch”; “… daß man die farbige Bevölkerung und ihre Unwissenheit benutzt hat, um durch erbärmlich Schmeichelei ihre Stimmen für Corruption … zu gewinnen”; “Die Deutschen haben sich in Amerika die Aufgabe gestellt, Amerika von der politischen Corruption, der socialen Heuchlerei und der wahnsinnigen Temperenzlerei zu befreien.” St. Charles Demokrat, 2 May 1872. 255 institutions to exhibit a wonderful power in blending and assimilating the most heterogeneous elements.” The senator maintained that the Tropics, in contrast, were

“congenial ground” to the “mixed Latin, Indian, and African races,” who “cannot even be reached by our teachings.”109

Schurz’s Radical credentials allowed him to use the racialized notion of reform to bridge the gap between border-state Democrats and Republican reformers. German

Democrats in Missouri and Ohio encouraged the Liberal Republicans. The editors of the

St. Louis Anzeiger des Westens, the Columbus Westbote, and the Cincinnati Volksfreund

remained wary that Democrats might be exploited by Liberals who “remain with one foot

in the party from which all the trouble now emanates,” but during 1871 they praised

Schurz’s actions.110 German Democrats were proud that the “German senator” was

confronting the “giant” of the Grant administration, and they agreed with him on tariffs,

temperance, and German unification.111 His racially charged reform agenda also suited

them. Late in 1871, the Cincinnati Volksfreund indicated the converging positions of the

Liberals and the New Departure Democrats. Editor Emil Rothe began by explaining that

Democrats could not “be blamed for their now abandoned opposition to the rash

extension of civil equality to a class of people still incapable of self-rule.” He intended to put such issues behind him: “All these questions, in which the Democratic Party was in

conflict with the Zeitgeist, are now settled.” Corruption was the new problem plaguing

109 Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 3rd sess., App. 26, 27, 29 (11 January 1871). For background, see Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 186-88, 191-95. 110 “… noch mit einem Fuße in der Partei stehen blieben, von der jetzt alles Unheil herkommt.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 21 November 1871. See also St. Charles Demokrat, 4 May 1871; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 24, 30 November 1871, 4, 11 December 1871, 2, 8 February 1872, 19, 27 March 1872, 2, 8 April 1872; Columbus Westbote, 10 April 1872; Anzeiger des Westens, 3, 26, 28 March 1872, 11, 27 April 1872. For a survey of newspaper positions, see Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 250-57; Wittke, The German-American Press in America, 155-58. 111 “Der Riese.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 10 November 1870. 256 the nation. The Volksfreund directly linked political decay to Republican Reconstruction.

Democrats linked corruption to “centralization,” “party-tyranny, “carpetbaggery,” “saber- rule,” and “military despotism,” terms they routinely used in reference to the enfranchisement of African Americans in the South.112 Rothe clearly judged that

Democrats’ chances of ousting Grant were better served by an alliance with Liberals than by continued association with the “Democrats who cling to the old and belong to a bygone era.”113 German Democrats accepted the Fifteenth Amendment, but they still resisted the ideal of racially inclusive citizenship that it represented.

Ultimately, the former Radicals’ concessions were more significant than

Democrats’. German Liberal Republicans chose to cooperate with elements hostile toward African American citizenship, even as the implications of such a stance became clear. Back in 1870, Krekel had acknowledged that some of the supporters of the Liberal

Republican movement in Missouri would strip the freed people of their rights if they could. Former Republicans had believed that they could maintain control by holding the balance of power. They had insisted that Democrats who voted for the third party ticket demonstrated their acceptance of the Fifteenth Amendment. Following the election of

Gratz Brown, however, Schurz courted southern whites, becoming more dependent on the votes of the Democrats who had proven capable of manipulating him. German

112 “Ihre jetzt aufgegebene Opposition gegen die vorschnelle bürgerliche Gleichstellung einer noch zur Selbstregierung unfähigen Volksklasse kann ihr auch nicht zum Vorwurfe [sic] gerechnen”; “Aber alle diese Fragen, in welchen die demokratische Partei in Conflict mit dem Zeitgeiste gewesen ist, sind jetzt erledigt”; “Corruption”; “Centralisation”; “Parteityrannei”; Carpetbaggerei”; “Säbelherrschaft”; “Militärdespotie.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 11 November 1871. See also Anzieger des Westens, 24 August 1872. 113 “Am Alten klebende und einer vergangenen Zeit angehörige Demokraten.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 21 November 1871. 257 Americans’ message of reform became ever more closely tied to Democrats’ desire for

white rule in the South.

As the public face of Liberal Republicanism, Schurz’s appeals to white southerners exposed the compromises inherent in the movement. He demonstrated that he was more interested in white rule than equal citizenship when he continued to speak of

“amnesty” after hardly any restrictions remained on former Confederates. In Missouri, the Liberals’ support of amnesty had meant overturning the state’s unusually sweeping proscriptions of Confederate sympathizers.114 At the national level, however, no law excluded former Confederates from voting, and by the early 1870s only a few hundred southern leaders were still barred from office-holding under the Fourteenth

Amendment.115 Schurz introduced a Senate bill to remove these disabilities in December

1870. But this “amnesty” was largely symbolic. It symbolized that Liberal Republicans

intended to return southern governments to white hands by removing federal support for

African Americans.116

White southerners who violently subverted the Fifteenth Amendment provided

the starkest indicator of the potential impact of “reconciliation.”117 In his 1865 Report on

the Condition of the South, Schurz had documented that southern whites had used

violence to keep former slaves subjugated. At that time, he had thought that giving

African Americans the vote would allow them to protect themselves. By 1869 and 1870,

114 For the stringency of the provisions in Missouri in comparison to other states, see Foner, Reconstruction, 42. 115 Foner, Reconstruction, 504; James A. Rawley, “The General Amnesty Act of 1872: A Note,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (1960): 481-82. For the stringency of the Missouri provisions, see Foner, Reconstruction, 42. 116 Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 3rd sess., 118 (15 December 1870). Schurz made an even stronger speech in 1872. Congressional Globe, 42nd Cong., 2nd sess., 698-703 (30 January 1872). 117 Rable, But There Was No Peace; Keith, The Colfax Massacre. 258 however, it was apparent that terrorism could also undermine voting rights.

Organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia not only

targeted black schools and churches, they intimidated Republican voters. Violence was

the worst in areas were African American majorities could decide elections, but it also

surfaced in Missouri, which Schurz claimed was “in a more peaceful and orderly

condition than it ever had been.”118 In 1870, Wilhelm Schreck, an itinerant preacher who

like Schurz hailed from Prussia’s western territories, wrote to the senator from

Warrenton, Missouri to relate an event that had transpired on election day in November.

A group of “rebels” had cried out “Hurrah for Jef Davis,” the former president of the

Confederacy. When German Union veterans countered with “and a rope to hang him,”

the secessionists took out revolvers, forcing them to take the comment back. The preacher, who described himself as a supporter of “human rights,” believed it was “still far too early to give such people the vote.” As a religious man, he understood the value of forgiveness, but before it was given “a change of heart must also take place.” His

Warren County neighbors still wanted “to wipe the D___ Dutch like us from the face of the earth.”119 This was just one example of the violence marring elections during 1870.

Schurz’s response to the violent abrogation of voting rights was at the heart of the

Liberal Republican movement. In April 1871, he was one of the few Republicans in

Congress to vote against the third piece of legislation designed to implement the Fifteenth

Amendment. The bill that became known as the Ku Klux Klan Act was an ambitious

118 Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 3rd sess., 119 (15 December 1870). 119 “Menschen Rechte”; “… noch viel zu frühzeitig solche Leute daß [sic] Stimmrecht zu geben”; “Es muß auch eine Sinnes Ae[n]derung stattfinden”; “die D Dutch wie uns … von der Erde vertilgen.” Wilhelm Schreck to Schurz, Warrenton, Missouri, 12 December 1870, reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC. For warnings that the Liberal Republicans’ faith in former Confederates was misplaced, see for example William Gilman, Springfield, Missouri, 28 February 1871, reel 5, Schurz Papers, LC. 259 extension of federal power. It made it a federal crime for an individual to interfere with

citizenship rights. The act empowered the president to declare martial law and suspend

the writ of habeus corpus to protect African American voters.120 In his statement of

opposition, Schurz acknowledged the problem of Klan attacks and intimidation, but he

explained that the potential abuse of federal power outweighed his concern for the

victims of such violence. He opposed the bill “because I consider the rights and liberties

of the whole American people of still higher importance than the interests of those in the

South whose dangers and sufferings appeal so strongly to our sympathy.” Schurz placed

his hope in the sort of arrangement the parties had brokered in Missouri. He believed a

conciliatory stance would “dissolve that bond of common grievance which binds the law

and order loving Democrats of the South to the lawless element” and “strengthen the

influence and power of the honest element in the Republican party of the South by

refusing our countenance to the selfish schemers and tricksters who, under all sorts of pretexts, continually invoke the aid of the national Government to sustain them in power.”121 Other Liberal Republicans had more modest objections to the Ku Klux Klan

Act. The St. Charles Demokrat considered political violence a “sensitive issue,” emphasizing that the only real problem with the legislation was the power it gave the

“tyrannical” Grant.122

Liberal Republican discussions of terrorism in the South minimized its

significance. As federal prosecutors were moving against the Klan in South Carolina in

September 1871, Schurz made a major speech reaching out to the white South at

120 Foner, Reconstruction, 454-59; Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 196; Wang, The Trial of Democracy, 83-86. 121 Congressional Globe, 42nd Cong., 1st sess., 687, 688 (14 April 1871). 122 “Heikle Sache.” St. Charles Demokrat, 6 April 1871. “Herrschsucht.” St. Charles Demokrat, 20 April 1871. 260 Nashville, Tennessee.123 He condemned “acts of violence and persecution inflicted by a

certain class of the Southern population upon Republicans and colored people,” but he

absolved most southern whites of culpability. The Liberal leader described the reaction

of the white South to African American political activity as natural considering “all the

traditions of her people,” and he depicted African Americans as “inexperienced” voters

controlled by “unscrupulous and rapacious demagogues.” Stressing the value of “local

government,” Schurz assured his audience that even the atrocities committed by white

terrorists did not warrant the Grant administration’s actions in South Carolina.124 He sympathized with whites whom he believed were subjected to vindictive and corrupt rule by African Americans and their self-serving white supporters. Schurz’s efforts appeal to southern Democrats publicized the fact that a victory for the Liberal Republicans might endanger the implementation of the Fifteenth Amendment’s principle of inclusive and participatory citizenship. Reconstruction produced a unique political climate in 1871, but

German Liberals demonstrated that the United States was responding to some of the same forces at work across the Atlantic. Orderly government by “best men” seemed as important to the nation as safeguarding citizens’ right to vote.

* * * * *

In 1872, the future of the Liberal Republican movement depended on the outcome of a national convention scheduled to meet in Cincinnati that May. One German-born

Liberal Republican from Indiana later remembered, “Never have so many Germans taken

123 On the South Carolina trials, see Lou Falkner Williams, The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, 1871-1872 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996). On the profile of Schurz’s speech in the national press, see Murat Halstead to Schurz, Cincinnati, 18 September 1871, reel 6, Schurz Papers, LC. 124 Schurz, “The Need for Reform and a New Party,” Nashville, Tennessee, 20 September 1871, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 2: 261, 277, 264, 267, 283-84, 277-78. 261 part in a convention.”125 German Americans from around the region gathered in

Cincinnati eager to play a decisive role in American politics.126 From Missouri came

Friedrich Münch, Carl Schurz, Joseph Pulitzer, Louis Benecke, and Karl Dänzer.

Illinois’ Gustav Körner, Caspar Butz, and Friedrich Hecker attended, and August

Thieme, Friedrich Hassaurek, Charles Reemelin, and J.B. Stallo represented the host state.127 Many other notable immigrants awaited telegraph reports from the

“extraordinary” convention.128 Indeed, it is easier to list the prominent German Ohioans and Missourians who remained with the Republican Party in May 1872. Cleveland’s

Jacob Müller, for example, was serving as Lieutenant Governor of Ohio and refrained from leaving the Republicans until his term expired in 1873.129 Nationally, war hero

Franz Sigel, constitutional scholar Franz Lieber, and Chicago editor Hermann Raster all rejected the allure of the third party.130 Although Ohio and Missouri played an unusually

125 “Niemals haben sich an einer Konvention so viele Deutsche beteiligt.” W.A. Fritsch, Aus Amerika: Alte und Neue Heimat (Stardgard i. Pom: Verlag von Wilhelm Prange, [c. 1905-1908]), 50. Fick Pamphlet Collection, German-Americana Collection, UC. 126 On the convention organization, see James S. Rollins to Schurz, Jefferson City, 4 February 1872, reel 6, Schurz Papers, LC; St. Charles Demokrat, 28 March 1872; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 26 January 1872; Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, 132. 127 Reemelin, The Life of Charles Reemelin, 202; Koerner, Memoirs of Gustav Koerner, 2:557; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 29 April 1872, 2 May 1872; St. Charles Demokrat, 30 November 1871; Westliche Post, 17 April 1872; Wittke, “Friedrich Hassaurek,” 12. Hassaurek did not take a formal role in the convention, but given his residence in Cincinnati and his activity on behalf of the Liberal Republicans, I suspect his biographer is correct that he attended. See box 2, folder 10, Hassaurek Papers, OHS; Rutherford B. Hayes to S. Birchard, Cincinnati, 15 September 1872, reel 172, Hayes Papers, HPC. Many other German Americans attended the concurrent meeting of the national Reform and Reunion Party, a New Departure Democratic organization. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 3 May 1872. 128 “Außergewöhnliche.” St. Charles Demokrat, 9 May 1872; Wächter am Erie, 1 May 1872. 129 Toledo Express, 10 January 1872; Columbus Westbote, 21 February 1872, 30 March 1872; Cincinnati Volksblatt, 31 August 1872; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 12 January 1872; Cleveland Anzeiger, 16 August 1872; “Jacob Mueller” in The Dictionary of Cleveland Biography, ed. David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 324; Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 254. 130 Cleveland Anzeiger, 10 August 1872; Columbus Westbote, 27 April 1872; Engle, The Yankee Dutchman, 222; Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 254. Lieber died before the presidential election. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 4 October 1872. 262 strong part in the movement, German Republicans across the country joined it.131 The

Indiana delegate was not far off the mark when he observed that “nearly all prominent

leaders of Deutschtum” gathered at the convention.132

From the perspective of German Liberal Republicans, everything went wrong in

Cincinnati. The national convention struggled to find a candidate who would unite them.

German-born delegates favored Boston’s Charles Francis Adams, the son and grandson of presidents who had served as a Republican in Congress and as ambassador to the

United Kingdom, or Lyman Trumbull, an Illinois senator who had taken an independent position in the Republican Party since his vote for Andrew Johnson’s acquittal on impeachment charges. The two other leading candidates were Horace Greeley, the eccentric editor of the New York Tribune who supported tariffs and temperance, and

Gratz Brown, who had grown much closer to the Democrats since 1870. When Frank

Blair arrived in Cincinnati he arranged for Gratz Brown to withdraw his candidacy at the last moment and support Greeley in return for the vice-presidential nomination. There were still more delegates who preferred either Adams or Trumbull, but Greeley’s able campaign manager took advantage of the confusion to win a majority.133

Unable to hide his intense disappointment at this outcome, Schurz was, in Blair’s words, “cut to the quick.”134 One German participant wrote, “A trickster, raised in the slimy politics of then Missouri—Gratz Brown—was able, by combining with a few tricksters in other states, to nominate Horace Greely, and turn the whole body into a

131 For a more extensive list, see Nagler, “Deutschamerikaner und das Liberal Republican Movement 1872.” 132 “Fast alle prominenten Führer des Deutschthums.” W.A. Fritsch, Aus Amerika, 50. 133 Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, 158-63. 134 Frank Blair, Jr., to James S. Rollins, 9 May 1872, Frank Blair, Jr., to James S. Rollins, Washington, D.C., 25 May 1872, folder 122, Rollins Papers, WHMC—Columbia. See also Koerner, Memoirs of Gustav Koerner, 2: 557. 263 mockery of itself, I shall never forget that adjournment.”135 The nomination had “created a total fiasco,” the Cincinnati Wahrheits-Freund declared, “and with it the entire Liberal

Republican movement had found a sad end;” it had “committed suicide.”136 German

Americans found few redeeming characteristics in Greeley, who had not even joined

other Anglo-American Liberals in supporting Prussia in the European war.137 German

Liberals saw the New Yorker’s nomination as the defeat of the principled Germans at the hands of the conniving Yankees.138 The Volksfreund wrote, “Honesty, intelligence and talent, which were all represented there in unusual measure, were outsmarted, oppressed, and roguishly mishandled by the spirit of haggling, wire-pulling, and baseness.”139 In its postmortem, the Wächter am Erie compared the “pragmatic” Anglo-Americans to the

“theoretical” Germans.140 Future president Rutherford B. Hayes agreed that the Germans

were the “honest” element in convention in a letter to his son.141

Schurz and the other prominent German Liberal Republicans only reluctantly stood by their candidate. In a personal letter, Schurz told Greeley that he found the circumstances surrounding the nomination “painful.” He believed the “the whole character and aspect of the movement is changed.” Since he believed German immigrants had flocked to the party because they “cared … about the moral tendency of the movement,” he judged that they had little interest in helping elect Greeley. Schurz

135 Reemelin, The Life of Charles Reemelin, 202. See also Columbus Westbote, 15 May 1872. 136 “… gründlich Fiasko gemacht, und die ganze liberal republikanische Bewegung hat damit ein trauriges Ende gefunden”; “Selbsmord begangen.” Cincinnati Wahrheits-Freund, 8 May 1872. 137 New York Tribune, 22 August 1870, 5, 7, 12, 27 September 1870. 138 Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, 159-63; Matthew T. Downey, “Horace Greeley and the Politicians: The Liberal Republican Convention in 1872,” The Journal of American History 53 (1967): 727-50. 139 “… wurden Ehrlichkeit, Intelligenz und Talent, die alle dort in seltenem Maaße vertreten waren, vom Schachergeister, von der Drathziegerei und von der Gemeinheit übervortheilt, unterdrückt und bübisch mißhandelt.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 6 May 1872. 140 Wächter am Erie, 11 M ay 1872. 141 Rutherford B. Hayes to His Son, Cincinnati, 9 May 1872, reel 172, Hayes Papers, HPC. 264 related that “the most prominent German leaders of the West” were now determined to

oppose the Liberal ticket.142 He briefly considered organizing an alternative nomination, but decided to support Greeley and court the Democratic Party’s aid. Even before the

nomination, Schurz had hoped the Democrats would endorse a Liberal Republican

candidate.143 In July, the Democratic Party grudgingly nominated Greeley. No German

Democrat in Ohio and Missouri really liked the New Yorker, but by November the

Cincinnati Volksfreund, the Fremont Courier, and the Columbus Westbote had all decided that if the choice was between Greeley and Grant, they would support Greeley.144

In the end, the original German Liberal newspapers such as the Westliche Post, the St.

Charles Demokrat, the Wächter am Erie, and the Cincinnati Volksblatt came out for him.145 A speech by Hassaurek that ran in the Volksblatt summed up their campaign rhetoric. Hassaurek had no difficulty cooperating with Democrats who “recognized the equality of all people before the law.” He believed that Greeley would reform the civil service, free the South from “carpet-bagger rule,” and effect the reconciliation necessary to reestablish “harmony and fraternal feeling.”146

Although the largest German-language newspapers in Ohio and Missouri at least tepidly supported Greeley, some important figures did not. In September Judge Stallo told a St. Louis crowd that they only reconciliation he could accept would be one “with

142 Schurz to Horace Greeley, Washington, D.C., 6 May 1872, reel 7, Schurz Papers, LC. 143 August Belmont to Schurz, Vincennes, Indiana, 23 April 1872, reel 7, Schurz Papers, LC. 144 The Columbus Westbote supported the Democratic nomination of Greeley as early as mid-May. Columbus Westbote, 15 May 1872. The Cincinnati Volksfreund and the Fremont Courier accepted Greeley once it became clear he would be nominated. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 3 July 1872. Fremont Courier, 20 June 1872. For a survey of the German-language press, see Cincinnati Volksfreund, 13 June 1872, 1 July 1872. See also Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, 199-221. 145 Wächter am Erie, 11 May 1872; Cincinnati Volksblatt, 18 September 1872; St. Charles Demokrat, 9 May 1872. 146 “… die Gleichheit aller Menschen vor dem Gesetz anerkennt”; “Eintracht und Brüderlickkeit.” Cincinnati Volksblatt, 19 September 1872. 265 an acknowledgement of the rights of those who were freed by the war and “a coming

together of the races in the South.” He asked, “Will the emancipated slaves stand together with their former masters when they [the masters] join … with a party whose

doctrines only mean oppression and slavery to them?147 The Toledo Express, a

Republican newspaper since before the war, printed Stallo’s speech. Two other German-

language newspapers also represented the regular Republicans in Ohio. The Cincinnati

Courier had been founded as a regular counterweight to the reform-oriented Volksblatt in

1869. It announced in favor of Grant once the Democrats had nominated the unpalatable

Greeley.148 Anglo-Americans established the Cleveland Anzeiger to espouse the

Republican Party line in German in August 1872.149 The Republicans declared they stood for “national unity, freedom, and equality.” The Cleveland Anzeiger wrote,

“Hooray for Grant, the much maligned and yet taciturn savior of the Union in war and in peace.”150 The Republicans associated Greeley with the terrorism in the South, questioned his ability to implement reform, and reminded German immigrants of his stance on temperance.151 Yet some opponents of Greeley had no interest in supporting

Grant either. Democratic-leaning periodicals such as the St. Louis Anzeiger, the

147 “… eine Anerkennung der Rechte derjenigen, die durch den Krieg befriet sind”; “ein Zusammenstehen der Racen im Süden”; “Werden die emancipirten Sclaven mit ihren früheren Herren zusammenstehn, wenn diese … mit der Partei sich verbinden, deren Lehre für sie nur Unterdrückung und Sclaverei meint?” Toledo Express, 21 Septebmer 1872. For other reports, see Westliche Post, 18 September 1872; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 3 October 1872. 148 Cincinnati Volksfreund, 15 July 1872. On the founding of the Courier, see Arndt and Olsen, German- American Newspapers, 438; Max Burgheim, Cincinnati in Wort und Bild: Nach authentischen Quellen bearbeitet und zusammengestellt (Cincinnati: M. & R. Burgheim, 1888), 138. 149 Cleveland Anzeiger, 5 August 1872. 150 “Nationaleinheit, Freiheit und Gleichheit”; “Hurrah für Grant den vielverleumdeten, und doch schweigsamen, Retter der Union im Krieg und im Freiden.” Cleveland Anzeiger, 5 August 1872. See also Toledo Express, 2 March 1872. On regular Republican papers in other states, see Cincinnati Volksfreund, 24 April 1872. 151 Cleveland Anzeiger, 2, 6, 9, 10, 15 August 1872, 2 September 1872; Toledo Express, 24, 26 September 1872, 25, 28 October 1872, 1 November 1872. 266 Cincinnati Wahrheits-Freund, and the new St. Louis Amerika believed if Greeley was

elected he would maintain protective tariffs, support temperance activists, and ignore the authority of state governments.152 The Amerika even recommended that its readers register a protest vote for the Bourbon Democrat candidate in November.153

In black Missourians’ and Ohioans’ first presidential election, Grant won

convincingly with about 55 percent of the nation’s popular vote. Thanks to Greeley,

German-American voters could not send a clear message in 1872.154 Grant won Ohio

again, and Cleveland’s German wards did not reveal any shift away from the Civil War

hero.155 German-born voters probably did contribute to transforming Cincinnati from a

city that had gone for Grant in 1868 into one that went for Greeley. Three of the four

wards identified as German Republican strongholds in 1868 gave Grant a smaller proportion of their votes. In the Seventh Ward, for example, the incumbent’s returns fell

dramatically from about 73 percent to about 48 percent.156 Yet Grant still claimed majorities in the other three wards. Overall, the Volksfreund was probably right when it calculated that German Cincinnatians had tipped: less than half of them now voted

Republican. Since rural Ohio Democrats turned out for Greeley, the Democratic paper was probably was probably right to assert that as many as four of every five German

Ohioan voters supported the Democratic-Liberal Republican ticket.157

152 Wahrheits-Freund, 8 May 1872. On the St. Louis Anzeiger, see Toledo Express, 28 October 1872. 153 Amerika, 27 October 1872. 154 McGerr, “The Meaning of Liberal Republicanism: The Case of Ohio,” 319-20. 155 See table 1 in the appendix. 156 See table 2 in the appendix. 157 See table 4 in the appendix. The Volksfreund analysis was partly based on the Liberal Republican vote in the October state elections. Cincinnati Volksfreund, 14 October 1872, 6 November 1872. 267 In contrast to Ohio, Missouri was one of only six states—four in the border region and two in the South—that returned Liberal Republican majorities.158 Greeley won 56 percent of the Missouri vote, but far fewer voters in heavily German areas supported the presidential candidate than had supported Gratz Brown for governor two years earlier.

Among five German wards that had overwhelming endorsed Brown in 1870, Greeley won narrow victories. None of these wards supported the Republican candidate who ran for governor in November 1872, allowing Democrats to end the interlude of Liberal

Republican power in the state.159 German St. Louisans would continue to lean much more Republican than the city or state as a whole, but the 1872 election was a watershed.

