Carl Schurz

Carl Christian Schurz (March 2, 1829 – May 14, 1906) was a German revolutionary, American statesman and reformer, U.S. Minister to Spain, Union Army General in the American Civil War, U. S. Senator, and Secretary of the Interior. He was also an accomplished journalist, newspaper editor and orator, who in 1869 became the first German-born American elected to the United States Senate.

Schurz, a native of Liblar, Germany, attended a Gymnasium in Cologne and then enrolled in the University of Bonn in 1847. He was studying to obtain a doctorate degree and to become a professor of History when his studies were interrupted by the German Revolution. At age 19, Schurz became a leader of a student movement that encouraged democracy, influenced by Gottfried Kinkel. He joined the revolutionary army, fighting in several battles against the Prussian Army. When the revolutionary army was defeated at Rastatt in 1849, Schurz escaped to Switzerland, knowing that the Prussians intended to kill their prisoners. He returned to Germany, where he led a secret mission that freed Gottfried Kinkel from prison. Schurz then resided in Paris, until he was expelled by French authorities in 1851. He migrated to England, where he married Margarethe Meyer. In 1852, they emigrated to the United States, originally residing in Philadelphia. Schurz and his wife moved to Wisconsin, where he joined and campaigned for the Republican Party. In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln appointed Schurz Minister to Spain. After returning from Spain in 1862, Schurz was appointed Union Brigadier General by Lincoln.

During the Civil War, although Brig. Gen. Schurz served with distinction, known for his personal bravery and military discipline, his "German regiments" in 1862 were heavily criticized by the press for retreating during the Second Battle of Bull Run at Chancellorsville. After the war, Schurz was elected a Senator from Missouri in 1868. In 1869, he became the first U.S. Senator to offer a Civil Service Reform bill to Congress. During Reconstruction, Schurz was opposed to federal military enforcement and protection of African American civil rights, and held nineteenth century ideals of Anglo superiority and fears of miscegenation. In 1870, Schurz formed the Liberal Republican Party, which opposed President Ulysses S. Grant's annexation of Santo Domingo, and his use of the military to destroy the Ku Klux Klan in the South under the Force Acts. Schurz lost the 1874 Senatorial election to Democratic Party challenger and former Confederate, Francis Cockrell. After leaving office, he worked as an editor for various newspapers. In 1877, Schurz was appointed Secretary of Interior by President Rutherford B. Hayes. Although Schurz honestly attempted to reduce the effects of racism toward Native Americans and was partially successful at cleaning up corruption, his solutions towards American Indians "in light of late twentieth-century developments", were repressive. Indians were forced to move into low quality reservation lands that were unsuitable for tribal economic and cultural advancement. Promises made to Indian chiefs at White House meetings with President Rutherford B. Hayes and Schurz were not always kept.

During his later years, Schurz was perhaps the most prominent independent in American politics, noted for his high principles, his avoidance of political partisanship, and his moral conscience. His wife, Margarethe Schurz, was instrumental in establishing the kindergarten system in the United States. Schurz is famous for saying: "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right."

Early life
Schurz was born in Liblar (now part of Erftstadt), Prussia on March 2, 1829, the son of a schoolteacher. He studied at the Jesuit Gymnasium of Cologne, and learned piano under private instructors. Financial problems in his family obligated him to leave school a year early, without graduating. Later he graduated from the gymnasium by passing a special examination and entered the University of Bonn.

German revolution
At Bonn, he developed a friendship with one of his professors, Gottfried Kinkel. He joined the nationalistic Studentenverbindung Burschenschaft Franconia at Bonn, which at the time included among its members Friedrich von Spielhagen, Johannes Overbeck, Julius Schmidt, Carl Otto Weber, Ludwig Meyer and Adolf Strodtmann, sponsored by his former comrade-in-arms, Joseph Benson Foraker. In response to the early events of the revolutions of 1848, Schurz and Kinkel founded the Bonner Zeitung, a paper advocating democratic reforms. At first Kinkel was the editor and Schurz a regular contributor. These roles were reversed when Kinkel left for Berlin to become a member of the Prussian Constitutional Convention. When the Frankfurt rump parliament called for people to take up arms in defense of the new German constitution, Schurz, Kinkel, and others from the University of Bonn community did so. During this struggle, Schurz became acquainted with Franz Sigel, Alexander Schimmelfennig, Fritz Anneke, Friedrich Beust, Ludwig Blenker and others, many of whom he would meet again in the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War.



