Author Archives: Joel

by Joel | 11 August 2025 · 5:53 am

Irish Famine Destinations

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 30-36:

The Irish arriving on America’s eastern seaboard usually settled in lodgings close to the port, especially in New York where a staggering average of 300 were disembarking daily, every day for six years: on some days more than 1,000 would arrive on a single tide. As we know, this was the favoured destination of the Irish exodus, which immediately raised its status to that of the busiest port in the world. Whether their original intention had been to move on to other cities or out on to the plains and lush farmlands, to head for the frontier or to join the Gold Rush, the majority of the Irish emigrants stayed right there, in New York.

…

The exodus to Canada was different: the vast majority moved on. Though many thousands sailed to the colony known as British North America, their true destination was the United States. Canada was cold, sparsely inhabited, and many of its people spoke only French. Job prospects were poor, and worse still, to remain there meant a continued existence under the hated British flag. Boston had only a tenth of New York’s direct traffic but its Irish population was swollen by the masses coming from Canada.

Many had sworn an oath to settle north of the border, in return for a cheaper Atlantic passage to Halifax or Saint John, and, if they were sailing into Quebec, a free place on a barge to carry them up the St Lawrence River to Montreal. English politicians and civil servants were anxious to populate the country and subsidized fares as low as £2 (US $11), were made available. Many thousands of families were not given a say in the matter. Canada was the destination for destitute tenants on the huge estates in Ireland, cleared by their landlords, who paid the fares and chartered the ships, and the passage to Canada was far more economical than to the United States.

Once they landed, however, a great many emigrants went south. If they had a little money they took the lake steamers, small coasters and schooners, or whatever means of transport was available. If not, they walked across the border. For six months of the year the larger Canadian ports and the St Lawrence seaway were ice-bound and closed but even in the warmer half of the year, the great majority of Ireland’s Famine emigrants an – estimated 200,000 – merely used those ports as staging posts.

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Filed under Britain, Canada, food, migration, travel, U.S.

by Joel | 10 August 2025 · 6:13 am

Voyage of the Perseverence, 1846

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 17-18, 34-35:

As Ireland’s capital city, Dublin was by far the biggest and busiest of all the ports around the Irish coast, and the passengers for one of the first voyages of the Famine period, directly to New York, boarded here on St Patrick’s Day in 1846. The sweet smell from the hatches of the Perseverance still hung in the air, for Demerara, the old Dutch colony in the West Indies, was her last port of call and sugar, rum and molasses had recently been unloaded.

…

The abundant Canadian forests had more than enough wood to equip the expanding fleets on either side of the ocean and timber was only a fraction of the price compared with Europe. So Martin and Sons despatched their senior captain, William Scott, to Saint John in New Brunswick, to build, buy and commission new ships to sail under their flag, to be registered in the port of Dublin.

A native of the Shetland Isles in the north of Scotland, Captain William Scott was a veteran of the Atlantic crossing. At around the time when most men would be thinking of retiring, he gave up his desk job and his home in Saint John and returned to his adopted city. When he took the Perseverance out of Dublin that day, he was an astonishing 74 years old.

For the first time Captain Scott’s barque of 597 tons was carrying passengers, the vanguard of a million Famine emigrants. He would cut short the farewells, scorning the quayside tears, anxious to get this strange cargo down below while he prepared his ship to catch the late afternoon tide the following day, on Wednesday, March 18th. The crew had cleared the holds, and ship’s carpenter James Gray had fitted out bunks four tiers high and 6 feet square. The fare in steerage was £3 (around US $15). In the cramped conditions for 210 passengers, pots and pans to cook their meagre rations were a priority, as were a tradesman’s tools to earn a living in America. The mate Shadrack Stone checked the passengers and their belongings as they stepped on board. Perhaps there was also room for a couple of fiddles, maybe a squeezebox or a set of Irish pipes.

…

In reasonable weather groups of 20 or 30 passengers at a time would be allowed on deck to breathe fresh air for a change, wash their clothing and clean themselves, and to cook whatever rations were still intact and fit to eat. In bad weather they would be forced to remain below, in complete darkness if the seas were really rough, the heaving waves bringing all kinds of discomfort as well as the inevitable seasickness for poor travellers. Most of the time they stayed on their bunks: despite the lack of space, it was usually more comfortable there than on deck.

