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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
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 The Library of Congress 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/hungariancontrovOOcart 
 
THE 
 
 HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY 
 
 AN 
 
 EXPOSURE 
 
 OF THE 
 
 FALSIFICATIONS AND PERVERSIONS 
 
 OF THE 
 
 SLANDERERS OF HUNGARY, 
 
 BY ROBERT CARTER. 
 
 BOSTON : 
 
 REDDING & COMPANY, 8 STATE STREET. 
 
 18 5 2. 
 
THE 
 
 HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY : 
 
 AN 
 
 EXPOSURE 
 
 OF THE 
 
 FALSIFICATIONS AND PERVERSIONS 
 
 OF THE 
 
 SLANDERERS OF HUNGARY. 
 
 
 
 BOSTON j 
 
 REDDING & COMPANY, 8 STATE STREET. 
 
 1852. 
 
This pamphlet is not a history of the Hungarian War, nor even, except incidentally, a 
 defense of the motives and character of the Patriots and Heroes of that war. The great mass 
 of the American people are well satisfied that the contest between Hungary and the House 
 of Hapsburg, was a contest for Freedom and Democratic Institutions, against Despot- 
 ism, Usurpation and Perfidy. That there are any among us who entertain different 
 sentiments, is owing altogether to the labors of the North American Review, and the New 
 York Courier and Enquirer, the editors of which, Messrs. Bowen and Webb, from motives 
 that I need not discuss, have seen fit to oppose themselves to the general opinion, not of this 
 country only, but of the civilized world. Their attacks upon the Hungarians have been widely 
 and zealously circulated — Mr. Bo wen's articles, I am told, having been distributed as a pam- 
 phlet distinct from the Review in which they appeared. The calumnies thus propagated 
 have found their way even into the Senate of the United States, and have there been urged in 
 debate, in opposition to the Resolution of Welcome to Kossuth. 
 
 Messrs. Bowen and Webb rely for support of their theories on quotations from a number 
 of books and documents of more or less authority, from which they have culled such passages 
 as would serve their purpose, and have paraded them as conclusive evidence against the 
 Hungarians. The best reply to this line of argument, in my judgment, is a critical examina- 
 tion of these "authorities," and an exposure of the mode in which the quotations from them 
 have been made. This is what I have attempted to do, — with what success the reader can 
 determine for himself. 
 
 I have likewise devoted considerable space to the consideration of Mr. Bowen's grossly un- 
 fair reply to Mrs. Putnam, who, in the Christian Examiner, had criticised his articles on Hun- 
 gary with eminent ability, and with a degree of knwledge on the subject to which no 
 other American can pretend. It will be seen that on every point which he has endeavored 
 to make against her, I have shown that she is right and he wrong, by the very testimony to 
 which he himself appeals. 
 
 I have endeavored, in conclusion, to give briefly a plain and accurate statement of the case 
 between Austria and Hungary, and of the true causes and objects of the Hungarian Revolu- 
 tion. To those who desire full and reliable information on these subjects, however, I recom- 
 mend a book recently published at Philadelphia, " Hungary and Kossuth? by Rev. Dr. Tefft, 
 of Cincinnati. 
 
 A considerable portion of the following essay appeared last winter in the Boston Atlas, but as 
 the controversy to which it relates is now more fully than ever before the public, it is not 
 inopportune to republish what was then written. 
 
 Cambridge Mass., Dec. 24, 1851, 
 
 R.a 
 
 IV? 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 MR. BOWEN'S FIRST AND SECOND ARTICLES. 
 
 The attack upon the Hungarians was begun in 
 this country by Mr. Francis Bowen, with an 
 article, entitled— "The War of Races,"— in 
 the North American Review, for January, 1850, 
 which embraced, he declared in a preliminary 
 letter to the Boston Daily Advertiser, the re- 
 sults of a good deal of " labor and research." 
 Prefixed to it, by way of text, was the title of 
 an able and impartial work on Hungary, by a 
 French writer, M. Degerando, who had long 
 resided in that country, and was probably bet- 
 ter acquainted with its real condition than any 
 foreigner who had yet written about it. Mr. 
 Bowen stated, in the beginning of his article, 
 that " we depend for information chiefly on M. 
 Degerando' s book, and on a series of excellent 
 articles contributed by E. de Langsdorff and H. 
 Desprez to the Revue des Deux Mondes." [War 
 of Races, p. 79.] These are the only authori- 
 ties to whom he refers, with the exception of a 
 document published in the New York Tribune, 
 an incorrect translation of the Hungarian 
 Declaration of Independence. 
 
 Mr. Bowen's use of the best of these authori- 
 ties, M. Degerando, is fully and correctly stated 
 in the following passage from Mrs. Putnam's 
 First Article in the Christian Examiner, Nov., 
 1850, p. 423 : 
 
 " The work of Degerando, which the North 
 A merican Reviewer selects as the theme of his 
 article, was published in 1848, before the com- 
 mencement of the war, and gives no intelligence 
 from Hungary later than the summer of 1847. 
 It cannot, therefore supply information in regard 
 to the war or its immediate causes. It con- 
 tains, however, full and accurate accounts of 
 the political institutions of the country, and of 
 the character and condition of the various 
 classes of the population. We regret that the 
 
 Reviewer has not availed himself of the infor- 
 tion thus afforded. We cannot, indeed, but 
 express our surprise at the treatment which a 
 writer of the high standing of Degerando, has 
 received at the hands of the editor of the 
 North American Review. After placing the 
 title of this work at the head of his article, 
 and citing the name of the author among his 
 authorities, he does not again refer to it. There 
 is not a statement of fact or opinion in the 
 article which can be attributed to M. Deger- 
 ando ; and the greater part of it is in direct 
 contradiction to the statements of that author. 
 Yet, though the work of M. Degerando is pro- 
 fessedly under review, the writer of ' The War 
 of Races ' gives no intimation that any such 
 contrariety of opinion exists between himself 
 and his supposed authority ; he passes no 
 judgment upon the work ; he cites none of the 
 author's statements, not even to controvert 
 them. The charges against the Hungarians con- 
 tained in that article, went forth to the world, 
 therefore, with the sanction of the respected 
 name of Degerando. Three months afterwards, 
 in another article, written to support the asser- 
 tion made in the former one, the Reviewer, for 
 the first time, alludes to his dissent from the 
 opinions of Degerando ; the only notice of the 
 work which is supposed to make the subject of 
 •The War of Races,' is to be found in a note 
 to the article on 'The Politics of Europe.' " 
 
 It appears, then, that Mr. Bowen's " labor 
 and research " were confined to a few articles 
 in a popular French magazine, the Revue des 
 Deux Mo?ides, from which, also, he admits, he 
 derived almost the whole of his " information." 
 The Revue has long been notorious for its anti- 
 republican tendencies, and the authors of its 
 articles on Hungary, MM. de Langsdorff and 
 Desprez, are royalists, apologists for Austria, 
 and admirers of Haynau and Metternich. The 
 use which Mr. Bowen has made of their articles, 
 and the extent to which he is indebted to them 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 for " information," are so extraordinary, and 
 have so decisive a bearing upon his character as 
 a historian and a man of letters, as to render it 
 advisable to enter at some length into an exposi- 
 tion of his obligations to them. 
 
 In " The War of Races," [pp. 106, 7, 8,] there 
 is an elaborate account of a distinguished Hun- 
 garian Magnate, Count Szechenyi, which in 
 point of style and of information, is perhaps 
 the best and most striking passage of the article. 
 If original with Mr. Bowen, it would have de- 
 served the credit it has received as the result of 
 considerable research. It is in fact, however, 
 entirely translated, without the slightest ac- 
 knowledgment, from an article by M. deLangs- 
 dorfFinthe Revue des Deux Monties for Decem- 
 
 ber, 1848. Yet Mr. Bowen prints it as alto, 
 gether his own production. He does not give 
 the least intimation that he is indebted in its 
 composition to any one, but offers it as the 
 result of his own researches upon Hungarian 
 history. The sketch of Szechenyi in the Revue 
 fill a space equal to fifteen or twenty pages of 
 the North American. Mr. Bowen's translation, 
 in three pages, is of course abridged in parts,but 
 it is chiefly by omissions which did not suit his 
 purpose, because they were favorable to the 
 Hungarians. 
 
 I have made a literal translation of some por- 
 tions of De LangsdorfFs article, that the reader 
 may compare it with the corresponding passages 
 of Mr. Bowen's : 
 
 "The Danube had been, as it were, forgotten 
 and neglected by the Hungarians. Repelled 
 by the difficulties which its navigation present- 
 ed at two or three points, they had confined 
 their use of it to sending down-stream some 
 bateaux de transport, and large rafts, which were 
 to be broken up when they arrived at their des- 
 tination. Szechenyi comprehended, as he says 
 in one of his works, that here was a magnificent 
 gift of Providence, which man had left unused. 
 He built at Pesth a boat of a light and stout 
 form, and descended with some intrepid boat- 
 men, the rapids and shoals hitherto regarded as 
 impracticable. There was universal enthusiasm 
 in Hungary when it was known that these new 
 Argonauts had happily passed the redoubtable 
 Iron Gates, the last cataracts of Orschowa. 
 Patriotic subscriptions were organized every- 
 where in order to begin the necessary works and 
 to found a navigation company ; skilful en- 
 gineer's soon removed the principal obstacles, and 
 within a year after the adventurous expedition 
 of Szechenyi, a line of steamboats was in full 
 activity upon the upper and lower Danube, 
 from Ratisbon to Vienna, and from Vienna to 
 Constantinople. * * * The Austrian Gov- 
 ernment assisted in this movement, and con- 
 tributed to the enterprise considerable funds. 
 Prince Metternich figured among the first 
 stockholders, though he jested sometimes upon 
 the pretensions of the Hungarians 'who thought 
 they had invented the Danube.' The name of 
 Szechenyi was already famous ; no one knew, 
 however, the extent and variety of his mind. 
 At this period many of his countrymen regarded 
 him only as an engineer, more skilful than 
 those who had preceded him, but his political 
 genius soon showed itself with that superiority 
 which imposes upon the multitude the chiefs 
 whom they think they choose themselves. A 
 series of publications upon all the subjects 
 which then occupied men's minds, established 
 the political reputation of Sz6chenyi, and decid- 
 
 " His first enterprise, commenced twenty years 
 since, was an attempt to improve the navigation 
 of the Danube, a work of immense importance, 
 as we have shown, to the prosperity of the coun- 
 try. The obstructions in the river were so great, 
 that only large rafts and some bateaux were sent 
 down-stream, to be broken up when they had 
 once arrived at the Black Sea. Szechenyi built 
 at his own expense a light and stout boat, in 
 which he descended the river himself, and as- 
 certained that the rocks and rapids were not so 
 formidable as had been supposed. He then or- 
 ganized a company for removing the greatest 
 obstacles from the bed of the stream, and plac- 
 ing a line of steamboats upon it. The under- 
 taking had complete success, and within one 
 year the boats were plying regularly from llat- 
 isbon to Vienna, and from Vienna to Constanti- 
 nople. The enterprise excited great enthusiasm 
 in Hungary ; the Austrian government favored 
 it, and contributed largely for its execution. 
 Metternich himself was pleased, and became 
 one of the first stockholders, though he laughed 
 at the boasting of the Magyars respecting it, ( 
 ' who thought they had invented the Danube.' 
 This work made Szechenyi very popular; but 
 as yet his countrymen regarded him only as an 
 able engineer. He soon showed himself, how- 
 ever, a politician and publicist of the highest 
 rank, by a number of pamphlets published in 
 quick succession, advocating with great elo- 
 quence and ability some important changes in 
 the Constitution of the state and the relations 
 between the peasants and the nobility. These 
 pamphlets were the first productions of impor- 
 tance written not in Latin or German, but in 
 the Magyar tongue. * * * The brilliant 
 reputation which Szechenyi acquired was earned 
 as much by his temperance and his regard for 
 justice and the rights of all, as by the boldness 
 of the changes that he proposed. ' I wish,' he 
 remarked, ' to awaken my countrymen so that 
 they may walk, and not that they may throw 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 ed the rest of his life. These pamphlets were 
 written, not in Latin or German, but in the 
 Magyar tongue. It was the first time that works 
 of such importance had been published in that 
 idiom. * # * * * Szechenyi's populari- 
 ty and glory were unequalled ; he was in truth 
 the first citizen of his country, as this title he 
 merited as much by his respect for justice and 
 the rights of all, as by the boldness of his plans 
 of reform. He had roused his country without 
 overturning it, and such had always been his 
 ambition. ' I wish to awaken my countrymen,' 
 said he to a foreigner, « so that they may walk, 
 and not that they may throw themselves out of 
 the window.' His name was in every mouth. 
 The counties vied with each other in fending 
 him patriotic addresses and diplomas of citizen- 
 ship, which gave him the right of voting in 
 their local assemblies ; when he arrived in any 
 village, the peasants with music at their head, 
 went out to meet him, ail wishing to see and 
 hear him, and calling him their father and their 
 liberator. The Diet of Transylvania did homage 
 to the eloquent publicist by sending him a 
 gold pen, several feet in length ; his name 
 was given to the first steamboat that furrowed 
 the Danube ; the national academy, the circle 
 of the nobility, and the institute of the Hunga- 
 rian language, at the same time elected him 
 their president. In every drawing room at 
 Pesth, strangers might see an engraving repre- 
 senting Szechenyi, in a sort of apotheosis, amidst 
 luminous clouds ; beneath, Hungary coming out 
 of chaos, and the Danube, covered by vessels 
 of all nations, rolling majestically its placid 
 waters adown the levelled rapids of Orschowa." 
 — Revue des Deux Mondes, Tome 24, pp. 683, 684, 
 6S9. 
 
 themselves out of the window.' His popularity 
 became immense. His name was in every 
 mouth, and the counties vied with each other 
 in sending him addresses of congratulation and 
 rights of citizenship. When he arrived in any 
 village, the peasants went out to meet him 
 with music, and called him their father ard 
 lit era tor. The Diet of Transylvania sent him 
 an entire gold pen, several feet in length, and 
 the national academy, the circle of the nobility 
 and the institute of the Hungarian language, 
 at the same time elected him their President. 
 His name was given to thefir.-t steamboat which 
 glided down the River Danube ; and in every 
 drawing room at Pesth, the stranger might see 
 an engraving in which Szechenyi appeared in a 
 sort of apotheosis surrounded by luminous 
 clouds, while beneath, Hungary was represented 
 as coming out of chaos, and the Danube, cover- 
 ed by vessels of ell nations, flowed on majesti- 
 cally, not fretted by rocks or rapids, towards 
 the sea." — North American Review, January, 
 1850,^. 106-7-8. 
 
 Compare, also, the following passages, which I have selected on account of their brevity : 
 
 "The beau-ideal of this government, was it 
 not the ancient diets, where 80,000 nobles as- 
 sembled on horseback on the plain of Rakos, to 
 deliberate upon peace or war, uttering alto- 
 gether the formidable cry, 4 To Arms !' after 
 which no scrutiny of the vote was needed r" — 
 Revue, Tome 24,/?. 675. 
 
 " The custom, indeed, has a historical mean- 
 ing ; it throws abroad light on the ancient 
 constitution of the diet, .which consisted of 
 80,000 mounted ncbles, assembled on the plain 
 of Rakos to determine on war or peace, and 
 uttering r 11 together the formidable cry, * To 
 Arms !' — after which no scrutiny of the vote 
 was needed." — N. A. Review, p. 105. 
 
 " The Hungarian constitution seems to have 
 been made entirely for the profit of this class, 
 or rather this class is the constitution itself. 
 r J he Hungarian noble is, and calls himself a 
 member of the crown of Hungary ; membrum 
 sacroc coronce; he is part of the sovereignty. * * * 
 If we wish for a parallel we must recall the 
 government of Ancient Poland, and the defini- 
 tion of J. J. Rousseau : ' There the nobles are 
 everything, the burghers nothing, and the 
 peasants less than nothing.' " — Revue, T. 24, p. 
 676. 1* 
 
 " The ancient constitution of Hungary was 
 made, as we have seen, solely for the benefit of 
 this class ; in their favor, for the protection 
 of their order, the Golden Hull of Andreas II. 
 had been issued. Hitherto every one of their 
 number had called himself a member of the 
 crown of Hungary ; he was a p irt of the sov- 
 ereignty. Their idea of the constitution corres- 
 ponded perfectly to Rousseau's definition of the 
 government of Poland, * where the nobles are 
 everything, the burghers nothing, and the peas- 
 ants less than nothing.' " — N. A. Review, p. 109. 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 From the last instance, it will be seen that Mr. 
 Bo-wen is indebted to De Langsdorff for even 
 his quotation from Rousseau ! 
 
 I am sorry to say that these are not isolated 
 cases. Mr. Bowen's " War of Races " is nearly 
 sixty pages long. Four or five of these pages 
 consist of acknowledged quotations, but the 
 remainder is put forth as entirely of Mr. Bow- 
 en's own composition — as the result of his own 
 "great labor and research." It has been so 
 accepted by the readers of the North A merican 
 Review, and Mr. Bo wen has received consid- 
 erable credit for it, having, it is said, been ap- 
 pointed to the Professorship of History in Har- 
 vard University on account of the historical 
 merit of that article. Nevertheless, I affirm 
 that, of the sixty pages of that article, at least 
 fifty are taken directly from the Revue des Deux 
 Mondes, either by literal translation, or by a 
 process of abridgment which any person who 
 understands French, and can write tolerable 
 English, could perform nearly as well as Mr. 
 Bowen has performed it. And no acknowledg- 
 ment whatever has been made for this, though, 
 indeed, no amount of acknowledgment would 
 be sufficient to justify the passing off such a 
 translation as an original historical essay. Mr. 
 Bowen's admission, that he " depends for in- 
 formation " chiefly on M. Degerando's book, 
 and on the articles of Langsdorff and Desprez, 
 does not meet the case at all. It is not merely 
 " information " that Mr. Bowen has derived 
 from the Revue ; he has taken from it his narra- 
 tive, by literal translation, or by an easy abridg- 
 ment ; he has taken from it nine -tenths of his 
 facts ; he has taken from it his rhetoric, the very 
 ornaments of his style ; in short, all that in any 
 kind of composition ought to be particularly 
 the writer's own. If I may so speak, he has not 
 studied and digested these French essayists, 
 and re -produced their substance in a form of 
 his own growth, but he has torn them limb 
 from limb, and with the mangled fragments 
 has put together a distorted and disjointed figure, 
 which he has arrayed in the garments and 
 jewels of his victims. 
 
 I say distorted and disjointed, for Mr. Bowen 
 has not only plundered Messrs. De Langsdorff 
 and Desprez, but he has perverted them in the 
 most outrageous manner. They are royalists 
 and apologists for Austria and for Metternich ; 
 but, though ill-informed and prejudiced, they 
 are not destitute of honor and a sense of justice 
 -^they did not begin to write with the intention 
 of deliberately slandering a whole nation. They 
 admit a great deal in favor of the Hungarians. 
 
 They allow much credit to the nobility for ef- 
 fecting reforms and yielding up their privileges ; 
 and though they describe with severity the con- 
 dition of Hungary in former times, they mention, 
 without reluctance, the immense improvements 
 of the last few years. But Mr. Bowen, in trans- 
 lating from them, systematically omits all that 
 they say in favor of the Hungarians, and converts 
 all their unfavorable conjectures, " perhapses," 
 and " it is possibles," into downright dogmatic 
 certainties. He suppresses all that they say in 
 praise of the Hungarian leaders, and exaggerates 
 all that they say against them. I will give two 
 instances of this perversion, out of dozens which 
 I could cite. In the " War of Races," [p. 110,] 
 Mr. Bowen gives a short and sneering account of 
 Kossuth. The sneers, of course, are Mr. Bowen's 
 own, but the rest is translated from the Revue, 
 [Tome 24, p. 266,] from an article of De Langs- 
 dorff, who in the very paragraph from which 
 Mr. Bowen translates his "information, " says of 
 Kossuth, that he is " a democrat of the new revolu- 
 tionary school, who 'will seek to get rid of the nobility 
 when he shall have got rid of Austria," and that 
 he " has not feared to overthrow the whole po- 
 litical and social state of his country, to realize 
 dreams of universal equality, more chimerical in 
 Hungary than any where else." Mr. Bowen 
 quits De Langsdorff when he comes to this pas- 
 sage, skips it, and goes on translating from the 
 rest of the paragraph, leaving the gap to be filled 
 up by the following rare specimen of his own 
 original composition : 
 
 "In fact, Kossuth's party, ever since it was 
 organized, has been endeavoring to effect a com- 
 plete separation of Hungary from Austria, the 
 preservation of feudal privileges, and the dominion 
 of the Magyar race, being more important in their 
 eyes than the promotion of the commercial and 
 other material interests of the country, and the 
 intellectual cultivation of its people !" 
 
 Again, [" War of Races," p. 89,] a passage is 
 quot cd, in which De Langsdorff says : 
 
 "I shall never forget the impression I received 
 when on the bridge which crosses the Danube at 
 Pesth, I saw every peasant, every poor cultivator 
 of the ground, rudely stopped and compelled to 
 pay toll both for himself and for the meagre 
 horses harnessed to his cart. The tolls are heavy, 
 amounting to a considerable sum for these poor 
 people ; while the Magyar gentlemen, mounted 
 on fine horses, or seated in elegant carriages, 
 passed and repassed without payment. * * 
 * * This exemption, it is true, was but a 
 small affair, and tyranny has other practices that 
 are far more odious : but from that time I was no 
 more astonished by the inequalities and anom- 
 alies which I witnessed during the rest of my 
 journey ; I had foreseen them all on the bridge 
 at Pesth." 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 7 
 
 With these last words Mr. Bowen concluded 
 his quotation. And why? Because M. de 
 Langsdorff went on to say : 
 
 *• The feeling which I experienced, others 
 shared with me. In 1836, the diet decreed that 
 the nobles should be subjected to toll on the sus- 
 pension bridge which was about to be construct- 
 ed at Pesth. This was the first breach made in 
 the privileges of the nobility ; and it toas by the 
 nobility that it was made. There, where I felt 
 only a sterile emotion, generous citizens, sacri- 
 ficing their interest without hesitation, found the 
 opportunity to repair a long injustice. Since that 
 time the Hungarian nobles have walked resolutely 
 in that path ; it is they who for tioenty years have 
 been laboring to file the chains of their subjects ; it is 
 they %oho in a solemn day, have willed to break them 
 forever." — Revue des Deux Mondes, Aug. 1, 1848. 
 
 These perversions will give some idea of the 
 spirit in which Mr. Bowen wrote his article, and 
 of the manner in w r hich he perverted his " au- 
 thorities" into a seeming support of his charges 
 against the Hungarians. And I must beg the 
 reader not to suppose that^these are rare instanc- 
 es, which I have carefully detached from the 
 body of the article. On the contrary, such 
 perversions constitute the very essence of the 
 " War of Races," and pervade it throughout, to 
 an extent that is scarcely to be imagined by one 
 who has not gone into a careful analysis of it, 
 and compared it paragraph by paragraph, and 
 line by line, with the documents on which it 
 professes to be based. In the Christian Exam- 
 iner, Mrs. Putnam has, in her peculiarly guarded 
 and temperate manner, very justly described its 
 character. She says, [p. 428] : 
 
 " We are reluctantly compelled to affirm that 
 there is no portion of the article on the "War of 
 Races," on which the reader can safely rely. 
 We do not exaggerate, and we believe that all 
 those persons who have an acquaintance with 
 the history of Hungary, and who have read the 
 article in the North American, will sustain us 
 when we say, that there is hardly a sentence in 
 this article in which an error is not either ex- 
 pressed or implied ; in many portions of it, error 
 is so interwoven with error, that the baffled 
 critic turns from the task of refutation as from 
 the entrance to an inextricable labyrinth. We 
 are disposed to believe that the absence of 
 any formal and labored confutation of the arti- 
 cle on the " War of Races" — to which absence 
 the author appeals as a proof of its invulnerabil- 
 ity — may be attributed to the Herculean labor 
 which the task of correcting all the errors con- 
 tained in this historical essay seemed to involve, 
 and the great length to which such a confutation 
 must be extended, if the task were thoroughly 
 executed. These errors pervade every part of 
 the article, and are almost as numerous in that 
 portion which relates to those periods of Hunga- 
 rian history which are most familiar to the 
 general reader, as in those whose investigation 
 requires a certain degree of research." 
 
 In confirmation of this opinion, I will quote 
 that of another person, very competent to judge 
 of such a question. Count Gurowski, a man of 
 great learning and ability, who has held a high 
 official position in Russia, and who is intimately 
 acquainted with the affairs of Eastern Europe, 
 and who, moreover, is neither a Magyar, nor a 
 partizan of the Magyars, but on the contrary is 
 a Slavonian, and has been a prominent leader of 
 the Panslavistic movement, which is most hos- 
 tile to the Magyars, said, in February, 1850, in 
 a review of the " War of Races :" — 
 
 " It is a thick and dark forest of errors in his- 
 torical or rather unhistorical quotations, as well 
 as in reasoning. Almost every line requires 
 rectification. Almost all motives assigned to 
 the actions of individuals, as well as to the mass 
 of the people in Vienna, in Hungary, and in the 
 Sclavonian countries, are put in a false light, 
 and denote by the quoted French authorities 
 perfect ignorance or perfect bad faith. As most 
 of the facts are misrepresented or shown in the 
 falsest possible light, so almost all the deductions 
 are at least erroneous ; and it cannot be other- 
 wise, as a disfigured fact very naturally produces 
 the most false conclusions ; and the number 
 of these is infinite, so as to render their rectifi- 
 cation impossible." 
 
 This is certainly strong language ; but it has 
 peculiar weight from the fact that Count Gu- 
 rowski used it in the most friendly spirit towards 
 Mr. Bowen, whom, at the time, he regarded as 
 the unconscious victim of the misrepresentations 
 of the writers in the Revue des Deux Mondes. 
 
 The " War of Races" was followed by a> sec- 
 ond article on the same subject in the North 
 American Review for April, 1850, the tone of 
 which was, if possible, still more unfavorable to 
 the Hungarians, while the mode in which it was 
 put together was not a whit more "creditable to 
 the literary honesty of Mr. Bowen. One or two 
 instances of this peculiar mode Avill be sufficient. 
 In attempting to throw discredit on the govern- 
 ment of Kossuth, a work entitled " Louis Kos- 
 suth, and the Recent History of Hungary," by 
 Arthur Frey, is referred to as an authority which 
 " will not be disputed by the sympathizers with 
 Kossuth and his party." Mr. Bowen admits 
 that he has not seen this book, but says that he 
 borrows some extracts from it, from the London 
 Athenaeum. The first and most important of 
 these extracts then follows, [N. A. R., April, 
 1850, p. 499,] introduced by " Mr. Frey says." 
 Now, in reality, Mr. Frey says no such thing. 
 The passage which Mr. Bowen endeavors to 
 palm off as Frey's, is a portion of the editorial 
 in the Athenaeum, and of no more authority than 
 the statements of any other anonymous English 
 
8 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 newspaper writer ! See London Athenaeum, Aug. 
 29, 1849, p. 855. 
 
 Repeatedly, in this second article, Mr. Bowen 
 adduces as a proof that the Hungarian movement 
 was not at all republican, the fact that in the 
 Manifesto which is sometimes called the Dec- 
 laration of Independence, the word Republic 
 does not occur. The force of this objection will 
 be felt, when it is remembered that in the Amer- 
 ican Declaration of Independence the same 
 omission occurs, the words republic or republican 
 not being mentioned or alluded to. A fact 
 which Mr. Bowen, at that time Professor of His- 
 tory in Harvard University, does not seem to 
 have been aware of — or if he were, thought fit 
 to overlook it in his zeal to find fault with the 
 Hungarian Declaration. 
 
 MRS. PUTNAM S REPLY TO MR. BOWEN. 
 
 These articles of Mr. Bowen were severely 
 and ably criticised by various Journals of Boston 
 and New York. But the first elaborate reply to 
 them was made in the Christian Examiner, for 
 Nov., 185-t), [continued March, 1851,] by Mary 
 Lowell Putnam, of Roxbury, Massachusetts. 
 Mrs. Putnam is a daughter of the Rev. Dr. 
 Lowell, and a sister to the poet, James Russell 
 Lowell. Her extraordinary attainments in lan- 
 guages and general literature had long command- 
 ed the respect and admiration of a wide circle 
 of friends and acquaintances, though from her 
 modest indifference to notoriety, her reputation 
 had hitherto scarcely reached the public ear. — 
 Of the extent of these attainments some idea 
 may be formed from the fact that Mrs. Putnam 
 has made herself acquainted, and in most cases 
 well acquainted, with Greek, Latin and Hebrew, 
 with French, Spanish, Portugese, Italian, Ger- 
 man, Swedish, Danish, Hungarian, Polish and 
 Russian, with Turkish and Sanscrit, and, I be- 
 lieve, with several other European and Asiatic 
 languages, which I am not able to designate with 
 accuracy. And creditable as is the acquisition 
 of this mass of knowledge, the circumstances 
 under which it has been effected render it still 
 more meritorious ; for besides the impediments 
 to literary labor of a large household and a fam- 
 ily of children, all the duties incident to which 
 have been performed with exemplary fidelity, 
 Mrs. Putnam has labored under the disadvantage 
 of weak eyesight, so that for years she did not 
 open a book, but was forced, in the study of sev- 
 eral languages, to rely wholly on the aid of read- 
 
 ers and amanuenses, who in some cases did not 
 understand a word of what they were assisting 
 her to acquire. The obstacles of this kind which 
 her energy and perseverance have surmounted, 
 were indeed full as great as those with which 
 the historians, Augustin Thierry and Prescott, 
 have had to contend, and her triumph over them 
 deserves the same applause that has been so 
 justly bestowed on theirs. 
 
