ON A MISSION FOR KOSSUTH
The arrival, in December, 1851, of Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot, on
his mission for the redemption of Hungary, set all America in a flame
of shallow enthusiasm, and I went to hear his appeals. What he asked
for was money to arm his country, to renew the struggle with the
House of Hapsburg. His eloquence carried away all deliberation in the
Northern States, and even shook the government at Washington; but, in
the end, the only practical result was his gain of the dollars which
the hearers paid to hear him speak, and which no one regretted who
heard him, for such oratory no one in the country ever had heard, even
from men to whom the English language was native. Before making his
discourse in any town, he took the pains to find out something of the
local history, and thus touched the patriotism of his audience in the
parish bounds, and the past glories of America were revived in terms
of a new and strange flattery. We were like the Athenians after
hearing the Philippics of Demosthenes,--all ready to march against
the Austrian. Before he left New York I had volunteered to fight or
conspire, or take any part in the struggle which might fall to me. I
kept my counsel from my family, and when Kossuth went on his westward
tour it was settled that, on or after his return to Europe, I was to
follow.
His tour of the Northern States was a triumph that caused him to
entertain hopes which a man of more sobriety and common-sense would
not have conceived. Against the indifference to liberty and the
selfishness of the slave States, his flood of eloquence broke in vain.
He knew that the North contained most of the capital and energy of
America, and he supposed that they ruled, and was late in learning
that the South ruled us. At Washington he came into contact with the
statesmanship and the demagogy of the republic, and, while the
former gave him a magnificent reception, the latter quietly and
undemonstratively quenched his hopes. The South had no sympathy with
Hungarian or any other liberty, and we felt the chill fall on Kossuth
and his eloquence. But, for the politicians, there was something to
be made out of him and the naturalized voters, mainly republicans and
refugees from the various revolutions which had failed in Europe; so
he was not denied the expectation of some private assistance, though
the hope that the United States should openly declare Hungary a
belligerent, and thus give its moral weight to Kossuth, the recognized
governor, was soon seen to be an idle and fallacious one. "Something
might be done," said the politicians. So Kossuth waited.
A presidential election was near, and negotiations were initiated
between Kossuth and the party leaders for his influence on the foreign
vote, and, pending these, he could decide nothing as to his future
movements. I was in the habit of going to see him at night, and
sometimes waited for the departure of the committees of the
politicians who were in discussion with him. One night, when I went
in, I found him in a state of nauseated irritation, and he broke out,
saying, "Mr. Stillman, if your country does not get rid of these
politicians it will be ruined in fifty years." He had just received a
Democratic committee, which had formally promised him, in return for
the influence he might exert in favor of their candidate, two ships of
war ready for service, and a sum of money, the exact amount of which
I cannot now remember, but I think it was half a million dollars.
Naturally he did not tell me if he had closed with the proposition,
but the making of it by the committee was a revelation as to the
purity of American politics which he fully understood. This committee
had presented itself with the authority of Franklin Pierce, Democratic
candidate for the presidency.
The scheme in which he at first proposed to utilize my services was
the formation of a deposit of arms and materials of war at a point in
the Mediterranean from which he could descend promptly on the coast of
Croatia, and this indicated that the two men-of-war of the committee
entered into his plans. The desired point he found in the little
island of Galita, south of Sardinia, unoccupied and apparently
unclaimed by any power, but on which, he told me, the flag of the
United States had been hoisted some years before by one of our
cruisers; evidently as a joke on the part of some of our sailors.
I was to visit it and report on its fitness for his purpose; but
negotiations dragged, or there was some hitch, nothing was concluded
until Kossuth's departure for Europe became necessary, and Pulzsky,
his _alter ego_, was given full instructions concerning me. I was to
follow when affairs were in a certain state of readiness; and, in
fact, after a few weeks, I was summoned to London. I received from
Pulzsky the clue to Kossuth's quarters, in a quiet street, Bayswater
way, if I remember rightly, to which I was to go only late at night,
and by some roundabout road, as the Austrian spies were always
watching him.
