Carl Schurz: Sewer Escape, Spandau Jailbreak, and a Senate Seat

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Carl Schurz was born in Prussia in 1829 and left school a year early because of his family's financial ruin, then passed a special exam to enter the University of Bonn, where he studied under Professor Gottfried Kinkel. In the revolutions of 1848 he took up arms for a democratic constitution, and in 1849 he escaped the besieged fortress of Rastatt through a sewer drain and crossed into Switzerland. He then slipped back into Prussia under a false name, bribed a guard at Spandau prison and freed Kinkel, who was lowered from the roof and smuggled by carriage to the coast before they fled to London. There he married Margarethe Meyer, who later helped establish the American kindergarten system, and in 1852 they settled in Watertown, Wisconsin.

Schurz organized German American voters for the Republicans, campaigned for Abraham Lincoln and became minister to Spain in 1861, then returned to serve as a major general whose 11th Corps units were routed at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and blamed in the press. His postwar survey of the South for President Andrew Johnson warned that without federal control freed people would face violence and de facto slavery through black codes. Elected from Missouri in 1869 as the first German born U.S. senator, he broke with Ulysses S. Grant, opposed the Enforcement Acts and lost his seat in 1874. As Rutherford B. Hayes's Secretary of the Interior he introduced competitive exams, kept Indian affairs under civilian control and oversaw removals onto poor reservation land.

• His 1859 Boston speech, True Americanism, argued that immigrants were as loyal as the native born.
• As a newspaper editor in St. Louis he hired a young reporter named Joseph Pulitzer.
• He prosecuted land thieves who were clear-cutting public forests.
• He led the Mugwump bolt against James Blaine in 1884 and later joined the American Anti-Imperialist League.
• In the Senate in 1872 he said: "My country, right or wrong, if right to be kept right, and if wrong to be set right."