Carl Schurz democratic ideals A look back at 1848 (1907)

In 1849 Carl Schurz came to America. He settled in Wisconsin, studied law, heard Abraham Lincoln debate Stephen A. Douglas, and became a big Lincoln fan. When Lincoln was elected president in 1860, he named Carl Schurz ambassador to Spain. Then he asked Schurz to come home to fight in the Civil War and made him a general.

After the war, Schurz became a newspaper writer, an editor, a U. S. senator, and secretary of the interior See It Now - Carl Schurz Addressing the Reform Conference. He worked to conserve the wilderness and to be fair to Indians when hardly anyone thought of those things. Like many American immigrants, Schurz had fallen in love with the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the guarantees of the Constitution: "If you want to be free," he said, "there is but one way. It is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors."