She researched original German-language documents including “diaries, letters, and regimental histories,” to support her thesis. She looked at the activities and documents produced by the early German-American organizations that formed in St. Clair County called the Giessen Emigration Society. She looked at the activities of German leaders like Gustave Korner and the writings of J. Englemann, and writings to relatives by Johann Dieden called, “The Know-Nothing Mayor.” . She supported her thesis with the writings by Albert B. Gaust’s, The German Element in the United States” which talks about the German-American Union Officers who called themselves the …show more content…
I believe Christine Bearden-White proved her thesis effectively. Looking paragraph by paragraph shows she used statistics, original personal letters and documents, historical documents, census and other historians to support her ideas and conclusions. She used original documents, articles in historical papers, and writings by other historians to prove that the majority of Germans in Illinois settled in two areas, that Germans enlisted and joined mainly German infantries, and German Americans in Illinois gravitated to the Republican party, and believed that slavery was wrong, that it was an immoral act, that they did not want to see wrongs done in the German homelands to continue in