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Peter V

Peter Victor Deuster (13 February 1831-31 December 1904) was a member of the US House of Representatives (D-WI 4) from 4 March 1879 to 3 March 1885, succeeding William Pitt Lynde and preceding Isaac W. Van Schaick.

Biography[]

Peter Victor Deuster was born in Duren, Rhenish Prussia in 1831, and he emigrated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1847. He worked as a printer before moving to Port Washington in 1854 to edit a newspaper and serve as a postmaster and in other local offices. Deuster, a Catholic, was a prominent Copperhead Democrat during the American Civil War, publishing the anti-radical Milwaukee Seebote and calling Carl Schurz a "political mountebank", opposing the Republican Party's freethinkers and abolitionists, encouraged negrophobia in his immigrant readers, instigated a draft riot in Port Washington in 1862, and expressed concern that Abraham Lincoln's assassination would allow the Radical Republicans to take power and unleash a policy of retribution and revenge. Deuster served in the State Assembly from 1863 to 1864, in the State Senate from 1870 to 1872, and in the US House of Representatives from 1879 to 1885, and he later served as consul at Krefeld in Germany from 1896 to 1897. He died in 1904.

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