Ohio History Journal

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The OHIO HISTORICAL Quarterly

The OHIO HISTORICAL Quarterly

VOLUME 65 ?? NUMBER 4 ?? OCTOBER 1956

 

 

 

Carl Schurz and

Rutherford B. Hayes

By CARL WITTKE*

 

 

The German Revolution of 1848 ended in the emigration of

large numbers of political refugees to the United States. Among

them were men of substance, social standing, and education: young

intellectual radicals fresh from the universities, and older, more

reserved agitators for reform, whose dreams of a united, republican

Germany were shattered by the military might of reactionary rulers.

In America, a land of liberty and opportunity, they provided an

intellectual leaven which made the cultural contributions of the

German element the most significant in the history of American

immigration.1 Many of these "argonauts seeking the golden fleece

of liberty" were the spiritual heirs of Germany's golden age of

liberalism and among them none was more successful or dis-

tinguished than Carl Schurz, the foremost German-American.

This son of the Rhineland, reared in the Catholic tradition, had

abandoned his university career at Bonn to take part in futile

revolutionary skirmishes in the Palatinate. His daring rescue of his

former professor, Gottfried Kinkel, from the fortress prison of

Spandau, near Berlin, won him world-wide fame. With his teacher,

young Schurz escaped to London, where he married the daughter

 

* Carl Wittke is chairman of the department of history and dean of the graduate

school at Western Reserve University.

1 Carl Wittke, Refugees of Revolution: The German Forty-eighters in America

(Philadelphia, 1952).