Overview

Missouri is well-known for its German American heritage, but the story of nineteenth-century German immigrant abolitionists is often neglected in discussions of the state’s history. This collection of ten original essays (with a foreword by renowned Missouri historian Gary Kremer), relates what unfolded when idealistic Germans, many of whom were highly educated and devoted to the ideals of freedom and democracy, left their homeland and settled in a pre–Civil War slave state. Fleeing political persecution during the 1830s and 1840s, immigrants such as Friedrich MÜnch, Eduard MÜhl, Heinrich Boernstein, and Arnold Krekel arrived in the area now known as the Missouri German Heritage Corridor in hopes of finding a land more congenial to their democratic ideals. When they witnessed the state of enslaved Blacks, many of them became abolitionist activists and fervent supporters of Abraham Lincoln and the Union in the emerging Civil War. Editor Sydney Norton and the other contributing authors to Fighting for a Free Missouri explore the Germans’ abolitionist mission, their relationships with African Americans, and their activity in the radical wing of the Republican Party.

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9780826222923

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Reviews

"""Fighting for a Free Missouri is an excellent collection of essays by well-known scholars who specialize in the study of German Americans or African Americans that makes a much-needed contribution to the study of the interactions between these two groups of people during the nineteenth century and their perceptions of each other. The essays address the complex relationship for German immigrants between being ardent philosophical opponents to slavery as an institution and their sometimes lackluster support for racial equality. Collectively, these essays prove that German immigrants and their publications played a crucial role in the abolition of slavery in Missouri. They also demonstrate that German immigrants were not a united ethnic group but a people of diverse socio-political ideologies.""--Petra DeWitt, Missouri University of Science and Technology, author of The Missouri Home Guard: Protecting the Home Front during the Great War ""A weighty contribution to Missouri history, Civil War history, and the history of immigration.""--David Roediger, University of Kansas, author of Class, Race, and Marxism and Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All"

Author Information

Sydney Norton is an independent scholar and the director of German Language Solutions, a company that specializes in language teaching, translation, and cultural programming. Her publications include exhibition catalogs and journal articles on contemporary German art and literature, the performing and visual arts of the Weimar Republic, and German immigrants in Missouri.

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