With the election of President Abraham Lincoln, editors of St Louis’s Westliche Post cautioned its German immigrant readers to remain “as vigilant as the Wide Awakes.” German Republican clubs maintained armed readiness and organized “Home Guard” militia units, watching pro-Southern St Louisans like the Ninth Ward Washington Minutemen do the same.
And St Louis was packed with ’48ers ready to bear arms. Between 1834 and 1837, thirty thousand largely educated Germans immigrated to the United States, and seven thousand settled in St Louis. They did so as slavery became the operative political and ethical issue of the day.
Why St Louis? The answer is good utopian propaganda.
In Report of a Journey to the Western States of North America, Gottfried Duden had portrayed the lower Missouri valley as “Western Eden, a better Rheinland especially suited to Germans.” A. B. Faust described Duden’s “dreamweaver” writing style:
His skillful pen mingled fact and fiction, interwove experience and imagination, pictured the freedom of the forest and of democratic institutions in contrast with the social restrictions and political embarrassments of Europe. Many thousands of Germans pondered over this book and enthused over its sympathetic glow. Innumerable resolutions were made to cross the ocean and build for the present and succeeding generations happy homes on the far-famed Missouri.
Once stateside, immigrants were largely excluded from the Southern plantation class, and abnormally few Germans owned slaves in St Louis, primarily out of a conscious, ethical objection. Missouri was a new chance to build a Rheinland on free soil, free labor, free men. “The only way we adoptive citizens can get through this political crisis,” Westliche editors wrote,
is to fulfill all legal duties faithfully, to hold with the Union and the Constitution, and to work together with our American fellow citizens to preserve peace, order and law. . . . The gaze of the entire Union is directed at the German citizens of Missouri, so let us show ourselves worthy of the expectations that rest on us.
This immigrant class brought along communal-social technologies: schools, newspapers, Turnverein athletic clubs, massive beer halls as opposed to isolated small taverns, hunting clubs that could train up into militias — all hard-learned community values from the pressure cooker of Europe. “Capitalism was coming to them,” said Matt Christman, Jacobin contributor and cohost of the podcast Chapo Trap House. “As opposed to the continental project in the United States, it became pretty clear that the only way to survive was through peasant solidarity in the new urban environments.”