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.