Carl Schurz

German-born American politician

• Born: March 2, 1829
• Birthplace: Liblar, Prussia (now in Germany)
• Died: May 14, 1906
• Place of death: New York, New York

Recognized as a leader of the German American community in the United States, Carl Schurz was a partisan of liberty who fled Germany after the revolutions of 1848 and made a career as a journalist and politician, serving as a Union general in the Civil War, a U.S. senator, and a secretary of the interior.

Early Life

The son of Christian and Marianne (Jüssen) Schurz, Carl Schurz (shewrts) was born in one of the outbuildings of a moated castle in the Prussian Rhineland (Germany), where his grandfather worked for Baron Wolf von Metternich. His family was of humble origin but was respected in the local context of village life; his grandfather was the count’s estate manager, one uncle was the mayor of a neighboring village, and his father was the Liblar schoolmaster. Schurz was reared a Roman Catholic, but with a strong dose of Enlightenment skepticism; as an adult, he considered himself a “freethinker.”

As a boy, Schelling enjoyed the run of Metternich’s estate, its formal gardens, its forests, and its farmlands. His parents noted his unusual intelligence and his musical skill and resolved to make sacrifices to give him a higher education. Thus he left his father’s school in the village, going to preparatory school at neighboring Brühl and then at Cologne, several miles away. When he was seventeen, the family moved to the nearest university town, Bonn, so that the boy could study there, even though his parents had suffered financial reverses that temporarily put his father in debtors’ prison.

At Bonn, Schurz began to make a name for himself both in the politically liberal fraternal organizations and as a budding scholar, under the tutelage of the young Romantic Gottfried Kinkel. Then came the revolutionary fervor of 1848. Immediately, Schurz interrupted his formal education and turned to a life of political activity. Like many young men of his generation, he saw 1848 as the opportunity to achieve a unified German state with a liberal-democratic constitution. Too young to stand for election himself, he turned to journalism and popular agitation to support his goals.

Schurz’s zeal for freedom and justice, his skills as a writer and speaker, and his tireless and combative commitment to his cause were characteristics that would distinguish him as a prominent American statesman years later. He joined the revolutionary army that fought against the old monarchies and barely escaped with his life when it was forced to surrender. In 1850, he returned to Prussia from exile in France and Switzerland in disguise and rescued Professor Kinkel from the prison to which the Prussians had condemned him. After spending a brief time in Paris and London, where he wooed and married Margarethe Meyer, daughter of a well-to-do Hamburg mercantile family, he decided to leave the Old World for America. If he could not be a citizen of a free Germany, he concluded, he would become a free citizen of the United States.

The tall, slim young man with thick glasses affected the flowing hair and mustache of a Romantic liberal in 1848; as he matured, he was recognizable for his bushy beard and sharp features, so often caricatured by the New York editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast.

Life’s Work

Schurz and his young wife arrived in the United States in 1852, staying first in Philadelphia and eventually settling in Watertown, Wisconsin, in 1855. As an immigrant, he was neither tired nor poor. His wife’s dowry was enough to set him up in business. His fame as a daring fighter for freedom in Germany, his solid education, his gifts as a writer and speaker, and his political ambition combined to make him a well-known figure almost immediately. Although he rarely stood for election himself, his persuasiveness with German American voters made him a force to be reckoned with in the ethnic politics of that age.

Schurz led the Wisconsin delegation to the Republican National Convention in 1860. Though originally pledged to William H. Seward, he became an avid supporter of Abraham Lincoln once he had received the nomination. Schurz traveled more than twenty-one thousand miles campaigning for Lincoln, speaking in both English and German, and was credited with swinging much of the German American vote away from its traditional inclination for the Democratic Party and into Lincoln’s camp. In gratitude, Lincoln appointed him minister to Spain and, after the onset of the Civil War, brigadier and then major general in the Union army. Schurz’s military career did little to enhance his reputation. He was only in his early thirties, and his high rank was clearly a result of political influence rather than demonstrated military skills. Schurz did his best, however, to contribute to the Union cause, seeing action at the Second Battle of Bull Run, Gettysburg, and Chancellorsville. Lincoln invited Schurz to report directly to him on the wartime situation, which Schurz did with great energy, pressing the president to emancipate the slaves.

After the war, Schurz settled in St. Louis as part owner and editor of the German-language Westliche Post. His wife never liked the American Midwest, however, and so she spent much of her time in Europe. While visiting his family in Germany in 1868, Schurz made a widely reported visit to Berlin, where the onetime revolutionary was warmly received by Otto von Bismarck, now prime minister of Prussia and chancellor of the emerging German Empire.