During the 1849 military campaign in Palatinate and Baden, Schurz was adjunct officer of the commander of the artillery, Fritz Anneke, who was accompanied on the campaign by his wife, Mathilde Franziska Anneke. The Annekes would later move to the U.S., where each became Republican Party supporters. Anneke's brother, Emil Anneke, was a founder of the Republican party in Michigan. Fritz Anneke achieved the rank of colonel and became the commanding officer of the 34th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment during the Civil War; Mathilde Anneke contributed to both the abolitionist and suffrage movements of the United States.

The revolution in Germany ultimately failed. When the fortress at Rastatt, the last holdout, surrendered with Schurz inside, Schurz escaped to Zürich. In 1850, he returned secretly to Prussia, rescued Kinkel from prison at Spandau and helped him to escape to Edinburgh, Scotland. Schurz then went to Paris, but the police forced him to leave France on the eve of the coup d'état of 1851, and he migrated to London. Remaining there until August 1852, he made his living by teaching the German language.

Marriage and U.S. migration
While in London, Schurz married fellow revolutionary Johannes Ronge's sister-in-law, Margarethe Meyer, in July 1852 and then migrated to America. Living initially in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Schurzes moved to Watertown, Wisconsin, where Carl nurtured his interests in politics and Margarethe began her seminal work in early childhood education. Schurz is probably the best known of the Forty-Eighters, the German emigrants who came to the United States after the failed liberal revolutions.

U.S. political career
In 1855, Schurz settled in Watertown, Wisconsin, where he immediately became immersed in the anti-slavery movement and in politics, joining the Republican Party. In 1857, he was an unsuccessful Republican candidate for lieutenant-governor. In the Illinois campaign of the next year between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, he took part as a speaker on behalf of Lincoln—mostly in German—which raised Lincoln's popularity among German-American voters (though it should be remembered that Senators were not directly elected in 1858, the election being decided by the Illinois General Assembly). Later, in 1858, he was admitted to the Wisconsin bar and began to practice law in Milwaukee. In the state campaign of 1859, he made a speech attacking the Fugitive Slave Law, arguing for states' rights. In Faneuil Hall, Boston, on April 18, 1859, he delivered an oration on "True Americanism," which, coming from an alien, was intended to clear the Republican party of the charge of "nativism". Wisconsin Germans unsuccessfully urged his nomination for governor in 1859. In the 1860 Republican National Convention, Schurz was spokesman of the delegation from Wisconsin, which voted for William H. Seward; despite this, Schurz was on the committee which brought Lincoln the news of his nomination.

Minister to Spain
In spite of Seward's objection, grounded on Schurz's European record as a revolutionary, Lincoln sent him in 1861 as ambassador to Spain. He succeeded in quietly dissuading Spain from supporting the South.

Civil War
Persuading Lincoln to grant him a commission in the Union army, Schurz was commissioned brigadier general of Union volunteers in April, and in June took command of a division, first under John C. Frémont, and then in Franz Sigel's corps, with which he took part in the Second Battle of Bull Run. He was promoted major general of volunteers on March 14 and was a division commander in the XI Corps at the Battle of Chancellorsville, under General Oliver O. Howard, with whom he later had a bitter controversy over the strategy employed at that battle, resulting in their defeat by Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson. He was at Gettysburg (a victory for the Union) commanding the Third Division of Howard's XI Corps, and at Chattanooga (also a victory for the Union side), at which he served with the future Senator Joseph B. Foraker, John Patterson Rea, and Luther Morris Buchwalter, brother to Morris Lyon Buchwalter. Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA) was a Congressional observer during the campaign. Later, he was put in command of a Corps of Instruction at Nashville. He briefly returned to active service, where in the last months of the war when he was with Sherman's army in North Carolina as chief of staff of Henry Slocum's Army of Georgia. He resigned from the army when the war ended.

Reported on the South
In the summer of 1865, President Andrew Johnson sent Schurz through the South to study conditions; they then quarrelled because Schurz approved General H.W. Slocum's order forbidding the organization of militia in Mississippi. Schurz's report, suggesting the readmission of the states with complete rights and the investigation of the need of further legislation by a Congressional committee, was ignored by the President.