 Mrs. Putnam's knowledge of the languages I 
 have enumerated is not limited to the grammar 
 and dictionary. She has made herself familiar, 
 in many cases, with the literature and history of 
 the nations by whom they are spoken ; and of 
 the result of her researches she has given some 
 specimens, in a series of contributions to the 
 North American Review and the Christian Ex- 
 aminer, written with a vigor of style and thought 
 as creditable to her intellect, as the matters they 
 treat of are to her learning and industry. To 
 the literature and history of Hungary and Po- 
 land she has of late years given special attention, 
 and her studies in this direction have been facil- 
 itated by an acquaintance with eminent schol- 
 ars of those countries resident among us, and by 
 the possession of a very fine collection of books 
 in nearly all the languages of Europe. 
 
 "With these qualifications for the task, Mrs. 
 Putnam accepted the challenge which Mr Bowen, 
 in the North American Review, had offered to 
 the public on the subject of his articles on Hun- 
 gary. She replied to him in the most thor- 
 ough manner, in the Christian Examiner, and 
 demonstrated to the satisfaction of everybody 
 who has read her reply, that he had pretended 
 to knowledge on the subject which he did not 
 possess, and that he had greatly misrepresented 
 the Hungarians and their cause. By a skilful 
 analysis of his first article, she proved that it 
 was based altogether on the Revue des Deux 
 Mondes, and that even that Revue, hostile as it 
 is to the Hungarians and to Freedom, afforded 
 no true ground for the monstrous accusations 
 and misrepresentations of the " War of Races." 
 She showed that the respectable and reliable 
 authority, Degerando, the title of whose work 
 he had placed at the head of his article, was not 
 used at all in its preparation, so that really 
 " there is not a statement of fact or opinion in 
 the article which can be attributed to M. Deger- 
 ando ; and the greater part of it is in direct 
 contradiction to the statements of that author." 
 She showed also, that Mr. Bo wen's articles con- 
 tained contradictory statements on points mate- 
 rially affecting his argument, and that he had 
 himself mentioned facts, the admission of which 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 completely overthrew the conclusions he was 
 laboring to establish. She pointed out the 
 cause of these inconsistencies, so singular in an 
 article drawn entirely from one shallow source, 
 which cause was, that Mr. Bowen's zeal against 
 the Hungarians had outrun even that of the 
 French writers from whose partisan essays he 
 drew his materials, so that his anti-Hungarian 
 theories were much more extreme than theirs, 
 and were so far from being supported, that they 
 were actually contradicted by some of the facts 
 which they had furnished and he had quoted. 
 She proved, in fine, in the most conclusive man- 
 ner, that Mr. Bowen's articles were inaccurate, 
 illogical and unjust, to such a degree that it 
 might literally be said of them, " that there is 
 hardly a sentence in which an error is not either 
 expressed or implied." 
 
 This was proved, too, not by Magyar testimo- 
 ny, as Mr. Bowen sneeringly asserted in a sub- 
 sequent rejoinder,but by the authorities to which 
 he had himself referred, and whom he had 
 expressly endorsed as respectable and trustwor- 
 thy. It may be remarked also, that this over- 
 whelming refutation of Mr. Bowen's mistakes 
 and fallacies was performed without one word 
 of personality or harshness, with a rigid attention 
 to all the punctilios of decorous controversy, 
 and in a style which for moderation, dignity and 
 power, formed a striking contrast to that of the 
 articles on which she was commenting. Her 
 reply was not less remarkable for power of rea- 
 soning and strictness of logic, than for profound 
 and varied learning. 
 
 MR. BOWEN S REJOINDER. 
 
 Mr. Bowen attempted to reply to Mrs. Putnam, 
 and to some of his newspaper critics, by two Let- 
 ters in the Boston Daily Advertiser. The first 
 of these letters consists chiefly of a sketch of 
 himself and his position, intermixed with de- 
 nunciation of those who have criticised him in 
 the public journals. It exhibits a sensitiveness 
 to criticism not to have been looked for in the 
 editor of a critical review, whose profession for 
 years has been to expose and castigate the liter- 
 ary misdemeanors of others, and who has not 
 been remarkable for the forbearance or good 
 nature with which he has exercised that pro- 
 fession. 
 
 A few specimens will suffice to show the style 
 and temper of this first letter. The Boston 
 
 Transcript and the New York Tribune are spoken 
 of as not respectable papers ; and Mr. George 
 Ripley, of the Tribune, is described as " a former 
 Clergyman of Boston, who long ago abandoned his 
 profession and his faith, to xoander in the wilds of 
 infidel socialism.'" Mr. Bowen says of himself, 
 that against him " a grand crusade of the Coal- 
 ized Democratic and Freesoil parties has been 
 invoked, that they might obtain possession of the 
 government of the State, for the express purpose of 
 depriving him of an honorable appointment, exclu- 
 sively literary and educational in its character, 
 ichich he held, and thereby of despoiling him and his 
 family of their daily bread " — a statement which 
 affords an entirely original if not very satisfactory 
 solution of the political revolution in Massachu- 
 setts, and affords also a tolerably fair notion of 
 Mr. Bowen's peculiar mode of viewing contem- 
 porary history. 
 
 His second Letter is devoted exclusively to 
 Mrs. Putnam's article in the Christian Examiner. 
 He says that he has read that article '* with as- 
 tonishment and profound regret. It is not merely 
 written in a sneering and offensive tone through- 
 out, but its apparent object is not so much to 
 defend the Hungarians, as to damage the char- 
 acter of the Reviewer, by insinuating, and even 
 openly declaring, that his object was to under- 
 take the defence of Austria." Mr. Bowen makes 
 no attempt to substantiate by quotations this 
 unjust description of the tone and object of Mrs. 
 Putnam's article, but proceeds, by way of retort, 
 to assert that she " admits more for Austria — 
 claims more for Austria than I have ever admit- 
 ted or claimed." He says that she " even praises 
 the Austrian policy," and has a better right 
 than he to be called " an apologist for Austria.' 
 To prove this he quotes two expressions from 
 Mrs. Putnam's article, pages 448-49, which may 
 reasonably be presumed to be the strongest he 
 could find. They are these : " The Austrian 
 Government is not more than any other, entirely 
 independent of Public opinion." "Among the 
 reforms proposed by the liberal party in Hungary^ 
 there were doubtless some tohich were viewed with 
 less disfavor than others by the Austrian govern* 
 ment, and which, under certain conditions, it might 
 not be indisposed to promote." 
 
 Mr. Bowen must have held in slight estima- 
 tion the intelligence of his readers in the Daily 
 Advertiser, or must have relied strongly upon 
 the haste with which newspaper articles are com- 
 monly read, when he ventured to quote the above 
 sentences, ps involving " praises of Austrian 
 policy," and proving that their writer is even 
 more than himself an " apologist for Austria.' 
 
10 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 He must have known that it might with truth 
 be said of the goverment of Rome, under Nero 
 or Caligula, or of the governments of Dahomey 
 or Morocco, under their worst tyrants, that 
 " they were not, any more than any other, en- 
 tirely independent of public opinion." No gov- 
 ernment has yet existed among men entirely 
 independent of public opinion. As for the sec- 
 ond sentence, it is difficult to discover in it any 
 ** praises of Austrian policy," especially when 
 the force of the qualifying phrase, " under cer- 
 tain conditions," is considered. There is prob- 
 ably no government so corrupt, or so adverse to 
 improvement, that it might not be disposed to 
 promote some reforms under certain conditions, 
 particularly if those conditions were manifestly 
 to its own advantage. 
 
 It is clear, then, that Mr. Bowen's charge 
 agaimst Mrs. Putnam, that she praises the Aus- 
 trian policy, and is an apologist for Austria, is 
 not at all justified by the quotations which he 
 brings to support it. This would have been 
 still more evident, had not Mr, Bowen, with 
 his usual unfairness, omitted to give the whole of 
 the passages from which he made his quotations. 
 In the first instance which he cites, Mrs. Put- 
 nam, so far from defending the Austrian gov- 
 ernment, was actually exposing the fallacious 
 nature of Mr. Bowen's defence of it. He had 
 said, in the North American Review for Janu- 
 ary, 1850, page 108 : — "It is much to the credit 
 of the Austrian government, that although 
 Szechenyi was the leader of the constitutional 
 opposition in the diet, it adopted nearly all his 
 projects of reform, and submitted them under 
 the form of royal propositions to be discussed 
 in both houses." Upon this Mrs. Putnam re- 
 marked : — " The Reviewer founds his opinion 
 of the disposition of the Austrian government 
 in regard to refortr, upon the nature of the 
 royal propositions offered to the diet. This ar- 
 gument is wholly fallacious. The Austrian gov- 
 ernment is not more than any other, entirely inde- 
 pendent of 'public opinion ; and in Hungary espe- 
 cially, it has always been forced, in appearance 
 at least, to pay a certain regard to the wishes of 
 the nation. By affecting to take the initiative 
 in reform, by offering to the consideration of 
 the diet some of the questions which occupied 
 the attention of the nation, the Austrian govern- 
 ernment effected a double purpose ; it allayed 
 the excitement of the nation by apparent con- 
 cession, and secured for itself, with the ignorant 
 and short-sighted, the credit of proposing meas- 
 ures whose success it was at the same time re- 
 tarding and thwarting by every expedient." 
 
 In the second instance, Mrs. Putnam's lan- 
 guage was this : — " Among the reforms proposed 
 by the liberal party in Hungary, there were doubt- 
 less some which were viewed iciih less disfavor than 
 others by the Austrian government, and which, un- 
 der certain conditions, it might not be indisposed to 
 promote. But under these conditions, they 
 would be less serviceable than dangerous to 
 Hungary. Thus, the contest in the diet often 
 concerned, not simply the adoption of the meas- 
 ure proposed, but the conditions under which it 
 should become law. For example, with regard 
 to the taxation of the nobles, Austria could 
 have no objection to their taxing themselves at 
 their pleasure, if the Austrian government was 
 to have the command of the revenues thus 
 raised ; but the Hungarian nobles, while they 
 were ready to contribute money for the service 
 of their country, refused to do so to strengthen 
 the hands of its enemies. They insisted that if 
 the nation subjected itself to taxation, the diet 
 of the nation should have a voice in the disposi- 
 tion of the funds thus contributed." 
 
 It will be perceived, from this, that Mr. Bowen 
 detached from their proper connection the sen- 
 tences which I have italicised, and held them 
 up as proofs that Mrs. Putnam had praised the 
 Austrian policy and was an apologist for Austria, 
 when it was perfectly obvious that the whole 
 tenor of her argument was just the other way. 
 What renders this attempt to misrepresent Mrs. 
 Putnam still more inexcusable is, that Mr. 
 Bowen, as if confident that his misquotations 
 had demonstrated that Mrs. Putnam was guilty 
 of gross injustice towards him, assumes a tone 
 of injured innocence, and indignantly declares 
 that " this is not a point of ordinary misrepre- 
 sentation, or of wresting words from their 
 proper meaning ; it is a question of simple truth or 
 falsehood." Mr. Bowen is right. It is evidently 
 a question of simple truth or falsehood, and it 
 is equally evident that the falsehood does not 
 rest with Mrs. Putnam. 
 
 Mr. Bowen goes on to say, " Of course, I im- 
 mediately formed the opinion, which was only 
 strengthened by perusal of the remainder of the 
 article, that it was not written by the person 
 whose initials it bears, and who was unwarily 
 lent the sanction of a highly respectable name 
 to statements and language furnished by 
 another." This gives us some insight into the 
 process by which Mr. Bowen " forms his opin- 
 ions." He had not the slightest reason for sup- 
 posing that Mrs. Putnam did not write the ar- 
 ticle. He knew that she had furnished to his 
 own Review several articles of equal learning 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY, 
 
 II 
 
 and ability ; and he knew, moreover, that she 
 was incapable of accepting the credit of an ar- 
 ticle which she did not write. He should have 
 known, also, that in proceeding upon this in- 
 jurious assumption, he was rendering himself 
 liable to the imputation of being ready to insult 
 Mrs. Putnam, without being ready to incur the 
 responsibility of doing it in a direct manner. 
 
 Mr. Bo wen next says: "The hardihood or 
 recklessness of assertion which I have exposed 
 in this instance, pervades the whole article. I 
 should say that it had been prepared by on© 
 who had a profound knowledge of the Magyar 
 language, and a profound ignorance of history 
 and every other subject." The " instance " to 
 which Mr. Bowen refers in this insolent style, 
 is that of "praising the Austrian policy," in 
 which, as I have already shown, the " hardihood 
 or recklessness of assertion" belongs to him 
 alone. 
 
 Succeeding this, is a string of sneers at Mrs. 
 Putnam's knowledge of the Magyar tongue, 
 and the consequent advantage it gives her in 
 writing of Hungarian history. The logic of 
 this portion of his letter, and indeed Mr. Bowen's 
 logic generally, may be judged of by a single 
 passage. He says : " On the same principle 
 we must declare that no one shall write about 
 the history of America who has not a thorough 
 knowledge of Choctaw." In thus comparing 
 the Magyar to the Choctaw — the language of a 
 great and cultivated people, with the dialect of 
 a few thousand savages — Mr. Bowen must have 
 known that he was making a comparison which 
 was no comparison at all. A knowledge of the 
 Magyar is obviously of the highest value in 
 writing of the recent history of Hungary ; a 
 knowledge of Choctaw is not needed for the 
 history of America. The passage will serve to 
 illustrate both Mr. Bowen's mode of reasoning, 
 and the candor with which he has treated Mrs. 
 Putnam. 
 
 It is not difficult to point out the cause of the 
 bitter aversion which Mr. Bowen entertains to- 
 wards the Magyar language, and the indigna- 
 tion which he has repeatedly expressed in the 
 North American Preview, as well as in the Daily 
 Advertiser, at Mrs. Putnam's presumption in 
 making herself acquainted with it. In his first 
 article, the " War of Races," he laid great stress 
 on a passage in the Hungarian Declaration of 
 Independence, in which something was said 
 about " the ancient and received principles 
 which have been recognized for ages," which 
 according to Mr. Bowen's interpretation, meant 
 " acknowledging the absolute supremacy of the 
 
 Magyar race in the country which they con- 
 quered, and where they have been lords of the 
 soil and the dominant nation for eight or nine 
 centuries." — [North American Review, vol. lxx, 
 p. 82.] Mr. Bowen made a great point of this, 
 which in fact was the only piece of evidence to 
 be found in his article — his quotations from 
 French Magazines being, of course, no evi- 
 dence at all. Mrs. Putnam quietly disposed 
 of the whole thing, by showing that there was 
 no such passage in the Declaration, but that it 
 was an interpolation of the person who trans- 
 lated the document from the Magyar into Eng- 
 lish, who had taken the word fonebbi {above) 
 to mean former or ancient, and had paraphrased 
 it accordingly. The demolition of the structure 
 he had reared on this passage, has given Mr, 
 Bowen a strong disrelish for the Magyar lan- 
 guage in general, and especially for the word 
 fonebbi, to which he has never since alluded 
 without evident disgust and vexation. 
 
 MR. BOWEN S EIGHT POINTS. 
 
 The main portion of Mr. Bowen's Letter is 
 devoted to the consideration of eight points in 
 the former history of Hungary, concerning 
 which, as Mrs. Putnam proved, he had shown 
 himself to be incorrectly informed ; which points 
 he himself characterizes as among the 1 " com- 
 mon and notorious facts of history." Her ob- 
 ject in exposing his ignorance in these particu- 
 lars, was to show, that as he was grossly mis- 
 taken about well known and long settled points 
 of Hungarian history, he was not likely to be 
 accurate with regard to comparatively obscure 
 and confused passages. That portion of the 
 letter in the Daily Advertiser which contained 
 the discussion of these Eight Points, appeared 
 subsequently in the North American Review 
 for January, 1851, pp. 241-2-3-4-5. 
 
 The first of these points Mr. Bowen states 
 and defends as follows : 
 
 " The Examiner sneers at me for representing 
 Ferdinand I. as claiming to be rightful sov- 
 ereign of Hungary, in quality apparently of de- 
 scendant from his wife, after I had admitted 
 that the Hungarian crown at this period was 
 elective. Dr. Robertson says that he did claim 
 the crown, and that \ this claim was founded on 
 a double title ; the one derived from the ancient 
 pretensions of the house of Austria to both 
 kingdoms ; the other from the right of his wife, 
 the only sister of the deceased monarch ;' and in 
 the very next sentence he admits that the 
 
12 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 crown was elective. Archdeacon Coxe asserts 
 the same fact, in almost exactly the same lan- 
 guage. The Examiner's sneer, therefore, is di- 
 rected against these two historians." 
 
 This is all that Mr. Bo wen says on the sub- 
 ject, and leaves the uninformed reader to sup- 
 pose that the matter is settled by the reference 
 to Coxe and Robertson, and that Mrs. Putnam 
 stands opposed to two respectable historians. 
 Now let us see what the passage was on which 
 Mrs. Putnam was commenting. It may be 
 found on page 97 of the North American Re- 
 view for January, 1850. Speaking of the Hun- 
 garians, it says, " Ferdinand I. of Austria, had 
 become their rightful sovereign after the death 
 of the unhappy Louis II., whose sister he had 
 married, and tohose right was of course transmitted 
 to her descendants." The apparent meaning of 
 this is, as Mrs. Putnam justly remarked, that 
 Ferdinand became rightful King of Hungary, in 
 quality of descendant from his wife ; which in- 
 volved not only an absurdity in expression, but 
 in point of fact, for he became King by election, 
 and not by right of his wife, who had no right 
 at all to the throne, for, as Mr. Bowen had him- 
 self expressly stated on the same page, the female 
 line had at that time no claim whatever to the 
 Hungarian crown, nor indeed for nearly two 
 hundred years afterwards. Mr. Bowen, how- 
 ever, quotes Dr. Robertson, and refers to Arch- 
 deacon Coxe, to prove that Ferdinand did claim 
 the crown. Mrs. Putnam did not deny his 
 claim, but denied Mr. Bowen's assertion that on 
 the strength of that claim he became rightful 
 King of Hungary. The truth of the matter, 
 and the nature of Mr. Bowen's mode of making 
 quotations and references, will be understood 
 by the following passages from his own author- 
 ities. The first is from Robertson's Charles V., 
 Harper's edition, page 219 : 
 
 " As Lewis was the last male of the royal 
 family of Jagellon, the Archduke Ferdinand 
 claimed both his crowns. This claim was found- 
 ed on a double title ; the one derived from the 
 ancient pretensions of the house of Austria to 
 both kingdoms ; the other from the right of his 
 wife, the sister of the deceased monarch. The 
 feudal institutions, however, subsisted both in 
 Hungary and Bohemia in such vigor, and the 
 nobles possessed such extensive power, that the 
 crowns were still elective, and Ferdinand's rights, 
 if they had not been powerfully supported, would 
 have met with little regard" 
 
 Various considerations, none of which had 
 reference to the claim of his wife, " at length 
 secured Ferdinand the throne." Dr. Robertson 
 says, " though a considerable party voted for 
 the vayvode of Transylvania." It is evident 
 
 from this passage, of which Mr. Bowen quoted 
 only a portion, that Robertson, so far from sus- 
 taining the statement in the North American 
 Review, really controverts it. 
 
 The case may be briefly stated thus. Mr. 
 Bowen asserted that Ferdinand I. became right- 
 ful King of Hungary in right of his wife, who 
 was sister to King Louis II. Mrs. Putnam re- 
 marked that Mr. Bowen had himself admitted 
 that the Hungarian crown at that period was 
 elective, and consequently Ferdinand could not 
 have become rightful King by right of his wife, 
 who, of course, had no hereditary right to an 
 elective crown, and who, besides, was excluded 
 by a law which rendered females ineligible to 
 the sovereignty of Hungary. Mr. Bowen re- 
 plies, that Robertson and Coxe siipport his as- 
 sertion, and by a garbled extract from Robert- 
 son shows that, according to that historian, 
 Ferdinand claimed the crown in right of his 
 wife — as if claiming the crown were the same 
 thing as receiving it, or being rightfully entitled 
 to it. In the very passage which Mr. Bowen 
 partially and unfairly quotes, Robertson ex- 
 pressly states that the crown was elective, and 
 that Ferdinand was chosen king for other con- 
 siderations than his marriage with the sister of 
 Louis. 
 
 But Mr. Bowen refers to Archbishop Coxe, 
 the historian of the House of Austria, in proof 
 that his assertion was correct. Here is the 
 passage to which he refers :— Hist, of House of 
 Austria, Bonn's ed., vol. i., p. 496. 
 
 "Louis being the last male of his family, 
 Ferdinand claimed both crowns under a double 
 title ; the one derived from family compacts, 
 which secured the reversion to the House of 
 Austria in failure of male issue to the reigning 
 family ; and the other in right of his wife, 
 Anne, the only sister of the deceased monarch. 
 But the natives of Hungary and Bohemia were too 
 much attached to their right of election to respect 
 these compacts, or even to acknowledge his claims as 
 husband of the princess ; and Ferdinand prudently 
 xcaiving his pretensions, offered himself as a candi- 
 date) according to the usual mode of election." 
 
 Here we have it distinctly stated that the na- 
 tives of Hungary not only refused to acknowl- 
 edge the Austrian's claims in right of his wife, 
 but that Ferdinand waived his pretensions, and 
 " offered himself as a candidate, according to 
 the usual mode of election." Mr. Bowen ven- 
 tured to quote a detached portion of Robert- 
 son's statement of this matter, but he prudently 
 contents himself with referring to Coxe, with- 
 out quoting him. I will also remark here, as a 
 very significant fact, that in none of these quo- 
 tations or references does Mr. Bowen mention the 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 13 
 
 page or volume, thus rendering it impossible for 
 his readers to follow and verify his authorities, 
 except by a laborious search through perhaps 
 several voluminous works. The reason of this 
 unusual omission is apparent enough to those 
 who have taken the trouble to hunt up the pas- 
 sages to which he appeals, or which he pretends 
 to quote. 
 
 Having shown by the very authorities to 
 which he himself referred, that Mr. Bo wen was 
 wrong in the first point, which he contested 
 with Mrs. Putnam, let us consider the second. 
 He states it thus: — [North American Review, 
 p. 2f2.] 
 
 " We had asserted that 'after the memorable 
 scene with Maria Theresa, this right [of the 
 House of Hapsburg to reign in Hungary] was 
 extended, according to the terms of the Prag- 
 matic Sanction to the female line.' The Ex- 
 aminer objects, that ' if this right had not been 
 extended to the female line in the lifetime of 
 Charles III., father of Maria Theresa, the me- 
 morable scene could never have taken place.' 
 The ignorance here displayed is almost incredible. 
 Charles the Third lived seven or eight centuries 
 before Maria Theresa was born. Charles the 
 Sixth (as he is called by all historians except 
 the Magyars) who was her father, had indeed 
 persuaded the Hungarians nominally to accept 
 the Pragmatic Sanction, some twenty years be- 
 fore the scene, just as most Sovereigns of 
 Europe had done, who broke their pledge im- 
 mediately after the death of Charles, just as the 
 Hungarians were expected to break theirs. Of 
 course the female line was actually established 
 on the throne only by the success of the queen's 
 appeal to the Hungarian Diet." 
 
 In Mr. Bowen's own language it might be 
 said that the disingemiousness here displayed 
 is almost incredible. He pretends to believe 
 that Mrs. Putnam had confounded Charles the 
 Sixth of Germany who lived in the 18th cen- 
 tury, with Charles the Third, who lived in the 
 9th century. Now he knew very well that Mrs. 
 Putnam meant Charles the Sixth of Germany, 
 though she preferred, very properly, to use his 
 Hungarian title in writing of Hungarian history. 
 The proof that he knew this, is contained in the 
 sentence which he has put between brackets — 
 " Charles the Sixth, (as he is called by all histo- 
 rians, except the Magyars)," which shows that 
 Mr. Bowen was aware that the Magyars did not 
 call him Charles the Sixth, and that Mrs. 
 Putnam in styling him Charles the Third, was 
 using his Hungarian title. Consequently he 
 knew that his rude charge of " almost incredi- 
 ble ignorance " was without foundation, and 
 was a gratuitous insult to Mrs. Putnam. 
 
 In transferring this passage from the Boston 
 Daily Advertiser to the North American 
 Review, Mr. Bowen added the following 
 
 2 
 
 note [N. A. Rev. Jan. 1851, p. 243] which 
 establishes beyond question his unfairness in 
 this matter : 
 
 "The overweening national pride of the Mag- 
 yars appears even ludicrous, when manifested 
 through their obstinate determination not to 
 recognize their sovereigns except under the ap- 
 pellation by which they were known in the 
 annals of Hungary, though they were univer- 
 sally known by a different title throughout civ- 
 ilized Europe. Grave complaints were made 
 by Magyar writers, and even by the May gar 
 Diet, because their late sovereign would style 
 himself Ferdinand L, while they persisted in 
 calling him Ferdinand V. What common 
 reader would recognize the Second James of 
 England under his Scotch title of James VII r" 
 
 I have copied the whole note. It will be 
 seen that Mr. Bowen distinctly avows his 
 knowledge that the Hungarian sovereigns were 
 known by a different title in the annals of 
 Hungary from that which they bore in the an- 
 nals of Germany, and therefore, though he 
 may think what he pleases of the propriety of 
 using the Hungarian title, he is fully aware 
 that its use does not display " almost incredi- 
 ble ignorance" and consequently his charge of 
 such ignorance against Mrs. Putnam, and his 
 pretended belief that she confounded Charles 
 III. of Hungary with Charles III. of Germany, 
 can only be characterized as a spiteful and un- 
 truthful fling at that lady. 
 
 Mr. Bowen's intense hatred of the Hunga- 
 rians, and his " obstinate determination " to 
 misrepresent them, is strikingly manifested by 
 his ascribing to " overweening national pride, 
 which appears even ludicrous," their persist- 
 ence in calling their sovereigns by a national 
 title, instead of a foreign one. It may be that 
 Mr. Bowen does not know, but certainly every 
 man who has read history to any considerable 
 extent, knows that all nations situated as the 
 Hungarians have been, have acted like them in 
 this respect. They would have been false to 
 themselves if they had not. Charles I. of Spain 
 became, by election, Charles V. of Germany, and 
 by the latter title he was, and still is universally 
 known throughout civilized Europe. Yet the 
 Spanish nation persisted and persist in styling 
 him Charles I., when speaking of their own his- 
 tory. And in Scotland, previous to the legisla- 
 tive union with England, the Scottish nation 
 continued to speak of their sovereigns by the 
 national, instead of the English title. In the 
 Scottish Parliament and in all public documents 
 James I. and James II. of England were always 
 mentioned as James VI. and James VII. It was 
 a mark of independence and nationality, which 
 was guarded with just anxiety. Mr. Bowen's 
 
14 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 inquiry, " what common reader would recog- 
 nize the second James of England under his 
 Scotch title of James VII. ? " is worded with 
 that ambiguity upon which he frequently relies 
 to cover up his fallacies. He does not state 
 under what circumstances or conditions he sup- 
 poses James to be mentioned. If he were to 
 write on a blank sheet of paper the words 
 "James the Second," or " James the Seventh," 
 certainly, no reader, common or uncommon, 
 could tell who was meant. But if in writing 
 the history of Scotland, James VII. were men- 
 tioned, it would be a very uncommon reader 
 who did not recognize James II. of England ; 
 while if the monarch in question were mention- 
 ed simply as James II., the second James of 
 Scotland, who lived two hundred years before 
 him, would be understood. 
 
 Mr. Bowen's reference to the Hungarian Diet 
 and to Ferdinand I. or V., is founded altogether 
 upon a passage in Paget's Hungary and Tran- 
 sylvania, a work which Mr. Bowen justly char- 
 acterizes as " excellent and impartial," and 
 from which he quotes largely in the course of 
 his articles. I copy the passage, because it con- 
 tains a clear statement of the case, and because 
 it will serve to illustrate Mr, Bowen's mode of 
 dealing with the " authorities " to whom he so 
 confidently refers : 
 
 " The bill now brought up from the Deputies, 
 and to which the degree of importance attached 
 by all parties, appeared ridiculous to a stranger, 
 had reference to the appellation of the new 
 king, and was to settle whether he should be 
 addressed as Ferdinand the First or Ferdinand 
 the Fifth. The matter, hoivever, teas not so unim- 
 portant as it may appear ; the fact is, he is Em- 
 peror Ferdinand the First of Austria, and King 
 Ferdinand the Fifth of Ilicngury ; and unless 
 Hungary had ceased to be an independent country, 
 which the greatest courtier would not dare to insin- 
 uate, there could be no question as to his proper 
 title. The Magnates, however, thought other- 
 wise ; it was understood that the Court desired 
 that the style of Ferdinand the First should be 
 used, and the Magnates were too anxious to 
 please, not to desire the same thing. The Dep- 
 uties had now, for the fourth time, sent up this 
 same bill, insisting on the title of Ferdinand 
 the Fifth ; and for the fourth time the Magnates 
 were now about to reject it. Two or three short 
 speeches were made in Latin, the Palatine 
 seemed to sum up the evidence in the same 
 language, and the question was declared decid- 
 ed. As we afterwards heard, it was in vain the 
 Court party exhausted their breath and servility 
 in favor of what they supposed the Court would 
 wish. At the moment when the Magnates were 
 as firm as rocks on the wrong side, the Court 
 took the wise course of showing its contempt 
 for such supporters by sending down a procla- 
 mation — ' We, Ferdinand the Fifth, by the 
 
 grace of God, King of Hungary,' &c. — adopting 
 of its own accord what it knew to be right, and 
 perceived to be the general wish, leaving the 
 odium of having opposed it to its blind satel- 
 lites.— [Paget, ch. vi. vol. 1, pp. 175, 6, 7, Am. 
 edition.'] 
 
