CHAPTER 1

THE SLAVS IN AMERICA

We have no records of the arrival in what is now the United States of the first Slavic nationals. We don’t know from where they came or where they settled. But it seems certain that at an early date Slavs appeared in all of the various streams of colonization though primarily as individuals. We must remember that it was not until the nineteenth century that the world became seriously interested in the nationality and language of a person. The medieval period had thought only in terms of allegiance to a given monarch or to some supernational state which embraced persons of many tongues and origins, united in a common loyalty.

This held true for the first two centuries of American settlement and we always have to take it into account. It may be well to glance briefly, then, at the political situation in the Slavic lands, from the discovery of America through the next century.

Christopher Columbus discovered the New World less than a half century after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks and the liberation of Moscow from the Tatar yoke. Europe was filled then as now with homeless people, the Christians of the Byzantine Empire and of the Balkan Christian states, preferring the hardships of a wandering life to existence under the Mohammedan Turks. The armed forces of all countries were filled with adventurers who had been driven from their homes and were glad to fight as mercenaries.

For example, there were Greek soldiers in the armies of Francisco de Pizarro in his conquest of Peru in 1532. Later these same men took sides with Diego de Almagro in his revolt against Pizarro and made for him the first cannon cast in the New World.[1] This intermixture of nationalities continued throughout the era of the discovery and the ensuing decades. This was the height of the Spanish power and it was under the flag of Spain that men of all nationalities, especially from the Mediterranean area, went to serve.

At this time, the most powerful Slavic state was the Polish Republic, the _Rzeczpospolita Polska_. Yet this was far more than ethnographic Poland. It took in almost all Ukrainian and Byelorussian lands as well as ethnographic Lithuania and Latvia and a considerable part of eastern Germany. It maintained the closest connections with the Danubian principalities and even Hungary. Thus, a person known as a Pole could very easily have been one of several Slavic and even non-Slavic nationalities.

The Czechs formed the nucleus of the Kingdom of Bohemia, itself a subsidiary of the Hapsburg domains, the Holy Roman Empire (which, to use the words of Voltaire, was already ceasing to be either Holy, Roman or an Empire). The Slovaks and the Carpathian Ukrainians were under the Crown of St. Stephen of Hungary as were the Croats, while the Slovenes were more particularly connected with Austria. Yet again, the lands of the Crown of St. Stephen were also part of the Empire.

Thus the only Slavs not included either in the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires or in Poland were the Muscovite Russians. At this period few of them thought of crossing the boundaries of their western neighbors. Those who left their original homes traveled eastward and by the middle of the seventeenth century had reached the Pacific ocean and were poised to cross the north Pacific at its narrowest point.

We must keep these facts in mind when we think of the early Slavic immigration to the United States. This jumble of nationalities and states was still more confused by the fact that the overwhelming majority of the educated Slavic population used one of the three international languages of the day. The Roman Catholics used Latin, the Orthodox employed either Church Slavic or Greek, and these “higher” tongues supplemented and in large part replaced the vernaculars in legal and historical records. This was a period of religious turmoil as well, beginning with the Hussite wars in Bohemia. These were continued by the Protestant Reformation touched off by Martin Luther and the Counter-Reformation under the leadership of the Jesuits. At the same time, the new Protestantism and the older Latin Rite were spreading among the Orthodox Slavs and the situation was still further complicated by the Union of Brest in 1594 which formed the so-called Uniat Church or Catholic Church of the Eastern Rite.

Each of these religious disputes, with the political consequences that they involved, added to the number of displaced persons. The adherents of every religion found shelter with their friends in any of the countries of Western Europe—England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Holland. These were added to the number willing to risk anything to secure a new home. This was the background of the early colonization efforts in America.

The Spanish settlements in the southwest are less easily discussed. There can be no doubt that the leaders of the great religious orders that spread through California and New Mexico were of Spanish birth but there is considerable evidence to show that some of their subordinates were probably of Slavic origin. At least they seemed familiar with the peculiarities of Orthodox iconography. The Spanish mission in Santa Barbara, California, displays the Eastern form crucifix. Many of the wood paintings of saints in New Mexico superficially resemble crude icons. Yet little has been done to trace the early lives of the monks who worked in these missions. It would certainly not be surprising to find that some had made their way to the Spanish centers of the Franciscans and Dominicans from the disturbed area of Eastern Europe.[2]

We are on far surer ground when we come to the colonies established by the English along the Atlantic coast. In 1610, the Virginia Company sent to Jamestown, with Lord de la Warr, a group of Polish gentlemen as workmen. These were apparently refugees in England from one of the many upheavals in the _Rzeczpospolita_. Their names appear in Anglicized forms and since we have no information about their experiences before they reached England, many of them have been claimed by the Poles, Ukrainians, and the other peoples included in the Polish state.[3]

