Hugh Gibson presented his diplomatic credentials in April 1919, a few weeks before Poland celebrated, for the first time as an independent nation, its May 3 Constitution Day. The constitution adopted in 1791 had planted the seed of political renewal in a dying state. It was thus truly a momentous event, bringing all Poles together. Gibson, although freshly arrived, fully grasped its symbolism.

Yet Poland had recovered its freedom as a divided house, which—paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln—could not possibly stand. Józef Piłsudski, upon his triumphant return from captivity in Germany on November 10, 1918, had been recognized as the new head of state by the regent Zdzisław Lubomirski. Yet the Allies in Paris, who were about to the decide on the fate of two of Poland’s former partitioning powers, considered the Polish National Committee, headed by Roman Dmowski, to be the legitimate representative.

Historically, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, whose prepartition 1772 borders were to form the legal precedent for a discussion at Versailles about Poland’s new geographic definition, had been a motley patchwork of nationalities, cultures, and religions held together by weak institutions. Poland had survived as a nation against all odds, perhaps because it was both myth and reality.

Throughout the partitions the Poles carried their country in their hearts and in their minds. Striving to preserve their identity, they created a powerful mythology expressed privately in family tradition, manifested publicly through the arts, and buttressed by religious fervor, which placed Poland under God’s protection. Yet the Polish nobility had also managed to retain, often with grim determination, a form of direct ownership of its ancestral lands. Vast latifundia to small farmsteads were like so many patches of Poland, which had once been conquered by the power of the sword. This was particularly marked in the borderlands of Poland, in the north and in the east, where the spoils of ancient wars were still attached to Lithuanian and Polish names. This caste’s visceral attachment to the land, the source of both social standing and wealth, was its prime form of patriotism.