Eugene Arthur Kozlay

Well, that was certainly interesting, and I stored the incident away for future reference. Meanwhile, family and career took precedence for the next thirty years or so, and I would only occasionally run across all those writings and wonder what else was in them. My husband was very proud of his ancestor, but all we really knew about him was that he had been Colonel of the 54th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment during the Civil War, serving in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia and later in the Charleston SC area, and that he had been brevetted Brigadier General at war's end. We had his lengthy regimental journal, as well as his Colt pistol, sword, and a beautiful portrait among other memorabilia. There was also some family lore, that he had been a nobleman in Hungary and that he had been an engineer on the first elevated railroad in Brooklyn, New York, neither of which was documented in any way, and that he had somehow been involved in helping fellow émigrés who were forming a Hungarian community in New Buda, Iowa.

It wasn't until the summer of 2001 that my interest was again sparked regarding this shadowy individual whose name I carried. My husband and I were invited to a 50th wedding anniversary by his first cousin, whom he had not seen since childhood. At the party, the cousin brought up the issue of the regimental journal. Could we make a copy of it for him? All right, I said, it is about time we get that journal transcribed. My husband's father had once asked his secretary to take on this task, but the result had been unsatisfactory.

Once I had finished the transcription, I became intrigued with this obviously brilliant but complex man. I then turned to the other writings and memorabilia and inventoried all that had been long forgotten in that cupboard. I was astonished at how much there was, most of it consisting of Hungarian writings dating from the early 1850s. It was time to find out what it said. Besides, some of the material was badly deteriorated, and if we didn't do something quickly, it would be lost forever.

I was fortunate to find a student here in Baltimore, István Schunck, from Budapest, who agreed to take on the translations. And what a revelation it was. The documents fell into three major categories. The largest group of writings was a diary, consisting of nearly 500 pages dated for the most part from 1849 to 1853. This diary chronicled his experiences as a young lieutenant in the 1848-49 War of Liberation and then followed him as he fled Hungary at the end of the war to Hamburg and then to Scotland and America, where he arrived in January 1850. The account then continued as he settled for a year in New Orleans, spending the year learning English, and then back to New York, where he settled permanently. It also contained a significant amount of poetry, both in Hungarian and in German (and in one case Slovak) as well as memories from his childhood and teenage years in Hungary. The diary is very personal and detailed, containing a wealth of information about his everyday life, his friends, his lovers, and his Hungarian compatriots. His passion is evidenced on every page - in his deep love for his homeland, in his hatred for the despised Austrians, in his joy in making love to beautiful girls, in his despair over the constant bickering and contention among his fellow exiles, and in his depression in being faced with finding a way to make a living in an unfamiliar land where he could not even speak the language and had no profession which he could follow. His keen observations vary widely, ranging from the slave market in New Orleans to the political situation in Mexico. The personal nature of this large set of writings is underscored by his refusal to let anyone else read it, saying that it would serve as entertainment in his old age.

The second and third major group of writings consisted of copies of letters he wrote during this period, mostly to his fellow émigrés who had fled the Austrians during that terrible time in late 1849, and their letters to him. By 1851 and 1852, most of them were scattered around the country, some of them to New Buda, others as far flung as New Orleans, St. Louis, Baltimore, Chicago, and San Francisco.

As the translations began coming in, and as I began to learn more about Jeno Kozlay, my research necessarily expanded in dozens of directions. In order to put these writings in perspective, I needed especially to learn far more about the history of mid-19th-century Hungary and its abortive attempt to set up an independent democracy. I learned much about Kossuth, especially as Jeno claimed a blood relationship to him through his grandmother. Other names that cropped up repeatedly - László Újházy, Ferenc Varga, Antal Reményi, János Prágay, and even the famous, or infamous, Apollonia Jagello, opened my eyes to the very rich history of these early Hungarian refugees and their very real hardships as they carved out a new home in a country with an unfamiliar culture and language.

Though he left less information about his life in Brooklyn, it is clear that Jeno, now calling himself Eugene Arthur, began to make his presence known in the local German community. He became involved in local politics, and at the outbreak of the Civil War, he was asked to organize a regiment. The 54th New York Volunteer Regiment, although composed largely of Germans and named "Schwarze Jaeger," also featured Stephen Kovacs as its Major. Other notable Hungarians who appear in his regimental journal include General Julius Stahel, who later achieved the rank of Major-General and was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, and George D'Utassy, Colonel of the 39th New York Infantry Regiment, both of whom were military leaders, along with Colonel Kozlay, in the Shenandoah Valley early in the war.

