Carl Schurz

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Carl Schurz
United States Minister to Spain
In office
July 13, 1861 – December 18, 1861
PresidentAbraham Lincoln
Preceded byWilliam Preston
Succeeded byGustav Körner
Personal details
Born
Carl Christian Schurz

(1829-03-02)March 2, 1829
German revolutions of 1848–49
American Civil War
(1861–1865)
This article is part of a series on
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in the United States
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Carl Schurz (German:

civil service reform. Schurz represented Missouri in the United States Senate and was the 13th United States Secretary of the Interior
.

Born in the

Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He also became a strong advocate for the anti-slavery movement and joined the newly organized Republican Party, unsuccessfully running for Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin. After briefly representing the United States as Minister (ambassador) to Spain, Schurz served as a general in the American Civil War, fighting in the Battle of Gettysburg
and other major battles.

After the war, Schurz established a newspaper in

Reconstruction. Schurz chaired the 1872 Liberal Republican convention, which nominated a ticket that unsuccessfully challenged President Grant in the 1872 presidential election. Schurz lost his own 1874 re-election bid and resumed his career as a newspaper editor. He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1878.[3]

After Republican

New York Evening Post and The Nation and later became the editorial writer for Harper's Weekly. He remained active in politics and led the "Mugwump" movement, which opposed nominating James G. Blaine in the 1884 presidential election. Schurz opposed William Jennings Bryan's bimetallism in the 1896 presidential election but supported Bryan's anti-imperialist campaign in the 1900 presidential election
. Schurz died in New York City in 1906.

Early life

Carl Christian Schurz was born on March 2, 1829, in Liblar (now part of

Rhenish Prussia, the son of Marianne (née Jussen), a public speaker and journalist, and Christian Schurz, a schoolteacher.[4] 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 then entered the University of Bonn.[5]

Revolution of 1848

Carl Schurz as a young man

At Bonn, he developed a friendship with one of his professors,

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.

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, he joined the revolutionary army, fighting in several battles against the Prussian Army.

suffrage movements
of the United States.

Photograph of Carl Schurz seated in a chair; he has dark hair and a mustache and wears glasses.
Carl Schurz, [c. 1859–1870]. Carte de Visite Collection, Boston Public Library.

When the revolutionary army was defeated at 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.[10]

Migration to America

While in London, Schurz married fellow revolutionary

Forty-Eighters, migrated to the United States.[5] 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.

In Wisconsin, Schurz soon became immersed in the anti-slavery movement and in politics, joining the

Fugitive Slave Law, arguing for states' rights. In Faneuil Hall, Boston, on April 18, 1859,[12] 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.[10]

After Lincoln's election and in spite of Seward's objection, Lincoln sent Schurz as minister to Spain in 1861,[13] in part because of Schurz's European record as a revolutionary.[10] While there, Schurz did not manage to cause any lasting impact on the Spanish authorities regarding the conflict.[14] He returned to the US in early 1862 to join the Union army.

American Civil War

"For freedom in Germany and America": West German commemorative stamp featuring Schurz for the United States Bicentennial, 1976

During the

Oliver O. Howard.[10] A bitter controversy began between Schurz and Howard over the strategy employed at Chancellorsville, resulting in the routing of the XI Corps by the Confederate corps led by Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson
. Two months later, the XI Corps again broke during the first day of Gettysburg. Containing several German-American units, the XI Corps performance during both battles was heavily criticized by the press, fueling anti-immigrant sentiments.

Carl Schurz as Major General of Volunteers during the Civil War.

Following Gettysburg, Schurz's division was deployed to Tennessee and participated in the

Henry Slocum's Army of Georgia. He resigned from the army after the war ended in April 1865.[10]

In the summer of 1865, President Andrew Johnson sent Schurz through the South to study conditions. They then quarreled because Schurz supported General Slocum's order forbidding the organization of militia in Mississippi. Schurz delivered a report to the U.S. Senate documenting conditions in the South which concluded that Reconstruction had succeeded in restoring the basic functioning of government but failed in restoring the loyalty of the people and protecting the rights of the newly legally emancipated who were still considered the slaves of society.[15] It called for a national commitment to maintaining control over the South until free labor was secure, arguing that without national action, Black Codes and violence including numerous extrajudicial killings documented by Schurz were likely to continue.[15] The report was ignored by the President, but it helped fuel the movement pushing for a larger congressional role in Reconstruction and holding Southern states to higher standards.[16][10]

Newspaper career

Photograph of Carl Schurz; he wears glasses and a beard.
Carl Schurz, [c. 1859–1870]. Carte de Visite Collection, Boston Public Library.

