The German-Texans: Anti-Slavery in a Slave Republic

Fredericksburg was founded in eighteen forty-six by settlers brought to Texas under the Adelsverein Society, a German colonization company funded by minor nobility who imagined a German state carved out of the Texas Hill Country. The imagined German state did not materialize. Fredericksburg did.

The people who built it were unlike most of the Anglo-Texan communities around them in one specific way. A large proportion of them opposed slavery. Some had fled the failed revolutions of eighteen forty-eight in Germany and Austria and Bohemia, revolutions animated by republican ideals that included the abolition of human bondage. They were called Forty-Eighters, and they brought those convictions to the Texas Hill Country with them.

In eighteen fifty-four, German settlers in the Hill Country signed what became known as the Comfort Manifesto, a document that explicitly opposed secession and slavery. This was not the dominant position in Texas. The state held over one hundred eighty thousand enslaved people. The political pressure to conform was significant.

When the Civil War came and Texas seceded, many Hill Country Germans refused to serve in the Confederate Army. They organized themselves. They attempted to flee to Mexico. Confederate authorities regarded them as a security threat. The August tenth, eighteen sixty-two massacre at the Nueces River, sixty-five miles south of San Antonio, was the result.

The German-settled belt of the Hill Country, Fredericksburg, Comfort, Boerne, New Braunfels, Seguin, represented a Texas that did not march in lockstep with the political consensus around it. That dissent had a cost. The Treue der Union monument in Comfort records what that cost was, in the names of the men who paid it.