The centrality of the Republican Party to German-Missourian identity was a thing of the past.

The Liberal Republicans had failed at the polls, but their movement had important consequences for the direction of Reconstruction. By 1872, the burst of constitutional activity that had transformed American citizenship was spent. The last quarter of the nineteenth century would prove to be the “doldrums” of progress in American voting rights.160 During the 1872 campaign, the national Democratic Party gave up all efforts to

repeal the Fifteenth Amendment, but it condoned other methods of undermining African

American political power. The Republican Party continued to identify with the plight of

the freed people, but Republicans signaled that they understood that northern sympathy

158 The other states were Kentucky, Maryland, Tennessee, Texas, and Georgia. Burnham, Presidential Ballots, 165-229. 159 See table 3. Six strongly German counties identified by historian Paul Kleppner dropped from supporting Gratz Brown with 75.2 percent in 1870 to giving Greeley only 44.2 percent in 1872. Kleppner, The Third Electoral System, 111. 160 Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 196. 268 for the white South would make it harder for them to protect black rights.161 A majority

of Republicans in Congress backed the largely symbolic Amnesty Act of May 1872, and

their national platform essentially adopted the Liberal planks of civil service reform,

amnesty, and local government at their national convention.162 Liberal Republican descriptions of Reconstruction constrained Republican action. German immigrants who participated in the third party had helped legitimize the idea that the whole project of extending African American citizenship had been corrupt, vindictive, and foolhardy.163

Liberal Republicans had encouraged the notion that national reconciliation would have to come at the expense of racial equality. Without quite grasping the impact of the compromises they had made between 1870 and 1872, German immigrants had contributed to the idea that North and South would only reunite when northern

Republicans stopped intervening on behalf of black southerners. This position involved

nothing less than pitting national unity against the protection of citizenship rights. In the

final analysis, German Liberal Republicans had eroded the connection between

nationalism and liberalism. They had compromised the understanding of citizenship and

nation that had fueled the Revolutions of 1848 and Radical Reconstruction. In his

ambitious interpretation of American history in global perspective, A Nation among

Nations, Thomas Bender’s describes this transition. By the end of the century, he argues,

“While some of the national ambitions of 1848 had been realized …, liberal

161 Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, 164-99; Foner, Reconstruction, 509-11; Wang, The Trial of Democracy, 120-21, 161-64, 300; Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 107-11. 162 Rawley, “The General Amnesty Act of 1872,” 482; Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, 185-86; Proceedings of the Liberal Republican Convention, in Cincinnati, May 1st, 2nd and 3rd, 1872 (New York: Baker & Godwin, Printers, 1872), 19-21; Proceedings of the National Union Republican Party Held at Philadelphia in 1872 ([Philadelphia]: Charles W. Johnson, 1903), 51-52. 163 Andrew Slap makes the connection between Liberal Republicans and the “Lost Cause” interpretation of Reconstruction. Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, 181-86, 199-221 269 achievements had been compromised.”164 At the same time that Bismarck was, in David

Potter’s words, “carefully dissociating liberalism from nationalism in Germany,” the

United States was moving in the same direction.165

Carl Schurz identified the German Empire as a model of national unity. In early

1872, he pointed out that German politicians who had participated in the Revolutionaries

of 1848 now sat in the parliament of the German Empire. Forty-Eighters had reconciled

with their old monarchical opponents. Schurz had himself enjoyed a cordial visit with

the Iron Chancellor in 1868.166 The German-born senator believed that the United States, the “great Republic of the new world which marches in the very vanguard of modern civilization,” should at least learn from—and ideally surpass—the “example of wisdom is set by other nations.”167 A few years later he could have pursued the comparison further.

German Republicans were willing to compromise racial justice and voting rights to reunite North and South just as European liberals were compromising the ideals of constitutionally limited government and effective popular representation to unite the

German states behind Bismarck. Most German immigrants would not remain uncritical supporters of Bismarck, but Americans became more interested in what they could learn from Germany during the Gilded Age. This would be particularly true as they contemplated how to educate good citizens and address the new inequalities created by industrial work.

164 Bender, A Nation among Nations, 179, 177. 165 Potter, “The Civil War in the History of the Modern World,” 297. 166 Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 165-66. 167 Schurz, “General Amnesty,” speech made in the U.S. Senate, 30 January 1872, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 2:338. 270

CHAPTER 7

“TO EDUCATE ENLIGHTENED AND PATRIOTIC CITIZENS”: GERMAN AMERICANS, RELIGION, AND THE SCHOOL DEBATES OF THE 1870s

“American citizens’ attachment to their public schools bears witness to their

republican character,” one German American wrote to the Westliche Post in 1870. He

added that “the common school [Volksschule] is a crucial republican institution,”

explaining, “In the common school, ideas that only theoretically exist in political

institutions and are first put into practice.”1 Essentially, this was the

Republican Party’s position. Education had been central to Republican plans for reconstructing the nation following the Civil War. Indeed, one historian describes the public school issue as “the soul of the Republican program in the 1870s.”2 Always

supporters of public education for their own children, northern Republicans responded to

the freed people’s demand for education in the South and the challenge of instructing

immigrant children in America’s cities. The Freedmen’s Bureau, Republican state

governments, and municipal school boards invested in education, hoping to transform

African Americans and young immigrants into good citizens. Republicans hoped that as

1 “Die Anhänglichkeit der amerikanischen Bürger an ihre öffentlichen Freischulen legt ein Zeigniß ab für ihren republikanischen Charakter”; “Die Volksschule ist eine wesentliche, republikanische Institution”; “Die Gedanken, welche nur in der Theorie, in politischen Institutionen und in der Volkssouveränität existiren, werden erst in der Volksschule praktisch gemacht ….” Westliche Post, 13 June 1870. 2 McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction, 6. William J Harris identified education the “cornerstone” of Republicans’ Reoncstruction efforts in Mississippi. Harris, “The Creed of the Carpetbaggers: The Case of Mississippi,” Journal of Southern History 40 91974): 199-224. For a useful description of Republicans and education in a northern state, see James C. Mohr, The Radical Republicans and Reform in New York during Reconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 153-201. 271 children learned to read and write, they would also learn the value of self-reliance and the

habits of democracy. As the letter in the Post put it, schooling promised to calm the

“unsettling influence” of recent developments, including “the acquisition of citizenship rights.”3

The Westliche Post’s correspondent believed most people were “in agreement on

the main points” of education.4 He was dead wrong. Although public education would

win wide support among German Americans, African Americans, and native-born

Republicans, it remained deeply controversial. Americans fought over schools because

they helped define who was a citizen and what citizenship meant. Most Democrats in the

South were hostile to public education because they did not want to pay to educate

“another man’s child,” especially when that child was black.5 Southern Democrats had no intention of using education to foster African American citizenship. In northern and western states, including Ohio and Missouri, the Catholic Church would also challenge

Republican plans. Although many Catholic parents happily sent their children to public schools, most Catholic leaders rejected them as godless institutions. They would seek public funding for their own parochial schools. The struggle among Catholics,

Protestants, and secularists—who believed publicly funded teachers should not discuss religious values at all—ensured that education would not be the simple panacea

3 “Beunruhigenden Einflusses”; “Erlangung des Bürgerrechts.” Westliche Post, 13 June 1870. 4 “… in der Hauptsache harmoniren.” Westliche Post, 13 June 1870. 5 Floyd C. Shoemaker and Isidor Loeb, eds., Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 12 vols. (Columbia: The State Historical Society of Missouri, 1930-1944), 9:113. 272 Republicans sought. Schools, historians have observed, were a “battlefield of social change.”6

German-Catholic clergymen and lay leaders spearheaded campaigns to secure public contributions to Catholic schools. At the same time, German-Catholic parents tried to remove Protestant hymns and the King James Bible from the public classroom.

German-American leaders from both parties joined this campaign to secularize education.

They maintained that no public money should ever support Catholic or Protestant indoctrination. All German Americans witnessed the backlash this position provoked from Anglo-American Protestants. Native-born Republicans believed Catholic education and public schooling that did not mention of God or the Bible eroded the Protestant values that formed the non-sectarian foundation of the American nation.

6 Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars, New York City, 1805-1973: A History of the Public Schools as Battlefield of Social Change (New York: Basic Books, 1974). The national fate of public education during Reconstruction is usefully delineated in a skillful analysis of the U.S. Office of Education. Donald R. Warren, To Enforce Education: A History of the Founding Years of the United States Office of Education (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974). On the antebellum precedents for conflict over public schooling, see Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). I include further references to the extensive literature on religion and the public schools below. Generations of African American scholars have recognized “the inextricable ties between citizenship in a democratic society and popular education.” James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 1. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America showed the centrality of education to Reconstruction. Du Bois emphasized the themes to which later scholars would return: the great importance freed people put on education, the development of southern education under the administrations of white and black Republicans during Reconstruction, and white Democrats’ vicious attacks on African American education. See also W.E.B. Du Bois, The Common School and the Negro American (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1991); Henry Allen Bullock, A History of Negro Education in the South from 1619 to the Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); Ronald E. Burchart, Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction: Freedmen’s Education, 1862-1875 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980); William P. Vaughn, Schools For All: The Blacks & Public Education in the South, 1865-1877 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1974); Heather Williams, “‘Clothing Themselves in Intelligence’: The Freedpeople, Schooling, and Northern Teachers, 1861-1871,” Journal of African American History 87 (2002): 372-90; McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy, 143-298; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 472-501; Foner, Reconstruction, 96-102. 273 The role of German Americans in the school wars of the 1870s illustrates the emergence of a new cultural and political environment following the Fifteenth

Amendment and German Unification. After a decade in abeyance, religious tensions would again become a central feature of American public life. This time, however,

Prussian schools and the Prussian against the Catholic Church within the

German Empire would be inescapable points of reference for American Protestants,

Catholics, and secularists. Many Anglo-Protestant Republicans would admire the way

Bismarck tried to use education to establish a distinctly Protestant national culture. They considered it one of the lessons the New World could learn from the Old. Although

German immigrants had first alerted Americans to the German Empire’s strengths, most of them rejected the idea that American schools should teach citizens to conform to

Anglo-Americans’ Protestant values. This chapter explores the role of German immigrants and German precedents in the Reconstruction debate over public education.

It concludes by considering how the issue of education indicated the divides of the decades to come. In 1875, native-born Missouri Democrats would overturn the state’s controversial education system, limiting African Americans’ opportunities to put the principle of equal citizenship into practice during the Gilded Age.

* * * * *

Transatlantic educational ties were well established before Reconstruction.

Horace Mann, the famous Massachusetts educator, had traveled to Prussia to report on

the kingdom’s public schools in 1843.7 Mann had praised Prussia’s provision of free and

7 Horace Mann, Report of an Educational Tour in Germany, and Parts of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Simkin, Marshall, and Company, 1846). On Mann’s career, see Jonathan Messerli, Horace Mann: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1972). For a useful analysis of Mann’s report, see Karl-Ernst 274 compulsory public elementary schooling and its national network of graded secondary

and tertiary institutions. In a published report, he described professionally trained

German teachers, who followed such German-speaking theorists as Henry Pestalozzi and

Friedrich Diesterweg.8 The Prussian teachers Mann observed followed a liberal pedagogy that encouraged students to think independently. Such instruction was an

inspiring alternative to the rote memorization Mann was familiar with in New England

schools. A strict Calvinist by upbringing, Mann was less taken by the “sectarianism” of

all Prussian schools. He recorded with distaste watching a Catholic priest explain

. He noted, however, that religious instruction was kept separate from

other lessons. If a school contained Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed Protestant

children, they were divided for separate religious lessons. This compromise had, in fact,

developed as the Prussian Ministry of Spiritual, Educational, and Medical Affairs

centralized the kingdom’s school system, assuming a function previously performed by

churches.9

Writing in the 1840s, Mann was troubled by the contradiction between Prussia’s apparently progressive schools and its authoritarian leadership. He could only resolve the inconsistency with a prophecy: “No one who witnesses that quiet, noiseless development

Jeismann, “American Observations Concerning the Prussian Educational System in the Nineteenth Century,” in German Influences on Education in the United States, ed. Geitz, Heideking, and Herbst, 21- 42. See also Karl A. Schleunes, Schooling and Society: The Politics of Education in Prussia and Bavaria, 1750-1900 (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 1-3, 108-12; John A. Walz, German Influence in American Education and Culture (Philadelphia: Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation, 1936), 7-46; Daniel Fallon, “German Influences on American Education,” in The German-American Encounter, ed. Trommler and Shore, 77-87. On nineteenth-century German influences on American philosophy and literature more generally, see Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences, 1600-1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957). 8 Jeismann, “American Observations Concerning the Prussian Educational System,” in German Influences on Education in the United States, ed. Geitz, Heideking, and Herbst, 32. 9 Ibid., 27; Mann, Report of an Educational Tour in Germany, 153-54. 275 of mind which is now going forward in Prussia through the agency of its educational institutions can hesitate to predict that the time is not far distant when the people will assert their right to a participation in their own government.”10 Unbeknown to Mann, the

Prussian monarchy feared just such an eventuality. Since 1819, Prussian authorities had tried to reverse pedagogical innovations and counter the growing power of professional teachers.11

Concerned with nation and citizenship, German educators had played a significant role in the Revolutions of 1848. Many of them had emigrated to the United States with other Forty-Eighters.12 Disappointed by the staid instruction they found in poorly funded schools in the United States, they set out to make their mark on American education. At the elementary and secondary level, German-American teachers were overwhelmingly male, and they served as community leaders.13 Before he became a famous general,

Franz Sigel had taught in St. Louis during the 1850s.14 Teachers defended their status by organizing professional associations.15 German-American teachers’ societies supported

10 Mann, Report of an Educational Tour in Germany, and Parts of Great Britain and Ireland, 204. 11 On both progressive education reforms and reactions against them, see Bettina Goldberg, “The Forty- Eighters and the School System in America: The Theory and Practices of Reform,” in The German Forty- Eighters in the United States, ed. Brancaforte, 204-06; David Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1880-1918: The Long Nineteenth Century, 2d ed. (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 63-64, 160-61; Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (London: Allen Lane, 2006), 406-07. 12 Schleunes, Schooling and Society, 128; Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 300-309; Goldberg, “The Forty- Eighters and the School System in America,” in The German Forty-Eighters in the United States, ed. Brancaforte, 206-07. 13 Based on the example of German educator Friedrich Fröbel, Margarethe Schurz founded what was possibly America’s first in 1856 while her husband Carl was still an unsuccessful Wisconsin politician. Ann Taylor Allen, “American and German Women in the Kindergarten Movement, 1850- 1914,” in German Influences on Education in the United States, ed. Geitz, Heideking, and Herbst, 87-88. There is some disagreement over whether Margaretha Schurz was indeed the first. Many German Americans became interested in the Kindergarten movement during the 1850s. Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 307. 14 Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 302. 15 New professional organizations were formed in response to the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Karl- Günther, “Interdependence between Democratic Pedagogy in Germany and the Development of 276 German-language instruction. German Cincinnatians had pioneered bilingual public education in the United States in 1840. By 1875, over half of Cincinnati school children attended bilingual schools that used German as the language of instruction for up to half of each school day.16 St. Louis also began to employ German-speaking teachers before the Civil War. By 1870, thirty-seven of St. Louis’s fifty public schools provided some instruction in German.17 German-American teachers also promoted innovative German pedagogy. The Westliche Post chastised the superintendent of St. Louis schools, William

Torrey Harris, for reading too much Hegel and not enough Pestalozzi and Diesterweg.

Harris, who would go on to lead the National Bureau of Education, became famous for his dedication to the Hegelian idea that individual freedom could best be realized through collective institutions. The Post believed the -born Hegelian had adopted the wrong part of the German tradition.18

German Americans’ influence on American education grew in the favorable climate of Republican rule that followed the Civil War.19 German Americans were among those white Missourians who responded quickly to freed people’s demand for

Education in the United States in the Nineteenth Century,” in German Influences on Education in the United States, ed. Geitz, Heideking, and Herbst, 46-47; Jacobi, “Schoolmarm, Volkserzieher, Kantor, and Schulschester,” 115-28; Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 308-09. 16 Carolyn R. Toth, German-English Bilingual Schools in America: The Cincinnati Tradition in Historical Context (New York: P. Lang, 1990), 57-58, 61-62. 17 Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 152; Kurt F. Leidecker, Yankee Teacher: The Life of William Torrey Harris (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946), 273-75; Kanter, “Class, Ethnicity, and Socialist Politics: St. Louis, 1876-1881,” 45; Westliche Post, 13 July 1872. 18 Westliche Post, 6 May 1870; Leidecker, Yankee Teacher; John S. Roberts, William T. Harris: A Critical Study of his Educational and Related Philosophical Views (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association of the United States, 1924); Frances B. Harmon, The Social Philosophy of the St. Louis Hegelians (New York: Columbia University, 2943), 82-96. 19 Jurgen Herbst, “Introduction,” in German Influences on Education in the United States, ed. Geitz, Heideking, and Herbst, 11. Historians have documented the increasing post-war interest in German education, especially in American universities. Pochmann, German Culture in America; Charles F. Thwing, The American and the German University: One Hundred Years of History (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1928), 106-74. 277 education in Missouri.20 Georg Husmann had helped the state establish a modern school system in the constitution of 1865. In the legislature, Friedrich Münch had introduced a bill to lift the prohibitions on black education. In 1866, Münch refused to vote for any

legislation that required local school districts to provide segregated schooling.21 During the late 1860s, Missouri Republicans required school boards to provide elementary schools for African Americans when more than twenty black children lived in their district. The legislature empowered the state superintendent to intervene when local authorities failed to act.22 In the private arena, St. Charles’s Arnold Krekel joined the board of the Lincoln Institute, which members of the 62nd United States Colored Infantry

founded in 1866 to serve African Americans.23

German Americans across the believed the state had an interest in educating its citizens. The Democratic Cincinnati Volksfreund had backed public schooling since 1853. The paper maintained it was important that every person have the opportunity “to acquire the skills that are necessary to recognize duties as a member of civil society, as a citizen of a great free state, and … because the state and consequently every citizen has the duty to care about the fact that the freedom granted to us is not endangered by ignorance and degeneration of individual citizens.” The Volksfruend’s editors believed they represented most German Americans, including “the rank and file

20 For the efforts among black Missourians, see for example Irving Dillard, “James Milton Turner: A Little Known Benefactor of His People,” The Journal of Negro History 19 (1934): 377. 21 Worried that too few people knew about his principled opposition to school segregation, Münch wrote to the Westliche Post. He urged readers to consider “how the future, indeed the very near future, would judge our behavior” (“wie die Zukunft, ja schon die nahe Zukunft, über unser Handeln richten wird”). Westliche Post, 24 February 1866. 22 Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 121-25; Henry S. Williams, “The Development of the Negro Public Schools System in Missouri,” The Journal of Negro History 5 (1920): 137-43; W. Sherman Savage, “Legal Provisions for Negro Schools in Missouri, 1865 to 1890,” Journal of Negro History 16 (1931): 309- 12. 23 Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 128-30. 278 of our German Catholics.” 24 More controversially, the Volksfreund joined its Republican

competitor, the Volksblatt and the St. Louis Westliche Post in advocating compulsory schooling.25 Calls for mandatory school attendance were an editorial staple in the St.

Charles Demokrat. In a nod to the Prussian education system, the Missouri paper dubbed

“Schulzwang” the “German idea.”26 The Westliche Post and Carl Schurz supported expanding the power of the federal Bureau of Education, which the Republican Congress established in 1867 to collect and disseminate information about education.27 Even

Missouri’s German Democrats supported strong state oversight of education.28

Unlike many native-born Republicans, German Americans hoped schools could nurture good citizens without requiring cultural homogeneity. German Americans saw teachers as facilitators of a cultural exchange that would transform the United States as it forged citizens out of newcomers. In education as in politics, German-American leaders devoted their careers to the “modification of the American spirit, through the German.”29

This is apparent in their defense of German-language instruction. In 1873, the St. Louis

Anzeiger des Westens indignantly asserted that bilingual education was “in the interests

of American citizenship.” It would ensure that German-speaking children “were woven

24 “… sich die Kenntnisse zu erwerben, welche nötig sind, seine Pflichten als Mitglied der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, als Bürger eines großen Freistaates zu kennen und ... weil der Staat und somit jeder Bürger die Verpflichtung hat, dafür zu sorgen, daß die uns verliehene Freiheit nicht durch Unwissenheit oder Verwilderung einzelner Bürger gefährdet werde”; “Der Masse unserer deutschen Katholiken.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 19 July 1869. 25 Cincinnati Volksfreund, 21 October 1869; Westliche Post, 10, 11 February 1865, 15 March 1865. On the Volksblatt, see commentary in Wahrheits-Freund, 14 July 1869. 26 St. Charles Demokrat, 11 May 1871. For ongoing concern, see St. Charles Demokrat, 6 July 1871, 27 February 1873, 10 April 1873, 28 January 1875. Münch had been supporting compulsory schooling in letters to the Westliche Post since at least the time of the 1865 constitutional convention. Westliche Post, 3 February 1865. 27 Westliche Post, 8 December 1870; McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction, 19; Warren, To Enforce Education. 28 See Henry Spaunhorst’s speech in the Missouri legislature reported in the Wahrheits-Freund, 15 February 1870. On the Anzeiger des Westens, see Amerika, 9 February 1874. 29 Schurz to Margarethe Schurz, 8 July 1867, in Intimate Letters of Carl Schurz, 383. 279 into the whole population precisely in their most impressionable years.” More

significantly, however, the children of “the older Anglo-Saxon or already American population will also be enlightened by the communication between them and the

Germans, and through their knowledge of German literature, the Americans will acquire

access to the intellectual activity of the German people, which will allow them to honor

and respect the newly immigrated.” According to the Anzeiger, school administrators

had no place making children conform to Anglo-Protestant values for the state had

“nothing to do with the beliefs of its citizens.”30 German Americans believed that everyone would benefit if public schools provided a space where Americans could learn from each other.

* * * * *

German-American Catholic leaders were also wary of Anglo-Protestant hegemony, but they differed with their Protestant and unchurched Landsmänner on education. Since their position had a disproportional influence on this facet of the debate over citizenship, it is worth examining in depth. For decades, the Church had tried to distance Catholics from the rest of the German-American community. Catholics had good reason to distrust the Forty-Eighters, whose anti-clericalism sometimes lapsed into a bigoted condemnation of all things Catholic. In 1853, for example, Friedrich Hassaurek

30 “Aus Motiven ihres amerikanischen Bürgerthums”; “… gerade in ihren empfänglichsten Lebensjahren so gründlich in die Gesammtbevölkerung des Landes verwebt”; “Der ältrern angelsächsischen oder bereits amerikanischen Bevölkerung wird der Verkehr zwischen ihnen und den Deutschen ebenfalls erleuchtert und durch ihre Kenntniß der deutschen Literatur erlangen die Amerikaner eine Einsicht in die geistige Thätigkeit des deutschen Volkes, die sie die Neu-Eingewanderten ehren und achten läßt”; “… hat es mit dem Glauben seiner Bürger nicht[s] zu thun.” Anzeiger des Westens, 11 September 1873. I have found no evidence of any German-language newspaper that rejected bilingual education during the 1860s or 1870s. All newspapers, relying as they did on a German-speaking readership, leapt to defend it. One correspondent to the Toldeo Express described German-language instruction as a “right” (“Recht”). Toledo Express, 21 February 1872. For similar sentiment, see for example Toledo Express, 27 March 1872; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 28 September 1871, 3 October 1871. 280 had roused Cincinnati’s non-Catholics to protest the visit of papal envoy Gaetano Bedini.

Hassaurek had legitimate concerns that Bedini was implicated in the executions of Italian

nationalists, but the freethinking editor used intemperate rhetoric to stir up such anti-

Catholic animosity that the ensuing riots resulted in one death.31 The tension between

Catholics and other German Americans had subsided somewhat during the Civil War. In their political campaigning, German Republicans such as Hassaurek had avoided religion and focused on slavery. In urban centers such as St. Louis and Cincinnati, some German

Catholics has responded to their efforts by voting for Republican candidates. Religious conflict among German Americans had remained muted before 1870. During the early months of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Catholics proved nearly as excited as other

German-speaking Americans.

In 1870, however, religion was again becoming a point of controversy in Missouri and Ohio. National and international developments shaped this trend. Following the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, native-born Republicans rededicated themselves to the Protestant values that had always infused their politics. The Republican Party began what one historian identifies as “an ambitious effort to forge a national culture, heavy with evangelical overtones that demanded social conformity.”32 American

Republicans were part of an international shift.33 Nationalists around the world were

challenging traditional religious authorities, seeking new ways to turn popular piety to

31 John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 25; White, Religion and Community: Cincinnati Germans, 34-49. 32 McAfree, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction, 5. 33 For an excellent encapsulation of this transition, see McGreevy, Catholic and American Freedom, 91- 26. Investigating the German experience, Helmut Smith usefully argues that Catholics were not anti-nationalist. They “rarely questioned the legitimacy of the national state as it was founded,” but “to a certain extent, [they] wrested German nationalism from its exclusive association with Protestant tradition,” forming an alternative nationalism.” Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 137-38. 281 state advantage. In Europe, Catholics were caught between Bismarck’s nationalizing forces and the authority of the Pope. Responding to the new threat of Protestant nationalism, the Twentieth Vatican Council in 1870 asserted the dogma of . While a few Catholic theologians, such as Munich professor Ignaz

Döllinger, contested the assertion of papal power, the challenge of nationalism actually reinvigorated popular piety and political expressions of Roman Catholicism.