Newspaper career
In 1866, Schurz moved to Detroit, where he was chief editor of the Detroit Post. The following year, he moved to St. Louis, becoming editor and joint proprietor with Emil Preetorius of the Westliche Post (Western Post), where he hired Joseph Pulitzer as a cub reporter. In the winter of 1867-1868, he traveled in Germany – the account of his interview with Otto von Bismarck is one of the most interesting chapters of his Reminiscences. He spoke against "repudiation" (of war debts) and for "honest money" (the gold standard) during the Presidential campaign of 1868.

U.S. Senator
In 1868, he was elected to the United States Senate from Missouri, becoming the first German American in that body. He earned a reputation for his speeches, which advocated fiscal responsibility, anti-imperialism, and integrity in government. During this period, he broke with the Grant administration, starting the Liberal Republican movement in Missouri, which in 1870 elected B. Gratz Brown governor.

After Fessenden's death, Schurz was a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs where Schurz opposed Grant's Southern policy as well as his bid to annex Santo Domingo. Schurz was identified with the committee's investigation of arms sales to and cartridge manufacture for the French army by the United States government during the Franco-Prussian War.

In 1872, he presided over the Liberal Republican convention, which nominated Horace Greeley for President. Schurz's own choice was Charles Francis Adams or Lyman Trumbull, and the convention did not represent Schurz's views on the tariff. Schurz campaigned for Greeley anyway. Especially in this campaign, and throughout his career as a Senator and afterwards, he was a target for the pen of Harper's Weekly artist Thomas Nast, usually in an unfavorable way. The election was a debacle for the Greeley supporters: Grant won by a landslide, and Greeley died shortly after the election.

In 1875, he campaigned for Rutherford B. Hayes, as the representative of sound money, in the Ohio governor's campaign.

Secretary of Interior
In 1876, he supported Hayes for President, and Hayes named him Secretary of the Interior, following much of his advice in other cabinet appointments and in his inaugural address. In this department, Schurz put in force his theories in regard to merit in the Civil Service, permitting no removals except for cause, and requiring competitive examinations for candidates for clerkships. His efforts to remove political patronage met with only limited success, however. As an early conservationist, he prosecuted land thieves and attracted public attention to the necessity of forest preservation.

During Schurz's tenure as Secretary of the Interior, there was a movement, strongly supported by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, to transfer the Office of Indian Affairs to the War Department. Restoration of the Indian Office to the War Department, which was anxious to regain control in order to continue its "pacification" program, was opposed by Schurz, and ultimately the Indian Office remained in the Interior Department. The Indian Office had been the most corrupt of the Interior Department. Positions therein were based on political patronage and were seen as granting license to use the reservations for personal enrichment. Schurz realized that the service would have to be cleansed of such corruption before anything positive could be accomplished, so he instituted a wide-scale inspection of the service, dismissed several officials, and began civil service reforms, whereby positions and promotions were to be based on merit not political patronage.

Schurz's leadership of the Indian Affairs Office was not uncontroversial. While certainly not an architect of the campaign to push Native Americans off their lands and into tribal reservations, he continued the practice of the Bureau of Indian Affairs of resettling tribes on reservations. In response to several nineteenth-century reformers, however, he later changed his mind and promoted an assimilationist policy.

New York City
Upon leaving the Interior Department in 1881, Schurz moved to New York City. That year Henry Villard acquired the New York Evening Post and The Nation and turned the management over to Schurz, Horace White and Edwin L. Godkin. Schurz left the Post in the autumn of 1883 because of differences over editorial policies regarding corporations and their employees. In 1884, he was a leader in the Independent (or Mugwump) movement against the nomination of James Blaine for president and for the election of Grover Cleveland. From 1888 to 1892, he was 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 and held this office until 1901. He also succeeded Curtis as editorial writer for Harper's Weekly in 1892 and held this position until 1898. In 1895 he spoke for the Fusion anti-Tammany Hall ticket in New York City. He opposed William Jennings Bryan for president in 1896, speaking for sound money and not under the auspices of the Republican party; he supported Bryan four years later because of anti-imperialism beliefs, which also led to his membership in the American Anti-Imperialist League. True to his anti-imperialist convictions, Schurz exhorted McKinley to resist the urge to annex land following the Spanish-American War. In the 1904 election he supported Alton B. Parker, the Democratic candidate. Carl Schurz lived in a summer cottage in Northwest Bay on Lake George, New York which was built by his good friend Abraham Jacobi.

