1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [139]
But it was a wave of newcomers from even farther afield that was truly transforming the face of St. Louis. Beginning in the 1840s, German and other central European immigrants poured into the city, attracted at first by a pioneer propagandist named Gottfried Duden, who described the Mississippi Valley as a kind of American Rhineland: just as romantic, but with lusher vegetation and a milder climate, both politically and meteorologically. This may not have been quite accurate, but by the time Duden’s countrymen made the trek and realized as much, the migration had taken on a momentum of its own. By 1861, a visitor to many parts of the city might indeed have thought he was somewhere east of Aachen. “Here we hear the German tongue, or rather the German dialect, everywhere,” one Landsmann en-thused. Certainly you would hear it in places like Tony Niederwiesser’s Tivoli beer garden on Third Street, where Sunday-afternoon regulars quaffed lager while Sauter’s or Vogel’s orchestra played waltzes and sentimental tunes from the old country. You would hear it in Henry Boernstein’s St. Louis Opera House on Market Street, where the house company celebrated Friedrich Schiller’s centennial in 1859 by performing the master’s theatrical works for a solid week. You would hear it in the newspaper offices of the competing dailies Anzeiger des Westens and Westliche Post, as well as the weekly Mississippi Blätter. You would hear it even in public school classrooms, where the children of immigrants received instruction in the mother tongue.42
St. Louis was still officially slave territory, of course. Indeed, it was here that Dred Scott—“the best known colored person in the world,” locals liked to boast—had sued for his freedom; here that his widow and daughters still lived in an alleyway just off Franklin Avenue.* Mrs. Scott and her children were free, though—as were most black St. Louisans. The number of slaves in the city had dwindled to fewer than two thousand, or less than 1 percent of the population. Local politicians—even some who owned a few slaves themselves—were calling for the state to enact gradual emancipation. It would be good for business, they said; it would lure even more Yankee capital to town.43
No wonder that when cotton growers from Little Dixie came into the city they sometimes felt as though they were in an alien country. Yet Missouri as a whole still lay firmly in the political grasp of such men: the Southern planters, the slaveholders, the aristocratic scions of old French colonial families. As a bloc, they and their supporters far outnumbered the German newcomers, and in the early months of 1861, as their sister states seceded one by one around them, these men naturally assumed that it was they who would decide Missouri’s fate.
In January, the state had sworn in a new governor. Claiborne Fox Jackson was a poker-playing, horse-trading, Little Dixie planter who had once led armed Border Ruffians into neighboring Kansas to keep it from becoming a free state. Better just to let the Indian savages keep Kansas forever, Jackson had once said, since “they are better neighbors than the abolitionists, by a damn sight.”44
Officially, Jackson was neutral on secession, reassuring everyone that the ultimate decision would be up to the citizens of Missouri. But in his inaugural address, he made his leanings clear enough. “The weight of Kentucky or Missouri, thrown into the scale,” could tip the balance nationally from the Union to the Confederacy, the governor said. And should the federal government try to coerce the seceding states, he warned, “Missouri will not be found to shrink from the duty which her position upon the border imposes: her honor, her interests, and her sympathies point alike in one direction,