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By Root 1749 0

organize a German Legion to aid the 1848 revolution, things became a bit hot for him with the Parisian authorities, and he prudently decamped. In America he became Henry Boernstein: homeopathic physician, saloonkeeper, brewer, pharmacist, theatrical impresario, hotel owner, novelist—and, naturally, political agitator. After purchasing the ever more influential Anzeiger des Westens in 1850, he swung the paper even harder to the left. Though he may have cut a somewhat eccentric figure around town, with his flamboyant clothing and a pair of Mitteleuropean side-whiskers that would have put Emperor Franz Josef to shame, Boernstein was a force to be reckoned with in St. Louis, a man both admired and hated.47

For such men, and even for their less radical compatriots, Missouri’s slaveholding class represented exactly what they had detested in the old country, exactly what they had come here to escape: a swaggering clique of landed oligarchs, boorish aristocrats obstructing the forces of modernity and progress. By contrast, the Germans prided themselves on being, as an Anzeiger editorial rather smugly put it, “filled with more intensive concepts of freedom, with more expansive notions of humanity, than most peoples of the earth”—more imbued with true democratic spirit, indeed more American, than the Americans themselves. Such presumption did not exactly endear them to longtime St. Louisans. The city’s leading Democratic newspaper excoriated the Forty-Eighters as infidels, anarchists, fanatics, socialists—“all Robespierres, Dantons, and Saint-Justs, red down to their very kidneys.” Clearly these Germans were godless, too: one need only walk downtown on a Sunday afternoon to see them drinking beer, dancing, and flocking to immoral plays in their theaters—flagrantly violating not just the commandments of God but the city ordinances of St. Louis.48

Few if any of the city fathers were prepared, however, to risk enforcing the blue laws. Those beer drinkers and theatergoers had become a powerful voting bloc. Many Missouri Germans cast their first votes for Thomas Hart Benton, when the old maverick—not unmindful of demographic shifts in his home state—steered toward populism. Then they rallied to the new Republican Party. Their special hero in 1856 was John C. Frémont. Here was a leader in the true style of the Forty-Eighters: no dough-faced politician but a dashing idealist, a man of action, a bearded paladin. (That Colonel Frémont happened to be the illegitimate son of a French mural painter only enhanced his Romantic cachet.) It was with somewhat less enthusiasm that they would unite behind Lincoln four years later—split rails held little charm for the acolytes of Goethe and Hegel. But support from intellectuals like Boernstein encouraged them: the editor, who was fast becoming one of Missouri’s top Republican power brokers, hailed his party’s nominee, in proper Achtundvierzigerisch terms, as “the man who will see his way through a great struggle yet to come, the struggle with the most dangerous and ruthless enemy of freedom.”49

A few months later, the Wide Awake craze reached St. Louis. Capes! Torches! Secret meetings! It was just like the good old days back in Dresden and Heidelberg. Before long, Germans by the thousands were joining up, and relishing the opportunity to get back into fighting trim. One of the local movement’s leaders (discreetly writing in the third person) later recalled:

From their headquarters … the Wide Awakes marched in procession to the places of appointed political gatherings, and while the meeting continued, (if at night,) each man, with a lighted lamp placed securely on the end of a heavy stick, stationed himself on the outside of the assembled crowd, thus depriving ruffianly opponents of their hiding-places in the dark. At the first two meetings which the Wide Awakes thus attended, the enemy, not understanding the purposes of the club, began their usual serenade of yells and cheers, but they were speedily initiated into the mysteries of the new order; which initiation consisted in being besmeared with