Bernie MacKinnon's Blog - Posts Tagged "german-americans"
The German Americans
In Manfred Kirschenbaum, my novel's main hero Major Nathan Truly has a hugely valuable asset. Kirschenbaum is a hunchbacked German immigrant, a veteran of the 1848 revolutionary movement that rocked the German states, along with much of Europe. He is working as a hack driver in New York City when he and Truly first meet, in the aftermath of that city's July 1863 Draft Riots (still the most deadly and costly such event in U.S. history.) Kirschenbaum's physical limitation prevents him from joining the Union cause as a soldier—but not as an intelligence operative. In that capacity, under Truly's direction, he shines, displaying wily resourcefulness and an observant eye. Working as coachman for Gideon Van Gilder, a venomous Copperhead newspaper publisher, he gathers information on anti-Union activities in NYC, which was then a hotbed of pro-Southern sentiment. And when Van Gilder mysteriously flees the city in terror, it is Kirschenbaum who drives his horse-drawn coach through the night, toward a fateful rendezvous in the Shenandoah Valley. With that rendezvous, the increasingly dire events of Lucifer's Drum are set in motion.
German Americans remain the largest distinct ethnic group in the U.S.—and in the Civil War, were the largest such group represented in Union military ranks. German-speaking people were settling in British North America from the earliest colonial times, the very first being Dr. Johannes Fleischer at the 1607 founding of Jamestown, Virginia. In the North, they played a conspicuous role in the settling of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa and Missouri; in the South, many set roots in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, French Louisiana and eventually Texas (where, in a fine example of cultural cross-fertilization, they introduced Mexican residents to the accordion.) They were drawn by the classic immigrant visions—rich land for farmers and a burgeoning economy for shopkeepers and artisans, as well as freedom from religious and political oppression.
Germany would not exist as a coherent nation until the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-71, when Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck engineered a stunning victory over France. Simultaneously, the loosely run German Confederation—founded by the 1815 Congress of Vienna, comprising thirty-nine principalities—was galvanized into the German Empire. But before von Bismarck's triumph, these German states chafed under the autocratic domination of Austria; they were therefore fertile ground for liberal political agitation. In early 1848, an anti-monarchist revolution broke out in Paris and ignited several concurrent uprisings throughout the Confederation, throwing many crowned heads into panic. Working and middle class Germans held massive street demonstrations, demanding better living and working conditions, as well as universal male suffrage, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press and a united Germany. In many instances, royalist troops fired on unarmed demonstrators, who reacted by arming themselves and taking the crisis to a new and bloodier level.
Austrian Emperor Ferdinand I, Prussian King Fredrick William IV and the many German princes made nervous concessions. A National Assembly was called in the free city of Frankfurt am Main—in the novel, Kirschenbaum's home city—and drew up a constitution enshrining the principle of equal rights. Its primary goal was to unite the states as a constitutional monarchy—but as the revolution's working and middle class factions gradually split, and as advocates of Austrian vs. Prussian hegemony failed to agree, royalty and aristocracy realized that the liberal peril was receding. The Assembly at Frankfurt was dissolved in May 1849. Full-fledged war broke out between the revolutionaries and the Kingdom of Prussia, and the revolutionaries lost big.
Street-fighting scene from the Revolutionary Year
of 1848, Adolphe Hervier (1821-1879).
(Courtesy: Library of Congress)
In a dispiriting anticlimax, concessions were cancelled, rights abolished and protests violently suppressed. Arrests, executions and imprisonments followed. One consequence of this was a great wave of German immigration—disappointed exiles known as "The Forty-Eights," seeking the political freedom they had failed to achieve in their homeland. For the United States, this brought an infusion of people who, however hardscrabble their lives, were beneficiaries of the German primary school system—at that time, probably the best and most inclusive in the world. Overall highly literate and well-read, they took a robust interest in current events—and when the Civil War commenced, they overwhelmingly supported Lincoln and then Emancipation.
Several all-German units did fight for the South, though none reached regimental strength. In Texas, the community of Forty-Eighters steadfastly opposed both slavery and secession. Threatened with the draft in August of 1862, one armed group of them attempted an escape to Mexico but were caught and crushed by a Confederate force on the Nueces River. The North, by contrast, raised many all-German regiments—five from Pennsylvania, six from Ohio and eleven from New York, as well as others from Indiana and Wisconsin. More than 200,000 Union soldiers were German-born. In war-riven Missouri, the pro-Union German community was a crucial factor in preventing secession. (It was a largely German unit under Captain Nathaniel Lyon, in May 1861, that kept Confederates from capturing the federal arsenal at St. Louis.)
