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Im Abendlande: German-American Liberalism and the Civil War in the Border West, 1830-1877

Garrison, Zachary S

Abstract Details

2015, PhD, University of Cincinnati, Arts and Sciences: History.
German immigrants arrival in the American West’s Ohio and Mississippi river valleys beginning in the 1830s and culminating in the 1850s, coincided with the rise of sectional politics and debates over slavery that threatened to tear the nation apart. This dissertation argues that within this maelstrom German Americans asserted a liberal nationalist philosophy, emphasizing individual rights and freedoms, to challenge the paradox of enslaved labor in a free nation. That they did so in a region I’ve termed the `Border West,’ a highly contentious space where free and slave labor systems came crashing together and northern, southern, and western identities vied to determine the nation’s westward march, makes the story all the more salient. For once southern slaveholding states seceded from the Union Germans in the Border West found themselves on the frontlines of the American Civil War. In response, Germans in Missouri, southern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, and northern Kentucky largely rejected the conservative racial mentalities and conditional loyalties that dominated the border region and insisted that only through emancipation could the nation be saved. Rather than an altruistic act, German immigrants’ critique of slavery was grounded in European experience and the struggle to secure the liberal nation state. After a series of failed nationalist revolutions in Europe, German liberals set out for the American frontier with the intention of escaping the aristocracy and landed elites. These conservative forces, they argued, had undermined the formation of a free nation and therefore obstructed the concept of Bildung, a cultural construct that championed individual improvement and self-consciousness. Yet in America, southern slaveholders appeared as simply a new form of autocracy. Fearing slavery would inhibit westward progress by delivering land meant for white workers into the hands of the southern “slavocracy,” many German American liberals embraced the burgeoning Free Soil and Free Labor movement along with the newly formed Republican party in 1854. When war broke out in 1861, Germans nearly uniformly joined the Union army. By advancing a war to destroy slavery, Germans in the Border West represented one of the strongest sources of Unionism; but, ironically, in a region largely opposed to black citizenship and Radical Republican rule, they were identified as dangerous outsiders. With the war’s conclusion, a conservative counter-revolution began in the Border West and Germans suddenly found themselves on the outside looking in. In many ways mirroring the national reaction to Radical Reconstruction, many Germans came to deny black equality. Instead, they claimed the mantle of a new moderate party, the Liberal Republicans. Employing the same line of reasoning they had once used to justify emancipation, German Liberal Republicans argued that a united, free nation required the end of both federal occupation in the South and special protections for African Americans. Having secured the Union, Germans in the Border West largely abandoned radicalism and instead began to secure their place within it.
Christopher Phillips, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Bruce Levine, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Katherine Sorrels, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
David Stradling, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
276 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Garrison, Z. S. (2015). Im Abendlande: German-American Liberalism and the Civil War in the Border West, 1830-1877 [Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1439310544

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Garrison, Zachary. Im Abendlande: German-American Liberalism and the Civil War in the Border West, 1830-1877. 2015. University of Cincinnati, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1439310544.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Garrison, Zachary. "Im Abendlande: German-American Liberalism and the Civil War in the Border West, 1830-1877." Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1439310544

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)