The Forgotten Legacy of Carl Schurz
On a parapet in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan is a grand memorial to a now long forgotten American statesman.
Located in a park of the same name and cast in bronze, this figure, standing tall on a pedestal holds a crumpled fedora in hand and gazes to the west.
His name was Carl Schurz and at one time he was a house-hold name in the United States.
The pre-eminent ‘ethnic politician’ of his age, Schurz was in many respects the foremost representative of the U.S.’s sizable German-American population back when this group was still highly self-conscious of its identity.
Like many other prominent German ex-patriates of his age, he found his way to American shores following the failed 1848 revolution in Germany which forced upon him the status of political refugee.
Within a few years of his initial arrival in the U.S., he became a prominent abolitionist and a leader of the nascent Republican party.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, Schurz would go on to become a general in the Union Army, more or less through strength of will rather than through expertise.
With union victory and the end of the U.S. Civil War came new challenges for the aspiring Schurz who eventually was sent out by President Johnson to inspect the newly defeated South.
There he found a great deal to report back on including the attempt by Southern whites to reinforce the pre-war racial hierarchy through white on black terrorism.
Schurz’s call for troops to garrison the south fell on deaf ears as President Johnson had other ideas in mind.
Despite Schurz’s prescient warning that federal troops would be needed to effectively enforce the newly wrought fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, Schurz eventually backtracked on his own arguments.
This may be because he was elected in 1868 to the U.S. Senate from Missouri, a border state where his political views proved unpopular.
By 1872, he ultimately founded a new party, the short-lived Liberal Republican Party, which opposed President Ulysses Grant’s enforcement of policies Schurz once helped to create.
