to support it here in America.”
—Carl Strehly and Eduard Mühl
In discussions of slavery and civil rights, there is scant mention of immigrants. The majority of the focus on resistance to slavery rightly goes to black freedom fighters, such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, who fought slavery by serving as “conductors” of the Underground Railroad. But we also have to highlight how some Anglo-Americans, including the Framers of the United States Constitution, despised slavery and supported abolition. Besides Ella Lonn’s pioneering work on how the Irish, German, and other ethnic Americans experienced the Civil War differently from their white counterparts, not much else has been written about immigrants and the role they played in abolishing slavery in the United States.
Benjamin Franklin, one of the Framers of the United States Constitution and an abolitionist, abhorred German immigrants, and wanted controls on their immigration to the United States. He claimed that they were not smart, didn’t adopt local values, and endangered the whiteness of New England.9 Many German immigrants came from homelands where they did not have full citizenship rights—they could not vote, did not have the right to own property, or were subjected to high taxation and lacked freedom of speech. In the early nineteenth century, some had even fought against despotic rule in the German Confederation, and they moved to the new United States, expecting to share similar ideals.
As newly arrived immigrants with idealistic values, they were distraught when confronted with the institution of slavery. Slavery was an even harsher system of rights deprivation than what they had experienced, and one that contradicted the freedom and democracy that they were expecting in their new home. Some Germans, particularly the ones in Midwestern states, such as Missouri, had a radical idea that posed a special kind of problem to the new republic: they wanted to abolish slavery, and equated anti-slavery with immigrant rights.
These first-generation German immigrants included Friedrich Münch, Carl Strehly, Eduard Mühl, and Arnold Krekel. Together, they served as editors and contributors of German language newspapers in Missouri, writing articles and commentary against slavery in the 1800s, before the rise of popular abolitionist sentiments.
Friedrich Münch, in particular, penned many articles in the 1850s and 1860s in opposition to slavery, and successfully mobilized thousands of Germans to join the Union Army to fight the Confederates in the Civil War. He also opposed deportation of people who were formerly enslaved, stating, “We’ve no right to send away people who were born here, who have committed no crime, and who have indeed worked for the common good of their neighbors.”10 Yet Münch was no hero; he made decisions that were hypocritical and repugnant despite his advocacy. He purchased an enslaved person to help his wife with chores. He could not foresee integration, and so he proposed resettling emancipated people in a separate territory, such as Florida.
In a similar vein, fellow German journalists, such as Carl Strehly and Eduard Mühl, wrote against slavery in the 1840s for Hermanner Wochenblat before it became a popular movement.11 Initially, they were against abolition of slavery, and thought that the moral arguments against slavery would certainly turn the tide, but they changed their minds as they became disillusioned with the lack of progress.
Unlike the other first-generation German immigrants who came from educated and bourgeoisie backgrounds, Arnold Krekel came to the United States when he was seventeen years old from Prussia and had no fortune.12 He worked low-wage jobs to support himself as his family settled in St. Charles, Missouri, where Krekel experienced much antagonism from the pro-slavery population. In response to growing nativism against German and Irish immigrants, Krekel founded the St. Charles Demokrat in 1852. He was appointed as a US Western District Court judge by Abraham Lincoln, and presided over the Missouri Constitutional Convention of January 11, 1865, signing into law the Ordinance of Emancipation, which freed all the enslaved people in Missouri without any compensation to the enslavers.13
These German immigrants were regarded with much scorn where they lived. Their neighbors threatened them with violence and guerilla warfare because of their anti-slavery, pro-Union agenda. They were also living in extremely xenophobic times. The newly arrived Irish and German immigrants found themselves targeted by the nativist Know-Nothing movement.
After the Civil War, many Germans integrated over time with Anglo-Americans and abandoned their support for black liberation, though German immigrant pioneers such as Münch and Krekel continued to support and advance black suffrage and education. In this way, they helped to define a notion of American citizenship that valued racial justice, labor rights, and suffrage for all.
While these early German immigrants were unable to eradicate the negative impacts of slavery, their efforts helped create a more just society. Their conflict with native-born Americans shows us that immigrants did not need to adopt regressive anti-black views. Still, even with some foreign-born allies, it was up to African Americans to lead the struggle that ultimately won citizenship for all persons born in the United States.
Wong Kim Ark
Even after the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, states still saw it within their authority to invoke police power to control migration at the state level. California tried to limit and exclude Chinese immigrants based on their earlier use of police powers to restrict black migration to the state.14 After the courts struck down taxation laws designed to target Chinese immigrants, California began to focus on character and conduct, such as lewd behavior, in order to craft laws for restricting Chinese migration. And “as California goes, so goes the nation.”
Instead of quelling these discriminatory state laws, the federal government passed exclusionary laws against the Chinese. The Page Act of 1875 prohibited the entry of immigrants who were considered undesirable, including anyone from Asia coming as a contract laborer, any Asian women engaging in prostitution, and any convict from another country.15
Unsatisfied with the Page Act, Congress followed up with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which explicitly placed a ten-year ban on immigrants from China, a clear example of race-based exclusion.16 The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was amended and renewed several times. Subsequent acts extended the discrimination by prohibiting reentry after leaving the United States, and requiring all existing Chinese residents to obtain a certificate of residency in order to prevent deportation. The Exclusion Act and later reauthorizations banned all legal migration from China, and Chinese immigrants living in the United States were denied citizenship even if born in the United States.
One of the people denied citizenship was Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco in 1873 to noncitizen parents. When he was twenty-one, he visited his parents, who had returned to China. When Wong Kim Ark returned to the United States in 1895, he was denied entry on the grounds that he was not a United States citizen. Instead, he was confined on board the steamship, and had to file a writ of habeas corpus for his freedom. He was asked to present two white witnesses who could attest to his birth, because as a Chinese person, his own testimony carried no weight in the eyes of the law.
His case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which explicitly rejected limitations on birthright citizenship and ruled that Wong Kim Ark was a United States citizen by virtue of his birth on US soil, even though his parents were not US citizens.17 The acceptance of birthright citizenship in 1898—a time when hysteria over Chinese immigrants was high—advanced the fundamental constitutional value of jus soli for all. Over time, courts have continued to defeat many efforts to limit birthright citizenship.
Even after he won citizenship, Wong Kim Ark faced persistent discrimination. Whenever he visited his parents abroad and returned to the United States, he was forced to show to show sworn affidavits that he was born in the United States.18 The United States did not repeal Chinese exclusion policies until 1943.19
The federal use of its immigration enforcement power to racially discriminate against Chinese immigrants directly contradicted
