America Transformed, American Marxism, Bringing on the War, Crusaders and Revolutionaries, Enemies of the Republic, Immigration, Lincoln's Hessians, Lincoln's Revolutionary Legacy, Myth of Saving the Union, Northern Culture Laid Bare 
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The only liberal democratic America which existed for German revolutionaries prior to 1860 was in the Northern States, already given over to burned-over districts and various “isms” of reform and communal-living movements. Well-before 1860, and mostly due to the foreign immigration in the North and flowing westward, two very different Americas existed. The South retained the Founders republic and Constitution; the North became the liberal democratic America which German revolutionaries believed they were migrating to. The Southern soldier fought for political independence against not only conscripted and bounty-enriched patriots in blue, but also recently-arrived Germans dreaming of a liberal socialist America. It was not by accident Lincoln purchased a German-language newspaper in Springfield, Illinois, to help him win the Republican nomination in 1860, and one-quarter of his army of invasion were German.
The Teutonic Tide
“After the Revolution, a number of the Hessian hirelings who had been brought over by the British settled in America . . . [and joined] the German settlements, avoiding the English-speaking communities in the United States because of the resentment shown towards them. The second period of German migration began about 1820 and lasted through the Civil War. [Between] 1845 and 1860 there arrived 1,250,000, and 200,000 came during the Civil War. [Due to the defeat of the socialist revolutions in Europe in 1848,] There seemed to remain only flight to liberal democratic America.
Arrived in America, these Germans were not content to settle, like dregs, in the cities on the seacoast. [And] westward they started at once . . . by way of the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes, and later by the new railway lines into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Wisconsin and Iowa. St. Louis was the center of a German influence that extended throughout the Missouri Valley.
Unlike the Irish, the Germans brought with them a strange language [and] many of the intellectuals believed they could establish a German state in America. “The foundations of a new and free Germany in the great North American Republic shall be laid by us,” wrote Follenius, the dreamer, who desired to land enough Germans in “one of the American territories to establish an essentially German state.”
After 1870 a great change came over the German migration. More and more industrial workers, but fewer and fewer peasants, and very rarely an intellectual or man of substance, now appeared at Ellis Island for admission to the United States. The new Germans came in hordes even outnumbering the migrations of the fifties. Humility on the part of these newcomers now gradually gave way to arrogance. Instead of appearing eager to embrace their new opportunities, they criticized everything they found in their new home.
In 1895 there were some five hundred German periodicals published in America, and many of the newer ones were rabidly Germanophile. Before the United States entered the Great War, there was a most remarkable unanimity of [pro-German] expression among these German publications; afterward, Congress found it necessary to enact rigorous laws against them. As a result, many of them were suppressed, and many others suspended publication.”
(Our Foreigners, A Chronicle of Americans in the Making; The Chronicles of America Series, Allen Johnson, editor, Yale University Press, 1921, excerpts pp. 129-131; 134-135; 141-143)