Leonard, over 500,000 ethnic Germans fought for the Union—of that number, just short of half were native-born Germans. Around 5000 Germans fought for the South. Without Germans, Missouri almost certainly have left the Union fold in the earliest days of the war. Virtually all of the volunteer troops raised in the first wave of 1861 recruitment in Missouri in those earliest days of the war were Germans. Very large numbers of the Home Guard troops raised in Missouri in the second wave of 1861 recruitment were Germans. All told, around 30,000 troops from Missouri were German. To grasp the enmity with which the Germans were held in Confederate quarters, the Southern press very often referred to them as Hessians, harkening to the memory of the hated German mercenaries who fought for the British during the American Revolution. In order to grasp the hatred one Missouri guerrilla held toward the “Dutch”, refer to my book on Sam Hildebrand. He executed them without mercy as quickly as they fell into his hands. Since Hildebrand was of German extraction himself--albeit generations removed from Europe--his hatred was towards the easily identifiable native-born Germans he came upon. For additional reading of Germans in the Civil War, refer to James M. McPherson, “What They Fought For, 1861-1865” (1994); Joseph George Rosengarten, “The German Soldier in the Wars of the United States” (1890); Wilhelm Kaufmann, “The Germans in the American Civil War” (1999) (translated by Steven Rowan); Ella Lonn, “Foreigners in the Confederacy” (2002).