 From this passage Mr. Bowen has manufac- 
 tured his sneering remark, that — " Grave com- 
 plaints were made by Magyar writers, and even 
 by the Magyar Diet, because their late sovereign 
 would style himself Ferdinand I., while they 
 persisted in calling him Ferdinand V." 
 
 In support of his assertion, that " after the 
 memorable scene with Maria Theresa, the 
 right of the House of Hapsburg to reign in 
 Hungary was extended, according to the terms 
 of the Pragmatic sanction, to the female line" — 
 Mr. Bowen says : — [North American Revieto, p. 
 243.] 
 
 " Archdeacon Coxe, who is followed by Pro- 
 fessor Smyth, when speaking of the preparation 
 for the scene in 1741, says ' the grey-headed 
 politicians of the Court of Vienna in vain urged 
 that the Hungarians, who, when Charles the 
 Sixth proposed the Pragmatic Sanction, had de- 
 clared that they icere accustomed to be governed by 
 men, and would not consent to a female succession, 
 would seize this opportunity of withdrawing 
 from the Austrian domination. But Maria 
 Theresa formed a different judgment and her 
 opinion was justified by the event.'" 
 
 Mr. BoAven prudently omits to indicate in 
 what part of Coxe's extensive work this passage 
 is to be found. It occurs on page 269 of vol. 3 
 of Bonn's edition, not far from the middle of 
 chapter 101. It really has nothing whatever to 
 do with the question. The fact is, according to 
 Coxe himself, that Maria Theresa made no ap- 
 peal whatever to the Hungarian Diet on the 
 subject of her right to the throne. Her right 
 to the throne had been solemnly recognized by 
 the Hungarian Diet, nearly twenty years before. 
 The Hungarian nation acquiesced in that re- 
 cognition ; it made no opposition to her acces- 
 sion, but on the contrary, as Coxe expressly 
 says, vol. 3, p. 268, she, " at her coronation, 
 had received from her grateful subjects the 
 warmest demonstrations of loyalty and affec- 
 tion." And yet Mr. Bowen quotes from the 
 very next page of Coxe, to prove that " of course 
 the female line was actually established on the 
 throne only by the success of the queen's appeal 
 to the feelings of the Hungarian Diet I " He 
 might as well have said that Mr. Fillmore was 
 actually established in the Presidency only by 
 the good reception of his first message to Con- 
 gress. Maria Theresa's appeal was for military 
 aid — for men and money. She had been treach- 
 erously attacked by nearly all the neighboring 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 15 
 
 nations, including, among others, France, Prus- 
 sia, Bavaria, and Saxony : her dominions were 
 invaded on all sides by powerful armies, and in 
 this " wholly desperate " condition, as Coxe 
 says, "Vienna menaced with an instant siege, 
 abandoned by all her allies, without treasure, 
 without an efficient army, without able minis- 
 ters," she threw herself on the generosity of 
 the Hungarian Diet, not for confirmation of her 
 right to the throne, for that they had already 
 confirmed, but for means to carry on the war. 
 The Hungarians nobly responded. They voted 
 large supplies of men and money ; they rose in 
 arms with enthusiasm, thirty thousand volun- 
 teers marched to the relief of Vienna, and Aus- 
 tria was rescued from imminent destruction. 
 The passage from Coxe which Mr. Bowen quot- 
 ed so confidently, was a rhetorical flourish 
 about the doubts which "the grey-headed pol- 
 iticians of the Court of Vienna " had entertained 
 as to the success of her appeal — and nothing 
 more. Professor Smyth, as Mr. Bowen ac- 
 knowledges, follows Archdeacon Coxe in his 
 account of the matter ; and that account is in 
 both of them, wholly against the statement 
 which Mr. Bowen refers to them as sustaining, 
 and fully justifies Mrs. Putnam's criticism of 
 that statement. 
 
 The third point which Mr. Bowen contests 
 with Mrs. Putnam, he states in this manner : — 
 [North American Iievieio,p 243.] 
 
 "The Examiner, in referring to a statement 
 of ours, says that ' the confirmation of the union 
 with Austria, or to speak more accurately, the 
 confirmation of the House of Hapsburg, on the 
 Hungarian throne, by the act of the Diet of 
 1G87,' could not have contributed to the release 
 of Hungary from the Turks in 1683. Of course 
 it could not ; but according to Coxe and all 
 other historians (except the Magyars) the union 
 with Austria was in fact confirmed as early as 
 1567." 
 
 Mr. Bowen does not here, as in other parts 
 of his rejoinder, quote the passage from the 
 North American on which Mrs. Putnam was 
 commenting, but merely alludes to it as "a 
 statement of mine." I do not know why in this 
 instance he departed from his usual practice, 
 but I know that if he had quoted his own 
 words, it would have been evident to his read- 
 ers that Mrs. Putnam's criticism was perfectly 
 just. He said — North American Review, Jan., 
 1850, page 97 — that "Hungary made choice, so 
 long as her monarchy remained elective, of the 
 Emperor of Austria to be her king, and finally, 
 in a Diet held at Presburg, in 1687, acknowl- 
 edged the hereditary right of the same family 
 
 to reign in both countries." This acknowledg- 
 ment was, of course, the confirmation of the 
 House of Hapsburg on the Hungarian throne. 
 Yet Mr. Bowen, after thus fixing the date of 
 the "union with Austria" in 1687, in the North 
 American Review for Jan., 1850, says in his 
 letter to the Daily Advertiser and in the North 
 American for January, 1851, "according to 
 Coxe and all other historians, it was confirmed, 
 as early as 1567." To support his new theory, 
 Mr. Bowen quotes three or four lines from 
 Coxe — vol. 2, p. 49 — about John Sigismond, 
 stating that Sigismond " engaged not to as- 
 sume the title of King of Hungary, except in 
 his correspondence with the Turks, and to ac- 
 knowledge the Emperor as king, his superior 
 and master," — which has nothing whatever to 
 do with the matter. Coxe really confirms Mr. 
 Bowen' s first statement, the one in the North 
 American, Jan. 1850, as may be seen by reference 
 to vol. 2, pages 450, 1, 2, chap. 66, in which, 
 after narrating the victories over the Turks in 
 1687, he says: 
 
 " In the midst of these successes, Leopold 
 completed his long meditated design of render- 
 ing the crown hereditary. * * * * Notwith- 
 standing the wretched state of Hungary, and the 
 humiliation of every foreign power from whom 
 the natives could expect assistance, they adhered 
 with singular pertinacity to the mischievous, 
 though darling privilege of electing their 
 monarch ; they employed every subterfuge, and 
 offered every expedient, to save a right which 
 they considered as the palladium of their liber- 
 ties. "When all the threats, bribes, or conces- 
 sions of Leopold could not extort their consent 
 to render the succession hereditary in the female 
 line, he prudently yielded to their prejudices. 
 The states agreed to the coronation of Joseph 
 as an hereditary sovereign, and confirmed the suc- 
 cession in the males, both of the German and 
 Spanish branches ; but still reserved to the 
 nation the right of election on the extinction of 
 the male line." 
 
 This was in 1637, when, and not in 1567, the 
 House of Hapsburg was admitted to hereditary 
 possession of the Hungarian throne. It follows 
 therefore, from Mr. Bowen's own authority, 
 and from that of Archdeacon Coxe to whom he 
 refers, that he was wrong, and Mrs. Putnam 
 right in the third point. 
 
 Mr. Bowen states the fourth point thus : — 
 (N. A. II., p. 244.) 
 
 " The Examiner goes on to affirm that 'the 
 Turks were not driven out of Hungary in 1683 ; 
 neither toere they driven out by Sobieski, though 
 the reviewer seems so well satisfied of this fact.' 
 We had tolerably good reasons to be satisfied of 
 it, if Coxe, and every other English, French, 
 and German historian, who have written the 
 history of this period, arc to be trusted." 
 
16 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 I do not understand what could have induced 
 Mr. Bo wen so confidently to assert that his state- 
 ment is supported by all German historians, 
 when he had before him, on the very page of the 
 Christian Examiner from which he was quot- 
 ing, Mrs. Putnam's reference to three German 
 histories, in proof that his statement was in- 
 correct. Nor do I understand how, if he ex- 
 amined all the German historians of that period, 
 as his remark would imply, he could have over- 
 looked that passage in so accessible a work as 
 Mcnzel's History of Germany — vol. 2, p. 495, 
 of the English translation — in which it is 
 stated, that after Sobieski had "returned to 
 Poland — Charles of Lorraine, aided by Lewis 
 of Baden, carried on the war during the ensu- 
 ing year, and attempted to regain Hungary." Of 
 course, if Hungary had been already regained 
 by Sobieski, Charles of Lorraine would not 
 have attempted to regain it. Menzel, in the 
 very next sentence, e«pressly says, " the 
 Turkish commandants and garrisons retained 
 possession of the Hungarian fortresses, and 
 offered a brave and obstinate resistance." It is 
 evident, then, that all the German historians do 
 not support Mr. Bo wen's assertion, that Sobieski 
 expelled the Turks from Hungary. Neither 
 do all the English historians, as I shall now 
 proceed to show from that very work of Arch- 
 deacon Coxe, to which Mr. Bo wen so frequent- 
 ly refers. It is true that Mr. Bowen quotes a 
 passage from Coxe, which, to a careless reader, 
 might seem to prove the contrary, though no 
 person who had read the book, or had it before 
 him, could possibly be misled by it. This 
 passage states that, after Sobieski had defeated 
 the Turks at Vienna and at Parkan " the Turk- 
 ish army, continuing their flight to Belgrade, aban- 
 doned Hungary." — Hist. House of Aus., vol. 2, 
 p. 449. This refers merely to that particular 
 Turkish army which Sobieski had routed, and 
 which he pursued only to Gran, the nearest 
 Turkish fortress in Hungary, in the capture of 
 which he participated with Charles of Lorraine, 
 the German commander. The reason why the 
 Turkish army retired to Belgrade was, not that 
 they were pursued thither, but that the Grand 
 Signior himself was there awaiting their return 
 — a fact which Mr. Bowen's favorite authority, 
 Coxe, does not mention, but which may be 
 found on p. 275, vol. 2, of Knolles' History of 
 the Turks, continued by Sir Paul Rycaut, 
 abridged by Mr. Savage, London, 1701, or in 
 Rycaut's own ponderous folio. A few days 
 after the fall of Gran, which took place in 
 October, Sobieski set out for Poland, and on 
 
 the 24th of December, or about two months 
 afterwards, he and his army were in winter 
 quarters at Cracow, having in the meantime 
 performed a toilsome march of two hundred 
 miles, across the snows of the Carpathian moun- 
 tains. See Fletcher's Hist, of Poland, Am. ed., 
 p. 111. Sobieski never returned to Hungary. 
 
 Gran is more than 200 miles fmm Belgrade, 
 and the Turks continued to hold the intervening 
 country, as they had held it for a century and 
 a half, having pashaws in the principal cities and 
 garrisons in all the fortresses. They were ex- 
 pelled from it gradually, in the course of two 
 long and bloody wars, the last of which termin- 
 ated in 1718, with the treaty of Passarowitz, by 
 which the Turks relinquished their last posses- 
 sions in Hungary. The proof of this from Coxe 
 is, that on the same page from which Mr. Bowen 
 took the above quotation, mention is made of 
 the Turkish bashaw of Great Waradin, an im- 
 portant Hungarian city, at a period considerably 
 subsequent to Sobieski's departure; and on 
 the next page, it is stated that " the surrender 
 of Cassan again threw the principal parts of 
 northern Hungary into the power of the emper- 
 or ;" and the capture of Buda is recorded, the 
 ancient Hungarian capital, which the Turks 
 had held for 157 years. Buda is only 26 miles 
 from Gran, and was not taken till 1686, three 
 years after Sobieski's departure. Still further, 
 on page 458, v. 2, Coxe states that by the treaty 
 of Carlowitz, the date of which was 1699, Aus- 
 tria regained " all Hungary north of the 
 Marosch, and west of the Teiss ;" which still 
 left a considerable province in possession of the 
 Turks. The recovery of this province, which is 
 known as the Bannat, is stated by Coxe, vol. 3, 
 p. 403, to have taken place in 1718. This proof 
 from Mr. Bowen's favorite authority will, I sup- 
 pose, be sufficient to establish the truth of my 
 remark, that all English historians do not sup- 
 port his statement. But if more evidence be 
 needed, I offer that of the Encyclopedia Amer- 
 icana, which was mostly taken from the Ger- 
 man, and was edited by a German scholar 
 whose knowledge of history will not be ques- 
 tioned, and who may reasonably be supposed to 
 be well informed upon that of Austria. In the 
 article on Hungary, vol. 6, pages 475-6, it is 
 stated, that civil commotions " delayed the ex- 
 pulsion of the Turks, in which Leopold I. finally 
 succeeded so far that he retook Buda, 1686, and, 
 by the peace of Carlowitz, 1699, recovered the 
 rest of Hungary, except the Bannat" " The 
 Congress of Passarowitz, 1718, restored the Ban- 
 nat to Hungary." 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 17 
 
 It is evident, therefore, that Mr. Bo wen was 
 mistaken in asserting that the Turks were 
 driven out of Hungary in 1683 by Sobieski, 
 and that " Coxe, and every other English, 
 French, and German historian, who have writ- 
 ten the history of this period " supported his 
 assertion ; and Mrs. Putnam's criticism was of 
 course correct. 
 
 Mr. Bo wen states "his fifth point thus : — [North 
 American Review, p. 244.] 
 
 " We had said that ' in the final struggle, the 
 noted Tekeli and his partisans fought with the 
 Turks against Sobieski ;' for proof of which, 
 see Coxe and all other historians (except the 
 Magyars) passim. The Examiner seems to deny 
 this, by asserting that 'Sobieski was already 
 dead at the time of the final struggle,' which it 
 fixes in 1716; while on the authority given 
 above, we placed it in 1683." 
 
 It will be seen that Mr. Bowen's fourth and 
 fifth points are essentially the same ; for Mrs. 
 Putnam did not mean to deny, nor does she, to 
 a candid reader, even seem to deny that Tekeli 
 fought with the Turks against Sobieski. She 
 merely intended to dissent from Mr. Bowen's 
 assertion that Sobieski and Tekeli fought in 
 the final struggle ; which dissent, I think, is 
 not without justification from the fact, that the 
 final struggle took place when the former had 
 been dead twenty years, and the latter more 
 than ten ; which renders it improbable that 
 either of them fought in it, notwithstanding 
 Mr. Bowen's reference to " Coxe and all other 
 historians." To prevent misapprehension, it 
 may be as well to remark that Mrs. Putnam 
 gives 1716 as the date of the final struggle, be- 
 cause the last great battle was fought in that 
 year ; the treaty by which the Turks abandoned 
 Hungary being dated two years later. 
 
 Mr. Bowen, it will be noticed, repeats his as- 
 sertion that the expulsion of the Turks from 
 Hungary took place in 1683. Mrs. Putnam 
 maintained, Ch. Ex. page 431, that he was mis- 
 taken, and that it took place in 1718. I have 
 brought sufficient proof that Mrs. Putnam was 
 right. Mr. Bowen, however, in defending his 
 fifth point, in his Letter to the Boston Daily 
 Advertiser, quoted a passage frojn McCulloch's 
 Universal Gazetteer, (Vol. i. p. 1145) where it is 
 said, (speaking of the Hungarian nobles) " so 
 great was their antipathy to the Austrian yoke, 
 that in 1683 they rose, with Tekeli at their head, 
 and called upon the Turks to relieve them from 
 servitude. Austria, however, succeeded by the 
 help of John Sobieski and Prince Eugene, in ex- 
 pelling the Turks from these countries, &c." This 
 
 2* 
 
 quotation apparently sustains Mr. Bowen's as- 
 sertion that the date of the Turkish expulsion 
 was 1683, and does not sustain Mrs. Putnam's 
 counter-assertion that it was 1718. I have 
 copied the quotation exactly as it stands in Mr. 
 Bowen's Letter. The reader will notice that it 
 closes with a comma, after which Mr. Bowen 
 puts, &c. Would any one have thought that 
 the sentence which followed that comma, and 
 which completed the passage thus partially quo- 
 ted by Mr. Bowen, was this — " and they were 
 finally secured to it by the treaties of Carloioitz 
 and P assay owitz in 1718." 
 
 The character of this transaction is easily un- 
 derstood. Mr. Bowen has a controversy with 
 Mrs. Putnam about the date of an important 
 event in history. He states one year as the 
 date, and she states another. He finds in Mc- 
 Culloch's Universal Gazetteer, or Geographical 
 Dictionary, a passage in which both dates are 
 mentioned — the date for which Mrs. Putnam 
 contends being given as that of the event in 
 question, while the other is introduced as the 
 date of a totally different event. Mr. Bowen 
 quotes that portion of the passage which con- 
 tains the date for which he was contending, and 
 stopping at a comma, suppresses the sentence 
 which proves the truth of Mrs. Putnam's posi- 
 tion ! 
 
 Soon after the appearance of Mr. Bowen's 
 Letter in the Daily Advertiser, I reviewed it in 
 the Boston Atlas, and exposed in nearly the 
 foregoing manner, the true nature of this quota- 
 tion from McCulloch. Mr. Bowen saw this ex- 
 posure of his peculiar mode of quoting authori- 
 ties, and in copying his Beply from the Daily 
 Advertiser into the North American Review, 
 he omits the mangled quotation which he had 
 made from the first volume of McCulloch, and 
 substitutes this passage from the second vol- 
 ume — (speaking of Turkey under Solyman the 
 Magnificent) : 
 
 " At this period the Turkish empire was un- 
 questionably the most powerful in the world. 
 Nor had this mighty power even then reached 
 its greatest height. Solyman was succeeded by 
 other able princes, and the Ottoman arms con- 
 tinued to maintain their ascendency over those 
 of Christendom until in 1683, the famous John 
 Sobieski, King of Poland, totally defeated the army 
 employed in the siege of Vienna. This event 
 marked the era of their decline.'" 
 
 Mr. Bowen explains the substitution of the 
 one passage for the other by the following note : 
 — [North American Revieiv, p. 245.] 
 
 "In a former publication of this paragraph, 
 in a newspaper, in place of the sentence here 
 cited from MeCulloch,Tanothcr sentence, which 
 
18 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 was quite irrelevant, was accidentally substi- 
 tuted by a mistake of the copyist." 
 
 This statement has, of course, all the weight 
 that belongs to the word of a man who has oc- 
 cupied the respectable post of Professor of His- 
 tory in Harvard University. But it is so ex- 
 ceedingly unsatisfactory, that I am compelled 
 to declare I cannot give it implicit belief. It 
 does not seem likely that a copyist would make 
 such a mistake as to substitute a passage from 
 one volume, for a greatly different passage in 
 another volume. Nor do I understand how such 
 a mistake could escape correction. Mr. Bowen, 
 it is said, read his letter to some of his friends 
 in Cambridge before he sent it to the Advertiser. 
 Why did he not then detect the mistake ? Why 
 did he not detect it when reading the proof? 
 Or did he, a Professor of History in Harvard 
 University, send long historical articles to the 
 press, without examination or revisal, and that, 
 too, concerning matters in which his intelli- 
 gence and accuracy had been publicly impeach- 
 ed ? And why did he let the mistake go uncor- 
 rected for a month, when a note of a dozen lines, 
 to the editor of the Advertiser, would have rec- 
 tified it, instead of waiting till his unfair quota- 
 tion had been exposed in the newspapers ? 
 Why, too, did he pretend to refute Mrs. Put- 
 nam by quoting against her the passage from 
 the second volume of McCulloch, without mak- 
 ing any reference to the passage in the first vol- 
 ume which was so decisive in her favor? He, 
 of course, must have read both of these pas- 
 sages, or he could not have pointed them out to 
 his copyist. 
 
 But the consideration which to my mind is 
 most decisive against the probability of the al- 
 leged mistake, is this : The question at issue 
 between him and Mrs. Putnam was about Tekeli 
 and the expulsion of the Turks from Hungary. 
 Now there is not a word about Tekeli or Hun- 
 gary in the second quotation from McCulloch. 
 It is altogether irrelevant, and merely says, 
 what no one ever denied, that in 1683 Sobieski 
 defeated the Turks before Vienna ; which 
 11 event marked the era of their decline," Mc- 
 Culloch says, meaning their apparent decline, for 
 their real decline began with Lepanto. Sobies- 
 ki's victory, instead of being the " final strug- 
 gle," was only the first blow in the expulsion of 
 the Turks from Hungary. That expulsion was 
 accomplished by Prince Eugene in 1718, when 
 Sobieski had been dead more than twenty years. 
 But the first quotation, which Mr. Bowen says 
 is " quite irrelevant," and was " accidentally 
 substituted by a mistake of the copyist," does 
 
 mention Tekeli and does speak of the affairs of 
 Hungary. It was, in fact, the most relevant to 
 his purpose that could have been found, if, un- 
 fortunately for Mr. Bowen, the last clause of 
 the sentence, which he suppressed, had not 
 completely refuted the apparent meaning of the 
 portion which he copied. The question was 
 when, and by whom, were the Turks expelled 
 from Hungary. Mr. Bowen said, in 1683, by So- 
 bieski. Mrs. Putnam, and all historians say in 
 1718, by Prince Eugene. And now, to give the 
 finishing stroke to Mr. Bowen's quotations from 
 McCulloch, I will complete his second extract 
 from that author, by adding its conclusion. 
 
 "The Ottoman arms continued to maintain 
 their ascendency over those of Christendom un- 
 til, in 1683, the famous John Sobieski, King of 
 Poland, totally defeated the army employed in 
 the siege of Vienna. This event marked the 
 era of their decline. For a tchile they continued 
 to oppose the Austrians and Hungarians with 
 doubtful fortune and various success ; but the vic- 
 tories of Prince Eugene gave a decisive superiority 
 to the Christians." — [Vol. ii. p. 977.] 
 
 Perhaps this was omitted " accidentally" — 
 "by a mistake of the copyist" ! 
 
 Mr. Bowen states his sixth point thus : — [N. 
 A. K, p. 245.] 
 
 Commenting on our assertion that the Turks 
 held possession of nearly half of Hungary for a 
 century and a half after Ferdinand came to the 
 throne, the Examiner says : • this then was the 
 protection which the Hungarians found from 
 their enemies in the union with Austria ; ' and 
 again, ' Austria neither protected the Hunga- 
 rians from the Turks, nor suffered them effec- 
 tually to protect themselves.' This is really 
 too bad. During the whole period in question, 
 the greatest part of the Magyars were not the 
 enemies, but the active allies and friends of the 
 Turks, against the Christian powers of Europe; 
 their leaders, John of Zapolya and his posterity, 
 and Tekeli and others, could not have kept up 
 the contest with Austria for a month, except by 
 the aid of the infidels. 
 
 This is not a fair statement of Mrs. Putnam's 
 position. Mr. Bowen in the North American 
 Review [Jan. 1850, p. 97] had said, in order to 
 demonstrate the value to Hungary of the Aus- 
 trian connection, that since the battle of Mohacs, 
 in 1526, the Hungarians " have found protec- 
 tion from their enemies [the Turks] only by 
 their union with Austria." He also stated, 
 that for a century and a half after the battle of 
 Mohacs, the Turks had possession of full half 
 of the kingdom, although before that battle 
 the Hungarians had repeatedly driven them 
 back, and protected not only Hungary, but the 
 rest of Europe from their incursions. Mrs, 
 Putnam commented on these inconsistent state- 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 19 
 
 merits, and said very truly, "Austria neither 
 protected the Hungarians from the Turks, nor 
 suffered them effectually to protect themselves. 
 It was when their armies were commanded by 
 Austrian generals, and their cities filled with 
 Austrian garrisons, — it was when Austrian 
 misgovernment and falsehood had divided the 
 nation against itself — that the Hungarians were 
 forced to submit to the Turks." Evidently, Mr. 
 Bowen's sixth point is not more defensible than 
 the others. He asserted that the Hungarians 
 found protection from the Turks only by their 
 union with Austria. Mrs. Putnam replied that 
 by his own statement the Turks had possession 
 of half the kingdom for a century and a half 
 after the accession of the Austrian dynasty, 
 whereas, previous to that accession the Hunga- 
 rians had protected not only their own country 
 but the rest of Europe from them. It is true 
 that during that century and a half, the Hun- 
 garians frequently fought with the Turks against 
 the Austrians, but it was because they invaria- 
 bly experienced better treatment from the Turks 
 than from the Austrians. The infidels granted 
 them religious toleration, while the Catholic 
 House of Austria sought to extirpate their na- 
 tional Protestant faith by cruelties unparalelled 
 in Europe since the days of Domitian and Nero. 
 If anything more is needed to be said on this 
 point, I will cite the authority of M. Degerando, 
 one of the most accurate and intelligent of the 
 writers on Hungary, who, on page 9 of his valu- 
 able work de V Esprit Public en Hongrie, after re- 
 marking that Austrian intrigues had divided and 
 enfeebled the country from even the time of 
 Hunniades, but that the Turks could effect no- 
 thing against it under the Magyar Kings, 
 says — 
 
 " Even after the battle of Mohacs, Sultan Soly- 
 man quitted Hungary without retaining posses- 
 sion of a single village. When he again invaded 
 Hungary the country was under the dominion 
 of the Austrian Ferdinand, so that it may, with 
 strict truth, be said that the Turks who could 
 not conquer Hungary Irom the Hungarians, 
 conquered it from the Austrians. If for a hun- 
 dred and fifty years the Pashaws encamped on 
 the soil of Hungary, it was owing to the policy 
 of Austria." 
 
 It will be seen that the statement of Deger- 
 ando is identical with that made by Mrs. Put- 
 nam, which Mr. Bowen affects to consider 
 " really too bad." 
 
 Mr. Bowen's seventh point is stated in this 
 way, N. A. R. p 245 : — 
 
 "The Examiner objects to our calling both 
 John Hunniades and his son, the almost equally 
 renowned Corvinus, kings of Hungary, by say- 
 
 ing that the former was not a king, but only 
 4 governor of Hungary.' He was a king in fact, 
 though not in name, just as Charles Martel and 
 Pepin were really kings of France, though nomi- 
 nally only mayors of the palace. Gibbon does 
 not hesitate to speak of the reign of Hunniades, 
 in the same sentence in which he alludes to ' the 
 titular king, Ladislaus of Austria.' " 
 
 Had Mr. Bowen quoted the whole of the pas- 
 sage in Gibbon, to which he refers, it would 
 have been apparent to his readers that Mrs. 
 Putnam was right in her criticism, for Gibbon 
 explicitly says, not that Hunniades was&«?^, but 
 that he w r as supreme captain and governor of Hun- 
 gary. The passage is near the middle of the 
 67th chapter of the Decline and Fall, and is so 
 short that I can see no good reason for Mr. Bow- 
 en's not quoting it. " During the absence and 
 minority of Ladislaus of Austria the titular king, 
 Hunniades was elected supreme captain and gov- 
 ernor of Hungary ; and if envy at first w r as silenc- 
 ed by terror, a reign of twelve years supposes the 
 art of policy as well as of war." This is very far 
 from supporting Mr. Bowen's distinct assertion 
 that Hunniades was king of Hungary- — on the 
 contrary, it refutes it. Gibbon evidently used 
 the word reign, in this place, as a synonym of 
 administration, without intending to convey the 
 idea of royalty. Mr. Bowen's remark that Hun- 
 niades was " a king in fact, though not in name," 
 is not to the purpose. It might be properly said 
 that Richelieu and Mazarin w r ere kings of France, 
 " in fact, though not in name ; " but the writer 
 who, in treating of French history, should speak 
 of " those renowned kings, Armand de Richelieu 
 and Julius Mazarin," would be commonly held 
 to have made a ridiculous blunder. It may be 
 remarked also, that in speaking of Corvinus as 
 "almost equally renowned" with his father, 
 Hunniades, Mr. Bowen betrays an ignorance of 
 European history which could scarcely have 
 been looked for in a person holding the profess- 
 orship of history in Harvard University. King 
 Matthias Corvinus was, in every respect, greater 
 and more renowned than his father. 
 
 Mr. Bowen's eighth and last point is of little 
 consequence. He states and defends it thus, N. 
 A. R. p. 245. 
 
 " We once used the abbreviated expression 
 'Emperor of Austria,' instead of the more com- 
 mon phrase, • Emperor of the House of Austria.' 
 Of course the former expression is just as cor- 
 rect as the latter; for the sovereigns in question 
 were emperors (of the Holy Roman Empire) 
 an appellation which had become merely titular 
 for more than a century before Francis resigned 
 it, so that they were usually designated by ad- 
 ding the name of their hereditary dominions." 
 
so 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 This is not an entirely accurate statement of 
 the case. In the North American Review, Jan. 
 1850, p. 97, Mr. Bowen asserted "that Hungary 
 made choice, so long as her monarchy remained 
 elective, of the Emperor of Austria to be her 
 king." Upon which Mrs. Putnam remarked 
 that " there were no Emperors of Aixstria during 
 the period that the Hungarian monarchy re- 
 mained elective, nor for more than a hundred 
 years afterwards. This title did not exist until 
 the present century. It was assumed in 1804, 
 by Francis, in anticipation of the loss of that of 
 Emperor of Germany, which he resigned in 
 1806." Mrs. Putnam was, of course, correct, 
 and Mr. Bowen's expression was inaccurate, 
 though, I presume, the inaccuracy was owing to 
 carelessness, rather than to ignorance. But in 
 his reply, Mr. Bowen fails into another inaccu- 
 racy, in saying that the common phrase for the 
 sovereigns in question, was "Emperor of the 
 House of Austria," during the century that pre- 
 ceded the resignation of Francis. They were 
 commonly known as Emperors of Germany. 
 