By 1870, German Catholics had already put down strong roots in the United

States. A minority in the Irish-led American Church, they congregated in “national parishes” led by German-speaking priests.34 St. Louis and Cincinnati were important

Catholic centers that seeded strongly German-Catholic settlements in their rural hinterlands.35 German Catholics relied on education to perpetuate the faith. In the

Midwest, an estimated two thirds of the German parishes established schools within two years of their founding.36 According to contemporary observers, nearly thirteen thousand children in Cincinnati and over eight thousand children in St. Louis attended parochial schools in 1870. Many of these students were either the children of German-born parents or German-born themselves.37

34 Kathleen Neils Conzen, “German Catholics in America,” in The Encyclopedia of American Catholic History, ed. Michael Glazier and Thomas J. Shelley (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1997), 575. 35 Along with Milwaukee, St. Louis and Cincinnati marked the corners of what one historian identifies as a triangle of German-Catholic settlement. Colman J. Barry, The Catholic Church and German Americans (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1853), 45. See also Georg Timpe, ed., Katholisches Deutschthum in den Vereinigten Staaten: Ein Querschnitt (Freiburg im : Herder & Co., 1937). 36 Lacking the incentive of preserving foreign-language instruction, only one-quarter of Irish-American Catholic parishes opened schools during their first two years. Conzen, “German Catholics in America,” 578. For German pride in this, see Wahrheits-Freund, 14 February 1866. 37 On Cincinnati, see F. Michael Perko, A Time to Favor Zion: The Ecology of Religion and School Development on the Urban Frontier, Cincinnati, 1830-1870 (Chicago: Educational Studies Press, 1988), 209; Harold M. Helfman, “The Cincinnati ‘Bible War,’ 1869-1870,” Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 60 (1951): 370. Helfman reported 12,000-15,000 students, citing the Cincinnati Commercial, 10 September 1869. Another report counted 8,305 in 1869. It excluded boarding schools and academies run by Catholic sisterhoods; White, “Religion and Community: Cincinnati Germans, 1814- 282 Catholics were proud of their educational achievements, which helped

distinguished them within the German-American community. The most influential

German-speaking proponent of Catholic education in Cincinnati was Anton B.

Schwenniger, a priest, who like Carl Schurz had studied at University.38 In 1870,

Schwenniger assumed editorship of the country’s oldest German-language Catholic

weekly, Cincinnati’s Wahrheits-Freund. Bearing Archbishop John B. Purcell’s

imprimatur, Schwenniger’s paper claimed a circulation of 13,000 that year, far more than

any of the city’s secular German-language dailies.39 In St. Louis, German Catholics were also led by a newspaperman, Henry J. Spaunhorst, a Hanover-born entrepreneur who founded the Amerika in 1872.40 The new sheet proclaimed itself “a newspaper for truth

and justice.” 41 Spaunhorst was too busy serving as a state senator and leading national

Catholic organizations to edit the paper personally, but his Catholic faith and Democratic politics guided its content.42

Both Schwenniger and Spaunhorst both believed it was impossible to inculcate the “morality and piety” necessary for children to become good citizens without attending to their religious development. 43 The Amerika wrote, “There can be no proper education

1870,” 293. On St. Louis, see Michael Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads: The Phelan Miscalculation and the Education Amendment of 1870,” Missouri Historical Review 95 (2001): 380. Henry Spaunhorst believed half of all Missouri school children attended private institutions. Wahrheits- Freund, 15 February 1870. 38 New York Times, 3 April 1897. 39 Arndt and Olsen, German-American Newspapers, 454, 456, 457. See also Georg Timpe, “Hundert Jahre katholischer deutscher Presse,” in Katholisches Deutschthum in den Vereinigten Staaten, ed. Timpe, 4-33. 40 Loeb and Shoemaker, eds., Journal of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 107-08 41 In 1869, for example, he intervened to ask the Missouri governor to pardon an immigrant who had fought with the police after his stepson had entered an altercation with his landlord. Henry J. Spaunhorst to Joseph W. McClurg, St. Louis, 8 March 1869, box 1, folder 19, Records of Governor Joseph W. McClurg, Office of Governor, MSA. 42 For Spaunhorst’s understanding of the newspaper’s mission, see its inaugural issue. Amerika, 17 October 1870. 43 “Sittlichkeit und Gottesfurcht.” Wahrheits-Freund, 12 July 1865. 283 of the youth where worldly instruction is carefully divided from moral education and

without imparting respect of the fear of God, who is the origin of all wisdom.”44 The

Wahrheits-Freund explained to readers that Catholic schools produced good citizens because “in all circumstances, a religious person is a better citizen than an unreligious one.”45 Along with other Catholic authorities, German-Catholic leaders condemned the

“godless” public schools.46 In a speech before the Missouri legislature in January 1870,

Spaunhorst observed that “the fruits of the public school system reveal themselves all around us.” According to the layman, they included political corruption, abortion, and even “the prevention of natural reproduction.”47 The Amerika and the Wahrheits-Freund agreed that “no good Catholic” could enroll his or her children in a “system of education without a religious purpose.”48 Yet Schwenniger and Spaunhorst knew there were plenty

of “bad” Catholic parents. An estimated seven thousand or more Catholic children

attended the St. Louis public schools in 1870.49 St. Louis Archbishop Peter R. Kenrick had to restrain parish priests who wanted to deny their parents absolution.50 In

Cincinnati, the Wahrheits-Freund noted that 30 percent of the students at one local school

44 “Es kann keine richtige Erziehung der Jugend geben, wo der weltliche Unterrichtung sorgfältig von der moralischen Erziehung getrennt ist, und ohne Rücksicht auf die Furcht Gottes, die der Anfang aller Weisheit ist, ertheilt wird.” Amerika, 4 November 1873. 45 “… ein religiöser Mensch unter allen Umständen ein besser Bürger ist, als ein religionslöser.” Wahrheits-Freund, 1 September 1869. 46 “Godless” reference in James A. J. Burns to John B. Purcell, Springfield, Ohio, 26 February 6 1873, box 28, Archbishop Purcell Papers, ACC. 47 “Die Früchte des öffentlichen Schulsystems von Amerika zeigen sich rings um uns her,” “die Verhinderung der natürlichen Fortpflanzung.” Wahrheits-Freund, 15 February 1870. 48 “Kein guter Katholik” (bold in original). Wahrheits-Freund, 28 July 1869. “Erziehungssystem ohne religiösen Zweck.” Wahrheits-Freund, 15 February 1870. 49 For the St. Louis estimates, see Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 380. 50 Peter R. Kenrick to H. Van der Sanden, St. Louis, 21 December 1866, 26 April 1869, 6 Apr 1869, box 1, folder 4, Archbishop Peter R. Kenrick Papers, ASLA. 284 were Catholic. Schwenniger tried concertedly to convince parents to abandon public schools.51

Spaunhorst and Schwenniger considered it unconscionable that Catholic parents

should pay taxes to support public schools that their children ought not to attend. “Is it just,” Schwenniger asked, “to compel someone to pay for something for which he can

have no use?”52 He explained to his fellow Missouri senators that “I do not want the state to dictate the manner of school education that should be imparted to our children when the same is contrary to our conscience and convictions.”53 In order to defend “freedom of religion,” political representatives of Ohio and Missouri German Catholicism argued, the state should “collect the public school funds and distribute them equally among everyone.”54 In other words, tax-payers should pay for Catholics to provide religious education to their children.

Catholic demands prompted a conflict that became known as the “Bible Wars,” which revolved around what values the American people should pay to teach their future citizens. In 1869, New York City’s Boss Tweed briefly secured public funding of parochial schools, slipping a provision into a tax levy bill that passed the New York state legislature.55 In Cincinnati, Schwenniger took the unusual step of entering in a bitter

51 Wahrheits-Freund, 26 April 1871, 3 May 1871. For the division between Catholic parents and Catholic leaders, see the Wächter am Erie, 21 September 1869, 18 November 1869. 52 “Ob es Recht sei,” Schwenniger asked, “Jemanden zu zwingen, für irgend etwas zu zahlen, von dem er keinen Nutzen haben darf.” Wahrheits-Freund, 14 July 1869. See also Wahrheits-Freund, 1 February 1871, 19 April 1871. 53 “Ich will nicht, daß der Staat die Art und Weise der Schulbildung vorschreibt, welche unsern Kindern ertheilt werden soll, wennn [sic] dieselbe unserem Gewissen und unseren Urberzeugungen zuwider ist.” Wahrheits-Freund, 15 February 1870. 54 “Religionsfreiheit” Wahrheits-Freund, 12 July 1865. “… die öffentlichen Schulfonds einsammlen und gleichmäßig unter Alle vertheilen.” Wahrheits-Freund, 14 July 1869. 55 Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 373; Lloyd P. Jorgenson, The State and the Non-Public School, 1825-1925 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 112-14; McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 115; Ravitch, The Great School Wars, New York City, 1-104. On Catholics an 285 print debate with “Herr Hassaurek” at the Republican Volksblatt and “Herr Rothe” at the

Democratic Volksfreund, freethinkers who represented the mainstream German-American

view that public funds should not support religious education, either Catholic or

Protestant.56 Schwenniger ran signed editorials in the Wahrheits-Freund defending tax- payer subsidies of Catholic schools. In early 1870, Catholic leaders in Missouri tried to

emulate Tweed’s actions. One of Spaunhorst’s Irish-Catholic colleagues in the Missouri

legislature surreptitiously included a provision for appropriating funds for private St.

Louis schools that educated children for free.57 All these demands for public funding quickly created a controversy that Schwenniger observed “stirs all of America like a whirlwind.”58

In Missouri and Ohio, was nearly as inflammatory as Catholicism. In

August 1869, members of the Cincinnati Board of Education sought a compromise between Catholic and Protestant leaders. They planned to ban Protestant practices

objectionable to Catholics from the city’s public schools in preparation for consolidating parochial schools under public control. The Cincinnati board voted twenty-two-to-fifteen

to prohibit religious texts and songs in the common schools.59 The majority included lay

Catholics who represented the interests of all those observant parents who wanted to send

education before the Civil War, see Jay P. Dolan, The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815-1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 99-120. 56 Wahrheits-Freund, 14 July 1869, 28 July 1869 57 Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 383-84. 58 “… ganz Amerika wie im Wirbelwind bewegt.” Wahrheits-Freund, 1 September 1869. 59 On Harris, see Jorgenson, The State and the Non-Public School, 133, 156; Leidecker, Yankee Teacher, 291-93; Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 378; McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 117-18. On Cincinnati, see Helfman, “The Cincinnati ‘Bible War,’” 370-71. See also Bernard Mandel, “Religion in the Public Schools of Ohio,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 58 (1949): 185-206; Stephan F. Brumberg, “The Cincinnati Bible War (1869-1873) and its Impact on the Education of the City’s Protestants, Catholics, and Jews,” The American Jewish Archives Journal 45 no. 2 (2002): 11-46. 286 their children to free public schools but were offended by the insensitivity of Protestant teachers.60 Archbishop Purcell’s brother had encouraged these Cincinnatians to believe

Catholic authorities supported their proposal, but Purcell and Schwenniger quickly turned against any merger plans. The Wahrheits-Freund took the stance that “Catholics are specifically bound by their conscience to condemn a school system that categorically bans any religious instruction.”61 The paper declared, “No compromise as long as it

infringes a principle that is sacred to us.”62

Most German Americans, however, joined the forces of . Weighing

in on the issue in August 1869, the Cincinnati Volksfreund empathized with Catholic

students who “were subjected to puritanical rules.” The paper condemned all obstacles

that stood in the way of Catholic parents sending their children to public schools. Yet

like Republican organs, this Democratic sheet maintained that “the separate education of

future citizens is not in accord with our republican national life.” The consolidated,

secular system the school board proposed would be “a step toward the implementation of

the principles [of the] Declaration of Independence.” The Volksfreund believed German

immigrants deserved some of the credit for the plan for they had provided a

counterweight to native-born Protestants by challenging practices the paper called

“fanatical encroachments.” Somewhat misleadingly, the Volksfreund suggested that

immigrants had brought with them the experience of “non-sectarian” schooling in

60 See for example a priest’s letter to Purcell about the public schools of Yellow Springs, Ohio. James A. J. Burns to John B. Purcell, Springfield, Ohio, 26 February 1873, box 28, Archbishop Purcell Papers, ACC. In St. Louis, Superintendent Harris already made public schools essentially secular. Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 380. 61 “Die Katholiken nämlich in ihrem Gewissen verbunden, ein Schulsystem zu verurtheilen, welches jeden religiösen Unterricht grundsätzlich verbannt.” Wahrheits-Freund, 1 September 1869; Helfman, “The Cincinnati ‘Bible War,’” 378-79. 62 “Kein Compromiß, sobald ein Prinzip durch dasselbe angetastet wird, das uns heilig ist.” Wahrheits- Freund, 1 September 1869. See also Wahrheits-Freund, 26 April 1871, 3 May 1871. 287 Europe. Ignoring the religious content of German schooling that did endure, the editors pointed out that German schools had raised the “level of education” of “the whole people

[Volk],” Catholics, Protestants, Reform Protestants, and Jews.63

The Volksfreund was right that secular public schooling was a point of “non- partisan” agreement among German Americans.64 The Cincinnati’s Volksblatt,

Cleveland’s Wächter am Erie, St. Charles’s Demokrat, and St. Louis’s Westliche Post

and Anzeiger agreed that public funding of any religious education threatened Missouri

and Ohio’s “free schools.” It would “alienate the citizens of this great republic, who

consist of so many diverse elements, from each other” and halt the progressive trend

toward secular education.65 Missouri’s Liberal Republican Party, which had briefly united most of the state’s German Democrats and Republicans, included a plank in its

1870 platform denying parochial schools public funding.66

Many Anglo-Americans opposed secular schooling just as strongly as they

opposed funding Catholic schools. Indeed, they sometimes equated the two tendencies.

Protestants around the country depicted the Cincinnati Board of Education’s decision to prohibit Bible readings as a victory of “Scheming Priestcraft.”67 Among the protests,

63 “… unter die puritanische Regel gezwungen wurden”; “Die getrennte Erziehung der zukünftiger Bürger und Bürgerinnen derselben Stadt und desselben Staates ist nicht im Einklage mit unserem republikanischen Staats- und Volksleben.” “ein Schritt zur Verwirkung der Grundsatze … [der] Unabhängigkeits- Erklärung”; “fanatischen Uebergriffe”; “Simultanschulen”; “Bildungsstufe”; “das ganze Volk.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 28 August 1869. The newspaper approved of the Prussian system of allowing parents to choose which religious instruction their children attended. 64 “Unparteilichkeit.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 2 September 1869. 65 “Freischulen”; “… die aus so verschiedenen Elementen bestehenden Bürger dieser großen Republik für immer einander … entfremden.” Cincinnati Volksblatt quoted in the Wahrheits-Freund, 14 July 1869. See also Anzeiger des Westens, 11 September 1873; Westliche Post Wochen-Blatt, 10 November 1869; Wächter am Erie, 23 March 1869; St. Charles Demokrat, 30 September 1869. 66 Westliche Post, 3 September 1870. 67 Jorgenson, The State and the Non-Public School, 120; Helfman, “The Cincinnati ‘Bible War,’” 379-80; Amory D. Mayo, Religion in the Common Schools: Three Lectures Delivered in the City of Cincinnati, in October, 1869 (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1869). 288 petitioning, and public meetings of the “Bible Wars,” the defenders of reading scripture seemed to forget that the Catholic Church did not support secular schools. Yet as Amory

Mayo, a conservative Unitarian minister who sat on the school board, noted, Anglo-

Americans were “suddenly appalled by the fear that a Catholic and an Atheistic sect have struck hands to divide, distract, and wholly change that great institution [the public school system].”68 The city’s English-language press, with the exception of Murat

Halstead’s Cincinnati Commercial, vigorously opposed the prohibition of Bible

reading.69 Most native-born editors shared Mayo’s view that the Bible only imparted the non-sectarian Protestant morality that the American founders had acknowledged as “the supreme law of human life.”70 Anglo-Missourians expressed similar opinions. The

Missouri Superintendent of Education argued “moral and religious education” must be included in state schools.71 In 1869, the Missouri State Teachers’ Association met in a

Baptist church in Kansas City and opened with a reading of scripture.72 A majority of

Anglo-Americans in Ohio and Missouri believed American citizens must be exposed to

Protestant values.

In Missouri, German-American secularists united with Anglo-American

Protestants to oppose any public funding of parochial schools. The budding German- speaking journalist, Joseph Pulitzer, was the first to call on the Missouri House to reconsider the bill that allowed public money to go to Catholic schools.73 Although he

68 Mayo, Religion in the Common Schools, 13; McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction, 28. 69 Helfman, “The Cincinnati ‘Bible War,’” 380; Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 377. 70 Mayo, Religion in the Common Schools, 14. 71 Thomas Parker, Report of the Superintendent of Public Schools in the State of Missouri to the Twenty- Fourth General Assembly, Adjourned Session (Jefferson City: Ellwood Kirby, 1869), 34. Quoted in Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 377. 72 Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 378. 73 St. Charles Demokrat, 3 March 1870; Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 385. 289 would go on to great fame in New York, the Hungarian-born Missouri Representative

was still very much a protégé of his employers, Carl Schurz and Emil Preetorius at the

Westliche Post.74 Other men associated with St. Louis’s German establishment also

stepped in to oppose dividing the public school fund. A German-American lawyer

involved in the Westliche Post’s business and political endeavors rushed to Jefferson City

with Superintendent Harris to represent the school district.75 German-American state senator Henry Gottschalk proposed a sweeping amendment to the Missouri Constitution that would prohibit public funding of any sectarian organizations.76 Gottschalk’s

amendment won overwhelming support from Missouri legislators, and in November

1870, over 92 percent of Missouri voters ratified it. Even counties with a large German-

Catholic population and St. Louis itself supported banning public funding of private

schools.77 Catholic leaders such as Spaunhorst were isolated on the loosing side of the controversy.

In contrast to Missouri, Ohio found German-American secularists at odds with

Anglo-American Protestants. The bulk of German Cincinnatians supported the school board’s step of taking the Bible out of the classroom, while Anglo-Protestants fought the measure. In February 1870, the Superior Court of Cincinnati ruled by a two-to-one majority that “our common schools can not be secularized under the Constitution of

74 Saalberg, “The Westliche Post of St. Louis,” 185-228. 75 St. Charles Demokrat, 3 March 1870. On the lawyer, James Taussig, see Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 162. 76 Loeb and Shoemaker, eds., Journal of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 85-86; Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 385-86. Ohio’s 1851 constitutional already barred “religious sects” from “any part of the school funds of this state.” Ohio Constitutional Convention, Official Report of the Proceedings and Debates of the Third Constitutional Convention of Ohio, 2 vols. (Cleveland: W.S. Robison & Co., 1873-1874), 1:xxx. 77 The state’s aggregate vote was 126,118 to 10,789. About 65 percent of voters in heavily German and Catholic Osage County supported the amendment, as did about 83 percent of voters in St. Louis County. Hoey, “Missouri Education at the Crossroads,” 390-91. 290 Ohio,” which as a “Christian” state encouraged schools “as means of instruction in

religion, morality and knowledge.”78 The following month, German Americans gathered in the Arbeiter Hall to express their opinion on the “Bible question.” Chaired by a

Protestant pastor, Republican politician August Willich, Democratic editor Emil Rothe, and Republican judge J.B. Stallo, the meeting passed resolutions protesting the court’s decision. This group of Cincinnati Germans was convinced “that only a free school, independent from very confessional character can educate enlightened and patriotic citizens.” They opposed “Bible reading as well as the singing of spiritual songs in state schools.”79 In April 1870, Cincinnati voters endorsed the school board decision and the

Arbeiter Hall resolutions, voting by a convincing majority to return the “anti-Bible” representatives to the school board.80

The German-Ohioan supporters of secular education eventually triumphed. The

Cincinnati case was appealed to the Supreme Court of Ohio, where Stallo continued to

lend his legal talent and immigrant perspective to the Bible reading prohibition. The judge and philosopher had trained for the Catholic priesthood before he turned to

Hegelian philosophy, decided to identify as a freethinker, and married a Protestant

woman. From the first, his legal arguments had focused on explaining why Bible reading

in schools was offensive to Catholics. Not only did Catholics relate to the Bible

differently than Protestants, he argued, but teachers were never “abstract, non-

78 Helfman, “The Cincinnati ‘Bible War,’” 381, 385. Quotation from the Opinion of Judge Marcellus B. Hagans, Superior Court of Cincinnati, 15 February 1870, in John D. Minor et al., The Bible in the Public Schools: Arguments before the Superior Court of Cincinnati in the Case of Minor v. Board of Education of Cincinnati (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1870), 370, 371. For the Judgment, see pages 419-20. 79 “Bibelfrage”; “… daß nur eine freie Schule, unabhängig von jeden confessionellen Charakter, im Stande ist, aufgeklärte und vaterlandsliebende Bürger zu erziehen”; “das Bibellesen sowohl, wie das Absingen geistlicher Lieder in den Staatsschulen.” St. Charles Demokrat, 7 April 1870. The Wahrheits-Freund reported Catholics displeased but distanced itself form the issue. Wahrheits-Freund, 23 February 1870. 80 Helfman, “The Cincinnati ‘Bible War,’” 386. 291 denominational Christians.” He observed that if the Bible “be read at all as the exponent

of religious truth, explanations of a critical nature … should be added.”81 He reasoned that because the Bible could not be read without interpretation, it was impossible to use scripture to teach non-sectarian morality. Stallo also challenged the lower court’s notion that the United States was a Christian country: “If this is a Christian country, in the sense that the non-Christians have no rights which the Christians are bound to respect, or in the narrower sense, that the Christians enjoy rights and privileges, which the law denies to the non-Christians, the time has come for the refluence of the wave which has brought so many millions of European thinkers and laborers to the shores of the new Western world.”82 Immigration, in Stallo’s eyes, had fundamentally changed the country. When the Ohio Supreme Court ruled in Stallo’s favor in December 1872, it confirmed that those waves of immigrants had transformed American citizenship. There was no going back.83

* * * * *

Meanwhile, events in Europe gave Americans a perspective on the association between religious education and nation-making. American citizens of all backgrounds

could plainly see their own controversy paralleled to the one unleashed by the German policies that became know collectively as the Kulturkampf. Like many American

Republicans, Chancellor Bismarck believed that German Catholics’ loyalty to Rome

81 Minor et al., The Bible in the Public Schools, 65. 82 Ibid., 71-72. 83 The court did not prohibit Bible reading in Ohio public schools, but rather defended the right of the Cincinnati Board of Education to exclude religious texts from the classroom. On the rise of secularism, see Helfman, “The Cincinnati ‘Bible War,’” 386; Perko, A Time to Favor Zion, 204-05. For a useful documentary history of secularization in all the states, see also, Samuel W. Brown, The Secularization of American Education (New York City: Columbia University Teachers College, 1912). 292 threatened the “unity won on the battlefield.”84 Himself a pietistic Lutheran repulsed by

Catholicism, Bismarck capitalized on anti-Catholic hysteria and the secular impulses among German liberals. The German Empire’s attack on the Catholic Church was more concerted than that of any other state. In 1871, it became a prosecutable offense for a priest to use the pulpit to communicate any message deemed “political.” The following year, members of Catholic religious orders were prohibited from any part in German public education.85 The Jesuit order was expelled from German territory, and in 1873, the state took control of training and appointing Catholic clergy. German authorities tried their best to enforce these laws and passed further discriminatory legislation until in

1878, over half of Prussia’s priests were in exile or in prison.86 Sensing that he was only

encouraging Catholics to defend their faith, Bismarck let the campaign wane at the end of

the decade when a new pope was elected.87

Facing anti-Catholicism in the Untied States, German-American Catholics

identified with the victims of the Kulturkampf. Catholic newspapers such as the Amerika

and the Wahrheits-Freund included news of the Prussian-led attacks on Catholics in nearly every issue during the years following 1871. Catholic organizations sponsored lectures reporting on Bismarck’s persecutions.88 In August 1872, 750 German-Catholic

84 Otto von Bismarck, Die gesammelten Werke (Berlin: O. Stollberg, 1924), 15:332. Quoted and translated in Ronald J. Ross, The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf: Catholicism and State Power in Imperial Germany (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1998), 11. For a succinct recounting of the conclusions reached in the extensive German-language literature, see Clark, Iron Kingdom, 568-76. 85 Bismarck was most directly concerned with Polish Catholics who retained control over schools in Prussia’s eastern territories and the residents of Alsace and Lorraine who remained loyal to France despite Prussian annexation. Erich Schmidt-Volkmar, Der Kulturkampf in Deutschland, 1871-1890 (Göttingen: Musterschmidt-Verlag, 1962), 73-74. 86 Ross, The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, 7. 87 Ibid.; Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 207-52; Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 42-49. 88 Wahrheits-Freund, 8 January 1873; Amerika, 4 November 1872 293 Cincinnatians gathered to protest the German chancellor’s policies. An exiled Jesuit priest addressed the group, which resolved “to assure our brothers in Germany that their sad situation hurts us deeply.”89 American Catholics received other firsthand reports. A priest traveling in northern Germany wrote to Archbishop Purcell that “there cannot be another country on the globe, where under the cloak of liberal concessions and national demands the church received harder blow, than in this empire of blood and iron.”90 A

German Cincinnatian studying at an Austrian seminary related the worsening situation to

the archbishop. He believed that Bismarck had his sights on “the total extinction of

Catholic life and the subjection of our holy church to the will and caprice of infidel

rulers.”91 By the time the young seminarian returned to the United States in 1875,

German Catholics had begun to emigrate to escape the Kulturkampf.92 A priest in

Springfield, Ohio reported that five young men had joined his parish from the heavily

Catholic territory of Lorraine, which Prussia had acquired from France as a condition of the 1871 peace settlement.93 A correspondent to the Wahrheits-Freund noted that

Prussian persecution had swelled the ranks of German-American Catholicism.94

German-born Catholics still saw the United States as a haven, but their solidarity with their persecuted brethren made Catholicism’s transnational reach more apparent.

