Ohio History Journal

The OHIO HISTORICAL Quarterly

VOLUME 68 ?? NUMBER 1 ?? JANUARY 1959

 

 

 

 

Friedrich Hassaurek:

Cincinnati's Leading Forty-Eighter

 

By CARL WITTKE*

 

 

 

THE ABORTIVE GERMAN REVOLUTIONS OF 1848 and 1849

led to an exodus of political refugees from Europe to the

United States which was unique in the history of American

immigration. Among the German immigrants who crossed

the Atlantic in the 1850's in quest of greater economic

opportunities and political liberty, there were a significant

number of journalists, lawyers, and other professional men,

men with a good education and social standing, who were

able to assume political and cultural leadership for their

fellow immigrants in America and provide a cultural leaven

and a vitalizing intellectual transfusion for the entire German

immigration. In the 1850's, when nativism was rampant in

the United States and the foreign-born were on the defensive,

the "Forty-Eighters," as the political refugees were known,

furnished a proud and aggressive leadership for the German

group. They were convinced that they had a mission in

America to counteract the blighting effects of Puritanism

and to inject the more liberal views of the European En-

lightenment, and it was during their ascendancy that the

 

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

school at Western Reserve University. He is the author of a number of books on

the German immigrant in the United States.

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2    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

Germans of the United States experienced what has been

described as their "Hellenic Age."

For many of the refugees their first years in America

were a period of "storm    and stress."   Intellectuals, poorly

prepared to make a living in any practical way in a new

land, had to find new roots for their uprooted careers. Their

gradual Americanization, and the conversion of rabid young

radicals into conservative, successful citizens, is one of the

most illuminating chapters in the history of American immi-

gration. Friedrich Hassaurek, one of the youngest of the

Forty-Eighters, who left Austria when he was a mere lad

of sixteen, to settle in Cincinnati, became one of the city's

respected and influential citizens. His experiences in America

were typical of those of many of his fellow countrymen.¹

Hassaurek was born in Vienna on October 9, 1832.2 His

mother, Johanna Abele, was a sister of the Austrian general

Baron Vincenz von Abele. His father, Franz Hassaurek,

was a businessman and banker by vocation, and a litterateur

by avocation, who wrote comedies, poems, and librettos for

operas, and acted as host to a distinguished literary circle

which met regularly at his home, and included such well-

known figures as Grillparzer. Probably because the elder

Hassaurek was more attentive to his literary interests than

to his business activities, he lost large sums of money and

died poor in 1836. His widow married Leopold Markbreit,

a businessman of sufficient means to provide her young son

Friedrich with a good education.

Young Hassaurek had just completed his preparatory

studies for the university at the Piarist Seminary in Vienna

when the revolution broke out in 1848. The sixteen-year-

1 For details on the Revolution of 1848 and its effects upon the United States,

see Carl Wittke, Refugees of Revolution: The German Forty-Eighters in America

(Philadelphia, 1952). The most recent account of the Viennese uprising is Reuben

J. Rath, The Viennese Revolution of 1848 (Austin, Tex., 1957).

2 This account is based largely on a collection of Hassaurek papers made avail-

able to me by the widow of the late Charles Monroe Coffin, professor of English

at Kenyon College, who brought the papers to Ohio from California. They are

now in the library of the Ohio Historical Society in Columbus.

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FRIEDRICH HASSAUREK        3

 

old lad immediately joined the "student legion" of the Uni-

versity of Vienna, took part in the skirmishing in and

around the city, and was twice slightly wounded. When the

imperial army put down the uprising and reestablished the

authority of the emperor, Hassaurek left for the United

States to join his mother and her second husband, who had

settled in Cincinnati in August 1848. The boy arrived in

April 1849. His stepfather had died the previous December.

Not yet seventeen, Hassaurek began a notable career in

journalism which eventually led to the editorship and presi-

dency of Cincinnati's most influential German - language

paper, the Cincinnati Volksblatt. His first articles dealt with

events in the Austrian capital during the stirring days of

1848, and they were written for Der Deutsche Republikaner,

a radical paper edited by Emil Klauprecht, who denounced

priestcraft and capitalism with equal vigor. In one of his

contributions Hassaurek brashly attacked Johann Bernhard

Stallo, already a well-known leader of the earlier German

immigration to Cincinnati, for a speech the latter made in

Covington on the Negro question, and thereby precipitated

several bitter exchanges between the radical Republikaner

and the more conservative Cincinnati Volksblatt.

