Historians have long known that German immigrants provided much of the support for emancipation in southern Border States. Kristen Layne Anderson's Abolitionizing Missouri, however, is the first analysis of the reasons behind that opposition as well as the first exploration of the impact that the Civil War and emancipation had on German immigrants' ideas about race. Anderson focuses on the relationships between German immigrants and African Americans in St. Louis, Missouri, looking particularly at the ways in which German attitudes towards African Americans and the institution of slavery changed over time. Anderson suggests that although some German Americans deserved their reputation for racial egalitarianism, many others opposed slavery only when it served their own interests to do so. When slavery did not seem to affect their lives, they ignored it; once it began to threaten the stability of the country or their ability to get land, they opposed it. After slavery ended, most German immigrants accepted the American racial hierarchy enough to enjoy its benefits, and had little interest in helping tear it down, particularly when doing so angered their native-born white neighbors. Anderson's work counters prevailing interpretations in immigration and ethnic history, where until recently, scholars largely accepted that German immigrants were solidly antislavery. Instead, she uncovers a spectrum of Germans' "antislavery" positions and explores the array of individual motives driving such diverse responses.. In the end, Anderson demonstrates that Missouri Germans were more willing to undermine the racial hierarchy by questioning slavery than were most white Missourians, although after emancipation, many of them showed little interest in continuing to demolish the hierarchy that benefited them by fighting for black rights.
And as Walter Johnson shows in this searing book, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation's past.
McCandless, P. (2000). A History of Missouri, Vol. II, 1820 to 1860, revised edition. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Moore, G. (1953). The Missouri Controversy, 1819–1821. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Nester ...
These carefully crafted essays by leading scholars such as Amanda Cobb-Greetham, Clarissa Confer, Richard B. McCaslin, Linda W. Reese, and F. Todd Smith will help teachers and students better understand the Civil War, Native American ...
Minutes of the Missouri Baptist General Association; Baptist Home Missions, 341. While the Germans are generally considered to be antislavery, there was some variation in their views. Kristen Layne Anderson, Abolitionizing Missouri: ...
Garrison’s unique transnational perspective to the sectional crisis, the Civil War, and the postwar era complicates our understanding of German Americans on the middle border.
Evangelical Schisms and the Crisis of the Union in Missouri Lucas Volkman ... Kristen Layne Anderson, Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Missouri (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University ...
the Missouri Compromise an alarm bell in the night (though for completely different reasons than Walker), Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, at precisely the same moment that white Americans celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the ...
See also Confederate States of America (Confederacy): policies toward USCT; Halleck, Henry W.; laws of war; Lieber, Francis; military necessity; Sherman, William T.; Vattel, Emmerich de Jackson, Andrew, 43, 46–47, 85–86 Jacobinism, 37, ...
... 2013); Kristen L. Anderson, Abolitionizing Missouri: Germans Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016); and Susanne Martha Schick, “'For God, Mac, ...
Abolitionism, and the role played by German immigrants in opposing slavery, is the subject of Kristen Layne Anderson, Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth- Century America (2016), published by ...