Church leaders counseled world-wide unity and vigilance against the threats of

89 “… unsere Glaubensbrüder in Deutschland zu versichern, daß uns ihre traurige Lage tief schmerzt.” Westliche Post, 7 August 1872; Cincinnati Volksblatt, 5 August 1872. 90 Bernhard H. Engbers to John B. Purcell, Münster, Germany, 4 January 1872, box 27, Purcell Papers, AAC. 91 Charles S. Kemper, to John B. Purcell, , Austria, 22 November 1872, box 27, Purcell Papers, AAC. 92 Michael Phayer, “German Catholic Immigrants: Historical Background,” in The Encyclopedia of American Catholic History, ed. Glazier and Shelley, 569-71. 93 J.N. Thisse to John B. Purcell, Springfield, Ohio 27 September 1872 box 27, Purcell Papers, AAC. 94 Wahrheits-Fruend, 8 January 1873. 294 Protestantism, secularism, and nationalism.95 Reviewing the developments of 1872, the

Amerika identified a “great war” between the Church and its enemies. On one side, stood

the faithful, the Vatican, and the German bishops. On the other, massed such men as

Charles Darwin, renegade priest Ignaz Döllinger, Otto von Bismarck, and German

Marxist Karl Liebknecht.96 Rather than see Europe’s rising nation states as bearers of progress, German-American Catholic authorities believed modern Europe was sinking back “into the bare old heathenism” of pre-Christian Europe. “It was an appalling slavery,” the Amerika wrote, “a nameless misery, in which the hellish principle of the whole pagan world sunk as if into a chasm. A chasm—whether the constitutional form was republican or monarchical.”97 Though American Church leaders certainly preferred

a secular republic to a Protestant monarchy, Catholic periodicals feared the anti-

Catholicism expressed by Protestant and unchurched Americans. For those Catholics

who had chosen immigration, North America was still a better place to be Catholic than

Europe. Yet nowhere were Catholics safe from the rising force of nationalism.

The Amerika found it particularly ominous that “since the last Franco-German

war, it has become so common to depict everything American as terrible, everything

95 Wahrheits-Freund, 1 February 1871. For German-American Catholics’ paradoxical support of religious freedom and opposition to secularism, see especially Jon Gjerde, Minds of the West. See also Conzen, “Immigrant Religion and the Public Sphere: the German Catholic Milieu in America,” in German- American Immigration and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective, ed. Helbich and Kamphoefner, 69-116; Conzen, “Immigrant Religion and the Republic: German Catholics in Nineteenth-Century America,” German Historical Institute Bulletin 35 (2004): 43-56; Philip Gleason, The Conservative Reformers: German-American Catholics and the Social Order (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968); John T. McGreevy, “Catholicism in the United States and the Problem of Diversity: The View form History,” in What’s Left? Liberal American Catholics, ed. Mary Jo Weaver (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999), 191-204. 96 Amerika, 31 December 1872. For similar sentiment, see Wahrheits-Freund, 25 January 1871. 97 “… in das nackte alte Heidenthum”; “Es war eine entsetzliche Sklaverei, ein namenloses Elend, in welches dieser höllische Grundsatz die ganze heidenische Welt wie in einen Abgrund versenkt hat. In einem Abgrund; mochte die Form der Verfassung republikanisch oder monarchisch sein.” Amerika, 21 October 1872. See also Wahrheits-Freund, 1 February 1871. 295 German as exemplary.”98 Germany was increasingly a model for the United States following the Civil War. “There can be little doubt,” a German historian remarks “that in the half-century following the American Civil War, Americans began to look to Germany for suggestions and inspiration in coping with the mounting problems of a mushrooming industrial civilization.”99 Unification signaled Germany’s progress, making Americans more interested than ever in German education. In 1873, the St. Charles Demokrat observed that in earlier years any criticism of the Untied States had been met with the retort: “Well, why don’t you leave if you don’t like it here?” Now, the editor sensed a

“gratifying” change in English-language lectures, magazines, reviews, and daily conversation: “the beginning of self-criticism.” No longer did Americans claim “there is no other land in the whole world like America.”100 Comparisons between American and

German schooling, Friedrich Münch noted in 1875, “almost always turn out in favor of the latter.”101 Yet Münch himself counseled caution. He concluded that although the

German education system could boast compulsory schooling, better prepared teachers,

98 “Seit dem letzten deutsch-französischen Kriege ist es so üblich geworden, alles amerikanische als erbärmlich, alles deutschländisch aber als musterhaft zu bezeichnen.” Wahrheits-Freund, 1 January 1873. For more evidence that Americans were increasingly interested in Germany, especially German education, see Amerika, 22 October 1872, 2 November 1872, 24 November 1872; St. Charles Demokrat, 27 February 1873; “Ein Amerikaner uber europäische Schulen,” Der deutsche Pionier 5 (1872): 249-50; “Der Haß anderer Nationen gegen Deutschland,” Der deutsche Pionier 5 (1873): 299-301; Carl Türke, Rom und Amerika: Eine Culturskizze allen patriotischen Bürgern der Vereinigten Staaten gewidmet (Cincinnati, 1875), Fick Pamphlet Collection, German-Americana Collection, University of Cincinnati; Charles Phelps Taft, “The German University and the American College: An essay delivered before the Cincinnati Literary Club, January 7, 1871,” manuscript scrapbooks, vol. 1., 337-64, The Literary Club of Cincinnati Records, CHS. 99 Jurgen Herbst, “Introduction,” in German Influences on Education in the United States, ed. Geitz, Heideking, and Herbst, 11. 100 “Well, warum gehst Du nicht fort, wenn es Dir hier nicht gefällt?”; “erfreulich”; “der Beginn der Selbstkritik”; “es ist in der ganzen Welt kein Land wie Amerika.” St. Charles Demokrat, 13 March 1873. 101 “… fast immer zu Gunsten der letzteren ausfallen.” St. Charles Demokrat, 3 June 1875. 296 and more advanced pedagogy, it was subject to more sectarian control than American

schools.102

German Americans’ response to the Kulturkampf reflected the slightly more

critical approach to the German Empire that developed after their euphoric optimism of

1870. On the one hand, leading German Americans saw the separation of church and

state as an important part of Germany’s political development and believed that the

Catholic Church was an obstacle to German unity. The Democratic Cincinnati

Volksfreund defended Bismarck’s assertion of control over Catholic authorities in

Prussia’s Polish eastern territories, believing that together with the local aristocracy, the

Church threatened “the one true principle of the course toward national, political, and religious equality.”103 Catholics brought the Kulturkampf upon themselves, the paper

suggested with “tactless language, ‘with or without episcopal approval,’” which “not

infrequently irritates.”104 The Republican Volksblatt similarly defended Prussia’s efforts to incorporate its new westerns territories of Alsace and Lorraine, which were overwhelmingly Catholic. The newspaper considered it necessary to compel loyalty in regions where the Catholic Church actively resisted annexation. Imperial rule with the cultural “Germanization” it entailed could only end “once the foundations of intellectual, industrial, and commercial intercourse between Germany and Alsace are laid.”105 The

102 St. Charles Demokrat, 3 June 1875. 103 “Das einzig richtige Prinzip der nationalen, politischen und religiösen Gleichberechtigung Bahn.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 7 March 1872. 104 “… taktlose Sprache ‘mit oder ohne bischofliche Approbation’”; “nicht selten Aegerniß gibt.” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 22 August 1872. 105 “Wenn die Grundlagen geistigen, gewerblichen und kommerziellen Verkehres zwischen Deutschland und dem Elsaß wieder gelegt sind …” Cincinnati Volksblatt, 1 November 1872. On German-American reactions to the annexation, see Trefousse, “German American Immigrants and the Newly Founded Reich,” in America and the Germans, ed. Trommler and McVeigh, 162. On Alsace and Lorraine, see Michael B. Gross, The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century 297 self-consciously secular mainstream German-American press accepted that there were times when the state had an interest in interfering with religion.106

German-American politicians and editors were ambivalent, however, about how the Kulturkampf was conducted. Democrats were particularly wary of endorsing . “What, by heaven, do the maintenance of the lessons of their church and the instruction of the youth by the living religious have to do with the future, power, and glory of the German Empire?” asked the Volksfreund in 1872.107 Even the

Republican Westliche Post, no friend of the Catholic Church, was uncomfortable with the

Kulturkampf. “The core of the great controversy,” in the editors’ opinion, was whether the German administration was balancing religious freedom against legitimate restrictions on those forces that threatened the state:

The state has no right to limit or even to want to control the freedom of opinion and conscience of its citizens. So that it cannot do that, even if it were inclined to, the constitutions of all free states have outlined the principle that the state have nothing to do with the church as such. But does that give any church the right to misuse its power over the minds of its believers to subvert the necessary authority of the state over its citizens?108

Germany (Ann Arbor: Press, 2004), 240-43. On the efforts to “Germanize” the western territories, see Dan P. Silverman, Reluctant Union: Alsace-Lorraine and Imperial Germany, 1871- 1918 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1972). 106 Wächter am Erie, 24, 26 February 1872; New-Yorker Staatszeitung, 29 December 1873; Franz von Löher, “Der Haß anderer Nationen gegen Deutschland,” Der deutsche Pionier 5 (1873): 300. On the Anzeiger des Westens, see Amerika, 9 November 1873. On the Westliche Post, see Freitag, Friedrich Hecker, 439-51. See also M. Orestes Kolbeck, American Opinion on the Kulturkampf, 1871-1882 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1942), 42-43. 107 “Was beim Himmel, haben der Verfechtung der Lehren ihrer Kirche und dem Unterrichts der Jugend lebenden Ordensgeistliche mit der Zukunft, Kraft und Herrlichkeit des neu entstandenen deutschen Reichs zu thun?” Cincinnati Volksfreund, 22 June 1872. 108 “Der Kern der großen Streitfrage”; “Der Staat hat kein Recht, die Meinungs- und Gewissens-Freiheit seiner Bürger einschränken oder gar controlliren zu wollen. Damit er Das nicht thun kann, selbst wenn er dazu geneigt wäre, haben die Verfassungen aller freien Staaten den Grundsatz [dar]gestellt, daß der Staate mit der Kirche als solche nichts zu schaffen habe. Aber giebt Das irgend einer Kirche das Recht, ihre Macht über die Gemüther ihrer Gläubigen, zur Untergrabung der nothwendigen Autorität des Staats über dessen Bürger zu mißbrauchen?” Westliche Post, 9 July 1872. 298 In 1872, the Westliche Post was reluctant to take sides. In any case, many German-

American observers agreed that the German administration’s anti-Catholic policies had not furthered its own goals. The success of the Catholic Central Party in

Reichstag elections in 1874 seemed to confirm that the Kulturkampf only strengthened

Catholic solidarity.109 Perhaps German Americans’ uncertainty about how to

approach the persecution of Catholics is best illustrated by the scarcity of editorials

addressing the subject. Many editors printed cable news and correspondence

announcing the unfolding restrictions on the Catholic Church without registering their

own opinions.110

As German Americans became more skeptical of Bismarck’s policies, Anglo-

American Protestants expressed increasing interest. Those Americans who supported

Bible reading in public schools felt more affinity for the Kulturkampf than the secular

German Americans who had opposed it. They gave German Americans cause to fear the overtly Protestant control in the United States and the German Empire.111 The Wächter am Erie, for example, protested the way that native-born Protestants tried to use the international “church dispute” to divide German Americans.112 Many Anglo-American

Protestants admired the restrictions Bismarck placed on the Catholic Church.113 In

109 Cincinnati Volksfreund, 22 August 1872; Westliche Post, 9 July 1872. 110 Westliche Post, 22 July 1872; Columbus Westbote, 3, 22 May 1873; Cincinnati Volksblatt, 12 May 1873; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 16, 17 January 1874. To some extent, the absence of editorials on the Kulturkampf reflects trends within the newspaper industry. German-American newspapers were increasingly viable commercial concerns rather than partisan mouthpieces. This transition led to a reduction in all editorial content, but editors still expressed their political opinions and could have taken a stronger stand on the Kulturkampf. 111 A German-born Cincinnati pastor provided an unusual exception, publishing a pamphlet in support of the Kulturkampf in 1875. Türke, Rom und Amerika. 112 “Kirchenstreit.” Wächter am Erie, 10 September 1875. See also Kolbeck, American Opinion on the Kulturkampf, 42-43. 113 Kolbeck, American Opinion on the Kulturkampf, 14-49. 299 private, President Grant expressed pleasure that the German Empire was a Protestant power.114 Ohioan Rutherford B. Hayes went further and during his 1875 gubernatorial campaign styled himself as a crusader in the international fight against Catholicism. One of Hayes’ correspondents recommended that the rising Republican study the laws that

Bismarck had implemented, as “no statesman of moderntimes [sic] has understood so well how to handle this [the Catholic] question.”115 Although Hayes was no Bismarck, he believed Protestant Republicans could unite around the issues of temperance, anti-

Catholicism, and “non-sectarian” public schools.116 A handful of established German-

American politicians, such as Carl Schurz, would reconcile Hayes’ Protestant anti-

Catholicism with their own secular anti-Catholicism. As we shall see, however, most of

the prominent German Americans of the Civil War Era would be alienated by the

Republicans’ resurgent Protestant nationalism.

* * * * *

During the last three decades of the century, immigration from southern and

eastern Europe would exacerbate cultural tensions, and Jim Crow would entrench racial

segregation, but the contours of the Gilded Age debate over how to use schools to initiate

new citizens into the American national community took form during Reconstruction.

The conventions elected to revisit the Ohio constitution in 1873 and the Missouri

constitution in 1875 provided a forum for the positions that had emerged in the previous

114 William T. Sherman to Ulysses S. Grant, St. Louis, 10 August 1867, in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. Simon, 17: 482-83. See also, Tyler Anbinder, “Ulysses S. Grant, Nativist,” Civil War History 43 (1997): 119-41. 115 Daniel Ullman to Rutherford B. Hayes, Grand View-on-Hudson, N.Y., 20 January 1877, reel 55, Hayes Papers, HPC. 116 For more evidence that this was a conscious campaign strategy, see McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction, 178-80. 300 years.117 Both conventions were somewhat anticlimactic, but they captured Americans’ attitudes toward public education. Each convention revealed that European institutions had captured the American imagination since 1870, although some delegates found this a worrying trend. During the deliberations, different groups staked out their positions on education. German-American secularists and their allies had won important legal and practical victories, but they faced powerful opposition from native-born Protestants who believed public schools should instill Protestant values in America’s youth. Although a few Catholics continued to challenge Protestant hegemony, Catholic Americans were divided. Finally, there were no African Americans in either convention. The absence of black delegates indicated the marginalized position from which African Americans would have to campaign for educational parity. Ten years earlier, black Missourians had seized education as a route to full citizenship, but in 1875 Democrats threatened the concessions they had won. The education debates illuminate the state of black citizenship as

Reconstruction was drawing to a close.

During the constitutional conventions in Missouri and Ohio, delegates speculated on whether Europe had anything to teach the United States about educating its citizens.

They repeatedly invoked the German Empire as a state that provided well-funded, comprehensive education to its people. A Massachusetts-born Republican who lived among German immigrants in northeastern Ohio assured his state’s convention that

“Prussia owes her superiority and strength to-day to her compulsory schools.” He saw strength and justice in the Prussian system, proclaiming, “She stands forth the first nation in the galaxy of nations, powerful and grand, and it is because she is so just to her poor—

117 The Ohio constitutional convention lasted into 1874, shifting its deliberations from Columbus to Cincinnati in late 1873. 301 her common people.”118 Another delegate agreed that “it is her vigorous system of

compulsory education that, in sixty years, has raised her [Prussia] from a bankrupt and

conquered petty kingdom to the ruling empire of Europe, and made her the seat and home

of intelligence, industry and wealth.” This Ohioan believed that Prussian power rested on

a broad foundation of engaged individuals. He cited “reliable statistics” from Germany

to show that education had “enable[d] the citizen to vote with intelligence.”119 Prussia’s

admirers did not see Germans as subjects of Wilhelm I. Instead, Germans were

“citizens.” Those Americans who promoted the Prussian example believed Horace

Mann’s prophecy of the 1840s was coming true. Prussia was rising. They thought its

well educated population had ensured the kingdom’s industrial progress and military

might and was now demanding increasing control over its own governance.

Prussia was a familiar point of reference, but many Americans remained skeptical

that American citizens should be educated like European subjects. Missouri’s native- born Democrats were particularly suspicious of the German Empire.120 All but seven of the sixty-eight delegates who gathered in Jefferson City in the spring of 1875 belonged to the party that was only just regaining power. Over half of the delegates had served in the

Confederate army or actively supported the Confederacy.121 Since the lifting of voting

118 For Anson Pease’s speech, see Ohio Constitutional Convention, Official Report, vol. 2, pt. 2, 2216. For biographical information, see Ohio Constitutional Convention, Official Report, 1:iii; U.S. Census Bureau, Population Schedule of the Ninth Census of the United States 1870, manuscript returns for Massillon City, Stark County, Ohio, 23. 119 Ohio Constitutional Convention, Official Report, vol. 2, pt. 2, 2245. 120 In the Ohio convention, principal William P. Kerr of Licking County spoke against compulsory schooling along Prussian lines, saying, “Prussia has the best system in the world to make artificial men— soldiers for Emperor William—those who will grace a despotism. But we do not desire that kind of men trained up here, nor that system of education that makes such men.” Physician George W. Hill of Ashland County rejected the “Prussian system of compulsory education, which makes men mere plastic figures of the state.” Ohio Constitutional Convention, Official Report, vol. 2 pt. 2, 2192, 2238. 121 Floyd C. Shoemaker, “Personnel of the Convention,” in Journal of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, ed. Loeb and Shoemaker, 1: 67, 64-65. 302 prohibitions in 1870, such men had briefly lent their support to Liberal Republicans before inaugurating several decades of Democratic rule with the election of a Democratic governor and U.S. senator in 1872.122 Most of these Democrats agreed with a Kentucky- born Unionist who claimed the educational system the Republicans had established in the state in 1865 was “founded and administered on the theory that the children of the people belong to the State, and that the State is empowered to rear and educate them in such a manner that they become the servants and defendants of the State.” He believed it was

“impossible to disguise the fact that there is a manifest and growing tendency of public opinion to drift into the European system to the great danger of the subversion of our republican institutions.”123 A Confederate who had been forced to flee Missouri during the war echoed this point, asserting that public education was fundamentally “anti- democratic and anti-republican.”124 The role German-Americans had played in the

Republican Party no doubt intensified the Democrats’ distrust of foreign influences. Yet

even those Americans who recoiled at the thought of learning from Europe understood

that Prussia was considered an educational standard. A St. Louis Democrat, for example,

claimed that French and German schools were stronger in “constant & unremitting

attention to the foundations of learning before the higher branches.” Further debate

122 Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 323-24. 123 Shoemaker and Loeb, eds., Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 9:74. On Elijah H. Norton of Platte County, see Leopard, “Biographical Sketches of the Delegates,” in Journal of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, ed. Loeb and Shoemaker, 1:98. 124 Shoemaker and Loeb, eds. Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 9:113. On Phillip Pipkin, see Leopard, “Biographical Sketches of the Delegates,” in Journal of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, ed. Loeb and Shoemaker, 1:110-11. 303 revealed he was using this example to justify reducing public instruction to an absolute

minimum.125

German immigrants in the Missouri and Ohio conventions identified themselves

as strong supporters of comprehensive and secular public schooling. In Missouri, where

the very future of the public school was in doubt, four of the five German-born delegates

fought for education. One of only of six Republicans in the convention, Charles D.

Eitzen had long served as in the German settlement of Hermann and took an active

role in managing its public schools.126 Perhaps because his Republican constituency in

Gasconade County was outnumbered in the convention, he hardly spoke. One of his few contributions was a resolution to oppose shortening the period of time during which

Missouri children would be eligible for free schooling.127

Two German-speaking Democrats joined Eitzen in defending the Republicans’

education system. A Hegelian philosopher and close associate of Superintendent Harris,

Henry Brokmeyer, believed that the convention should compel every child to attend

school. “I would like to see in this State,” he told the other delegates, “a system of

education which will commence with the lowest branches & end with the highest; and

every dollar I have in the world I would place at the service of the State in establishing

such a system.” Showing his characteristically Hegelian trust in strong institutions, he

declared that education was essential to the relationship between the state and

individuals. In a republic, he explained, citizens instituted laws and had a duty to obey

125 Shoemaker and Loeb, eds. Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 9:106. On Albert Todd, see Leopard, “Biographical Sketches of the Delegates,” in Journal of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, ed. Loeb and Shoemaker, 1:110-11. 126 Buel Leopard, “Biographical Sketches of the Delegates,” in Journal of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, ed. Loeb and Shoemaker, 1:83-84. 127 Shoemaker and Loeb, eds. Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 9:53. 304 them. Only education could ensure they were “capable of instituting good laws” and

“receive[d] intelligence sufficient to understand those duties.”128 Joseph Pulitzer, who had recently left the Westliche Post and joined the Democratic Party, also showed his

intellectual debt to Brokmeyer’s Hegelian circle. The popular newspaperman argued that

“the state is not a volunteer organization.” Since citizens had to obey laws and pay taxes,

they all benefited from being educated enough to understand the law and prevent

unnecessary public spending.129

In the Ohio convention, where the evenly balanced parties both supported public

education, German-American delegates sought to bar religious lessons from all the state’s public schools.130 Julius Freiburg, a Bavarian-born merchant and manufacturer, tactfully

voiced his opposition to public funding of sectarian schools. The Jewish Cincinnatian

said that as a member of a religious minority he identified with Catholics. At least in the

United States, he remarked, they did “not meddle in other people’s belief.” Yet Freiburg

worried that funding Catholic schools would prompt every other sect to claim their share,

eroding the state’s ability to provide free education. The Jewish population, he pointed

out, had little trouble with Cincinnati’s secular public schools. He estimated that

although only about one in every twenty-three Cincinnatians was Jewish, as many as one

in three of the Queen City’s high school students came from Jewish families. “The Jews

are not afraid that their children will have any foolishness pumped into them by sending

128 Ibid., 9:70, 72, 71. 129 Ibid., 9:129, 130. 130 Forty-eight Democrats, fifty Republicans, four Liberal Republicans, and three independents composed the Ohio convention when it first met. Columbus Westbote, 17 May 1873. Cleveland Republican and freethinker Jacob Müller also tried unsuccessfully to remove any reference to God from the constitution’s preamble. He said his constituents had not sent him to Columbus and then Cincinnati “to make a declaration as to God.” Julius Freiburg pointed out that many terrible things had been done by governments claiming divine inspiration. Ohio Constitutional Convention, Official Report, vol. 2, pt. 2, 1746, 1751-2. 305 them to common schools,” he concluded, “as they believe that their parental control is

strong enough over them to pump all out that might be instilled.”131

Although the Ohio convention welcomed Freiburg’s speech with laughter, education remained a sensitive issue.132 Joseph Carbery, an Irish-born Catholic, bravely tried to ensure some of the state’s education fund would go to private schools. Carbery presented the same arguments Catholic leaders had used in earlier years, and once again

Catholic Ohioans were divided. Other delegates said a minority of their coreligionists took Carbery’s position. They worried that he was only provoking anti-Catholic feeling.133 Catholic fears were justified. One delegate angrily described Carbery’s plan

as one where “the people will be taxed in order to educate a race of bigots.”134 As this

comment suggests, Carbery’s opponents expressed a hostility that incorporated deep prejudice as well as legitimate concerns about sponsoring Catholic instruction. Most of

those who took the floor stated they were in favor of schools “open to all—offensive to

none,” but some derided the Church.135 Claiming neutrality as an “unregenerate sinner,” an Akron representative summed up the tenor of these remarks:

I, as a citizen, and high representative of the State, must combat the intolerable insolence of this [Catholic] church government, that aims at the total protection of individual independence to the one-man power at Rome, that proposes to put the education of the children of our grand young free State whose aspirations are born of God, under the control of the monkish minions of that shameless spiritual despotism, the essence of whose power is founded in blasphemy and falsehood. It

131 Ohio Constitutional Convention, Official Report, vol. 2 pt. 2, 2258. 132 In the Missouri convention, Henry Spaunhorst had no desire to rehash the conflict of 1870 by requesting public funding of Catholic schools. He focused instead on an unsuccessful bid to exempt church property from taxation. In an effort to justify reducing state support of education, a few Anglo-American delegates complained that St. Louis schools were anti-religious, but this was not central to the debate. Shoemaker and Loeb, eds. Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 8:337-38, 9:341, 10:45-86. 133 Ohio Constitutional Convention, Official Report, vol. 2, pt. 3, 2333. 134 Ibid., vol. 2, pt. 2, 2280. 135 Ibid., vol. 2, pt. 2, 2237. 306 is an impious attack upon the advancing intelligence of the age, and intended to check the growth of our liberalizing aspirations, and deliberately designed to crush our manhood, and enslave our conscience to blind subserviency to the and dominion of effete superstitions, the worst of all despotisms.136

A Wood County delegate accused Carbery of starting a conflict that could “exceed the bodily suffering produced by the rack, under the Inquisition.”137

If education could not bridge the divide between Catholic and Protestant

Americans, it held little chance of integrating African Americans into the American political community as full citizens. No black delegate represented the approximately 2 percent of Ohioans and the 6 percent of Missourians who were African American, but

race still shaped the debates. Missouri delegates presented their racial opinions as they

considered including a section in the Bill of Rights that outlawed slavery. No one

doubted that slavery was a thing of the past, but the majority of the convention liked the

symbolism of the prohibition. Some members, such as German-American Liberal

Republican Louis Gottschalk, welcomed it as a demonstration of goodwill toward the

freed people.138 For others, constitutionally declaring slavery dead symbolized the

illegitimacy of the Republican bodies that had passed Missouri’s emancipation proclamation of 1865 and the Thirteenth Amendment. They hoped the anti-slavery

clause would mark the end of state action on behalf of African Americans. A former

Confederate was relieved that “the thunder of the Republican party is departing

forever, & that the glorious negro question on which they have subsisted for ten years in

136 Ibid., vol. 2, pt. 2, 2233. 137 Ibid., vol. 2, pt. 3, 2188. 138 Shoemaker and Loeb, eds. Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 4: 292 307 this country is about to die in Missouri.”139 One Kentucky-born Democrat still resented the time spent on what he referred to as the “nigger proposition.” He asked, “Are we convened with a view to operate in the interests of the nigger?”140

Democrats resented the way Republicans had made African American education part of their Reconstruction program. During 1874, Massachusetts senator Charles

Sumner had campaigned to pass federal legislation prohibiting segregated schools.