Prominent among German Americans was Carl Schurz, a Forty-Eighter who threw his legal and journalistic skills behind the early Republican Party, and whose wife Margarethe was a pioneer in the field of early childhood education. Appointed ambassador to Spain by Lincoln, Schurz tactfully influenced that country against supporting the Confederacy. Later, he served as Brigadier-General and earned a reputation for bravery, serving at the Union defeats of Second Bull Run and Chancellorsville and then the victories of Gettysburg and Chattanooga. After the war, he edited newspapers at Detroit and St. Louis. In 1868 he was elected Senator for Missouri, becoming the U.S. Senate's first German American. He later served as Secretary of the Interior under President Rutherford B. Hayes.
Just as prominent was Schurz's friend and fellow Forty-Eighter Major-General Franz Sigel. Sigel's mention in Lucifer's Drum is not complimentary, referring to the whipping he took at the Battle of New Market (May 15, 1864) in the Shenandoah. But Sigel was a man of proven valor, whose reputation helped attract German recruits throughout the war—"I fights mit Sigel!" was their proud declaration. Early on, he was instrumental in keeping the Union's grip on Missouri. And on March 8, 1862, Sigel's counterattack at the Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas, sealed an important Union victory.
Major-General Franz Sigel, victorious at Pea Ridge
but crushed at New Market; throughout the war, a
powerful symbol of pro-Union German Americans.
(Courtesy: Library of Congress)
Max Weber, who had served under Sigel in the '48 revolutionary forces, raised a German American unit called the Turner Rifles and became a Brigadier-General of Volunteers. At Antietam, assaulting John Brown Gordon's position along the Sunken Road, Weber was grievously wounded. He too gets brief mention in Lucifer's Drum, for his hasty evacuation of Harper's Ferry during Early's Raid. (True to the time and place, Sigel and Weber are referred to in the book as "Dutchmen," a common corruption of "Deutsch.")
Lawyer, revolutionary and politician Friedrich Heckler escaped royalist authorities in Europe and settled in Illinois, where he had a major role in founding the Republican Party and focusing its abolitionist principles. He became a regimental colonel of largely German immigrant troops and was badly wounded at Chancellorsville, though he recovered to participate in the victory of Missionary Ridge and the capture of Knoxville.
Seventeen German immigrants serving under the Union banner received the Medal of Honor.
Rich and poor, male and female, Catholic and Protestant and Jewish, these German Americans represented a vast and obvious benefit for the United States, given their literacy, industriousness and idealism. Poignantly, they were just the sort of German that Germany itself, some seventy years after the U.S. Civil War, could have used to combat Hitler's rise. And when the U.S. army landed in occupied Europe, its ranks again featured German names from top to bottom—from future novelist Private Kurt Vonnegut to Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight Eisenhower. Thus, often, is one nation's catastrophe another nation's gain.
German Americans remain the largest distinct ethnic group in the U.S.—and in the Civil War, were the largest such group represented in Union military ranks. German-speaking people were settling in British North America from the earliest colonial times, the very first being Dr. Johannes Fleischer at the 1607 founding of Jamestown, Virginia. In the North, they played a conspicuous role in the settling of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa and Missouri; in the South, many set roots in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, French Louisiana and eventually Texas (where, in a fine example of cultural cross-fertilization, they introduced Mexican residents to the accordion.) They were drawn by the classic immigrant visions—rich land for farmers and a burgeoning economy for shopkeepers and artisans, as well as freedom from religious and political oppression.
Germany would not exist as a coherent nation until the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-71, when Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck engineered a stunning victory over France. Simultaneously, the loosely run German Confederation—founded by the 1815 Congress of Vienna, comprising thirty-nine principalities—was galvanized into the German Empire. But before von Bismarck's triumph, these German states chafed under the autocratic domination of Austria; they were therefore fertile ground for liberal political agitation. In early 1848, an anti-monarchist revolution broke out in Paris and ignited several concurrent uprisings throughout the Confederation, throwing many crowned heads into panic. Working and middle class Germans held massive street demonstrations, demanding better living and working conditions, as well as universal male suffrage, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press and a united Germany. In many instances, royalist troops fired on unarmed demonstrators, who reacted by arming themselves and taking the crisis to a new and bloodier level.
