John Sobieski

John Sobieski (September 10, 1842 – November 12, 1927) was a Polish-born American soldier, attorney, and politician in the Prohibition movement. He claimed to be a collateral descendant of King John III Sobieski of Poland.

History He was sent in exile to the United States after his father was executed by Russians in 1846 for revolutionary activity in Poland. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1855 and joined the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War. Following the war, he joined Mexican revolutionaries against Emperor Maximilian and witnessed the emperor's execution in 1867.

In the United States, he settled in Minnesota and was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives, as a Republican, in 1868, from Hennepin County, Minnesota, and introduced a bill for women's suffrage. In 1879, he married a prominent abolitionist and prohibitionist Lydia Gertrude Lemen, an American from Salem, Illinois. Through his wife's affiliation, he became a leading member of the Polish branch of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and preached against alcohol in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Illinois to prohibition-camps. He was active as a sought-after public speaker from the 1880s until his death. Sobieski was also a leader in the organization of the International Organisation of Good Templars, and near the end of his life, claimed to have "organized two thousand and eighty-six lodges of Good Templars, and taken into the order ninety thousand members"