Congress had passed Sumner’s Civil Rights Bill after the august Republican’s death

without including schooling. The national debate had served, however, to remind

Democrats that comprehensive public schooling entailed both centralization and

obligations to African Americans.141 In the Missouri convention, an out-state delegate

described the political context of public school building in Missouri. Many of his

constituents had lost the right to vote at the time that the county built an “extravagant”

school for which they were still paying.142 Another Democrat grudgingly accepted that the state must educate its black citizens, despite his conclusion that it had been

“unnatural” to make “citizens of the African population of this State.”143 For the majority of the convention, the fact that the state’s community of the citizens now included

African Americans appears to have increased their hostility toward public education.

Education, the argument went, was an individual responsibility: “Where a man who is not industrious enough, who has not thrift enough, who is not enterprising enough to provide

139 Ibid., 4:301. On Junius Holliday, see Leopard, “Biographical Sketches of the Delegates,” in Journal of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, ed. Loeb and Shoemaker, 1:88-89. 140 Shoemaker and Loeb, eds. Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 4:307, 306. 141 McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction, 125-49. 142 Shoemaker and Loeb, eds. Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 9:128. 143 Ibid., 4:330-31. 308 some means for the education of his child, is not fit to raise a child.”144 One delegate saw public education as a slippery slope that could lead to other social provisions such as the

state being obliged to clothe “a pauper Negro.”145

Missouri’s 1875 constitution reflected these Democratic prejudices. When it came to a vote, the Democratic majority in the convention dismissed Pulitzer’s and

Brokmeyer’s vision of comprehensive education as “utopian.”146 Article XI on education

included a new mandate requiring racial segregation in all the state’s public schools.147

Decentralization and divestment saw to it that this separate provision of education would

not be equal. Democrats slightly reduced the number of years that Missouri children

would be eligible for public schooling.148 They gave county governments more say in

school spending, no longer charging the legislature with distributing school funds so as to

“equalize the amount appropriate for common schools throughout the state.”149 These

measures made a difference on the ground. In 1878, Missouri’s superintendent of

education detailed how school district officials evaded allocating their share of

educational funds to African Americans. In many rural parts of the state, local authorities

failed to enumerate African American children for the purposes of establishing schools.

144 Ibid., 9:118. 145 Ibid., 9:114. 146 Ibid., 9:266. 147 Loeb, “Constitutions and Constitutional Conventions in Missouri” in Journal of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, ed. Loeb and Shoemaker, 1:41. 148 This was despite the admitted popularity of public education among white Missourians. See for example Shoemaker and Loeb, eds. Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, 9:139. 149 Democrats also symbolically eliminated a clause empowering the legislature to make education compulsory. Loeb, “Constitutions and Constitutional Conventions in Missouri,” in Journal of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, ed. Loeb and Shoemaker, 1:40-41. A historian of Missouri writing in the 1940s described the change as salutary: “The former centralized scheme was dissolved for a democratic system in which the people were given almost complete control over schools.” Floyd C. Shoemaker, Missouri and Missourians: Land of Contrasts and People of Achievements (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1943), 2:664-65. See also Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 131-32; St. Charles Demokrat, 28 January 1875. 309 When challenged by black leaders, the local governments would obstruct any enquiries

until it was too late in the school year to organize the necessary staff and facilities.150

Although African American schools in Ohio also received inadequate support, the

constitution that voters rejected in 1874 did not systematically undermine education.

Even with Democrats in power, the Ohio legislature declined to mandate either

integration or segregation.151

Despite glaring deficiencies, African Americans had more educational

opportunities in Missouri than in most southern states. At century’s end, Missouri would

still lead all other former slave states in the percentage of black children aged five to nine

attending school.152 In other states that avoided federal Reconstruction, African

American public education had hardly got off the ground. Delaware made no movement

toward providing education to African American students, while Kentucky and Maryland

never established more than the theoretical basis for black education. In the states of the

former Confederacy, African Americans, northern philanthropists, and the Freedmen’s

Bureau had taken the lead in establishing schools, and Republican state governments

followed with the infrastructure to support them. Texas, for example, established a state

150 Williams, “The Development of the Negro Public Schools System in Missouri,” 157-58; Savage, “Legal Provisions for Negro Schools,” 313-15. 151 Ohio Constitutional Convention, Official Report, vol. 2, pt. 2, 2239-41. Republicans tried to desegregate Ohio schools in the late 1870s. Leonard E. Erickson, “The Color Line in Ohio Public Schools, 1829-1890” (Ph.D. diss., The Ohio State University, 1960), 181-296, 347-50. Ohio’s African Americans led the nation in challenging the unequal education from 1834 to 1903. J. Morgan Kousser, Dead End: The Development of Nineteenth-Century Litigation on Racial Discrimination in Schools (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 58-59. See also Frederick A. McGinnis, The Education of Negroes in Ohio (Wilberforce, Ohio: Curless Printing Company, 1962), 44-70. In 1874, the Ohio constitutional convention rejected a proposal to require segregated schooling. Ohio Constitutional Convention, Official Report, vol. 2, pt. 2, 2239-41. 152 Anderson, The Education of Southern Blacks, 151. Earlier studies produced slightly different statistics, but Missouri remained in the top two or three former slave states in African American school attendance. Du Bois, The Common School and the Negro American, 23; Williams, “The Development of the Negro Public Schools System in Missouri,” 159. 310 board of education led by an able young Prussian-born man who oversaw the distribution of state taxes, teacher certification, and even compulsory elementary schooling in separate black and white schools. Local school authorities and white terrorists resisted these innovations, and when Democrats regained control of the Texas legislature in 1872, they began to dismantle the whole system, dispersing school funds to private entities and abolishing the office of state superintendent. Around the South, “” marked the end of Reconstruction by assailing public education.153

By the time Missouri voters overwhelmingly ratified the new constitution in

October 1875, it was clear that Reconstruction was on the wane. Although black

Missourians voted in the referendum, the state’s Democratic majority signaled it would not actively defend African American citizenship. Education had emerged as an issue that immigrants, native-born whites, and African Americans would contest during the

Gilded Age.

The German Empire had assumed a distinctive place in the debate over how to educate new citizens. Offering an alternative path to national greatness, Germany had become a polarizing yet unavoidable presence in American discussions of the future.

German Americans had a hand in all of these developments, but their political power was

in doubt. The sense of shared mission that pervaded the German-American public sphere

153 On Texas, see Carl H. Moneyhon, “Public Education and Texas Reconstruction Politics, 1871-1874,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 92 (1989): 393-416, and McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction, 94-95. An early twentieth-century education professor in North Carolina argued that the South was not far behind the North in education policies, but his own tabulation of Reconstruction’s educational advancements suggest otherwise. Edgar Wallace Knight, The Influence of Reconstruction on Education in the South (New York: Columbia University Teachers College, 1913; reprint, New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1972), 91-94. For more reliable summaries, see Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 4-32, Burchart, Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction; Vaughn, Schools For All, 24-48; McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction. 311 from 1870 to 1872 was dissipating. The economic hardships of the 1870s would test it even further.

312

CHAPTER 8

“ENTITLED TO A LIVING”: GERMAN AMERICANS AND SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP, 1873-1877

The great railroad strike of 1877 reached St. Louis on Tuesday, July 24. Perhaps

ten thousand people turned out that evening to show their solidarity with the strikers. The

racially integrated working-class crowd at the Lucas Market cheered through speeches in

German and English organized by the Marxist Workingmen’s Party. The mass meeting

finally culminated in a call for a city-wide general strike. At midnight, Sergeant John

Finn telegraphed his impression of the “immense meeting” to the War Department’s

Chief Signal Officer in Washington.1 Finn believed revolution was in the air. The

speakers had “deprecated” violence unless it was “made necessary by attack on them,” but the army officer felt that “the General drift of speeches was in favor of Determination

to gain their objective or die.” The Workingmen’s Party’s goals were broader than those

of the railroad workers who had first triggered the national wave of industrial action. The

group called on Congress to ban child labor, mandate an eight-hour day, and appropriate

“two or three hundred millions of dollars to be applied for the benefit of the working people.” 2 The St. Louis strike’s Executive Committee explained it was “the duty of the

1 On Finn, see David Roediger, “‘Not Only the Ruling Classes to Overcome but also the So-Called Mob’: Class, Skill and Community in the St. Louis General Strike of 1877,” The Journal of Social History 19 (1985): 219. 2 John Finn to Chief Signal Officer, telegram, St. Louis, 24 July 1877, series 4, reel 70, Hayes Papers, HPC. For summaries of the notoriously inconsistent newspaper accounts, see David T. Burbank, Reign of 313 government to enact such laws as will ensure equal justice to all the people of the nation.” In particular it maintained, “Every man willing to perform a use to society is entitled to a living.”3

The workers’ demands for social and economic rights brought St. Louis to a standstill for the rest of that week in the summer of 1877. Their remarkable protests expressed what English sociologist T.H. Marshall termed “social citizenship.” Writing in the 1940s, Marshall argued that in contrast to civil and political citizenship, social citizenship was intended to mitigate the consequences of economic inequality. Social citizenship encompassed a range of rights, from “the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society.” 4 Examining

British history, Marshall observed that the eighteenth century had been the formative period for civil rights, while political citizenship had taken root during the nineteenth century. He saw social citizenship essentially as a twentieth-century phenomenon.5

Marshall’s model has limited power to explain the status of women and African

Americans in the United States, but it does capture an important transition. During the

1870s, white workingmen in northern and western cities were beginning to shift their

focus from political to social rights.6

the Rabble: The St. Louis General Strike of 1877 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966), 53-58; Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (New York: Monad Press, 1977), 171-75. 3 Executive Committee, “Proclamation,” broadside, St. Louis, 25 July 1877, Social Democratic Labor Party Records, 1871-1877, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. Reproduction in Burbank, Reign of the Rabble , frontspiece. The German portion appeared in the Westliche Post , 26 July 1877. 4 T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1950), 11. 5 Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class , 21 6 For critiques of Marshall’s approach, see Margaret R. Sommers, “Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere: Law, Community, and Political Culture in the Transition to Democracy,” American Sociological 314

Black farmers and workers in the South—among the most impoverished

Americans—also hoped government agencies would protect them from the punishing post-war economy. Yet the fact that black and white workers pursued social citizenship would increase the general resistance to all concessions to African Americans. The events of 1877 would consolidate the transition that had begun between 1870 and 1872.

Labor conflict fueled northern support for the sort of reform that had first been expressed in the Liberal Republican movement. Although Republican and Democratic politicians in the North came to accept the Fifteenth Amendment, their fear of a workers’ revolution eroded their sympathy for African Americans. As Eric Foner has influentially argued,

“Class and racial prejudice reinforced one another, as the reformers’ concern with distancing themselves from the lower orders at home went hand in hand with a growing insensitivity to the egalitarian aspirations of the former slaves.” 7 It was a change in

emphasis rather than an ideological about-face, but this development was significant.

Overcoming southern whites’ hostility to African American political rights would have

required the sustained use of federal power. Republicans had always been divided and

ambivalent about expanding the purview of the federal government. In light of workers’

demands, African Americans’ pleas for protection against southern whites would appear

to be one of many unreasonable demands for special state action. The strikes would also

Review 58 (1993): 587-620; Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). 7 Foner, Reconstruction , 497-98. Foner’s work drew in part on the insights of older historians, particularly Du Bois, Black Reconstruction , and Montgomery, Beyond Equality . Other historians have extended Foner’s argument about entwined nature of economic ideology, racial ideas, and Reconstruction politics. See Stanley, From Bondage to Contract ; Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction , 83-121; Nancy Cohen, Reconstruction of American Liberalism ; and Beckert, The Monied Metropolis , 172-265. 315 test the biracial working-class cooperation evident at the St. Louis rally. The initial reactions to the turmoil of 1877 anticipated the challenges of the Gilded Age.

Disproportionately urban and working-class, German Americans played a leading role in what became known as the “Great Strike” of 1877. Like the education controversy, labor strife demonstrated how much the German-American community had changed since 1870. The working-class protests revealed class divisions and drew public attention on a new generation of German-American organizers. Established German-

American leaders worried that the work stoppages showcased the fact that German immigrants helped introduce to the United States. German-American participation in the events of July 1877 illuminates the transatlantic dilemma of industrialization in the late nineteenth century. The strike does not provide a neat conclusion to German immigrants’ influence on American citizenship. Rather, this chapter argues that German-American demands for social citizenship in Ohio and

Missouri in 1877 contributed to the untidy and painful transition from the Reconstruction debate over political rights to the Gilded Age contest over social rights. It first outlines how German Americans approached economic inequality and how Republicans and

Democrats failed to address the problem during the election 1876. To conclude, I consider the implications of the drama of 1877 for the decades to come.

* * * * *

The that lasted from 1873 to 1878 compelled German

Missourians and German Ohioans to articulate their ideas about the economic and social rights that adhered to citizenship. In September 1873, the company of Civil War financier Jay Cooke collapsed, triggering a panic. The wave of bank failures quickly

316 escalated into a full-scale depression that spread throughout the United States and beyond. By September, Missouri railroads, mines, and iron works were laying off workers. After two years of economic crisis, only about a fifth of those American wage workers who remained employed had steady work, and many saw their wages cut by up to 45 percent. 8 In Cincinnati, hundreds of the least fortunate begged officials for work

and bread each day, and tens of thousands of the city’s homeless slept on basement floors

in police stations each night.9 It was enough to convince some immigrants to consider returning to Germany. 10 Farmers also suffered during the 1870s as plummeting land prices compounded the effects of already low agricultural profits. During a tour of his

county in late 1873, the editor of the St. Charles Demokrat reported that farms were still productive, but western farmers were falling further into debt.11 Some southern planters

who were unable to pay wages in cash offered their workers sharecropping contracts.

Many of the modest number of African Americans who had bought their own farms or

who paid rent in cash were pushed into sharecropping or wage labor. 12 One federal

official estimated that the blacks of low-country Georgia owned less property at the end

of the 1870s than they had as slaves. 13 “Times are hard,” Carl Schurz recognized in

1875, “business is languishing; our industries are depressed; thousands of laborers are

8 Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 , 20. See also Foner, Reconstruction , 512-24. 9 Ross, Workers on the Edge , 240-44. 10 There is no evidence that many immigrants chose to return to Europe, which was also feeling the effects of the depression, but several newspapers ran pieces to discourage the step that they believed some immigrants were contemplating. Amerika , 2 June 1875; St. Charles Demokrat , 10 June 1875. 11 St. Charles Demokrat , 27 November 1873. 12 Foner, Reconstruction , 537. 13 Congressional Globe , 46th Cong., 2nd sess., Senate Report 693, pt. 2, 261. Cited in Foner, Reconstruction , 537. 317 without work; the poor are growing poorer; the country is full of distress; something must be done to afford relief …. The question is what that something should be.”14

Democrats offered a simple answer: vote Republicans out of office. The panic of

1873 only reinforced their conviction that Republican economic policies befitted a few well-connected speculators at the expense of the great majority of Americans. “The government,” the Fremont Courier lamented, “is not run in the interests of the people

[Volk ], but in the interests of the rulers.” 15 Democrats had evidence that Republicans perpetrated frauds to line their own pockets. In 1872, an investigation into Crédit

Mobilier, a dummy company formed by stockholders of the Union Pacific Railroad,

revealed that investors had paid off congressmen to conceal the fact that federally

subsidized contracts were not subject to open bidding. Yet when the Democratic

Cincinnati Volksfruend identified “Schwindel” as the “true cause” of the financial crisis,

the editor did not distinguish between outright fraud and the policies that he believed

stacked the American economy against honest farmers, workers, and businessmen.16 All along, German Democrats had disapproved of Republicans’ “fraudulent” politics of granting public land to railroad companies, protecting domestic manufacturers with tariffs, and manipulating the supply of greenbacks.17 Jay Cooke, the Volksfruend

reminded its readers, had profited from the Republican land grants that had fueled the

railroad boom of the 1860s. 18 Democrats did not conceal their sense of vindication. The

14 Schurz, “Honest Money,” Speech delivered in Cincinnati, 27 September 1875, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz , 3: 161, 184 15 “Die Regierung wird nicht im Interresse des Volkes, sondern im Interresse der Regierend geführt.” Fremont Courier , 9 October 1873. 16 “Schwindel”; “eigentlich Ursache.” Cincinnati Volksfreund , 24 September 1873. 17 “Schwindelhaften Regierungspolitik.” Columbus Westbote , 5 November 1873. 18 Cincinnati Volksfreund , 24 September 1873. 318 Columbus Westbote coolly judged the panic a “beneficent storm, which would bring wholesome lessons and wholesome consequences with it.” 19

Leading German-American Democrats critiqued Republican economic policy, but they did not embrace an alternative view of citizenship that included social or economic rights. Since they believed government interference on behalf of special interests had caused the economic crisis, most prominent German Democrats maintained that less government involvement in the economy would remedy it. They assumed that halting aid to the wealthy would benefit “the great middle” of Americans and avoid the necessity of government relief to the poor.20 A correspondent to the Volksfreund summed up the mainstream Democratic view: “Property owners have no legitimate [rechtlich ] obligation to provide for the wellbeing of their less well-off fellow citizens; they are certainly morally obliged to, but no one has the right [ Recht ] to compel them to.” In short, “Poor people have no legitimate [ rechtlichen ] claim on anyone for their advancement.”

“However,” the writer continued, “the property-less working classes have the full right to demand such laws from the state which secure the fruits of their labor and give them the opportunity to become property-owners themselves.” The writer’s main example was the

19 “Wohlthätiges Gewitter, das heilsame Lehren und heilsame Folgen mit sich brachte”; “legitimate Geschäft.” Columbus Westbote , 1 October 1873. 20 I owe my understanding of this position in great part to Heather Cox Richardson’s expansive synthesis, West from Appomattox , which expertly recaptures the middle-class ideas that came to dominate the rhetoric of mainstream American politicians during the late nineteenth century. As she puts it, “On one hand, they believed, were hard working Americans—those who believed that success came through hard work and that all Americans were working their way up together. On the other hand were special interests—those who believed that they were fundamental conflicts in society that must be adjusted by the federal government.” Richardson, West from Appomattox , 1-2. I have some reservations about how much interpretive weight should be given to contemporaries’ claims they represented the great majority of Americans. Nancy Cohen’s alternative interpretation emphasizes that “liberal reform public intellectuals” of the period “posited an active role for the state in society and economy, even as it justified constraints on democracy and the ascendancy of corporate capitalism.” Politicians may not have championed this change, but many influential Americans did not see the corporations merely as another special interest group. Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism , 5. 319 elimination of tariffs, which disproportionately taxed the poor by inflating prices for staples while protecting wealthy manufacturers from foreign competitors. For most

Democrats before 1877, abolishing the “monopoly-economic system” was the only acceptable way to help suffering workers.21

Like many other Americans, the editors of the Volksfreund distinguished between

“respectable workers” and “loafers” based largely on whether they accepted its view of

citizens’ legitimate claims on the state.22 During scattered strikes in the late 1860s and early 1870s, most German Democrats joined the Columbus Westbote in accepting that

“workers have an absolute right to strike for higher wages and use all legal means to improve their situation.” Yet they suspected that when workers did organize, they did not confine themselves to legitimate tactics or reasonable demands on individual employers.

Facing the reality of worker mobilization and demands for legislation such as the eight- hour day, many Democrats worried that workers would become a “tyranny” as dangerous to the wellbeing of the American people as the “monopolists.” 23 This severe approach persisted even in the winter of 1873 as layoffs curbed labor organization and pushed

many people to the brink of starvation. The Westbote claimed most workers—“at least the German ones”—had “taken care of the necessary supplies for cellar and kitchen in

21 “… haben die Besitzenden die rechtliche Verpflichtung für das Wohl ihrer unbemittelten Mitbürger zu sorgen; moralisch sind sie allerdings dazu bewogen, aber sie dazu zu zwingen had Niemand das Recht”; “Die armen Leuten … haben an Niemanden einen rechtlichen Anspruch zu ihrem Fortkommen”; “Wohl aber haben die unbemittelten Arbeiter-Klassen das volle Recht, von dem Staate solche Gesetze zu verlangen, welche ihnen die Früchte ihres Schweitzen sichern und ihnen die Möglichkeit geben, selbst Besitzer zu werden”; “Monopol-Wirthschaften.” Cincinnati Volksfreund , 13 June 1872. See also, Cincinnati Volksfreund , 13, 26 April 1872, 17 January 1872; Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staatszeitung , 22 November 1873. 22 “Ordentliche Arbeiter”; “Loafers.” Cincinnati Volksfreund , 13 June 1872. Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction , 88-89. 23 “Die Arbeiter haben ein vollkommens Recht, für höheren Lohn auszustehen und alle rechtlichen Mittel anzuwenden um ihre Lage zu verbessern”; “Tyrannei.” Columbus Westbote , 23 April 1873. For other examples, see Cincinnati Volksfreund , 3 August 1870, 28 October 1871, 13, 20, 21, 25 June 1872. 320 good time.” Times might be harder in towns larger than Columbus, the paper conceded, but that was partly because “in cities such as New York too many opportunities offer themselves to workers to squander away their pennies.” Instead of putting money away

“for a rainy day,” workers had reportedly chosen to live extravagantly. 24 The Westbote suggested that worthy workers saved their wages and acted as independent citizens; unworthy workers wasted their money and organized to advance their special, class-based interests. Workers’ welfare was therefore their own responsibility, not a citizenship right.

