RLP 149: Germans in St. Louis During the Civil War with Heidi Mathis

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 149, Germans in St. Louis during the Civil War with Heidi Mathis. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (46s):
Let’s go, Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (49s):
Hi, Nicole, how are you doing today?

Nicole (52s):
Good. I’m excited to talk more about Missouri and Germans with Heidi.

Diana (56s):
It’s always fun to jump into a new location where we haven’t really researched or a time period in that location that we haven’t researched. But before we get to our episode, let’s talk a little bit about all the fun we’ve been having this week reading our Study Group members reports. Have you been enjoying that?

Nicole (1m 13s):
I have, it’s hard to only spend a short amount of time. I want to really dive in and just spend an hour on each report.

Diana (1m 20s):
But when we have so many, we can’t do that. I have really noticed that this particular group, not that previous groups didn’t have great reports, but I have just really enjoyed the variety of research topics and the variety of localities and time periods. And I just feel like we are getting better as genealogists. You know, the citations are great. Explanations are good. The research is good. So it’s just been a pleasure reading through these reports.

Nicole (1m 51s):
It has.

Diana (1m 52s):
Well, we have got our guest on with us again today, heidi Mathis is here. Hi Heidi. Hello. We’ve been enjoying working with Heidi as one of our Family Locket genealogists and in our study groups. And she’s been writing for us about researching Germans in Missouri, specifically. And our previous episode, we talked a lot about why the German Immigrants were coming into Missouri at this particular time of 1840-50, 1860. And obviously this is the time period right before the Civil War and during the Civil War. So Heidi, just tell us a little bit about the impact that all of these German Immigrants had on Missouri during the civil Civil War.

Heidi (2m 37s):
It is interesting to think about what happened. You had this state that was a border state during the Civil War and it was very evenly split between pro-union and pro-Southern forces. And you just had this huge wave of Germans coming in that kind of tip the state towards the north. And by looking at the situation, we can kind of see how the differences really couldn’t be worked out and how those just kind of reveal the tensions in the Civil War. And one way to do that, if you can, is to be able to look at individuals in this period and the Missouri state archives had a photograph of this woman Euphrasia Pettus.

Heidi (3m 22s):
And she was written about in this book that I had read called Abolitionizing Missouri, which talks all about this situation, where you had all these Germans coming in, and the woman who wrote the book, her last name is Anderson. And she was the one who introduced me to this character, Euphrasia Pettus. I looked her up and Euphrasia was born in 1839 in Missouri. And her father had been a veteran of the 1812 war, and his name was William Grimes Pettus. He had migrated from Virginia to Missouri. So he was one of the, those wave of Missourians who had Southern roots, who had been also pouring into Missouri in the very early 1800s.

Heidi (4m 4s):
They brought their pro-slavery economy and mindset to Missouri. This Pettus family was enumerated on the St. Louis 1860 census. You know, at the time they were enumerated on the census, St. Louis had gone from a handful of Germans earlier to by 1860 there were 22,534 Germans out of a total population of 77,860 St. Louis. I just began to wonder, what did the Pettus family feel about suddenly being swamped by all these Germans? And in the book, she had found a quote that said from the pro-slavery newspaper, the leader, “these people want to revolutionize our political system, vote away our property and banish our Negro population from our territory.”

Heidi (4m 49s):
So you can see there was a kind of a war of words going on in St. Louis at this time.

Diana (4m 56s):
Right? Because we had talked in the previous episode about how we had a German newspapers, and then we’ve got these pro-slavery newspaper. So you’ve got these two factions fighting it out. I think it’s really interesting that you brought up the point that these early Missourians came in, mainly from the slave states. And I know there were some that came from other areas, you know, that maybe came down from Ohio or Illinois or Indiana that maybe weren’t not pro-slavery, but there were a lot that were the southerners. And especially because they were bringing their slaves with them, they looking for that new land, new plantations. So of course, we’re going to have a culture clash and have a big split.

Heidi (5m 38s):
Absolutely. And the tensions were just rising in general, as, as things got closer and closer to the Civil War.

Nicole (5m 43s):
I wanted to ask you more about the book Abolitionizing, did you just pick that up because you were learning more about your German ancestor?

Heidi (5m 52s):
Exactly. You know, how you do genealogy, you kind of get one little fact here. And one little fact there, and actually what was making me think about this was, my husband has, his great-grandmother was one of these people just like Euphrasia Pettus. They had owned slaves and had come from North Carolina and Virginia and had gone through Kentucky and Tennessee. And I actually remember on a podcast of yours, Diana mentioning that. And it just got me thinking about the whole bigger picture. And so when I read that my ancestor Burkhard Schlag had joined the Civil War regiment. And I, I got me thinking, like, why did he do that? He was married.

