Winter 2005-2006
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Vol. 23 No. 4 WINTER 2005-2006 PPuullaasskkii AA HHeerroo’’ss FFiinnaall RReesstt Report from the 2005 Board of Managers General Pulaski’s Body by Edward Pinkowski Lecture presented at the Pulaski Museum in Warka, Poland in October 1997 If one may want to know exactly where the work, as was seen in 1853 and 1996, the officers Polish general of the American War of and crew prepared to bury Pulaski's body in Independence died and trace his body from his military uniform with a flag draped over then on, one must start by imagining to be on him. a dirty, smelly, 14-gun privateer, known as the Then the Polish General fell into a vacuum. Wasp, owned by Joseph Atkinson, a merchant Historians didn't pay much attention to of Charleston, South Carolina, and privately Pulaski in America until Jared Sparks, who manned under Captain Samuel Bulfinch, who left the pulpit of a Unitarian church in April, took up sailing in Boston at an early age. One 1823, to edit the North American Review in must also forget most of what was ever said Boston, received a 38-page pamphlet from Paul about this ship. Bentalou, a French captain in the Pulaski For at least two days the black-painted Legion. After reviewing it, Sparks quoted sec- Wasp, sails furled, was tied up at the wooden tions from the pamphlet and tied it with pier of the Bonaventure plantation in Georgia, General Lafayette's return to America at that where Vice Admiral Charles-Henri d'Estaing, time.1 For the next two decades, until he com- who commanded a French squadron of forty- pleted the biography of Pulaski in 1844, Sparks three ships and an army of 4,456 men, set up picked up where Bentalou left off, questioned a field hospital and based his artillery in survivors of the American Revolution, visited September, 1779. His engineer called the place, Europe on several occasions in search of docu- separated from old Savannah by a few miles of ments on Pulaski, and repeated Bentalou's woods, Thunderbolt Bluff after the river of the false claim that Pulaski was buried at sea. same name. Today the river is known as These claims misled generations of Pulaski's Wilmington. When the Wasp arrived there to friends and admirers. For more than a century load the French artillery guns used in the and a half, Bentalou and Sparks were the siege of Savannah and to transport sick and source from where many writers drew a great wounded bodies to Charleston, the evacuation deal of their information on Pulaski and the of the American and French army camps at fate of his remains. They also stated that the Savannah was almost done. There were no doctors left at the Bonaventure pier and "only one lad," as Captain Bulfinch called him, to take care of the sick and wounded on his brig- Index antine. One of the last two hospital cases to Flitlock & Powderhorn reach the Wasp was Pulaski. General Pulaski’s Body Lecture by By the afternoon of October 15, 1779, Captain Edward Pinkowski at the Pulaski Bulfinch had no room to take any more pas- Museum in Warka, Poland, regarding the sengers. When another wounded officer, Lt. historical record of General Pulaski’s Cornelius Van Vlieland, who had lost an arm burial..............................................................................2 in the siege of Savannah, asked him for pas- Presidential Proclamation LPresident sage to Charleston, Bulfinch arranged to send Bush’s Proclamation on occation of the him on another ship. In the sequence of events, Anniversary of General Pulaski’s it looked as if the visit of Lt. Van Vlieland came death...............................................................................8 before the death of Pulaski, as Pulaski's death Drumbeat certainly created a vacancy aboard. Had the General President’s Report..............................9 young lieutenant waited, Bulfinch would have General President’s Trip to Poland............10 had space for him. Annual Appeal Progress Report.................10 Partly because of his occupation with the Middle East Changes.........................................11 one-armed officer, Bulfinch was not entirely Reports from Societies......................................11 aware of the preparations on the Wasp to Annual Meeting Report...................................14 make a coffin out of pine boards either at hand Dunsmore restauration...................................15 or brought aboard from the plantation for Patriot Vignettes.................................................16 Pulaski's body. From the evidence of their 2 Wasp was a United States warship. Many to any money. Their owners hired them out to newspapers, magazines, and books, including the Wasp and received the pay of forty dollars speakers at anniversary programs, still per- a month for each slave. Other sailors received petuate the falsehood of the "USS