In 1851, as the Northern black community organized in response to the threat of the Fugitive Slave Act, a society of black activists in Ohio came together to offer “material aid” to German revolutionaries currently suffering under a counter-revolution in Europe. In response, a grateful German-American community of Cleveland declared that as soon as they had ensured a free democracy in Germany, they would “use all means which are available to abolish slavery” in America (p. 34).

Mischa Honeck, through extensive and impressive research, has unearthed a set of surprising vignettes such as this one. These stories, when put together, reveal a rich portrait of cross-racial and cross-ethnic solidarities in the antebellum period. “We are the Revolutionists: German- Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848” uses “the tools of microhistory and collective biography” to focus on four stories of interactions between German radicals and American anti-slavery activists (p. 9). Although primarily about German immigrants, Honeck’s work is most insightful because of what these relationships tell us about the nature of American abolitionism, a movement that we see as far less parochial, religious, and enveloped in the logic and ideology of the free market than has previously been reported.

Using both English and German sources, from American and European archives, Honeck contributes to a growing literature about the transnational nature of American abolitionism and is one of the first historians to emphasize the widespread connections between American “immediatists” and continental European revolutionaries. Honeck’s book suggests that abolitionism drew on two different types of transnational cooperation: personal interactions and ideological affinities. He is strongest uncovering the depth of the first, describing in detail how Germans like August Willich, Adolph Douai, Karl Heinzen, and Mathilde Anneke befriended and influenced American abolitionists. Interestingly, he leaves out the most prominent (and controversial) relationship between a German radical and an American abolitionist: the romantic and intellectual exchanges between Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass. Perhaps Honeck felt that Maria Diedrich had already explored their intertwined lives, but it is an odd omission.1

For Honeck, German radicals were attracted to American abolitionism, partly because they saw it as consistent with the liberal nationalist ideology of their own revolutionary movement. In the 1850s, unlike today, nationalists were more often on the left, interested in the nation-state as the guarantor of individual equal rights and the natural enemy of entrenched local forms of power. South Carolina planters and Prussian Junkers both seemed to prefer local control, formal hierarchies, and networks of personal patronage, while Radical Republicans would follow German revolutionaries in calling for a centralized state that could exercise democratic power to protect individual rights and formal equality.

Of course nationalist logic also tended to privilege a homogenous cultural and political space. This imagined homogeneity – with its erasure, suppression, or even violent destruction of minorities – would have an ignoble legacy, in both America and Germany. And Honeck admits that many German immigrants, if not necessarily the radicals on whom he focuses, soon gained in America a racialized sense of themselves as free white men. It was this racial nationalism that would be the cornerstone of the antebellum Democratic Party, a party that would be home for most German immigrants until the rise of the Republican Party. On the other side, many American abolitionists flirted with nativism, disturbed by beer halls and rowdy German socializing on the Sabbath, aspects of German culture that also upset the nationalist project of cultural homogeneity. Although Radical Reconstruction offered a brief hope of a liberal nationalism in which shared dedication to equal rights would define the American nation, 1877 signaled a retreat in both native and German communities from commitments to racial justice and a descent into ethnic chauvinism.

If many German immigrants were no better on issues of race and slavery than their Anglo or Irish neighbors, there was a non-negligible minority that was, and that sought meaningful alliances with the Northern black community. Scholars of African-American history will be interested in some of Honeck’s stories which highlight the cosmopolitan and transnational world in which Northern black activists operated. There was Peter Clark, the black educator from Cincinnati, whose intellectual world included Moncure Conway, the Transcendentalist anti-slavery activist and August Willich, a German revolutionary socialist. Honeck illustrates well the cross-fertilization of ideas and people in a section on Adolph Douai, a German radical who first fled Germany because of his participation in the 1848 revolutions, and then was pushed out of Texas because of his anti-slavery views. After the Civil War, Douai was surprised to discover that the very printing press he had used in the 1850s to advocate free soil had been reclaimed by newly freed slaves, who were publishing Texas’ first black newspaper, and who “gratefully remember his dangerous and courageous agitation in their behalf” (p. 70).

There were, of course, some tensions between native and German reformers. One source of disagreement, highlighted in the contrast between the religiously Orthodox radical Wendell Phillips and Karl Heinzen, arose over religion and evangelical culture. Heinzen, an outspoken atheist who remembered well the ties between church and state in absolutist Europe, could not understand how otherwise progressive reformers allowed themselves to become “Bible Slaves” (p. 145). If Phillips and Heinzen disagreed about religion, temperance, and moralism, though, such disagreements did not get in the way of a functioning political alliance, suggesting that the American abolitionists, while more religious than their German comrades, were not as narrow and hidebound as our popular image might suggest.

Many of the German anti-slavery activists, like August Willich, also held sophisticated anti-capitalist beliefs. Willich had been a member of Marx’s Communist League, and was described as “The Reddest of the Red” for his stance in support of labor (p. 84). It is probably dangerous to extrapolate too much from the extraordinary lives of these activists, but Honeck’s work complicates notions drawn from scholars of whiteness studies, like David Roediger2, about the co-fabrication of American racism and working class identity. Simultaneously, it challenges the dominant interpretation of abolitionism, descended from the work of Eric Williams and David Brion Davis3, which sees anti-slavery as embedded in the ideological framework of capitalism. This challenge to the historiography sometimes seems implicit and one wishes Honeck more self-confidently articulated it. Here his micro-history method may hold him back. Honeck’s attention to biographical detail is one of his greatest strengths, but it sometimes comes at the expense of his ability to make broader claims about intellectual and social history.

This is a minor point, though, and overall “We are the Revolutionists” is an important and welcome contribution to the scholarship of abolitionism, immigration, and radical movements. In Honeck’s work, the abolitionist movement appears closer to a recognizably modern left struggle. Although (like many activists) imperfect in their dedication to equality, Honeck’s characters nonetheless were on the forefront of a fight for racial justice, a secular democratic state, workers’ rights, and women’s equality. If Honeck’s work can help dent the sentimental and condescending notion of American abolitionism as parochial evangelical moralists it will be a valuable contribution to the field.

Notes:
1 Maria Diedrich, Love Across Color Lines. Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass, New York 1999.
2 David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. Race and the Making of the American Working Class, London 1991.
3 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, Ithaca 1966; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, Chapel Hill, 1998 (1944).