Adolph Douai

Douai was driven from Texas in 1856 due to his published opposition of slavery, living out the rest of his life as a school operator in the New England city of Boston.

Karl Daniel Adolph Douai was born February 22, 1819, in Altenburg, Thuringia, in the Duchy of Saxon-Altenburg, the son of a school teacher.

[2] He worked variously in his boyhood years as a newsboy, as an assistant to his father in teaching peasant children, as a crocheter of home manufactured wollen shawls, among other small jobs.

Life in Russia had a radicalizing impact upon Douai and after 5 years in the country he returned to his native Altenburg, convinced that a revolution for constitutional and democratic government was in the wings.

[1] With the coming of the Revolutions of 1848, Douai helped organize clubs for workers and students and took an active part in the political movement, sitting as a member of the revolutionary Landtag of Saxe-Altenberg.

[1] Douai prevailed on the charge of treason but was nevertheless sentenced to one year in prison on three of the counts against him, a result which forced him to close his school and disburse its property.

[1] After being removed from his position in Newark, Douai accepted an offer to start a new educational academy in Irvington, New Jersey, but no suitable building could be had to bring the project to fruition.

[5] In the fall of 1877 there was a short-lived plan for Douai to serve as English-language translator of Das Kapital, the magnum opus of Karl Marx first published in 1867.

[6] In January 1878, the German-language socialist daily newspaper the New Yorker Volkszeitung (New York People's News) was established, and Douai began to write extensively for the publication.