…

The hearths were nothing more than rudimentary boxes lined with bricks, a crude form of barbecue. When the weather was rough, no fires would be allowed, but there would often be a period of calm at the end of the day, as dusk was settling on the ocean, when a few passengers would be allowed on deck to cook for their families and friends below. Then it would be the turn of the youngest apprentice seaman on board, Jack in the Shrouds as he was known, to clamber up the rigging carrying a jug of water to douse the flames. Many a protest was raised, but no argument was heeded.

The water ration was supposed to be 6 pints per person per day, to drink, wash and cook. If the journey lasted beyond the estimated period, passengers and crew alike went thirsty and dirty, and those on board could soon gauge if they were going to be on the sea for longer than expected when the daily water allocation was reduced. Head money covered the dues which might be payable by the captain at the port before any passengers were allowed to disembark.

During the six years of the Famine Emigration the Passengers’ Acts, which covered the provision of food, were changed, and different versions of these Acts were imposed by American and British governments. A glaring example of the contrast between the legislation of the two countries was in the number of passengers allowed on board. America decreed only two people be allowed for every 5 tons of the vessel’s registered tonnage, while in Britain, the allowance was three for every 5 tons. Thus, British ships could carry half as many passengers, again 300 instead of 200, as American ships of similar size. Not surprisingly, American ships were considered to be faster, safer, more comfortable, more modern, and sailed by more competent crews.

Rigid enforcement of the Acts was impossible. There were regularly too many passengers aboard too many ships and too few Customs and Immigration officers. These were hard times, desperate times: with so many ships carrying emigrants for only one voyage, the politicians in Washington and London could easily be ignored, and many a captain was guilty of failing to care properly for the people in his ship. Changes in the Passengers’ Acts were aimed at making ocean travel safer, for the protection of the passengers, but their effect was to drive up the fares, bringing despair to the impoverished people in Ireland.

In the first year of the Famine sailings the ships were supposed to provide each passenger, each week, with a total of 7lbs of bread, biscuit, flour, rice, oatmeal or potatoes. One pound of food a day was nothing more than an insurance against starvation: the passengers themselves were supposed to be responsible for anything else they required. Three years later, in 1849, the Acts were amended, decreeing that twice a week tea, sugar and molasses were to be given out. Ship owners were also directed to provide more space on board for each passenger. The new Act laid down a minimum of 12 square feet, so now the bunks were 6 feet long and 2 feet wide where previously they had been only 20 inches wide.

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Filed under Britain, Canada, economics, food, industry, migration, travel, U.S.

by Joel | 9 August 2025 · 1:56 pm

Irish Famine Ships Introduction

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 13-14:

Five thousand ships sailed across the Atlantic with Irish emigrants in the six years of the Famine Emigration. They were diverse in size, safety and comfort, or the lack of it, and they varied in many other respects – in age and in the experience and quality of their crews, their speed on the voyage, provisions on board, and the fares they charged.

American packet ships of more than 1,000 tons, with triple-decks were built in the late 1840s specifically for the emigrant trade. They would carry more than 400 passengers, some in private cabins. But by no means all the ships were custom-built. When the British Queen first put to sea in 1785 she needed several major repairs before she could carry passengers on regular voyages from Liverpool to New York. And when the Elizabeth and Sarah achieved infamy in the fever year of 1847, she had been at sea for 83 years.

Undoubtedly, many of the Famine ships would have carried African slaves in the early years of the 19th century. The European slave traders finally ended their activities barely a dozen years before the onset of the Famine and the Arab slavers continued to ply well into the 1860s.

There were tiny vessels like The Hannah with a crew of six and measuring only 59 feet – about the same length as four family cars parked bumper-to-bumper. She was converted from a coaster by the addition of a third mast to enable her to go into deeper waters, and sailed to New York five times, from Dublin, Cork and Limerick, with a complement of only 50 or 60 passengers crammed below in a single hold.

These Irish men and women were not always welcome on arrival in their new homeland, for this desperate migration represented cheap labour, a threat to the established American workforce. But they dug canals, built roads and laid railways, they became seamstresses and servants.

The alternative was to stay at home and starve. A meal, a job, a place to rest, a chance to survive was all the Famine emigrants asked. They left Ireland by sailing ship every day, summer and winter, for six years while the Famine lasted, to make the 3,000 mile journey across the Atlantic Ocean. This is their story.