Before the close of 1849 Hassaurek secured more steady

employment, at $3.50 a week, as translator and assistant

editor of the Ohio Staatszeitung, a paper started by four

German book printers, and later owned by Captain Henry

Roedter. Before long the enterprising young journalist

acquired a paper of his own. With the help of friends

Hassaurek was able to raise a hundred dollars in cash and

credit to buy the Hochwachter, a German weekly which had

been established in Cincinnati by Georg Walker, a graduate

in theology from the University of Tubingen who preferred

newspaper polemics to sermons, and who had been engaged

in several earlier and unsuccessful journalistic ventures,

including the founding of the Louisville Volksbuhne, Ken-

tucky's first German-language paper. Walker died while

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4   THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

working on the Hochwachter, and Hassaurek, in association

with Wilhelm Wachsmuth, a former publisher of the Ohio

Staatszeitung, acquired control. The youthful Forty-Eighter

soon became the sole owner. His office was located in the

old "Railroad Building," at Court and Main streets, above

the printshop of the Cincinnati Volksblatt. At the time, there

were four German papers in Cincinnati, the Volksblatt, the

Ohio Staatszeitung, Der Republikaner, and the Union, which

was later merged with the better-known Cincinnati Arbeiter

Zeitung.

Hassaurek described the Hochwachter as an "organ for

intellectual enlightenment and social reform," and a special

sounding board for the "younger" German immigration.

The paper definitely belongs in the category of radical, anti-

clerical journals which Forty-Eighters launched by the

dozens during their "storm and stress" period in America.

Hassaurek's violent advocacy of socialistic measures and

anti-clericalism antagonized many of the older Germans, for

the Hochwachter, in its head-on assault upon America's

"primeval forest of churches and dogma," attacked every

form of clericalism, supernaturalism, and priestcraft. In

association with Karl Obermann, another extremist, Has-

saurek organized the "Free Men's Society" of Cincinnati,

which was dedicated to humanism, rationalism, and ethical

culture. The organization soon had its own hall at Vine and

Mercer streets, and Hassaurek undertook an extended speak-

ing tour to recruit members for the movement in other cities,

and to solicit subscriptions for his paper. In December 1852

he engaged in a week of public debates on the morality and

rationality of Christianity in the Mechanics Institute of

Cincinnati with Wilhelm Nast, the patriarch of German

Methodism. The gentle, pious Nast was no match for Has-

saurek's slashing attacks on organized religion in a hall

packed with the latter's supporters, and after the first en-

counter Nast turned over the assignment to debate with the

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FRIEDRICH HASSAUREK        5

 

fiery young radical to another German Methodist minister.³

The climax of the Hochwachter's violent anti-clericalism

came in 1853, when Archbishop Gaetano Bedini, the papal

nuncio, visited Cincinnati.  To liberals and radicals like

Hassaurek, Bedini was the incarnation of all the evil forces

of reaction. The papal nuncio was charged with having

supported the Austrian reaction against Italian liberalism,

and with direct responsibility for the execution of Italian

revolutionists in 1848. In inflammatory articles the Hoch-

wachter alerted its readers to the forthcoming visit of the

"Bloodhound of Bologna." An editorial, written by Hassa-

urek's associate, F. A. Hobelmann, whipped up such excite-

ment that on Christmas Day from eight hundred to a

thousand German radicals, recruited largely from the mem-

bership of the Free Men's Society, marched to the residence

where Bedini was staying. The demonstrators carried ban-

ners with such inscriptions as "No Papacy" and "Down with

Bedini," and the nuncio was hanged in effigy. A contingent

of Irish police arrived to break up the riot, shots were fired,

one man was killed, and others were wounded. The next

day Hassaurek was arrested for inciting the riot. The inci-

dent was widely discussed in the German-language press of

the country, and a number of more conservative editors

denounced Hassaurek's extreme anti-clericalism and attacked

him especially for precipitating the disturbance on Christmas

Day. The Hochwachter blamed the police for the shooting,

and eventually the prosecution dropped the case.