Wasp" just forty-five dollars a month. The petty officers, as they often repeat the manufactured date of from the boatswain to the gunner, each Pulaski's birthday. received sixty dollars a month. The captain After years of nibbling at historical records was paid four dollars a day and two dollars for and not finding a certificate of burial, I turned his table.3 to a large body of official records, letters, logs, These crewmembers could hardly imagine and other material left by the French expedi- that some of them would become pallbearers tion under Admiral D'Estaing in Georgia. for General Pulaski. Or were slaves used as Among the depositories, the Library of pallbearers? No one knows. While slaves were Congress in Washington had microfilm often the pool from which pallbearers and records of the expedition. grave diggers were drawn, they were hardly When I called for part of the French collec- noticed by the purveyors of news. tion, a staff member there told me that some- The more I probed, the harder it became to one in the reading room already had loaned it, find Pulaski's Valhalla. If Bentalou was the and I was introduced to a Hungarian expatri- other officer brought to the Wasp on October ate, Mrs. Ellen Szaszdi, who offered to help me 15, 1779, he was unable to follow the body with the story of a Polish freedom fighter. away from the ship. Still, hidden in the dusty As a result of our conversation, she immedi- files of the National Archives were the papers ately found the owner of the Wasp in a French of Martha Miller, who was married to Eleazar letter dated September 12, 1779. In it, J. Phillips in 1786. After her husband died in Plombard, the French consul at Charleston, November, 1826, she applied for a government wrote to Count d'Estaing: pension, and in her papers I discovered that M. Atkinson, a businessman of this town Eleazar Phillips, the purser of the Wasp, made and owner of the brigantine Wasp, Captain the coffin for Pulaski's body.4 Bulfinch, leaves this morning to be at the I did not find evidence that Pulaski was not orders of M. le Comte. This brigantine is armed buried at sea until 1971, after years of search- with fourteen cannons and it will help to ful- ing for the Wasp's logs, which I did not find, fill the object of M. d'Estaing for some small and other records, I found a letter that armed craft.2 Bulfinch wrote by candlelight to General The French consul's letter was like a guided Benjamin Lincoln-commander of American missile. Of all the officers and men who served forces in the South--on October 15, 1779, at on the Wasp in the fall of 1779, only three have Thunderbolt Bluff. Lincoln made no fuss over been identified--Captain Samuel Bulfinch, Lt. it. He stuck the letter into a leather pouch. If William Main, and Eleazar Phillips, the purser Lincoln tried to hide Pulaski's death from the and steward, who was in peacetime a carpen- British, he wasn't successful. Within three ter and cabinet maker. The first two died days Prevost knew of Pulaski's death and yet within thirteen years of each other, Bulfinch Congress did not know of his death until Lt. in Philadelphia on Feb. 27, 1813, and Main in Col. Charles-Frederic Bedaulx--whom Pulaski Charleston on April 15, 1800, none of them appointed second in command of his indepen- leaving published accounts of their services in dent corps on November 13, 1778--mentioned it. the disastrous siege of Savannah. Lt. Main was Less than two months later, Bedaulx, a tall, second in command, a position of such rank blonde, 25-year-old Swiss soldier of fortune, and importance that only ships with a fair died in a hospital at Charleston of a lingering sized crew were entitled to one. In his two illness. Still, the legend survived that he had responsibilities, Phillips not only relayed been killed in action helping Pulaski in the orders to the crew and transmitted signals to siege of Savannah. Unlike Pulaski, however, other ships but also received money from the the register of St. Phillips Church in Navy Board of South Carolina to provide Charleston shows that Bedaulx was buried in stores for the captain and officers of the Wasp. the parish cemetery on December 8, 1779. At some point, Bulfinch dispatched an offi- When Lincoln left the army in 1781, cer to open a recruiting station in Charleston, Bulfinch's letter was stored in his farmhouse to enlist a crew. Each one who enlisted to at Hingham, Massachusetts. The large bulk of serve on the masted ship at least six months his papers, preserved during his life, and kept got a bounty of $100. Slaves were not entitled out of strange hands for over a century and a 3 half, were taken out of the Lincoln homestead tation in 1765, planted soy beans smuggled out and deposited in Boston where they were of China between marshes and tidal streams, microfilmed in 1963 by the Massachusetts starting a whole new industry in the country.