Booknotes: Fighting for a Free Missouri

New Arrival:

• Fighting for a Free Missouri: German Immigrants, African Americans, and the Issue of Slavery edited by Sydney J. Norton (Univ of Mo Pr, 2023).

Directly challenging Missouri's native-born, proslavery majority on ideological, social, and political grounds, heavy German immigration into the state during the years leading up to the Civil War rapidly transformed Missouri society. Those differences helped set up an epic factional clash during the Civil War between Missouri's antislavery radical minority (among whom the Germans figured very significantly), the state's proslavery Unionist majority, and Confederate sympathizers.

From the description: "This collection of ten original essays (with a foreword by renowned Missouri historian Gary Kremer), relates what unfolded when idealistic Germans, many of whom were highly educated and devoted to the ideals of freedom and democracy, left their homeland and settled in a pre–Civil War slave state." Glancing through the text, it looks like many essays encompass both pre-war developments and wartime activities, and the final essay, written by a sociologist playwright, explores the ways in which German abolitionists of old inspired her own current work.

Prominent individuals, some well-known and others less commonly recognized by readers of Civil War-era topics, are a major part of many essays. More from the description: "Fleeing political persecution during the 1830s and 1840s, immigrants such as Friedrich Münch, Eduard Mühl, Heinrich Boernstein, and Arnold Krekel arrived in the area now known as the Missouri German Heritage Corridor in hopes of finding a land more congenial to their democratic ideals. When they witnessed the state of enslaved Blacks, many of them became abolitionist activists and fervent supporters of Abraham Lincoln and the Union in the emerging Civil War."

The contributors to editor Sydney Norton's Fighting for a Free Missouri: German Immigrants, African Americans, and the Issue of Slavery collectively "explore the Germans’ abolitionist mission, their relationships with African Americans, and their activity in the radical wing of the Republican Party."