Description
Book SynopsisLiberal German immigrants, having escaped the European aristocracy who undermined their revolution and the formation of a free nation, viewed slaveholders as a specter of European feudalism. By contextualizing German Americans in their European past and exploring their ideological formation in failed nationalist revolutions, Zachary Stuart Garrison adds nuance and complexity to their story.
Trade ReviewZachary Stuart Garrison's dynamically researched book offers a new starting point in the discussion of German American participation in the Civil War. Living on the middle border and the border west, these men and women can be seen dealing with slavery, nativism, and America's political party system in ways that cut them free from the historical stereotypes to which students of the nineteenth century have become accustomed. To his credit, Garrison depicts the range of German-speaking immigrants and settlers as very real people who negotiated their new surroundings by finding a middle ground between their high-minded ideology and the evolving reality of life on the border between North and South"—Joseph M. Beilein Jr., author of
Bushwhackers: Guerrilla Warfare, Manhood, and the Household in Civil War Missouri"Zachary Stuart Garrison offers a thorough and engaging study of the ways in which German Americans on the Midwestern border responded to the issues of slavery, sectionalism, and the Civil War. In the process, Garrison includes an original explanation of how nineteenth-century understandings of nationalism, liberalism, and abolitionism developed in a transatlantic context"—Andre M. Fleche, author of
The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict"I was very interested to read Zachary Stuart Garrison's book
German-Americans on the Middle Border. It is a coherent and useful summary of the existing published literature on politically and militarily active German-Americans before, during, and after the Civil War. I hope it will inspire further exploration in the untranslated materials that still remain open to research"—Steven Rowan, author of
Germans for a Free Missouri: Translations from the St. Louis Radical Press, 1857—1862"What did it mean for an ethnic minority to embrace free labor along slavery's western border, where the vast majority of white people felt they must maintain the institution or risk economic and social 'degradation'? Zachary Stuart Garrison's
German Americans on the Middle Border grapples with such critical questions, skillfully tracing the genealogy of German American liberalism and political ideology in an understudied region"—Matthew E. Stanley, author of
The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in the Middle America"Zachary Stuart Garrison makes a powerful case for the importance of German liberal ideology to the development of antislavery thought in the Midwest. This nuanced depiction of the evolution of that ideology during the middle of the nineteenth century demonstrates the centrality of German liberalism to explaining both why so many Germans became radical Republicans during the Civil War and why so many sought moderation during Reconstruction"—Kristen Layne Anderson, author of
Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America
