Howells, William Dean, 1837-1920 -- Childhood and youth
We were now going from the country to Columbus, where my father, after
several vain attempts to find an opening elsewhere as editor or even as
practical printer, had found congenial occupation at least for the
winter; and the reader who likes to date a small event by a great one
may care to know that we arrived in the capital of Ohio about the time
that Louis Kossuth arrived in the capital of the United States. In the
most impressive exile ever known he came from Hungary, then trampled
under foot by the armies of Austria and Russia, and had been greeted
with a frenzy of enthusiasm in New York as the prophet and envoy of a
free republic in present difficulties, but destined to a glorious
future. At Washington he had been received by both Houses of Congress
with national honors which might well have seemed to him national
promises of help against the despotisms joined in crushing the Magyar
revolt; we had just passed a law providing for the arrest of slaves
escaping from their owners in the South, and we were feeling free to
encourage the cause of liberty throughout the world.
Kossuth easily deceived himself in us, and he went hopefully about the
country, trying to float an issue of Hungarian bonds on our sympathetic
tears, and in his wonderful English making appeals full of tact and
eloquence, which went to the hearts if not the pockets of his hearers.
Among the other state capitals he duly came to Columbus, where I heard
him from the steps of the unfinished State House. I hung on the words of
the picturesque black-bearded, black-haired, black-eyed man, in the
braided coat of the Magyars, and the hat with an ostrich plume up the
side which set a fashion among us, and I believed with all my soul that
in a certain event we might find the despotisms of the Old World banded
against us, and "would yet see Cossacks," as I thrilled to hear Kossuth
say. In those days we world-patriots put the traitor Görgy, who
surrendered the Hungarian army to the Austrians and Russians, beside our
own Benedict Arnold; but what afterward became of him I do not know. I
know that Kossuth went disappointed back to Europe and dwelt a more and
more peaceful newspaper correspondent in Turin till the turn of
fortune's wheel would have dropped him, somehow politically tolerable to
Austria, back in his native country. But he would not return; he died in
Turin; and a few years ago in Carlsbad I fancied I had caught sight of
his son at a café, but was told that I had seen the wrong man, who was
much more revolutionary-looking than Kossuth's son, and more like
Kossuth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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