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by Joel | 8 August 2025 · 6:27 am

I came across two striking Polish acronyms in the last chapter of the history book I just finished reading: Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014).

ZSRR = Związek Socjalistycznych Republik Radzieckich, lit. Union of Socialist Republics Soviet (abbr. Związek Radziecki, Union Soviet),
also ZSRS = Związek Socjalistycznych Republik Sowieckich (abbr. Związek Sowiecki, Union Soviet)

ZOMO = Zmotoryzowane Odwody Milicji Obywatelskiej, lit. Motorized Reserves of the Militia of Citizens. These were the troops who broke up large public demonstrations against the regime from the 1950s through the 1980s. They were disbanded in September 1989, after the election of June 4, 1989, a day of glory in Poland (and of infamy in China).

Another linguistic tidbit from the last chapter (p. 630) is Nie ma wolności bez Solidarności! lit. Not have freedom without Solidarity!

The Far Outliers will be heading for Poland next month.

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by Joel | 5 August 2025 · 7:53 am

Piecing Poland Back Together, 1920s

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 553-555:

The first task facing the new state was to recover from the devastation of the war, which had been enormous. Much of the infrastructure of the country had to be rebuilt from scratch. Industry needed to be developed, as there was huge unemployment. And agriculture, which had been disrupted and ravaged by the war, needed to be put back on its feet. The country was impoverished; it was also experiencing a food crisis. To boot, some four hundred thousand Poles had died fighting in the Prussian, Austrian, and Russian armies during World War I, which meant a depletion of the best patriotic forces.

Another enormous challenge concerned the knitting together of disparate pieces of territory and peoples who had experience of very different imperial regimes—different legal systems, educational systems, forms of national and local governance, and the like. The enormity of the physical task of bringing together the previously partitioned lands, after 123 years of belonging to states other than Poland, was reflected in the network of railways. The railways all led to the imperial hubs, thus being a centrifugal not a unifying force. New railway branches had to be added to facilitate travel to the capital of Warsaw as well as to cross the breadth and length of the state. Even today one still notes a particular denseness of railway lines in the west (the former Germany), light coverage in the east, and the south best served by the Galician west–east line connecting Kraków with Lviv and beyond.

Those businesses that were able to resume operation relatively quickly now faced a different domestic market. No longer were they able to export to Berlin, Vienna, or Saint Petersburg. And if they had relied in part on inputs available elsewhere in those empires, they would need to find new suppliers within the borders of the new state. The country experienced a painful bout of hyperinflation in 1923: at one point, one U.S. dollar was worth 20 million Polish marks. The replacement of the mark by the zloty in the spring of 1924 and the concomitant currency correction essentially wiped out the savings of the country’s middle class. This did not augur well for the economic well-being of the citizens of the young Polish state.

As the history of partition suggests, not all Polish citizens were equally prepared for national independence. Regionalism became pronounced, as inhabitants felt they had more in common with those who came from their partitioned zone than with those from other partitioned zones. Few had any real experience of self-rule, making Galicians the most likely candidates to move to the new capital, Warsaw, to help run the new government. This in turn rendered Lviv, the former capital of Galicia, a remote provincial backwater. At the same time, there must have been a clash of cultures in the new Polish capital. The earlier inhabitants of Warsaw (as we have seen) had a very unpleasant experience in the elections to the Russian State Duma. Would these experiences carry over to Polish politics in an ostensibly Polish state?

Indeed, few Poles knew what to expect from the new Poland. In a novel by Stefan Żeromski, The Spring to Come, the reality of life in a state experiencing growing pains is brought to life. A Polish industrialist in what was then the Russian imperial port of Baku tries to interest his son (the main protagonist of the novel), who had lived his entire life outside of the homeland, in moving to Poland. The father weaves a beautiful story of Poland as a land of glass houses and does convince his son to try his luck in the new Poland. However, this useful fiction of glass houses—a place of perfection, a promised land—proved but a bubble that soon would burst. There were no glass houses. Rather, the reality of life in the young state proved challenging at best.

Of course, no one in 1924 knew what a normal nation-state was to look like, let alone how to create one in this heterogeneous part of the world. There were various ideas as to Poland’s future shape as well. Various political camps had their own visions and mobilized their constituencies to fight to turn them into reality. The Roman Catholic clergy most decidedly had its own ideas of the role the church was to play in Polish life. Peasants sought improved conditions for farming, as well as greater access to land—something that was more easily accomplished by expropriating non-Poles than by doing the same to Polish nobles.