The decade of the 1850's was marked by a number of

disgraceful feuds and much personal abuse among German

radical journalists. Editors used vile expletives to give spice

to their articles; there were a number of libel suits, and

several physical encounters; and the Hochwachter was in-

volved in several bitter controversies.  On one occasion

Hassaurek and a competitor threatened to extinguish each

other in a duel, and a Cincinnati court had to intervene with

3 See Cincinnati Commercial, January 6, 1853.

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6    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

a restraining order. Karl Heinzen, another ultra-radical

who published his Pionier in Cincinnati from November 1854

to June 1855, on November 22, 1854, attacked Hassaurek

for misrepresenting his position, in a letter which virtually

was a challenge to a duel, and he repeatedly referred to his

rival in radicalism as "Hasendreck" and the "beer hall

Demosthenes." In turn, the Hochwachter was extremely

critical of Heinzen's "Louisville Platform," which constituted

the latter's blueprint for reform, and as a result Hassaurek

and Heinzen became enemies for life.⁴

The Hochwachter also feuded with Wilhelm Weitling's

Die Republik der Arbeiter, primarily because Weitling re-

ferred to the whole Free Men's Society movement as but

another device to lead the common people back "into the tute-

lage of the confused . . . German philosophers." Hassaurek,

in turn, denounced as a "brain storm" Weitling's utopian

dreams of a communist society and accused its author of

being "a slave of the priesthood" and an embezzler of the

hard-earned dollars of German working men, which he spent

to support his colony at Communia, Iowa.⁵ Die Menschen-

rechte, another radical organ published for a short time in

Cincinnati, in 1853, by Wilhelm Rothacker, fought with the

Hochwachter about all sorts of trivial issues, and espoused a

form of humanism which challenged Hassaurek's leadership

of the seven hundred members of his Cincinnati Free Men's

Society.⁶ Feuds of this kind finally reached the point that

other German papers like the Columbus Westbote and the

Philadelphia Freie Presse proposed an armistice among the

battling journalists, in order to raise the tone of German-

American journalism, and the Hochwachter approved the

suggestion.

On the more constructive side, Hassaurek's organ urged

4 For Heinzen's career, see Carl Wittke, Against the Current: The Life of Karl

Heinzen (Chicago, 1945).

5 See Carl Wittke, The Utopian Communist: A Biography of Wilhelm Weitling,

Nineteenth Century Reformer (Baton Rouge, 1950) especially p. 149.

6 See, for example, Die Menschenrechte of November 19, 1853. There is a

small file of this paper in the library of the Ohio Historical Society in Columbus.

• 6
 

FRIEDRICH HASSAUREK        7

 

the Free Men's Society to close its bar, and pay less attention

to beer and social events and more to the higher things of

the mind. Hassaurek helped organize a German theater in

Cincinnati, known as Das Deutsche Institut, which gave four

performances weekly until 1861. The Hochwachter also

waged war against the fraudulent practices of immigrant

"runners," railroad companies which sold tickets to immi-

grants, and other individuals and companies that cheated

and exploited the new arrivals in the American port towns.

Hassaurek singled out the New York firm of Rischmueller

and Loescher for special attack, and several libel suits were

filed against him in the court of common pleas of Hamilton

County, but the cases finally were settled without a trial.

Hassaurek's papers contain an undated agreement signed by

both parties to end the controversy.

In 1856, Hassaurek, now widely known through his paper

and his lecture tours among the Germans of the Middle

West, had a chance to buy the Illinois Staatszeitung of Chi-

cago "for a song." He had been led to believe that Joseph

Medill and M. C. Vaughan of the Chicago Tribune were

willing to help finance the purchase, and he corresponded

with George Schneider of the Illinois Staatszeitung about a

figure of eight thousand dollars. The transaction was never

completed, partly because, according to Hassaurek's version,

the latter was too busy making speeches for the Republican

party in that year to give the matter proper attention. In

1857 Hassaurek sold the Hochwachter to Moritz Jacobi and

Otto Reventlow. Sometime later the purchasers were in a

violent controversy with the former owner over the payment

of a chattel mortgage of six hundred dollars.⁷

The sale of the Hochwachter marks the end of the ultra-

radical period in Hassaurek's career. His interests shifted

to law, the Republican crusade against slavery, and public

service. Years later he referred to this "storm and stress"

period as the "rabid" portion of his life, and characterized

7 Hochwachter, March 17, 1859.

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8   THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

F. A. Hobelmann, his associate on the Hochwachter, as "one

of the most rabid of the rabid" and a "dead beat" in money

matters.

