This is a collection of personal letters written by the eminent German- American statesman, Carl Schurz (1829-1906), to his immediate family and close friends. Schurz maintained a legal residence in Watertown, Wisconsin from 1855 to 1866, even though lecture tours and campaign speeches took him all across the northern United States. Several of these letters deal with Schurz’s Wisconsin years, and most are published here for the first time in English. They are filled with descriptive insights about German immigrants and native-born Americans as well as about the newly developing urban centers of the Upper Midwest. Schurz was a political revolutionary during his university years in his native Germany. When he emigrated to the United States, he became an outstanding spokesman for the anti-slavery cause and the Republican party. One of his missions was to mobilize German-American communities against slavery, but his rhetorical skills in English as well as German soon won him a broader following. Later, Schurz became an ardent champion of civil service reform. His other contributions to American life ranged from farming and practicing law to serving as Ambassador to Spain (1861-62), Civil War general (1862-63), Senator from Missouri (1869-75), organizer of the Liberal Republican Party (1872), and Secretary of the Interior (1877-81), where he made the conservation of natural resources an object of policy for the first time. Schurz was also considered one of the leading journalists of his day, editing the New York Evening Post (1881- 83) and writing for Harper’s Weekly (1892-1901). His biographies of Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln are still read today.
– from the Library of Congress American Memory website