Background
Gustav was born on October 11, 1805 in Munich, Germany, the son of the Russian diplomat Johann Gustav von Struve and Friederike Christine Sibille, nee von Hockstetter, of a Swabian noble family. His family came from the lesser nobility.
military publicist Surgeon agitator
Gustav was born on October 11, 1805 in Munich, Germany, the son of the Russian diplomat Johann Gustav von Struve and Friederike Christine Sibille, nee von Hockstetter, of a Swabian noble family. His family came from the lesser nobility.
He attended preparatory schools in Munich and Karlsruhe, and from 1824 to 1826 studied law in Gottingen and Heidelberg.
Struve accepted a post as secretary of the Oldenburg legation at Frankfurt, but soon found himself at odds with the stuffy diplomacy of the Metternich period. For a while he became a judge in Jever and afterwards settled as lawyer in Mannheim.
He published a work on constitutional law, Ueber das positive Rechtsgesetz (1834), and one on current politics, Briefwechsel zwischen einem ehemaligen und einem jetzigen Diplomaten (1845), which earned him a short jail sentence because he accused Metternich of treason. The same thing happened shortly afterward because of another of the many pamphlets which he issued during the forties.
In 1843 he founded the Zeitschrift fur Phrenologie and published Phrenologie in und ausserhalb Deutschland, at the same time lecturing on the subject at Heidelberg and Mannheim. He agitated against capital punishment and advocated that phrenologists be put in charge of prisons.
In 1845 he became editor of a political journal, Das Mannheimer Tageblatt, and when he proved too radical for the owners he founded his own, the Deutscher Zuschauer, and began the agitation for a German republic culminating in the Revolution of 1848. He was instrumental in calling the popular mass meeting at Offenburg in Baden, on March 19, 1848, in which the revolutionary demands were formulated.
He was elected a member of the Vorparlament but left this body when it proved too meek and impatiently organized an armed band of 300 men to cooperate with Friedrich K. F. Hecker for the establishment of a republic. After a clash with government troops he was arrested at Seckingen, and released on condition that he emigrate to Switzerland. After a short time he returned with 200 men to support Franz Sigel, but they were again defeated at Freiburg, and Struve fled to Switzerland where he made preparations for renewed fighting. When the ephemeral republic under Brentano collapsed he fled again to Switzerland, was expelled to England, and finally emigrated to America in 1851.
He settled on Staten Island, but his efforts at journalism and play-writing did not prove successful. A wealthy German brewer by the name of Biegel invited him to live on his estate at Dobbs Ferry on the Hudson for the purpose of writing a history of the world from a democratic point of view; Struve considered this Weltgeschichte (1852 - 60), in nine volumes, his magnum opus. His main thesis was that tyranny and repression are detrimental to economic and cultural progress - America's progress in the nineteenth century he considered due to freedom from restrictions as much as to natural resources.
In 1861, at the age of fifty-six years, he entered the Union army as a private in the 8th German Volunteer Regiment under Louis Blenker, soon advancing to the rank of captain. He was discharged, however, in November 1862, because he protested against the appointment of Prince von Salm-Salm as Blenker's successor against the wishes of the entire regiment.
After death of his wife, he settled in Coburg where he was married to a Frau von Centener. He continued to publish various works, chiefly on America and on the Revolution. An autobiographical work, Diesseits und Jenseits des Oceans, appeared in 1863. Lincoln appointed him consul to the Thuringian states, but that government declined his appointment because his radical writings had involved him in renewed difficulties.
In 1869 he settled in Vienna, where he died.
Struve was an abolitionist, and opposed plans to create a colony of freed slaves in Liberia because he thought it would hinder the abolition of slavery in the United States.
Descriptions of his character and even personal appearance differ from adulation to sarcastic belittlement. As a nineteenth century disciple of Rousseau and Robespierre he combined the noblest humanitarian intentions with opinionated impracticability. There seems to be general agreement that he utterly lacked qualities of leadership, but that he possessed idealism and tenacious courage.
In 1845, Struve married Amalie Düsar on 16 November 1845 and in 1847 he dropped the aristocratic "von" from his surname due to his democratic ideals. In 1863, his wife, Amalie Dosar, to whom he had been married in 1845, died, and he returned to Germany. His first wife had died in Staten Island in 1862. Back in Germany, he married a Frau von Centener.
