Carl Schurz

• 1. Introduction

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  Carl Schurz was born on the 2nd of March, 1829, in a small town called Liblar in the Rhine Province of Prussia, the son of a schoolteacher and a woman who was herself a journalist and public speaker. He died in New York City on the 14th of May, 1906. In between, he fought in two revolutions, escaped from a defeated army besieged inside a fortress, broke a man out of a Prussian prison, commanded troops at Gettysburg, hired a young Joseph Pulitzer, served as a United States Senator, became the 13th Secretary of the Interior, and outlived the political party he helped create. He was the first German-born American elected to the United States Senate. His wife, Margarethe, helped establish the kindergarten system in the United States. His name lives on in a park next to the official residence of the Mayor of New York City, in a mountain in Yellowstone, and in streets running through more than a dozen German cities. The questions worth asking about Carl Schurz are not simply what he did, but why a man who championed civil-service reform and spoke passionately for human rights also oversaw policies that forced Native Americans onto reservation lands unsuitable for their economic and cultural survival. And why did a man who escaped one crumbling political cause keep returning to build new ones?

• 2. A Revolution and a Rescue

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  At the University of Bonn, Schurz formed a close friendship with his professor Gottfried Kinkel, and together they founded the Bonner Zeitung, a newspaper arguing for democratic reforms in the early days of the 1848 uprisings. Kinkel edited it first; Schurz contributed regularly. When Kinkel left for Berlin to take a seat in the Prussian Constitutional Convention, the roles reversed and Schurz took the editorial chair. When the Frankfurt rump parliament called on citizens to take up arms for the new German constitution, Schurz and Kinkel answered. Schurz served as adjunct officer to Fritz Anneke, the artillery commander, during the 1849 campaign in Palatinate and Baden. The revolutionary army was eventually cornered and defeated at the fortress of Rastatt. Schurz was inside the fortress when it fell, and he knew the Prussians meant to execute their prisoners. He escaped and made his way to Zurich. The story did not end there. In 1850, Schurz slipped back into Prussia in secret, entered the prison at Spandau, and extracted Kinkel. He helped Kinkel reach Edinburgh, Scotland, before the Prussian authorities could close the net. Schurz then went to Paris, but police expelled him from France on the eve of the coup d'etat of 1851. He moved to London, made his living teaching German, and in July 1852 married Margarethe Meyer, the sister-in-law of fellow revolutionary Johannes Ronge. Several of the men Schurz had fought alongside in Germany reappeared in his American life. Fritz Anneke reached the rank of colonel in the Union Army; his wife Mathilde contributed to the abolitionist and suffrage movements; Anneke's brother Emil became a founder of the Republican Party in Michigan.

• 3. Making a Place in America

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  Schurz and Margarethe settled first in Philadelphia, then moved to Watertown, Wisconsin, in 1852. Watertown is where Margarethe began the work that would make her historically significant in her own right: her early efforts in childhood education helped establish the kindergarten system in the United States. Carl threw himself into Wisconsin politics and the anti-slavery movement, joining the newly organized Republican Party. In 1857 he ran as the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, losing. In 1858 he was admitted to the Wisconsin bar and began practicing law in Milwaukee, taking Halbert E. Paine as a law partner starting in 1859. Paine encouraged Schurz to lean into public speaking rather than law. On the 18th of April, 1859, Schurz delivered an oration in Faneuil Hall, Boston, on the subject of "True Americanism", deliberately using his status as an immigrant to defend the Republican Party against charges of nativism. At the 1860 Republican National Convention, he was the spokesman for the Wisconsin delegation, which cast its votes for William H. Seward. Despite that, Schurz ended up on the committee that formally delivered Lincoln the news of his nomination. Lincoln sent him to Spain as minister in 1861, partly on the strength of his European reputation as a revolutionary. Schurz returned to the United States in early 1862, finding no lasting purchase with Spanish authorities, and joined the Union Army.

• 4. War and Its Controversies

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  Persuading Lincoln to grant him a commission, Schurz was made a brigadier general of Union volunteers in April 1862. In June he took command of a division, first under John C. Fremont and then within Franz Sigel's corps, which brought him to the Second Battle of Bull Run in August 1862. He was promoted to major general in 1863. His division was assigned to the XI Corps, commanded by General Oliver O. Howard, and fought at both Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. At Chancellorsville, a bitter dispute broke out between Schurz and Howard over tactics. The Confederate corps under Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson routed the XI Corps. Two months later, at Gettysburg, the XI Corps broke again during the first day of fighting. The XI Corps contained several German-American units, and the press hit it hard, treating the failures as evidence against immigrant soldiers. Following Gettysburg, Schurz's division moved to Tennessee and took part in the Battle of Chattanooga. Late in the war, Schurz served as chief of staff of Henry Slocum's Army of Georgia as part of Sherman's campaign through North Carolina. He resigned after the war ended in April 1865. That summer, President Andrew Johnson sent Schurz on a tour of the South to assess conditions. The resulting report to the Senate documented extrajudicial killings and Black Codes, arguing that Reconstruction had restored basic governmental function but had not secured the loyalty of the Southern population or the rights of formerly enslaved people. President Johnson ignored the report, but it became fuel for the Congressional movement pushing for a more demanding reconstruction policy.

