The Revealing Case of Carl Schurz

As I reflect on Adam Serwer’s essay “The Next Reconstruction,” one figure haunts me: Carl Schurz.

Schurz was a German immigrant and Union General. The Johnson administration commissioned him to report upon race-relations in the post-bellum South. Unlike some of his fellow generals, Schurz was not ill-disposed to white Southerners. As Serwer notes, “Schurz sympathized with white southerners who struggled to adjust to the new order.” In particular, Schurz recognized that it would take Southerners time to shed racist habits fit for a racialized slavocracy and put on habits fit for a different social order. Schurz writes:

It should not have surprised any fair-minded person that many Southern people should, for a time, have clung to the accustomed idea that the landowner must also own the black man tilling his land, and that any assertion of freedom of action on the part of that black man was insubordination equivalent to criminal revolt, and any dissent by the black man from the employer’s opinion or taste, intolerable insolence.

Schurz expected to see these racist habits during his time in the South.

But what Schurz encountered was worse—much worse. Consider his report:

I saw in various hospitals negroes, women as well as men, whose ears had been cut off or whose bodies were slashed with knives or bruised with whips, or bludgeons, or punctured with shot wounds. Dead negroes were found in considerable number in the country roads or on the fields, shot to death, or strung upon the limbs of trees. In many districts the colored people were in a panic of fright, and the whites in a state of almost insane irritation against them.

Given this extreme racial violence—these deplorable acts aimed at maintaining white power—Schurz strongly recommended that the federal government intervene to protect the newly freed Blacks. In fact, Schurz was so committed to this cause that he bypassed President Johnson’s efforts to stonewall him, circulating his findings so the public, especially Northerners, could read them.

Schurz’s counter worked. As Northerners read his report, many demanded Congress act to squelch the violence against Blacks throughout the South.

But in a matter of years, Schurz was singing a different tune. Whereas radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens continued to champion substantive federal intervention in the South, Schurz called for the cessation of federal intervention. As Eric Foner writes:

Schurz advocated political amnesty, an end to federal intervention, and a return to ‘local self-government’ by men of ‘property and enterprise’… Schurz sincerely believed blacks’ rights would be more secure under such governments than under the Reconstruction regimes. But whether he quite appreciated it or not, his program had no other meaning than a return to white supremacy.

Schurz new tune became the country’s anthem. And as Serwer argues, the choice had major consequences for Blacks and poor Whites.

Local authority was ultimately restored by force of arms, as Democrats and their paramilitary allies overthrew the Reconstruction governments through intimidation, murder, and terrorism, and used their restored power to disenfranchise the emancipated for almost a century. Many of the devices the southern states used to do so—poll taxes, literacy tests—disenfranchised poor whites as well.

The very people Schurz sympathized with suffered under the policies he later came to support. Schurz was not a hate-filled white supremacist nor a benevolent racist. But he did end up advocating for a social order that aided and abetted the spread of systemic racism.