Description
Book SynopsisMissouri 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, relates what unfolded when idealistic Germans left their homeland and settled in a pre-Civil War slave state.
Trade Review“
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 “Missouri's entering the Union in 1821 coincided with the beginning of large-scale immigration from German-speaking Europe, with nearly two million Germans coming to the U.S. prior to the Civil War. Many of them sought to start a new life on the Missouri frontier. These immigrants, in a pivotal slave state, found themselves embroiled in the controversy over the abolition of slavery in the "land of the free." Sydney Norton's anthology plunges the reader into the midst of this struggle, offering a multitude of insights into the interactions of German immigrants with the enslavement of African Americans and the bloody battle that ultimately led to freedom.”—William D. Keel, University of Kansas, editor of
Yearbook of German-American Studies
