Photo by Jean Baptiste Feilner
Henry Boernstein's carte de visite, made in Bremen in 1873
The recent story of Dr. Adam Hammer and his colorful life, owning a brewery while simultaneously fighting for the abolition of slavery in St. Louis, led me to investigate some of his contemporary German-American revolutionaries in the Gateway City. Much ado has been made about the 1848 revolutions in Europe and how people fled to America after their failure. But what is so often sanitized from the history of those German refugees—at least here in conservative St. Louis—is just how radical those men and women were. Rather than being German versions of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, they were further to the left politically than those two Americans could have ever imagined.
Take Henry Boernstein, for example. As I mentioned several weeks ago, he also owned a small brewery for a short time. He’d also, back in Europe, corresponded directly with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. But a perusal of contemporary newspaper stories reveals that his famous German-language newspaper, the Anzeiger des Westens, was not some simple Teutonic USA Today for the antebellum era. The paper was vehemently opposed to slavery—frustratingly so for the monolingual English-speaking, slaveholding elite of Missouri who could not read what was being said about their Peculiar Institution. The St. Louis Globe Democrat printed a letter to the editor on August 2, 1854, referring to “Boernstein and his Satanic crew…of such infidels and agitators.”
The Anzeiger editor knew how to give as much as he could take, mocking the current mayor of St. Louis in another letter to the editor. Boernstein’s agitator status also stretched deep in to the South, judging from various newspaper articles from as early as 1852 in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alabama, almost a full decade before the outbreak of the Civil War. In one incident, a woman of dubious reliability recounts her supposed assault on Boernstein in the streets of St. Louis after he had insulted the honor of her presumably slaveholding husband.
Striking Boernstein on his back with pieces of leather cowhides, one woman claimed that his “skin must be thicker than the hide of a rhinoceros, if it does not still exhibit all the colors of the rainbow, and even though Mr. Boernstein himself may long since have forgotten how to blush, the same cannot be said of his back.”
Lithograph by F. Welker; courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
Friedrich Hecker commemorative lithograph, c. 1881
Boernstein, like another colleague of Dr. Hammer, Friedrich Hecker, would take up arms for the Union when the Civil War broke out in 1861. Again, Hecker was far from a simple Revolutionary War hero Baron von Steuben, arriving from Germany to fight for freedom. Like the aforementioned refugees from 1848, he stood further to the left politically than is usually mentioned in local celebrations of German heritage. In fact, Hecker is largely forgotten today, despite the collection of his papers at the State Historical Society of Missouri and the large obelisk dedicated to him in Benton Park. His oblivion is a shame, as he is known throughout Europe as one of the more important figures of the 1848 revolutions.
Photo by Chris Naffziger
The Friedrich Hecker monument in Benton Park has been stripped of its bronze plaque, as have many of the old German monuments in South City. One more erasure of history.
Hecker’s attempt at overthrowing the government of Grand Duchy of Baden in the Black Forest failed (he was never a very good military commander), and he came to the St. Louis region, most likely around the same time as Dr. Hammer. Hecker’s political activities in Illinois (where a town is named for him) brought him into contact with Abraham Lincoln. Fighting in the Union army, Hecker was wounded in the battle at Chancellorsville, the great Confederate victory. A University of Missouri webpage states that modern Germans view him as a 19th-century Che Guevera.
Beyond a doubt, German-Americans’ service in the Union army in such large numbers (even Adolphus Busch and William Lemp, sons of capitalist German industrialists, signed up) was the direct result of these radical newspaper editors’ and agitators’ work. Despite modern attempts at historical revisionism about “States’ Rights,” the content of these German newspaper articles (now available online) makes it abundantly clear that abolitionism was a motivating impetus for Boernstein and Hecker in fighting for the Union. Likewise, by reading their own words in German, we see that their leftist political beliefs were a major influence in their push for the end of slavery.
Why has this aspect of the 1848 German immigrants’ contribution to American history been ignored? I strongly suspect there are two major contributing factors. The first is the strong anti-German sentiment that sprang up during World War I. Much of the German contribution to American society was expunged from history at this time, beginning with simple acts such as renaming St. Louis streets and moving to broader issues such as the acceleration of Prohibition, which destroyed the economic power of countless German industrialists.
The second factor is the threat of Marxist revolution in the early 20th century, coinciding with the defeat of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires in 1918. The Russian Revolution’s story is very much intertwined with that empire’s defeat by the Central Powers in 1917, and Western Europe and America’s fear of Communism certainly caused the reputation of our German freedom to decline. Yet these were great men and women, fighting for noble causes in the infancy of United States history.
