historians have reexamined the war's impact on German-speaking communities and the important roles they played in politics and society during this time. Kristen Layne Anderson's Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America argues that St. Louis Germans were not as solidly anti-slavery, Republican, or pro-African American as portrayed by contemporaries or subsequent historians. Anderson demonstrates that most St. Louis Germans' self-interest led

more »

... m through a trajectory of initially accepting slavery in the 1840s, supporting the Republican Party and emancipation in the 1850s and 1860s, and finally abandoning the interests of blacks by 1870 (pp. 1-5). Relying heavily on several St. Louis German newspapers throughout her study, Anderson states that Germans initially seemed to be "aloof " or accepting of slavery