Good morning, it’s Tuesday, October 29, 2013, the date of the 1929 stock market crash. Of more contemporary relevance, perhaps, are letters written by a German immigrant named Carl Schurz on this date in 1855—and again, exactly five years later, from the Abraham Lincoln campaign trail. “The sun has risen bright and clear,” he wrote his wife on Oct. 29, 1855, from Watertown, Wis., “and the view spread out before me presents so cheerful and sweet a picture that I am distinctly encouraged to hope we shall be very happy here.” Schurz and his wife, Margarethe, would prosper in Wisconsin, but as far as being “very happy,” Carl Schurz was not the kind of person who could be content while other people were in bondage. Hed escaped the upheaval in Europe, but he was about to re-enter politics. His career would take him to Washington and Spain, to many Civil War battlefields, and later to the U.S. Senate and a cabinet position in Washington—and, finally, into the New York publishing business. As a college student in Bonn, Carl Schurz joined the fighting in a democratic revolution sweeping Europe in 1848. Crushed in the streets by Prussian troops, and branded enemies of the state who would be imprisoned or executed, these “Forty-Eighters,” as they came to be known, dispersed as best they could. Schurz escaped to Switzerland, worked on a newspaper in Paris, taught school in England before leaving for the nation that beckoned from across the sea. As he told his brother-in-law, if he could not “be the citizen of a free Germany,” he would “be a citizen of free America.” He landed in New York in 1852 before making his way to Philadelphia. Heeding a call to keep heading west, he set out for Chicago and then Milwaukee in the autumn of 1855. Finally, he alighted in Watertown, a brand new burg being settled mostly by Germans, before sending for his family. Both he and Margarethe made their marks in that place. The Schurzes became prosperous farmers, and she started the first kindergarten in the United States. But her husband’s passion was politics—specifically the politics of liberation—and he immersed himself in the formation of a new entity that would alter the governmental equation in this country. That entity was the Republican Party. Carl Schurz campaigned in 1856 for John C. Fremont, the Republicans’ first presidential candidate. Undaunted by Fremont’s defeat, he was heavily involved four years later. After initially supporting William H. Seward as the party standard-bearer, Schurz enthusiastically embraced the man chosen as the Republican nominee. “I shall carry into this struggle all the zeal and ardor and enthusiasm of which my nature is capable,” he wrote to Abraham Lincoln. The same disinterested motives that led me and my friends to support Gov. Seward in the Convention, will animate and urge us on in our work for you, and wherever my voice is heard and my influence extends you may count upon hosts of true and devoted friends.” Schurz lived up to that promise. On this date in 1860, with the election only a week away, he wrote his wife a letter that reminds contemporary Americans fretting over the state of our self-governance that politics has never been, as the saying goes, a game of bean bag. It seems that some 200 members of a Republican group called the Wide-Awakes gathered to hear Schurz speak at a pro-Lincoln rally. The Wide-Awakes, who existed throughout the Midwest, were all-male groups that weren’t above the occasional brawl. The tipoff that this particular rally might not end completely amicably is that the boys assembled a few nights beforehand at a place called Rieber’s Saloon. At that location, they were set upon by an equivalent group of Democratic Party rowdies headed by a man named Emil Rothe. Apparently, many knuckles were bloodied in this encounter—noses, too. Rothe was captured by the Wide-Awakes, who let him go, thereby enhancing the Republicans’ reputation for mercy. “By this incident,” Schurz wrote to his wife, “the Wide-Awakes have gained great respect, and since then nothing more has been heard about any kind of disturbance. But it is said that even the Democrats—that is, the decent ones—were so angered by the conduct of their fellows that many of them have come over to the Republican Party.” Schurz never stopped caring about the party or its cause. After Lincoln’s election, the president sent Schurz to Spain as an ambassador. In March of 1862, however, he made a personal appeal to Lincoln to come home and fight in the Union Army. He didn’t feel he could avoid combat, he told his commander-in-chief, while his adopted nation was “fighting for its life.” Surprised by this request, but admiring of it—and in need of generals who would engage the enemy—Lincoln appointed the 33-year-old immigrant as a brigadier general. In the ranks and the officer corps of the Union Army, Schurz would find several other “Forty-Eighters.” He himself would command troops at Manassas, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. After the war and Lincoln’s assassination, he was sent as an emissary to the South by President Andrew Johnson. Afterward, he returned to the Midwest, this time to St. Louis, where he became a newspaper editor and then a U.S. senator from Missouri. Disillusioned by the Reconstruction policies of President Grant, Schurz briefly helped form the Liberal Republican Party, but re-entered the fold after the election of Rutherford B. Hayes, who named him secretary of the Interior. Four years earlier, Schurz left his adopted country with an evocative phrase, one that is occasionally shortened in a way that alters its meaning. “My country, right or wrong,” he said in a February 29, 1872 Senate floor speech. “If right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” Carl M. Cannon
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 15:19:08 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015