1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [142]
The national Republican establishment was quick to exploit this touching display of pro-Lincoln sentiment in the heart of a slave state. William Seward hastened to the city and, from the balcony of his hotel room, addressed a crowd of Wide Awakes who had come to serenade him by torchlight. The master politician—forearmed, as usual, with flattery specific to his audience—exulted: “Missouri is Germanizing herself to make herself free.” (Frederick Douglass had already expressed similar enthusiasm: “A German only has to be a German to be utterly opposed to slavery,” he wrote.)51
Of all those attempting to harness the unruly energy of St. Louis’s Wide Awake Germans, none was more assiduous or effective than Francis Preston Blair, Jr. The younger brother of Montgomery Blair—Lincoln’s postmaster general, and his cabinet’s strongest proponent of defending Fort Sumter—thirty-nine-year-old Frank Blair, a former protégé of Senator Benton, had won a seat in Congress as a Missouri Republican. Although publicly opposed to slavery (he favored resettling the nation’s blacks as a new American colony somewhere in Central America), Blair was first and foremost a narrow-eyed opportunist, a tireless strategist for his own sake and for that of his vast web of kin by blood and marriage, a network whose nerve center was the family’s Washington mansion, which faced the White House across Pennsylvania Avenue. His canny instincts told him early on that secession and civil war were inevitable. In the Wide Awakes of St. Louis, he saw not a constituency of any national electoral importance—there was no way that Lincoln could carry Missouri anyhow—but rather a personal power base, a legion of Republican centurions who might march at his back through the chaotic days to come.52
Blair made sure that the Wide Awake clubs did not disband after the election. By Christmas, in fact, rumor had it—correctly, for once—that he was starting to arm them with Sharps rifles provided by certain unofficial sources in the East. (Some of the Germans’ new weaponry arrived hidden, appropriately enough, in empty beer barrels shipped to Tony Niederwiesser’s saloon and others.) Under the supervision of General Sigel, and with veterans of the Prussian officer corps acting as instructors, they began their clandestine drills, practicing with wooden muskets when they lacked real ones. St. Louis, however, was not a place where such things could be kept secret for long. By early March, Democratic papers carried reports of a terrifying new battalion known as the Black Jaegers (it sounded even more horrible in German, the Unabhängige Schwarzer Jägerkorps), allegedly so named because they would fight under a black flag, signifying no quarter to their foes.53
The Jaegers’ foes, for their part, were not sitting idly by. The secessionists formed their own force of armed Minute Men—“the grimmest of German-haters,” Boernstein called them—establishing a headquarters in the old Berthold mansion at the corner of Fifth and Pine. Many of the city’s old-line militia groups affiliated themselves with the new organization. Unlike Blair’s forces, the Minute Men had little need for secrecy. On February 13, in fact, they were officially mustered en masse into the Missouri State Guard—a clear signal of Governor Jackson’s intentions, in case anyone was still in doubt.54
Democratic newspapers fanned the flames more vigorously than ever against “the Red Republicans or Infidel Germans,” the “ ‘fugitives from justice’ of foreign lands, who by some trickery have become citizens of our country.” Abolitionist fanatics were concocting some dark plot, one editor warned, and “the German population of our city are to be used as the means for carrying out the objects of the dastard enterprise.” Ordinary Missourians used more direct language: along with the usual racial epithets, “Damn Dutch,” a corruption of Deutsch,