Fraternity-Testvériség, 1994 (72. évfolyam, 1-4. szám)
1994-01-01 / 1. szám
. 1 FRATERNITY Page 6 Lajos 1802 - 1894 Kossuth es, Gentlemen, either America will regenerate the condition of the old world, or it will be degenerated by the condition of the old world. ” Speech delivered in Concord, Massachusetts, May 11, 1852 HIS JOURNEY IN THE UNITED STATES by Elemér Bakó ‘In a sermon preached on Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 1851, the Reverend Joseph P. Thompson, Pastor of the Broadway Tabernacle Church in New York, issued this greeting: Thou Noble Magyar! We welcome thee for thine own sake and thy country’s ...We know the heroism that for years bore up in thy far banishment, the cause of Hungary before the world and God. We welcome thee to a dominion over free hearts that honor virtue, truth and liberty .... In thy own tongue we bid thee welcome. Éljen! Isten Hozta! Kossuth! The person thus addressed was not present; owing to stormy weather, his ship was still out on the ocean. But his fame had preceded him: the newspapers were already füled with accounts of his heroic efforts to preserve Hungary’s first constitutional government against the overwhelming military power of the Austrian and Russian Empires. The bloodbath that had followed the imperial victory earned worldwide contempt for the two emperors. Concerted efforts were made by the United States, England, and France, directed by the Secretary of State Daniel Webster and his British counterpart Lord Palmerston, to rescue Louis Kossuth and his compatriots who had taken refuge in Turkey. Deeply grateful, Kossuth, throughout his life, urged the “two Anglo-Saxon nations” to liquidate their historical differences and to join forces against despotism everywhere in the world. Lajos Kossuth, a Protestant, was bom in 1802 in the northern part of Hungary, to a prominent family. The generation of young reformers who emerged in Hungary in the beginning of the 19th century, under the influence of Count István Széchenyi, founder of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1825, soon accepted Lajos Kossuth as their leader. After the gross betrayal of Hungary on the part of Metternich’s Austria, he rose to national prominence. When others began to hesitate, Kossuth did not, and was soon elected by the embattled representatives of the nation as a “Governor-President” after the House of Hapsburg was dethroned on April 14, 1849. Kossuth tried to direct the government of his nation toward the American model. His love for America had its roots in his youth. Among his most important guides to American life, history, and institutions were two works: the Hungarian translation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s La démocractie en Amerique, which followed the publication of the original by just a few years, and an enthusiastic account of a journey to the United States in 1831 and 1832 by Sándor Bölöni Farkas. After Kossuth became President, the United States Government, and particularly Secretary of State Daniel Webster, enthusiastically took up the cause of the “American model at the Lower Danube.” A young Transylvanian, Count Samuel Wass, Kossuth’s personal emissary, was tacitly permitted to set up “Committees for Hungary” in the summer of 1849 throughout the United States; at one of these meetings, in