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by Joel | 3 August 2025 · 6:11 am

Poles in Japan vs. Russia, 1904

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 526-528:

In 1904 war broke out between Russia and Japan. As odd as it may seem, the clash with its tiny Asian neighbor proved troublesome for the Russians. The war effort led to problems at home and provided new opportunities, and new challenges, for the Poles of the Russian Empire.

The hostilities provided impetus for the Poles (always on the lookout for opportunity in the international arena) to plot. Both Piłsudski and Dmowski made their way to Tokyo, independently of each other, and each with a different agenda. Piłsudski offered the Japanese Polish military services; his men would fight the Russians on their home front, thus helping Japan win the war. Dmowski came to warn the Japanese against taking up Piłsudski’s offer; he expected that the war might compel the Russians to make concessions to the Poles. While the double visit might have been seen as a comedy of errors (the two men actually met while in Tokyo, discussed their respective views, and respectfully chose to differ), the fact that the bemused Japanese were willing to hear each side suggests the Poles were being treated as if they were genuine players in the international realm, and not subjects of Russia. And, although they declined to use the Poles to fight, the Japanese general staff did provide Piłsudski with some money and war materièl in the hopes he might gather intelligence for them.

The Revolution of 1904–1907

In the meantime the Russo-Japanese War continued, increasingly showing the weakness of the eventual loser, Russia. This weakness had repercussions for the Poles of the empire. The diplomatic efforts of Piłsudski and Dmowski notwithstanding, the events of 1904 and beyond would be more noteworthy for the upheaval and bloodshed they engendered. In the fall of that year, a working-class demonstration broke out in Warsaw’s Grzymułtowski Square in which Piłsudski’s PPS fighters (some sixty strong) defended the crowds against the Russian police and mounted Cossacks. A number of participants were injured, while over four hundred were arrested and six lost their lives—as did one Russian policeman. This was the first armed clash between Poles and Russians since 1863….

Back in the Polish lands, strikes in places such as Warsaw and Łódź raised the specter of revolution; martial law was declared. Poles were becoming radicalized, especially the Polish workers, many of whom lost their jobs as a result of the economic decline brought on by the war.

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Filed under Japan, labor, nationalism, Poland, Russia, war

by Joel | 2 August 2025 · 8:57 am

Rebuilding a Polish Nation in Galicia

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 504-507:

Unlike the Hohenzollerns of Prussia/Germany or the Romanovs of Russia, the Habsburgs were Roman Catholic monarchs—and this is an important distinction. Furthermore, Habsburg piety was proverbial. All this meant that there should have been more common ground between the Poles and Austrians. At the same time, the Habsburgs had historically been the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (defunct as of 1806) and thus had a special relationship to the Germans of the rest of Europe.

As in all the partitions, the treatment of the new subjects was uneven. In the beginning, the Austrian authorities sought to civilize what they considered to be a backward land. Later, under the oppressive influence of Metternich, they sought to constrain what they thought was a revolutionary people—as witnessed in the debacle of the peasant jacquerie of 1846. (The incorporation of the Free City of Kraków into Galicia set the relatively thriving medieval capital of Poland back decades.) Metternich had seen fit to equate Polonism with revolution. Doubtless the new ruler of the Austrian Empire, Franz Joseph, felt similarly.

Only after a period of absolutism and Germanization did the tone change. This was brought about by several Austrian military defeats. The loss to the French in 1859 led to reforms at home that ultimately resulted in constitutional rule in Austria as of the early 1860s. Notably for the Poles, they were allotted their own provincial Seym as early as 1861.

The defeat of Austria by Prussia in 1866 was even more significant. The defeat forced the Habsburgs to reach a new modus vivendi with the Hungarians, who had been chafing under Habsburg rule particularly since the end of their failed revolution of 1848–1849. In 1867, the two parties reached the famous compromise that led to the establishment of the Dual Monarchy. Henceforth, the country would be known as Austria-Hungary.

