On bringing Americans home

MARTIN KOSZTA WAS NOT officially an American citizen, but that didn’t matter to the captain of the U.S. Navy warship demanding his release from the custody of a foreign government in July 1853.

It had been only a few days since Commander Duncan Ingraham and the crew of the USS St. Louis had arrived in the Turkish port city of Smyrna. But word quickly spread that Koszta, a Hungarian by birth who had immigrated to the United States in 1849, had been taken prisoner on an Austrian warship named Hussar.

Koszta had fought as a soldier in Hungary’s failed bid for independence from the Austrian Empire and fled to the U.S. Having lived there for nearly two of the required five years, he had declared his intention to become an American and received his “first paper” toward citizenship. But he had returned on private business to Turkey, and the Austrian Empire cared only about his revolutionary past. He was brutally kidnapped and placed under guard in the harbor “pending his forced return to Austria for probable execution,” according to The Foreign Service Journal.

As American diplomats protested in vain to Austrian and Turkish officials, Ingraham visited Koszta on July 1 aboard the Hussar, where “a brief but dramatic conversation took place between the prisoner and the American,” according to the Journal:

Ingraham asked Koszta how long he had been in the United States. One year and eleven months, he replied.

With the intention of settling there permanently? Yes.

When and where did he file a “first paper,” the declaration of his desire to become an American citizen? On July 31, 1852, in the Court of Common Pleas for the City and County of New York.

“Do you want the protection of the American flag?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Then you shall have it,” declared the Commander.

I’ve been thinking about this historical footnote lately; I’ll return to it in a moment. First, I want to direct your attention to an official United States government website for American families who pray they never view it.

“If you’ve come to this page, the State Department has informed you that your loved one has been determined to be wrongfully detained,” says The State