Remembering Tadeusz Kościuszko on the occasion of America’s 247th birthday, this July 4th
By John Cebrowski, PHC Board Member
Tadeusz (Thaddeus) Kościuszko, hearing of America’s uprising against Great Britain and its need for military engineers, and armed with a fervent belief in democracy, in June of 1776 departed for America.
Two months later a surprise visitor walked into Ben Franklin’s Philadelphia shop. Kościuszko, a 30-year-old Pole just off the boat from Europe, via Martinique, introduced himself and offered to enlist as an officer in the new American nation’s army.
Franklin, curious, quizzed Kościuszko about his education, experience, and values and was impressed with his revolutionary spirit and genius for engineering. That August 30th, armed with Franklin’s recommendation, Kościuszko walked into Independence Hall and introduced himself to the Continental Congress.
In October John Hancock appointed him an engineer and colonel in the Continental Army, and Franklin hired him to design and build forts on the Delaware River to help defend Philadelphia from the British navy. There Kościuszko befriended General Horatio Gates, commander of the Continental Army’s northern division, and in May 1777 Gates sent him north to New York to evaluate Fort Ticonderoga’s defenses. Kościuszko and others advised that a nearby hill needed to be fortified with cannons. Superiors ignored his advice, believing it impossible to move cannons up the steep slope. That July the British, under the command of General John Burgoyne, arrived from Canada and sent six cannons up that steep slope, firing into the fort, and forcing the Americans to evacuate. A floating log bridge across the Hudson River, designed by Kościuszko, helped them retreat south.
Kościuszko’s greatest contribution to the American Revolution came later in the Battle of Saratoga on October 7th, when the defenses he designed along the Hudson were the most significant factor in the Continental Army’s victory. Kościuszko capitalized on Bemis Heights, a bluff overlooking a bend in the Hudson and near a thick wood, as the spot for Gates’ troops to anchor formidable defensive barriers, parapets, and trenches. It gave Gates a clear advantage against Burgoyne.
Burgoyne’s troops couldn’t penetrate Kościuszko’s defenses. On October 17th Burgoyne, and what was left of his army, officially surrendered to Gates. This was the first British army in world history to surrender. This marked the major turning point in the Revolutionary War. France might never have entered the war to support a shaky American cause. Gates and Benedict Arnold got most of the credit for the victory, which Gates deflected to Kościuszko. “The great tacticians of the campaign were hills and forests,” Gates wrote to Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, “which a young Polish Engineer was skilful enough to select for my encampment.”
Since General George Washington considered West Point on the Hudson to be the most important strategic location in America, in 1778 he selected Kościuszko to plan its fortifications. From 1778 to 1780, during the height of the Revolutionary War, Kosciuszko designed and oversaw the construction of forts, gun batteries, redoubts, and the placement of a 65-ton iron chain across the Hudson River to block British invasions. Fortress West Point was never captured.
Kościuszko then sought transfer to the Southern Department of the American Army in the Carolinas. Serving as chief engineer under General Nathaniel Green, his duties included building bateaux, siting camps, scouting river crossings, overseeing fortification construction, and directing a ring of Afro-American spies. There he twice rescued American forces from British advances by directing the crossing of two rivers. He also oversaw the siege of British defenses at Ninety-Six, in South Carolina.
After the war Washington honored Kościuszko with gifts of two pistols and a sword. In 1783, in recognition of his services, the Continental Congress promoted him to brigadier general.
Returning to Poland in 1793, after Poland’s second partition by Russia and Prussia had overturned the 1791 constitution and chopped 115,000 square miles off Poland, Kościuszko led an unsuccessful uprising in 1794 against both foreign powers. After years of captivity in Russia, he returned to the United States in August 1797 and lived in a boarding house in the capital, Philadelphia, where he developed a close friendship with then Vice-President Thomas Jefferson.
Kościuszko, having attended the Royal Knights School in Warsaw and classes at the Ecole Militaire in Paris, founded in 1750 by King Louis XV to train young cadets of the royal army, had learned the value of military education. He vigorously promoted the establishment of an American military school for officers to President Thomas Jefferson, and Jefferson did just that in 1802. “General Kosciuszko, I see him often,” Jefferson wrote Gates. “He is as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known, and of that liberty which is to go to all, and not to the few or rich alone.”
Today Kosciuszko is remembered with statues in Washington, Boston, Detroit, and other cities, but the most famous is at West Point. The Kościuszko Monument pictured here was paid for by the Cadets themselves and dedicated on July 4, 1828. Robert E. Lee had been a Cadet member of the Committee that raised the funds for the Kościuszko Monument at the monthly rate of 25 cents from each Cadet. It is the only monument in the history of West Point paid for by Cadets of the Academy.
When he returned to Europe in May 1798, hoping to organize yet another war to liberate Poland, Kościuszko scribbled out a will. It left his American assets, $18,912 in back pay and 500 acres of land in Ohio, his reward for his war service, for Jefferson to use to purchase the freedom and provide education for enslaved Africans. Jefferson, revising the draft into better legal English, also rewrote the will so that it would allow Jefferson to free some of his slaves with the bequest. The final draft, which Kościuszko signed, called on “my friend Thomas Jefferson” to use Kościuszko’s assets “in purchasing negroes from among his own as well as any others,” “giving them liberty in my name,” and “giving them an education in trades and otherwise.”
One month before his 1817 death, Kościuszko wrote Jefferson, reminding him of the terms of his will. But Jefferson, struggling with age and finances, and inquiries about the estate from heirs in Europe, appeared in federal court in 1819 and asked a judge to appoint another executor of Kościuszko’s affairs. Kościuszko’s will was never implemented. A court-appointed executor squandered most of the estate, and in 1852, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the American will invalid, ruling that he had revoked it in a 1816 will. Kościuszko’s 1817 letter to Jefferson proves that was not his intent. The abolitionist sentiment behind his will makes Tadeusz Kościuszko an even stronger proponent of liberty, voice of conscience, and inspiring revolutionary figure.
Anthony Bajdek, Associate Dean Emeritus, Northeastern University, contributed to this article.
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