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Konstanty Gaszynski
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Rogowski, Maciej
Major
Until 1847 no one heard of Major Maciej Rogowski. Obviously, he was created by a patriotic Polish poet and writer. Konstanty Gaszynski, in a valiant effort to put a little flesh on the bones of General Pulaski who lost his life fighting on horseback for American freedom. Gaszynski, who fled from Poland in his early 2Os and spent the rest of his life mostly in the city of Aix-en Provence, about 19 miles north of Marseille, France, tricked nearly everybody up to now posing as Pulaski's aide-de-camp. The fictional work, which he wrote in Polish and named Reszty Pamietnikow Macieja Rogowskiego (The Rest of Maciej Rogowski's Diary), was published at Paris in 1847. Few copies remain. According to the Library of Congress, no library in the United States has a copy of this publication and the National Library of Poland has the only one on record.
None of the American historians in the second half of the 19th century mentioned Major Rogowski until Charles C. Jones Jr. wrote a two-volume history of Georgia in 1883 and quoted passages from Reszty Pamietnikow Macieja Rogowskiego. Exactly how he got his hands on a copy, either in Polish or in French, who translated it, in part or in whole, isn't clear. Julia Ruth Jones, the daughter of Charles C. Jones Jr. from his first marriage, translated the parts of other French journals that he used in his writings.
His second wife, Eva Eve, whom he married October 28, 1863, was a niece of Dr. Paul Fitzsimon. Eve, who no doubt attended the wedding in Savannah, Georgia, and established a warm relationship with his niece's husband. Both were officers in the Confederate Army. The uncle and niece were born and raised on cotton plantations near Augusta, Georgia, though not at the same time, and in 1830, while he was in Paris to study under the best French surgeons, he was the only American who would take part in the Polish bid for independence, together with his teachers and hundreds of French physicians, and, without his knowledge, Konstanty Gaszynski, who interrupted his writing career to fight in vain for his freedom. After the fighting broke out on November 29, 1830, Dr. Eve arrived in Warsaw, where he immediately treated the wounded insurgents in a hospital, and later rode in an ambulance with an infantry regiment and took care of the wounded men on the spot until he was captured. The Russians held him in prison until the Polish army was compelled to lay down its arms on October 5, 1831. Then Dr. Eve boarded the 471-ton Rhone at Le Havre, France, and arrived in New York on December 31, 1831.
Before Gaszynski died in 1866, Dr. Eve visited Europe three or four times, and was in Paris, where Gaszynski printed his memoirs in the guise of Rogowski, a number of times. Whether he picked up a copy in Paris is unknown. Unfortunately, Gaszynski's so-called memoirs, printed in Polish and in French, did not find itself, in whole or in part, into English until Houghton-MiffIin in Boston published Jones' two-volume History of Georgia in 1883. Like the earlier Pulaski books, Jones treated Pulaski no better and no worse than David Ramsay, Jared Sparks, Benson J. Lossing, and others. They all differed in details.
Had he gone to other sources - novels, short stories, or whatever they were - Jones would have found enough false heroes to fill the corners of his library. In the 1790s Ashbel Stoddard, who ran a newspaper and bookstore in the Catskill mountains at Hudson, New York, lifted a section of Les Amours du Chevalier de Faublus, by Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray, and sold it under the title of "The Interesting History of Baron de Lovzinski." At the same time another bookseller in New England, Samuel Etheridge, changed the title of the same account, 59 pages long, to Love and Patriotism. When one compare these two items to Gaszynski's memoirs, the actions of Lovzinski contradict those of Major Rogowski. For example, Rogowski was knocked out by a musket ball and was unconscious after Pulaski was knocked off his horse by a cannon ball.
According to Rogowski's ghost writer, Pulaski shouted, "Forward," to "two hundred strong," when there were only Captain Paul Bentalou and a few others with him, and whispered, "Jesus, Maria, Jozef," which were missing in Bentalou's account of Pulaski's death.
Lovzinski, on the other hand, has a long conversation with Pulaski, while a doctor removes the iron bali from his right thigh on October 9, 1779, and instead of "Jesus, Maria, and Jozef," one finds these exclamations: "You owe to the Russians an eternal hatred! You owe to Poland the last drop of your blood!" and "Ah! It is but too true, that I shall never see my native country again!"
Like Rogowski and Lovzinski, Lt. Charles Litomiski, who was supposed to have buried Pulaski on St. Helena's Island, was not a real person. And there were real persons who in one way or other were not involved in the death of Pulaski, although one finds they invented stories to portray themselves as eyewitnesses. This is, however, not the place to discuss them.
As the records prove, Rogowski was nothing but a carbon copy of the false heroes that the American Revolution produced. He was never under General Pulaski's command. Nor an officer of the Continental Army. Never a major, captain, aide-de-camp, or anything else to General Pulaski. Neither a volunteer on Pulaski's staff. He was a figment of Gaszynski's imagination.
As much as he wouldn't admit it, Jones chose not to argue with the peddlers of false information. There was a time when the authors of General Casimir Pulaski's military activities in America did not have access to the records of the Continental Congress, George Washington's Continental Army, and many other sources. None of them and other sources like Google and Wikipedia shed light on Major Maciej Rogowski.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)