The same situation prevailed in New Netherlands. There can be no doubt that some of the settlers in the new Dutch colony were Slavs. Thus for a long while, the name of the Zeboroski[4] family, one of the early settlers, was written in Jersey Dutch. The family is proud of its Polish origin but again like so many, it also has been claimed by the Ukrainians. Another Slav of this period is Augustine Herrman, a skilled surveyor from Prague. He apparently went first to Virginia, then moved northward to New Amsterdam and later founded Bohemia Manor in Maryland. Efforts have been made by both the Czechs and the Germans to prove that he was of their origin but what proof there is favors the Czechs.[5] Many other families, such as the Roosevelts, can trace their origin to the Baltic states but leave us to decide from which particular group the original ancestor came.

A still more tangled situation arose in the early colony of Delaware, while it was still New Sweden. The Swedes eliminated the first Dutch settlement around Fort Casimir and then in 1641 founded their own Fort Christina and sent over a population of Swedes, Germans and Finns, and all this at a time when the Poles and the Swedes were conducting their own warfare behind the shelter of the Thirty Years War. At the same time the Swedes were trying to make the Baltic a Swedish lake and their representatives were deeply involved in negotiations with the _Zaporozhian Kozaks_ who were in an almost constant state of revolt against Poland. The Swedes then ruled both Livonia and Estonia. In view of all this it would have been surprising indeed if there had not been Slavs in the colony of New Sweden, the area in which the traditionally American form of the log cabin seems to have originated, a form reminiscent of the architecture of the East Baltic Slavs. The evidence for New England is less clear, though we know that the authorities of the new Harvard College seriously thought of inviting the distinguished Czech educator, Jan Amos Comenius (Komensky) to serve as the first president, in 1630. However, nothing came of it.[6]

In the eighteenth century there is the same uncertainty. In 1741 a group of the _Unitas Fratrum_ (the Bohemian Brethren) from Bohemia and Moravia, were led by Count Zinzendorf to a settlement in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. It is at least possible that some of these settlers spoke Czech as well as German. If they did, it would explain more clearly the interest in the community that was taken during the American Revolution by General Kasimierz Pulaski, who seems to have made a point of attending religious services there whenever he could. The architecture of the older buildings further suggests Slavic influence.

The American Revolution brought to the New World another group of Slavs, of whom the best known are the two Polish leaders, Generals Pulaski[7] and Tadeusz Kosciuszko.[8] Pulaski, already a well-known figure in Poland, brought with him a number of other East Europeans and Slavs who formed a considerable portion of the famous Pulaski Legion. We have also the names of others, such as Count Bienowski and Colonel Michael Kovach, an Hungarian, a member of the Legion who was killed at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1779. Most of the Legion’s survivors stayed in the new country.

Another possible source for inspiring Slavs, and especially Poles, to come to America was the career of Major General Charles Lee,[9] of the American Army. He had once been in command of the Cadet School in Warsaw founded by King Stanislaw Poniatowski. In addition to that, most of the French troops who served in America had previously been on duty in western Poland supporting the Saxon claims to the throne and helping the Poles oppose Russian domination. There is no way of knowing whether or not this force had received Slavic recruits during its term of duty there. The services of both Pulaski and Kosciuszko, and the later return of Kosciuszko to the United States in 1797, built up considerable interest for Poland in the United States. This continued for nearly a half century, leading to a fair amount of immigration from the former Polish state, especially after the Polish Revolt of 1831.

Moreover, American newspapers of the time published long accounts of events in Europe. Thus, in 1733 John Peter Zenger included in the New York _Weekly Journal_ an account of the efforts of Stanislaw Leszczynski to secure the throne of Poland. Numerous similar examples could be cited. However, no organized interest in Slavic lands and peoples developed.