I had a letter to a Madam Schmidt, a German refugee, and an advanced
republican, at whose house I used to meet a little assembly of
refugees,--German, French, Russian, etc. Every Sunday night we used to
meet and discuss the politics of Europe. Of my friends of this circle
I remember only one,--a Mr. Norich, a young Russian, with whom I
contracted a close friendship, never since renewed. Nothing more was
said of the Galita plan, which seems to have depended on the success
of the political negotiations with the Americans, and it was finally
decided that I should go to Milan and carry the proclamations which
Kossuth was to issue to the Hungarian soldiers of the Italian garrison
there, ordering them, in case of any revolt, not to fire on insurgent
Italians. This was in prevision of the insurrection which Mazzini had
determined for the spring of 1853, and with regard to which there were
grave dissensions between the two chiefs. Kossuth was not ready
for the Hungarian rising, and refused to order it till there was
a prospect of success, while Mazzini believed that, even if
unsuccessful, the rising was necessary to keep his influence on the
Italian population, which was already shaken. Kossuth said to me that
he disapproved Mazzini's plans, for he refused "to play with the blood
of the nations;" but, if Mazzini persisted, he would give the order to
the Hungarian troops not to fire on the people if any rising should
take place; more than that he could not do.
Pending the ripening of Mazzini's scheme I waited in London, at the
orders of Kossuth, but before the moment came for my undertaking this
mission a new one became urgent. When the Hungarian insurrection of
1848-49 had become evidently a failure, and Kossuth was about to
escape into Turkey, he decided to conceal, in some place secure from
Austrian discovery, the crown jewels, including the crown of St.
Stephen, which was considered by the Hungarian people as necessary to
the lawful coronation of their king, and with which Francis Joseph
had not been crowned; and he and Bartholomew Szemere, one of his
colleagues in the ministry--employing for their operations a
detachment of prisoners, who were shot after the concealment was
complete--buried the jewels at some point down the Danube. Having
received information that Szemere, who was then opposed to Kossuth,
was about to disclose their hiding-place to the Austrian government,
Kossuth determined to remove them, and organized an expedition to this
end, of which I was to become the apparent head. The description of
the hiding-place was written in a most complicated cipher dispatch,
the key to which was contained in a stanza of a song known to
Kossuth's correspondent in Pesth. Each letter in the dispatch was
represented by a fraction, of which the numerator was the number of
the letter in one of the lines of the song, and the denominator the
number of the line. This dispatch was then written in four parts; the
first, fifth, ninth, etc., letters being put in the first part;
the second, sixth, tenth, etc., in the second; the third, seventh,
eleventh, etc., in the third; the fourth, eighth, twelfth, etc., in
the fourth, and so on to the end. Of these parts of the dispatch,
written on the finest paper, I had charge of two; one for myself, and
one for a person indicated at Pesth, and the other two were to go by
way of Constantinople, one for the confederate who carried it and one
for the correspondent who had the song-key. We were to meet and spell
out the directions and go to the hiding-place, and, when the jewels
were recovered, they were to be hidden in a box of a conserve for
which that vicinity was noted, and then carried to Constantinople,
from which point I was to take charge of them and deliver them in
Boston to Dr. S.G. Howe, the well-known Philhellene.
I folded my portion of these dispatches small, wrapped them in thin
gutta-percha, and, going to the most obscure shoemaker in the part of
London which I knew, had the heel of one of my boots excavated and
the packet deposited in the hole and covered over again by a stout
heel-tap. My orders were to take at least six weeks for the journey,
to go by a roundabout route, and travel as if for pleasure. From
the Austrian territory I was to write to Kossuth all the political
information I could collect, the messages being conveyed in a
cryptograph in which the form of the letter was to be that of a
correspondence between lovers. The words composing the message were to
be written on spaces left in a mask of which each had a copy, and the
spaces between the words then filled up so that the letter would carry
some meaning when read as a whole. Love-letters were supposed to give
most room for nonsense. Knowing very little French, I bought a pocket
dictionary and a copy of Racine, and, during a ten days' stay in
Paris, by diligent use of the former in all my transactions, I picked
up enough for the needs of travel, and, spending all my leisure over
the latter, I was, before my mission was over, able to converse with
considerable fluency and knew my Racine thoroughly.
