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By Root 1711 0

and determine her to stand by the South.” (Judging by the printed sources, Jackson seems to have been a man who spoke frequently in italics.) One of the governor’s first acts in office was to secure legislative approval for a statewide convention to determine where Missouri would pledge her loyalties and her considerable resources. To leave the Union would require a statewide referendum. But neither the Governor nor the legislature seemed to have the slightest doubt about which way the convention—or Missouri’s citizenry—would vote. The delegates certainly seemed like a reliable enough group: some four-fifths of them were slaveholders. They gathered first in Jefferson City, the state’s tiny capital, and then, seeking better hotel accommodations, moved to St. Louis.45

The gentlemen did indeed find the creature comforts of the metropolis far more satisfactory. In every other respect, however, the move to St. Louis was the worst strategic blunder that the hard-core Jacksonites could have ventured. For they arrived in a city that was tense, frightened, and divided—and whose inhabitants were arming themselves not just for secession, not just to preserve the Union, but for an all-out ethnic war.

Almost since their first arrival, the Germans of St. Louis had been a class apart politically as well as culturally. Many had left their native land to escape not only poverty but also the reactionary regimes that ruled Germany’s claustrophobic labyrinth of tiny duchies and principalities. Arriving in the United States, they rejoiced in the expansive landscape, in the freedom of expression, and in the spirit of a nation whose watchword, they had been told, was liberty.

And they almost immediately fell afoul of their new American neighbors. In 1836, when a black St. Louis man was accused of murdering a police officer, a group of whites seized the prisoner from the city jail, manacled him to a tree at the corner of Seventh and Locust, and burned him alive before a large crowd of spectators. The next day, the shocked editor of the city’s recently established German-language newspaper, the Anzeiger des Westens, denounced the atrocity. “Citizens of St. Louis!” he wrote. “The stain with which your city was defiled last night can never be erased.”

Citizens of St. Louis promptly taught him a lesson. Several hundred of them gathered as an angry mob outside the Anzeiger’s office, and only with difficulty were restrained from committing another lynching. The next morning’s issue of the St. Louis Commercial Bulletin, a leading English-language newspaper, chastised the editor for insulting in an “unjust manner the whole community.”46

But the newcomers were not to be intimidated so easily. Over the succeeding years, as their ranks swelled, they grew ever bolder and more outspoken. In 1848 and 1849, the steady flow of arrivals became a flood as Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians fled the aftermath of the failed liberal revolutions across Europe. Among those it swept into St. Louis was Franz Sigel, the daring military commander of insurgent forces in the Baden uprising, comrade of Louis Kossuth and Giuseppe Mazzini; in his new homeland, Sigel became a teacher of German and school superintendent. Another political refugee was Isidor Bush, a Prague-born Jew and publisher of revolutionary tracts in Vienna, who settled down in St. Louis as a respected wine merchant, railroad executive, and city councilman—as well as, somewhat more discreetly, a leader of the local abolitionists.*

Most prominent among all the Achtundvierziger—the Forty-Eighters, as they styled themselves—was a colorful Austrian émigré named Heinrich Börnstein. Whether Börnstein was a hero or a scoundrel depended on whom you asked. In Europe he had been a soldier in the imperial army, an actor, a director—and, most notably, an editor. During a sojourn in Paris, he launched a weekly journal called Vorwärts!, which published antireligious screeds, poetry by Heine, and some of the first “scientific socialist” writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. When Börnstein helped