Where and when were the first Southern slaves emancipated?  Long before Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation or the date celebrated by Juneteenth. It was in St. Louis under a proclamation of John Fremont, the rogue Union general, on August 30, 1861.  In Chapter 4 of The Broken Heart of America, Walter Johnson suggests that his early move for emancipation was influenced by two German immigrants, a journalist and a military officer,  and the liberally disposed German community of south St. Louis.

Fremont had no standing to change the legal status of slaves, and President Lincoln chastised him, because it would “alarm our Southern Union friends,” at a time he was desperately trying to hold the Union together. The official position of the U.S. government was that slaves were “contraband of war” temporarily held.

Fremont told the President he would not rescind the emancipation, but that the President had every right to countermand him publicly. Lincoln obliged and removed Fremont from command by November, 1861. He was brought to Washington to face other charges, for which he was eventually acquitted.

Fremont’s wife, Jessie Benton, met the President not long afterward and reported he was furious with her husband. “It was a war for a great national idea . . . . General Fremont should never have dragged the Negro into it” (Gerteis, Civil War in St. Louis, 151).  This was two years before the Emancipation Proclamation.

According to Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America the German immigrant community in south St. Louis had a strong influence on both the political journalism and the assembled Union army in  St. Louis. Not only bricklayers, the immigrants were liberal thinkers influenced by the writing of Karl Marx, Frederich Engels and their naturalized American publisher Joseph Weydemeyer.  Weydemeyer published the famous radical philosophers when they were considered subversive criminals in France and Germany, and he had to flee to the U.S.A. to avoid arrest.

He eventually landed in St. Louis, where he founded the “Proletarian League” and the “Communist Club.” The communists were committed to “the abolition of private ownership of the means of production” and “the equality of all human beings, irrespective of color or sex.” This position naturally led Weydemeyer to become an abolitionist, but more in the cause of proletarian liberation than the crusade for human rights.

The German immigrants comprised a large percentage of the Union army in St. Louis, and they were led by Prussian officers Henry Boernstein and Franz Sigel, both disciples of Karl Marx. Boernstein brought his communist vision to a German language newspaper Anzeiger des Westens.  Sigel organized the working class German radicals into a paramilitary battalion that was ready to seize Camp Jackson (Jefferson Barracks) within a month after the firing on Fort Sumpter (April 12, 1861).

Boernstein and the Marxist publisher Joseph Weydemeyer promoted the cause of abolition in local German and English newspapers and recruited a host of immigrants to the battle to subdue the slave state of Missouri.  The native born citizens of north St. Louis were not easily recruited to the Union cause. When the Confederate prisoners were marched from Camp Jackson to the Arsenal for imprisonment, the German soldiers were pelted with rocks and shouts of “Damn the Dutch” and “Hurrah for Jeff Davis.” There was a stampede and social unrest in the city for days until finally the wealthiest families began to make plans to leave.

After seizing Camp Jackson Boernstein and Sigel began a march westward under  the command of Nathaniel Lyon. Walter Johnson comments, “Lyon’s march across Missouri has been largely forgotten by a Civil War historiography focused on the eastern theater and the Battle of Manassas, which was fought on July 21, 1861. Lyon’s battles in in Missouri, however, were the only Union military victories in 1861; more than that, the actions taken by his army presaged the course of the war” (129).

Johnson refers to the “actions” of accepting and recruiting runaway slaves to the Union army as they marched across the western frontier. “Revolutionary alliance with runaway slaves was a strategic imperative. It would take Abraham Lincoln and his eastern generals another year to absorb the lessons of Lyon’s campaign” (130).

General Lyons took Jefferson City without much resistance, but there was a strong slaveholder presences there. When Boernstein was left in charge of the city, he compromised on the liberation of slaves and found himself under-manned in holding the city, as Lyons marched on.

“As Lyons’ army marched west it relied on runaways for information about their owners, the landscape, and the whereabouts of pro-Confederate troops in the field” (131). Increasingly they were arming the fleeing slaves to fight alongside them in battle. In Springfield, the federal force was defeated, Lyons was killed, and they retreated to Rolla for the winter. Franz Sigel took over command.

Sigel, an avowed Marxist, welcomed the collaboration of the former slaves. Observes Johnson, “The politics of the camp in Rolla–the combination of the political radicalism of Sigel and the revolutionary action of the African Americans who joined his army– came for a brief moment to define the approach of the entire US Army Department of the West, still headquartered in St. Louis but now under the leadership of John C. Fremont” (132).

The German community of St. Louis were loyal supporters of Fremont even after his recall to Washington. The German press  spoke in favor of Fremont and Franz Sigel, to the detriment of Fremont’s successor, General Henry Halleck. In 1864 they were among the principal supporters of Fremont’s brief candidacy for president, as the nominee of the Radical Democracy Party. Notably the party was also supported by Frederick Douglass, Wendell Philips, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Despite Fremont’s abysmal failure as a Presidential candidate, his abolitionist connections with the German community of south St. Louis foreshadowed the Emancipation Proclamation and the eventual federal policy toward the liberation and arming of former slaves to the Union cause.