Meantime, Hassaurek had been reading law with Judge

W. M. Dickson of Cincinnati, and in 1857 he was admitted

to practice. His first partner was James Elliott, his second,

Christopher von Seggern. Thereafter he practiced alone,

or in close association with his half brother, Leopold Mark-

breit, who for a time had a loose partnership with Rutherford

B. Hayes. Hassaurek developed a lucrative practice, and

counted many Cincinnati Germans among his clients. His

successful defense of a demented German murderer on a plea

of insanity attracted wide attention and proved excellent

advertising for the rising young attorney.

The crusading energies of many of the Forty-Eighter

radicals were eventually drained off into the controversy

over slavery and abolitionism. Here was a moral issue into

which their fiery radicalism could be channeled, and on which

they could work shoulder to shoulder with their American

brethren. Hassaurek's career followed a common pattern

among the Forty-Eighters. He was uncompromisingly op-

posed to slavery, and his first affiliation was with the Free

Soilers. In 1854 he spoke against the Kansas-Nebraska bill

at a mass meeting of Germans in Cleveland. In 1855 he faced

a hostile audience in Quincy, Illinois, when he spoke on "Slav-

ery and Jesuitism."⁸ From 1855 to 1859 he was a member

of the Cincinnati City Council, and fought against Sunday

closing laws. In 1856 he stumped the Middle West for

Fremont and the Republicans. In 1860 he was a delegate to

the Chicago Republican convention and played a prominent

part in the pre-convention conference of German delegates

who demanded specific assurance that the new party would

not be dominated by nativists and Puritans. Hassaurek

made a vigorous speech to the convention pointing out that

8 See Columbus Westbote, December 7, 1855.

• 8
 

FRIEDRICH HASSAUREK         9

 

the German vote would be crucial in the coming campaign.9

In 1860 Hassaurek stumped Ohio for Lincoln, and spoke

eloquently in German and English to large audiences. In

Cleveland he held a German audience with a speech that

lasted two and a half hours. Letters from Republican leaders

throughout the Middle West begged him to come into their

territory where the German vote was thought to be decisive,

and the twenty-eight-year-old campaigner filled as many of

these requests as his health permitted.  Hassaurek corre-

sponded with such prominent Ohioans as Salmon P. Chase,

Ben Wade, Jacob D. Cox, and John Sherman, and Chase had

written him as early as 1857 to inquire about what the

reactions of the Germans would be to a proposed constitutional

amendment which would require immigrants to Ohio to wait

one year after naturalization before they could vote.10

On the slavery question Hassaurek's views remained un-

changed. He was an abolitionist. In 1864 he delivered a

long speech on the philosophy of the issues in that campaign.

In it he examined the history and culture of the warring

sections, and maintained that the civilization of the North

was far superior to that of the South, primarily because of

the corrupting effects of the institution of slavery upon the

Confederate States. As late as 1867 the Republican party

reprinted a speech Hassaurek made in Columbus on June 19

of that year demanding the right to vote for the Negro.

Lincoln was fully aware of the political influence of the

Forty-Eighters in the campaign of 1860, in persuading many

of their countrymen to desert their Democratic allegiance for

the Republicans, and the German leadership was not hesitant

about reminding the president of his obligation to remember

them in the distribution of the political spoils. Hassaurek

9 See also F. L. Herriott, "The Conference in the Deutsches Haus, Chicago,

May 14-15, 1860," Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society, XXXV

(1928), 101-191.

10 Chase to Hassaurek, April 7, 1857. A similar "two year amendment" in

Massachusetts two years later aroused the entire German element and precipi-

tated a crisis for the new Republican party. See Wittke, Against the Current:

The Life of Karl Heinzen, 289-291.

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10   THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

wanted a diplomatic post, preferably in Switzerland, and many

prominent politicians endorsed his claims for an appointment.

Timothy C. Day of Cincinnati wrote to Francis P. Blair;

others wrote directly to Lincoln, or agreed to speak to him

about the matter. A letter from Indianapolis gave him the

support of the Republican organization in Indiana. Hassaurek

was assured that Chase was favorably disposed toward him,

and members of the Ohio congressional delegation, with the

exception of Tom Corwin, signed a petition on his behalf.