 I have now considered all the points in which 
 Mr. Bowen attempts to reply to Mrs. Putnam, 
 and I have shown, chiefly from his own author- 
 ities and references, that in every case Mrs. 
 Putnam was right, and he wrong. I have also 
 shown that he has misrepresented Mrs. Put- 
 nam, and perverted her language, in order to 
 make out that she "praised the Austrian pol- 
 icy" — that he has charged her with "incredi- 
 ble ignorance," when by the terms of his own 
 statement, it is evident that he knew she was 
 not ignorant — and that to convict her of injus- 
 tice to him, he has referred to authors as if they 
 sustained him, when he could not, by any de- 
 gree of carelessness, have failed to see that they 
 really supported her ; and that, furthermore, 
 he has made quotations to prove that she was 
 wrong, suppressing portions of those quotations 
 which proved that she was right. 
 
 Let me now ask the reader's attention to the 
 following passage from Mr. Bowen's Letter to 
 the Daily Advertiser : 
 
 " I have now considered all the specifications 
 in the charge of blundering in my statements 
 of historic facts, and can safely leave the reader 
 to form his own opinion of them. One of two 
 conclusions must be true : — Either the Exami- 
 ner is grossly ignorant of the most notorious facts 
 stated by the most common historians, or it has de- 
 liberately forged historical statements in order to 
 damage my reputation, and deprive me of office, 
 thinking that a bold and confident utterance of 
 them might cause them to pass as truths with 
 the ignorant, the malicious, or the unwary; — 
 
 a hope in which, so far as the editors of the 
 Times, the Transcript and the Tribune are con- 
 cerned, it has not been deceived. This is strong 
 language, I confess ; but in view of all the cir- 
 cumstances attending this gross attack upon my 
 character, subsistence, and even personal safety, 
 I leave it to the public to judge if it be not 
 fully deserved." 
 
 This, it will be observed, contains a direct 
 charge against Mrs. Putnam, of having " delib- 
 erately forged historical statements" in order 
 to damage Mr. Bowen's reputation, and deprive 
 him of office, — the office of Professor of History 
 in Harvard University. It is true, that Mr. 
 Bowen makes this atrocious charge under cover 
 of an alternative ; but it is equally true that 
 that alternative has nothing whatever to do 
 with the matter. Whether Mrs. Putnam be 
 "grossly ignorant" or not grossly ignorant, 
 could have no effect on the deliberate forgery 
 of historical statements with which he charges 
 her, thinking, I suppose, that " a bold and con 
 fident utterance of the charge might cause it to 
 pass as truth with the ignorant, the malicious, or 
 the unwary." 
 
 This, then, is the position in which Mr. 
 Bowen has placed himself with regard to Mrs. 
 Putnam. He has utterly failed in attempting 
 to refute her courteous exposure of his mistakes 
 in Hungarian history, and in making the at- 
 tempt, he has grossly misrepresented her mean- 
 ing, perverted her language, and has made the 
 most unfair quotations, to cover up his blunders 
 and convict her of ignorance and injustice ; and 
 then, after all this, he turns round and indig- 
 nantly charges her — a lady of distinguished 
 learning and ability, and of the highest social 
 standing — with having deliberately forged his- 
 torical statements, in order to damage his repu- 
 tation, and deprive him of office ! 
 
 Mil. BOWEN S LAST ARTICLE AGAINST HUNGARY. 
 
 As I have already stated, Mr. Bowen has 
 copied into the North American Review for 
 January, 1851, the principal portion of his 
 Reply to Mrs. Putnam, which first appeared in 
 the Boston Daily Advertiser. He has added 
 nothing to his Eight Points except a note on 
 the persistence of the Magyars in styling their 
 king Ferdinand Fifth instead of First, and anoth- 
 er note, explaining the " mistake of the copy- 
 ist " in the matter of the quotations from Mc- 
 Culloch, both of which notes I have considered 
 above. In this last article, Mr. Bowen speaks 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 21 
 
 of his first one,— the "War of Races" — as a 
 " plain and inoffensive statement of historical 
 facts concerning a nation upon the eastern con- 
 fines of Europe, with whom our countrymen 
 had had no political, commercial or literary re- 
 lations whatever, and of whose history they 
 might fairly be presumed to know as little as 
 they did of the early annals of China." 
 
 This passage, which is otherwise of no impor- 
 tance, deserves notice as an illustration of the 
 peculiar recklessness with which Mr. Eowen 
 makes assertions, and of his disregard for accu- 
 racy, even when inaccuracy can be of no service 
 to him. Hungary is not a country upon the 
 eastern confines of Europe. It is exactly in 
 the centre of Europe, with regard to east and 
 west ; and, in fact, approaches a little nearer to 
 the western, than to the eastern boundary of 
 Europe. The statement that we " had had no po- 
 litical, commercial or literary relations whatever 
 with Hungary," is intended, I presume, as an 
 assertion that when Mr. Bowen wrote his first 
 article, we had no accessible means of informa- 
 tion about that country. But for several years 
 we have had all the political relations with 
 Hungary that any nation, except Austria, can 
 have; that is, we have maintained an embassy 
 at the Court of the Hungarian King. Indeed, 
 the political intercourse between our govern- 
 ment and that of the Empire of whichllun- 
 gary is the most important part, began at a very 
 early stage of our national existence, as may be 
 seen from Mr. "Webster's Letter to the Chevalier 
 Hulsemann. Our commercial relations with 
 Hungary, it is true, have been very slight, but 
 as for our literary relations with that country, 
 if by the term, Mr. Bowen intends means of in- 
 formation, we had them in abundance long be- 
 fore he began to write his articles. Bowring's 
 Poetry of the Magyars is a well known book, 
 the works of Paget and of many other English 
 travellers, could be found in our libraries, while 
 every large geographical work contains an ac- 
 count of Hungary, in some cases a very good 
 one, like that of McCulloch, which is as long as 
 an ordinary article in the North American Re- 
 view, and furnishes statements which com- 
 pletely refute Mr. Bowen's conclusions. Nearly 
 every English journal of note had published 
 elaborate articles on the subject before his 
 "War of Races" appeared, and that essay, 
 as I have previously stated, was derived alto- 
 gether from the most widely circulated of 
 French periodicals, La Revue des Deux Mondes. 
 In fact, his assertion, that of the history of 
 Hungary, our countrymen " might fairly be 
 
 presumed to know as little as they did of the 
 early annals of China," although it may be 
 true of Mr. Bowen himself, when he began to 
 write on the subject, is not time of those among 
 us — and their number is not few — who have 
 studied general history more than is needed for 
 the getting-up of a review article ; nor is it con- 
 sistent with Mr. Bowen's own statements else- 
 where. For, in attempting to reply to Mrs. Put- 
 nam's exposure of his blunders in Hungarian his- 
 tory, he Bays he shall " confute them by referen- 
 ces to such authorities as are in the hands of every- 
 body,— to pages with which a schoolboy may be 
 supposed to be familiar." These authorities he 
 enumerates as Gibbon, Robertson, Coxe, Pro- 
 fessor Smyth and others. Others, in Mr. Bow- 
 en's peculiar style, simply means McCulloch, 
 from whose Geographical Dictionary he makes 
 some extracts, the character of which I have 
 shown above. Now Gibbon, Robertson, Smyth 
 and McCulloch have all been republished and 
 widely circulated in this country, while Coxe's 
 House of Austria has long been a standard 
 work for libraries, and for some years past could 
 be obtained in a cheap form at almost any book- 
 store in our cities. If these, then, are "good 
 authorities for the History of Hungary," (N. A. 
 Review, Jan., 1851, p. 241,) and are "in the 
 hands of everybody," even of " schoolboys," 
 what becomes of the dense ignorance which Mr. 
 Bowen assumes to have existed on the subject ? 
 
 Mr. Bowen omits in the North American, the 
 atrocious charges of "falsehood" and "for- 
 gery," and of making a " gross attack upon his 
 character, subsistence, and personal safety," 
 which he dealt out so vehemently against Mrs. 
 Putnam in the Daily Advertiser, though he has 
 not the sense of justice, to make the least retrac- 
 tion or apology for them — unless their silent 
 withdrawal, in this second edition of his reply, 
 may be construed as an acknowledgment that 
 he is conscious of his error. But even in this 
 better- considered article, his laneua^e is not 
 free from offensiveness. He still persists in his 
 absurd sneers at Mrs. Putnam's knowledge of 
 the Magyar language, and again affirms that her 
 article "appears to have been written, not so 
 much for the purpose of explaining the nature 
 of the war in Hungary, as for that of damaging 
 the reputation of the only American writer who 
 has dared to plead the cause of ten millions of 
 oppressed and down-trodden Slavonians, Wal- 
 lachians," &c. 
 
 He says, for instance, on p. 240 : 
 
 " The character of the whole article, which is 
 nearly seventy pages long, may be interred with 
 
22 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 sufficient accuracy from a single statement in it, 
 which we copy as a curiosity, for it is certainly 
 one of the most astounding assertions on record. 
 The only facts alleged in immediate confirmation 
 of it, are those which we have already consid- 
 ered in a foot-note on page 226 s « Since the reign 
 of St. Stephen, all the races inhabiting the kingdom 
 have composed the Hungarian nation, and have 
 shared equally in all its honors and all its suffer- 
 ings.' — Christian Examiner for November, 1850, 
 p. 466. 
 
 " We have no doubt, whatever, that the wri- 
 ter fully believed this marvelous statement at 
 the time of making it. It only shows how far 
 one may be misled by a little pardonable vanity, 
 arising from the consciousness of having ac- 
 quired some knowledge of the Magyar language, 
 a very rare, if not unique accomplishment for 
 one not born in Hungary, and by implicit reli- 
 ance on a single, but very untrustworthy source 
 of information*" 
 
 It is not necessary to comment upon the good 
 taste of Mr. Bowen's allusion to Mrs. Putnam's 
 knowledge of the Magyar language, nor upon 
 his logic in attempting to refute a historical 
 statement by sneering at the "vanity" of the 
 person who has made it. The justice of his im. 
 putation of " implicit reliance on a single source 
 of information " (he means the Magyar) may be 
 comprehended from the fact, that Mrs. Putnam's 
 article contains extracts from every book or 
 writer referred to by Mr. Bowen himself in the 
 ' ' "War of Races," and that it is chiefly by his 
 own authorities that she refutes him. She 
 quoted besides from a number of German au- 
 thorities, and scarcely at all from Magyar writers. 
 
 The passage from Mrs. Putnam's article on 
 which Mr. Bowen lays such stress, needs no 
 defence to any one who is tolerably well ac- 
 quainted with the history of Hungary, and I do 
 not understand how, if Mr. Bowen has read one 
 half of the books he quotes from or refers to, he 
 can have any doubt whatever of its truth. In 
 the North American Review for Jan. 1850, pp. 
 99, 91, he said: 
 
 " The present position of the Magyars in Hun- 
 gary is very much what that of the Normans in 
 England was, for the first century or two after 
 
 the conquest To break the spirit 
 
 of the conquered Saxons by the insults as much 
 as by the losses inflicted upon them, to proscribe 
 their language as well as to rob them of their 
 estates, to ridicule their habits, and to brand 
 them as an inferior and degraded race, who 
 were unfit to hold office, and unworthy to bear 
 arms, was the settled policy of the earlier Nor- 
 man kings." 
 
 Mrs. Putnam, commenting on this ridiculous 
 passage, said very truly [Ch. Ex. Nov. 1850, pp. 
 466-7] ; 
 
 " We have already shown that no such con- 
 dition of things as that supposed by the Review- 
 er, has existed in Hungary for at least eight 
 hundred years. Since the reign of St. Stephen, 
 all the races inhabiting the kingdom, have com- 
 posed the Hungarian nation, and have shared 
 equally in all its honors and all its sufferings. 
 Was then this state of things introduced in the 
 Spring of 1848, when the Hungarians obtained 
 a virtual independence of Austria ? Did the Mag- 
 yars seize this occasion to exclude their fellow 
 countrymen from the privileges of citizenship ? 
 Were the other races branded at that time, as 
 inferior and degraded, and declared unworthy of 
 bearing arms and of holding office ? The first 
 officer commissioned by the Hungarian ministry, 
 at the commencement of the insurrectionary 
 movement in Croatia and Slavonia, was the Sla- 
 vonian Hrabowszky ; in the first battle which 
 was fought in the late war, the Hungarians were 
 commanded by the Wallachian Moga ; one of 
 the most distinguished of their generals was the 
 Servian Damianich ; when sentence of expulsion 
 from the throne had been pronounced on the 
 house of Hapsburg, the first act of the indepen- 
 dent nation was to confer the highest office in 
 the State upon the ' Slovac' Kossuth." 
 
 Mr. Bowen, it will be seen, compares the 
 present position of the Magyars in Hungary with 
 that of the Normans in England for the first 
 century or two after the Conquest ; and by in- 
 ference, compares the condition of the Slavo- 
 nians, Wallachians, &c, to that of the conquer- 
 ed Saxons, who were branded as an inferior and 
 degraded race, unfit to hold office, and unwor- 
 thy to bear arms. Mrs. Putnam demolishes 
 this most absurd statement by a simple reference 
 to the well known facts that Hrabowsky, Moga, 
 Damianich and Kossuth, none of them Mag- 
 yars, held high military and civil offices during 
 the late war — a war which Mr. Bowen main- 
 tains to have been on the part of the Magyars, 
 nothing but a struggle to keep the other races 
 in an oppressed and degraded condition, from 
 which enlightened and liberal Austria was fight- 
 ing to relieve them. In one of the above quo- 
 tations, Mr. Bowen says he has "considered in 
 a foot note on page 226," these facts about the 
 elevation of Kossuth, Moga, &c. 
 
 Now, let us see in what manner he has " con- 
 sidered " them. Hrabowszky, he says, " is 
 nearly allied to Count Zichy, one of the most 
 influential Magyar nobles in Hungary ! " Mr. 
 Bowen does not condescend to explain how a 
 man of an "inferior and degraded race," came 
 to be " nearly allied to one of the most influen- 
 tial Magyar nobles." " The Wallachian Moga," 
 he says, "Kossuth deposed immediately after 
 that first battle, and put Georgey, a Magyar 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 23 
 
 noble, in his place." Mr. Bowen means— if he 
 means anything, except to throw dust in the 
 eyes of his readers—that Moga was deposed be- 
 cause he was a Wallachian, and Georgey put in 
 his place, because he was a Magyar, without 
 any reference to the military talents or conduct of 
 the two generals. But how came Moga to be ap- 
 pointed, and permitted to fight the first battle of 
 the war, if the race to which he belonged was 
 " deemed inferior and degraded, and unworthy 
 of holding office ?" That is the question, and 
 Mr. Bowen's pretended answer to it, is simply 
 an insult to the common sense of his readers. 
 Schlesinger, from whom he got the fact, says 
 (vol. i., p. 81): 
 
 " Moga exposed his troops in this engagement 
 in an unpardonable manner ; and the main body 
 of the Magyar army would have been lost, had 
 not the retreat been ordered in time. On this 
 occasion, the great talent of Kossuth displayed 
 itself; with a keen penetration and discern- 
 ment, possessed only by men of highly-gifted 
 natures, he detected among thousands the man 
 worthy to take the future command of the army. 
 It was Georgey who first directed Kossuth's 
 attention to the faulty tactics of Moga. Kos- 
 suth raised Georgey to the rank of General 
 upon the field of battle, and invested him with 
 the command the following day." 
 
 Kossuth and Damianich, Mr. Bowen says, 
 were Magyarized nobles, and, " as is usual with 
 renegades, were more fanatically Magyar than 
 the Magyars themselves " ! He makes no at- 
 tempt to explain how these men of " inferior 
 and degraded races " came to be Magyarized 
 nobles, and elevated to the highest offices of the 
 State. 
 
 The fact is, that Mr. Bowen's position on 
 this subject of races in Hungary is utterly and 
 even absurdly wrong. I am at a loss to con- 
 ceive how he could retain it for a moment, after 
 reading the works from which he quotes. If 
 indeed he has read them or any of them, he 
 must know that he is wrong. He must know 
 that the other races were not slaves or serfs to 
 the Magyars, or even politically oppressed by 
 them. There was formerly a noble class and a 
 peasant class in Hungary — the noble class hav- 
 ing great and exclusive privileges. But there 
 were millions of Magyar peasants and tens of 
 thousands of nobles of Slavonic and Wallachian 
 race. By a series of legislative acts, urged on 
 by the nobles themselves, in many cases against 
 the opposition of the Austrian government, and 
 extending over a period beginning with 1832 
 and ending with 1848, the exclusive privileges 
 of the nobles were relinquished, and the peas- 
 ants raised to a perfect equality with them be- 
 
 fore the law. So far were the Croatians from 
 being oppressed, that they in fact had peculiar 
 privileges above even the Magyars, as I shall 
 show hereafter. 
 
 I cannot better illustrate the absurdity of the 
 articles in the North American than by suppos- 
 ing a parallel case, which I think will exactly 
 match that of Mr. Bowen, and will also illus- 
 trate his mode of reasoning. I will suppose a 
 Hungarian Reviewer as prejudiced against this 
 country as Mr. Bowen is against Hungary, and 
 that in the course of his profound researches, 
 he has discovered that our white population 
 consists of several distinct races, speaking dif- 
 ferent languages, viz. : the Anglo-Saxon, the 
 Dutch in New York, the Germans in Pennsyl- 
 vania, the French in Louisiana, and the Irish 
 everywhere. He takes it into his head that the 
 Anglo-Saxons, known also as Yankees and as 
 Americans, which latter title they sometimes 
 " arrogate to themselves," as Mr. Bowen says the 
 Magyars do that of Hungarians, oppress and 
 degrade the other races, and do not allow them 
 to hold office. To substantiate this position, he 
 quotes from English travellers, to show what an 
 uncivilized, vainglorious, grasping, domineer- 
 ing race the Americans are. He quotes from 
 Knickerbocker's History of New York, and 
 from Irving' s other works, from Paulding's 
 novels, from jest books, and from the speeches of 
 the St. Nicholas Society, abundant proof that 
 the Dutch mortally hate and abhor the Yan- 
 kees, and that the Yankees defraud and oppress 
 the Dutch. He refers to the Anti-Kent dis- 
 turbance, as an illustration of the way in which 
 the Dutch peasantry are trampled on by their 
 aristocratic tyrants, and relates how their strug- 
 gle for freedom was crushed by the Yankee 
 militia, led by an Anglo-Saxon officer, the sher- 
 iff. He quotes from documents and newspa- 
 pers, to show in what a state of profound igno- 
 rance the Anglo-Saxons have kept the Germans 
 of Pennsylvania, and how deeply they have 
 loaded them with public debt in order to debase 
 and crush them, at the same time " daring to 
 boast themselves as the friends of education 
 and advocates of equal laws." He quotes all 
 that has been written, so far as it will suit his 
 purpose, about the dislike entertained by the 
 French of Louisiana to the Americans, and the 
 annoyance they have experienced from the rest- 
 less, ambitious and improving spirit of the latter 
 people. He refers to the most authentic works 
 to prove that some time ago — he takes care not 
 to specify the precise period — these French 
 were dissatisfied with the American yoke, and 
 
24 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 were inclined to hail the British as deliverers ; j battle field, was, " Give 'em hell, boys ! " [See 
 and details the high-handed proceedings of the.N. A. Review, pp. 224-5-6-7, Jan. 1851, where 
 
 American General, Jackson, who kept them 
 down by terrorism, proclaiming martial law and 
 imprisoning all who opposed him. He relates 
 also, in this connection, with a convenient 
 omission of dates, the pathetic history of the 
 Acadians, who were expelled from their homes 
 by a Yankee force led by a Yankee commander. 
 Colonel Winslow. 
 
 To show how the Irish are oppressed and de- 
 based, he copies descriptions of their mode of 
 life in the cellars and garrets of our great cities 
 he anatyzes public documents, to prove that 
 vast numbers of them have been consigned to 
 jails and workhouses, by their relentless Yankee 
 masters : he cites passages from newspapers, to 
 show how ruthlessly their convents have been 
 burnt at midnight by Yankee mobs, and how 
 the same haughty oppressors have shot them 
 down in the streets of Philadelphia, and sacked 
 and destroyed their churches and dwelling- 
 houses. He culls from Native American 
 speeches and articles everything tending to 
 prove what a deep hatred exists between the 
 races, and how determined the aristocratic 
 Americans are to keep the Irish in subjection. 
 Finally, he mixes up these quotations with ex- 
 tracts from works by Smith, Brown and Jones, 
 from pamphlets and newspapers, all proving 
 conclusively that che Pequods were extermina- 
 ted, the Cherokees deprived of their lands, the 
 Seminoles hunted with bloodhounds, the tories 
 tarred and feathered, the cow-boys and skinners 
 hung, the Mormons persecuted, and the Nulli- 
 fiers, (whom he takes to be a distinct race,) 
 ground to the earth and goaded to rebellion by 
 unjust revenue laws, enacted by the domineer- 
 ing Yankees. To demonstrate the oppressed and 
 degraded condition of South Carolina, (the 
 American Croatia,) he cites the speech of Mr. 
 Pvhettinthe United States Senate, Dec. 16, 1851, 
 in which it is emphatically declared that " the 
 tyranny of this government over the South is 
 more ruthless than that of Austria which en- 
 slaved Hungary." 
 
 He proves, in the same way, by judicious quo- 
 tations, that Major Andre was executed as a 
 spy ; that Joe Smith was shot at midnight by a 
 band of Anglo-Saxon assassins ; that Gen. Lin- 
 gan was murdered by a Baltimore mob ; that 
 Washington was an ambitious rebel, so parsi- 
 monious that he sold his old war-horse when 
 his campaigns were ended ; and that Gen. Tay- 
 lor was a blood-thirsty ruffian, who hunted 
 Indians with dogs, and whose only order on the 
 
 Mr. Bowen expatiates on the atrocities of the 
 Magyars and the savage and vile character of 
 their leading generals and statesmen.] 
 
 The Hungarian reviewer might then trium- 
 phantly appeal to his bewildered readers, and 
 exclaim, almost in the words of Mr. Bowen — 
 "Behold this formidable array of authorities ! I 
 have summoned into Court a crowd of reputable 
 and unim peached witnesses, professing all forms 
 of political doctrine, whose united and harmo- 
 nious testimony can leave no doubt upon a 
 mind of ordinary capacity. I have merely used 
 their language instead of my own. Since the 
 fall of the aristocracies of Venice and Poland, 
 the Yankees in America, with few exceptions, 
 have been the most arrogant, cruel and tyran- 
 nical nobility iii the world. I have proved 
 that their leaders were corrupt and merciless, and 
 that the other races of their country were deemed 
 inferior and degraded, and unworthy of holding 
 office." And if some better informed person 
 should civilly enquire — w If this last statement 
 of yours be true, how did it happen that Jack- 
 son, of the Irish race, and Van Buren, of the 
 Dutch race, were elected Presidents, while 
 Soule, of the French race, was admitted to the 
 Senate, and Muhlenberg,of the German race, was 
 sent Ambassador to our own Court at Vienna ? " 
 — ■ the Hungarian Mr. Bowen might reply, as 
 his American prototype has done — "I do not 
 deny your facts — but X will explain them — 
 I will • consider " them. Jackson was allied by 
 marriage to an influential Anglo-Saxon family. 
 Van Buren was • deposed ' at the end of his 
 first term, and the Anglo-Saxon Harrison put 
 in his place. As for Soule and Muhlenberg, 
 they were completely Americanized, and as is 
 usual with renegades, were more fanatically 
 American than the Americans themselves ! " 
 
 This may be deemed by those who have not 
 examined the subject, an extravagant caricature 
 of Mr. Bowen's articles on Hungary. But hav- 
 ing carefully read the principal books from 
 which he quotes and misquotes, I can confidently 
 affirm that it is not exaggerated. The sketch 
 of the imaginary Hungarian reviewer's opinion 
 of this country, contains in proportion to its 
 length, more facts and fewer false inferences 
 than Mr. Bowen's statements about Hungary. 
 The reader can judge for himself whether there 
 be any difference between the logic of the two 
 reviewers so far as Kossuth, Moga, &c, on the 
 one side, and Jackson, Van Buren, &c, on the 
 other, are concerned. 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 25 
 
 MS. BOWELS ANTI-HUNGARIAN AUTHORITIES. 
 
 The " formidable array of Authorities " refer- 
 red to active, forms the main portion Of Mr. 
 Bowen's last article on Hungary, and consists of 
 a confused mass of extracts from " English, 
 Trench, German and Hungarian writers," com- 
 prising, I believe, about seventy distinct cita- 
 tions, strung together without explanation or 
 comment. These extracts, which Mr. Bowen 
 calls " a formidable array of authorities," are 
 chiefly taken from anonymous pamphlets — from 
 Austrian documents whose falsity has been fully 
 exposed by the English press — and from books 
 long ago published, relating to a condition o*f 
 things that had ceased to exist in Hungary, 
 years before the war began. The titles of ten 
 English and German books are prefixed to the 
 article — four of these were published at Vienna, 
 in 1849 and 1850, subject to the most rigid cen- 
 sorship, and while the city was in a state of 
 siege — another appeared at Presburg in 1849, 
 under the candid and impartial sanction of Hay- 
 nau and his martial law ; and of the remaining 
 five, tioo are anonymous ; one is by a notorious 
 Austrian partisan, Count Mailath ; and another 
 was published in London eleven years ago, is a 
 work of no authority whatever, and so far as 
 Mr. Bowen quotes it, does not say a word about 
 races, or relate at all to the recent condition of 
 Hungary. One only of the ten works, that of 
 Schlesinger, is of any value, and the quotations 
 from that are so perverted by omissions that 
 they convey, or seem to convey the very reverse 
 of what the author intended ; and the same 
 thing is true of the quotations from most of the 
 other respectable works whose titles are not in- 
 cluded among the ten : for Mr. Bowen quotes 
 from several books whose titles he has not pre- 
 fixed to his article. 
 
 Prominent among these "authorities" is 
 "Hungary: its Constitution and its Catastrophe. 
 By Corvinus.'" Corvinus is a great name in 
 Hungarian history ; it was the surname of the 
 famous Hunniades and of his still more famous 
 son, king Mathias Corvinus. Doubtless, many 
 of Mr. Bow r en's readers were familiar with the 
 name, and doubtless some of them have sup- 
 posed that " Corvinus," was a well-known and 
 respectable Hungarian authority. I have heard 
 of one or two who thought so. Mr. Webb, of the 
 N. Y. Courier and Enquirer, who has, without 
 acknowledgment, made use of Mr. Bowen's 
 quotations as if he had himself read the books 
 from which they are taken, speaks of " the his- 
 torian Corvinus," as if he were sorr e well-known 
 
 3 
 
 writer. Mr. Bowen relies greatly on Corvinus. 
 He makes thirteen extracts from him, which 
 cover six or seven of his thirty pages. And 
 what does the reader suppose this work to be ? 
 It lies before me as I write — an anonymous 
 pamphlet, with a green paper cover, written by 
 some English scribbler, who took " Corvinus " 
 as a nom de plume, as one would take " Junius," 
 or "Brutus," or "Publicola," or O. P. Q., or 
 X. Y. Z. It may be written by an Austrian 
 agent, by an Englishman in the Austrian ser- 
 vice (there are hundreds in the army), or by 
 some paid advocate of Metternich or Haynau. 
 The thing is too contemptible for serious notice, 
 but I will give one illustration of the way in 
 which Mr. Bowen has used even this " authori- 
 ty." Mr. Bowen's theory is, that the late war 
 in Hungary was a struggle on the part of the 
 Hungarian nobles to maintain their ancient con- 
 stitution, and the dominion which it gave them 
 over what he calls their serfs and subject races, 
 the Croatians, Slavonians, Wallachians, &c, and 
 that there was nothing republican about it. 
 It is to sustain this theory that he has arranged 
 his quotations, as well from " Corvinus " as 
 from others. " Corvinus " himself, on the first 
 page of his pamphlet, speaking of the Diet of 
 which Kossuth was the leader, and which began 
 the war, says : 
 
 " A spirit came over that Diet which no ad- 
 ministrative reforms could satisfy — a spirit 
 totally at variance with the genius of the Ancient 
 Constitution, which established its ascendency 
 by abrogating that constitution, and sought to 
 maintain it by sacrificing the monarchy. There 
 can be no greater error than to suppose that the 
 war of 1848-9 was a movement in defence of 
 the time-honored institutions, which had then- 
 roots in the laws of St. Stephen and Andreas 
 II." 
 
 Tn fact, the object of this anonymous pamph- 
 let was, to render the Hungarian war unpopular 
 in England, by showing that it was a republican 
 and democratic movement. 
 
 Another of these " authorities " is an " Offi- 
 cial List of 467 persons executed by the Hunga- 
 rian Revolutionary Government," which was 
 published at Vienna last year, in justification of 
 the cruelties of Haynau and the other Austrian 
 generals, and to throw odium on the Hunga- 
 rians. The greater portion of it was translated 
 and published in the London Times of Sept. 10th 
 and 11th, 1850, under the title of the Magyar 
 Bloody Assize, as a vindication of Gen. Haynau, 
 after the attack upon him by Messrs. Barclay & 
 Perkins's draymen. It was treated with con- 
 tempt and ridicule by the English press gener- 
 ally, and its absurd falsities exposed in the most 
 
26 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 triumphant manner. The worthlessness of the 
 thing is transparent, as I can show, merely by 
 making a few extracts. Mr. Bowen has filled 
 two pages of the North American Review with 
 quotations from it, carefully selecting those 
 which would best bear examination. Some of 
 the cases he has cited stand in immediate jux- 
 taposition with the following, which I copy, 
 word for word, from the Times, in every case 
 giving the entire statement : — 
 
 " Gyika Marian was shot at Koratzintz on the 
 20th of October, 1848, for attempting to strangle 
 one of the insurgent magistrates." 
 
