Wolfgang Helbich, Walter Kamphoefner. Deutsche im Amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg: Briefe von Front und Farm 1861-1865. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2002. 580 S. EUR 39.00 (gebunden), ISBN 978-3-506-73916-2.
Reviewed by Russell A. Kazal (Department of Humanities, University of Toronto at Scarborough)
Published on H-German (January, 2005)
Among the mountains of books devoted to the American Civil War, letter collections make up one of the more prominent peaks. Over a thousand such titles exist, as Wolfgang Helbich and Walter Kamphoefner note in the foreword to their contribution to the genre, Deutsche im Amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg. The volume, which brings together wartime correspondence generated by seventy-eight German immigrants, thus raises the unavoidable question: was this, yet another collection of Civil War letters, worth the effort? Readers of H-German might also ask, would this particular collection be worth their time?
The answer to the first question is an emphatic yes; to the second, a qualified one. Historians of the Civil War, of the mid-nineteenth-century United States, and of American immigration would find this a welcome source, and the volume strongly merits an English translation on those grounds alone. Students of German immigration may well find this collection indispensable. The correspondence, with its focus on conditions and experiences within the wartime United States, has less to say to historians of Germany. Yet those with transnational interests--in migration, including return migration, in trans-Atlantic networks and influences, and in the image of America in the German states--may also find this collection rewarding.
Deutsche im Amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg represents a meticulously edited distillation of letters, almost all written between 1860 and 1865, now collected in the Bochumer Auswandererbrief-Sammlung (BABS). Unlike the editors' earlier collection of immigrant correspondence, Briefe aus Amerika (translated as News from the Land of Freedom), the present volume consists, for the most part, not of complete letters, but rather of extensive letter excerpts.[1] The editors aimed to select passages in which immigrants addressed a specific range of topics, including the war itself, politics and slavery; immigrant military experience; relations with other ethnic groups; and the perceived reputation of Germans in America (pp. 13-14). Helbich and Kamphoefner, however, are careful to indicate the nature of material they excluded from a reproduced letter; where more than three lines are excised, a count of those lines and a brief description of the missing material are given in brackets. The editors also employ exhaustively researched headnotes that draw on a wide range of sources--manuscript census returns, muster rolls, church registers, and family histories, among others--to provide what amounts to a biographical sketch of each writer. Crucially, Helbich and Kamphoefner decided to include letters from civilians--farmers, workers, merchants, farm wives--as well as soldiers, although, as they note, the relative scarcity of women's letters in the BABS for these years prevented a full representation of female writers (p. 14).
The result of this effort is a rich, eminently readable, and at times gripping collection of 343 letters, one that offers a window not only into the war, but also on the social history of wartime German America. The collection itself is divided in two parts, the first taking in letters that originated in the eastern theater of war, the second devoted to letters originating in the western theater. The letters are preceded by a long introductory section (pp. 23-99) that lays out the history of the war and the role German immigrants played in it. Much of this section covers ground familiar to historians of the United States, yet chapters on the political stances and military experience of German immigrants are eye-opening; the latter chapter in particular breaks new ground. The book closes with a series of appendices that include a glossary, a bibliography, and a set of maps illustrating the ebb and flow of the war's campaigns.
One of the volume's many strengths lies in the diversity of immigrant backgrounds it covers; the letter writers include, among others, conservative Catholics and Lutherans, politically radical freethinkers, ordinary workers and farmers, affluent businessmen, settled immigrants and sojourners, rural and urban dwellers, Northerners and Southerners, and Confederate as well as Union soldiers. These correspondents in turn reflect the political diversity of German America, especially as it related to the war, race, and slavery.
The old image of German immigrants as committed anti-slavery Unionists certainly receives some support here, as with the New York officer who described the war as "a fight of holy principles that should give the final death-blow to slavery" (p. 186). Yet we also find Confederate soldiers with varying degrees of commitment to the Southern cause; a Union Army private who would just as soon "drive the blackley abolitionists to the devil along with all their niggers" (p. 152); and the pious Pennsylvania couple who note tartly that President Lincoln would not have been shot had he not gone to the theater "on holy Good Friday" (p. 304). Indeed, one of Helbich and Kamphoefner's most interesting findings is that few of the letters of German enlisted men in the Union Army collected here show an ideological or even a patriotic commitment to the Union cause. This stands in stark contrast to James McPherson's finding that a majority of Union soldiers whose letters he analyzed expressed such patriotic or ideological convictions (pp. 76-79).[2]
The collection likewise provides backing for the editors' conclusion that service in the Union Army did not dismantle ethnic boundaries among its soldiers, at least so far as Germans were concerned (p. 82). In fact, the army's all-German regiments, they suggest, resembled nothing so much as German Vereine deployed in the field (p. 72). They note the charming example of Corporal Wilhelm Albrecht's 1864 letter describing the "Lokal" he and his fellow soldiers built in winter quarters, complete with German and American flags, singing practice, and a subscription to the Leipzig Gartenlaube (pp. 72, 172).
Such trans-Atlantic contacts suggest a transnational dimension to the volume that may be of interest to some historians of nineteenth-century Germany. Apart from the fact that many of these letters were directed to homeland relatives or acquaintances, the book also provides correspondence from a return migrant--Heinrich Stähler, who helped to run a copper refinery in Confederate-held southeast Tennessee before returning to Germany in 1864 (pp. 420-433)--as well as from immigrants who later visited Germany. Some letter writers clearly maintained an interest in homeland politics, to the point of viewing the United States as a vehicle for political change in Europe. Thus, the Missouri Unionist Karl Adolph Frick wrote to his mother in 1862 predicting a quick end to the war: "And then perhaps we can also think about the future liberation of Germany, for the matter would only be feasible from this continent." ("Und dann ist vielleicht auch an die einstige Befreiung Deutschland zu denken denn nur von Diesem Contigent [Kontinent] wäre die Sache ausführbar") (p. 401).
The collection does have some limitations. As noted above, women's voices, while present, are underrepresented. Likewise, in their abridgements, the editors may have left out material that could be of interest to some scholars. When they indicate in brackets that they have excised passages concerning, for example, "antagonism between Germans and Americans" (p. 345) or "amerikanische 'Weibsleute'" (p. 391), one wonders what the full text stated.
Overall, however, Deutsche im Amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg is a very welcome addition to the corpus of published primary sources on German emigration and American immigration, and a fine achievement of historical editing. Historians of Germany may find it of interest; historians of the nineteenth-century United States certainly should, and this reviewer hopes they will soon have it available in an English translation.
Notes
[1]. Wolfgang Helbich, Walter D. Kamphoefner, and Ulrike Sommer, eds., Briefe aus Amerika. Deutsche Auswanderer schreiben aus der neuen Welt 1830-1930 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988); and Walter D. Kamphoefner, Wolfgang Helbich, and Ulrike Sommer, eds., News from the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).
[2]. James M. McPherson, What They Fought For, 1861-1865 (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1994); and For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
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Citation:
Russell A. Kazal. Review of Helbich, Wolfgang; Kamphoefner, Walter, Deutsche im Amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg: Briefe von Front und Farm 1861-1865.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10174
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