That the Habsburgs had been compelled to make concessions to one of their subject peoples was a fact not lost on the Poles. Already the failure of the January Insurrection under Russian rule led some important Galicians to reconsider their approach to the Habsburg monarchy. A new and influential group known as the Kraków Conservatives resolved to be loyal to the Habsburgs. Although initially skeptical, after several years the Polish elites of Galicia were won over to this idea. Even the defeat of Austria at the hands of Prussia did not shake their belief in the monarchy.

…

These developments led to a third, and most fruitful, phase for the Galician Poles. Unlike the disgruntled Czechs of Bohemia, Poles decided to participate in the Reichsrat or imperial council, a two-chambered parliament in Vienna. Polish elites sought to recast Galicia as a conciliatory, conservative, loyal province. All this boded well for the position of Poles within the Habsburg Empire. Indeed, during the Dual Monarchy, a number of Poles actually came to hold important posts in the imperial government, including that of prime minister.

Given a degree of autonomy, Galicia became a haven for the Poles—a place where Poles could be Poles while still being loyal to the Habsburg dynasty. This dual identity was facilitated by Article 19 of the Fundamental Laws, which specified that each people within the monarchy had the right to cultivate its own nationality and language. Poles, and especially the democrats who vied with the conservatives for influence within the province, availed themselves of this opportunity in various ways, including the celebrating of a series of national figures and historic anniversaries. Among the most noteworthy were the solemn reburial of the poet Adam Mickiewicz in the Wawel crypts in 1890 and the five-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Grunwald in 1910, also celebrated in Kraków. The Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski had commissioned a massive monument commemorating that great medieval battle. These large public celebrations helped to bring Poles from all three partitioned lands closer together.

Thus, in the last third of the nineteenth century, the best place to be a Pole—certainly if one wanted to be politically active—and unlike in the Prussian or German lands, politically active in Polish—was Galicia. One could breathe Polish air there—or, as was also remarked, the very stones spoke Polish. To be sure, in Vienna (in the Reichsrat) Poles used German for their interpellations. However, back in the province, in the Galician Seym, the Polish language ruled (although it should be noted that Ruthenian interpellations during the proceedings were written down, phonetically, in Latin—not Cyrillic—script). Polish nonetheless became the language of government, the language of schooling.

Galician Poles had a high degree of autonomy—all of which allowed them to school themselves in the art of governance, to work in the bureaucracy, to develop scholarly institutes and universities where Polish would be the language of instruction, and the like. They lived in a country in which they had parliamentary representation and the rule of law. This, combined with the rights of nationalities, suggests that, as of the last third of the nineteenth century, one might think of Galicia as the closest thing to a Piedmont that the Poles had (Piedmont, meaning the Italian province that initiated Italian unification in the 1860s). Could these advantages within Galicia, thus, help propel the Poles to their own unification?

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Filed under Austria, democracy, Germany, Hungary, Italy, language, migration, nationalism, Poland, religion, war

by Joel | 31 July 2025 · 4:46 pm

Wielka Emigracja po 1831

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 454-458:

Not all Poles stayed around to see how matters would develop after 1831. Already during the insurrection, some insurrectionists abandoned the Kingdom of Poland and made their way to the west. After the November Insurrection, a mass exodus of Poles ensued to France, Belgium, and Britain. There were so many Poles in western Europe that this came to be called the Great Emigration (Wielka Emigracja). The term wielka can mean large—which it was. Somewhere in the vicinity of ten thousand Poles became political émigrés in Paris and elsewhere. But wielka also means great. It was a great generation, comprised of the leading Polish intellectual lights as well as dedicated cadres of insurrectionists. Among those former were the great Romantic poets—the so-called Bards: Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, and Zygmunt Krasiński. Mickiewicz, incidentally, had managed to escape from Russia to the west right before the November Insurrection.

Also in emigration was a young composer from Warsaw, Fryderyk (French: Frédéric) Chopin. Son of a Polonized emigrant from France, Fryderyk was in Vienna when the insurrection broke out and made the reverse journey. The young Chopin, whose musical genius would (among other things) popularize Polish dances such as the polonaise, the mazurka, and the krakowiak, channeled his anguished reaction to the loss of the November Insurrection into his famous, and moving, Revolutionary Étude.

Only in emigration did Polish Romanticism—in literature even more than in music—develop to its full potential. Polish literature of this period is interesting not only for its intrinsic value but for what it represented to Polish society in that period. When politics failed (as they clearly did in 1830–1831), poetry took its place. Poland went from being led by generals wielding sabers to generals wielding pens.