German Democrats often couched their understanding of workers’ rights in partisan terms, but they essentially agreed with German politicians and editors who

identified themselves as independents or Republicans. Independent since the Liberal

debacle of 1872, the Cincinnati Volksblatt believed “the whole system” that the

Republican Party had developed had caused the financial crisis: “It is based on

inequitable preference and the extortion of the working, farming, and middle class in the

interests of the few finance and stock kings.” 25 Even men such as Carl Schurz and

Friedrich Hecker, who had rejoined the Republican Party, remained critical of railroad subsidies, paper money, and high tariffs. 26 Leading German independents and

Republicans agreed with Democrats that even the widespread economic hardship of the

24 “Die meisten Arbeiter, wenigstens die deutschen”; “… sorgen bei Zeiten für nöthigen Vorräthe in Keller und Küche”; “in Städten wie New York beiten sich dem Arbeiter auch zu viele Gelegenheiten, um seinen Sparpfennig totzuschlagen”; “für einen nassen Tag.” Columbus Westbote , 5 November 1873. See also the Cincinnati Volksfreund ’s condemnation of socialism, 3 August 1870. 25 “Das ganze System”; “Es beruht auf ungerechter Bevorzugung und auf Aussaugung des Arbeiter-, Bauern- und Mittelstandes im Interesse der wenigen Finanz- und Bösenkönige.” Cincinnati Volksblatt , 25 September 1873. On the Volkblatt ’s political independence, see Cincinnati Volksblatt , 5 July 1876. For German Republicans’ continued commitment to hard money policies, see Cincinnati Volksblatt ; 31 May 1873, 2 November 1876; Cleveland Anzeiger 24 July 1876; Westliche Post , 6 October 1876; St. Charles Demokrat , 7 October 1875. 26 On Hecker, see Freitag, Friedrich Hecker , 348-55, 452-86. More detailed treatment of Schurz’s position follows below. 321 depression did not require Americans to rethink the government’s social obligations. The

Volksblatt longed for “pecuniary independence” and “equal justice” for all but not

government aid to the unfortunate. 27

During the 1870s, many farmers and workers in Ohio and Missouri believed that increasing the supply of paper money would assist struggling Americans. In some ways, this “Greenbackism” was appealing because it allowed its proponents to avoid making social claims on the government. They were ostensibly reasserting the economic autonomy of independent producers and workers in the face of the rising “monopolies.” 28

Yet their program required new government action to redistribute financial resources to

the regions and classes that the panic had affected most, and after the strike of 1877 labor

groups helped form a Greenback-Labor Party. 29 Most German Americans, however,

were adverse to the popular manipulation of currency. Some Marxists believed it

distracted from their central task of mobilizing the working classes, but for men such as

Schurz, the policy seemed acknowledge citizens had social rights.30 In 1875, the

outgoing senator from Missouri stumped on behalf of Rutherford B. Hayes, who again

sought election to the Ohio governorship, this time against stiff opposition from a soft-

27 “Pekuniären Unabhängigkeit”; “gleiche Gerechtigkeit für Alle.” Cincinnati Volksblatt , 25 September 1873. 28 David Montomery emphasizes that the greenback movement allowed various reformers to coalesce one last time behind “the illusion of harmonious society.” Montgomery, Beyond Equality , 446. 29 Philip S. Foner, H istory of the Labor Movement in the United States , vol 1, From Colonial Times to the Founding of the American Federation of Labor (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 475-88; Foner, Reconstruction , 521-22. 30 Friedrich A. Sorge, Friedrich A. Sorge’s Labor Movement in the United States: A History of the American Working Class form Colonial Times to 1890 , ed. Philip S. Foner and Brewster Chamberlin (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), 156; Philip S. Foner, The Workingmen’s Party of the United States: A History of the First Marxist Party in the Americas (Minneapolis: MEP Publications, 1984), 95-96; Montgomery, Beyond Equality , 442. Gretchen Ritter, a historically-minded political scientist, has provided a detailed examination of how the currency issue cut across partisan lines and reflected different understandings of citizenship. Ritter, Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 5-6, 29, 63. 322 money Democrat. 31 Schurz summarized the hard-money position at Cincinnati’s Turner

Hall in September. He mocked the inflationists’ depiction of economic redistribution:

Prosperity is to revive at once; every man, woman and child is to have plenty of money …. The laboring man will command the situation; he will have to work less and get higher wages for it than ever; and in an incredibly short time we shall all be rich; or rather, while now the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, then the rich will get poor and the poor will get rich, the ‘money power’ will be broken ….

Schurz argued that inflation would only benefit unscrupulous borrowers, “speculators, who, instead of following the path of frugal and steady industry, tried quickly to get rich on their wits.” He believed that sound monetary policies, “the strictest maintenance of the limitations of governmental power,” and “economical conduct in our public affairs” were the only ways to protect “worthy laborers.”32

German Americans’ rejection of paper money stood out in Ohio and Missouri.

Immigrants in rural areas did not participate in the Grange, a fraternal order of white farmers that was founded in 1867 to combine social functions, purchasing and distribution cooperatives, and non-partisan lobbying for the government to increase the money supply and regulate railroad prices. In the black belt of the South, planters used the Grange to advance their campaign for white control. 33 The order’s strength, however,

lay in the West. Between May 1873 and January 1875 the number of Granges in

Missouri rose nearly ten-fold to 2,009, more than in any other state.34 Although German

31 Encouraged by former Liberal Republicans, Schurz was clearly looking to further his career by supporting Republican liberals and to shore up his influence German voters. See Trefousee, Carl Schurz , 225-26. 32 Schurz, “Honest Money,” speech delivered in Cincinnati, 27 September 1875, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz , 3: 190-91, 201, 167, 193. 33 Foner, Reconstruction , 548-49. 34 Solon J. Buck, The Granger Movement: A Study of Agricultural Organization and Its Political, Economic, and Social Manifestations, 1870-1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1913), table between pages 58 and 59. Buck’s work remains useful for its political focus, while other works emphasize 323 immigrants were a significant minority of Missouri farmers, they contributed little to this proliferation.35 Advertisements calling “every sensible Farmer to join the Grangers” ran

in the pages of the St. Charles Demokrat . 36 The editor cautiously advised readers to

examine the resolutions passed at various Grange meetings. On his 1873 survey of St.

Charles County, he reported that one Grange member, “like most of the thinking farmers

with whom we had the opportunity to speak about the Granger movement, … was not

totally convinced that [it] was ‘exactly the thing’ either.”37 The small-town newspaper’s opposition to inflationary policies did not waver.38 In northwestern Ohio, the Fremont

Courier found that fewer than six German Americans were involved in the “Farmers’

Movement” in Sandusky County. 39 The St. Louis Amerika added that the Grange’s

“foolish secrecy business,” acceptance of an active role for women, and inclination

toward temperance repelled German Catholics.40

Although largely uninterested in Greenbackism, German immigrants had always

taken a prominent role in labor radicalism in Ohio and Missouri’s urban centers. As

historian Bruce Levine has demonstrated, working-class refugees from the Revolutions of

1848 brought a commitment to “radical democracy” with them to the United States.41

the organization’s social activities. See for example D. Sven Nordin, Rich Harvest: A History of the Grange, 1867-1900 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1974). Foner, Reconstruction , 548. 35 Gerlach, “Population Origins in Rural Missouri,” 1-21. 36 “Jedem vernünftigen Farmer … sich den Grangers anzuschließen.” St. Charles Demokrat , 26 June 1873, 14 August 1873, 4 September 1873, 9 October 1873, 4 March 1875. 37 “Wie die meisten denkenden Farmer, mit dennen wir über die Granger-Bewegung zu sprechen Gelegenheit hatten, war auch unser Gastgeber nicht ganz überzeugt, daß dieselbe ‘gerade das Ding’ sei.” St. Charles Demokrat , 27 November 1873. 38 Across the state line in Illinois, Gustav Koerner observed that “the German press and the Germans generally opposed this reckless and, in the end, most disastrous policy” of increasing the money supply as well as the Grange itself. Koerner, Memoirs of Gustav Koerner , 2:583. 39 Fremont Courier , 9 June 1873. 40 “Alberne Geheimnißkrämerei.” Amerika , 6 February 1874. See also Cincinnati Volksblatt , 31 May 1873. 41 Levine, The Spirit of 1848 . 324 During the early 1850s, men such as August Willich, Joseph Weydemeyer, and even the young Friedrich Hassaurek had organized protests and strikes for wage increases and labor protections. Willich and Weydemeyer were Marxists who sought to develop class consciousness among American workers. These men, like most labor leaders in the

United States and Germany, blended their social goals with a profound respect for the republican tradition.42 During the 1850s, German-American workers were committed to free labor ideology, convinced that ending slavery would realize the principles of the

Declaration of Independence and improve all workers’ lot. Willich’s biographer observed, “For Willich socialism was essentially and specifically the implementation of republican principles.”43 Like St. Louis’s Weydemeyer, Willich held office as a

Republican, commanded troops during the Civil War, and campaigned for African

American suffrage.44 By the late 1860s, however, Weydemeyer was dead and Willich had retired to a small town in western Ohio. Historians agree that the Civil War

“absorbed the idealism of the early German immigrants, and the socialist movement had to begin again in the Sixties.” 45

42 On the United States, see Wilentz, Chants Democratic ; Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Democracy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982). On Germany, see Hartmut Keil, “An Ambivalent Identity: The Attitude of German Socialist Immigrants toward American Political Institutions and American Citizenship,” in In the Shadow of the Staue of Liberty , ed. Marianne Debouzy (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1988), 257-73; Hartmut Keil, “German Working-Class Immigration and the Social Democratic Tradition of Germany,” in German Workers’ Culture in the United States , ed. Keil, 1-23. 43 Easton, Hegel’s First American Followers , 187. 44 Ibid.; Obermann, Joseph Weydemeyer . 45 Thomas W. Gavett, Development of the Labor Movement in Milwaukee (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 27; Schnierov, Labor and Urban Politics , 54; John B. Jentz, “The 48ers and the Politics of the German Labor Movement in Chicago during the Civil War Era,” in The German-American Radical Press: The Shaping of a Left Political Culture, 1850-1940 , ed. Elliott Shore, Ken Fones-Wolf, and James P. Danky (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 49, 58-60; Montgomery, Beyond Equality , 167; Levine, The Spirit of 1848 , 264; Foner, The Workingmen’s Party , 10; David T. Burbank, “The First International in St. Louis,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin 18 (1962): 166; Philip S. Foner, 325 After the Civil War, a new generation of German-speaking socialists pursued a more orthodox and internationalist Marxism. Although they appreciated the right to vote, the newcomers had a more ambivalent relationship to the American political system and

American citizenship than their predecessors. 46 The International Workingmen’s

Association—the First International—had been founded in London in 1864. By 1872,

there were nine sections of the International in the United States, and a disproportionate

number of their 5,000 members were German-speaking.47 The American Marxists sent delegates to European congresses and were drawn into the tangled battles unfolding on the continent and in England. 48 In 1876, they formed the Workingmen’s Party of the

United States to further their domestic legislative aims and promote labor unionization.

The German Americans who dominated the Workingmen’s Party emphasized that they

did not consider the political system of “this middle-class Republic” sufficient to abolish

the wage system and create a classless society. German-speaking Marxists were already

frustrated with native-born radicals whose interest in a variety of reform activities

repeatedly drew them into electoral races. 49 Committed to the international class struggle, the Workingmen’s Party was wary of American partisan politics. It would not

“Introduction,” in Friedrich A. Sorge’s Labor Movement in the United States , 8. Friedrich A. Sorge and Adolph Douai were among the few members of the earlier generation who remained active socialists. Douai personally made the transition to a more internationalist Marxism. Nadel, Little Germany , 141-54. 46 Keil, “An Ambivalent Identity,” 257-73; Dirk Hoerder, “The German-American Labor Press and Its Views of the Political Institutions in the United States,” in The German American Radical Press , ed. Shore, Fones-Wolf, and Danky, 190-91; Roediger, “‘Not Only the Ruling Classes to Overcome,’” 227. On international solidarity in the labor movement more generally, see Philip S. Foner, H istory of the Labor Movement , 409-13. 47 Philip S. Foner, The Workingmen’s Party , 12-14, 19. 48 After a split at a congress held at The Hague in 1872, the First International relocated its headquarters in New York, but it disbanded four years later. Philip S. Foner, The Workingmen’s Party , 17-19. 49 Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848- 1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 155. Messer-Kruse argues that the failure of socialism in the United States had much to do with German-born socialists’ failure to appreciate the American reform tradition. For all its merits, this interpretation does not adequately address the earlier generation German-American Marxists who fought for abolition and black suffrage. 326 “enter into a political campaign before being strong enough to exercise a perceptible interest.” The party suggested that although local sections might contest some races, they should “abstain from all political movements in general for the present and to turn their back on the ballot box.”50

The Workingmen’s Party explicitly embraced the concept of social citizenship.

The party’s German-language organ in St. Louis would outline its appraisal of the limits of political citizenship in its first issue, which appeared after the Great Strike. The

Volksstimme des Westens began by renouncing the Republican Party’s free labor arguments: “We cannot find the slightest evidence that work in the North has become freer since the abolition of slavery.” The editors concluded that universal manhood suffrage had proved inadequate to protect workers. They characterized “political rights” as “only empty words.” Democratic and Republican candidates might promise everything to working-class voters, but “at the first conflict between capital and labor, they unthinkingly and unfeelingly without examination position themselves on the side of the first.” Despite its critique of the political system, the St. Louis Workingmen’s Party would contest local elections. Its leaders intended to use partisan activity to champion the idea that citizens possessed rights beyond those of mere political participation. They pledged themselves to “set[ting] out the causes of [the worker’s] afflictions and seek[ing] moral and material rights.” 51 Specifically, these Marxists advocated public ownership of

50 Philip S. Foner, ed., The Formation of the Workingmen’s Party of the United States: Proceedings of the Union Congress Held at Philadelphia, July 19-22, 1876 (New York: American Institute for Marxist Studies, 1976), 33-34. Philip S. Foner, The Workingmen’s Party , provides details of the party’s activities during its brief existence under this name during 1876 and 1877. 51 “Freie Arbeit”; “... können wir … nicht den geringsten Anhaltspunkt dafür finden, daß die Arbeit im Norden seit der Abschaffung der Sklaverei freier geworden sei”; “politischen Rechte”; “nur ein leeres Wort”; “... beim ersten Conflict zwischen Kapital und Arbeit ohne Prüfung, unbedenklich und rücksichtslos 327 railroads, public works relief, legislation mandating an eight-hour day, and an end to child labor.52

Some groups of German-American workers were less interested in social rights.

The Cleveland Biene (Bee) represented German Americans who critiqued the emerging industrial order and felt disillusioned with the political process, but still saw citizenship in essentially political terms. A federation of craft unions took the Biene ’s inaugural issue to press in August 1873, the month following the outbreak of the panic. The editors expressed skilled workers’ understanding of the “worker question.” The Biene ’s first editorial declared, “The power of individual people has disappeared vis-à-vis the power of capital and in factories the worker is nothing more than a cog in a machine.” The paper believed that workers did not need new social rights, but “the recovery of their individuality.” To that end, “workers must unite and form associations for the defense of their wages and their lives.” 53 The Biene remained optimistic that the “outlook” was improving for workers to use their political power to regain their independence. 54 The paper urged workers to support policies that would undermine “monopolies”: a return to specie-backed currency, the elimination of the protective tariff, the outlawing of railroad price fixing, the devolution of the powers of the presidency, and the popular election of

auf Seiten des ersteren stellen”; “... die Ursache seiner Bedrängnisse klar und deutlich auseinandersetzt und moralische und materielle Rechte erstreben.” St. Louis Volksstimme des Westens , 1 September 1877. 52 For enumeration of the Marxists goals, see Philip S. Foner, The Workingmen’s Party , 34-35; Roediger, “Not Only the Ruling Classes to Overcome,” 213; Ross, Workers on the Edge , 250; Schnierov, Labor and Urban Politics , 54-55; Burbank, Reign of the Rabble , 19. 53 “Arbeiter-Frage”; “Gegenüber der Kapitalkraft ist die individuelle Menschenkraft verschwunden und ist der Arbeiter in den Fabrikanen nicht mehr als das Räderwerk der Maschinen”; “die Wiedergewinnung ihrer Individualität”; “… müssen die Arbeiter sich vereinigen und die Genossenschaften bilden zur Vertheidigung ihres Lohnes und ihres Lebens.” Biene , 6 August 1873. 54 “Die Aussichtenbessern sich.” Biene , 20 August 1873. 328 senators.55 None of these planks approached the assertion of social rights that appeared

in the Volksstimme ’s columns.

Many German-language newspapers came and went during the 1870s, but the

Biene ’s failure after less than a year of publication symbolizes the challenges facing labor

organizations between 1873 and 1877. Times were so hard that employers could easily

replace striking workers from the ranks of the unemployed. Despite the weakness of

unions, Americans were increasingly suspicious of working-class activism. Since May

1871, they had worried that the United States might suffer the violent turmoil that had

thrown France into civil war when “the masses” had seized control of Parisian

government. The conflict surrounding the “Paris Commune” had resulted in some 25,000

deaths.56 In the United States, municipal authorities had also violently suppressed protests. In New York, mounted police had attacked a mass meeting of unemployed workers who gathered in Tompkins Square in 1874 to demand public works employment. 57 Compounding middle-class fears, there were new accusations that

African American workers in the South were using their political power to secure social

concessions. A New York Daily Tribune reporter, James S. Pike, published accounts

alleging that the South Carolina government was “plundering the property-holders of the

state” to support corrupt politicians and the undeserving poor. 58 In this hostile climate, it is unsurprising that the number of unionized workers declined precipitously and strikes

55 Biene , 17 September 1873, 20 August 1873. 56 Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre , 19. 57 Philip S. Foner, H istory of the Labor Movement in the United States , 448. On other demonstrations of the unemployed, see Ross, Workers of the Edge , 247-51; Herbert G. Gutman, “The Failure of the Movement by the Unemployed for Public Works in 1873,” Political Science Quarterly 80 (1965): 254-76. 58 Pike’s reports for the Tribune formed the basis for a book. James S. Pike, The Prostrate State: South Carolina under Negro Government ( New York: Loring & Mussey, 1935; reprint, New York: D. Appleton, 1974), 179. I rely on Heather Cox Richardson’s analysis. Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction , 104- 7. 329 dwindled.59 By the mid-1870s, the Workingmen’s Party had only recruited 600 German-

speaking members in St. Louis. 60 The Cincinnati branch had a total membership of only

500.61 Yet Americans would learn that this was an unreliable gauge of workers’ support for social rights.

* * * * *

During the centennial year of 1876, no American could miss the attacks tormenting African Americans in the South or the poverty afflicting the nation. Rather than generating new solutions to these problems, however, the presidential election campaign confirmed that the two major parties had been converging during the depression.62 Both parties promised to protect workers by limiting the power of special interests, and neither embraced the idea of social citizenship. Democrats emphasized that they would reduce protective tariffs. Republicans focused on returning the currency to the . Members of both parties fell over each other in their efforts to position themselves as the true reformers who would end corrupt relationships between businessmen and politicians. The Republicans said they would conduct “a thorough and lasting reform of the public service,” while their opponents pointed out that “waste and fraud” had thrived on the Republican watch. 63

Democrats and Republicans announced that they would uphold the Fifteenth

Amendment. The Democrats’ national platform affirmed the party’s “devotion to the

59 Philip S. Foner, H istory of the Labor Movement in the United States , 439-55. 60 Burbank, Reign of the Rabble , 19. 61 Ross, Workers on the Edge , 250. 62 On the declining strength within the Republican Party of “Sentimental Reformers” who accepted “the ideal of popular use of governmental machinery to promote the common good,” see Foner, Reconstruction , 335-447. (Quotation on page 447.) For the national convergence of the parties see Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction , 88-89, 110, 120; Foner, Reconstruction , 488-99, 512-24. 63 “Ein durchgreifende und dauernde Reform des öffenlishen Dienstes.” Westliche Post , 6 November 1876. Donald B. Johnson, ed., National Party Platforms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 49. 330 Constitution of the United States with its amendments” and paid lip service to “the equality of all citizens before just laws of their own enactment.” 64 In Ohio and Missouri,

Democrats assured voters that southern whites “now only harbor the hope of joining us in

upholding the common rights of American local self-determination in brotherly union

under the old flag with one constitution and one fate.” 65 Of course such statements were designed to obscure the fact that southern Democrats still ran on white supremacy, cooperating with terrorists who sought to disenfranchise African Americans in what would be a very bloody campaign season.

Republicans still ran as the party of “the full realization of the principle of political freedom and equality for all without respect of descent and race.” 66 They were beginning to concede, however, that their ability to protect their southern supporters was

in fact tightly constrained. In its effort to balance state and federal powers, the Supreme

Court had made it more difficult to enforce equal protection and eliminate racially-

motivated voting discrimination. The Slaughterhouse cases of 1873 had narrowly defined the rights that stemmed from national citizenship, declaring the federal government could not intervene to protect rights that properly adhered to state citizenship. In 1876, the decision handed down in U.S. v. Cruikshank specifically denied federal authorities the authority to step in to prosecute individuals who violated African

American rights. They could only act against states. The white men who had killed over

64 Johnson, ed., National Party Platforms , 49. 65 “… jetzt nur den Wünch hege, gemeinsam mit uns die gemeinsamen Rechte der amerikanischen lokalen Selbstregierung in brüderliche Vereinigung unter der alten Fahne, mit Einer Verfassung und Einer [ sic ] Schicksals-Bestimmung, aufrechtzuhalten.” Translation of an open letter from Samuel J. Tilden, New York, 24 October 1876, in Fremont Courier , 2 November 1876. 66 “Die vollständige Durchführung des Grundsatzes der politischen Freiheit und gleichheit Aller ohne Rücksicht auf Abstammung und Rasse.” Cleveland Anzeiger , 24 July 1876. 331 one hundred black Louisianans in the 1873 Colfax Massacre went unpunished. 67 These

court decisions had undermined the power of those Radical Republicans who were still prepared to use federal power to protect black rights. Although they were still outraged

at travesties such as Colfax, northern Republicans’ resolve was waning. Afraid of a voter backlash, Grant had declined to send troops to Mississippi to protect black and white

Republicans facing defiant violence in the 1875 elections. Democrats had effectively

nullified the post-war amendments and “redeemed” Mississippi. 68 Clear differences on race remained between the parties, but they were diminishing.

Knowing they must balance their northern and southern constituencies, both parties carefully selected sites for their national conventions in 1876. Republicans met in

Cincinnati, a city on the river that had formerly divided slave and free states. Ohio was entitled to twenty-two electoral votes—only New York and Pennsylvania qualified for more—and it had recently returned to Republican hands after a Democratic victory in

1874. Indicating the state’s significance, the hotly contested nomination finally went to

Rutherford B. Hayes. Not a well-known national figure, the governor brought with him a record of largely avoiding questions of African American citizenship in favor the issues of hard money, honest government, and anti-Catholicism. 69 Schurz welcomed the

outcome of the convention, remarking to another former Liberal that the Republican

67 Justices noted that attorneys representing the Grant administration failed to present arguments proving the racial motivations of the defendants. Although this affected their rulings, it did not alter the implications of the case. Michael Les Benedict, “Preserving Federalism: Reconstruction and the Waite Court,” Supreme Court Review (1978): 39-79. 68 Foner, Reconstruction , 557-63. 69 A postmortem in the Democratic Columbus Westbote referenced the conflict over public funding of Catholic schools, declaring the “Nigger question” had been replaced by the “School question.” Columbus Westbote , 13 October 1875. See Forrest W. Clonts, “The Political Campaign of 1875 in Ohio” (M.A. thesis, The Ohio State University, 1921). On Hayes’ anti-Catholic stance, see Rutherford B. Hayes to John Sherman, Fremont, Ohio, 7 August 1876, vol. 129, John Sherman Papers, LC. 332 platform was “our platform in every word with a pledge of an honest man as a candidate for the Presidency attached to it.” 70 After Schurz and Hayes met at the Columbus train station in early July, Hayes’ secretary assured a Cincinnati Republican, “I have no doubt he will be with us.” 71 Schurz assumed an active role in Hayes’ campaign.

German immigrants were a much more significant presence among the

Democrats. Many German-American politicians had never returned to the Republican

Party after opposing Grant in 1872. Gustav Körner later recalled that the Liberal campaign had eased the way for him to “act with the regenerated Democracy.”72 He

found good company in Forty-Eighters such as Joseph Pulitzer, who had become a

Democrat, withdrawing his investment in the Westliche Post in 1873. 73 In Cleveland,

August Thieme had taken the Wächter am Erie over to the Democrats after 1872.74

Thieme’ long-time friend, Jacob Müller, left the Republican Party in 1873, ostensibly because he opposed its inflationary currency policy. 75 The Cincinnati Volksblatt —which by 1876 claimed to be the largest German-language newspaper in the West 76 —had been politically independent since 1872. Editor Friedrich Hassaurek had attempted to revive a

70 Schurz to Murat Halstead, New York, 14 February, 3 May, 30 May, 7 June 1876, folders 6 and 7, Halstead Papers, CHS. Hayes had not been Schurz’s first choice. See also E. Bruce Thompson, “The Bristow Presidential Boom of 1876,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 32 (1945): 3-30; Schurz to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Fort Washington, Penn., 9 July 1876, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz , 3: 258. 71 Alfred E. Lee to Smith, Columbus, 3 July 1876, folder 4, Smith Papers, OHS. Cincinnati Volksblatt , 10 July 1876; Trefousee, Carl Schurz , 228. Hayes’ secretary actually knew the former senator better than his employer. Alfred E. Lee had served in Schurz’s division during the Civil War and the two men had briefly worked together at the Detroit Post . 72 Koerner, Memoirs of Gustav Koerner , 2:565, 597-98. 73 Saalberg, “The Westliche Post ,” 225-26. 74 Columbus Westbote , 16 April 1873; Fremont Courier , 14 September 1876. 75 “Jacob Mueller,” in The Dictionary of Cleveland Biography , 324; Westliche Post , 12 October 1876. Mueller apparently did not reconsider his choice when President Grant vetoed an “Inflation Bill” supported by many Ohio Democrats. 76 Cincinnati Volksblatt , 16 July 1876. 333 third party in 1873 to “help elect nominees of the Dems & Liberals.” 77 During Hayes’

1875 run for the governorship, he had written, “Of course I shall vote for Hays [ sic ],” but

Hassaurek made it equally clear he would not campaign for him.78 Before the presidential election, the Volksblatt ’s shareholders had voted narrowly to support Hayes.

Hassaurek promptly announced to readers that his “own convictions” dictated that he

resign as editor.79 Franz Sigel, who had supported Grant in 1872, now threw his support to the Democrats. 80 Of course new Republican politicians and editors emerged, and

Schurz’s Westliche Post and the St. Charles Demokrat backed Hayes, but many leading

Forty-Eighters had written off the Republican Party by 1876.

