Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 2).djvu/402

392 ary Hungary, escaped into the Turkish dominions, and the Sultan refused to surrender the fugitive to the Austrian government. The President of the United States was authorized by a joint resolution of the two houses of Congress, in March, 1851, to send an American man-of-war to the Mediterranean for the purpose of bringing Kossuth to America. Kossuth, accompanied by other Hungarian exiles, embarked on the United States Frigate Mississippi on September 10. He spent a short time in England, where he was received with very great enthusiasm, and, early in December, he arrived at New York. The cause he represented appealed powerfully to the sympathies of a free people; and his own romantic history, his picturesque and impressive presence, and the intellectual richness of his oratory, gorgeous with Oriental luxuriance of phrase, and poured forth with the most melodious of voices and peculiarly captivating accents in a language not his own, fascinated all who saw and heard him. At once he confessed that he had come to enlist the government and the people of the American Republic in the cause of his country. He hoped to renew the struggle of Hungary for national independence, and to find in the United States not only sentimental, but “operative,” sympathy in the shape of “financial, material, and political aid.”

The warm interest which the President and Congress had manifested in his fate, as well as the demonstrations of enthusiasm with which the