Contemporary Authors

• Sons of the White Eagle in the American Civil War - 2016 Casemate Publishers, Havertown, PA

• Stephen Ambrose Historical Tours - https://stephenambrosetours.com/about-stephen-ambrose-historical-tours/historians-team/

  Mark Bielski, Ph.D., Director
  Mark Bielski brings a wealth of professional experience in academics, journalism and executive management to Stephen Ambrose Historical Tours, where he is involved in business development, guiding, lecturing and tour itinerary design. He received his Ph.D. in war studies at the University of Birmingham, England. His ability to relate history in an engaging way coupled with his warmth and sense of humor, make him a favorite among our guests who have traveled with him. Mark has personally designed the WWII: Poland and Germany, D-Day to Berlin and The Civil War Eastern Theatre tours. The privileges and pleasures of Mark’s work are having the opportunity to interview and travel with numerous veterans and their families from WWII, the Korean conflict and Viet Nam.

• Mark Bielski Home Page - http://markbielski.com/bio/

  Bio
  Mark-Bielski-HeadshotMark Bielski is an historian, author, and the Director at Stephen Ambrose Historical Tours.

  Mark’s career has involved academics, history and literature, journalism and publication writing as well as corporate management. As the director at Stephen Ambrose Historical Tours, he is involved in business and educational development, historical guiding, lecturing and itinerary design for tours that primarily involve World War II in Europe and the American Civil War. The privileges and pleasures of Mark’s work are having the opportunity to interview and travel with numerous veterans and their families from WWII, Viet Nam and other conflicts.

  Mark’s first book, Sons of the White Eagle in the American Civil War: Divided Poles in a Divided Nation, was published by Casemate and recently released in hardback. This book combines his center of historical interest, the American Civil War, with a curiosity about Polish history, long a source of intrigue as a descendent of Polish immigrants. While leading a tour in Poland, he struck up a conversation with a colleague about the extent of Polish involvement in that conflict. The later discovery of written accounts on Poles in America provided the impetus for this fascinating book on a little known part of American history. As Mark says, “It was amazing to find a core of interesting players from Poland fighting on either side during the American Civil War. That in many ways sprang from the turmoil and revolutionary times in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century.”

  As Stuart McClung of the New York Journal of Books says in his lengthy review of Sons of the White Eagle, “The historiography of this unfortunate period of American history has certainly been enhanced by Mark Bielski. The research is impressive…” (Read more reviews.)

  He is currently working on a second book about Stonewall Jackson. This fictional account of the circumstances surrounding Jackson’s death has intrigued him for a long time.

  Mark’s media experience ranges from interviews with Tammy Bruce and a discussion with Tom Brokaw at the Churchill War Rooms in London, to writing for civilwar.com and presentations at symposia, to being an editor of a magazine. He is a member of the American Historical Association and the Society for Military History.

  He received his Ph.D. in History at the University of Birmingham, England as well as an M.A. and B.A. in English from Georgetown University and Tulane University respectively.

  Mark lives in New Orleans, where he enjoys the city’s culinary, cultural and musical riches on a daily basis.

Sons of the White Eagle in the American Civil War: Divided Poles in a Divided Nation
William B. Kurtz
Journal of Southern History. 83.3 (Aug. 2017): p696+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
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Sons of the White Eagle in the American Civil War: Divided Poles in a Divided Nation. By Mark F. Bielski. (Philadelphia and Oxford, Eng.: Casemate, 2016. Pp. xvi, 296. $32.95, ISBN 978-1-61200-358-0.)

Recent scholarship on ethnic Americans during the Civil War has understandably focused on the two largest groups, German and Irish immigrants. Polish Americans, estimated as numbering perhaps 30,000, have received comparatively little attention due to their small numbers and the difficulty of working with Polish materials. Thus Mark F. Bielski offers a welcome take on the Polish Civil War story in his new book. Sons of the White Eagle in the American Civil War: Divided Poles in a Divided Nation. Whereas many recent studies of other ethnic groups are geographically constrained, Bielski's study is evenly divided between four Polish Confederates and four Unionists, with another switching sides during the conflict. Bielski argues that a "tradition of freedom and liberalism," forged in wars and revolutions fought to defend Poland, deeply influenced Polish Americans' participation in the Civil War, leading some to support southern independence while others sought to uphold the Union (p. xiv). The author helpfully puts his story into the larger context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Polish history as well as the previous military service of Polish heroes such as Thaddeus Kosciuszko and Casimir Pulaski in the American Revolutionary War.