Heidi (6m 32s):
He had two children. So I got this book probably just started Googling around Germans in St. Louis and Civil War. And this book came up and it was a, I thought it was a really well done book. And she had done a tremendous amount of research of reading all of these German language newspapers to really get an idea of what they were thinking. And so it just brought me right into the mindset of, of Germans in St. Louis at that time.

Nicole (6m 57s):
That’s really cool. I think that’s such a good idea that as we research our ancestors and as we have questions that we can then turn to the field of history, where they have done a lot of that research in newspapers and more of the study of historical movements and things like that, where we can get a broader sense of maybe what it would have influenced our ancestors actions.

Heidi (7m 20s):
Absolutely. I’ve always loved studying the Civil War and just thinking about that time period. And so this was just an excuse.

Nicole (7m 29s):
So I looked up the book on Amazon and I’ll put a link to it in the show notes in case anyone else wants to take a look, but it’s, is this the full title? Abolitionizing Missouri, German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth Century America.

Heidi (7m 43s):
That’s the one.

Nicole (7m 44s):
Great. Okay. I’ll put the link to that in the show notes. I studied history in college and we read a lot of things like this and my Civil War course. And there’s a lot of books that you can read out there that are by historians that are focused on specific times and places like this. So it’s a really good example of what’s available for us to read and study. If we look beyond the typical genealogy and reference books into historical books.

Heidi (8m 9s):
Absolutely. I love that.

Nicole (8m 10s):
All right. Well, let’s continue on with our second character. You know, we got our character Euphrasia and she was a typical southerner. What about a German?

Heidi (8m 19s):
Well I happen to know one! We’re going to be talking again about my little ordinary third great-grandfather Burkhard Schlag, who came to St. Louis in 1854 from the German state of Hesse. And like I was saying, right, when the Civil War started, he was already married and had two children and he owned a saloon. I didn’t know too much more about him than that. And that’s why I had gotten this book, like we were saying, and wanting to learn more about what was going on in the previous podcast. We were talking about how, when the Germans arrived, they weren’t particularly super anti-slavery, but over the course of the 1850s, they just gradually more and more radicalized to being very, very pro-union in St.

Heidi (9m 3s):
Louis. And in the book that we were talking about, the author, Kristin Lane Anderson, she speculated that the St Louis Germans may have been uniquely more pro-union because St. Louis was the city farthest south with the largest population of newly arrived Germans, and Anderson argued that for the most part, Germans everywhere blended in with attitudes around them and were no more or less anti-slavery than their neighbors, except in St. Louis around this period of the Civil War, Anderson thought that the St Louis Germans would have been around slavery and its tensions more regularly. And this may have provoked them into picking aside, then Germans, who lived in a city further north, like Cincinnati or Milwaukee.

Heidi (9m 49s):
She read a great number of German language newspaper sources in English and, and German. And she argued that from 1854 onward, that St. Louis Germans were progressively radicalized up through the Civil War as I was saying. And so how did I know which side my little guy Burkhartd took? Well, there were two reasons. One was that I found his muster roll card for the Fourth Volunteers of Missouri. And the second was that he named his third child, Julius Sheridan Schlag after the Union general. So I’ve always wondered if Philip Sheridan was in St. Louis. And if my little guy ever heard him speak or what it was that attracted him enough to name his son, that because I’m pretty sure Julius Sheridan Schlag was the only one that ever lived

Diana (10m 38s):
So interesting. Well, I know that we talked a little bit in the last episode, kind of hinted at the camp Jackson affair, and that, that was a big deal in St. Louis. So let’s talk a little bit about that.

Heidi (10m 50s):
This is when all the tensions that we had been talking about between pro-union and pro-slavery between German and native born Americans boiled over the control of the St. Louis arsenal. President Lincoln was reputed to have said, “I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky”. So for him keeping the border states out of the Confederacy like Kentucky and Missouri and Maryland, it was super important to him to keep them out of the Confederacy. So he tried not to push them too hard. Border states like Missouri and Kentucky occupied strategic territories that were vital to the execution of the war. They usually sat on evenly divided populations, which made their control really tricky.

Heidi (11m 34s):
So in the run-up to the start of the Civil War in April of 1861 St. Louis had become an armed camp. There were pro-Confederate Minutemen. It had basically divided into factions, armed factions, and the pro-Confederate ones were called the Minutemen and the pro-Union ones were called the Wide Awake. And there was a newly elected pro-Confederate governor called Clayborne Fox Jackson than at the federal level. Shortly after Lincoln had taken office in March of 1861, he had replaced the previous pro-Confederate general with Nathaniel Lyon, who was an uncompromising anti-slavery new Englander.

