German Americans, African Americans, and the construction of racial identity in nineteenth-century St. Louis, 1848-1872.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study examines the evolution of German American racial attitudes during the nineteenth-century through an investigation of the relationships between German immigrants and African Americans in St. Louis, Missouri. It focuses on how these attitudes changed over time and the role the Civil War and Emancipation played in those changes. The German Americans of St. Louis shifted their position on slavery and the place of African Americans in American society in relation to the needs of their on community.
Upon their arrival they quickly adopted American racial ideology and generally accepted the institution of slavery during the 1840s and early 1850s. Once slavery appeared to be a threat to the German population, during the struggles over the settlement of Kansas, Germans began to openly question the wisdom of allowing slavery to spread. Some even supported emancipation, thereby distinguishing themselves from many whites in Missouri. This need to attack slavery to protect their own political and economic interests increasingly led them to question the racial basis of the institution of slavery as well. While they did not for the most part deny the existence of racial difference, antislavery Germans increasingly sympathized with the plight of the enslaved, portraying African Americans as human beings who shared the universal human desire to be free.
During the Civil War many St. Louis Germans saw African Americans as potential allies against the Confederacy. After the war, however, native-born whites condemned Germans for their radicalism and Germans, like other white Americans, began to consider more fully what place the African American population would occupy in the post-emancipation world. In part out of fear over the return of pre-war nativism and the ascendance of the Republican Party, they once again closed ranks with other whites against the full citizenship claims of African Americans. Although the most radical Germans continued to argue that African Americans had earned full political rights through their war service, the majority of the German population again deployed the language of American racism to justify denying ex-slaves full citizenship rights and by implication defend their own rights as bonafide citizens in their adopted country.