Bielski's nine men represent different generations of Polish immigrants, from Adam Gurowski, who fought in the 1830-1831 rebellion against Russia, to Valery Sulakowski, who was a veteran of the 1848 revolutions, to Peter Kiolbassa, who grew up in a Catholic Polish settlement in Texas. All of the men (except Kiolbassa) were of aristocratic background, with most of them leaving behind published memoirs or having received their own biographical treatment from previous historians. Many were ardent nationalists who either fought against foreign rule of a divided Poland or who lectured or wrote in support of Polish independence in the United States. Bielski uses these elite men as representative examples of the roughly 1,500 Confederate and 5,000 Union soldiers of Polish ancestry who fought in the Civil War.

For historians, the usefulness of Bielski's book comes in his compiling this collective biography of Polish American men from a variety of sources, including Polish language materials. The book's long contextual passages and its lengthy discussions of military battles, however, indicate that it is primarily meant for the general reader or Civil War enthusiast. For example, in his lengthy description of the battle of Brice's Crossroads in 1864, Bielski loses sight of the Polish Union officer, Joseph Karge, instead spending too much time explaining the mistakes of his commander, Samuel D. Sturgis. Also, the beginning of the book suffers from a considerable amount of repetition of basic historical and biographical information, and Bielski includes long quotations from other historians instead of paraphrasing them. Finally, the portrait gallery on the back cover is misleading; it may be unclear to a general reader that not all of the men pictured (such as Edwin M. Stanton and Nathan Bedford Forrest) were Polish.

Sons of the White Eagle in the American Civil War, in short, is a useful study of nine extraordinary Polish Americans during the Civil War intended for a general audience. The book leaves many important questions unanswered. How typical were these nine men's experiences compared with those of other Polish Americans during the war? Did other Polish Americans, both men and women, share their liberal, democratic, and nationalist values? Why did Catholicism play a major role in so few of the men's lives? How did Polish involvement in the Civil War influence future waves of lower-class Polish immigrants later in the century ? The answers to such questions will go a long way toward a more complete understanding of the meaning of the Civil War in Polish American history.

William B. Kurtz

University of Virginia

• Civil War Books and Authors
  https://cwba.blogspot.com/2016/07/review-of-bielski-sons-of-white-eagle.html
  Word count: 1300

  Monday, July 18, 2016
  Review of Bielski: "SONS OF THE WHITE EAGLE IN THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: Divided Poles in a Divided Nation"
  [Sons of the White Eagle in the American Civil War: Divided Poles in a Divided Nation by Mark F. Bielski (Casemate, 2016). Hardcover, maps, photos, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:246/312. ISBN:978-1-61200-358-0. $32.95]

  With the flood of Eastern European immigration to the United States occurring much later in the century, the Polish contribution to the armies of the Civil War was necessarily small, dwarfed by other European ethnic groups like the Germans and Irish. According to author Mark Bielski in his new book Sons of the White Eagle in the American Civil War, 4,000-5,000 ethnic Poles served in the Union armies and 1,000-1,500 fought for the Confederacy. The lives of nine of these immigrant Poles, four of whom joined the Union side and four the Confederates (with another eventually wearing both uniforms), are the subject of the book.

  Polish names can be difficult for English speakers to grasp, so Bielski begins with a very helpful spelling and pronunciation primer. Limited language skills on the part of American scholars have long been a barrier to the study of foreign-born participants in the Civil War, but the author's knowledge of Polish allowed him to do most of his own source translation.

  Bielski organizes the book on a generational basis. While no direct correlation between historical timing of immigration and later Union vs. Confederate loyalty was found, the author's approach does serve as a useful way to offer context for why these men were forced to leave their native land and which factors shaped by their cultural background and life experience were involved in deciding which side to join during the Civil War. The final partition of Poland among the Prussian, Austrian, and Russian empires occurred in 1795. The oldest generation represented in Bielski's study was most directly influenced by this traumatic event, which erased their nation entirely from the European map. Those that fought in the 1830 revolt against Russia were able to trace the most direct lineage to earlier Polish patriots (Casimir Pulaski and Thaddeus Kosciuszko) that came to America's defense in its time of need. A later group fought in the great failed revolutionary upheavals of the 1840s, and the book's youngest cohort was born in Poland but raised in the United States.

