Cornish, Louis Craig: Transylvania. The land beyond the forest (Philadelphia, 1947)
7. Kossuth’s American visit and afterward
ko ssuth’s American visit and afterward 67 her constitutional liberties to the other states within the Austrian Empire. Later he wanted the countries around Hungary to federate for freedom and mutual protection. Whether he was aware of this larger inclusive purpose when he knelt in the dark by the river we do not know. But later he wanted federation. Perhaps his journeying through the States of our Union may have encouraged him. The dominant fact is that Kossuth adopted Washington’s faith both in independence and federation. The Sultan denied Kossuth’s wish to proceed with his followers to Constantinople, but allowed him to stop in Asia Minor, first at Vidin, then at Shumla, and last at Kutaiah, giving him a handsome allowance on which he lived in some dignity as the President of Hungary. Austria hoped that he would now become as helpless as Napoleon had been at St. Helena. But isolated though he was for the next two years he still managed to keep up his fight for the liberation of Hungary. Subsequent events were no doubt due largely to his own persistent activity in exile. As in every period of his life this banishment was full of color and unexpected action. He sent foreign agents about Europe, he had several of them, and he conducted an enormous correspondence in four languages reaching almost literally to the ends of the earth, making use of Hungarian, German, French and English. “A war of letters began,” says Zarek, “a war without a parallel. Letters broadcast to the world, letters moving, provocating, argumentative.” He could not believe that the free powers, he included the United States, would stand idly by and let Hungary be doomed to Austrian tyranny without striking a blow on her behalf. Was she not one of them, a free and constitutionally