Walter D. Kamphoefner Ph.D

[major bill]

Tonight I was reading some articles in some older Civil War magazines. In What German Americans Fought For: Evidence from Immigrant Letters by Walter D. Kamphoefner North& South magazine February 2007 Doctor Kamphoefner makes same good points. However the article is a bit short for him to go to great lengths on the subject.

This is from the article: "But like their northern compatriots, Germans who lived in the South seldom expressed approval of Confederate war aims, even when coercion or opportunism led them to serve under the Stars and Bars. Just as among German Letter-writers from the North there was only support of the Union cause of indifference, among those from the South there was only opposition to the Confederate cause or indifference."

I understand that much of the "Southern" German immigrants lived in Texas and Missouri and the treatment of Germans in these two areas was not overly kind, I find Dr. Kamphoefner's blanket statement to questionable. So this brings me to ask a couple of questions.

Were the German immigrants in the South almost universally opposed to Confederate war aims? I find it hard to believe Southern German immigrants can be of one mind.
Why should I trust Dr. Kamphoefner's conclusions? I take it he is an expert in this area but does he have a bias on this subject? I guess I should read his book as a magazine article is limited in space.

 

[John Winn]

I've got German immigrant ancestors on both sides, one set that lived in Charleston, SC (having first lived in Haiti) and another that lived in Savannah, GA (having first came to Nova Scotia). Two males from the Savannah side served in the Confederate army having joined up at the beginning. The one from the Charleston side was too old to serve but his family were all confederate supporters - one being my gg grandfather who was English and a major blockade runner - and several grandsons volunteered. He died a few months after being strung up by Union occupiers in Anderson, SC who were trying to get him to tell them the location of the family riches.

So, I couldn't agree with Dr. K's absolutism.

 

[AndyHall]

I believe it depends largely on where they settled and, perhaps, their relative isolation. The Unionist sympathies of the Germans in the Texas Hill Country north and west of San Antonio is well known, but in more settled parts of the state they tended to be more in line politically with their non-German neighbors. From my Buffalo Bayou book:

The first casualty of the Civil War on Buffalo Bayou was an unnamed Confederate soldier who had the misfortune to be a recruit in a militia company organized by members of the local turnverein, a health and physical fitness movement that was popular among German immigrants to the United States. The company organized by the Houston turnverein, the Turner Rifles, was commanded by Captain E. B. H. Schneider, a 31-year-old native Rhinelander.[1] Schneider was one of the founders of the Houston turnverein and, in keeping with the spirit of that organization, drilled them strenuously. Schneider "at once sought to apply the most rigid discipline and exhaustive methods in training his men to be soldiers," one Houstonian would recall years later. The captain would load them down with camp equipment, packs, cartridge boxes and the like, and march them far out into the countryside and back. He also liked to drill the men at quick time and the double-quick, "for the amusement of people who had gathered to see them drill."[2]

If Captain Schneider was proud of his soldiers, though, he was also vain and, on one day, criminally stupid. One afternoon in early 1861, seeking to push his company into ever-more spectacular feats of military drill, he marched them down San Jacinto Street, across the wharf and into the bayou. He evidently assumed they would continue marching in formation across the bottom, and emerge on the other bank "as if nothing had happened." It didn't work out that way, of course; there was an eight-foot drop into the bayou from the wharf and, thanks to ongoing dredging efforts, the water there was twelve or fifteen feet deep. Remarkably, only one of the soldiers drowned, a young man who to that point had been deemed the best all-around athlete and swimmer in the company. The body was recovered and laid out in the city armory; the dead man's rites were said to have been the first military funeral in Texas during the war. [3]
______________
[1] U.S. Census of 1860; Ward 3, Houston, Harris County, Texas, 119.
[2] S. O. Young, True Stories of Old Houston and Houstonians (Galveston: Oscar Springer, 1913), 214.
[3] Young, 214. ​

Schneider's militia company eventually became Company C of the First Texas Heavy Artillery, and there are German names scattered all through the regiment rolls as reflected on Fold3, from Gustav Adolph to F. M. Ziegler.

 

[Pat Young]

Tonight I was reading some articles in some older Civil War magazines. In What German Americans Fought For: Evidence from Immigrant Letters by Walter D. Kamphoefner North& South magazine February 2007 Doctor Kamphoefner makes same good points. However the article is a bit short for him to go to great lengths on the subject.

This is from the article: "But like their northern compatriots, Germans who lived in the South seldom expressed approval of Confederate war aims, even when coercion or opportunism led them to serve under the Stars and Bars. Just as among German Letter-writers from the North there was only support of the Union cause of indifference, among those from the South there was only opposition to the Confederate cause or indifference."

I understand that much of the "Southern" German immigrants lived in Texas and Missouri and the treatment of Germans in these two areas was not overly kind, I find Dr. Kamphoefner's blanket statement to questionable. So this brings me to ask a couple of questions.

Were the German immigrants in the South almost universally opposed to Confederate war aims? I find it hard to believe Southern German immigrants can be of one mind.
Why should I trust Dr. Kamphoefner's conclusions? I take it he is an expert in this area but does he have a bias on this subject? I guess I should read his book as a magazine article is limited in space.

Walter D. Kamphoefner is the editor of a book with hundreds of translated letters from German soldiers.