Death
Schurz died at age 77 on May 14, 1906 in New York City and is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Sleepy Hollow, New York.

Publications
Schurz published a number of writings, including a volume of speeches (1865), a two-volume biography of Henry Clay (1887), essays on Abraham Lincoln (1899) and Charles Sumner (posthumous, 1951), and his Reminiscences (posthumous, 1907–09). His later years were spent writing the memoirs recorded in his Reminiscences which he was not able to finish — he only reached the beginnings of his U.S. Senate career.

In memoriam
Schurz is commemorated in numerous places around the United States:
 * Carl Schurz Park, a 14.9 acre (60,000 m²) park in New York City, adjacent to Yorkville, Manhattan, overlooking the waters of Hell Gate. Named for Schurz in 1910, it is the site of Gracie Mansion, the residence of the Mayor of New York since 1942
 * Karl Bitter's 1913 monument to Schurz outside Morningside Park, at Morningside Drive and 116th Street in New York City
 * Carl Schurz and Abraham Jacobi Memorial Park in Bolton Landing, New York
 * Schurz, Nevada named after him
 * Carl Schurz Drive, a residential street in the northern end of his former home of Watertown, Wisconsin
 * Schurz Elementary School, in Watertown, Wisconsin
 * Carl Schurz Park, a private membership park in Stone Bank (Town of Merton), Wisconsin, on the shore of Moose Lake
 * Carl Schurz Forest, a forested section of the Ice Age Trail near Monches, Wisconsin
 * Schurz Monument ("Our Greatest German American") in Menominee Park, Oshkosh, Wisconsin
 * Carl Schurz High School, a historic landmark in Chicago, built in 1910.
 * Schurz Hall, a student residence at the University of Missouri.
 * Carl Schurz Elementary School in New Braunfels, Texas
 * Mount Schurz, a mountain in eastern Yellowstone, north of Eagle Peak and south of Atkins Peak, named in 1885 by the United States Geological Survey, to honor Schurz's commitment to protecting Yellowstone National Park
 * In 1983, the U.S. Postal Service issued a 4-cent Great Americans series postage stamp with his name and face
 * The USS Schurz was commissioned in 1917 as a Patrol Gun Boat. Formerly the small unprotected cruiser SMS Geier of the German Imperial Navy, the ship had been taken over by the U.S. Navy when hostilities between Germany and the U.S. commenced, after having been interned in Honolulu in 1914. The Schurz sank after a collision on 21 June 1918 off Beaufort Inlet, Florida.
 * The USS Schurz was commissioned in 1917 as a Patrol Gun Boat. Formerly the small unprotected cruiser SMS Geier of the German Imperial Navy, the ship had been taken over by the U.S. Navy when hostilities between Germany and the U.S. commenced, after having been interned in Honolulu in 1914. The Schurz sank after a collision on 21 June 1918 off Beaufort Inlet, Florida.

Several memorials in Germany also commemorate the life and work of Schurz:
 * Streets named after him in Berlin-Spandau, Bremen, Stuttgart, Erftstadt-Liblar, Giessen, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Köln, Rastatt, Paderborn, Pforzheim, Pirmasens, Leipzig, Wuppertal
 * Schools in Bonn, Bremen, Berlin-Spandau, Frankfurt am Main, Rastatt and his place of birth, Erftstadt-Liblar
 * The Carl Schurz Haus in Freiburg im Breisgau is an innovative institute (formerly Amerika-Haus) fostering German-American cultural relations
 * an urban area in Frankfurt am Main
 * the Carl Schurz Bridge over the Neckar River
 * a memorial fountain as well as the house where Lt. Schurz was billeted in 1849 in Rastatt
 * German Armed Forces barracks in Hardheim
 * German federal stamps in 1952 and 1976

The United States Army base in Bremerhaven, Germany was also named for Schurz - Karl Schurz Kaserne. The base served as a logistical hub for U.S. forces in Germany. The base was returned to the German government in 1996, following the end of the Cold War.

Schurz was portrayed by Edward G. Robinson in John Ford's film Cheyenne Autumn (1963), which shows in part his efforts to secure fair treatment for Native Americans.

Highlights of Schurz's career are dramatized in the third part (“Little Germanies”) of Engstfeld Film's four-part series Germans in America (2006).