Heidi (12m 16s):
So he was a literal Yankee and all over Missouri, the tension was just rising and St. Louis was a tinderbox. So at this time in April, the Civil War had just started on April 12th in, at Fort Sumter. And all eyes were really shifting to the St. Louis arsenal. The arsenal was the fourth largest in the United States, and it was the largest within the bounds of a slave state around mid April. Governor Jackson asked the Confederate President Jefferson Davis to begin moving large and small arms to near the arsenal. And it probably in order to seize it, this was a crunch point to decide who was going to control this arsenal.

Heidi (12m 56s):
Not only was it important to control the arsenal, the weapons, it was really important to control the strategic place on the Mississippi river confluence because the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Illinois river all meet there at St. Louis. So whoever control St. Louis was really going to have the figurative high ground in Missouri for the war. So Burkhard likely read this German language newspaper, Anzeiger Des Westens, as I was mentioning before, his funeral announcement was in it. So that’s why I think he probably read it. Anzeiger had this stridently pro-Union editor who was the 48er that we talked about last time, Henry Bornstein, and throughout the winter and spring of 1861, this newspaper was printing article after article exhorting Germans to help preserve the Union.

Heidi (13m 43s):
And on April 19th, so just about a week or so after Fort Sumter, Burkhard probably read this. I imagine that he did. And just to let you know, Fatherland refers to United States and not to Germany, but these, this was printed in German and I’m just going to read in English here, but it says; “not more words, but weapons will decide. We ourselves can enlist bayonets and canons, commanders, and regiments. We will certainly do it. And we’ll place our whole Legion at the service of the Fatherland and under the command of the President. Every doubt, every question is now untimely, the Fatherland calls.

Heidi (14m 23s):
We stand at its command. No German fit to carry arms will fail to defend his freedom and his Fatherland.” So I found that in the Missouri Historical Review, it was a January, 1948 article and I kind of just couldn’t believe how strident it was, but it really explained why this married man, who might risk everything and joined this regiment to, to protect his new Fatherland.

Diana (14m 46s):
As you were talking, it reminded me of how in my Missouri course, we talked about the Civil War and how there were two seats of government. This Confederate governor decided to set up as long government for the Confederacy over the state. And then President Lincoln had appointed this new governor who was part of the Union government of the state. So they had two centers of government. It was just crazy. So it was very interesting when you talked a little bit about that, but I agree that that newspaper article just, wow, that really incited everyone I’m sure. And also I was thinking about Burkhard that if everybody else in the neighborhood was joining up, I’m sure he would too. It was the thing to do. They wanted to defend their rights.

Diana (15m 30s):
And that was really interesting.

Nicole (15m 31s):
Did you translate that yourself?

Heidi (15m 33s):
I did not translate this historical article had a translation of it actually. I tried to find Anzeiger in German, and I was not able to find it so if there’s anyone out there who can, I’d love it.

Nicole (15m 44s):
That’s nice that they had it in the article already. What did you find out about the response of the St Louis German community to this call to arms?

Heidi (15m 55s):
Right in this period, the first for Missouri volunteer infantry is, were formed and they were almost entirely German. And then a week or two later, there were 10 regiments and they were 80% German. So the Germans were really well-represented in this kind of response to this threat on the arsenal. So on May 1st, governor Jackson, he called up his pro Confederate militias for maneuvers, just outside St. Louis. And they set up what they called Camp Jackson. And it was just a little less than five miles from the arsenal. And the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis had already delivered heavy weapons, or he was delivering heavy weapons by May 9th.

Heidi (16m 35s):
And so on May 10th, Captain Lion, who was the one appointed by president Lincoln, marched 6,000 of these troops out to Camp Jackson. And they captured the 669 pro-Confederate militia men. And as they were marching these captives back there’s a St. Louis angry procession is shouted, and they threw rocks at the mostly German troops and were reported to have said, damn, the Dutch. Dutch is a, a common misnomer of Deutsche or German. And so eventually the tensions got high enough, that shots were fired at the Union troops and they fired back. And all in all 28 people were killed and 75 were wounded in the city that day.

Heidi (17m 21s):
So obviously this was a, a traumatic event for everybody. And, you know, as I thought about Euphrasia and what she was living through, because she was enumerated on the 1860 census. So she was likely still there in 1861. She and her pro-secessionist neighbors were probably really alarmed to see all these foreigners who stood on the opposite side of the Civil War. People who she probably viewed as not having the same right to be there as she did, because they had just arrived, but wrote this letter to her sister on May 20th. So very shortly after this event, and she succinctly summed up the feelings that many Missourians must have felt after these mobilized immigrants, forcibly swung their city to the union “my blood boils in my veins when I think about the position of Missouri held in the union at the point of the Dutchman’s bayonets.”

