For American principles and American honor;

For American Principles and American Honor is one of Carl Schurz’s many published speeches and political essays, working in the kind of public political writing that occupied substantial portions of his long career as an American statesman. Schurz was a German born American politician, journalist, and reformer whose career across the second half of the nineteenth century made him one of the most influential immigrant political figures in American history.

Schurz arrived in the United States in 1852 as a refugee from the failed German revolutions of 1848, settled eventually in Wisconsin, and built a remarkable career across multiple fields. He served as a Union general in the Civil War, as American minister to Spain under Lincoln, as a United States Senator from Missouri, as Secretary of the Interior under President Hayes, and as the editor of various major American newspapers including the New York Evening Post. His political evolution across his career took him through the Republican Party of the Civil War era, through the Liberal Republican movement of the 1872 election, through various reform efforts including civil service reform, and into the Mugwump movement of the 1880s and the Independent political alignments of his later years.

The specific speech or essay that this volume collects would have addressed whatever the most pressing political question was at the time of its publication. Schurz’s published political writings across his career addressed civil service reform, the gold standard, anti imperialism, immigration policy, racial questions in the Reconstruction era and after, and the various other major political issues that occupied American public life across the second half of the nineteenth century. He was particularly known for his commitment to civil service reform and for his leadership of the Mugwump revolt against the Republican Party in 1884, when he and other Mugwumps refused to support the Republican presidential candidate James G. Blaine and helped elect the Democrat Grover Cleveland.

Schurz’s prose in his political writings is in the formal nineteenth century rhetorical style, dense by modern standards but carefully constructed for the educated political class that the partisan press served. His German background gave his English prose a particular cadence and a careful attention to political and philosophical argumentation that distinguished his writing from many of his American contemporaries. The arguments tend to be substantive, with extensive engagement with the political and historical issues at stake.

For students of late nineteenth century American politics, of the immigrant experience in American public life, of civil service reform and the wider Mugwump tradition, or of the long debates over American imperialism that occupied the end of the century, Schurz’s published writings are essential primary sources. He remains one of the most important immigrant political voices in American history.