Land Pirate

April 27, 2011

Abraham Lincoln called his second-floor office in the White House “the Shop,” an apt metaphor for a place people drifted in and out of constantly. At first glance, it was not the most impressive command center for the mighty war effort beginning to stir. Across the Potomac, in Alexandria, a Confederate flag fluttered insultingly, within easy view of the White House. Office-seekers, the bane of Lincoln’s existence, continued to show up, even as desperately needed troops failed to. But at times, the flotsam and jetsam pouring into the Executive Mansion produced a welcome visitor. Late April brought an office-seeker Lincoln knew well, for his help asking German-Americans to vote. Now Lincoln needed them to fight; and Carl Schurz was just the man to speak to them.

Library of Congress Carl Schurz

Schurz was only 32 in the spring of 1861, but had already lived many lives. A 19th century Zelig of sorts, he had a knack for arriving just as trouble was erupting, and for leaving just as he was about to get caught. He was born on the grounds of a castle near Cologne, where his grandfather was an employee of an aristocratic family, and he seems to have spent most of his life storming the castle in one sense or another. As a 19-year-old German student, passionate for the liberal revolutions sweeping Europe in 1848, he conceived a plot worthy of “Mission Impossible” to penetrate Berlin’s Spandau prison and liberate his teacher, Gottfried Kinkel, who was being held for his political views.

The rescue was a remarkable piece of derring-do; after months of secret preparation, including disguises, copied keys and well-placed bribes, Schurz lowered his teacher to the street from an open window, where he had a carriage waiting. The escape was a sensation, and made Schurz the most famous teenager in the world. But the revolution itself failed, and thousands of idealistic young Germans flocked to the New World to start life over again, free of princes, prelates and Prussians.

Banished from Germany, Schurz spent a few years in England, where he lived among German expatriates, and married one of them, Margarethe Meyer, a Jewish pioneer of kindergarten education. But Schurz always had a soft spot for America (his grandfather revered George Washington), and in 1852, he and his wife came to the United States, just two more immigrants.

They ultimately settled in Watertown, Wis., where in 1856 Margarethe opened up the first kindergarten in America, dedicated to the radical idea that young children have a sensitive intelligence of their own. There, living among post-1848 Germans who felt a keen aversion to autocratic power, Schurz fell in naturally with the Republican party, whose first meeting took place in the tiny town of Ripon, Wis., in early 1854.

As the star of Abraham Lincoln rose, Schurz attached himself to it. Their first meeting was memorable. On a train to Quincy, Ill., the night before the Lincoln-Douglas debate was to take place there, Schurz was amazed to encounter a ragged human specimen, the great man himself:

I must confess that I was somewhat startled by his appearance. There he stood, overtopping by several inches all those surrounding him. Although measuring something over six feet myself, I had, standing quite near to him, to throw my head backward in order to look into his eyes … On his head he wore a somewhat battered “stove-pipe” hat. His neck emerged, long and sinewy, from a white collar turned down over a thin black necktie. His lank, ungainly body was clad in a rust black coat that should have been longer. His black trousers, too, permitted a very full view of his large feet … I had seen, in Washington and in the West, several public men of rough appearance; but none whose looks seemed quite so uncouth, not to say grotesque, as Lincoln’s.

Following that ringing endorsement, Schurz fell hard for him, recognizing an antipathy to slavery that matched his own, and an unearthly political intelligence that exceeded his own. For his part, Lincoln was smart enough to know that German “48ers” were a natural constituency for him. They were also numerous. Any sentient reader of the 1860 Census tables could see just how German America had become in the previous 10 years, with over a million German-born citizens. Certain cities were almost German protectorates within the United States; Cincinnati and St. Louis, for example. A little-noticed event in the latter city on March 7, 1861, was the marriage of a recent German immigrant named Adolphus Busch to the daughter of a small local brewer, Lily Anheuser. In 1876, he would test a new beer, named after the town of Budweis in Bohemia (today a Czech city called České Budějovice).

Wisconsin was another Germanic place, complete with a New Berlin and a Germantown, and from this base Schurz made a dazzling career as a speaker for Lincoln and the Republicans at a time when plenty of Americans were loudly anti-immigrant. In 1859, Schurz gave a speech in Boston on “True Americanism” that claimed the immigrant’s place in American society more eloquently than anyone had to that date. Throughout 1860, he gave Lincoln everything he could, and brought thousands of Germans into his camp. In gratitude, Lincoln offered Schurz a plum assignment — minister to Spain. It was controversial to send a former revolutionary to an aristocratic stronghold, but Lincoln wanted to honor his friend.