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 German-language Westliche Post (Western Post), where he hired Joseph Pulitzer as a cub reporter. In the winter of 1867–1868, he traveled in Germany; his 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"—code for going back on the gold standard—during the presidential campaign of 1868.[10]

U.S. Senator

Carl Schurz is Don Quixote in this cartoon by Thomas Nast from Harper's Weekly of April 6, 1872

In 1868, he was elected to the

Liberal Republican movement in Missouri, which in 1870 elected B. Gratz Brown governor.[10]

After William P. Fessenden's death, Schurz became 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 1869, he became the first U.S. Senator to offer a

civil rights, and held nineteenth century ideas of European superiority and fears of miscegenation.[17][18]

In 1870, Schurz helped form 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 Enforcement Acts.

In 1872, he presided over the Liberal Republican Party convention, which nominated

Charles Francis Adams or Lyman Trumbull, and the convention did not represent Schurz's views on the tariff.[10] 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.[19] The election was a debacle for the Greeley supporters. Grant won by a landslide, and Greeley died shortly after election day in November, before the Electoral College
had even met.

Schurz lost the 1874 Senatorial election to

Governor of Ohio. In 1877, Schurz was appointed United States Secretary of the Interior by Hayes, who had been by then been elected President of the United States. Although Schurz honestly attempted to reduce the effects of racism toward Native Americans and was partially successful at cleaning up corruption, his recommended actions towards American Indians "in light of late twentieth-century developments" were repressive.[20] Indians were forced to move into low-quality reservation lands that were unsuitable for tribal economic and cultural advancement.[20] Promises made to Indian chiefs at White House meetings with President Rutherford B. Hayes and Schurz were often broken.[20]

Secretary of the Interior

Carl Schurz and James Blaine in a Puck political cartoon of c. 1878 by J. Keppler

In 1876, he supported Hayes for President, and Hayes named him

Civil Service. He was not in favor of permitting removals except for cause, and supported 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.[10]

Chief Ouray
and his wife Chipeta.

During Schurz's tenure as Secretary of the Interior, a movement to transfer the Office of Indian Affairs to the control of the War Department began, assisted by the strong support of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.[21] 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 office in the Interior Department. Positions in it were based on political patronage and were seen as granting license to use the reservations for personal enrichment. Because Schurz realized that the service would have to be cleansed of such corruption before anything positive could be accomplished, 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.[22]

Schurz's leadership of the Indian Affairs Office was at times controversial. While certainly not an architect of forced displacement of Native Americans, he continued the practice. In response to several nineteenth-century reformers, however, he later changed his mind and promoted an assimilationist policy.[23][24]

Later life

Atlantic to New York.[25]

Upon leaving the Interior Department in 1881, Schurz moved to

New York Evening Post and The Nation and turned the management over to Schurz, Horace White and Edwin L. Godkin.[26] Schurz left the Post in the autumn of 1883 because of differences over editorial policies regarding corporations and their employees.[27]

In 1884, he was a leader in the Independent (or

four years later because of anti-imperialism beliefs, which also led to his membership in the American Anti-Imperialist League.[28]

True to his anti-imperialist convictions, Schurz exhorted McKinley to resist the urge to annex land following the

1904 election he supported Alton B. Parker, the Democratic candidate.[30] 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 and legacy

Schurz died at age 77 on May 14, 1906, in New York City, and is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Sleepy Hollow, New York.[31]

Schurz's wife, Margarethe Schurz, was instrumental in establishing the kindergarten system in the United States.[32]

Schurz is famous for saying: "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right."[33]

He was portrayed by Edward G. Robinson as a friend of the surviving Cheyenne Indians in John Ford's 1964 film Cheyenne Autumn.

Works

Schurz published 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, reaching only the beginnings of his U.S. Senate career. Schurz was a member of the Literary Society of Washington from 1879 to 1880.[34]

Memorials

Schurz monument in New York City
Carl Schurz Park, Upper East Side Manhattan, New York City
Carl Schurz grave, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y.

Schurz is commemorated in numerous places around the United States:

Several memorials in Germany also commemorate the life and work of Schurz, including:

Harper's Weekly gallery

  • Schurz and other anti-Grant "conspirators" – March 16, 1872
    Schurz and other anti-Grant "conspirators" – March 16, 1872
  • French Arms investigation – May 11, 1872
    French Arms investigation – May 11, 1872
  • Schurz and his victims – September 7, 1872
    Schurz and his victims – September 7, 1872
  • Schurz is depicted as a carpetbagger - November 9, 1872.
    Schurz is depicted as a carpetbagger - November 9, 1872.
  • Schurz leaves the U.S. Senate – March 20, 1875
    Schurz leaves the U.S. Senate – March 20, 1875
  • Schurz reforms the Indian Bureau – January 26, 1878
    Schurz reforms the Indian Bureau – January 26, 1878
  • Schurz counsels a wounded settler – December 28, 1878
    Schurz counsels a wounded settler – December 28, 1878
  • Schurz and Wilhelm II – July 14, 1900
    Schurz and Wilhelm II – July 14, 1900
  • Schurz and Emilio Aguinaldo – August 9, 1902
    Schurz and Emilio Aguinaldo – August 9, 1902
  • - February 26, 1881
    - February 26, 1881