  Some of these men did not specifically spell out their reasons for joining the Union or Confederate side, but the book's offers a fine chapter length discussion of possible contributing factors. According to Bieski, for much of its history Poland had a rudimentary form of political and legal democracy, a form of government much more progressive than its autocratic neighbors, so Enlightenment notions of freedom appealed to Poles and Americans alike. As newcomers to America, the Poles were obviously not guided by traditional party affiliations, but they were simultaneously attracted to the Republican anti-slavery platform and repulsed by its nativist element. Like many Americans, immigrant Poles also found their loyalties guided and tested by the sometimes contrasting layers of duty felt toward nation, state, and local community. Nearly all the Poles in Bielski's study were deeply troubled by the U.S. government's close relationship with autocratic Russia (including the Lincoln administration's actions during the war years), and some cited U.S. support of Russia and similarities between them in imperialist ambitions as strong reasons to take up the Confederate cause. On the other side of the equation, others viewed the potential breakup of the United States, not as a triumph of self-determination but a national calamity to the cause of freedom reminiscent of the partition of Poland. A major theme to take away of all this is that the Civil War motivations of immigrant Poles were just as complicated, contradictory, and difficult to predict as those of their native born American neighbors.

  As stated above, a balanced group of men in terms of age and belligerent side was selected by the author for examination in the book. After immigrating to America, Gaspard Tochman continued to lobby for the Polish cause and defended Kosciuszko's heirs against Russian attempts (apparently with State Department collusion) to confiscate their U.S. property. Residing in Virginia, Tochman supported the Confederate cause on Constitutional grounds (at least as he interpreted them) and raised troops, but declined to lead them in person when his bid for a general's appointment was denied. Another veteran of the 1830 revolt was the Radical Republican and State Department official Adam Gurowski, who remains an enigma with his seemingly unexplicable ideological conversion to pro-Russian Pan-Slavism. Ignacy Szymanski also fought the Russians in 1830. He was part of Louisiana's planter class and led troops from that state during the Civil War, but his greatest contribution seems to have been in the sphere of prisoner negotiations, where he used his diplomatic skills to great effect.

  Ludwik Zychlinski and Valery Sulakowski, both participants in the uprisings of the late 1840s, fought on opposing sides. Zychlinski served with the Army of the Potomac until 1863, when he was discharged and returned to Poland to fight the Russians. Sulakowski made a mark as a strong disciplinarian and one of the best regimental commanders in the Confederate army, but resigned his commission in 1862 when passed over for promotion. He later returned to the service as an engineering officer in the Trans-Mississippi, providing invaluable assistance to Texas's coastal defenses. He also was involved in a failed plot to transport Polish volunteers across the ocean to aid the Confederacy.

  Two of the most well known Polish-American Union officers to today's readers are Joseph Karge and Wladimir Kryzanowski. Bielski lavishes a great deal of attention on their respective Civil War careers, with Kryzanowski's section by far the book's lengthiest. The author makes a strong case that Kryzanowski deserves more recognition as one of the bright lights of the ill-starred Eleventh Corps. Bielski also speculates that nativist impulses delayed Kryzanowski's promotion to general (a first attempt early in the war failed confirmation). Joseph Karge proved to be a fine cavalry officer, perhaps best known for beating Nathan Bedford Forrest in open battle. In truth, the engagement at Bolivar was a rather inconsequential affair, and the author demonstrates due restraint while discussing its significance.

  Born in Poland but raised in the U.S., the youngest of the nine men profiled in the book are Leon Jastremski and Peter Kiolbassa. In terms of loyalty and political conviction, Peter Kiolbassa would prove the most elastic of all the figures examined in the book, jumping side from Confederate to Union mid-war and freely switching between parties for personal gain in the post-war period. In contrast, Leon Jastremski remained a die-hard Confederate. During the war, he worked his way up through the ranks from private soldier to officer in the 10th Louisiana, fighting with the Army of Northern Virginia. Captured for the second time at Spotsylvania in 1864, he was later shipped to Charleston as part of the "Immortal 600" contingent of officers and escaped imprisonment near war's end.

  In recent decades, immigrant studies have assumed a much more prominent place in the Civil War literature. However, even after taking into account the comparatively minute scale of their contributions to both armies, the Polish experience has been unduly buried beneath the weight exerted by the far more numerous European ethnic groups. Sons of the White Eagle in the American Civil War not only brings into sharp focus the actions and significance of a number of prominent military figures (and one civilian), it also usefully examines the cultural and political connections between Poland and the United States throughout the turbulent first half of the nineteenth century.

