>Part of the group of German ex-revolutionaries who wore general's stars in the Civil War, Carl Schurz was born in Rhenish Prussia and at college developed liberal political leanings. He partcipated in the 1848 revolutionary uprisings and after their defeat, he and colleagues fled Prussia for fear they would be executed for insurrection. Moving from Switzerland to Britain and then France, Schurz was forced to leave that country after the Second Empire was founded in the 1851 coup-de-etat. He lived in London and then emigrated to the United States with his wife and settled in Philadelphia. Schurz became active in the abolitionist movement and the nascent Republican Party. After Lincoln's election as president, he spent a few months as minister to Spain before coming back to be commissioned a brigadier general in the Union army.>Schurz then led a division in the largely German command of Franz Sigel and was a major general by early 1863, at which point it was now the XI Corps, but the outfit had consistently performed poorly on the battlefield and was blamed in large part for the Union defeat at Chancellorsville. By the time of Gettysburg, Schurz was one of two major generals in the Army of the Potomac to still only command a division and felt insulted that he was not given command of the XI Corps, but it was clear by then that his dreams of being a corps commander would remain just that. The XI Corps redeemed themselves when they were transferred west in the fall.
>Schurz was in charge of training recruits at Nashville for a time and returned to active service with Sherman's army at the very end of the war, after which he resigned his commission and returned to civilian life. He went on a fact finding mission through the occupied South after the close of hostilities and reported that strong measures were needed to preserve law and order and protect the rights of freed slaves. President Johnson took no action on the report, but it was influential in calling for tougher Reconstruction policies. Schurz spent he next three years as a newspaper editor and re-visited his native land of Germany. He called for the gold standard during the 1868 presidential election.>Schurz was elected Senator from Missouri in 1868, the first German-American to sit in the Senate, and strongly promoted Teutonic efficiency and honesty in government. To that end, he criticized the corruption of the Grant Administration and supported the Liberal Republican movement. Schurz lost his reelection bid in 1874 as the Missouri state legislature had come under Democrat control and they instead elected ex-Confederate general Francis Cockerell to the Senate.>Although Schurz had opposed slavery, he also resisted the idea of giving African-Americans full and equal rights and opposed civil rights legislation.
>After leaving the Senate, he resumed working as a newspaper editor and campaigned for Rutherford Hayes in 1876; after Hayes's election as president, he rewarded Schurz with the post of Secretary of the Interior. As he did with African-Americans, Schurz was willing to defend Native American rights, but only to a point--he objected to extermination policies of natives and worked to clean up corruption in the department, but also did not consider them the equal of the white man and instead moved them to marginal reservation lands. The Indian Office had been notoriously corrupt and Schurz worked hard to clean it up and remove obvious incompetents and people embezzling public funds. He was a strong advocate of civil service reform and opposed the patronage system. In time, he came to believe Native Americans should be encouraged to assimilate into mainstream society.>When Rutherford Hayes left the White House in 1881, Schurz moved to New York City and resumed work in the newspaper business. He broke with the Republican Party and endorsed Grover Cleveland in 1884. Schurz continued to work at newspapers and campaign for honest government over the years. He was opposed to both the McKinley and Bryan tickets in 1896; while in favor of the gold standard rather than Bryan's bimetallism, he also objected to the Republican Party. However, in 1900 Schurz did endorse Bryan as he was against the US annexation of Spanish territory after the war with Spain, charging that the territories contained millions of non-white and mixed races. He endorsed Alton Parker in the 1904 presidential election and passed away two years later at age 77.
>>18285300>and strongly promoted Teutonic efficiency and honesty in governmentCorruption in government was always way too tolerated in the US probably because it mostly derived from British political culture and they also tended to have a cavalier attitude towards it.
those German troops always performed terribly even with many being professionally trained soldiers in Yurop