See also

Notes

  1. ISBN 3-8253-1256-9
    .
  2. ^ "Schurz, Carl (1829-1906)". Wisconsin Historical Society. Archived from the original on 2013-10-30. Retrieved 2 November 2016.
  3. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  4. ISBN 0253108411
    . Retrieved 2 November 2016 – via Google Books.
  5. ^ a b c d Dictionary Of American Biography (1935), Carl Schurz, p. 466.
  6. ^ Schurz, Carl. Reminiscences, Vol. 1, pp. 93–94.
  7. ^ Van Cleve, Charles L. (1902). Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity From Its Foundation In 1852 To Its Fiftieth Anniversary. p. 209: Philadelphia: Franklin Printing Company.
  8. ^ Schurz, Reminiscences, Vol. 1, Chap. 6, pp. 159.
  9. ^ W. R. Mc Cormick: BAY COUNTY Memorial Report: Emil Anneke: in: Report of the Pioneer Society of the State of Michigan, Vol. XIV, 1890, Lansing, Michigan, W. S. George & Co., State Printers & Binders, Page 57–58 Archived 2016-03-03 at the Wayback Machine
  10. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Chisholm 1911, p. 390.
  11. ^ Killian, Marcella (April 28, 1952). "Carl Schurz". Watertown Historical Society.
  12. ^ Hirschhorn, p. 1713.
  13. ^ Dictionary Of American Biography (1935), Carl Schurz, p. 467
  14. ISBN 978-0-8262-1938-1
    .
  15. ^ a b Schurz, Carl. "Report on the Condition of the South". gutenberg.org. Retrieved 2022-05-04.
  16. ^ "Report on the Condition of the South". Teaching American History. Retrieved 2022-05-04.
  17. ^ Mejías-López (2009), The Inverted Conquest, p. 132.
  18. ^ Brands (2012), The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses S. Grant in War and Peace, p. 489.
  19. ^ This story, and the conflict between Nast and Harper's editorial writer George William Curtis, is related by Albert Bigelow Paine in Thomas Nast: His Period and His Pictures, 1904.
  20. ^ a b c Fishel-Spragens (1988), Popular Images of American Presidents, p. 121
  21. ^ "Army charges answered". The New York Times: 5. December 7, 1878. ARMY CHARGES ANSWERED; THE INDIAN SERVICE UPHELD BY MR. SCHURZ. WHY IT WOULD BE UNWISE TO TRANSFER THE INDIAN BUREAU TO THE WAR DEPARTMENT--INCONSISTENT AND INACCURATE STATEMENTS BY MILITARY OFFICERS--LOOSE MANAGEMENT UNDER THE ARMY. INCONSISTENT AND INACCURATE STATEMENTS BY ARMY OFFICERS. ALLEGED ARMY DISHONESTY. MEASURES OF IMPORTANCE. MR. SCHURZ CROSS-EXAMINED. OTHER WITNESSES
  22. ^ Trefousse, Hans L., Carl Schurz: A Biography, (U. of Tenn. Press, 1982)
  23. ^ Hoxie, Frederick E. A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1981.
  24. ^ "Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, November 1, 1880," In Prucha, Francis Paul, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. See Google Books.
  25. ^ Sturm und Drang Over a Memorial to Heinrich Heine. The New York Times, May 27, 2007.
  26. ^ Villard, Oswald Garrison (1936). "White, Horace". Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
  27. ^ "No Longer an Editor; Carl Schurz Severs his Connection with the 'Evening Post'." The New York Times, December 11, 1883
  28. ^ Chisholm 1911, pp. 390–391.
  29. ^ Tucker (1998), p. 114.
  30. ^ Chisholm 1911, p. 391.
  31. ^ German Monuments in the Americas
  32. ^ "Schurz, Margarethe [Meyer] (Mrs. Carl Schurz) 1833 - 1876". Wisconsin Historical Society. 8 August 2017. Retrieved 8 August 2021.
  33. ^ Schurz, Carl, remarks in the Senate, February 29, 1872, The Congressional Globe, vol. 45, p. 1287. See Wikisource for the complete speech.
  34. ^ Spauling, Thomas M. (1947). The Literary Society in Peace and War. Washington, D.C.: George Banta Publishing Company.
  35. ^ "Schurz Monument - Postcard - Wisconsin Historical Society". December 2003. Retrieved 2 November 2016.
  36. ^ Federal Writers' Project (1941). Origin of Place Names: Nevada (PDF). W.P.A. p. 53.
  37. ^ "Schurz Bridge". Retrieved 2 November 2016.

References

Further reading
Wikisource has original works by or about:
Carl Schurz

External links

Diplomatic posts
Preceded by
United States Minister to Spain

1861 		Succeeded by
U.S. Senate
Preceded by
U.S. Senator (Class 1) from Missouri
1869–1875
Served alongside: Charles D. Drake, Daniel T. Jewett, Francis Blair, Lewis V. Bogy
 Succeeded by
Political offices
Preceded by United States Secretary of the Interior
1877–1881 		Succeeded by
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