From Paris I made the journey to Brussels in the company of an
American gentleman, Mr. Coxe, of Alabama, traveling with his wife and
daughter. At Brussels I made, through the Coxes, the acquaintance
of M. Le Hardy de Beaulieu, the leader of a section of the Belgian
Liberals, whose father had held a command in the Belgian contingent at
Waterloo. My acquaintance with M. Le Hardy lasted many years, he being
much interested in America, and having, with his brother, founded
a Belgian colony in Alabama. The ancestral estate of the Le Hardys
included part of the field of Waterloo, and we visited it in company
with M. Le Hardy, who pointed out the trenches made by the heavy
artillery of Napoleon still distinguishable on the surface of the
fields in spite of the subsequent ploughings. I suppose that his
familiarity with the fields from his boyhood gives authority to his
assurance that the depressions we saw were the effect of the ploughing
of the guns in the wet, soft earth, and did not exist in the natural
lay of the land, and the incident brought one very near to the great
struggle which fixed for long the position of England in European
politics. M. Le Hardy had been, like his father before him, urged to
resume the title of nobility which the father had renounced in the
warmth of the republican movement prior to the Empire, having burned
the patent in the square at Brussels; but, like the father, he had
always refused. He was a consistent and, as he would now be classed, a
moderate republican.
Visiting Dusseldorf for the sake of the school of art there, I seemed
to go into the Middle Ages. We landed from the Rhine steamer in the
night, finding the streets deserted even by the police, and dimly
lighted by oil lamps hung across them at wide intervals, and I
wandered a long time at random with my valise in hand, searching for a
hotel, and not meeting a living person to ask guidance of. I blundered
at length on a little inn in whose drinking-room still burned a light,
and in which I found a night's lodging. Such a primitive state of
civilization was to me, fresh from Paris and Brussels, romantic. At
Berlin I made the acquaintance of Varnhagen von Ense, through a letter
of introduction from Frau Schmidt, my republican refugee friend of
London. He treated me with great consideration, and promised me a
winter of brilliant social life if I would stay at Berlin. The chief
inducement offered was the acquaintance of Humboldt, then absent from
the city. Of Varnhagen von Ense I retain the most delightful memory.
I found him courteous, genial, and hospitable, with a large-minded
outlook on politics and a great interest in America. I saw also the
new museum, with Kaulbach at work on his frescoes, and, going by
Dresden, reached Prague, where I began my political reports to
Kossuth.
Arriving at Vienna, I was beforehand with the famous police, which I
found not to merit its reputation for sharpness, and went at once,
after establishing myself at the hotel, and before my name was
reported to the authorities and a spy put on me, to the address of a
republican, known to Kossuth, and to whom I was directed to apply for
the identification of some Hungarian resident in the city on whom
Kossuth could depend to reëstablish communication with the Viennese
malcontents, broken by a misadventure of his former agent. This
adventure Kossuth recounted to me, I suppose to keep up my courage in
the perilous business he was sending me on. One of his agents had
been sent on a round tour with instructions for certain officers or
soldiers, and, having been detected in communication with the barracks
and arrested, a memorandum book was found on him in which, amongst
many addresses of persons to whom he had no mission, those to which
he was directed were interspersed. All were arrested, among them the
Vienna agent, who, ignorant of the reason of his arrest, suspecting
treachery, and fearing the disclosures that might be extorted from him
by torture, rolled himself in his bedclothes and set fire to them with
his candle, the only means of suicide left him. When he felt that the
burning was fatal he made an alarm and bade the attendant call the
council of war, which immediately met in his cell. He then avowed his
complicity in treasonable plans, and, assuring them that nothing more
could be extorted from him by any torture they might inflict, that his
chief would soon come and make all things right, and that there were
thousands more as ready to die as he, he refused to say any more and
died in silence.
My business was to find a man to take this agent's place. The
individual to whom I was sent was a ribbon manufacturer on one of the
main streets, and, pretending a desire to visit his weaving rooms, we
went to the manufactory in the upper stories, and then I disclosed,
with no preamble, my mission. The good man was in ecstasies, and to
show his joy invited me down into his living apartments and introduced
me to his wife, daughters, and the lover of one of his daughters, as a
messenger from Kossuth! If my hair did not rise on end, I am certain
that at no crisis of my life could it ever have done so. During my ten
days' stay in Vienna and the four weeks I afterward passed in Pesth, I
never lost a nervous apprehension of the consequences of this singular
imprudence, for I was in the enemy's country, on business the
slightest suspicion of which meant an obscure prison and complete
disappearance from any friend. With cipher dispatches on my person in
the handwriting of Kossuth, well known to all the authorities, and
with my secret in the possession of five women and two men, the
uneasiness I felt for the first two or three days can better be
imagined than expressed. I did nothing all day long but walk the
streets, drink coffee, and smoke cigars with constant apprehension of
an arrest.