• 5. Senator, Editor, Insurgent

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  In 1866, Schurz took on the role of chief editor of the Detroit Post. The following year he moved to St. Louis and became editor and co-proprietor of the German-language Westliche Post, where he gave a young Joseph Pulitzer his start as a cub reporter. In 1868, Schurz was elected to the United States Senate from Missouri, the first German-born American to hold that office. His Senate reputation rested on speeches pressing for fiscal responsibility, anti-imperialism, and clean government. In 1869 he introduced the first Civil Service Reform bill ever offered to Congress. His break with President Ulysses S. Grant accelerated into an organized opposition. Schurz helped start the Liberal Republican movement in Missouri, which in 1870 elected B. Gratz Brown as governor. In 1872, Schurz chaired the Liberal Republican Party convention, which nominated Horace Greeley for president. Schurz's own preferences had been Charles Francis Adams or Lyman Trumbull, and the convention did not share his position on the tariff. He campaigned for Greeley anyway. Grant won in a landslide. Greeley died shortly after election day in November, before the Electoral College had even met. Harper's Weekly artist Thomas Nast, working throughout this period, made Schurz a regular target and rarely drew him favorably. Schurz lost his own 1874 Senate re-election bid to Democrat and former Confederate Francis Cockrell. He went back to editing newspapers, and in 1875 helped Rutherford B. Hayes win back the governorship of Ohio.

• 6. Interior, Indians, and Reform

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  Hayes, having won the 1876 presidential election, appointed Schurz as Secretary of the Interior in 1877. Schurz brought to the department the same conviction he had pushed in the Senate: that merit, not political connections, should determine who held government jobs. He supported competitive examinations for clerical positions and opposed removals except for documented cause. His efforts met with only partial success. As someone who thought of himself as an early conservationist, he prosecuted land thieves and drew public attention to the need for forest preservation. Mount Schurz, a peak in eastern Yellowstone north of Eagle Peak and south of Atkins Peak, was named in his honor in 1885 by the United States Geological Survey, specifically recognizing his commitment to protecting Yellowstone National Park. During his tenure, General William Tecumseh Sherman led a push to transfer the Office of Indian Affairs back to the War Department, which wanted to continue its "pacification" program. Schurz blocked the transfer, keeping the Indian Office within the Interior Department. He also launched a wide inspection of the office, dismissed officials he found corrupt, and began reforms tying promotions to merit. Even so, the policies Schurz oversaw forced Native Americans onto reservation lands that were, by late twentieth-century assessments, unsuitable for tribal economic and cultural advancement. Promises made to Indian chiefs at White House meetings with Hayes and Schurz were frequently broken. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1878. He left the Interior Department in 1881, when Hayes's term ended.

• 7. The Long Independent Career

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  In 1881, German-born Henry Villard, president of the Northern Pacific Railway, purchased the New York Evening Post and The Nation and handed management to Schurz, Horace White, and Edwin L. Godkin. Schurz left the Post in the autumn of 1883 after clashing with his colleagues over editorial policy toward corporations and their workers. In 1884 he led the "Mugwump" movement, working to prevent James G. Blaine's nomination and instead backing Democrat Grover Cleveland's successful presidential run. From 1888 to 1892, Schurz served as general American representative of the Hamburg American Steamship Company. In 1892 he succeeded George William Curtis as president of the National Civil Service Reform League, a post he held until 1901. That same year he also succeeded Curtis as editorial writer for Harper's Weekly, a role he kept until 1898. In 1895 he spoke in favor of the Fusion anti-Tammany Hall ticket in New York City. He opposed William Jennings Bryan's bimetallism in the 1896 election, spoke for sound money without operating under Republican Party auspices, then backed Bryan four years later because of shared anti-imperialist convictions. That anti-imperialism brought him to the American Anti-Imperialist League, and he personally urged President McKinley to resist annexing territory following the Spanish-American War. In the 1904 election he supported Democrat Alton B. Parker. He spent summers at a cottage in Northwest Bay on Lake George, New York, built by his close friend Abraham Jacobi. Two of his written works appeared after his death: an essay on Charles Sumner published posthumously in 1951, and his Reminiscences, issued in 1907-09, which he had not been able to finish, stopping only at the beginning of his Senate years.