• New York Journal of Books
  https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/white-eagle
  Word count: 912

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  Sons of the White Eagle in the American Civil War: Polish Officers on Both Sides of the War Between the States
  Image of Sons of the White Eagle in the American Civil War: Divided Poles in a Divided Nation
  Author(s):
  Mark Bielski
  Release Date:
  June 29, 2016
  Publisher/Imprint:
  Casemate
  Pages:
  312
  Buy on Amazon

  Reviewed by:
  Thomas McClung
  The presence of many prominent and not-so-familiar foreign individuals in the ranks of both armies in the Civil War is well known, especially Irish and German. One of the more famous (or infamous as the case may be) names that comes to mind is Franz Sigel.

  In this book, author Mark Bielski has taken a representative sampling of men, of the thousands extant, who were first and second generation Poles and served on each side or were important civilian spokesmen providing moral and political support for their respective nations.

  The first generation of these men, imbued with the concepts of nationalism and love of liberty, and inspired by Revolutionary War forerunners such as Thaddeus Kosciuszko and Casimir Pulaski, had served in various revolts and revolutions in their native land. They resisted the presence of imperialist forces of Russia, Austria, and Prussia in the 1830s and 1840s. In defeat, they came to the United States to begin anew and escape any legal retribution by their enemies.

  The second generation, following the same examples as those of the first, chose their respective sides as the secession crisis reached a climax in America in the winter of 1860–1861. Those who “went south” did so not because of any support for slavery but partly as a result of viewing the North’s invasion in terms of the authoritarian regimes against which their forebears had struggled.

  Although this study’s subjects were mostly of aristocratic origins, one was of peasant stock. They were officers and enlisted men, too, described as not necessarily homogenous but similar in many ways besides just being Polish.

  As it was, there was one, Peter Kiolbassa of Texas, who switched sides after being captured and eventually served in the United States Colored Troops. Another, Ludwig Zychlinski, took leave mid-war to return to Poland to fight against the Russians.

  Notwithstanding that most of these names may be unfamiliar to devotees of the War Between the States, two on each side should be somewhat familiar. Wlodzimierz Krzyzanowski and Joseph Karge were Federal officers who attained a measure of success and renown over the course of the war in the infantry and cavalry, respectively. The latter was one of the few who managed to inflict a defeat on General Nathan Bedford Forrest, albeit in a relatively minor skirmish.

  On the Confederate side were Leon Jastremski of the polyglot 10th Louisiana Infantry, recognized as Louisiana “Tigers” (as were other units from that state), and Gaspard Tochman, who raised troops for the Southern Army, was denied a general’s commission but also, as a civilian, possessed the legal acumen to justify the South’s secession under the United States Constitution.

  The other three, Valery Sulakowski, Ignatius Szymanski, and Adam Gurowski also made their marks in the ranks and out. It would seem that Gurowski, for all of his support for the North, was sufficiently a Radical Republican to have been considered a physical threat to Abraham Lincoln’s safety and welfare at one point.

  In any event, this study was well worth the effort to identify these men and their efforts. Complementing the well-organized text are a number of photographs and illustrations of the nine subjects and others cited therein; however, contrary to most publications, there is no indication of the source of these photographs. One might assume the Library of Congress.

  The maps, primarily of the battles where each man fought (Gettysburg, Second Manassas, etc.) but also including one of northern Mississippi where Karge served, are excellent, include scale and specify the location of each man’s unit in the fight.

  Six of the seven appendices are photographic reproductions of a respective subject’s muster roll card, immigration document, service record, or death certificate. The last is of Karge’s gravestone.

  The author has demonstrated an extensive use of primary as well as secondary sources from memoirs and newspapers to the Official Records and contemporary books, journals, and articles. The research is impressive as indicated in the bibliography.

  The historiography of this unfortunate period of American history has certainly been enhanced by Mark Bielski. It should be incumbent upon others to continue to delve into the origins, backgrounds, and service of other foreign nationals who participated on both sides of the conflict in order to more fully understand their motivations to sacrifice on behalf of their adopted country and set an example for those of their native land.

  Stuart McClung holds a Master of Arts in Military History and has written reviews for the Journal of America's Military Past and Humanities and Social Sciences Online. He is a recognized long-time living historian and interpreter at Gettysburg National Military Park and various state and local venues. He is also a member of the Society for Military History, the Council on America's Military Past, and the Civil War Trust.