Koerner, Gustave Philipp b. November 20, 1809; Frankfurt am Main d.April 9, 1896; Belleville, Illinois
Lawyer and politician who became lieutenant governor of Illinois in 1853. Koerner received his doctorate in law from the University of Heidelberg in 1832. He began practicing law, but after supporting the unsuccessful August 3, 1833, revolt in Frankfurt, Koerner fled to Le Havre and from there to the United States.
He arrived in New York City and went directly to St. Louis, where he saw firsthand the horrors of slavery. He chose to settle down in Belleville, Illinois. He studied American law at the prestigious Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, where he first met Mary Todd, before she married Abraham Lincoln. Afterward, Koerner returned to Belleville to practice law in Illinois and married Sophia Engl eman on June 17, 1836. They had five sons and three daughters. He was a cofounder of the Belleville Library and enjoyed a stimulating intellectual atmosphere in St. Clair County, where many of the German settlers in the country had been educated in a classical curriculum and were considered Latin farmers, plowing the fields while reading a book in Greek or Latin.Koerner was attracted to politics and met Lincoln while campaigning in the presidential election of 1840. He was elected to the Illinois state legislature for the term 1842-1843. He was appointed justice of the Illinois Supreme Court and served for the years 1845-1851 and was elected lieutenant governor of Illinois for the term 1853-1857. Koerner was instrumental in helping to found the state’s Republican Party and proved adept at using the political influence of the Illinois Staats- zeitung, which was quietly subsidized by Lincoln. He became Lincoln’s major German American adviser and helped him draft an antislavery plank for the Republican Party platform in 1860.
With the start of the Civil War in 1861, the fifty-two-year-old Koerner primarily advised Lincoln about German American political appointments in Illinois.
He disliked the famous radical organizer, Friedrich Hecker. Koerner felt that Hecker was too radical and would prove to be a dangerous influence on the Republican Party. Yet the fifty-year-old Hecker took command of the 24th Illinois Infantry on June 18, 1861. Koerner could only organize the 43rd Illinois Infantry Regiment. After Carl Schurz resigned as minister to Spain in 1862, Koerner was appointed to this position, and he succeeded in keeping Spain neutral in the American Civil War. He remained active in politics until 1876 when he retired from public life and eventually wrote a history of German Americans (1880).William H. Roba
See also Altgeld, John Peter; American Civil War, German Participants in; Frankfurt am Main Citizens in the United States; Hecker, Friedrich; Illinois Staatszeitung; Politics and German Americans; Schurz, Carl
References and Further Reading
Korner, Gustave Philipp. Das deutsche Element in den Vereinigten Staaten, 1818—1848. Cincinnati, OH: A. E. Wilde, 1880.
Korner, Gustave Philipp, and Thomas J. McCormack Koerner. Memoirs of Gustave Koerner, 1809—1896: Life-sketches Written at the Suggestion of His Children. Cedar Rapids, IA: Torch, 1909.
Tolzmann, Don Heinrich. The German- American Experience. Amherst, MA: Humanity Books, 2000.