(This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)
This reproduction was printed from a digital file created at the Library of Congress as part of an extensive scanning effort started with a generous donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Library is pleased to offer much of its public domain holdings free of charge online and at a modest price in this printed format. Seeing these older volumes from our collections rediscovered by new generations of readers renews our own passion for books and scholarship.
(This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)
This reproduction was printed from a digital file created at the Library of Congress as part of an extensive scanning effort started with a generous donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Library is pleased to offer much of its public domain holdings free of charge online and at a modest price in this printed format. Seeing these older volumes from our collections rediscovered by new generations of readers renews our own passion for books and scholarship.
Douglas and Popular Sovereignty. Speech of Carl Schurz, of Wisconsin, in Hampden Hall, Springfield, Mass., January 4, 1850. Also, Remarks of Senator ... of the Landing of the Pilgrims, As...
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
(This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)
This reproduction was printed from a digital file created at the Library of Congress as part of an extensive scanning effort started with a generous donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Library is pleased to offer much of its public domain holdings free of charge online and at a modest price in this printed format. Seeing these older volumes from our collections rediscovered by new generations of readers renews our own passion for books and scholarship.
Carl Schurz was a German revolutionary and an American statesman, journalist, and reformer, who became a prominent member of the new Republican Party. He represented Missouri in the United States Senate and was the 13th United States Secretary of the Interior.
Background
Carl was born on March 2, 1829 in the little town of Liblar on the Rhine, (now Erftstadt, Germany).
His father, Christian Schurz, was first a village schoolmaster and then embarked in business; his mother, Marianne Jussen, the daughter of a tenant farmer, was a woman of unusual force of character. Both made every sacrifice to help their son to the career of which he dreamed - a professorship of history.
Education
Schurz attended the gymnasium at Cologne (1839 - 46) and became a candidate for the doctorate at the University of Bonn in 1847.
Career
Profoundly influenced by Professor Gottfried Kinkel of Bonn, one of the intellectual leaders of the struggle for democratic institutions, Schurz followed him in the abortive revolutionary movement upon Siegburg, on May 11, 1849. Thereafter he became a lieutenant and staff officer of the revolutionary army taking part in the final battles of the united rebel forces of Baden and the Palatinate at Ubstadt and Bruchsal, and those on the line of the Murg River in Baden on June 28-30, 1849.
Sent by order into the fortress of Rastatt, just before it was surrendered, he was one of its defenders until the surrender more than three weeks later. Rightly expecting to be shot if captured, Schurz declined to deliver himself up to the conquering Prussians. With two companions he concealed himself for four days, finally escaping through an unused sewer which was their first place of refuge. They crossed the Rhine and entered French territory, Schurz finally joining the large colony of German refugees in Switzerland.
In Switzerland he might have stayed indefinitely had it not been for the plight of his beloved teacher, Kinkel, who had been captured, put on trial for his life, and sentenced to life imprisonment. After being treated as a common felon, Kinkel was at length transferred to the prison at Spandau, a fortified town near Berlin. In response to Frau Kinkel's appeals, Schurz undertook the liberation of her husband. Twice, with the aid of a false passport, he reentered Germany, where he was himself on the proscribed list. After nine months of preparation and plotting with the complicity of a turnkey, Kinkel was lowered to the street from an unbarred attic window of the prison in the night of November 6-7, 1850. In a waiting carriage Kinkel and Schurz left the city by the Hamburg road, only to alter their course and drive straight to Mecklenburg. They were successfully concealed in Rostock until a tiny schooner conveyed them to England. To this day no single incident of the Revolution is better known in Germany; no other has in it more elements of romantic daring and unselfish personal heroism.
Schurz went to Paris in December 1850, but in the summer of 1851 was expelled from France by the police as a dangerous foreigner. During this period he won the friendship of Mazzini and Kossuth and other great leaders of the democratic movement in Europe.
In August he set sail for the United States, following in the footsteps of many of his associates-in-arms of the brief campaign of 1849. In 1856 he purchased a small farm in Watertown, Wis. , where an uncle's family had settled.
Having espoused the antislavery cause with all the ardor and enthusiasm he gave to the revolution of 1849, Schurz was immediately drawn into Republican politics. The next year he was sent as a delegate to the Republican state convention which promptly nominated him for lieutenant-governor although he was not yet a citizen of the United States, a point that did not become pressing because he was defeated by 107 votes despite wide campaigning in both English and German. A year later, the campaign of 1858 found him speaking in Illinois for Abraham Lincoln and against Stephen A. Douglas.