Heidi (18m 17s):
So later that summer in 1861, the St. Louis arsenal and St. Louis were firmly in Union hands. There were more skirmishes and things, but by the summer, it was all over with. And when I’ve heard of popular histories of the Civil War, you don’t hear too much about St. Louis, but it was a very strategic place on the, on the Mississippi River. Instead, we have often heard a lot about Vicksburg, you know, and that huge siege that happened there. And I guess the reason we don’t hear about St. Louis is that unlike Vicksburg, St. Louis remained uncontested for the whole war. And it was partly because of these newly arrived Germans. I like to think they had a small part to play.

Nicole (18m 56s):
That’s neat that you can relate with your ancestors and cheer them on as part of the position you would have liked to have held back in the Civil War. That’s fun. Wow. And I love the letter, euphrasia, that’s neat that you found that and that you can kind of use that to help you understand what people were thinking.

Heidi (19m 17s):
Yeah, absolutely. I just couldn’t believe it when I, when I saw that and I got that little quote from the book Abolitionizing, so she, she had found that, but then I was able to find her picture. And this letter, the actual letter in, I believe it’s the Missouri State Archives. Maybe we’ll get a link to the actual place so you can find it. But as Diana has been saying throughout her series, Missouri is just a fantastic place to have ancestors in. There are so many great archives. And I think the St Louis county library is just a phenomenal resource because they have like dedicated people there who can answer your genealogical questions.

Heidi (20m 0s):
And I have, I’ve hit them up many times just with questions on how to find different records sets.

Diana (20m 8s):
Well, I think this has been such a fun episode. I like diving deep into some of these things that we don’t know much about. And I think it’s a really good example of how you took this ancestor. You knew nothing about you discovered what side he was on in the Civil War, and you discovered all of these things that came into play and that swirled around him and his family. And it really brought you closer to him. Didn’t it?

Heidi (20m 34s):
Absolutely. I have just an absolute soft spot in my heart for Burkhard. I, I later found a little passport application for him and it gave a little description of him. Cause I don’t have any photographs. And it described him as being five, three and having blue eyes and under nose, it said large I don’t know. It just, it got me. And it’s true. I do have pictures of his children and they, my, my great-great-grandmother, she did have a big nose. And so anyway, I just imagined my little Burkhard with having a big nose. So anyway, I do think that it is really fun.

Heidi (21m 19s):
Most of our ancestors were very ordinary people, but understanding what they went through helps us understand history so much more, not only their history, but the history of our country. And, you know, sometimes our, our ancestors were on the side we’d want to be on now. And sometimes they were not, all of those situations helps us think about American history, hopefully in a more honest way.

Diana (21m 45s):
Yeah. I like that. I think regardless of our views, we can learn so much from history, putting ourselves in the shoes of our ancestors and thinking about what they would have faced really helps us to have some good perspective on our own challenges, right?

Heidi (22m 0s):
Oh, 100%. I actually sometimes prefer thinking about history than what’s going on in real life today. Sometimes it’s a little more comforting just to go back and see the same tensions being played out and see how they were dealt with and how they were overcome. It gives you hope that we can overcome the challenges that we have today. Just like these people are more able to overcome some of their challenges.

Diana (22m 22s):
Yeah, I agree. Well, thank you so much, Heidi, for coming on and teaching us all about the German Immigrants and St. Louis and about the Civil War and the Camp Jackson affair. I think even more than the history was just the lesson that there is always more to researching our ancestors. We may have found the records. We may have found the relationships, but do we really have a window into their souls? And we can figure that out by learning about everything that happened around them and finding some of these published sources where other people have written, maybe our ancestors didn’t have a letter or something in the newspaper, but other people did.

Diana (23m 4s):
And they maybe had very similar thoughts as their neighbors. So lots of food for thought from this episode. So thank you again.

Heidi (23m 10s):
Oh, it was my pleasure. Thank you so much.

Nicole (23m 13s):
So I did go ahead and find the picture and letter of Euphrasia Pettus. So I’ll put those in the show notes. They were found on the Missouri Historical Society website, which is not a surprise because as we discussed in one of our recent Missouri repositories at the sides, this is the Historical Society that is located in St. Louis.

Heidi (23m 35s):
Yeah. I have been totally just blown away. I feel so happy that my grandfather was born in, in Missouri, just because I’ve enjoyed their archives so much.

Nicole (23m 47s):
Absolutely. Well, thanks Heidi. And thank you to all of our listeners. We’ll talk to you guys again next week. Bye.

Diana (23m 55s):
All right, bye. Bye everyone.

Nicole (23m 54s):
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