I was able to locate a significant amount of correspondence written to Kozlay during the Civil War period (Kozlay Papers, Special Collections, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY), and although he was writing in English for the most part by this time, numerous letters written to him in Hungarian testify to his continued association with fellow Hungarians during this period. The few examples of his writing during the later 1850s show an increased use of English as he became more proficient with the language, and in fact in 1857 he published a novel in English, Secrets of the Past: A Romance of the South, which was set in New Orleans in 1814. The novel was serialized in the United States Democratic Review between September 1857 and June 1858 and may be found in its entirety on the Internet as a part of the Cornell University's contribution to the Making of America Project.

Throughout this research I have been aided immeasurably by my correspondence with descendants of several of these early Hungarian refugees and especially with Stephen Beszedits, a Hungarian living in Toronto, Canada, who has done extensive research and writing about Hungarians in the Civil War and whose articles have appeared in this Newsletter. He was able to supply supplemental information about a number of Eugene's compatriots, especially those who also served in the Civil War. He was also helpful in shedding additional light on some of the cultural issues of the period and on the relationships among this group as a result of his own research. He has even attempted to find out more information about Eugene Arthur Kozlay's life in New York during his trips there and has provided me with suggestions for further research. Because, of course, much work is left to be done. Although we have been blessed with a great deal of rich material, there is much that we still do not know. Ironically, thanks to the diary we know more about his everyday life in Hungary than we do about his later life in America. We do know that he was admitted to the New York State Bar Association, though he never practiced law, that he held a variety of civil service positions, and that when he died in 1883, his occupation was listed as civil engineer. Only two of his six children survived childhood. His son, Charles Meeker Kozlay, became a printer and publisher and a noted authority on the short-story writer Bret Harte.

We have certainly been blessed with far more material than most who seek information about their ancestors and can only be grateful that Jeno/Eugene was such a prolific writer. And we are fortunate that succeeding generations chose to save this material, even though for the most part they couldn't read it and had no idea what was in it. The Kozlay generation preceding ours actually made numerous attempts to find out more about Jeno - where was he from? what was his life like in Hungary? - but to no avail. They had no idea that the answers were right in the cupboard!

Once it became clear how much fascinating material we had, I wanted to share it, both with present-day descendants and with others who might have an interest. This led to a first-time-ever reunion of the Kozlay descendants in the U.S. in the fall of 2002, most of whom had never met each other. I set up a display of the writings and memorabilia in our home in Timonium, Maryland, and gave each descendant a copy of all the materials, either on a computer disk or a printed version. I have been less successful in my attempt to find other descendants of Jeno's fellow Hungarian exiles. Only one has been located so far, though I will continue to search.

Certainly one highlight of this research was our decision to travel to Hungary in the fall of 2002 to see his homeland for ourselves. Though most of the area has changed drastically in the last 150 years, we were able to walk through areas of Pest where Jeno lived during his student days, and even dine in restaurants where we can be reasonably certain he dined, and we traced a trip he took as a teenager to visit his relatives in present-day Martin, Slovakia. Sadly, the vineyards owned by his family in Pomáz, just north of Budapest, are gone, and there is little left from that era in his hometown of Jászkisér, a tiny village lying between Jászberény and Szolnok, east of Budapest. But there was enough to see that we could share his terrible feelings of loss as he was forced to leave his beautiful homeland, knowing that he would probably never see it again. We were also determined to visit the Vasvary Collection in Szeged during our trip, and though we regretted that our visit there was all too brief, it was exciting to see how much effort has gone into preserving records of other Hungarians who emigrated to America over the years. We were even able to trace the histories of some of the émigrés we had come to know through the diaries and letters.

It was perhaps naive to hope that there might be more left of mid-19th-century Hungary during our trip, but after all, 150 years is a long time ago. If one adds to that the tremendous political and geophysical changes that have taken place in Hungary during that period, including the numerous destructive floods of both the Duna and the Tisza, it is less surprising that so little remains that Jeno might recognize today. This makes the existence of written records so important. Dates of births and deaths, and even of significant events, can be cold and their interest wanes quickly, but to be able to read accounts of daily life, and of loves gained and lost, and even of snowball fights with the girls at the age of 13, this is what truly brings history alive.

It is my intent to publish this material, with significant annotations which will put his writings in historical and anthropological context. Eugene Kozlay has left us a rich resource which should interest not only Hungarians and Hungarian-Americans but also historians for whom it would provide primary source material on 19th-century Hungary and on the Hungarian émigré experience.

In his diary, Jeno quotes (in translation), "Let it be our assignment to so live that at our tomb the Good would say blessings and would wish us back." As I stood before his tombstone in Brooklyn, New York, I could honestly say that he indeed fulfilled that assignment.