From American Scholar

A compelling article from which we could learn much about liberty, patriotism--and who can be a patriot. "You would even hear [German] in public-school classrooms, where the children of immigrants received instruction in the mother tongue. Politically, too, the newcomers were a class apart. Many had fled the aftermath of the failed liberal revolutions that had swept across Europe in 1848...Missouri’s slaveholding class represented exactly what they had detested in the old country, exactly what they had wanted to escape: a swaggering clique of landed oligarchs...[T]he Germans prided themselves on being...“filled with more intensive concepts of freedom, with more expansive notions of humanity, than most peoples of the earth”—more imbued with true democratic spirit, indeed more American than the Americans themselves." More here: http://www.theamericanscholar.org/civil-warfare-in-the-streets/