But I did not neglect my business. I found a Hungarian whose name
Kossuth had given me as the alternative probable medium of the renewed
relations with Vienna, but he not only refused to have any relations
with the late dictator, but strongly warned me of the possible
consequences to myself of the mission I was on, and made me see very
clearly that Kossuth overrated his influence on the Hungarians after
the _débâcle_, for which he was largely responsible. But it never
occurred to me that it was possible to withdraw or do less than obey
my instructions. I reported to Kossuth that the only person I could
find who was willing to assume the responsibility of entering into
relations with him was the ribbon-maker, and then, having acquired
the confidence of the American consul, who was a zealous agent of the
imperial government, and got his visé for Hungary, I made my way to
Pesth.
Once on the scene of my real labors, I discovered how incompetent a
conspirator Kossuth was. He had given me the name of his correspondent
in Pesth and his residence, in the Karolyisches Haus, as if that were
his ordinary residence, without warning me, though he knew it, that he
was really in hiding from the police, and probably only to be reached
with precaution and indirectly. Adopting the same tactics as in
Vienna, and not to attract attention by inquiries, I went at once in
a cab to the house. The porter, of course, in reply to my inquiries,
being in hearing of the cab-driver, who was probably a spy, denied any
knowledge of such a person. I drove back to the hotel, and then went
on foot alone and asked again for the individual, but got the same
reply, this time angrily delivered. Utterly at a loss what to do, I
wrote at once to Kossuth that the person wanted was not at the address
indicated. Instead of writing to him to find me and giving him
my address, Kossuth only reiterated through the post the former
instructions. I repeated the denial, and then waited. In conversation
with the hotel people I inquired as fully as was possible without
exciting suspicion, about persons of liberal tendencies and such as I
conceived that I might make use of, and studied the position as best I
could. Pending this study I was summoned to the police headquarters to
give an account of myself. This I did in a manner which must have been
satisfactory, as they found that I knew little German and was a very
stupid and unpractical individual, which I must have really been, to
find myself there. I accounted for myself as a landscape painter on
his travels, and as I knew nobody and made no acquaintances they
dismissed all suspicion of me, our consul's assurance no doubt
covering all doubts, and I waited still. But after a few days more
a convenient attack of illness gave me a pretext for calling a
physician, and I chose Dr. Orzovensky, who I had learned had been
chief of the medical staff under the revolutionary authorities.
Through him I made such inquiries as were possible about the people to
whom I was sent, and then for the first time discovered that they were
all under accusation as conspirators and searched for by the police,
and of this I had no warning from Kossuth.
But in all this wandering my boot-heel was wearing away, and it was a
question of wearing into the packet of dispatches, or putting them in
a place of security. I accordingly dug them out, and, hiding them in
a convenient corner of the cupboard in my room, where they must
soon have been discovered in case of a domiciliary visit, took the
excavated boots out to throw them into the river, choosing the
earliest darkness of the rainy evening of the same day. I knew that
if the bootblack saw the excavated heel he would in all probability
report the fact, and my arrest would follow. In my ignorance of the
fact that the city was under martial law, and that without a pass no
one could be in the streets after 8 P.M., I had waited till 9 to be
screened by the darkness, and then, walking down the river on the
dike, I slipped down to the water's edge by the path, and gently
tossed the boots into the rapid current. Seeing the dangerous articles
float away into the dark, I turned to go up the dike to the road
running along the top of it, when, to my dismay, I heard a sentinel
directly across the road challenge, saw the officer of the guard
coming on his rounds, and heard his reply to the challenge. I hurried
down the bank, hoping that I had not attracted attention, but feeling
that in the contrary case I was in most imminent danger of arrest, and
the thought of the dispatches left where they must be found in case of
suspicion gave me a moment's anxiety. I hurried back along the water's
edge till I judged that I was out of sight from the post, and then
walked up on the dike and towards the hotel.
