He became a dedicated supporter of the still young Republican Party and campaigned for Lincoln in Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Wisconsin. After the election, President Lincoln appointed him U.S. envoy to Spain. The first defeats of the Union Army in the Civil War occasioned his return to play an active part as Union general in the war against the Confederacy and the struggle for the emancipation of the slaves.

After the devastating war had ended, leaving 600,000 dead, Schurz returned to civilian life, working as Washington correspondent for the New York Tribune, then as editor-in-chief of the Detroit Post and after l867 as co-editor and part owner of the German-language Westliche Post in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1869, he was elected U.S. senator by his new home state. Thus at the age of forty, only sixteen years after arriving in America as a homeless fugitive, Carl Schurz became a member of his adopted country's highest legislative body, an institution often more powerful than the president in those days.

As secretary of the interior under President Rutherford B. Hayes from 1877 to 1881, Schurz had the opportunity to begin his long championed civil service reform and make improvements in the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

He then moved to New York City, where he helped found the New York Evening Post. From 1892 to 1898 Schurz wrote the editorials for Harper's Weekly. He became nationally famous as a political writer and reformer, especially in the field of civil service administration.

During extensive lecture tours and new journalistic endeavors after his service in the Cabinet Schurz continued to speak out on questions of American domestic politics. As an expounder of a self-confident German-Americanism, he was sought after as a speaker by German clubs around the country. At the opening of the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, he expressed his attitude as follows: " I have always been in favor of a healthy Americanization, but that does not mean a complete disavowal of our German heritage. It means that our character should take on the best of that which is American, and combine it with the best of that which is German. By doing this, we can best serve the American people and their civilization."

He died in New York on May 14, 1906. In addition to his collected speeches, books written by Schurz include Life of Henry Clay (2 vol., 1887) and Abraham Lincoln: An Essay (1891).

Some of his quotes:

"Our ideals resemble the stars, which illumintate the night. No one will ever be able to touch them. But the men who, like the sailors on the ocean, take them for guides, will undoubtedly reach their goal."

"My Country! When right keep it right; when wrong, set it right!"