Carl Schurz led an interesting life, all right, and he is one of those figures who was very well known and influential on a national scale in his own time, but is mostly forgotten, except, I guess, by historians, in our own.

Schurz was a German native who took part in the revolutions in Germany in 1848, after which he was obliged to escape to the U.S. Due to his skills as an orator, his connections in the German-American community here and his reputation as a revolutionary hero, Schurz quickly became an influential speaker among the sizable German speaking population in the U.S. He became a fervent abolitionist and spoke much on the subject. He campaigned for Lincoln and became an associate of and sometime adviser to that famous figure. His descriptions of his meetings and conversations with Lincoln are among the highlights of these memoirs' second volume. At the outbreak of war, Schurz became a Major General in the Union army, leading a regiment of German-Americans. There is evidently some controversy about how well (or poorly) these troops performed, and Schurz spends some time trying to refute his regiment's poor reputation. At any rate, his descriptions of his war experiences are quite interesting, as you'd imagine.

This third volume opens with the Battle of Gettysburg and continues through 1869, at which point in his writing ill health caused Schurz to put down his pen. He passed away shortly thereafter in 1906. (Historians Frederic Bancroft and William Dunning pick up the narrative and continue the story of Schurz's life fron 1869 through 1906, working from their subject's voluminous correspondences and publications.) The book's original copyright is 1908. My volume was published in 1917.

The most fascinating part of this volume is Schurz's description of the years immediately after the war. At the behest of Andrew Johnson, Schurz toured the southern states just a year after the cessation of the fighting to gather a report for the president of conditions on the ground. Schurz's narrative of what he saw there, and the attitudes he heard from those he spoke with during his three-month sojourn are riveting. He talks about the fact that many Southern whites were completely at a loss as to how to proceed without slavery, upon which they depended for their labor force. The keenest necessity for all involved was to get a crop into the ground quickly, but many land owners simply didn't believe that their former slaves would work at all without being physically forced. They had no confidence that blacks would work for pay. Additionally, many thought that once the Union troops left, they'd be once again free to handle this situation however they wanted, up to and including the re-institution of slavery. (Interestingly, at least to me, this all points up a glaring weakness in And Wait for the Night, the novel about Reconstruction I read just before this book, which, in an evident attempt to whitewash the era, glosses over this issue entirely.)

Schurz, who soon became a Senator from Missouri, then provides an in-depth account of (what he considered) Johnson's wrong-headed and ultimately disastrous policies toward reconstruction. After that, we get a similarly up-close picture of the horrid Grant administration. In addition, Schurz reports on his meetings and lengthy conversations with Bismark upon Schurz's return to Germany as, now, a traveling diplomat.

The book becomes less compelling, although still intellectually interesting, once Schurz's biographers take over the narrative, as one would imagine. There's a bit too much hero worship. Plus, the issues Schurz threw himself into, including the reform of the Civil Service system (which was rife with corruption and cronyism, especially under Grant) and various currency issues (gold vs. "greenbacks" -- Schurz was for gold), while vital at the time, seem less urgent a century and a half later.

I recommend this volume of Carl Schurz's memoirs very highly indeed for readers interested in Reconstruction in particular, and the American politcal scene in the second half of the 19th century in general. Taken together, the three volumes of Schurz's memoirs provide a wonderful look at a fascinating life and mind, lived during interesting times, indeed. ( )