Grimm, Franz

Born: 1824-XX-XX Germany

Died: 1862-04-06 Pittsburgh Landing, Tennessee

Flourished: 1853 to 1861 Belleville, Illinois

Franz Grimm, newspaper editor, was a native of the Duchy of Brunswick, Germany, and worked as an editor in his native country before he fled to the United States following his participation in the German revolution of 1848. By 1853, he had settled in Belleville, Illinois, where he edited the German language Belleviller Zeitung for four months that year, then again served as editor, 1856 to 1857. Grimm briefly edited the anti-slavery Volksbladt in Belleville the following year before returning to editorship of the Belleviller Zeitung, 1858 to 1861. Under Grimm’s editorship, the Belleviller Zeitung was an anti-slavery newspaper. He was a delegate to the 1856 Republican National Convention and supported Abraham Lincoln for president in the election of 1860. Grimm enlisted as a captain in a German American regiment, the Forty-Third Illinois Infantry, in 1861 and was killed in action at the Battle of Shiloh. Grimm married Erna Remnitz in 1855 and the pair had two children. In religion, Grimm described himself as “an infidel” according to “the christian meaning of the word.”

Franklin William Scott, Newspapers and Periodicals of Illinois, 1814-1879, vol. 6 of Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1910), 22-23; Christina Bearden-White, “Illinois Germans and the Coming of the Civil War: Reshaping Ethnic Identity,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 109 (Fall 2016), 231-51; Proceedings of the First Three Republican National Conventions of 1856, 1860, and 1864 (Minneapolis, MN: Charles W. Johnson, 1893), 41, 69; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), St. Clair County, IL, 268; U.S., Registers of Deaths of Volunteers, 1861-1865, 6 April 1862, Shiloh, TN (Lehi, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2012); Illinois Daily State Journal (Springfield), 16 April 1862, 3:2; Illinois, U.S., Wills and Probate Records, 1772-1999, 29 April 1862, St. Clair County (Lehi, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2015); The Advocate (Belleville, IL), 26 December 1862, 2:1.