In late April, however, that friend had other ideas. Brimming with war fever, he raced to the White House and badgered Lincoln with ideas about forming a German cavalry regiment, on the theory that Prussians and cavalry regiments were more or less synonymous. There were weaknesses in Schurz’s theory (he had no experience as a soldier, and no love for the Prussians who had crushed his revolution), but they were easily smoothed over in the excitement of April 1861.

John Hay, whose diary gives so much insight into the early days of the Lincoln White House, records that Schurz electrified the place as soon as he arrived:

April 26: Carl Schurz was here today. He spoke with wild enthusiasm of his desire to mingle in the war. He has great confidence in his military prowess, and his capability of arousing the enthusiasm of the young. He contemplates the career of a great guerilla chief with ardent longing.

April 27: The Seventh Regiment Band played gloriously on the shaven lawn at the South front of the Executive Mansion. The scene was very beautiful. Through the luxuriant grounds the gaily dressed crowd idly strolled, soldiers loafed in the promenade, the martial music filled the sweet air with vague suggestions of heroism, and Carl Schurz and the President talked war.

April 28: Carl Schurz told me he was going home to arm his clansmen for the wars. He has obtained three months leave of absence from his diplomatic duties & permission to raise a cavalry regiment. He will make a wonderful land pirate, bold, quick brilliant and reckless. He will be hard to control and difficult to direct. Still, we shall see. He is a wonderful man.

The “land pirate” boasted that he would raise a regiment of “Iron and Steel”; Hay, irrepressible, retorted that their motto should be “I Run and Steal.” That line, dutifully recorded in Hay’s handwriting, was even more dutifully crossed out after writing it. Fortunately, he didn’t cross it out well enough, and it can still be read.

But for all this horseplay in Washington there was still grave doubt about the fate of the new government. A remarkable anecdote in Schurz’s “Reminiscences” reveals how poorly guarded the president was, despite all the soldiers parading in front of their girlfriends:

As soon as possible I reported myself to Mr. Lincoln at the White House. He seemed surprised, but glad to see me. I told him why I had come, and he approved. In his quaint way he described me the anxieties he had passed through since the rebel attack on Fort Sumter and before the first Northern troops reached Washington. He told me of an incident characteristic of the situation which I wish I could repeat in his own language. I can only give the substance. One afternoon after had had issued his call for troops, he sat alone in this room, and a felling came over him as if he were utterly deserted and helpless. He thought any moderately strong body of secessionist troops, if there were any in the neighborhood, might come over the “long bridge” across the Potomac, and just take him and the members of the Cabinet — the whole lot of them. Then he suddenly heard a sound like the boom of a cannon. “There they are!” he said to himself. He expected every moment somebody would rush in with the report of an attack. The White House attendants, whom he interrogated, had heard nothing. But nobody came, and all remained still. Then he thought he would look after the thing himself. So he walked out, and walked, and walked, until he got to the Arsenal. There he found the doors all open and not a soul to guard them. Anybody might have gone in and helped himself to the arms. There was perfect solitude and stillness all around. Then he walked back to the White House without noticing the slightest sign of disturbance.

In the end, Schurz did get his war experience. He served ably in Madrid, where he quelled support for the Confederacy, and then came back to fight in earnest. He did his work well — over four years, 176,817 German immigrants fought to preserve the Union. Through a series of commands, Schurz was in the thick of the action at Second Bull Run, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, surrounded by his countrymen, eager to fight for freedom in a way they had not been able to back home. And to prove themselves loyal Americans in the bargain. They paid a terrible cost, and many offered the last full measure of devotion to their adoptive land.

Following the war, Schurz pursued a long and brilliant political career that included stints as Senator from Missouri, an enlightened secretary of the interior, and an important role as a government reformer and anti-imperialist at a time when those principled stands were not especially popular. In other words, he remained an angry young man well into old age. Yet he never lost his reverence for the man who, more than any other, helped this restless exile to find a home in America. He wrote a book about Lincoln, named his son after him, and never stopped talking about him. His extraordinary career of idealism married to action did not end until his death in 1906. Eleven years later, when the United States declared war on an increasingly autocratic Germany, it renamed a captured German naval vessel the U.S.S. Carl Schurz.

Sources: Adam Goodheart, “1861: The Civil War Awakening”; Hans L. Trefousse, “Carl Schurz: A Biography”; Carl Schurz, “The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz”; Michael Burlingame, ed., “Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay”; Barbara Donner, “Carl Schurz and the Civil War”; Albert B. Faust, “The German Element in the United States”; “Mr. Lincoln’s White House” [mrlincolnswhitehouse.org]; “Mr. Lincoln and Friends” [mrlincolnandfriends.org].

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Ted Widmer is director and librarian of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He was a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and the editor of the Library of America’s two-volume “American Speeches.”