German Americans on the Middle Border by Garrison Zachary Stuart;

Author:Garrison, Zachary Stuart; [Garrison, Zachary Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press

CHAPTER 6

REBEL BUSHWHACKERS AND THE “DAMNED DUTCH”

RADICAL GERMANS AND THE DEEPER ROOTS OF MISSOURI’S GUERRILLA WAR

By summer 1863, Sam Hildebrand was perhaps the most notorious guerrilla fighter in southeastern Missouri. The Perryville Union suggested, “It would be an exceedingly good thing if this rascal could be caught and hung. No man deserves it more.” For the war’s duration, his name appeared regularly in military reports and newspaper accounts deploring the spiraling violence. Although those loyal to the Union had much to fear, Hildebrand’s wrath seemed curiously concentrated on one segment of the population: German immigrants, or the “Dutch,” “Damned Dutch,” or “Black Dutch,” as Hildebrand and other noted guerrillas and native-born white people derisively referred to them.1

Indeed, throughout his colorful postwar memoir, Hildebrand often revealed his pointed enmity for Germans. In one instance, in August 1863, he and a small band of riders set out for the town of Hamburg, hoping to “take in three or four Dutchmen who had given the relatives of my two men a great deal of trouble.” Deceptively donning the Union blue, Hildebrand coaxed one German to abandon his initial fear and leave the protection of his home. On realizing the grave error, “the whole family came out, placed themselves in a group near us and implored in broken English to spare their father.” Despite the pleas, Hildebrand took the man a short distance away and “hung him to a lean tree.” In justification, Hildebrand cited a number of instances in which he believed Germans had victimized his own family, a fact compounded by the realization that “during the whole war the Dutch went further, tried harder and risked more for my capture than any other people.” For Hildebrand, his family and his culture were under attack, suffering at the hands of immigrant outsiders.2

Consistent with traditional interpretations of Missouri’s guerrilla war, Hildebrand’s actions fit a pattern of personalized, retributive violence that largely lacked broader meaning or ideology.3 Yet plumbing the depths of Missouri’s guerrilla war reveals a cultural, economic, and ideological conflict with roots stretching decades before 1861, including German immigrants’ first arrival in Missouri. Throughout the sectional crisis, Germans elevated their criticisms, portraying slave labor as anathema to a free society. By forming a powerful voting bloc in St. Louis and several river counties, they threatened to alter the state’s political dynamic and uproot its institutions. This emboldened political activism fed the perception that Germans represented Northern fanatic abolitionism and were a horde of foreign mercenaries armed by an oppressive federal government. Yet rarely is German liberalism’s radical antislavery ascendance factored into interpretations of Missouri’s guerrilla warfare.

In German liberalism’s vision of western progress, slavery was an ugly contradiction and a historical wrong that needed correction. Sectional politics and the threat that secession posed to the Union radicalized antislavery Germans along the Middle Border. This was especially true in Missouri, where they saw the chance to upend traditional powers on the state and local levels and open avenues to German leadership. Militarily, Germans made up

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