The following quotations are taken from
Germans for a Free Missouri: Translations from the St. Louis Radical Press, 1857-1862, by Steven Rowan.
Anzeiger des Westens, 16 August 1860
(The
Anzeiger was St. Louis's most prominent German-language paper, prior to the Civil War.)
Slaveowners and Proslavery People
The tendency to doubt the motives of any slaveowner who is trying to achieve importance in the Republican party has always seemed to us to be an irresponsible error. If we had not personally experienced the fact that it is often precisely the slaveowners who belong to our party who are the most deeply principled Republicans, we ourselves would never have realized it to be possible.
Why do the Republicans fight in the free states? Are there slaveowners there? Certainly there are none there at all. The people they fight are pro-slavery people, and what they fight are the politics of proslavery.
It is the system of free labor that is fighting with the system of slave labor; it is true democracy that opposes the oligarchy of the South and the rule of a destructive system; 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 white man and not to the slaveowning baron of the South; but it is not the nonslaveowners who are struggling with the slaveowner for the freeing of slaves.
....The free states do not want to be dominated by the slave states; they do not want to give proslavery principles any more terrain than they already have by strict interpretation of the law....In Missouri right now there are more than five hundred slaveowners who are antislavery people at the same time....for experience has taught them that slave labor is not as productive in Missouri as free labor...
Carl Bernays, Editor
-- translated by Steven Rowan, in
Germans for a Free MissouriIn 1857, Gratz Brown, still a nominal Democrat, shocked his fellow legislators and the nation by proposing in the General Assembly that slavery be abolished in Missouri. It was not that slavery was immoral as the Massachusetts abolitionists claimed, said Brown, but that the economic health of Missouri was at stake. Emancipation would attract capital, stimulate business, raise land prices, and increase the population. Slavery's only contribution to Missouri, he argued, was to identify it with the backward South. The state's principal trading partner was the Northeast, and that relationship should be enhanced.
-- James Neal Primm, from the introduction to
Germans for a Free MissouriThose who claim that the Civil War was not about slavery really need to do a little bit of basic research. The thousands of primary sources (like these) tell us unmistakably that slavery was a major issue of the time period.
Those who think the Civil War was simply as a moral crusade to free our black brothers and sisters are equally mistaken. There were many reasons to oppose slavery, or the extension of slavery to the West or North.
The following are taken from letters written during the Civil War, by Joseph Ferdinand Boesel, and his uncle Ernst Boesel, both recent immigrants form Germany, who had settled in the German immigrant community of Latium, Texas. These letters make me tear up a bit. Young Ferdinand sounds like a solid American, who understood and loved the blessings of freedom. He seemed to believe he was fighting for the independence and freedom of the South, his new "fatherland." In his first two POW imprisonments, he is defiant and confident of victory. The third time around, he swears an oath to the Union, and gets a desk job (leg wound). He dreams of starting a farm after the war, and marrying a certain girl back home, but dies in hospital of causes unknown. After some years, his uncle (also a Confederate veteran) married the girl.
The Boesel Letters: Two Texas Germans in Sibley’s Brigade, Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov, Allan R. Branum, and Paula K. Hood, eds.
Southwestern Historical Quarterly 102, no. 4, April 1999
One is really free here. I could take my gun and wander through the whole country. I can give notice at my job today and leave tomorrow. If I should want to get married, my fiancee and I would go to a Justice of the Peace and put it in writing, declare our intentions, and everything is O.K. I could have my children baptized or not, send them to school or not, and nobody would say anything about it.
....Everybody here says I am a greenhorn, but they say I will become a real Texan. That makes me glad. I am, and will stay, satisfied here. And I am happy under the circumstances.
With a little work, you can raise all the vegetables you can eat. Without work nothing grows in Germany, either.
But over here, it really does not matter what one has done or been before, and you are respected so long as you do honest work. In Texas, I have seen many nobleman [sic] driving an ox or mule team. And 2 noblemen served in my company as soldiers.
Written by Ferdinand, as a POW at Fort Leavenworth
The North is not fighting to save the Union, but rather to set 4 million blacks free, so the black can subdue 6 million whites. The blacks have an easy life compared to a day laborer in Germany. Without slaves, the South would be a desert. but with free blacks, no white man could live there...We are fighting for our rights; the Union is lost. What a pity!...But the North will never subdue the South. Never! Never! What a difficult fight we face....it is a blessed fight for freedom.
I have never been a Confederate sympathizer, but I think the above passages give the lie to the idea that Southern concerns over their own loss of freedom, under Republican rule, were something cooked up afterward to justify secession and war. Not that it makes it OK, just sayin.
