Abolitionizing Missouri

Kristen Layne Anderson's study looks closely at the ways German immigrants in St. Louis moved from a relative ignorance of and indifference to issues of slavery and abolition to positions of antislavery by the late antebellum period, hardy Unionism and support for emancipation during and because of the Civil War, and civil rights (especially voting rights) for blacks during Reconstruction. In doing so, Anderson offers one of the few sustained inquiries into how any immigrant group engaged the issues of race, national obligation, and equal rights at that time. Anderson's approach is largely chronological and evolutionary, as she observes how Germans in St. Louis came to equate free soil and then emancipation with their own economic and political self-interest. By Anderson's reckoning, critical external actions—for example, the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, secession, and arming black troops—created critical moments that forced Germans to choose a course of action, each pushing them toward a more antislavery and racially egalitarian perspective and position. At no time during this movement was German thinking of a piece; proslavery and prosouthern German voices countered the seeming majority standing against slavery's advance and southern secession. For Anderson, however, the antislavery and pro–black rights narrative arc moved almost inexorably in one direction until the 1870s

Constitution · Emancipation · German · Ideology · Ignorance · Immigration · Political science · Politics · Secession · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Suffrage · Victory · American History and Culture · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

• Civil War Settlers

  Open Access•Anders Bo Rasmussen•Civil War Settlers•2022

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