Gustav Koerner

Gustav Philipp Koerner, also spelled Gustave or Gustavus Koerner was a revolutionary, journalist, lawyer, politician, judge, and statesman in Illinois and Germany and a Colonel of the U.S. Army who was a confessed enemy of slavery. He married onJune 1836 in Belleville Sophia Dorothea Engelmann , they hadchildren. He belonged to the cofounders and was one of the first members of the Grand Old Party and he was a close confidant of Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd and had an essential role in his nomination and election for president in 1860.

He aboarded onMay 1833 on a ship in Le Havre to North America affiliated with a group of emigrants headed by the father of the Engelmann family, whose son Theodor was an old friend of him from college times. On the passage he became engaged with his subsequent wife Sophie, a daughter of the Engelmanns who was born in the Electorate of the Palatinate , an historic region of Germany. Her cousin George Engelmann had explored as a vanguard of his family the region in the Midwestern United States already a year before. He was also from Frankfurt, belonged to the same age group as Gustav and had attended the same school, received a degree as M.D. and became later a man of reputation as a famous expert of the botany of North America.

Source: Wikipedia