Carl Schurz

United States state institutions Russian revolutionary democrats United States Germany 1829–1906 ○ Natural causes

Forty-Eighter who fought in the Baden revolutionary army of 1849 and became a US senator and Secretary of the Interior

Born at Liblar in Prussia's Rhine Province in 1829, he studied at the University of Bonn. In 1848 he and his teacher Gottfried Kinkel founded the Bonner Zeitung for democratic reform, and in 1849, answering the call to defend the imperial constitution, he joined the revolutionary army of the Palatinate and Baden and fought the Prussians. Escaping when the fortress of Rastatt fell, he reached Zurich, and in 1850 he slipped back into Prussia to free Kinkel from Spandau prison. He emigrated to the United States in 1852, joined the Republican Party in Wisconsin and campaigned against slavery. After serving as minister to Spain in 1861 he became a Union general, fighting at Gettysburg among other battles. As senator for Missouri from 1869 to 1875 he helped found the Liberal Republican Party, and he was Secretary of the Interior from 1877 to 1881. He died in New York in 1906.

Also known as: Carl Christian Schurz · Karl Schurz

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