BIALKOWSKI, STANISLAWPolitical refugee. Two excellent scholars, one is now in a grave and the other a recluse, both of whom discovered a great deal of information about the Polish political refugees in the United States, 1831-1864, tried to find the first name of the first Bialkowski in the United States. Neither Florian Stasik, author of Polska Emigracja Polityczna w Stanach Zjednoczonych Ameryki, 1831-1864, nor Maria J. F. Copson-Niecko, one of the major contributors to Poles in America, edited by Frank Mocha, were successful.
Before they came out of academia with their studies, Jerzy Jan Lerski, author of A Polish Chapter in Jacksonian America, listed Bialkowski, without his first name, among the Polish exiles who arrived in New York, March 30, 1834, on board two Austrian warships, Guerriera and Hebe (Ebe), from Trieste on the Adriatic sea. The voyage lasted four months and ten days.
Stasik, however, found a letter from Stanislaw Menue in the June 13, 1843, issue of Trzeci Maj (The Third of May), one of the short-lived Polish newspapers published in Paris, France. On December 13, 1839, in the military barracks at Newport, Kentucky, over the Ohio River from Cincinnati, Menue enlisted for five years in the U. S. Army and soon found himself at Fort Mackinac, a stately stone palisade on a bluff overlooking Lake Huron, in Michigan with Sergeant Bialkowski in the 5th Infantry. In his letter to Trzeci Maj, written March 12, 1843, Menue said that Bialkowski, Toloczko, Szaniewski, Dabrowski, and Kaminski were stationed at the Michigan fort.
As enlistment records show, Stanislaw Bialkowski, who enlisted for three years, was probably the first Polish soldier at Fort Mackinac. Charles Toloczko, for the second time, enlisted March 21, 1838; Casimir Szaniewski, April 27, 1839; Edward Dabrowski, May 16, 1839; and Andrew Kaminski, who would become the first Polish settler of Detroit, May 6, 1839. Another Polish exile, Felix Pleve, who had spent a little time in England, enlisted April 25, 1842, and finding himself so far from civilization, he killed himself on March 7, 1843.
Actually, their regiment operated in the Upper Midwest, mostly between the majestic straits of Mackinac, after which the fort was named, and Fort Snelling in Minnesota. The soldiers for the most part protected white settlers around Lake Huron, Minneapolis and St. Paul. Bialkowski, who was a sergeant, which was also the rank of Menue, was discharged November 29, 1840, at Fort Snelling upon the expiration of his service.
Not enough is known of the contents of Menue's letter in Trzeci Maj. It was just a footnote, or na przyklad, to Professor Stasik. Mrs. Copson-Niecko took it more seriously and questioned Stasik's reference to Bialkowski. She said she found no record of Bialkowski's enlistment in the U. S. Army. After raising the issue, she stored her notes in a closet of her apartment in Washington, D. C., where she lived with her Polish-born husband, and still has not released her findings to the public.
On my own, in the National Archives, where I first met Copson-Niecko in the 1960s or '70s, I found the enlistment of Stanislaw Bialkowski, written Bilcuski and Bilkoski, in Company F of the 5 th U. S. Infantry Regiment. As it revealed, Bialkowski, who came from Cracow, Poland, where he was born about 1810, walked into the recruiting office of a Major Young in New York City, Nov. 29, 1837, and enlisted in the U. S. Army for three years. There were no other persons in the country at the time of the same names.
I am convinced that Stanislaw Bialkowski was one of the 235 Poles who bade farewell to their homeland and sought protection in Austria, seeking only the liberty of crossing the country and entering France with an Austrian passport, but the French government did not want to cooperate with the Polish freedom fighters. The exiles were arrested and confined in the fortress at Brno in Moravia. During their imprisonment, Austria negotiated a deal with all the parties involved in their affair and laid it in their lap. The Austrian government agreed to ship them to the United States rather than to Russia. Then the Polish refugees, always in Austrian custody, were forced to march through the Alps to Trieste, where they were confined for another three months. In November of 1834, 234 Polish officers and soldiers and one who had his wife with him sailed on two Austrian frigates under Admiral Bandiera and arrived at New York on Good Friday in 1834.
Each man received four dollars to spend in Malta, three in Gibraltar, and thirty-three in New York. Now that he was a pilgrim in a foreign land, with nothing but the clothes on his back and sad memories, Stanislaw Bialowski received handouts from New Yorkers and lessons in English. Most of them, because they had been farmers in Poland, were unable to find jobs in New York. The younger exiles were students when the Polish revolution broke out and, if not wounded, wasted no time in looking for a new mode of living. Fifty were in the army --i. e., Russian -- until 1830 and supposedly enlisted in the American army one after another, in pairs, or whatever they had to do in order to stick together.
As Bialkowski was twenty-seven years of age in 1837, he was in the prime of life. He was five feet ten inches tall, an excellent height for a soldier, and just right for the rigors of army life. He was assigned to military service in the wilds of Michigan, difficult and dangerous as it was, and for the first time in 1839, when other Polish soldiers arrived, he had enough hands to play cards and swap stories in their own language.
As it remains today, the exodus of Stanislaw Bialkowski is not complete. Where is his grave? In the case of the others, Menue was killed in action at El Molina del Rey, Mexico, September 8, 1847. Toloczko died in the general hospital at Pueblo, Mexico. Kaminski died in Detroit. The others are still a mystery. Hopefully, the Bialkowski family, which in 2002 had 6,858 persons of the same name in Poland, will pick up the trail where I left off snd follow it to the end.
Author: Edward Pinkowski (2011) [email protected]