Democrats chose St. Louis for their convention because it symbolized their

returning ascendancy among German Americans and in the South while avoiding any

association with disloyalty. Democrats had dominated Missouri politics since the defeat

of Liberal Republicanism in 1872. German Americans were among those who worked

hard to ensure that the Democratic presidential candidate would support Reconstruction’s

constitutional amendments, civil service reform, and fiscal conservatism. An old German

Cincinnatian later claimed credit for the nomination of Samuel J. Tilden, a hard-money

New Yorker whose record of opposition to the Tweed Ring allowed him to claim the

mantle of reformer. Carl Reemelin, who had withdrawn from party politics during the

77 to Friedrich Hassaurek, Columbus, 7 June 1873, Don Piatt to Friedrich Hassaurek, 8 July 1873, Thomas Ewing to Friedrich Hassaurek, Lancaster, Ohio, 2 June 1873, , Columbus, 12 July 1873, Roeliff Brinkerhoff to Hassaurek, Mansfield, Ohio, 23 April 1873, Thomas A. Hendricks, Indianapolis, 16 July 1873, box 2, folder 9, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. See also Wittke, “Friedrich Hassuarek,” 13. 78 Friedrich Hassaurek to Rutherford B. Hayes, Cincinnati, 15 September 1875, box 2, folder 10, Hassaurek Papers, OHS. Wittke, “Friedrich Hassuarek,” 13. 79 “Eigene Ueberzeugung.” Cincinnati Volksblatt , 11 July 1876. See also the building tension, Cincinnati Volksblatt , 7 July 1876. Democrats welcomed Hassaurek. Fremont Courier , 22, 29 July 1876. 80 Wittke, Refugees of Revolution , 258-60. 334 Civil War, arrived at St. Louis with plans to “form a combination of all prominent

Germans, that I could gather in St. Louis in a public declaration that the Germans in the

United States were in favor of Tilden.”81 Carl Dänzer at the Anzeiger , he learned, already had a similar plan. The two men joined forces to organize a German-American committee which drew up resolutions supporting Tilden. Körner believed Tilden won the support of the “overwhelming majority” of former Liberal Republicans, and Democrats

“spoke confidently of the Germans.”82 Judge J.B. Stallo even sent an endorsement from

Cincinnati.83 A Republican informant at the St. Louis convention reported, “It is now

more than ever important that Gov Hayes’ letter of acceptance shd. have no uncertain

stand on civil service.” Republicans believed Tilden’s nomination had attracted more

German Americans to the Democratic Party. 84

During the autumn of 1876, Hayes and Tilden fought fiercely for German votes.

Schurz campaigned tirelessly for Hayes. In dozens of letters, he reported his activities to

Hayes and tried to persuade the candidate to adopt positions that would appeal to German

Americans and former Liberal Republicans. The two men essentially agreed on currency policy and civil service reform, but Schurz encouraged Hayes to be more forceful in articulating his personal views. A strong anti-corruption stance, he maintained, “would rally to your support as a strong working power a large majority of the independent element, especially also of the independent Germans.”85 Two days later, he wrote, “I

81 Reemelin, The Life of Charles Reemelin , 218. 82 Koerner, Memoirs of Gustav Koerner , 2:605; William H. Smith to Hayes, Chicago, 1 July 1876, reel 41, Hayes Papers, HPC. 83 W.M. Dickson to Hayes, Avondale, 30 June 1876, reel 40, Hayes Papers, HPC. See also Manning Force to Hayes, Cincinnati, 9 September 1876, reel 46, Hayes Papers, HPC. 84 Enclosure in William H. Smith to Hayes, Chicago, 1 July 1876, reel 41, Hayes Papers, HPC. 85 Schurz to Rutherford B. Hayes, Fort Washington, Penn., 21 June 1876, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz , 3:252. A confidante reported that a strong statement on civil service 335 have since received information … especially concerning the Germans East and West … which impresses me more than ever with the extreme importance of a broad, bold and striking declaration … of your own opinions and determined purpose in favor of a straightforward strong specie-payment policy, the purification of the Government and a non-partisan civil service with tenure of office on good behavior.” 86 He maintained the

“reform question” was the “controlling” issue for German Americans. 87

Schurz considered southern policy less important to German-American voters.88

He encouraged the Republican nominee to move away from “old war issues” and on to

“the living questions” of the future. Schurz advocated “policy of justice and conciliation,

[rather] than in an attempt to rake up old animosities and in a mere repetition of old cries.” 89 Hayes needed Schurz’s support, but he was uncomfortable with the idea of backing “local self-government.” It seemed to him “to smack of the bowie knife and the revolver.” He wrote to Schurz, “‘Local self-government’ has nullified the 15th amendment in several States, and is in a fair way to nullify the 14th and 13th.” Hayes then hinted that he was prepared to compromise: “But I do favor a policy based on the observance of all parts of the Constitution—the new as well as the old, and therefore I suppose you and I are substantially agreed on the topic.” 90 It was such balancing that

reform would be necessary to “secure the influence of Schurz.” W.D. Bickham to Hayes, Cincinnati, 25 June 1876, reel 40, Hayes Papers, HPC. 86 Schurz to Rutherford B. Hayes, Fort Washington, Penn., 23 June 1876, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz , 3:252. For corroboration of Schurz’s impression, see S.W. Gurney to Hayes, Milwaukee, 30 June 1876, M.A. Jacobi to Hayes, Cincinnati, 30 June 1876, reel 40, Hayes Papers, HPC. 87 Schurz to Hayes, 25 September 1876, Schurz-Hayes Correspondence, HPC. 88 Ibid. 89 Schurz to Rutherford B. Hayes, Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, 21 June 1876, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz , 3:249. 90 Hayes to Schurz, Columbus, 27 June 1876, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz , 3:254. 336 allowed Republicans to speak of African American rights without indicating exactly what they would do to protect them. On the stump, Schurz proclaimed Republicans’ commitment to “an excellent execution of the laws, joined with a just, conciliatory and honorable policy toward the people of the South.” 91 The smaller German-language

Republican newspapers addressed the plight of southern blacks, but the editors of the influential Cincinnati Volksblatt and Westliche Post , like their Democratic opponents at the Cincinnati Volksfreund and St. Louis Anzeiger , stressed other issues.92

Schurz also worked hard to overcome Hayes’ association with nativism. The candidate’s wife, Lucy Hayes, was a well-known temperance activist, and Hayes had taken a prominent anti-Catholic position in the school debates of the previous years.

Alluding to Bismarck’s policies, the Democratic Cincinnati Volksfreund accused Schurz of participating in a “Culturkampf” against Catholics and selling out to a party hostile to immigrants.93 Schurz and other German Republicans sought assurances from Hayes that

he was not prejudiced against immigrants, and they publicly denied the Ohioan was a

“Know-Nothing.” 94 At the same time, German Republicans embraced Hayes’ anti-

Catholicism more overtly than they had before. The small Cleveland Anzeiger wrote,

“Well, the majority of Germans in the U. States have sympathy neither for ex-rebeldom

91 This quotation is from a summation Schurz made of his views in a letter intended for publication in the New-Yorker Staatszeitung . Schurz to Oswald Ottendorfer, Fort Washington, Penn., 22 July 1876, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz , 3:279. 92 For Republican references to the violence and unrepentant “rebels” in the South, see Cleveland Anzeiger , 24, 25, 26 July 1876; Cincinnati Volksblatt , 27 October 1876, 3 November 1876; 93 Cincinnati Volksfruend , 6 July 1876. 94 Hayes to Schurz, Columbus, 15 September 1876, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz , 3:338 337 nor for communion with the Catholic Irishdom.” 95 Republicans stood, it told readers, for the “security of our institutions against the instruction of a powerful hierarchy, which is obedient to the commands of a powerful foreign church leader.” 96 The issues of the Civil

War and African American citizenship no longer subordinated all others.

The German-American vote was up for grabs. Schurz relayed to Hayes, “A large majority of the German voters, and among them very many who always went with the

Republicans, are now inclined toward Tilden. I can assure you that I know this to be so.” 97 The returns bore out this assessment, but as the Westliche Post pointed out, it was

hardly as if “99 out of 100 Germans vote[d] Democratic.”98 In each of Cleveland’s five

German wards, Hayes won a smaller percentage of the vote than Grant had in 1868. He

still won majorities in two, as he did in the entire city. 99 The German-Republican vote in

Cincinnati did not measurably decline. Four of its five heavily German wards voted

strongly for Hayes, far exceeding his razor-fine majorities in Cincinnati and Ohio as a

whole.100 In St. Louis, all but one of the five most German wards registered much lower

support for Hayes in 1876 than Grant in 1868. A majority of voters in four out of five of

these wards, however, still supported Hayes. That was a significant result considering the

95 “Die Deutschen in den Ver. Staaten haben nun einmal in ihrer Mehrheit weder für das Exrebellenthum noch für die Gemeinschaft mit dem katholischen Irländerthum irgend welche Sympathien.” Cleveland Anzeiger , 25 July 1876. 96 “Sicherstellung unserer Institutionen gegen die Ausbildung einer mächtigen Heirarchie, welche den Befehlen eines im Ausland wohenden Kirchenoberhauptes gohorsamen ist.” Cleveland Anzeiger , 24 July 1876. 97 Schurz to Hayes, Fort Washington, Penn., 7 August 1876, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz , 3:280. 98 “99 Hundertstel der Deutschen stimmen demokratisch.” Westliche Post , 12 October 1876. 99 See table 1. 100 See table 2. An Anglo-American Democrat reported this frustrating exception a colleague. James J. Farran to William Allen, Cincinnati, 17 September 1876, box 19, William Allen Papers, LC. 338 Republican won less than 46 percent of the city-wide vote, and he polled even lower in the state.101

In the days following the November election, Americans did not know whether

Ohio or Missouri had voted for the next president of the United States. The outcome hinged on results from the violently contested states of South Carolina, Louisiana, and

Florida. The Republicans who administered the elections in those southern states invalidated returns from the counties worst affected by political violence. Democrats protested this move, setting in motion a crisis that was not resolved until the next year.

After a series of complex negotiations in Washington, Democratic members of the House of Representatives cleared the way for the final count of the electoral votes, which favored Hayes. The exact terms of the compromise reached in March 1877 cannot be known, but they resulted in President Hayes indicating that he would not use the army to protect the rights of southern blacks. He ordered troops to stand down in South Carolina and Louisiana, capitulating to the southern Democrats whose return to local power depended on suppressing the African American vote. In another sign that he was resigned to white rule in the South, Hayes nominated Schurz to become Secretary of the

Interior. Although Republicans continued to try to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments in the South as the courts and public opinion allowed, Reconstruction ended with the concessions that Hayes made to secure the presidency in 1877. 102

* * * * *

101 See table 3. The Grant’s 1872 election does not provide a useful point of comparison because of the Liberal Republican challenge. 102 Foner, Reconstruction , 575-82. On continuing federal attempts to enforce of voting rights, see Wang, The Trial of Democracy , 134-215. 339 As much as Hayes tried to avoid it, the issue of social citizenship broke into the headlines soon after his inauguration. The Great Strike showed that German Americans, from Hayes’ cabinet to the streets of St. Louis, would find themselves at the center of the controversies of the coming age. Carl Schurz would press President Hayes to respond forcefully to the uprising. During the campaign, Schurz had demonstrated that he was unsympathetic to struggling workers and the unemployed. “There is no ‘social question’ in America,” he asserted at one point. 103 German-born trade unionists, Marxists, workers, and the occasional Democrat condemned this remark. They would maintain that their Landsmann had failed to recognize that the poor suffered nearly as much in the

United States as in Europe. Tens of thousands of Americans took to the streets the summer of 1877 because they felt politicians such as Schurz had failed them. They protested that the two main political parties had ignored Americans’ legitimate social

rights. Their demands for social citizenship suddenly transfixed the nation.

On July 16, workers on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad left their posts to protest

the latest in a series of deep wage cuts. When the news reached Martinsburg, West

Virginia, the town’s unionized railroad employees took control of rail yards and stopped

all freight on the “B & O.” In response, President Hayes authorized the use of regular

army troops against the strikers.104 The interruption of rail traffic and intervention by military forces would come to characterize the strikes. During the two weeks that followed, railroad workers walked of the job throughout the country, and protesters from

103 “Es giebt keine soziale Frage in Amerika.” Volksstimme des Westens , 3 September 1877; Cincinnati Volksblatt , 24 July 1877. 104 Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 , 33-54. On the strikes, see also Robert V. Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959). A recent work argues that in part the Great Strike represented a protest of railroads’ incursion into urban spaces. David O. Stowell, Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). See also Stowell, ed., The Great Strikes of 1877 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008). 340 New York to California expressed their solidarity with the labor action. In Pittsburgh state troops killed at least twenty unarmed strike supporters on July 21. 105 The outraged

community burned and destroyed industrial property. Such violence was generally

avoided, but protestors stopped trains and damaged buildings in towns and cities across

North America. In Columbus, Ohio, for example, workers gathered as soon as they

learned of the massacre in Pittsburgh. The Columbus Westbote reported that the meeting

had decided to let trains pass until outside “agitators” and “scoundrels” interfered.

Monday the 23rd was “a day of great commotion” as “the wildest rumors flew through

the city,” but all the excitement amounted to little more than a few reports of property

damage. The Westbote credited Ohio National Guard regiments and the hasty assembly

citizens’ militia with preventing immanent unrest.106

In Cincinnati, the Marxist Workingmen’s Party with its substantially German

membership supported the strikers.107 Representatives of the party met on the 23rd to

denounce the railroads and the governments that used armed force to support them. They

also called for calm, posting guards to protect property and calling workers to use the political process to implement their goals. An African organizer, Peter

H. Clark, articulated the Marxist view of class conflict and stressed his opposition to the private ownership of property, but he concluded that “in any case, the ballot box is the best place for American citizens to seek remedy for grievances.” 108 At first, the

Democratic Volksfreund believed “that in the present strikes the blame lies more on the

105 Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 , 63-65. 106 “Wühler”; “Schurken”; “ein Tag der größten Aufregung. Die wildesten gerüchte durchflogen die Stadt.” Columbus Westbote , 25 July 1877. 107 Marxists also played an important role in Chicago. See Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics , 70-76. 108 “Der Stimmkasten sei für amerikanisch Bürger unter allen Umstanden der beste Ort, um Abhülfe fur Uebelstande zu suchen.” Cincinnati Volksblatt , 23 July 1877. See also, Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 , 130-32, 223-34 341 side of the railroad companies than on the side of the workers.” It distanced the legitimate strikers from incidents of violence and arson, suggesting, “Everywhere the rioters are not workers but work-shy rabble.”109 Its tune changed slightly once Cincinnati police arrested the strike organizers and Workingmen’s Party leaders. Halting rail traffic,

the paper decided, was an unacceptable interference with and the

strikers’ “unlawful conduct must therefore be all the more condemned.”110 That was

essentially the position of the Republican Volksblatt , which had been more hostile to the strikers all along.111 Editors at both Cincinnati newspapers were relieved when the strike ended and the protests were suppressed.

Although the strikes convulsed the whole nation, events in St. Louis were, according to a leading historian of the subject, “unique in the history of the American labor movement.”112 Only in St. Louis did the strike take on the character of a “labor

revolution.” 113 The Workingmen’s Party established undisputed—albeit tenuous— control of an estimated twenty thousand protestors, mounting a comprehensive general strike. 114 The possibility that Marxists could act as representatives of the St. Louis “mob”

alarmed municipal leaders as much as any violence. By casting doubt on the idea that political citizenship and free labor were sufficient to defend meaningful equality, the St.

109 “… daß in den gegenwärtigen Strikes die Schuld mehr auf Seiten der Eisenbahngesellschaften, als auf Seiten der Arbeiter liegt.” Cincinnati Volksfreund , 23 July 1877. “Die Tumultuanten sind überall nicht Arbeiter, sondern arbeitsscheues Gesindel.” Cincinnati Volksfreund , 25 July 1877. 110 For the strike leaders’ non-voilence, see Bassler to the Chief Signal Officer, telegram, Cincinnati, 25 July 1877, series 4, reel 70, Hayes Papers, HPC. “… gesetzwidriges Gebahren muß daher auch um so energischer verdammt werden.” Cincinnati Volksfreund , 28 July 1877. 111 Cincinnati Volksblatt , 21, 23 July 1877. For snippets of other reactions in the Cincinnati press, see James Matthew Morris, “The Road to Trade Unionism: Organized Labor in Cincinnati to 1893” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cincinnati, 1969), 162-70. 112 Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 , 157. 113 “Arbeiterrevolution.” Westliche Post , 26 July 1877. 114 Burbank, The Reign of the Rabble , 167. 342 Louis strikers posed a fundamental challenge to the United States. To urban elites and many middle-class Americans, it seemed that “a dangerous element” threatened the political system they had fought so hard to achieve.115

Before 1870, the older generation of German-American leaders had been prominent proponents of political citizenship. In 1877, new German-American leaders became conspicuous champions of social citizenship. Prussian-born Albert Currlin was one of the most active members of the Executive Committee that the Workingmen’s

Party created to coordinate the strike effort in St. Louis. Unlike the city’s recognized

German-American leaders, Currlin had not yet been born at the time of the Revolutions of 1848. He emigrated to the United States in his early twenties in 1874, becoming an active socialist in New York and Philadelphia before taking a paid position with the St.

Louis Workingmen’s Party.116 The man the Westliche Post dismissed as a “journeyman baker” spoke in German at the strike’s daily rallies.117 From the outset, Currlin struck back at what he considered establishment organs and their notion of American exceptionalism. He ridiculed Schurz’s remark the pervious year that there was no “social question” in the United States. Thinly veiling a personal attack, Currlin remarked that the

Hayes administration “consists of capitalists and lawyers.” 118 In order for workers to

control government and reap a fair share of the nation’s wealth, he insisted, they must

unite behind the general strike. His opponents would consider this incitement, but

Currlin and the Executive Committee repeatedly sought to prevent lawlessness and

115 “Ein gefährliches Element.” Anzeiger des Westens , 23 July 1877. 116 Burbank, Reign of the Rabble , 18. For a slightly different description of the elusive labor activist, see Kanter, “Class, Ethnicity, and Socialist Politics,” 39-40. 117 “Bäckergesellen.” Westliche Post , 28 July 1877. 118 “Soziale Frage”; “… besteht aus Kapitalisten und Advokaten.” Anzeiger des Westens , 24 July 1877. 343 negotiate an end to the work stoppage. 119 They even formed a special guard to protect property and safeguard the mail.

One meeting in particular symbolized the challenge men such as Currlin presented to older leaders. On Friday, July 27, Currlin arrived at the office of St. Louis’s

German-born mayor, Henry Overstolz, seeking the release of Workingmen’s Party

members who had been arrested in a raid on their headquarters earlier that afternoon.

Speaking in German, Overstolz reportedly asked Currlin whether he was an American

citizen and why he had “incited” the workers. According to the Westliche Post , Currlin

explained he was not yet naturalized, saying defiantly, “I was already a member of the

Commune in Germany.” 120 Overstolz had him arrested. The press depiction of this

incident is not consistent with Currlin’s increasingly conciliatory toward the end of the

week, but it captures municipal leaders’ fear of his internationalist vision. 121 Currlin believed that the political citizenship that Overstolz’s generation had so treasured had not

set the United States apart from Europe. Overstolz and Schurz’s Post , on the other hand,

were committed to the American political and economic system and anxious to distance

themselves from any hint of disloyalty. The Post was incredulous that “Currlin appeared

to consider himself a martyr for the cause of freedom.” 122

Contemporaries debated exactly how many German Americans supported

Currlin’s cause. Disassociating itself from the strike, the Westliche Post claimed early in

119 “Aufreitzen.” Westliche Post , 25 July 1877. Burbank, Reign of the Rabble, 71-73, 82-83, 101-02, 114, 122, 136. 120 “Aufgehetzt”; “Ich bin ein Mitgield der Commune schon in Deutschland gewesen.” Westliche Post , 28 July 1877. 121 Burbank, Reign of the Rabble , 146. For other German-born socialists’ naturalization, see Keil, “An Ambivalent Identity,” 268. 122 “Currlin schien sich als Märtyrer für die Sache der Freiheit zu betrachten.” Westliche Post , 28 July 1877. 344 the week that “among the Germans in particular, rich and poor stand fast together when it comes to driving murderous incendiaries into the open.”123 Since the Republican

newspaper characterized the whole episode as violent, it was suggesting that few German

Americans were involved in the week’s protests. In fact, of course, immigrants could both deplore violence and support the strike. The Anzeiger des Westens also approached

the issue of German strike participation obliquely. On Thursday, the editor had “no

doubt” that “German citizens” would sign up to participate in the militias organizing to

oppose the strike. 124 Both main newspapers avoided assessing the proportion of strikers and protesters who were German-born. It turned out that German Americans were overrepresented both among the leaders of the Committee of Public Safety that opposed the strike and the rank and file strikers they arrested on Friday. According to the St.

Louis Times , over 60 percent of the seventy-three arrested strikers were “German.” 125 In retrospect, even the St. Louis Anzeiger had to concede “the unpleasant appearance that

Germans played a prominent role in the late strike-disturbances.” 126 As if to drive home

this point, five strongly German wards would elect Workingmen’s Party candidates to the

city’s school board just a few months later.127 Many German Americans repudiated the approach of the two main parties.

123 “Unter den Deutschen namentlich stehen hier Arm und Reich fest zusammen, wo es gilt, Mordbrenner zu Baaren treiben.” Westliche Post , 24 July 1877. 124 “Keine Zweifel”; “die deutschen Bürger.” Anzeiger des Westens , 25 July 1877. 125 Roediger, “Not Only the Ruling Classes to Overcome,” 216, 228, 230. 126 “… die unangenehme Erscheinung, daß bei letzten Strikerunruhen die Deutschen eine hervorrangende Rolle gespielt haben.” Anzeiger des Westens , 2 August 1877. 127 Kanter, “Class, Ethnicity, and Socialist Politics,” 45, 48-49. Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 , 222. 345 In their fear that all German Americans would be tarred by the strikes, St. Louis’s

German-American editors took the most strenuous anti-strike stand in the city. 128 The

Democratic Anzeiger rejected organized workers’ attempts to distinguish themselves

from the “rabble.” The paper considered “impeding” replacement workers and disrupting

railroad traffic illegitimate tactics. The Anzeiger maintained that strike organizers actively sought the participation of violent elements in their demonstrations. All the people involved were “enemies of civil society and public welfare, enemies whom the state must overpower and bring to submission.” 129 Similar comments made the Westliche

Post a particular target of the Workingmen’s Party. The broadside announcing the general strike warned German Americans that Schurz’s paper “indulged in the coarsest lies and calumny about us.” 130 In turn, the Westliche Post resolved to take off the “kid gloves.” 131 By Thursday, there were picketers outside its offices. A railroad executive

who hoped to hasten federal action telegrammed Schurz in Washington to tell him the

“mob” was “now threatening” his newspaper. 132 It actually became a point of pride for

Schurz and his partners. “The enmity of the communists,” they announced, “is more

agreeable to us than their friendship.” 133 No one could accuse the Anzeiger or the

Westliche Post of quiescence.

128 For a comparison with the English-language newspapers, see Burbank, Reign of the Rabble , 131. 129 “Gesindel”; “verhindern”; “… Feinde der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft und der öffenlichen Wohlfahrt, Feinde die der Staat überwältigen und zum Gehorsam zwingen muß.” Anzeiger des Westens , 24 July 1877. 130 “… sich in gröbster Lüge und Gemeinheit über uns.” Westliche Post , 26 July 1877. 131 “Glaçehandschuhe.” Westliche Post , 28 July 1877. 132 James H. Wilson to Schurz, telegram, St. Louis, 26 July 1877, reel 18, Schurz Papers, LC. 133 “Der Haß der Communisten ist uns angenehmer, als ihre Freundschaft.” Westliche Post , 27 July 1877. After the strikes were suppressed, the paper proudly ran a piece from the , which recognized its anti-communist stand. Westliche Post , 31 July 1877. See also Westliche Post , 26, 27 July 1876, 1 August 1877. 346 German-American newspapers were unwilling to recognize that the promise of

American political citizenship failed to satisfy all German immigrants. They rejected the

idea that the strikes expressed class-based interests, avoiding the fact that, as the British

consul in St. Louis observed, “a large portion of the public” appeared to see the strikes “a

legitimate mode of warfare.” 134 Instead, German-American newspaper editors interpreted events through a lens that separated worthy and unworthy citizens. They believed worthy workers accepted the limits of American citizenship and demanded little of their government, while the unworthy poor preferred to agitate for government protection. Throughout the week of St. Louis strikes, the Westliche Post and the

Anzeiger characterized the strike leaders as betraying worthy workers. On Thursday, the

Westliche Post explained that it had nothing against “the real workers” but it opposed the

“political bummers,” who “constantly provoke the honest workers into insurrection in the most criminal and damnable ways.” 135 The Anzeiger asked, “Does any rational person believe that the circumstances of the working classes can be improved in this way?” It suggested that the strikers and protesters did not understand the real interests of the working class. According to the Democratic newspaper, Americans who wanted to work would only suffer. 136 Both newspapers identified a struggle not between labor and

capital, but between good and bad citizens. They resisted any analysis of the strikes that

would legitimize the Workingmen’s Party’s class-based critique of American citizenship.