These newfangled generals led a cultural campaign. Their task was to produce a vibrant literary culture that would unite all the lands of the former Commonwealth as well as enrich the Polish spirit. Here the Polish Romantics were influenced by thinkers like Herder, famous for his conception of the Volksgeist, which can be translated as the spirit of the people or nation or as national character. In this vision, the people or nation was viewed increasingly as the common man.

This proved to be one of the most important periods of Polish literature, if not the most important (which surely could be argued). And Adam Mickiewicz—the young poet introduced earlier—is the most famous of the Polish Romantic poets. Indeed, he is the most famous literary figure in all of Polish history. Thus it is interesting to consider the opening line of his most famous work, the epic poem Pan Tadeusz. Expressing the longing of the émigré for the country he has left behind, it begins with the invocation, “Lithuania! My fatherland!” Writing in Polish, this poet who hailed from the territory of today’s Belarus, considered Lithuania his homeland. This suggests that this quintessentially Polish poet reflected ideas of Poland and Polishness that were hardly straightforward—ideas more redolent of the former Sarmatian, Commonwealth realm. Polish and provincial culture (brought to life in the Lithuanian landscape) were one in this depiction of a soon-to-be-lost Sarmatian idyll in its encounter with the transformations of the Napoleonic era. Indeed, it is a Polish peculiarity that national self-definitions were often forged at its margins—in the borderland realm increasingly referred to in the nineteenth century as the Kresy.

Paris proved a seedbed for all kinds of ideas about Poland’s past, present, and future. The émigrés were obsessed with “the Polish question,” a question not limited to the regaining of national sovereignty. Lacking independent statehood, Poles had to answer some other crucial questions as well. They increasingly had to choose, consciously, to be Poles, as this was no longer a choice of state identification. But what, then, was Polishness? How was one to define Poland, or who was a Pole? How to justify being—let alone becoming—Polish, in a world of imperial dominance?

Again, the poet spoke. Or, rather, wrote—although it should be added that Mickiewicz also spent the period from 1840 to 1844 lecturing on Slavic literature at the Collège de France, his lectures often electrifying his audience. Consider his Books of the Polish Nation and the Polish Pilgrimage. Mickiewicz believed that the Poles had a mission of universal significance. In his messianic vision, Poland was the Christ of Nations, suffering for the rest of the world. “But on the third day,” he wrote in true biblical style, “the soul shall return to the body, and the Nations shall arise and free all the peoples of Europe from slavery.” Mickiewicz also saw a special role for his nation in the Slavic world. The future of Europe lay with the Slavs—and the Poles, not the Russians, were Slavdom’s natural leaders, who would fight against the perceived evils of civilization.

Despite his liberal use of biblical phrasing, Mickiewicz’s Roman Catholicism was hardly orthodox. The Pole was conflicted in his relationship to the See of Peter. He, like many others, was outraged that the Vicar of Christ should side with the partitioning empires and condemn the Polish insurrection. Furthermore, Mickiewicz fell under the spell of Andrzej Towiański, a leader of a mystical cult; this experience did little to strengthen his connection to the Roman Catholic Church of his day.

Mickiewicz and the Romantics focused their attention, in exile, on the Polish nation, seeking to determine what in the Polish past was significant, and whether the nation had a historical mission. Theirs was an ideal vision of the nation, focusing more on the body politic—the potential masses of Poles—than on any future territorial incarnation. The Poland of the Romantics was one of the mind. They believed that their nation did have a mission, which was to bring universal freedom to Europe. In this mission lay all hope for Poland. Only if Poles fought for universal freedom could they be considered worthy of regaining independent statehood. Their national stance, thus, was an active and engaged one. The purpose of Polish Romantic literature, furthermore, was to embolden and inspire the nation as well as strengthen national consciousness, without which there could be no gains. In an age when generals wielding sabers had failed, the Romantics saw themselves as generals wielding pens.

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Filed under Baltics, Belgium, Britain, education, France, language, literature, migration, nationalism, Poland

by Joel | 30 July 2025 · 3:24 pm

Life in Poland’s Partitions, 1795

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 421-424:

Life under the three empires took on distinctly different forms. If regionalism was a problem earlier, it now threatened to become even more intractable. Although the three partitioning powers prided themselves on being enlightened states, each approached the new territories and new subjects differently. Thus, a new layer of regionalism was superimposed on the old ones. The newly acquired population was incorporated into each of the partitioned territories in different ways. Each empire was further diversified and internationalized—perhaps in ways even the partitioning powers had not anticipated. Likewise recall that, although the final partition of Poland came only in 1795, already since 1772 certain parts of the country had come under foreign rule, which left the territories further differentiated.

