In this chapter, evidence from immigrant letters is used to address the following question: How did German immigrants in the era before 1871 regard the political situation in their homeland? How widespread was the “spirit of 1848,” and, above all, how deeply did it extend down into the rank and file? How were political opinions and preferences concerning the United States, on the one hand, and Germany or Europe, on the other, interrelated, particularly in the Civil War era? This question extends to political partisanship, disposition toward the war effort itself, and toward the race issues that emerged from it. What effect did the confession, education, and social origins of immigrants have on their views? All these questions are closely interwoven with another issue, the degree to which emigration was politically motivated in the first place.

There are a number of works that skirt around the edges of these questions, but none that really gets at its center. Peter Marschalck has estimated that only a few thousand of the emigrants in the aftermath of 1848 were politically motivated. But as other scholars and I have argued, economic and political grievances were often closely intertwined, and at least a rudimentary political consciousness was much more widespread among immigrants than is often realized.