While busy pressing his own case, Hassaurek also received

many letters from fellow Germans asking for his support

in presenting their claims to the new administration. Has-

saurek was appointed minister to Ecuador, instead of Switzer-

land. He is supposed to have thanked Lincoln for "appointing

him to the highest position the administration had to give," a

reference to the fact that Quito had the highest altitude of

any capital city in the world, and the president is said to have

enjoyed the comment and passed it on to his cabinet.¹l

Hassaurek made the most of his relatively unimportant and

unexciting post. He quickly became proficient in Spanish,

as he already was in German, English, and French, and he

carried on much of his correspondence in Spanish. He sent

geographical and scientific data to the American Geographical

and Statistical Society in New York. He learned to know

and understand the Ecuadorians, made a number of important

personal connections, and eventually wrote a significant

volume based on his experiences in South America. He ren-

dered excellent service in bringing about a settlement of

claims between Ecuador and the United States, worked out

the procedures for adjudication and arbitration by a joint

commission, and himself served as the American commis-

sioner.

Unfortunately, Hassaurek's sojourn in Ecuador was seri-

ously complicated by divorce proceedings instituted by his

11 Harry Barnard, in his Rutherford B. Hayes and His America (Indianapolis,

1954), p. 212, attributes the remark to Hayes, who is supposed to have said

"the highest office, viz., nine thousand feet above the sea at Quito."

• 10
 

FRIEDRICH HASSAUREK        11

 

first wife on grounds of adultery. The affair might easily

have resulted in a public scandal, and at one point Hassaurek

thought the time had come to resign. The whole sorry tale

can be reconstructed, at least from Hassaurek's point of view,

from the long letters he wrote to his mother, his wife, and

Judge Dickson, who handled the case for him. Only the

barest outline need be included here, but it is significant that

while the case involved much that was damaging to both

parties, Hassaurek did not destroy the correspondence which

deals with the main events in this unpleasant affair.

In a nineteen page letter written to Judge Dickson from

Quito on March 6, 1863, Hassaurek explained that he had

married after a violent quarrel with his mother, to whom he

was deeply attached, and who was about to take a third hus-

band. Hardly eighteen at the time, the emotionally disturbed

young man, eager to get out of his mother's house, got a sym-

pathetic hearing from a woman somewhat older than he was,

who, according to Hassaurek, had left a husband in Mexico

and had lived with an Irish soldier in New Orleans and Cin-

cinnati. According to Hassaurek, his wife had a violent tem-

per, was exceedingly jealous and possessive, and was consumed

with a desire to dominate her brilliant young husband. She

kept him away from his mother for several years and inter-

cepted her letters, and the son had to take secret leave of her

when he departed for Ecuador. Hassaurek seemed to be com-

pletely helpless in the hands of his emotionally disturbed and

hypercritical wife, who made life unbearable for him but

would not let him go. Matters became worse in Ecuador, and

in June 1862 Mrs. Hassaurek and her daughter left for New

York, where she apparently convinced Friedrich Kapp, an-

other distinguished Forty-Eighter, that her husband had sent

her off so that he could live undisturbed with a mistress in

Quito. Hassaurek tried to effect a reconciliation, and proposed

a trial separation, but to no avail. He informed Judge Dick-

son that the charges about his conduct in Ecuador were

groundless, but admitted that in his despair he had found

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12   THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

consolation for a time from an equally distraught and lonely

woman in Cincinnati. Dickson took the precaution of writing

Chase to forestall any hasty action on the part of the admin-

istration in Washington. The case ended in a divorce. Judge

Stallo, no friend of Hassaurek, handled the litigation for the

plaintiff. There were some damaging letters, but Judge

Dickson managed to keep the story out of the papers, and the

attorneys worked out a financial settlement, by which Mrs.

Hassaurek received a house and lot, and substantial alimony.

In 1864 Hassaurek returned to the United States to cam-

paign for the Republican party and to work for the release

of his half-brother, Col. Leopold Markbreit, who was being

held as a hostage in a Confederate prison. After the election

he went back to Ecuador to resume his duties, but resigned

in 1865 to become editor and part owner of the Volksblatt,

the leading German paper in Cincinnati, which has the dis-

tinction of having been the first German daily in the United

States.

In 1872 Hassaurek joined other Forty-Eighters in the

Liberal Republican revolt against "Grantism." The year

before, he corresponded about the possibilities of staging a

revolt against the Republican regulars, with such prominent

Ohioans as Jacob D. Cox, George Hoadley, and Stanley

Matthews. Hassaurek was interested in civil service and

tariff reform, sound money, an end to the turmoil over

southern reconstruction, and above all, he wanted to rid the

country of inefficiency and corruption in Washington. The

Cincinnati Volksblatt called for a special convention of the

reformers, and Hassaurek organized a "Reunion and Reform

Association" in Cincinnati, which cooperated with similar

groups in Missouri and elsewhere. When the Liberal Re-

publican convention which met in Cincinnati in 1872 nomi-

nated Horace Greeley, Hassaurek and his paper gave him

strong support, and Greeley carried Hamilton County by

four thousand. After Grant's triumphant reelection, Has-

saurek corresponded with Thomas Ewing, Cox, and others in

• 12
 

FRIEDRICH HASSAUREK        13

 

an effort to keep the Liberal Republican movement alive, but

his attempt in 1873 to organize a new "People's Party" in

Ohio failed.