 " Gligor Stank, justice of Dulcse, Arad Coun- 
 ty, was shot for hunting the lady of the manor with 
 dogs through the Jorest, with intent to kill her or to 
 do her some grievous bodily harm " (/) 
 
 " John Kowatsch, Honved, [Hungarian sol- 
 dier] of Worcse, County of Congrad, was hanged 
 on the 7th of October, 1848, for having assassin- 
 ated one of his comrades" (!) 
 
 " L. Hassinger, a Jew from Pesth, was shot on 
 the 3rd of June, for having, whilst acting as a 
 spy to the rebel army, betrayed their movements 
 to the Austrian troops." 
 
 " N. Wuinow, a peasant, was accused of having 
 murdered a Hungarian spy. He was shot at 
 Palandy in April, 1849. 
 
 " Th. Stettin, a borderer, was shot for mutiny 
 by the orders of General Bern" (!) 
 
 "A peasant, name unknown, was hanged at 
 Verschetz, in May, 1849, for killing one of the 
 rebel Hussars " (!) 
 
 " Stefan Doho and John Vorbasz, of Szgedin, 
 were in February, 1849, tried and executed at 
 Kanissa, for murdering Major Tar of the Hon- 
 veds" (!) 
 
 Three-fourths of the list are of this character. 
 The persons put to death were spies, traitors, 
 and deserters, or were convicted of murder and 
 other high crimes by the regular tribunals of 
 the country. I have quoted some of the short- 
 est instances I could find, passing over scores of 
 cases nearly as absurd. Several of those enu- 
 merated in the list, were of persons who were 
 killed by mobs, for which the Hungarian gov- 
 ernment was no more responsible than the Eng- 
 lish government was for the assault on Haynau. 
 Others were cases of murder, by individuals 
 which had nothing to do with politics; and in one 
 instance an officer was classed among the " mur- 
 dered," because he was shot at and killed by the 
 Hungarian skirmishers while marching in the 
 Austrian ranks (!) A Captain Ottstadt was put in 
 the same comprehensive category, because, hav- 
 ing been taken prisoner by the Hungarians and 
 released by the Austrians — "he died of cholera 
 24 hours after his return to his home" ! And 
 from such a document as this, Mr. Bowen culls 
 two pages of extracts to blast the reputation of 
 
 a gallant and unfortunate people, guilty of no 
 crime but that of struggling manfully for free- 
 dom and liberal institutions, against the com- 
 bined despots of Austria and Russia. 
 
 It would be tedious and superfluous for me to 
 examine separately every quotation on Mr. 
 Bowen's thirty pages, or to criticise each of his 
 twenty " authorities," with regard to most of 
 which he prudently abstains from committing 
 himself by vouching for their value, except by 
 the general assertion that they are "reputable 
 and unimpeached witnesses," in which state- 
 ment he includes the anonymous pamphleteer 
 "Corvinus," and the "official List" of Mag- 
 yar atrocities. The writers whom Mr. Bowen 
 specially endorses, either in the North American 
 or in his letters to the Daily Advertiser, are 
 Schlesinger, Pulszky, Paget, McCulloch, and 
 De Langsdorff. I shall confine my examination 
 therefore, to the quotations from these five wri- 
 ters, though the manner in which they are dealt 
 with may serve as an index to the treatment of 
 the rest. 
 
 Schlesinger is a Hungarian by birth, who has 
 long resided in Berlin, and who has written in 
 German a history of the war in Hungary. The 
 English translation of this, from which Mr. 
 Bowen quotes, was edited by Francis Pulszky, 
 ex-Secretary of State to Ferdinand, king of 
 Hungary, the late Emperor of Austria. Pulszky 
 is a man of high character and ability, thorough- 
 ly conversant with Hungarian affairs, and to 
 Schlesinger' s work prefixed a valuable introduc- 
 tion, and added several notes, correcting the oc- 
 casional inaccuracies of the text. Mr. Bowen's 
 first quotation from Schlesinger is the following. 
 [N. A. Review, Jan. 1851, p. 212.] 
 
 " The Magyar movement is widely distin- 
 guished, both by the power which called it forth 
 and the object it had in view, from all the revo- 
 lutions that convulsed Europe during the last 
 two years. The political knowledge of the Mag- 
 yars does not extend much beyond that of their 
 own constitution ; and it is remarkable with 
 what singular affection and constancy this an- 
 cient constitution, with all its defects and ab- 
 normities, has been held fast and cherished by 
 the people. Whilst all the other nations have 
 sought to enlarge more or less their representa- 
 tive constitutions, the Magyar has dreaded any 
 change in his, clinging to its very letter, as the 
 Mussulman to the words of the Koran." 
 
 Mr. Bowen's purpose in quoting this, was 
 evidently to make it appear that the Magyars 
 were clinging with stupid bigotry to an old and 
 defective constitution, simply because it was old, 
 — and in fact, the passage, as he has quoted it, 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 27 
 
 offers no other interpretation. But how far 
 such a construction would be from that intended 
 by Schlesinger, will be seen by reading the con- 
 tinuation of Mr. Bowen's quotation, which is as 
 follows: [Vol. 1, p. 114.] 
 
 " The cause of this lies, not so much in a 
 belief of its excellence, as in the long struggles 
 of the Constitutional principle against the abso- 
 lutist efforts of the Vienna Cabinet; to oppose 
 which 'the Magyars, in their Diet at Presburg, 
 had no more effective weapon than the letter of 
 their Constitution, ratified, as it has been, by the 
 coronation-oath of every successive king. In 
 this policy, the opposite parties in the Diet were 
 agreed ; indeed, for a long time past, it had been 
 the safest, nay, the only possible course. The 
 liberal Hungarian did not cling to his ancient 
 Constitution as the free citizen of the United 
 States does to his, from a conviction of its excel- 
 lence, but because he knew that the concession 
 of any single point would strengthen the absolu- 
 tist government in Vienna." 
 
 The following is more elaborately mangled. 
 It is from vol. II. pp. 88-9 of Schlesinger, and 
 may be seen as quoted, on p. 232 of the N. A. 
 Review. 
 
 " A far greater error, which must be laid to 
 the charge of the Governor and his Ministers 
 was the misapprehension of their task in refer- 
 ence to the question of nationalities. The De- 
 claration cf Independence had no meaning, un- 
 less the perfect satisfaction of all the wishes of 
 the Croats, Serbs and Wallachs, followed im- 
 mediately. The separation of Hungary from 
 Austria ought at the same time to be a bond of 
 union with the South Sclavish races. That this 
 was not easy of accomplishment, must be admit- 
 ted ; indeed it was extremely difficult to enter 
 into any kind of peaceable and conciliatory 
 relations with those nations. [Austria, more- 
 over, had cunningly prevented this, by placing its 
 creatures at the head of the hostile races. It had 
 always been impossible to enter into negotiations 
 with these men ; Jcllachich, Raiachich, Supli- 
 cacz, Theodorovich, and the rest had received far 
 too decided orders, far too brilliant promises to allow 
 this. But seeing that an understanding with 
 the leaders of the Sclaves was impossible, — and 
 knowing that numerous voices among these races 
 were beginning to raise the question of an alliance 
 with Hungary] — the Government ought, [for 
 this very reason] to have disarmed the power of 
 the leaders, by issuing a proclamation, and at 
 once conceding all the demands of the Hunga- 
 rian Sclaves, however exaggerated. No attempt 
 ou»ht to have been made to negotiate vith the 
 leaders, but the Diet should have addressed 
 themselves directly with this explanation to the 
 people. By such a step, the Declaration of In- 
 dependence would have gained in significance 
 and grandeur." 
 
 The sentences between brackets were omitted 
 by Mr. Bowcn, for very obvious reasons ; — they 
 stated the well-known truth, which he desired 
 to suppress, that the opposition to the Hunga- 
 
 rians which existed among a portion of the Scla- 
 vonic and Wallachian races, was fomented by 
 Austria, whose creatures, Jellachich, Raiachich, 
 &c, had been placed at the head of those races 
 for that very purpose. 
 
 The next quotation from Schlesinger which I 
 shall notice is fortunately a short one. [N. A. 
 R. p. 217.] 
 
 "The Hungarian revolution comprehended 
 all the elements of success — great statesmen, 
 great generals, a great nation, and a country 
 favorable to their arms. In the first French 
 revolution the people had taken up arms against 
 the king; here (at the commencement at least,) 
 a nation had risen in support of their king. [The 
 object was the same — freedom and indepen- 
 dence : but in France the people were unsup- 
 ported by the aristocracy, in Poland the aristoc- 
 racy Avere unsupported by the people — here 
 they both fought together."] Vol. II., p. 223. 
 
 The portion which I have enclosed in brack- 
 ets was omitted by Mr. Bowen, because it con- 
 flicted with his assertion that the Hungarian 
 war was not a war for freedom and independence; 
 and with his assertion that it was a struggle of 
 the aristocracy to keep the people down; whereas 
 Schlesinger, who is by far the best authority 
 that Mr. Bowen quotes, says expressly, that un- 
 like the case of Poland, the people and the aris- 
 tocracy of Hungary fought together against the 
 Austrians. Schlesinger's statement, that the 
 Hungarian nation at the commencement rose in 
 support of their king, alludes to the fact that 
 the war began with Jellachich/s invasion of 
 Hungary, under secret orders from the Emperor- 
 king, who, when interrogated by the Hunga- 
 rians, denied that he had given such orders, and 
 proclaimed Jellachich a traitor, upon which the 
 Hungarians took arms in the name of the king, 
 and drove Jcllachich out of the country. 
 
 The next quotation from Schlesinger is equally 
 decisive of Mr. Bowen's unfairness. [N. A. R. 
 p. 231] : 
 
 " [The Hungarian Envoys at all the Courts 
 started from the principle that, in their position 
 they had only to deal with the existing Govern- 
 ment ; and Teleki always stood aloof from the 
 parties in France, who were either at the helm 
 of affairs or contending for power. This alone 
 can explain the fact, that the Count was well 
 received by all the successive ministries. His 
 official notes were received, but their efficacy 
 was crippled, the reactionary party having gained 
 the upper hand, and] the French statesmen, un- 
 der pretext of a dread of socialism, considering 
 France not in a position to intervene. This 
 party, under Lamartine, had already exerted 
 their influence against Hungary, and the conse- 
 quence was, that Pascal Duprat, who had in 
 fact received his instructions from Bastidc, as 
 
28 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 agent in that country, did not leave France. In 
 June, 1819, the affairs of Hungary took a better 
 turn In the Elysee and the hotels of the minis- 
 ters ; but the overthrow of the party of the 
 Mountain again destroyed all that the emphatic 
 manifestations of public opinion had effected in 
 favor of Hungary. The very circumstance that 
 the socialists had taken part for Hungary was 
 sufficient to determine the Conservatives against 
 it. [ The Moderate party, and especially Mauguin, 
 lost no opportunity of expressing their sympathy ; 
 but at the same time they would not hear of an 
 intervention, from a dread of the Rouge party. 
 The French Government, however, again sum- 
 moned resolution, when the affairs of Hungary 
 were prosperous, to send an agent to that coun- 
 try, as well as to protest energetically against 
 Russian intervention."] Vol. II. p. 59. 
 
 The passages within brackets were suppress- 
 ed by Mr. Bowen, apparently in the hope that 
 some careless reader might suppose that the 
 portion quoted sustained his ridiculous charge 
 of Socialism and Red Republicanism against 
 the Hungarians. Schlesinger's meaning was, 
 that the French statesmen refused to interfere 
 in favor of the Hungarians, not from want of 
 sympathy, but because all their energies were 
 required at home to keep down the Socialist 
 party, which they had just overthrown, and 
 which was yet very formidable. From that 
 part which Mr. Bowen judiciously declined to 
 quote, it will be seen that the Hungarian en- 
 voy, Count Tcleki, so far from intriguing with 
 or courting the Socialists, stood aloof from all 
 parties, and was well received by all the suc- 
 cessive Ministries. The Conservatives, of whom 
 Schlesinger speaks, were the Royalists ; but the 
 Moderate party, which was Republican, though 
 opposed to the Socialists, lost no opportunity 
 of expressing their sympathy with Hungary. In 
 fact, Schlesinger's true meaning was just the 
 reverse of the apparent meaning of the passage 
 which Mr. Bowen disingenuously tore from its 
 context. 
 
 The last of Mr. Bowen's quotations from 
 Schlesinger which I shall notice, is so long that 
 I shall copy only the material portions of it, 
 omitting some irrelevant passages about Geor- 
 gey. — [N. A. Review, pp. 234-5. J 
 
 " The Parliament held secret conferences, to 
 discuss the great question how the hostile Scla- 
 vish and Wallachian races might be won over 
 to the Magyar cause. The result was * * * 
 a declaration of the equal rights of all national- 
 ities, and an amnesty to all who had borne arms 
 against Hungary, [28th July, 1849.] * * * 
 But the recognition of equal rights came a year too 
 late, for it now merely offered to the Sclavish 
 races a concession which had already been se- 
 cured to them by the Emperor of Austria, and 
 offered it moreover in the sight of their burnt 
 
 down cities, desolated villages, and desecrated 
 graves." 
 
 To the sentence I have italicized, M. Pulszky 
 affixed a note, saying that it was 
 
 "Incorrect; all the inhabitants of Hungary 
 had, since March, 1848, possessed equal rights ; 
 the Diet only gave an amnesty for the Wal- 
 lachs, Saxons, and Serbs, who were at this time 
 all subdued by the Hungarians." 
 
 This note Mr. Bowen omitted, making no 
 allusion whatever to it, and copied the incorrect 
 statement in the text, because it served his pur- 
 poses to have it appear that the Magyars had 
 granted equal rights to the other races only in 
 July, 1849, a few weeks before the war ended, 
 when he must have known that, as Pulszky 
 stated, all the inhabitants of Hungary had, since 
 March, 1848, possessed equal rights. On page 
 234 of the N. A. Review is another quotation 
 from Schlesinger, too long for me to copy, to 
 which Pulszky affixed a note containing an im- 
 portant correction, which Mr. Bowen silently 
 omits. 
 
 From Pulszky' s preface to the Village No- 
 tary, by Baron Eotvos, Mr. Bowen quotes two 
 or three paragraphs which he garbles in several 
 instances by omitting passages unfavorable to 
 A ustria. I will copy the shortest instance. 
 
 " Baron Eotvos was the leader of a third 
 party. He was imbued with the levelling ten- 
 dencies of French liberalism. The men of 
 Eotvos' school admired the theoretical perfec- 
 tion of Centralization, and vied with the Vienna 
 party in their aversion to the county institu- 
 tions, with their assemblies and elections. [But 
 the Austrian Camarilla wished to establish the 
 so-called ' Paternal Absolutism,' in the place of the 
 county institutions ; while the Eotvos party 
 dreamed of a free parliamentary government.] 
 His party considered Hungary as a tabula rasa, 
 and they endeavored in defiance of history to 
 raise a new political fabric," &c. 
 
 The passage within brackets Mr. Bowen sup- 
 presses. 
 
 Mr. Bowen's quotations from Paget are not 
 any fairer than those from Schlesinger. The 
 following is from the second volume of " Hun- 
 gary and Transylvania," pp. 229-300, Am. ed. 
 [N. A. R. p. 213.] 
 
 [ " There seems, too, to be some idea among 
 the tttes exalttes here, of an Illyrian nationality.] 
 It is no uncommon thing to hear them reckon- 
 ing up the Croats, Sclavonians, Bosnians, Dal- 
 matians, Servians, Montenegrins, and Bulgari- 
 ans, and then comparing this mass of Sclaves 
 with the three or four millions of Magyars, and 
 proudly asking why they should submit to deny 
 their language and their origin because the 
 Magyars command it. I am very far from wish- 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 29 
 
 ing this party success, though I cannot help in 
 some degree sympathizing with a people who 
 resist, when they think a stronger power is 
 willing to abuse its strength by depriving the 
 weaker of those objects — language and religion 
 — which they hold as most dear. [No one can 
 doubt how highly conducive it would be to the 
 good of Hungary that Croatia should be made 
 completely Hungarian ; or that it is disgraceful 
 to the age in which we live, that Protestants 
 should be excluded from a whole country on 
 account of their faith ; yet indubitable as are 
 these facts, it may nevertheless be very impoli- 
 tic to seek to remedy them by violent means.] 
 The act has passed, however, which declares 
 that in ten years' time no Croat shall be eligible 
 to a public office who cannot read and write the 
 ^Magyar language, and the consequence has 
 Hbeen, the creation of a feeling of hatred against 
 the Magyars, which bodes but very ill for the 
 speedy Magyarizing of the Croatian people, — 
 [I have no doubt thft some portion of this op- 
 position is connected with Russian intrigue ; 
 for it is particularly strong among members of 
 the Greek church, and it is so much the inter- 
 est of Russia to weaken Austria, by disorganiz- 
 ing her ill-united parts, that we may be sure 
 such an opportunity for- the attainment of her 
 object would not be lost."] 
 
 The passages within brackets were omitted 
 by Mr. Bowen. That at the beginning and that 
 at the end are not of much importance ; yet 
 they should have been quoted — the first as 
 showing that the boasts about the numbers of 
 the Croats, Sclavonians, &c, were not uttered 
 by the people generally, but by the tttes exalUes 
 of the small town of Agram, which Mr. Paget 
 was then visiting ; and the last, as expressing 
 his opinion that this feeling of hostility to the 
 Magyars was not altogether owing to the acts 
 of the Hungarian Diet, but was in part pro- 
 duced by Russian intrigue. The passage in the 
 middle, which Mr. Bowen suppressed, w r as, 
 however, of essential importance ; for in it Mr. 
 Paget clearly expresses his opinion that it would 
 be highly conducive to the good of Hungary, 
 tb - '- Croatia should be made completely Hunga- 
 rian. By Hungary, he means to include Croatia 
 itself, which for eight centuries, has been a part 
 of that country. Its peasantry spoke a dialect of 
 their own,which till within a few years, had been 
 wholly uncultivated ; so that when Paget wrote, 
 there were but three or four books in it. The 
 people who spoke this dialect numbered only a 
 few hundred thousands, and, of course, it was 
 as desirable that the principal language of the 
 country, the Magyar, which was spoken by 
 millions, should prevail, as that that the Eng- 
 lish should prevail over the French in Louisi- 
 ana, or over the German in Pennsylvania. The 
 allusion to the exclusion of Protestants from 
 Croatia is also very important, and I do not won- 
 
 3* 
 
 der that Mr. Bowen was unwilling to quote it. 
 It will be understood by the following passage 
 frcm the same chapter of Paget, [vol. ii. pp. 
 296-7, Am. ed.], from which Mr. Bowcn's ex- 
 tract was taken. 
 
 " Crotia and Sclavonia have the same lazes and 
 Constitution as the rest of Hungary, except in one 
 or two particulars, in which they enjoy special priv- 
 ileges. * * * * A case has lately arisen 
 with respect to one of these privileges, which 
 has given it a very unenviable notoriety. It is 
 the privilege of excluding all Protestants from the 
 2)Ossession of property, and I believe of refusing 
 them even the right of living within the boundaries 
 of the two countries. This question has been 
 mooted before the General Diet, and a more 
 tolerant law passed ; but as yet no change has 
 been effected , for the Croatians have refused to 
 sanction or adopt it." 
 
 This is very significant. More than one-half 
 of the Magyars are Protestants, nobles as well 
 as peasants, and indeed Protestantism is known 
 in Hungary as the Magyar religion. Yet Croa- 
 tia and Sclavonia had the privilege of excluding 
 all Protestants, Magyars as well as others, from 
 holding property or even from residing there ; 
 and when the General Diet of Hungary, the 
 Magyar Diet, as Mr. Bowen delights to call it, 
 passed a more tolerant law, it was nullified by 
 the bigoted Croatians ! This single fact is suffi- 
 cient to refute Mr. Bowen's repeated assertions 
 that the Magyars domineered over and oppress- 
 ed the Croatians and Sclavonians, and that the 
 late war was commenced for the purpose of 
 keeping the latter races in subjection. It is in 
 fact sufficient to explode his whole position on 
 the subject of Hungary, and, I repeat, that I do 
 not wonder that he was unwilling to quote it. 
 
 I will copy one more of Mr. Bowen's quota- 
 tions from Paget, [N. A. R., pp. 228-9.] 
 
 "One of the fundamental laws of the Saxons 
 (Germans) is the equality of every individual 
 of the Saxon nation. They have no nobles, no 
 peasants. Not but that many of the Saxons 
 have received letters of Nobility, and deck 
 themselves out in all its plumes ; yet as every 
 true Saxon will tell you, that is only as Hunga- 
 rian nobles, not as Saxons. Their municipal 
 government was entirely in their own hands ; 
 every village chose its own officers, and man- 
 aged its own affairs, without the interference 
 of any higher power. [A few years ago, how- 
 ever, a great and arbitrary change was made in 
 this institution, which though it almost escaped 
 notice at the time, has since excited the most 
 bitter complaint. The whole of this transaction 
 was managed without the consent cither of the 
 Diet or the Saxon nation. Its effects have been 
 to deprive the Saxon communities of the free 
 exercise of their privileges, and to deliver them 
 into the power of a corrupt bureaucracy, over 
 which they have little or no control."] — [Vol. k., 
 pp. 211-12, Am. cd.] 
 
30 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 Mr. Bovren omitted the latter portion of the 
 quotation, I suppose, because it showed that 
 the condition of the Saxons, as described in the 
 first portion, had been changed even before Mr. 
 Paget' s visit to them, which was about fifteen 
 years ago, and changed, too, not by the Magyars, 
 but by the arbitrary act of the Austrian Govern- 
 ment. Mr. Paget, on the same page, relates 
 that Magyar and Saxon deputies went together 
 to Vienna, to remonstrate with the Emperor 
 against these proceedings. 
 
 Among his thirty pages of citations, Mr. 
 Bo wen has one from McCulloch's Universal 
 Gazetteer, or Geographical Dictionary, which 
 through inadvertence, I presume, he cites as 
 McCulloch's " Com. Gaz.," Mr. McCulloch be- 
 ing the author of a Commercial Dictionary. 
 In examining the Eight Points of his rejoinder 
 to Mrs. Putnam, I had occasion to expose the 
 mode in which he had quoted from this same 
 Avork of McCulloch's. The following speci- 
 men will be found equally remarkable. 
 
 " The internal government of the nation is a 
 mixed monarchy and aristocracy. Laws can 
 only be enacted by the joint consent of the 
 King and the Diet ; and although the executive 
 power be said to lie with the King, yet the sov- 
 ereign has only the nomination of Lords Lieu- 
 tenant (obergespanne) of counties, and adminis- 
 trators ; since every other public officer is either 
 elected by the county itself, or named by its 
 Lord Lieutenant — a nomination, however, which 
 is often successfully disputed. * * * • * * 
 Under the kings of the reigning house, a great 
 portion of Hungary and of the annexed districts 
 was conquered from the Turks by great exertion 
 on the part of the other imperial States ; and 
 many important alterations, in the relations of 
 the King and the estates took place at different 
 times. What are called the cardinal privileges 
 of the nobility and clergy, who are looked upon 
 as equal to the nobility, have been preserved to 
 the present day, to an extent unparalleled in 
 any country in Europe. * •; ' * * * * The 
 nobles being mostly Magyars, it follows that the 
 Magyar nation has been chiefly instrumental in 
 maintaining the constitution during so many 
 centuries." — [McCulloch's Com. Gaz., (New 
 York Ed.), 1S45, pp. 1142-1144.] 
 
 I have copied the whole extract, even to a 
 comma, exactly as it stands in the North Amer- 
 ican Review, Jan., 1851, pp. 208-9. The reader 
 will notice that apparently the whole passage is 
 in McCulloch's own language, Mr. Bowen giv- 
 ing no indication that it is not. He will notice 
 also that it is stated towards the close of the 
 quotation, that the privileges of the nobility 
 have been preserved to the present day, to an 
 extent unparalleled in any country in Europe, 
 and that the only date given in connection with 
 
 the extract is 1845. My copy of McCulloch is 
 of the same edition as that which Mr. Bowen 
 uses— the New York edition, published by the 
 Harpers. On turning to it, I find that the last 
 clause of Mr. Bowen's quotation, " The nobles 
 being mostly Magyars," &c, consisting of three 
 lines, is taken from the section on the Finances 
 of Hungary, on p. 1144— the rest of the quota- 
 tion being extracted from the section on the 
 Constitution, pp. 1142-1143. I find also that 
 not a word of the quotation, except the three 
 lines from the section on the Finances, is 
 McCulloch's own language, but on the con- 
 trary, is from an Austrian document which 
 McCulloch puts in quotation marks, and which 
 he introduces in this manner : 
 
 " The following account of the Hungarian 
 constitution is given in the official report drawn 
 up for the use of the Emperor's Cabinet, by 
 Baron de Baldacci, and may be looked upon as 
 a declaration of the rights of the nation on the 
 part of the crown." 
 
 When it is known that the Hungarians, at 
 the date of that document, were engaged in a 
 contest with their king, on the subject of their 
 rights, precisely similar to that which the Eng- 
 lish House of Commons maintained so long 
 against the Stuarts, the significance of the 
 phrase I have italicized, on the part of the crown, 
 will be evident enough ; and evident enough 
 also will be the injustice of quoting against the 
 Hungarians such a document, and passing it 
 off as the statement of the impartial and intel- 
 ligent McCulloch. Mr. Bowen might, with as 
 much propriety, copy one of Hallam's quota- 
 tions from the manifestoes of Charles L, and 
 offer it to his readers as that historian's state- 
 ment of what the constitution of England really 
 was in the early part of the seventeenth century. 
 But the injustice of the quotation will be made 
 still more manifest by the following passage from 
 McCulloch's own pen, which immediately fol- 
 lows the last words of Mr. Bowen's quotation : 
 " in any country in Europe." 
 
 " Such were the claims asserted and the priv- 
 ileges allowed by the King of Hungary in 1831. 
 That the political privileges of the nobles have 
 been maintained, should, perhaps, be matter 
 of rejoicing, when the services they have recently 
 conferred on their countrymen are taken into ac- 
 count ; and still more, when they have been 
 the means of preserving what will no doubt 
 become, in the end, a really free system of gov- 
 ernment. At present [1840], except the right 
 of election, which is vested in the 267,300 no- 
 bles, there is no political privilege which the loioest 
 Hungarian does not enjoy in common with the 
 inhabitants of the other constitutional States 
 of Europe." 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 31 
 
 Now, why did Mr. Bowen suppress the above 
 passage, and especially the date of 1831? He 
 knew, for he had repeatedly admitted the fact 
 in his articles, that immense changes were ef- 
 fected in the condition of Hungary, in the years 
 that immediately succeeded 1831. Or if he had 
 forgotten his own statements, he could not have 
 failed to be reminded of the fact by McCulloch, 
 whose article on Hungary he seems to have 
 ransacked for scraps which, when detached 
 from their proper connection, would apparently 
 serve his purposes. I will quote some of the 
 passages I refer to, which it is impossible Mr. 
 Bowen could have overlooked, and to which he 
 makes not the slightest allusion. 
 
 " Of late years, the higher classes have been 
 laudably active in endeavoring to ameliorate 
 the condition of the lower orders, by the foun- 
 dation of schools, the distribution of useful 
 works, attention to the state of prisons, &c. ; 
 and their private beneficence has been effectu- 
 ally aided by the grand legislative measure 
 of 1836, which so much extended the civil 
 rights of the peasants. By the act of the Diet 
 of that year, called the ' Urbarium,' the nobles 
 gave up in principle two of the most obnoxious 
 privileges of their order — freedom from taxation, 
 and the right of being judges in their own 
 causes in manorial courts. The exemption 
 from taxation was waived, not by a voluntary 
 acceptance of burdens, which would have oc- 
 casioned a vast revolution in property, and en- 
 dangered one of the most valuable advantages 
 of the Hungarian constitution ; but by the 
 enactment that if a noble purchased a peasant's 
 holding liable to taxation, the noble should 
 continue to pay the impost. In some respects, 
 the lords were placed in a disadvantageous position 
 by the new law, as the peasants may leave, sell, 
 or transfer their holdings at will ; whereas, the 
 lord has no power over them, except that of execu- 
 tion for rent. * * * * To this decree of 
 the Diet, tohich, as a voluntary act of self-renun- 
 ciation by the nobles, has no parallel in the annals 
 of any other nation, other measures have since 
 been added of scarcely less importance. A de- 
 cree of the Diet of 1839 secures to the peasant 
 the right of disposing by will of all kinds of 
 property. In 1840, the Diet passed a bill de- 
 claring Catholics and Protestants to stand upon 
 an equal footing in contracts of marriage, neither 
 confession being suffered to impose restraints 
 upon the other, and admitting Jews to equal 
 rights with other commoners throughout the 
 kingdom." Pp. 113S-39. 
 
 These were McCulloch's statements in 1840, 
 of the condition of Hungary, and of the char- 
 acter of her nobility ; as patriotic a race of men 
 as ever existed, according to the testimony of 
 all writers on the subject except Mr. Bowen. 
 De Langsdorff, another of Mr. Bowen's authori- 
 ties, speaking of the act of the Diet of 183G, 
 says : 
 
 " This was the first breach made in the privi- 
 
 leges of the nobility ; and it was by the nobility 
 that it was made. There, where I felt only a 
 sterile emotion, generous citizens, sacrificing 
 their interests without hesitation, found the op- 
 portunity to repair a long injustice. Since that 
 time, the Hungarian nobles have walked reso- 
 lutely in that path ; it is they who for twenty 
 years have been laboring to file the chains of 
 their subjects ; it is they who, in a solemn day, 
 have willed to break them forever. — Revue cles 
 Deux Mondes, August 1, 1848, p. 402. 
 