134 Quoted in Burbank, Reign of the Rabble , 64. 135 “Die wirklichen Arbeiter”; “politischen Bummler”; “Diejenigen welche in der verbrecherischsten und verdammungswürdigsten Weise den ehrlichen Arbeiter beständig zum Aufruhr … reizen.” Westliche Post , 26 July 1877. 136 “Glaubt ein Vernünftiger, daß die Lage der arbeitenden Klassen auf dieser Weise gebesssert werden kann?” Anzeiger des Westens , 24 July 1877. 347 The Westliche Post and the Anzeiger des Westens led calls for a government

crackdown. The Westliche Post supported the intervention of state and federal troops in

Pennsylvania, and its editors joined their competitor Carl Dänzer of the Anzeiger among

the “most respected business leaders” who belonged to the Committee of Public

Safety. 137 The Anzeiger was the first to suggest a preemptive attack. On Tuesday,

Dänzer asserted that the national “disorder” must be “ended, and when it can not happen

in a friendly manner, it must happen with the application of all force that the law puts at

the disposal of the authorities.” 138 “What are we waiting for?” the lead editorial asked a

few days later. Factories and rail yards were closed, and “bands of youths pipe and drum

their way through the city.” The newspaper urged action before any criminal acts were

committed: “There are already signs that the reigning anarchy may turn into robbery, plundering, and bloodshed.” 139

It was ironic that the Democrats supported city, state, and federal action against strikers because they might infringe other citizens’ rights. For over a decade, they had

resisted federal intervention on behalf of African American rights. Now they were eager

to call on federal troops to protect property and disperse protesters before they even became violent. Following the strikes, the Westliche Post reflected on the change in the

Democrats’ tone. “All the Democratic newspapers,” it noted, “shouted themselves hoarse calling for federal protection during the past week; they only felt safe again once federal troops were marching in the streets, and two Democratic governors were the first who

137 “Angesehenste Geschäftsleute.” Westliche Post , 25 July 1877. See also Westliche Post , 26 July 1877. 138 “Unordnung”; “... muß ein Ende gemacht werden, und wenn es nicht in Gutem geschehen kann, muß es mit Anwendung aller Gewalt, welche die Gesetze den Behörden zur Verfügung stellen, geschehe.” Anzeiger des Westens , 24 July 1877. 139 “Worauf wartet man noch?”; “Banden von halbwüchsigen Pfifern und Trommlern durch die Stadt”; “Schon zeigen sich die Anzeichen, daß die herrschende Anarchie jeden Augenblick in Raub, Plünderung und Blutvergießen umschlagen mag.” Anzeiger des Westens , 25 July 1877. 348 telegraphed with most urgency for the national army.” 140 The paper exaggerated somewhat. The Cincinnati Volksfreund , for example, would have prefered that local volunteers and state troops had been used to suppress the uprisings. 141 To add to the incongruity of the situation, the Westliche Post was itself also vulnerable to such a critique. Since 1870, Schurz had hoped Republicans would renounce their military commitment to African Americans in the South. In 1877, not only did his newspaper support federal mobilization against the strikes, Schurz prompted Hayes’ decisive response. Six companies of U.S. regulars left Fort Leavenworth, Kansas for St. Louis early in the week.142 The German-American leaders of the Civil War Era reached a bi- partisan consensus that suppressing working-class protest was a legitimate use of federal power.

Class divisions within St. Louis’s German-American community were only becoming more evident, but the old elite and the new labor leaders came to agree on race.

As in Cincinnati, the protests in St. Louis had initially suggested the potential for

working-class cooperation across racial lines. On Monday, African American speakers

had mounted the platform beside Albert Currlin to address welcoming integrated

audiences.143 At the Tuesday evening rally, a black steamboat worker asked whether working-class St. Louisans would stand by strikers at the levee regardless of color.

140 “Alle demokratische Zeitungen riefen sich heiser um Bundesschutz während der letzten Woche, sie fühlten sich erst wieder sicher, wenn die Bundestruppen in den Straßen marschirten, und zwei demokratische Gouverneure waren die ersten, die auf’s bringendste um Bundesmilitär telegraphirten.” Westliche Post , 1 August 1877. 141 Cincinnati Volksfreund , 25 July 1877. 142 James H. Wilson to Schurz, telegram, reel 18, Schurz Papers, LC; Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 , 165; Burbank, Reign of the Rabble , 21-22. 143 Burbank, Reign of the Rabble , 33, 73, 118; Roediger, “Not Only the Ruling Classes to Overcome,” 225. 349 Voices from the crowd assured him they would. 144 Yet as David Roediger has pointed out, white racism eventually helped undo the strikes. Currlin said as much as he tried to defend himself against felony charges of riot. In an interview riddled with racial epithets that Joseph Weydemeyer never would have employed, Currlin said the Executive

Committee had decided to call of mass meetings when “a gang of niggers” had turned the general strike into disorderly “mob” actions. 145 He told the St. Louis Times , “We did all

we could to get the crowd to disperse and to dissuade any white men from going with the

niggers.” 146

Currlin’s antipathy was no doubt real, but it was also calculated to appeal to men such as the editors of the Westliche Post and Anzeiger , who claimed that “Negro

‘’ played a opinion-forming role among the masses of strikers. 147 The

Westliche Post observed on Thursday that a parade of sriking workers the previous

afternoon had attracted “a rear gaurd of colored deck hands and vagabonds of the worst

sort numbering in the hundreds.” It editorialized, “It is an absolute fact that many dark

figures that came up out of their dens on the levy joined in on the demonstrations

yesterday to make off with anything that wasn’t riveted or nailed down in case there was

a disturbance of the peace.” Furthermore, “The so-called ‘roust-abouts’ are playing a

leading part in the demonstrations and everyone who reads the daily police reports knows

144 Burbank, Reign of the Rabble , 54; Roediger, “Not Only the Ruling Classes to Overcome,” 225. 145 Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 , 207-08; Roediger, “Not Only the Ruling Classes to Overcome,” 225. This insight inspired Roediger’s tremendously influential 1991 book, Wages of Whiteness . See especially Roediger, Wages of Whiteness , 167-70. 146 Burbank, Reign of the Rabble , 72-73. 147 “Neger ‘Roustabouts”; “eine tonangebende Rolle spielten”; “Haufen ‘Strikers.’” Anzeiger des Westens , 26 July 1877. 350 what is expected of them if it comes to a disturbance of the peace.”148 Perhaps because arrest lists disproved their allegations, newspapers made racial attacks only a minor feature of their denunciations of the strikes.149 Yet both working-class and elite leaders

in the border state recoiled at the thought of integrated labor organization.

To Anglo-Americans, the events of July 1877 revealed a foreign menace, not an

African American one. In the wake of the mass arrests that ended the St. Louis strike,

German-American leaders had to grapple with the fact that many strikers had brought

European ideas to the United States. The St. Louis Anzeiger printed a story from the

New-Yorker Staatszeitung that aimed to reassure Anglo-Americans that most German

Americans “condemned the socialist delusion.” Yet the German-American writer knew

that “in this country, socialism is a foreign growth.” He chose to identify with the

American tradition, proclaiming, “Socialism is and remains a European plant, which will

never thrive in this country.” In recent years, the article maintained, socialism had spread

in France, Germany, and Russia. That was understandable, according to the piece, because the “paternal” aspects of socialists’ goals made some sense within the traditional

structures of the Old World. Yet they had no place in a republic. In this analysis, the

recent turmoil had come to America with “immigrants infected with the sickness of

socialism” who did not understand how citizenship worked in a republic. 150 Forgetting

148 “... eine nach Hundereten zählende Arriere-Garde von frabigen Deckarbeitern und Strolchen der allerschlimmsten Sort.”; “Es ist eine ausgemachte Thatsache, daß an den gestrigen Demonstrationen, sich viele dunkle Gestalten betheiligten, die aus ihren Schlupfwinklen an der Levee in die Stadt hinaufgekommen waren, um im Falle einer Ruhestörung sich mit dem zu bereichen, was nicht niet und nagelfest ist. Die sogenannten ‘Roust-abouts’ nahmen einen hervorragenden Antheil an den Demonstrationen und was sich von ihnen erwarten läßt, wenn es zu einer Ruhestörung kommt, weiß jeder der die täglichen Polizei-Berichte liest.” Westliche Post , 26 July 1877. 149 Roediger, “Not Only the Ruling Classes to Overcome,” 225-26, 232. 150 “... die socialistischen Hirngespinnst … verdammt”; “der Socialismus in diesem Lande ein ausländisches Gewächs sei”; “Der Socialismus ist und bleibt eine europäische Pflanze, die in diesem 351 their own internationalism of recent years, most German-American newspaper editors condemned “the Internationale.” Reluctantly, they acknowledged that German

Americans had once again proved a conduit for European ideas.

German-American leaders sought to reassure Americans that many German brought more palatable understandings of citizenship and political economy to the United

States. The syndicated New-Yorker Staatszeitung piece reminded readers of the Forty-

Eighters, who had come to the United States “to enjoy the blessings of free, constitutional self-government.”151 As Bruce Levine has observed, such revisionism failed to capture the radicalism German Forty-Eighters during the 1850s and 1860s. 152 Many of them had

taken the position that the United States must enfranchise all male citizens if it was to live

up to its founding ideals. If all American men could participate in democratic

government, the Radicals had hoped, the nation’s social problems would solve

themselves. In 1865, a few prominent German Americans had argued that the

transformation of immigrants into citizens provided a model for African American men

to acquire voting rights. Haltingly, this idea had spread within the German-American

Republican leadership. In Ohio, a majority of the German-born Republicans accepted it by 1867. In Missouri, many German Republicans did not vote for African American

suffrage in the state referendum of 1868, but their political activity had nonetheless

helped open opportunities for African American men. Congress had sent the Fifteenth

Amendment to the states for ratification in 1869. After that point, even newspapers such

Landes nie gedeihen wird”; “väterliche”; “der mit der Krankeiheit des Socialismus behaftete Einwanderer.” Anzeiger des Westens , 2 August 1877. 151 “… um die Segungen einer freien, verfassungsmäßigen Selbstregierung zu genießen.” Anzeiger des Westens , 2 August 1877. 152 Levine, The Spirit of 1848 , 263-71. 352 as the Staatszeitung and the Anzeiger joined most German Ohioans and Missourians in

grudgingly accepting African American suffrage.

Although the New-Yorker Staatszeitung ’s 1877 observation misrepresented the

Forty-Eighters’ early careers in the United States, it did reflect the accommodations they had made since 1870. No sooner had racial exclusions from voting been constitutionally prohibited than political citizenship began to loose some of its appeal. In 1870,

developments in North America and Europe conspired to erode Forty-Eighters’ certainty

that the widespread citizenship would solve the dilemmas that confronted many

countries. The Franco-Prussian War and German unification had prompted them to

question whether all men were equally capable of exercising good citizenship and led

them to reconsider the relative merits of republics and monarchies. In the Liberal

Republican movement from 1870 to 1872, German Republicans had joined German

Democrats in emphasizing the necessity for reform and reconciliation, compromising

their commitment to African American rights. They had strained the connection between

nationalism and liberalism. German Missourians and Ohioans in both parties still hoped

that public schools would allow American men of diverse backgrounds to learn the skills

of citizenship and heal the nation’s divisions. But during the early 1870s, the struggle

over education had shown how difficult it would be to use common schools to unite

Americans.

The Great Strike presented a more fundamental challenge to American

citizenship. In Thomas Bender’s words, “Industrialism effectively brought an end to the practical utility of the republican tradition and laissez-faire political economy.” 153 In July

153 Bender, A Nation among Nations , 257. 353 1877, German-American elites rejected the notion of social citizenship, but their response to the labor unrest signaled that they too were rethinking the relationship between the state and its citizens. Frightened to leave the future of the United States in the hands of the urban working class, they advocated the heavy-handed use of military force and arbitrary arrests to suppress non-violent industrial action. In the decades that followed,

Americans would accept a range of less authoritarian and more creative responses to the problems created by industrialization. 154 In August 1877, a New Yorker wrote to Schurz

at the Department of the Interior suggesting that the United States form a federal labor bureau to “organize the labouring class against itself.” It would prevent “the organization

is now going on in the laboring class,” which could make the next outbreak more

effective than the one that had just passed. 155 In 1884, Congress would respond to such

suggestions by forming the Bureau of Labor in the Department of the Interior. There

would always be reformers who were more sympathetic to working-class appeals and did

not see such innovations merely as an opportunity to manipulate workers. African

American leaders and some whites would also publicize the double burden African

Americans faced because their economic marginality was compounded by racism and

contraventions of their political rights. Yet American race relations foundered in the late

nineteenth century despite the rising popularity of various Progressive reforms.156 It

154 For example, Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics emphasizes the importance of reactions that transcended class divides in late nineteenth-century Chicago. 155 [Sender’s name illegible] to Schurz, New York, 7 August 1877, reel 18, Schurz Papers, LC. 156 David W. Southern, The and Race: Reaction and Reform, 1900-1917 (Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, 2005); McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy , 299-394; Axel R. Schäfer, “W.E.B. Du Bois, German Social Thought, and the Racial Divide in American Progressivism, 1892-1909,” Journal of American History 88 (2001): 925-49; David W. Southern, The Malignant Heritage: Yankee Progressives and the Negro Question, 1901–1914 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1968); Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Ronald C. White, Jr., Liberty and Justice for All: 354 would be nearly a century before white reformers again focused their energies on the legacy of slavery and racial prejudice as they had between 1865 and 1870.

During the final decades of the nineteenth century, many of the responses to industrialization were transatlantic. In Germany, Bismarck feared the growing political influence of the Social Democratic Party and industrial unrest. The chancellor used two attempts to assassinate Emperor Wilhelm I in 1878 as a pretext to secure a series of repressive laws that banned societies with “social-democratic, socialist, or communist” tendencies.157 To counter the continued popularity of socialism and reinforce the power of his administration, Bismarck also provided state support for workers. In the early

1880s, the Reichstag passed three compulsory insurance schemes to protect Germans against the risk of sickness and accident and provide for them in old age or in case of prolonged incapacitation. 158 Germany’s “socialism from above” reflected Bismarck’s ambition and the peculiarities of the German Empire. As one economist has put it, “In a sense, social rights were granted to prevent having to grant enlarged political rights.” 159

Such an approach might seem antithetical to political thought in the United States, but

Racial Reform and the Social Gospel, 1877–1925 (: Harper & Row, 1990); Ralph E. Luker, The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Eileen L. McDonagh, “The ‘Welfare Rights State’ and the ‘Civil Rights State’: Policy Paradox and State Building in the Progressive Era,” Studies in American Political Development 7 (1993): 225–71. 157 Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1870-1918 , 198; Vernon L. Lidtke, The Outlawed Party: in Germany, 1878-1890 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 70-78; Gerhard A. Ritter, Social Welfare in Germany and Britain: Origins and Development , trans. Kim Traynor (Leamington Spa, United Kingdom: Berg, 1983), 32-33. 158 Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings , 222-25; Axel R. Schäfer, American Progressives and German Social Reform, 1875-1920 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000), 184-88; Lidtke, The Outlawed Party , 155-75; Daniel Levine, Poverty and Society: The Growth of the American Welfare States in International Comparison (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 63-68; Ritter, Social Welfare in Germany and Britain , 17-82; Gaston V. Rimlinger, Welfare Policy and Industrialization in Europe, America, and Russia (New York: Jon Wiley & Sons, 1971), 89-130; Jürgen Tampke, “Bismarck’s Social Legislation: A Genuine Breakthrough?” in The Emergence of the Welfare State in Britain and Germany, 1850-1950 , ed. M.J. Mommsen (London: Croom Helm and the German Historical Institute, 1981), 71-83; Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings , 221-26. 159 Rimlinger, Welfare Policy and Industrialization , 112. 355 industrial poverty was a massive challenge to the American tradition. Americans drew what inspiration they could from the political experiments in Europe. Schurz’s New

York correspondent who advocated a labor bureau had perhaps been inspired by the response of the German administration to the economic crisis of the 1870s. At the other end of the political spectrum, the Social Democratic Party leader, Eugene V. Debs, considered social insurance along German lines a program that could contribute to “the democratizing of the whole of society,” reconciling the American republican tradition with workers’ needs. 160 Deb’s party began to include compulsory social insurance in its platform in 1900, and the Progressive Party adopted a similar plank in 1916.161 Although it was not until the of the 1930s that it would be seriously considered on a national level, the German system provoked considerable debate at the turn of the twentieth century.

In 1877, German Americans still could not predict the initiatives that transatlantic networks would convey, but they knew that they bore some responsibility for alerting

Americans to the inspiring lessons and cautionary tales that emanated from across the

Atlantic. Like the Cincinnati “Bible Wars,” St. Louis’s Great Strike demonstrated what a turning point 1870 had been. Socialism and efforts to counter it were transatlantic answers to the dilemma upon which German Americans agreed: the Fifteenth

Amendment had not solved all America’s problems. Americans still valued the right to vote. Women’s campaign for suffrage would emphasize how important the ballot box

160 Johnson, ed., National Party Platforms , 140. For how this fit into Debs’ approach, see Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs . 161 Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings , 242-45; Levine, Poverty and Society , 167-72; Johnson, ed. National Party Platforms , 128, 142, 166, 177, 211; Schäfer, American Progressives and German Social Reform , 184-88. I found Thomas Bender’s discussion of “paths away from laissez faire” indispensable to this description. Bender, A Nation among Nations , 263-71. 356 remained. Yet disenchantment with the power of political citizenship transformed the context within which African Americans would struggle to protect their political and social rights.

357

APPENDIX

TABLES SUMMARIZING SELECTED ELECTION RESULTS

358 Ward German- Lincoln (R) Amend Ohio Grant (R) for Grant (R) Hayes (R) born among for president constitution to president in for president for president white males in 1860 (%) allow black men 1868 (%) in 1872 (%) in 1876 over 21 (%) to vote in 1867 (%)

4 32.0 67 68.1 66.3 64.3 58.2 5 37.1 45 31.5 42.1 44.1 36.0 6 54.3 67 59.1 68.5 71.9 63.6 7 47.8 64 45.4 58.1 54.6 49.2 11 60.9 44 37.4 49.3 51.6 44.8 City-wide total 32.3 58 49.7 61.2 64.3 52.6

State-wide total 7.2 52.3 46 54.0 53.2 50.2

359 Table 1: Voting in Cleveland’s “German” wards, 1860, 1867, 1868, 1872, and 1876

Cleveland “German” wards defined as wards where over 30 percent white males over 21 were German-born based on 1860 manuscript census. Thomas W. Kremm, “The Rise of the Republican Party in Cleveland, 1848-1860” (Ph.D. diss, Kent State University, 1974), 301. Ohio-wide German-born population based on total German-born as percentage of total population according to the 1860 census. Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Eight Census, 621-23. Cleveland results from Kremm, “The Rise of the Republican Party in Cleveland,” 291; Ohio Secretary of State, Annual Report, 1873 (Columbus: State Printers, 1874), 103; Cleveland Leader, 9 October 1867, 8 November 1876. Ohio results from Sawrey, Dubious Victory, 115; Ohio Secretary of State, Annual Report, 1868 (Columbus: Columbus Printing, 1869), 47, 103-6, 109- 10; Burnham, Presidential Ballots, 676-77.

Ward Lincoln for Amend Ohio Grant for president Grant (R) for Hayes (R) for president in 1860 constitution to in 1868 (%) president in 1872 president in (%) allow black men to (%) 1876 (%) vote in 1867 (%) 7 71.8 58.5 72.6 47.7 55.8 9 36.0 19.7 37.5 50.1 56.5 10 69.2 62.9 72.3 56.5 65.4 11 75.9 59.5 78.6 58.2 65.2 12 57.1 48.4 58.1 55.4 67.0 City-wide total 52.3 45.4 56.3 44.7 50.7

Table 2: Voting in Cincinnati’s “German” wards, 1860, 1867, 1868, 1872, and 1876

360 Cincinnati “German” wards defined by the Republican Cincinnati Commercial, 5 November 1868. It also labeled the eighteenth and nineteenth wards “German,” but I exclude these wards because they did not exist in 1860. Election results from Cincinnati Enquirer, 8 November 1860; Cincinnati Volksfreund, 11 October 1867, 6 November 1872, 12 November 1876; Ohio Secretary of State, Annual Report, 1868, 54.

Ward German- Lincoln (R) Amend Grant (R) Brown (LR) Grant (R) Henderson Hayes (R) born among for president constitution to for president for for (R) for for total in 1860 (%) allow black in 1868 (%) Governor in president governor president population men to vote in 1870 (%) in 1872 in 1872 in 1876 in 1858 (%) 1868 (%) (%) (%) (%)

1 58.9 65.5 35.4 71.9 88.1 46.3 46.8 57.4 2 55.4 65.0 22.1 66.2 94.5 48.5 45.1 55.8 3 33.9 44.8 38.7 69.4 92.5 51.4 49.8 50.3 8 31.0 46.3 30.4 50.1 64.4 49.1 49.7 51.6 10 36.8 46.5 32.0 42.7 74.6 37.0 37.3 38.0

City- 33.1 41.6 32.7 54.6 78.7 45.8 46.7 45.9 wide

361 total State- 8.3 10.3 42.7 57.0 62.2 44.0 43.7 41.4 wide total

Table 3: Voting in St. Louis’s “German” wards, 1860, 1868, 1870, 1872, and 1876

St. Louis “German” wards defined as wards where over 30 percent of the total population was German-born based on an 1858 city census. Kellner, “The German Element on the Urban Frontier,” 320. Missouri-wide German population based on German-born as percentage of total free population according to the 1860 census. Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Eight Census, 621-23. St. Louis results from Westliche Post, 5 November 1868, 12 November 1870, 8 November 1872, 9 November 1876. Missouri results from Missouri Republican, 8 November 1860; Parrish, A History of Missouri, 3:3; Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 258; Burnham, Presidential Ballots, 570-71; Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 269; Shoemaker, Missouri and Missourians, 2:21.

County, Township Douglas (D) Seymour (D) Greeley (LR) for for president for president president in in 1860 (%) in 1868 (%) 1872 (%) Auglaize, Jackson 94.2 98.7 98.3 Crawford, Vernon 72.1 78.6 80.4 Crawford, cranberry 76.0 84.2 84.8 Crawford, Chatfield 79.7 92.8 89.3 Henry, Monroe 83.3 83.9 83.7 Holmes, Paint 74.6 79.6 79.3 Mercer, Marion 97.6 100.0 83.5

Mercer, Recovery 85.5 87.7 81.3 Mercer, Granville 93.2 96.2 77.6 Monroe, Summit 79.7 79.3 81.1

362 Ottawa, Salem 76.7 86.5 80.1 Pike, Beaver 82.8 79.8 74.4

Table 4: Voting in selected “German Democratic” townships in rural Ohio, 1860, 1868, and 1872

Townships selected because they showed a high proportion of Democratic voters and German-born men based on the 1860 census in Kelso, “The German-American Vote in the Election of 1860,” 195. Election results from Ohio Secretary of State, Annual Report, 1868, 40-73; Ohio Secretary of State, Annual Report 1873, 92-129.

Ward German- For born among adoption of total constitution population in 1865 (%) in 1858 (%) 1 58.9 29.7 2 55.4 31.0 3 33.9 32.6 8 31.0 39.9 10 36.8 49.9 City-wide 33.1 32.1

total State-wide 8.3 51.1

363 total

Table 5: Voting in St. Louis’s “German” wards on referendum on Missouri constitution of 1865

St. Louis “German” wards defined as wards where over 30 percent of the total population was German-born based on an 1858 city census. Kellner, “The German Element on the Urban Frontier,” 320. Missouri-wide German population based on German-born as percentage of total free population according to the 1860 census. Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Eight Census, 621-23. St. Louis results from Westliche Post, 8 June 1865. State-wide results from Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 46.

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7. ARTICLES AND ESSAYS

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Wittke, Carl. “Friedrich Hassaurek: Cincinnati’s Leading Forty-Eighter,” Ohio Historical Quarterly 68 (1959): 1-17.

______. “The German Forty-Eighters: A Centennial Appraisal,” American Historical Review 53 (1948): 711-725.

Woodward, C. Vann. “Seeds of Failure in Radical Race Policy.” In New Frontiers of American Reconstruction , ed. Harold M. Hyman, 125-47. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966.

8. DISSERTATIONS

Bergquist, James M. “The Political Attitudes of the German Immigrant in Illinois, 1848- 1860.” Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1966.

Christensen, Lawrence O. “Black St. Louis: A Study in Race Relations, 1865-1965.” Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1972.

398 Dobbert, Guido. “The Disintegration of an Immigrant Community: The Cincinnati Germans, 1870-1920.” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1965.

Dwight, Margaret L. “Black Suffrage in Missouri, 1865-1877.” Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1978.

Erickson, Leonard E. “The Color Line in Ohio Public Schools, 1829-1890.” Ph.D. diss., The Ohio State University, 1960.

Kelley, Sean M. “Plantation Frontiers: Race, Ethnicity, and Family along the Brazos River of Texas, 1821-1886.” Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2000.

Kelso, Thomas J. “The German-American Vote in the Election of 1860: The Case of Indiana with Supporting Data from Ohio.” Ph.D. diss., Ball State University, 1968.

Kremling, John H. “German Drama on the Cleveland Stage: Performances in German and English from 1850 to the Present.” Ph.D. diss, The Ohio State University, 1976.

Kremm, Thomas W. “The Rise of the Republican Party in Cleveland, 1848-1860.” Ph.D. diss, Kent State University, 1974.

Nolle, Alfred H. “The German Drama on the St. Louis Stage.” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1917.

Noyes, Elmer E. “A History of the Grand Army of the Republic in Ohio from 1866 to 1900.” Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1945.

Olson, Audrey L. “St. Louis Germans, 1850-1920: The Nature of an Immigrant Community and Its Relation to the Assimilation Process.” Ph.D. diss., University of Kansas, 1963.

Saalburg, Harvey. “The Westliche Post of St. Louis: A Daily Newspaper for German- Americans, 1857-1938.” Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1967.

399