Prussia became a much more heterogeneous entity, although it sought to dilute the concentration of Poles in the newly acquired territories. The Prussian state took over the Crown lands, which it sold to German landowners; German bureaucrats took the place of Polish officeholders. No municipal self-rule or noble assemblies were allowed under Prussian rule. A Protestant power, Prussia also took over properties belonging to the Roman Catholic Church. Religious issues complicated the picture. Prussia truly became a multiethnic and multidenominational state. It was faced with either dealing with, or doing away with, diversity.

Prussia eventually undermined the Polish nobles by taking away their privileges. The position of their peasants was strengthened. The position of Jews was changed beyond recognition, their corporate rights undone. Rather, Friedrich the Great delineated two types of Jews: those who were to assimilate and in the process receive civil rights and those who did not have these rights and would be expelled from the province. This facilitated a relatively rapid Germanization of the first group—certainly compared to the two other Central and East European empires.

The situation in Austria looked quite different. Under Maria Theresa and especially Joseph II, various reforms were implemented—reforms that could be considered enlightened. But under Francis I, scarred by the events of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic periods, reaction ensued. Seeking to centralize power, the Habsburgs took away various privileges of the Galician nobility. Indeed, many nobles suffered dreadfully under Austrian rule: if they were not able to provide proof of nobility—something that was difficult for many an old noble family fallen on hard times—they were reduced to the status of peasants. This déclassé nobility was clearly the worst off, although the burden of taxation reduced further nobles to penury. The peasants came to fare slightly better, as they were protected by legislation and the amount of time they spent working for the landlord was regulated. Jews were obliged to take German surnames and serve in the military (like members of all the estates), but their communities still had jurisdiction over religious matters. Although a staunchly Catholic power, Austria clearly did not trust its own population: witness the strong censorship of newspapers and other printed materials in the empire. The province would remain backward, socially as well as economically.

The territories that came under Russian rule—the most extensive of the lot—were the most ethnically diverse. The easternmost lands were inhabited by people we would now call Belarusians and Ukrainians (but which then were most likely termed Ruthenes or even Russians), Lithuanians, Tatars, and Jews. Poles were mainly noble landowners. It was Polish (Sarmatian) culture that had long radiated out through the entirety of the Commonwealth and that still carried weight.

Paradoxically, these lands witnessed little initially in the way of reforms. Even the old courts and laws were maintained. The nobles within the Russian Empire initially were not as inconvenienced as were nobles under Austrian and Prussian rule, except for the fact that Crown lands were taken over. By contrast, peasants found Russian rule more onerous: now classified as serfs, they were the chattel—that is, the personal property—of the landholders, who could do with them as they wished. Furthermore, they would eventually be subjected to Russia’s onerous military service: recruits were taken for a period of twenty-five years.

The biggest problem for the Russians related to religion. The imperial authorities would do away with the Uniate (Greek Catholic) religion in the 1830s, forcing Uniates to convert to Russian Orthodoxy. As the partitions provided Russia with her first real encounter with large Jewish populations, she decided to restrict them to a region that would become known as the Pale of Settlement; this swath of land was more or less coterminous with the boundaries of the former Commonwealth. Unlike their coreligionists elsewhere, Jews, thus, could not penetrate further into the heart of the empire, that is, into Russia proper.

Such was the starting point. It would not be the ending point. The arrangement ratified in 1795, and reaffirmed in 1797, proved less permanent than the partitioning powers might have imagined.

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Filed under Austria, Germany, language, migration, nationalism, Poland, religion, Russia

by Joel | 29 July 2025 · 5:59 am

Kościuszko in Poland

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 404-407:

The last third of the eighteenth century had initiated an increasingly painful spiral of action and reaction. Catherine’s trampling of Polish religious sensibilities led to the Confederation of Bar, which in turn resulted in the first partition. That shock propelled Poles to contemplate the series of reforms that culminated in the Constitution of May 3, 1791. The reaction to this was the Targowica Confederation and the second partition. Despite the Russian terror and intimidation, however, not all Poles were resigned to this fate.