 The solemn day to which M. de Langsdorff 
 alludes, was in March, 1848, when the last ves- 
 tiges of " feudalism " were swept away by the 
 Hungarian Diet, and -equal rights granted to all 
 the inhabitants of Hungary, without distinction 
 of race or birth. Another of Mr. Bowen's au- 
 thorities, and a highly respectable one, M. De- 
 gerando, said in 1845, in a passage quoted in 
 the N. A. Review, April, 1850, p. 329 ; 
 
 "To the Hungarian nobility belongs the 
 honor of having been the first to propose all 
 these new laws. Under the eyes of a retrograde 
 government, they are accomplishing a task, be- 
 fore which the aristocracies of every other 
 country have shrunk back. They prepare the 
 reign of equality, before the people for whose 
 good they labor have yet thought of raising; 
 their voice. * * * * Not only does this 
 aristocracy accord the rights granted to the in- 
 ferior classes, but it also despoils itself of the 
 privileges that it has possessed for ten centu- 
 ries ; it offers spontaneously to pay imposts to 
 which it has never been subjected, and breaks 
 of itself the last barrier which separates it from 
 the people." 
 
 Mr. Bowen himself, in his Peview T for Janu- 
 ary and April, 1850, admitted, though as re- 
 luctantly and as obscurely as he could express 
 it, that " for twenty years preceding the recent 
 war," beneficial changes had been going on 
 [p. 106] ; that each successive Diet, during that 
 period, passed new measures of reform [pp. 107, 
 516]; that, after 1843, only a single question 
 remained to be settled [p. 516]; and that this 
 question was settled in 1848 [p. 517] when 
 "the work of social reform" was finished — re- 
 luctantly indeed, but still finished— by Kos- 
 suth's ministry [p. 516]. The Hungarian no- 
 bility relinquished the last of their exclusive 
 privileges in March, 1848. In October, 1848, 
 seven months afterwards, the war with Austria 
 began.. And now in the face of his authorities 
 and in the face of his own admissions, let us 
 listen to Mr. Bowen's deliberate summing up 
 of his statements about Hungary in the North 
 American Be view for Jan., 1851. [pp. 238-9.] 
 
 " Since the fall of the aristocracies of Venice 
 and Poland, the Magyars in Hungary, with few 
 exceptions, have been the most arrogant, cruel 
 and tyrannical nobility in Europe. The robber 
 
32 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 barons of the middle ages did not more fully 
 merit the vengeance which sometimes overtook 
 them at the hands of their despairing vassals, 
 than did these semi-barbarous nobles the ruin 
 which h?s at length befallen them. They have 
 kept their country three centuries behind the 
 age, for the sole purpose of retaining their odi- 
 ous privileges as an order and a race. The 
 policy even of Austrian despotism was liberal 
 and enlightened, compared with theirs. They 
 were the firmest supporters, the pliant instru- 
 ments and vassals of that despotism, so long as 
 it would aid them in riveting the chains upon 
 their unhappy subjects. When that aid was 
 withdrawn, they turned fiercely against the 
 power to which they had so long submitted 
 without a murmur, and at the same moment 
 found themselves surrounded, as with a wall 
 of fire, by their revolted and desperate vassals. 
 Slowacks and Wallachians, Servians, Germans, 
 and Croatians, races separated from each other 
 by the widest differences of languages, manners 
 and religion, were now united by a common 
 hatred of the Magyars, and fought against them 
 with a long restrained thirst for vengeance, and 
 with all the energy of despair." 
 
 What an extraordinary people these Magyars 
 must be— according to Mr. Bowen. First, they 
 labored for twenty years to effect measures of 
 reform by which all their peculiar privileges 
 were given up, and by which they placed them- 
 selves on a perfect political equality with the 
 other races ; — and then, seven months after they 
 had thus voluntarily relinquished the last of 
 their privileges, " they turned fiercely against" 
 Austria because it would not " aid them in 
 riveting the chains upon their unhappy sub- 
 jects " — " their revolted and desperate vassals "! 
 It is possible, however, that these inconsisten- 
 cies may really exist, not in the conduct of the 
 Magyars, but in the memory of Mr. Bowen, 
 of the peculiar shortness of which, abundant 
 evidence was exhibited by Mrs. Putnam in the 
 Christian Examiner. The following is one of 
 the instances which she cites. In the North 
 American Review for January, 1851, p. 221, 
 speaking of the proclamation by which Jella- 
 chich, Ban of Croatia, was deprived of his office, 
 which proclamation Mr. Bowen maintained to 
 be a forgery, he said — " Towards the close of it 
 allusion is made to the fact that the emperor 
 had summoned Jellachich to come before him 
 and defend his conduct, which summons, it is 
 foolishly alleged, he had refused to obey. * * * 
 Now, it is notorious that he did appear before 
 the emperor at Innspruck, in June, as sum- 
 moned." Here, Mr. Bowen, to show the falsity 
 and absurdity of a document which does not 
 please him, says that it "foolishly alleges " that 
 Jellachich had "refused to obey 7 ' the emperor's 
 summons, when "it is notorious" that he did 
 
 iobey, Now, Mr. Bowen himself, just twelve 
 . months before, had made the very same state- 
 ment which he here condemns as having been 
 "foolishly alleged," and had himself denied 
 this "notorious" interview! In the N. A. 
 Review for January, 1850, p. 124, he said : 
 
 " The emperor, who, in the middle of May, 
 had secretly left his capital and taken refuge at 
 Innspruck, temporized at first; but as the conduct 
 of the Czechs at Prague grew more outrageous, 
 he became more hostile to the Sclavonian cause, 
 and summoned the Ban to meet him in the 
 Tyrol, and to give an account of his conduct. 
 Jellachich not only refused, but attended the 
 Sclavonian Diet, which he had called at Agram, 
 where he was formally elected Ban by that 
 assembly, having hitherto held his office by im- 
 perial appointment. The emperor then denounced 
 him as a rebel, and ordered him; to be deprived of 
 all his offices and titles." 
 
 Mr. Bowen's articles on Hungary abound in 
 inconsistencies of this kind, for it is only by such 
 inconsistencies that the facts which he encoun- 
 ters in the course of his argument could be made 
 to bend in accommodation to his theories. Mrs. 
 Putnam's exposure of them will well repay 
 perusal not only by its extraordinary learning, 
 but as one of the best instances in our literature 
 of candid, sagacious and triumphant criticism. 
 
 In closing this review of the articles of Mr. 
 Bowen, I can honestly say that I have not half ex- 
 hausted the record of his perversions, plagiarisms 
 and falsifications. To expose them all would, in 
 fact, require a considerable volume, for Mrs. 
 Putnam's assertion that " there is hardly a sen- 
 tence in his principal article in which an. error 
 is not either expressed or implied," is literally 
 true. I do not believe that there can be found 
 elsewhere in the English language in the same 
 compass, so many blunders, so many falsehoods, 
 so much literary dishonesty. Yet it was with a 
 consciousness of these crimes against the truth, 
 that Mr. Bowen put on an air of righteous indig- 
 nation, and charged Mrs. Putnam with false- 
 hood, and with having " deliberately forged his- 
 torical statements, in order to damage his repu- 
 tation and deprive him of office." No wonder 
 such words were so ready to his lips, when the 
 things they signify were so familiar to his mind. 
 
 MR. BOWEN S DEFENCE OF HIS ARTICLES. 
 
 The greater part of the foregoing remarks on 
 Mr. Bowen's articles appeared in the Boston 
 Atlas, last winter. My last communication was 
 handed to the editors of that paper on Jaa. 25, 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 33 
 
 1851, but did not appear till February 3. On 
 February 6, the overseers of Harvard University 
 were to meet for the purpose, among other 
 things, of confirming or rejecting Mr. Bowen's 
 appointment to the Professorship of History 
 which he had held for some months. On the 
 morning of that day, a letter from Mr. Bowento 
 the editors of the Atlas, appeared in that paper 
 as a reply to my criticisms. It may be supposed 
 to contain all that Mr. Bowen had to say in de- 
 fence of himself, and in justice to him, 1 shall 
 republish it entire, with the exception of a few 
 portions of a merely personal nature, and of a 
 long appeal to the newspapers to let him alone 
 for the future, so far as the war in Hungary is 
 concerned. 
 
 I have indicated by figures some passages, 
 remarks on which will be found below. 
 To the Editors of the Atlas : 
 
 Gentlemen : — As you have devoted twelve or 
 fourteen columns of your paper, within the last 
 few weeks, to severe comments upon my conduct 
 and writings, I will ask the favor of you to give 
 me about one-tenth part as much space for a few 
 remarks in reply. 
 
 Little more than a year ago, I published an 
 article, in which, while severely censuring the 
 conduct and policy of Austria, I advocated to 
 the best of my ability the cause of the Hunga- 
 rian " subject races," of Slavonian, Wallachian, 
 and German descent — about eight millions in 
 number, who had recently broken their chains 
 and risen up fiercely against half a million of 
 Magyar nobles, who had held them in servitude 
 for nearly eight centuries, and had recently 
 crowned, their highly oppressive treatment of 
 them by making it penal for them to speak their 
 own language. This article gave great offence 
 to a few Magyar and Polish nobles resident in 
 this country ; and through some penny newspa- 
 pers (1) they published such bold denials of the 
 truth of history in regard to it, and such scur- 
 rilous attacks upon the character of its author, 
 that I was obliged to write a second article, (in 
 April, 1850,) in which the testimony adduced 
 in support of the allegations contained in the 
 former one, was so complete and satisfactory that 
 no doubt remained upon the minds of intelligent 
 persons, and no further attempt was made for 
 seven months to convict me of holding anti-re- 
 publican sentiments, or the N. A. Review of 
 making historical blunders. (2) But within the 
 last three months, these attempts have been 
 renewed with so much acrimony, and carried on 
 to so great an extent, that I have been again 
 forced to break silence, though very reluctantly, 
 and to produce still more testimony against the 
 cause of the Magyar aristocrats, and in favor of 
 their insurgent, and now triumphant subjects, 
 their former serfs and slaves. This I did in two 
 letters to the Boston Daily Advertiser, and in an 
 article in the N. A. Review for January last. In 
 the latter, I summoned into court a cro w d of wit- 
 nesses, English, French, German, and Hunga- 
 rian, professing all forms of political doctrine, 
 
 whose united and harmonious testimony can 
 leave no doubt upon a mind of ordinary capa- 
 city, however unwelcome the truth may be, or 
 how obstinate soever the bias by which its re- 
 ception at an earlier day was prevented. The 
 article is little more than a string of citations 
 from authorities which few will be hardy enough 
 to dispute. By arranging and linking together 
 these extracts, I merely told the story of the 
 civil war in Hungary over again, only using the 
 language of a crowd of reputable and unim- 
 peached witnesses, instead of my own ; and it 
 may safely be left to the reader to decide which 
 form of the statement is more injurious to the 
 Magyars. 
 
 Some of these witnesses were Magyars, and 
 their testimony was, consequently, of great 
 weight. The explicit admissions of an opponent, 
 every one knows, form the most valuable and 
 unimpeachable kind of evidence. Schlesinger 
 was the chief witness of this class. (3) When 
 his testimony was first adduced, in my first 
 letter to the Advertiser, I said, speaking of his 
 book : " Of course the work contains many extrava- 
 gant assertions and perversions of fact, designed 
 to procure sympathy for the Magyars in other 
 lands ; but as the book was designed for circu- 
 lation in Germany and England, it also contains 
 many admissions and frank acknowledgments 
 which are not calculated to favor that cause in 
 Republican America. Want of space obliges 
 me to restrict my citations from it ; but enough 
 may be gleaned to confirm my general position 
 that the war in Austria teas a war of races, first 
 waged among the Hungarians themselves, and 
 not a revolt of the whole nation against Aus- 
 tria." 
 
 And, to "prevent all caviling," in a note to 
 the article in the Review, I added : "To save 
 space, Ave have been obliged to make the ex- 
 tracts as brief as possible ; but the omissions are 
 indicated, and tlie exact references to the volumes 
 and pages will enable any reader to verify them 
 with little difficulty. '\i) Yet your correspondent, 
 R. C, who has occupied eleven mortal columns 
 of your paper with an attempt to answ r er my 
 articles, has actually devoted a large portion of 
 this large space, — nearly the whole of his last 
 communication, — to very superfluotis proof that 
 these Magyar waiters, (5) Schlesinger particu- 
 larly, make many other assertions, besides those 
 which I had cited— these others being very fa- 
 vorable to the Magyar cause. Of course they 
 did ; no attentive reader of my articles could 
 doubt the fact ; the few sentences just quoted 
 indicate it very clearly- The fact only strength- 
 ens my argument. With all their predilection 
 for the Magyar cause, which was their own 
 cause ; with all their rash assertions in favor of 
 this cause, their candor and love of justice, as 
 R. C. would say, compelled thern to make ad- 
 missions enough to justify nearly every one of my 
 statements, R. C. need not have spent a month, 
 as he says he has done, in painful study of my 
 articles, and of the authorities to which I refer- 
 red him, for the purpose of pointing out omis- 
 sions, the places of which I had carefully indi- 
 cated throughout ; any reader of common in- 
 telligence, with the books at hand, might have 
 pci't'ormed Pv, C/s month's work in fifteen min- 
 
34 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 utes. The volume and the page were given ; 
 and asterisks, or some other mark, showed just 
 where he was to look for the omitted passage, 
 which passage itself proved that it was quite 
 irrelevant to the point at issue, viz : that the 
 Magyars themselves admitted nearly all that I 
 had asserted respecting them. That they also 
 said something else, in defending their own 
 cause, was a quite irrelevant fact, with which I 
 had nothing to do. That they did say such 
 other things was a fact which, in general terms, 
 I had already communicated to the reader ; and 
 I had also told him just where he might find 
 them. (6) 
 
 I had also quoted from high official authority, 
 accounts of eight brutal judicial murders, com- 
 mitted by the Magyar revolutionists, two of the 
 victims being priests, and the third a woman sev- 
 enty years of age. Without venturing to ques- 
 tion one of these statements — nay, seeming to 
 admit by implication that these accounts were 
 correct, or that they were the best substantiated 
 of the lot, R. C. objects that the list from which 
 they are taken also contains accounts of many 
 other cases, some of which, he thinks, are of 
 doubtful authenticity. Very well; I did not 
 quote one of these doubtful cases. I cited only 
 those about which there appears to be no doubt ; 
 for R. C, with all his "learning and ability," 
 and a month's study, does not venture to ques- 
 tion one of them. Were these unfair citations 
 on my part ? (7) 
 
 I am further charged with citing from Mc- 
 Culloch's Gazetteer, a statement which McCul- 
 loch makes, not on his own unsupported author- 
 ity, but on that of Baron Baldacci ; and R. C.'s 
 commentary on this important fact would lead 
 the careless reader to infer that McCulloch cited 
 the passage only for the purpose of confuting 
 it. But no such thing ; McCulloch adopts it as 
 his own, leaving it to be implied that it was the 
 best account of the matter which he could find. 
 As his whole work was a professed compilation 
 from the highest and latest authorities that he 
 could obtain, and as in this case he gives not 
 only the name, but the exact words, of his au- 
 thority, one would think that the passage was 
 suited, above all others, for fair citation. (8) 
 
 The charge of plagiarism that is brought 
 against me, by one who admits that five- sixths 
 of my article were not borrowed from any 
 writer, and that the other sixth, though founded 
 on the statements of fact contained in a French 
 Review, was so written that not one sentence of it 
 was a literal translation from the original, but 
 that the whole was a restatement of the facts in 
 my own language, — this charge, I say, may be 
 quietly put aside without explanation or de- 
 fence. Full credit was given in the beginning 
 of my article to the French writer for the aid 
 that he had rendered. (9} 
 
 As your correspondent was seemingly unwil- 
 ling to close so long a communication without 
 adducing a particle of new testimony upon the 
 subj ect, while I had brought forward a cloud of 
 witnesses, he copies, from an old communication 
 to the vilest penny newspaper in New York, a 
 few sentences of vague denunciation of my arti- 
 cle, which he says were written by a well 
 known Polish Count, now resident in this coun- 
 
 try. It is quite likely that he did write them ; 
 I should be much surprised if one of the Polish 
 nobility, who boasts that he held for some years 
 an important office in the Russian Ministry, and 
 stood high in favor with the Emperor Nicholas, 
 — favor which he earned by publishing at Paris, 
 in 1834, a harsh attack upon the principles and 
 conduct of his own countrymen, who had then 
 recently been engaged in their memorable strug- 
 gle for freedom, — did not give his suffrage very 
 heartily in favor of half a million of Magyar 
 nobles, who endeavored to put down a rebellion 
 of eight millions of their own hereditary bonds- 
 men. Here in America, such testimony is sure 
 to be appreciated at its true value. (10) 
 
 As an offset to this remarkable voucher of the 
 genuine republicanism of the Magyars, I will 
 now cite some testimony that came to me, quite 
 unsolicited and unexpected, about two months 
 ago. In November last, a gentleman whom I 
 had never seen, though his name was familiar 
 to me, came to my house, bringing a note from 
 one of the most distinguished clergymen in 
 Boston, introducing him as " a learned Hunga- 
 rian, who, having read your article in the N. A. 
 Review, expresses his admiration at the extent 
 and accuracy of your acquaintance with the 
 history of his country, and with the causes of 
 the late revolution." Of Sclavonic descent, 
 born and educated in Hungary, which he quit- 
 ted for the last time only in January, 1850, and 
 having held high academical office, for which 
 his acquisitions admirably fitted him, while his 
 profession debarred him from taking up arms, 
 he seemed qualified above all others in this 
 country to form and express a fair and unbiassed 
 opinion as to the merits of the respective parties 
 to the contest. At the request of several gen- 
 tlemen in Boston, he had procured and care- 
 fully read my article on the War of Races, and 
 the one in reply to it in the last number of the 
 Christian Examiner, in order that he might in- 
 form them which gave the more faithful and 
 trustworthy account of the whole matter. He 
 had expressed to them his opinion, without re- 
 serve ; and they will doubtless be willing to say 
 what that opinion was, if their testimony should 
 be needed. The following is what he told me, 
 as I reduced it to writing at the time. 
 
 He said, " I thought no one who had not 
 been resident at least thirty yeaiss in Hungary, 
 could have given as truthful a sketch as yours 
 of the nature of the war in that country. It was 
 ' a war of races ;' it was a rebellion of the long 
 down-trodden and oppressed Slavons and Wal- 
 lachians against their insolent and cruel mas- 
 ters, the Magyars. Not a Slowack peasant join- 
 ed the Magyar army, except by compulsion. 
 Three of my own brothers were in this predica- 
 ment : they were told, ' enlist, or you must die ;' 
 they did enlist, and were all killed. Many 
 other Slowacks were in this way driven into the 
 ranks, but all took the first opportunity to de- 
 sert to the Austrians. The Austrian Emperor 
 had always, to the full extent of his power, be- 
 friended the poor Slavon and Wallachian peas- 
 ants, and protected them against the Magyar 
 nobles ; the Austrian government was, there- 
 fore, very popular among them. After the rev- 
 olutions at Vienna and Pesth, the poor peasants 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 35 
 
 were in despair; they were abandoned to the 
 dominion and wrath of the Magyars, who could 
 now tyrannize over them without restraint. 
 They sent one or two deputations to St. Peters- 
 burg, to implore help from the Russian Emper- 
 or. When the Austrian column, under Gen. 
 Schlich, and especially when the Russians of 
 Paskiewitsch's army, passed through my own 
 town, I saw that they were received with the 
 utmost enthusiasm. The common people turned 
 out in great numbers, and many of them actu- 
 ally kissed the feet of the officers and soldiers, 
 as their deliverers. I was, myself, in 1848, 
 apprehended in Pesth for some remarks made 
 in a coffee-house about the justice of putting 
 all four languages on a par, and not forcing the 
 Magyar tongue upon those who hated it ; for 
 this offence, I was imprisoned three months. 
 The Magyars sent commissioners into the Slow- 
 ack counties, who, with the aid of the troops, 
 acted in the most insolent and barbarous man- 
 ner. Kossuth was ennobled because he had re- 
 ceived a university education ; his parents were 
 peasants. He became Magyarized, as some of 
 the poor Slowacks did, who loved office and 
 emolument better than their race; for no one 
 not Magyarized could expect any preferment. 
 They were nobiles Magyarisati, or Magyarized 
 nobles. I tell these these things to my own 
 detriment and peril, knowing how much the 
 sympathy of Americans has been excited on 
 false pretences for the Magyars ; but I am a 
 minister of Christ, and must tell the truth. 
 Here is a copy of the Christian Examiner for 
 November, in which you will perceive I have 
 underscored very many passages in the Magyar 
 article, and put against them a mark signifying 
 falsehood ; while at the end of nearly all the 
 extracts made in it from your article I have 
 written rede." 
 
 So far the Sclovack clergyman. I had not in- 
 tended to print his testimony, which has been 
 lying in my desk for nearly two months ; for it 
 seems to me to be of very little importance, in 
 comparison with the positive and complete evi- 
 dence from official documents, which I have 
 cited in my articles in the Review. But as the 
 coarsely expressed opinion of a Polish noble- 
 man converted into a Russian Minister of State, 
 is so confidently cited in favor of the Magyar 
 aristocrats, I now offer the direct testimony of a 
 Hungarian clergyman in favor of those poor 
 Slavonian peasants whom Count Gurowski treats 
 with lofty disdain. Your readers can decide 
 which is the more trustworthy witness of the 
 two. 
 
 And now, having put my authorities in the 
 van, I beg permission to disappear behind them, 
 and to hope that the pitiless storm of abuse, 
 which has been beating upon me for the last 
 fourteen months, may in future be directed 
 against such haters of liberty and advocates of 
 despotism as Lamartine, Pulszky, Lord Brough- 
 am, Rey, Schlesinger, and a dozen others, whese 
 evidence I have cited. I fear the poor Slovack 
 clergyman now brought forward will get his 
 full share of it. (11) 
 
 * * # # * * * 
 
 Francis Bowen. 
 
 Cambridge, Feb. 4, 1851. 
 
 (1) The truthfulness of the impression which 
 Mr. Bowen here seeks to convey, that his attack 
 on the Hungarians gave offence only to " a few 
 Magyar and Polish nobles resident in this coun- 
 try," and that the criticisms upon it were made 
 " through some penny newspapers," may be 
 inferred from the fact that it was criticized edi- 
 torially by the Boston Atlas, the Boston Tran- 
 script, the New York Tribune, the New York 
 Evening Post, the Washington Republic and 
 other equally respectable journals. "Whether 
 or not their articles were written by Magyar or 
 Polish nobles, I have no means of knowing, 
 but presume that such was not the case. 
 
 (2) The statement that the testimony in Mr. 
 Bowen's second article was " so complete and 
 satisfactory that no doubt remained upon the 
 minds of intelligent persons," may be true un- 
 der a peculiar definition of "intelligent per- 
 sons ; " but as Mrs. Putnam expressly states in 
 the Christian Examiner that it was this very 
 second article which induced her to write her 
 reply, and as that reply was written within the 
 seven months to which Mr. Bowen refers, it is 
 evident that there was an attempt during that 
 period " to convict the North American Review 
 of making historical blunders." 
 
 (3) " Some of these witnesses were Magyars 
 — Schlesinger was the chief witness of this 
 class." The writers whom Mr. Bowen was 
 charged with garbling or perverting, besides 
 Schlesinger, are De Langsdorff, Robertson, 
 Coxe, Gibbon, McCulloch, Corvinus, Paget, 
 Pulszky and Mrs. Putnam. Of these Pulszky 
 is the only Hungarian, and even he is not a 
 Magyar. Mrs. Putnam says he is of Slavonic 
 descent. Nor is Schlesinger a Magyar. He is 
 of German descent and though, born in Hun- 
 gary, has for many years resided in Germany, 
 chiefly at Berlin. His book was written in 
 German and published in Germany. The au- 
 thor, in fact, was no way identified with the 
 Magyars or their cause. Nor were all the 
 other authors whom Mr. Bowen garbled favora- 
 ble to the Hungarians. Corvinus and De Langs- 
 dorff are decidedly hostile to them, yet in quot- 
 ing from even these writers, Mr. Bowen omitted 
 all that was favorable to the Magyars, though 
 the omission frequently left the quotation in 
 such a state that it conveyed a meaning directly 
 opposite to that which the writer intended. 
 
 (4) " The omissions are indicated, and the exact 
 references to the volumes and pages will enable any 
 reader to verify them with little difficulty." This 
 " little difficulty " may be understood from the 
 
36 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 fact that of the ten books whose titles afe pre- 
 fixed to Mr. Bowen's last article in the North 
 American, seven are in German, and can be ob- 
 tained in this country only by sending a special 
 order to Europe for them. The three other 
 works are in English. Of two of these, I could 
 find no copies in Boston or Cambridge and those 
 which I at length used were imported expressly 
 for the purpose of "verifying" Mr. Bowen's 
 quotations. As to the third work, the only copy 
 I -could hear of, belonged to the Library of 
 Harvard University and was, when I enquired 
 for it, in Mr. Bowen's possession. Yet, says 
 Mr. Bowen, any reader can verify my quotations 
 with little difficulty ! 
 
 (5) The communication to which Mr. Bowen 
 here refers, treated of his quotations from "Cor- 
 vinus," the Austrian " Official List," Schles- 
 inger, Paget the English traveller, Pulszky, 
 MeGulloch and De Langsdorff— and of no oth- 
 ers. Of these, Pulszky is the only one whom 
 Mr. Bowen could possibly suppose to be a 
 Magyar, 
 
 (6) This is Mr. Bowen's whole reply to the 
 charge of garbling his authorities. It will be 
 seen that with his customary artfulness, he en- 
 deavors to make his readers believe that it was 
 only Magyar writers whom he was charged 
 with perverting — and that he attempts no de- 
 fence of his fraudulent quotations from Robert- 
 son, Coxe, Gibbon, Paget, De Langsdorff, &c. 
 The substance of his apology is that he omitted 
 only "irrelevant" matter — which is not true; 
 as the reader can satisfy himself by referring 
 back to the specimens of his mode of quoting 
 on pages 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, &c, of this 
 pamphlet. Mr. Bowen might as reasonably 
 attempt to prove that the Scriptures authorized 
 suicide, by quoting the texts, " Judas went and 
 hanged himself — go thou and do likewise" — and 
 then justify his citation by pleading that he 
 had omitted only " irrelevant " passages. If 
 he had said of some poem he was criticising in 
 his Review, " This poem excels the Excursion 
 and rivals Paradise Lost — in length, if in no 
 other quality :." he would hardly consider the 
 poet justified in quoting the North American 
 as authority for the opinion that his work " ex- 
 cels the Excursion and rivals Paradise Lost " — 
 on the ground that he had omitted only some- 
 thing "quite irrelevant" and that "the ex- 
 plicit admissions of an opponent, every one 
 knows, form the most valuable and unimpeach- 
 able kind of evidence." Yet this is precisely 
 the mode in which Mr. Bowen has cited author- 
 
 ities against the Hungarians, and this is the 
 sort of apology which he deliberately offers for 
 doing so. 
 
 (7) I will ask the reader to look back to page 
 26, and then say if he ever saw a more flimsy 
 or more disingenuous reply than this. Mr. 
 Bowen, to prove that Kossuth and his associ- 
 ates were bloody and merciless tyrants, brings 
 forward an Austrian official document contain- 
 ing a statement of several hundred cruel acts 
 which it was alleged had been committed by 
 the Hungarian government. To throw odium 
 on the Hungarians Mr. Bowen quotes from this 
 document the cases which appear to him most 
 likely to serve his purpose. Commenting on his 
 quotations, I said "the worthlessness of the 
 thing is transparent," and quoted entire cases 
 (some of which stood side by side with those 
 quoted by Mr. Bowen) to show that the persons 
 put to death were criminals-— assassins, spies 
 and deserters, who were executed by order of 
 the regular military and civil tribunals. Yefr 
 Mr. Bowen says that I did not venture to ques- 
 tion one of the cases he had quoted, and coolly 
 asks, " were these unfair citations on my part ?" 
 He endeavors to make it appear that my objec- 
 tions were, that some of the cases " are of 
 doubtful authenticity," and affirms that he 
 cited only those about which there appears to 
 be no doubt." My objection was that nine- 
 tenths of the cases stated by the Austrian docu- 
 ment were on the face of them, those of criminals 
 who, if executed, were executed justly and legal- 
 ly, or of persons put to death by mobs for which 
 the Hungarian government was no more respon- 
 sible than the American government was for 
 the murder of Joe Smith, the Mormon. Noth- 
 ing could be meaner or more unjust than to cull 
 out the most plausible passages from such a 
 document, and hold them up as " high official 
 authority," that Kossuth and his associates 
 were tyrants and murderers. 
 
 (8) McCulloch cited the passage, as he ex- 
 pressly says, because it was " a declaration of 
 the right of the nation on the part of the crown." 
 And he immediately proceeds to state, in his 
 own language, facts which do confute the infer- 
 ences that Mr. Bowen sought to establish by 
 quoting the langiiage of Baron Baklacci. The 
 statement of these facts Mr. Bowen suppressed, 
 and substituted in their place a scrap taken from 
 another section of McCulloch's article. If the 
 passage from Baron Baldacci " was suited above 
 all others for fair citation, because McCulloch 
 gives the name as well as the words of his au- 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 37 
 
 thority," why did not Mr. Bo wen. give tlie name 
 as well as the words ? Why did he omit even 
 the quotation marks, by which McCulloch had 
 carefully distinguished the extract, and refer 
 entirely to him as authority for the statement ? 
 
