Missouri is well known for its German American heritage, but the story of nineteenth-century German immigrant abolitionists is often neglected in discussions of the state’s history. Nearly two million Germans arrived in the United States in the years prior to the Civil War, many of them seeking to start a new life on the Missouri frontier.

In Fighting for a Free Missouri: German Immigrants, African Americans, and the Issue of Slavery, historian and editor Sydney Norton shares 10 essays from African American and German American scholars, detailing what unfolded when idealistic Germans, many of whom were highly educated and devoted to the ideals of freedom and democracy, left their homeland and settled in a pre-Civil War slave state.

When they witnessed the state of enslaved Black people, many of them became abolitionist activists and fervent supporters of Abraham Lincoln and the Union in the emerging Civil War. Norton and those who contributed work to Fighting for a Free Missouri explore the Germans’ abolitionist mission, their relationships with African Americans, and their activity in the radical wing of the Republican Party.