Description:

Hermann Raster was born in the duchy of Anhalt, where his father was a court official, in 1827. After becoming caught up in the 1848 revolution he left Germany and made his way to the United States, where he worked as a journalist first in New York City and then in Chicago. He became active in the fledgling Republican Party and, as editor of the German-language Illinois Abend-Zeitung newspaper in Chicago, was one of the most steadfast supporters of the United States and of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. After the war's end he occasionally held political patronage jobs while continuing to work as a journalist. His first wife, Emilia Hahn, died in 1861. He then married Margarethe Oppenheim, who survived him upon his death in 1891.