Maximilian Frederick Francis Feodor Otho Milo Johannes Sobieski migrated to America from his native Poland sometime before 1850. As a direct descendant of Poland’s legendary king Jan III Sobieski, best known for defeating the Turks in 1683 and raising the siege of Vienna, he believed himself a marked man from birth. Poland had ceased to exist as of 1794, when the empires of Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary carved up the last of it between them. Anyone of aristocratic blood found themselves potentially at risk from imperial agents (especially tsarist ones) with orders to suppress anyone who might serve as a focus for popular rebellion. A violent insurrection in 1830-31 only served to strengthen the resolve of the Russians to maintain their hold. Perhaps this explains why Sobieski fails to appear in old Antioch College catalogs, and all our accounts of him while he lived come from letters few ever saw: he didn’t want anyone to know he was here.
Our earliest descriptions of Sobieski come from Mary Mann in two letters written to her husband Horace in 1856. In one she writes that he is “said to be a Polish prince, incognito to save his life.” In the other Mary reports the rumors that “he is the prince who, if Poland were free, would have first claim to the throne, that [Russian diplomat Count Alexander de] Bodisco visited him in New Haven just before he left and tried to prevail upon him to return to Poland and be loyal to the tsar, because they think he plots here against the Russian interest. They also wanted him to part with lands which he refused. He disappeared from New Haven in the night...evidently afraid of some foul play.” She had received this and other information from her sister Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who said of those who knew him: “They all speak of him with interest, but not very freely because they do not wish to talk about his whereabouts while he wishes to keep out of view.”
By all accounts Sobieski was brilliant. A master of
languages, he “knew all tongues, with the minute and all comprehensive knowledge of a
German scholar,” according to Antiochian Henry Clay Badger. Yale president Noah Porter, Sobieski’s patron and
perhaps his only real friend, characterized him as “a man of superior intellect and a
scholar familiar with most modern languages and their literature, with the civil law, with
logic and philosophy, with philology and general grammar, [and] with the entymology and
syntax of the English language.” The last was no mere eulogy, for at the time of his
death investigators found among Sobieski’s things an unpublished English dictionary
of pronunciation of perhaps 2000 pages. Even more remarkable is the fact that he likely
never knew a word of English before coming to America.
For a man who needed the kindness of strangers for his very survival, Sobieski apparently knew little about garnering their sympathy. Mary Mann had found him insufferable, “a nuisance in this place to young and old.” Student and teacher alike complained of his teaching methods, which Badger described as “a complete bore to his classes.” Mary also implied that he possessed an inflated sense of his own ability, and a deflated one of others: “Do not be surprised if [Sobieski] reports the faculty of Antioch unfit for their work. He thinks no one knows any thing but himself.” While his attitude stood him in poor stead with his colleagues, his reportedly dismal performance as a teacher most likely led to Sobieski’s dismissal from Antioch in 1858.
Sobieski moved to Springfield, Ohio, where he continued to teach. There he developed a friendship with a member of Congress, most likely Republican Samuel Shellabarger, who several years later recounted Sobieski’s rather bizarre tale. “From him I gathered, during a number of months of personal intimacy in 1859...that he claimed to have long been a political prisoner, in close confinement in a Russian dungeon, for an attempt to raise a revolt...and was sent to Siberia...He always seemed to dread any public notoriety and preferred to live incognito...believing his movements were under surveillance by Russian spies...he often predicted his own assassination.” Once, at a dinner party in Springfield, Sobieski pointed out another Pole in attendance as a relative of the famous Polish nationalist Thaddeus Kosciusko, who he said would someday kill him.
Additional accounts of Sobieski, compiled together, describe a lifelong fugitive: “constant movement from one teaching position to another at small colleges and schools, reticence about his personal history, late night visits to friends, sudden disappearances -- and fear that he was being followed, and that he would die by violence.”
Perhaps Sobieski had been right all along. In 1875 he was working in Kentucky as a representative for G & C Merriam Co., publishers of Webster’s dictionary. One day he arrived in the city of Covington on the Ohio River, and checked into the Jackson Boarding House. Observers reported him acting depressed, and some said he appeared drunk. In Covington he bought several suits, flashed an enormous wad of cash at a local tailor, and talked of having his book published.
Two days after this shopping spree, Sobieski was dead. The boarder next to his room, described by investigators as “singularly obtuse and forgetful,” had heard moaning from Sobieski’s room, and alerted the landlord. They found Sobieski alive, but barely, and rushed him to the hospital. Strangely, they found eight dollars stuffed in his mouth, and on the way to the hospital he said something about having $15,000 in cash, though no one ever discovered the money. M.F.J. Sobieski died at St. Elizabeth’s hospital in Covington on 10 Mar 1875. As if to lend credence to Sobieski’s fears, the coroner ruled inconclusively that he had died either from asphyxiation or a blow to the head, neither a very natural cause of death. Consequently, speculation raged on the part of those that knew him about the likelihood that someone had murdered him. The culprits, if any, have yet to be found.
Lack of evidence makes finding the grains of truth in Sobieski’s fantastic and mysterious tale difficult. What little exists points to a man consumed by self preservation and an unrealistic sense of his own value. Even though he carried the family name of a great military commander (Jan III wasn’t much of a king, but he could fight), he really had no claim to the throne, as Poland traditionally elected its rulers. If he had a following substantial enough to warrant the Russians harrassing him, historians of this well-documented period in Poland’s tragic history would know about him.
Certainly thousands of Poles of high birth or professional standing, including the composer Frederic Chopin and the poet Adam Mickiewicz, migrated to the West after 1830 rather than live under Russian domination. No evidence of a campaign to hunt down and assassinate Polish emigres exists, though there can be little doubt as to the extreme methods Russia employed to maintain its hold over Poland. In this period several political factions in Poland competed for the right to speak for the Polish people -- sometimes violently. While Sobieski likely had good reason to leave Poland, he was probably quite safe abroad. Many emigres lived long and unmolested lives in Paris, a far more likely setting for such classic palace intrigues than Yellow Springs or Covington. Moreover, other emigres had highly public careers agitating against the Russians and lobbying the Western Powers to intervene and even liberate Poland. They provided much easier targets of assassination than the furtive Sobieski.
If he had actually been murdered -- the circumstances of his death are admittedly suspicious -- it probably had nothing to do with secret societies of Polish super-patriots or sinister Russian spies. Sobieski carried a large amount of cash on him the last time anyone saw him alive, and boasted to complete strangers (although in his death throes) about having $15,000 on hand, a sum worth killing for in 1875 dollars. If someone choked Milo Feodor John Sobieski to death or bashed in his skull in his room at Jackson House, it was either for his money or his attitude, both of which he apparently possessed in ample supply.