Schurz was critical of President Andrew Johnson but enthusiastically supported Ulysses S. Grant in the 1868 elections. German American forces were influential in Missouri politics, and the state legislature sent him to Washington, D.C., as a senator. After arriving there, he became disillusioned with the apparent corruption in the spoils system, and he turned his polemical skills to the issue of civil service reform. This challenge to the status quo alienated many of his party allies, and he was not returned to office in 1874. The Senate provided a platform for Schurz’s oratorical skills, and he gained a national reputation as a spokesperson for reform and for the German American community. Because of his criticisms of United States politicians, some alleged that he was not a patriotic American. He responded with a turn of phrase that has become famous: “My country right or wrong: if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

No partisan loyalist, Schurz was active in founding the Liberal Republican Party, which supported Horace Greeley for president over Grant in 1872. With the election of 1876, however, he returned to the Republican Party, supporting Rutherford B. Hayes, and after Hayes’s victory, Schurz was made secretary of the interior. He attempted to initiate environmental controls, particularly over forest lands, and to follow a humanitarian policy with respect to the Indians. His liberal idealism was unable to overcome deep-seated interests that opposed his policies. He left government office in 1881, never to serve again, and pursued his career as a journalist, author, and lecturer. He made New York his home, where he became editor in chief of the Evening Post and, eventually, Harper’s Weekly.

As an independent, Schurz found himself among the “Mugwumps,” who were more committed to his liberal ideals, especially civil service reform, than to any political party. Looking at his record, one sees a man who supported James A. Garfield (Republican) in 1880, Grover Cleveland (Democrat) in 1884, 1888, and 1892, William McKinley (Republican) in 1896, William Jennings Bryan (Democrat) in 1900, and Alton B. Parker (Democrat) in 1904. In an age when corruption was often an accepted part of the political process, Schurz remained free of its taint. His nineteenth century liberalism has been criticized as being narrow and doctrinaire, a laissez-faire philosophy that had little room for labor unions and social programs. However, his concepts of personal liberty, due process of law, and clean government surely put him in the mainstream of American political thought and action.

Schurz favored suffrage for black men—but not for women—and spoke out strongly against anti-Semitism. During the 1890’s, he looked with dismay upon American diplomatic and military expansion and, polemically as ever, crusaded as an anti-imperialist. The onetime general loathed war and its accompanying atrocities; moreover, he seemed to fear that an active policy overseas by the United States might at some time lead to a conflict with the land of his birth, Germany. As a man in his sixties and seventies, he traveled and spoke as avidly against an American empire as he had once fought for Lincoln’s election and freedom for the slaves. Though he no longer was alleged to be able to swing the German American vote in major elections, he was widely praised as that community’s leader and was showered with honors. He died peacefully at his home in New York City at the age of seventy-seven.

Significance

Schurz saw himself as “the main intermediary between German and American culture.” He continued to be equally fluent in German and English, writing his widely read memoirs in both languages. He traveled back and forth many times between the United States and the old country, filled with pride for both. When accused of mixed loyalties, he responded that he loved equally his “old mother” and his “new bride.” Stalwart and eloquent, he vigorously defended the cause of freedom, as he saw it, in Germany and in the United States.

Schurz’s stubborn dedication to his principles and his combative temperament sometimes earned for him the enmity of political opponents. Surely not even all German Americans supported him on every issue. As a group, however, they were proud of his accomplishments, the most impressive of any German immigrant at that time, and they agreed with him that fondness for their country of origin did not diminish their patriotism as Americans. Schurz would have been deeply saddened by the political and diplomatic events of the first half of the twentieth century that brought the United States and Germany into conflict, but much heartened by the development of a firm alliance between America and a liberal-democratic Germany after 1945.

Bibliography

Decker, Peter R.“The Utes Must Go!” American Expansion and the Removal of a People. Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 2004. Chronicles three centuries of Ute history, focusing on government policies that forced the tribe’s removal from Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Includes information on Schurz’s role in creating and enforcing these policies during his stint as secretary of the interior.

Easum, Chester V. The Americanization of Carl Schurz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929. A brief, older work, upon which further scholarship on Schurz has depended.

Fuess, Claude M. Carl Schurz, Reformer: 1829-1906. Edited by Allan Nevins. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1932. A gentlemanly biography by a scholar of German American parentage.

Schurz, Carl. Intimate Letters of Carl Schurz: 1841-1869. Edited and translated by Joseph Schafer. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1928. Hitherto unpublished letters, mostly to members of his family, which shed light on Schurz’s career and personal life beyond that shown in the six-volume set cited below.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz. 3 vols. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1907-1908. An entertaining and enlightening view of Schurz as he saw himself, with insightful sketches of the great men he knew, especially Lincoln, Bismarck, and a long list of American political figures. A modern abridgment by Wayne Andrews (New York: Scribners, 1961) is available, with an introduction by Allan Nevins.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz. Edited by Frederic Bancroft. 6 vols. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913. The vast array of Schurz’s political output is set forth in this old, but well-edited, collection of his works.

Trefousse, Hans L. Carl Schurz: A Biography. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982. A scholarly study of Schurz, based on exhaustive study of the printed and manuscript sources in the United States and in Europe, including some private letters to his companion in later life, Fanny Chapman. Excellent notes and bibliography.

Wallman, Charles J. The German-Speaking Forty-eighters: Builders of Watertown, Wisconsin. Madison, Wis.: Max Kade Institute for German American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1990. Chronicles the experiences of Schurz and other emigrants who left Germany after the revolutions of 1848 and eventually settled in Watertown, Wisconsin.