One of these Poles was Tadeusz Kościuszko. Hailing from the region of Polesie (in the vicinity of today’s Belarus), Kościuszko was one of the poor but deserving young noblemen who received an education from the reform-minded Piarists, as well as at the Knights’ School in Warsaw. After a brief period spent in France (where he studied further) and elsewhere in western Europe, Kościuszko headed across the Atlantic in 1776. The Pole offered his services to George Washington and the Continental Congress. Kościuszko’s arrival was timely, and his services were both needed and appreciated by the Americans fighting for their independence. The Pole was given a commission and put to great use his skill as both a military engineer and a field commander. Among other things, Kościuszko fortified and defended places such as Philadelphia, Saratoga, and West Point, thus enabling these locations to withstand British attack. For his contributions to the American victory, the Polish nobleman was given United States citizenship and was promoted to the rank of brigadier general in the U.S. Army before returning home in 1784.

Having secured a position in the Polish army as of 1789, he fought on the side of King Stanisław in August 1792. However, upon learning the summer of 1793 that the king had acceded to the Targowica Confederation, General Kościuszko resigned his commission and left the country. France awarded him honorary citizenship. While in emigration, he was prevailed upon to return to rump Poland to lead a national insurrection.

With his eye-opening experience in America as well as Poland, Kościuszko was the right person for the job. He was convinced that the Poles had to fight a new type of war, one in which the entire citizenry rose to defend their country. In other words, he sought to mobilize the entire population of Poland—all estates, all regions. The challenge of getting burghers and peasants as well as nobles to join the fight did not escape Kościuszko. He admitted himself, “we must awaken love of our country among those who hitherto have not even known that they have a country.”

Kościuszko, thus, was a man with a mission. Although given dictatorial powers to lead the national rising, the general was not one to abuse them. This is seen from the oath he gave in Kraków on March 24, 1794, when he took control of the rising that would bear his name. Kościuszko swore he would use the dictatorial powers invested in him “only for the defense of the integrity of the frontiers, the gaining of sovereignty for the nation, and the establishment of universal freedom.” He truly was an anti-magnate.

The all-powerful military commander set about gaining support from all sectors of society. An important source of manpower had to be the numerous peasantry. While in Kraków, Kościuszko conscripted local peasants, who—given their lack of other weapons—turned their scythes into bayonets and joined the battle for Polish freedom. (A lack of arms and ammunition was a big problem for the insurrectionists.) Fighting alongside what remained of the Polish army, such peasants—it was hoped—would be the mainstay of Kościuszko’s insurrectionary forces. Having over the course of several weeks assembled an army of some four thousand regular troops and two thousand peasant scythe men, Kościuszko set north to engage the Russians in battle.

The two forces met near the village of Racławice on April 4. The Russian army was in for a surprise. The first battle of the Kościuszko Insurrection would look like nothing the Russians had ever fought. The Polish military commander employed tactics inspired by his experience in America. While the regular troops engaged the Russians, the fearless peasant scythe men raced out from behind them and toward the Russian cannons. They captured a dozen cannon and caused disarray and dismay among the Russians, who hastily retreated—if not before taking heavy losses. The Russians also left behind much-needed ammunition and arms.

Kościuszko’s secret weapon—the Polish peasant—proved decisive at the battle of Racławice. After the battle, the military commander famously ennobled several peasant scythe men, the most notable of whom was Bartosz Głowacki, for their bravery. Kościuszko also donned the traditional peasant cloak as a sign of recognition of what this new and vital part of the nation had achieved. Still, for numerous reasons this did not result in an influx of peasant scythe men. The following month, Kościuszko would issue a proclamation at Połaniec that gave the peasants personal freedom and reduced their labor dues for the duration of the insurrection. Like the potent image of peasant scythe men defending their country, the picturesque symbolism of a nobleman in peasant garb was but a first step in breaking down the barriers that had separated the two estates.

Kościuszko embraced the peasant out of conviction, not out of convenience. This, after all, was the man who had freed his own peasants upon his return to Poland and later would bequeath the property and money he had in the United States to free as many American slaves as was possible, charging his friend Thomas Jefferson to execute this, his last will and testament. Not for nothing did Jefferson famously call Kościuszko “the purest son of liberty.”