Slavery, Reconstruction, and the Generation of '48

(I started this experiment with substack with a post relating to St. Louis and the Civil War. I am ending the experiment with another post in the same vein. Thank you readers for your attention and comments.)

One of those less explored avenues in history is the tie between the failure of republican revolutions in German states in 1849 and the abolition of slavery in the United States.

Approximately 1.3 million Germans immigrated to the United States in the 11 years after the defeat of revolutions in the German states, accounting for about 4 percent of the US population of 33 million in 1860. They settled mostly in a belt that ran from New York and New Jersey westward through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, with a few spreading southward into northern Kentucky and some going northward into southern Michigan and Wisconsin.

They played a key role in keeping Missouri loyal to the United States when 11 southern states pulled out the union to establish the Confederate States. Missouri was the largest of the border states. The loyalty of Missouri to the United States helped sway Kentucky and Maryland to remain loyal, too. If the three of them had gone into the Confederacy, it would have increased the population of the Confederacy by a third, from 9 million to 12 million (and decreased the population of Union states from 22 million to 19 million) and put the third largest manufacturing city in the former union, St. Louis, in the Confederacy. It would have been a different war.

In early 1861, Missouri was up for grabs. Captain Nathaniel Lyon relied on German volunteers to defeat the secessionist militia that was gathering outside St. Louis in preparation for an attack on the US arsenal in that city. The St. Louis arsenal was larger than any arsenal taken by the Confederacy in any of the 11 states that seceded from the United States. Lyon relied on Germans again to take the capitol of the state from secessionists, defeat them in battle at Boonville, and chase them to the southwest corner of the state.

Lyon failed in his effort to crush the secessionists, and lost his life, when a Confederate army much larger than his own invaded from Arkansas to support the secessionists and met him in battle at Wilson’s Creek. He did so much damage to them in defeat, however, that the Confederate army withdrew after the battle and secessionists in Missouri were too weakened to mount a major campaign to retake the land they had lost.

Robert Rombauer, a German-speaking immigrant from Hungary and veteran of 1848, who fought under Lyon and later wrote a book about these early battles,ⁱ was surely not the only immigrant who viewed the Civil War as a continuation of the revolutions of 1848, and the battle against plantation slavery as a continuation of the battle against feudal aristocracies.

The lifetime record of that generation of Germans, however, was more mixed. Although German immigrants of the generation of ‘48 were broadly united in their opposition to slavery, they were not united in what came after. This is perhaps best illustrated by the career of Carl Schurz, whose political star rose higher than any other German’s from the launchpad of his Civil War military career. Schurz attained the rank of major general in the US Army during the Civil War. After the war, he famously castigated southern planters for their treatment of enslaved people, but then just as famously wrote later that blacks were not ready for freedom and full citizenship and needed the tutelage of experienced white, Southern leaders. A strong believer in the superiority of northern Europeans, he helped lay the intellectual foundation for the Jim Crow system of segregation. Although a Republican, he was a leading critic of Reconstruction and President US Grant’s championship of equal rights.

Schurz, who had settled in Wisconsin in the 1850s, moved to Detroit after the war and then to St. Louis to join forces with Frank Blair. Blair, a formerly prominent Republican who switched to the Democratic Party when Andrew Johnson was president, was a political precursor of Donald Trump. He talked about formerly enslaved people the way Trump talked about immigrants from Latin America. As the Democrat’s vice presidential candidate in 1868, Blair crisscrossed the country warning that ratification of the 14^th amendment granting citizenship to anyone born or naturalized in the United States would unleash a wave of black criminals to commit murder and rape against whites. Some historians have blamed him for the defeat of the Democrats’ ticket, but he was just getting started.

Blair helped arrange for Schurz to move to St. Louis and become part owner of the Westliche Post, a prominent German language newspaper. He got Schurz a ghost job at the Missouri Pacific Railroad and helped get him elected as a US Senator from Missouri. They formed a bipartisan tandem in Congress to attack Reconstruction. While they both received salaries from the Missouri Pacific, they called opponents in Congress corrupt for accepting gifts of railroad stock.

As the partnership between Blair and Schurz grew, Schurz led a walkout of anti-Grant Republicans from the Republican Party to establish the Liberal Republican Party. Their cornerstone issue was political corruption and nothing screamed corruption to them as much as Reconstruction. Schurz and Blair engineered a unified convention of Liberal Republicans and Democrats in 1872 to select a ticket to run against Grant. Schurz was confident this was the beginning of the end of the Democratic Party and the emergence of the Liberal Republicans as the major party opposing the Republicans (who they called “the black Republicans”). He was wrong.

Grant won re-election in a landslide and the Liberal Republican Party collapsed. Schurz returned to the Republican Party, where he supported Rutherford Hayes to succeed Grant. Hayes appointed him Secretary of the Interior in return. Schurz favored ‘assimilating’ Native Americans into American society and abolishing reservations. He also pushed for the adoption civil service exams that favored formal education (and adherence to a standard set of spelling and punctuation rules) and gave results that matched his belief in the intellectual superiority of northern Europeans (especially Germans and English). That began a process of undoing one of Grant’s ‘corruptions,’ his appointments of Blacks, Jews, Native Americans, and women to government jobs.

Schurz went back to the Democratic Party after he left the Hayes administration, supporting Grover Cleveland for president and officially leaving the Republican Party in 1900 to protest the conquest of the Phillipines.

Many of the generation of ‘48 supported equal rights for blacks, but not enough. The generation that helped the Union win the Civil War and abolish slavery ended up with a mixed record on race and civil rights.

iRobert Rombauer, The Union Cause in St. Louis in 1861, Nixon-Jones Printing Co., 1909,

Thank you for reading. This is my last post on this Substack.