 (9) This paragraph is meant for a reply to 
 the charges [see ante, pp. 4, 5, 6] of plagiarism 
 from the writers in the Revue des Deux Mondes. 
 Instead of saying as it now reads, " of the 
 sixty pages of that article, at least fifty are 
 taken directly from the Revue, " &c. — I 
 inadvertently wrote in the Boston Atlas, 
 " of the sixty pages of that article, there are 
 not fifty which are not taken directly from the 
 Revue," &c. I did not perceive that the strict 
 grammatical meaning of this, was the reverse of 
 what I intended. But, as elsewhere I had ex- 
 plicitly enough stated that the " War of Races " 
 was throughout a plagiarism from De Langs - 
 dorff and Desprez, it does not seem to me pos- 
 sible that Mr. Bowen could have really mistaken 
 my meaning, as he pretends to have done. I 
 did not admit that " five-sixths of his article 
 were not borrowed from any writer," nor did I 
 admit that the other sixth " was so written 
 that not one sentence of it was a literal transla- 
 tion from the original." On the contrary, I 
 quoted several passages in which there were 
 dozens of sentences literally translated. The 
 "full credit" given to MM. De Langsdorff and 
 Desprez consisted in saying — "we depend for 
 information chiefly on M. Degerando's book, 
 and on a series of excellent articles contributed 
 by E. de Langsdorff and H. Desprez to the 
 Revue des Deux Mondes." [N. A. Review, 
 p. 79.] I have shown, in preceding pages, that 
 these "excellent articles," were depended on 
 for something more than " information." 
 
 (10) This is an amusing specimen of Mr. 
 Bowen's peculiar mode of reasoning. A Polish 
 nobleman who was opposed to the attempt which 
 the Polish nobility made to throw off the yoke 
 of Russia, must of course, he favorable to a sim- 
 ilar attempt on the part of the Magyars ! And 
 a Russian Minister, high in favor with the em- 
 peror Nicholas, must also, of course, be favora- 
 ble to the Magyars, ichom the Emperor sent an 
 army to subdue ! " Here in America such reason- 
 ing is sure to be appreciated at its true value." 
 Mr. Bowen very well knows that Count Gurow- 
 ski is a republican in sentiment, and that he is 
 neither a Magyar, nor a partisan of the Mag- 
 yars, though with all his Sclavonic partialities he 
 is too candid to deny, that, in their war with 
 
 Austria, they were fighting for freedom and 
 republican institutions. 
 
 (11) In reply to the "testimony" of this 
 " Slovack clergyman," whom Mr. Bowen, it 
 will be observed, takes good care not to name, it 
 is only necessary to enlarge a little Mr. Bowen's 
 own statement, and add a few particulars which 
 he saw fit, judiciously enough, to omit. Per- 
 haps he forgot them. They are these. Some- 
 time previous to November, 1850, this " Slovack 
 clergyman" arrived in this country from Eng- 
 land, and represented himself as on a mission 
 to obtain contributions for the assistance of the 
 Unitarians of Hungary. He stated that his 
 obj ect had been favorably regarded by the Uni- 
 tarians of England, and that he had received 
 pecuniary assistance from them on account of 
 it. He was well received in Boston and its 
 neighborhood, and obtained from Unitarian 
 gentlemen a considerable sum of money for 
 the use of the Unitarian churches in Hungary. 
 He called on Mr. Bowen, as we have seen, and 
 expressed himself delighted with his articles on 
 Hungary. He called on persons who differed 
 from Mr, Bowen in opinion, and was equally 
 delighted with the soundness of their views. 
 Mr. Bowen appears to have intended to use his 
 " testimony " in his letters to the Boston Daily 
 Advertiser, which were published in the last 
 week of November, 1850. In one of those let- 
 ters he alludes to this " Slovack clergyman" as 
 " my informant," in a way which shows that 
 the testimony had been inserted, and then has- 
 tily suppressed. Why it was suppressed, may 
 be conjectured from the fact, that just before 
 Mr. Bowen's communication appeared in the 
 Advertiser, letters were received in Boston 
 from well-known Unitarians in England, con- 
 veying information about the character and 
 conduct of this " Slovack clergyman," the re- 
 ceipt of which was speedily followed by his 
 disappearance from the eyes of those who had 
 been accustomed to behold him. With him 
 also disappeared the money which had been 
 contributed for the benefit of the Unitarians of 
 Hungary. The last certain intelligence that I 
 have of him is, that not long after his detection 
 by the Unitarians, he was confronted and ex- 
 posed by one of his own countrymen, who 
 found him, in a neighboring town, endeavoring 
 to pass himself off as a Univcrsalist, and dis- 
 coursing unctuously upon the progress of Uni- 
 versalism in Hungary. I have no doubt that if 
 Mr. Bowen had charged the Magyars with can- 
 nibalism, this man would have testified that he 
 
38 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 had seen them dining on the bodies of Slovacs, 
 Croatians, Wallachians, &c. Neither have I 
 any doubt that Mr. Bowen speaks the truth, 
 when he says that he had not intended to print 
 his testimony — for he knew perfectly well its 
 utter worthlessness. It is to be regretted that 
 he did not adhere to his intention, or at least 
 not depart from it on the very eve of the meet- 
 ing of a body which was to decide whether he 
 should retain or be rejected from a respectable 
 and lucrative professorship. Such testimony 
 as that of this " Slovack clergyman," should 
 not have been brought forward in so confident 
 a manner, at such a moment. I need scarcely 
 say that it is a tissue of falsehood from begin- 
 ning to end. 
 
 Before taking final leave of Mr. Bowen' s arti- 
 cles on Hungary, it may be worth while to re- 
 mark here, as a significant characteristic of 
 them, that whenever he has occasion to speak 
 of a man with a title, a Prince, a Count, a 
 Baron, &c, it is invariably with marked respect 
 — especially if the person so distinguished be a 
 partisan of despotism. The putting to death of 
 such a man he appears to regard as a crime al- 
 most too horrible to be thought of, but for ple- 
 beians who suffer a similar fate he expresses 
 little sympathy. He never alludes to the deaths 
 of Count Lamberg and Count Latour without a 
 visible shudder, or without applying the most 
 severe epithets to the deed. But of the brave 
 and honest Hungarian General, Damianich, he 
 says:— [N. A. R., Jan., 1851, p. 226]— " It is 
 some consolation to know that this ruffian was 
 one of the insurgent generals hanged at Arad 
 after the surrender of Georgey." The great 
 leaders of European republicanism, even the 
 most illustrious in character and ability, are 
 never mentioned without a sneer. Lamartine 
 he speaks of as " our poor, phrase -making \ gasco- 
 nading friend Lamartine" — Mazzini, whom it 
 is charitable to suppose that Mr. Bowen is really 
 as ignorant of, as he appears to be — is dismissed 
 with brief contempt as " a veteran conspirator " 
 — to conspire against the despots of Europe 
 being, with Mr. Bowen, an unpardonable crime. 
 Garibaldi, the Italian patriot hero, he calls " a 
 leader of brigands." Kossuth, Mr. Bowen treats 
 still more vilely. He never mentions the illus- 
 trious Hungarian without a feeble sneer, or a 
 mean insinuation. He calls him " a Slovac 
 lawyer," " a demagogue and radical of the low- 
 est stamp," "a fanatic and ultraist," "a flaming 
 patriot," and a "renegade." He even descends 
 so low as to rake up a calumny Avhich appeared 
 
 in the English newspapers during the Hunga- 
 rian war, (and was immediately and conclu- 
 sively refuted,) to the effect that Kossuth, in 
 conjunction with Georgey, had murdered Count 
 Zichy, and, as Mr. Bowen phrases it, had "rob- 
 bed the house of their victim after his execu- 
 tion, and carried off from it some diamonds, 
 emeralds and other articles of costly jewelry." 
 In his anxiety to defame Kossuth, Mr. Bowen 
 takes special pains to explain to his readers that 
 " the accusation was, that the Magyar leaders 
 devoted these valuables to their own uses, and 
 did not put them into the treasury of their 
 party."— [N. A. K.. Jan., 1851, p. 227]— That is 
 to say, "the accusation was," that Kossuth is 
 not only a murderer, but a thief! 
 
 Mil. WEBB S ATTACK ON THE HUNGARIANS. 
 
 Mr. James Watson Webb, who is sometimes 
 called Colonel, and sometimes, I believe, Gen- 
 eral W ebb, the editor of the New York Courier 
 and Enquirer, printed as a supplement to his 
 paper of April 11, 1851, a very long and viru- 
 lent attack u- on the Hungarian cause, in which 
 he said, " Our aim will be to show that Kossuth 
 and his associates are entitled to none of our 
 sympathy and but little of our respect * * * 
 and that there is cause for every Republican 
 heart to throb with joy instead of being shrouded 
 in grief, that the war in Hungary terminated 
 in the overthrow of Kossuth and his associates, 
 in their heartless attempt to achieve their own 
 independence of Austria, and at the same time 
 of enslaving forever nearly ten millions of their 
 country men.'' 
 
 The following, among other positions, were 
 laid down as clearly established by Mr. Webb, 
 in this article : 
 
 That Hungary consists of thirteen millions 
 ;mcl a half of people, of whom four millions and 
 a half are Magyars (600,000 of them Nobles,) 
 and about nine millions Croats, Wallachians, 
 and other Sclavonic Races. 
 
 That for eight centuries and upwards, the 
 four and a half millions of Magyars, have kept 
 iii the most servile bondage the nine millions 
 of the Sclavonic races — whence is derived our 
 term slave, as applied to the Southern Negro. 
 
 That the slavery of this ten millions, was of 
 the same absolute character as our Negro Slav- 
 ery, only much more severe, because until abol- 
 ished by Mbttkknich, in 1845, the Magyar No- 
 ble had the power of life and death over the 
 white Sclave, who is in intellect the equal of his 
 master. 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 39 
 
 That the Magyars having forced Austria to 
 recognize their almost entire independence of 
 the Empire, the Sclavouians of Hungary, actua- 
 ted by the general spirit of Liberty which per- 
 vaded Europe in 1848, and headed by the gal- 
 lant Jellachich, Ban of Croatia, demanded 
 from the Hungarian Diet, their freedom, and 
 equality of social and political rights ; which 
 the Magyars and the Magyar Government re- 
 fused — Kossuth being the Minister of Finance, 
 and the principal man in the Government. 
 
 That therefore, the Ban of Croatia, and all 
 the Sclavonic races, rose in revolt against then- 
 oppressors. 
 
 That this Avar was commenced by Hungary 
 against Austria, by Kossuth's marching an 
 army to Vienna, without Hungary's complain- 
 ing, of any grievance against Austria — except 
 that the Emperor would not aid the Magyars to 
 keep the Sclaves in bondage — personal and 
 political. 
 
 That never until the 28th of July, only 
 twelve days before the final fall of Kossuth, 
 Georgey, and the Magyar nobility, did they 
 ever even pretend to light for freedom or lib- 
 erty, or offer equal rights to all races in Hun- 
 gary. 
 
 That Kossuth and his Government warred 
 in defence of Slavery and Oppression, and against 
 personal freedom, political liberty, and equality 
 of personal and political rights ; and that all 
 good men and friends of liberty throughout the 
 world, should rejoice in his overthrow ; because 
 it broke the chains of nine millions of white 
 Slaves, held in bondage, and denied even per- 
 sonal as well as political freedom, by four mil- 
 lions and a half of proud, haughty and ambi- 
 tious Magyars — a Tartar tribe, who for eight 
 hundred years, have held in slavery the de- 
 scendants of the Sclavonic races, Avhich they 
 subjugated in the eleventh century. 
 
 These propositions comprise the substance of 
 Mr. Webb's charges against the Hungarians. 
 The first of them is sufficient to show that he 
 is grossly ignorant on the subject of the races 
 of Hungary ; for he speaks of the Wallachlans 
 as Sclavonians — which is as absurd a blunder as 
 it would be for a writer on America, to call the 
 Cherokces an Anglo-Saxon race. I might, in 
 fact, properly enough dismiss the whole state- 
 ment on the ground of its palpably outrageous 
 improbability — for Avhat man of sense can be 
 made to believe that four millions and a half of 
 Magyars could, at the same time, successfully 
 resist the armies of the Austrian Emperor, and 
 keep in check ten millions of revolted Sclaves 
 "in intellect the equal of their masters " ? But 
 Mr. Webb, like Mr. Bowen, relies on "authori- 
 ties" for proof of his proposition, and the 
 greater part of the ten huge columns of his arti- 
 cle are filled with quotations — all of which, with 
 one or two exceptions, are stolen from Mr. Bowen' s 
 articles in the North American Review. I say 
 stolen, because Mr. Webb takes them without 
 
 the slightest acknowledgment, copying word 
 for word and letter for letter, nearly the whole 
 of Mr. Bowen's translations and extracts, and 
 passing them off as the result of his own reading 
 and research. 
 
 In proof of this, I will analyze this article of 
 Mr. Webb, column by column, and point out, 
 in detail, his obligations to Mr. Bowen. 
 
 The first column is introductory, and bor- 
 rowed substantially from Mr. Bowen, though 
 Mr. Webb has taken the trouble to rewrite his 
 plunder. He gives one of Mr. Bowen's tables 
 of the population of Hungary — altering it, 
 however, to suit himself so far as to convert 
 2,400,000 Wallachians, 260,000 Magyar Szeklers 
 and 250,000 Jews into Sclavonians ! 
 
 The second column commences thus : 
 
 "The Magyar race numbers just about one- 
 third of the population ; yet in the hands of this 
 one-third, for eight centuries have all power 
 and authority rested, even to the life and death 
 of the other races. They have ever been the 
 masters — the other races the slaves ; and never 
 has slavery assumed a more servile attitude 
 than in Hungary — never have masters exercised 
 such despotic, absolute, and unlimited power, 
 as the Magyars have for centuries exercised 
 over their dependants." 
 
 This is Mr. Webb's statement — "the Magyars 
 are masters — the other races slaves" — and 
 slaves of the lowest and most degraded kind. 
 No more absolute slavery has ever existed. He 
 had just before said, in the preceding paragraph, 
 that "the Croats, Wallachians, and all the other 
 Sclavonic races, were as much slaves [to the 
 Magyars] as are the negroes of Carolina slaves 
 to their white masters." "In support of this," 
 he proceeds to " quote largely from unques- 
 tioned sources." Then follows his first quota- 
 tion credited to " M. liey : Autriche, Honarie, et 
 Turquie en 1839-48, as cited by Corvinns" — and 
 "as cited by Mr. Bowen," Mr. Webb should 
 have added ; for he has copied it word for word 
 from the North American Review for January, 
 1851, pp. 209-10. The anonymous " Corvinus " 
 translated the passage from some obscure French 
 writer, Mr. Bowen quoted it at second hand 
 from him, and Mr. Webb gravely cites it at 
 third hand from Mr. Bowen — without giving 
 credit, however. Now let us sec in what man- 
 ner M. Rev, as cited by Corvinus, as cited by 
 Bowen, supports Mr. Webb's theory that the 
 Sclavonians were all slaves, the Magyars all 
 masters. The quotation begins thus : 
 
 "The ancient collection of laws, the Triparti- 
 tum declares that the nation or body politic, is 
 composed exclusively of nobles ; accordingly out 
 of 550,000 nobles, the Magyars count 404,000, 
 
40 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 which leaves only 86,000 with a proportionately 
 feeble influence to the Sclaves, the Germans, and 
 the Wallachians." 
 
 It appears from this, then, that these poor 
 Wallachians, Sclavonians, &c. who, according to 
 Mr. Webb " are as much slaves, as are the ne- 
 groes of Carolina slaves to their white masters" 
 — count among their numbers no less than 
 86,000 nobles! The complaint of Mr. Webb's 
 "authority" is, not that the other races were 
 slaves to the Magyars, but that of the 550,000 
 nobles, too large a proportion belonged to the 
 Magyar race, so that the other races had less 
 political influence than their numbers entitled 
 them to. The fact that there were 86,000 nobles 
 of wow-Magyar race, is sufficient to refute the 
 assertion that the Magyars were masters and the 
 other races in the condition of negro slaves. I 
 may as well remark here, that no part of the 
 population of Hungary has been in such a con- 
 dition for the last six or eight centuries. There 
 was a class of nobles and a class of peasants — 
 but the nobles were of all races, and the pea- 
 sants of all races — there being millions of Mag- 
 yar peasants, and, as Mr. Rey states 86,000 no- 
 bles of Wallachian and Sclavonian race. But 
 the peasants were very far from being slaves, 
 and before the war with Austria commenced, all 
 legal or political difference between them and 
 the nobles had been abolished. 
 
 Mr. Webb's Second Column contains seven 
 other quotations : the first of which may be 
 found on page 208, the second on page 207, the 
 third on page 209, the fourth and fifth on page 
 210, and the sixth and seventh on page 211 of the 
 N. A. .Review for Jan., 1851. 
 
 Mr. Webb's Third Column contains three 
 quotations. The first, he says, is from an au- 
 thority universally respected — Paget' s Hungary 
 and Transylvania. He has- copied it from the 
 N. A. Review, p. 213. It is the same passage 
 Mr. Bowen's unfair treatment of which, I have 
 pointed out above, p. 29. Mr. Webb has copied 
 it word for word, and has not even taken the 
 trouble to change the references from the scarce 
 English edition used by Mr. Bowen, to the 
 common American edition published a year or 
 two ago at Philadelphia. One of the passages 
 omitted in this quotation of "an authority uni- 
 versally respected" relates to the fact that the 
 Croatian Diet persisted in excluding Protestants 
 from the country — a majority of their Magyar 
 " masters " and " oppressors " being Protestants. 
 Considering that they are " as much slaves as 
 the negroes of Carolina," it is a little remarkable 
 that these Croatians should not only have a 
 
 legislature of their own, but should actuall 
 take the liberty of excluding from the country 
 the majority of their "masters," because of a 
 difference of religion ! 
 
 The second of the thre« quotations in Mr. 
 Webb's Third Column, is taken from the N. A. 
 Review, p. 217. The third quotation Mr. Webb 
 introduces by saying "we quote from Count 
 Mailath's Geschichte pp. 421-22." Count 
 Mailath's Geschichte was published at Hamburg 
 in 1850, and has not yet been translated. Pro- 
 bably the only portion which has appeared in 
 English is this identical passage, which was 
 translated by Mr. Bowen and printed in his 
 Review. Mr. Webb's translation, singularly 
 'enough, corresponds to Mr. Bowen's, word for 
 word, and letter for letter. Pie begins, like Mr. 
 Bowen, in the middle of a paragraph and makes 
 the very same omissions of inconvenient sen- 
 tences. If he had not positively assurred us that 
 he "quotes from Count Mailath's Geschichte 
 pp. 421, 422" (he is very precise in his refer- 
 ences) the inference would be irresistible, that 
 he had copied the extract from the N. A. Re- 
 view, pp. 220, 221, 222. 
 
 In Mr. Webb's Fourth Column there are three 
 quotations. The first and third of these are taken 
 from the N. A. Review for Jan. 1851, pp. 222, 
 223, 224 ; the second is taken from the N. A. 
 Review, Jan. 1850, p. 116. Mr. Webb does not 
 give any authority for it, which is not to be 
 wondered at, for he had too much prudence to 
 refer to Mr. Bowen as an " authority," and as 
 Mr. Bowen had translated the extract without 
 acknowledgment from the Revue des Deux Mon- 
 des, it was of course somewhat difficult for Mr. 
 Webb to give due credit for it ! In introducing 
 the quotations in this column, Mr. Webb uncer- 
 emoniously appropriates several of Mr. Bow- 
 en's notes and observations. 
 
 Mr. Webb's Fifth Column contains only two 
 quotations. One of these is avowedly taken 
 from the N. A. Review for Jan. 1850, p. 125 — 
 where it appears as original with Mr. Bowen ; 
 the other purports to be from an Austrian offi- 
 cial pamphlet, of which I know nothing. It is 
 an absurd and scandalous attempt to implicate 
 Kossuth in the murder of Count Latour, who 
 was put to death by the mob of Vienna in the 
 sudden insurrection of October 6th, 1848, Kos- 
 suth at the time being in Hungary several hun- 
 dred miles distant ! As I have never seen the 
 original, I cannot decide how much Mr. Webb has 
 falsified this document,but one instance of perver- 
 sion is so glaring as to be detected at first glance. 
 An extract is given from a letter to Kossuth by 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 41 
 
 Csany, a well-known Hungarian, who writes on 
 the 7th of October, that he has sent three couri- 
 ers from Vienna to Pesth " with very agreeable 
 news." This " very agreeable news" was, of 
 course, the triumphant Democratic insurrection 
 of the day before, and the flight of the Emperor 
 to Innspruck. Mr. Webb, however, attempts 
 to deceive his readers by informing them, in a 
 parenthesis, that this very agreeable news was 
 the murder of Latour ! This he repeats at 
 every opportunity, whenever the news from 
 Vienna is mentioned. 
 
 Mr. Webb's Sixth Column contains only one 
 quotation — a long one from Brownson's Quar- 
 terly Review ! The value of this, as an autho- 
 rity on the affairs of Hungary, it is not necessary 
 to discuss. 
 
 Mr. Webb's Seventh Column contains one 
 extract which is from a letter of Archbishop 
 Raiachich, describing the cruelties practised in 
 the South-eastern part of Hungary in the begin- 
 ning of the war. It is copied from the N. A. 
 Review for Jan. 1851, p. 224. It is dated Car- 
 lo witz, August 1, 1848. Mr. Webb introduces 
 it by saying that " Kossuth despatched General 
 Bern into Transylvania to strike terror into that 
 region — ichat Bern did there, and how he con- 
 ducted the war amid that simple and almost 
 unarmed people, the following document will 
 show. Comment is unnecessary." 
 
 •« Comment is unnecessary," indeed, except 
 to remark that the Archbishop's letter related 
 not to Transylvania but to the Bannat, and that 
 on the 1st of August, 1848, Bern had not yet 
 made his appearance in the Hungarian war. 
 On the 14th of October of that year, he, for the 
 first time, appeared at Vienna, then in revolt 
 against the Emperor. On his flight from that 
 city, a fortnight later, he became acquainted 
 with Kossuth, whom he met on the steamboat 
 which was conveying them down the Danube. 
 It was not till the 26th of November that Bern 
 set out from Pesth to conquer Transylvania, and 
 his military operations in that country did not 
 fairly commence till the 20th of December. It 
 is manifest, therefore, Mr. Webb to the contrary 
 notwithstanding, that a document dated August 
 1, 1848, could not throw much light on Bern's 
 proceedings four or five months afterwards. 
 This is one of fifty instances, in which Mr. 
 Webb betrays a ludicrous ignorance of the mat- 
 ter he so glibly writes about. 
 
 Mr. Webb's Eighth Column contains three 
 extracts. The first is from a Hungarian Mani- 
 festo and is copied from the North American, 
 Jan. 1850, p. 81. The second and third (origi- 
 
 4* 
 
 nally from the Revue des Deux Mondes) are copied 
 from N. A. Review, Jan. 1851, p. 235. 
 
 In Mr. Webb's Ninth Column there are three 
 quotations, all of which are borrowed from the 
 N. A. Review, pp. 212, 214, 234. 
 
 Finally in the Tenth and last Column there 
 are eight quotations, all of which may be seen 
 verbatim in the N. A. Review for Jan. 1851, pp. 
 205, 206, 219, 230, 234. 
 
 It appears, therefore, that of Mr.Webb's thirty- 
 tioo quotations from "authorities," thirty are 
 copied from the North American Review, with- 
 out acknowledgment, and paraded before the 
 readers of the New York Courier and Enquirer 
 as the result of the laborious researches of the 
 learned editor of that journal ! Mr. Webb, in 
 fact, has plundered Mr. Bowen as unscrupu- 
 lously as Mr. Bowen plundered the writers in 
 the Revue des Deux Mondes. He does not appear 
 to have seen one of the books from which he 
 pretends to quote, and I am quite confident that 
 his studies in Hungarian history have been con- 
 fined almost entirely to the veracious pages of 
 the North American Review. 
 
 In addition to his pilfered quotations from the 
 North American Review, Mr. Webb endeavors 
 to strengthen his position on the subject of 
 Hungary by relating his personal experience in 
 that country. In 1850, I think it was, he was 
 appointed to represent this country at the court 
 of Vienna, but the Senate of the United States 
 by an almost unanimous vote refused to confirm 
 so unfit a nomination, and Mr. Webb was speed- 
 ily recalled from Austria. During his stay in 
 Vienna, he says he made this whole subject his 
 study, and afterwards pursued his investigations 
 in Hungary itself. He thus details his expe- 
 rience : 
 
 When we had exhausted our research in 
 Vienna, (!) and by conversations with the Mag- 
 yar nobles learned precisely the feelings and 
 objects and purposes of the late war in Hun- 
 gary, we obtained permission from the Austrian 
 Government, (at that period such a course was 
 necessary,) and visited Hungary itself, to judge 
 for ourselves of all we had heard. We pene- 
 trated as far as Buda and Pesth, (!) where we 
 had every facility of pursuing our investiga- 
 tions unmolested ; and we stopped at Komorn, 
 and lingered at Presburgh, actuated alike by the 
 recollections of the past and the sad desolation 
 of the present. In our own happy country, 
 thank God, we know nothing of the desolation 
 of war ; but above all and over all — of a war 
 of races, as was most emphatically the war in 
 Hungary ; and to describe what we saw in this 
 regard, would be only to make man hate his 
 fellow man. One incident told us the whole story 
 as regards the hatred of the now freed Sclave 
 to his late master. 
 
42 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 In crossing the suspension bridge, which con- 
 nects Buda, the ancient Offen, with Pesth — 
 which by the way is the finest structure of the 
 kind we met with — our coachman, once a Slave, 
 now a free Sclave, pointed cxultingly to a man 
 paying toll. We inquired of our courier what 
 it meant; and he explained that the person 
 pointed to, was a small Magyar noble, whose 
 right it was, formerly, to pass, toll free, but who 
 now was considered no better than the late 
 slave, and was required to pay toll like him. 
 The exultation of the Sclave at this spectacle, 
 his spirited crack of the whip, and almost hurra 
 for freedom, told as plainly as words could have 
 done, that the Magyar rule was at an end, and 
 that tyranny and oppression fell with Kossuth 
 and his Magyar nobility. 
 
 Great deference is due to the statements and 
 opinions of the inquisitive and adventurous 
 traveller who has explored foreign lands and 
 speaks of what he has seen. And there is some- 
 thing peculiarly romantic and imposing in Mr. 
 Webb's solemn assertion that he "stopped at 
 Komorn and lingered at Presburgh," and that 
 he even "penetrated as far as Buda and Pesth." 
 But with all my admiration for the intrepidity 
 of his explorations, I cannot refrain from stating 
 that steamboats ply regularly between Vienna 
 and Buda-Pesth, and that the distance between 
 them is just 135 miles, or ten miles less than 
 the distance from New York to Albany ! Ko- 
 morn and Presburg are both upon the river, 
 and the boat which conveyed the enterprising- 
 explorer, probably stopped at those places to 
 land or receive passengers. Mr. Webb saw 
 about as much of Hungary as a foreigner, ig- 
 norant of English, would see of the United 
 States, who should land at New York, embark 
 on a Hudson river steamboat, and "stopping" 
 at West Point and " lingering " at Poughkeep- 
 sie, "penetrate as far as" — Albany ! 
 
 The gross and almost incredible ignorance 
 of Hungary which Mr. Webb displays through- 
 out his article, is strikingly manifested in this 
 account of his travels. He calls Buda "the 
 ancient Offen." In reality Buda has been the 
 name of the city from time immemorial. Offen 
 is merely its German name. But the most pal- 
 pable exposure of ignorance, if not of falsehood, 
 is in the anecdote of the coachman, " once a 
 Slave now a free Sclave." The law which de- 
 creed that all passengers, whether nobles or not } 
 should pay toll on this suspension bridge, was 
 passed in 1836. It was passed by a Diet com- 
 posed exclusively of nobles who thus voluntarily 
 relinquished their privilege of passing a bridge 
 toll-free. The privilege, too, had no connection 
 with race. Sclavonic nobles as well as Mag. 
 yar nobles passed free, while Magyar peasants 
 
 paid toll as well as Sclavonic peasants. And 
 yet, in 1850, fourteen years after the passage of 
 this law, Mr. Webb pretends that his coachman, 
 " the late slave," was still so unused to the spec- 
 tacle of a Magyar noble paying toll that his 
 exultation was strong enough to tell " as plainly 
 as words could have done, that the Magyar 
 rule was at an end, and that tyranny and oppres- 
 sion fell with Kossuth and his Magyar nobility." 
 I have not the least doubt that the story is a 
 mere fabrication. The coachmen at Buda-Pesth, 
 whether Sclaves or not, have for centuries been 
 as free as coachmen in New York. Every well- 
 dressed man, of whatever race, was allowed to 
 pass without paying toll on the old bridge, and 
 on the new bridge, the coachman must have 
 seen, every time he crossed it, dozens of men 
 paying toll, who, fourteen years before would 
 have been exempt. Mr. Webb's attempt to 
 demonstrate by this invention that Kossuth and 
 his party (by whose exertions the special privi- 
 leges of the nobles were abolished) were tyrants 
 and oppressors, is perfectly in keeping with the 
 stupid ignorance and malignant falsehood which 
 characterize his whole article. 
 
 Contemptible as this article is, it has, I am 
 ashamed to say, acquired a certain degree of 
 importance, and a good deal of notoriety, from 
 having been read, in whole or in part, to the 
 Senate of the United States as an argument 
 against the Resolution of Welcome to Kossuth. 
 But for this circumstance it would have been 
 unnecessary to notice it as a part of the Hunga- 
 rian Controversy. Neither in itself, nor from 
 the character of its author, is it entitled to the 
 least consideration. 
 
 THE POLITICAL STATE OF HUNGARY. 
 
