Mischa Honeck > Quotes

“Proslavery southerners were highly suspicious of Douai’s plan to establish a forum for public debate in their own backyard, presuming that this was simply a strategy for camouflaging abolitionist intentions. The climate of fear and self-censorship created by antebellum southerners around the slavery issue ran counter to Douai’s notion of free enlightened discourse. Moreover, it reminded him of the repressive Old World structures that he and his fellow emigrants had left behind. The harsh, occasionally even violent attacks of the proslavery majority smacked very much of the police states they had vehemently opposed in Germany. “You had rather be off or we shall make [you] go,” infuriated southerners told the foreign-born agitators. In this situation, slavery had ceased to be an abstract ideological problem. Invoking the right to free speech and using slavery as a metaphor to illustrate his own condition...Though the Texas free-soil activists wrote extensively about the economic dimensions of slavery, it was their own intellectual enslavement they feared most. For them, slavery was morally and politically wrong, but it was also useful as a yardstick for measuring their own degree of freedom.”
― Mischa Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848

“Many Forty-Eighter exiles were profoundly troubled after finding that the social realities around them hardly matched the highly idealized version of a bill-of-rights republic that they had envisioned. Often it was only a matter of weeks until first experiences prompted them to temper their enthusiasm and develop a more ambivalent response. One of the aspects of American life subjected to the most severe criticism was the utilitarian world of business and profiteering. Echoing the sentiments of his fellow exiles, Kapp could not understand why so many of his new neighbors seemed to be driven by no other desire than to get rich. He concluded that if Americans preferred the money of today over the ideas of the Founding Fathers, the history of the United States would have to be presented as a chronicle of declension, not progress.”
― Mischa Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848

“At their 1848 convention in New York, Garrison and his followers promised to proudly remember “that one of the first acts of the French people, after the achievement of their own liberty, was to decree the immediate emancipation of [their] slaves.” A few days earlier, on May 9, the American and Foreign AntiSlavery Society had celebrated “the progress of emancipation in the colonies of Sweden, Denmark, and France” and expressed the hope “that the last spot on earth where slavery exist[ed would] not be the Republic that was first to proclaim the equality of man.”
― Mischa Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848