He was in demand for one campaign after another; in April 1859 he aided, by request, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts in his fight against the Know-Nothing movement in that state, delivering one of his most famous speeches, "True Americanism", which helped to defeat a proposal to deny the ballot to foreign-born voters in Massachusetts for two years after federal naturalization. Schurz was next put forward for the governorship of Wisconsin; the prize went, however, to another.
He was then admitted to the bar and entered into a law partnership, but the antislavery cause and politics absorbed most of his time. His greatest forensic effort - he considered it the greatest success of his oratorical career - was his speech in Cooper Union, September 13, 1860, which was devoted to a merciless critique of Stephen A. Douglas and was marked by sarcasm, humor, and his unusual power of clear exposition.
For all of these services, Lincoln had written to him on June 18, 1860, that "to the extent of our limited acquaintance, no man stands nearer my heart than yourself" and appointed Schurz minister to Spain, although he was in the midst of raising the 1th New York ("Lincoln") Cavalry of which he expected to be colonel.
Arriving at Madrid in July 1861, Schurz devoted himself, like Charles Francis Adams and other American representatives in Europe, to advancing and safeguarding the Union cause abroad, and gave all his leisure time to military campaigns and tactics which he had studied ever since his brief military experience in Germany. Finding, however, that the Northern cause was greatly weakened by the failure of the government to become clearly antislavery, and receiving no encouragement in this matter from Secretary Seward, Schurz returned to the United States in January 1862, to put his views before Lincoln. The latter received him kindly, but persisted in his policy of awaiting a more favorable public opinion at home.
Schurz resigned as minister in April, was appointed brigadier-general of volunteers, and was given not a brigade, but a division on June 10, 1862, thus being placed in command of troops some of whom were veterans of a year's standing. He was frequently complimented in dispatches, and on one occasion after his troops passed in review with the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln confirmed the press reports that "the division commanded by General Schurz impressed the Presidential party as the best drilled and most soldierly of the troops that passed before them".
At the second battle of Bull Run, August 30, 1862, the new brigadier of two months' service and his division won high praise in one of the bloodiest and bitterest defeats of the Army of the Potomac, whose final withdrawal they covered. It was, however, the misfortune of this division and the corps to bear the brunt of Jackson's sudden attack at Chancellorsville. Badly placed by the corps commander, General O. O. Howard - despite repeated protests and warnings by Schurz - the division broke and retired in disorder before the overwhelming Confederate onrush, but was finally rallied in part to aid in preventing what threatened to be a complete disaster. There resulted a long controversy between Schurz and Howard, but the former's efforts to obtain a court of inquiry and justice for his troops failed.
At Gettysburg, where, because of the killing of General Reynolds and the consequent advancement of General Howard, Schurz took command of the XI Corps, his troops bore the brunt of the Confederate attack upon the right wing. After heavy losses they retired in some disorder through the town to Cemetery Ridge, again in obedience to orders from Howard.
That Schurz was himself not held responsible for the Chancellorsville disaster appears from the fact that on March 14, 1863, he was promoted to major-general. After Gettysburg, the corps was transferred to the western field.
Schurz again became involved in a controversy, this time with General Hooker. A court of inquiry subsequently found that his conduct had been entirely correct and proper. After Chattanooga the depleted XI and XII Corps were merged into a new XX Corps, and Schurz was appointed to command a corps of instruction at Nashville. Schurz, after some months, asked to be relieved of his command, conferred with Lincoln, and then made many speeches on behalf of the President's reelection. The end of the war found him chief of staff to Major-General Slocum in Sherman's army.
He resigned immediately after the surrender of Lee. Before Schurz could decide upon his next course of action, President Johnson asked him to visit the Southern states and to report at length to him upon conditions there. Schurz traveled from July to September 1865, and wrote a lengthy report that has extraordinary historical value to this day, because of its detailed analysis of the situation, its clarity of statement, and its vision (Speeches, Correspondence, I, 279-374).
Resigning in the spring of 1866, Schurz next became editor-in-chief of the Detroit Post, then just established by leading Michigan Republicans. Here he remained only a year, when he became joint editor, with Emil Preetorius, of the St. Louis Westliche Post, and one of the proprietors of this German-language daily.
A delegate to the Republican National Convention which met to nominate Grant for the presidency in 1868, Schurz was at once chosen temporary chairman of the convention, and made the keynote address. He drew up the resolution in the platform calling for the removal of disqualifications upon "the late rebels". As usual, he made many speeches in the campaign which followed. After a bitter contest between the Radicals and Liberals in the party, he was himself nominated for the United States Senate from Missouri, and duly elected by the legislature.