By this time Hassaurek had become almost ultra-conserva-

tive, and the Republican party had become too paternalistic

for his tastes. He was opposed to government intervention in

all matters that could be left to private initiative and enter-

prise. He denounced the growing bureaucracy as inefficient,

wasteful, expensive, and likely to become corrupt; he was a

free trader; and he opposed temperance legislation, laws to

regulate interest, and government favors to private business.

He favored the short ballot reform; he wanted fewer elective

and more appointive offices; and he advocated a simple, eco-

nomical government, without "artificial political nostrums

and patent medicines." Like Jefferson, he believed that that

government is best which governs least--a far cry from the

socialistic attitude of his younger years!

In 1876, disgusted with "Grantism" and the developments

in his own party, Hassaurek endorsed the Democratic can-

didate, Samuel J. Tilden, even though his fellow townsman,

Rutherford B. Hayes, was the Republican choice, and he

advocated Tilden's election in a speech delivered at a ratifica-

tion meeting in Cincinnati on July 8, 1876.12 However, the

majority of the stockholders of the Cincinnati-Volksblatt

company, of which Hassaurek was president, Charles P. Taft,

vice president, and Colonel Markbreit, business manager,

decided to throw the support of the paper to Hayes. There-

upon Hassaurek took a year's leave of absence for travel

abroad. Upon his return he resumed his duties as editor-in-

chief. In 1880 he was finally reconciled with Carl Schurz,

the most prominent of the Forty-Eighters and a member of

President Hayes's cabinet. He had dinner with the secretary,

and joined forces with him in the common cause--of opposi-

tion to a third term for Grant.

Hassaurek was a man of many talents. He wrote a lucid

12 The Washington Sentinel, July 15, 1876, reprinted the speech on the front page.

• 13
 

14   THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

and lively prose, and while abroad in 1876-77 sent accounts

of his experiences to the Volksblatt, where they were printed

serially under the title "Europaische Kreuz und Querzuge."

They still make interesting reading. Hassaurek intensely

disliked Bismarck and Prussianism, and regretted that Ger-

many had not been united along more liberal lines. He hated

the class system of the German railroads, and found German

officials insolent and high-handed. With such criticisms he

combined fascinating descriptions of the German landscape

and life in cities and countryside, and he was particularly

impressed with the beauties of Switzerland. He admired its

simple governmental structure, but deplored the fact that the

Swiss Republic had borrowed its system of military service

from Prussia.

While still with the Hochwachter, Hassaurek had published

a novel entitled "Hierarchy and Aristocracy." It was without

particular merit, and appeared serially in his paper only. On

the other hand, his years in Ecuador produced a substantial

volume, Four Years Among the Spanish-Americans, which

went into three editions, and appeared in a German translation

in Dresden as late as 1887. The four hundred page book,

published by Hurd and Houghton of New York in 1868, is

far more than just another superficial travel book. The

author devoted many pages to South American geography,

geology, history, and ethnology, and the book contained

fascinating accounts of mule-back trips into the interior,

where Hassaurek found alligators, volcanoes, Inca ruins, and

the life of the natives of almost equal interest. He wrote of

agriculture and the mechanic arts, government, social customs,

the influence of Spanish civilization, and the engrafting of

what he called Romish religion on ancient idolatry, and he

had much to say about the ignorance and immorality of the

monks, and the illiteracy and degraded condition of the

natives. Hassaurek thought he had enough material for a

whole history of Spanish colonialism, but he never got

around to writing a second volume.

• 14
 

FRIEDRICH HASSAUREK        15

 

About sixteen hundred copies of Hassaurek's major work

were printed in the first edition, and about half had been

sold by May 1869. Hassaurek had subsidized publication,

and later he and his publishers became involved in a dispute

over royalties. The proud author sent copies to Charles

Nordhoff of the New York Evening Post, Henry Raymond

of the Times, and Horace Greeley of the Tribune. The Ger-

man-language press took notice of the book, and even Nast's

Methodist Christliche Apologete carried a favorable review.