It was very dark and raining slightly, but as I came within the circle
of light of one of the street lamps the vigilant eye of the officer of
the guard caught me, and he hailed, "Who goes there?" I did not reply,
but, acting as if I did not hear, hurried to get directly under the
lamp which was near, with a feeling that if the officer saw me there
he would see that I was what I pretended to be, a stranger, and also
with a feeling that I was safer at a distance if the challenge were
followed by a bullet. Under the lamp I stopped for the officer to come
up. I was not really frightened, but I cannot deny that I felt very
nervous, as he came up, and, in an inquisitorial tone, asked, "What
are you doing here?" I replied in German which was certainly comical
and not a little shaky, for it was a fragmentary remembrance of the
German read in my early college course, and never since revived, that
"I was doing nothing--that I was a strangers" (ich bin ein Fremden),
and had come out to see the effects on the river, pointing to the
glimmering lights; but, fortunately, my German was so funny that he
burst out laughing, and after a "sehr schön, sehr schön," as I had
said "strangers" in the plural, he replied, "When you are a strangers
you must stay in the house," and gave me friendly directions as to
how to get back to my hotel without falling in with the police, "who
wouldn't let you off as I have." I was fortunate enough to arrive
without any further notice. The officers of the army hated to do
police service, and my inquisitor was no doubt glad not to pass me
into the custody of the police. I have always wished to know the name
of my protector, for such he was.
I remained in Pesth over a month, exciting an increasing attention and
being unable to account for a further delay, as I was doing nothing,
not even sketching, which, in the vicinity of a fortress, would have
been the surest way of inviting arrest. I profited by the acquaintance
of Dr. Orzovensky's family to pass the time agreeably, and, finally,
being unable to extort by post further instructions from Kossuth, or
explanations in reply to two urgent letters describing the position I
was in, and being unable to give any reason for a longer stay, or to
find the people I was sent to, I determined to go back to London and
start again with fuller oral instructions and a better understanding
of the difficulties. I went to Orzovensky and frankly told him my
errand, and asked him if I might leave the dispatches in some place
known to him, so that he could indicate to some other person, should
my mission be taken up by another, where they were to be found. He
burst out on me with violence, accusing me of endangering his family
as well as himself, and assuring me that if the slightest suspicion of
my mission should transpire they would all be thrown into prison,
and he be ruined, refusing to have anything to do or say about the
dispatches, and breaking off all communications with me on the spot.
I had not, up to that moment, felt any _real_ fright, though, when I
stood under the scrutiny of the officer on the dike, I must confess I
felt extremely nervous; but Orzovensky's violence, and his own panic
at the thought of having harbored treason so long, making me fear that
his anxiety to escape all suspicion might compel him to denounce me,
gave me a _mauvais quart d'heure_. I was instantaneously in an awful
funk, and I had a practical demonstration of the "_vox haesit in
faucibus_," for I was unable to reply to the good doctor in anything
but the faintest whisper, and my tongue clattered in my mouth, as dry
as a stick, in an instant. I threw the dispatches in the sink and took
the next train for Vienna, undisturbed by the train running off the
track in the night, in the greater anxiety of my position, and, after
making at the station of Vienna only a hasty lunch on a boiled sausage
and a roll, continued my journey by express until I was out of the
Austrian dominions, and stopped to sleep at Frankfort. My panic was
as unreasonable as my security had been, for there was no reason to
believe that Dr. Orzovensky would warn the authorities, or that I
could not have carried the dispatches back to Kossuth in safety. My
habitual courage was not the courage of one who realizes his danger
and faces it coolly, but that of constitutional inability to realize
what the danger is, however clearly it may be shown to him. As a habit
the realization of my danger only came to me when the danger itself
had gone by, and then I was frightened.
Arrived at London, I went to report to Kossuth, expecting a scene and
reproaches, when I was prepared to show him that the failure of the
mission was due to his having neglected to inform me that I was going
to a man wanted by the police, and in close hiding, so that my failure
to find him was probably due to the openness with which I made my
approaches, and to his not having then informed his correspondent that
I was on the ground expecting to see him, and that he must look out
for me. But he only exclaimed, with a tone of regret, "Three months
lost!" yet there was, probably, a reciprocal disapproval of our
methods of carrying on a conspiracy; for, while he was most gravely
disappointed at getting no result from his work and expenditure, no
doubt owing largely to my incompetence for that kind of service, I was
equally dissatisfied at being sent on an expedition which put my
life in imminent danger, with the minor perils of torture and long
imprisonment, provided with information utterly insufficient and
needlessly incomplete for the mission confided to me.