Austrian Emperor Ferdinand I, Prussian King Fredrick William IV and the many German princes made nervous concessions. A National Assembly was called in the free city of Frankfurt am Main—in the novel, Kirschenbaum's home city—and drew up a constitution enshrining the principle of equal rights. Its primary goal was to unite the states as a constitutional monarchy—but as the revolution's working and middle class factions gradually split, and as advocates of Austrian vs. Prussian hegemony failed to agree, royalty and aristocracy realized that the liberal peril was receding. The Assembly at Frankfurt was dissolved in May 1849. Full-fledged war broke out between the revolutionaries and the Kingdom of Prussia, and the revolutionaries lost big.
Street-fighting scene from the Revolutionary Year
of 1848, Adolphe Hervier (1821-1879).
(Courtesy: Library of Congress)
In a dispiriting anticlimax, concessions were cancelled, rights abolished and protests violently suppressed. Arrests, executions and imprisonments followed. One consequence of this was a great wave of German immigration—disappointed exiles known as "The Forty-Eights," seeking the political freedom they had failed to achieve in their homeland. For the United States, this brought an infusion of people who, however hardscrabble their lives, were beneficiaries of the German primary school system—at that time, probably the best and most inclusive in the world. Overall highly literate and well-read, they took a robust interest in current events—and when the Civil War commenced, they overwhelmingly supported Lincoln and then Emancipation.
Several all-German units did fight for the South, though none reached regimental strength. In Texas, the community of Forty-Eighters steadfastly opposed both slavery and secession. Threatened with the draft in August of 1862, one armed group of them attempted an escape to Mexico but were caught and crushed by a Confederate force on the Nueces River. The North, by contrast, raised many all-German regiments—five from Pennsylvania, six from Ohio and eleven from New York, as well as others from Indiana and Wisconsin. More than 200,000 Union soldiers were German-born. In war-riven Missouri, the pro-Union German community was a crucial factor in preventing secession. (It was a largely German unit under Captain Nathaniel Lyon, in May 1861, that kept Confederates from capturing the federal arsenal at St. Louis.)
Prominent among German Americans was Carl Schurz, a Forty-Eighter who threw his legal and journalistic skills behind the early Republican Party, and whose wife Margarethe was a pioneer in the field of early childhood education. Appointed ambassador to Spain by Lincoln, Schurz tactfully influenced that country against supporting the Confederacy. Later, he served as Brigadier-General and earned a reputation for bravery, serving at the Union defeats of Second Bull Run and Chancellorsville and then the victories of Gettysburg and Chattanooga. After the war, he edited newspapers at Detroit and St. Louis. In 1868 he was elected Senator for Missouri, becoming the U.S. Senate's first German American. He later served as Secretary of the Interior under President Rutherford B. Hayes.
Just as prominent was Schurz's friend and fellow Forty-Eighter Major-General Franz Sigel. Sigel's mention in Lucifer's Drum is not complimentary, referring to the whipping he took at the Battle of New Market (May 15, 1864) in the Shenandoah. But Sigel was a man of proven valor, whose reputation helped attract German recruits throughout the war—"I fights mit Sigel!" was their proud declaration. Early on, he was instrumental in keeping the Union's grip on Missouri. And on March 8, 1862, Sigel's counterattack at the Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas, sealed an important Union victory.
Major-General Franz Sigel, victorious at Pea Ridge
but crushed at New Market; throughout the war, a
powerful symbol of pro-Union German Americans.
(Courtesy: Library of Congress)
Max Weber, who had served under Sigel in the '48 revolutionary forces, raised a German American unit called the Turner Rifles and became a Brigadier-General of Volunteers. At Antietam, assaulting John Brown Gordon's position along the Sunken Road, Weber was grievously wounded. He too gets brief mention in Lucifer's Drum, for his hasty evacuation of Harper's Ferry during Early's Raid. (True to the time and place, Sigel and Weber are referred to in the book as "Dutchmen," a common corruption of "Deutsch.")
Lawyer, revolutionary and politician Friedrich Heckler escaped royalist authorities in Europe and settled in Illinois, where he had a major role in founding the Republican Party and focusing its abolitionist principles. He became a regimental colonel of largely German immigrant troops and was badly wounded at Chancellorsville, though he recovered to participate in the victory of Missionary Ridge and the capture of Knoxville.
Seventeen German immigrants serving under the Union banner received the Medal of Honor.
Rich and poor, male and female, Catholic and Protestant and Jewish, these German Americans represented a vast and obvious benefit for the United States, given their literacy, industriousness and idealism. Poignantly, they were just the sort of German that Germany itself, some seventy years after the U.S. Civil War, could have used to combat Hitler's rise. And when the U.S. army landed in occupied Europe, its ranks again featured German names from top to bottom—from future novelist Private Kurt Vonnegut to Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight Eisenhower. Thus, often, is one nation's catastrophe another nation's gain.
