Most Americans think of the U.S. Civil War as the quintessential “American” war. That is the way K-12 students are taught about the bloodiest conflict in American history. College undergraduates are often reminded that this is “our” war; we cannot blame it on anyone else; and we are the ones who must understand it. As such, the U.S. Civil War has traditionally been studied as a domestic conflict. Anyone who teaches U.S. history must address how the war became possible, how the nation emerged from this catastrophe, and how the legacies and memories of the Civil War continue to haunt us. Most instructors barely have time to mention the view that, although British textile workers suffered high unemployment due to the Union blockade of Confederate cotton exports, they were largely supportive of Northern efforts to end slavery. Students may also learn that immigrants fought in disproportionate numbers for the North. While they made up about 13 percent of the population, foreign-born men or the sons of at least one immigrant parent made up 43 percent of Union soldiers (Don H. Doyle, The Cause of All Nations [2014]). Scholars emphasize the ideological reasons for this overwhelming support for the Union: immigrants fought for free labor, economic opportunity, freedom from oppression, and for the survival of democratic self-determination. The Gettysburg Address and scholarship about Lincoln's most important speech support the claim that the North and the survival of a United States was mankind's last best hope that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Patrick Gaul rejects this celebratory narrative of liberalism and reminds us that German backing of the Union should not be taken for granted. Despite widespread support for the cause of liberty, especially among some elite 48ers, Central European merchants, shipping companies, as well as arms manufacturers and traffickers traded with the highest bidders and did not shy away from smuggling goods, successfully avoiding the Union naval blockade most of the time (Alison Clark Efford, German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era [2013]). Focusing on the Hanseatic city states of Hamburg and Bremen as well as Central Europe's financial center, Frankfurt am Main, Gaul begins with an overview of the multiplicity of German-language discourses about U.S. slavery during the antebellum decades. He rejects the idea that German-speakers uniformly opposed slavery for moral reasons. Instead, he argues that several domestic and international events competed for people's attention, and in the end, economic interests of producers and consumers outweighed ideological concerns. German-speakers generally “shrugged their shoulders” regarding slavery and the abolitionist movement (58).
Gaul draws on rare documents of the Hamburg-based Hapag and Bremen's Norddeutsche Lloyd shipping companies to illustrate the economic and geopolitical importance of the Hanseatic cities as centers for overseas trade. American diplomacy had focused on expanding trade relations since its inception. When fighting broke out in April 1861, international law of the time meant that states which declared their neutrality (Great Britain and France) or those which remained silent (Prussia, Austria, as well as the German city-states) could not stop private companies from trading with both belligerent parties. The records show that shipping companies made surprising profits through the transport of goods when the war disrupted German immigrant passenger traffic to the North American continent. Nearly 40 percent of all weapons shipments arriving in New York between 1860 and 1865 originated in Hamburg and Bremen, second only to English ports. Gaul suggests that the illicit trade in arms and cotton contributed to the length and severity of the bloodshed in North America.
Ordinary textile workers recognized global interconnectedness for the first time when they lost their livelihoods. The Central European textile industry and its workers suffered greatly when cotton imports were reduced by more than 96 percent in 1862 due to the “Cotton Famine.” Governments across the region provided some much-needed financial assistance to companies and poorhouses. At the same time, by the third year of the war, the port of Bremen received considerable amounts of smuggled cotton from Texas via the Mexican port of Matamoros. Enticed by generous bounties and promises of free land through the Homestead Act, increasing numbers of German immigrants made their way across the Atlantic again after 1863, just when arms shipments from Central Europe to the U.S. declined. Southern agents in Central Europe did their best to discourage potential immigrants, highlighting instances of fraud and coercion.
Gaul shows that Frankfurt am Main was the interior river port equivalent to Hamburg and Bremen. As the political capital of the 1848–1849 revolution, it also emerged as the most important financial center of continental Europe. Moreover, much of Frankfurt's hinterland had been the source of German-speaking emigrants for more than a century and a half. During the 1860s, nearly two-thirds of Union securities traded in Europe were sold in Central Europe. Yet Gaul cautions that the prospect of financial gain was probably more important than “explicit sympathies for the Union” (295).
The Confederate surrender at Appomattox and Lincoln's assassination six days later were celebrated and mourned in Central Europe. Gaul shows that hopes for a positive influence on German political unity did not materialize with the 1866 Seven Weeks’ War, also sometimes called the German Civil War. Instead, the emancipation of four million enslaved people and their new claims to civil rights in the U.S. contributed to the discourse of controlling and civilizing “racially inferior” workers in Central Europe and colonized peoples in Africa. Nevertheless, public memory of the American Civil War heralded the triumph of liberty over oppression.
Based on his dissertation at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Patrick Gaul's work is important because it offers new insights about the American Civil War in a Central European context. Gaul engages an enormous body of literature on two continents and in two languages. He may be forgiven for leaving out some of the latest scholarship by scholars such as Alice Baumgartner and Kevin Waite. Gaul's book should be translated into English to make it accessible to a broader audience. Scholars wishing to learn more about his fascinating evidence and findings can read his concise English-language overview in a thirty-page article, “Trading in the Shadow of Neutrality,” published in the Bulletin of the German Historical Institute in 2020.
