Carl Schurz

Carl Christian Schurz (German: [ʃʊɐ̯ts]; March 2, 1829 – May 14, 1906) was a German-American revolutionary and an American statesman, journalist, and reformer. After the German revolutions of 1848–1849 He migrated to the United States in 1852 and became a prominent member of the newly-forming Republican Party. After serving as a Union general in the American Civil War, he helped found the short-lived Liberal Republican Party and became a prominent advocate of civil-service reform. Schurz represented Missouri in the United States Senate and served as the 13th United States Secretary of the Interior.

Born in the Rhine Province of the Kingdom of Prussia, Schurz fought for democratic reforms in the German revolutions of 1848–1849 as a member of the academic fraternity association Deutsche Burschenschaft. After Prussia suppressed the revolutionary movement Schurz fled to France. When police forced him to leave France he migrated to London. Like many other "Forty-Eighters", he then migrated to the United States, settling in Watertown, Wisconsin, in 1852.

After being admitted to the Wisconsin bar, he established a legal practice in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. During his time in Milwaukee, Carl Schurz was actively involved with the Milwaukee Turners, whose emphasis on physical culture and civic engagement helped shape the principles he carried into his later public service. 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 the Kingdom of Spain in 1861, 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 St. Louis, Missouri, and won election to the U.S. Senate, becoming the first German-born American elected to that body. Breaking with Republican President Ulysses S. Grant, Schurz helped establish the Liberal Republican Party. The party advocated civil-service reform, sound money, low tariffs, low taxes, and an end to railroad grants; it opposed Grant's efforts to protect African-American civil rights in the Southern United States during 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.

After Republican Rutherford B. Hayes won the 1876 presidential election, he appointed Schurz as his Secretary of the Interior. Schurz sought to make civil service based on merit rather than on political and party connections, and helped prevent the transfer of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the War Department.

He was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1878.

Schurz moved to New York City after Hayes left office in 1881 and briefly served as the editor of the New York Evening Post and The Nation; he 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.

Carl Christian Schurz was born on March 2, 1829, in Liblar (now part of Erftstadt), in Rhenish Prussia, the son of Marianne (née Jussen), a public speaker and journalist, and Christian Schurz, 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 graduation. Later, he passed a special examination for graduation from gymnasium and then entered the University of Bonn.