Davisons Solicitors

Davisons Solicitors

Davisons Solicitors

Posted on: January 12, 2012 - 10:19 am
by Admin

Ivan Vasilievich Turchaninov was a direct descendant from a long line of Don Cossacks [Vsevelikoye Voysko Donskoye] best described as Russia’s famed frontier fighting force. A full-blooded familial and full-fledged fraternal fighter, he followed in the footsteps of his father, a Leib Guard [Leyb-Gvardiya] Major and attended the Imperial Military Academy [renamed the General Staff Academy or Akademiya general’nogo shtaba] in St. Petersburg. He served with distinction in the Crimean War [Vostochnaya Voina or the Eastern War]. Turchaninov was promoted to Kazachy Polkovnik [Colonel] of the Russian Imperial Guard, the personal guards of the Emperors, Tsar Nicholas I and his son Tsar Alexander II.

Esli Druk Akazalsa Vdruk [If A Friend Appears Suddenly]

Due to his disgust at Russia’s defeat on the Crimean Peninsula and his dismay at the terms of the Treaty of Paris that Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid I had decreed and Tsar Alexander II had agreed to, instead of and rather than having a St. Petersburg wedding, Turchaninov and his commander’s daughter, Nadezhda Antonina L'vova, married in Krakow, Poland on May 10, 1856. Shortly thereafter, in protest of the aristocracy and autocracy of Russia, they expatriated to the United States. The couple settled in Chicago and Turchaninov, by then known as John Basil Turchin, went to work for the Illinois Central Railroad in the engineering department headed by a former Captain of the 1st U.S. Cavalry, George Brinton McClellan, who’d served as an official observer on behalf of the United States during the Crimean War and was a great admirer of the Don Cossack mounted companies.

As the 1850s turned into the 1860s, Illinois Central Railroad’s former, little known, lawyer, Abraham Lincoln had become America’s 16th President. When war commenced, Turchin lobbied Lincoln for a colonelcy in the Union Army. The newly elected 13th Illinois Governor, Richard Yates, quickly commissioned the 40 year old Russian a Colonel of the 19th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Turchin and the 19th were reassigned to the newly organized Army of the Ohio under the command of General Don Carlos Buell, who then named him Colonel of the 18th Ohio in Brigadier General Ormsby MacKnight “Old Stars” Mitchel’s Third Division.