Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism

Chapter 7: Louis Kossuth and the Campaign of 1852

146 Americans erupted in a final frenzy over revolutionary Europe in early 1852, despite, or because of, the recent setback experienced by Louis Kossuth, the dashing Hungarian revolutionary. Kossuth had come to the United States late in 1851 to raise support for renewing the Hungarian independence struggle against Austria. He arrived via Turkey and Britain , each of which granted him temporary asylum from Hapsburg o∞cials who wished to kill him. Reacting to accounts in American newspapers of the enthusiastic British reception of the Hungarian, Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi arranged for an American warship to bring Kossuth across the Atlantic.1 Reputed to have taught himself English by reading Shakespeare and the Bible while in an Austrian prison, Kossuth at first did not disappoint Americans eager to see an articulate, romantic, Christian revolutionary firsthand. When he met Americans and first heard “Yankee Doodle,” he remarked that it reminded him of an esarda, a popular Hungarian dancing song. He spoke the language of revolutionary peoples in 1848: in addition to speaking in eloquent English, he also gave addresses in French, Italian, and German. Americans got a first taste of his stirring rhetoric by reading newspaper stories of his addresses in England, such as at Birmingham: [I] lay before the Parliament of Hungary the . . . terrible alternative which our fearful destiny left to us . . . to present the neck of the nation to the deadly stroke aimed [by Austria and Russia] at its very life or . . . manfully to fight the battle of legitimate defense. Scarcely had I spoken the words . . . when the spirit of freedom moved . . . and nearly four hundred representatives rose . . . and lifting their right arm towards God, solemnly swore, “We grant it, freedom or death!” There they stood . . . awaiting what further words might fall from my lips. . . . A burning 7. Louis Kossuth and the Campaign of 1852 Louis Kossuth and the Campaign of 1852 147 tear fell from my eye, and a sigh of adoration to the Almighty God fluttered from my lips, and bowing low before the majesty of my people, as I bow now before you . . . I left the tribune . . . speechless, mute (M. Kossuth paused a moment. . . .) Pardon me . . . gentlemen . . . the shadows of our martyrs . . . pass before my eyes, and I hear the millions of my nation once more shout, “Freedom or death!” Kossuth was “rather taller than we had supposed,” according to the New York Tribune, yet his blue eyes, prominent forehead, and “oriental features . . . distinctly marked by su≠ering” conveyed an intriguing mix of exoticism and humility. Kossuth wore a beard, which became a source for many American men’s emulation and women’s enchantment. Moreover, he was a defeated revolutionary seeking answers in America. Kossuth captured American attention like no foreigner had since the Marquis de Lafayette visited in 1824.2 Yet Kossuth’s and Lafayette’s visits provoked profoundly di≠erent reactions . Americans roundly exalted the Frenchman, but many found the Hungarian’s appeal deeply troubling. Thus, instead of Lafayette’s 1824 tour, an even better historical analogue of Kossuth’s mid-nineteenth-century visit is the 1793 visit of Edmond Charles “Citizen” Genêt, a representative of the Girondin regime that established republican rule in France after the revolution had toppled Louis XVI. As French minister to the United States, Genêt had two charges. First, he was to involve America in the French mission to spread universal liberty, specifically by recruiting Americans to arouse the peoples of Florida and Canada against their colonial rule by Spain and Britain and thus distract those powers. Second, he was to negotiate a commercial treaty with the United States, to the exclusion of British interests. Genêt quickly began commissioning the outfitting of French privateers , manned largely by American sailors, to prey on British ships and to conduct expeditions into Spanish Florida. When he arrived at Charleston , and on his ensuing overland trip to Philadelphia, the national capital, Americans treated Genêt to thundering welcomes all along the way.3 Genêt wrote to the French foreign a≠airs minister that American citizens and local o∞cials were embracing him and his cause with “perpetual fetes,” which, he apparently assumed, indicated impending o∞cial American support for France. But no such support developed. The Washington administration treated Genêt coolly. Two weeks after he arrived in the 148 Distant Revolutions United States, Washington proclaimed the country “friendly and impartial toward the belligerent powers...