Books
Julius Wilm, Ein deutscher Revolutionär im Amt: Carl Schurz und der Niedergang der Minderheitenrechte in den USA der 1870er-Jahre (Berlin, De Gruyter, 2024) 78 pages, 9 illustrations. ISBN: 9783111430829, 24,95 Euro.
The book is now available as an open access PDF from Deutsche Nationalbibliothek!
Carl Schurz (1829-1906) rose to prominence as a democratic revolutionary in Germany in 1848/49 and made a career in the USA during the Civil War era as an abolitionist and Republican politician. Particularly in Germany, he is even today celebrated as an advocate of equality for all humans. My book Ein deutscher Revolutionär im Amt: Carl Schurz und der Niedergang der Minderheitenrechte in den USA der 1870er-Jahre uses many previously unknown sources to paint a more nuanced picture of his later political activism. Starting in 1870, as a US senator, Schurz opposed civil rights protection for formerly enslaved African Americans in the southern states. From 1877, as US Secretary of the Interior, he initiated harsh forced assimilation policies against Indigenous peoples. The book follows Schurz's departure from the universalism of earlier years. It places his proposals in the larger debate on the proper shape and extent of democracy in the 1870s United States. Although Schurz's proposals anticipated government policies of later decades, his efforts to reduce the rights of African Americans and Indigenous peoples still met with broad resistance.
Translated reviews
"Ein deutscher Revolutionär im Amt aims to correct myths and provide facts for the discussion surrounding the German commemoration of Schurz." – Frauke Steffens, "Schatten auf der Lichtgestalt" (Shadows on the shining figure), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 5, 2024
"Wilm succeeds in precisely reconstructing Schurz's political and intellectual biography in the two decades following the end of the Civil War. Anyone who wants to learn more about the limitations of liberal white ideals of freedom in a century of nation building and imperial land grabs should definitely pick up this book." – Mischa Honeck, H-Soz-Kult, September 3, 2024
"In history classes, the Schurz case could be used to discuss a peculiar 'history of democracy on both sides of the Atlantic' (Hedwig Richter) with great benefit." – Malte Ristau, Geschichte für heute. Zeitschrift für historisch-politische Bildung, No. 1 2025, p. 128.
Julius Wilm, Settlers as Conquerors: Free Land Policy in Antebellum America (Stuttgart, Germany, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2018) 284 pages, 39 illustrations, 23 tables ISBN: 9783515121316 | €52
Winner of the University of Cologne's 2020 Offermann-Hergarten Prize
Preview:
Table of Contents | Introduction
Available from U.S. and international booksellers and many academic libraries
In early America, the notion that settlers ought to receive undeveloped land for free was enormously popular among the rural poor and social reformers. However, well into the Jacksonian era, Congress considered the demand fiscally and economically irresponsible. Increasingly, this led proponents to cast the idea as a military matter: land grantees would supplant troops in the efforts to take the continent over from Native nations and rival colonial powers. Settlers as Conquerors examines the free land debates of the 1790s to 1850s and reconstructs the settlement experiences under the donation laws for Florida (1842) and the Oregon Territory (1850). Both laws promised to bring the interests of poorer whites and their government into a more harmonious relation – to the exclusion of African Americans and for the explicit purpose of displacing Native peoples. Drawing on new records, Settlers as Conquerors details the trajectory of settlements and shows how the settler-imperialist experiments fell apart and undermined the rationale of the donation laws. After home seekers fled Florida due to malaria and militias in Oregon triggered uncontrollable violence, settlers came to be seen as unreliable agents of government aims.
Reviews
"This is the single most detailed exploration of free land in antebellum America." — Amy S. Greenberg, Pennsylvania State University
"This is a skillful study of American proposals for the distribution of free public lands that predated the Homestead Act of 1862." — Christopher Clark, University of Connecticut
"Wilm's sensitivity to the effect of U.S. settlement policies on native peoples is one of the finest features of this book, furnishing a dimension that traditional U.S. land policy studies have lacked." — John R. Van Atta, American Historical Review, Vol. 125, June 2020
"Settlers as Conquerors is critical to understanding the policies that preceded the Homestead Act and to understanding the history of Oregon. With its clear and engrossing narrative, this book deserves a wide readership." — Katrine Barber, Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol. 123, No. 4, Winter 2022
"… Wilm's book is an excellent and detailed addition to the history of public lands and deserves a place on the bookshelf of anyone interested in the issue." — Jamie L. Bronstein, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Vol. 110, No. 3, Summer 2019
"The book brings well-known facts and new approaches to settlement conflicts in the early US Republic into a new framework." (translation) — Katharina Loeber, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, Vol. 49, No. 1, 2022
"This book is a model of careful scholarship. It has a tight focus but wide resonance, and it lays out evidence in logical detail. It also exemplifies the value of a fresh look: as a German scholar, Wilm clearly saw how this topic had drifted into the realm of mythology for U.S. historians." — J. M. Opal, Western Historical Quarterly 51, Spring 2020
"The essential strength of the book lies in the author's impressive research and data-driven evidence." — Thomas Richards Jr., Journal of Southern History, Vol. 86, February 2020
"[a] captivating piece of research" — Hanno Scheerer, H-Soz-Kult, June 24, 2019
"extremely valuable comparative history" — Laurel Clark Shire, Missouri Historical Review, Vol. 114, No. 2, 2020
"The book […] would be quite suitable as content for a graduate level course or seminar on U.S. historical geography." — Michael Yoder, Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 66, October 2019