 In the foregoing pages I have confined myself 
 chiefly to an exposure of the mode in which 
 Messrs. Bowen and Webb have sought to estab- 
 lish the truth of their charges against the Hun- 
 garians, without attempting directly to disprove 
 the charges themselves. I think the reader 
 will admit, that whether those charges be true 
 or false, I have shown conclusively, that the 
 methods resorted to in order to sustain them, 
 are outrageously unjust and dishonest. I will 
 now consider the charges themselves. The 
 groundwork or basis of them all, is the political 
 and social state of Hungary in the latter part 
 of 1848, when the war with Austria began. It 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 43 
 
 is alleged by Messrs. Bowen and Webb that, at 
 that period, the Magyar nobility were absolute 
 masters of the country, all the political power 
 of which was in their hands, and that they 
 domineered over and oppressed the Croatians, 
 Sclavonians, Wallachians, Germans and other 
 races. These other races, according to Mr. 
 Bowen, were the "subjects" and "vassals" 
 of the Magyar nobility. " The present position 
 of the Magyars in Hungary," he says, " is very 
 much what that of the Normans in England 
 was for the first century or two after the Con- 
 quest" — [N. A. Review, Jan., 1850, p. 91.] — 
 Again, p. 122, he says of the Magyars, "their 
 cause was bad ; they sought to defend their ancient 
 feudal institutions, a,nd their unjust and excessive 
 privileges as an order and a race, against the incur - 
 sion of the liberal ideas and the reformatory spirit 
 of the nineteenth century." Mr. Webb, as we 
 have seen above, (pp. 38-9) asserts that the 
 other races in Hungary were absolute slaves to 
 the Magyars — that their condition was even 
 more degraded than that of the negro slaves 
 of South Carolina. And both of these writers 
 maintain that the Hungarian war was nothing- 
 more nor less than an attempt on the part of the 
 Magyars, with Kossuth at their head, to keep 
 their subject races down, while Austria was 
 .striving to raise them up. 
 
 Let us now see how far these statements are 
 sustained by competent witnesses. 
 
 The best English book of travels in Hungary 
 is " Hungary and Transylvania, by John Paget." 
 Mr. Paget visited Hungary in 1835, thirteen 
 years before the war with Austria. Mr. Bowen 
 says his work is " excellent and impartial." 
 Mr. Webb says he is " an authority universally 
 respected." Here are some extracts from his 
 chapter on " Country Life and Peasantry," 
 chap. 11, volume 1. 
 
 " It was not till 1405 that the Hungarian 
 peasant seems to have had a recognized civil 
 existence. In that year it was first declared 
 that the peasant should have the power to leave 
 the place where he was born, in case he could 
 obtain his lord's consent ; which consent, how- 
 ever, it was provided, should not be arbitrarily 
 refused. It must not be imagined that, because 
 this was the first legal notice of the peasant's 
 existence, he had formerly been treated as a 
 mere slave. Slavery had been, in fact, abolished 
 on the introduction of Christianity." [A. D. 1000] 
 #**#*«. rj<h e S pi r it in which the new 
 TJrbarium [a law enacted by the nobles in 1835] 
 is conceived, may be imagined from the avowed 
 principle, that where it icas safe and proper, the 
 rights of the peasant should be increased, and his 
 burdens diminished ; but in no instance should his 
 privileges, hotoever attained, be curtailed. * * * 
 
 Since the passing of this law, it can scarcely be 
 said any longer that the peasant alone pays 
 taxes ; for it is especially provided, that should 
 a noble purchase a peasant's fief he is not only 
 liable to all the labor and payment of the land- 
 lord, but also to all the taxes of government, 
 county rates, &c. * * * * I have entered 
 thus at length into the laws affecting the Hun- 
 garian peasantry, especially those which regu- 
 late their intercourse with their lords ; because 
 I have been anxious to show that they are not, 
 as strangers commonly suppose, serfs, nor their 
 lords tyrants, with unlimited power over their 
 lives and fortunes." 
 
 These are Mr. Paget' s statements as to the 
 condition of the Hungarian peasants in 1835. 
 Here is what he says of the party to which 
 Kossuth belonged — the party opposed to Aus- 
 tria: 
 
 "The favorite objects of their desires were, 
 after strengthening the nationality of Hungary, 
 freedom of commerce and an improved commer- 
 cial code ; the navigation of the Danube, and 
 the improvement of internal communication ; 
 increased freedom and education of the peasantry ; 
 the repeal of the laics preventing the free purchase 
 and sale of landed property, perfect equality of all 
 religions, and the freedom of the press. For the 
 greater part of these objects they are still struggling.' ' 
 —[Vol. i., p. 102.] 
 
 Another high authority, a most accurate and 
 intelligent writer, McCulloch, says in a passage 
 which I have quoted before, (p. 30) and which 
 was written in 1840 — "At present, except the 
 right of election, which is vested in the 267,300 
 nobles, there is no jyolitical privilege which the loivest 
 Hungarian does not enjvj, in common with the in- 
 habitants of the other constitutional states of Europe" 
 
 Yet, says Mr. Bowen, the great mass of the 
 Hungarian people in 1848, were serfs and vas- 
 sals to the nobles, while according to Mr. Webb, 
 they were more absolute slaves than the negroes 
 of South Carolina ! 
 
 In the Monthly Chronicle for August, 1841, 
 a magazine which was edited, I believe, by 
 Hon. Nathan Hale of the Boston Daily Adver- 
 tiser, there is published a letter from an Ameri- 
 can gentleman travelling in Hungary, to his 
 friend in Boston, which letter I have reason to 
 suppose, was written by Mr. George Sumner, 
 brother to Hon. Charles Sumner, of the United 
 States Senate. He says, under date of May 1, 
 1841: 
 
 "I must tell you something of Hungary; of 
 which you know nothing, (that I will venture 
 to say at this great distance) and which is after 
 Russia, the most interesting, and the most mis- 
 represented country which I have visited. One 
 can form no idea abroad of the movement which 
 is going on among this people ; it is really 
 mighty. Their own journals are all in Hunga- 
 
44 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 rian {Magyar) and it is only through Austvi&n \ subjects ; it is they who, in a solemn day, have willed 
 papers that a ray of light occasionally finds its .to break them forever."— Bevue des Deux Mondes, 
 way to Europe. The Austrians dread the spirit 
 of freedom and independence which prevails in 
 Hungary, and use all efforts to spread abroad 
 
 the opinion, that the country is inhabited by 
 race of turnip-eating savages, who murder their 
 peasants when they will, and who are only kept 
 within the pale of humanity by the kindly and 
 beneficent influence of the enlightened govern- 
 ment of Austria. But at the Diet- of Hungary, 
 all the measures for the improvement of the 
 country— all measures for ^ liberating the peasants, 
 for limiting the amount of labor that may be re- 
 quired of them, for elevating their condition — all 
 these have been proposed by the people, that is 
 the favored part of the people who compose the 
 Diet, [the nobles'] and have been uniformly opposed 
 by Austria." 
 
 M. Degerando, a French gentleman who re- 
 sided many years in Hungary and whose works 
 are of the highest authority, said in 1845, in a 
 passage which was quoted by Mrs. Putnam in 
 the N. A. Review for April, 1850, p. 329. 
 
 " To the Hungarian nobility belongs the honor of 
 having been the first to propose all these neio laws. 
 Under the eyes of a retrograde government, they are 
 accomplishing a task before which the aristocracies 
 of every other country have shrunk back. They 
 prepare the reign of equality, before the people 
 for whose good they labor have yet thought of 
 raising their voice. We have said that the peo- 
 ple, raised by degrees from servitude, have now 
 become citizens, since, according to the last de- 
 cisions, they have now a right to possess the 
 land. Let us add, that the nobles have now 
 resolved to take on themselves half the expenses 
 of the comitat, which the peasants have borne 
 alone up to this time. Not only does this 
 aristocracy accord the rights granted to the 
 inferior classes, but it also despoils itself of the 
 privileges that it has possessed for ten centu- 
 ries ; it offers spontaneously to pay imposts to 
 which it has never been subjected, and breaks 
 of itself the last barrier which separates it from 
 the people. We regret that Europe is not more 
 attentive to these noble efforts. This is a work 
 which merits the ardent sympathy of all free 
 countries ; and it belonged to a people generous 
 as the Magyars to give this spectacle to the 
 world." 
 
 I have quoted once before the statement of 
 M. De Langsdorff, a writer hostile to the Hun- 
 garians and a warm partisan of Austria — but it 
 will bear repetition. 
 
 "In 1836, the Diet decreed that the nobles 
 should be subjected to toll on the suspension 
 bridge which was about to be constructed at 
 Pesth. This was the first breach made in the 
 privileges of the nobility ; and it teas by the 
 nobility that it was made. There, where I felt 
 onl}' a sterile emotion, generous citizens, sacri- 
 ficing their interests without hesitation, found 
 the opportunity to repair a long injustice. 
 Since that time the Hungarian nobles have walked 
 resolutely in that path ; it is they who, for twenty 
 years, have been laboring to file the chains of their 
 
 August 1, 1848. 
 
 Another of these anti-Hungarian writers in 
 the Revue des Deux Monde s, M. Desprez, candidly 
 says, in an article dated Aug. 15, 1848 : — 
 
 " In reading the history of the contests of the 
 Magyars with Austria, and of their constitu- 
 tional progress, we are pleased to recognize, with 
 M. de Degerando, their generous qualities, their 
 liberalism, and all the services which they have 
 rendered to modern ideas. They have power- 
 fully contributed to reanimate political life in 
 the veins of old Austria, and now they possess, 
 more than any other people of the empire, the 
 experience of constitutional government and of 
 parliamentary discussions, the spirit of adminis- 
 tration and of political eloquence." 
 
 These citations will be sufficient to show that 
 the peasants or lower classes of Hungary were 
 neither slaves nor serfs, nor degraded and op- 
 pressed in the years immediately preceding the 
 war with Austria. It will be observed that the 
 writers I have quoted, speak of the higher class 
 as the nobles, and the lower class as the peasants, 
 and that they do not allude to the existence of 
 any political or legal distinction between the 
 Magyars and the other races — the Sclavonians, 
 Croatians, and Wallachians, &c, for " whose 
 down-trodden condition" Messrs. Bowen and 
 Webb exhibit such an ardent, I might almost 
 say, such a " fanatical " sympathy. The reason 
 is that there icas no such distinction. The whole 
 theory of these gentlemen about Magyar supre- 
 macy and Magyar tyranny, is utterly unfounded. 
 There were, for ages, great and unjust inequali- 
 ties of class in Hungary. The nobles had ex- 
 cessive privileges, and the peasants were sub- 
 jected to grievous burdens — but it was not an 
 affair of race at all. The nobles were of all 
 races, and the peasants were of all races. The 
 nobles of Magyar race had no privileges which 
 did not belong to the nobles of the other races, 
 and the Magyar peasants were exempt from no 
 burdens which were borne by the peasants of 
 the other races. 
 
 In the Christian Examiner for May, 1850, 
 Mrs. Putnam has stated this matter with her 
 usual clearness and accuracy. She says : — 
 
 "There have not been, since the earliest 
 times, any political distinctions in Hungary, 
 founded on difference of race. The distinction 
 between privileged and unprivileged classes was 
 not a growth of Magyar institutions, nor a con- 
 sequence of the Magyar Conquest. When the 
 Magyars entered the country, they found the 
 institution of serfdom already existing there ; 
 but with the exception of the prisoners taken 
 in arms against them, all whom they found free 
 they left free. Those who submitted, without 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 45 
 
 offering resistance to the conquerors, were even 
 left in possession of their estates. The wide 
 plains of Dacia afforded ample room to the in- 
 vaders. The prisoners taken in war were re- 
 ceived into the army of the victors. If they 
 distinguished themselves by their courage, they 
 were raised to the rank of nobles, and received 
 grants of land in reward of their services. "With- 
 in a hundred years after the occupation of the 
 country by the Magyars, all the inhabitants, of 
 whatever race, were regarded as composing one 
 nation, called the Magyar or Hungarian nation. 
 The Magyar race is, without question, re- 
 garded as the ascendant race in Hungary; the 
 country takes its name from them ; its political 
 constitution is of Magyar origin. This ascen- 
 dency, however, is not supported by any pecu- 
 liar political privileges. The Magyar is the 
 ascendant race in Hungary, as the Anglo-Saxon 
 is the ascendant race in the United States. The 
 allegation that the other races in Hungary are 
 deprived of their political rights, is as absurd as 
 it would be to say that the Germans of Penn- 
 sylvania, or the French of Louisiana, are not 
 represented in the Congress of the United States, 
 because they do not sit there as Germans or as 
 Frenchmen, but as citizens of the United States. 
 The whole Hungarian nation, without distinc- 
 tion of the races composing it, is called the 
 Magyar or Hungarian, — in Magyar, Magyarok 
 (pi.); in Latin, Hungari. Some of the most 
 distinguished patriots both of past and present 
 times, have been of Slavonian and Wallachian 
 descent." 
 
 In corroboration of this last statement, I 
 will mention that the two most famous men in 
 the ancient history of Hungary, John Hunni- 
 ades and his son King Matthias Corvinus, were 
 of "Wallachian race. Yet the former became 
 Governor, and the latter, King of Hungary — 
 by election ! So, too, in the recent history of 
 Hungary many of the most eminent and popu- 
 lar men have sprung from other races than the 
 Magyar. According to Mr. Bowen, Kossuth 
 himself is not a Magyar, but a Slovack. — 
 Pulszky, the Hungarian Envoy to England, is 
 of Sclavonic race. The Minister of Justice in 
 Kossuth's government, Vukovich, was of Ser- 
 vian race ; the Minister of Finance, Duschek, 
 of Sclavonic. 
 
 The exact facts in this matter are — that the 
 nobles of Hungary, by a series of legislative 
 acts, commencing in 1832 and terminating 
 March, 1848, six months before the war with 
 Austria began, voluntarily relinquished all 
 their privileges, and granted equal rights to 
 all the inhabitants of Hungary ; that among 
 those rights v/as that of voting ; that the Diet 
 or Legislature which governed the country 
 when the war began, was elected by universal 
 suffrage, and was composed of men of all races 
 and classes. Bearing these facts in mind the 
 
 reader can appreciate the character of Mr 
 Bowen's charge against the Magyars, that in 
 their war with Austria " they sought to defend 
 their ancient feudal institutions, and their unjust 
 and excessive privileges as an order and a race, 
 against the incursion of the liberal ideas and the 
 reformatory spirit of the nineteenth century." 
 
 THE WAR WITH AUSTRIA. 
 
 The true causes and objects of the war in 
 Hungary may be very briefly told. In the early 
 part of 1848, the Hungarians, under the leader- 
 ship of Kossuth and Batthiany, had succeeded 
 in obtaining what they had long aimed at — a 
 responsible ministry, a strictly constitutional 
 form of government, the abolition of all privi- 
 leges of class, the freedom of the press, and 
 other liberal institutions. So soon, however, 
 as the Austrian government recovered from its 
 panic at the revolutions of Paris, Vienna and 
 Italy, it sought to reduce the Hungarians to 
 subjection. The first step towards the accom- 
 plishment of this, was to weaken and distract 
 the Hungarians, by stirring up rebellions among 
 the ignorant and fanatical border population of 
 Hungary, the Croats, Servians and "Wallachians, 
 who are mostly of the Greek Church. By art- 
 fully working on the natural jealousies of race, 
 and on the bigotry of these people, it succeeded 
 in persuading a portion of them to side with 
 the Emperor, against the government of Hun- 
 gary. A fact which no more condemns the 
 Hungarian cause,than the adhesion of the Tories 
 and of the Canadians to George III. condemns 
 our devolution. The great mass of the other 
 races cordially united with the Magyars in 
 upholding that government. Even in Croatia, 
 the hostility to the Hungarian government was 
 very far from universal, though a large body of 
 Croatians, when called upon by their popular 
 and influential Ban or Chief, Jellachich, in the 
 name of the Emperor, followed him into Hun- 
 gary, from which they were speedily expelled. 
 This began the war. The imperial armies in- 
 vaded Hungary. For a time, the Hungarians 
 fought merely in defence of their constitutional 
 rights. But when it became manifest, by the 
 promulgation of the Constitution of Olmutz, 
 that the Austrian Emperor was determined to 
 reduce Hungary from an independent kingdom 
 into a mere province of Austria, they renounced 
 all allegiance to the House of Hapsburg, elected 
 
46 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY, 
 
 Kossuth. Governor, and prosecuted the war 
 with the view of founding a Republic. Arthur 
 Frey, a writer to whose authority Mr. Bowen 
 appeals, says, speaking of the spring of 1849 : 
 
 "The Hungarian struggle now began to as- 
 sume that import which the party of the republi- 
 cans, Kossuth at their head, the Poles and the 
 many foreigners in the Hungarian army, had 
 
 been striving to give it Kossuth 
 
 had only waited for the favorable moment ; he 
 had left the house of Hapsburg time enough to 
 extinguish, by their conduct, the last spark of 
 attachment in the hearts of the people. Now, 
 when the lips of every Magyar had only curses 
 for the hitherto reigning family, Kossuth tore 
 away the veil of constitutionality with which 
 he had hitherto covered his republican plans ; 
 now he showed them boldly ; now he spoke it 
 out in thundering tones, that only under a repub- 
 lican form of government could Hungary be free 
 and happy ; and the nation, which, perhaps, two 
 months before, would have shuddered at the 
 idea, now shouted forth its joyful and trium- 
 phant approbation." — Ludwig Kossuth und Un- 
 garns neuesie Geschichte, III., 13, 14, as cited by 
 Mrs. Putnam. 
 
 And here is more conclusive evidence. It is 
 an extract from a speech which was made to the 
 Diet in April, 1849, by Szemere, the Secretary of 
 State, the Head of Kossuth's Cabinet. 
 
 "The ministry comes forward with no long- 
 programme. Three points, however, must be 
 named. Pirst, the ministry acknowledges itself 
 to be a revolutionary government. It will not, 
 therefore, shrink from any means conducive to 
 the rescue of the country. With the return of 
 peace it will cease to be a revolutionary govern- 
 ment ; extraordinary measures can be justified 
 only by extreme necessity. Secondly, the min- 
 istry declares itself to have a republican tendency. 
 The enemy of monarchy, it is, in like manner, 
 the enemy of every republic which preaches 
 that • property is robbery.' It wishes — God 
 permitting — a republic which shall bless rather 
 than shine. Thirdly, the ministry declares itself 
 to have a democratic tendency. It adopts the 
 principle of the sovereignty of the people in all, — 
 yes, in all its consequences." 
 
 This is an official Declaration made at the time, 
 by the Prime Minister of Kossuth's Cabinet, of 
 the objects and tendencies of the Revolutionary 
 Government of Hungary, six months after the 
 beginning of the War and four months before 
 its close. It is no after-thought, no subsequent 
 pretence, and is as clear and decided as language 
 will admit of. The reader can determine for 
 himself which is most worthy of credit, this 
 explicit official declaration, or the theory of 
 Messrs. Bowen & Webb, (supported as it is by 
 dishonest quotations, and untrustworthy " au- 
 thorities") — that the War in Hungary was a 
 mere struggle on the part of the Magyars to 
 preserve feudal institutions, and keep in subjec- 
 
 tion eight or ten millions of their own country- 
 men — and on the part of Aiistria, an attempt to 
 free those subject millions, and give to them 
 liberal constitutional institutions, including 
 Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press and 
 Universal Suffrage. For my part, I do not think 
 it necessary to argue such a question, nor to 
 offer further evidence upon it. 
 
 KOSSUTH IN HUNGARY. 
 
 I have adverted in the foregoing pages, to the 
 attacks of Messrs. Bowen and Webb upon the 
 character and conduct of Kossuth. Now that 
 the American people have seen with their own 
 eyes, and heard with their own ears the illus- 
 trious governor of Hungary, an elaborate reply 
 to these defamations is scarcely needed. They 
 have witnessed for themselves his matchless 
 eloquence, his inexhaustible energy, his frank 
 and dignified demeanor. They have hailed him 
 with unparalleled enthusiasm, not only as a man 
 of the loftiest genius, but of the purest and 
 noblest character. In greatness of intellect, in 
 greatness of heart, the spontaneous acclamation 
 of America places him among the foremost of 
 the age, if not of any age. Yet it may be of 
 interest to know in what light he is regarded in 
 his own country, and in what estimation he was 
 and still is held by his own people. I shall 
 conclude my task, therefore, by quoting from 
 the most valuable and accurate work that has 
 yet been written on the Hungarian War — that 
 of Schlesinger — some passages descriptive of 
 Kossuth in Hungary. 
 
 From the first moment when he was hurried 
 into public life, the character of Kossuth was 
 stamped with such resolution, that the policy 
 of the Austrian government never ventured an 
 attempt to gain him over to their side. Prince 
 Metternich and his creatures in the Pressburg 
 Diets were at other times not chary of their 
 means and appliances, whenever they required 
 to win over any distinguished persons to the 
 cause of the Government. But for Kossuth, 
 whose talents were justly appreciated, and the 
 dangerous power of whose integrity was practi- 
 cally recognized by the prosecutions against him, 
 the great bird-snarer deemed it labor lost to 
 spread his nets. No insidious tempter approach- 
 ed Kossuth ; and this is even a greater proof of 
 his integrity and incorruptible honor, than if he 
 had resisted the arts of temptation. 
 
 * * * * * * * 
 
 The favorite author of Kossuth was, Rousseau, 
 as might partly be inferred from the opening of 
 his career. He was still young when he quitted 
 
THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 4'; 
 
 prison, but his hatred of the Austrian system of 
 police had become confirmed and embittered 
 during his imprisonment. A martyr in the 
 cause of freedom of speech, his genius, his elo- 
 quence, his fervent zeal, above all his patriotism, 
 clinging with fond attachment to the old insti- 
 tutions of Hungary, yet enthusiastic in his aspi- 
 rations for a progressive development of her re- 
 sources, early gained for him the sympathies of 
 all the youth of his- country. 
 
 In 1817 he was elected a member of the Diet, 
 and here he unfolded the principles of his party 
 with sueh forcible eloquence, that they soon 
 became the most powerful leaders in the coun- 
 try. Here he delivered his masterly speeches 
 in stipport of equalizing the claims of the nationali- 
 ties, the emancipation of all sects of religion from 
 civil disabilities, the abrogation of the bur dens which 
 oppressed the peasants, and in opposition to the ex- 
 clusive privileges of the nobility and, the high clergy- 
 
 The enthusiasm with which Kossuth's 
 speeches were received found its way and car- 
 ried his principles alike into the poorest hovel 
 on the Putzta and into the Assembly of the 
 Magnates. EveryAvhere the seed fell on genial 
 soil, and many high-minded and energetic men 
 in the higher walks of life received, adopted, and 
 propogated Kossuth's opinions. 
 
 * * * #- * * * 
 
 Kossuth attended the sittings of the Diet at 
 Dcbreczin [during the war] only when he had 
 communications of importance to make, or pro- 
 positions which he wished personally to lay be- 
 fore the Assembly. At these times he was like 
 a king without throne or canopy, — the House 
 and the Tribune, the hearts of all present were 
 for an hour's space at his entire command ; and 
 we may apply to him the words which Lamar- 
 tine used in speaking of Mirabeau : " From the 
 moment of his entry into the National Assembly 
 he alone filled it : he was there, himself the 
 People : his gestures were commands, his mo- 
 tions Coups d'Etats." 
 
 Kossuth always went to the House of Assembly 
 on foot, and it was touching to witness the joy 
 and reverence with which every one saluted him 
 in the streets. The women seemed bewitched 
 by hi3 look, and had no glance for any one else 
 when he appeared, although he cannot exactly 
 be called handsome : an expressive melancholy 
 trembles around his eye when he is silent ; and 
 it is not until he speaks, especially when in an 
 impassioned strain and in Hungarian, that his 
 features acquire their full animation and signifi- 
 cance. He expresses himself fluently in Ger- 
 man, which he is fond of speaking, and his 
 German style is pure and elegant ; yet he can- 
 not dissemble his Magyar accent. 
 
 It was touching to see Kossuth walk along 
 the streets : every one stepped aside with the 
 utmost respect, and the children stared with 
 open eyes and mouth. Every now and then a 
 pert little urchin would salute him with his 
 " Eljen Kossuth ! " or some old woman would 
 mutter to herself devoutly, a blessing as the 
 Governor passed her. The peasant's eye spar- 
 kled with joy and pride when he saw him, 
 and standing close against the wall to let him 
 pass, he gave him his blessing — " Isten Aldja ! " 
 and forgot to replace the fur cap on his head, 
 
 as he followed the Governor with, eager gaze 
 until he turned the corner. Kossuth was in 
 his eyes a model of wisdom and goodness, the 
 impersonation of all that was excellent upon 
 earth, the pride of his existence, the hope of 
 his children. For Kossuth every peasant was 
 ready at any moment to face death — to mount 
 the gallows or be slain upon the spot. Nor will 
 this attachment die out among the people ; it 
 is rooted too deeply in the heart of the young 
 Magyar, who has been taught to cherish it from 
 the cradle up, and whose first prayer, when he 
 awakes in the morning, and when he goes to 
 sleep at night, is for Kossuth. 
 
 Were Austria to-morrow to recognize the 
 Hungarian paper-money at its full nominal, 
 value, and receive it in exchange for Austrian 
 bank-notes, yet thousands of the Kossuth-notes 
 would remain buried in the earth ; for the peas- 
 ants look upon them as of more genuine value 
 than Austrian bank-paper because bearing Kos- 
 suth's name. 
 
 ****** * 
 
 Kossuth was religious in the noblest sense of 
 the word. Relying on the justice of God, he 
 had faith in the victory of a cause which he 
 deemed sacred, in the virtue of mm, and in the 
 strength of the human will. He worshipped 
 the Creator by honoring the creature ; he re- 
 spected man by devoting the whole energies of 
 a warm heart to his country. Such a religion 
 of love has power to overaw r e even the most 
 hateful natures. Napoleon, in his time, was 
 ridiculed in thousands of satires and caricatures ; 
 before Kossuth, even the frivolous malice of his 
 enemies shrunk abashed. It was not the power 
 of his genius, nor the temporary height to which 
 he was raised that overawed these men ; but 
 the uprightness of Kossuth's mind, the sanctity 
 and greatness of his thoughts, the unselfish 
 devotion of his noble heart, imparted to him an 
 unapproachable dignity in spite of his failings 
 and errors. 
 
 Kossuth combines two talents, which are 
 rarely found in one and the same individual ; 
 he knows as well when to be silent as when to 
 speak : he understands the art of listening, in 
 such a manner as to convince the speaker that 
 the silence of his auditor proceeds not from 
 absence of mind, but from calm, undivided 
 attention. The slight and quick motion of the 
 corners of his mouth, and the raising or depres- 
 sion of his eyelids, betray the degree of interest 
 he feels and his assent to what is said ; for he 
 has never known or practiced the art of smooth- 
 ing his features into an impassive and impene- 
 trable expression. He is a great diplomatist in 
 public life, understanding by diplomacy the art 
 of detecting, comprehending and turning to 
 account the dispositions of others : no one has 
 displayed this talent on the tribune, in so mas- 
 terly a manner as Kossuth, and few r , therefore, 
 have worked so powerfully on the hearts of his 
 auditors. If it be said that he unites the talent 
 of the actor with that of the orator, — a reproach 
 which has often been made, — he must be called 
 unquestionably a great actor. He has never 
 strained after petty effects, nor tricked up the 
 pictures of his oratory with finical touches of 
 the pencil; but he carries away his audience 
 
48 
 
 THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 by a just combination of reasoning and feeling. 
 Whilst some orators would enforce conviction 
 by the strict logical consequence of their argu- 
 ment, and others seek to transport their listen- 
 ers by an overpowering appeal to their feelings, 
 Kossuth's eloquence consists in an alternation 
 of effect, a magnificent blending of the two sys- 
 tems. In this harmony lies the power of his 
 oratory, and the certainty of his success. 
 
 Whatever blame may be imputed to this re- 
 markable man, no one has hitherto dared to 
 attribute his actions to paltry or egotistical 
 motives. He has invariably proved a true 
 friend, and no mean spirit of revenge ever 
 found access to his breast, or sprung up to check 
 the free growth of his great virtues. Many of 
 his early friends have at a later period separated 
 from him, either from a feeling of mere envy, 
 from political conviction, a fear of following out 
 the consequences of his policy, motives of safety, 
 or the like. But his honest, upright character 
 was such, that his most dishonest enemies have 
 never dared to assail it, except by secret and 
 side attacks. 
 
 Let any man travel at the present day from 
 
 one end of Hungary to the other, and he will 
 convince himself, perhaps to his surprise, that 
 there is but one voice, one feeling respecting 
 Kossuth, in the towns, on the landed estates of 
 the nobility, and among the country people, — 
 all revering him as the greatest, the most true- 
 hearted patriot. An ignominious death has 
 raised noteless persons to the rank of martyrs, 
 and immortalized their names, — Kossuth will 
 be worshipped as the martyr of his nation, with- 
 out cross or gallows. He may pass his life in 
 exile — be it even in outward comfort — whilst his 
 countrymen at home are beggared, starved, im- 
 prisoned, shot and hanged ; yet no Magyar will, 
 in cool moments of reflection, charge Kossuth 
 as the originator of the unspeakable misery that 
 has befallen his country ; so deeply is he assured 
 of the real causes of the blow under which 
 Hungary has succumbed, so convinced is he of 
 the greatness of Kossuth's character, and of the 
 grief he suffers in exile for his beloved country. 
 " God in his mercy be with him ! " — these are 
 the Avords on the lips of every peasant in Hun- 
 gary, since the disastrous termination of the 
 struggle. 
 
 Errata. On page 10, second column, ninth line from bottom, for " u 
 On page 12, second column, twenty-ninth line from top, for " Arch&ts/i 
 
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