SZEGED, Hungary — Frederick Knefler served in the Union Army under Gen. Lew Wallace, author of “Ben Hur” and son of an Indiana governor.
George Grechenek suffered a thigh wound in Williamsburg during the Civil War and died 12 days later at Harewood Hospital in Washington.
Julius Stahel-Szamwald, born here in southern Hungary, was one of President Lincoln’s favorites in the Union Army. When Lincoln went to Pennsylvania for the Gettysburg Address, the command of the guard of honor, composed of officers with high rank, was awarded to Stahel-Szamwald.
Also, Charles Zagonyi was famous for his cavalry charge in Springfield, Mo., on Oct. 25, 1861.
Interesting tidbits, but Knefler, Grechenek, Stahel-Szamwald and Zagonyi have something in common besides their Union loyalty. Each was Hungarian, and they are featured in “Lincoln’s Hungarian Heroes,” a book published in 1939 about Hungarians who fought in the American Civil War.
The book shows that information on that war has roots far beyond, well, America.
The author of “Lincoln’s Hungarian Heroes” was Edmund Vasvary (Odon Vasvary), who was born here in Szeged in 1888. The site where he was born is across the street from a church that is 501 years old.
Hungarians, of course, were not the only recent immigrants who fought in the American Civil War, but they made a name for themselves, especially north of the Mason-Dixon line.
“At the outbreak of the Civil War there were still little more than 4,000 Hungarians (including women and children) in the United States. Of this number, some 800 served the Union cause, where their past military experience and sympathy for the North were recognized and rewarded with officer commissions,” Yale Richmond writes in “From Da to Yes: Understanding the East Europeans.”
“Hungarians in the Union armies included two major generals, five brigadier generals, 15 colonels and lieutenant colonels, thirteen majors, twelve captains, and some four dozen lieutenants. No other immigrant group proportionately provided as many top officers as Hungarians.”
Mr. Vasvary took note of this distinction. He moved to Pittsburgh in 1914 and then to Washington around 1935, according to Maria Korasz, curator since 1984 of the Vasvary Collection at the Csongrad County Library here.
Mr. Vasvary, as a young man, began to collect newspaper articles on notable Hungarians, many of whom had moved to the United States. He was able to find stories in both English and Hungarian, thanks to the large immigrant population in Cleveland, for example, that could support Hungarian-language newspapers.
He wrote from Washington in 1972, according to Miss Korasz, that he wanted his collection sent to Szeged after his death, and that is what happened: He died in the nation’s capital in 1977, and the collection came here a year later. The county library had obtained his book when it was published in 1939.
Szeged (Say-ged), a town of about 200,000 people, may seem an unlikely spot to find information on the American Civil War. The city is more than two hours south of the capital, Budapest, and less than one hour from the borders of Serbia and Romania. Szeged was devastated by a flood in 1879, and today it is known for its paprika, which is exported worldwide.
Mr. Vasvary returned to Szeged for the last time in 1974 and gave a lecture about his life and his collection, according to Miss Korasz. Andras Csillag was curator of the Vasvary Collection between 1979 and 1983 and was present when Mr. Vasvary visited Szeged for the last time.
The impetus for his collection was newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who was born about 30 miles east of Szeged, in Mako, in 1847. In 2000, Mr. Csillag, now a university professor in Szeged, wrote the first biography of Pulitzer published in Hungarian.
Pulitzer moved to the United States in 1864 and served a year in the Union Army. He later became publisher of papers in New York and St. Louis, and his name honors the top award for journalists. Mr. Vasvary collected stories about Pulitzer and then many other famous, and ordinary, Hungarians.
Many countries in Europe, including Hungary, were the scenes of bloody revolutions around 1848. The experience soldiers in those countries gained on their home turf did not go unnoticed by the Union in the 1860s. Knefler, for instance, fought in Hungary’s war for independence, according to Mr. Vasvary, and during the Civil War, he was among the first in line at the Battle of Romney in what later became West Virginia.
Mr. Vasvary’s book, mostly a biographical listing, also mentions 12 Hungarians who fought for the South.
Estvan Bela, for example, settled in Richmond when he moved to America and was the only known Hungarian general in the Confederate Army, according to Mr. Vasvary.
The collection, according to Miss Korasz, includes 1,500 books and 463 loose-leaf volumes. The biographies go beyond Civil War heroes. There are articles about such notable Hungarian Americans as movie star Zsa Zsa Gabor (born in Budapest) and football star Joe Namath, who was born in Pennsylvania after his family moved from Hungary. Miss Gabor starred in TV’s “Green Acres” in the 1960s, and Mr. Namath led the green-clad New York Jets to an improbable Super Bowl victory in 1969 over the Baltimore Colts.
So who visits the Szeged collection? Miss Korasz said Hungarians interested in family genealogy stop by, as do university students focusing on American history. Szeged is home to one of the largest universities in the country. It also is a sister city to Toledo, Ohio (which has a large Hungarian neighborhood), and residents of northwestern Ohio have visited the Vasvary Collection in the past three years.
Mr. Vasvary’s granddaughter came to Szeged and visited the collection in 1996, according to Miss Korasz. She was born in Washington in 1944. She was joined on the trip by her son, Michael. Mr. Vasvary had a son and daughter, and both are deceased.
The legacy of Mr. Vasvary, who also was a church leader, lives on with “Lincoln’s Hungarian Heroes.”
A few other notes on Hungarians in the Union Army with connections to Washington:
• Alan Schoepf was a general in the Union Army. He died Jan. 15, 1886, in Hyattsville.
• Louis Solyom arrived in New York in 1861. He fought in 11 battles, most of them in Maryland and Virginia. After the war, he began work at the Library of Congress, mostly with the division of Eastern European languages. He died in 1913 in Bethesda.
• Stahel-Szamwald gets a lot of attention in “Lincoln’s Hungarian Heroes,” and for good reason. He was born in Szeged in 1825 and served in the Austrian army and then the Hungarian revolutionary army. He later worked as a journalist and teacher in London and Berlin.
He moved to America in 1859, thinking his military days were behind him, but he ended up as lieutenant colonel of the 8th New York Regiment in the Battle of First Manassas on July 21, 1861. He was promoted to colonel and then brigadier general within the year, and in 1863, he received the Medal of Honor.
At Manassas, “if Stahel’s regiment had not kept back the Cavalry advance, the Confederate Army could have done much more damage. … it could easily have resulted in the occupation of Washington,” according to Mr. Vasvary.
Stahel-Szamwald also “distinguished himself at the Battle of Cross Keys, Va.,” according to the book. That is of special interest to this writer, who grew up less than 30 miles from the scene of that battle in the Shenandoah Valley.
This writer graduated from Turner Ashby, a high school in Virginia named for a Southern cavalry officer. Ashby was defeated in battle by Hungarian Unionist Philip Figyelmessy.
The family farm of my maternal grandmother, near Dayton, Va., was burned to the ground by Gen. Philip H. Sheridan and his troops during the Civil War. After reading Mr. Vasvary’s book, It would not be a surprise to learn there was at least one Hungarian in Sheridan’s band.
David Driver is a free-lance writer from Cheverly. He and his family currently live in Szeged, just 100 yards from where Mr. Vasvary was born. This is his second article for the Civil War page.
Sign up for Daily Newsletters