If Kossuth had cautioned me that his correspondent was in hiding and
wanted by the police, I should not have committed the grave error of
going openly to find him, and under the eye of a cabman, who would
probably report to the police my act. Had he even after that informed
his correspondent where I could be found and who I was (which was
perfectly practicable, for he told me himself that he had received
letters from the correspondent during my stay at Pesth), there could
have been communication at once. Kossuth said that I ought to have
sought out the friends at the Tiger café, where they were in the habit
of meeting publicly, though he knew that the city was swarming with
spies, and that the state of siege existed (and of this, even, he did
not warn me), and that my chief difficulty was to avoid being brought
into contact with suspected Hungarians; nor did he recollect that he
had given precise instructions to avoid anything which might lead any
one to suppose that I was more than an objectless traveler. I was most
reasonably disgusted with having my life exposed in this careless way,
and he, perhaps, as reasonably so with my want of resource, and the
result was that he decided not to employ me again in such work, and I
decided to wait for active insurrectionary movements, in which I could
take my place. As it happened, however, the Austrian government had
recovered the crown jewels; some one in the secret--Kossuth said
Szemere--having learned that Kossuth was sending an expedition to
recover them, and, from jealousy of him, disclosed the hiding-place.
Kossuth's practical incapacity for the minutiae of conspiracy in this
case was, I judged from what I afterward learned of his compatriots,
characteristic of him. He continually neglected the details of
important affairs, working by magnificent inspirations, which left out
of consideration the defects of human nature. His self-exaltation had
offended many patriots who did not fall under his personal magnetism,
and his assumption of authority in military matters where he had no
knowledge to justify it, alienated the competent officers. The treason
of Görgey, as it was popularly considered, was probably due to the
perception that Kossuth was an impracticable head for an active
revolution, under whose dictature there was no hope of final success
while he at the same time refused to abandon his impracticable
ideals; and I heard from actual participants that there was great
dissatisfaction amongst the officers with his assumption of dignity,
out of place, and of command, for which he was incompetent. The fact
was that he could not distinguish between the practicable and the
impracticable, and though not so visionary as Mazzini, he believed
that his power of arousing the wild enthusiasm of the Honveds and
masses of Hungarians, due to his marvelous eloquence, was enough to
carry on war with, and he would not see that, from the moment that
Russia intervened, it was only a question of time when and how the
insurrection should end. Then his treatment of the Slavonic element of
the population was fatal to the movement. The Serbs only asked to be
admitted on an equal footing with the Magyars to the struggle against
the centralizing tendency of the German element at Vienna, and
Kossuth contemptuously exclaimed, in response to their demand, "These
Rascians, who consider themselves a nation and are only a band of
robbers," etc.,--a reply hardly calculated to conciliate--one which in
fact threw the Slavonic population against the movement and made the
Russian intervention inevitable. Kossuth, like Mazzini, was simply an
insurrectionary force--the administrative power existed only in great
and imposing schemes which lacked adaptation to ordinary human nature
and existing circumstances. The personal fascination of the man was
beyond anything I have ever known, but his failure as the chief of a
state was, I believe, inevitable.
I took my congé as secret agent, but it was understood that when the
renewal of the revolt from Austria, to which he looked forward at no
distant time, was at hand, I should take the place to which I had
looked forward in the beginning. I saw one of Kossuth's associates
subsequently, after the failure of Mazzini's Milan movement in the
spring of 1853; and he then told me of the failure, and how the
Hungarian soldiers, as had been ordered, refused to fire on the
insurgents and had been decimated and sent to Croatia. More than
thirty years after, I went to see Kossuth at Turin, and introduced
myself as the young man who went to Hungary for him to carry off the
crown jewels. He burst out with an impetuous denial of the existence
of the expedition. "But," said I, "I have your letters written to
me in Pesth." "I should like to see those letters," he replied. I
promised to send them, conditionally on his promise to return them;
but thinking it over, I sent him only one, inclosed in a stamped
envelope directed to myself, with a letter recalling the promise to
send it back. I never heard from him again, however, and saw that he
only wanted to get the letters to suppress their evidence.