Schurz

Schurz, name of German-born U.S. couple prominent in public life. Carl Schurz (1829–1906) came to the United States after fighting in the 1848–49 revolution in Germany. An antislavery activist, he was a supporter of Abraham Lincoln and later a brigadier general in the Civil War. He served in the U.S. Senate as a Missouri Republican (1869–75), helped found the Liberal Republican Party, and was secretary of the interior (1877–81). Schurz wrote biographies of Henry Clay (1887) and Abraham Lincoln (1889). He was editor of the New York Evening Post and The Nation in the early 1880s, and chief editorial writer for Harper's Weekly from 1892 to 1898. Margaretha Meyer Schurz (1833–76), a student of the German educator Friedrich Fröbel, was influential in the establishment of kindergartens in the United States, and worked with her husband, assisting him in his social reform and political activities.