"Civil Warfare in the Streets"

"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 enthused...

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 wanted to escape: a swaggering clique of landed oligarchs. 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 endear them to longtime St. Louisans... 

Missouri’s Germans had been slow to unite behind Abraham Lincoln in the recent presidential election—the folksy rail-splitter held little charm for the acolytes of Goethe and Hegel. But support from intellectuals like Boernstein encouraged them: the editor, fast becoming one of Missouri’s top Republican power brokers, hailed his party’s nominee 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.”... 

The sentries waved her through; clearly this was just a widow paying a visit to her militiaman son, and her basket must be full of sandwiches she had lovingly prepared for her dear boy.

In fact, the wicker basket held two loaded Colt revolvers. And if the sentries had peered under the old lady’s veil, they would have glimpsed something even more surprising: a bushy red beard.

Surely there must have been a hundred simpler ways to reconnoiter the rebels’ picnic ground...

Grant himself would believe for the rest of his life that but for Lyon and his Germans, the Arsenal, and with it St. Louis, would have been taken by the Confederacy. By seizing the initiative—by transforming the Wide Awakes into soldiers and moving against the secessionists before they could properly organize—the “damn Dutchmen” had sent their enemies reeling, never to regain their balance."

https://theamericanscholar.org/civil-warfare-in-the-streets/#

This is one "white saviors" movie that I would watch. The identity stuff here is fascinating. 

FB: This is wild. "

Missouri Germans flocked to join the semisecret political groups, known as Wide Awakes, that formed across the North in support of Lincoln’s candidacy. Capes! Torches! Nighttime parades!... Although Lincoln lost Missouri decisively, the Wide Awake clubs did not disband after the election. In fact, they began arming themselves: not with torches now, but 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.) Under the supervision of General Sigel and veterans of the Prussian officer corps, they began their clandestine drills."