THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
the Sigels, Franz and Albert, and others, who made their abode in the city of St. Louis itself. The infusion of such ingredients gave to the German population of St. Louis and its vicinity a capacity for prompt, intelligent, and vigorous patriotic action which, when the great crisis of 1861 came, made the pro-slavery aristocrats, who had always contemptuously looked down upon the “Dutch” as semi-barbarians, stare with amazement and dismay at the sudden appearance of their hardly suspected power which struck such telling blows for Union and Liberty.
Before leaving the vicinity of St. Louis I visited the German revolutionary leader, Friedrich Hecker, on his prairie farm near Belleville in Illinois. I had never personally met him in Germany, but had heard much about his brilliant qualities and his fiery, impulsive nature. He had started a republican uprising in South Germany at an early stage of the revolutionary movement of 1848, which, although quickly overcome by a military force, had made him the hero of popular songs. His picture, representing him in a somewhat fantastic garb, was spread all over Germany, and as an exile he had become a sort of legendary hero. Being a man of much study and large acquirements, he was entitled to high rank among the “Latin farmers.”
His new home was a log-house of very primitive appearance. Mrs. Hecker, a woman of beauty and refinement, clad in the simple attire of a farmer's wife, plain but very tidy and tasteful, welcomed me at the door. “The Tiedemanns announced your coming,” she said, “and we have been expecting you for several days. Hecker is ill with chills and fever and in very bad humor. But he wants to see you very much. If he uses peculiar language, do not mind it. It is his way when he is out of sorts.” Mrs. Tiedemann, Hecker's sister in
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