On March 4, 1869, two days after his fortieth birthday, he took his seat in Washington. He speedily found himself in the group of anti-Grant senators, joining Sumner in the defeat of Grant's plan to annex Santo Domingo, and opposing at many points the "spoils-loving and domineering partisans" of the President. On December 20, 1869, years before the policy it outlined was adopted, Schurz introduced a bill to create a permanent civil-service merit system. He was at his best in his incessant attacks upon public corruption.
He could not win reelection in 1875, for, because of the Republican split, the Democrats had gained control of the Missouri legislature. He was again compelled to turn to journalism and the lecture platform for support. Schurz, who was disgusted with Grant and distrustful of the Democrats, had probably done more than any other leader to promote the Liberal Republican movement.
He was the permanent president of the Cincinnati convention of 1872 that organized the new party and, although profoundly disappointed by the nomination of Horace Greeley and without hope of success, was active in the campaign. In 1876, to the dismay and anger of many of his Liberal Republican associates, he supported Hayes, being assured that the latter was sound on the money question, would restore the South, and would promote civil-service reform. On March 4, 1877, Schurz entered the cabinet of Hayes as secretary of the interior.
On leaving the cabinet Schurz began his fourth venture into journalism. At the invitation of Henry Villard, who had just purchased the New York Evening Post and the Nation, he became head of a triumvirate of remarkable editors comprising besides himself, Edwin L. Godkin and Horace White. The brilliant chapter in journalism which they thus began ended in two and a quarter years, in the fall of 1883, because of differences as to editorial methods and policies between Schurz and Godkin. The friendship of the three men remained unbroken; until his death Schurz was a valued counselor of the Evening Post.
Schurz's final venture into journalism began in 1892, when in succession to George William Curtis he for six years contributed the leading editorials to Harper's Weekly. Their authorship was at first kept secret, as had been his contribution of many articles to the Nation, prior to its amalgamation with the Evening Post in 1881, notably some regular letters from Washington in 1872 and 1873. In 1898 his connection with Harper's Weekly was ended by his refusal to support the drift toward the war with Spain.
The latter years of his life Schurz gave to literary labor, to letters upon public questions, and to occasional public speeches. He was for years (1892 - 1900) president of the National Civil-Service Reform League, and of the Civil Service Reform Association of New York (1893 - 1906). In every mayoralty election in New York, in which he resided from 1881 on, he made his influence felt in the struggle for good government.
Besides his speeches and unfinished reminiscences, mention should be made of his admirable Life of Henry Clay (2 vols. , 1887), a notable essay on Lincoln in the Atlantic Monthly, June 1891 (also printed separately, 1891 and later), and a pamphlet, The New South (1885).
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Politics
When the war with Spain came Schurz warmly opposed it, as he did the annexation of the Philippines, declaring that fatal violence was being done the anti-imperialistic, peace-loving ideal of America, free from all entangling foreign alliances.
An ardent admirer and supporter of Grover Cleveland, except occasionally, as in the matter of the Venezuelan episode of 1895, Schurz championed William J. Bryan in 1900 on the anti-imperialist issue, as he had opposed him on the free-silver question four years earlier.
Views
Quotations:
Schurz is famous for saying: "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right. "
He once wrote that foreign-born citizens were "more jealously patriotic Americans than many natives are, " since they watch the progress of the Republic "with triumphant joy at every success of our democratic institutions, and with the keenest sensitiveness to every failure, having the standing of this country before the world constantly in mind".
Personality
Schurz had rare gift of oratory. Schurz spent months in traveling through the United States, and set about acquiring that remarkable mastery of the English language which made it possible for him to make campaign speeches in English within five years after his arrival.
Carl Schurz was a man of great personal charm, of commanding presence, despite a very tall and rather lanky figure, of a gay, vivacious, and unusually happy spirit, which was never daunted by his bitter disappointments in the trend of domestic and foreign policy from 1898 on. Devoted to his family, an amateur pianist of talent, blessed with a great sense of humor, together with much playful irony, he took cheerfully those periods of his life when he went counter to public opinion, and willingly paid the price therefor. He remained until his death extraordinarily rich in friends and admirers.
Quotes from others about the person
William A. Dunning and Frederic Bancroft have written in their addenda to Schurz's unfinished memoirs that his "whole conception of public policy was far above the play of merely personal and party interests"; and that his senatorial career was accordingly one of "exceptional seriousness and dignity".
Connections
Schurz married Margarethe (or Margaretha) Meyer, of Hamburg, July 6, 1852. His wife died in 1876. Of two sons and two daughters, three survived him; all died without issue.