Little is heard of Russians at this period, although American representatives had appeared in St. Petersburg during the Revolution and the Tsars, in the early 1800’s, began to send diplomatic representatives to Washington. Prince Dimitry Golitsyn,[10] a member of a socially prominent Russian family, was the first Roman Catholic priest to be fully trained and ordained by Bishop Carroll in the United States. He continued until the end of his life to be one of the leading Catholic priests in Pennsylvania, and maintained contact with the Russian Ministers in Washington. We also know that in 1800, Kutusoff mantles and bonnets were very popular in New York society.[11]

Until 1848, the Slavs who came to the United States came either as individual travelers or as individual immigrants, perhaps drawn in the train of some more prominent compatriot. There are several interesting accounts of this period, in Polish, such as those by Juljusz Ursin Niemciewicz who came with Kosciuszko in 1797 and remained in the country for several years. He visited Boston around 1799 and his diary mentions a Polish Unitarian library, the _Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum_, in Harvard of which nothing is now known.[12]

The situation was different in the Pacific northwest.[13] The Russians during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reached the Sea of Okhotsk and Kamchatka in their eastward advance and began to push into the north Pacific in quest for furs. Late in the century they started to establish more or less temporary trading posts on the Aleutian Islands. In 1783, Grigory Shelikov established a more permanent center at Kodiak. This center of Russian influence was later transferred south to St. Michael on the site of the present Sitka in 1800. (The ablest Russian governor, Aleksander Baranov, went further. In 1811 he sent his most trusted assistant, Ivan Kuskov, to establish a Russian trading post at Fort Ross, not far from San Francisco). Shelikov had founded the Russian-American Company to exploit these new lands, and his talented successor, Nikolay Rezanov, visited the New World in 1805, dreaming of controlling the entire Pacific coast, including the Spanish settlements in California with San Francisco as their head. On his return across Siberia he died at Irkutsk as the result of a fall from his horse and his dreams largely perished with him, although later the Russians did try to seize the Hawaiian Islands and make the north Pacific a Russian lake.

Fortunately for the Americans, the Russian settlements were poorly supported from St. Petersburg and the intricacies of Russian law left Baranov and his successor without the necessary supplies and they were compelled to indulge in illegal trade with the British. Boston merchants also carried to Kodiak and Sitka the goods which the Russian-American Company had neglected to send.

Strangely enough, the Russians failed to cross the coastal mountains either in Alaska or further to the south. They contented themselves with the hunting of marine animals, especially the sea otter, sending the skins back to Siberia for Asiatic distribution. They apparently did not realize that the American continent could be crossed by land, a peculiar oversight when we remember their rapid crossing of the whole of Asia. Rezanov had hoped to make Kodiak a center of Russian culture. He had come to Russian America by sea from St. Petersburg and brought with him a large library of books for an academy which he proposed to establish. Apparently Shelikov had spread excessive stories of the Russian achievements, for Kodiak was only a wretched frontier village and not an embryonic metropolis, Slava Rossii, as he boasted. Rezanov’s collection remained in Kodiak until its destruction by fire on July 18, 1943.

The Russian Orthodox Church also sent a mission to the colony. The monks, largely from Valamo, were devoted men and at least one was a martyr. The greatest of the Russian clergy was Ivan Venyaminov, later Archbishop Innokenty, Metropolitan of Moscow and one of the great figures of the Russian Church. This mission converted the majority of the Aleuts and Eskimos in the neighborhood and the Russian language was long the common speech on most of the Aleutian Islands.

Russian expansion thus had begun to take shape seriously at about the same time the Americans began to push westward. After buying the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson sent an expedition under Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the northwest. In 1806 the expedition reached the mouth of the Columbia River. Then followed the settlement of Astoria by agents of the American fur trader, John Jacob Astor. By the time the Russians were ready to advance to the south, the Americans were established in the center of the area and the Russian colonies never formed a solid belt on the west coast. For some reason the Russians did not try to eliminate the Americans and the southern settlements began to wither away from inability to expand. In 1841, Fort Ross was sold to a group of Americans and the Russians withdrew northward.

The lively trade between Sitka and Boston was interrupted by the War of 1812 and when peace came, commerce was further hindered by Russian efforts to impose trade restrictions that were unacceptable to the Americans. These came at the same time as the revolutions and declarations of independence of the Spanish colonies and the adherence of Tsar Alexander I to the Holy Alliance to aid Spain in recovering them. The Russian efforts at controlling the north Pacific and the American sympathy for the Spanish colonies led to the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 which doomed European expansion in the New World. Both President Monroe and his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, had held diplomatic posts in Russia and were aware of the differences between the Russian and American points of view.

The Monroe Doctrine and the settlement of the northwest determined the fate of Russian America. It was blocked to the south by the United States and the British settlements in the Canadian West. In 1867, Russia realized the hopelessness of its position and sold the territory now known as Alaska to the United States. The Russians then established their bishopric in San Francisco but during the next years the Russian colony in the far west remained an isolated group and it was only toward the end of the century that it merged with the general Slavic immigration.

This, then, is the first phase of Slavic contact with the New World. Relatively little imprint was left on American life, although we must not undervalue certain ideas that did pass into the young republic. They were the result of individual effort rather than organized or mass movements which came later.