… U.S. Civil War and the Rise of Modern Antisemitism
"AUGUST BONDI already had a distinguished record as a revolutionary when he mustered into the Fifth Kansas Cavalry in the Union Army in December 1861.
Swept up as a 14-year-old in the liberal uprisings in Europe, he had carried a flintlock musket as the youngest member of the Academic Legion in Vienna in March 1848. He then volunteered for a regiment mustering to join the democratic rebellion in Hungary. His parents immediately persuaded their son to leave with them for St. Louis. He was one of several thousand political exiles—"Forty-Eighters"—who made their way to the United States once these liberal revolutions foundered.
If Bondi's parents hoped that precipitate relocation would quiet their son's revolutionary ardour, they were quickly disappointed. For Bondi soon became "tired of the humdrum life of a clerk" and "thirsted" for adventure.
"Any struggle, any hard work," he recalled, "would be welcome."
Settling in Kansas in 1855, Bondi was drawn into the political conflict that roiled the territory. By 1856 he was riding with John Brown, one of a handful of Jewish Forty-Eighters to fight alongside the radical Free Soiler…"
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Armand