The Nation described the author as a "capable observer and

trustworthy narrator."

In 1865 Hassaurek had published an article entitled "Tupac

Amaru, the Indian Martyr of Peru," in Gazley's Pacific

Monthly.¹³ In 1879 Robert Clarke and Company published

his The Secret of the Andes, a romance, the scene of which

was laid in Peru two generations after the Spanish Conquest.

The story dealt with the career of an Indian queen who

guarded the hidden treasure of the Incas, and devoted her

life to the service of her downtrodden people. The male hero

of the story, who turned into a villain, was a young cavalier,

Don Julio, whom the queen led blindfolded to the Inca

treasure, on the promise that he would liberate her starving

subjects from Spanish oppression. Instead, Don Julio be-

trayed his benefactress, took up with another woman, and

became the commander of the Spanish army which fought

with the queen's native forces. When her former lover was

captured by the natives and was about to be torn to pieces,

the queen ended his faithless career by shooting an arrow into

his heart, an act which was intended to symbolize the final

triumph of love over revenge.

The novel was reviewed in leading German and English

papers. The Washington Chronicle found the story thrilling

but believed the author needed more practice in writing.

The Atlantic Monthly and the New York Tribune carried

favorable reviews, and the New York Times referred to the

13 (New York), II (1865), No. 1, pp. 9-18.

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16   THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

"blossoming out of a great novelist." The Cincinnati West-

liche Blatter, the Sunday edition of the Volksblatt, ran the

novel serially, and in 1880 a German edition was published.

The Baltimore Correspondent of April 19, 1879, referred to

Hassaurek as "another Charles Sealsfield." Impressed by

his success, the author resolved to write another novel, but

if the book was even begun it was never finished. A plan

to do a biography of Simon Bolivar met the same fate.

One other publication must be included in a discussion of

Hassaurek's activities in the field of belles-lettres. It was a

collection of nearly forty poems, written in German and

published by M. & R. Burgheim of Cincinnati, under the

title Welke Bluthen und Blatter (Faded Blossoms and

Leaves). Some of these poems originally appeared in the

Cincinnati Volksblatt and the Westliche Blatter; a few were

translations of English, French, and Italian poems. Most of

them were highly romantic and sentimental; the meter was

not always perfect; and through many of them there ran

a strain of melancholy, the musings of a man in the fall of

his life who is awaiting the final sleep of winter. One or

two suggest the bitterness of a Schopenhauer.

Until his last illness Hassaurek continued to fill many

speaking engagements, for he loved the public platform,

and he was an earnest, direct, and vigorous speaker, and

especially successful in after-dinner oratory, a field in which

the Cincinnati Enquirer thought he had no equal in the United

States.¹⁴ In the spring of 1882 Hassaurek gave the Lincoln

memorial address in Cincinnati, and the next month he made

the main address at the Turnfest in that city.¹⁵ Shortly there-

after he left for his final visit to Europe, on a bridal tour

with his third wife.

Hassaurek drank the waters at Carlsbad for what he

thought was a liver complaint. Although his health steadily

deteriorated, he and his wife visited most of the leading

14 September 20, 1885; see also March 16, 1882.

15 Cincinnati Volksblatt, April 15, May 28, 1882.

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FRIEDRICH HASSAUREK             17

 

cities of Western Europe, from which he sent back interest-

ing and well-written accounts for the Volksblatt. Hassaurek

attended a Sangerfest in Switzerland and was in Paris for

the interment of Victor Hugo in the Pantheon. In Frank-

furt, Germany, he visited the Paul's Kirche, where the Ger-

man liberal parliament had assembled in 1848 to unify

Germany along republican lines. He was disturbed by the

anti-German feeling which he found in France, and in his

observations on Germany he continued to contrast American

democracy with Prussianism, to the great disadvantage of

the latter. Hassaurek's last illness turned out to be cancer,

and after two unsuccessful operations he died in Paris on

October 3, 1885, at the age of fifty-three.¹⁶

16 For obituary notices, see Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, October 4, 1885;

Wachter am Eric (Cleveland), October 5, 1885. See also Cincinnati Enquirer,

September 20, 1885; and "Friedrich Hassaurek," in Der Deutsche Pionier (Cin-

cinnati), XVII (1886), 3-25.

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